I am calling for a Reformation of the Protestant and Judaic Religion in America. Israeli leaders should condemn the evil whim of Von Trouble-Trump, and reject his plan to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. The defunding of the United Nations included an attack on The World Environment. The World will not allow a minority of Jewish People, and, The Evangelical End Time Loons, to work out their destructive religious paranoia on the whole world. There is no proof God made the world!
The late Denis de Rougemont and I may be in the same World Tree. He fits the bill of the Antichrist. However, he was a Christian who employed Christian ideals to vanquish Nazi Ideals. Hitler was the real Antichrist, who has come and gone. He caused much destruction, but, the Killer Christ failed to appear. Millions of Earthlings live carefree secular lives. Game over!
I have brought Rougemont’s cause to America. He was a protector of the environment. As Grand Master of the Knight Templars of Rougemont, I hereby instruct all Good Men to come the aid of the Earth.
Jon Rose Presco
Environmental protection and advocacy
In 1977, Prince Sadruddin, together with Denis de Rougemont and a few other friends, established a Geneva-based think-tank, Groupe de Bellerive (named after Bellerive, the municipality where he lived in Geneva), and a non-profit organization, the Bellerive Foundation. The foundation collaborated with international institutions, British and Scandinavian bilateral aid organizations, and other NGOs such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).[4] It became a leading grassroots action group promoting environmental protection, natural resource conservation and the safeguarding of life in all its forms.
The United Nations General Assembly isn’t alone in its lack of support for the Trump administration’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
On Thursday, the body overwhelmingly rejected the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The move is a rebuke of the administration’s decision that many have warned could undermine the peace negotiations Trump promised during his presidential campaign.
But some of the most vocal critics are closer to the issue.
Only 16 percent of Jewish Americans support moving the embassy to Jerusalem immediately, according to AJC’s 2017 Survey of American Jewish Opinion.
China has now assumed the mantle of fighting climate change, a global crusade that the United States once led. Russia has taken over Syrian peace talks, also once the purview of the American administration, whose officials Moscow recently deigned to invite to negotiations only as observers.
France and Germany are often now the countries that fellow members of NATO look to, after President Donald Trump wavered on how supportive his administration would be toward the North Atlantic alliance.
And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S., once the only mediator all sides would accept, has found itself isolated after Trump’s decision to declare that the U.S. recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
The rapture concept then started to proliferate in America after the Civil War, through the efforts of figures like John Nelson Darby, who referred to it as Dispensationalism.
But in today’s political climate, these attitudes are particularly striking. Often, evangelicals identify pan-governmental or “globalist” political entities with the Antichrist, a figure of evil believed to rise to power during the tribulation that follows the rapture. In the 1972 evangelical film A Thief in the Night, for example — a film many #RaptureAnxiety contributors cite as enormously influential on their childhood — the Antichrist is literally a branch of the United Nations claiming control over the entire world. Likewise, in the Left Behind books, the Antichrist is the leader of a one world government known as the “Global Community,” a seemingly peaceful equivalent to the United Nations that turns out to (once again) be in league with Satan.
Understanding the link between “globalist” organizations and the Antichrist in evangelical thought is vital for understanding the evangelical lens through which current affairs are viewed.
Initially, Bellerive worked with UNICEF and the United Nations Children’s Fund in the struggle against deforestation. Prince Sadruddin was motivated in part by what he called “ecological refugees,” who were forced to leave regions that could no longer sustain them due to desertification and other environmental changes. The foundation worked with Swiss specialists to develop low-cost, energy-efficient cooking stoves that relied on renewable energy sources such as methane and biogas. It distributed these among needy rural populations, primarily in Africa. Other areas of concern for Bellerive included the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the protection of threatened species.[4]
As a resident of Switzerland, Prince Sadruddin was concerned about the impact of insensitive tourist development and deforestation on the European Alps. At the World Economic Forum in 1990, he launched Alp Action to protect the mountain ecosystem and preserve the Alps’ cultural diversity and vitality. The Bellerive Foundation program encouraged eco-tourism, aiming to reduce the impact of outdoor adventure sports on the fragile alpine habitat. During its years of operation, Alp Action successfully launched over 140 projects in seven countries.[11] It found inspiration in the system of national parks of the Canadian Rockies.
A long-standing trustee and former Vice-President of the World Wide Fund for Nature International, Prince Sadruddin led Bellerive’s support for threatened species. Bellerive was also amongst the first organizations to warn of the potential human health hazards of modern intensive farming methods.[12]
In May, 2006, the activities of the Bellerive Foundation were merged into the Geneva-based Aga Khan Foundation (founded in 1967 by Prince Sadruddin’s nephew Karim Aga Khan IV) to form the Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan Fund for the Environment. The US$10 million fund is dedicated to finding practical solutions to environmental problems. The fund concentrates its activities in six areas that were important to Prince Sadruddin: Environmental education; natural resource management in fragile zones; nature parks and wildlife reserves; environmentally and culturally appropriate tourism infrastructure; environmental health; and research.
Geneva, Switzerland, 31 May 2006 – The activities of the Bellerive Foundation are being integrated into the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) in the form of the “Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan Fund for the Environment”, a US$ 10 million fund which will be dedicated to practical solutions to environmental problems.
The Bellerive Foundation was founded by the late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan in Switzerland in 1977. Its major programmes focused on the link between the scarcity of natural resources and poverty in the developing world; the preservation of fragile mountain ecosystems; animal protection; and initiatives in environmental education.
The new Fund will concentrate its activities in six main areas: environmental education; natural resource management in fragile zones; nature parks and wildlife reserves; environmentally and culturally appropriate tourism infrastructure; environmental health; and research.
Special focus areas include water resource management in areas of desertification and measures to reduce the vulnerability of poor populations to natural disasters. The Fund will also work to alleviate the poverty that forces people to consume the few resources available to them — a cycle that often results in deeper poverty, depleted soils, deforestation, desertification, pollution, water scarcity, disease and hunger. Bellerive activities, such as tree conservation and the design of fuel-saving cooking systems, will reinforce AKF’s existing programmes.
The Foundation’s present environment-related activities include: rural development projects that have planted over 26 million trees and transformed 33,000 hectares of degraded land into productive use, in northern Pakistan; natural resource management in drought-stricken areas of Kenya and India that encompass rainwater harvesting systems, tree planting, conservation education and reservoir construction; and rural water and sanitation projects designed to reduce the prevalence of disease in Afghanistan.
Environmental concerns also cut across the activities of the other eight agencies of the Aga Khan Development Network. Projects range from a hydroelectric plant in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan to appropriate sanitation measures and low-cost filtration techniques for drinking water being developed at Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan.
The University of Central Asia, which will be located on three campuses – in Khorog, Tajikistan; Tekeli, Kazakhstan; and Naryn, Kyrgyz Republic – will incorporate parks that function not only as environmental resources for local communities, but as dynamic laboratories for research and education in a variety of disciplines, including water and dry land management, reforestation, energy substitution and biodiversity.
Parks also play an important part in redevelopment efforts elsewhere. In Cairo, for example, an urban revitalisation project in the city’s historic district includes a 30-hectare (74-acre) park that has become a catalyst for positive change in one of the poorest areas of the city. In Khorog, Tajikistan, and Nairobi, Kenya, two other parks are intended to have a similar positive impact on social, cultural and economic development.
Other efforts encompass environmental impact studies and reforestation efforts by the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development’s Serena hotels in East Africa. The Serena hotels, which have received Green Globe certification, have been in the forefront of efforts to create environmentally friendly tourism infrastructure while preserving wildlife reserves near its hotels, resorts and lodges.
About Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan and His Highness the Aga Khan
The late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, paternal uncle of His Highness the Aga Khan, was the second son of Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah Aga Khan, who was the 48th Imam of the Ismaili Muslims and President of the League of Nations from 1937 to 1939. Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah Aga Khan’s first son was Prince Aly Khan, father of the current Aga Khan.
Prince Sadruddin founded and chaired the Bellerive Foundation along with his wife, Princess Catherine. Prince Sadruddin served the international community in a variety of roles, including the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees (1965-77) and the United Nations’ Coordinator for Assistance to Afghanistan (1988-90). He was also the United Nations’ Executive Delegate of the Secretary General for a humanitarian programme for Iraq, Kuwait, and the Iraq-Iran and Iraq-Turkey border areas (1990).
The current Aga Khan, His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan, became the 49th hereditary Imam of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims in 1957, succeeding his grandfather. He is the Chairman of the Aga Khan Development Network, a group of nine agencies whose mandates include the delivery of improved healthcare, quality education, the preservation of historic neighbourhoods, microfinance, water and sanitation, housing, agricultural development, tourism infrastructure, power generation, financial services, aviation and media. The activities of each agency are designed to reinforce and complement those of the other agencies within the Network.
For more information, please contact: Sam Pickens
Information Officer
Aga Khan Development Network
1-3 avenue de la Paix
P.O. Box 2049
1211 Geneva 2
Switzerland
Tel: (+41 22) 909 7277
Fax: (+41 22) 909 7291
E-mail: sam.pickens@akdn.org; info@akdn.org
As a resident of Switzerland, Prince Sadruddin was concerned about the impact of insensitive tourist development and deforestation on the European Alps. At the World Economic Forum in 1990, he launched Alp Action to protect the mountain ecosystem and preserve the Alps’ cultural diversity and vitality. The Bellerive Foundation program encouraged eco-tourism, aiming to reduce the impact of outdoor adventure sports on the fragile alpine habitat. During its years of operation, Alp Action successfully launched over 140 projects in seven countries.[13] It found inspiration in the system of national parks of the Canadian Rockies.[7]
A long-standing trustee and former Vice-President of the World Wide Fund for Nature International, Prince Sadruddin led Bellerive’s support for threatened species. Bellerive was also amongst the first organisations to warn of the potential human health hazards of modern intensive farming methods.[7]
In May 2006, the activities of the Bellerive Foundation were merged into the Geneva-based Aga Khan Foundation (founded in 1967 by Prince Sadruddin’s nephew Karim Aga Khan IV) to form the Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan Fund for the Environment.[14] The US$10 million fund is dedicated to finding practical solutions to environmental problems. The fund concentrates its activities in six areas that were important to Prince Sadruddin: environmental education; natural resource management in fragile zones; nature parks and wildlife reserves; environmentally and culturally appropriate tourism infrastructure; environmental health; and research.[14]
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Prince_Sadruddin_Aga_Khan
Federalisation of the European Union is the institutional process by which the European Union (EU) is transformed from a confederation (a union of sovereign states) towards a federation (a single federal state with a central government, consisting of a number of partially self-governing federated states). There is ongoing discussion about the extent to which the EU has already become a federation over the course of decades, and more importantly, to what degree it should continue to evolve into a federalist direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalisation_of_the_European_Union
A Pan-European movement gained some momentum from the 1920s with the creation of the Paneuropean Union, based on Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi‘s 1923 manifesto Paneuropa, which presented the idea of a unified European State. This movement, led by Coudenhove-Kalergi and subsequently by Otto von Habsburg, is the oldest European unification movement.[2][3][4] His ideas influenced Aristide Briand, who gave a speech in favour of a European Union in the League of Nations on 8 September 1929, and in 1930, who wrote his “Memorandum on the Organization of a Regime of European Federal Union” for the Government of France.[5]
At the end of World War II, the political climate favoured unity in Western Europe, seen by many as an escape from the extreme forms of nationalism which had devastated the continent.[6]
Denys Louis de Rougemont (September 8, 1906 – December 6, 1985), known as Denis de Rougemont (French: [dəni də ʁuʒmɔ̃]), was a Swiss writer and cultural theorist who wrote in French. One of the non-conformists of the 1930s, he addressed the perils of totalitarianism from a Christian point of view. After the Second World War, he promoted European federalism.
He founded in Geneva the “Centre Européen de la Culture” in 1950[4] and in 1963[5] the “Institut Universitaire d’Etudes Européennes” (IUEE, “Graduate Institute of European Studies”, attached to the University of Geneva). He was president of the Paris-based Congrès pour la Liberté de la Culture.[6] Probably his most influential work is Love in the Western World (1939, 1956, 1972; English translations 1940, 1956, 1982).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_de_Rougemont
The Idea of Europe in the work of Denis de Rougemont and the French non-conformists
09/03/2009 Leave a comment
Denis de Rougemont was a main thinker of the so-called non-conformistes des années trente, a movement of young intellectuals that appeared in France at the beginning of the turbulent 1930s, in opposition to both the individualism of liberalism and the collectivism of the Soviet Russia. [1] The main bulk of their work was published between 1930-34 and was concentrated around three separate currents:
- The founders and members of L’Ordre nouveau. An intellectual movement established by the Russian migrant Alexandre Marc (born in 1904 in Odessa as Aleksander Markovitch Lipiansky), its goal was to prepare the conditions for a ‘spiritual rebirth’ of the European culture. Its effort was concentrated on going beyond such dualistic divisions as nationalism-internationalism and capitalism-communism. Its inspirations came, among other sources, from the Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard, the federalism of Proudhon, the great critique of Modernity Nietzsche, or from the historicism of Péguy. The thinkers who were a part of L’Ordre nouveau also included Robert Aron, Arnaud Dandieu, Daniel-Rops, Jean Jardin and finally Denis de Rougemont.
- The Catholic revue L’Esprit of Emmanuel Mounier, founded in 1932. From the beginning it evolved in tight collaboration with L’Ordre nouveau. In reaction to the events of the Second World War it radically shifted to the political left , in order to slowly move back to more moderate positions of the ‘New Left’, under which it still publishes to this date.
- Young thinkers of Jeune Droite, who were mostly dissidents of the French reactionary and monarchistic right Açtion française. These thinkers included Jean de Fabrègues, Jean-Pierre Maxence and Thierry Maulnier.
Furthermore, Ferdinand Kinsky also includes among them those thinkers, from whom the non-conformists drew their inspiration: Stern, Blondel, Buber, Nédoncelle, Karl Barth, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain or Nicholas Berdiaeff.[2]
Although the non-conformists came from different backgrounds and their thinking took on some issues rather opposing positions, they all subscribed to the doctrine of ‘personalism’, and, consequently, to federalism. The non-conformists converged on the point that
‘man was above all not an “individual.” He is a “person,” that is both responsible and free, committed and autonomous, a being in himself, but related to his fellowmen by his responsibility’.[3]
As a person, human being is not a lonely monad, not even a rational being, which could exist outside of society, but a social entity whose nature is fulfilled only by sharing his life in common with others. To live within a society does not mean to be enclosed in a ‘homogeneous’ nation-state, but to be a part of multiple and overlapping ‘intermediary’ communities, which are most naturally formed around family, territory, or profession. For the non-conformists/personalists, these intermediary communities both historically and philosophically ultimately share the common European ‘well’ from which they draw their actual particular ideas and traditions. Europe and its culture for them necessarily precede nations and nation-states. The thinkers such as the Schlegels or Herder constructed the idea of a self-sufficient nation from already present, primordial European philosophical and historical traditions. The English historian Christopher Dawson best summarises this position in his 1932 work The Making of Europe, when he notes that
‘The evil of nationalism does not consist in its loyalty to the traditions of the past or in its vindication of national unity and right of self determination. What is wrong is the identification of this unity with the ultimate and inclusive unity of culture which is a supernatural thing.
The ultimate foundation of our culture is not the national state, but the European unity’.[4]
The nation-state was thus only one realised possibility of the European culture. A peculiar thing about nationalist movements was that they consciously denied the notion of their own continuity and grounding in the common European history and philosophical thought. Martin Heidegger would say this was a perfect manifestation of the ‘metaphysics of subjectivity’ – they picked up one particular set of characteristics out of their European heritage and by intellectual sleight of hand, suppressing the memory of their nations continuity with other European sources,[5] argued for their ‘homogeneity and cultural self-sufficiency’.
The French thinker Alain de Benoist recently argued from the same perspective, when he distinguished our ‘objective’ history as ‘a pile of representations of identity of past times and past protagonists’,[6] from our actual-assumed identity, whose dimension is always political since it is based on the projection of our past towards the future. In other words, our actual identity (in the 19th and 20th c., it was that of nations and nation-states), always grounds the collective ‘I’ in the past, based on values and necessities of the present and possibilities of the future. As Alain de Benoist adds, ‘memory screens [our timely, historical identity] and retains what conforms to its idea of the past and to the image it wants to give in order to give it a meaning’.[7]
Diversity of European identities
The purpose of Denis de Rougemont’s book The Idea of Europe is precisely to rip off our identity from the grip of the present and selective memory of nation-states and ground it in the timely and space-bound objective narrative of Europe. Rougemont’s preface to the book also forms the general leitmotif that weaves through the whole work:
‘ Europe is much older than the European nations. Their lack of unity and their ever more illusory claims to absolute sovereignty endanger its very existence. If only they could unite, Europe would be saved, and with it all that remains valuable in its richly creative diversity’.[8]
Titian: The Rape of Europa “l
The Rape of Europa by Titian
‘from that time onward the name of Europe and the concept of Europe will recur in even more solemn contexts down to the Carolingian Empire, in apostrophes to the Pope, in ecclesiastical panegyrics, in prose and verse chronicles, and in the lives of the saints’.[12]
The final step was taken with Charlemagne, whose dominium was called ‘Europe vel Regnum Caroli’ and on whom his court poet Angilbert bestowed the titles of ‘head of the world . . . summit [or tiara] of Europe . . . supreme father’.[13] Europe thus becomes a political entity, which is not merely constructed as one of the contemporary three divisions of the map of the world (Europe, Libya or Africa, Asia), it is finally an ‘autonomous entity, endowed with spiritual virtues’.[14]
As we know however, this was a premature spring and the fragmentation of Charlemagne’s empire under his three sons soon followed, as if in the anticipation of the things to come in the period from the 17th to 20th century. On 434 pages, Denis de Rougemont continues to recount various conceptualisations of Europe that followed. Nevertheless, what is probably the most intriguing section of the book is part seven,[15] where he tries to mend together various 20th century historians and thinkers to give us an idea what ‘European identity’ means, if it went through such diverse historical manifestations.
Rougemont’s conceptualisation of European identity
First of all, through his overview of different conceptualisations of Europe, Rougemont lead us to reject the idea that there could be one ‘ true’ atemporal European essence, which could be taken as the lowest ‘common denominator’ of everything European.[16] Europe is above all the totality of its representations – and a European is in the first instance the one who finds in its diversity something that resonates with his ‘present I’. The first step in the formation of any identity is thus conscious self-identification, finding one’s possibilities not by ‘returning to the sources’, but by resorting to the sources in order to discover how do they fit into one’s present and future. It might be therefore said that there are ‘two Europes’, the one which is philosophical and historical, i.e., the one which provides us through its totality with different representations of what it has meant to be a European, and the other which is inherently bound to politics. The latter is dependent on the way one answers the question of what one wants Europe to be – 0n the way how does one ‘chooses’ one’s identity from the possible sources. In other words, in one way Europe (‘unconsciously’) already ‘is’, but in the other way it is still dormant, waiting to be appropriated as a political project – consciously adopted as a part of our own present identity. Only when Europe materialises through the political process as a cultural entity, it will be possible to ‘grasp’ it and built upon it in our social life in new ways.
This idea of ‘two Europes’ is in fact very close to the constitutive or expressivist theory of language of Herder. Its importance was recently recognised by the Canadian communitarian thinker Charles Taylor.[17] Herder, and through him Taylor, argued that the language not only describes the reality (‘what is already there’, on the background), as such theorists as Condillac claimed, but also constitutes and recreates it anew, under a different perspective. For Condillac or Locke, linguistic expression was always linked to some pre-existing content, to the idea that ‘at each stage of [linguistic] process, the idea precede[d] its naming, albeit its discriminability results from a previous act of naming’.[18] Herder, however, adds to the language a new, ‘expressive’ dimension, claiming that the interlocution not only describes, but that ‘it also open[s] possibilities for us which would not be there in its absence’.[19] In other words, by saying something, we do not only describe what is already there, but also shape it to a new dimension. By creating a political Europe, we do not only re-represent what is already there, but we are giving Europe a new dimension by the creative process itself.
Perhaps this was also a reason why Heidegger in his later thought credited the poetry for allowing us to temporally ascend to the ‘authentic’ Being. As one of Heidegger’s interpreters Richard Polt notices, ‘if Heidegger is right, then our most authentic relation to language is poetic. Instead of using language as a tool for representation, we should respect it as a rich source of poetic revelation’.[20] The poet thus represents an authentic existence – instead of using old words and worn out meanings, he ‘appropriates’ the reality in relation to his own person. Does it mean that all great minds who try to build Europe politically are also poets?
The Abduction of Europa by Rembrandt (1632own person.
This excurse to the theory of language might help us appreciate what Denis de Rougemont is ultimately suggesting in his search for ‘the’ European identity. Although there are undeniable sources of European culture such the ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity, the Celts, or the ancient German tribes, what Europe is for us will in the last instance depend on what do we want it to be. It is true that the most of the European thought arose as the positive or negative reaction to the ancient Greeks, be it the Romans with their sombre gravitas who unsuccessfully tried to emulate the joyous Greek spirit, or the Christians who upheld the rational Apollo at the expense of Dionysos. Nevertheless, in the last instance it always depends on ourselves whether we identify with these sources or not. Paul Valéry for instance felt closest to the Greeks, claiming that
‘what we owe to Greece is perhaps what has most profoundly distinguished us from the rest of humanity. To her we owe the discipline of the Mind, the extraordinary example of perfection in everything. To her we owe the method of thought that tends to relate all things to man, the complete man. Man became for himself the system of reference to which all things must in the end relate. He must therefore develop all the parts of his being and maintain them in a harmony as clear and even as evident as possible. He must develop both body and mind’.[21]
Denis de Rougemont would have certainly agreed with Valéry. One might even argue that personalism itself – with its conception of a person as against the liberal idea of a self-sufficient individual, is the conscious adoption of the Greek heritage on the part of the non-conformists. Rougemont keenly notices that our Greek heritage has become in the recent years more important, arguing that
‘the revival of our interest in things Greek is reflected in the twentieth century by the most varied symptoms: discovery of the pre-Socratic philosophers . . . the vogue for mythology (Freud’s Oedipus complex, the Ulysses of Joyce or Kazantzakis, Spitteler’s Prometheus, Gide’s Theseus, Cocteau’s Orpheus, etc); revival of the themes and titles of Greek tragedy by many playwrights, poets, and composers (“Choephores and Eumenides,” by Claudel and Darius Milhaud, to mention only one example, re-created the sacred thrill of the ancient drama, of which a poet like Racine retained only the plot); rediscovery of the secret of the Doric style; passionate researches into the mystery religions . . .[22]‘.
Philosophically and historically, as Denis de Rougemont shows us in The Idea of Europe, we therefore already are Europeans. Politically and in our memory, some still consider themselves to be enclosed within ‘homogeneous’ national entities and deny their shared European roots. Only the future will shows us, however, whether we will also manage to appropriate our identity politically.
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Reblogged this on Rosamond Press and commented:
Trumo and his false Evangelical cult have taken over our democracy. I suspect the Puritans were backed by remnants of the Knights Templar.
John