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Thursday, March 28 2024 @ 04:41 AM CDT

God save us from holy warriors

Whited Sepulchers

Joey Slinger

Echoes of Vladimir Putin's warning last month in Munich will rumble around for a long time, particularly in Washington where George W. Bush so jealously stores the grapes of wrath.

The Russian president took serious issue with Bush's efforts to impose himself as CEO of the world order. One nation, he said, cannot presume to run the global show, especially not one like the U.S. that, no matter what it claims, is far from being a model of democracy or morality. He said his country reserves the right to respond forcefully wherever its interests are infringed.

Russia has a dog in the fight, too. A big one.

His speech has been described as a new Cold War declaration. Or as Russia's return to the world stage as a counterweight to the U.S. Or both.

Stimulating stuff.

But it also had a truly astonishing subtext that was only revealed during a "news conference" in Moscow where Gen. Leonid Ivashov, who once ran the Russian military's international relations bureau, told the Russian media how to interpret what Putin said.

No pussyfooter, he ranked the Munich speech with Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Mo., "only with the reverse message," and said, yes, "it indicates Russia's entry into'' – in Novosti news agency's translation, "trespassing on" – "the zone of American influence."

What was astonishing, however, was Ivashov's declaration that it was part of a new policy based on Russia's tendency, in turbulent times, "to become a spiritual leader of Christianity."

This almost floored the moderator, who exclaimed, your "phrase about Russia tending to become a centre of spiritual revival – this is a loud phrase."

You betcha.

It used to be they were opposites, Russia and the U.S.

Communism, capitalism. Godlessness, Godfulness.

Now they're both capitalist. Now they're both God's little helpers, making the world safe for Christianity. And they're both still bristling with no end of atom bombs.

Does it encourage you to know that Putin had a born-again experience similar to Bush's? Remarkable enough that a man who would head the KGB's successor had a mother who was (for years secretly) a devout Christian. In 1996 (Bush saw the light in 1986), after nearly dying in a fire (Bush's demon was booze), Putin became a practising member of the Russian Orthodox Church.

History has no shortage of profoundly religious, and warlike, national leaders: Julius Caesar, Cromwell. Most of them have been inclined to exceptional bloodthirstiness, as if the holiness of their determination to bring peace to the world freed them to use whatever means they cared to, no matter how extreme.

Do we imagine that a Russian leader aflame with Christian zeal will be any less aggressive when it comes to asserting – reasserting – imperial ambitions than those Soviet leaders whose religion was the Communist state itself?

America's righteousness should never be underestimated. It's genetic. There was a burning conviction among the very first settlers that they were, one historian writes, "a covenanted people, pledged to God and ordained to play a signal role in the unfolding design of Providence."

Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919 makes it hair-raisingly plain that Woodrow Wilson believed he was chosen by God (as George Bush states he, too, has been) to lead America and show the nations of the world how, in his words, "they shall walk in the paths of liberty" (as Bush is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Bush has been happy to use whatever methods he believes his mandate from Heaven justifies: arbitrary imprisonment, kidnapping, torture. To achieve the goal he set in his second inaugural speech, "ending tyranny in our world," it is okay to employ a little tyranny.

William Pfaff, in The New York Review of Books, cites Bush's conviction that all nations will become democracies, given the chance, and his expectation that all the other fully functioning democracies will subordinate themselves to U.S. leadership.

Such arrogance can be antagonizing, even downright intolerable, given that the other major democracies are not only advanced societies, but often more advanced than the U.S. "in social standards, distribution of wealth and opportunity, the provision of universal health care and free and affordable education."

And ultimately, Bush's crusade presents us, certainly us Canadians, with a really good question. What if we'd rather not have our souls saved by the U. S.? Or, make no mistake, by Russia either.

Who can blame us? Robespierre (of all people, and long before he became high priest of the guillotine) put it this way: "No one loves armed missionaries."

http://www.thestar.com





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