Day Of The Lord (Glory To Ukraine III.)

Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light.

As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.

Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it? ~Amos 5:18-20

Earlier today I saw this. Mike Pompeo at some point said "Do you think Americans care about fucking Ukraine?" 

Well, evidently a lot of us do.

But for me, it's more than that. Isn't Mike Pompeo a 1980's-early 1990's Army veteran and supposedly some kind of big-time Evangelical, or something? 

I mean, dude, if you served in the Cold War and you don't care about freedom or resisting Russian aggression...well, I think you were in the wrong goddamned business and I say that as an Air Force veteran my damn self.

Not only that, but I happen to know because...reasons...that a hell of a lot of American Christian groups and churches put one hell of a lot of effort in the 1990's into evangelizing people in the former East Bloc countries, former Soviet states, and even Mongolia. 

Hell, I donated to such efforts, and when I was in college in the late 1990's and early 2000's I saw a little of how that bore fruit...because for awhile, we had a number of foreign students from those parts of the world, and several of them were Evangelicals or Pentecostals. Maybe not quite the American kind...but in some cases, pretty damn close. And some of these students who lived in the dorms were, in fact, more or less adopted by local churches for all the reasons...good and bad...that you might expect. 

My first semester that I lived in the dorms I was friendly with a little clique of mostly Evangelical and Pentecostal students from the Baltic states, one each from Estonia and Lithuania and two from Latvia. Three of them were in the Bible study group my ex and I helped start. But there were also students from Bulgaria,  Russia and Ukraine, There were also several Middle Eastern and Turkish students...though that would become a larger group later on and a couple more from Sub-Saharan Africa.

And you know, some of the stories that the Christian students from the former Soviet Union told were...well, exactly the kind of stories that are why people donated to Voice Of The Martyrs and shit like that. Even in the era of Glasnost and shit, Marxism-Leninism could be a jealous god. My Latvian friend Aelita told me about how her dad got arrested, and ended up losing his job...and pushed into a lower-paying, worse job, simply for being religious. She also said that he was lucky, in the old days one might be sent to a labor camp...or shot.

And from what I hear, these days if you're an Evangelical or a Fundamentalist or a Pentecostal, life in Putin's Russia isn't all that much different. You might not get shot, but you'll still be persecuted because the government wants people to become Orthodox Christians of the exact right kind, in other words to join the government-aligned Russian Orthodox church.. 

Of course, people like Mike Pompeo and Pat Robertson don't care about that. Their idea of Christianity...and even of their own Dominionist bullshit...is so American-centric that an Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian or Ukrainian person who believes the exact same stuff in a similar or even exactly the same way...might as well not even exist to them. Unless they come to America and go to your church and say all the right words when asked to give a talk.

I heard more from my friend than the church people did, and a lot of it was pretty shitty. Life in the Soviet Union was pretty shitty. Just like life in Putin's right-wing attempted reboot of it is shitty, and will be for however much longer he lasts.

Of course Pat Robertson is going to say Putin is being "Compelled by God to start a war" that will "lead to the End Times invasion of Israel." Pat says that about everything. 

But, Ya know, it's funny, for people who say they believe the Jews are God's Chosen People they're sure goat-eager to see Israelis get killed. And they don't give a damn how much either the Ukrainians or the Russians might suffer for their warlike visions, or who might die or what their spiritual condition might be at the time. 

Heaven isn't heaven if everybody gets to go, and whether they say so or not, they think of other people's death or suffering in terms of acceptable losses if they think of it at all. That's why they like the idea of The Rapture and of people being "Left Behind." They beat off to the idea of sitting up there in Heaven watching other people suffer through the judgments of Revelation.

And since Trump failed to bring all that about, now they're hoping Putin will do it. 

I'd bet you money that it enrages these motherfuckers that the Ukrainians are fighting back at all, much less so effectively. It enrages them that an entire society has pulled together to fight, and that the world is backing up the Ukrainian government and its people. 

And I'm sure they look at the fact that the EU is giving the Ukrainian Air Force 70+ Mig-29 and Su-25 fighter jets and see it as the devil's work that the EU is helping a free people to remain that way.

Helping people resist their own Apocalypse, to stand firm against the darkness of their own Day Of The Lord is of course anathema to the Apocalypse-worshipers and the Death-fetishists.

Never mind that the Ukrainians are literally doing drive-by bombings of Russian armor with Molotov Cocktails to fight for their freedom. I mean, I'm sure more jets and munitions and weapons will help, but these people would fight anyway, apparently.

And I'm sure Mike Pompeo hates that, too. Because he doesn't really give a fuck about Christ or Christianity.

These "Conservatives" don't give a damn about freedom now, if they ever really did at all. 

Their "Day of the Lord" isn't "Darkness and not light" it's not even the conquering Christ of Revelation...it's when Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin or somebody like that crowns their self as some kind of world-emperor. Yes, these people basically worship the Antichrist, but they're too stupid to realize that.

Not that they'd care, or change, if they did.

Because it doesn't matter one bit to these assholes what Jesus ever said about Power...or war, for that matter. They think we should all just bend over and take it so they can have their power trip and suck up to dictators and feel righteous about it. They don't understand how Americans could give care about Ukraine because their entire starting point is that they don't care about America unless it conforms to their abusive ideology. They don't understand why Ukrainians care about Ukraine for the same reason.

While right-wingers try to tear everything down so they can use the rubble to built an autocracy, they claim to be defenders of civilization.

But the real defenders of civilization are the people fighting in Ukraine right now.

If you want to have a better country, you have to be a better citizen.

Ukrainians get that, now if they didn't before. Why don't Republicans?

Part II.

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