#4 - JRL 2006-178 - JRL Home
Modern society tends to totalitarianism - Russian priest

Moscow, August 7, Interfax - Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, deputy head of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relation, is concerned for the penetration of totalitarianism into international organizations.

‘A godless society sooner or later becomes totalitarian. It is incapable of giving itself to the work of the Lord, giving the most important or even some problems to His disposal. It seeks to regulate everything, even the length of sprats in a tin, as today’s European Union does’, Father Vsevolod writes in another part of his diary called Little Shreds published in the July issue of Pravoslavnaya Moskva newspaper.

The priest noted that in today’s world there are more and more things ‘not pronounced in public’. In this world, a person who has chosen ‘freedom from something’ rather than ‘freedom for something’ ‘will inevitably become a slave - first a slave of himself and then a slave of those who, miserable and restless like himself, cannot but build totalitarianism to hide in it from his own conscience’.

‘Today the concern is to avoid saying too much, for instance, about homosexuals or ethnic minorities. Tomorrow attempts will be made to control thoughts through ‘education’. As a result, I think, we will be happier than people of ‘the dark ages’, Father Vsevolod believes.