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Roscoe's avatar

Katya here, thank you, Hobnob, for your impassioned comment. In his Afterword at the end, Michael says, "However, without courage we are lost..."

Boris Pasternak's epic, poetic novel is a living Pascha (Easter) ode written in the darkest of times under the Bolsheviks -- and that word simply means "the bigger ones", which was a lie. Of course, Pasternak risked his life writing it, and it was so powerful and threatening a work that we in the west through the great dumbing down and the total inanity of the Hollywood (disseminators of Mind Virus) don't know it at all. It was completely inverted with hypnotic music by the hasbara, I mean movie, makers.

Fast forward to today (Holy Thursday, Last Supper, night of the arrest) and Europe, through the leaders of the EU, have gone full Neo-Nazi. ( And what will the US do?) Dostoevsky described the dying of Christianity in Europe in the 1860's. There are Eastern Orthodox Church Fathers who maintain that the Great Schism between East and West didn't happen until the 1500's with the Occult takeover of Rome. Some even delay it up to the Roman Pope's formal declaration of infallibility, in 1877(?). Of course, now we have shamanic paganism and Churchianity and AI.

When I spent time in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), what astonished me was the beauty of Christian worship that could not be killed in the cathedrals, churches, monasteries that I saw, and I went deeply into the Kiev caves. On the surface, everything was atheist. But "the courage of genius," the death and resurrection and Transcendence of Dr. Zhivago did not die. Another astonishing thing was the reverence in ordinary people's speech, when they weren't too afraid to talk to the American, unlike anything I would hear here at home, for all our "superiority"-- see the blogspot on Lady Day that Michael left in his comment to me in the previous substack. In a very real sense, ordinary people still lived in medieval ways.

Our Orthodox Christian Church went bolshevik centuries ago, and we modern Christians have killed God in our hearts in conformity, which we call obedience. We are very much in danger of becoming what surrounds us, pharisaic murderers and neo-nazi as we clamor for crucifixion, calling it politics and tradition. And as we fail utterly to love our children. The trickery seems to have worked.

Sorry to be brief and to sound oblique, but my husband's phone is going extinct. So much for techno-wonders that come at such cost . . .

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hobnob's avatar

The blight on Christianity I dread most at Easter is self imposed. It's when we hear an admonition from the pulpit not to read anti-Semitism into the Jewish conspiracy to execute Christ. "Don't even go there," one priest said of the thing we wouldn't have thought of had the priest not mentioned it. This time I'll be ready with thoughts of the passion of Palestine and how so little has changed in all these years. Only now they are trying to get us to kill the Persians for them instead of doing the job themselves as in days of old.

It's a wonder of the world how the Jews can dish it out but can't take it (except from other Jews maybe. Larry David would probably agree, and for all I know, did a witty episode illustrating the point.) The difference is the Jews have backup and we don't. If it matters to them what you say, they can rain hell on you, to speak Trumpian. They've got organized watchdogs everywhere, at home and abroad, on the lookout for anti-Semitism: ADL, AIPAC, American Jewish Committee, World Jewish Congress, Hillel, Jewish Federation of North America, Combat Antisemitism Movement, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative, Canary Mission, to name a few, all of them determined to stamp out the "plague of anti-Semitism" (thus our Catholic HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.).

And they've got the law and government on their side: the Civil Rights Act expanded into a tool to fight anti-Semitism; appointment of a cabinet-level Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism; anti-BDS laws; codification of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance into state law and its adoption by universities; passage of the Antisemitism Awareness Act in the House of Representatives; as much as 97% of FEMA security grants to non-profits goes to Jewish institutions; withdrawal of federal funding to universities who fail to protect Jewish students; the Justice Department's formation of a Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism; introduction of the Countering Antisemitism Act in Congress; Trump's Executive Order to Combat Anti-Semitism by marshalling "all federal resources to combat the explosion of anti-Semitism on our campuses and in our streets since October 7, 2023"; Trump's Executive Order titled Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism, requiring universities to monitor and report students involved in anti-Semitic activities and directing deportation of non-citizens for anti-Semitism activism; to name a few such enforcement tools.

We, on the other hand, have the Coalition of Catholics Against Antisemitism and Christians United for Israel. It seems Judaism is our established religion and you can't say anything that offends a Jew. That's a double whammy on the First Amendment, which prohibits an establishment of religion and guarantees the freedom of speech.

It gets worse. Speaking of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect, Trump just appointed a Chabad rabbi as his Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, replacing Deborah Lipstadt. His name is Yehuda Kaploun, quoted as saying “Our situation is similar to that of Jews in 1930s Germany, on the eve of Kristallnacht." https://israelpalestinenews.org/trump-appoints-new-u-s-antisemitism-envoy/ You can see Trump venerate the Lubavitcher Rebbe here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcsjaSs8u5g The appointment requires Senate confirmation. I hope somebody inquires into Kaploun's view of the 613 Commandments (Mitzvot) as endorsed by Chabad, particularly No. 598: "Wipe out the descendants of Amalek." https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/756399/jewish/Th And for the record, here's Netanyahu exhorting his people to remember what Amalek has done to them as he launches their genocide of Palestinians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMVs7akyMh0.

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