Thursday, May 9, 2019

Russian Christians Must Resist Cult of War, Mitrofanov Says


Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 8 – Ongoing Russian government efforts to make World War II the central event of Russian history in the 20th century violate the basic norms of Christianity and must be opposed by the church, according to Archpriest Georgy Mitrofanov, a professor of history at the St. Petersburg Spiritual Academy.

            His argument, made in the influential church journal Pravoslaviye i mir, merits particular attention because in the view of most observers, the Moscow Patriarchate and the church it heads have become little more than handmaidens of the Kremlin on this point (pravmir.ru/pochemu-my-hotim-povtorit-vojnu-protoierej-georgij-mitrofanov-ob-istoricheskom-bespamyatstve/).

                Mitrofanov says that as a historian and as a priest, he is “deeply convinced” that elevating World War II in the way that the Russian government now is doing is “a completely unacceptable approach. War is anti-natural from all points of view.” It not only kills and maims people during it but changes their attitude toward violence and oppression for all times.

            “Not one individual who has passed through this experience can be certain what will happen with his soul after the war” because “in war it isn’t glorious achievements that dominate but crimes. The Church does not know the definition of hero … it knows only the call for man to be holy.”

            Those who try to confuse this situation are undermining the capacity of people to remain human and Christian; and consequently, “to view war as the founding event of our history and life is impossible – we aren’t some wild nomadic horde or tribe of cannibals who survive by constantly fighting and killing someone.”

            “In our history,” the archpriest says, “there have been events and periods when we didn’t destroy but created; we had a culture and a spiritual life.” Why can’t the state and society point to those as “the most important things in our history?”

            Especially immoral are slogans like “’We can do this again!’”  No one who knows about war either directly or from family members can want that. “I do not want to repeat that. I do not want to experience what my relatives experienced during the war.  And this is the position of any normal person.”

             At the present time, “we lack an adequate understanding of war as sin and unhappiness, and this is really horrific because people who do not understand their own past risk experiencing it again … And it is sad that the Church on this has said practically nothing,” Mitrofanov continues.

            “One of the most horrific consequences of Soviet times,” the church historian continues, “is the breakdown in historical memory within families. ‘Better for children to know nothing about grandfather and grandmother who were nobility, merchants or priests, lest God forbid something should happen.’” 

            Consequently, Russians lost that most important form of memory and learned about the past only from state-approved messages, and those have become in some respects worse in the last decade than they were even in Soviet times, in large measure because the current generation of Russian leaders has no direct or even indirect experience of war.

            For them and then for the people their propaganda is directed at, war has been reduced from a human tragedy to “a computer game” and thus become almost acceptable, especially when there is the notion from such games of multiple lives.  People are freed from having to think seriously about their mortality.

            When the elites of the world consisted of people who remembers the war … there was a fear before war. I couldn’t bear Soviet propaganda when I was a child,” Mitrofanov says; “but such irresponsible and flippant attitude toward war [as now being disseminated in Russia] I did not encounter even then.”

            “Yes, we were prepared for war and attack but there was always the subtext that this would be a misfortune and catastrophe and must not be.” Now that subtext is gone and with it the constraints that existed in the past, the archpriest continues.

            Mitrofanov says that he does not really understand “why the theme of World War II is viewed as the basic theme of the Russian tragedy of eth 20th century. Our tragedy began with World War I, a conflict that made the revolution and all succeeding misfortunes of our country inevitable, including up to the 1990s, with the Afghan and Chechen wars.”

            “Now, having entered the 21st century, we of course should remember the 20th as one of the most horrible centuries of Russian history and perhaps the most horrible in terms of the number of victims which we suffered. But to speak about that requires an entirely different tone than the one that has been adopted.”

            “The theme of war is very important,” the church leader says; “but most important of all is the theme of peace.”

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