Category: Europe

Cardinals McElroy and Cupich denounce Iran war: ‘War now has become a spectator sport.’

“A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game—it’s sickening,” Cardinal Blase Cupich said.

 

by Edward Desciak

Following the United States and Israel’s overnight missile barrage of Iran on Feb. 28 and the widening war across the Middle East, a number of U.S. bishops have spoken out in opposition to the war.

They underscored an urgent need for peace and a return to diplomacy, denounced as unjust American and Israeli military aggression and expressed deep concern for the millions in the region affected by the armed conflict.

“At this present moment, the U.S. decision to go to war against Iran fails to meet the just war threshold for a morally legitimate war,” Cardinal Robert McElroy of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., said.

In an interview with the Catholic Standard on March 9, he explained that the U.S. offensive operations failed to meet at least three criteria of just war theory—the Catholic framework for evaluating the morality of military action—including the requirements for just cause, right intention and clarity that “the benefits of this war will outweigh the harm which will be done,” made impossible by the unpredictability of the region.

Cardinal McElroy said: “Almost everyone rightly believes that the Khamenei regime has been for decades a brutal and repressive government that has spread terrorism throughout the world and should be replaced. But there is immense concern that this war will spiral out of control and embroil the United States in ever greater depth.”

The cardinal, who has also voiced opposition to the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy, mentioned particular concern for the military families he has spoken with who are worried about their loved ones’ safety.

“We must all work together to forbid this expansionism to lead us into an ongoing morass in Iran,” he said, expressing his “deepest concern” for the “deterioration of moral norms” in the United States and the world, signified by the growing willingness to turn to preventative war over diplomacy as a legitimate means of foreign policy.

Cardinal McElroy’s responses echoed comments from Cardinal Blase Cupich of the Archdiocese of Chicago, who criticized the war and the Trump administration’s mix of militarism and entertainment in a statement on March 7.

Cardinal Cupich cited a post from the official White House X account captioned “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY” that spliced clips from popular action movies, cartoons and TV shows “with actual strike footage from their war on Iran.”

It was one of many edits the White House has posted over the last few days in which the account has similarly spliced together video footage of the war with NFL and MLB highlights and video game references.

“A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game—it’s sickening,” Cardinal Cupich said. “This horrifying portrayal demonstrates that we now live in an era when the distance between the battlefield and the living room has been drastically reduced.”

He noted that the social media post dishonored the six U.S. soldiers who had been killed at that point during the war (the death of another service member was confirmed on March 8) as well as the hundreds of others who have died across the Middle East, “including the scores of children who made the fatal mistake of going to school” the day a U.S. missile struck a naval base next to an elementary school in Iran, killing 175 people.

“The moral crisis we are facing is not just a matter of the war itself, but also how we, the observers, view violence, for war now has become a spectator sport or strategy game,” Cardinal Cupich wrote, referencing a particularly macabre scandal involving the popular prediction market site Kalshi, where Americans can now gamble on matters of life and death. The company is the respondent in a $54 million class action lawsuit after it declined to pay out wagers on whether Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would be ousted by March 1, citing a “death carveout.”

Cardinal Cupich also urged the American people not to “become addicted to the ‘spectacle’ of explosions.”

“Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment,” he wrote, “as if it’s just another piece of content to be swiped through while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store.”

“I know that the American people are better than this. We have the good sense to know that what is happening is not entertainment but war, and that Iran is a nation of people, not a video game others play to entertain us,” he concluded.

The cardinals joined the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Paul Coakley, who followed Pope Leo XIV’s lead and released a statement on March 1 condemning the hostilities: “We ask for a halt to the spiral of violence, and a return to multilateral diplomatic engagement that seeks to uphold the ‘well-being of peoples, who yearn for peaceful existence founded on justice.’”

Archbishop Coakley added: “I invite Catholics and all people of goodwill to continue our ardent prayers for peace in the Middle East, for the safety of our troops and the innocent, that leaders may seek dialogue over destruction, and pursue the common good over the tragedy of war.”

The Archdiocese of New York’s new archbishop, Ronald Hicks, also commented on the Iran crisis in a brief interview for 1010 WINS on March 5, calling for prayers and diplomacy. “We have to give some special prayers for our men and women in uniform and pray for their protection, too, and everyone involved,” he said.

“It is absolutely heartbreaking.”

Source: Cardinals McElroy and Cupich denounce Iran war: ‘War now has become a spectator sport.’ – America Magazine

Bastille Day: How literary writings see the French Revolution

The storming of the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789, is seen as a defining event in the French Revolution. But how does the revolution affect writers, poets, painters and other creative minds?

By Mohammad Asim Siddiqui

France celebrates Bastille Day to commemorate the storming of the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789, a defining event in the French Revolution. The Bastille was originally built as a castle in Paris in the 14th century to protect the city. But it was later used as a prison and came to symbolise the brute and arbitrary powers of the king.

The historiography of the French Revolution offers varied perspectives on the events, with some celebrating its revolutionary character and others highlighting the violence that accompanied it. For instance, British historian Eric Hobsbawm in Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (1990) focuses on the positive takeaways of the Revolution – Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (liberty, equality and fraternity), the spirit of the Enlightenment, and the overthrow of aristocracy by the middle class.

He also laments many historians’ and writers’ emphasis on the violence and destruction associated with the Revolution. Hobsbawm considers historian Simon Schama’s bestselling book Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989), which highlights the violent nature of the Revolution through an engaging narrative. He sees it as part of a tradition in England established by Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and many other popular works.

But how do Romantic poets like William Blake, William Wordsworth, and P B Shelley depict the French Revolution? Why does Albert Elmer Hancock say that the French experience “humanised” Wordsworth? Why does Jane Austen deliberately avoid discussing directly the events of the French Revolution that so disturbed her world, but incorporate many of her responses to those events in her writing? Continue reading “Bastille Day: How literary writings see the French Revolution” →

This is fascism

[Propaganda images by Trump supporter Jon McNaughton]

Fascism starts with talk, not tanks. With democratic elections, not a coup. And it takes hold thanks to people who think things won’t move quickly—until they do just that.

By Rosan Smits

Fascism starts with talk, not tanks. With democratic elections, not a coup. And it takes hold thanks to people who think things won’t move quickly—until they do just that.

On February 18, 2025, a video appeared on X. An officer from Enforcement and Removal Operations can be  The sky over the Seattle airport is overcast. Jet engines can be heard idling in the background.

Then: the clinking of chains. We see a blue plastic crate, filled with metal restraints. Someone lays them out on the tarmac—one set of cuffs per person. People are cuffed tightly, hands and feet. The camera shows no faces, only bodies and steel. The video ends with a shackled prisoner climbing the boarding stairs with difficulty, his restraints hitting against the metal steps.

The title of the post: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight 🔊”. The abbreviation is a jarring reference to the type of YouTube video that soothes and  Distant whispers, the rhythmic patter of raindrops, the rustling of leaves in the wind. And in this case, the sound of heavily chained men being deported.

Fascism is back. This time no swastikas, Nazi flags, or deadly bureaucracy, but MAGA hats, right-wing extremist memes, and a triumphant fist held high. No ghettos or concentration camps, but data-driven manhunts and “detention facilities” in El Salvador and Guantanamo Bay. No SS officers or brownshirts, but  and a Capitol mob.

It’s perfectly clear: the US president, Donald Trump, is putting together a fascist regime. And fast. Not only Trump’s   But what’s more, internationally renowned scholars—the indisputable experts when it comes to fascism—are now 

Their warnings still meet with resistance. For many, the label “fascism” is inextricably tied to the Holocaust and should be left in the past out of respect for the six million murdered Jews. Others see the term as exaggerated and alarmist: every fascist so far pales in comparison to Adolf Hitler. Accusing Trump of fascism, they feel, is like yelling “FIRE!” just because someone, somewhere has lit a small flame—a distraction from the very real challenges facing the United States.

And yet it’s precisely that resistance to using the word fascism that’s typical of how fascism works. Fascism thrives by playing down what was previously seen as extremist. And once that happens, any warnings get dismissed as overly alarmist.

Trump takes it to the next level: anyone who accuses him of being fascist  It’s a tried and true tactic to sap language of meaning: If everyone calls their adversaries “fascist,” the word loses its power to warn people about actual fascism.

Instead of continuing to debate whether or not Trump can be called a fascist, it’s better to understand why experts are alerting us. To do that, it’s essential we understand how fascism works, so we can recognize today’s variants, in the US and beyond.

The function of fascism

Fascism conjures up images of the death and destruction of the Third Reich, Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, Francisco Franco’s generals, or perhaps the white hoods of the Ku Klux Klan. When you think of fascism, you think of its most visible and extreme outgrowths. But while everyone has some idea of what fascism means, there’s no clear definition.

In order to recognize fascism as a wider phenomenon, we shouldn’t look to those visible extremes, says Professor Emeritus Robert Paxton, author of the seminal work The Anatomy of Fascism (2005). According to Paxton, we should look at what function fascism serves for politicians 

That function is strategic. Fascism is a way to take political grievance, shared by members of a dominant group in society, and mobilize it against some supposed “enemy,” often aided by a degree of societal breakdown during a time of crisis. It’s similar in that sense to sometimes called 

But where populist leaders stretch the ground rules of democracy, fascists take things further. They change the rules, seize absolute power, and destroy those seen as foes, using violence if need be.

Fueling this strategy is emotion, not some coherent set of ideological convictions. Ultranationalism and an unshakable belief in the “survival of the fittest” are always part of fascism, but aside from that, there’s no unifying story.

“A fascist just has to be a storyteller,”  The fascist’s words matter, in the sense that they must provoke rage. But what he says, and whether it’s true, matters a great deal less. The fascist simply has to “find a pulse and hold it.”

Continue reading “This is fascism” →

The Call to Return the Statue of Liberty to France, Explained

Statue of Liberty

“The statue is yours, but what it embodies belongs to everyone,” said French politician Raphael Glucksmann in a sharp rebuke of Trump’s attacks on democracy.

By Isa Farfan

A call that could easily have gone unnoticed for the Statue of Liberty to be repatriated to France has generated a media swarm over the sculpture and sparked a war of words between a European Parliament member and the White House press secretary.

Raphaël Glucksmann, one of France’s 79 members of the European Parliament, called for Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty to be returned to its sender, citing President Trump’s allegiance to “tyrants” and gutting of scientific research institutions at a center-left convention on Sunday, March 16.

While it was a passing remark made at a French political event, the comment nonetheless found itself at White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s podium on Tuesday when a reporter asked her head-on whether the infamous gift would be returned.

So will the Statue of Liberty, which has sat in the New York Harbor since October 1886, be uprooted, dismantled, and shipped across the Atlantic back to France?

“Absolutely not,” Leavitt said. “My advice to that unnamed, low-level French politician would be to remind them it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now, so they should be grateful to our great country.”

Responding to Leavitt’s jabs, Glucksmann posted a statement on X, in English, clarifying his calls for the “symbolic” repatriation of the statue.

“No one, of course, will come and steal the Statue of Liberty,” Glucksmann said. “The statue is yours, but what it embodies belongs to everyone. And if the free world no longer interests your government, then we will take up the torch, here in Europe.”

The statue, a fixture of the New York Harbor horizon, was conceived as a gift to commemorate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence and the abolition of slavery the year prior.

France dug into public funds to construct the statue and Americans fundraised to construct the foundational pedestal through benefit art exhibitions and auctions and a direct call for donations by Joseph Pulitzer in his newspaper, New York World. 

The American-funded pedestal is marked by a 1903 bronze plaque inscribed with Emma Lazarus’s 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus,” which imagines the “mighty woman with a torch” declaring: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

However, Glucksmann argues, the United States has strayed from the values the statue’s inscription purports.

“We are counting on you,” Glucksmann wrote.

Source: The Call to Return the Statue of Liberty to France, Explained

Macron and Le Pen to face off in crucial live TV election debate

Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen
Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen

Far-right challenger out to avoid repeat of 2017 ‘failure’ in two-and-a-half hour clash with incumbent

Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen will go head to head in a live TV debate on Wednesday night that could prove crucial in making up the minds of undecided voters four days before the French presidential runoff.

The high-stakes, two-and-a-half-hour confrontation, the only direct clash between the two candidates, has been a tradition of French presidential campaigns since 1974, often confirming or dashing electoral ambitions.

With recent polls giving Macron a lead of up to 12 points before Sunday’s vote, Le Pen will be keen not to reproduce the poorly prepared, muddled and aggressive performance that sealed her eventual defeat in 2017  [ . . . ]

Continue at source: Macron and Le Pen to face off in crucial live TV election debate | French presidential election 2022 | The Guardian