Well lets think that through because the old S.U. really controlled things like religion (wanted to eliminate it but controlled is a better term), as religion is s threat to state authority and acts as a check. It’s hard to make laws when people feel the law will send people to hell, more so religion has more of a hold on what is morality, which the people will hold the state up to. Many freedoms arise from the interplay of church and state authority battling each other.
In that a unified and state approved ‘church’ is important to maintain an authoritarian government. A approved and controlled religion would be easier for that recreation effort.
The Russian invasion is really about natural resources (in addition to Putin’s desire to recreate the Russian Empire).
“Although it accounts for only 0.4% and 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface and world’s population respectively, the country has approximately 5% of the world’s mineral resources.”
That’s what it’s meant to me for the majority of my life. There was a few years in the early 2010s when it was positive, but before that it usually meant “people who disagree with me in some vaguely-yet-implicitly-huge way to the left of me” and today in American political discourse it often means “people who disagree with me and consider themselves to the left of the GOP but who I consider right leaning enough to categorically dismiss them”.
Agreed! However, Russia is extremely homophobic, and I’m sure that aspect of it is incorporated in their never ending propaganda against the west. I believe the main thrust is “Reunification” which, according to sources in Russia, has been Putin’s wet dream for many years.
I honestly believe that if the Ukraine invasion had gone well and was the “Blitzkrieg” he had been hoping for, Putin would be setting his sights on the rest of eastern Europe. Now, with all the woes he is having politically and economically due to what has become a grim and prolonged affair, he may have to change his mind.
The Orthodox churches have always survived by being arms of the state. That’s been true from its inception. They did not choose the path of the Catholic church, of vying with the state for primacy. By the way, they have always been separately governed; there is no Orthodox pope who reigns over all, and the Russian church does not and I believe never has had authority over any other Orthodox church.
Putin, I feel certain, uses religious extreme conservatism as a weapon, just as he uses everything else. He may have religious beliefs but he is a pathological narcissist and God is just a rubber stamp for his ambitions.
He’s just completely wrong. I grew up in a liberal household in a liberal state. Liberals feared the Soviet Union. They didn’t care for the CIA, either.
There were some communists who admired the Soviet Union (usually in a "it’s a hell of a lot less brutal to its populace than the Russian empire was way) but that was not the view of liberals.
I’ve been participating in Pride parades since the very first one in 1970 (they weren’t parades back then, but illegal radical marches). If we had only known that we were threatening the World Order of Russia, we would have had much more to be Proud of.
I remember that time very well. I never heard any liberal express love for the USSR.
This is certainly an aspect of the invasion, but that doesn’t mean it “really about” that, and that alone. Shitty people have lots of shitty reasons for doing their shitty things, and it’s a mistake to try to single out any one shitty reason as “The One”, as if, if we could fix that one thing, they’d stop acting so shitty.
There’s lots of reasons why Putin is doing what he is, and focusing on any one of them in isolation is probably a mistake.
In more detail, the Orthodox believe that authority in the Church rests with a set of highly-placed bishops called “Patriarchs”, and that while some patriarchs might have more respect or status than others, none of them has any authority over any of the others. And in fact, they recognize the Bishop of Rome (i.e., the Pope) as one of those patriarchs, and one of particularly high status (the “First Among Equals”). So in the eyes of the Orthodox, the Pope has absolute authority over the Roman Catholic Church, and in the same way, the Patriarch of Moscow has absolute authority over the Russian Orthodox Church, and so on for the other patriarchs.
So, no, other Orthodox churches might potentially look to the Russian Orthodox, or to the Roman Catholics, or to any other church, as sources of potentially-wise advice, but nothing beyond the level of advice.
A lot of Russian opposition to the kind of westernization that Ukraine is embracing is due to the effects of the 1990’s on Russia, when neoliberal policies being imposed on Russia sent that nation from the dominant part of a globe-spanning empire to an economic basket case with a declining birth rate, a plummeting life expectancy, the wealth of the nation looted by a new class of oligarchs and the value of pensions and salaries rotting away under inflation and devaluation.
Is it any wonder that Russians doubled down in much the same way as the American rust belt - the people deriving financial benefit from the situation allying with reactionaries against the new social changes, and so distracting the have-nots with something that gets them right in the gut?
Al Jazeera had a decent article today about the role of the Russian orthodox church in the war.
Pope and several priests appeal to the Russian Orthodox Church leader after he endorsed the Ukraine invasion.
It talks about the support of the Russian patriarch and the various clergy, both in and out of Russia, who oppose the war. It also mentions that the Ukrainian church broke from the Russian one in 2018, and that there’s a major schism over that. Other Orthodox churches recognized the Ukrainian church, which didn’t sit well with the patriarch in Moscow.
Now you’ve got me wondering- we can pick up 1/7 more from the Russian flag (already got blue from Ukraine, there is no white, so…). What other flags would we need to combine to make the whole thing?
I gotta pile on. I know that there were liberals who dabbled with Soviet Love into the 60s, but my recollection is that certainly by the 70s and 80s any veil of humanity was long gone and virtually nobody was pro-Soviet in the US. I mean, there’s always a fringe, but nothing enough to even garner notice in either of the two parties.
Also, yes- liberal has come to mean anything the (ever-farther) right doesn’t like. I am by no reasonable definition a liberal, but have been told on many occasions that even holding disdain for Trump makes me a per se liberal.
Jamaica is red, green and yellow, dark blue could come from Dutch or Luxemburg flags, pale blue and yellow again Ukraine, but orange and violet are tricky.
Having gone to college at an extremely liberal U.S. campus in the 1980s, there was certainly a group of far-left liberals who embraced communism at that time, and who were very vocally active on campus.
My recollection is that they didn’t necessarily and specifically support the USSR, which was an imperfect implementation of communist ideals that they held (and even they would likely have acknowledged that the Soviets repressed their people), but these were the guys who wore Che Guevera t-shirts, and supported leaders and countries that represented the “people’s revolution,” such as Castro in Cuba and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
Yeah, there were always some American Marxist defenders of the Soviet ‘deformed worker’s state’ as a fucked up example of tyrannical Stalinist communism that nonetheless should be defended as the lesser of evils. However bad it might be, it was still on the less crooked path than the racist, exploitative, capitalist states of the West.
But that wasn’t even all Marxists and in the U.S. we’re talking a few tens of thousands of people at most back in the day and that might be overly generous. The fringe of the fringe.