Orthodox Reflections

There have been many strange political marriages in history, but by far one of the strangest has been the enduring romance between American Conservatives (small government, Jeffersonian types) and the massive power of Leviathan. American (traditional) Conservatives hate the IRS, mostly love Jesus and traditional morals, believe guns prevent tyranny, wax apoplectic about violations of their rights, demand government accountability, and cheered when Reagan said, “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Leviathan – a gigantic, unaccountable national security apparatus that spends massive budgets on overthrowing foreign governments, prosecuting foreign wars, bribing journalists, and spying at home and abroad. Since the rise of godless Communism, these two opposites have had a strange marriage of convenience that the Election of 2020 will finally, and mercifully, be putting to an end.

The military, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI – conservatives since at least the 50’s have largely given all of these organizations unqualified support. They were the heroic first line of defense against the evil commies. When I joined the military in the 80’s, it was to defend God and freedom. My Southern, Evangelical idealism was not at all unusual in the military at the time. Killing people in foreign lands, interfering in foreign governments, even helping dictators murder dissidents were all just the price we had to pay to beat the commies for Jesus.

But then a weird thing happened. We did beat the commies. Even before I was discharged, the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union were gone. Like a lot of Conservatives, that was a shock to my system. I had been led to believe Communism was forever. Of course, looking back on the economic disaster that it is, I can hardly believe it lasted as long as it did. But when it all crashed down, I really expected that we would scale back the National Security state and go back to mostly minding our own business as we did prior to WWII.

Instead, we just plunged on finding new wars to fight, and new ways to justify our bloated military and intelligence budgets. In the 90’s, American Conservatives rallied around a president, Bill Clinton, in bombing the hapless Orthodox Christian Serbs and the equally defenseless Iraqis. Most Americans wouldn’t have bought a used-car from Clinton, but as a nation we sure bought into campaigns of mass-murder on the basis of transparent lies. It was around that time I converted to Orthodoxy, and suddenly realized just how much abuse the Orthodox Church and her people were subjected to by American power. Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Ukraine, Romania, Albania, Russia, Greece, Cyprus, Georgia, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Syria – whether killing people, imposing sanctions, picking sides in ecclesiastical disputes, overthrowing governments, supporting dictators, hampering self-defense, or trying to rewrite legal codes to foster the LGBTQ+ agenda, the American National Security State has been neck-deep in global Orthodoxy for decades.

I was once privileged to meet a Bishop from Albania in the early 2000’s. I asked him what the biggest problem was in Albania for the Church. I expected him to talk about the rise of Muslim fundamentalism. He smiled at me kindly and said, “American culture and American power, for both serve Satan.” I will never forget that moment.

But other Conservatives continued in the 90’s and 2000’s to cling to an idea that somehow our intelligence agencies and military were “above the partisan fray.” Lacking a national church of our own, religious Americans filled in the gap by worshipping the National Security State as a point of national unity. Where a nation’s treasure is spent, there is its heart. In 2019, the United States had 17 Intelligence agencies at a publicly acknowledged cost of $81.7 billion. The classified stuff is extra. The Department of Defense spent an estimated total of $962 billion. Combined, we easily spend over $1 trillion a year on spying and destruction around the world.

All that money. All that power. The ability to compromise foreign politicians with secretly obtained dirt. The ability to change votes. The ability to bribe journalists to shade their coverage. The ability to overthrow governments around the world by manufacturing mobs of protestors and “controlling the narrative.” As an American, I watched this happening to innocent people around the world, and I worried about when the money and the power would come for us. My fellow small government-minded Conservatives had a blind spot for this. Despite the revelations of Snowden and Assange, most on the Right continued to denounce “conspiracy theories” that would indicate our National Security State was mired in illegal spying and massive war crimes.

Better to wrap yourself in the flag, and pretend only the Bureau of Land Management was power-hungry or that in Federal Law Enforcement, only ATF was as incompetent as it was corrupt. Sure, as the Obama Administration wore on, more Americans could buy the idea that the DOJ under Eric Holder could run guns into Mexico. Movies and TV indicated that, maybe, the CIA in the bad-old days might have made some money running drugs. We were willing to believe the IRS could be used to punitively audit conservative groups. We even, finally, got clarity on how badly Clinton lied over Serbia and how Bush had lied us into war in Iraq. Widespread American apathy spared Syria a full-scale invasion, despite the best efforts of our entire National Security establishment. So maybe we had learned a few things.

But it took Donald J. Trump being elected president to fully and completely expose the truth. The National Security State does not see itself as the servant of the American people. It sees itself as our master. And Donald Trump’s America First ideas had to go, lest they eventually damage budgets, careers, and power. So we watched in horror as sinister revelation after sinister revelation came to light. The Trump Campaign was spied on. The FBI manufactured evidence to indict Trump supporters and officials such as General Flynn. Since the election of Trump, the Media has turned into a less trustworthy version of Pravda. Lies have piled on top of lies, and it has became clear that senior levels of federal law enforcement, the National Security agencies, and the military were colluding with the Democrats to bring down the President via a sham impeachment. And then came the current election, where the level of coordination in stealing votes between Democratically-controlled cities and states simply cannot be ignored.

The Democrats in the House impeached President Trump. Democrat governors and mayors locked down their economies to hurt the President’s re-election chances, and twisted election law in favor of insecure, fraud-prone mail-in ballots for “safety.” It is also true that the election is now being stolen in Democratic strongholds. But please don’t make any mistake about this. The same National Security State that has been after President Trump since 2015 is neck-deep in coordinating this just as if we were in Ukraine or Honduras. The people of the United States have reared a scorpion in our bosom, and it is now stinging us to death. The party of unbridled lust for power has teamed up with the National Security State to do to us what we have done to so many others. We now have our own “color revolution” complete with a “botched election,” street riots, and our very own Orange-man Hitler who is refusing to yield to the “will of the people” as expressed by CNN commentators. It must all be true, since I saw it on TV.

Which brings us back to this divorce I mentioned. On a go-forward basis, the marriage of convenience between the National Security State and American Conservatives is now, officially, ended. Charges of “conspiracy theorist” or “Russian agent” or “anti-American radical” or “Putin apologist” or “racist” or whatever will simply be shrugged off. It is not a “conspiracy theory” if it is, indeed, a fact. From this point on, conservative Americans will never believe another word uttered by the National Security, Federal Law Enforcement, and Democratic Party establishments. The Republic has been overthrown in front of our very eyes, and a doddering old fool has been installed to bow to the Globalist Agenda.

Even before the election, some conservatives were calling for the abolition of the CIA, the FBI, and a radical restructuring of the DoD. These calls will get louder, as will demands that Florida and other Red States carve out more power versus the Federal Government. It was always destined to end this way. The heart and soul of the Republican Party are small government Christians. Only by threatening them with a boogey man like Communism or Jihadism could the National Security State get them to give up their freedoms, their privacy, and their hard-earned tax dollars. The Democrats with their affinity for bureaucracy, centralization, and conformity are a natural power-base for our tax-fattened authoritarians. A republic may pay its spies and its soldiers half-way decently, but a totalitarian state offers them the opportunity to be Giants Walking the Earth. The requirement to mouth politically correct platitudes is a small price to pay for such lofty status. Fallen man and power are a toxic combination.

As an Orthodox Christian, I am not burdened by the end-times prophecies of the Evangelicals. While they have naively looked for the anti-Christ to arise in Europe (the revitalized Roman Empire), they have failed to see our own national complicity in fanning the rise of Hellfire. Perhaps they should have noticed all those Roman-looking buildings in Washington D.C.?  Instead of modeling ourselves on the Roman Republic, perhaps it was always destined to be the corrupt empire of Nero that we would have to endure.

I really don’t know how this is going to end. President Trump may rally a judicial response and yet prevail. But whether he does or not, the time has come to scrap the National Security State. Not reform it, but totally scrap it. The United States must become a peaceful, decentralized Republic once more. If we continue to fund secret agencies capable of destabilizing foreign countries, then we can rest assured that they will not refrain from bringing their work home to us. Either we do away with the National Security State, its Democratic Party political arm, its tech billionaire support network, and its Antifa / BLM street army, or they will most assuredly do away with us.

Damien is a U.S. Army veteran and member of the Orthodox Church in America