Dispatches from Deena Stryker
As part of what might just be part of a timid rethink of Washington’s precipice stance vis a vis Russia, in its March 20th issue, Time magazine, a right of center fixture on the US political scene for almost a hundred years, devotes two main articles to the Trump presidency, one of which will erroneously be considered more significant: Trump’s dismantling of the government bureaucracy.
Image above: Putin with Patriarch Kyrill. Certainly far more sincere about his personal morality than most of his counterparts across the globe, starting with smug Washington.
Compared to what could be a devastating campaign with predictable consequences, the subject-matter of the second article, titled Moscow Cozies Up to the Right reveals a largely unknown phenomenon whose consequences can only been seen as positive, whatever one’s attitude toward religion, and that is, the American Evangelical — and Catholic right’s outreach to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
There are two basic ‘rights’ in the U.S. The traditional religious right, which has existed since the founding of Puritan America, blossoming into a myriad of denominations, and even sects over time, all of which are concerned with defending the family as the basic social structure, via church-going and associated activities, and which in recent decades has developed a long list of organizations that lobby government and promotes its sexual values such as teen abstinence and condemnation of abortion across society.
The ‘alt’ right is of more recent vintage, and while it purports to support religion, it is mainly interested in the transformation of American society along pseudo-fascist lines, paying homage to far-right historical figures such as Hitler and gathering its members into groups whose preferred mode of locomotion is motorcycles, and who sport razed cranes and lethal weapons. Although the President’s special advisor, Steve Bannon, is believed to have ties to the alt right, it is the religious right that looks with favor upon the Russian President.
Thanks to the negative image created by the US media, Americans see Vladimir Putin at best as a regenerated Communist who still wants his country to conquer the world (something that the Soviets never actually pursued, as their policies were essentially reactive to Western aggressiveness]. Contradicting the presumption that its job is to seek out information far and wide, the media has worked to strengthen that impression, slavishly echoing the political class’s characterization of Vladimir Putin as a ‘thug’. As they daily repeat accusations of Russia’s ‘threat’ to the Baltic countries, along with other similarly ludicrous claims, both print and television have blacked out the fact that Putin is not only a practicing Orthodox Christian, but that he campaigns for Russians to follow suit. (What appeared as an exaggerated reaction to the Pussy Riot performance in a Moscow cathedral becomes a lot less surprising in light of Vladimir Putin’s close relationship with Patriarch Kyrill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.)
The Russian president’s commitment to religion may have more to do with his abhorrence of “the West’s moral degeneracy” than with belief in in a white-bearded old man sitting on a throne in heaven, but what matters is that most Americans are utterly unaware of this strong commitment in a leader who is routinely dismissed as ‘a former KGB agent’. A documentary on Putin put together by Russian television Rossiya 24 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_IE…shows Putin driving himself to a remote mountain Orthodox monastery, as a donkey repeatedly appears to lead him on.
Most Americans will by now have forgotten a two-liner about President Putin’s visit to the dying Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 2007, to award him the State Prize of the Russian Federation for Humanitarian work. As far back as the nineteen eighties, the Nobel Prize writer foresaw that a rapprochement between (then Soviet) Russia and the US was most likely to come about through their common Christian heritage — although he may not have anticipated the rise of US megachurches. (In its brotherly love, and commitment to peace through social justice, Communist praxis, incidentally, is far closer to the teachings of Christ than the highly selfish and individualistic Capitalist way of life.)
Nor, probably, would Solzhenitsyn have predicted that the leader he admired would welcome Russian pro-gun activists’ ties with the NRA. In 2011, a young Siberian woman, Maria Butina, the protegee of a Russian banker and former senator, Alexander Roshin, organized a pro-gun group in Moscow and soon established ties with the NRA. Whether thanks to her campaign or not, in 2014 Russia passed a law allowing citizens to carry guns for their personal protection, and in a script remindful of the Fulbright Program, Butina’s contacts with prominent Americans led to her becoming a graduate student of international affairs at the American University in Washington.
As the Trump Presidency is ever more embroiled in an investigation into its ties to Russia, which include the possibility of collusion with Russia’s so-called ‘interference’ in the recent presidential election, it is likely to get crucial support from both Evangelicals and Catholics, alongside the NRA.
“Only in America” does worship of God go hand in hand with that of firearms, but some may see this underreported story as yet more proof that ‘God works in mysterious ways”.
DEENA STRYKER, Senior Contributing Editor
Born in Philadelphia, Stryker spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, her latest being
CUBA: Diary of a Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia Sanchez
America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World
A Taoist Politics: The Case For Sacredness
She began her journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome, spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before they made the revolution (‘Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young’). After spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, she wrote the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of the Soviet Union (“Une autre Europe, un autre Monde’). Her memoir, ‘Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel’, tells it all. ‘A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness’, which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and modern science and what this implies for political activism; and ‘America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World” is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from the City on a Hill’.
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