Holy Russian Empire, Batman!
“Look son, bein’ a good shot and bein’ quick with a pistol, that don’t do no harm, but it don’t mean much next to being cool-headed. A man who’ll keep his head, and not get rattled under fire, like as not he’ll kill ya.”
–Gene Hackman as William “Little Bill” Daggett, Unforgiven
Russia’s Vladimir Putin is getting rattled under fire. He can’t hit the side of a barn any more, and his quick-draw antics are wearing thin. As a last resort, Putin has turned to God and asked Him for a Holy Russian Empire to protect Putin from reality. What’s the Russian for “burka”?
Putin has seen a stunning series of setbacks in recent weeks. First there was a horrifyingly successful terrorist attack on Domodedovo, one of Russia’s most important airports in the center of its capital city, and then he was openly contradicted by the country’s so-called president when he claimed the crime had been solved.
It was a devastating below, because Putin’s primary claim to fame was that he had “pacified” Russia’s roiling and separatist Caucasus region. Instead, the world saw how Putin’s crazed efforts to assassinate leaders in the region have left the rebels headless, furious, and capable of — in Putin’s words — “senseless cruelty.” It’s Russia, though, that has been repeatedly convicted of senseless, state-sponsored cruelty in the Caucasus by the European Court of Human Rights. In fact, that court is literally overflowing with such claims against the Putin regime.
Then the bad news just kept coming.
Yet another key Russian space satellite tumbled out of orbit.
Putin was caught red-handed constructing an obscenely enormous personal residence even as a fellow dictator came under fire in Egypt for similar practices. Putin started reminding the world very much of Saddam Hussein.
Then there was Beautygate, parts I and II. First Putin was openly abandoned by one of the country’s most famous prima ballerinas — in favor of his most hated rival Mikhail Khodorkovsky. And then, in the wake of the airport atrocity, he was exposed by Naomi Campbell, of all people, as a prurient, prepubescent schoolboy more interested in barely legal boobies than terrorist booby traps.
Where else to turn but to God?
It was hardly surprising when Putin announced Russian politics is now wide open for the Russian Orthodox Church, his leading cheerleader. But that didn’t make it any less terrifying.
In a breathtaking one-two punch, the Kremlin announced that from now on Orthodox bigwigs will receive the same type of state-sponsored security as Kremlin bigshots get, and the Orthodox Church answered by freeing priests to enter politics. The Kremlin applauded the decision.
The Russian Empire embracing xenophobia, anti-western Orthodox dogma and pan Slavic Nationalism, sounds like a return to form for them. It worked for the Romanovs for 3 centuries and helped Stalin rally the USSR when all seemed lost in WW2, so I wish them good fortunes. By the by, Kim, I looked over all your articles here at PJ media and every one them is anti-Putin and anti-Russian from my point of view. What’s your angle here? Looking to restart the the glory days of Cold War, I hope not.
I agree with you. I would add that the American people owe a debt of gratitude to the Russian people for their WWII sacrifices. Eighty percent of the German Army was chewed up by the Red Army. Also, Russia has been attacked about 11 times from 1400 to about 1920 by the Muslims (Ottoman Turks). Additionally, they were attacked by the French. If I had experienced such, I would be xenophobic. The Russian people have beaten back each attack and devastated the aggressors. God bless Putin, the Russian people, and the Russian Orthodox Church! We should take a page from Putin’s book on how to treat Islam. There is no redemption in Islam.
Never heard of the Germans allies, the Japs, have you? Or places like Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa? American soldiers sure did. Every time I hear about the sacrifices of the Russians under that idiot, Stalin, I ask myself, why the ____ should I care? Russian leftists killed millions of their own countrymen and threatened the world in general with their attempt to spread the disguised version of Russian Nationalism known as Soviet Communism. Sorry, but I’m not the least bit interested in giving Russians excuses after what they did with the West’s gift to them in WW2.
And has anyone ever been “interested” in your feverish rantings? I doubt it. The fact that you’re not “interested” in crediting Russian soldiers for your freedom does not change the fact of your debt to them.
Russian soldiers are not responsible for our freedom. Seems to me they did everything they could to take our freedom for 60 years.
Russians seem to think they owe their freedom to us in the US. Many times I’ve heard their people say that just “knowing” that a place like the US existed gave them hope.
Well – those days are gone, but I’m still not going to thank some WWII guy for a freedom he didn’t provide.
Alexander, in my view Kim exposes the dark sides of Russian politics which undoubtedly leads to fighting Mista Putin as a cause of Russia sufferings. Again, the life of Russian Orthodox church, which is a blunt obedience and desire to self-distraction, is deeply embedded into Russians’ conscious and helps Mista Putin to manipulate the poor ignorant Russians — Russia is not only Moscow and S.Petersburg; Russia is, in fact, all other cities, yep.
Ms. Zigfield
It is going to be difficult for you to get a complete understanding of what you are watching without understanding Ezekiel. Putin is doing exactly what he is supposed to be doing. The muslims are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. They will not be enemies long. Putin does not want any ideology other than his own influencing any of his people. The west has NEVER had any influence over the Russian people. They have been atheistic in their attitudes since 1920 or so for the most part. My sister in law is Russian. Her father was the Dean of Mathematics at Moscow university. They dont care about religion. Never have never will. The Russians dont condone any religion, and they are not about to start. Russia, Iran and Turkey are going to attack Israel. What you are watching is the events that set that up. God and the church are not the same thing. A relationship with God is one on one, you and Him. It has nothing to do with the church. So when you say Putin has turned to God you insult God. He hasnt turned to God he is using the vessel, the church, to try to control people. This has been done for over a millenia. The popes did the same thing. This isnt any different.
“A relationship with God is one on one, you and Him. It has nothing to do with the church”
Sounds to me like the “dictatorship of relativism”. Under this philosophy, God can be whoever you want him/her to be. ZooWeeMama! I am building my own Aztec temple, and you are first in line.
Your end of times delusions need not apply to the real world. That kind of thinking is just as dangerous as Putin attempting to turn Russia into a theocracy.
Vladimir Putin, a czar is born!
Putin is looking more and more like Czar Nicholas did during World War I. He is an abosolute ruler, but he also seems more detached and out-of-touch with what is actually going on inside of Russia. If you see a guy that looks a lot like Rasputin following Putin around in the next few months, Russia really is doomed.
Problem is, what is going to replace Putin once he either dies or somebody puts him up against a wall and shoots him (which is, after all, what happened to Nicholas and his entire family). I think Russia is being set up for yet another civil war. Problem is, they already tried Communism and I doubt the Russian people would be willing to go back to that. So what’s left? Hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t they try that “Democracy thing” that was adopted right after the Berlin Wall fell? A little freedom in Russia might be a refreshing change from all of the Communism and authoritarianism the country has been forced to endure over the past 100 years. Or they will simply have one dictator followed by another dictator. Maybe there are just some countries where any form of democratic government just cannot flourish, like in, say, any Muslim or arab country. Well, at least with the fall of the Berlin Wall, they had a chance at it. You can’t say the same for a lot of other countries on this planet.
The Russian Orthodox Church has been the lackey of the regime since the days of Peter the Great. Stalin rehabilitated it during WWII to whip up patriotism, too – support of the government in exchange for being allowed to survive. I suspect that the church is so enervated by now that it will contribute little to Putin’s security and will, by throwing in with him, simply dissipate the last shreds of its authority. Baptist Russia, anyone? Or maybe the Old Believers will finally win.
Kirill has openly castigated Muslims.
And this is a problem…. how? Are Muslims not to be castigated or criticized? They are off limits somehow?
Dear Kim,
Unfortunately, your post is rife with ignorance and misinformation. Please hear me out before deleting or rejecting this comment.
1) I understand your dislike of Putin, and don’t plan on arguing the point; the man has his shortcomings and drawbacks, and although I personally feel that he has lifted Russia out of the morass that country was in in the 1990s, there is bad that can be said of the man.
2) The ROC has allowed clerics to run for office, but with a very important caveat: it has to be in areas where elected officials are actively waging war against Christianity – the Church quickly noted that Russia is not such a place, and that the new rule applies to the ROC’s clerics abroad. One priest has already filed paperwork to run for mayor, without the blessing of his bishop, and may face defrocking. Clergymen running for office is not something the church undertakes lightly, and so far that priest has been the only one to step forward.
3) There is no dress code. Fr. Vsevolod Chaplin simply recommended (among many other things) a more modest approach to how women dress in terms of lowering immorality on a society-wide level. You can call it chauvinistic if you like, but it’s not out of line with what religious leaders usually say, and it’s certainly not indicative of an impending national dress code (a la Saudi Arabia). Russia has never had something like that, and would never stand for it, even if the Church wanted it imposed, which it doesn’t. This was, more than anything, a call to personal responsibility.
4) The Patriarch never blamed Haitians for the earthquake. If you could read Russian, you would quickly locate the source of the lie: a scathing and totally unsubtle article that concludes that Haitians were to blame without actually offering a quote of the Patriarch saying so. What +PK did say was that the general lawlessness and immorality of Haiti, not only presupposed, but on display, led to the abnormal level of suffering by that people DURING the earthquake, due to 1) the careless and poor infrastructure that only magnified the damage and has delayed recovery, 2) people not helping one another in times of need. He then contrasted that with the tight-knit and caring nature of the Kazakh people (to whom he was speaking at the time, intending to compliment their historic kindness in dealing with Russian exiles during the Stalin regime). In short, it was NOT a Pat Robertson moment, even though the Church’s opponents wanted it to be so, and billed it as such, shamefully.
5) That article you linked to does NOT include a “knock” against Muslims. If anything, Muslims in Russia (the separatist conflicts are primarily ethnic, not religious – al Qaeda and other religious organizations have trouble establishing a foothold among the tribes of the Caucasus, precisely because it’s not a religious war) live in greater harmony with their non-Muslim neighbors than they do here. In fact, this has become a problem for the Church from the OTHER direction: after Muslim men killed a soccer player a few months ago (and two priests not long before that, plus the Domodedovo bombing), the Church came out against racist/nationalist protests that rocked the capital and called for deportation and all other sorts of malarkey. Russian nationalists have attacked Kyrill for kowtowing to a conspiracy to *undermine and destroy* the Russian ethnie, when in fact he called for calm and Christian charity in response to “hooliganism.” Hardly the champion of rabid nationalism; in fact, Russian neo-paganism has begun spreading as a response to what is perceived as the Church’s weak stance on Russian “ethnic issues.”
Like I said above, I have no problem with criticism where it’s due. But you hurt your own credibility and that of your ideological fellows by reporting false facts and weaving patterns out of nothing. Please consider reflecting this in your post, or at least doing your best to research a little more thoroughly next time. Finding someone who can read Russian would also help – it will help differentiate between real news stories and schlock smear pieces.
God bless.
Whatever merits your article may have had, it appears more like a verbal shell game where you switch between acts you ascribe to Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church in the same sentence.
The premise of the article – that native Russians are troglodytes for being concerned about the demographics – is more empty-headed than the thinking you ascribe to the targets of your barbs.
Given a choice between a Russia dominated by the orthodoxy of the Church or the Sharia of Islam – I choose the Church every time.
Why on earth would anyone still publish this Kim Z.? She really is “la Russophobe,” a crude, unhinged Russia-hater.
I thought PJM had finally broken with her/it/them. Alas, no.
Agreed. Zigfeld is quite simply a disgrace.
Why is it still politically correct, and socially acceptable, to vent hatred upon Slavic Orthodox Christians, when it would not be acceptable to do the same to anyone else?
Thanks. Kosovo Field, eh?
Reveals the hack work preferred by Pajamas Media.
Owen Morgan (below) is much the same.
#8
I’ll go along with that. I’m not going to continue to read poorly researched snark as daily fair on PJM any more than I will on any other site. The truth is the truth but this crap is neither truthful nor entertaining. You do not have to cut stories from whole cloth to find derogatory things to say about Putin.
More and more in the “modern world” of the 21st century I’m reminded of Christopher Hitchens’ controversial and perhaps ultimately prophetic book, “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”
The title of Mr. Hitchens’ book is factually incorrect. Religion has not poisoned “everything.” Many of humanity’s greatest cultural achievments were created specifically for religious use or were heavily inspired by religion…Bach, Handel, Milton, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and so on. If Bach and Handel made “poisoned” music and Michelangelo made “poisoned” art, I’m afraid to imagine what is “non-poisoned” art and music…Damien Hirst and the Sex Pistols? Ugh.
So-called intellectuals like Hitchens and Richard Dawkins really make me Isaac Asimov. He was an atheist and had 1000 times the intellectual power of Hitchens and Dawkins; but unlike them, Dr. A. never stooped so low as to grossly insult what he acknowledged was one of the great civilizing forces of humanity.
Who really cares about the whacky world of Putin? With the introduction of America’s constitutional form of democracy and capitalism to the world, communism/socialism is [eventually] self defeated. Putin’s a dead-man-walking and like most of those kinds, they turn to some God of choice for whatever salvation they may think are due them.
All the leaders and peoples of the world do this very thing. When they smell the winds of personal or societal defeat they go running to their God and churches of choice for deliverance. Only problem is, they never find the [exact] deliverance they were looking for….and eventually die away. Funny thing how people [use] religion.
We should all care about the whacky [sic] world of Putin because, unfortunately, he is a major player on the world stage. Remember, Russia still has a large nuclear arsenal. If Putin falls or becomes ineffectual, and government authority there dissipates, what might happen to all those weapons?
Russia is a major oil and wheat exporter. If their oil industry or farms collapse under Putin’s authority, what might happen to the world economy?
As a hard-core capitalist, I would sincerely like to believe that constitutionalism and capitalism will destroy collectivist forms of government; unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The revolts in North Africa give me hope, but when I look at most of the world, what I see is collectivism to one degree or another–Europe and Asia especially come to mind–and it doesn’t seem like those are coming down any time soon. By the time those systems are “eventually” defeated, the U.S. might have become so stagnated that something even worse could come about and take hold.
People turn to religion for many reasons. I think that when society is decaying, it is possible that people turn to religion precisely because it provides the structure in life that secular society has failed to provide…also, for moral and emotional support. I’m an atheist, so I’m not totally sure about this, but maybe someone here who is religious can comment.
How do you know that religious people “never find the [exact] deliverance they were looking for?” Can you get into their minds and read their thoughts?
The author writes (first line, fourth paragraph):
“It was a devastating below…”
He probably meant “blow” but the typo isn’t the issue; the issue is that the article is badly written, in a hurry, not well thought out, without a clear main point. His claim that the Russians don’t like islam (as if they should) and are ‘xenophobic’ rings like the author’s implicit intent in this piece is to peddle islamophilia and multiculturalism – both issues which have been widely addressed by PJM and its readers and rejected by the vast majority of commenters.
Don’t you hate underhanded propaganda? Not to mention the backstabbing of the Russian Eastern Orthodox Church (as if for the author, these ‘barbarians’ aren’t really “Christians” or “civilized” like the rest of the West). What an embarrassment for PJM.
Historian, let me sum up your pondering on the universal truth that
1) Russians do like Muslim very much — Russia was under the rule of Islam for centuries; all Russian culture is sewn in Eastern motif;
2) Russia is staying far from Western way of life – as an historian you know this fact better than me. Russia is not “West” at all; Russia is pure “East”, literally. So, your “…like the rest of the West…” has no meaning.
3) Kim doesn’t go after simple duped Russians; it’s Russian politics drives her crazy.
Hope it helps.
Where are you located?
What do you study, if anything?
I suggest you go easy on the drugs and/or booze.
What some people call xenophobia, others call a true understading of history. One poster mentioned the numerous times Russia has been attacked by brutal regimes that didn’t only seek to conquer it, they sought to wipe Russian civilization off the face of the earth. An historical understanding of Russia’s role as the Eastern bastion of Western civilization surrounded by hostile neighbors would help Americans to appreciate their natural suspicion of outsiders.
I remember being struck by two interviews which shed a light on the “Great Russian” mentality. One was with the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had, I think, just returned to Russia from his exile in the United States. His attitude to the newly independent states of Central Asia, such as Kazakhstan, was that they had no right to independence. Now, I’d have to agree, quite a few years on, that the Central Asian states, without exception, are basketcases, but that’s hardly a case that any Russian should make without blushing.
The second interview surprised me more. Solzhenitysn, after all, had been a communist and had developed into an Orthodox Christian, with the emphasis more on the “Orthodox” than on the “Christian”. Mstislav Rostropovich was one of the greatest cellists of living memory, along with Tortelier, Casals and Jacqueline Du Pre. Like Solzhenitsyn, he lived in exile in the USA and returned to Russia only after the collapse of the ussr. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, he always seemed to be genuinely committed to freedom – until the fighting started in Chechnya, at which point he turned into another Great Russian mouthpiece. He couldn’t grasp the notion that the Chechens didn’t want to be Russians, had never wanted to be Russians and had been treated abominably by the Russians, including that more-Russian-than-the-Russians Stalin, rather repulsively feted further up in this thread. Russians clearly share with communists and jihadists the notion that territory, once acquired, must never be let go.
Russia made war on Chechnya (the great Oleg Gordievsky calls Putin “the butcher of Grozny”), while stoking independence movements in Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Ukraine and in just about every other former soviet Republic. You can argue that the separatists had a case in all those places, but no more than the Chechens had. If only Russia had let Chechnya go, the two countries could be friends now. Instead, thanks to Putin, there is an endless cycle of violence.
“The title of Mr. Hitchens’ book is factually incorrect. Religion has not poisoned “everything.” Many of humanity’s greatest cultural achievments were created specifically for religious use or were heavily inspired by religion…Bach, Handel, Milton, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and so on.”
I read better books on atheism than ones written by Hitchens and Dowkins (George Smith comes to mind), but in his book Hitchens demolishes your argument.
Interestingly, Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) did not produced Bach, Hendel and so on. Russian cultue was not inspired by church. It is arguably the most primitive, vulgar and backward of all Christian churches. It is close to protestant churches in its attitude to culture.
Only Catholic Church helped (paid for) music, art and even some scientific research. And it did not because of its Christian values, but despite of them. The reason for it – is that Catholic Church incorporated so much of “the pagan” values to its Christian thought.
ROC pursue common interests with Islam and do not consider it as a problem. Anti-semitism is a problem with ROC. It is rampant among the clergy and quietly encouraged by the top ROC establishment. It is especially disturbing as one of the very few russian religious philosophers Nikolay Berdyaev said everything could be said about shame of anti-semitism in ROC. Yet he is quietly ignored and “priests” like Kuraev can openly distribute Nazi-like lies.
Hopefully combination of homosexual leader and vulgar institutions of ROC will turn more Russians away from that backward and harmful religion.
Better than the Zionazi-Feminazi-10thCrusader they have in USA. Orthodox Church has never been warlike in this century. 5% is underated. And the true Church is not in a building but inside, people who know God need no Church, unlike those who know how to go to Church but will never know God.
How Orthodox is Russia when there is only 5% or so of Russians which go to church?
The real Russia has more to do with the patron saint of my priest, Philip of Moscow, than it does with those who conclude that it is best for the Moscow Patriarchate to be the department of religion for the Kremlin.
I hit the link for the article on the palace and I immediately thought of the Direct TV commercial about the rich Russian in his mansion with a hoard of gold bars and a miniauture pet giraffe–”Opulence, I has it.”