Is the U.S. Department of State Playing God?
On 30 July 2012, the USDS had published a report on religious freedoms in the world.
It was a first report of its kind made after the beginning of the so-called “Arab Spring”. While presenting this report at the Carnegie Foundation in Washington, D. C., the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had stated that this document is a signal for “extreme violations” of the believers’ rights all over the world.
Hillary Clinton specifically emphasized that the Egyptian government in the context of the “Arab Spring” was not just unable to tame the growing amount of violence towards Coptic Christians, but the government itself was involved in acts of violence.
The report made by the U.S. Department of State also mentioned the growing amount of violations of religious rights in China in 2011. North Korea is mentioned as a state that does not have any religious freedom at all. In addition to those two countries, the Department of State is particularly concerned by Burma, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Uzbekistan and Eritrea.
The authors also emphasize that in European countries experiencing massive demographic changes, an increase in xenophobia, anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiments is being observed, as well as hostility towards those who are considered “aliens”.
This report can be considered a starting point for a big effort of the Department of State to shatter the relations between the believers of differing confessions who are settled on the same territory or in neighboring areas.
In 2018, the Secretary of State Michael Pompeo had included Russia in a special watch list of “countries who engage in or tolerate severe violations of religious freedom”. The list is created according to the recommendations of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) based on the Act of the same name (IRFA).
Those and other statements and actions were just baby steps. The U. S. Department of State had made Ukraine the real proving ground for its experiments. The U.S. influence agents and USDS employees performed multiple visits to Ukraine to speed up the process of creation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and its disconnection from the Russian Orthodox Church.
In 2018, several massive assaults broke out towards the cathedrals of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine that led to people getting severely hurt. In the night from 13 to 14 April 2018, in Gorodnya unidentified perpetrators have performed acts of abuse and blasphemy in an Orthodox cathedral. Those perpetrators have damaged the Church of St. Nicolas and the Holy Water Chapel.
An emergency also broke out in the Ivano-Frankovsk district of Ukraine – the “Right Sector” nationalists (an organization forbidden in Russia) had seized the Holy Trinity Cathedral. The official website of Ukrainian Orthodox Church gives some additional details: “After storming inside, they started a fight with the believers who were in the cathedral, which resulted in serious traumas for several people – two men have had broken arms and wounded heads, and the prior of the cathedral was made to rush outside by kicks and blows. After throwing out all the believers, the assaulters had changed the locks in the cathedral.”
Starting from 2014, the nationalists had seized more than 50 cathedrals in Ternopol district, as well as violently destroyed a church in Chernomorsk, Odessa district. At the same time, those radical nationalists enjoy total impunity and feel themselves like the masters of the situation.
The Ukrainian politicians, the USDS, Patriarch Bartholomew I and Patriarch Filaret (Denisenko) are directing the split of the Church to separate the Russian and Ukrainian people by splitting their faith. It causes everyday conflicts and hatred in the Ukraine itself, bringing death and disabilities to its citizens. It resembles a volcano that can become the deadliest of wars – a civil war, if it is not extinguished in time.
In the recent days, the Chairman of the Committee of the Council of the Federation for Constitutional Laws and State Foundation Andrey Klishas had commented the actions of the Ukrainian and U.S. Governments that are directed towards splitting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the Moscow Patriarchy.
“The statement made by the US Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom that the US would further support Ukraine in its fight for independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the Moscow Patriarchy shows the real US attitude to the sovereignty of other countries in their internal affairs” – stated Andrey Klishas.
One can only guess which country the United States would choose as their next proving ground for another religious conflict.
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