The war in Ukraine is a clash of civilizations that could go MAD
This October 2022 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, and the lesson learned seemed to have been lost to the current generation of leaders in the collective West. The U.S. driven NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia has been rhetorically escalated to a maddening level, as if hinting at the possible use of low yield battlefield nuclear weapon is a “game of chicken” and not a green light to ascend the ladder of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) against Russia with the largest nuclear stockpile in the world.
Eight months into the war in Ukraine there is no mistaking, as the former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard in announcing leaving her party said, the ruling Democrat party is “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers”. They are the neocons and while neocon bipartisanship infests both parties Democrats and Republicans, the neocon ideology rules Washington since it seized control of American foreign policy following the end of the Cold War.
The neocon ideology, as expressed by the authors of Rebuilding America’s Defenses (A Report of the project for the New American Century, September 2000) amounts to, “At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.”
The strategic objective of neocon policy in securing full spectrum dominance of the U.S. in global politics required destabilization of post-Communist Russia and eventually regime change in Moscow. Russia was assumed to be the principal impediment in advancing “America’s grand strategy.” This assumption is no longer hidden in the U.S. driven NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.
The Ukraine war has also turned out to be in Bernard Lewis’s phrase “the clash of civilizations” adopted by Samuel Huntington as title of his book. The U.S. at the head of the collective West has undergone a transition coincident with the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, from its founding Christian culture into the nihilism of the “woke” culture of godlessness and radical secularism at war with Christianity and Christians.
During this same period post-Soviet Russia transitioned no less radically from the godless culture of Communism/Bolshevism into spiritual and cultural rebirth of Orthodox Christianity. Moscow is once again the third Rome following Constantinople, which was consecrated as Byzantium’s capital and the second Rome in the fourth century until its fall to Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century.
Christianity in the West, as the second millennium came to an end, became a shriveled limb of Christendom. In the middle of the last century Romano Guardini, professor of philosophy and theology at the University of Munich, published The End of the Modern World. It has since been hailed as a minor classic.
Guardini’s book was a Christian reflection on the making of Europe into a self-cognizant continent distinct culturally from Africa and Asia. The defining historic periods of the West, or Europe as Christendom, in Guardini’s view, were not lost since they remained intelligible and related to one another in a living continuity, as pagan Greece and Rome became centres of Christianity. But it is this continuity, this memory of the past alive in the present and framing the future, Guardini lamented, that was irreparably ruptured by the godless ideologies of Communism and Nazism mortally wounding Christian Europe in the two world wars of the last century.
Guardini’s theme resurfaced early in the new millennium in an exchange between Professor Marcello Pera, philosopher and politician who at the time (2004) was president of the Italian Senate, and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and later succeeded John Paul II as Pope Benedict XVI. Their exchange was published as a small book, Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam (2006).
Pera in addressing his remarks to Cardinal Ratzinger quoted him, “Relativism…in certain respects has become the real religion of modern man” and that it “is the most profound difficulty of our day.”
Pera described relativism as “contradictory, false, and counterproductive for Christians.” He wrote, “Counterproductive, because if relativistically speaking, one truth is equivalent to another, what is the purpose of dialogue? And if faith contains no truth, how can we be saved?”
Cardinal Ratzinger in reply recalled “the spiritual roots of Europe.” “Europe would no longer be Europe,” expressed the Cardinal, “if this fundamental nucleus of its social edifice were to vanish or be changed in an essential way. We all know how much marriage and the family are in jeopardy.” The effects of relativism and multiculturalism meant, “In our contemporary society, thank goodness, anyone who dishonors the fate of Israel, its image of God, or its great figures must pay a fine. The same holds true for anyone who dishonors the Koran and the convictions of Islam. But when it comes to Jesus Christ and that which is sacred to Christians, instead, freedom of speech becomes the supreme good.”
Relativism illustrates, Cardinal Ratzinger asserted, “a peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological. It is commendable that the West is trying to be more open, to be more understanding of the values of the outsiders, but it has lost all capacity for self-love. All that it sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure.”
The West has gone giddy with “wokeism” and the demonic imaginings of transhumanism. As a civilization, the West holds nothing sacred anymore. Instead, its contemporary priestly caste of intellectuals and media-rated pundits celebrate with fanfare the notion “God is dead”, as was exultantly announced by those epigones of atheism, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.
This is the present context of anti-Christianity in the West that blankets Christendom as radical secularism and relativism, and that finds release as Russophobia in the elite-driven hatred of all things Russian under Putin, but not against China in whose economy the collective West over the past three decades invested giddily.
From a Christian perspective the proxy-war in Ukraine against Russia is indefensible. Anyone in the West, any church in the West, in recalling John Paul’s “Apostolic Letter published in January 1988 on the occasion of the Millennium of the Baptism of Kievan Rus” (see https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=3700&repos=1&subrepos=0&searchid=2298305) cannot mistake what is at stake in this “clash of civilizations” of the West against Russia.
John Paul II wrote:
Yes, both Churches, the Catholic and the Orthodox, despite the difficulties born of age-old misunderstandings, today more than ever are determined to rediscover communion around the Eucharistic Table and are looking with particular attention and hope, in this Millennium, to all the spiritual sons and daughters of Saint Vladimir…
Europe is Christian in its very roots. The two forms of the great tradition of the Church, the Eastern and the Western, the two forms of culture, complement each other like the two “lungs” of a single body. Such is the eloquence of the past. Such is the inheritance of the peoples who live in this Continent.
One cannot but note John Paul II’s reference to “Kievan Rus”, instead of Ukraine that emerged as an independent entity only a few years after his letter was published. Ukraine was a construct of the post-1917 Communist/Bolshevik Soviet Union. But through the heart of this relatively recent construct runs the historic divide between the Eastern and the Western expressions of Christianity the Pope so appositely described as the two “lungs” of a single body.
It is not any wonder the left in the West passionately embraced the godless Soviet Union, and now as passionately opposes a Christian Russia. It is also unsurprising how so much of the West in embracing the politics of the left has also embraced its demonic, relativistic, and transhuman values in which cultural Marxism is embedded.
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