21 October 2014. As Seen by Vitaly Podvitsky. You Don’t Understand! 2014

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Само слога Србина спасава (Only Unity will Save the Serbs)!

St Sava

Recently, V V Putin was in Belgrade celebrating the 70th anniversary of its liberation from the fascist occupiers in the VOV. The Red Army helped the partisans to chase the Nazis out of Dodge. However, the ties between Russians and Serbs go far back into history, far beyond the VOV and World War I. Ever since the 18th century, Russians have aided Serbian aspirations for independence and statehood. Serbs haven’t forgotten this. We’ve stood beside our Serb compatriots for GENERATIONS! I’m glad to say that the Serbs are true, trusty, and loyal friends, to a fault. They’ve never betrayed Russia, nor shall they.

RUSSIA AND SERBIA… BLOOD BROTHERS FOREVER!

There’s nothing that Obama or Merkel can do to harm that. Serbia isn’t going to kiss America’s ass any time soon or any time later. That’s that…

BMD

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20 October 2014. A Call for Pastoral Sanity… It’s Time to Gag the Rigourist Idiots

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I adapted the following from an article on the Catholic Church here. It spoke to some problems that we have too. I’ll have more to say, but let’s get the raw meat on the table, first. Again, what follows is an adaptation!

BMD

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I don’t call for discussion to change teaching, but to expand it to include missing parts… the “missionary” and “pastoral” dimension… the merciful, healing, loving, welcoming part of the Church, which those outside the Faith don’t get to see. If you come to understand why they don’t, well, you get the point of my call. Those of us who know the Church know that in our parishes, schools, and institutions, our pastors pastor. They tend to us, nurture us, help us, and support us… whoever we are, and whatever our stage of moral development. Most of us live in a gap between who we are and who we’re called to be; being Orthodox isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. The doorway is wide; inside, essentially, it’s warm and welcoming… a clinic for the feeble, not a club of the smug. It’s nuanced and compassionate, even if it keeps the goals clearly in the spotlight.

So why do so many people see only judgementalism and rejection, even pharisaism? It’s because some concentrate on asserting doctrinal clarity and uniformity, partly to restore direction following divisions opened up in the early 1960s (the time of the Church War… SVS and Jordanville had a real Cold War going on). This meant keeping out the pastoral. We just didn’t discuss awkward pastoral questions, so, existing teaching and practise suffered, too. We have to bring the peripheral into the centre, breaking open the Church to a new (yet ancient and old) pastoral language. We need to ask tough questions with unprecedented frankness… how does one bind the wounds of the divorced, whilst promoting indissolubility? How do we embrace gay people, whilst celebrating marriage as a conjugal institution? How can the church be, like a good parent, both clear teacher and merciful mother? The tensions are as old as Jesus, who called people to lifelong sexual fidelity yet saw the adulteress as both sinner and victim. What’s new is bringing the tension into the governance of the Church.

A few think this is deeply misguided. They make a lot of noise… but compared with those who consistently favour a pastoral and missionary reset, they’re a tiny number. However, that means only that we need a lot more discussion and reflection before we can come up with concrete proposals. What matters is that we bring the pastoral to bear on the doctrinal… the Church decided to live in that tension. It’s a lot less tidy, but a lot more holy.

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His Holiness said, “The Church respects all human decisions, including those of sexual orientation, but we reserve the right to call sin a ‘sin’”. That is, I’m not calling for throwing out actual synodically-defined doctrines of the Church. The Councils are what they are… the Lived Tradition is what it is… the Canons as actually wielded by the Church reflect what it truly is.

To hear some, you’d think that homosexuality and abortion are the central questions in Christianity. They are not. Emphatically, they’re not. Our Lord Christ left us no clear guidance… the Church simply tells us that homosexual activity is sinful… and that abortion is a sin, too. However, neither is at the level of greed… the Mother Sin, as it were. As the Apostle put it, ῥίζα γὰρ πάντων τῶν κακῶν ἐστιν ἡ φιλαργυρία (Root for all the evil is the love of money)… “Love of money is the root of all evil”. In Latin, it’s Radix malorum est cupiditas… cupidity is ardent desire, inordinate longing or lust; covetousness. Yet, the modern-day moralists say nothing about this… they urge us to vote for Republican greedsters due to their stance on “morality”. However, if greed, cupidity, the love of money, is the root of all evil… and Apostle St Paul IS an authoritative source… it means that we can’t vote for a faction whose mottos are “Greed is good”… “Winning is the only thing”… “America is a spotless city on a hill”.

Note well that there’s no tension in their world-view… as there must be in all forms of Truth. Its all “black n’ white”… yet, the Church is the most Zen-like of all the Christian bodies… it out-Zens Zen! As a priest told me once, “The Church keeps certain things undefined so as to give its clergy the pastoral freedom to deal with specific cases. When a teaching comes under attack… then, the Church MAY define it… but only after reaching a consensus”. Orthodoxy gives us the right questions to ask to come up with the right answers… it isn’t a stereotyped set of responses, regardless of the circumstances. Orthodoxy is authoritative… but only after long and often acrimonious debate. It took the Church CENTURIES to deal with Arianism… it wasn’t an overnight thing.

We face the same sort of thing here. There are pastoral problems in the Church… but they’re pastoral, not doctrinal. I truly don’t see a major problem with homosexuality in the Church (sorry, the konvertsy obsessed with it don’t seem to realise that they’re in a body that really doesn’t have much of a “gay problem”). It’s simply not there… as the Church doesn’t excommunicate gays… it doesn’t shun them… but it also doesn’t bless “gay marriage” nor does it bless homosexuality. It realises that a certain number of people are gay… it recognises this. It doesn’t bless it… it doesn’t commend it. When Bishop Job Osacky allowed Mark Stokoe to take communion, he wasn’t blessing homosexuality… that was oikonomia… an exception that didn’t overturn the rule. That’s how we do things. The rule stands… but we interpret it compassionately and with the intent of keeping people within the Church. We don’t use the rules as clubs… as one sees in certain konvertsy circles (Paffhausen is a good example of this). We deploy the canons as positive tools of healing and integration.

I know that this will cause certain of the rigourists to come out of their holes. So be it. I am NOT arguing for “anything goes”… however, I AM saying that we can’t allow a loud set to take over the direction of the ship. Remember, the same people who obsess on homosexuality and abortion also obsess on questionable doctrinal positions like the so-called “toll houses” (I believe that the ROCOR Synod was correct in closing down all discussion on them).

As a priest at Jordanville once told me, “St Serafim said, ‘Save your own soul, and thousands will be saved around you’. That means that you should concentrate on cleansing yourself. If you can do this little thing, the larger will fall into place”. The older that I get, the wiser that gets! If you can work on yourself, it affects the world around you… now, that’s what I believe. If you want to go out to crusade against this or that, my advice is to leave Orthodoxy… that’s not what we do. However… do ponder what the “big tent” means… and the big tent does exist in Russian Orthodoxy. There’s room for all sort of people in Christ’s Church. It’s a House of Sinners… not the Haven of the Saved. The older that I get, the more “lenient” that I get… the Church is all about Ultimate Things. Anything that distracts from that is wrong. The Crusaders against gays and abortion should reflect on that. There IS a wrong way on focusing on the right things… now, THAT’S a meaty bone to gnaw upon!

BMD

20 October 2014. Latest Sitrep Map from the Front…

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The VSN is reducing the pockets of junta resistance around Lutugino, Zaporozhe, and Dyakovo (the grouping in Amvrosievka is no more). None of these pockets sits on, or near, major motorways, railway lines, or paved major feeder roads. That is, the border crossing points and the routes to Lugansk and Donetsk are under full and undisputed patriot control. The Union of People’s Republics of Novorossiya has complete control of its border with the RF in its zone of control, which, of course, is a major argument for the fact that it’s a sovereign state independent of the fascist Uniate junta in Kiev. The operations are going slowly because of the rasputitsa… it’s slowing down all parties. Look at this image from 1941:

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That’s the conditions in the field now. There’s a frost predicted for this part of the world starting on Saturday… if it continues, the ground could harden sufficiently for major operations by early November. Note that you DIDN’T get that from Stratfor… they’re NOT the “Shadow CIA” as Barron’s (they were typical bonehead US “conservative” idiots) so stupidly put it. It only has 75 to 200 employees, no technical means, and no “operators”… its pure Bush League, not the same thing as Langley or the SVR at all. They do have some middling contacts in DoD (one of their execs is a former SEAL) and some pedestrian-level foreign sources… but mostly they’re just an overrated security consulting firm with a line of bullshit a mile long and 100 feet deep. I’ve got no government or major contacts… but my “men/women in the street” see things and pass them on. It does make a difference if the monk observing the troop movement is a former army officer… that is, some of my contacts are as good (and as limited) as Stratfor’s are.

Bite the coin that the Western media offers… quite often, it’s only ungrounded bullshit peddled by the likes of Stratfor (as one put it, “It’s nothing but The Economist two weeks late, at 40Gs a year”. They’re just offering you the “accepted wisdom”… they DO have an agenda, kids… and it’s not in your favour. Get focused and keep wary… the times be evil.

BMD

20 October 2014. Some Sanity on Russia’s Role in the Present Crisis… Good Link

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I don’t have the time to translate this entire article. I urge you to click on this link (machine-translate it, if you must); please, read it through, it’s one of the best analyses that I’ve read on the whole situation. Time isn’t in the junta’s favour… V V Putin knows it… P A Poroshenko knows it… as do B H Obama and John Kerry… so do all the other leaders in Eurasia. This whole affair was a botched American attempt to railroad through the TTIP… the Ukrainian Crisis was only a catalyst to buffalo the EU into becoming a political, military, and economic appendage of the USA. The recent sanctions against some Magyar politicos proves it, even for the slow learners. It incensed the USA that the Magyars dared to indict American businessmen for tax evasion… what ungrateful bastards! Don’t they realise who they’re biting… hmm, I’d say that the Happy Hunkies have brains and they realise who’s their real friend and who’s their real enemy (despite having a fellow with the name “Goodfriend” (I shit you NOT) as head of the US Embassy). Besides, VVP would be happy to right a small part of Trianon for them (that is, smile at their rule over Podkarpatskaya, as long as local minorities had their rights enshrined in the Magyar Constitution)… whilst the Americans wouldn’t… need we guess where Budapest would go?

The present game isn’t over the Ukraine… the EU doesn’t want it… NATO doesn’t want it… it’s over the EU and its trade and energy ties. Washington’s gambit is now clear… unfortunately for Foggy Bottom, Chilly Hilly (Kerry is only a figurehead… Obama doesn’t know or care much about foreign affairs) met her match in Vladimir Vladimirovich. The American game was to scare the EU out of its energy ties with Russia… but offered it no real alternatives in either the near- or long-term. Ergo, it ginned up the crisis, sanctions were part of the game… but no one in Europe wants to go to war or even help the Ukraine (most view it as being in the Russian sphere, save for a small English-speaking minority… which is the only group that counts for boneheaded ignorant Anglo Americans).

VVP sits at the chessboard… he IS the Grandmaster. Obama isn’t in his league… Cameron and Harper certainly aren’t. Merkel is the only Western pol remotely close to him in ability. In any case, the USA doesn’t have any real levers against Russia… it has a negative trade balance and the trade isn’t overly large… Russia imports about 5 billion USD (205 billion Roubles. 30.7 billion Renminbi. 306 billion INR. 5.65 billion CAD. 5.7 AUD. 3.9 billion Euros. billion 3.1 UK Pounds) worth of American goods, whilst the USA buys about 17 billion USD (698 billion Roubles. 104 billion Renminbi. 1.04 trillion INR. 19.2 billion CAD. 19.4 billion AUD. 13.3 billion Euros. 10.6 billion UK Pounds) worth of goods from Russia. That is, the American ability to harm Russia is next to nil… it doesn’t have any economic levers, the EU is sluggish over further sanctions (the only real victims of sanctions were European businesses and farmers), and the USA really doesn’t have the ability to project ANY of its conventional military forces into the Russian heartland… it can only strike Russia with its strategic nuclear forces (don’t forget, the RVSN can strike the American heartland, too).

The USA can’t keep up the charade longer. It has no money or forces to commit to a ground war in Eastern Europe against a peer force (which it hasn’t faced since the end of the Korean War in 1953… the PLA and VVS did well against the boastful Anglo Americans). The US forces have the strength to deal with one major and one minor war at a time. At present, the US forces are overextended… a war in Afghanistan… a warlet against ISIS in Iraq… continuing insurgencies in Yemen, Libya, and Colombia… aiding rebels in Syria… keeping up an occupation force in Kosovo. There’s nothing left… the USA isn’t the “sole superpower”… that exists only in the fevered imaginations of neocons and Yahoo teabaggers. The USA IS a Major Power… but so are Russia and China… the USA can NOT invade either of these countries without risking Nuclear Ragnarok. Iran has Russian and Chinese guarantees… everyone knows it. Ergo, the USA isn’t going to attack it… no matter bow much John McCain or Ben Cardin fulminate.

Shall it all be over by December? I’d hope so… but the Kiev fascists could still throw a spanner into the works. Don’t forget the Uniate UPA massacres… they did it before… that means that they could do it again. There’ll be no real peace until the fictive state known as the Ukraine is dead, buried, and gone. Until then, Satan walks the earth and laughs…

BMD