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[ by Charles Cameron — Washington Post, meet Pravmir ]
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Putin and the Patriarch: a Christian Jihad in al-Sham!

I was prepping this for yesterday’s post, saving relevant articles in their own little folder, but got sleepy before actually writing this business up, and today’s Washingtomn Post does the job better than I could have, so you can go read The Christian zeal behind Russia’s war in Syria to get the basics.

Most striking feature of that story, ICYMI, is this tweet:

Russian Orthodox priest blesses a Russian military base using an icon of Stalin. HT @vorobyov pic.twitter.com/bWKnLE1nTk

— James (@historyboy77) June 18, 2015

I’m not sure whether that’s a Russian base “facing” Syria or Ukraine — the WaPo seems to have illustrations of both, which is a tad confusing — but an icon of Stalin?

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Aside from the base and its purposes, however, it’s worth noting that Pravmir in late June discussed How the Church to respond to the attempts to make the image similar to the icons of Stalin? (lacking Russian, I have to go with Google Translate’s translation), and that Archpriest Alexander Saltykova explained:

The Church has responded to the recent actions A. Prokhanov, as well as before it meets a number of similar cases involving attempts to write psevdoikony of Stalin and Lenin, Hitler and such historical figures.

So Saratov archdiocese called the action A. Prokhanov “blatant provocation”. His attempts to organize a “religious worship” “psevdoikony depicting IV Stalin’s “cause” regret and resentment. ”

It is also recalled that the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church “has repeatedly emphasized,” that “canonization persecutor of the Church and the organizer of the bloody mass repression impossible” and “The very idea is absurd.”

See also:

Saratov archdiocese apologized to the believers of the ceremony with the icon of Stalin

Saratov archdiocese called a provocation action of the writer, the founder of the “Izborsk club” Alexander Prokhanov. Thus, members of the clergy have commented on the incident at the air base in Engels, where the priest was consecrated by order made izbortsev icon of “Our Lady Sovereign”, which is surrounded by Soviet marshals depicted Generalissimo Joseph Stalin.

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Seems there’s a little more to this story than meets the Washington Post eye.

I’ll be interested to see what John Schindler makes of this, and also welcome comments from any others interested in Russia and or Orthodoxy reading here..

[ by Charles Cameron — plus a date-setting video, awaiting The End in 2031! ]
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Armageddon. Even if you can’t hotwire it..

you may still be able to dodge it..

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From the late Israeli analyst, Reuven Paz:

Jihadi apocalyptic discourse, either by Jihadi-Salafi scholars, clerics, or supporters of global Jihad is one of the main innovations of the Jihadi-Salafi discourse that followed the September 11 attacks. Waves of what may be termed apocalyptic discourse are not new in the modern Arab Islamic world. They accompanied almost every major war or disaster that occurred in the Arab World in modern times. Such major events were the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the last Muslim Caliphate in 1922-24; The 1948 war with Israel — the “catastrophe” (Nakbah) in Arab and Palestinian eyes — which resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel; The 1967 war — the calamity (Naksah) in Arab and Muslim eyes — which resulted in Israeli occupation all over Palestine, Jerusalem, and Al-Aqsa mosque, and marked a humiliating Arab defeat; and the first Gulf war in 1991, following the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, which marked the first round of America’s massive military involvement in the Middle East. These wars, and some additional minor events such as the “Triple aggression” in the Suez canal in October 1956; “Black September” and the sudden death of the most admired Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser in September 1970, The Islamic revolution in Iran in February 1979; The Israeli-Egyptian peace// agreement the same time; The Iran-Iraq war between 1980-88, or the Soviet collapse in 1990-91, created waves of apocalyptic discourse.

From John Schindler:

Fifteen years ago I authored a piece for Cryptologic Quarterly, the National Security Agency’s in-house classified journal, about how close the world actually came to World War III in the early 1950s. Although this was little understood at the time, the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950 was a dry-run for the Kremlin, which was obsessed with silencing Tito’s renegade Communist regime in Yugoslavia. Had the United States not strongly resisted Pyongyang’s aggression, a Soviet bloc invasion of Yugoslavia would have followed soon after.

Of course, President Harry Truman did send U.S. forces to defend South Korea in the summer 1950, resulting in a conflict that has never formally ended. More importantly, he saved the world from nuclear Armageddon, as my CQ piece laid out in detail. Lacking much Western conventional defenses in Europe, any Soviet move on Yugoslavia would have resulted in rapid nuclear release by a hard-pressed NATO. I cited numerous still-secret files and as a result my article was classified TOPSECRET//SCI.

However, NSA has seen fit to declassify and release my article, minus some redactions, and even post it on the Agency’s open website. They have omitted my name, perhaps out of fear UDBA assassins will track me down decades after Tito’s death, but I’ll take my chances.

You can read the article here — enjoy!

Sources:

Reuven Paz, Hotwiring the Apocalypse: Jihadi Salafi Attitude towards Hizballah and Iran

John Schindler, Dodging Armageddon: The Third World War That Almost Was, 1950

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None of which precludes date-setting — something that both Christian and Islamic scriptures suggest is futile.

I can’t embed MI7 Agency‘s Passage Through the Veil of Time, but it’s an intriguing entry into the prediction stakes, and the first I’ve seen that confirms Richard Landes‘ contention that Christian millennial movements will be with us at least until the second millennial anniversary of the death and resurrection of Christ in the 2030s — and no doubt through the start of the next Islamic century in 2076 AD since, as Tim Furnish has also reminded us, “Mahdist expectations increase at the turn of every Islamic century.”

[ by Charles Cameron — let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light? ]
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Questions:

does Cheney‘s “dark side” comment sound less obnoxious when following Franklin Delano Roosevelt‘s “walk with the devil”?

alternatively, does Cheney’s remark make FDR’s look less appealing? Perhaps you’re in agreement with both sentiments?

if you agree with FDR but not with Cheney — when did we cross the Iraq bridge?

at what point should we “put on the armour of light”?

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FDR apparently claimed he was quoting an Orthodox / Bulgarian proverb — I doubt an Orthodox theologian would have gone on record with such a claim, and haven’t been able to confirm a source as yet — my thanks to John Schindler, Grurray and Velina Tchakarova for their help with the search.

[ by Charles Cameron — my piece contains some choice quotes from John Schindler to give perspective ]
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Here’s a teaser from my latest post at LapidoMedia:

St Vlad

There’s a small Russian Orthodox sect that, as Time magazine reported in 2011, considers Russian President Vladimir Putin a Saint.

It’s an all-female sect, it’s called The Chapel of Russia’s Resurrection, and its members venerate Putin as a sort of second coming of the Apostle Paul.

The group’s founder, Mother Fotina, explains:

‘According to the Bible, Paul the Apostle was a military commander at first and an evil persecutor of Christians before he started spreading the Christian gospel. In his days in the KGB, Putin also did some rather unrighteous things. But once he became president, he was imbued with the Holy Spirit, and just like the apostle, he started wisely leading his flock. It is hard for him now but he is fulfilling his heroic deed as an apostle.’

The focus, then, is not so much on Vladimir Putin as on Russian nationalism. And while the sect itself is small and obscure, the concept of Putin symbolizing Russian nationalism of a specifically spiritual sort is a potent one in Putin’s own projected image

But perhaps you should read the whole thing…

[ by Charles Cameron — third of three, almost caught up ]
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Schindler a few days back:

I'll say it again: Kremlin's positioning itself as pro-Christianity & pro-Islam against the militant atheists & Islamists is potent stuff.

— John Schindler (@20committee) January 19, 2015

Schindler’s latest:

While you weren't looking, Putin positioned himself as defender of faith against extremists, and Pope F kinda agrees http://t.co/oQlmGs3aKB

— John Schindler (@20committee) January 21, 2015

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Today’s John Schindler post, The West, Islam, and the Last Stand of the WEIRD, is another blockbuster must-read, but for my purposes in this series I’ll just quote a short excerpt. It’s the middle paragraph here that’s key, but I’ll give you a little before and after for context:

While Christian Europe of the last century still had some common ground with believing Muslims, the gap today between our societal values and those of most Muslims is vast and cannot be overcome without huge changes, perhaps on both sides, that seem unlikely to happen without bloodshed.

To make matters worse, the only European country that is making an effort to appeal to normal people of faith in dangerous times is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, the Kremlin, speaking through its religious mouthpieces, has staked out a clear position that terrorism is unacceptable, but so is intentionally offending religious people with blasphemy. In this formulation, Russia — and Russia alone — offers a welcoming home to Christians and Muslims alike, while driving extremists of all sorts, whether they be jihadists or Communist cartoonists, out of the public square. Religion is not the problem, Russia makes clear, and its support for traditional religions here is consistent — extremism is.

WEIRDos in the West naturally find all this a tad comedic, and they were mightily surprised when Pope Francis (“One cannot provoke; one cannot insult other people’s faith; one cannot make fun of faith”) came alarmingly close to towing the Kremlin line about Charlie Hebdo. Yet again, post-moderns were distressed to discover that the Pope of Rome is actually a Catholic. You have to be part of the WEIRD demographic to find it “shocking” when traditional religion stands up against aggressive blasphemy.

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I still haven’t quite figured out how almost everybody comes to have an opinion about almost everything: I know enough about a small archipelago of topics to have a sense of how much I don’t know, even in my areas of interest, in between my islands — and I am vividly aware that my chosen archipelago is only one of many, many, many — oh, why don’t I just quote Newton, and let him speak for us all:

I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

There are areas of knowledge that John explores, in this post in particular, that I don’t know enough about to trust my own opinions on, but one point he keeps making keeps on shining through: that the western secular mindset has a blind spot wherever religious intensity appears.

And by religious intensity I don’t necessarily mean piety, or deep theological knowledge — which are the criteria that pollsters use to judge such things. The disciples of Christ were fishermen, he talked with prostitutes and (oy!) centurions among others, they were his peeps. The test, then, is not mosque, church or synagogue attendance, nor dietary behavior: religion happens, first and foremost, to humans, and that’s something John captures neatly, as it applies to Muslims, in this para about the majority of Muslims world-wide:

They try, they fail, they keep trying. They usually make an effort during Ramadan, at least, and if a life crisis appears, they will pray and seek the comfort of the mosque; the rest of the time their lived faith is rather hit-or-miss. In other words, they are completely normal human beings.

Human beings, that is, with an available transcendant perspective that can be activated by crisis, by global dissonance, by perceived injustice — as the supreme justification for brutality among those so disposed, and as the supreme invitation to good works among the likes of Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, and many less known but no less generous souls.

Heaven and Hell, no less than East and West, are present in human reality, as John Milton knew. We should permit them, with caution and understanding, into our minds and models, and onto our maps. First, though, we should understand and sense what they mean, within human hearts and minds — no easy task.