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Entry: Let's Sit Out World War IV Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/lets_sit_out_world_war_iv#8729 Post contents: @ "Lost in Finland", come on. If your country was able to fend off the Russians when you were vastly outnumbered in 1940, then you AND your Russian and European cousins as a united front (I believe they will be, soon enough) can certainly fend off the Golden Horde. Finland. God, how I love Finland. For the rest of my life I'll keep, as a memento, my passport with the stamp of entry to Finland on 26 March 2000, when I fled from Russia to Finland on an overnight train because I got caught in the crossfire between Russia and the Americans who were trying to ruin Russia. I don't blame the Russians for that, for how a handful of them mistook me for an enemy at the time; but I WAS grateful for the fiercely defended border of Finland, through which I crossed over to freedom. I owe eternal draughts of Kosten Korva vodka to the valiant Finns who defended that border (well, defended a border close to it) in 1940. But those old wars between Europeans/Christians (including Russians) are over now, and Russia is now, once again the "Shield of Europe" (and of Christendom) just like it was 600-900 years ago, like when (Saint, perhaps?) the Russian icon painter Rublev painted this icon of the "Face (of Christ) Not Made By Hands". He painted it (I believe it was Divinely inspired) at a time (early 1400s) when the Russians were liberating themselves from the Tatar yoke - one generation later, the Tatars were finally defeated in Russia (simultaneous with the Turkish conquest of Constantinople) - and then Moscow was declared by Russian Christians to be "the Third Rome", and although I'm not Russian Orthodox, I do believe there's some truth in Moscow being "a" (even if not "the") Third Rome, meaning (at least) a locus of Christian resistance to Christendom's enemies. By the way, an anecdote about this icon: During the Bolshevik revolution, around 1918 or so, this wooden icon was dumped into a pile of firewood (when the Communists were denuding Churches), but then miraculously, a poor Russian who was pilfering firewood found this icon in a stack of "junk" wood, and he preserved it even though he didn't even know it was by Rublev. Now it's in the Tretyakov art museum in Moscow (and even in "Communist" times, it was kept safe there - that's a big difference between Russian "Communism" and the infinitely more barbarian Chinese kind). The survival and preservation of this Russian icon - painted while the Russians were saving Christendom from the Islamicist would-be-invaders/conquerors - is, I believe, a miracle. And I say that as an Anglo-Catholic with a very Protestant mind. Here is the icon. Please contemplate it, and its history, and then contemplate the necessary alliance between Catholics and Eastern Orthodox AND Protestant Christians, against our mutual enemies (not all Muslims, but yes the likes of Osama Bin Laden.) Here - brace yourselves, because (I believe) this icon really was Divinely inspired: http://web.ku.edu/~russcult/visual_index/images/orthodoxy/christ_rublev.jpg Sent at: 2008 08 21