“Divine Totalitarianism”

“Divine Totalitarianism”

 Via Ekaterina Mishina

In recent years, religion and the state in Russia have tended to be closely intertwined, with the state using the church as an instrument of manipulation. This is evidenced by the recent conflict over the staging of Tannhӓuser at the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater. IMR legal expert Ekaterina Mishina analyzes the relationship between the government and the church in today’s Russia and draws parallels with totalitarian and fascist regimes of the recent past.

 

Orthodox activists have been demanding resignations of Boris Mezdrich, director of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater, and Timofey Kulyabin, stage director of Tannhӓuser, for a long time. In late March, the activists held the so-called “standing in prayer for protection of religious feelings” in Novosibirsk. Photo: RFE/RL

In 2003, Free Inquiry magazine published an article by political analyst Lawrence Britt titled “Fascism Anyone?” that defined 14 characteristics of a fascist political regime. The article evoked all kinds of reactions, ranging from positive to extremely negative. Particularly harsh criticism was offered by an anonymous commenter who wrote under the pseudonym “Fascist Heart.” Brimming over with enthusiasm, Fascist Heart (here referred to as “he” for ease) tried to tear to pieces both the article itself and its author. His main point was that Britt was an unpleasant and suspicious person because he was not a doctor of political science, but a former manager at such companies as Allied Chemical, Mobil, and Xerox Corp. According to Fascist Heart, no one could be interested in a former manager’s opinion on fascism and its characteristics, because that opinion would by definition be wrong. Apparently, if Britt had worked for some time as a dictator in some small fascist state and gained some experience there, the harsh critic would have approved of his conclusions.

Meanwhile, there are many examples to prove that you can be an outstanding political scientist even without a formal political education: Dmitry Oreshkin, for one, graduated from the Department of Geography at Moscow State University, with a Ph.D. in geography, while Vladimir Pastukhov was trained as a lawyer. I see no reason to dismiss Britt’s views just because he studied business, not political science—especially because the characteristics of a fascist regime defined by Britt generally do not contradict the definition of fascism outlined in the constitutional law of many countries.

According to Britt, fascism has the following features:

• Powerful and enduring nationalism
• A disregard of universally recognized human rights
• A tendency to look for enemies and use the idea of atoning sacrifice as a unifying framework
• A dominant position in society of the armed forces
• Strong gender-based discrimination, homophobia, and condemnation of abortion
• The exertion of state control over the media
• A maniacal obsession with national security
• The merging of religion and state
• Protection of corporations
• Harassment of trade unions
• A contempt for intellectuals and the arts that results in the freedom of artistic expression coming under attack
• An obsession with the idea of crime and punishment, often leading to the police having almost-unlimited powers
• Rampant nepotism and corruption
• Rigged elections

That said, Britt does not mention the following characteristics of fascism:

• A fundamentally different political meaning of the concept of head of state as a result of the dramatic expansion of that role’s actual authority
• Abandonment of the concept of electivity of the head of state, even under a republican form of government
• The existence of only one legal political party (in Nazi Germany, the German National Socialist Workers’ Party; in Italy, the National Fascist Party; and in Spain, the Falange of traditionalists and nationalist-syndicalist juntas), with the head of that party (Fuhrer, Duce, Caudillo) usually having full state power
• An open merger between the dominant fascist party and the state apparatus, resulting in the party becoming the core of a dictatorship
• A dramatic reduction in the role of the parliament, with the parliament either being abolished (as in Italy, once the fascist regime stabilized) or degenerating into a purely decorative institution, deprived of any features shared by parliaments of democratic states (as in Germany or Portugal until 1974)¹

In the constitutional law of many countries, fascism is defined as the most blatant, cynical, and severe form of totalitarianism.² Therefore, some of the attributes set forth by Britt are common to the majority of fascist as well as a number of totalitarian regimes. One such common feature is the merging of religion and state. As Britt explains this concept, “fascist states use religion as an instrument to control public opinion. State leaders resort to religious rhetoric and terminology even when the basic principles of the religion are completely opposite to the actions or policies of the government.”

Italian prime minister Benito Mussolini was a pioneer in building meaningful dialogue and mutually beneficial cooperation between the fascist state and the church. In 1929, Mussolini and Cardinal Pietro Gaspari, who represented the Holy See, signed three documents (the Conciliation Treaty, the Financial Convention, and the Concordat) that went down in history as the Lateran Treaty. This treaty stated that Roman Catholicism was the only state religion of Italy, that the Supreme Pontiff was sacred and inviolable, and that “any attempt against his person or any incitement to commit such attempt” was “punishable by the same penalties as all similar attempts and incitements to commit the same against the person of the king. The Concordat defined a wide range of rights and privileges of the Roman Catholic Church, and Article 1 of the Financing Convention provided for generous payments to the Holy See in exchange for ratification of the Conciliation Treaty.

The recent conflict surrounding the production of Tannhäuser has revealed a new dimension of the relationship between religion and the state in today’s Russia. It clearly demonstrates that if, contrary to the expectations of the state, the church does not act with sufficient toughness, Orthodox activists can be used to manipulate public opinion.

In his book The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, David Kertzer writes that Pope Pius XI worked closely with Mussolini for more than a decade, giving the fascist regime the institutional power and moral legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church. According to Kertzer, this alliance was particularly remarkable because of the fact that Mussolini was a staunch supporter of secularism. However, the deal turned out to be beneficial for both sides.³

When, on April 1, 1939, the nationalist leader Francisco Franco came to power in Spain and the Second Republic fell, the winner turned out to be primarily the Catholic Church, which had suffered heavily during Republican rule in the 1930s. Article 3 of the Constitution of 1931 separated the church from the state and declared that there was no official religion in Spain, thus putting an end to the centuries-old power of the church in that nation. Article 26 of the Constitution introduced a series of harsh restrictions on religious communities. In particular, organizations considered to pose a threat to national security were abolished and their property nationalized. Once in power, Franco immediately banned all the reforms of the Second Republic that had had an extremely negative impact on the spiritual and social role of the church in Spain. The church regained its privileged status immediately after the end of the civil war: in June 1941, the rights of the church were formally recognized in an agreement between the Vatican and the government of Franco and then finally formalized in the Concordat signed in August 1953. The church fully adapted to the conditions of the Franco dictatorship, with Cardinal Goma, the Archbishop of Toledo, coining the famous phrase “divine totalitarianism.”

Soviet-style totalitarianism, by contrast, was not so kind to the clergy. The first conflict emerged in December 1917, when the decrees “On Civil Marriage, on Children and on Keeping Civil Registry Books” and “On Divorce” made marriage and family relations exempt from the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Soviet Criminal Code of 1922 clearly demonstrated the attitude of the Bolsheviks to the church. It criminalized the “use of religious prejudices of the masses to overthrow the workers’ and peasants’ government, or to incite resistance against its laws and regulations” (Art. 119); “commission of fraudulent acts to incite superstition among the masses of the population, as well as to benefit in such a way” (Art. 120)“; “teaching religious beliefs among minors in public or private educational institutions and schools” (Art. 121); and “practicing worship in public institutions and enterprises, as well as placement of any religious images in such buildings” (Art. 124).

It wasn’t until the post-Soviet period that the relations between the Russian authorities and the church started to warm up, and gradually this relationship morphed into something that is very reminiscent of the “merging of religion and state.” In this sense the Pussy Riot case is symbolic. Instead of being prosecuted under Article 5.26, part 2, of the Code of Administrative Offenses for “insulting religious feelings of citizens or desecration of articles, marks and emblems relating to the world outlook symbols thereof,” members of the punk group were convicted of criminal offenses under Article 213 of the Criminal Code (hooliganism). The conviction of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina is a classic example of the genre of selective enforcement. Apparently, in order to avoid accusations of religiously based prosecution, Russian lawmakers decided to create a respectable legal framework to prosecute those who offend the religious feelings of citizens. On June 29, 2013, Article 148 of the Criminal Code, which until then had modestly criminalized “illegal obstruction of the activity of religious organizations or of the performance of religious rites,” was expanded to include new provisions. The revised article criminalized “public actions expressing obvious disrespect for society and committed to insulting the religious feelings of believers,” as well as the commission of such acts “in places specially designated for worship and other religious rites and ceremonies.” It thus became much easier and more convenient for the state to protect the feelings of the faithful.

The recent conflict surrounding the production of Tannhäuser has revealed a new dimension of the relationship between religion and the state in today’s Russia. It clearly demonstrates that if, contrary to the expectations of the state, the church does not act with sufficient toughness, Orthodox activists can be used to manipulate public opinion. After all, except for Metropolitan Tikhon, who filed a complaint with the Prosecutor’s Office, none of the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church called for any action to be taken against the director of Tannhäuser or the director of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater. On the contrary, on March 5, the official website of the Russian Orthodox Church published an explanation by Vladimir Legoyda, head of the Synodal Information Department, in connection with the situation. His words were correct and encouraging: any believer or priest, he wrote, who notices something in the public sphere that he considers blasphemous or insulting to his feelings should not immediately rush to the Prosecutor’s Office. “A sinner is not only the one who blasphemes God, but also the one who falsely accuses someone of blasphemy,” claimed Legoyda. However, these words were ignored by Orthodox activists. A prayer event held in the center of Novosibirsk on March 29 looked quite menacing. Slogans like “Down with American quasi-occupation” did not make this rally look like something peaceful, and appeals to “protect the sacred and save Russia” sounded very much like the infamous “Kill the Jews and save Russia.”

In today’s Russia, the government actively uses religious communities to manipulate public opinion, even though religion and state are legally separated in accordance with Article 14 of the Constitution. Protection of religious feelings is increasingly being used as an argument to justify harassment and escalate criminal persecution. It could also come in handy for officials seeking to justify the reintroduction of censorship.

 

References:

1. See. А.А. Мишин, Конституционное (государственное) право зарубежных стран. Москва, “Статут”, 2013, pp. 149–157.
2. Ibid, p. 150.
3. David I. Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (New York: Random House, 2014).

 

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Putin’s Unholy Alliance With Orthodox Church To Persecute Gays

Putin’s Unholy Alliance With Orthodox Church To Persecute Gays

by Susie Madrak

Vladimir Putin is not your typical head of state. He’s a thug, and Russia is a state run by gangsters. Frank Schaeffer, who (having grown up in the bosom of the Christian right) knows a thing or two about religious hate, writes about Putin’s unholy alliance with the Orthodox Church to persecute gays:

With the disgusting acquiescence of the Russian Orthodox bishops, Vladimir Putin has accomplished what Sarah Palin, Franklin Graham and Michele Bachmann could only dream of doing in America. He’s made it okay to persecute gay people people in Russia. Putin has built his power base of corruption and terror with the help of the religious and conservative elements of his society. He’s become expert at courting the alliance of the Russian Orthodox Church. And here in America conservatives are lining up to defend Putin. For instance, writing in The American Conservative,  in an article called Culture War Goes Global, (August 13, 3013) Patrick J. Buchanan writes:

As Father Regis Scanlon writes in Crisis Magazine, in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI reiterated Catholic doctrine that homosexuality is a “strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,” an “objective disorder.” That homosexual acts are unnatural and immoral remains Catholic teaching.

Thus, if we seek to build a Good Society by traditional Catholic and Christian standards, why should not homosexual propaganda be treated the same as racist or anti-Semitic propaganda? …. “The adoption of Christianity,” declared Putin, “became a turning point in the fate of our fatherland, made it an inseparable part of the Christian civilization and helped turn it into one of the largest world powers.” Anyone ever heard anything like that from the Post, the Times, or Barack Hussein Obama?

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, took to TV to say that “liberalism will lead to legal collapse and then the Apocalypse.” On another occasion, he called Putin’s rule “a miracle.” When convening the heads and senior members of 15 Orthodox Churches for an unprecedented meeting at the Kremlin in the summer of 2013, Putin praised the moral authority of the church. “It is important that relations between the state and the church are developing at a new level,” Putin said in televised remarks, with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill by his side. “We act as genuine partners and colleagues to solve the most pressing domestic and international tasks, to implement joint initiatives for the benefit of our country and people,” he told the clerics.

Alongside Kirill, those present included Patriarch Theodore II of Alexandria, Theophilos III of Jerusalem and Ilia II of Georgia. Also present were the heads of the Bulgarian, Serbian, Polish and Cypriot Orthodox Churches. Together they represented more than 227 million faithful.

To my knowledge not one American Orthodox bishop protested this meeting. I’m reminded of the silence of most of the German churches during the rise of Hitler.As a member of the Orthodox Church, in this case the Greek Orthodox Church, I’m ashamed.

Where are the voices of Orthodox leadership, not only in Russia but here, denouncing this awful man and the terror he’s unleashing against gay men and women? Putin has presided over show-trial prosecutions of political opponents and reformers. He’s used the full weight of his government against artists who mock religion. He’s encouraged the liquidation of crusading journalists who have been beaten and murdered. Putin and his government may have been directly involved in at least one such killing.

Now with the approval of the Russian bishops Putin is inventing a new enemy to distract attention from his fascist takeover of Russia: Russia’s LGBT men and women. As Adam Lee, a writer living in New York City points out in an article published byAlternet, Putin’s “parliament” passed increasingly draconian anti-gay laws. Russian activists have even been arrested for just holding up a signs reading “Gay is normal.”A bill now under consideration would take away children (both adopted and biological) from gay and lesbian parents. With the Russian Church, parliament and Putin saying that LGBT people aren’t fully human, homophobes in Russia are emboldened. The torture and murder of gay people, by gangs of skinheads assaulting gay-rights protestors in public, with the police looking on,is happening. And American evangelical Christians think this is all great. So, apparently judging by their silence, do American Orthodox church leaders.NOW American evangelical and Roman Catholic right-wing haters are climbing aboard the Russian hate parade .

Click back to Adam Lee’s Alternet story to see just how eagerly right-wing Christians are fanning the flames.

Related articles

• Putin’s Unholy Alliance With Orthodox Church To Persecute Gays (crooksandliars.com)
• Russian Muslim clerics warn of unrest over court ban of Koran (themuslimissue.wordpress.com)
• Humor failure in Russia: Crackdown on ‘Pastafarians’ shows Kremlin-church ties (worldnews.nbcnews.com)

Putin: West Equates “Belief in God with the Belief in Satan

Putin: West Equates “Belief in God with the Belief in Satan”

by Richard Bartholomew

Several months after announcing his divorce, Vladimir Putin turns to the subject of family values:

Another serious challenge to Russia’s identity is linked to events taking place in the world. Here there are both foreign policy and moral aspects. We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.

The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote paedophilia. People in many European countries are embarrassed or afraid to talk about their religious affiliations. Holidays are abolished or even called something different; their essence is hidden away, as is their moral foundation. And people are aggressively trying to export this model all over the world. I am convinced that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.

Putin was speaking at Valdai International Discussion Club; according to a blurb, the club “was established in 2004 by the Russian News & Information Agency RIA Novosti and the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. It has become an important cooperation venue for the Russian and foreign intellectual and political elite.”

Putin’s reference to paedophilia appears to relate to the legal status of a Dutch group called Stichting Martijn. According to Dutch News in April:

Last year, a civil court in Assen banned the paedophile lobby group Stichting Martijn with immediate effect, saying what the foundation does and says about sexual contact between adults and children contravenes the accepted norms and values in Dutch society.

The appeal court said texts and photos on the foundation’s website do not break the law.

The group has existed since 1982, and reportedly has about 60 members; an associated political party (the “the Charity, Freedom and Diversity Party”) was registered in 2006 and dissolved in 2010. Of course, Putin’s extrapolation from this case to the general outlook of “Euro-Atlantic countries” is absurd and in bad faith, but it’s part of an old Russian tradition of justifiying authortarianism in moral terms by invoking the decadence of the west. Putin may also have been inspired by an anti-gay group called “Russian Mothers”, which claims that paeodophilia is promoted in Norway; I wrote about this here.

Putin also discussed the place of organised religion in Russia:

Russia – as philosopher Konstantin Leontyev vividly put it – has always evolved in “blossoming complexity” as a state-civilisation, reinforced by the Russian people, Russian language, Russian culture, Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s other traditional religions. It is precisely the state-civilisation model that has shaped our state polity. It has always sought to flexibly accommodate the ethnic and religious specificity of particular territories, ensuring diversity in unity.

Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and other religions are an integral part of Russia’s identity, its historical heritage and the present-day lives of its citizens.

Leontyev, according to an account by George L. Kline (1), has been described as “the Russian Nietzsche”:

Leontyev was a Russian thinker who, almost two decades before Nietzsche, offered a “Nietzschean” celebration of “the aesthetic” and an equally Nietzschaen critiqie of democratic and egalitatian values, “mass culture”, and ultilitarian and socialist ideas.”

However, unlike Nietzche, he was a Christian, and he called

for a struggle to the death against the “anti-Christ of democracy”

Shades here of the kind of thing that reportedly appears in Patriarch’s Kirill’s book Freedom and Responsibility.

(1) page 197 of Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the West, edited by Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Patrick Sherry, Steven T. Katz, Cambridge University Press, 1985. And there’s a profile of Kline – formerly Milton C. Nahm Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College – here.

Related articles

• Putin: West Equates “Belief in God with the Belief in Satan” (barthsnotes.com)
• Putin’s Unholy Alliance With Orthodox Church To Persecute Gays (crooksandliars.com)
• Vladimir Putin: ‘Europeans are dying out so why would we want gay marriage?’ (pinknews.co.uk)

Communism As Religion

Communism is Religion

Posted by Daniel G. Jennings

One major argument that apologists for religion like to make against proponents of secularism, humanism and religion is to equate all opponents of religion with Communism and the numerous crimes against humanity perpetuated by such monsters as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Fidel Castro. The best argument against these people of faith is a simple one, far from being a humanist or rationalist belief system, Communism was and is a religion.

Like all religions, Communism is irrational, dogmatic and based on faith rather than science. Just like Christianity and Islam, Communism had its Holy Books which were treated as Holy Scripture, namely the writings of Lenin, Mao, Marx and others–all of which were far from scientific. Karl Marx, who was treated by Communists as a genius, was actually a small-time journalist whose writings are a collection of prejudices, generalizations and editorializing. Marx held and promoted some beliefs which were later disproved by science, for example Marx taught that many human characteristics we now know to be inherited through genetics were caused by environmental factors. When scientists in 1930s Russia pointed this fact out, Stalin reacted by throwing the scientists into the gulag just like the Church imprisoned Galileo. Just like fundamentalist Christians who promote creation science, Stalin (himself the recipient of an “education” in a Christian seminary) backed a charlatan named Lysenko who came up with a completely false science of genetics that fit squarely with Communist dogma and then banned the teaching of genetics because it contradicted Communist dogma.

As with Christianity and Islam, Communism attracted followers by promising a pie-in-the-sky heaven to the faithful. The difference being that the Communist heaven would be sometime in the future when all people would be happy and equal under Communism rather than after death. This magical future was conveniently pushed farther and farther into the future so that Communist leaders could “explain” to the average people impoverished by their wonderful system why they hadn’t yet achieved utopia. It might also be pointed out that the Communists never actually said exactly how this utopia would be created–just as Christians and Moslems can present no evidence of life after death.

Like most religions, Communism operated on irrational faith; people in Communist countries had to have absolute faith in the Communist system and its leaders. Thinking for oneself was strictly verboten in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Ho’s Vietnam. Those who questioned Communism and its leaders were treated as heretics by the Communist state.

Far from being an example of the evils that occur when religion is removed in society, Communism is a perfect example of the excesses and horrors that result when religion is allowed to take over a society. The Communist Party acted just like the church had in Medieval Europe.

Just like the Church in Medieval Europe, the Communists tortured and killed those who refused to adopt the official faith. Just like the Church, the Communists promoted the belief that governmental authorities were all-knowing, all-powerful and sanctioned by God, and the idea that refusing to bow to authority was a sin.

Just like the medieval church, the Communist Party promoted the idea of saints, people whose total devotion to the Communist cause was a good and holy thing and entitled them to be worshiped. The difference was that the Communists substituted Communist leaders like Mao and Stalin for the saints. The Communists even revived the bizarre medieval practice of worshiping the dead bodies of the saints; they built massive mausoleums in which they placed the embalmed bodies of their dead leaders and forced their people to worship them.

Just like the Russian Orthodox Church, the Communists also created icons, pictures of Communist leaders whom people were to worship. In North Korea, for example, it is even a crime to destroy a picture of the late dictator Kim Il Sung.

The Communists also revived the horrendous medieval practice of the Inquisition, an official body to hunt down and eliminate heretics, in the form of the purge trials and the various secret-police forces. Hundreds of thousands of people in Communist countries were tortured, brutalized and murdered by such bodies.

Just like the church before them the Communists tried to force their captured enemies to repent their “sins.” After the fall of Saigon, 600,000 Vietnamese were forced into concentration camps called reeducation centers to learn Communist dogma. Just as the “First Holy Roman Emperor,” the religious fanatic Charlemagne, tried to forcibly baptize German pagans captured in his wars, captured American soldiers in the Vietnam and Korean wars were also forced to admit the “truth” of Communism.

As if bringing back the Inquisition wasn’t bad enough, the Communists also revived the witch hunt. Like other people of faith, the Communists blamed the failings of their system–not on their own loony dogma–but on hidden enemies who were secretly sabotaging Communism so as to prevent the Communists from creating a utopia. In 1930s Russia, tens of thousands of innocent people, many of them good Communists, were falsely accused of being foreign agents and “wreckers” who were sabotaging the Stalinist system, and then executed or thrown into the gulag–where many of them died from torture, forced labor and starvation. Those killed in this purge included several of the Red Army’s top generals who were falsely accused of being enemies by Communist courts using information provided by the Nazis (thus leaving Russia unprepared in 1941 when it’s real enemies attacked).

It must also be noted here that it didn’t take the Russian Communists long to revive another old evil of the church: anti-Semitism; by the early 1950s, Stalin was blaming Russia’s problems and his own bad health on the Jews. Just as the Medieval Christians blamed plagues and the black death on Jews secretly poisoning wells, so Stalin blamed his ill health on Jewish doctors who were trying to poison him.

In the 1960s, Mao went Stalin one better. When the Chairman’s brutal attempt to create the Communist heaven on Earth, the “Great Leap Forward,” failed miserably, resulting in the worst famine in human history, Mao blamed–not himself or his faith–but the Chinese people for not having enough faith in Communism (much as Hitler had blamed the German people and not his own incompetence, arrogance and stupidity, for his defeat in World War II). Mao then turned vast numbers of Communist fanatics, known as Red Guards, loose to punish the Chinese people for not showing enough faith in Mao and Communism. Just as the Medieval witch hunters burned little old ladies at the stake for owning cats, Chinese people were beaten up and terrorized for such crimes as owning birdcages or wearing makeup in the so-called Cultural Revolution. Many great treasures of China’s past were destroyed by Communist thugs during the Cultural Revolution (just as the Taliban blew up Buddhist statues in Afghanistan).

The excesses in Soviet Russia and Red China have been repeated in almost every other Communist country. Almost every Communist regime has behaved like a religion that is in a manner completely irrational and paranoid. The major difference between the Communist fanatics and the Christian fanatics of the inquisition was that the Communists had access to modern technology, weaponry and systems of government that enabled them to kill far more people far more quickly. Had the inquisition access to the same technology as the Communists, its body count would have rivaled that of Stalin and Mao.

Far from being an example of what happens when religion, faith and God are removed from society, Communism is a perfect example of what happens when society is turned over to religion. People are deprived of their basic freedoms, science and scholarship are suppressed, and average people are tortured and murdered for not displaying sufficient faith.

It must also be said here that Christianity did little or nothing to stop Communism or the horrible crimes the Communists committed against humanity. Russia was the most religious country in Europe in 1917 yet the Church was unable to stop the Bolshevik takeover. If Christianity is such a powerful force for morality, why couldn’t the Orthodox patriarchs and bishops have simply ordered the Russian people not to follow Lenin and Stalin’s orders? Why weren’t the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church able to appeal to the piety of Joseph Stalin, himself a product of an Orthodox seminary, and get him to recant Communism? Far from protecting Russia’s people from Communism, the Orthodox Church did little but have the Russian people sit and pray to icons for the end of the Communist system.

It was not the Orthodox Church or its leaders that formed the main resistance to Communism in Russia, it was humanists and rationalists who refused to bow to irrational Communist beliefs. For example, the great scientist, Andre Sakarov, and many other Russian intellectuals, refused to go along with the Communist assault on the human mind. Later on, more enlightened and intelligent Soviet leaders, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, undermined Communism by allowing people to question and challenge its basic assumptions. Just like Christian and Islamic dogma, Communist dogma can’t stand up to a close examination based on reason and the scientific method.

It was the secular, democratic, capitalist societies in the United States, Japan and Western Europe–which are based on humanistic and rational values–which ultimately proved to be the undoing of Communism. The irrational, faith-based, Communist system simply couldn’t compete with the rational, secular United States and its allies. By basing their societies on faith rather than on reason, thus being in no position to change or adapt their system to meet future challenges, the Communists thereby sowed the seeds of their own destruction–except, of course, in countries such as Vietnam and China where Communist leaders have quietly abandoned Communism and adopted capitalism in order to preserve their own skins and line their own bank accounts.

Far from being an example of a godless society, Communism is a perfect example of the dangers which religion poses to human freedom and humanity’s future. Those Americans who want to establish an official religion should take a hard look at the history of Communism, for any country that establishes an official religion and a faith based system will end up just like the Communists–in the ash heap of history.

Related articles

• Sixty years after death, Stalin turning hero for Russians (thehindu.com)
• Confronting Stalin’s Legacy, 60 Years After His Death (reason.com)
• VIDEO: Russia divided over ‘hero’ Stalin (bbc.co.uk)
• Russia Marks 60th Anniversary of Stalin’s Death (abcnews.go.com)

The Priest and The Magical Disappearing Watch | Russian Orthodox Church Doctors Photograph

The watch seen around the world

by Mano Singham

I am sure some of you have heard the hilarious story of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church patriarch Kirilli I that has been all over the blog world. But just in case you missed it, here it is.

What happened was that the church’s website published what seemed like a routine public relations photo of the patriarch with some person.

Alert Russian bloggers noted that the patriarch, who had just delivered a sermon on the virtues of an ascetic lifestyle, was wearing a Breguet wristwatch that costs around $30,000. That story resulted in a subtle change in the website with the original photo being replaced by another in which the offending watch no longer appeared.

But eagle-eyed bloggers noticed that although there was no longer any watch on his wrist, the reflection on the shiny table showed the watch! When this was pointed out, the church apologized for the substitution and replaced the original photo with the watch.

But apparently no one alerted the patriarch to this reversal because he denied even owning such a watch, now an obviously absurd claim. Kirilli then claimed that he had looked through the many gifts he gets and found that he had indeed received such a watch but had never worn it and that the original photo had been doctored to insert the watch to make him look bad, an even more obvious lie.

Russian bloggers delivered the coup de grace by graciously providing the church with a new photograph where now it is the patriarch that has been photoshopped away, leaving just the watch!

This kind of guerilla journalism is why I love blogs.

These religious heads are such liars and Kirilli seems to be just another one of your run of the mill hypocrites, preaching austerity and morality which practicing something else, just like Pope Ratzo. “Russian bloggers have published rumors that the patriarch has a large country house, a private yacht and a penchant for ski vacations in Switzerland, though none of this has been proved… But the patriarch has presented himself as the country’s ethical compass, and has recently embarked on a vocal campaign of public morality, advocating Christian education in public schools and opposing abortion and equal rights for gay people.”

These people deserve all the ridicule they get.

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