freecounterpoint: Can Putin lend us some cojones?

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Can Putin lend us some cojones?

13 comments:

Tecumseh said...: C'mon, JJ, render unto Caesar what is due. This KGB man knows how to stare down his counterparts. If someone -- anyone -- can establish the principle that the Saudis need to reciprocate before building another 1,000 mosques in Europe and the Americas, I'll take it, no matter where it comes from.; 12/07/2008 3:43 PM
Mr roT said...: Caesar did some good in history, AI. Putin never will. Beslan and him are two sides of the same coin.

Anyway, that's not my point. My point is that if we don't like mosques for the ideology they spread, can we be so positive about a Russian Orthodox hierarchy backed by a murderous thug regime?
If Putin is for it, it is a good time to be circumspect. If he's just saying 'no' in a creative way, then fine, but the boot should not be let off Russia's neck for a long time.

By the way, what would Russians be doing in Riyadh anyway? I think the RO church there would be a good place for our spooks to set up shop and shoot everyone on a quiet Sunday morning.

Also, that same Russian Church has been associated with the worst thug regimes for the last 1400 years, giving about everything nasty that Pepe says about Christians a powerful example. The crap about Galileo and the Inquisition generally is all exaggerations. The RCs stayed closer to the Word than the rest without going off into unsustainable fruit movements (by syncretizing with practical Roman ways).

In addition, the Orthodox Church has provided inspiration to much better (and thus more dangerous) adherents than other closed-minded antiChristian sects. Think Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn's highly informed and attractive Russian Nationalism - Chosen People status stuff.

By way of comparison, consider the mormons.

There are plenty of religious reasons not to like the mormons' beliefs, but they never organized the kind of barbarity that the Russian Orthodox did.; 12/07/2008 4:00 PM
Tecumseh said...: This is total crap, JJ. Like all churches, the Russian Orthodox Church has a chip on its shoulder -- he who doesn't, let him cast the first stone. And they did have their unsavory characters (think Rasputin), and did they share of nasty stuff (think pogroms). But your tirade against the ROC as a whole (over the past 1,400 years!?) is completely unjustified, especially as it comes against a church that has so greatly suffered in the 20th Century at the hands of atheist Communism (think of millions upon millions of believers killed, and untold number persecuted, not to say literally thousands of churches razed, or turned into commie agitprop centers).

At any rate, I'd be very happy to see a Russian Orthodox church in Riyadh -- of course, it won't happen, but stranger things have happened in the past.; 12/07/2008 4:11 PM
Mr roT said...: Yeah, 1400 years. Show me an enlightened RO state, AI, in the same sense that, say, France and Southern Germany have been reasonable RC states or England has been enlightened Anglican or Israel has been enlightened Jewish.

About the sufferings befalling a religion, we can also commiserate (and exclude) Islam.; 12/07/2008 5:29 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: Well, JJ, the Orthodox church was based out of Constantinople. Compared to the world around it, for most of its 1000 year existence Byzantium was highly enlightened.
True enough, it failed to participate in the High Renaissance or Scientific Revolution. Gee, wonder why.
The Russian Orthodoxy did not take over until after that, and that point it was endlessly on the defensive. Cruel and mean spirited it often was in these last 500 years, but it was so while surrounded on most sides by far greater cruelty and mean-ness of spirit. Of all the movements that led to slaughter of man against man in the "Eastern Front" of the West the Orthodox played a very minor part.
I agree with you as to the general historical nature of RC vs RO, but I don't think any branch of christianity would have fared well in those lands.; 12/07/2008 6:40 PM
Mr roT said...: Agreed. Fair enough. But the land and neighbors influence the culture, AA, and for that reason RO is what it is. If it had to brutal in order to survive, then so be it. But that doesn't mean that it's not brutal and we should welcome a mass conversion here.

One can make similar arguments for Islam and (for similar reasons) what used to be the brutality of the Spaniard piece of the RCC, probably the only RCs to convert at the point of the sword.

Where might they have learned that?; 12/07/2008 7:16 PM
Tecumseh said...: JJ, I still have no idea what the hell are you talking about. You construct out of whole cloth a bogeyman, with no (or extremely little) historical basis in fact. You sound like the Hitch after 3 or 7 single malts (hold the rocks), railing against the Catholic Church. By the way, have you ever stepped foot in the lands of the Orthodox Church? Or are you fabulating about it, based on second-hand ramblings?

Reminds me of when I first got to that school in Morningside Heights, way back when: one of my fellow students, upon learning where I hailed from, asked me, "are there giraffes there"? He was not kidding.; 12/07/2008 7:58 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: I think JJ has in mind, at least in part, the Jew hatred which led to the pogroms. There is no doubt, AI, that both RC and RO had eras where the Church played an important role in demonizing Jews. This was still a living presence in Portugal when I was there. Making amends for this, seeking reconciliation, was something that John Paul II, for example, made central to his papacy.
JJ also seems to have in mind, for RO, the identification of the Church with the State, so that--for example-- other branches of Christianity were persecuted. I have read a number of articles that there is pressure from RO to ban/limit other factions of Christianity in Russia today.
That said, in the context of what eastern Christianity was faced with after the fall of Constantinople, RO was far more a force for good, for relieving the pain of the world around it, than it was for oppression. And what it was to suffer through under Communism was of great orders of magnitude worse than anything done by people in its name.
Perhaps, JJ, it was because both Dosteyevsky and Solzhenitsyn saw clearly the terror that is Communism, one as the storm built, the other in its heart when unleashed, that they turned to God and the Church. It was a haven of human decency, by comparison, to the Hell being born.; 12/07/2008 9:13 PM
Mr roT said...: AA, CWB, whom you've met in Houston, put it this way: "We got rid of communism for the Russians and after a few short years, they've elected a bloody dictator (Putin) by a landslide. We got rid of Hitler and the Germans took democracy. We dumped Imperial Japan and they have a parliament. Iraq will have a good chance at democracy, saddled with Islam, but noooooooo, not the Russians. It's not even communism that's that bad. It's the Russians themselves."

So let's take the only thing really defining them, (I am not sure you caught my drift about Dostoyevsky, but close enough), and evaluate that.

Simple, no?; 12/07/2008 9:31 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: Well, JJ, recall that overthrowing Hitler did not lead to Democracy in Germany because the Germans now saw the way. The Germans adopted the system of those who shaped the political culture of the territory. They had little choice, the old order being eradicated. Where we were, there was Democracy. Where the Soviets were, there was Communism. Japan is democratic today because we insisted it be democratic, and held control over the nation long enough to set up the political culture for an asian democracy.
Russia had no such thing. Communism collapsed but the communists, those who had been members of the party and the ruling elite, continued in control. Putin openly pines for the glory days of the Soviets as much as Nathan Bedford Forrest pined for the glory days of the South's "special institution". The difference is that no force for change occupied Russia to lead it out of despotism, whereas NBF was forced to the strategies of terrorism and an attempted longterm sabotage of the Union. I doubt very much either Japan or Germany would have been democracies if we had allowed the old orders to retain their independence and power, and had accepted their say so as sufficient.; 12/07/2008 9:42 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: By the way, JJ, I do concur with AI that Putin was just saying "no fucking way". I doubt very much he had set out hopes for establishing an Orthodox church in Riyadh. This is after all a country where if one of its citizens is caught wearing a cross or icon, or possessing literature from another religion, it is Dada time.; 12/07/2008 10:08 PM
Tecumseh said...: I'm not defending the Russians -- they never figured out democracy, never will. They've been brutalized through the ages, and, in turn, made life hell for people around them, and in their midst -- not to say, to themselves. That said, I think it's totally absurd to blame their bloody murdering ways on the ROC. It's probably the only organized entity in that whole landmass that has provided some kind of moderating counterpart over the centuries.; 12/07/2008 10:12 PM
Mr roT said...: Putin pines for the glory days of Norilsk and the Russians vote him at 90%, AA.

OK, they didn't have any good sense forced on them, but do they have to be so enthusiastic for the bad sense?; 12/08/2008 10:42 AM

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)