Does God take sides?

Sometimes one hears it said in American theopolitical discourse, that God does not take sides in politics. There is one sense in which this is a true and worthy impulse to say. And there is another sense in which this glib characterisation becomes dangerously wrong.

Firstly, I tend to believe that it is fully right and accurate to hold that the God of the Holy Scriptures, the Creator of the cosmos, has little to choose in terms of American politics. I believe it is proper to say that God is neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

The first reason that such a characterisation is true, is because the agendas of both parties take moral positions which would be thoroughly and irreconcilably repugnant to the early Church. The first-century Apostolic text called the Didachē, to take one example, explicitly condemns the practice of abortion. This practice is, sadly, ‘unequivocally’ countenanced as a ‘reproductive right’ by the official platform of the Democratic Party.

The Republican Party is no better than the Democratic Party—indeed, in one fundamental way it is worse. The Didachē condemns idolatry as thoroughly as, and in fact more often than, it condemns abortion. And the Republican Party upholds, from the very first sentence of the preamble of its own platform, an explicit form of idolatry: the idolatry which exalts the nation-state as ‘exceptional’ and ‘unlike any other nation on earth’, and which exalts the US Constitution as a sacred ‘covenant’. What does God have to choose between one party for which destroying innocent children is a sacred right, and another party which proclaims aloud with the priests of the Sanhedrin that they have ‘no king but Cæsar’?

Although for a long time I have personally refused to support either major party with my vote, I say this not to cast aspersions on the ordinary American Christians who decide to vote with one major party or the other. Most people have independent reasons, driven by pragmatism or by personal and contextual considerations, for preferring, even strongly preferring, one party over the other. I assuredly do not believe that having such reasons makes one evil or an enemy of God. I say this merely to demonstrate that the God Who created the whole of the cosmos, Who revealed Himself by the law and the prophets to ancient Israel, and Who Himself took human flesh from a certain virgin in first-century Galilee, has nowhere to lay His head when it comes to the halls of power in Washington.

But does this mean that God does not take sides in politics, full stop?

First-order, it strikes me as rather presumptuous for American Christians to assume, that simply because the two main Coke-and-Pepsi options in their own particular powerful nation-state are both distant from God, that God must be equally distant from all possible forms of political expression. Yet many high-minded and well-intentioned evangelicals, Catholics, even Orthodox Christians, make an explicit and public point that ‘God is not political’ and that it is the job of Christians to ‘rise above politics’.

However well-intentioned this apolitical impulse may be in its attempt to engender benefit of the doubt between neighbours on opposing sides of the political divide, it nevertheless confuses a particular point. Politics is, at its basis, merely the art of learning to live together with one’s neighbour. The call to love one’s neighbour is a fundamentally political statement, and even the strictest hermits and most cloistered monks in Christian history were enjoined by their vows to uphold this particular substance in their politics. But then comes the question of the scholar of the law to Christ: ‘Who, then, is my neighbour?’

Christ answers this in the immediate sense with the parable of the Good Samaritan. However, He also more generally answers the question of this scholar of the law in the Beatitudes of Matthew 5. If nothing else, the Beatitudes tell us, in their apportioning of blessing, the political position of God. In short: God does take sides. God takes the side of the poor; of those who sorrow; of the meek; of those who hunger and thirst for justice; of the merciful; of the innocent; of the peacemakers; of the persecuted.

Worth noting is that these categories are not merely symbolic or transcendental. The Beatitudes are not a parable—in fact, they are one of the few places in the Greek Scriptures where Jesus is not speaking in a way that points primarily to the symbolic. The Beatitudes are specific, direct and concrete. And they have immediate ramifications to present-day political situations.

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Iraqi people who still suffer from poverty, infant deformity and internal displacement—or would He be found on the side of their invaders and occupiers?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Yemeni people, overwhelmingly children, who still suffer from the attacks of bombs and rockets and the threat of starvation—or would He be found on the side of the Croesuses of Saudi who launch those bombs and rockets and blockade Yemen’s ports?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Syrian people who still suffer from the effects of war, invasion, religious persecution, starvation, sanctions—or would He be found on the side of the Turkish, Saudi, Qatari, Emirati, Uighur and other CIA-funded Wahhâbi religious extremists who invaded and murdered them?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Palestinian people whose livelihoods are destroyed, who are evicted from their homes, and who are shot dead and detained on the streets of their own cities and villages—or would He be found on the side of the settlers and military who do the destroying, evicting, shooting and detaining?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Haitian people who are protesting in the streets against the dysfunction of their state and the theft of their country’s wealth—or on the side of those who would send in tanks and planes to oppress them?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the ordinary people in Donbass who have suffered from nearly nine years of non-stop shelling and from deliberately-engineereed lack of access to schools and hospitals—or would He side with the race-nationalist paramilitaries, SBU, AFU and NATO forces who are doing the shelling?

Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Venezuelan people—or on the side of the foreign operatives and mercenaries who tried to overthrow their elected government? Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Bolivian people—or on the side of the lithium mining consortiums which foisted a coup on them? Would Jesus be found on the side of Indigenous water and land defenders—or on the side of huge multinational energy conglomerates who use police forces and National Guard to harass and repress them? Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Africans—or on the side of the French and British and American governments who continue to siphon off Africa’s wealth? Would Jesus be found on the side of innocent children—or on the side of those who traffic and exploit their bodies, or kill them in the womb?

In my own humble opinion, even to pose these questions in the light of the Beatitudes, is to answer them. Unfortunately, in each of these cases, the considerations and interests of worldly power—sometimes soft-pedalled into the conversation under the guise of soi-disant ‘democracy’, ‘rule of law’, ‘nuance’, ‘impartiality’, ‘objectivity’—serve to cloud and muddy the consciences of those who would otherwise clearly answer in each of these instances. But if Jesus does promise the blessings He did in the Beatitudes, then we must say that He would take the side of the Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, Palestinians, Haitians, New Russians, Venezuelans, Bolivians, Indigenous nations, African nations, children—over their oppressors and persecutors. Jesus Himself took just such a political side when He chose to be crucified by the Roman authorities in conjunction with the Sanhedrin and their Herodian puppets… between two bandits. They discredited Him and crucified Him as a political agent, as a would-be ‘King of the Jews’.

Those of us who live in an empire with pretensions of universality, a latter-day Rome, where the primary political choices are between infanticidaires on one side and open idolaters on the other, have a responsibility to choose a radical third option, and to side with those throughout the world who suffer at the hands of Cæsar. And we must do so even at the risk of being called ‘communists’, ‘tankies’, ‘campists’ and worse. To do otherwise would be to betray the Gospel, and the Beatitudes in particular which place God on the side of those who suffer, rather than those who of design and intent inflict suffering.

Thick as a BRICS?

Interesting news recently out of Moscow: evidently the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are attempting to build a shared infrastructure for ease of payments that may end up including a new reserve currency as a rival to the dollar. This move comes as a response to Western financial sanctions on Russia which froze its foreign reserves in response to the escalation of the Ukrainian war.

It became clear very soon after this war heated up that the global financial system was even less of a level playing field than it originally appeared. As such, the BRICS nations all seem to be interested in finding ways to reduce reliance on Western institutions that enforce financial and economic dominance, such as the IMF. As a leftist, the only thing I can say is this: more power to them. To say that such a strong challenge to the financial hegemony of the Washington-London-Tôkyô Triad is welcome would be a strong understatement. And there are several aspects to this new reserve currency that sound particularly intriguing.

The first is that it would be based on a basket of the five BRICS nations’ currencies: the ruble, the renminbi, the rand, the rupee and the real. This seems like an interesting ‘middle way’ that avoids the pitfalls of the euro. Allowing each of the member nations to retain control over its own monetary (and thus also trade) policies in ways which the Eurozone didn’t seems a good way to avoid internal friction between the member countries.

Also, the money not being tied to a commodity (like gold) helps keep the supply flexible and reduces the possible exploitation of agricultural communities. America’s experiment in gold-backed reserve currency turned out to be a disaster for the working poor in this country, and it seems like the BRICS countries are not eager to repeat that mistake. However, this structure does seem to come with its own risks. It would be interesting to see how the banking-oversight mechanism for this currency would work.

The other big news this week is that Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in the US. This is also welcome news to me, and I make no bones about it. The Mississippi law upheld in the court’s decision actually seems to be a fairly moderate law which places the same restrictions on abortion access after the first trimester that most modern Western European countries have. However, I have some strong reservations about the long-term results of the overturn.

First and foremost, we simply don’t have the same supports for new and expecting mothers that Western Europe does. Placing restrictions on abortion parallel to those that exist in, say, France and the UK, without enacting the parallel social safety net provisions, is going to have a wantonly and cruelly punitive effect on childbearing women. The Democrats (using the excuse provided them by Manchin and Synema) completely punted on the Build Back Better Act, which would have included provisions for an expanded child tax credit, paid family leave, medical care subsidies, universal pre-K, new affordable housing and school lunches: all of which would have directly benefitted new mothers. And of course not one single Republican supported the BBBA, which shows effectively that they’re not and never have been the pro-life party that they claim to be.

Second, the overturn hands the decision over whether (and how) to restrict abortion access entirely over to the individual states. We’ve seen this movie play out before under different circumstances. It didn’t end well. It’s very likely that we will start seeing nullification arguments and secession movements begin to take shape in the near future as the divides grow sharper. I have seen multiple pro-life women in my social media network refer to the Roe overturn as a ‘Pyrrhic victory’. I think they happen to be right about that.

However, one thing that the Roe overturn is going to clarify, and quickly, is the degree to which Americans who claim to care about human life actually do. I fully expect the vast majority of so-called ‘pro-life’ Republicans will continue to sit on their hams and oppose any sort of humane legislation that would make life for new mothers and children more possible and bearable, and I would unfortunately say the same about so-called ‘pro-life’ Democrats in the mould of Joe Manchin. The Solidarists are probably going to continue to mealy-mouth their way into conversations about how we should create pie-in-the-sky ‘decentralised’ legislative solutions which stand no chance of garnering popular support anywhere and which wouldn’t work even if they were passed. The necessity of socialist fixes to the American economy, I expect, will become a lot clearer to a lot more people in the coming months, and I hope that these fixes can attract the support of at least a handful of pro-life types who are uncomfortable with the cognitive dissonance their Republican allegiance has hitherto imposed on them.

A growing Third World consensus position

Here’s an interesting map and dataset from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Now, the accompanying commentary is, of course, bourgeois nonsense (as to be expected from a neoliberal rag like The Economist)… however, the data itself are interesting for several reasons.

The great bulk of the world’s population have not, in contrast to what many in the Western media would tell you, chosen a side in this conflict. Most nations of the global south have either staked out a carefully neutral position through their diplomatic and economic policies, or else they tend to lean mildly in one direction or the other (with Asian and African countries generally leaning in Russia’s direction, and Latin American countries generally leaning in the West’s direction—though there are obviously notable exceptions in all cases).

If there are any commonalities in what one sees coming out of the global south in response to Russia’s assault on the Ukraine, then they are these. Global south countries are willing to condemn the assault itself, but are highly unwilling to back the West’s New Cold War hybrid-war strategy (including economic sanctions, freezing out of international agreements, and weapons sales / shipments) against Russia. The data show a fairly significant cleft between the Washington-Tokyo-London ‘triad’ (now joined unconditionally by Brussels, sadly) and the rest of the world at large. And they show nowhere near as clearly as in the EIU’s own breakdown of support for Russia by population vs by GDP. Countries with low financial clout are overrepresented among Russia’s supporters; while countries with high financial clout are overrepresented among Russia’s enemies.

Whether they take this position for economic reasons, reasons of political expediency, ideological alignment or security interests is a matter of debate, of course. And in most cases, this debate ends up being a façade for some rather patronising views of the global south generally. That is to say, Western observers tend to attribute resistance to the Western agenda in the global south to base mercenary motives, corruption or ‘authoritarianism’—while they attribute acquiescence to the same to good-faith democracy-and-human-rights idealism. But the data are what they are.

Not to toot my own horn too loudly on this, but this shows a tendency I’ve been talking about right along on my blog. Even here, though, I’ve been taking my queues somewhat from Dcn Steve Hayes over at his blog, Khanya. The fact that certain of my readers are only just now upset with me, whether for pointing this out or for agreeing with the global south over the new Western bloc, shows that they never have read me very carefully. Ah well, que sera.

It used to be the case that four primates of the Local Churches were devoted to finding a just ecclesiastical solution to Orthodoxy’s geopolitical woes between Moscow and Constantinople. That was before the primates of both Cyprus and Alexandria decided to break fellowship with and betray the Third World by decisively throwing in their lot with the US/NATO bloc. The primates of the Third World had been, in fact, Orthodoxy’s best hope for restoring a just ecclesiastical peace—which might very well have averted a shooting war. Jerusalem and Antioch—both of which have been and continue to be the sites of religiously-motivated violence and discrimination against Christians—may yet manage to be an instrument of God’s justice and of God’s peace in Eastern Europe.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of when a radical Jewish teacher from the backwater Syrian province of Galilee (al-Jalîl), from a humble background in carpentry, was put to death in Jerusalem for opposing the greatest empire in the world of that time, along with that empire’s religious toadies. This is a Jewish teacher Who was venerated by Rome’s official enemies, magi from Parthia, as well as by a Roman centurion; by local collaborators (tax collectors) of this empire, and by local resisters (zealots). In the end, He was crucified between two of these latter. He was betrayed by one of his own disciples. His own step-brothers did not believe in Him. His most trusted disciple denied Him three times. All of the (male) disciples but one fled from danger at His arrest.

This week of all weeks, we should not look for truth to the great centre of financial and military imperial power, to the latter-day Cæsar among his marble monuments and idols on the Washington Mall. Nor should we necessarily look for truth to the rival power, to the latter-day Parthian Shâh in the Kremlin. Adherents of truth may be found in either place, and it is probably easier to find them in the rival power, but those with power will not be likely to be among them. We should not look to the disciples who all fought each other to be at His right hand, yet at the Crucifixion had all deserted their teacher and were nowhere to be found. There is no doubt in my mind that Patriarch Bartholomew (with all of his strivings to claim for himself the honour of ‘first without equals’) is one such disciple… and the jury’s out on whether or not Patriarch Kirill will ultimately be found to be such. We shall see.

Instead, we must look to where the Theotokos stood, to where the disciple John stood, to where Saint Dismas was crucified by the Lord’s side. Look to where the forgotten and crucified peoples of the world are: the Christians and Alawites and other religious minorities of Syria, the Yemenis, the Congolese, the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Kashmiris, the Palestinians, the refugees and civilians of Donbass. Christ will be among them.

Batting zero

The Forever War rolls on...

This past election cycle, I made for myself a five-item ‘litmus test’ that I would cast my primary ballot on, as well as decide how to cast my general election ballot. My litmus items were: Medicare for All, $15 an hour, ending the forever war, relaxing visa restrictions on legal immigrants and meaningful criminal justice reform. (As I have said before: even though I am solidly pro-life in my political convictions, that issue has been relegated to a position of electoral irrelevance, largely by the fact that Republicans want to keep it as a culture-war ‘wedge’ and won’t do anything about the issue.)

Even this five-item litmus test was in fact a slightly watered-down and dumbed-down version of the seven-item litmus test that I made early in the primary season in response to the candidates’ answers to survey questions in the press. I pulled a 1944 Russell Kirk and voted for Gloria La Riva on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, because Biden’s record was against him on all five of the issues that I care about and decided to stake my vote on.

Recent events, and at least two events this past week in particular, have confirmed over and over again my choice to not support the Democratic Party with my vote. We’re back to Bourbon Democracy, in that the Democrats have both forgotten nothing about their failure in 2016, and learned nothing from it. Biden is clearly hankering after a thorough drubbing in the midterms next year, and a devastating loss in 2024 to a Republican candidate who will no doubt make Trump look like a tame kitten in comparison.

Let’s start with Medicare for All – a reform to our healthcare system which we desperately need, and some version of which all other industrialised countries and even conservative monarchies have… and which Biden said he would veto if it crossed his desk. Biden’s healthcare plan was literally written by the insurance companies. And not only does it fall short of Medicare for All, but it doesn’t even provide for a public option, which was the compromise position for the Democratic candidates back in 2008 when Obama was running for president! Joe Biden is facing down a massive crisis in the American healthcare system and doing nothing to fix it. He’s not even slapping a plaster on a massive hæmorrhage.

Now let’s go to the issue of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Biden has privately told governors he is not going to fight for it, despite this having been his one single campaign promise that I liked, and which could have swayed me to vote for him if I thought he was sincere about it. Clearly he wasn’t. His politics around wage increases are clearly a cynical ploy to attract working-class voters into his electoral base before abandoning them. Biden having won the election, he could very easily put pressure onto Democratic senators like Joe Manchin with vulnerable seats, and twist their arms to get them to support a $15 per hour mandate in the relief bill. But that promise was all hot air. He isn’t going to do it, for the same reasons that Obama didn’t push for a public option in the Affordable Care Act. His interests are with the donor class, and the donor class simply doesn’t want to pay their workers more.

Asking for meaningful criminal justice reform or meaningful policing reform from the key Democratic sponsor in the Senate of the infamous 1994 crime bill should probably have been seen as trying to squeeze blood from a stone. And the recent attempts by centrist Democrats to continue qualified immunity for police officers accused of wrongdoing, in the name of quixotically-elusive ‘bipartisanship’ and ‘political compromise’, along with Biden’s administrative attempt this past week to refund the brutal COPS initiative of the Clinton-era Department of Justice (which placed resource officers in public schools, for example), do not offer a great deal of hope that he’s likely to advance this cause either.

Visa reform? Rights for legal immigrants and asylum seekers? I had little enough hope for that on the campaign trail, when Biden decided to blow up at immigrant-rights advocate Carlos Rojas and told him to vote for Trump. This past week saw Biden open new detention facilities, and reopen an infamous Texas tent camp to continue processing deportations and family separations. Biden is not only straight-up continuing all of Trump’s most hideous abuses of legal asylum seekers, he actually appears to be expanding them.

And then there is the forever war, of which Biden has long been a supporter, and now appears to be continuing with all the incontinence and callous disregard for human life we ought to have expected from him from the start. Biden has just bombed Syria. Again. Just like Trump did and just like Obama did. The people of Syria and especially the long-suffering Orthodox Christians of that country have suffered more than their fair share and certainly more than they ever deserved at the hands of the American government and its hideous head-lopping takfiri-jihâdist proxies. Backed up by the war propaganda and manufactured consent from inane mouthpieces of the CIA like 60 Minutes, the Biden Administration seems as hellbent on continuing this revolting, heinous, profligate, destructive war on sæcular and Christian Arabs, Assyrians and Armenians in the Middle East. Biden also seems to be continuing in Trump’s determination to harass, beleaguer and starve the people of countries like Venezuela and Haiti. And still he continues to ramp up a strategically-insane new cold war with both China and Russia.

(It goes without saying that on life issues, Biden stands foursquare against his own church, and with the most radically-libertine elements within his own party that seek to trample down all legal humane considerations for unborn and even recently-born children. Again, though, this issue is so politically-polarised as a culture-war wedge that it is impossible to expect anything productive in policy to result from voting one way or another on it. Republicans continue to fund Planned Parenthood, for example.)

Biden is currently batting zero in terms of his actions in the fields of policy that I pinned my vote to this time around. That isn’t to say, by the way, that he isn’t undoing some of the damage to American infrastructure and the mechanisms of government that Trump did. But those gains are as ephemeral as the executive orders and signing statements that enacted them, and they can be blown away with the next shift of the electoral weathervane. But on the issues that can sway significant portions of the middle America that has remained so alienated in politics in the past two election cycles, Biden is either doing nothing or worse than nothing. I take no pleasure in saying this, since many of the options that are looming on the horizon when democratic legitimacy collapses in this country are far more horrifying than the banality of Biden’s evil, but these things needed to change long ago if we are to have any hope of recovery as a nation.

For realism, and against utopians in balaclavas

Evo Morales, former president of Bolivia

I reject capitalism. I reject militarism. I reject racism.

I reject the whole concept of billionaires. I reject the ‘too-big-to-fail’ banking system. I reject big pharma, big oil, big tobacco and big tech. I reject the dictatorial ownership of workplaces by a small handful of executives and managers. I reject usury as unnatural, and the idea of making money off of money. I reject the whole œconomics of exploitation and predation and fraud. I reject the whole idea that our œconomy is the best of all worlds. I reject abortion – the in utero democide of the working class – as any kind of solution to poverty or œconomic stress.

I reject wars of aggression. I reject sanctions aimed at the poor. I reject hybrid wars. I reject colour revolutions. I reject torture. I reject drone strikes on civilians. I reject starvation tactics. I reject them especially when my own country does them. I reject the whole idea that I need to condemn other countries for defending themselves from mine. I reject the worship of flags (but not their existence). I reject the idolatry of gods and generals made of stone and metal. I reject the corruption of defence contractors. I reject the military-industrial complex.

I reject the militarisation of police. I reject ‘urban renewal’. I reject big-box corporate architecture. I reject redlining. I reject the application of the death penalty. I reject for-profit prisons. I reject neoliberal school ‘reform’. I reject all harmful, demeaning and condescending stereotypes of black, brown, red and yellow people. I reject any idea that I should have more in common with a white man living in some other country or some other state, than I do with the Black and Latino folks living in my own neighbourhood.

Full stop. But. Ideological pacifism and anarchism are themselves false solutions, even – I would go so far as to say – forms of idolatry. I am convinced of this by people like GK Chesterton, Vladimir Solovyov, Mother Maria Skobtsova and Nikolai Berdyaev - all of whom also rejected capitalism, militarism and racism, every bit as stridently as I do here.

Pacifism by its very nature attempts to equate the robber with the victim of robbery, the aggressor with the aggressed-against, the exploiter with the exploited. Pacifism cuts off at its root any wholly natural feeling of pity for or of righteous anger on behalf of the oppressed. However admirable the nonviolence of a Dr King, the endless drumbeat of disdain and doubt and tone-policing and moral censure from ‘white moderates’ against people who defend themselves is a kind of poison. There is something self-satisfied and self-serving in this demand that the weak and the wronged lie supine, docile and passive while they are beaten and raped and killed by the powerful – and this in particular is what Solovyov and Chesterton militated against. (Note, however, that this is not an argument for ‘just war’. I have never seen a just war. I simply do not think a just war is possible given the modern technologies of killing that are at the disposal of modern governments, or the technologies of psychological warfare that make it easier than ever to dehumanise those that states would have us consider enemies.)

And notwithstanding my intellectual admiration for Georges Sorel, Franz Kafka, and some certain others in the historical anarcho-syndicalist tradition of thought, anarchism is nowadays little more than the ideology of the feeble-minded, foolish, ignorant and irresponsible. The ‘in defence of looting’ ideology cheered on the nighttime looters in Minneapolis (who, it turns out, were not left-wingers at all, but instead a mixture of opportunists and far-right agents provocateur), and made it easier for society to blame and scapegoat the daylight-hour marchers for justice for George Floyd who were respectful and well-coordinated. A white anarchism that smashes and burns storefronts, then runs and hides for cover behind black bodies when the police crack down, is no sort of ideology that I can respect.

And internationally, the same pattern plays out with the rejection of even imperfect states in the Third World, because they are states. When anarchists reject the populist governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia, or of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, or even Baššâr al-’Asad in Syria – they manufacture consent for military intervention, and then enable and give licence to the very worst, most racist elements in those societies that opportunistically seek advantage for themselves. The fascist Áñez government rode to power in a Western-backed coup in Bolivia last year, and was cheered on by white Western anarchists who bought into media lies about Morales and in general just hated him for, um, leading a state. The same anarchists hated Chávez and hate Maduro in Venezuela, such that they supported the neoliberal Juan Guaidó (or else adopted a cowardly position of neutrality once their job in delegitimating the democratic government was done). The same also happened in Syria with anarchist support for the ‘Free Syrian Army’, which was from the very start controlled by violent far-right fundamentalist elements.

I would much rather stand for realism and wu wei in foreign policy: recognising contingencies and imperfections in the administration of states, making a good-faith effort to try and constrain the worst aspects of militarism, seeing the value in leaving other countries alone when the safety of our own citizens is not threatened. I would rather stand in solidarity with progressive leaders like Morales and Maduro, and leave states alone that do not threaten our fundamental security or national (not private) interests. That beats embracing an impossible idealism which ultimately only serves Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. I would rather stand for a broad, non-sectarian left economic policy with a preference for worker-ownership and an independent monetary policy. And I would rather stand for a reformist approach to community policing so that we can actually successfully demilitarise the police and put an emphasis on public safety as something responsive and trustworthy. In short, what I would rather stand for is something like a realist left.

‘What consequences should China face?’

I’d kind of given up on watching the Democratic debates, in large part because they are so badly staged in general. But there was one question which I felt it would be wrong to ignore. Dana Bash’s question to Bernie Sanders during the CNN presidential debate – ‘What consequences should China face for its role in this global crisis?’ – was smarmy, and it played into the unfortunate tendency of American China-watchers to find something to blame about the Chinese government and the Chinese people, whom they’re fairly bad at distinguishing from each other. As it stands, though, the good senator from Vermont struck something of the right tone in his answer:

I don’t think this is the time for reparations. Now is the time to be working with China. They are learning a lot about this crisis. And in fact, we have got to work with them, we have got to work with the World Health Organization, we have got to work with Italy, we've got to work with countries around the world. If there was ever a moment when the entire world is in this together, got to support each other, this is that moment. Every country on Earth is going to be affected. Every country on earth has got to work together.

Senator Sanders is right. The Chinese government has been learning a lot throughout the crisis, and a lot of that learning was trial-and-error. There is no valid reason to believe the Chinese government knew what to expect, and their reaction to the warnings of Dr Li in Wuhan was understandable even if, in hindsight, it was incorrect. In the United States, it is difficult to get ordinary Americans, or even the government, to take the warnings of doctors and the CDC seriously. Add to this, that our government has had a lot more advance warning and infinitely more knowledge than the Chinese government initially had, to prepare for the inevitable transmission of COVID-19 cases to American soil. Those who live in glass houses oughtn’t throw stones.

Such a question as Bash’s bosses chose to have her ask Sanders amounts to irresponsible and frivolous red-baiting. Ms Bash wanted to pin Sanders as a China sympathiser, probably based on his previous answers to China-related questions. And she wanted to do so in much the same way as the New York Times wanted to pin Sanders as a Soviet sympathiser for hosting a perfectly normal (and indeed encouraged!) sister city exchange between Yaroslavl and Burlington back in the 1980s. The question is not serious, and yet the fact that both liberal and conservative media outlets took it seriously is its own problem. The Blob still wants us to believe that its moral legitimacy is unquestionable, and that it is competent not only to pass judgement on how other countries conduct their internal affairs, but also to decide upon and enforce ‘consequences’ on them.

But, as an exercise, let’s take the question seriously. What consequences should China face? Let’s start with the doctors and paramedics in Wuhan. The consequences they deserve are medals and parades in their honour. They are heroes, full stop. What consequences should the government face? That’s a very different question. The Chinese government did make some mistakes – again, with the benefit of hindsight, these are easier to see – in their initial response. But on the face of it, they ought to be lauded by the international community for an admittedly heavy-handed response that kept people alive and bought the rest of the world two months to prepare for the coming epidemic. And what consequences should the Chinese people face?

Even to pose this last question is to expose the narcissism and inhumanity of the thinking of the foreign policy establishment here. They do not even care to distinguish, when they speak of a country, between the people and the government. How else can we explain the persistence of sanctions – particularly those against Iran and Venezuela – as they are dealing with a pandemic that has killed almost a thousand of the people of Iran, not merely the government? How else can we explain the eagerness with which the foreign policy establishment wants to punish China – and Iran, and Venezuela – while we still haven’t allocated sufficient money and energy to caring for our own people? We can no longer pretend that the public health problems of one country will stay within that country. And so the real question becomes: what consequences must our government face for their sheer inability to change course when confronted with a pandemic?

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.

Iconoclasm versus syncretism in Bolivia

A Bolivian indigenous man holding a wiphala flag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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