Introduction: Patriotism
We define patriotism as the love of our country in its God-created beauty. This has nothing to do with the blindly fanatical promotion of man-created States, institutions and menacing armies as ‘better’ than others; patriotism has nothing to do with hatred for other countries, for in patriotism there is nothing negative, only positive. We have always maintained that love for other countries, inter-patriotism, is a virtue, but that it comes from love for one’s own country, where it was God’s will for us to be born. Indeed, we say that he who does not love his own country cannot love other countries, just as he who hates himself also hates others. This we can see throughout history in the stories of one pathological and self-obsessed ruler after another, from pagan Roman Emperors to Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Napoleon, the Kaiser, Lenin, Hitler and those more recent.
The Origin and Spread of Nationalism
We define nationalism as a secularist lack of love for other countries, which originates in ignorance of them and arrogance with regard to one’s own country. Modern nationalism was born in 16th century Western Europe as a secular reaction to the oppressive centralism of Papist Europe. Nationalism was thus born in the Protestant countries of Europe, the classic case being England, whose greedy ruler made himself head of his own national ‘Church’, a department of state, a secular institution or ‘establishment’ with a religious exterior. However, nationalism soon spread outside Protestant England, Holland, Scandinavia and Lutheran German principalities to Roman Catholic countries like Spain, Poland, Ireland and France which were soon infected. Ultimately, the evil of nationalism, evident in Western European nations, small but powerful through their technological superiority, was to result in the Satanic, inter-tribal slaughter of the First and then the Second World Wars.
Nationalism in the Orthodox World
However, it was not only the Protestant and then Roman Catholic world that underwent the inherently secular process of nationalism. Later, in the 18th century in Russia and in the 19th century the Orthodox world also underwent the same process, especially in the Balkans, thus repeating the ‘Balkanisation’ that had already affected Western Europe, causing warfare and strife there. As a result, a Council in Constantinople on 10 September 1872 qualified such nationalism, or ‘phyletism’, as a heresy: the Church, it said, should not be confused with a single nation or race. This phyletism affected the whole Orthodox world, but above all the Patriarchate of Constantinople and other areas that had been under the Turkish Yoke (Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania). However, in recent generations we have seen the same intolerant, racist phyletism in the Ukraine, Finland, North America (‘the OCA’), Estonia and in France and England (‘the Paris Jurisdiction’).
Two Remedies for Nationalism
Since 1945, Western Europe and the Westernised world have found a remedy for the spiritual disease of nationalism in another spiritual disease: Globalisation (= Americanisation). This is in fact a return to the old Roman Papist centralism of the Middle Ages, a return to the oppressive pyramid of feudalism under the mask of the futurist Big Brother, with its universal electronic surveillance, satellites and drones. By destroying local diversity, globalisation, or globalism, has tried to project a homogeneous, ‘one size fits all’ uniformity onto the whole ‘Mcworld’. At last the Orthodox world has been provided with an alternative remedy. This is the Trinitarian ideal of ‘Holy Rus’, the multinational Inter-Orthodox Eurasian Confederation led by the Russian Federation. Belarus and Kazakhstan already belong to this and the Ukraine, last week on the verge of bankruptcy and social chaos, for which the illusory, US-devised, bankrupt EU puppet had no remedy, is now also finding an alternative in it.
Conclusion: Inter-Patriotism
Once Orthodox countries like Serbia, Moldova and Georgia have not yet fallen to the EU, though their political elites are being sorely tempted by EU bribes, as the elites of many other countries before them, including in the early 1970s the UK political elite. The hope now is that other countries like Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic States can also free themselves from the EU and join the Confederation, first overcoming their nationalism. As for the nations of Western Europe (which includes Galicia in the westernised far west Ukraine), only minorities there defy the pride of secularist nationalism. However, beyond them there are Syria and the Middle East, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australasia, where Orthodox minorities are also allying themselves with the Trinitarian ideal of Unity in diversity: Inter-Patriotic Holy Rus.