Holy Wars: How A Cathedral Of Guns And Glory Symbolizes Putin’s Russia | Talking Points Memo

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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was first published by The Conversation.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1407424
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The Church of St. Zardoz.

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A man defined by the myths he has created about himself creates a place for people to worship a man who himself is a myth. How fitting.

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Fits perfectly into his delusional belief that he’s the next Russian tsar.

He’s only going to be getting the same comeuppance that FatAss the Would-be King got.

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Putin and Trump share the grotesque religious convictions of self-aggrandizement, self-dealing, self-enrichment and corrupt, autocratic politics.

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The Czar was the ‘anointed’ of God; Patriarch Kyrill declared Putin the same.

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Beware the holy trinity - church and state and law
For every death the virus gets more deadly then before

Homophobia
The worst disease
You can’t love who you want to love in times like these

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I would say then that it is time for Putin to step outside and demand that God kneel before him in abject deference to his greatness. Thunderbolt to follow burning Putin to a crisp
Church bells ring out across the globe

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Losing a fair and open election is not nearly “comeuppance” enough for Putin. Not after what he has done since 2/24/22. His personal money should be used to rebuild what his army destroys and that money should also be given to families of Ukrainians who have lost loved ones, their homes, their jobs …in short Putin’s personal money and that of his oligarchs should be used to rebuild Ukraine.

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And I thought that I couldn’t despise any religious organization any more than I do all of the protestant orgs and the Catholic International Pedophile assoc. But surprise! I do believe the Russian Orthodox - hell, the whole Eastern Orthodox - church just burst into prominence.

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If only there was that god.

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There is a Ukrainian Orthodox Church. But then there is that church word.

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To westerners this may see grotesque hypocrisy and nationalist chauvinism, but the message projected by this church comes straight out of nineteenth-century Panslavism and tsarist ideology. “Nationalism–Autocracy–Orthodoxy” was the slogan launched by Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1856) and embraced especially by Alexander III (1881-1894) and Nicholas II (1894-1917). The Russian Orthodox Church fully supported it. In its messianic form, even the great writer Dostoevsky echoed it–as did Dostoevsky’s twentieth-century heir, Solzhenitsyn. So this resonates deeply with many ordinary Russians. Not all, of course. The alternative “spiritual” outlook among Russians is westernism, the conviction that Russia’s proper place is among the rest of liberal, progressive Europeans. But “westerizers” and liberals have always lost in the struggles for the Russian “soul.”

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So the best historical analogue for Putin may be Spain’s Philip II.

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Thanks for this.

The horror of Stalin seems to overshadow so much of what happened in the last century. I have often felt that the sacrifices made by the Russian people in WW2 is too often not appreciated. Not even known. The Blood Lands are broad, buried over in one inhumanity over the next, with the sense of law, justice, even hope, lost. Thus the myths, the need.
True history, the search for truth is the only healing. And now this loss of the study and appreciation of it, and most of all the rewriting of history by the Right in America, is crippling. All of you who lean towards the light carry our hope.

I can’t read this to edit, my eyes so tired of tears. Strength and love to you all.

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The Russian Orthodox Church is pretty vile, bigoted and corrupt.

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The entire GOP party drools over this. Good thing none of them read TPM.

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The Serbian Orthodox Church struck me in much the same way.

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The Serbian Orthodox Church operates in region with a volatile crucible of violent religions: Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Islam. All of them have cultivated, fostered and nurtured hatred for centuries. Remember Bosnia?

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Yes, and there has also been a apocalyptic strain of chauvinistic Russian religious nationalism known as the myth of the Third and Final Rome.

Basically, the first Rome was the seat of the Roman Empire, the pre-eminent superpower of its time.

When the western division of the Roman Empire fell to invaders, the hub of the Christianized eastern division – Constantinople (named after Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor — and originally named Byzantium after Byzas, an ancient colonizing Greek king, and today named Istanbul, Turkey), became the second Rome.

And in the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, there was no separation between church and state; the political ruler also headed the church, and Constantinople was the seat of Orthodox Christianity.

The Byzantine Empire lasted a thousand years until the Ottoman invasion in 1453. After World War I, with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, some within Russia proclaimed Moscow as the Third and Final Rome and the worldwide seat of Orthodox Christianity. These clerics and chauvinists predicted that Russia was destined to rule the world as the Third and Final Rome. They also believed there would never be a Fourth Rome.

As the Russian Orthodox Church is very reactionary, the idea of a Third and Final Rome adds a triumphalist and millennialist bent to a reactionary church that is perfectly willing to align itself with a reactionary, anti-Western and revanchist Putin regime that presents itself to its people as an instrument of a pure noble society that is not corrupted by, and serves as a counterforce to, Western values of decadence, greed, corruption, diversity, multiculturalism, feminism, secularism and modernism, and hell-bent to reclaim the territory, influence, power and glory of the former Soviet Union or Russian Empire.

It’s a very pernicious and noxious mix and organizing principle, similar in its effect to the blood-and-soil mysticism of the volk and the fatherland advanced by Hitler’s Nazi regime.

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