Putin arrives at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Tver region
I have just gone through 50 posts here without any mention of a giant of faith, literature and civilization like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn even by the defenders of Russia. That may say something about why Russia is not enjoying a good press here.
BTW, I have a piss poor view of most of Western Europe (far more so than of Russia), the United Nations, and the folks who killed 300 innocent schoolchildren in a former Soviet republic bordering Russia (I personally think it would have been wonderful if Bush had called Putin and ofered a blank check on American assistance to the extent desired by Putin and miltant public statement in support of Putin in that affair). I am skeptical of anyone who does not have similar piss poor views of those targets.
Russia does not have to be RodneyDangerfieldNation and Western expectations are not very high. Putin could have a very good relationship with us and vice versa to the great benefit of Russia and the US. Maybe he will seek that. Bush has not been very critical of Putin and, if anything, has been quite the opposite.
If you are Russian by ancestry, you may not appreciate the mythical lore of leprechauns and banshees or the near genetic attitude normal to my Irish relatives against many Brits (other than Churchill, Thatcher and Blair). As a Catholic, I may not appreciate the sufferings of the Orthodox in the 20th century as you do. You should play your strong trump cards such as the fate and suffering of the Orthodox under communism including your martyrs, the fate of the Romanovs which no real American can fail to hold against the Soviets (not against the Russians or the Orthodox), the magnificent witness of Solzhenitsyn (that exemplar of Russian culture) who helped shore up our "Cold war" mentality without encouraging any anti-Russian feeling whatsoever. Did not our domestic enemy Soros actually loot Russia during the Yeltsin era by corrupting local officials to buy the economic patrimony of much of Russia at 10 cents on the dollar or 10 kopeks on the ruble???? Perhaps the nited States can cooperate in his prosecution by the Russians for crimes of bribery. Perhaps the Russians would like to sue him under RICO in our courts for restoration of the loot.
In the middle of the 19th century, the US had an ally in Russia and vice versa. Russia's history has been hard but that would seem to guarantee that Russia is a more promising potential ally by far than any of the Euroweenie states.
I am afraid that derisive references to the US in the Cold War or to Cold War wannabes born too late to contribute does not help the cause of better regard among Americans for Russia. I know that I never regarded anti-communism as anti-Russian any more than it was anti-Cuban or anti-Chinese. The subjects of communist regimes were the bulk of communism's victims.
How much do Americans know about the Russian Orthodox Church? About Russian history? About Russian literature? We Americans need and deserve to be wooed to a regard for Russia that would benefit both nations. Likewise Russians need and deserve to be wooed as well. A Russo-American friendship or even alliance (now that communism is at least formally out of the way) is very much in the interests of both. Add India and much of Eastern Europe.
If Putin would publicly embrace Russian Orthodoxy convincingly and genuinely, it would help with American conservatives. At the very least, Moscow ought to be worth an Orthodox Mass. Better yet would be sincere conversion to Orthodoxy without which it is impossible for Russia to truly be Russia.
If Putin would further give credible assurances that Russia will not revert to the post-1917 "bad old days," so much the better. If those two things are in place, the US should be prepared to reciprocate in any reasonable way. We have much to learn from a restored Russia. I suspect we have a few things to help Russia with as well.
May God bless you and yours.
Putin arrives at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Tver region
Putin has embrace Holy Orthodoxy. He asked the blessing of Patriarch Alexy before accepting the presidency. He and his wife make frequent visits to monastic elders for advice--a very important part of Orthodox spirituality we in North America, unless we are blessed to live near one of the few scattered monasteries here, have difficulty partaking of. On his visit to President Bush's ranch, he caused a stir by refusing to eat beef barbeque on a fast day. I understand he has a private chaplain.
Under his government, monastic life is thriving again with many professions, and the Patriarchate proclaimed the glorification of Tsar Nicholas and his family as Passion Bearers--the particular class of saints to which I had always held they belonged, those who died as Christians not because their killers targeted them as Christians (in which case they would be Holy Martyrs) but because their Christian faith led them to meekly accept a death from which they could have escaped, in imitation of Our Lord. (SS. Boris and Gleb who refused to fight for the throne of Kiev because they were Christians, but were killed because they had a claim to it were the first saints so titled.)
The fact this is not known in the West (except among us Orthodox believers, who seem to have our own news sources) is probably due to the Russophobia of our press. At root, I think this is due to what the Monk Andrew christened "Pravoslavnophobia"--the fear or dread of Orthodox Christianity (esp. Slavic Orthodox Christianity).
The next line of defense among hard core Russophobes once they are forced by facts finally getting into their consciousness to admit that Russia is no longer communist, and won't go back to being communist, is always to propose that the Russian government has substituted Russian Orthodoxy for Communism as the state ideology.
Somehow the fact that substituting St. Nilus of Skora, St. Philaret of Moscow, St. Aleksandr Nevsky, . . .,the Royal Passion Bearers and New Martyrs of Russia for Lenin, Stalin, Khruschev, . . ., the persecutors and murderers of the Passion Bearers and Martyrs is a HUGE change doesn't seem to get in. Russia, according to them is still a threat.
And I suppose maybe it is. After all, once one takes Orthodox Christianity seriously, and understands what it is, it can be very upsetting to Westerners world-view. We deprive freethinkers of almost all their anti-Christian talking points, protestants of their claim to have 'fixed' the Church or recovered the ancient Church, and papists of their claim that the Pope of Rome was always the head of the Church. The entire history of Europe looks very different when one tells it all, including the history of Orthodox lands--the Roman Empire fell in 1453, not 476; classical learning never vanished from Europe; far from women being kept down in the Middle Ages, rich widows who owned vast tracts of land could bankroll claimants to thrones; Saxons fleeing the Normans go to Kiev and Constantinople (why? wasn't England under the Pope?); the Church never suppressed literacy (in Western Europe it was the (Germanic barbarian) nobility who did so, but this only becomes clear when one remembers general literacy died out in Western Europe long before the schism, and the same Church championed literacy East and West) . . . All in all very, very upsetting to Westerners.
And those Russians. . .they had the timerity to keep the project going even after the Turks took Constantinople. Why if it weren't for them, rationalism and humanism (whether in the papal, protestant or secularist version) could have freely taken hold of all of Christendom.
Even the 'multiculturalists' have some cultures they won't embrace: the Orthodox Christian cultures of Eastern Europe and the Levant. My wife had to take a course on 'multicultural sensitivity' in psychology. The professor was oh, so tolerant, until my wife (who is Greek) raised a point about the Greek immigrant experience. The professor 'wrinkled up her nose' and said something disparaging about "Orthodox Greeks".
It isn't just Clinton who prefered the jihadists to the Orthodox Serbs.