The Return of Satan

The devil is in the news again, at least on Russian TV. Time after time, big names on state television have portrayed the current war in Ukraine not only as a struggle between Moscow and Kyiv; nor even Russia versus NATO, but as an actual contest between good and evil, with the celestial forces on the one hand and Satan on the other. Russian commentator Vladimir Solovyov admitted that ‘we were formerly Soviet atheists, but we are now a crack team of Orthodox, Muslim and Buddhist traditionalists waging a war against Satan from our base in the Kremlin.’ It’s no fluke. Last month, the Jamestown Foundation think tank noted that the apocalyptic language came from Putin himself.

In late September 2022, at the ceremonial signing of treaties to incorporate the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts into the Russian Federation, President Vladimir Putin declared that the “world has entered a period of a fundamental, revolutionary transformation.” To bring about that change, Putin continued, Russia is fighting against “the dictatorship of the Western elites” and the “complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values and … a religion in reverse—pure Satanism” . This was a peculiar choice of words for the Russian president—a former communist with a law degree—who is not known for excessive piety or messianic beliefs …

The words are perhaps peculiar but certainly deliberate. Vladimir Putin’s Muslim allies have declared the Ukraine war a ‘Big Jihad’. On September 16, 2022, amid Kadyrov’s reports about sending another group of fighters to Ukraine, a video appeared in social networks of the oath that combatants from Chechnya pledge to “wage gazavat (jihad, Muslims’ sacred war) in the name of Allah” against the Satanic West.

Words like “Allah” and “Satan” may sound odd to secular Western elite ears. But in Communism’s eyes, and certainly in Russian history, most every war is a holy war. As George Orwell noted in Nineteen Eighty-Four, every enemy of the Party is evil incarnate, Satan for preference. “Emmanuel Goldstein … is the principal enemy of the state according to the Party of the totalitarian Oceania. He is depicted as the head of a mysterious and possibly fictitious dissident organization called ‘The Brotherhood’ and as having written the book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. He is only seen and heard on telescreen, and may be a fabrication of the Ministry of Truth, the State’s propaganda department.” Like Freddy or Jason, Goldstein’s a supernatural force.

When protagonist Winston Smith asks O’Brien, an Inner Party member, whether The Brotherhood is real, O’Brien replies: “That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No. As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.”

Like Nazi Germany’s campaign against the Jews, the Kremlin dedicated an enormous amount of time and money to exterminating God, who officially didn’t even exist. Lenin supported his version of a Ukrainian Orthodox church and wrote eagerly of his desire to destroy Islam while using it, if he could, to advance Communism. But it was Stalin and Mao who really shifted the anti-religious campaign into high gear. “The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and 1930s was the Russian Orthodox Church, which had the largest number of faithful. Nearly all of its clergy, and many of its believers, were shot or sent to labor camps. Theological schools were closed, and church publications were prohibited. More than 85,000 Orthodox priests were shot in 1937 alone. Only a twelfth of the Russian Orthodox Church’s priests were left functioning in their parishes by 1941.” The anti-religious campaigns in China, by definition a kind of ‘holy war’, have never stopped. Their targets include Tibetan Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Jews and the Falun Gong. “In 2006, allegations emerged that many Falun Gong practitioners had been killed to supply China’s organ transplant industry.”

While the lapsed churchgoer may only remember God occasionally, the militant ideological atheist thinks of Him all the time. Communism and its derivatives have always been waging holy wars, recognizing that if “politics is downstream of culture”, culture is downstream of religion. There is nothing more alarming to a cult than a rival. In fighting the Western progressives, the heirs of Bolshevism recognize an apostate version of themselves, and therefore like Emmanuel Goldstein, a deadly threat.

Woke, argues an article reprinted by the Catholic University of America, is the next big Western religion. “The Church of Woke has began its Long March to transform American life in the mid-1960s. Like Christianity, it has burrowed deeply into elite society and the institutions of state power. Now we are locked in a culminating phase. The third generation of Woke—true to Late Roman antecedents—must cast down the Pantheon of American Exceptionalism, of Founders and Heroes, establishing a new divine order that will wash away America’s sins of Racism, Patriarchy, and Heteronormativity.” Naturally the new religion of the West must be fought by old-time promoters of the Worker’s Paradise in their Kremlin basilica.

Thus the return of Satan to the center stage of political discourse is not only understandable but inevitable. Yet in this fight, which is God and which the Devil? You decide. But it’s well to remember that if the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, then his second greatest was to ensure, that once discovered,  you thought the other guy was Satan.

Books: Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order Kindle Edition by Michael Walsh (editor). In this timely and necessary book, Michael Walsh has gathered trenchant critical perspectives on the Great Reset from eighteen eminent writers and journalists from around the world. Though I wouldn’t exactly consider myself an eminent writer, mine is one of the 18 chapters in this book, and I think it’s worthwhile.