"Patriotism and Collaborationism" (continued) - Karen AGEKYAN

Karen Agekyan's article "Patriotism and Collaborationism" (continuation) is devoted to analyzing how "super-values" — religious, ethical, aesthetic — are used in politics to justify diametrically opposed practices, including collaborationism and intra-national terror.

Introduction and Methodology

The author continues the distinction, begun in the previous publication, between urgent ethno-national values-interests (land, power) and higher-order super-values. The work's thesis: the higher the value and the more strongly it claims to express the very essence of a people, the more variable its political projection becomes, and the easier it is to use it to justify any practical course of action — from serving an occupying power to fratricidal conflict.

Religious Sanction of Political Expediency

Drawing on church history of the first half of the 20th century, the author shows how references to Holy Scripture were used to justify opposing positions:

• Metropolitan Sergius's Epistle of 1927 ("Sergianism"), which proclaimed loyalty to the God-fighting Soviet regime and shifted blame for the conflict between Church and state onto the persecuted themselves;
• Metropolitan Anastasy's epistles of 1938 and 1942, which praised Hitler as "the leader in the world struggle for truth" and extolled the occupation of Russian lands as "liberation."

The author emphasizes: the problem is not the personal sinfulness of individual hierarchs, but the fact that lofty truths contain no built-in "antidote" against opportunistic use — the same citations can be employed to condemn and to justify anything at all.

The Scottish Example

Two periods of Scottish history are compared: the era of the Wars of Independence in the 13th–14th centuries, when ethno-national interest was not burdened by a religious or ideological projection and independence was preserved; and the era of the Reformation in the 16th century, when the confessional split among the elites and the turning of warring parties to France and England respectively for help became a key cause of the loss of sovereignty.

The Symbol of Joan of Arc

Drawing on the cult of Joan of Arc (with reference to research by John Hutchinson), the article traces how a single national symbol was successively appropriated by republicans, monarchists, communists, Vichy collaborationists, and later by Le Pen's National Front — each time being filled with opposite ideological content. It is shown that a heroic image, originally consolidating the nation, easily transforms into an instrument of internal political division, whereas the reverse movement — from a divisive interpretation to a unifying one — is far more difficult to achieve.

Key Conclusion

The author concludes that the more "grounded" and unambiguous the basic ethno-national values are, the harder it is to use them to justify betrayal or collaborationism; conversely, lofty metaphysical and ethical values, being "defenseless" against opportunistic use, are capable of sanctifying virtually any political position — even mutually exclusive ones. This does not devalue the values themselves, but it does register their instrumental vulnerability in the political field.