tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42517770160374977832024-03-15T21:00:09.854-05:00The Heavy Anglophile OrthodoxMatthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.comBlogger1922125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-26808106767020656292024-03-15T20:59:00.002-05:002024-03-15T20:59:29.755-05:00Peace will surely comeA <a href="https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/peace-will-surely-come-a-message-by-faina-savenkova">letter to Palestine</a> from <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2023/04/prophets-not-without-honour.html">Faina Savenkova</a>, the <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2022/08/for-faina.html">children’s author</a> in the Donbass. I have no comment of my own to add; it suffices to let her speak for herself:
<blockquote>Hello, Palestine!<br /><br />
My name is Faina. All my short life I have lived in war. I know what a blockade is. I know what it’s like to be under fire. I know how it is when people are dying not far away, but you hold on with all your might because your whole family needs water. I know what it is to realize that old people and children have been and are being killed by weapons supplied by the West, and you can do nothing. Every day, like you, we bury our fathers and mothers and children. They destroy, like you, hospitals, and temples just because we want to be free and happy. I know what war is. I know what it is to lose friends, but I ask you to hold on and not to despair. We will cope with everything, no matter how hard it is.<br /><br />
In Donetsk and Lugansk there is the Alley of Angels. There is a memorial there dedicated to the children who were killed by Ukraine. I can say with bitterness that Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria have their own Alley of Angels who died under destroyed mosques and churches. Because the world is unjust and cruel, and the enemy is merciless. But I have hope that Donbass, Syria, and Palestine will be free and children will stop dying from shells. And the souls of the victims of these wars will look down on us from heaven, protecting our fragile lives. That’s what will happen. That’s what I believe. I do not know what will happen tomorrow to each of us, for we all live in war, but peace will surely come.<br /><br />
With love to you, <br />your friend Faina Savenkova</blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7Y6Mzthm_ALIjk5iT8ZqhODQ6SxOpVme9cdTPDRU2lgRw7Ai8X74dE58zlXBpMsxTl4aO7JhyphenhyphenOuNbhUWpk2QrEcln3nypx87W1KI5_pwz1tl75gJxT772dAbdOG8AsiZUYb5l9MngCDf2x_XkKhydxcONLPj_BVKXaJ_kSnIHgrhcThxNW7jGTl7fomy0/s718/432281501_10100283635224940_9055434202886898767_n.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="575" data-original-width="718" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7Y6Mzthm_ALIjk5iT8ZqhODQ6SxOpVme9cdTPDRU2lgRw7Ai8X74dE58zlXBpMsxTl4aO7JhyphenhyphenOuNbhUWpk2QrEcln3nypx87W1KI5_pwz1tl75gJxT772dAbdOG8AsiZUYb5l9MngCDf2x_XkKhydxcONLPj_BVKXaJ_kSnIHgrhcThxNW7jGTl7fomy0/s400/432281501_10100283635224940_9055434202886898767_n.jpg"/></a></div>Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-36610381107947218802024-02-22T19:35:00.004-06:002024-03-12T22:02:43.554-05:00Of Guatemala and Gaza<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLlpWlVIFysJF-MxmuV7Glfw5PY6qNWNObWyFLi1z4wojiSTgQP8TOxVV6W8RTbJ0QRu563W9F6VCfFcllWGh1T_9JqosP7QSKj3S3I6-sXEyraUcWSbe3WgX_y5sOFJO4Xk7EAVW4Rl5UXkiJglGQq9bNH-YjuDtoueI7sryswO4C1k9ZEIhVSYEg6jE4/s1015/Screenshot%202024-02-22%20at%2018-15-21%2075DFECE9-1FC4-4555-AC25-A72B4CBE77F9.jpeg%20%28JPEG%20Image%201536%20%C3%97%202048%20pixels%29%20%E2%80%94%20Scaled%20%2844%25%29.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="871" data-original-width="1015" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLlpWlVIFysJF-MxmuV7Glfw5PY6qNWNObWyFLi1z4wojiSTgQP8TOxVV6W8RTbJ0QRu563W9F6VCfFcllWGh1T_9JqosP7QSKj3S3I6-sXEyraUcWSbe3WgX_y5sOFJO4Xk7EAVW4Rl5UXkiJglGQq9bNH-YjuDtoueI7sryswO4C1k9ZEIhVSYEg6jE4/s400/Screenshot%202024-02-22%20at%2018-15-21%2075DFECE9-1FC4-4555-AC25-A72B4CBE77F9.jpeg%20%28JPEG%20Image%201536%20%C3%97%202048%20pixels%29%20%E2%80%94%20Scaled%20%2844%25%29.png"/></a></div>
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This past Tuesday, after two and a half years of construction and labour of those monastics and faithful under the guidance of Archimandrite Evangelos Patá, a seminary and mission centre <a href="https://www.thewordfromguatemala.com/2024/02/20/new-era-begins-for-orthodox-church-in-guatemala/">opened</a> in the Huehuetenango District of Guatemala, reports <a href="https://orthochristian.com/158813.html"><i>Pravoslavie.Ru</i></a>. The Orthodox community in Guatemala is one of the explosive success stories of twenty-first century Orthodox mission work, particularly after 2010 when 500,000 Guatemalans—mostly indigenous Maya people—converted <i>en masse</i>. A steady stream of converts into the Orthodox Church has continued since then.
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This new seminary and mission centre will ‘serve the spiritual, educational and administrative needs of the faithful’, who are As Fr John Chakos puts it on his blog: ‘The palpable joy that filled this day reflected the vibrant Christian faith of the long suffering Mayan people who endured much throughout their tragic history, but never lost hope.’
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<div align="center"><iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N7vCww3j2-w?si=APDYhrmzm72tK_xz" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
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How true this is. The ‘tragic history’ of the Guatemalan Mayan people is one which can be attributed directly to American imperialism and the legacy of colonialism. During this time, the Guatemalan military and government forces, trained by the <a href="https://www.derechos.org/soa/guat-not.html">School of the Americas</a> and funded by the American government, used <a href="https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/americas/the-school-of-the-americas-more-than-qa-few-bad-applesq/">‘scorched earth’ tactics</a> against the Indigenous people of the country: including death squads, ‘disappearances’, strafing from helicopters, internment camps, forced starvation, torture and sexual violence. Leftists, labour leaders and union organisers were also subjected to this targetted violence from the state. Canadian folk-rock musician Bruce Cockburn, after visiting Guatemala during this time, wrote the song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7vCww3j2-w">‘If I Had a Rocket Launcher’</a> specifically about this situation.
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The flocking of Indigenous Maya Guatemalans to the Orthodox Church in the present day, may be considered one of the fruits, primarily, of the career of Archimandrite <a href="https://religionnews.com/2021/09/27/catholic-church-inequality-indigenous-guatemalans-turn-to-orthodox-christianity/?fbclid=IwAR1KlZQUXCcnskzWkv9f2YtfTfLzAdcsVMHODWJnhZL47bbASAGoenHWqSU">Andrés Girón</a>, a cleric who took up the cause of the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala, specifically during this time of the US-backed military dictatorship in the 1980s. For his efforts, Archimandrite Giron was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church on account of his pro-Indigenous stand, and he fled to Mexico after several assassination attempts on him by the right-wing government, after which he joined the Orthodox Church and continued his advocacy work. Although he was an agrarian-minded Christian and not a Marxist, he gained the moniker ‘Father Revolutionary’ from both his supporters and his opponents, particularly when he began supporting progressive land reforms which would benefit the Indigenous peoples. He even began <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/27/world/guatemalan-priest-s-daring-crusade.html">political action</a> against the US-backed military government, at the head of the left-wing, anti-capitalist Asociación Nacional Campesina Pro-Tierra, and direct action by occupying and farming land collectively for the benefit of the people living there.
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<div align="center" class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1_YGGz2b1kNmwKorPYQR19eWcW3jM8TzRI-Td5z-VLlgAHxXTlas7_5zPOy4pUwCXvU5aFVh5skGG8fZ8jRoBdRsu8f6E8En31fhTH4LL2Gf5pjerbLNCK4A6H-kGHrYaZip5vCudnBGhM-SM1Q61GfSvnlj9BpnrVb_ejS1QdF_W2zX9_HrXea3yswiG/s536/andresgiron.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="536" data-original-width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1_YGGz2b1kNmwKorPYQR19eWcW3jM8TzRI-Td5z-VLlgAHxXTlas7_5zPOy4pUwCXvU5aFVh5skGG8fZ8jRoBdRsu8f6E8En31fhTH4LL2Gf5pjerbLNCK4A6H-kGHrYaZip5vCudnBGhM-SM1Q61GfSvnlj9BpnrVb_ejS1QdF_W2zX9_HrXea3yswiG/s400/andresgiron.jpg"/></a><br /><i>Archimandrite Andrés Girón</i></div>
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Even though his electoral campaigns did not win him much support in terms of government reform, the Indigenous Mayans quickly gravitated to his social ideals, not to mention his religious convictions. At a time when the Catholic Church was divided between a reactionary hierarchy and a liberation-theological parish priesthood (and the hierarchy winning out more often than not); and when Evangelical Protestantism was marching in lockstep with state violence and American-style capitalism and white supremacy; Orthodox Christianity began to look all the more attractive. When Fr Andrés Girón joined the Orthodox Church in 2010, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Mayans came with him. Stop me if any of this <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1905.htm">starts to sound familiar</a>.
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I beat this drum a lot. I have remarked before, and repeatedly, that the Indigenous peoples of Asia and America are <a href="http://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2019/01/orthodoxy-and-indigenous-solidarity.html">a valuable witness <i>within</i> Orthodoxy</a>. Orthodoxy at its best does not see Indigenous traditions and languages as things to be assimilated from the outside or suppressed from above. It values these traditions and languages <i>in themselves</i>, and transfigures them <i>from the inside</i>.
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<div align="center" class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3DpfDo2iw-2cPAJzL-K2LHwqwc1mdtiObeWXYRECr07EhxKlySy72edhJ4vEbR3UrZxD2onlah-9WDRq4WblVPxIfpTXmxsJrCaiTgDVBrkR3naGfuCljAeReO68T06PLA9QPPKi0NFCHeVKishtSVykePudoDgq8uyyPeuUGJ6KVgptSoRCmYXOj9MrC/s610/Glava_kiltovo_13%281%29_mainPhoto.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="610" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3DpfDo2iw-2cPAJzL-K2LHwqwc1mdtiObeWXYRECr07EhxKlySy72edhJ4vEbR3UrZxD2onlah-9WDRq4WblVPxIfpTXmxsJrCaiTgDVBrkR3naGfuCljAeReO68T06PLA9QPPKi0NFCHeVKishtSVykePudoDgq8uyyPeuUGJ6KVgptSoRCmYXOj9MrC/s400/Glava_kiltovo_13%281%29_mainPhoto.jpg"/></a><br /><i>Orthodox womens’ monastery in Kyltovo, Komi Republic, Russia</i></div>
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For example: Orthodox Bibles, prayer books, patericons and religious texts have been published in Indigenous languages such as <a href="https://orthochristian.com/121291.html">Sakha</a>, <a href="https://ibtrussia.org/en/news-120420">Nenets</a>, <a href="https://ibtrussia.org/en/news-07072022">Evenki</a>, <a href="https://orthochristian.com/111825.html">Chukchi</a>, <a href="https://orthochristian.com/120193.html">Khanty</a>, <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/database/LME/entry/lme.20442485/html?lang=en">Skolt Sámi</a>, <a href="https://fennougria.ee/en/the-bible-in-komi/">Komi</a>, <a href="http://www.finland.orthphoto.net/history-en.html">Veps</a>, <a href="https://www.asna.ca/alaskan-texts">Aleut and Tlingit and Yup’ik</a>. <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-accidental-apostle-to-angara.html">Saint Innocent of Irkutsk</a>, <a href="http://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/08/remembering-saint-herman-wonderworker.html">Saint Herman the Wonderworker of Alaska</a> and, later, <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/10/remembering-our-father-among-saints.html">Saint Tikhon of Moscow</a> defended Indigenous rights against oppression and exploitation first by Russian and later by American pecuniary interests and colonisation. (One can see from these examples that the witness of Fr Andrés Girón was not without precedent!) But Indigenous people themselves have contributed to Orthodoxy in profound and ineluctable ways. <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2017/09/neomartyr-peter-cungagnaq-aleut.html">Saint Peter the Aleut</a>, <a href="https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2021/07/26/102091-repose-of-saint-jacob-netsvetov-enlightener-of-the-peoples-of-al">Saint Jacob Netsvetov</a>, <a href="https://alaskapublic.org/2023/12/15/st-olga-of-kwethluk-to-become-first-ever-yupik-saint/">Saint Olga of Alaska</a>... these <i>Indigenous saints</i> have deeply and without question enriched the experience of American Orthodoxy. And the former two of these saints did so, while Indigenous people in the Americas were undergoing <a href="https://www.se.edu/native-american/wp-content/uploads/sites/49/2019/09/A-NAS-2017-Proceedings-Smith.pdf">one of the worst genocides</a> of human history.
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Now, let us turn our attention, for the sake of comparison, to another Indigenous people. The people of the country of Palestine are descended, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5544389/">indisputably from a scientific and genetic point of view</a>, from the ancient Levantines. Modern Palestinians are genetically closest to the Bronze Age inhabitants of Canaan, with unbroken ancestral roots in the Levant going back nearly 4000 years. (We ethnic Ashkenazim simply cannot claim the same thing: <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/most-ashkenazi-jews-are-genetically-europeans-surprising-study-finds-8c11358210">over forty percent</a> of our autosomal ancestral DNA originates in Western Europe--France and Germany.) What appears clear now, is that this Indigenous population of the ancient Holy Land has undergone numerous <i>cultural</i> and <i>religious</i> and <i>linguistic</i> shifts through the millennia. So although Palestinians are <i>culturally</i> Arabic, and the majority are Muslims, their presence in the place where they are <i>long predates</i> the Arab conquests and the rise of Islâm!
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<div align="center" class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBbEBzO6sLzIJ1sXwGJNaz8bhksCHahTAw3tutiHXnJRyhDsNgi7ZgjgxhJ4D67WjpnScI6XAJvc1_0GuyW1KhVPOzRPt5g_soG0B7l66_8xDLPSowWZkFFPWWSX3R8MaKR53D3M0xoC6WjeD87dfNCL04_BqownXxqip8lfAUYIAm5JzqRKPcTrz-I3j3/s1500/Screenshot%202024-02-22%20at%2019-31-24%206536ba6c0487ff031cabf260%20%28WEBP%20Image%201000%20%C3%97%20667%20pixels%29.png"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBbEBzO6sLzIJ1sXwGJNaz8bhksCHahTAw3tutiHXnJRyhDsNgi7ZgjgxhJ4D67WjpnScI6XAJvc1_0GuyW1KhVPOzRPt5g_soG0B7l66_8xDLPSowWZkFFPWWSX3R8MaKR53D3M0xoC6WjeD87dfNCL04_BqownXxqip8lfAUYIAm5JzqRKPcTrz-I3j3/s400/Screenshot%202024-02-22%20at%2019-31-24%206536ba6c0487ff031cabf260%20%28WEBP%20Image%201000%20%C3%97%20667%20pixels%29.png"/></a><br /><i>Church of St Porphyrios, Gaza, Palestine</i></div>
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Indeed, Palestinians were among the <i>first Christians</i>. Gaza was a <i>Christian city</i>. The Church of Saint Porphyrios, which was <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/20/we-were-baptised-here-and-we-will-die-here-gazas-oldest-church-bombed">bombarded by the Israel Occupation Forces</a> two weeks into their current war, dates back <a href="https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2013/03/gaza-orthodox-church.html">over sixteen hundred years</a>. Gaza was home to Christian saints such as <a href="https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2019/02/26/100606-saint-porphyrius-bishop-of-gaza">Bishop Saint Porphyrios</a> himself, <a href="https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/0216/06/05/101628-venerable-abba-dorotheus-of-palestine">Abba Dorotheos</a>, <a href="https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2024/04/22/101183-venerable-vitalius-of-gaza">Saint Vitalios</a> and <a href="https://orderofsaintgeorge.org/saint-sylvanus-of-gaza-no-international-wire-needed-to-ask-the-saints-to-intercede/">Saint Silvanos</a>, to name but a few. Before Palestine was Muslim, Palestinians followed Jesus Christ. And before Palestinians followed Christ, Palestinians were without question among the people who worshipped the God of the Hebrews, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, at the Second Temple.
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Despite the prevarication and mealy-mouthed excuses that issue from on high in Washington and New York, there can be very little doubt now that what is going on right now as we speak, in the home territory of this <a href="https://en.jerusalem-patriarchate.info/">very oldest of Christian Churches</a>, is <a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide">a genocide of the Palestinian people</a>, at the hands of another US-backed far-right parafascist government: complete with <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/12/16/israel-is-taking-scorched-earth-policy-to-a-new-level">scorched-earth tactics</a>, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/21/why-is-israels-military-killing-so-many-of-its-own">death squads</a>, <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/18/israel-starvation-used-weapon-war-gaza">weaponised starvation</a>, <a href="https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/torture-tactics--israel--uses-to-kill-palestinian-prisoners">torture</a>, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/20/middleeast/israel-hamas-un-investigation-sexual-abuse-intl/index.html">sexual violence</a>. In short, the Palestinians <i>now</i> are suffering everything that the Indigenous Guatemalans faced from the military dictatorship of that country in the 80s and 90s. And the American government <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/07/bidens-support-of-israel-leaves-him-as-isolated-as-russia-on-the-world-stage-analyst.html">backs the Israeli fascists to the hilt</a>.
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<div align="center" class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0wYmyNyUlLbCgxgL6_OAo9wNbbaxQqlN7MXItEc0rO5tfDS9or5e0twpBeZEXsgDOlwu3vfj8bxjXMcI5raMpW3g_D94LGHPf-mhz2YmAYhGDpEE1EuD2I2jbTQ1Bfg2gZOwC-eya8RLHMez7FrNBQUo-4179hCdeQfCrBw-k3wwby0gvSZez58Ec-_10/s950/woods-04.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="632" data-original-width="950" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0wYmyNyUlLbCgxgL6_OAo9wNbbaxQqlN7MXItEc0rO5tfDS9or5e0twpBeZEXsgDOlwu3vfj8bxjXMcI5raMpW3g_D94LGHPf-mhz2YmAYhGDpEE1EuD2I2jbTQ1Bfg2gZOwC-eya8RLHMez7FrNBQUo-4179hCdeQfCrBw-k3wwby0gvSZez58Ec-_10/s400/woods-04.jpg"/></a><br /><i>Archbishop Alexios of Gaza</i></div>
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But if there is another Indigenous genocide occurring right now in Gaza, there is also another Fr Andrés Girón, in the saintly <a href="https://greekcitytimes.com/2023/10/21/archbishop-alexios-why-did-israel/">Archbishop Alexios of Gaza</a>. Archbishop Alexios <a href="https://orthochristian.com/156751.html">has courageously declared</a> that he will not abandon his flock there even if he is the last Christian standing in Gaza. And he has dedicated his work to <a href="https://orderofsaintgeorge.org/archbishop-alexios-first-the-people-need-food/">giving food and clean water and shelter</a> to any who have come to need it, even as they are being denied these by the military. And he has rededicated himself to praying for the dead, the dead without number: and <a href="https://orderofsaintgeorge.org/from-archbishop-alexios-of-tiberias-in-gaza/">many of these dead are Christians</a>.
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The Indigenous Christians of the Holy Land need our solidarity, and they need it now more than ever. But, just as Efraín Ríos Montt has gone down to Sheol, while the relatives of people he ordered to be slaughtered by the tens of thousands are flocking to the Church to be joined to Christ, so too will Netanyahu and his hateful right-wing butcher-regime and his death squads go down to the pit, while the names of the innocents who died at Saint Porphyrios shall be sung by the heavenly choirs without end. Of this I am sure. And if God wills it, may He let Gaza again breathe, be free and be green, as Guatemala may now (to a certain extent) do.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhttVBiW0pBkO5RnKm3cwNMiT13YWMZq2LgU3Vurq56NlN85QEvCQLneg1Fy4-rketsGz30XVBzoMPspcxxs1sxFuR7zDR8OchMklBXN2UQkJG0E9ct2dR7pwAvoYHMFuJ9or2dhRdzrLuqVAyKaS-u5uTgaEbROvj2ZIt0wtJZm4WypOr7OPHJ4xoMegZG/s1800/Screenshot%202024-02-22%20at%2019-34-19%2032LY4PQ-highres-1699271073.jpg%20%28WEBP%20Image%201200%20%C3%97%20630%20pixels%29.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="945" data-original-width="1800" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhttVBiW0pBkO5RnKm3cwNMiT13YWMZq2LgU3Vurq56NlN85QEvCQLneg1Fy4-rketsGz30XVBzoMPspcxxs1sxFuR7zDR8OchMklBXN2UQkJG0E9ct2dR7pwAvoYHMFuJ9or2dhRdzrLuqVAyKaS-u5uTgaEbROvj2ZIt0wtJZm4WypOr7OPHJ4xoMegZG/s400/Screenshot%202024-02-22%20at%2019-34-19%2032LY4PQ-highres-1699271073.jpg%20%28WEBP%20Image%201200%20%C3%97%20630%20pixels%29.png"/></a></div>Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-32218432470861525992024-02-14T19:50:00.001-06:002024-02-14T20:04:08.527-06:00The dragon and the bear<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZeaHZa3hHVfSFsP0l09-Gb9KkVHzV_KlT4AccX4mbwbBfAJCQqdi23Lc6tWxTbCJhELMLe6FGdB1v_SpEXbYFXOm2etuzy-LQ8OVS84p9RAST8Y79tHe6jIGevKlxplB5jcsZzUSHNTRt4aWdW3_VSVwBhBMRKovsCv1edTltvY4l6cUoeKnPCSw9DEoh/s995/dragonyear2024.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="995" data-original-width="544" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZeaHZa3hHVfSFsP0l09-Gb9KkVHzV_KlT4AccX4mbwbBfAJCQqdi23Lc6tWxTbCJhELMLe6FGdB1v_SpEXbYFXOm2etuzy-LQ8OVS84p9RAST8Y79tHe6jIGevKlxplB5jcsZzUSHNTRt4aWdW3_VSVwBhBMRKovsCv1edTltvY4l6cUoeKnPCSw9DEoh/s400/dragonyear2024.jpg"/></a></div>
First of all, (sort of) belated blessings for Spring Festival this year, and a Happy Year of the Dragon! It’s the middle of <a href="https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-public-holiday-2024-schedule/">Golden Week</a>, so I’m still in the window!
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恭喜发财!幸福安康!万事如意!身体健康!龙马精神,财运亨通!
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According to the <i>Yijing</i>, the relevant hexagram seal for this year is <i>qian</i> 谦, or ‘modesty’, composed of an upper trigram <i>kun</i> 坤 (the receptive, field) and a lower trigram <i>gen</i> 艮 (keeping still, mountain).
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The judgement associated with this seal is as follows:
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<blockquote><i>MODESTY creates success.<br />
The superior man carries things through.</i></blockquote>
And the associated image for his seal is that of a subterranean mountain.
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<blockquote><i>Within the earth, a mountain:<br />
The image of MODESTY.<br />
Thus the superior man reduces that which is too much,<br />
And augments that which is too little.<br />
He weighs things and makes them equal.</i></blockquote>
This image in fact reminds me of something that Fr Thomas Hopko of blessed memory once wrote on the subject. Modesty (that is to say, humility) is not a matter of self-abasement in his view:
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<blockquote><i>Humility does not mean degradation or remorse. It does not mean effecting some sort of demeaning external behaviour. It does not mean considering oneself the most vile and loathsome of creatures. Christ Himself was humble and He did not do this… Genuine humility means to see reality as it actually is in God. It means to know oneself and others as known by God… The humble lay aside all vanity and conceit in the service of the least of God’s creatures, and to consider no good act as beneath one’s dignity and honour.</i></blockquote>
In order to ‘reduce that which is too much’, we have to have a certain standard as to what ‘too much’ is; and we can’t do that without looking outside of ourselves for the standard. The same goes with ‘augmenting that which is too little’, ‘weighing things’ and ‘making them equal’. The standards are not to be found in us, but to realise that requires that we understand reality by a different measure than our own fallible perspective. Faith may move mountains, even if it is as small as a mustard seed which is buried in the earth. But to understand this parable, we can’t be reading it with the eyes of worldly pride.
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~~~
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And, by the way, in the interest of <a href="https://actipedia.org/project/rectification-names">rectification of names</a>, it is properly called <b>Spring Festival</b> (春节). That is even though this festival does mark the New Year on the agrarian calendar, and even though it technically falls during winter. Traditionally, farmers used Spring Festival as a yearly marker to <a href="https://arcticportal.org/ap-library/news/2763-spring-festival-2022"><i>prepare</i> for the necessary work</a> that needed to be done <i>by</i> the vernal equinox—hence the name.
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Despite <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/28/asia/chinese-lunar-new-year-controversy-intl-hnk/index.html">the woke usage</a> nowadays, Spring Festival is <i>not</i>, properly speaking, a ‘Lunar’ New Year, because the traditional agrarian calendar is in fact a <i>lunisolar</i> calendar, with intercalations to make up for discrepancies with the solar year, and not a true lunar calendar. And thank goodness for that, because if it were <a href="https://www.islamic-relief.org.uk/resources/islamic-calendar/">a true lunar calendar</a>, Spring Festival would jump around <a href="https://islamqa.info/en/answers/170701/the-reason-why-ramadan-changes-every-year-in-relation-to-the-gregorian-calendar">as much as Ramadan does</a>. But I don’t see anyone lining up to call Spring Festival the ‘Lunisolar New Year’.
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And… wait, where and when was the traditional agrarian calendar developed again? It wasn’t developed in Seoul. It wasn’t developed in Tôkyô. And it sure wasn’t developed in Manila (where agricultural work is based on the tropical ‘dry’ and ‘rainy’ seasons with no need for a lunisolar marker for the coming of spring). It was developed along the Yellow River in the Central Plains of <i>China</i>. The agrarian calendar is traditionally <a href="https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/oficina-afers-religiosos/en/blog/understanding-chinese-calendar">accredited to the Yellow Emperor</a> in about 2700 BC, with reforms to it being made during the Shang (1600 BC – 1046 BC) and Zhou (1046 BC – 256 BC) Dynasties. The <i>New Year</i> on this calendar was first celebrated in <i>the Central States</i>: what is now <i>China</i>.
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So, for English-speaking people to call it ‘Chinese New Year’ is, even if not exactingly correct as a translation, still completely understandable. Further: it’s asinine for the perpetually-aggrieved wokesters, Redditors and bourgeois Korean and Japanese nationalists to try to ‘correct’ them prescriptively, to the <i>even more incorrect</i> ‘Lunar New Year’.
<br /><br />
~~~
<br /><br />
Two days before Spring Festival, also, media personality and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson <a href="https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1755734526678925682">held an interview</a> with the President of Russia, released on the Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. It’s a two-hour-long interview, but I highly encourage watching it.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG8iFipE3ycftxAH-RafMOmecLw2uE0C7lx2S2LQ1CnOG5rZD6RzCOTQW4YQ5kYflCZAm1GK3R4vnWdi7mDB9JmQ0FACejRIjbEzon-kCrlMRoiAaAFOyIl94Eoikvz9V7r-S94ylA6LIK1D_HdXo5qSbdTLQTNJoHrtdgxTeRMshIIjdXo2ce6jMHWqok/s1500/Screenshot%202024-02-14%20at%2019-49-02%20putin-carlson-interview.jpg%20%28WEBP%20Image%201000%20%C3%97%20563%20pixels%29.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="844" data-original-width="1500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG8iFipE3ycftxAH-RafMOmecLw2uE0C7lx2S2LQ1CnOG5rZD6RzCOTQW4YQ5kYflCZAm1GK3R4vnWdi7mDB9JmQ0FACejRIjbEzon-kCrlMRoiAaAFOyIl94Eoikvz9V7r-S94ylA6LIK1D_HdXo5qSbdTLQTNJoHrtdgxTeRMshIIjdXo2ce6jMHWqok/s400/Screenshot%202024-02-14%20at%2019-49-02%20putin-carlson-interview.jpg%20%28WEBP%20Image%201000%20%C3%97%20563%20pixels%29.png"/></a></div>
What somewhat surprised me about it, actually, was how <i>unsurprising</i> Putin’s historiographical position was. There was nothing at all idiosyncratic, revisionist or even overtly nationalist in Putin’s reading of medieval and early modern Russian history. If anything, it was a standard textbook treatment of the subject which held to consensus positions on the creation of the Rus’ polity under Ryurik, the baptism of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-christian-radicalism-of-early.html">Kievan Rus’</a>, the <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2019/05/otyrardyn-kureyi-cassandra-tale-of.html">Tatar yoke</a>, the geopolitical struggle between <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-class-politics-of-eastern.html">Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth</a>, the <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-promise-of-pereyaslavl.html">Treaty of Pereyaslavl</a> and so on. But the fact that he dwelt upon the history of medieval and early modern Rus’ far longer than Carlson was clearly comfortable with, shows that Putin not only takes that history seriously but thinks it is worthwhile for Americans to be exposed, even to an abridged textbook version of it.
<br /><br />
It somewhat restored my respect for Putin, as well, that he refused to be baited or led, as Carlson was clearly attempting to do, into acceding to or supporting American conservative culture-war aims or narratives. Most notably: when Carlson attempted to push forward his idea that China would attempt to exert its hegemony over Russia in a more intolerable way than America would, Putin at once dismissed this as a ‘bogeyman story’. He further emphasised that China was Russia’s neighbour with a long land border; that it was a valuable partner in trade; and that its leadership is much more interested in compromise than in confrontation or domination. Putin is not about to sell out his good relationship with such a neighbour for a fistful of empty promises from the West.
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To give another example, Putin steadfastly declined to delve into the details of any of his dealings with former (or current) American leadership. At first I found this rhetorical tactic a little frustrating. I was wondering why he was protecting these people, or lending them a cover of plausible deniability. But after a while I came to realise that Putin was simply being a diplomat. Even though he clearly has grievances with the way Russia has been treated by America and by the West more broadly, even under Yeltsin’s tenure, he isn’t in the business of singling out particular American political figures for particular instances of blame. For similar reasons, he also didn’t give in to Tucker’s questions about the current state of the American social fabric and its relations with the government… though there it might really be a weak point in his knowledge rather than a gentlemanly attempt not to take sides.
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But Putin also, to his credit, refused to offer support even implicitly, for the idea that a change in administration alone could bring about a thaw in relations with Russia. Carlson was clearly leading him with his questions toward an admission that Trump would be preferable to Biden for Russia. But for Putin, it clearly isn’t a question of a Republican or a Democrat in the White House. (I made exactly this point <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/07/russia-china-and-america-2016.html">eight years ago also</a>; I’m glad it still holds up!) Putin observes that the American <i>élite</i> mentality which prevails in both parties, and which attempts to destroy anything that it can’t control, needs to shift first.
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So, <a href="https://www.silkandchai.info/2020/04/chinagate-is-new-russiagate.html">I can’t believe I’m saying this</a>, but a <i>major</i> tip of the hat to Tucker Carlson for holding this interview. It needs to be seen; Carlson has provided a valuable service to the American people to be able to hear the arguments of the other side for themselves. As for Carlson himself, though, as an interviewer… he seemed to be rather out of his depth, and one could get the impression at a couple of points that Putin was playing with him, even trolling him a bit (as when he hinted at Carlson’s unsuccessful attempt to join the CIA).
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I hope that (in the spirit of the <i>Yijing</i> for this New Year), we can approach this interview with the Russian President in a spirit of humility, in the interest of correcting our deficiencies or exaggerations in vision, and making things equal.Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-66255264008806056872024-02-03T18:05:00.001-06:002024-02-03T18:05:23.346-06:00Iraq War III, Syria War II, Yemen War II<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGW5oxY5SfHfHRVji7kTSwsqhuQfrM4Ru9qLOyog6uRyUsgb0oylJp7EjrNIxwCDpbiO9FNUbePLoytXLJUNWo7VVY-zCcCTcmrbVoUBs-3MphkEIjV6Q7jJuGX1hekkyWK0IOQTB5iIkHCnMn8gUg9L7puxLsZf53Lzw0yGOf6FgnbhKpDDR_H0Nq4OCf/s4032/YUP77QWTYVLTBCSFX544SYJGL4.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="2268" data-original-width="4032" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGW5oxY5SfHfHRVji7kTSwsqhuQfrM4Ru9qLOyog6uRyUsgb0oylJp7EjrNIxwCDpbiO9FNUbePLoytXLJUNWo7VVY-zCcCTcmrbVoUBs-3MphkEIjV6Q7jJuGX1hekkyWK0IOQTB5iIkHCnMn8gUg9L7puxLsZf53Lzw0yGOf6FgnbhKpDDR_H0Nq4OCf/s400/YUP77QWTYVLTBCSFX544SYJGL4.jpg"/></a></div>
Man, I get sick to death of this culture of remakes. Hollywood really doesn’t have any new or original ideas, do they? It’s just Iron Man this, Batman that: military abuses abroad, police abuses at home. And even the focus group-tested corporate-boardroom storylines don’t change. Or rather, I should say, the lies. We have to bomb Iraq because of… wait, what again? Weapons of mass destruction? Oh, wait, no, it’s <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-do-you-solve-problem-like-medea.html">those evil Eye-ranians</a> up to their no-good tricks. Because three soldiers are dead who… wait, what were they doing there, again? Why were they there? I thought the Iraqi government had already <a href="https://thehill.com/newsletters/defense-national-security/4392394-iraq-wants-us-military-out/">given us the eviction notice</a>? Or several? Why were they even there in the first place?
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So, under Biden <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us-launches-retaliatory-strikes-iraq-syria-nearly-40-reported-killed-2024-02-03/">we have another war</a>. Another unilateral illegal military action, without Congressional approval, open-ended, with no strategy for either victory or exit. And we have declared it, make no mistake, on the <i>people</i> of Iraq—who apparently haven’t suffered enough <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2013/03/find-cost-of-freedom.html">these past two decades</a> on our account—and on the <i>people</i> of Syria, who apparently also haven’t suffered enough <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2013/10/you-can-still-see-their-blood.html">these past dozen years</a>. Oh, and on <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/01/22/1226222496/us-uk-airstrikes-houthis-yemen">the people of Yemen</a> just for good measure, because why not? Clearly 377,000 dead people, mostly children, in that country didn’t get that message across firmly enough. And of course, we have also declared <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-war-in-iraq-was-war-on-truth.html">war on truth</a>, because American <i>imperium</i> has no greater enemy than reality.
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But tell me again how it’s those evil Eye-ranians who are to blame. Or the Russians, always the Russians. As Ginsberg put it: ‘Its them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.’ Point the finger anywhere but at Washington, anywhere but at Hollywood, anywhere but at Wall Street, anywhere but at yourself—in short, anywhere but at those actually responsible.
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I’m sick. I’m not motion-sick; there is no motion, and that’s the problem. I’m sick to death. I’m sick of the lies. And I’m sick that children die, under the flag that I’m told is mine, while we all clap along passively in the theatre and wait for the after-credits teaser that previews the next million children to die. I beg God to let me leave the room, but I can’t. What else can I do? They’re not going to stop the reel no matter how much I object, and attract the heckling of the people in back who are still in their trances. But there’s nothing else for me to do, except pray.Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-20516830547721444102024-01-29T11:42:00.002-06:002024-01-29T11:43:25.788-06:00Marx, Freud and Darwin - an aphorism<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif46WsNZJQ9rr64zAv1g5lL-7OcmMPfRePAaj3tIOZ9eqzM87RZBD3dcF6jzmdTgxZ0Mp3Xyf_yeL4-BDn_3mR9QGSZQjrFxlCnNeMmaw9WKHg2qRzhQ-faE14417qQSFPHcNg2Rgv6uHHFz6yw_R9w_KWLqlJWPgoTx0dFVzMokPoqlSMsw0kDdynJlTF/s760/2021082722080_959c11378c8e6572a1a1f78b8e97b1c36c1e6ad75c1d6b753e339215914af316.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="507" data-original-width="760" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif46WsNZJQ9rr64zAv1g5lL-7OcmMPfRePAaj3tIOZ9eqzM87RZBD3dcF6jzmdTgxZ0Mp3Xyf_yeL4-BDn_3mR9QGSZQjrFxlCnNeMmaw9WKHg2qRzhQ-faE14417qQSFPHcNg2Rgv6uHHFz6yw_R9w_KWLqlJWPgoTx0dFVzMokPoqlSMsw0kDdynJlTF/s400/2021082722080_959c11378c8e6572a1a1f78b8e97b1c36c1e6ad75c1d6b753e339215914af316.png"/></a></div>
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Marx, Freud and Darwin are excellent physicians. The terrible mistake lies in making any one of them into a metaphysician.Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-3240311806010303292024-01-17T19:58:00.000-06:002024-01-17T19:58:20.824-06:00Hypersonic Missiles and the millennial desire/inability to believe<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIdMtoJ1MuDAOJUPCrNF_a-8Pth_GjgLSXB6mIO0m7-uATisVVYLZGVy_UyupKOuy6GGrsirboGZzXzAkxH5MiAPiKlDdPEyVB2SkyhETGJFzn-2OqoCwYJlgkRyp3xOiRZqJHEY3J51eOPOQsMfqvFRXQ-QVpxszbQwFD_Xb-ZTcm5L8f6OzlIOfX3Ffq/s786/samfender.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="521" data-original-width="786" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIdMtoJ1MuDAOJUPCrNF_a-8Pth_GjgLSXB6mIO0m7-uATisVVYLZGVy_UyupKOuy6GGrsirboGZzXzAkxH5MiAPiKlDdPEyVB2SkyhETGJFzn-2OqoCwYJlgkRyp3xOiRZqJHEY3J51eOPOQsMfqvFRXQ-QVpxszbQwFD_Xb-ZTcm5L8f6OzlIOfX3Ffq/s400/samfender.jpeg"/></a></div>
My <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/03/slipping-into-well-travelled-wake.html">Anglophilia</a> has been notably muted of late. I hope my reasons for this will not be taken as petty. On an external level, I simply find vanishingly little to admire about modern Britain: which still somehow allows <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/08/epstein-sex-tapes-prince-andrew-bill-clinton-richard-branson-witness-claimed">Prince Andrew</a> to walk around free, which persists under the political ‘leadership’ of Rishi Sunak, and which continues under the cultural sway of the likes of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20231018020620/https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/24435186/piers-morgan-israel-hamas-war/">Piers Morgan</a> and <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2021/12/on-jo-rowlings-cultural-and-gender.html">Jo Rowling</a> (whose politics have become predictable, boring, and almost <a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/british-jewish-kids-told-to-hide-identities-jk-rowling-speaks-out-amid-anti-semitism-fears-in-uk/articleshow/104368904.cms?from=mdr">a sad self-caricature</a> at this point). And on a personal level, I’m still struggling with some of my own psychosexual hang-ups, with which my early Anglophilia seems to have been <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/06/my-jennifer-complex.html">very deeply entangled</a>. My Anglophilia has been battered and bruised, certainly. It’s a lot quieter than it used to be. But it’s still there and runs quite deep.
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And one Briton whom I am quite happy to celebrate for his artistic and cultural achievements is rock musician <a href="https://www.samfender.com/">Sam Fender</a>.
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<blockquote><i>Maybe we were born and raised too cynical;<br />
In the wake of a miracle, we’d never believe.<br />
You impersonate the seasons—your gold autumnal haze,<br />
But something dies inside you when winter rears its face.</i></blockquote>
Fender’s got two studio albums out now, <a href="https://shop.samfender.com/collections/music/products/hypersonic-missiles-standard-cd"><i>Hypersonic Missiles</i></a> and <a href="https://shop.samfender.com/collections/music/products/seventeen-going-under-standard-cd"><i>Seventeen Going Under</i></a>—both of which are tremendous testaments to the enduring appeal and rejuvenation of rock ‘n’ roll music generally. But it’s <i>Hypersonic Missiles</i> in particular that I want to focus on here.
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<i>Hypersonic Missiles</i> is deceptively simple in terms of its musical character. His music has a certain transatlantic appeal, with roots rock, blues rock and American heartland rock written deeply into its figurative DNA… not surprising when one considers that Sam Fender considers <i>Born to Run</i>- and ‘Dancing in the Dark’-era <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/news/sam-fender-seventeen-going-under-feature-album-review-interview/13579776">Bruce Springsteen</a> to be one of his formative influences, along with soul legends <a href="https://thelast-magazine.com/sam-fender-musician-profile-interview-play-god-dead-boys/">Otis Ray Redding</a> and <a href="https://spindlemagazine.com/2018/02/introducing-bbc-sound-of-2018-nominee-sam-fender">Donny Hathaway</a>. There’s nothing pretentious about Fender—no progressive time-signature shenanigans, no operatic frills. His music is proudly and defiantly a stylistic throwback, while at the same time retaining its own deeply British independent character.
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With such a melodic character, one might expect the lyrics of his songs to follow a similarly straightforward direction: rebellion, outlaw ballads, life on the open road. No such matter. Fender’s lyrics are deeply introspective and even philosophical. My intention here, actually, is to provide <i>Hypersonic Missiles</i> as a poetic-lyrical companion piece to my friend Daniel Schwindt’s <a href="https://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9781621381327?invid=17751881466"><i>There Must Be More than This</i></a>. These two works raise many of the same questions, raise many of the same cries of internal pain, struggle over many of the same social and even religious problems.
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This may seem an odd pairing. Sam Fender is, like many Britons of his age, agnostic—when asked if he was religious, his simple and immediate answer was ‘no’, even though half of his family is religious. His experience of being at a religious camp ended in a sacrilegious prank he and a friend played on the camp wardens that got them expelled. By contrast, Daniel Schwindt has been a committed Catholic traditionalist for as long as I’ve known him. Politically, Fender has been a bog-standard British leftist for a long time, <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/09/congrats-to-jezza.html">Corbyn supporter</a> and so forth. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L12ORqw6R7A">‘Play God’</a>, the first single released from this album, was largely greeted as a dystopian anti-Trump anthem, for example—though recently he’s made some noises about being disenchanted with the left. Schwindt’s politics are deeply syncretic, though I would still classify them as conservative.
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But Fender’s album and Schwindt’s book share a certain commonality of observation… even of spiritual aspiration. Both of them write out of a certain shared <i>cultural</i> alienation common to millennials in the Anglophone West. In both of their works there is a will, a strong thirst, to believe in something greater, something better… but that will is hampered by having grown up on a foundation of shifting sand.
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<i>Hypersonic Missiles</i> is not a concept album, but the songs do hang together thematically. It’s an indifferent, even callous, world that is viewed through the eyes of the young and the vulnerable. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDsFKOrLWhU">The title song</a>, which is also the opening track, is sung through the eyes of a narrator (loosely autobiographical in Fender’s case) whose fatalist attitude toward the modern world and its leaders—who say it’s ‘<i>high time for hypersonic missiles</i>’—gets him called a ‘nihilist’. Yet his attitude of powerlessness in the face of world realities that he has neither the power nor the knowledge to affect, is one which he has learned from his ‘elders’: ‘<i>the silver-tongued suits and cartoons that rule my world</i>’. This very much parallels Daniel Schwindt’s broad characterisation of the millennial predicament.
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But there’s more to it than that. Fender’s narrator has difficulty really committing even to his own positions. He owns up to some degree of knowledge, but then disavows it in the same breath: ‘<i>kids in Gaza are bombed and I’m just out of it</i>’; ‘<i>I’m not smart enough to change a thing</i>’; ‘<i>I’ve no answers, only questions, don’t you ask a thing</i>’. It’s as though this narrator understands that there is something being asked of him that he can’t deliver… an understanding that gets spun out and explored in greater detail in ‘White Privilege’: this dovetails very closely with Schwindt’s characterisation of millennial ‘guilt’. The only thing he can own up to is a commitment to love the recipient of said song:
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<blockquote><i>But I believe in what I’m feeling,<br />
And I’m falling for you.<br />
And though this world is gonna end, but till then,<br />
I’ll give you everything I have—I’ll give you everything I am.</i></blockquote>
It’s not entirely blameless, that the thing that Fender’s narrator finds most ‘real’, the things he can ‘believe’, is a <i>feeling</i>. I think he understands quite well that this is not enough to base any kind of commitment on, yet at the same time, it’s all he has, and it’s the only thing he has control over.
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This broad, what I will call <i>attitudinal</i>, agnosticism (rather than religious agnosticism) is what underwrites the entirety of the album. It isn’t an accident, therefore, that the spectre of suicide, of overdose, of death-by-despair, lingers over the whole album like a threatening cloud. In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2EKkWl7K1A">‘The Borders’</a>, Fender cites how his friend’s godmother ‘<i>took those pills, and now she’s gone</i>’. And of course ‘Dead Boys’ is all about the too-many deaths-by-despair of young men in the impoverished towns of the English north where Fender grew up. And the snarling, imprecatory ‘Use’ at the end of the album maintains a kind of strange ambiguity likening certain kinds of abusive interpersonal relationships to abusive drug habits.
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This attitudinal agnosticism contrasts starkly with a certain degree of Scriptural literacy in Fender, which is most noticeable in ‘The Borders’. ‘The Borders’ is a loosely-autobiographical song of Fender in his younger days, who lost a friend who was like a brother to him in many ways. Yet the language he uses in it, and the character of the two boys, very closely recalls the Old Testament tales of estranged brothers: Esau and Jacob most notably, but there are also hints of Ishmael and Isaac, Joseph and Judah, even Abel and Cain, in the tale he spins… transposed into the contemporary key of Geordie poverty. The friendship / foster-brotherhood Fender describes rises out of shared experiences: growing up in houses of divorce, abuse, neglect, generational anger… but also the resentments of one against the other build up from the start: ‘<i>and your dad took off when you were a baby, and you still hate me for my dad stuck around.</i>’
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There are these glimmers of hope, like when Fender’s friend’s godmother helps him deal with his anger issues. But then those glimmers of hope die. There is no turn in the story in ‘The Borders’. Not only is there no faith that can save the friends and foster-brothers from estrangement, but even the possibility of faith is occluded. The story ends with one brother’s hand at the other brother’s throat. Unlike Ishmael and Isaac, unlike Esau and Jacob, there is no reconciliation. But Fender is still alive and singing—even if it is as <i>hebel</i>, as a passing breath—suggesting that maybe there is hope somewhere… outside the song and its story.
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This deeply underscores Daniel Schwindt’s assertion that it requires massive effort, often seeming insurmountable, for millennials to <i>believe</i>. The sort of faith required to effect a reconciliation like the one which ‘The Borders’ seems to yearn for but doesn’t happen—simply isn’t there. And we see certain intimations of the background of fundamental uncertainty (both economic and existential) that underlies this lack of belief.
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The most hopeful song on the album, actually, is ‘You’re Not the Only One’, quoted above. It’s a song in which Fender’s narrator is addressing a lover who feels alienated from the fake smiles around her, the pressure to conform, and the meaningless rituals of ‘night life’. The narrator assures her, tells her that she’s not alone, that he admires her composure but also shares her disillusionment. Yet even here there’s a strange ambiguity, a double meaning in the language which distances itself from certainty. (What lover wants to be told that they’re ‘not the only one’?) A similar disillusionment diffuses another not-really-love-song here, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_0oCxfL9cM">‘Will We Talk?’</a>, which distinctly <i>un-</i>romantically explores the mixed feelings and internal contradictions of the ‘<i>age-old ritual</i>’ of a one-night stand.
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Other songs speak to conditions which are more universal and less grounded in specifically-millennial generational angst. ‘Saturday’ describes the age-old work-week grind and the longing for the release of the weekend; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx_A6SbU8pY">‘That Sound’</a>, the classic mentality of the rock musician for whom meaning and beauty in life is found in his music (and in precious few other places). Comparisons to Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger and John Mellencamp again assert themselves. ‘Two People’ is a distinctly <i>non-</i>millennial song: Fender is describing the travails of an older couple in an abusive, unhappy relationship. One is tempted to think of this song as something of a reply or a coda to ‘Jack and Diane’ or ‘The River’, though ‘Two People’ is much less specific than these—its protagonists are anonymous.
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But there is also a kind of generational <i>response</i> to ‘Born to Run’ here, too, in ‘Leave Fast’. There’s a lot less hope that getting out of Dodge is an option in ‘Leave Fast’, which is in fact slow and elegiac in tone, but there’s also a lot more urgency:
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<blockquote><i>Mass of filth and rubbish outside the houses,<br />
And broken fridges and torn up sofas.<br />
The boy racers tearing down the beehive road<br />
Leading out to coastlines,<br />
Where kids freeze their lungs<br />
And run amongst the rolling dunes away from everyone.</i></blockquote>
The fact that this song takes the form of a conversation with an ‘old man’ who was apparently less fortunate in getting out of his situation than Springsteen was in getting out of Jersey (as a culture writ large), makes this song a suitable close to the album.
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<i>Hypersonic Missiles</i> is, at first glance, a fairly bleak album. But because it speaks to the reality of a world where faith (and still less certainty) are hard to come by, and because it speaks to that reality with empathy and understanding, even the bleak moments are characterised by a sense that Fender suffers <i>with us</i> through them. Beneath the unbelief which is so prominent, there is a deep unmet desire to believe. And the album as a whole is shot through with these painfully-bright incomplete slivers of hope, these fragments of promises that things might get better. Honestly, <i>Hypersonic Missiles</i> is one of the best expressions of millennial spirituality that I’ve yet heard, particularly in light of Schwindt’s work.Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-89390601472646565882023-12-31T22:25:00.004-06:002023-12-31T22:43:01.015-06:00Yinxu on the Mississippi——密西西比河边殷墟<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3-sPFBMinTMLrFuFGh-k1lphperhS4NGnGqP4iF1yFAuk8pbJ5nsx9YBYHIstAdT07V_3C84LEr4k9IoDIkiwcUto8pFMIYDKgIv_T1X7agrFFUYeAO3z8EG2l15V213m2g5Pv6PcUvlDHI0QCziZFigykYX268ncWnkX2VJKVLNhmsl9DAYq4HQY6vr_/s4160/Teracube_20231230_1153_976.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="3120" data-original-width="4160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3-sPFBMinTMLrFuFGh-k1lphperhS4NGnGqP4iF1yFAuk8pbJ5nsx9YBYHIstAdT07V_3C84LEr4k9IoDIkiwcUto8pFMIYDKgIv_T1X7agrFFUYeAO3z8EG2l15V213m2g5Pv6PcUvlDHI0QCziZFigykYX268ncWnkX2VJKVLNhmsl9DAYq4HQY6vr_/s400/Teracube_20231230_1153_976.jpg"/></a></div>
As mentioned in <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2023/12/ulysses-s-grant-fighter-lover.html">my blog post about Ulysses S Grant</a> yesterday, I got to visit <a href="https://cahokiamounds.org/">Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site</a> together with my in-laws. Cahokia. Immense, monumental ancient step-pyramids and earthen mounds that date back a thousand years… right at the southern tip of the American Midwest.
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Cahokia, located just on the other side of the Mississippi River from St Louis, in Illinois, is a thousand-year-old archaeological site consisting of a number of large raised earthen structures, as well as the remnants of a wooden stockade and a <a href="https://cahokiamounds.org/explore/#tab-id-3">‘Woodhenge’</a>—a now-reconstructed ring of 49 wooden posts which archaeologists believe to have functioned as an immense solar calendar, used to calculate the equinoxes. <a href="https://cahokiamounds.org/mound/mound-38-monks-mound/">Monks Mound</a> is the largest pyramid north of the Mexican border, with a base measuring 13 acres in area (equal to the Great Pyramid at Giza), 955 feet across and 775 feet wide, and currently reaching a height of 100 feet.
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The Cahokia Mounds were the site of a massive urban settlement between the years 900 and 1350 AD. From the archaeological evidence it can clearly be seen to have been a thriving centre of trade, with a distinct social hierarchy, metalworking and sophisticated astronomical and agricultural methods. (Woodhenge attests to the astronomical sophistication, as does the fact that the mounds and the plaza are constructed in an ‘hourglass’ shape bounded by two strict east-west lines of construction.) It could thus be said with ease, that the middle Mississippian polity which built and lived among the mounds was a <i>civilisation</i> in the true sense of the word.
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It was a fascinating experience to walk in the shadows of the mounds… and then to climb Monks Mound with its sweeping vistas. There is something truly numinous about standing in Cahokia, a kind of <i>awe</i> that I have only twice or thrice felt before in my life: at the <a href="https://www.visitourchina.com/anyang/attraction/archaeological-site-of-yin-xu.html">Yinxu Archaeological Site</a> in Anyang; at <a href="https://www.tour-beijing.com/blog/henan-travel/luoayng-travel/museum-of-luoyang-eastern-zhou-royal-horse-and-chariot-pits">Tianzi Jia Liu</a> in Luoyang; and standing inside the old city walls in Luoyang and Xi’an. This is not the same as religious awe, the sense of standing in the presence of the Divine. For that, I go to Divine Liturgy, or pray before icons of Christ and His Mother. It is a very different, very human and this-worldly sort of awe—the sense of standing on a spot that you knew (not just felt, or fancied, but <i>knew</i>) that others had stood, three, five, ten thousand years before you. Call it <i>civilisational</i> awe.
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It is standing in just such places—yea, even in places where mass human sacrifice was conducted—that one begins to understand what <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-other-russian-inequality-secondary.html">Konstantin Leont’ev</a> understood in between the lines of his philosophical and medical writings. Cultures are <i>alive</i>; they have life-cycles. And even when they pass out of earthly existence and memory, they leave <i>traces</i> behind them that one can’t help but <i>feel</i>. However much our modern sensibilities, our religious and humanitarian scruples (which have been not so much earned on our own merits as entailed upon us by bitter experience of <i>past</i> ages), might turn back upon us at the contemplation of a civilisation perpetuating itself through the infliction of violent ritual death upon its own… there is nonetheless something truly splendid and grandiose about it, a kind of stoic and sanguine beauty which pervades the remains.
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It was fascinating to walk amid this ancient monument, this millennium-old testament left by a pre-contact Indigenous <i>civilisation</i>, together with three Chinese people who are very near and dear to me. What was interesting in particular to me was how close the ancient sites of their own intimate knowledge were to the fore of their minds as we walked together.
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Their first thought, also, was to liken the place to Yinxu, and also to <a href="https://www.visitourchina.com/xian/attraction/the-terracotta-army-and-horses.html">the Bingmayong</a>. The cruelty—the <i>picturesque</i> cruelty, the <i>cruelty of fell beauty</i>—of <a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1012136">a Shang state</a> perpetuated by mass human sacrifice, or of the First Qin Emperor who <a href="https://localadventures.travel/blog/curiosities-of-the-chinese-wall/">built a great Wall</a> partly with the blood and bones of the men that he ruled, posed a ready parallel to what one might see at <a href="https://cahokiamounds.org/mound/mound-72/">Mound 72</a>. Hundreds of virgin maidens, exquisitely arrayed in marine shells, and then slain and arrayed at the southernmost point of the complex, their remains aligned in perfect reverence with the cardinal directions, the eternal tracks of sun and moon and season, giving life and death in their turn…
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And what right have we, we shallow and arrogant <i>children</i>, we <i>neonates</i> in the grand scheme, to pass judgement upon this civilisation or those who inherited it? What do we know of what is sacred, or of what is true or what is correct? What price have we paid for that knowledge? Let’s give Nietzsche his due and acknowledge it: nowhere close to a price high enough, assuredly. Today we palefaces wax sentimental and lachrymose over the fate of the idealised Native American, with his fading ethic of spiritual and environmental harmony… yet we have no deep understanding by <i>what route</i>, by what <i>autochthonous root</i> in fact, the Indigenous peoples of this continent have come to such an ethic.
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The stately, bloody grandeur of the Cahokia Mounds, even in its ruined current state, speaks still in resounding echoes of its former colossal resplendence, followed by its equally titanic collapse… this was the price, these were the conditions under which the Dakota and their cousin-nations learned what wisdom they still hold about the necessity of humility in the face of nature, about the need to honour one’s connectedness to others before the Creator. And the ancestors of the Lakota and Dakota, of the Kansa and Ponca, of the Ho-Chunk, the Choctaw and the Creek—they <i>earned</i> that wisdom, and carefully tended it down the generations, easily over 150 years <i>before</i> the white man ever laid eyes on the silver banks of the Mississippi.
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The <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/south-china-ancient-human-dna-hints-native-americans-east-asian-roots-study-shows-1728136">posited prehistoric connexions</a> between the Han Chinese and the Indigenous peoples of this continent <a href="https://today.tamu.edu/2015/07/21/study-confirms-first-americans-came-before-clovis/">may be vastly overstated</a>. But what <i>is</i> true, is that the Chinese civilisation and the heirs to the Cahokian civilisation (let’s not be coy and pretend that we don’t know who they are, or that they aren’t still with us today), share a great deal in common, when it comes to having dealt with the life-cycle of their civilisations. Let’s not whitewash those similarities, and still less downplay them or sentimentalise them or moralise them. Let us face them as they are.
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If these ruminations on Cahokia strike one as too pre-Christian, too radical-reactionary, too culturally-maximalist, too elegiac of premodern brutality—in short, too Leont’evian—<i>good</i>. I want people to feel at least a glimmer of the mingled discomfort and awe that I felt as I led my feet and legs carefully along the tended paths, between and among the mortuary grounds and the hallowed heights of those ancient mounds.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsJsCz_V31D9jKToBr8vAt6QOGNe8XOpnV3az0aCaWlI9k-cDpO_fHRCTOKRABp3dtLyr_wB9l6N5MBZmHNFJlNrld9auCQFtr2OgXKDfTeXEmLuxEpZXllndQmIcBBDtq4e2Z3yME18KNmuZTB_1WYTkDADScahga6hAKXRQRxyW0g84Z90q8HJ5lq3_7/s4160/Teracube_20231230_1240_516.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="3120" data-original-width="4160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsJsCz_V31D9jKToBr8vAt6QOGNe8XOpnV3az0aCaWlI9k-cDpO_fHRCTOKRABp3dtLyr_wB9l6N5MBZmHNFJlNrld9auCQFtr2OgXKDfTeXEmLuxEpZXllndQmIcBBDtq4e2Z3yME18KNmuZTB_1WYTkDADScahga6hAKXRQRxyW0g84Z90q8HJ5lq3_7/s400/Teracube_20231230_1240_516.jpg"/></a></div>Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-25708363908770195502023-12-30T22:59:00.012-06:002024-01-01T16:35:20.638-06:00Ulysses S Grant: fighter, lover, honourable profligate<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhWbdnMjk_IgYaGft4scJvKqUz4i9A_RSpcBDGwW5UCzQZXMarNpCuU0V14X_RN083L7PkL7wwBaYcrkFhWJQXsydmOiSVn46nncCWXBn_nWT54nhTWkx7VG6S9qiCL_R5K2YEwWZuhNAX2PnkAvNuy8yytmWnBlFHyuejvA4ytuYLkyZn16vqZrfLm_e9/s919/Teracube_20231230_1347_847~2.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="919" data-original-width="675" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhWbdnMjk_IgYaGft4scJvKqUz4i9A_RSpcBDGwW5UCzQZXMarNpCuU0V14X_RN083L7PkL7wwBaYcrkFhWJQXsydmOiSVn46nncCWXBn_nWT54nhTWkx7VG6S9qiCL_R5K2YEwWZuhNAX2PnkAvNuy8yytmWnBlFHyuejvA4ytuYLkyZn16vqZrfLm_e9/s320/Teracube_20231230_1347_847~2.jpg"/></a></div>
I am currently writing this blog post from the great south Midwestern town of St Louis, Missouri, where my family and I are planning to bring in the New Year. It had been our hope—to this point, not a disappointed one—that the stratospheric conditions would be amenable to a mild and restful holiday. Today, we visited (a safe distance after the winter solstice) the Mississippian holy site of the Cahokia Mounds—which may be the subject of a blog post in the near future. We also visited the farm which belonged to Civil War hero and former US President Ulysses S Grant.
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I am prompted to write this post on account of the fluctuating posthumous historical fortunes of a number of American figures in public life. It’s a foregone conclusion, for example, that the reputation of Alexander Hamilton is far more positive in the present day, on account of <a href="https://medium.com/the-shadow/the-neoliberalism-of-musical-theatre-c6e36644d011">a certain neoliberal Broadway non-talent</a>, than it was thirty or even twenty years ago. (And this: for <a href="https://www.history.com/news/alexander-hamilton-slavery-facts">one of the right reasons</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/22641501/hamilton-parks-rec-harry-potter-cringe-obama-era-pop-culture">a <i>hell</i> of a lot of wrong ones</a>.) It strikes me that Grant is another, similar victim of <a href="https://apnews.com/article/religion-race-and-ethnicity-native-americans-d3e8e8c3169c75016d468519c15dec28">the historiographical ‘swing’</a> which began in earnest in the Obama era. And the national monument dedicated to his memory seems fully committed to this ‘swing’ and a revisionist view of its subject… for better and for worse.
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It has been customary to view Grant, possibly under the influence of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/06/how-did-ulysses-grant-become-a-caricature/57485/">the Dunning school</a> of American historiography, as <a href="https://www.insidehook.com/culture/ulysses-s-grant-came-seen-failure">a drunkard, a butcher, a fool and a failure</a>. To its great credit, the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/ulsg/index.htm">Ulysses S Grant National Historical Site</a> here in St Louis does a thorough and creditable job, drawing from primary sources, to deflate some of these caricatured assessments.
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Apart from one unfortunate bout in his younger years as a distinctly-unhappy minor officer stationed far away from his beloved family at Fort Humboldt, Grant’s relationship with alcohol was a distinctly moderate and temperate one. Far from being a fool, Grant had a natural cunning and understanding of military strategy, as well as a distinct streak of stubborn tenacity, which manifested itself in his victorious career during the Civil War. And as for being a failure… that is a distinct matter of perspective. Certainly Grant’s efforts to manage Southern Reconstruction met with less than stellar results. And as for economic policy… well, we’ll get to that later. Suffice it to say for now, that I do not share the National Park Service’s rosy view of Grant in that regard. However, he did manage to bring the American military campaigns against the Plains Indians to a satisfactory close, and began the slow, fitful, rocky and still-incomplete process of finding a tolerable place for the Indigenous peoples in postbellum American society that did not involve genocide.
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But the National Park Service, <i>aussi dans l’air du temps</i>, swings far, <i>far</i> too hard in the opposite direction. They portray Grant in what I would consider to be nigh-hagiographical terms, according to a certain civic-religious sensibility. A saint—yea, a racial visionary far ‘ahead of his time’ in terms of his treatment of the African-American, a stoic patriot of monumental proportions, a military genius, an even-handed diplomat of a distinctly liberal temper, and a devoted gallant and family man whose final and overriding concern was for his beloved wife and children. If he had certain flaws, they are incidental failings, ones which can be explained by temporary quirks or established habits of the culture he grew up in… or else they are endearing, mild faults, like being too trusting of political allies and business partners too eager to take advantage of his largesse for their own ends. The picture which the National Parks Service paints of the man begins with his manumission of William Jones, and ends with his deathbed bequest of the proceeds of his dictated memoirs to his faithful Julia and their four precious children.
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Insofar as one can draw something like this picture from the primary sources… well and good. And I certainly understand the desire to portray a beloved native son in his very best possible light. But bringing my own ‘lens’ and background knowledge of Grant and his times to bear, I came away from his monument with a rather different picture of man and legacy than the one which the National Park Service sought to impress upon me. For me, President Grant is neither blackguard nor saint, neither bleary-eyed dullard nor Moses on the interracial mountaintop, but indeed precisely a man of his time and his culture—with some very distinct and (again, to my own view) highly blameworthy and inexcusable flaws.
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What is interesting to me is how, culturally, Grant comes off very much so as a <i>man of the backcountry South</i>. More specifically, he comes off as an <i>Appalachian</i>—a <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/187704/born-fighting-by-jim-webb/">‘born fighter’</a> after the ethnographic portrait of his tribe painted by former US Senator Jim Webb. Grant’s father Jesse Root was born in the solidly-Appalachian Pennsylvania hinterland, and he married and sired Hiram Ulysses by a Scots-Irish Presbyterian girl, Hannah Simpson. Grant himself was born in Point Pleasant, which belongs solidly in the Cincinnati foothill zone of <i>southern</i> Ohio and is probably best considered a part of the American South in its own right.
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In his early life especially—though his early habits foreshadow in many respects his behaviour in later life—Hiram Ulysses talks, behaves and reacts like a <i>hillbilly</i> (in the very best and noblest of senses). Our young Ulysses demonstrates many of the best characteristic features of Appalachian culture: aggressively independent; highly opinionated; dedicated to a deep individual internal sense of right; fiercely and even fanatically devoted to his friends, family, faith and flag. One sees this intriguing mix of traits particularly in his relationship with the (Deep Southern) Dents. Ulysses was deeply committed to his friendship to Fred Dent, enough to stay for extended periods of time with Dent’s family and work there. He grew even more closely, and touchingly, devoted to Fred’s younger sister Julia—whom he later married. Yet he often got into heated, even explosive, arguments over the subject of slavery with his host (later father-in-law). Ulysses had inherited both his father Jesse Root’s abolitionist convictions and a particularly hotheaded way of expressing them: for both of which Dent, slave-owning plantation patriarch that he was, had no use whatsoever. Very often young Julia was the one left mediating these arguments and preventing them from coming to blows.
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Ulysses and Julia Grant enjoyed probably one of the most touchingly tender and enduring romances ever to grace the White House. Their initial attraction was probably born out of common interests: Ulysses Grant had a deep and abiding love for horses, and Julia Dent was an avid equestrian in her youth. But—‘for ought that I could ever read, could ever hear by tale or history, the course of true love never did run smooth’—and this <a href="https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/a-midsummer-nights-dream/read/">of old Bill’s observations</a> certainly held in regard to these two. First of all there was the age gap: when they met, Ulysses was 20 and Julia 16; at his first proposal Julia turned him down because she felt she wasn’t mature enough to reciprocate his feelings. Then there was the problem of their families. Initially neither the Dents nor the Grants gave the union their approval—owing largely to the differences in class and political convictions between the two fathers. Grant’s failures in business placed the young family under considerable financial strain, and later his placement at various military postings often drew him away from Julia. But their bond was strengthened by the fact that they carried on regular and frequent correspondence, of which many of the letters from Grant’s side survive.
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Ulysses took the characteristically Appalachian career choice of joining the military in his youth, graduating from West Point with no particular academic distinction, though he did devoted and admirable service in the Mexican War (which he later recalled with some chagrin as a pointless imperialistic adventure). Yet being posted far from his beloved Julia took a toll on him—prompting his one youthful alcoholic bout which sadly dogged his later career. It was in his military career, in the Mexican War as well as later in the Civil War, where he displayed yet another pair of typically-Appalachian traits: tenacity and vengefulness.
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Grant had written on his bones the law of the feudal Scots, which dictates that if someone hits you, <i>you hit them back harder so they can’t do it again</i>. He lived his military (and, in some instances, later political) career by this principle. He distinguished himself at <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/fort-donelson">Fort Donelson</a> by staging a ruthless and unrelenting counterattack against a Confederate <i>sortie</i>, <i>against his superior officer’s orders</i>, and would not be satisfied with anything less than an unconditional surrender of the fort by its Confederate commander. His performance in the <a href=" https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/battle-shiloh ">Battle of Shiloh</a> also followed this pattern. The first day of the battle, on 6 April, commanded on the Union side by Sherman and Prentiss and McClernand, was an utter <i>débâcle</i> and a total human waste: the single bloodiest battle, in terms of American lives, of this or any other American war. Grant noted in his writings that one could walk across the clearing from one end to the other treading only on fallen bodies, with one’s feet never touching the ground. Yet, in Grant’s typical style, his order for Buell and Wallace the following morning was: to hit the Confederates back at once, and hit them hard. And early in the morning on 7 April, that is exactly what the Union troops did: surprising the Confederates at the captured Union camp before breakfast, and fighting them to a bloody rout throughout the afternoon. At the end of the day, over 23,000 soldiers lay dead at Shiloh.
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Ironically, it was precisely for this <i>archetypically Southern</i> personality trait in Grant, that later Southern historians would revile him as a ‘butcher’. Yet I do not count this as sin on his part. Grant fought his fights with honour and tenacity. Intriguingly, particularly from a monument in Missouri, it is not for these traits that he is chiefly remembered now, but instead for his (equally-controversial) policy of accepting African-American recruits under his command. The National Park Service credits this to Grant’s racial egalitarianism, and there is indeed a good case to be made there from Grant’s letters. Yet it needs to be remembered also that Greater Appalachian culture was broadly (if imperfectly) equalitarian in this respect—if one could handle a gun, black or white, he was welcome to join a fight.
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From the other side, I think, certain assertions of Grant’s ‘bigotry’ against various groups—Irish and German Catholics, for example, and Jews—fail to take this aspect of his personality into account. Grant was liable to lash out, often unfairly and in sweeping terms, against people whom he thought had wronged him. He joined (for the length of a single week, before walking out in disgust) the ‘American Party’, better known as the <a href="https://pastexplore.wordpress.com/2021/01/24/anti-catholic-sentiment-in-president-ulysses-s-grants-1875-address-to-civil-war-veterans/">Know-Nothings</a>. This happened <i>after</i>, and <i>because</i>, he was precipitously rejected from a civil service vacancy in St Louis, which Grant attributed to a conspiracy on the part of the Irish and German Catholic residents of the town. And his indefensibly antisemitic <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/order-no-11-judaic-treasures">General Order 11</a> during the War, expelling all Jews from the states under his military command, was issued in response to certain specific unscrupulous Jews <a href="https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2019/12/general-ulysses-grant-began-expelling-southern-jews-during-civil-war-until-president-lincoln-stepped-in.html">like the Mack brothers</a> who, unfortunately, actually were in the business of smuggling Confederate cotton into the North and undermining the war effort. Adding a personal angle to this order, Grant may have been particularly incensed that the Mack brothers had inveigled his own father, Jesse Root Grant, in their shady business.
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What fascinates me, rather, is Grant’s <i>magnanimous</i> posture toward Lee and toward the Confederate armies, after <a href="https://www.nps.gov/apco/learn/historyculture/the-surrender-meeting.htm">Lee surrendered at Appomattox</a>. His terms were more than generous. If there was any basis for considering Grant a saint, that basis would be best in evidence here: his offer to the Confederate soldiery to keep their horses, their arms and their freedom after their surrender and demobilisation was practically unprecedented <i>anywhere</i>. Grant’s offer of peace to Lee was a gesture of <i>noblesse oblige</i> more easily credited to a medieval <i>chevalier</i>, or a particularly-saintly Kievan Rus’ <i>boyar</i>. One is tempted to think that Lincoln’s vision of a lasting peace without rancour between the North and the South reintegrated under the same Union made a deep impression on Grant.
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Grant’s overall <a href="https://www.britannica.com/story/what-was-ulysses-s-grants-policy-regarding-reconstruction"><i>plan</i> for Southern Reconstruction</a> was, in my view, also saintly—though that plan’s actual implementation considerably less so. It’s true that this vision was considerably hampered by Andrew Johnson’s far less-egalitarian model for Reconstruction, and later by the politics of racial backlash and domestic terrorism which undid much of Grant’s work. But it’s generally true that Grant’s continuous desire was to lift up the South in an image of reconciliation and racial equality-of-opportunity, coordinate with Lincoln’s direction indicated in the <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/abraham-lincolns-second-inaugural-address">Second Inaugural</a>. This high value that he set on reconciliation and peace is one which followed him into his negotiations with the Plains Indians and the wise (if belated) halt he put on the extermination campaign the US Army was waging on them in the American West; and into his foreign policy endeavours elsewhere in the world. His attempt to resolve the standoff between Qing China and Meiji Japan over the Ryûkyû Islands, though ultimately unsuccessful (much to the sad fate of the <a href="https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/islands-of-protest-japanese-literature-from-okinawa/">Ryûkyûan people themselves</a>), was nonetheless guided by the high value he set on peace and mediated agreement.
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Now… up to this point my interpretation of Grant’s cultural background and its influence on his decisions sits together fairly comfortably with the National Park Service’s view of him, though it offers a somewhat different colour to the Union general’s rationality and decision-making process. When it comes to Grant’s <i>presidency</i>, my assessment of him notably <i>diverges</i> from that which the National Park Service provides. I do <i>not</i> view Grant as a particularly successful or praiseworthy president.
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My assessment rests primarily on account of his stubborn attachment to the gold standard, and his concurrent hostility to the greenback movement. What is true is that the popular perception of Grant as personally corrupt simply does not stand up to scrutiny. On the other hand, it is undeniable that as president, his policies <i>viciously squandered</i> the brief window for a truly democratic economy which President Lincoln’s far-sighted soft-money policies opened, rendered the Panic of 1873 inevitable… and inescapably favoured corrupt interests, plutocracy and the concentration of Money Power in the United States. Both the right-wing racist Democratic backlash in the Deep South, and the left-wing Populist insurgency in the Midwest and Upper South, can in some measure be attributed to Grant’s blockhead approach to economics. What’s more, Grant’s late-life personal financial misfortunes, which the National Park Service presents tragically as the result of Grant’s trusting nature, mirror precisely his poor management of the national economy.
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Grant simply did not have the same experimental temperament that Lincoln did, a willingness to play with new ideas. Lincoln was open and welcoming, for example, to the advice of Illinois Col. Dick Taylor in 1862 when it came to <a href="http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/lincoln_obama.php">financing the war effort</a> with <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2015/10/does-north-american-cultural-history.html"><i>greenbacks</i></a> (government-issued promissory notes not backed by specie in precious metals), in a way that Grant evidently had not been the year before. What Abraham Lincoln, along with his ingenious Treasury secretary <a href="https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Salmon_P._Chase">Salmon Portland Chase</a>, handed to the American people, was a currency system that could be responsive to their own growing <i>productive capacity</i>, rather than hitched to a <i>commodity medium</i> that fluctuated in value, and whose price fluctuations stood to benefit primarily the (wealthy) holders of the medium. Sadly, the holders of specie—and the industrial and usury-financial caste they represented—militated against this pro-producer, pro-farmer, pro-labour currency system from the very beginning.
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Grant’s understanding of economic and monetary policy, unfortunately, was always fairly shallow. He understood it in the same moralistic terms that many other ordinary people, both North and South, did. Gold was gold, and had to be honoured as such anywhere, whereas the promises of a government printed on a piece of paper were considered to be somehow <i>dis</i>honourable. When considering his Appalachian cultural proclivity toward a certain valence of honour, in timocratic terms, this interpretation of specie-versus-greenbacks gains further force. Just as with General Order 11, this explanation is not meant to stand in as excuse, but perhaps to shed some light on its psychological meaning for him.
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Unfortunately, this attitude toward gold as the only acceptable basis for an American monetary policy created a series of escalating problems for Grant that only worsened as he tried to correct course. His attempts to break the Johnsonian gridlock over the greenback question and steer the American economy back toward a ‘sound-money’ basis, resulted directly in a legislative demonetarisation of silver in 1873, which later produced a bank run that same year. This ‘Crime of ‘73’ was seized on by advocates of silver currency (themselves no better on this question than the goldbugs, largely being silver mine owners in the far West and other middle- to upper-middle-class holders of silver specie) as proof of Grant’s economic incompetence. Several subsequent legislative ‘fixes’ meant to ease the nation into a ‘resumption’ of payments in gold specie, served only to kick the can down the road, and send the nation into a prolonged economic slump… despite several (vetoed) attempts by soft-money advocates and their sympathisers (dismissed and derided as ‘inflationists’) to jumpstart the national economy by tabling the specie question and queueing a fresh legislative injection of greenback currency into the system.
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One can easily imagine from this how people reacted. Grant’s Reconstruction policies, however well-intentioned, were viciously attacked by racist demagogues in the South who seized on the worsening plight of poor farmers with nothing but greenbacks to their name. They scapegoated blacks and Northern educators as agents of Grantian corruption, and these foul parasitic ‘Redeemer’ Democrats waged an unremitting campaign of <a href="https://www.ncpedia.org/redeemer-democrats">beatings, rapes, murders and organised domestic terror</a> against them, destroying the Reconstruction governments of their respective states through brute violence.
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Elsewhere in the nation, third-party advocates of the greenback and <a href="https://www.nationalbook.org/books/democratic-promise/">the democratic promise</a> behind it struggled to get their message out regarding the <i>causes</i> of the economic slump… with limited electoral success largely confined to the Midwest American states. But a consistent pro-greenback message would be sent only in the 1880s with the rise of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2015/09/radical-politics-of-anachronism.html">the People’s Party</a> (which enjoyed considerable popularity in the American South when plain people started to realise that the race-baiting Democratic promises of ‘redemption’ were no better than Republican ones).
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Grant’s reputation suffered in his second term, not on account of any <i>corruption</i> on his part (the accusations of corruption were always only a politically-convenient distraction), but rather on account of his invincibly-clueless approach to the monetary question. The golden bullet-wound to the leg with which Grant was determined to hobble the American economy continued to bleed through the rest of his term and into that of Hayes. Yet, <i>stunningly</i>, and continuing in the same vein of economic illiteracy and idiocy that Grant was mired in, the National Park Service <i>lauds</i> him for having ‘paved the way for the resumption of specie payment, reestablished a sound currency, and provided the basis for the orderly growth of the American economy’! Yikes. I suppose this is <i>one</i> way to sidestep the problem of America’s lost decade, especially if you’re out to determine that Grant was a man ‘ahead of his time’.
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In his private life, too, Grant’s gormless but ‘honourable’ approach to questions of finance left him an easy mark for <i>dis</i>honourable men to come and cheat him. Grant’s son Buck introduced his father to a certain Wall Street broker (and, as it would turn out, notorious con man) <a href="https://www.green-wood.com/event/a-disposition-to-be-rich-ferdinand-ward-the-greatest-swindler-of-the-gilded-age/">Ferdinand Ward</a>, along with a certain banker who underwrote his schemes named James Fish. Grant was convinced to lay out most of his personal fortunes in Ward’s shell game, and even used a personal loan from Vanderbilt to keep Ward’s firm afloat when it was clear it was going belly-up. Ward absconded with all of Grant’s money and left him penniless and in deep debt at the very end of his life. The only way that Grant, dying of throat cancer, could manage to keep his family solvent and out of penury, was to sell <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674976290">his memoirs</a> (a task with which he received significant help from a certain modestly-successful author and satirist by the name of <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/how-mark-twain-helped-ulysses-s-grant-write-his-personal-memoirs.htm">Sam Clemens</a>).
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There is much in Grant’s biography for one to admire. One may, and should, point to his ability to take principled stands even when doing so affected him adversely, as a mark of his high character. One may also point to his tenacity and cunning as a strategist and a fighting man, a true son of Appalachia. And one may justly point to his tender relationship with Julia Dent and his manifest devotion to his children. But the man was not without certain critical blind spots and flaws particularly on economic matters: flaws for which his presidential reputation has, to a certain degree deservedly, suffered.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzwRRUPj_wR79ALEDtlY5obTuHsa4DULAVGHkl2vxwntNY6ztwvjOUNDPGcHXX3sxVuQOE4QGW3Ppi1skqYxwhUhQvWnsb2sVgPHfCxOzKK0cMxkqw-ID2VxncxCEUpfIWl5Sqm5bbZTcSaNYvIniSkrxCrxliWUNtB2YAhXCWFxPLvOrSmgybHmZpvyZE/s4160/Teracube_20231230_1423_725.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="4160" data-original-width="3120" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzwRRUPj_wR79ALEDtlY5obTuHsa4DULAVGHkl2vxwntNY6ztwvjOUNDPGcHXX3sxVuQOE4QGW3Ppi1skqYxwhUhQvWnsb2sVgPHfCxOzKK0cMxkqw-ID2VxncxCEUpfIWl5Sqm5bbZTcSaNYvIniSkrxCrxliWUNtB2YAhXCWFxPLvOrSmgybHmZpvyZE/s400/Teracube_20231230_1423_725.jpg"/></a></div>Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-78537903745779526272023-11-30T07:59:00.000-06:002023-11-30T07:59:13.730-06:00Six Walks in a disappearing wilderness<div class="separator" style="clear: both;" align="center"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm49_MeHdM45OzeO9rUTogxuth_Y_gFBtdfTwfoR_xpfEzUcmyPlIoff2seLzBQm3Z-m5L4pbgt_2nLEOXtpyP4wQ6zTUbZujfrVRiV4MBK4uTjo0F751ox_sgoTquT2cULY9LqHU5CPhx71qUGDMJd4qQ8g8SgNbzcGuiKpf44EtXg0wPaHfGVVjJS7U/s600/Walk600.jpg" ><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="346" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm49_MeHdM45OzeO9rUTogxuth_Y_gFBtdfTwfoR_xpfEzUcmyPlIoff2seLzBQm3Z-m5L4pbgt_2nLEOXtpyP4wQ6zTUbZujfrVRiV4MBK4uTjo0F751ox_sgoTquT2cULY9LqHU5CPhx71qUGDMJd4qQ8g8SgNbzcGuiKpf44EtXg0wPaHfGVVjJS7U/s400/Walk600.jpg"/></a></div>
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<i>Cross-posted from </i><a href="https://www.silkandchai.info/2023/11/six-walks-in-disappearing-wilderness.html">Silk and Chai</a><i>:</i>
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I just finished reading <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Palestinian-Walks/Raja-Shehadeh/9781416569664"><i>Palestinian Walks</i></a>—a poignant and tragic memoir by human rights lawyer, author and Palestinian activist Raja Shehadeh about his work in the Holy Land over the course of nearly four decades. Shehadeh, who is an ethnic Palestinian Christian, makes numerous Scriptural references owing to the simple fact that he lives where Scripture was written, and where the events of Scripture took place. But his spirituality is not of an overt, apologist or confessional nature; indeed, his attitude toward organised religion in general is self-avowedly ‘cynical’. Living in a land which is riven by communal factionalism and self-serving zealotry on the part of the settlers, does understandably tend to leave a bad taste in the mouth when it comes to theological questions. But rather, we can see that spirituality most clearly in his meditations on the shifting ecological balance and the fragile disappearing landscapes he loves so dearly. He is very much so a lover of the land and its people, a fact which comes through painfully in every chapter. Glimmers and moments of his faith in Christianity do emerge, however—particularly in his visit to the <a href="https://en.jerusalem-patriarchate.info/holy-pilgrimage-sites/the-holy-monastery-of-saint-george-choziba/">Monastery of St George Choziba</a> in Wadi Qelt.
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To get a good grasp of the tenor of the book, it’s necessary to quote Shehadeh at length about the nature of these walks he would take. Here is his description of the <i>sarḥa</i> (سرحة), which is the term he uses for the sort of walk he would do:
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<blockquote><i>It was mainly young men who went on these expeditions. They would take a few provisions and go to the open hills, disappear for the whole day, sometimes for weeks and months. They often didn't have a particular destination. To go on a </i>sarha<i> was to roam freely, at will, without restraint. The verb form of the word means to let the cattle out to pasture early in the morning, leaving them to wander and graze at liberty. The commonly used noun </i>sarha<i> is a colloquial corruption of the classical word. A man going on a </i>sarha<i> wonders aimlessly, not restricted by time and place, going where his spirit takes him to nourish his soul and rejuvenate himself. But not any excursion would qualify as a </i>sarha<i>. Going on a </i>sarha<i> implies letting go.</i></blockquote>
Shehadeh’s evocation of the <i>sarḥa</i> rather mirrors the false etymology that <a href="https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/17/thoreau-walking/">Henry David Thoreau posits</a> for ‘saunter’ (from ‘<i>sainte-terre</i>’) as a sort of pilgrimage, though one without a fixed aim. I have little doubt that this choice was intentional on Shehadeh’s part, even if it’s left unsaid. Shehadeh demonstrates a firm command of English-language literature regarding his home country, and an enviable degree of appreciation for its artistry—even as he chides figures like <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Notes-on-a-Journey-from-Cornhill-to-Grand-Cairo/William-Makepeace-Thackeray/9781609772147">WM Thackeray</a>, <a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL11744893W/Journal_of_a_visit_to_Europe_and_the_Levant">Herman Melville</a> and <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/299688/the-innocents-abroad-by-mark-twain/">Mark Twain</a> for their unappreciative, imperialist’s-eye view of his country and his people.
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Shehadeh describes a landscape in which every ridge, crest, rock, dry riverbed and hill-slope has a name—in Arabic, most commonly, but with the occasional Canaanite and Aramaic epithet arising. He describes an austerely exquisite panorama, not to everyone’s tastes, but with life and vibrancy enough to one trained in the ability to look for it. His careful—yet lively—descriptions of the geological features, of the local plant and animal life, and the ways in which his fellow Palestinians (and their goats, their grapevines and their earthen houses) came to a <i>modus vivendi</i> with their near-desert surroundings, all bear witness to the personal stake he has in the well-being of this place.
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Yet despite this naturalist, travelogue feel, <i>Palestinian Walks</i> is very much so a memoir, a personal text. He describes the effort his maternal uncle, Abu Ameen, put into constructing a <i>qasr</i>, essentially a cottage, in the wilderness of Harrasha—and the quirky romance he enjoyed with his hardworking bride, Zariefeh, as they spent their honeymoon hauling rocks and setting them into place. We get to see some of the family dynamics, too. Raja Shehadeh belongs to that educated class of Palestinians, who were drawn into the British administration at Jaffa… although they all hailed from Ramallah. He describes the differences in attitude between his two uncles: one who went off to Jaffa to become a ‘successful’ administrator; and the other who stayed behind and lived stubbornly in the desert hills outside of Ramallah, neither knowing or needing any other kind of life.
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A personal streak runs throughout each of these <i>sarḥât</i>. Raja describes one of the first land cases that he took up on receiving his law degree, defending the title of a certain Palestinian named François Albina (who was referred to as ‘the Christian’ landowner by his Muslim neighbours in Beit ‘Ur, in contradistinction to another large landowner nearby whom his neighbours called ‘the Jew’). He details much of the history behind this case, including how the Israeli settlers—with the entire machinery of the Israeli legal system and seemingly bottomless foreign pockets behind them—resorted to practically every trick of legal chicanery and sleight-of-hand in order to undercut Albina’s claim to the land… and even essentially blackmail him into abandoning that same claim by demanding compensation for its use. Raja also describes how this served as an almost perfect test case: the defendant was an independent landowner who was not a Muslim. Yet the Israeli judiciary, despite being forced at every turn by Raja’s argument to acknowledge that Albina had an incontestable and continuous presence on and claim to his own land, ultimately decided on an expansive interpretation of an Israeli military order that gave the go-ahead for settlers to take it and build on it anyway.
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Raja’s description of the wall that went up, straight through Albina’s property, is heart-wrenching. Instead of a gentle hillside shaded by pine trees, there was a garish, sixteen-foot concrete wall separating a nestle of villas in a gated community for Israeli high-tech IT employees, with a highway running to the coast, all lit by electric floodlights, overshadowing what remained of the Palestinian community in Beit ‘Ur. He describes both the intrusion of the built space, and all of the architectural choices which accompanied it, as perfectly keyed to stir up animosity and hatred between the two sides, assuring that violence would become an issue later. This point is driven home as, later, in the same vicinity, Raja and his wife Penny end up being shot at by Palestinian militants (Raja doesn’t say Ḥamâs specifically) even after calling to them in Arabic to stop.
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Raja Shehadeh makes no bones about the fact that he refuses to consider violence as a legitimate tool. His weapon of choice is the law. His reasons for this are not religious at all, but primarily secular and practical: he knows full well that the Palestinians will not be able to outgun or outkill the Israelis; and he also understands that no peace arrived at through bloodshed is capable of being permanent. He also takes a long-term, generational view of the conflict… though to what extent this view is the product of hindsight in view of the Oslo Accords (which undermined practically all of his legal work defending Palestinian land claims) is unclear.
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The Oslo Accords loom large in Shehadeh’s narrative as a kind of classical <i>nemesis</i>. In his view, the Palestinians who came to Oslo were essentially lulled into a false sense of security by the theatrics of hospitality put on by their Norwegian hosts, while the Israelis essentially walked away with the legal rights to the proverbial lock, stock and barrel. Although Shehadeh clearly, and for very good personal reasons, shuns and deplores the violence of the militants, still he views the political opportunism and low cunning of Fataḥ and the PLO more generally in still-bleaker terms: having sold out the patrimony of their people in exchange for aid money and pats on the head from Western governments. (In this, he echoes a sentiment I’ve heard repeatedly in Antiochian and Palestinian Christian circles, particularly with regard to Mahmoud Abbas.) One sees a lot of this frustration in his third <i>sarḥa</i> down to the Dead Sea, which he takes in the company of a young PLO member who talks about the Oslo Accords with a nigh-intolerable rose-tinted <i>naïveté</i>. Here he also describes with alarm the disappearing biome and impending ecological catastrophe which can be observed in the lowering line of the Dead Sea, as Israeli interests divert the fresh water of the Jordan.
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In another rare flash of religiosity, Raja Shehadeh describes his pilgrimage to the Monastery of Saint George Choziba in the chapter which follows. He is more comfortable, it seems, referring to figures of the Old Testament (like King David and the Prophet Isaiah) than to the figures of the New—but given where he lives and what his context is, perhaps this is not so strange. Again: his attitude toward religion in general is a negative one. Given what he has described of the overt religiosity of the Israeli settlers, which somehow coexists with callous disregard for neighbour, with casual violence and with absolute comfort in the one-sided and prejudicial use of the machinery of law… this is understandable. And yet he approaches the monastery, sixteen centuries old, with its fortified walls, its dark incensed cloistered interior, its candle-lit icons, with an attitude of deep respect and admiration, if only in the sense of inspiration for the ordering of one’s own life, or the attitude which a people under siege need to adopt.
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Raja Shehadeh’s cloister of choice was a modest home with a courtyard in Ramallah… though even this was not inviolate of Israeli brutality, as he learned the hard way when his town came under siege and later occupation. More to the point, perhaps, is that <i>writing</i> became the discipline through which he could manage the defeats, the insults, the violence and the hopelessness which had become the common lot of his people. He discusses, in the context of a <i>sarḥa</i> which the two of them took together, the long friendship he has with <a href="https://ecfr.eu/special/mapping_palestinian_politics/mustafa_barghouti_plc/">Dr Mustafa Barghouti</a> of the PNI Party, and the differences which their lives took. Raja Shehadeh began as a lawyer and ended up as a writer; Mustafa Barghouti began as a medical doctor and ended up as a politician. Yet the two men share a conviction that the Palestinian struggle must be waged in civil society and in terms of generations rather than intifadas.
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The final chapter is a harrowing one, but it’s one which I think Shehadeh relates masterfully, simply from a literary standpoint. He describes getting lost right around Dolev, where he grew up—not because of his failing memory, but because the landscape itself had changed so much as to be unrecognisable to him. He ends up finding his way back to Ramallah by process of elimination: all the places which are blocked off to him by Israeli settlements, border walls or checkpoints. He describes a tense encounter with a young, armed Israeli settler who has snuck out of Dolev in order to smoke hashish. The conversation between the two is narrated excellently: a confrontation between two views of the same place that have been shaped by different values and different realms of knowledge. Placing this conversation at the end of the book, after we have been given this personal history of legal struggle and attempts to conserve some semblance of legal consideration for both the landscape and its original inhabitants, was a shrewd choice on Shehadeh’s part: we can see the clear delineation between his view and the ‘settler’ view. Shehadeh is a conservationist and a believer in the rule of law; the settler he encounters is a believer in material progress and victors’ justice. Yet in the end the two of them come, if not to an understanding, then at least to an uneasy truce over the <i>nargileh</i> (punctuated poignantly by the sounds of distant gunfire—whose ‘side’ it is, neither can tell).
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<i>Palestinian Walks</i> is a book that I would strongly recommend as a means of understanding the (both literal, figurative and historical) lay of the land in the Israel-Palestine conflict, as well as the common experience that shapes the convictions of the Palestinian side of that conflict. The author—a nominal Christian and a functional pacifist—is nonetheless an authoritative voice for a people who are predominantly Muslim and who are committed to a resistance which can turn, as we have seen, violent. It’s also valuable as an English-language travelogue. However he might chide and wag his finger at the likes of Melville and Thackeray and Twain, what Shehadeh has given us could easily be placed alongside them as a companion-piece, painting in intimate colours the intricate but endangered desert ecology and human communities of the West Bank.
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One last note. My own view is that it’s a grim necessity, in these days, to engage in such intentional book-reading as a <i>counterpoint</i> to the prevailing media narratives over the recent conflict. You are not going to get the truth about this or any conflict abroad from CNN, from Fox News, from the <i>New York Times</i> or from the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, which are all mouthpieces for the State Department and committed to a singular liberal ideology and historical myopia which colours their entire editorial perspective. The benefit of reading books like Shehadeh’s, is that such reading can help someone who is distant and removed from the conflict gain a sense of context, a sense of historical grounding, which is not otherwise available in our information landscape. Although Shehadeh is somewhat self-deprecating about his chosen means of coping with political defeat and the disaster befalling his people, his writing does serve this very needful and, dare I say, God-pleasing purpose.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;" align="center"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1DCzsScC4nY1pUC3v1eK9o4Pm1BWSmEk_HKZcunu31f1N3iMv_iPQFrVT-haDgUzMrr7xhNpusVqe3fiTO828kjTmwPAq9ALWFG7tCqZAuQ9mjkQYweCvEobAXA22buE11elPbdJI5MTYULuJ-BgBYP7XH4AsjJTrTaJPaat55Gd_AFxBONOI4IjTvg8/s580/rajashehadeh.jpg" ><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="387" data-original-width="580" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1DCzsScC4nY1pUC3v1eK9o4Pm1BWSmEk_HKZcunu31f1N3iMv_iPQFrVT-haDgUzMrr7xhNpusVqe3fiTO828kjTmwPAq9ALWFG7tCqZAuQ9mjkQYweCvEobAXA22buE11elPbdJI5MTYULuJ-BgBYP7XH4AsjJTrTaJPaat55Gd_AFxBONOI4IjTvg8/s400/rajashehadeh.jpg"/></a><br /><i>Raja Shehadeh</i></div>Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-19329268940915236412023-11-25T21:24:00.000-06:002023-11-25T21:24:35.135-06:00Russia, Palestine and ‘moral equivalence’<div align="center"><b>I.</b></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA0fwoQifR8hyphenhyphenyroIrSTkmCbkxmlyVhv4odCPW9p8_9zv9KSUXFNLLqBtAK5cY5e1iHYbyJaBkcTzV2tnAaHDm5CYOWB60EfB-nzHdHZ7SZsUI1w2u2t9hTvhGuIvH5j4rewU9kwib1iRGIgJMgcpu5W7miQfY173sUMHdcU-USzXXUn4UIn5og8zgCHfP/s1080/donbas-nobody-report-29sept-18.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1080" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA0fwoQifR8hyphenhyphenyroIrSTkmCbkxmlyVhv4odCPW9p8_9zv9KSUXFNLLqBtAK5cY5e1iHYbyJaBkcTzV2tnAaHDm5CYOWB60EfB-nzHdHZ7SZsUI1w2u2t9hTvhGuIvH5j4rewU9kwib1iRGIgJMgcpu5W7miQfY173sUMHdcU-USzXXUn4UIn5og8zgCHfP/s400/donbas-nobody-report-29sept-18.jpg"/></a></div>
With regard to the war in Ukraine, I’m in a relatively strange position. When the most recent phase of the war began in February 2022, <a href="http://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2022/02/five-points-on-ukraine-conflict.html">I was firmly opposed to Russia’s incursion</a>, though I reserved a series of criticisms of the Ukrainian government with an eye to the injustices against Russophone Ukrainians and ethnic minorities in places like Bukovina and Transcarpathia which preceded it. My reasons for opposing the Russian war effort were, in retrospect, perhaps a trifle naïve. I thought the initial attack by Russia <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/27/fighting-on-streets-of-kharkiv-ukraines-second-largest-city-as-west-bars-russian-banks-from-swift">against Kharkov</a> was inhumane and inexcusable, given that Kharkov was the site where Russophone Ukrainians first <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20161222072355/http://www.rferl.org/a/kharkiv-operation-ukraine-terrorism-separatist-arrests/25324984.html/">came under violent attack</a> from the Ukrainian SBU back in April of 2014.
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Later events and revelations caused me to significantly revise my stance. Whereas before I was critically pro-Ukraine in the current conflict for principled anti-war reasons, I am now critically pro-Russia… for principled anti-war reasons. I still think that the Russian armed forces have made significant strategic errors and tactical bungles in the prosecution of the war, and that the political leadership has been… inconsistent. But several factors caused me to change my view. Firstly, there were <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/09/former-nato-military-analyst-blows-the-whistle-on-wests-ukraine-invasion-narrative/">the revelations from Swiss intelligence officer Jacques Baud</a> that western nations were conducting military exercises in the Black Sea and that the Ukrainian military were ramping up attacks on Donbas <i>before</i> 24 February 2022. Secondly, there were the <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/02/diplomacy-watch-why-did-the-west-stop-a-peace-deal-in-ukraine/">Russian peace proposals in April of 2022</a> that the Western bloc, and the United Kingdom in particular, did their level best to scupper. Thirdly, there were the striking admissions by high-ranking European and American officials such as <a href="https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2022/12/13/merkels-confession-could-be-a-pretext-for-an-international-tribunal/">Angela Merkel</a> and <a href="https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/merkel-hollande-confessions-signify-betrayal:-russian-offici">François Hollande</a>, that the West never intended to abide by the Minsk Agreements but instead use them as a time-buying pretext to arm Kiev for war.
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Although none of these three reasons <i>by itself</i> constitutes a valid <i>casus belli</i> for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (at least, in light of Western Christian just war theory), when taken together as a pattern, they cast Russia’s actions in an entirely different light. Russia was acting in response to a series of premeditated, offensive provocations from the West. And Russia had attempted numerous times to come to a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. These factors convinced me that Russia’s actions were in fact <i>defensive</i> rather than <i>offensive</i>, and that the Ukrainian nation as a whole had been grievously abused <i>by the Western bloc</i>, and made to serve as a <a href="https://www.litscape.com/author/Aesop/The_Monkey_And_The_Cat.html">catspaw</a> to advance Western plans to weaken and compromise Russia’s political process and territorial integrity. Basically, everything the West accused Russia of doing to Ukrainian society, the West was actually doing (or planning to do) to Russian. I think it is fair to say that my previous critically pro-Ukrainian position was already being <a href="http://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2022/07/rereading-armament-of-igor-in-time-of.html">revised by July</a>, and was already critically pro-Russian by <a href="http://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2023/01/echoing-morris-on-russia.html">January of this year</a>.
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I can still understand and sympathise, <i>to a limited degree</i>, with the attitude of anti-war moral outrage over the February 2022 Russian incursion. After all, I shared in it! But, as the great British economist John Maynard, Baron Keynes, is often <a href="https://in.pinterest.com/pin/763219468087355304/">famously credited with saying</a>: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind, sir—what do you do?’ Just as the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1885.Pride_and_Prejudice">first impressions</a> of Elizabeth Bennet of Mr Darcy and Mr Wickham had to be revised as enough of the facts became known to her and pointed to an entirely different interpretation and colouring of events and circumstances, so I too all but <i>had</i> to revise my position concerning the events of February 2022.
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I also began to notice, in the prosecution of the ‘special military operation’, that Russia’s tactics and overall military doctrine were aimed <i>not at territorial conquest at all costs</i>, but instead at the degradation of Ukrainian military capacity and the protection (insofar as possible) of civilian lives. This was clearly not owing to Russian military weakness and strategical stupidity, but owing to an active choice on the part of the Russian chiefs of staff. Inexcusable high-profile incidents such as Bucha notwithstanding (and in the awareness that a full-scale impartial investigation has yet to be conducted), the Russian armed forces have taken great pains to remove civilian populations from positions of physical danger, and direct their attacks as exclusively as possible at military targets—most of these being along the line of contact.
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As of four days ago, the UN Human Rights Office has reported that <i>over the past 20 months</i>, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/civilian-death-toll-ukraine-tops-10000-un-human-rights-office-2023-11-21/">10,000 civilians have been killed</a> in the Russo-Ukrainian War. This sounds like a lot, and indeed there can be no moral excuse for such death as in any modern war. But for a modern armed conflict, Russia is actually incurring a comparatively low rate of civilian deaths. For comparison: the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170726090114/https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/">Iraq Body Count project</a> (which is in fact probably a severe underestimate of civilian deaths) showed that American servicemen were responsible for over 20,000—<i>twice as many</i>—confirmed Iraqi civilian deaths across a similar period of time. (And the Iraq War was <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-war-in-iraq-was-war-on-truth.html">in fact a war of choice</a>, and no such tragic conflict of two nations’ defensive claims as the Russo-Ukrainian War is!)
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It is also worth noting that there is <i>no active armed resistance</i> to speak of against Russian rule inside the territories that Russia is occupying. There are a handful of far-right neo-Nazi Russian <a href="https://archive.ph/20230522173138/https://meduza.io/en/news/2023/05/22/belgorod-governor-reports-incursion-into-region-by-ukrainian-sabotage-and-reconnaissance-group">paramilitaries and criminal groups</a> associated with the so-called ‘Irpin Declaration’ in armed opposition to the Russian government. But these seem to operate exclusively out of Ukrainian-controlled territory and enjoy practically zero support in Russian-controlled Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhzh’e and Kherson oblasts. A critical thinker is forced to wonder why this is. If Russia really were behaving as the brutal, imperialistic, homicidal territorial aggressor so <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/07/russophobia-as-orientalism.html">commonly portrayed</a>, then why are the civilians in the territories it controls acquiescing to Russian rule so passively and meekly? Why not take up arms against the oppressor?
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<div align="center"><b>II.</b></div>
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This context also formed in large part my attitude toward the current war being waged by Israel against Gaza. To engage in any analysis of this conflict is to step into a rhetorical minefield. This is because the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160119181748/https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-myth-of-moral-equivalence/">Cold War-relic</a> <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/snarl-words-and-purr-words-1692796">snarl-phrase</a> of ‘moral equivalence’ is again being bandied about with great abandon over the past month and a half, notably by <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20231016182447/https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-sin-of-moral-equivalence">Sam Harris</a>, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20231111142621/https://www.foxnews.com/media/bill-maher-scolds-obamas-moral-equivalency-israel-Ḥamâs-he-really-disappointed-me">Bill Maher</a>, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20231107175621/https://www.jns.org/obamas-moral-equivalence-between-Ḥamâs-and-israel-encourages-hate/">Jonathan Tobin</a>, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20231123024838/https://nypost.com/2023/11/22/opinion/obamas-false-equivalence-on-Ḥamâs-is-outrageous-and-adds-pressure-on-israel/">Alan Dershowitz</a> and other such <a href="https://akarlin.com/on-liberasts-and-liberasty/">liberast</a> luminaries. Condemnations of ‘moral equivalence’ in this context are very nearly equivalent to a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVlRompc1yE">‘how <i>dare</i> you!!’</a> non-argument. It’s almost an emotive reflex, to the effect of: How <i>dare</i> you liken us enlightened ones, us democratic and human-rights-respecting heroes, to those unspeakable and irredeemable villains, terrorists, baby-killers and death-cultists over there?
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The first and foremost philosophical problem with condemning ‘moral equivalence’, in fact a huge problem on its face, is that <i>all</i> moral reasoning relies to some degree on drawing analogies between disparate situations such that certain equivalencies can be meaningfully derived. Practically all systems of ethics in Western thought going back to Plato and Aristotle rely at their basis on analogical arguments and reasoning. Plato in particular was famous for using analogies (‘the divided line’), parables (the Charioteer, the Cave, the Man chained to a Lion and a Many-Headed Beast) and even myths (Atlantis, the Ring of Gyges) to draw the characters of his dramas—and with them, his readers—into a deeper understanding of the particular point of virtue or knowledge that he was exploring. Plato’s discursive methods were formalised into a system by his student-<i>cum</i>-rival <a href="https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/virtue-ethics/">Aristotle</a>.
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In a very real sense, all serious moral thinking in the West is an exercise in drawing equivalences, and the ‘how-dare-you’ demand to <i>cease</i> drawing such analogical equivalences is tantamount to demanding that we turn off our brains and toss out the very fundaments of Western ethical thought. In this case, <i>a fortiori</i>, the need for meaningful analogies, and a cogent language for evaluating such analogies, is paramount. For example: I note that these same talking-heads condemning ‘moral equivalence’ seem to have no objections to the rather spurious moral equivalence <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=349340540820219">of Palestinians to Nazis</a> that the Israeli authorities are wont to engage in.
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Now, it should be obvious from this example that some analogies are better, closer and more cogent than others. The benefit of accepting equivalency and analogy as a valid method of moral reasoning, is that we are better equipped to say which equivalencies and analogies are <i>invalid</i>. The Germans during the Second World War were in command of their own state, for one thing. The Palestinians have no state. And they have a ‘government’ only in the most risibly loose of senses. The Germans had control over an entire financial sector, an entire industrial war machine, a command structure, including an air force, that the Palestinians completely lack. And, probably most importantly, the Germans were also driven by an ideology of racial superiority and social Darwinism, which, <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2019/01/how-to-make-sense-of-sayyid-jamal-ad-din.html">for reasons which should be obvious</a>, holds no endogenous currency whatsoever among the Arabs of Palestine.
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Regarding the neologism of ‘Islamofascism’, a coinage which circulates promiscuously among the same people who snarl against ‘moral equivalence’, the following must be said. We must speak of the Ikhwânism of Ḥamâs on its own demerits, and these are very real. It is disgusting beyond words that the Ḥamâs leadership <a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/hamas-top-brass-is-worth-11-billion-its-goal-is-not-to-bring-water-electricity-to-gaza-101699508169872.html">lives like kings</a> in places like Dubai and Doha while the Palestinian constituency they supposedly govern gets bombed to hell. But, while Ikhwânism may bear comparison to fascism in some respects, fascism is in a very real sense secular and nationalistic, in a way that even the most brutal and death-loving forms of Islamism are not.
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<div align="center"><b>III.</b></div>
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But, having established foremost the need for ‘moral equivalencies’ (in the most basic sense of simply having an analogical method for ethical comparison), I think it may be possible to begin to discuss the parallels between the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and the Israeli-Palestinian one a bit more cogently. Hopefully a more convincing case can be put forward than Biden’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/20/joe-biden-tv-address-to-nation-oval-office-speech-vladimir-putin-Ḥamâs-aid-for-israel-ukraine">senile and inchoate conflation</a> of Russia and Ḥamâs as fellow-dastards and enemies of all that is good and decent.
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Three such equivalencies, between Russia and Israel, <i>do</i> rise immediately to the surface.
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<ol><li><b>Fraternal conflict.</b>The Israelis and the Palestinians, much like the Ukrainians and the Russians, are quite literally brother-peoples.
<br /><br />Israelis and Palestinians have been shown by objective genetic studies to <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/jews-and-arabs-share-recent-ancestry">share recent ancestry</a>. Both Palestinians and Israelis are largely Semitic peoples with roots in the Levant.
<br /><br />Likewise, all of the East Slavic peoples—Ukrainians, Belarusians and ethnic Russians—<a href="https://bmcgenomdata.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12863-017-0578-3">share ‘almost identical proportions’</a> of Caucasian and Northern European genetic material, making them incredibly close kin simply from the standpoint of heredity.</li> <br />
<li><b>Defensive justifications.</b> The Israeli case for war is, on its face, similar to the Russian one—insofar as it is justified on the basis of self-defence and security against not merely local but also regional foes.
<br /><br />In Russia’s case, those regional foes are the eastern European nations which are members of the NATO bloc; while in Israel’s case, those regional foes are the Arab nations with which it hasn’t yet come to a <i>modus vivendi</i>.</li> <br />
<li><b>Territorial occupation.</b> It must be mentioned that in each case, Russia and Israel in the prosecution of their respective wars hold and occupy territory that, under international law, does not belong to them.
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Russia occupies much of the Donetsk Basin, Zaporozhzh’e and Kherson in defiance of international law. Israel occupies the West Bank and Gaza in defiance of the same international laws.</li></ol>
However, there also arise a number of <i>dis</i>similarities between the two conflicts; mostly historical in their import, though not irrelevant to the current situation in each country.
<ol><li><b>Religious significance.</b> Palestine is very literally holy ground to all three of the major Abrahamic religions. The Temple Mount, the Tombs of the Patriarchs, the site of Christ’s Nativity, the Holy Sepulchre, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Mount of Olives—all <a href="https://en.jerusalem-patriarchate.info/holy-pilgrimage-sites/">exist within the borders</a> of the present Holy Land. There has historically been massive contention over these sites, both among Christian confessions and between Christians, Jews and Muslims.
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The Pontic territories under dispute do contain religious significance for Orthodox Christians. Sevastopol in particular is a place sacred in Russian Orthodoxy, as the site of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2014/07/remembering-baptism-of-kievan-rus.html">the baptism of St Vladimir</a>. But there is nothing in Crimea or elsewhere in the territories under dispute between Russia and the Ukraine, which qualitatively resembles in character the holy sites in Palestine.</li>
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<li><b>Settler colonialism.</b> The presence of Russophones in the Ukraine is not, in overall terms, the result of a deliberate concerted policy of colonialism or settlement—even though Tsarist Russia, and later the Soviet Union, <i>did</i> have deliberate policies of colonial settlement in numerous <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20031013">other places</a>. By contrast, Israeli history is very overtly and self-consciously colonial and settlement-oriented: the main organisation for Jewish settlement was literally called the <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-colonization-association-ica">Jewish Colonisation Association</a>; Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky both explicitly framed their project in terms of colonisation.
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Ironically, the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230308040723/https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/07/russia-colonialism-imperialism-solidarity-ukraine/">use of ‘postcolonial’ discourse</a> to describe modern Ukrainian reality is not endogenous but rather a postmodern (and post-Soviet) borrowing <i>from the West</i>… and this discursive strategy is, to put it mildly, broadly unconvincing to the <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-ukraine-is-not-vietnam-just-ask.html">actual former subjects</a> of Western colonial governments, who (not without reason) see this discursive strategy as self-serving and driven by ulterior interests.</li>
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<li><b>Social segregation.</b> The people who now live in the Donetsk Basin are, by and large, the descendants of the same Don Cossacks that had independently lived among and intermarried with the locals since the seventeenth century. Rates of intermarriage between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/153099?seq=20">have historically been high enough</a> that Russians and Ukrainians in the Ukrainian East are functionally the same people. No formal segregation policies have separated ethnic Ukrainians from ethnic Russians in the past, neither under the Tsars, nor under the Soviet government, nor under the current Russian Federation.
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By contrast, segregation in Israel has been legal and formalised since its founding. Intermarriages are <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/03/08/intergroup-marriage-and-friendship/">vanishingly rare</a> between Israelis and Palestinians, and the Israeli state actually <a href="https://www.mei.edu/publications/once-again-israel-throws-unlawful-barrier-palestinian-family-reunification">erects legal barriers</a> as well as <a href="https://apnews.com/article/politics-middle-east-jerusalem-israel-west-bank-2ce5d9956b729ad6169c880d00068977">physical ones</a> in order to prevent it.</li>
<br />
<li><b>Economic disparity.</b> There has historically been <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/russian-inequality-on-the-eve-of-revolution/A5CED37A899914A15F9CFB1777A441DF">very little difference</a> between residents of Ukrainian territories and residents of Russian territories in terms of wealth, even going back to Tsarist times. Certain politically-charged famines notwithstanding, Ukrainians were overall about as well-off as Russians throughout most of their history together. The recent disparity between overall Ukrainian wealth and overall Russian wealth has more to do with <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2013/02/blog-post.html">the policies chosen</a> by their respective governments <i>after</i> the collapse of the Soviet Union. After the disastrous shock-therapy of the 1990s, Russia turned toward <a href="https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/what-states-share-russias-economy">a mixed economic policy</a> based on self-reliance and food security; while the Ukrainian government largely <a href="https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/05/15/ukraine-neoliberalism-europe-economic-suicide/">remained mired in Western neoliberalism</a> with all its attendant ills.
<br /><br />
The <a href="https://www.kqed.org/lowdown/3184/why-are-palestinians-so-much-poorer-than-israelis-theres-a-bit-more-to-it-than-culture">marked disparity</a> between Israeli wealth and Palestinian wealth, by contrast, is the product of <i>deliberate design</i> rather than negligence or happenstance. The Palestinians were not only driven off the land they had once owned, but they were <a href="https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/what-actually-ails-the-palestinian-economy/">directly plundered of their resources</a> of all sorts, by both legal chicanery and outright burglary, under Israeli administration. This was the case both in the 1948 <i>Nakba</i>, and in the wake of 1967.</li>
<br />
<li><b>Violent resistance.</b> Both Ukraine and Palestine do have histories of violent resistance, though these are different in character. Ukraine has witnessed sporadic uprisings against Tsarist rule; it resisted incorporation into the Soviet Union during and after the First World War; and Ukrainian nationalists fought in the Nazi SS against the Soviets during the Second World War. Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule was largely politically rightist and middle- and upper-class in terms of class base, being motivated largely by nineteenth-century nationalist ideas.
<br /><br />
By contrast, there has been armed resistance to Israeli occupation of Palestinian land practically since the very beginning. Palestinians of all social classes <a href="https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1643032">began fighting back</a> against the expropriation of their land and the expulsion of their people almost immediately after 1948, and again repeatedly through the Intifadas. The Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and displacement has been ideologically diverse: ranging from left-wing Marxist-Leninist (PFLP) through secular-liberal (Fataḥ, Third Way) to right-wing Islâmist (Ḥamâs).
<br /><br />
Currently there is no real resistance movement to speak of against Russian rule inside the territories it occupies. (The aforementioned Irpin-aligned groups operate within Ukrainian territory and with Ukrainian state support.) Though one may (and should!) deplore Ḥamâs’s ideology and its methods, the fact of its very existence points to the adverse conditions under which Palestinians live, and the continued determination of Palestinians to resist their occupiers. Clearly these conditions of life are not mirrored in Donbass, Zaporozhzh’e or Kherson.</li>
<br />
<li><b>Avoidance of civilian casualties.</b> In the present conflicts, there are clear distinctions in the treatment of civilians in war. The best UN estimates of civilian death toll in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict since February 2022 sit <a href="https://ukraine.un.org/en/253322-civilian-deaths-ukraine-war-top-10000-un-says">right around 10,000</a>; <a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/ukraine/ukraine-child-casualties-ukraine-rise-7-over-summer-over-540-children-killed-18-months-war">545 of whom are children</a>. This is over a time period of <i>20 months</i>. These deaths are not to be minimised in terms of the moral harm done; however, as noted above, Russian forces have been demonstrably willing to sacrifice territorial gains and forward momentum on the battlefield precisely in order to <i>avoid</i> placing civilians in harm’s way.
<br /><br />
By contrast, over the past <i>7 weeks</i>, Israeli forces have already killed <a href="https://turkiye.un.org/en/253313-gaza-unprecedented-and-unparalleled-civilian-death-toll-guterres">13,000 civilians</a>; about <a href="https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15503.doc.htm">5,300 of whom are children</a>. This comes from a <i>deliberate military policy</i> of targeting civilian areas and humanitarian infrastructure with shells and air strikes.</li></ol>
<div align="center"><b>IV.</b></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSXa9uO5NTOzbJ-vnewArsxRy0LDIwhL43yeTawMv6N2wshd8GmsKH-zVshg2bjbcsCeGzu1IEllc5eUs6zzZKPs2QL5mgB64vXeGPtbaRHyY-DqzezooNcEyxMzKlaKzBV6sn6rcKSyfNp2RBlTkfB4LV-lH73p90zkstT9P9qbBvRlsDYLijjL_xUAMc/s863/putin_and_abbas.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="486" data-original-width="863" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSXa9uO5NTOzbJ-vnewArsxRy0LDIwhL43yeTawMv6N2wshd8GmsKH-zVshg2bjbcsCeGzu1IEllc5eUs6zzZKPs2QL5mgB64vXeGPtbaRHyY-DqzezooNcEyxMzKlaKzBV6sn6rcKSyfNp2RBlTkfB4LV-lH73p90zkstT9P9qbBvRlsDYLijjL_xUAMc/s400/putin_and_abbas.jpg"/></a></div>
In drawing these parallels, and showing points of similarity and dissimilarity between the conflicts in Gaza and in the Ukrainian East, it is not my primary intention to make a simple and straightforward case of ‘Russia good; Israel bad’—even if one of my secondary intentions was indeed to complicate President Biden’s (and the US State Department’s, and that of the ‘moral equivalence’-shouters) narrative of ‘Russia bad; Israel good’. I have neither the desire nor the inclination to hide or hedge about my sympathy for the Palestinian cause… or my comparative <i>lack</i> of sympathy for the Ukrainian one. But I equally have no desire to fall into a ‘how <i>dare</i> you!!’ trap of my own. There are numerous complexities and tragic historical contingencies to both conflicts that render any such Manichæan interpretation analytically worthless.
<br /><br />
In the case of Palestine in particular, no historical reckoning can be complete without a thorough accounting for <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/01/antonius-and-arab-movement.html">Western Europe’s colonial designs</a> on the region after the Ottoman collapse, or for its inexcusable and genocidal crimes against European Jewry <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-shoah-through-american-eyes.html">during the <i>Shoah</i></a> which lent new urgency to the Zionist plea. And in the case of the Ukrainian problem, one has to navigate the disparate experiences of the Galician west, the maritime south and the industrial Russophone East, and the attempts they did make to live together in peace in the wake of independence. There one also has to navigate the problems of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2013/12/sergei-samaritan.html">debt politics</a> and the legacy of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2014/02/an-insidious-continental-trend.html">the same European genocide</a>.
<br /><br />
In leaving off this analysis, I think the only truly proper thing to do is to lift it up to the Most High, in Whose hands justice is complete and not partial, and in Whose ultimate reckoning all things will be given their proper place and due, and before Whose Truth I hope I dare not exalt the fruits of my own reasoning or prejudices as rivals.Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-11923065775302834172023-11-23T15:18:00.005-06:002023-11-23T16:55:26.861-06:00Giving thanks today<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLN3WIqd7gnGhFq9XGSfUAhte9IuvduTySJ6XAsf_1tmYdwafm80XIIRarycXO0ejjaRaAYMNTnSATPAjMjieEg48xLjxTvcYO_FhmKTOp5rCIAfFd-EOzW40XdMLmYeqDgEDiHYnJ_j-n7H6gF6EIYDk6oDqjPByz9LGew4ZfI7gAxP1APZ2vAjcSLgoc/s2048/stmarys.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="500" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLN3WIqd7gnGhFq9XGSfUAhte9IuvduTySJ6XAsf_1tmYdwafm80XIIRarycXO0ejjaRaAYMNTnSATPAjMjieEg48xLjxTvcYO_FhmKTOp5rCIAfFd-EOzW40XdMLmYeqDgEDiHYnJ_j-n7H6gF6EIYDk6oDqjPByz9LGew4ZfI7gAxP1APZ2vAjcSLgoc/s600/stmarys.jpg"/></a></div>
There is good reason to be thankful, first of all, that a holiday exists in American public life upon which gratitude—not merely a sentiment, but a virtue indeed—can still be, and is expected to be, expressed. Gratitude, which presupposes contentment with the good things one has, and which excludes by its nature expressions of covetousness and of entitlement, is a virtue completely alien to the ideology and the <i>ethos</i> of hyper-capitalism and hyper-individualism which suffuses the vestiges of the American public sphere. If this isn’t good reason to be thankful that Thanksgiving still exists, I quite frankly don’t know what is.
<br /><br />
I am grateful, firstly, to God for His manifold blessings, for His creation, for His tireless labour through which creation exists, for His Sabbath rest (undertaken not out of His need but out of ours). I am grateful that God precedes us all and yet still loves us; I am grateful that God chose that we should exist, rather than that we should not. I am grateful to our Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, for whatever hope I have left in me. I am grateful to my parents, without whose love and support I would not be here, sustained me when I was hospitalised and still sustain me now. I am grateful <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2019/03/speaking-of-spiritual-ethnicity.html">to my ancestors</a> of whatever country they come—<a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/04/what-god-hath-conjoined_12.html">English</a>, <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2020/01/holy-father-cyndeyrn-garthwys.html">Welsh</a>, <a href="https://featherquake.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-handful-of-vetter-photos-may-1978.html">German</a>, <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2019/01/paradoxes-of-assimilated-americanised.html">Jewish</a>, <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/10/yugoslavia-alter-byzantine-project.html">Illyrian</a> and <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2023/05/why-does-saint-paul-mention-scythians.html">Scythian</a>.
<br /><br />
One reason why <i>this</i> Thanksgiving is special, is because my parents-in-law have arrived here from China for an extended visit. Their arrival is timely and deeply appreciated. Because I am their son-in-law and they are my parents-in-law, it’s to be expected that we don’t see eye-to-eye 100% of the time. However, I can already tell that my wife is happier because they’re here. I can already tell that my children are happier because they’re here. And they are already making our home a more complete one while they are present. My parents-in-law have been an inestimable help to my wife and me, in getting us physically and financially established in our living situation here in the Twin Cities metro area, and in assisting us with various aspects of our life here together. I am and will continue to be grateful to them for as long as they live and as long as I live.
<br /><br />
This reflection on the Chinese side of my extended family, prompts me to undertake an examination of my own weak spot <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/01/arab-nationalism-arab-christianity.html">for the Arab cause</a>. The root of the matter is this: my family <i>would not be here with me</i> in the United States, if it were not for the sustained Herculean efforts of the Arab-American community in Pawtucket, Rhode Island prevailing against the legal inertia of the DHS and immigration services. In particular, I want to give thanks for <a href="https://stmarypawtucket.org/about-our-church/clergy/">Fr Elie (Estephan)</a> of <a href="https://stmarypawtucket.org/">St Mary Antiochian Church</a>, whose own efforts in <a href="https://www.valleybreeze.com/news/local-church-adopts-refugees-as-their-own/article_05b7562d-7d1a-50ef-bcc8-59cdefdf882d.html">helping Syrian and Lebanese refugees</a> find support and shelter here from war and deprivation at home, equipped him to address my own (much less dire) family situation.
<br /><br />
In 2015 and 2016, Fr Elie assisted me with a list of contacts and advisers as well as his own introductions and good words, including with <a href="https://www.attorneyatlaw.com/firms/susan-saliba-attorney-at-law">Ms Susan Saliba</a> (an immigration attorney in Massachusetts) and <a href="https://mokhibermoretti.com/">Mr Albert Mokhiber</a> (an immigration lawyer in DC), who afterward assisted me <i>pro bono</i> with completing the paperwork and navigating the ‘grey areas’ necessary for my wife and kids to join me here legally and in a timely way. For this reason, ever since that time I have always felt a need to pay it forward. Those same war refugees, who are the main beneficiaries of this legal and financial and physical assistance, and in much greater need than I am, I have come to see in a very real sense as my own family by virtue of our common situation. This is what underlies, to a significant degree, my sympathy and support for the cause of <a href="https://syriasupportmovement.org/">Syrian peace</a>, and for the cause of <a href="https://sabeel.org/">Palestinian peace</a>.
<br /><br />
I am grateful to St Alexander Nevsky Church in Saimasai, Kazakhstan, for <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2009/10/visiting-russian-orthodox-church.html">introducing me</a> to the Orthodox Christian faith. I am grateful to Fr Sergey (Voronin), one-time rector of Holy Dormition Church in Beijing, China, for educating me and guiding me gently into that faith, and <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2014/02/on-17-th-of-february-i-was-officially.html">chrismating me</a>. I am grateful to <a href="https://www.sthermanmpls.org/">St Herman’s Orthodox Church</a>, and to all of my friends and fellow-parishioners there, for continuing to assist in my salvation. I am grateful to them for putting up with my eccentricities, and for encouraging me to continue learning the Russian language.
<br /><br />
I am grateful to the school I teach at, and to the <a href="https://www.spfe28.org/">Saint Paul Federation of Educators</a> for being a source of community belonging and a source of strength for me. (Pray that we get a just contract!) I am also grateful to the students I teach—even the ones who misbehave occasionally!—Hmong, Karen and Vietnamese; White and African-American; Ojibwe and Hispanic. I learn as much from them as they learn from me, and I hope that in my classroom at least, they get as many chances as they can to explore how much they have to offer, and to exercise the reserves of strength and wisdom they possess.
<br /><br />
And I am grateful indeed to the Ojibwe and Dakota nations whose guest on this earth I am. I am grateful that the Ojibwe and the Dakota are still here and still speaking and still active, and that they continue to bear witness to the sacredness of things like <a href="https://honorearth.org/">clean drinking water and healthy land</a>. (And if this sentiment is somewhat subversive of the civic mythology of Thanksgiving: so much the better! I was always a bit of a <a href="https://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/15/Mary-Dyer">Mary Dyer</a> at heart; that’s something I <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2009/11/friendly-persuasion.html">come by honestly</a>, and am also grateful for.)
<br /><br />
To all I wish a Thanksgiving filled with love and gratitude: for the good things that we have been given, and for the <a href="https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2021/12/25/103638-the-nativity-of-our-lord-god-and-savior-jesus-christ">one Good One that is given us</a> to expect at the end of the season, through the prayers and labours and faith of our Lady, the Most Holy and Most Pure Birthgiver of God and Ever-Virgin Mary.Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-54672861783433778652023-10-29T22:16:00.002-05:002023-10-29T22:16:57.810-05:00Collected aphoristic thoughts and quotes on PalestineAll thoughts are my own unless quoted otherwise.
<blockquote><i>I honestly think that for most people, they simply parrot </i>[about the conflict]<i> what their favoured media outlets tell them to, and CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo and WSJ all tell them the same thing... with some surface-level permutations based on domestic political / cultural / tribal alignment. God forbid we should read actual books about each region’s history and the roots of each conflict, instead of just regurgitating easily-digestible headlines, op-ed columns and talking-head takes.</i></blockquote>
<div align="center">~~~</div>
<blockquote><i>One thing that Vladimir Solovyov got very much right in <a href="https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/war-progress-and-the-end-of-history_vladimir-s-soloviev/1830973/#edition=62021299&idiq=48953909"></i>War, Progress and the End of History<i></a>, is that there is a kind of falsehood, a deep moral obscenity, in those who preach non-violence to the powerless, from a position of safety and security.
<br /><br />
The argument between the General and the Prince in the first conversation was over <a href="https://zoryaninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/The-Armenian-Massacres-of-1894-1897-a-Bibliography-2016_08_25-18_41_10-UTC.pdf">the Armenians in the late 1800s</a>, but equally so I think it could apply to the Palestinians today.</i></blockquote>
<div align="center">~~~</div>
<blockquote><i>Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English, or France to the French.</i>
<br />
<div align="right">- <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/lsquo-the-jews-rsquo-by-gandhi">Mahatma Gandhi</a></div></blockquote>
<div align="center">~~~</div>
<blockquote><i>We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.</i>
<br />
<div align="Right">- <a href="http://www.mandela.gov.za/mandela_speeches/1997/971204_palestinian.htm">Nelson Mandela</a></div></blockquote>
<div align="center">~~~</div>
<blockquote><i>It’s tragic that so many people are made unable to tell the difference between “explanation”, “justification”, and “apologia”. Often, those things are conflated on purpose with the help of the media to prevent/shut down any civilised discussion around certain subjects.</i>
<br />
<div align="Right">- <a href="https://www.facebook.com/chdv1991/posts/pfbid025rgMKsx7JJM4xNKo9wg9fx1z1zcMQJ2ZK9jwppAECxuKe5imerA72TXuFfFhkoqdl">Denis Vladimirovich</a></div></blockquote>
<div align="center">~~~</div>
<blockquote><i>A few assorted thoughts. Not all of them are completely consistent with each other, but so be it.
<br /><ol>
<li> All war is bad on all sides.</li>
<li> Some </i>casus belli<i> are more just than others.</li>
<li> Few conflicts have stable solutions (this side of Parousia).</li>
<li> Still fewer conflicts have obvious solutions.</li>
<li> That does not mean we (individually and collectively) shouldn't look for solutions.</li>
<li> No one who isn't in a position of power should be <b>expected</b> to have the solutions.</li></ol></i></blockquote>
<div align="center">~~~</div>
<blockquote><i>Imagine engaging in abstruse academic debates about dogmatic vs. hopeful universalism as Gaza burns.</i></blockquote>
<div align="center">~~~</div>
<blockquote><i>To have empathy is not to assert power or to take revenge. It is to feel broken with those who have been broken—and if you are a follower of Jesus, which, </i>de facto<i>, we are not, is to be broken with them.</i>
<div align="Right">- <a href="https://ephesusschool.org/mene-mene-tekel-upharsin/">Fr Marc Boulos</a></div></blockquote>
<div align="center">~~~</div>
<blockquote><i>My hope and prayer is to be a source of light, and not darkness. Let’s be honest: this pain we’re all feeling isn’t specific to this moment; it’s ongoing. The truth is that for me, for my family, for Palestinians: this is life.</i>
<div align="right">- <a href="https://www.facebook.com/realmoamer/posts/pfbid0ag98cw4wRoctMtFnoberttyYNoRBoucJ8H3Z9q2sehS5G3FLzkQ6nm17m8KviDzXl">Mo Amer</a></div></blockquote>
<div align="center">~~~</div>
<blockquote><i>Enough oppression against the Palestinian people! Peace does not come from the bodies of children, killed people, innocent people, and women. Peace comes when the decision-makers in this world realize that our people have dignity, as all the peoples of the world. We are not advocates of war, we reject violence and killing, and we are seekers of peace, but at the same time, we seek justice and have a right that we will not give up.</i>
<div align="right">- <a href="https://www.facebook.com/AntiochianOrthodoxChristianArchdiocese/posts/pfbid02WrzLyJqA3kRsEQGYGvYsyiWcWJfMq9BtM4BFQqcy67Nudjg7cgNizXSzCE1EwiPjl">His Holiness Patriarch John X (Yazigi) of Antioch</a></div></blockquote>
<div align="center">~~~</div>
<blockquote><i>In the Middle East, the net effects</i> [of European cultural hysteria]<i> are: <br /><ol>
<li>that Europe is burdened with the heavy baggage of interventions that inflame Muslim hostility toward the West, and </li>
<li>to create the psychological imperative to find some way to assuage their own sense of guilt by finding, and magnifying, the sins of their victims.</li></ol></i>
<div align="right">- <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/21/michael-brenner-europe-jews-muslims/?fbclid=IwAR0kUYfTCRc1Ku9fN-FACm43iT5WGfMUXbaaRyC_h3AMM_1Oa27gwKyg2Ho">Dr Michael Brenner</a></div></blockquote>
<div align="center">~~~</div>
<blockquote><i>Moral discourse in the West has degraded so far that even the most basic calls for justice and humanity are considered to be Marxist, subversive or terroristic.</i></blockquote>
<div align="center">~~~</div>
<blockquote><i>The descent to evil. “Do unto others what you would like them to do to you” has increasingly been replaced by “Do unto others the evil they did to you”, and even by “Do to others the evils before they might do it to you.”</i><br />
<div align="right">- <a href="https://www.facebook.com/john.dalton1/posts/pfbid02sPNx79oVSMCqWEQr3xx8F7gW6dPp4SVSnBxbpGxaEoxYUh5uuSJ2FULe2w4Wi39Al">Fr John D’Alton</a></div></blockquote>
<div align="center">~~~</div>
<blockquote><i>As an Orthodox Christian leftist with Semitic ancestry, I have two questions.<br /><ol>
<li>By what moral logic are the Arabs supposed to shoulder 80 years of responsibility, at the cost of their lives and their homes, for the crimes of Hitler?</li>
<li>By what moral logic are Palestinian Christians supposed to shoulder responsibility, at the cost of their lives and their homes, for the recent crimes of Hamas?</li></i></blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2koEjOd-ROmvnSYS1m8hXJGZV5GLnMZuaZq0DEt-fcX7BXHzzqXM_yREYfQD3I-CetyjDLp-hc0DDhVgM9f7R_a8uLDlUgksZqkU0_XbiykWSFLwHsTC0imdkyzALh-rqIUJFoMLcYHqfjo2tVBt3u1O9HKFkfC0xWd5ievbEp45brwtFjkNJCl3oGJUt/s2000/gettyimages-1734348129_slide-f20d7b138643f053b1dd37c149668e7e8eb10798-s2000-c85.webp" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="1333" data-original-width="2000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2koEjOd-ROmvnSYS1m8hXJGZV5GLnMZuaZq0DEt-fcX7BXHzzqXM_yREYfQD3I-CetyjDLp-hc0DDhVgM9f7R_a8uLDlUgksZqkU0_XbiykWSFLwHsTC0imdkyzALh-rqIUJFoMLcYHqfjo2tVBt3u1O9HKFkfC0xWd5ievbEp45brwtFjkNJCl3oGJUt/s400/gettyimages-1734348129_slide-f20d7b138643f053b1dd37c149668e7e8eb10798-s2000-c85.webp"/></a></div>Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-66998894076910114602023-10-29T19:44:00.001-05:002023-10-29T19:44:19.707-05:00Neither Fordham nor Montanika, pt. 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjLkFQdAVsAJ5Zf8q2LLzdAd8aNAwUDtIT0v-2prfAEMMv-Jhy8NVscci3bpSp6NWNlkMoxgXxZDpSFmEELuvUZigqXArd7YfrdC2s8PYoK8QMNzNZujGqyfS237ECFUUUz2N_yhPu14G9SnBrcNHgoNlpXRVLW68bZKdF0qDx5uCqq0YgdJN93pFAccC9/s1600/athanasius.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="1063" data-original-width="1600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjLkFQdAVsAJ5Zf8q2LLzdAd8aNAwUDtIT0v-2prfAEMMv-Jhy8NVscci3bpSp6NWNlkMoxgXxZDpSFmEELuvUZigqXArd7YfrdC2s8PYoK8QMNzNZujGqyfS237ECFUUUz2N_yhPu14G9SnBrcNHgoNlpXRVLW68bZKdF0qDx5uCqq0YgdJN93pFAccC9/s400/athanasius.jpg"/></a></div>
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The émigrés and <i>samizdat</i> thinkers of Soviet Union, including the ones of the ‘liberal’-left who have most deeply inspired me (<a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/08/against-all-utopias.html">Nikolai Berdyaev</a>, <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/02/two-post-marxist-paths.html">Fr Sergei Bulgakov</a>, <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-synodal-religious-type-two.html">St Maria Skobtsova</a>, <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2017/05/bunakov-russian-social-thought-and.html">St Ilya Fondaminsky</a>, etc.) saw their task as being the overthrow of a monolithic, impersonal, totally-mobilised system which completely <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2015/11/blog-post.html">constrained thought and freedom of the spirit</a>.
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But in the wake of that system’s collapse, what took its place was even worse—an anarchic free-for-all hellscape in which those who could not help themselves were brutally trampled underfoot, or left to rot through starvation, or homelessness, or drink, or drugs, or hopelessness. Among <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2023/06/fr-andrei-tkachev-interviews-on.html">the internal critics of the Soviet Union</a>, all but the most ideologically-blinkered neoliberals were left aghast by <a href="https://www.silkandchai.info/2020/06/a-grim-but-needed-look-at-90s-russia.html">the human waste and wreckage</a> that took its place.
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And now, in the absence of the Soviet system, we are faced with a very different monolithic, impersonal, totally-mobilised system which completely constrains thought and freedom of the spirit... though it masquerades itself underneath the banners of ‘freedom’. This is a system of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2014/04/god-and-mammon-and-tragedy-of-trying-to.html">monopoly</a>, of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2022/11/its-unreal-world-that-were-forced-to.html">endlessly-volatile finance-capital</a>, of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2020/03/markets-dont-work-in-public-health.html">techno-dystopian nightmares</a> which <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-billionaire-class-and-quest-for-man.html">dissolve the barriers between person and machine</a>, of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-war-in-iraq-was-war-on-truth.html">destruction</a> (not even truly ‘creative’ anymore, if indeed it ever was) with <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/10/as-insane-now-as-it-has-ever-been.html">the military-industrial complex</a> as <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2023/02/minsky-contra-military-industrial.html">the vanguard of concentrated wealth</a>.
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The task which is before us, now, as before the Soviet émigrés of a prior age, is the <b>utter demolition</b> of the spiritual roots of this hateful, faceless, godless system.
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If <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2022/07/neither-fordham-nor-montanica.html">I am critical</a> of <a href="https://www.fordham.edu/academics/centers-and-institutes/orthodox-christian-studies-center/">Fordham</a>, it is because not only have they abandoned this task—they have taken up a position as <a href="https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268038960/the-mystical-as-political/">the handmaidens of this anti-personalist, hyper-capitalist system</a>... <b>in the very name of personality</b>! Witness how they attack the outward enemies of finance-capitalism when they are, or appear, strong (<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230326095250/https://publicorthodoxy.org/2022/03/13/a-declaration-on-the-russian-world-russkii-mir-teaching/">Russia</a>, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230617223132/https://publicorthodoxy.org/2022/02/01/russias-scramble-for-africa/">China</a>), and wholesale ignore the victims of finance-capitalism when they are weak (<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230131012213/https://publicorthodoxy.org/tag/palestine/">Palestine</a>, wherein the only three Fordhamite articles on offer are afterthoughts over two years old and provide nothing but weak-tea platitudes based on outdated Clinton-era political thought).
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And if <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2022/07/neither-fordham-nor-montanica.html">I am critical</a> of <a href="https://www.patristicfaith.com/conference-orthodox-montanika/">‘Montanika’</a> / <a href="https://www.patristicfaith.com/">Patristic Faith</a> / <a href="https://southernorthodox.org/">Ludwell Fellowship</a>, etc., it is because they have misconstrued this task of our age entirely. Clinging to the tattered rags of white <i>émigré</i> politics and homebrew backlash-political <i>ressentiment</i>, they are still fighting rearguard battles of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2017/08/silly-rabbit-dixies-for-whigs.html">a war which has already been won</a> (or lost, depending on your perspective). They are still looking for enemies on the outside, when in fact <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-problem-with-woke-ad-campaigns.html">the enemy has already taken the castle</a>, and is issuing their orders for them.
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The <i>haute-bourgeois</i> academic Fordhamites may occasionally make pious noises about standing up for the victims, but <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2021/03/a-call-from-heart-to-class-treason.html">Catherine Liu straight-up has their number</a>. They are currying and <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/virtue-hoarders">hoarding ‘virtue’</a> (or rather, what passes for it in our age), while at the same time seeking the cosy embrace of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teradata">tech-bros and Wall Street finance</a>, particularly Teradata and CitiBank.
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And the <i>petit-bourgeois</i> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230719195524/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnt7Iy8GlmdPwy_Tzyx93bA">YouTube personality-cultists</a>, <a href="https://rlo.acton.org/archives/20144-debate-the-source-of-human-morality.html">profiteering pedlars of an older brand of Whiggery</a>, <a href="https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nathanael_Kapner">street preachers</a> and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20231022064105/https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">psychological charlatans</a> which make up the ‘native opposition’ within Orthodox Christianity are... well, perhaps they are not as close to being antichrists as the Fordham types are. At least they are sincere. But they are still cultural and political sectarians. They are <a href="https://www.rbth.com/history/334237-russian-protestants-old-believers"><i>raskolniki</i> and Old Believers in their spiritual ‘type’</a>, and as such they are pitiable and deluded. And they draw people in--idealistic, lost, ‘angry young men’ in particular—with the exact same lures and promises that the German, Dutch and northern French Reformers did in the 1500s and 1600s.
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I don’t know how else to describe my position here. I find Anglo liberalism, particularly in its <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2021/10/a-closer-look-at-dave-chappelles-recent.html">‘woke’/rainbow-flag/ersatz-radical</a> form, utterly repugnant. But Anglo conservatism <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2017/11/conservatism-aint-what-it-used-to-be.html">has no draw left for me</a>. Neither political ‘pill’ can cure the disease that afflicts us all—including myself. All I am left to say here is: эй, приди, Господь Иисус!Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-14497730906311386662023-10-28T21:44:00.003-05:002023-10-28T22:06:04.029-05:00A plea for peace in Palestine<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzSRp2MccBsueE6gThlUgJj8LTYcPxAU3tysgOh1xHUix2sVQHj6fVdlvj6OVjZMSYCYJhCWlC2Lw4fsC9rnVkHRzVvH4a91Ai4eQA8VH_lv3BfacDP8pCEhF1E6GI_DNC_bipBKNXr-LyX6D-Q01kJQ3GfZfuX8tnLUJuhbcmZY0G5oLwn5hlbCJySpHx/s1000/7147g5Ig5NL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="647" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzSRp2MccBsueE6gThlUgJj8LTYcPxAU3tysgOh1xHUix2sVQHj6fVdlvj6OVjZMSYCYJhCWlC2Lw4fsC9rnVkHRzVvH4a91Ai4eQA8VH_lv3BfacDP8pCEhF1E6GI_DNC_bipBKNXr-LyX6D-Q01kJQ3GfZfuX8tnLUJuhbcmZY0G5oLwn5hlbCJySpHx/s400/7147g5Ig5NL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg"/></a></div>
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Another ‘<i>tolle, lege</i>’ moment here, in the wake of recent events in Gaza. This is excerpted from the Epilogue to Fr Paul Nadim Tarazi’s book <a href="https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/land-and-covenant_paul-nadim-tarazi/2901998/#edition=6060639&idiq=10601571"><i>Land and Covenant</i></a>:
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<blockquote><i>In the 19th century, with the rise of nationalism in Europe, anti-Jewish sentiments were on the rise, especially in Russia and France. Some leading European Jews realised that the mood presented an opportunity for them to establish a ‘Jewish homeland’. The culmination of their efforts, and especially those of Theodore Herzl, a Viennese Jew, was the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. Until 1905, Argentina and Uganda were considered as possible sites for the establishment of a ‘homeland’. So, the idea of a ‘return’ to Palestine and Jerusalem was not as essential then as it is presented nowadays. Even when the choice eventually tilted toward Palestine, this cannot be taken, </i>per se<i>, as a proof that it was a </i>de facto<i> realisation of a perennial dream or even triggered by the ‘obvious’ understanding of ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ and the </i>‘aliyah<i>. If Jews were genuinely interested in the ‘return’ to Jerusalem for religious reasons, they could have done so over past centuries. They did not do so because they fared well or preferred to stay, for other reasons, wherever they were dwelling. [...]
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From the beginning of the 20th century, governments that supported the establishment and later the policies of the state of Israel did so and still do for political reasons. Their interest then and now lies in the control of that region for its geopolitical and oil-related economical importance. But, here again, while Jews and superpowers look to their interests, which can be explained on a human level, it is the religious factor that complicates the matter in an unprecedented manner. The introduction of an unwarranted divine element makes the situation of the Middle East even more complex. The most pernicious aspect of this factor is that it is affecting policy making for and in the region. Such an attitude becomes dangerous when people believe they have figured out God’s ongoing activity on the historical realm from the perspective of their specific group or nation, their collective. In doing so, they create a monster, if not an idol, to which they chain God. But the biblical premise, as I have repeatedly shown, is that history is still trailing along not because of man’s realisations, but out of God’s mercy and longsuffering.
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The earth--every earth--is the Lord’s as are </i>those who dwell therein<i>. The Middle East, as any other part of the earth, is the patrimony of those who have lived there for centuries. It is their duty, regardless of their religious affiliation, to make it a better place for the upcoming generations. More specifically, the earth of Palestine is the patrimony of the Palestinians, and they alone have the last word in its future. Others are welcome to help, but not to dictate. This scriptural teaching does not apply solely to the Middle East. Our entire planet would be a better place if that rule was applied in every earth on our planet.
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Whether Palestine will prove to be a ‘holy land’, is up to God, and him alone, to decide when he comes to judge the living and the dead. The nations of the world and, more importantly, the Christians of the West, are to extend a helping hand for the purpose of committing the Palestinians to the Lord’s peace. They are not, through their self-serving policies and attitudes, to force Palestine into a bloodbath and then use the situation they create as a renewed opportunity to intervene. To live in peace, the Palestinians need to be left in peace!</i></blockquote>Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-57138752445297928802023-10-15T22:23:00.001-05:002023-10-15T22:23:18.835-05:00Baran: a working-class romance with Biblical themes<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoh_uZLjRCeHjp2KtCG4ETIncLxKouRMpclm5hDkC6SdYwwmDUrEdwNAabO4QNsUwPrQ6hf1G-wbftbzAWG5xSts3T1fPmBqr0cVpaVaNqnJ3ie_i8uKXS1vJ2hlCdPYiOuyQ5AzKcY4yu7_mjI8uJ7QF9twaEwaB8ggZWJ2hAbuST0Gt0Vw1tHx0iGKoM/s495/ti108393.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="255" data-original-width="495" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoh_uZLjRCeHjp2KtCG4ETIncLxKouRMpclm5hDkC6SdYwwmDUrEdwNAabO4QNsUwPrQ6hf1G-wbftbzAWG5xSts3T1fPmBqr0cVpaVaNqnJ3ie_i8uKXS1vJ2hlCdPYiOuyQ5AzKcY4yu7_mjI8uJ7QF9twaEwaB8ggZWJ2hAbuST0Gt0Vw1tHx0iGKoM/s400/ti108393.jpg"/></a></div>
I had the pleasure of watching Majid Majidi’s film <i>Children of Heaven</i> some years ago, and I liked it so much that I decided to go back and watch some of the other notches on his directorial belt. I managed to pick up a used DVD copy of <a href="https://watson.brown.edu/cmes/events/2022/persian-film-series-baran"><i>Baran</i></a> at Half Price Books some months back, and finished watching it yesterday. Watching this movie turned out to be a thoroughly serendipitous choice, as it helped me to illustrate a portion of the Bible study group at <a href="https://www.sthermanmpls.org/">St Herman’s Orthodox Church</a>, for which I was the discussant. I was discussing the early life of the <a href="https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2021/12/12/604-righteous-isaac">righteous patriarch Isaac</a>, the son of Abraham.
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<i>Baran</i> is a romantic melodrama, but it is much more than that. It is deeply specific: it involves an Iranian construction worker who falls in love with a crossdressing Afghan refugee who is trying to earn money to support her injured father. But for all of that specificity, it carries all the weight of a fable—a tale with universal importance and appeal. And, Majidi being a religious director, there is also a <i>spiritual</i> significance to the film, and the references and appeals to Scripture were probably not at all unintended.
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Lateef (a name which means ‘gentle’ in both Arabic and Farsi) is a young Iranian who works on a construction site. Actually, he has it fairly easy. He’s the tea boy, and his job is to boil tea and carry it on a platter to the other workers on the site. His boss, Memet, in order to get his construction work done faster and cheaper, hires on the down-low Afghan migrants and refugees from the Taliban, who do back-breaking manual labour for cents on the dollar (dinars on the touman?) compared to their Iranian coworkers. One of these, a man named Najaf, falls and breaks his foot; he has to be trucked home. But this incident attracts the attention of government inspectors who question Memet about his illegal hiring of Afghans.
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Najaf’s replacement, brought by his brother Soslan, is a young boy named Rahmat (whose name means ‘mercy’ or ‘graciousness’)… who is actually a girl in disguise. After Rahmat has an accident herself and spills half a bag of cement on a fellow-worker from two stories up, Memet assigns the Afghan ‘boy’ to do Lateef’s job—and Lateef to do real construction work.
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Lateef, who is money-grubbing, lazy, hotheaded and more than a bit arrogant, holds a grudge against Rahmat and tries to undermine ‘him’ and play pranks on ‘him’ at every turn: including dumping dirty water over ‘his’ head from three stories up, and trashing the kitchen where ‘he’ works. But as Lateef is plotting yet another scheme against ‘him’, he discovers—as the wind wafts away the curtain from the kitchen area and Rahmat is doing up ‘his’ hair—that ‘he’ is actually a she.
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Lateef’s attitude toward Rahmat changes, and he begins to observe her more closely. He discovers that she is in fact not an opportunist or greedy at all, and in fact lives up to her name. She does her best to give good tea and bread and cigarettes to the workers, and she takes the scraps and goes up to the third floor of the construction site to feed the doves with them. Lateef observes all of this in secret, and begins to help Rahmat both secretly and in the open. The story is really one about Lateef <i>repenting</i>, about his character changing. He gradually goes from being a grudging, arrogant, pugnacious lout—to also living up to his name.
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There is a lot in the story of Lateef that is <i>Jacobean</i>… that is to say, that reflects the story of Jacob as he labours for Laban to win the hand of Rachel. Lateef’s labours for Memet and his acts of kindness toward Soslan and Najaf—and his disappointments when these go astray or unnoticed also reflect this story (as when Laban tricks Jacob into marrying his elder daughter Leah). But there is one scene in particular which reminded me more strongly of Isaac and Rebekah.
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There is a scene close to the end of the film, where Lateef is helping Rahmat (whose actual name is <i>Baran</i>, or ‘Rain’) pick up some vegetables that she spilled on the ground. The two of them make eye contact. Their expressions change. It is clear—despite Rahmat-Baran’s character not saying a single word throughout the entire film—that Baran returns Lateef’s feelings for her. But then she puts on her <i>niqâb</i> in front of him. All the time, she does not break eye contact with him, even while the truck which is taking her back to Afghanistan is driving away. But Lateef smiles as he watches one of her footprints being washed away by the rain.
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This scene seems to be a direct reference to the passage in Genesis where Rebekah is approaching Abraham’s camp from afar, and notices Isaac at a distance. She questions Abraham’s servant about who he is, and upon learning that this is her intended husband, she <i>leaps down</i> from her camel and <i>veils herself</i> before him, presenting himself to her as a bride. The emotional poignancy of this scene is enriched by this parallel to the Hebrew Scriptures.
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Again, this is such a sweet, beautiful, wholesome, heartfelt film that its appeal becomes broadly universal despite the deeply Central-Asian particularity of its setting and characters, and the barriers of language and class and sexual mores that divide the two protagonists from each other. The cinematography is also amazing… Majidi has the ability to create a film that has a certain <i>weight</i>, using natural lighting and long static shots in order to mimic the same effect that American movies had from twenty years before (but have since lost). I highly, <i>highly</i> recommend <i>Baran</i> as a film with both deeply human and deeply spiritual significance.
Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-9064877316737421092023-10-14T00:13:00.015-05:002023-10-14T00:13:00.145-05:00A prayer for peace, from a Christian of Gaza<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3yOgEde25nxEF2WzrCkKWRQHvcrchmoEsQnj_xm_zM3fyTlxj6biRo1V6qfY2R62ery7Pl8nDoAdGsVMQ3noGomcvqYjV5mp5SB5Xsoozdb9VQFk0s_r3lHWNW5AUsvnm5rFpjFRdkRtzfVAEWBrSXkrCjUebXrnrsly3hND2lbV69fCN15Cnds0MEHYU/s396/st%20Cosmas%20Melodist.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="396" data-original-width="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3yOgEde25nxEF2WzrCkKWRQHvcrchmoEsQnj_xm_zM3fyTlxj6biRo1V6qfY2R62ery7Pl8nDoAdGsVMQ3noGomcvqYjV5mp5SB5Xsoozdb9VQFk0s_r3lHWNW5AUsvnm5rFpjFRdkRtzfVAEWBrSXkrCjUebXrnrsly3hND2lbV69fCN15Cnds0MEHYU/s400/st%20Cosmas%20Melodist.jpg"/></a></div>
Today, the fourteenth of October, is <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2020/10/holy-hierarch-kosmas-melodist-bishop-of.html">the feast-day of Saint Kosmas the Poet</a> of Gaza. It is worth remembering Saint Kosmas today, when his fellow Arabs, including <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/01/arab-nationalism-arab-christianity.html">Christian Arabs</a>, are under siege in the very place where he reposed, by a hostile army of nationalists following a deluded messianic vision. As I write this, the Gazans—over one million people—are in their literal eleventh hour, having been given a twenty-four hour ultimatum to evacuate Gaza in an order that <a href="https://fortune.com/2023/10/13/un-israel-evacuation-1-million-northern-gaza-impossible-tragedy-calamity/">the UN has deemed ‘impossible’</a>. This is in response to a brutal attack by Hamas on several Israeli settlements bordering Gaza. There can be no real, cogent moral defence of such a surprise attack targeting civilians. But instead of producing a rational and thoughtful response as to how we got to this juncture, the war machine is gearing up once again to grind down, not only Hamas, but Palestinians outside of Hamas who are already helpless and already without defence. This includes the Christians of Saint Porphyrios Church in Gaza, who have requested our prayers. They face a true martyrdom: sacrificial suffering on account of a crime in which they had no part.
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There are few who seek understanding of this conflict. But for those who are interested, I would recommend two books in particular: the work of George Antonius, <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/01/antonius-and-arab-movement.html"><i>The Arab Awakening</i></a>, and William Dalrymple’s travelogue <a href="http://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/05/in-footsteps-of-saint-john-moskhos.html"><i>From the Holy Mountain</i></a>. The latter is not <i>about</i> the history of the Holy Land <i>per se</i>, but intimates many things which are relevant to the present state of affairs. The autobiography of Iraqi statesman Adnan al-Pachachi, <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/01/living-to-some-purpose.html"><i>Living to Some Purpose</i></a>, may also be of some interest to readers on this question.
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The land which is called ‘holy’, is crying for peace, yet peace is very far from its grasp. I find myself in deep grief for those who have lost their lives on both sides already. And I find myself deep in anger, not only at Hamas, but also (and more so) at the Israeli state and leadership who failed to prevent this attack, and who will now wreak a vengeance that will target the innocent along with the guilty. There can be no true peace without justice; and justice can only be arrived at, when <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2021/05/remembering-nakba-and-gaza-today.html">the rightful claims of the Palestinian cause</a> are acknowledged, and when <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/10/both-as-american-of-european-jewish.html">the security of the Jewish people everywhere</a>, not just in the Holy Land, is assured. I can only add Rev’d Dr John Mason Neale’s English translation of the hymn for peace from the Christmas Canon, which was authored by the holy Palestinian of Gaza whom we commemorate today:
<blockquote><i>Father of Peace, and God of Consolation! <br />
The Angel of the Counsel dost Thou send<br />
To herald peace, to manifest Salvation, <br />
Thy Light to pour, Thy knowledge to extend; <br />
Whence, with the morning’s earliest rays, <br />
Lover of men! Thy Name we praise. <br />
<br />
’Midst Caesar’s subjects Thou, at his decreeing, <br />
Obey’dst and was enrolled: our mortal race, <br />
To sin and Satan slave, from bondage freeing, <br />
Our poverty in all points didst embrace: <br />
And by that Union didst combine<br />
The earthly with the All-Divine. <br />
<br />
Behold! The virgin, prophecy sustaining, <br />
Incarnate Deity conceived and bore; <br />
Virgin in birth, and virgin still remaining, <br />
And man to God is reconciled once more: <br />
Wherefore in faith her name we bless, <br />
And Mother of our God confess. </i></blockquote>
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Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-75096548369701130252023-10-09T11:59:00.002-05:002023-10-09T11:59:32.753-05:00Archbishop Theodosios (Hanna) of Sebasteia speaks<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxjubAO4FF7DAD9z6hC4vqPIY4zWGJt8B5cKtapNoKZkt1RrHVexDTzJJEWN12a2AYmXhlt6otD-O4dsswWmgC927G2YNTLCu2D9coERfeKtltjjd4LRvaeZURWD8Mc5ESoYf8O7j2HkwmphwkdKpQypcBg3BnTzeTvTLYorT-NrDH-C7VhNIqg2BaUz35/s720/FB_IMG_1696870736457.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="720" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxjubAO4FF7DAD9z6hC4vqPIY4zWGJt8B5cKtapNoKZkt1RrHVexDTzJJEWN12a2AYmXhlt6otD-O4dsswWmgC927G2YNTLCu2D9coERfeKtltjjd4LRvaeZURWD8Mc5ESoYf8O7j2HkwmphwkdKpQypcBg3BnTzeTvTLYorT-NrDH-C7VhNIqg2BaUz35/s400/FB_IMG_1696870736457.jpg"/></a></div>
His Eminence the Archbishop Theodosios (Hanna) has some words to say about the recent bloodshed in Palestine, to which I can add only, ‘<i>tolle, lege</i>’:
<blockquote>We do not advocate war, violence and murder, but at the same time we are not neutral about the issue of our Palestinian people. We are with our oppressed and beleaguered people, who have the right to live freely in their homeland, like the other peoples of the world.
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Palestinians will not surrender to occupation, oppression, exploitation and besiegement. And Palestinians will not surrender to any policy of repression, blackmail or [political] pressure aimed at eliminating the Palestinian issue.
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Our people are living persons who love life, freedom and dignity, and we say to the authors of the slogans of peace to place the first and foremost emphasis on justice. In no way should the executioner and the victim be placed in the same category. Our people are victims of the occupation that will surely disappear, and we as Palestinian Christians stand with our people in this cause. It is our cause, and these people are our people. God help the people who face conspiracy upon all sides, but the Palestinians will not raise the banner of surrender.
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Greetings to the souls of the martyrs and greetings to all those who associate and defend these lands, its sanctity and sanctities.
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To this world that claims to be civilized and rich in democracy and freedoms, we say that you bear a certain degree of responsibility: because you witness the dangerous violations in Jerusalem and other Palestinian sites, and you ignore the unjust practices of the [Israeli] occupation.
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The images of destruction, death and blood hurt us. And we will remain, as we were, advocates of peace based on justice, not on surrender. Peace is one thing and surrender is another. And I believe that the message of the Palestinians to the whole world is that we will not surrender no matter how much they attack us, no matter how much they conspire against our holy places and our people.
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We feel sorrow and pain for every drop of blood that flows, especially that of civilians and innocents. We are not advocates of violence and murder. But we are advocates of right and justice, of the defence of the Palestinian people and their legitimate rights to live in freedom and dignity.</blockquote>Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-67479479041911441032023-09-28T18:18:00.004-05:002023-09-28T19:17:55.751-05:00The Asianness of Jesus (and why it matters)<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgimREHHjYht3ym7AxsLaoBMCeLjuxtK6NcDlSjGfK3h6Ya9UB6JbC-rpEm5MyaxxFjz381daoJ3vsoqOX0F8YoSbvIEFlIMaIsPhPQDLisyH1xBK3s4H1XK1g6WZ-kq2XQpj8AWKUG9-whDxMoLNgG_gat_lTeHsuYUBqOtIAZ8IcCkkDaIXpWhDB4aIno/s759/Screenshot%202023-09-28%20at%2018-03-25%20icon-chinese-saints.jpg%20%28JPEG%20Image%20900%20%C3%97%20506%20pixels%29.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="759" data-original-width="732" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgimREHHjYht3ym7AxsLaoBMCeLjuxtK6NcDlSjGfK3h6Ya9UB6JbC-rpEm5MyaxxFjz381daoJ3vsoqOX0F8YoSbvIEFlIMaIsPhPQDLisyH1xBK3s4H1XK1g6WZ-kq2XQpj8AWKUG9-whDxMoLNgG_gat_lTeHsuYUBqOtIAZ8IcCkkDaIXpWhDB4aIno/s400/Screenshot%202023-09-28%20at%2018-03-25%20icon-chinese-saints.jpg%20%28JPEG%20Image%20900%20%C3%97%20506%20pixels%29.png"/></a></div>
Recently I wrote this post on Facebook.
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<blockquote><i> Jesus was not American.<br />
Jesus was not European.<br />
Jesus was an Asian who was raised in Africa.</i></blockquote>
This struck me as being simply a bald statement of historical and geographical fact, unassailable from the standpoint of simple empiricism. Bethlehem, where our Lord Christ was born (Luke 2:1-20), is a town in the West Bank of Palestine, which is on the continent of Asia. And the town where our Lord Christ was raised by the Theotokos in exile, al-Maṭariyya, is just outside of Cairo in the mainland of Egypt (Matthew 2:13-23), which is on the continent of Africa. And the importance of this fact to me seemed to be obvious, simply by reference to the logic of the Incarnation. God had a flesh-and-blood body. God therefore had a mother, a birthplace, a homeland, a biological family, a career—and all of those things should be revered as such.
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For example: we know that Jesus was a practising Palestinian Jew of the Second Temple. He was descended from the tribe of Judah through His maternal grandfather Joachim, and from the tribe of Levi through His maternal grandmother Anna (according to the <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0847.htm"><i>Protoevangelium of James</i></a>). We know that Jesus spoke a Northwest Semitic language as His mother tongue (Matthew 5:22; Matthew 27:46; Mark 5:41; Mark 7:34; Mark 15:34). In terms of language, the closest modern-day kin to Jesus are the neo-Aramaic-speaking Syrians who live in <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210712-syria-village-which-speaks-language-of-jesus-prepares-for-return-of-pilgrims/">Ma’lûlâ, Syria</a>. We know that He learned Hebrew as a second language: otherwise He would not be able to read and discuss Scripture (Luke 4:16). And He also very likely learned Greek, the common tongue in His region of the Roman Empire, as a third—which is how He would have conversed with Pilate (John 18). We know that Jesus is identified as a Galilean (Matthew 4:12). We know all of this from Holy Scripture.
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However, this was apparently a bit too much for some of my commenters, some of whom baldly asked, ‘So what?’; while another replied a bit more waggishly by pointing out that in those days, Asia referred only to Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and Africa only to the Roman province of Africa (which is now in Libya and Tunisia). To the last point—fair enough. But the former question is one which I think deserves a bit of unpacking.
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As inheritors of Western Christendom, there is a prevailing attitude that Jesus is ‘ours’ by default. Not only is this attitude untrue, but it was also <i>never true</i>. Jesus is not our inheritance by way of civilisational legacy or cultural osmosis. Rather, Jesus <i>becomes</i> our inheritance when we become His, when we join Him in the Eucharist, and through the prayers and disciplines of His Church. Thus, when I say that ‘Jesus is not European’ and ‘not American’, my purpose is not to belittle Europeans. We know that Jesus had among His followers those whom we would now consider European and white, such as the Roman centurion in Matthew 8 and Luke 7. Likewise Jesus had among His followers those whom we would now consider to be black Africans, such as St Simon of Cyrene in Mark 15 and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8.
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Another reason I point this out has to do with modern geopolitics. Jesus Christ lived His life on the ragged periphery of the Roman Empire. The Jordan River marked in a very real sense the liminal division <a href="https://www.bibleodyssey.org/places/related-articles/the-jordan-river-in-israelite-history/">between West and East</a> in the Hebrew imagination: it was the Schengen Line of His time, and His Baptism was very much so an act of religiously-imbued (think: Exodus) <a href="https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/baptism-politically-subversive-act">civil disobedience to Rome</a>. The Roman Empire and its logic were pagan. Judaism was very much so a minority religion and as often as not a persecuted one within the Empire. The fact that Christ appeared <i>as an Aramaic-speaking Mizrahi Jew</i>, that is to say <i>as a West Asian</i>, at that moment in history, is significant. He became Incarnate in a contested region between two huge world empires: one need only look at maps of Rome and Persia all throughout this period to see what I mean. And He was wrongly condemned and crucified as an enemy of one of those empires.
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Just as it was the job of Christians in the first century to peaceably resist the evils of the Roman Empire, so too it is the job of Christians in our day to resist the current Atlanticist, Euro-American Empire, which is ideologically post-Christian and in many senses sub-pagan in terms of our retrograde rejection of metaphysics and higher culture, not to mention our <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2012/01/whose-universe-which-values.html">false pretences</a> to being the arbiter of universality and universal values.
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Note that Jesus never appeals to what the Parthians do at any point in His ministry. In no case, therefore, should our resistance to our empire be conditioned by or referred to what is done by the Russians or by the Chinese. <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-synodal-religious-type-two.html">The Russians worship God</a> and God will care for them. And <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2012/04/confucianism-as-religion-preparing-new.html">the Chinese are yet in the process of rediscovering God</a> after a long period of state-enforced atheism. Rather, it is for the evils <i>of our own culture</i> and <i>our own civilisation</i>, which we shall be called to account at the Last Judgement. And make no mistake that, collectively, we in the West will have some ‘splaining to do.
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But, as one particularly astute commenter observed,
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<blockquote><i> I suspect if you’re getting pushback, it’s from folks who see the “Jesus wasn’t white” line used by people who then try to shove Christ into their own particular postmodern identity politics or to peddle particular partisan liberal political positions. When Christ asks either the “Western chauvinists” or the liberal identity politics advocates “Who do you say I am?”, he’s bound to get the wrong answer either way.</i></blockquote>
This is quite true, and a necessary corrective to what I originally wrote. And, as I responded to him, as often as not nowadays those two groups (Western chauvinists and id-pol liberals) tend to overlap significantly. The significance of the Asianness of Christ is lost, every bit as much on those who would uphold a highly-specific, deracinated, bourgeois <a href="https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/columnists/2022/11/25/boba-liberals-the-derisive-term-for-privileged-asian-liberals/69672282007/"><i>boba</i> liberal</a> understanding of ‘Asian’, as on those who refuse to acknowledge Jesus as anything but a white Anglo-American, whether of a liberal or a conservative cultural posture. Making Jesus a champion of ‘woke’ racial shame in the name of equity, is every bit as spurious and idolatrous as making Him a champion of gun rights.
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When I speak of Christ as Asian, I speak in the mode of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2015/11/blessed-martyr-elias-fondaminsky.html">St Ilya Fondaminsky</a>, when he spoke of Christianity as the ‘response <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-response-of-awakened-east.html">of the awakened East</a>’ to the <i>ersatz</i> universalism of the Hellenic West: a response which ‘tore apart’, even ‘to shreds’, the world order of that time. Even if it’s not entirely right to cast our Saviour as the bringer of a spiritually multipolar world (Christ Himself became <i>the</i> pole), still it’s not entirely wrong either. Rather than swearing fealty to the singular self-sufficient ‘universal’, to the man-god in Rome, the early Christians swore fealty rather to the God-man Who was crucified and Who rose from the dead: to a <i>particular</i> (and only because particular, truly universal) Who was <i>both One and Plural</i> as the Holy Trinity.Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-80387264877477646322023-06-29T23:54:00.001-05:002023-06-29T23:54:09.764-05:00An aphoristic reflectionWhat God asks of us is so simple. To love Him, and to love our neighbour.
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How easy the yoke! How light the burden!
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Yet to <i>fulfil</i> these commandments is the work of a lifetime.Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-76133128153325789322023-06-23T10:27:00.002-05:002023-06-23T10:27:52.552-05:00The synodal religious type: two perspectives<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTyewBMywbZoFCuJLtfmFYvj0WOUUsi198kD15UCzMdWDwJ7WiueQtS3MH38Io4Gco4MQt-WeKaF4nq0f7R0scNXMdS-6h2yuhNEbcvZE8_l0SLPy1sYixU4dLmQRW3q0v5WgrCoIa_8l0Bs2cUsQXo6U9DJqJXpzLKR0ptt0nNdU8d7r2GOujqLpbUEYA/s3296/skobtsova.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="3296" data-original-width="2637" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTyewBMywbZoFCuJLtfmFYvj0WOUUsi198kD15UCzMdWDwJ7WiueQtS3MH38Io4Gco4MQt-WeKaF4nq0f7R0scNXMdS-6h2yuhNEbcvZE8_l0SLPy1sYixU4dLmQRW3q0v5WgrCoIa_8l0Bs2cUsQXo6U9DJqJXpzLKR0ptt0nNdU8d7r2GOujqLpbUEYA/s400/skobtsova.jpg"/></a></div>
<blockquote><i>There is also a path that seeks a genuinely religious relation to people, that does not want either a humanistic simplification of human relations or an ascetic disdain of them...</i></blockquote>
<blockquote><i>We are called to oppose the mystery of authentic human communion to all false relations among people. This is the only path on which Christ’s love can live; moreover, this is the only path of life--outside it is death. Death in the fire and ashes of various hatreds that corrode modern mankind, class, national, and race hatreds, the godless and giftless death of cool, uncreative, imitative, essentially secular democracy.</i><br /><br />
<div align="right">- St Maria (Skobtsova), ‘The Second Gospel Commandment’</div></blockquote>
<blockquote><i>There is much that alarms me on this side of the front </i>[the West]<i>. I look everywhere and nowhere do I find anything that would point to the possibility of any breakthrough from material life to eternity. Occasionally we come across a very uncertain expression of extremely general and diffused idealistic hopes, somewhat in the style of Dostoevsky’s ‘sympathy with everything beautiful and lofty’--but it is all rather vague. They say: ‘We’re defending the right cause, we’re fighting for the liberation of national minorities, or for the federal organisation of Europe, or for democracy.’<br /><br />
These things are not enough. Test yourselves.<br /><br />
Imagine that you must immediately give your life for one of these goals of struggle. Try to imagine a real death. And you will understand that your own life, however modestly you may evaluate its significance, is in some ultimate metaphysical sense greater than any [of these things]...</i><br /><br />
<div align="right">- St Maria (Skobtsova), ‘Insight in Wartime’</div></blockquote>
Rereading Saint Maria (Skobtsova) of Paris’s <a href="https://svspress.com/mother-maria-skobtsova-essential-writings/"><i>Essential Writings</i></a>, I find there is much to discomfort and disturb readers of every political persuasion; not least the persuasion which currently considers itself ‘left-liberal’. Saint Maria’s attitude toward secular humanism and toward political democracy, and toward that constellation of values which currently carries the banner of the European Union, is <i>decidedly</i> negative, even harsh. Again and again throughout her writings she considers <i>bourgeois</i> democracy and its cultural trappings to be nothing but pale, unsatisfactory facsimiles of what Christian love should look like in the public sphere. This places her squarely at odds with contemporary authors like <a href="https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268038960/the-mystical-as-political/">Aristotle Papanikolaou</a>, and affiliated outlets like <i>Public Orthodoxy</i>.
<br /><br />
Her strivings toward a theopolitical ‘synthesis’, for which the touchstones to which she keeps returning for them remain <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2019/11/solovyov-and-problem-of-post-scular.html">Vladimir Solovyov</a>, <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/03/khomyakovs-russian-orthodox-high-toryism.html">Aleksei Khomyakov</a> and <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/12/a-philosophical-fragment-on-saints.html">Fyodor Dostoevsky</a>, were never about reconciling Orthodox Christianity to any purely secular ideal of political life, even as these strivings retained, as they did to the very end of her life, some of their earlier <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2015/10/primitive-and-irrational-autopsy-of.html">socialist, pro-labour</a> character!
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Would she have embraced Putin, as <a href="https://tass.com/society/1070178">Solzhenitsyn did</a>? It is difficult to tell, and in any event, given all that has happened since the Second World War, it is an unfair question to ask. But on the other hand, <i>given what she wrote</i> during that time, it is <i>supremely</i> difficult to imagine that Saint Maria would take the same path of acquiescence to the spirit of the age, that too many Orthodox Christians in Western Europe and America have done. Even more so when one considers that toward the end of her life, Saint Maria of Paris evinced greater and greater pity and sympathy upon her own people, who were bearing the brunt of the Nazi attack. According to her friend and close collaborator Nikolai Berdyaev: ‘she had a passionate love’--even an ‘exceptional love’--‘for Russia and for the Russian people; in the final period of her life, the period of the War, she assumed a tone of passionate patriotism which took on an extreme form’. That patriotism, and the tenor thereof, may be seen in quotes such as this one:
<blockquote><i>It is hard for us Russians. Perhaps never before has history created such tangled and contradictory situations as we now find ourselves in. We may say that, whatever turn things took, under whatever circumstances, we always got hit on the head in passing.</i>
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<div align="right">- St Maria (Skobtsova), ‘Insight in Wartime’</div></blockquote>
It is hard to see such sympathy as ‘extreme’, as Berdyaev does; if there is an extremity to it, it is an extremity of empathy, with which there can be little objection. But it is this Russian patriotism, a patriotism of sympathy-in-suffering, which colours Saint Maria’s treatment of the other ‘types’ of spirituality she identifies, first in her essay ‘A Justification of Pharisaism’ and secondly in her essay ‘Types of Religious Life’. Saint Maria takes the view, an understandable view in the wake of the October Revolution, that the typical religious stance of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-trouble-with-white-emigres.html">the white <i>émigré</i></a>, with its emphasis on a dead autocracy and a reliance on modes of spirituality that were better-suited to a bureaucratic state or noble circles which no longer existed in any meaningful form, was ultimately doomed:
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<blockquote><i>There is no doubt but that on the historical plane the synodal period has come to an end with no possibility of return; there is no basis for assuming that the psychology which it engendered can survive it for long. In this sense it is not important how we assess such a religious type. Only one thing is important: without a doubt it is dying and has no future. The future challenges the Church with complex, new and crucial problems.</i>
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<div align="right">- St Maria (Skobtsova), ‘Types of Religious Life’</div></blockquote>
But despite this harsh, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfNe2uv-bHs">Ezri-like</a> assessment of the synodal religious type, Saint Maria is by no means lacking in sympathy toward it. It comes on the tail end of her having praised, albeit in highly qualified terms, the ordered life which it protected, the traditions which it governed, and the wondrous art and architecture which it inspired. And in her earlier essay, ‘A Justification of Pharisaism’, although she distinctly blames the failures of the synodal type of religiosity with the ‘falling-away’ of the intelligentsia and the forces of revolution that were unleashed on the country, she also says that it is not for the philistine, the one without religious or moral feeling, to attack the synodalists who preserved the treasures of Christianity through times of great suffering and deprivation. And she concludes, poignantly: ‘Yet the Church of that period also had her righteous men.’
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It was in light of going back to read Saint Maria’s <i>Essential Writings</i> that I picked up <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipFa67eZel0">Fr John (Strickland)</a>’s book on <a href="https://www.holytrinitypublications.com/making-holy-russia"><i>The Making of Holy Russia</i></a>. Saint Maria proclaims the doom of this particular type of religious life, and pronounces it exhausted of its creative forces; what Fr John does, is he goes back and examines those creative forces themselves, which were evident in the propagators of the synodal religious type, the champions of autocracy and Russian Orthodox patriotism in the times before the October Revolution. Fr John ultimately holds up the same two sides of the coin that Saint Maria does: both the sympathy for it and the evidence of its failures. But in Fr John’s treatment of the synodal type of religious life, we get to observe those forces in greater detail, in greater historical specificity, than we do in Saint Maria’s rather more <a href="https://orthodoxwiki.org/Typology">typological</a>, artistic (in the sense of painting a portrait rather than taking a photograph) overview of the same. In Fr John’s book we get to see specific figures, thinkers and speakers emerge, on both the reformist and on the conservative side of that religious type.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyMiGZ0sJ7hYVb8HSxEzmUAQ5YgEvdJJ9nuPWG7ink7b6uhq69XsEJFdgy9LI4g00F8TGf-HzWtG3KoXf6hx0PiAwKdOzr9ps6-E8EN9XPkJwg7fgou5htuw5opdQFkKmnJI28a7h7b-ID8t8400OmQcdXeAPsrdKg0g2qDIJ3CdJ9cHAE-KLcnSUSv3w3/s600/strickland.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyMiGZ0sJ7hYVb8HSxEzmUAQ5YgEvdJJ9nuPWG7ink7b6uhq69XsEJFdgy9LI4g00F8TGf-HzWtG3KoXf6hx0PiAwKdOzr9ps6-E8EN9XPkJwg7fgou5htuw5opdQFkKmnJI28a7h7b-ID8t8400OmQcdXeAPsrdKg0g2qDIJ3CdJ9cHAE-KLcnSUSv3w3/s400/strickland.jpg"/></a></div>
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Fr John speaks of Orthodox patriotism in Russia in two distinct phases. The first, largely corresponding to the rule of Tsar Aleksandr III and the early portion of the rule of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/07/centenary-of-royal-passion-bearers.html">Tsar St Nikolai II</a>, is one in which the full creative energies of Orthodox patriotism are bent on both the ‘internal mission’ of the Church (to Russia’s lukewarm-to-apostate intellectual and noble classes) and on the ‘external mission’ (somewhat misleadingly so called, as it pertains to missionary activities among the Russian Empire’s non-Russian ethnic minorities). The task of crafting a theology of love of homeland, and love of the people therein, in fact <i>required</i> a great deal of creative energy and endeavour; especially given that <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2014/03/slavophilia-and-russian-idea.html">Russia’s Slavophil inheritance</a> rendered most clergymen of the time especially <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/06/more-thoughts-on-orthodoxy-and.html">sceptical of the Western-style nation-state</a> and the revolutionary secular mass-political ideology that accompanied it.
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And so you see in <i>The Making of Holy Russia</i> a large number of different and disparate voices adding to this conversation, ranging from staid reactionary critics of progress such as <a href="https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%80_%28%D0%91%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87%29">Archbishop Nikanor (Brovkovich)</a> of Odessa and <a href="https://orthodoxlife.org/scripture/agony-christ-gethsemane/">Archpriest John (Vostorgov)</a>, to socialists such as <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/svetlov-pavel-iakovlevich">Archpriest Dr Pavel (Svetlov)</a>. This is in a time, under Tsar Aleksandr III when there was already articulated an ideological doctrine of Official Nationality, the questions of how the Church with its universal mission and imperatives could be reconciled with duties to the state and (the growing sense) to the people, began being explored with an acute intensity of interest. However, there was a strong sense during this period that State and Church were indeed in harmony, and that the Tsar could be trusted to be an Apostolic statesman in the mould of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2017/05/constantine-helena-and-christian.html">St Constantine</a> or <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2014/07/remembering-baptism-of-kievan-rus.html">St Vladimir</a>.
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There was something of a crisis among these adherents to Russian Orthodox patriotism when Tsar Nikolai II began calling for a degree of religious freedom and official sanction to followers of other faiths in the Empire, beginning in 1902. He issued several edicts which seemed to hint at a desire for greater religious toleration in the Russian Empire, which rather disturbed Orthodox patriots such as Archpriest John (Vostorgov). In 1905, after the events of 22 January, Tsar Nikolai II made good on these promises with <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/30/on-this-day-nicholas-ii-signs-decree-for-tolerance-development-a65437">his Paschal Edict</a> making religious toleration a policy which held throughout the Empire. This precipitated something of a crisis of conscience among Russian Orthodox patriots, who were suddenly in the uncomfortable position of attempting to uphold an autocracy which was no longer keeping up its ‘end of the bargain’ to support the Church. One bone of particular contention in this matter regarded the Old Believers, who (as Fr John notes) had in many ways a more convincing claim to represent the ‘national faith’ of the Russian people than the synodal Church did.
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This led to Orthodox churchmen taking several different paths. One path was into the arms of the ‘patriotic unions’, or <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Black-Hundreds">Black Hundreds</a>. This was very much a minority option, as most of the Orthodox clergy regarded these unions as revolutionary in temperament, and ‘pagan’ in their understanding of nationality. (It is worthy of note that the term ‘pagan’ in Russian, <i>языческий</i> connotes a connection to language as a marker of ethnic belonging.) Additionally, Orthodox clerics who were involved in the ‘external mission’ openly abhorred the Black Hundreds’ hostility to the <i>inorodtsy</i> as an impediment precisely to that mission. Among the Orthodox figures who <i>did</i> approach the Black Hundreds, none of them did so uncritically. Here Fr John highlights the examples of <a href="https://orthodoxwiki.org/Anthony_%28Khrapovitsky%29_of_Kiev">Archbishop Antonii (Khrapovitskii)</a>, whose objections to the worst forms of nationalism are a <a href="http://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2017/08/metropolitan-antony-and-bishop-saint.html">matter of public record</a>, Archpriest John (Vostorgov) and lay Orthodox publicist Vladimir Skvortsov. Even though the latter two figures did occasionally lapse into ethno-nationalism of the type represented by the ‘patriotic unions’, on the whole these three attempted to soften and convert the pagan ethno-nationalist revolutionism of the Black Hundreds into something more recognisably Christian.
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Another approach was taken by Orthodox intellectuals and philosophers, of whom Fr John highlights Vladimir Solovyov, <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/02/two-post-marxist-paths.html">Fr Sergei (Bulgakov)</a> and the artist <a href="https://modernmyrrhbearers.com/art-mikhail-nesterov/">Mikhail Nesterov</a>. These three figures, as a general tendency, attempted to articulate and promote a form of Russian Orthodox patriotism that was civic and plurinational rather than ethnic, embracing suffering rather than embracing revolutionism, and approaching social and economic problems with a greater urgency of need than approaching military ones. Both the religious idealism of Solovyov, which was later embraced and tempered by Fr Sergei, and the artistic hallowing of the Russian wilderness and the ‘feminine’ genius of the national Russian saints which was exposited by Nesterov, provided an alternative understanding of Russian Orthodox patriotism. This is the more radical understanding which was picked up by Saint Maria of Paris in her later years; Saint Maria was a close friend of Fr Sergei (Bulgakov), and drew explicitly on the thought of Vladimir Solovyov in her intellectual life.
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Fr John bookends his discussion of Russian Orthodox patriotism of the ‘synodal’ type with two public Orthodox commemorations: that of the glorification of <a href="https://obitel-minsk.org/en/st-seraphim-of-sarov-life">Saint Seraphim of Sarov</a>, and that of the glorification of <a href="https://obitel-minsk.org/en/hieromartyr-hermogenes-dispelling-cowardice-from-people-s-hearts">Patriarch St Ermogen of Moscow</a>. In his comparison and contrast of these two commemorations, the first one being much more public and commented-upon than the latter, with the latter courting some controversy as a result of the fractured state of Orthodox patriotism at the time. (For example, the Old Believers, using their newfound freedom of the press, put forward a case that St Ermogen was in fact the last true representative of the Old Belief before the Petrine and Nikonian reforms distorted the witness of the official Church.) At the same time, though, Fr John notes that despite the failures (again in agreement with St Maria) of the synodalists to articulate a coherent vision of their understanding of the links between the universal Church and the Russian people, there <i>was</i> significant creative energy that went into the endeavour.
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This is a necessary step, I think, to understanding the situation that Russia finds itself in now. Again, they find themselves in a tangled and contradictory circumstance in which their heads are getting hit in passing. They find themselves the target of superpower posturing and encroachment, they find their brethren in Donbass, Crimea, Kherson and Zaporozh’e under threat, they find themselves backed into an intolerable situation. And the Russian Orthodox Church, under Patriarch Kirill, now finds itself once again having to walk a tightrope between being a national Church with deep ties to the Russian state, and an international / post-Imperial Church with flocks of many different ethnic groups in numerous countries in the former Soviet lands. This is a situation which calls for understanding and <i>informed</i> criticism rather than the mere blind opprobrium and self-satisfied sententious sermonising in which Western Christians (including Orthodox Christians living in the West) are now wont to indulge.Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-14284286962238509062023-06-14T18:56:00.004-05:002023-06-14T18:56:54.181-05:00Fr Andrei Tkachev: interviews on socialism<a href="https://medium.com/@erichmakarov_27425/why-i-believe-andrei-tkachev-d7819f9a35c6">Fr Andrei Tkachev</a>, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church with a notable and high-profile public presence, has given two noteworthy interviews which touch on the topics of political economy. In this one, he is answering a question from economist Mair Bek about socialist economics (as divorced from socialism as a comprehensive doctrine) and also about secularisation. Intriguingly, although Fr Andrei is rather unsympathetic to secularism, his attitude toward socialist economics is much more nuanced. It is to be borne in mind from the outset that Fr Andrei has <a href="https://www.pravoslavie.ru/srpska/print118911.htm">the exact same critiques</a> of the early Bolshevik terror and of communism that practically every single Orthodox thinker has had since that time and even before (and he is of course equally and likewise critical of both liberalism and nationalism, on the basis that all three set up human concepts and worship them idolatrously as gods). However, listen to what he has to say here (and turn on the English auto-translation of the CC as needed):
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Of particular interest to me is how Fr Andrei warns <i>precisely</i> against socialism <i>as a comprehensive doctrine</i>, but evidently believes that one ‘can and should’ adopt ‘the best of all social teachings which have justified themselves’ from the socialist period. Even more interesting, is that he cites <i>China</i> as an example to follow, not just Sweden and not just ancient Greece! It makes me wonder if he is simply tossing China off as an off-the-cuff example, or if he is talking about Chinese antiquity, or if he is talking specifically about <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2017/10/one-foot-in-big-red-circle.html">the Chinese model</a> of social and economic organisation in the wake of Deng Xiaoping. Given the growing closeness between Russia and China over these past few years in particular, it makes me somewhat more sceptical of the first interpretation.
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And then there is <i>this</i> interview, with <i>Pravoslavie.Ru</i>, in which Fr Andrei Tkachev in a much more decided and firm manner <i>defended the Soviet Union</i>, at least in its later post-Lenin and post-Trotsky phase, as a ‘beautiful country’ which encouraged high culture, <i>literature and music and art</i>, promoted literacy, upheld positive social norms and essentially prepared the ground for a new flourishing of Christianity. This is a much more interesting perspective, as he is taking the <i>post-ideological</i> bend of the late Soviet period and asserting it as a kind of <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%2017&version=KJV">‘altar to an unknown God’</a>. Again, this is a particularly fascinating perspective for me to hear, as this is a priest whom we in the US would consider ‘Generation X’, that is to say precisely that he was raised in the late Soviet Union and has a first-hand degree of insight into what those years were like.
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Anyway, some real wisdom and worthwhile economic insights in the public addresses of Fr Andrei. Hopefully more people listen, who are in a position to take counsel from him.Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-30558441466141728202023-06-03T14:32:00.001-05:002023-06-03T14:33:34.338-05:00Lord, when did we see...?<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI1lpQl8X35o2I7fOnt5JAkLs8qxP7tKyWVTk68MbaMhzpf18MjEQyfSzUfU54O1f93Gspo3sOqGGrrMWlHfQ2y7d4RgZDxNMXE7mh-Q2tCf2OLa7bkJXQA3_MJRxHpVIcfi66pYRvgGCH3W4cx5vXZatr43vDH4oPwoVExQfaz3NrlE94_B501dwOgA/s1460/headlineImage.adapt.1460.high.homelessness_a.1424295907496.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="911" data-original-width="1460" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI1lpQl8X35o2I7fOnt5JAkLs8qxP7tKyWVTk68MbaMhzpf18MjEQyfSzUfU54O1f93Gspo3sOqGGrrMWlHfQ2y7d4RgZDxNMXE7mh-Q2tCf2OLa7bkJXQA3_MJRxHpVIcfi66pYRvgGCH3W4cx5vXZatr43vDH4oPwoVExQfaz3NrlE94_B501dwOgA/s400/headlineImage.adapt.1460.high.homelessness_a.1424295907496.jpg"/></a></div>
For I was hungry, and you <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/05/snap-food-stamps-debt-ceiling-deal">cut my SNAP benefits</a>;<br />
For I was thirsty, and you <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/climate/line-3-pipeline-biden.html">ran tar sands pipelines through my water</a>;<br />
I was a stranger, and you <a href="https://mronline.org/2022/01/21/the-700000-club/">detained and deported me</a>;<br />
Naked, and you <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/02/adams-nypd-homeless-camps-00022473">set the cops on me</a>;<br />
Sick, and you <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/biden-s-plans-america-s-medical-debt-crisis-fall-short-n1294510">handed me a six-figure medical bill</a>;<br />
In prison, and you <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/us/joe-biden-crime-laws.html">said I deserved to be there for life</a>.Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-21981536484877568902023-06-02T23:15:00.002-05:002023-06-02T23:29:14.612-05:00‘Humble Month’?<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0c-2PMsvYW09KhVdWI58rT_3wvl49BeRYkMq0Kg37v1OY8DBmgxyYy38Fq01Nr7Femob5p8hiWi9iH8MgRDBzi3lMeEvI6F2dV_F4COSJ9XnfKKZ6PNfREpETiCO58DskqVz4pPQ95WPLqOgOwFRpBlL0c9XlGLx8JogXBmfMTeGfQSCAy3MgNWlRjw/s756/trinity.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="756" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0c-2PMsvYW09KhVdWI58rT_3wvl49BeRYkMq0Kg37v1OY8DBmgxyYy38Fq01Nr7Femob5p8hiWi9iH8MgRDBzi3lMeEvI6F2dV_F4COSJ9XnfKKZ6PNfREpETiCO58DskqVz4pPQ95WPLqOgOwFRpBlL0c9XlGLx8JogXBmfMTeGfQSCAy3MgNWlRjw/s400/trinity.jpg"/></a></div>
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I have seen some Orthodox Christians recently begin talking about the possibility of making June <a href="https://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/2023/06/june-is-orthodox-christianity-month-we-celebrate-humility/">‘Humility Month’</a> or ‘Humble Month’. The idea is that, as the secular culture around us is celebrating <a href="https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/lgbt-pride-month-became-religious-holiday/">gay pride</a> (including the advocates of secular culture from the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230326034606/https://orthodoxyindialogue.com/2022/06/06/happy-pride-month-from-orthodoxy-in-dialogue/">sadly predictable usual quarters</a>), we should seek to exalt instead the virtue of humility as an antidote to pride of all kinds. Speaking as an Orthodox Christian layman, I’m here to say that ‘Humble Month’ is a bad idea… but not for the reasons you might think.
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Two days from now, in the Orthodox Church, we will celebrate the feast of the fullness of the revelation of the Holy Spirit in history. We will celebrate <a href="https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2023/06/04/45-holy-pentecost">the Last and Great Day</a>, the dawning of the great fire, the holy fire which descended upon the heads of the Apostles as they gathered together ‘in one place’, in the Cenacle at Jerusalem. It is the last of the great feasts in the Church, and it marks the historical beginning of the Church in the world.
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Let us be absolutely clear about the meaning of this feast. It is a day upon which the Gospel of salvation went forth by grace into the hearing of <i>all peoples</i>. A new word, indeed the Word of Truth, was proclaimed even in the tongues of the <a href="http://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2023/05/why-does-saint-paul-mention-scythians.html">most despised barbarians</a>.
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The Book of Acts mentions several nations which heard this word in their own native language: Parthians and Medes (speakers of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2015/10/in-defence-of-iranian-civilisation.html">Iranian languages</a>); Elamites (speakers of an <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110513235032/http://www.ancientscripts.com/elamite.html">extinct language isolate</a>); Mesopotamians (speakers of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2020/09/holy-equal-to-apostles-thekla.html">Aramaic</a>, with <a href="https://omniglot.com/writing/akkadian.htm">Akkadian</a> still in liturgical use); Judæa (Aramaic and <a href="https://omniglot.com/writing/hebrew.htm">Hebrew</a>); Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia Minor (<a href="https://neoskosmos.com/en/2022/06/28/dialogue/opinion/pontian-and-cappadocian-greek-the-languages-that-struggle-to-survive-post-genocide/">dialects of Greek</a>); Phrygia (<a href="https://omniglot.com/writing/phrygian.htm">Phrygian</a>); Pamphylia (Greek); Egypt (<a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-education-of-salama-musa.html">Coptic</a>); Libya (<a href="https://omniglot.com/writing/tamahaq.htm">Tamahaq</a>, Greek and <a href="https://omniglot.com/writing/latin2.htm">Latin</a>); Rome (Latin); Crete (Greek); and Arabia (<a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2019/05/debunking-some-hasbara-talking-points.html">Arabic</a>). These languages were <i>all explicitly sanctified</i> in Scripture by the Holy Spirit. And even those which were not explicitly sanctified here were blessed in the Great Commission. (As a result, it makes better sense, following the logic of Pentecost, for Orthodox Christians to celebrate June as <a href="https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1466616436543/1534874922512">Indigenous History Month</a> the way they do in Canada. The languages of those who were here first are similarly blessed. But I digress.)
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The fire that descended upon the Apostles at Pentecost was <i>not a destroying fire</i>. It was not the fire that consumes. It was the same as the fire that Moses beheld in the Burning Bush—a fire which illumines, is the essence of creativity. This is the fire of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost calls us to a <i>creative</i> and <i>self-giving</i> relationship to the world. What better evidence could there be of this, than of the Word being preached in the tongues of all the nations present in Jerusalem? It ought to go without saying, though, that Pentecost <i>also calls us to be humble</i>. As <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2016/01/remembering-righteous-father-john.html">Saint John of Kronstadt</a> <a href="http://livingorthodoxfaith.blogspot.com/2009/11/on-humility-by-st-john-of-kronstadt.html">said</a>: ‘<i>The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, who fills the whole universe, passes through all believing, meek, humble, good, and simple human souls, dwelling in them, vivifying and strengthening them.</i>’ Pride has no place at Pentecost. The Holy Spirit finds no place to dwell in those who are filled up with themselves, their own ‘me’-ness.
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So ‘Humility Month’ gets at least this one thing—and it is quite an important thing—right. Humility before the Holy Spirit is very much <i>needful</i>; without it, we are nothing. On the other hand, though, the whole ‘Humility Month’ business strikes me as a purely reactive posture. It takes as primary, not the witness of the Orthodox Calendar and the Liturgical cycle ordained by the power of the Holy Spirit… but instead the imitative liturgics of the surrounding secular culture. It bases its witness not on Pentecost, but on an evil or a privation to be opposed. This is, to put it bluntly, almost an <i>anti-</i>Pentecost approach.
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If such reaction is at times a deep and understandable temptation in an age where <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-vampire-castle-sorties-against.html">identity politics</a> and <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-problem-with-woke-ad-campaigns.html">‘woke’-ism</a> seem to have gone completely amok, we should nonetheless understand the impulse <i>as</i> temptation, <i>as</i> a passion in the Patristic sense. Orthodox Christians should certainly not strive to mimic the culture in opposition—in other words, to posture as a set-theoretical <i>not-X</i> to the culture’s <i>X</i>. There is so much that is <i>truly good</i>, that is <i>original</i> in the Orthodox culture—what I should say is, the Orthodox <i>cultures</i> that were sanctified at Pentecost, be they Greek, Arabic, African, Persian, Syriac, Latin, or any of the cultures that were baptised afterward—that there should be <i>no need</i> for us to make a commemorative ‘Month’ that is simply the stated opposite of what a weak, shallow and exhausted consumerist culture finds ‘good’.
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Let us be <i>truly humble</i>, then, if that is our aim. Let us proclaim the Pentecost in whatever language we can find to hand—surely that language will by no means exhaust the Holy Spirit’s glory. Let us be <i>creative and self-giving</i> as the Apostles were then. Let us make <i>more</i> than a Month of it, for the Pentecost is the <i>fiftieth day</i>, the fullness of time in the new creation. Let us be proclaimers of Christ Risen and Ascended. Let us be seekers of the Father’s abundant mercies. Let us be witnesses of the Holy Spirit’s work in the world.Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-23788423719514341612023-05-17T11:09:00.003-05:002023-05-17T11:22:33.619-05:00Why does Saint Paul mention the Scythians?<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq4Z83NXsugBNWbW-7dxk44TGPtnQFtQfZkcV87dHPqdUz3HsW1YP-ly6mH-VjA610dznwNi8FVgULB--NSveV0Kvr8VbF7iX0IssQci_ffRd7je7XROcuph6cySM8Z6-cmJktT2Hq0L0ys8Ydll6Nxs1kJyqtsxb244vrl0EXsP9keaGwD05b1BVQFg/s636/main-qimg-8a481165bc8bdb2a7b86a2970aa6e3e2-lq.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="636" data-original-width="602" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq4Z83NXsugBNWbW-7dxk44TGPtnQFtQfZkcV87dHPqdUz3HsW1YP-ly6mH-VjA610dznwNi8FVgULB--NSveV0Kvr8VbF7iX0IssQci_ffRd7je7XROcuph6cySM8Z6-cmJktT2Hq0L0ys8Ydll6Nxs1kJyqtsxb244vrl0EXsP9keaGwD05b1BVQFg/s400/main-qimg-8a481165bc8bdb2a7b86a2970aa6e3e2-lq.jpeg"/></a></div>
<blockquote><i>Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.</i> (Colossians 3:11)</blockquote>
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In terms of ancestry, I am genetically related to a number of different peoples who lived in Late Antiquity: the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the Cherusci, the Chatti, the Thuringii, the Langobardi (all Germanic peoples), the Gauls and Britons (both Celts) and the Pannonian Illyrians. One tribe among my ancestors, however, stands out: the Scythians. The Scythians were a nomadic people who lived in the Caucasus Mountains around what is now Georgia and southern Russia; as they expanded, their territory extended across the Pontic Steppe as far as Moldova and Romania to the west, and to the east as far as Kazakhstan. Like most nomadic peoples of the time, they were a motley crew, and probably included diverse elements including Iranian, Turkic, Finnic-Ugric and Caucasian. Their rule extended briefly into Asia Minor; later on, a number of allied tribes emerged from what had been the Scythian Empire: the <a href="http://www.silk-road.com/artl/sarmatian.shtml">Sauromatæ</a>, the <a href="https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/massagetae">Massagetæ</a>, the <a href="https://iranicaonline.org/articles/cimmerians-nomads">Cimmerians</a> and the <a href="http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Altera/sakas.html">Saka, or Sai</a>. The <a href="https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/alans-an-ancient-iranian-tribe-of-the-northern-scythian-saka-sarmatian-massagete-group-known-to-classical-writers-from">Alans</a> (or <a href="https://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hhshu/notes19.html">Yancai</a>), the nomadic people who invaded Europe along with the Huns and from whom <a href="https://www.rbth.com/politics_and_society/2016/10/28/the-ossetians-from-nomads-and-warriors-to-the-artists-of-the-caucasus_643015">the modern culture of the Ossetians</a> descends, were themselves a scion of the Scythian stem.
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The great question is: why did Saint Paul include the Scythians in this passage in Colossians?
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To answer that question, we need to understand first the connotation that term <i>Σκυθης</i> had to the Greek-speaking audience that Saint Paul was addressing. To the Greeks, and to the entirety of the Roman Empire in fact, the Scythians were the penultimate barbarians. From the Greek perspective, <a href="https://raceethnancientmedhistory.wordpress.com/2019/03/11/scythians-who-were-they-really/">the Scythians were seen as savages</a>: ruthless, cruel, inebriated, undisciplined, lacking in restraint. They were purported to drink the blood of their enemies and fashion the skulls of those they killed into drinking-vessels. The Greeks often used the imagery of wild animals to describe the Scythians.
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But the relationship of the Greeks to the Scythians was more complex than this. Scythian culture was as often an object of desire or wistful longing. For example, the Greek myth of the Amazons was probably derived from the way Scythian (specifically Sauromatae) women would wear weapons and armour and participate in war. There was thus an element of sexual exoticism that accompanied the Scythians. In other places, Scythians were often cast in the role of the ‘noble savage’: free from the constraints of civilisation and thus in a permanent state of childlike innocence. In a word, the Greek attitude toward the Scythians may be described as <a href="http://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2015/10/in-defence-of-iranian-civilisation.html">a progenitor</a> or as an early example of <a href="https://theconversation.com/orientalism-edward-saids-groundbreaking-book-explained-197429"><i>orientalism</i></a>.
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As Saint Paul was both an educated Jew and a Roman citizen, we should not imagine that he was ignorant of any portion of this context, or that his choice of the word <i>Σκυθης</i> in this list was accidental. On one level, we may take it as read that there were Scythians among the members of the Early Church; there’s not really any reason to doubt, given the presence of Scythians in Asia Minor, that Saint Paul was not speaking literally here. But on another level, the inclusion of <i>Σκυθης</i> points to a much deeper element in the Pauline discourse. Given <i>what the Scythians represented</i> to the Greek audience he was addressing, Paul’s explicit inclusion of them in his description of the Church and its members is an implicit <i>rebuke</i> of these orientalist or proto-orientalist attitudes among them. Just as Greeks did not have to undergo circumcision to be included in the <i>ἐκκλησία</i>, so Paul is saying, <i>nor did Jews have to give up their identities as Jews</i> to be included in the <i>ἐκκλησία</i>, so too were barbarians welcome as long as they were sincere in following Christ. Even Scythians were welcome in the <i>ἐκκλησία</i>, without having to be Hellenised first!
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Does any of this sound familiar?
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These days there is a marked increase in orientalist discourse on account of the world organising itself into a ‘harder’ NATO bloc, the ‘West’, aligned firmly against ‘the rest’, most notably <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-ally-patrushev-says-russia-is-now-fighting-nato-ukraine-2023-01-10/">against Russia</a> and <a href="https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/implementing-natos-strategic-concept-on-china/">against China</a>. It is disingenuous to pretend that the facts are otherwise. It is also disingenuous to pretend that Russian and Chinese people are not the <a href="http://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2018/07/russophobia-as-orientalism.html">objects of orientalist fantasising</a> on the part of the West, even in the present day, or that Ukrainian nationalist discourse (fervently stoked by NATO actors) isn’t deliberately <a href="https://acpo.vedeckecasopisy.cz/publicFiles/001248.pdf">invoking these orientalist tropes</a> as part-and-parcel of its anti-Russian <i>pathos</i>.
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Saint Paul would reject all of this, utterly. He would reject out-of-hand the <i>a priori</i> assumptions of both Ukrainian nationalism and the aggressive Western, particularly American and British, chauvinism against Russia and China. He rejected them in his own day, as Colossians 3:11 makes plain. Saint Paul was neither in the business of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/06/donald-trump-warn-future-west-in-doubt-warsaw-speech">‘defending the West’</a>, nor of <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/21/biden-ukraine-russia-nato-democracy-00083812">‘defending democracy’</a>. He was not in the business of defeating the enemies of Rome by force, no matter how ‘barbaric’ they were. Nor was he even in the business of converting the ‘barbarians’ to either a Greek or a Jewish civilisational standard. He was in the business of bringing the good news of Christ—who was both Jewish and Roman, as well as being an outlaw to both worlds when He was put to death on the Cross—to the world, barbarians, even Scythians, and by extension those even further east, very much included.
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Saint Ilya Fondaminskii-Bunakov, himself a Jew by ancestry, provocatively suggested that Christianity was the spiritual response, even the ‘revenge’, of <a href="https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-response-of-awakened-east.html">the awakened East</a> against the false, pretentious, homogenising universalisms of Greek and Roman civilisation. Intriguingly, he even referred specifically to the Scythians as a formative ‘Eastern’ influence on the Russian state. In our own day, we need to recover this insight with regard to the false, pretentious, homogenising universalism of the American <i>imperium</i>. Our own <i>imperium</i> elevates to godhead not necessarily a Cæsar or a god-emperor (though we do have people <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/god-emperor-trump">with such pretensions</a>, for which irony is but a flimsy excuse). Instead we promote a set of falsely-universal ideals (whether bourgeois democracy, capitalism, industrialism, even shallow identitarian ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity-equity-inclusion’) in whose name that <i>imperium</i> is enforced through economic, political and military violence. If we are to take Saint Paul’s admonition to the Colossians seriously, then we should prepare a world, at the very least an <i>ἐκκλησία</i> in which Russians are free to be Russians, Chinese are free to be Chinese, Iranians are free to be Iranians, Syrians to be Syrians, Vietnamese to be Vietnamese, Indigenous to be Indigenous—not with any chauvinism or pretensions to grandeur attached, for in Christ and His kingdom such worldly distinctions are devoid of importance, but in the full depth of their cultural belonging.
Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-18514054603704938922023-04-16T09:59:00.005-05:002023-04-16T13:50:11.574-05:00Христос Воскресе!<div class="separator" style="clear: both;" align="center"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWxpm8nLa4Q9uI3apX6mXD9SNicHyITTuURhR9uoyy2xMINmhKUUkfeWURX3ySEXmZOS_9mMS5J9f4MMbchoMEvjVB-fipzoG4wu2ZYoameJNiUBNzxu9XzVWNFIoPqk2C_HRJZkCj0ONekZAXUNdooraiPJBYoRIJMW7LgQ-AJTvTIQ1cHleHKUjN5A/s498/%D1%85%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%81-jesus.gif"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWxpm8nLa4Q9uI3apX6mXD9SNicHyITTuURhR9uoyy2xMINmhKUUkfeWURX3ySEXmZOS_9mMS5J9f4MMbchoMEvjVB-fipzoG4wu2ZYoameJNiUBNzxu9XzVWNFIoPqk2C_HRJZkCj0ONekZAXUNdooraiPJBYoRIJMW7LgQ-AJTvTIQ1cHleHKUjN5A/s400/%D1%85%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%81-jesus.gif"/></a><br />
Христос воскресе! Воистину воскресе! (<i>Church Slavonic</i>)<br />
Христос шэнтэ! Вӯййкэсьтан шэнтэ! (<i>Kildin Sámi</i>)<br />
Чырысти райгас! Æцæгæй райгас! (<i>Ossetian</i>)<br />
Христос чĕрĕлнĕ! Чăн чĕрĕлнĕ! (<i>Chuvash</i>)<br />
Христос бунидиэни дидюхэ! Тэде бунидиэни дидюхэ! (<i>Hezhen</i>)
</div>Matthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.com0