A correction and a podcast

Who is the leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church? A reader sets us straight. How exactly does Russia subvert democracies? Monique Camarra and Livia Ponzio explain, with the help of Yuri Bezmenov.

As a reader very correctly wrote to me in response to yesterday’s newsletter,

Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople is not “[t]he leader of the world’s Eastern Orthodox Church.” The linked New York Times piece got it wrong too, calling him “[t]he spiritual leader of the world’s Eastern Orthodox Christians,” which he would love to be, but is not. The Cosmopolitan Globalist is forgiven for the error, it being Lent and all.

As it happens, Bartholomew is engaged in a long-running dispute with his counterpart in Moscow, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill. The details are a tedious morass, and in full candor—speaking as an Orthodox Christian—both parties have covered themselves in dishonor. The latest arena of their decades-long festival of mutual loathing has been, well, Ukraine — which is actually part of the historic Moscow Patriarchate, and within which the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate has set up a parallel network of bishops loyal to it, in an effort to siphon money and prestige away from Moscow. The next-most-recent act of Moscow against Constantinople has been to set up its own parallel network of bishops in Africa (historically Constantinople’s territory); and of course the most-recent act was actually to invade Ukraine. No one doubts but that Kirill’s men would have cleaned house in parishes throughout the country had the invasion succeeded.

Anyway, believe it nor not that is the simple synopsis. I guess His All-Holiness Bartholomew has succeeded to some extent if The New York Times gave him such a gratifying mischaracterization!

Our reader is entirely correct, and this is not only an important matter of faith, but a highly important matter of politics, especially, as he notes, in Ukraine. I’m mortified that this error slipped past me; I, of all people, should know better. And I did know better. But I put that up at the end of  the day, when I was tired and distracted. Mea culpa.

For those who wish better to understand this, a reading list:

• Statement by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church concerning the encroachment of the Patriarchate of Constantinople on the canonical territory of the Russian Church

• Speech by the [Ukrainian] President on the results of the All-Ukrainian Orthodox Unity Council

• His Holiness Patriarch Kirill: Patriarch Bartholomew has lapsed into schism

• Russia’s Orthodox Church paints the conflict in Ukraine as a holy war (paywalled)

• How Geopolitics are driving the biggest Eastern Orthodox schism in a Millennium

• Minutes of the Holy Synod meeting of December 28, 2018 (in Russian)

• Metropolitan Hilarion: Believers of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church are being forced to drive into a new schismatic structure created in Ukraine (in Russian)

• Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is not just a war of politics—it’s a holy war.

The religious dimensions of the conflict in Ukraine have been gravely neglected in Western media coverage. (Surprisingly, one exception has been Rolling Stone. See: How one priest turned Putin’s invasion into a holy war.)

---

Have you listened to our podcast with Monique Camarra and Livia Ponzio about the global disinformation network Russia has built to confuse, overwhelm, and destabilize democracy? Prefatory to listening, you might wish to watch, if you haven’t already, this classic interview with Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB operative who defected to the United States in the early 1970s:

For those of you who find it too time-consuming to watch long interviews, here’s a transcript of the most significant remarks, though the whole interview is truly worth your time:

Bezmenov: Ideological subversion is the process, which is legitimate, overt, and open; you can see it with your own eyes. All you have to do, all American mass media has to do, is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes, and they can see it. There is no mystery. [It has] nothing to do with espionage. I know that espionage intelligence-gathering looks more romantic. It sells more deodorants through the advertising, probably. That’s why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond-type of thrillers.

But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion and [the] opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15 percent of time, money, and manpower [are] spent on espionage as such. The other 85 percent is a slow process, which we call either “ideological subversion,” or “active measures” in the language of the KGB—or “psychological warfare.” What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality, of every American, to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.

It’s a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages. The first one [is] demoralization; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. …

The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society. …

The demoralization process in [the] United States is basically completed already. For the last 25 years... actually, it’s over-fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.

As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it. ... That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.

So basically America is stuck with demoralization and unless ... even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American[s], it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.

The next stage is destabilization. This time [the] subverter does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption; whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby doesn’t matter any more. This time—and it takes only from two to five years to destabilize a nation—what matters [are] essentials: economy, foreign relations, [and] defense systems. And you can see it quite clearly that in some areas, in such sensitive areas as defense and [the] economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in [the] United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it fourteen years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process [would have gone] that fast.

The next stage, of course, is crisis. It may take only up to six weeks to bring a country to the verge of crisis. You can see it in Central America now.

And, after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure, and economy, you have [the so-called] period of normalization. It may last indefinitely. Normalization is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda. When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in ‘68, Comrade Brezhnev said, “Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalized.” …

Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system trains another generation of people who think they are living at the peacetime. False. [The] United States is in a state of war: undeclared, total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system. And the initiator of this war is not Comrade Andropov, of course. It’s the system. However ridiculous it may sound, [it is] the world Communist system (or the world Communist conspiracy). Whether I scare some people or not, I don’t give a hoot. If you are not scared by now, nothing can scare you.

But you don’t have to be paranoid about it. What actually happens now [is] that unlike [me], you have literally several years to live on unless [the] United States [wakes] up. The time bomb is ticking: with every second [he snaps his fingers], the disaster is coming closer and closer. Unlike [me], you will have nowhere to defect to. Unless you want to live in Antarctica with penguins. This is it. This is the last country of freedom and possibility.

Although communism itself has been discredited (among everyone who experienced it, at least), people trained to think in these terms—the KGB, in particular—inherited the Soviet Union’s institutions of external subversion and control them to this day. As Monique and Livia explain, Russia employs the four-stage subversion model Bezmenov described to advance Russian foreign policy aims, which are hardly an improvement on the old ones. This model works, unfortunately.

If you’ve ever asked yourself why unregenerate anti-vaxxers are prone to believing that Ukrainians are Nazis, this podcast will explain what perhaps you already suspect: That’s not a coincidence.