Saturday Commentary and Review #108
Armenian Existential War, Meloni Ready to Combat Human Trafficking?, Twitter as DoD PsyOp Base, TradCaths in Poland Take on Clerisy, Ancient Apocalypse as Dangerous?
“I am not responsible for geography”, explained Joseph Stalin in 1939 to a shocked Vyacheslav Molotov and other Politburo chiefs as to why Finland must be invaded.
I first learned of this bit of history from Simon Sebag Montefiore’s “The Court of the Red Tsar”, an engrossing book that delivers example after example of Stalin’s propensity for wicked black humour. It has stayed with me ever since and immediately comes to mind whenever a global conflict pops up. The Kurds are a horrible victim of geography, for example, spread across 5+ countries, with each of them of great importance to the world’s most important current powers. The Balkans are another example, with Gary Brecher once explaining the scene there as one in which “There are no good guys. All the good guys were killed a long, long time ago.” Poland is a classic example, caught between the Germans and Russians. The list is practically endless.
Armenians too are a victim of geography, and in more ways than one. Landlocked, sandwiched between two historical enemies (Turkey and their Turkic cousins in Azerbaijan, both of whom are US allies), with an Atlanticist Georgia to the north and a sanctioned Iran long in the crosshairs of the USA to the south, Armenia finds itself in a very, very rough neighbourhood. Its traditional protector, Russia, does not direct land access to it, and is currently busy in Ukraine trying to forestall NATO expanding its southern flank in its quest to strangle it.
Like the Balkans, political maps do not reflect actual ethnic ones in the Caucasus, meaning that many peoples are stuck either without homelands of their own, or as minorities in the homelands of others, separated from their own people. Armenia is a case of the latter, with Armenians found throughout the Caucasus, but importantly as a majority in Nagorno-Karabakh (the Armenians call it “Artsakh”), an enclave wholly within Azeri borders, one that was 80% Armenian in population.
Armenians managed to wrest this autonomous region of Azerbaijan from Azeri control in the dying days of the USSR, but even Armenia did not recognize it as separate from Azerbaijan, leaving it in a state of limbo. This allowed the Azeris to move against it in 2020, defending the principle of territorial integrity. Armenia does have friends (Russia and Iran), but it is precisely these friends that leave them prone to attack from the Azeris. Making the situation even worse is that an Armenian defection to the Atlanticist side would be of no use either, as the Azeris have what the Armenians can never have: oil and gas that can partially replace Russian sources for European markets, plus ethnic ties to the incredibly important NATO ally in Ankara.
Sohrab Ahmari recently visited Armenia, to report on the unenviable position that the world’s oldest Christian nation finds itself in these days: a victim of great power politics sandwiched between enemies seeking its total annihilation.
More recently, Azerbaijan’s kleptocratic regime has imposed a blockade against the 120,000 Armenian Christians who reside in Nagorno-Karabakh. Authorities in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, have cut off the single road that connects the territory to Armenia proper, depriving the region of food, medication, and other critical necessities. They also briefly shut off the territory’s gas amid freezing temperatures—at least the second time they have done so in as many years. Aircraft daring to deliver humanitarian supplies have been threatened with shootdown.
Armenians—the world’s oldest Christian nation and the victims of the first modern genocide—face extinction in a territory stippled by their churches and crosses. Meanwhile, their nation-state risks being downgraded to a rump state by an Azerbaijan flush with natural-gas revenue and emboldened by foreign-policy elites in Washington and Brussels. As Russia, Armenia’s historic protector, recedes from the scene, Armenians are in a race for national survival.
“Who, whom?” is the question here. The Azeris have done a great job in ingratiating themselves with the USA since they were embarrassed by the Armenians three decades ago. Gas riches made this easy.
The history of the dispute:
In 1918, in the aftermath of World War I, and centuries of first Persian and then Russian imperial rule, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia were born as independent states. In Armenia’s case, the Turkish genocide of its Armenian population added an especially powerful impetus to independence. Almost immediately, border disputes arose between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis in three mixed provinces: Nakhichevan, Zangezur, and Karabakh.
The status of the first two of those regions—Nakhichevan and Zangezur—was decided in pitched battles waged by the two nationalist sides. Nakhichevan, a sliver of land lodged between Armenia and Turkey, fell into Azerbaijani hands, forming an Azeri exclave, and so it remains today. In Zangezur, in southern Armenia, the Armenians prevailed. In each case, the victorious side achieved a measure of ethnic consolidation—which is to say that it burned the other’s villages and drove out its population.
Left undecided, however, was the fate of Karabakh, which the Armenians call Artsakh. The mountainous spiritual heartland of the Armenian people, it’s where their alphabet was created, and where Armenian statehood endured even as it was extinguished elsewhere by the empires. Karabakhi Armenians retained their independence even through centuries of Iranian suzerainty, with their rulers styling themselves—and being recognized by the Persians as—“shahs.”
The indigeneity of the Armenians to Karabakh is irrefutable, given the presence of centuries-old churches and cross stones. Yet that hasn’t discouraged the current Baku regime from trying its hand at historical revisionism and bogus “archaeology” that involves removing Armenian inscriptions from churches—that is, when it hasn’t demolished memorial sites. These revisionist efforts include a bizarre claim that the Armenians are “interlopers,” who seized the region from Roman or Caucasian Albanians, a long-since-disappeared people not to be confused with Balkan Albanians. As Grigor Hovhannesyan, a former Armenian ambassador to Washington, told me with a sigh, “the nouveaux riches of this world can rewrite history.”
In the event, in 1920, the Red Army rolled in, conquering both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Soon the Bolsheviks would impose their big freeze on all national disputation. But what to do about Karabakh? Among their most fateful decisions, as far as the people of this region were concerned, was to grant Karabakh the status of an autonomous region within the new Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, having initially contemplated it as part of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Their logic—or illogic—has been the subject of voluminous Soviet historiography in the century since. In immediate geopolitical terms, the Bolsheviks were keen to appease oil-rich Azerbaijan, which they hoped would also coruscate as a revolutionary beacon, summoning the downtrodden masses of the Middle East to rise up against their rulers. But as historian Thomas de Waal has noted, there were other reasons, drawing on both older traditions of Russian statecraft and the precepts of Marxist ideology. For one thing, the Soviets took up the Russian imperial model’s insistence that individual governorates should make geographic and economic sense, and by their lights, the Azerbaijan republic wouldn’t be whole without Karabakh, since, for example, Azerbaijani shepherds would graze their livestock in the region. From a Marxist perspective, moreover, the Soviets believed that they could open up new utopian horizons by impelling ethnically diverse peoples to live side-by-side, forcing strangers to become “brotherly peoples.”
Sohrab goes on to claim that this “worked” for a while, which it did. Like in the ex-Yugoslavia, a dictatorship with a police state was needed to freeze this ethnic conflict. One liberalization set in, the frozen conflict quickly defrosted and came alive again.
But by the 1980s, neither was the case. To an extent unbeknownst to Gorbachev, the whole system was coming apart by the time the two Armenian writers visited him to make their case (in February 1988). The sense that the big Soviet freeze was thawing had given the Karabakhi Armenians an opening, which they used to repose the question left unsettled by the post-World War I settlement: namely, the question of their independence from Azerbaijan.
In the weeks and months that followed, peaceful protests gave way to flare-ups of violent intercommunal tension. For a short while, Homo Sovieticus made his last stand, and a nobility shone through his inescapable weakness: For when Azerbaijanis agitated by the Karabakhi uprising staged a vicious anti-Armenian pogrom in the Caspian city of Sumgait, young Communist militants were the only Azerbaijanis to come to the aid of their “brotherly people,” the Armenians. In doing so, they drew on left-internationalist traditions that were fast waning.
War broke out. Both sides committed atrocities: benzene injected into captured soldiers’ bodies, massacres of fleeing civilians, population transfers. Cases of infantrymen looking through their rifle’s sights, only to glimpse former neighbors and friends donning enemy uniforms, were hauntingly common. The Armenians benefited from a combination of zeal, initiative, early access to Soviet arms, and the assistance of the newly unemployed Russian officer class. When the dust settled, in 1994, Azerbaijan lost Karabakh, though no government—not even the Armenian one that had fought for it—formally recognized the newly formed Republic of Artsakh. For the Armenians in Armenia proper, it sufficed that their Karabakhi cousins were secure from potential ethnic cleansing, with a roadway known as the Lachin Corridor linking the two societies. So it was that the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute entered the 21st century, once more in a frozen state.
Since then, the Azeris have used their oil and gas wealth to build a new military (with help from the Turks and Israelis in particular) and lobby US officials to give them a free hand in Nagorno-Karabakh. The price for this has been the ebbing and receding presence of Christians on what was once solidly Christian land in the South Caucasus. Remember this when people accuse the USA of being a Christian country.
Giorgia Meloni has upset many right wing and conservative Italians and Europeans for two reasons in particular:
her immediate expressions of fealty towards Atlanticism
her lack of action against human traffickers in the Mediterranean using Italian soil to unload migrants from Asia and Africa
The first point could either be sincere or simply a tactic in which to assure allies that she and her government are not a systemic threat to NATO, the EU, and so on. It can be viewed as her buying good will for the second point; a willingness to move forcefully against industrial-scale human trafficking in the Mediterranean by various NGOs and their sea vessels. Unlike the first point, the second is unforgivable in the eyes of Italian (and European) rightists, as Italy is a key player in this story, unlike Ukraine.
Remix is reporting that Meloni’s government is now preparing to take action against these human traffickers:
Starting next year, however, Giorgia Meloni’s government will introduce stricter rules for NGO boats operating in the Mediterranean Sea to prevent them from coordinating their activities with people smugglers and from searching for would-be immigrants near the Libyan shore.
Italy’s council of ministers was to approve on Dec. 28 a draft security decree that will include a new Code of Conduct for those NGOs and accelerate the processing of asylum requests.
One of the big changes the new right-wing government in Rome plans to introduce is that migrants taken on board an NGO boat in an alleged search-and-rescue operation will be required to declare if they intend to file an asylum request once in Europe. If this is the case, the country under whose flag a given ship is sailing will be required to take in the asylum seekers and process their requests.
The new policy change may give governments in Germany, France and other nations second thoughts about funding migrant boats operating on the Mediterranean if they are the ones forced to take these migrants in.
The second point:
A second major change is that after a search-and-rescue operation, an NGO ship will have to immediately ask for a safe port to disembark the rescued migrants and will have to sail towards their designated port, without waiting for days for further opportunities to “rescue” migrants.
This is meant to put an end to the practice of systematic searching for would-be illegal immigrants, sometimes in coordination with people smugglers, instead of conducting genuine search-and-rescue operations.
The NGOs that will violate the new rules will face administrative sanctions and can eventually have their ships seized by the Italian authorities in case of repeated violations.
The second part of the new “security decree,” which will have to be later approved by Italy’s parliament to become law and remain in effect, will provide for fast processing of asylum requests and more efficient repatriation procedures for those whose requests are rejected.
The nature of human smuggling in the Mediterranean and its ebbs and flows these past several years:
In 2016, 181,436 illegal immigrants entered Italy. Thanks to the new rules introduced by Interior Minister Marco Minniti in the summer of 2017 and a memorandum of cooperation that was then signed with the Libyan government in Tripoli, the number dropped that year to 119,310.
The lowest number —and the lowest death toll as well — was reached in 2019 after over a year with Matteo Salvini as Italy’s interior minister, with “only” 19,471 migrants arrivals by sea. However, that number included a significant rise observed from September to December, when Salvini’s League was replaced by the center-left Democratic Party as the 5-Star Movement’s coalition partner under Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.
Similarly to what was observed during the previous years, most of the migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean Sea on small fishing boats or bigger ships run by European NGOs this year did not escape war. Out of the 100,000 who had arrived from Jan. 1 to Dec. 21, some 86,000 were from countries at peace. Out of these, over 20,000 were from Egypt, and almost 18,000 were from Tunisia. Bangladesh came third with over 14,000 of its citizens among those who reached Italy through the Mediterranean Sea this year.
Some will regard Meloni’s moves as half-measures. They certainly will require cooperation from countries from which these migrants originate.
The details of the Twitter Files are a case of “they have been doing this all along, just like we suspected, and they are now downplaying it after years of denial”. This leaves people who assumed this to be the case feeling underwhelmed, but the scandal is nevertheless real. Twitter really is a clearinghouse for intel psyops, and once again we have the proof that this is the case. Put yourself in the government’s shoes (if you can imagine yourself working for it): would you not use a tool to your advantage if it was given to you?
Lee Fang of The Intercept is the greatest investigative reporter currently on my radar, and I’ll let him deliver to you what you need to know on this subject:
Twitter executives have claimed for years that the company makes concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed covert propaganda campaigns on its platform.
Behind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.
The accounts in question started out openly affiliated with the U.S. government. But then the Pentagon appeared to shift tactics and began concealing its affiliation with some of these accounts — a move toward the type of intentional platform manipulation that Twitter has publicly opposed. Though Twitter executives maintained awareness of the accounts, they did not shut them down, but let them remain active for years. Some remain active.
Fang and The Intercept were given access to some documentation for around the period of a week, but not unrestricted access as they were restricted to requesting certain kinds of information that were then sorted by an attorney.
The direct assistance Twitter provided to the Pentagon goes back at least five years.
On July 26, 2017, Nathaniel Kahler, at the time an official working with U.S. Central Command — also known as CENTCOM, a division of the Defense Department — emailed a Twitter representative with the company’s public policy team, with a request to approve the verification of one account and “whitelist” a list of Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.”
“We’ve got some accounts that are not indexing on hashtags — perhaps they were flagged as bots,” wrote Kahler. “A few of these had built a real following and we hope to salvage.” Kahler added that he was happy to provide more paperwork from his office or SOCOM, the acronym for the U.S. Special Operations Command.
Twitter at the time had built out an expanded abuse detection system aimed in part toward flagging malicious activity related to the Islamic State and other terror organizations operating in the Middle East. As an indirect consequence of these efforts, one former Twitter employee explained to The Intercept, accounts controlled by the military that were frequently engaging with extremist groups were being automatically flagged as spam. The former employee, who was involved with the whitelisting of CENTCOM accounts, spoke with The Intercept under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
In his email, Kahler sent a spreadsheet with 52 accounts. He asked for priority service for six of the accounts, including @yemencurrent, an account used to broadcast announcements about U.S. drone strikes in Yemen. Around the same time, @yemencurrent, which has since been deleted, had emphasized that U.S. drone strikes were “accurate” and killed terrorists, not civilians, and promoted the U.S. and Saudi-backed assault on Houthi rebels in that country.
Other accounts on the list were focused on promoting U.S.-supported militias in Syria and anti-Iran messages in Iraq. One account discussed legal issues in Kuwait. Though many accounts remained focused on one topic area, others moved from topic to topic. For instance, @dala2el, one of the CENTCOM accounts, shifted from messaging around drone strikes in Yemen in 2017 to Syrian government-focused communications this year.
Doing the bidding of USGov:
For many years, Twitter has pledged to shut down all state-backed disinformation and propaganda efforts, never making an explicit exception for the U.S. In 2020, Twitter spokesperson Nick Pickles, in a testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, said that the company was taking aggressive efforts to shut down “coordinated platform manipulation efforts” attributed to government agencies.
“Combatting attempts to interfere in conversations on Twitter remains a top priority for the company, and we continue to invest heavily in our detection, disruption, and transparency efforts related to state-backed information operations. Our goal is to remove bad-faith actors and to advance public understanding of these critical topics,” said Pickles.
In 2018, for instance, Twitter announced the mass suspension of accounts tied to Russian government-linked propaganda efforts. Two years later, the company boasted of shutting down almost 1,000 accounts for association with the Thai military. But rules on platform manipulation, it appears, have not been applied to American military efforts.
The emails obtained by The Intercept show that not only did Twitter whitelist these accounts in 2017 explicitly at the behest of the military, but also that high-level officials at the company discussed the accounts as potentially problematic in the following years.
more:
In the summer of 2020, officials from Facebook reportedly identified fake accounts attributed to CENTCOM’s influence operation on its platform and warned the Pentagon that if Silicon Valley could easily out these accounts as inauthentic, so could foreign adversaries, according to a September report in the Washington Post.
Twitter emails show that during that time in 2020, Facebook and Twitter executives were invited by the Pentagon’s top attorneys to attend classified briefings in a sensitive compartmented information facility, also known as a SCIF, used for highly sensitive meetings.
“Facebook have had a series of 1:1 conversations between their senior legal leadership and DOD’s [general counsel] re: inauthentic activity,” wrote Yoel Roth, then the head of trust and safety at Twitter. “Per FB,” continued Roth, “DOD have indicated a strong desire to work with us to remove the activity — but are now refusing to discuss additional details or steps outside of a classified conversation.”
Stacia Cardille, then an attorney with Twitter, noted in an email to her colleagues that the Pentagon may want to retroactively classify its social media activities “to obfuscate their activity in this space, and that this may represent an overclassification to avoid embarrassment.”
Jim Baker, then the deputy general counsel of Twitter, in the same thread, wrote that the Pentagon appeared to have used “poor tradecraft” in setting up various Twitter accounts, sought to potentially cover its tracks, and was likely seeking a strategy for avoiding public knowledge that the accounts are “linked to each other or to DoD or the USG.” Baker speculated that in the meeting the “DoD might want to give us a timetable for shutting them down in a more prolonged way that will not compromise any ongoing operations or reveal their connections to DoD.”
Military psyops:
The U.S. military and intelligence community have long pursued a strategy of fabricated online personas and third parties to amplify certain narratives in foreign countries, the idea being that an authentic-looking Persian-language news portal or a local Afghan woman would have greater organic influence than an official Pentagon press release.
Military online propaganda efforts have largely been governed by a 2006 memorandum. The memo notes that the Defense Department’s internet activities should “openly acknowledge U.S. involvement” except in cases when a “Combatant Commander believes that it will not be possible due to operational considerations.” This method of nondisclosure, the memo states, is only authorized for operations in the “Global War on Terrorism, or when specified in other Secretary of Defense execute orders.”
In 2019, lawmakers passed a measure known as Section 1631, a reference to a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, further legally affirming clandestine psychological operations by the military in a bid to counter online disinformation campaigns by Russia, China, and other foreign adversaries.
In 2008, the U.S. Special Operations Command opened a request for a service to provide “web-based influence products and tools in support of strategic and long-term U.S. Government goals and objectives.” The contract referred to the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, an effort to create online news sites designed to win hearts and minds in the battle to counter Russian influence in Central Asia and global Islamic terrorism. The contract was initially carried out by General Dynamics Information Technology, a subsidiary of the defense contractor General Dynamics, in connection with CENTCOM communication offices in the Washington, D.C., area and in Tampa, Florida.
A program known as “WebOps,” run by a defense contractor known as Colsa Corp., was used to create fictitious online identities designed to counter online recruitment efforts by ISIS and other terrorist networks.
The Intercept spoke to a former employee of a contractor — on the condition of anonymity for legal protection — engaged in these online propaganda networks for the Trans-Regional Web Initiative. He described a loose newsroom-style operation, employing former journalists, operating out of a generic suburban office building.
“Generally what happens, at the time when I was there, CENTCOM will develop a list of messaging points that they want us to focus on,” said the contractor. “Basically, they would, we want you to focus on say, counterterrorism and a general framework that we want to talk about.”
From there, he said, supervisors would help craft content that was distributed through a network of CENTCOM-controlled websites and social media accounts. As the contractors created content to support narratives from military command, they were instructed to tag each content item with a specific military objective. Generally, the contractor said, the news items he created were technically factual but always crafted in a way that closely reflected the Pentagon’s goals.
“We had some pressure from CENTCOM to push stories,” he added, while noting that he worked at the sites years ago, before the transition to more covert operations. At the time, “we weren’t doing any of that black-hat stuff.”
Twitter found nothing from Russia regarding state-sponsored psychological operations involving “disinformation”. In fact, it was too busy helping the USGov (especially the DoD) do that instead.
Pope Benedict XVI passed away this morning. My favourite Pope during my lifetime, his retirement upset those of us opposed to the liberalizing tendencies within the Catholic Church. Hopefully is legacy will right the ship, but I do have my concerns.
Many of us remain within the Church because we are Catholic and because we are confirmed Catholics with all the Sacramental Rites that come with it. The type I belong to has not agitated for change, leaving it to forces within to work out. Others take different approaches, one of those being participation in the Latin Mass, something that Pope Benedict XVI encouraged (or at least, allowed), and which the current Pontiff has clamped down on, as it is a pre-Vatican II remnant.
I had no idea that the Latin Mass has a presence in Poland until I stumbled upon this piece in Balkan Insight (part of the Soros NGO spiderweb). Expectedly, this investigative piece is to generate fear and anger among its readers.
The men are assembled along the left, the women line up along the right, and the very young children follow the proceedings from an anteroom, soundproofed behind a glass screen. The dress code is sombre – mostly black, occasionally grey. The women are obliged to cover their hair, though judging by the sprinkling of Louis Vuitton and Hermes headscarves, there is no injunction against luxury. Silent and perfectly still, the congregation surrenders to the language of the ancient church: “Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto”.
For the sermon, the priest switches from ecclesiastical Latin to everyday Polish. “You used to be so passionate about your faith and your national identity,” he says. “You paraded with your T-shirts of war heroes and sang hymns in praise of the Lord and the motherland. Now all that is gone. Why?” The reproach seems to be directed exclusively at the male members of the congregation. They lower their heads penitently.
Appeals to nation and faith are uttered in the same breath on Poland’s Independence Day, the annual holiday on November 11 that commemorates the restoration of the country’s sovereignty. However, the faith invoked at this Independence Day mass, in the leafy Warsaw suburb of Wawer, could not be further from the mainstream Catholicism that anchors Poland’s national identity.
The mass was held at a small chapel belonging to the Society of Saint Pius X, an organisation of Catholic priests that was established by Marcel Lefebvre, a controversial French archbishop who was excommunicated by no less a figure than Pope John Paul II, patron saint and supreme icon of modern Polish Catholicism. Performed in traditional Latin rather than Polish, the ceremony at Wawer contained deeply traditional elements that even the most conservative of Poland’s churchgoers might have found archaic. It was arranged at the behest of the Independence March Association, a Polish far-right organisation that convenes an annual march on Independence Day, rallying tens of thousands of ultra-nationalists to declare their hostility to “cultural Marxism” and LGBT rights while affirming – sometimes violently – their “patriotism” and “traditional” Polish values.
Robert Bakiewicz is the face of Polish “TradCathism”:
The head of the Independence March Association, Robert Bakiewicz, is the most recognisable figure within Poland’s extra-parliamentary far-right, and the closest thing to a leader for its disparate formations. At the mass in Wawer, he could pass for the doorman of an upmarket nightclub – burly physique, smart grey overcoat, military-grade haircut. Contemplating the altar, he is periodically interrupted by uniformed lieutenants equipped with wireless earpieces and armbands.
Bakiewicz – the name is pronounced “Bon-kyeh-vich” – is among the minority of Catholic traditionalists worldwide who prefer to attend mass in the original Latin rather than in their native languages, as is the norm. The traditionalists believe the mainstream Catholic way of worship has strayed from dogma and become too liberal, too ecumenical. As they see it, the Latin, or Tridentine, mass still preserves the splendour and sanctity of the pre-modern Church. In a later interview at his office, Bakiewicz criticised the liberalised version of the rite that he grew up with. “It became like a spectacle of sorts, like a Protestant church… something infantile, something I could not take seriously,” he said.
The tie-in:
On social media, the Latin mass is associated with the “trad Caths” – Anglophone internet-speak for an increasingly visible new generation of online Catholics. The “trad Caths” of Instagram and TikTok share content celebrating the values and aesthetics of traditional Catholicism, in tones that veer between the playful and the unabashedly sincere. Bakiewicz has joined in the fun – his private Facebook profile has featured a meme-style portrait of himself with the slogan, “Latin Mass Matters” – but his “trad Cath” identity is also a political statement. It signifies a rejection of a historic ally, the Polish clerical establishment, and a recalibration of the far-right’s relationship with Church and state. It also underlines his own credentials. To lead the far-right, you must be more nationalist than the nationalists, and more Catholic than the Catholics. And there is no better way of demonstrating that, in today’s Poland, than by being seen at Latin mass.
An angle of approach (to sow divisions on the right) opens itself up:
Poland’s nationalists have traditionally been close allies of its Church leaders. Through Nazi occupation and Soviet dominance, they served as joint custodians of national identity, active in the resistance and in the preservation of Polish culture. Over the last decade however, the clergy has been hit by a series of scandals that have weakened its standing with the nationalists, as within Polish society at large, leaving it looking like the junior partner in its alliance with the right-wing government. Media reports have exposed the profligacy of Polish bishops who spent donations to the Church on expensive cars, real estate and lavish renovation schemes. More damagingly, senior clergy in Poland have been implicated in committing and covering up child abuse – allegations that echo those made against Catholic bodies across the world.
The scandals have prompted accusations that the clerical establishment has been behaving like an unaccountable elite, corrupted by power and privilege. Indeed, the far-right’s criticism of Church leaders has a distinctly populist tone, suggesting an archetypal contest between “everyday people” on the one hand and “elites” on the other. “I will send my men to protect churches,” Bakiewicz told me in October 2020, as an effective ban on abortions ignited anti-clerical protests across Poland. “But I will never send them to protect the palaces of bishops.”
Matters have not been helped by the current pope. Hailed as a reformist by liberals, Pope Francis has irked conservatives in Poland and beyond, prompting many to question his judgement. Traditionalists have been particularly troubled by the Pope’s decision to restrict access to the Latin mass, reversing efforts by his predecessor, Pope Benedict, to restore some legitimacy to the ancient rite. Where the era of Pope John Paul II marked the consolidation of the relationship between Poland’s nationalists and clergy, the era of Pope Francis coincides with its weakening. “It’s not like we disobey the Pope, the hierarchs,” Bakiewicz said. “But one cannot ever accept others preaching a false gospel, even if it is – to quote Saint Paul – an angel descended from heaven.”
The part of the Dinaric Alps where I am from is very, very devoted to the Franciscans who have been with us since they were sent to this area by the Church back around 1350 AD (can’t remember the exact date right now). Franciscans have the reputation of ‘being with the people’, as opposed to the clerics. No doubt this division between certain orders and the clerisy has occurred elsewhere over the centuries.
On the Latin Mass:
I began the interview by asking him about his enthusiasm for Latin mass. He responded that the modern mass, replacing the Latin version, undermined the Church’s claim to universality – the claim, in other words, that its teachings applied equally to everyone. “The Church cannot suddenly start changing what it used to preach,” he said, because universality also meant that the institution “needs to be understood in the same way.”
Almost all churches in Poland conduct the mass in the Polish language – a legacy of the Second Vatican Council, held in Rome between 1962-5. The extraordinary summit resulted in sweeping reforms that were welcomed by liberals as a timely overhaul of obsolete doctrine and ritual. Importantly, priests were permitted to celebrate mass in the native language of the congregation rather than Latin. Deeply conservative factions within the Church, however, rejected the changes. Some of these factions were eventually cast out by the Vatican.
The Society of Saint Pius X is among the leading formations that have been exiled to the margins of the mainstream faith. It was established in 1970 by Marcel Lefebvre, a French archbishop who had led opponents of the reforms at the Vatican Council. In 1988, Lefebvre was branded a schismatic and ex-communicated by the Vatican after he defied papal authority by personally consecrating three priests.
“I remember the Lefebvre movement as minnows, back in the 1990s,” said Stanislaw Obirek, a former priest who lectures in American Studies at the University of Warsaw. “They were insignificant.” That changed, he said, as the movement began to attract prominent recruits in Poland, including an influential Jesuit priest and a popular right-wing historian. “People like that gave them recognition and legitimacy, and their optics became more attractive.”
Bakiewicz’s wing of the far-right embraced the Lefebvre movement after falling out with the clergy three years ago. The bond was fortified a year later, amid the largest protests seen in Poland since the dying days of the communist regime. The targets of the protesters’ fury were the leaders of the governing coalition and their allies in the church, deemed to bear joint responsibility for a new law effectively banning abortions. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets for weeks on end, church services were interrupted by activists, and the word, “murderers”, was spray-painted on church facades across the country.
Politics and opportunities:
In the interview at his office, Bakiewicz heaped scorn on the clergy that had barred his followers from its churches. He accused them of taking a passive stance during the protests against the abortion law, thereby neglecting a fundamental duty to stand up for the faith. “They suddenly went silent, they did not do what the Church expects them to do.” Instead, he said, “at moments like these, the Church, the bishops, the cardinals in particular, are bound to sacrifice and martyrdom.” After a brief pause, he clarified that he did not mean “martyrdom” in the literal sense.
He also criticised the clergy over its response to recent events – the arrival in Poland of more than three million Ukrainian refugees fleeing the conflict with Russia. Ukrainians now account for nearly eight per cent of Poland’s population, marking a dramatic shift for a country characterised since World War II by the absence of any sizeable linguistic, religious or ethnic minorities. The homogeneity of contemporary Polish identity is typically upheld by the far-right as a virtue, to be defended at all costs against migrants from Islamic countries.
Towards the Ukrainians however, allies in the confrontation with the historic Russian enemy, there is no overt hostility. “These people came to us from a war-torn country,” Bakiewicz said, striking a paternalistic note. “It’s not the time to think about trivial, materialistic things.” But the Polish clergy, in his view, was once again at fault – it had missed an opportunity to bring the Ukrainians, most of whom follow a branch of the Eastern Orthodox church, within the fold of the Catholic faith. “I am disappointed that the Polish Church is not fighting for these souls,” Bakiewicz said. Converting Ukrainian refugees to Catholicism could, he argued, serve a dual purpose: it would create a durable bond between the two countries and it would boost the strength of the Polish Church.
The proposed mass conversion of a displaced people may sound like anachronistic fantasy – something out of Europe’s mediaeval past – but it encapsulates a particular view of faith and nation on the far-right. Some refugees are welcome, in this view, if they can be assimilated into the faith, reinforcing rather than altering it.
TradCathism is growing legs.
We end this week’s Substack with a look at ANCIENT APOCALYPSE, a series that is receiving condemnation from many quarters, archaeologists in particular. I have thus far watched only one episode, but might binge on the rest this evening.
Instantly rising to the video giant’s top ten shows, the series was branded “the most dangerous show on Netflix” by the Guardian. Progressives have excoriated it for being “anti-intellectual” and promoting “dangerous conspiracy thinking,” going so far as to tie the show and its presenter, journalist Graham Hancock, to what the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “close encounters of the racist kind.”
However, Hancock’s claims aren’t “dangerous” or “racist.” They are countercultural. These vile smears are the thrashings of a runaway monoculture that suppresses the discussion of any ideas that challenge prevailing narratives, especially from sources outside of mainstream, credentialed, left-of-center media and academia. By stifling vigorous debate and intellectual flexibility, this monoculture deprives mankind of the greatest tool it has to overcome the growing challenges to our continued existence, from global famine and energy shortages to, yes, even an apocalyptic asteroid.
In his new series, Hancock explores evidence for the existence of human civilization before a comet strike 12,900 years ago is hypothesized to have destroyed much of the planet. One example he presents is 12,000 year old Gobeki Tepli, an astrological temple complex of 20 large stone buildings, whose surrounding sites archaeologists believe could predate the comet’s impact. Hancock argues that precise, large stone buildings such as these, detailed with carvings demonstrating advanced astronomical knowledge, simply could not have come out of nowhere.
Though Hancock’s claims are open for debate, Hancock’s fundamental assumption that human civilizations existed before ours is not unreasonable. Modern humans have existed for an estimated 300,000 years, apocalyptic asteroids hit the planet roughly every 10,000 years, sea levels were 400 feet lower during the Ice Age, and humans gravitate towards living near the coast. Given how long humans are estimated to have existed, along with the vast and geologically frequent changes to our planet, this conclusion seems more plausible than believing no previous civilizations have existed at all.
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Every time I see some ridiculous statement by the SPLC I'm reminded of how impressive it is that they managed to completely invent their cultural authority and "expertise" completely ex nihilo. All kinds of institutions treat them like they warrant some kind of deference, as if they hadn't just memed their way into an air of legitimacy that in fact was just made up and has no foundation.
Also, if you haven't read it yet, I enjoyed this: https://www.palladiummag.com/2021/05/17/why-civilization-is-older-than-we-thought/