!Letter of protest
---
agk's diary
14 March 2022 @ 20:35
---
written on GPD Win 1
under blankets in garage loft bed
---
This is a letter I sent to my priest.
Father,
I hope I don't miss the mark with this letter. I
hope you read it in the spirit of charity, love,
and compassion which motivated me to write.
In response to the war in Ukraine and maybe the
enthusiasm for it in this country, you began to
lead the church each Sunday in the prayer for
peace. I strongly feel this is right. The church
also did something I think wrong: subtly, then more
boldly, chose a side in a shooting and propaganda
war.
I was unsettled after your sermon two weeks ago in
which your daughter won your approval to skip Ash
Wednesday services for a peace vigil. The feeling
had nothing to do with your parenting (which
inspires me), but with the question of our nation's
war fever. Of course peace is good. I'm afraid the
vigils equate peace with military victory over
Russia. I'm unsettled by Russophobia in this
country and propaganda and censorship worse than
2001-2003 when the US justified the start of our
destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Somehow we had none of this compassion over the
last 8 years as Ukrainian Army and ultranationalist
freikorps shelled Donetsk and Luhansk, burned anti-
Maidan protesters alive in the Odessa Trade Union
building, occupied Mariupol, killed thousands of
Ukrainians, and produced 1.5 million refugees. The
atrocities affected families of some of my Russian
and Ukrainian friends, attracted charity and activ-
ism, and were covered by Russian media. The West
was profoundly uninterested.
Afghans are dying of famine caused by US sanctions
and the Biden administration's theft of central
bank reserves. More are expected to die this year
than in 20 years of war. We don't care. Nor do we
care about the deadlier ongoing starvation and
massacre of Yemenis by Saudi with generous US
assistance. Our outrage is socially acceptable
only when geopolitically useful.
The church may not be called to respond to suffer-
ing not in the consciousness of parishioners. That
doesn't strike me as wrong. Once we're troubled by
events unfolding in the world, I think it's the
Church's responsibility to nurture compassion and
guide us to relate as Christians to trouble.
I'm a preacher's kid. I was the daughter at peace
rallies; I watched my dad struggle with how to be
faithful with things like this. That's why I'm
writing. From a sermon illustration our partisan-
ship escalated to starting a small group on Ukraine
and theology. We ended last Sunday's service with
Ukraine's national anthem.
I think the worst habits of the Western church were
its wars and conquests---the Crusades; the Jesuit
advance guard of colonialism. How can the church
guide us in good Christian habits, not bad ones?
US and Polish support for anti-Russian war, whether
defensive (as in Ukraine) or offensive (as in the
Caucasus) is promoted as crusades---against asiatic
tyranny or judeo-bolshevism, shoring Roman Catholic
bulwarks against Russian Orthodox barbarism, etc.
The framing attracts tens of thousands of volunteer
crusaders from social strata like those attracted to
ISIS---US boogaloo bois, German AfD, British foot-
ball hooligans, young men eager to kill the other,
punish heretics, "make the world safe for whites."
Our long wars for conquest of Iraq and Afghanistan
were also framed as crusades. The church should
condemn abusing the faith to recruit killers.
Ukraine has been a neocolonial vassal of the US
since at least the US-backed 2014 Maidan coup. A
good bit of the US foreign policy establishment's
antipathy to Russia in the last 3 administrations
comes from Russia clawing back a lot of sovereignty
after the lost decade of the '90s, when Yeltsin's
US-backed coup regime destroyed Russia and subju-
gated it to our financial vultures.
I'm not trying to convince you to take a side. I'm
pointing to dangers of taking any side a state at
war wants us to take.
My political consciousness came from the years be-
tween Yeltsin's coup and the 1998 Russian financial
crisis. Most of my friend group of Russians, Belo-
russians, Ukrainians, and Armenians fled here during
those dark days when the "Chicago boys" gleefully
looted and dismembered my friends' countries, stole
everyone's savings and old people's homes, created
oligarchs to govern the state's dismembered pieces,
drove women's primary employment from factories to
prostitution and vodka kiosks, and collapsed life
expectancy.
During that conquest and national humiliation, my
family and I also knew people who lived through the
bloody breakup of Yugoslavia. Some just survived,
some tried to build peace when possible. They sens-
itized me to the risk of fratricide and inoculated
me against black-and-white thinking. Wars kill
civilians, including economic wars. Everyone,
combatant and non-, who lives through war has to
do shameful things. There are no good guys in war.
This war's particularly hard to understand. Propa-
ganda and censorship suffocate nuance as violence
touches us. I bet a parishioner lost touch with
someone they love who was sleeping in the metro,
trying to avoid gunpoint conscription, or fleeing
both Russian artillery and US/Ukraine-backed ultra-
nationalists who want them as human shields.
I'm not your only parishioner with Russian friends
terrified of '90s coming back. Everybody with means
seems to have left for Istanbul, EU, Central Asia.
Tens of thousands lost jobs when Western companies
closed. The ruble lost half its value. Cut off from
family in Ukraine and the West, Russians try to
make sense of what's happening in a propaganda
environment more fraught but as confusing as ours.
What should be the Christian response to the war? I
don't think we should just play the anthems of all
belligerents along with Ukraine's: DNR, LNR, Russia
..or of cheerleaders of Russia's and Ukraine's
destruction: Poland, US, etc. The prayer for peace
is tremendously focusing. Beyond that, I believe
prayer can guide us into proper relationship with
conflict, propaganda, and God's suffering children.
To pray vaguely for Ukraine is to be too much like
the ghouls in blue-and-yellow who exhibited the
morose Ukrainian ambassador at Biden's State of the
Union address. She certainly knew those applauding
her sabotaged Ukraine-Russia peace talks that week,
warmongered for years, and argued for continuing to
arm Ukrainians like their "moderate" Syrians---not
to decisively win, but to produce a long quagmire.
Almost nothing's worse for peace than friends like
them.
I probably pray wrong. I pray for demilitarization
of all states and insurgents; successful, fair
diplomacy; compassion for all who suffer war;
political leaders' wisdom and mercy; understanding
and brotherhood with whoever I'm supposed to hate;
kindness, patience, slowness to anger. I pray for
God to protect noncombatants and bend the war into
inflection from bad recent years in Ukraine, Yemen,
Afghanistan, Libya, etc, to happier everyday life
for ordinary people.
I write apprehensively. Evy counseled me not to.
"What you're doing is *dangerous,*" she said. Her
family's central story was a terrible flight afoot
from Hungary after the harsh Soviet proxy govern-
ment response to letters like this one written by
her opinionated great-uncle.
I was beaten, jailed, and interrogated repeatedly
for providing medical aid with street medic teams
to protesters who challenged our country's belli-
cose doxa in 1999-2003---NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
was humanitarian, US invasion of Iraq and Afghani-
stan was liberation, WMDs threatened us, NATO's
expansion to Russia's border was benign.
People in the US antiwar movement had FBI branch
offices and joint anti-terror squads assigned to us.
UK undercover police conceived children with female
antiwar activists, including a friend of mine, to
abusively hold them emotionally hostage. Our houses
were raided (mine 4 times just in 2003).
This time the doxa is that cheerleading a nation at
war while preparing for a long awful insurgency is
advocating for peace. I have a young daughter. I
don't know of a movement like the one I served. I
want to protect my family from harm. All I intend
to do is write you from my cowardice.
I'm surely wrong about most of this, but you and
Kierkegaard say Jesus wants us to be in relation-
ship, not right. I hope you receive my concerns with
love and hold them in prayer. Maybe in my tangled
thoughts and emotions there's an accident of
faithfulness to the Gospel and penitential work of
Lent that helps your tough work of guiding us to
live Christian lives together.
