Putin has been tactically astute and ruthlessly opportunistic. At home and abroad, he wants Russia to regain the prestige it held when he was growing up.

Vladimir Putin: 

The rebuilding of ‘Soviet’ Russia

by Oliver Bullough

The world was stunned when Russia invaded Crimea, but should it have been? Author and journalist Oliver Bullough says President Vladimir Putin never kept secret his intention to restore Russian power - what's less clear, he says, is how long the country's rise can continue.

On 16 August 1999, the members of Russia's parliament - the State Duma - met to approve the candidacy of a prime minister. They heard the candidate's speech, they asked him a few questions, and they dutifully confirmed him in the position.

This was President Boris Yeltsin's fifth premier in 16 months, and one confused party leader got the name wrong. He said he would support the candidacy of Stepashin - the surname of the recently sacked prime minister - rather than that of his little-known successor, before making an embarrassing correction.

If even leading Duma deputies couldn't remember the new prime minister's name, you couldn't blame the rest of the world if it didn't pay much attention to his speech. He was unlikely to head the Russian government for more than a couple of months anyway, so why bother?

That man was a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, and he has been in charge of the world's largest country, as president or prime minister, ever since. Few realised it at the time, because few were listening, but that speech provided a blueprint for pretty much everything he has done, for how he would re-shape a country that was perilously close to total collapse.

Just 364 days previously, Russia had defaulted on its debt. Salaries for public sector workers and pensions were being paid months late, if at all. Basic infrastructure was collapsing. The country's most prized assets belonged to a handful of well-connected "oligarchs", who ran the country like a private fiefdom.

The once-mighty Russian army had lost a war in Chechnya, a place with fewer inhabitants than Russia had soldiers. Three former Warsaw Pact allies had joined Nato, bringing the Western alliance up to Russia's borders.

Meanwhile, the country was led by Yeltsin, an irascible drunkard in fragile health. The situation was desperate, but Putin had a plan.

"I cannot cover all the tasks facing the government in this speech. But I do know one thing for sure: not one of those tasks can be performed without imposing basic order and discipline in this country, without strengthening the vertical chain," he told the assembled parliamentarians.

Born in Leningrad in 1952, Putin came of age in the Soviet Union's golden years, the period after the USSR's astonishing triumph in World War Two. Sputnik, the hydrogen bomb, Laika the dog and Yuri Gagarin all bore witness to Soviet ingenuity. The crushing of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 bore witness to Soviet resolve. Soviet citizens were enjoying a time of peace and prosperity. Life was stable. People got paid. The world respected them. Everyone knew their place.

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Read more: www.bbc.com

“Beauty” is the only one of the ancient “transcendentals” that still speaks to us through modern culture. But she has become separated from her sisters, Truth and Goodness, and thus relativized and subjectivized

Beauty Won’t Save the World Alone

by Stratford Caldecott

The title of Gregory Wolfe’s excellent collection of essays, Beauty Will Save the World, is based on a much-quoted line from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. In its context it appears only in indirect speech, being attributed by one of the other characters to the “Idiot” of the title, Prince Myshkin. Thus in its original context its meaning is ambiguous, or at least ill-defined. That makes it doubly appropriate for Greg’s title, since he is arguing against the “ideologues” of today’s culture wars in favour of a literary and imaginative approach to the truth. Conservatives have succumbed to philistinism, and fail to appreciate modern art, he argues. Great literature, and art in general, explores the world—and today that means the modern world—from the inside. It is not preachy or moralistic; as a result, conservatives of a Puritan or pragmatic bent often find it unedifying, or even profane. But it is legitimate, Greg believes, for art to shock, to revolt against established conventions, to make explicit what others may hesitate to look upon. In many cases this may the only way for the artist to discover a “redemptive path toward order”.

A particular target of the book seems to be those conservatives who can see nothing good coming out of modernity except the Inklings. I suspect Greg numbers me among them, although in reality my tastes are much broader than the things I tend to write about. But it is the case that my interest is less in literature and the arts, important though these are in posing the right questions and exploring the ambiguities of our time, than in philosophy and theology, where we legitimately search for answers to those very questions. This is not the same as seeking an ideology, though of course a theology can be rendered ideological easily enough. Theology at its most authentic is not a fortress of ideas, but more like a path across a landscape, a route map, or a system of signposts. It is intrinsically mystical, it is of the spirit not the letter.

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Read more: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

Vienna Islamica: elle scuole medie e superiori (ginnasio escluso) di Vienna ci sono 10.734 studenti musulmani contro 8.632 cattolici

A Vienna ci sono più studenti 

musulmani che cattolici. 

Cambiano i libri di testo

Leone Grotti

Presto avverrà il sorpasso anche alle elementari

Nelle scuole medie e superiori (ginnasio escluso) di Vienna gli studenti musulmani hanno superato per numero quelli cattolici, nonostante la popolazione islamica rappresenti appena il 6 per cento del totale, secondo le statistiche pubblicate dal Vienna Board of Education.

NUMERI DEL SORPASSO. Quest’anno ci sono 10.734 studenti musulmani nelle scuole citate della capitale austriaca contro 8.632 cattolici, 4.259 serbi ortodossi e 3.219 ragazzi senza religione. Molto presto dovrebbe anche avvenire il sorpasso dei bambini musulmani su quelli cattolici alle elementari, se si conta che nel 2030 la popolazione musulmana dovrebbe passare dalle 500 mila unità di oggi alle 800 mila (9,5 per cento del totale).

VIENNA ISLAMICA. La religione islamica, insomma, ha già conquistato Vienna. Come ricordava a Milano il cardinale Christoph Schonborn: «La decrescita dei cattolici a Vienna è drammatica, siamo ormai sotto il 40 per cento e tra non molto arriveremo al 30 per cento». Per adeguarsi, l’Austria sta introducendo un nuovo libro per insegnare l’islam in tedesco ai bambini delle elementari, come riportato dalGatestone Institute di New York.
Il testo si chiama Islamstunde (Ora islamica) ed è stato redatto dall’Autorità religiosa islamica austriaca (Iggio), associazione finanziata dallo Stato che si occupa dell’educazione islamica nelle scuole pubbliche e private.

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Leggi tutto: www.tempi.it

Cardinal Bagnasco : ne pas se laisser intimider par la dictature du Gender

Le gender à l'école a pour but 

d'inculper les enfants contre la famille

Source: lesalonbeige.blogs.com

Le président de la Conférence Épiscopale italienne 

appelle les familles italiennes à résister à l’idéologie LGBT.

Lundi 24 mars, lors de l’ouverture du Conseil permanent de la Conférence Episcopale italienne, le cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, qui la préside, a abordé l’idéologie du genre :

• « La préparation au synode sur la famille, en deux phases en 2014 et en 2015, ainsi que le récent consistoire sur ce même thème ont providentiellement mis l’accent sur cette réalité tant ‘méprisée et maltraitée’, termes qu’a utilisé le Pape même : j’irais jusqu’à préciser « méprisée » sur le plan culturel et « maltraitée » sur le plan politique ».
• « Il est frappant de constater que la famille est devenue un bouc émissaire, à l’origine des maux de notre époque, plutôt que la défense universelle d’une humanité meilleure et la garantie d’une pérennité sociale. Ce ne sont pas les lois qui garantissent la vie commune – mais elles sont plus que nécessaires – mais c’est la famille, une crèche naturelle d’humanité et de justice ».
• « Cette logique tordue et idéologique, engage une nouvelle initiative de trois volumes intitulés « Eduquer à la diversité à l’école », sur lesquels les écoles italiennes se penchent, notamment destinés aux écoles primaires et aux collèges. En théorie, ces trois volumes visent à mettre fin à l’harcèlement et la discrimination – chose tout à fait juste. Mais en réalité, ils ont pour but d’ « inculper », et j’utilise ce terme exprès, les enfants contre la famille, l’autorité parentale, la foi religieuse, la différence entre un père et une mère… Des mots magnifiques qui semblent aujourd’hui avoir perdu tout leur sens,devenus même gênants, que l’on souhaite même peut-être éliminer de notre vocabulaire ».
• « C’est la lecture idéologique du « genre » - une véritable dictature – qui souhaite écraser la diversité, tout homologuer, jusqu’à traiter l’identité de l’homme et de la femme comme de pures abstractions. Alors, l’on peut se demander avec amertume si l’on veut faire de l’école des « camps de rééducation », d’ « endoctrinement ». Mais les parents n’ont-ils pas le droit de donner l’éducation qu’ils souhaitent à leurs enfants ? Ou sont-ils désormais chassés de ce rôle ? Leur est-il demandé leur opinion ? Les enfants ne sont pas des choses à expérimenter. Les parents ne doivent pas se laisser intimider, ils ont le droit de réagir avec détermination et clarté: il n’y a pas d’autorité qui tienne sur ce point ».

70 years under Communism have damaged generations of Russian families.

Still recovering

Pavel A. Parfentiev

The history of 20th century Russia is one of social and political upheaval, and the family, being the “natural and fundamental group unit of society” (Article 16.3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), could not escape being profoundly affected.

Society’s development and its stability and prosperity depend, among other things, on the continuous growth or, at the very least, stability of population size. This piece of common knowledge is complemented by a vast body of research indicating that the stability and security of the natural family are vital to such development. The environment provided by the natural family plays a crucial role in the social well-being and productivity of younger generations. In other words, securing society’s prosperity requires not only reversing the current depopulation trend, but also ensuring that most children are being born and raised in intact, two-parent (mother-father) families.

This is especially important in Russia, where the birthrate continuously lags behind replacement levels. According to official Rosstat figures, natural population loss in 2010 amounted to 239,600 people. The aggregate birthrate in 2009 was 1.54, compared to the replacement level of 2.1, a figure even the most optimistic Rosstat forecasts say Russia will not be able to reach before 2030. Meanwhile, Russia leads the world in abortions, with abortion rates in 2010 reaching 1,186,100 per year. The institution of the family in Russia is, too, undergoing a crisis—in 2011, 51 marriages out of 100 ended in divorce.

Today’s Russia needs to develop and implement a comprehensive family policy that would strengthen marriage, fatherhood, motherhood, and with it family life and family values. This need makes it worthwhile to study the history of family policy in Russia, both to observe the roots of some of the current issues and to avoid serious mistakes in the future.

The Revolution and Its Consequences (1917 — 1921)

The first signs that industrialization in Russia and the processes related to it were beginning to drag the family into a systemic crisis began appearing as far back as the end of the nineteenth century. Cities and industrialized regions of the country saw birthrates decreasing, children increasingly born outside of marriage, marriages becoming less stable, and multigenerational families and family ties weakening.

Laying what later became the ideological groundwork for the post-1917 Communist authorities in Russia, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are widely known to have entertained largely negative views of the traditional family. According to Marx and Engels, under Communism the “bourgeois” family would have to “disappear,” just as “the capital” would. The practice of parents “exploiting” their children would be abolished, and family education would be replaced by public education.

These ideas were taken up and further radically developed into early post-revolutionary Russian ideology. The new authorities’ first steps were to “liberalize” family relationships—and thus simultaneously to undermine the influence of religious institutions such as the Russian Orthodox Church.

The year 1917 saw the Soviet government passing decrees “On Civil Marriage, Children, and Registries” and “On Dissolution of Marriages.” The decree “On Dissolution of Marriages” granted spouses unconditional freedom to a divorce, performed by a local court, at the desire of either one or both parties. “On Civil Marriage” decreed that all except civil marriage (including religious marriage) would cease to be recognized by the state, while at the same time abolishing all distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. (It should be noted that the sole aim of introducing civil marriages was to undermine religion. Writing in 1922, one Soviet lawyer stressed that “[t]he institution of Registrars was necessitated by the fight against the Church.”

Affirming such moves, the 1918 Family Code introduced a whole new morality, contravening the existing practices of marital and family law. In its provisions for divorce, the new legislation granted spouses rights to separate property and thereby abolished shared, family property. The Code also included vague criteria for deprivation of parental rights. Article 153 stated that “[p]arental rights are exercised exclusively in the interests of the child, with courts invested with the right to deprive the parents thereof in case said rights are exercised improperly.” Article 183 prohibited adoption, replacing it with a system of state-appointed foster caretakers. The Soviets were also the first government to proclaim complete freedom of abortion.

All of these steps were in line with the new authorities’ ideology of considering the family the backbone of the oppression of women. Russian Communists thought the liberation of women required destroying family households and family education for public versions of both, while drawing women en masse into public production. Writing in 1919, Lenin argued that “true liberation of women, true Communism comes about only when and where the masses rise up . . . against . . . small-scale households.”

In his 1920 work The ABC of Communism, Nikolay Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, ideologues of the new order, wrote:

In a bourgeois society, a child is viewed as being exclusively, or at the very least, largely a property of his parents. When parents speak of a child as “their daughter, their son,” it implies not only their parenthood, but also the right to educate their own children. From a Socialist point of view, this right is entirely and completely unfounded. An individual does not belong to itself, but to society—humankind.

This view is seconded by Lenin, writing in 1920: “We are serious in delivering on our manifesto commitment to transfer the economic and educational functions of the individual household to the society.”

The new ideologues explicitly stated the need to destroy the family. A. M. Kollontay, one of the Communist party’s most active family policy makers, formulated this need in no uncertain terms as far back as 1918: “The family is doomed. It will be destroyed.” N. Bukharin also wrote that “in a Communist society, when private property and oppression of women finally come to an end, so, too, will prostitution and marriage.”

As a natural consequence of the new authorities’ antifamily policy, a rapid disintegration of the family followed. Freedom of divorce led to serial polygamy and prostitution masquerading as marriage. In 1920 Petrograd (now St Petersburg), 41% of marriages lasted only three to six months, 22% less than two months, and 11% less than one month. Open prostitution was rampant.

The number of divorces skyrocketed. While in 1913 there were 0.15 divorces to 1,000 marriages for Russian couples, 1926-1927 saw 11 (almost 100 times more). In 1920 Petrograd 92 marriages out of 1,000 ended in divorce,9 and in 1926 Moscow it was 477 per 1000. The state widely advocated freedom of sexual relations.

One can say with certainty that the period dealt the natural family a devastating blow, one from which Russian family policy is still recovering.

See also:

• The “New Economic Policy” Period (1921 — 1929)
• The Stalin Period (1929 – mid-1950s)
• The “Full-fledged Socialism” Period (1950s – mid-1980s)
• The Perestroika and Post-USSR Period (late 1980s – 2010)
• The Modern Period (2010 – the present)

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Read more: www.mercatornet.com

Una intervista che doveva servire ad accordare gli strumenti fra la Casa Bianca e il Vaticano in tempi di aperte dissonanze su vita, famiglia e libertà religiosa Leggi di Più: Obama-Papa. A tema non la poverta ma la libertà religiosa

Obama voleva chiacchierare della «povertà nel mondo», papa Francesco lo ha «incastrato sul suo laicismo»

Come era prevedibile, l’operazione simpatia del presidente Usa verso i cattolici nell’anno delle elezioni mid term è fallita: il Pontefice ha voluto parlare dei suoi attacchi alla libertà religiosa, altro che “sperequazione”

Obama e papa Francesco? Nello storico incontro di ieri in Vaticano il Pontefice “ha incastrato Obama sul laicismo, altro che sperequazione”. In un articolo che compare sotto questo efficace titolo, Mattia Ferraresi conferma sul Foglio quello che abbiamo anticipato ieri, ovvero che l’operazione “alleanza Usa-Chiesa per la lotta alla povertà”, studiata e annunciata strumentalmente dal presidente degli Stati Uniti per riavvicinare i cattolici nell’anno delle elezioni di metà mandato, è fallita.

ACCORDO MANCATO. «Il comunicato diffuso ieri dalla Sala stampa vaticana dopo l’incontro», spiega Ferraresi, «non contiene riferimenti ai temi su cui Obama e i suoi spin doctor intendevano virare la conversazione: non compaiono la “sperequazione” e la “giustizia sociale”», e neanche «si fa riferimento ai “poveri”». Insomma, non sono mai citate le «parole chiave che Obama aveva affidato a Massimo Gaggi del Corriere in una intervista che doveva servire ad accordare gli strumenti fra la Casa Bianca e il Vaticano in tempi di aperte dissonanze su vita, famiglia e libertà religiosa». Il presidente americano, sottolinea il Foglio, «si aspettava una scampagnata nelle periferie esistenziali» con papa Francesco, «il leader più amato del mondo», ma purtroppo per lui «il suo proposito è stato frustrato».


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Leggi tutto: www.tempi.it

Traditional architecture is predicated on the ideal of beauty as an objective reality, while modernism exalts subjective preferences.

Timeless Beauty:

 Conservatism’s Modernist Problem

by Joel Pidel

Conservatives who reject modern architecture have reasons to do so. Traditional architecture is predicated on the ideal of beauty as an objective reality, while modernism exalts subjective preferences.

Matthew Milliner’s recent article, “Nameless Beauty: Conservatism’s Architecture Problem,” leaves the impression that conservatism’s architecture problem is the aesthetic equivalent of clinging to one’s guns and religion. The argument proceeds through a personal narrative in which the modernist works of Chicago compel the author to expand his aesthetic vision. It concludes by suggesting that a commitment to beauty as an enduring conservative value should lead conservatism to temper its use of tradition as an existential crutch with which both to defend against and to attack modernism.

I do not begrudge our author his fresh phenomenological eyes in principle, and I know that the article is not a polemic against traditional architecture. It strikes me more as an indictment of a pejorative, if stereotypical, brand of conservatism that closes itself to ever new experiences of beauty, to which new and unfamiliar (modernist) forms can potentially give rise. Traditionalism and modernism are thus played off each other to this effect. However, I believe the arguments presented are so many straw men; furthermore, following them to their logical conclusion would lead one to an equally precarious position of exchanging one’s dogmatic slumber for a certain aesthetic relativism: it is beautiful because Ijudge it to be so.

A rejection of modernism, or of particular modernist works, is not necessarily due to some prejudice or ignorance, or because one has closed oneself off to its beauty, subjectively apprehended. It may simply be that conservatives have seen modernism for what it is and found it wanting. One could just as easily invoke the case that suddenly to find Frank Gehry’s architecture “beautiful” suggests that one’s previous dogmatism regarding the beauty of traditional architecture was never properly grounded in the first place, and thus both pre- and post-“enlightenment” visions collapse into the same unity of personal preference and subjective experience.

Conservatism may have an architecture problem, but if so, this imaginative defect is not confined by political or spiritual boundaries. Practicing architecture, I am as likely to find a conservative, religious person doing modernist architecture as a liberal, irreligious person doing traditional architecture. The same could be said for other arts, such as music. What is most revealing is how few persons still practice authentic traditional architecture. The architectural landscape is overwhelmingly populated by those with a modernist aesthetic mindset—conservative or not.

At the same time, it is quite correct to point out the empty homage that conservatism often pays to beauty, in terms of both time and resources. One need only look at contemporary instances of sacred architecture to see how they reveal both this reality and their modernist tendencies. It may also be correct to suggest that what conservative aversion to modernism and preference for the traditional there are remain largely unexamined by the general populace.

However real these problems may be, I do not think they predominate. They strike me more as symptoms of the larger problem. Contemporary conservatism betrays what I would term a “transcendental schizophrenia.” In other words, conservatism operates within a more or less traditional realm with regard to its understanding of truth and goodness, while unwittingly operating within a more or less modernist realm with regard to the order of beauty in aesthetics.

Much of conservatism at the lived, existential level, if not at the intellectual level, has swallowed the lie—or, rather, the half-truth—that beauty is subjective. Of course it is subjective! The other half of the truth, though, is that it is only because there is an objective reality to be subjectively perceived. Beauty is not whatever I want it to be; it is a reality to be discovered and—dare I say it—conformed to.

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Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com