Monthly Archives: April 2014

A Ukrainian Europe?

Over the last 23 years, ever since the Ukraine was invented to unite completely different peoples, 80% of whom speak fluent Russian and not one of the many regional dialects of ‘Ukrainian’, we have seen its situation go from fragile to disastrous. In the Galician far west the descendants of pro-Nazi Poles have been united with the descendants of anti-Nazi Russians in the south, east and north. As for the centre, known to history as Little Russia, some are not quite sure of their identity. As for the south-west, formerly Czechoslovakia, formerly Hungary, the heroic Transcarpathians (Carpatho-Russians) have declared their independence and look to Moscow for freedom from provincial Ukrainian tyranny. Transdnestrians by the Moldovan border do the same. Meanwhile EU Poland, Hungary and Romania are handing out passports to any who can claim their ancestry.

Bankrupted, ravaged and asset-stripped by a generation of mafioso oligarchs, many young Ukrainians have been forced to emigrate, above all to Russia and Belarus, but also to Poland, Slovakia, Western Europe and Canada. Many older people eke out a living on absurdly small pensions and plots of land, thanks to which they can feed themselves. The ‘thirdworldization’ of the Ukraine, once one of the greatest industrial hubs of the Soviet Union and the pre-1914 breadbasket of Western Europe (80% of Britain’s wheat then came from the Ukraine), has reached crisis point.

Its US puppetmaster is now attempting to turn the Ukraine into a colony, a sub-department of the CIA, ruled by an unrepresentative, self-proclaimed oligarch junta in Kiev, come to power through terrorist violence. The result is chaos and the open revolt of its peoples. Just as in puppet Iraq, Baghdad rules nothing outside a small central area, and in puppet Afghanistan, Kabul has no control over the vast mass of that country, so too the self-appointed regime in Kiev has never controlled the peoples it claims to rule and even its armed forces disobey it.

In all this, however, the Ukraine only resembles the European Union, beneath whose bloodied flag the coup d’etat against the democratically-elected government of the Ukraine took place last February. Thus, just as the east, south, north and parts of the west of the Ukraine want freedom, so too the east, south, north and parts of the west of the European Union also want their freedom. The south and the east of the Ukraine, called by history ‘New Russia’, have been bankrupted, indebted and asset-stripped by the centre (Kiev) and are resisting, restless and angry. So too the south and the east of the EU, bankrupted, indebted and asset-stripped by the centre (Berlin), are resisting, restless and angry. They are saddled by unpayable debts – though less unpayable than the $17 trillion of debts of the USA. This is a noose around the neck of every US citizen, especially if China, Russia and India decide to launch a new reserve currency.

Thus, most of the east of the EU, the Baltics, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus, wants to leave the EU. In fact, their peoples never wanted to join it; it was only their corrupted and bribed politicians and their friends in the brainwashing media that wanted that. There was never any popular consent. Indeed, Cyprus even tried to do what the Crimea has done and escape. Its German owners would not allow that.

Thus, most of the south of the EU, bankrupt Italy, southern France, Spain and Portugal, is tired of Berlin’s exploitation.

Thus, the peoples of the north, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, and even Norway and Iceland, are disturbed at their elite-imposed Islamization and distressed by the corrupt and anti-democratic ways of the unaudited EU.

Thus, in the west of the EU, Ireland resembles Transcarpathia (Carpatho-Russia) in the south-west of the Ukraine. Once a colony, Ireland attained independence through armed struggle, but then became a colony again, bankrupt and feudally dependent again. At least Transcarpathia has declared independence from the US-installed, provincial Fascists in power in Kiev, though its national leader, Fr Dimitry Sidor, has been kidnapped by right-wing thugs sent from captive Kiev.

Thus, the centre of the Ukraine (known to history as Little Russia) is undecided. Benelux, northern France, Germany and Austria in the center of the EU are also undecided. (Though Switzerland is definitely decided – against the EU). The imposition by the elite under a propaganda fanfare of the inflationary euro is resented. The French National party want to drop it and two thirds of Germans never wanted it in the first place.

In the extreme north-west of the EU, even the peoples of the UK were never consulted about membership of the EU. In that they are similar to the people of the west and north-west Ukraine in Galicia and Volhynia. Although the centre of US influence in Western Europe, like Galician Ukraine, the peoples of the UK object to colonial rule from Brussels/Berlin. It does not want to be part of a Europe which includes its south and east.

The Establishment of the EU is symbolized by its unelected President, an unknown Belgian. That Establishments imposed itself anti-democratically on the peoples of Europe. Even the limited referenda it granted were repeated until they obtained the ‘right’ answer. Now that Establishment is opposed by right and left alike, standing in an increasingly narrow, self-proclaimed centre – so narrow that it increasingly looks like a bottleneck.

Movements of the popular national right in Europe (excluding militants, extremists and marginals from the far right) want their national sovereignty and identity back from the neocon transnational elite. That is why in French such movements are called ‘souverainistes’.

Movements of the popular national left in Europe want their jobs and their human dignity back from the neocon transnational elite, who stole their money and asset-stripped and indebted the people to anonymous banksters. That is how they created a huge underclass of unemployed or precariously employed, ‘the precariat’, on zero hours and temporary contacts, or ‘workfare’.

Both left and right resist the global elite. They resist through defending and reclaiming their national sovereignty and Christian identity from the Islamization (sectarianism) imposed on them. They resist through defending and reclaiming their jobs and savings from the creditization (indebtment) imposed on them.

They resist the global elite which has caused interminable chaos in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

They resist the global elite because they still have the vestiges of Christian culture, whereas the mocking and patronizing elite is openly anti-Christian.

They resist the global elite whose aim is to elect from their midst a World Ruler to be enthroned in Jerusalem.

Just like free Ukrainians, those of the peoples of Europe who are still free resist, and with the support of resurgent Russia, in whose Christian roots they share. For the choice that the peoples of Europe, like the peoples of the Ukraine, face is not primarily political and economic, ethnic or social, but spiritual: between Christ and Antichrist.

Myths about Contemporary Russia

Introduction

The Western ruling elite in both North America and Western Europe is rattled. For the first time since 1917, its totalitarian monopoly of ‘liberal’, ‘West is best’, mythology is being challenged – by Russia and to the pleasure of the real international community, i.e. of everyone outside the narrow Western world. In Western Europe the elite is also frightened by the possible results of the European elections on 22 May, after which it may lose a lot of money. It is therefore pulling out all the stops and resorting to the demonization of and lies about Russia – its stock in trade that goes back to before 1917. Its favourite trick is, in its usual racist way, to present Russia as ‘Asiatic’ and ‘barbarian’- much to the disgust of real and ever more powerful Asian nations.

In reality the problems of Russia of the last 300 years have all been caused by the toxic waste that has been exported to it from Europe. Thus, revolutionary terror and Napoleon came from France, the concentration camp from Britain, Marx from Germany (with Ricardo’s economics, French socialism and Hegel and Feuerbach’s philosophy) and Hitler from Austria, with four aggressive Western invasions of Russia between 1812 and 1941, not counting the fifth one in today’s Ukraine…Here are five myths currently being plugged by the Western elite and the media that is feudally dependent on it, despite the fact that many Western people (‘the plebs’) do not believe them at all.

1. Russia produces nothing and is no more than a Third World country with oil and gas

Oil and gas represent only 10% of Russian GNP – as against 41% for the corrupt and fanatical Western ally Saudi Arabia. Agriculture is 5% of Russian GNP (third largest exporter in the world for wheat despite a difficult climate), industry represents 28% of the economy and the service sector represents 66%. It is also the world’s third largest producer of electricity (nearly twice that of France, where 80% of it comes from nuclear power) and it controls one third of the world’s nuclear construction industry. It has a monopoly of launch equipment for the international space station, has the second largest navy in the world, its search engine Yandex has been ahead of Google and the Kaspersky anti-virus is No 1 in the world. Third World!

2. Russia has never in 1,000 years had any system of rule except totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is an invention of the West – as was feudalism. The Empire of the Tsars was not absolutist (that was French) but, in its best moments, a people’s monarchy. Serfdom, as such, was introduced by the German Empress Catherine II on the basis of Western feudalism and lasted just over 100 years. It was abolished peacefully a few years before the USA abolished slavery and that at a cost of 600,000 dead. You only have to compare the way Russia treated the native peoples of Siberia and the way the USA treated their cousins in North America, massacring them and packing them into concentration camps called ‘reservations’. As regards the Western record in Latin America, Africa and Asia, we only have to think of Spain in Latin America, Portugal in Brazil and Africa, Belgium in the Congo, Britain in India, Tasmania, Canada, the Sudan and South Africa, Germany in what was South-West Africa and France in Algeria, Madagascar and Indo-China. The Orthodox Church always counterbalanced any excesses of the Russian State and the Tsars were forced to obey the Church’s morality – unlike today’s Western presidents and prime-ministers. Today Russia is no less democratic than France, though President Putin is seven times more popular than President Hollande; Western Europe accuses Russia only because it needs a mythical enemy so that its elite can profit from the US umbrella.

The demographic deficit

After the fall of the Soviet Union, so mismanaged by the atheist Gorbachov, and the disastrous decade of Westernisation (and the oligarchs it produced) that followed under the provincial drunkard Yeltsin, there was a huge fall in the birth rate from 1.89 in 1991 to only 1.17 in 1999. However, with abortions falling by one third between 1990 and 2006, since 2009 the population has been rising and in 2012 the birth rate stood at 1.73, higher than in the corrupt and bankrupt European Union. Life expectancy has also risen sharply in recent years and it now stands at 69 and is still on the rise. The great increase in prosperity since 2001 has helped enormously: between 2000 and 2013 the average salary rose sixfold (though, true, there has been some inflation), the rate of poverty went down from 35% to 13% (now lower than in many Western countries) and unemployment stands at only 5.5%, less than half of the EU average. (Of course none of this is true in the westernised Ukraine, where corruption and oligarchs have ruled for 23 years, ever since the country was invented). Seeing the demographic suicide of Western Europe, its selfish ‘childfree’ (not childless) propaganda, its ‘culture of death’ of abortion and euthanasia (John Paul II), and the consequent Muslim takeover, Russia has reacted. For example every child born there means a benefit for the family of 7,000 euros. Here the Russian Church has played a great role in promoting marriage.

The Gulag continues

The Gulag does not exist. Thus, in Russia there are 800,000 in prison – compared to 2.5 million in the USA, where one American in 140 is in jail. In the USA the death sentence exists (500 executions in Texas alone since 1976) – not in Russia, as was the case for most of the period under the Tsars. It was Western Communism, like Western Nazism, that murdered – the main victims by far being Russians themselves. And in Russia there is no Guantanamo.

Russia is immoral

‘Russians are cruel, thieving, dishonest and unable to cope with freedom’. The history of the prejudices of Western anti-Slavism goes back to the mass murderer ‘Blessed’ Charlemagne (ask the Slavic Wends) and the massacres by Western ‘crusaders’ in Jerusalem, New Rome (‘Constantinople’) and in Moscow in 1612. Little wonder that Hitler’s racism was not only against the Jews, of whom he slaughtered at least 5 million but even more against the Slavs, of whom he slaughtered 30 million. Perhaps his violence goes back to the Thirty Years War, when a third of the population of Germany was slaughtered, or is it to the Inquisition, or to the French Revolution or to the two World Wars that Europe started and spread? It seems strange that Russian crime should be targeted by Western countries where crime has tripled since the 1960s. Surely this is a result of Western materialism (the same philosophy that lay behind the Communism that the West exported to Russia), which makes people dependent on ever greater consumerist wants of material things, which has produced the contemporary Western spiritual desert.

Conclusion

At present the Western ruling elite and their feudal media are intent on spreading hatred of Russia. Would the West not be better off co-operating with Russia for its survival, so that it can cast off the shackles of neocon feudal colonialism, save family life from its culture of death and so recivilise itself with the values of bimillennial Christianity, which is still alive in Russia? Or does it really prefer to listen to its grasping and egoistic elite and their subservient and ignorant media and walk the path of hatred, jealousy and suicide? There is the choice.

The Tortuous Path of Western Religion in the Global World

This April’s canonization of two twentieth-century Popes of Rome has only served to underline the gulf between the Church and Roman Catholicism as regards the criteria for sainthood. The first pope to be canonized, a jocular Italian peasant, and the second, a highly politicised Polish nationalist philosopher, were both enemies of the Orthodox Church. The first took part in anti-Orthodox activities in Bulgaria, the second in Yugoslavia and the Ukraine. This is no surprise, since both have been canonized by a Jesuit pope, who is a form backer of Galician Uniats and last weekend received the self-appointed Premier of the Ukraine, the scientologist and promoter of anti-Ukrainian terrorism Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

The present Pope’s support for the disintegration of the Ukraine probably comes under US orders, following President Obama’s recent visit to Rome, just as John Paul II made himself available to the US to help bring down the Soviet bloc in the 1980s. It was under the latter’s pontificate in particular that Catholicism was penetrated by pedophile priests, whose activities were camouflaged by Rome. Naturally, the double canonization in Rome was attended by a bishop from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, who sat with the other Uniats, not with the Protestants (Lutherans and Anglicans). In this way that Patriarchate can see what its fate will be if it does entirely join Rome – it will become just another Roman Catholic colonial subculture.

These papal canonizations, like that to follow later this year, illustrate the confusion of the Vatican of the last fifty years. It is not exact to say that Catholicism has lost the way; rather it has found a multitude of false ways. As they say: when you stop believing in something, you will believe in anything. The gap between official Vatican proclamations and what ordinary Catholics actually believe has grown and grown. However, the overall trend of the last fifty years has been towards a Catholicism that is ever more secularized, protestantized, politicized, turned away from God, symbolized by their priests who now turn their backs to God during their services and face the world instead. The Catholic merger with the world is also symbolized by the ‘modern’ ‘design’ of its church buildings, furnishings and vestments. And the modern designs of the 60s and 70s look very old-fashioned in today’s post-modern world.

Overall, Catholicism has shown a loss of the sense of the sacred, of Divinity, of holiness, a movement towards protestantization and so secularization. In the face of that, many of the most devout Catholics – as well as many ordinary Catholics – have abandoned Catholicism, since they have felt abandoned by their own hierarchy. Catholicism has lost the Western world. Its reality today is in Latin America, Africa and Asia, though here too there are losses, for example Brazil, where 40% of the population is said to have joined Protestant sects. Of the future it is hard to speak. The sectarian Muslim world and Hindu India remain mysteries, though it is said that by 2030 China will be the largest Christian nation on earth. And there, as everywhere else, the spiritually sensitive and the historically-minded will see through Western mythology and find their way to the Orthodox Church.

As a result of the collapse of Catholicism in the Western world, over the last two generations right-wing Catholics have joined the Catholic traditionalists; as for the moderate and the younger generation, faced with the spiritual desert of the West, they have been drawn into any number of sects and cults. There they seek a sense of belonging. The degeneration of modern Catholic worship, characterised by infantilism, the entertainment mentality, and the lack of spiritual understanding are reflections. They are reflections of the modern consumer mentality. This has conditioned and shaped modern Catholicism, like modern Protestantism, making it into a ‘cafeteria religion’, a ‘pick and mix’ consumerist supermarket. Today Western religion faces a civilizational dead end; the thread of its manmade life has been unwound. If the West wants to continue as a spiritually-based entity, and so a morally-based entity, it will have to look outside its apostatic self for sustenance.

On the Failure of Anglican Converts to Produce an Orthodox Culture

Introduction

It is now fifty years since Anglicans began to convert to the Orthodox Church in this country. In that time most have failed to incarnate themselves into Orthodox culture and then transmit that culture to succeeding generations, children and grandchildren, instead forming only small, short-term, ex-Anglican ghettos. Now hybrid Anglican Orthodoxy is dying out and disappearing. What went wrong? We believe that we can see four reasons for this failure, two of which are sociological, two of which are theological. What are they?

a) Sociological Reasons

1. Numbers

First of all, it must be said that only a relatively small number of Anglicans have entered the Orthodox Church in the last fifty years. I remember that at the Effingham Conference in 1975 I was told by one in authority at Ennismore Gardens (the jurisdiction of the late Metr Antony Bloom, who formed a self-justifying ‘mini-diocese’ out of ex-Anglicans) that 1,000 English people had been received by that date, the vast majority from an educated Anglican background. Since then, in the 1980s, a number of Anglicans were received by a dissident archbishop into the local diocese of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and, in the 1990s, some 300 were received into the Western European diocese of the Patriarchate of Antioch. But even so, it is unlikely that numbers of converts ever reached even 3,000, probably fewer at any one time. And this figure does not take into account numbers lapsing through being received prematurely, back into Anglicanism, into nothing, or else into Greek sects, or else dying of old age.

There have been several reasons for these small numbers. First, there has been the problem of language – most Orthodox use their native languages (i.e. not English) in Church services. This tends to create immigrant ghettos and does not reach down into English society, attracting only the well-educated and well-travelled. For example, some Greek parish priests, and in fairness representatives of all jurisdictions have done this, have shown hostility and sometimes downright rudeness to English people interested in the Orthodox Faith. Unedifying anecdotes abound. There is also the fact that after over some 900 years of being cast out of this country, the Orthodox Church has had to start here again from scratch as a poor immigrant Church, without funding, without church buildings, without infrastructure. This lack of infrastructure has discouraged many Anglicans because of the mentality described below

2. The Establishment Mentality

Anglicans generally suffer from an Establishment mentality. As an inherent and wealthy part of the Establishment, they usually expect everything to be done for them by their State authorities. As a State Church, they often suffer from the syndrome that expects everything to be provided. The problem of Anglican and Anglo-Catholic clericalism (‘the clergy will do it’) only makes the problem worse. This is utterly different from the Orthodox Church, where the impoverished faithful (priests and laity) have to do everything for themselves and can expect no financial or practical support from their impoverished bishops. This Anglican Establishment mentality, often public school and very patronising to ‘poor Eastern European peasants’, also leads to a class-based exclusiveness. This is basically racist and hypocritically but deliberately snubs those who do not belong to it, not only Non-English people, but also English people but who are not of Anglican and Establishment background.

b) Theological Reasons

1. A Weak Dogmatic Consciousness

One of the main characteristics of Protestantism (and clearly this includes Anglicanism despite its outward pretence of catholicity, as invented in the 19th century) is its weak dogmatic consciousness – in other words, its lack of faith and so lack of spiritual depth. Thus, it has a concept of God, but only the dimmest concept of the Holy Trinity and is not even aware that it confesses the papal filioque (as well as the papal calendar). Thus, it has a concept of ‘Jesus’ (the human nature of Christ), but not of the Son of God, not of the God-man, and therefore not of the Incarnation. In addition it utterly confuses the Holy Spirit with psychic self-exaltation (a confusion that underpins the ‘charismatic’ movement). Indeed, it is difficult to know if modern Protestantism, dependent on Western States and secular cultures, without the dogmas contained in the sign of the cross, believes in anything.

Thus, it is said that 40% of Anglican clergy do not believe in God, let alone in the Holy Trinity, the Divinity of Christ, the Holy Spirit, Providence, the Resurrection, the Ever-Virgin Mother of God, the Saints, the Sacraments and prayer-deepening fasting. Certainly, especially at Easter time, we are accustomed to State-appointed Anglican bishops, let alone the laity, regularly saying that they do not believe in the Resurrection. Thus, for many Anglicans and sadly, ex-Anglicans, the Orthodox Faith appears only to be an intellectual hobby, a piece of snobbish exotica for outward mimicking and ritualism, an upper middle-class debating issue, at best a personal and private theory, at worst pure fantasy. And this problem of a lack of commitment has only been reinforced by another difficulty.

2. Personality Cults

Sadly, the Orthodox Diaspora has been dominated and divided by a series of mainly Russian personality cults. Alpha egos, all claiming some unique revelation or access to Divinity, shrouded in absurd foreign jargon, have split relatively small groups of immigrants and even smaller groups of converts. Each personality, preaching some pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-mystical and pseudo-esoteric cult and claiming holiness, has attracted the inexperienced and, frankly, the ignorant. With most of the real Orthodox world inaccessible because of Communist persecution and most of the Church paralysed because of Communist captivity, and so no checks and balances, such personalities were able to dominate small groups of naïve and inexperienced converts and even hoodwink them, almost hypnotically. This was especially the case in insular Britain, geographically cut off from a sense of catholicity, the wider Orthodox Church world and an overview of the civilizational and cultural reality of the Orthosphere.

Conclusion

Although the above description of the past is pessimistic, we are optimistic about the future. In recent decades atheist regimes collapsed and Churches were freed from their feudal shackles; the old personality cultists with their absurd claims are dead and their books gather dust; masses of immigrants from Orthodox Europe have renewed Church life and the Faith; finally, today’s converts are coming from the vast mass of English people who are not Anglican. They have no cultural prejudices, no baggage, and are therefore receptive to and can commit to genuine Orthodox culture, without simply mimicking it, just as Anglo-Catholics have always mimicked Catholicism. Today, with the services translated and more churches, the Orthodox Church can reach further into English society, far beyond the spiritually superficial and elitist Anglican Establishment, than ever before. In this way, and in this way alone, can an authentic local Orthodox culture be produced in this country, by becoming incarnate in the roots of the land. Reality is taking over from fantasy.

Why There Will be no World War III Yet

The atheist US elite wants to start World War III in the Ukraine, which it has spent 5 billion dollars destabilising and undermining. With a bankrupt economy, such a war would be the ideal solution for the US military-industrial complex run by the neocons. However, nobody in the international community wants it, neither the Russia Federation, nor China, nor India, nor anyone else, including even the war-weary, German-run European Union. Although the illegal US-funded, head puppet in Kiev, Arseniy Yatsenyuk (called ‘Yats’ by his US neocon puppeteers), has unleashed a civil war against the Ukrainain people, he also wants a World War, but he will not get it. Why?

It is now fifteen years since atheist NATO forces bombed Belgrade, murdering and maiming innocent Serbs, and dismembering Serbia. It is six years since the atheist US tried to take over Christian Georgia and invade Christian Russia – and failed. Since then it has gone on to tear apart and persecute Christians in once relatively prosperous Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria, where the capital Damascus, seat of the Patriarchate of Antioch is in ruins and Christian flee for their lives from Muslim fanatics, armed, funded and supported by the atheist West.

Now the US and EU elite is trying to destroy the Christian Ukraine, where the anti-Orthodox Kievan fanatics, who seized power from the democratically-elected government two months ago, have sent, on US advice, a reluctant army, backed by US mercenaries, to slaughter Ukrainian citizens in the New Russian east of the country. The situation in the Carpatho-Russian (Transcarpathian) south-west and Little Russian north is not so different. Only the people of now Russian Crimea are safe from the ravages of the CIA-controlled, separatist junta in Kiev which is now escalating tensions all over the Ukraine.

The bullying bombast, threats and blackmail coming from Washington have isolated the atheist USA elite from the international community as never before. But however much the pathetic propagandists of the venal Western media scream about a Third World War, to terrify and intimidate the naive Western public and demonise Russia, it is not to be. However many warships with missiles the Washington elite sends into the Black Sea, there will be no Third World War. Whatever the devilish scenario dreamed up by the atheist neocons for the Christian Ukraine, there will be no Third World War there. The atheists will bring Antichrist to power otherwise.

May: A Turning-Point?

The European elections of 22 May are fast approaching, falling just three days before elections in the governmentless and rudderless Ukraine, where a separatist, US-installed junta has seized power by violence. This time the European elections may present a real choice to their electorate. Do Europeans want to continue with the Fourth Reich project, a United States of Europe, a museum and graveyard of dead culture, a Europe without Christ, or do they want to stop the project now and even reverse the catastrophe before it is too late?

The true face of the European Union, a despised colony of the bullying, meddling US elite, who are now using Ukrainians as pawns in their giant geopolitical game, has been recognized by ever more Europeans. The former Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, has indicated how mistaken the EU elite is in meddling in the Ukraine. In Hungary the Jobbik National Party is openly supporting Russia against the USA; its leader, Gabor Vona, said in Moscow in 2013 that ‘Russia is defending European values, whereas the EU is betraying them’, and may join the Eurasian Union. In France Marine Le Pen of the National Front, with between 20% and 30% of support, is saying much the same. Even Nigel Farage, the leader of the Independence Party in the UK, says that he admires President Putin, and in the USA such paleocon (definitely not neocon) leaders as Patrick Buchanan and Ron Paul support the new Russia against the Western Sodom.

The European elites are worried. Despite the propaganda daily pumped out by their European Establishment media, ordinary Europeans are resisting. President Putin’s appeal is to the long hoodwinked, native peoples in the depths of Europe, who have for so long been oppressed by their know-it-all, ‘liberal’, Establishment elites. His appeal is to European roots, to those who wish to live in the Christian, Mediterranean civilisation of Europe, at whose roots lies Orthodox Christianity, which is also the only living belief-system in contemporary Russia.

The peoples of Europe do not want to be taken over by sects, either the Protestant variety – and all Protestantism, a splinter of Catholicism, is sectarian because it is humanist and individualist, based on a humanistic ‘Jesus’ cult, not on the God-man. Neither do they want to be taken over by the Muslim sect – and make no mistake Islam, a splinter of Arianism, is also a sect. This is against a sombre background. In just a few days’ time the Vatican machine is intending to canonize two recent popes, John XXIII and John-Paul II. Both of them represent the protestantising current of modern Catholicism and therefore the canonization of that current. This is the current that denies the Divine, the presence of the sacred. Characteristically, they are being canonized by a Jesuit Pope who venerates the awful mass-murdering Uniat Kuntsevich as a saint and is encouraging Uniat aggression in the Ukraine.

It is now for the Orthodox Churches to reject the personality cults surrounding contemporary and recent philosophers of Orthodox academic ‘theology’ and their associated freemasonry, simony and decadence. It is for the Russian Orthodox Church in particular to show Europe what Church Christianity, and not Christian sects, actually is. For decades Europe has been riding a bicycle in the wrong direction. It is time to stop, turn round and go back to recivilization. If it does not, it will suicidally leap, like a mass of lemmings, into the abyss of its own making.

The Purity of Holy Orthodoxy

The title is an expression used in an inspiring conversation with the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus at the ROCOR Council of San Francisco in 2006. Below are a number of recent conversations, both actual and also from correspondence by e-mail, regarding current Church matters, all of which illustrate the search of all conscious Orthodox for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy in the Light of the Resurrection.

Q: What recent changes have marked the Church inside Russia?

A: A generation has now passed since the commemoration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus in 1988 and the world-changing events that followed it, namely the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result of the passing of that generation, in the last few months there have been major changes, with the retirement in Kiev and St Petersburg of both Metropolitans Vladimir and in Minsk that of Metr Philaret. Thus, all three most senior Metropolitans in the Russian Church inside Russia have retired through age and ill health. This is the end of the old generation of those who were connected with the highly controversial and politically-minded Metr Nikodim (Rotov) of the Soviet period.

Those of his disciples who are still alive have all had to adapt since the Jubilee Council of 2000 with its rejection of sergianism and ecumenism and canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Royal Martyrs, and then the acceptance of the reconciliation between the Church inside Russia and the Church Outside Russia in 2007. In other words we are now entering the second generation since the collapse of secularist-atheist ideology in the Russian Lands and so the resurrection by the purity of Holy Orthodoxy of the crucified Church inside Russia. These three senior posts that have changed hands are symbolic of a more general generational change, as Lazarus’ grave-clothes have fallen off.

Q: What do you mean by ‘Lazarus’ grave-clothes’?

A: I liken the resurrection of the Church inside Russia to the resurrection of Lazarus. This was an incredible and astounding miracle, but we should not forget that Lazarus’ grave-clothes did not smell good because the decomposition of his body had already begun. These grave-clothes are represented by the deathly, Soviet and post-Soviet (not yet Russian), phenomena and problems that have accompanied the resurrection of the Church inside Russia.

Q: What phenomena?

A: For example, inside Russia in the 1990s they were so short of priests that they ordained very easily. There were several disasters here with clearly unworthy ordinations and subsequent defrockings, sometimes for sexual misdemeanours, sometimes for financial misdemeanours. I have met such priests – I know what I speak of. Then there was the confusion between Stalinism and the Church and the total misunderstanding or even rejection of the Royal Martyrs – all as a result of the brainwashing from old Soviet propaganda and lies. Then there have been the phenomena of pro-Catholic clergy (like the assassinated Fr Alexander Men, a suspected Uniat) and the events surrounding Paris-style Russophobes, including the modernist, pro-Protestant Fr George Kochetkov, suspended at one point by Patriarch Alexis as a ‘neo-renovationist’, and the recent scandals concerning Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev and Professor Zubov (a close friend of the late Olivier Clement), who both had to be sacked. These are all people who to some extent still live in the Soviet thought world. They have never managed to shake off the spiritual and intellectual impurity of the past and so make the transition from that old-style Soviet conditioning, paradoxically mixed with a superficial Orthodoxy, to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

The same thing happened outside Russia, where the Church inside Russia had several unworthy and scandalous representatives, uncanonically ordained, or other representatives who are now very elderly as they were appointed in Soviet times. Fortunately, the unworthy ones have mostly died out or been moved, some very recently. According to the 2007 agreement the Church inside Russia has to prepare its parishes outside Russia (except in China and Japan, which is part of its canonical territory) for their canonical handover to ROCOR. His Holiness understandably wants this process to go smoothly, without hurting anyone’s feelings, especially those of the elderly. Therefore it will take a generation before it is completed and all moves to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Q: Surely there were impurities in ROCOR also?

A: ROCOR had from the start two wings. One was the political wing whose identity was nationalistic, cultural and anti-Communist rather than simply Orthodox; the other wing, which could be called the ‘Johannite wing’, as represented by St John of Shanghai, was the mainstream of ROCOR. Our view was and is Christian. I can remember how the political and nationalist wing dominated in certain parishes, for example at the former ROCOR chapel in Paris or at the old London Cathedral, as it used to be, when it had several members who worked for MI5. Significantly, those parishes have not survived, but died.

This was because the politically-minded elements refused reconciliation with the Church inside Russia in 2007 or even before. As one of our archbishops said before 2007, reconciliation with the repentant Church inside Russia, the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, would lead to a ‘purification’ of ROCOR. That is exactly what happened. Spiritual impurities such as extremism, phariseeism, sectarianism and fanaticism could not bear reality and love others or the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, and so that political wing left the Church for various sects. Several of the small communities concerned in North America were dominated by individuals who worked for the CIA or the Canadian Secret Services.

Q: What do you make of current political changes in the Ukraine?

A: Two weeks ago the US removed the gold reserves of the Ukraine. Then the CIA took over a floor in the offices of the Ukrainian Secret Police in Kiev and the head of the CIA, John Brennan, went to Kiev on Lazarus Saturday. The head of the CIA does not visit a foreign country without a very good reason. It was no doubt with the intention of hoping to further destabilise the Ukraine and then run it, just as it did countless Latin America banana republics and Italy and Greece after the Second World War.

Sure enough, just after that, the CIA began issuing black propaganda, sheer lies, for example about alleged persecution of the Jews in the eastern Ukraine or that President Putin had tens of billions of dollars in private bank accounts in the West, implying that he was a thief. Naturally the Western-media were fed those lies and naturally reported them. The Times of London (part of the Murdoch tabloid empire) was especially keen to report these slanders and lies.

For instance, as regards the Jews, everybody knows that the Jews were massacred by the Uniat Ukrainian SS in Galicia, the western Ukraine, which welcomed Hitler and where earlier anti-Jewish pogroms had taken place. These are facts of history. Many members of the Ukrainian (= Galician) SS, with Polish nationality, came to live in the UK and especially the US, after World War II. I know; I met some of them 30-40 years ago; some of them were frightening and admitted to killing Jews.

Today, at least 150 US mercenaries, probably being paid for by the CIA, are active against the people of the Ukraine, given that most Ukrainian soldiers and police refuse to use violence against their own people – indeed 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already asked for Russian nationality. Other soldiers in the eastern Ukraine have simply joined the insurrection of the Ukrainian people against the junta. We cannot see this crucifixion of the Ukraine, orchestrated in Washington and Brussels and carried out by their paid puppets in Kiev, as being successful.

Q: Why not?

A: First of all, the Ukraine is bankrupt, which is why the bankrupt US called on the world to ‘save the Ukrainian economy’. But it is too late. Prices are doubling. The poor people of the Ukraine, exploited and impoverished for 23 years by corrupt oligarchs, are spontaneously rising up against the unrepresentative, US-installed, separatist Kiev junta and its terror tactics. That regime seized power from the democratically-elected government in Kiev by violence and murder; now it is facing opposition from the Ukrainian people, who are using the same techniques as it did, in order to seize back power from it in turn. As it is written, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. But there is chaos.

Q: Does any of this have any significance in Orthodox terms? Is it not all political?

A: All of this is highly significant for us. Today’s Russia is at last just beginning to position itself as a spiritual power, opposing the secularist atheism of the Western elite. This was Russia’s traditional role – to protect Christian civilisation both from Western barbarians and from Eastern hordes. Thus, it repelled the Mongol-Tartar yoke, encouraged moderate Islam, repelled the Charleses, Napoleons and Hitlers, liberating both Paris and Berlin, and supported the Church in the Holy Land, the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch. Outside Eurasia Russia has always helped the peoples of the developing world, aiding them to throw off the yoke of colonialism, as did Tsar Nicholas II during the Boer War in South Africa and also in Tibet, Thailand and Ethiopia. Even the Soviet Union merely continued these policies in Africa (the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria), Asia and Latin America.

The Russian Orthodox civilisational model, the Christian one, is quite different from the Western Catholic/Protestant model, which calls itself ‘Judeo-Christian’. Thus, the ‘civilised’ Judeo-Christian West and ‘Western values’ destroyed the native peoples of the Americas and Africa, enslaving them, massacring them like wild animals, sending them into concentration camps (‘reservations’), as the British were still doing in Kenya and Malaysia in the 1950s. Christian Russia, on the other hand, spreading across Eurasia into Alaska, left the native peoples in peace, not enslaving them or systematically exploiting them, but making them into equal allies. Today Western ‘civilisation’, which has reached its final stage of degeneration in Europe and the USA, has come to a dead end by trying to subjugate the whole world to its ruling transnational atheist elite and its corrupt New World Order pseudo-democracy. That, in fact, only gives a false choice – between one atheist oligarch and another.

Only Russia can potentially deliver the world from this civilisational dead end by providing a Non-Western and spiritual alternative. This is a geopolitical challenge and a historic turning-point. The US military-industrial complex, to use Eisenhower’s terminology, has bankrupted itself with its lust for global hegemony and us finally meeting its match in the resurgent Russian Lands. The New World Order, the near-millennial and ever accelerating movement of the Western world to enthrone Antichrist in Jerusalem, has been stopped for the moment.

The Russian Lands (Rus) are, it seems, returning to fulfilling their destiny as the last restraining force in the world, the last bastion of True Christianity. The Ukraine is a litmus paper, an acid test of this. If the Ukraine were to fall, that is, to lose its Orthodoxy, that would lead to the enthronement of Antichrist. The situation is on a knife edge, which is why so many icons in Russia and the Ukraine are at this moment giving off myrrh. We have to understand that today’s division in the Ukraine exists as the result of two historic injustices, which have to be righted

Q: Which are these injustices?

A: These two historic injustices are the events of 1054 and 1917, which are interconnected. In 1054 semi-barbarian, provincial nationalists, filled with the pride, greed and ambition of Roman paganism, rose up in heresy against the Church of Christ, the Christian Roman Empire, and declared that they were the true Church! And persecution followed 1054, with 1204, the sack of New Rome by barbarian Catholics, which in turn led to 1453, the fall of New Rome, not to mention the Western Crusades against the Russian Lands (including today’s ‘Ukraine’), and all the anti-Church horrors that followed, including Uniatism.

The second historic injustice was in 1917 when the descendants of the same provincials performed a coup d’etat in St Petersburg, overthrowing the legitimate government of the Lord’s Anointed on behalf of traitors, cowards and deceivers from inside the country who had lost their Faith. This atheist coup resulted in the martyrdom of the Christian Emperor and the destruction of his Empire, which had been about to end the First European War and liberate Constantinople (so preventing the Armenian genocide), Vienna and Berlin.

The atheist coup of 1917 also culminated in 1991 in the destruction of the legacy of the Christian Empire which had been built up over centuries by the Tsars and their peoples. That 1991 collapse of the legacy of the former Orthodox Empire, the Soviet Union, was inevitable because its atheism had denied the Faith of a Faith-based Empire. Today, in 2014, we are merely seeing the attempt to deepen that geopolitical fall, again using provincial nationalists, this time from the far west of the Ukraine, as its pawns. All that is happening now was prophesied by Solzhenitsyn in 1998. Thus, as he said then, the US and its EU colony want to dismember and separate the Ukrainian part of the remains of the Orthodox Empire, the Empire’s weakest link.

Q: Why is the Ukraine the weakest link of the former Orthodox Empire?

A: The word Ukraine is composed of two ancient Slavonic words meaning ‘at the border’ – though interestingly it could also be translated as ‘on the edge’. It was first recorded in the 12th century in this sense of a narrow strip of borderland and there exists an interesting academic article on its origins and uses for many geographical areas, including the area near Kazan. However, in its modern and non-historical sense – and so a sense completely unknown to the greatest ‘Ukrainian’ writer Gogol – the word ‘Ukraine’ was invented only in the late 19th century by the Hapsburgs. Then it was reused by the Soviets and the Nazis, and today by the US and the EU – by five empires all thoroughly hostile to the Orthodox Church. Indeed, decades ago I met old Ukrainian emigres, adults before the Revolution, who told me that they had never heard the word ‘Ukraine’ until the 1920s, when the atheists brought it in.

The contemporary Ukraine is the weakest link because at present it includes and is now run by never denazified, ultra-nationalist, Uniat Galicia, which until 1939 was part of eastern Poland. This is a schismatic, Catholicised area, which lived under foreign and anti-Orthodox – Polish and Austrian – rule for centuries. The majority of its population, just like that of the rest of Western Europe, now has no concept of uncompromised, unsecularised, non-1054 Christianity, that is, of Orthodox values. Until that area returns to Poland, or else becomes independent, it will continue to create chaos in the rest of the ‘Ukraine’, the 85% of it which is known to history not as ‘the Ukraine’, but significantly, going from east to west, as New Russia, Little Russia and Carpatho-Russia.

Q: So does this mean we should support President Putin?

A: He is only a politician and, like all politicians, he makes mistakes. The Ukraine, in some form or other, has a right to exist as an independent state, just like Belarus. It is an integral part of threefold Rus – Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus are the primary territory of Rus, the three Russias. I suspect that President Putin thinks the same thing. The last thing he wants to have to do is to send in tanks. However, he has to defend his country and Russian people against extreme Western aggression – which is what he did when he restored the Crimea to Russia amid the jubilation of its people. Otherwise the Crimea would have been invaded and occupied by the US military and its ports would have become NATO naval bases, closing off the Black Sea to Russia.

Our objection is not to an independent ‘Ukraine’, but to its domination and division by an anti-Orthodox and unrepresentative, US-installed, puppet clique in Kiev, which would mean that the Ukraine would become just another bankrupt and pillaged Western colony, like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya etc. Divide and rule is ever the Western policy. Our support should go to the martyred Tsar Nicholas II, as he was the last ruler of All Rus, and not to politicians. We support the saints – politicians only count inasmuch as they support the saints. Again we fight for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, not for politicians.

Q: Why has the BBC been so incredibly biased in its reporting of events in the Ukraine?

A: Since the Second World War the UK Establishment elite has become the poodle or colony of the US ruling elite (a relationship that the UK Establishment has flattered itself into calling ‘the special relationship’!) and it has taken no account of the peoples of these islands. The BBC, even more than other Western media, is biased because it is an inherent part of that Establishment elite, in the pay of a secularist-atheist regime and its secret services. It is therefore hostile to Christianity, especially to uncompromised Christianity, that is, Orthodoxy, just as it is hostile to the people, from which it is ever more distant.

The BBC has become particularly subservient to the Establishment since it dared to criticise the Blair regime’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, for which the Blairites sacked the BBC Director General and intimidated BBC journalists. Now the BBC just seems to parrot whatever MI5 and MI6 tell it. I know two BBC journalists who have also worked for the secret services, which infiltrated the BBC from its inception in the 1920s; there must be many more of them.

Thus the BBC talks of the Neo-Nazi Uniat Galician terrorists in Kiev, who overthrew a democratically-elected government as ‘heroes’, but calls the Ukrainian citizens who are rising up against foreign oppression and US mercenaries in the south-west, south, east and north, ‘pro-Russian activists!’ Nor has the BBC reported on the wave of dissatisfaction in Kiev at the doubling of many prices and the very large anti-junta demonstrations in Kiev….

Q: Some would say that your views on the Ukraine are political and that Orthodoxy should be apolitical. What would you say to this?

A: Precisely by saying that they are ‘apolitical’, such people are making a political statement. For them Orthodoxy is, like Protestantism, just a personal belief, a private affair, a mere theory or hobby, which has no public and practical ramifications, no Incarnational consequences. This is a denial of the Incarnation of Christ. What they are saying is that Christianity should have no influence at all on society, including on economics and politics, and should just be a set of private opinions or personal fantasies for futile discussion and theoretical debate.

In the meantime, they say, we should just swim with the secularist-atheist tide of US/EU apostasy, to which such people, some of them nominally Orthodox, are spiritually enslaved. However, our Faith, if it is real, has practical consequences. This is what these secularists refuse. For those who are secular-minded, religion has no importance, but for us what counts is the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. The many icons now giving off myrrh in Russia and the Ukraine only prove the spiritual significance of these current events.

Q: With the events in the Ukraine and the new puritanism of political correctness, will there be a witch-hunt and persecution of Russian Orthodoxy in the West?

A: Not yet. We have not yet come to this point; that will come later. Then we may need Russian passports and in any case have to take refuge in Russia in order to get baptized and practise our Faith. But we are not there yet.

Q: So much for the contemporary situation of the Church inside Russia. What is the situation of the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR? Some say that it no longer has any reason to exist, since the Church inside Russia also has parishes outside Russia. What is the role of ROCOR in this new reality?

A: The Orthodox diaspora, whether in Europe, the Americas or Australia, and of all nationalities, has experienced two temptation or deviations in the last 100 years or so. The role of ROCOR is to avoid them. These are the deviations of the superiority complex and the inferiority complex.

The first deviation is that of the nationalist ghetto, of the superiority complex. This means that the Orthodox Faith is preserved as if in a museum, without any reference to the surrounding world (because of the superiority complex towards it), to the reality in which the children and grandchildren of the immigrants go to school and grow up. This ethos can be called the ‘three-generational syndrome’, since after three generations such a faith dies out, as it no longer even speaks in a language comprehensible to the descendants of the original immigrants. ‘Three generations and you are out’. I have seen countless Russian parishes in France and England disappear completely because of this mentality. It was the fate of the old London ROCOR Cathedral (but this will not at all be the case of the new parish that has risen phoenix-like from its ruins), exactly as was foreseen by many in the 1970s and 1980s, but also of many parishes abroad under the Church inside Russia, which are not independent of Russia, as is today’s ROCOR.

The second deviation is that of the conformist ghetto, of the inferiority complex. This means the ‘let’s swim with the tide’ mentality. Again I have seen countless examples in France and England. ‘Let’s give communion to Catholics, after all they are Christians’ (Paris jurisdiction). ‘Now we are in England, we baptize our children in the Church of England’ (as one well-known Russian academic in Cambridge did). ‘After all, we really do not want to be different from the others’. ‘The English do cremations, so we’ll do them as well’ (the old Sourozh jurisdiction). ‘The Protestants have pews in church, so shall we’ (Greeks and Antiochians). This is the deviation of those of weak faith, the ecumenists, liberals and modernists, who do not really believe in Orthodoxy, just like the Uniats. Indeed, the atmosphere in modernist churches (as sometimes in Finland, for example) is exactly that of Uniat churches.

It is to be noted, however, that, initially at least, both these deviations are psychological, and not at root theological, though in a second phase, they are then justified theologically, clearly by a false theology. ROCOR must avoid both these deviations.
Q: So what is the role of ROCOR? What is authentic Orthodoxy in the Western world?

A: Authenticity is faithfulness to the best, and not to the worst, in both attitudes. This means being both traditional and open, both strict and merciful, but without excesses and extremes, which would mean being unfaithful. We must be faithful to the incarnation and to the spiritual, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Our calling, the establishment of authentic European Orthodox culture, as also of authentic American and Australian Orthodox culture, means being both faithful and international = fruitful. ROCOR has an opportunity to do this, depending on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, that is, inasmuch as we can be both faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church and also be incarnate, settled and permanent here (unlike most parishes dependent on the Church inside Russia). At least, this can be the case, for as long as our spiritual existence is tolerated in the increasingly intolerant West.

Q: Do you have examples of these deviations in the specific situation of Orthodoxy in the UK?

A: Here in the UK we have two ‘renewed’ jurisdictions, those of the Romanian and Russian Churches, which in recent years have increased in size from one parish or a few parishes to many parishes, simply by immigration. However, we also have the older jurisdictions like the Greek, which used to be the biggest but is now beginning to die out, just like the Russian in the 1970s and 1980s. The Russians immigrated in about 1920 and so after 50-60 years, in the third generation, began to die out. The Greeks (more precisely Cypriots) mainly immigrated here in the 1950s and 1960s – 50-60 years ago – and so too are now dying out. This is the ‘three generational syndrome’, which I mentioned above.

There are also two tiny ethnic English jurisdictions under the Patriarchate of Antioch (anti-Greek, anti-Russian, Antiochian’, as some Anglicans say) and the Paris Exarchate (the old Bloomite Sourozh jurisdiction). These are deaneries because they are both only a few hundred strong and mostly composed of ex-vicars and converts from Anglicanism. The Exarchate is particularly weak and small and is tending to die out. They failing to pass on their ‘Anglican-Orthodox’ Faith to children and grandchildren and so are dying. Their possible possible survival can only come from attracting Greeks, Romanians and others, not from attracting Anglicans.

Here I am much more optimistic about the future survival of the Antiochian Deanery, which is rapidly becoming Romanian. However, it still has to ordain clergy who are not ex-Anglican vicars. Here there is a very useful lesson to learn: all ethnic jurisdictions die out – including ethnic English jurisdictions. In other words, successful parishes – of all jurisdictions – are non-ethnic, that is, they live if they accept those whom God sends to them, without ethnic ghettoism, including Anglican or ex-Anglican clubbishness. In other words, they live only if they put the Faith above nationality, only if they put the Kingdom of God first.

Q: Does this mean that the convert movement in the UK has stopped?

A: The convert movement (I would prefer the word ‘trickle’) in the UK was only ever basically in England and it was always very small, concerning at most 2,000-3,000, many of whom were received by various jurisdictions without preparation and soon lapsed. There is still at least one ex-Anglican priest, like the late Metr Antony Bloom, who perhaps is his model, who receives within one week! You can imagine that his turnover is large. In 18 years he has not grown. It is true that the convert ‘movement’ has declined as the old generation of converts dies out, but it has not stopped. What it happening today is that Anglicans have largely stopped joining the Orthodox Church and trying to become Orthodox, which actually they often did not succeed in doing in any case.

Q: Why have they stopped?

Firstly, because Anglicanism is itself dying out, so there are even fewer Anglicans than before. Secondly, because those who are interested generally find Orthodoxy ‘too hard’ and either do not try to become Orthodox (if they try at all) or else give up very quickly, especially if they have been received prematurely by one of the ethnic English groups.

Q: So there are no more converts?

A: There are still converts, but they come more and more from the vast majority of English people who are not Anglicans. However, though there are fewer converts, they are now generally more serious. They are refreshing, blank sheets, without the cultural prejudices and baggage of Anglicanism. Here there is a future. English Orthodox culture could only be born when that prejudiced Establishment Anglican culture was dead. Authentic Orthodox culture could never be built on a compromised, semi-Orthodox, semi-Anglican faith.

Q: How are people being converted today?

A: There are two ways. One is through information about Orthodoxy which is today on the internet and then brings them to Church services. The other is through Orthodox wives whom they marry and who convert them. Orthodox wives are often very good missionaries.

Q: You have not mentioned those who did not support the reconciliation between the two parts of the Russian Church in 2007 and left to join various sects which existed already. How do they fit into the picture? Do they suffer from the superiority complex of the nationalist ghetto? Surely they do not suffer from the inferiority complex of the conformists?

A: They do not belong to nationalist ghettoes, as much as to ideological or psychological, sectarian, ghettoes, usually very Russophobic and very right-wing – such was the case even before they left ROCOR. In the USA, from what one of their bishops proudly writes and tells me, they seem to be linked to the CIA. There are among these people, and most are converts from Anglicanism or other forms of Protestantism, some very sincere and pious people, but also some with psychological problems. It is tragic. Sects are always based on hurt pride which then turns to hatred.

Such protest sects make themselves irrelevant, not only because they are tiny (often fewer than ten in number over the whole country), but also because they have played into the hands of this world by painting themselves into irrelevant corners. They have no influence because they focus so much on small and often ritualistic detail and individual opinions, with a negative, ‘anti-everything’ mentality. What they lack is a conscious, logically consistent and integral Orthodox world view, an overview. That is very important and all Orthodox need to develop such a world view.

Q: Do you think that the Inter-Orthodox Council will actually take place in 2016?

A: On paper, no, especially since the amazing, absurd and pretentious claims of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Ukraine, as described in the statement of Patriarch Bartholomew on Palm Sunday, which was surely written by the CIA. In the 1970s there could be no Council because the Russian Church inside Russia was controlled by the KGB; now we have Constantinople controlled by the CIA. That statement alone has surely set everything back until after the death of Patriarch Bartholomew.

However, everything is still possible – if the Greek Churches can overcome their vanity and inferiority complex, which the American State Department so plays on and exploits, and if they and the other Balkan Churches can overcome their phyletism (nationalism). Thus, at present three problems are outstanding and until they are solved they will stop this Council taking place.

Q: Which are?

A: Firstly, there is the territorial dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem. Secondly, there is the dispute between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and, thirdly, that between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Orthodox Church in America (OCA).

These three problems all have to be solved before even a proper agenda (rather than the old, secularist, Protestant-style 1970s one) can be agreed. So 2016 is possible, but the Patriarchate of Constantinople will first have to liberate itself from outside political interference from the US government, which is forcing it to interfere in the Ukraine and Mt Athos, and from the Vatican. So Constantinople must demonstrate that it is free and independent and can actually speak with an Orthodox voice and not a Greek nationalist and Uniat voice. Metropolitans Andrew and Seraphim of the Church of Greece have already warned it about this quite clearly in their 89-page letter asking for the repentance of Pope Francis.

Q: Do you think in this context that the Church inside Russia could take back the autocephaly of the OCA in order to ease negotiations with Constantinople?

A: I think that for the Church inside Russia the OCA is a bargaining counter. We all know that there is a problem with the autocephaly of the OCA, the brainchild (not heartchild) of the highly controversial Fr Alexander Schmemann. Firstly, it was granted during the Cold War by the self-same, highly controversial Metr Nikodim (Rotov), whom we mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, and whom the Roman Catholics claim to have been one of their cardinals. So it was dubious from the start.

However, secondly and much more importantly, how can you give a jurisdiction autocephaly when it has been in schism from you for decades (as was the pre-OCA Metropolia) and, above all, when it only includes a minority of the Orthodox who live on the same geographical territory? However, the Church inside Russia will not cede these points if Constantinople does not first abandon its own anti-canonical errors elsewhere, for example on Mt Athos, in the Ukraine, Estonia, Finland and Paris, returning Russian Church property to the Russian Church.

Q: What could happen to the OCA, if Constantinople did stop such anti-canonical interventions?

That would be a miracle, so who knows? I suppose one solution would be to take back the OCA’s autocephaly and grant it autonomy instead. Alternatively, you could wait until the present generation of OCA bishops, many of them in difficult and compromised situations or retired, die out. Then, after that generational change, you could pick up the pieces and reincorporate the ex-OCA into the Russian Church in North America, though letting ultra-liberal, dissident pieces which are perhaps beyond redemption (St Vladimir’s Seminary?) join Constantinople or simply go back to the Episcopalians. The OCA too can only survive if it moves towards being a group based on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Bright Monday 2014

Three Myths

The founding myth of the Western world is that East and West are divided and that the West is far larger and superior to the East. In terms of Church history, we know that this is untrue. Thus, Christianity is an Eastern or Asian religion, and for the first thousand years since Christ, the East dwarfed the small, provincial and backward West, which was still united to the East on which it spiritually depended. Thus, the vast majority of the Apostles and the Church Fathers lived in the East, all the Universal Councils took place in the East, and all the vital movements of Church life in theology, monasticism and liturgical and cultural life, began in the East and colonised the West. Thus, authentic Christianity united, and did not, and does not, divide, East and West.

A second more recent Western myth is that Greek Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodoxy are different. Yet history tells us that authentic Greek Orthodoxy is identical to Russian Orthodoxy, for Russian Orthodoxy comes precisely from Greek Orthodoxy. If some individual Greek Orthodox have in recent decades compromised themselves, that does not affect Greek Orthodoxy itself. Such a myth also demonstrates the total ignorance of those who propagate it, for it suggests that they have never heard of Romanian Orthodoxy, Georgian Orthodoxy, Serbian Orthodoxy etc., which are also identical to authentic Orthodoxy, which is multinational and multilingual, a unity in diversity, and which with all the other Local Churches form the One Church of God.

A third myth being propagated by the ignorant Western media and politicians at present is that the Ukraine is a single historic country. In fact it is an artificial construct, thought up by Austrian imperialism five generations ago in order to divide the East Slav borderlands (‘ukraina’) from the rest of the Russian Lands (‘Rus’) and so rule over them. Three generations ago Nazi German imperialism used this myth in the same way to divide and rule the East Slav borderlands; today American imperialism, to its shame, merely follows the Nazis, who as the Third Reich tried to destroy the much weakened Third Rome. Today, the destabilisation of the Ukraine by the USA is continuing apace and the US administration is spending billions of dollars to undermine the country.

Thus, recently, President Obama has been to see Pope Francis in order to encourage him to use Ukrainian Catholicism to undermine further the Ukraine. However, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Ukraine completely distrust Catholicism, for they know it to be an integral part of a foreign ideology and State, the Vatican, which has always warred against them. And at this moment between 100 and 300 US mercenaries from the notorious Blackwater Corporation are in the Ukraine to kill and punish the Ukrainian citizens who are fighting for freedom for the 80% of Ukrainians from the illegal Galician puppet junta in Kiev. New Russia (the south and east), Little Russia (the centre) and Carpatho-Russia (the south-west) are fighting for their lives against the US-installed Uniat separatists in power in Kiev.

Why do such myths exist? Myths are always cultivated for psychological reasons, for self-justification. Thus, the East/West myth has been set up for this. If it is believed, it means that the West is superior to the East, that the two are irreconcilable and that therefore the West must crush the East. The second myth of a difference between Greek and Russian is a feeble attempt to divide and rule the Orthodox Church and Uniatise or Westernise (it is the same thing) the Church, so that it is no longer able to resist. In this way the West shows how it encourages apostasy and moves towards Antichrist and the apocalypse, for when the Church is no more, the end will come. And the third and final myth is only a continuation of the second, an effort to destroy the last bastion of the Church in the Russian Lands, Holy Rus.

The Mission of Orthodox Civilisation

Following the 1917 Western-organised coup d’etat, before which the Russian Empire had stood on the brink of victory in the Great War and of freeing Constantinople, and after the imperial martyrdoms of 1918 and the lost Civil War, by 1920 it seemed to many White Russians that all was over. The old Russia appeared to be finished, as the new Soviet Russia set out on the path of the atheist materialist ideology which had been imported into it by ‘sealed’ train. The ideals of Holy Rus, preserved in their integrity in the Church Outside Russia, seemed to have no future in the Russian Lands themselves. And so began many a lonely decade of exile, bitter repentance and isolation in the Church Outside Russia, while we hoped and prayed that the Church Inside Russia might not only survive persecution and captivity but also revive, and then we could join together with it.

True, from 1941 there began something of a revival, though it was beneath yet another colossal and tragic onslaught from the hordes of Western Europe. But by 1945 it could be seen that though in many respects the worst was over, there was still far to go. The next two generations were to be years of frustrating stagnation. Then in 1991 there came another tragedy. Through the utter incompetence of the last atheist leaders what remained of the Russian Empire (most of it) was divided. Under the new Communist/Capitalist opportunists, it appeared that the Russian Lands were to face the final phase of Westernisation, wholly losing their identity under the tide of American consumerism. It seemed as though this might be the end even for the remaining Orthodox cultural values, a heritage which had ironically been preserved by the cultural emptiness of Communism.

Thus, the West could impose the ‘restructuring’ (‘perestroika’) in Russia that it wanted. This would involve the destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church, which geopoliticians like Brzezhinski knew is the source of resistance to the West, of the ideal of Sovereign Holy Rus. The end, it appeared, was near. Then, in August 2000, with the Jubilee Council of the once captive Church and the canonisation of the Imperial Martyrs, the New Martyrs and New Confessors, there came hope. Just as Orthodox Russia had defeated Napoleon and Hitler, so it could defeat apostasy again. Outside Russia the processes of apostasy in the USA and its Western European colonial satellites (NATO), set on the New World Order which destroys national, family and personal identity, go forward. And although Russia since 2000 has not yet reversed those processes of apostasy, it has stopped them.

The fifth column of the anti-Russian oligarch-thieves, most of them not Russian and living abroad, who stole the people’s assets through ‘privatisation’, criminals protected by the West with its myth of democracy ( = aggressively atheist, elected dictatorship), has been defeated inside Russia. Inspiration came from the spiritual treasury of both parts of the Russian Church, from figures like the ever-memorable Archbishops Seraphim (Sobolev) and Averky of Jordanville and Metropolitan John (Snychev). They all knew that Russian Orthodox Civilisation is founded on the ideal of the Church of All Rus, on Holy Rus, the spiritual foundation for the rebirth of the Orthodox Empire. This is the only remaining bulwark of the unadulterated Christian Faith anywhere, which alone can fight against the evil of apostasy that now walks abroad. Such figures explained that Holy Rus is:

Spiritual integrity – the uncompromised Orthodox Faith lived out in daily life; the primacy of the spiritual and therefore of the moral over the material; the incarnation of this Faith in State life, that is, in social, political and economic life; the Sovereign, Imperial ideal of the people’s monarchy; the kingdom of heaven incarnate on earth in a multinational and multilingual Orthodox Empire. Here, as all the authentic representatives of Holy Rus have explained, we are not talking of Russian nationalism, but of the united patriotism of the many different peoples of Holy Rus. All who identify themselves as Russian Orthodox, regardless of nationality, belong to this world, the Orthosphere, and to the uncompromised service of the spirit and aims of the Church. The rebirth of Holy Rus as a Spiritual Empire is our ideal, the ideal of all Russian Orthodox Civilisation.

In this we are quite different from Western civilisation. Its ideal is progress, defined as material development based on science and technology. Its purpose is to increase human physical comfort and material wealth. On the other hand, Russian Orthodox Civilisation has as its ideal the transfiguration of the human will and soul and mind, which is only possible through spiritual and moral progress. Material progress denotes only that the human-being becomes a thing, part of matter, part of the material and biological world. Hence Darwinism, in which man is promoted as an animal, a mere biological and physiological entity, without an immortal soul, and whose only aim is the acquisition of things, or consumerism, as it is now called. This is the opposite of the spiritual and moral values of the New Testament and therefore of Russian Orthodox Civilisation.

It is thus clear that progress, in the Western material sense, is a movement to apostasy, to the end of the world, to the Last Judgement. This is the opposite of the spiritual and so moral transfiguration of humanity, which is the ideal of the Gospel and of Holy Rus. In the words of the great ecclesiologist and New Hieromartyr St Hilarion (Troitsky): ‘The ideal of Orthodoxy is not progress, but transfiguration…The New Testament does not know of progress in the European sense of this word, in the sense of moving forwards in the same dimension. The New Testament speaks of the transfiguration of nature and consequently moving not forwards, but upwards, heavenwards, Godwards’. This must also be the ideal of the Orthodox State, which is to restrain evil and apostasy by taking on the values of the Church. This is the alternative to the way of the world proposed by globalised capitalism.

The aim of Orthodox Christian economic life consists not of making a profit, as in crude monetarism, but of better ordering our spiritual and so moral life. Instead of Western economics, based on the race for profit through stripping finite natural resources and egoistic consumerism, Russian Orthodox Civilisation proposes sufficiency, but no more, for all. Economic development is to be regulated not by money-lending banksters and speculators on stock exchanges, but by the Lord’s Anointed. Private enterprise is not for individual profit, but for public well-being. Instead of futile and parasitic consumerism, based on the exhaustion of natural resources and the sullying of God’s Creation, we would then have a just distribution of natural wealth and social contentment. For this to happen, we need a State founded on the values of Orthodox Civilisation.

The Atheist War Against the Multinational Orthodox Church Continues

The seizure of power in Kiev by a tiny minority of extremist Galician Catholics (Uniat Ukrainians from the far west, formerly eastern Poland) had been carefully planned. Through the violent overthrow of the democratically-elected Ukrainian government with generous US financial backing ($5 billion) and EU support last February, it opened a Pandora’s Box. Now the three parts of the Ukraine, the small Polonised and Neo-Fascist Galicia, central Malorossiya (Little Russia) and purely Russian southern and eastern Novorossiya (New Russia) are divided. The vast majority of the inhabitants of the Ukraine do not recognise the unrepresentative Kievan junta.

The nature of the modern Ukraine as an artificial construct, a nationalist divide and rule Western project, has been revealed. This is despite the empty and pathetic sabre-rattling by the head of NATO, which is still licking its wounds from its defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Ukraine is a puppet made in Austria just over a century ago and founded on xenophobic pride and hatred. Its puppet leaders, whose ancestors fought with Hitler and have been handpicked by the US politician Victoria Nuland, are incompetent and cannot control their peoples. Russia now waits while what remains of the ‘Ukraine’ goes bankrupt, its gold reserves yesterday transferred to Switzerland and the USA in the final act of twenty-three years of asset-stripping by corrupt oligarchs.

The events in the Ukraine must be seen as part of the whole, Western-orchestrated, geopolitical war against the Church of Christ. That began in North Africa, spread to the Middle East, especially Syria, the only place on earth where the language of Christ, Aramaic, is still spoken, and has now been spread to Little Russia, the south-western corner of the Russian Lands, Rus. This attempt to divide historic Rus by the Western atheists uses Ukrainian nationalism, so recently founded on a provincial identity and a regional language from the Polish borderlands (‘Ukraine’ in Russian). All this is in order to cut off this potentially rich area, where natural gas has just been discovered, from its kindred Russian Lands and their peoples.

Western atheism is outraged that the Russian Lands are united, their unity founded not on ethnicity, but on over a thousand years of Christianity, the common and multinational Russian Orthodox Faith, thus making those lands into Holy Rus. It has not forgiven its peoples for throwing off Western atheism in its Soviet form. This is why Western atheism has now set out to use its puppet Patriarchate of Constantinople to undermine the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, the majority of whose members are Carpatho-Russians – another part of Holy Rus. However, in failing to recognise the Czechoslovak episcopate and even absurdly daring to call itself its ‘Mother-Church’ (!), that sorry Patriarchate has indicated that no Inter-Orthodox Council will be held in 2016. Such a Council could only take place if all the Local Churches are represented there, and not just the ones that the CIA allows.

Holy Rus is by definition multinational and not nationalist, the heritage of the Roman Christian Empire, and not some provincial localism. It unites 62 different nationalities. Unlike Ukrainianism (or for that matter Hellenism, Montenegrinism and Macedonianism etc – other artificial Western constructs from the 19th century on), Holy Rus does not put a regional national identity and language above the Universal Church of Christ. In the Second World War Hitler instructed his occupying administrators to set up a separate church in each village of the Ukraine. This is still the Western project, so coloured by Protestant separatism, today. It will not succeed.

Some are concerned that the Russian Orthodox Church and those with it, the Georgian Orthodox Church, the Polish Orthodox Church, the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and supporters in Alexandria, Antioch, Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, will be isolated by Western meddling. They should not be concerned by this. We recall how the ‘democratic’ majority shouted out ‘Crucify him, Crucify him’; we are happy to be ‘isolated’ from that majority. Today the Russian Lands are rising from the ashes of the past. A generation has passed since the dissolution of Soviet atheism. Now that the Church is being reborn, its values are beginning to be embodied in social, political and economic life and so the Russian State is also being reborn, returning to Orthodox roots and traditional values.

Orthodox England

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