By Theodore Shoebat
The German and Turkish governments will be cooperating together to ‘fight against terrorism.’ As we read in one report from the Daily Sabah:
The German government wants to better forge communication channels with Ankara on security issues by organizing consultation meetings amid signs of normalization in bilateral ties in recent months, a German media outlet reported. According to an article published in the German newspaper Welt yesterday, the German government expressed willingness to have consultations with their Turkish counterparts in cooperation against terrorism. Representatives of the German Federal Ministry of the Interior and high-ranking officials from Ankara were due to meet yesterday. It was expected to be about the fight against Daesh.
A spokeswoman for the office of German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière stressed in a response to a question by the Welt the “need for close cooperation with Turkey in what we understand by terrorism.” Germany was “the starting point and destination of terrorists whose travel routes lead to and from Syria via Turkey.”Moreover, Turkey has “repeatedly been the victim of massive attacks by terrorists until very recently.” Most recently, security consultations took place in February 2017 on the sidelines of a state visit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Turkey.
Germany has recently increased the number of investigations into suspected supporters of the PKK. The number of preliminary proceedings launched against suspects has increased from 15 in 2013 to 130 in 2017, a spokesman for the Federal Prosecutor’s Office told a German news agency yesterday.
While in 2014 and 2015 there were more than 20 trials each year for membership in or support for the PKK, in 2016 the number doubled to 40, the spokesman said. The spokesman did not specify how often the cases resulted in sentencing for those accused.
The latest trial starts on Wednesday in the upper regional court in the northern city of Celle where a 43-year-old Turkish national faces charges of being a regional representative of the PKK for the city of Oldenburg in Lower Saxony. The man is also accused of being linked to the planning and execution of travel to northern Iraq and the recruitment of PKK fighters. If found guilty of supporting a terrorist organization, he could face up to 10 years in prison.
Having seen relations hit rock bottom over the course of the last one-and-a-half years, the two sides are seemingly taking another step forward with this move. Indeed, the efforts of the foreign ministers of the two countries played a key role in the normalization process. While Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu hosted his counterpart Sigmar Gabriel in October in Antalya, Gabriel hosted Çavuşoğlu in Germany’s Goslar city.
Furthermore, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wants to invite German Chancellor Merkel to Turkey or travel to Germany once the government is formed in Germany. “If Germany forms a new government, Erdoğan will either invite Merkel to Turkey, or he might go to Germany. We should maintain dialogue,” Çavuşoğlu said last week. “We want to do everything for a better atmosphere,” he added.
“A new year has begun. And it will be a good year. The meeting with my dear friend Sigmar [Gabriel, the German foreign minister] was very positive, very constructive. We had tensions with Germany. Through our efforts, we see rapprochement between Germany and Turkey. Germany has always been our closest ally,” Çavuşoğlu also said.
In the wake of the release of German human rights activist Peter Steudtner and two other German nationals whose name were not disclosed, German citizen Meşale Tolu was released last month. However, German journalist Deniz Yücel has remained in pretrial detention since last year. The German government is paying great attention to his release. Berlin has been criticizing Ankara on human rights issues.
On the other hand, the Turkish government has levied harsh criticism on Berlin for harboring terrorists, providing them safe haven and showing unwillingness for extraditions. It is angered about Berlin’s indifference towards the PKK and the Gülenist Terror Group.
War is nigh. The world is racing towards Armageddon. Right before our eyes we are seeing the beginning stages of the start of a major world war. Arms races, nationalism and militarism are growing with more intensity every year. Hungary and Germany are supporting the restoration of militarism, reminding us of the German Hungarian alliance in the First World War. Turkey is being given more and more power in the Middle East, reminding us of the Ottoman Empire which has been an ally of Germany since 1871, and joined Germany in its war of imperialism and racial domination in the First World War. This is all a sign that another great war between the major powers of the earth is looming.
But the world has been distracted with other things. From 2014 to 2015, everybody was focusing on ISIS and Christian persecution. But this died out in late 2016, especially with the victory of the Trump campaign.
The media has not been giving the same amount of coverage that it used to on the war in Syria. The world has been practically ignoring Syria. Headlines are now popping up about how the Syrian government just retook Deir-ez-zor from Islamic terrorists, and now the only area under the control of Islamic jihadists is the Idlib province. There is much talk about how all of this is a sign that the US is failing in its regime change objective in Syria.
Why is Syria no longer such a huge headline? I remember how in the years of 2014 and 2015, ISIS, Syria and Iraq were extremely popular topics. By the middle of 2016, we began to see the subjects of ISIS, Syria and Iraq, waning. By the end of 2016, the story of ISIS and Christian persecution in the Middle East was on life support, and people turned their eyes from it only to gaze up with all their attention towards the victory of Donald Trump. By 2017, interest in the subject of the situation in the Middle East, fell into a coma. It did not die out, it still remained alive, with only a few people here and there giving their regards.
What happened? Did all of the horrible things happening in Syria and Iraq suddenly stop? No, its just that the media’a attention on the situation has shifted. People’s interest are determined by the media. The ones who control the media know this, and so they have been distracting their attention to other matters. So what is taking place underneath the headlines?
The reason why, I believe, they are not focusing so much on Syria and Iraq anymore, is because the US and NATO are now giving power to Turkey to control the region. As the Daily Beast wrote a number of months ago:
One Syrian opposition news agency reported an unnamed rebel commander saying that U.S. support will continue for a few months and then move to a new mechanism. The commander added that the U.S. is pressuring rebels to unify under a joint military command before resuming support. There is also the possibility that Turkey and Qatar would fill the breach.
A very dangerous and popular ideology that we will see continue to rise is pan-Turkism, or the belief that the Turkic race is the superior race, and that all of the Turkic races, from parts of China (the Uighurs), to Central Asia (Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, etc) and Turkey (really biblically Gog and Magog), must unite together. During the Second World War, Pan-Turkish activists in Turkey openly supported Hitler and the Nazis. In 1942, the Pan-Turkish nationalists sent soldiers into the Caucasian border, where Russia and Turkey meet, to support the Nazis against the Soviet Union.
In 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkish nationalists believed that it was their time to rise up, and Pan-Turkish organizations believed in establishing a Turkish ethno-state in Azerbaijan, which is interesting given the fact that this was one of the central territories of the Seljukian Turks, the founders of the first Turkish empire.
After the Second World War, the Americans were, supposedly, very worried about the Soviet Union expanding into Europe. They saw Turkey as a great defense against the Soviets, because Turkey is geographically the closest NATO nation to Moscow, while at the same time it is right within the same region of the oil countries of the Middle East. The US became fixated on embedding Turkey into the anti-Soviet bloc, and so it became a central nation of NATO’s Gladio program, which was a series of operations done by the CIA and other Western European secret service agencies, in which they commissioned Nazi leaders of the Third Reich to recruit neo-Nazis and pan-Europeanists to commit terrorist attacks. The plan was to then blame the attacks on far-Left terrorists with the objective of stirring nationalist sentiment against the Soviet Union. (I have written extensively on Operation Gladio and how it is still continuing through major think-tanks and movements like the Counterjihad. You can read about it by clicking here).
Turkey right now is the second most armed nation within NATO. Why is this? Because the US armed Turkey to the teeth as part of the Gladio operation, so that Turkey will be able to fight Russia in the future. As Swiss historian Daniele Ganser has written:
“As Turkey furthermore guarded a third of NATO’s total borders with Warsaw Pact countries, the Turkish elite became an excellent defense contractor for the United States military industry and recipient of billions in US aid. Armed by the United States during the Cold War, Turkey set up the largest armed forces in Europe, and the second largest in NATO after the United States. In a reckless gamble the United States in 1961 stationed even nuclear missiles in Turkey targeting the Soviet Union.” (Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, ch. 17, p. 225)
Turkey is the second most armed country within NATO because the United States made it that way. It is similar to what the US, under the Trump administration, has been doing, giving more power to Turkey in the Middle East, and also allowing Japan to increase its military capacity, and by encouraging Germany to increase spending on its military. All of this, like Gladio, is being done under a pretext to (so they say) combat Russian expansion. It makes you wonder if Gladio ever ended. The CIA claims that the operation was disbanded in 1990, but that was said only after the Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, became the first politician to expose Gladio before the press.
When we see what is happening before us, with the US arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine, allowing Japan and Germany to build up their militaries, and giving leeway to Turkish expansion, it makes you wonder if the plan is really combating Russia. From all of this, it appears that the masterplan truly is eugenics, genocide, population control, and the ascending evil of racialist nationalism and world empire. The US is only creating a frankenstein, a frankenstein that it will soon have to fight in the future in which God “will bring strangers upon thee, the terrible of the nations: and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom, and they shall defile thy brightness.” (Ezekiel 28:7) It is only then that the US will unite with Russia, as it did in the past against the Germans in both World Wars.
When the US was working to use Turkey as a major player for the Gladio operation, the Americans wanted to use the violent pan-Turkist movement to foment anti-Soviet hatred. The American government decided to use a key figure within the racist pan-Turkist circle, Alparslan Türkeş. During the Second World War, Turkes was a Nazi operative who worked as the contact for the German Nazis in Turkey.
Turkes was convinced of the Darwinist and eugenist race theories of the Nazis, and in his speeches he would quote from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. When we speak of fascism, we usually think of Benito Mussolini emulating Hitler. But what we rarely talk about are the Muslim Turkish nationalists who also emulated Hitler. Look no further than to Nihal Atsiz. Around the same time as Turkes, there was another Turkish nationalist leader by the name of Nihal Atsız, who obsessed over Hitler so much that he, like the Alt-Right fanatics of our time, wanted to look like him. Here is his photo:
The syncretism between Sufi Islam, Pan-Turkism and Nazism, was the fitting formula for an anti-Soviet movement. One CIA document from 1949 said that Turkey is an “extremely favourable territory for the establishment of both guerrilla units and Secret Army Reserves. Politically the Turks are strongly nationalistic and anti-Communistic, and the presence of the Red Army in Turks will cause national feeling to run high.” Turkes was no small deal. He became the main contact for the CIA in their Gladio operation. As the CIA trained the Taliban against the Soviets, so the US would do the same with these Turkish racists. In 1948, Turkes made contacts with the CIA, and, it is said, upon being given orders by the CIA, he began to set up a nationalist paramilitary group in Turkey.
Turkes traveled to the United States where he made connections with people from both the Pentagon and the CIA. From 1955 to 1958, Turkes worked within Washington as part of NATO’s mission in Turkey. By 1952, Turkes had already established a paramilitary organization called Seferberlik Taktik Kurulu, or Tactical Location Mobilization Group. The base for this paramilitary entity was the CIA building, American Yardim Heyeti, or the American Aid Delegation, located in the Bahceliever district of the Turkish capital of Ankara. In 1965, the Tactical Mobilization group was restructured and given a new name, Special Warfare Department.
These squads would be used to conduct false flag attacks to spark nationalism in Turkey. For example, in 1955, Turkish agents threw a bomb into the Mustafa Kemal Museum in Thessalloniki in Greece. The bomb exploded and became a popular headline. The Turkish government and press then blamed the attack on Greeks. Racist hatred erupted, and Turkish nationalists then used the story to justify going on a killing craze and a rape spree. On September 6th and 7th, 1955, in the cities of Istanbul and Izmir, Turkish nationalist gangs destroyed hundreds of Greek homes, murdered sixteen Greeks and raped 200 Greek women. Priests were also scalped and burnt in their beds. According to a report made by the United States Congress:
Greek priests were reported circumcised, scalped, burned In bed; Greek women raped. … Just 9 out of 80 Greek Orthodox churches In Istanbul were left undesecrated; 28 were demolished.
Here are photos of the mob and its violence:
In 1965, Turkes founded the extreme right National Action Party (Millietci Hareket Partisi). The party’s “youth organization” was actually its armed wing, the notoriously violent Grey Wolves. Their creed was that the superior race of the earth was the Turkish race. The magazine of the Grey Wolves, Bozkurt, declared the racist tenets of the organization:
“Who are we? We are the members of the Grey Wolf (Bozkurtcu). What is our ideology? The Turkism of the Grey Wolf (Bozkurt).What is the creed of the Bozkurtcu? They believe, that the Turkish race and the Turkish nation is superior. What is the source of this superiority? The Turkish blood.”
The Grey Wolves see violence as not just a holy principle (Jihad), but a natural part of human struggle, denoting its own Hiterlian Social-Darwinist ideology. The Grey Wolves declared:
“War? Yes, war, if necessary. War is a great and holy principle of nature. We are the sons of warriors. The Bozkurtcu believe that war, militarism and heroism should receive the highest possible esteem and praise.”
In 2015, Ülkü Ocaklar, a member of the Grey Wolves, called for hunting down Armenians:
“What should we do now? Should we start a hunt for Armenians in the streets of Kars?”
Racism and eugenics were part, and are still part of the ideology of the Turkish elites ruling Turkey. One thing we must understand is that the belief system of Turkey is not Wahabi Islam, but really a mixture of Turkish nationalism, racial theory, and Sufi Islam, or a mystical Islam greatly influenced by the works of Jalal al-Din al-Rumi.
This mixture of Islam, eugenics, nationalism and Nazism, will arise again in a very dangerous syncretism.
TURKEY AND GERMANY
There is much talk about how Germany and Turkey are having a spat. But while the headlines distract you with this idea, German officials are meeting with the Turkish military as part of NATO policy in the Middle East. There is a report from NATO that just came out last night that speaks of how NATO, specifically Germany, is providing support to Turkey in Syria and Iraq:-
“I am pleased to have led this useful visit to Konya,” the Deputy Secretary General said. “NATO AWACS aircraft are playing a vital role in support of Turkey and the Coalition to Defeat ISIS. It has been a privilege to meet the men and women carrying out this important mission,” Ms. Gottemoeller added.
The delegation comprising German parliamentarians and NATO staff was received at Konya airbase by Turkish diplomatic and military officials and General Dawn Dunlop, Commander of the NATO AWACS fleet. Ms. Gottemoeller and the members of parliament toured the airbase, received operational briefings and met with air crews, including German Air Force staff, stationed there.
Konya airbase, around 250 kilometres south of Ankara, has served as a forward operating base for NATO AWACS surveillance aircraft since the 1980s in addition to its national role as a Turkish military facility. The base took on added importance to NATO operations due to the turmoil in neighboring Syria and Iraq. NATO AWACS operating out of Konya conduct patrols in support of Turkey and the Counter-ISIS Coalition. About 50 NATO military personnel are currently stationed at the base.
All of this talk about Germany and Turkey having a ‘strained’ relationship, is all good cop/bad cop talk being done as a show to distract people. There is no strained relationship between Germany and Turkey. While headlines keep trying to convey this message that Germany and Turkey are beginning to hate each other, German troops and officials are in Konya Airbase in Turkey. Merkel has said that if she wins in the upcoming election in Germany that she will end the EU accession negotiations for Turkey. Even if this is true, it means nothing. As Turkish political analyst Semih Idiz said recently:
So she is saying, for example that she will try and convince the other members states on Turkey, but has not said that Germany will veto Turkey’s membership negotiations, which Germany has a right to do. France, for example, which is also opposed to Turkey’s membership, has vetoed chapters in the negotiation process that have to do with full membership, and is only allowing chapters which will boost Turkish-EU ties further but with guarantee membership for Ankara.
Since 1871, Germany and Turkey have been allies. When the Protestant Reformation broke out in Germany in the 16th century, it was the Ottoman Empire that made alliances with Protestants throughout Europe in their fight against the Catholic Hapsburg Empire. This religious and political relationship, with such a long history, is not going to end now because Merkel said so. Lets not forget that when Merkel became chancellor in 2010, she said that multiculturalism has ‘utterly failed.’ She then was pro-diversity in 2014, when Germany and Turkey cooperatively facilitated the refugee situation in Europe. In 2016 she said that she would back a burka ban in schools, courts and other state buildings. The only reason why she said that was because of the anti-Muslim sentiment that has been rising in Europe due to the migration crises that she helped start. You are seeing the Hegelian dialectic taking place right before your eyes. They create problems and then present themselves as the solution. Its all a game for power. Now we are in 2017, and she is playing as the nationalist who would stop Turkey from joining the EU. Are we really to believe this woman?
Remember what happened in WW1, Germany, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarians were allies against the Americans and the Entente. I believe that in this revival of the Ottoman Empire, we will also witness the rise of Germany and Hungary.
THE COMING HUNGARIAN, TURKO-GERMANIC ALLIANCE
Look at Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary. Since 2014, he and his party, Fidesz, has been adulated by the right wing in both Europe and America because they have expressed themselves so much against accepting migrants, and so much in favor for nationalism and helping persecuted Christians. We at shoebat.com, in the beginning, fell for this trick. In fact, the Hungarian government invited our organization, Rescue Christians, to participate in a meeting on rescuing oppressed Christians. As it turned out, it was all a media front. The Hungarian government wasn’t planning on helping anybody, and asked our director Keith Daives to sign a statement that the Hungarian government is helping Christians. Keith refused. We found out about Fidesz’s jingoist sentiments. The co-founder of Orban’s Fidesz party, Zsolt Bayer, called for the purging of all gypsies from Hungary “regardless of the means”:
“A significant part of the Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals, and they behave like animals. When they meet with resistance, they commit murder. They are incapable of human communication. Inarticulate sounds pour out of their bestial skulls. At the same time, these Gypsies understand how to exploit the ‘achievements’ of the idiotic Western world. But one must retaliate rather than tolerate. These animals shouldn’t be allowed to exist. In no way. That needs to be solved — immediately and regardless of the method.”
Anti-Gypsy sentiment is something always found in Nazis. “But,” says the typical blog commenter, “Viktor Orban is defending his people from the migrants and wants to keep Hungary for the Hungarians. He is a good nationalist! How dare you go against him!” You may feel this way all you like, it does not change the way things are. Putting our emotionalism aside, the bottom line is that where you have nationalism, you have genocidal ideologies. Viktor Orban, while playing his role as the good nationalist, is totally in favor for a militarist Germany and European Union. Just recently, the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, said that Europe can no longer rely on America for protection, and because Great Britain has decided to leave the EU, nations within the European Union must increase their military capacity. That means a militarist Germany, and a massive increase in military manufacturing. Junker said:
“The protection of Europe can no longer be outsourced. Even our biggest military powers – and I could count them on one, maximum two – cannot combat all the challenges and threats alone”
“We should list the issue of security as a priority, and we should start setting up a common European army”
Turkey is in a good location, and although there are now wars on its borders, strategically it is in one of the world’s most important locations. It has an enormous private sector. Why should it pay any attention to the Hungarians – aside from friendship and the intellectually intriguing question of common origins lost in the mists of ancient history? Why should any member of its business community divert their gaze to Hungary? I believe that there is one fact which even the most successful Turkish businesspeople would be wise to consider: Hungary is a country of ten million, and we are capable of generating exports worth 110 billion dollars; meanwhile Turkey is a country of eighty million, which is capable of generating exports worth 145 billion dollars.
To sum up, we have the legend of common Turkish-Hungarian origins. We have mutual respect. We have an outstanding political and personal relationship between the leaders of the two countries. We have an enormous Turkey and a strengthening Central Europe. And we have a Hungarian investment and business environment without rival in Europe.
Most in the West do not know that the Hungarians are a Turkic people, and the nationalists have a grandiose and delusional pride about being Turkic and related to the peoples of Central Asia. Each year in Hungary, there is the Kurultáj event, a festival where Hungarians, alongside various tribes and Turkic peoples, get together to celebrate their Turkic roots. In 2012, Vice-chairman for Orban’s Fidesz party, Sándor Leszák, welcomed tribal leaders in the National Assembly, and the Hungarian government, which was also dominated by Fidesz, funded the event with 70 million forints (about a quarter of a million US dollars).
Over a whopping quarter of a million people visited the town of Bugac to attend the Kurultaj event, celebrating the Turkish race. What makes this even more interesting is that the first Kurultáj did not take place in Hungary, but in Kazakstan, in 2007. Kazakstan is a Turkic country, and for Hungary to hold their first meeting celebrating ‘Turkishness’ in Kazakstan, reflects the Turanian ideology that Orban and the rest of the Hungarian nationalists follow.
The 2012 event included pagan rituals akin to Native Indian rites, with worship of a crescent moon idol:
“Cooperation is a question of force, not of intention. Perhaps there are countries where things don’t work that way, for example in the Scandinavian countries, but such a half-Asiatic rag-tag people as we are can unite only if there is force.”
“Our clothes are slightly dingy, we are a little more disorganized, we have let ourselves go a bit in the past eight years, there are signs of decadence here and there, but we believed in the values on which your world is built, in honour, in diligence, in responsibility and in respect, and we can prove it. We, as members of the European Union, sail under western flag, but as you also know, we are an eastern nation, and for us, just as for you, the principal commandment is that every agreement has to be kept.”
We are proud of having come from Asia. On the bottom of our infants, in about 30 out of 100 cases, for six weeks there is a small red dot, just like in the case of Japanese babies. I have been told about this by Japanese scientists, I didn’t know before.[…] My point in mentioning this is just that sometimes others know more about us than we do. While talking with Chinese delegations many times a week, they all begin their talks saying that, well yes, between us there is some deep, deep, deep… maybe even kinship.
Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon has unveiled an ambitious new National Shipbuilding Strategy which meets the challenge set by Sir John Parker last November and sets out plans for the first batch of Type 31e frigates.
Sir John Parker’s independent report into British naval shipbuilding proposed far-reaching recommendations to transform the UK maritime industry and boost the prosperity of regions, shipyards and maritime supply chains across the country.
Today’s Strategy sees the Government accept Sir John’s recommendations and step up to what he called a prospective ‘renaissance’ in British shipbuilding. Building on the Government’s industrial strategy, it outlines an ambition to transform the procurement of naval ships, make the UK’s maritime industry more competitive, grow the Royal Navy fleet by the 2030s, export British ships overseas, and boost innovation, skills, jobs, and productivity across the UK.
It announces the government’s plan to procure new Type 31e General Purpose Frigates. A price cap has been set of no more than £250M each for the first batch of five frigates. In line with standing UK policy on warships they will be built in the UK. They could be built in a way which could see them shared between yards and assembled at a central hub. The first ships are set to be in service by 2023. Shipyards will be encouraged to work with global partners to ensure the vessel is competitive on the export market.
Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said:
“This new approach will lead to more cutting-edge ships for the growing Royal Navy that will be designed to maximise exports and be attractive to navies around the world.
“Backed up by a commitment to spend billions on new ships, our plan will help boost jobs, skills, and growth in shipyards and the supply chain across the UK.”
The Strategy sets out the government’s commitment to work with industry to reinvigorate and maximise export success. The Type 31e will be designed to meet the needs of the Royal Navy and with the export market in mind from the beginning. This could see industry’s customer become not only the Royal Navy but for the navies of Britain’s allies and partners.
The MOD is committed to new ships for the Royal Navy through its rising budget and £178bn equipment plan. In July, at BAE’s Govan shipyard, the Defence Secretary cut steel for the first of eight Type 26 frigates, HMS Glasgow. The £3.7 billion contract for the first three, the largest for naval ships this decade, will secure hundreds of high skilled jobs on the Clyde until 2035 and hundreds more in the supply chain across the UK.
Notice what it says: “The first ships are set to be in service by 2023.” This is the same date that Turkey to be a major world power, in its plan which it called the 2023 Vision. Britain’s plan to use its new battle ships coincides with Turkey’s vision of empire. This is not a coincidence, and corresponds with the reality of the approaching third world war.
Great Britain recently produced two new aircraft carriers, as we read in a report released yesterday:
The first of the Royal Navy’s giant new aircraft carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth arrived in Portsmouth last month.
And the second – HMS Prince of Wales was officially named by the Duchess of Cornwall at a ceremony in Scotland.
She’s due to arrive in Portsmouth within the next couple of years. Richard Jones reports.
The government has released its long-anticipated strategy for the future construction of Royal Navy ships.
Drawn up by industrialist Sir John Parker, the strategy is designed to speed up and reduce the cost of Ministry of Defence projects.
The MoD has come under harsh criticism for bloated projects running hundreds of millions of pounds over budget, and dragging on much longer than intended.
Why is Britain building all of this war technology? War is nigh. Its just like what took place prior to World War One; Winston Churchill and a small number of British officials knew that war was coming, but their knowledge was kept within their own circle, outside of the general populace.
The masses were shocked when war finally broke out in 1914. People did not think that a world war would take place, because they believed the lies that politicians made, that everything was peaceful. We marvelled at ourselves on account of our own innovation in technology. When the world erupted in blood shed, and men entered that long and dark fray in the trenches, the American novelist, Henry James, wrote of how deceived people once were, thinking that peace would be continuous:
“The plunge of civilization into this abyss gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be … is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.” (See Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 4)
Days later, Fr. Sampson entered a church where some nurses were. The church had been devastated by bombs, and only two walls remained. But, there was beheld two images: one of St. Paul, the other of St. Peter. And a crucifix also remained intact. In this church, Fr. Sampson gave a homily, the words with which I will end this article:
The image of the naked Galilean hanging from the cross has always inspired great love and fierce hate. Nero sought to make the cross a hateful image by putting Christians to death upon it, pouring pitch upon them, and lighting Rome with these flaming human crosses. Julian the Apostate said that he would make the world forget the Man on the cross, but in his final agony he had to acknowledge, “Thou has conquered, Galilean.” Communists forbid its presence because they fear its power against their evil designs. Hitler has tried to replace the image of our Blessed Lord on the cross with a stupid swastika. Invectives, false philosophies, violence, and every diabolical scheme have been used to tear the Christ from the cross and the crucifix from the church. Nevertheless, like the bombs that were dropped on this chapel, they have only succeeded in making the cross stand out more and more in bold relief. The image we love grows greater in our understanding because of the vehemence of the hate it occasions in wicked men. Each of us has that sacred image stamped upon his soul. Like the chapel, we are Temples of God. And no matter how we are torn by the bombs of tragedy and trial and assault from without, the image of the crucified remains if we want it to. Now at the foot of this cross let us renew our baptismal vows. Let us promise to shield forever His image in our hearts.