How the war is impacting Sápmi

In Arctic news, Sámi activist and anti-war protester Andrei Danilov is currently seeking (and being denied) asylum in Norway. Norway’s government claims that it cannot offer him asylum because he currently has a Swiss visa. But his case shows rather clearly, and sadly, how the current war is dividing Sápmi from itself, as the four states which encompass the Sámi nation draw up battle lines between them. Norway is a NATO member; and although Sweden and Finland are not formally aligned with NATO, their governments have certainly drifted closer to the NATO sphere in recent years.

Within Russia, Sámi opinion appears to be deeply divided, just as it is among the rest of the Russian population. Hard polling data among Kildin Sámi in Murmansk Oblast are not readily available on this particular question, but it seems reasonable to assume that there is a significant ‘Z’ contingent, a small but vocal anti-war contingent, and a solid majority between them who simply don’t want to get into trouble.

There is a substantial body of anecdotal literature to back up this trifurcated view. A significant number of Sámi within Russia, such as Anna Igontova (one of the three elected representatives of the Russian section of the Sámirađđi since 2018), have come out in favour of Russia’s ‘special military operation’. So has Kola’s Sámi Association, and the Russian Arctic indigenous advocacy organisation RAIPON. Others, like Andrei Danilov and exile organisations like ICIPR, are coming out strongly against Russia’s assault on the Ukraine. In addition, RAIPON and ICIPR have issued statements questioning each other’s legitimacy and right to speak on behalf of the indigenous peoples of the Russian north.

First order: this is truly heart-breaking, and it should be so for anyone interested in the welfare of indigenous peoples in the Arctic or anywhere else. What we are seeing is the instrumentalisation of indigenous concerns to prop up political actions elsewhere that they, prima facie, have nothing to do with. We should condemn equally this instrumentalisation, whether it comes from the Russian government, or the governments of NATO-aligned countries like Norway and Germany. It seems to me that both NATO and Russia are now actively playing the same chess game over the Arctic.

Second order: we need to understand why the Russian government gets the kind of support it does from RAIPON and other organisations like the Kola Sámi Association, which come the closest to actually democratically representing the Skolt, Kildin and Ter Sámi peoples within Russia. It isn’t enough to take the ‘official dissident’ line that these organisations are merely suborned by the Russian state to suit its own ends, though clearly a significant degree of political pressure has been applied there. As a broad generalisation: Russia’s indigenous nations have been active supporters of the current government for a number of years now, including on questions like the recent revisions to the Russian Constitution.

The first thing we need to understand about this, is that Russia’s smaller ethnic nations have by and large carefully cultivated a sense of civic nationalism that is defensively oriented against the ethnic nationalism perpetrated on some of the seedier corners of the Russian far-right. A careful distinction has to be made here between the terminology of ‘russkii’ (русский) and ‘rossiiskii’ (российский). English doesn’t preserve this linguistic distinction, and translates both terms as ‘Russian’. The first term is an ethnic designation. The ethnic ‘Big’ Rus’ of Novgorod, Pskov, Moscow, Tver, Ryazan, Rostov and so forth; the ‘White’ Rus’ of Minsk and Polotsk and Turov; the ‘Little’ Rus’ of Galich and Volhynia; and the Carpathian Rus’ of Užhorod and Maramoroš—are all русский. The second term, российский, is a civic designation. The idea behind российский is that you can be Tatar, Nenets, Nivkh, Ket, Evenki, Sakha, Tuva, Buryat, Selkup, Bashkir, Chuvash, Chechen, Dagestani, Adyghe or Sámi, and still be every bit as российский as this guy on YouTube.

The entire concept of российский civic-nationalism was eagerly embraced by most Russian indigenous groups, precisely because—in the wake of the collapse of the concept of the ‘new Soviet man’—the российский self-identifier was all that stood between them and oblivion. And this, of course, in a time when a great swathe of Russia’s ethnic-Russian population was also facing oblivion at the hands of a clique of neoliberal capitalist economists who literally left millions of them to starve or die deaths of despair, and of a government which had been rendered powerless to assist them. Perhaps ironically, this shared suffering between the русский-Russians and the post-Soviet, newly-российский indigenous peoples in the nineties, helped to forge a new sense of sympathy and solidarity between them.

But the generalised atmosphere of grievance also brought out the worst in some of the far-right enthusiasts for Руси-as-opposed-to-Россия. Ethnic violence in Russia, many of the organised forms of it being associated with the far-right ‘Russian March’ (of which Western liberal darling Aleksei Navalnyi has been a staunch supporter and for which support he has never apologised), peaked in the early 2000s. This allowed Putin—whether genuinely or cynically—to position himself as a defender of the interests of all россияне, when he cracked down on the ‘Russian March’ and its associated far-right ethnic extremism. This strategy worked—spectacularly. In the words of Mikhail Alekseev, writing for Edinburgh University Press:

Putin has faced practically no ethnic minority backlash over his Ukraine policy since the autumn of 2013. No survey or other systematic data on the issue have been available, but the reputable Levada Centre poll of 20–23 March 2014 showed that 88 per cent of Russia’s population (+/− a sampling error of 3.4 per cent) backed what the questionnaire described as ‘Crimea’s joining of Russia’. Only 6 per cent of those surveyed opposed it (Levada Centre 2014b). In a telephone ‘megasurvey’ of 48,590 Russians in eighty- three provinces, conducted on 14–16 March 2014 by the independent but government-loyal Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) and the Kremlin-run VTsIOM service, 91 per cent of the respondents sup- ported, and only about 5 per cent opposed, Crimea’s annexation. In all but one of the predominantly non-Russian ethnic republics (Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino- Balkaria, Karachaevo- Cherkessia, Mari El, North Ossetia, Tatarstan and Tyva) residents polled in the megasurvey supported Crimea’s annexation at about the same rate as residents of Russia did on average, plus or minus three percentage points.

Ultimately, then, the political strategy of the indigenous nations of Russia is entirely a defensive one. This is understandable. They naturally distrust the elements of the far-right that seemed to have gained in prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They also view liberal politicians as (to put it politely) unreliable, both because they backed the economic policies that immiserated Russians of all ethnicities, and because they flocked to the same politics of grievance as the far-right did when Putin came to power in 2000. They may not, and as seen from some of the anecdotal evidence above clearly do not unanimously, support all of Putin’s policies. But their political options are few and unenviable.

A side note here. People in Russia are not stupid, and they do have access to foreign news media. Among the Finno-Ugric nations of the Russian Federation (including not only the Sámi but also the Karelians, Veps, Votes, Ingrians, Erzyans, Mokshas, Maris, Udmurts, Permian-Komis, Mansis and Khants) in particular, I would imagine that the hateful racialist rhetoric coming out of, for example, the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance toward Finnic-Ugric peoples in general probably hasn’t won them many friends in that quarter. Now, of course, I’m not a Mari, nor am I a Moksha, nor anything in between. But if I were, I’d imagine it would be rather hard for me to sympathise with Ukrainians who consider me a barbarous Asiatic element that has contaminated historical Muscovy and are thus the distant historical scapegoats for all of their political woes. Note also how this charge echoes the grievance-politics of русский far-right ethno-nationalism. In fact, I’d probably be more willing to tolerate the annoying and somewhat-creepy sexualised patronisation of probably otherwise well-intentioned filmmakers like Aleksei Fedorchenko, than I would the caliper-wielding eliminationism of the race-purists who publish material for Ukrainian government ministries.

In addition, I would imagine that a lot of ethnic minorities in Russia are carefully scrutinising, insofar as they are able, how the ethnic Hungarians (also speakers of a Finno-Ugric language), Romani and Jews are currently being treated inside the Ukraine… in part because they fear that a resurgent русский ethno-nationalism could lead to the same treatment in Russia. They see Hungarians essentially being kicked out of their schools in Transcarpathia. (To get an idea of how unpopular the Ukrainian national cause is in Hungary because of this, consider: Hungary is a member of NATO and its government has, correctly, officially denounced the Russian assault. And yet, Orbán Viktor handily won his recent re-election there on a campaign promising not to send weapons into the Ukraine.) They see Roma being beaten, stripped naked, sprayed with iodine, tied to lampposts and left to freeze. And of course they see marches in honour of war criminals who perpetrated the Shoah. All of this context makes the entire narrative of Ukraine-as-hardscrabble-liberal-democracy versus Russia-as-despotic-villainous-aggressor an incredibly hard sell, particularly to ethnic minorities in Russia who remember all too well how the domestic русский ethno-nationalist far-right has treated them in the recent past.

Again, none of the foregoing is to excuse, let alone to defend, Russia’s recent actions in the Ukraine. Putin lost my support precisely when I heard that he bombed Kharkov. But some level of strategic empathy is called for in this instance. The Sámi in Russia, like other indigenous peoples there, have lived through three decades now of extreme uncertainty. If Western media imagine that they are the victims of state repression and manipulated by propaganda, one must even more so consider that the context of their very real hopes and fears rests precisely on this uncertain footing. Where can they look for defence? Not to the capitalist Western countries, who showed zero concern for their health, safety and welfare in the nineties. (Even now, Danilov is being denied asylum—see how much Norway cares for the Sámi!) Not to the old Soviet ideals—these can only be of comfort in nostalgia, in total abstraction from the present reality. And certainly not to the liberals, who happily allied themselves with the worst forms of far-right ethno-nationalist grievance politics. But if Putin fails, then they will find themselves again the scapegoats of a politics of grievance. That is not a happy place to be.

So, again, if you are a person of conscience, pray for the Sámi: whether they are pro-war, anti-war or anywhere in the middle. Pray for the Sámi in the West as well as in the East. My position, and it will continue to be my position unless and until something drastic happens, remains the same as that of the Sámirađđi: I oppose military action as unjust, I oppose escalation, I oppose punitive sanctions aimed at the civilian populace… and I advocate for a negotiated settlement that respects both Ukrainian sovereignty and Russian security.

Leg dich nicht mit dem Bären an

A major victory for renters in Berlin today:

Berliners have backed one of Europe’s most radical responses to gentrification: seizing property from so-called mega landlords. In a referendum timed to coincide with Germany’s general election on Sunday, locals supported expropriation by 56% to 39%.

“It’s nearly impossible to describe this feeling,” Kalle Kunkel, an activist for Berlin’s Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen campaign, told Euronews. “For many of us, it feels like the end of a four-year marathon. Or at the very least, we’ve reached a major high point.”

The campaign is named after Deutsche Wohnen, a private landlord that held more than 110,000 apartments in Berlin.

Kunkel sees the referendum victory as the culmination of years of campaigning against skyrocketing housing and rental prices. The vote could see private landlords that hold more than 3,000 units having them expropriated and folded into the city’s affordable housing stock. This would socialise more than 240,000 apartments.

“It was an incredibly clear victory,” Kunkel added. “A majority of Berliners in all but two (of 12) districts supported the initiative. Which means the whole city said: ‘We don’t want speculators to have a say in our housing’. And that’s a decision that political leaders simply can’t ignore.”

Unfortunately, it looks like Berliners’ just and democratic demands may be quashed by a constitutional court. But the fact that this referendum passed, primarily with the support of The Left party and a coalition of mostly younger renters in Berlin, shows that voters are increasingly convinced that deep-reaching systemic change is necessary to correct course. It is a big step toward a more just order.

Remembering the Nakba and Gaza today

In the past six days, Israeli armed forces have killed 126 people, including 31 children, and wounded 920 more after shelling Gaza and bombarding from the air. Nearly ten thousand Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes from the assault. This coordinated and deliberate display of military brutality against a civilian population comes as a result of protests against Israeli police, who have been aiding illegal Israeli settlers to forcibly evict Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem over the past several weeks.

According to any civilised measure of what constitutes just warfare, Israel’s retaliation to these protests is anything but just. The principles of necessity and proportionality are not only routinely ignored, but flouted, by Netanyahu’s misgovernment of miscreants. It is not, as the American press misreports it, a ‘clash’. It is not, as said misgovernment risibly calls it, a ‘civil war’. It is an act of ethnic cleansing, one which also targets and impacts the indigenous Christians of the Middle East.

It is necessary to remember that this is not a sectarian struggle. It is not about Muslims versus Jews. Christians have been integral to the Palestinian struggle since the beginning. The newspapers that were chiefly responsible for building the movement opposing Zionist settler-colonialism, al-Karmal and Falasṭîn, were run by Orthodox Christian editors: to wit, Najîb Naṣṣâr and ‘Îssa al-‘Îssa. The Palestinian Arab Congress arose out of the Muslim-Christian associations that arose as organic Arab nationalist societies in every major city in Palestine. The cause of Palestine is not a Muslim one only, it is a human one.

Of the Palestinian people who live in aš-Šayḵ Jarrâḥ, a significant proportion of them are in fact refugees from aṭ-Ṭalbiyyah in the western part of the city, which during the 1920s and 1930s was a predominantly Arab Christian neighbourhood. Between 1948 and 1967, the Israelis cheated or outright stole the land from the Arabic residents and kicked them into East Jerusalem. The current takeover by Israeli settlers, the evictions and the confiscation of property, are in fact a continuation of the initial Nakba which took place in 1948 and which is remembered each year today.

The Nakba is continuing in aš-Šayḵ Jarrâḥ and in Gaza, through the familiar pattern of people with guns terrorising people without guns. However, the people of Palestine are rising up against the unlawful evictions, and they deserve support. So far, that support has not been forthcoming from the United States or from the Biden Administration, which has been blocking UN Security Council action to stop the escalating violence against Palestinians. Moreover, they refuse to condemn the killing of children by the Israeli military. This is part of a definite pattern on the part of this administration, and one may be sure that the hypocrisy is being noticed abroad.

For that matter, it’s also necessary to remember that the Nakba is not just a Middle Eastern problem. It is a European problem. George Antonius’s book The Arab Awakening should be required reading on this topic. The British and French governments rankly betrayed their Arab allies during WWI, first with the Sykes-Picot Agreement and then with the Balfour Declaration. It was easier for them to foist off the ‘Jewish problem’ onto a subjugated and colonised population far away in the Middle East, than for them to deal with their own deep-seated anti-Semitism. The same principle held when it came to European support for Zionism after World War II. The same people who perpetrated the horrors of Shoah on European Jewry were content to send the rest of them packing to the Middle East: a way to assuage their guilty consciences without bearing any real cost.

(Even today, the openly anti-Semitic governments of Poland, Hungary and the Ukraine enjoy an alliance of convenience with the far-right ethnonationalist Likud misgovernment in Israel. And in the United States, men who can’t stand the idea of their children going to school with Jewish children openly tout their alliance with Israel. This ‘double game’ allows anti-Semitism in the West to continue to disguise itself as ‘friendship’, and also allows Israel to benefit from a continuing climate of hostility to Jews in Western nations.)

In the meantime, however, the Palestinian people cannot wait for justice. This Nakba Day, let us first begin by praying for an end to the violence. And then, in the spirit of that prayer, at the very least let us be courageous enough to acknowledge the truths of what is happening in Palestine. What is going on is not a ‘clash’ or a ‘civil war’ between two sides of equal strength which bear equal blame: one side has tanks and planes and nuclear weapons and the other side does not, and the more powerful side has no regard for restraint. What is going on is not a conflict over religion: it is a conflict over land. What is going on is also not a far-away iteration of irrational regional hatreds: it is the culmination of a long and deep-seated spiritual illness in the West, and it is one for which our governments and peoples bear responsibility. Once we have been courageous enough to acknowledge these truths, let us then translate that awareness into action. Israel’s ongoing crimes against Palestine must end, and international pressure must be brought to bear for that to happen. And the costs of Europe’s centuries-long mistreatment of the Jews must no longer fall upon an Arabic populace that bears no responsibility for that mistreatment.

The spellbreaking power of the Elbe

Eastern Europe truly is a very different place from Western Europe, in part because many of the illusions and lies that our elites have concocted for us about political realities simply shatter and vanish upon contact with Eastern Europe. And by ‘Eastern Europe’ I do count those areas of what is more properly called Central Europe, which begins in the Elbe River basin and includes what used to be East Germany.

Take Russiagate, for example. Russiagate was always a lie – and a flimsy lie at that, but no less dangerous for being flimsy. The American journo class, and especially MSNBC, tried incredibly hard to paint Trump as an agent of Russia, someone who served primarily Russian interests, who was elected essentially at Russia’s behest. The lie was repeated so baldly and so repeatedly that the Putin-Trump ‘bromance’ and the Russian ‘love affair’ with Trump became articles of faith. The only problem is that none of it is actually true, and the Russiagate story is used to play centrist Americans for suckers. Neither Putin, nor the Russians who elected him and continue to support him, ever had much use for Trump, save for the fact that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton.

Indeed, the Pew poll that came out at the beginning of this year regarding attitudes toward Trump and America worldwide still support this view. Russians really don’t like Trump, who has a confidence rating of 20%. For comparison, Trump polls as well or better in Canada (28%) and every single Western European country surveyed – the UK (32%), the Netherlands (25%), France (20%), Spain (21%), Italy (32%) – except Germany (13%). On the other hand, despite the growing impatience with him, Russians do still love Putin, and the same Pew data gave him a rating of 73%.

But what do I mean when I say the Elbe dispels political illusions? I mean precisely this: the lie of Russiagate becomes ever more untenable the closer you actually approach Russia. Where the Russiagate story about election collusion and Trump being a Russian agent has purchase, one would expect to see equally or near-equally low approval ratings for both Trump and Russia. And indeed, in Western Europe this is generally the case, with Russia receiving approval ratings about on par with Trump there, according to Pew data collected in February this year. This is not necessarily a good indication that they ‘buy’ the Russiagate story, however. It may simply be the case that Western Europeans see both Trump and Russia as threats to their interests.

But the Elbe breaks this spell, hard, in two different ways. First of all, one sees the expected low approval ratings for Russia in Poland (33%) and the Ukraine (32%). However, both countries show markedly higher approval for Trump. Poland, in fact, is the only country in Europe where a slim majority (51%) have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, whereas in the Ukraine a plurality (44%) believes the same. Intriguing, no, that significant portions of the populations in Poland and in the Ukraine approve of Trump but do not approve of Russia? If Trump were Russia’s agent, wouldn’t one expect to see those numbers closely coincide, as they do in Western Europe?

On the other side, we have countries where Russia polls highly, but Trump does not. Bulgaria has a remarkably high degree of trust in Russia (73%), but Trump is even more unpopular there (26%) than in Canada or Italy. Likewise Slovakia – a solid majority of the country trusts Russia (60%), which is far more than can be said for Trump (34%). And finally Greece, where Russia generally (58%) and Putin personally (52%) sway a majority of the population’s trust, but where Trump (25%) is as thoroughly distrusted as in Western Europe. Even in East Germany, this same pattern seems to hold: 43% of East Germans have a favourable opinion of Russia – markedly more than in West Germany (33%). But East Germans also seem to loathe Trump every bit as much as their West German neighbours do, with an approval rating in the high teens. It’s very much the case that the closer one gets in proximity to Russia, the more ludicrous the idea that the Russian state or, even more so, the Russian people are invested in Trump seems to be. And that seems to hold regardless of what opinion one has of Russia.

One of the notable analyses that accompanied the Pew study was the degree to which European support for Trump was predicated on domestic political objectives and orientation. The new nationalist right parties tend to have far warmer feelings for Trump on average than their countrymen – even when those new nationalist right parties are also Russophobic, as in Poland and Hungary. On the other hand, warm feelings for Russia simply do not seem to be driven as much by ideological considerations, at least in Eastern Europe. As I have said before, pro-Russia parties in Eastern Europe tend to fall as much on the political left or even in the centre as on the right.

And to a certain extent, I believe ideology does matter. A historical connexion with Orthodox Christianity does seem to correlate to a certain hostility to capitalism of the sort that Trump represents, although that anti-capitalism cannot be said to be causally linked to the corpus of Orthodox doctrine or Liturgical practice (which is a shame!). These Orthodox countries do, after all, seem to have done a better job on the whole of keeping their social services and transfer mechanisms intact despite the onslaught of neoliberalism against them. The fact that the countries which are traditionally within the Orthosphere seem to be particularly cool toward Trump and warm toward Russia does seem to indicate a certain ideological distaste for what Trump represents, over-against that which Russia represents. These are taken, with good reason, to be two different things.

But what does seem to matter in these countries, is not ideology, but culture, which in some ways underlies politics more deeply than ideology does. Bulgaria has a deep and abiding connexion to its Orthodox roots, going back to the Seven Saints. Bulgarian literature has a strong Russophile streak – for example, Ivan Vazov’s famous novel! And of course there is the long history of peasant rebellion which this literature implies, which is echoed in the interwar distributist governance of Aleksandar Stamboliyski. In particularly the eastern part of Czechoslovakia, too – and Carpathian Ruthenia in particular – there was a strong streak of both peasant rebellion and cultural attachment to Russia, which has carried its echoes into modern-day Slovak politics.

It’s actually a bit sad, because the data I’m drawing on here really are hidden in plain sight. It’s just that convenience and force of habit weigh more heavily with the average consumer of news media than truth does, and therefore this intellectually-lazy and baseless association of Trump with Russia continues unabated, to be used – as it inevitably will be – as a blunt instrument and as an accusation of disloyalty against the opposite ‘side’ in American electoral politics. What a truly sorry time we live in, where even the people who claim to be on the side of ‘facts’ and ‘reason’ are simply blind to both. What few hopes I have left for sanity in the West, are actually in the East of the West… in the Elbe Basin and beyond.

Holy and Right-Believing Prince Ştefan III of Moldova

Saint Ştefan ‘cel Mare’ of Moldova

Today, the twelfth of July, is the day of the canonisation of Saint Ştefan, the fifteenth-century voivode of Moldavia, who preserved the territorial integrity and Orthodox faith of the territory of Moldavia – that is to say, Moldova – from onslaughts by all three surrounding powers: the Ottoman Empire, Poland and Hungary. His reputation among historians is mixed. But he is highly regarded and treasured by both Romanian and Moldovan historians, particularly after the fall of communism, for his preservation of Moldavian independence amidst the depredations of the great powers around him. He was glorified by the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1992; his feast-day is the second of July.

Ştefan Muşat [also in English Stephen, cognomen ‘cel Mare’ or ‘the Great’] was born to Bogdan II of Moldova and his wife Maria Oltea sometime in the mid-1400s; the year is unclear but it was probably sometime before 1440. He had three brothers – Ioachim, Ioan and Christea – and two sisters – Sorea and Maria. He was a very young man when his father seized the throne of Moldavia by force, with the aid of the peasant leader of Hungary Hunyadi János. Bogdan II made his young son his heir and co-ruler, while swearing fealty to Hunyadi as suzerain. However, one of Bogdan’s siblings, Petru Aron, assassinated him in October 1451 and took the throne for himself, being supported by the Kingdom of Poland – forcing the eleven-year-old Ştefan to flee Moldavia for Hungary.

Ştefan Muşat, as a young man, served as a retainer of the (in)famous Vlad Țepeș ‘the Dragon’ around the time he became ruler of Wallachia. Vlad thereafter lent his assistance to young Ştefan when he decided to retake his kingdom in 1456. At the head of an army, 6,000 strong, consisting largely of peasants from the south of the country, Ştefan charged headlong into his country and confronted his uncle Petru Aron at Doljești and Orbic in April 1457, routing his forces and causing him to flee for Poland.

The young Ştefan, most likely not yet being 20 years of age, was crowned as voivode of Moldavia on the 13^th of September that year by Metropolitan Teoctist. According to tradition, this took place in an assembly of boyars and clergy on the Plain of Direptate, near to the battlefield where he had fought and defeated Petru Aron. Teoctist, being Serbian-educated and Serbian-consecrated, was apparently one of the few Romanian clergymen who had not approved of the Union of Florence (and thus had significant sway among the Moldavian people). Saint Ştefan emphasised the Orthodox and religious elements of his title, in part to emphasise his connexion to the recently-fallen Orthodox Constantinople.

Ştefan wasted no time in chasing down his usurping uncle into Poland, signing the treaty of Overchelăuţi with the Polish king the following year, on the understanding that Casimir IV would not give his political or military support to Petru Aron. Petru Aron thereafter fled to Hungary, and Ştefan was forced to cede significant degrees of his sovereignty to Poland in exchange for protection from Hungary’s king Hunyadi Mátyás. Subsequent years saw Ştefan mount several campaigns against Hungary in order to protect the borders of Moldavia. During Ştefan’s campaigns against Hungary, in 1465, he managed to recapture Chilia, for which he traded with Poland for some of his northern territory, reëstablishing the historical boundary between Poland and Moldavia.

Both Hungary and Moldavia used disgruntled elements of each other’s landowning classes as military supports in their campaigns, one against the other. Thus, it’s not surprising that Ştefan used his new position to consolidate the power of the voivode over the boyars. Ştefan ruled in a distinctly autocratic manner, and did not flinch from using his friend Vlad Țepeș’s methods of juridical terror and execution – including impalement – against landowners and boyars who defied him. He suppressed Romani and Tatars in his realm, and undertook particularly heavy-handed and cruel administrative actions to prevent them from posing military threats to his power. He welcomed Armenians, Germans and other immigrants to settle in the underdeveloped agricultural regions of Moldova; however, he ruthlessly expropriated property from Jews under his sway and occasionally levied tariffs against merchants who crossed his borders. His policies of centralisation and protectionism, combined with selective open-door policy for immigrants and punitive actions against the nobility, ended up expanding both the powers and the military responsibilities of the Moldovan peasantry.

He expropriated a great deal of land from the more stubborn boyars. Of this land, he gave much of it to the Orthodox Church, and thus earned a certain reputation for religious devotion – and encouraged his loyal boyars to do the same. Over a dozen stone churches were built in Moldavia on his orders, most of these featuring a uniquely-Romanian architectural style which mixed Byzantine and Western principles. He commissioned the consecration of the Putna Monastery, whose votive church would become the resting place for himself and his family, and which is today located in northeastern Romania. He also contributed heavily to a body of Romanian Liturgical literature and music, which was – intriguingly – transcribed in the Cyrillic script. He had, it seems, an affinity for Slavic cultural expressions.

Saint Ştefan repulsed an invasion by Tatars in 1469, and another attempted coup by his treacherous uncle the following year. Capturing Petru Aron along with several of his supporters, Ştefan had them executed, thus putting a decisive end to the Moldavian succession issue. Once this was done, and having nothing more to fear from Hungary, Ştefan turned his attention to the threat from Turkey and the Tatars to his East, on the Black Sea coast. He sparred several times with the Ottoman vassal of Bessarabia, Radu ‘cel Frumos’. When the Ottomans invaded Moldavia in 1475, the holy voivode led a coalition of Christian kings, including those of Poland and Hungary, to expel the Turks from Moldavia and to dethrone Radu once and for all. Ştefan declared Moldavia to be the ‘Gate to Christendom’, and applied to both the Papacy and to the Venetians for help – which, as might be expected, never materialised. Upon the release of Vlad Țepeș in 1476, the Impaler launched a campaign to free Wallachia from the Ottomans – which ended in his death. Ştefan, on a rare occasion, found himself militarily defeated by the Turks, and was forced to flee for safety into Poland. However, with two of his vassals holding firmly in their fastenings, the voivode was able to return to his homeland that same year.

A power vacuum in Wallachia consumed much of the Moldavian monarch’s attention for the following years – though ultimately, after several failed attempts on Ştefan’s part to intervene in the succession, Wallachia is ceded to Ottoman suzerainty. Several treaties Ştefan was forced to sign between 1479 and 1484 ceded considerable degrees of sovereignty to Poland and Hungary in exchange for protection from the victorious Ottomans; however, the Ottomans under Bayezid II still attack and take the valuable port towns of Chilia and Cetatea Albă. Poland ultimately betrays Moldavia to the Ottomans, prompting Ştefan to again turn to Hungary. On the disputed succession of Władysław Jagiełło to the Hungarian throne, Ştefan – though effectively a supporter of Władysław – was again able to effectively play Poland and Hungary off of each other in order to assert Moldavian independence.

Towards the end of his life, in 1499, Saint Ştefan was finally able to leverage the strategic location of Moldavia and the political clout he carried in both Polish and Hungarian courts to force a settlement that would forge a Christian anti-Ottoman alliance – in which Moldavia would be considered a full and independent member. Even so, the continued Ottoman pressure on Moldavia would mean that Ştefan as well as his heirs would continue essentially paying protection money to the Ottomans in exchange for recognition of their sovereignty.

Ştefan married four times: first, to a woman named Mărica (who bore him a son, Alexandru); second, to Evdokia of Kiev; third, to Maria Palaiologina of Doros; and fourth, to Maria Voichița of Wallachia. In addition to his wives he also consorted with a number of women outside, claiming paternity of at least two illegitimate sons. His fourth wife would bear him a son, Bogdan [called ‘cel Chior’ or ‘the One-Eyed’], whom he would raise to take the throne after his death. Saint Ştefan, as the leader of a small state wedged between several large and powerful ones (much like the Kazakh khan Abylaı), skilfully played Poland, Hungary and the Ottomans against each other. His strategic acumen allowed him to make a successful bid for Moldavian independence, and his personal knack for nipping political plots in the bud and ensuring his personal longevity allowed Moldavia a degree of stability, order and internal peace which lasted through the reigns of his son and his grandchildren; and which it seldom had before or since.

Ştefan III makes for a complicated saint, very similar in character to Saint Éadgár the Frithsome of England. His sex life was – to say the least – not particularly saintly, though his fealty to Orthodox doctrine is past doubt, and there are interesting indications of a kind of sæcular asceticism in his life. For example: he did not hold a permanent court, and even in peacetime he liked to live in tents and sleep on the ground. He also prayed and mourned even over the graves of his enemies, and kept a rule of fasting and personal penance after battles. He was also notable for his personal generosity to monastics both at home and in places like the Holy Mountain, as well as to poor and needy people inside his kingdom. Saint Ştefan’s rule was indeed notoriously heavy-handed; however, he was a remarkably astute and tenacious political leader, one who was wholly committed to the defence of his folk and of his Church. The Catholic Pope Sixtus IV described him as an ‘athlete of Christ’. Particularly toward the end of the Cold War, he came to be seen as a heroic figure who is revered by all Romanians and Moldovans. In modern-day Moldova, particularly on the political left, he is considered to be the founder of the state, being the author of Moldovan independence from foreign powers – both Christian and non-Christian. Holy and great prince Ştefan, steadfast defender of the Moldavian land and people, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Ştefan of Moldavia, Tone 1:

Fearless defender of the True Faith
And protector of the land of your forefathers,
Great founder of holy churches and monasteries,
O Prince Ştefan, pray to Christ God
To deliver us from our needs and sorrows.

Coat of arms of Ştefan cel Mare

What comes afterward? redux: post-liberalisms rising

Given the somewhat worried tone of my non-hagiographical blog posts of late (like ‘Hindsight and foresight’, ‘Ideological history’, ‘Solovyov and the problem of the post-sæcular’), I felt it might be wise to spend some time speaking a bit more dispassionately and analytically about what I’m observing at this point in world news.

I don’t think that the news on that end is all bad; not a bit of it. I am merely asserting that those of us in the West who are sceptical of the legacy of liberalism need to tread carefully because we are setting out onto uncharted territory. It is very difficult for any of us to reference or chart a future without the complex of liberalism-slash-nominalism-slash-capitalism-slash-technocracy hanging over us. We have – and I very much include myself here – a tendency to look to winged visions of prisca theologica and other past manifestations of præ-liberal order in our attempts to envision what a post-liberal order will look like. But what is happening on the global scale, as history keeps proving itself to be very far from a Fukuyama-style end, is both terrifying and exhilarating. Instead of one post- or alter-liberalism popping up to assert itself, we have a whole plethora of them, and some of them are very clearly preferable to the others.

What I’m going to try to do here is to organise them in a systemic way, such that they can be placed in perspective with each other. The ‘liberal international order’ centred in Washington and New York which finds itself still in power but with ever-dwindling reserves of moral or theoretical legitimacy, is also playing favourites. That needs to be very carefully borne in mind. That said, the global backlash against liberalism, the Washington Consensus, neoliberal technocracy and austerity politics has afforded us a moment of fertile experimentation in terms of political organisation. It’s worth taking account of where all these options are coming from, what is prompting their rise, and where they are likely to go.

1. Illiberal democratic socialism. This ‘option’ is the one I’ve been talking up for a long while now. It combines the œconomic priorities of democratic socialism (including public ownership, public infrastructure, state-mediated wage bargaining, strong welfare-state initiatives) with a strong Tory paternalist streak in social policy. Illiberal democratic socialists tend to be pro-natalist, pro-family, civic-communitarian, immigration-sceptical (but not racialist), classical in their architectural tastes. They also have a penchant for the preservation of wilderness and wildlife. Their star is currently ascendant in Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Moldova and Slovakia), and has echoes in the ‘Russkiy Mir’ politics of the Baltic states.
   
   One of the reasons I’m so bullish on the illiberal democratic socialism of Eastern Europe is because it so easily bears the peculiar Byzantine marks of Yugoslav and Czechoslovak politics that I’ve come to value so deeply. As such, they bear a kin resemblance – not at all accidental, in my own humble opinion – to the Tory socialisms of John Ruskin and William Morris which were so influential on me. At the very least, this illiberal democratic socialism may be a means for Yugoslavs and Eastern Europeans to assert a strong regional identity.





2. Civilisational realism. This is the option that is being put forward primarily by the state and the leading theorists of Russia. As articulated by Dr Boris Mezhuev, civilisational realism is not so much an ideology as it is a strategy of engagement and an attempt to mitigate the effects of the modern de facto multipolar world order. The civilisational realists are noticeably informed by the conservatism of Karamzin, Il’in and Berdyaev, and very much opposed to manifestations of liberal ideology. But they are nonetheless quite mild and quiet on the topic of ideological issues of any sort, whether œconomic or social. The civilisational realists are not crusaders; they bear neither the Western nor the Islâmic world any animus unless either attacks them. Likewise, they aren’t particularly voluble on domestic issues, apart from critiquing the culture of corruption that has accompanied Russian society since the years of Gorbachev and Eltsin. As I have mentioned before, the intimation of loss is a strong constant undercurrent in the creative thinking of the Rodina. Civilisational realism is an expression of the Russian nation’s desire to be given an autonomy and dignity she (rightly) feels she’s been denied for decades.
   
   At the same time, though, the civilisational realists are keenly attuned to the questions of particularity and historical contingency that were originally raised by Herder. This is, without a doubt, a legacy of the Slavophil impress on Russian conservatism. Likewise, the willingness to engage the West on positive terms is a deliberate echo of the Slavophil engagements of the early-to-mid nineteenth century. But civilisational realism tends in a very different direction than Slavophilia. It doesn’t bear the messianic marks of the original Slavophils. Its historical awareness has given its proponents a degree of humility that is lacking in the likes of Kireevsky, Khomyakov or Aksakov. They do not pretend to be giving to the world the unique ‘new word’ that Russia was supposed to speak; instead, they are trying to allow Russia time to catch its breath again.





3. Marxism. Far from being the dead or moribund ideology that our élites have been telling us it’s been for the past three decades, the Marxist parties of southern India, Nepal, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Venezuela, (until recently) Bolivia and (yes) China have shown themselves to be resilient, flexible, tough and pragmatic. Whether or not you agree with their outcomes or the means by which they keep power, they have shown themselves to be politically stable in the face of active attempts to bludgeon them into submission or oblivion with sanctions, interventions and colour revolutions.
   
   More than that: Marxism has proven to be surprisingly dynamic. I can attest from experience that actually-existing Marxist parties operate in an intellectual space heavily-dosed with inaccessible, inane, soporific jargon. At the same time, there is valuable intellectual work being done at the fringes of the ‘big red circle’. Marxism is creatively making contact with environmentalism; with religion; even with culturally-conservative traditionalism – and the results are, to say the least, interesting to watch. Marxism is likely to remain a significant alternative to liberalism for the foreseeable future throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia.





4. Red Shî‘ism; Black Shî‘ism. The title of Dr Ali Shariati’s article is an apt description of the politics – on both sides of the coin – of the Mihwar al-Muqâwamah. It represents, like the civilisational realism described above, a strategy rather than an ideology per se, and it is a strategy that is shared by both sæcular Arab nationalists and theocratic Persians. But it is an offensive rather than a defensive strategy; a strategy for pursuing asymmetric warfare rather than a strategy for détente.
   
   ‘Red’ Shî‘ism, informed as it is by the martyrdoms of ‘Alî and Husayn on behalf of the helpless and by the eschatological ideal of righteous kingship inherited from Zoroastrianism, takes a natural and instinctive solidarity with the oppressed and uses it as a revolutionary rallying-cry. The ‘red’ Shî‘ism of Hizbullâh which actively takes up the cause of the Christians in Lebanon, just as readily in the case of Ansârullâh takes up the cause of the starving and deprived Yemeni people. The idea of martyrdom on behalf of the defenceless in Shî‘a Islâm is strong enough that its passion extends to the welfare of non-Muslims.
   
   But as Dr Shariati notes, ‘red’ Shî‘ism – the religion of the martyrs – turns rapidly into the ‘black’ Shî‘ism of the Safavids – the religion of mourning. There is a certain note of cynicism that creeps in around the edges when Shî‘ism is exposed to the realities of power. Though Shariati is more emphatic on the nature of ‘red’ Shî‘ism and more apophatic on ‘the religion of mourning’, what he doesn’t say about the latter is eloquent. The ‘religion of mourning’ is one in which the fervour for the dignity of the oppressed cools and congeals into a set of theocratic dictums. The cleric takes himself into a masjid beside ‘Âlî Qâpû, his face long with resignation, and expounds with grim necessity the realities of power politics. This is not, I hasten to add, merely an Islâmic problem: we Orthodox Christians, too, have our problems with ‘mourning’ cynicism. But the words of the clerics in Tehran, however just their outward cause, are to be watched with care.





5. Nationalisme intégral. I have written before, at length, about how Christian democratic politics betrayed their radical roots in the 1950s and 1960s for a rapprochement with the bourgeois politics of ordoliberalism and austerity œconomics. It seems to be something of an irony that when you strip away this discredited layer of œconomic whiggery, what remains is not the humane radicalism of Mounier and Maritain, which has long since absconded, but instead something a good deal bleaker: a positivist, corporatist nationalism recalling that of Maurras.
   
   The crisis of social solidarity that the European Union suffered with the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008 spurred a massive backlash, particularly in Eastern and Southern Europe. The result in places like Poland (with the election of Duda) and Hungary (with the election of Orbán) was a certain coarsening of the national fibre. Both the PiS and the Fidesz parties lay claim to the Christian democratic mantle, but both of them avidly play to a certain narrative which links the salvation of Christendom to the fate of the nation-state, and furthermore posits the integral party apparatus as the sole means of saving both. This too-close and instrumentalist conceptual linkage between a higher and more primal form of solidarity, and a lower and more contingent one, is actually quite dangerous, and there are good reasons to be wary of it.
   
   Christians first and foremost should be wary of this kind of integral nationalism. It is not taking root only in Western nations culturally rooted in Christendom. It is also growing roots in India with the BJP under Modi, which self-describes as ‘integral humanist’. And it is also growing roots in Turkey with the AKP under Erdoğan, whose integralist ideology is drawn straight from Qutb’s articulation of political Sunnî Islâm – a connexion which the ‘Little Sultan’ still values in his current policy. The more integralist Hungaries and Polands are cultivated in the West, the more open and vulnerable we leave our brothers in the East to their enemies in places like Turkey and India.





6. Fascism. Speaking of far-right nationalisms, here’s another one that’s come slithering up from the gutter of the twentieth century’s mechanised total wars of ideology. Never mind, of course, that fascism is rooted in transhuman futurism and avant-garde æsthetics. Never mind that the resurgent alt-right shares similarly haute-moderne and post-moderne roots. It is still going to pretend to be the alternative to liberal decadence that Europe (and Latin America) has been missing. And, unfortunately, it looks likely to gain more than a mere handful of followers.
   
   I want to be very clear that I am using the term ‘fascism’ in a very narrow and technical sense. Fascism is not merely a byword for just any far-right nationalism with corporatist characteristics. It is not the same thing as the nationalisme intégral that I mention above, though it is a kissing-cousin. Intégrisme has problems, but it stops well short of claiming to regiment and militarise all aspects of social and individual life. Even in this strongly-restrictive definition, though, fascism is present enough in places like the Ukraine, Brazil and now Bolivia to be dangerous and worthy of mention as one of the illiberal ideological forces rising in liberalism’s shadow.





7. Salafi jihâdism. This fundamentalist ideology has been a distinctive danger around the globe since well before the World Trade Centre attacks on the eleventh of September, 2001 – arguably it’s been so since the late 1980s in Afghanistan. Now the fanatical toxin is spreading from Nigeria to Bosnia to Xinjiang and the Philippines. In Nigeria, Christians are being persecuted as never before. The headloppers of Dâ‘iš and al-Qâ‘idah are unfortunately a ubiquitous presence from Libya to Iraq, with Syria having borne a great brunt of the terrorist damage in recent years.
   
   The Salafis may receive aid from the United States intelligence services. However, they think of themselves as the ‘purifiers’ of Islâm from all the modern dross that has accumulated around centuries of Islâmic cultural practice throughout the world. That includes anything in the visual arts or in literature that does not conform to a rigid standard of Muslim piety. They adhere in lockstep to the most stringent and literal of textual interpretations of the Qur’ân and hadith, and increasingly they believe that the only right way to rectify Islâm is by the creation of a state purely founded on Islâmic law, which is to be rigidly and ruthlessly enforced uniformly across the entire body of believers and subject peoples. They are the Islâmic equivalent of the equally-literalist fundamentalist evangelicals in the United States.

Now, it should be crystal clear to the gentle readers of this blog that I harbour some robust partizan preferences among these options. I am avowedly a very strong supporter of the syncretic paternalistic leftism that has arisen in Eastern Europe: the closest thing on offer we have to the High Toryism of Britain’s better days. I also have strong sympathies toward the ‘civilisational realism’ of Russia’s conservatives. I have long felt such realism to be a healthy counterweight to the foreign policy we conduct here, based as it is on outdated ideologies on autopilot and a morass of private interests anchored in the military-industrial complex.

I have also been known, on occasion, to comment positively on political Shî‘ism and on Chinese Marxism. However, my true loyalties lie with Mosaddegh and the National Front in Iran’s case; and with the Democratic League in China’s case – both socialist-leaning organisations with healthy respect for tradition.

So it should come as no surprise as I finish this analysis, that I am deeply invested in what form the post-liberal order in the world will take. I do not want to live in a world dominated by the picayune hatreds and petty spats of a gross-odd bickering nation-states, each headed by the most clownish of bourgeois buffoons their pandering mass-medias can conjure to the baying rabble. It is an insult to lions to have to be governed by such rats. Neither do I want to be governed by a dour, joyless puritanical religious élite who would snatch the Christmas eggnog out of my hands and expect to be thanked for the favour. At the same time, it’s clear to me that actually-existing liberalism, exhausted as it is in a moral and intellectual sense, can no longer pretend to offer to the world a set of coherent rules for the pursuit of the good. That task now falls to others. But which others: that is a question that matters deeply.

It strikes me that all of these options have a certain investment in questions of theopolitics. That is not a surprise. The Enlightenment project was by and large a separation of the political sphere from the questions of ultimate meaning, and the relegation of those questions of meaning to the purely private sphere and the realm of the conscience. It is therefore no surprise that the ideologies now jockeying to take the place of liberalism are attempting to reconnect questions of governance to questions of meaning in various ways. Once again I have to reiterate: I agree with the religious intégristes on the stakes involved here. I also agree with them on two of their three sentences. But there are clearly a number of different ways in which the temporal and the æternal ends of man can be configured, and we would do well not to choose one which seems too easy or too glib.

Weosendes in Pulgaraland

For the first time in centuries, thanks to the efforts of the Bulgarian government (particularly the Coalition for Bulgaria, which spearheaded the project) and conservationists, and some coöperative nature reserves in Niedersachsen and Nordrhein-Westfalen, wild European bison are returning to the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria! What’s more, one of the females in the new herd has given birth to a baby calf - the first of its species born south of the Danube since the Middle Ages.

This is big environmental news. The European bison, which once roamed everywhere in continental Europe from France to the Russian steppes, was all but extinct everywhere except for a few forested areas of eastern Poland and Transcarpathia by 1500. Even these animals were very nearly hunted to extinction by the Deutsches Heer in the Eastern theatre of World War I. It was only thanks to the efforts of a handful of far-sighted German conservationists that the last dozen or so animals were placed in zoos for their protection. Reintroduction efforts were made into the wild lands of several Eastern European and Asian countries from these small captive stocks, beginning in 1951. The reintroduction of bison into these areas has already helped to stabilise and diversify local œcosystems. From the article:

For the first time in centuries, European bison are now roaming free in the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria. The herd of seven animals (two males and five females) was released from their enclosure this summer and is now living free in the Studen Kladenets Hunting Reserve (part of the Rhodope Mountains rewilding area), where the Rewilding Rhodopes team is monitoring their behaviour and movement on a daily basis.

“This is a momentous occasion,” says Hristo Hristov, a rewilding officer attached to the Rewilding Rhodopes team. “The animals are now reoccupying their former ecological niche, finding water and food, learning to protect themselves against wolves and jackals, and exploring the challenging terrain.”

The good news doesn’t end at the bison release. One of the free-roaming female bison has already given birth – this is the first bison calf born in the wild south of the River Danube since the Middle Ages. The female calf and mother are both doing well.

“We are thrilled by the new addition,” says Hristov. “The calf was born in one of the wildest parts of the reserve and has been following the herd ever since. This young bison is a symbol of hope for a wilder and more biodiverse Rhodope Mountains. This is why we have named her Nadezhda (meaning ‘hope’ in Bulgarian).”

As they roam free in the Rhodope Mountains, the bison will live alongside deer, wolves, vultures and many other rare and endangered species. As in the Southern Carpathians of Romania, where Rewilding Europe and partners have been reintroducing bison since 2014, the animals will have a positive impact on local wild nature, helping to create biodiversity-rich mosaic landscape through their grazing and browsing, as well as enhancing local food chains.

“The European bison will bring a range of benefits to wild nature and people,” says Hristov. “The existing herd has already become quite a visitor attraction and will help us to develop nature-based tourism here.”

Many long and healthy years to Nadezhda, and congratulations to the wildlife conservationists of Bulgaria and the village of Studen Kladenets! Gód hælo, weosendes!

Meaningful justice requires hierarchy of values

One of the things I find I have diminishing patience for – either in online discourse or in any other public forum – is the lazy equalisation of values that comes from reductive readings of history and a certain lack of education in philosophy. Indeed, this was one of the reasons I wrote that piece late last month on how a right attitude toward the family is necessary to combat nationalism. The Good (and the Beautiful, and the True) may be ontologically one, but it presents itself to us humans in a dizzyingly-vast array of discrete goods necessary to our flourishing, and part of the real work of striving for the good is sorting through these goods in an attempt to properly place them. Even if we assert that justice and the Good at its base requires some form of real equality for people (something which, even as a leftist, I’m not 100% convinced is possible), that very same equality of being requires a hard inequality of values – with differing ranks and degrees of importance being ascribed to each.

It strikes me after reading several pieces that both the Anglo-American tradition of liberal conservatism, and the Continental tradition of national conservatism, have both been losing the plot rather badly in this most essential of conservative endeavours (at least according to Russell Kirk, for whom the transcendent moral order and hierarchies of value were of paramount importance) for about the past two hundred years or so. This point was driven home rather strongly by several articles I read recently, one of which being a Rod Dreher gush piece over Orbán Viktor (the interesting but for various reasons rather troubling Prime Minister of Hungary), and the other being the New York Times review of George Will’s latest book, which appears to be nothing short of a liberal-conservative manifesto in an age where such beliefs seem, to put it politely, quaint.

Both Dreher and Will seem to be in not-quite-equivalent measures guilty of ignoring Kirk, because both of them dangerously collapse the entire project of the transcendent social order in ways which mirror – as Dreher notes with one of his increasingly-sporadic flashes of self-awareness – the Ahmari-French debate at the Catholic University of America, which is in itself a rehash of a theopolitical debate which has been rollicking the English-speaking Catholic world for some time and which does not leave us Orthodox types unscathed.

If we were to take this debate at face value, at its core is the question of whether the state can or should take an interest in substantive questions of justice – including on pelvic issues – to the extent that it should be willing to bring the force of law to bear on them. For French, conservative goals can be best advanced by preserving in the state as much of a neutral arbiter as possible on questions of cultural value, and preserving as much private space as possible for conservative options to be pursued, through the pluralism of a marketplace of ideas. For Ahmari, by contrast, the state cannot be neutral. It is always already an expression of the values implicit in a culture; and the culture war must be fought in order to win a just state, which can be used to pursue both public and private goods.

The confusion of means and ends on both sides of this debate is all too readily apparent, unfortunately. French’s defence of pluralism clearly does not extend to the international sphere; and he is all too willing to use the full coercive strength of the state to force another sovereign people to adopt an entirely different way of life and an entirely different laundry-list of social goods, as seen in his repeated, intellectually-odious defences of the Iraq War (which was indeed a war on truth itself). French’s variant of ‘classical liberalism’, precisely as a comprehensive doctrine of justice replete with its own priests and zealots, justly earned its obsolescence through this very war – along with the prior one in Yugoslavia, and the subsequent one in Libya. For Ahmari’s part, his embrace of Trumpism reeks of the very same sort of ‘sincere irrationality’ that he derides in French. Ahmari derides French for cutting deals with the devils of sexual licence and other forms of cultural progressivism in his pursuit of a level cultural playing field. However, he shows himself all too willing to cut deals with the philosophical devil of post-modernism in his practical political choices.

These are not hypocrisies specific to these two gentlemen or to this specific debate: they point straight to the problems with both ‘classical liberalism’ and Catholic intégrisme. Though both claim to combat progressivism, both are in fact guilty of accommodating progressive arguments about the nature of political reality. Classical liberalism always hides the comprehensive (and, at base, non-Christian) nature of its own truth claims behind various guises of ‘neutrality’ in state and market, precisely because any hint of the specificity of its value-claims undermine its claims to universality. On the opposite side, intégrisme – which in its original instance as now arose as a deliberate counter-narrative to liberal conceptions of politics – has never been as pious as it pretends to be. Maurras was an agnostic. The creative force behind Action française came from the anti-Dreyfusards. From the start, the intégriste project had only a positivist and instrumentalist conception of faith.

Both Frenchian classical-liberalism-via-neoconservatism and Ahmarian intégrisme make the fatal error – fatal, that is, from the temperamental conservative, Burke-and-Kirk perspective – of collapsing necessary distinctions-of-kind within the moral order. These collapses lead each to have a deficient or disordered understanding of the proper rôle of the state. Classical liberalism conflates the limited, procedural state and the negative liberties it safeguards with higher orders of goods, such that it cannot conceive of any potential discrete social or political good or moral priority which that state might sacrifice its neutrality to pursue. In essence, for liberalism, negative liberty becomes a sort of god.

On the other hand, intégrisme in its too-close, ostensibly-religious pursuit of these discrete social and political goods, expounds a religion which smells a bit too much like a state. It arrogates to the religious sphere the responsibility of crafting political projects, and in so doing instrumentalises the religious. Even the innocuous-sounding ‘integralism in three sentences’ makes the Grand Inquisitor’s mistake. Our intégristes think spiritual and temporal goods possess only differences in degree, but belong to the same category. The problem with this, of course, is that it undermines actual religious witness on spiritual goods which don’t rightly belong to the same kind as the temporal ends of politics. Christ did not come to deliver us bread; He came to be our bread and drink and to deliver us from the very need for bread.

Which brings us back to Dreher and Will. Although Dreher seems closer to the truth than Will to me, I must be harder on Dreher here because he should know better than to embrace Orbán and his quasi-intégriste project with both arms open. If Dreher had any interest or even idle curiosity about the religious tradition to which he has attached himself – which also happens to be mine – he would know very well that neither side of this debate is particularly friendly to Orthodox Christians. He would know that neither side appreciates the precarious witness we bear on the theopolitical question, nor the tragic witness we bear on the question of nationalism. These witnesses, both tied to the material and political legacy of Eastern Rome, are not unrelated to each other.

Please do not mistake this for an appeal to false moderation. It’s an appeal to maximalism. In fact, my position here is pure Leont’ev, pure Pobedonostsev. Like both of these great Russians, we should not concede the slightest ground here; nay, neither to classical liberalism nor to the resurgence of nationalisme intégral. An approach which preserves the hierarchy of values in a transcendent moral order, indeed, must be particularly careful not to conflate the different kinds of loyalties which are due in different proportion to different loci of our social context, because to do otherwise would be to risk effeminacy and vulgarisation. However, given the state of our national climate of mutual fear and loathing, I fear that both effeminacy and vulgarisation lie inescapably in our path.

In America, I fear, the way out will be long and difficult. It will involve passing through a protracted period of barbarism. (Partially contra Fallows, though it may not be as bad as advertised, it will still be no cake-walk.) It will involve the near-insurmountable task of building and living out different modes of loyalty to each other than those being presented to us in our political, cultural or social lives. Our bad national habits of embracing bumper-sticker patriotism, totemic brand consumption and other forms of sacrifice-free virtue-signalling voluntaristic affinity that calls for no level of sacrifice, simply won’t cut it anymore.