Masterclasses are all the
rage right now, so we’ll hop on that bandwagon for a moment and say that if
anyone wants a masterclass on why Evangelical Protestants shouldn’t be in
charge of United States foreign policy, he will have a difficult time finding a
better one than the opening
segment of American Family Radio’s Today’s Issues for Monday, 18
Aug. 2025.
We have a lot of respect for
AFR’s parent organization, the American Family Association, for its work in
promoting Christian culture by combating abortion, pornography, the LGBT cult,
and so on. But the political and
religious programming on AFR can be a real trainwreck sometimes. So it was on Today’s Issues.
The segment in question
featured a discussion of the Ukraine-Russia war in the wake of the meeting
between Presidents Trump and Putin, and the commentators, who are supposedly
well-informed on current events, couldn’t stop mouthing the dishonest talking points
that permeate the mainstream Western press:
1. Putin invaded the Ukraine without provocation
and without justification for the sake of acquiring resource-rich lands.
This kind of statement was
excusable in the opening days of the war, when passions were running high and
reporting was chaotic. But it has now
been going for more than three years since the war began. That is plenty of time to do the necessary
research into the background of the conflict.
The commentators on TI have not done that research. Let’s help them.
Many folks in the West live
in a make-believe world where nothing happened in the Ukraine prior to
2022. Pres Putin one day just woke up
(so this fanciful thinking goes) and decided to go to war with the Ukraine because
he’s an evil dictator who wants to re-establish the Soviet Union.
There is actually a very long
history surrounding Western aggression toward Russia on her western marches,
and Russia’s efforts to fend it off.
More recently was the US-EU sponsored coup in the Ukraine in 2014 that
turned her into a puppet state of the West to be used precisely for
destabilization operations against Russia.
The RAND Corporation’s 2019
document ‘Overextending and Unbalancing Russia’ specifically mentions
weaponizing the Ukraine against Russia.
Thousands of people in the eastern provinces of the Ukraine, which
culturally are very close to Russia, had also been killed by the murderous Kiev
regime from 2014 to 2022, when Russia had finally had enough of Western
treachery and took matters into her own hands to protect herself and her
friends within the Ukraine from that Western puppet government.
But Western aggression
against Russia extends much further back in time. Ben Dixon wrote a series of essays that go
into great depth on Western-Russian relations in centuries past (one of them is
here). We will simply note a couple of examples in
this regard. The first is one of the
earliest examples of the post-Orthodox West’s attempts to subjugate Russia, via
the Roman Catholics during the life of the
wonderful prince St Alexander Nevsky:
A very troublesome time had begun in Russian history: from the
East came the Mongol Horde destroying everything in their path; from the West
came the forces of the Teutonic Knights, which blasphemously and with the
blessing of the Roman Pope, called itself “Cross-bearers” by wearing the Cross
of the Lord. In this terrible hour the Providence of God raised up for the
salvation of Russia holy Prince Alexander, a great warrior, man of prayer,
ascetic and upholder of the Land of Russia. “Without the command of God there
would not have been his prince.”
. . . The Teutonic
Knights remained a dangerous enemy. In a lightning-quick campaign in 1241 Saint
Alexander recaptured the ancient Russian fortress of Kopore, expelling the
knights. But in 1242, the Germans succeeded capturing Pskov. The enemy boasted
of “subjecting all the Slavic nation.” Saint Alexander, setting forth in a
winter campaign, liberated Pskov, that ancient home of the Holy Trinity, and in
spring of the year 1242 fought a decisive battle against the Teutonic Order. On
the ice of Lake Chud both armies clashed on April 5, 1242. Raising his hands
towards the heavens, Saint Alexander prayed: “Judge me, O God, and judge my
strife with a boastful nation and grant help to me, O God, as to Moses of old
against Amalek, and to my great-grandfather Yaroslav the Wise against accursed
Svyatopolk.”
By his prayer, by the help of God, and by military might the
Crusaders were completely destroyed. There was a terrible slaughter, and there
was such a crashing of striking spears and swords that it seemed as though the
frozen lake were in motion and not solid ice, since it was covered with blood.
When they turned to flee, the enemy was pursued and slashed by Alexander’s army
“as if they sped through the air, and there was nowhere for the enemy to flee.”
Later, they led a multitude of captives behind the holy prince, marching in
disgrace.
Contemporaries clearly understood the universal historical
significance of the Great Battle of the Ice, and the name of Saint Alexander
was celebrated throughout Holy Russia, “through all the lands, from the
Egyptian Sea to Mount Ararat, from both sides of the Varangian Sea to Great
Rome.”
The western boundaries of the Russian land were safely secured
. . . .
The
other comes from the time of the Protestant Reformation:
In the course of its centuries-old history, Valaam Monastery,
located near the border of Great Novgorod with Sweden, was repeatedly ravaged
by the Swedes. The latter were attracted both by a desire for profit and by a
desire to plant the Latin faith in the surrounding lands.
Under King Gustav Vasa (1523-1560), the Reformation took place
in Sweden. During the reign of his son John III, a military detachment of
Lutheran converts, who, according to St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov), " still
breathed a fanatical predilection for their newborn faith," pursued the
Orthodox King, crossed the ice from the mainland to the island and attacked the
Monastery. February 20, 1578 " 18 old men and 16 novices were martyred for
their steadfastness in the Orthodox Faith." Their names with the note
"beaten by the Germans on Valaam elders and servants" were entered
into the Synodikon, which later ended up in Vasiliev Monastery: Hieromonk
Titus, Schema-monk Tikhon, Monk Gelasios, Monk Sergius, Monk Barlaam, Monk
Savva, Monk Konon, Monk Sylvester, Monk Cyprian, Monk Pimen, Monk John, Monk
Samon, Monk Jonah, Monk David, Monk Cornelius, Monk Niphon, Monk Athanasios,
Monk Serapion, Monk Barlaam, the novices Athanasios, Anthony, Luke, Leóntios,
Thomas, Dionysios, Philip, Ignatius, Basil, Pakhomios, Basil, Theophilos, John,
Theodore, and John.
2. The second dishonest talking point regards
the so-called kidnapped Ukrainian children taken by the Russian army. War propaganda featuring fake atrocities
committed against children is a hallmark of modern Western countries. England used it against
the Germans in WWI; the US famously used it against Iraq in 1990 – the
much-ballyhooed testimony that Saddam Hussein’s goons were taking babies from
hospital incubators and murdering them, which was later proven to be a
fabrication.
The Western countries are
stooping to this strategy once again vis-à-vis Russia. But, again, a little research dispels the
lies at once. Mrs Helen Andrews, who
possesses and displays a ruthless precision in her research and writing, put
this claim to rest more
than a year ago:
. . .
The rest may be here:
https://orthodoxreflections.com/evangelical-protestants-should-not-be-directing-us-foreign-policy/
Or here:
--
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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