"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths." Northwoods is a ministry dedicated to refreshing Christians and challenging them to search for the truth in Christianity, politics, sociology, and science
"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life"
Father God, thank you for the love of the truth you have given me. Please bless me with the wisdom, knowledge and discernment needed to always present the truth in an attitude of grace and love. Use this blog and Northwoods Ministries for your glory. Help us all to read and to study Your Word without preconceived notions, but rather, let scripture interpret scripture in the presence of the Holy Spirit. All praise to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
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I have to wonder how many of these people have any kind of record with the police, and how many are first-time protesters. Was that taken into account when sentencing? Certainly, some violent protesters deserve what they got, or will get, and maybe that will calm the violence. But the police do seem to be handling the anti-Muslim protesters a lot more aggressively than the antisemitic, pro-Hamas protesters.
A 32-year-old man became first adult to face rioting charges when appeared in court Friday following a week of unrest across England and Northern Ireland ignited by a July 29 knife attack in which three young girls were killed. File photo by Adam Vaughan/EPA-EFE
Aug. 16 (UPI) --The first adult to face rioting charges following a week of unrest across England and Northern Ireland, ignited by a July 29 knife attack in which three young girls were killed, appeared in court Friday.
Kieran Usher, 32, did not enter a plea as he appeared at South Tyneside Magistrates' Court on Friday morning.
His next apprearance is scheduled for Aug. 23 at Newcastle Crown Court.
Usher, of Sunderland, was arrested Thursday by Northumbria Police and was charged with rioting in relation to alleged disorder that took place in Sunderland on Aug. 2.
The Crown Prosecution Service said he was "one of a number of individuals" it expected would face the more serious charge -- which carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence -- after a 15-year-old boy became the first Thursday.
That compares with the maximum five years in prison for violent disorder offenses with which the majority of people accused of taking part in the unrest have been charged until now.
In Northern Ireland, three men and a boy were charged with riot over the weekend.
Usher's case is likely to be referred to a crown court as the maximum prison sentence a magistrate can impose is 12 months.
On the other side of the country at Preston Crown Court, 20 miles from the scene of the dance school killings in Southport, 41-year-old Roger Haywood of Blackpool was sentenced to 30 months in prison after pleading guilty to violent disorder and two counts of assaulting an emergency worker.
Judge Robert Altham said a drunken Haywood fronted an "angry" mob that ran amok through the tourist town of Blackpool pelting police officers with missiles and injuring a security guard at a shopping mall.
The judge told the court that Haywood incited a group of people to break through a police cordon near the town's war memorial, attempting to use a megaphone to urge them on but was "too intoxicated," before going on to attack two police officers.
Another 460 suspects are currently going through criminal proceedings after Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions, vowed speedy justice for people involved in "far-right thuggery" in cities and towns in England and Northern Ireland in which dozens of police were injured and minorities and hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked.
Of those, about 185 have pleaded guilty and are being sent to the crown courts to be sentenced, Justice Department figures show, and 153 have been committed for trial after pleading not guilty.
At least 99 people have been sentenced so far with the fact many received the maximum three years in prison after pleading guilty to violent disorder being credited with deterring further outbreaks of unrest.
About 30 cases are in Northern Ireland with most charges related to anti-migrant demonstrations or race-hate attacks but justice is proceeding considerably more slowly due to different processes than in England where sentencing has been expedited.
Many suspects have been denied bail, regardless of their plea, meaning they remain in prison on remand until they are sentenced or go to trial.
I watched the opening scene of this show and it was quite stunning as is mentioned below. I may have to watch the rest although I hate watching shows where they seem to think the f-bomb is necessary and everyone uses it. That may be the truth these days, but I still don't like it.
Historical views of early Chinese communism are very interesting and confirm my theory that paranoia is inherent in communism no matter where it raises its ugly head.
The science and controversy behind Netflix’s ‘3 Body Problem’
WATCH: Netflix's "The 3 Body Problem" is about the fictional invasion of Earth. But the political blowback it's stoked is real and many viewers have been wondering if the science portrayed in the show is genuine. Global's Nathaniel Dove looked into it.
Based on the 2008 novel by Liu Cixin and brought to the small screen by Game of Thrones creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, the series tells the story of an impending alien invasion of Earth.
The show portrays some science that left some viewers with questions and some historical events that have upset some people in China.
Global News spoke to experts to separate fact from fiction and history from hysteria.
What is a three-body problem?
A three-body problem refers to three astronomical bodies, like planets or suns, and how each object’s gravity impacts the other’s orbits.
But it’s easiest to understand if we start with a two-body problem.
“The closer objects are, the stronger is the gravitational pull,” York University professor emeritus of physics and astronomy Paul Delaney said.
The sun is about a million times larger than the Earth, according to NASA, and so its gravity holds our planet in orbit around it.
The orbit is stable, making it predictable, Delaney said.
This is a two-body problem, just like the moon and the Earth, and it’s a problem that’s been solved since Sir Isaac Newton’s work on gravity.
“We can theoretically figure out where (the two objects) will be as a function of time,” Delaney told Global News.
“There are complications with angular momentum and tidal forces and friction,” he said, speaking from Tuscon, Ariz., “but to all practical intents and purposes, the moon will stay in a stable orbit.”
There are other planets in the solar system and the moon orbits Earth. Delaney told Global News, though, that these objects are so far away and have such small mass compared with the sun that they don’t significantly influence the Earth’s orbit.
A three-body problem involves another astronomical object, like another sun.
“The stability of the planetary orbit around the two stars,” he said, “is not stable.”
4:05
‘We’re charting a course to Mars’: Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen reflects on moon mission
That instability means the orbit becomes less predictable because the changing distances and forces that the objects exert on each other would also alter the speed.
“Therefore, predicting where they will be as a function of time (is) doable, but much more difficult,” Delaney said.
So, three-body problems do exist and can get even more complicated, with even eight stars.
An “n-body” problem, Delaney explained — where “n” represents any number of objects exerting gravity on each other — is “horrendous” to calculate.
An n-body problem could eventually result in one of the objects colliding with another, or being ejected off into space, according to Delaney.
And the different gravities pulling on a planet in an n-body problem of two or more could disrupt, if not destroy, life on the planet.
It could affect tectonic plates and cause earthquakes, alter tides and change the water cycle and weather, Delaney told Global News.
“If our surface temperature fell below zero consistently for just years, let alone centuries or beyond, yeah, we’d be toast,” he said.
The three-body problem in the Netflix show refers to three suns, with the Trisolaran people living on a planet caught between them.
“Tri” comes from the Latin and Greek language and means “three,” while “solar” comes from the Latin word for “sun.” Their planet is caught between the gravity of the three suns and their civilization is perpetually destroyed.
The aliens want to invade Earth to live on a planet with a stable two-body problem.
The proton phone
To view their potential future home, the Trisolarans use a proton to project and receive information across the universe from Trisolaris to Earth using something called “quantum entanglement.”
“The moment you put the word ‘quantum’ in front of anything, everybody goes, ‘ooh,’ and anything seems possible,” Delaney said.
Quantum entanglement is real, he added, but it doesn’t work — as far as we know — how the show portrays it.
Protons are positively charged subatomic particles. Along with neutrons, which have no charge (as in, “neutral”), they make up part of an atom’s nucleus.
For example, an atom of hydrogen comprises one proton and one negatively charged electron in a probability field around it.
Protons are not “small lumps of matter that just sits there,” Delaney said. They have specific characteristics, involving, among other things, the electrons around them and their own spin.
“That information, we believe, can be entangled to other particles, so that all of the exact states of this particular particle are mimicked by (that) particle,” Delaney said.
“And if you change this (proton’s) state, (the other proton’s state) changes instantaneously regardless of distance.”
He said this was an example of one of the frictions between quantum mechanics and the regular atomic theory of matter, which states that anything can only move as fast as the speed of light.
“If you’re 400 light years apart, then it takes 400 years” to get there, travelling at the speed of light, Delaney said.
Entanglement ignores that distance – but it doesn’t mean information can be transmitted.
“The proton isn’t exactly scanning Earth, picking out photographs and transmitting information about its local environment,” he said.
Bombing space to travel
At one point, a human character in the show proposes detonating a series of nuclear bombs in space to propel a spaceship forward.
This, it turns out, is theoretically possible.
“We looked at that option back in the ’60s when nuclear warheads were common,” Delaney told Global News.
The craft would have been “powered by successive explosions of hydrogen atomic bombs,” according to the American Air and Space Museum website. The crew compartment would be “well shielded from the blast and radiation” and shocks of the blasts were absorbed through water-cooled springs.
The site says the U.S. government cancelled Orion in 1964 after seven years of work “mainly because of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which outlawed nuclear testing in the atmosphere.”
Delaney said the design looked untenable and dangerous, with a giant irradiated plate permanently situated behind the astronauts and a need for many nuclear bombs.
Chinese controversy
The show has drawn attention not just for its science fiction but also for its portrayals of political events.
The series opens with a scene set in the 1960s in China during the Cultural Revolution.
“The first scene made my jaw drop,” one person wrote on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform.
“Westerners fundamentally can’t accept the idea of Chinese people inventing cutting-edge technology,” another person wrote on the ratings and social network site Douban.
The Cultural Revolution began in China in 1966 when the leader of the Chinese Community Party (CCP) and country, Mao Zedong, mobilized Chinese youth against the bureaucracy, according to Carleton University professor emeritus Jeremy Paltiel.
Mao believed he was being frozen out of power, he said, and believed he could purge the people he didn’t like while also inoculating China against losing its revolutionary zeal by having young people toss out the old.
“It became quickly extremely violent because nobody was sure who the right targets were,” Paltiel said.
He said the CCP never fully counted the dead, but “certainly we’re talking about tens of thousands of people who were beaten to death.”
“People were beaten to death in public,” he said, and some were “cannibalized.”
He told Global News he was an exchange student in 1974, after the violence ended.
“In our dorm, the shower stalls had no doors left on them because they’d been taken off during the Cultural Revolution to form armour (for) the students who were fighting each other.”
The country is still ruled by the CCP and Mao remains a revered leader. As such, Paltiel said, the Cultural Revolution is “not very well taught.”
“(The CCP) says it’s a mistake, but they don’t dwell on it” because it’s a period of suffering and humiliation for the party.
He suspected the criticism some in China have levelled at the Netflix series likely stems from surprise from people unfamiliar with what happened, in a country where history and the internet are heavily censored. He also suggests some may be outraged because it seems like foreigners are embarrassing China by showing such a tumultuous time.
But the novel that forms the source material for the Netflix show was written by a Chinese author, Liu Cixin, and initially published in China before being translated into English.
The novel won the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction and fantasy in 2015.
While the decision to adapt the book faced criticism in 2020, with five Republican senators calling on Netflix to reconsider over comments by Liu about Uyghur Muslims, Netflix defended the decision in a statement reported on by Variety that year.
“Mr. Liu is the author of the books, not the creator of this series,” Netflix was quoted as saying.
China orders Christians to pray for dead communist soldiers
or face consequences
By Leah MarieAnn Klett,
Christian Post Reporter
Monday, September 06, 2021
Catholics attend a Christmas eve mass at a Catholic church near the city of Taiyuan, Shanxi province,
December 24, 2012. | Reuters/Jason Lee/File Photo
Though Chinese Christians are banned from honoring their own martyrs, they are now required to pray for communist soldiers who died in the war with imperial Japan to “demonstrate the good image of peace-loving Christianity in China.”
According to religious liberty magazine Bitter Winter, the Chinese Communist Party recently issued a new directive requiring state-sponsored churches to pray for soldiers of the Red Army who died during the resistance war against Japanese occupation forces.
The directive was reportedly sent to all churches that are part of the government-controlled Protestant Three-Self Church.
In part, the directive orders churches to “organize peace prayer worship activities to commemorate the 76th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War around Sept. 3, according to the actual situation.”
It adds: “Local churches and congregations may, according to the actual local situation, carry out relevant peace prayer activities in a small and decentralized form, in line with the local requirements for prevention and control of the new COVID epidemic, to further promote the fine tradition of patriotism and love of religion and to demonstrate the good image of peace-loving Christianity in China.”
Churches are further "required to submit evidence of the relevant activities (text, video and photo materials) to the Media Ministry Department of the China Christian Council by September 10” or face consequences, according to Bitter Winter.
In August, members of the Theological Seminary in Fujian were also invited to attend a celebration to pay tribute to martyrs of what China dubs “People’s War of Resistance Against the Japanese Aggression.”
Prayers were held seeking the intercession of “Jesus, the King of Peace” for the “peaceful reunification” of China, Bitter Winter reported.
Though the CCP requires churches to pray for deceased communist soldiers, Bitter Winter notes that Christians in China are forbidden to pray for their martyrs, and those killed by the CCP cannot be commemorated.
Religious persecution is worsening across China, as President Xi Jinping’s "sinicization campaign," introduced in 2015, seeks to bring religions under the officially atheist party’s absolute control and into line with Chinese culture.
In May, the CCP ordered churches affiliated with the government to plan celebrations to mark 100 years of its existence.
In addition to asking religious persons to learn the history of the party, go on a “pilgrimage” to visit revolutionary sites, or hold exhibitions at religious venues, churches were required to host events featuring centennial celebrations.
The Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association in Jiangbei district of Chongqing city subsequently held a “Grateful and Praise for the CCP Blessing Mass” at one of its worship gatherings.
“The Church should organically unify ‘Love Party, Love Country, and Love Socialism’ and faith; boldly speak about politics, while speaking about faith in accordance with law,” Ding Yang, the priest who officiated the mass, was quoted as saying.
Open Doors USA, which monitors persecution in over 60 countries, estimates that there are about 97 million Christians in China, a large percentage of whom worship in what China considers to be “illegal” and unregistered underground home churches.
However, house church leaders are under intense pressure to join the government-controlled church. Those who refuse face intense persecution, as the government has installed more than 170 million facial recognition cameras, many in or near churches, to identify those who attend worship services.
Christians are often charged with participating in cults or with other crimes against the CCP, such as “bad business practices” or “intent to undermine the state.”
The government has also imposed a ban on the online sale of Bibles.
Authorities also pressure Christian parents by refusing their children an education, threatening to send their children to government re-education camps or forcibly remove adopted children from their parents.
The U.S. State Department has labeled China as a “country of particular concern” for “continuing to engage in particularly severe violations of religious freedom.”
Getting used to a "new normal" was a very different experience for Christians in parts of the world where "restrictions" meant they would be refused access to food, medical care, and crucial aid.
Open Doors is releasing their 2021 World Watch List (WWL), showing the levels of worldwide discrimination against Christians over the past year.
The list reveals how COVID-19 led to increased systemic discrimination against minority Christians.
Open Doors says the pandemic meant Christians from India to Yemen saw an increase in violence and discrimination, lacked basic necessities, and were put under increased surveillance because of their faith.
The list, produced by Open Doors International annually, highlights the exacerbation of systemic discrimination and persecution more than 304 million Christians around the world experienced in 2020 due to the coronavirus.
According to the findings in the WWL, COVID-19 was a reason behind the worsening of persecution already experienced by believers across the globe.
The pandemic encouraged the repression of minority Christians in countries like Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Some were denied aid, the report shows. Others were told they could not have food because "your Church or your God should feed you."
A violent Islamist group in Somalia, Al Shabaab, blamed Christians for the existence of COVID-19, stating the virus was "spread why (by?) crusader forces who have invaded the country and the disbelieving countries that support them."
COVID-19 gave authorities in some countries the authority to investigate the homes of Christians and church members.
Open Doors says their WWL is the "only instrument actively measuring the persecution of Christians, world-wide, annually."
For the first time, all 50 countries on the WWL scored levels of persecution considered to be "very high." The top 12 countries were labelled with "extreme" levels of persecution.
In 2020, 34 countries scored at the level of "very high" persecution.
In total, 74 countries showed "extreme," "very high," or "high" levels of persecution. This is one higher than in the previous year.
Open Doors estimates at least 1 in 8 of all Christians worldwide were affected.
The top countries ranked as having an "extreme" level of persecution include North Korea, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, Eritrea, and Yemen.
The list will be released during an online event today on Facebook and YouTube at 6 p.m. local time. Christians gathering for the release of the WWL will engage in a time of learning, worship, and prayer for persecuted Christians around the world.
"As we grapple with restrictions here, we can learn a great deal from our brothers and sisters living in countries where their faith costs them dearly, every year. They know they are not alone, because we have not forgotten them," says Gary Stagg, executive director of Open Doors Canada.
"The World Watch List helps us advocate for them intelligently, and pray for them intentionally that they would be able to stay, as lights in dark places."
A former Chinese Communist Party official in Shaanxi Province has been accused of bribery and defying orders from President Xi Jinping. File Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI
(UPI) -- A senior Chinese Communist Party official in Shaanxi Province has been charged with taking $101.3 million in bribes connected to the construction of an illegal resort village in the Qinling Mountains.
Chinese news agency Xinhua reported Tuesday that Zhao Zhengyong, former chief of the Shaanxi Provincial Committee of the Communist Party, was found to have embezzled more than $100 million during his trial at the First Intermediate People's Court of Tianjin Municipality.
The bribe linked to Zhao dwarfs the graft case of Xing Yun, a former senior legislator of northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Xing was sentenced to death in 2019 for accepting money and valuables worth $63.9 million.
Zhao, a former senior national legislator, was a leading Communist Party official in Shaanxi Province from 2003 to 2018.Of the $101.3 million he accepted while in office, $41 million "was not received," Chinese prosecutors said Monday.
Zhao reportedly pleaded guilty to taking bribes on Monday. He is being charged with forging ahead with construction projects in the Qinling Mountains, which was reportedly declared a nature reserve six times since May 2014 by Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Zhao left office in January 2019 and is believed to have fallen out of favor with Xi for "disobeying orders," according to Chinese state media.
I wonder if he would have been prosecuted had he remained in Xi's favour?
Xi has kept a low profile following the coronavirus pandemic that began in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
The growing movement among countries for China to apologize and pay reparations is drawing a nationalist response in the country, the South China Morning Post reported Tuesday.
Chinese analysts are warning of trends that exclude China from global cooperation.
"We have every reason to say that an international alliance is forming that excludes China and the Chinese yuan," said Li Yang, director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' National Institution for Finance and Development, according to the Post.
Luckin Coffee fires CEO, COO amid fraud probe
By Danielle Haynes
(UPI) -- China's rival to Starbucks, Luckin Coffee, announced Tuesday the departure of two senior management officials implicated in a fraud investigation.
The board of directors fired CEO Jenny Zhiya Qian (above) and Chief Operating Officer Jian Liu. Both also resigned from the company's board.
Jinya Guo, senior vice president, was named acting CEO, and Wenbao Cao and Gang Wu, both senior vice presidents, were named to the board as replacements.
The departures come after six other employees who were involved in or had knowledge of the scandal were suspended or placed on leave.
In April, Luckin revealed that Liu fabricated about $310 million in sales in 2019, prompting the company's stock to fall 80 percent.
"The company has been cooperating with and responding to inquiries from regulatory agencies in both the United States and China," Luckin said. "The company will continue to cooperate with the internal investigation and focus on growing its business under the leadership of the board and current senior management."
It's not so long ago that they were known as the "Godless Communists." Which means it still comes as a surprise that the party has no objection to the idea of including a reference to the man upstairs in Russia's constitution.
A century on from the Bolshevik revolution, things have come a long way. Russian and other Soviet Communist officials once reveled in their promotion of state atheism, so present leader Gennady Zyuganov's reasoning has also raised a few eyebrows.
Far from being the ‘Opium of the People,’ Zyuganov said that Communism is actually derived from Christianity. Leaving no doubt that party founder Vladimir Lenin would be to rolling in his grave – if he had one.
“When I studied the Bible, in the gospel of the Apostle Paul ... there was the main slogan of Communism. He who does not work does not eat.” he explained. “Actually, in many ways, the moral code of a builder of Communism is built on the Bible.”
While Orthodox Patriarch Kirill and the rest of his church surely welcome the sentiment, they may also dwell on the fact that the Soviet-era Communist party brutally suppressed Christians and murdered thousands of clergy.
Although Zyuganov’s beliefs are very far from Marxism and traditional communist doctrine, his colleagues in the State Duma weren't hugely surprised by his views. This isn’t the party leader’s first flirtation with religion – he once called Jesus Christ the first communist on earth.
Before the establishment of the Soviet Union, Russia was a profoundly religious country. The integration of the Orthodox Church into the government meant that Lenin considered them an organ of the bourgeoisie. Thus, the revolutionary leaders adopted an official atheist policy and, after decades of propaganda, religion in the Soviet Union was absent from mainstream thought.
The break-up of the USSR led to faith being thrust back into the limelight within Russia, and many former staunchly Communist Russians began to turn to Christianity. With over 80 percent of the modern Russian population believing in a God, it's not a shock to see products of the Soviet system simultaneously promoting God and Communism.
There is no confirmation yet if God will be included in the new Constitution. A working group is currently designing all the proposals, and a confirmatory national vote is due to be held on April 22, 2020 – Lenin’s 150th birthday.
A Swedish newspaper has come under fire after it stopped short of publishing a headline with the word Christmas. It instead referred to the much-revered holiday season as “winter celebrations.”
Sydsvenskan, a regional daily headquartered in Skåne County, published an article on how Christmas celebrations are being moved from Gustaf Adolf Square to the “safer” one at Stortorget, as part of counter-terrorism measures.
Stockholm was the scene of a deadly terrorist attack on April 7 last year, when a truck ploughed into a crowd of pedestrians, killing five and injuring many more.
Police reported that the perpetrator had expressed sympathy with extremist groups, including Islamic State.
But the newspaper was blasted for sacrificing long-held traditions in the name of political correctness when it used the phrase “winter celebrations” in its headline rather than saying Christmas.
“So Christmas is called ‘winter celebration’ in Malmö? There you have it,” a Twitter user said as he posted a link to the controversial article.
Given the nordic country is bound to reach near-zero temperatures, one disgruntled person queried: “Who is celebrating the winter?!”
While one made light of the issue saying: “Waiting to read about ‘winter evening’.”
It was echoed by a fellow Tweeter who asked whether people were waiting to open up “winter” presents under a “winter tree.”
Another, on a more serious note, pointed out how integration cannot occur “when we do not want to show our culture.”
The paper also faced accusations of accommodating Muslim integration in a bid to tackle the terrorist threat.
At this rate, one netizen said, Easter will soon be called the “spring celebration.”
“Looking forward to eating candy and eggs during the coming spring celebration!?” the Tweeter said.
The government and the media in Sweden, much like here in Canada, are dramatically further to the left than the general population. If they know it, they think it's a good thing to keep pushing people further and further to the left. This is Politically Correct insanity! And it will result in cultural suicide.
Viktor Orban's Hungary risks becoming a European pariah after declaring it will no longer certify gender studies courses. Even if they're right about their academic worthlessness, should officials tell universities what to teach?
"Astonishment" was the word Budapest's Central European University (CEU) used in response to the government's measures – "without any justification or antecedent" – first proposed last year and outlined in detail earlier this month. The 44 students enrolled in the master's program at the George Soros-backed university would be allowed to complete their courses, alongside the 10-person intake at the state-funded ELTE, the only other Hungarian university to teach the discipline. But from next year onwards, the ministry of education will not spend public funds on gender studies, nor award diplomas for completing a degree (though CEU students can continue to study for the English-language US-certified degree).
The decision places Hungary radically at odds with the rest of the Western world. From Croatia to Ireland, every other EU state has at least one functioning gender studies program, and in the US, the number has risen threefold in the last three decades, with courses offered at over 350 higher learning institutions.
'Gender studies is ideology, not science'
But perhaps more astonishing than the closure itself is the honesty with which the government is justifying its decision. Although officials' statements mention low enrollment, financial expediency, and real-world applicability of gender studies diplomas, they have made it explicit that this is an ideological decision first and foremost.
For the first time in decades, a democratic country has made an explicit pushback against the left-wing drift of academia.
"The subject of the discipline goes against everything the government thinks about human beings," Bence Retvari, the minister of human resources and one of the ideologues of the proposal, told parliament last year.
"Gender studies—similarly to Marxism-Leninism—can be called an ideology rather than a science, and therefore it is doubtful that it attains the scientific level expected for a university degree course."
It can be argued that rather than being "like Marxism-Leninism," gender studies are in fact Marxism-Leninism, founded on feminist theory and intersected with the latest left-wing sociology and political science.
Here is a sample of the areas of specialization from the CEU course website: Gender Dimensions of Post-State Socialism; Feminist Knowledge Production; Activism, Social Movements and Policy; Gendering Theory.
It is, frankly, doubtful that it is possible to meaningfully engage with (or even critique) most of these topics without contentious pre-existing ideological suppositions.
And having emerged from their own traumatic history of totalitarian socialism, Viktor Orban's nationalists do not want to see their homeland re-infected with a new strain they see as wreaking havoc in Sweden or Germany.
"This study does not help in raising our nation; moreover it destroys value-oriented thinking that is still present in the Central European countries. Our burning problem is the demographic issue, which will not be solved by studying sexual minorities and deepening feminist philosophy," Lorinc Nacsa of the ruling coalition Christian Democrats wrote to ELTE after it unveiled its gender studies course last year.
Stripped of the initial shock value, this perspective is at least understandable. For the current government, the growth of a self-perpetuating cottage industry of gender studies faculties around the world is no more a justification of their legitimacy than the popularity of alchemy at medieval universities is proof that base metals can be turned into gold.
And this fits in perfectly with Orban's vision of his provocatively-named "illiberal democracy," for which he has been given mandate by an overwhelming victory in April's election.
'Arrogant decision'
But the line between a robust democracy that refuses to shepherd its electorate into a narrow corridor of acceptable social views, and outright authoritarianism is not an impermeable one, particularly in a new, and still relatively fragile, social order such as post-Communist Hungary.
ELTE issued an extended statement in which it accused the government of violating the constitution, and pointed out that its studies have specific societal uses, such as understanding the impacts of an economic crisis on women, or the social effect that many Hungarian women going abroad for childcare jobs has had on the men left behind at home. ELTE also said the government did not directly inform them of the proposed changes, and demanded a consultation that would hopefully result in a compromise.
Gabor Bencsik, the pro-government editor-in-chief of the Hungarian Chronicle, also called on the ruling coalition to re-evaluate its "arrogant decision," saying that gender studies courses are not in themselves against traditional values, and could be used to ask questions such as "Is it possible to boost the birthrate?" or "How can men and women in families better relate to their children?"
Despite these dissenting voices, the decision doesn't appear to have provoked concerted outrage, particularly as it has been dragging on for 18 months, and is sandwiched between dozens of other stories pointing to the ascendancy of the government, such as the campaign against Lajos Simicska, a former pro-Orban media magnate-turned nemesis, and the decision by Soros' Open Society Foundation to close its Budapest offices. If Orban's opponents want to reverse his policies, they will not do it with editorials about the "Magyar dictatorship", but will likely have to wait their turn at the ballot box.
Should Universities have the right to teach ideologies that cause cultural desecration? Should a country that so recently emerged from communism not have the right to protect itself from destructive ideologies?
I'm proud of Hungary being the first democracy to stand up against this wave of far-left lunacy.
