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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment