(Orthodox) Russian soldiers engage in systematic rape to prevent women from having babies in future

[Platina]

//... while reminding us that the clergy are comforting those who are sent to kill unarmed and bound civilians and kidnap children.//

Commenting on this part ONLY, would you have soldiers NOT get spiritual care?

Some of your points are good and some not. Obviously these priests had nothing to do with naming the division, but yes, it's ridiculous that they all gathered around his statue for a photo and then that was posted on the diocesan site.

 

[rusmeister]

I think they see themselves as disconnected from, and even opposing, actual evils committed by Russians in the Ukraine. But they will probably tend, for the most part, to deny that any Russians are committing any evils, and I don’t see any good excuse that can be offered for the Russian Church’s tendency to ally itself with the Communists and Stalinism. I myself am bewildered by it, Archer, even though I can conceive and grasp a lot of how they see things. It seems mainly to be driven by an attitude of “our country has always been great” which then seeks to minimize and/or deny the past evils, and /or to justify the past evils under an attitude of “You can’t make an omlet without breaking some eggs”.

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

I recall a time when TAW wasnt hysterical. This obsession with “Evil Putin” sounds like the level of crazy we heard from those women screaming at the sky when Trump won….a frenzy worthy of the Red Hour orgy…..that reference was for my buddy Rus….

 

[archer75]

I think they see themselves as disconnected from, and even opposing, actual evils committed by Russians in the Ukraine. But they will probably tend, for the most part, to deny that any Russians are committing any evils, and I don’t see any good excuse that can be offered for the Russian Church’s tendency to ally itself with the Communists and Stalinism. I myself am bewildered by it, Archer, even though I can conceive and grasp a lot of how they see things. It seems mainly to be driven by an attitude of “our country has always been great” which then seeks to minimize and/or deny the past evils, and /or to justify the past evils under an attitude of “You can’t make an omlet without breaking some eggs”.

You put it in accurate terms, although to me a different formulation presents itself: the Russian Church celebrates and sees no need to condemn or even to distance itself from...the murder (present and past) of its own flock, and the attempted destruction of the Russian Church.

Even if we pretend to ignore for the moment that this is an Orthodox forum...I cannot see that as anything but astoundingly destructive incoherence.

The notion that the clergy of an autocephalous church would choose to ally themselves with forces that were openly committed to laying waste to the Church...I confess I find the whole thing boggling. I feel disoriented even to see that this picture exists, I posted it, and am now replying to your remarks.

At the end of and after the Soviet period, the ROC (regardless of the virtues or sins of any of the faithful or clergy between 1917 and 1991) at least could claim to be, in some way, putting itself back together after a period of unusual persecution.

It is hard to see an end to the present situation, but if an end comes, it will be hard to see how the ROC will justify what it has done in full view of the entire world. I suppose the obvious options are denial and repentance. Or, once the public money is pulled out, we could see the failure of the ROC as a jurisdiction.

I cannot quite believe that there is a picture, on this thread, of Orthodox clergy gathered around a statue of a man primarily known for overseeing the murder of Orthodox Christians.

 

[Nick1000]

I recall a time when TAW wasnt hysterical. This obsession with “Evil Putin” sounds like the level of crazy we heard from those women screaming at the sky when Trump won….a frenzy worthy of the Red Hour orgy…..that reference was for my buddy Rus….

Flat-out full genocide in progress.

Putin should be placed in shackles and taken to the Hague and tried for war crimes.

 

[rusmeister]

You put it in accurate terms, although to me a different formulation presents itself: the Russian Church celebrates and sees no need to condemn or even to distance itself from...the murder (present and past) of its own flock, and the attempted destruction of the Russian Church.

Even if we pretend to ignore for the moment that this is an Orthodox forum...I cannot see that as anything but astoundingly destructive incoherence.

The notion that the clergy of an autocephalous church would choose to ally themselves with forces that were openly committed to laying waste to the Church...I confess I find the whole thing boggling. I feel disoriented even to see that this picture exists, I posted it, and am now replying to your remarks.

At the end of and after the Soviet period, the ROC (regardless of the virtues or sins of any of the faithful or clergy between 1917 and 1991) at least could claim to be, in some way, putting itself back together after a period of unusual persecution.

It is hard to see an end to the present situation, but if an end comes, it will be hard to see how the ROC will justify what it has done in full view of the entire world. I suppose the obvious options are denial and repentance. Or, once the public money is pulled out, we could see the failure of the ROC as a jurisdiction.

I cannot quite believe that there is a picture, on this thread, of Orthodox clergy gathered around a statue of a man primarily known for overseeing the murder of Orthodox Christians.

I think this is kind of the point - that we agree on something really important, but you tend to express the Russian evils from your point of view, and seem uninterested or unwilling to imagine how they might see themselves. Very few think in terms of “Ha ha! I am doing evil and relish it!” Most imagine themselves to be doing good, and sadly, Christians doing wrong can easily imagine themselves doing the work of God. I think we agree on that, and it’s just a matter of what we express, how we come across to each other.

 

[Lukaris]

Here are some observations of Russian Orthodox priest

Fr Ioann ( Burdin) who has walked a fine line his dissent of the invasion of Ukraine. There seem to centuries of deep rooted problems within the Russian Church. I have been following his blog for the past year. This is a long pasted post & I just thought it might be worth sharing. I am not making any inferences to anyone’s posts in the thread,





OLD SONGS ABOUT THE MAIN THINGS
(a cursory look at the history of the Russian church)

The Mongol rule was a golden age for the Russian church. The Mongols completely freed the clergy from any duties - tribute and taxes. While Rus' was impoverished, church wealth grew at breakneck speed.

In a hundred years (from the beginning to the end of the 14th century), as many monasteries were built as in 400 years before. By the middle of the 16th century, there were about 200 monasteries in Rus'. Some are huge.

The monks did not have time to cultivate those lands that were donated to them in large quantities. It was the monasteries that were among the first landowners who asked the king to attach the peasants to the land.

At the time of its heyday, the Trinity-Sergius Monastery owned hundreds of thousands of serfs who cultivated monastic estates in 15 provinces.

In general, the church owned a third of the land in Russia and two million slaves out of a total of 12 million (at the time when Catherine 2 took them into state ownership).

In the 14-15 centuries, the monks mostly lived not in the monastery, but in the villages belonging to it, where they supervised the agriculture, trade and crafts of their brotherhood.

According to many testimonies of foreigners, in the 16th century only one Russian monk out of ten knew "Our Father", the Vologda bishop was unable to answer the foreign guest's question - how many evangelists were there, and ordinary lay people did not know at all either the Gospel, or the Creed, or even "Our Father" and "Virgin Mother of God rejoice".

Maxim Grek, who arrived in Russia to translate liturgical books, was horrified by the decline in morals among the clergy.

The Russian clergy is so absorbed in worldly wealth, wrote Prince Andrei Kurbsky, that "it lies motionless, caressing the authorities and pleasing them in order to keep their own and gain even more."

This conflict between the worldly and the spiritual resulted in the well-known clash between the supporters of Nil Sorsky and Joseph Volotsky. It was finally resolved in favor of the "covetous" after the disciple of Joseph, Metropolitan Daniel blessed Prince Vasily 3 to divorce his barren wife, marry again and took upon himself the royal sin. In gratitude, the prince gave the Josephites the opportunity to put their opponents behind bars (including the famous Maximus the Greek).

The Russian Church did not just support the monarchy, it developed the entire ideology of Russian autocracy: the idea of the Third Rome, the crowning of the kingdom, the divinity of the origin of royal power, the Moscow sovereigns as the heirs of Emperor Augustus - the universal Christian rulers and emperors of all the Orthodox world ...

The delusions of grandeur that developed from Moscow sovereigns - from Ivan to Vladimir - and resulted in the desire to subdue all the surrounding peoples, we are indebted precisely to the leaders of the Russian church, who for centuries cultivated this mania in the "autocrats".

Realizing their greatness, the kings began to remove and appoint metropolitans, appropriate church money and property, and finally abolished the patriarchate and expropriated church lands. The carefully fed dragon grew up and ate the mother.

And all the same, right up to the revolution itself, Russian monasteries were "a cemetery of useless riches."

Nikolai of Japan complained that, having millions of dollars in turnover, the church did not want to fork out for missionary work in Japan, and he had to collect money from private individuals for a penny.

Semyon Fudel bitterly recalled how in the bell tower of the Novogorodsky-Yuryevsky monastery precious deposits rotted, stuffed there from floor to ceiling.

He also wrote about the colossal salaries that diocesan bishops received from the state. Metropolitans of Kyiv and Moscow (with ready premises, servants, departures, table) had in cash: the first - over 100 thousand, and the second - over 60 thousand rubles. in year. Ordinary dioceses gave their archpastors 30-50 thousand a year, not counting apartments and other maintenance. Departments with salaries below 10 thousand rubles. per year (with full maintenance) were already considered poor. At the same time, a factory worker (in 1908) received an average of 240 rubles a year.


The meager crumbs of these useless riches were spent on the poor. Everything else fell into the tenacious hands of the Bolsheviks, who spent something on the civil war and attempts to unleash a world revolution, and something else that rotted in other cellars in the same way.

But even having become poor, the church did not get rid of the habit of "serving the sovereign" and, seeing off curses to the grave of the new martyrs - "enemies of the people", sang praises to their executioner:
"We pray for the strengthening of your strength and we send you a prayerful wish for many years of life for joy and happiness our great Motherland, blessing your feat of serving it and being inspired by this feat of yours" (Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, N 12, 1949).

Dreaming of expanding the boundaries of his empire, Stalin tried to use the church to promote his influence abroad, including through the world council of churches, however, the project of a great empire "from ocean to ocean" died with him on March 5, 1953.

Subsequent general secretaries were small in caliber, and therefore used the church for small-scale intelligence work and sponsoring the "Peace Fund", which fed the communist parties and terrorist movements around the globe.

And only perestroika allowed the Russian church to take its rightful place as one of the pillars (or legs of the presidential chair) of Russian power.

And here the flourishing of church and monastic construction began again in Rus'. Well, yes, the financial river is not so wide. And serfs have not yet been allowed to attach to parishes and monasteries ... But on the other hand, familiar bells tinkle loudly from the church pulpit (even in Moscow itself!) - "Holy Rus'", "foreign languages" ... And there - choo! - something new: "globalism", "liberal values", "Motherland or death"...

These close embraces of the Russian church and power are strong. What can separate them?
1.6Kviews

МАРАН АФА Блог Иоанна Бурдина

Блог Иоанна Бурдина

t.me

 

[Platina]

I don't support the war, but I don't see how it makes any sense to call this a genocide. The fighting is in the areas that are more heavily Russian... It's not like Western Ukraine is being trampled in order to wipe out Ukrainians.

 

[Nick1000]

I don't support the war, but I don't see how it makes any sense to call this a genocide. The fighting is in the areas that are more heavily Russian... It's not like Western Ukraine is being trampled in order to wipe out Ukrainians.

Putin is flat out waging war against civilians with the goal of eliminating every possible resemblance of anything Ukrainian related and reducing as many cities and towns to a lunar landscape as possible.

The fact that many Russians- whether soldiers of civilians- may also die along the way is of no concern to the Russian regime.

It's disgusting . There is not a day that goes by that multiple Russian artillery units do not roll into a city, identify row after row of civilian housing units, and flatten them. The deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime along with all the other rape and torture, kidnapping of children and taking them into Russia, etc.

Disgusting. If Putin and his regime have solid defenses in charges of genocide against them, they can make their case at a war crimes tribunal.

In regard to genocide, your view is noted and is worthy of being heard and probably has some merit.
But not moreso than the testimony and experience of residents in such towns as Bucha where the Russians systematically went door to door executed anything and everything- man, woman, and child WITHOUT REGARD to the military threat they posed.

 

[archer75]

I think this is kind of the point - that we agree on something really important, but you tend to express the Russian evils from your point of view, and seem uninterested or unwilling to imagine how they might see themselves. Very few think in terms of “Ha ha! I am doing evil and relish it!” Most imagine themselves to be doing good, and sadly, Christians doing wrong can easily imagine themselves doing the work of God. I think we agree on that, and it’s just a matter of what we express, how we come across to each other.

I think I'm reasonablhy willing to go into how "they" ("they" here are RF people who support the war against Ukraine) justify it to themselves, although I don't say too much about it -- that line of thinking is already visible enough. And I think that line of thinking is incorrect and sinful.

Indeed, few (it seems) think that they are the villains. I might also say (and did all but say above) that few tend to have a cheerful or celebratory attitude about those who are known for murdering their "kind" (communion, race). I would be very surprised to see the clergy of a Roman Catholic diocese gathered around a statue of Andronikos Komnenos at a library named for him, or some such place, if Andronikos Komnenos had lived (barely) within living memory and was known ONLY for taking active (suppose it was much more active than is generally believed) part in the event known as the Massacre of the Latins. Why...why would Roman Catholics celebrate the murder of Roman Catholics? The bloody and extrajudicial execution of a papal legate?

It's because I'm trying to put myself in their shoes that this is so troubling to me. One assumes that the clergy in the picture think of themselves as Orthodox, as most Orthodox do, and that they think of themselves as non-villanous, as most people do when we are not really focused on repentance. How do Orthodox clergy, whose patriarch supports the notion that they are in some kind of spiritual battle against "the West," celebrate Feliks Dzerzhinsky, a Polish noble who...worked for a criminal and atheistic regime and oversaw the murders of many Orthodox clergy?

My being boggled here isn't really about the war against that a nuclear power is waging against Ukrainian schoolchildren and babies while doing its best to destroy, exile, and otherwise terrorize its own people. It's about coherence. I think this picture shows that the mainstream (Putinite, and its even-more-extreme offshoots) narratives about Russian history are becoming incoherent. Not objectionable, not factually wrong, but incoherent. You say, I assume rightly, that

it seems mainly to be driven by an attitude of “our country has always been great” which then seeks to minimize and/or deny the past evils, and /or to justify the past evils under an attitude of “You can’t make an omlet without breaking some eggs”.

But -- as any number of high schoolers could tell you, and as you already know, the history of Russia is not just one current. There have been many movements and currents opposed to each other. It does not make sense for them all to be equally "good." You say that they minimize or justify the past evils (for example, the slaughter of Orthodox clergy). If one minimizes past evils, then there has to be some good thing that was associated with those evils. What was Dzerzhinsky "good" at? Organizing? Overseeing? You have to oversee or organize something. You can't just use oversight-and-murder skills in some abstract way unrelated to real actions. Omelette? Where's the omelette that was made by "breaking these eggs" (summary executions of thousands of people)? Someone, please, show me this super-delicious omelette. "Лес рубят — щепки летят" (proverb: when you cut down the wood, chips [of wood] go flying -- similar to omelette / eggs).

I try to see this from their perspective, and...all I can come up with is a fog. You can't admire (from an Orthodox perspective) anything Dzerzhinsky is known for. It's impossible. I haven't even seen an attempt to do it in words (maybe there are some).

So how can this picture be? My limited understanding says that, from the perspective of the clergy -- and here, I'm being as charitable as I can imagine being -- the meaning of it must be something like "POWER TO MURDER is GOOD!" But it's not that thought in words, just a reflex of that thought that cannot be spoken (because speaking it would too obviously contradict...all of Orthodoxy.

Now, there may be another perspective here--that of those who decided to put it up. I don't know the identity of those people. For all I know, they are not even nominally Orthodox. I can guess at those people's motivations, and it might be something like "use this to show how completely we control the minds of the Orthodox clergy, by having them celebrate someone who killed Orthodox clergy."

There was discussion on here a couple years ago about Archbishop Elpidophoros of GOARCH and his holding of a "Black Lives Matter" sign. I will not try to summarize the discussion and do not intend to restart it. I will only say that my initial opinion at the time, which was, roughly, "There's nothing criminal or un-Orthodox about this statement in itself, and it's entirely possible that someone from another cultural background doesn't understand everything attached to it," was at least sort of hasty and, in context, wrong-ish. But it IS possible at least to imagine good motivations for holding that sign. One can imagine this sort of thing easily. Imagine an Orthodox bishop holding that sign in the 1930s when the Scottsboro "boys" were on trial. Anyone would say "Sure, that doesn't contradict Orthodoxy. These young men and boys are human, made in the image of God, they're not to be killed or imprisoned for no reason, not to be subjected to years of torment, not to be the targets of false witness, of course not."

Is this possible here, an understanding of how the understanding of those pictured is (locally, with imperfect knowledge) not a howlingly obvious contradiction of the Orthodox faith?

I can't see it. As I said above, the closest I can come is a kind of broken thought: "Us good, others bad. Us power, others weak. Killing is us, killed is them. Killer good! Killer us! Us good! Kill!" This is the best I can do here. This is my understanding of what you said above, in context. I'm not attributing this thought to you. I'm saying that, yeah, I see that they likely have some kind of notion of "us good!" What does this mean? For "us" to be "good" without comment? It means that sin is good. "Our country has always been great." Well, the recent history of the country is well-known for horrific, atheistic, murderous regimes that made a point of persecuting the Orthodox. The unambiguous meaning in this context is "sin is great."

What was the omelette that was made by breaking those eggs (the skulls of clergy and laity)? There was no omelette. The omelette was the killing. And it's true enough to say that "You can't kill people without killing people." But in "you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs," the omelette is the immediate goal. In "You can't kill people without killing people," the similarity of structure makes it look like a justification. But that's a trick. It's really a tautology. One might assume or imagine on trying to look at this charitably "well, maybe Dzerzhinsky did bad stuff, but it was for a good cause." What was the cause? Power enforced by and propped up by killing was the goal.

The picture shows approval of murder, specifically, the murder of Orthodox Christians -- not even the Orthodox Ukrainians who are being murdered right now, but the very ancestors (culturally, maybe in the flesh!) of those pictured. One of the central claims for justifying the war is (or was) that MP Orthodox were being persecuted. Clergy here are shown respectfully standing by a bust of a man known for persecuting and killing...MP Orthodox.

"Killing Orthodox Christians is good. Sin is good. Goodness is determined not by whether something is pleasing to God, but by whether it is commanded by a secular power that claims the name 'Russia' for itself. In effect, the ruler of Russia is God." -- This is my best attempt to make sense of this picture, the most coherent "lesson" I can take from it, the best I can do when I try to see how it means something to those who produced it.

This is counter-factual madness, un-Orthodox on its face.

 

[archer75]

Putin is flat out waging war against civilians with the goal of eliminating every possible resemblance of anything Ukrainian related and reducing as many cities and towns to a lunar landscape as possible.

The fact that many Russians- whether soldiers of civilians- may also die along the way is of no concern to the Russian regime.

It's disgusting . There is not a day that goes by that multiple Russian artillery units do not roll into a city, identify row after row of civilian housing units, and flatten them. The deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime along with all the other rape and torture, kidnapping of children and taking them into Russia, etc.

Disgusting. If Putin and his regime have solid defenses in charges of genocide against them, they can make their case at a war crimes tribunal.

In regard to genocide, your view is noted and is worthy of being heard and probably has some merit.
But not moreso than the testimony and experience of residents in such towns as Bucha where the Russians systematically went door to door executed anything and everything- man, woman, and child WITHOUT REGARD to the military threat they posed.

@Platina, it's genocide. As I have posted on this thread, the Russian propaganda machine makes no secret: the goal is to destroy the very idea of being Ukrainian.

The Putinites learned a long time ago they could not "win" on the battlefield, so they decided to wage war against children, pregnant women, unarmed civilians, the elderly.

This affects all of us spiritually. Not only do all humans live in the world, and this war is a cancer on the history of the world, but we members of TAW are all in communion with a jurisdiction that supports genocide. How they justify it to themselves or what a given YouTuber says is irrelevant.

 

[archer75]

Thanks for the link, @Lukaris. Worthwhile blog posts from Father Ioann, looks like.

 

[archer75]

The fact that many Russians- whether soldiers of civilians- may also die along the way is of no concern to the Russian regime.

Have already died, with another wave of mobilization coming up soon, in all likelihood.

"Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars
could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient..." - George Orwell, 1984

Inconvenience is the ONLY reason a hundred thousand, a million, ten million slaughtered would be worth even a moment's thought to the regime. The world is dealing with a regime that all but openly considers its own subjects to be less than slaves, to be garbage. More or less openly, now. Putin appears with fake 'mothers of dead soldiers' (regime types who appear in other videos in other roles) and tells them, "hey, your son could have drunk himself to death, lots of people in this country do. Wasn't this better?"

(Note: I do not share the opinion that the citizens of the RF are garbage. However, their government appears to hold this opinion.)

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

Flat-out full genocide in progress.

Putin should be placed in shackles and taken to the Hague and tried for war crimes.

And you believe CNN, NATO, MSNBC, NY Times, Pravda Ukraina, Democrats, RINO Republicans, Klaus Schwab, Justin Trudeau, the EU, and the rest of these media outlets?

Putin isn’t Mother Theresa, but neither is Jewish leader Zelensky and the corrupt Ukrainian machine. They’re a mafia state. Zelensky shut down canonical Orthodox parishes in his country, has martial law and civil liberties and freedom of the press 100% halted. He’s the same as “Evil Putin.”

The casualties coming out of Ukraine are wildly different from Russian claims. Neither side is reporting the truth. No proof of genocides. This kind of talk took place as years ago against the Serbian people with “Mass graves” and “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” NATO carpet-bombed the poop out of Serbia for three straight months and cut their power grid and damaged their water delivery systems tearing the place apart. Serbs still haven’t forgotten. They were the convenient fall guy villains. And NATO and several EU nations were happy to give the stolen land of Kosovo to the Albanian squatters. It’s ok if Israel and Kosovo steal land. But if Russia annexes territories, it’s a crisis. ‍

Nobody thinks Russia is in there passing out tickets to see the Wiggles, but we can’t get hysterical believing the pravda and “news” from American and Ukrainian sources either.

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

Where was all this “genocidal” outrage when Ukraine’s government was killing, harassing, marginalizing, and persecuting ethnic Russians in Ukraine lo these past many years? How many videos have we seen showing talk shows, variety shows, and even the ole standup Jewish comic Zelensky talking up killing Russians LONG before this war?

Where is the outrage that NATO forced this? If Ukraine had kept to the origin idea that they were to abide by the peace accords at Minsk regarding Donbas and the longstanding idea that Ukraine is a neutral country not in league with NATO, this war wouldn’t have gone down. Lindsey Graham, that warmongering McCain, Obama, and the neocons in concert with military-industrial complex were listing for this conflict clear back in 2014 and building it up. If these color revolutionaries and CIA goons and Nazi paramilitary creeps hadn’t run Yanukovich off, a duly elected president, would this hellish war being going on?

 

[Platina]

In regard to genocide, your view is noted and is worthy of being heard and probably has some merit.
But not moreso than the testimony and experience of residents in such towns as Bucha where the Russians systematically went door to door executed anything and everything- man, woman, and child WITHOUT REGARD to the military threat they posed.

But is that genocide?

 

[Nick1000]

But is that genocide?

Most definitely.

"genocide" = " the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group"

The Russian machine is fully engaged in trying to systematically depopulate Ukraine and remove all references to Ukraine as a separate people and culture and identity.

If you want to argue that most of what Putin and the regime are doing are just war crimes rather than genocide that's fine. We are not going to try the case here.

Putin consistent message to Ukraine before the war and into the war has always been "Marry me or I will kill you, your children, your elderly parents and your dog." And he has gone on to do just that- with more to come, much more.

Of course having State run Russian TV talking about how we need to drown Ukrainian children does not have a good look to it either.

Russian TV host urging Ukrainian children be drowned is suspended by Kremlin broadcaster RT

Pro-war advocate Anton Krasovsky apologized for getting "carried away", but Ukraine argues his comments were an aggressive incitement towards genocide.

fortune.com

 

[Nick1000]

And you believe CNN, NATO, MSNBC, NY Times, Pravda Ukraina, Democrats, RINO Republicans, Klaus Schwab, Justin Trudeau, the EU, and the rest of these media outlets?

Putin isn’t Mother Theresa, but neither is Jewish leader Zelensky and the corrupt Ukrainian machine. They’re a mafia state. Zelensky shut down canonical Orthodox parishes in his country, has martial law and civil liberties and freedom of the press 100% halted. He’s the same as “Evil Putin.”

The casualties coming out of Ukraine are wildly different from Russian claims. Neither side is reporting the truth. No proof of genocides. This kind of talk took place as years ago against the Serbian people with “Mass graves” and “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” NATO carpet-bombed the poop out of Serbia for three straight months and cut their power grid and damaged their water delivery systems tearing the place apart. Serbs still haven’t forgotten. They were the convenient fall guy villains. And NATO and several EU nations were happy to give the stolen land of Kosovo to the Albanian squatters. It’s ok if Israel and Kosovo steal land. But if Russia annexes territories, it’s a crisis. ‍

Nobody thinks Russia is in there passing out tickets to see the Wiggles, but we can’t get hysterical believing the pravda and “news” from American and Ukrainian sources either.

Rather than enter into the same tired agreement/disagreement on some points above, I will go in the other direction, and say that you had it right in the early days.


I agree with the tone and statements from your March 9 post - particularly where you say:

"We lay people have to do better. This isn't a "globo homo" war. This is about power and restoration of a dead empire. It's about one man's ego. It's about asserting one's will over others. It's about revenge. It's about control. It's about Hitler-style "breathing space." It's appalling."

full post below. other good points contained therein.

gurneyhalleck1 post from March 9, 2022 -

I have to say, I have a VERY heavy heart about this. I think most reasonable people know that Ukraine may be corrupt (aren't all countries these days!?), may want to join the EU and be reaching out to the West, but do they deserve to be bombed mercilessly day and night? Do they deserve no humanitarian safety zones, civilian areas being racked with bombing, all because supposedly there are Nazis and Ukraine wants to join the EU and NATO?

I get a bit fatigued from Russia crying out about gay parades. You guys are very familiar with my views on LGBT. I'm one of the loudest against it....that being said.....poisoning enemies, jailing opposition guys like Nevalyny, endless false flag operations, massive abortion numbers, pilfering $$$$ from your economy so that the people receive very little of it (imagine Russia, as mighty, as huge, as expansive as it is, only has the GDP of Florida!!!! And all the oil, gas, palladium, silver, and other ag money goes directly to the oligarchs. People have an average income of $17,000 in Russia), paying mercenaries to kill Americans in Afghanistan, bombing Chechnya into oblivion, stealing territories in the name of history, etc. is pretty much as bad as sodomy. I'm tired of us over-simplifying sin down to outward sexual acts like being gay. Orthodoxy has always been a sane religion that points out sin being far more nuanced. It's why we do Forgiveness Vespers. We ask forgiveness of people we scarcely know because we know that our indifference toward them, our own innate selfishness, and our inward ego are so great that we need to acknowledge between us all the need to forgive. How a patriarch could take a day this sublime and important and squander it breaks my heart. And listening to people in my parish, they loved his sermon and 9 out of 10 of them have a "Go Putin!" stance. I'm sick hearing this. Total indifference toward people who have lost family, are living in subways and train stations, destroyed homes, dead pets, murdered neighbors, broke and without water/food, husbands left behind to fight possibly to the death....that all means nothing because, heck, Putin is fighting the gays!

We lay people have to do better. This isn't a "globo homo" war. This is about power and restoration of a dead empire. It's about one man's ego. It's about asserting one's will over others. It's about revenge. It's about control. It's about Hitler-style "breathing space." It's appalling. It's not appropriate for Forgiveness Sunday. The patriarch should have taken the time to ask the people to forgive HIM for his indifference and his quiescence in a catastrophe.

Russia will come out of this devastated. So sad.

Bosco!

 

[truefiction1]

Here are some observations of Russian Orthodox priest

Fr Ioann ( Burdin) who has walked a fine line his dissent of the invasion of Ukraine. There seem to centuries of deep rooted problems within the Russian Church. I have been following his blog for the past year. This is a long pasted post & I just thought it might be worth sharing. I am not making any inferences to anyone’s posts in the thread,





OLD SONGS ABOUT THE MAIN THINGS
(a cursory look at the history of the Russian church)

The Mongol rule was a golden age for the Russian church. The Mongols completely freed the clergy from any duties - tribute and taxes. While Rus' was impoverished, church wealth grew at breakneck speed.

In a hundred years (from the beginning to the end of the 14th century), as many monasteries were built as in 400 years before. By the middle of the 16th century, there were about 200 monasteries in Rus'. Some are huge.

The monks did not have time to cultivate those lands that were donated to them in large quantities. It was the monasteries that were among the first landowners who asked the king to attach the peasants to the land.

At the time of its heyday, the Trinity-Sergius Monastery owned hundreds of thousands of serfs who cultivated monastic estates in 15 provinces.

In general, the church owned a third of the land in Russia and two million slaves out of a total of 12 million (at the time when Catherine 2 took them into state ownership).

In the 14-15 centuries, the monks mostly lived not in the monastery, but in the villages belonging to it, where they supervised the agriculture, trade and crafts of their brotherhood.

According to many testimonies of foreigners, in the 16th century only one Russian monk out of ten knew "Our Father", the Vologda bishop was unable to answer the foreign guest's question - how many evangelists were there, and ordinary lay people did not know at all either the Gospel, or the Creed, or even "Our Father" and "Virgin Mother of God rejoice".

Maxim Grek, who arrived in Russia to translate liturgical books, was horrified by the decline in morals among the clergy.

The Russian clergy is so absorbed in worldly wealth, wrote Prince Andrei Kurbsky, that "it lies motionless, caressing the authorities and pleasing them in order to keep their own and gain even more."

This conflict between the worldly and the spiritual resulted in the well-known clash between the supporters of Nil Sorsky and Joseph Volotsky. It was finally resolved in favor of the "covetous" after the disciple of Joseph, Metropolitan Daniel blessed Prince Vasily 3 to divorce his barren wife, marry again and took upon himself the royal sin. In gratitude, the prince gave the Josephites the opportunity to put their opponents behind bars (including the famous Maximus the Greek).

The Russian Church did not just support the monarchy, it developed the entire ideology of Russian autocracy: the idea of the Third Rome, the crowning of the kingdom, the divinity of the origin of royal power, the Moscow sovereigns as the heirs of Emperor Augustus - the universal Christian rulers and emperors of all the Orthodox world ...

The delusions of grandeur that developed from Moscow sovereigns - from Ivan to Vladimir - and resulted in the desire to subdue all the surrounding peoples, we are indebted precisely to the leaders of the Russian church, who for centuries cultivated this mania in the "autocrats".

Realizing their greatness, the kings began to remove and appoint metropolitans, appropriate church money and property, and finally abolished the patriarchate and expropriated church lands. The carefully fed dragon grew up and ate the mother.

And all the same, right up to the revolution itself, Russian monasteries were "a cemetery of useless riches."

Nikolai of Japan complained that, having millions of dollars in turnover, the church did not want to fork out for missionary work in Japan, and he had to collect money from private individuals for a penny.

Semyon Fudel bitterly recalled how in the bell tower of the Novogorodsky-Yuryevsky monastery precious deposits rotted, stuffed there from floor to ceiling.

He also wrote about the colossal salaries that diocesan bishops received from the state. Metropolitans of Kyiv and Moscow (with ready premises, servants, departures, table) had in cash: the first - over 100 thousand, and the second - over 60 thousand rubles. in year. Ordinary dioceses gave their archpastors 30-50 thousand a year, not counting apartments and other maintenance. Departments with salaries below 10 thousand rubles. per year (with full maintenance) were already considered poor. At the same time, a factory worker (in 1908) received an average of 240 rubles a year.


The meager crumbs of these useless riches were spent on the poor. Everything else fell into the tenacious hands of the Bolsheviks, who spent something on the civil war and attempts to unleash a world revolution, and something else that rotted in other cellars in the same way.

But even having become poor, the church did not get rid of the habit of "serving the sovereign" and, seeing off curses to the grave of the new martyrs - "enemies of the people", sang praises to their executioner:
"We pray for the strengthening of your strength and we send you a prayerful wish for many years of life for joy and happiness our great Motherland, blessing your feat of serving it and being inspired by this feat of yours" (Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, N 12, 1949).

Dreaming of expanding the boundaries of his empire, Stalin tried to use the church to promote his influence abroad, including through the world council of churches, however, the project of a great empire "from ocean to ocean" died with him on March 5, 1953.

Subsequent general secretaries were small in caliber, and therefore used the church for small-scale intelligence work and sponsoring the "Peace Fund", which fed the communist parties and terrorist movements around the globe.

And only perestroika allowed the Russian church to take its rightful place as one of the pillars (or legs of the presidential chair) of Russian power.

And here the flourishing of church and monastic construction began again in Rus'. Well, yes, the financial river is not so wide. And serfs have not yet been allowed to attach to parishes and monasteries ... But on the other hand, familiar bells tinkle loudly from the church pulpit (even in Moscow itself!) - "Holy Rus'", "foreign languages" ... And there - choo! - something new: "globalism", "liberal values", "Motherland or death"...

These close embraces of the Russian church and power are strong. What can separate them?
1.6Kviews

МАРАН АФА Блог Иоанна Бурдина

Блог Иоанна Бурдина

t.me

Father's historical narrative reveals a hidden underbelly of egalitarian philosophy. This priest could be an anchor for CNN.

Here are some observations of Russian Orthodox priest

Fr Ioann ( Burdin) who has walked a fine line his dissent of the invasion of Ukraine. There seem to centuries of deep rooted problems within the Russian Church. I have been following his blog for the past year. This is a long pasted post & I just thought it might be worth sharing. I am not making any inferences to anyone’s posts in the thread,





OLD SONGS ABOUT THE MAIN THINGS
(a cursory look at the history of the Russian church)

The Mongol rule was a golden age for the Russian church. The Mongols completely freed the clergy from any duties - tribute and taxes. While Rus' was impoverished, church wealth grew at breakneck speed.

In a hundred years (from the beginning to the end of the 14th century), as many monasteries were built as in 400 years before. By the middle of the 16th century, there were about 200 monasteries in Rus'. Some are huge.

The monks did not have time to cultivate those lands that were donated to them in large quantities. It was the monasteries that were among the first landowners who asked the king to attach the peasants to the land.

At the time of its heyday, the Trinity-Sergius Monastery owned hundreds of thousands of serfs who cultivated monastic estates in 15 provinces.

In general, the church owned a third of the land in Russia and two million slaves out of a total of 12 million (at the time when Catherine 2 took them into state ownership).

In the 14-15 centuries, the monks mostly lived not in the monastery, but in the villages belonging to it, where they supervised the agriculture, trade and crafts of their brotherhood.

According to many testimonies of foreigners, in the 16th century only one Russian monk out of ten knew "Our Father", the Vologda bishop was unable to answer the foreign guest's question - how many evangelists were there, and ordinary lay people did not know at all either the Gospel, or the Creed, or even "Our Father" and "Virgin Mother of God rejoice".

Maxim Grek, who arrived in Russia to translate liturgical books, was horrified by the decline in morals among the clergy.

The Russian clergy is so absorbed in worldly wealth, wrote Prince Andrei Kurbsky, that "it lies motionless, caressing the authorities and pleasing them in order to keep their own and gain even more."

This conflict between the worldly and the spiritual resulted in the well-known clash between the supporters of Nil Sorsky and Joseph Volotsky. It was finally resolved in favor of the "covetous" after the disciple of Joseph, Metropolitan Daniel blessed Prince Vasily 3 to divorce his barren wife, marry again and took upon himself the royal sin. In gratitude, the prince gave the Josephites the opportunity to put their opponents behind bars (including the famous Maximus the Greek).

The Russian Church did not just support the monarchy, it developed the entire ideology of Russian autocracy: the idea of the Third Rome, the crowning of the kingdom, the divinity of the origin of royal power, the Moscow sovereigns as the heirs of Emperor Augustus - the universal Christian rulers and emperors of all the Orthodox world ...

The delusions of grandeur that developed from Moscow sovereigns - from Ivan to Vladimir - and resulted in the desire to subdue all the surrounding peoples, we are indebted precisely to the leaders of the Russian church, who for centuries cultivated this mania in the "autocrats".

Realizing their greatness, the kings began to remove and appoint metropolitans, appropriate church money and property, and finally abolished the patriarchate and expropriated church lands. The carefully fed dragon grew up and ate the mother.

And all the same, right up to the revolution itself, Russian monasteries were "a cemetery of useless riches."

Nikolai of Japan complained that, having millions of dollars in turnover, the church did not want to fork out for missionary work in Japan, and he had to collect money from private individuals for a penny.

Semyon Fudel bitterly recalled how in the bell tower of the Novogorodsky-Yuryevsky monastery precious deposits rotted, stuffed there from floor to ceiling.

He also wrote about the colossal salaries that diocesan bishops received from the state. Metropolitans of Kyiv and Moscow (with ready premises, servants, departures, table) had in cash: the first - over 100 thousand, and the second - over 60 thousand rubles. in year. Ordinary dioceses gave their archpastors 30-50 thousand a year, not counting apartments and other maintenance. Departments with salaries below 10 thousand rubles. per year (with full maintenance) were already considered poor. At the same time, a factory worker (in 1908) received an average of 240 rubles a year.


The meager crumbs of these useless riches were spent on the poor. Everything else fell into the tenacious hands of the Bolsheviks, who spent something on the civil war and attempts to unleash a world revolution, and something else that rotted in other cellars in the same way.

But even having become poor, the church did not get rid of the habit of "serving the sovereign" and, seeing off curses to the grave of the new martyrs - "enemies of the people", sang praises to their executioner:
"We pray for the strengthening of your strength and we send you a prayerful wish for many years of life for joy and happiness our great Motherland, blessing your feat of serving it and being inspired by this feat of yours" (Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, N 12, 1949).

Dreaming of expanding the boundaries of his empire, Stalin tried to use the church to promote his influence abroad, including through the world council of churches, however, the project of a great empire "from ocean to ocean" died with him on March 5, 1953.

Subsequent general secretaries were small in caliber, and therefore used the church for small-scale intelligence work and sponsoring the "Peace Fund", which fed the communist parties and terrorist movements around the globe.

And only perestroika allowed the Russian church to take its rightful place as one of the pillars (or legs of the presidential chair) of Russian power.

And here the flourishing of church and monastic construction began again in Rus'. Well, yes, the financial river is not so wide. And serfs have not yet been allowed to attach to parishes and monasteries ... But on the other hand, familiar bells tinkle loudly from the church pulpit (even in Moscow itself!) - "Holy Rus'", "foreign languages" ... And there - choo! - something new: "globalism", "liberal values", "Motherland or death"...

These close embraces of the Russian church and power are strong. What can separate them?
1.6Kviews

МАРАН АФА Блог Иоанна Бурдина

Блог Иоанна Бурдина

t.me

That's not the Church history that we learned. Ours featured actual saints and pious poor believers (some clerics, some serfs or peasants). This one is so reductionist that it could have come straight from the History Channel. And I believe that both Nilus (Sorsky), the leader of the non-possessors camp, and George, the leader of the possessors camp, are canonized, because the Church deemed it critical to have both of these approaches active in the life of the Church. Also, a certain St. Sergius of Radonezh blessed Russian soldiers to fight. There's a time for everything under the sun, even a time to wage war, as tragic as this is.

 

[truefiction1]

Most definitely.

"genocide" = " the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group"

The Russian machine is fully engaged in trying to systematically depopulate Ukraine and remove all references to Ukraine as a separate people and culture and identity.

If you want to argue that most of what Putin and the regime are doing are just war crimes rather than genocide that's fine. We are not going to try the case here.

Putin consistent message to Ukraine before the war and into the war has always been "Marry me or I will kill you, your children, your elderly parents and your dog." And he has gone on to do just that- with more to come, much more.

Of course having State run Russian TV talking about how we need to drown Ukrainian children does not have a good look to it either.

Russian TV host urging Ukrainian children be drowned is suspended by Kremlin broadcaster RT

Pro-war advocate Anton Krasovsky apologized for getting "carried away", but Ukraine argues his comments were an aggressive incitement towards genocide.

fortune.com

War brings with it the hunting down of women and children and killing them, because the soldiers sometimes experience such horror that a rage drives them to punish someone. US soldiers have done this too, as did the Japanese in Nanking. It's not genocide. It's called "beserking". It is why war ought to be avoided if at all possible, because war almost always comes to this.