Prayers for Prešov

Last Friday a gas explosion ripped through an apartment complex on Mukačevská ulica in the eastern Slovak town of Prešov. Ninety professional and twenty-nine volunteer firefighters were despatched to fight the conflagration, which was successfully extinguished only on Saturday evening. Eight people have died so far; dozens more have lost their homes. It’s one of the worst tragœdies of this sort to afflict Prešov. President Zuzana Čaputová has offered her condolences; Mayor of Prešov Andrea Turčanová has organised a volunteer fund for the victims; and Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini has visited the city and allocated €1,000,000 in government funds for repairs, reconstruction and aid.

Prešov is the largest city of Eastern Slovakia and also the capital of its eponymous region. The Orthodox Christians of Slovakia – overwhelmingly belonging to the Carpatho-Rusin minority – mostly belong to this region. It is home to the former ecclesiastical capital of the Eparchy of Mukačevo and Užhorod (formerly the Eparchy of Mukačevo and Prešov under the Serbian Church), the Cathedral of Saint Aleksandr Nevsky, and it has been important to Orthodoxy since the days of Saints Cyril and Methodius.

If possible, gentle readers, please do contribute something to Ms Turčanová’s emergency fund to aid those who were bereaved or made temporarily homeless by the blast. It should be possible to use the Xoom or Venmo services to donate. The fund account belongs to ČSOB Banka, and the account number is SK90 7500 0000 0040 0859 1229, variable number 6122019. The fund is in the name of the city: Mesto Prešov. And, of course, please keep the people of Prešov, particularly those who are dead or grieving or homeless, in your prayers.

China, Syria, Uighurs and the Silk Road redux

Syrian Foreign Minister Walîd al-Mu‘allem
with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi 王毅

In one of the least surprising headlines of the past few news cycles, the government of Syria is thus far the only government to defend China’s human rights record in Xinjiang, in response to the Uighur Act recently passed by the US House of Representatives.

The Syrian people have good reasons to distrust Uighurs, and good reasons to want them kept as much as possible within Chinese borders. The Uighur members of Jabhat al-Nusra affiliate Turkistan Islâmic Party (formerly the East Turkistan Independence Movement), who follow the radically-puritanical and grotesquely-violent Salafist form of Sunnî Islâm, have been active in northern Syria as some of the most vicious jihâdist groups outside of Dâ‘iš. The Uighur jihâdists have raped, tortured and crucified Arab Christians. They’ve beheaded civilian prisoners. They’ve kidnaped children as young as five to harvest their organs. This last charge should indeed render their accusations of organ harvesting against the Chinese government psychologically-suspicious. And they’ve done all this under the protection and logistical support of the Turkish government. So neither the Syrian government nor the people are going to shed too many tears about younger Uighur men being kept home by the authorities in China.

Of course, on the positive side, the Syrian government and the Chinese government have a relationship of long standing which can be traced in the immediate term to the 1960s. That’s when the Arab Socialist Ba‘ath Party began aligning itself globally with the Chinese Communists in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split. However, this relationship is not of recent provenance. It can with some justice actually be traced back to the An Lushan Rebellion 安史之乱 against the Tang Dynasty, when the Arab Caliphate sent cavalry to China to help them put down the rebellion. Notably, An Lushan was a tribesman of Central Asia, and the Arabs of the Levant clearly thought it to be in their best interests to aid the government of China instead. The Chinese (Nestorian) Christian general Guo Ziyi 郭子仪 fought alongside these Arabic knights.

More recently, the sæcular Arab nationalist states which were formed in the wake of the First World War formed some natural allegiances with the Hui Muslim minority in China. The Hui Muslims were, in fact, the descendants of Arab, Persian and Turkic traders on the Silk Road and their Chinese spouses. For the most part they practised a traditional, but moderate, form of Sunnî Islâm – that of the Hanafî school of jurisprudence – and they culturally assimilated to Chinese culture while still retaining the particular use of Arabic in religious settings. The Hui sought Arab help against Japan in the Second World War, and the Arab states which tended to be the most sympathetic were those led by left-wing nationalist figures who inclined to moderation in religious matters themselves.

The roots of Uighur discontent in China have a lot to do with the Hui Muslims, who have historically occupied a kind of ‘model minority’ status in China. Here I may be tipping my own hand a bit, but the Uighurs I worked with were intensely proud of being distinct. One Uighur co-teacher I had tended to look down on her Kazakh co-workers, which rather took me aback. But I learned that there was a historical reason for this. The Uighurs still consider themselves the heirs of the Chagatai Khanate, in which they still tend to place a great deal of civilisational pride. They have long held a certain kind of resentment against the Hui Muslims, who – like them – were Hanafî Muslims of a fairly tolerant form of devotion. But the Hui were culturally Sinicised, which offended the sensibilities of the Uighurs. The Hui became the symbols of cultural accommodationism, which also rendered them a target of nationalist violence and, later, fundamentalist terror. The Uighurs shed the first blood in this case, attacking a caravan of Hui civilians near Qeshger in 1933 and killing about 800 people.

This is not to say that the Hui themselves have been immune to the siren call of Salafism; indeed, the first Salafi group to enter China was largely through the Nationalist-aligned Xibei San Ma, and they called themselves the Yihewani 伊赫瓦尼, or the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ – though the relations between this group and the Ægyptian ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ of Sayyid Qutb are nebulous. However, these early waves of Salafism in China have generally been hostile to the newer ones, as well as to the historical Hanafî. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the Hanafî majority of the Hui largely sided with the Communists in the Civil War, against the Yihewani.

Even so: a lot of the cultural erosion of Uighur identity, over which Anglophone liberals are now crying such obnoxious crocodile tears, has actually occurred gradually, from below, over the past four decades. The primary agent of that erosion has actually not been the Chinese state! The Saudis and the Turks, who have been pushing on them this poisonous puritanical ideology of Salafism, have been encouraging the Uighurs to undercut their own traditional jurisprudence and the use of their own language in religious venues. Even traditional architecture has not been safe from Saudi influence!

What’s more, the Arab states, both sæcular and not, have been actively monitoring the situation in Xinjiang, and their analysis is far more relevant and trenchant than the usual yellow-peril tinged analyses coming out of the Beltway and the Anglophone press. The commentary of the Dubai-based and Saudi-funded Al Mesbar Studies and Research Centre is actually quite explicit about the history of Islâmic thought in Uighur nationalist circles. They are clear about its progression from the traditional devotions of the Hanafî school toward modern Salafism. They are also clear about the contradictions between the Hanafî and Sûfî majority in China and the Salafi minority.

The genesis of the roots of Salafism can be traced back to Mongol expansionism and its contemporary origins to European colonialism. Salafism assumed a new dimension after the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in the 20^th century and was reinvigorated with increased globalisation in 21st century. The Kingdom of al Saud aggressively promoted its brand of Salafism called Wahhabism. With religious exchanges and educational programs, Saudi influence and funding gathered momentum. With the oil money transformed the landscape of Islâm, the call to go back is Salafism found resonance among Muslims worldwide.

The fastest growing Islâmic movement in the world is Salafism. The ideological footprint of Salafism in China is growing. Salafism is an ideological spectrum from the peaceful to the violent. Like elsewhere in the world, the Muslims most susceptible to recruitment by extremist and terrorist groups are those who have embraced Salafism. With the increased contact with South Asia and the Middle East, the Chinese Muslims have been influenced by the Salafi-Jihâdi-Takfiri ideologies. With greater interaction, Chinese Muslims realized that Islâm in their own country has been adapted. Although most Salafists in China are peaceful, increasingly the version of Salafism influencing a growing minority of Chinese is of both religious and security concern.

The vast majority of the Chinese Muslims are Hanafi and Sufi, schools antithetical to Salafism and its virulent strains. Like other countries, China is challenged by the growth of Salafism especially the Jihâdist and Takfiri strain. As an ideology, Salafism in China is propagated on-line and in real space. Like in the real space, Salafism on-line is a spectrum from mainstream to extreme. The existing footprint of Salafi-Jihâdi-Takfiri ideology that has entered China from overseas is reinforced by an on-line version of Salafism, Cyber Salafism is influencing a segment of the Chinese Muslims especially the youth. Also called “cut and paste Islâm,” Cyber Salafists selectively take passages out of context from religious texts and drive Jihâdism and Takfirism, a departure from classical Salafism.

They are also quite clear about the nature and broader aims of Turkish influence there:

In China, the fight for the independence of Xinjiang was spearheaded by Uighur nationalists in the centre and north and Uighur Salafists in the southwest. Gradually, with influence from the bordering South and Central Asia and support from the distant Middle East and Europe, the entire movement assumed a Salafist orientation. Despite efforts by Beijing and Xinjiang governments to dismantle the underground Salafi infrastructure, ideological and operational threat persisted and grew. Although a Uighur militant infrastructure survive in Xinjiang, the sustained pressure to dismantle the group led many like Mahsum to flee China. They reorganised themselves in Munich, Dubai, and in Peshawar in the 1980s and 1990s with support from governmental, non governmental, community, and crime [sic].

As the Turks and segments of the Turkish government considered Uighurs as Turkic, they actively and tacitly supported unity moves by the divided Uighur migrant and diaspora organizations. Driven by the breakup of the Soviet empire and rise of Central Asian states, Turkey wished to expand its influence from Turkey through Central Asia to Xinjiang. The Uighur elite organized the first Uighur National Congress in Istanbul in December 1992. While Turkey remained a key centre, political activity expanded to Germany, fundraising emerged in the Gulf and militant activity in Pakistan spread to Afghanistan.

This is not necessarily to say that what China is doing to the Uighurs is all righteous and blessed. But as Americans, our memories tend to be frightfully short, and we tend to get outraged over all the wrong sorts of things. Not only should we be paying far more attention to our own racial profiling and mass incarceration problems than we currently are, both of which are far worse than China’s. But if we really had the interests of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia at heart – let alone those of the Christian peoples of the Middle East! – we would be doing our best to encourage the humbler, older, more tolerant and more devotional strains of Islâm that belong to the traditional Turkic heritage there. That is largely what the Central Asian ‘Stans’ are attempting to do. We would not now automatically be siding with the jihâdists and takfiris who have usurped that heritage and gutted it, and who are now making war on peoples across the Silk Road in the name of a globalising fundamentalist ambition.

At least Syria’s government does not seem liable to making such a mistake. So much the better.

Holy Hierarch Beuzeg, Bishop and Abbot of Dol

Church of St Budock, Cornwall

The eighth of December is the feast-day of Saint Beuzeg [also Budoc] of Dol, a Breton abbot and bishop who grew up in Ireland. He is associated not only with his fellow abbots of Dol, Samson and Maelor, but also with Saint Maodez, whose early story is similar enough to his that the two men may have been twin brothers. He was also the tutor and spiritual father of one of the sons of the holy couple Fragan and Gwen – Saint Gwenolau.

The mother of Saint Beuzeg and Saint Maodez, a saintly and long-suffering Breton woman named Senara, was married to a rather distrustful Breton prince, the king of Goello who reigned in Tréguier. When she was several months pregnant, her stepmother began to whisper in her husband’s ear that the child was not his. Enraged, the husband of Senara ordered that she be locked inside a barrel and thrown into the sea to drown. However, the all-merciful God had compassion upon this innocent woman and her unborn children, and not only sustained their lives aboard their makeshift craft for five months, but so arranged it so the currents bore them to Ireland. As the hagiography goes, Saint Brigid assisted Senara in childbirth, blessed her newborns and gave her to know in a vision where the poor woman would wash ashore: at Youghal in County Cork. Saint Beuzeg – who according to the hagiography could talk soon after he was born – was baptised and raised in the abbey at Youghal in Ireland. He became a monk there, and then an abbot.

Some long while afterward, both Senara and Beuzeg (and presumably Maodez as well – though at the time he was living as a hermit in Cornwall) were welcomed back to Brittany. Senara’s stepmother had fallen deathly ill and, in fear of her soul, confessed and repented of her lies against her innocent stepdaughter. Senara’s husband had sought her out and found her in Ireland, and was reconciled happily to her, but he himself soon fell ill and died. Abbot Beuzeg became a hermit, and lived on the Île-de-Bréhat. Other Breton locales associated with Saint Beuzeg are Porspoder and Plourin, where he was supposed to have set up hermit’s cells. Another explanation is given in the Life of Saint Gwenolau, that it was more the violence the British were suffering from their Saxon neighbours that caused Beuzeg to flee into Brittany. Nevertheless, it was at Île-de-Bréhat that, according to the Life of the later saint, Gwenolau was entrusted for his education to Saint Beuzeg by his devout parents.

Later Saint Beuzeg would return to the mainland of Brittany from his island hermitage and meet Saint Maelor, the second bishop of Dol who succeeded Saint Samson. Maelor was apparently so impressed by Beuzeg that he willingly relinquished the Bishopric of Dol to him. Upon his election Beuzeg ruled in the see of Dol for 26 years, and reposed peacefully in the Lord sometime in the early 600s. His saintly cultus is of course strongest in Brittany, but he is also venerated in Cornwall and Wales. Holy bishop Beuzeg, faithful shepherd of the Breton flock, pray unto Christ our God for our salvation!

Thou wast miraculously preserved from the ocean’s fury
And, being sustained by the hand of God,
Thou didst devote thyself to His service, O Hierarch Beuzeg.
Being showered with temporal and spiritual honours both in Armagh and in Dol,
Thou didst labour to win souls for Christ,
Therefore we implore thine aid,
Begging Christ our God that He will save our souls.

Politicking and the Medz Yeghern

Despite my earlier support for Ilhan Omar, my congresswoman has deeply disappointed me, and many other Minnesotans, over her ‘present’ vote on the Congressional bill to recognise the Medz Yeghern as a genocide. Representative Omar’s reasoning as given, defending her ‘present’ vote, is almost a pastiche of woke-idpol reasoning and whataboutism. I have little else to say about this vote other than what I already have. Congresswoman Omar’s willing acquiescence in Turkish lies is absurd, it is craven, and it is pointless. We do not need an ‘ally’ like Turkey that cannot face the truth about its own history.

But try telling that to the president, who has been putting what pressure he can on the Senate to block the Senate from passing a resolution by unanimous consent recognising the Medz Yeghern as a genocide. The unprincipled opportunism of the president is the exact mirror image of the unprincipled opportunism of our congresswoman, sad to say, even though they are on opposite sides of the political divide.

Now, I have no love for Ted Cruz, who is a spineless sellout willing to throw Christians in the Middle East straight under the bus. And I have no love for Bob Menendez either, a cynical and corrupt Clintonian war-hawk who has been not only wrong but heinously so on nearly every single foreign policy issue of the last fifteen years.

But stopped clocks can be right twice a day, and both of them happen to be in the right on this issue. What happened to the Armenians in 1915 and 1916 is considered by a consensus of historians as a genocide, and a formal recognition of that genocide is long overdue. I’m glad that the American government is finally getting around to it at last, even if – and here Omar perhaps did speak a grain of truth – it took a moment of gæopolitical gamesmanship to bring it about.

Speaking on a personal note, I have nothing but warm feelings and gratitude for the Armenian-Americans I knew in Rhode Island. One of them was my twelfth-grade history teacher, and also a committed labour organiser. They are not only upstanding members of the community but also steadfast friends and comrades. The Armenian diaspora has had to fight an uphill battle in many Western countries against a ‘strategic partnership’ between Turkey and its allies. However, they have achieved something remarkable in bringing about recognition of what happened to them, and in that cause have built a remarkable sense of solidarity. The passage of the bill recognising the Armenian Genocide is encouraging; the fact that it has been accompanied by the usual cynical politicking much less so.

Venerable Stinan, Hermit-Martyr of Ramsey Island

Saint Justinian’s Chapel, St Justinian, Dyfed

Today in the Orthodox Church we venerate Saint Stinan, another holy man from Wales’s Age of Saints. A Breton hermit who lived on Ramsey Island, he was more renowned for being the starets or spiritual father of Saint Dewi of Wales.

Stinan [alternatively called Iestyn in Welsh, Justinian in English or Jestin in Breton] was born to a noble Breton family and given a sound education in the liberal arts by his parents. He was apparently took to this education so well that he soon became renowned among the Bretons for the profundity of his learning. He was ordained a priest and served dutifully among his countrymen in Armorica for some years.

At the urgings of a command from on high, telling him to go out from his land and his kindred, he left his home at an early age, placed himself in a boat made from scraped hides, and committed himself to God’s protection. He took up a life of solitude, taking up the hermit’s cross and seeking to fight his spiritual battles in the wilderness of his island off the coast of Dyfed, in the furthest southwest corner of Wales.

On Ramsey Island, he found a holy man named Honorius living there with his sister and her handmaiden. Honorius hosted Iestyn with great warmness, and saw fit to give the island entirely to Saint Stinan. Stinan agreed, on the condition that Honorius’s sister and her handmaid leave the island, that their ascetic strivings might not be disturbed. Some unbelievers were said to have scoffed at this, but both Honorius and his sister saw the sincerity in Stinan’s request, and agreed to it. Honorius’s sister asked for, and got, Stinan’s blessing for herself and her maid before they departed.

Saint Stinan lived a life of exemplary holiness and strict asceticism. He was soon visited by Saint Dewi, who was then bishop in Dyfed, and who was apparently so impressed by Stinan’s way of life and his wisdom in answering profound spiritual questions that Dewi at once begged Stinan to be his confessor and spiritual father. Bishop Dewi also provided for Saint Stinan wherever he chose to travel.

It so happened that one day five men in a boat appeared in the channel between Ramsey Island and Dyfed, shouting up to Saint Stinan to be let near, for they bore grim news that ‘he whom you love is ill, and bids you hurry to his side’. Saint Stinan got into the boat with them, and began chanting Psalms. He looked around at them and saw that their faces were hiding some secret malicious glee; and then he understood that they were in fact devils. He began chanting Psalm 35, and by the time he reached the fourth verse (‘Let them be confounded and put to shame that seek after my soul!’) the devils and the boat both vanished, and Stinan found himself submerged in the midst of the waters. By the grace of God Stinan was lifted on the waves from the water and found himself washed up on a rock on the mainland; there he saw Saint Dewi standing before him alive and well, whom the devils had told him was ill.

The Evil One, who had been cheated of Saint Stinan’s soul by his prayers from the Psalter, still sought his life. He implanted in the souls of three brethren who had come with Saint Stinan the seeds of jealousy and restlessness. When Saint Stinan gently reproved these brethren, they rushed upon him with evil intent, took up axes and cut off his head. Having done this wicked deed, the murderous disciples were at once stricken with leprosy. They fled Ramsey Island and came, weeping and groaning, to ‘Lepers’ Rock’, where they spent many years in repentance. After many years their leprosy was cured, through the forgiveness of Saint Stinan who was murdered by them.

Where Saint Stinan’s head fell a fountain of most pure water gushed forth from the rock. This water had the power to heal even those who had ingested deadly poisons. One such man – a man named Jona whose stomach had turned ulcerous from having taken poison in milk – was brought to Stinan’s Well and made to drink some of the water; the man coughed up a living frog and his ulcers were cured.

Saint Stinan’s body, after his murderers had beheaded him, picked up his own head and walked with it from Ramsey Island, across the water to Llanstinan, three miles inland from Fishguard. There he lay down and was buried. On that spot, Saint Justinian’s Church still stands. Many wonders were wrought there, before Saint Dewi – having been told of the place in a vision – came to where Saint Stinan was buried. He brought his bones out of the ground and had him translated to his cathedral in St David’s. The bones of Saint Dewi and Saint Stinan can still be seen behind the altar in the Cathedral. Holy father Stinan, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Ramsey Island, Dyfed

Ideological history: the Fourth International take on 1619

An early colonial Quaker meeting

Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North over at the World Socialist Web Site have a rebuttal to the New York Times’s 1619 Project that is interesting and infuriating in nearly equal measure. I suppose that is to be expected from Trotskyists. But all the same there’s enough that’s substantially correct about their critique that it’s worth dwelling on at some length.

First of all, I have to admit that I agree with the overall general thrust of the Fourth International’s critique of 1619. Given my antiracist positions, as well as my High Tory scepticism of the American project generally, a casual blog reader might be tempted to conclude that my sympathies are firmly on the side of the Times in this case. That would be incorrect.

Racism is indeed an evil. Racism is indeed an evil that is deeply enmeshed in American society going back to colonial times. However, I have also always held that racism is historically circumscribed and that concrete things can be done to combat it. Useless white liberal self-flagellation on the op-ed pages of the Times is not one of them. Community policing reforms, criminal justice reform, instituting rent controls, providing equitable funding and staffing for public schools, instituting Medicare for All, ending informal population-control policies in black neighbourhoods, ending private for-profit prisons, ending redlining and predatory credit practices by both banks and payday institutions, ending the damn Forever War that runs on and destroys primarily black and poor bodies: these largely œconomic fixes would go a long way toward eliminating the most intolerable forms of racism in American society. In short, ending capitalism would also end the great bulk of the race-based misery of black America.

I agree wholeheartedly with Niemuth, Mackaman and North insofar as they hold to the limited argument against the 1619 Project and its central conceit. It is indeed not ‘in the DNA’ of America or Americans to hate each other based on the colour of their skin – either literally or figuratively. The biological and sociological determinism of the worldview behind the 1619 Project is ahistorical and, indeed, morally noxious – for the very reasons they describe.

But the problems begin to crop up very quickly when the authors for the Fourth International stray from this narrow critique into a broader take on world history, and their sweeping and reductive takes on ‘the global history of slavery, which extends back into the ancient world’. For one thing, classical slavery and modern chattel slavery were and are very different institutions, underpinned by very different material conditions. It’s actually something of a travesty, that authors proclaiming themselves to be Marxist overlook this. Any Marxist worth his salt should have a ready materialist explanation for the differences between classical and early modern slavery, because – as it happens – there is one.

In Europe itself, the two institutions – the slavery of Antiquity, and the chattel slavery of the Age of Exploration – were separated by a good half millennium of gradual abolition and humane developments in law, like those undertaken by Adamnán of Iona in the British Isles and by Eike von Repgow on the Continent. This gradual abolition happened in large part because of the building reliance of the agrarian œconomies of the late-antique barbarian kingdoms on arable land and its produce rather than on labour. This œconomic structure, which was still largely in place on the continent during the capitalist revolution, was the source of a great deal of the early resistance to the new institution of modern chattel slavery, and made up a significant element of the abolition movement going forward. This is something I have laid great stress on over the course of my writing on this blog. The old feudal resistance to the new money-based, urban and mercantile œconomy provided an early basis for the proletarian resistance that was as yet in its germinal stage.

This article series takes aim at a distorted and blinkered view of the social history of the Americas, which obliterates the contributions – as the authors purport to see it – of the nascent proletarian movement in the Northern United States in combatting both chattel slavery and Jim Crow, as well as a host of other forms of œconomic and social exploitation. And that is good and right and just. Every one of their critiques of Hannah-Jones and her Project is fully deserved. But it’s more than a bit infuriating to see the authors themselves fall into the same trap when it comes to the early history of the movement for abolition.

Tracing abolitionism as a movement back only to Wilberforce – as Niemuth, Mackaman and North do – is in fact its own form of erasure. For the same reasons that it is dishonest to omit, elide or downplay the rôle of the Northern white working class in abolitionism, so too it’s dishonest to do the same for the religious predecessors of the movement. Omitting the religious convictions of the Society of Friends or the anti-slavery activism of James Oglethorpe, or the later political syncretism of Richard Oastler (which actually got results for the working-class in Britain), from the story of abolition is every bit as great an act of distortion and violence to historical truth. Why? Because it shows the actual instance of a Marxist dialectical synthesis between the advocates of ‘feudal’ reaction and the advocates of anti-slavery radicalism, in directing a humane change in œconomic relations.

Now, I do understand that my gentle readers are likely to think, after reading all this, that the foregoing is just Cooper on one of his genealogical or arcane political hobbyhorses. And you might be right to think so to some degree. But getting the history right is something for modern leftists to be concerned with, precisely because there is simply no critical mass or critical constituency for any sort of ‘pure’ leftism in the United States. And that constituency is very unlikely to be built without some kind of populist rapprochement.

It’s telling that the closest that the working class has ever come to achieving meaningful degrees of political power in the United States was the ultimately-failed populist uprising of the 1880s and 1890s – and that was born precisely out of a fruitful alliance between urban workers who wanted to expand public ownership of infrastructure, and rural farmers who wanted to reduce their debt burden. It’s also telling in a negative way: even the most liberal elements of the professional class have always put their own interests first, and never those of the working class. It’s worth pointing out that there is considerable discontent nowadays among the very people who identify as conservative or independent, against the neoliberal consensus the authors justly rail against. A lot of that discontent is voiced in opportunistic or cynical ways, but it’s there and it’s genuine. If the left wants to gain power, it has to work with this discontent rather than in isolation from it.

I agree with the authors of the critique that history is not a morality play. Therefore, there is nothing to be gained by rendering one side of that history idealistically ‘pure’, any more than by rendering it racially ‘pure’. We only impoverish our own historical understanding when we airbrush out of our history the religious Dissenters, the Royalists, the Nonjurors and such who prepared the fields for abolitionism, built up much of the œconomic infrastructure which made abolition possible, and even tended the first fruits of its harvest. Even though, to a large degree, they were either neutral or on the ‘losing side’ of the American Revolution.

Iconoclasm versus syncretism in Bolivia

A Bolivian indigenous man holding a wiphala flag

The political upheaval in Bolivia has been all over the news recently, and as it happens I do want to comment about it rather badly. What we are seeing happening in Bolivia right now is, in fact, a coup. And it is an unfolding crackdown specifically against indigenous interests, and it’s taking a turn for the sanguinary.

From a purely political perspective, the perpetrators of the coup against Evo Morales are utterly illegitimate, and their comportment is reprehensible. On account of Orthodox Christianity’s unique position within Christendom vis-à-vis indigenous rights, neither our hierarchs nor our laity should be silent about condemning this coup. Indeed, many of our Orthodox brothers and sisters in Guatemala already are.

Needless to say, I agree with Tulsi on this. Sorry, Liz, you’re not very credible on this issue. Sorry, The Economist, you’re not either, nor on many others. And of course, the same goes for Foreign Policy magazine (see also here), the New York Times, the Washington Post and the rest of the usual gang of bloodthirsty cheerleaders for American imperium.

But there is a deeper problem than that, which can be seen in the new junta’s quasi-religious, clerical-fascist rhetoric. Most of that government are Protestant fundamentalists, and their antipathy to the country’s indigenous majority is couched in chiliastic terms. What’s more, Bolivian cultural symbols like the wiphala, the tawa chakana and Pachamama have become battlegrounds. They are being attacked even as the people are being attacked, by Bolivia’s new junta. The flags are being burned, and Pachamama is being denounced.

And thus the political problems, including the one of the coup d’état mentioned above, become infused with theological ones. This almost always presents problems, particularly (but not always) when it happens in the Western Hemisphere, where right-wing Protestantism and right-wing Catholicism tend to ally in an œcumenism of fear. This is also the case here. The fundamentalists – and certain Catholic traditionalists as well – would have us believe that the distinctions are clear-cut and the battle-lines have been drawn. But even if the problems have been drawn up falsely, they are not problems to run away from. Sadly, Orthodox commentators in English-speaking countries have a tendency either to dismiss these as ‘Catholic problems’, or else ally themselves with the most retrograde elements within Catholicism and Protestantism as part of this same œcumenism of fear. Both of these positions are reactive and do not draw upon the corpus of the relevant Orthodox social witness among non-Christians, particularly in Russia and Alaska.

First of all, it’s necessary to take at least a cursory account of the history of Bolivian popular worship. Pachamama was not invented at the Amazonian Synod, and not adopted overnight by Pope Francis. Pachamama has been, in fact, a long-standing element of syncretic Catholicism in South America, and has been identified with the Virgin Mary at least since the 1500’s. It is not an immaterial historical point that this kind of syncretism is endemic to the regions in the New World conquered by the Catholic colonial powers: Santería, Voudun, the modern Puebloan religion. This particular form of religious syncretism almost always appears as a form of indigenous resistance to being conquered. That is not an excuse for, let alone an endorsement of, such syncretism. It is merely a statement of historical correlation.

Secondly, Pachamama originally referred to the Andean goddess of nature; however, it is a title and not a name. It means, literally, ‘World-Mother’, and it has been used to refer to the Virgin Mary since the introduction of Catholicism to South America. Whether it’s appropriate to assign the title of Kósmotokos (the Greek equivalent of Pachamama) to the Theotokos is a purely theological problem, and as such it is way out of my league. I wouldn’t dare to comment on it for myself, let alone for the Church. But acknowledgement of this fact places the problem of the Pachamama at the Amazon Synod in the same realm, with the same theological stakes, as the Nestorian controversy. Again, I do not dare to take a side on this question, not without the guidance of the Fathers or the received Tradition – except to say that titles are important, and can make the difference between a genuine case of idolatrous hæresy or a relatively-harmless theologoumenon.

An Orthodox Christian – or, for that matter, a cogently Catholic – answer to the current problem of syncretism must therefore be informed by both the historical and theological stakes, and by our own tradition of iconography. Politics is limited, and merely taking refuge in political reaction renders us powerless and subject to the whims of the prevailing political winds. Mere blind opposition runs the risk of turning us into iconoclasts, or idolaters of a different sort.

Above all, we must not pretend that Orthodox cultures are somehow pristine, pure and unblemished by these problems. Orthodox history also has instances in which conquest and imposition have resulted in religious syncretism. The occurrence of, or at least the scholarly interest in, dvoeverie in Russia is probably the best example of this. Contrary to romantic-nationalist mythmaking and Soviet anti-Christian polemics, dvoeverie (Russian ‘double belief’, or paganism) was probably not a continuous and unbroken presence in Russia from the times of Kievan Rus’ up to the present. Instead, it’s much more likely that ‘double beliefs’ arose as a reaction against the bureaucratic reforms of Peter the Great, and became the object of interest only in the nineteenth century and the advent of romantic nationalism. The current prevalence of dvoeverie in the North Caucasus and among Russian Cossacks in particular would seem to support the recent nature of the phenomenon.

Even so, the patient, humble model of evangelisation embodied in our holy fathers Saint Tryphon of Pechenga, Saint Innocent of Irkutsk, Saint Innocent of Alaska, Saint Herman of Alaska, Saint Jacob Netsvetov and others is probably our best response. These saints did not journey among foreign peoples in arrogance, immediately smashing their places of worship, declaring them to be filthy and cowing them into the church. Instead, they lived among them in a discipline of ascesis and an attitude of humble service and love; and when the people in need of evangelisation were ready, they would come or their own accord to hear the Word of Truth. When these non-Christian people were exploited or abused by Christians, these saints would rally to their non-Christian neighbours’ defence. This model is not the sole patrimony of the Christian East, either: this gentle model of evangelism was heavily promoted by Saint Gregory the Dialogist, Pope of Rome.

This model of evangelism, instead of retrenching the failures of earlier generations, offers forth the possibility and necessity of repentance on the part of Christians who must own a historical legacy of violence and exploitation. Indigenous syncretism is, after all, a rebuke against Christian failure to preach the Gospel without violence. More importantly, it offers indigenous people the possibility of becoming iconographers for themselves. The life and witness of Matushka Olga of Alaska is a great example of this. I do not know if Matushka Olga ever made an icon out of wood and clay and paint with her own hands, but I do know that she tended to the indigenous young women in her parish who came to her, and that she treated each one as an icon of the living God. This is equally an important work of iconography, to pay reverence to the icon of Christ in the human person.

Pachamama may or may not be a retrievable form of such iconography. Like I said before, that involves assigning titles to the Holy Theotokos, and that is a labour of the intellect way above my pay grade as a lay Orthodox blogger. All the same, it is this model of evangelism, both historical and current (witness Archimandrite Andres Girón de Leon of blessed memory) that we must uphold. This is not only to rebuke the perpetrators of the current political violence against the indigenous people in Bolivia, which is shamefully being committed in the name of our Lord. This is not only to rebuke the hidden civilisational idolatry of the œcumenists of fear. It is also to retain the promise of Christ that all cultures are capable of receiving Him and being transfigured in Him – without necessary reference to any other.