By Ralph Benko
Russia is a nation of mystics. Before Putin there was Rasputin.
Putin presents as nihilism reincarnated. Per the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Russian Nihilism is perhaps best regarded as the intellectual pool … out of which later radical movements emerged; it held the potential for both Jacobinism and anarchism.”
Defeating the Jacobinism which fomented the Reign of Terror, and its guillotines, and the Black Handed anarchism that fomented a century of guerre à outrance demands fighting not only by hero-warriors but by spiritual justice warriors.
Nihilism delenda est.
A world spiritual justice war has begun. Only by challenging Putin’s legitimacy can we defeat his propaganda-fueled popularity, ending his massacre of innocents.
The UK Guardian reveals the rising challenge to “Putin’s patriarch” of the Russian Orthodox Church.
“[Patriarch] Kirill, who had close links with the KGB in Soviet times, has described Mr Putin’s leadership as a religious miracle. As bombs have rained down on Ukrainian cities, he has asserted that it is “God’s truth” that the people of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus should be reunited as one spiritual people. During a sermon delivered in Moscow last month, he portrayed the invasion of Ukraine as part of a ‘metaphysical’ struggle against a decadent west …. As a result, amid a global Christian backlash, the ROC is fast becoming a pariah church within a pariah state.”
The heroism of the Ukrainian freedom fighters is a breath of fresh air in our fetid political world. So is the heroism of the priests and church officials denouncing Moscow.
That said, more is needed. War is about victory.
The Ukrainian resistance wins battle after battle. Yet the Kremlin’s forces keep administering ever more brutal blows.
Putin is brutally conducting mass murder, razing cities and laying mines that will maim for generations. As the New York Times reports, “The Russian general who has been put in charge of the invasion of Ukraine earned distinction in Moscow for his handling of his country’s intervention in the Syrian civil war, where he helped to oversee a brutal, scorched-earth campaign ….”
We must be at least as ferocious in stripping from Putin all pretence of legitimacy. Consider the magnitude of Putin’s evil.
The blackest, most damning, most plausible analysis is presented by David Goldman, writing as “Spengler” in Asia Times, headlined Cardinal Richelieu explains Vladimir Putin:
“Dilettantes like the Americans think of eliminating a regime. Real connoisseurs of power arrange to eliminate entire provinces.”
Goldman then recounts Russia’s brutal demolition of Chechnya. And goes on to today:
“There is only one way to govern Russia, and it does not involve lace doilies. … Ukraine was hollow before the war began. … Twelve million Ukrainians, fully half the able-bodied population of working age, left before the war started. Another five million have fled. As Russian artillery pounds Ukraine’s cities, more will flee. How many will return? Large parts of Ukraine will fall into ruin.”
Rule or ruin. Putin, having failed to impose his rule, now intends to ruin.
He does so under a false pretense of a moral crusade against the decadent Western infidels. We need valor and will need more than valor to win this war. We must win the hearts and minds of the Russian people.
Putin must be shown up as not a mere brutal thug but as illegitimate. A fraud.
Turning the people of Russia against Putin is the only way to end the invasion.
The Guardian continues:
“Initially reluctant to make the full force of his opposition to Mr Putin public, Pope Francis has begun to harden his language, telling the patriarch that the concept of a holy or just war cannot be reconciled with Christian teaching. The World Council of Churches, which represents 580 million Christians of various denominations around the world, has unsuccessfully urged Kirill to use his influence with Mr Putin to intercede for peace. An emerging lobby within it is now calling for the ROC to be expelled.”
It is time for all people of faith, from pulpits to pews, to confront Putin’s Hell-bent course and stand as spiritual justice warriors condemning Putin’s damnable course, blessing Ukraine’s resistance leaders.
As William Butler Yeats, in 1919, the year of my mother’s birth, prophesied in The Second Coming:
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Slouches now Vladimir Putin, neo-nihilist anti-Christian. Now is the time for us to stand with him who vexed the Father of Lies to a thousand years of stony sleep.
Nothing less. Ukraine is this world spiritual war’s first, but not final, theater. We must be sufficiently ferocious to win the spiritual war.
Or else.
Glory to Ukraine!
