Moscow Patriarchate Priest Vsevelod Chaplin’s Unique Opinions
First an article from Interfax:
(Moscow, May 27, Interfax) The Russian Orthodox Church (referring to the Moscow Patriarchate– ed.) believes that Russia cannot be powerful and successful if its people don’t realize supreme ideals and values and don’t have will to stand up for them.
“Neither oil nor weapons make nation great. If we don’t have ideals and a supreme global goal, we will be deprived of oil and gas and all our weapons either won’t be used due to the lack of political will or will be used against ourselves,” the deputy chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin said on Tuesday at a conference in Moscow.
He thinks that “ideological and volitional components of politics are central and define everything,” and only having it realized, “Russia can achieve success.”
According to him, the minority won the October coup in 1917 because they had “a supreme aim and spared no effort to achieve it.” Fr. Vsevolod noted that the society’s majority also had the same goal “but, perhaps, they weren’t taught to defend their choice.”
“Future Russia’s victories also depend on whether there are supreme goals, supreme values and ability to achieve the goal leaving out minor every day priorities for the sake of our global mission,” the Moscow Patriarchate’s representative summed up.
More “scraps” (as they call it) from this thoughtful fellow from the Moscow Patriarchate. Our comments are in italics. —NFTU
Will peace in Europe and America last long? I don’t think so. The times Akhmatova called “vegetarian” sooner or later always come to an end, especially in the period of intense social contradictions in the world. In fact, 100-200 million members of the Western elite cannot hold in leash the rest six milliard of Earth’s population. Neither stick nor carrot will help. It was in mid 90s that in perfect silence I warned western analytics against nuclear terrorism, today it is considered a real danger. One French politician even has recently counted possible political and economical consequences of terroristic nuclear attacks to European capitals.
NFTU: 100-200 million is no longer talk of the “Western elite”. It is a combined population of every major city in Europe and America, and our writer knows this. He is not talking about the “elite”, but major population centers in the West.
The West has two ways out. The first one is to create numerous, extremely destructive (nuclear, chemical and etc.) flash points of conflicts that allow to get rid of two-three milliards people and at the same time justify economical emergencies a-la the USA refusal to devalue the dollar or expropriating Middle East reserves of oil. But this way is unsafe as the recent conflicts have shown that it’s difficult to manage them and they can easily catch the West as well.
NFTU: The author apparently thinks in very Soviet terms. While there are certain groups like the Fed Reserve who can affect the rise and fall of the dollar (and not by much) there is no “currency pegging” as has existed in Soviet and modern Russia, and so although his idea of creating conflicts to avoid dealing with economic crises is probably spot-on, the context in which he views them is far removed from reality. Not that such couldn’t occur if the country continued down the path of totalitarianism.
The second way is to create global “Orwell’s” totalitarian regime with all-around electronic chase, brainwash, severe repressions against dissidents and widespread system of squealing. The whole historical experience shows that such a regime can conceal social conflicts inside for a long time.
NFTU: We can assume the author understands this well.
Today it is technically difficult and expensive to build, even for the United States. But I am afraid that global policy will develop right in this direction. Even if the main slogans of such reforms will be democracy and political correctness, in practice we’ll have to leave them out.
NFTU: What the author is leaving out as well is who is helping who. The strongest infrastructures, technologically for this sort of regime (and from which the US Government is drawing inspiration) are not in the West at all, but in China, a close Russian ally due to their shared history with communism. Russia’s support for China is not simply talk, but a lot of activity to bring the two countries together for the increase of their goals. And the Moscow Patriarchate is right in the middle of that too, building chapels for Russian “businessmen” in China. As a body with a history of using churches for monitoring people and government communications, the Patriarchate is doing its part to further the very totalitarian aims of which Fr Vsevelod Chaplin speaks. Yet he conveniently neglects mentioning this.
Clearly this “young voice” of the Moscow Patriarchate is very much of the old “school”.
