Putin Moves Against Radio Free Europe

by Christopher A. Ferrara

       The mountain of evidence that Russia’s "miraculous" transformation is yet another fraud on the West continues to grow. On October 5, 2002 The New York Times reported that the Practicing Christian has just annulled his predecessor Boris Yeltsin’s 1991 decree allowing Radio Free Europe to broadcast from Russia. The Kremlin claims that "Putin’s decision was purely technical and will not affect the work of the station."

       But not even the Times is buying that line. As the Times reporter notes, "In Russia, however, purely technical decisions rarely lack political undertones. To advocates of a free press here, Mr. Putin’s decision was stunning, raising the specter, they said, of still more Kremlin meddling in Russia’s mass media." The Times quotes Radio Free Europe’s bureau chief in Moscow, Andrei Shary, as warning that "freedom of speech is deteriorating day by day in Russia. If Yeltsin’s decree was a symbol in 1991, the revoking of the decree by Mr. Putin is a symbol too."

        What’s behind the Practicing Christian’s latest authoritarian move? Clearly, notes the Times, it is Radio Free Europe’s unrelenting coverage of the civil war in Chechnya, and of the Ukraine, where the Catholic Church is under a fierce attack - no doubt approved by the Practicing Christian. The most succinct comment on this and all the other Russian developments noted in this column was that of Aleksei Simonov, chairman of the Glasnost Foundation, who stated simply: "We are becoming a closed society."

        What do the Fatima revisionists have to say for themselves, more than 18 years after the non-consecration of Russia? Not only is there no religious conversion in "that poor nation," but even Russia’s supposed political conversion is daily being revealed as a total sham. But Pope Sodano I (as I have referred to the Cardinal Secretary of State in an earlier column), who presides over the affairs of the Catholic Church without any mandate from the Holy Ghost, wants us all to believe that "Fatima belongs to the past." In fact, he insists that we believe it. And any priest or bishop who refuses to say that two plus two equals five or that black is white - Father Nicholas Gruner for example - can expect to be persecuted by Sodano and his apparatus. For in a Church beset by scandal and confusion on every continent, the prime imperative at the Vatican is to implement the Party Line of Cardinal Angelo Sodano. Meanwhile, the people of Russia and the members of the Church continue to suffer the consequences of the incredible folly of this man and his worldy-wise collaborators.