(Image: Left to Right, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio; General Jorge Videla, dictator of Argentina from 1976 to 1981)
“Jorge Mario Bergoglio… has been a staunch supporter of US imperial interests in Latin America for more than 30 years.”
“…one of the main supporters… of Argentina’s military dictatorship which came to power in a CIA supported coup in 1976.”
“Jorge Mario Bergoglio not only supported the US sponsored dictatorship, he also played a direct and complicit role in the ‘Dirty War’ (la guerra sucia) in liaison with the military Junta headed by General Jorge Videla, leading to the arrest, imprisonment, torture and disappearance of progressive Catholic priests and laymen who were opposed to Argentina’s military rule.”
The statements above were made in an online article by Michel Chossudovsky, a Russian-Canadian researcher, immediately after Pope Francis was elected. It should be noted that Chossudovsky is known as a purveyor of conspiracy theories, but he’s hardly alone in pointing the finger at the former Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires as a figure complicit in Argentina’s “Dirty War“. Argentinian left-wing investigative journalist Horatio Verbitsky has made similar claims. In 2005, Verbitsky published a book entitled, The Silence: From Paul VI to Bergoglio: The Secret Relations Between the Church and the ESMA. (The ESMA was the naval academy-turned torture facility used by the Argentinian junta during the war.) Verbitsky’s book led to a lawsuit against Jorge Bergoglio, alleging that he was involved in the kidnappings of two Jesuit priests in the 1970s. After twice refusing to testify, Bergoglio took the stand in 2010. Start asking around among well-connected Catholics in Buenos Aires, and you’ll hear a consistent refrain: everyone has heard he was involved, nobody has been able to prove it, he always denied everything.
Though we may never know the real answers, the truth of the matter should be of extreme interest to any serious journalist seeking to understand the man who now reigns as one of the most controversial popes in history. But for now, I want to focus on the more fundamental question these allegations raise: Why don’t we already know more about who Jorge Mario Bergoglio is?
And to understand the answer to that, you need to know a bit more about how such information is discovered and shared.
Are you wondering why no one ever heard about any of these rather serious charges from the mainstream press? Is it because they had already, the same day as the Chossudovsky article was published — March 14th, 2013 — launched their very public love affair with the “humble” new Argentinean pope? It seems unlikely. The quotes above were published the morning after Bergoglio had stood – an almost totally unknown figure – on the loggia and said next to nothing to the crowd.
That night, the press dove for their keyboards to Google his name and find something to say that continued their own safe and well-established narrative. In their minds at the time the notion was still lodged that the figure of the pope was equivalent to Catholicism’s “oppressive” views. It was the rare writer in Rome that night who was receiving — and paying attention to — the warning messages coming in from the new pope’s countrymen. Within several days, however, both the secular and Catholic media found things in this pope they could love, and the cautionary messages were drowned out.
I recently asked why journalists have been so eager to avoid digging into the more interesting questions about the pope’s past, implying that it was sheer laziness or ideological manipulation. This lack of interest seems quite strange on its face, given that Francis comes from a country whose recent history has been of such dramatic political interest. When I was a child, Argentina was synonymous with the “mess in South America” – grossly corrupt and murderous tin-pot military regimes brutally grasping power by applying both ends of their rifles to their own people and amassing personal wealth without the slightest regard for human life. I was ten when the military coup happened, and even at that age I could grasp that there was something horrifying going on down there.
Remember, this was one South American revolution that stood above the rest for its extreme brutality. This was the one where they “disappeared” political opponents by shoving them out of airplanes into shark-infested waters — after which, surviving witnesses testified to seeing bits and pieces of human remains floating amidst pinkish sea-foam.
The Past is Prologue Irrelevant
Immediately after that chilly, damp night in Rome when the Church was given her 266th pope, I remember seeing some brief comment here and there about “questions” over Bergoglio’s involvement in the Dirty War. But since no one really knew what it was all about, it got no traction. And so, these questions dried up almost instantly, lasting no more than a couple of days post-Conclave, until the secular media decided to change tracks. Only a scant few weeks later, Bergoglio himself started the game, distracting the media with his “Who am I to judge?” plane presser, and the lot of us have been running barking after his trail of carefully deposited breadcrumbs ever since. One thing the man knows how to do magnificently, we have learned, is bait the press. And the press was only too willing to go along for the ride. They suddenly realized they’d found a friend, a fellow-traveler proposing the same cultural ret-conned reboot.
But still…
Body parts… sharks… once you’ve heard it, that kind of thing sticks in your head.
Given that Jorge Bergoglio, SJ, was the Provincial Superior of the Jesuits of Argentina, he was also a major figure in the Church right smack in the middle of the whole messy, brutal, blood-soaked festa. Which, one would think, should make the rapidly-diminished lack of interest in his past a little more inexplicable.
Except…not really.
If horror and brutality were the metrics by which we remembered history, Argentina should be on the same plane as the Killing Fields and Gulags. But for some reason, Latin American horrors just don’t count, and I think the reason is the nature of modern journalism. No one today knows anything about the present, let alone the past, that writers on the internet are not willing to tell them. The horrors of the Holocaust of World War II is useful to the narrative; the horrors of the Gulags less so; the Dirty War not at all.
The fact is that most readers at present are in their 20s and 30s, and to this supremely solipsistic demographic anything that happened before they were born, in some country they’ve never been to, is irrelevant. We live in a time when teenaged SJWs shrieking obscenities on Twitter are considered sober and informed political analysts. A fifty year-old, like me, whose memory of the world’s political affairs stretches back before Return of the Jedi was in theatres might as well be a dinosaur. And it would be useful to remember that most of the journalists working the Vatican beat are younger than I am.
To understand how the narrative is being developed around Pope Francis, therefore, we have to understand how journalism works.
I would like to propose three reasons that Francis’ rather colourful past has not come to light either in the secular or Catholic mainstream press:
- Time and space constraints
- Poor political and philosophical education
- And most importantly, the transformation of the role of news media into a political narrative-generator divided according to rigidly defined, almost sacrosanct – and totally useless – factional categories.
Since journalists are now in the reality-generating business, they must decide what is and isn’t real. And for the chosen narrative, nothing outside those categories can be acknowledged to exist.
Time and Space in the Internet Vortex
In fact, I will defend my colleagues on both sides of our ideological divide, and say this failure is not really completely their fault. They are presented with a nearly impossible task, the need to make complex political and social issues simple enough for an ordinary non-expert to read and digest in no more than 20 minutes with his morning coffee.
Actually, no. Let me amend that. 20 minutes was in the days of print journalism. Now the writer has about 150 words to grab someone’s attention from his TwittFace feed. (To give you an idea how long that is, this paragraph and the one before it are exactly 154 words.) Buzzfeed is perhaps the venue to have most successfully grasped that most “journalism” is now read on phones on the subway. The “daily news cycle” has been reduced from 36 to no more than about 6 hours (give or take time zone differences).
The bottom line is that a news-cycle writer has no more than a few hours to produce copy, and that copy has a shelf life of about six hours. I used to tell my contacts that they had three hours to return my emails requesting comment or I would have to go on to the next person on my list. And one of the reasons I finally quit the daily grind and went indie was that I had realized I was losing touch with the issues I was covering under the sheer pressure of producing copy every day. I had no time to read or digest or even really figure out what was going on.
Frankly, one does not get into journalism in these times because of a need to inform the public. Once you have done this a few years, you will have realized that “the public” cannot really be informed. And if you try, you will go mad with despair. If you keep going in the job at all it is most likely because of your own personal desire to know what’s going on.
Bad Education
There is a reason journalism has reached its current state.
J-schools in our times are mostly leftist ideological indoctrination camps. The critique of university “education” that has suddenly burst onto the public screens since the Trump election has for at least 60 years been infinitely multiplied in faculties of journalism.
Way back in 1998, I re-started my college education in the Classics department of Dalhousie University. Officially, I was studying Latin. Unofficially, it was Boethius and Augustine. At the time, I started writing for the campus newspaper, which consisted mostly of just attending campus events and producing modest five-paragraph pieces. It was my little hobby.
But I started thinking I would like to write for a living. I was reading Edmund Burke and becoming interested in Hannah Arendt’s investigation into human and political evil. (I also attended a few public lectures at the philosophy department and learned all about why no one at university could think straight. Seriously? … Derrida?…)
I visited the j-school at Kings, my college at Dalhousie, and just what I saw on the student bulletin board was enough to put me off. I discovered after examining the syllabus that these kids weren’t learning anything of substance. They were being drawn into a self-referential and totally enclosed bubble-verse, to be used as political activists – pawns essentially – by their older, more deeply ideologically-entrenched professors.
A working journalist I contacted said that in her experience, a j-school ticket was nothing more than an ideological merit badge, and editors even then were avoiding them. Not only were they all vicious little Marxists, unable to play nicely with others, but they weren’t being taught even the rudiments of composition. In other words, they couldn’t write.
To expect people who have never read anything but ideological pamphlets, who can’t construct simple sentences in English, to have a sufficiently broad worldview to tackle the complexities of the Great South American Tangle, is, quite honestly, asking too much.
“Bias” and the Narrative Framework: the Big Blind Spot
Because it is their job to tell stories, journalists have to start by looking for a coherent structure, a comprehensible framework within which the topic they’re covering can be understood. This is where we come into the world of “editorial bias”. But even a novice in the field will quickly realize that every single news outlet is biased. The difficulty comes when they try to claim to be “objective” and unbiased. When they try to hide what they really think for the purpose of hoodwinking the public. Hidden bias – bias that claims not to be biased – is a vice. But without a “narrative framework”, journalism could not exist.
In the case of journalists working for established outlets, whether the BBC or the National Catholic Register, this means they have to work within the framework that has already been created by their predecessors and editors. Something the public generally doesn’t know – because newspapers don’t like to tell anyone – is that these “biases” or narrative structures are even at times set in stone in an outlet’s organizational charter. It’s written into the founding charter of the Toronto Star, for instance, that the paper was established specifically in order to promote a leftist political viewpoint.
But acknowledged or not, a narrative framework is an absolute necessity, and it is the job of the individual writer to try to discern honestly the truth of the one within which he works. This work is usually done early in one’s career.
In certain cases (cf. Malcolm Muggeridge) an individual will discover that he has been working for the “wrong side” and switch, sometimes quite dramatically. But these instances are exceedingly rare, and can be likened to a sort of ideological religious conversion. (And if we’re wondering where most of the paying journalism jobs are found, it should be remembered that Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the most respected voices of his time, had a heck of a time finding a paying gig after he switched.)
The simple fact is that even if they are not writing for the AP or the BBC, but for a niche audience like First Things or The Federalist or the Spectator, they necessarily must write something that their audience can understand — and are willing to accept.
And South American politics is hard. It’s complex. It defies our Star Wars-derived political metaphors. The more nuanced national character of Argentineans, Paraguayans, Chileans, and Brazilians is something most of us have little to no experience with. It’s all tangled up with 16th century Spanish colonial aristocrats, Marxism, the CIA, drugs, vicious power struggles, military coups, disappearing civilians, and the Catholic Church – none of which a normal, WASPy North American j-school graduate is going to have the first notion about.
We balk when we can’t figure out where the key players fit into our categories. When we hear it said that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, whom we are told is a “liberal,” with the support of the Jimmy Carter-era CIA, was helping the “right wing” military regime disappear “progressive” priests, our wiring gets crossed and our ears get a little smoky. It’s why so few have dared to tackle the meaning of his “Peronism”. It just defies our attempts to mash it into our paradigm, so we turn to easier subjects.
Our dichotomous left/right North American political paradigm has been out of date even in secular politics for decades. This is perhaps particularly true for we Catholics whose political training was in the Reagan/Bush era of the American Culture Wars. Our worldview consists of two mutually opposed political camps, cleanly divided by the “political fence”. One can live very close to the fence, perhaps, having “moderate” views on immigration, war, poverty and the environment (Left) and contraception, abortion and “gay marriage” (Right), but the fence is still the central image of our now hopelessly outmoded political paradigm.
The Culture War-era attempt to paste this paradigm onto the internal struggle in the Catholic Church since the advent of the Social/Sexual Revolution has become even more hopeless. This or that prelate is still regularly defined in the secular press as a “liberal” or a “conservative,” disregarding completely even the most superficial understanding of actual Catholic social teaching.
Writers on Catholic subjects will often decry the use of these labels (and prelates will be even more offended by their designated categories, but for different reasons) as next to useless. But they will say that since their audience, Catholic and secular, are in the main entirely innocent of even rudimentary knowledge of Catholic teaching, the labels are what we’re stuck with.
The problem in both realms is that it creates a state of nearly total blindness for everything that does not fit the predetermined categories. One must shoehorn everyone into one camp or another. It is like saying that in the animal kingdom there are only two categories, cnidaria and ungulates; if one is not either a jellyfish or a grass-eating quadruped, one simply cannot really exist. Or at least, having only two possible categories, that the wolves, ants, crows, fish, seals and polar bears must in some as-yet undisclosed way be classifiable as some form either of jellyfish or cow.
A New Way Forward
This poverty of categories among the rather narrowly educated journalists, working to their daily deadlines, was the problem we had when Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013.
The media immediately dove in and started to position him in relation to their paradigm-defining fence. And sure enough, some of the first things we heard about him, on that very night, were that he was “a conservative” because he had opposed “gay marriage” and been “very strong” against abortion in Argentina.
Presto! He fit the paradigm in time for an aperitivo! By nine o’clock, everyone had clicked “send” and gone out to dinner in the Borgo to celebrate a narrative well-maintained. That none of that narrative could be demonstrated as true after five minutes of Googling did not deter its journalistic curators one bit.
About three days later, without batting an eye, they had read his signals and retconned him as a hero of their cause, and here we sit today, with this Peronist wrecking ball playing the press like the chumps they are. Like tossing fish to a pool full of trained seals. But in all this, the confusion has grown and grown. The journalists are losing their audiences as they continue to parrot their narrative while the pope carries on defying all the categories. The one thing in Bergoglio’s mind — his all-consuming passion — is the one thing they’ve missed: his single-minded and scruple-free lust for power.
To understand this, what we need is a new narrative framework. I suggest that because we are not limited by the constraints of the daily deadline and the big operating budgets, the work of clarifying the narrative framework could be undertaken by bloggers and other kinds of independent researchers, making our living as we do by direct-to-customer sales.
But crucially, the public must start to use their own rational faculties. If a journalist talks about “humble Pope Francis,” the reader must start asking whether this characterization fits the facts. If we are told by the Tablet that Cardinal Burke or Matthew Festing (the former Grand Master of the Knights of Malta) are liars and cheats, we must look at what kind of publication the Tablet is, and at what we know about the character and intentions of such men.
When the Independent or the Tablet or the Guardian or the Washington Post tells us that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been cleared of any suspicion of wrongdoing in his involvement in the atrocities of the military junta of 1970s Argentina, we must ask what kind of writers these are, and how they have covered other issues related to the Church. And we would do well to compare it with what we know about Bergoglio’s current behaviour, and ask what is plausible and likely.
We cannot know the truth by blindly accepting a given narrative framework. But we also have to remember that no journalist can possibly tell the truth without one.
A frightfully thoughtful article…
“The horrors of the Holocaust of World War II is useful to the narrative; the horrors of the Gulags less so; the Dirty War not at all.”
– I’ll say, we must also never forget, or better to say, get more informed about Armenian genocide which has killed about 1,5 million Christians, and probably even more from 1915 to 1920. American news outlets have also been reluctant to use the word “genocide” to describe Turkey’s crimes. The phrase “Armenian genocide” did not appear in the New York Times until 2004…
Therefore I suggest to read (if you can find it) “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” which is a novel by Austrian-Bohemian writer Franz Werfel written in 1933.
And see here in this very recent article of The Catholic Herald UK, the daily but the hidden slaughter of Nigerian Christians. But Who’s Hiding It?!
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/april-7th-2017/a-hidden-slaughter-meeting-nigerias-endangered-christians/
The muslims are the slaughterers, but the butchers aren’t hiding this. The world is. It’s only Christians being killed. And black ones at that. So who gives a darn, right?
Yes! I am continually surprised when I tell people that the genocide was actually against Christians, not Armenians per se. The atrocities against them, especially the crucifixions and impalement of women who refused to allow themselves to be used as sex slaves, is covered up. One woman, Aurora Mardiganian, made a film about it, but it was very traumatic for her, and she had a breakdown during the promotion of the film. The film itself has been almost completely destroyed, but parts of it were incorporated into later documentaries. I think it was called “Ravished Armenia.”
Don’t forget the Ukrainians! Stalin (the real one, not our English friend with the Sovist nom de plume) deliberately starved 7-14 million Ukrainians into submission re his collectivization program.
Walter Duranty, N.Y. Times “correspondent”, who was very close to Stalin, wrote propaganda pieces masquerading as news stories saying that there was no famine, the Ukrainian people were well fed etc.
To this day, the N.Y. Times will not give back the Pulitzer prize that Walter Duranty won for journalism.
The Catholic Church has acknowledged the murder of Armenians by the Turks as genocide since the Papacy of St. John Paul II in it’s Church documents (although Pope Francis was the first Pope to speak the word “genocide” out loud to describe it).
I would also add the genocide of the Herero by the German colonial government in German South West Africa (now Namibia) at the beginning of the 20th century, and the ongoing murder of farmers in South Africa which is shamefully ignored by both the South African government and the world media.
Very interesting …. I would agree and loved following this to the end. Such thoughtful writing. Thank you.
So apropos of nothing, this hit my inbox after we published this today…
http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2017/04/pope-francis-cuba-and-leftist-alba.html?m=1
Apropos of much, you mean, right, Steve?
Truth really IS stranger than fiction.
Not really, it has been long clear that the Bergoglian mediation was about providing a dig out to the Maduro dictatorship. Pope Francis has largely ignored the opposition, almost made a point of it. Lilian Tintori, wife of jailed opposition leader Leopolda Lopez, chained herself to the walls of the Vatican, and, as expected, Pope Francis had a full diary, too busy to meet, or just ignored her.
Hilary, maybe you have already heard of it, but there is a book coming soon in Argentina about Bergoglio and the church. Its author, Antonio Caponnetto, is a wise (scholar?) person and a good catholic. His book is entitled “No lo conozco: del iscariotismo a la apostasía” (I do not know him: from Iscariotism to Apostasy).
https://adelantelafe.com/recomendamos-nuevo-libro-antonio-caponnetto-francisco/
Caponnetto was silenced by his bishop a couple of months after the election
http://statveritasblog.blogspot.fr/2013/06/el-obispo-de-san-rafael-mendoza-prohibe.html
It is about time. Hopefully there will be an English translation.
I don’t believe they will be able to afford a translation. In Argentina everything is expensive…
The book will be presented next week in Argentina, and is true that Bishop Tausig of San Rafael , Mendoza, silence him in 2013 in Mendoza.
I thought I saw one comment from you pointing some historic inaccuracies in this article (sharks, etc.). I couldn’t have said it better.
Hilary you might need to read ALL the sources, not just Pagina 12 newspaper. You can’t just rely on one source.
Thank you !
Correction:
Jorge Rafael Videla.
Not Valdera.
Just when you think you can’t hear anything worse, you hear something worse. Everything, everything, we come across makes this man seem more monstrous. The thought that he could live to 100 comes near to filling my heart with despair. Or that his successor could be as bad or worse. All we have left is our Faith, The Mass (in Latin), adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and the rosary. Please God, send your Holy Mother to help us. And while you’re listening Lord, take care of Steve Skojec, Hilary White and all the bloggers and online, truly Catholic news outlets who work so tirelessly to keep us informed and united.
Perhaps this papacy is meant to teach us that all we *ever* have is the Faith.
Correct. In the end, all we will have is Christ thru His Mother and our FAITH. That is ALL we will have. I think that the Lord God wants us to trust and depend ONLY on Him. And…..that’s exactly where we’re going…..to have ONLY HIM.
…..and hence for the faithful to prepare, support, desire a pope who will truly lead this Church and our world.
I must say that while I see the reason you might be worried, I don’t share the angst.
This is happening because God allowed it. From it, He will bring good. Tomorrow is good Friday. We should learn from this that God has the last Word.
Ronald Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”
Chicago Tribune newsroom (back in the 80s): “If your mother says she loves you, check the facts.”
Thank you, Hillary.
I wonder if the Chicago Tribune still follows their own advice. Didn’t they proclaim DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN in 1948?
They likely adopted this principle AFTER that screwup.
They did indeed. I was pleased to see the suggestion front and center several scenes in the very good movie “The Case for Christ” now in theaters, true story of the journalist Lee Strobel as he tried to take down the Resurrection via “facts” and could not. He worked for the Chicago Tribune. He screwed up in a serious political case due to not really digging for facts, well portrayed in the movie. He found faith when he let facts on the Resurrection speak. And a Roman Catholic priest (former archeologist) figures strongly in his transformation, and is very positively portrayed. Many interesting facts in the movie. But back to the original point, good journalism is fact based…….so much of the time today facts are hard to discern. Back in college I had a rip-roaring fight with a very liberal professor about the crowds at the first visit of JPII to NYC. His point was that cameras could make anything look differently than it really was. Though he was a raving liberal, on that he was right. And we know that now far more than we did back in the late 70s!! (I’m dating myself. 🙂
LOL!! 🙂
The day after Jorge Bergoglio became the pope, I happened to be driving a long way. Anxious to learn something about this figure who had burst so unexpectedly onto the scene, I listened to a commentator on Catholic radio telling us to disregard all reports that the new Supreme Pontiff was, at least through surrogates, a cold-blooded murderer, because there was a fair likelihood that such allegations were untrue, or at least exaggerated. This did not strike me as a good sign–nor did I ever (through that kind of media outlet, anyway) hear another word about it.
I’m just reading Mark Riebling’s Church Of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler. Riebling, reportedly a very careful researcher and no apologist for the Catholic Church, turns most recent historical theses concerning Pius XII on their collective heads. Far from being some kind of lackey for Nazism or a coward too timid to speak out against monstrous crimes, it seems the good pope was in fact at the center of a wide ranging plot to commit tyrannicide, i.e. to murder Hitler. (The book is fascinating and I recommend it to anyone, even those not especially interested in history. It’s hard to put down.) We can only hope there is a careful researcher somewhere in Argentina or elsewhere as interested in the activities of our present pope. The article above suggests he or she could also write a real page turner.
Agreed. I encourage the author to pursue this as a type of vocation — a way of “keeping the faith”. We need it because very shortly the Post VC2 “Catholic” Church will be the Everyman’s Anything You Believe And Want To Do Church. It follows from Feancis’ comments about decentralizing the Church. Or maybe it will be the church of “The Latter Day Apostates and Heretics of the One True Church of Jesus Christ”.
I have the feeling that a correction is coming and not from the Four Cardinals. And when it comes Francis and his buddies will not like it in the least.
I need that book
I read further today, Thomas (slow reader) and the depth and perdurance of Pius XII’s determination to eliminate Hitler are astounding. Many at the Vatican tried to dissuade the pope from such an active role, but he would have none of it; the unjust ruler of Germany, this “fundamentally wicked man” in the pope’s own words, had to go! At times he even became uncharacteristically truculent towards those who challenged his boldness. Discovering all this, it makes my blood boil to think of the enormous injustice done to this good man by the likes of Rolf Hochhuth and John Cornwell! And there is another fact brought out in the book, one that many have sought to hide in the years after the war. It was mainly the Catholic Church in Germany that sustained the effort to do away with the tyrant; the Protestant churches, especially the Lutherans, were too much under the influence of Luther and Calvin who taught absolute obedience to secular rulers.
I did some research on Pope Pius XII when I was in graduate school and read Cornwell’s book to get the other side. It was a penance for sure
Pope Pius XII was praised by Chaim Herzog (Israel’s Founding President) Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and Albert Einstein for his efforts to protect and save the lives of Jews. It was even said the Catholic Church was the only institution that did anything regarding the murder of Jews in the concentration camps (by among others the New York Times).
And then in the heady 60s all of this was first forgotten, then turned on its head. Unfortunately, today when so few read at all it’s easy to rewrite history and use the “revised” version for propaganda.
For some reason, on musing more regarding this article, Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” came to mind.
Seems to me we are up against some of these tactics:
Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.
Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people. The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.
Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.
Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”
Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. (NOTE: When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation. Chaos ensued.)
Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”
Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.
We are so used to reading quickly through all of the new bits we are given. If you read these steps slowly, and try to see what they mean, it is actually amazing that many of us fall for these simple ‘rules’ over and over again. We have learned to skim through so much information on a daily basis, that real reading often escapes us.
I am glad I paused to read this list of rules you posted. (I’m sure I’ve read them many times before!) I will try to keep them in mind as I continue perusing the ‘news’ we are fed daily. Thank you, Julia O’S.
Thank you so much, MaryKJ for your kind words. I think you are so right. We too are prone to fall for these tricks and tactics of the left, whether political or more importantly theological (though of course the former is a tool of the latter!) I wonder if #5 and #11 are the Achilles heel of many of us. We are, after all, social in our creation by God. To be shunned is a terrible and difficult thing, and while it is easy to say one will bear anything for the truth of God, to actually do it is a terrifying thing. E.G., Our Lord in His human suffering during the Agony in the Garden. And he was God! How much more difficult for us to stand ground when we are marginalized. And it happens in a million ways —- more and more as we wake to what is at stake. God bless you!
If the Devil’s Ambassador is using Alinsky’s playbook, He’s in “good” company — right up there with Trump’s predecessor. I think maybe we should adopt that playbook to drive all the modernists into the Looney bin.
Pas d’ennemis à gauche.
Please translate. Thank you.
“There are no enemies on the left.” It means that the speaker is on the extreme left of the political spectrum. It comes from the French Revolution, I think, but am not certain.
A more moderate leftist would have enemies on the left.
Thank you! My French vocabulary is extremely limited.
Hmm. You have a project! Rewrite the manifesto for the Good Guys use! 🙂
I can’t read that book which is “dedicated” to the Enemy.
I understand. I am going by the “Know thine enemy” school of thought.
References (in Spanish) which may be helpful:
1) On 8 November 2010 the then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, now Pope Francis, was called to testify for justice Argentina as witness in the case of the abduction in 1976 of the Jesuit priests Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics during Argentina’s military dictatorship. Although Cardinal Bergoglio was never accused always the doubt which was his role in the kidnapping of priests.
Ref.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kusAEY26O4Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UirmAbUKzI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcHGPkhCsOY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4U3VYTxwk0 (no subtitles)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfzZn8XX9YE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d5seunsxpw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT0S0DOL6G0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1uYl3RfYZk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swRuNGPl56c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwP-48aXOXQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqaBLHSIgEw
Also
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8EoFlIbDPw
2) Left-wing representative Luis Zamora was not satisfied at all with Bergoglio’s testimony..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4949Lb7mfY
3) This is the declaration of Graciela Yorio (March 2013), sister of Fr. Orlando Yorio, S.J., on Jorge Bergoglio.
Ref.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oudGSuogICw
These references are not enough – though – to have the whole picture of what really happened.
Connecting dots you can find quite a few references, both in Youtube and in your browser.
All references have Spanish subtitles (not perfect…)
There are also books written by argentinean authors.
One more reference. Sorry I missed this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kIPZC_CiX4
Just an observation: the less-cropped image is “Bergoglio: ‘Traveling Man’* on the Bus.”
https://www.google.com/search?q=bergoglio+on+bus&oq=bergoglio+on+bus&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l3.10637j0j4&sourceid=silk&ie=UTF-8#imgrc=x29JGL-nS7B7YM:
*Code for a “Brother Mason”
“Fellow Traveler” is what I’ve heard them call each other.
It is worse than this.
My Spanish is not good enough to follow these testimonies but it’s great they’re posted. A small comment : There’s a weird hand gesture in Testimony 12 at 4.57……………right hand goes inside the jacket perhaps above the heart whilst the elbow is being supported by the left hand which was not resting on anything but just in midair. The gesture is maintained for a couple of minutes. I thought he might be trying to get something from his pocket ? It’s a weird gesture……weird enough to catch your attention. Same gesture as in the well circulated photo of Bergoglio travelling by train. I wondered if it meant something to the people in the courtroom.
That he’s a traveling man?
yes, looks like it.
That’s a masonic gesture. It’s called the hidden hand. Some have disputed it’s masonic origin saying that the gesture originated in classical pagan antiquity. However, since the enlightenment, it has become a gesture used and adopted by freemasonry.
Hilary I am not quite sure the point of your article other than journalists should be educated about what and whom they write about and the background and context of the narrative.
While the past is prologue to some extent I think we already know enough about Pope Francis to make a judgement. He is a political figure wishing to play a leading role on the world stage to help bring about the NWO using religion as a power and propaganda device. He is a Pope in name only and should be expelled from office.
It might be nice if somebody studied the relationship between Bergoglio and other excellent jesuits in Argentina, such as Leonardo Castellani (1899-1981) or Alfredo Saenz or the uruguayan Horacio Bojorge. Maybe it is already done, I don’t know.
I wonder in which terms he was with the orthodox seminary in Paraná (see their magazine Mikael) that was destroyed but the progressive church in Argentina. Check http://www.quenotelacuenten.org/revista-mikael-quien-como-dios/
It would help to have a fuller picture, considering his position with both political and ecclesiastical power.
“residente en un Hotel.”
That line…almost says everything you could ever want to say about this pontificate. The bishop of Rome, the pope, the successor of St. Peter…
Lives
in
a
hotel
For no reason other than his own desire to project a superficial image to the entire world.
Someone knows the truth about Francis’ past. But we all are living his present. No Journalism Degree needed to discern the clear and present danger that is he.
Insightful, tantalizing, and much appreciated.
(F.Y.I.) Some recent nieuws…
While I was reading this: New Ways Ministry’s “Fr. James Martin Effect”
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/new-ways-ministrys-fr-james-martin-effect
And at the same time was thinking on this:
“Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
(1 Corinthians 6, 9-10)
And then… guess what!!!
I’ve got this recent nieuws from this very day, which I saw just a two minutes ago…:
“Father James Martin appointed by Pope Francis to Vatican department for communications”
http://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/04/12/father-james-martin-appointed-pope-francis-vatican-department-communications
WOW. Lord, have mercy on us!
My perspective is a little different. One photo that accompanied the Associated Press article announcing Jorge Bergoglio as pope was one of him on a Buenos Aires subway, serious look on his face and his hand tucked into his coat (masonic style). There you go, one photo speaks a thousand words to tell the elite in the newsrooms of the world…this guy is one of us, hands off…no criticizing, just rave about him. I distinctly remember CNN showing that photo with PF’s election, but now I can no longer find it.
http://www.nbcnews.com/slideshow/news/the-life-of-pope-francis-51167130 (photo # 6)
In photo #4, did you notice that he washed the feet of a woman on Holy Thursday 2005 (before Pope Benedict XVI was elected)? That should have been a red flag to everyone.
It’s terrifying that most journalists are younger than me!
I have coworkers who weren’t even born when I was in high school.
The concise explanation of exactly why the secular political labels of left/right, conservative/liberal have no place in a proper understanding of our Faith alone makes this article worthwhile
Hilary, I get your point about the need for a new narrative, but was expecting you to start delivering said narrative in your article… Is this the beginning of a series of articles you are doing to start furnishing this new narrative?
It’s what I and Steve and others like us have been doing since March 2013.
Dear Ms. White,
I’ve just read Mr. Cerra’s comments in Spanish, and I adhere to most (not all) of them.
I understand that my 14 Youtube references may mean nothing to the English-speaking reader, but in the end, I only tried to introduce facts into the discussion, having the ultimate testimony of those who were involved. And believe me, if you understand Spanish, you can make a lot of inferences just hearing what is said and declared therein. And also from gestures, silences and evasives.
Beyond that, please understand that it’s not easy (or linear) trying to have the correct interpretation of what happened down here in Argentina in the sixties and seventies.
And eighties. And nineties. And beyond. Until today.
You make a very good and profound analysis of journalism, but since I’m not a journalist, I can only expect that a journalist must not put his/her ideology before the facts. Quite difficult, isn’t it?
We all have that very problem when we analyze the news every day. Can we get rid of our own prejudices or of our previous ideas? Can we build history from scratch, from contradictory fragments?
Much has been written the so-called Dirty War down here in Argentina, and the narrative is always biased according to the writer’s ideology.
One suggestion: if you want to deepen into this subject, you must also be careful to eclectically select who you read, what your sources are… If you read Clarín and La Nación you’ll have a different story than that of Pagina 12 (Horacio Verbitsky) or Tiempo Argentino.
When I read the news now (2017) from different sources – here in Argentina, I have the impression that I’m not reading NEWS, but reading narratives.- built up by trolls or not-officially-declared-militants. You end up believing what suits your experience (in the best case) or your ideology (in the worst).
Bergoglio has a positive image for most Argentinians. But there is a deep crack.
Most love him. A few abhor him. And the vast majority of the few who dislike him do it
for political, not religious reasons. The Argentinians are not – on the whole –
too prone to religious analysis (it’s my opinion).
In the last group (dislikers) , you roughly have “sedevacantists” on one side, and “traditionalists” on the other. Naturally – and you know it better than me – the diagnosis is quite the same, but not the inferences.
And the confusion goes on and on.
Sincerely,
JLM
The mainstream press today is nothing more than liberal propaganda, run by or influenced by marxists and Freemasons. Hence they all agree with Francis. So why expose anything about him?
Excellent observations. You have good Eyes. 😉 (You knew that was coming, right?)
I didn’t know you were a Canadian! I’m not but I recognize the names of the colleges.
Very interesting.
The ultimate framework and perspective.
***
After nearly 236 years, the plan to destroy all the thrones and overturn all the altars in Europe has met with incredible success with the conquering of the final and most priced throne, that of St. Peter. – http://wp.me/p2Na5H-ZM
This article is ridiculous.
I am argentine , 63 years old.
In Argentina there was a war in the 70s, a war supported by Cuba and the USSR.
The total number of terrorists dead was bellow 8000.
You cannot compare this with other genocides as in World War Two , or the Armenians or Lenin or Stalin genocides.
It’s true that a few oh the eight thousands were innocents , as in all wars.
Among other nonsense , there are no sharks in the River plate where some people were thrown by planes of the army runned by Massera ( see below).
The war started well before 1976.
The revolución of march 1976 was asked by the mayorie of the Argentinians, including the political people.
The power of the dictatorship, relied on general Videla head of the army and admiral Massera head of the Navy.
Bergoglio was involved, that is right, but had no relation with President Videla who was a good person dealing with a war and with internal enemies, especially Massera.
Bergoglio was very close to Massera, a Mason and a psychopath , like himself.
That is what you need in orden to understand Bergoglio.
He is involved with masonery and is a psychopath.
I remember reading about this at the start of this Papacy, but it was not touched on in depth and then completely disappeared. Is it possible the reason for the 2010 testimony was to have this cleared up by the Cardinal in a public way for the next conclave, going on the record with his denial, since the rumors seem to have been around for a very, very long time and may have hindered his chances? Yet but another conspiracy theory surrounding this very conspiratorial theory inspiring Pontiff. He leaned right before he leaned left (which I think he has addressed in some interviews) and it seems to always be to the extreme.
Om stil van te worden….
Their counter-narrative: Rebel Pope “Pope Francis” (Nat Geo documentary Film) – https://youtu.be/TmUmJn1sYZA