Venerable Sabbas the Sanctified of Jerusalem

Saint Sabbas of Jerusalem
القديس سابا القدسي

Today, the fifth of December, is the feast-day of Saint Sabbas, one of the great monastic fathers of the Middle East in Late Antiquity. Saint Sabbas, who in the Orthodox Church is often known by his cognomen ‘the Sanctified’, established the Dayr Mâr Sâbâ, one of the holiest and most visited monastic houses in the Holy Land, which to this day continues as a shining jewel of the Jerusalem Patriarchate. He is venerated throughout the Holy Land and throughout the Orthodox Church.

Saint Sabbas [Gk. Σάββας, Syr. Sava’ ܣܒܐ, Ar. Sâbâ سابا] was born to Cappadocian Greek parents, Iōannēs and Sophia, in Moutalaski – which is in the modern-day Talas district in the Turkish province of Kayseri (Cæsarea) – in the year 439. His father, Iōannēs, was a commander in the Roman Army, who was placed on assignment in Alexandria when the future Sabbas was about five years old. His father left the boy in the care and tutelage of a kinswoman named Hermia. Unfortunately, Hermia was something of a weak governess. The boy’s uncles were given free reign over his property and fell to squabbling over it. As a result, he was sent into the monastery of Saint Flavian and given to the monks to study. When his father returned three years later, the boy had already renounced the world and had dedicated himself to the celibate service of God. Though his parents entreated and begged him to return to sæcular life and marriage and siring children, the young Sabbas adamantly insisted that he stay with the monks.

In particular, he loved reading from the Psalter. He performed all that was asked of him without complaint, even the menial duties, and loved the sixty-five monastic brethren with whom he lived, seeking to learn from each of them. In being the servant of all, he became the greatest among them. He acquired the virtues and held onto them like precious gems: sobriety, obedience and humility. So great was his virtue as a monk that he worked wonders even as a young man. At one time a baker left his clothing in a red-hot oven. Sabbas went into the oven to fetch the clothes, first making the holy sign of the Cross; he came out of the oven unscathed.

When he was fifteen or sixteen years old, he went to the abbot of Saint Flavian’s and asked his leave to undertake a pilgrimage into the Holy City, there to take up another monastic abode. After a probation of two years, his request was granted, and he went into Jerusalem, staying at the monastery of Saint Passarion that winter. The abbot at Saint Passarion’s, Elpidios, asked Sabbas to stay with them in that monastery, but Sabbas asked and was granted permission to seek out instruction from Euthymios who lived nearby, and who understood the path of hesychasm.

Saint Euthymios received Saint Sabbas in his own monastery, and treated him with great warmth and hospitality, but he forbade him to stay there, and instead recommended him to the care of his friend Saint Theoktistos. His reasoning for this seems to have been that he did not want to set the precedent for accepting teenagers into the cœnobitic life. Whatever his reason, however, Saint Sabbas obeyed the word of Euthymios as though it were the word of God Himself, and went and subjected himself to whatever discipline Theoktistos sought to lay upon him. He served in the community of Saint Theoktistos for ten years longer until the age of thirty, in fasting and vigil and prayer, and showed great love for his monastic brethren, as well as great skill and diligence in holding the Divine Liturgy and the monastic hours.

After the repose of the saintly abbot Theoktistos, Saint Sabbas asked the permission of his successor as abbot, Logginos, to go out into the wilderness and lead the life of a solitary anchorite and hesychast. After taking counsel with Saint Euthymios and considering the great virtue of the young monk, Abbot Logginos gave his assent, and Saint Sabbas went to live in a cave some short ways south of the abbey of Saint Theoktistos. Here he prayed, held vigil, fasted five days out of the week, and made crafts with the work of his hands, and brought them to the monastery on the sixth day where he also partook of food and the Eucharist. During Great Lent Saint Sabbas stayed with Saint Euthymios and one of his disciples named Dometian in a desert place in the Wâdî al-Jûz. There they fasted, even barely drinking water, and prayed constantly. Saint Euthymios reposed in the Lord on the twentieth of January, 473.

This wâdî was the place which Saint Sabbas chose for his desert strivings, though he went out further into the desert and lived in a cave there, guided by an angel of God. This became the centre of the Dayr Mâr Sâbâ. Saint Sabbas himself forged a close friendship with Saint Theodosios the Cœnobiarch at this time, and attracted to himself some 150 hermits and monks who together built the lavra. In the early days of the monastery, the ancient Enemy of mankind set eagerly to work sowing discord among the monks, and from their envious hearts they began to grumble against Saint Sabbas, slander him, and asked Patriarch Salloustios to grant them a replacement abbot. Far from granting their wish, however, Salloustios saw through their envy and instead appointed Saint Sabbas a priest as well as confirming him as abbot. Patriarch Salloustios also ordered that the central lavra church be renovated. This occurred in the year 491.

Many new monks came to the Dayr Mâr Sâbâ. Of particular importance among the Sabbaïtes were monks from the Armenian nation, who were drawn to Saint Sabbas’s holy way of life. A certain Bishop Johannes of Köln (not to be confused with the Dominican friar of the Counter-Reformation) even joined the lavra. Saint Sabbas built a cœnobitic monastery at Kastellion, a fortress to the north-east of the lavra. Patriarch Salloustios then proclaimed Saint Sabbas to be the abbot of all the anchorites, and Saint Theodosios to be abbot of all the cœnobites in the Holy Land. Saint Sabbas would joke with Saint Theodosios, that Sabbas was the ‘abbot of the abbots’, while Theodosios was the ‘abbot of the children’, and that Theodosios had the harder job.

Saint Sabbas continued to build new monastic communities and cave-dwellings for hermits. It was during this time in his life as well that he came into conflict with those in authority. If Saint Sabbas had lived an inward life of contemplation, of repentance, of collection of the virtues, he had not forgotten that in the outward world action is sometimes demanded. Emperor Anastasios I Dikoros, who sympathised with the more doctrinaire Monophysites, had begun deporting and exiling Chalcedonian priests and bishops on charges of ‘Nestorianism’. Soon even the new Chalcedon-supporting Patriarch of Jerusalem, Salloustios’s successor Elias, found himself a target of political repression, for his support of the Patriarch of Antioch, Flavian II. Saint Sabbas himself travelled to Constantinople to protest this action and defend Elias in speech, and subsequently organised the anchorites and monks of Dayr Mâr Sâbâ to stage a protest and defend Elias with their bodies. These actions were only partially successful and Elias was still sentenced to exile, where he reposed in the Lord. But Saint Sabbas and Saint Theodosios were able to successfully convince the Jerusalem Synod to appoint Iōannēs III to the Jerusalem Patriarchate. Although Iōannēs was an Alexandrian, his sympathies had been with the more moderate Miaphysite party, and he later embraced the Council of Chalcedon with both arms. In this way, the Chalcedonian creed was saved from being completely suppressed in the Christian East.

Saint Sabbas made a second trip to Constantinople at the age of ninety-two, where he met Emperor Justinian. Here again his pleas were for mercy and for good works. He interceded with the Emperor to spare the populace of the Holy City from a general political repression, which he had planned on account of the Ben Sabar revolt. While he had the ear of the Emperor, Sabbas also encouraged him to promote infrastructure and public architecture in the Holy Land, and prophesied that in so doing Emperor Justinian would win back the West for the Empire (which he did). Sabbas also spent the last years of his life preaching against the various hæresies which threatened the Church. He also by his prayers brought the rain which ended a drought which had plagued the Holy Land for five years following the exile of Patriarch Elias.

Saint Sabbas reposed on the fifth of December, 532, having striven lifelong in monastic asceticism, prayer, fasting and almsgiving. He was recognised as a saint almost immediately. When his relics were uncovered fifteen years later, in the translation from Jerusalem to Constantinople, they were found to be incorrupt. His importance for the life of the Church in his own time was so great that his life was committed to writing by the monk Kyrillos of Skythopolis in 557. The relics of Saint Sabbas rested in Constantinople until 1204. When the Crusaders burnt and pillaged Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, Saint Sabbas’s remains were among the plunder that was stolen and carted off to Venice. It was only in 1965, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, that the Roman Catholic Pope Paul VI formally apologised to the Eastern Orthodox Church and – as a gesture of goodwill and repentance – returned the relics of Saint Sabbas to Dayr Mâr Sâbâ in Jerusalem. Great and venerable father Sabbas, humble servant of all and teacher of monks and anchorites, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Sabbas of Jerusalem, Tone 8:

With the streams of your tears you cultivated the barrenness of the desert;
And by your deep sighs, you bore fruit a hundredfold in your labours.
You became a luminary, shining upon the world with miracles.
O our righteous Father Sabbas, intercede with Christ God that our souls be saved!

Ceasefire in Artsakh

It should not come as a surprise that, in the recent armed exchanges between Azerbaijan and Armenia, I tend to take Armenia’s side. It is clear to me that the Azerbaijanis are being egged on by Turkey, which still sees the world’s first Christian kingdom as a thorn in its side and has not given up its project to wipe it off the map. In addition, Artsakh has been a territory inhabited by indigenous Armenian communities for centuries. It still is majority-Armenian, and home to numerous churches and priceless cultural treasures of the Armenian people – which are now in danger of attack. That said, I am thoroughly relieved that now the cooler heads in Russia and Iran have managed to put together a ceasefire – as Russia has now been calling for for weeks.

Armenia is, in addition to being the world’s first Christian kingdom, is also home to a community of people who have endured centuries of persecution in a fairly hostile neighbourhood. Surrounded by unfriendly countries – Georgia, Turkey and Azerbaijan all holding territorial claims against Armenia – historically Armenia has relied on Russia (a fellow Christian nation) and Iran (a nation which at least wasn’t Sunnî, which wasn’t Turkish and which was suspicious of the Ottomans) for security.

As an aside: it also seems that there is a significant fellowship of feeling between Armenia, and Americans of Asian and Pacific Islander descent. Some of Armenia’s most faithful friends in the US House of Representatives are our Chinese-American legislators – Reps. Judy Chu, Ted Lieu and Grace Meng – as well as other members of CAPAC such as Reps. Tulsi Gabbard, Ro Khanna and Barbara Lee. I do want to give CAPAC a much deserved shout-out for being so solid in their support of Armenia. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Asian-American community in the US knows very well what it is like to be a distrusted minority in a fairly hostile neighbourhood; it is not a surprise to me that there should be such a confluence of solidarity there.

The situation the Armenian nation has with Artsakh is tricky because, even though international law dictates that Artsakh is in fact an unalienable part of Azerbaijan, the majority population there is Armenian and Christian, and would in fact prefer to be part of Armenia. This presents a tricky problem, and Armenia understands perfectly well that an all-out war would be devastating to the ethnic Armenians that live in Artsakh. For the same reason, Turkey wants a war there. This is why Turkey has been deploying armaments (including drones) and irregular fighters from Syria – remember all those ‘moderate rebels’? – into Artsakh to undertake a guerrilla war and provoke Armenia into hitting back.

This is why it needs to be crystal clear. The idea that America shares any sort of common interest with Erdoğan’s Turkey – an increasingly intégriste state which has taken a hard turn away from Europe; which sponsors jihâdist terrorism; and which actively works to destabilise and invade its neighbours: including Greece, Cyprus, Syria and now Armenia – is a thoroughly disgusting pretense. Unfortunately, it’s a disgusting pretense that Turkey’s presence in NATO permits and compels our statesmen to uphold. In a sane world, Turkey’s membership in NATO would not only be brought into question by its behaviour over the last ten years. In a sane world, Turkey’s membership in NATO would call the continuing legitimacy of the entire alliance into question.

Unfortunately, we can’t bet on it. Turkey is too valuable a gæopolitical player in that area of the world, and the liberal American foreign policy establishment of course wants to keep using an increasingly-despotic and increasingly-maniacal Turkey as a vector against Russia. It’s also unfortunately crystal clear that the same American foreign policy establishment is licking its chops over this development – if they didn’t already help to orchestrate it behind the scenes. Having already orchestrated political brushfires in the Ukraine with the Maidan coup, in Syria with the same Turkish-backed ‘moderate rebels’, and most recently of course in the long-standing target of Belarus with an anti-government protest that quickly turned violent – the next logical step was always to set the Caucasus on fire.

This is why Orthodox Christians need to be petitioning not just Saint Gregory Photistēs, Saint Ephraim the Syrian and Saint James the Greatmartyr in our prayers for peace in the Caucasus, but also Saint Euphrosynē of Polotsk and Saints Boris and Gleb of Kiev. It would also be wise to pray to the Orthodox saints among the Turkish people, whom I’ve taken care to highlight on this blog over the past year. The latest bloodshed in Artsakh is part of a much larger game, and we need to be aware of both the target and the stakes.

Holy Hierarch Meletios, Archbishop of Antioch

Saint Meletios of Antioch
القديس ملاتيوس بطريرك أنطاكية‎

Today is the feast in the Holy Orthodox Church of Saint Meletios, an archbishop of Antioch who reigned during the late fourth century. He was notable for his struggles against the Arian hæresy, struggles which did not endear him to the reigning powers in Constantinople. He was deposed and exiled from Antioch three times on account of his criticisms of emperors and on account of his firm adherence to the Orthodox doctrine.

Saint Meletios [Gk. Μελέτιος, Ar. Malâtiyyûs ملاتيوس] was an Armenian of Melitēnē, who lived a life which was ‘blameless, just, reverent, sincere and most gentle’. His parents were of the nobility. In the year 357 he was consecrated bishop of Armenian Sebasteía (now Sivas in Turkey), from which his enemies managed to get him deposed before 360. He took refuge in the Syrian deserts, and then moved to Berœa (now Aleppo, Syria). It happened that the previous (Arian) archbishop in Antioch, Eudoxos, was something of a social climber: his ambitions to be elected Patriarch of Constantinople alienated him from his flock, who expelled him. from which he was invited at the behest of both the Orthodox (then a minority in Antioch, and somewhat disparagingly called ‘Eustathians’ after Saint Eustathios of Antioch) and Arian populations of Antioch to serve as their bishop. Because of his prior support for the ‘moderate’ Arian bishop Ákákios Monóphthalmos of Cæsarea, the Arian party was amenable to his election. In fact, so fervently well-wished was the new archbishop in Antioch, that the citizens contended with each other to offer him their hospitality. Even the Jews and the pagans turned out to welcome Saint Meletios and watch his procession enter the city!

At first, Saint Meletios did not speak to the people about Christology. He dealt with them gently, admonishing and encouraging them toward a less selfish, less quarrelsome and more humble way of life. It was Saint Meletios who at this time ordained Saint Basil a deacon, and who oversaw the baptism of Saint John Chrysostom, who was then still a youth. Indeed Chrysostom had been among those who had come out into the streets upon Meletios’s entry into Antioch. But the saint dealt with the people of Antioch the same way he dealt with young people in general: with meekness and patience and painstaking care. His methods and his admonishing words were gentle. But he was nonetheless insistent on instructing the folk of Antioch – not least by his own mild and meek example – in the Christian temperament and a Christlike way of living.

It was a full three years after his installation as Archbishop there, that he wisely chose to begin to speak and write on theological matters. He was expelled from Antioch in 361 and 362 after some conflicts with the Arian hierarchs, and went back to his homeland in western Armenia. There is a hagiographical legend that he was expelled after he preached a homily on Proverbs 8 before the Arian Emperor Constantius II, in which he espoused Nicene Trinitarian views and which caused the Arians present with him to attempt in vain to hush him – being hushed by one Arian archdeacon he expounded the doctrine of the Trinity with the gestures of his hands and fingers. However, this legend appears to be a pious fiction as primary-source accounts of the homily in question have nothing to do with Christology. Saint Meletios did, however, write an Exposition of the Faith that was explicitly Nicene in its Christology – in 363, after his return to his see at Antioch during the reign of Emperor Julian. Owing to both his conflicts with the Arian hierarchs and his quiet but marked espousal of Trinitarian theology, the gentle Saint Meletios both enlarged and was embraced by the ‘Eustathian’ community in Antioch.

Saint Meletios was sadly a bit too ‘late’ and a bit too mild in his embrace of the Council of Nicæa for some of the ‘Eustathians’, however. There was a schism in Antioch. In Meletios’s absence during his first exile, a cleric named Paulinus was consecrated bishop in absentia by a Western hierarch, Lucifer Calaritanus. Paulinus’s followers were strict legalists, who held the following objections to Meletios: had been consecrated by both Arian and Orthodox hierarchs, that he had been ‘soft’ on the Arians of Antioch at first, and that he had received former Arians into Orthodox communion by œconomia, without rebaptism. For his part, Saint Meletios behaved with the same meekness toward Paulinus that he had toward the Antiochenes at first, and in all things sought to heal the schism. Saint Meletios also hosted a local council in Antioch in 364 which affirmed the Nicene teachings.

Saint Meletios was expelled again from Antioch in 365, after Emperor Valens came by his laurels. The Arians, then in the ascendency, concocted and disseminated a great variety of absurd and malicious libels against the holy Meletios – including that he was a follower of Sabellius. Emperor Valens, who sympathised with the Arian party, listened to these libels and cast Saint Meletios out of Antioch twice: the first time in 365, and the second time in 371.

Saint Meletios returned to Antioch in 378 after the death of Valens and the crowning of Emperor Gratian. Again at that time he tried to heal the schism between himself and Paulinus by making the proposal that they rule as co-bishops as long as they both remained alive, but that if one of them should repose in blessedness before the other, that the other should have sole sway in the archbishopric. Paulinus would not accept the saint’s proposal. However, Saint Meletios was afterward recognised as the sole valid bishop among the Orthodox by Emperor Gratian’s governor.

Toward the end of his earthly life, Saint Meletios ordained the young Saint John Chrysostom first a reader, then a deacon, in Antioch. He came to Constantinople at the invitation of Saint Theodosius, who desired especially to see him. Saint Theodosius – then fighting the Goths on Gratian’s behalf – called the Second Œcumenical Council in the City, and of course Saint Meletios was one of those in attendance. Without being assisted by any of his attendants, Theodosius recognised the holy man at once, leapt up and ran to him, knelt at his feet and gave him a kiss the way a loving son would do for a father he had long missed.

Theodosius said afterward that he had recognised Meletios, because he had seen the holy man in a dream, in which the holy man had anointed and crowned him Emperor, and vested him with the robe of purple and the other seals of his office. And this dream thereupon came to pass. At the Œcumenical Council which Theodosius had convoked, Saint Meletios of Antioch in stentorian tones declared, ‘We understand three Hypostases and we speak of a single Essence!’ As this happened, he seemed to be surrounded by a holy fire that flashed like lightning. The Antiochian bishop, so renowned for his meekness and self-beshedding humility, astounded the whole synod of bishops by the forcefulness and forthrightness of his teaching. Here again the hagiographers insert the story of his teaching the doctrine of the Trinity with his fingers as well as his voice.

Saint Meletios also gave his blessing to Gregory of Nazianzus as Patriarch of Constantinople. However, before the Second Œcumenical Council could officially begin, the holy man took ill and reposed in the Lord. This was a cause of great mourning for the Emperor and for the bishops there present, and Saint Gregory of Nyssa delivered the eulogy for this humble servant of servants. Saint Meletios’s relics were conveyed in state to Antioch, and interred with the honours due to a saint of God in the church he himself had consecrated to house the relics of Saint Babylas. Meletios has been the namesake and inspiration of many other holy men of the Antiochian Church, including the great Arab patriot Patriarch Meletios II. Holy hierarch Meletios, sweet and meek archpastor of Christ’s holy Church, pray unto Him who loves mankind to save our souls!

Apolytikion of Saint Meletios, Tone 4:

A model of faith and the image of gentleness,
The example of your life has shown you forth
To your sheep-fold to be a master of temperance.
You obtained thus through being lowly, gifts from on high,
And riches through poverty.
Meletios, our father and priest of priests,
Intercede with Christ our God that He may save our souls.

On Syriac Christian realities

Mar Gorgis Church, Bakhdida, Iraq

One thing was particularly troubling to me as I was writing my hagiographies of our Syriac saints this month: Saint ’Abu, Mâr Ya‘qûb, Mâr ’Ishâq, Mâr ’Afrâm and Saint Frahât. Their biographies attest to places that still exist, and places that are endangered by our government’s policies.

The ancestral home of Saint ’Abu, and home to some of the most beautiful and rich thousand-year-old (but now threatened) architecture in the world, including one of the greatest libraries in history: Baghdad? Obviously still a real city. The US military, under orders from the five-and-dime Antichrist in the White House, just straight up murdered two men there in the middle of a civilian airstrip. And now, as we speak, it’s the site of a huge protest against our government’s very presence there, after the lawful government of Iraq voted for our troops to leave and our government, arrogant occupiers that we are, refused to remove them.

The only reason we’re there, of course, is because of Bush’s brutal, gratuitously unnecessary and unjust war of choice that killed upwards of 600,000 people, destroyed much of this material heritage of humanity, and was based on and fuelled by wilful and deliberate lies. Lies which were, in no small part, propagated and perpetuated by a suppliant belligerati with a certain plausible façade of internationalism: Christopher Hitchens, Václav Havel, Liu Xiaobo, Garry Kasparov, André Glucksmann and Adam Michnik. These belligerati were and are willful, compulsive liars who have still not gotten over the delusion that they are somehow persecuted martyrs for truth.

Speaking of Iraq, the city of Mosul was once known as Nineveh – the biblical city where Jonah preached! Mosul was once the thriving centre and beating heart of Syriac Christendom – home to the monastery from which Mâr ’Ishâq wrote his Ascetical Homilies. That monastery was attacked repeatedly and destroyed, and the holy abbots and monks put brutally to the sword, by the Kurds multiple times throughout the 1700s and 1800s. The Kurds destroyed the monastery’s library, including the original writings of Mâr ’Ishâq, in 1828, committed a democide of the Assyrians in Mosul in 1843, killing over ten thousand people and destroying the Christian architecture and holy iconography. The site still exists, but the monastic community itself was moved to al-Qûš soon afterward. The Assyrians were one of the groups – along with the Armenians and the Pontic Greeks – who were targeted and killed in the Ottoman-perpetrated genocides of 1915-1917.

Arbela, the centre of the Assyrian diocæse of Adiabene where Mâr Ya‘qûb, Mâr ’Afrâm and Saint Frahât lived most of their lives, is also in northern Iraq – modern-day Erbil. Adiabene covers an area which covers the northern tip of Iraq and the southeastern tip of what is now Turkey, as well as a part of Western Iran. Erbil’s built culture is far more ancient even than Baghdad’s – the Citadel alone dates back 4,300 years – and it is one possible contender for being the oldest continuously inhabited human settlement on the face of the planet.

The Assyrian Christians of northern Iraq – including Mosul and Erbil – suffered perhaps more than any other group because of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They were persecuted by vengeful Sunnî militias while the American military, acting under orders from Bush’s State Department, dismantled the Republican Guard that had been protecting them, and then deliberately and maliciously neglected them when they came for protection. American evangelicals, too, mostly ignored the plight of the country’s Christians, and their situation from 2003 to 2011 was left to be ‘reported’ in American media by Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist of Doonesbury. The Assyrians of Iraq were targeted again there by the forces of Dâ‘iš, which managed to capture Mosul and most of the Plains of Nineveh. (Dâ‘iš was technically ‘founded’ in by az-Zarqâwî in 1999. But it was incubated as a proto-state precisely in the vacuum of power that followed the invasion of 2003. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was and remains a consequence of American foreign policy in Iraq under Bush and Obama, which allowed it to flourish.) The substantive displays of solidarity the Assyrian Christians got from within the country were largely from the Shî‘a majority in southern Iraq.

The Assyrians, and other groups of Arab Christians, also inhabit far western Iran, southeastern Turkey and northeastern Syria, a region which is coterminous with Kurdistan. The difficulty the Assyrians face – and this is a difficulty that is made clear if one reads even the sæcular literature, like William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain – is that the Assyrians are neither Turks nor Kurds. They thus face repression from three sides of an asymmetrical armed conflict that has only escalated since 2011. Under the Turks they were subject to genocide – and they are subject to Turkish brutality again, now that we’ve left a power vacuum in northeastern Syria. As mentioned above, the Assyrians face mass killings, rape and repression from Dâ‘iš. And the Kurds have not behaved particularly well toward the Christians of the region either, as can be witnessed from the history of places like Mosul. The ‘Rojava’ experiment in northeastern Syria, however rosily it is portrayed by certain anarchist groups in the West, resulted in a precipitous loss of the Assyrians’ cultural and religious rights as the Kurds have demanded their assimilation or expulsion.

These places all have ancient heritage. Diyarbakır (once Amida) and Urfa (once Edessa), both now in Turkey, were both home to significant populations of Assyrians and Armenians – who either fled or were killed or evicted between 1900 and 1925. In Nusaybin (once Nisibis), the Assyrians hung on longer, but the Kurdish-Turkish conflict and the Syrian Civil War caused them to flee. These communities are ancient and irreplaceable. They not only represent an invaluable golden thread of Christian religious heritage; they reflect a heritage of human history going back into the infancy of civilisation itself. Holy places are places; and holy history is history.

This is a truth for which I think American Christians in particular have an insufficient appreciation. I can’t say for sure how this comes to be the case, but I have a few surmises. In a handful of high-up cases among the power élite, I think there is an awareness of the Christian heritage of the Middle East, combined with an intentional malice against both the legacy and the people, that drives the war policies and the immigration policies that exclude and destroy Middle Eastern Christians. For most Americans, however, ignorance and fantasy seem to be the key culprits. I have to wonder if – excepting a handful of places now within the borders of the state of Israel – there isn’t a certain degree of mystification at work when American evangelicals in particular refer to places in the Scriptures. A mention of Damascus in the Book of Acts doesn’t register to American ears as a real place in real time, but is a mythologised setting, a backdrop against which a certain fable can unfold. There is a certain sense in which we Americans read the Scriptures as fundamentally about us, which precludes the sort of civilisational humility which characterised, for example, early English Christianity. And that leads us to ignore the reality of the places and people around Christ in the Gospels, in such a way that it distorts the personality of Christ Himself.

In addition, living at the core of the sole world superpower, based as it is on technological dominance of man and nature rather than on any religious qualms, has a hardening effect on hearts, and a deadening effect on our ability to show compassion for crucified peoples. That seems to be the case, whether they are in an Aramaic-speaking village in Mesopotamia, or in an old neighbourhood in Wuhan, or in a detention facility on the Texas border, or on a reservation just upriver. We are not becoming stronger or greater; we are merely becoming coarser, and that is not an improvement. For the love of God – I say this not as a vain exclamation, but as a genuine and impassioned entreaty – this needs to change.

Our father among the saints Mâr Ya‘qûb an-Nusaybîni

On the thirteenth of January we celebrate a great Syrian father, Mâr Ya‘qûb [also Jacob or James], Bishop of Nisibis. He is most renowned in the Orthodox Church as the spiritual father of Mâr ’Afrâm [Saint Ephrem] the Syrian. However, he was also a participant, at the invitation of Emperor Saint Constantine, of the First Œcumenical Council of Nicæa, and is one of the holy signatories of the Council.

Mâr Ya‘qûb was born in Nisibis in the middle of the third century. His father was a Christian whose name was Jafâl. Two narratives are given with regard to his origin. The earlier one is that Jafâl belonged to the same tribe as Holy Apostle James the brother of the Lord; this is the narrative credited by the hagiographer Alban Butler, who additionally describes him as a ‘Syrian’ by ethnicity. The Armenians hold that Jafâl was an Iranian prince. Mâr Ya‘qûb was apparently close friends in his youth with Saint Gregory Photistes, with whom he later corresponded in letters. When he was still a young man, Ya‘qûb took fire for the faith and went into the mountains in what is now northern Iraq, to live as a hermit. He wore only the rough clothing of goat hair, fed himself on herbs and fruits only, and lived under the open sky without the benefit of a roof over his head or a fire for warmth.

The fame of his ascetical exploits grew, and the Bishop of Arbîl visited him in his isolation. He performed a number of ascetic feats and acts of devotion to God. At one time during his isolation he climbed al-Ghûdiyya seeking a relic from the ark of Noah; as he slept on the mountain an angel appeared to him and led him to a splinter of the ark. In the place where he slept a holy spring appeared. He took the splinter with him and entrusted it to another hermit, Marûkah.

He happened as he was wandering, upon a spring next to which a group of lewd women were boasting loudly of their exploits – and as he passed by they jeered at him. They had let their hair down to take a bath in the spring. Ya‘qûb whispered a prayer to God, and at once the spring dried up, and the hair of the women turned white. The women turned to Mâr Ya‘qûb, apologised to him and repented. Ya‘qûb once again prayed to God, and the waters of the spring returned – however, the hair of the women remained white. At another time, some greedy men tried to scam some money off of the holy man. One of them covered himself in a shroud like a corpse, and lay down on the side of the road. The others went up to Mâr Ya‘qûb and asked him for money to bury the ‘dead’ man. When they returned to the roadside, however, they found the man under the shroud had truly died. Stricken, the other men knelt by Ya‘qûb and confessed their sin to him. When Ya‘qûb prayed to God, the man under the shroud was raised again to life.

Mâr Ya‘qûb gave strength to the Christians on both sides of the divide between the two powerful empires of his day. He boldly and courageously preached against the wicked emperor Maximian in Rome, and publicly confessed the true Faith during the persecutions wrought by the same. And he also travelled among, and comforted, the Christians of Persia, exhorting them to steadfastness under the persecutions of Šâpur II. It was sometime shortly after or concurrently with this that he was consecrated as bishop in Nisibis.

Though he once again took up residence in the city of his birth, and left the desert to serve among the people of the city, in no way did he forsake his desert way of life. He dressed as he always had, ate as he always had, and even slept outside the bishop’s residence. In addition to this, as bishop he revealed himself to be an attentive and caring archpastor, and also a fierce and formidable advocate for the poor and oppressed. Whatever wealth he had and whatever gifts he was given found their way out of his hands and into those of the poor. He visited the sick and imprisoned, and he had a special care for widows and orphans, whom Christ commended to the care of His people.

At the same time, though, he had indeed been brought up gentle, and had been given the very best of educations by his father Jafâl. In his position as bishop, he sponsored and helped to build a public school in Nisibis, which took young boys in free of charge – as well as blessing the foundation of a new church there, which was completed in 320. He himself became a malfâna – a teacher, or professor – in this school, and would later entrust his pupils to his spiritual son Mâr ’Afrâm in the same rôle. Mâr Ya‘qûb’s instruction of his pupils was as much by example as it was by didacticism and lecture.

Mâr Ya‘qûb was also a formidable and stalwart champion of Orthodoxy against the various heresies – chief among which in his own time was Arianism. He was present at the Council of Nicæa in 325, as mentioned above, where he argued tenaciously and vociferously for the full divinity of Jesus Christ over-against the hierarchical hæresy of Arius. Mâr Ya‘qûb is one of the sainted signatories of the Council and is commemorated together with the other Nicene Fathers on the twenty-ninth of May.

He is also famous for working a great wonder in Nisibis on the eve of an invasion by the Persians under Šâpur II in 338, shortly before his blessed repose. Though he could hardly be considered a partizan of the Roman government, Mâr Ya‘qûb nonetheless had to think of the protection of the people in the city. Mâr Ya‘qûb ascended the wall, attended by his deacon ’Afrâm, and prayed to God. He prayed for the destruction of no man, but only that Nisibis might be delivered in peace from the Persian siege. At once there arose a plague of gnats and flies among the Persian ranks, which not only greatly grieved the soldiery but particularly attacked their cavalry and pestered the horses. Šâpur was forced to destroy his siege engines, abandon the siege of Nisibis and depart – at that time – in peace. Mâr Ya‘qûb reposed peacefully in the Lord later that year, and is commemorated in the Orthodox Church on the thirteenth of January and on the thirty-first of October. Holy father Ya‘qûb, blessed ascetic and teacher, friend to the poor, pray unto Christ our God that we unworthy sinners may be saved!

By simple words he gave milk to his infants,
The Church in Nisibis was as a child with him.
As with a child, he loved her and chastened her.
The womb of him who gave birth to the flock bore her infancy.
The first priest gave milk to her infancy.
The wealthy father laid up treasures for her childhood.

- Mâr ’Afrâm, Hymns on Nisibis

Church of Mâr Ya‘qûb, Nusaybin

No war in the land of Esther, redux

Qasim Soleimani and Abu Mahdî al-Muhandis

Today at one in the morning local time, the United States government has ordered the drone strikes which have assassinated Major General Qasem Soleimani of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps – Quds Force and Abu Mahdî al-Muhandis of the Hizbullâh Brigades as they were travelling in a convoy at Baghdad International Airport in Iraq. This is an act of wanton and unprovoked aggression against not only Iran but also the legitimate government in Iraq, and it pushes us closer to yet another open-ended boots-on-the-ground war in the Middle East, one which I have taken pains to speak out against on this blog for the past eight years and more.

Major General Soleimani was perhaps the sole person who, more than any other single figure in the region let alone any of the major players there, did the most to oppose, fight and clear the ground of Dâ‘iš in Iraq. He was a strategic master when it came to marshalling a broad coalition of small players – many of whom did not get along with each other – toward a broader goal in the defeat of the ‘Islamic’ State. The actions of Major General Soleimani may well have saved the lives of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of the living stones of the region – the Armenian, Assyrian and Arab Christians of the Fertile Crescent who have been worshipping there for over one and a half millennia, long before the advent of Islâm. Make no mistake, the local Christians are not at all happy with Soleimani’s death. These Christians have already been aligned with Hizbullâh for the past five years, and our reckless action has once again put them in mortal danger.

Not to mention that Soleimani and the government he represented were, in the purely-functional terms represented by the task of ridding the Middle East of Dâ‘iš, our ally – whom our government basically just stabbed in the back. And it did so in such a gratuitous manner, bombing him in the middle of Iraq’s busiest civilian airport, that they’ve basically made him into a martyr for the cause for most sane people in Iraq and Iran – not to mention in Syria and among the Yemeni Houthis.

These personal accomplishments of Soleimani solidly underscore the fact that Iraq and Iran together have played the single most important rôle in defeating Dâ‘iš in the entirety of the latter’s sordid and miserable existence. Iran’s government has not been responsible for any terrorism aimed at American civilians or government since the 1980s – or any other Western country for that matter. In fact, Iran has not launched a single offensive war against another country in living memory; the war with Iraq in the 1980s seems to be long put past. Hizbullâh, the same: they have been a legitimate political party in Lebanon for this length of time and have not attacked American people or interests for over thirty years. These are all truth – expect them all to come under attack from the centre and from the right over the next news cycle as the war drums begin to beat louder.

The usual neocon ghouls, of course, are licking their chops with glee over this. It looks like the exact wrong people have once again gotten their hooks into a gormless, gutless, spineless president who wouldn’t know right from wrong if they slapped him in the face. (There is quite a lot of bitter irony here in reading back over tweets from 2016.) But by attacking and killing one of the most celebrated anti-Dâ‘iš generals in the Fertile Crescent, alongside one of Iraq’s commanders, in the middle of a civilian airfield, they’ve destroyed any last scrap or vestige of goodwill we might have had from the Iraqi people otherwise for our presence there. Iraq’s civilian authorities are basically already telling us to get out.

As far as the presidential contenders on the other side are concerned, preventing a war with Iran has again just shot to the top of the priority list, and we need to be listening very carefully to how they react. So far, the results have been predictable. Only Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard have had the moral clarity and fortitude to stand up and say this was wrong, without qualifications – while Joe Biden and Liz Warren have notably not done so. Once again now, all together. No war in the land of Esther. No war in the land of Mordechai. No war in the land of Daniel. This needs to be the fervent prayer of all Christians of goodwill, everywhere; and not least among the Orthodox Christians whose families and friends once again lie in the crosshairs.

UPDATE (5 Jan): Over 700 people, including yours truly, turned out in Minneapolis yesterday on a bright but brisk Saturday afternoon, to stage an impromptu demonstration against the Baghdad Airport bombing as part of a national effort spearheaded by the ANSWER Coalition. The swift and effective coördination of this event was thanks to the Minnesota Peace Action Coalition, the Anti-War Committee, Women Against Military Madness, Veterans for Peace and the National Iranian American Council. Members of the Teamsters Local 120, Minnesota Nurses Association, the Twin Cities chapter of the DSA, the Catholic Worker Movement and the Simone Weil Centre were in attendance.

The attendance numbers and the organisational breadth of the event both indicate a significant jump forward for the anti-war movement locally. I’m unfortunately too well aware that the committed core of the activists there belong to the mix of libertarians, socialists, vets, immigrant-rights activists and Christian radicals that have kept the anti-war movement alive through the Obama years. I’m also aware that a non-zero part of the turnout here was motivated as much by anti-Trump sentiment as it was by any principled opposition to military adventurism or any stand in favour of foreign-policy realism. Still, the forward momentum is a good thing; we need to keep it up and we need to encourage more such actions. Hopefully we can get more of the political mainstream on board. The stakes are high enough.

Politicking and the Medz Yeghern

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

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

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

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

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

‘Îd al-Jalâ’

The seventeenth of April is Evacuation Day (‘Îd al-Jalâ’ عيد الجلاء) in Syria. The day celebrates the occasion in 1946 when the last French troops left Syrian soil. As one might suspect, the fact that Syrians celebrate their independence on this day rather than on, say, the first of January – when the Allied Powers during the Second World War recognised Syrian independence from France – shows precisely how tenuous that guarantee of independence was, and also showcases the very good reasons the Syrian people have to distrust the French even when they make such promises. Among the foreign leaders who commemorated Evacuation Day with the Syrian people this year were Belarusian President Aliaksandr Lukašenko and Armenian President Armen Sarkissian.

This year nature too is joining the festivities, as flowers are blooming across the country and butterflies and birds are returning. The Syrian people, too, this year have a few reasons to rejoice, though particularly on an œconomic front their struggle is far from over. The war is winding down; Syrian refugees and displaced people are returning home; Dâ‘iš has been decisively weakened (but not yet quite defeated); and most of the country is firmly under the control of the rightful government of Baššâr al-’Asad. Peace talks are being held in Qazaqstan.

However, not all is yet well in Syria. There are still foreign jihadis and Kurdish forces still operating in the country. There is a shortage of resources, particularly fuel, which is the direct result of a brutal sanctions régime from the Western countries and which are directly impacting the poorest and most deprived sectors of the society. And the rightfully-Syrian Arab Hadbatu al-Jawlân is still under foreign occupation – a sad fact which is also commemorated on each Evacuation Day. That occupation sadly has now been validated, over the heads of all the Arab peoples, by our own criminal government.

Additionally, and importantly, our beloved Aleppine archpastors of the Christian confessions, Sayyidna Paul Yâzijî and Mâr Yôhanna Ibrâhîm, are still missing – and this week, six years will have passed since they were abducted. May this Evacuation Day also see renewed and intensified prayers on their behalf, for their release from captivity and for their safe return. May God keep and protect them, and keep them ever in His own memory.

May God grant victories to the Orthodox Christians over their adversaries. May He save and have mercy upon Baššar al-‘Asad and upon the righteous and Christ-loving Syrian Arab Army; may He surround Syria’s sovereignty with peace and subdue beneath their feet every enemy and adversary. May He grant it that the whole of the Syrian nation be liberated from foreign occupation and oppression!

The Treaty of San Stefano

The signing of the Treaty of San Stefano

William Morris would demand that I post something to mark the occasion. It was, after all, a cause near and dear to his radical heart, moved as he was by the plight of the Bulgarians in the nineteenth century. As would the great Ivan Vazov, whose book Under the Yoke I’m currently reading – a ‘Romance of the Bulgarian Revolt’ of 1876.

Anyway, the third of March (or 19 February on the Julian Calendar) is the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of San Stefano which ended the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, and which the Bulgarian nation still celebrates today as the beginning of their independence. It is also remembered fondly by the Serbian and Romanian peoples, who likewise gained independence from the Ottomans under the terms of the treaty. An unfortunate oversight of the treaty, at first, was the Armenian population, which – being Christian and therefore suspect, though they had remained loyal to the Ottomans – was ruthlessly suppressed and in some cases massacred by Kurdish cavalry. A sinister omen of worse Turkish atrocities still to come. The Russians were able to secure, at least in the formal language of the agreement, some protections for the Armenian population in Asia Minor – however, they lacked any kind of enforcement mechanism.

Unfortunately, the treaty was only a preliminary, and was vastly ‘watered down’ at the insistence of the Western powers – particularly Britain and Austria-Hungary – who demanded a revision on the grounds that it violated the earlier Treaty of Paris. A subsequent agreement, hammered out in Berlin, drastically reduced the size of the newly-created independent Bulgaria and left the Ottomans in control of Macedonia, Greece, Albania and Kosovo. The Treaty of Berlin splintered the Balkans in several different ways and fostered ethnic rivalries between Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Romanians and Turks in a way which would not be undone until the inevitable eruption of the Great War.

What is worse, the British and the Austrians, who – apart from a handful of noble souls like Morris – supported the Turks in despite of their ham-handed atrocities against civilian populations in Bulgaria, perfectly understood that the Treaty of Berlin was nothing more than a stopgap and that there was very little the Ottoman Empire could do to keep itself afloat much longer. They understood perfectly well that a greater, more massive conflict was coming – but did not exercise any sort of political will or foresight to stem the injustices that would ultimately give rise to it. The interference of the British and the Austrians in the peace of San Stefano was unjust, and there they sowed some of the bad seed that would return to be reaped in the whirlwind thirty-five years after.

The Treaty of San Stefano is still somewhat important, as it marks one ‘small victory’ in a broader ‘long defeat’ throughout the nineteenth century. The four great nations of the Balkans, who up until now had been (unwilling) subject peoples of the Ottoman Turks, were suddenly finding themselves carved up by the great powers on every side and even further abroad, subject to new forms of beggary by capitalist finance and colonial depredation under the guise of ‘infrastructure’. Hard winters were coming, but at the very least, in March of 1878, though, the peasants of the European Southeast could feel a warm spring gust of liberation. For a great many of them, that wasn’t nothing. The farthest thing from it.

Честит празник, българи!

Why Syrian Christians loved Hâfiz

Hâfiz al-’Asad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s always a Hitch…

Image courtesy the Daily Mail

And it’s usually worthwhile to read him. The younger one, that is.

Peter Hitchens notes that, this time (as so many times before), the Russians have been telling us the truth about the so-called ‘revolution of dignity’, which was in fact a right-wing putsch carried out by heavily-armed thugs, aimed against the legitimate and democratically-elected government of Viktor Yanukovich. Hitchens (and the paywalled article by David Roman which he cites) rightly alludes to the Waffen-SS insignia and other evidences of far-right hooliganism on the Maidan, which have been confirmed even by research friendly to the overall aims of the movement. To all of which can be added: the beatings by Maidan activists of unionists, journalists and non-whites, the arson attack which murdered 42 labour activists in Odessa, the ugly anti-Semitism which has not died down but gotten worse in the meantime.

The central point of the piece is solid; if I have any gripes with it, it’s that Mr Hitchens is a wee bit too soft on Saakashvili. Saakashvili as crusading anti-corruption outsider is rather laughable not only when you consider his Atlantic connexions in the early junta, but also when one considers his rôle as the sadistic, corrupt ex-dictator of Georgia (which country has since sensibly and rightly stripped the man of his citizenship and has sought to have him arrested and extradited).

Hitchens must be heeded on this point. (As a rule, I’ve found it a useful exercise to give notice to the Old Right, of whom Hitchens and Bacevich are representative, on these kinds of issues.) Now, it is true that the presence of fascism and far-right elements in the original Maidan protests has not given neo-Nazi parties like Svoboda or the Radical Party any immediate political benefits. But it’s clear that the willingness of more ‘moderate’ (read: neoliberal) parties to make common cause with fascists signals something about the nature of the current government itself, as well as about the nature of the opposition.

Let’s think back to the waning days of 2013. Yanukovich was overthrown because he refused to sign an accession agreement to the EU. Regardless of what you think of Yanukovich’s record prior to that (and believe me, it isn’t inspiring), speaking from the point of view of the welfare and dignity of the Ukraine’s working class, Yanukovich did the right thing in rejecting the agreement. The EU accession agreement was a textbook example of the exact same sort of œconomic liberalism that the interwar agrarians in Czechoslovakia made a point of explicitly rejecting in their own day. All trade barriers were to be removed. The investment was overwhelmingly to flow one way; the trade to flow the other. The beneficiaries of the agreement would essentially all be German (or Belgian, or French); the losers and victims would be Ukrainian. Sean Guillory summed it up eloquently:

I think there is a false choice here as much as there is a force choice. Ukraine’s desire to be in the EU should be separated from the problems with Yanukovich. But because of its dire economic situation, Ukraine is being forced to make a decision—cast its future with the EU or with Russia. But people must understand that the EU path—and frankly the association agreement doesn’t appear to be a path to membership. It is an attempt at neoliberalizing Ukraine.

It’s an attempt that has succeeded to a significant degree. But it hasn’t gone down simply. The Ukraine’s continuing transition into neoliberalism, privatisation and austerity has to disguise itself by ascribing false names to events that deserve their own explanation. It has to dehumanise people who fall out of line. Crimea’s annexation by Russia was legally dubious, though not without historical precedent; however, the attitudes of its people are anything but dubious: they prefer to be part of Russia by overwhelming majorities, and continue to be so. Protests against neoliberal trade policy that arose organically in the Donetsk Basin, largely among industrial workers there, were written off as a Russian operation. The Ukraine’s losses of both Crimea and parts of the Donbass were wholly avoidable self-fulfilling prophecies, arising from the fact that the post-2014 politicians wanted to keep the territory but couldn’t care less about the people who lived there.

Is the current Ukrainian government ‘far-right’ or ‘fascist’? No. It is neoliberal. That is a distinction that critical observers need to continue to make. However, that same neoliberal government continues to rely on far-right and fascist support, for everything from the rewriting of its history to the maintenance of the status and geopolitical alignment of its current political élites. It shouldn’t take someone like me to explain why that’s troubling.

And this is why voices of the Old Right, like those of Peter Hitchens and Andrew Bacevich, are so valuable. Very few people will listen to a leftist on these things – most of us (even and perhaps especially a left-conservative Slavophil like me) would just be accused of ‘red Putinism’, Soviet nostalgia or post-Occupy sour grapes. No one ever had cause to accuse Peter Hitchens of being soft on the commies. When these issues are couched in the language of realism, sober assessment of national interests, the balance of moral obligation with ability, the understanding of fallen human nature as having real-world ramifications – there is still a remote chance that people will listen.