!Letter of protest --- agk's diary 14 March 2022 @ 20:35 --- written on GPD Win 1 under blankets in garage loft bed --- This is a letter I sent to my priest. Father, I hope I don't miss the mark with this letter. I hope you read it in the spirit of charity, love, and compassion which motivated me to write. In response to the war in Ukraine and maybe the enthusiasm for it in this country, you began to lead the church each Sunday in the prayer for peace. I strongly feel this is right. The church also did something I think wrong: subtly, then more boldly, chose a side in a shooting and propaganda war. I was unsettled after your sermon two weeks ago in which your daughter won your approval to skip Ash Wednesday services for a peace vigil. The feeling had nothing to do with your parenting (which inspires me), but with the question of our nation's war fever. Of course peace is good. I'm afraid the vigils equate peace with military victory over Russia. I'm unsettled by Russophobia in this country and propaganda and censorship worse than 2001-2003 when the US justified the start of our destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq. Somehow we had none of this compassion over the last 8 years as Ukrainian Army and ultranationalist freikorps shelled Donetsk and Luhansk, burned anti- Maidan protesters alive in the Odessa Trade Union building, occupied Mariupol, killed thousands of Ukrainians, and produced 1.5 million refugees. The atrocities affected families of some of my Russian and Ukrainian friends, attracted charity and activ- ism, and were covered by Russian media. The West was profoundly uninterested. Afghans are dying of famine caused by US sanctions and the Biden administration's theft of central bank reserves. More are expected to die this year than in 20 years of war. We don't care. Nor do we care about the deadlier ongoing starvation and massacre of Yemenis by Saudi with generous US assistance. Our outrage is socially acceptable only when geopolitically useful. The church may not be called to respond to suffer- ing not in the consciousness of parishioners. That doesn't strike me as wrong. Once we're troubled by events unfolding in the world, I think it's the Church's responsibility to nurture compassion and guide us to relate as Christians to trouble. I'm a preacher's kid. I was the daughter at peace rallies; I watched my dad struggle with how to be faithful with things like this. That's why I'm writing. From a sermon illustration our partisan- ship escalated to starting a small group on Ukraine and theology. We ended last Sunday's service with Ukraine's national anthem. I think the worst habits of the Western church were its wars and conquests---the Crusades; the Jesuit advance guard of colonialism. How can the church guide us in good Christian habits, not bad ones? US and Polish support for anti-Russian war, whether defensive (as in Ukraine) or offensive (as in the Caucasus) is promoted as crusades---against asiatic tyranny or judeo-bolshevism, shoring Roman Catholic bulwarks against Russian Orthodox barbarism, etc. The framing attracts tens of thousands of volunteer crusaders from social strata like those attracted to ISIS---US boogaloo bois, German AfD, British foot- ball hooligans, young men eager to kill the other, punish heretics, "make the world safe for whites." Our long wars for conquest of Iraq and Afghanistan were also framed as crusades. The church should condemn abusing the faith to recruit killers. Ukraine has been a neocolonial vassal of the US since at least the US-backed 2014 Maidan coup. A good bit of the US foreign policy establishment's antipathy to Russia in the last 3 administrations comes from Russia clawing back a lot of sovereignty after the lost decade of the '90s, when Yeltsin's US-backed coup regime destroyed Russia and subju- gated it to our financial vultures. I'm not trying to convince you to take a side. I'm pointing to dangers of taking any side a state at war wants us to take. My political consciousness came from the years be- tween Yeltsin's coup and the 1998 Russian financial crisis. Most of my friend group of Russians, Belo- russians, Ukrainians, and Armenians fled here during those dark days when the "Chicago boys" gleefully looted and dismembered my friends' countries, stole everyone's savings and old people's homes, created oligarchs to govern the state's dismembered pieces, drove women's primary employment from factories to prostitution and vodka kiosks, and collapsed life expectancy. During that conquest and national humiliation, my family and I also knew people who lived through the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia. Some just survived, some tried to build peace when possible. They sens- itized me to the risk of fratricide and inoculated me against black-and-white thinking. Wars kill civilians, including economic wars. Everyone, combatant and non-, who lives through war has to do shameful things. There are no good guys in war. This war's particularly hard to understand. Propa- ganda and censorship suffocate nuance as violence touches us. I bet a parishioner lost touch with someone they love who was sleeping in the metro, trying to avoid gunpoint conscription, or fleeing both Russian artillery and US/Ukraine-backed ultra- nationalists who want them as human shields. I'm not your only parishioner with Russian friends terrified of '90s coming back. Everybody with means seems to have left for Istanbul, EU, Central Asia. Tens of thousands lost jobs when Western companies closed. The ruble lost half its value. Cut off from family in Ukraine and the West, Russians try to make sense of what's happening in a propaganda environment more fraught but as confusing as ours. What should be the Christian response to the war? I don't think we should just play the anthems of all belligerents along with Ukraine's: DNR, LNR, Russia ...or of cheerleaders of Russia's and Ukraine's destruction: Poland, US, etc. The prayer for peace is tremendously focusing. Beyond that, I believe prayer can guide us into proper relationship with conflict, propaganda, and God's suffering children. To pray vaguely for Ukraine is to be too much like the ghouls in blue-and-yellow who exhibited the morose Ukrainian ambassador at Biden's State of the Union address. She certainly knew those applauding her sabotaged Ukraine-Russia peace talks that week, warmongered for years, and argued for continuing to arm Ukrainians like their "moderate" Syrians---not to decisively win, but to produce a long quagmire. Almost nothing's worse for peace than friends like them. I probably pray wrong. I pray for demilitarization of all states and insurgents; successful, fair diplomacy; compassion for all who suffer war; political leaders' wisdom and mercy; understanding and brotherhood with whoever I'm supposed to hate; kindness, patience, slowness to anger. I pray for God to protect noncombatants and bend the war into inflection from bad recent years in Ukraine, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, etc, to happier everyday life for ordinary people. I write apprehensively. Evy counseled me not to. "What you're doing is *dangerous,*" she said. Her family's central story was a terrible flight afoot from Hungary after the harsh Soviet proxy govern- ment response to letters like this one written by her opinionated great-uncle. I was beaten, jailed, and interrogated repeatedly for providing medical aid with street medic teams to protesters who challenged our country's belli- cose doxa in 1999-2003---NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was humanitarian, US invasion of Iraq and Afghani- stan was liberation, WMDs threatened us, NATO's expansion to Russia's border was benign. People in the US antiwar movement had FBI branch offices and joint anti-terror squads assigned to us. UK undercover police conceived children with female antiwar activists, including a friend of mine, to abusively hold them emotionally hostage. Our houses were raided (mine 4 times just in 2003). This time the doxa is that cheerleading a nation at war while preparing for a long awful insurgency is advocating for peace. I have a young daughter. I don't know of a movement like the one I served. I want to protect my family from harm. All I intend to do is write you from my cowardice. I'm surely wrong about most of this, but you and Kierkegaard say Jesus wants us to be in relation- ship, not right. I hope you receive my concerns with love and hold them in prayer. Maybe in my tangled thoughts and emotions there's an accident of faithfulness to the Gospel and penitential work of Lent that helps your tough work of guiding us to live Christian lives together. Anna