Posted on 08/01/2013 11:01:59 AM PDT by Rennes Templar
Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin has praised Russian authorities for not caving in to pressure from abroad, saying granting asylum to US whistleblower Edward Snowden would help prevent the establishment of a ‘global electronic prison camp’.
“It is encouraging news that Russia is demonstrating its independence in this case as it has in many others, despite the pressure” said the head of the Holy Synod’s Department for Relations between the Church and Society.
Vsevolod Chaplin added that the Snowden saga has been broadly discussed both on the domestic and international level, with Russia’s position potentially bolstering its image as a country upholding “the true freedom of ideals.”
The Russian cleric further argued that Snowden’s revelations confirmed the existence of a pernicious problem discussed by Orthodox Christians for many years – “the prospective of a global electronic-totalitarian prison camp”.
“First they get people addicted to convenient means of communication with the authorities, businesses and among each other. In a while people become rigidly connected to these services and as a result the economic and political owners of these services get tremendous and terrifying power. They cannot help feeling the temptation to use this power to control the personality and such control might eventually be much stricter that all known totalitarian systems of the twentieth century,” Interfax news agency quoted Chaplin as saying.
The church official added that in his view true democracy remained an unreachable ideal.
“Any political system fixes the domination of a few over many. In the twentieth century the harshest forms of such political power used brute force, but now they are using soft power, through total data collecting and through soft persuasion of people, first through slogans but then through legal acts,” Chaplin explained. He noted that currently the soft power system was promoting such topics as declaring the western political system as the only viable option, making religion a marginal trend, and sidelining both criticism of market fundamentalism and leftist political platforms.
Chaplin urged Russian authorities to defend “real freedom, the freedom from the global ideological dictate and from the electronic prison camp.”
The cleric also offered a possible solution – the development of its own electronic communications system that would be independent from foreign-based mediums. “The nation has the brains for this and I hope we will also have a will,” Chaplin declared.
Russia is currently considering Edward Snowden’s request for temporary asylum and the former NSA contractor still remains in the transit zone of the Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.
The Russian Justice Ministry on Tuesday sent a formal response to a letter from US Attorney General, who assured Moscow that Snowden would not face the prospect of death or torture if handed over to the United States.
The Russian ministry did not provide the details of its reply to the press.
We live in Bizarro World...every day.
“the development of its own electronic communications system that would be independent from foreign-based mediums.”
ROL (Russia On Line)
Hey, they already got all the best hackers... now if they could just swap out their black hats for white...
It’s crazy that Russian Society gets it much more than the US.
Maybe Snowden will convert to the Russian Orthodox Church? he should find a pretty Russian girl and get married—I hope he’s learning Russian. Maybe the Ruskies will put him on the Cruiser Moscow and take him to Cuba? That will be the only way he gets to Havana without a drone strike.
The days of the U.S. lording it over Russia and China over civil rights issues are done. It is the U.S. that has a president who uses the constitution for ... cleaning his boots. It is the U.S. that leads the world in prisons. And now, with the exposure of NSA plans to build a computer center five times the size of the Pentagon to store the records of every comunication, phone or net, inside the country and going out, it looks as if jokes about Rusian abuse of its people will be few and far between. Think about that when you wonder about Putin’s motives. What he is doing is exercising his new comand of the moral high ground.
Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin has praised Russian authorities for not caving in to pressure from abroad, saying granting asylum to US whistleblower Edward Snowden would help prevent the establishment of a ‘global electronic prison camp’.
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Boy that is a great way to put it. ‘global electronic prison camp’.
Pass it on
I have thought that we all should build our own comm groups. I would sign up in a minute for a PRIVATE system. I have nothing to hide. I just hate the idea of what it happening to my country.
"Then God reveals prophetic messages on Russia's church, saying that Russia will be the country that will glorify Him more than any other country and that she will be the head (spiritually) of many nations."
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