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Clash of Religions Underpins Ukraine War and All Politics in the World
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Arvind Kumar | Date:04 Aug , 2022 0 Comments
Arvind Kumar

Arvind Kumar is a writer and an activist. He has analyzed conflicts and assessed geopolitical risks in his professional capacity for trading in the energy market. He lives in Houston, Texas. He can be reached at arvindk@uchicago.edu

The war in Ukraine has brought a stark reality to the fore – all politics of Europe and America, as well as all of their wars around the world, are rooted primarily in the mutual hatreds of various religions towards one another with ethnic and racial divisions being important secondary factors. While Russian President Vladimir Putin has described Ukrainians as belonging to his Orthodox Christian faith and has termed the Russians and Ukrainians as one people[1] in the context of opposing Catholic Europe’s use of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to expand eastwards, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is a Jew, has appealed to the global Jewry to oppose Russia[2].

Within America, it is the Roman Catholics and the Jews, particularly those of Russian and Polish descent, who have labeled themselves ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives,’ and have persistently advocated the idea of annihilating Russia. Both the East European Jews, known as the Ostjuden, and the Roman Catholics hold a deep-seated grudge against the Russian Orthodox Christians, and in the past hundred years, have used America as a tool to wreak vengeance against the Russian Orthodox Christians for the various defeats they have suffered at the hands of the Russians over several centuries.

On the other hand, Americans who have historically supported an isolationist foreign policy such as passing laws that existed between the two world wars which required non-interference in other countries’ wars, have been Protestants. This division has once again manifested itself within the US, including within the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., with the strongest American supporters of US involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war being Catholics and East European Jews in both the Republican and Democratic parties and the strongest opponents being Protestants. Influential figures in the media and academia too, regardless of political affiliation, are split along the same lines. Among the popular Republican-leaning radio and television anchors, Mark Levin who is Jewish, and Sean Hannity who is a Catholic, have expressed support for American involvement in the war, while Fox TV’s Tucker Carlson who is a Protestant is opposed to any involvement.

American politics, in general, is also organized along the same lines with the Republican Party representing the Protestants who are vocal in their calls for liberty, while the Democratic Party’s values are shaped by White Catholics and White Jews who seek a greater role for the government. Blacks, Hispanics and Sunni Muslims are accommodated within the Democratic Party to the extent that they help achieve a majority to pass legislation, and as long as they limit themselves to playing second fiddle to the White leadership. The leadership of this coalition has weaponized Sunni Islam and wields the Muslims as swords in one hand while they wield Blacks and Hispanics as human shields on the other hand.

It is in this context that the US State Department has used terrorists such as the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Kosovo Liberation Army, and Osama bin Laden to destabilize other cultures, even as the Democrats have hidden behind organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and movements like Black Lives Matter which purportedly exist to help Blacks but were founded, funded, and operated by Whites. For more than 65 years after its founding, NAACP had only White Jewish Presidents, and it would be 1976 before it got its first Black President.

In contrast to the Sunni Muslims, Shias are treated as enemies, as Shia dominated Iran is seen as an ally of the Russian Orthodox Christians. Even the Mizrahi Jews, who are of Asian and African descent, are disdainfully described as ‘Black Jews,’ branded as ‘Zionists,’ accused of running an apartheid state in Israel, and thrown under the bus by the Jews of European descent who view the Mizrahi Jews, the Likud party which is a party of the Mizrahi Jews as has been pointed out by the late Israeli politician Uri Avnery[3], and even Israel as existential threats to the Catholic-Ostjuden relationship with Sunni Islam.

The Ostjuden are Europeans first, and it is Europe and its politics, and not Israel, with which they feel a strong connection. Another reason that the White Jews view the Sunni Muslims in a favorable light is that the Ottoman Empire provided shelter to the Jews who were persecuted in Europe.

American elections too reflect these religious divisions with states where Catholics overwhelmingly outnumber Protestants being Democratic strongholds while Protestant dominated states tend to vote Republican. The swing states are those where the numerical strengths of the two groups are close to one another. Additionally, Jews vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party, and one exception to the Catholic-Protestant divide has been the Episcopalian church, which, despite being a tiny minority, has a disproportionately powerful presence in Washington, D.C.’s political establishment.

The leaders of this Protestant church have allied themselves with the Catholics ever since the interfaith dialogues were launched as part of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican in the 1960s, and this alliance has been responsible for many of the bipartisan measures in America’s two-party system, much to the chagrin of many Republican voters, who, without realizing the religious motives, view the bipartisanship by the Republican politicians as a betrayal of their values.

Although the Protestants are a majority in the US, the Catholic-Ostjuden coalition, which often becomes the Catholic-Ashkenazi coalition whenever the American Jews of Germanic descent join the coalition, has succeeded in using the policy of divide-and-rule to keep a tight grip on political power. The coalition instructs Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians, Muslims, Hindus and other minorities that their enemies are the White Protestants who are routinely vilified with labels such as ‘fascists,’ ‘crazy,’ ‘lunatics,’ ‘extremists,’ ‘racists,’ ‘white supremacists,’ ‘Nazis,’ and the two terms ‘far-right’ and ‘nationalists’ which are used with a negative connotation. Outside the US, these groups are set upon one another.

For their part, the White American Protestants are used as tools after being made to swallow the false propaganda fed to them that their enemies are the people of various religions and ethnicities throughout the world (except Catholics and Jews), all of whom allegedly persecute Christians. It is for sustaining this narrative that the US government invests billions of dollars every year in the media and academia, and the US State Department oversees the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) which generates propaganda against various religions and races of the world. In utter disregard for the principle of the separation of church and state, the US government has allowed USCIRF to be run by rabbis, bishops, cardinals and key functionaries of various religious organizations[4].

Among the targets of the US State Department’s defamatory attacks have been Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, both of whom are Protestants, and Azerbaijan’s President IlhamAliyev who has a Shia Muslim background. The media in the US is also segregated along religious and racial lines with the major media houses in both the print sector and the broadcast sector, including outlets such as the New York Times and CNN, being owned and run by members of a specific religion and race.

Even though the Protestants created the United States Constitution along with the Bill of Rights in order to prevent the kind of religious persecution they had faced in Europe at the hands of the Catholic and Anglican churches, the history of American Protestants, at least since the outbreak of the first world war, has been one of repeatedly being dragged into fighting various wars and creating social unrest in other countries on behalf of either the Catholics or the Ashkenazi Jews.

In the recent past, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, former US President Richard Nixon, and James Baker who was the Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush, argued in favor of an aid package for Russia with the aim of integrating it into Europe. They outlined a proposal that would be similar to the Marshall Plan which was used to peacefully integrate Germany into Europe after it was defeated in the Second World War. While Baker and Nixon were Republicans, their proposal to integrate Russia into Europe found support among key people in the Democratic Party too with US President Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, proposing the ‘Partnership for Peace’ program in January 1994 which would be open to Russia in order to achieve a united Europe. According to Warren Christopher, the program was intended to “turn former adversaries into partners” and “be open to all nations in Eastern Europe on a non-discriminatory basis.”[5]

The plan was immediately opposed by Stephen Hadley who was a Roman Catholic and who would go on to become the National Security Advisor in the George W. Bush administration, two-time National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft who was a Mormon married to a Catholic, and Arnold Kanter who was yet another Roman Catholic and who had been the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. The three of them lost no time in co-authoring an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times denouncing the ‘Partnership for Peace’ proposal and advocating a hawkish militarist role for the NATO which would expand to include Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Ukraine while keeping out Russia and treating it as an enemy[6].

In 1997, during the hearings before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations[7], John Ashcroft, the son of a Pentecostal minister who was a Senator at that time and would become the U.S. Attorney General in the George W. Bush administration, stated that he was a “bit concerned” about NATO’s enlargement and argued, “I think to allow enlargement, without understanding our relationship to Russia in the context of it, would be in error, and I am sure you are doing that. But in one sense it seems like we are isolating a potential ally in Russia. We are telling them that you are not a part of the European or western oriented group of nations, and that troubles me, particularly when it appears to me that the administration is beginning to, while isolating a potential ally, embrace a new threat – the People’s Republic of China – particularly the administration’s consideration of allowing nuclear cooperation with China.”

Others at the hearing who wanted cooperation with Russia included the last American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, Jr. and Thomas Pickering who had served as the ambassador to Russia between 1993 and 1996 after being appointed by Bill Clinton. Matlock stated that he “disagree[d] that the enlargement of NATO significantly advance[d] U.S. security interests” and described it as “a misguided policy” that “could go down in history as a profound strategic blunder,” while Pickering wanted NATO enlargement and NATO cooperation with Russia to go hand in hand and argued that “NATO does not need an enemy.”

As proof of Russia’s sincerity, Pickering listed several steps taken by Russia including signing on to the NATO-Russia Founding Act and the Partnership for Peace program, joining the peacekeeping forces in Bosnia side-by-side with NATO, ratifying the START I Treaty and implementing its reductions in arms levels, supporting START II and agreeing to work on START III, and taking the Permanent Joint Council of the Founding Act seriously and working with the Duma to implement its goals. He also stated that “the reintegration of Germany and the other Axis Powers into the community of democracies and the West stands as one of the great diplomatic accomplishments” and wanted to take the same path with Russia.

This position faced a strong push back from Bill Clinton’s second Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Stephen Hadley, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Although Kissinger, who is a Germanic Jew, has recently called for a surrender by Ukraine, that is merely pragmatic advice in the face of Russia gnawing away at Ukraine’s territory on the Black Sea coast. In the 1997 Senate Committee hearings, Kissinger had argued in favor of treating Russia as a threat and expanding NATO eastward.

Another Senator, the late Paul Wellstone, who like Kissinger was Jewish, played coy and pretended that he did not know enough about the issue despite being a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and of Ukrainian descent, and extolled Madeleine Albright as the person who was knowledgeable on the issue and deferred to her. In reality, Wellstone had carefully positioned himself as a ‘progressive’ peacenik who opposed wars and had become the darling of the antiwar ‘left’ and had to choose his words carefully to maintain this perception. Brzezinski, a Polish Catholic, claimed that the purpose of “NATO expansion [was] not primarily a moral crusade, meant to undo the injustice the Central European peoples suffered during the half-century long Soviet oppression,” but in his denial was the confirmation that vengeance against Russia was on his mind.

On the Russian side, all its leaders including Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin wanted to join NATO after transforming it from a military alliance into a peaceful coalition. Russia even joined the ‘Partnership for Peace’ program with its Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev signing the program’s framework document[8]. Despite this action, in response to a question whether Russia would be welcomed into the NATO if they met the criteria of becoming a democracy, Albright made the false claim that Russia had “said that they do not wish to be a part of it.”

All along, it was Albright and others like Hadley, Kissinger, and Wellstone who wanted to keep the fire burning by treating Russia as a threat and expanding NATO eastwards. While Richard Nixon, James Baker, Warren Christopher, James Matlock, Jr., Thomas Pickering, and John Ashcroft, who were for cooperation with Russia, were all Protestants, Madeleine Albright, like Stephen Hadley and Zbigniew Brzezinski, had a Catholic background, and it is the Catholics who once again prevailed in setting the foreign policy.

In 1993, Albright had displayed her aggressiveness and hostility towards the Orthodox Christian world during a discussion on Bosnia when she demanded of Colin Powell who was then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”[9] Albright’s attitude had resulted in Colin Powell writing that American troops were not “toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global chessboard.”[10] When Albright later became the Secretary of State, NATO was transformed from a defensive force to an aggressive outfit that started wars to grab the resources of other cultures and destroy their infrastructure in order to prevent them from prospering. Albright, along with General Wesley Clark who is also a Roman Catholic, relentlessly bombed Belgrade in 1999, and after their bombing campaign, the two of them used their private investment firms to attempt a take over of various industrial sectors in Kosovo[11] which was placed under ‘supervised independence,’[12] a thinly veiled term for ‘control by the conquerors.’

Albright’s transformation of the NATO into a de facto papal army to wage holy wars and conquer other cultures has resulted in NATO launching wars against Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Albright’s hostility towards the Eastern Orthodox people was the reason for the US instigating Catholic Slovenia, Catholic Croatia, Muslim Bosnia and Muslim Kosovo to secede from Yugoslavia.

Earlier, as ambassador to the United Nations, a bitter Albright had been responsible for the US vetoing a second term for Boutros Boutros-Ghali as the UN Secretary General as she saw him as an obstacle in her efforts to start an all out war against the Serbian people. She followed up this action by creating the infamous oil-for-food program in which starving the civilian population of Iraq was used as an official policy tool to achieve her ends. In Albright, the Catholics had found a worthy torchbearer who not only advanced their interests with a missionary zeal, but carried out her tasks in a cold-hearted manner as she was always angry and lacked the ability to have empathy for her victims. When CBS anchor Leslie Stahl pointed out that 500,000 children had died in Iraq as a result of the starvation policy, Albright stated that the deaths were “worth it!”[13]

The success of the Catholics, despite comprising just twenty percent of the American population, can be attributed to John F. Kennedy becoming the first Catholic President of the US in 1961. Accusations and rebuttals about Kennedy being more loyal to the Vatican than to the United States had formed a major part of the election campaign in 1960. After Kennedy became the President, the floodgates were opened to the Catholics and their Jewish allies who have completely taken over the institutions and muscled out the Protestants from participating in the shaping of America’s foreign and domestic policies.

Among the institutions the Catholics have taken over from the Protestants are the US Supreme Court where all nine judges are either Jews or Catholics, and various universities and organizations which receive money from the government. Kennedy also created the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) which is known to interfere in global geopolitics. The organization, which is headed by Samantha Power, another Catholic, grants hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars to Catholic organizations every year[14], and has been accused of causing strife around the world. In 2012, it was expelled from Russia for meddling in Russian politics.

Catholics also exert their influence through international institutions such as the United Nations which can be readily seen from the fact that Catholic institutions are disproportionately favored as the partner organizations of the UN. The rise of Catholic power in America in the post-Kennedy years coincided with the wane of the power of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs whose peak and decline are described in Gregg Herken’s book, Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington[15].

Since Kennedy became the President, Catholics and their allies have continuously held at least one of the important offices of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor and the head of Central Intelligence Agency which together play a key role in formulating the foreign policy of the US. Robert McNamara, Frank Carlucci, Les Aspin, William Cohen and Lloyd Austin who have served as the Secretary of Defense; Henry Kissinger (who, like Carlucci, also served as the National Security Advisor), Cyrus Vance, Alexander Haig, Madeleine Albright, John Kerry and Antony Blinken who have served as the Secretary of State; Zbignew Brzezinski, Richard Allen, William Clark, Stephen Hadley, Thomas Donilon, Herbert McMaster, Robert O’Brien and Jake Sullivan who have served as the National Security Advisor; John McCone, William Colby, William Casey, John Deutsch, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan and William Burns who have served as the Director of CIA; and President Joe Biden who had been a key member of the Senate Foreign relations Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee for more than thirty years, all had either a Roman Catholic or Jewish upbringing. Many others in key decision making roles, like former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have been affiliated with Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution in Washington, D.C. which is a prime recruiting ground for the CIA.

Additionally, since 1962, when John McCormack became the first Catholic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Catholics have controlled the legislative agenda for both the foreign and domestic policies by holding the speakership for 44 of the past 60 years. During this period, seven out of the ten Speakers – John McCormack, Tip O’Neill, Tom Foley, Newt Gingrich, Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner and Paul Ryan – have been Catholics. Within the House of Representatives and the Senate, Catholics hold thirty percent of the seats while Jews hold an additional eight percent. Together with the minority groups and the Episcopalians on their side, the ‘liberals’ can create a bipartisan majority at will in both chambers of the Congress.

During the Ronald Reagan administration, Catholics even succeeded in making the US enter into a diplomatic relationship with the Vatican after 117 years. In 1867, the US Congress had prohibited funding for diplomats to the Vatican. However, in 1983, despite vocal opposition from Protestants, Clement Zablocki, a Catholic representative from Wisconsin, introduced legislation that resulted in repealing the 1867 ban.

It was during the Reagan administration that Catholics started openly asserting themselves. When the Protestant Secretary of State George Shultz worked towards reducing tensions with the Soviet Union by pursuing a policy of arms reduction and denuclearization, he faced opposition from the Roman Catholic CIA Director William Casey who ganged up with the Episcopalian Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, a feud that played out in public[16]. Another Catholic in the Reagan administration was Reagan’s Chief of Staff Donald Regan. According to Nancy Reagan’s memoirs, Donald Regan terrorized others in the Reagan administration and tightly controlled access to the president.

At the Reykjavik Summit in 1986, Shultz, Ronald Reagan who was a Presbyterian, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had come tantalizingly close to eliminating all nuclear weapons. Reagan’s successors, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, too were instinctively inclined to favor cooperation with the Russians even though their opponents within their own administrations eventually succeeded in overturning any improvement in the relationship with Russia. Bush signed an agreement which paved the way for an astronaut to be launched by the Russians and sent to Mir, a cosmonaut to be launched by Americans aboard an American space shuttle, and the space shuttle and Mir to dock with each other. The cooperation in the area of space exploration was extended further in 1993 when Bill Clinton announced that Russia would be a partner in the International Space Station.

However, the relationship with Russia became worse after Madeleine Albright became Bill Clinton’s second Secretary of State, and further deteriorated after George W. Bush became the President, as his administration had overwhelmingly Catholic decision makers and even came to be known as the first truly Catholic presidency[17]. Bush had also outsourced much of his foreign policy to the “neocon” group, Project for the New American Century. Three members of the group, Lewis Libby who was a Catholic, Paul Wolfowitz whose family had a Polish Jewish background, and ZalmayKhalilzad who was a Sunni Muslim had co-authored the controversial Defense Planning Guidance document for the US Department of Defense in 1992. When the New York Times published excerpts from the draft of the document[18], it ruffled feathers in capitals across the world leading to the language in the document being toned down.

The document brazenly declared that the US alone must be a strong power, have control over the world’s raw materials and resources even if they belonged to other countries, and prevent other nations from becoming stronger or forming independent alignments. The document even advocated playing Ukraine against Russia to prevent the Russians from accessing their own resources and termed India as harboring “hegemonic aspirations.” Ironically, the only country the document described in positive terms was the Islamic Republic of Pakistan with which it called for an American military relationship as the country was allegedly the key to stability in Southwest Asia and Central Asia.

In recent times, President Donald Trump, yet another Protestant, wanted a better relationship with Russia, non-interference in other countries’ conflicts, focus on domestic policies along with strengthening the local economy, and for European countries to pay their fair share in NATO. These positions, as well as Trump’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ were identical to the policy positions and the slogan used in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. In response, Trump faced immense opposition from the CIA, and he too has expressed his distrust of the intelligence provided by the CIA.

For a long time, the CIA has been known to be a Catholic institution and has even been nicknamed as ‘Catholics in Action’ and the ‘Catholic Intelligence Agency,’[19] and its intelligence has been suspect. The most famous cases of the American intelligence apparatus planting fake intelligence in order to push the US into taking military action have been the false claims of the Vietnamese attacking American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 and its fake claims of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction in 2002, a position supported by the then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who has now become a Catholic.

Even before their ascendancy in American politics, the loudest proponents of a hawkish policy against the Soviet Union were the Roman Catholics. The shrillest critics of the Russians, Senator Joe McCarthy and Edward Hart who was the first Chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee after it became a standing committee, were both Catholics, and Henry Luce, the founder of TIME and the author of the American Century which called for a dominant American role in global affairs was Catholic jure uxoris.

The anti-Russian sentiment was the dominant theme among American Catholics during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s as they held the Russians responsible for the civil war in Catholic Spain. The role of the Catholic church in the break-up of the Soviet Union too has been widely acknowledged with Pope John Paul II being credited[20] for playing an active role against the Soviets during the Cold War, and Catholic Poland playing a key role in shaking up the Communist bloc before Catholic Lithuania became the first country to declare independence from the Soviet Union.

The Cold War itself had been based on the containment strategy of George Kennan, who, as the deputy chief of the American mission in Moscow, pointed out in his famous ‘Long Telegram[21] of 1946 that it was not necessary to attack the Soviets as they were not risk takers but withdrew when they encountered resistance. According to Kennan, it was enough to have sufficient force and make clear the readiness to use it, but it would be rare to actually require to do so. Kennan, a Protestant, went on to become a critic of American involvement in both the Korean War and the Vietnam War which resulted from a militarization of his containment strategy.

After Kennan was sidelined, many of the later proponents of the Cold War who were responsible for military actions around the world convinced the world that their fight was an ideological war against Communism, but their real target was Russia and not Communism as seen from the fact that they supported the Communist state of China. Besides, the Catholics and Jews have always been the most ardent supporters of socialism in large numbers as they control the most number of educational and healthcare institutions as well as other non-profit organizations which benefit from government largesse based on socialist policies.

The history of American Jewish groups lobbying Washington, D.C. to take an anti-Russian position goes back to the time before the Bolsheviks came to power, and after the Bolsheviks overthrew the Mensheviks in the October Revolution of 1917, American forces even participated in the Russian civil war. A tract entitled “An address to their fellow-Jewish citizens by American Jewish organizations” dated December 1, 1920, and which was published in the Annual Report of the American Jewish Committee[22], pointed out that Leon Trotsky and YakovSverdlov, who were Jewish, were among the leadership of the Bolsheviks (although in a minority), and “the leaders of the Mensheviki, who are the sworn foes of Bolshevism, are to a large extent Jews.” Many East European Jews migrated to the US in the early twentieth century both before and after the Jewish Mensheviks were overthrown from power in Russia, and it is the descendants of these East European Jews who control the politics of American Jewry even today.

Although the arrival of the Sephardic Jews and the Germanic Jews to America pre-dated the arrival of East European Jews, the East European Jews outnumber the other Jews and hence dictate the politics of the Jewish Americans. Until the early twentieth century, the Germanic Jews, who saw themselves as polished intellectuals, wanted to be accepted by the Christian mainstream in Europe as well as in the US and worked towards assimilation. They set up various institutions such as the American Jewish Committee, had a presence in politics and the banking industry, viewed the East European Jews as ghetto Jews who needed to be civilized and promoted Reform Judaism for this purpose.

However, once the East European Jews became numerically superior, the Germanic Jews were forced to appease them and accommodate their political positions – which were primarily focused on the destruction of Russia – in order to not split the American Jewry and lose their influence over American Jews in general.

The feud of the East European Jews with the Russians goes back to 1595 when the church in the Polish-Lithuanian Empire broke off relations with the Orthodox church and became Catholic by placing itself under the authority of the Pope. The Jews had been on good terms with the Muslim rulers of Spain but when they were expelled by the Catholics under the Alhambra Decree of the Vatican after the fall of the Islamic rulers, they sought asylum among the Orthodox Christians. When the Polish-Lithuanian empire became Catholic and started persecuting the followers of the Russian Orthodox churches in what was called Little Russia, an area that encompassed today’s Ukraine, the Jews were put in charge of levying taxes on these churches on behalf of the Polish rulers.

The Jews also held the keys to the churches and collected a fee to permit any ceremony to be performed in the Orthodox churches. Subsequently, when Russia defeated the Polish empire and took over Little Russia, the Jews, faced retaliation and have been repeatedly persecuted ever since.

The actions of Joe Biden’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, are an extension of this conflict between the Jews and Russians. Nuland brings a 117-year old family resentment to policy-making, as her grandfather left the Russian empire to escape the pogroms against Jews in 1907. Nuland, who harbors religious hatred against the Russian Orthodox Church, advocates a very aggressive foreign policy against Russia and is one of those responsible for the covert action which resulted in the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014[23]. Her husband, Robert Kagan, is a co-founder of the “neocon” outfit Project for the New American Century[24].

European politics too is based on religious divisions with most of the hostility directed at the Orthodox Christians. In the 2021 elections in Germany, one of the key issues was the nature of Germany’s relationship with Russia. While many elements in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) took a belligerent stance against a closer relationship with Russia and even threatened Russia with sanctions for taking away business from Ukraine by building the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline[25], the Social Democratic Party (SPD) has traditionally argued for friendlier relationship with Russia[26]. While it is widely known that the CDU is the party of the Catholics and SPD has its voter base among the Protestants, the startling similarities between the religious demographic map of Germany and the map of the electoral results of the 2021 German elections shows that religion is the primary basis of political divisions.

In Hungary and France too, it is the Protestant Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the Protestant President Emmanuel Macron respectively who want to sue for peace with Russia. Macron’s position is consistent with the history of French politics being defined vis-a-vis the status of political interference by the Catholic Church. One of the defining characteristics of each of the Republics of France after the French Revolution has been to be either pro-Catholic or anti-Catholic.

Although the term ‘left’ today signifies the alliance between Catholics and Jews of European descent, and the term ‘right’ is used as a slur against everyone else, it was in France during the French Revolution that the political terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ originated with the Catholics sitting on the right of the President in the National Assembly and the Protestants sitting on the left. The French Revolution itself was a movement by the Protestants and the Jews against the power of the Catholics. The terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ started being used interchangeably with ‘left’ and ‘right’ after nineteenth century Britain had the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party as the two major parties.

Religious divisions have been the main driver of not just politics but also the wars of Europe and America. The Napoleonic wars and the rule of Napoleon were based on hostilities as well as agreements with the Catholic Church, the Crimean war started off as a war against Russia when France asserted the rights of the Catholics in the Russian empire and joined forces with the Ottoman Empire which asserted the rights of the Sunni Muslims, the Irish civil war was a war between Catholics and Protestants, and both the world wars saw the Catholic powers on one side with the Protestants joining the anti-Catholics and the Orthodox Christians on the other side. During the first world war, Vatican actively lobbied Italy to join the war on the side of the Catholic powers of Austria-Hungary and Germany, but the Italian Foreign Minister who was an Anglican signed a deal to get Italy to fight on the side of the Allied Powers, an action that led to anti-war street protests by the Italian people who were Catholics. The Third Republic of France, which was opposed to Vatican’s interference in its politics and was an anti-Catholic Republic, too joined the Allied Powers as it was led by a virulently anti-Catholic President.

Religion played a key role during the Second World War too with Vatican being heavily involved. British journalist John Cornwell uncovered the fact that the rise of Adolf Hitler had been facilitated by Pope Pius XII[27] who was instrumental in the Vatican signing a deal with Hitler which allowed the Vatican to directly control German Catholics in various ways including by collecting a tax from them in exchange for the withdrawal of the Catholic Church from involvement in German politics. That act resulted in dismantling the main opposition party that could have challenged Hitler.

The Pope also trivialized the holocaust of Jews. After the Second World War, Vatican was the main driver of American involvement in Vietnam, and the Catholic Church was the only beneficiary of the Vietnam War as several villages in the country converted en masse to Catholicism during the war. It was John F. Kennedy who increased the number of American troops in Vietnam and started an active war, but even earlier, according to Jason Henderson of the US Army, Cardinal Francis Spellman, an influential leader in the Catholic church, played a key role in persuading the Eisenhower administration to get involved in Vietnam, and the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles took his son Avery, who was a Cardinal in Spellman’s diocese, for a three day meeting with Pope Pius XII[28].

Henderson also points out that Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA and brother of John Foster Dulles, took Spellman’s help to overthrow the democratically elected government in Guatemala in a coup in 1954. That coup had the support of the Catholic Church and resulted in the replacement of the Presbyterian Jacobo Arbenz by a Roman Catholic military officer Elfeg oMonzon. Later, Spellman was an important participant in the Second Vatican Council. In recent times, apart from the ongoing war in Ukraine, NATO’s war against Yugoslavia in the 1990s was a war by the Catholics against the Orthodox Christians of Eastern Europe.

Like the Episcopalian Church in the US, one exception among the Orthodox Christian churches of Europe is the Greek Orthodox Church which was brought into the fold of the West as a result of the Second Vatican Council[29], an act that resulted in a protest by the Russian Orthodox Church[30]. Greece was also ‘westernized’ by the military junta between 1967 and 1973 when the government eliminated the cultural influences of the eastern world. Like the Catholic and Protestant dominated countries, Greece has been admitted to the European Union, but others like Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia are kept waiting endlessly on account of their populations not belonging to the “correct” religions. The Sunni Muslims of Turkey and the people of various Orthodox faiths such as Romanians and Bulgarians are viewed as being useful allies of NATO who can supply soldiers during wartime, but are treated as unwanted people who should not be part of European society during peacetime.

Attempts by Turkey and Serbia to build energy independence or a strong economy independent of the EU and its currency have been met with false accusations of these countries perpetrating human rights violations. NATO also expects Turkish people to defend the West European nations, but should Turkey find itself in a war with Syria or another country, NATO will only safeguard the Bosporus, the Dardanelles and other parts of Turkey which are of strategic importance to Europe but will not defend the lives of the Turkish people.

Over the years, the Catholic-Ostjuden coalition within the US government and the European Union along with their junior partners, the Sunni Muslims, have waged several wars to prevent the Orthodox Christian world and the Shia Muslim nations from embarking on even peaceful infrastructure projects that would benefit ordinary people. They launched a war against Yugoslavia when Russia was building an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Europe through Yugoslavia, they tried cutting off Russia’s access to the Caspian Sea by instigating Chechnya and Georgia against Russia, they started a war in Syria when Qatar wanted to build a natural gas pipeline to Turkey transiting through Syria, they accused Shia countries of building the Shia Corridor which was nothing but a road from Iran to Lebanon as though building roads was a crime, and they have now caused a war by trying to expand NATO into Ukraine.

The Catholic-Ostjuden leaders in the West want to escalate the Ukraine War into a world war, but a key ingredient for any world war is the use of India as the source of cannon fodder. Opposing Russia in the UN would have played right into the hands of the West and led to India being trapped into a commitment to send troops to spill their blood for what would effectively be another Crusade against the Orthodox Christians. That is why India’s neutrality in the UN frustrated the West and led to resentment in Washington, D.C., Brussels and Rome. It is high time that others in the world too woke up to political realities and set themselves free by refusing to cater to the perpetual-war machine of powerful religious groups.

Reference:

[1]          “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Vladimir Putin, 12 July 2021, Kremlin website,  http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181

[2]          “Zelensky in Hebrew appeal to world Jews: ‘Cry out’ against Russian invasion,” The Times of Israel, 2 March 2022, https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/zelensky-in-hebrew-appeal-to-world-jews-cry-out-against-russian-invasion/

[3]          “When and How the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi Rift Was Born,” Uri Avnery, Haaretz, 28 February 2017, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2017-02-28/ty-article/.premium/when-and-how-the-ashkenazi-mizrahi-rift-was-born/0000017f-e3a9-d9aa-afff-fbf98d1d0000

[4]          “Anti-Hindu USCIRF: Sex, crime, bigotry in the name of religious freedom,” Arvind Kumar, The Sunday Guardian, 28 December 2019, https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/news/anti-hindu-uscirf-sex-crime-bigotry-name-religious-freedom

[5]          “Promoting Security and Stability in Europe,” Remarks by Secretary of State Warren Christopher at White House news conference, Washington, D.C., 7 January 1994, US Department of State Dispatch, Vol. 5, No. 2, page 17, https://books.google.com/books?id=KJhHAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA17

[6]          “A Partnership of Unequals Can Be Satisfactory to All : Europe: Promises of NATO membership won’t address security worries in the East.” Brent Scowcroft, Stephen Hadley and Arnold Kanter, Los Angeles Times, 7 January 1994, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-01-07-me-9308-story.html

[7]          The Debate on NATO Enlargement, Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, One Hundred Fifth Congress, First Session, October 7, 9, 22, 28, 30 and November 5, 1997, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-105shrg46832/html/CHRG-105shrg46832.htm

[8]          “Russia joins NATO ‘Peace Partnership,’” Tyler Marshall, Los Angeles Times, 23 June 1994, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-06-23-mn-7714-story.html

[9]          “In Farewell, Albright Jabs at Powell,” John Diamond and Washington Bureau, Chicago Tribune, 10 January 2001, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2001-01-10-0101100176-story.html

[10]        Seyom Brown, The Illusion of Control: Force and Foreign Policy in the 21st Century (Brookings Institution Press, Washington, D.C., 2004), p. 33

[11]        “Lobbying for lucre in Kosovo, former US officials raise larger questions about conflict of interest rules,” Tim Fernholz, Quartz, 12 December 2012, https://qz.com/36150/lobbying-for-lucre-in-kosovo-former-us-officials-raise-larger-questions-about-conflict-of-interest-rules/

[12]        “U.S. Recognizes Kosovo as Independent State,” Secretary of State Condolezza Rice, Washington, D.C., 18 February 2008, https://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/rm/2008/02/100973.htm

[13]        “‘We Think the Price Is Worth It,’ Media uncurious about Iraq policy’s effects – there or here,” Rahul Mahajan, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 1 November 2001, https://fair.org/extra/we-think-the-price-is-worth-it/

[14]        See, for example, the amounts sent for some of the years at “Following the money from the White House,” Tom Gallagher, National Catholic Reporter, 22 March 2012, https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/following-money-white-house

[15]        “Triumph and Decline of America’s Protestant Ascendancy,” Mark Tooley, The American Spectator, 3 February 2015, https://spectator.org/triumph-and-decline-of-americas-protestant-ascendancy/

[16]        “The Shultz-Weinberger Feud,” Philip Taubman, The New York Times, 14 April 1985, https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/14/magazine/the-shultz-weinberger-feud.html

[17]        “Is George Bush leading America’s first truly Catholic presidency?” RNS Blog Editor, Religious News Service, 15 April 2008, https://religionnews.com/2008/04/15/is-george-bush-leading-americas-first-truly-catholic-presidency3/

[18]        “Excerpts From Pentagon’s Plan: ‘Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival'”, The New York Times, 8 March 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/excerpts-from-pentagon-s-plan-prevent-the-re-emergence-of-a-new-rival.html

[19]        “Why Catholics thrive in the CIA,” Robert Wargas, Catholic Herald, 5 May 2016, https://catholicherald.co.uk/why-catholics-thrive-in-the-cia/

[20]        “Pope arrives in native Poland talking about weather, NATO Pontiff wants his country included in European role,” New York Times News Service, Baltimore Sun, 31 May 1997, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-06-01-1997152055-story.html

[21]        “Telegram,” The Charge in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State dated 22 February 1946, from the National Security Archive, George Washington University, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm

[22]        The American Jewish Year Book 5682, Volume 23, edited by Harry Schneiderman, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1921, p. 374, https://www.google.com/books/edition/American_Jewish_Year_Book/zKdKAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA374

[23]        “Who is Victoria Nuland? A really bad idea as a key player in Biden’s foreign policy team,” Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies, Marcy Winograd, Salon, 19 January 2021, https://www.salon.com/2021/01/19/who-is-victoria-nuland-a-really-bad-idea-as-a-key-player-in-bidens-foreign-policy-team/

[24]        See the profile of the Project for the New American Century at the website of the Militarist Monitor, https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/project_for_the_new_american_century/

[25]        “Germany’s CDU party leader threatens Russia with sanctions if Nord Stream 2 harms Ukraine,” Tass, 31 July 2021, https://tass.com/world/1321467

[26]        “Built to Last: Coalition Formation and German-Russian Relations after the Election,” Cornell Overfield, Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2 October 2017, https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/10/built-last-coalition-formation-german-russian-relations-election/

[27]        “Hitler’s Pope,” John Cornwell, Vanity Fair, October 1999, https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1999/10/hitlers-pope

[28]        “The Influence of the Catholic Church on the Esenhower Administration’s Decision to Directly Intervene in Vietnam,” Jason A. Henderson, Major, U.S. Army, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA589877.pdf

[29]        “Joint Catholic-Orthodox Declaration” of 7 December 1965 on the website of the Vatican, https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/speeches/1965/documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19651207_common-declaration.html

[30]        “A Protest to Patriarch Athenagoras On the Lifting of the Anathemas of 1054,” 2 / 15 December 1965, Orthodox Christian Information Center, http://orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/philaret_lifting.aspx

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