Monthly Archives: February 2015

More Orthodox Churches for Thailand

Before the Russian Revolution Siam (now Thailand) was one of the few still uncolonized, sovereign countries of the world. Therefore, as with Tibet and Ethiopia, links between it and the Orthodox Empire were strong. Today, as if to make up for the historical injustice of the overthrow of the Empire in 1917 and the interruption of close relations between the two countries, Orthodoxy is spreading there, with the Russian Orthodox mission now entering its sixteenth year.

On Sunday, the feast of the New Martyrs and Confessors, the sixth Orthodox church to be built in Thailand, dedicated to the Royal Martyrs, was solemnly consecrated in Hua Hin by Archbishop Theophylact. It is situated 120 miles from Bangkok near the summer palace of the Thai Royal Family, which was built between 1911 and 1915 by the heir to the Thai throne, the Minister of Defence, Prince Chakrapong. He had spent his childhood and youth in Russia, received his education at the Military Academy and was considered to be a ward of Tsar Nicholas II, who was a friend of his father King Chulalongkorn.

This week Orthodox life in Thailand will be marked by events surrounding two more churches. On Tuesday Archbishop Theophylact will lay the foundations of St Vladimir’s church in Chiangmay and on Thursday he will consecrate the church of St Sergius on the island of Chang. All the churches in Thailand have been built on the donations of parishioners.

Guest Column — Gerald Celente — America: Murder, Inc.

February 3, 2015 | Categories: Gerald Celente

Guest Column — Gerald Celente — America: Murder, Inc.

In this article Gerald Celente sums up American culture as revealed by the movie “American Sniper.” The culture of the “exceptional people” is barbaric, murderous, perverse.

Be a “Proud American.” We hate, blindly. We murder, blindly, whether on the streets of Ferguson, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Ukraine. Wherever there are people to be killed, we are there, doing the job. It is the American way.

American Sniper: A Model American
By Gerald Celente
Publisher, Trends Journal

The votes are in and the decision is overwhelmingly clear. Chris Kyle—the Navy SEAL portrayed in the blockbuster movie purported killer of some 200 Iraqis during four tours of duty—is the people’s choice.

From record ticket sales to major media accolades, from the halls of Congress to the White House, the nation has spoken: “American Sniper” is all-American. Chris Kyle—the most lethal killer in U.S. military history, a true hero, a brave warrior—has been anointed as a role model for all that America has come to stand for.

“American Sniper has the look of a bona fide cultural phenomenon!” said Brandon Griggs of CNN. And as Michelle Obama contends, “… for all those folks in America who don’t have these kinds of opportunities [to meet veterans and military families personally] films and TV are often the best way to share those stories.”

Speaking at a film industry event, Ms. Obama said the movie stressed, “The complicated moral decisions they [troops] are tasked with … the balancing of love of family with love of country.”

For Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the essence of his “love of country” lay in obeying his commander in chief and living up to Washington’s “moral decisions.” As the movie has it, when the Twin Towers were brought down on 9/11, off to war Kyle marched. This take-no-prisoners Texan dutifully followed the orders of the tough-talking faux-Texan George W. Bush to get those “evil doers.”

Bush’s simplistic and transparently shallow bravado about bringing ‘em in “dead or alive,” a comforting scenario made plausible by nearly a century of Hollywood Westerns, once again played out perfectly in Hollywood’s “American Sniper.” In a nation where politics has become show business for ugly people, the mindset of America’s first lady made perfect sense; film and TV’s dumbed-down, glossed over, whitewashed versions of hard facts served as the perfect substitutes for harsh reality and the solid truth.

Perhaps Ms. Obama had found a soft spot in her heart for Mr. Kyle because he closely reflects the words and deeds of her husband. In his book, American Sniper, Kyle wrote that killing is “fun,” something he “loved.” In the book “DoubleDown,” authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann wrote that President Obama bragged that he’s “really good at killing people” while discussing drone strikes with his staff.

If not exactly presidential material, Kyle certainly has what it takes to be second in command. In his memoir, he wrote “We wanted people to know, we’re here and we want to mess with you … we will kill you…”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, in his response to the recently released report on CIA torture, said he was proud of his role in creating the gruesome interrogation program that included water boarding and rectal feeding. Did he have any regrets for what he ordered? “No … absolutely not … and I’d do it again in a minute,” Cheney said.

Indeed, if Kyle were alive he would certainly be a force to be reckoned with in the 2016 race for the White House. While it would be difficult to trump Hillary Clinton’s giggling glee over the murder of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, (“We came, we saw … he died,”) in a war that she personally pushed for, Kyle’s statement that he “… couldn’t care about the Iraqis. I loved killing bad guys. … I loved what I did. I still do … it was fun,” comes very close.

The American Sniper is a model American. And the American model is immorality. George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condaleeza Rice, Susan Rice, Samantha Powers … the list of perpetrators goes on. And so does the list of their crimes: slaughtering millions by waging wars based of false information, overthrowing sovereign governments based on lies, killing innocents and “suspects in drone strikes” without regard to international law and with no personal regret for their roles in fostering the mass murders. Like Chris Kyle, each of them speak proudly of their actions and express not a hint of sorrow.

Most Americans have forgotten about former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who defended Bill Clinton’s sanctions against Iraq on a 60 Minutes segment. When the show’s host, Lesley Stahl, asked her “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean that’s more children than died in Hiroshima … is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “we think the price is worth it.”

“We,” she says, as if it truly included “us.” So speak the moralizing madmen and madwomen—sociopaths and psychopaths—who pontificate from their positions of high office, telling the rest of us what we must believe and who should be killed next.

Chris Kyle did his patriotic duty. He obeyed orders, followed the words and carried out the tasks issued from the White House. The fish rots from the head down. The American Government is the American Sniper.

Gerald Celente is the founder and director of the Trends Research Institute in Kingston, N.Y., and publisher of the Trends Journal and Trendsresearch.com.

Paris – Berlin – Saint Petersburg?

War rages in Europe. Thousands are dead. Financed by Washington and supported by its zombie media, Kiev junta troops, a ragbag of Uniats, schismatics, released criminals and foreign mercenaries, that is, all who have not fled the US-run Ukraine for freedom, deserted or dodged the draft, are surrendering and handing over yet more arms to the ever stronger freedom fighters of the Ukrainian people. Having shot down a civilian Malaysian Airlines plane and murdered everyone on board, the desperate Satanists from Kiev have been using cluster bombs against the civilian population since at least October. Such are the atrocities of the CIA-installed Neo-Nazi junta against the people of the Ukraine in their bid for freedom.

Meanwhile, in Washington itself, another ridiculous political puppet, the married ‘Patriarch of Kiev’, Filaret Denisenko, awards a medal to the Christ-hating Senator McCain and begs for arms to slaughter the Ukrainian people. Denisenkos’s heart is twisted by Ukrainian nationalist hatred and jealousy at not being elected Patriarch of the Russian Church in 1990 He pleads with the State Department to get his absurd little ‘church’ recognized by the US-run Phanar bureaucrats in Istanbul. It is not going to happen, for that would destroy the last shreds of legitimacy of the Phanar, already rejected by the vast majority of Orthodox, including those who count within its own little jurisdiction, the monks of Mt Athos.

While Kerry warmongers with the CIA junta in Kiev, Merkel and Hollande rush to Moscow to sue for peace in the Ukraine. Cameron is of course absent – as another of Washington’s warmongering puppets he will be useless in any search for peace. ‘Old Europe’, to use the contemptuous American term for those whom it could not bribe or browbeat into supporting its genocide in Iraq 12 years ago, is begging Russia to save the collapsing and bankrupt provincial Ukraine. Ironically, the situation there was the creation of the absurd EU imperialistic dream of forcing all of Europe to join the EU Fourth Reich and of the US coup d’etat in Kiev a year ago, which overthrew the legitimate democratic government.

The alternative to a peace plan agreed to at the last moment by the penitent Merkel and Hollande in conjunction with Russia (80% of the inhabitants of the Ukraine are Russian-speaking and of Russian descent) is yet more US arms and yet another US-organized bloodbath and chaos. Exactly as the US have achieved everywhere else that they have invaded in the world, from Latin America to Vietnam, from Africa to the Middle East. But practically, what interest does Russia have in the Ukraine, once the breadbasket of Europe and the most prosperous republic of the Soviet Union, in what has now become the basket case and poorest country in Europe, torn apart by a civil war? Practically, what can be done?

From the beginning, it was clear that if the artificial amalgam of the recently-invented ‘Ukraine’ – originally thought up by the Austro-Hungarian bureaucrats just over a century ago in order to divide and rule that part of their Empire, and since added to by Soviet bureaucrats for the same reason – is to survive, it must become a federal State with wide autonomy for its many different peoples and territories. However, the billionaire arms dealer Poroshenko (real name, Waltzman), whom Washington’s public relations experts set up as President of the Ukraine last year, specifically rejected this common sense solution – no doubt on orders from his US paymasters, who have no idea of history or geography.

Unless Poroshenko, who made his fortune by selling off the arms of the Ukrainian armed forces to the Third World, repents, logically there is only one solution: for the Ukraine to be dismantled, just like Europe’s other artificial conglomerates, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and perhaps one day, the UK, Spain and Germany (the annexation of East Germany by the conglomerate of West Germany caused many of the contemporary problems in Europe, since it led directly to the foolishness of the euro). Very simply, the southern and eastern half of the ‘Ukraine’, together with the Crimea, can once more become a happy and autonomous republic in the Russian Federation, Novorossiya, as it was until the Communists annexed it.

As for parts of the south-west, they can return to Romania and Hungary; Carpatho-Russia (‘Transcarpathia’ to the imperialists and secret police in Kiev) can return to Slovakia or even Hungary, or else can become a separate republic within the Russian Federation; parts of the Uniat west, once denazified, can return to Poland; and the rump that is left can either return to being Malorossiya (Little Russia – its historical name) or else can retain the recently invented name of ‘the Ukraine’, remaining an independent through corrupt and bankrupt republic. In 25-50 years this could be absorbed into the German-run EU (if that still exists by then), or more realistically and quickly join the Eurasian Economic Union, on a par with Belarus.

One of the great ‘what ifs’ of history is what would have happened if the Paris-Berlin-Saint Petersburg axis had not been broken in 1914. Surely then, the nations of Europe would have resisted the masonic plot to set it at war and destroy its monarchies, which some believe to have been directed by certain forces in London. Of course, it was not to be, and Berlin, gripped by power lust, launched its Great War. Could Berlin today, run by one from East Germany where President Putin from Saint Petersburg also once lived, and supported by its French colony, not be able to act independently from Washington (which today plays the role that London played in 1914) and broker peace in the troubled Ukrainian provinces?

If Europe could act together as Europe, scrapping the imperialist US Cold War creations of the EU and NATO, it could unite in a real Community of Sovereign Nations, including the Russian Federation. A Community of Nations from the Pacific to the Atlantic, a united Eurasian Economic Union, could become reality. The Fascist bribery and euro, imposed from Brussels, could cease. The UK could be saved from its status as a neocon vassal in Europe. Many nations, from Catalonia to Wallonia and Scotland could at last be freed from centralization. However, none of this is possible if the German and French leaders continue to reject the Christian roots of Europe and wander in the lost paths of atheism, just as they did in 1914.

The Long Path to Restoration

As a result of the atheist and materialist philosophies which came out of the so-called ‘Enlightenment’ (in truth, ‘Endarkenment’), most of the 20th century was wasted. The appalling human and material waste took place in huge and extremely costly genocidal wars between rival European imperialisms and then between Capitalist atheism and Communist atheism. These conflicts reached their apogee in the Second World War between neo-pagan Nazism and neo-pagan Communism, between rival imperialisms in North Africa and the Pacific with nuclear holocaust and then in the stand-off and proxy conflicts between East and West in the Cold War, with its potential to obliterate all humanity in MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).

At that time the Church and the last faithful Christians, representing the only Third Way between these rival neo-paganisms, were squeezed and oppressed between Communist atheism and Capitalist atheism. The former ideology held captive the larger Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe, most notably the Patriarchate of Moscow, the latter ideology held captive the smaller Greek-speaking Orthodox Churches, most notably the tiny Patriarchate of Constantinople. Apart from the millions of martyrs of whom the world was not worthy, there were few who were free, but they included those who have come to be recognized as great saints, like St Nicholas of Zhicha, St John of Shanghai and St Justin of Chelije and St Paisius of Athos.

After the fall of Soviet atheism at the very end of 1991, Capitalist atheism stood triumphant and sought to globalize its imperialism unchallenged, seeking the world hegemony necessary to prepare for the enthronement and coming reign of Antichrist. Having defeated Communism, in its triumphalism it considered that now only the Islamic world needed to be crushed for the final victory of Zionism. However, the last faithful Christians in the various Local Orthodox Churches did not lose hope. Encouraged and inspired by the examples of the New Martyrs and Confessors throughout the Orthodox world, a turning-point came in 2007 with the long-awaited reuniting of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, the capital of the Russian Federation.

Under the influence of the Church of All the Russias, the world’s largest and most multinational Local Church, the citizens of the Russian Federation have become conscious of the situation and have in the last few years been choosing sides. Some mainly older people, with a twisted nostalgia for the mass murderers Lenin and Stalin, look for their country to become a Soviet Union 2 and so fall back into atheist persecution of the spiritual and fail once more. Others, so-called ‘liberals’, want the Russian Federation to abandon its millennial identity and become a Western vassal-state of atheist neocons and traitors and so fall into the same spiritual impurity, selfish exploitation, consumerist self-indulgence and inevitable failure as the Western world.

However, ever more citizens in the Russian Federation are looking to the Third Way, the path of repentance and return to its historic identity and destiny. This is the path of becoming once more the Third Rome, the Christian Empire, the bulwark and centre of the whole Church and all the spiritual forces in the world, the centre of Resistance to Antichrist, Who has made the West into his blinded pawn. Currently a Satanic war against the Church is being waged – and we should make no mistake – this is the Third World War. Amid the catastrophes in Syria, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova and the bloody, anti-Ukrainian NATO puppet-show in Kiev come the words of a Metropolitan of the Patriarchate of Antioch.

On 1 February, the sixth anniversary of the enthronement of His Holiness Kyrill, Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias, the representative of the Patriarchate of Antioch in Russia, Metropolitan Niphon of Philippopolis, was present at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, built and then rebuilt to commemorate the victory over Western atheism. He said: ‘The meaning of today’s feast for the Orthodox world is in the care of Your Holiness for the unity of Universal Orthodoxy. Your open-ended dialogue during Your Patriarchal visits to the ancient Patriarchates emphasizes a Pan-Orthodox response to today’s challenges, in which religion is being squeezed out of human life and moral values are being subjected to radical revision’.

After the Liturgy on that day, at a meal in honour of the Patriarch at the Cathedral, surrounded by dignitaries, the Arab Orthodox Metropolitan, representing a land where people still speak Aramaic, the language spoken by Christ, spoke. He asserted that the Patriarch’s activities resounded throughout the world and witnessed to the fact that his visits outside Russia were deeply significant for the various Local Churches and their peoples. He added: ‘Seeing, sensing and living Your care for the strengthening of the unity of all Orthodox and Universal Orthodoxy we, the representatives of the Orthodox Churches at Your throne, are witnesses that the day of Your enthronement as Patriarch of Moscow became an epoch-making event and great feast’.

The Sad Case of Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry, a Briton of Jewish origin, is an actor, TV celebrity, darling of the BBC, Cambridge intellectual, manic-depressive who has attempted suicide several times, well-known homosexual ‘married’ to a man half his age and also a passionate atheist.

What does his atheism show? First of all, his recent diatribe showing his hatred for all faith, that is, for awareness of spiritual reality, shows that he has no concept of God. He may be an intellectual with a vast knowledge of abstract facts, but he certainly has no experience of spiritual reality. In a word his heart is, it seems, dead. His notion that if there is a God, He is responsible for all the appalling suffering of humanity, is as primitive a concept of faith as is possible. It reminds us of the spiritual level of the brutal peasant Khrushchev. He, on Gagarin’s return from space, declared that clearly God did not exist, since Gagarin had been into space and not seen Him!

However, God saw Gagarin and soon after He received both Khrushchev’s and Gagarin’s souls.

Essentially, the deformation here is that of the humanist and rationalist brainwashing of modern Western ‘culture’ that Fry has undergone.

Firstly, he has been conditioned to think that humanity is never responsible for evil and even apparently incapable of evil. He ignores the fact that all wars are caused by human beings who have fallen into atheism (however they may cloak their atheism), most obviously the Second World War, and that faith (or rather manmade ‘religion’) is only ever used as an excuse to justify wars, which are in fact all motivated by human greed for territory and power, however motives are camouflaged. Evil motives always cloak themselves in what is good and noble.

Secondly, he has been conditioned to think that humanity can understand everything. What he has failed to understand here is that we can know very little in general and nothing at all about faith with our brains. Faith (unlike manmade ‘religion’) depends on the spiritual experience of a different organ, not on the intellectual experience of our brain, but on the spiritual experience of our heart, and if our heart is not working, then our brains are blinded, disfunctional. Either our hearts are alive and have that experience, we have met God, or else they are not alive and we have not had that experience and not met God. Clearly, he has not.

Therefore it would be better if Stephen Fry kept his silence until he has had some experience in the deeper realm beyond the superficial, beyond the mere brain and the mere emotions, in the realm of the Spirit, sensed by the living heart which then inspires faith which then inspires the brain. However, Stephen Fry, created by God, first needs to know that this is not possible until he has purified his heart of his passions, and so cultivated his inner sight and met God. And only he can begin to purify and cultivate his heart. It is a process called repentance.

Churchill: Inconvenient Truths

I remember a conversation in 1976 about the English character with the late Nicholas Zernov, a prominent representative of the Paris School of disincarnate Russians. He recalled that the reputation of the English among Russians of his generation was that of ‘hypocrites who will stab you in the back’. My protest to him that, although this was a perfect description of the Establishment Anglicanism of the ruling class with whom he mixed, it was not a description of the English and certainly not of the down to earth English among whom I had been brought up, elicited from him complete astonishment; after nearly fifty years of naïve and disincarnate life in the country he had never realized that most English people were not and never have been Establishment Anglicans.

An example of such Establishment hypocrisy is the recent celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Churchill’s death. Billed as ‘the greatest Englishman’ by a certain tabloid (ignoring the fact that he was half-American), can we really think anything of the sort about him? Of course there are a great many people in this country, now in their 80s and 90s, who agree with the title bestowed on him by that tabloid. But then I have met similar elderly Italians who call Mussolini a genius and elderly Russians who say the same of Stalin (‘there was order and no crime in those days’). I have even met elderly Vichy French, as well as Germans and Austrians, who have a very high opinion of Hitler. Perhaps they are all victims of brainwashing propaganda and nostalgia for a vanished past and youth.
Whatever our balanced conclusions about Churchill, we do have to consider some facts:

Churchill took part in Kitchener’s massacre (‘battle’) at Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898 (at least 27,000 Sudanese cruelly slaughtered by ‘modern’ military technology, including Maxim guns) and even more afterwards in the plundering of Khartoum, with many being burned to death.

Churchill supported the genocide of 28,000 Afrikaaner women and children in British concentration camps in the Boer War between 1899 and 1902.

Churchill’s utterly misconceived and mishandled Gallipoli campaign in 1915 led to the deaths of 200,000 Allied and Turkish soldiers, all for nothing.

Churchill’s encouraged the British suppression of the Arab revolt in Iraq (invaded by Britain in 1914 and later partitioned with disastrous consequences), which included the bombing of the Kurds and the use of poison gas against them. This has led to repeated violent British involvement there to this day. He reckoned the massacre of the Kurds as of no importance since they were ‘a degraded race’ – but then he thought much the same of all Non-European peoples.

In 1941 Churchill knew Singapore was undefendable, yet 8,000-15,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers and citizens were killed and 130,000 captured in his futile and humiliating Malaya campaign and the greatest surrender and defeat in British military history.

Churchill deliberately did not warn the USA about the Pearl Harbour attack by the Japanese in 1941 because he needed it to be involved in the War on the British side.

Churchill rejected scientific advice and ordered the appalling bombing of German civilians in Hamburg, Dresden… (600,000 German civilians and 160,000 young allied airmen killed). Many reckoned Churchill as no better than a gangster for this unpunished war crime.

In WW2 Churchill allowed 6 to 7 million Indians to starve to death in the Bengali holocaust, when he could have saved the majority of those lives. (Churchill – racist and imperialist to the core – also seemed to have no concept of the previous horrors of British India – with 10 million dying in post-1857 India Mutiny reprisals and 6-9 million starving to death in the 1895-1900 famines, saying that ‘the Indians breed like rabbits anyway’ – let alone horrors like the British responsibility for the 1840s Irish Potato Famine in which 1 million died).

In 1944 Churchill rejected the Brand plan to save Hungarian Jews (between 200,000 and 400,000 were killed by the Nazis and Hungarian Fascists).

In 1944 Churchill decided on the partition of Palestine (in 1878 Jews had been 5% of the Palestine population; in 1948 they were 1/3 of the population; 67 years on, there are now over 7 million Palestinian refugees), ensuring the permanent Middle East crisis.

Churchill acknowledged the crucial importance of dividing and ruling in the Indian subcontinent, that is, maintaining Hindu-Muslim antipathy, in order to preserve British rule in there. Eventually 1 million died in the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.

Sobering facts.

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (January-February 2015)

Q: Some consider that the Orthodox world was very weak in the 20th century. Would you agree?

A: 20th century Orthodoxy produced more martyrs than any other century, as well as a great many confessors, so I do not see how you can call the 20th century Orthodox world ‘weak’.

Q: But what about the betrayals of the Faith by certain bishops and even patriarchs in the 20th century?

A: This existed, but we get what we deserve. If we were real Orthodox, we would be strong and so would all our bishops be strong, but we are nominal and therefore decadent Orthodox. The whole problem is not with others, but with ourselves. The Church is us. To think otherwise is an unChristian path which leads directly to the sect. We find fault with ourselves, not with others. Hate the sin, but love the sinner. Only the Non-Orthodox-minded hate sinners and, in so doing, love the sin. We Orthodox know that all of us are sinners, even if some perhaps more than others, we know that all of us are the victims of Satan and therefore we should feel more solidarity with one another, knowing that we have only one common enemy, not each other, but Satan and Satan alone. ‘Bear one another’s burdens’, as the Apostle says.

Q: What about the historic injustices that the Orthodox world has suffered, the sack of Constantinople in 1204, the many Western invasions of Russia? Did they not weaken the Orthodox world too?

A: It is true that there have been many historic injustices and betrayals of the Church by the West which wanted to substitute itself for the Church.

Just in the second millennium, there were the invasion and occupation of England in 1066, the pillage of Constantinople in 1204 which led to its fall in 1453, the invasion of Russia by the Teutonic Knights in the 13th century, by the Poles in the 17th century and then by the Europeans under Napoleon in 1812, the 19th century imposition of German princes on Greece and Bulgaria, the Western invasion of the Crimea and the invasion and occupation of Cyprus by the British.

In the 20th century there were the invasions of Serbia and Russia by the Central Powers in 1914, the Western-organized Russian Revolution in 1917, the invasions by Germany and its allies of several parts of the Orthodox world in 1940-41, the CIA-installed, banana-republic colonels’ regime in Greece in the 1960s-70s, the Western genocide in Serbia in the 1990s, the EU colonization of Orthodox Eastern Europe and today the bloodthirsty Western puppet regime in Kiev. However, we should not make excuses out of these historic injustices that our civilization has suffered. The source of all these historical injustices is in our own decadence. If we had been faithful, these injustices would never have occurred.

Q: So much for the past and today. Do you think that the 21st century overall will be positive or negative for the Orthodox world?

A: Who am I to answer such a question? It is not yet clear which way the Christian Church, that is, the Orthodox world, is going. On the one hand, there are signs of hope, the renewal of monastic life on Mt Athos since the 1960s, the fall of atheism in Eastern Europe and Russia since 1989, the spread of Orthodoxy worldwide. On the other hand, there is much that is profoundly decadent and a cause for pessimism. The President of Estonia is an American, the new President of Romania is a German, there are American-appointed Non-Ukrainian ministers in the Ukraine, the President of Montenegro is an EU puppet etc. However, the Orthodox people can resist the EU/US imposed Establishment and choose freedom, as we have just seen in Greece, though of course the leaders who choose freedom usually get assassinated.

Q: By ‘much that is profoundly decadent’ are you also thinking of corruption? For example, the political, business, banking, police and justice systems in Romania, Greece, the Ukraine or Russia and so on are steeped in corruption and bribe-taking, even more than in countries like Italy, Spain and France. Why is there so much corruption in Orthodox countries, why are Orthodox so corrupt?

A: First of all, today there is, sadly, no such thing as ‘an Orthodox country’. There are only ex-Orthodox countries or, optimistically speaking, ‘pre-Orthodox countries’, which we hope will become Orthodox countries again. Secondly, Orthodox are not corrupt, only ex-Orthodox are corrupt. Our Orthodox Faith is everything. Destroy it and you destroy the source of all our morality and our whole political, social and economic system. We have only one ideal – Orthodoxy, the Church. Take that away from us and the corrupting passions of this world rule.

The West has never understood that. It thinks that if you destroy someone else’s civilization, then you can almost automatically make it into part of Western ‘civilization’. That is the greatest of illusions. If you destroy, you destroy. Full stop. Western ‘civilization’ does not work outside the Western world. When the West destroys someone else’s civilization in the name of ‘freedom and democracy’ by bombing it back to the Stone Age, all it produces is the Stone Age, not Western ‘civilization’.

That is why after the Western coup d’etat in 1917, the Russian Empire became a corrupt mafia regime of criminals and bandits, the Soviet Union, created by the West. We Orthodox have no other values, no other source of morality, justice and honesty than our Faith. In the Christian Church, the Orthodox world, we only have the Church. It is all or nothing for us. Thus, the corruption in Greece, when the elite bankrupted the nation and the people after the imposition of the euro, exists because the elite is not Orthodox. He who is not Orthodox in a once Orthodox country is corrupt. The same is true of Romania, Russia, Bulgaria and so on.

In the West it is different. In the West, at least in the part that has Protestant culture, there is an elaborate half-way house between the Church and corruption, a set of legalistic and humanistic balances and checks, ultimately Christian in origin, which are the substitute for the fullness of Orthodoxy. Having said that, the West is still corrupt. The EU cannot even be audited. In England your career will never go very far if you are not a mason or at least a member of some paramasonic club like the Rotarians. And as an Italian told me decades ago: ‘In England you have taxes, in Italy we have bribes. It is the same thing – payment for a protection racket; it is just that in England the protection racket is State-run, in Italy it is private’.

Q: Has the decadence in what you call ‘ex-Orthodox countries’ or ‘pre-Orthodox countries’ affected the Diaspora?

A: That decadence has affected us profoundly. Quite simply, it has made the foundation of new Local Churches in the Diaspora impossible because the necessary conditions for their establishment have not been in place in the homelands, where the leaders of the Local Churches were all politically enslaved and so spiritually compromised. No new Local Church can be built on spiritual compromise.

As regards the Diaspora itself, it has been unable to do anything alone because it lacks the spiritual level. To have a spiritual level implies having monastic foundations, which the refugees, political or economic, who formed the Diaspora have also largely lacked. In other words, even regardless of the captivity of all the Local Churches in the homelands, the Diaspora has not been spiritually mature enough to form new Local Churches.

Q: What do you mean by spiritual maturity?

A: Spiritual maturity is the spiritual growth that comes from suffering. This, incidentally, is why modern Western societies, spoilt by superficial consumerism, are so infantile, so immature. The majority in them do not know suffering.

Q: Can you give examples of this spiritual immaturity in the Church context?

A: We have the example of the OCA (Orthodox Church in America), which was granted a disputed autocephaly by the Patriarchate of Moscow at a time when it was in Soviet captivity. Nearly fifty years after the OCA received this disputed autocephaly, it is still riven by sectarian, spiritually immature, politically-minded, modernistic factions. They ignore and even despise and deny the two spiritual roots of the OCA, of American Rus in Alaska and of Carpatho-Rus in Pennsylvania, that is, of two strands of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, and want to substitute some kind of superficial, compromising, ephemeral, Protestant American cultural customs for those roots. It is like replacing the hymnography of Orthodox Christmas with ‘Jingle Bells’ (I quote from the practice of one ‘Orthodox’ parish of converts in California) or a fine French wine with Coca-Cola (I paraphrase the words of a well-known and more traditional OCA bishop from the past).

To be fair to OCA laypeople, many or most of whom reject these extremist factions and their modernism, we have to mention the problem of hundreds of former members of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). Also spiritually immature and politically-minded and ignorant of or rejecting the traditional practices and spiritual roots of the Church Outside Russia which were obvious before the mid-1960s, they tried to innovate and, on finally failing, abandoned ROCOR for various extra-ecclesial sects. This happened over a period of two decades between 1986 and 2007 before the reconciliation of ROCOR and the Church inside Russia. (In the same way, some renovationist intellectuals also left the Church inside Russia before its reconciliation with ROCOR, since they could not accept the reality of Church life). Extremists of any type cannot abide unity and reality and always fall for fantasies and sectarian mentalities

Q: Who were these renovationists in the Church inside Russia who left? I thought renovationism in Russia had been defeated in the 1920s and 1930s.

A: Yes, it was very much defeated, but only inside Russia. I meant the sectarian renovationism in foreign parishes in the jurisdiction of the Church inside Russia. This had been allowed to develop and was still preventing unity and reconciliation between the two parts of the Russian Church after the Jubilee Council in 2000.

Q: What conditions would you say need to be in place for any legitimate autocephaly in the Diaspora

A: There are two conditions, one concerning the Diaspora, the other concerning the Local Churches involved. 1. Freedom from spiritual compromise in the Diaspora, that is, the consciousness among a sufficient number (I mean at least 10,000s, not a few hundred) of rooted and mature Orthodox in the Diaspora that they need status as a new Local Church through autocephaly. 2. Freedom from spiritual compromise, that is, agreement among the seven Local Churches which have jurisdictions in the Diaspora on the granting of such an autocephaly.

Q: Leaving aside the first condition and agreement among the seven Churches, why can the Russian Church today not provide autocephaly for the Diaspora and found new Local Churches in, say, Western Europe, Australasia, North America and Latin America? After all, the atheist regime in Russia died a generation ago and today the Church there is politically free, free of State interference. Otherwise, there would never have been any reconciliation between it and the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR).

A: True, the Church inside Russia is politically free and the reunited Russian Church now has 342 bishops, about half the total number of Orthodox bishops worldwide, and nearly 40,000 clergymen, with 4,000 being ordained the last two years alone. However, merely being politically free is not the same as being free of ‘spiritual compromise’. There are other problems which create what I call ‘spiritual compromise’. For example, unlike in the atheist period, the masses in the Russian Lands are at least baptized, but that is not enough. You have to live the Faith to be Orthodox.

Only a minority of the people and of the elite in the Russian Lands are living Orthodoxy. Many middle-aged people in the bureaucracy still think in the old Soviet mafia ways – otherwise there would not be corruption, oligarchs and even a civil war going on for oligarch control in the Ukraine. All those phenomena are due to the atheist Soviet heritage. It is why you have so much alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce (ABCD). The Church inside Russia is still not spiritually strong enough. You can also see this in nationalistic tendencies in sections of the Russian population.

Q: What nationalistic tendencies?

A: In Russia today there are nationalists, that is semi-Orthodox, who still have a Soviet mentality even though they have been baptized. For instance, they can speak of such opposites as the Tsar-Martyr and Stalin as ‘Russian heroes’ in the same breath. Or they speak of ‘the Russian world’, instead of the Russian Orthodox world. Or they speak of commemorating Vladimir (Putin) by name at the liturgy.

Q: What is wrong with praying for your political leader by name?

A: Everyone agrees that Vladimir Putin is by far the best leader Russia has had since 1917, but he is not the Anointed Tsar, he is at best the politician who, God willing, is preparing the way for the restoration of a legitimate Tsar. But he is not the Tsar himself, only a forerunner. And only an Anointed Tsar is prayed for by name at the liturgy. To pray for a secular leader at the liturgy by name is a form of nationalism, however positive the underlying motivation. Worse than that, in a multinational Church, I think with 62 nationalities in all, you do not offer public prayers for the leader of only one nationality. That would be divisive. If some wish to pray for ‘Vladimir’ in their personal prayers, that is fine, but at the liturgy, in public prayer, we pray only for the authorities in general.

Q: How can such nationalism be overcome?

A: In order to overcome such nationalism we must develop the awareness of what the word ‘Rus’ means.

Q: And what does ‘Rus’ mean?

A: Our Patriarch is called Patriarch of ‘All Rus’, that is, of All the Russias. And ‘Rus’, as in ‘Holy Rus’, the phrase which expresses the Church’s ideal, means multinational, for it includes all the dozens of different races who confess the uncompromised Russian Orthodox Faith, not just Russians. The enemies of the Church, whether nominal, nationalistic Orthodox or Western heterodox – and both groups are actually enemies of the Church – are terrified of a Church which is multinational and uncompromised. Because their souls are narrow, both suffer from the same narrow, reductionist nationalism.

Q: If the Russian Church is at the moment unable to do anything in the Diaspora, then why, if the other conditions were met, could the Patriarchate of Constantinople not provide autocephaly for the Diaspora and found new Local Churches in, say, Western Europe, Australasia, North America and Latin America?

A: Now you are out of the frying pan and into the fire. First of all, unlike the Russian Church, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has never freely given any people autocephaly; Greek imperialism is a great hindrance here. Secondly, that Patriarchate is not only enslaved by US politics – since 1948 its Patriarchs have been nominated by the CIA – but it is also very nationalistic. Hellenism is stronger than Christianity. I can name three Greek priests in England who have in the last 15 months refused to baptize unbaptized English people into the Patriarchate of Constantinople for the simple reason that they ‘are not Greek’. So I baptized them in their place. Such clergy see the Church as a mere Greek club. This is characteristic in general. Whatever you say about Russians, they are not as nationalistic as this. I will always remember attending the Greek Cathedral in Paris on a Sunday, now 35 years ago; the Liturgy was stopped because the Greek ambassador entered – late. This is highly symbolic. A representative of the Greek State was considered to be more important than Christ.

Q: What is nationalism, spiritually?

A: Nationalism is a spiritual disease – a sign of a lack of spiritual experience and spiritual consciousness. It is what lies behind the absurd and violently nationalistic schisms in the Ukraine, in Macedonia, in Montenegro and in Moldova, which are so eagerly and mockingly exploited by the West as the movements of provincial bumpkins (which is what they are). Wherever you get decadence, you get nationalism, nationalistic tendencies and wherever you get nationalism, you get decadence. You can dress this up in a name like phyletism, but it is still nationalism, racism.

Q: Is nationalism only a sign of decadence among Orthodox?

A: Not in the least. In the 5th century it already lay behind the Coptic/Monophysite schism and the Nestorian schism. In the 11th century, it lay behind the Western schism, when the West wanted to replace the Church with its own ethnic identity (‘Roman’ Catholic, not Catholic) and began to deride the Church as ‘Greeks’ and ‘Byzantines’, so reducing it to an ethnic identity. In the 16th century it lay behind the Protestant Reformation, which was essentially an anti-Latin revolt of the Germanic peoples.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the invention of Anglicanism by the bloodthirsty Tudor monarchs, who, like the popes of Rome before them, supplanted Jesus Christ as heads of the Church in a purely ethnic operation. Unlike in the Orthodox Churches, however much they may suffer from nationalism, in Anglicanism the monarchs (or nowadays atheist and agnostic prime ministers) appoint the bishops and actually influence and shape Anglican doctrines and beliefs, whether it is the sacraments or a female episcopate.

Q: Why is nationalism so poisonous in Church life?

A: Simply because nationalism is another word for worldliness.

Q: If the Russian Church and the Patriarchate of Constantinople cannot act in the Diaspora, what about the Romanian Church? That is the second largest Local Church. Could it not act, if the other conditions were right?

A: No, the Romanians are also unable to do anything. Sadly, their country has now become an EU colony and so, like the Patriarchate of Constantinople, it is US-run. Apart from nationalism (fully backed by Washington, which is eager to cultivate and exploit that weakness – ‘every man has his price’ is the motto), there is a second and closely related disease in Romania, which has evolved directly from nationalism. That is ecumenism.

For instance, in Italy, where the Romanian jurisdiction is by far the largest Orthodox jurisdiction, the impression given by representatives of the Romanian Church is that ‘we are Catholics who use Romanian in our services, instead of Italian. There is no other difference between us’. (Some Romanian priests even use white wine in the Eucharist so as to be ‘like the Catholics’). Romanian Church representatives are so poor that they will compromise on almost anything with the Vatican to get the free use of redundant Catholic churches in Italy. Nationalism stands behind this ecumenism because Romanians and Italians are of the same Latin race, a racial fact which the Vatican exploits to the maximum. This is only one step away from Uniatism and the Vatican knows this and exploits this – Romanian Catholic and Roman Catholic do sound very similar.

The Romanian situation closely reminds me of the relations of the Patriarchate of Constantinople with the Anglicans when they sit the Archbishop of Canterbury on the bishop’s throne in their churches, or with the Catholics, whom they ban themselves from receiving into the Church, even though they plead to be received. (Thus if a Catholic priest wishes to be received into the Rue Daru jurisdiction (Patriarchate of Constantinople), he has to be sent to the OCA to be received, in other words, he is received through the back door).

Only recently in Germany two Romanian Orthodox priests became Catholic priests. Why not? The local Romanian bishop had been saying for years that ‘there is no difference between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church’. His priests were just being logical. On top of that the Catholics pay better. For an Orthodox who has no dogmatic consciousness of Orthodoxy, i.e. who is an apostate, it is only logical to be Catholic.

What I am saying is that any Local Church which is reduced to nationalism is very easily exploited by the enemies of the Church, whether the enemy is Protestantism or the Vatican, or secular-Protestant Washington or its secular-Catholic EU vassal or, perhaps the worst enemy, nominal, nationalistic Orthodoxy. Nationalism is the result of decadence, a low spiritual level, which causes a weak dogmatic consciousness, in other words, which creates an attachment to this world, which is much stronger than an attachment to the Kingdom of God, the values of the Church.

Q: So if at the present time no Local Church can act in the Diaspora, what is the solution?

A: There is no solution to the Diaspora problem at the present time because the solution is much more practical than that dreamed up by a few disincarnate intellectuals in ‘theological’ institutes. It is in the Incarnation of the Faith in international life, that is, in the restoration of the legitimate multinational Christian secular authority, the restoration of the Orthodox Emperor and Empire. Once this is restored, there will be the multinational support for the Diaspora and new Local Churches there. There were no jurisdictional disputes in the Diaspora before 1917, when there was an Orthodox Emperor. Once the Orthodox Emperor is restored, there will be the necessary finance, say, 200 billion roubles (£2 billion / $3 billion) for new Local Churches, the necessary infrastructure will be created and all the jurisdictional problems will be solved worldwide, as they were before the Revolution of 1917.

Q: What is preventing this?

A: Ourselves. We Orthodox first have to want and to be worthy of a restored Emperor and Empire. In 1917 the Orthodox elite had so far lapsed from the Faith that they actually rejected a Christian Emperor and Empire. The question is when will Orthodox stop being ‘ex-Orthodox’ or optimistically speaking, ‘pre-Orthodox’, and become worthy, ready to accept an Orthodox Emperor and Empire again. Only then, with an end to decadence, with a developed Orthodox consciousness, shall we see an end to the problems of the Diaspora.