The Anti-Manichaeist

It doesn’t take that many days to “see” Kyev, but I would not trade for the world the feeling of what it was like last night to sit up on the hill overlooking the Maidan as the sun was setting. We just sat silently and reflected on the event that had happened. For me, the hope that was ignited among so many Ukrainians here was rekindled in me. It was easier for me to have hope. Hope for a future where existing extreme concentrations of so easily abused power will be reduced so that we don’t see as many man-made disasters like Chernobyl.

I went to the Chernobyl museum today and it was well worth the time. I think everyone who goes to Ukraine needs to be reminded of what the consequences of that terrible event were like and how many lives were lost. They have exhibits about 9-11 at the museum, since NY firefighters sent a plaque and letters following the Chernobyl event when so many firefighters died and they reciprocated. It was odd and yet very heartwarming to unexpectedly see pictures of my home country in such an unusual place.
I did some brief interviews today in Kyev. I talked with a group of pagan priests protesting on the Maidan. They are trying to keep people from violating the laws in building bridges to an island, Khortycia, on the Dnieper. This island is the largest in Europe and is a national reservation, but people are building their own bridges to it and that is making it unmanageable for them to try and preserve it. Apparently two of them are on a hunger strike and on their 10th day. They are not getting the support they want from Yuschenko. Part of the problem may be the way their belief system is linked with their activism. Much of what they said to me, seemed a bit out of left field and I encouraged them to seek broad support for their task without trying at the same time to propagate their entire belief system. But it was interesting, because this is the sort of political activism that needs to try and find more of a chance of success in Ukraine now.

I also talked with a Yanukovich supporter. For her, an engineer it was all meat and potatoes, though she supported the OR supporters right to protest, but she didn’t think anything good came of it, though that was mainly because her own welfare had not changed. Though this no doubt stems from the inflationary printing of money by Yanukovich, a fact that she acknowledged.

I talked with a pagan, who said that he was with the OR in his spirit and that believed that a renewal of the spirit of people in Ukraine was needed. Later he started asking me about my views about GWII and I shared with him my view that there was no basis for immediate regime change and that Saddam’s regimes days were already numbered and we could easily have afforded to wait for it collapse as he had always proven himself to be mainly a local bully whose misactions could be contained. I also got the chance to share a little about the radically nonviolent political person of Jesus with this man and expressed that my hope for the future was based on more people believing in and emulating that Jesus.

Later, I got a chance to talk with a missionary from the Southern Baptist Church, temporarily located in Ukraine, though he plans to be deployed to Kazakhstan eventually. He shared about how things were for them during the OR. Apparently, they supported the OR supporters, but also tried to support the other side, too. This seemed unfortunate to me, as the matter did not really entail supporting one side over the other, but rather supporting the fairness of the elections and I don’t see any reason why churches should not be fully in support of ensuring the fairness of conduct by the parties during elections so long as all sides actions are held accountable in the process. I talked to him some about the possibility of translting the Politics of Jesus, or some other more popular work by Yoder on biblical research into who Jesus was, into Ukrainian and he suggested that Russian would be the better language. I need to check to see if such a translation has not already been done and then it would probably be necessary for free copies to be distributed for them to make much of a difference in the former SU.

Yet, I am starting to think that describing the nonviolent political nature of the historical jesus in simple terms would be a great way to foster political and religious changes throughout the former SU. And, of course, now, or in the near future, is the right time to do this. I even talked with a woman from Pakistan whose husband works for a western bank in Kyev. She said that the people in her country were very interested in the events in the OR. It seems that we may be seeing some political spillovers from the OR coming about in the rest of the world. There still are young people trying to replicate the success of the OR here in Ukraine, protesting the mayor of Kyev here, in a nonviolent manner. I’m told the same group, PORA, was responsible for the replacement of the president of a university in Cherkassy who had ruthlessly forced students and teachers to vote for Yanukovich. I met and talked with some of them yesterday and got a free bright yellow t-shirt.

In other developments, my friend told me that some USAmericans and Ukrainians are buying newspapers and television channels in Russia, laying the ground for Russia to have its own OR or other political change. It may be that the globalization of journalism is taking off as a serious component of int’l political manipulations.

All of this makes the need for reform of the UN more urgent. Unfortunately, the way the UN is set up now only promotes its paralysis and marginalization. Some reforms are needed to prepare it for the post-cold war world. I think one reform would be to make it so that the five permanent members of the UN security council no longer had vetoes and instead there was a need for a 9-country out of 15 for action to be taken. This would check both the US and Russia’s influence and permit it to be a more influential part of the developing field of int’l governance.

dlw