Essays in Idleness

The Soviet-Russian tactic, through the age of Stalin and to the present in Ukraine, has been to spread ruin over a countryside, once they have recruited sufficient numbers for war. Cities are methodically encircled, and their artillery reduces them to rubble. It is a ruthless, intently moronic war strategy, that has earned Russia a reputation quite opposite to that of her starets (monastic elders), and chess masters.

Why do the nations, surrounding Russia, wish to join NATO? Why, for that matter, did Europeans try to ally, against the Third Reich? Why do schemes of Oriental despotism still persist, in the Occident, regardless?

The Soviet-Russian argument for invading Ukraine is that the western portion of that country aspired to NATO and EU membership, and therefore needed to be “de-Nazified.” In some university faculties this is supplemented with a charge that Western Imperialists have been teasing the Russian bear.

I daresay they are right, and the corrupt, Westernized Ukrainians can be blamed for welcoming the seduction.

As contemporary atheists suspect the iteration of religious wars, we might consider this dimension. The Western Ukrainians have, as west Europeans, adhered, often in the past, to Augustinian (western, Catholic) Christianity; the more traditional Slavs to a more ancient, Eastern form of Christianity in which Church and State are not so alien to each other. (Communism builds a shining bridge, for the defective mind.)

But societies on both sides have largely apostatized, desacralized, deconsecrated, secularized, and refocused their waning sense of awe and honour away from God, towards faithless sex, romantic politics, and the almighty dollar.

We are surrounded, but more to the point infused, with brutish lies, and there is little to choose between “democracies” East and West.

War is a crime, according to various authors. It is an indication that while we have risen above chimpanzees in our use of technology, and raiding tactics, still, we remain, morally, about on the monkey level. Or if we had made slight gains, these have now receded. There are arguable exceptions among the saints (who never entirely disappear), and even some of the more complicated sinners, but in general we grow overweight and lazy, until we receive the signal from our rulers to become murderous again.

Some animals kill for sport — not just because they are hungry — but our persuaded vegetarians develop psychoses that exceed this destructiveness. Ukraine is just a little war, in which one nation gets wiped out; there will only be a few million dead, wounded, and exiled. Our “environmentalists” are much more ambitious. They hope to transform the whole world.

Except through Christ, I have come to believe, there is no path out of our lamentable condition.