Will Judeo-Christian Values Save us from Armageddon?
Mixing religion with politics is generally not a good idea, but it looks like that is one of the few remaining options to avoid sleepwalking towards a nuclear catastrophe.
Mixing religion with politics is generally not a good idea, but it looks like that is one of the few remaining options to avoid what Senator Sam Nunn and a growing number of foreign policy experts describe as a continuing “sleepwalk” towards a nuclear catastrophe.
Judging from statements from the White House, Congress, and various war hawks, this is exactly what is currently happening. However, if America is indeed a democracy, the voices of people must be heard and, according to the latest Gallup poll, around 90 percent of Americans believe that the country is moving in the wrong direction and do not approve the job done by Congress.
So, what is left for those of us who are not ready to face a rendezvous with extinction? Here, it may be useful to take recourse to the power of religion. According to Pew Religious Landscape Study, nearly nine-in-ten American adults say they believe in God or a universal spirit. At the same time, unlike in the previous two decades of disastrous wars led by the United States and NATO in the Middle East, the current war in Ukraine involves no militant Islamic factor. Those now in the driver’s seat are wholly composed of self-identified Christians and Jews.
Ironically, most of them claim their adherence to Judeo-Christian values but in reality, they just inherited Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Socialist Revolution after the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, and converted it into Permanent World’s Conquest after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Jared Peterson from American Thinker is correct when he states that “the West’s interest in Ukraine is merely a neocon, U.S. hegemony adventure, seeking to assert U.S. top dog dominance in Eastern Europe, and thereafter the world.”
Official Washington and its transatlantic loyalists call this war “unprovoked” and blame it all on Vladimir Putin. However, there is another America which disagrees, including many well-known experts both, on the Right and Left, who can hardly be dismissed as Putin’s bootlickers or useful idiots.
For example, University of Chicago’s Professor John Mearsheimer explains the strategic situation eloquently in “Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine” or according to MIT’s Professor Noam Chomsky: “The core issue for 30 years has been Ukraine’s entry into NATO.”
A perennial leftist gadfly, Chomsky has been savaged for noting that “fortunately” there is “one Western statesman of stature” who is pushing for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine rather than looking for ways to fuel and prolong it: “His name is Donald J. Trump.”
The list of people in the know with similar views is long and keeps growing, but since we are trying to get religion into the discussion, why not quote Pope Francis, who didn’t mince words by saying that the “barking of NATO at the door of Russia” might have led to the invasion of Ukraine and that he didn’t know whether other countries should supply Ukraine with more arms.
Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs in his recent article, “Ukraine is the Latest Neocon disaster,” didn’t hesitate mentioning some specific names of those who got us into this quagmire when they declared that the United States must dominate the world and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge U.S. global or regional dominance.
I’d add neolibs to this team but, in any event, are we to believe that these ideas correspond to Judeo-Christian values? Everyone knows of Moses and the Ten Commandments, but not a single one of them justifies any of the disastrous policies.
However, the Biden administration is packed with the very same folks who somehow manage to balance their supposed Judeo-Christian values with their endless wars. Having done so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the chances that they’ll repent and change course before the inevitable fires spread across the globe are admittedly close to zero.
But who knows what would happen if their priests, rabbis, as well as parishioners in their churches and synagogues, plus those in the electorate representing the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe that the country is going in the wrong direction, started to raise their voices in protest?
If a movement led by a true “moral majority” of citizens awakens before we pass the point of no return, perhaps we can stop at the edge of the abyss and return to the life where our values correspond to Ten Commandments rather than lunatics’ desire for hegemony and world domination. U.S. currency bears the statement, “In God We Trust.” Maybe we don’t have much time left to make that more than just a slogan.
Edward Lozansky is President and Founder of the American University in Moscow and the U.S.-Russia Forum and a Professor at Moscow State and National Research Nuclear Universities.
Image: Reuters.