Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Revenons a nos moutons

Having spent a good deal of time on the Pussy Riot story, aware that there are other stories around, not least in Russia, that may well be of interest I had not intended to return to it quite so soon. Needs, however, must be. What prompted me to change my intentions was the extraordinary amount of ignorant and rather venomous nonsense that has been written about the rather courageous young women. I am talking about ignorance here, rather than deliberate propaganda that is being spread by the Russian authorities, though clearly it has been quite effective with some unexpected people.

The nonsense and the ignorance revolve round some people's inability or reluctance to understand or even try to understand what really goes on in Russia and their equal reluctance to accept that not everything is exactly like their own rather limited experience in life. Thus I have been told by people who have, one assumes, never been near the country or spoken to many Russians that they know exactly how "the Russian people" as a whole feel about the punk prayer. For someone who has studied British attitudes to Russia at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this is all rather old hat. An extraordinary number of people then thought they knew exactly what "the Russian" was like. Those who lived long enough were stunned when "the Russian" started to behave somewhat differently from the way he or she was supposed to, according to the people who knew with such certainty.

Opinion polls show that many people are against Pussy Riot's actions though a number of them distrust the legal case and think the sentence is too harsh, a much smaller number support them and a very large number have no opinion or, much more likely, prefer not to stick their necks out or think too much about a dangerous subject, especially as it is summer and time for berry picking (soon it will be mushroom picking) as well as jam making and salting of cucumbers and tomatoes.

Somewhat belatedly, perhaps mindful of the possibility that the accusations levelled by the young women at the Orthodox Church hierarchy might be looked at by people more seriously, the Church has called for clemency. It is not clear what that might mean at this stage of the proceedings: they should have called for the clemency before sentence was passed not after. Which brings me to some of the silliest comments I have seen on the subject and the suggestions that they should have carried out their protests in a mosque. That, say such commentators with a self-satisfied smirk (it is there in the written words) would have shown them. They would have had considerably worse treatment.

Setting aside the possible psychopathology of people who smirk mentally at the thought of young women (and pretty young women at that) being harshly treated and abused physically, one must ask the question why on earth should they have gone to a mosque? How does a mosque come into the picture? This was not "edgy comedy" as one person described it to me disdainfully of the kind one sees on TV or at Edinburgh, which annoys me considerably as well. This was a political protest. A real political protest against a very nasty authoritarian regime and against the Orthodox Church hierarchy that is the real defiler of the churches and cathedrals, even of the one that was built in the nineties. What would be the point of protesting against their venality, corruption and closeness to the Putin regime in a mosque?

The point that all these people who rush into making comments miss is that the young women of Pussy Riot are Christians and approach the subject from a Christian point of view. Possibly that has become a little hard to understand in the West though I don't think so.

Allow me to link to two excellent pieces on the subject, both published on the other side of the Pond by two people who have actually looked at what the three defendants said in their closing statements. Having read some of their letter from prison and translated one of them into English I can see that the statements confirm what was said in the letters. Here is Charles Cameron on Zenpundit, one of the best sites around and John O'Sullivan, a man who has been quoted several times on this blog, in the NRO Corner.

Oh, and here is another fun story some people might like to read. It tells a few possibly unpalatable truths about the Church hierarchy and, especially, about Patriarch Kirill. I must say I rather like the moniker "Patriarch of Switzerland and all Watches".

12 comments:

  1. Thank-you for the reminder of how the Church is collaborationist. This does not work in the long run

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  2. Sadly, it seems to have worked up to a point in Russia for a long time. But people do rebel. I recall talking to one of the religious dissidents in the Soviet Union. They, too, thought of the Church as their enemy and rightly so.

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  3. Are they christians? I confess that I don't know what they are.

    Could you give a pointer to a statement of what any of their individual religious beliefs are? I have seen a great deal of assumption but no definitive statements and, frankly, the individuals in question are the ones to define their own beliefs.

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  4. I think if you read their statements and,perhaps, the letters they wrote from prison you might see some of it. Those are their own statements. All of it has been translated but in any case I assume from your certain knowledge that you read Russian.

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  5. Helen - No Russian here. My knowledge of Orthodoxy comes from Romania. It's a completely different language root but we're in the same neighborhood, so to speak, and the theology should mostly be the same. It's my read of their closing statements in translation that leads me to suspect they are not, in fact, christian but I do not entirely trust the translation and only hold that as the most tentative of suspicions, just enough to wonder.

    They certainly could have helped themselves by putting forward statements of support from their parish clergy if they could swing it. That they didn't is a sherlock holmes style "curious incident of the dog barking in the night". It's such an obvious defense if it were available.

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  6. I rather suspected that your knowledge of Russia, matters Russian and the situation with the Russian church were limited. Your comment confirms that. They have been supported by a few clergymen but the parish clergy is unlikely to go against the hierarchy, however veneal, corrupt and state controlled they might be. That is the truth but one needs to be interested enough in Russia itself to find that out.

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  7. I wanted to drop in a quick word of thanks, Helen.

    It looks as though I'll be reviewing Kyrill's book Freedom and Responsibility: A Search for Harmony for an Evangelical magazine quite soon -- frankly, I have sympathies on both sides of the issue, being a lover of both liturgy and liberty!

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  8. Helen - I was president of two parish councils for over a decade in total time. I'm quite familiar with the phenomenon of the spineless cleric. It is part of the post-communist sickness in the East. The Church is in dire need of re-norming classic behavior, and part of that is the priest telling the truth. It will not happen if you do not create an expectation that it *should* happen.

    I expect the priest to follow Jesus' example and so I act like the hierarchy is not infected with a festering mass of backstabbing power seekers. Of course they will do the right thing. And the laity must support them in doing the right thing for the sake of all their souls.

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    1. Frankly if that is what you expect from the Russian Orthodox hierarchy or the parish priests you are in for a great deal of disappointment. However, it does not look to me like you will bother to find out the reality of the situation and I don't blame you. Your image is so much more beautiful than the reality of the Russian Orthodox Church under Communism and after it.

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  9. I think this post misses the point. You don't have to defend the sentences, or be a defender of Putin or the corrupt Orthodox hierarchy to see that the Pussy Riot campiagn is a massive sham targeted at gullible Western audiences. Firstly, these women are not Christians or 'anti-establishment rockers'. As far as I can see they have never made any recordings. What they have done is to have a sex orgy in public, in front of minors, and stuffing a frozen chicken up one of their vaginas, again in full public view, as well as a whole host of similar such artistic achievements. One more vile than the next. As Simon Jenkins said, to treat the Pussy Riot gesture as a stand for artistic liberty is like praising Johnny Rotten, as the Voltaire of our day. There can be disproportionate apologias as well as disproportionate sentences.

    However it isn't so much the protests themselves which are outrageous. What's really outrageous is the reaction of the US-UK police states. For them to get on their high horse over Russia's (undeniably) disproportionate sentencing is grotesquely hypocrical. All of these regimes routinely lock up speech-criminals and (particularly in the case of America) mete out wildly disproportionate sentences for minor offences. Whatever happened to looking at the beam in one's own eye first?

    The UK and US governments don't give a tinker's cuss for freedom of expression, they are just pi**ed off that Russia is no longer led by a drunkard willing to hand over the country to the IMF asset strippers. A Saudi journalist gets illegally extradited from Malaysia and imprisoned in Saudi Arabia without trial or due process for tweeting honest thoughts about the prophet - silence from the West. Thai citizens legitimately criticizing their monarchy end up in prison - silence from the West. The violent crackdown on protestors in Bahrain -deafening silence from the west.

    This hypocrisy highlights how the UK and US use memes like "human rights" and "freedom of speech" as a tool to further their geopolitical interests and ferment unrest whilst remaining silent on their own human rights abuses and those carried out in states that toe the line. That is the real outrage.

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    1. Jen, I assume there is no point in replying to you as you have been arrested by whichever Western police state you live under. If you or somebody near you who is reading this blog in great secret could let me know which prison you are in I shall try to organize some food parcels and candle-lit protests about your imprisonment for speaking up against the police state.

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    2. No point because you cannot answer. You would be trying to defend hypocrisy which is indefensible. So you write a silly reply instead free of argument.

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