Saint Josef Stalin? Orthodox Church asked to canonize him.

[onager]

:rofl:

Well, if that don't beat all, as my Granny used to say. (Usually right after she said "Shit fire!," another expression I've always found useful.)

The ol' atheist exemplar and bete-fucking-noir of Xians everywhere might end up as a religious icon.

LITERALLY an icon. In fact, the icons are already made up. Uncle Joe with a halo, just like the holy family. Watch the video at the link below.

This tickles the Haggard out of me. Because I just waded thru yet another LONG thread with yet another OP whining about "fundamentalist atheists." As always, a few slow learners posted the old canard about Stalin killing millions "in the name of atheism."

As those of us who read whole history books, and not just the parts we like, knew long ago--Stalin happily used religion when it suited his purposes. Most notably after the German invasion of Russia in June 1941. He even publicly tolerated such miraculous nonsense as the Madonna of Kiev.

(As well he might. The Ukrainians greeted the German army with flowers and the traditional friendship symbols of bread and salt. The black crosses on the German tanks led the Ukrainians to believe they were being liberated by a Xian army. It didn't take them long to figure out liberation wasn't in the cards, though the Wehrmacht and SS were certainly majority Xian organizations.)

And now...Saint Stalin!

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=764_1217602997

[Captain Hilts]

1. I knew a guy who served with Vlasov's Army. I don't think Uncle Joe's gonna make it. nt

[onager]

6. If I weren't an atheist, I would say...

"Not a chance in hell."

Every reference I've seen to this attempt says it only appeals to "older" Russians.

The PR angle is interesting, though. Somewhat like under the old Soviet system, Stalin is being "rehabilitated." Play down the bloodshed, play up the positive achievements of dragging Russia into the modern age.

Maybe they can hire Condoleeza Rice! "Well, I think a reasonable person would agree, there's just no way he could have foreseen that famine in Ukraine..."

I'm about as much of a Fundamentalist Atheist as possible, but even I ROFL when I see some of the old Russian movies from the early Communist era. The ones usually summed up as the "Boy And His Tractor" genre.

e.g., Earth (Zemlya), made in 1930. In which a whole Russian farm village instantly converts to atheism.

Now THAT would be a miracle.

Earth, BTW, is worth watching because it was directed by a real artist, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and has some stunning visuals. But the Party was obviously looking over his shoulder.

[rug]

33. Neither will Nazi collaborators.

[madrchsod]

2. now that is funny...

[saltpoint]

3. I hope the person who nominated Stalin for sainthood reconsiders

and withdraws the suggestion.

[no_hypocrisy]

4. 30 million Ukranians died of famine b/c of Stalin.

THAT'S "saint" material???

[fascisthunter]

5. a good reason my family is so damn small today

the death and destruction that psycho wrought on humanity lives on. There are some really twisted individuals out there enough to submit his name... may they never feel this man's wraith.

[Renew Deal]

7. Is making people "disappear" considered a miracle?

;)

[charlie]

8. Holy Geronimo Christ!

They don't even soft pedal his bloody insanity. His greatness just somehow makes his douchebaggery irrelevant. Wow.

"The people have forgiven him for the repressions, the collectivization, the elimination of cadres of the Red Army and other inevitable errors and tragedies of those cruel military and revolutionary times."

"Stalin has become the true national leader of Russia. He turned a backward country into an industrial giant."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/2445683/Could-Josef-Stalin-be-made-a-saint.html

[beam me up scottie]

9. Wow.

Just wow.

[kenny blankenship]

10. Truly the age of miracles has not passed!

That is to say, the book of crazy ass religulous crap will never be fully closed, so long as religion itself persists.

[RetiredTrotskyite]

11. If Those Idiots Could Canonise The Romanovs...

then, unfortunately I could see this happening. I can't imagine why anyone would think Stalin is saint material--maybe because he used to be in an Orthodox seminary lol. I got out of this bunch of nuts ten years ago and this certainly doesn't give me a reason to reconsider. But this is the racist, homophobic, sexist Orthodox Church we are talking about here.

[charlie]

13. To be sure

The Church is cool to the idea. And canonising Nicholas was idiotic. But guess who Joe is running second to (at the moment) in a "Name of Russia" competition?

The popular rehabilitation of those two is just mindbending.

[RetiredTrotskyite]

15. Uh, lemme guess. Lenin? Ivan the Terrible?

[charlie]

16. Lol

Those two would've probably been better. No, it was the fuckup's fuckup, Nicholas II.

[raccoon]

21. Was Nicholas canonized? nt

[charlie]

22. He, his family

and some of the others the Bolsheviks killed with them. He's known as "Saint Nicholas the Passion Bearer."

[raccoon]

23. OMFG. nt

[knitter4democracy]

35. They canonized everyone murdered by the Soviets, though.

Not just the Romanovs but everyone killed in the Purges.

[struggle4progress]

12. Sigh. More of the usual bullshit in this forum ...

This story seems to have originated in The Telegraph last summer:

Could Josef Stalin be made a saint?
The Communist party in St Petersburg has petitioned the Orthodox Church to canonise Josef Stalin if he wins a television poll to nominate the greatest Russian in history.
By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
Published: 6:03PM BST 22 Jul 2008 ...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/2445683/Could-Josef-Stalin-be-made-a-saint.html

The Church doesn't seem to pleased with his epoch:

Stalin era should never return – Russian Orthodox Church
Moscow, March 5, Interfax - On the day of the 55th anniversary since Stalin's death the Moscow Patriarchate has warned against glorifying Stalin's era and called for a realistic evaluation of the period. "Present and future Russian citizens should be aware of what Stalin's era really was and should not be painting idealistic pictures of the time," Reverend Georgy Ryabykh, the acting secretary for relations between Church and the public at the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations, told Interfax-Religion .. http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/2008-49-38.cfm

Stalin purge victims honored
Wooden cross marks location of executions
By Bagila Bukharbayeva, Associated Press | August 9, 2007
MOSCOW -- Russian Orthodox priests consecrated a wooden cross yesterday at a site south of Moscow where firing squads executed thousands of people 70 years ago at the height of Josef Stalin's political purges. Created at a monastery that housed one of the first Soviet labor camps and brought by barge to Moscow along a canal built on the bones of gulag inmates, the 40-foot cross has been embraced as memorial to the mass suffering under Stalin. The ceremony at the Church of New Martyrs and Confessors, built recently at the Butovo site, is one of a series of events planned throughout this year to mark the 70th anniversary of the Great Purge of 1937, when millions were labeled "enemies of the state" and executed without trial or sent to labor camps. Hundreds of people, most of them women wearing colorful headscarves, laid flowers and lit candles under the cross. The crowd, led by priests carrying icons, continued to the execution and burial site for a service. Some of the women were crying ... http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2007/08/09/stalin_purge_victims_honored/

[Lydia Leftcoast]

25. Exactly: It's a bunch of Stalin groupies ASKING the Orthodox Church to canonize him

Given how many priests and nuns were sent to the Gulag during Stalin's era, I'm sure that the reaction at the Moscow Patriarchate was "They've got to be kidding!"

Might a bunch of crazy right-wingers nominate Joe McCarthy for canonization in the Roman Catholic church? Sure, it's conceivable. Would the Catholic church actually do it? Naah.

[DeSwiss]

14. ....

:rofl: K&R

[and-justice-for-all]

17. Not surprised really....

Has the Catholic Church ever excommunicated Hitler? Nope.

[crikkett]

18. It was a miracle that he could wipe out so many of his own

and outlaw the religion that was just asked to canonize him.


This is a hoax by the way, the result of a TV poll of 'the greatest Russian in history'... see reply #12

[troubledamerican]

19. 45% of Russians approve of Stalin

http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/8104-3.cfm

[Pacifist Patriot]

20. Which makes me curious how many were born after he died.

[SidneyCarton]

27. Probably quite a few.

"De-Stalinization" never went really deep under Khruschev, in order to fully purge the old monster from the system, Nikita would have had to essentially dismantle the whole USSR. As a result, the Russians never really had to confront the Holodomor (The genocidal Ukranian famine of the 30's) or the purges or the criminal mismanagement of national defense in 1941 the way the Germans had to face up to the Holocaust and WWII. One does not see a corresponding nostalgia for Hitler in Germany for precisely that reason. Interestingly enough, one does see it to a slightly greater degree in Austria, which was treated more like a victim in the aftermath of the war than an aggressor.

[Silent3]

24. Or did, in 2004.

I'm having to guess that the year of that survey is 2004 based on the title of the web page, "JRL 3-8-04", since the text of the article only says "March 5" with no year.

I suspect the approval trend will be downward over time, since positive attitudes toward Stalin are more prevalent among the oldest Russians, and as they die out, not too much of the younger generation is going to replicate their sentiments.

Then again, now that Russia in in harder economic times like everywhere else, that sort of thing can inspire an upswing in approval of hard line authoritarians.

[SidneyCarton]

26. If it wasn't for Stalin's prodigious body count, this would be funny.

There is no small degree of irony here, Josef Dugashvili's (pardon my spelling please) mother always wanted him to become a priest, even sent him to a seminary. It was there that little "soso" decided that religion was crap and embraced Marxism. Stalin did reopen the churches during WWII, as a tool and a prop because it kept the Russians fighting, when he did not have a use for religion, he suppressed it. If they do canonize him, then it is an act of spiritual bankruptcy beyond comprehension, it's akin to canonizing Nero.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

28. Did you read the article?

It's a bunch of Stalin groupies asking the Orthodox Church to canonize Stalin. I can't imagine the Orthodox Church actually doing it.

It's sort of like Republicans wanting everything named after Reagan.

[SidneyCarton]

29. Yes I did, and I get it.

I didn't answer very well in the last post, so I apologize. My point was that I assume that they would as soon canonize Pontius Pilate or Nero as Stalin, these groupies are nuts, their suggestion makes no sense whatsoever.

[onager]

30. BTW, the Orthodox Church already declared Stalin "divine..."

From the website Seventeen Moments in Soviet History:

The enmity between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet state came to an official end in September 1943 with the election of...Sergei Stragorodskii, de facto leader of the church for seventeen years, as Patriarch.

The election had been preceded by a momentous September 4 meeting in the Kremlin between Joseph Stalin and three leading Metropolitans: Sergei, Aleksei Simanskii of Leningrad and Nikolai Iarushevich of Kiev.

Stalin granted them the right to open a limited number of churches and religious schools, and to convene a national synod on September 8, which duly elected Sergei patriarch.

Upon his elevation, Sergei immediately declared Stalin the divinely anointed ruler, initiating an uneasy collaboration between church and state that survived the Soviet system.

http://soviethistory.org/index.php?page=subject&SubjectID=1943patriarch&Year=1943

Nothing new there. As Thomas Jefferson observed back in 1814: "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them..."

Here are some observations from someone who saw the process first-hand. He has some some very good comments about how the Communists co-opted religion, which you can read yourself at the link:

I grew up in communist Yugoslavia - far cry from Stalinist Russia, granted, but I do have a feel for what went on there...

When communism collapsed, it was a collapse of a religion. The faithful were left bereft of all meaning in their lives. Some, especially the very old, refused to believe it. They saw it as a temporary setback orchestrated by the evil (demonic) forces of the West.

But for majority, this precipitated a sudden crisis of belief, and an immediate switch back to the "old faith" - orthodox Christianity.

The greatest communists became the strongest, most zealous believers. New churches started popping up all over the place. Creationism surged from non-existent to a belief shared by a significant portion of population. Ken Ham, Hovind, Harun Yahya became household names, as "documentaries" started to air all over the place. In some places (such as my home country, Serbia) faith classes were introduced into elementary school curriculum (and include strong creationist motif).

This wave crested a few years ago, and is now on a slow downslope. But, as far as the cause of atheism in the previously-communist-now-Orthodox countries goes, this post-communist faith resurgence is by far the most important phenomenon to consider.

Comment #9 by: M. | June 23, 2009, 11:46 am

http://www.daylightatheism.org/2009/06/stalin-the-divine-savior.html

[JerseygirlCT]

31. Wow.... just... wow. nt

[saltpoint]

32. It must have been pretty bizarre to be at the meeting where somebody

actually proposed this and others there agreed with the suggestion.

[knitter4democracy]

34. I seriously doubt that's ever going to happen.

Since they canonized everyone murdered in the gulags as the many thousands, I highly doubt anyone would be okay with canonizing that murderer. Priests were martyred on his direct orders, for goodness sake. Crucified on the Holy Doors of their churches. There would be a huge outcry against anything like that or if they formed a committee to canonize Beria or any of his other KGB henchmen.

[libguy9560]

36. It's quite strange

How such a repulsive individual wanted to be a priest early in his life.