Hope (from the cycle “The House of Life”)
George Frederic Watts
1886
This is a most appropriate image for this essay… yes, I DO hope, but if one is to persevere, one must expect opposition… only those willing to “swallow a kopeck’s worth” need continue onward… it’s so easy to swallow the Big Lie of the “Received Narrative” (you’ll get applause and “recognition”)… but it’s hard to follow the path that the Truth of History reveals to us (you’ll have a hard go of it and you’ll be called a “fool” and “lunatic” to boot). Hope is open to us… but only if we’re willing to pay the cost. Shall we?
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There are two ways of looking at the world… one can either look at history, which is a record of actual events, found in archival documents and contemporaneous journalism, or, one can rely on “received narrative”, which one can make up as one goes along. Quite obviously, religious cultists and political quacks rely on the latter, whilst most of the rest of us would prefer the former. Again, as this is not a simple proposition, this submission shall be longer than usual, so, I beg your indulgence. You’ll find your patience well-rewarded.
Let’s start with a solid example of a “received narrative”… I’m going to “name names” and give specifics, for it’ll give you a handle on how it gains currency, and how it retains “institutional legitimacy”. Let’s wind back to August 1991. At that time, I was attending a ROCOR parish in upstate New York (one that was, for all intents and purposes, a metochion/podvorie of Jordanville). We all know about the “August Events”… the attempted coup against Gorbachyov and its utter collapse, which led to the end of the USSR. This led to utter confusion and discombobulation amongst the ROCOR leadership. The events weren’t unrolling “according to script”… there wasn’t an utter collapse of the MP… indeed, the Church was the only institution left intact, and Patriarch Aleksei Rediger was the only national leader of stature to hold the country together.
Suddenly, the ROCOR had a decision to make. Would it reconcile with a resurgent and powerful MP, or, would it oppose the MP because events didn’t follow their “received narrative?” In personal terms, would the ROCOR follow the hardline rejectionist policy of Vitaly Ustinov or would it follow the Christ-like conciliatory policy of Antony Bartoshevich? Interestingly enough, both of these hierarchs were born in 1910, and both were born into military families. They both worked in French-speaking territories, but the two men were antipodes apart in personality. Vitaly was power-hungry… he had politicked vigorously for the post of Metropolitan in 1964, so much so that Metropolitan Anastassy Gribanovsky persuaded St John Maksimovich not to run for the position, so that Vladyki Anastassy could propose Philaret Voznesensky as his successor to avoid a messy battle in the Holy Synod (in fact, Anastassy resigned before his death to ensure a smooth succession… he didn’t trust the motives of the pushy Vitaly). Vitaly did succeed as First Hierarch after the death of Philaret in 1985, but the twenty-year “wait” embittered him (as he was an “ambitious” man). One of Vitaly’s first actions was to mishandle the Holy Transfiguration crisis in Brookline, bungling it so badly that people left who could’ve remained, had Vitaly and his loud clerical partisans (who are still “influential”, by the way) shown a little restraint and forbearance.
Archbishop Antony, on the other hand, was a “peacemaker” who favoured understanding with the MP. An embittered priest said to him during the terrible dark years of the Ustinovshchyna, “Why do we put up with this?” Vladyki Antony replied, “Where else can we go?” He often went to the Holy Mountain, and the great Athonite Elder Paisios Eznepidis once told a pilgrim, “Your Antony is a hero! He isn’t with [the ecumenists], and he’s not with [the perverse zealots]!” Vladyki Antony always opposed the monastic zealots who attacked the MP (found mostly at Jordanville and Brookline)… note well that Jordanville is attempting to “airbrush out” this part of their past.
In 1991, there was a decision to take, and Vladyki Antony’s health was on the wane (he was to die a little over two years later). For the first two to three weeks after the collapse of the coup, the clergy were silent, as were their loud claque of lay supporters. I said to Misha Solovyov, “What would you have said if I’d told you on August first that the Reds would be out in two weeks?” He smiled broadly, and replied, “I’d have told you to go home and sleep it off!” During the time of the coup events, of course, the local media was interviewing those whom they thought might have an “insider angle” on events (for instance, they interviewed one of the local Armenian priests). A friend of mine worked in a local TV outlet, and I gave them the address for Wsewolod Drobot (the local “pastor”) and the parish’s phone number. My contact told me that, after numerous attempts, they stopped trying to contact him. I should mention that Mr Drobot did NOT live in our area… he lived (and lives) on a property adjacent to that of the monastery (some say that the monastery owned the property, others not… so, let’s leave it as I stated it), which is over 100 kilometres away (Drobot played ecclesial politics in Jordanville (it’s of interest to note that his brother, Yuri, was a “Paris Exarchate” priest in France)… he was head of the “Presbyterial Senate”… impressive, huh?). I DID mention that the parish was, for all intents and purposes, a podvorie of the monastery, didn’t I?
Then, everything CHANGED. It happened in a trice… Drobot started screaming (literally), “The communists are still in charge!” His strident coterie of supporters (such as certain loud members of the Federoff clan) echoed this new party line without reservation. They shouted down anyone who opposed this new “received narrative”, they did their best to hector such people out of the parish. For instance, in the early ‘90s, this Lilliputian group (average Sunday attendance: 20-30) often had FOUR priests serving a given liturgy (Drobot, Moisei Tarasevich, Michael Fritz, and Peter Olsen). Fr Peter soon found himself on the outs… I don’t know the details, but the outcome was clear enough… Fr Peter jumped from the ROCOR to the OCA. One just didn’t do that in the ‘90s. The reaction of the parish was instructive… Fr Peter became an “unperson” overnight. No one EVER mentioned his name… they removed all photos with him in it. It does sound like the worst of the Cult of Personality, doesn’t it? To speak bluntly, it was pure “stereotypical communist” behaviour! This, from so-called anti-communists! Rather Pogoesque, no? “We have met the enemy, and he is us”… I didn’t last much longer, myself. I have the “scars” to prove it.
This is what a “received narrative” is, and this is what it leads to, inevitably. Sadly enough, this isn’t the only fairy tale extant out there… “Orthodoxy in America dates from 1794”… no… Russian Orthodoxy in Alaska dates from 1794, Russian Orthodoxy in the lower-48 and Canada dates only from the early 1890s. “Jordanville was always for reconciliation, but it had to hide it”… what vacuous nonsense… I KNOW what they said in the ‘90s, for they said it to my face! It’s why I walked away from the Church for about ten years… I found out that Vladyki Antony was right… “Where else can we go?” Are there more examples of this, especially from the benighted partisans of Paffhausen and the crankish autocephalist cabal? Certainly… but I think that I’ve made my point; it’s time to roll this one up.
We have a choice… we can stand with Vladyki Antony Bartoshevich, Archbishop Job Osacky, Metropolitan Nicholas Smisko, St John Maksimovich of Shanghai and San Francisco, Archbishop Kyprian Borisevich, Metropolitan Leonty Turkevich, Fr Basil Stroyen, and Metropolitan Anastassy Gribanovsky, if we do so, we stand for the Truth of History. On the other hand, we can stand with Jonas Paffhausen, Feodosy Lazor, Pierre l’Huillier, Matthew Tate, Mark Stokoe, Lyonyo Kishkovsky, Gregory Jensen, Gleb Podmoshensky, Alexander Lebedeff, Viktor Potapov, Vitaly Ustinov, Freddie M-G, Rod Dreher, Patrick Reardon, and Terrence Mattingly, if we do so, we stand for the “Received Narrative”… that is, we’d stand for a Big Lie worse than any purveyed by Suslov or Göbbels… and we all know who the Father of Lies is, don’t we? THAT’S whom we would adore, kids, if we were to attend to the whoppers purveyed by the mewling konvertsy and the grasping First Families…
LET HISTORY JUDGE!
Barbara-Marie Drezhlo
Tuesday 7 June 2011
Albany NY
Voices from Russia 
7 June 2011. Remember the Meeting on the Elbe! What Kind of World Do YOU Want?
Tags: Elbe, Germany, John Boehner, political commentary, politics, poster, Theodore Roosevelt, Tim Pawlenty, United States, USA, White House, World War II
Remember the Meeting on the Elbe!
V Fenin
undated (1970s?)
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The above poster commemorates an actual event in 1945… the meeting of the American and Soviet armies at the Elbe River in Central Germany, which effectively ended the existence of the Nazi nightmare. The USA of 1945 was a state organised on the lines of the Social Market, that is, the government helped to “level” the playing field between ordinary folks and the rich, it stepped in to help ordinary folks with the problems of life. Even though FDR saved the capitalists, they hated him… they were (and are) selfish, grasping, and mean-spirited worshippers of Mammon (the worst being the Sectarian scummers with their false cries of “Jayzuss”).
Until 1980, the gap between rich and working folks continually narrowed. What happened? Dotty Ronnie Reagan became President in 1980… perhaps, the most false man ever to sit in the White House. As Val Zorin of VOR noted, “You always had to keep in mind that Reagan was an actor”. People fell for his shtick… and allowed him to implement one of the most evil and wicked economic policies that this country has seen since the age of the Gilded Age Robber Barons. Today, Tim Pawlenty, Paul Ryan, Dropout Scott Walker, and John Boehner propose that we dismantle the New Deal… in order to finance a massive tax giveaway to the rich and ruinously expensive wars abroad. That is, NOTHING for the sick, poor, and elderly… BILLIONS for war, the rich, and idle “speculators” and “investors”. They say that government should stop regulating business… well, here’s what Theodore Roosevelt said:
If I had to choose, I’d say that TR was completely in the right, and the modern teabagger Republicans are completely in the wrong.
You can have the America of 1945… which was fair to all and helped win World War II… or, you can have the world of the Robber Barons (by the way, do know that Paffhausen and Potapov prefer the world of the Robber Barons)… the Robber Barons milked the people so badly that America was on the verge of revolution in 1933 after unchecked speculation caused the Great Depression. Do you want a repeat of that? Ponder it well…
It’s time to “go back to the future”… Socialism is better than Anarchic Corporate Capitalism… let’s have the America of the Great Victory over Hitler, not the America of the Worship of the Almighty Dollar. It’s YOUR choice…
Tuesday 7 June 2011
Albany NY