Bad move, Leo

Dingsheim_StKilian_Leo_IX

Maybe we shouldn’t blame St Leo for the Orthodox/Roman split in 1054 (seems like only yesterday, doesn’t it?). But he certainly teed it up for his Legate, wonderfully named Humbert, whose was the proximate curial slipper that kicked over the hornet’s nest. Not quite a thousand years later, the consequences continue to reverberate:

Syriza in Athens and Putin in Moscow: An Unholy Alliance?

[Oy vey!] the troubling attitudes of Syriza and its leaders in foreign policy…

Syriza has chosen to rule in alliance with 13 deputies from the rightist party of Independent Greeks, which gives the new government a majority. But why did a militant neo-Marxist phenomenon like Syriza find itself wedded to a conservative force like the Independent Greeks?

Information about the background of this puzzling lash-up is dismaying, and indicators point to meddling from Moscow….

The first foreign official to visit prime minister Tsipras was Russian ambassador Andrey Maslov, who soon invited defense minister Kammenos to visit Moscow. Putin echoed the welcome. Meanwhile, aside from its criticism of European economic policies, the Tsipras cabinet has dissociated itself definitively from Western sanctions against Moscow over the seizure of Crimea and other Russian armed intrigues in Ukraine.

This piece was written by somebody named Steven Schwartz, who seems to be associated with an organization called “The Institute for Islamic Pluralism”. (Funny… you don’t *look* Islamic.) But of course other, less obviously ridiculous figures have worried about some sort of entente between Syriza and Russia. With good reason, I hope and pray; and my prayers on this topic ascend in Latin and Greek impartially. In fact I may brush off the Old Church Slavonic grammar and make a stab at that.

Ah, those Greeks. Not only are they making a break from Miss Merkel’s Austerity Academy; they seem to be going AWOL from the NATO citadel.

This all makes me very very happy.

10 thoughts on “Bad move, Leo

  1. Interestingly enough, they seem to be playing up the whole Orthodox as religious nutters angle. Look at this characteristic turdlet from the British Bullshit Corporation:

    The Russians fighting a ‘holy war’ in Ukraine
    http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30518054

    From the article you cited:

    “Islam is by no means the only faith in which evil intentions are covered by pious phrases. The fantasy of a new Christian Orthodox empire should alarm the world no less than the tremors of the financial markets or the status of the euro.”

    Is Eastern Orthodox the new Islam? Is the “Christian Orthodox Empire” the new Caliphate? Damned if this doubleplsugoodspeak isn’t getting repetitive. They are determined to mine this particular vein of propaganda until it’s exhausted. Some religion-addled horde or another from the general direction of Russia is always threatening Europe. But now that the very role model of Western rationality appears to have joined their ranks, what other explanation can there be but they have succumbed to religious hysteria or Putin’s hypnotic gaze?

    Alexander Nevsky and friends vs the Teutonic Knights, round x. I’m cheering for Alex.

  2. Schwartz is just another “fat and hairy ex-Trot” whose life aim is to sound the tocsin about the Islamic peril by organizing awareness raising events like the annual “Islamofascism week”. Reminds one of something written about that generation of former Trots who later became right-wing evangelists of whom the corpulent Hitchens was a better known example:

    Of all the leftist sects that emerged in that period to take advantage of the global revolutionary upheaval that shook established institutions in every country, the IS was possibly the most pernicious, the most arrogant, and the most blindly sectarian. Inspired by deranged fakirs, of whom Peter Sedgwick was but one outstanding example, the IS dragged half a generation into a one-way alley of political despair, mixing half-baked Marxist incantations with sentimental appeals to a vanishing labourism. This, says Hitchens, was politics ‘without illusions’. Maybe. But the result of their final disillusionment is a world now peopled with ex-IS graduates, a cynical, sardonic, amoral generation, without faith or optimism and prey to the enthusiasms of the Thatcher era – and plentiful in the higher reaches of the media.

  3. Look into the Hellenic legion that fought along side the czars army in
    The Anglo French “intervention ” in Crimea way back when
    dickens entertained us Yankee doodles
    Not
    Dumbo Abby

  4. The world as put together by the neo-liberal internationalists since the fall of the Soviet Union is coming apart at the seams. That’s fine by me, I don’t like the way the world’s been put together but then as I scan history I can’t think of a time since history began to be written when I did like the way it was put together.

    That said, things like this rarely fall apart peacefully. There are a number of proxy wars around the world that could get out of control (hello Ukraine and we’re also looking at you most of the Middle East). Sometimes events take control and the people who thought they were running things find themselves floating on the flood waves like the rest of us. I feel we’re perilously close to a time like that.

  5. Comrades, what say you on the latest on Greece? On the surface, it looks like the comrades in Greece blinked but I personally think that there’s still hope for them sticking it to Troika. If their meager proposal to be delivered on Monday will not get accepted by their slave masters, they could present their case to their people in a binary choice of scrap austerity and get out of EU or keep the same shit and stick with EU, in which case, you would hope that they pick the former. Also, I don’t understand why they haven’t put any capital control measures in place. Sure, it’s hugely unpopular but what’s a comrade to do? Any thoughts on this?

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