The Many Faces of Christianism -- Part 3: The 'Russian World' in Europe

The Many Faces of Christianism: The 'Russian World' in Europe -- Part 3, continued from Part 2 

Chapter 1 is an introduction to the book by all four editors:  Marietta van der Tol, Petr Kratochvíl, Sophia Johnson, and Zoran Grozdanov.

It introduced the concept of "imaginaries", which I struggled to understand, but I think I can interpret it in the Lacanian sense of an external image that shapes one's self-perception, as a child's image of itself is shaped by its reflection in a mirror. So there are two things: the child itself -- the reality, and the imaginary -- the external image that shapes the child's perception of itself. 

Among the imaginaries discussed in this chapter are the concepts of "Holy Rus'" and "Holy Russia" and what strikes me about it is that in this chapter they are discussed purely as imaginaries. They are not examined in context, and there is apparently no attempt to understand them theologically, or relate them to the thing that is reflected in the mirror. They are simply assumed to be exactly as the external Western observers assume them  to be in a kind of self-referential circle. The "Holy Rus'" referred to in this chapter is a Western imaginary of a Russian imaginary of an unmentioned original.

Recently, the idea of the Russian World has increasingly aligned with Russia’s expansionist policies. A politicized version of Christianity, and Russian Orthodoxy in particular, is highly influential in shaping the idea of the Russian World, partially through the canonical claims of the Russian Orthodox Church, but mostly through popularised notions of Holy Rus’ and Ancient Rus’ that imply the unity of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians as ‘brothers’. In this sense, the Russian World refers to an “organically unified transnational orthodox Christian Russian civilisation that includes the territories and people of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and sometimes other nations” (Van der Tol et al 2025:6). 

If this was meant to be a serious critique of the way a theological imaginary (Holy Rus') has influenced a secular political imaginary (Russian World), then it should surely compare the imaginary with the reality, and show how they differ. It should at least attempt to understand the original in its own terms rather that rather arrogantly assuming that its imaginary of an imaginary is the only correct view of the world.

What is Holy Rus', or Holy Russia? 

Holy Rus' refers to the spiritual descendants of Saints Olga and Vladimir of Kievan Rus', who introduced the Christian faith into the regions to the north of the Black Sea in the ninth century. Over the following centuries it spread to an area roughly covered by modern Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Over the centuries it developed some features that made it distinct from Christians in other parts of the world. It had a common liturgical language (Church Slavonic), and honoured as Saints a set of Christians unique to that part of the world. It is these Saints that constitute the essence of "Holy Rus'".

"Holy Russia" was a subset of those spiritual descendants of St Olga and St Vladimir who spoke the Russian language or lived in the Russian state, which developed mainly as a resistance to Mongol conquest in the twelfth century.  

In the 19th century the Napoleonic conquests sparked a resistance in the form of a romantic nationalism, which emphasised the distinctness of language and culture. In Russia it also led to the growth of a pan-Slavic nationalism. In the 20th century the Bolshevik Revolution resulted in most of the territory of Holy Rus' falling under  the domination of a radical Western secularist and internationalist ideology, which encouraged atheism and discouraged religion of any kind, including Christianity, and at least two generations grew up under this regime.

When the Bolshevik regime fell in 1990, many of the suppressed movements, including nationalism and Christianity, resurfaced. But after two generations of suppression, very few people had any idea of what they were about, and only had "imaginaries" to go on. These were often confused and mingled, sometimes quite deliberately by some people, and so various forms of Christian Nationalism (and unChristian Nationalism) developed.

In its original meaning, Holy Russia was not holy because it was Russian; it was holy because it was Christian. Holy Rus' linked people of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine because they were baptised, and not because they were part of a "Russian World". In the reality of Holy Rus' (as opposed to the imaginary) the war between Russia and Ukraine is tragic because it is a war between people who have been baptised in the Orthodox Christian faith and are therefore brothers through common citizenship of the Kingdom of God, and not of some earthly political entity. If they assert (or deny) that they are brothers because of belonging to some earthly political entity, then, from a Christian point of view, their attitude is idolatry -- they have idolised some secular conception of a nation, an "imaginary", if you like.

But this essential background history is entirely missing from the opening and introductory chapter of The Many Faces of Christianism. It is a serious defect.

It also seems to me that there is also a legitimate sense in which Holy Rus' or Holy Russia can be imaginaries -- rather in the way that C.S. Lewis described the relationship between Logres and Britain. 

Continued in Part 4: Populism and Religion  

The Many Faces of Christianism -- Part 2: Imaginaries and other buzz words

 The Many Faces of Christianism -- Part 2 -- continued from Part 1.

The first thing that struck me when I began to read The Many Faces of Christianism was the use of the word imaginaries. It appeared in the first paragraph, and about seven times in the first chapter (more if you include footnotes, none of which explained it).

Here is one of the sections in which the word appears in context:

In all of this, the bulwarks of present-day anti-liberalism, such as the notions of Holy Rus’ or the Russian World, nationalist and populist movements in Europe, as well as the Make America Great Again-campaign feature major political imaginaries: they assert a timeless connection between certain territories, certain people, and cultural or civilizational exceptionalism. All of these build on a connection of these political imaginaries with (selected aspects) of religious tradition.

One might conclude, therefore, that "imaginaries" are things that assert timeless connections between certain territories and people on the one hand, and cultural and civilizational exceptionalism on the other -- but it's still a rather nebulous concept.

I recalled, however that I had seen the term used a couple of years earlier in a book I had been editing. It popped up in Chapter 12, and I was unable to edit the sentences in which it appeared, because I had no idea what they meant. I asked the author, and suggested that he include a definition of it and a couple of other terms (like "hybridity") somewhere in the first chapter so that readers who encountered them later in the book could see what he was talking about.

He said the term had been suggested to him by a mutual friend and former colleague of mine in the Missiology Department at the University of South Africa (Unisa), Klippies Kritzinger, so I asked him what the term meant. I thought I had made a note of his reply, but I had mislaid it. I did a web search, which said it has something to do with the square root of -1. It took me some time to find Klippies Kritzinger's reply, and when I eventually did find it, it said:

I used the term 'imaginary' more or less in the sense that the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor does. He coined the term 'social imaginary', which is not the same as a theory. I use the term ecclesial imaginaries, which I first called the 'functional ecclesiologies' by which members view and experience the church. These are imaginaries such as: church as stokvel (you don't get buried from church building if you are owing on your 'dues'; church as theatre (it is mainly about entertainment: vibrant music and motivational speeches); church as school (mainly about teaching and learning); church as business (minister as CEO, flashy marketing and huge building); and so on... The wonderful biblical images of Body of Christ, people of God, group of disciples, bride of Christ, and so on are perhaps affirmed intellectually, but the actual praxis (theory-practice-theory-practice) is driven by these imaginaries. And I told Stephan that many URCSA members and students do church in these ways, which I find problematic and disappointing. I hope this helps a bit....

That did help in the case of the book I was editing two years ago, but it doesn't help much in the case of this book, which has "imaginaries" scattered throughout, but they seem to mean something other than popular erroneous conceptions of the Church. 

It does, however, seems to have become the Western theological buzzword of the 2020s, as "relevant" was in the 1960s, "contextual" in the 1970s, and "holistic" in the 1980s. It's one of those words that lots of people seem to use, but no one is quite sure what it means. 

Since retiring, however, I seem to have got out of touch with most Western theology, and I realised that I'd kept in touch with most of it while I was working through gossip in the Unisa cafeteria and editing theology study guides, but, since losing access to the Unisa library ten years ago, I've been pretty much out of touch with it. 

But reading The Many Faces of Christianism I begin to suspect that many Western theologians are as out of touch with Orthodox theology as I am with Western theology and view it mainly through Western Protestant/secular/political spectacles, and perhaps even primarily through the spectacles of the CIA.

In trying to get a handle on "imaginaries" I also asked on an English usage internet forum, some of whose members had access to more resources than I do, and it appears that it is not in the Oxford English Dictionary, but suggested it may have been imported from French, and was possibly connected with the French philosopher Lacan. And yes, that seems a promising path to follow, except that  I learn that, like Lacan's other contributions to psychoanalytic theory, it was subject to a continual reformulation throughout his work. It appears to mean an image external to oneself, like a child observing its reflection in a mirror. I'll have to think about that some more, and see if there are any clues further on in the book.

Holy Rus' is mentioned as one of the "imaginaries", but if an "imaginary" in the Lacanian sense, bears the relation of the image of a child in a mirror to the child itself (as Kritzinger's distorted ecclesiologies in relation to the Body of Christ suggest), then surely in a serious work of theology they should also be discussing the child, rather than just the imaginary? But the authors of this book, in effect, live in the world through the looking glass.

There are other terms that pop up without clear definitions, for example "anti-liberalism"  in the passage quoted above, and "liberal democracy" elsewhere. My initial impression (which may change when I've read more, though I doubt it) is that for the editors and most of the authors, "liberal democracy" is characteristic of the countries of Western Europe and North America, and "anti-liberalism" characteristic of Christian Nationalists. I'm sure that the second part of that is right, but I'm not sure of the first part. Britain's terrorism laws, for example, which treat opposition to genocide as terrorism, are far more draconian than South Africa's 1967 Terrorism Act, passed at the height of its Christian Nationalism phase.

Continued in Part 3. 

 

 

The Many Faces of Christianism -- Part 1

 I tend to think of "Christianism" as a neologism, and a term that few people have heard of or use, but then saw that I had blogged about it when I first came across it twenty years ago. It struck me then (and I still believe now) that Christianism is to Christianity what Islamism is to Islam, as Zionism is to Judaism, and as Hindutva is to Hinduism -- a militant use of religion as a kind of cultural identify for distinguishing "us" from "them". 

Then I read about a new book, The Many Faces of Christianism: The ‘Russian World’ in Europe, edited by Marietta van der Tol, Sophia R.C. Johnson, Petr Kratochvíl and/ Zoran Grozdanov. It sounded as though the term had gone mainstream, well, at least in academia. I saw several mentions of the book, and thought it might be worth reading and discussion, since it seemed to be one of the areas and one of the issues over which World War 3 might break out.  So a year ago I put it on my "to read" list, and this week I discovered that the publishers are distributing the ebook copies free, so I got a copy and have started to read it.

But it seems that I am the only person on the GoodReads site who is actually reading it. I asked on various online forums dealing with theology and missiology if anyone was interested in discussing it, but there were no takers, so I've decided to write my thoughts as I read it in my blog here as I go along.

This isn't a review, though the notes I make might be useful for writing a review later on but is rather my conversation with the authors and editors of the book, though no doubt they will never read it. If anyone does read this, and is open to discussing it, well then I'd love to hear from you. There are things that puzzle me about the book, and other people may be able to throw some light on them.

One reason for my interest in it is that Christianism is the militant and extremist wing of Christian Nationalism, and Christian Nationalism was the ruling ideology of the National Party government of South Africa during the apartheid years, from 1948 to 1994. With the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994 we thought that Christian Nationalism was a discredited ideology. Many of those who had supported it in the past abandoned it when they saw that the sky didn't fall, and it was something of a surprise when it began to be adopted in parts of Europe and the USA. 

To give an idea of where it is going, then, here is the Table of Contents.

    1 The Many Faces of Christianism: The 'Russian World' in Europe 1
    Marietta van der Tol, Petr Kratochvíl, Sophia Johnson, and Zoran
    Grozdanov


    2 Populism and Religion: Why the Twain Will Always Meet 17 Petr
    Kratochvíl

    3 When a Light Cloak Turns into a Pious Cage: Thinking National
    Identity with Karl Barth and John Paul II 41 Zoran Grozdanov

    4 Fratelli Tutti: A Failed Battle against Christian Nationalism?
    60 Anne Guillard

    5 The Russian World, The Hungarian World, and Make America Great
    Again: Political Imaginaries and Their Spaces 80 Marietta van der
    Tol

    6 Russian World, Holy Russia: Towards a New Ideology? 107 Veronica
    Cibotaru

    7 Putinism and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Religious Motifs 125
    Dmytro Bintsarovskyi

    8 From St. Paul and Carl Schmitt to Alexander Dugin: The Katechon
    as a Political Category in Empire Building 143 Dustin J. Byrd

    9 Between Religious Nationalism and Universal Familism:
    Anti-Gender Movement Values in Croatia and Serbia 169 Ivan Tranfic

    10 The Orthodox Church and the Greek Solution Party: A Stunted
    Political Relation between Adjacent Ideological Platforms 194
    Konstantinos Papastathis and Anastasia Litina

    11 Belonging without Attending? National Identity and Contemporary
    Religious Patterns in Serbia 210 Marko Vekovic

    12 The Danish People's Party and the Heritage of Tidehverv: A
    National Example of a European Tendency 230 Erik Sporon Fiedler

    13 Christianity, Religion and Christian Democracy 250 Katharina
    Kunter and Leon van den Broeke

    14 The European Union as a Space of (In)Securities: Analysing
    Political Reasoning by Lithuanian Catholics 273 Rosita
    Garskaite-Antonowicz

    15 Theopolitical Visions of National Belonging: Resisting the
    Totalising Tendencies of Inclusion 290 Jenny Leith

    16 The Contested Meanings of the Anglican Parish in Multireligious
    England 308 Lauren Morry

    17 Concluding Reflection: The Call for Political Theologies after
    Christendom 325 Marietta van der Tol, Petr Kratochv¡l, Sophia
    Johnson, and Zoran Grozdanov Appendix 1: A Declaration on the
    "Russian World" (Russkii Mir) Teaching 336

    Appendix 2: A statement of solidarity with the Orthodox
    Declaration on the "Russian World" (Russkii Mir) Teaching, and
    against Christian Nationalism and New Totalitarianism 342

 

Continued in Part 2 

 

A Real-Life Spy Story

The ANC Spy Bible: Surviving across enemy lines by Moe Shaik
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A real-life spy story that is as gripping and exciting as any novel.

But I very nearly didn't read this book. I picked it off the library shelf and when I saw the name of the author, and immediately a phrase sprang to mind: "a generally corrupt relationship". 

Those were the words of a High Court judge speaking about Schabir Shaik, brother of the author, and his relationship with a prominent politician, Jacob Zuma. I very nearly put the book back on the shelf. I didn't want to read about sleaze, and nothing more could be more sleazy than the dealings of corrupt politicians and businessmen. 

And then I thought, aren't you being prejudiced? Take it out and read it, and if it's too sleazy, you can change it for another book in a fortnight's time -- you're not buying the book. So I took it out, and I'm glad I did. It is well worth reading and raises a lot of interesting and important questions.

Moe Shaik was a member of the African National Congress (ANC) underground in South Africa in the 1980s when the movement was banned and being a member was illegal. He was arrested and detained for questioning about the whereabouts of an ANC courier, and after being tortured by the Special Branch was eventually released, but not before making contact with someone in the Special Branch (SB) who was sympathetic, and after his release began feeding him with information from within the SB.

This resulted in Moe Shaik starting a special intelligence unit within the ANC. Just as the Special Branch tried to collect information on the ANC, so the ANC began collecting information on the SB -- what they knew and what they didn't know, and some of their sources of informatio0n within the ANC. It was dangerous work, and there was always the risk of being caught.

When the ANC was unbanned in 1990, and political prisoners were released, people like Moe Shaik had to continue underground for a while. The National Party politicians might be willing to negotiate with the ANC, but there were many in the security services who continued to fight the war, perhaps in the hope that they could change the minds of their political bosses.

As the new democratic South Africa was born, Moe Shaik and his colleagues were faced with a different question: what was the role of an intelligence and security service in a democratic society?

This is one man's view of events, one man's memoir, but it is just such personal views that make history come alive and be more than a boring chronicle that reads like minutes of a meeting. It gives valuable insights into the history of the period, and if you like spy fiction, you'll probably also enjoy it.

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Midnight's children

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fictional autobiography of a child born at the moment India became independent in 1947.

And as the child grows up, he feels that the ups and downs of his own life mirror the fortunes of the country. Quite a long time ago I read a novel, A bend in the Ganges, set in the time of India's independence, and from that I knew it was beset by violence. That novel, like this one, followed the history of a family, and how the family was affected by the historical events. But Midnight's Children is no straightforward historical novel. It is surreal. Or perhaps paranormal. Or perhaps magic realism. It aims to show not the mere historical events, but the spiritual significance of them.

And so the children who were born at or immediately after midnight on 15 August 1947 are able to communicate with each other telepathically, and have abilities that science fiction writers of the 1950s used to indicate conventionally with the abbreviation PSI.

It is quite a dense and complex book, and I thought that, like some long and complex Russian novels, it needed a list of Dramatis Personae that one could refer to. There are so many characters that when one finds a reference to something that happened to one of them 150 pages earlier, one needs to reread the earlier incident to remember what happened and who was involved. But that means it is not the kind of book to read once and throw away. There ware things that will become clearer on a second or third, or even a seventh or eighth reading.

But now I have to take it back to the library. A few years ago I tried to read The Satanic Verses by the same author, and couldn't finish it. I found it too boring and confusing. If iot was satire, it was satirising things beyond my experience, which I couldn't connect to. But Midnight's Children reminded me of a song from 50 years ago:

Yesterday's dream didn't quite come true
We fought for our freedom and what did it do?
Now no one can see where they stand. 

And fifty years ago, when we sang that song, freedom was still tomorrow's dream, but I knew, back then, that when it came and faded into the past as yesterday's dream, we would know that it didn't quite come true. 

Twenty-five years ago I visited Kenya, which had been independent for just over 30 years, as India was at the end of Salman Rushdie's book. Several Kenyans asked me about South Africa, which had then enjoyed about a year of its brand-new democracy, which we had been all excited about, but the Kenyans showed no interest in that. Their questions showed that what interested them most about South Africa was the Mandela divorce, and who would get the money. They could not conceive of a politician who was not in it purely for the money. And 25 years later we have reached the same point in South Africa. And Salman Rushdie shows the spiritual reality of that, as it played out in India.

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The Mission: A Life for Freedom in South Africa, by Denis Goldberg

The Mission: A Life for Freedom in South Africa by Denis Goldberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A very readable autobiography of a South African political activist.

Denis Goldberg was born and grew up in Cape Town. His parents were communists, and imparted to their children a desire for social justice. He went to university and studied engineering, and became a civil engineer. In the 1950s he joined the Congress of Democrats which was part of the Congress Alliance of organisations opposed to apartheid, with separate organisations for black, white, coloured and Indian South Africans. The Communist Party had been non-racial, but when the National Party came to power in 1948 one of their first acts was to ban the Communist Party of South Africa, which then went underground as the South African Communist Party.

The Congress Alliance sponsored the Congress of the People in 1955, which in turn adopted the Freedom Charter, which put forward the vision of a democratic non-racial South Africa. But those the National Party government regarded as the organisers were arrested and charged with treason, though after four years they were all acquitted.

In 1960 all the parties in the Congress Alliance were banned and they too went underground, and decided that, since peaceful protest no longer seemed a workable political activity, they should move to armed struggle. Denis Goldberg was among those arrested and tried in the Rivonia Trial of 1962, and was sentenced to life imprisonment, though he was released after 22 years. He describes the events leading up to his arrest, the trial, and his time in prison.

After he was released he went overseas and joined his wife Esme in the UK, where he worked to publicise the African National Congress (ANC) and its cause in Britain, Europe and elsewhere. After the ANC was unbanned in 1990 he worked to gain support for community development projects in South Africa. When his wife Esme died he married again and returned to South Africa, where he used his engineering training to advise successive ministers of Water Affairs and Forestry.

The parts of the book describing his personal and family life and his time in prison are very clear and readable, but his descriptions of the political situation and political activities are less so. These parts of the book could be confusing to readers who do not have prior knowledge of the political history of the times. In some places, when describing the political scene of the 1950s, he mentions the Non-European Unity Movement, but seems to assume that his readers will know that it was, what its policies were, and how it differed from the Congress movement.

In other parts, he gives the impression that he is writing an apology to defend himself from criticisms by his colleagues in the ANC. This is no doubt because he was criticised in some quarters, but exactly for what is only hinted at and not stated explicitly. In these parts of the story one gets the impression that he is writing for his colleagues to defend his own actions, and not for the general reader.

I do not agree with all his views, and there were some attitudes that seemed alien to me. As a pacifist, I was never too taken with the idea of the armed struggle and the use of violence, though I recognise that not everyone is a pacifist and most people are unlikely to be. And as a liberal I felt a bit uncomfortable with the top-down authoritarian structure. Of course that was partly because they saw themselves as an army, and so developed along military lines with a top-down command structure. Nevertheless, the need for getting approval for everything from the next level of command in the rather rigid hierarchy seemed strange to me, especially when the movement was underground. I would have expected more flexibility, and expecting members to do things on their own initiative rather than passing everything up the command chain and waiting for permission to come back down.

It would make more sense to me to ensure that people are familiar with the general principles and policies of the organisation, and apply them in ways that are possible in particular circumstances of time and place. But Goldberg writes in such a way as to give the impression that he is trying hard to preclude or counter accusations that he was acting on his own initiative.

Later, however, when the ANC was in power, he accuses civil servants of being dull and unimaginative and obstructive of changes that would better the life of the people. I think his criticisms are justified, but it might be the authoritarian structure of the ANC that has caused it.

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Christianity and Trumpism

I've never before had a guest post on any of my blogs, but today I've made an exception for the following post by David Smith, a retired South African academic and Anglican layman.

The last few years have seen the growth of the Trumpist cult, which some have claimed to be Christian, or at least as something that Christians are not merely justified in supporting, but even obliged to support. But Christian leaders, perhaps fearing the division that might be caused, have said very little about this, and given very little guidance to their flocks. David Smith's plea for such guidance deserves to be heard.

‘What’s on your mind?’ And what disturbs your heart? A concern that has been pursuing me in the past months, but particularly in the last few weeks, is the question of how followers of Christ can be as deeply divided as they are along political lines, without top-level opposition emerging among churches. That at least is my observation, the perspective of a lay-person.

I am not sure how it is connected, but let me start with the rank ‘prosperity gospel’ of various new churches (Bushiri’s can stand for many of them, right down to its ‘enlightened’ self-understanding). There seems to have been from the established churches a decrying of this phenomenon without any strong moves to contain it. Perhaps it would have flourished as it has, whether or not it was effectively anathematised. But the profiles of its leaders – people like Bushiri and T B Joshua, for example, and a host of US-based ‘pastors’ who work chiefly through television and online means – strongly suggest personality cults: not just influence and ‘leadership’, but charisma and grip.

Now, strange as it may seem to extend this rough model to a figure far outside the ‘pastorate’, there appears to be a personality cult among Christians that has taken hold around Donald John Trump that needs to be examined and – if the political lessons of the Book of Revelation are anything to go by – resolutely opposed.

I arrived at this conclusion when I was confronted on social media with the utterances, not of a vociferous right-wing American booster, but of a local young woman, a former student in my university department and someone with whom I had worked in preparation of advanced exams. She seemed at the time like a well-adjusted person and her appointment upon graduation as a school teacher seemed like a natural progression. So I was taken aback, a fortnight ago, to read her mouthing the ‘voting fraud’ agenda that Trump has been promoting, and in very uncompromising terms.

When one of her friends expressed shock at her ‘hurrah’ stance for this unbeatable force, and pointed out that, as the person and Christian she knew, she should surely find ‘reprehensible’ the notions and energies radiating from Trump’s career, she blithely came up with the old line that, while his personal values might be unattractive, the policies he was propounding were fine. In this exchange, she was egged on by her brother, both of them looking to God to vindicate the instrument of his purpose, etc. Only re-election would suffice to fulfil the divine plan. It was no comfort to me to discover soon after that a one-time acquaintance (also a teacher) who has since moved to New Zealand, shared these exact opinions.

I have been assured that there are other South Africans of this persuasion, and that they are not all church-goers. (They are, so far as I know, all white.) But a personality cult maybe cuts across lines like believers vs. agnostics. And it is the Christian support for this man that repulses me. I admit that that goes back a long way, indeed, to the time before he was elected in 2016, so it is nothing new. But it was new to me to realise that it had a foothold in this country, where the president’s policies surely have (at most) tangential relevance. The personality cult diagnosis has become a cliché among the commentators who are critical of Trump, the White House, the GOP, and those Protestant evangelicals and Catholics who have been rallying to his cause. That doesn’t make the diagnosis less ominous, when one thinks of the modern national leaders who historically have been considered to rule by this special power: Stalin and Hitler in Europe, Haile Selassie (the object of a relatively benign messianic cult), Idi Amin and Mobutu Seseseko in Africa, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, and Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos (could you call them a couple cult?) in Asia, Che Guevara (a guerrilla leader) and Evita Peron in S America (both divinized by the Left, and by impoverished populations). Narendra Modi appears to have the same degree of hold across India at present. So the list continues...

How are we, members of a politically restrained church, to relate to this? Have the churches that reject this subjugation of believers to personified movements been vocal enough in distancing themselves from this phenomenon? Or is it a temptation to be drawn too deeply into these confrontations, even if it is by way of resisting? When does the time come when the lines of rejection have to be clearly and institutionally drawn? Or is the idea of taking a stand an illusion, the sort of thing that people who feel impotent before this strange darkness try to draw strength from? 

David Smith 

I've shared some of my own thoughts on this in the past -- here, for example Notes from underground: Why Trump lost Christian voters in 2020, but I think it is something that Christians should be talking about more.

Modern Paganism, Secularism and Syncretism

American Christians who support Donald Trump have warned of the danger of modern paganism, American Paganism | Commonweal Magazine:

... pro-Trump Christians have emphasized a new reason to be afraid. The United States, they say, is devolving into such wanton “paganism” that the country may not survive. The true America awaits rescue by the Christian faithful, and in such an existential struggle, nearly any means are justified—even reelecting a morally abhorrent president. Examples of this rhetoric are not in short supply, among pundits and even in more scholarly work. In an essay praising Donald Trump’s “animal instinct” for “order” and “social cohesion,” Sohrab Ahmari opposed an America of “traditional Christianity” to one of “libertine ways and paganized ideology.” These are our only choices, he insisted. Between such incompatible enemies, there can be only “war and enmity,” so true believers should be ready to sacrifice civility in the battles ahead to reconquer the public square. Rod Dreher has speculated that Trump, while unpalatable, could be a divine emissary holding back the horrors of Christian persecution, like the biblical figure of He Who Delays the Antichrist, an implicit nod to old pagan enemies. “If Christians like me vote for Trump in 2020,” Dreher warns, “it is only because of his role as katechon in restraining what is far worse.” Though in a calmer tone, Ross Douthat entertained similar ideas in his column “The Return of Paganism,” wondering if the pantheist tendencies in American civil religion could morph into a neo-paganism hostile to Christian faith.

But this article suggests that they are looking for the danger of modern paganism in all the wrong places, and seeks to show where the real danger lies. The article is written from a Roman Catholic point of view, but there is little in it that I, as an Orthodox Christian, can disagree with, and it deserves a careful reading by all Christians.

Bur before going any further, some clarification of terms may be needed, and especially the terms paganism, secularism. and syncretism. David Albertson does this to some extent in the article, but not really enough.

Paganism is Christian slang for anything not Christian. As the historian Robin Lane Fox puts it in his book Pagans and Christians,

In antiquity, pagans already owed a debt to Christians. Christians first gave them their name, pagani... In everyday use, it meant either a civilian or a rustic. Since the sixteenth century the origin of the early Christians' usage has been disputed, but of the two meanings, the former is the likelier. Pagani were civilians who had not enlisted through baptism as soldiers of Christ against the powers of Satan. By its word for non-believers, Christian slang bore witness to the heavenly battle which coloured Christians' view of life.

Since the middle of the 20th century there have been various groups who call themselves Pagans, and are sometimes called Neopagans, who have sought to revive pre-Christian religions in predominantly Christian or post-Christians societies. Albertson's article is not referring to such groups, and Eliot almost certainly wasn't.

Secularism is pagan in the sense that it is not Christian, but about 50 years ago Harvey Cox, in his book The Secular City, made an important distinction between secularism, which is an un-Christian (and sometimes anti-Christian) ideology, and secularization, which is a social process that is quite compatible with the Christian faith and indeed in many respects springs from it.

For example, in 1538 the government of England ordered every parish in the Church of England to keep registers of baptisms, marriages and burials. Thee hundred years later, in 1837, the English government introduced secular registration of births, marriages and deaths. That was secularization, which relieved the church of the burden of having to collect records on behalf of the government (though it could still do so, on its own terms, to keep track of irts own members).

In the same way there is a distinction between a secular state, which is neutral with regard to religion, and a secularist state, which is actively anti-religious.

Syncretism is the blending of two or more religions so that a new religion results which is different from either. Puritans often claimed that Christian celebrations such as Christmas and Easter were either pagan or syncretistic, and at times tried to suppress them. For more on this see Evangelicals and Hallowe’en | Khanya.

Having dealt with the definitions, let's get back to the modern paganism and syncretism, and look at some examples of the paganism and syncretism that Albertson is talking about. One example is an article that was widely circulated quite recently -- 5 Reasons Socialism Is Not Christian - The Christian Post:

To socialists, all that really exists is the material world. In fact, Karl Marx, the father of socialism/communism, invented the notion of dialectical materialism — the belief that matter contains a creative power within itself. This enabled Marx to eliminate the need for a creator, essentially erasing the existence of anything non-material.

To socialists, suffering is caused by the unequal distribution of stuff — and salvation is achieved by the re-distribution of stuff. There's no acknowledgment of spiritual issues. There's just an assumption that if everyone is given equal stuff, all the problems in society will somehow dissolve.

The article is thoroughly disingenuous, full of misleading assertions like this one, and in fact tries to fuse the pagan ideology of Neoliberalism with Christianity to form a syncretistic mixture.

I far prefer what Nicolas Berdyaev, the Christian philosopher, has said about this:

It was the industrialist capitalist period which subjected man to the power of economics and money, and it does not become its adepts to teach communists the evangelical truth that man does not live by bread alone. The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbours, for everybody, is a spiritual and religious question. Man does not live by bread alone, but he does live by bread and there should be bread for all. Society should be so organized that there is bread for all, and then it is that the spiritual question will present itself before men in all its depth. It is not permissible to base a struggle for spiritual interests and for a spiritual renaissance on the fact that for a considerable part of humanity bread will not be guaranteed. Such cynicism as this justly evokes an atheistic reaction and the denial of spirit. Christians ought to be permeated with a sense of the religious importance of the elementary needs of men, the vast masses of men, and not to despise these needs from the point of view of an exalted spirituality.

To expand a bit on what Berdyaev said, the article displays a lack of knowledge of what socialism is.

As Berdyaev points out, it was capitalism that introduced a thoroughly materialistic world view. Socialism, in its varied forms, is a reaction to capitalism, largely with a view to remedying its defects.

Capitalism, as Berdyaev points out, subjected man to the power of economics and money.

Socialism came up with objections to this, and most of the objections are based on the principle that as the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath, so the economy was made for man, not man for the economy. .

The principle behind most forms of socialism is that man should control the economy rather than be controlled by it. That doesn't mean that every form of socialism is automatically good, but it does mean that it should not be simplistically dismissed as "materialistic" as this article does.It is materialistic because it is responding to a materialistic system, namely capitalism.

Capitalism arose in history out of a set of economic circumstances, generally in the 15th & 16th centuries. It wasn't really a matter of conscious human design, it just happened.

Later people tried to analyse how it worked -- Adam Smith, Karl Marx and others. Some, like Adam Smith, thought it would work OK if you left it alone. Others, like Marx, pointed out that it caused widespread misery -- and between Smith and Marx came the industrial revolution, which may have affected their analysis.

Socialism was a human reaction to the social effects of impersonal economic forces, and came up with various proposals for remedying the defects of capitalist society.

So saying that socialism is antithetical to Christianity really means that Christianity should never criticise capitalism.

Well, there are two ways of looking at it.

One is that the economic powers are among those referred to in Romans 13
as ordained by God, and to which man must therefore be subject.

Another is that they are among the weak and beggarly elemental spirits
that St Paul thinks have bewitched the Galatians (Gal 3:1-4:9).

What do you think?

Another aspect of Albertson's  article that is very interesting is that though he deals primarily with the USA, there are some notable similarities between the Cult of Trump and the Cult of Rhodes in southern Africa -- it ios the same kind of pagan impulse driving both.

Row about Rhodes

Over the last few days I've seen a lot of comments on Twitter and elsewhere about the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Cape Town university, and some students demanding its removal.

Removing statues seems to be quite a popular activity, at least in some circles.

At one point a couple of friends and I contemplated the possibility of starting a campaign for the removal of the Ideomeneo sculpture at Unisa. Unlike the Rhodes statue, it was abstract, represented nothing, and was quite inoffensive.The aim of the campaign would have been satirical, to demonstrate that so many of the things that the university administration got into a tizz about (in the late 1980s) were quite trivial.

Nothing came of that, but the Taliban were much more serious about the destruction of Buddha statues in Afghanistan, which they accomplished expeditiously by using them for artillery practice, ignoring the protests of people all over the world.

When US troops invaded Iraq in 2003 they lost no time in toppling  a statue of Saddam Hussein, as a publicly staged media event.

And more recently ISIL is clearly sufficiently well-supplied with munitions to destroy ancient buildings and monuments of no strategic value, but perhaps of symbolic value in trying to erase history.

And if we go back a few years, there was a song:

One early morning in the year of '66
A bunch of Irish laddies was knocking up some tricks
They thought old Admiral Nelson had overstayed his time
So they helped him on his way with some sticks of gelignite.

Up went Nelson in old Dublin
Up went Nelson in old Dublin
All along O'Connell Street the stones and rubble flew
As up went Nelson and his pillar too.

So it seems to be quite a popular activity.

One exception that stands out is Zimbabwe, where there was a similar demand for the removal of Cecil Rhodes's grave. Robert Mugabe blocks Cecil John Rhodes exhumation - Telegraph:

Godfrey Mahachi, one of the country's foremost archaeologists picked by Mr Mugabe to be the director of Zimbabwe's National Museums and Monuments, said the grave was an important reminder of the country's colonialist past which could not be airbrushed out. The self-chosen burial place of Oxford-educated mining magnate and pioneer Rhodes in 1902, it still attracts thousands of visitors each year, bringing much-needed tourism revenue to the area. "The call for the removal of the grave is not new but our view is that it is part of national history and heritage and therefore it should not be tampered with," Mr Mahachi told the Zim Diaspora news website.

So it seems that there are widely differing views on this.

Since I have an interest in history, I tend to agree with the views of Godfrey Mahashi -- one cannot airbrush out the past, and when you do, it is all too easy to forget and repeat the mistakes of the past. As one person tweeted, in response to demands of students that the statue be removed, its removal would do nothing, absolutely nothing, to improve the education of those students. It has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with "transformation", just as our fantasy campaign for the removal of Ideomeneo would have done nothing to facilitate the transformation of Unisa. Removal of some of the dead wood among the teaching staff would have done far more to achieve that, but instead Unisa chose to remove whistle-blowers who pointed out what was wrong with the teaching material.

Cecil Rhodes was an excellent example of a businessman who became a politician in order to further his own business interests. And his statue can serve as a reminder of that very thing. He made his money out of diamond mines, and when he became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony he secured a monopoly for his company. Let us look at his statue and remember.

What should be removed is not the statue but the businessmen of our own day who go into politics to further their own business interests. Rhodes is dead, and can do no more harm. But his successors do harm every day.

Not your average Scandiwegian whodunit

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's Cold (The Fall of the Welfare State, #1) by Leif G.W. Persson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Over the last 10 years or so Scandinavian crime fiction has come to dominate the genre in the English-speaking world. Many of the books in the genre have a gloomy boozy divorced (or about to be) detective as protagonist. This one is different.

There is no protagonist. We are given glimpses into the lives and loves and hates of members of different branches of the Swedish police as they are touched in some way by the apparent suicide of an American journalist who fell from the 16th floor of a student residence.

The book is not well-written; in many ways there seems to be too much irrelevant detail. Describing in detail how a single protagonist spends Christmas is one thing; doing it for five or six different characters seems to be overdoing it. Some of the problems in the writing may be problems in translation rather than in the original. The writing sometimes seems stilted.

One of the more disconcerting things is that it takes one a while to work out the period the story is set in. The book was first published in 2002, so one expects it to be at around the turn of the century, but the technology doesn't fit -- there are no personal computers, only typewriters. No cell phones. The technology used would seem to date it to about the mid-1970s, but the story also concerns the investigation of a possible plot to assassinate the Swedish prime minister, which links it to the assassination of prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. Though the prime minister in the book is not named, there are sufficient resemblances in the story to make that a possible period as well.

One of the minor characters is a South African student with an improbable name, and there were stories of South African connections to the assassination of Olof Palme, and in Totale aanslag by De Wet Potgieter this is presented as historical fact. As an aside (this is not mentioned in the story, and is rather a personal anecdote), in 1988 my wife worked in a factory and the office next door to hers was used by a company that was indirectly linked. Sometimes she could not help overhearding conversations in the next door office, and she got the impression that they were involved in some shady business -- money laundering, illicit diamond buying, or something like that, and possibly the assassination of the Swedish prime minister. At about that time we had a break-in at our house, and the house was thoroughly ransacked, cupboards and boxes were emptied, but the only things that were taken were the cheap loudspeakers for our radiogram, which had been carefully unscrewed from their cabinets (the cabinets themselves were left behind), and some food. We had the impression that the thieves were looking for something very specific, which they didn't find, and the usual things that thieves took, cameras, computers etc., were left behind.

But, to get back to the book, in spite of its deficiencies, it was an interesting story, even if it was not well-told, and ultimately worth reading.






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Liberalism and old liberals revisited

Yesterday, while on holiday in Pietermaritzburg, we visited old friends Colin and Mary Gardner, whom we had not seen for a long time, and one of the things we talked about was a proposal by Paul Trewhela for a new history of the Liberal Party of South Africa, and also Paul Trewhela's notion that the Liberal Party ought to have gone underground in 1968, instead of disbanding when the Improper Interference Act became law.

(the picture shows Val Hayes, Colin & Mary Gardner)

I've blogged about Paul Trewhela's proposals before, so I won't repeat everything that I said there, but Colin Gardner came up with a new slant on it. He was a member of the national executive of the Liberal Party at the time the decision was made to disband, and he said that they had considered ignoring the Improper Interference Act (which prohibited multiracial political parties) and just carry on as if nothing had happened, and decided not to. One of the reasons for that, that I had not been aware of, was that some Liberal lawyers, who were in touch with some National Party lawyers, said that that was what the government was expecting, and if it happened, they would declare the Liberal Party a "white" party, and prosecute the black members for contravening the Improper Interference Act. Basing political decisions on what was, in effect, idle gossip over tea at a Law Society meeting, or something similar, may seems strange, but that was one way of gaining intelligence of the intentions of the government.

And as for Paul Trewhela's idea, which he still seems to be pushing, that the Liberal Party ought to have, or even could have, gone underground, it would have been impossible, for reasons I have already noted (Notes from underground: A liberal underground in South Africa), namely that, having operated openly and publicly for 15 years, all active Liberals were known to the SB (Security Police), and any such activity would have been reported to them immediately by their izimpimpi.

Colin Gardner also remarked that one of the things that followed the passing of the Improper Interference Act, though not necessarily caused by it, was the rise of Black Consciousness. At first the National Party government welcomed BC, because they saw it as their policies bearing fruit, but it didn't take them long to realise that it was independent of their control, and not at all what they had in mind by "own affairs". Steve Biko's declaration of himself as a "non-nonracialist" could initially be mistaken for what the National Party government had in mind when it passed the Improper Interference Act, but eventually they learned that it wasn't.

Colin also thought that Steve Biko was using "non-nonracialism" as a tactic, and would, if he had lived, become nonracialist, though whether he or his ideals would have survived in the current South African political climate might be questionable.

Steve Biko didn't have a good word for what he called "white liberals" (which continues to be a swear word in South Africa), but I suspect that what he had in mind when he used the term "liberal" was Nusas (the National Union of South African Students), rather than the Liberal Party. And, as have pointed out in Notes from underground: A new history of the Liberal Party?, the word "liberal" is still misused, and still misunderstood, as much as, if not more than, it was 45-50 years ago.

Politicians' genitals: private or public parts?

In the same week controversy has erupted in both Canada and South Africa over the depiction of the genitals of politicical leaders of those countries in works of art.

In Canada 'Well hung' nude Harper painting sparks mixed reactions | Toronto SUN:

A nude painting of Canada's prime minister has politicians and Tim Hortons employees cracking jokes, pundits crying foul and one federal department reportedly offering up cash.

Titled Emperor Haute Couture, the portrait hanging in a Kingston, Ont., public library shows a full monty Stephen Harper, leaning back on a chaise lounge chair surrounded by a doting team with a terrier at his feet, about to sip a steaming Tim Hortons coffee.

In South Africa, on the same day, came the news that ‘Portrait of Zuma is below the belt’ - Politics | IOL News:

The ANC is outraged at a portrait that shows President Jacob Zuma, in the pose of Lenin, with his genitals hanging out. And the party is headed to court to force the artist Brett Murray, the Goodman Gallery and the City Press newspaper to remove the portrait.

The Goodman Gallery said Murray will not comment and will let the art “speak for itself”.

The 1.85m-high piece, priced at R136 000 and titled The Spear, was first reported on by City Press and a picture of the portrait was printed and displayed on its website.

Perhaps conspiracy theorists will see something significant in the fact that both the above newspaper reports were published on the same day.

In South Africa attempts to have the Zuma painting removed have been criticised as attacks on the constitutional right to freedom of speech.

The Bill of Rights states:

16. Freedom of expression

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, which includes ­
1. freedom of the press and other media;
2. freedom to receive or impart information or ideas;
3. freedom of artistic creativity; and

4. academic freedom and freedom of scientific research.

2. The right in subsection (1) does not extend to ­
1. propaganda for war;
2. incitement of imminent violence; or
3. advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm.

But in this case there is an earlier section of the constitution that might be in conflict:

10. Human dignity

Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.

So if the matter ever gets as far as the Constitutional Court, it will be interesting to see which constitutional principle prevails.

But it is certainly not the first time that politicians' genitalia have been the subject of political satire. Back at the time of the Rainbow Warrior affair a newspaper cartoon depicted French President François Mitterrand with his fly open and a very erect nuclear missile protruding. He was flanked by the leaders of other nuclear powers, and I think the caption was "Mine's bigger than yours." I forget which newspaper it was in.

And of course in South Africa there is the political cartoonist Zapiro, who for a long time depicted Jacob Zuma with a shower protruding from his head, after Zuma had said that having a shower was his way of taking precautions against HIV/Aids.

But last week's art offerings seem to have been of a somewhat different order.

And, like the Bill of Rights, I find myself in two minds over the whole thing.

On the one hand, I think that both as the State President and also as a human being, Jacob Zuma has the right to dignity and privacy guaranteed by our constitution. Even though he holds public office, he has the right not to have his private parts treated as public and exposed to public view.

And this is akin to the principle behind the recent phone hacking scandal in the UK, in which the former newspaper executve, Rebekah Brooks, has been charged with perverting the course of justice.

Can one by-pass this principle by calling it "art"? And where does one draw the line between the work of artists and that of paparazzi?

On the other hand, I recall the trial of Johannesburg artist Harold Rubin for "blasphemy" back in 1963. The Wikipedia article, however doesn't do either him or his work justice, and omits to mention that his exhibition was opened by Brother Roger, CR, an Anglican monk of the Community of the Resurrection, who was later pulled off a train to give evidence at his trial, and whose evidence probably played an important part in his subsequent aquittal. The picture in question, with the title "My Jesus", did not, as the Wikipedia article claims, have the head of a monster, but showed a human being on a cross undergoing extreme suffering. This is not the way Orthodox Christian ikons depict Jesus Christ on the cross, but Harold Rubin was not a Christian, but a Jew, though the life and death of Jesus possibly had more significance to him than it did to most Jews, something that he tried to express in his picture.

The legal system at the time certainly did try to curtail Harold Rubin's freedom of expression, but then at that time we had no Bill of rights. And the Bill of Rights we now have explicitly guarantees the freedom of artistic expression. But Harold Rubin was no paparazzo, and I believe, as did Brother Roger (who knew much more about art than I do), that it was a genuine work of art. I'm not so sure about last week's offerings.

Cosatu, the DA and the youth wage subsidy

This week I lost a lot of respect for Cosatu.

Cosatu (Congress of South African Trade Unions) objects to the idea of a youth wage subsidy. The DA (Democratic Alliance) supports it. A couple of months ago Cosatu refused to meet DA leaders to discuss it, so the DA leaders decide to march to Cosatu headquarters to to hand over a memorandum on the topic. Cosatu objected to this, and said that the DA should engage properly, and not march. Yet when the DA leaders did try to engage properly, Cosatu rejected this. Then Cosatu supporters attack the DA marchers phyically. It's a sad day for democracy in South Africa.

I dislike the DA, and would never vote for them. I have grave doubts about the value or usefulness of a youth wage subsidy. But in a democratic society they should have the right to express their views on this and discuss it with those of differing views. This week, Cosatu attacked democracy.

That does not mean that the DA is blameless. Remember the Democratic Party's (one of the partners in the Democratic Alliance) 1999 election campaign, when they had posters all over the place, exhorting voters to "fight back" against democracy? Even if they made a public apology for that, I still wouldn't vote for them -- politicians love apologising for other people's mistakes, but never for their own (remember Tony Blair's apology for the slave trade, which ended two centuries ago, but he did not apologise for bombing Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq).


I think the Sowetan got it right when they said The time to talk is now - Sowetan LIVE:

Zille's party is taking the march very seriously, and will be accompanied by Parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko, youth leader Makashule Gana and national spokesman Mmusi Maimane, in protest against what they term Cosatu's bias against the unemployed and in favour of those who already have jobs. But what we are concerned about is the tone set by the parties ahead of today's march. When the DA first mooted the march, Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said then the opposition party would never understand what it would be like to be a young black woman who earned a minimum wage.

Both parties have been behaving like kids in a primary school, though Cosatu have taken on the role of the playground bullies.

To be honest, I first learnt of the march on Twitter,  mostly from tweets objecting to it. I googled to find out what it was about, and discovered that it concerned the proposed youth wage subsidy, which I had not heard of before. So I googled for that, and what I read sounded rather vague, but it was enough to make me think I'm agin' it.

I know that's prejudice on my part, because I don't know enough about the proposal or how it will work. But it reminds me of what I learnt in History II about the Speenhamland System, which ended up exacerbating the problems it was intended to solve.

But the issue will not be resolved by thuggery in the streets. Children bullying children in schools is bad enough. Adults bullying adults in the streets is worse. 

The day the Queen flew to Scotland for the grouse shooting

The Day The Queen Flew To Scotland For The Grouse Shooting: A Document by Arthur Wise

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are some books that one reads and re-reads, others that one reads once and discards, and yet others that one re-reads once and reads again after many years. This book is one of the last category.

Sometimes books re-read after a long period are slightly disappointing, not quite as good as one remembered them. Others are better than one remembered them. For me, Jane Austen's novels fall into the "better on re-reading" category; I think that the first time I read her books I was too young to appreciate them.

And then there are those books, like this one, that are much the same.

I can't remember exactly when I first read The day the Queen flew to Scotland for the grouse shooting, but it must have been soon after it was published, when I had just returned to South Africa after spending a couple of years studying in England.

Because of the differences between the South African academic year and the English one, I had a few months to fill in before going to the University of Durham, and I spent them driving buses in London, and so learnt something about the South of England.

And though Durham University drew students from all over, there were several from the North, from whom I learnt that wogs came from South of the Trent.

So Wise's book about a football riot between northern and southern teams escalating into a civil war seemed like a credible scenario. It was about an England that I knew 45 years ago. And one thing that struck me on re-reading it is that little has changed. The book was first published in 1968, and is set a few years into the future, but in the book there is little that might not be equally applicable to the England of 2015, even though much has happened in between.

It could easily have happened in the "winter of discontent" in the mid-1970s, or during the Thatcher years of the 1980s that saw the deindustrialisation of the North.

It could have happened, but it didn't, so perhaps one can relegate it to the "unfulfilled prophecy" department.

But what prompted me to read the book was something someone wrote in a book discussion newsgroup:

What were the boys celebrating? And why should anyone outside Mali care? That is something I tried to figure out when I read that a group called Mouvement National pour la Libération de l'Azawad (MNLA; Azawad National Liberation Movement) had today, April 6, 2012, declared Azawad (comprising what used to be north-east Mali) to be an independent, sovereign state (so far unrecognized by any other country). It's not every day that a new sovereign state is declared, after all, even one with a population as small as 1.3 million and one as far away from Europe and the West as Timbuktu (now located in Azawad).

Well, why should anyone outside Mali care? We should care because before we know, it could be happening to us. In the 1950s the Central African Federation was formed; in the 1960s it broke up. In 1960 Nigeria became independent, in 1967 it was wracked by civil war, as Biafra sought to become independent, and this at a time when the dream of some was a United States of Africa.

The European Union has drawn states together, but even today in the UK there are people who wish to see the end of the UK, to undo the ties that bound England and Scotland together for 300 years. Politicians speak of national unity, but local loyalty dies hard. The tensions that Wise writes about are still there, and occasionally make themselves felt.

And so in a sense it has happened. Not in England, perhaps, but in several other countries. One of them is Yugoslavia, which in some ways, in the 1980s, was like England upside down -- with rich Slovenia in the north, and poor Kosovo in the south, and both straining to break away, and all the bitterness and hatred that Wise describes raged through the Balkans in the 1990s, though in real life the Americans were not as benevolent as he portrayed them in his book. But Wise died in 1982, and didn't live to see that fulfilment.

Wise describes the destruction of Nottingham, and I remember when I first read it I thought he was getting carried away with hyperbole. I thought such cruelty and savagery could not happen in real life. But since then we have seen the destruction of Homs and Fallujah. Such things are not only possible, they have actually happened.

So though Wise's extrapolation of trends of his day into the near future didn't take place in precisely the way he predicted, they have happened, and will go on happening, and so his book remains fresh and readable.

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Who won the Cold War?

Who won the Cold War? In a book I read recently, Book review: A history of the English-speaking peoples | Khanya the author was in no doubt that Maggie Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan "won" the Cold War, but the author's worldview was utterly anachonistic, and can only be described as neojingoism.

Clarissa takes a somewhat different view of it in Clarissa's Blog: Who Caused the Collapse of the Soviet Union? Part I:

Nothing annoys me more than hearing people discuss completely in earnest whether the collapse of the Soviet Union was brought about by Ronald Reagan or by somebody else. Such discussions make just as much sense as trying to figure out whether world peace was achieved by this or some other politician. 'Well, there is no world peace,' you'd say. Right you are. And there was no collapse of the Soviet Union. Not in any meaningful sense, that is. As to the end of the Cold War, if you seriously think it's over, you need to stop spending so much time listening to the American media and turn to some external sources of information every once in a while. The winner of the Cold War is yet to be decided but I somehow doubt that you can win any war by pretending it isn't taking place.

I think her whole article is worth reading, though I disagree with the premiss that the Cold War is continuing.

To that extent I agree with the late Samuel Huntington, who said that the Cold War was primarily a clash of ideologies, while what we are seeing in the post-Cold War world is a clash of civilizations.

One of the relics of the Cold War is the term "Third World", which still seems to persist, though its meaning seems to have changed, or rather dissipated. The "three worlds" view of geopolitics was composed of

• First World: the capitalist world
• Second World: the communist world
• Third World: the non-aligned states

The Third World was founded by India, Indonesia and Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavia was the only Third-World state in Europe, and, in a sense, its disintegration, like that of the Soviet Union, marks the end of the Cold War.

If the Cold War was a war of ideologies, as Huntington says, then one could say that Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher "won" the Cold War, because their brand of free marketism is the dominant religion in the world today. That is where Huntington got it wrong; he posits Western Christianity as the religion of Western Civilization. It isn't. Free Marketism is.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and Bolshevik rule in Russia is a somewhat different matter. By Brezhnev's time, if not before, faith in communism had grown cold. The leaders of the ruling Communist Party uttered all the old slogans, but the conviction had gone out of them. All that was left was a clinging to power, and, as Clarissa points out, the most powerful men in Russia today resemble nothing so much as the Vicar of Bray.

Electoral reform

In the past couple of weeks I've been seeing and getting into quite a lot of discussions on electoral reform.

Here in South Africa our last four elections have been held under the proportional representation system, which, when it was first introduced in 1994, seemed to be a vast improvement on the "winner takes all" contituency system. Now we've had it long enough to see the disadvantages, and we've been discussing the merits of possible alternatives.

Then a friend in the UK, a retired Anglican bishop John Davies, who was in South Africa in the 1960s, raised the same question, which is also being discussed in the UK, and I've recently read some blog posts about it, for example Purple Words on a Grey Background: Electoral Reform. As John Davies put it:

What both of you are saying is that the difference between SA and UK is great - greater than I had realised, really; that is not to be wondered at. I still think that the principle of 'my MP' is so important in practice as to be non-negotiable; but in the SA process it may well be an unaffordable luxury. It would be nice to be able to say that we in UK can treasure such a principle because of our greater maturity as a democracy. But this is not a viable claim, really, in so far as only a smallish proportion of our electorate actually takes the democratic facilities seriously - if the strength of a democracy is measured by voter turn-out, we are much less credible than SA as a functioning democracy. But I think that it is a sign of a degree of maturity that there is at present a serious critique of our electoral process; and it may well be that we should move closer to the SA method, rather than assume that SA (or Egypt, for that matter) should move towards ours. At times like the present, people who function as 'world leaders' tend to express the hope that troublesome nations should become 'genuine democracies'; but when it comes to spelling out exactly what that means, rhetoric has to give way to nuts and bolts - and nuts & bolts can come in very many shapes and sizes, as any mechanic knows.

The question John had posed to us was: How, in practice, do you, with the present SA system, relate to the legislature?

And my answer was that in practice, we don't.

There are no such things as "surgeries" here, because MPs don't have constituencies, and they represent their parties. Their reelection depends much more on their standing in their parties than on the votes of the electorate.

That is why many people are dissatisfied with the present PR system, and have been discussing possible alternatives.

I think it was the right thing to do in the first democratic election, and perhaps the second. Under a straight constituency system most of the smaller parties would have been wiped out, but I think it was important that they be represented. They represented people who had never before been represented in parliament, and they needed a platform to be able to contribute. In the first democratic election, for example, the PAC got 1% of the vote, and that gave them 4 MPs. Under a constituency system they would have had none.

In the event they turned out to be a bunch of bumbling old men who lived in the past, and perhaps few people would now care whether they were represented or not. But in 1994 it was important, and so with the other minority parties. Only those that got less than 0,25% of the vote would have no representation at all.

If we had a constituency system and a general election now, I think that ANC would take about 85-90% of the seats, with the DA and the IFP sharing the remainder between them. And I wouldn't feel happy voting for any of them at the moment. At least PR gives me a wider choice.

The great advantage of proportional representation is that it allows minority views to be represented, but it makes MPs accountable to their parties rather than the the electorate, because it is the parties that decide who is on the list of candidates, and their relative positions on the list. This means that ordinary people don't really relate to the legislature.

In local government we have a mixed system. There are some members of the city council elected by proportional representation, and others elected by wards, so we have two votes - one for the ward candidate, and one for the PR list of party candidates. That seems to give the advantages of both systems, and perhaps we should do that nationally as well.

One of the systems that came up in discussions was the idea of a single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies. It sounded complex, and I don't pretend to understand it, but it seemed to me that it would fall between all the stools. There would still be no concept of "My MP".

So I think that the best system would be one that extended the local government system to national and provincial government as well, where one would vote for both a party-list candidate and a constituency candidate, perhaps with the refinement of the Alternative Vote system for the constituency candidates.

Maybe that would be the closest we could get to having our cake and eating it.

FF Plus - Tollgate Petition

I never imagined that the day would come when I would sympathise with any cause promoted by the far-rightwing Freedom Front Plus Party, but I do sympathise with their campaign against the new toll roads: FF Plus - Tollgate Petition.

Toll roads were introduced to South Africa by the National Party (remember them?). Roads were paid for by the Road Fund, and were funded mainly by a tax levied on fuel. The National Party nicked this money, because they wanted to use it to fund their attempts to destabilise Angola, Mocambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia and other countries.

I wonder what the ANC's excuse is?

They have simply continued with the old NP policy, with no "transformation" in sight.

The NP then privatised the busiest roads and allowed private companies to make profits from the tolls. At the same time they deregulated transport, which resulted in more and heavier vehicles using the existing roads (often to avoid the toll roads). And that too has continued. Check, for example, the road from Bapsfontein to Standerton. It is the quickest and least congested route from Pretoria to KZN, and it is in bad condition because of the number of heavy vehicles usuing it to avoid to tolled sections. With even more tolled sections it can only get worse.

I wonder what the ANC's excuse it?

There's certainly been no transformation there, just a continuation of the old NP policies.

The fairest and most cost-effective way of paying for roads is a fuel levy. This also uses the "user-pays" principle -- the more you use the roads, the more fuel you use, and the more you pay.

But if they insist on charging 66c per kilometre, I suggest that those who have the special number plates that can be read by the toll gantries should be given a discount of R6.60 per litre on fuel. That would compensate for the cost of travelling between the toll gantries, which are about 10 km apart.

As for us, well, it will cost us about R300.00 more to go to church on a Sunday.

I'll certainly support the FF Plus petition.

I don't know if I'll vote for them, though.

But I might volunteer to distribute petition forms and leaflets at taxi ranks.

Religion and politics

Religion and politics don't mix -- well that's what the pietistic evangelicals of the religious right used to tell us back in the days of apartheid. Therefore, they concluded, Christians should not criticise political leaders and their policy of apartheid and the ethnic cleansing that resulted from it. "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's".

Now the boot is on the other foot, and it is the secular humanists and the "new atheists" who are saying that religion and politics don't mix, and one gets the impression that if they had their way there would be two voters rolls, an A roll for atheists, to elect 350 members of parliament, and a B roll for agnostics, who would be allowed to elect 50 members of parliament, and the rest would have no vote at all, and everyone knows that all war, hatred and oppression in the world has been caused by religion, and until the superstitious have come to their senses they should not be allowed to vote.

But what about the politicians themselves?

Over the last week there have been several news items about prominant politicians and their religious views, practices or utterances, to wit Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama and Jacob Zuma. These have been interesting, but even more interesting have been the responses.

Let's start with Jake the Fake. So far no one has put it better than Tinyiko Sam Maluleke's Blog - Thinking Allowed!: Welcome to Jacob Zuma's Heaven:

“When you vote for the ANC, you are also choosing to go to heaven. When you don’t vote for the ANC you should know that you are choosing that man who carries a fork … who cooks people.” Thus spake the son of God to loud cheers and unstoppable giggles. And not for the first time, mind you. He spoke before, he is speaking now and he will speak again. How many times before, has he underlined the intimate relationship between the ANC and the Lord? With uncharacteristic calm and collection, our Jacob has pointed out that until the Lord returns, the ANC will rule. To the ANC has ruling authority been granted during this interim period of uncertainly — the in-between period — the period between the ascension of Jesus and the return of Jesus. Only those who hide in the ark called ANC will survive the trials and tribulations of the current age! You have heard it said before that Jesus will return to fetch the righteous and the holy, but in Mthatha last Friday, Jacob the son of God said to you, Jesus will return to fetch those clad in the black, green and gold.

'Nuff said. If you want to read more, go and read the rest of it on Tinyiko's blog.

Then there was this: Putin on Mount Athos pilgrimage:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has visited the monastic community of Mount Athos in Greece, one of Orthodox Christianity's holiest sites.

He was the first Russian leader to visit the male-only community, on a narrow, rocky peninsula east of Thessaloniki, Russian TV reported.

The trip was part of Mr Putin's two-day visit to Greece.

He has openly embraced the Orthodox faith, despite having served the atheist Soviet regime as a KGB officer.

Well, I suppose that makes him an apostate atheist, but at least he has gone to the source, unlike the days when the leader of the Russian Communist Party, anxious to acquire some of the magic pixie dust that fell from the church, which public opinion polls showed was more trusted by the people than politicians, decided to visit a church one day for a photo-op, and lit a candle with his cigarette lighter.

And then there is Barack Obama.

If Putin was a convert from atheism, Barack Obama, was a convert from agnosticism and, rather touchingly, seems as much concerned about his own family as about religion in the great affairs of state or the fortunes of his party. Barack Obama affirms his Christianity | The Guardian:

The US president told the national prayer breakfast in Washington that he prays for peace in the Middle East – and that he also asks for God's assistance with his 12-year-old daughter, Malia.

'Lord, give me patience as I watch Malia go to her first dance, where there will be boys. Lord, let her skirt get longer as she travels to that place,' Obama recounted.

Obama's speech today was laced with Biblical references in his most public affirmation of his faith. With many Americans under the illusion that he might be a covert Muslim, Obama explained: 'I came to know Jesus Christ for myself and embrace him as my Lord and Saviour.'

Obama described his upbringing as 'not religious', his father as a non-believer and his mother 'grew up with a certain scepticism … she only took me to church at Easter and Christmas – sometimes'.

The response of one American (but typical of other responses) to this news was to say "The Koran permits lying if doing so benefits Islam."

We are urged to pray for rulers and civil authorities, so let us pray for all these leaders. But especially Barack Obama, because he is evidently president of a nation of lunatics.