“I prefer the company of the US State Departement, the Republican Party, and Born-Again Christians to YOUR indifferentist Byelorussian brothers… understand?”
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As of 15.30 EDT Saturday 16 April 2011, there’s still no official note of condolences regarding the terrorist action in the Minsk Metro from either the OCA or the ROCOR posted in an easily accessible and highly-visible location on the homepage of their official websites. Metropolitan Philaret Vahromeyev personally, and the BOC/MP in general, have shown nothing but kindness and hospitality to OCA and ROCOR hierarchs, clergy, and faithful in the past. They receive THIS as thanks… SILENCE… silence, at a time when any decent person, of any faith (or of no faith at all, for that matter), would say kind words of comfort to a friend, an acquaintance, or even a stranger. There’s no public message signed by Jonas Paffhausen… there’s no official note of sympathy signed by Hilarion Kapral… His Holiness Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev issued public condolences, in an expeditious manner, on 12 April, less than 24 hours after the blast took 12 lives. Why is there deafening silence from the OCA and the ROCOR regarding this tragedy?
What gives? The BOC/MP has always extended a hand of friendship to the OCA and the ROCOR… where was the reciprocity, at the least? This ISN’T how true friends act… this isn’t even how outright strangers act when informed of an “ordinary” death, let alone multiple deaths in a terrorist action. The utter SILENCE of the OCA and ROCOR is mystifying… especially as many of their faithful are of Byelorussian background. That is, many still have living ties with Byelorussia… they know what’s going on… indeed, some of the relatives of the blast victims may very well worship in OCA or ROCOR parishes here.
I call it EVIL… in the extreme. Is there an explanation for it all? Sadly, I think that there is one. JP is a fanatic teabagger who sucks up to the most rabid right-wing extremists in the Republican Party and to Looney-Tunes Sectarians. The fact that the GOP social programme is utterly opposed to the social teaching of the Church doesn’t faze Fathausen in the very least. The fact that the Sectarians attack the Church in the rodina doesn’t bother him in the slightest. Lyonyo Kishkovsky is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, which means that he hates Byelorussia on principle. Victor Potapov was (or is) a big sweat at Voice of America, he’s got contacts up the yin-yang with the Washington Post and the Washington Times (he’s obviously the conduit for JP’s recent despicable little screed in the Post), and his ties with the most unhinged wingnut Republicans are well-known and of long standing (as is all too common amongst Vlasovtsy Russians of the Second Wave). He even has a red US passport… and those of us “in the know” know what that means.
To put a cherry on the top of it all, the konvertsy are almost invariably Republicans of the most Neanderthal sort. You see, their problem in TEC wasn’t really with homosexuals or radical theology… they support Benjamin Peterson, SVS, New Skete, and Paffhausen, after all. They lost a battle for the political orientation of the TEC… it had NOTHING to do with theology. These jerks assumed that since Orthodoxy is most often socially conservative, that it was supportive of Republican “conservatism”. Nothing is farther from the truth… the Church stands foursquare against the atomised individualism of the Neoliberal Free Market… it stands FOR a cooperative society where everyone looks out after each other. That is, the Church is FAR closer to the KPRF than it is to the US GOP.
The konvertsy made common cause with the Forty First Families/apparatchiki. Don’t forget, Mark Stokoe is a former Syosset drone lusting for reinstatement. Yet, Stokoe’s site gives us a glimpse into why this indecent and putrid silence on the Minsk bombing occurred. Recently, he ran a propaganda piece about how some OCA people “rescued” a child from nasty ol’ Russia in the ‘90s… he’s a Russophobe, pure and simple. Most of the konvertsy are Russophobes… and many of the old-line OCA/ROCOR First Family/apparatchik sorts are smarmily anti-Russian deep down (especially, Second Wave Russians)… they look down their noses at the Centre (they still think that Russia is mired in the Nasty Nineties). They refuse to see that the religious revival began under Gorbachyov, in the Soviet time… their ideology (whether it’s of the right, of Jordanville, or, of the left, of SVS, truly doesn’t matter) blinds them to reality. THEY ALONE HAVE THE KEY TO TRUE SPIRITUAL RENEWAL. Is it surprising that the konvertsy and the apparat joined hands? Both are believers in a will o’ the wisp, not the reality that exists right before us.
Is any priest going to offer Pannikhida for the dead? I would hope so… but the silence on this portends otherwise. However… I must fulfil my duty. If any priest wants to offer Pannikhida, here’s an updated and expanded list of the victims:
- Natalia Abraj
- Tatiana Zakharkova
- Galina Pikulik
- Olga Solovyova
- Anna Shagoyko
- Vitaly Bakan
- Sergei Gerasimchik
- Roman Kaptyukh
- Yuri Klemets
- Anatoly Narkevich
- Aleksandr Parfuntsev
- Sergei Serban
- Anatoly Makeychik
This updated list includes one more person who died of wounds in hospital on Friday. That is, there are 13 victims in total… shall any priest honour these thirteen? Shall any priest pray for them publicly? Shall we sing Вечная память for them in a public Pannikhida?
I shall NOT be “nice”… I shall NOT be “polite”… I shall NOT be “respectful”. I SHALL speak the truth as I see it. The people of Byelorussia, and the Byelorussian Orthodox Church/MP and the Byelorussian state that embody them, are not merely our “friends”… they are quite often “family”. That’s why this silence is reprehensible and without warrant. Jonas Paffhausen and Hilarion Kapral showed us what they were made of… the first was no surprise, but the second was a disappointment. I think that Metropolitans Anastasy Gribanovsky and Leonty Turkevich are looking down from Heaven aghast at all this.
What have we devolved into? That’s for you to figure out… it’s not pretty, is it?
Barbara-Marie Drezhlo
Saturday 16 April 2011
Albany NY
