The possible disappearance of Ukraine from the political map of Europe is the least of the problems facing the international community of states. We are all at a make-or-break junction in world history and not only Russia, but also the 'West and the rest' have to take a stand and help out to bring about a fairer, multilateral world order. Anything less could mark the end of civilisation itself.
Before tackling the West's last crusade happening under our own eyes, I feel we should appreciate Vladimir Putin for trying to reverse western expansionism in his neighbourhood and for pointing the conflict back to the ones responsible for promoting it for ages.
The fact that we are all only a few steps away from all-out war against Russia as well as from nuclear catastrophe is by no means accidental. As matters now stand, the United States is led by a Catholic president and its House of Representatives by a Catholic speaker. We all know that Catholics have been Russian Orthodoxy's implacable foes for centuries. In fact, as Natalia Narochnitskaia explains in one of her papers "it is ridiculous to explain 600 years of unprovoked expansion to the Western fringes of Russian Orthodox lands by the 'divisions of Poland' and 'czarism' [...] It was the West using the spear of east European Catholics that was consistently moving eastward from the 10th to the mid-20th century. The territory of Russia was consistently pushed further away from the cradle of the Russian statehood."
As the balance of power in Europe shifted in the 18th century in favour of Russia and older powers like Poland, Sweden and Turkey declined, the importance of the Russians increased manifolds. Unfortunately, "civilised" Europe found it very hard to accept such geopolitical shifts ever since, and insisted on labelling Russians as "barbarians", just as Zelensky and president Biden do now.
Nor was the strategy of alleviating east-west tensions by involving Russia in various European coalitions successful in the longer term. As the same Natalia Narochnitskaia points out, "a larger part cannot be integrated by a smaller one, which goes a long way towards explaining the centuries old rejection by the West of Orthodox Russia.[...] Russia is the vehicle of Byzantine legacy the West hates so much".
Most of today's American political leaders have been influenced in their views of Russia by Zbigniew Brzezinski's depiction of Orthodox Slavs as culturally inferior to other ethnic groups in the world. In the current environment, this enables Zelensky and Ukrainian ultranationalists to reject peaceful compromise with Russians and advocate their indiscriminate killing by the local population instead.
NATO's relentless eastwards expansion to the borders of Russia, therefore, fits a centuries-old tradition. This latest crusade is now led by a small number of Slavic nations that have joined the alliance in 1997, aided and abetted by an American Catholic president who is catastrophically ill-prepared for the job. Since 2014 as vice-president, Joe Biden has been in direct control of the upheaval in Ukraine and the subsequent takeover of the Kiev government by Ukrainian ultranationalists, most of whom are Catholic themselves. The conflict in Ukraine has however been presented to a hapless Western public as a fight for democracy against autocracy. It is hoped, in the view of American planners, that such a false narrative might eventually convince misguided Europeans or even Americans to fight the Russians directly in Ukraine in the near future.
The expansion of the West using Europe's crusading Catholic Slav nations, like Poland, is not the sole explanation for Nato's expansionism in the last 20 years. The other ingredient contributing to today's explosive situation is the US military-industrial complex (MIC), a traditional major provider of American jobs. The expansion of Nato has been instrumental in assisting US industries working for the complex to sell military hardware to its new member countries, which have become its captive customers.
To date, only president Obama has tried to reduce the size of his country's MIC and to cut defence budgets. He is also credited with starting a series of brainstorming sessions among the military with the objective of finding downsizing solutions. Soon after he left office, however, president Trump allocated more money to the military and, using the current tensions in Ukraine, president Biden increased the US defence budget yet again.
For American citizens, the US is a safe and secure country defended by its geographical position in between two oceans. The average American finds it hard to understand why the US should pay for Europe's defence via Nato, or why it should take on the obligation to fight on behalf of any Nato member that might come under attack, for reasons that have nothing to do with the interests of the United States. Still, by continually depicting Russia as a menace to American democracy or as the barbaric aggressor of innocent, democratic Ukrainians, the Catholic lobby in the US and Europe - which also includes the Vatican - has succeeded in preparing the Western population psychologically for war with Russia.
Problem is, Catholic pundits and political leaders are acting like a dangerous bunch of idiots. Russia is not only a huge and militarily powerful country, but it is also the main nuclear power in the world today. Short of eradicating it from the map, the US has no other solution but to reach an acceptable compromise with this former foe and learn to live with it peacefully. This, of course, involves first and foremost giving up Catholic-inspired crusades against this country.
As FDR advised during the forties, the US and Russia should try to become in some ways more like each other. For its part, Russia did try to become more like the United States, in adopting a market economy. It is now up to the United States to ditch liberal democracy in favour of electoral democracy and to start accepting the fact that Orthodox Christians around the world are in no way inferior to Catholic Christians.
On a wider, Western scale, the Catholic faith should finally be reformed in ways that would prevent it from interfering in international relations between states the way that the Church has in the past, and still does today. In order to defang it, it would be a good idea for the Italian state to abolish Vatican statehood, transform the Vatican into a national museum with the proceeds going to the Church's many victims, and give it 44 hectares to move its headquarters somewhere else in Italy, away from Rome itself. This way the Catholic Church would become like any other Christian denomination and hopefully act accordingly.
We have to keep in mind that all modern day political leaders who have organised crusades against Russia were Catholics, from Napoleon, Hitler and Mussolini, to Joe Biden and Boris Johnson today. The current arrangement with the Italian state which recognized in 1929 the sovereignty of the Holy See within the Vatican was a major error. As Rome was the capital of the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church has thrived for centuries by giving religious backing to all European powers in their quest of empire-building, from the Spanish and the Portuguese in the New World to the Austrians and French within Europe. In truth, the Catholic Church has been responsible for keeping the flame of imperialism and crusades alive for most of its existence, all while benefitting handsomely from the leaders and countries it supported in their quests. By revoking the Lateran Treaty from 1929 and by moving the Catholic Church head office outside Rome and getting this church out of international politics, the Italian state would make a huge contribution to world peace.
As matters now stand, the Catholic Church has a big share of responsibility in fuelling American hegemonism around the world and trying to cash in on it. I advocate this course of action not out of hate for Catholics, but in the interest of avoiding a devastating nuclear war, which Catholic crusaders are unfortunately ill-equipped to prevent.
