Lenten reflections

For some reason, I cannot offer these directly yet.
But you might check out the reflections of the penitent private detective:

Stripes

Wounds

Trinity

Phrase of the Day: “known wolves”

Almost every major terrorist attack on Western soil in the past fifteen years  has been committed by people who were already known to law enforcement.

-- The New Yorker, 27 Jan 2015

The expression lone wolf attacks has burst its way into the English vocabulary of late.    This followed a major media push by al-Qaeda a few years back:  stymied in their 9/11-style coordinated attacks (thanks to our watchful eyes in the sky), they launched a series of random, infra-theological, to-whom-it-may-concern appeals to Westerners to simply go out and slaughter people.   A few heeded the call.  Subsequently, ISIL began pushing the same thing -- though, crucially, only as a distant second-best to emigrating from the Dâr al-Kuffâr and making a new life in the Caliphate.  (In some ways, ISIL is more principled than is AQ.)

In French, the equivalent phrase is loup solitaire. (German, less zoomorphically: Einzeltäter.)  Fair enough;  but it is often used by the socialo appeasers  in a disinformational, self-protective way, implying that

(a)  Don’t blame us for not preventing this;  no-one could have foreseen it; the guy just came out of nowhere.

(b)  His attack was a purely individual act of madness, with no further motivations or connections, certainly not to [name of named confessional persuasion redacted]!   Ne faites surtout pas l’amalgame !

I did it ... *my* way

The New York Times this morning has a useful corrective to all that:

Brooklyn Arrests Highlight Challenges in Fighting of ISIS and ‘Known Wolves’

In Canada and Australia, young men inspired by the bloody, apocalyptic vision of the Islamic State were thwarted in their efforts to join the battle in Syria, so they took up arms in their homelands, staging small attacks that drew widespread attention.

In London, Mohammed Emwazi was known for years to be sympathetic to the message of Islamic extremists, and by 2013 he had joined the militants on the Islamic State in Syria. Now he is better known as “Jihadi John,” the black-masked figure who has appeared in numerous beheading videos.

[NDLR:  Many further cases could be added, of assassins antecedently well-known to the police for recidivism or violent crimes, from Denmark, France, etc. -- dbj]

In stark contrast, two young men in New York who were similarly enthralled by the Islamic State’s vision and who the government claims wanted nothing more than to join the fight, were arrested before they could make it to the killing fields in the desert.

In all of these cases, the suspects were known to the authorities. But only in New York were the suspects arrested, accused of pledging support for the Islamic State and trying to leave the country.

The decision to arrest the men highlights the evolving challenges confronting law enforcement as officials calculate whether and when to intervene in instances of what some have begun calling “known wolves.”

There are “lone wolves and known wolves,” said a law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation. “A lone wolf is someone who comes out of the woodwork; a known wolf is on your radar.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/nyregion/brooklyn-arrests-highlight-challenges-in-fighting-of-isis-and-known-wolves.html

Sidenote:    The same issue has a quite interesting article on one of the more influential Islamist provocateurs for Egypt.  His background might give some people pause, but not the tens of thousands who follow him on Facebook:

Bolsen was born a freckled redhead, named Shannon Morris, and baptized as a Catholic. He converted to Islam in his early 20s, and he adopted the middle name “King” after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his mother’s maiden name, Bolsen, to become Shahid King Bolsen.

The family’s life in Dubai came to an end three years later in a lurid scandal. Prosecutors later accused Mr. Bolsen of posting a picture of the family’s Ethiopian maid on the Internet in order to lure a German businessman, Martin Herbert Steiner, 48, with offers of sex.

They met at Mr. Bolsen’s home, and in the interview Mr. Bolsen said he had sought to convince Mr. Steiner to change his ways. “He was soliciting illicit sex with Muslim women in the United Arab Emirates, and I was trying to convince him that this was dangerous,” Mr. Bolsen said.

Mr. Steiner was drunk and tried to force himself on the maid, Mr. Bolsen said. “We fought and I unfortunately caused his death,” he said.

The cause of death was an overdose of chloroform, which Mr. Bolsen told the court he kept in the house to fight insomnia but had used to try to sedate Mr. Steiner. After the killing Mr. Bolsen stuffed the body in a suitcase, disposed of it by a desert highway, and was arrested as he tried to fly to Oman, he acknowledged.

Mr. Bolsen was initially convicted of murder and sentenced to death by an Emirati court.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/world/american-agitator-helps-fuel-attacks-in-egypt.html

Well, well, you take your imams where you find them, I guess.

 

Footnote:  For some reason, Shahid King (a.k.a. Jihadi Jerkoff) has an especial animus against Kentucky Fried Chicken;  after his incitements, several franchises in Egypt  were hit.  In this,  “King” follows in the footsteps of that other noted crusader for human gallinaeous rights, the shred guitarist Buckethead.

"You deserve a break today ♬"

[Appendix] Désabusé French commentary on the issue of what had been called “les électrons libres du jihadisme”:

Le loup solitaire n'existe plus. C'est un vestige de «l'époque» afghane, qui occulte les profonds changements survenus dans les mouvements islamistes radicaux depuis le début de la guerre en Syrie, et l'engouement des jeunes européens pour le jihad. Nous ne sommes plus face à une poignée de combattant venus d'une terre lointaine, mais à des milliers de jeunes volontaires immergés dans une nébuleuse salafiste qui contrôle désormais une grande partie des «cités» européennes.

Cheik Omar Bakri, une figure emblématique de l'Islam radical qui a endoctriné des dizaines de milliers d'européens, me confiait à Tripoli que «le jihad ne s'arrêtera que quand le drapeau de l'Islam flottera sur le balcon de l'Elysée et de la Maison Blanche».

Pour connaitre personnellement les membres de ces organisations, je puis vous affirmer que ces loups sont tout, sauf solitaires…

http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/monde/2014/06/20/31002-20140620ARTFIG00352-comment-al-qaida-s-est-implante-en-france.php

 

[NB: «cités»  means ‘public housing projects’.]

 

[Update 27 April 2015]

L'affaire Sid Ahmed Ghlam signe une fois pour toutes l'acte posthume de la théorie du «loup solitaire». Comme Merah en 2012 ou, plus récemment, Amedy Coulibaly en janvier dernier, l'étudiant algérien soupçonné d'avoir voulu perpétrer un attentat contre au moins une église de Villejuif pourrait être au cœur d'une nébuleuse qu'explorent les enquêteurs. Ces derniers sont persuadés que les quatre fusils d'assaut Kalachnikov, les pistolets, les gilets pare-balles, les brassards ainsi que les chasubles siglés «Police» retrouvés dans sa chambre et son véhicule représentent une panoplie trop importante pour un seul et unique assaillant.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2015/04/27/01016-20150427ARTFIG00310-attentatdejoue-les-complicites-au-coeur-de-l-enquete.php

Explication de texte

A prayer for the Lenten season:

Almighty and everlasting God,

who hatest nothing that thou hast made,

and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent:

Create and make in us new and contrite hearts,

that we  worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness,

may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness;

 through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Sterling commentary  here:

http://anglicanhistory.org/usa/advent/misoff.html

Theological themata

The following are snippets from posts of some religious import; click on the link for the full essay.

Rejecting our appointed time of circa threescore and ten, he arranges for his brain to be kept alive in a beaker:  thus seeking eternal life, not on God’s terms, but on Satan’s.  (These deals usually do not turn out well.)

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/brains-in-vat.html

I am not saying that numbers are ideas.  Or if they are that, they are that in addition, where they keep such scruffy company as the Idea of a Unicorn and the Idea of a Ham Sandwich. They are, rather, facts as hard as baseballs, packing quite as much wallop. (Also, admittedly, we are interested in the Pitcher …)

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/02/existence-and-use.html

Now Solly got thoughtful.   “Y’know… Just indulge me here, okay?  Because I heard a rumor there’s this, some kind of Church doctrine, in this general area -- I won’t even try to quote it, I’d just screw it up:   but something along the lines of, like, a woman and a man, yadda yadda, and they get hitched up by God, in just the right way:  and from then on,  it’s like trying to yank a horseshoe loose from the hoof -- or no:  more like, trying to yank the blue right out of the sky.”

            Murphy raised a respectful eyebrow.  “That’s pretty much it, Solly.  That’s very well put.”   He nodded again, and savored.  The blue, right out of the sky.

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/2014/03/murphy-on-meaning-of-belief.html

Sober orthodoxy of each camp would doubtless concede that the others “believe in” the “same” God (whatever it means to “believe in” something ultimately unknowable  this side the grave, and whatever “same” means  when comparing finitely described infinites); adding simply, that they worship Him amiss.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2010/12/topological-theology.html

But now here is the key -- and it is a key to Christianity as well, that faith that embraces paradox …

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/01/orthoepy-of-doxology.html

Sidenote on theologoumenon.  It is not every day that Dr. J. learns a new word;  this one’s a doozer. 

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/07/parsing-trinitarian-minimalism.html

Sin has a certain dignity, as only upon a foundation of Morality can it raise its head.  Chimps in their lubricious oestrus cannot be considered “adulterers”.  In this sense, we are not certain that M. Hollande has actually committed any “sin”.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/01/in-further-defense-of-m-fr-hollande.html

Such creatures are needful, lest the scala naturae  wane at its base.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/07/infimae-scala-naturae.html

Age-old Theological Conundra cheerfully solved by Dr J

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/07/age-old-theological-conundra-cheerfully.html

We are sweaty, dust-caked survival machines -- that has been shown -- much like the cockroach and the rat.  Are we anything else as well ?

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-challenge-of-darwinism-updated-for.html

This frame of clay which Thou hast shaped

and quickened with Thine inblown Word,

a cloak about my spirit draped:

Mold it a little longer, Lord.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/04/linguist-contemplates-afterlife.html

I may well have much more free time after I die.  (No more dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles!  Free at last, Lord -- Free at last !!!)

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/02/wissbegierde.html

“Gödel turned out to be an unadulterated Platonist, and apparently believed that an eternal ‘not’ was laid up in heaven, where virtuous logicians might hope to meet it hereafter.”

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/03/mathematicians-contemplate-afterlife.html

Tares planted in the Endarkenment (humorously known as the Enlightenment) have sprouted to weeds that choke the vacant lots where atheists briefly couple and depart …

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/duet-at-distance.html

I believe I have successfully defended C.S.Lewis against any suggestions that he was either a prude or a scold;  but what of his original suggestion that the sexual instinct in modern man has somehow gone wrong?  That is indeed a startling thesis -- and utterly at variance with the  contemporary climate of right-thinking opinion that anything goes and that’s just dandy.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/01/on-sex-and-c-s-lewis-updated.html

Whether the evidence of the Apostles for all that they saw and sensed and heard, was indeed no greater than that whereby we announce, “Hullo!  A penny-bun upon the table.” -- the testimony of the senses, the notoriously wayward senses -- I cannot say.   Wasn’t there; only read the book. 

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-miracles.html

On this Landscape question, Hawking notwithstanding, I’ll go with the Pope.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-is-there-something-rather-than.html

Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht …

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2010/12/theologia-mathematica-i.html

We know, on scientific grounds, that penguins cannot exist.  How, then, to explain the persistence, among the unlettered, of a belief in these fanciful creatures?

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-existence-of-penguins.html

Desecrating a sacrament is, no doubt, protected “speech”, in the greatly and sometimes grievously distended sense that that simple word has gradually acquired in secular law;  but that doesn’t mean the Church has to put up with it.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/03/de-logica-ecclesiae_10.html

Erdős sees the Deity, not exactly through a glass darkly, but under some distortion -- perhaps a projective transformation.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-theometry-of-paul-erdos.html

That God is simply the sum of All that Is, is mere pantheism.  We shall posit rather, that He is its Stone–Čech compactification.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/04/internal-external-universal.html

What makes a movie moral  is by no means that the ultimate verdict of Judgment Day shall be anticipated here in this life -- as it so manifestly is not, despite the hype and come-ons from certain motivational evangelists outside the discipline of the Historical Church.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/01/on-movies-and-moral-anchors.html

Mel Gibson’s “The Passion” does not come from this world.  It’s less a traditional film than a passion play, a ritual re-enactment.  If you weren’t well versed in the Gospels, most of it wouldn’t even make sense

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/02/passion.html

There is something prelapsarian about the penguins, a thing that indeed tugs at us  like a magnet  the filings, we in our fallen state.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2010/12/penguin-passion.html

Legalistic legerdemain

Cases like the following bring especial despair, since courts are supposed to be the final bulwark against our misdeeds.   Even Presidents and magnates  are subject to the Law.  Sed qui custodiet ipsos custodes?

(1)  Yet another ludicrous legal hijacking from Texas, in which Apple is shaken down by an obscure shell-entity, that makes no products, and contributes nothing to the world, but has learned how to exploit U.S. patent law and the art of venue-shopping.   And why?  Here’s why:

The company is located in Tyler, Texas, two blocks from the courthouse where the trial was held.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2889032/apple-ordered-to-pay-texas-company-5329-million-after-losing-patent-case.html

(That area of Texas is legally notorious.)

Not holding any special brief for Apple, here;  simply for legal sanity.

Here is an earlier case in which Apple was the aggressor:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/08/apple-vs-samsung-re-update.html

(2)   Italy strikes another blow for … what?

At first blush, you read this, and think:  Good, judges will be held accountable for gross misdeeds.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2015/02/25/01003-20150225ARTFIG00300-italie-les-magistrats-payeront-pour-leurs-erreurs.php

But when you realize that there is now a financial incentive for frivolous lawsuits against any judge against whom someone might hold a grudge … you pause.  And when you consult Italy’s history of “holding someone legally accountable” … Consider the harassing of Italian seismologists:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/stalinist-science-policy.html

La Grande Bouffe

Certain censorious eyebrows have frowned at the self-celebrating birthday feast que s’offre Zimbabwean President-for-Life Robert Mugabe.   Featured on the menu:  expensive elephants.

This aspect of Mugabe’s fine dining  is being widely reported in the European press, including in the British Isles, but for some reason  it has been largely omitted in American media.   Similarly, Americans are in general unaware of the predilection of his fellow African dictator, Bokassa, for another succulent delicacy, long pig.

"Tastes like chicken..."

Both men are still widely revered in Africa, though scarcely outside it.

To those who objected to the high cost of the festivities, saying that it might better have been spent on Zimbabwe’s orphans, the President-for-Life gave an answer recalling that of Our Lord in similar circumstances, though turned upside-down, indicating in effect:

Orphans are but the mayflies of a day;

Me you have with you forever.

عقبة بن نافع

In our earlier post, we discussed the rhetoric and linguistics of the ISIL-associated name Dabiq.  And now, in this morning’s headlines, there is another:

In the latest terror incident in Tunisia, a group which, a while back, pledged allegiance to ISIL, killed four policemen.  The group is being reported as Phalange Okba Ibn Nafaâ, Okba Ibn Nafaa Brigade and various other renditions.   A proper transcription would be Katîbat `Uqba ibn Nâfi`, or `Uqbah ibn Nâfi` Brigade.   (Here the circumflexes, for which you may also substitute a macron, indicate a long vowel, which affects the stress:  thus, it is the first syllable of Nâfi` that is stressed.)  In Arabic:

عقبة بن نافع

So who is this gentleman, for whom the brigade is named?  

Not, as one might suppose, some recent martyr who is being commemorated (such is the style of Palestinian groups, for instance).   Rather, the group has reached all the way back to the 600s A.D. -- the first few years of the Islamic era. Uqba ibn Nafi was a Crusading Muslim general who led the conquest of the Maghreb, after his famous uncle had conquered Egypt.

Here they are  smiling for their group portrait:

Having a wonderful Time -- Wish U were here

This harking back to the earliest days of Islam, is typical of Salafis, and is in line with the choice of Dabiq for the magazine.

Dies cinerum

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.

Memento homo, quia pulvis es  et in pulverem reverteris

Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent:

Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we  worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness,  may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

And here we see the holy-day, as celebrated in the village of Heldra (in Hesse):

Our Lenten reflections  of seasons past  may be consulted  here.

A thought for Shrove Tuesday

From a Jesuit:

We cannot find anything that does not originate in God.   Each tiny thing that we encounter, especially each human person, is directly related to the Godhead in all its glory.

-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p.188

Some decades earlier, G.K. Chesterton put a similar thought more epigrammatically:

Man cannot love mortal things.

He can only love  immortal things --

   for an instant.

Oddly, although that phrasing wears the badge of Chestertonian love of paradox, this fragment seems -- paradoxically -- more intuitively convincing.  Father Schall’s pensée is nice, is pious, but might well be met with doubt.  With Chesterton, you suddenly just see it.

Mardi Gras

Violins and trumpets!  Children in the streets.

Balloon men and circus gongs  and peasants selling sweets.

Tall man in a top hat, smiling  walking by.

Old dog on a hayrick, in the sun, he’s sly.

Here comes the mayor, with him  the city band.

Dancers turn and gaily wave;  sailors lend a hand.

Everybody’s celebrating;  no-one is ashamed.

No-one but the old dog, sly eyes, leg lame.

The village band strikes up a tune, the dancers take it up.

Mice and aunts and children prance, spry cat and young pup.

Buttons in their buttonholes  and music in their ears.

The old dog slips from the hayrick and disappears.

The village fool sits on the stool, and gives the folks advice.

Gently gay they take it, and everything turns out nice.

Children gobble cherries and fruit ice from the golden bowl.

But the old dog is in the alley now, on the prowl.

The evening follows afternoon,  the happy dancers yawn.

It’s home to suppers and sleepy beds, to dream until the dawn.

The sun stares down upon the earth, with swollen bloody eye.

This is the time the dog likes best.  He’s sly.

Sleep pretty, tiny pretty ones.  The nighttime loves you best.

Aloft awash  on a sleep of dreams, in down and nightgowns dressed.

For the old dog  screaming at the moon,  bitterly insane--

he cannot harm you from the hill;  you cannot share   his   pain.

Code Red

            Code -- Red!

            Rest in bed.

            Time to soothe

            your sleepy head.

{ for more about the lovely snow,

   gently press …    here …. }

Tales of Winter, in Rootabaga Country

One winter back then, it got so cold, all the snowmen froze to death;  and the moon  stuck to the sky.

‘Nother time, Time froze, so it looked like we’d have winter forever.

But then the Blind Man had a good idea.  He broke out the firewater, and soon all was well.

There’s another story somewhere but I can’t tell it cos I can’t thaw it.

So those are the tales they tell, out in Rootabaga Country.

Folks around here  believes them all;  so I reckon they must be true.

~

[Update, even deeper into winter.  February the Frigid.]

I finally arrive at work, after trudging in from a far parking-lot.   I tell my podmates (whose upturned faces observe what must look like an entering yeti):  “Ask me if it’s cold.”

Exchanged glances.  Then, dutifully, someone recites:  “Is it cold?”

Momentarily I act nonplussed, as though the question made no sense.  “Is it -- ‘cold’?  Relative to what?  It isn’t cold relative to Pluto;  this would be like a summer’s day to them.  On Pluto, the oxygen is in a solid state, like peanut brittle;  to breathe, you have to break off a chunk and chew.”

Everyone allowed as how we’re lucky it isn’t that cold right here right now.

Fifty Shades of Incarnadine

It has become apparent that, quite apart from such socio-politico-theological aims (legitimate or otherwise) that ISIL might pursue, there is an increasing fascination, among many of its activists, with Execution Porn, for its own sake.   This we have analyzed here;  herewith  an update.

The Latest:

* A dozen or so Kurds are paraded in cages, presumably prior to the main event:  their immolation.  (Rather like the pre-game festivities at the Superbowl.)

* 21 Copts, kidnapped in Libya, were brightly decked in orange jumpsuits, paraded along the sort of seashore that usually features a golden retriever and a life-insurance ad, and then beheaded, in a 21-ring ceremony.  (The media has been unhelpful as to why these Egyptian Christians  were in Libya in the first place;  presumably they fled there, from the Egyptian skillet, into the fire.)

Those acts are not so much political statements (again:  whether noble or misguided) as variety acts : the Caliphate embracing the Société du Spectacle.   For the victims here were neither combatants (like the Jordanian pilot), nor Westerners (inherently evil for racial reasons), but simply guys who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And now for something  completely different ...

And you know that, what these publicity-junkies are thinking now, is:   What can we do, that's completely different?  What can we do for an encore?

Fact is, ISIL is going to have to get cracking, if they want to continue to dominate the Atrocity Sweepstakes:  Boko Haram is now giving them some serious competition, recycling their seven-year-old Christian sex-slaves as suicide bombers against pretty much random civilian targets.

[Hot leaks from an inside source!]  A preview of upcoming events:

* A score of Sufis, dressed in wool, are set alight.

* Seven lords a-leaping  are obliged to jump over a cliff.

* A clowder of kittehhs  are herded together (a feat in itself) by a contingent of masked doggehhs, and treated verrehh, verrehh    badlehhh….

(VIP seating available from TicketMaster.)

[Update 23 June 2015]  The ISIL metteurs-en-scène keep coming up with ever more stage-business to thrill their audience.

The Site Intelligence group, which tracks jihadist activity online, released what appears to be an Islamic State video from northern Iraq. It depicts three grisly group killings of 12 supposed "spies."

The first scene shows four men forced into a car that is then blasted by a militant with a rocket-propelled grenade. The next scene, like something created by a sadistic Bond villain, shows detainees lowered into a pool in a metal cage and then brought up, lifeless and frothing at the mouth. And the last, the most gruesome, shows a cordon of prisoners led onto open terrain with explosives attached to their necks; the explosives are detonated and heads fly into the air.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/06/23/what-the-islamic-state-did-to-two-boys-caught-eating-during-ramadan/

Rosenmontag word-of-the-day: “Schoduvel”

Americans are fond of ‘celebrating’ the ‘diversity’ of their country.  But actually, compared to Europe, it is pretty much one mass-marketed culture from coast to coast.   Europe -- residually, at any rate -- still has genuine diversity of cultural traditions  of a kind unimaginable in America.

Thus, take Shrovetide (a word most Americans can no longer even define.)

In America, Mardi Gras is basically just a time for people from various regions to go to New Orleans to get drunk.   Culturally, it is quite comparable to the Superbowl;  its religious significance (as Shrove Tuesday) is nil.

In many parts of Christian Europe, Fasching still means something;  it is observed, in different regions, in multiple different ways, with traditions going back to the Middle Ages.  

Rosenmontag -- 1836

Mardi gras (Fastnacht) to be sure, by those who remember that we then faire gras as a last indulgence before the forty-day fast that begins on Ash Wednesday; but likewise, especially in northern Germany, Rosenmontag.

And even, in Braunschweig (Lower Saxony), especially, a festival on the Sunday before that:  the Schoduvel (North German dialect -- literally ‘scare-devil’), going back to folkways intended to frighten-off such imps as  Jack Frost, and eventually blending in with the Karneval.   Little did the revelers realize that they have more to fear than the ills of winter:  much closer to home, they have been nursing a nest of vipers, now for years.

For now this genuine European diversity  is under threat from those who adopt “Diversity” as a banner, using it as a club to bludgeon European dignity and history.  Most recently, today in Braunschweig, the Schoduvel has been canceled owing to threats of violence from the Salafistenszene -- not something the police take lightly, given the events of the day before, next door in Denmark.  A couple of weeks before that, a parade in protest against Islamist violence was forbidden by German police owing to … threats of Islamist violence.  (The links/grün/bisounours coalition  failed to notice the irony.)

Schoduvel -- Doomed by Diversity

~

Folkloristic footnote:

The variegation of traditional European cultures  is not only country by country, but region by region, in Germany in particular.   We earlier glanced at Ripuarian richness:

   http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/12/acronym-of-day-arteas.html

For a Plattdeutsch account of Shrovetide festivities:

http://ksh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%C3%9Ftelovend%C3%9Fzoch

http://ksh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruusemoondaach

Aschermittwoch as well is marked regionally with particular traditional pageantry:

Strohbärentag

[Update 21 November 2015]  Yet another Christian festival, canceled because of an Islamist terrorist threat:

Le traditionnel cortège pour l’arrivée de la Saint-Nicolas à Vilvorde, dans la grande banlieue de la ville, est supprimé.

http://www.lemonde.fr/attaques-a-paris/article/2015/11/21/alerte-maximale-dans-la-region-de-bruxelles-le-point-sur-les-dernieres-informations_4814756_4809495.html

Annulé

[Update 24 Feb 2017]  Good news!  Brunswick in Lower Saxony is merrily celebrating the Schoduvel, under the defiantly jaunty slogan (and beneath the focussed gaze of hundreds of policement,

"Helau, wir tun es allen kund :  der Schoduvel bleibt frei und bund."

http://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/braunschweig_harz_goettingen/Braunschweig-155000-Jecken-feiern-Schoduvel,schoduvel620.html

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weiterblättern möchten,

Bitte hier klicken:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Mitteleuropa

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Deutschtum

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[Update 10 mars 2018]  Meanwhile in France:

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2018/03/10/01016-20180310ARTFIG00050-sur-fond-de-polemique-la-nuit-des-noirs-aura-bien-lieu-a-dunkerque.php

Bon «clet’che» !

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