NATO attacks Russia not only with physical weapons, sanctions and propaganda; it also attacks Russia using religion. On April 15, Tass reported that Ukrainian artillery units in Adveevka were given Orthodox Churches as targets for their high explosive shells. That the Nazi Kiev forces attack churches should not perhaps surprise us. The Donbass People’s Republic mission to the Joint Control and Coordination Center on issues related to Ukraine’s war crimes stated that almost two dozen churches and monasteries have been damaged or destroyed in Donetsk, Yasinovataya and Makeyevka since 2022. The Ukrainian army carries out the most massive attacks on church holidays.
The US and its NATO’s allies are waging war against the world, targeting as “adversaries” Russia and China, and their allies and partners, which are striving for sovereignty and independent development. NATO’s war is being conducted in all spheres of life and combines the general military threat with their war against Russia using Ukraine, supplemented by the information war; using their control of the mass media for propaganda, another “weapon of mass distraction.”
Their propaganda makes full use of moral demagogy, reserving to themselves the right to speak in the name of the good, dividing people into the “good” and the “bad”, marking off their opponents as bad, as enemies, justifying violence against them. The advocates of this moral demagoguery are mostly rich countries using it against the poor ones, the privileged classes against the dispossessed. The United States of America claims to possess, as the self-styled “world leader” and military superpower, both moral superiority and absolute truth, when it has no morality, and knows no truth.
Their claims to moral supremacy are unfounded. Their moralization is hypocritical. While lecturing other nations on freedom, democracy, and human rights, they themselves violate the fundamental human rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including “the right to freedom of opinion and expression”, which includes freedom “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
In reality, the US and its vassal governments, keep people in the dark by blocking their access to alternative sources of information and by imposing biased propaganda through their networks in the monopolized mass media, which demonize their “adversaries,” Russia and China, and other nations standing in their way. They also violate “the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.” Their propaganda inflames racist Islamophobia, Russophobia, Sinophobia, the hatred of the “other”.
A main target of these attacks has become the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia strives to maintain its political, economic, and cultural sovereignty, in a nation in which Christians, Muslims, and other religions and beliefs flourish in a multiethnic and multi-confessional country. This success raises dismay and jealousy in NATO because it is an impediment to its “divide and conquer” imperial policy. The Russian Orthodox Church is fundamentally important to Russia’s cultural identity and the spiritual expression of its people and so the US and its NATO allies, in line with their goal to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia, have made it their task to slander the Orthodox Church, reduce its authority and influence, to persecute, not only the Church itself, but all its adherents.
In their cynical and evil crusade against Russia, the US puppet governments in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, for political-ideological reasons, are persecuting priests, hierarchs, and members of the Churches affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church, seizing church property and imprisoning priests. The wanton physical destruction in Ukraine is bad enough, but now they have raised the level of their barbarity by trying to destroy the authority and prestige of the Russian Orthodox Church, as part of the NATO attempt to destroy Russia and its people.
The attack on Russian Orthodox Churches by the Kiev Nazis and their NATO masters continues the NATO practice of crimes against humanity and religion begun with their crimes against the Orthodox Church and culture that Serbia has suffered in Kosovo since the NATO occupation of its heartland province of Serbia. There, more than 160 Orthodox Churches, monasteries, and other religious sites, have been destroyed by the Albanian NATO allies since 1999, part of their ethnic cleansing operations conducted against Serbs and Serbian culture.
This US-NATO crusade has escalated into direct attacks against the Moscow Patriarchate. Western barbarity knows no limits. For on April 17, 2024, the Estonian Minister of the Interior announced the intention to recognize the Moscow Patriarchate as a terrorist organization and therefore ban the Estonian Orthodox Church—an autonomous body within the Patriarchate. Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov correctly called the move “asinine.”
On April 19, 2024, The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe amplified the attack by adopting a resolution characterizing the Russian Orthodox Church as complicit in war crimes and calling on all member states to recognize it as such, that is, as a criminal organisation.
One wonders what phantasms and goblins haunt these maniacs at night to come up with such imbecilic, macabre, and depraved ideas. Their fevered imaginations, stirred by their defeat on the battlefield and on the economic front, can only think of further ways to show the world their degraded state of mind and their complete moral bankruptcy. They attempt to kill the cultural-religious soul of the Russian people, an impossible task, and achieve instead the murder of their own souls.
The situation in Ukraine is becoming worse by the day as adherents of the Orthodox Church affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate face persecution, assaults, arrests, slanders, and destruction of their churches. The matter has been discussed at the Human Rights Council, where Vakhtang Kipshidze, Vice-Chairman of Synodal Department for Church’s Relations with Society and Mass Media, Moscow Patriarchate, who briefed the Council, said: “An analysis of the situation leads us to the assessment that the authorities of the country have an objective of completely annihilating the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Believers who do not want to convert to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, established by current Ukrainian authorities in 2019, will be stripped of their rights,” and,
“The first step to the restoration of peace in Ukraine is the end to persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” calling on Council members “to abandon political differences for the sake of the principle of religious freedom and adopt effective measures to protect worshipers in Ukraine.”
During the debate that followed, the Russian Federation’s representative, said that the Ukraine Parliament’s draft legislation would completely ban the activities of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. “The Kyiv regime is trying to justify the purge of the country’s religious field and free the hands of radicals to violence and lawlessness”, he added, pointing to seizures of churches and forced illegal legal liquidation of their communities under the guise of supposedly “voluntary transitions” to other faiths, since 2019.
Of course, the Americans and their allies on the Council accused Russia of propaganda but made it clear they were justifying the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and supported the Estonian action of labelling them as terrorist organisations.
When the artificial, anti-Russian Church, was created in Ukraine by NATO and Poroshenko in 2019, Patriarch Kiril of Moscow and All Russia, stated,
“I believe the developments in Ukraine will undoubtedly have very dangerous effects in the lives of many countries. What is happening in Ukraine can be used as a precedent. That means that everything, which ensured interreligious peace, religious freedom and human rights will, in all likelihood, stop being untouchable, particularly, if these values stand in the way of solving certain political problems.”
He was right, and he links the new threats against the Orthodox Church with the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church is following its own civilizational path of development, different from that chosen by the West. Contemporary Russia is “a country of believers with a majority of pious people,” which largely determines its spiritual strength as well as “the strength of people’s solidarity and the ability to work together for the good of the Motherland, and if necessary, to defend it.” This is precisely the cause of the ever-increasing attacks from the West on the Russian Orthodox Church, but Patriarch Kirill said that he will not be intimidated by the ban on entry into European countries.
As an aside, those readers interested in an historical overview on how the split in Christianity developed into the separate Catholic and Orthodox branches of the Christian Church and how and why the artificial creation of a new anti-Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine occurred in 2019, may wish to read this earlier article.
The liberal West is losing its spiritual-ideological battle against Russia. Their ideals and values are compromised and disgraced by their violent neocolonial politics, their hypocrisy. “The West against the rest” cannot win by intellectual-spiritual arguments, and so they resort to using police-state devices, such as the recent Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe resolution.
In fact, we have not seen such medieval thinking since the time of Henry VIII in England in the 1500s, who destroyed the Catholic Church in England, not for religious reasons, but for political ones, to get his way in his marriages in the face of Rome’s opposition. The repression that followed, the executions of priests and nuns, the physical destruction of some of the most beautiful buildings in England, the churches and monasteries, has had consequences up to today in the UK. The message of the Sermon on the Mount was replaced by a message of hatred, bigotry and violence. Now we see this repugnant thinking rekindled in the minds of the fascists who have taken power in the West.
They claim to represent “freedom,” “democracy,” “Western values,” yet, by their words, and their actions, they prove themselves to be the busy architects of a new world prison in which dictatorship is called democracy and their “western values” are the torture chambers of Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the police cells in Ukraine, Nazis torchlight parades, Nazis slogans in the US Congress, SS soldiers cheered in the Canadian Parliament, the slaughter of innocents in Gaza. They are the “values” that all fascists share. But just as the old fascists of the 30s and 40s were defeated and destroyed on May 9th 1945, the new ones will also be defeated and destroyed. The survival of civilisation depends upon it.
Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
