554 years ago today, Constantinople, the God-guarded City, the Queen of Cities, fell to the assault of the forces of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II.  Three days of pillage and rapine followed.  The Byzantine Empire came to an end after 1,123 years.

Update: Paul Cella has a good commemoration here.  

Second Update: Dr. Trifkovic also has a very good piece on the Fall of Constantinople.

News media world-wide described the event as a step in overcoming Russia’s tragic history. The New York Times called the merger “the symbolic end of Russia’s civil war.” But the reality is far more complicated. Not only are there theological and moral issues at stake, but there is also the suspicion among some that Mr. Putin is building new networks of influence by using the church to reach out to Russian émigré communities all over the world. ~Nadia Kizenko

I imagine that there will be a more proper official response to Prof. Kizenko’s unfortunate article than my various blog posts, but until then I want to say a few more things about this.  People at church on Sunday who had seen the article were upset by this, and they regarded it very poorly.  While Prof. Kizenko may encourage those intent on breaking away from the Russian Orthodox Church, which would be a terrible thing for all, she has certainly not persuaded anyone.  One reason is that her article is so thoroughly inaccurate.  Perhaps she felt the need to give the story a political spin to make it attractive to the editors at WSJ.  Perhaps those editors twisted or manipulated her words to give them the worst possible meaning.  I do not know the full story about that, but what I do know is that Prof. Kizenko has misrepresented or misunderstood central issues and matters of fact in the reconciliation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church.  The reality is complicated and the history of the negotiations much more involved and drawn out than she claims, but it is Prof. Kizenko who has opted to tell a simple story of political meddling and “Putin’s acquisition.”

As for the charge that Mr. Putin would like to reach out to emigre communities, I’m sure this is true.  This is hardly some sinister plot.  Many countries often look to build up networks of communication and support with their Diasporan communities abroad, and as I have suggested in the past this probably was a motive of Mr. Putin in supporting the reconciliation.  In any case, his motives in the matter are beside the point.  An important point to be made here is that the emigre communities of the Russian Church Abroad are hardly so large as to constitute a major resource that the oil-rich master of the Kremlin would make much effort to “acquire” it, to use the Journal‘s unfortunate phrase.  Certainly, no one familiar with the Synod would confuse it with having the rather larger financial resources of some other Orthodox jurisdictions.  The gain for Putin and the Moscow Patriarchate in purely wordly terms is very, very small.  Prof. Kizenko’s claim that Moscow now will have access to a “ready-made network of 323 parishes and 20 monasteries in the U.S. alone, and over a million church members in 30 countries [bold mine-DL]” is simply not true.  Would that we had so many parishes and monasteries!  Would that we had so many members!  That would be wonderful news indeed, but it would certainly be news to us.  

The numbers of members worldwide in Synod parishes come to something like 150,000 people.  News stories are frequently inflating the number of parishioners in our churches.  Certainly, if there are so many of us in America alone, it is remarkable that our representation in the greater Chicago area–one of our archdiocesan centers–should be limited to our cathedral and one modest parish.  The ROCOR parish directory is available to anyone who would care to peruse it.  There you will find that, counting parishes and monasteries together, there are only 111 Russian Orthodox Church Abroad churches, monasteries and hermitages in the United States, roughly one third as many as Prof. Kizenko claimed.  In the rest of the world, including what were the ROCOR parishes in Russia, there are 126 listed churches and monasteries outside the U.S., bringing the global total to 237.

More worrisome and dangerous is the hint that there is something suspect about the loyalty of Russian Orthodox, as if they take their orders from the Kremlin.  This sort of argument is absurd when it is applied to Catholics, it is absurd when applied to Mormons, and it is absurd when it is applied to us.  Priests are being cast as agents of political influence, and Orthodox parishes are being made out to be conduits of Moscow’s power.  This is shameful and untrue.  This would be insulting enough, but it also revives ugly and tiresome stereotypes about the Orthodox that we are unacceptably submissive to state control or that state authorities have some undue control over the operations of the Church.  The hoary charge of Caesaropapism lurks just out of view, and with it the claim that we are not much more than “the emperor’s men” or, in this case, “Putin’s men.”  Such compromises have happened occasionally, rarely, in the history of the Church during times of great trials.  Many of the heretical emperors exercised such excessive interference in the affairs of the Church, but this has been so far from the normal state of affairs that it is amazing that this stereotype has endured.

Select presidential candidates respond to a query from The Jerusalem Post about how they understand the importance of the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship.  McCain does his best to leap to the front with an exuberant endorsement of Israel as an ally (you have to admire the “sacred soil” line, considering McCain’s general dislike of religious conservatives here and around the world), and Romney works in his “caliphate” shtick–who can forget that Hizbullah dream of a caliphate?  Clinton avoids these more spirited efforts, but puts in a respectable amount of abasement (nice touch with the nihilism reference).  Obama does his best to keep up, but he will continue to be dogged by his stubborn insistence on referring to Palestinians as if they were human.  Richardson says all the “right” things, and even manages to work in a New Mexico reference!

After falling over himself to declare his utmost devotion, Brownback makes sure to throw in at the end: “To be sure, Israel has problems and difficulties, and my support for any particular Israeli policy or government would not be unconditional.”  He makes sure to end on a variant of his boilerplate slogan: “However, my administration would always reaffirm that at its heart Israel is good, and because of that, Israel can help America and the world be great.”  It was bad enough when he used this sort of saccharine talk about America alone, but if this is going to be a characteristic of a Brownback foreign policy I think we could probably do without it.

Consider Iraq. The split among conservatives has widened since Saddam was toppled in the spring of 2003. Traditional realists continue to put their trust in containment, and reject nation-building on the grounds that we lack both a moral obligation and the requisite knowledge of Arabic, Iraqi culture and politics, and Islam. Supporters of the war still argue that, in an age of mega-terror, planting the seeds of liberty and democracy in the Muslim Middle East is a reasonable response to the poverty, illiteracy, authoritarianism, violence and religious fanaticism that plagues the region. ~Peter Berkowitz

From these sentences, I would conclude that Mr. Berkowitz doesn’t like this latter group at all and enjoys making their position sound even more ridiculous than it is.  Somehow, I don’t think that’s the case, but he certainly makes the supporters of the war sound preposterous. 

What Mr. Berkowitz fails to mention is that when it comes to conservative magazines, think tanks and other forms of institutional conservatism, the overwhelming majority remains more or less fully committed to the war.  Except for long-time opponents of the war at The American Conservativeand Chronicles, dissent in the journalist and pundit classes has come in small doses and has mostly been limited to questions of implementation and practicality.  The mainstream conservative response to Ron Paul points to a broader uniformity on foreign policy that goes beyond Iraq, and the sloganeering of the other nine presidential candidates confirm that this uniformity will not be challenged by any of the “viable” potential nominees of the Republican Party.  Indeed, I can think of no area of policy debate where the right is more conformist and uninterested in a variety of opinions than on foreign policy.  There may be some diversity on the right elsewhere, but this is often a measure of just how confused, aimless and disorganised both party and movement have become during the years of Republican rule.   

Is it just me, or does this entire op-ed have the feel of someone just going through the motions of defending the intellectual vitality of conservatism?  Oh, he hits all the usual points.  Here he talks about Burke, there about Kirk, and over there he mentions Strauss and Hayek.  There’s even the reliable complaint that too few people learn about the conservative tradition in school–not that there was ever a time when all that many people were being assigned a lot of Kirk and Hayek.  Indeed, this is an inheritance that is worth remembering, maintaining and defending, and it wouldn’t hurt if many more “conservatives” today would avail themselves of the works of these authors.  We would probably be spared many crusades for “freedom and democracy” in future were more familiar with actual conservative thought.

We cannot acquiesce in independence movements where independence means a return to savagery or Communist domination. ~Sen. Barry Goldwater

Earlier today I had written a fairly lengthy commentary on this item taken from a 1961 National Review Goldwater essay, but my browser cut out on me at an inopportune moment and all of it (plus the time I had spent writing it) was lost.  What follows will be a shorter, more pointed version of what I was going to say.

Mr. Kimball of The New Criterion has done us a service in reminding us of both the sensible and strange things in Goldwater’s essay.  Unfortunately, I must disagree with Mr. Kimball here when he says that the line quoted above constituted “sound advice” on Africa policy.  It is the sort of thing that I expect was quite in line with National Review anticommunism c. 1961, and it is probably the sort of thing that internationalists always like to hear, but what it is not is sound.  For starters, this was precisely the sort of thinking the New Frontiersmen applied to Indochina with unhappy results for all concerned.  Goldwater’s idea here made as much, or as little, sense for Asia as it did for Africa.  Who prevailed in an internationalised form of what had been a Vietnamese civil war had surprisingly little to do with containing the international Soviet communist threat, as we can see fully in retrospect, but then the logic of expanding containment to Southeast Asia to counter such a threat relied heavily on misunderstanding the strategic goal of containment (keep the Soviets out of western Europe) because there was a fundamental misunderstanding of the Soviet threat.  When seen as an implcabale, universal revolutionary force that could not be checked by traditional methods, the Soviets might appear to pose a very different kind of threat from the one they actually posed.  Thus Washington might pursue containment anywhere in the globe, regardless of whether it mattered to weakening the Soviets.  The Soviets were not ideological zealots so much as they were Russian national imperialists and great power players on the world stage, which had a significant effect on how to address the threat they posed to the West.  As Russian nationalism in communist dress was not fully understood or appreciated, neither was the indigestibility of the subject nations of the USSR and the Soviet bloc (except by Kennan), and as a result the opposition between different nations within the communist world was not as clear as it should have been.  The greatest diplomatic and political successes of the Cold War followed from recognising this opposition and the national dimension, while some of the worst blunders stemmed from undervaluing or underestimating the role of nationalism and ethnic differences.

Additionally, George Kennan, the “author” of containment–though he would have disputed the significance of the article that formulated the concept in its classic form–saw containment as a policy that should have been focused squarely on Europe, since Europe was the strategically significant continent where the confrontation with the Soviets was.  The farflung corners of the globe were of lesser concern, because they were, well, actually less important as a matter of geopolitics.  Furthermore, just as advocates of “rollback” and the New Frontiersmen misunderstood the Russian nationalist core of Soviet policy they also misunderstood the greater significance of some form of nationalism in driving Third World independence movements.  A classic mistake repeated again and again in the Cold War was to take these nationalist and anti-colonialist independence movements as natural Soviet satellites, when they often turned most sharply to Moscow or Beijing (or both) in response to efforts to smother them.  Above all, the quote points towards a lack of depth of analysis, as if it were enough to know that such-and-such an independence or national movement calls itself communist or even merely socialist to conclude that its interests are somehow connected to that of other communist states.  Attention to national divergences and cleavages between communist states (such as those between Beijing and Moscow or Belgrade and Moscow or Tirana and Moscow or Beijing and Hanoi) proved to be very important when noticed or would have been very useful in developing policy had they been noticed more often and taken more seriously.  Today we neglect or ignore vital differences between different states and Muslim groups at our peril. 

That brings us back to Africa.  Independence movements fairly often turned to savagery or communism because of efforts to repress them (e.g., Algeria, Angola, Mozambique) or to intervene against them.  This does not discount the home-grown savagery and brutality of many African regimes in their artificial countries, all of which were of no great strategic significance.  Some turned strongly pro-Soviet and were outside our influence and some were anti-Soviet or anticommunist and therefore seen as useful bulwarks against Moscow’s influence, but all of them were basically irrelevant to American interests, except to the limited extent to which they affected such allied states as South Africa.  Acquiescence was not only to be expected–it was the sensible approach.  Indeed, American interests arguably might have dictated more support for at least some independence movements at this time.  Meanwhile, of the African communist movements in Africa that America did actively try to suppress, the Angolan Marxists are still in power after a long, protracted and nasty civil war with UNITA that accomplished nothing except for making life in Angola miserable.  The nominal Marxists now sell us oil, which makes it all rather unclear what the civil war was for.  Asian and African independence movements largely went ahead with our “acquiescence” with a variety of results: many of the resulting regimes proved awful, but it is difficult to see how intervention would have made the situation less awful.  Ironically, the occasion when Washington and the West did “acquiesce” to a pro-communist national movement in Africa was in supporting the rise and legitimisation of the ANC in South Africa on the grounds of supporting “democracy.”  That has probably been one of the greatest active mistakes in Africa policy, such as it is, of the last 30 years, and southern Africa is suffering the consequences of it.  As it happens, “acquiescence” is usually not a bad policy, because it is another way of saying “minding our own business.”

The Republicans gave up a lot to get Kennedy, particularly in agreeing to “Z” visas that would allow the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in the United States to stay as legal residents and eventually seek citizenship. ~Fred Barnes

Shorter June 2007 Washington Monthly forum on how the Democrats can compete for the military vote:

Carter: Attacking Serbs was a good thing.

Cohen: Don’t get trapped in the kill zone (a.k.a., Iraq)!

Stewart: Theocracy is scary.

Exum: Be like Kennedy (and Rumsfeld)!

Douglas: Be tough like Webb!

Tyron: Ignore the generals.

Fick: You, too, can serve the empire.

But Rove cautioned against reading too much into polls, or the results of the 2006 midterm elections. “It’s important to keep in perspective how close the election actually was,” he said. “Three thousand five hundred and sixty-two votes and we would have had a Republican Senate. That’s the gap in the Montana Senate race. And eighty-five thousand votes are the difference in the fifteen closest House races. There’s no doubt we’ve taken a short-term hit in the face of a very contentious war, but to have the Republicans suffer an average defeat for the midterm says something about the underlying strength of conservative attitudes in the country.” Rove’s arithmetic was correct, but he sounded like John Kerry, who, shortly after his defeat in the 2004 election, told me, “I received the second-highest number of votes in American history.” ~The New Yorker

Put another way, Rove’s response is a bit like that of an Astros fan who could still say, “Sure, the Sox beat us four games to nothing in ’05, but all of the games were really close.”  Rove quite happily ignores that the national vote–the one that will matter quite a lot next year–gave the Dems a nine point advantage in the midterms.  The Democrats could point to a number of extremely close House elections (in New Mexico or Wyoming or Illinois) that went against them and say, “If we had just had a few thousand more votes here or there, we would have gained 40 seats.”  It might be true, and yet it could very well be irrelevant.  For Rove to continue to describe the losses last year as “average” for a midterm election reveals just how little he has learned: with gerrymandering and advantages of modern incumbency taken into consideration, losing 30 seats is a blowout defeat.

Meanwhile, Rep. Jeff Flake sums up the bankruptcy and desperation of the GOP today:

All we can hope for, I guess, is for the Democrats to overreach on something. 

That’s what they were saying for a lot of last year, too, and it didn’t happen.  Until it does, or until Republicans develop something like an effective response to the demands of the electorate, the GOP can expect to keep sinking.

Must we arrive at something anti-liberal when we build up from a metaphysical proposition? ~Joseph Bottum

The suspicion of metaphysics would be more persuasive if, for another example, we imagine that religiously informed governments follow a pattern that invariably ends in some form of the Inquisition, granting civil police powers to religious authorities. ~Joseph Bottum

Mr. Bottum’s entire essay would be more persuasive if he didn’t pepper it with bizarre phrases like “the Counter-Enlightenment of the Left” and bizarre statements like the one quoted above.  The punishments meted out in “the Spanish Inquisition” were carried out by the secular arm.  Religious authorities were never vested with “civil police powers.”  The Inquisition investigated into whether people were heretics, infidels and the like, whereupon it fell to the secular authorities to carry out whatever sentences the law required for profession of heresy or apostasy, and so on.  The ecclesiastical office itself did not carry out any of the punishments that followed from these investigations.  This may seem like a minor point, but Bottum’s essay is riddled with these sorts of lazy claims.