The history of the world suggests a rather different
interpretation of mankind’s purpose. It seems more likely than we have been
brought into this world to serve as fodder for God’s quirky pranks. And God
surely has a cruel sense of humor – more like cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, as a matter of fact.
For some time now God has been laughing at Russia. He has been
laughing at America, too, and may yet saddle the Free World with a leadership
team comprised of President Donald Trump
and Vice-President Ben Carson. But Russia has been the butt of His most
sadistic attempts at humor.
God may have been angered by the Bolsheviks’ militant atheism
or by their hubristic claim to create Heaven on Earth – the same way He had
been made unhappy by humans trying to build the Tower of Babel. Be that as it
may, he is extracting a terrible revenge. He has given Russia a Church that is
very much in line with the description of Antichrist in the New Testament – KGB
agents dressed in priestly robes feeding the faithful pagan fetishes like the
Virgin’s Girdle while using the pulpit to spread hatred.
Take last week’s speech by Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow and
all Rus’ and the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, in which he warned
against casting doubt on Stalin’s accomplishments, especially praising his
government’s achievements during the 1920s and the 1930s. It would have been
delightfully ironic if it weren’t so utterly despicable. Stalin was up to his
neck in the blood of clerics and ordinary believers of all creeds, confessions
and denominations. Moreover, Stalin’s persecution of the Russian Orthodox
Church was especially murderous starting in the late 1920s. It went on
throughout the 1930s, ending only in June 1941,
when Stalin made a cynical appeal to the religious feelings of the
Russian people to help defend him from Hitler’s tanks.
In fact, while it has become customary to date Stalin’s Terror
from the early 1930s, it actually started with the anti-religious campaign in
1928, right around the dictator’s 50th birthday. Of course, 1937 saw the peak
of bloodletting, when some 85,000 priests were executed, but the relentless
campaign against religion went on throughout the period the Moscow Patriarch
decided to glorify. More than 90 percent of all Orthodox priests – whose ranks
had already been decimated during the revolution and the Civil War – had been
killed or sent to the GULAG by the start of the Great Patriotic War. Less than
two percent of Russian Orthodox Churches remained open by then, the rest having
been blown up or turned into warehouses. Some of the most valuable artistic and
historic monuments in Russia had been barbarically destroyed.
Patriarch Kirill rising to Stalin’s defense is not the sickest
joke yet. There have been proposals, advanced for example by writer and
political activist Alexander Prokhanov, to canonize Stalin. Google images under
the heading “Saint Stalin” and you’ll come up with a bunch of his icons, on
which Stalin is depicted in a full generalissimo regalia, wearing his Order of
Lenin trinkets and Hero of the Soviet Union stars.
God is even tinkering with the names of Russian Orthodox
clerics for comic effect. How else to regard a Church spokesman whose last name
is Chaplin? Or Patriarch Kirill’s secular name, Gundyaev, which harks back to
the Russian transcription of the German Hund
– meaning a dog or a mean person.
The name Putin is also a bit of a jocular description of his
career path, since he was literally “put in” a position of power by a bunch of
short-sighted oligarchs. Indeed, Vladimir Putin is probably the least
accomplished, grayest man to sit in the Kremlin since the Bolshevik Revolution
– and, God knows, there have been plenty of nincompoops and buffoons in that
position before. Putin is a name that
fits in well with Lenin and Stalin but those two, albeit ruthless and murderous
villains, were, each in his own way, extraordinary men. They both wrote
extensively and their lives and deeds remain a source of endless fascination of
scholars around the world. The most recent book in English, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator by
Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk, came out last May.
Putin’s life, by contrast, can be amply described in a
Wikipedia page. He has written nothing and has proposed no ideology or
doctrine. Yet, his popularity and personality cult are approaching those of
Stalin. God seems to be saying to the Russian people: “I can put any old Putin
in the Kremlin, and you will worship him.”
Stalin’s Soviet Union fought a heroic war against real fascists
who invaded the country and threatened the physical survival of every one of
its citizens. Putin’s Russia repeats history as farce, to use Marx’s words. It
is fighting a nasty terrorist war, using thugs and psychopaths to invade a
neighboring country and inventing fake fascists in the Ukrainian government.
Russian propagandists still strive to portray Putin’s hybrid war in Ukraine as
the continuation of the Great Patriotic War, appropriating and befouling the
ribbon of St. George for that purpose..
And then there are those civilian airplanes falling out of the
sky. There is a kind of sardonic design in their terrible symmetry. The
Malaysian Boeing cast a stark spotlight on Putin’s Ukrainian misadventure,
which many people around the world had been inclined to ignore before that
tragedy. The multiple cockamamee scenarios Russia kept advancing one after
another and its clumsy attempts to sabotage the international investigation
only confirmed its status as a rogue nation.
Then, the moment Putin’s destructive energies shifted to Syria,
as though on cue came the crush of the Russian plane in Egypt. Once again,
Russia is determined to present its own version of events and is showing itself
unwilling to accept the possibility that the Airbus A321 was brought down by
terrorists.
It is understandable that Putin would not want this new tragedy
to be connected to his military action in support of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
We don’t know the cause of the crash yet, but it may be preferable for Putin if
it turned out that there was a terrorist bomb on board. Because if the plane
disintegrated in the air all by itself, it would be hard not to reach the
conclusion that God is playing a nasty cat-and-mouse game with the Russian
leader.
