In response to the Riot of Uniate Nationalists in Lvov, Orthodox Activists Plan a Large Rally There for 9 May Next Year

Orthodox public organisations plan to hold a large march next year in Lvov on Victory Day. “I’ve received a torrent of calls from members of various Orthodox groups in the Ukraine, which stated that there shouldn’t be any more disgraceful spectacles like the one staged by the extremist Svoboda faction, and that next year, on 9 May, Orthodox activists are determined to be there for the veterans and help them to lay wreaths”, Kirill Frolov, the head of the Ukrainian Section of the CIS Institute, told our Interfax-Religion correspondent on Thursday. He went on to say, the Orthodox would march to the Lychakovsky Cemetery, to pay respect to the graves of Galician Russophiles, of whom 60,000 are buried there, and, then, hold a large rally before the Memorial of Glory.

As Frolov noted, “The ideological forebears of the Ukrainian nationalist organisation Svoboda provoked the Austrian government to undertake a persecution of the Galician people, who, at that time, supported all-Russian unity and wanted to leave the Unia and embrace Orthodoxy. They accused Galician Russophiles of spying for Russia, they carried out much mayhem, shooting people down in cities and villages, and they took others to a special concentration camp at Talerhof, where there were no barracks yet built, so the people slept on the bare earth in the winter of 1914“. In his view, Orthodox believers should agitate to seek legal recognition of the genocide carried out against the Galician Russophiles as “a crime against humanity”, not only during the planned action in Lvov for the next Victory Day, but on a steady basis. They should also demand that the Lvov municipal authorities allow the construction of an Orthodox cathedral. In addition, Frolov continued, Orthodox activists in the Ukraine should demand that there be an investigation of the “criminal and terrorist activity” of the so-called “Kiev Patriarchate”, “which is, for all intents and purposes, the puppeteer of the Svoboda faction. In particular, they should investigate the fact that the KP recruited militants who fought alongside the Chechen separatists Basayev and Dudayev, and, on top of that, they also seized canonical Orthodox churches, brutally beating the clergy there as they did so”.

For its part, the all-Ukrainian public organization Православный выбор (Pravoslavny Vybor : Orthodox Choice) called the riot in Lvov on 9 May, “an act pf terror directed  against all those who wanted to honour the memory of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War. We’d also like to draw the attention of the Ukrainian federal authorities to the positions taken by the councils of Lvov, Ternopol, and Ivano-Frankovsk Oblasts. Through their decisions regarding the celebration of Victory Day, they opposed the will of the entire Ukraine, thus, contributing to the outbreak of sacrilegious violence on 9 May in Lvov”, according to a statement of the organisation received by Interfax-Religion.

12 May 2011

Interfax-Religion

http://www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=40718

Editor’s Note:

Dum-da-dum-dum… you guessed it… it’s time to award the Order of the Big Green Weenie again, kids. I noticed that Interfax had posted this article on their English side… minus the third paragraph! If you’re going to translate the article, translate all of it… not only part of it! FOR SHAME! Normally, I don’t look at the English side of Interfax; it just depresses me. It’s why I only take stuff from the Russian side… that’s complete and to the point.

Well, well, well… the Interfax English translator comes in dead-last in the Pierogi Race, as per usual. Is that a surprise?

BMD

Tomorrow is 14 May… Don’t Forget to Commemorate Metropolitan Leonty Turkevich! Вечная память!

Editor’s Foreword:

My apologies for the image quality… I had to use what I could find… and I used everything that I found.

BMD

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Editor’s Afterword:

There was SILENCE on oca.org concerning the commemoration date of Metropolitan Leonty Turkevich (1876-1965), who was, arguably, one of the most important Russian Orthodox hierarchs who ever lived in the USA, He was, indisputably, the most important hierarch in the history of the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Metropolia. It reached its apogee under his rule, and it has never reached such heights since, mainly due to the effects of the incompetent leadership, self-centred egotism, and crackbrained inanity of Aleksandr Dmitrievich Schmemann (don’t forget how ADS plunged a knife into the back of his benefactor, G V Florovsky).

Let’s go BACK TO THE FUTURE! For some fifty years, ADS’ numbskull notions have been tried… well, they didn’t work in the past, they’re not working now, and they’re not going to work in future, either. It’s time to take out the humane killer and euthanise autocephaly. If the konvertsy leave, so be it… they’re only some 10 percent of  the whole (they’re a larger percentage of clergy, though)… Dreher, JP, Mark Maymon, Terrence Mattingly, Mark Stokoe, Pat Reardon, Freddie M-G (yes, some of these are AOCANA, but they’re cut from the same bolt of cheesy cloth)… they’re all of a piece, and it’ll be nothing but “good riddance to bad rubbish” if they leave canonical Orthodoxy.

Let’s go back to the sane principles of Metropolitan Leonty… no, we can’t “go back” to 1965… that’s gone, and the autocephalists have muddied the waters too much. However, we can renounce the false path that we’re on now… and we can go home. Vladyki Leonty will bless us from heaven…

Вечная память! Eternal Memory!

He’s SORELY missed…

Barbara-Marie Drezhlo

Friday 13 May 2011

Albany NY

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Editor’s Postscript:

DO note that oca.org and Stokoe have posted NOTHING urging believers to remember Vladyki tomorrow. Shall some priest, somewhere, serve Pannikhida for Vladyki? It’s the decent thing to do…

BMD

13 May 2011. For What It’s Worth… Russian State TV Viewers Give Massive Support to Stalinism

The 22 April episode of the weekly talk show Поединок (Poyedinok : Duel) on the Russian official state television channel Rossiya 1 discussed Stalin and his role in Russian history. The debate, chaired by the show’s regular presenter, Vladimir Solovyov, was between Gennady Zyuganov, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), and Leonid Gozman, co-chairman of the Right Cause non-parliamentary opposition party. In his opening remarks, Solovyov said, “The public discussion of the project to immortalise the memory of the victims of the totalitarian regime and to achieve national reconciliation began today. Although the document doesn’t say a word about Stalin, some say that it’s a virtual de-Stalinisation plan. Such fierce battles have started that national reconciliation is in danger of becoming national confrontation. Why, despite all the revelations, does Stalin remain an idol for many?”

In his opening statement, Zyuganov said, “The country has been driven into a corner. We need cooperation. Instead, some offer confrontation. We propose constructive work, not this scandal, which, again, some try to impose on a country that’s writhing in the throes of crisis. I don’t believe this is the right way; it’s an even greater impasse, it’s a pit into which we’re all falling”. For his part, Leonid Gozman said, “Stalinism isn’t just about mass murders and concentration camps. That’s in the past. Stalinism is about unassailable and irremovable authorities, the government’s absolute power, the people’s powerlessness, flashers on cars, and unjust courts. This isn’t about yesterday; this is about today. We’re not discussing the past; we’re discussing the future. We’re discussing how our country should live”.

Zyuganov said that condemnation of Stalin equals the condemnation of the whole Soviet period in Russian history, saying, “After the victory in May 1945, when the banner of victory proudly flew over the world, the Americans felt that our example was dreadfully contagious. Therefore, they formulated a strategy that attempted to demonstrate that the Soviet Union wasn’t the architect of victory; rather, it was no better than the Fascists were. Several years ago, Neo-Nazis, followers of Vlasov and Bendera, attempted the same thing in the Council of Europe; they attempted to raise this issue in Europe. At the time, it looked like total nonsense to me; yet, suddenly, today, a so-called human rights commission in a Kremlin office resurrected this same argument. This isn’t just an attempt to judge Stalinism; this is an attempt to brand the entire Soviet era as criminal”. The interactive vote conducted throughout the programme gave Zyuganov a massive victory, with over 100,000 votes to Gozman’s 14,000.

22 April 2011

BBC Monitoring, as quoted in Johnson’s Russian List

http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs053/1102820649387/archive/1105286616401.html#LETTER.BLOCK23

Editor’s Note:

It’s interesting for us as Russian Orthodox Christians living in the Anglosphere (USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) to note where the apparats of the OCA and the ROCOR are getting their information on the rodina. I’d submit that information passed by the apparat to the hierarchy is crank and crooked, of no value whatsoever. For instance, in the OCA, Jonas Paffhausen is a partisan figure, a follower of the Tea Party, a Republican nutter. His ideas on Russia (and politics, in general) are those of such barmy and unhinged rightwing loudmouths as Paul Goble, Paul Weyrich, Pat Buchanan, and George Weigel. It’s why he kisses the naked bums of the Uniates (for the Uniates are the darlings of the American rightwing)… it’s why he was tardy in offering condolences for the victims of the Minsk Metro bombing (that wouldn’t have sat well with his Foggy Bottom pals)… it’s why he was silent on the Uniate disruption of Victory Day celebrations in Lvov (he doesn’t want to upset the delicate sensibilities of his Uniate boon companions).

JP’s main advisors on “foreign affairs” are Lyonyo Kishkovsky, Viktor Potapov, Seraphim Gan, and Dickie Wood… they’re all entrenched apparatchiki, and they’re all tied in with the Republican Party, in one way or another. Potapov is the farthest to the right in his politics, he’s one of the most rabid Vlasovtsy, but he went along with the 2007 Reconciliation formally, for if he hadn’t, he’d have lost his “place”, and he wasn’t about to do that. In addition, he was/is a government bureaucrat in Voice of America/Radio Liberty high enough to hold a “red” passport (that is, in American terms, he’s a “Sergianist”, a shameless lickspittle for the “powers-that-be”). That means that there’s a possibility that he went along with the Reconciliation in order to be a “mole” within the ROCOR for the Feds. Note well that I used the word “possibility”… not “probability”… that’s a lower category on the scale of “impossible… improbable… possible… probable… certain”. Certainly, it does fit in with his extreme wingnut politics. Potapov is known to have ties at the Washington Times, which he probably used to recruit the author of the fluff piece on JP in the Washington Post (Julia Duin has been a frequent writer in the Times).

In short, the close association of many in the apparat with Neoliberal “conservative” elements hobbles and distorts Russian Orthodoxy in the Anglosphere. Don’t forget, the Church in the rodina has close ties with “progressive” forces, and His Holiness has attacked “Free Market” economics on many occasions. That is, most ordinary Russian Orthodox Christians in the English-speaking diaspora are unaware that the Church and Party have made their peace (by and large)… and that the Church opposes the very basis of most Western political and economic theories (especially so-called “conservatism”). The Church doesn’t “demonise” Iosif Stalin… it doesn’t “canonise” him, either. I think, in the end, our attitude towards Iosif Vissarionovich will be the one taken towards the actions of Ivan Grozny… he was a man where good and evil intermingled. I think that’s the best description of the man and his times…

BMD