Okay, Commander Rob W., this one’s for you. Cindy will really appreciate it . . . or
really get angry, this time. This week
people have been commemorating the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
seventy years ago. (We note in passing
that we don’t recall anyone saying anything a few years back when the
seventieth anniversary of the bombing of Coventry in November of 1940 came
around.)
 |
| Si vis pacem, para bellum. |
Most, if not all, of the commentary, speeches, articles, and
so on, have quite properly focused on making peace the preferred option instead
of war, and in eliminating nuclear weapons.
The problem is that simply mandating something rarely makes it happen. You have to remove the underlying cause(s) of
something in order to be truly effective at reform.
That’s the whole point of social justice. You don’t focus on removing the problem per se.
Instead, you focus on reforming the flawed institution(s) that resulted
in the problem. Thus, if you want to
raise people’s incomes, you don’t just give them money, although that may be
necessary as an expedient in the short term.
Instead, you remove whatever barrier is preventing people from becoming
productive and deriving an income from providing a marketable good or service.
Similarly, you may forbid the use of nuclear weapons, but
that only works in the short term, and then only if you have the ability to
prevent people from using nuclear weapons.
The only way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons effectively, however,
is to take away the reasons people would even consider using them . . . and we
don’t mean by surrendering or wiping Israel off the face of the earth,
either. You make it possible for people
to mind their own business, and open up access to the means whereby they have business
to mind:
• As we noted last week, CESJ’s article
that appeared this past June in Homiletic
and Pastoral Review, “Pope
Francis and the Just Third Way”, has been translated
into Spanish, formatted, and sent to a number of key people in the
Spanish-speaking world. It is available
both as a stand-alone piece and in a dual language version in .pdf. The anticipated Portuguese translation fell
through due to unexpected circumstances, but a team has committed for the
French. The French translation should be
ready by the end of September at the earliest.
• The article by
CESJ’s Director of Research, “Justice Without Rights?”, has excited some interest. Not as much as the latest article on an
unrelated subject (“The
Satire of Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson”), but some. The article focuses on some odd comments made
by Vatican advisor Dr. Jeffrey Sachs that hinted Pope Francis might have
problems with Americans’ adherence to their natural law rights of life,
liberty, and property. Since these are
also at the heart of Catholic social teaching, it is unclear why Dr. Sachs
believes that Pope Francis would have a problem with them.
• This past Wednesday we heard from an official with the National Bank of Poland who requested permission to shorten, edit, and
translate into Polish the recent blog series on the Greek debt crisis for
publication in an economic journal. We
are exploring the possibility of translations into Spanish, French, and
Japanese once an edited English version is ready. Interest has already been expressed in using
a French translation to provide the nascent resistance movement in Burundi with
a specific program to counter the recent usurpation of power by the president,
and in circulating an English version at the World Bank.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 47 different countries and 48 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Poland, and India. The most
popular postings this past week were “Halloween Horror Special XIII: Mean Green
Mother from Outer Space,” “News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 28,” “Solving the
Greek Debt Crisis, V: Presenting the Solution,” “Solving the Greek Debt Crisis,
VIII: Specific Monetary Reforms,” and “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property.”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least those that
we know about. If you have an
accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at
mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into the next
“issue.” If you have a short (250-400
word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog —
do not send them to us to post for you.
All comments are moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#
