Tag: Russia

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The Saint

Is there anything that speaks as directly and conclusively to the credibility of the church as the fact that the wife of Nicholas II, Alexandra, has been made a “saint” by the Russian Orthodox Church?

In 1981 Alexandra and her family were acknowledged by The Russian Orthodox Church as martyrs, and in 2000, Empress Alexandra was made a saint by the church. She was canonized as both a saint and as a passion bearer.  From Here.  Don’t click on it: it’s one of those awful click-bait Facebook links.

Seriously?

Can we, in the future, expect to see “Saint” Diana?  Why not? Let’s see: she was famous.  She was rich.  She was vain and self-serving.  She was  a consummate narcissist.   Do we even have to wait for a miracle?

I will concede that she appears to have been faithful to her husband, and she volunteered for nursing duty during the war, along with her daughters.  She didn’t commit any mass slaughters like Olga of Kiev.  But she also may have been at least partly responsible for bringing on the Russian Revolution with her irrational attachment to Rasputin and her belief that he could heal Alexey’s hemophilia– at least, temporarily.  When it was apparent to all of the Czar’s advisers and ministers that Rasputin was widely hated among the populace, she and Nicholas refused to disassociate themselves from him.  When Prime-Minister Stolypin reported in more detail on Rasputin’s lecherous behaviour, he had him exiled but Alexandra persuaded him to allow back.  With the survival of the entire government at stake, it was left to the husband of one of Nicholas’ nephews,  Prince Feliks Yusopov, to try to save the Czar from himself by assassinating him.  As it turns out, it was too late.

Can you imagine some sequence of thought or imagination in which a genuinely spiritual person in a Church based on the gospel of Jesus Christ has an authentic experience of encountering qualities in  the story of Alexandra that would inspire you to exclaim, “what a saint!  What a model and paragon of Christian virtue and humility!  What an inspiration to all of mankind!  Think of all the suffering she alleviated!  Think of her purity and modesty!  Think of how constantly she placed others ahead of herself!”

But then, we are talking about a movement–I do mean broadly, Christianity itself– that bloviated constantly about purity and humility and spirituality and service to mankind and truth and dignity… and then voted– overwhelmingly– for Donald Trump in a real election.

How can anything said by its adherents be taken seriously anymore?

And to those who rejected Donald Trump but insist they are Christians, I cannot imagine how you rationalize a faith that itself proclaims that you can and should judge people by their fruits.

 

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The Kabuki Theatre of Putin and the Ukraine

[I am publishing this because I was wrong.  I want to acknowledge it, because that’s the only way we learn to be better and more astute in judging these issues.  I really thought Putin would not go this far, but it is clear he is a madman–madder than we thought–who is dangerous to all of Europe.]  Gwynne Dyer courageously acknowledging that he was wrong about Russia’s intentions on the Ukraine.  The odd thing is, he was actually right.  He thought Russia would not invade Ukraine because Ukraine had a far more formidable army than most commentators thought.  He was right about that– most commentators also thought Russia would overwhelm Ukraine within a matter of weeks.

Still leaning towards the idea that all this blather about Ukraine is just so much self-perpetuating frenzy: everyone is reporting it so it must be true. And who is supplying all the networks with the lustrous video of tanks and missiles and armored personnel carriers racing around? The Russians of course.

Gwynne Dyer thinks Putin has no intention of invading and he’s right more often than most pundits. Every TV newscast starts out with “INCREASING tension today… ” but tension can’t increase every day without reaching 100% at which point it’s either the same or it decreases. North Korea had it’s time; then Iran. Now it’s Putin.

Strikingly, nobody ever mentions the size of the Ukrainian army, which is actually the largest in Europe at 250,000.

If you hypothesize that this is all just theatre and watch the news in that context, nothing seems jarringly out of place. The White House wants to look tough and determined; Putin wants to look like he’s big and powerful enough to go toe-to-toe with Biden (he’s not: Russia is really not that big or powerful), the media thrives on a perpetual state of crisis.

It’s like Republicans and the crime the rate: it’s always going up. It’s now at 26,000 percent.

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I just happened to be wandering around Kursk one day with 1 million men and a few tanks and…

At the end of World War II, German Field Marshal Erich Von Manstein surrendered to the British and was incarcerated at a camp in Bridgend (somewhere in England) for about 8 years. His health, apparently, was a concern, so he was released early from an 18-year sentence (after a mere 4 years). Then he lived for another 20 years, during which he apparently enjoyed the confidence of the new, democratic West German government.

Von Manstein had lots of friends, including Churchill and General Montgomery. They testified to his good character. Von Manstein, you see, was one of those “honorable” Prussian generals who only wanted to serve his country with courage, dignity, and good grooming.

How he suddenly found himself in Stalingrad with a million Germans with guns and tanks remains a mystery to this day.

Von Manstein wrote in his biography that if Hitler had only left the generals alone to manage the war in the East, Germany would have won the war. What a shame. Isn’t that what comes to mind when you read a statement like that? What a shame.  If only…

Aside from the fact that it probably wasn’t true– Russia was not France– you would think Von Manstein would have been glad– given his avowed personal reservations about Nazism— that someone prevented Hitler from taking over the world. Especially since it couldn’t be him, what with duty and honor and all that.

Like Rommel, Von Manstein claimed he never carried out many of Hitler’s criminal directives and that appears to be partly true. Other than the one to kill 5 million Russians and bomb Stalingrad to the ground, of course.

So conservatives love to point to a guy like Von Manstein because, from a certain, twisted perspective, he seems to represent the idea that war-making can be ethical, uplifting, spiffy, and delightful. What fun it would have been if that parvenu Hitler hadn’t spoiled the party!

Unfortunately, one has to accept the fact that, like Rommel, and Beck, Von Manstein didn’t really seem to have that big of a problem with Hitler as long as he was winning. The ethical issues only seemed to come up when the possibility of war crimes trials appeared on the horizon.

That’s the problem with the entire “conservative resistance” to Hitler– they almost all supported him regardless of his policies as long as he was winning. The problem with the Jews? Well, you had to obey orders or you would be shot. Except that the Italians weren’t very good at obeying those orders and they didn’t get shot.  They were elbowed aside by people like Von Manstein so the real Fascists could get he job done: round up those Jews.

When Hitler started to lose, like Kurt Waldheim, the good generals  suddenly seemed to realize that the concentration camps were a bad idea. “I knew it! I knew we would get in trouble for that…”

Would Nazi Germany have defeated Russia if Hitler had left it up to the Generals? Maybe. Suppose the Generals had decided that a two-front war was not viable– suppose they would have concentrated all of their fire power on Russia. And suppose they would have prepared better and started in April instead of June…. Suppose they had seized the oil fields in the Caucasus before attacking Stalingrad?

But even the generals did not anticipate the T-34 tank, in the huge numbers the Soviets were able to muster, or the millions of soldiers they could eventually hurl into the war.

More importantly, they had anticipated that Russia would surrender after massive defeats on the battlefield.  Russia was not going to surrender under any circumstance.  There was no “there” there, for the “victorious” generals to arrive at.  Just desolation, destruction, and eternal resistance.

Von Manstein vs Rudolph Hess

Hess: left Germany in May 1941, years before most of the worst Nazi atrocities were committed.

Von Manstein: fought to the end of the Reich.

Hess: betrayed Hitler who ordered that his plane be shot down.

Von Manstein: loyal to the fuehrer to the end.

Hess: wanted to negotiate a peace deal with Britain, possibly with the aim of turning the Reich’s full force upon the Soviet Union.

Von Manstein: I was just following orders, except when I didn’t. Critical of the officers who attempted to assassinate Hitler.

Hess: life in prison.

Von Manstein: released after serving 4 years of an 18-year sentence.

… because of his health. He died in 1973.

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Blue Like Putin

For all of the lovely, lovely speeches about liberty and democracy and freedom and all those great American values those unreasonable Iraqi’s simply refuse to thank us for, George Bush stands by, completely oblivious or ignorant or just plain complicit as Russia slides back into dictatorship.

Under Putin, the Kremlin has steadily been increasing its ownership or control of television, radio, and internet news outlets. It just took over the Russian News Service (through proxy), and called a meeting with the journalists employed there. From now on, they were told, no coverage of the opposition. No bad news about the economy or politics within Russia. The United States is our enemy. And at least 50% of the newscast will be devoted to “happy news”.

And George Bush stands by and smiles and appears completely uninterested.

How on earth can Bush continue to declare that the goal of the war on Iraq is to bring freedom and democracy to that nation, while clearly conveying utter indifference to the state of democracy within Russia, or Egypt, or Libya, or Saudi Arabia?

Well, that’s not difficult at all to understand, unless you ever really believed the statements about democracy.

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Anastasia

As if the story of the Russian Revolution and the end of the Romanov dynasty was not strange enough, we have the endlessly fascinating story of Anna Anderson who claimed to be Anastasia, and succeeded in convincing a number or relatives and acquaintances of the Romanov’s that she was the real thing.

The Grand Duchess Anastasia

Anna Anderson was found attempting suicide in a river in Berlin in 1920 and taken to a hospital. Two years later, one of the other patients, Clara Peuthert , after seeing pictures of the Grand Duchess in a magazine, identified her as the Grand Duchess Tatiana, one of Anastasia’s older sisters.

A former member of the royal court circle, Baroness Buxhoeveden, came to the hospital to see for herself; she immediately called her a fraud: she was too short to be Tatiana.

Anna Anderson subsequently identified herself as Anastasia instead. On the right are the pictures: Anastasia, then Tatiana, then…. a polish peasant girl who had gone missing about the same time Anna Anderson was found in the river, Franziska Schanzkowska. And then, Anna Anderson.

Anna Anderson (Franziska Schanzkowska)

Anna Anderson

So why did anyone ever seriously consider her claim to be Anastasia? Apparently some Russian émigrés had designs on the rumoured millions in gold Nicholas had supposedly shipped overseas to fund a government in exile. When they heard about Anna Anderson’s claims, they saw a route by which to lodge legal claims against the estate of the Romanovs.

I had never realized before how stunningly similar Anderson looked to Tatiana, at least, from the pictures, who was stunningly similar to Franziska Schanzkowska. Except, of course, for the height, the fatal flaw.

As it turns out, DNA testing eventually proved that Anna Anderson was, almost certainly, Franziska Schanzkowska. In retrospect, it is hard to even accept that she was merely deranged. If she was not Anastasia, she had to have worked on the job of impersonating her, especially when she had been put to the test so many times. She had to have had help– most likely Gleb Botkin, the son of the the Romanov’s family doctor, who also died at the hands of the Communists.

That doesn’t explain how she was able to fool so many people for so long. How she apparently acquired the ability to speak English and French. Or why she appeared to be three inches shorter than Franziska’s claimed height.

Does it need to be explained that so many people were taken in by her even though she couldn’t speak a word of Russian? But then, some supporters came to believe that she could at least understand Russian, and speak a few words of it. But then again…. the Romanovs, apparently, preferred English.

It is duly noted that Anna Anderson’s height and shoe-size did not correspond exactly to Franziska Schanzkowska’s, and that she showed many scars and injuries that Franziska, it is a alleged, did not have at the time she disappeared. I don’t find this evidence as compelling as the DNA evidence, but it has given ammunition to a small number of determined supporters to continue insisting that Anna Anderson really was Anastasia.

It’s a very strange story. If Anderson definitely resembled Franziska and Franziska bore an uncanny resemblance to Tatiana and Tatiana is Anastasia’s sister–

By the way, the movie, with Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner, is lame. But you can see why they tried: there is a brilliant movie in there somewhere.

Incidentally, I am intrigued by the number of contemporary writers, sympathetic to the Royal Family, who enjoy enumerating the vast list of atrocities some editorialists had ascribed to Rasputin, as if the obvious exaggeration meant he really wasn’t all that bad of a guy. Why? Because he only seduced a hundred women instead of a thousand? Because he was a lunatic but not a madman? Because he practiced extortion but not mass murder? The same applies to Nicholas II and Alexandra: the fact that they were not the monsters the Bolsheviks made them out to be doesn’t mean they were not appallingly bad leaders who, convinced they had been appointed by God, blindly and stubbornly led their own nation to ruin. Had Nicholas instituted a few reasonable, modest reforms at the right time, there would have been no Russian Revolution, and history would have been kinder to millions of people.

If you insist on believing that Anna Anderson might well have been the Grand-duchess… read this.

Interesting Trivia: the grand duchesses slept on the same metal cots wherever they traveled. They were folded up and taken with. Give me the simple life…. Interesting Trivia #2: the Romanov family mostly spoke English in the house, not Russian.