On Orthodox Christian anti-capitalism

Gennady Zyuganov of the KPRF, with HH Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’

Firstly, Happy International Workers’ Day, gentle readers! Also, a blessed feast of the holy and right-believing Saint Queen Tamara of Georgia! (If it sounds incongruous to you to celebrate both a sainted monarch of Georgia’s feudal golden age and the working men and women of the world on the same day – well, in that case, a hearty welcome to my blog, and do feel free to read my past posts.)

As it so happens, this is a perfect occasion to talk about the overlap of Orthodox Christianity, culture and œconomics; particularly in light of the recent Bershidsky piece in Bloomberg which, citing a World Bank study which is in turn based on the World Values Survey, tries to argue a causal relationship between Orthodox Christian nations’ cultural values and their disinclination to capitalism.

Let me get this out of the way first. I don’t take issue with the premises of Bershidsky’s piece or those of the study it cites. That people in Orthodox countries are less happy than their Western counterparts, less trusting, less favourable to new ideas, less likely to engage in entrepreneurship, more risk-averse and more supportive of public-sector intervention in the œconomy – in short, that Eastern European people in nations which were culturally shaped by Orthodox Christianity don’t make good capitalists – is something I generally tend to agree with. Also, I will be among the first to agree with and applaud the argument that Orthodox Christianity as a whole is not particularly amenable to capitalist logic.

But that’s pretty much where my agreement ends. I can’t help but see the explanation Bershidsky and his World Bank œconomists give as fundamentally lazy: namely, that Eastern European countries do not view capitalism favourably because the religious background of these countries’ cultures is averse to it. More proximate explanations are mentioned for form’s sake, but discounted for reasons which are never made clear. For example: the fact that these countries did not fully industrialise before adopting communism; or the fact that in the wake of communism they were subject to shock-therapy neoliberal restructuring, a remedy which was in most cases far worse than the disease that it tried to cure. Ask the average working-class Russian, Romanian, Greek or Serb ‘on the street’ why they oppose capitalism, and they won’t start quoting Saint Basil at you. It would be awesome if they did, but chances are that they’ll tell you their personal experience of how privatisation and restructuring negatively impacted their lives.

Bershidsky duly name-checks Weber and Chaadaev in his piece. Me? I’m reminded more of Ha-Joon Chang’s book, Bad Samaritans, and particularly the chapters in which he talks about Confucianism and the rough transitions Confucian countries made to capitalism. In each case, when the nations in question fare poorly under capitalism or in an industrial transition, pro-capitalist œconomists and sociologists have been quick to play the Weberian ‘culture card’. Confucian-cultured Koreans and Chinese supposedly didn’t make good capitalists because they prioritised scholarship and farming over mercantile pursuits; because they didn’t value the rule of law; because they approved nepotism and family connexions over objective suitability for a specific job.

When, during the eighties and nineties, historically-Confucian countries started doing really well, many of the same sociologists began reëvaluating Confucianism. All of a sudden, Confucian culture was transformed in the Western mindset into a virtuous culture of discipline, with a strong work ethic, loyalty and social cohesion with obvious benefits to a private-sector firm. Ha-Joon Chang very rightly called shenanigans on such cultural-essentialist explanations for why some cultures fare poorly (or better) under capitalism some of the time. Even though he didn’t and wouldn’t discount culture entirely, he was nonetheless sensitive to the impact material conditions and, yes, human choice can have on cultural formation. More importantly: Dr Chang showed up the self-serving nature of these ‘just-so’ stories that the sociological water-bearers for free-market ideology tell about why the benefits of global markets fail to evenly or proportionally distribute themselves.

Nathaniel Wood at Fordham’s Public Orthodoxy blog, who rightly lays his finger on many of the same issues with Bershidsky’s cultural-essentialist ‘just-so’ story as I do, calls this – in reference to the Huntington thesis – a ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative. He then attempts to provide counterexamples to Bershidsky’s claim that Orthodox Christianity is particularly amenable to communism. There is much in Wood’s answer to Bershidsky here to admire. His insistence that religious anti-capitalism is not just a phenomenon of the Christian ‘East’, but also obtains to a significant degree in Roman Catholic theology, is insightful, profound and correct. And he also rightly describes Bershidsky’s assessment of Orthodox Christianity as a malicious caricature. Mr Wood’s critique of Bershidsky ultimately strikes me as more than a trifle reactionary, however, and it’s unfortunately clouded by certain blind spots of its own.

In answer to Bershidsky’s caricature, unfortunately Wood presents us with something of a more benign caricature of his own, concerning Russian Orthodox social thought. Wood is right about the anti-capitalist nature of early Slavophilia, but it was neither as Western nor as anti-Western as he makes it out to be. As with all caricature, it contains an important grain of truth: Slavophilia was influenced by German Romanticism (particularly Schelling), and its key proponents did engage in anti-Western polemic – ultimately spearheading a number of different ‘syncretic’ philosophical movements in the non-West which attempted to fight the ‘hegemonic discourse of Western superiority’. On the other hand, this characterisation misses a significant part of the picture. As with (for example) New Text Confucianism particularly in its Qing Dynasty incarnation, Slavophilia returns to pre-Enlightenment thinking – including that of the Early Church Fathers and the Kievan Rus’ chroniclers – to join an internal political dispute rather than to react directly against the West. Kireevsky and Khomyakov were more interested at first in rectifying a certain literary-cultural-creative sloth within Russian culture itself, than they were in polemicising against the West. This parallels the New Text-inspired internal criticism of Qing literary culture and governance made by Gong Zizhen and Wei Yuan, whose thought only later and in retrospect took on an ideological character of anti-Western resistance.

Wood’s answer also seems rather unfair to current-day Russian thought. It’s a bit simplistic to claim Putin as a ‘clash of civilisations’ ideologue when two of the three philosophers he cites most are the Russian Silver Age thinker Vladimir Solovyov (a modern Christian Platonist whose universalist and pro-Western tendencies have been well noted) and the very same Nikolai Berdyaev whom Wood cites as a bridge between Orthodox thought and modern Western thought.

More importantly, reading the publications of its hierarchs closely on their own terms, the Russian Church does not oppose human rights discourse per se; instead they object to its use as a fig-leaf for sexual libertinism, œconomic exploitation and unjust war. Is it truly in the best interest of understanding to ignore, either the Russian clerics’ good-faith attempts to do the kind of engagement Wood himself calls for, or the just grounds for suspicion of human-rights talk on their part? Indeed, is it helpful in countering the ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative to simply assume the Russian Church’s bad-faith interest in promoting ‘authoritarianism’ for its own sake?

Bringing this back around to the initial Bloomberg piece: I’m very far from casting doubt on the communitarian potentials of Orthodox Christian doctrine. Even in the United States, the initial experience of Orthodox Christianity (outliers like Philip Ludwell III notwithstanding) was as the immigrant faith of working-class Rusin coal miners, whose priests and hierarchs were also active in the struggle of their labouring flocks for just wages and humane treatment. Even transplanted into North America, Orthodox Christianity at its best has borne a strong witness to a communitarian vision that speaks up for the worker and for the poor.

At the same time, much as I might wish it to be otherwise, it takes quite a few wild leaps of the idealist imagination to derive the current set of anti-capitalist attitudes on display in Eastern Europe out of those same doctrines. Speaking of Fr Sergei Bulgakov: material conditions matter, and explanations which fail to account for those material conditions ought to be regarded with the requisite suspicion.

War is a racket

Maj Gen Smedley Butler

War is a racket. One may have missed it in all the media hubbub, but Robert Fisk – an institution in Middle East reporting who has been dodging mortar shells, giving kidnappers the slip and ducking sniper bullets since the 1970s – who went on site to Douma, could not confirm that a chemical weapons attack even took place there, saying that the evidence of such an attack was ‘flimsy at best’. And now, residents of Douma have been brought before the Hague to testify, and they assert that no chemical weapons attack took place. The mainstream press of the United States, France and the United Kingdom have not been looking to either verify or challenge these accounts on a factual basis; instead they are seeking to smear the messengers.

War is a racket. As Syria was pummelled by an illegal missile attack by its former colonial oppressors, the stock values of ærospace defence concerns ‘lit up’, so to speak. Smedley Butler was never so right. And the first victim of these wars in the Middle East always seems to be the truth. Interventionist-minded Americans get to pretend they are doing good in the world and pretend that they care about Syrian lives – even though they don’t – all while the war profiteers enrich themselves at the expense of the poor, both here at home and where their death machines fell. Who cares whether or not a pretext or two for an unjust war was fabricated?

War is a racket. The words that fall from the lips of every American watching the news and every American hearing the endless drumbeat from the Beltway talking heads that our nation’s military power must be squandered in an endless fight to reshape the world must be: ‘Prove it.’ We must not allow our patriotism to be questioned, because we who oppose war seek our country’s salvation from itself. We should and must appeal, again and again, to that great statesman of our nation’s infancy, John Quincy Adams, and his words of caution against such foolish quests. We cannot truly be a guarantor even of our own freedoms when we allow, even by our silence, that the truth may be bought and sold, the way we can see it being bought and sold under our very noses.

War is a racket. Let’s not be suckered by it anymore.

Tessering back

An artist’s rendering of the cherubim Proginoskes

Prefaced with the requisite SPOILER ALERT:

I read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time when I was much, much younger. (I can’t remember with any great certainty, but I was probably in middle school.) It’s one of those books that was kept stuck in the back of my memory and creative imagination. Long after I had forgotten even the names of the characters and the planets and the stars, the images stayed with me. The tesseract, the transfiguration of Mrs Whatsit, the Black Thing, the creepy syncopated sameness of Camazotz, the punishment of the boy bouncing the ball, the transparent column, the brain in a vat, the kindness of Aunt Beast – and of course the final image of a sister’s love for her brother saving him – these were things that fired my late-childhood mental vision and apparently stuck with me. It made a pretty deep impression on me. And as with other novelists whose young-adult works I tend to lump in the same category, like TA Barron and Isaac Asimov, I read only one of L’Engle’s books: this one.

I didn’t come back to A Wrinkle in Time, believe it or not, because of the recently-released and lukewarmly-received Ava DuVernay film adaptation (which I still haven’t seen and have no immediate plans to see). I came back to it because it came up on the list of AP English Language and Composition recommended reads, and it was one of the few books I could unreservedly recommend to my AP class in Hunan Province. Before assigning it to them, I read it through again for myself – along with the sequel, A Wind in the Door.

The book was far more profound than I had remembered it. That was partially because, back when I first read it, I hadn’t quite cottoned on to how unusual the heroine, Meg Murry, was – a socially-inept, painfully-introverted genius with deep self-esteem issues; possibly a partial reflection of the author’s own unhappy boarding-school years. This had registered with me only on an intellectual level if indeed it registered at all. Reading it now, of course, her insecurities, temper and self-doubt are front and centre. It’s only against them that the SFnal images that were so indelibly burned into my early-teenage brain really attain to their true poignancy. Meg’s discovery of her own strengths and ability to love as she is thrown into the mission to recover her father and later Charles Wallace – against the deadening conformity of Camazotz and the cold malice of IT, against the Black Thing, against her own adolescent insecurities (and desire for security) – had an entirely new power over me. Even though the story was as familiar as a folktale as I reread it, it was as though I was reading it for the first time.

The direct Biblical allusions, delivered as they are in this SFnal context, are Lewisian in their forthrightness. The transfiguration of the Mrs W’s – and the ascent to a mountain, no less – has Gospel overtones, though Calvin’s Petrine reaction to the sight of it is lovingly but pointedly rebuked by Mrs Whatsit. She and her companions answer them, instead: ‘Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift their voice; let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory unto the Lord!’ L’Engle, so affectionately like Tolkien and Lewis in her Anglican piety (and yet so distinct from them in her literary genius, as is only meet and fit!), has a psalmodic sensibility that best understands the Good and the True in terms of song and musical expression. Not for nothing does she have Charles Wallace and Calvin cite Shakespeare, Bach and Beethoven as fighters against the darkness, alongside Rembrandt, Buddha and Gandhi.

But the distinct message that rings through loud and clear is not one of apologetics. L’Engle chooses for the heroine of the novel an awkward, ill-tempered and self-doubting character as Meg Murry, who never seems to fit in anywhere and yet is chosen as much for her faults as in spite of them. That itself delivers a moral with distinct ramifications. L’Engle doesn’t paper over evil. She doesn’t apologise for it or try to explain it away. And she doesn’t exempt anyone, not even the Mrs Ws, from its effects. She does allow ‘the foolish and the weak’ to have the final say – and that final say is through an act of selflessness, of self-sacrificial kenōsis, when Meg decides to return to Camazotz to rescue her brother from IT.

The common assumption that the dystopia of Camazotz – all people rendered exactly alike within a vast, impersonal, yet horribly-efficient bureaucracy – was an allegory for communism is one to which Anna Quindlen alludes in her introductory ‘appreciation’ to the version I was reading. But Madeleine L’Engle didn’t make a very good Cold Warrior. The point seems she was trying to make with Camazotz was apparently much more subtle, and it seems she toyed with the idea of making the political angle explicit before deciding against it. Though I can understand why she left out this passage (Camazotz works fine as an allegory in its own right without having its ‘real-world’ significance spelt out), it still showcases the subtlety and sensitivity of L’Engle’s political thinking. She was as much concerned with the subtle undercurrents of conformity and acquiescence to impersonal guarantees of security within democracies, as she was with the totalitarianism of their Cold War foes. Indeed, it seems she herself wanted to revisit these themes in her subsequent novels in the Kairos continuity. If A Wrinkle in Time can be read as broadly anti-totalitarian with its portrayal of dystopian Camazotz, its sequel A Wind in the Door showcases a warning from the opposite direction.

A Wind in the Door is a good deal more surreal than A Wrinkle in Time; where the Murrys (and O’Keefe) explored planets in the first novel, the second has them trying to unlearn the idea that size matters. The actions of one single sub-microscopic organism have effects, we learn, that could save or shatter the galaxy. The life or death of a child, Charles Wallace, is considered a civilisational tipping point. When Meg, Calvin and a cherubim named Proginoskes are sent to Yadah (the mitochondrion/planet within Charles Wallace where this cosmic contest takes place) by their teacher Blajeny, being unable to move or see in the normal way, they begin learning from Proginoskes to communicate not through words, but through ‘kything’ (and this is an adoption of an Anglo-Saxon root word that I couldn’t help but cheer!), a kind of telepathy which allows its users to ignore distances in space and time in order to connect with each other. There’s an œcological theme at play here: it’s postulated that plants and planets are able to ‘kythe’ this way.

As part of Meg’s first ‘test’ in the novel, the enemies of life and good – manifestations of nothingness which are named in this novel as the Echthroi – impersonate a minor (and initially unlikeable) character from A Wrinkle in Time, Meg’s principal Mr Jenkins, and in so doing showcase two different ‘faces’ of evil. One of them – exhibiting a desire for uniformity and conformity and levelling to an impersonal standard of ‘like’-ness – voices the totalitarian ethos which drives IT in A Wrinkle in Time. The other one, who reappears close to the climax as the Mephistophelean voice which tempts Sporos (an infintesimally-small but crucially-important lifeform who inhabits one of Charles Wallace’s mitochondria), advocates total freedom from restraint and responsibility. (The true Mr Jenkins is the one who appears most limited, and Meg is able to recognise and Name him by the mistakes he makes.)

Sporos is a larval-stage individual member of a fictional symbiotic species (farandolæ) which keep Charles Wallace’s mitochondria healthy. A Wind in the Door has Meg and Calvin journey inside this mitochondrion in order to save Charles’s life; the crucial confrontation has Meg and Calvin urging Sporos to accept his adult responsibilities and Deepen, rooting himself in Charles, sacrificing a certain degree of freedom in order to join the ‘song’ of the faræ and thus fulfil a higher and life-giving cosmic purpose. The evil Echthros, on the other hand, encourages Sporos only to think of his own freedom and pleasure, to live for the moment, to proudly assert his ‘rights’ and individual independence from the cosmic order in which he lives. In keeping with the œcological theme: adult farandolæ, or faræ, are likened to ancient trees; one of the things the Echthros tempts the larval farandolæ to do is to destroy and consume the Deepened faræ. If A Wrinkle in Time did contain an anti-totalitarian cautionary tale, A Wind in the Door’s cautions are broadly anti-libertarian.

Even though it is not explicitly linked to Christianity, the kenotic theme of A Wind in the Door is every bit as radical as – if not more so than – that of A Wrinkle in Time. In the penultimate confrontation with the Echthroi, Mr Jenkins is able to save Sporos and Calvin by sacrificing himself; in turn, Proginoskes sacrifices himself to save Mr Jenkins (along with Calvin, Meg and Charles Wallace). The Neoplatonic theme by which the evil Echthroi are literally presented as no thing (instead, they have to imitate actually-existing things), is continued here: because Proginoskes X-es himself – erases his own existence – in order to save Mr Jenkins, he mystically earns his own existence. One may imagine that his fate is similar to that Mrs Whatsit’s. She began as a star in A Wrinkle in Time, but sacrificed herself to defeat the Black Thing.

I will own to enjoying A Wind in the Door immensely, not least for the beauty of the language. Unlike Wrinkle, this truly is the first time I’ve read this book. And it is a far more challenging read than Wrinkle, in part because L’Engle is pushing the envelope of her voice; toward the end, Wind becomes almost a kind of prose poetry. Sometimes the actions and reactions of the characters as they are plunged into this surreal and sense-bending contest between good and evil, strike me as a bit unnaturally blasé, and even the Murrys’ unquestioning acceptance of Charles Wallace’s assertions that Meg is inhabiting one of his mitochondria seems a bit unreal. But these are minor quibbles. I have enjoyed immensely this ‘tesser’ back to the works of L’Engle, and look forward to reading more in this series.

Pointless video post – ‘Hidden Dance’ by Gao Hong and Issam Rafea

Yesterday, for our sixth wedding anniversary, Jessie and I went out to the Cedar to hear two instrumental masters do improvised duets on two lutes. Dr Gao Hong 高虹 (who is from my wife’s hometown of Luoyang, Henan Province) is a world-renowned talent on the pipa 琵琶 (Chinese lute), a student of the late Shanghai lute master Lin Shicheng 林石城, who has been recognised both in China and the United States and who has participated in several cross-cultural and international music groups, and is currently on the faculty at Carleton College where she directs a Chinese music ensemble. Dr Issam Rafea عصام رافع is a likewise world-famous Kuwaiti-Syrian oud عود (Perso-Arabian lute) master, symphonic composer, chair of the department of Arabic music at the High Institute of Music in Damascus and conductor for the Syrian National Orchestra for Arabic music.

These two apparently met some time back and decided to do some impromptu recording sessions, out of which came their joint album Life As Is earlier this year. This concert we went to was sublime. Two masters of similarly-descended (but wildly divergent, soundwise) instruments carrying on what I can only describe as a conversation in music, on various themes. Though Gao herself did much of the introductory speaking and Rafea was quite a bit more reserved, and even their musical styles reflected their differing personalities, the two of them clearly had a musical-spiritual chemistry that shone through. For someone like me with no instrumental talent to speak of (and paltry vocal talent in comparison to the rest of my family), it was really something astonishing to listen to.

Wu wei as foreign policy

In these past couple weeks of bluster, danger and illegal missile strikes, the example of China has been one to study with care. China has never really been a nation which acts rashly, and the most recent diplomatic and foreign policy crisis has proven no exception to that rule. Xi Jinping’s cabinet has lodged the obligatory objection to our precipitous military action, of course. But they’ve also been calling for dialogue and attempting to diplomatically manoeuvre the situation away from a disastrous precipice. And that’s not all. China’s government and public policy apparatus have not been lazy or remiss. They have been quietly and unobtrusively studying the behaviour of its chief informal ally in the Middle East from a strategic standpoint.

Say what you like about the Chinese Communist Party, about its domestic governance, or about Xi Jinping’s recent consolidation of domestic political power into his own hands. But his actions on the international stage have been characterised by an admirable discretion, patience, restraint and subtle persistence. China’s recent behaviour serves as a small but apposite example of the traditional philosophical principle of wu wei 無為 as applied to international affairs.

Wu wei is a somewhat slippery philosophical concept, which is often translated into English with various permutations of ‘inaction’, ‘non-action’ or ‘passivity’. The temptation to render it as ‘laisser-faire’ is a common one (but nonetheless wrong) for those who want to coöpt the Daoist philosophical tradition as a proxy for political libertarianism. But the concept (which, by the way, is not specific to Daoism) isn’t necessarily an argument against government per se, though it is true Daoism has historically exercised a greater scepticism of government action than most other schools of contemporary political philosophy. Wu wei also has a dynamic quality, though; perhaps a better translation of the term would be something like ‘action without effort’. A decent explanation for the concept is given in this brief video, for which link (and for much of the idea that went into this post) thanks are especially due to Addison Hodges Hart:

Bringing this back to China’s policy on Syria: China’s policy isn’t exactly laisser-faire. What they are doing might look like ‘inaction’ or ‘passivity’ from the point-of-view of an American policy-maker beholden to military contractors and driven by an ill-thought impulse to ‘do something’ – that ‘something’ seeming inevitably to involve the deployment of ‘shock and awe’ and ‘smart bombs’ – in response to a crisis in foreign affairs. That impression would be mistaken.

China’s actions are far more interesting than that. They are deploying their ‘soft power’ tools – diplomacy, influence, scholarship. And they are exercising tact and patience in how and when they deploy these tools. More importantly, they don’t bluster and they don’t make impossible promises or empty threats. As a result, the government of Communist China is not entangled in webs of deception and intractable geopolitical struggles in the same way the American government currently is. They are free to position themselves and free to choose when, if or how to intervene. Most importantly: they can position themselves as an honest broker, a neutral and disinterested party and an effective mediator, in a way that we are now no longer able to.

The Chinese Classics, the zhuzi baijia 諸子百家, the operatic and literary traditions, and – last, but assuredly not least – the Daoist canon, all offer a vast wealth of strategic and practical wisdom. And regardless of what you may think of Xi Jinping – whether you believe him to be a true lover of the Classics (which is my inclination) or a cynical manipulator thereof – it cannot be denied that his education has left him with a distinct mastery of strategic questions. Neither he, nor the foreign policy apparatus of China as a whole, are to be underestimated, and perhaps we might be doing well to study China’s practical philosophical legacy, every bit as eagerly as Chinese students are imbibing Strauss and Schmitt.

Why Syrian Christians loved Hâfiz

Hâfiz al-’Asad

A common response – sadly too common – to the recent statement by the Christian churches of Syria condemning the American attack on their country, was that the hierarchs of these churches were displaying their sycophantic opportunism and currying favour with the government. As one of my gentle readers commented a couple of days ago: ‘Disgusting statement by bishops who could not care a damn about the suffering’ of Syrians. With respect, this sort of response is sadly mistaken, historically-illiterate, and – in the context of our day and age, right now – remarkably dangerous.

In due time, I will follow up with a contemporary look at the attitude of Syria’s Christians toward the current president, Baššâr al-’Asad. For now, however, I will focus on his father. I am currently reading From the Holy Mountain, a work of remarkable travel literature rich with historical detail, written by the Scottish Catholic journalist William Dalrymple. It is worth reading for its own sake, of course, and at this point I’m only a third of the way through. It is Dalrymple’s attempt to follow the pilgrimage route of the seventh-century Byzantine monastic and spiritual ‘novelist’ Ioannes Moskhos, who travelled from Mount Athos into the Egyptian desert, keeping a record of his travels which was eventually published as the contemporarily-popular devotional ‘novel’ The Spiritual Meadow. (Guess what I’ll be reading next?)

In any event, in our own modern time, Dalrymple journeys from Greece through Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel and ends up in Egypt – along the very route that Ioannēs Moskhos took, or at least something as close to it as he could manage. Like Moskhos, he describes the living environment – the villages, the cities, the countrysides and the ruins – that he passes through, as well as the sites of historical interest that would have dated back to Moskhos’s day. As he enters Syria, he visits the (now-kidnapped) Metropolitan Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Aleppo. In the office, Dalrymple recounts, ‘I was shown to a gilt armchair beneath a huge photograph of a beaming President ’Asad, and a fractionally smaller portrait of the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch.’

Why such love for such a ‘repressive’ and ‘ruthless’ dictator? Unlike those of his host, Dalrymple’s sentiments toward the senior al-’Asad not positive. He hints darkly at the sinister reputation of the mukhâbarât (al-’Asad’s Cheka-style secret police) and asides on the corrupt policies of the Syrian government with a characteristically-understated British distaste. He also relates some amusing anecdotes and Soviet-style black humour he heard from his hosts about al-’Asad. But his host is voluble about the situation in Syria, and gives a different take, to say the least, situated in the local context.

We have always thought of ourselves as citizens, not refugees… Christians are better off in Syria than anywhere else in the Middle East. Other than Lebanon, this is the only country in the region where a Christian can really feel the equal of a Muslim – and Lebanon, of course, has many other problems. In Syria there is no enmity between Christian and Muslim. If Syria were not here, we would be finished. Really. It is a place of sanctuary, a haven for all the Christians: for the Nestorians and Chaldeans driven out of Iraq, the Syrian Orthodox and the Armenians driven out of Turkey, even some Palestinian Christians driven out of the Holy Land by the Israelis. Talk to people here: you will find that what I say is true.

What Dalrymple discovers is that the Christians of Syria really do think highly of Hâfiz al-’Asad and his government. The Armenians who fled genocide and repression in Turkey found a haven in Syria, and the Arabs who met them treated them with hospitality. Aleppo became, in the period between the First World War and the Syrian Revolt, a kind of ‘Noah’s Ark’ (in Dalrymple’s words) for the different Christian communities that were being massacred and displaced by the Turks – and of course, the Mandatory government saw these recent Christian arrivals as ready allies (which was, as Michael Provence’s book makes clear, not always the case).

The socialist Arab Ba’ath, a progressive, egalitarian and sæcular current within the broader stream of Arab nationalism, was heavily Christian in character from the beginning – just as Arab nationalism itself was. Michel ’Aflaq, an Antiochian Orthodox Christian, was among the first forerunners of Ba’athism. And the Ba’athist coup d’etat in 1970 was largely welcomed by Syria’s Christians. As Dalrymple puts it, ‘the period of uncertainty for Syria’s Christians came to an end’ with Hâfiz al-’Asad’s rise to power. The Alawites – the branch of Shi’ism to which al-’Asad belonged – had long had close and friendly ties to Syria’s Christians, to the point where Sunni Muslim fundamentalists disparage them as Nusayrîyyah (literally, ‘little Christians’). Hâfiz al-’Asad was no exception to this rule. Dalrymple again:

In ’Asad’s Syria Christians have always done well: at the moment, apparently, five of ’Asad’s closest advisers are Christians, including his principal speechwriter, as are two of the sixteen cabinet ministers. Christians and Alawites together hold all the key positions in the armed forces and the mukhâbarât… The Christians themselves estimated that they now formed slightly less than 20 per cent of Syria’s total population, and between 20 and 30 per cent of the population of Aleppo, giving that city one of the largest Christian populations anywhere in the Middle East.

The confidence of the Christians in Syria is something you can’t help noticing the minute you arrive in the country. This is particularly so if, like myself, you cross the border at Nisibis: Qâmishli, the town on the Syrian side of the frontier (and the place where Metropolitan Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim was brought up) is 75 per cent Christian, and icons of Christ and images of his mother fill almost every shop and decorate every other car window – an extraordinary display after the furtive secrecy of Christianity in Turkey. Moreover Turoyo, the modern Aramaic of the Tur ’Abdin, is the first language of Qâmishli. This makes it one of a handful of towns in the world where Jesus could expect to be understood if he came back tomorrow.

The fear of Christians in Syria was not of the government. Even in 1994, when Dalrymple was writing, the fear expressed to him by the Christians of Aleppo and elsewhere was related to the rise of Muslim fundamentalism. An Armenian man Dalrymple interviewed put it this way:

After ’Asad’s death or resignation no one knows what will happen. As long as the bottle is closed with a firm cork all is well. But eventually the cork will come out. And then no one knows what will happen to us.

As I said, I hope to bring this topic more ‘up to date’ in a later post. But in such historical circumstances as these, the continued pro-government stance of Syria’s Christians, from the progressive presidency of Hâfiz al-’Asad until the present time, hopefully makes some greater sense. The precariousness of Syria’s Christian populace has been felt, in the bloodiest and most painful possible way, in these six years of civil war, as the anti-government rebels – overwhelmingly made up of Sunni Muslim fundamentalists of the most debauched and violent sort – have committed heinous atrocities upon Christians, Shi’ites and Yezidis. It is unsurprising to say the least that they turn to the government and to the Syrian Arab Army – built upon the promise of a semi-sæcular modus vivendi – to defend them.

Understand, all ye nations

A Statement Issued by the Patriarchates of Antioch and all the East for the Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, and Greek-Melkite Catholic

Damascus, 14 April 2018

God is with us; Understand all ye nations and submit yourselves!

We, the Patriarchs: John X, Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and all the East, Ignatius Aphrem II, Syrian Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and all the East, and Joseph Absi, Melkite-Greek Catholic Patriarch of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, condemn and denounce the brutal aggression that took place this morning against our precious country Syria by the USA, France and the UK, under the allegations that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons. We raise our voices to affirm the following:

1. This brutal aggression is a clear violation of the international laws and the UN Charter, because it is an unjustified assault on a sovereign country, member of the UN.
2. It causes us great pain that this assault comes from powerful countries to which Syria did not cause any harm in any way.
3. The allegations of the USA and other countries that the Syrian army is using chemical weapons and that Syria is a country that owns and uses this kind of weapon, is a claim that is unjustified and unsupported by sufficient and clear evidence.
4. The timing of this unjustified aggression against Syria, when the independent International Commission for Inquiry was about to start its work in Syria, undermines of the work of this commission.
5. This brutal aggression destroys the chances for a peaceful political solution and leads to escalation and more complications.
6. This unjust aggression encourages the terrorist organizations and gives them momentum to continue in their terrorism.
7. We call upon the Security Council of the United Nations to play its natural role in bringing peace rather than contribute to escalation of wars.
8. We call upon all churches in the countries that participated in the aggression, to fulfill their Christian duties, according to the teachings of the Gospel, and condemn this aggression and to call their governments to commit to the protection of international peace.
9. We salute the courage, heroism and sacrifices of the Syrian Arab Army which courageously protects Syria and provide security for its people. We pray for the souls of the martyrs and the recovery of the wounded. We are confident that the army will not bow before the external or internal terrorist aggressions; they will continue to fight courageously against terrorism until every inch of the Syrian land is cleansed from terrorism. We, likewise, commend the brave stand of countries which are friendly to the Syria and its people.

We offer our prayers for the safety, victory, and deliverance of Syria from all kinds of wars and terrorism. We also pray for peace in Syria and throughout the world, and call for strengthening the efforts of the national reconciliation for the sake of protecting the country and preserving the dignity of all Syrians.