Who is a Jew? Race, “the Chosen People” and Biopolitics

Israel is structured as the “homeland” of the race called “Jews,” but not for the faith of Judaism, since many who say they are “Jews” through faith are not racially qualified to be Israeli, and are thus excluded. To become an Israeli, one must possess state-approved racial credentials. Thus, geography is wedded to genetics (biopolitics), or what Friedrich Ratzel called “anthropogeography”: non-Jews are perpetually the Other who, because of their DNA, have no legitimacy, let alone place, within the state, or on the land; they are barely tolerated and openly hated. To then speak of “democracy” or even “civilization” in the context of Israel is to ignore this biopolitical fact. Historically, we must bear in mind that the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was grounded in the currents of eugenics of the 19th and 20th century. Thus, Israel is a habitation (Lebensraum) for the race officially labeled “Jews,” and none other; and the purpose of the state is the regeneration of “Jews.”

But such a biopolitical set-up requires that there be a clear, genetic demarcation of the “Jew” from the “non-Jew.” This distinction was once based on tradition, in that those people who belonged to historical Judaic faith communities were accepted as “Jews.” This meant that not only the majority Ashkenazi (from Europe) and the Sephardic (from North Africa), but also the Mizrahi (from Iran, Syria, Iraq), the Beta Israel (Falasha) of Ethiopia, the various Jewish groups of Yemen, India, Central Asia and China—were all regarded as belonging to a greater Jewry, although the latter six groups were given this status very reluctantly, if at all. Given the predominance of the Ashkenazi in Israel (since the state has always been a German Ashkenazi project), there is extreme prejudice against “Jews” who do not “look” like the Ashkenazi.

But also given this diversity—is there a distinct racial stock that can be clearly labeled as “Jew?” The state of Israel certainly thinks so, for it has various racial laws in place (the Jewish Nation-State Law, the Law of “Return,” the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law). This protection now also includes a state-mandated DNA test to determine the racial qualification of anyone wanting to immigrate to Israel. In fact, it is illegal and thus impossible for ordinary Israelis to get a DNA test (as commonly done in the rest of the world, as a personal, fun, genealogical project)—such a test is only possible via court order (the Genetic Information Law 5761, passed in 2000)—because only the state of Israel can say who is a proper “Jew.” Such racial policing by the state implies that Israeli bureaucracy possesses clear and precise racial biomarkers. The notion of a distinct race of “Jews” is paramount—which guarantees Israel’s uniqueness. Without it, the logic of Israel as a “the land for Jews” falls apart, and it would then be a country like any other in this world, where just ordinary folk live.

“The Chosen People”

Lurking behind this racial distinction is the Protestant reading of the Bible, whereby modern-day “Jews” are held to be a unique people, especially chosen by God to carry out divine work in the world. The common understanding therefore is that the people known as “Jews” today are direct descendants of individuals inhabiting Holy Scripture. In other words, there is a supposed unbroken racial continuity from Abraham to today, despite the glaring fact that Abraham neglected to leave behind a sample of his DNA. Likewise, there are no DNA samples on record for all the prophets, kings, chief priests, scribes, guards, sadducees and pharasees mentioned in Holy Writ. So, what possible basis can there be for any sort of claim of familial descent stretching back thousands of years?

This model of uniqueness was introduced and codified by the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz, in his eleven-volume History of the Jews (published, 1853-1870); and then other historians, such as Moses Hess, went on to affirm the notion of “Jews” as a distinct race—thus, there was a jüdische Typus (a “Jewish type”), which was “scientifically” knowable (and here the “science” of the day was utilized, such as skull shape, shape of ears, noses, etc.). These historians, in turn, were following the age-old Protestant project of aligning with God’s “Chosen people,” which created “Christian Zionism,” and which led to various wry remarks, such as, that “Presbyterians are Jews who eat pork.” Here, the question of race was, and remains, central. Non-Protestant Christians, on the other hand, understand the term “the Chosen people” as the Church, the people who follow Christ, and not as a distinct race.

Graetz’s notion also grounds the state of Israel, whereby the Bible is the legal “deed” of ownership of the land once known as Palestine, in that the “Jews” of today are phyletic heirs of the ancient Israelites, whose literary lives and episodes play out against the backdrop of Palestinian geography.

But once we wade into antiquity and actually try to locate the ancient “Jews” outside faith, we run into all kinds of difficulties—lexical, linguistic, archaeological, and historical. First, you might be wondering why “Jew” is here quotation marks—in order to indicate that this racial category is a recent one. In antiquity, we do not have a term that can be rendered as “Jew.” Instead, what we have is a geographical designation: “Judaean,” that is, someone who lived in the area called “Judaea.” In antiquity, there are Judaeans; there are no “Jews.” In other words, geography is not akin to race, and it is impossible to push the racial term “Jew” back, say, 3,000 years.

This also therefore means that it is impossible to pinpoint a distinct genetic marker within the archaeological record for “Jews.” What we have are people (Judaeans) living in the region now called Israel, a region called “Palestine” by the Romans. The race of these people is impossible to determine. Many communities lived in the area, and all of them shared an indistinguishable and thus common material culture (Egyptian, Canaanite, Philistine). In other words, there is no indication at all in archaeology that a tribe of Hebrews erupted into “the Promised land,” conquered and settled it (Grabbe, 2017, pp. 82-88). This then calls into question the sequence of events known as the “Exodus,” which is the etiology used to justify possession of Palestinian land that comprises the modern-day state of Israel. Whoever the people were that God chose have long disappeared in the obscurity of millennia. They have vanished without a trace. Nothing genetically associates them to the people that call themselves “Jews” today.

But the concept of the “Chosen people” also means a racial uniqueness from the rest of humanity (supremacism), which is widely assumed and believed, and given that archaeology, linguistics and history cannot verify such a distinction, a more crucial question arises: to say that modern “Jews” are heirs to an ancient Hebrew matrimony and patrimony (race and land)—means that we possess a precise genetic marker of the “Chosen people”—ancient and modern, both of which match perfectly. Of course, none exists. How then can the modern “Jew” be genetically matched with the people of the Bible, as their living heir?

Here, we could veer into the history of modern Judaism, but suffice it to say that it is not the one talked about in the Bible—whatever that ancient belief system may have been, it has little to do with the faith called “Judaism” today. The only indications we have of that ancient Judaean faith are from Josephus, and they do not match up at all with modern-day Judaic practice. In the words of Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser: “This is not an uncommon impression and one finds it sometimes among the Jews as well as Christians—that Judaism is the religion of the Hebrew Bible. It is, of course, a fallacious impression… Judaism is not the religion of the Bible” (Judaism and the Christian Predicament, p. 59). A fact very clearly enunciated by the Jewish Almanac (1980, p. 3): “Strictly speaking it is incorrect to call an ancient Israelite a ‘Jew’ or to call a contemporary Jew an Israelite or a Hebrew.”

In short, there is no unbroken genetic history of the “Chosen people” from Abraham down to our times, nor is there a persistent, unchanging “Judaism,” especially since much suggests that there were systems of belief that were pre-Mosiac (pre-Torah, as it were). Whoever the people of the Bible were, they have disappeared; perhaps because they either became Christians, or later, Muslim. Their genes are impossible to trace let alone find in the populations of today.

But does a race of “Jews” exist today? The majority of the inhabitants of Israel are Ashkenazi, and then Sephardic, and Mizrahi. What history does their DNA contain? In a nutshell, largely Central and Eastern European and with some Asian. The most recent study suggests that the Ashkenazi are from Italy, and are thus Europeans. Very many hopeful studies have been carried out, which seek to “prove” that the “Jews” of today are indeed the descendants of the ancient Israelites. The originary assumption of all these analyses is to assert vague claims about continuity of ancient bloodlines, such as the Levites or the Cohenim. Needless to say, no one possesses the genomes of ancient Levites and Cohenim, against which to compare their modern descendants. Much is also made of the rare disorders that afflict “Jews” (Tay-Sachs, Neimann-Pick, and Gaucher); but again, these diseases are hardly confined to the “Jews” alone and are widespread in other groups.

More sober and neutral studies and analyses come up with a very different picture—that those we call “Jews” today are a mongrel lot of Romans, Greeks, Anatolians, Slavs, Iranians, Greater Turks (Khazar) and North Africans, with very little Middle Eastern components (of course, “Middle Eastern” itself is a vague category, which in no way can imply direct descent from Abraham). Such neutral studies are routinely attacked and vilified by those with vested interests—but they are never negated. In fact, a recent challenge by the eminent Israeli geneticist, Eran Elhaik, to prove “Jewishness” once and for all, using very precise criteria, was accepted and taken up by only two of the many pro-“Chosen-people” geneticists. And the results these two brought in only confirmed once again that a distinct race of “Jews” does not exist. There are only people of varied and mixed descent—like the rest of humanity. Those that believe in the “Chosen people” supremacy simply believe in a lie.

Biopolitics

It was Johann Rudolf Kjellén, who coined the phrase “biopolitics” (as well as the phrase “geopolitics”), by which he understood the state as an “ethnic individuality” which gives it organic power used to dominate others in order to persist. In this process, the myth of the “Chosen people” is essential as the ground upon which the entirety of the Zionist project that is Israel rests. This myth gives Israel power over others, especially over Protestant America whose unbounded support is legendary and uncompromising (billions of dollars and weapons), because it believes that it is thus aligned with God’s “Chosen people” (and all manner of Bible quotations are tossed about as “proof” for such support).

Therefore, Israel presents itself as the land of the racially homogeneous “Chosen people,” and this explains its authoritarianism when it comes to the Palestinians—because Israel is a closed community with supposed common DNA, inherited from dim antiquity, which can only mean that other races must exist in a hierarchy of inequality with “Jews,” since these Others mean to harm the “Chosen people.” In effect, the life of Israel (past, present and future) is determined by perceived hereditary biology for the welfare and protection of “Jews.” The baseline protection consists in discouraging and religiously denying any mixed marriage and extra-marital sex between “Jew” and “non-Jew.”

The entirety of Israel’s actions, political and social, are best understood as expressions of “Jewish” biology, whose welfare is guaranteed by the state’s innate race-based structure—that is, the essentialized association of DNA with geography. “The Chosen people” thus can do no wrong, for they are merely pursuing their biological destiny.

Perhaps, Israel some day will learn to live without the crutch of race and will abandon its supremacist ideology. If it does not, it will eventually disappear, as “Jewish supremacism” is a deadend.

C.B. Forde writes from rual Canada.

Featured: The Children of Israel Crossing the Red Sea, by Frédéric Schopin; painted ca. 1850-1860.

My Story 40 Years Ago on Israeli Apartheid and Palestinian Resistance

Since this important article is difficult to find, we are republishing it, with the kind permission of the author.

I wrote about Israeli apartheid over 40 years ago. I visited Israel and the West Bank in 1981. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had just been assassinated, though my visit had been planned before that. This is what I wrote for The Nation (May 29, 1982), prescient in the title, “The West Bank as Bantustan.”

Hebron, West Bank

On the map of Israel put out by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism, there is no line separating the West Bank from Israel proper. A small caveat at the bottom of the sheet says, “This map is not an authority on international boundaries,” but what it represents is indeed the policy of the government of Menachem Begin toward the occupied territory. The West Bank, once the ancient Hebrew kingdoms of Judea and Samaria is held to be religiously and historically part of “Eretz Israel,” the land of Israel—or, as Regin has taken to calling it, “Western Eretz Israel.”

As part of its scarcely disguised goal of annexing the West Bank, Israel has recently stepped up its attacks on Palestinian leaders and has attempted either to force out the Arabs living here or to encourage them to leave through restrictive policies on economic activity, education, housing and political life. One example of that campaign can be seen here in the battle for Hebron, twenty-two miles south of Jerusalem.

Mustafa Natshi, acting mayor of Hebron, told me that | Jewish settlers had attacked Arab schoolgirls, that they regularly threw rocks at Arabs’ windows, that they had uprooted 1,000 olive trees belonging to two Arab families and that they had broken into the shop of an Arab quiltmaker and destroyed his machinery. All these have been confirmed. A correspondent from Ha’aretz, the most respected Hebrew daily, arrived at the scene of the settler-student clash and found blood on one girl’s hand and the rest of the children crying hysterically. Shulamit Aloni, a member of the Knesset, reported seeing Jewish settlers throwing rocks at Arab houses. The military governor of the territory ruled that the uprooting of the trees had taken place and was illegal. And the quiltmaker showed to the press the damaged machinery from his shop, which the Israelis had wanted to take over and use as an entrance to an attached communal house.

That house is the center—and Hebron the symbol—of the efforts by the ultra-Orthodox Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) to establish a Jewish presence throughout the West Bank. Inside the two-story Ottoman-era stone building, where twenty families live, a young woman told me that Hebron was “as much a part of Israel as Haifa,” and that Jews would never leave it. Outside, at a sandbag fortification, two Israeli soldiers and an armed settler stood guard with M-16s and Uzi machine guns, while other soldiers watched from posts atop nearby buildings.

The Gush Emunim also took over part of the great Hebron mosque, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, said to contain the burial places of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, a place holy to both Moslems and Jews. A few rooms have been cleared of Moslem prayer rugs and fitted with wood cabinets that hold the Torah scrolls. Soldiers stand guard there, too. A settler walking to the shrine carried an automatic rifle.

Some 23,000 Jews now live in eighty settlements on the West Bank, along with 800,000 Arabs. The first Jewish settlements, established under Labor Party governments, were located along the border with Jordan and were intended as a defense against attack, but the settlement policy was expanded substantially under Begin, and now the interior is dotted with new Jewish towns. As much as 30 percent of the West Bank land has been taken by Israelis during the fourteen-year occupation. About half the confiscated property had been held by the Jordanian government; the rest had absentee owners, or was used communally for grazing or privately for growing crops.

To drum up Jewish nationalistic support, the Israeli government runs tours of the settlements. I booked one with Yossi Meshulam, a legal adviser in the Ministry of Agriculture. In Ariel, Meshulam stood at the barbed wire fence at the perimeter and pointed to the rolling landscape spotted with rocks. “They don’t have anything here but olive trees,” he said. He turned to the shells of new buildings that will house electronics and manufacturing plants: “This will benefit the Arab villages—they can work here.” The inexorable move toward annexation is a time bomb. Israel does not dare to make West Bank Palestinians citizens because, added to the Arab population in Israel itself, they would number 1.8 million, compared with 3.2 million Jews. With their higher birth rate, they would become a majority in just a few decades, and Israel would cease to be a Jewish state. Nor can it permanently maintain its occupation over the Arabs here, because that would increase international hostility to Israel, prolong Arab terrorist attacks and increase the likelihood of another war. And ultimately, the repressive measures required to maintain the occupation would corrode Israeli democracy.

About 3,000 Palestinians are already in Israeli jails for crimes ranging from throwing explosives and possession of weaponsto membership in banned organizations. Four Arab newspapers are subject to stringent censorship, and three editors are under “town arrest,” unable to go to their East Jerusalem offices. Bir Zeit University has frequently been closed in response to student demonstrations. Although university administrator Gaby Baramki says there has been “no problem in teaching, no direct interference” by authorities, it has been difficult for him to get work permits for some of the foreign professors who are a substantial part of his staff, and several hundred Arab books and journals have been banned at Bir Zeit (although many of these publications are available at Hebrew University in Jerusalem). A new regulation gives Israeli authorities the power to approve student admissions and faculty hiring.

Some expressions of resistance have been allowed. I saw a surprising example one night in Jericho, about six miles from the Allenby Bridge on the Jordanian border. A troupe of young actors from East Jerusalem who call themselves The Storyteller put on an agitprop farce in an old theater. An Israeli soldier searches an Arab cafeand finds a stack of leaflets. He reads one aloud: “To our people who are struggling in all areas of occupied territory.” The theatergoers cheered. Then the title character, Mahjoob Mahjoob, accepts a job in Israel, gets threatening notes denouncing his collaboration and finally quits. Loud applause.

The problem of Arabs having to work in Israel or for Israeli companies is a real one, as the play indicates. Some 50,000 Palestinians from the occupied territories, most of them unskilled, work in restaurant kitchens or on construction gangs or at one or another menial job. There is little work for them on the West Bank, which was deliberately left undeveloped during Jordanian rule. Today, Israel exploits the cheap labor and captured customers for its products. It discourages new indigenous Arab industry while aiding Jewish settlers who want to set up factories. The West Bank and Gaza have been absorbed into the Israeli economy, just a step away from political annexation. The Israeli settlements are already under Israeli law, not West Bank jurisdiction.

Labor Party critics have described the occupied territories as “Little Bantustans.” The comparison is apt. And the lesson should be that such a system won’t work for Israel any more than it does for South Africa.

Lucy Komisar is a well-known investigative journalist. Her website is The Komisar Scoop.

Featured: Mother and Child, by Sliman Mansour; painted in 2009.

A “Nuremberg Trial” for Israel’s Crimes Against Palestinians?

Make no mistake. Israel has committed massive crimes in Gaza and in the West Bank against the Palestinians. When will the thousands killed get justice? Or are we all supposed to just go on with our lives and pretend that it’s all the pursuit of “the right of self-defense?” Who are these IDF snipers who anonymously shoot children, and no one is even curious to know who these killers are? Is this the way of war now, according to the “international rules based order” that we should be so proud of in the West, which is supposedly the hallmark of our “civilization?”

A day of reckoning will come. There are good men and women who are wokring to make that a reality.

And what are we to make of our politcal class that utters not a peep about the slaughter that Netanyahu is doing, but who earlier could not get the ICC to issue an arrest warrant for President Putin fast enough, because Putin was assumed to have “kidnapped” Ukrainian orphans that they might have a decent life in Russia. But Netanyahu can kill as many children as he wants, since that is not a crime according to the “rule of law,” so the “jurists” at the ICC stay busy identifying “Russian crimes” that might be spotted at the backs of their cereal boxes.

Kurt Tucholsky was paraphrasing a French joke when he observed that “the death of one person: that’s a catastrophe. One hundred thousand dead: that’s a statistic!”

What Israel has done for over a month in Gaza is now a matter of statistics, for they have killed over 15,000 so far, more than 4000 of them children. It is the Palestinian Holocaust, because there are many more thousands buried under all those pancaked buildings where people once lived. And now that the Israeli assault continues, many thousands more will die.

Given these grim statistics, it becomes more and more important to remember the one person, rather than mention in passing the vast number of the now faceless thousands dead.

One such person was Elham Farah, a Christian Palestinian, living in Gaza, where she had taught music all her life. She was 84 years old and was the daughter of the Palestinian poet, Hannah Farah.

On November 12, 2023, an Israeli sniper shot her in the leg, as she came out of the Holy Family Church in Gaza City, where she had been sheltering to escape the bombing. She wanted to make sure that her home had not been hit. A sniper was waiting who are trained to shoot in the leg.

Those inside the church tried to rescue her, as she cried out for help, but people were afraid of Israeli snipers who long have had a reputation for being merciless. Elham Farah bled to death over several days. No one came to help her because of the sniping. She had just survived the bombing of Saint Porphyrios, the 850-year-old church in Gaza, which took the lives of 18 other Christians. Is such a death for a gentle old lady acceptable to those who see themselves as “civilized?” And why no one even knows about the crimes of Israeli snipers is unimaginable.

The hell unleashed by the Herod of our time in the Holy Land escapes the mind’s ability to describe horror—to see little children torn apart by bombs, dropped by pilots in their sophisticated flying machines is beyond the reach of words…

Then Herod perceiving that he was deluded by the wise men, was exceeding angry: and sending killed all the menchildren that were in Bethlehem, and in all the borders thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.

Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremias the prophet, saying:

A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not (Matthew 2:16-18).

“Rama” or “Ramah” is the name of several Palestinian towns, and “Rachel” stands in for all mothers whose children have been slaughtered by the powerful. Such killing was “righteous revenge” because the Hamas razzia of October 7th was fabricated as brutal, with beheaded babies and babies in ovens, when it was the IDF that did most of the slaughter of Israelis that day. Why the need to lie by Israel? The full truth about what really happened on October 7th is now coming out: Hamas killed IDF soldiers in combat. It was not a “terrorist” attack:

Thus on October 7th:

  • The IDF killed anything that moved;
  • Many Israeli captives were still alive, two days after October 7;
  • Israelis were killed by the IDF with heavy shelling of houses and cars;
  • Most of the civilian deaths happened because of the IDF;
  • It was a razzia by Hamas because most of the captives taken were IDF officers.

And in the West, we have the war enthusiasts, eagerly cheering on Netanyahu and his ilk to kill more, to kill without compunction, for there will be no red lines drawn, because Israel is for “civilization,” because that is how you fight wars, by killing as many babies as you can with bombs.

Perhaps in the months or even years ahead, there will come a time for a “Nuremberg Trial” for the murderers that are now in power in Israel—and for the IDF soldiers snipers who shot down Elham Farah and the two liitle Christian Palestinian boys, and also for the many “journalists” and “scholars” who justified and whitewashed the crimes against humnaity now permanently recorded for the world to see. Remember, they did hang Julius Streicher, even though he perosnally had killed no one.

C.B. Forde writes from rural Ontario, Canada.

War and the Future of Russia

Alexander Dugin recently sat down with Pavel Volkov of Ukraina.ru to discuss the current war in the Ukriane and its implications for the future of Russia. We bring you this English translation through the kind courtesy of Geopolitka and Ukraina.ru (Part 1 and Part 2).

Pavel Volkov (PV): Alexander Dugin, against the background of recent events, is a freeze on the Ukrainian front possible?

Alexander G. Dugin (AGD): The Palestinian conflict has seriously changed the situation. All the countries subordinate to the US were at war with us until the last moment, and Ukraine had huge support. We often underestimate it for political and propaganda reasons, but in fact it was so unprecedented that we can say that Russia was at war with NATO. Now there is a new object—the Islamic world. Even if it is a coalition of a few countries, say, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran—it is already enough to divert a huge part of military attention to another region. And then there is Taiwan. So, Ukraine is absolutely no longer the only front in the struggle of the unipolar Western world against the multipolar world. New front lines are emerging, and the topic of Ukraine is shifting from an exclusive first priority to a secondary one.

The West is loyal, the West will support Ukraine for a long time, but probably not with such enthusiasm. And in this situation, it can offer us some new move, for example, to freeze the conflict in order to carry out rotation, prepare fresh personnel, etc.

PV: On what terms?

AGD: That’s the thing; all the terms of truce that can be offered now will be twenty stories below what we can consider minimally acceptable. They will be humiliating, impossible demands that no one will even consider seriously. What happened with the grain deal? When Moscow realized that its terms could only be twenty levels below the minimum acceptable, it aborted the deal. And with the ceasefire, there will be even tougher demands for various reasons—because of overheated expectations in Ukraine itself, because of the radical demonization of Russians in the West, and because of the overestimation of our weakness. At one point, we did demonstrate weakness by withdrawing from Kiev and retreating from the Kharkov Oblast. After that, the West had the impression that Russia was finished, Russia was weak, Russia was a colossus on clay feet, and now it could be done away with. And then we rebuilt, and it turned out that this was not exactly the case; but expectations remained high.

So, I think that proposals for peace talks may now follow, but even the initial terms will be so unacceptable that Russia, even with great desire, will not be able to accept them for a thousand reasons. Now we are starting the presidential election campaign, and it will obviously be held under the banner of victory; and anything that even remotely resembles victory will be welcomed. And anything that will resemble defeat or betrayal, neither the incumbent nor the future president has the authority to accept. That’s why I’m not too worried about peace talks. That’s the worst thing we go to pieces on; but it turns out it’s not the only thing. We’ve seen enough of other problems during the Special Military Operation.

PV: If not negotiations, the what?

AGD: We are more likely to see a destabilization of the situation in Ukraine itself. Feeling the weakening of support, the Ukrainian elites will flounder, shifting responsibility to each other. Zelensky is now in a very difficult position. He may have canceled the elections rationally. When a country is at war, it is usually ruled by a dictator, a person who, due to historical circumstances, is forced to concentrate all the power in his hands—there is nothing special about that.

But in the West, the constant holding of elections, the constant reproduction of electoral cycles, is in a sense an essential tool. It is necessary to constantly change leaders so that they do not fall into a sense of impunity, and even pro-Western leaders who are too welded to their seats are overthrown by the West. That is why this idea of postponing the elections, which Zelensky seems to have agreed with the West to do, is actually working against him. There are double standards there; they can support canceling the elections and then blame it on Zelensky.

PV: But if for some reason the freeze does happen, what risks will it bring to Russia? After all, Russia is also heated in a certain way.

AGD: It is. The worst thing that can happen in this war is peace, i.e., a truce on the terms of the enemy. The fulfillment of these conditions will not be able to be presented as a victory. Because indeed we have huge casualties—people are losing loved ones, losing children, blood is flowing through the souls of Russians, and just saying that we will freeze the conflict will not be accepted by anyone; it is fraught with the collapse of the country and the system, and it is better not to even think about it.

I think that our authorities soberly realize that it is impossible to freeze the conflict without victory, without bright, tangible, visible positive results. Of course, there will be talk about it; someone who dreams of Russia’s defeat inside and outside Russia will exacerbate this situation; but as far as I imagine the supreme authorities, this is impossible. We will talk about peace when we have victory.

PV: How do we understand that victory has come?

AGD: There can be different ways: victory over the whole of Ukraine or the liberation of only Novorossiya, or even a part of Novorossiya within the four regions that are already part of Russia within their administrative boundaries. But at least the consolidation of the borders of the four new regions can be considered a minimum victory, which will not actually be a victory. In my opinion, this is not even a minimum, but a failure and defeat in the eyes of our society, which has already shed so much blood. Half of Ukraine—with Odessa, Mykolaiv, Kharkov, Dnipropetrovsk, maybe Sumy and Chernihiv—is still a good thing. But no one will even talk to us about four regions; they will offer us even less than what is already unacceptable for us. The distance between what can be the basis for peace talks for Ukraine and the West and for us is too great. Until the positions are brought closer together, until we launch a powerful offensive with a siege of Kiev, it will be impossible to negotiate.

PV: So, the basis for negotiations can only be the direct military seizure of territories?

AGD: Yes, or if the Ukrainian government collapses. On the other hand, we can come to negotiations if everything collapses. But, of course, this is unlikely. In short, the difference between the two minimal sets of peace proposals is now so great that further fighting is inevitable. And with it will come political processes inside Russia and inside Ukraine. Inside Russia, they are predictable—the strengthening of the “Victory Party” and the final liberation from the “Traitors’ Party;” while in Ukraine, in my opinion, we should expect disintegration. When people do not get what they dream of, when the difference between what is proclaimed and what is real becomes completely unacceptable, they look for someone to blame. Someone must answer for the failure of the counter-offensive. It will weaken Ukrainian society, split the elites.

At the beginning of the Special Military Operation, both society and the elites of Ukraine turned out to be quite consolidated by Nazi propaganda, expectation of trips to Europe and, above all, hatred towards us. Russophobia, the feeling of rage, hatred, the desire to kill, to destroy really consolidated the society, but this also has its limits.

The failure of the counteroffensive has shown that Russia is very strong, and this failure is something that Ukrainian elites and Ukrainian society will have to deal with. How they will react, I honestly don’t know. Whether this failure will be enough to hit them hard enough to make them collapse and give up, or whether they will be able to rebuild and continue to resist, I can’t say.

But in any case, our prospects may not be brilliant, but they are not bad, are reliable, connected with the president’s will to lead the country to victory, while the situation in Ukraine will worsen. Zelensky is fed up—first he made us laugh like a clown, then he poured out blood, used all methods of attracting attention, and now he has nothing to impress, surprise and inspire. So, his star is starting to fade; plus the West is distracted on other fronts. In this situation, I think that very, very slowly the initiative will pass to us. Very slowly, because it is difficult to fight against all of NATO, and with such a rabid, hate-pumped puppet as Ukraine. Consider a pack of rabid wolves given long-range missiles. We don’t really know how to respond to this.

PV: The problems may split Ukrainian society, but it will not then love Russia. Are there any non-military tools left to pull Ukraine out from under the external control of the West, or has that train left?

AGD: I don’t think there are any left. That train has left. They were there, but we did not use them. So now there is no solution to this problem other than a military one. Another question is what to do next. If we imagine that we have liberated Ukraine up to Lvov, what will we offer them next? Of course, we have to offer them something. But this is not a question for today. The war will be so complicated and long that we will have time to think about it.

I am absolutely convinced that there is no other way out but Empire and Orthodoxy, a powerful world pole with the preservation of classical culture and classical worldview in contrast to the modern degenerated West, mobilization of the Slavic deep beginning. We need this; it will be quite acceptable for Ukrainians as well. But first we need to break the back of the Western liberal-Nazi political machine. Destroy it. Then we will think what to say to the Ukrainians. Until our boot is on the border with Poland and Hungary, it is useless to talk about economy, ideology—no one will listen to us. Only after a crushing military victory will they take what we say seriously.

So far, we have often squandered the threat potential. It is fine when experts say this, but when our major military and political figures say: “Don’t do this, or you will be badly off,” and then the “badly off” does not come, they significantly lower the value of Russia’s words and declarations. In this situation, until we answer for our words with deeds, until we fully defeat Ukraine on the battlefield, it seems to me that in the current situation, it is simply irresponsible to talk about any other leverage. No one will listen to us. Economics does not play a role—they blow up gas pipelines, which take dozens of years and billions of dollars to build. Frankly speaking, the economy, except for the military economy, does not matter now. And the military economy means a sufficient number of high-quality weapons and good uniforms for soldiers. That’s the only thing that matters.

PV: But the economy is also a standard of living. This is, among other things, what attracts Ukrainians to Europe. It is not so unimportant that in the same new regions there is development, people have a place to live, they study, they have high-tech and high-paying jobs. That would be interesting for them.

AGD: No, it would not be interesting for them. First of all, no one will show it to them. Secondly, if Ukraine had fought for comfort, it would have kept itself together with Crimea; and being a bit more subtle and flexible in its policy towards Russia, would have gotten European comfort and the country would be in a generally good position. No, the Ukrainians sacrificed all of this for one thing: to kill a Russian. The rage of their Russophobia supersedes any considerations of “looking to get comfortable” and “who gets paid how much.”

I do not believe that we are dealing with material motivation of our enemy at all. Our adversary is demon-possessed. You can’t do that with a demon. The demon is sent to destroy, to kill, to die. He will not think where it is more profitable for him—with the Russians, in the new territories to live, or in the West. His consciousness lives completely separate from his body. And in this struggle with the Ukrainian demoness, no arguments about the fact that the new territories are better, cities are being built, will not work at all—firstly, they will not be shown, and secondly, they will not believe.

As long as a person is possessed by a demon, what do you say to him? What to explain, for example, to a drunken person? Don’t walk on the highway—you’ll get run over? But he goes there because his legs are moving. He can’t think, he can’t hear anything. And demon possession is even worse. It deprives one of all critical thinking; he can evaluate nothing, see nothing, believe nothing. The possessed live in an absolutely illusory world, where the material factor itself turns into some demonic aspiration. We say to them—here is comfort, here is convenience, here is prosperity; and they say—no, you are lying to us, the material factor is when a Russian is killed, a Moskal should have his eyes gouged out, burn him, then it will be a material factor. Somewhere out there in Mariupol, houses are being built and former citizens of Ukraine are living happily in them—no one will believe it. Even if they see it, they won’t believe it. Until we break the neck of the military-political machine, nothing will change; no one will listen to any arguments.

PV: What about the people in the new territories and the several million refugees who came to Russia? They have lived in Ukraine for a long time, and after Maidan, they were subjected to corresponding treatment. They are complex, and there must be some special way of dealing with them?

AGD: They’re complicated, but easier than the ones on the other side. Of course, they need an approach to them, but right now, admittedly, I don’t have time for them. Russia’s existence is in question. Of course, I realize that it is important, but if there is no Russia, there will be neither these people nor other people, no people at all. We in the capital live in a kind of frozen state, while in reality there is a bloody battle for history going on at the front—in Zaporozhye, in Kherson, in the Donbass. We walk the streets, ride scooters, and below us all the ground under the asphalt is soaked with the blood and pain of those people who are fighting for us.

People who have recently found themselves inside Russia at least understand what all this is for. It is they who have to explain to us what is happening. We can’t tell them anything, because Russia, in general, is also to blame for allowing all this to happen. When Ukraine started behaving in an absolutely Russophobic manner, why didn’t they stop it when they could have? We have made so many mistakes in relation to Ukraine over the last 30 years that we are partly to blame.

And the people who live in the new territories have seen everything for themselves; they made their own choice; they are our teachers; they are much more awakened. This is the war in which they were the first to wake up and awaken Russia. We must treat them with utmost care and love, but it is they who must lead us forward to Lvov. I think it is not they who need our support, but we need theirs. The people of the new territories are our vanguard, showing us the way. As for our social obligations to them, I think we are fulfilling them. If not well, we fulfill them; even worse, before our elderly population. We are now in a situation where we are overcoming the nightmare into which our country collapsed in the late 1980s. It is a shared tragedy. We must restore the unity of our Empire—it is simply a historical duty and for this we can and must pay any price at all. There will be no Empire—there will be no Russia. There will be no us. There will be not only no future, but even no past.

If we defeat the West in Ukraine, then we confirm by deeds that we are the pole of a sovereign civilization, the pole of a multipolar world; we shall preserve our present, our future and our past. If not, we are finished. We will be erased from history.

PV: Alexander Gelievich, you represent one of the popular philosophical and political movements in Russia. It is interesting how you and your supporters see the future of Russia.

AGD: Everything starts with geopolitics. To be an empire, as Brzezinski said, Russia must establish control over Ukraine. Geopolitics is linked to ideology—the more we realize ourselves as a sovereign Russian civilization, Russian world, Russian Empire, the more we will turn to our roots, our attitudes, which we abandoned especially 100 years ago, with the Bolsheviks firstly, and then again in the 1990s. We actually betrayed ourselves completely in 100 years, first by abandoning religion, Orthodoxy, the Tsar, and then by abandoning social justice and defending a very special Soviet civilization. We have betrayed ourselves twice in 100 years and it does not go in vain. We betrayed the Empire, we betrayed the Russian world, we betrayed our identity and now it is necessary to restore it.

PV: Perhaps Brzezinski is not exactly the kind of thinker on whose ideas Russian society should rely. What does empire mean to you? What is the configuration of power, property, social structure? What is it all about?

AGD: The empire, which we will build as Ukraine is liberated, should have a completely independent ideological, political, social structure, which will be based on the continuity of different stages of Russian history. There will be elements of Orthodoxy and supreme autocratic power, and social justice—in the Soviet period this was the main requirement of our Russian people and other peoples of Russia. At the same time, of course, atheism, materialism, the completely plebeian, petty and disgusting idea of material progress we must discard, returning to the ideals of the Church, Orthodoxy, to the ideals and high aspirations, to the principle of aristocracy of the spirit—these are all things that have been lost over the last 100 years that we must restore as we win on the Ukrainian front.

PV: It seems to me to be some kind of eclecticism—both autocracy and social justice at the same time. And who owns the property? After all, social justice depends directly on how to distribute what we have.

AGD: Only materialists have in their minds the question of distribution of property. Property is important. But in fact, there are many other options besides total material equality (communism) and bourgeois inequality. If we are talking about a socially oriented solidarity society, the gap between rich and poor should not exceed some normal limits. In a solidarity society there must be mutual aid. The principle of autocracy in no way contradicts the principle of social justice.

PV: Well, communism is not about full material equality, but about the absence of exploitation. Did I understand correctly that in the solidarity society of the empire of the future, the rich and the poor will remain, i.e., there will be capitalism, but with a “human face”—with a more equitable distribution?

AGD: No, capitalism is the Anglo-America, Western model that destroys everything. Capitalism is not just a society with a market, but a market society, where everything is sold, where everything is bought, where there is only one class—the bourgeoisie. Capitalism is the essence of what we are fighting. No capitalism! There can be no capitalism in a full-fledged holy empire. It’s a completely different system. But why should we speak in terms of Western political models only? Socialism, capitalism—all these are borrowings from Western culture, which is alien to us. We need to build a Russian society and we will have Russian property. This is the way Russian people have traditionally understood property.

PV: In different eras, Russian people have understood property in different ways. What do you mean?

AGD: Read the Eurasianist jurist Nikolai Alekseev’s The Russian People and the State. It’s a wonderful book. He said that the most correct approach is the idea of relative private property. Relative private property is roughly what was understood in the Soviet Union as personal property. It is at our disposal, but we cannot do whatever we want with it. For example, a dog is in our possession, but we cannot kill it because that would be immoral to society and heartless to the dog itself. It would be a crime. It is the same with all that is entrusted to us. We should treat land, houses, means of transportation, and other things with social and moral consideration. That’s beautiful!

PV: It is immoral to kill a serf, too; Saltychikha was punished for it at one time, but he is still a serf. But that’s not even the main question. On what principle will we be entrusted with something? Someone will be entrusted with an oil rig, and someone will be entrusted with a khrushchevka apartment in a dormitory district of a provincial town, right?

AGD: No. I am absolutely convinced that the people’s wealth—oil, gas, natural resources—all should belong to the state. Exclusively to the state, because they cannot be the object of private property; no matter how much people help to extract them. The subsoil belongs to the state, to all the people. Therefore, every citizen of this beautiful Empire of the Russian future has the right to some share in the nation’s wealth. Another thing, each of course will need to provide a minimum—a minimum of housing, a minimum of land. This will be the task of a strong autocratic power, because it is a support.

People living in their homes on their land will give birth to Russian children, and they will be loyal and grateful; they will be real carriers; they will be brought up in the right way. We need to change everything. When we apply to the future Empire the principles of what we had in the 20th century, or what we see in the West, these are absolutely false examples. It is necessary to build a completely new society. And this new society is the society of the future Empire, which will have to break with the West, with its ideas about capitalism, socialism, equality and inequality.

PV: No socialism, no capitalism, no equality, no inequality—it’s hard to see how you can walk somewhere in the middle.

AGD: Everything has to be different. Everything has to be solidarity, has to be spiritual, has to be very highly developed, highly educated, highly organized. And we are capable of that. These are our ideas, our dreams. And in the 19th and even in the 20th century, the goal of our ancestors was to build precisely such a just society. And when we gave it some concrete form according to Western models—one or the other—we just came to contradictions. There should be a very open development.

Everything will be resolved as we win in Ukraine. We will not be able to move beyond where we stand if we don’t do a renewal and revitalization of the system in Russia itself. And so, as we strengthen ourselves, as we reclaim our own identity, we will win victory after victory. Each victory on the front will actually mean a victory within the system and the establishment in our society of the correct laws and proportions that have been monstrously broken throughout the last hundred years of history—in the seventy-year Soviet cycle and especially the last thirty years of liberal de facto external governance of the country.

PV: If the correct laws and proportions, as you say, were destroyed exactly 100 years ago, then they were correct at the beginning of the 20th century? That’s the society you think was good? But it was capitalism with feudal vestiges.

AGD: No. There were a lot of falsehoods then also. What people dreamed of in the 19th and 20th centuries should be realized in the 21st century. All those concrete forms of realization that these dreams took require a very serious critical analysis. But the most important thing is why we reject the last hundred years, because then the Church was rejected, sacredness was rejected. We followed the Western path of materialism, atheism and then for the last thirty years—capitalism. Before that, socialism. We got carried away by the materialistic, atheistic ideas of the West, and so we destroyed everything. We have destroyed our society, we have destroyed our spirituality, we have destroyed our families, we have destroyed our culture.

We are being danced around by some crazy women like Pugacheva (they were dancing until the last moment), scaring us with their senseless hysterical shrieking. Then, at a critical moment for the country, the monster was in Israel, mocking the country, choking on Russophobia. And when even there it is required to show some tact and courage with regard to the new homeland (apparently, not so new, since that’s where it escaped to), it runs away from there again. This is the kind of ugliness that the last hundred years of our history have produced. Disgusting scum of the human race have come as models in our culture. Similar figures in politics, economics, and so on. Now we have to get out of it.

PV: Are such characters only a product of the era you mentioned? What about all those heroes of the Great Patriotic War and not only, whom that era gave us? And in the 19th century and earlier, were all patriots and not a single traitor?

AGD: I am not saying that we should go backwards. We need to move forward and realize the dreams of Russian people, Russian patriots who fought for Russia, who saw its shortcomings, but who dreamed of a better Russia, of the Russia of the future. These are their dreams that we must realize. Not just to restore what was. If everything had been perfect in the 19th century, there would have been no revolution. And the people who made revolutions, perhaps many of them were also driven by good thoughts. These good thoughts, these bright dreams, love for Russia, loyalty to God, understanding of our culture, our identity, its defense, the will for justice—these ideals, these traditional values should be embodied now in the Russia that we will build. So here, yes, monarchy and Orthodoxy are principles. They are beautiful.

We have had autocracy throughout our history. And for the last hundred years it has also been monarchy, only it was not called that. Autocracy is the most important principle of organizing such large territories. The principle of Empire, the principle of Orthodoxy and the spirit, the superiority of the spirit over matter—this is the orientation of our entire society. If it doesn’t happen, there’s no point. We are not of this world. Our Empire is not of this world. Or rather, partly of this world, and partly not. And this spiritual dimension, this vertical, is the main thing to convey. It is necessary to realize the dream of our ancestors the 19th century, the 20th century—but without religion, without faith, without Church, without God, without Christ—any, even the most perfect, society will be worthless.

PV: But you can’t make people believe in God if they don’t.

AGD: You know, when the Special Military Operation started, many people, especially volunteers, went there with the red flag, some with the imperial flag. But now, more and more of us are gradually seeing the Savior of the Uncircumcised—the banner with Christ is the most common among the volunteer units. Christ Himself will come if we turn to Him. He will come to us. If people realize their love for the Motherland and begin to simply leaf through our history page by page, they will see the importance of the Church. There is no need to force anyone. There should be no compulsion here. I am absolutely convinced that every Russian person is deeply Orthodox. Many people just don’t realize it. There is no need to force, no need to impose anything on anyone. You just have to tell them.

When people are tortured for 70 years with atheistic propaganda, beating out of them ideas about the spirit, about religion, about the soul, about eternity, about heaven, about the resurrection of the dead, who can stand it. What will happen if you are put in a cell for 70 years, tortured, false views implanted into your consciousness, and then for 30 years even worse—they say, take care only of yourself; there is no justice, no country, only you, while you live; and then you turn into a machine and upload your stinking dreams and episodes of your idiotic life to a cloud server. That’s how you’ll be preserved if you don’t steal enough money to freeze you and then unfreeze you someday.

These infernal, satanic ideas about life that our man has been indoctrinated with, they get knocked out on the fronts. They are dislodged when a man thinks about what it is to be Russian. To him comes this banner with the Savior of the Uncircumcised, and who will bring it? We will. Priests will bring it. Russian people will bring it. The state will bring this banner with the Savior. One should look at it and everything will become clear by itself.

And of course we will help people to return to themselves, and not force them to swear an oath to a new ideology. We don’t need to invent any new ideologies. We need to return to ourselves, because the return to God is not a return to the past, it is a return to the eternal. There is the eternal. The West has decided to build its civilization of the last centuries on the fact that there is no eternal, that there is only time. This is a false idea; the devil speaks through their mouths. This is the devil we are fighting against today, every day in Avdiivka, in Kherson, near Bakhmut. This is a real devil, because he believes that there is no eternity. And we are soldiers of eternity.

Featured: The Baptism of Russia, by Mikhail Shankov; painted in 2003.

Gaza: The Tunnel War

After the Palestinian Hamas movement’s Operation Al-Aqsa Storm and Israel’s response, military experts in various countries began to talk about the phenomenon of “tunnel warfare.” The well-known military strategist Edward Luttwak published an article, “The Battle of the Tunnels is about to begin in Gaza” on October 25, 2023.

In it, he pointed out that in Palestine, “underground networks have many uses, with everything from weapons drills hidden from overhead balloons or synthetic aperture radars (which produce photo-like images in all degrees of visibility) to makeshift headquarters and even rest areas protected from air strikes. Built with the cement and rebar donated by the European Union, Qatar and both Islamic and Western charities ‘to build housing for refugees,’ and delivered to Gaza through the Israeli port of Ashdod—Israeli governments that tried to limit the cement imports were barraged with ‘human rights’ demands—the tunnel network has grown exponentially over the past decade. Israeli soldier-analysts even refer to it as ‘the Underground,’ in reference to London’s labyrinthine tube network.”

It was no secret to Israel that these underground communications would be used to wage war against them. But Luttwak warns, if Israel concentrates its efforts on destroying the tunnels in Gaza, it will be virtually powerless. Because tunnel warfare requires very specific detection and monitoring skills, equipment, close-range weapons (even compact assault rifles are too long), the use of specialized shields and respirators, and a very fast reaction time.

Experts say there are several types of tunnels in the region. Along the northern border with Lebanon, Hezbollah used diamond-tipped drills to cut passageways in the rock. On the southern border, tunnels from Gaza to Egypt have long been used to smuggle goods, while tunnels to Israel have been used to attack Israeli villages and, in 2006, to kidnap Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

A Hamas leader, Yehya Sinwar, recently claimed that they have 500 kilometers of tunnels dug under the Gaza Strip, an area of about 360 square kilometers, roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. Hamas survived shelling, air raids and major IDF ground incursions in 2009 and 2014. So over the years of experience, they have made sure that the command structure, manpower and ammunition depots used to strike Israel from hidden firing points can survive Israeli incursions, artillery and airstrikes.

According to the IDF, Hamas’ underground defense and offensive structure is well supplied with food and fuel. This will enable Hamas fighters to withstand a prolonged siege. Compounding the situation is the fact that tunnel entrances are often in residences, various buildings, fields in the desert surrounding Gaza, and one found in a washing machine. Finding them is like looking for a needle in a haystack. According to the IDF, the command and control center for the entire labyrinth of tunnels is located under Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa. Such statements from Israel are apparently given to justify strikes on churches, mosques and hospitals in the Gaza Strip.

It is noted that Israel has no illusions about the dangers it faces in taking Hamas tunnels. It has previously fought an uphill battle in their depths during the 50-day ground invasion of Gaza launched in 2014 to destroy the tunnels to Israel (Operation Unbreakable Rock).

During this campaign, Israeli troops entered the tunnels on the outskirts of Gaza and suffered casualties because they were unprepared for what lay ahead. Israeli soldiers faced enormous technological difficulties in locating, fighting in, and destroying hidden Hamas tunnels.

In response to Hamas’s efforts, Israel had previously created a special Corps of Engineers unit, known informally as Yahalom (Diamond). The tunnel warfare unit is called “Samur,” which means “weasel” in Hebrew and is the initials of the words “Slikim” (hiding places) and “Minharot” (caves or tunnels).

On its website, the “Yahalom Advanced Unit” describes its mission as follows: special sabotage missions, demolishing and blowing up buildings, sabotaging enemy infrastructure, handling explosives, preparing explosive devices and bombs, neutralizing enemy explosive devices, clearing complex minefields, and locating and destroying terrorist tunnels. The unit sometimes utilizes robots and many remote-controlled devices.

A secret underground training center has been set up to train the unit, with a mock-up of Hamas tunnels built to “detect, map and neutralize underground tunnels that threaten any country.” Israeli tunnel units have practiced underground warfare in the artificial Palestinian Baladiya City, which is located on a military base, in the Negev Desert.

Nevertheless, so far, the IDF has had no particular success in destroying the tunnels. Only the use of anti-bunker bombs with a strong destructive effect gives them some hope. However, this comes at the cost of a large number of civilian casualties. In a month of fighting in Palestine, more than 10,000 people have been killed.

The very question of the use of various underground passages and structures as a tool of war is not something new or extraordinary. In ancient times, tunnels and underground structures were also used in wars.

For example, the Jews used them to attack the Roman legions during the revolt of 66-70 AD. The Romans encountered similar tactics in the Balkans and in the forests of Germanic tribes. Even earlier, underground tunnels were built by the Persians to undermine cities, and were also used to mop up advancing soldiers with lit sulfur (the prototype of a gas attack).

During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the technique of tunnel digging and the use of gunpowder charges was greatly improved in Europe. Asia also used tunneling until the wars of the 20th century—the Chinese built tunnels between village houses to attack the Japanese during the occupation. Later, the Japanese themselves began creating similar communications systems that were used against the US Marines. The famous defensive Maginot Line in France also had a system of underground tunnels and bunkers. In 1940, the Germans did not attack it, but simply bypassed it, actually taking it without a single shot, and France was forced to capitulate.

Vietnam, North Korea, and Afghanistan are places where the U.S. military has already encountered tunnel warfare. However, before the Americans in Afghanistan, Soviet soldiers were familiar with them. During the Cold War, systems of underground bunkers were actively created both in the USSR and in the US and were designed to accommodate command centers.

In addition to Israel, the US is also very interested in this kind of action.

The first manual that describes tactics and procedures for fighting in underground structures is FM 90-10-1, “An Infantryman’s Guide to Combat in Built-Up Areas,” dated 1993.

Prior to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the mission of capturing large underground military complexes was assigned to first-tier special operations units, such as Army Force Delta and Navy SEAL Team 6, as well as the US Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment.

However, after the U.S. designated the DPRK, Russia, Iran, and China as threats, the requirements changed.

In late 2017, the US Army spent about $572 million to train and equip 26 of its 31 active combat brigades to fight in large-scale underground structures beneath densely populated urban areas around the world. Training Circular TC 3-20.50, “Small Unit Training in Subterranean Environments,” was released at that time.

In 2018, DARPA launched the Subterranean Challenge project to train fighters and first responders by exploring man-made tunnel systems, urban subways, and natural cave networks [v].

In the same year, an underground warfare training center was built at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It is built on Range 68 and features over a kilometer of tunnels with tight spaces and unexpected elements.

In November 2019, the U.S. Army issued another doctrinal document on the topic of Underground Warfare. It stated that there are more than 10,000 tactical tunnels in the world and underground structures will be increasingly used in modern armed conflicts.

It was also said that to fight this new type of combat, infantry units need to know how to effectively navigate, communicate, overcome difficult obstacles and attack enemy forces in underground labyrinths ranging from narrow corridors to tunnels as wide as residential streets. Soldiers will need new equipment and training to operate in conditions such as total darkness, bad air and lack of cover from enemy fire in areas where standard army communications equipment does not work.

The US also drew attention to the experience in Syria, where terrorists from ISIS (banned in Russia) and other anti-government groups have used underground communications (including the creation of tunnels) to attack checkpoints, blow up buildings and other infrastructure in various cities.

But in addition to hypothetical threats, hundreds of tunnels already exist in the United States along the border with Mexico, which are used by drug cartels to smuggle drugs and illegal migrants across the border. In January 2011, the U.S. government built a special tunnel in Yuma, Arizona, to study this problem and develop measures to combat it. Various “anti-tunnel” technologies began to be practiced there. They used acoustic detectors, electromagnetic wave generators, robots equipped with sensors and special anti-bunker bombs.

It is likely that Israel has already received some support from its American colleagues when the first airplanes with equipment and ammunition arrived in October.

Of course, the likelihood of armed conflicts using underground infrastructure is not only related to Israel and the United States.

In 2015, Paul Springer, professor of comparative military history at the US Air Force Command and General Staff College, warned that “If irregular warfare remains common in the next few decades, as it has been for many recent conflicts, tunnels are likely to play an increasingly important role. Dominant conventional powers, most notably the United States, have a massive informational advantage provided by aerial surveillance. One way to offset some of the effects of this information dominance is to simply conceal activities, particularly underground. Tunnels can create a defensive nightmare for attackers, and negate many of the advantages held by a technologically superior conventional force. The process of clearing and destroying a tunnel network is expensive, time-consuming, and likely to inflict many more casualties than an engagement above ground. Tunnels also offer a dual-usage in peacetime, in that they provide infiltration and smuggling routes. If the entrances and layout of the tunnels can be kept secret, their existence creates a major security threat.”

Apparently Springer was referring to Iran when he talked about compensation because of US intelligence assets. And Iran has an extensive underground infrastructure of bunkers, housing missiles and drones.

The Russian army also faced tunnel warfare when it knocked out Ukrainian neo-Nazis from the Azov Battalion (a terrorist organization banned in Russia) from the undergrounds of the Azovstal plant. On the other hand, industrial infrastructure is still different from specially designed military communications. Therefore, in the current confrontation with Hamas, Israel actually has no effective tools to destroy them. Because of this, the IDF is using scorched earth tactics in an attempt to achieve an intimidation effect.

Leonid Savin is Editor-in-Chief of the Geopolitika.ru Analytical Center, General Director of the Cultural and Territorial Spaces Monitoring and Forecasting Foundation and Head of the International Eurasia Movement Administration. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.

An Act of State Terrorism

Introduction

In Part One of “An Act of State Terrorism,” our article examining the decision by the United States to drop a plutonium bomb on the largest Catholic community in Japan in 1945, we explored five aspects of this tragedy and this crime.

We discussed the 400 year old Catholic heritage of Nagasaki; the frightful death toll and ghastly material devastation wrought by the detonation of the 21 kiloton Fat Man bomb over that city; the unresolved question of how Nagasaki appeared, suddenly, almost at the last minute, and by an anonymous hand, on the target list for nuclear incineration; the opposition of many American military leaders to the use of atomic weapons against civilians; and, finally, the false narrative of bomb proponents who claimed that the Soviet declaration of war against Japan was unexpected, reactive and opportunistic.

In Part Two, I propose to begin the examination of those, in the United States government, who were responsible for the unprecedented decision to terrify an enemy into surrender, by utilizing the then unimaginable destructive force of nuclear weapons, and using it on civilians, resulting in the deaths of perhaps two hundred thousand innocent human beings.

Our focus in this installment will be on the Cabinet official under whose authority the bomb was developed and deployed, the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson.

An Act of State Terrorism, Part Two

At the end of 1945, following the conclusion of the Second World War, the Armed Forces of the United States of America had eight five star officers, four Fleet Admirals — William Leahy, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz and William Halsey — and four Generals of the Army — George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, Henry “Hap” Arnold and Dwight Eisenhower.

Leahy and MacArthur would later express moral objections to the atomic bombing of civilians. Halsey called it “a mistake.” Eisenhower thought the first use of such weapons by America was inexpedient. All, with the exception of Marshall, thought their use was unnecessary.

Even Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, who would later defend the dropping of the two atomic bombs, initially advocated for their deployment against military targets only. After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Marshall urged that the atomic bombing of cities be halted, as America’s limited supply of these new bombs needed to be conserved as potential tactical weapons, for battlefield use, in the invasion of Japan.

It was America’s political leadership, not its military and naval commanders, who wanted and decided to use nuclear weapons in 1945.

A Very Different Government

Hilaire Belloc warned of the danger of “reading history backwards,” of assuming that the standards, structures and practices of today obtained in the past. Compared to 2023, America had a profoundly different federal government in 1945.

At the end of the Second World War, the vast civilian architecture of the modern national security state had not yet been created. That creation would come in two phases, the first in the immediate post-war period, and the second, after the 9/11 attacks.

When the U.S. government considered the military application of atomic power in 1945, those advisory, policy making, and executive institutions so preeminent in our own time — the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council and the Department of Defense — did not yet exist.

There was no Cabinet level Ambassador to the United Nations, and there was, certainly, no all powerful Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, who could, like Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski, rival or displace the Secretary of State in influence.

The National Director of Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security would be 21st century constructions.

That contemporary Colossus of centralized power, the Executive Office of the President, with its cabinet department size and its myriad councils and agencies, was unknown in 1945. Nor was there a prime ministerial White House Chief of Staff, who could treat Cabinet secretaries as functionaries, and control, or even restrict, their access to the President.

In 1945, the Vice-President had no voice in the counsels of the Executive branch, and no presence or staff in the White House. In fact, he had, virtually, no staff at all, only a small office in the Capitol, from which he would emerge to discharge his constitutional obligation to preside over the Senate.

As the 25th Amendment, governing presidential and vice-presidential succession, was only proposed after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the office of Vice-President was vacant during the first Truman administration.

In the eighty-two days, from January 20 to April 12, 1945, during which time Harry Truman served as Vice-President of the United States, he only met with President Franklin Roosevelt, alone, on two occasions. On neither of those occasions, did FDR bother to tell him about the Manhattan Engineer District Project, a.k.a., the atomic bomb.

Three Civilian Advisors

At the end of the Second World War, the President of the United States had just three principal civilian advisors in matters of foreign policy and national defense. These were the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the Navy.

Their significance in the government was underscored by their proximity to the President. Their offices were located in the Old Executive Office Building, colloquially referred to, simply, as the State, War and Navy Building — that great, 19th century Second Empire edifice next to the White House, and connected to it by an underground passageway. It is now called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

In 1945, the U. S. Secretary of State was James F. Byrnes. The Secretary of War was Henry L. Stimson, and the Secretary of the Navy was James Vincent Forrestal. Both Byrnes and Forrestal were baptized Catholics. Only one however, still adhered to the religion of his baptism.

The Grey Eminence

The actual management of the atomic bomb project was in the hands of the War Department.

Seventy-seven years old in the summer of 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson was the U.S. government’s most distinguished and experienced grey eminence. Harry Truman was the sixth American President whom he served.

By birth, ancestry, religion, economic status and education, Stimson was an archetypical member of the American nomenklatura, sometimes called the Eastern Establishment.

Born in New York City in September of 1867, to a family of pious Presbyterians, he was the son of a surgeon and the grandson of a banker. His father sent him to Phillips Andover Academy, Yale University (where he joined Skull and Bones) and Harvard Law School.

A successful Wall Street attorney with the white shoe firm of Root and Clark, Stimson, by the time he was in his mid-thirties, was earning an annual income of $20,000, the equivalent of nearly $700,000 per year today.

Appointed, by President Theodore Roosevelt, as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1906, Stimson served until 1909, prosecuting antitrust cases. In his only attempt at elective office, Stimson became, with Roosevelt’s endorsement, the Republican nominee for Governor of New York in 1910, losing in the general election to Democrat John Dix.

From 1911 to 1913, Stimson served in the Cabinet of President William Howard Taft as the U.S. Secretary of War, the same office he would hold thirty years later in the Second World War. As a Regular Army Colonel in the Field Artillery in the First World War, he spent nine months in France, from 1917 to 1918, at the American General Staff College in Langres.

After the war, Stimson resumed his law practice, was made a Brigadier General in the Reserves, and became, in 1921, one of the founders of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge named Stimson an Envoy Extraordinary to the Republic of Nicaragua — then a de facto American protectorate — to settle that country’s electoral dispute. Later that year, Coolidge appointed him Governor-General of the Philippines.

In 1929, President Herbert Hoover recalled Stimson to Washington to confer upon him the highest gift in the providence of the Presidency. Hoover appointed him U.S. Secretary of State.

Serving until the end of the Hoover Administration in 1933, Stimson was the American delegate to the London Naval Conference in 1930, and would later proclaim the Stimson Doctrine, a policy of sanctions and non-recognition, aimed at containing Japanese aggression in Manchuria.

In July of 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, intent on running for an unprecedented third term, and seeking bi-partisan support for his foreign policy of all aid to Britain short of war, returned the 72 year old Henry Stimson, after an absence of 27 years, to the War Department.

For Roosevelt’s purposes, Stimson was an inspired choice. Although a prominent Republican with an impeccable reputation, Stimson was an internationalist, and therefore an interventionist, and more significantly, was an old retainer to the Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt family.

A Bureaucratic Interest

No cabinet official had a more compelling bureaucratic self interest in the successful use of atomic weapons than Henry Stimson. After all, he had just spent more than two billion, in 1940’s dollars, ($33 billion today) on the Manhattan Project, and he spent it surreptitiously, without the direct knowledge of Congress.

One of the congressional officials from whom he concealed the details of the project was the Chairman of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, the junior Senator from Missouri, one Harry S. Truman.

Stimson then spent another three billion dollars ($49 billion in today’s money) on the development and production of the delivery system for the atomic bomb, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the most expensive weapons system in the history of the planet up to that time.

The B-29 proved to be a spectacular triumph of American aircraft design and engineering, a veritable quantum leap in aviation technology. It remained a front line American aircraft into the jet age of the Strategic Air Command, and was the principal U.S. heavy bomber in the Korean War.

In the middle of World War II however, Stimson had no way of knowing that. So, hedging his bets against the possible failure of the B-29 program, he then spent another $124 million ($2 billion in 2023 dollars) on a second delivery system, the now forgotten Consolidated B-32 Dominator.

In total, Stimson’s War Department expended $84 billion, in real dollars, to develop and deliver the atomic bomb.

Far from being an enthusiast for his own creation, Stimson was afflicted with a moral ambivalence about the bomb that bordered on schizophrenia. In policy terms, Stimson’s position was one of protracted inconsistency about the use of the weapon.

The Targeting of Civilians

In May of 1945, the Truman Administration established an inter-departmental Committee, known as the Interim Committee on the Military Use of the Atomic Bomb, to formulate policy about the deployment of the bomb, and to craft public statements explaining its existence to the American people.

The Chairman of the Interim Committee was Henry Stimson. The Committee was advised by a technical body called the Scientific Panel.

From its very beginning, the committee determined that civilian losses concomitant with the use of the bomb were not to be viewed as collateral casualties. The bomb was specifically intended to be a terror weapon which explicitly targeted civilians and maximized civilian deaths.

The second of the committee’s first three recommendations, adopted unanimously and issued on June 1, 1945, was: “It should be used on a dual target plant surrounded by or adjacent to houses and other buildings most susceptible to damage;”

The Target Committee, headed by the Director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie Groves, had already come to the same conclusion. On May 12, 1945, that committee decided that the bomb should be used against “important targets in an urban area of more than three miles diameter,” — area bombing on an immense scale.

On June 6, 1945, Stimson met with President Truman to discuss the Interim Committee recommendations. According to Stimson’s memorandum on the meeting, Truman, already briefed by his aide, (and soon to be Secretary of State) James Byrnes, expressed no concerns with the committee report, beyond what to tell the Russians in the upcoming Potsdam Conference.

Nor did Stimson register any objection to the targeting of homes in a nuclear attack. At the very end of the meeting, however, Stimson, in a reference to the conventional firebombing of Japanese cities, told Truman “I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities.”

It makes no sense, of course, to support the atomic bombing of civilians while condemning conventional area bombing as Hitlerian. Was Stimson reluctant to challenge the findings of his own committee? Why did he not raise this issue in the committee which he chaired? Was this remark a subtle means of implanting doubt in Truman’s mind?

Stimson Begins To Dissent

Twelve days later, on June 18th, President Truman held a meeting at the White House, with both his military and civilian advisors, to discuss the invasion of Japan. While most of those present supported a landing in the Japanese Home Islands in November, Stimson, seconded by his Assistant Secretary of War, John McCloy, suggested that an invasion would solidify Japanese resistance in a fight to the death.

An even more dramatic intervention was made by Fleet Admiral William Leahy, who told the President that the unconditional surrender of Japan was not necessary to the successful conclusion of the war.

Truman, revealingly, told Leahy that he could leave the issue to Congress, but he could not change public opinion in this matter.

On July 2nd, Stimson sent a memorandum to the President, entitled a Proposed Program for Japan. It is a remarkable document. While arguing, ostensibly, against an invasion of Japan, Stimson raises issues directly related to the use of atomic weapons.

Stimson told Truman that Japan was under blockade, had no allies and no navy, and was increasingly vulnerable to air attacks. He went on to say, contrary to the pervasive racial hatred of the time, that “Japan is not a nation composed wholly of mad fanatics of an entirely different mentality from ours.”

Addressing the policy of unconditional surrender, Stimson asserted that a Japanese surrender could be facilitated if we “do not exclude a constitutional monarchy under her present dynasty.”

In a seeming repudiation of his own committee, Stimson concluded the memorandum by stating that “Our own bombing should be confined to military objectives as far as possible.”

Stimson would lose the first of these arguments, and only prevail, belatedly, in the second. The bomb would be used on civilians, and Truman would only agree to the preservation of the monarchy after the destruction of Nagasaki.

With the successful test of the atomic bomb at Alamogordo in New Mexico on July 16th, the bureaucratic momentum for its use became inexorable. By the beginning of August, 1945, Stimson, the Administration loyalist, was busy monitoring last minute preparations for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Saving Kyoto, Sacrificing Nagasaki

Henry Stimson’s last known intervention about the use of the atomic bomb, prior to the bombings, was his direct appeal to President Truman on July 24th to spare the city of Kyoto, the historic center of Buddhism and Shintoism in Japan, by removing it from the target list. It was immediately thereafter that Nagasaki was added to the list.

Was Henry Stimson the anonymous decision maker who selected Catholic Nagasaki for destruction to save pagan Kyoto? The archival record offers no clues, but we do know that Stimson embraced all the prejudices of his time, his class, and his religious sect.

As a young lawyer in the 1890’s, Stimson was a committed “goo-goo,” a member of the Good Government Club of New York, dedicated to stamping out patronage and corruption in local government, i.e., Irish control of municipal politics.

Stimson entered government as an appointee and a disciple of Theodore Roosevelt, a President notorious for his nativism and bigotry. As a diplomat and colonial administrator, Stimson believed that Catholic Filipinos and Latin Americans were incapable of democratic self-government, requiring, instead, the firm hand of Anglo-Saxon tutelage.

Like every other rich WASP in the FDR Administration, Stimson had a visceral animus against the Catholic leader of Free France, once telling Harry Truman that Charles De Gaulle was “psychopathic.”

In his last public comments, a few months before his death in 1950, Stimson, in a letter to the editor of The New York Times, denounced Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The Tragedy of Henry Stimson

An attorney represents the position of his client. A mandarin — a high civil servant — learns the values of obedience, discretion, compliance with the institutional consensus, and acquiescence in decisions, once made.

Stimson was both of these in his long career. The tragedy of Henry Stimson was that he was inclined to do right, in a vague, Protestant/humanitarian sort of way, but lacked the moral clarity that the Catholic Faith would have imparted.

He had principles, and personal probity, but no concept of unbreachable moral prohibitions, rooted in Divine and natural law. In the end, everything was negotiable, where compromise was permitted and expected.

Like Pontius Pilate, Henry Stimson was morally discomforted by the decisions confronting him, and like Pilate, he preferred the acceptance of a crime to the uncertainties and unpleasantness of political discord.

On two occasions in his career, Stimson rejected the elite consensus. He argued against the vengeful Morgenthau Plan, which would have destituted the German people and depopulated the country by de-industrializing Germany.

Like General George Marshall, Stimson believed that American support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine would be inimical to U.S. interests in the Middle East.

On August 10, 1945, the day after the bombing of Nagasaki, Stimson, with the support of the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, appealed to the President to halt all attacks, both atomic and conventional, on Japan, to give that country an opportunity to surrender.

Stimson and Colonel William H. Kyle (right) arriving at the Gatow Airport in Berlin, Germany to attend the Potsdam Conference (July 16, 1945). Source.

After the war, towards the end of his life, Henry Stimson’s institutional loyalties and ruling class sensibilities proved impossible to discard. In a February, 1947 article in Harper’s Magazine, Stimson not only defended the killing of innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but assumed responsibility for carrying out the decision: “I approved four other targets including the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Ironically, Stimson, one of the few cabinet officials who expressed moral reservations about the killing of civilians in wartime, would, in this article written in his retirement, provide the official narrative justifying the use of atomic weapons on the innocent as “our least abhorrent choice.”

C. Joseph Doyle is the Executive Director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts. Doyle is also the Director of Communications for the Friends of Saint Benedict Center.

Featured: Henry Lewis Stimson, by Ellen Emmet Rand; painted in 1933.

Captio Lincolnie

Pugna Lincolniensis fuit magnae pugnae mediae aetatis. Hoc carmen pugnam et reparationem describit. Hic versus descriptionem pugnae saeculo decimoquarto in prima parte conscriptam fuisse verisimile est. In uno codice extat: MS. Cotton. Vespas. B. XIII. fol. 130, vo.

Incipiunt versus de Guerra Regis Johannis.

Serpserat Angligenam rabies quadrangula gentem.
In proprium jurata jugum, motuque minaci
Gens sibi degenerans, ut libera serviat, alta
Corruat, incolumis ægrotet, tuta pavescat,
Vendicat antiquas inimico consule leges;
Non legis libra, non juris luce, nec igne
Sacri consilii, sed nec lima rationis,
Fulgurat in vetitum spreta ratione voluntas.

Prima fuit rabies proprio concepta tumore;
Altera belligeras Francorum traxerat alas;
Conduxit nigras Scottorum tertia turmas;
Flexit quarta leves tenui sub veste Galenses.

Fœdera rumpuntur pacis, tonitrusque minaces;
Serpsit in attonitas corrupta licentia turres,
In quibus ægra fides latuit, medicumque salutis
Expectata diu, tandem de munere Christi
Convaluit, traxitque suas in bella cohortes.

Hæc rabies patiente Deo permissa parumper
Non concessa fuit, ut molles fulmina mentes
Comburant, nec ut ira Dei confundat inermes.
Sed cordis scrutator oves deserta petentes
Errantesque diu proprio revocavit amore,
Vapulet ut meritas medicato verbere culpas,
Divinasque minas clementia patris amicans
Ubere materno lenivit verbera patris.

Anglorum nutabat honor, regnique venustas,
Inclinata caput divini judicis iram
Senserat, et tumido timuit servire tyranno.
Pendula palma, diu dubio protracta favore,
Nunc risit Gallis, nunc risum contulit Anglis,
Verius applaudens istis, fallacius illis.

Non tulit ulterius regem regnare furentem
Vindicis ira Dei; cecidit percussus ab illo
Cujus templa, domos, combusserat igne minaci.
A face fax oritur fati, flammæque furorem
Dum furit in regem febris vindicta fugavit.
Summus honos mors illa fuit, culmenque decoris
Attulit, in nullo quod erat superatus ab hoste,
Et tot erant hostes; victus victore superno,
Invictusque suos hostes moriendo momordit.

Desinat ira tumens; discat servire potestas
Curvarique Deo, cui subdens colla resurget;
In surgendo cadet: brevis est humana potestas,
Et brevibus discat finem properare diebus.

Planxerat extinctum regio viduata Johannem,
Degenerique timens sua subdere colla marito
Invocat Angligenas Anglorum lacrima vires;
Quo gravior dolor est, propior medicina doloris.

Fulserat interea minimæ scintillula formæ,
Regia progenies, laceri spes unica regni,
Stella quasi succensa Deo, nubemque paternam
Exuit, irradians nova lux, stellasque fugatas
Fulmine de patrio pueri candela vocavit.

O Pietas preciosa Dei! qui magna magistrat,
Fortia confundit, infirma levat, feritates
Fulminat, inflatos frangit, qui virginis alvo
Parvulus egressus, parvum suscepit alendum,
Ecclesiæque dedit gremio, quem matris in ulnas
Blanda parens recipit, nato blandita parentis
Obsequio, teneram capiti positura coronam.
Consilium cœleste fuit, quod consona sacri
Unio consilii regi parere puello
Non timuit, timuitque magis servire tyranno.

Unio sacra novum maturat ad ardua regem;
Utilitas, pietasque, fides, concurrere fatis
Conjurant, cunctos[que] crucis signare sigillo;
Constiterant vexilla crucis, regemque novellum
Ambierant, bajulosque crucis crux alba decorans
Instabiles statuit fidei fundamine turmas.

O famosa viri legatio, lima beati
Consilii, sidus recti, speculum rationis,
Gala dei cultor, curæ cristata galero!
Anglia victrices strinxit divinitus enses,
In commune bonum fundunt castella catervas
Signiferas, belloque truces, hostique minaces.

Tempus erat quo terra novo pubescere partu
Cœperat, et teneras in crines solverat herbas,
Vellera pratorum redolens infantia florum
Pinxerat, et, renovas crispans coma primula silvas,
Innumeras avium revocavit ad organa linguas,
Gallica tum rabies aquilonis adhæserat Anglis,
Conjurata manus medios transire per Anglos,
Londoniis egressa suis, longasque latebras
Deseruit Lodovica cohors, comitesque superbos
Concessa pudet ire via, Montique Sorello
Subsidium ferale ferunt, nam quo magis illum
Major palma colit, graviorem ferre ruinam
Præcavet ira Dei; sed cautior inde recessit
Nobilitas comitum, fidei flos, regia virtus,
Cestrensis clipeus, donec frendente tumultu
Transierat rabies notum super ardua castrum,
Trigintæque latus, longique superbia belli
Fluxit ad obsessam matronæ nobilis arcem.

Huc ubi fata feras fremitu flexere phalangas,
Fama volat, comitesque vocat, comitumque sodales
Cestrenses, crescitque seges clipeata virorum.
Regia signa micant, et conjurata sequuntur
Agmina, clara fides cum denique protrahit ora,
Candida signa crucis juvenum præstantia pingunt
Pectora, consolidat communis corda voluntas;
Vincendi spes una fuit, victoria cunctas
In facies præmissa patet, plausuque secundo
Permittunt socias in consona prælia dextras.

Instabat sabbatum quo festa peracta superni
Flaminis, et trinum celebrat deitatis honorem
Vespera; sol prima lambebat lampade terras,
Cum tuba terribili dederat præludia cantu;
Bella movent ferrata duces, tot signa videres
Nutantes tremulo galeas superare volatu,
Tot clipeos vario mutantes signa colore.
Fulsit in armatas solaris gratia turmas,
Febricitabat iners, validabant corda feroces.
Venit ut attonitam constantia Martis ad urbem,
Terribili juvenes muros cinxere corona,
Rimanturque novos aditus; nec protinus urbem
Invasere duces; legatio mittitur intus
Sacrilegos revocare viros ad fœdera pacis.
Nec placuit pax ulla feris, convitia fundunt,
Legatos spernunt, adduntque minacia verba.

Irrita legati postquam mandata reportant,
Magnanimos monet ire duces; tum bellicus horror
Infremuit, tonuere tubæ, mugitus in auras
Horridus insurgit, et, constrepitante tumultu,
Mirari poterant terrena tonitrua nubes.
Transiliunt fossas, transcendunt mœnia, portas
Confringunt, aditus rumpunt, et prælia miscent.
Et gladiis fecere viam; confusio digna
Sacrilegos sternit, fundunt examina Christi
Ferrigeras Mavortis apes, stimulisque timendis
Hostiles penetrant tunicas, squamosaque ferri
Texta secant, Saulosque trahunt ad vincula Pauli,
Reddidit et lepores conversio sacra leones.

Hic Moyses in Monte stetit, Josue stationem
Fixerat hic solis, magnum premit inde Goliam
Funda lapisque David; vidit venerabile mirum
Lincolniensis honor, vidit maris ira trophæum
Imperiale Dei, vidit quadrangula pestis
In se victrici vexilla resurgere palma.
Vidit, et obstupuit, sensitque superbia belli
Pro puero pugnare Deum; nec sponte quievit,
Sed crepuit, pacisque pedes in colla recepit.

O famosa dies, nostrum veneranda per ævum!
Bellica qua rabies latuit, qua pacifer ensis
Pestiferas domuit partes, qua gratia Christi
Dedecus extersit natum, fideique lavacro
Proluit inscriptum versa de fronte pudorem.

Expliciunt versus de Guerra regis Johannis.

Featured: Secunda pugna Lincolniensis. Matthæus Parisiensis, Chronica majora, volume II, folio 51v (55v), annis 1240-1253.

The Wars of Nagorno-Karabakh

Good books are rare, and clear, concise works are even rarer. Jean-Marie Lorgé’s Les guerres du Haut Karabakh (éditions Baudelaire, 2021) has both these qualities. It should be published in English.

To understand this tragic conflict, you need to know Erdogan’s vision of the international chessboard (or his geopolitical vision, if you prefer) as the author describes it. And we can trust him.

Erdogan anchors Turkey on two pillars: the “Blue Homeland” and “Pan-Turkism.” The “Blue Homeland” is a kind of bread-and-butter patriotism aimed at taking control of the southern and eastern Mediterranean Sea and its resources. This should put Europe on its guard. The counterpart to this “Blue Homeland” is the realization of Enver Pasha’s grand design: the coalition of Turkish-speaking regions from the Bosphorus to the Altai Mountains, under Turkish leadership. Azerbaijan, the Muslim-majority country ethnically, culturally and linguistically closest to Turkey, is the second link in this Pontic chain: from Turkey to Kirghizia, via Azerbaijan, Turkmenia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The first Nagorno-Karabakh war (1990) pitted it against Azerbaijan. The second war (2020) brought Turkey into the picture. Its unwavering support for Azerbaijan is in line with Ankara’s policy. Added to this, and no one dares say it, is Islam’s age-old hatred of Christians. And on this point, Turkey has shown throughout history that this hatred has gone as far as genocide, not only of Armenians but also of Aramaic-speaking Christian populations. The press calls it ethnic cleansing, but religious cleansing too.

In September-November 2020, the immediate aim of the Azerbaijani “steel fist” offensive was to break the Shushi lock, to block the Lachin corridor (10 km long) through which the only road linking Karabakh to Armenia passes, and to cut off the second road linking two Armenian towns. In other words, the aim was to suffocate Nagorno Karabakh. The defeat, both military and political, was total. Armenia was left with the choice of either toning down its desire for Westernization and accepting closer political and military relations with Russia, Iran and China, or accepting the path outlined by Erdogan on December 10, 2020 at the Victory Parade in Baku”: vassal status within a regional coalition dominated by a Turkey drunk with its Ottoman past. And we know all about the Ottoman past: from Islamic oppression to massacres and genocide.

There remained a third way: to start a desperate war all over again. That’s what we’ve seen recently. With a new debacle. The second war was part of Erdogan’s vision of a Bosphorus/Altai territorial continuum, of which the Turkey/Azerbaijan territorial continuity was the first step. To achieve this, the Nagorno Karabagh lock had to be broken.

And that’s now done. There’s still one more lock: Siunik, which has been Armenian for two millennia, and which the Azeris also claim, but taking the 19th and 20th centuries as their starting point; that is, when their state was born. Before that, there is no history of Azerbaijan comparable to the long and dramatic history of Armenia or Georgia. The Azeris can therefore make no claim before the last three centuries. The capture of central and southern Siunik by Turkey, through Azerbaijan, would see the realization of Pan-Turkism’s major political objective: a Turko-Azerbaijani mass (Muslim and hardline), with three maritime windows.

Once Turkey joined Europe, we can imagine the consequences. The third Nagorno-Karabakh war did indeed take place. But not the one we might have expected. Which may mean that it’s not over yet. On the territories recovered by Azerbaijan under the terms of the November 9, 2020 agreement, some 80 Christian religious buildings have been destroyed.

Marion Duvauchel is a historian of religions and holds a PhD in philosophy. She has published widely, and has taught in various places, including France, Morocco, Qatar, and Cambodia. She is the founder of the Pteah Barang, in Cambodia.

Prayer to Our Lady of Palestine

During these times of great cruetly that has been unleashed upon the people of Palestine, let us pray to our Lady that peace may at last break out in the Holy Land.

O Mary Immaculate, gracious Queen of Heaven and of Earth, behold us prostrate before thy exalted throne. Full of confidence in thy goodness and in thy boundless power, we beseech thee to turn a pitying glance upon Palestine, which, more than any other country, belongs to thee, since thou hast graced it with thy birth, thy virtues and thy sorrows, and from there hast given the Redeemer to the world.

Remember that there especially thou wast constituted our tender Mother, the dispenser of graces. Watch, therefore, with special protection over thy native country, dispel from it the shades of error, for it was there that the Son of Eternal Justice shone. Bring about the speedy fulfillment of the promise, which issued from the lips of thy Divine Son, that there should be one fold and one Shepherd.

Obtain for us all that we may serve the Lord in sanctity and justice during all the days of our life, so that, by the merits of Jesus and with thy motherly aid, we may pass at last from this earthly Jerusalem to the splendors of the heavenly one. Amen.

Letter from the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem

Dear Brothers and Sisters,
May the Lord give you peace!

We are going through one of the most difficult and painful periods in our recent times and history. For over two weeks now, we have been inundated with images of horrors, which have reawakened ancient traumas, opened new wounds, and made pain, frustration and anger explode within all of us. Much seems to speak of death and endless hatred. So many ‘whys’ overlap in our minds, adding to our sense of bewilderment.

The whole world views this Holy Land of ours as a place that is a constant cause of wars and divisions. That is precisely why it was good that a few days ago, the whole world joined us with a day of prayer and fasting for peace. It was a beautiful view of the Holy Land and an important moment of unity with our Church. And that view is still there. Next October 27th, the Pope has called for a second day of prayer and fasting, so that our intercession may continue. It will be a day that we will celebrate with conviction. It is perhaps the main thing we Christians can do at this time: pray, do penance, intercede. For this, we thank the Holy Father from the bottom of our hearts.

In all this uproar where the deafening noise of the bombs is mixed with the many voices of sorrow and the many conflicting feelings, I feel the need to share with you a word that has its origin in the Gospel of Jesus. That is the starting point which we set out from, and return to, time and time again: a word from the Gospel to help us live this tragic moment by uniting our feelings with those of Jesus.

Looking to Jesus, of course, does not mean feeling exempt from the duty to speak, to denounce, to call out, as well as to console and encourage. As we heard in last Sunday’s Gospel, it is necessary to render “to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” (Matt. 22:21). Looking to God, we therefore want, first of all, to render to Caesar what is his.

  My conscience and moral duty require me to state clearly that what happened on October 7th in southern Israel is in no way permissible and we cannot but condemn it. There is no reason for such an atrocity. Yes, we have a duty to state this and to denounce it. The use of violence is not compatible with the Gospel, and it does not lead to peace. The life of every human person has equal dignity before God, who created us all in His image.

The same conscience, however, with a great burden on my heart, leads me to state with equal clarity today that this new cycle of violence has brought to Gaza over five thousand deaths, including many women and children, tens of thousands of wounded, neighborhoods razed to the ground, lack of medicine, lack of water and of basic necessities for over two million people. These are tragedies that cannot be understood and which we have a duty to denounce and condemn unreservedly. The continuous heavy bombardment that has been pounding Gaza for days will only cause more death and destruction and will only increase hatred and resentment. It will not solve any problem, but rather create new ones. It is time to stop this war, this senseless violence.

It is only by ending decades of occupation and its tragic consequences, as well as giving a clear and secure national perspective to the Palestinian people that a serious peace process can begin. Unless this problem is solved at its root, there will never be the stability we all hope for. The tragedy of these days must lead us all, religious, political, civil society, international community, to a more serious commitment in this regard than what has been done so far. This is the only way to avoid other tragedies like the one we are experiencing now. We owe it to the many victims of these days and to those of years past. We do not have the right to leave this task to others.

Yet, I cannot live this extremely painful time without looking upward, without looking to Christ, without the faith that enlightens my view and yours on what we are experiencing, without turning our thoughts to God. We need a Word to accompany us, to comfort and encourage us. We need it like the air we breathe.

“I have told you this so that you might have peace in me. In the world you will have tribulations, but take courage, I have conquered the world.” (Jn. 16:33).

We find ourselves on the eve of Jesus’ Passion. He addresses these words to His disciples, who will shortly be tossed about, as if in a storm, before His death. They will panic, scatter and flee, like sheep without a shepherd.

Yet, this last word of Jesus is an encouragement. He does not say that He shall win, but that He has already won. Even in the turmoil to come, the disciples will be able to have peace. This is not a matter of theoretical irenic peace, nor of resignation to the fact that the world is evil, and we can do nothing to change it. Instead it is about having the assurance that precisely within all this evil, Jesus has already won. Despite the evil ravaging the world, Jesus has achieved a victory, and established a new reality, a new order, which after the resurrection will be assumed by the disciples who were reborn in the Spirit.

It was on the cross that Jesus won: not with weapons, not with political power, not by great means, nor by imposing himself. The peace He speaks of has nothing to do with victory over others. He won the world by loving it. It is true that a new reality and a new order begin on the cross. The order and the reality of the one who gives his life out of love. With the Resurrection and the gift of the Spirit, that reality and that order belong to His disciples. To us. God’s answer to the question of why the righteous suffer, is not an explanation, but a Presence. It is Christ on the cross.

It is on this that we stake our faith today. Jesus in that verse rightly speaks of courage. Such peace, such love, require great courage.

To have the courage of love and peace here, today, means not allowing hatred, revenge, anger and pain to occupy all the space of our hearts, of our speech, of our thinking. It means making a personal commitment to justice, being able to affirm and denounce the painful truth of injustice and evil that surrounds us, without letting it pollute our relationships. It means being committed, being convinced that it is still worthwhile to do all we can for peace, justice, equality and reconciliation. Our speech must not be about death and closed doors. On the contrary, our words must be creative, lifegiving, they must give perspective and open horizons.

It takes courage to be able to demand justice without spreading hatred. It takes courage to ask for mercy, to reject oppression, to promote equality without demanding uniformity, while remaining free. It takes courage today, even in our diocese and our communities, to maintain unity, to feel united to one another, even in the diversity of our opinions, sensitivities and visions.

I want, and we want, to be part of this new order inaugurated by Christ. We want to ask God for that courage. We want to be victorious over the world, taking upon ourselves that same Cross, which is also ours, made of pain and love, of truth and fear, of injustice and gift, of cries and forgiveness.

I pray for us all, and in particular for the small community of Gaza, which is suffering most of all. In particular, our thoughts go out to the 18 brothers and sisters who perished recently, and to their families whom we know personally. Their pain is great, and yet with every passing day, I realize that they are at peace. They are scared, shaken, upset, but with peace in their hearts. We are all with them, in prayer and concrete solidarity, thanking them for their beautiful witness.

Finally, let us pray for all innocent victims. The suffering of the innocent before God has a precious and redemptive value because it is united with the redemptive suffering of Christ. May their suffering bring peace ever closer!

We are approaching the solemnity of the Queen of Palestine, the patroness of our diocese. The shrine was erected during another time of war, and was chosen as a special place to pray for peace. In these days we will once again reconsecrate our Church and our land to the Queen of Palestine! I ask all churches around the world to join the Holy Father and to join us in prayer, and in the search for justice and peace.

We will not be able to gather all together this year, because the situation does not allow it. But I am sure that the whole diocese will be united on that day in prayer and in solidarity for peace, not worldly peace, but the peace which Christ gives us.

With sincere prayers for all, 

+Pierbattista Card. Pizzaballa 
Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem