APRIL 20 2022
THE PUTIN PUZZLE.
We see his face everywhere: no smile, conventionally dressed: just an ordinary bloke, clean shaven, no beard, no mustache: Joe Doe in person, and small at that. Meet him on the street, and you wouldn’t give him a second glance.
Yet in his hands lies the fate of the world. He, and he alone, started the war in Ukraine. Why? A small man with big ambitions? The restorer of the Great Russian Empire? If that his goal, he’s off to a bad start, with possibly ominous consequences.
A strange man, this Putin. He is often portrayed sitting at one end of a huge 10+ meter narrow table, isolated and alone: brooding, solitary, afraid of intimacy, afraid of being afraid, always right, always correct, always decisive.
Will history repeat itself?
I am reading Barbara Tuchman’s classic, The Guns of August, describing in minute detail how World War I unfolded and how especially the English agonized before committing themselves to war, then expected to last a few months. Now many historians assume that this conflict was only concluded 31 years later, in May 1945 with Hitler’s suicide in Berlin.
I am reading this book with fast-rising feelings of foreboding: is it possible that we are facing another world war? The war to end all wars? Will it coincide with our war against Creation?
For a long time, I have postulated that we, the human race, are fighting God through killing creation, taking in stride the floods, the heat, the hurricanes, the forest fires. I also think that battling God’s earth is mentally preparing us for worse conditions to come, as the hot war in Ukraine may soon engulf the entire world, just as the Spanish Civil War in 1936-39 was a prelude to World War II.
I am afraid, sore afraid, that Putin is the personification of evil: doesn’t laugh, doesn’t scold, shows no emotion, shows no feelings.
The opposite of Jesus.
We read how Jesus wept. We read how Jesus loved. We read how Jesus is portrayed by his opponents as a glutton and winebibber, because he enjoyed the fruits of the earth; he also openly defied temple rules and religious ordinances. Jesus taught us to live, and that to the full.
And Putin?
He reminds me of a little poem:
“Whenever God erects a house of prayer
The Devil builds a chapel there;
And ‘twill be found upon examination
The latter has the largest congregation.”
Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman.
Here’s a line I never expected to write: much of what is seen as Christian has become the opposite: The Russian Orthodox Church fully endorses Putin; The American Southern Baptist and many Roman Catholics fully agree with Donald Trump; The Brazilian largest Protestant segment, Pentecostalism, is fully behind Bolsonaro, the destroyer of the Amazon.
Poor man. Putin is on his own and consumed by the past, trained and shaped as an agent of the Soviet Secret Police, he acts not on facts but on fiction, not on proof but on fabrication and suspicion.
What’s wrong?
What is there in contemporary Christianity that thwarts humanity’s attempts to find itself? Just as Psalm 2 portrays God laughing in heaven at the feeble attempts of earthly rulers to rule, so Satan wherever he is, is delighted at the twisted situation the church finds itself in, as the greater mass of church goers has elevated Christianity to a ‘religion’, as if formality, church attendance, and vicarious confessions can redeem us.
Putting Putin’s position in perspective is placing Capitalism also on the weigh scale. Capitalism may have a more benign appearance, but its true face is becoming more evident each day through so-called natural disasters.
I wonder, is American Capitalism, in which we all are enmeshed, any better than Putin’s pledge to pursue the ancient Greater Russian Dream? Aren’t both the American and the Russian aims the same: Creative Destruction of the Planet?
True, Putin embodies the Devil at its worst, but Capitalism embodies the Devil at its most insidious: under the cloak of a blessing, both systems abuse organized Religion for their own ends.
The Putin Puzzle solved.
Where Jesus wants us to be fully human, Putin is the total antithesis. I am inclined to think that the Putin – Trump – Bolsonaro triumvirate – fully endorsed by much of the ecclesiastical establishment – represent the Trinitarian Anti-Christ.
Just as religion in Jesus’ days, killed him, today the embodiment of these three politicians, in league with their denominations, is killing creation, is, in essence, killing the Creator by being true lackeys of The Evil One, whom Jesus called, The Prince of the World. 1 John 5: 19 confirms this, “We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the Evil One.”