A question about the current crisis.

 

Have any members of the Western political elites (broadly construed to include lesser figures like members of Congress or their European equivalents, prominent religious figures, celebrities, etc.) spoken out against the insane tide of Russophobia engulfing their nations?

As someone who loathes Putin and delivered aid to a Ukrainian Catholic parish for shipment to that besieged nation, I find this blinkered ethnic cancellation campaign beyond repulsive. 

But even more so is the utter refusal of anyone in prominent political or cultural positions to call it out and to continue to do so.  

If you have examples of people doing so, I would love to see them. But I suspect they come from those at the fringes of power, according to various values of the term "fringe."

Proof of concept leaps to my distrustful mind. But in the short term it is another marker of how unfit our leaders are to lead free people, and how little they like such folks.

Not All Russians.

The insane anti-Russian hysteria is correctly rebuked by Charles Cooke in this excellent essay. 

We have been sternly (and correctly) told not to lump all Chinese in with their genocidal government nor all Muslims for the dreary drumbeat of atrocities across the globe.

And yet, the hysteria here has slipped the leash without anything close to the same pushback.  

During the First World War, the British public took to booing dachshunds in the street — or so I was told as a boy. I always thought this was probably untrue, but I am now beginning to wonder. In the last 48 hours, I have read that “the International Cat Federation” — that pillar of civilization — “has banned Russian cats from its international competitions”; that the Paralympics “will deny access to athletes from Russia and Belarus”; that the state of New Hampshire is removing “bottles of Russian vodka from New Hampshire’s state-run liquor stores”; that EA Sports intends to “remove the Russian National Team and all Russian club soccer teams from its FIFA video game franchise, and remove all Russian and Belarusian hockey teams from the latest NHL video game franchise”; and that Russian chess player Alexander Grischuk has been “kicked out of a forthcoming tournament” in Norway, despite being a critic of the war that has caused his ejection. From here, booing dogs seems the obvious next step.

I can certainly imagine a situation in which one country’s behavior became so extraordinary — and the threat that it posed became so total — that another country needed to take the sort of zero-tolerance line that includes the superintendence of cat-fancying. In 1940, Nazi Germany posed such a threat to Great Britain. But, clearly, Russia isn’t at that point yet, because, if it were, we would have stopped buying its oil. We are not expected, I hope, to believe that it is imperative that we expel Russian pixels from our video games, but a mere matter of taste whether we cease to purchase Russian energy? Somehow, that would seem a failure to get our priorities straight.

Our reluctance to distinguish between Vladimir Putin’s evil on the one hand and Russians and Russian culture more broadly on the other is especially jarring given how unwilling so many people have been to criticize the Chinese Communist Party for its role in the Covid-19 pandemic. Last year, it was deemed beyond the pale even to mention China in connection with the pandemic — lest doing so lead to sudden outbreaks of “anti-Asian hate.” Why, I must ask, is the same rule not being applied here? Is there really no useful middle ground? Assuming sufficient due process, there are excellent reasons to target well-connected Russian oligarchs, just as there are solid justifications for our having imposed harsh sanctions on the broader Russian economy. But vodka that is served in the United States? Norway wasn’t willing to boycott an Olympic Games that was being held in a country that is committing genocide, but it has the resolve to keep a dissident chess player from competing on its shores? None of this makes much sense.

I was going to ask rhetorically whether we intend to abandon Tchaikovsky and Dostoyevsky, too, but, as it turns out, this isn’t really a joke, for over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen notes that “the editors of the ‘Studies in the History of Philosophy’ have decided not to pursue the project of publishing a thematic issue devoted to Russian religious philosophy.” Why? Are there are a lot of religious philosophers in the Russian military? Did they help plan the invasion of Ukraine? Are the bulk of them fans of Putin’s — or even still alive? This is boobishness in the extreme, the equivalent of disowning Beethoven because of Bismarck’s bad behavior. The United States should use any leverage it has against the Russian regime, but there is a difference between leverage and iconoclasm, and it is one that too many in the West are not presently observing.

Even Russian NHLers are getting death threats, to the horrified outrage of their emigre Ukrainian Jewish agent.

The closest analogy here is China, given that state misbehavior is directly comparable, so I will focus on that. 

Why the difference? A couple of likely culprits in my book.

First is cash--China owns a lot of things and people in the West, and that sweet yuan stream is addicting. 

Second is the poisonous identity politics of the West: Russians are overwhelmingly white, and insane domestic nastiness transfers well overseas in this case. Xi gets the race card played on his behalf, but there is nothing in the same deck for Putin. 

Oh, make no mistake: there is no shortage of apologetics for Putin's hellish aggression out in the wild. But it is dressed in a different brand of blood-stained tinsel than that which festoons the monster in Beijing.

How about "our Vlad-loving Patriarch" instead?

The invaluable Pillar does excellent work today examining the impact of Putin's war of aggression on the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches. The report can be found here.

As hinted at before here, there is more than one Orthodox Church in Ukraine. The largest is recognized by the Patriarch of Constantinople and those in communion with him. The other is recognized by Kirill, who heads what is easily Orthodoxy's 800 pound gorilla. The demographic and power imbalance in the patriarchates is profound, and drives the schism between them.

Which, yes, started in 2018 because the Patriarch of Constantinople recognized one Orthodox Church in Ukraine, and Kirill the other.

But the attack on Ukraine has thrown the Russian-recognized one into turmoil. 

To the point where two Russian-recognized diocese have stopped recognizing the Russian Patriarch in the Divine Liturgy:

“The termination of the commemoration of the Primate of the Church, not because of doctrinal or canonical errors, or delusions, but because of discordance with certain political views and preferences, is a schism, for which anyone who commits it will answer before God, not only in the age to come, but also in the present,” Patriarch Kirill of Moscow wrote March 2 to an archbishop of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is governed by Kirill.

The statement came after Metropolitan Archbishop Evlogy of Sumy, a city in eastern Ukraine, instructed his priests Monday to discontinue prayers of communion with Kirill in the Divine Liturgy, or celebration of the Eucharist. 

Schism is the refusal of submission to the authority of a legitimate religious authority, or refusal of communion, or unity, within a church body.

Evlogy’s decision is understood to be a repudiation of Kirill’s leadership. It came after the Russian Orthodox patriarch issued prayers Sunday that seemed aimed at theologically justifying Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

But the Sumy Orthodox archbishop said in a statement March 2 that directing priests to stop praying liturgically for Kirill is not an act of schism. Evlogy wrote that he remains in communion with Kyiv Metropolitan Onufriy, leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Kirill’s jurisdiction. 

As with the various western Catholic forms of Mass, the Divine Liturgies of the East (Orthodox and Catholic) commemorate the servant of the Faithful. In the case of churches with patriarchs, it is "our Patriarch," sometimes with the prefix "our most blessed" or even "God-loving Patriarch."

So, to not recognize your servant-patriarch is a momentous decision. But one that makes sense in momentous times--like your nation being assaulted and your patriarch making justification noises for the assault. 

Hence my sardonic suggestion in the title. It increasingly fits the ecclesiastical situation, sadly.

And it will only get worse as the war rages on and Ukraine continues to be ground down. Unfortunately for those who support the Russian patriarch, it seems that he has no intention of changing direction. 

Which bodes ill for an internal revolt among the rest of the elites who support Putin and his offensive. They bought the ticket, and they are riding it all the way down.

It's easy to pray for Ukraine, and right to so do. But remember Russia in your prayers, too. The noble people of that land deserve better than the would-be tsar, kleptocrats and lickspittles plunging them all into ruin.

A very interesting infrastructure project.

Actually, substitute "insane but admirable" for "interesting": a transcontinental tunnel under the Bering Strait.

Yes, it's an older story, but it's news to me. Leaving aside the engineering issues, I have only one question: did we green-light it at our end, or will it just be that one of these days Pootie-Poot is going to emerge from the ground near Nome shirtless and shovel in hand, to the adoring applause of the Russian press?

American approval seems to be a rather significant bit of data the article is lacking.

Chess Boxing.

A new Russian sport.

Any commentary I offer would be superfluous.

DNA confirms murder of last two Romanov children.

Alexei and Maria, rest in peace.

[Photo Credit.]