Friday, March 27, 2009

Re: The Shrinking Russian population

Someone who didn’t leave his name left the following comment in response to "The Shrinking Russian population":

God is with the followers, not with your satanic country. Like Byzantine perished due its betrayal to the God, Russia will face the same painful death because it was always an empire built on blood. For centuries they were oppressing orthodox christian nations and never was a real orthodox country, rather paganic. Russians are not an european stock but rather a mixture of european-turkic-finnish-mongol-caucasian stocks.

Lawrence responds

I’m so used to America being called “satanic” by Islamists that I jumped to the conclusion that the above author had the US in mind, but the rest of the note expresses a good deal of hostility toward Russia; so I’m guessing that Russia rather than the US is his target. Whoever wrote this note is obviously not one of the ant-like 100% Russians that Kuznetzov admires.

Calling a nation “satanic” is one of the Islamist slogans, but I haven’t heard the term “the followers” as an intransitive expression before. Followers of what, of whom?

Reference to Byzantium also brings to mind the fall of Byzantium and the Islamic victory, but the writer goes on to complain about the suppression of “orthodox Christian nations” which leads me to believe he is from one of those orthodox Christian nations, a nation that considers itself more orthodox and more 100% something than Russia itself.

If the writer of the above note should read this, I would ask that he provide some evidence for his assertions. The religion most practiced in Russia today is the Orthodox. Church membership isn’t very high, perhaps because of the suppression of religion during the Communist period, but I’m sure more Russians are orthodox than are atheist or Islamic.

And as to the pagan background of Russia, we all have that if you go back far enough. We who are Christians, whether Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant can all trace (if we have the genealogical tools and information) our ancestors back to a time when they were pagan.

As to the Russian empire being built upon “blood,” I think the same thing could be said about any empire. If you want to single out a particular Tsar and say he was more bloodthirsty than any other emperor ever, that would be a hard thing to prove.

I do like, whenever possible, to move away from mere assertions and unsupported statements that are vaguely insulting.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Lawrence,

What sounds vague to you is clear to me. The author of the rabid anti-Russian comment is without any doubt a representative of Galicia.

By the way, Lawrence, did you receive my two responses to your e-mails?