wickedness & violence

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Genesis 6:5–6 ESV

The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.

He saw what man had made, and it was very bad. And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.

Genesis 6:11–12 ESV

Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.

Violence & corruption... the earth was filled with violence and was thereby corrupt. One day the earth will be filled with peace, and will thereby be restored, renewed.

Today I sense the peace of God in my heart, a taste of what will one day be unending. And I once again marvel at Jesus, who made all things new.

pakistan & india

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Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice." My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

via Why My Father Hated India - WSJ.com.

holodomor

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James Kirchick on Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder:

There were moments reading this book when I was forced to shut it closed, an experience utterly alien to me. Like any reasonably historically-aware individual, I considered myself familiar with the carnage that overtook Europe in the earlier half of the 20th century: the gas chambers and the gulags, the mass shootings and show trials, the wanton disregard for human life and the heinous ideas which compelled people to, actively or passively, play a part in the deaths of tens of millions of fellow human beings. Reading about this period, there comes a point when the sheer scale and horror of the events which took place — the instant incineration of tens of thousands of civilians, for instance — desensitizes one from appreciating the sheer terror and physical pain that individuals endured.

Even with the knowledge of these attrocities, there is still little than can prepare a reader for the grisly accounts of the Ukrainian Famine that Timothy Snyder details in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Of course, I knew something about the widespread starvation that afflicted Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. This mass culling was directly caused by Josef Stalin’s collectivization policies, which were comprised of seizing private farms and exporting whatever food was grown to the rest of the Soviet Union and beyond. Those who have studied the event in-depth will not find anything new in Snyder’s account. But most readers, I imagine, will reevaluate their conception of the depths of human depravity when they read, in particular, about the widespread cannibalism that became rampant in what Robert Conquest has referred to as “one vast Belsen.” These are tales that one imagined lay only in the realm of zombie films: parents cooking and eating their own children, children in a nursery eating each other, a starving toddler literally eating himself.

The lack of popular knowledge about the Ukrainian Famine, or Holodomor, is largely attributable to two factors. The first is that, unlike the Nazi Holocaust, the question of whether the famine constitutes a premeditated act of genocide on the part of Joseph Stalin (as opposed to, at worst, a symptom of callous neglect, or, at best, a tragedy brought upon by environmental factors) remains a topic of a highly politicized historical debate.

via Hoover Institution.