Posted on 02/11/2014 10:19:14 AM PST by Servant of the Cross
Putin ends up existing to warn us in the West of what we are not.
Vladimir Putin has the world’s attention this week. The circumstances will remind everyone that reset with Russia is dead. Its working hypothesis — that it was the George W. Bush administration, not the Putin regime, that had either inadvertently or provocatively offended the other’s sensibilities — was invented before the 2008 election on Obama’s partisan and political considerations, not empirical observation.
Under reset, the incoming Obama administration, more nuanced than the outgoing Bush administration and drawing on more enlightened thinking, would appeal to the better angels of Putin’s Russia. The more complex Obamaites would help enlighten the Putin autocracy to the fact that the U.S. and Russia had common interests in improving free trade. We really both wanted to calm world tensions while discouraging proliferation, combating terrorism, working with the United Nations, quelling international crises, and promoting human rights. Once Russians had been tutored about America’s good intentions, we could undo (“reset”) the damage done by the swaggering braggadocio of the interventionist prior administration. Misunderstanding and ill feelings, not ill intentions and malfeasance, were Russia’s sins.
And what is the result of reset? It is open Russian promotion of the Syria/Hezbollah/Iran axis that was active in Iraq and is now more so in Syria. It is Russian obstruction at the U.N. of most American initiatives. It is another round of strangulation of the former Soviet republics. It is satisfaction that a frustrated United States has been reduced to appeasement instead of taking serious steps to thwart Iranian nuclearization, as Putin eggs Iran on ... It is more internal oppression of a brutal sort. And it is a gratuitous delight in exposing the Obama administration as sanctimonious and weak...
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
VDH ping ...
In the course of his research for Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile (Harper Collins), Joseph Pearch traveled to Moscow to interview the writer. The excerpt below is from that interview:Solzhenitsyn: In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as 'we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology.' The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point."
Solzenitsyn added, "Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive."
As the concept of America's philosophical foundations, rooted in its Declaration of Independence from coercive government and adherence to belief in Divine Providence, "endowed by their Creator" rights, "laws of nature and of nature's God," and "Supreme judge of the world," as this concept is systematically erased from the American mind by censors of textbooks and the public square, then comparison and analysis such as this attempt by Hansen is difficult to evaluate.
Heck even Putin looked up to Reagan.
So long as Russia promotes Christianity defends at home and defends it abroad, I am more than pleased to see it exercise great power status. Indeed, I am relieved and grateful for its forthright sanity in the face of American relativism and hedonism. Unlike America, Russia’s not obsessed by an exceptionalist mythology that empowers it as international scold and moral bully in service of the fake religion of messianic equality.
"Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive."
Oh, really?! Would you care to elaborate on this? Please do tell us more.
Or a Christian in Syria.
You know that photo is from Reagan’s post-presidency tour that the western MSM ignored. He gave speeches and was prominently featured in their media. He basically told them the West was not their ideological enemy and there was no need for continued animosity while extolling the virtues of free markets and capitalism.
Reagan was smart. He took the wind out of the Soviet ideology the state operated under and derived its authority from. Within months the Soviet system collapsed from the ground up. People just stop working. Gorbachev, being a true ideologue who believed in the principle of spontanaiety in peoples movements let them go.
They were not defeated by the West they just gave up fighting an enemy that did not exist. Czar Nicholas and Hitler were just ghost memories in the minds of aged Party members.
Sure.
We’re not exceptional. God has not appointed us to show the rest of the world how to live. We are not helped by the Calvinist myth of election borne to New England by Calvinists and enshrined as the semi-official American state religion. We have our own house to take care of, which badly needs cleaning.
But the one who did not know and did what deserved a beating will receive a light beating. From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded. ... Luke 12: 48
If America has been given much (i.e. natural resources, freedom, education, a large country protected by oceans, Constitution, innovation, entrepreneurship, technology, etc.), is it not our obligation to pass it on and promote/defend what we can to the rest of the world? I would propose that our relative prosperity is evidence of our exceptionalism and the reason God does expect us to share it with the rest of the world.
That guy with the camera hanging on him, behind the little kid is Putin, correct?
Yes, is Putin.
I agree, but what exactly is the "fake religion of messianic equality"?
It’s the myth that we’re all naturally equal. It’s the idea that this notion should be spread throughout the world and held with religious fervor.
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