Before a great man there is even greater woman

In 1552 the princess, 17 at the time, married the heir to the Portuguese throne. When he died two years later, she returned to Spain.

Young, beautiful, and aware of her royal position and power, Juana was also endowed with a talent for ruling. While her brother, Philip II of Spain, was in England as husband of Mary Tudor, he made Juana regent. From 1554 to 1559 she was the effective ruler of Spain.

Juana had an additional ambition: to become a Jesuit. Telling none of her family, she informed Spanish grandee Francis Borgia, an early Jesuit, that she wanted to join the Society of Jesus.

So perilous was the project that all existing Jesuit correspondence about the situation avoids her name, using the pseudonym Mateo Sanchez, or Montoya, instead. In a quandary, Ignatius appointed a committee to advise him. It recommended that Juana enter the Society as a permanent scholastic; truly a Jesuit but forever in formation. Otherwise, with solemn vows, she would have been—according to canon and civil law—legally dead, dispossessed of everything, and incapable of ever marrying again.

With the novel, simple, and terminable vows of a Jesuit scholastic, she could have separated from the Society if necessary. When Juana pronounced her three religious vows as a Jesuit, absolute secrecy was enjoined on everyone.

She could make no obvious change in her manner of life. So, for her, poverty meant leading a rather austere life at her already simple court. Chastity meant never marrying again. Obedience—well, her letters show her sometimes trying to give orders to Ignatius and Borgia. SOURCE

The operative word here is "tried" to give orders, and the author of this article does not amplify, but elsewhere I came across Jesuits saying that Juana "gave orders" to Ignatius and Borgia. If they were followed through it would mean that the feisty woman was actually in charge of the Jesuit Order, no? They say that "Behind every great man there's a great woman", but here's an example that it actually works the other way around.

Juana:

Spooks and snitches

For some time researchers were trying to figure out the identity of a secret services asset known as Bolek. Allegations circulated that the asset was none other but Lech Wałęsa - the legendary Solidarity leader, future President of "free" Poland.

Despite Wałęsa's repeated denials the allegations never went away. Whether Wałęsa was an asset or not, one thing is certain - the former secret services as well as communist era military intelligence wield enormous power to this day, skillfully operating yesterday's knowledge about today's political figures. If you ever wandered what happened to all those hundreds of thousands of operatives after the political shift you can pick up THE FIFTH INTERNATIONALE, a book dealing with the very subject.

Former Polish President – a Communist Secret Service agent – a book Hundreds of Poles queued outside Warsaw bookstores yesterday to snatch up copies of a new book claiming former Polish president, Solidarity union leader and Nobel laureate Lech Walesa was a communist agent in the 1970s, Polish National TV reported.

Queues formed before 8 am outside Warsaw's Institute of National Remembrance - a research centre that investigates Communist and Nazi crimes - for the release of "Walesa and the Security Service."
Others tried their luck at the numerous bookstores that carried limited numbers of the 700-page volume.

The book "Walesa and the Security Service" by Slawomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk has new evidence that Walesa was an informer for Poland's communist-era secret service in the 1970s while working at the Gdansk shipyards and later, as president, removed archive documents that implicated him.

Walesa, 65, has denied the allegations and called the institute's authors "fanatics" with libellous claims. He has threatened legal action and said he will soon release his own book to tell his side of the story.

Although the rumours have circulated for decades, the book brought the debate to a head and sparked controversy in Polish politics.

Walesa became an anti-communist hero worldwide after he led a strike at the shipyards against Poland's communist regime in 1980, helping bring down communism at the end of the decade. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983.

Walesa won a 2000 court ruling that said he was not a spy. But opponents, including Polish President Lech Kaczynski, say they know he had worked for communists.

Some see the allegations as tactics used by right-wing politicians for political gain. In a recent survey conducted by the daily Dziennik, 43 per cent said they did not believe the former president worked with the secret police.

The book sparked wide public interest and dominated last week's newspapers and talk shows.

Outside the institute, the crowd grew frustrated when the 600 copies sold out at noon. An official tried calming impatient customers with promises that more copies would be available in two weeks. Many say they what matters for them in the book is not deciding about Walesa's guilt or innocence but making it possible for everybody to learn the truth about secrets of communist past. SOURCE

The most serious threat to U.S. interests

"All through the
1980s and early 90s [U.S. army intelligence officers] recognized that
‘the most serious threat to U.S. interests was not secular
Marxist-Leninism or organized labor but liberation theology."

Author Peter Hallward in his book: Damning the Flood.



On Amazon

Globalisation - a path to Hell?

Fr Jon Sobrino, SJ, in Edinburgh:

He drew on his latest book, 'The Eye of the Needle' - No Salvation
Outside the Poor' to contrast what humanises and gives life with
what dehumanises and destroys life. Globalisation,
in particular, is terribly dehumanising because though it implies
a good, it is in fact destructive and divisive. The
poverty gap - or wealth gap - dehumanises even before we make
an enquiry about any causal relationship between the rich and
the poor. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus sums
up the global reality very well, says Sobrino. In contrast,
the poor themselves humanise us, and the Latin American bishops
of the Medellin conference famously urged us to make an 'option
for the poor'. For Jon Sobrino the poor, in fact, lead
us to the divine, and he proposes an 'option to let salvation
come from the poor'. SOURCE

Triumph of money over culture?

It is reported from the United States that the Americans have declared our patents void. That fits their mentality exactly. I have the impression anyway that the Americans participate in a European war every quarter century in order to be able to take for themselves as cheaply and easily as possible whatever cultural work has been done in Europe. The American continent is hardly in a position to bring forth anything of its own in the cultural realm. It is dependent upon imports from Europe, and as the Americans are so crazy about money they naturally like to take possession of the results of our creative and inventive labors as far as possible without paying for them.

Joseph Goebbels, Ph.D., in The Goebbels Diaries, April 23, 1942

Application for sex

Am reading an interesting book: We, by Eugene Zamiatin. Written in Russian, first published in translation, in English in 1924, We is set in a Utopian society where citizens’ every action is planned to the minute detail, everyone lives in a glass apartment, eats, sleeps and works at the same time, and files an application to have sex with a citizen (Number) of choice. Freedom is an unwanted concept that leads to unhappiness.

Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, we wake up, millions of us at once. At the very same hour, millions like one, we begin our work, and millions like one, we finish it. United into a single body with a million hands, at the very same second we carry the spoons to our mouths, at the same second we go out to walk, go to the auditorium, to the hall for the exercises, and then to bed.

Not as Utopian as it might have seem almost 100 years ago, We was an inspiration for Orwell’s 1984.

The authority of the state

[...] modern men go on exhibiting a superstitious belief in the authority of the state.

The myth of legitimate authority is the secular reincarnation of that religious superstition which has finally ceased to play a significant role in the affairs of men. Like Christianity, the worship of the state has its fundamentalists, its revisionists, its ecumenicists, and its theological rationale. The philosophical anarchist is the atheist of politics. [...] the belief of legitimacy, like the penchant for transcendent metaphysics, is an ineradicable irrationality of the human experience. However, the slow extinction of religious faith over the past two centuries may encourage us to hope that in time anarchism, like atheism, will become the accepted conviction of enlightened and rational men. Robert Paul Wolff in On Violence

Robert Paul Wolff on wikipedia

Citizen resistance

Most of us are familiar with the term citizen's arrest:

A citizen's arrest is an arrest made by a person who is not a sworn law enforcement official. In common law jurisdictions, the practice dates back to medieval England and the English common law, when sheriffs encouraged ordinary citizens to help apprehend law breakers.

Despite the title, the arresting person does not usually have to be a citizen of the country where he is acting, as they are usually designated as any person with arrest powers. Source: Wikipedia

Stuart Littlewood argues that citizen-delivered justice can go a lot further:

Genocidal tyrants, corrupt leaders and bloodthirsty heads of state hankering for global domination and wishing to keep the world in turmoil once again infest the planet. They are often born and nurtured in the Western democracies the world is told to admire but which are now so corrupt they disgust many right-thinking people. These menaces can’t be brought to justice in the normal way, so it’s a job for a revived and revamped Assassination Bureau.

Military commanders in the resistance and bomb-making freedom fighters are not the issue. The people of the world need an instrument to eradicate the low life in high places that threatens humanity. They need to dispatch those who deal in mega-deaths, who meddle massively where they have no business, who create injustice and who make life miserable for millions. We all have our wish list. I’ll wager the same target names keep reappearing.

Think of it: a socially-responsible international public riddance service ready to do business with any member of the public who feels himself at war with these evil forces and can put a good case for a slaying before the bureau chief and his panel. I see long queues forming to enlist the bureau’s help in eliminating the world’s tormentors. For them there is no hiding place. Riddance requests have to be accompanied by a suitable “intelligence finding”, of course.

The work of an Assassination Bureau would be perfectly “legal” and “legitimate”, and most certainly “necessary”. It would simply follow the precedent set by America and Israel. SOURCE

No long ago I toyed with the very same idea for a thriller novel. Yet again life proves much more interesting than fiction. The movement to take charge of our own wellbeing is growing. We can no longer leave it up to those who claim to speak and act on our behalf but time and again prove to be the very enemy they vow to defend us from.

The CIA - what exactly does it do

Ever wondered what the Central Intelligence Agency actually does? In the words of the accomplished CIA officer Philip Agee:

The CIA, after all, is nothing more than the secret police of American capitalism, plugging up leaks in the political dam night and day so that shareholders of US companies operating in poor countries can continue enjoying the rip-off. The key to CIA success is the 2 or 3 percent of the population in poor countries that get most of the cream, while the marginalized 50, 60 or 70 percent are getting a lesser share. Philip Agee in CIA DIARY.

Secret police is secret police regardless of the acronym it uses, which suggests that one may substitute the "CIA" for any country’s intelligence agencies / secret police, and to the poor of other countries one may add the struggling masses of one’s own compatriots. If one does it one shall see what one’s sweat-and-blood-drenched taxes are paying for: one’s own enslavement. But one should not despair, not everything is so gloom and doom: one gets a break now and then – some of the secret police funds come from black operations, the drug smuggling and weapons sales that would embarrass one’s high and mighty rulers if the truth became known.

I’m kidding of course - no amount of filth and lies will embarrass a politician.