Whose Side Is God on Now?

BY PAT BUCHANAN

In his Kremlin defense of Russiaโ€™s annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin, even before he began listing the battles where Russian blood had been shed on Crimean soil, spoke of an older deeper bond.

Crimea, said Putin, โ€œis the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptized. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.โ€

Russia is a Christian country, Putin was saying.

This speech recalls last Decemberโ€™s address where the former KGB chief spoke of Russia as standing against a decadent West:

โ€œMany Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values. Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation.โ€

Heard any Western leader, say, Barack Obama, talk like that lately?

Indicting the โ€œBolsheviksโ€ who gave away Crimea to Ukraine, Putin declared, โ€œMay God judge them.โ€

What is going on here?

With Marxism-Leninism a dead faith, Putin is saying the new ideological struggle is between a debauched West led by the United States and a traditionalist world Russia would be proud to lead.

In the new war of beliefs, Putin is saying, it is Russia that is on Godโ€™s side. The West is Gomorrah.

Western leaders who compare Putinโ€™s annexation of Crimea to Hitlerโ€™s Anschluss with Austria, who dismiss him as a โ€œKGB thug,โ€ who call him โ€œthe alleged thief, liar and murderer who rules Russia,โ€ as the Wall Street Journalโ€™s Holman Jenkins did, believe Putinโ€™s claim to stand on higher moral ground is beyond blasphemous.

But Vladimir Putin knows exactly what he is doing, and his new claim has a venerable lineage. The ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers who exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, was, at the time of his death in 1964, writing a book on โ€œThe Third Rome.โ€

The first Rome was the Holy City and seat of Christianity that fell to Odoacer and his barbarians in 476 A.D. The second Rome was Constantinople, Byzantium, (todayโ€™s Istanbul), which fell to the Turks in 1453. The successor city to Byzantium, the Third Rome, the last Rome to the old believers, was โ€” Moscow.

Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.

Putin is plugging into some of the modern worldโ€™s most powerful currents.

Not only in his defiance of what much of the world sees as Americaโ€™s arrogant drive for global hegemony. Not only in his tribal defense of lost Russians left behind when the USSR disintegrated.He is also tapping into the worldwide revulsion of and resistance to the sewage of a hedonistic secular and social revolution coming out of the West.

In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russiaโ€™s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity. His recent speeches carry echoes of John Paul II whose Evangelium Vitae in 1995 excoriated the West for its embrace of a โ€œculture of death.โ€

What did Pope John Paul mean by moral crimes?

The Westโ€™s capitulation to a sexual revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide โ€” the displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum writes that she was stunned when in Tbilisi to hear a Georgian lawyer declare of the former pro-Western regime of Mikhail Saakashvili, โ€œThey were LGBT.โ€

โ€œIt was an eye-opening moment,โ€ wrote Applebaum. Fear and loathing of the same-sex-marriage pandemic has gone global. In Paris, a million-man Moral Majority marched in angry protest.

Author Masha Gessen, who has written a book on Putin, says of his last two years, โ€œRussia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world.โ€

But the war to be waged with the West is not with rockets. It is a cultural, social, moral war where Russiaโ€™s role, in Putinโ€™s words, is to โ€œprevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.โ€

Would that be the โ€œchaotic darknessโ€ and โ€œprimitive stateโ€ of mankind, before the Light came into the world?

This writer was startled to read in the Jan-Feb. newsletter from the social conservative World Council of Families in Rockford, Ill., that, of the โ€œten best trendsโ€ in the world in 2013, number one was โ€œRussia Emerges as Pro-Family Leader.โ€

In 2013, the Kremlin imposed a ban on homosexual propaganda, a ban on abortion advertising, a ban on abortions after 12 weeks and a ban on sacrilegious insults to religious believers.

โ€œWhile the other super-powers march to a pagan world-view,โ€ writes WCFโ€™s Allan Carlson, โ€œRussia is defending Judeo-Christian values. During the Soviet era, Western communists flocked to Moscow. This year, World Congress of Families VII will be held in Moscow, Sept. 10-12.โ€

Will Vladimir Putin give the keynote?

In the new ideological Cold War, whose side is God on now?

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of โ€œSuicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?โ€ To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

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