Conservative Senator Dies on American Independence Day

Jesse Helms, who represented the state of North Carolina in the United States Senate for 30 years, died early on July 4, 2008. He was 86.

Hero to Rightists, Foe to the Left

Tom Leonard writes on Helms’s impact for the Telegraph:

Mr Helms, a senator for North Carolina for five terms spanning 30 years, was nicknamed “Senator No” for opposing just about everything that conflicted with his view of conservatism. The long list included abortion, gay rights, affirmative action for ethnic minorities, feminism, the United Nations and what he called “dirty art”.  His name became synonymous with social conservatism and he played an important role in moving the Republican party to the Right… As chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr Helms placed a key role in promoting what he saw as a moral foreign policy backed by heavy spending on defence.  Famously blunt and intransigent, he was lionised by conservatives and vilified by liberals and once said that his job was to derail the freight train of liberalism.

Agence France Presse highlights Helms’s role in shaping United States Foreign Policy as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

He was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where he pressed for reform of the United Nations. He also coauthored the Helms-Burton Act tightening and codifying as law US sanctions against communist Cuba. The law, highly controversial internationally, sought to apply sanctions against non-US firms doing business in Cuba, and penalized those suspected of profiting from assets seized from US nationals after the 1959 revolution. Helms was the first legislator from any country to address the UN Security Council.

A Conservative Legacy amid Tributes and Criticism

Adam Hochberg called Helms “a conservative purist” on NPR:

In his three decades in the Senate, Helms battled tirelessly for the conservative cause. He waged high-profile fights against the Panama Canal treaty, AIDS funding, abortion and affirmative action. He was willing to take on his fellow Republicans — criticizing Presidents Reagan and Bush for accepting tax increases in the 1980s and ’90s. But Helms was best known for his steadfast opinions on social issues. He lambasted Hollywood for sex and violence in movies, criticized artists whose work he considered obscene and berated groups he felt were destroying traditional families…

Tom Ferraro writes the Reuters obituary, calling Helms “a die-hard anti-communist firebrand who championed a wide range of conservative causes in his 30 years in the Senate.”

It might be hard to think of a better epitaph than that, but Helms framed his own desired legacy differently. Hochberg adds the following at the conclusion of the aforementioned NPR remembrance:

When asked in the 1983 NPR interview about the political legacy he hoped to leave, Helms, in contrast to his fiery campaign rhetoric, was introspective and modest: “I would like to be remembered as a fella who did the best he could and didn’t back down when he thought he was right. And if I’ve done anything … made any contribution, and I don’t say that I have … it is that I have introduced into the dialog some things that may not have been introduced otherwise.”

Concord Live’s Posts and Resources on America’s Second President

In honor of Independence Day, Concord Live is rounding up its previous posts on John Adams, a Founding Father of the American Republic whose Burkean sensibilities helped steer the country clear of revolutionary excess, fighting to preserve the colonies’ traditional liberties and embarking on the creation of a new government by studying and developing the their long-established institutions. Adams died on July 4, 1826.

Liberty Fund Publishes Collected Works of John Adams

Sit Down, John!- John Adams Opens “1776″ Musical

HBO Dramatizes Life of John Adams from McCullough Biography

Western Democracies Urge Freedom for Cuban Political Prisoners, Colombian Hostages

At a summit on June 10, 2008 in Brdo, Slovenia, the United States and the European Union issued a joint statement calling for the unconditional release of Cuba’s more than 300 political prisoners, as well as the unknown number of hostages held by armed groups in South America. The statement specifically welcomed Cuba’s signing of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and called for that country to fulfill the obligations entailed in ratifying the agreement. However, Colombia and the FARC were not mentioned by name.

This important story was picked up in Spanish-language media, but largely ignored by English-language outlets. For example, it gets just a mention in the Miami Herald followed by a reference to coverage in the Spanish-language el Nuevo Herald:

Leaders of the European Union and the United States have urged Cuba to free its political prisoners “unconditionally.” They also urged guerrilla groups in Latin America to free “all their hostages.”
Click here for full story in Spanish

 The relevant section of the 2008 EU-US Summit Declaration reads:

We will continue to work together and in collaboration with partners in Latin America and the Caribbean, to spread the benefits of democracy in the Western Hemisphere; to promote economic opportunity and social development; to uphold democratic institutions and human rights; and to enhance security. We encourage democratic processes in the countries of the region consistent with the Inter-American Democratic Charter. We welcome Cuba’s signing of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and urge the government to ratify the Covenant and demonstrate its commitment by unconditionally releasing all political prisoners. We will work together to support human rights, democratic values and an active civil society and the continued exercise of freedom of expression throughout the region. We condemn the taking of hostages in any circumstances whatsoever and call on illegal armed groups to release all hostages.

Read the full text of the 2008 European Union - United States Summit Declaration here.

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the [Iron] Curtain

Just as Concord Live’s last post on the FARC’s mounting defeats and the radical Latin American left’s material and political support for them was published, news broke of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s calls to the FARC to free their hostages and end their guerrilla strategy. Helen Murphy, writing for Bloomberg, has a summary of the situation as it stands:

The guerrillas, who hold as many as 750 hostages for ransom and political bargaining chips, are cornered in the country’s most remote regions with their ranks reduced to as few as 8,000 fighters from as many as 17,000 before President Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002. At that time, guerrilla attacks and bombings were common inside Bogota and other major cities.

International pressure on the FARC to free its hostages took an unexpected turn yesterday when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez urged the rebels to give up their armed struggle and unilaterally release all their captives, some of whom have been held for more than 10 years.

“Guerrilla war has passed into history,” Chavez said in his regular Sunday television program, “Alo, Presidente.” “You in the FARC should know, you have become an excuse, an excuse for the empire to threaten all of us.”

Chavez, on Jan. 11, called the FARC, designated a terrorist group by the U.S., Canada and the European Union, a real army with legitimate political goals, worthy of the world’s respect. Colombia accuses the Venezuelan president of assisting the rebels with arms and as much as $300 million in financing.

The governments of Colombia and the United States welcomed his words, but his actions remain to be seen.

Shifting Tactics Continue to Foment Violence and Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean

Given the following:

First, that Interpol certified the computer files and documents obtained on the Colombian Army’s raid resulting in the killing of Raul Reyes, and that this evidence showed Hugo Chavez a willing direct sponsor of FARC terrorism;

Second, that this year’s bid to gain the FARC legitimate belligerent status fell absolutely flat, resulting rather in today’s announced European Union-United States call for the release of all hostages held by armed groups in South America as well as freedom for all of Cuba’s over 300 political prisoners;

Third, that the strategy of creating radical regimes through the ballot box rather than through military-driven revolution (woe to ye who think that the ballot box embodies any kind of procedural democratic guarantee when dealing with determined people with Marxist ideology and aims) has worked well enough to bring Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, and Daniel Ortega to power in the Twenty-First Century Socialism coalition nurtured by totalitarian Cuba’s Fidel and Raul Castro, and to bring the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (the political home of El Salvador’s vicious 1980s terrorist guerrillas) within striking distance of winning El Salvador’s next elections;

And fourth, that Chavez was offering $300 million to finance the FARC’s operations (land mines, child soldiers, and targeting of civilians included) even as he shuttled from Venezuela to Colombia on a purported mission of mercy to gain the release of hostages, which served as a pretext for his belligerent status drive;

it is reasonable to conclude that this public position taken by the Venezuelan dictator:

First, is a reaction to the political cost of the intelligence revelations from Raul Reyes’s files, chiefly in the form of the international pressure alluded to in the second point;

Next, that there is no reason why the FARC might decline to aim to continue destabilizing Colombia for another 50 years if its members ostensibly demilitarize and compete politically to achieve the same kind of bloody rule under which they have kept the Colombian interior for decades;

Next, that the Twenty-First Century Socialist coalition will continue cooperating to support radical leftist agendas whether under the guise of guerrilla forces, political parties, student and youth movements to the detriment of the people of Latin America who will continue to be denied freedom, peace, and the opportunity for prosperity;

And finally, that as long as Cuba remains under the rule of a regime that terrorizes its people and remains determined to export revolution, Latin America and the Caribbean will be especially prone to tyranny and material poverty.

Hope for Peace in Colombia?

The past few months have seen a number of important victories for the Colombian government over the damnably long-lived Marxist, narcotrafficking FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). The killing of 2nd-in-command Raul Reyes and the seizing of invaluable intelligence from his laptop computer, surrenders by various other leaders, and the news of the death of FARC founder Pedro Antonio Marín, also known as Manuel Marulanda, or Tirofijo (Sureshot), have come hot on the heels of massive protests by Colombian citizens in their home country and abroad against the murderous guerilla army.

President Uribe’s Success against the FARC

In a May 29th article, the Economist writes sensibly  that the FARC’s total defeat may be only a matter of time due to the determined long-term campaign of the Colombian government, led by President Alvaro Uribe since 2002:

Recent changes of government strategy are now bearing fruit. These involve encouraging guerrilla desertions and targeting the leadership. The FARC are now losing more deserters than they are gaining new recruits, according to General Freddy Padilla de León, the armed-forces’ commander. “They are reduced militarily, isolated politically, have a reduced social base and we are cutting their finance [by acting against their drug business]. It’s impossible for them to return to the cities,” he says.

Sophisters, Calculators, and the Economist

In the same article, however, the Economist writes mindlessly about how “the FARC survived the end of the cold war, but at the cost of its ideological purity, by turning to drug-trafficking and kidnapping.” These crimes are apparently less innocent than the usual actions taken by Marxists who gain any measure of power, whether in the Soviet Union, Cambodia, or Cuba: the creation of labor and concentration camp systems, the torture and imprisonment in inhuman conditions of political enemies and complete innocents, and mass executions. The article also leaves out particularly atrocious practices like the targeting of civilians or the use of children as soldiers, described in a Human Rights Watch report here.

FARC’s International Ties: Cuba, Ecuador, and Mexico

It would be a mistake to leave out the century’s worth of international cooperation among communists to place allies and useful idiots in political power through revolution or other means.  The FARC and other groups have benefited from these international networks for decades. Some of the better known examples of this kind of subversion are the Communist Internationals, the World Festivals of Youth and Students, and the Tricontinental or OSPAAAL.

One recent instance of a Cuban intelligence official funneling Mexican students sympathetic to the radical Latin American left to a FARC camp in Ecuador, currently led by Castro and Chavez ally Rafael Correa, is reported here by United Press International.

It is also worth noting the rise of powerful narcotraffickers on the Mexican scene, whose targeted bombings combine with recent attacks by a group called the People’s Revolutionary Army against Mexico’s state-run Pemex oil monopoly to create a climate eerily reminiscent of the bad old days in Colombia. Ioan Grillo of Time Magazine reports and suggests the connection here.

FARC and Venezeula’s Hugo Chavez

Jens Glüsing, writing for Der Spiegel International, has a report hinting at the kind of support of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez for the Colombian terrorists:

Chavez admired FARC founder Marulanda and was “downright obsessed” with his strategic skills, says a Colombian intelligence agent. The Venezuelan leader allegedly offered his idol a financial injection of $300 million (€194 million) — the amount Marulanda had estimated it would cost his group to seize control of the government in Bogota.

The Economist writes more extensively on the insight into the FARC’s inner workings gleaned from the e-mails and information seized on the raid that killed Raul Reyes here:

The e-mails show the extent to which the army has the FARC on the run: the secretariat members often complain of their difficulties in communicating with each other. Days after Mr Reyes was killed another member of the secretariat, Iván Ríos, was murdered by his own bodyguard. This week Mr Ríos’s deputy, Nelly Ávila Moreno (aka “Karina”), surrendered. But the FARC is far from defeated. In an e-mail last August Mr Briceño notes that guerrilla landmines are undermining army morale. Their impact is “very good and we are going to increase them,” he writes.

Nicargua’s Ortega an Unabashed Admirer of Tirofijo

In other news, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, who spouts class warfare rhetoric and praises the half-century of totalitarianism in Cuba and terrorism in Colombia along with Cuba’s Fidel and Raul Castro, Venezuela’s hugo Chavez, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, could not resist publicly eulogizing the FARC’s founder and longtime leader. The Associated Press via the International Herald Tribune reports on the once-and-future Sandinista leader, who paid tribute to Tirofijo at the 2008 Foro de Sao Paolo in Montevideo, Uruguay. For a quick reminder of Sandinista atrocities committed under Ortega, check this article from Front Page magazine and its references.

Mary, Mother of God and Metahistorian

The Catholic News Agency reports on an address at the conclusion of the Marian month of May on Saturday, May 31, 2008 during which Pope Benedict XVI stated that

Following the Annunciation of the Archangel, “Mary found herself with a great mystery closed in her womb; she knew that something unique had happened; she was aware that the last chapter in the history of the salvation of the world had begun,” the Pope said…

“Her faith enabled her to see that the thrones of the powerful of this world are all transitory, while the throne of God is the only rock that does not change and does not fall. After centuries and millennia, her Magnificat remains the truest and most profound interpretation of history, while the theories of so many wise men of this world have been disproved by the facts over the course of the centuries.”

H2O News reports further on the Pope’s address, and includes footage here. Of course, the kinds of schools of historical thought utterly refuted by the actual course of history are those that attempt to prescribe the course history surely must  take. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and all the smokers of Enlightenment pipe dreams vanish before Mary and her recognition that Christ is the center and meaning of History.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

Marian Monument Offers Reparation for Reformation Iconoclasm

At a press conference on April 29, 2008, the Art and Reconciliation Trust, a charity based in London, announced drive to create a monument to the medieval Marian shrines destroyed in England during the Reformation. The monument, to be titled Mary Most Holy, has a fundraising target of £1,250,000. The unveiling of the statue is due to take place on the 13th of October 2009, the feast of St Edward The Confessor, patron of England.

The Project Artist, Architect, and Site

The Trust commissioned prominent British sculptor Paul Day to create the work, in conjunction with architectural firm Donald Insall and Associates. The same team of sculptor and architects produced London’s Battle of Britain Monument, unveiled on September 18, 2005. The projected location is in the Chelsea Embankment Gardens of Chelsea Manor, once the home of St. Sir Thomas More and his family. Thomas Cromwell (one of More’s chief persecutors along with his master, Henry VIII) ordered the shrines stripped of valuable items and destroyed on the site in 1538.

The Destructiveness of the Protestant Revolt

Writing for the Times, Carla Powers states that

To feel the the violence of the Protestant Reformation, one has to look at the scarred and broken statuary in Europe’s medieval churches. Determined to destroy Roman Catholic imagery, iconoclasts in England went on a frenzy of destruction that lasted from 1536 to the death of Oliver Cromwell more than a century later.

“Their vandalism,” the art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon wrote in The History of British Art, “was evangelism.” They hacked off the faces, heads and noses of saints. They smashed stained glass, built bonfires of statues of the Virgin and slashed paintings. The scholar Lawrence Stone once said that the art historian of Britain’s medieval period was a “palaeontologist, who from a jawbone, two vertebrae, a rib and a femur contrives to reconstruct the skeleton of some long- extinct creature and endow it with flesh”.

Atonement for Monasteries and Shrines Forever Lost

Despite the ruined remains from when England and the whole of Western Europe were united by the Catholic religion, the time’s spiritual imprint never wholly disappeared. Flash forward to the 21st century, when, according to the Trust’s website,

Three or four years ago, a group of us from different Christian denominations visited most of the Marian shrines across England and Wales which had been desecrated at the time of the Reformation.

We felt that it was important that we should visit these destroyed shrines to pray and make reparation, asking God to forgive this terrible offence against Him and His holy Mother. Where we could we had a Mass offered, and where we couldn’t, we prayed the Rosary, the Divine Mercy Chaplet and a prayer that was written especially for the occasion.

In 2005, at the conclusion of the ‘Reparation Pilgrimages’, it was decided that we would erect a beautiful statue of Our Lady on a site in Chelsea as an act of atonement as close as possible to where Her statues were burnt after being stripped of the accumulated gifts resulting from centuries of pilgrimage.

Details on Mary Most Holy in Chelsea by Paul Day

Writing for the National Catholic Register, Bryan Berry reports on the specifics of the monument, and relates some of artist Paul Day’s ideas:

The Mary Most Holy sculpture will be a bronze triptych about 12 feet high and 10 feet wide. In the two side panels, iconoclastic thugs in modern dress are smashing the statues with sledgehammers. Some mock the figure of Jesus on the cross; one, however, mournfully cradles the decapitated head of Mary — “suddenly realizing that he is destroying the heritage that he and his family and his family’s family were devoted to,” sculptor Day said in an interview the day before the press conference. In the background are headless saints, their hands folded in prayer…

In the central panel of Mary Most Holy are the figures of Mary and the child Jesus, flanked by two figures, one penitent and the other adoring, on a “bare, ruined” street, as Day describes it. Despite the destruction in the two side panels, “the mood of the sculpture is ultimately very positive,” Day explains.

“In a piece which is otherwise quite complicated, Mary and Jesus stand proud and are clear” — as if emerging unvanquished by the divisions among Christians shown in the side panels. “Reconciliation requires confrontation with the truth of the past,” Day said at the press conference.

About the Art and Reconciliation Trust

The Art and Reconciliation Trust’s Patrons are His Grace Edward William Fitzalan-Howard, the Duke of Norfolk; The Lady Nicholas Windsor; The Right Reverend Alan Hopes, Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster; and The Very Reverend Monsignor Graham Leonard. The Trustees are Mr. Peregrine Bertie, Mr. John Booth, Dr. Gerard Kilroy, Mrs. Helia Nicolle, Mrs. Frances Scarr (Chair), Lady McNair-Wilson, and Canon Martin Warner.

 

Solzhenitsyn’s Homecoming from Exile

On May 27, 1994, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to his native Russia after 20 years of exile, during which time he lived and wrote in the United States, traveled and spoke internationally, and achieved his greatest fame and respect abroad. Even today in 2008, 14 years after his return, Russia is still getting to know Solzhenitsyn, her greatest living writer, even as many in the rest of the world risk forgetting him.

The BBC’s report filed at the time is featured here, along with some updates and contextual links.

Also featured is the BBC’s video report, here.

History: It Used to be the News, After All

In addition to News, Quotations and Wisdom, Commentary, ConcordTV, and Announcements (like this one), from today onward Concord Live, your favorite conservative blog, will feature a History category highlighting import dates and events for conservatives, reactionaries, traditionalists, and old-fashioned folks of many stripes. Look out for new posts in this category!

The Works of an American Disciple of Edmund Burke

The Online Library of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund, Inc., recently made available a 10 volume collection of the Works of John Adams, edited by the American president’s grandson Charles Francis Adams.

The edition includes John Adams’s autobiography, his diary, his famous works Novanglus, Thoughts on Government, and Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, collected essays, and letters and state papers from 1777-1811.

The full collection can be found here:

John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856). 10 volumes.

Accessed from http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/2098 on 2008-05-04