In Memoriam of the Warrior-Brother Fallen

To my son

Farewell of the Slavic Woman

This is my traditional article.

Here we are between the May 1^st  and May 9^th  Holidays. Both are not celebrated in the US. May 1^st   originated even on the Haymarket Square in Chicago. There is a monument there; Obama, a Chicagoan  should  know about that. In Russia, in my childhood we  studied the history of the May 1^st Holiday, the International Day of the Workers’ Solidarity very thoroughly. We were told  to  memorize the names of all those workers who were shot there. I still remember one of those names-Albert Scanlon.  In Russia that was a spring holiday- people  marched  down  main streets with  flowers, there was a lot of laughter, rather a rare thing in Russia.  I loved that Holiday.  Our paranoid- delusional Congress in 1958 denounced it as a  ‘Commie day’ and  moved the Holiday to the labor day in September. What a  remnant  of  McCarthyism!

 And in about a week after that there is  a  ‘Holiday  With Tears’- the sacred  Victory Day,  May 9^th, the day  commemorating the end of the most bloody carnage in history, the day for which 27 million Russians paid by their lives, three generations of  young people  went to eternity and  the whole world was saved. The world was saved. Now it doesn't want to  acknowledge that.

May 9^th  is not celebrated anywhere but  in Russia. No  congratulations, no telegrams, no commemorations. There are Holocaust museums throughout the world  with  names of  the victims where children are brought in to ‘adopt’ a name  of the dead person and ‘go through the process’ (as if that bizarre necrophilia could  make them feel anything but fear and disgust). Why aren’t there  any  WWII museums with the names of all those 27 million Russian citizens (including   Jews, Roma and  Communists who were so viciously exterminated) so that a visiting person could adopt a warrior for an hour, say?  I wouldn't mind if  there were names  of all  those who fought  and died for freedom from Jean Mouline to  General Patton,  from  Joseph Bros Tito to   Janush  Korchack (Henrik Goldshmidt). Why not?  We have to pay  tribute to those people, all of them as Russian poet Alexander Tvardovsky said, ‘I know there is no fault of mine that others  did not come home from war. But still, but still, but still,,,’ Come to think of it- why  won’t in the Russian Halls of that Memorial   the Tvardovsky’s verses be recited; his immortal  ‘On The Day  When The War Ended’ and ‘ I Was Killed At Rzhev?’ Maybe American schoolchildren should hear those poems; they would understand the sense  without   knowing the language.  Passion speaks volumes.

There are literally thousands   of volumes written by the Western historians about the WWII as well as numerous movies and most of them are pure garbage. That is because there is one taboo, the   elephant in the room  those historians as if in solidarity pretend not to notice- starting from June 22, 1941 when Germany attacked Russia  the war became a Crusade. Yes, those 4mln soldiers  who attacked Russia on that fateful day were Crusaders; only instead of  the Crosses on their backs they had ‘Gott Mitt  Unst’ (God is with us) on their uniform belts. Like the actual truly first Crusade in  the Y1209 in the South of France against Albigeyseans,  this one was the Crusade against  fellow- Christians, just because they (Russians) decided to have a different way of life, different interpretation on what was  happiness, duty, joy, satisfaction, faith, love. That’s why in the Nazi Germany they proclaimed, ‘If Jesus had resurrected now He would be  the follower of the Fuhrer’- and  no Pope excommunicated them, no Lutheran priest cursed them in the US or in  England.  As in 1209 the Prophets of the Crusade proclaimed  indiscriminant  killings on the ‘ Eastern Territories’ as a ‘joyful duty’; they  literally unleashed the worst in the people  and proclaimed it to be the best.  The similar thing we can refer to  when we talk about Spanish colonization of America and US whites exterminating Indians.  Every century has its Medieval Times, said  Kazimeszh  Brandyce, and it was the  Medieval Crusade crossing the Russian borders on that fateful night when  all the children in the children’s camp where my father  was were killed by a bomb. All but three.

Oh, but weren’t they atheists?  Those Commies in Russia, all 200mln of them, they all were Godless, right? They  denied God, they destroyed the churches, they made them into museums and used the treasures to develop steel mills.  Even Jews there were atheists, so they had succumbed to evil and  in sorts- deserved  their fate. That’s what I hear   from many. Covertly, inadvertently, through malicious whisper I hear that. And here's my answer- go, f&ck yourself, morons.

Russia was and is a  Christian civilization. 1000 years passed since Orthodox Christianity was adopted there  as a primary spiritual environment and no Communism and/or Stalinism or whatever ‘ism’ could  extract that spirit from the soil. People do not have to go to the  Church to keep with God- as soon as they retain the teachings in their everyday life.  And on every step in Russia  it could be seen that Jesus  was still present and  no matter whether you followed the Ten Commandments or the  Moral Code of the Builder of the Communism- He was there to guide you.  No, even in the darkest times the Russian army would not have a doctrine of Gott  Minst  Unst- Orthodox  Jesus never would  agree to the external aggression.  As for Jews, the emancipation through secularity should be  the dream of everyone- and if secular, the society can still be Christian as a  nation without the medieval intolerance. No, those were not the ‘Eastern Territories’- that was a civilization  and the Crusade  targeted it for destruction.  

Christianity was in the first perception of the Russians that  ‘German workers would not fight against their brothers in the East.’ It was in those  original rather naïve expectations that Germany would collapse ‘under the weight of its crimes’.  Dostoevsky had written about the ‘ wholesome compassion of the Russian soul’ and that soul did not want to believe that  those were the barbarians coming in all full devilish glory of the technology.  It took a horrible lesson of 1941 for the nation  to develop a Noble Rage but when it developed- Russia  started  on its path to the eternal glory.  That’s the primary issue, the main one- the world as we know it  is in   debt to Russia for its survival as  a Humanity.  NOBODY CAN JUDGE THEM!  Russian  civilization  sacrificed its people for all of us and  completed the impossible – it managed to defeat  the devilish evil while retaining the human face. Despite the dictatorship, despite Stalin, despite the losses, despite the rage- the soul of the sacred Covenant remained untouched and  Russian citizens came out of it not only better but strong enough to rebuild the country and then do away with the dictatorial regime in 1953-1956. What other nation  can   boast such an achievement? And what other nation had been so maliciously   treated after it saved the world?

Negativity based on ignorance, the curved mirror had become  the  primary tone in practically all teachings about Russia in the West. The dream of  mind creates monsters and we have now Condi Rice, a ‘specialist’ in the Russian affairs,  Sarah Palin who  ‘sees Russia from her window’,  and Obama saying that  ‘Russian invasion of Georgia is unacceptable.’ Obama does not know where Georgia is located, for goodness sake.   Most of the schoolchildren in here and in   the Western Europe still think that the Crusade included  Germany, England and the US against Russia.  Here we say  that the US won the WWII, that the US army liberated Auschwitz, that  the US liberated Europe from Hitler. Here we  make movies in which  those Jews killed  out  there are all  kosher, ready to die for their ‘Jewishness’ as if  they profess the glory of the state of Israel  in the future. What a dreadful blasphemy.  I consider the Latter- Day- Saints people’s effort to Christianize the dead as  the  one less offensive than that malice.

Spinmeisters,  boy! There was that German   commenter on the OEN who wrote  consistently that Russia had to improve itself. That was, of course after we tore Serbia to pieces.  That was, of course, after the bloody drunk Boris exterminated citizens of Moscow in 1993.   That was after the US raped Iraq and Afghanistan. That was after we started to send drones to kill indiscriminately. That was after we tortured people and  Gitmo was called an American Gulag.

Ah,  the Gulag.  Everyone knows  this word in the West, even Bush.  Dostoevsky apparently  is  the beloved writer of Laura Bush but she surely does not know the Russian words like Mertvy Dom (Dead House)- defining the labor camp  Dostoevsky was  in when he was convicted. Neither does she know such words as Sakhalin, that is the island on which there was the Tsarist Russia  main hard labor camp. She, of course, knows Auschwitz but  not Dachau  because when Dachau was opened it was a celebration in Germany, proclaiming that it was  for the ‘rogue elements’ and ‘ enemy combatants’, just like Gitmo. Oh, no. They all know the GULAG. But is  the Gulag the face of Russia?  We know  that the face of Germany is not Hitler  but Sofia Scholl. We know that the face of Italy is not Mussolini but Garibaldi.  We make movies about them,  devote  conferences to them. Why don’t we   talk about Martemian Rutin, the ‘first one’, who stood up to Stalin, why don’t we talk about Anatoly Zhigulin and his  Communist Youth Party,  why don’t we talk about  Archbishop Luke?  Oh, they  do not fit  into our molds, they are bigger than that, they were Communists themselves, they were .. Russians. Those heroes, they were uncool.   How about the infamous Moscow trials?  OK, those victims were tortured but they were Communists themselves, right? They deserved it. That’s what we say now. We say dog ate dog.  Who cares, right?

 Wrong. In my childhood we cared.  In my schools we read about  the  horrible  processions on the streets of the German cities, the medieval parades in the  1930s when  prominent Jewish families were forced to  walk with their children in shame and we cared. We read about  lynching and about  tar and feathers in the US and we cared. We understood the cruelty.

We take from  history not ashes but fire as Jean Jourice said.  Russian nation won the WWII and then  the people came back and in 1953-1956 they overthrew the monsters and closed the GULAG. THEY CLOSED IT! Millions were freed in several months. Tell that to our little foxes who still cannot close Gitmo. Yes, they did  that in Russia not how we would like them to do, in their own, sometimes twisted way  but they did it and  we squeal now  faced by much smaller problems. Maybe we should learn from them instead of telling syrupy stories about   Jesus in Gulag and Crosses on the Vietnamese dirt.   How much Christianity was in the   Hiroshima  and Nagasaki nuclear bombardment?  How much Christianity was in the firebombing of Dresden?  How much Christianity is in  the water boarding?  You know, the newest poll in the US reveals that  the churchgoers prefer torture (!). Really my  Utmost for my Highest.  Hypocrisy of all  of that  is  truly sickening.

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