History

Russian Orthodox Church Urges Political and Legal Treatment of Crimes Committed by Bolsheviks

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Moscow, April 18, Interfax – Proposals on de-totalization recently made by the President’s Council for Development of Civil Society and Human Rights have long come to a head, the Moscow Patriarchate believes.

“It is quite evident that such proposals should have been made long before. It is necessary to give legal and political treatment of the crimes committed by the Bolsheviks’ regime. Not only do they include Stalin’s crimes, but also those committed by Lenin, Dzherzhinsky and Trotsky,” Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the head of the Synodal Department for Church and Society Relations said in an interview to Rossiyskiye Vesti weekly.

He believes it is necessary to commemorate the victims of the bloody Bolsheviks’ coup and “stop glorifying the butches by naming streets in their honour.”

“At the same time, we should avoid replacing the Soviet society, despite its distorted attitudes, with the consumer society which prevents people from having any big goals,” Father Vsevolod believes.

Commenting the assertion of the above proposals that “the civil war lasted 70 years”, he said “the civil war did not last 70 years: it has been a civil confrontation caused by the Bolsheviks’ coup and still pending. We are here to stop it.”

Father Vsevolod disagreed with the statement that “the whole Europe is responsible for launching World Wars I and II.”

“Governments of several Western countries are responsible for launching World War I. However, I would not release some members of the Triple Entente from responsibility as well. It is not the German people, but the Nazi government of Germany which bears responsibility for unleashing the Second World War,” he said.

A Hidden History of Evil: Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?

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Source: City Journal | Claire Berlinski

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.

[…]

Read the entire article on the City Journal website (new window will open).

Acton Institute: Atlas Shrugged – See the Movie, Skip the Book [VIDEO]

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I received permission to reprint this blog post by Acton Institute blogger Bruce Edward Walker. Walker, correctly in my view, draws out the authoritarian impulse in Rand’s philosophy of “Objectivism” that can be distilled down to this: The libertarianism (man’s moral agency is self-referencing) that describes Rand’s Objectivism stands against the classical liberalism (what we today would call moral conservatism) of a Burke, Kirk, or even Tocqueville which see the bonds between people and thus society and culture as fundamentally religious in character.

Ayn Rand

Rand stood against the cultural leveling of statism, particularly the loss of character and mediocrity it fosters. That is the appeal of her philosophy. There is little difference between, say, Soviet materialism and the state-sponsored corporatism of the modern welfare state (Europe in particular but increasingly so in the United States). However, the final refutation of this debilitating journey into what Friederich Hayek warned is a new “serfdom” is actually moral renewal. Rand was not able to penetrate the moral dimension of statism because of her passionate atheism. The best she could offer was an anti-statist libertarianism that inevitably results in an authoritarianism of a different sort (and fostered a personal life that is best described as morally chaotic).

Whittaker Chambers

I’ve included two items that shed more light on Rand and her influence on American intellectual history. The first is the critique of Atlas Shrugged by Whittaker Chambers, the ex-Communist turned Catholic who’s book “Witness” is perhaps the clearest testament of moral clarity of his age. The second is an interview with William F. Buckley, who fills in some of the cultural history of the era. Buckley described Atlas Shrugged as “ideological fabulism.” (Chambers worked for Buckley at National Review in the 1950s.)

Whittaker Chambers: Big Sister is Watching You

William Buckley on Ayn Rand & Atlas Shrugged:

Source: Acton Institute | Bruce Edward Walker

Atlas Shrugged – See the Movie, Skip the Book

Is it conceivable to endorse the cinematic adaptation of Ayn Rand’s libertarian manifesto Atlas Shrugged – as I do – while rejecting the flawed ideology which inspired it?

I would argue, yes. On the one hand, I place the Beatles at the pinnacle of 1960s pop music while concluding that their song “Mr. Moonlight” is wince-inducing to the point of being unlistenable. Likewise, I admire 99.9 percent of G.K. Chesterton’s body of work yet disagree with him on his assertion only men should vote. On the other hand, I disagree for the most part with Camille Paglia’s worldview yet admire her writing style and intellectual honesty.

So it goes with Ayn Rand. Her free-market views were a welcome antidote to New Deal policies and the malignant growth of government programs and crony capitalism. And for the same reasons I warmly welcome the first installment of the planned cinematic trilogy of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged – timed to coincide with the traditional Tax Day this coming Friday – which renders her themes in such a fashion they appear ripped from the headlines of today’s Wall Street Journal.

Atlas Shrugged-Part I captures the malaise of our times in its depiction of a United States of the near future when businessmen look to government to throttle competition by any means necessary (e.g. legislation and regulation) rather than innovating and investing to succeed. Part I ignores Rand’s anti-collectivism, rampant individualism, atheism and, for the most part, libertarian libertinism, to focus on her depictions of government looters and corporate rent seekers.

All this recommends the movie to lovers of liberty properly understood, to borrow a phrase from Russell Kirk. In fact, I’ll go so far as to encourage readers to see the film and skip the book.

My problems with Rand and Objectivism, the ideology of “enlightened self-interest” she founded, go beyond the oft-quoted admonition of Whittaker Chambers in which he expressed her autocratic intransigence led him to read Rand’s command to all detractors real and perceived “to the gas chambers go!” on every page. There is some truth to Chamber’s critique, to be sure, in that any worldview that rejects faith and community eventually succumbs to obduracy leading to what Russell Kirk labeled the “chirping sect” of libertarianism (a phrase he borrowed from T.S. Eliot).

By chirping sect, Kirk intentionally references Edmund Burke’s “insects of the hour” — those libertarians who splinter into ever smaller groups and thereby sacrifice both the personal and common good on the altar of their own narcissism masked as “individualism.” One need only read about the internecine strife within the Objectivist’s ivory tower to note the wisdom of Burke and Kirk. The CliffsNotes version: Arguing with Rand meant immediate exile to intellectual Siberia.

Contrary to Rand’s individualism, the United States since its beginning has congregated in townships and parishes where true democracy flourishes under the express influence of religious faith. Nineteenth-century writers Alexis de Tocqueville and Orestes Brownson both noted these communal incubators and conservators of liberty – small collectives that reflect their respective faiths to advocate for the good of all within their sphere.

As Tocqueville wrote in his seminal Democracy in America:

In the United States the influence of religion is not confined to the manners, but it extends to the intelligence of the people. Amongst the Anglo-Americans, there are some who profess the doctrines of Christianity from a sincere belief in them, and others who do the same because they are afraid to be suspected of unbelief. Christianity, therefore, reigns without any obstacle, by universal consent; the consequence is, as I have before observed, that every principle of the moral world is fixed and determinate, although the political world is abandoned to the debates and the experiments of men. Thus the human mind is never left to wander across a boundless field; and, whatever may be its pretensions, it is checked from time to time by barriers which it cannot surmount. Before it can perpetrate innovation, certain primal and immutable principles are laid down, and the boldest conceptions of human device are subjected to certain forms which retard and stop their completion.

Among his many salient points against libertarianism enumerated in the essay, “Libertarians: the Chirping Sectaries,” Kirk said:

What binds society together? The libertarians reply that the cement of society (so far as they will endure any binding at all) is self-interest, closely joined to the nexus of cash payment. But the conservatives declare that society is a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn; and that it coheres through what Aristotle called friendship and Christians call love of neighbor.

Elsewhere in his essay, Kirk delineates the differences between individualism as expressed by Rand and her like and the community spirit so intrinsic to our national character by invoking Eric Voegelin, whom, Kirk states:

[R]eminds us – is not between totalitarians on the one hand and liberals (or libertarians) on the other; rather, it lies between all those who believe in some sort of transcendent moral order, on one side, and on the other side all those who take this ephemeral existence of ours for the be-all and end-all-to be devoted chiefly to producing and consuming. In this discrimination between the sheep and the goats, the libertarians must be classified with the goats – that is, as utilitarians admitting no transcendent sanctions for conduct. In effect, they are converts to Marx’s dialectical materialism; so conservatives draw back from them on the first principle of all.

In short, capitalism and the toxic individualism of Rand and others for the instantaneous benefits supposedly granted leads to liberty misunderstood in the forms of materialism and licentious behavior – both antithetical to liberty properly understood as the fully realized temporal life in community and faith.

So I’m thankful Atlas Shrugged-Part I avoids the toxic elements of Rand’s so-called “philosophy” and am hopeful the subsequent installments of the film trilogy steer clear of the same pitfalls. By all means, see the film and avoid the book.

Death Warrant of Ancient Christianity

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If American liberals and neo-cons get their way and America invades Syria, the Syrian Christians will be persecuted and forced out of their ancient homeland.

Source: Real Clear Politics | Philip Jenkins

Ever since the wave of popular movements started sweeping the Middle East, Western media have rarely found much good to say about the authoritarian regimes under attack. Few observers deny that the last generation or so of Arab rulers were indeed greedy despots, and it seems desirable for Western powers to intervene as forcefully as they can on behalf of what are commonly billed as pro-democracy movements. The arguments against intervention are obvious enough, most obviously that it is much easier to begin a military intervention than to end it, while we rarely have much idea about the political character of the supposed democrats we are trying to aid. But in one case above all, namely Syria, debates over intervention have missed one overwhelming argument, which is the likely religious catastrophe that would follow the overthrow of the admittedly dictatorial government. Any Western intervention in Syria would likely supply the death warrant for the ancient Christianity of the Middle East. For anyone concerned about Christians worldwide — even if you believe firmly in democracy and human rights — it’s hard to avoid this prayer: Lord, bring democracy to Syria, but not in my lifetime.

Why is Syria so critical to the religious geography of the region? From ancient times, the territory had a complex mixture of religious traditions, and one that was far too complex to reduce to a simple Christian-Muslim divide. Under the long centuries of Ottoman power, Syria retained its sizable Christian minority, but other minority populations also flourished, groups that originated within Islam, but which orthodox believers condemned as heretics and apostates. Particularly important were the Alawites, a group that certainly includes Christian and even Gnostic strands in its esoteric world view. In fact, they were long known locally as Nusayris, “Little Christians” The Druze are no less secretive in their beliefs, and are equally loathed by strict Islamists. Although estimates are shaky, a reasonable estimate is that Alawites make up around ten percent of Syria’s population of twenty million, with the Druze at another three percent.

Christian numbers are still harder to determine. Over the past century century, Syria regularly served as the last refuge for Christian communities who had been largely destroyed elsewhere in the Middle East — for Christians fleeing massacre in Turkey after 1915, or in Iraq after 2003. A standard figure for the number of Syrian Christians is ten percent, or around two million believers, but that omits an uncertain number of thinly disguised crypto-believers, not to mention the recent arrivals from the wreck of Saddam’s Iraq. A fifteen percent Christian minority is quite probable.

It’s one thing to catalogue the religious oddities of a particular country, but we also have to know that that diversity is the absolute foundation of Syrian politics. Basically, a large majority of Syria — officially, some 74 percent — is Sunni Muslim, and the nation’s politics for almost fifty years has been devoted to ensuring that this majority does not gain power. Ever since 1963, Syria has been ruled by variations of the Ba’ath Party, an Arab ultra-nationalist movement originally co-founded by the Syrian Christian intellectual, Michel Aflaq. Because of its devotion to absolute secularism, the Ba’ath cause appeals strongly to religious minorities who fear the overwhelming demographic power of Sunni Islam. Christians, Alawites and others all have a potent vested interest in drawing all Arab peoples, regardless of faith, into a shared passion for secular modernity and pan-Arab patriotism, in sharp contrast to Islamism.

Since the 1960s, Ba’ath rule in Syria has meant the dictatorship of a highly structured one-party system closely allied to the armed forces and the intelligence apparatus. But it has also meant the dominance of the nation’s religious minorities, who are so over-represented in the military-intelligence complex. This means above all the Alawites, in alliance with Christian elites. Hafez al-Assad (President from 1971 through 2000) was of course an Alawite, and by the 1990s, five of his seven closest advisers were Christian. The deadliest enemies of the al-Assad clan were the Sunni Islamists, organized in groups affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood. But any effective Sunni opposition ended violently in 1982, when government forces suppressed a revolt in the city of Hama, killing possibly twenty-five thousand.

The evils of the Syrian regime are obvious enough: this is a classic police state with a penchant for assassination whenever it sees fit, and no compunction about supporting terrorist attacks at home or abroad. But just imagine that the Ba’ath regime fell. Whatever happened in the first few months of revolution, by far the most likely successor regime in the long term would be Islamist, led by activists anxious to avenge Hama. Alawites, Druze and Christians could all expect persecution at best, massacre at worst, a fate that could potentially befall five million residents. And this time, there would be no welcoming Middle Eastern refuge (Egypt has millions of its own Coptic Christians, but is not going to welcome a mass immigration of foreign Christian refugees). The only solution for these Syrian minorities would be exile from the region — to France or the US, Australia or Canada.

The West might like to see the Ba’ath regime crushed as thoroughly as its counterpart in Iraq, but as on that earlier occasion, the religious consequences of intervention could be horrible. Before planning to intervene in Syria, Western nations had better start printing several million immigration visas to hand out to refugees seeking political asylum, and demanding protection from religious persecution.

‘Erdoğan saved future of Greek Orthodox Patriarchate

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Diostheos Anağnostopulos

Source: Today’s Zaman

The spokesperson of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, Father Dositheos Anağnostopulos, has said Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan saved the future of the patriarchate by offering Turkish citizenship to a number of archbishops in 2009.

In an interview with the Star daily, Anağnos-topulos said there were 12 archbishops on the patriarchate’s Spiritual Board at the time. “Most of [those archbishops] are very old. In order to become a member of this board, one has to be a Turkish citizen. If the patriarch dies one day, it seemed unlikely that a new patriarch would be elected from the board [due to the members’ age]. This danger has now passed. The prime minister attended a luncheon on Büyükada in August 2009 … and said the problem with the Spiritual Board will be overcome if archbishops applied to become Turkish citizens. He assured us that applicants would be granted citizenship,” the spokesperson stated.

Anağnostopulos defined the prime minister’s remarks as the “most positive moment in his lifetime.” “After the prime minister’s call, 27 of 35 archbishops abroad submitted applications to become Turkish citizens. Thirteen of them have already been granted citizenship,” he added. In 2010, CNN International ran a story on the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in which it suggested that Patriarch Bartholomew could ultimately be the last patriarch if Turkish laws, demographics and attitudes do not change. According to Anağnostopulos, however, this is no longer the case, thanks to Erdoğan.

The spokesperson also said Erdoğan and Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç were the first state authorities to express their wish to re-open a closed Greek Orthodox seminary on Heybeliada, off the coast of İstanbul. The Halki Seminary was closed in 1971 in accordance with a law that put religious and military training under state control.

In addition, Anağnostopulos said the Halki Seminary is of high importance for the Greek Orthodox population as it was once a base where clerics were trained for the religious community.

“An argument has been put forward by some people in Turkey. They say the Greek Orthodox population comprises only 2,500 people, and we needn’t train clerics for so few people. They say we may ‘import’ clerics from abroad. However, they should know that the Greek Orthodox patriarch is the most senior among Orthodox churches in the world. This is why he was granted the ecumenical title. We also have followers outside of İstanbul, including in North and South America and some parts of Europe, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Their priests and archbishops are appointed by our patriarch. And for their appointment, it is a must for candidates to have graduated from a seminary,” he stated.

Anağnostopulos also said the re-opening of the Halki Seminary would not run contrary to the Treaty of Lausanne. He also ruled out fears that the “Byzantine spirit” would be revived if the seminary is re-opened.

“Some fear that it will go against the principles of the Republic of Turkey if the patriarchate is a very strong institution. This is wrong. The Republic of Turkey has a secular character. Every religious group has the right to continue its activities provided they are not engaged in politics. It is now a fact that the closing down of the Halki Seminary was not legal. I personally believe that the seminary was used as a trump card in the Cyprus issue and was eventually shut down,” he noted.

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