Month: November 2023

When it comes to defining their war objectives, the Russians not so much move the goal posts as throw them out of the stadium.

When Putin’s hordes flooded into the Ukraine on 24 February, 2022, the objective was defined as de-Nazifying and demilitarising the country. Wiping the Ukraine out as a sovereign state in other words: that was the only way to achieve such worthy goals.

When several crushing defeats turned that objective into a pie in the sky, Vlad lost the thread. Having missed the original target, he began both to lower his sights and to raise them – sometimes in the course of a single day.

Aiming low, he’d announce ad urbi et orbi that all he wanted was to make sure Russian-speaking Ukrainians wouldn’t be abused by bloodthirsty Judaeo-Nazi Ukies. In the next breath, he’d go global. His redefined aim was in fact defending (or else creating – it could be either) a Pax Russica, made up of all Russian speakers around the world.

That gave me a few sleepless nights, pursued as I was by the nightmares of Russian tanks rolling down Piccadilly to protect my right to speak Russian, which I don’t want to speak anyway. I was also tempted to alert the residents of Brooklyn’s largely Russian-speaking Brighton Beach to the imminent airborne landing of Spetsnaz paras.

Jesting aside, unclear strategic objectives compromise tactical operations, and someone must have put a quiet word to that effect into Putin’s shell-like. To his credit, he understood and acted on that understanding.

Earlier this week Vlad convened his Security Council and delivered a speech meant to eliminate any strategic obfuscation once and for all. The Council members applauded, and so did much of the rest of the country. Now they knew.

“In the Ukraine,” said Vlad, “Russia is waging war on the USA to create a Palestinian state. The absence of such a state is the principal injustice of today’s world, which the USA is guilty of, and which Russia must correct by fighting in the Ukraine.”

Clarity at last, happiness all around. Noticing the unbridled enthusiasm written on the faces of everyone present, Vlad went on to explain that the West was the “root of evil” in the world.

“Behind the tragedy of the Palestinians, the massacre in the Middle East, the conflict in Ukraine, many other conflicts in the world, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and so on, are the ruling elites of the United States and their satellites,” continued Vlad, like a thief screaming “Stop thief!” as he runs ahead of his pursuers.

“It would be good for those who worry so deeply about citizens of Israel to investigate what their special services are up to in Ukraine, and that they are trying to provoke pogroms in Russia,” added Putin. “Pure scum, there is no other word for it.”

He was referring to the pogrom at Makhachkala’s airport the other day, when a mob screaming “Allahu akbar!” rushed onto the runway hoping to massacre Israeli passengers on the flight arriving from Tel Aviv.

In the process they looted the airport shops, proving that the terminal has come up in the world since I myself landed there. My friend Tony Daniels and I went to Makhachkala in 1995, when the FCO asked us to have a look at the refugee camps on the Dagestan-Chechnya border. At that time, there were no shops to loot at the airport – but on the plus side, there was plenty of naked concrete.

The horror stories of Russian atrocities we heard at the camp were the worst I had ever heard, and people dying in front of our very eyes proved the stories were true. If further validation was necessary, the Russians have now provided it by their inhuman massacres of civilians in the Ukraine, every bit as horrific as in the two Chechen wars.

Rallying Dagestani Muslims to storm that airport, while also launching an anti-Semitic riot in Khasavyurt (the site of that camp in 1995), seems like a task beyond even the combined efforts of CIA and Mossad, but well within the capabilities of the FSB. It has form in that sort of thing: Russian and Soviet security services have always whipped up anti-Semitism to channel resentment into that proven conduit and away from the government.

Putin then accused the dastardly Yankees of using their Israeli proxies to murder “hundreds of thousands” of Gaza civilians, including the mandatory “women and children”. Since Hamas sources themselves had only claimed 8,000 such victims, Vlad was out by two orders of magnitude at least. But that, as the Russians say, is only half the trouble.

If the Guinness Book of World Records had an entry for the most deranged speeches, it would have to be updated every time Putin opened his mouth in public. Accusing others of atrocities against civilians when the Russians are indeed killing hundreds of thousands of them in the Ukraine takes more than just mendacious cynicism.

Putin seems to have lost all touch with reality, but the scary thing is that the Russians don’t mind. Their social networks are bursting at the seams with messages of enthusiastic support and calls for immediate nuclear strikes on all major Western cities.

All this should eliminate all doubts, if any still exist, as to who really is the root of evil in the world. Putin’s speech is nothing short of a declaration of war on the West, specifically the US.

He is issuing a war cry: by murdering Ukrainian civilians, Russia is fighting the US to create a Palestinian state. This sounds deranged, and at the level of semantics it is. But the semiotic signal comes across loud and clear: Russia considers herself at war with the US and the West in general. I do hope we are listening and making notes.

P.S. Speaking of evil, the other day the Israeli authorities showed an audience of foreign reporters a 43-minute film cut together from footage shot by the bodycams of Hamas terrorists.

Those reporters have been around a block or two, and they’ve seen horrors worse than those Tony and I witnessed in 1995. Yet the bloodbath shown in the film shocked even that blasé audience.

Many hyperventilated and ran out, others threw up, some others had hysterical fits. Those experienced people had seen many massacres, but scenes of people dismembered with hoes and babies roasted in the oven were too much even for them.

In 1945 the victorious Allies forced many Germans to watch documentaries of Auschwitz and Treblinka. It would be nice to do the same thing by forcing all those pro-Hamas demonstrators to watch that horror film. Greta Thunberg should get a free ticket.

“Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life,” writes Max Weber in his canonical work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904-1905.

To any sixteenth-century humanist or Protestant this line of thought would have sounded not just wrong but downright daft. Yet Weber’s readers nodded their collective understanding. For them, that observation went without saying.

A shift must have occurred in the intervening four centuries, and it did. It’s called Protestantism.

Luther was an Augustinian monk, and he was strongly influenced by the founder of his order. Yet in the time-proven manner of a politicised exegete, Luther focused on those teachings that supported his own thoughts and ignored those that didn’t (such as unquestioning obedience to the church, which Augustine demanded, and the vital importance of sacraments, which Augustine extolled as “the visible form of an invisible grace.”).

One such aspect stands out: the doctrine of predestination, closely linked to original sin.

The Fall, according to Augustine, stigmatised man for ever. Original sin was so grave that it couldn’t be redeemed by anything an individual could do in his lifetime. Only God could determine who would be saved. No one but God could either know a person’s final destination or affect it in any way.

The greatest philosophical problem arising from predestination is its seeming contradiction with free will. After all, if choices we make using our free will are irrelevant to our salvation, what makes our will free in the first place? And why do we need it at all? Free will can only remain man’s most valuable possession if we stand to gain from a correct choice or suffer the consequences of a wrong one.

God’s is the absolute freedom, but if we are truly created in his image, ours has to be at least a relative one. Only God can be totally free, but that doesn’t mean man has to be totally enslaved.

Luther also declared that every man was his own priest, thereby extending humanism to religion. In one fell swoop this made apostolic succession, along with the church hierarchy, redundant and therefore useless.

But it couldn’t have been made completely useless for as long as the church hierarchy was considered essential to the task of preserving Christian tradition. Showing laudable consistency, Luther chopped through that Gordian knot with Alexander’s élan: if it takes a useless church hierarchy to preserve tradition, then tradition is useless too. Who needs it anyway if the Scripture contains the whole truth of Christianity?

This explains why 300 years later John Henry Newman felt justified to write that: “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant”. For Luther’s denial of equal rights to tradition ignores both the history and the nature of Christianity.

To begin with, the first Gospel wasn’t written until decades after Jesus. Yet the church had survived and spread in the intervening period by subsisting on tradition, mostly oral. Also, since Christianity is a living religion, revelation can be given gradually, not once and for all.

Unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity isn’t a religion wholly contained in a written document, and nor can it ever be regarded as such this side of heresy. The Scripture may be the first, second and tenth most important parts of doctrine. But it isn’t the only part.

Calvin developed Luther by pushing the idea of predestination to an absurd extreme. He acted in the manner of a heretic who attaches undue significance to one single aspect of faith, however correct it may be.

We are predestined for salvation or damnation, pronounced Calvin, and, since we live in “total depravity”, we can do nothing to affect the outcome. The idea of good works as restitution for sin is Catholic nonsense, a way of keeping the masses in check. Some will be saved and others damned, regardless of their works (apart from faith, which is a work too).

When asked to put a number on the lucky winners of that divine lottery, Calvin tended to change his mind. The range varied from a miserly one in 100 to a generous one in five. In any case we were talking about a small minority, but out of curiosity, how could we know which of us had drawn the lucky ticket?

It’s Calvin’s answer to this question that led Weber to regard capitalism as a predominantly Protestant phenomenon. God, explained Calvin, gave those to be saved a sign of his benevolence by making them rich.

No, God wouldn’t just rain gold on the elect. Rather he’d guide them to a way of life that would deliver wealth as a reward. Hard work would be an important part of it, but piety and frugality also had a role to play, if only as a way of thanking God for the lucre he had allowed the righteous to make. Virtuous conduct was thus an equivalent of a thank-you note to God.

This was nothing short of a revolution, a crucible of class war. For the first time since Christ, a major religious figure upgraded wealth from an object of bare toleration to a sign of divine benevolence. Grace became quantifiable in pieces of gold.

In common with most successful revolutionaries, Calvin sensed the mood of his flock and told them exactly what they craved to hear. Secretly Genevans had always known that God rewarded righteousness with money, just as he did in the Old Testament; now they no longer had to be secretive about it.

Austerity was in their nature too. The burghers eschewed opulence both out of inner conviction, but also to emphasise the difference between themselves and the idle, degenerate aristocracy on the one hand and lazy, impoverished layabouts on the other.

By allowing the bourgeoisie to strike out against both, Calvin provided a much needed tool of social control. He married remunerative work and religion, thus making indolence a sin, only matched by the sin of pleasure-seeking. Now if hoi-polloi were to rebel against the rich, they would be rebelling against God – not something they were prepared to do. Not yet anyway.

For all his (and Luther’s) anti-Semitism, Calvin pushed Christianity even further towards its Judaic antecedents than Luther did. For one thing, material reward for virtue had until then been a feature of the Old Testament only.

Followers of Christ were supposed to leave their possessions behind, not try to multiply them. Unlike Abraham whose faith was rewarded by riches, theirs was rewarded by a lifetime of penury. St Francis, shedding his clothes and walking out of his father’s house naked, was closer to Christ than a successful merchant could ever be.

Those who according to Calvin were predestined for salvation had to show their gratitude by pursuing puritanical self-denial not just during some festivals, such as Lent, but every minute of their lives. Though he attacked Catholic monasticism, Calvin effectively took his own version out of the monastery, extending denial of the world to the world at large.

In theory, there is something attractive about the ideal of pursuing virtue one’s whole life, not just a hundred or so days a year. And it’s easy to poke fun at a hypothetical Catholic who divides his week between debauchery and double-dealing only to go to confession on Sunday and be forgiven. In practice, however, there is a serious obstacle to turning such an ideal into reality. It’s called human nature.

Perfect life can only be achieved by perfect people, and few fit this description. The rest welcome any excuse to practise what they don’t preach.

As a result, many Protestants used their religious freedom to steer clear of the more taxing demands on their lives. In heeding Calvin’s simple explanations, they slit their own religious throats with Occam’s razor. Gradually many of them, along with much of what used to be called Christendom, moved away from the religion itself.

This isn’t what Calvin envisaged, and it is something both he and Luther would have abhorred. They themselves believed in God with sincere passion. What they didn’t seem to believe in was unintended consequences, a failing they share with secular revolutionaries.

It’s otherwise known as Reformation Day, but I believe in calling a spade a spade, as long as I don’t get done for commiting a hate crime.

On 31 October, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg.

Thereby Europe stepped into the antechamber of secularism, for the Reformation pushed the countdown button for it. I may go into the doctrinal and theological reasons for that tomorrow, but today I’ll just ask a simple question:

Why did the Reformation become so successful at that particular time, early in the century when even translating the Bible into vernacular was a capital offence?

After all, that wasn’t the only attempt at church reform. The Englishman John Wycliff and the Czech John Hus before Luther, along with the Fleming Cornelius Jansen (or rather his followers) immediately after him, also tried to correct the iniquities that so excited the sixteenth-century Protestants.

Yet their efforts neither destroyed the traditional church nor created a new one. Whatever their original intent, those reformers achieved just that: some reform, not much.

Conversely, first Luther and then Calvin succeeded in breaking away from the Catholic church altogether, starting worldwide confessions of their own. In many areas of dogma, liturgy, everyday practices and the whole tenor of religion, these confessions veered as far away from orthodox Christianity as was possible while still remaining Christian.

Yet, though the original animus of the Protestants was directed at dogma, liturgy and clerical abuses, their success had little to do with correcting any of those. At the risk of sounding materialist, one has to conclude that the contributing factors were almost all secular.

The Holy Roman Empire was a feudal network of principalities, mostly though not exclusively Germanic, acting as vassalages to the supreme feudal lord, the Emperor. Some of the potentates were desperate to assert their independence from the papacy, sensing correctly that the Emperor’s power would diminish if denied its ecclesiastical underpinnings.

The most effective way of breaking away from the Pope would have been to break away from Catholicism altogether. However, by that time the only alternative to it, the Eastern confession, had become no alternative at all.

Thus, when Luther came up with his sweeping reforms, his audience was primed, and the seeds of his dissent fell on fertile soil already softened up by Renaissance humanism.

The feudal aristocrats of the Holy Roman Empire didn’t take long to realise that what was under way was the birth of a new religion, not just a reform of the old one. A new religion meant a new political arrangement, this much they knew.

And, following two centuries of humanist scepticism, that was probably all they needed to know. Their secular aspirations came first. Fine points of theology and liturgy were strictly secondary.

However, the power of the feudal aristocracy was being curbed not only by the Pope but also by the emergence of the bourgeoisie, a new, mostly urban, class.

The economic, and consequently political, power of that class derived neither from inheritance nor from arable land. Mostly the bourgeois relied on labour, their own or hired, to get ahead. Their economic success was measured not in acres but in money – the more of it, the better. This put them on a collision course with the Catholic church.

First, though the church’s opposition to usury had by then weakened, it had by no means disappeared. Even if some secular authorities had made the charging of interest legal, the general attitude of the church was that of half-hearted toleration, barely masking the tacit disapproval underneath.

Yet credit was the bloodline of the urban middle classes, since without it they couldn’t take advantage of the business opportunities arising in the rapidly growing towns. Hence the bourgeoisie of the Holy Roman Empire felt uncomfortable with the Catholic church.

Nor were they happy with the Jewish domination of financial services that would inevitably ensue if Christians were banned, or at best discouraged, from lending money at interest.

Whatever latent anti-Semitism the bourgeois possessed to begin with became more virulent because they felt that their own church was pushing them into the hands of the Jewish money lenders. That resentment was described in English literature, both approvingly (by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice) and disapprovingly (by Scott in Ivanhoe).

It wasn’t only the growing middle classes but also many of the aristocrats who were often indebted to the Jews, and those gentlemen were conditioned to solve financial problems by violence. After all, their original fortunes had been made that way.

This was the nature of many anti-Jewish massacres, including the 1190 pogrom in York (the last such event to take place in England), where the mob led by local noblemen first broke into the Minster to destroy the promissory notes kept there, and only then went after the Jews. That bile could also partly account for the anti-Semitism of both Luther and Calvin who were aware of its appeal to their flock.

The difficulty of obtaining credit wasn’t the sole problem the urban middle classes had with the church. Their wealth depended on hard work – not only around the clock but also around the calendar. Yet both the clock and the calendar were affected by the traditional practices of the church: it wasn’t just the Sabbath day that was supposed to be kept holy.

The ‘days of obligation’ set aside for religious worship numbered at least 100 in many dioceses, which meant that almost a third of the year was to be taken out of wealth-generating toil. This paled by comparison to the 200 such days demanded by the Eastern church at its most orthodox, but that was little consolation for the aspiring Germans.

Upwardly mobile classes are innately opposed to any traditional hierarchies, and this held true for the Germanic bourgeois of the sixteenth century. That’s not to say they were intuitively egalitarian, far from it. It’s just that, for their aspirations to be pursued unimpeded, they needed to replace the old hierarchy of status derived from birth with the new hierarchy of status derived from money.

To that end, throughout the Middle Ages the emerging class of urban bourgeoisie had been fighting for political independence from the aristocracy. Municipal government and other local institutions had been wrenching bits of sovereignty away from feudal noblemen, including ecclesiastical ones.

The wealthier the bourgeoisie became, the more political power it could wield – and the more prepared it would be to break away from the church. Yet, pious as most of the townsmen were, they weren’t quite ready to part ways with their faith even if they had problems with their church. And in those days they tended to use the words ‘faith’ and ‘church’ almost interchangeably.

When the reformers came along, the bourgeois heaved a sigh of relief. They no longer had to be good Catholics in order to be good Christians: “Every man is his own priest,” declared Luther. Thus it stands to reason that they welcomed with open arms the original reformer, Luther, and especially Calvin who reformed the Reformation by pushing it even closer to the middle class.

Luther stayed within the confines of the German principalities, and his survival was largely owed to his appeal to the secular aspirations of the German princes, however carefully they tried to mask such aspirations with pious verbiage. That’s why, 19 years before Tyndale was immolated for merely translating the Bible, those princes shielded Luther from papal wrath.

I realise to my shame that I’ve been waxing materialist throughout this short sketch. The fault isn’t so much mine as my subject’s, but I still must atone for it. So, barring a nuclear attack in the next 24 hours, I’ll try to decorticate Protestant theology tomorrow – showing, with luck, that it too pushed Europe closer to secularism.