Resolution of the EPP Political Bureau of 17 March 2009

On parliamentary elections from the Republic of Moldova

The EPP closely follows political developments from the Republic of Moldova on the eve of the parliamentary elections which will take place on 5th April 2009. As a democracy in transition and as a country which has proposed the strategic objective the European integration, Moldova is to deepen its political and economic reforms, to adjust its laws and practices to the European standards. The separation of the totalitarian soviet past and the advancement to democracy must be strengthened by strong institutions of the rule of law and total respect for human rights.

In the current electoral competition, the EPP as usually, supports its partners from the Republic of Moldova – the Christian Democratic People’s Party led by President Iurie Roşca. Our fraternal party is the oldest democratic institution in this country. Being at the forefront of the struggle for democracy and independence for over twenty years, this party affirmed itself as a vigorous political movement, formed of real fighters for freedom. The PPCD is the only political party in Moldova which was present in all five legislatures of the national Parliament from 1990 until now. Now is the historic moment for a considerable electoral victory and its accession to governing.

The EPP expresses its conviction that the electoral process in Moldova will be fair and democratic one, according to international standards in the field, and the authorities will ensure all conditions for an honest and transparent political competition.

The EPP declares its full solidarity with Christian Democratic People’s Party and wish them success in parliamentary elections. Our political family will be with the PPCD and after the elections of this year and will encourage the co-operation of the European institutions with the new Moldova’s authorities in order to support the efforts of this country to consolidate its economy and democratic institutions and to advance on a closer co-operation with the European Union.

]]> http://cezarsen.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/the-epp-declares-its-full-solidarity-with-christian-democratic-peoples-party/feed/ 0 admin http://cezarsen.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/putin-is-approved-as-prime-minister/ http://cezarsen.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/putin-is-approved-as-prime-minister/#comments Thu, 08 May 2008 16:34:44 +0000 admin http://cezarsen.wordpress.com/?p=12 Continue reading →]]> MOSCOW – Russia’s Parliament overwhelmingly confirmed Vladimir V. Putin as prime minister on Thursday, completing a carefully managed departure from the presidency in a manner that left him the country’s dominant politician and with a clear grip on power.

Mr. Putin, out of office less than 26 hours, received 392 votes in the 450-seat Duma, Parliament’s lower house.

After a brief endorsement from his protégé and presidential successor, Dmitri A. Medvedev, Mr. Putin once again commanded the stage. He gave a 45-minute speech, proposing a series of domestic policy initiatives that seized many of Mr. Medvedev’s campaign themes and echoed his presidential addresses over the past eight years.

“Great and grandiose tasks lie before us,” Mr. Putin said, addressing a legislature firmly under his control as Mr. Medvedev sat silently.

The proposals included efforts to reduce Russia’s double-digit inflation, new legislation to create tax breaks for education, housing, and medical costs, and more government spending for housing, infrastructure and military equipment.

He also proposed tax reductions for the oil industry and said his government would work to revive agriculture and spur food production.

As much as 70 percent of the food in Russia’s major cities is imported, he said, suggesting that costs for food staples were especially vulnerable to inflation in a time of rising global transportation costs. “To lower prices, we must increase our production,” he said.

Mr. Putin suggested that he would move quickly, and that draft legislation for changes to the tax code — detailing what cuts and tax breaks will be made, and when — would be presented to legislators in August.

Mr. Medvedev was sworn in as Russia’s president on Wednesday inside the Grand Kremlin Palace in a ceremony mixing czarist splendor with renewed Russian confidence.

The ceremony marked the passing of formal power from Mr. Putin to his untested protégé.

But the events also served as a tribute to the enduring stature and popularity of Mr. Putin, whom Mr. Medvedev nominated as prime minister within hours of taking office.

Mr. Putin, a former intelligence service chief who had presided over Russia’s economic revival while consolidating power, rolling back civil liberties and leading a government plagued by corruption, arrived at the ceremony Wednesday alone and before Mr. Medvedev.

He stepped from a black limousine and briefly stood before the ceremonial Presidential Regiment, which was standing outside in the chill. “Greetings, comrades!” he said, and was met with a deep, rousing cheer.

In a departure from past inaugurations, the outgoing leader then addressed the more than 2,400 guests inside St. Andrew’s Hall before the new president took his oath. Mr. Putin said he had lived up to his promise, made eight years ago, to serve the country and its citizens faithfully.

The remarks appeared to presage Mr. Putin’s continued hand on Russian power.

“It is extremely important for everyone together to continue the course that has already been taken and has justified itself,” he said.

Only then did Mr. Medvedev, 42, approach the lectern, rest his hand on a copy of Russia’s Constitution and utter the oath of office.

In a brief address afterward, he touched themes he had embraced since Mr. Putin selected him as his successor late last year and shepherded him through a scripted election.

He emphasized improving living standards, education and medical care, and modernizing Russia’s narrow economy, which relies on oil and gas revenues, as well as other forms of natural resource extraction.

“I would like to assure all of the citizens of this country that I will be working to my fullest capacity,” he said. “I fully realize how much has yet to be done.”

Mr. Medvedev, whose public persona is decidedly softer than Mr. Putin’s, also stressed the importance of civil rights, as he has in several speeches since he became the president-elect.

Minutes later, Mr. Putin accompanied the new president outside to review the passing formations of the ceremonial regiment. When the two men left the dais after the last platoon passed, it was on cue from Mr. Putin, not Mr. Medvedev, who followed the former president’s lead.

The ceremony Wednesday was brief. But the leaders’ paired comments, and Mr. Putin’s physical dominance of each ceremonial stage, neatly framed the central questions about what the inauguration will mean for Russia’s politics and direction.

Will Mr. Putin remain the nation’s pre-eminent politician and policy setter? Or will Mr. Medvedev, whose career has been spent in his sponsor’s shadow, have the ability and latitude to choose the country’s course?

Mr. Medvedev has no known political history as a member of the nation’s security services, whose members climbed through the ranks of government and business under Mr. Putin to become a pervasive and dominant national force.

Mr. Putin, 55, managed to stay atop these often warring government clans, and to mediate their disputes and secure enough of their loyalty to create the impression of a stable, if not fully predictable, state. Whether Mr. Medvedev will be able to navigate the country’s bureaucratic and business disputes alone is not clear.

Mr. Medvedev has also presented himself in paradoxical ways.

He has often complimented the style and achievements of Mr. Putin, with whom he appears to have both a friendship and unwavering public support. But at times Mr. Medvedev has publicly championed the rule of law and the importance of human rights – both of which faced intense pressure during Mr. Putin’s two terms.

His critics have said that he is little more than Mr. Putin’s puppet, and that his pledges to liberalize the country and commit to human rights are undermined by the very means of his election, against a weak slate of pro-Kremlin candidates. The Russian government allowed no true opposition candidates to compete.

Mr. Putin leads United Russia, the country’s dominant political party. Mr. Medvedev’s remarks Wednesday and his first presidential decree – guaranteeing public housing by 2010 for surviving veterans of World War II – emphasized domestic affairs.

A difficult foreign policy portfolio awaited him, including a West wary of Russia after Mr. Putin’s assertive style and claims by Georgia, a Kremlin satellite in Soviet times that has turned toward the West in recent years, that Russia has been annexing the breakaway region of Abkhazia.

There was no immediate announcement about the composition of Mr. Medvedev’s government, or about how powers would be divided between the Russian leaders. The two men are scheduled to appear together on Friday at a military parade in Red Square.

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting.

I.A. Rus

Two days before the Vatican marks the third anniversary of John Paul’s death, Monsignor Slawomir Oder told Vatican Radio that he has turned over the report to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

The report summarizes and analyzes all the documentation about John Paul’s life and virtues that had been gathered since his 2005 death, including testimony from witnesses and his own writings.

“In the past days I have submitted a semifinal version,” Oder said. “It’s about 2,000 pages that need further technical and editing adjustments, but we can say that in its entirety, the report is complete.”

Now, an independent Vatican official, the Rev. Daniel Ols, must review Oder’s report and give it the final go-ahead for an official presentation to the Congregation, which must then gather committees of cardinals and bishops to discuss the merits of the case.

Oder declined to give a timetable for that, or say when the Vatican might decide to beatify John Paul.

The Vatican’s complicated saint-making procedures — which can include the weighing of favorable and unfavorable information — require that a miracle attributed to the candidate’s intercession be confirmed before beatification. A second miracle is necessary for canonization.

Pope Benedict XVI put John Paul on the fast track to possible sainthood just weeks after his death on April 2, 2005, waiving the customary five-year waiting period.

Such a waiver had only been granted once before, to Mother Teresa, who died in 1997 and was beatified in 2003.

John Paul’s sainthood process is progressing quickly, with milestones reached at nearly every anniversary of his death.

Last year, the investigation into John Paul’s life and virtues was officially closed, and French church officials turned over to the Vatican documentation about a purported miracle attributed to his intercession.

Benedict will preside over a Mass on Wednesday marking John Paul’s death.

To touch the secret of Lenin’s attitude to religion it is necessary to remember a writer of genius Dostoevsky, who managed to reveal the teomachist intention in the European culture. As an artist Dostoevsky did not formulate his ideas in completed concepts, but in the “philosophy of images” he is extremely accurate. Dostoevsky fought against materialistic views of his opponents, though not regarding them proper materialists. Consciousness of atheists – the characters of his novels – is dual: they need God to deny Him.

This is exactly what we notice in Lenin’s behavior. He could not mention religion without damnation, for he was possessed by the need of pathological reviling of the Divine: religion for him is nothing but “sacerdotalism”, “coquetting with God”, “the foulest of things”, “necrophilia”, for “every religious idea about a certain god, every coquetting with god is inexpressible abomination… the most dangerous abomination, the foulest pest”. In his approach to different historical phenomena Lenin made a show of finding relativity in everything and fighting with any idea of something being absolute. This was the core of his struggle with spirituality. But as soon as it came to religion, Lenin retreated even from “impartial” Marxist methodology and fell into frenzy and madness. It is evident that at the bottom of it there was his perception of the religious reality as the absolute enemy. Here Lenin lacked patience even for presenting religion as something historically conditioned and temporal.

In his work “Childhood disease of leftism in Communism” Lenin taught that one should compromise in every issue, but not in the goals of Communism. He always jeered at those who were unable of this. But Lenin himself never allowed compromise with religion. It never occurred to him to dodge God, the Church or religion. Stalin being a true Leninist in all other things still allowed employment of religion to retain power on the first communist base. Marx, who would not miss to say a meanness about religion, still made attempts to use historical approach. Lenin fell even below the level of Marxism and was ecstatic about the most vulgar antireligious brochures and critics of religion like the malicious Helvetius.

Lenin feared not only religious reality, but also of religious symbols. He could not stand even mentioning God. For example, he was irreconcilable with “God-seeking” and “God-construction”, though in these doctrins the concepts about real God were missing, and he could derive revolutionary benefit from them in atheistic propaganda. The fact that Lenin could not play or joke with religion and treated everything pertaining to it most seriously, testifies that in Lenin’s opinion destroying religion was the most important purpose of the communist regime. Lenin launched the bloodiest and most massive religion persecution in history.

As early as on May 1, 1919, in a document addressed to Dzerzhinsky Lenin demanded: “It is necessary to do away with the cassocks and religion as soon as possible. The cassocks should be arrested as counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs and shot away hip and thigh in all places. As many as possible. Churches should be closed down. Their buildings should be sealed up and turned into storehouses.” On December 25, 1919, on account of the feast of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, when the Orthodox could not work Lenin issued an order: “It is silly to put up with “Nicholas”. We should rouse everyone in Cheka to shoot away those missing at work because of “Nicholas”. In his letter to Molotov for the members of Politburo of March 19, 1922, Lenin insisted on the necessity to make use of mass famine in the country and appealed to the communist leaders to archly blitz the Church within the framework of the campaign “seizure of valuables”, to deal religion a deadly blow in order to deprive the future generations of believers of any will to resist: “Just now and only now, when in the countryside they eat people and there are hundreds or even thousands corpses lying on the roads we can (and so we must) conduct seizure of church valuables with most frenzied and merciless energy, never minding suppression of any kind of resistance… At all costs we have to bring about seizure of church valuables in the most determined and fastest way, which will provide us with funds of several hundred millions gold rubles.” Lenin agreed, “if it is necessary to go the length of some cruelties to achieve a certain political goal, it should be carried out most drastically and quickly, for the mass cannot stand long-lasting cruelties”. Lenin called for “fighting the most determined and merciless battle to the Black-Hundred clergy and suppress their resistance with the cruelty, which they will not forget for many decades”. Lenin persuades his associates that “the campaign of seizure of Church valuables” should be conducted “with merciless determination, not stopping short of anything and as soon as possible. The more representatives of reactionary bourgeoisie and clergy will be shot away under this pretext, the better. We should give the public such a lesson that they will not dare think of any resistance for quite a few decades.”

The reason for such a cannibalistic pathos is that Lenin hated the Church even more than religious ideology, because the Church is life in God. Personal satanic malice is felt in Lenin’s attitude to the Church, infernal hate, which he was unable to hold back. As soon as he got the chance to destroy the Church, Lenin forgot all his theories about strict laws of history, asserting which he as Marksist set himself against the narodnik movement. In his practical attitude to religion Lenin lapses into voluntarism. It is not a fruit of hypocrisy, but rather the result of doublethink, which reflects the dual nature of Marxism-Leninism. Lenin always declared himself complete materialist and atheist, but was he really such?

No doubt, the Leninism ideology is materialistic: primacy of matter, concept of the world as a mechanism, and of the man as of a social-biological machine – a part of the world’s self-developing machine. But according to its objectives and deep orientedness Leninism could not be materialism. The logic of complete materialism does not offer any standards of conduct, has no ideas about proper and improper, for man being a socially biological mechanism cannot have any obligations before the world machine. Such materialism should regard the idea of God as a harmful mistake, but it cannot cause the pathos of maniacal denial or unrestrained passion for reviling. It is only the duty of theomachy that makes Lenin behave toward the world as if its basis is non-material. Denying existence of God Lenin fought against God and the Divine as against the most real essence. Fanatic atheism of Lenin’s type is possible only when they deny religion as a harmful superstition, but they fight against God as an absolutely hostile reality.

At the same time it is absolutely logical that exactly materialism is the ideology of Leninism. Leninism is not materialistic according to its motives and goals, but only materialism may be the ideology of Leninism. Thought materialism with its logics cannot substantiate militancy of atheism, and all the more the pathos of theomachy, it is necessary as an instrument and the ultimate aim of theomachy. Such position cannot be consistent, for it is based on self-deception, playing with oneself, which allows to avoid direct denying of principles, and it is logically inevitable within the materialistic ideology. Leninism is unable of critical introspection, because it is philosophical and psychological doublethink described by George Orwell. The foundation of any kind of doublethink is doublethink toward God.

It is wrong to regard atheistic materialism as the ultimate antithesis of religion. It is impossible to consider devil – the personified non-existence – a materialist. Only such an atheism can be the ultimate antithesis of religion that at the same time acts as an anti-Christian “religiosity” having its own scriptures and cult, its own idols. Leninism is an anti-Christian doctrine that thrusts its way of existence. A typical Leninist-atheist is not a dispassionate armchair scientist, but an obsessed fanatic, burning with hatred to the Divine foundations of the world. Leninism with its will for global rearrangement of the universe recognizes that the world is not deterministic; in the world both religion and atheism have chances to win. The world is not material, but in case Communism wins it may become materialistic. God for Lenin is not something, which either exists or not, but something that can exist but should not, something that should be eliminated. Victory over God is brought about through man. That is why the orientation of Marxism-Leninism is revealed through the concept of what man is and what he should become.

While man in Christianity is a participant of world’s deification and attainment of Divine existence, the concealed goal of Lenin’s atheism is to turn man into an agent of excarnation, into the source of non-existence. However this is not merely the will “not to be”, but a desire to fall into state opposite to the existence created by God, and to lug away the whole world. For man to be God’s co-creater, he has to possess freedom and ability to create, because only through creation in God it is possible to deify the world. To be a carrier of non-existence man has to refuse freedom and ability to create and to determine himself to the external circumstances. Contrary to the desire of a Christian to live in God as the source of freedom (“where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty”) a Marxist-Leninist tries to live in the impersonal necessity releasing from responsibility for apostasy.

The concept of Marxist-Leninist ideology is revealed in its attitude to history, to formulation of human role in it. Lenin regarded man as a derivative of production relations. It means that all people of a certain epoch had common essence irrespective of individual diversity, that man is rigidly determined by the ambience. But the party stands over this ambience, it controls it (“there is nothing impossible for the Party”), so it controls also man. The ultimate obsession with theomachy makes free of all materialistic and atheistic “laws” and confers satanic freedom in non-existence. Thus, atheistic materialism claims that society is determined by the laws of material history, which in fact allows the party leaders to have freedom to direct these “laws” on behalf of the theomachist atheism. This logic was exposed already by Dostoevsky, who in his analysis of phenomenon of Nechaev’s movement anticipated in the figure of Shigalev the future incorporation of Communism. Shigalev “offered for the ultimate solution of this issue to divide the mankind into two unequal parts. One tenth is given personal liberty and unlimited rights over the rest nine tenths. The latter have to lose there identity and turn into a sort of herd and under unlimited obedience through a number of metamorphoses reach primeval innocence, a kind of the primeval paradise, however they will have to work. The measures suggested by the author to strip nine tenth of their will and altering them into a herd by means of reeducation of whole generations are quite remarkable, based on natural data and are very logical”. And Russia has firsthand knowledge of this iron logic of all kinds of apostasy.

Dostoyevsky was an active opponent of materialistic theories that claimed that man is “spoilt by ambience”, but he did not consider his revolutionary characters to be materialists. It is not by chance that he called his novel “Demons”. Demonic theomachy parasitizes on materialism devoid of any ethics. It cannot act openly, because through theomachy itself it will recognize the One, against Whom it is fighting – God.

Thus, Leninism is a dialectical combination of the ultimate atheism with a special kind of religious pathos. This is obsession with Satanism as with total theomachy. Leninism is materialistic by its ideology, but not by ontology. Materialism and atheism is an instrument for fighting against something that can exist only beyond the framework of this ideology. The aim and the basic idea of Leninism is construction of extremely anti-Christian society, and the concealed ultimate aim is non-existence. Theomachy is the core and dominant of Leninism. But theomachy demands destruction of the universe as God’s creation and destruction of God’s image and likeness in man. This is the reason for destructions and genocide under the regime of Marxism-Leninism unprecedented in the history of humankind. Thus all the parts of Marxism-Leninism doctrine are subject to its primary target – achievement of infernal kingdom on earth, they describe different stages on the way to it and the methodology of struggle for it.

Victor Aksiuchitz