Crossville, Tennessee – You’re going to want to bookmark these articles and save a copy so that, a year or three down the line, you can mock me for how wrong I got everything OR look back in wonder trying to figure out how I figured it out. I’m going to give you both a threat assessment AND a preview of where the shifting geo-political situation is going to take us. Decades ago, when I was doing talk radio in the Chicago area, the majority leader in the Illinois House told me they brought tapes of a lot of my stuff down to Springfield, the Capitol. When I asked him why, he said that I was an excellent prognosticator, but still within the upper range of normal on everyday things. BUT, he added, when I said something so out there that nobody had even thought it or seemed absolutely absurd, you could take it to the bank that it would happen.
As you have undoubtedly noticed, I begin very cockily today. It is intentional. I’m going to go way out on a limb. I don’t care about mockery or disbelief. When it all happens largely as I say it will (I figure 80% or better) it will give you further confidence when I tell you that this is NOT the end, confidence you are going to need as we go along these next few years.
People tend to treat the words, “Intelligent” and “Wise” as if they are synonymous. They are not. Intelligence, like strength or beauty, is simply a tool – a gift from God. It can be used to serve good purposes or evil, to serve God or self. Wisdom is the sense to seek the good – which, it turns out, is God. A wise man uses whatever intelligence he has to do the good he can within the limits he has and within what reality will allow. A man with no wisdom, but lots of intelligence is among the most dangerous idiots among us. This fool uses his intelligence to convince himself that his fantasies and wishes are reality. He can deceive a lot of good, honorable people with his schtick, but the first person he always deceives is himself.
All the gifts God gives us are also the first tools the devil uses to try to seduce us. A foolish man is easily seduced into believing he is author of the gifts given him and so, is a superior species of being. This is the beginning of his downfall – and of that of those who attach themselves to him. If it is not the most elegant seduction of the satan, it is by far the most common and profitable.
I know people often view whatever I say, whatever disclaimers I give, as some sort of prophecy. That is not the case. Certainly, everything I say is informed by all of my experiences, including the mystical. But the way the Lord has worked with me is to give me great volumes of information while insisting that I do great volumes of home study – and then insist that I figure it out, not according to conventional wisdom (which usually isn’t), but by seeing things for what they are in themselves, then extrapolating from there based on first principles and according to actual human behavior. Whether it broadly proves true and points to practical ways for progress and gain determines whether it is wisdom or foolishness.
Intelligent people who, with great self-absorption, work diligently to prop up fanciful absurdities of their own devising, in order to demonstrate that they are a superior species of being, are constantly chasing up blind alleys and box canyons. The only way out is the way they came in. But that would require they admit they were mistaken – and would jeopardize their sense of superiority. So, they waste time trying to justify even their obvious errors in a vain attempt to prop up their supercilious conceit. For all their thunder and empty show, they are barren – empty vessels – until they embrace humility. It is vanity that leads one to make the unforgivable sin – and it is unforgivable because a man’s vanity has made him incapable of recognizing the sin in it, and so, oblivious to the need for forgiveness. The wise man will make his share of errors, but will keep what is good, abandon what is error, and take responsibility for those errors in his unyielding, but stumbling, pursuit of what is true, what is beautiful, and what avails. If he is faithful until the end, he will bear great fruit that will last.
Much of what I say in these pieces differs radically from conventional wisdom. That’s okay. I have been crawling out on limbs all my life and, so far, it has worked out fine (if often uncomfortable) for me. In a few delightful cases, I have managed to change conventional wisdom on a subject. That is a delight, but carries with it the sorrow of seeing it quickly bowdlerized with new and improved nonsense from conventional thinkers. But it does position me and those around me to advance and start contemplating the next right step, instead of remaining trapped in the previous blind alley – knowing that each new step must be as hardly won as the last. So, whether what I have to say is wisdom or not will be revealed by God in His good time – and is dependent on how faithful I am in seeking His wisdom, which is the only real wisdom, rather than my own pale imitation. So here goes.
Russia, Ukraine, and Europe
This is a distinctly minority position, but the rabid hatred of Russia and Vladimir Putin makes no sense at all to me. Even serious commenters I have great respect for seem to assume it is a given that Putin wants to reconstitute the old Soviet Union with territorial conquests. Putin, once riffing off an old gem from Winston Churchill, said, “Any Russian who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart. Any Russian who wants to reconstitute it has no brain.” To me, that clearly suggested that Putin wants Russia to be a great nation, but without the pathologies and internal contradictions that were inherent to the old Soviet Union.
If Putin is an overheated territorial expansionist, he sure has little to show for it after a quarter century atop the Russian government. The only two countries he has invaded are Georgia and Ukraine. In Georgia, he only took the south portion of the country, the portion that was riddled with Islamic Jihadists who used that part of the country to launch attacks against Russia. In Ukraine, he has only targeted territory that has been consistently and historically Russian; mainly Crimea and the Donbass. Three times after the Ukrainian War began, Putin was ready to sign an agreement that would repatriate that territory while leaving historical Ukraine unmolested further. All three times it was the west, primarily through Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, that torpedoed those deals.
A very strong case can be made that, in Ukraine, Russia was working to repatriate Russian territory, using the threat of broader action as leverage to gain the repatriation. Since 2014, after the U.S. spent $5 billion to overthrow the Russia-friendly Ukrainian government and replace it with a U.S. aligned government, it has been official Ukrainian policy to discriminate against and harass, often violently, citizens in Russian-majority territory, including the burning alive of dissidents who favored Russians. The Azov Brigade, an explicitly neo-Nazi division of the Ukrainian military, was tasked with keeping citizens in line in Russian-majority territory of Ukraine. The citizens in the eastern territories of Ukraine, the historically Russian territories, have not been allowed to vote in Ukrainian elections since 2014. If, say, part of California was taken by Mexico through some anomalous administrative filigree – and then Mexico took to oppressing and persecuting the former Americans, I would hope we would have a chief executive who would defend them, working to repatriate the territory and threatening to invade Mexico proper to give us leverage in our legitimate territorial claims.
Ukrainians have reasonable cause for their hatred of Russia. Josef Stalin forced the starvation of over 6 million Ukrainians during the Holodomor. That is not the sort of offense you can easily just “walk off.” Yet it is not an effective (or appropriate) response to mount a milder version of persecution against Russians who had nothing to do with the original offense. And it is not even a sane act to voluntarily commit over ¾ of a million of your own people to death in a meat grinder that you insist on pursuing, despite the futility of it.
The point is that the caricature of a snarling Putin, madly plotting to take over the world does not hold up under any, much less serious, scrutiny. That is not to say that Putin does not have some wolfish characteristics. Hardly a surprise, given that Russian politics have been run by wolfish characters for almost a thousand years. A gentle fawn – or even a raging bull – would be eaten in a day. What is notable is that Putin is the most patient, restrained wolf ever to thrive and survive leading Russia. We should make the best of that.
There are, undoubtedly, officials in the Kremlin who, if they took power, WOULD try to replicate the purely territorial greatness of the old Soviet Union. Putin, I believe, is much smarter than that. He understands how vastly destabilizing to a nation it is to hold unwilling regions and satellite states in captivity. It fosters stubborn resentment and is a constant flashpoint for unrest. It is not territory which makes a nation great, but a common culture and resolve. That is a lesson that Ukraine is learning, to its sorrow, right now.
I am a believer in the right of self-determination for nations and regions which have such a common culture, language, and/or religion. Ukraine has all three. At least historical Ukraine does. Much of what Ukraine claims to the east is historically Russian territory, with Russian culture, language, and religion. While understandable, given past Russian oppression, it is Ukraine that has opted to deny self-determination to these historical Russian territories. And, in fact, has chosen to subjugate them.
Most commenters of stature have ceased arguing that we must fight for Ukraine in order to support democracy. It is hard to argue you are fighting for democracy by supporting a nation whose president has cancelled all elections, dissident media, political parties, and shuttered dissident Churches. The boogeyman of Russia aggressively taking territory throughout western Europe could very well become a reality if short-sighted fantasists posing as geopolitical geniuses succeed in their quest of overthrowing Putin. If you depose the most patient, restrained wolf leader in the history of the country, what are the odds you are going to get a replacement leader who is even more restrained and patient? The end that observers say they seek (a peaceful, stable Europe) is undermined by the means they support – toppling the most benign Russian leader in memory (though, admittedly, that is a low hurdle to clear).
While NATO was tacitly understood to defend Europe from Russian aggression when it was established in 1949, the charter overtly committed that, “They (member nations) are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” Vice-President J.D. Vance was dead on when he told the Munich Security Conference that the biggest threat to NATO is the abandonment of those principles by the European Union and many of its larger nation states, notably Great Britain, Germany and France – all of which are attacking basic principles of individual liberty, the rule of law, and citizen sovereignty. How much longer an organization that is aggressively and flagrantly attacking the core principles it was established to defend can last is a defining question of this age.
The eruption between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice-Pres. Vance at the White House on February 28 sounded the death knell for NATO. For all the sound and fury, Ukraine has little strategic significance to the U.S. Signing the major minerals deal would have given it strategic significance and served as a profound security guarantee. But Zelenskyy insisted that, even with such a deal, he would accept no peace that did not return the Russian-majority territories, including Crimea, to Ukraine (pre-2014 borders). Even now, after he has agreed to a cease-fire for 30 days, he still insists there will be no peace unless Russia cedes all this territory back to Ukraine.
In the week following the White House blow-up, western European leaders almost unanimously pledged their undying fealty to Ukraine…but then realized that, for all their posturing, they no longer have the means – economic or military – to do much of anything other than cheer from the sidelines. The core principles underlying NATO are dead – at least in western Europe. Whether it will be via a leisurely unraveling or a sudden collapse, NATO is a dead man walking.
By necessity, if there is to be any stability in Europe, the U.S. will have to deal seriously with Russia. Most European nations are now geopolitically and internally unstable due to some three decades of irresponsible decisions and profligacy. This plays right into the sort of greatness that Putin actually seeks: to have a sphere of geopolitical influence and to serve as protector of independent nations within that sphere. Did you know that the first major national project that Putin mounted once he appeared on the national stage was to spearhead the effort to restore the name of St. Petersburg to the great city the Soviets had renamed Petrograd?
It is a wolfish Christianity, to be sure, but Putin has defended Christianity more boldly than any western nation the last 15 years, including the U.S. When ISIS was raging through the Middle East and Africa, killing Christians brutally, Russia was the only nation that mounted a serious defense. It is happening again right now as Christians are being persecuted, tortured and killed in Syria after al-Quaeda has taken over. Russia has been a mainstay in defending family life and traditional marriage, more so than any western nation. Its failings are its tolerance for abortion and the brutality of its internal politics.
Of course, any discussion of Russia from a spiritual standpoint must include the apparitions at Fatima in 1917. Our Lady asked the Church to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart, warning that if we did not, the errors of Russia would spread throughout the world. Again, I am going to be brutally candid here. I think most interpretations of Our Lady’s message are painfully childish. We had a two, maybe a three-year window, to make that consecration. We did not. And so the errors of Russia spread, like a terrible virus, throughout the world. I am glad that Pope St. John Paul made the consecration in 1984. But I regard that consecration as a form of penance for not having done it when it could have prevented those errors from spreading. If Mama tells you to shut the stable doors or the horses will get out, mulishly ignoring her and then shutting them long after the horse have left the stable won’t magically bring them back.
Second, Our Lady did NOT warn us against Russia: she warned us against the ERRORS then percolating in Russia. Frankly, nearly the entire western world has been infected with those errors while, astonishingly, Russia seems to be in the middle stages of recovery from them. We have stubbornly deluded ourselves that Russia is the problem while gulping down the errors whole. As the cartoon character Pogo sadly lamented, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Until we figure that out we will continue to slog through mud.
This is typical of how God delivers messages, in a way that our vanity and hubris can interpret to mean that we’re great and those other losers are the problem. If you view heavenly messages through a triumphalist lens you will get it wrong every single time.
As NATO fades from relevance, western Europe will have to deal with the Islamic invasion leaders have imposed upon their people. I will discuss parts of it in more depth in the next piece, but Jihadist Islam is soon to collapse in the Middle East, only to reconstitute itself in Europe. Already, Islam is tacitly governing some of the formerly greatest nations on that continent. The punitive restrictions feckless European leaders have imposed on their people will pale in comparison to the depredations Islam will impose when it takes formal control. Then there will be wars and rumors of wars.
In the end, America and Russia will jointly invade Europe – to liberate it, not to conquer it. Implausible as it sounds, Russia will become the protector of European and Central Asian liberty. In doing so, it will be, truly, a great nation.
This has been the first of a series of three pieces on the global situation. Next up, I will take a hard look at both Islam and China. In the final piece, I will examine the Church and America.
If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.
Find me on X at @JohnstonPilgrim
The Corps of Renewal and Charity (CORAC)
18208 Preston Rd., Ste. D9-552
Dallas, Texas 75252
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