I recently reposted a series of five homilies entitled, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” on the Just Society page of this site. I did so because, in my view, what Putin is doing in Ukraine is an example of apocalyptic behavior about which John the Revelator warned.
 
Please note: I am not maintaining that what Putin is doing in Ukraine is THE Apocalypse. It is, rather, AN apocalypse. We can only wish that there were but one apocalypse. But, we are not so lucky. The apocalypse that Putin is executing in Ukraine is but one of many apocalypses that many madmen such as Putin have wrought in every era of world history.
 
In this blog post, I will briefly review but one aspect of Putin’s apocalyptic ride on the back of the black horse of John’s revelation.[1]
 
In Putin’s now six-weeks-long invasion of Ukraine, we see him as the rider on the white horse.
 
“Then I saw—imagine this! —a white horse. Its rider held a military bow and was granted a crown. He went off triumphantly, intending to conquer.”[2]
 
This horseman represents the personal and nationalistic desire to conquer and dominate other peoples and nations. Predictably, and as John so accurately observes, this desire leads to conflict at the personal level and to war at the national level.
 
“And another horse, this one red, went off, its rider given power to take peace from the earth to the extent that they kill each other. He was equipped with a vicious sword.”[3]
 
Here is Putin’s Russian war machine—a machine bought and paid for by Lucifer[4]—activating the Ukrainian war machine—also bought and paid for by Lucifer—with military resources—also bought and paid for by Lucifer—supplied by the west, including and especially America. These killing machines cause blood to flow. Hence, the second horse’s red color. But war machines are but one way to kill. And so, we come to the third horse, the focus of this brief blog post.
 
“Then I saw—imagine this! —a black horse. Its rider held a set of scales in his hand. I heard something like a voice coming from the four creatures, announcing: ‘A quart of wheat or three quarts of barley costs a day’s wage, while olive oil and wine you are not to impact.’”[5]
 
Food shortages. Hunger. These are often the unintended consequences of war. Often, they are intentional war strategies. But whether they are the consequence of intentional military planning or simply unintended consequence, they are real. We have already seen it in places like Mariupol. We are seeing, today, the initial stages of a broader apocalyptic food shortage and starvation pattern that is a consequence of Putin’s mad invasion of Ukraine.
 
“Prices for food commodities like grains and vegetable oils reached their highest levels ever last month largely because of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the ‘massive supply disruptions’ it is causing, threatening millions of people in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere with hunger and malnourishment, the United Nations said Friday.
 
“The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said its Food Price Index, which tracks monthly changes in international prices for a basket of commodities, averaged 159.3 points last month, up 12.6% from February. As it is, the February index was the highest level since its inception in 1990.
 
FAO said the war in Ukraine was largely responsible for the 17.1% rise in the price of grains, including wheat and others like oats, barley and corn.”[6]
 
And, again.
 
“Monica Kariuki is about ready to give up on farming. What is driving her off her 10 acres of land outside Nairobi isn’t bad weather, pests or blight — the traditional agricultural curses — but fertilizer: It costs too much.
 
“Despite thousands of miles separating her from the battlefields of Ukraine, Kariuki and her cabbage, corn and spinach farm are indirect victims of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion. The war has pushed up the price of natural gas, a key ingredient in fertilizer, and has led to severe sanctions against Russia, a major exporter of fertilizer.
 
“Kariuki used to spend 20,000 Kenyan shillings, or about $175, to fertilize her entire farm. Now, she would need to spend five times as much. Continuing to work the land, she said, would yield nothing but losses.”[7]
 
This is entirely consistent with John’s revelation as portrayed in his four horsemen. And what of the fourth and final rider?
 
“And I saw—imagine this! —a pallid horse. As for its rider, his name was Death, and hell accompanied him. And he was given dominion over a large swath of the planet to slay with the sword and with starvation and with death and with earth’s wild beasts.”[8]
 
At this stage, thousands have and are dying under the weight of a madman’s unholy desire for domination (white horse) and the world’s war machines that the desire has naturally enough activated (red horse). As a result, people have and are dying of starvation. Food shortages are on the rise (black horse). The bodies of the dead are being eaten on the streets as the number of dead grow and/or the danger of gathering and burying them becomes every more dangerous. The tit-for-tat will only increase (pale horse). Many nations are being drawn into the conflict—both passively and actively.
 
Will this apocalypse spread further? How far? Will it become the traditional global apocalypse imagined by so many readers of Revelation?
 
I don’t know. No one does. But we do know this. It all began with a desire. An unholy and ungodly desire to conquer. To dominate. It all began with the Satanic will to power. To be number one. To take glory to oneself. And we know this, too. Such apocalypses will remain part of human history, playing themselves out over and over again until the humble, self-sacrificing spirit of Jesus—the spirit that puts others before self—rules the world; until the first choose to be last and allow the last to be first. Only this spirit of at-one-ment—connectedness, unity, linkage—can save the world. Otherwise, as the final word of the Hebrew Bible warns, the earth’s end will and can only be ḥerem, extermination.[9]
 
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!
 
 
[1] An extended exploration can be found in my five homilies on the Just Society page of this site.
[2] Revelation 6.2. This and all translations found below are mine.
[3] 6.4
[4] “I will buy up armies and navies and reign with blood and horror,” he threatened God when cast out of the garden.
[5] 6.5-6
[6] “Food prices soar to record levels on Ukraine war disruptions,” AP, Nicole Winfield
[7] “Russian war worsens fertilizer crunch, risking food supplies,” AP, Geoffrey Kaviti, Chinedu Asadu, and Paul Wiseman
[8] 6.8
[9] See Malachi 4.6

The passage from Ecclesiastes that is found at the head of this and many other posts has come often to my mind over the past weeks as I have observed the madness that is flooding Ukraine and spilling out into our living rooms through news reports. There is another passage, no less insightful or true, it seems to me, that has also repeatedly come to mind.
 
“This is the world,
brutal and cruel, that Troy tried to withstand.
Cruelty wins in the end.
Our little clearings of civilization may seem real,
but mindless wilderness always lurks,
may take its time,
but in the end overwhelms all our pretensions to decency.
We revert to beastliness. (Seneca, Trojan Women, Lines 985-990)
 
It is difficult to not feel the sad truth of Seneca’s assessment of the mortal condition.
 
In a series of tweets, I sent the following out.
 
With the atrocious images flowing out of Ukraine showing the systematic war crimes that Putin’s army has and is committing, I have to assume that Putin knows that he can never leave “mother Russia” again. Never.  No amount of disinformation will be able to change what the world now knows with certainty: Putin is a war criminal. Putin must now know that to leave Russia for any reason is to be arrested as a war criminal. 
 
He must now know that there will be no more arrogantly strutting around with world leaders or any more hope of renewing a G-8 coalition that includes him, for fear of certain arrest. 
 
He must now know that he will never again jet around the world in one of his or his oligarch buddy’s private luxury jets, for fear of arrest upon landing. 
 
He must now know that he will never again step foot on any one of however many mega yachts he has stolen from the Russian people, for fear of arrest. 
 
He must surely now know that he will never again enter another of the however many penthouses or mansions that he owns in any one of several swank locations on the globe, for fear of arrest. 
 
He must now know that even if he can manage to get to any of those billions of dollars he has stolen and stashed away, he will never spend one cent of it outside a devastated Russian economy. 
 
He must now know, finally, that he is a prisoner in his country. His life will never be the same. His world has changed forever.
 
He must now understand all this. This makes him very, very dangerous. The question is, how many other lives is he prepared to change and ruin? The other question is, is there anyone bold and calculating enough to remove him from power, turn him over to international courts, and/or end his pathetic life?
 
To better understand what Putin is, what he is about, what he represents, and how utterly dangerous he is to global peace, to human life and existence, I have reposted a series of five homilies I wrote some time ago on “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” It can be found on the “Just Society” page of this site.
 
Moroni testified, “I speak unto you as if ye were present, and yet ye are not. But behold, Jesus Christ hath shown you unto me, and I know your doing.”[1] This is really saying something. But John, the Revelator, were he to so speak might say something like, “I have seen all of you, from the dawn of time to the last gasping breaths of mortals upon the earth.”
 
The Revelator saw Putin. But not only Putin. What he sees in Putin is not unique. Putin is but one of many, many lunatics in world history who have madly chosen to climb up on the back of the wild horses of John’s apocalypse and wildly ride across the world stage.
 
In the past six weeks, we have witnessed Putin’s wild ride. We have watched as he has galloped across Ukraine first on the white horse, then on the red, then the black, and finally, through reports of war crimes coming from Ukraine, on the pale horse. The scale of his wild ride is still confined to Ukraine. It has not become global. But, it grows more likely with each passing day that his mad ride on the four wild horses will become more encompassing; the arena become larger; the battle grounds expanded.
 
We are told to pray for peace. Very well. But, now is not simply a time to pray for peace. We are quickly getting well past that point. We must begin to pray for an end to Putin’s madness; a stop to his mad ride on the four horses of John’s apocalypse, even if it be by the arm of God Himself.
 
“Avenging God, YHWH,
   avenging God, reveal yourself.
Rise up, Ruler of the world…
 
[May he ] send the same calamity upon them that they sent upon others,
   and bring an end to them with the same evil they perpetrated on others;
      Yahweh, our God, will certainly bring an end to them.”[2]
 
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!
 
 
[1] Mormon 8.35
[2] Psalm 94.1-2, 23, author’s translation.

Hitler.
 
Nazi.
 
Today, and for a long time now, it has been deemed unacceptable to compare individuals to Hitler or organizations to Nazis. Now, it is true that no one or thing in 2022 America—not tRUMP, not DeathSantis, not Abbot, not the GOP, not any of their ilk—can be compared with Hitler or his brand of Nazism as found in Germany during the 1940s. However, it is accurate to say and ought to be acceptable to observe that the individuals and organizations mentioned above are showing similarities to Hitler and signs of Nazism as manifest in the late 1920’s and early to mid-1930’s. Could we not at least call them, “budding Nazis”? Maybe, “Nazis in embryo”?
 
Do not tell me, for example, that Hitler and his Nazi party would not have been thrilled by the new Texas law that directs the state’s Child Protective Services to “begin handling reports of gender-confirming care for kids as child abuse.” Don’t tell me that the secretive manner in which investigations into such “gender-confirming care” cases are handled is not right out of Hitler’s and the Nazi playbook. Do not tell me that the designation of such secretive investigations into “gender-confirming care” as “special assignments,” does not conjure up horrifying images from Nazi Germany’s activities aimed at ethnic cleansing.[1]
 
But, no, the GOP and their leading lights have not begun to actively murder millions of innocent people because they are different… yet—though the jury is still out on how many people have suffered and died because of the grievousness of the decrees they have written and the wickedness of so many of the laws that they have passed.
 
It is also true that tRUMP has not yet shot anyone “in the middle of Fifth Avenue.” Okay? His supporters have not yet been put to the test to see if he was correct when he boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, okay, and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay?” Of course, the fact that his supporters are still with him after all his record-setting lies and unprecedented corruption—including his encouragement of and leadership in an insurrection against the United States government—might be taken as evidence that he was right and that his supports have failed the test of being freedom loving, patriotic, and moral Americans. Not to mention being just plain, decent human beings.
 
All of this leads us to the second noun in our title.
 
Cult.
 
This word is deemed to be inappropriate for polite society. So, though tRUMP looks very much like a cult leader and tRUMPism looks for all the world like a cult to me, we will for now avoid the designation. We will just call the movement, “religion,” and Trump, its prophet.
 
If questioned about this designation, I will offer up this interesting piece of evidence. I will ask the reader to consider, again, tRUMP’s apparently accurate assessment that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, okay, and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay?” What he really means is that people will follow him even when he is wrong.
 
Now, consider the common Mormon religious position that one is to “follow the prophet” even if and when he is wrong. Sounds an awfully lot like tRUMP’s assertion to me. I suppose that the prophet could stand in temple square and shoot someone and still maintain many of his supporters. In fact, one suspects that the response to this crime would be much like the response of TRUMP’s supporters’ to his myriad of crimes: justify it by finding a way around calling it a crime. Argue that prophets, actually, can say and do no wrong. Whatever they say and do is, by definition, “right.” We learned that long ago from the first Mormon prophet, Joseph.
 
Nothing, it seems, is more important than standing by your man.
 
So, yes, with this single evidence among the many that we could innumerate, we are justified in calling tRUMPISM a religion. False and apostate, yes, but religious in nature nonetheless. This new “faith” increasingly shows strong indications of being a cult. With each passing day, its adherents display clearer and clearer signs of being willfully brainwashed. That which is insane is increasingly viewed as rational and sane. How much longer can it be before this apostate religion morphs into full-blown cult and then from budding Nazism to full-on Nazism? How long before its adherents metastasize from budding Nazis into full-on Nazis?
 
It isn’t inevitable, of course, that today’s budding cultists and Nazis become the real McCoy tomorrow. But no one who claims to still be rooted in reality and who loves goodness and virtue can afford to passively wait around to find out. The threat that the American right—inspired and empowered by the devil named, Trump—represents to all that is good and holy is not to be ignored. It must be exposed for the evil and danger that it is.
 
For me, the word of God is the first defense. It is more than a defensive shield. It can be and should be used, like a double-edged sword, as one of the most powerful offensive weapons against this unholy abomination.
 
“And now, as the preaching of the word had a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just—yea, it had had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword, or anything else, which had happened unto them—therefore Alma thought it was expedient that they should try the virtue of the word of God.”[2]
 
If the “virtue of the word of God” fails to quell, defeat, and obliterate the American evil that tRUMP has brought to light and breathed new life into, then… well… as Jesus said to the “daughters of Jerusalem,
 
‘Weep not for me,
but weep for yourselves, and for your children.
For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say,
“Blessed are the barren,
and the wombs that never bare,
and the paps which never gave suck.”
Then shall they begin to say to the mountains,
“Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.”
For if they do these things in a green tree,
what shall be done in the dry?’”[3]
 
May it not be so, Lord! But may repentance awake and forgiveness be granted.
 
Even so, com, Lord Jesus!
 

[1] “Caseworkers: Texas order on trans kids handled differently,” Paul J. Weber, AP News.
[2][2] Alma 31.5
[3] Luke 23.28-31