We Have Someone To Fear But Fear Itself

(Letter to the Christian Nation)

I am certain that my fellow Americans don't expect me to address them at all. This is finally the time to speak not only the truth, but the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need I shrink from honesty describing conditions that your country is facing today. Your great Nation will endure as it has endured, and if she turns up her head, she will revive and she will prosper again.

As a ground for our reasoning together, let me explain my personal indebtness of gratitude to your nation as a whole, which can be seen in the plurality of debts – to your warriors and your pacifists, your physicists, your mathematicians, your parents and your students, your lawmakers and your civil disobedience movements, your policemen and your human rights watchers, your residents and your refugees, your Jews and your Gentiles, your immigrants and your presidents, your policians and your citizens, your computer programmers and your theologians, your atheists and your philosophers, your classic conservatives and your neocons, your liberals and your anarchists, your writers and your filmmakers…

Life on the other side of the Iron Curtain is a good teacher for ungrateful children, even if its pedagogical techniques can look harsh at times. And I just have to say that what I've received from you so far can rightly be summarized under the name of Amazing Grace.

My life itself would be impossible or unlikely without your taking your cross at the World War II. My grandfather was in the army, and he was detained by the Germans, and returned and married my grandmother. Your studebakers and your weapon, your engineers and your factories, your finances and your instruction, more things that I remember and even more things I don't, empowering me to live where I live and write what I write. For all of us living here it was a foretaste of the Gospel: there is another king but Stalin and Hitler, another law then the Revolution and the Ordnung, another way than dependency and stealing, another rule than the rule of mob and the rule of the State, another sanction than our court decisions and our social sanctions, another truth than our Pravda and our gossips, another leaven beyond our proud KGB and our corrupt police-misnamed-militia.

Is there something at all in our relation that I could dare to condemn unilaterally? For your bright thinkers and your missionaries, it became customary to feel sorry about something you've done to us, as a Nation to a Nation. It took some time for me to acquire some understanding of your "sorrow" first, and now I'm ready to meet them in the right way:

I get what you mean, brothers and sisters, but it's really nothing to feel sorry about. Just get over your sorrow, and turn to the present and the future that belongs to you and to me. De nada, forget it, it's nothing and will remain nothing.

Your "consumerist society" is really a producers' society. It takes a half life in the destroyers' society to appreciate; it takes a three hours in the long queue before the first McDonald's in Moscow to get handle of this truth and feel it and taste it and find it good.

Affiliates and workers of your "military-industrial complex" participated in the engineering, design and development of things, ideas and systems which made me learn, from my very childhood, the meaning of words beautiful and interesting, well-done and well-thought out, what a device which works as expected looks like and what is a ground-breaking innovation. I studied PDP-11 assembly language at my 11, and at my 16 I learned 16-bit Intel assembly language for x86 machines. Within our own engineering industry, most of your invention were renamed to hide their origins, but the power of hiding and renaming is itself powerless in the long run: most industrious of us, when they wanted to understand how something works or how to fix things by thinking, turned to the Real Manuals which are In English in the quest for real purposes, real laws and principles, real programming languages and real design decisions embodied in our hardware, whether it was wearing "Made in USA" or "Made in USSR" (Сделано в С.С.С.Р) on its shields. When I was working on our software in our own military-industrial complex, making efforts to create and develop some data exchange protocols working on our data transfer equipment, I was amazed of how it all became to suddenly make sense when I learned the real name of the standard we worked with (MIL-STD-1553) and started to look things up in Wikipedia (which is the library catalogue of the Internet, which is the Alexandrian library of our days). And in the beginning of your scientific and technical works, in forewords and introductions to the dry intellectual material, we sometimes met a complete surprise: the author expressing his gratitude to his wife for being patient and helpful. Just the way you were, o America.

What do you think of George Soros, your business magnate, investor, and philanthropist? Is he a hero of this heartless world, bringing hope to the hopeless, or is he a vicious hypocrite, preaching high taxes while evading them and "helping" victims in order to enslave them even more? Let me answer you in my own way.

Some twenty years ago, when my mother gave birth to my younger brother, the father of his, which is distinct from the father of mine, preferred to flee his responsibility, and no one on earth cared for us all. At that time, there was a program of "humanitarial aid" in action on our land. I left my home, crossed the river and the bridge (it took an hour or two), and came back to our place with a heavy package of boxes of instant cereal. Next year or two I ate it in the morning before I went to school, and in the evening before I went to bed. Tell me nothing more of the Manna, the bread from heaven, the tree of life, the memorial of resurrection, o thy missionaries and thy preachers! Let your wise fools discuss whether a "theory of mere symbolism" is better or worse than a "theory of the real presence" – either way I'm sure that I'll recognize it when I taste it.

My high-school teacher of math and computer programming, Marina Alexandrovna Fruhauf, fed me with the unique experience of real science and real thinking, real formal languages and real computer languages, real problems and real solutions, real tasks and real assignments, real education and real evaluation of knowledge and skills. She both strenthened and enabled me to start earning money in that very high school when I was 14, by programming computers and taking care of them. Theoretically and legally there was a huge "state system of education" around us, the top-down bureaucracy with a foolish head (or heads) in Moscow, Russia. Marina and me were both "under" it, by the very same theory; yet she had a protective name on her shoulders, pointing that there is another reality beyond the bureaucracy and its rules: the name of "Soros's teacher". Educational bureaucrats could not anymore impose their rules and regulation and restrictions on her and her students, against her own decisions of mercy and knowledge: being "the teacher of Soros" was not worthless here. And she gave me, among the others, the foretaste of all things intellectual and realistic: there is always a real math beyond textbooks, a real knowledge behind rules and applications, a real judgement and a real evaluation beyond grades and exams and multiple-choice tests. I learned that I have self-esteem, and this self-esteem, high or low at times, can be right or wrong independently of the majority opinion, of dead rules and dead regulations, of the schoolboard's and school director's decisions.

That's how I learned "the land of free" before "TANSTAAFL", and "the land of opportunity" before "the rule of Law". Even before I started to reflect on the true nature of education, before I read Ivan Illich or Dorothy Sayers – I've tasted what they mean, and it was good. O thy preachers and televangelists, tell me more about the centrality of grace in the notion of Law! Rationalists and irrationalists, moralists and libertines, fight your battles in confidence: the meaning of any true grace is always "there is another Law, which is a way to escape", and any true law is saying "there is another grace for you." – and in the law-grace distinction itself, I learned that the new, real, graceful law is always closer to my heart than the alleged grace of living under the Pharaoh.

What do you think of your software industry, your Bill Gates and your Microsoft, your Digital Equipment Corporation and your Apple Computers, your Eric Raymond and your Linus Torvalds?

We have the Sea of Sofware Pirates here, the land where the principle of Copyright itself is disrespected. There is a fear of the police, substantiated by treat of imprisonment and the force of weapons, but nothing more. We all just had to be pirates in order to take a look on something intellectual and share something intelligible with one another.

Now I repay the debt by acknowledging that the very closedness, the lack of source code and manuals, the hiddenness of protocol specifications and the lack of file format descriptions – all this was my highschool and my university, teaching me the science of reverse engineering, of learning principles by watching the works, of learning purpose and meaning by looking at the internal details, of giving names to things nameless and recognizing existing names in the superficial garbage of digits, constants and addresses. There is more to say here: among unregulated and sometimes (or mostly) illegal activities of hackers and pirates, there is an ethical standard which they all "hold to be self-evident". We needed Eric Raymond, (both as the computer programmer and as the politician), to start the work of discovering and formulating and describing the "rules", but we didn't need him to know what to do – just to know why we do what we do and why we feel what we feel about it. Tell me about the sin of schism, o thy bishops and thy churchmen! We already had "the sin of forking" on our tablets, before the tablets themselves were handed down.

What do you think of thy Richard Stallman, a founding father of Free Software Foundation? Is he a communist in disguise, a hater of private property and free enterprise, or an advocate of an important human rights? And is he "going too far" in one or another direction?

For many of us, the "closed source" thing was, initially, the only conceivable reality. I had a privilege to start reading other people's code very early, and a privilege to learn some skills required to get the purpose and meaning of programs when the source code was missing. Of course, being born and brought up by a family of engineers and scientists, (with the environment of family friends and children of family friends sharing the same properties), I had the seed of my "manifest destiny" in my heart. A dozen years ago I met Linux and Free Software software in general, having to interact with it, work with it, read it, study it, try it, fix it and sometimes write it. Now I'm writing this text with GNU Emacs, on a computer running Debian GNU/Linux. I have learned the distinction of a standard and an implementation, the importance of good and fitting names, just weights and measure, and the possibility of redemption for any software bug in existence. I have learned that the foundational documents and legal contracts are important enough so you can cease to worry about selecting "the right people" with enough "level of qualification" as your future co-workers and helpers: just write a good document and let the people self-select themselves.

And many things I have yet to learn.

Is Free Software "bad for the people"? You can think that in some remote future, when alleged software communism kills the free market, evil leaders of the movement will extort, by taxes and violence, money that they will surely need to get some innovation. Living in the land where Stallman's "The Right to Read" is not as much an anti-utopia as it is truthful history, I can say that you can get what you fear from the other side of the coin. During the time of peace and political stability, copyright is not used frequently to abridge the freedom of speech. However, the dangerous seeds of man-made law, of artifically created domain of property are always there. This days, any Russian business which is not technically illegal from the beginning can be stopped for a month or two by the whim of a local police officials: they arrest company's computers to "check them for pirated software". No one needs a court order to do it, no report from the copyright holder is required – and when it happens, our only hope is the state machine's "corruption" and the blessed bribery. And you just have to have computers if you want to do business which is not technically illegal, even if you would not need them otherwise.

The spontaneous order arising in free software community and communities is far from randomness. The lack of respect for copyright and trademarks and patents does not preclude somewhat similar notions from being universally accepted, more or less. Eric Raymond explained that much in The Cathedral and The Bazaar. Churchmen and businessmen, you have a lot to learn here, if you disconnect law and grace, order and anarchy, faith and deeds. You need to learn that your artifical landmarks and walls and guardians are not that important for preserving distinctions – deep there inside the people, there is no chaos, but the law. They have to be lawful in order to be fruitful, and most of the time, they are – and not because they decided to be lawful in order to gain fruits (that doesn't usually happen here, because no Mammon worshipper will choose this field to try his skills). There is no simple inclusivism and exclusivism here, there are implicit and explicit contracts, traditions, customs, personal responsibilities, borders and guns, goods and gold.

What do you think of your Erle Stanley Gardner, a lawyer and a writer? Even before we could read English, we learned from his books what a court of law looks like, and how you can get a verdict of "non guilty" if you are not guilty in reality, even if both the public and the rules and regulations are initially against you. And he did something equally important: most of us have never been to Los Angeles and California, and I never left USSR in my life – but I'll never forget your deserts and your gold miners, your taverns and your ranchos, your truthful cops and your faithful private detectives, your love of liberty and justice for all. Perry Mason series were filmed since 1957 A.D. under the umbrella of Columbia Broadcast Services. My wife and me were watching them during recent months, learning to understand spoken English and to speak it to each other. Our image of "great society" is far from some impersonal machine taking care of poor people from cradle to grave. We have seen how, when you are a criminal and your own lies trap you and you words convict you, you can openly announce what you have done, preferring the justice of the court of law to the hope of hidden negotiations in the D.A. office. And when you prefer negotiations, you have that option too: the answer will incriminate me, say your criminals, using the Fifth Amendment as the city of refuge. And in another book and another movie, your Nero Wolfe and your Archie Goodwin left the courtroom against the court rules and regulations, facing the treat of charges and imprisonment, because Nero Wolfe became sure that his testimony will condemn the innocent. That is the true glory of New York, his testimony in the court where you are standing now.

What do you think of thy Noam Chomsky, the icon of students and campuses? Is he a hero of indepence of Academia? Is he a postmodern fool, vile socialist, lawless anarchist, a pseudoscientific poser who confuses formal and human languages? Let the Father in Heaven judge the intentions of his heart; whoever he is, he was among our teachers, showing the importance of language and languages, the rules arising from the superficial chaos, the connection between the way we think and the way we speak.

In Soviet Russia, perhaps less than in France but more than in your homeland, the language itself is in process of being redefined as a creation of centralized institutions, which establish the rules and names instead of discovering them. It obliterates the connection between the living body of language and the rules and regularities (which are gradually replaced by regulations). O thy rationalists and conservatives, next time you look at "postmodernist confusion" and "ultimate relativism" where some text is headed, imagine a world with only a trace of connections which are obvious to you. The same work which means "confusion" for you is frequently a hint for us that "there may perhaps be a connection".

These days, thy have no "official language" at your federal level. In our land, this very fact sounds like the Gospel of hope. For twenty years the people of Ukraine are subjected to the endless political blackmail and discontent over the question of "Ukrainian as the only official language" versus "Russian as the second official language". There is a warning for you, brethren: you all hating to "press 1 for English", prepare to vote for Yanukovitch to be permitted to speak English, and get ready to come to your Maidan if you want to teach Spanish to your children.

What do you think of your student rebellions and your disobedient youth, your hippies and your punks, missionaries of unrestricted promiscuity, of uncontrolled use of drugs and alcohol? I'm sure we know more than you here about promiscuity, drug use and alcohol addiction. What I remember and what I see is not exactly in favor of addictions, but there is something more you should know. We have the whole communities and subcultures arising on the principles of "uncontrolled anything", and they don't even profess any explicit "principle of self-government" or "a set of moral laws" to counter the corruption of addiction. Now can I tell you what it means to visit our city of Saint Peter with no acquaintances, no money and no hotel reservation, and find a shelter and food and beer and wine and strong drink on campus, without being asked to pass any theological exam or accept any set of rules and regulations first?

And there are rules and regulations in those communities. I take it for a lifelong explanation of what is the "natural law", "the works of law written on human hearts": when you have no shelter, look for those who are far from their parent's home, who themselves live in the places "officially belonging" to some "state-established institution", who may have to defy some official rules to welcome you, who may have to beg their parents for money to feed you, who may have to conceal their age and even beg for money to buy the wine and beer which they freely give you. When you're in Russia, among the people with no smiles, in the dark street with strange people talking harsh language and verbally abusing each other, how to find help and safety and direction? You can ask your Father in Heaven if you know Him; and if you don't, just look around you.

When you see a group of men with weird haircuts of violet and orange color, you may safely approach them and ask questions without danger of being robbed (or you may approach a policeman, but that's more risky). When you see a mixed company of girls and boys playing music (or something resembling music) in the street and begging for money, you can come to them and ask for a place to spend a night, if you're homeless. And this place will be as safe as you can get here, even if you're a single young girl beyond the "age of consent" whatever it happens to be (or mean) in legal codes of yours and in the laws of our land. Our hippies have no fine-grained distinctions between "rape-rape" and "rape-but-not-quite", even as our village traditions are not always that clear about "rape" versus "consential illicit sex". Yet the very same hippies (in person and in the community) can be relied upon to distinguish these things by their own heart. And they value the principle of "parental consent" more than our legal codes and social sanctions; they also value another principle, a person's right to escape from the oppression, even from the parental oppression, perhaps in order to live and think freely for a few days and then return back home – but this principle has no immediate connection with supposedly unrestricted right to have sex. And we know what the meaning of "having sex" is, and now we even know what the meaning of "is" is.

And when you know a single name of a person belonging to such local "unregulated" community, you are a rich man here.

The city of Saint Peter once welcomed me and my friends by her unregulated community of the strangers and homeless in its student campus. The currency which we all paid for dinner and bed and breakfast was the name: «Фил Левый» (meaning Philip the Left, a boy who once visited our Kolmogorov's school campus the very same year, and ate and drank with us). The person bearing this name was not there, and he was not even immediately known by anyone who welcomed us.

A few years later, my wife and me came to the same city to another campus, officially belonging to the same "state university". This time, our Christian brother was present there (though we had no way to know it for sure before we came: mobile phones were toys for the rich). We were welcomed again, and the main argument we had for the woman "priesthood" guarding the campus was the name: actually, the same name Philip, only meaning another person who was and is a professing Christian and who probably belongs to some "christian right" "moral majority" by his profession of faith and his moral values. I can testify that while we had long and deep and close personal friendship with Philip the Right, so the warm welcome was expected and virtually known in advance (though the possibility of his absence remained until we learned otherwise), there was no qualitative difference in the response we get – by the left and by the right. That is, the same Law was governing what's going on – the first time and the next. Tell me about real presence and real absence in sacraments, tell me about importance or unimportance of this theological distinction! Tell me more about ex opere operata, my friends. As of the possibility of being "saved" without taking a "sacrament", I can tell you something: on a certain level, "I ate and drank with Philip" would probably add some credit to our currency, and it would add much to our own personal history, but in the beginning, the name itself was enough to open the doors and be welcomed and fed.

And our parents never condemn their wayward children in the name of abstract moral values, or preferred principles of courtship, or the pre-marital sex being forbidden. There is a law in our hearts and minds and souls, and its fifth commandment is like this:

Don't be Pavlick Morozov, or else your days won't be long upon the land.

In our country, the term pre-marital itself used to have dual meaning: for non-christians, it referred to the registration of your marriage, if the state permits it – usually conducted and celebrated as the wedding proper. For christians, it referred to church wedding, at least before the official Russian Orthodox Church surrendered to the state enough to start requiring state registration before wedding (You can easily find ministers and churches bold enough to ignore that, and there are some unofficial orthodox hierarchies here, so it's not the end of the story yet. They will ask you about your life and your history, and they will believe your answer if it's credible, and they will assert or deny your right to be married accordingly – and if they turn you away, you can find another church with enough corruption to just do what you pay for, and overstep the official requirement for an extra price). But I digress. Our parents have more than enough of relations premarital and extramarital, of unregistered marriages and unregistered divorces, unwed motherhood and abolished fatherhood. What we all learned from this is that: though there is no such thing as "no-fault divorce", and there is sometimes a designated guilty party – there is no grace in "disallowing" and "forbidding" association and separation if you don't do it on behalf of the victim, but pursue abstract principles and moral values when you do so. Our fathers and mothers have the court of law in their hearts. Behind (or without) registrations and weddings, they saw full well the underlying "principle": engagement is when a man calls a women his bride, his wife, or his girlfriend, and she responds by calling him her bridegroom, her husband or her boyfriend. Engagement becomes marriage when it's accepted by the head of bride's household, but there is not necessary a formal approval involved: we know our parents well enough to be sure at times that they won't object, and indeed they won't. If a man assures a woman that he is separated from his former wife, we decide whether he's telling the truth, not by state registration or state's court decision or the church wedding being annulled – but he has the right to say so if the "former wife" knows she is "former", and he is lying otherwise. As of the guilty party supporting the innocent party, it happened here all the time before the state could know everything what we earn and actually before the whole "enforcement" business was restarted by the officials. There was more injustice and lawlessness under the false priesthood of Komsomol and the Party then under the alleged "hedonism" and "anarchy".

What do you think of your Federal Reserve? Does it preclude a real gold standard from being reestablished, or does it protect you from the barbaric relief of gold and silver money? Does it help you or hurt you in some "international arena" where every foolish thing happens these days?

We survived the money that failed. Our only national bank accessible to our people, Sberbank, decided to cease payments and steal our deposits (not that I had one personally: I was a child). We had our share of gold confiscation in our thirties, just as you did; this time, there was no forceful confiscation, no imprisonment and no torture, just everything that supposed to be "riches" and "savings" became toilet paper… Well, only the minor part became toilet paper (and the value of toilet paper was not that close-to-zero then as it is now): those of us who believed in Sberbank's security and stability got nothing at all for their digits and records.

Yet there were real money here, liquid enough to serve as medium of exchange. These pieces of paper seemed as good as gold, they were accepted by people, shops and stores, they were saved when we had to prepare for the unknown future – all of this happened when it was a crime, it happened when there was no one to say what a "crime" is, and it happened even after our newly-emerged rulers began to preach the "danger of dollarization" and the importance of having our own "sovereign Russian roubles" – at that time most of those activites started to become illegal according to our State's legislation (our word for "illegal" should normally be translated as "technically illegal" into English to preserve the spirit: that is, "illegal but I don't agree with that alleged illegality").

Each of this pieces have a portrait of your father and your ruler on it, and there was the inscription which read: "In GOD We Trust". Economists in high places fight over currency board and monetary independence, free-floating exchange rates or fixed rates. We the people of icons and statues, got what we didn't deserve: the message on the medium which replaced pictures of Lenin in our hands: there is another king but caesar, there is another GOD but Lenin, and there is a way to escape. When I turned for guidance to your history and your literature, your moral values, your legal traditions and your just and righteous people – that was partially because of that downpayment, not only the money as such, but of the truth: "there is another GOD but Lenin!".

Now let me assert one of my beliefs about your past and your history. Eighty years ago, in 1932 A.D., Franklin D. Roosevelt, your lawful husband and your legal representative under the President of Presidents and the Husband of Husbands, made a motion turning you into the Nation of Fools.

In his marriage oath, he asserted that the only thing you have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. This assertion has met with enough of that understanding and support of the People themselves which was essential for making it a legal covenant under Jesus Christ. I hope that you acquired enough wisdom to say something more instead of mere repeating your words of support again in these critical days.

In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. Our common difficulties concern only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

That's more or less describes our common condition. And I'm that foolish optimist denying the dark realities of the moment: I'm worried but full of hope, I'm troubled but I don't give up, I have no property to lose but this computer and my bible and something even less worth mentioning, I have no gun and no gold except my wedding ring. But I have something to tell you.

Your distress comes from the failure of substance. Actually, you are stricken by a plague of locusts. Yet compared with the perils which your forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, your have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at your doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.

Primarily this is because the rulers of mankind have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, and have not admitted their failure yet, and have not abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court and are rejected accordingly by the hearts and minds of men.

Our common forefather, Adam, had something to do before he ever "tried" any "efforts" in advance of some "goals". He named the beasts of the land, looking for a help meet for him. But there was the Name which was not in Adam's hands to give away, which was in his heart and mind and soul, and the only thing Adam could do with it is recognition or denial, true description or false description, faithfulness or adultery.

O America! your earthly husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt, used to be young and uneducated in the sight of our God. When the Nation was waiting for his oath, he declared that the only thing you all have to fear is the "fear itself", "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror".

Now you know that the meaning of word "God" for your heart, your mind and your soul is, by definition, the answer to the question: Whom shall I fear? It's not the only question, for sure. Whom shall I love? Where shall I have my hope? Who is the Lord of your Nation and all the other Nations on Earth? Who will build your national Houses when you are working on your own houses for your families and your children in order to please Him? Who will guard your Nation even as we are guarding our homes?

Your earthly husband, Franklin the Child declared, first and foremost, that there is a "thing" to fear: fear itself. It's nameless, it's unreasoning, it's unjustified, it paralyzes efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Sometimes, when children wake up early, they see "dark realities of the moment" in their room: nameless, formless and void… Usually they are smart enough to cry, so the father or the mother comes in and turns on the light, and we see that the nameless thing we were afraid of are not really formless, not really dangerous, and it has no inherent paralyzing qualities of its own.

Eighty years ago you named a "being" you are going to fear. Fortunately, we know this thing full well here, living closer than you to the people and the lands living under a similar coventant with this being. Only they have the name for it, as it were not a thing but a person. They call him Allah.

Allah is the valid and perfect translation of the word "god". But this name doesn't instantly point to the sky any more: that's because you are gods too. The music's over, let's turn on the light. It is a god of fear itself, a god of iron curtains, a god of each and every "wall of separation", each and every schism, each and every ism. It's a god of namelessness and unknowledge, a god of looking and being unable to name, a god of smelling and being disallowed to touch, a god of illegal everything and a god of all things illegal. It is a god of drug trafficking and slave trade, a god of abortion and rape, a god of murder and mammon, a god of war and slavery, a god of trading your children's freedom for money, a god of redemption from slavery with another children's life, a god of hostages and a god of paralyzed SWAT teams.

It's also a god of poisoning and a god of blindness: your very language and thinking is littered with the notions erroneously pointing to him. Are you religious "just like his worshippers"? Come closer to me, become secular. Are you secular "unlike his worshippers"? Come and welcome even closer if you want, become Christians. Continue to live under the blue sky and enjoy your life if you don't want "religious propaganda": there is a truth in the assertion that "there is probably no god". THERE IS CERTAINLY NO ALLAH – that's what is already written on your hearts, that's what you should advertise in words whenever you dare – but you don't have to even dare, you can't help testifying to this fact by your actions and your existence and your life. It's counterfeit, powerless and doesn't have worshippers, it has hostages and it relies on their intelligence, their life and their presence, and the fear of your outer people to look into evil, name evil, talk about evil. You received a scary reminder of his harsh gospel 11 years ago. Not one of you believed anything or converted to anything in your heart and in your mind and in your soul. For each woman and each man, before or after that memorial, no one ever converted or believed it, everyone was just scared enough to comply. This way Allah gets a kind of counterfeit omnipresence, making you afraid to look at the sky and each other.

Real God, our Lord Jesus Christ, our Jahweh the Creator and Lawgiver, our common Husband and our President, abhors the prayer in schools when there is even a shade of a notion of "Jahweh or Jesus or Allah" in the children's hearts or in the officials' heads. The notion of Abrahamic religions has a redeeming quality of Abraham's name, and you will soon find that the concept is more meaningful than you could ever expect.

Now it's about time to break your only entangling alliance, o my mother by spiritual adoption, the land of free. You descended into Iraq to find their weapons of mass destruction, and you overlooked the only WMD because it presents everywhere, because it's in your heart as surely as it is in theirs. What do you think of the minorities, having their "rights" and their "wrongs"? In your mind, replace one group of supposed worshippers with a group of hostages, and redo the calculation of your allegiances, applying this principle. When you say "you have the right to your god, just as we do", you confirm the worship of Fear itself, you assure your hostages that their "lord" is the real owner of your land as it is of theirs. Frequently they have families and friends in that remote "lands of slavery", so they can't speak freely, denying the fear of your heart. Saying "there is another God, Yahweh, and Jesus Christ is his son" is not offensive to any slave of the Fear, it is the gospel and freedom and truth. If you are an atheist and still can say something (that is, you somehow evaded the curse of not having access to the Word) – just say "there is certainly no Allah", and that will be fair enough.

I recall seeing a photo of Winston Churchill who showed the sign of "V for victory" – it was posted by my Christian brother together with an argument that it's a sign of satan, a sign of a devil with two horns. Churchill's relation (alleged or real) with Aleister "the satanist" Crowley made the thesis credible enough that my brother decided to praise Hitler for fighting the Allies (he was also a monarchist and a traditionalist, and the countries of Axis had some understandable appeal to him).

Now I know the true meaning of this sign. Just like the horn of a unicorn in the middle ages pointed at the unity of the Father and the Son, "V for Victory" proclaims the Gospel: "There is another King". You have a way of death, a web of social sanctions and the state laws, and you're endlessly trying to escape it, or perhaps to manipulate it? "There is another way, the way of Life".

You have the army of your own sons and daughters in a foreign land? Worship the god of fear itself, order them to burn their Bibles. Next time, send them forth unarmed, it would be smarter than what you done. But doing a foolish thing does not invoke eternal sanctions, and it's neither a desecration nor a sacrilege (as long as you own the Bibles you burn). I'm also the father, and I can say that when my daugter does a foolish thing, a good explanation is more than enough to get over it.

Burning Qu'ran is unnecessary and foolish: when you have a complete description of a criminal, his portrait and the record of his modus operandi, do you burn it at will? Rather, translate it and reprint it, illustrate it and comment it, and don't forget to add BANISHED or perhaps NOT WANTED in front of its content. Study "islamic theology" to know your former enemy and laugh at its foolish face, which was your distorted reflection when you were afraid of it. What is the uninformed consent? What is blackmail? What is the army of hostages, the army of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, or else… you'd better not name what happens"?

Allah is the god of legislative homosexual rape, of building a social structure on fear and the alleged clean/unclean separation. Come to our Russian prisons, visit the people and look at how they live: you find that the pariahs of their community, when it's structured at all, are the victims of homosexual rape. Thieves and murderers and actors and performers and even lawful innocent people have some authority and some rights there, surely, but the whole social order is established around that invisible wall of separation. The "curse" of once being raped extends to anyone who shares the same cup with the unclean. The most powerless of our churches, when she serves a common cup of wine (or uses a common spoon) in our prisons, is countercultural and ground-breaking when it refuses to serve a separate cup or a separate spoon to pariahs. Did you know that the husband, while he lives, is the law for his wife? Then what happens when you impose the law on a man or woman against her consent?

For the land of war, that is, for your side of the iron curtain, allah is the god of impersonal representation, of "building the system that works well by the rules imposed in an impersonal way". Allah is the god of "I was just following orders", that is – I was just a hostage, don't blame me.

When you bribe away an official imposing a corrupt "social order", be it a state legislation, a campus rule, or a speech code – don't serve two masters at once, the god of fear and the God of Liberty. When you're in clean conscience and you intend no wrong, invite the official into your home, share the food with him and explain your position and your reasons, and invite him openly to conspire with you in the true order of yours. When he accepts the gift or simply agrees with your reasoning, let him know that he is not spreading corruption, but justice, and the gift is a retainer for his services as an attorney before the people and the protector before the impersonal machine of rules and regulations.

Allah is the god of registering the events which did not happen, the god of reporting crimes before the crimes happen, the god of administering punishment for potential crimes, the god of slippery slope, the god of looking into the abyss and being scared and paralyzed. As Nietze rightly announced, Allah is dead.

Look at your current boyfriend, America – he is your mirror. He is not acting from his evil heart or conspiracy, he is acting as the lawful representative of yours in the eyes of the God of Truth. You are currently the nation of fools, and when he is a president of fools, what do you expect him to do? Is it wise to be smart when you represent fools? Nay, it is against the constitution.

I'm a fool, so I'm on the same level with you, o America, and with you, Mr. Barry Obama. In the only true reality, there are no top-down hierarchies and no pyramids and no pharaohs. There is a big steppe of the Earth, and the wonders of science and engineering and the gift of languages enables me to be omnipresent enough to meet you, in my writing from the other side of the globe, from the former land of war and slavery to the land smelling war and slavery. I have enough experience of lawful and merciful dealing with my mother's husbands, former and future husbands included, regardless of their professed creed, their religiosity or secularity, their papers and their registrations, their country of origin and their race. We never meet in person, but I have a couple of close friends, Ruben Enikolopov and Maria Petrova, who lived in your land and enjoyed its fruits and its freedom, and who also have seen you in Moscow giving the message of hope and change. Now I'm not a district attorney like Sonya Sotomayor wanted to be when she watched Perry Mason movies. I'm your Perry Mason, investigating the crime of manstealing and slave trade, to provide a possibility of restoration and the verdict of "not guilty". When kidnapping is discussed in the court, immunity can be granted for minor offences, as Sonya surely knows full well. I can't forgive you on behalf of my mother America, but I'm ready to ask the court for the immunity – we don't discuss lies, theft or even collateral damage of lifes and property when Liberty is at stake.

Some of your allegedly conservative opponents, Mr. Obama, were foolish enough to bring up the argument that made me want you to be the President of the United States. They said that "your christian upbringing was no significant difference from a typical Muslim upbringing", or something like that. Thus denying the name of Christ, they became fools, and I suddenly thought that you are qualified to represent a nation like this. Personally I think that you have tasted both kinds of upbringing, and maybe the Christian one was masquerading as atheistic or secular part of the time. You have shown some skills of allah's school up to this day, fearing one group or another, one conspiracy or another, one social layer or another. In order to remain powerful and merciful, it seemed to you, you have to restrict freedom and impose your orders no matter what, and I'm far from holding the hostage responsible for what he was forced to do.

Now tell my mother, don't you be silent: if you have tasted both the "upbringing" under Allah and the christian childhood, do you feel the difference between them – yourself? And you surely have tasted the wine of Christian marriage, now – perhaps you do feel the difference here?

You have a great device in your heart, which is your true iPhone and your true teleprompter – and it is not something explosive or dangerous. It's your true "think different", true hope for a true change. Here on the sky, we have your true birth certificate, and it says "christian", like you surely know. The question is, are you going to deny it before the court, or confirm it? If you are a Christian, there is no condemnation in being radical and all that stuff, there is no guilt of earthly association, and there is no lose of lawful power involved in accepting the truth – in fact, the only true Community Organizer we received in Pentecost is ready to empower you just as surely as your fear is paralyzing you. Are you ready to admit that you serve Jahweh and Jesus Christ the Son of God, in their eternal unity? Because you do serve them, whether you want it or not. Currently we are all serving Him as a team of fools – and he needs us in this role as well as in the others.

If you are still a hostage, remember that there is no conspiracy more powerful than ours – the conspiracy of Fools with the Beginning of Wisdom. I suppose you heard that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The god of fear, however, is not the beginning of anything, it's the god of crime and punishment without repentance and restoration.

Now I'm ready to launch my Weapon of Mass Restoration, my transcontinental two-edged sword. This time, it's not going to separate you, o my dear mother and her husband. It's going to separate the bombshell around your heart from your heart itself.

When my old mother Russia was in a concentration camp, her prisoners had a hope for the American grace in the form of a nuclear bomb: just to end the unjust law and order, that is, lawlessness and disorder, not the disorder of unconstrained human heart but the anarchy of fear and separation. During my school years, we all learned how to behave when a missile is known to be approaching – these instructions were summarized by the people in this way:

Wrap yourself into a white sheet and slowly creep to the cemetery.

My message to you, o my mother and my young step-father, is of another kind.

Recall that you are already wrapped in the holy Name of Jesus Christ, then wake up and go from your death bed to your homeland, trusting in your true Transportation Security Administration of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We don't check papers and we don't discern faces. We don't believe in social orders as machines, the kaleidoscope of the walls of separation showing its images in the darkness of Fear. We have local personal allegiances and they make lawful hierarchies, they are the basis of our faithfulness, and we know how to disagree respectably and disobey lawfully. You don't have to destroy anything, and you have enough power to help the restoration -- even the school of destruction can help. Ask Saul Alinsky how to overturn unlawful rules and regulation of the dead; whenever he becomes Paul Alinsky, he has something to tell you concerning the bubblegum. We have another part of this story here: in our state-regulated education shrines, where everyone was almost equally poor in any kind of real and surreal money, we the pupils have the medium of exchange. After 1980's Olimpics in Moscow, there was more American bubblegum here than before, and we the pupils begun to use… well, the bubblegum was "good money", so we usually ate them -- ask an economist about the Gresham's law. But papers from its empty packages were kept and used as a medium of exchange, and also as a tool of gambling. They had a lot of images on them, explaining diversity and unity to us, a bunch of monolingual children which were unable to translate or understand anything like "E Pluribus Unum".

Good bye, o America! I wish you good luck – that is, blessings by our common Father – while you look at your true Bridegroom in Heaven. Rest in freedom, and I hope your earthly husband will take a good care of you.

Good bye, Barry! Our common Federal Reserve in the Sky is full of gold, and you can't be bothered to audit it, and you're not powerful enough to end it.

We'll be in touch anyway – in one true God, the God of Richard Feynman who Fixed Radios by Thinking and tought me Physics by Writing Books, the God of Martin Gardner and the Taste of Mathematics, the God of Jews and Gentiles, the God of Sabbath for Man, and not Man for Sabbath, the God of Divorce and Remarriage, the God of Jim Morrison and Alabama his Mother, the God of Pink Floyd, the art of wall-breaking and needing no education, the God of Tokyo Rose and christian warriors, the God of Romans and Greeks, the God of Philosophy and Liberal Arts, the God of the Sun governing days and not the Party rationing the Saving Daylight, the God of There is Another Way, the God of Ayn Rand and Taggart Transcontinental, the God of USSR and its Railroads where my Grandfather worked when he was on Earth, the God of John Lennon Imagining There Is No Allah…

We are approaching one truly international holyday, April's Fool Day – when no one following news can tell whether they are true or false. That's a good thing for my weapon to go under the radars of fear. I'm going to launch it with a time shift through my brother in Christ, Bojidar Marinov.

Good bye, Fear! I'm afraid we won't be in touch for long. Sorry to say that, but I'm somewhat happy to say "good riddance" to the god of TSA, SSN, ITIN, IRS, INS, RIAA, MPAA, H1B… – I'm a fool and I can't bother to learn how to name these things and how to interact with them. Perhaps you, o Fear, have another temporal residence in Unlawful Nations: this alliance is not that powerful today, but perhaps you can stay there before they drive you out by themselves. Frankly, I can't name any land or any heart where you could reign any more. Maybe you repent, and whenever we need more wisdom, you will come again here as the converted Fear of God. But don't try to take hostages again: we learned enough to resist it, thanks to the wound of Nord Ost and the wound of Beslan. Negotiate with our real God, the God of Another Way, if you want some swines for your final supper – but they won't be human swines anyway, because there is nothing unclean there.

For now, you owe Jahweh a restitution for your crimes. You owe us the color of green – the color of Saint Patrick and his free Irish children, the color of caring for the Earth without unlawful enforcement of dead letters.

You owe Jahweh the Moon. In your favourite style, you are masquerading as both "being the moon god" and "not being the moon god", hinting at yours being a god of slavery on the dark side and a god of fear on the bright side.

You owe Jahweh that star of David, the symbol of our common inheritance of amazing grace and just law, our common exodus. I can't blame a creature with an intellect of a child for stealing, more than I could blame the adults who were tricked into believing you – and that would mean I should include myself.

In any way and all this things, let our Father of lights be the judge.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost

Anton Kovalenko,

Elektrostal, Moscow Area, Russia.

The Eve of the April's Fool Day, Anno Domini 2012.