The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[Steve Thomas]

3 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Steve,

      I consider myself an expert of sorts on the history of Russian (and Soviet KGB) Orthodoxy-- a subject that most Americans know almost nothing about. 

 

W.,

That article reminded me a lot of the testimony of Paul Raigorodsky before the Warren Commission on March 31, 1964.

https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/testimony/raigorod.htm

Steve Thomas

[Kirk Gallaway]

5 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Steve,

      I consider myself an expert of sorts on the history of Russian (and Soviet KGB) Orthodoxy-- a subject that most Americans know almost nothing about. 

      IMO, Putin's KGB-controlled ROC Moscow Patriarchate is a pseudo church-- a cynical tool of Putin's fascist police state.  Kyrill Gundyayev and his MP heirarchs own the ROC buildings, chalices, and the vestments, but it's all for show.  They are, in fact, the non-canonical successors of Stalin's KGB agent heirarchs -- including the late Patriarch Alexei II Ridiger, who was the KGB agent "Drozhdov" overseeing Putin's seizure of the free Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia in 2007.

      The current heirarchy of the ROC MP was never free of the NKVD/KGB/FSB.  It was always a tool of the state-- merely transitioning from service to Soviet communism (and atheism!) to servicing Putin's fascist police state.

      As we can see from Putin's current campaign of war crimes and mass murder in Ukraine, the man is no more "Christian" than Joseph Stalin.  He makes a show of lighting candles in the ROC buildings, while his ROC MP priests and bishops, literally, bless Russian missiles and assault rifles!  It's pseudo-Christian fascism, somewhat similar to right wing Protestant Evangelical fascism in the U.S. today-- where the focus is on a kind of hypocritical, Puritanical tribalism, rather than on compassion and love for humanity.

      I used to chant services in Russian and English on the ROCOR kliros for a number of years here in Denver before Putin and his KGB-controlled Moscow Patriarchate seized the ROCOR in 2007.  It was the end result of a multi-year, carefully orchestrated KGB op in Western Europe and North America.  For many years, our ROCOR parish here in Denver was comprised about 50-50 of American converts and second and third generation "White" Russian refugees from the Bolshevik revolution.  Since 2007, it has been comprised of recent Soviet emigre/Russian nationalists under the control of Putin's MP/KGB pseudo-church.

     After the Bolsheviks gained control of Russia, by 1925, they murdered the last legitimate Patriarch of Moscow, St. Tikhon, and used what was left of the ROC in Russia as a tool of the Cheka/NKVD.  In the process, thousands of Russian Orthodox hierarchs, clergy, and laity were murdered and/or sent to concentration camps-- beginning with Solovki, which Solzhenitsyn accurately described as the "grandfather" of Stalin's Gulag.

     Most Russian Orthodox churches were dynamited by Stalin, or turned into gymnasiums and skating rinks.

     Stalin re-opened some ROC church buildings after the N-a-z-i invasion in 1941 in a cynical appeal to Russian "patriotism"-- but the Stalinist MP "church" was always a KGB-controlled propaganda tool-- analogous to Eisenstein's WWII Soviet propaganda film, Alexander Nevsky.  

      If you watch Alexander Nevsky, notice that Stalin and Eisenstein never show any Russian Orthodox crosses, priests, or bishops in Novgorod or Pskov.  They show the golden domes of the Russian Orthodox church buildings, but the appeal was solely nationalistic and pragmatic -- defending the Russian land from the nefarious Teutonic knights and Roman Catholic monks.

Obviously I don't have to tell you W. that Putin decriminalized Domestic violence with support of his Russian Orthodox Church in 2017. "Under the new law, a person can beat his spouse or child until she’s bloodied and bruised, and as long as her injuries don’t require a hospital stay,"

There have numerous cases since of violent child rape in Russia by priests in Russia.

I was brought up a Catholic and I know of a few people who were sexually abused by Catholic Priests..

https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/02/russia-decriminalized-domestic-violence-with-support-from-the-russian-orthodox-church.html

[W. Niederhut]

1 hour ago, Steve Thomas said:

W.,

That article reminded me a lot of the testimony of Paul Raigorodsky before the Warren Commission on March 31, 1964.

https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/testimony/raigorod.htm

Steve Thomas

Fascinating reference, Steve.  Thanks for posting this.

Obviously, the Warren Commission was mainly interested in Raigorodsky's knowledge of the Oswalds and George De Mohrenschildt in Dallas, but the interview also offers some interesting history of the mid-20th century schism between the exiled Russian bishops of the ROCOR and the Metropolia that eventually became the OCA.

My own spiritual father/mentor, Fr. Alexey Young, wrote the definitive book on the history of that ROCOR/Metropolia schism, as referenced in the Orthodox Wiki article here.

https://orthodoxwiki.org/ROCOR_and_OCA

[W. Niederhut]

1 minute ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

Obviously I don't have to tell you W. that Putin decriminalized Domestic violence with support of his Russian Orthodox Church in 2017. "Under the new law, a person can beat his spouse or child until she’s bloodied and bruised, and as long as her injuries don’t require a hospital stay,"

There have numerous cases since of violent child rape in Russia by priests in Russia.

I was brought up a Catholic and I know of a few people who were sexually abused by Catholic Priests..

https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/02/russia-decriminalized-domestic-violence-with-support-from-the-russian-orthodox-church.html

Kirk,

    Putin's KGB/Moscow Patriarchate ROC has also actively persecuted gay and lesbian people.  Sadly, it's something that they have in common with some red state Protestant Evangelicals in the U.S. nowadays.

    It's not my concept of Christianity.  "If a man hates his brother, how can the love of God be in him?"

    As for Putin's MP, the ROCOR never believed that it was a canonically legitimate church after 1925.  It's not my job to judge them, but I never went along with the MP annexation of the ROCOR in 2007.

    Regarding the child abuse issues-- they are horrific anywhere.  I have known and worked with a number of abused ex-Catholics over the years.  I also once treated a priest who was referred for sexual misconduct (with adults.) 

    I read somewhere that 10% of the entire population of the U.S. are disaffected ex-Catholics!  30 million?

    My mother was a Roman Catholic, the daughter of Slovenian immigrants to the U.S.  When the news about child abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston first surfaced in the U.S. M$M back in the day, I asked my mother about it and she said, "That never happened here!" (In Colorado)  But, as we eventually learned, it happened everywhere.  It was endemic.

   

[Benjamin Cole]

Re Ukraine:

Is there a point where NATO is shamed into a humanitarian interdiction? 

That is, if it appears several hundred thousand people have been killed in Ukraine, and about that many are showing skeletal forms and look soon to perish from hunger...then would NATO intervene? 

Is not such an outcome a real possibility now? 

If an interdiction is inevitable (I suspect it is), then why wait? 

From the unification of the Russian church and media with the state (mentioned by W. and others), and the vice-like grip Putin has on all of the above...what will stop Moscow from a horrible war of attrition in Ukraine?

This is not another tiresome blue-red kool-aid debate. This is a serous question.

Have Biden-NATO shown any resourcefulness, any imagination, any capacity for warding off what now appears inevitable? 

Was essentially partitioning Ukraine to Putin---the pre-invasion Biden-NATO position---a mistake we can learn from? 

 

 

 

[Matt Allison]

Ben- you do realize that Russia is paying a ghastly toll in casualties, right? They are getting slaughtered at an incredible rate for Putin's insanity. When it comes to attrition, the Russian Army is the one facing that.

The Russian people and/or generals need to remedy this situation. They are the only ones that can immediately stop this.

[Benjamin Cole]

43 minutes ago, Matt Allison said:

Ben- you do realize that Russia is paying a ghastly toll in casualties, right? They are getting slaughtered at an incredible rate for Putin's insanity. When it comes to attrition, the Russian Army is the one facing that.

The Russian people and/or generals need to remedy this situation. They are the only ones that can immediately stop this.

Matt-

I only know what is on the internet. It appears the Russians are taking heavy losses, in equipment and people. (The thought of youthful Russian conscripts being killed or sent home without body parts is saddening also).  

I am leery of the internet consensus. For example, I figured the puppet government in Afghanistan might not be popular, and the US was in a quagmire without a positive end. But 70,000 Taliban were able to take over a nation of 40 million without a shot! The Afghan Army into which hundreds of billions of dollars had poured for 20 years?  The internet-M$M had presented a warped view of Afghanistan. No one said, "The Afghanis will not fight against the Taliban at all. The US has no supporters outside of the Afghan government."

So, perhaps the Ukraine picture is...well, not as "good" as we hope (and even what we regard as "good" is a daily catastrophe for Ukrainians). 

Here is a perfect globalist arguing the Ukrainians are winning:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/ukraine-is-winning-war-russia/627121/

I have no idea how long Putin will persist in Ukraine, which many Russians (rightly or wrongly) regard as part of Russia, and important to Russian national interests.

It appears Biden/NATO have engineered a cruel stalemate, and globalists cheer that result as a victory. 

I guess it is non-PC to even discuss or ask if there are better options on the table. 

 

 

 

[Matt Allison]

Ben- the only way this ends is via the death of Putin.

Seriously, that's it.

Sucks, but that's the reality.

And that can only be accomplished by someone inside Russia; IOW, a citizen or general.

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Matt Allison said:

Ben- the only way this ends is via the death of Putin.

Seriously, that's it.

Sucks, but that's the reality.

And that can only be accomplished by someone inside Russia; IOW, a citizen or general.

Well, maybe true.

If so, what is the fastest way to bring about the demise of Putin?

1. A stalemate in Ukraine.

2. Actual losses and defeats in Ukraine? 

[Steve Thomas]

Russian tabloid posts — then removes — report on Defense Ministry's count of Russian soldier deaths in Ukraine
From CNN's Paul P. Murphy, Vasco Cotovio 

http://https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-putin-news-03-21-22/h_a213420135eab380f17aa89f50fa890d

"The Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda published, then later removed, a report that the Russian Ministry of Defense had recorded 9,861 Russian Armed forces deaths in the war in Ukraine.
The report from the tabloid originally read, "According to the Russian Defense Ministry, during the special operation in Ukraine, the Russian Armed Forces lost 9861 people killed and 16153 wounded."
Seconds after CNN read the original article — at 9:56 p.m. Moscow time according to the HTML code — the story was updated and removed all references to the death count. That update on the outlet's website came shortly after the article began to get attention from social media posts, which referenced the death count. "

10,000 people a month? That can't last long.

Steve Thomas

[Douglas Caddy]

 

The heads begin to roll in Russia | TheHill

 

Russia warns relations with US could be severed in 'note of protest' | TheHill

 

Edited March 22, 2022 by Douglas Caddy

[Joe Bauer]

9 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

But 70,000 Taliban were able to take over a nation of 40 million without a shot! The Afghan Army into which hundreds of billions of dollars had poured for 20 years?  

The true amount of U.S. taxpayers money spent on Afghanistan was at least 1 TRILLION and maybe as much as 2 TRILLION!

And the day after we pull out, the forces we fought took over that country immediately.

Now THAT is a complete failure.

What did we get in return for spending an amount of American tax payer money that could have infused A BILLION DOLLARS EACH into 2,000 impoverished areas of our country?

A mind blowing amount of monies which really could have created instant massive job growth, improve infrastructure, build or improve thousands of new schools and hospitals, built hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units and provided improved and affordable medical care all across America.

Every student loan holder in America trapped into years of crushing debt could have been relieved of those life stressing and burdening chains.

Social Security could have been totally bolstered to avoid insolvency.

We are militarily rich...and yet for at least half the country socially poor and under never ending and always worsening standard of living stress and neglect due to our spending priorities.

2 TRILLION DOLLARS ...GONE!

With nothing to show for it here in our own country where we need help more now than we have in decades!

The economic divide between the small minority of super wealthy and ever more stressed working class and poorer in America has grown to scary levels. The deepest since the end of WW II. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Benjamin Cole]

39 minutes ago, Joe Bauer said:

 

No argument from me. And before Afghanistan there was Iraq, and before that Vietnam...

[Douglas Caddy]

 

[Matt Allison]

6 hours ago, Steve Thomas said:

"The Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda published, then later removed, a report that the Russian Ministry of Defense had recorded 9,861 Russian Armed forces deaths in the war in Ukraine."

That's freaking insane. No wonder they've stopped progressing.

6 hours ago, Steve Thomas said:

10,000 people a month? That can't last long.

Nope, it sure can't.