The death (most likely murder) of imprisoned Russia opposition figure Alexei Navalny is a sickening human tragedy, a stark reminder of how fundamentally brutal the State is in most places, most times, through most of our fallen history. Such thuggery is the norm, not the exception. For most of American history, we were the exception. We’re losing that status, throwing it away with both hands, as the judicial persecution of Donald Trump and his supporters is proving in our news headlines every day.

I am thinking of our own Alexei Navalnys, the January 6 protestors who have been locked in solitary confinement, bankrupted, driven to suicide, by our own thuggish regime — which more and more each day we can see is controlled behind the scenes by unelected spooks in the Deep State.

At least five Jan 6 defendants committed suicide instead of continuing to endure the torture by Joe Biden’s DOJ.

Matthew Perna was one. Instead of expressions of outrage and sympathy, the government shut down a 5k arranged by his family in his memory: https://t.co/AcBUkg4eLo

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) February 16, 2024

Our spies who hate us decided to nullify Trump’s election via the Russia Collusion hoax, and they got away with it. They chose to steal the 2020 election by one means or another, and they got away with that too. The only people facing prison time are those who pushed back against them. That tells you what kind of regime we live under today: Putinism, without Putin.

A thoughtful commentator on X raises another worthy issue:

What happened to Alexei Navalny is horrible and almost certainly the result of Putin’s brutal dictatorship

But if you didn’t post about Gonzalo Lira, an AMERICAN journalist killed by the Zelensky dictatorship, then you’re a hypocrite

Also, Navalny’s death is no justification to… https://t.co/Mmbyerxzf0

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) February 16, 2024

Every time someone mentions poor Mr. Navalny as a pretext for escalating the Ukraine war, remember him and his family in prayer. Then mention Gonzalo Lira, and see what that person says. Judge his sincerity by that.

Vladimir Putin’s “Faith” Journey

But for now I’d like to offer some insight into Vladmir Putin himself, and by contrast into the Regime Christians who whisper “He Gets Us” into one ear, while calling us hateful “Christian Nationalists” in the other.

An old college friend of mine did two very interesting things: He converted to Orthodoxy, and went to work as a very close advisor to one of the richest men on earth. (No I’m not naming names, but make your best guess.) And this old friend told me something. The Orthodox circles he moved in had ties to highly placed people in Russia, who told him why the Soviet Union actually collapsed, why the intelligence services and the military let Communism die. They told him the “inside” story. For what it’s worth, here’s how it goes:

The young, upcoming men inside the KGB were patriotic Russians. They’d swallowed Communist ideology as it was drilled into them because they thought that worldview promoted Russian power. But by the mid-1980s it was clear that this wasn’t true — that Communism was in fact an alien Utopian fantasy foisted on the country by a crackpot group of radicals who’d happened to seize control in 1917. It hadn’t made Russia great, but had murdered tens of millions, destroyed the economy, driven Russian woman to have (it was estimated) six abortions each. Dedication to Communism, rather than Russia, had driven the country to ruin itself by trying to seed revolutions around the world, and rule the ungovernable wasteland that is Afghanistan.

Russia had spent 70 years on some crank “vegan keto” diet, and wouldn’t survive it much longer.

So these young KGB men, including Putin himself, quietly agreed among themselves that Communism had to go. Instead, they would restore a Russian nationalist regime, reverting to the old Russian worldview of Orthodox Christianity. Not because they believed in Christ or the Church, but because it worked better. If Russians were to return to Christianity, they might not be so prone to alcoholism, abortion, and all the other social plagues that had savaged Russia’s birth rate and hollowed out its society.

Becoming Russia’s Constantine

And that’s why Putin and his circle starting rebuilding churches — because they correctly perceived that Christianity is a better plan for living than Utopian atheism. That’s why today Russia isn’t embracing the trans insanity and castrating little kids, or filling its military with mentally ill recruits who demand expensive sex-change hormones. Because none of that works, as any sane person can see. Even those without faith can see (if dimly) the light of the Natural Law written on our hearts. And if they know what’s good for them (even on earth) they’ll try to follow it.

The Russians see correctly what Christian living entails, and agree that it works better than the alternatives on offer, so they’re willing to try it, whether they have faith or not. That’s not inspiring. It reminds us of Constantine, perhaps, who at first grabbed Christianity as a means to rescue the Roman empire.

The Woke Post-Christian Cancer

By contrast, here in the West our elites completely mistake what Christianity and its ethics really entail, but they embrace it with the fanaticism of Jim Jones and his followers in Guyana. As historian Tom Holland showed in his brilliant book Dominion, the woke ideology is a kind of mutated post-Christian tumor, a gross exaggeration of certain Christian impulses replicating out of control. As we noted this week, progressive post-Christianity teaches:

Real Christianity consists of social service work, not preaching, teaching, rebuking, warning, or punishing injustices. People who feel called to do those things are secretly Pharisees.

If it’s good for each of us to serve the needy voluntarily, it would be even better for the government to compel every person to do that, whether he wants to or not. That’s “building up the Kingdom.”

If we’re to see each needy person as Jesus, then we should make marginalized people and groups a fetish, and worship them — since they’re now “Jesus” to us. Let’s meet all their demands, move them here en masse, tear up our laws, reshape our system of government, and lavish taxpayers’ money on these “victim” groups as the Magdalene poured her tears over Jesus’ feet.

This cancerous new gospel arises from two perverse impulses, which swap out Christ for Antichrist: the urge to exaggerate all the ways in which Jesus seems to diverge from His Father’s commands in the Old Testament; and the desire to render Christianity more unworldly and “spiritual” by making it incompatible with actual earthly life. As we pointed out here back in 2020:

The impulse to scorn the normal, spit on the virtuous, and embrace any oddball or rebel as somehow inherently holy? That’s a Christian heresy, and a deadly one. If Christianity really, truly led to Wokeness it would be false — and instead of following it down the Gadarene slope to the sea, we should instead rend our garments at its blasphemy. The creed of the Antichrist is worse than any paganism the world has known.

So Putin, who believes in Russia and nothing else, is willing to promote certain Christian principles because they work. The West, which believes in a crackpot post-Christian suicide creed, doesn’t care if they work. In fact, the chaos at our borders and in our streets perversely appears as a virtue, proof that our dedication is somehow unworldly and “pure.”

Putin’s Trolling Us to Re-Elect the Democrats

One final observation: Thanks to our aggressive post-1990 foreign policy, Russia’s elites now see us as implacable enemies. So they are more than happy to see the West embrace progressive, suicidal policies — including open borders and self-sterilizing trans madness. And that’s why Putin wants to see the Democrats win the next election. He knows they’ll make the West weaker, in part through wasting billions on an unwinnable war in Ukraine. When Trump was in office, Putin didn’t dare invade. Ukraine was at peace, Afghanistan was under control, and our borders were secure.

I think that’s why Putin did his interview with Tucker Carlson — to help discredit Carlson, weaken Trump, and wheel Joe Biden’s gurney across the finish line in November. Putin wasn’t threatened by Alexei Navalny rotting in prison. But murdering him helped whip up the crazy zealots in the West who will use any means, legal or illegal, to keep Trump out of office.

Remember that the Russian national sport isn’t football but … chess.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.