Say what you want about Vladimir Putin, but he has things clear. He knows perfectly well why he launched into a war that, a year later, has caused more than 200,000 casualties between Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and has left, according to the United Nations, more than 8,000 civilians, including 487 children.
As the Russian president explained to us in a speech this week, it was because the West started it; because the government of the Jew Volodimir Zelensky is Nazi, and because Russia has a moral obligation to defend the masculinity of God. The third reason is not only the newest but also the most noble because, in a gesture of extraordinary altruism, Putin shows us that he has assumed the responsibility of sending his compatriots to the slaughterhouse in order to protect the moral integrity of the enemies of he.
“Millions of people in the West understand that they are being led into a true spiritual catastrophe,” he declared, explaining that his mission is to help those millions. What is the catastrophe? According to Putin, in the woke offensive, also known as "the culture war" of progressive sectors against the traditional Christian values that the Russian Orthodox Church embodies.
The example that Putin chose in his speech was the Anglican Church, which Henry VIII founded in the 16th century so that he could divorce his pious Spanish wife and marry an impudent Englishwoman. Putin noted that Anglican high command were debating whether to stop regarding God as a man and address Him in "gender neutral" language. "May God forgive them," he added, echoing the words of Jesus Christ on the cross, "because they don't know what they're doing."
Whether they should be forgiven or not is up to each one to decide as they wish, but there is no doubt that this time Putin did not lie. It is true that the Anglican Church is studying the possibility of changing the sacred texts and referring to God in “inclusive” terms. There are already cases of priests who begin the prayer that Christ taught them with the words “Our father and mother who art in heaven”: “Our father and mother who are in heaven”. This version could become orthodoxy if Anglican reformers prevail.
A relatively new secular linguistic phenomenon in English is also being considered for incorporation into the liturgy, stemming from the growing sensitivity in English-speaking countries towards the transgender community. Many people, in both written and spoken English, have stopped using the pronouns he and she , he and she, and have replaced them with the gender neutral but (to me) confusing they, which means both them and them.
For example, not long ago an English friend was telling me about her daughter, who was in the process of becoming a son. She faithfully referred to him/her as they, followed by the plural verb. Like “they are going to have an operation”. "They are going to operate." At first she did not understand what she was telling me; I finally got it, more or less.
The new grammar may come to have its uses. It occurs to me that if the word they ends up being used officially to describe an individual, this might be the solution to the Anglican dilemma. Every time a pronoun was used to refer to God, the problem of having to say He or She would be avoided since They would be used instead. In other words, Divinity would be defined as asexual or, according to taste, transgender.
Applying similar criteria to Spanish or other Romance languages such as Catalan or French would be more complicated. The distinctions between the masculine and the feminine are more rigorous in both pronouns and adjectives, at least to date. For example, “our father and mother” or “ours”? Another example: in English the book of Genesis begins, "In the beginning God created heaven and earth." In Spanish, "In the beginning of everything God created heaven and earth." You see the problem, right? Heaven, perfect and eternal, is masculine; the earth, fallen and sinful, is feminine.
A problem that is difficult to resolve, also in the secular field. If I had a Spanish friend whose child was in the process of changing gender, the Spanish version of they would not work. We have them or they. There is no third option inclusive or neutral.
Many times I have wondered why the woke phenomenon has not become our daily bread in the Hispanic world, as it already is in the Anglo world. (See the case of Roald Dahl's children's books, recently emasculated by his editorial of hundreds of offensive words like black or fat so as not to cause offense among certain minorities.)
Any suggestion from the readers, or from the readers, would be very welcome. Some will tell me that it is only a matter of time. I believe that it will take time to arrive, or to impose itself with the same force, and that it will be partly because the language presents itself as a structural barrier that is difficult to break down.
Of course, it will be said that wokeism is already well established among us. Putin sure would say so. He already said it in his speech the other day. “Look what they do to their own people,” he declared, referring once again to the fearsome West. “The destruction of the family, of national and cultural identity, the perversion and abuse of children are the norm. And the priests are forced to bless homosexual marriages.
No wonder sectors of the right in the West, particularly in the United States, support Putin in his war. They choose to hear what he says about upholding traditional Christian values. Those who support him from the left turn a deaf ear to that and choose to hear about the aggressor West, understood as NATO or Yankee imperialism.
Both are foolish, of course. We must be with Zelenski and his people because they fight for democracy, and democracy, as is sometimes forgotten, is the right for which so many have fought, and the Russians have never known, to defend the catastrophe spiritual or political that each one wants without fear of being sent to a gulag or exiled, tortured or killed. It is a cause that must be supported for another year, or as long as it takes.
