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Letter #57, 2022, Monday, March 28: The Attack on Ukraine[2022-03-28][Engleză]The following article on the war in Ukraine, written by Dr. John Lamont, is a powerful indictment of the decision of the Russian government to attack Ukraine. Because it contains some facts and arguments I have not seen in other places, I thought it worth bringing to your attention. Lamont is a Catholic scholar and his piece was first published six days ago, on March 22, on the Rorate caeli website a site which supports the traditional Latin liturgy at this link. So it reflects the thinking of one who is part of that milieu. I do not agree with every point Lamont makes, but thought his piece might spark responses and comments from readers. Please feel free to make such comments (I could include them in a future letter).I still believe there prayer, which expresses a desire of the heart, and soul, is needed now. Maria, ora pro nobis (Mary, pray for us.). RM P.S. Today, March 28, is the 2-year anniversary of the death of my father, William Moynihan. May eternal light shine upon him, and may he rest in peace. Support the Moynihan Letters Putins Attack on Ukraine by Dr. John Lamont March 22, 2022 Although wars are a temporal phenomenon, they often have religious repercussions or arouse religious passions and disputes. The Russian attack on Ukraine is no exception. One of its religious effects has been to provoke divisions among Catholics. Most of them have backed the Ukrainians in their self-defence against invasion. Some vocal Catholic traditionalists have however taken the Russian side to a greater or lesser extent certainly to the extent of arguing that the Ukrainians should not be given assistance by other countries in their fight against the Russians, a step that would doom them to defeat. This argument is not framed in purely political terms. The pro-Russian side sees the Ukrainians as aligned with the anti-Christian order that dominates the West, and the Russians as defenders of Christianity and traditional values. This makes it important to get at the truth of the nature of this conflict, in its temporal aspects as well as in its inevitable religious dimensions. This essay will attempt to do so. *** Before the Russian attack on Ukraine, I had some sympathy with the Russian position on that country, for the following reasons. The Russian insistence that Ukraine not join NATO seemed a reasonable one. NATO is a military alliance that exists to oppose Russia. Ukrainian membership in NATO would bring a foreign military alliance to within a few hundred kilometres of the Volga. Any Russian government would have reason to regard this as an existential threat, and would oppose it by any means possible. Russian complaints about illicit foreign interference in Ukrainian politics have a basis in fact. In 2014, Viktor Yanukovich, the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, was deposed by a revolt. Yanukovych was grotesquely corrupt, but he had been fairly elected by a substantial majority. The demonstrators who overthrew him had substantial backing from the United States, and some of the groups most involved in the violent confrontations that led to his downfall were neo-Nazis. When Putin was negotiating with the French president Emmanuel Macron over Ukraine immediately before the war, these reasons seemed to indicate that he had a case, and that the Russian demands that were reasonable should be accommodated. Many people said this at the time. *** The Russian attack on Ukraine showed that Putin had been playing a comedy with Macron, and that his sympathizers, including myself, had all been fooled. This was shown by the strategy of the Russian attack. The Russians chose the most ambitious plan available to them; an attack on multiple axes from north, east, and south. The goal of this attack was to decapitate the Ukrainian government, completely surround and destroy the Ukrainian armed forces, and conquer the entire country except for its western region. Its goal is not neutralization of Ukraine, but conquest. This implements the Russian view expressed plainly by Putin, and held by most Russians that Ukrainians are a variety of Russians rather than a separate nationality, that Ukraine is not a legitimate state independent of Russia, and that the historical union of Russians and Ukrainians in a single state should be restored. The western region would probably have been left on the table by the Russians because most of the countrys resources are outside it, because its territory is suited to insurgency, and because Putin knows that it kept up a strong and determined armed resistance to Stalin from 1945 to 1951. Such a union of Russia and Ukraine would of course greatly enhance the power of Russia. The reasonable points made by Putin prior to the war were a clever blind, designed to disguise and to facilitate this war of conquest. His goal was to use these demands to divide and confuse opinion outside Ukraine and thereby facilitate his attack. Once its military goals were achieved, he intended to thumb his nose at the West and incorporate most of Ukraine into Russia. This remains his goal. *** The goal of the Russian attack, not to speak of its methods, shows that right is on the Ukrainian side in this war. The Ukrainians do not want to be ruled by the Russians. The Russians are in the wrong in trying to forcibly subdue and conquer them, and the Ukrainians are defending their just rights in resisting them. The Ukrainians are not fighting for George Soros and the New World Order, as some conservatives absurdly claim. They are fighting for their homes, their families, and their country. *** There is also the consideration that one of the Russian war aims is the destruction of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. The Russians see the Ukrainian Catholics, with some reason, as a bastion of Ukrainian nationalism, and consistently describe them as fascists. The Russian Orthodox Church helped Stalin to suppress the Ukrainian Catholic Church in 1946, a process that involved the death of most of the bishops, priests and religious of that church under torture, before the firing squad, or in the Gulag. The Russian Orthodox have never disavowed their involvement in this suppression or expressed regret or repentance for it, and aspire to repeat the forced incorporation of Ukrainian Catholics into a Russian-controlled Orthodox Church; an initiative that agrees with the goals of the Russian government, and is indeed necessary for their realization. The Russians will suppress the Ukrainian Catholics if they conquer Ukraine. After taking over the Crimea in 2014, they repressed the Ukrainian Catholics there. If the Russians take Kiev, the Ukrainian Catholic Patriarch Sviatoslav Shevchuk will be shot. *** The strict question of the justice of the war is thus not in doubt. The Ukrainians are in the right, and the Russians are in the wrong. This question does not however exhaust the moral, religious and political significance of the war, which demand further examination. One important starting point for this examination is provided by the excellent book by Dominic Lieven, The End of Tsarist Russia (2015). Lieven describes the role of Ukraine in the genesis of the First World War. Those of us who associate that war with the Somme and Passchendaele are surprised to find that the great slaughters on the Western Front in which our forebears took part depended on political struggles over Ukraine. At the beginning of the 20th century, the status of Imperial Russia as a great power depended on its possession of the wealth, resources, industry and population of Ukraine. Romanov rule over Ukraine was threatened by Ukrainian nationalism, whose epicentre was in the western section of Ukraine ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ukrainian nationalism and Ukrainian culture was intimately linked with the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which had been completely suppressed by the Russian empire but survived in Austrian-ruled Ukraine. The threat to the Empire posed by Ukrainian nationalism made the conservative, Slavophile element in Russia hostile to the Austrians and ready to go to war with them. Russian hostility to Austria was counterbalanced by German fear of increasing Russian economic strength. The growth in Russian population, wealth, industry, and scientific achievement before the First World War threatened to eclipse German hegemony in Europe and place Germany in a position of permanent inferiority to Russia. Germany was thus ready to go to war with Russia while the balance of power was still in her favour. From a purely military point of view, this was a sensible calculation; Lieven shows that the Russian military authorities reported to the Emperor in 1914 that the country was not ready for war with Germany, and would be defeated. Nicholas II was told that the country would not be ready for war until 1917. However, he failed to heed this advice, with the defeat of Russia and the Russian Revolution being the consequence. Putins Valdai Club awarded Lieven a prize for his work in 2018, which indicates that Putin takes an interest in his views on Ukraine. *** The traditional Russian interest in possession of Ukraine is thus an essential element in this war. What about the political differences between Russia and Ukraine? Putin claims to be seeking the de-Nazification of Ukraine, and to be waging the war for this purpose. Eventual fascist elements in Ukraine do not mean that Ukraine is a fascist or neo-Nazi state. The fact that the Ukrainian president Zelensky is Jewish is one thing that demonstrates this, but it is not the fundamental consideration. Fascist and Nazi states have a distinct political structure. This includes brutal suppression of all political opposition and expression of political dissent; systematic, omnipresent, and dishonest propaganda and indoctrination; glorification of the ruler; exaltation of brute force and military might; and rejection of all absolute moral, legal or religious principles that conflict with the power and control of the state and the actions of the ruler. Ukraine does not have this political structure. In Ukraine, there is real public criticism of the ruler and real competition for political power, and the populace have a real say in who rules them. Even if it did have this structure, that would not justify Putins trying to invade and conquer it. But his proclaimed goal of de-Nazification is all the more baseless and absurd given the Russian connections to neo-Nazism and fascism. One aspect of these connections is the neo-Nazi affiliations of military units connected to Russia. The pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region included a number of neo-Nazi units; The round eight-pronged swastikakolovrat (a neo-pagan swastika) appeared on the badges of the neo-Nazi Rusich and Ratibor sabotage-reconnaissance units within the Batman Rapid Response Group, and the Svarozhichi battalion within the Oplot brigade. Like the Azov Battalion, these neo-Nazi units often have pagan religious affiliations. Yan Petrovsky, a senior officer in Rusich, is a well-known Russian neo-Nazi. This Russian unit has committed numerous atrocities while fighting in Ukraine. The Russian mercenary company Wagner is a central tool of the Russian state. It is used for Russian military operations when direct involvement of the Russian military would be politically undesirable. The Wagner group has conducted important operations in the Middle East and Africa. Its leaders are known for their Nazi sympathies. In accordance with Nazi ideology, they largely reject Christianity in favour of paganism, espousing a revived pagan religion known as Rodnovery. The group was given its name by its founder, Dmitri Utkin, to express his admiration for Richard Wagner and the Third Reich. Utkin has had SS insignia tattooed on to his body. *** The principal connection between Russia and fascism is however the structure of the Russian political system. Unlike previous Russian rulers Catherine the Great, say, or Nicholas I Putin both seeks and receives popular support for his rule. But the form of popular support that he receives is the kind sought by fascist rulers. Both Hitler and Mussolini enjoyed popular support for most of their careers. Putin achieved popular support by techniques similar to those of the German and Italian dictators (whose methods he is likely to have carefully studied). These techniques had four components: delivery of real benefits to the mass of the population, omnipresent propaganda and indoctrination in favour of the ruler and his regime, suppression of criticism of the ruler, and suppression by force or fraud of any real political opposition. This is how Putin himself stays in power. This feature of Putins rule should be kept in mind by Catholics and conservatives who see him as in some way a defender of traditional or Christian values. Putins opposition to gender and LGBTetc. ideology is no doubt genuine. It is of course not a mark of Christian commitment, since Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung also either opposed these things or would have opposed them if they had known about them. The nature and significance of Putins opposition to this ideology needs to be understood. It is the opposition of one evil to the evil at the opposite extreme from it. Gender ideology denies manhood entirely. Sursa: www.InsideTheVatican.com Contor Accesări: 684, Ultimul acces: 2026-07-31 03:20:23
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