Reconsidering Putin & the Russkis (and the Muslims)

This is interesting.  Ivan Ilyin simply does not believe the US Gummint Line about religion, and in case you forgot that Official Line, look at anything said by GWBush or--more recently--McMaster.  While they may be 'good men,' they are ignorant as raccoons about the reality of religious influence in the lives of men--including Muslims.

Anyhow, anyone who influenced Solzhenitsyn and Putin deserves our attention and understanding.

...Ilyin was critical of Western-style democracy, emphasizing instead the importance of a strong government in accord with Russia’s autocratic heritage. Nor did he believe in religious freedom as most Westerners understand the term, instead arguing that its unique role in the forming of Russian society entitled the Orthodox Church to a permanent, special position in Russian life. And to tell the truth, Ilyin was nearly as hostile toward the Western bourgeois as he was toward Bolsheviks, for in his judgment Bolshevism was the natural consequence of a bourgeois order.

Safety and comfort had always been the true ideals of liberal democratic states, he insisted, and as a result “noble motives (religious, moral, patriotic, and spiritual) weakened and withered in human souls,” making room for “ridiculous, evil, perverse and avaricious plans advanced by totalitarian demagogues of the Left and Right.” The rise of a class of professional liars—unscrupulous journalists and lawyers—went hand-in-hand with a massive program of de-Christianization, he claimed, and quite aside from the eternal spiritual damage wrought, the sociopolitical consequence would be that the law of the land would lose its sanctity. Sooner or later the materialist perspective of the bourgeois class leads to violence and anarchy, concluded Ilyin, just as the Enlightenment’s “denial of a personal devil is gradually replaced by the justification of the diabolic principle.”...

Recall that Solzhenitsyn nailed the West's vices in his Harvard speech which has been buried in benign neglect by our 'aristocracy', which is near-synonymous with our Cloud People/City Class/Establishment.   Also recall that Ilyin discusses vis-a-vis religion applies perforce to Mohammedanism.  See "sharia law."  It is amazing that the Intellectualoids simply have not figured this out.

Nor have many of them understood "nationalism" correctly.  Ilyin does:

A love for one’s own nation does not inevitably imply hatred for other peoples, as self-assertion is not synonymous with a sure attack, and defense of what is one’s own does not mean expropriation of what is not. This makes nationalism and patriotism manifestations of an elevated spirit, rather than waves of self-conceit, egotism and bloody barbarism, as some of today’s journalists, who do not remember their forefathers and have squandered their national spirit, attempt to explain it.

This guy died in 1954 and he's talking about NBCCBSABCCNN today!

OK.  Time to listen to Shostakovich's Seventh again, eh??