Fundamentalist perverts
Sun, Jan 19, 2025 page7
Putin’s regime has nothing to do with spirituality; he is simply the latest in a long line of murderous modernizers
By Slavoj Zizek
The standard interpretation of the Russia-Ukraine war is that it is a “clash of cultures” pitting Western liberalism against traditional Russian authoritarianism, but this is deeply misleading. Far from being a traditionalist, Russian President Vladimir Putin is merely the latest in a series of murderous modernizers stretching from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great to Catherine the Great and Joseph Stalin.
When Stalin was asked to define Bolshevism in the late 1920s, he described it as a combination of Russian dedication to a cause and American pragmatism. Once in power, he sought to imitate the US industrialist Henry Ford’s achievements throughout the Soviet Union, brutally erasing all traces of Russian tradition through, most prominently, the violent collectivization of agriculture.
Stalin was also a great admirer of Peter the Great, who built a new capital for Russia on the Baltic Sea (St Petersburg) to establish a direct link with Western Europe. Peter’s reforms faced resistance from so-called Old Believers, Eastern Orthodox Christians whose liturgical and ritual practices predated the reforms carried out by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow in 1652 to 1666. Many Old Believers ultimately chose death over compromising their faith. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, thousands died by self-immolation.
Things only really changed in Russia with the October Revolution; and even then, the first Soviet government included several prominent figures with Old Believer backgrounds. The Bolsheviks correctly saw such sectarians as representatives of a long-running social protest against the czarist regime. The Old Believers had always distrusted the unity of church and state (which really meant the former’s subordination to the latter), insisting that the religious community remain a self-organization of common people.
More:
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2025/01/19/2003830456
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