Last
week, we wrote only briefly of the kinship between the Cossacks of the Ukraine
and the warriors of the South. Let us
look now a little more deeply at one likeness between the two: their defense of Christianity.
Matfey
Sheehan says of the Cossacks:
Cossacks
are basically Russian Vikings. They are a semi-democratic military people, who
elect a Hetman - a warlord - to lead them, and are known for their unshakable
courage in battle, and unwavering defense of the Orthodox faith. Cossacks
launched many Viking-like raids and even assaulted the shores of Ottoman-ruled
Constantinople, infuriating the Sultan in the 16th century.
When
the Sultan, the most powerful man in the world, demanded that they stop,
their response was a letter filled with profanity and mockery. "You
will not make Slaves of Christian Sons!" they said to him. And indeed,
when his Tatar forces laid siege to the Lavra, the Cossacks came to defend it, though it's
widely believed that a miraculous and terrifying omen from the
Lavra's icon saved the day.
Now,
in modern divided Ukraine, the fight is again raging.
One
of the places Cossacks have always protected unto death is the Pochaev
Lavra, a monastery in Western Ukraine that has historically been a stronghold
of Orthodoxy, its mighty walls a bulwark of the Russian Faith throughout the
ages. For that, it has endured endless attacks and trials.
Between
the 16th-19th centuries, the greatest threat to the Lavra was the Union of
Brest. This union was a Catholic church coup encouraged by, if not outright
created, by the Polish nobility to divide and conquer their Ukrainian
territories.
Poland
was ruled by an elected Monarch and a Senate, where every nobleman was
considered equal, and even rebellion against the crown was legal. In practice,
the country was often ruled by families of powerful Magnates with more
influence than the crown itself.
In
Ukraine, these Magnates brutally persecuted the Cossacks. They forcibly
converted many churches to Vatican control; Cossacks who died for Poland in
wars were put in stocks in peacetime.
Moved
by the suffering of his people, Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky, the Greatest Cossack
of all time, staged a rebellion against Poland.
In
those days, the Bogdan Khmelnitsky lead his uprising against the Poles, to
defend the Golden Liberties (Polish-Lithuanian system of political freedoms
afforded to every noble) of the Cossacks and the Orthodox Church.
Just
as Dmitri Donskoi came for the blessing of Saint Sergius of Radonezh,
Bogdan Khmelnitsky came to the Lavra for the blessing of Saint Job.
After
obtaining Saint Job’s blessing, and many hard battles, his uprising was finally
successful. He not only defeated the Poles with the help of Czar Alexis of
Russia, but he did the unthinkable: he reunited Ukraine with Russia for the
first time since when the Mongols violently separated them in 1240.
. . .
Of
Dixie, Neil Kumar writes,
As aforementioned, it is
of the utmost importance that this, the purest of men, was ours, the hero of our Cause; he was
so confident in the divinity of our Cause that he looked forward to presenting
himself before the Lord when the time came. Jackson was not a secessionist at
first, and prayed to avoid war, which he knew as “the sum of all evils”, but he
knew that “if the government should persist in the measures threatened, there
must be a war…we shall have no other alternative; we must fight.” War was not
something to be sought, but rather the last recourse in a world in which no
political defenses remained. After all, Virginia’s motto was and remains sic semper tyrannis. Jackson
witnessed the execution of the subsequently canonized terrorist John Brown,
that emblem of the Yankee character, or as Dabney put it, “the Moloch of
Federal ambition”, “fanaticism set on fire of hell.” He saw the hatred raining
upon the Southern people from Northern pulpits and presses; he saw radical
egalitarianism on the march, that evil which, again in Dabney’s words, “under
the name of equality, would subject all the rights of individuals to the will
of the many, and acknowledged no law nor ethics, save the lust of that mob
which happens to be the larger.” All of this should sound familiar to those of
us who keep abreast of the news in our nation each day. The Christian South,
Dabney wrote, “saw the mighty beast gathering his forces for the bound upon his
prey, yet they calmly stepped before his jaws”; against odds that would
overwhelm anyone else, Jackson and our forefathers nonetheless fought, men
against and out of time.
They gave everything for
our posterity, for our birthright, because they understood the consequences,
the utter devastation that would be wrought by our enemy. They understood that
the state had been seized and weaponized against them, that those institutions
which should have served as their guarantors had been usurped, made into their
devourers. They understood that Northern capitalism stood with knives out for
Southern agrarianism. They saw plainly that ruthless mercantile finance
disguised as abolitionism hungrily licking its lips in rapturous anticipation
of the eviscerated Southern lifeblood that would whet its appetite and slake
its thirst, grist for its dark satanic mill. They understood that the Yankees
threatened wholesale slaughter and pillage, “the extermination of a whole
people’s national life”; they understood that their homes were threatened with
annihilation, that, again in Dabney’s words, “the most powerful moral forces of
the soul would be evoked to sustain the struggle.” Against the threat of the
extended director’s cut of the John Brown raid, against the basest lusts and
Mammon-worship, we fought for hearth and home. We fought for the Founding
principles, for freedom from,
not freedom to [This is an unfortunate
misunderstanding by Mr Kumar. As
Alexander Dugin has pointed out, it is classical liberalism’s ‘freedom from’
that we must abandon: freedom from
authority, tradition, clan, etc.
‘Freedom from’ destroys the cohesiveness of society-W.G.];
Jackson himself referred to the War as “our second War of Independence”. We
fought for God and the organic hierarchy that grounded our society. Jackson was
sustained in the struggle through his faith, but also by his outrage at the
barbarous inhumanity of the Yankee. As his men entered what was once Romney,
Virginia, “scarcely anything appeared by which it could be recognized by its
own children, save the everlasting hills which surround it.”
Though
it is late in the history of the world, it is not too late for the South to try
to strike up a friendship with the Cossacks of the Ukraine. There is more than enough common ground for
the two to build a substantial bond. May
God bless the effort!
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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