Role Models in Times of Trouble

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Helmuth Hubener

“German boys! Do you know the country without freedom, the country of terror and tyranny? Yes, you know it well, but are afraid to talk about it. They have intimidated you to such an extent that you don’t dare talk for fear of reprisals. Yes, you are right; it is Germany – Hitler Germany! Through their unscrupulous terror tactics against young and old, men and women, they have succeeded in making you spineless puppets to do their bidding.”

Helmuth Hubener (1942 )

The White Rose

Helmuth Hubener 1925-1942
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Helmut Hubener was 1/3rd of “The White Rose”, whose mission was to confront and fight the Nazi-machine and offer help to those who suffered from them, particularly German Jews, at the heighth of Nazi power. Hubener, 17, Karl-Heinz Schnibbe, 17, and Rudi Wobbe, 14, knew they could never overthrow the Nazis and instead concentrated on informing German people about the outright Nazi deception. These Hamburg teenagers instinctively saw through the lies and onslaught of Nazi propaganda and became active in a fight against it.
They secretly acquired radios to listen to the BBC, and published a series of anti-Nazi pamphlets from information aquired from broadcasts. The White Rose then posted these tracts on ad boards, in mailboxes and even hand distributed them into those seemingly interested.
Eventually, in 1942, they were tracked down, arrested and subjected to brutal interrogation at Gestapo headquarters. The Gestapo had difficulty believing that a group of teenagers had done incredibily sophisticated work without adult help.
At their trial before Germany’s highest court in Berlin, all three were convicted of high treason. Karl was sentenced to five years, Rudi to ten years, and Helmuth, their leader, to death. Asked if he had anything to say, Hubener replied, “Now I must die, even though I have committed no crime. So now it’s my turn, but your turn will come.” Hubener was executed by guillotine.
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from When Truth Was Treason by Karl-Heinz Schnibbe.
More on Hubener here:
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and the winner is...

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John Spong v. Bill O'Reilly

"Everything is a spin on this program. There's nothing wrong with that. You do it with great style. You're sort of a Rush Limbaugh with perfume." -John Spong

Bill O'Reilly: All right. With us now is John Shelby Spong. So I'm basically saying that African-Americans owe loyalty. And this is racist?
John Spong: Well, what you said, it seems to me, was that Al Sharpton and other black people should say that they were better off because they were in America than if they had stayed in Africa.
O'REILLY: Well...
SPONG: And Bill, I sort of grew up of that stuff.
O'REILLY: Hold, it. Here's what I said exactly so that the audience knows. All Americans realize, I guess I was wrong on this, "all Americans realize that African-Americans are much better off in the United States than they would be with their brethren back in Africa." And you think that's a racist statement?
SPONG: Yes, on several levels. I think it's racist in that it doesn't take into consideration what has happened to black Americans in this country, the history of slavery and segregation. It also doesn't take into consideration what the colonial powers have done to Africa over the centuries.
O'REILLY: Bishop, I'm just stunned. All Americans, all right, I say, agree -- and I'm wrong on that, because obviously you don't. All right. You would not say that black Americans are better off in the U.S.A. than they would be if they were in Africa? You say that's an erroneous statement?
SPONG: Bill, when I was a child growing up in North Carolina, one of the ways slavery was justified was to say blacks are so much better off by being brought over here to be civilized and to be made Christians.
O'REILLY: We're not talking about the 19th century. We're talking about 2002. There is no slavery anymore.
SPONG: That's right, but we have the heritage of that. And we have slavery's bastard step-child, segregation, that has been effective in this country and is still effective.
O'REILLY: But we don't have segregation now.
SPONG: Well, you don't legally. You don't legally. But in this country, the black people still need a leg up to get to be equal.
O'REILLY: All right, that's fine. But again, I'm going to go back. Are black Americans not better off living here in the U.S.A., where life expectancy is 76, than in Africa where life expectancy is 49?
SPONG: Well, life expectancy for black Americans is not equal to life expectancy for white Americans.
O'REILLY: It's over 70. It's 49 in Africa. That's more than 20 years difference, bishop.
SPONG: But you cannot go back and say that what has happened in Africa -- we don't know what would have happened in Africa had it not been colonialized.
O'REILLY: I'm dealing with reality. I'm dealing with 2002.
SPONG: I am dealing with reality, too.
O'REILLY: You know, I was very offended by your column. And I think you're way out of base, calling this a racist statement. I deal in facts. And the fact of the matter is that black Americans in the year 2002 are better off in the United States than they would be if they were living in Africa. That is a fact.
SPONG: No, no, you call this a no-spin zone.
O'REILLY: Correct.
SPONG: And that's a spin.
O'REILLY: It's not a spin. It's a fact.
SPONG: Everything is a spin on this program. There's nothing wrong with that. You do it with great style. You're sort of a Rush Limbaugh with perfume.
O'REILLY: Well look, you're living in a dream world, bishop.
SPONG: No, I'm not.
O'REILLY: And if you want to live in that world, that's fine. Now you say "O'Reilly demanded a yes or no answer from Al Sharpton." OK?
SPONG: As you've just done from me.
O'REILLY: No, I didn't. I just said you're living in a dream world. And you are. "To what is regarded as the ultimate test of truth, are black people better off today, today," and you even say that in your column, in America than they would be in Africa? There is no question -- but there's no question that they are. So what are you dragging up the racism thing for? What are you dragging that up for?
SPONG: Well, do you want to be proud of where we are in race relations in this country? I'm proud of some progress we've made, but we've got a long way to go.
O'REILLY: Well, we have a long way to go in every country on earth, all right. There's no good country or perfect country. Everybody works. But here we go. And this is my basic tenet. If you're an African-American, a black American or a Chinese-American, or a Native-American or whatever you are, Irish-American, doesn't matter, you owe your country loyalty. Am I wrong there?
SPONG: No, I don't think you're wrong there, but...
O'REILLY: But that's my basic tenet.
SPONG: No, no, but there's a great big but. Remember, Africans didn't come here voluntarily. Your ancestors and mine did. Your ancestors and mine ancestors came looking for a better life. Blacks came to make your ancestors and my life -- my ancestors have a better life. There's a very big difference. And we need to address that.
O'REILLY: Address it how?
SPONG: Well, I think in all sorts of ways. Affirmative Action programs would help. The voting rights act, which finally gave black people the chance to vote. A wonderful story about how George Wallace stopped campaigning against blacks and started campaigning against Communists because they were 250,000...
O'REILLY: All right. So you're basically saying that America owes black people whatever.
SPONG: Oh, I think we do. But I also think...
O'REILLY: OK. And if you say that black, like I did, that black people owe loyalty to America because of the opportunities, do you know that 80 percent, that black married couples that stay together in America earn 80 percent of what white married couples earn? OK? And it's skewed because most black couples, most black people live in the south where salaries are lower. You're telling me that's not parity there, bishop?
SPONG: No, they don't have parity yet by a long shot.
O'REILLY: OK, so that statistic is bogus?
SPONG: Yes, I think...
O'REILLY: You don't believe that statistic?
SPONG: Well, statistic...
O'REILLY: Even though it comes out of the Census. You, Bishop Spong, don't believe it.
SPONG: No, but if I were say I've got -- statistics can prove anything.

O'REILLY: But that statistic is rock solid.
SPONG: No.
O'REILLY: 80 -- oh, OK, the Census statistic is no good. We'll throw that right out, because you, Bishop Spong, don't believe it. We'll throw that out the window. Come on.
SPONG: I don't think that's the proper statistic to be -- we can take statistics to prove anything.

O'REILLY: You want economic parity? It looks like black, married couples have economic parity to whites, but you don't believe that.
SPONG: I think we've come a long way. I think we've got a long way to go yet.
O'REILLY: All right.
SPONG: And I would be proud of this country when we arrive.
O'REILLY: So will I. I think everybody wants fairness for all Americans. Now I was so disappointed that you raised this racist card, because that is the most bogus argument. I don't -- we've had you on this program many times. And you and I -- you're a very liberal guy. You think that I'm Rush Limbaugh. That's fine. We disagree on many issues, but we respectfully disagree.
SPONG: I think so.
O'REILLY: You throwing in that racist canard here, that racist accusation, that shatters any respect because that's not true.
SPONG: Well, you see, I interpret racism to be a lot broader than you do. I think it's in the very air that we breathe. I think it's like alcohol. I think I am a recovering racist, like persons might be recovering alcoholics. I think you've got to be on guard against racism in your assumptions all the time. I was the bishop in the city of Newark, which is an overwhelmingly black city. And I had to constantly be aware of the things in my past that would come up and continue to distort, not my actions so much as the assumptions that were there. I think racism is a sickness that will take generations, maybe centuries to...
O'REILLY: Well nobody's arguing that. But you, a bishop, a man of God, leveling a racist accusation at me, based upon a comment that says blacks should be loyal to the U.S.A., I mean, that's just -- number one, you're wrong, OK? But number two, it's unfair. It's blatantly unfair to do it.
SPONG: I understand that you think it's wrong, but I don't believe that it is because...
O'REILLY: But you're making a judgment about me. And you don't even know me. You don't know what I do, who I help, and how I deal with people. You just don't know.
SPONG: That's true. But Bill, I only know and your personal persona. Indeed, that's the only way you know me. And I have to judge on that. And it should not surprise you that people are critical. You...
O'REILLY: Oh, I don't mind you being critical, but when you say this is a racist statement and you couldn't back it up here, I guarantee you, I'll send the mail. You're going to get fileted tomorrow.
SPONG: That's OK.
O'REILLY: You can't back it up. It just diminishes you. I know you're a good man, but that charge diminishes you.
SPONG: See, I'll get a lot of mail, too, that will be supportive.
O'REILLY: Maybe.
SPONG: Because we have different audiences.
O'REILLY: And we'll let the audience decide as always.
SPONG: And I expect your audience will be voting in favor of you.
O'REILLY: I hope so, because I have the facts on my side.
SPONG: I don't think so.
O'REILLY: And that's what always matters.

Interview:

Huston Smith on the Sanctification of Science and the Dethroning of God

Micheal Toms: Huston, you're mentioning how the scientific paradigm has crept into academic circles, how the scientific model has actually become part of the research into the humanities, and how it can stifle creativity and originality. But in your writings you've also referred to David Bohm's theory of wholeness and the implicate order. David Bohm is certainly one of the foremost theoretical physicists of our era and has pioneered, I think, a theory of physics that almost sounds like a spiritual philosophy.
Huston Smith: It does indeed.
MT: One very similar to some of the Oriental philosophies you're so familiar with. What is your view of the possible coming-together, the linking, with science coming back around to its roots in natural philosophy?
HS: It's an immensely exciting time. The outcome hasn't been determined; we'll find out how things go, but the incursions are fruitful. On one hand, the developments in science have undercut a kind of crass Newtonian view of reality as consisting of ultimate little atoms that are unrelated to other things—our century has undercut that. The interrelation between the parts of being—which David Bohm emphasizes with his concept of implicate wholeness—clearly is a move back towards the unity which traditional philosophies, those of Asia included, emphasized. At the same time, I think we have to be careful here. Modern science has become a powerful symbol for transcendence—again I use "transcendence" to refer to that which is greater than we are by every criterion of worth we know, including intelligence and compassion. Modern science suggests such a realm, but I do not think that it proves it. Nor do I think that it can, for this reason: The crux of modern science is the controlled experiment; that's what distinguishes modern science from generic science, and what gives it its power by virtue of its power to prove. It can winnow hypotheses and discard those that are inadequate. What we don't see is the corollary of all this, which is that we can control only what is inferior to us. Things that are greater than we are, including more intelligent, dance circles around us, not we they. So there's no way that we are going to get angels, or God, or whatever other beings there may be that are greater than we are, into our controlled experiments. So I think modern science will never prove anything in the area of the human spirit. But it can suggest, and I find it suggesting powerfully. For me, modern science has come to rival, even outstrip at times, sacred art and virgin nature as a symbol of the divine.Now, if I can continue one more step. I think there's a trap if those who share our kinds of spiritual interests rush on to say, "Well, that's true of science up to this point. But that only shows that we need a new science that is larger in scope and can prove these transcendent realities." When I hear that, and I hear it very often, my impulse is to say, "In proposing that move, you show me where your loyalties lie, namely, in science! You're for transcendence, but you won't really believe it exists until science proves that it does. So your move shows that you continue to accept science as the ultimate oracle as to what exists." That acceptance is the heart of modernity's problem, so the call for a science that proves transcendence only perpetuates the problem.In probing the physical, material world, science is brilliant; it is a near perfect way of telling us about that. And to know about nature is a great good, for nature is awesome in its own right.But science doesn't have to do everything. And if we try to make it do everything, with every step of its expansion we will decrease its power and will end up with a kind of mushy science. Of course, we can define "science" in any way we please. I prefer keeping it hard-nosed, powerful and precise, while insisting that it can only disclose a part of reality.
MT: It occurs to me as I hear you present your case here—which I think is very compelling—that it may explain why it's so difficult to get psychic and paranormal experiences to happen in the scientific laboratory.
HS: Exactly. I believe that paranormal powers are real. But to get anything into a laboratory, we have to reduce the variables to a single alternative so we can discover which side of it is true. Where the object in question exceeds us in complexity, we can't do that.
MT: This may also explain why it has been so easy to change the agenda of colleges and universities, through the federal budget and the like. We've made science into some kind of god.
HS: Oh, clearly.
MT: And science has become our religion.
HS: Alex Comfort has a nice line on that. He says, "science is our sacral mode of knowing." Sacral is a coined word—it comes from "sacred." I think he's right. Science has almost exactly replaced the role that revelation served in the Middle Ages. Then, if you wanted the final verdict on what is true, you would go to the scriptures and the traditions of the Church. Now we go to science. One intellectual historian has pointed out that as far back as a hundred years ago, more people believed, really believed, in the truth of the periodic table of chemical elements than believed anything in the Bible. In the century since then, we've moved further in that direction. Science has become the revelation of our time.And to return to our previous point, it should be with regard to the material world. The slip is that we have turned science into scientism—scientism being defined as the assumption that science is the only reliable way of getting at truth, and that only the kinds of things it tells us about really exist.
MT: It may require some sense of humility to admit that we have confused science with scientism.
HS: It will. In a way, we know what we need to know. It's one of these things that we know but never learn.
MT: Or that we know but haven't integrated.
HS: That's right. It has to be assimilated. But everything in our culture—almost everything—works against that assimilation. The visible bombards us from dawn to night. The tangible is so much with us that it's hard to put it in perspective. That's all we need to do, just put it in perspective. But that saving grace is difficult to allow.

disturbing church news

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News Release from Presbyterian Church
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complete with "Arson Prevention Suggestions for Churches"

here is a recent Liberty Forum post as well

yeesh!

The other 9/11

Kristallnacht

November 9th (day/month in Europe, 9/11) is the anniversary of "Kristallnacht - the Night of Broken Glass".

On the night of October 27 1938, Zindel Grynszpan and his family were forced out of their home by Nazi police. His store and the family's possessions were confiscated and they were forced to move over the Polish border into relocation camps. Grynszpan's seventeen-year-old son Herschel was living with an uncle in Paris. After receiving the news of his family's expulsion, he went to the German embassy in Paris intending to assassinate the German Ambassador to France. Upon discovering that the Ambassador was not in the embassy, he settled for a lesser diplomat, Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath. Rath, was critically wounded and died two days later, on November 9.
Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels used this event for media-manipulated "news" of Jewish conspiracies against Germany, inciting all Germans to "rise in bloody vengeance". The long winter night of November 9th soon turned into a campaign of organized widespread violence against all Jews. Even German non-Jews who dared to protest or seek calm were beaten. Police and firemen watched thousands of people brutalized, buildings smashed, looted and burnt.

The next morning, sidewalks were laden with rubble, broken glass and ash.


The lack of any public outrage and protest only encouraged the Nazi government to pass more oppressive laws in the following months.
Prominent Germans who protested were soon arrested. Ordinary Germans who protested were beaten up.
Personally, I only hope that we here in America have learned from such recent historic examples of hateful and righteous arrogance for world power, political gain, dogmatic ideology, religious doctrine, all resulting in complete and utter disaster.

From the "what the hell is happening" Dept.

Puritanism of the Rich

Bush's ideology has its roots in 17th century preaching that the world exists to be conquered
George Monbiot Tuesday November 9, 2004

By the mid-17th century, most English Puritans saw in poverty "not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion...but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will". This leap wasn't hard to make. If the Christian life, as idealised by both Calvin and Luther, was to concentrate on the direct contact of the individual soul with God, then society, of the kind perceived and protected by the medieval church, becomes redundant.

If Bush wins," the US writer Barbara Probst Solomon claimed just before the election, "fascism is possible in the United States." Blind faith in a leader, she said, a conservative working class and the use of fear as a political weapon provide the necessary preconditions.

She's wrong. So is Richard Sennett, who described Bush's security state as "soft fascism" in the Guardian last month. So is the endless traffic on the internet.

In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton persuasively describes it as "... a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity". It is hard to read Republican politics in these terms. Fascism recruited the elite, but it did not come from the elite. It relied on hysterical popular excitement: something which no one could accuse George Bush of provoking.

But this is not to say that the Bush project is unprecedented. It is, in fact, a repetition of quite another ideology. If we don't understand it, we have no hope of confronting it.

Puritanism is perhaps the least understood of any political movement in European history. In popular mythology it is reduced to a joyless cult of self-denial, obsessed by stripping churches and banning entertainment: a perception which removes it as far as possible from the conspicuous consumption of Republican America. But Puritanism was the product of an economic transformation.

In England in the first half of the 17th century, the remnants of the feudal state performed a role analogous to that of social democracy in the second half of the 20th. It was run, of course, in the interests of the monarchy and clergy. But it also regulated the economic exploitation of the lower orders. As RH Tawney observed in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), Charles I sought to nationalise industries, control foreign exchange and prosecute lords who evicted peasants from the land, employers who refused to pay the full wage, and magistrates who failed to give relief to the poor.

But this model was no longer viable. Over the preceding 150 years, "the rise of commercial companies, no longer local, but international" led in Europe to "a concentration of financial power on a scale unknown before" and "the subjection of the collegiate industrial organisation of the Middle Ages to a new money-power". The economy was "swept forward by an immense expansion of commerce and finance, rather than of industry". The kings and princes of Europe had become "puppets dancing on wires" held by the financiers.

In England the dissolution of the monasteries had catalysed a massive seizure of wealth by a new commercial class. They began by grabbing ("enclosing") the land and shaking out its inhabitants. This generated a mania for land speculation, which in turn led to the creation of sophisticated financial markets, experimenting in futures, arbitrage and almost all the vices we now associate with the Age of Enron.

All this was furiously denounced by the early theologists of the English Reformation. The first Puritans preached that men should be charitable, encourage justice and punish exploitation. This character persisted through the 17th century among the settlers of New England. But in the old country it didn't stand a chance.

Puritanism was primarily the religion of the new commercial classes. It attracted traders, money lenders, bankers and industrialists. Calvin had given them what the old order could not: a theological justification of commerce. Capitalism, in his teachings, was not unchristian, but could be used for the glorification of God. From his doctrine of individual purification, the late Puritans forged a new theology.

At its heart was an "idealisation of personal responsibility" before God. This rapidly turned into "a theory of individual rights" in which "the traditional scheme of Christian virtues was almost exactly reversed". By the mid-17th century, most English Puritans saw in poverty "not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion ... but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will".

This leap wasn't hard to make. If the Christian life, as idealised by both Calvin and Luther, was to concentrate on the direct contact of the individual soul with God, then society, of the kind perceived and protected by the medieval church, becomes redundant. "Individualism in religion led ... to an individualist morality, and an individualist morality to a disparagement of the significance of the social fabric."

To this the late Puritans added another concept. They conflated their religious calling with their commercial one. "Next to the saving of his soul," the preacher Richard Steele wrote in 1684, the tradesman's "care and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far as it will go." Success in business became a sign of spiritual grace: providing proof to the entrepreneur, in Steele's words, that "God has blessed his trade". The next step follows automatically. The Puritan minister Joseph Lee anticipated Adam Smith's invisible hand by more than a century, when he claimed that "the advancement of private persons will be the advantage of the public". By private persons, of course, he meant the men of property, who were busily destroying the advancement of everyone else.

Tawney describes the Puritans as early converts to "administrative nihilism": the doctrine we now call the minimal state. "Business affairs," they believed, "should be left to be settled by business men, unhampered by the intrusions of an antiquated morality." They owed nothing to anyone. Indeed, they formulated a radical new theory of social obligation, which maintained that helping the poor created idleness and spiritual dissolution, divorcing them from God.

Of course, the Puritans differed from Bush's people in that they worshipped production but not consumption. But this is just a different symptom of the same disease. Tawney characterises the late Puritans as people who believed that "the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian."

There were some, such as the Levellers and the Diggers, who remained true to the original spirit of the Reformation, but they were violently suppressed. The pursuit of adulterers and sodomites provided an ideal distraction for the increasingly impoverished lower classes.

Ronan Bennett's excellent new novel, Havoc in its Third Year, about a Puritan revolution in the 1630s, has the force of a parable. An obsession with terrorists (in this case Irish and Jesuit), homosexuality and sexual licence, the vicious chastisement of moral deviance, the disparagement of public support for the poor: swap the black suits for grey ones, and the characters could have walked out of Bush's America.

So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the US this ideology has to be a religious one. Bush's government is forced back to the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to understand what it's up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but to the 1630s.

Pilgrim's Progress

We Have Now Become The Nation Our Founders Escaped From

GARRY WILLS
Garry Wills, an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University, is the author of "St. Augustine's Conversion."

The Endarkenment Of America
November 4, 2004

This election confirms the brilliance of Karl Rove as a political strategist. He calculated that the religious conservatives, if they could be turned out, would be the deciding factor. The success of the plan was registered not only in the presidential results but also in all 11 of the state votes to ban same-sex marriage. Mr. Rove understands what surveys have shown, that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution.

This might be called Bryan's revenge for the Scopes trial of 1925, in which William Jennings Bryan's fundamentalist assault on the concept of evolution was discredited. Disillusionment with that decision led many evangelicals to withdraw from direct engagement in politics. But they came roaring back into the arena out of anger at other court decisions - on prayer in school, abortion, protection of the flag and, now, gay marriage. Mr. Rove felt that the appeal to this large bloc was worth getting President Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (though he had opposed it earlier).

The results bring to mind a visit the Dalai Lama made to Chicago not long ago. I was one of the people deputized to ask him questions on the stage at the Field Museum. He met with the interrogators beforehand and asked us to give him challenging questions, since he is too often greeted with deference or flattery.

The only one I could think of was: "If you could return to your country, what would you do to change it?" He said that he would disestablish his religion, since "America is the proper model." I later asked him if a pluralist society were possible without the Enlightenment. "Ah," he said. "That's the problem." He seemed to envy America its Enlightenment heritage.

Which raises the question: Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?

America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of Enlightenment values - critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences. Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity. They addressed "a candid world," as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, out of "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more, when a poll taken just before the elections showed that 75 percent of Mr. Bush's supporters believe Iraq either worked closely with Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11.

The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.

Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.

It is often observed that enemies come to resemble each other. We torture the torturers, we call our God better than theirs - as one American general put it, in words that the president has not repudiated.

President Bush promised in 2000 that he would lead a humble country, be a uniter not a divider, that he would make conservatism compassionate. He did not need to make such false promises this time. He was re-elected precisely by being a divider, pitting the reddest aspects of the red states against the blue nearly half of the nation. In this, he is very far from Ronald Reagan, who was amiably and ecumenically pious. He could address more secular audiences, here and abroad, with real respect.

In his victory speech yesterday, President Bush indicated that he would "reach out to the whole nation," including those who voted for John Kerry. But even if he wanted to be more conciliatory now, the constituency to which he owes his victory is not a yielding one. He must give them what they want on things like judicial appointments. His helpers are also his keepers.

The moral zealots will, I predict, give some cause for dismay even to nonfundamentalist Republicans. Jihads are scary things. It is not too early to start yearning back toward the Enlightenment.