Rome, 2 April 2024 – In these days, we seem to have fallen back into the climate of fifteen-twenty years and more: and a lot of propaganda echoes on both sides the themes dear to the times of the struggle between “Good and Evil”, between the “rogue states” they were talking about Bush Jr. And Donald Rumsfeld and the “Western Satan” of the ayatollahs. Let’s try to bring order to this slogan-based brawl.
The Islamist militants (an adjective which is not at all equivalent to “Muslims”, but which indicates those who intend to use the Muslim religion for political and terrorist purposes) then spoke of a jihad to be banned against the West; and among us there were those who considered jihad to be the Muslim equivalent of what in our country was the “holy war”, of the “crusade”.
So, it was said, the Islamists want the “holy war” against the Westexactly how we wanted it when we were ignorant fanatics like them.
Nothing could be further from the truth. For Muslims, the masculine term jihad indicates “the worthy effort in a direction pleasing to God” and it does not necessarily imply any act of war: it can in some cases be carried out by fighting, but it is also carried out by opposing crime, diseases, epidemics, natural cataclysms, poverty, injustice, ignorance. Similarly, between the 11th and 18th centuries the West developed the juridical and theological idea of “crusade”, especially (but not only) against Islam: and someone even tried to smuggle in a sanctification of it. But in vain. The Western Christian world knows the concept of “just war”explained in the 5th century by Saint Augustine: but limits it to defensive wars proclaimed by a legitimate prince. Sometimes poets and propagandists have spoken of a “holy war”, but never theologians: and the Church, while blessing the Crusader insignia, has always clarified that there is no “sanctifying” war in and of itself. Anyone who fights a “just war” commits a crime and is guilty of mortal sin like anyone else. For Judaism, Islam and Christianity no “holy war” is actually possible –
For his part the Moscow Patriarch Kirillsupporting without a doubt “Putin’s war” (it must be said that in Orthodox countries the Church is a state organ) and condemning, as he has always done, what in his opinion is the impious and licentious character of Western “permissiveness”, “consumerism” and “hedonism”, he evoked the reason for the Svyashènnaya Vajna (literally “sanctifying war”): expression already in use in Russia of 1812-’13at the time of war against Napoleon, which was proposed again in 1941, in the climate of indignation against the Nazis who, by unilaterally breaking the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of three years earlier, had invaded the Soviet Union. On this occasion, the “Great Patriotic War” (as the 1941-’45 conflict is still defined in Russia), the poet Vasili Lébedev-Kumach almost immediately wrote the poem Vstavài, strange orgòmnaya (“Arise, O immense Country”) for which the composer Aleksandr Aleksandrov, author of the he Soviet national anthem and founder of the Red Army Choir, composed the music.
That hymn, which from its refrain was called Svyashènnaya Vajnà, has been from then until today the best known and dearest patriotic song of the Russian people: a bit like The Piave Song for us. It is a patriotic song, which apart from its refrain has nothing “holy” about it. With his religious authority Kirill has “blessed” something which in itself has nothing to do with the “holy war”, but which is, if anything, part of the highly nationalistic context set for the current conflict by the Russian government, which wants to connect the war of these days to defend the homeland of over eighty years ago.
This is the reality of things. The rest is voluntary misunderstanding, vulgar mystification.
Learn more:
The mystery of the Havana Syndrome. “Russia is behind the secret weapon that causes brain damage”
Click here if you want to subscribe to the Qn WhatsApp channel
