The Situation - Part I

Staring the enemy in the face ; what is Vladimir Putin and why is he doing this?

Russian invasion. Just about the most terrifying two words in the English language for people my age, who grew up in the Cold War. I’ll admit it, I’m deeply terrified of the prospect of a large-scale European nuclear war - or worse.

But just for a few minutes, let’s take a deep breath and see if we can confront some of the trolls and orcs of our imagination. Fear is obviously being used by government through media to manipulate public opinion and reactions. This isn’t a “conspiracy theory”; it’s just the way government has functioned since the 1970s.

But I don’t want to be manipulated by fear. I want to understand things so that my reaction to what’s happening is adequate. Decisions made on false information can never be good ones. So if I’m going to react, I want to do so accurately, in a way that is in keeping with actual reality.

Only the Real counts.

Obviously this situation is immensely complex and nuanced, and I can get things wrong as easily as anyone. So, I’m not going to claim here to know things that “experts” don’t know. But I have had some training in investigation, and I thought it might help others who haven’t if I shared something of what I’ve been finding.

This will be more than a single Substack post can cover, of course, so we’re going to be looking at a short series.

Lifting up the rocks; staring down fear

First, we’re going to have to try to get hold of our anxiety. I’m happy to share one method that I find works for me.

Like everyone, I am struggling to understand what’s going on, and at the same time struggling to keep calm. I’m pretty scared so I’m tuning to old habits: investigation. Nosiness. It’s an instinct I was able at one time to develop into an entire career; if I’m afraid of something I want to know more about it.

In general, the modern world scares the hell out of me. It’s why I live in a tiny medieval town in central Italy and still wash dishes by hand. And fear does to me what it does to everyone: gives me the urge to run away or hide under the bed. But for some reason there’s a quirk of my brain that fear also excites a kind of riveted curiosity. So I’ve spent the last couple of decades looking very closely at Modernia, and figuring out what particularly about it scares me so much.

When I was little I was frightened of the crabs that lived under the rocks at the beach. But I could not resist the urge to lift up the rocks to watch the dreaded spider-like creatures scrabble away from the glare and my inquisitive fingers. I think there was just some instinct that told me if I understood a thing that scared me, I might feel less afraid. Stare straight at it, until you feel less scared.

I’ll sum it up: stare it down. I can’t help you not feel afraid. But maybe if we find out more things about the scary stuff we can start to get braver.

I’m finding in the last few days that my childhood terror of nuclear annihilation is prompting a single-minded, laser-focused desperation to understand what is really going on. That and my journalistic experience is telling me not to trust the narrative that is already forming in government and media.

I’m going to offer some data here, not answers. I don’t have answers. But I think I may be finding some things that could lead to helpful clarifications. I’m not an expert, but I have been trained in how to ask questions.

My wise drawing teacher once told me that a solution to confusion about what you’re looking at is to “sneak up on it”. Clarify everything around the object that confuses you; the space that is left will be the right spot.

St. Olga of Kiev, pray for us

Ukraine: some things I know for sure

Some basic things need to be clarified before we talk about anything else. I would have thought the following statements are so obvious they shouldn’t have to be made, but my interactions with some conservative and Catholic activists in the last few years have shown me there is a weird stream of thought in that community that wants Putin to be some kind of moral hero. And he isn’t.

Ukraine is a sovereign, independent country with the right to exist, and to be left alone. It is a modern nation state, with not only all the trappings of those very modern entities like a constitution, parliament and military, but all the things that defined an ancient Nation - that is, a People, a “Gens” - like language, history, culture, mythology, symbols and religion. They are Slavs, but they are not Russian. Ukraine is not Russia, a fact that even Stalin’s USSR acknowledged backhandedly by his genocide-by-famine; those were expendable people to him exactly because they were not Russians.

Ukraine has not only the right but the moral duty to fight this invasion that is an existential threat.

Putin’s invasion is an unlawful act, whatever philosophical, ethnic, political or historical justifications are offered. The same as was the previous incursion in 2014, the current invasion is an unjust war of aggression, an attempted conquest of someone else’s country. This alone, whatever political ideology he chooses to espouse, puts Putin in the category of all unlawful aggressors of history; he’s the bad guy.

Ukraine’s government may be corrupt, and may be as caught up as anyone in the Big Awful Thing we don’t like and fight against (cf: “New World Order” WEF, “Great Reset,” etc…) but Ukraine the nation isn’t the same thing as the government. Just as Canada isn’t Justin Trudeau or the Liberal Party of Canada. Just as the United States isn’t Joe Biden’s monstrously corrupt pack of jackals. Just as Italy isn’t Mario Draghi, Il Vampiro, sinking his venomous fangs into this country on behalf of the EU’s various godless agendas.

Ukraine’s political, social and economic problems aren’t going to be solved by being destroyed and its people forcibly subsumed into a country they don’t want to be part of.

Sts. Vladimir and Olga, Christianising princes of Kievan Rus

A wrong interpretive framework

Everyone who isn’t Ukrainian or Russian, or somehow otherwise deeply involved in the politics of the former Soviet Bloc nations is at a disadvantage in understanding. Our Western, European/North American political categories and frames of reference don’t translate well into Cyrillic. We see what Vladimir Putin is doing and we can’t fathom his motives or his long term goals. Why has he invaded another country? Why does he seem to think he is morally entitled to do this?

An American friend upset by the whole thing - as who isn’t - called Putin “that evil Communist!” And this is exactly the problem I’m talking about; Putin isn’t a commie. His motives and interests don’t fit into that category at all. But our paucity of political categories leaves us unable to understand what he is and why he’s doing this.

His actions in the context of the post-War 21st century seem not only inexplicable, but archaic; he seems like a man from a previous, more barbaric time. I don’t mean the 20th century; I mean the 6th century BC. He seems to want to do to Ukraine what Babylon did to Israel and we can hardly believe what we are seeing right now.

Trapped as we are in our interpretive framework, we want to shoehorn every situation into the thought pattern of “leftwing” vs “rightwing,” our bicentenial struggle for control over “liberal democratic” states¹. We inherited this paradigm from 18th century Western European political philosophy, completely alien and unknown in Russia.

Eastern and Central Europe (and Asia and Africa) have political, social, cultural and religious categories, divisions and goals dating back millennia. We don’t understand what’s happening because a totally different categorical framework has finally forcibly bumped up against ours, and we have been so perfectly encased in our own that we failed to realise that others even exist.

What is Russian Imperialism?

If we have spent our entire lives inside a bubble, an entirely enclosed system of thought, it’s very hard to even recognise that we have gaps to fill. But now that we understand that this gap exists, let’s take some cautious steps to understanding the competing worldview that may be behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

We sometimes hear people referring to Putin as a Communist. This is a mistake on a couple of levels. He was a member of the KGB during the Soviet rule. The USSR may have been Communist, but the people in it, even the people involved in politics, are always going to be more complicated.

We’ll deal with Putin’s personal ideology below, but it might also help to understand the motives of the Soviet Union if we remember it’s not just that they were communists; it’s that they were Russian communists. The Russian part is the part we’re failing to grasp.

Vladimir Putin thinks he’s morally justified in invading Ukraine based on an interpretive framework that dates back to the conversion of Kievan Rus to Christianity in the 1st millennium.

To put it as simply as possible, he thinks Ukraine is a “natural” part of a Russian empire, that has no natural right to autonomy. For him the category of “liberal democratic nation state” is an artificial political construct of corrupt 18th century Western philosophy and should simply not apply to anything that falls within the cultural ambit of the “natural” Russian-led Slavic domains.

Dr. Frederick W. Kagan is a former professor of history with a PhD in Russian and Soviet military history from Yale. It’s long, but fascinating, because it gives a lot of history. Worth a complete listen-through.

If you haven’t got nearly two hours to sit through it here’s some bullet points:

Putin’s goals

• Putin was probably never an ideologically committed Communist but has the concept of a “special destiny” of Russia - similar to the US “manifest destiny” concept, that “The West” is arrogantly seeking to prevent Russia from fulfilling.

• This goal is aimed at the creation of a Russian-led “Eurasian” empire equal to the economic and military powers of the West.

• His aim in Ukraine was never territorial conquest, but “regime change” - to remove the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he sees as a western puppet and replace it with a puppet regime of his own that would, at least, oppose Ukraine’s growing closeness to the West and NATO. At best, to bring Ukraine “back into the Russian fold,” either as a client state with nominal independent governance or simply as a province of the Russian federation.

• Putin has written articles and given speeches indicating that he does not believe Ukraine has a right to exist as a state independent of Russia.

• “He’s been very explicit about his intention to destroy the NATO alliance, to break the ties between the United States and Europe.”

Russia’s “special destiny”

• From the time of the Napoleonic Wars Russia has considered itself as “something more than European.”

• This was assisted in the 19th century by the acquisition of certain Asian territories, but then in the 20th by Bolshevism that explicitly rejected the Western, Liberal economic model.

• Strands in Russian philosophy and political thought dating to Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584), propose a “uniqueness” of Russia, and the “Russian soul”.

• “When Putin's talking about the geostrategic calamity of the fall of the Soviet Union what he really means is the loss of Russia's privileged position as one of the two rulers of the world and what he is aspiring to is re-establishing that.”

Russian Orthodoxy is a reminder that Christianity is not “Western”

• Russian Orthodoxy is not connected meaningfully to “the West” in the sense of coming out of Rome or being connected to any modern² political ideas. Russia was evangelised not from Rome but from Constantinople, and has its theological and liturgical ties not with Latin Christianity, but with Greek.

• Starting in 1453, Russian Orthodox philosophy started to propose the concept that the “centre” of all Christianity is Moscow that “was the inheritor of the true faith.”

• Within the Orthodox world, the concept of “separation of Church and State” is not a thing. Equally, the Roman/Latin idea that the Church is a superior authority to the State - cf: the papal bull “Unam sanctam” - post-dates the Great Schism by 300 years.

• Russian Orthodoxy’s conception of the relationship between the Church and the State is much more along the lines of the relationship between the Byzantine Emperor and the Church of the 1st Millennium. The Emperor (based in Constantinople, not Rome) had authority derived from the approval of the Church but also over the Church, at least, over the episcopate. We recall that was the Emperor, not the Pope, who convened the 1st Ecumenical Council of Nicaea.

• There was never in Russia the cultural or political “space” between the Patriarch of Moscow and the State, a condition that is so fundamental to Western political thought we hardly notice anymore that it’s there.

• “Putin has carried on the tradition of the Czars of subordinating the Moscow patriarchate to himself. The Moscow patriarchate at this point is fundamentally an arm of the Russian government. (Putin) controls it de facto.”

Russian Orthodoxy, Constantinople and Ukraine

“There was a big fight a couple of years ago because the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had been a component [of] or subordinated to the Moscow patriarchate. The formal leader of all of the Orthodox communities is in Constantinople. A few years ago… the Ukrainian Orthodox Church petitioned the patriarch in Istanbul³ to grant it autocephaly, to make it independent of the Moscow patriarchate and that was granted. And so the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has become an independent entity directly under the Constantinople patriarch. And Putin bitterly resented that, hated it, attacked it.”

In 2018, this resulted in the Moscow Patriarchate breaking communion with the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Many in the Orthodox world hold that this meant a break with the Orthodox Church in general. Since the invasion, Patriarch Kirill’s standing among the family of Orthodox Churches has fallen even further. Many - probably most - Orthodox see the invasion as a fratricidal war, unnecessary and criminal and the Moscow Patriarch’s support of it indefensible. They hold that he has made himself and the national Church of Russia a pariah.

Read more about Kirill and his history of Russian nationalist extremism - that he was a KGB agent is not disputed - here.

What does Putin want? Dominion.

Let’s wrap this up by talking a little about the political concept of “dominion” and how it is distinguished from “dominance”. From the above we can start to understand what Putin is claiming for Russia over Ukraine, and why and how religion figures so prominently in it.

Dominance is about simple control, the fact of simply having power over a finite area, group of people or scope of influence. Basically, control over person, place or thing.

Dominion is something more.

“On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities,” Geoffrey Symcox:

Political dominion is of the highest importance for making a place great, because it brings with it dependence, dependence brings gatherings of people, and the concourse of people brings great-ness. Cities that have dominion and authority over others attract public wealth and private fortunes in various ways; here the ambassadors of foreign princes and the agents of the lesser towns congregate; the weightiest cases are argued, both civil and criminal, and appeals are referred; the affairs and negotiations of private persons and communities are debated by men of rank, and the state’s revenues are collected and disbursed…

“Dominion,” Oxford Shorter (1974)

“The power or right of governing and controlling; sovereign authority.”

A good friend who thinks about things a lot offers this definition and explanation of “dominion”:

Dominion is a spiritual power exercised by stewardship or sovereignty over an area of responsibility, and all people and things within that area. The control of and use of dominion gives the stewardship or sovereignty the authority to govern. When the stewardship or sovereignty is unable to maintain control of or make use of dominion, then they have no authority to govern.

The truckers convoy in Ottawa for example, removed the ability of the capital city and the federal government to make us of or keep control of dominion. For 22 days, the entire government of Canada, municipal, provincial and federal had no dominion, and were powerless against the situation that removed it. Had the truckers been prepared as an army does, to stand their ground and hold it with armed conflict, the government of Canada would have lost the battle. They did not have the means, the manpower, and the consent of the people of the nation. And they had lost the dominion, which is a power granted from God.⁴

So, Putin is not merely achieving the control that any thug with a gun can acquire, but is claiming the right to rule. How is this “right to rule” granted? Where does it come from? It can’t simply come from the barrel of a gun or a stockpile of nukes. Putin is not merely acting like a power-mad thug. He’s asserting something more, something connected with metaphysics, with the divine. He wants Russia to be “great” in the sense above.

He’s not insane. He’s not irrational. It’s just that his motives are something we have not seen in a long, long time; they are outside our current paradigm. The world he envisions is one in which a united Russian “empire” is at least an equal to the US-dominated “West,” in which the “manifest destiny” of Russia is realised in economic and military power.

If we look carefully at the differences, cultural, historical and religious, between Russia and the “West” we can begin to understand why Vladimir Putin has concluded that his is a God-given right to dominion over Ukraine (and a lot of other places) and made himself the implacable enemy of an entire political ideology, “Western Liberalism”.

~

Next; we’ll talk about the Russian political philosophy of “Neo-Eurasianism”; and how it’s an implacable ideological opponent of Western Liberalism.

~

Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom of this. I hope we can get to the bottom of some of these strange events, and the reasons behind them, and thereby at least clear some of the fog, a first step to getting anxiety under control. If you have enjoyed this or found it useful, I hope you’ll click to subscribe and also consider donating through my Ko-fi page, Hilary White; Sacred Art. For the time being, writing and painting are my sole sources of income and I could really use your help. Thanks.

~

1. A ridiculously outdated paradigm even for us, btw. Mostly the “rightwing” vs. “leftwing” is maintained by media for purposes of keeping the public divided and arguing over artificially generated tribalist nonsense. In reality state governments are totally ruled by transnational organisations and corporations and partisan distinctions are meaningless. Obsolete.

2. And by “modern” we mean anything post-dating about 1100 AD.

3. The execrable heretic, the Bergoglio of the Orthodox, Bartholomew.

4. At some level, it’s almost to their credit that the Trudeau government reacted the way they did to the truckers, recognising they were being challenged not on their ability to rule, but their moral right to do so.