Orthodox view on Victory Day?

gzt

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Lukaris

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It is a pivotal day in Russian history and millions of Russians ( Ukrainians & other former Soviets) died for their fellow people. Most of them were patriots who were probably not responsible for the system they lived under. It is their history and they honor their forefathers & foremothers who gave their lives.
 
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E.C.

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What? Yes, the defeat of the Nazis was a great triumph that should be celebrated. It was not just the "Communists" who won, but the entire world. The Nazi plan for the Orthodox Church was just as hostile as the early Bolsheviks. St Gorazd of Prague, pray for us! Holy New Hieromartyr Gorazd of Prague, Bishop of Moravia and Silesia (+ 1942) | MYSTAGOGY RESOURCE CENTER
Not to minimize Bishop Gorazd's martyrdom, but if one wants to see what was in store for Orthodoxy under the Nazis one need not look further than what the Serbs went through under the Ustashe with the support of the Croatian Catholic Church. Their plan was to "kill 1/3, expel 1/3, force convert 1/3". There's reports of Croatian Ustahes being urged on by Roman Catholic priests to kill Serbs being reassured "Don't worry, I'll forgive your sins later".

Apparently they were so brutal to the Serbs that even the German Nazis had to tell the Croats to tone it down.
 
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E.C.

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4) Just because people are moral on the outside does not mean that those people are truly virtuous. The Nazis had plenty of vices that they secretly practiced. And then their were certain official state run programs like their breeding programs aimed at breeding the master race, where SS soldiers were encouraged to come to various facilities and mate with healthy young German woman to try to breed more future soldiers for the Fatherland, not to mention some of their horrific experiments etc.
I think one of the singers of Abba was conceived through one of those programs.
 
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Pavel Mosko

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rusmeister

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*Ahem!*
As a resident expert on Russia (see my user name), I can say that most of us have little conception of the Russian side of things, and if the Russian national histories exaggerate their own accomplishments, so do ours.
Large portions of Russia and the Soviet Union in general were occupied by the Germans, who got all the way to Moscow before being pushed back, and the war touched and caused devastation in practically every family. Nearly everyone lost one or more close relatives, often all of them, and the suffering under occupation and the cruelty of the Germans is hard for us to imagine. We just plain didn’t experience that, even if our own grandfathers landed in Normandy or Okinawa. As a result, the holiday is treated religiously. Belittle it, and Russian involvement, and they will react more harshly than if someone walked into one of our altars and defiled it.
 
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As a resident expert on Russia (see my user name), I can say that most of us have little conception of the Russian side of things, and if the Russian national histories exaggerate their own accomplishments, so do ours.
Large portions of Russia and the Soviet Union in general were occupied by the Germans, who got all the way to Moscow before being pushed back, and the war touched and caused devastation in practically every family. Nearly everyone lost one or more close relatives, often all of them, and the suffering under occupation and the cruelty of the Germans is hard for us to imagine. We just plain didn’t experience that, even if our own grandfathers landed in Normandy or Okinawa. As a result, the holiday is treated religiously. Belittle it, and Russian involvement, and they will react more harshly than if someone walked into one of our altars and defiled it.
I agree... and for greater insight, I recommend anyone possessing hearts and minds stable enough to do so to watch this (maybe even 2 or three times): Come and See (1985) - Russian Movie Online about WWII
 
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archer75

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I feel compelled to add one thing here, surely obvious to many who are reading this thread.

At practically any Orthodox Christian service (including many served in private homes), you will see the bishop, priest, deacon, or whoever is serving as senior reader cense icons with a censer or hand censer. The people present are censed as well. If you have a Jewish, Roman Catholic or atheist friend or visitor in your home who is standing there respectfully while you pray, they are censed. The person doing the censing in a church does not stop to ask whether anyone is Orthodox. This is because everyone is made in the image of God and the image of God (even if severely distorted by sin) is worthy of respect.

The Nazi government of Germany carried out an aggressive invasion of many other countries and performed countless crimes there that had exactly nothing to do with shutting down bars where someone was behaving in a sinful manner, and everything to do with systematically murdering helpless, weaponless people, including the elderly, women, pregnant women, nursing women, and children. I have read an account of a crying child bayoneted in its mother's arms and hurled into the pit simply to shut it up (just before nearly everyone there was murdered anyway). These are not mistaken or random acts of "lone wolves" during wartime. They represent a consciously chosen and directed program of destruction. Everyone undesirable was to be exterminated like vermin or enslaved and worked to death in service of the regime.

This is not even the tip of the iceberg. Anyone with a library card or an internet connection can easily find reams of information about the Nazis.

But just what I have typed above is sufficient to show that the Nazi program was antithetical to one of the basic truths of the Orthodox faith that we see visually / physically expressed at literally every censing all over the world, without which truth we would have no Orthodox worship and no Orthodox faith: that man is made in the image of God.

St. Alexander of Munich risked death and was killed for stating this basic and obvious truth that the Nazi regime was evil.

From OrthodoxWiki:
Alexander Schmorell was buried behind Stadelheim Prison, in the cemetery at Perlacher Forst. In his last letter to his family, he writes the following:

"Now it shall be none other than this, and by the will of God, today I shall have my earthly life come to a close in order to go into another, which will never end and in which all of us will again meet. Let this future meeting be your comfort and your hope. Unfortunately, this blow will be harder for you than for me, because I go in the certainty, that in my deep conviction, I have served the truth..."


St. Alexander, pray to God for us!
 
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Pavel Mosko

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*Ahem!*
As a resident expert on Russia (see my user name), I can say that most of us have little conception of the Russian side of things, and if the Russian national histories exaggerate their own accomplishments, so do ours.
Large portions of Russia and the Soviet Union in general were occupied by the Germans, who got all the way to Moscow before being pushed back, and the war touched and caused devastation in practically every family. Nearly everyone lost one or more close relatives, often all of them, and the suffering under occupation and the cruelty of the Germans is hard for us to imagine. We just plain didn’t experience that, even if our own grandfathers landed in Normandy or Okinawa. As a result, the holiday is treated religiously. Belittle it, and Russian involvement, and they will react more harshly than if someone walked into one of our altars and defiled it.

As bad as the Nazi's were I'm not sure if the Communists were an improvement (for the average non-Jewish Russian). I mean Stalin starved like a million Kulaks, purged his officer corps etc. during peace time which caused a number of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers to join up with the Germans as Russian tank and infantry units in the early days of the Invasion. And of course you got those scenes during the siege of Stalingrad where the high command setup machine guns in the rear to shoot anybody trying to retreat!
 
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As bad as the Nazi's were I'm not sure if the Communists were an improvement (for the average non-Jewish Russian). I mean Stalin starved like a million Kulaks, purged his officer corps etc. during peace time which caused a number of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers to join up with the Germans as Russian tank and infantry units in the early days of the Invasion. And of course you got those scenes during the siege of Stalingrad where the high command setup machine guns in the rear to shoot anybody trying to retreat!
Sure, Bolsheviks (later to become known as communists) were as evil as they come. But most of the Russian people weren't Bolsheviks, but merely suffered under their yoke, as we in the West will someday (soon) suffer under the yoke of our Bolsheviks. But this doesn't diminish the suffering caused by the rise of the 3rd Reich by any means, does it?
 
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E.C.

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*Ahem!*
As a resident expert on Russia (see my user name), I can say that most of us have little conception of the Russian side of things, and if the Russian national histories exaggerate their own accomplishments, so do ours.
Large portions of Russia and the Soviet Union in general were occupied by the Germans, who got all the way to Moscow before being pushed back, and the war touched and caused devastation in practically every family. Nearly everyone lost one or more close relatives, often all of them, and the suffering under occupation and the cruelty of the Germans is hard for us to imagine. We just plain didn’t experience that, even if our own grandfathers landed in Normandy or Okinawa. As a result, the holiday is treated religiously. Belittle it, and Russian involvement, and they will react more harshly than if someone walked into one of our altars and defiled it.
The fact that WWII was not an American war outside of Pearl Harbor and the Aleutian Islands Campaign is something that we as Americans take for granted. Making it as far as Moscow and former Stalingrad I think the US equivalent would be as if Canada invaded and made it as far as Washington DC with a segment that reached Texas.

There's a travel vlogger on Youtube that goes by the name "Bald and Bankrupt". It's a bald British guy who's gone to different countries around the world, but he goes to the former USSR a lot and speaks very good Russian. I like it because he tends to go to places that many tourists won't go to such as the Caucasus, various autonomous republics of non-Russian people, etc. I remember in one video he was at a Great Patriotic War memorial in a rural part of Belarus. This memorial was built on what little was left of a village and had stone monuments with the names of the villagers who were killed. Most had anywhere from 4-15 people all of the same family (I think it was one monument per house) with their ages and we're talking at least two dozen monuments just for this one village. Not too far away was another memorial which had about fifty or so stone monuments representing villages in that province which were entirely destroyed and each monument there had the village name, the number lost, and I think also either the date it was destroyed, or the date liberated (maybe both?). He went on to say that these memorials are just for the villages that they know about! Sadly, we'll likely never truly know how many people were lost just on those plains between what's now Poland and Moscow.


Exaggerations aside, you're absolutely right rusmeister in that we in the USA just didn't experience a lot of the horrors of war. Even when I was in Okinawa to this day seventy years later there are many caves around the island that are forbidden to enter because that's where civilians went to kill themselves for fear of the American invasion and subsequent occupation. The Japanese told there people a lot and so there were a lot of cases of mother taking their kids into a cave with a grenade and going from there.
 
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Lukaris

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It is interesting, in certain aspects, to probe the psychology of the Nazi regime. There were some German generals loyal to the order but retained their humanity & were combat effective but demoted at times for not being purely evil. A good example is General Gottherd Heinrici:
Gotthard Heinrici - Wikipedia
 
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buzuxi02

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The Greeks still comemorate the last Byzantine emperor even though he was a uniate for fighting to the death against the Turks.
Millions of Russians had died and their country's fate could have been the same as all those Armenians and Greeks and Assyrians who no longer exist in Anatolia and Egypt and Syria etc.
With that said I also think it's wrong that Germans cannot commemorate their war dead like everyone else does.
 
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Dorothea

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It is a pivotal day in Russian history and millions of Russians ( Ukrainians & other former Soviets) died for their fellow people. Most of them were patriots who were probably not responsible for the system they lived under. It is their history and they honor their forefathers & foremothers who gave their lives.
Yes. And from what I've learned, Russians lost the most people during WWII. So, what happened in WWII affects nearly everyone's relatives, ancestors from then.
 
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You’re only married to a Russian, have half Russian kids, and live in Russia. As if you know! ^_^^_^:sorry:

*Ahem!*
As a resident expert on Russia (see my user name), I can say that most of us have little conception of the Russian side of things, and if the Russian national histories exaggerate their own accomplishments, so do ours.
Large portions of Russia and the Soviet Union in general were occupied by the Germans, who got all the way to Moscow before being pushed back, and the war touched and caused devastation in practically every family. Nearly everyone lost one or more close relatives, often all of them, and the suffering under occupation and the cruelty of the Germans is hard for us to imagine. We just plain didn’t experience that, even if our own grandfathers landed in Normandy or Okinawa. As a result, the holiday is treated religiously. Belittle it, and Russian involvement, and they will react more harshly than if someone walked into one of our altars and defiled it.
 
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Dorothea

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And not only that, the two Orthodox countries were integral parts of the downfall of the Nazis -- Russia (even if it was run by atheists at the time, it still had Orthodox believers living underground) and Greece.
 
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rusmeister

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Well, it's obvious there will be more Orthodox in Russia than in Germany (mostly Lutherans and Catholics), but it looks like everyone just want to overlook the Communists who after the War kept persecuting Orthodox Christians.
Looks can be deceiving.
I assure you, that I see Communists and Stalinists all over the place now. The American foreign policy that insists on making Russia an enemy and credible geopolitical threat is causing them to multiply. They figure, “Why join a West that is aiming to screw us?” And Victory Day IS a focal point for them, the one thing they can self-righteously beat their chests over, because it is true that ordinary people from the Soviet Union bore tremendous losses that we are unable or unwilling to wrap our heads around. On a Victory Day that was cold with light drizzling, and a parade cancelled with the excuse of Covid, I saw Communists gathered with red flags in the town square anyway. I see Orthodox people in my church who admire and justify Stalin. And I am alarmed.
 
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