Orthodox Reflections

Copyright © 2024 By Cassandra St. John, an Orthodox Christian

In my last piece, with the hundreds of thousands of war casualties in mind, I aimed anti-war verbiage at the Russians, before launching a broadside at America’s hegemonic war machine and its religious enablers. The piece was about Archbishop Elpidophoros of the Greek Archdiocese, and it included my critiques of his warmongering.

I, your lovely, astute political correspondent, began a brief and salutary anti-war section with these lines:

“I am neither left nor right, and I condemn the Russians for their disgraceful role in the Ukrainian calamity. (I have this habit of reacting poorly to bloodletting, no matter who is doing it.) But let’s be clear: Elpidophoros and Bartholomew serve the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC).”

Using my column for their manipulative purposes, Charles Bausman and “Russian-Faith.com” removed my references to Russians, disgrace, and bloodletting. They retained my byline but edited the piece without permission, reposted it, and continue to ignore requests to take it down. I hereby christen them “In-Bad-Faith.com.” Frailty, thy name is revision.

Ignominy, thy name is war.

I am philosophically opposed to war. Let me pound my desk, Khrushchev-style, to emphasize the point. I am against arms races. I am aghast at clergy of any type or any nationality enabling the militarists instead of tamping them down — including Orthodox clergy abetting Orthodox militarists in Ukraine. “Holy war,” my foot, Patriarch Kirill and Mr. Putin.

Pugilists and armchair warriors: Put down the guns and listen.

Before you launch explanations of and justifications for this grinding Slavic conflagration, you first should realize that the Russia-Ukraine war represents a fundamental and foreboding shift in the conduct of warfare. Nicholas, the editor of “Orthodox Reflections” and a United States military veteran, explains:

“Air assets can’t be deployed [easily], because air defenses are so good the aircraft are in constant danger. . . . What has now happened is that war is back to attrition. Russia pounds defensive positions with drones and artillery, creeps forward slowly in small units, sometimes brings in armored assets to back up the infantry, takes a defensive line, [and] then rinse and repeat. The results are huge piles of dead bodies and a slow, slow slog.”

Nicholas also urges everyone to abandon outmoded notions of armored vehicles rolling across open terrain or armies winning dramatic battles. Small, agile drones have taken over warfare and have heightened its intensity. Drones make massing troops, breaching defensive positions, and staging sneak attacks extremely difficult because they can go in for the kill and then dodge return fire. This Reuters article confirms Nicholas’ assessments: “How drone combat in Ukraine is changing warfare.”

Nicholas continues:

“Russia is in the process of perfecting [this new style of warfare]. China is learning these lessons. . . . Attritional warfare is deeply immoral, even within the framework of war. You are literally eroding lives on a daily basis. The deaths of the enemy, not the gaining of territory, is the objective. You crush the enemy military so that the enemy must accede to your will. . . . It is World War I all over again. You fight till exhaustion. Only when one side has essentially collapsed will you see big moves.”

Ukrainian soldiers fire artillery toward Russian positions in the southern Kherson region. (RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, Marko Ivkov/AP)

So, using each other as target practice, the Russians and the Ukrainians are giving the world a master class in modern attritional warfare. Thanks, “Russian World.”

A pithy saying attributed to Albert Einstein is that after the destruction of World War III the next world war will be fought with sticks and stones. Nicholas echoes that sentiment: “[Adding in missiles], even without the nukes, a major conflict is going to bury millions. With the hypersonic weapons, there is no defense possible. War should be unthinkable.”

I recall the line from President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1963 speech: “I speak of peace because of the new face of war.”

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Nevertheless, America, Ukraine, and Russia are escalating their godforsaken war as I write, stoking fears of a nuclear exchange while also stoking memories of the satirical black comedy “Dr. Strangelove.” In the movie, the character Major T.J. “King” Kong rides a bomb as though astride a bucking bronco, whooping as he and the bomb plummet to Earth and explode. Is that a militarist’s dream come true?

The decades-long, cocky Russian-American rivalry is coming to a head. Power politics are in your face, whether or not you want them. The message from each side is clear: You can’t blow up the world — that’s our job!

Where are the voices of reason? Novaya Gazeta Europe recently reported: “Patriarch Kirill dismisses nuclear fears, arguing Christians don’t fear ‘end of the world.’” The esteemed Russian Orthodox patriarch has demoted himself to the leader of a doomsday cult? Did you have that possibility on your End-Times Bingo Card?

Are tit-for-tat escalations more likely to decrease the world’s howling militarism or to increase it? What will an even more bellicose world look like? Importantly, given the mind-bending warmongering of Kirill & Co. on the one side and Bartholomew & Co. on the other, what will a more bellicose Orthodox Church look like? That is the unkindest cut of all. And even if peace is soon declared in Ukraine, the world’s growing militarism will persist.

“Orthodox Reflections” previously has covered various aspects of American militarism. Following are four recent examples of Russian militarism, each juxtaposed against a piece of sage wisdom about the follies of war. Notice how well the sage wisdom has aged.

1. “Since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military has repeatedly used missiles to blast civilian targets across the country, with devastating consequences” (The Associated Press, 2023).
   • “Though war may not, strictly speaking, be an ecclesiastical heresy, one might consider it to be the perpetuation of the iconoclast mindset,” said Metropolitan Tikhon of the OCA in 2022.

Recovered Shahed thermobaric warhead stamped with “TBBCh-50M,” plus “4-24,” which may be the date of manufacture. (Forbes, Ukraine MOD)

2. “The Russian defense market is expected to grow significantly due to the ongoing geopolitical and economic crises resulting from wars” (Mordor Intelligence, “Russia Defense Companies, 2024-2029”).
   • “War is a racket,” said Smedley Butler in 1935.

3. “Russia to produce over 32,000 drones each year by 2030, TASS reports” (Reuters, 2024).
   • “War is the health of the State,” said Randolph Bourne in 1918.

4. Russian schools “are indoctrinating children with false government-mandated narratives and directly reporting those with dissenting views to the police and security services” (Oleg Kozlovsky of Amnesty International, 2024).
   • Men, women, and children are being trained to be “tolerant of war, receptive of war, prepared for war, lovers of war,” said Dorothy Thompson in 1937.

Don’t Tase me, bro. All I am saying is give peace a chance.

War is hell. It is also a big haul. Is the big haul the real reason for the Russia-Ukraine war? U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham has said repeatedly that Ukraine sits atop trillions of dollars of mineral assets that the U.S. wants to keep out of Putin’s grubby, little hands. Et tu, Putin? Is Russia’s use of the term “holy war” congruent with Slavic coreligionists slaughtering one another over mineral-laden real estate? What would an “unholy war” look like?

Have you noticed that every war is now a mini-world war, with everyone aligning one way or the other? And that the wars are queuing up concurrently? Russia versus Ukraine. Israel versus Hamas. Israel versus Iran. China versus Taiwan. The U.S. government clutches its pearls over Russian aggression in Ukraine while simultaneously giving Israel carte blanche to smash Gaza like Godzilla.

Is Ukraine defending itself against an imperial Russia? Or is Russia defending itself against the hegemonic U.S. and its proxy, Ukraine? Or is it a bit of both? Do you care enough to choose a side? What exactly are you choosing besides death and destruction? And the perennial question: Is all warfare, at heart, a racket — a dishonest scheme?

The age of hegemonic global empire is the Age of Insanity. As an American, I am expected not only to pick a side in every war and to argue over the particulars, but also to help pay for the killing. I am expected to approve one thug’s slaughter over another’s. I reject the false choice. Aren’t the rabid, worm-infested dogs of war fighting over rotten carcasses on the edge of an abyss?

I do mean all of the dogs. “Facing Russian threat and an uncertain America,” Europe is investing more money in its own defense. Meanwhile, Germany is “Aiming To Survey National Readiness for Youth Military Service.” Achtung! With the U.S. providing Europe’s defense since the end of World War II, the Continent had a veneer of peace. Now that the Europeans don’t trust the fickle Americans to protect them, they are rearming. All for militarism! Militarism for all!

One might well applaud seeing the effete Europeans manning up. My family already did its bit, sending a great-uncle to fight on D-Day. In June 1944, as a young crack shot, he was among the 34,000 Allied troops who stormed Omaha Beach to help liberate France from the Nazi totalitarians. He ended up a decorated combat veteran, raised a family, and lived to a ripe-old age. If my long lineage of pioneers and cowboys had a motto, it would be: “We Will Fight You on the Beaches — or Anywhere.”

Today’s threats, however, including a seething competition among elite factions to command a totalitarian global government, are insidious. How will the proles beat those threats by fighting unwinnable wars? They won’t. I reject wasting any more of the world’s blood and treasure on unnecessary wars, or on the merchants of death who profit from them. Perhaps more prayer and repentance and less war would help the world.

That message would be nice to hear from Orthodox officialdom, wouldn’t it? Instead, the Russian Church “has ardently propagated the Kremlin’s ideology surrounding the offensive in Ukraine, painting it as a ‘holy war,’” reports The Moscow Times.

Propaganda such as that justifies the government-sponsored killing that war entails, but it is an odd message for the Orthodox Church to promote.

In a short documentary called “The Suspended” (with English subtitles), Fr. Andrei Kordochkin and Fr. Vadim Perminov express their views about the Russian Church’s pro-war stance. Both priests have faced personal upheaval for speaking out against Russian militarism, including being temporarily suspended from their sacerdotal duties.

“There is a lot of religious language, not only from the lips of Church leaders, but also from government ones,” says Fr. Andrei, a Russian emigré priest and academic living in Germany. “They say this is a ‘holy war.’ . . .”

Fr. Andrei continues: “On the part of the state, of course, there is a request to sacralize war. . . . [For a war, the government needs] to make sure that you want to kill and be killed. It is around this that the cult of war, the cult of death, arises within the framework of modern civil religion in Russia.

“That is, in general, it is suggested that this is the best thing that can happen to you. And the state, in general, in this paradigm, does not exist to provide people with decent living conditions. It exists in order to ideologically justify their death in the war for this state, as the best thing that can happen to them. The life option is not considered at all. Obviously, murder cannot be a sacred act. And, therefore, there is no holy war in Christianity, and there cannot be.”

Fr. Vadim concurs. “In my opinion, the Russian Church is now sick in its own way,” he says, alluding to the militarism that has affected the entire society. The priests hope that admitting that lamentable state of affairs publicly will be the first step in helping the Russian Church regain its primary mission of teaching repentance unto salvation.

In March 2022, early in the war in Ukraine, Fr. Andrei coauthored an open letter to the Russian government, calling for an end to the hostilities and offering “a pastoral message calling people to repentance,” he says. Three hundred clergy and scholars signed the letter.

Then came the crackdown. For their audacity to challenge Russian militarism, the priests have faced disciplines ranging from the temporary suspension of duties to imprisonment. Seemingly drawing inspiration from Orwell’s dystopian writing, the Russian Church has banned some of the priests from serving, or has even defrocked them, because they dared to pray for “peace” instead of “victory” in the war. The Mir Vsem (“Peace Unto All”) Foundation, begun by Fr. Andrei, tells the priests’ stories and solicits donations for them.

Aren’t these anti-war priests also serious casualties of the war — and harbingers of the negative effects of militarism?

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,—
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

So begins the poem “On Passing the New Menin Gate” by the British writer Siegfried Sassoon. The poem describes a World War I memorial outside Brussels, Belgium, which is engraved with more than 50,000 names of the British soldiers who fought and died in the area between 1914 and 1917, and whose bodies never were found. They fed an insatiable war machine yet have no graves. A former soldier and one of the war’s fiercest critics, Sassoon denounces the memorial for reducing the men to “intolerably nameless names.” More than 30,000 additional soldiers’ names, from the remainder of the war, are displayed at a nearby cemetery.

All told, approximately 16 million people (soldiers and civilians) died in World War I. “The War to End All Wars” was its catchphrase. In reality, the first two world wars were both civilizational disasters. Now your government, wherever you live, is prepping World War III — and beyond. They covet your youngsters to use as cannon fodder for their wars, which they know will line their pockets and those of their cronies. Will you offer up your young? Have you not an ounce of skepticism — or resistance — yet?