Thursday, March 31, 2005
The culture of death - in Florida and in Hollywood
With the news that Pope John Paul II is now being fed through a tube in his nose, how long will we have to wait until some idiot calls for (more or less seriously) that tube, too, to be disconnected and the Pontiff allowed to finally die? More thoughtful commentators will no doubt find parallels between the current condition of John Paul II, who made the fight against the "culture of death" one of the missions of his papacy, and that of Terri Schiavo, who in the Pontiff's worldview is becoming one of the victims - or martyrs, some would say - of that culture.
In another Pope-related news, AFP reports that "new documents found in the files of the former East German intelligence services confirm the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II was ordered by the Soviet KGB and assigned to Bulgarian agents," according to Italian daily "Corriere della Serra".
A few months ago I wrote that "if I could find out the answer to just one historical mystery of the twentieth century, I would love to know if Agca was a mentally unstable lone gunmen, or whether there was a conspiracy involving the Bulgarian, and perhaps even the Soviet secret service."
Many observers over the years have expressed doubts about the involvement of communist intelligence agencies in the assassination attempt. Some, undoubtedly, because as with everything else they were always prepared to give every benefit of the doubt to the enemy while denying it to their own countries; others, those with less illusions about the Soviet Empire, were nevertheless skeptical that KGB and its Eastern Bloc surrogates would go for such an incredibly high-risk operation.
Soon, we might finally be another step closer to the answer.
Kind of on the topic, don't miss Bridget Johnson's piece in today's "Opinion Journal" on the Hollywood's continuing infatuation with communism (two more Che movies in the pipeline, following on "The Motorcycle Diaries"):
Hollywood to America: that just soooooo boring and it's like, you know, soooooo last millennium.
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In another Pope-related news, AFP reports that "new documents found in the files of the former East German intelligence services confirm the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II was ordered by the Soviet KGB and assigned to Bulgarian agents," according to Italian daily "Corriere della Serra".
A few months ago I wrote that "if I could find out the answer to just one historical mystery of the twentieth century, I would love to know if Agca was a mentally unstable lone gunmen, or whether there was a conspiracy involving the Bulgarian, and perhaps even the Soviet secret service."
Many observers over the years have expressed doubts about the involvement of communist intelligence agencies in the assassination attempt. Some, undoubtedly, because as with everything else they were always prepared to give every benefit of the doubt to the enemy while denying it to their own countries; others, those with less illusions about the Soviet Empire, were nevertheless skeptical that KGB and its Eastern Bloc surrogates would go for such an incredibly high-risk operation.
Soon, we might finally be another step closer to the answer.
Kind of on the topic, don't miss Bridget Johnson's piece in today's "Opinion Journal" on the Hollywood's continuing infatuation with communism (two more Che movies in the pipeline, following on "The Motorcycle Diaries"):
"Annoying as the Che adulation is, a recent comment by a 14-year-old on an online movie message board was truly disturbing: 'I just saw The Motorcycle Diaries, which further made me question: Why is communism bad?... Young people are told how bad communism is, but we are not told why... The Motorcycle Diaries showed me how Ernesto Guevara wanted to help people... But this did not explain why he was such a "bad" person and apparently deserved to be murdered by the U.S'."No wonder our younger generation simply doesn't have a clue. Where are the movies about the tens of millions of victims of politics practised by Che? "It seems in all of these dark films there would be no room for heroes, but there are more than could fill the Kodak Theatre and its exclusive stage," writes Ms Johnson. "The boat people who have courted death to flee from Cuba and Vietnam, Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement, Vaclav Havel and his cohorts in the Velvet Revolution, the Hungarian resistance fighters who valiantly tried to keep the Soviets at bay in 1956, those who tried to find any way across the Berlin Wall, a lone man who blocked a column of advancing tanks in Tiananmen Square during 1989's democracy protests."
Hollywood to America: that just soooooo boring and it's like, you know, soooooo last millennium.
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