Most of these initial lines were initially written as an insert in my blog on 21 February 2022 while the world press was reporting on the so called crisis in the relation of Russia to NATO regarding Ukraine. In the following days and weeks, the volume of my text grew in a continuous process of “organic growth”, up to the point that it could not belong properly to a blog, requiring a separate essay with an “apparently unstructured structure” that portrays the conflict and its development during mainly the first year. Those who complain about “structure” do not take into account neither the role and limitations of logic in inquiry nor the definition of structure as related to function, and consequently the difficulties of information as related to debate. (Researchers may check The Design of Inquiring Systems, chaps. 2 and 3). The whole relates to my discipline of information science in that it puts in evidence its most critical relationship of information to social and political science, philosophy of science, and ultimately to theology. It shows the ultimate tragic misunderstanding of what information is, and the latest disaster of its abuse in so called artificial general intelligence as exposed in another text of mine. More on this below.

I only wish to advance some reflections that I have not noticed in the media's reports and comments about this issue and tragic consequences for all involved people. In doing so I do not claim any special competence in political science, geopolitical foreign relations and diplomacy. On the contrary I have had serious difficulties in understanding what historically has been going on, for instance, in the dissolution of the state of Yugoslavia, or in my parents’ native country Bulgaria, e.g. during World War II affecting the destiny of my whole family as refugees in Italy and Brazil and the suffering of relatives left in Bulgaria, or the historical relations between Spain and France starting with the Franco-Spanish War. Not to speak of the historical relations between Russia and Ukraine, and their relation to European events and especially in the World War II, and so on (more on this below). I only claim competence in discussing the meaning and problems of information (system) about the conflict, problems beyond the strict technical-administrative details of Internet-connections and disinformation in war.

My main message will be that the solution of a serious conflict is not well understood in the examples from this case of Russia vs. Ukraine. Extreme violence and deaths in ongoing wars as well as in suicides testify that survival itself (in this world!) is not the highest value. And life will be ultimately lost. Beyond violence and the historical concept of “just war” what is required is an insight into a rationality that justifies a spiritually grounded self-sacrifice by all parties in the conflict (and not only by our evil “enemies”), up to the extreme of martyrdom in the sense it has in Christianity.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE:

The extent of the following text requires for its reading a sizable length of time. After having written the main of my text, at the beginning of August 2022, I came in contact with the following three video-recordings that require a comparable amount of time and effort as the reading of my text. I offer them as a video introduction or complement to my text:

Russia vs. Ukraine or Civil War in the West?

By Jordan Peterson (10 July 2022)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxdHm2dmvKE (51:19)

Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault?

By John Mearsheimer (June 4-7, 2015)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 (1:14:15)

A better alternative: Mearsheimer’s updated view at the 2022 Holberg Debate

Moment in human history that won’t be forgotten soon

By Jordan Peterson & Frederick Kagan (9 March 2022)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaKSBkHOQDI (1:44:38)

Total viewing time about 3 hours (3:10:12)

In 2023 I started considering to stop the apparently unending updating of my whole text. At the beginning of February I came across an essay by prof. Claes Ryn whose content I judge to be roughfly equivalent to what I had written below. Therefore, I propose it as an alternative to this present paper: Hubris Kills Diplomacy. A review of U.S.-Russia relations as the war in Ukraine continues, except for the programmatic avoidance of the most important theological-psychological causes of the rise of hubris, as suggested below. Finally I discovered three papers written by Nicolai N. Petro, (references follow below) which seem to cast a unique thoughtful perspective, compatible with mine, on the whole problem.

I also came then across a report published officially in January 2023 by the Rand Corporation, which obviously was considered as framed in a language that is politically acceptable in the USA, and consequenty in the western world: Avoiding a Long War. U.S. Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict, by Samuel Charap, Miranda Priebe. I perceive this report, as well as a later one by Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan, Redefining Success in Ukraine, as being the first so published reports that are officially acceptable if yet with reservations in the USA’s and Europe’s Ukraine-friendly establishment. In a few important respects they are in concordance with the observations and conclusions of the present text of mine even if this may not be easily perceived. They can also be read as a complement to my essay here below.

The main question – NATO and Donbas

I cannot refrain from asking myself on why the Western press that rightly or righteously condemns the invasion of democratic free countries does not show some understanding of Russia’s security concerns regarding NATO’s expansion. It has been reported that president of Ukraine Zelenskyy already the first day of his presidency is said to have teased the Russian government represented by president Putin by announcing that Ukraine would seek membership in both the EU and NATO as he may have promised to the people in his prior election campaign. He repeated later his attempts to rapprochement to both. What Russia had requested is basically the assurance that Ukraine would not seek and NATO would not offer to neighboring Ukraine partnership in NATO. It was righteously and peremptorily, if not arrogantly, refused by both Zelenskyy and the NATO secretary general Stoltenberg as I watched the latter in his declaration on television, on the basis of the concept of Ukraine’s sovereignty. In turn, this matter is related to Russia's territorial security and to conflicts about Crimea and Ukraine’s southeastern region including Donbas.

I think that it is enough to know that NATO is dominated by the militarily most powerful USA, which in turn has now about 600 military bases in 80 countries including 21 in Germany.

[Note: I revisited this Wikipedia’s non-permanent link on 17 April 2023 and the text had been changed. I could not find this change with the tool “View history” back to February 2022 when I had begun to write this text. On 17 April 2023 - permanent link - Wikipedia reports that the Pentagon in 2013 stated that “around” 600 bases are overseas. “The total number of foreign sites with installations and facilities that are either in active use and service, or that may be activated and operated by American military personnel and allies, is just over 1.000”.]

It has lately reaffirmed its presence in eastern Europe through the Operation Atlantic Resolve. It is the only nation in the world that historically, before any risk of invasion of its territory except for the episode of Japanese invasion in the Aleutian islands of Alaska, already has used overseas nuclear weapons of mass destruction. And except for the perceive threats during the second world war of establishment of German espionage and invasion forces in Latin America (cf. Operation Bolívar) which was reported to have caused USA's discrete FBI intervention in Argentina's politics.

In two atomic bombings overseas the USA that had never been bombed killed between 129.000 and 226.000 people, almost all civilians including women, children, children or would be babies in pregnant women, infirm and disabled elders. They can be compared with estimated 415.000 civilian deaths following the invasion in the Vietnam war. Together with other nations today the USA has an arsenal of nuclear weapons and does controversial research on chemical and biological warfare, historically exemplified by the CIA’s illegal human experimentation program MK-Ultra. All this while the Ukrainian-Russian disinformation warfare claims that both parties (here, here and here) have been preparing for biological warfare. After the justified terrors of the Cold War, there are reasons for Russia being afraid and not wanting missiles parked in neighboring countries, as USA did not tolerate them in Cuba as it would not tolerate them near its borders in Mexico. Mexico’s historic conflict with USA about the annexation of Texas and relation to slavery may be suggestive for analogies, farfetched as they may seem, with Ukraine vs. Russia. The same for the movements for the annexation of Canada to the United States. Not to mention the “annexation” of Native Americans’ territories to the “United States” or USA as part of settler colonialism that still today raises questions about the identity of a nation like the United States. And not to mention, regarding the present Disunited States of America, the story of the Confederate States of America that were felt and “annexed” by the Union as Russia feels Ukraine’s “secession” seen against the earlier history of both nations, suggesting their present conflict as analog to the American Civil War: more than one million casualties, including more than 600.000 soldier deaths. In the same spirit one could talk about Russia’s “annexation” of Ukraine. It easy to misunderstand why all this is mentioned. An evil is not an apology for other evils, but a reminder that evil (the “mote in the eye”) is always attributed to others, to our “neighbor” or our “enemies” or to our friends’ enemies, rather than to ourselves. Therefore it is interesting to meditate over an analysis made long after the rest of this section was originally written, on June 4, 2023 from the USA news agency CNN with the title :Why the US “does not get to assume that it lasts forever” and referring, among others, to the book The Divided States of America, and initiating with the following:

As the United States marks its 247th birthday Tuesday, questions about how many more the nation will celebrate in its current form have become ominously relevant.

Possibly not since the two decades before the Civil War has America faced as much pressure on kits fundamental cohesion. The greatest risk probably isn’t a repeat of the outright secession that triggered the Civil War, though even that no longer seems entirely impossible in the most extreme scenarios. More plausible is the prospect that the nation will continue its drift into two irreconcilable blocs of red and blue states uneasily trying to occupy the same geographic space.

Two world wars including one Holocaust testify that well-intentioned humans can do and deny anything. The apparently unrelated fact is that many people who pity the number of innocent children killed in wars do not consider fetuses as babies and therefore abortions as murders: a statistical overview is that the reported number of the annual number of abortions worldwide as being about 70 million in 2014 (The Lancet, vol. 388, issue 10041, pp. 258-267, 2016). That means more than 190.000 killed children per day or, if preferred, embryos, developing infants, fertilized eggs, actively caused to die by people who claim to have “loved” each other and abhor deaths and suffering. These daily 190.000 victims can be seen as victims of desecrated “sexuality” that often was neither love nor wish for life. They are mourned by only a few percent of the world's well-intentioned population that declares itself being against war and killing of innocent defenseless beings, up to the extreme position of veganism. Those babies or embryos who survive the risk of abortion may be sacrificed and killed later in childhood or as soldiers in their youth, for the higher purpose of wars for democracy and freedom.

One of the few courageous insightful commentators, the former Swedish ambassador in Russia Sven Hirdman, expresses it bluntly is an article on January 26, 2022 (my trans.):

For the Russian leadership, it is a matter of the heart to retain control of Crimea and thus of the naval base in Sevastopol; support the millions of ethnic Russians in the Donbass; and in particular to ensure that Ukraine does not develop into a hostile platform against Russia. This is in conflict with the current political leadership of Kyiv and the Western Ukrainians' efforts to integrate Ukraine into NATO and the EU.

Sacrifices and the god "Democracy"

I know of people in Sweden who, because of fear for appearing politically incorrect, do not dare to express their feeling that Ukrainian themselves may be seen as refusing to sacrifice some of their political liberties for the sake of sparing the deaths and destruction following an invasion of their country. It is a question of sacrifice, avoiding still greater coming sacrifices. And, regarding sacrifice: statesmanship is not simply following the “public opinion” or the majority’s opinion in a country or of the geopolitical world, as if it were God’s will or because one has won elections or hopes to win the coming ones. Or hopes to be remembered by posterity as a hero, champion for democracy or laissez faire, as others hoped to create Lebensraum. It is also to bear the responsibility for a preventive reconciliation based upon an understanding the motives and feelings of the former friend and becoming enemy. This is for preventing the people’s suffering in face of geopolitical risks of war, destruction, homelessness, famine, and deaths that they themselves cannot evaluate but can and must be pedagogically enabled to understand for the sake of a wise democracy. This responsibility includes the organization of prior evacuation of civilians from cities that are fortified for future defense and resistance, as otherwise they, especially if armed as in a permissive Ukraine, will be perceived by aggressors as human shields and seen as legitimate war targets, which in turn become objects of disinformation and reciprocal accusations in the world press under the label of "war crimes ". Ukraine's parliament was reported in February 2022 to have passed a law allowing citizens to carry firearms. Civilian men aged 18 to 60 (with certain exceptions) are not allowed to leave Ukraine. A local NGO official would have said that "there is a feeling that Ukrainians will fight". This could invalidate later accusations of war crime for killing Ukrainian civilians and for destroying apartment buildings whose roofs and terraces may have been turned into shelters for weapons and combatants (cf. Amnesty’s later report below). If the invading enemy evacuates civilians from the invaded territory in order to avoid civilian deaths, the war of (dis)information will accuse the enemy for “deportation” of civilians. And so on.

This recalls the case of Israel Defense Forces that report that civilian Palestinians in Gaza happen to be bombed as they are used as human shields by the Hamas military manufacturers and launchers of rockets over the border to Israel. Or as Iraqi civilians (not to mention earlier Vietnamese) happened to be killed in the USA invasion and the resultant asymmetric warfare, with an estimated death toll of at least 185.000 -208.000. And when mentioning Iraqi civilians we should not forget the historical illustrative case of Wikileaks’ video account of USA Army murdered civilians on July 12, 2007 that ultimately lead to Julian Assange’s situation as of April 21, 2022, following imprisonment and the Westminster Magistrates Court formal approval of his extradition to the USA, pending .the British home secretary’s approval and Assange’s appeal by judicial review. (Cf. my early review in WikiLeaks & Information.)

If it is a question of sacrifice, it may not be a question of sentimentally enduring war and hard suffering in the hope of getting coming advantages in EU. It is rather a question of faithfully keeping together a family (as of a family of historically and culturally close, interdependent nations) in an unknown, unpredictable dangerous world. Why should one assume capability of making such sacrifices for a family of nations when especially the West excels in dissolution of single families as expressed in the number of divorces? It is reported, for instance, that about half of Swedish marriages end in divorce, and sometimes in violence and murder. All this after the partner having been chosen “democratically” and the union even having produced children that cause war about who among the parents about who will keep them. How can people believe religiously in “democracy” to the point of willing to die for it, when they cannot practice it, do not trust it when the election winners turn out to be “wrong”, and it does not seem to work with their partners and within the family? A controversial analogy is a family where each member feels sovereign in choosing his own friends and lifestyle, or a couple of friends who kept together because of reciprocal pleasure and usefulness, and one of them perceives another fellow as being better, younger, kinder, prettier, richer, and in a sovereign decision abandons the former friend while continuing to live in the neighborhood. Why should then strangers in different countries be expected to sacrifice their dreams of national prosperity and “freedom” of getting and doing whatever they want, for the sake of peaceful coexistence? As in a pandemic, or in a possible future conflict on Taiwan in relation to China, the democratic "best for a sovereign nation" does not need be the best for whole population as it consists of groups of people of which, say, in case of invasion 10 percent will be killed while 60 percent will be refugees in miserable living conditions around their own country, and 30 privileged percent including top government officials and business people may move to and find a safe refuge and satisfactory new life in other Western countries. In doing so, they will furthermore perceive that, contrary to the case of Moslem refugees from the East, they will be particularly welcomed by people who want to show their goodness and affluence, or at least their hate of Russia equated to the oppressive earlier Soviet Union, rather than to show their brotherhood in a weakening Christianism.

Nevertheless, it is not necessary to be controversial by the choice of an analogy like a family. We could try to conceive the geopolitical family as a "system" considered as in West Churchman's The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971, as earlier in The Systems Approach, 1st ed. 1968), where the inquiry deals with the understanding and handling of the conflict when it is seen from what “we”, the victim of physical aggression can do, rather than tell to the “enemy-aggressor” what it should do or not do (cf. again the mote and the beam in the eye). The previous paragraph (above) would then consist in analyzing the "nation" as a client of the system, consisting of the various different groups of clients or affected people mentioned above. The difficult problems would arise when it becomes necessary to state the goals and therefore the measure of performance of the system (and its decision makers, top politicians, president, CEO) as related to the respective clients, beyond the journalistic jargon "democracy". Why not aim at a certain low maximum percentage of deaths and of destroyed buildings, instead of risking and allowing high percentages of deaths and destruction that will then be attributed to, and enhance a spiral increase of self-justified hate (“positive feedback”) of the enemy, combined with the paradoxical “democratic” heroization of the failed decision makers. Their heroization will also allow them (and the people) to boast about the “unity” of the suffering people, whose unity is enhanced by their common exposure to, and therefore increasing commonly shared, gradually increasing irreversible hate of the invading enemy, further boasted by the psychological pressure of not being able to confess the loss of “sunk costs” including loss of own citizens’ lives. Besides all of this it is known that the creation of an external enemy can unite the people of a nation in trouble, not only Ukraine but the polarized USA itself. James Mattis, former USA secretary of defense wrote, for instance, on The Enemy Within, overviewed as follows:

In 1838, Abraham Lincoln warned that our nation’ greatest threat came from within, that while our external enemies would not defeat us, we could still “die by suicide”

Our politics are paralyzing us; we doubt instead of trust, dismiss instead of listen, demonize instead of compromise & stress differences instead of commonalities

E pluribus unum is not just a phrase on our coins, it is a moral imperative, a noble expression of our duty to build a “more perfect” union for future generations

Other have surveyed (inconclusive) research on Do people need foreign enemies? American leaders’ beliefs after the Soviet demise. Or, Americans need something to fight for - before they find someone to fight against. Still worse problems arise when trying to define democracy in terms of not only clients but also decision makers who dispose of resources including money, military and weapons. Together with their solidary friends they may hate and want to take vengeance on the enemies to the point that in the further consequences they may be ready to sacrifice both part of their own clients, their own population, and other exposed outsiders in other countries. Hate may be so strong that in the wish to inflict suffering they may be ready to suffer themselves, or rather others in their own population, inverting the Christian idea of “Love your neighbor as yourself” into “Allow to inflict pain to yourself as much as you want your enemy to suffer”. The thing becomes still worse when it is understood that it becomes necessary to define the environment, i.e. all that can affect the measure of performance is not under the decision makers' control, such as the USA and its “soft power” on the media and the West’s opinion for Russia, and such as Russia and NATO for Ukraine. This last step is what has been most visibly ignored in our case. Not to mention who is the designer that is discussing the system as if he were an objective impartial observer, as I am trying to do now.

But do not worry: the author Churchman of the above mentioned book had to qualify it by expanding the discussion into The Systems Approach and Its Enemies (1979). The enemies are catalogued as being Politics, Morality, Religion and Aesthetics. In the present text after relating aesthetics to theology in another paper on the ongoing digitalization of society, I try to start from politics and to relate morality to religion and theology but I also wanted to suggest the degree of shallowness in the journalistic supposedly rational analyses of the conflict that is discussed in terms of “fact nets” or what Churchman calls “Leibnizian inquiring systems”. The most logically-analytically gifted discussant is able to build the most extensive patchwork of arguments, and “wins” de debate irrespective of neglected assumptions and definitions of the involved terms. The shallowness of the such rational analyses are matched by the shallowness of the ongoing thinking about security, exemplified by computer security. It leads to the supposition of the need for (training) “cyber-soldiers”, and “generals” like the Swedish representative in what corresponds to a sort of NATO organs such as the bunch of mind-blowing acronyms CENTR, ICANN, DNS and DNSSEC. All considered to be necessary for survival, but basically doomed because of the misunderstanding of what security is and what fact-nets can achieve in the long run, as I try to explain in a chapter on “desperate logic” and in the epilogue of an essay on the ongoing societal computerization. Hence, I proceed below, exemplifying in this essay an extension of what Churchman calls dialectic planning, or a Hegelian inquiring system (chap. 8 of The Design of Inquiring Systems).

The world press reports that depending upon the definition of democracy vs. dictatorship, less that 30% of the world population are living in democracies, surviving their murder rates and daily mass shootings. And I have witnessed that among those who live in democracies, as in Brazil, there are many who have expressed the wish to live in democratic dictatorships or “democraturs” (“demo-dictatorcracies”) since most of the population is not prepared to satisfy the requirements of democracy and will vote for the wrong president. An assurance of Ukraine not joining NATO would be less than a submission to Russian rule, which in turn is not comparable to the historic domination by a “barbaric” if yet today respected culturally sophisticated and in Wikipedia historically respected Tamerlane, whose military campaigns are estimated to have caused the death of about 5 percent of the world population at the time, which today would correspond to 400 million deaths. The problem of partially relinquishing a national or nationalistic own culture is something that I, as lifelong refugee and immigrant, have personal experience of and reflections on. It has led me to see its relation to the causes and dangers of adopting an “identitarian” culture. In a chapter of my essay on Information and Theology, I write

My own hypothesis is that these dangers have more to do with postmodern identity politics, and are experienced by people who do not have a sound psyche with a core for their personality, having instead an individual self-identity anchored, as expressed in analytical psychology, in a weak ego and totally unconscious self. So, they do not join social ideal movements, parties and "-isms" (including the Christianism of false conversions!?) so much because of shared values, as because of sharing nice or politically correct values makes their ego feel as belonging to a collective "body" or group that bestows value, personal dignity that is social, and (collective political) power, boasting the ego.

As I write in a later chapter of the same paper, it all seems to be a religious problem because a genuine ethical feeling of (familiar and) national or supra-national brotherhood may show up as popular violence and football hooliganism as in many sport events. It merges paradoxically with a morass of stubborn, praised, “sporty” nationalism and/or patriotism as now in both Russia and Ukraine, requiring an internal mental commitment to the consciousness of all having a common Father. It is the best if not only way to transcend the egoism of loving only oneself, the own family, city or nation. That is the reason why nationalism, masked in Sweden by secularized “democratism” and love for the oppressed in the whole world, tends as in Sweden to be seen as suspiciously related to only National Socialism or Nazism, undermining many youngsters’ will to do military service, leading to a (irresponsible) globalism that is in turn the source of the hubris of feeling to be the impartial, neutral, mediating and arbitrating, democratic conscience of the world. In the absence of such a commitment to a common Father people look for an authoritarian leader, motivating and explaining fascism and Nazism (and “Hitler”, and now “Putin”, often used today as only derogatory buzzwords), as Swedes can read in Tage Lindbom’s Fallet Tyskland (here and here). It is a tragedy to use them as derogatory buzzwords because they imply that it is not understood why (consequently despised) people were attracted to such movements, while today others are attracted to unrecognized, similarly dangerous ones. Among literature in English to which Lindbom relates he mentions David Calleo’s The German problem reconsidered. The book recalls the kind of self-examination that lacks in present self-righteous western history-writing, as also noted by Norman Davies’ in Europe at War (reviewed in SvD, August 24 2007). The same problems lie behind the by now famous discussions about crowd psychology, which beyond the teachings of critical social theory also may have much to say about the tragedy of the Holocaust, even if in my opinion they say much less than Carl Jung says in his Civilization in Transition.

It explains further the perception of the Russian Orthodox patriarch as bestowing a religious aura to Russian nationalism, which does not rely on pride or shame for being or not being a democracy. Besides that, at a lower psychological level, a submission to the Russian requests could mean in the worst case a renounce to an expected lavish economic support. It could also be a renounce to e.g. the LGBT rights in the European Union, exemplified in Sweden and other countries, by ongoing process of transitions from problematic criminalization of homosexuality over to crimininalization of gay-to-straight conversion therapy. It would also mean a renounce to police protection for Quran desecration (as earlier for the Muhammad drawings and roundabout dog controversy) in the name of “holy” democratic freedom of expression (as in Sweden around mid-March 2022) which however is not allowed for desecration of the Holocaust holier than God Himself, while such protection is no longer necessary for desecration of the Bible, as of the Holy Cross in Poland. It could also mean a renounce to movements like Pussy Riot’s support of Ukraine, renounce to a lot of other things like support of local #MeToo-movements, to reproductive health support for treatment of gender dysphoria, gender transitioning, detransition, same-sex marriage, to discussion about its consequences, to support of conflicting views on routine safe abortions, official support of pride parades, mass media’s televised diffusion of drag race entertainment as in the USA and Sweden, governmental or school sex education, or of diffusion of related literature such as non-binary and transgender Masha Gessen’s (outspoken critic of Putin). Parenthetically, the Swedish national radio, transmitted on January 21, 2023 (long after the rest of this chapter was written) a one-hour program introducing in an interview-form what it considered to be Gessen’s authoritative intellectual criticism of Putin.

A submission to Russian rule would mean a renounce, as Russia did after Maria de Naglowska departure from Russia for France, to being a cultural active participant of, and contributor to western Satanism seen as a group of ideological and philosophical beliefs based on Satan.

Most of these phenomena and activities seem to be related to the secular moral modernization of the Western democracies while some of them begin to be at least problematized if not outright countered in originating USA. They are moral modernizations that “conservative” Poland and Hungary (sharing Russia’s conservatism) have in part already been opposed to and were castigated by the top EU court in the name of “money for democracy”, based on the conception that all opposition to sexual innovation is Christian bigotry. In this context it is important to consider that such modern democracies rejection of such so-called Christian bigotry is also a rejection of main tenets of the great religions and overbearing contempt for the intelligence and judgment of generations of humans in all these countries who during centuries have believed, appreciated and made sacrifices in order to affirm and maintain such supposed bigotry. All this in the name of advance technology and arcane science like quantum physics as well as computer super-intelligence assumed to supersede religion and theology.

All this does not include other serious drawbacks, sacrifices and suffering that would be caused by Ukraine submitting to Russian requests, or even to Russian rule. It is interesting and symptomatic: neither Ukraine itself nor the world press have, to my knowledge, yet spelled out a simple list of the Ukrainian people’s foreseen sacrifices and suffering in the extreme case of a total submission to Russia, in order to avoid a feared invasion, deaths and destruction of the country. [The only similar list I saw was published one year after I wrote the rest of this section, after the invasion of Ukraine, in the above-mentioned paper published by the Rand Corporation, Avoiding a Long War (page 9-10), and yet mainly with regard to the conflict’s potential costs as seen from the USA.] If such a list has been composed but undemocratically kept secret for reasons of security, or has been considered to be unnecessary, this is as much significative as if its need has been unnoticed.

One thing is possible if not probable: that many Ukrainian top politicians, military and Ukrainian oligarchs, will lose their jobs, influence and part of their assets, related as they may be to widespread corruption in the country, one among the three most corrupt nations from 43 surveyed. It has also been called the most corrupt nation in Europe, which by itself raises doubts about the effects of economic help from foreign nations. It is also interesting that Ukraine (and Georgia) was the object of a special European Web Survey on Drugs 2021. It can be enough for explaining the present position of many Ukrainian top politicians and oligarchs face a possible conflict, and their dependency upon the particular type of democracy that has put them in power.

Categorical claims for sovereignty and freedom recall controversially to my mind the case of a young woman who claimed her liberty to do what and when she wanted, like walking out on the city’s streets, alone in the middle of the night, to and from nightclubs, with the sovereign right on her own body, i.e. without being importuned or raped. Or, I remember when living in the USA in the early sixties, the Federal Highway Administration or State Department of Highways (I think, precursor of the Department of Transportation) had a campaign in the daily press for road traffic safety with a whole page advertisement and big capital letters: “You may be right, you may be Dead Right” (cf. the message’s appearance on the net, and it possible origin in Proverbs 14:12), and further in the, else appearing in the controversially famous book by Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People:

“Here lies the body of William Jay,

Who died maintaining his right of way –

He was right, dead right, as he sped along,

But he’s just as dead as if he were wrong.”

You may be right, dead right, as you speed along in your argument; but as far as changing another’s mind is concerned, you will probably be just as futile as if you were wrong.

…

Buddha said: “Hatred is never ended by hatred but by love,” and a misunderstanding is never ended by an argument but by tact, diplomacy, conciliation and a sympathetic desire to see the other person’s viewpoint.

It appears that the core question is what is “right” in the sense that it should be worth to die for it, contrasted to the meaning of suicide which is not a simple intellectual, religious or psychological question as illustrated by e.g. James Hillman in Suicide and the soul. All this is almost as some would say about the case of Julian Assange, with respect to the democratic freedom of expression. Russia was criticized for not wanting to name its intervention in Ukraine as “war”, while the desire to see the other person’s viewpoint was weak when USA did not want Wikileaks to tell all what it had done in its Iraq war. A war motivated by the supposed existence of weapons of mass destruction. In my readings of daily newspapers I have seen only one case of a journalist on an editorial page (Paulina Neuding in SvD, April 29 2022), who applies this insight to the discussion of freedom of expression in a public burning of the Quran, when Muslims challenge and endanger the Swedish police force that should guarantee that the burning should/must be allowed. That is reminding, as my driving education instructor did, that we have obligations of respect and caution even before having rights, never ignoring the historical realities of the world of violence where nobody, not even we ourselves, is an angel. As illustrative examples illustrated in a couple of my articles, not everybody in the West understands why the USA, champion of freedom and democracy, does not consider Julian Assange with Wikileaks as an angel, despite of his uncovering democratic scandals and crimes of war. And not everybody in the West understands why democratic Wikipedia itself has problems with its implementation of democracy for accurate structuration and dissemination of its information on controversial issues.

Very few people understand the realities of violence and war, and still less have any understanding of its spiritual realities, as they may be revealed by an archetypal warrior such as Ernst Jünger in his famous book Storm of Steel, matched to an understanding of the meaning of suicide. It is a tragedy if these spiritual realities and highest values are misunderstood as being the god Democracy, since an understanding would be a reminder of the cause of the Bible’s famous lamentations of Jeremiah (texts here). It is symptomatic that domestic violence and war championed in western cities in the USA and lately also in Europe’s Sweden are supposed to be fought not mainly by means of ethical conscientization that includes children who are the coming adults, but only by means of the expanded judicial system, more severe laws, more prisons and policemen, as I had to observe in my blog. (Exemplified for the USA in The Economist, September 15, 2022 here and here.)

In Sweden, for instance I have seen only one Swedish intellectual who quotes from a pronouncement of the (consequently controversial, labeled and disposed of as being “far-right”) year 2022 French presidential candidate Éric Zemmour (my transl. from the Swedish. A pronouncement that is also commented by Le Monde in English):

"I have argued for many years that the West has a responsibility for the escalation of violence in the East, and that it must understand the Russian demands for the cessation of NATO enlargement. Unfortunately, we have done nothing to avoid this escalation. We are all responsible: certainly Russia, and this morning it is they who are primarily responsible. But the West is also responsible, with the uninterrupted expansion, for many years, of NATO in the eastern part of the continent, and the non-application of the Minsk Agreements. I have repeated for years that in order to make its voice heard, France must restore balance in its relations with Russia and the United States."

What is surprising that neither the press nor Russia itself mentions Realpolitik as represented in my mind by the United States’ historical involvement in regime changes Latin America and all over the world with the school example of the invasion of Grenada, besides the Bay of Pigs Invasion, or its famous assassination attempts on Fidel Castro that originated even the equally famous documentary on 638 Ways to Kill Castro Not to mention the latest example of the painful economic aspects of the boycott against Venezuela that have also been debated in the USA, besides the alleged attempts to invade Venezuela (e.g. here, here, here, and here), and the longer and also controversial embargo against Cuba. Plus the September 1973 in Chile when the military aided by the USA and its CIA staged a coup against Salvador Allende. Or, in general what may have been and be at stake in Ukraine: United States involvement in regime change. When such things are mentioned, western moralists use to respond: “And so what – this does not justify Russia’s threats". [See below about such justification.] I wonder how does it come that today we so easily accept the moralism of references to sovereignty, or of the observation that the president of Russia is not an angel, as if the president of the USA or the secretary general of NATO were that.

The only explanation that comes to my mind for the West’s self-righteous indignation for the threat to Ukraine is that it is seen as a democracy while USA-directed regime changes in Latin America, Afghanistan and Iraq with the Iraq war that was initiated with an invasion upon false premises, were seen as “military operations” for establishing democracies. The false premises for the Iraq war are illustrated in its documentary in the series "History's greatest lies", The series includes, by the way also a documentary on the Gulf War about Kuwait, USA’s “operation Desert Storm”, whose dark controversial background, which is exposed in another video may be appreciated in Wikipedia. Military operations or wars were justified by the claim of removing the threats to the nation and for establishing Democracy and Freedom, while a China’s military operation for “annexing” the Taiwan Republic of China would not be justified because of Taiwan’s democracy, which makes it a nation. Democracy as a god. In such context it is important to remind Smedley Butler’s book War is a Racket. The author was a major general of the USA Marine Corps who, at the time of his death (1940), was the most decorated Marine in USA history. In Wikipedia’s words “he describes and criticizes the workings of the United States in its foreign actions and wars, such as those in which he had been involved, including large American corporations and other imperialist motivations behind U.S. wars.”

These facts alone could be sufficient for Russia's fear of a future invasion and bombing based on false premises, as often has happened in world history. As the earlier United Kingdom’s-directed changes in e.g. Iran and the Middle East, which were justified as trying to establish democracies or mainly to assure the assets of oil. All this while the world’s attention for the risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine diverts it from USA’s responsibility in solving (democratically?) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Historically (after the famous Sykes-Picot, and Balfour agreements, plus here plus here) it has been seen as formalized by the United Nations under western and USA leadership letting Palestinians pay for the consequences of western colonialism after the first and second world wars plus the Holocaust. This formalization by the United Nations makes it the more awkward that Israel does not care for the very same United Nations’ position about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. These complexities about Israel-Palestine conflict are given as an example of neglected analog complexities in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which are illustrated below, mainly in the contributions of Nikolai Petro. It suggests a humbler western conciliatory attitude today, and that the USA should adjust its own internal politics and democracy for a just influence on the issue even through the UN. Instead what we see is an extreme polarization of its own political life and militarization, face poverty and civil unrest, gangs and frequent mass shootings in public places. Cf. the 2021 Capitol attack, with up to half of the USA population regarding the winning party and president as being undemocratically elected, while the country plays with NATO the role world’s police instead of “America first”.

In doing so it seems to me necessary to remember all historical questioning of the basis and essence of democracy, where Democracy today has to be written with capital D, since it may have become a substitute for God himself. Because of this, if my present text is misunderstood for being a politically incorrect objection to divine Democracy and if I were an important influential personality I could incur in the same penalties that the philosopher Fichte incurred in the famous Atheism dispute. It is in this same sense that I did conceive the contemporary tendency to reduce religion and theology to politics of right vs. left without the neglected vertical dimension. It is this process that also allows for the divinization of the freedom of expression, of art, of the press, of social media (except for Donald Trump), or condemnation of Covid conspiracy theories or of fake news. In a secular democracy, its divinization also implies the divinization of law and "rights" as represented in the EU by the European Court of Justice that consequently can castigate countries that do follow the gospel of philosophy of law as represented, e.g. in Sweden by the doctrine of Positive Law. This in turn allows, beyond the condemnation of whole “heretic” countries, for the “freedom” of Mohammad drawings controversy, the possibility, recommendation or injunction to use gender-neutral pronouns, the condemnation of Christian pastors and others who can be prosecuted, if yet finally acquitted at least in the Supreme Court, as in the case of Åke Green under the Swedish law against hate speech, because of biblical citations on homosexuality in his sermons.

It is then interesting to reflect on this kind of ideas. One example could be literary reflections in such a book as Democracy: the god that failed, or in criticism such as about Tyranny of the majority, or in a book translated from Swedish as The myth of democracy. Obviously, such difficult matters must rely on political science, and ultimately on philosophy and/or theology, in the sense of determination of ultimate, highest values. If this is not done, democracy gets corrupted by the mirage that it enables humans to get what they want irrespective of what they should want, just by means or the power that follows from majority: "Unity makes strength". This would be irrespective of what makes unity, as implied in the term religion as etymologically coming from Latin re (meaning "again") + Iigare (meaning "bind" or "connect"). A misunderstanding of these issues is what may lead to the modern phenomena related to political correctness or opinion corridor that I consider in an earlier paper. They appear often as the idea that we should opt for support of weakness of oppressed people, especially women, and minorities, for they are "right". It, in turn, opens the road for perverted Christianism in the form of "humane" communism and socialism caring for oppressed humans, and for the equally perverted objection by the philosopher Nietzsche seeing Christianism as a philosophy for slaves. While the real slaves are those who are not masters over their wills and are not able to make sacrifices as a proof and generator of brotherly love, in the place of power. As applied to the case of Ukraine this misunderstanding would mean that Ukraine is seen as being right, deserving sympathy and support just because its oppressed people would not get what they want, turned into equivalent to what they need, if they were overpowered by the supposed brother and master-ruler Russia.

Today, however, there are few politicians, journalists and military who are motivated to even browse the problematization of democracy at its roots, as by Plato and Aristotle. I found that a valuable modern contribution to the issue is the view The Myth of Democracy, by the Swedish political scientist and historian Tage Lindbom, who consequently may be labeled and disposed of as being "far right". Not to mention the book with the same title by the historian, justice, and professor or social philosophy Ferdinand Lundberg, and the Brazilian law professor J.U. Cavalcanti Netto who wrote a thoughtful book with the almost same title as Lindbom’s: (in Portuguese, my trans.): Democracy, a Myth.

The difference between Cavalcanti Netto and Lindbom is that the former’s sharp criticism of the abuses of democracy is based only on a brilliant logical-rhetorical analysis (cf. my Logic and Rape) of modern democratic politics, without relating it to historical and philosophical bases despite of the text implying some historical knowledge. It is, however, a knowledge that displays a lack of theological understanding, as by means of facile references to “Inquisition” and to the Church’s shortcomings. All this results only in a brilliant but “mechanical” exposition of logical paradoxes that purportedly prove the impossibility of a true democracy and expose the confuse and infected phenomena of political correctness that I address it in another essay. The reasoning partly explains the mechanics that seems to lie behind the often sanctified politics of Ukraine’s political leadership but not statesmanship. The result is that Cavalcanti’s approach, as most modern political science, risks reducing theology to politics and to a sterile struggle of “left” vs. “right” wings, in a process that I describe further in a theological essay. It is can be seen as a cynical interpretation of Hobbesian/Hobbist political philosophy, in the spirit of contemporary cynicism, an attempt to local and partial reenactment of Balzac’s The Human Comedy. It is properly revealed in the author’s self-chosen (Hobbesian?) motto for his whole book (p. 3, my trans.), and an invited introductory comment of its text (p. 9):

“Like a lighthouse on rocks, this book does not point the way. It signals imminent shipwreck”.

“Human beings are savage egoists and can only get along if they are girded and limited by legal restrictions”.

This all recalls also the misunderstanding of what “myth” is, when equating it to a lie, impeding the understanding of the depth of the problem and of democracy not being necessarily bad. With some goodwill it can be seen that the problem lies in its pre-requisites and the hidden presupposition that it represents "humanism" as being the ultimate goal or ultimate good inherent to the human being: the citizen. It is a failed idea formalized by Jean Jacques Rousseau, and leading to the famous amusing quotations attributed to G.K. Chesterton, “When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything”, supplemented by “The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums”. (Oxford Reference, #53 and 33.) The belief in "anything" must be interpreted and qualified, and in this case it is most often the belief in democracy and humanism because of the assumed inherent wise goodness of the majority of human beings, and of crowd psychology as related to the collective unconscious.

And this is also done without ever wondering about what it is that attracts people to Stalinist left or to fascist right that is promptly associated to Hitler and Nazism, or later to Islam, instead of attracting to Christianism. The only failed attempts to explanation are the well-intentioned but politicizing, misleading explanations offered by the Frankfurt school of critical social theory. Most people seemingly cannot afford to care for deeper, apparently farfetched explanations such as in the Bible (more on this below) or, say, in Carl Jung's Civilization in Transition.

The whole conflict in Ukraine can be seen as civilization in transition, an alternative conception of "The Decline of the West", as it also can be inferred by what Neve Gordon wrote on The problem with Israel's so called "crisis of democracy", while the ultimate problem was unexpectedly addressed in a program of the Swedish public radio, Sveriges Radio (8 Sept. 2023) with the title Israel och hotet inifrån [Israel and the threat from within], video available until further notice]. It addresses the basic question of this essay, on the conflict between Israel's orthodox Jews who require their own freedom of thought and religion with God that they put above the liberal god "Democracy" represented by the democratically liberal Israel's supreme court of justice.

From the more superficial point of view of Realpolitik, well below the neglected theological issue of Just War, it is easy to understand that many more or less democratic countries opt for NATO and its implied USA influence. This is because it stands for power, democracy or freedom equivalent to do and to get whatever the democratic majority wants, disregarding what “freedom” means, what it should be as illustrated by e.g. the Russian philosopher Nicola Berdyaev in Dostoievsky, An Interpretation (chap. III). But, who cares, when USA’s Western world stands mainly for prosperity, starting with expectations of investments and economic help as understood in the spirit of the Marshall plan, something that would certainly come also for “reconstruction” after a possible future invasion and destruction of the country. A reconstruction that would also boost the local industry and commerce of the helping nations who would have helped at the cost of sacrifices by their taxpayers.

The USA, contrary to Russia stands as in the two world wars, as a peninsula protected from neighbors by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. When exceptionally attacked on its own territory in the September 11 terrorist attacks with its 3000 deaths, in retaliation it could turn the world “upside down”. This in turn encourages the USA to paint, as ultimately in January and February 2022, a menacing Russia with imperial soviet ambitions in Europe. This in turn encourages European countries to join NATO, expecting or just hoping (“buck passing to daddy"?) that USA’s superpower will defend them despite its vague “America first” policies and the vagueness of the Nato Defence Planning Process NDPP. [It would be emphasized later, after February 24, by among others, Krister Eduards, former counsellor in Sweden’s Moscow embassy, in “Hasty decisions about NATO can be fatal”, SvD, paper ed. April 26, 2022].

[These aspects were barely noticed in the daily press when I first wrote the above paragraph before February 24, 2022, appearing only later, e.g. in SvD, “En splittrad USA gör Nato mindre stabilt” and “Svensk Natoansökan kan bli bråk i amerikanska senaten”, SvD March 16 and 17; in English “A fragmented United States makes NATO less stable”, and “Swedish NATO application could cause trouble in the USA Senate”. They are aspects that were barely noticed even as late as in April 2022 when Sweden together with Finland began considering to apply for NATO membership.]

In any case, countries’ opting for NATO membership will permit future localization of USA and others’ weapons and troops around Russia. It also encourages these countries to increase their contributions to and financing of NATO in terms of higher percent of their BNP. This alleviates the burden of the USA, stimulating its economy through its famous military-industrial complex and the new industrial state. And at the same time waging a proxy-war against Russia, debilitating it at the cost or Ukrainian and others’ human lives. All this while, as sole superpower, it retains NATO’s control while using its increasing prestige in its internal party politics. The western industrial complex would also enjoy a big stimulation and growth in its contribution to the reconstruction of a possibly destroyed Ukraine. Not to mention geopolitical, and market-economic aspects like the controversies on Nord Stream, where the choice is between Europe being dependent on Russia vs. on the USA for the supply of natural gas, among other products. In the middle of all that it is easy to forget that, for instance, the Cuban Missile Crisis was only solved with the USA’s acceptance of the non-publicized removal of American nuclear missiles from Turkey and Italy.

What appears to me as modern journalism’s failure is represented in the USA by “democratically” opposite interpretation of “facts” by CNN's and Fox News and their contribution to the political polarization of the country during Donald Trump’s presidential period. Opposite interpretations up to the point of the 2021 Capitol attack, as much opposite as Russia’s and Ukraine’s interpretation of their relation. In the small Sweden’s population (less than 1/30 of the USA and 1/100 of China) interpretation depends upon allegiance to the USA within the play of political world actors. Sweden has no CNN and Fox News but having posed to be the “conscience of the world” it has rather the Swedish public service television. Its correspondent in Ukraine, Bert Sundström, instead of forwarding interviews with representatives for both the Ukranian and Russian governments and think thanks, writes (my translation) on February 20, 2022:

Russia is desperately trying to find some kind of reason to attack Ukraine in - as it will be called - self-defense. But the whole idea is obscene. Only Russia is attacking, threatening and arming. There is no threat to Russia from Ukraine or NATO, but Russia will come up with something that gives a reason to start a military attack on Ukraine - maybe on Tuesday, I would guess.

This appears to me as being outright exceptionable, the more so when compared with the treatment of the Swedish public service radio’s present correspondent in the Middle East, Cecilia Uddén. During the 2004 American presidential election during which she was correspondent there, Uddén was hardly criticized for making an evaluative statement about one of the candidates on the radio’s broadcast. The comment was seen as a breach of impartiality [whatever it is, ignored in the case of Bert Sundström], leading to the suspension of Uddén from election coverage. This attitude to journalism is, again, well internationally matched in ongoing examples in the CNN vs. other television channels.

So, now we can expect that both Swedish and other less critical Western press and media correspondents in Ukraine will report official and popular Ukrainian and Western views on what happens in Ukraine. It reminds me that recently, during a stay abroad I had the opportunity in the hotel to listen to Deutsche Welle’s (and CGTN’s and BBC’s and France 24’s) daily televised news. Its degree of serious coverage and relative impartiality in interviewing Russian political scientists reminded me of a critical statement that by now is locally famous. It is by the Swedish literary historian and critic Horace Engdahl, suggesting the “Germany is a Sweden for adults”. Even despite of Germany as other western countries banning the RT DE Russian state-controlled media network for spreading disinformation, as RT America was in practice banned with state intervention backed by the United States Intelligence Community. A sizable amount of the Swedish public-service television resources is allocated to entertainment such as the Melodifestivalen song contest.

Afterword – Invasion and International Law

Basic rhetoric and political correctness require that I state, as others have done, that what happened is an absurdly fratricidal tragedy as all military interventions and wars are and should be considered, starting with the biblical account of Cain and Abel. And I must also state that I am neither a Russian agent nor perceive myself as a political man with biased sympathies.

These line in these section were initially written and later graduall updated when the world press announced on February 24th the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It should not have surprised anybody. Not because it was foreseen and announced within the Western world by those who hope to appear “wise after the (expected!) event” but, rather, by means of a “simple” analysis exemplified above. Controversial as it may seem to be, it reminds me of Osama bin Laden reported pronouncement (if I remember right) before the September 11 attack that USA should remove its military presence and “Crusade” in Muslim countries. Wikipedia expresses this as that he called upon the USA to withdraw all of its civilians and military personnel from the Middle East, as well as from every Islamic country of the world. It seems to me to be an analog to Russia’s objection to the expansion of NATO to its neighboring countries or USA’s reaction to the expansion of communism in the Americas.

Regarding the lack of “some understanding of Russia’s security concerns regarding NATO’s expansion” that I wrote at the beginning above, Andrew Sullivan writes in The Weekly Dish (Feb. 25):

And so when NATO, in the wake of our Cold War victory, decided to expand membership all the way to Russia’s borders, many Russian specialists feared triggering the worst kind of response. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake,” George Kennan told Tom Friedman in 1998. “There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else … We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.” (We still don’t, as we have just witnessed.)

I have seen only few analyses in depth behind all this, in terms of International Law. One appeared in the previously mentioned article by Sven Hirdman stating, concerning risks of war:

The risks of war are thus significant, all the more so as the security policy rhetoric is valid from both sides with pronounced threats. In addition, we are seeing more and more value and ideological gaps between the West and Russia, where Western countries under US leadership claim what they call a rules-based international order, i.e. a situation in which the US determines the rules while authoritarian states like Russia, China, Iran and Turkey adhere to their interpretation of a traditional international law under the UN Charter.

And regarding many righteous and self-good references to international law, he writes in another article (my trans.) with subsequent qualifying nuances, concerning the criticism of Russia’s for violations of that law:

It [the criticism] is legitimate even if it is highly exaggerated in the world we live in. International law is a fairly extensible concept that different parties interpret differently: Yes, borders must not be changed by force; yes, populations have the right to self-determination. The great powers and also other states have more or less continuously committed various violations of international law. They usually lead to legitimate criticism, but less often to sanctions and other concrete measures. Examples are the US-British war of aggression on Iraq in 2003, the airstrikes on Serbia in 1998/1999 and the attack on Libya in 2011. The Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan wars, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the French colonial wars in North Africa, the civil wars in the Balkans are other examples. full of violations of international law.

As a meaningful curiosity about the mirage of global democracy, it should be noted that the even supposed champions of democracy like the USA and Israel did inform the UN Secretary General that they do not intend to become states parties of the International Criminal Court.

At this point it is convenient to remind that the idea of international law and well as of the profane, supposedly "sacred" commandments of human rights (but no sacred unsavory human obligations), with the concepts of the United Nations, of NATO, of the International Criminal Court (ICC), as well as of genocide and war crimes, usual object of propaganda and disinformation in war, they all originate in Western culture. Westerns culture and presuppositions in story-telling imbue even supposedly “impartial” accounts of the Ukrainian conflict as apparently vindicated by John Lloyd’s (but see the readers’ comments!) in Zelensky’s Terrible Dilemma – and Ours: Capitulation or Bloody Resistance?. The author is unproblematically introduced as “a contributing editor at the Financial Times and co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism”. All this lies beyond the concept of “just war”, and is supported by the influential but in our contexts forgotten philosophy of Immanuel Kant that I problematize in the context of information and computers. To give a taste of the problem, as a summary I borrow from a review of Seán Malloy's book Kant’s International Relations: The Political Theology of Perpetual Peace (with my italics):

Kant’s International Relations is grounded on a political theology: just like when we look at the natural world we must presuppose its purposiveness, also in our practical life we must think and act as ‘if there is a rational ordered plan’ (p. 75) and an author of both natural and moral laws. However, this is not the God of the Bible, but a critical, post-scriptural deity that ordered the universe according to a telos leading human history towards more rational stages (pp. 130-136). Even though this may seem unacceptable from a secular and rationalist perspective, for Molloy, Kant’s ideas on cosmopolitanism and peace are based on hope and faith and not on empirical statements about republican or democratic governments and their relations.

Yes, it is a matter of political theology where the new Western theological god is Democracy with the assistant god or pope of Western philosophy: Kant himself. That may be the cause of the apparent silence, impotence or paralysis of the United Nations just before outbreak of the armed conflict, especially considering the claim that the influential USA prefers weak secretaries general that leave to the US a broader maneuvering space and possibility to use the UN as a tool or to ignore it altogether as in the Iraq war. Another of the few analyses in depth appeared in an article in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, (in what follows written as SvD, that here will be taken as major representative of Swedish liberal-conservative morning press; dates of +/- one day depending upon whether it is paper or digital). It was written by Gregor Noll on March 7, 2022. In it he relates a talk by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin on February 24, where he adduced an interpretation of the principle of non-intervention as an apparently paradoxical justification for his intervention in Ukraine. He did this in his talk by also observing that the West has several times used violence, violating international law’s prohibition to do so. Noll unravels the paradox by relating Putin’s position to the political theorist Carl Schmitt concept of Grossraum, and to the political analysis of Aleksandr Dugin, relativizing the concept of state, without this implying ideological communalities between Putin and national socialism. National socialism’s secular interpretation of Schmitt is due to Schmitt’s perceived ambiguous relation to theology and religion which, however, portrays an intuition that (our understanding of) theology stands above politics, and the brotherhood of humans above the brotherhood of a nation or of a family. Just to give a taste of the intellectual level of discourse and foster our humility in understanding the question, let me quote (from Matthias Lieyens, “Theology without God: Carl Schmitt’s profane concept of the political”, Bijdragen -Int. J. for Philosophy and Theology,72:4, 2011, p. 409, referring to Heinrich Meier, 1995. Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. The hidden dialogue, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press):

For Meier, Schmitt's notion of the political cannot but be founded on theology: "(t)he inescapability of the distinction between friend and enemy in the political 'sphere' 'corresponds' to the inevitability of the decision between God and Satan in the theological 'sphere"' (Meier 1995, p. 55-56). It is because of this theological basis that the political can become the total: both engage the human being existentially and totally. The affirmation of the political by Schmitt is thus nothing but a veiled struggle for substantial theological positions. He who denies political enmity, positions himself on the side of Satan. All attempts to overcome enmity are then seen as temptations of the antichrist to realize peace on earth against God's will.

At this point it is convenient to note what political scientist Claes G. Ryn writes in a paper on “On a More Complete Realism” (in Humanitas, Vol. 35, Nos. 1-2, 2022), which is relevant to issue treated here. The complexity of the rich and here welcomed text requires a sort of summary that gives a taste of its content, and this is attempted by means of some quotations. He observes:

the dominant approaches to international relations and grand strategy largely avoid both moral-spiritual and cultural issues.

the academic prejudice against addressing moral-spiritual and cultural issues

the progressives vastly underestimate the extent to which social and political practices that they favor—such as tolerance, respect for rights, rule of law, and freedom of speech—presuppose personality traits that are heavily indebted to precisely the ancient moral-spiritual and cultural traditions that they wish to expunge.

the sentimental-rationalistic ideology that has been so influential in the United States in recent decades. That ideology assumes that a certain political-economic model is inherently superior and that America, as an exceptional country based on universal principles, should champion that model everywhere, using military means if necessary. This thinking is reminiscent of the ideology of the Jacobins who spearheaded the French Revolution. The model they championed was “freedom, equality, and brotherhood.” They regarded France as the liberator of humanity. The new, American Jacobins advocate “freedom” and “democracy” and believe that the United States should help remake the world accordingly. It is hard not to associate this political grandiosity with the Greek notion of hubris or the Christian notion of pride.

It should be clear from this example that the field of international relations simply cannot do without addressing supposedly “subtle philosophical questions” or making supposedly “fine distinctions.”

It is interesting to note that despite of all such observations the author seems to be hesitant, even in an interdisciplinary context represented by the journal Humanitas, to detail the relation of moral-spiritual and cultural issues, to religion and theology in general, and Christianism in particular, as it is done in the present text of mine. Christianism is mentioned along with Confucianism, Hinduism and Buddhism, but their doctrines are not quoted. This hesitancy is paradoxically evidenced in his text when he observes that the field of international relations simply cannot do without addressing supposedly subtle philosophical questions or making supposedly fine distinctions. And, indeed, my present text will be and already has been chastised for its “scholastic reasoning” (see below). This is a phenomenon in its own right that I address in another context, in a paper on Information and Theology, where I also identify a secondary phenomenon of academic people who try to avoid “forbidden words”, while paradoxically hoping not to evade forbidden issues, by trying to redefine religious and theological issues as being political ones.

I mention all this because it reminds us of the complexities of the philosophy of international law that are often buried in academic erudition as by the professor of international law Ove Bring who, working in the Swedish tradition of positive law writes (SvD, April 8 2022 digital, April 9 paper) equating international law with morality:

In democracies such as Ukraine, people are often aware that their own side's respect for international law and morality gives soldiers a sense that they stand for justice, something that increases motivation and will to fight.

Yes, the god Democracy may foster self-righteousness, and the complexities of the meaning of international law are usually buried in erudition and ignored in the middle of mass media’s correct moralism and sentimentality in portraying the self-evident deadly tragedies of war. Moralism at the edge of sentimentality is also the western politicians admonishing China (cf. the reported EU Commission president’s and USA ambassador’s pronouncements and China’s report of president Xi Jinping position) on how to behave and relate morally to Russia, all this compared to the comments in China’s Global Times. It would also be benefic to compare with the pronouncements by Henry Kissinger (below).

The tragedies continue where each party’s propaganda (“disinformation”) depicts oneself a morally superior (again: the mote in the enemy’s eye). The peak of perceived moral superiority of western friends of Ukraine was achieved in a radio program of the public-service Swedish Radio (in 24 languages except English, in Wikipedia) in the series “Konflikt” [Conflict] of November 5^th 2022. The program named When the war moves to the bottom of the sea was dedicated to security at the bottom of seas and oceans and discussed the speculations about the cause of the 2022 Nord Stream gas leaks, perceived after seismic data that was characteristic of underwater explosions. The USA had since long declared itself very opposed to and sanctioned Nord Stream for it making Europe dependent upon Russian (rather than USA’s) gas deliveries. It is obvious that many around the world may have thought first of all that the whole incident was favorable to and therefore possibly caused by the USA. It was therefore interesting that a Swedish Radio’s interviewer in the program asks a senior researcher at the Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI), about whether the USA could be the agent responsible for the damages to Nord Stream. It is surprising when the researcher answers (after about 18:30 minutes of the program, in Swedish) stating that he estimates that the USA would not dare to do it because, if discovered, it would damage its already established position of so great moral superiority related to the conflict: he means that it would be a risk not worthy USA’s relatively trivial support of its own energy-gas businesses. As if the USA had not most important geopolitical interests, beyond minor financial ones, motivating the wreckage of Nord Stream. In view of Sweden’s interest in a NATO’s membership it is not strange that a senior researcher at its governmental defense research agency formulates an inept hypothesis. It is inept also in view of its implicit sort of logic tautology that we expect the USA to behave as morally superior because we expect that it does not want to spoil our image of its moral superiority. It would last until February 2023 before The Times, after Russian earlier reports (here and here if the links are not yet censored in the West, being then perhaps retrievable by substituting “rt.com” by “swentr.site” if not also already censored), would problematize “Who attacked the Nord Stream pipelines”. Also in February 2023, the controversial famous journalist Seymour Hersh published How AmericaTook Out the Nord Stream Pipeline. In the dull political unethical play about disinformation, news were published at the beginning of March 2023, following a report by the New Yok Times, “citing new intelligence that had been reviewed by United States officials” that the sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines was done by a “pro-Ukrainian group” acting independently of the Ukrainian government. Please note the sources of news in top western media: “new intelligence”, “reviewed by United States officials”. Please observe how the mind-blowing international play of disinformation uncovers blatant incompetence of intelligence and mass-media when by May 1, 2023 nobody seems to have yet formulated (I have not seen it) the hypothesis that the 2023 Pentagon document leaks may have been planted by the USA themselves in order to disorient the whole world in general and Russia in particular about operations in Ukraine.

But it is surprising, regarding Sweden’s role in the whole, that a supposedly non-political and non-governmental “objective-neutral” source of news as the Swedish Radio seldom if ever has interviewed any genuine Russian (or Indian or Chinese) researcher. Or, for that matter: interviewed some senior researcher of the Sweden’s (the “conscience of the world”?) proud institution from the times of its proudly advertised political and military neutrality: The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI-website here).

So, in the war of (dis)information the Russian invader is depicted by the “morally superior” West as a criminal who uses, if not only prepares to use, chemical and biological weapons, destroys civilian buildings – homes, schools, hospitals, tortures, rapes and kills his victims who are prisoners, innocent disarmed civilians, women, children and elders. This may also be seen as an analogy to what the documentary on The First Gulf War reports about some basic false premises created by the USA for the invasion of Kuwait in 1991, with emphasis on the so-called Nayirah testimony as part of the official Public relations campaign targeting the public involving the American global public relations consulting company Hill+Knowlton Strategies. Things that, beyond occasional press embarrassing press news (like Newsweek on The CIA’s blind spot about the Ukraine war ) only sporadic investigative journalists (like Alexander Cockburn and Seymour Hersh) usually dare to be interested in and to publish. Guess what happens in the case of the Russia-NATO-Ukraine conflict.

As if we were living at the time of the (now appreciated) figure of Tamerlane, disregarding the influence of Christianity. Because and despite of all this, and because of heroic and successful self-defense, the invaded Ukraine is claimed to deserve help with money and weapons from foreign nations who consequently can enhance their own profitable arms industry. All this while having their own share of indigent and homeless population. Regarding the profitability of the Ukraine conflict it is puzzling to consider the aftermaths of the USA campaign against the above mentioned Russia Today RT America, now in the form of the social media’s, and western governmental censorship of the Russian RT.COM. Regarding the latter, see the as yet (23 december 2022) not censored news based on the Politico with the title EU believes US is profiting from Ukraine conflict: “America is cashing in on the fighting while the bloc is left out in the cold, senior officials have reportedly said”. Some “conspiration theorists” will probably see this as echoing and updating of what the interesting but necessarily controversial economist Paul Craig Roberts wrote in 2014 about The Looting of Ukraine has begun. Other easily text that are easily classified as conspiracy theories are exemplified by How the US planned the war and energy crisis in Europe.

Mutual disinformation with respective immersion of the populations in the opposing parties storytelling has reached such a level that the western magazine The Economist could dare to publish “The Putin Show: How the war in Ukraine appears to Russians”, reproducing Russian news while assuming that readers will perceive the falsity of Russian state-controlled mass media’s reporting to its own population.

Disinformation reaches new heights or lows when it comes to claim the extent of the Russian brutality in killing of Ukrainians while at the same time claiming the need of western help in its heroic success of efficiently inflicting heavy human losses to the very same Russian enemy, up to the point of justifying a Wikipedia entry (5 pp. in Russian version vs. 45 pp. in the Ukrainian) on List of Russian generals killed during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. This is with tragic humor or outright ridicule shown in the (rt.com site censored) news on 1 Dec 2022 about “EU refuses to apologize for deleted post about Ukrainian casualties”:

The European Commission says it sees “no need to apologize” to Ukraine for a now-deleted statement made by its president, Ursula Von Der Leyen, who claimed the Ukrainian military had suffered 100,000 fatalities in its conflict with Russia. […] On Wednesday, von Der Leyen stated in a video published on Twitter that “more than 100,000 Ukrainian military officers have been killed” in the nine months since Russia sent troops into the country, adding that around 20,000 civilians have also lost their lives due to the fighting. The EC president’s statement sparked a backlash from Kiev, whose officials insisted that the death toll was “classified information” and subject to “restriction on publication.”

It was interesting for me, long after having written the main of this text, to compare these events with The Economist’s eagerness in publishing on July 5th 2024 data and comments on “How many Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine?” This is symptomatically matched by the BBC’s zeal in highlighting on July 8th 2024 a feature on “Children’s hospital hit as Russian strikes kill dozens in Ukraine”. This, as a note in a text on the Israel-Hamas war, at about the same time even more daily killings, including children and women, where happening in the Israel’s invasion of Gaza after Hamas’ terrorist attack in Israel on October 7, 2023.

The concept of disinformation that I treat in another context after having written the main of this text is itself is hidden behind confused conspiracy theories that advance hoax-science under such labels as “reflexive control” associated to Russian “bot farms”. This is as adduced by Frederick Kagan in his earlier mentioned video-conversation with Jordan Peterson. Mind-blowing conspiracy theories can also be constructed in the West, purposely supporting the Russian points of view, but blended with what gets classified as anti-Semitic seasoning that paradoxically happens to fire back and support western suspicions and hate of Russia. They are exemplified by stuff on the Ron Unz’s site (cf. also in Wikipedia) such as Explain it to me, please: If you want a war with Russia, China and Venezuela tell me why and how it would benefit Americans. The Ron Unz review is also notable for its “unconventional” and in the West controversial if not “scandalous” reports, such as (late after the invasion of Ukraine, in October 2023) Israel’s Culture of Deceit (originally here, authored by Chris Hedges). It is a pity that facile accusations of anti-Semitism, touching upon the Nazi influences in Ukraine and belonging to the ongoing disinformation campaigns in the USA, undermine important information on the conflict Russia-NATO-Ukraine (October 24, 2022). Ron Unz himself and his Ron Unz Review seems to be able so far to get away with their doings thanks to his being reported as being born to a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant in the USA. It all can be related to the public statements by prof. Jeffrey Sachs (also of a Jewish family and known from earlier positioning on Ukraine) in an article with the title World War III and World War II.

It is interesting that such Jews are often classified in the West as self-hating Jews and would be certainly be included in the likewise controversial SHIT-list. I think I remember this list being read as “Self-Hating-Israel-Threatening” and found on the net and in Wikipedia but, after threats of judicial persecution, having now disappeared except for being mentioned in connection with Masada2000, a former website described as extreme pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian and “radical-Zionist. All this for talking about “disinformation” while ignoring what both information, disinformation and misinformation are all about in the context of “Quality-Control of Information”.

In such a context there is no space for reminding the spiritual reciprocal coarsening and dehumanization of all parties that only superior literary skill is able to depict, as perhaps by the above mentioned Ernst Jünger, by Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Eric J. Leed in Violence, Death and Masculinity (Vietnam Generation, Vol.1, No.3, 1989), or in Swedish by Pär Lagerkvist’s Järn och människor [in English, in Iron and men, trans. Roy Arthur Swanson, 1988], opportunely reviewed by Maria Jönsson (SvD, April 9, 2022). The problem is sometimes also approached from a secular viewpoint in daily newspaper articles about the conflict in Ukraine, such as by Jenny Nordberg in “In the very darkest, civilization is tested” (SvD, April 10, 2022). An opportune historical example is the USA’s Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse in Iraq around year 2003. The tragic process of dehumanization includes all military, especially conscripted, drafted young men, who later are moralistically accused by safe, affluent and self-righteous outsiders for desertion or mainly for having committed war crimes after mental breakdown beyond combat stress reactions.

A related insightful account at the edge of what may be considered as politically correct is the article of the German correspondent Tomas Lundin in the same SvD (March 8, 2022), with the title (my trans.) “Did the West miss a historic chance when the Soviet Union fell?”. Meaning that EU and USA missed a historic chance to help Russia to become a peaceful part of the world community after the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin praised speech in the German Bundestag two decades ago, seen in the rearview mirror, appears in a different light. What emerges, when you read it again today, is how European security was seen from Moscow's perspective. A view of the "European House" as it was then called [cf. "Grossraum" mentioned above], which is based on the EU countries freeing themselves from US patronage and joining forces with Russia.

“No one calls in question the great value of Europe's relations with the United States. I am just of the opinion that Europe will reinforce its reputation of a strong and truly independent centre of world politics soundly and for a long time if it succeeds in bringing together its own potential and that of Russia, including its human, territorial and natural resources and its economic, cultural and defence potential.”

A few years later, at the security policy conference of the MSC [Munich Security Conference] in Munich, in his speech Putin accused the United States and NATO of striving for global domination and of "creating a world ruled by only one master, one sovereign." He described NATO's expansion as a serious provocation and addressed the heads of state, defense ministers and NATO officers in the audience.

Literature critic Emi-Simone Zawall writes (also in SvD 11 March 2022) that there is a general feeling in the West that it represent civilization, in opposition to a less civilized East, as suggested in a book by the American history professor Larry Wolff’s book Inventing Eastern Europe and more recently in an article by Arta Meoini at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, The Resumption of History and the Coming Post-Modern Order, in the Agon Magazine, Nov.1, 2023. Indirectly this appears also in the historically deep-going article by the history professor Kristian Gerner in the same newspaper as above (also 11 March 2022). Its title and subtitle seem to be extremely important for that I myself call the cultural civil war between East, this time represented by Russia, and West represented by the USA: Russia underestimates the soft power of the United States. Russia's foreign minister and Putin are misjudging the extent of US influence in both European and Ukrainian society. I would add "the extent of USA's influence in the whole Western society”. It is this undervaluation of that may be one reason for Russia’s apparent military incompetence at the beginning of its Ukraine invasion, when Russians possibly believed that a pure “aesthetical” demonstration of military power would bend their supposed cultural “brothers” to passivity and surrender. Furthermore, military personnel share in part the mentality of manual worker and engineers as less capable of “scholarly” diplomatic-political skill, as I explained elsewhere with reference to the Bible’s Sirach.

The soft-power is noticed e.g. in Sweden when the public service radio’s summer series of summer talks (“sommarvärdar”) every year gradually includes more USA-popular music to the detriment of national, European, and world’s music. This dimension of “cultural civil war” would later, in August 2022, be clearly noted and stated in a video by Jordan Peterson (mentioned above). Gerner's article clarifies why Ukrainian authorities could be seen as related to Nazism, as in their disputed role in the 1941 massacre in Baby Jar, and revived today in the spirit of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion. It also explains how Ukrainian baroque literature influenced Ukraine’s rapprochement to European humanism and secularization. It observes that north-American culture and the Anglo-Saxon world have a cultural and ideological hegemony in European mass-media news and commentaries coming often from unidentified sources that in the best case are qualified as “not confirmed” or not (yet) verified. It is a “soft power” that cannot be met with armed violence and terror. Cf. the polemical book How Europe became American (2021), relating it to the history of neutrality in the research of prof. Pascal Lottaz and (for those who understand Swedish) to the Swedish Public Radio program Konflikt [Conflict] The war that kills neutrality, broadcasted on April 29, 2023.

Pronunciations by Russian foreign minister S. Lavrov in the Russia Today (RT) network on May 27, 2022, however, show the Russian understanding of the cultural situation that is echoed by interesting if yet controversial western critics of “USA militarism” as in the movement of No Cold War (also here and here) also endorsed by e.g. prof. Jeffrey Sachs, or of globalism, Michael Hudson on Super imperialism and David Korten on When corporations rule the world. Both the references to secularization and humanism indicate that the problem lies along the ignored cultural problem of divinized democracy mentioned above along with Tage Lindbom’s above mentioned book, while Russia still refers to the Russian Orthodox Church and sees the USA as an invader of Europe along Napoleon’s and Hitler’s footsteps. All this while today’s press, especially in Sweden considered to be the most secularized country of the world is busy in characterizing (e.g. SvD March 23 and digital April 9, 2022/paper April 10) the Russian Orthodox Church as only a corrupt ally of political power. As a replication of the historical attempts to denounce the Catholic Church’s role in the Holocaust, or in the practice of pedophilia, while democracy is portrayed in pure form and supposed to be exempt from corruption and all that.

This issue of divinized democracy was much later (June 2, 2023), after USA’s and NATO involvement in support of Ukraine in the conflict with Russia, also been observed by Michael Vlahos, former director of the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs at the U.S. State Department in an article in the AGON Magazine on The Demon in America’s Sacred Narrative where he writes:

America is a Religion. On July 4, 1776, the United States was baptized with these words: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor”. By this oath, a nation was born and launched on its mythic passage of becoming. The Founders - our “creators” - had imagined more than a nation, however. They had also drafted the story arc of a divinely heroic journey, centering the United States as the culmination (to be) of History.

This is America’s sacred narrative. Since its founding, the United States has pursued, with burning religious fervor, a higher calling to redeem humanity, punish the wicked, and christen a golden millennium on earth. While France, Britain, Germany, and Russia stalked the world in search of new colonies and conquests, America has steadfastly hewed to its unique vision of Divine Mission as “God’s New Israel”. Whereas the mythical narratives of other great powers were cruelly self-centered, American scripture was - and remains today - “To Serve Man”.

Thus, among all the revolutions unleashed by Modernity, the United States declares itself - in its own scripture - to be the trailblazer and pathfinder of humanity. America is the exceptional nation - the singular, the pure-of-heart, the baptizer, and redeemer of all peoples despised and downtrodden: The “last, best hope of earth”.

This is the catechism of the American Civil Religion. In the world’s eyes, all this may seem like a ritual of self-serving vanity, yet the Civil Religion is the national article of faith for Americans. It is Holy Writ, which takes rhetorical form through what Americans take to be History. Yet this vision of history is better understood as a body of sacred literature, in many ways comparable to Islam.

Yes, if America as bastion of freedom and democracy is a religion it does not satisfy itself as Christianity now does after the crusades, with sending voluntary “missionaries” to faithless countries in order to convince them to its religion by practicing charity and by teaching. That is: unless one sees American soldiers as priests who convince by means of weapons. Compare with Vlahos' further texts as America’s Perilous Choice in Ukraine: How Proxy War Accelerates Great Power Decline. All this reminds that the “culture war” for moral modernization of the West had already started the job in Ukraine of making true “the dream of becoming an honest and open part of the West”. For instance, Ukraine imported Swedish lecturers on increased women’s rights and feministic gender equality academically represented by Swedish “gender science” corresponding to the apparently more humble American-English gender studies. This suggests that a cultural civil war was already going on in the country. As it was reported by the Swedish public radio in the weekly program Konflikt on March 5th, 2022. Despite of such lectures we have not yet heard Ukrainian voices against the prohibition of Ukrainian men aged 18-65 to leave the country (amounting to a general mobilization that would be reproached when done in Russia), and for allowing women to choose to stay fighting against invaders in Ukraine and send caring husbands abroad with the children. This the same kind of paradox that is exemplified by Putin’s late mobilization in September 2022 of Russian men (but not women) aged 18-65 who would not be allowed to leave Russia. Russia’s attitude is laudable at least inasmuch it is not coupled to official propaganda for feminism and import of lecturers on women’s rights and gender equality. Even such an insight is, however, obfuscated by an inconsequential confession in a text with the title As falls Russia, so falls the world. It is the confession that “The War in Ukraine boils down to a conflict between two conceptions of world order”, followed by a Newspeak that mixes exceptionalism with all-for-one transnational cooperation, economic globalization, and more.

A short excursion in history may be further illustrative. Merete Mazzarella in the Swedish newspaper SvD, March 3, 2022 reviews prof. Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb’s book The women are up tp something. Among other thoughts she writes, regarding philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe and what I elsewhere called the two greatest singular criminal acts of mankind committed, without any detailed warning, by today’s champion of democracy and freedom (my trans.):

"The women are up to something" was the name given to it [a further step beyond opposition to nuclear weapons] in the spring of 1956 by the management of the University of Oxford after the latter went on to nominate former US President Harry S Truman as an honorary doctor. It had been rumored that Anscombe intended to stand up and protest at the meeting where the decision would be made. Only 20 years old, she had already in 1939, together with a student friend, written a pamphlet questioning Britain's entry into World War II. She was not a pacifist, but she foresaw that sooner or later the Allies would not be content to bomb military targets - at the cost of a limited number of civilian lives - but would be guilty of deliberately killing civilians, and thus - it was her unwavering position - the war would no longer be just. Her position in 1956 was therefore consistent. For Anscombe, Truman was first and foremost a mass murderer. He was the man who ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the intention of forcing the Japanese to unconditional surrender. It did not matter if the atomic bombs saved lives in the long run, Anscombe did not think it was reasonable to humiliate Japan with a demand for unconditional capitulation; bove all she was convinced that the purpose can never sanctify the means.

Without subscribing to neither Anscombe’s philosophy nor any easy feministic pacifism, neither feministic nor other, (the hard pacifism being Gandhi’s that nobody mentions in Ukrainian context), I think that the attitude is worthy of attention, the more so against the classical background of “Good Acts and Evil Acts” (§ 1756 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church). Those who wish to evaluate the two greatest singular criminal acts of mankind, and their scaring context of popular American understanding, may study in detail the Rufus Miles Jr.’s remarkable paper “Hiroshima: The Strange Myth of Half a Million American Lives Saved”, (International Security, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1985, pp. 121-140), that obviously can always be rebuffed as anything else in the games of what I have called “logical soccer”. Swedish readers, however, may get additional food for thought in Tage Lindbom’s book Roosvelt och andra världskriget [Roosvelt and the second world war] (Norma, 1985).

It is obvious that Western countries were and are afraid for the realpolitik of a Russian invasion, the more so if it is not understood what does it mean that the Russian president is not Stalin, and Russia is not the Soviet Union as related to communism.

It is forgotten that the historical crimes attributed to communism in the Soviet world should be attributed to the official atheism of its political leaders and not to Russia.

And why is it forgotten? Because many of the westeners who attribute the crimes to the Soviet communism (and Nazism) are nowadays also atheists, who often unconsciously have their faith in the god of Democracy, often confused with capitalism and liberalism.

This is not understood even in passioned analyses of the second world war, such as Timothy Snyder’s celebrated Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. It is the very same atheism that fostered the rise of Communists, Bolsheviks and (in opposition) Nazists in intricate political relations that today are conveniently ignored by facile appeals to the god Democracy in its different “types” as surrogate for God and as a synonym for freedom to do what a majority wants to do. And if Russia today insists in associating Nazism with Ukraine, it is because Ukrainian culture, imbued by the progressive atheism of western secularization, is still tinged by associating (atheist) Nazism as an apparent “liberator” from Soviet occupation and oppression, confused with and equated with Russia that is certainly still struggling with similar problems but it is not imbued by the same degree of western culture and secularization. And since Democracy is seen as a god with no drawbacks but only benedictions, elders who remember and perceive some good sides of the old Communist rule such as no unemployment and health care are demeaned for only having “Soviet-nostalgia”. A further main advantage is that atheism avoids the Christian requirement of recognizing the own “mote in the eye” since evil is assumed to originate in any opponent who is not categorized as democratic.

In order to illustrate the difficulties of writing about these matter I will reproduce here below the comment of an old academic colleague of mine who, upon I having recommended his reading the text above, including what I wrote about Timothy Snyder, mailed to me the following commentary, which recalls in my mind the text I have written about Logic as Rape, and about Artificial General Intelligence. That is, about intelligence or intellect equated to logic, which in turn is equated to arguing for and against in a structured way, implying that if machines cannot think as humans, humans can begin to think as machines, as when writing in our context:

I wonder how you came to this conclusion, but I do not expect an answer. Your various writings on the subject are unfortunately incomprehensible to me .... Imagine if you had presented your claim and argued for and against it in a structured way. Then it might have been both interesting and readable.

That is, as if I should and could have publicly discussed the invasion of Ukraine, as welI as I show for the choice of atheism vs. Christianity, in terms of “for and against it in a structured way”. It is an atheism that presupposes and reveals an immense hubris because of its contempt for the “intelligence” of billions of human beings all over the world who have had and have a strong religious faith, based on millenary holy books that symptomatically are being desecrated in the modern secularized western world. From such wholesale contempt it seems not to be a large step to the racial contempt and downgrading of human to animals and pest or vermin, with association to the Holocaust and ethnic or racial conflicts. The contemptuous attitude of the mentioned colleague was crowned by his sarcastic remark, confounded and classified by him himself as irony, that any such reference to religion implies the assumption that God Himself would have explained to him, as to me why Timothy Snyder was wrong in his 23 lectures on The Making of Modern Ukraine plus in an interview on the country. All this in order to illustrate the ongoing attitude to atheism in the intellectual milieu of the West.

It is the very same atheism that stimulated the now forgotten original criticism by Dostoevsky, Berdyaev and Solovyov, in the country where the modern form of communist atheism was born, with communism as a main type of socialism. Their criticism reached well beyond the religiously lame account of Wikipedia’s Criticism of Democracy, and in particular its inept section on Religious Criticism. Another inept approach but rhetorically powerful approach has been Winston Churchill’s widely publicized quote that “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”.

It is the same atheism that today, beginning in the democratic West, is replaced by the god ¸ and is expanding in the increasingly secular democracies of the affluent but decadent western world, recalling its historic colonial crimes, exemplified by, say, the Haiti Independence Debt to France (1825) and the USA’s Occupation of Haiti (cf. “military intervention”) as ignored background for the later disastrous situation of that country. It recalls also its two world wars including the invasions of Russia, and its hateful treatment of political adversaries, as it is officially done today by the EU gathered under the leadership of the USA in its political and military support of Ukraine. And this is more so when the political West indeed does no longer mind for God but only for its own brand of the substitute: DEMOCRACY, celebrated lately by the famous January 6 United States Capitol attack, and related events including the 2023 Brazilian Congress attack. They all will be rhetorically and ritually trivialized by seeing them as proving the healthy resilience of godly democracy, while only a few intellectuals are able to take the issue seriously, as touched elsewhere (here, here and here) in this essay.

As, for instance, it is not understood what democracy means for a historically tormented Russia that lost some 27 million citizens in helping to achieve the 2nd world war’s victory over Nazism (which in turn was directed against communist Bolshevism). It is a victory that in the West is usually attributed only to the USA, neglecting what democracy means for other countries, for Russia and a China or India with a population of 1400 millions each and different history, cultures with different of conflicting traditions, religions and aspirations. All this compared to an affluent USA that has not yet solved its racial and poverty problems, as well as daily shootings, even of and by children, in the shadow of the struggle between unforgiving monolithic republican vs. democratic (sic!) parties. It is obvious that the West, and humanity in general, cannot learn from the disasters of the first and second world wars. It has not learnt enough from a Christianism that is gradually abandoned for a technically and industrially affluent democracy that it had helped to establish on the basis of Christian prerequisites. Among these prerequisites there is a consciousness that evil and wars cannot be prevented or solved by the temptations of playing God through money, power and glory, as addressed in Luke (4:1-13), or by having the beam in one’s eye, projecting and therefore seeing our own devil, madness and egoism in our enemies and scapegoats bearing the name of criminals or dictators. It resounds in more popular wisdom such as the following, whose source I could not identify but is echoed in Internet browsers by means of the string <change others>:

If you could change others, others could change you. But then you would have problems because everyone would want to change you in their own way. But don't worry. How could others change you when you can hardly change yourself?

The main idea is also echoed in famous Christian references such as the Litany of Humility by cardinal Merry del Val, which by the way symptomatically runs counter the Law of Jante, which is “world famous” only in Nordic countries. All the above may stand at the basis of the misunderstandings related to the “political theology” of Carl Schmitt mentioned earlier in my text in connection with Heinrich Meier. All this as addressed in Matt. 7:3 and Luke 6:41, and with due regard to several interpretations including the relation to reprimand as in Matt 18:15-17. Not to mention that the world would start resembling paradise if people could follow at least 6 or 7 of the Ten Commandments. Or, especially with respect to war, the fifth one “Thou shalt not kill”, and the Catholic catechesis’ §1756. The Bible, being one of the pillars of Westerns culture and civilization, is not only for “believers”. It appeals also to reason, or the intellect. It is a pity that the bearing strong feeling behind the western wholesale condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is sentimentality, as I myself condemn not only wars but also all evil in the whole world. Sentimentality reflects the opportune interpretation and one-way exploitation of the rest of the only one commandment that seems to be still alive in the minds of even most secularized West: “Thou shalt not kill, but…” and in particular “You shall not kill us”. But if we kill you, you cannot go on killing us. In the same context, thinking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is disturbing if not “scandalous” to consider that if Ukrainians had not shot invading troops the latter would not have had reason to shoot Ukrainians. The first to apply Thou shalt not kill is also the one who enables the possibility of the opponent also applying the same commandment and the probability of he and his family not being killed as in antiquity. But this requires a meditation upon the meaning of love, independence or freedom as it is required also in all conflicts and divorces. Compare with Nicolai Berdyaev’s chapter III on Freedom in his book Dostoievsky: An Interpretation.

In civilian context, Russia is in good company with both the USA and Ukraine with average rate in terms of reported number of yearly 6-7 civilian homicides per 100.000 habitants. We can only wonder what the statistics would be for each country’s number of homicides of own and enemies’ population, in each war it was involved. But it would probably lead to a naive arithmetic of counterfactual assumptions: what the numbers would have been if it had not have involved itself in all the wars. We can only wonder further about what lessons could be drawn from military theories such as Clausewitz’s, beyond the apparent platitudes of an American paper on Casualty Aversion in the Post-Cold War Era: Defined and Analyzed Through the Logic of Clausewitz. There, by the way, the author refers to the USA’s “small-scale contingencies”, to be compare with Russia’s criticized “special military operation” in Ukraine.

Sentimentality

Western comments after the invasion of Ukraine (contrasted to indifference to interventions in Syria as noted in one of the few western self-critical articles by Therese Larsson Hultin in SvD April 30, 2022) suggest the evolving of a tragedy and recall in my mind the two world wars, the specter of a third world war, and the hopelessness of "debates" on ethically complex matters, where Cristian morality in substituted by sentimentality. This is now obtained through recordings, images and references in mass-media to lamentations that should remind us of the earlier mentioned biblical lamentations of Jeremiah. They are the tragic plight of persecuted bloodied or killed “women and children” and often unmentioned elders and conscripted “young men-soldiers”, awakening a sentimentality that perhaps could have been alleviated by having seen proofs of other worldwide daily human suffering in poor countries, often ravaged by famine, violence and wars. Readers who understand spoken Portuguese language can in this matter of sentimentality appreciate the contrast between the masterly sentimental powerful rhetoric of comedian actor and president Zelenskyy and the unsentimental one of the Brazilian philosopher Luiz Felipe Pondé in a six minutes' video (accessed on Youtube March 28, 2022) with the title "Am I leaning towards Russia in the war?"

A late perfect “archetypal” example of sentimentality is the FULL SPEECH: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes address to Congress on July 24 2024, (see the National Public Radio – NPR’s one of the accounts of the event) long after I originally wrote the main body of the present text of mine. Almost 10 months after the Hamas terrorist invasion of Israel by Hamas on October 7 2023 and about 1300 Israeli’s plus 40.000 civilian Palestinians deaths and destruction of Gaza, Netanyahu was able to awaken tens of resounding applauses by the congressmen who were present, revealing secondarily to others the extent the extent of the ongoing cultural and moral tragedy. In its documentation it will remain as an outstanding example of contemporary rhetoric and sort of semantic analytical exercise or Rhetoric and Sophistry, which psychologically amount to sentimentality. It is something that The Economist perceives in the title of its comments on July 25: Bibi Netanyahu offered spectacle over substance in America: His fourth address to Congress was historic, but held few answers for Israelis.

Western sentimentality is encouraged by our having been protected from such suffering by our former generations' hardly won battles leading to the present (temporary?) privileged local peace prosperity. It has been keenly observed lately in an article by Emily Finley on Sentimental Humanitarianism Plagues the West”. It is a sentimentality that is significantly commented in Wikipedia (referring to the psychologist Carl Jung and the context of his Collected Works):

"Think of the lamentable role of popular sentiment in wartime! Think of our so-called humanitarianism! The psychiatrist knows only too well how each of us becomes the helpless but not pitiable victim of his own sentiments. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality. Unfeelingness is the counter-position and inevitably suffers from the same defects." [Carl Jung, Collected Works-CW11, §§183-185]

The quotation and reasons given above are why the present text of mine does contain neither cheap nor expensive tears, nor repeated laments of the tragedies of war and human suffering, coupled to my repeated condemnations of and expressions of disgust and hate for all evil devilish people that I must publicly distance myself from. This would be, in the minds of self-righteous people, a recalling of the cursed figures of say Tamerlane, Hitler, Stalin, Trump (for 50 percent of the USA population?), and now Putin. Regarding Trump it is extremely interesting to see what the Romanian theologian and ethnologist Mihai Andrei Aldea writes, coming as does from an apparently “western unamerican” culture while he may be mostly caring for the good old American spirit as half of USA population also sees it. In a, for us, conspiratorial weird style he writes Donald Trump – The last president of the USA (alternative layout here) suggesting that the last two years (2022-2023) national extensive official and public contempt for a former president elected by (again) about half of his country’s population is a worrying symptom of a split and decadent USA. More recently, Donald Trump as re-elected president in 2024 and installed in January 2025 in a few minutes’ video gives a sort of summary of how he sees the political and moral problem of USA’s role in world conflicts.

An unforgettable thought appeared once in the Swedish press, ironically expressing the conviction that the choice of a wrong president at the time, like Donald Reagan in the USA would not have taken place if the democratic choice had been left to the Swedish people. At this point it is convenient to recall that the main expressed Russian requirement for avoiding the armed intervention and ensuing human tragedies and suffering was a guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO.

My avoidance of sentimental tears is in order to keep emotions in harmony with intellect, which is more than logical analysis. Sentimentality makes us victims of political rhetoric, as the one of the former actor and now president of Ukraine Zelenskyy in an acclaimed talk to the USA congress on March 16, 2002 (here and here). To a nescient request for a NATO intervention that could cause a third world war, added to his own country's ongoing suffering, he made repeated similar requests (at the United Nations on April 5, 2022, official UN comment here). This, if anything, should raise doubts about the consequences of his lack of political understanding and experience upon the capacity for his good judgment about the best for his own population. A lack of experience, professional education and training for such a position would appear absurd if compared with the requirements for being a diplomat or a general in a theater of high-tech war, or CEO of an international corporation dealing with finance and advanced technology in a highly competitive environment. But it is not a question of lack of competence in a corrupt political context working in an inexperienced democracy but rather of it all being overpowered by something else, as suggested in a notice from the CNN of December 16, “Exclusive: FIFA rebuffs Zelensky’s request to share message of peace at World Cup final”, with the following commentary:

Zelensky has appeared via video at everything from the Group of 20 Nations summit to the Grammys and the Cannes Film Festival. He’s also done interviews and conversations with a diverse array of journalists and famous entertainers, including Sean Penn and David Letterman, employing the charm and media savvy he developed in the entertainment industry – he was an actor before becoming a politician – to rally support for Ukraine.

The role of Zelenskyy (standard mass media transliteration from Ukrainian spelling) is interesting in that he may have honest feelings but was and is still is a political actor with charisma working with the “myth of democracy” to which we refer several times in this essay. As such, in the ongoing conflict he embodies sentimentality if it is equated to the mastering of feelings by means of (again) Rhetoric and Sophistry before and after Plato's criticism. It is obvious that Zelenskyy may have won his election in Ukraine on the basis of his appearance in his entertainment career, especially his role in Servant of the People (political satire, comedy television series). His proficiency as actor appears during the ongoing conflict in his international appearances, as when he claims that his country deserves USA's and EU's economic support and weapons because Ukrainians in their fights are dying for the future existence of freedom and democracy in face of future further Russian invasions of European countries. Some likewise smart rhetorician or sophist could have, if not already has, countered such sentimentality by claiming that Zelenskyy is a “useful idiot” in furthering USA’s profits in its support of a proxy-war by Ukraine against Russia, debilitating it at the cost of Ukrainian lives, American taxpayers’ and European NATO allies’ money.

A report on March 10, 2022 claims that USA and NATO's unprecedented weapons transfers to Ukraine implying a western proxy-war against Russia’s military, as well as the above-mentioned arming of civilian population, could prolong the war and the horrifying violence imposed on Ukraine's civilian population. Or, as even an analysis in the CNN (August 22, 2022) expresses it: “Officials also fear that the Western strategy of arming the Ukrainians is becoming a short-term solution to a long-term problem: a war with no clear end point”. Sentimentality is also used for trying to raise funds in all NATO and western nations, the more so in face of Ukraine’s fear that a protracted war will decrease other friendly nations’ willingness to help with money and weapons. (See here in Swedish, and in English here, here, here, and research area of P.D. Wezeman.) Unbridled sentimentality may also be one reason for the violent polarization of opinions in the USA, champion of democracy, as reported in the news about the country’s reactions to the American television host and conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson’s by now famous video “The Russia-Ukraine war is causing moral panic”.

It is also possible to include into “unbridled sentimentality” the phenomenon that in the USA considered today, together with Greece in antiquity, as an “archetype” of democracy: the polarization around the decision of its Supreme Court on June 24, 2022 about abortion as well as on June 29th about affirmative action in college admissions, that culminates in a popular rejection of one main ground of democracy: the separation of powers. It is the division of a state’s government into three independent branches: a legislative, an executive, and a judiciary branch. The USA Supreme Court would never have commented the legality of president’s decision to invade Iraq on the basis of fake evidence and without the support of the United Nations. In the case of abortion, however, the president “respects” the court’s decision but in practice condemns it,. as he also does later in the case of affirmative action in college admissions. In doing so, the president neglects that the question is the interpretation of present, actual law, and the possible need for a legislative action to change it. Instead, in adducing assumed ideological allegiances of members of the Supreme Court (republican vs. democrats, conservative vs. liberals) and considering a possible increase in the number of members of the court in order to have a chance for reversing the majority, president Joe Biden legitimizes the view of a simple struggle, instead of separation and balance, between the three powers. In fact, it can be seen as a serious undermining of democracy relying on the separation of powers, as it was also done when Biden officially criticized the Supreme Court’s later decision on presidential immunity for presidential political actions. This is done without reflecting on why the Supreme Court does not officially comment on presidential executive actions, as it or some of its justices could have done on occasion of the invasion of Iraq based on executively “doctored” premises, which also influenced the resolution of the US Congress . Divinized democracy and politics are reduced to passion, and a research task in psychology and political science (and philosophy and theology!) is to understand a normative relation between reason, values, passion and sentimentality. The god Democracy reveals himself (or, today, herself?) to be human, or perhaps even “Human, All Too Human” depending upon the interpretation of the philosopher Nietzsche’s aphorism.

Or we can take the road of the famous study Democracy in America by the impressive Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), classified as diplomat, political scientist, political philosopher and historian. In the mentioned study (1835/2003, p. 511f.), echoed by the earlier mentioned Chesterton, he writes:

When a nation’s religion is destroyed, doubt takes a grip upon the highest areas of intelligence, partially paralyzing all the others. Each man gets used to having only confused and vacillating ideas on matters which have the greatest interest for himself and his fellows. He puts up a poor defense of his opinions or abandons them and, as he despairs of ever resolving by himself the greatest problems presented by human destiny, he beats a cowardly retreat into not thinking at all.

Such a state cannot fail to weaken the soul, strains the forces of the will, and shapes citizens for slavery. Not only do they allow their freedom to be taken from them, they often give it up

When authority in religious matters no longer exists any more than in political matters, men soon take fright at the sight of this boundless independence. This constant upheaval in everything brings disquiet and exhaustion. As everything in the domain of their intelligence is shifting, they crave for a firm and stable state in their material world. Being unable to recover their ancient beliefs, they find a ruler. […]

If a man is without faith, he must serve someone and if he is free, he must believe.

“Doubt takes grip upon the highest areas of intelligence, partially paralyzing all the others”? “If a man is without faith”? But what if he has “faith” or “believes” in his own reason or intelligence disregarding the problem of “belief and reason”? How about that? (Let’s put aside the case of Adolf Hitler.) Both the highest and all the other areas of intelligence become paralyzed and are perceived in others as the others’ “scholastic reasoning” (cf. later, below). Neglecting intelligent investigation of the nature of reason, causes, feelings and ideals can only produce moralistic, sentimental, peremptory demands for everybody’s condemning or at least “taking distance” from “violence” and from “Putin’s Russia”. They remind of what has been called political correctness or opinion corridor, without ever questioning what are “the highest areas of intelligence”, which today often are falsely and tragically equated to logic. This imposition to “take distance” equal to “being good” and “being right” is a negation of the core of democracy in freedom of thought and expression, a democracy and a freedom for which both civilians and military, young men, women, and children, not to mention elders and disabled are supposed to die for, as they do now in Ukraine and in many conflicts around the planet. It is not a question of being countered when saying that something is wrong or of enduring the extremes of prison or torture, but of being punished like being abandoned by relatives and friends, fired and left unemployed.

This indicates to me that not only Russia but also Ukraine and the USA (dominating NATO) find a ruler based on ideological passion obscurely related to sentimentality. The first mentioned finds it in what the West sees as a strong president of a democratic dictatorship (democratur) , while the other two nations find it in two presidents impersonating their democracy that in the shadow of the early mentioned crowd psychology expresses the obscure will of the (majority of the) people. This despite their temporality or the extreme polarization about what in the USA is exemplified by the 2021 Capitol Attack and conflict between republicans and democrats. One should not leave the impression that Tocqueville’s old observations are obsolete, since their resonate still today in the intellectual world, as suggested by late works and their references as exemplified by Tocqueville’s Christian Revolution (2013), The strange belief of Alexis de Tocqueville: Christianity as philosophy. (2013), America as a delusive model – Tocqueville on Religion (2007), Tocqueville on Christianity and American Democracy (2016), or A State of Faith: Tocqueville’s Civil Apologetic (2007). A particularly telling title is the one by prof. John Peterson referring to the “future of democracy”. Cf. others by search at Academia.edu.

In the meantime, unbridled sentimentality expresses itself in all sectors of western societies. I wrote above, before the invasion of Ukraine, about the deception offered by Swedish mass media in the coverage of the situation, giving up the ambition of impartiality and not being able, e.g. to interview a couple of Russian political scientists, as Deutsche Welle had done. And see what happened on July 12th 2022 at the public-service Swedish Radio (SR), in the summer series “Sommarpratare” [summer talks]. A twenty years old Ukrainian student Kateryna Martyniuk ,who speaks Swedish and lives in Western Ukraine’s largest city Lviv, was invited to speak to the Swedish people for one and half hour. She talked with a moving girlish voice and honest strong empathy, producing almost tears in my eyes, about the suffering caused by her experience of an unjust and cruel Russian invasion and war in Ukraine.

Another later example in less girlish but genuinely feminine voice was the German Foreign minister Annalena Baerbock’s long talk at the Parliamentary Assembly of the 46-nation’s Council of Europe (European Council), transmitted by Deutsche Welle on January 24, 2023 when she was expected to reveal her government’s decision about whether sending Leopard tanks to Ukraine. Instead, among examples of the Ukrainian population’s distress, she mentioned the case of a girl who could not go back to school because the building has been destroyed by Russian rockets that also could destroy homes and kill people and children at any time.

In order to understand the nature of deceiving sentimentality it could be enough to compare Baerbock’s talk with the unsentimental, not marked by emotional idealism, earlier day’s January 23 BBC’s program in the series “Hard Talk” when Stephen Sackur interviews or “speaks to” Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, entering into embarrassing questions about the Ukrainian government’s latest corruption scandals. Deutsche Welle (DW), as well as France 24 (and Al Jazeera, BBC World News’ Hard Talk, and why not CGTN, and the anathema RT News?) are interesting examples, in different degrees, of problematization of the political question, when compared to the Swedish Radio and Television. This is to the point of raising in my mind the extreme weird phantasy that the Swedish Radio and Television should go over to buy and translate into Swedish the news and commentaries and debates from e.g. DW, completing them with more innocent local national news. As the situation is now, what happens to the expected “impartiality” of the Swedish Television is exemplified by (again) the earlier mentioned Bert Sundström, former correspondent in Russia, who in the Swedish television news on November 9, 2023 (cf. at minutes 3:15) was invited to report his indignation for details of the cruel Hamas attack on Israel that started the 2023 Israel-Hamas war, based on 43 minutes’ videos shown on invitation of the World Jewish Congress and Israel’s embassy in Sweden. Otherwise the Swedish public service television enforces a routine for program hosts to remind listeners and viewers, in case of conflicts, that the counterpart had no opportunity to give his version of the events. On the same date of November 9, the Swedish television report on the Israel-Hamas announced that Swedish judicial authorities had declined to launch a preliminary investigation of possible war crimes committed by Israel in the conflict with Hamas, contrary to an earlier launching of such investigation of possible war crimes committed by Russia in the Ukraine conflict. All this while the experienced senior journalist Chris Forsne, declaring that she is highly critical of development of Swedish journalism, wondered in a pod (after the first 3 minutes) whether the present (2023) Swedish defense minister Pål Jonson (who in 2009 has been a visiting researcher at the NATO Defense College- NDC) is working for NATO or for Sweden, having been also accused of wanting to give a foreign power (USA) access to Swedish defense. What are the implications of that? How is that even possible when the Swedish NATO membership was not yet settled? So much for the difference between journalism, nationalism and activism after Sweden’s initiative to leave its earlier official neutrality and to join NATO, forgetting earlier ambitions to be a sort of “conscience of the world”. Now the Swedish “independent” public service radio and television network lets the world know that the righteous Swedish people “democratically” supports the righteous countries Ukraine and, and Israel.

Examples of good programs are found in DW’s program series Conflict Zone in February 2023, including interviews with “outsiders”, non-western justice warriors Dmitri Trenin and Senior Colonel Zhou Bo. I happened to see and listen to (English) Al Jazeera’s interview of Daniel Ellsberg on February 24, 2023, which was originally first aired in April 2022. Ellsberg, worldwide famous mainly for the Pentagon papers, “said it all”. The recording of this interview could also have been as a complementary confirmation of the present paper of mine, including references to USA’s invasion of Vietnam and planned invasion of Cuba (cf. its “expressing concerns” in June 2023 over China’s activities there) and the cases of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange whose cases were object of two special essays of mine (here and here). Ellsberg’s interview included his explanation of how USA and affluent western nations need Russia as enemy, and why any war means general disinformation but sizable economic profits irrespective of who wins. All this is now drowned in the sentimentality and rhetoric about the obvious tragedies of the conflict in Ukraine as of any war, as if it were a question of life or death for the highest divine values of democracy and freedom in complete oblivion of their theological meaning.

In the democratic paradise of free press that protects people from censored undemocratic “disinformation”, the only example of news from Swedish Radio from which a listener could induce Ukrainian corruption (except for earlier reports that Ukrainian government affirmed having taken measures against it), was broadcasted on 23 February 2023. The problem of corruption would reappear later in January 2024, when Human Rights Watch tells about “Several Investigative Journalists Under Pressure in Ukraine”. (See also here, and here). USA Today had already asked in an article on 19 Feb. 2023 whether 100 $ billion in weaponry and financial aid to Ukraine is landing in corrupt pockets of the military and oligarchs. One may have had to wait until December 2023 in order to see a more detailed and candid report in Svenska Dagbladet (Dec. 10, 2023) of the extensive Ukrainian corruption allowing young men to evade military service that would replace about 100 dead and 500 injured soldier per day (a total of about 200.000 until August 2023), by paying up to 10.000 dollar for a “white-paper” that justifies their exemption and escape from Ukraine. By the way, long after I wrote the main of this paper I also read in a main Swedish newspaper on July 28, 2024 that three months after the start of the war, in May 2022, only one in ten Ukrainians was ready to give up territory in exchange for a promise of a quick end to the war and preserved Ukrainian independence. Since then, the number had increased to 32 percent, according to the latest survey conducted by the Ukrainian sociological institute KIIS.

Disregarding that tiny Sweden itself until summer 2023 has supported Ukraine with “only” two billion dollars’ worth equipment, weapons and cash, the Swedish police and customs tell that they have noticed an increased smuggling of weapons from Ukraine to criminal gangs operating in Sweden. That is, western nations generous response to Ukrainian government’s requests for weapons, in a corrupt nation will imply their being partially diverted for profitable smuggling to foreign including Swedish criminal gangs. The whole picture is completed by the parallel news of hundreds of young Russian men escaping conscription in their home country and possible death in combat, requesting asylum in e.g. Poland and Sweden where they probably in the future will not risk their lives for the new country. Interestingly, similar asylum has been given to foreign homosexuals who, because of their leaning, risk persecution and death sentence in their home countries. This is also freedom.

All this It obviously legitimate and important in its own way. It reminds, however, that the same public-service Swedish radio, and television, which have often interviewed Ukraine sympathizers, as well as the Swedish Armed Forces about details of ongoing military operations, to my knowledge have not yet interviewed a single political scientist or researcher in Russia or who works at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute SIPRI. By the way, it may be symptomatic that SIPRI’s home page as per July 13th did not have any mention of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and it can be seen as a bankruptcy of so-called peace research, the more so after traditionally and formally neutral Sweden’s application to join NATO.

I suspect that the book by Alain Besançon, The falsification of the Good, published in 1985, says it all. It is related to sentimentality in the sense that the latter is just a falsification of the good. It is a contribution to the Russian philosophy that is blatantly ignored in the West and is represented in the book by Vladimir Solovyov (more on him below). As Wikipedia puts it

“Solovyov's basic philosophy rests on the idea that the essence of an object (see essentialism) can be validated only by intuition and that consciousness as a single organic whole is done in part by reason or logic but in completeness by (non-dualist) intuition. Solovyov was partially attempting to reconcile the dualism (subject-object) found in German idealism.”

In this respect it suggests that he was trying to do something similar to what Carl Jung in more complex form later conceived in what became analytical psychology. The falsification of the good recalls once more what I write in the general disclaimer about my research, and recalls the meaning of readers’ irritation with the exaggerated number of links with references in my text :

The more I studied and reflected upon my experiences, the more I got convinced that the main problem was not the lack of debates, books, publications, experiences, reflections, but rather the lack of wish, will, courage, that is "lack of time" to select readings, to read, to think, or to understand in depth and to act upon knowledge that is still valid and already available.

Jung’s analytical psychology can also express and explain a lot more, all related to the conflict in Ukraine. It explains the extremely subtle sentimentality of the earlier mentioned West Churchman in the final collapse of his “systems approach” to the subject of the present essay as I outlined above. It is a collapse that seems to be presaged in his including religion among the legitimate “enemies” of the systems approach. In a late article on “Peace and Science” (Systems Research, No. 4, 1987, 223-226) he mentions the need to think about (if not also feel and love) those who are oppressed by war, poverty, hunger and pollution (and now “climate warming”) as being the clients or stakeholders of the system in our thought. He mentions being inspired by the reading of (Kant’s problematic philosophy that I consider elsewhere, and) Saint Paul (“all of us are members one of another”) for hope, faith and love in confronting our “shadow side” (as from analytical psychology) that drives us toward evil, as well as our need of a guidance in the inquiry, that he goes so far as daring to call not God but at least G.O.D. or “Guarantor Of Destiny”. He foresees that the scientific disciplines as they have been known will have to disappear, as well the distinctions of physical vs. social science. I would add: hopefully not as today in artificial general intelligence! He writes “Ethics will become central concept, as will theology in the form of the guarantor problem”. At last he dares to state how scientific (and related political) bankruptcy is rooted in theology. The subtle sentimentality is Churchman’s relating those who are oppressed by poverty, hunger and pollution to the often mentioned “future generations”, which awaken out thoughts to our children and grandchildren. But what about the children and grandchildren of our enemies? All this while I wonder about adepts of veganism feeling the greatest distress when facing the exploitation and abuse of animals including the cruel separation of cows from their offspring.

Political and religious information: a bishop’s interview

This section of the paper was initiated upon my listening to an interview of Lars Anders Cardinal Arborelius, Roman Catholic cardinal and bishop of Stockholm, in a program (in Swedish, recording available until further notice here) broadcasted by Sveriges Radio (SR), the Swedish Public Radio, on April 16, 2022, 12:55 a.m. (reprised on April 17 at 06:03 a.m., and April 19, at 04:25 a.m). The following is my translated account of SR’s presentation:

Now Easter is here and in Ukraine the war is raging and millions of people are fleeing. What role can the pope and the Catholic Church play in trying to stop the war? In Russia, the supreme leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow [because of controversy, link to Russian version here] stands close to Vladimir Putin. He has previously described Putin's leadership as a miracle of God and in connection with the war he has blessed the Russian troops. The pope has taken a stand against the war - but at the same time wants the opportunity to mediate in the war and since its beginning he has had talks with both Kirill and Volodymyr Zelenskyy [because of controversy, link to Russian version here]. What influence does the pope have on Putin?

[Part of] Presentation of the interview with Anders Arborelius:
(1) Name: Anders Arborelius, Roman Catholic cardinal and bishop of Stockholm's Catholic diocese since 1998
(2) Age: 72
(3) Background: Carmelite monk and author
(4) Commentary by: Joel Halldorf (CV and publications here and here), church historian and writer at Expressen.
(5) Host - interviewer: Pontus Mattsson

My ambition is to report some reflections upon listening to the program, relating it to what was earlier reported in my text on the Russian-NATO-Ukraine information crisis and with reference to other texts of mine. The argument can be seen as apologetic conception of the criticism directed against Catholicism.

The Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow.

It is interesting to start observing the wording of the presentation of the program. It may be seen as a respectful interview but it may also be perceived as an example of the criticism of the Catholic Church. It is directed to the population of what is often considered as the most secular democratic country of the world as it can be easily seen in an Internet browser (see for instance here, here and here) where the main press in general does not mention neither God nor miracles, nor blessings. Nevertheless, the interview starts with the undisputed premise of “Putin’s leadership” having been considered by patriarch Kirill as miracle of God, and his having blessed Russian troops.

Starting from the end one can ask oneself whether it is not the case that all military chaplains in the world do bless their troops, with or without an implicit reference to the concept of “just war”. But the bishop finds the patriarch’s blessing as “horrific” [Swedish “fasansfullt”]. Even if there were no chaplains, one can wonder whether all military command personnel do not “bless” their troops, and whether a secular blessing is less or more moral than a religious blessing. A second question is the patriarch’s standing close to president Putin. Basic political understanding and experience should indicate that ambassadors and leading clergymen need to stand “close” to political leaders if they are to be able to have a dialog with them and ultimately to understanding their thought, having any influence on them. Let’s recall what Wikipedia reports on the Lateran Treaty and the role of the fascist leader Mussolini in the creation of the “sovereign” Vatican State, while the Church of Sweden was, but it is no longer, a State church:

Negotiations for the settlement of the Roman Question began in 1926 between the government of Italy and the Holy See, and culminated in the agreements of the Lateran Pacts, signed—the Treaty says—for King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini and for Pope Pius XI by Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri,on 11 February 1929.It was ratified on 7 June 1929.

The agreements included a political treaty which created the state of the Vatican City and guaranteed full and independent sovereignty to the Holy See.

This is a replication of what we should have been already understood from the events of second world war, and overviewed in e.g. Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust.

What has impressed me in this context is that many critics of the Catholic church who lament its relative weakness in that context do not realize that its influence must have been and be a function of how many were members, and that many critics themselves were not members. Another aspect appeared in the discussion that was raised by the fact that in his early life (1927-1951) Joseph Ratzinger, later pope Benedict XVI, was conscripted into the Hitler Youth and drafted into the German anti-aircraft corps as Luftwaffenhelfer.

The question is what should all people who live under a certain political power do in order to be able to survive and try to influence their environment, if not subscribing to a philosophy of revolution or to a Gandhi-pacifism, or to martyrdom in the name of Christ or Democracy. Or should they embark into the study of pacifism, including its Christian expressions, all absent in the cheap sentimental condemnation of the conflict in Ukraine. The Swedish Radio, a public service organ in a prosperous Swedish democracy, does not need to consider neither martyrdom, nor dialog or pacifism when it self-righteously judges popes, cardinals or an orthodox Russian patriarch as being involved in a war or “military operation”. But the Russian patriarch may not even deserve a serious consideration: “war’s first victim is truth”. In the war of disinformation that follows armed conflicts appear accusations of corruption and such, that I will not report here but already have mentioned in the above-mentioned text. All these complications contribute to the rise and development of wars.

All the above can be seen as an example of what in another context I tried to cover under the label of reduction of religion to politics. I will not complicate this exposition here, and therefore I prefer to leave it to the reader by means of a reference to the link to chapters in my essay on Information and Theology.

Catholic Church and sexual abuses.

As it has been often the case, from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, criticism against Christianism comes in this interview of the bishop in the form of casual questions about cases of sexual abuses. What is never addressed is the relation between the statistics of sexual abuses in activities or institutions related to the Church and those related to the rest of society at large, starting with the political and the interviewing mass media establishments. I have already addressed the problem in another context in my blog in Swedish, but translatable by means on the inbuilt page translator or in pieces of 5000 characters (including spaces) by means of e.g. Google-translate. Ultimately it is a question of understanding the meaning of sexuality which is also the meaning of relation between people, here specifically between the sexes beyond gender theory. It is necessary to understand why Russia with its Orthodox Church as well as several countries in Eastern Europe do not subscribe to the western Woke or Social Justice War SJW associated with the LGBT agendas, seen by many today as symptoms of democratic progress rather decline of the West. Permissive sexuality is what the western press, as already mentioned, labels as religious bigotry, neglecting the deep mental implications of sexuality for family, relationships and society, seldom if ever mentioned except in conservative contexts. I address that in an essay on Reason and Gender, and in my blog entry on the so called #MeToo phenomenon. Not even Catholicism as represented by Joseph Ratzinger, former pope Benedict XVI seems to fully understand how to approach this question beyond simple exhortations to keep sex within heterosexual marriage relationships. This very narrow understanding is evidenced in my introductory review of Ratzinger’s paper on Conscience and Truth where he only goes so long as to rely on lame extensions of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, while traditionalist Catholics are only able to accuse Jungian analytical psychology for being “gnostic”. Not only Catholic priests but all priests do not understand the close relation between so-called sexuality and religion, and are left defenseless in front of temptations that meaninglessly are diffused through mass-media and catalogued under terms such as not only pedophilia but also BDSM, LGBT, and if the latter is not enough, LGBTQ, LGBTQI, LGBTQI+adds “intersex” (and other gender variants). All in oblivion of the classical work of Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). I suspect that some few exponents of the Catholic Church, perhaps connected to the Vatican, may be conscious of, and study these matters, but they are considered to be too complex for being brought to the public, the more so when cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, former pope Benedict XVI has to recur to the problematic framework of Freudian psychoanalysis in the study of Conscience and Truth. Probably Plato was right when, before the advent of Christianity and the Bible he wrote in his famous Seventh Letter (341d, and 344c):

If I thought it possible to deal adequately with the subject in a treatise or a lecture for the general public, what finer achievement would there have been in my life than to write a work of great benefit to mankind and to bring the nature of things to light for all men? I do not, however, think the attempt to tell mankind of these matters a good thing, except in the case of some few who are capable of discovering the truth for themselves with a little guidance. In the case of the rest to do so would excite in some an unjustified contempt in a thoroughly offensive fashion, in others certain lofty and vain hopes, as if they had acquired some awesome lore. […]

For this reason no serious man will ever think of writing about serious realities for the general public so as to make them a prey to envy and perplexity.

This insight, consciously paradoxical for what I am doing here, is repeated in the classic book on The Art of wordly wisdom (item #210): “Know how to play the Card of Truth: "For those who can understand a word is sufficient, and if it does not suffice, it is a case for silence." it is one main reason for not relying upon the (im)possibility for public debate about the causes and meaning of pedophilia among priests.

In other words, the Catholic Church concentrates on understanding and explaining the meaning of sexuality represented by the relation between man and woman, a meaning that I survey in an essay on Reason and Gender, and also explains the causes and consequences of sexual deviations. The Church does not sanction the supposed superiority of the modern god of “Democracy”, “democratic debate” and freedom of expression, above God and the Scriptures, and their traditional interpreters sanctioned in ecclesiastical decrees. Ultimately this is the meaning behind the clash among various interpretations of the biblical “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" (Matthew 22:15-22, Mark 12:13-17, and Luke 20:20-26). The problem is the western wholesale adoption of the modern simplified democratic “Lockean” understanding of the separation of church and state (mentioned in Wikipedia), the adoption of the very same Lockean inquiring systems that are criticized in the above mentioned The Design of Inquiring Systems (chap.5). In practice, this means that the Catholic church avoids lying but does not rush in telling the truth to the police. This is also because neither police nor democracy may solve the problem. I have tried to show that neither in science nor politics, nor theology it is clear what truth is, and it is truth that will set us free, and not the other way round (John 8:32, again, for those who care for it). Not to mention the implications of all this for the solution of the problem of “disinformation”, not the least in war.

In any case, returning to the main trail of this section: I am afraid that many citizens perceive it as a coward self-humiliation of the Catholic church, seeing its exponents responding to accusations of cases of pedophilia by just expressing dull public apologies and promises of betterment with submission to the state by means of immediate reporting to the police. I feel that catholic bishops could say a lot more about the problem of pedophilia in the Church, as suggested (in Swedish) in my earlier blog on the matter. This by explicitly attributing it to the failing faith of a whole decadent West, which also influences the recruitment for, and the challenges to its priesthood, something that could and must but is not spelled out in other earlier occasions (e.g. July 2018) of the bishop’s appearance in social media.

The blind spot: Western decadence?

I use of the word (western) “decadence”, as I refer sometimes to the sites rt.com and swentr.site, despite of they having been practically “forbidden” or censored in western mass media because of the “Newspeak” claim of they being a sign of Russian “disinformation”. This despite of democracies relying on the freedom of expression and debate, and thereby showing the breakdown of the concept of democracy (“The Myth of Democracy”), and revealing that western mentality in its practice of democracy will tempt its political parties to charge the opposition for advancing “fake news” that should be ignored or censored. In other words, supposed democracies do not believe in democracy, realizing the impossibility of genuine “information and debate”. Or, as I wrote in the context of Quality-control of Information:

The debacle of democratic free expression, or the official mistrust of people, of freedom in communication and of power of argumentation, is displayed in governmental western censorship of news from the Russian network Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik News. In Sweden. It was directed by decision of The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (corresponding to USA’s FCC), following EU imposed sanctions announced 2 March 2022, while all those western countries were not in war.

Western mass media in their exposition of Western politics and its interpretations do not seem to be self-reflective in the sense of allowing the possibility of the Eastern counterparts considering the West as being decadent. It is not only the Eastern counterparts who suggest the West lacks self-criticism (the “beam in the eye”). Perhaps half or a sizable part of the USA population is self-critical, especially those who have a Christian pathos, exemplified by the criticism of atheism on the occasion of atheistic exploitation of shooting and murders in USA schools, when atheists ask how could God permit such tragedies to happen. By the way, nobody seems to care today for Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which uses the by now in the West forbidden word “decline” (of the West) for only being Eastern propaganda in smearing the West. In particular one should note in Spengler the “religion’s role” and the “Second Religiousness” (Spengler, vol. 2, Knopf reprint 1986, p.310 ff.) occurring concurrently with Caesarism. It is the rise of an authoritarian ruler that Max Weber if not also Spengler and myself, see as a reaction to the false god of (false) Democracy that as already noted above is seldom, but occasionally mentioned in social media.

Other researchers that do not seem to care so much for God or gods or Spengler, prefer to launch their own terminology, such as the institute and project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), which appears more worried for the situation in India than in the USA, launching for the former the neologism of “electoral autocracy”. As a matter of fact there are sizable segments of the populations in the West that are devastated by what they perceive as decadence in morals, divorces, abortions, post-genderism, riot-shootings, school and university decadence, atheism, agnosticism, and outbursts of post-New Age or as in Sweden “Old-Age” (Hávamál) or German neo-pagan different strands of SBNR (Spiritual But Not Religious). USA’ Fox News is also adamant in forwarding images of disastrous political decadence in the USA such as about the “post-Americans”.

Secular western mass media assume that the Catholic Pope, the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, in parallel with the USA president, can express judgments about, warn, condemn, insult, and exhort Eastern leaders in e.g. Russia, India and China to be more wise and moral. The result may be exemplified by the case (censored in rt.com in the West) of Moscow lodges complaint with Vatican: “ The Pope’s comments about Russia’s ethnic minorities were an “insinuation”, an envoy claims”. And this is done without ever expressing any sort of self-criticism in the spirit of the Gospel’s famous “The Beam in the Eye”, which is also the background of equally controversial and hardly interpreted “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Luke 6:37). And why not also “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7).

And, please remark that I have not dared to go so far as to quote the “extremely and absurdly provocative Luke: 29-30:

If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.

It can be seen as the Christian development of Plato, (who might dispute with J.S. Bach the title of “fifth evangelist”) in Gorgias, § 409b-c, 521e:

Polus: Then you would wish rather to suffer than to do wrong?

Socrates: I would not wish either, but if I had either to do or to suffer wrong, I would choose rather to suffer than to do it.

[…]

My trial will be like that of a doctor prosecuted by a cook before a jury of children.

And, as if foreseeing the advent of Jesus Christ, Plato also writes in The Republic, § 361e:

[T]he just man will have to endure the lash, the rack, chains, the branding iron in his eyes, and finally, after every extremity of suffering, he will be crucified […]

It can also be seen as an absurdly extreme development of the classic Jewish principle of “An eye for an eye” in the Book of Exodus 21:23-37. Wikipedia recalls that “Some propose that this was at least in part intended to prevent excessive punishment at the hands of either an avenging private party or the state, without remarking that this is the import of the Christian addendum to, and reinterpretation of the Old Testament--Torah. How difficult this all is for modern understanding is illustrated by the case of the Israel-Hamas war 2023, initiated in November 2023 by Hamas attack and killing about 1200 Jews, followed by an Israeli vendetta, with the support of high-tech artificial intelligence, an AI target-creation platform called “the Gospel” (cf. “Habsora”) destroying Gaza and killing more than 10.000 Palestinians during only the following first month. In this perspective, modern Israel appears as not being able to understand and respect the cultural religious basis of Jewish ethics, as Christian westerners appear to be unable to understand and respect the “core values” of their own ethics, reduced today to democracy and freedom of expression, while a profane empty talk is going on about human rights, war crimes, innocent civilians, and less about armed civilians. It is obvious that there is no much hope for a cultural humanization of a conflict like the one in Ukraine either, despite of Russia so far not having been accused of using similar AI bombing technology.

Long after the main body of this essay was written I got a reference to a most odd and fantastic “encyclopedic” paper written by a French author who was unknown to me and that I have not been able to inform me about except for his authorship of books that touch upon matters classified as conspiracies as I have already commented them in my blog: Youssef Hindi (as presented in a French video). The paper’s title and an associated sub-title is Eschatological war: Russia and the West: Clash of civilizations – Christian Russia facing antichrist progressivism. It is mentioned here because, disregarding how controversial it happens to be, I believe that its reading and understanding may be a prerequisite for its evaluation and the understanding of Western decadence and its theological import in relation to the Ukrainian conflict. I have not yet been able to study it in depth, as it seems to deserve to be studied, with regard for my comments on Islam in other texts. I feel that it may be necessary in order to better understand the importance of what I am writing here. It is the first time I feel awe in that somebody besides the earlier mentioned Tage Lindbom in his analysis of democracy is touching the theological bases of the political problem, and that this is dangerous for all involved people including myself. It touches the motivational kernel of hateful reciprocal disinformation as also concretized by the CNN’s commentaries of the exceptional events around the terror-murder of Dugin’s daughter Darya in August 2022, as exposed and commented in the network’s Internet site.

The bishop himself in the interview does not find an opportunity to neither refer to the Bible nor give a hint or advanced thought like the one that is exposed in the video Christianity and the Modern World, where Jordan Peterson interviews and has a conversation of almost 2 hours with American bishop Robert Barron. Barron observes that Peterson seems to have done more for attracting youngsters to the Bible than the Catholic establishment has done. I myself am still struggling to understand and incorporate in my thought the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s Why the Christian Church is Not Pacifist (source: London: SCM Press, 1940. Swedish readers may see it referred to in the editorial of the Stockholm church S:ta Eugenia Kyrkoblad Nr. 2, May 2022). Niebuhr’s thoughtful text, which by the way starts with a lot of valuable cursory Biblical references, is tainted by and immersed in the USA culture. It is the most advanced and sophisticated text on our matter that I have found but it is also blinding for its historic political uses, being close to problematic situational ethics in the company of controversial Karl Barth (with my warning for halo effect). Niebuhr’s text seems to counter my main point, but I see it as pragmatic accommodation to ongoing reality by means of systematic lowering and reinterpretation of the Christian message, exemplified best by his reference to the case of Luke 22:36: Jesus said “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one”. Compare, however, to the historical discussion in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (1993, p. 717). It suggests a paraphrase of the latter part of verse 36: “Sell you your mantle and buy trouble”. This is what “debate” about this issue would amount to. Niebuhr’s rhetorically powerful and well-meaning message may be a grave mistake. It is a sincere blatant allowance for sin already in the formulation of Christian ideals, of what man should be striving for and expect to achieve. It may be felt as an apparent cheap relief for the conscience of all of us, especially for politicians and military practicing a sort of “Protestant war ethic” analog to Weberian work ethic implying that a victory in war is a sign of salvation. But it neglects the basic message of the worldwide classic Imitation of Christ, (one of the most spread spiritual books after the Bible), together with its associated idea of missionary call for the conversion of a loved estranged enemy. Many westerners who have not the understanding and strength to reach so far, may still reach a spiritual yoga guru like Paramahansa Yogananda, a phenomenon that has been properly commented in the humanism of Carl Jung.

The Catholic bishop is perhaps discouraged to quote and interpret Biblical quotations like Niebuhr’s by assuming that in the most atheist albeit protestant Sweden the interviewer and the radio listeners will not understand biblical and theological references. It is the case of a critical reader of my present text (below) who misunderstands his own “feeling of God” when listening to the text of a song by the social and political activist León Gieco who conceives theology as liberation theology, not far from an idea of effective altruism. Such perverted theology is also the one which may lead critics of my examples of USA’s and the West’s violence, invasions and killings to counter by observing that a party’s (read USA’s) injustice and evil does not justify another’s (read Russia’s), and see above about such justification, remarking that this not comfortably said by the western press about Israel’s reaction to Hamas’ attack in the 2023 Israel-Hamas war. One main forgotten point, however, is that Russia may have reasons for mistrusting and fear the West represented historically by Nazism and today by USA and NATO as much as or more than the other way-round. And about a party’s historical evil injustice not justifying the counterpart’s, as it is often claimed (as in the comment of this paper in Swedish by the second reader in the Appendix below) it could justly be said that

One part’s evil injustice may justify or not justify the counterpart’s or another part’s similar response depending upon whether the later acting parts have not cared or cared for understanding the causes and reasons for the historical events, causes and reasons that may happen to have similarities in both the events, and are the focus of the present paper. All this besides the fact that a plea that “my crime does not justify yours”, rhetorically implies a cheap rejection of the biblical idea of “the mote in my eye”.

And in our context it is a humorously “touching” insight to compare this with the Swedish establishment’s defense for its Quran desecrations (more on this in my blog) by pointing out that the international criticism is hypocritical in view of such criticism not having been directed to the official Chinese government repression of its Moslem population, allegedly because of Chinas economic power. As if similar criticism were not directed towards the USA’ international military acting for similar reasons.

The vulnerable point of Niebuhr’s dazzling argumentation seems to me to appear in the American society’s change of the original of his famous Serenity Prayer if applied not to alcoholics but to the conflict in Ukraine. His original is reportedly the first version below, changed to the second version that follows. It is unclear to me which version also appeared in a sermon of Niebuhr's in the 1944 Book of Prayers and Services for the Armed Forces (but cf. its paragraph For Steadfastness, and meditate over the American military’s trouble in recruiting enough soldiers).

Father, give us courage to change what must be altered,

serenity to accept what cannot be helped,

and the insight to know the one from the other

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

courage to change the things I can,

and wisdom to know the difference

The pivotal question is the “can” vs. “cannot”, implying power relative to violence (see below), and the meaning of “must” (and “must not”!) relative to theological vs. political interpretation of goodness of wisdom. Many members of the family of alcoholics are tempted to force the alcoholic to stop drinking, and would confuse the courage of the text with power. The problem culminates when the alcoholic menaces to kill some family member such as an innocent wife or a child, where innocence is a further question (see below) related to the individuals’ free initial commitment to a lifelong love (friendship) in marriage. There lies the analogy to the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Niebuhr is reported to have charged that use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was "morally indefensible". But who cares for Niebuhr’ defense of moral indefensibility? As well as who cares for the killings of civilians in Israel’s bombing of Gaza in response to Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, estimated at about 10.000 (ten thousand) for the first month of the 2023 Israel-Hamas war, less than the famous “tens of thousands” in the bombing of Dresden in World War II, but a rhetorical “nothing” when compared to the killings of civilians in USA’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war? It is easy for Niebuhr to say that, if one does not consider the above-mentioned question of the striving for power and the limits to power and violence, endemic as they are to the Western drive to science, technology and industry.

Max Weber had much to say about their relation to Protestantism. This drive, as much as the victory in the second world war and expansion of influence and affluence in the West, were and are supposed to be “signs” of religious salvation. It is what also produced quantum physics, the atomic bomb and nuclear weapons, pivotal for the invasion of Ukraine face to its approach to NATO. How does democracy control the use of atomic bombs? It is not perceived that not only advanced weapons industry but also the whole technological-industrial complex and what is called technoscience, terminating today in computerization of society, undermine democracy. This happens under the banner of a necessary increase of security, because more and more can and is assumed to be triggered off by just the “pressing of a button” by one or two humans who consequently unleash a logical-mathematical and physical process that by definition bypasses the communication with and the judgement of other humans, and democracy itself. It does so up to the point that “general artificial intelligence” (GAI), in the form of the latest hype of ChatGPT is seen as a super-human (again, “godly”) intelligence to which human democracy will politically have to submit itself despite of cheap warnings for the need of (paradoxically) “democratic control” in face of “existential risks of artificial intelligence”.

We must remember that “security”, that I oppose to quality of information, stood at the center of the motivation for war and “military operations” in Ukraine and elsewhere, now and earlier in history. And security implied surveillance by a few, supposedly secure, which paradoxically and tautologically are supposed to be democratically controlled. I have hinted to this whole process in an earlier text dedicated to the meaning of human-computer interaction a text that I am daily tempted to complete with accounts of daily personal life experiences.

Returning to the interview: I wrote above that the interviewed bishop is perhaps discouraged by assuming that most atheist interviewers and radio listeners will not understand biblical and theological references. As a limitation of work and space I refrain from entering into Niebuhr’s own text because it leads to exhausting work and to the impasses that I account for in my essay on Information and Debate. It is, however, interesting to see how the Jesuit pastor of the Catholic vicar of St. Eugenia’s parish in Stockholm, Dominik Terstriep in his editorial mentioned above (translated parts here below) that was published in May-June 2022, well after the bishop’s interview, in some key sentences [my trans.] expresses an official understanding of the bishop’s vision in the light of Mark Siemons’ account (found also here) of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist. Jesuits are perhaps best suited to understand the interaction between theology and politics as historically evidenced in The Suppression of Society of Jesus. The bold style of certain words is mine, followed by a number in square brackets, which refers to my comments that follow the whole of the quotations:

However, the determination to support the Ukrainian people (not only) militarily is related to the moral evidence [1] provided by a war of aggression, images from the bombed-out Mariupol and from tortured people in Bucha. But there is a gap between moral judgment and political demands. It omits both the question of the goal and the reflection on one's own role as a militarily active bloc. In the emergency situation, you only have the choice to help concretely if you do not just want to watch how a people is crushed. Nevertheless, the question of whether the case is not sufficiently answered by rescuing an innocent victim. Behind it remains the question of what the long-term purpose of the aid deliveries is [2], what political goals are intended that can also be realistic for a time of peace. A lasting peace presupposes freedom and justice [3].

…

[Niebuhr says:] No matter how we twist and turn it, political pacifism protagonists end up accepting and justifying tyranny [4]. But he [Niebuhr] also warns against the dark opposite of pacifism: the one-sided affirmative view of war. The reminder that a war with nuclear power can never be won in the traditional sense should keep us from overconfidence in war as a means [5].

…

And the church? So far, we may have done what we do best: prayed and helped concretely [6]; asked that the scourge of war be taken away from us, sent supplies to the people affected by the war and took up war refugees. The pope has taken several initiatives to mediate in the conflict, which from the Russian side have been treated with a cold hand [7].

…

The question remains difficult to solve, I think, because a lot of things are so obvious. There is an aggressor (Russia) and a defender (Ukraine as a sovereign, free and independent state). A military attack cannot be justified, while defense is fully legitimate [8]. Maybe we need to do even more to understand the causes of the war [9]. To understand does not mean to forgive! But not only the gaze on the past is needed, but in the heat of battle it is also on the future. How can the conflict be ended? What does the countries' possible future look like? What support can they need and receive? Is there a perspective beyond victory and defeat? [10] Perspective that does not paint the opposite side as the absolute evil, the personification of the devil? [11] Can you negotiate with the devil? No, of course, it must be eliminated, which has happened many times in history. But this war is not a metaphysical battle. The more it is charged that way, the harder it becomes to achieve peace.

My comments:

[1] – Moral evidence? Innocent victim? It starts forgetting not only the absent images of the bombing of the USA bombings in Vietnam. It forgets the doctrine of the original sin, and forgets the easily forgotten truth that truth is the first victim of a war, which leads to battles of disinformation obtained from our friends. The enemy, pending a test of coarsest credibility, is claimed to be the first one who not only starts the whole thing, invades and shoots shooting soldiers. His soldiers, dehumanized by fear, hate and deaths, torture and kill civilians, but especially kill and rape women, kill, deport or evacuate (?) an number of children (estimated between 13.000 to 307.000, left in orphanages as in Romania?), and kill elders, destroying homes – schools - hospitals, lying, cheating, plundering (described in detail by the Belarusian, born to a Ukrainian mother and Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 Svetlana Aleksievich in the liberal Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter - DN April 22-23, 2022) and destroying for the pleasure of being and doing evil. In the war of disinformation the other party obviously will sustain that most accusations, e.g. rape claims, are fake, while their links will be censored, as they are in the kingdom of democratic free expression, leaving only secondary traces. Not to mention that Ukrainian and western claims that Russia had kidnapped and deported Ukrainian children. While Russia may counter affirming that they had evacuated children from occupied territory, perhaps upon request of their mothers or surrogate mothers and their agencies (cf. report of the New York Times 16 Oct. 2022 and BBC on 22 March 2022) or at orphanages who later do not dare to acknowledge this to Ukrainian authorities. See also the Medscape’s report of 6 April 2023 on Which Countries Allow Commercial Surrogacy? Regarding the industrial scale of surrogacy or “commercial baby business” in Ukraine The Guardian had already reported on 15 June 2020, before the Russia-Ukraine conflict (or war!).

Some are crying in their cots; others are being cradled or bottle-fed by nannies. These newborns are not in the nursery of a maternity hospital, they are lined up side by side in two large reception rooms of the improbably named Hotel Venice on the outskirts of Kyiv, protected by outer walls and barbed wire.

They are the children of foreign couples born to Ukrainian surrogate mothers at the Kyiv-based BioTexCom Centre for Human Reproduction, the largest surrogacy clinic in the world. They’re stranded in the hotel because their biological parents have not been able to travel in or out of Ukraine since borders closed in March because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

If this was because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and in Kyiv, how about what happens all over the country in war? On March 29, 2023, the Swedish public radio broadcasted among its world news its correspondent in Ukraine, Ukrainian-born Lubna El-Shanti reproducing a recording with the voice of a supposedly kidnapped Ukrainian teenager’s complaining that his parents had entrusted to Russian invaders. They would have promised his evacuation to a sort of vacation at a sea resort in Crimea. He tells that he had instead been submitted to unfriendly hardships. This recalls in my mind the Swedish media’s sensational reports of similar periodical complaints by teenagers whose parents in desperation about their behavior had entrusted them for treatment to youth institutions.

No “statistics”, and no source criticism. It is enough with one sentimental chosen case. Human inventiveness, the more so in war disinformation, shows even more that this: the cultural editor of Dagens Nyheter (May 7, 2022) digs from the text of Sting’s song Russians: “Believe me when I say to you I hope the Russians love their children too”, and quotes the Ukrainian author Oksana Zabuzhko who claims that children of Russian soldiers in Ukraine “are said” to be asking their fathers to "kill all Ukrainians as soon as possible" so that they can come home. From Zabuzhko, who has long driven a fierce criticism of Russian culture including Dostoevsky (e.g. Times Literary Supplement, March 22, 2022, Swedish trans. in Dagens Nyheter 29-30 April 2022) follows a criticism of Russian culture from which the paper’s cultural editor tries to defend culture reminding that we do not need, as some wish, to condemn both Pushkin and Pussy Riot [sic]. Zabuzhko displays her level of understanding in her observation that (in contrast to Western literature?] the Russian literature has always praised the criminal perpetrator. In this way she expresses her misunderstanding of Dostoevsky’s famous The Grand Inquisitor, and that what she calls praise of criminal perpetrator is the analysis of nature of evil. Yes, people may read Dostoevsky without feeling (Woody Allen’s joke) a desire to invade Ukraine. But the conclusion is that we must be careful for tyrannies’ self-glorification through exploitation of culture as Nazism did with Wagner since “art has the ability to rock human reason” but “it is not culture that is dangerous for man, it is rather man who is dangerous for culture”. My own conclusion in an earlier context: is that such derailment of cultural talk is what happens when does not acknowledge the relation between culture (art and literature) and religion.

Information war continues: the enemy is failing in his purposes, suffering heavy losses, his soldiers have low morale and keep deserting, evacuation of civilians from war zones is forced deportation, and so on. The whole thing may be the background of confuse versions of “cultural Marxism”, which supports the view that persecuted and oppressed, like the poor workers of the world are, like children (cf. Lord of the Flies!), also innocent and good, contrary to Jews and capitalists. Such story-telling may be a temptation for some to react adhering to Nietzsche’s view that Christianism (reminding Stoicism), is a “philosophy for slaves”.

[2] – The long-term effect but not purpose of delivery of aid and weapons against the obvious supremacy of an aggressor may be a public proof of the goodness and power of the aider but also an increased, prolonged expanding war and suffering of a population. This delivery of weapons constitutes also a paradoxical if not hypocritical demonstration of the tragic comedy of claiming to counter increasing civil violence in the cities and schools of a morally decadent West, not the least in the USA, by imposing on the population limitations on the legal right of acquiring and bearing firearms. It is a paradox that recalls the case of western countries increasing military budgets and repairs of their bomb-shelters while neglecting research on the general decadent ethics as “psychological” cause of war, civil unrest, murders, divorces and suicides.

[3] – Freedom and justice is easily equated to liberal democracy and as such awakens the problem of democracy considered elsewhere in our text. The Bible spells hardly understood complexities of freedom when it states that it is neither democracy nor defense that guarantee freedom, since freedom is composed of both freedom from and freedom to: “The truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32).

[4] – Accepting and justifying tyranny? Not really if our behavior is a proof of our commitment as in the Romans 12:20.21, leading to “heap burning coals on the enemy’s head”, awakening the enemy’s conscience by means of our own behavior.

[5] – Keep us from not only “overconfidence” in war as a means, but already from sheer confidence in it.

[6] – What we do best: pray and help concretely: yes but we could and should do better. For instance, to give concrete expression to the words of the Bible itself, which is seldom if ever mentioned in pious discussions of the Ukrainian conflict.

[7] – The pope may have taken initiatives to mediate in the conflict which from the Russian side have been treated with a cold hand, but what can be deduced above from the interview with the Catholic bishop is that there may be reasons for this, since there are scanty proofs of attempts to understand the causes of war and why “to understand is not to forgive”. It should be reformulated to “to understand is not necessarily to forgive, and understanding includes to know who, if not God himself, can and should forgive whom for what”. Ultimately it is interesting to notice that by the time I was planning to end the updating of the present essay of mine in March 2024, the news in the world press “exploded” about the Ukrainian “cold hand” treatment of a more or less misunderstood suggestion of the pope that Ukraine could or should “raise the white flag of “negotiations” (which could and should initially be called conversations on the base of the present text) with Russia. Because of the ongoing information war in the world press I suggest the reading of the Vatican News of March 9, 2024: Pope asks for courage to negotiate for Ukraine, possibly completed with the text of the same and other news agencies (here, here, here, here and here). But in my view the problem consists in the fact that nobody, not even the pope, sees a possibility to state, and still less to explain to the negotiating parties that democracy as it is perceived and practiced today is a myth, that is: an idol in the perspective of Christianity.

[8] - This motivates me to ponder the meaning of Matthew 26:51-53, which is not directed only to an aggressor: ^“With that, one of Jesus’ companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear. Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?”

[9] – Yes, not only maybe need it, but we certainly must do, and I imagine that this is what I am trying to do here.

[10] – Yes, agree, and I hope that this is what I am doing here, in not satisfying the demand by my supposed friends, to repeatedly curse the Russians as impersonated by Putin.

[11] – Personification of the devil? It is easy to read the Bible as the devil does, countering “If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also” (Luke 6:29-30) by adducing that it is not realistic to leave to God the final justice: innocent civilians must be killed if one part in war thinks that the devilish enemy counterpart uses them as living shields. This is so because of “He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord.” (Proverbs 17:15). I have seen a similar “logical” procedure being applied by a logically gifted Christian fellow when playing down the absurdity of an (in)justice-scandal: Glynn Simmons, a man released from prison in July 2023 after spending 48 years, most of his life, in prison for a murder he did not commit. What is not realized is that it is not just a question of “understanding each other” or of “language” (Russian vs. Ukrainian, Hebrew vs. Arabic). It is rather a question of seeing and minding the other’s suffering, which is not a nominal question of undefined nice and uncommitting “empathy” watered-dawn in philosophical scientizing erudition, but basically a psychic readiness to suffer and sacrifice oneself (“sharing in suffering”, discussed in one entry of my blog) that historically has been taught in religion, inherited by tradition and discussed in theology. This is the reason of why the above example of countering of Luke by means the Proverb points to the real tragedy of ongoing secularization of societies and the Western divinization of the idol or Myth of Democracy. All the while I dare to think, and now write, that soon there will be only Muslims who daily still seem to take religion and God seriously.

When questioned, the bishop mentions that he himself had not advised the pope, and in turn the pope may not have advised, and even less admonished, the patriarch in order to “keep the dialog open”. Nevertheless, the bishop does not mention that there may be necessity for mutual understanding before such a thing can be done. It is not a simple matter that the one party who is nice and knows better will admonish the other party who is assumed to be wrong, like Russia projected into Putin, is assumed to be. The bishop also laments the suffering of Ukrainians but does not consider the suffering of soldiers on both sides of the conflict, as any military chaplain is supposed to understand very well as exemplified in the previously mentioned USA’s Book of Prayers and Services for the Armed Forces. Felicitously the bishop does not directly demonize the Russian leadership by equating it with a “butcher” or the devil itself, but yet agrees that they seem to have listened more to the devil himself. The listener of the interview may then intuit that not only the bishop himself but mainly Russia’s and the Orthodox Church’s western democratic Catholic and Protestant counterparts must have been listening more to angels and to God. The bishop himself, after being confronted with all these reflections, seems to have difficulty in seeing the point, possibly because of a typical catholic blind spot in interpreting the two most difficult biblical admonitions of the “cast out first the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye” (Matthew 7:5), and “do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also” (Matthew 5:39). And it is time now to detail now the repeated reference to "the mote in the enemy's eye" in earlier admonitions in the Bible, namely Sirach 27:30 – 28:7 and Matthew 18:21-35, if it matters in today's secularized world. In fact, the bishop’s comments were (personal communication, on April 24, 2022):

It is important to get involved in this difficult conflict and of course to pray for peace. A key question is whether Patriarch Kyrill is convinced about the justification of the war or if he is more or less compelled. The question is then to what extent the pope could influence him in peaceful direction - and more importantly: whether Kyrill can influence Putin in some way.

The question as I saw it, however, was whether we ourselves are convinced that the war is not justified or are intellectually compelled by some blindness. And whether the bishop and the pope also allow that they themselves might be influenced or convinced by Kyrill in a just genuinely Christian direction about their attitude to the war, not to politically correct attitudes of western societies. In my earlier text (above) about the conflict between Russia and Ukraine I referred to self-criticism among a few western pundits but it is neither visible nor effective in the context of official politics and most private discussions among citizens in the West. Self-criticism is the least encouraged in Sweden, which expects to be recognized as a humanitarian super-power in its self-perceived global role, analog to USA’s (and NATO’s) perceived global role of world-police.

Reduction of the blind spot to politics.

It is interesting to see how the blind spot is effaced into politics, in an article by Martin Kragh (SvD April 17, 2022) on the reduction of religion and the perceived dangers for Russia as being the result of ideology and “Putin’s worldview” and “conspiracy theories, cultural war and pure fantasies”. The cultural war is therefore not considered as the effect but rather the cause of the problems and of the view. The West is perceived as decadent and rejecting its Christian roots because of it permitting same-sex marriages and rights of sexual minorities. Putin is regarded and mentioned by Kragh as the personification of Russia, having positioned himself as illiberal or anti-liberal bigoted thinker who thinks that the dangers for Russia comes also from perverted religious schooling in the West, and from feminism. He sees the Russian-Orthodox Church as a loudspeaker for Putin’s views, and patriarch Kirill in his book Freedom and Responsibility (2008) sees Europe’s dividing line as going between the Russian-Orthodox world and the western liberalism that led to “expansion and foreign, destructive social and cultural factors”. Nowhere in his article does Kragh, whose explicit guideline is liberalism, consider the degree of importance of religion in the West vs. East, except for seeing it as a weapon in the polemics between the two parties. It is true that the atheism of the times of the Soviet Union may have hurt the Orthodox Church, leaving painful wounds in the faith and ethical education of elders and youngsters, which mirrors the decadent faith in the West. But the consequent suffering of the population, like in Africa for other reasons, may also have strengthened the consciousness of the need for faith. Nothing in this account is problematized in the interview of the bishop whose main contribution to emphasizing Catholicism seems to be his preparedness in accepting the rare offer to be interviewed by the public service Swedish radio. He refrains, however, from making any reference to the Bible ignored by most of the listeners, or making any controversial comment about the Swedish government’s sending of weapons to Ukraine. The bishop has, however, in another context had a conversation (in Swedish) that I until further notice have not listened to, and cannot comment.

It is ironic that the very same day the SvD newspaper contained Kragh’s article it also published an article by Fredrik Lindström who criticized the very same perverted liberalism for leading to an unhealthy “state-individualism” and abdication from personal responsibility. Nevertheless, again, what is left unsaid is whether the solution may lie, as I do believe, in a religion that fosters such a responsibility by relieving the individual’s reliance on the state (assumedly benign in Sweden and malign in Russia). This, however does not happen if the Catholic Church apologizes for its shortcomings without certifying and counteracting the perverted social and journalistic process of reduction of Christianism to politics and, in the West, reduced further to Democracy.

And, by the way, it is not clear which is the bishop’s or the Pope’s main objection against Russia’s behavior, in the absence of any reference to and discussion about “just war” that, by the way today is replaced by talk on proportionality and distinction and stuff related to the International Humanitarian Law IHL, also commented by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Commandments begin to be supplemented by a lot of “buts”. I guess that the objection is that it is not a simple military “operation” in a (democratic, sovereign) country. But democracy is not a sovereign god. If the main objection is the political and ideological violence and oppression of Christianism by a communist or socialist government, then what is needed is a better understanding of its roots as exposed in Russian literature and philosophy that is ignored in the West (see below). I understand that the main objection to Russia’s behavior is the infringement of the fifth Commandment of “Thou shalt not kill”. But nobody would have been killed and, except for weapons nothing would have been destroyed, if Ukraine had not offered military resistance. Blasphemy?

In this last respect I dare to formulate a (farfetched?) challenging analogy to Osama Bin Laden’s above reported condition for refraining from attacks that would later be called terrorism: that USA should remove its military presence in Muslim countries. A bolder farfetched analogy is to consider “invaders” as “immigrants” who flee from feared invasion and destruction of their own country of origin, and expect a safer future in another country to which they hope to contribute and to influence. It is course confusing and absurd because it questions the deeper meaning of the used words or concepts where power borders on trust and affection. This confusion if furthered by thinking of the population of former colonies like India and Algeria whose population would later be considered citizens of the colonizing invading countries England and France, and needing or wanting to migrate to them.

Leaving analogies, contrary to the USA, it is reported that Russia retains the death penalty in law, but there has been a moratorium since 1996, making it de facto abolitionist. And, as always, it can be rebuffed by claiming that Russia does not respect the rule of law, murdering agents even in foreign countries, and it will be rebuffed by others observing that the USA murders agents as in drone attacks, as an Iranian general (and others, organized by its Assassination Bureau, as observed in controversial sources) in foreign countries, and so on as discussed in the logical soccer of debate games. And, by the way, on May 6, 2022 the Swedish press (SvD in e-mail to subscribers), referred to the New York Times of May 4, announced murder under the euphemism of "defeat" of a victim, in that [my trans.]:

The United States denies helping Ukraine defeat Russian generals. [Meaning that “U.S. Intelligence is helping Ukraine kill Russian generals, officials say”. My note]. The information was part of a revelation from the New York Times that media around the world have reported on. The White House called the publication "irresponsible" and the Pentagon said it provided some tactical information, but not some of that weight. Since then, more information has come that the United States issued the position to the flagship Moscow, which was sunk.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby says they are helping Ukraine tactically, but not with such serious things as Russian generals.

It is news in the same spirit of Reuter's communication om May 26,2022: Exclusive: U.S. and Ukraine discuss danger of escalation as new arms [supplied by the U.S. and its allies] extend Kyiv's reach. This news should be supplemented by the famous leak announced by the world press in 6 April 2023 (also here, here and here) about military information on the cooperation of US and NATO with Ukraine. On some occasions it has been called a third world war by proxy, or “in pieces”.

Christian conclusions from debates

The main, if not only advantage of debates, is succinctly depicted in the Bible's Sirach (27:4-7):

Tests in Life

4 When a sieve is shaken, the refuse appears;
    so do a person’s faults when he speaks.
5 The kiln tests the potter’s vessels;
    so the test of a person is in his conversation.
6 Its fruit discloses the cultivation of a tree;
    so a person’s speech discloses the cultivation of his mind.
7 Do not praise anyone before he speaks,
    for this is the way people are tested.

Probably most people who are engaged in analyzing the Ukrainian crisis, and particularly those in most secularized Sweden do not care much for these references, and may even rejoice by remarking that the last biblical citation above may be used as a criticism against me. Not only against me but also against the most deep-going and insightful, moderately critical analyses of the situation in mid-March 2022, such as a public service radio interview (in Swedish) of the earlier mentioned Swedish diplomat and ambassador Sven Hirdman, and the New Yorker’s interview of the political scientist John Mearsheimer (“the reckless expansion of NATO provoked the crisis”). As in all squabble everybody is rebuffed by somebody, as Hirdman is rebuffed by Tomas Bertelman in SvD, March 23, 2022), and Mearsheimer is rebuffed by Sir Adam Roberts (in The Economist, March 23, 2022.) But none of them mentions any application of Christian thought by they themselves or by the West and by the two concerned Eastern countries.

On the contrary, secular thinkers and political leaders will find that it is irrelevant why Jesus Christ and early Christian martyrs articulated their commitment but never spoke about any weapons or alliances in order to counter the power and oppression by the Roman empire. On the contrary, secular thinkers will prefer martyrdom, not for Christ but for Democracy, sacrificing themselves or preferably their own people (or better another nation’s like the West helping to sacrifice Ukraine’s), soldiers and civilians in genocides, for the sake of the modern gods of Power (of the majority) or godly Democracy equated to Freedom. Or, as in the TV program in the series Conflict Zone sent by Deutsche Welle on February 18, 2023, Poland’s prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki in a consensual dialog with, among others, Ukranian deputy PM for Restoration, USA’s congress’ minority leader and when trying to explain why Ukranians are expected to die for democracy had difficulty in detailing what it stands for, and stammered: “freedom…independence… just right to live”. As if those who do not live in western democracies had not the right to live, and as if those who now live in Russia should prefer to die rather than live in lack of enough freedom and independence, in total oblivion of the meaning of freedom.

As mentioned earlier in this text, political leaders of invaded and oppressed, suffering countries may even be overpowered by, and instill in their own population, so much hate and will of vengeance that, as in the case of Ukraine they will be ready, together will the self-righteous friendly world, to ask for interventions that risk a third world war. They will also want to impose on the enemy economic and other sanctions that in their ulterior unexpected consequences may cause spiraling reciprocal hate through pain, shortages and famine among innocent people in their own and other third-party countries. As mentioned earlier: an inversion of the Christian commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself, as unintentionally suggested in the Germany ambassador in the USA account (7 Dec, 2022) Ukraine conflict “transformed” Germany. Your hate of the enemy will lead to the hateful suffering of your own people and yourself. As when it is observed that unwillingness or inability to forgive implies an embitterment of yourself. Not to mention what crowd psychology may produce behaviors in countries that are dependent upon (Russian) fossil fuel and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), nullifying most politically naïve attempts to solve the apocalyptic global climate warming. Readers who understand spoken Swedish can, until further notice, listen to a recorded program about the Russia-Ukraine conflict possible effects on struggle against climate warming, sent by Swedish public radio on June 11, 2022.

This will be the victory of reciprocal aggression, hate and vengeance, when endurance and love are perceived as weakness and cowardice. We should also be conscious that the reason for all these words sounding as a defense for the aggressor, is that we tend to identify always with an innocent aggressed party. In other words, we are never sinful, and the concept of sin itself is regarded as obsolete. This is in the same way as most modern citizens are in favor of divorce because they identify as being the offended or disadvantaged party in the marriage that they would want to leave, never to be left and abandoned. And these identifications are all the result of a perverted misunderstood Christianism that is reduced to an outer cheap demonstration of a supposed piety for weakness. Because who is supposed to display cheap piety for, or appeal to the Christian feelings of, a sinful powerful violent and cruel aggressor? No, the assumption is that an aggressor cannot be met with expensive Christianism but only with alliances for a counter-aggression in stout self-defense. In other words, one does not understand why Christ died on the cross, except because of his supposed meek weakness or cowardice.

That these matters are neglected, misunderstood, and therefore do not interest polemicists about the Russia-Ukraine conflict are also patent in the disinterest to adduce works like Hannah Arendt's work On Violence, as well closer discussions by Carolina Ashcroft of the highly relevant connection between Violence and Power. A serious research along these lines would possibly lead also to arduous study of Simone Weil and her religious philosophy, intuitions that are akin to my references to J.G. Fichte in several papers such as Information and Debate and I nformation and Theology. In Christianity and originally in the Christian West, power as counterweight to violence (cf. Arendt’s message) was not evil. Belonging and being attributed to God it had to be good, practiced by good people, implying concern for and love of “thy neighbor” or human brother. It is the power of love, which recalls dictionary definitions of power as ability to act or produce an effect, or influence over others, or mental or moral efficacy. If it is not this kind of power, then Islam is perceived as preferable over Christianism. It is the question of the apparently paradoxical goodness of power as codified in Ecclesiastes 7:19-20 and explained further in Bible studies. Today it is blasphemous to suggest that in the West the contempt and condemnation of power gets psychologically transmuted into devotion for the “freedom” of practicing BDSM, which in terms of analytical psychology could be an unconscious enactment of submission to consciously repudiated godly power. It is easier to opt for political correctness and the self-righteous cheap condemnation of violence as the violence directed against Christ who, consequently, instead of being the savior, he himself would be supposed to have been saved by those who today cheaply condemn violence and do not even care for his message. Or, as one of critical readers of an early version of my text expressed it (in Swedish, below):

“It is simple. Either you are for violence or against. Scholastic reasoning does not belong here. I have always seen Christianity as a religion of humanism”.

In other words, not for humanity but for the supposedly overarching values of Humanism and Democracy. Never mind about whether my text is seen as “scholastic” by whoever ignores what scholasticism is and its merits, not to mention Aquinas. It is then enough with the rests of the only Commandment our popular culture still remembers but many do not follow in daily murders on our own streets and homes: “Thou shalt not kill”.

All this will recall our easy deprecation of the Holocaust and "minor" historical mass murders like the Babi Yar's by Nazis and Ukrainians, My Lai and No Gun Ri massacres by the USA (disregarding civilian casualty ratios in Korean, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars), and the latest adduced war crime by Russia in the Battle of Bucha. At such point, it must be refreshing to remember what the British were involved in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (what were British doing there?), also called the Sepoy Mutiny, and the First War or Independence: 150.000 Indians killed with 100.000 of them being civilians. And today Westerns champions of democracy will adduce reports on the Russian-orthodox patriarchate in Moscow's support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a sign of Christianity's evil or dissolution suggested by some of Ukraine's Orthodox churches wanting to break away from their Russian patriarch. All this while the Catholic Pope, under the opportune tacit shield of the Lateran Treaty and in the shadow of a prior Pope's desperate attempt to grasp the relation between Conscience and Truth, can be seen as condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine by means of indirect appeals to the Virgin Mary that are soon reduced to politics. With all this he engages the Catholic Church in (the Russia-hostile) Poland in hopeless attempts to mediate between Russia and Ukraine. A meaningful curiosity in such context is that an unanimous War Crimes Commission's tribunal declared former USA president George W. Bush (and former prime minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair) to be guilty of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and genocide as a result of their roles in the Iraq war. Never mind that the International Criminal Court – ICC – in a press release on 21 November 2024 (and added here in an updating of the present text on November 23) referring to the situation in the Palestine, which was swiftly rejected by Israel and the USA, writes:

The Chamber [the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I, my note] issued warrants of arrest for two individuals, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr. Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024, the day the Prosecution filed the applications for warrants of arrest.

And this is the place of mentioning that the Swedish public radio, which together with its twin public television programmatically downplayed both religion and news on the conflicts in Ukraine and especially in Gaza-Lebanon, broadcasted on November 22-23, a program on Putin's hidden means of power - how the Russian Orthodox Church became a political weapon (see saved page here). The program symptomatically interviewed Anders Strindberg, researcher at the Swedish Defense Research Agency plus at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security, and Fredrik Hultgren-Friberg, press spokesperson at the Swedish Security Service, which is concerned for Russian espionage, the more so after Sweden became a member of NATO. And the Swedish Christian congregations who rejoice for not being politically recruited (as in the USA by the political “Right”) are not aware that the reason is that in modern Europe and especially in Sweden, considered as the most secular country of the world, the majority of the population does not care for neither religion nor the church.

Those who care for what I adduce here may understand at least the title of the program should have been “Putin's hidden means of power - how the Russian Orthodox Church IS USED as a political weapon” (by the West, and why not also by all involved politicians, starting with Ukraine’s who fostered Ukraine’s orthodox church’s breaking ties with the Russian?).

Those in the USA, however, who care for religion and the church are exposed as being happily proud for being useful to the USA political elite, while happily ignoring that they are most probably possessed by the same spirit of those who led to the two world wars and the Holocaust (or today’s genocides in Gaza and elsewhere), as explained in Carl Jung’s Civilization in Transition (see “Wotan” and “After the Catastrophe” §§371 ff. and in Index on “Germany”, “Hitler” and “Jews”). This is shown in a uniquely courageous and balanced documentary of about 100 minutes that was uniquely broadcasted by the otherwise very “discrete” Swedish public television in November 2024. It was also sent by the BBC and its original title is Praying for Armageddon. It can be seen until further notice in two parts (part 1 here and 2 here) at the site of AlJazeera. It was introduced in Sweden as follows [Google translation], followed by the introduction at the BBC:

In the United States, the Christian right has great influence. The revivalist Christians are a power factor that constitutes an important part of Donald Trump's voter base. They hope and pray for the end of the earth and the return of Jesus. What could it mean for the future of the United States? Filmmaker Tonje Hessen Schei examines the influence of Christian revivalists on the American political landscape.

Praying for Armageddon is a political thriller that explores the power and influence of American Evangelical Christians as they aim to fulfil the Armageddon prophecy. The film observes American believers as they prepare for what they call The Holy War and exposes the powerful megachurch pastors who call for the 'final battle' that they believe will trigger the Second Coming of Christ. Completed before the current crisis in Israel and Gaza, it also unveils how politicians driven by faith embrace the State of Israel as the key to their prophetic vision for the end of days.

In other words: this can be seen as a conscious justification and preparation of a Third or Last World War, the more so with conflicts of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, and possibly Iran. Wikipedia, without the improbable editorial contributions from the Russian side, had in September 2022 a comprehensive and ambitious report on War crimes in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, that can be compared with Russian war crimes and United States war crimes, by those who want to ascertain what nation in the world, based on Wikipedia (“hosted” by the USA-based Wikimedia foundation) is the kindest, most humanitarian or God-fearing.

And so it will go on, terminating in war, suffering, and death. In the meantime, I am being told by good fellows around me that I should clearly declare that I condemn and "distance myself" from Putin. My desperately ironic answer will be: "don't worry: because of my righteous goodness and wisdom I publicly condemn all stupid evil people as well as all causes of human suffering regardless its causes and meaning". This reminds me of what, after waking up for three hours all night thinking about the events in Ukraine, I experienced the mornings on April 6 and 7, 2022, listening to the news on the radio about the above-mentioned battle of Bucha: I felt drenched in a sentimental sticky syrup of journalistic self-righteous goodness, contrasted with the evil (projected into) president Putin (as earlier Hitler), and his guilt for the tragedies of war. It is the sort of goodness that misleads the Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Asejev, (presented with his book The Torture Camp on Paradise Street to Swedish readers of the newspaper Dagens Nyheter on 8 April 2023) to paradoxically object to projecting Russia’s evil into Putin claiming that it must be imputed to the whole Russian people, a collective guilt. Assumedly because of the superior quality of Russian democracy, which guarantees the Russian people’s active support of its president? The question of collective guilt, however, is interesting for illustrating the trap of defective thinking as evidenced in Cecilia Aare’s article in Dagens Nyheter’s cultural section (July 1st, 2023) with the title “Who dares to look at today's Russia, with Stig Dagerman's eyes?” where she writes:

This year Stig Dagerman would have turned 100 years old. His "German Autumn" is a gem among Swedish reportage. World War II losers are portrayed as individuals in need. Not as a people carrying a collective guilt. One could now distinguish between evil people and evil social systems, says syndicalist Dagerman.

Her own point is that many Russian citizens and especially soldiers, in analogy to Germans in Nazi Germany in world war II were victims of propaganda and/or forced to fight, and therefore the survivors should be seen as individual victim of an evil (political and social) system. In this the individual is assumed to be intrinsically good and the evil is transferred to a system which is supported by a certain number of evil people. No question of good people (“like us”) also having evil in themselves, and the other way around. It is an example of what I described (in Information and Theology) of a moral and religious problem being reduced to a political one, easily transformed with Marxist help into left vs. right.

It is the same kind of goodness that motivates Sweden to warmly welcome Ukrainian refugees while aborting its coming babies and rejecting refugees from a Syria also bombed by Russia, a phenomenon noted in prof. Peter Gatrell’s research. In fact, I observed that Per Wirtén in a chronicle in the evening paper Expressen (March 24, 2022) calls the Swedish debate, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for being an "eco-chamber": anyone who claims that NATO's expansion to the east may be a cause of the Ukraine conflict is relentlessly marginalized as anti-American and pro-Putin. Or, as in my case, it can be even worse: bullied and “canceled” as uncompassionate stupid and evil fellow. I exemplify this elsewhere in a review of a book on political correctness that today creates the neologism of cancel culture as applied now (SvD, April 9, 2022) in the Western boycott of Russian culture, to be added to the older neologism of opinion corridor. Not to mention the boycott of (conservative opinion in countries such as Poland and) Hungary as expressed in CNN’s Opinion: Why conservatives gave a big welcome to leader who suppressed Hungary’s democracy. But I can say and repeat: I could never have allowed an invasion of neither Ukraine for the danger of NATO, nor Iraq in 2003 for the danger of its weapons of mass destruction, as I could never have allowed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the estimated supposed costs, and saving of lives of American soldiers.

Postscript – Censorship and reflection

From four among the readers of various versions of this paper I received the following four, plus three and two links listed below, the first three having been produced before the start of the armed conflict on February 24, 2022.

(1) https://youtu.be/h7Qj_bN-LWo (Nov. 24, 2017, 13:31 min.)

(2) https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/ukraine-three-scenarios/ (Jan. 31, 2022, text)

(3) Thomas Dalton’s book Unto Death: Martyrdom, Missions, and the Maturity of the Church (2019).

(4) https://youtu.be/5iEZc36zFYQ (Mar. 16, 2022, 1:22:19 min.)

(5) https://www.thepostil.com/the-military-situation-in-the-ukraine-an-update/

(6) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEIFwLKlq1Q (12:40 min.)

(7) https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/abp-vigano-globalists-have-fomented-war-in-ukraine-to-establish-the-tyranny-of-the-new-world-order/

(8) https://youtu.be/nybnJdYVrDk (SIAF event with Ivan Krastev)

(9) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJFbcKf3xpM (Jean-François Colosimo).

I forward them here for fostering a direct knowledge of the Russian position, since Russian sources like RT (Russia Today) are being censored, such as another controversial link on the subject of “Monsanto and BlackRock are buying up Ukraine”. Not to mention the controversial source (“Zero Hedge”) with news on June 7, 2023 of an article on Journalists are asking Ukrainian soldiers to hide their Nazi patches, NYT admits, which in turn refers to the New York Times’s article of June 5. Maybe also censored will be the link to “Ukrainian officials in the eastern Zaporizhzhia Region are being investigated for allegedly stealing massive amounts of humanitarian aid sent to them” (in August 2022). They may be censored because they (but not yet Wikipedia’s report on Ukrainian corruption mentioned above and later reports) allegedly are the governments’ propaganda and disinformation that does not deserve the right to freedom of speech in the West, while stories like the Ukrainian heroical legendary pilot like the “Ghost of Kyiv” pass through.

Mild authoritative news also pass through, such as about a new doctoral thesis by Denys Gorbach that describes Ukrainian President Zelenskyy not as the national hero and patriot he has been transformed into in recent weeks, but as an epic illustration of history as farce. Professor Jenny Andersson, at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, in an article in Aftonbladet (29 March 2022) with the title “The ghosts must die for Ukraine to live: New thesis describes the country's post-socialist economy - built on the legacies of both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union”, where

“oligarch-created clientelism replaced an earlier dependence on the Soviet state. The so-called social wage, all the benefits in kind such as food, timber or a place in a holiday village that were part of the Soviet system, did not disappear during the period of privatization and steel baths. It remained, but now in the form of direct personalized benefits from either the oligarch or an oligarch-subsidized mayor or union boss. The latter - khoziai - was a kind of lackey in a "criminal-political" structure.”

And, relating to the Gobarch’s thesis she writes that the Majdan revolution in 1989

“looked like a victory for democracy, but instead of democracy and human rights it put the Market first, dragging Eastern Europe into financial capitalism while the West's dependence on raw materials ensured that the Second World would not be the first. The dream of Europe put clothes on the scarecrow of contemporary capitalism.”

It reminds me that what is lacking in my text as well as in Western mass-media is an analysis of the economic forces behind what happened in Ukraine. It is obvious that justification of censorship of “fake news” as well the absence of such economic news and analyses is of the same type that is adduced in dictatorships or so-called authoritarian governments all over the world. Democracies in war do not willingly spread in their mass media information about oligarchs, corruption, statistics on desertions from their armies, or about youths’ declared unwillingness to be conscripted for going to war in defending their own or even less other NATO countries. I myself did see only one Swedish journalist’s mention of corruption involving the Ukrainian president Zelenskyy in an article (SvD, 11/12 March 2022) with the title “Zelenskyj’s skämt blev blodigt allvar i Ukraina” [Zelenskyy’s jokes became bloody serious in Ukraine]. Or a Russian censored report about one senior military officer’s illicit gains whose arrest can be used as a proof of the struggle against corruption. It is a meaningful curiosity to acknowledge what was controversially published in the (by Wikipedia duly classified and implicitly discarded right-wing) magazine The New American on March 21, 2022, prior to the later western canonization of Zelenskyy, on “Ukraine: A Deep State Wonderland”:

Ukraine is a giant playground of corruption for the Deep State and Ukrainian President Zelensky is a leftwing globalist puppet of the Deep State, warns The New American magazine’s Alex Newman in this episode of Behind the Deep State amid the ongoing conflict with Russian strongman Putin. Alex shows the connections between the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, the political dynasties of the United States, and much more. This episode follows last week’s exposing Putin’s connections to the Deep State and how he is following the globalist strategy for World Order outlined by Deep State toady Henry Kissinger.

For the rest I myself can testify that righteous acquaintances have submerged me in hints about the ongoing conflict as examined by Western pundits who support the ongoing main position of the whole Western press, one example being (in pdf-format) “How we got here with Russia: The Kremlin’s worldview”. The title can be misunderstood, since the view is another view. It is a view from Nataliya Bugayova at the Washington’s Institute for the Study of War. It is interesting but important to think about what have become the journalistic buzzwords impartiality and objectivity. The self-righteous acquaintances and supposed friends did not mind that The Institute of the Study of War, with its headquarters in Washington D.C., states on its own site (retrieved on May 18, 2022) that its mission is "We are committed to improving the nation’s ability to execute military operations and respond to emerging threats in order to achieve U.S. strategic objectives." It is this Institute for the Study of War that was unproblematically given as a supposedly objective reference by the earlier mentioned Frederick Kagan, husband of the Institute’s founder Kimberly Kagan, in his “unprejudiced” video-conversation with Jordan Peterson about the Ukraine conflict. The core problem is not the unwillingness and difficulty of being objective, or the falsity and unreliability of the counterparty, but rather the cause of such unwillingness and difficulty, which in the present text will be repeatedly related to the key biblical expression about the beam in the eye.

It is an irreplaceable basic point of journalistic honor not to obtain only further confirmation of what one already thinks and already dominates the cultural climate of the West and Ukraine. For us westerners Bugayova may sound like a Russian name, and in fact it is a part of the tragedy that Russian and Ukrainian languages are brothers as Russia and Ukraine are or have been. But she is introduced as having been “the former chief of staff to Ukrainian Economy Minister Pavel Sheremeta before becoming the first Ukrainian and first woman to be CEO of the Kyiv Post”. What is symptomatically lacking in journalistic impartiality and objectivity, views from e.g. India, China and, of course, Russia itself. But I have observed that as in science there are many Westerners who tend to join the temporary local majority. It does not have to be political correctness or opinion corridor but can also be an easy search for comfort, security and temporary peace, which however transform citizens in amplifiers and loudspeakers for “main views”. I myself have, to nuance conflict, preferred to continually update and process my discomfort in the present text.

Political correctness or opinion corridor has now developed to the point that they appear in Sweden as “phantom debates”, as the country’s tiny size invites it to mirror what happens in “big brother” USA, as noted in a recent political game about the right to abortion (in Swedish: cf. Håkan Boström in Göteborgs Posten, 28 June 2022, “Partierna går på spökjakt I abortfrågan”). Even a professional journalist in one main Swedish newspaper (Sam Sundberg in SvD, March 21, 2022) had to defend a historian postgraduate who had been harassed and "canceled" in Twitter. He had criticized the worrying silencing (cf. cancel culture) of Swedish debaters accused of being Kremlin-friendly, as Ukraine (contrary to Russia in the above mentioned case of Ukraine- and Israel-friendly Swedish Bert Sundström?) revoked the press accreditation of the Danish journalist Matilde Kimer over allegations of having spread Russian propaganda. I myself could have been one of those Swedish debaters because of this present text of mine. I have been criticized by close acquaintances who hypocritically have "distanced themselves" from me in the spirit of the cancel culture that paradoxically characterizes a democracy that first of all depends upon, and is proud of the freedom of expression. Its Internet applies censorship on the Russian rt.com and later even on its mirror swentr.site, and bans Nazi symbols and Holocaust denial while allowing justification of events with the police protecting desecration of the Quran. Cf. examples of the ending of "Swedish friendships” with friends or acquaintances who cancel me for not explicitly "having distanced" myself from, and condemned Putin. This is done instead of keeping a friendly simplified “Socratic dialogue”, now renamed as a disparaging "academic-scholastic" style, if not outright the worst of it all: Russia-friendly attitude, for not insulting Russia and Putin. It reminds the case of divorces and even the splitting of families that was reported in the USA when various members of families aligned for and against Donald Trump, as it was reported in Britain regarding having been for and against Brexit. A general view of the chaotic post-Trump USA-debacle in what concerns freedom of expression and freedom of the press is offered by an unconventional and painfully heavy and long video in which prof. Jordan Peterson interviews the author and journalist Matt Taibbi.

The matter touches me personally because it is related to my doctoral dissertation on Quality-control of Information (1972) and is related to my observation of censorship of talk about religion, as well as to my interest for political correctness or opinion corridor. But I am not alone in observing these phenomena. Some others, like Jacques Baud, write texts (on the military situation in Ukraine) that are dismissed as being just conspiration theories. Others, for instance, the political scientist Sanjib Baruah at the Bard College in New Yok, are not easily dismissed as when he writes in the Indian Express (March 27, 2022) that "the ambivalence of many countries in condemning Russia has made the fault line between Europe and non-Europe visible: a majority of the world population including China and India does not subscribe to the ideas of Pax Americana.

Anyway, the first four links that I announced above and are listed below suggest that what also has been going on is the above mentioned cultural war between East and West. (Please note that YouTube has an option for showing text of video-talk in English translation):

(1) https://youtu.be/h7Qj_bN-LWo (Nov. 24, 2017, 13:31 min.)

(2) https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/ukraine-three-scenarios/ (Jan. 31, 2022, text)

(3) https://youtu.be/5iEZc36zFYQ (Mar. 16, 2022, 1:22:19 min.)

(4) Thomas Dalton’s book Unto Death: Martyrdom, Missions, and the Maturity of the Church (2019).

The second and third links l are self-explanatory but it is the first one of the three videos above that best expresses the cultural civil war between the Russian East and the West that is dominated by north-American and Anglo-Saxon culture. It is a culture to which religion belongs but disappears even in most apparently deep-going analyses like "For Putin the war has biblical proportions" (SvD, Mar 21, 2022). Religion is there reduced to politics in a process that I illustrate elsewhere, in my paper on theology, or it is renamed "metaphysics" and it is associated to a repeatedly mentioned, undefined "conservatism". No mention of conserving what, and what-for. Therefore, even a conservative pundit does not care for theology when he concludes (in Oikos, March 13 2022, and here) that it had been a question of Russian "spirituality" vs. Westerns reason, while a conservative agenda would have been better ground of Russia's development. In this way this most important question is rhetorically buried in apparent erudition and "swept away". This may be the reason why in the first four weeks after Ukraine's invasion I saw in media only a couple of constructive suggestions for a sober diplomatic solution of the conflict (Gunilla von Hall, in SvD, March 25 and April 3, 2022) instead of cheap condemnations if not insults that show that we are the kind compassionate and wise fellows who "distance themselves from and condemn” a criminal dictator. As a “practitioner of Realpolitik” as he is described in Wikipedia, even old Henry Kissinger at age 98/99 expresses signs of constructive attitudes in several positionings on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as in Fareed Zakaria’s interview at CNN (6 Jan/11 July 2022). See also The Washington Post (24 May 2022) on “Kissinger says Ukraine should cede territory to Russia to end war”. Not to forget former USA ambassador to Moscow Jack F. Matlock Jr.’s article in Responsible Statecraft (October 17, 2022) on “Why the US must press for a ceasefire in Ukraine”. Symptomatically, however, the magazine Responsible Statecraft can be promptly and opportunely criticized in Wikipedia (by exponents of partisan views?) for its relation to the Quincy Institute that promotes “non-partisan views of U.S. foreign policy”. Such interviews and attitudes, the more so of Russian politicians, are conspicuously absent in most if not all media reports in the West (and censored in Russia Today but not yet on (its mirrorsite?) Swentr.site as per 18 October 2022), and this has a sad meaning of its own. It does not help that Kissinger’s proposal gets support from Elon Musk’s twitter (3 oktober 2022) who cannot be as easily accused for age dementia, but was masterly countered by former master comedian Zelenskyy (@ZelenskyyUa) in terms of “Which @elonmusk do you like more? One who supports Ukraine” vs “One who supports Russia?” As if it were a question of democratic liking. Cf. Elon Musk’s peace plan for Ukraine draws condemnation from Zelenskyy” (npr.org, 4 oktober 2022).

The fourth link was to the name of Thomas Dalton that I identified as the author of Unto Death: Martyrdom, Missions and the Maturity of the Church that is extremely ambitious and interesting as related to my references to the need of sacrifices up to ultimate Christian martyrdom. But he is confused with the Thomas Dalton of The Jewish Hand in World War Three. Because of the importance of free expression in our Western democracy, as my own mentioning of disinformation and Russian-NATO-Ukrainian dangers of triggering a third world war, I wish to offer such information to my readers. To the extent that this latter Dalton is classified as conspiratorial or even anti-Semite, the problem is partly addressed in my blog entry on conspiracy theories. In my view, they are concocted by authors who are extremely gifted for logical thinking, as also exemplified by earlier mentioned Paul Craig Roberts in foretelling an “American collapse”. Therefore they are prone to design in their minds fact-nets or so-called Leibnizian inquiring systems.

The other three links seem to having been sometimes classified in social media as “conspiratorial” and can be expected to be erased by net police sometimes after my verification of their existence on April 21, 2022:

(5) https://www.thepostil.com/the-military-situation-in-the-ukraine-an-update/

(6) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEIFwLKlq1Q (12:40 min.)

(7) https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/abp-vigano-globalists-have-fomented-war-in-ukraine-to-establish-the-tyranny-of-the-new-world-order/

The most powerful and documented besides the interesting but (in the West) strongly controversial 6, seem to be link 5, and especially 7 that is also important because it arises from an authoritative if yet controversial archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, reported to have been Apostolic Nuncio (ambassador of the Holy See) to the United States in a period between 2011 and 2016. The links remind us again of the fact that the first victim of war is truth, i.e. (true) information, and that it should also remind us that living in the West also means that we have been and are submerged in its main social media or social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter, and since earlier times in their web of international news agencies and their historical controversies starting, say, with Reuters, acquired in 2008 by Thomson Corporation. Because of this I limit myself to tell that I think that I disposed of the problem of evaluating their message because I consider it included in my treatment of conspiracy theories in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The next link, the almost one and half hour video

(8) https://youtu.be/nybnJdYVrDk (SIAF event with Ivan Krastev)

is rhetorically also most powerful, especially because it is not explicitly conspiratorial but rather embraces or includes the Ukraine conflict as a part, item, or element of a more inclusive whole. It is symptomatic that the public service Swedish television, contrary to e.g. Deutsche Welle does not interview neither such experienced political scientists nor controversial commentators such as in the above link (6), while sentimentally interviewing numerous suffering Ukrainian civilians, preferably children and women. The video requires an extremely attentive concentration to a very hurried speech that is based on a multitude of political schools and concepts or ambiguous terms (e.g.liberalism). In the mind of the listener it all get necessarily reduced to a complex logical network. I have already criticized this elsewhere and my criticism is applicable here with emphasis of lack of ethical-theological dimension beyond the framework of liberalism and historical Russian imperialism. I have not seen some explicit coupling to Russian culture, literature or philosophy that explain the rise of authoritarianism, its relation of unacknowledged “types of democracy”, and the perception of western decadence. The task of understanding Krastev, however, can be facilitated by recurring to his basic positioning taken after the explosion of the conflict in the newspaper article “We are all living in Vladimir Putin’s world now” (New York Times, Feb 27 2022). It suffers of the already indicated shortcomings of projection of historical and contingencies upon a person, “Putin” and Russian imperialism, as analog of “Hitler” and German Nazism. All this while knowing practically nothing about Russian society and its internal politics, and what internal problems Putin must handle, and what would have happened if another politician had been in Putin’s position as it could happen when his position was weakened as after the later incident with the Wagner group in mid-June 2023. I am prone to relate the Bulgarian Krastev’s mental framework to my own family’s history and painful personal experience of what the Soviet system has meant for Bulgaria. Especially when the whole political question is dissociated from an analysis of the crisis of democratic thought and from theological considerations as illustrated in the work of the already mentioned Tage Lindbom. A deeper understanding of the complexities of the whole issue can also be enabled by and understanding of the work of the historian Tony Judt whose name appears in the context of Krastev.

A complex display of the complete misunderstanding if not ignorance of Russian culture's relation to philosophy, theology and Christianity is found in the treatment of the “In Russia history does not belong to the past”, paradoxically implying that in the West it does so, together with old values that are irrelevant and forgotten. It was the title of an bulky newspaper article (SvD, March 27, 2022) with the subtitle "Russia is a country rather obsessed with reflecting on its history - and reinterpreting it if necessary". It is a review by the writer and translator Maxim Gregoriev of a couple of books by the professor of "Slavic languages with a literary focus" Per Arne Bodin who is said to be "focused on Russian modernism (especially Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak) and its relationship to the Christian and above all to the Orthodox-Christian tradition as influence, polemics, intertext and poetics”. Gregoriev starts asking himself the startling question of "why there are so many great Russian writers and visual artists, but in principle not a single significant philosopher or thinker". He reveals that he does not know e.g. the philosophical import of the "writer" Dostoevsky (1,6 million Google hits for "Dostoevsky+philosophy"), and of professional philosophers such as Vladimir Solovyov, and Nikolai Berdyaev. Swedish readers have an opportunity to try to understand Dostoevsky and the Russian Christian mindset, even beyond heroic attempts in the USA such as Understanding Dostoyevsky Courtesy of Woody Allen. They can read theologian and psychotherapist prof. Owe Wikstrom’s Långsamhetens Lov [The grace of slowness, here in German, Italian, and Spanish] about the “sixth evangelist” Dostoevsky, in the book’s sixth chapter “Saint Petersburg in March” (pp. 148-175). Our text is already too long.

It is tragically ironical that Gregoriev does not comment, probably because the does not know, Solovyov’s for our context most relevant doctoral thesis on the Crisis of Western Philosophy that is commented by Alain Besançon in the earlier mentioned The Falsification of the Good. It is preceded by a historical outline of Russian thought in the eyes of LeoTolstoy, followed by a whole chapter (chap. 4) on war (!) where, however, Besançon misses one main point of my own text, the meaning of the death of Christ on the cross, of sacrifice (cf. René Girard), and of Christian martyrdom. Which is obvious in the secularized West and in Sweden, often considered the most secularized country of the world. The book can be seen as an introduction for understanding and justifying Russian culture’s suspicion and fear of the West and its decadence. Gregoriev writes while odd misunderstood conspirational insights if yet with weird anti-Semitic remarks would find their way on the Internet, such as Paul Craig Roberts’ Western Civilization is in its Final Years. And, certainly, neither Gregoriev nor anybody else around cares to know something, for instance, about traditions like about Silouan the Athonite, celebrated in e.g. Arvo Pärt’s music “Silouan’s Song” (in The Deum. Ecm Records). Who cares about Christianism’s relation to war? Therefore it is not surprising that Gregoriev answers his own question by quoting Bodin and completing his own thought with (my trans.):

"Orthodox theology disapproves of the West's attempts to formulate logical proofs of God." In other words, the critique of reason (and thus the critique of the West, which is seen as the abode of utilitarianism and spiritual poverty) is enshrined in the entire long Russian cultural tradition where unity is more important than the individual, the whole more desirable than integrity. Perhaps that is why both Nietzsche and the so-called postmodern thinking, that is, the whole Enlightenment-critical dismantling of the free "subject" as ideal and notion, immediately found such a favorable foundation in the country. Yes, the Russian thinker seemed to exclaim, they finally get over there, everything is just a matter of power.

In my opinion this is an obscure concoction starting with the misunderstanding of the criticism of the abuse of logic and mathematics equated to "reason", an abuse that I myself have tried to clarify and a criticism that I support in two of my texts (here and here). It also shows a complete confusion of the theological meaning of individual free subject's integrity and his relation to the etymological ground of religion (instead of power) as "connecting" the individual subject to a unity and whole of humanity. Similar concoctions recur in the Swedish press, in a Sweden that is extremely secularized and technical, with weak philosophical interests. Another example of unconscious "political theology" is found in an article by the historian Johannes Heuman (SvD, April 7, 2022) referring to the French historian Pierre Rosanvallon where he sees the causes of the invasion as simply based on "feelings" such as revived Russian imperialism and strong nostalgia for "the power ambitions of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, all set against the democratic values". Also exemplified in a newspaper article by Björn Linnell (SvD, April 5, 2022) claiming that "the best description of Russia was written in 1839 by Astolphe de Custine, in La Russie en 1839". That is: an aristocrat coming from the well-intentioned French revolution's violence and terror in the name of democracy, and from a West that would engender two world wars, laments the Russian aristocracy's violence and lack of respect for human life while ignoring e.g. Dostoevsky's analysis of the roots of communism. Wikipedia's sources report on Custine suggesting "that he is one of the originators of a putative West European Russophobia" seems to be very appropriate for explaining the sources of the present attitude of the Western press to Russia and the conflict in Ukraine. It is, however, not appropriate for explaining the downfall of the quality of western press as exemplified by the Swedish public radio’s conversation between its foreign correspondents on August 28, 2022, “Therefore, Putin wants to crush Ukraine’s independence” [Därför vill Putin krossa Ukrainas självständighet]. In 40 minutes nothing is discussed about the originally main adduced cause of the war, the role of the intended association with the NATO. It can only be matched by the total lack of otherwise feministic empathy in CNN evaluation of the murder of Dugin’s daughter: “Darya Dugina’s death provides a glimpse into Russia’s vast disinformation machine – and the influential women fronting it”. In the meantime, the same network reports worries (here) that “With Roe overturned, LGBTQ activists worry same-sex marriage is next”. In the same meantime, westerns scientific press is busy in reporting (Science, 9 August 2022) “Rule change for reporting sexual misconduct could hurt grad students and others”. All this while Russia-Today’s report of “Evidence of Ukrainian shelling of Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant provided to UN” is censored in the West (not anymore available, except for copy here up to at least 29 August 2022) and still less reported by western press. The western press covers a wide range of worries that do not seem to allow deeper analyses.

We in the West are very eager to refer to Russian “imperialism” while forgetting or downplaying Western colonialism and lately the British Empire that by 1913 had an estimated sway over 23 percent of the world population at the time. Today it would correspond to about 1800 million people. But in the West, and in Sweden in particular, people can get very excited when someone as the Swedish professor of Slavic languages, Bengt Jangfeldt offers a public lecture on Ideologies in our times (part 3 “After the invasion”) as a background of Russian Expansionism-Pan-Slavism-Slavophilia-Eurasianism (Nikolay Danilevsky, followed by A. Dugin mentioned earlier in the present text). He mentions the political role historically assigned by Russian intellectuals to the Orthodox Church but gives no reference to any biblical or Orthodox theological guidelines for military action as exemplified in the present text. The effect of Jangfeldt’s erudite lecture on a world ignored in the West, recalls in my mind the proverb In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

The ninth link, a more than half hour video is possibly even deeper than the previous one.

(9) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJFbcKf3xpM

It is another kind of sterile but extremely deep erudition grounded in one of the books in French, The Crucifixion of Ukraine: A thousand years of religious wars in Europe, and personal presentation (in 15 languages including Russian, Spanish and German but not in English, as per November 2022) of the French orthodox theologian Jean-François Colosimo, related to St. Sergius Institute. A taste of his message is found in the presentation of his book (in French) Blindness - Religions, wars, civilizations:

This neither polemical nor irenic sum, rich in reminders and explanations, events and portraits, discoveries and revelations, but also lines of humor, where cults and cultures, false beliefs and real geopolitics, the intellectuals of the Old Continent and the scholars of the New World, without forgetting the Bible of the Jews and the Gospel of the Christians, shed light on the secret genealogy of nihilism. Of the devil and his possessed. Essayist, Jean-François Colosimo has devoted all of his research to the contemporary metamorphoses of God.

In the video interview (in French) with the title Ukraine is a civilizational frontier, related to the launching of his first mentioned book (The crucifixtion of Ukraine) Colosim puts the whole question in a historical and political perspective with rich references in theological name-dropping but with no theological content in terms of references to sacred books or such. Otherwise one can find in the course of the interview rare but valuable references to the Russian accusation of Ukrainian Nazism, to the process of secularization connected to the confounding of religion and nation, and to the relation to Catholicism and popes that we have not found the other way round. Dostoevsky as representative of Russian philosophical literature, however, is disposed of by only mentioning his name in a few seconds.

My evaluation is that the reader and listener is blinded by Colosimo’s brilliant erudition but that his own conception is a sad example of the reduction of theology to politics. It is exemplified by his superficial mention in a couple of minutes, but complete neglect of analysis of the USA in western history, culture, wars and military influence in NATO. In this sense he is an example of what I, in the context of Information and Theology, criticize Jordan Peterson for, the flight from pastoral basics and the wishful reduction of religion and theology to politics and history.

Self-criticism

Western man forgets that he as an observer can be and is observed by others who may lecture about him and Western colonialism. Carl Jung is one of the few westerners who looked to the West also from the East. Beyond age-old Christianism there are many ad-hoc created “isms”, an ending that, by the way, was symptomatically observed and properly commented by Carl Jung in his Collected Works (CW8 §405, 427; CW9i §617; CW10 §103, 469; CW11 §772, CW16 §3). I choose from CW19 §469 (my italics):

Our fearsome gods have only changed their names: they now rhyme with -ism. Or has anyone the nerve to claim that the World War or Bolshevism was an ingenious invention? Just as outwardly we live in a world where a whole continent may be submerged at any moment, or pole be shifted, or a new pestilence break out, so inwardly we live in a world where at any moment something similar may occur, albeit in the form of an idea, but no less dangerous and untrustworthy for that. Failure to adapt to this inner world is a negligence entailing just as serious consequences as ignorance and ineptitude in the outer world. It is after all only a tiny fraction of humanity, living mainly on that thickly populated peninsula of Asia which just out into the Atlantic Ocean, and calling themselves “cultured” who, because they lack all contact with nature, have hit upon the idea that religion is a peculiar kind of mental disturbance of undiscoverable purport. Viewed from a safe distance, say from central Africa or Tibet it would certainly look as if this fraction had projected its own unconscious mental derangements upon nations still possessed of healthy instincts.

This great gap between late Western and Eastern thought and politics is also reason for the theological derailment of the Great Replacement that Wikipedia qualifies as white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory. It claims that the ethnic French population – as well as white European populations at large is being demographically and culturally replaced by non-European people through mass migration, demographic growth and a European drop in the birth rate. To uncover this derailment and about what all this is about, it should be enough to realize the meaning of what happened in most secular Sweden in the year of greatest arrival of migrants in the year 2015, many of them Muslims. I noted that the number of "warmly welcomed" unaccompanied migrant children as reported by the press, almost 40.000, was about the same as the number of abortions in the country. Intelligenti pauca (few words suffice for him who understands - Latin). In the USA, The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) according to Wikipedia reported more than 600.000 abortions in the year 2015. So much for Western sentimentality about the plight of "beloved women and children" in war, contrasted to peacetime. And westerners will hear and see daily sentimental reports on the above mentioned civilian victims, preferably in terms of women, children and elders in the asymmetrical warfare in Ukraine, related to the USA president Biden calling Putin "a butcher" after meeting Ukrainian refugees in Poland (CNN edition March 26, 2022).

Once again, in this way this most important philosophical and theological question is rhetorically buried in apparent erudition and "swept away" reminding of the title of the book The Betrayal of the Intellectuals. In our case it is rather a betrayal of reason, or rather of the intellect, as accusations have been directed against me for writing in "academic-scholarly style" hiding behind talk about religion, instead of with disgust distancing myself publicly from "mad Putin". Lack of religious faith in the general population coupled to the intellectuals' theological lack of awareness is what leads people in affluent countries to associate and often replace the concept of evil by madness and irrationality of political leaders' supposed senile dementia (Elsa Westerstad in SvD March 8, 2022). A similar but in my view treacherously mild analog interpretation of Putin’s supposed mental derangement is advanced by Fiona Hill, “intelligence analyst” and former official at the USA National Security Council, and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, who writes a partly apparently impartial piece of analysis of the Ukraina-conflict when she is reported writing [my italics] “Putin is increasingly operating emotionally and likely to use all weapons at his disposal, including nuclear ones”.

The press, however, does not seem to ask for or expect a pronouncement from the very same Fiona Hill about Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggestion on November 5, 2023, that is would be “an option” for Israel to use nuclear weapons (here and here) in the 2023 Israel-Gaza war. This being at the same time an admission that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, recalling the scandal of Mordechai Vanuno. It is a scandal that may be seen as a reason for USA’s “unconditional” support of Israel, not the least in the later Israel-Hamas war. Israel is in fact seen as “the one only democracy in the Mid-East”, as a safe base for nuclear weapons, a base that is not at all publicized, as the above-mentioned bases in Turkey and Italy were not publicized in the context of USA’s acceptance of its removal of American nuclear missiles from Turkey and Italy that solved the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It is a 2000 years' withdrawal in the development of Western civilization, back to the Greek philosophy's view of evil as sheer lack of knowledge, whatever that is or should be. In such a case it should be lack of knowledge of the Christian concept of sin that would relate back to arduous interpretations of the above quotes from the forgotten Bible. It is easier to refer to “mad Russia”, as done in Swedish mass media, regarding the risk of it reacting to perceived extreme danger by means of nuclear weapons, as rats going to blind attack when persecuted in a corner of a room. Demonization or medical incrimination of humans by means of analogy to rats.

After all this, I felt quite exhausted and distressed because of the intuition of witnessing an oncoming further tragedy following the path to death of the human intellect, like a possible third world war. A war with nuclear weapons would be the ultimate abuse, rape of nature intuited by a mislead, lost, secular philosophy which legitimizes technoscience and sees atomic nature as a “standing reserve” (cf. German Gestell) ending in a misconceived quantum physics embodied in nuclear weapons and war that would overshadow all the problems of climate and apocalyptic global warming. The whole supposedly Christian world that still reads the Bible keeps repeating: “Do not kill, yes yes but…”, “Love thy enemy as yourself, yes yes, but” and “The beam in my eye, yes yes but…”. And further: “But the enemy is evil, and I must take care and protect my family or at least myself and my children…”, and the like. In doing so these good Christians are relying upon their own reason in the interpretation of the Bible and upon their conscience, perhaps without reflecting that all good faithful Nazis also did so, following their conscience. They forget or ignore what Wikipedia itself recalls, that “The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of socialism, as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free-market capitalism. In doing so they ignore or do not want to know what Joseph Ratzinger, later pope Benedict XVI, wrote about Conscience and Truth, or the dangers in listening to only one own’s conscience.

It is distressing to perceive the decline of western philosophy that is masked in its blinding divergent views and diversity, leading to what many identify as postphenomenology, postmodernism, transhumanism, posthumanism and post-trans-nowhere, trends that somehow also appeared in Russia with e.g. the philosophy of Nikolai Fyodorov (1829-1903) but apparently stopped there before the revolution. It all recalls the famous citation:

The renowned British philosopher A.N Whitehead once commented on Plato’s thought: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them”.

This decline can be seen as exemplified in the push for scientism, logicism, aesthetics or aestheticism in business renewal, leading to barely perceived absurdities in science, as in the future of artificial intelligence as society’s digitalization or “technological singularity”. Or the assumed brilliant future of ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) that “was tricked to endorse the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine”. Or it can be seen in the complete absence of western self-criticism (observed by Tage Lindbom's in the mentioned The Myth of Democracy, and in J.U. Cavalcanti Netto's Democracia, um Mito, or Emily Finley’s The Ideology of Democratism, and exemplified in the repeated condemnation of Russian politics such as in Stig Fredrikson's book Sista Ordet (The Last Word) whose interpretation of Russian history has been already questioned. The latter’s overbearing attitude leads to erudite errand wanderings such as the comments about the political philosophies associated with the earlier mentioned A. Dugin, who is “regularly dismissed in the West as a Putinist and even as a fascist” as developed in an essay on Revising the Fourth Political Theory. It is an erudite essay whose erudition in practice questions the utility of the Bible or Christianity for simple educated citizens. A parenthesis on Blaise Pascal’s observation in 1670 (p. 161, §251/451, Pensées, Nelson Éditeurs/Éd. Lutetia, 1955) on the intelligibility of the Christian religion that I already made in the concluding reflections of an essay on Information and theology:

"Une religion purement intellectuelle serait plus proportionnée aux habiles; mais elle ne servirait pas au peuple. La seule religionchrètienne est proportionnée à tous..." – ["A purely intellectual religion would be more adequate to the adepts; but it would not serve the people. Only the Christian religion is adequate to all ..."].

Pascal understood that neither the people nor erudite philosophers would be able today to understand or approve and apply e.g. Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). In Die Philosophie der Freiheit, 2nd edition, 1918, i.e. “The Philosophy of Freedom”, translated as Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, pp. 146, 155f.) Steiner suggests how to avoid war and achieve peace upon the basis of one’s own “conscience” (pp. 146, 164). Steiner’s extraordinarily gifted personality allowed his creating Anthroposophy as a new pseudo-Christian “religion” by means of an appropriation of the concept of Spirit. It is the same concept that later would be appropriated by Martin Heidegger’s “theology without God”, and eventually lead to Jacques Derrida’s mind-blowing book Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Much misunderstanding about Christian conscience would lead to the moral tragedy of the second world war that Steiner, contrary to Carl Jung, educated in the same culture, would not live long enough to see and regret.

Much of the western erudite philosophical errand wander, which is not democratically available to common educated people, leads also away from real problems present problems like the Ukraine-conflict over to e.g. whether computers can have consciousness and what consciousness is, or its relation to conscience. This is the why and how of phenomena like business hoaxes associated to WeWork (here and here), Theranos, and Bernard Madoff. Hoaxes have now also reached art in the form of mind-blowing non-translatable NFT, “Non-fungible token”. Hoaxes in geopolitics, however are more serious and are both a cause and effect of wars and of “disinformation”. The “champions of democracy” may then only hope that NATO now does not work like a Ponzi scheme on trust-currency, ending in “America first”, the more so if more countries, like Finland and Sweden, also join NATO. European countries can be hoped to better try to help each other and themselves relieving USA's NATO-responsibility while maintaining its hegemony there in its quality of superpower. Such a supposedly superior western philosophy as in business, science, technology, politics and art, which is being misunderstood as a philosophical and rational supremacy of the West over Russia and the East, leading to unending fake debates that consist of only logical “fact nets”, may still confirm the presently practiced theology without God (cf. here), especially the god Democracy.

The god Democracy is in turn undermined by the “industrialized” production of fake news and disinformation that I survey in the epilog of my essay on Computerization, indicating that it can be produced in Russia but the more so in the West and possibly exemplified in the commercialization of pro-Ukrainian products like Time to Rethink the Battle of Perceptions over Ukraine published by Percepto International a firm that also is said to offer governments and businesses all over the world the capability of influencing people’s “perceptions” for manipulation of democratic elections.

A note about what happens within the range of godly western democracies: conspiracy theories or conspiracies that for years can dominate a field of sport are exemplified by the historic scandal that about controversies on bribery, doping, defamation involving the UCI - International Cycling Union, and related to the names of Lance Armstrong, Hein Verbruggen, and Frankie Andreu. They also resulted in several documentaries (here, and here). My point is that if such a well-documented conspiracies and disinformation involving people and institutions for so many years can take place in “fully” democratic countries, in the “simple” context of cycling, what cannot be expected in the geopolitical and economic context involving several nations of the world? Disinformation in the USA-invasion of Iraq may then be an extremely simple example. And, in fact, on August 4, 2022, Amnesty International dared to publish the extremely controversial report: Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians. It immediately sparked furor and a resignation, and was reported to “divide the rights group”.

In fact, on April 27, 2023, The New York Times has an article by Charlie Savage with the title: Unreleased Report Finds Faults in Amnesty International’s Criticism of Ukraine, completed with the additional sub-title “The rights group commissioned an independent review of its August accusation that Ukrainian forces illegally put civilians in harm’s way”. The text initiates with stating the following, which indicates the political turmoil around the matter, on what is said or cannot be said for being disinformation, according to presumed democracy:

WASHINGTON — Amnesty International’s board has sat for months on a report critical of the group after it accused Ukrainian forces of illegally endangering civilians while fighting Russia, according to documents and a person familiar with the matter.

The 18-page report, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, underscores the complexity of applying international law to aspects of the conflict in Ukraine — and the continuing sensitivity of a matter that prompted a fierce and swift backlash to the human rights group.

In a lengthy statement on Aug. 4, Amnesty International accused Ukrainian forces of a pattern of illegally putting “civilians in harm’s way” by housing soldiers nearby and launching attacks from populated areas. Russia, which has shelled civilian buildings and killed many civilians, portrayed the finding as vindication, but it otherwise incited outrage. [And so on.]

Nobody dares to establish any possible relation to details of the unmentioned tactics in the Resistance Operating Concept (ROC) as reported by CNN (August 27, 2022) How Ukraine is using resistance warfare developed by the US to fight back against Russia. Because of the risk for disinformation war leading to western censorship of such news, as eastern censorship is said to censor opposing news in Russia, the Amnesty’s report is reproduced here in slightly adapted layout for economy of space (and it can be illustratively compared with another report, among a few, Unmasking War Propaganda against Russian Aggression):

Ukraine: Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians

- Military bases set up in residential areas including schools and hospitals.
- Attacks launched from populated civilian areas.
- Such violations in no way justify Russia’s indiscriminate attacks, which have killed and injured countless civilians.

Ukrainian forces have put civilians in harm’s way by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals, as they repelled the Russian invasion that began in February, Amnesty International said today. Such tactics violate international humanitarian law and endanger civilians, as they turn civilian objects into military targets. The ensuing Russian strikes in populated areas have killed civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure. “We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General. “Being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law.”

Not every Russian attack documented by Amnesty International followed this pattern, however. In certain other locations in which Amnesty International concluded that Russia had committed war crimes, including in some areas of the city of Kharkiv, the organization did not find evidence of Ukrainian forces located in the civilian areas unlawfully targeted by the Russian military. Between April and July, Amnesty International researchers spent several weeks investigating Russian strikes in the Kharkiv, Donbas and Mykolaiv regions. The organization inspected strike sites; interviewed survivors, witnesses and relatives of victims of attacks; and carried out remote-sensing and weapons analysis. Throughout these investigations, researchers found evidence of Ukrainian forces launching strikes from within populated residential areas as well as basing themselves in civilian buildings in 19 towns and villages in the regions. The organization’s Crisis Evidence Lab has analyzed satellite imagery to further corroborate some of these incidents. Most residential areas where soldiers located themselves were kilometers away from front lines. Viable alternatives were available that would not endanger civilians – such as military bases or densely wooded areas nearby, or other structures further away from residential areas. In the cases it documented, Amnesty International is not aware that the Ukrainian military who located themselves in civilian structures in residential areas asked or assisted civilians to evacuate nearby buildings – a failure to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians.

Launching strikes from populated civilian areas

Survivors and witnesses of Russian strikes in the Donbas, Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions told Amnesty International researchers that the Ukrainian military had been operating near their homes around the time of the strikes, exposing the areas to retaliatory fire from Russian forces. Amnesty International researchers witnessed such conduct in numerous locations. International humanitarian law requires all parties to a conflict to avoid locating, to the maximum extent feasible, military objectives within or near densely populated areas. Other obligations to protect civilians from the effects of attacks include removing civilians from the vicinity of military objectives and giving effective warning of attacks that may affect the civilian population. The mother of a 50-year-old man killed in a rocket attack on 10 June in a village south of Mykolaiv told Amnesty International: “The military were staying in a house next to our home and my son often took food to the soldiers. I begged him several times to stay away from there because I was afraid for his safety. That afternoon, when the strike happened, my son was in the courtyard of our home and I was in the house. He was killed on the spot. His body was ripped to shreds. Our home was partially destroyed.” Amnesty International researchers found military equipment and uniforms at the house next door. Mykola, who lives in a tower block in a neighbourhood of Lysychansk (Donbas) that was repeatedly struck by Russian attacks which killed at least one older man, told Amnesty International: “I don’t understand why our military is firing from the cities and not from the field.” Another resident, a 50-year-old man, said: “There is definitely military activity in the neighbourhood. When there is outgoing fire, we hear incoming fire afterwards.” Amnesty International researchers witnessed soldiers using a residential building some 20 metres from the entrance of the underground shelter used by the residents where the older man was killed.

In one town in Donbas on 6 May, Russian forces used widely banned and inherently indiscriminate cluster munitions over a neighbourhood of mostly single or two-storey homes where Ukrainian forces were operating artillery. Shrapnel damaged the walls of the house where Anna, 70, lives with her son and 95-year-old mother. Anna said: “Shrapnel flew through the doors. I was inside. The Ukrainian artillery was near my field… The soldiers were behind the field, behind the house… I saw them coming in and out… since the war started… My mother is… paralyzed, so I couldn’t flee.” In early July, a farm worker was injured when Russian forces struck an agricultural warehouse in the Mykolaiv area. Hours after the strike, Amnesty International researchers witnessed the presence of Ukrainian military personnel and vehicles in the grain storage area, and witnesses confirmed that the military had been using the warehouse, located across the road from a farm where civilians are living and working.

While Amnesty International researchers were examining damage to residential and adjacent public buildings in Kharkiv and in villages in Donbas and east of Mykolaiv, they heard outgoing fire from Ukrainian military positions nearby. In Bakhmut, several residents told Amnesty International that the Ukrainian military had been using a building barely 20 metres across the street from a residential high-rise building. On 18 May, a Russian missile struck the front of the building, partly destroying five apartments and damaging nearby buildings. Kateryna, a resident who survived the strike, said: “I didn’t understand what happened. [There were] broken windows and a lot of dust in my home… I stayed here because my mother didn’t want to leave. She has health problems.” Three residents told Amnesty International that before the strike, Ukrainian forces had been using a building across the street from the bombed building, and that two military trucks were parked in front of another house that was damaged when the missile hit. Amnesty International researchers found signs of military presence in and outside the building, including sandbags and black plastic sheeting covering the windows, as well as new US-made trauma first aid equipment. “We have no say in what the military does, but we pay the price,” a resident whose home was also damaged in the strike told Amnesty International.

Military bases in hospitals

Amnesty International researchers witnessed Ukrainian forces using hospitals as de facto military bases in five locations. In two towns, dozens of soldiers were resting, milling about, and eating meals in hospitals. In another town, soldiers were firing from near the hospital. A Russian air strike on 28 April injured two employees at a medical laboratory in a suburb of Kharkiv after Ukrainian forces had set up a base in the compound. Using hospitals for military purposes is a clear violation of international humanitarian law.

Military bases in schools

The Ukrainian military has routinely set up bases in schools in towns and villages in Donbas and in the Mykolaiv area. Schools have been temporarily closed to students since the conflict began, but in most cases the buildings were located close to populated civilian neighbourhoods. At 22 out of 29 schools visited, Amnesty International researchers either found soldiers using the premises or found evidence of current or prior military activity – including the presence of military fatigues, discarded munitions, army ration packets and military vehicles. Russian forces struck many of the schools used by Ukrainian forces. In at least three towns, after Russian bombardment of the schools, Ukrainian soldiers moved to other schools nearby, putting the surrounding neighbourhoods at risk of similar attacks. In a town east of Odesa, Amnesty International witnessed a broad pattern of Ukrainian soldiers using civilian areas for lodging and as staging areas, including basing armoured vehicles under trees in purely residential neighbourhoods, and using two schools located in densely populated residential areas. Russian strikes near the schools killed and injured several civilians between April and late June – including a child and an older woman killed in a rocket attack on their home on 28 June. In Bakhmut, Ukrainian forces were using a university building as a base when a Russian strike hit on 21 May, reportedly killing seven soldiers. The university is adjacent to a high-rise residential building which was damaged in the strike, alongside other civilian homes roughly 50 metres away. Amnesty International researchers found the remains of a military vehicle in the courtyard of the bombed university building.

International humanitarian law does not specifically ban parties to a conflict from basing themselves in schools that are not in session. However, militaries have an obligation to avoid using schools that are near houses or apartment buildings full of civilians, putting these lives at risk, unless there is a compelling military need. If they do so, they should warn civilians and, if necessary, help them evacuate. This did not appear to have happened in the cases examined by Amnesty International. Armed conflicts seriously hamper children’s right to education, and military use of schools can result in destruction that further deprives children of this right once the war ends. Ukraine is one of 114 countries that have endorsed the Safe Schools Declaration, an agreement to protect education amid armed conflict, which allows parties to make use of abandoned or evacuated schools only where there is no viable alternative.

Indiscriminate attacks by Russian forces

Many of the Russian strikes that Amnesty International documented in recent months were carried out with inherently indiscriminate weapons, including internationally banned cluster munitions, or with other explosive weapons with wide area effects. Others used guided weapons with varying levels of accuracy; in some cases, the weapons were precise enough to target specific objects. The Ukrainian military’s practice of locating military objectives within populated areas does not in any way justify indiscriminate Russian attacks. All parties to a conflict must at all times distinguish between military objectives and civilian objects and take all feasible precautions, including in choice of weapons, to minimize civilian harm. Indiscriminate attacks which kill or injure civilians or damage civilian objects are war crimes. “The Ukrainian government should immediately ensure that it locates its forces away from populated areas, or should evacuate civilians from areas where the military is operating. Militaries should never use hospitals to engage in warfare, and should only use schools or civilian homes as a last resort when there are no viable alternatives,” said Agnès Callamard. Amnesty International contacted the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence with the findings of the research on 29 July 2022. At the time of publication, they had not yet responded.

No further comment, beyond the earlier above reference to residential apartments and arms to civilians. But most importantly: what about Amnesty itself as related to the reactions to the report? The answer, unfortunately available directly only to those who understand Swedish, is implied by what Thomas Hammarberg, the former Secretary-General of Amnesty International 1980–1986, and later Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights 2006–2012 had to say in an interview at the Swedish public radio in March 2023. The sympathetic and highly respected Swedish diplomat and human rights defender, during three quarters of an hour leaves it clear what was mentioned above. Namely, that in a straight secular perspective, “sacred” human rights are based on the god of western Democracy, and are not accompanied by likewise sacred and spelled human obligations. It is the same god that motivates the problems of Liberation Theology that goes astray into Marxist thought, political correctness and woke , as well as the appearance of the already mentioned books with analyses of the “myth of democracy”. When questioned about the above Amnesty report Hammarberg answers that its publication was not a wise decision. As I understood, it was not wise because human rights should be related to particular persons and not collective bodies. A reflection is that perhaps this is the reason why western opinion has personalized Russia as a psychological projection into Vladimir Putin, the president of the Russian Federation, in the arrest warrant issued on 17 March 2023 by the ICC – the International Criminal Court. No further comments should be necessary after reading why the USA in not a state party of the ICC, and remembering, as mentioned earlier, that former USA president George W. Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair were accused for crimes against humanity. The case of Tony Blair resulted also in the satirical drama The Trial of Tony Blair recounting war crimes proceedings brought against him by the ICC. Not to mention the RT’s report in April 2023 on South Africa position (not publicized in the West and censored for the site www.rt.com) about ICC’s arrest warrant, as member of BRICS.

Maybe this is the place for relating the above mentioned that “in a straight secular perspective, “sacred” human rights are based on the god of western Democracy, and are not accompanied by likewise sacred and spelled human obligations” to the unexplored controversiality of the Nobel Peace Prize 2023 to the Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi. It is a controversiality that in turn should be the general issue of criticism of the Nobel Peace Prize. Her Nobel Prize lecture was focused on human rights or in her own words: “The realization of democracy is contingent upon the realization of human rights” that in turn are vindicated by the Women, Life, Freedom movement, named after a slogan that is seen as "challenging the violent patriarchal, deadly and authoritarian ruling ideology". Or “The slogan expresses the idea that women’s rights are essential for life and liberty, and that women should have the freedom to choose their own way of dressing, living, and participating in society”. Central keywords recurring in the Mohammadi’s lecture are found to be Democracy, Freedom, Equality and Human Rights (and Woman). One important item of the criticism of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), however, an item that is central to our present issue of the conflict in Ukraine, is the absence of mention to the Right to Refuse to Kill. The reason for its absence is central to the whole section of Wikipedia’s article on the UDHR that is devoted to its criticism, namely:

[T]he Declaration was "a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition" that could not be implemented by Muslims without conflict with sharīʿa law.

[M]ember states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which represents most of the Muslim world,officially resolved to support the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam,an alternative document that says people have "freedom and right to a dignified life in accordance with the Islamic Shari'ah".

Muslims broadly agree with the Declaration's universalist premise, which is shared by Islam, but differ on specific contents, which many find "insensitive to particular Muslim cultural values, especially when it comes to speaking about individual rights in the context of collective and family values in Muslim society". However, he notes that most Muslim scholars, while opposing the inherently secular framework of the document, do respect and acknowledge some of its "foundations". [The scholar] Abdulaziz Sachedina further argues that many Christians similarly criticized the Declaration for allegedly reflecting a secular and liberal bias in opposition to certain religious values.

What needs to be pointed out to those who uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be the highest, or sole, model, of a charter of equality and liberty for all human beings, is that given the Western origin and orientation of this Declaration, the "universality" of the assumptions on which it is based is—at the very least—problematic and subject to questioning. Furthermore, the alleged incompatibility between the concept of human rights and religion in general, or particular religions such as Islam, needs to be examined in an unbiased way.

I think that his says it all, but in the frame of the earlier quote of Plato’s Seventh Letter, I do not hope that this is the case of many readers. What happens, however, is simple in the sense that the western unwillingness or incapacity to incorporate spiritual religious dimensions in their psyche leads them to not only idolize artificial intelligence that is now expanding all over the world, but also to reduce religion to politics, God to Democracy and to its correspondent supposed universal human rights that in other cultures are conceived as dictated by God, or at least by the gods that today are instead associated to the challenging of (cf. above) "the violent patriarchal, deadly and authoritarian ruling ideology”. In the process, the reduction of God to Democracy is mediated by the reduction of God to feminism, or the earlier mentioned ““The slogan expresses the idea that women’s rights are essential for life and liberty, and that women should have the freedom to choose their own way of dressing, living, and participating in society”. This is because there is no understanding of the difference between god and goddess, as between masculinity and femininity, a differentiation that is the core of the discussion of Reason and Gender, and of the ramblings of modern sexuality confounded with love, leading to promiscuity, conflict and civil family wars.

And what about democracy and information? West Churchman, mentioned above, was he right in his struggle for grasping the essence of information and of system and identifying its “enemies” in Politics, Morality, Religion and Aesthetics? I see here that he may have been right regarding politics as I earlier saw regarding mathematics, logic and aesthetics in the process of digitalization of society, which allows us to communicate and think indiscriminately about what happens I Ukraine. The present account indicates that it may have been right to distinguish between morality and religion, but wrong to suggest a separation between them if seen under the label of theology that I consider in another context. And then it may be also wrong to consider theology as an enemy of systems thinking, since it is that particular conception of system that leads to a serious consideration of theology, and Christianism. Because of this I feel distressed in sorrow for not having been able to leave at my department of informatics at my university a tradition of interest for applications of the particular systems thinking, besides and beyond smart applications of so-called conceptual frameworks for the latest technical developments and computer gadgets.

I feel distressed, finally, also because of my incapability of fully assenting to the third petition of Lord's Prayer: "Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven", as well as assenting to the Litany of Humility. That is: of course, it does not matter what I do, think, say or write. This is the ultimate reason for prayer.

Self-criticism and criticizing Russia

A repeated criticism is that my text does not contain criticism of Russia, which symptomatically is equated to “Putin”. Such criticism is common knowledge in the West since its mass media expound it all the time. But people like to hear it again and again, and I suppose that it is because that makes them feel good, at least better than Putin. I identify myself culturally with the West, applying what in my above text was advanced about “the beam in the eye” or (see above) “changing others”, i.e. changing Russia. A friend of mine who has not (yet?) terminated our acquaintance accusing me for not explicitly condemn Russia’s (“Putin’s) behavior keeps repeating that past sins of the western geopolitical block do not wash out Russia’s and the past Soviet Union’s sins. I counter by asking how does he wash his own sins. Up to now he has not answered but I suppose that he may feel that he has no sins to wash out. Or, rather, I think that in fact he is washing them out by identifying himself with the West and condemning Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, as the supposedly Judeo-Christian West often identifies itself with Israel in the reciprocal “invasions” and killings in Palestine vs. Israel. A recurrent strangely recurrent phenomenon in these contexts is that never appears the question of WHY, not even in commentaries in the world press, why is my enemy so much hateful, besides the standard answer: my enemy (contrary to me) is evil. And this may be a basic scapegoat “mechanism” for estrangement and war as also richly suggested by the works of anthropologist René Girard (who eventually converted to Catholicism) with his Violence and the Sacred. In other words: What did I do, that raised so much aggressiveness or hate?

It is not OK to invade, bomb and kill people in other countries, as well in the own country, as many do today all over the world including the western world. This is already discussed in my text, including the related problem of disinformation. In this context it is interesting to note that a couple of my supposed friends terminated the acquaintance because they did not agree with my text, recalling to my mind the recent title of an editorial of the Swedish newspaper Världen Idag (in Swedish, translated into English): Totalitarian attitudes in the population pose a new threat to democracy. They could not change my text because they could not change me, recalling in my mind the above-mentioned wisdom about “changing others”. Ultimately this impotence can be seen as implied in my writing about what our West and Ukraine, not only Russia, could do, i.e. the “beam in our eyes”. And I do not terminate acquaintances with those who do not agree. All this illustrates further the process of disruption of dialog that contributes to enmity and war, and to the rise of hypocrisy and political correctness or opinion corridors. I perceive the disruption of dialog as a calamitous cultural phenomenon in what earlier was a Christian West. It starts with the breakdown of the family accompanied by the rise of feminism (cf. my paper on Reason and Gender), up to the point of showing up in the condemnation (see also here, here, here, here, and here) of the prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán taking up the rotating presidency of the European Union, for a diplomatic visit to Putin in July 2024. It also reminds the polarizing and disrupting effects in families and among friends of opinions about Brexit and Trump in England and in the USA. I think that some critics of mine who condemn what they derogatorily call my “scholasticism” (cf. above) or “academic reasoning” (below) happen to have the “engineering mind” or “social engineering mind” that I recognize as being the mind of my youth, and the mind of my old engineering colleagues, or the mind of majorities in materialist secularized Western countries. I have already addressed it in my essay on Debate as Fact Nets. This mind was identified already more than 2000 years ago in the Bible’s Sirach 38:24 ff. under the title Scholarship and Other Occupations. And now over to my critics.

For the rest instead of criticizing Russia or, as many symptomatically prefer, criticizing “Putin”, I will keep asking myself why (also symptomatically) I have not been requested to present some constructive suggestions for the solution of the Ukraine-conflict, when it is too late to have suggestions for its avoidance. Up to now I have introduced in my text only reference to a couple of such suggestions in mass media (see above), and I have not found reason for commenting them since nobody else has expressed any interest or need for it. Therefore, I will present further suggestions indirectly by hinting at (also symptomatic!) historic examples of what not to do. I do this despite of foreseeing that there will be scanty interest or need for it.

The Swedish public service television showed recently a 2020 British documentary television miniseries Once upon a time in Iraq that especially in its second episode features interviews with Iraqi citizens, American military personnel and journalists. In particular, it depicts the suffering of the population after the invasion of the country on false premises (as above, for the invasion of Kuwait?) from 2003 to 2011, especially the later reflections and account of lieutenant colonel Nathan Sassaman, who served in Iraq in 2003-2004 as commander of the Fourth Infantry Division. In this context the Wikipedia account of the documentary mentions the sensational fact that the American version of this documentary omitted a couple of interviews including the sensitive one with Sassaman. It may not have been convenient to show to the American public. More about him and the Iraq invasion can be found in Military Review (Professional Journal of the United States Army, September-October 2006, pp. 115ff) under the titles Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, and review of George Packer, The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq.

In this context it is also most relevant the mention of the American diplomat Paul Bremer who led the Coalition Provisional Authority following the invasion of Iraq. The account of Criticism and controversies around Bremer appears to me as it as “telling it all”, including the enormous complexities and pitfalls of the “military operations” or USA’s invasion of a foreign country which is much more foreign than Ukraine is for Russia. Cf. the “disbanding of Iraqi Army”. The Iraq invasion was justified by saying that “diplomacy had failed” meaning that it had failed to change the fundamental position of the Security Council including France, Russia, China and Germany, meaning that the USA would proceed with a “coalition of the willing” (cf. Legality of the Iraq War and violation of the United Nations Charter). My conclusion is that the logic of the USA invasion of Iraq confirms the logic of a feared future attack on Russia based on allegations of, say, missile bombing of some of its limiting NATO countries (cf. the case of explosion in Poland om 15 nov. 2022, here and here). It also confirms the logic of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Only the logic. Not to mention the western moralism on invasions, which are put in question by numerous examples with damning accusations, such as by the documentary series in 3 parts, Blood and Tears: French Decolonization, broadcasted starting 13 September 2022 by the Swedish Kunskapskanalen (“Den franska kolonialismen”, “Kolonierna under andra världskriget”) with its rich documentation in English on the net (example here), including a more bland article in Wikipedia on the French colonial empire. If it is not enough for learning about the origins of the assumed western moral superiority and democracy there is also The British Empire: A legacy of violence, a CNN opinion article by Peter Bergen referring to the historian Caroline Elkins’ book on the issue, and to The 1619 Project aiming “to reframe the [USA] country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States' national narrative." Bergen writes about Britain that “it’s important to bear in mind that this is the same country that amassed the largest empire history has ever known, with a quarter of the world’s land mass and 700 million people at its height”. To be compared with today’s repeated critical references (as by Fiona Hill) to the frightening Russian efforts to re-establish the Russian empire that ruled over 125 million people.

Regarding Paul Bremer’s Criticism and Controversies, an example of what to not do beside his disbanding of the Iraqi Army, was the De-Ba’athification of the Iraqi civil service. This means the necessity of being careful about whether and how do dismantle local organizations. Secondary symptoms of failures were former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich calling Bremer "the largest single disaster in American foreign policy in modern times", stating that he should have been relieved of his duties "no later than" September 2003. What is also mentioned is that Bremer's April 18, 2005 visit to USA’s Clark University as a guest speaker led to protests against his role in the Iraq War. Dissatisfied with Bremer's speech and answers, several students also voiced disappointment for the university having paid him $40,000. The fact that the USA did not understand these problems, could have been a lesson for Russia and Ukraine if Ukraine, prior to the invasion, had negotiated an acceptance of Russian conditions for refraining from invasion, or a future lesson for Russia in imposing its conditions upon an eventual victory. Such conditions in either case recall the experiences of the USA.

Here we have an example of the importance of knowledge of the complex history reported by Wikipedia about the discussions for the Japan’s “unconditional” surrender in World War II and its relation to the role of emperor Hirohito. A couple of details are notable: that Japan considered surrender under the threat of annihilation of the Japanese people as a race and nation by means of atomic bombs, and that this was considered while acknowledging an ethics and aesthetics of war in the spirit of the earlier mentioned Ernst Jünger. This is revived in a study of war and gender roles in USA’s Vietnam war by Eric J. Leed’s article in Vietnam Generation about Violence, death and masculinity. In fact, it is reported with reference to a book by Thomas M. Coffey, Imperial tragedy: Japan in World War II, the first days and the last, that the Japanese war minister Korechika Anami

expressed a desire for this outcome rather than surrender, asking if it would “not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower”.

We can be sure in lack of such an understanding of the meaning of Christianism, practically nobody today can imagine that Russia would be able to do as the USA did towards Japan. That is, threatening Ukraine with nuclear weapons as Russia threatened NATO and USA with retaliation in case of their intervention in Ukraine. And practically nobody can imagine that a negotiation between Ukraine and Russia could include, as it did for Japan, a respect for Ukraine’s internal basic civil hierarchy and organization corresponding to Iraq’s disbanding of its army, and De-Ba’athification of its civil service. Some of the details concerning the example in Japan are accounted for in the section on the USA general Douglas MacArthur’s “Protecting the Emperor”.

And talking about Christianism we may also talk about Christianity. A Catholic priest I know since his mission in the Swedish city of Umeå, Jose Valiamangalam, gave me copy of his doctoral thesis, a historico-theological study of St.Thomas Christians in the light of Varthamanappusthakam (Oriental Institute of Religious Studies, India, OIRSI No. 439, ISBN 978-93-82762-64-5). I wish to give a hint of the mind-blowing complexity of socio-cultural factors and identity, and therefore political, issues and conflicts involving self-declared peaceful Christians whose centenary history is ignored and therefore not understood in the West. For this, let me sample a piece of text from Wikipedia’s article on these St.Thomas Christians, without the expectations that readers will understand before understanding the whole article:

Kariyattil Iousep, accompanied by Paremmakkal Thoma and two other deacons, made the trip from Kerala in 1778 [The excruciating “martyrdom” of the round trip to Lisbon and Rome took lasted 20 months, as explained in the thesis. My note.] and he was consecrated as the Archbishop of Cranganore in 1782. However, the efforts drastically failed because of the unexpected death of Iousep while in Goa.Varthamanappusthakam, written by Thoma Kathanar in 1785, provides the detail of this journey until the death of the archbishop. Following this in 1787, representatives from eighty-four Pazhayakūr churches assembled at Angamaly and drew up the Angamāly Padiyōla against the colonial Latin hegemony, declaring their allegiance to the Paremmakkal Thoma and urged for the reinstatement of their native East Syriac hierarchy.

The thesis tells about peaceful conflicts among Christians, which were related to the Portuguese colonization including their missionaries implying, however, occasional murders in various described intrigues that are extremely difficult to be understood by outsiders. They are so little understood as the behavior of the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church in relation to Russia’s political leadership, as also evidenced by the earlier mentioned deep-going analysis (10 July 2022) of the Ukraine conflict by the controversial Jordan Peterson. From Valiamangalam’s thesis transpires that the St. Thomas Indian Christians were resentful against the Latin missionaries attempts to “colonize” them. They talk (p. 277ff.) about a “historical conflict between the “monarchical” ecclesiology of the Roman Church shaped after the imperialism with [meaning vs = towards?] the indigenous ecclesiology of communion of the Thomas Christians. The Thomas Christians see the vision of unity in terms of the mystical body of Christ according to the Pauline vision of the organic unity seen in First Corinthians chapter 12: 12-27, and in their tradition “the lay people were given good prominence and they had an influential participatory role in the Malabar Church assemblies…” I conclude that Valiamangalam, who often refers to the Second Vatican Council, expresses a longing for a more “democratic” ideal, exasperated as it could have been by the “imperialist-colonizing” tendencies of Latin missionaries coming mainly from monarchical Portugal. What the Indian Christians primarily wished was that their bishops and closest authorities should be chosen among they themselves. All this recalls the conditions of “surrender” as suggested in the previously mentioned Japan (vs. USA). The wish for democratization certainly made sense in India’s Kerala with its caste system but today it can be also seen as a (cf. Ukraine’s) “Westernization” towards the problem of the god “Democracy” advanced in my text. It threatens and has already disrupted the internal peace of Catholic Christianity as expressed by such movements as the Society of Saint Pius X “SSPX”, including “notable groups that have split from SSPX”.

A summarizing reflection is that the Russia-Ukraine conflict hides the same socio-cultural complexities that were described above, or worse since St. Thomas Christians had at least an explicit common, if yet differently interpreted, evangelical ideal. Its solution requires both parties’, if not even the third “NATO-party’s, understanding of its dynamics and meaning. Diplomats should be trained in this kind of understanding that includes geopolitical dimensions with socio-cultural and religious ones. Against his background it should be obvious how tragically and rudely naive is the first sentence of my first critic quoted below, which translated into English is “It is simple. You are either for violence or against.” Simplified further unto “You are either for Russia or against it”. Simplified further unto “You are for Putin or against him”. Recalling US George W. Bush “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”. All being a coarse rhetorical abuse of the forgotten Gospel’s “Whoever is not with me is against me” (Matthew 12:30).

And on September 28,2024, and months after had stopped updating this text, I felt the need to reproduce the following received mail-letter authored by the editor-in-chief of The Economist Zanny Minton Beddoes. Its content could be have been adapted by her or somebody else to the still ongoing and worsening conflict in Gaza (and later in Lebanon) that I treat in my other paper on that issue:

This month I spent a week in Ukraine. Together with my expert colleagues, Oliver Carroll and Arkady Ostrovsky, and our podcast producer, Heidi Pett, we criss-crossed the country from near the front lines in the east to Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odessa. We went to places that I had hitherto known only as marks on The Economist’s frequent maps: Kramatorsk, Zaporizhia, Pavlohrad. I wanted to see for myself how Ukraine is faring. We spoke to politicians, military commanders and business leaders, as well as to ordinary soldiers and civilians fighting, and living, in the 32nd month of Ukraine’s full-scale war. I then spent a few days with colleagues in Washington, to get a feel for where American policy towards Ukraine is heading.

The result is our cover story this week, and an hour-long episode of the Weekend Intelligence podcast that will air on September 28th. They are a sobering read and listen. It is crunch time in Ukraine, with its forces under pressure, winter approaching and the future of American support uncertain. We argue that both President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Western backers urgently need to change course. Greater honesty is needed about what is feasible militarily and the nature of the support Ukraine needs.

Let me repeat what I already wrote above: I feel distressed, finally, because of my incapability of fully assenting to the third petition of Lord's Prayer: "Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven", as well as assenting to the Litany of Humility. That is: of course, it does not matter what I do, think, say or write. This is the ultimate reason for prayer.

APPENDIX A – Various supportive sources

I do not believe that those who are negative to my text would be influenced by whatever support my position can get from sources of varying quality, some of which I already mentioned above. These sources are listed below, and are the few who have found their way in the western societies as a weak counterbalance to the main narrative of “our” western establishment. The latter may be seen as summarized by the Harvard Kennedy School’s report by faculty members on February 21, 2023, and by examples of how the USA military research (Linton Wells II) may see “cognitive-emotional” aspects of the USA defense as well as how the present (May 2023) chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, general Mark Milley, expresses publicly the general USA military strategy on “How to Avoid a Great-Power War”. In contrast, for the former I propose:

Henry Kissinger: wavering opinions 2014 – 2023	Mats Björkenfeldt (in Swedish)
Seymour Hersh	Jacques Attali
Nicolai N. Petro (here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, esp.7)	Youssef Hindi
Sven Hirdman (in Swedish)	Douglas Macgregor
David Reavill	Oliver Stone
Ivan Krastev	Noam Chomsky (and here)
Daniel Ellsberg	Pascal Lottaz
Jeffrey Sachs	David Sacks: (here, here, here, and comments)
Samuel Charap & Miranda Priebe	Denis Volkov
Jordan Peterson	Zhou Bo
Ron Unz	Matthew Crosston & Pascal Lottaz
Dmitri Trenin and here	Jonathan Power (vs. Piotr Pietrzak)
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs	Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò (or here)
(Chris Hedges &) Medea Benjamin	Arta Moeini (Peace & Diplomacy)
Tom Engelhardt & TomDispatch	Stina Oscarson (in Swedish)
Michael Vlahos	Tucker Carlson (here, and Putin interview here)
Richard Haass & Charles Kupchan (1, 2, 3)	Fyodor Lukyanov (on the above Putin interview)
Herfried Münkler (in Swedish, German author)	Matthew J. Dal Santo (Idem, as above)
John Mearsheimer	Glenn Diesen (here, my comment here)
Claes Ryn (and here, or here) Paul Craig Roberts (here)	Robert F. Kennedy Jr (here, here and here)

These references, which in part were already adduced in my above text can be seen as answering the criticism I have seen as possible to direct against this essay of mine. I myself wanted to complete such possible criticism by using the latest (as per June 18, 2023) hyped computerized tool ChatGPT – OpenAI (see also here, version at the same date). But let, before going over to the “readers’ criticism”, let me make a short parenthesis that put into evidence what is criticized in my text, and what is usually not criticized in other (like ChatGPT) texts.

On June 17, 2023 I put the following two questions to the available ChatGPT, and got the two subsequent answers (below) from the site https://chat.openai.com. They put in evidence the disregard of the core issues in my text and its references. Elsewhere (here and here) I mention why ChatGPT itself could not write my text. Its creators, unless they only wanted to market a profitable product, should understand that neither AI nor AGI could have written this text since they should have been trying the earlier mentioned Design of Inquiring Systems.

My two questions and respective answers were:

(1) Which are the causes of the conflict between Russia, NATO and Ukraine?

(2) How to solve the conflict and achieve peace between Russia, NATO and Ukraine?

(1) Which are the causes of the conflict between Russia, NATO and Ukraine?

ChatGPT:

The conflict between Russia, NATO, and Ukraine has its roots in a combination of historical, political, and security factors. While it is challenging to summarize all the causes comprehensively, here are some key factors that have contributed to the conflict:

Historical context: The historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine has been complex and intertwined. Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991, and there are historical and cultural ties between the two countries. The legacy of this shared history has shaped their interactions and perceptions.

Ukrainian independence and alignment: After gaining independence, Ukraine pursued closer ties with the West, including aspirations for European integration and possible NATO membership. This shift in alignment has been viewed by Russia as a threat to its sphere of influence, particularly in the context of its historical ties to Ukraine.

Crimea annexation: In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, a region that was previously part of Ukraine. The move was widely condemned by the international community, as it violated Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity. This event significantly escalated tensions between Russia and Ukraine, as well as between Russia and NATO.

Eastern Ukraine conflict: Following the annexation of Crimea, pro-Russian separatist movements emerged in eastern Ukraine, leading to an armed conflict between Ukrainian government forces and separatist groups. The conflict has resulted in thousands of deaths and a humanitarian crisis in the affected regions.

Geopolitical competition: The conflict can also be seen within the broader context of geopolitical competition between Russia and NATO. NATO's expansion eastward, closer to Russia's borders, has raised concerns in Moscow about encroachment and a perceived threat to its security. Russia has expressed opposition to NATO's presence in countries it considers part of its sphere of influence.

Ethnic and linguistic divisions: Ukraine is a diverse country with different ethnic and linguistic groups. The divisions between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians, particularly in eastern Ukraine, have played a role in exacerbating tensions and fueling the conflict.

Energy dependence: The issue of energy dependence has added another layer of complexity to the conflict. Ukraine serves as a transit route for Russian gas supplies to Europe, and disputes over energy pricing and supply have at times strained relations between the two countries.

It's important to note that the causes of the conflict are multifaceted and intertwined, and different perspectives exist on each side. The complexity of the conflict underscores the need for a comprehensive and nuanced approach to finding a peaceful resolution.

(2) How to solve the conflict and achieve peace between Russia, NATO and Ukraine?

ChatGPT:

The conflict between Russia, NATO, and Ukraine is a complex geopolitical issue with no simple solution. However, I can provide you with some general principles and approaches that can contribute to the resolution of conflicts and the achievement of peace. Please note that these suggestions are not specific to this particular situation and may not address all the intricacies of the conflict at hand. Here are some steps that could be taken:

Diplomacy and dialogue: Encouraging diplomatic efforts and open dialogue between all parties involved is crucial. Diplomatic negotiations can help foster understanding, address concerns, and find common ground.

Mediation and international involvement: Engaging neutral mediators or international organizations, such as the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), can facilitate negotiations and provide a platform for discussions.

Confidence-building measures: Implementing confidence-building measures can help create an atmosphere of trust and reduce tensions. These can include the withdrawal of troops from certain areas, establishing demilitarized zones, and implementing arms control agreements.

Respect for international law and agreements: Upholding international law and respecting existing agreements, such as the Minsk Protocol and the Budapest Memorandum, is essential. All parties should be committed to honoring their obligations and finding peaceful solutions within the framework of international law.

Addressing underlying grievances: Understanding and addressing the underlying grievances of all parties involved is important for long-term peace. This may involve addressing historical, cultural, economic, and security concerns through negotiation and compromise.

Economic and humanitarian assistance: Providing economic and humanitarian aid to the affected regions can help alleviate the suffering of the local population and create conditions for stability. This can include support for reconstruction, development projects, and assistance in meeting basic needs.

Public diplomacy and communication: Engaging in public diplomacy efforts can help shape public opinion and build support for peaceful resolutions. Promoting accurate information, fostering understanding, and countering misinformation are essential components of this approach.

Long-term conflict resolution: Developing a comprehensive and sustainable plan for long-term conflict resolution is crucial. This may involve addressing broader regional security concerns, promoting economic integration, and fostering people-to-people exchanges.

It is important to recognize that the conflict is complex and deeply rooted, and the path to peace will require sustained efforts from all parties involved. The suggestions provided here serve as general guidelines and should be adapted to the specific dynamics and challenges of the Russia-NATO-Ukraine conflict.

In order to emphasize that all these good and well-meaning advices are not being taken into account in today in today’s analysis of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, I will show now how, “ex-post”, after the fact, they appear hypocritical when seen against the historic account of the complexity of the relation between the USA and Mexico. Using the Google browser and my memory of how the USA states of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico belonged earlier to Mexico, in October 2022 I searched for a string with their names, and chose a hit in Quora that in turn led me to a ChatGPT result in Poe software, as follows. [My emphasis in italic font and in square brackets]:

(1) Did California, Arizona, New Mexico & Texas formerly all belong to Mexico? If Mexico took back all what it had, how many states would the US reduce by? Are any present day US states formerly parts of Canada, so Canada could increase its provinces?

ChatGPT:

Yes, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas were all part of Mexico before they became part of the United States. The United States acquired these states as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the Mexican-American War. If Mexico were to take back these states, the United States would reduce by four states. No, there are no present-day US states that were formerly parts of Canada. In fact, the United States and Canada have never been at war, so there has never been a situation where Canada could have taken control of any US states.

(2) How did Mexico lose California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas?

ChatGPT:

Mexico lost California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas through a series of historical events and conflicts. Here's a brief overview:

Texas: In the early 19th century, Texas was part of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. However, tensions grew between the Mexican government and American settlers in Texas, who sought greater autonomy. In 1836, the Texian settlers declared independence from Mexico and established the Republic of Texas. The Mexican government refused to recognize Texas independence, which led to the Texas Revolution. The conflict concluded with the decisive Texian victory at the Battle of San Jacinto. As a result, Texas gained de facto independence from Mexico and later joined the United States in 1845 as the 28th state.

California, Arizona, and New Mexico: In the 1840s, the United States initiated the Mexican-American War. The war was primarily fought over territorial disputes and disagreements regarding the border between Mexico and the newly annexed Texas. American military forces led by General Zachary Taylor and later General Winfield Scott invaded Mexico and achieved several significant victories.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo [my link]. In 1848, the war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico ceded a vast amount of territory to the United States, including California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, parts of Colorado and Wyoming, and small portions of several other states. Mexico also recognized the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas. In return, the United States paid Mexico $15 million and assumed $3.25 million in debts owed by Mexico to American citizens. [Money helps to ratify military victory.]

These historical events led to the acquisition of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas by the United States and the subsequent establishment of their statehood within the Union.

Please note at least a single symptomatic piece of text in the text above: “tensions grew between the Mexican government and American settlers in Texas”. And let’s not go into the analog conundrum of the Canada – United States relations, where at times in Canada fortresses were built in order to counter the threats of a USA invasion. My erudite commentary: Intelligenti pauca, which unfortunately must be translated unto a longer “Few words suffice for he who understands”.

APPENDIX B – Readers’ criticism of my paper

Since I published on two sites the first versions of my text it has been read by a number of readers whose opinions have in part contributed to the present version and evidenced couplings to another essay of mind on Information and Theology. For instance, the first reader below exemplified how the process of secularization of religion does unexpectedly and imperceptibly reveal itself in such expressions as in his criticism (in Swedish) of my essay on informational aspects of the Russia-Ukraine conflict: He writes “I have always seen Christianism as a religion for humanism”. That is, Christianism at the service of the highest value of humanism, with humanism implicitly identified with the highest god “Man in Democracy”, and also used by Swedish intellectuals as a base for direct attack and denigration of Christianism and of the figure of Jesus Christ.

The text received from the following readers are examples of typical opinions that I received, mostly negative, and I find that the objections have been considered and covered by my text. They are written in Swedish, English, Portuguese and Italian. Those who are genuinely interested may try an automatic translation in the Google-Translate. If it is not perceived that my text covers those objections it would require my further explanations, incurring in the insurmountable problems of “information and debate” to which I dedicate another whole essay.

Now over to the readers’ critical comments of earlier updated versions of my paper:

First reader (Swedish and English)

Det är enkelt. Antingen är man för våld eller mot. Skolastiska resonemang hör inte hemma här. Jag har alltid sett kristendomen som en religion för humanism. Är den inte det har vi ett paradis som är ett Helvete! Klara ståndspunktstagande behövs!

Glömmer ej anfallet på Beziers på 1200 talet [ref. here]. 20000 katoliker försvarade 200 kataner och vägrade släppa in påvekatolska härarna. På svar hur skall vi skilja kataner från katoliker blev svaret döda alla. Gud i himlen känner vilka som är rättroende. Resultat 15000 döda varav troligen 200 katarer. Detta var då påvlig kristendom! Motsvarande har naturligtvis hänt på protestantisk sida.

Tacksam för ställningstagande av nuvarande påven Franciskus!

[In the guise of critic argument the atheist-agnostic reader, who obviously did not know about the problems of Liberation Theology, forwarded to me also the Swedish translation and Spanish original of the following song by León Gieco Sólo le pido a Dios, translated here into English: I only ask of God, explaining the it had given him a sort of intuition of God:]

All I ask of God

Is that pain not be meaningless to me

That desiccated death not encounter me

Empty and alone, without having done enough.

All I ask of God

Is that injustice not be meaningless to me

That they not slap my other cheek

After a claw has scratched away my fortune.

All I ask of God

Is that war not be meaningless to me,

It's a huge monster and it tramples hard

Upon all the poor innocence of the people.

All I ask of God

Is that deception not be meaningless to me,

If a traitor is able to get one over on the many,

That those many not readily forget it.

All I ask of God

Is that the future not be meaningless to me,

Lost is one who must leave

In order to experience a new culture.

All I ask of God

Is that war not be meaningless to me

It's a huge monster and it tramples hard

Upon all the poor innocence of the people.

Second reader (Swedish, spelling: sic!)

Kristo efterlyser t.ex. en mer allsidig analys i svensk media av situationen. Svensk media består huvudsakligen av glättig underhållning och är inte opartisk. Analysen av USA är inte fel men det ursäktar väl inte Rysslands invasion av Ukraina?

Kristo missar en viktig sak i "försvaret" av Ryssland. När Putin tog över efter Jeltsin skedde en allvarlig förändring i Ryssland mot diktatur. Då började flera grannländer till Ryssland ansluta sig till Nato av "rädsla" för Putin. Man kunde se framför sig ett återupprättande av Sovjetimperiet. Under Jeltsin tid diskuterades att Ryssland skulle ansluta sig till EU! Gränserna mot omvärlden var helt öppna. Jag upplevde själv detta i mina kontakter med Ryssland. Jag träffade ryska handelsministern. Ryska företag kom till Sverige för att studera vår elproduktion. Mycket intressanta dialoger.

Med Putin hände något, en f,d. KGB agent med en annan världsbild och

ambitioner.

Jag begriper inte Kristos koppling mellan Demokrati o Gud.

Under president Jeltsin tid var Ryssland ett öppet land Jag träffade minister Chubais. Carl Bildt talade tom om att Ryssland skulle kunna ansluta sig till EU. Det fanns flera svenska stöd till Ryssland som jag deltog i. Kaliningrad var helt öppet. Det fanns en färjelinje till Kaliningrad.

Med Putin skedde en omsvängning. Polen. Tjeckien, Baltstaterna m.fl. gick därför in i Nato.

Nu hotar Putin med kärnvapen. Putin är enligt min och flera andras uppfattning vansinnig och sjuk, precis som Hitler på slutet. Lösningen på problemet är en statskupp i Moskva.

Stödet för att Sverige ska ansluta sig till Nato har helt naturligt ökat kraftigt.

[Apropå Kristo’s tips om John Mearsheimer i The Economist:]

Faktum är att Putin anfallit en neutral stat Ukraina. Nato har utvidgats p.g.a. att neutrala öststater känt sig hotade av Putin. Finland och sen Sverige kommer sannolikt att ansluta sig till Nato p.g.a. det krig Putin startat mot det neutrala Ukraina. Putin började med att ockupera bl.a. Krim och en del av Georgien. Det har funnits ett motstånd i Sverige mot att ansluta till Nato. P.g.a. Putins anfall mot Ukraina vill nu en majoritet av svenska folket att Sverige ska ansluta sig Nato. Nato är en försvarsallians eller hur?

Akademiska rapporter, analyser, korruption är en sak. Men det är inget försvar för att bomba civila, barn, sjukhus, bostäder etc. Detta är mord, krigsbrott och ansvariga ska ställas inför domstol och likaså deras sympatisörer. Putin har en målsättning att återupprätta ett Stor Ryssland. Finland har fram till Putins invasion i Ukraina argumenterat för neutralitet. Nu är det inte så längre. Jag träffade igår en finlandssvenska. Vem startade kriget? Inte är det Georgien eller Ukraina.

Jag har inte försvarat USA:s agerande i Afghanistan, Irak etc. Inte heller Sovjets agerande i Afghanistan. Brott som begåtts tidigare är inget försvar för de krigsbrott Putin gör idag. Under det s.k. 30 åriga kriget begick Sverige allvarliga brott i Tyskland, nuvarande Belgien etc. Nu diskuterar vi vad som händer i Ukraina. De brott som Putins krigsmakt begår i Ukraina försvarar Du uppenbarligen. Vid omröstning i FN generalförsamling försvarades Putin av t.ex. diktaturer typ Nordkorea.

Varför skulle inte Ukraina ha rätt att gå in i Nato? Ska Putin avgöra om Ukraina, Sverige, Finland, Georgien m.fl. ska få ansluta sig till Nato? Varför vill de ansluta sig? De känner sig hotade av Putin!

Du tar idag inte klart avstånd från Putins terrorbombningar av förskolor, skolor, sjukhus, bostäder etc. Det var Putin som startade kriget. Det sätt som Putin bedriver kriget strider mot internationella konventioner.

Akademiska resonemang kring orsaker till kriget kan inte under några omständigheter försvara kriget, Putins våldsbrott och den humanitära katastrofen.

Som jag tidigare skrivit anser jag det ytterligt allvarligt att Du inte kan ta avstånd från det Putins Ryssland gör i Ukraina. Putin startade kriget.

Bombar bostäder, teatrar och orsakar död och förintelse. Men barn och kvinnor ska kanske lida enligt din religiösa uppfattning?

På SVT fanns för några dagar sedan ett uttalande från patriarken Grekisk-ortodoxa kyrkan i Moskva. Han "stöder" Putins förintelsekrig i Ukraina. Jag har inte mer att tillägga.

Jag kan bara beklaga Din brist på empati och sympati. Ryssland begår idag

allvarliga krigsbrott, lidande och Du klarar inte ta ställning.

Otroligt. Mina diskussioner med Dig är avslutade.

Third reader (English, by a Frenchman)

I have read your article which talks about the general problem of the East and the West but only at the end the case of Ukraine, event as an illustration and consequence.

I also quickly read other texts, including veganism or climate change, and I often agree with you. But on what is happening now I can't be.

In the first place, I always defend a people that is attacked and that fights with great courage, that I could say desperate, against an enemy that is militarily very superior.

Secondly, I don't believe in the virtues of democracy any more than you do, I know the hypocrisy of the values that go with it. So obviously the United States imposes its law and its way of conceiving it in the whole world when it can, and with the failures that we know.

But this does not justify that conversely a dictator, or equivalent, such as Putin crushes a country under the bombs and thus saves an appalling individual named Bachar al Hassad. I have been several times to Syria and Lebanon, his father was also terrible but not to this extent, Syria is the most beautiful country I have seen historically and he has turned it into ruins thanks to Putin (Russia whose GDP is barely above Spain and Australia spends 15% of its budget on the army, is this a proof of good sense?)

But thirdly, no need to talk about power dramas with madmen, except that Putin is now one of those madmen. The way he behaves with his people and even his relatives has changed in the last ten years, it is said that he has cancer, which would explain his new bloated face, and this shows an evolution towards a personal power detached from reality and from any morality (and there in his vision of reconstitution of the Russian empire he resembles all those murdering czars of their own family).

AND IN THIS CASE I am afraid for the Ukrainians but also for myself. Even if Europe is partly a fiction, AW: Ukraine - Hubris Kills Diplomacy - by Claes Ryn – AGON I prefer it to protect me as it can, and if I am as critical as you are about the USA, I prefer NATO to be a threat against the bad guy who wants to come to my house. I don't agree with you at all on the moral you draw from the examples you give of the bad conduct of the USA: to be scandalized by a murder far away from home is quite justified, but the murderer is far away, when the crime happens in my street, I don't want to let the murderer go free. And then Putin threatens me directly, including with nuclear weapons. The USA is far away, it needs hypersonic missiles, but we are very close, and who can face it, only France and Great Britain have bombs, but it is nothing compared to the Russian arsenal.

Fourthly, I hate this consumer society subjected to a delirious capitalism, but I wish it would collapse by its internal contradictions, and not by the fire of the weapons of mass destruction that a single man could light, lost in his will to power. The monster is at my door, I do not ask myself questions about those who can help me. With kind regards.

Fourth reader (Portuguese)

[Referring to Jacques Baud (in French)]

Em curtas palavras os motivos que descreveu o autor não são verdadeiros.

1) Ele fala que a Rússia não foi um lado do conflito em 2014.

A verdade é que a Rússia foi sim. Ela já invadiu a Ucrânia em agosto de 2014 para ajudar as repúblicas a sobreviver. Além disso, após o Maidan a Rússia fez o tudo possível para criar essas repúblicas.

2) Ela fala que o termo "pró-Rússia" não é correto e deve ser "falando russo".

Quem sabe um pouco da Ucrânia vai dizer que isso não reflete a realidade. A maioria dos habitantes em Kiev, Kharkov, Dnipro, Odessa etc. são pessoas "falando russo". Olha a resistência dessas cidades agora. Sim, tinha e tem as pessoas "pró-Russos" lá, mas é minoria absoluta deles. Devido a aspectos históricos (especialmente como a Ucrânia foi formada no século XX) o Donbass sempre tinha a maioria das pessoas "pró-Russos". Mas a ideia do Kremlin (em 2014) foi deixar essas repúblicas como a parte da Ucrânia esperando que toda (ou pelo menos a metade da Ucrânia) vire "pró-Rússia" (ou pelo menos parte ("falando russo" vire para "pró-Rússia").

Agora eles usaram estas repúblicas como o argumento de invadir toda a Ucrânia. Mas a realidade é que fazendo disso eles viraram a parte "falando russo" fora do Donbass para a parte "contra-Rússia" agora.

É fácil de opor os outros argumentos dele, mas não sei se devo. Acho que aqueles dois acima (que parecem principais) já mostram que ele não entende completamente a situação na Ucrânia.

OK, foi suficiente para que desconfiássemos do resto.

Fifth reader (Italian)

Caro Kristo, grazie per l'invio tramite e-mail. Sono pienamente d'accordo con quanto dici nel blog sull'Ucraina. Scrivi l'articolo nel quale dovresti mettere un cenno al dopo Yalta, poi caduta del muro di Berlino, poi il ruolo di Eltsin, l'avanzata della EU (leggi USA+NATO) sugli ex-satelliti, l'imperialismo USA e Biden - cattolico - più feroce del delinquente Trump.

Sixth reader (Swedish)

Jag läste din artikel om Ukraina. Mycket bra skrivet och med många infallsvinklar som inte kommer fram i den allmänna debatten. Jag håller med om det allra mesta du skriver när det gäller konflikten/kriget i Ukraina). Jag skall vidarebefordra artikeln till några vänner, som jag tror kommer att uppskatta den.

När det gäller atombomberna (som berörs i din artikel) så är min inställning (som du redan vet) att de var både befogade och (tyvärr) nödvändiga. Jämför med en lång artikel där man också diskuterar bombningarna av tyska städer). Hade jag varit amerikansk president 1945 är jag övertygad om att jag fattat samma beslut som Truman och sedan resten av mitt liv ansett det vara rätt beslut (och så vitt jag vet ångrade aldrig Truman sitt beslut, även om han givetvis beklagade att han var tvungen att fatta ett sådant beslut -- men felet var inte hans utan de japanska militärernas, vilka hellre offrade hela sitt folk än förlorade ansiktet). General MacArthur, som var den som skulle leda en eventuell invasion av Japan, kalkylerade med att en sådan invasion, i värsta fall, skulle kunna kosta 1 miljon amerikanska soldaters liv och kanske 10 gånger så många japaners liv. Dvs alla tiders största blodbad. Nu dog ca 300 000 direkt eller senare av sina strålskador, vilket givetvis är fruktansvärt, men miljoner människoliv sparades genom atombomberna. I din text, i ett citat, nämns filosofen Elizabeth Anscombe (undrar hur många filosofer det finns här i världen -- det måste vara miljoner), som tycker att USA kunde ha låtit bli att förödmjuka Japan genom att kräva villkorslös kapitulation. Så hade man sluppit använda atombomberna.

I artikeln om bomberna mot Hiroshima och Nagasaki motiveras detaljerat varför en ärorik fred för Japan inte var ett möjligt alternativ (som både USA och England såg det och även jag ser det). Och när det gäller att förödmjuka så undrar man om Anscombe visste vad japanerna sysslade med i Kina, Korea och Manchuriet etc. De var betydligt grymmare än tyskarna och begick ofattbara och oförlåtliga grymheter på sina ockuperade områden. Med oförlåtliga menar jag att du och jag eller Anscombe inte kan, eller snarare inte har rätt att, förlåta dem. Endast deras offer har juridisk och andlig auktoritet att lösa dessa förövare från sin oerhörda skuld. Om du vill kan jag skicka dig bilder på massakern i Nanjing där nästan hela stadens befolkning (runt 300 000) mördades av japanerna. Dessa bilder visar högar av mördade kvinnor och barn med avhuggna huvuden etc. Det är lätt att sitta i sin sköna fåtölj, drickande en kopp gott té från Darjeeling och smuttande på en perfekt piece of toast med Coopers Oxford Marmalade på och förlåta hit och dit utan att ta reda på alla de vidriga detaljer man då bortser ifrån. Som jag ser det var det otänkbart att de ansvariga för dessa massakrer som japanerna utförde, skulle gå fria. Det finns inte i min värld. Jag tycker tvärtom att Japan behandlades långt mycket bättre än de förtjänade efter kriget (jag anser att USA gjorde rätt här – på så sätt slapp man att japanerna skulle försöka ta revansch så snart de blivit tillräckligt starka för detta). De fick ju en stor ekonomisk hjälp från USA och kom snabbt på fötter och blev ett av världens rikaste länder. USA avstod från att avsätta och straffa kejsaren, vilket de rent moraliskt borde ha gjort. Detta för att undvika att det japanska folket förlorade allt sitt självförtroende (de var ju knäckta redan som det var -- hur kunde Solens Rike förlora ett krig? -- detta fanns inte i deras föreställningsvärld). Japans behandling efter kriget var knappast den behandling som japanerna själva hade planerat för folken i sina erövrade områden. Det fanns dessutom en ytterligare aspekt till varför de Allierade inte kunde acceptera något annat än villkorslös kapitulation av Tyskland och Japan, vilken jag tar upp i de sista styckena i den artikel jag länkar till ovan.

Idag är det populärt att kalla både Churchill, Roosevelt och Truman för krigsförbrytare. Något jag definitivt inte ställer upp på.

Överhuvudtaget är jag mycket kritisk till Västvärldens intellektuellas syn på rättsskipning. I Ord 17:15 läser vi: "Att fria en skyldig, att fälla en oskyldig -- bådadera väcker Herrens avsky. [fetstil tillagt av mig]". I Västerländsk rättskipning (och även enligt många kristna) är det hemskt om en oskyldig döms. Och det tycker jag också. Och tydligen även Gud. Men om en skyldig går fri, det gör inte så mycket anser man i Västvärlden (även om man kanske inte tycker att det är bra). Det får vi ta helt enkelt. Men Gud tycker således att det senare är lika avskyvärt som det första! Jag tror att när ett brott förblir ostraffat råkar hela universum i olag. Balansen i universum störs och himlen ser ned på oss i vrede och förakt! Jag ser inget gott i Anscombes kritik av USA:s behandling av Japan. Att inte straffa de skyldiga (som premiärminister Tojo -- i praktiken Japans diktator under WW2) till japanernas oerhörda, oerhörda grymheter under WW2 vore för mig ondska av nästan samma proportioner som japanernas egen ondska! Då bortser man ju totalt från det enorma, ofattbara lidande som japaner och tyskar orsakade tiotals miljoner människor (inkluderande miljoner barn). En sådan skuld måste betalas och priset måste vara i proportion till gärningen, dvs i detta fall oerhört högt.

Som sagt det är lätt att, bortseende från alla hemska detaljer, känna varma känslor för skurkar och tycka att det var nog inte så farligt de de gjorde. Förlåtelse måste bygga på att man känner till alla vidriga detaljer, och helst skall man ha varit åskådare till och hört skrikan när småflickor i Nanjing våldtogs och sedan fick huvudet avskuret eller bebisar spetsades på bajonetter och kastades iväg som bollar! Sedan kan man möjligen förlåta (om man klarar av det). Då först har man rätt att uttala orden "Jag förlåter". Men detta gäller bara de som kan betraktas som offer, eller närstående till offren. Endast de har rätten att uttala dessa ord. Ingen annan! Dvs varken Anscombe eller du eller jag har rätt att förlåta japanerna och tyskarna för vad de gjorde under WW2. Eller bortse från eller förringa vad de gjorde. Då förvandlar vi begreppet förlåtelse till ett meningslöst, tomt begrepp. I den sanna förlåtelsen finns en enorm kraft och potential att upprätta människor och befria människor från deras bindning i ondska. Att bortse från onda gärningar har, som jag ser det, inte med kärlek att göra. Det är kärlekens absoluta motsats -- likgiltighet! Kanske har detta sina rötter i en vilja att framstå som god (det är detta jag döpt till "godska").

När Jesus säger att vi skall vända andra kinden till, riktar han sig till dig och mig, dvs till oss som individer. Vi skall förlåta våra personliga fiender och t o m älska dem (vilket inte alltid är lätt). Det är kärlekens Väg. Men detta gäller inte Överheten, dvs de som styr våra samhällen. Paulus säger ju att "överheten inte bär svärdet förgäves". För att det skall vara möjligt att leva i en fallen värld har Gud (som jag uppfattar det) förordnat att vi har ett rättssystem (för skydd mot inre fiender) och en militär (för skydd mot yttre fiender). Dessa har tillgång till en våldsapparat för att hindra ondskan att agera fritt. Observera att Jesus i Evangelierna möter flera soldater. Till ingen av dessa säger han att de skall sluta vara soldater. Däremot säger han till prostituerade att sluta sälja sin kropp och till ohederliga tulltjänstemän att de skall sluta ta mutor och orättfärdiga tullavgifter och i stället betala tillbaka allt de stulit.

Ibland säger folk till mig, "du som är kristen, hur kan du förorda hårda straff, ja t o m dödsstraff?" Jag brukar då svara, "Det är just för att jag är kristen som jag förordar hårda straff. Jag tror nämligen att människan är ansvarig för sina handlingar och därför måste ta konsekvenserna av dem (Gud anser ju också det – Yttersta Domen)". Vidare säger man, "Och du tycks ju också tro på existensen av ett Helvete. Ingen god gud skulle instifta något sådant." Mitt svar blir, "Existensen av Helvetet är beviset och garanten för att Gud är god!" En god och kärleksfull Gud kan inte bortse från ondskan och likgiltigt, med en gäspning, överse med den.

Detta var en liten sammanfattning av hur jag ser det hela. Jag skriver det mest för min egen skull. För att påminna mig om var jag står. Ovanstående var egentligen en parentes. Orättfärdigheten i Västvärldens intellektuellas rättssystem ligger dock tungt på mitt hjärta.

Artikeln du skrev var, som sagt, väldigt bra och tack för den! Det var bara det att Anscombe triggade igång mig.

Seventh reader (Swedish, translated into English)

Regarding your attached text Kristo, we must agree not to agree, agree to disagree as they say in such contexts.

Eighth reader (Swedish, translated into English)

While you criticize the West and the Western powers side up and side down, I do not find a single bad word from you about Russia (with the reservation that I may have missed something, the article is very long). You claim to be impartial somewhere, I do not see it possible to be more biased. In addition, Russia is the aggressor, so one should reasonably study its motives and actions in the first place.

[This very same reader, whom I associate to the ideal type I have described as using “logic as rape”, upon having noticed my above quotation of Plato’s Seventh Letter, commented it by writing: “Yes I know, as usual. It's easier to blame someone else for being stupid than to put some effort into explaining.”]

Ninth reader (Portuguese, translated into English)

[From a professor of computer science with deep interest for science, technology, spirituality and art, but thought that my and Claes Ryn’s texts were “too long” to read:]

After all, what did the article say? I think I have two firm opinions: Putin has committed a crime against humanity and he is crazy.

I didn't understand. Didn't Russia invade Ukraine? What to understand further? The excuse of the Russian population in Ukraine and the threat of NATO (which only has defensive power) are lame excuses.

I still don't understand. Are you justifying Putin's invasion? Or are you supporting and justifying it?

I don't need to read anything from anyone. Putin made an invasion and provoked a war. I am against wars. Is there anything else I need to know?

Tenth reader (Swedish, automatic translation)

Without explicitly commenting my above text, in June 2024 (after I practically had stopped updating this article) wrote the following in the media channel Swebbtv, on the basis of the (in Wikipedia allegedly classified as Russian propagandist) political scientist Glenn Diesen’s book ”The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order” (2024):

While both England and the United States as islands have total access to the world's oceans, Russia in the west, if you ignore the exclave of Kaliningrad bordering Poland and Lithuania, only has access to three shipping corridors. In February 2021, Ukraine and NATO announced plans to build two new naval bases on Ukraine's Black Sea coast. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed that the Black Sea was of priority interest to NATO. From March to June 2021, Defender Europe 2021 took place, one of the largest US-led military exercises in decades, covering both the Baltic and Black Sea regions. 2 In June and July 2021, the United States and Ukraine organized the largest naval exercise in decades in the Black Sea. NATO Deputy Secretary General Martin Erdmann admitted in July 2022 that the war in Ukraine is mostly about the control of the Black Sea. Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen optimistically announced that with NATO's expansion to Finland and Sweden, NATO can now also block Russia's access to the Baltic Sea. In 2021, the US also signed an agreement on the use of four military bases on Norwegian soil, which is about stopping Russia's fleet from crossing the Arctic. Thus, all three corridors would come under American control.

After 2014, several Americans have held key positions in the Ukrainian government. In 2014, Natalie Jaresko took office as Minister of Finance of Ukraine and received Ukrainian citizenship on the same day she took office. Jaresko was previously head of the economic section at the US Embassy in Ukraine. She thus went from representing US interests in Ukraine to representing Ukraine's interests. Aivaras Abromavičius, a Lithuanian citizen educated in the United States, became Ukraine's Minister of Economic Development and Trade. In 2015, David Sakvarelidze, a US Attorney General in New York, became Deputy Attorney General of Ukraine. He received Ukrainian citizenship the same year. During the 1990s and 2000s, a similar development had occurred in the Baltic states, where Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all had presidents who were North American citizens.

Prosecutor General of Ukraine Viktor Shokin complained that since 2014, "the most shocking thing is that all the appointments were made in connivance with the United States". Shokin's career ended when he opened a corruption case against the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, as the new administrators recruited were suspected of being involved in corruption. One of them was Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden. His father, Vice President Joe Biden, intervened in the investigation by getting Attorney General Shokin fired and threatening to withhold a billion dollar US loan guarantee. Hunter Biden's business partner in Burisma, Devon Archer, confirmed in July 2023 that Joe Biden was deeply involved in Hunter Biden's business.

In 2023, an American transgender person, who claimed that Russians are not human, became the new spokesperson for the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine. As Ukraine's situation became increasingly precarious and dependence on the West increased, Kiev largely outsourced the post-war reconstruction process to BlackRock and the management of the Ukraine Development Fund was entrusted to J.P. Morgan. Western agricultural giants bought millions of hectares of Ukrainian agricultural land.

Independent media were purged under the nationalist slogan "One nation, one language, one people". In February 2021, President Zelensky without any legal support closed three Ukrainian TV channels. The American think tank Foreign Policy celebrated the censorship with the headline: "Ukraine's president finally flexes his muscles".

In 2014, the United States began training Ukrainian soldiers and selling weapons to Ukraine. The following year, the CIA launched a secret program to train Ukrainian paramilitaries "to kill Russians". That same year, the US Congress condemned the Azov Battalion as a Nazi organization and banned US military support for the group. A year later, in 2016, the US Congress lifted the ban on funding the Nazis in Ukraine. In November 2021, the United States and Ukraine were the only two countries in the world to vote against a UN resolution against Azov. Washington claimed the resolution was Russian propaganda aimed at defaming Ukraine's independence movement.

The USA thus, despite its high rhetorical tail-wagging about spreading liberalism, democracy and human rights, has no problem whatsoever with supporting censorship and neo-Nazism and contributing to family corruption at the highest political level.

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