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Daily Archives: March 1, 2015
‘Europe must stop writing its future with an American pen’
Le Figaro, 23 February 2015
Interviewed below by the famous French Le Figaro newspaper, the well-known French politician and former French Presidential candidate, Philippe de Villiers, welcomes the Minsk accords. He encourages François Hollande and Angela Merkel to draw closer to Vladimir Putin to build a Greater Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. Philippe de Villiers, an aristocrat, devout Catholic with a large family and a French patriot, is the creator of Puy du Fou (a highly popular theme park on French history) and the founder of the political party, The Movement for France. In the mid-1980s, he welcomed Solzhenitsyn to a national shrine in the Vendee in the west of France to commemorate victims of the atheist genocide of French peasantry and nobility after the French Revolution. He was a candidate for the French Presidency in 1995 and in 2007 and knows President Putin personally. He is also a prolific writer and publicist.
Interviewed by Alexandre DeVecchio
Le Fig: What do you think of the Minsk agreement negotiated by François Hollande and Angela Merkel with Vladimir Putin?
De Villiers: The Minsk agreement is extremely important because it involves four new factors. Firstly, it has permitted the protagonists to get out of the logic of war. The diplomatic path of small steps is a sign of a possible peaceful future. Secondly, two major European states, France and Germany, have led the negotiations and are committed to implementing the agreement alongside Russia. It is plain that neither the EU nor America has the capacity or the will to make peace there. This agreement shows that it is only when Europe talks to Europe that a real peace becomes visible – it is the Europe of its nations. Thirdly, the agreement opens the way to the only solution that exists for the territorial unity of Ukraine: the accepting by Kiev of a specific status for the east of the country with the right to its native language, Russian. Finally, as for the difference with the September agreement, this one has a calendar for each phase.
Le Fig: Once does not make a habit – so you welcome the initiative of François Hollande?
DeVilliers: Yes, because Europe must stop writing its future with an American pen. François Hollande has acted as a head of state without regard to American orders. He was able to resist the insistence of the United States on the Ukraine joining NATO. Furthermore, we must encourage France to go beyond this first phase of liberation. François Hollande should now deliver the Mistral ship that Russia ordered and so respect the commercial contract signed by France and paid for by Russia for a billion euros. He should also lift the sanctions which are today acts of war that are more unfavourable to the French economy than to the Russian economy and which do not affect the American economy at all. But the most important thing, rather than insist on building an artificial Europe of Maastricht, he will be to prepare the only viable Europe that makes sense: to lay the groundwork for a grand strategic and cultural partnership with Russia – Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.
Le Fig: The agreement has already been violated by Ukrainian separatists. Can we trust Vladimir Putin?
DeVilliers: When you get back to the source of these occurrences, you note the permanent falsehood of the EU and the fantasies of the Western press. The ceasefire, to my knowledge, is being observed along the front line, except at Debaltsevo, a special problem that came up just before the Minsk agreement. But even there, today the heavy weapons are being withdrawn. Monitoring mechanisms are being put into place and the heads of state are talking to each other. When the media report that Russian trucks laden with humanitarian aid are laden with munitions, I have to ask: in this time of satellites that see everything, of Iphones that record for the record, what’s stopping them giving us proof? Where are the photographs?
LeFig: The idea of exporting the Puy du Fou idea could be turned down in Russia – is your unconditional support for Putin out of self-interest?
DeVilliers: Just the opposite. Having let Russia in on the advance planning for this Franco-Russian project, I discovered two things. First, that Russia is profoundly European. All her culture, all her elites and all her people look towards Europe. Solzhenitsyn told me once: “Don’t make the mistake of turning your back on Russia. It’s a matter of your future.”
Furthermore, I discovered that Putin is a genuine head of state. I also found out why in the West the elite one-worlders never cease criticizing him: America wants Europe to be the 51st star on the American flag. For that, they have to keep Europe sworn to NATO. Vladimir Putin is the perfect excuse, the ideal devil. Let us not forget the origins of the Ukrainian mess. Firstly, a coup d’etat fomented by NATO. Then the mistake of the Ukrainian government, the forbidding of the Russian language, finally, the US insistence on the Ukraine joining NATO. How can you imagine that the Russians could agree to see NATO on their doorstep? Vladimir Putin has no wish for the dismemberment of Ukraine. He simply wishes the recognition of the native Russian language in the Russian-speaking regions, a status for the regions and finally the neutrality of Ukraine vis-a-vis NATO.
Le Fig: Russia seems to have recovered a certain national pride. Isn’t there a risk of this turning into excessive nationalism?
DeVilliers: The difference with France is as follows: in Russia there is a real restoration of moral, civic, patriotic and spiritual values. The children of Russia are learning pride in being Russian. You tell Russians of Russia, of its greatness, its rich heritage, its Eurasian spectrum. And what are we telling the children of France? That France is a disgrace, that the French are a bunch of racists and that patriotism is a bore. There is more freedom of speech in Russia than among us. As Philippe Muray prophesied, we are stuck in a cage of -phobes: islamophobes, xenophobes, europhobes, homophobes. Nobody shifts! And we have a political class that’s been drained, sanitized, stuck through the microwave that blesses the splitting of society between secularists who make a spiritual void and Islamists who fill that void.
Le Fig: This doesn’t prevent the Russians themselves from experiencing strong ethnic and cultural tensions, does it?
DeVilliers: The difference with French-style integration is clear. There are in Russia 20 million Muslims out of 140 million inhabitants. Vladimir Putin applies the ancient prudent principle: “We lives in Rome like the Romans; we lives in Russia like the Russians.” In France those who wish to believe that secularism and human rightsism are enough to resolve the problem are manipulators or cowards. There is but one way to integrate our country, by becoming French!
Le Fig: Now that negotiations between the European Union and Greece are stalled, might Tsipras turn towards Russia?
DeVilliers: As far as the European oligarchy is concerned, Tsipras is in a state of mortal sin. He will soon be sacrificed on the Parthenon since he doesn’t kneel before the euro and he admits to a penchant toward Russia. He finds some virtues in the devil. But the worshippers of Brussels and Frankfurt have never understood that redemption by the euro doesn’t work for European economies. Greece will leave the euro: the negotiations will only postpone it. The European Union of today is an insane attempt at miracle-working, to annihilate the nation-state, national borders and to turn the peoples and industrial activities over to the masters of internationalization, who get immense profits from it.
Le Fig: What will the Europe of tomorrow look like?
DeVilliers: The idea concocted today, by the Eurocrats and the one-world elites, of a free trade agreement with the US will make Europe into a market annexed to America, turns its back on the future and on common sense. What I fault in their Europe is being an American Europe — a simple extension, both economic and cultural, of the United States. To predict the future, we could say “The European Union is dead! Long live Europe!” The true Europe, the Greater Europe, is from the Atlantic to the Pacific and that will rediscover the cradle of her cultural and ancestral alliances. The Europe of Queen Anne of Kiev, the Russian queen who married a French king. The Europe that rediscovers the old and good ideas that have led the world ever since men invented the triptych, sovereignty, borders and identities.
Will the 2016 Inter-Orthodox Council be Cancelled?
The Inter-Orthodox Council which the Patriarchate of Constantinople has so long wanted and which has been pencilled in for 2016 has always been in doubt. Firstly, there has been the question of the agenda. What is there to talk about, when all the dogmatic issues were long ago resolved? The agenda of mainly rather secular issues proposed, seemingly a throwback to the 1960s, has never really been shared with, let alone had the support or enthusiasm of, the faithful and appears to have been externally imposed by the forces which control that Patriarchate. Secondly, there have been several jurisdictional disputes potentially preventing such a Council taking place.
For example, there has been the question of the recognition of the much-disputed autocephaly of the small group known as the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), which was founded during the first Cold War and which is on shared territory with other Orthodox, the question of a group set up by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in Estonia creating two Churches on the same territory, the question of continued politically-motivated dissidence in Russian Church life in the Diaspora with defections to Constantinople, as well as the dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem regarding jurisdiction in Qatar. Now there are new issues, which also seem to be linked to political adventurism.
In recent days the US-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople has set up an alternative ‘Synod’ in the Czech Lands and Slovakia, in effect creating a division, similar to those after the establishment of Constantinople jurisdictions in the Diaspora after 1917 and more recently in Estonia. The decision to establish the new Synod was made after a meeting of two Constantinople bishops in Vienna on 6 February. In the church in Brno in Moravia on 22 February the 89-year old Archbishop Symeon, together with the retired Bishop Tikhon, consecrated a third bishop outside the Synod of the Local Church, effectively establishing a new Synod.
Almost at the same time the US-appointed Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople received a delegation of Ukrainians from Canada. He promised to help various schismatic groups in the Ukraine, which like Estonia is also on the canonical territory of the Russian Orthodox Church, unite under his authority. This is on condition that the US-appointed President Poroshenko in Kiev asks his Patriarchate to do so. The Patriarch promised ‘flexibility’, suggesting canonical vagueness. There is a clear political influence here, as the powers that be in the Western world continue to try to divide the Orthodox Church through its weakest point, the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
This has been controlled by the US since 1948, when it deposed the legitimate Patriarch Maximos, who was exiled to Switzerland, and appointed its own controversial Greek-American candidate. These latest measures have been seen as a new part of the US-inspired war of sanctions in revenge for Russian support for the Ukrainians fighting against the US-installed junta in Kiev which appeared after the overthrow of the democratic government there. This is surely a tactical error on the part of the US. It means that the Orthodox world will be able to ignore the now isolated Patriarchate of Constantinople. Like the EU, it has become just another unfree pawn in the new Cold War which the US has begun, from North Africa to the Middle East and from Central Asia to the Caucasus and Eastern Europe.
If Constantinople were politically isolated, the rest of the Orthodox Church would be able to hold a Council (just as it did in 1948 in Moscow), putting aside the modernist human rights-style agenda for the 2016 Council, dictated to the Church by external secular forces. These are the same forces as those that dictated the agenda of Vatican II, protestantizing and secularizing the Roman Catholic world fifty years ago. A future Council of free Local Orthodox Churches, perhaps to be held at the restored New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, could have a relevant agenda to discuss. This could for example be:
1. A statement on the need for the canonical freedom of the Church from the interference of all political authorities and thus a return by all to the Orthodox calendar and typicon. 2. A call to repentance to Orthodox who have lapsed into nationalism, modernism, sectarianism and other forms of Western secularism. 3. The reassertion of the Christian values which stand at the roots of the Western world, but which after a millennial process of degeneration it has finally wholly rejected in the last 25 years. 4. A call to the rest of the Non-Orthodox world to return to traditional values from secularism and consumerist materialism for the sake of the survival of humanity. 5. A statement on the concerted need to preach the Gospel in its Orthodox context throughout the Non-Orthodox world.
This seems to be the moment of decision for nominal Orthodox. Do they believe in the Gospel commandment of Christ that we are to baptize all peoples in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, or are they mere petty nationalists? Are they on the side of the Church, or are they prepared to support the West in its Antichristic project, which involves emptying the Middle East of all its native Christians and trying to destroy the canonical Orthodox Church in the Ukraine? Are they loyal to the multinational Orthodox Christian ideal of Holy Rus/Romaiosini, or are they loyal to provincial nationalism and the powers of this world? Are they loyal to Christ and His Church, or to the Godless Western grasp for global hegemony? Answers need to be given.
The Final Battle is Coming: The Truth Will Set You Free
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.
(Matt. 6, 33)
You are of this world; I am not of this world.
(Jn 8, 23)
I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.
(Jn. 12, 47)
If the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love his own; but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you…And you also shall bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning.
(Jn. 15, 18-19 and 27)
For many shall come in My name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many…Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and you shall be hated by all nations for My name’s sake.
(Matt. 24, 5 and 9)
Faith is a gift from God; Religion is a gift from the Devil.
(Anon)
Olga was burdened with the consciousness that those same people who so warmly befriended her belonged to a nation which had refused justice to her country.
The Last Grand Duchess (Olga Alexandrovna) by Ian Vorres, P. 240
There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.
Conan-Doyle, His Last Bow
Russia is the only centre of an unenslaved civilization capable of showing itself to be Christian. Therefore our patriotism…is above all the understanding of the importance of the unique Christian mission for which our people lives and of which it is convinced…Do today’s Western European elites belong to the real Europe? Alas! Theirs is not Europe. Theirs is Babylon…The goal of the real Europe is us, people who remember the presence of eternal and unchanging values, people who know what we live and die for. Such knowledge has virtually been lost in the west of the European continent.
Interview with Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin on Politrussia on 25 February 2015
Introduction: The Sovietization of the West
In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet Empire used to arrest Russian Orthodox for ‘anti-Soviet activities’, such as printing the Gospels and other Orthodox literature. Referring to a passage like I Peter 2, 17, its KGB agents would try to intimidate them with sly questions like: ‘Why do you not obey your own Apostle Peter and ‘honour the ruler?’ A few younger ones among those arrested were confused by their cunning. Others, older and with a clearer understanding of the New Testament and so Church teaching, would answer approximately thus:
‘We certainly honour our rulers and all men by praying for them, we never harm or hate others or use violence, we pay our taxes, we are law-abiding, but we put the laws of the Kingdom of Heaven above the laws of the kingdoms of this world. If the State and its appointees persecute us, try to silence us, order us to renounce our Faith and not go to church, then we refuse, accepting imprisonment or death for the sake of the Truth. This is the story of the Crucifixion and of the martyrs and of all Church history and nothing has changed today’.
Theirs is the answer that faithful Orthodox give in today’s world too. Wherever apostasy from Orthodoxy has occurred since 1917, throughout the Western Empire, in Estonia, in the Ukraine, in Czechia and elsewhere, we answer the same. We pray for our enemies, we utterly condemn violence and terrorism, we honour all, but we put the laws of the Kingdom of Heaven above the laws of the kingdoms of this world. ‘Blessed are you when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for My sake’.
Given the speed of the present Western apostasy from the vestiges of Orthodox Christianity conserved in heterodoxy, especially over the last fifteen years, it seems as though Western States are now setting out on the path of the old Soviet State. They are trying to silence us through intimidation. Orthodox Christians here must be prepared for persecution in the future, sooner than we thought. Why does this possibility of persecution concern heterodox less than us Orthodox? The answer lies in two different teachings on Church and State.
Heterodox Teachings on Church and State
Inherent to the filioque Trinitarian theology of heterodoxy are the twin heresies of papocaesarism and caesaropapism, which are the two sides of the same false coin. The first heresy is that of Catholicism, which puts the Bishop of Rome, called the Pope, above the rulers of the world and makes him the infallible source of the Holy Spirit. This simply makes his ‘Church’ into a State in its own right. In other words, what was once the Church is deformed into a mere religion, a worldly institution and so is deprived of the Holy Spirit.
The second heresy is that of Protestantism, which subjects the Church to the rulers of this world. This makes their ‘Churches’ into simple departments of State, Ministries of Morality which soon turn into phariseeism. This was what was introduced into Russia from Holland by Peter I, who greatly admired Protestantism, often preferring it to authentic Christianity. It also explains why most Anglicans, belonging to an erastian, State-founded institution, do not understand the Incarnational spirit of the Orthodox Faith and accuse us of being political!
these heresies represent the ideology of ‘in the world and of the world’. In other words, both are inherently secular. The reaction to them is in abstract, spiritualist, disincarnate philosophies, which are very attractive to intellectuals who lapse from the Catholic/Protestant coin and fall into spiritual illusion. They can be characterized as ‘not in the world and not of the world’. These pseudo-mystical, spiritually irrelevant currents were originally represented by the Gnostics and Origen and in the Western Middle Ages by such as Boehme and Eckhart.
In more recent times such futile speculations have been represented by masonry and Swedenborgianism, in modern times by the orientalisms of Sufism, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Kabbalah and various disincarnate movements like anthroposophy, occultism and hippy movements with their ‘mind-expanding’ drug-taking. These movements were very popular among the uprooted, disincarnate Russian elite in early twentieth century Russia, being pioneered by the pseudo-Catholic philosopher, the alcoholic Vladimir Soloviov.
The Christian Teaching on Church and State
Papocaesarism and caesaropapism, ‘in the world and of the world’, as well as disincarnate, anti-Holy Spirit illusions, ‘not in the world and not of the world’, oppose the balanced Gospel and so Church teaching on the Incarnation, ‘in the world but not of the world’. The Gospel, Orthodox view was represented in ancient times by those like St Basil the Great, St Ambrose of Milan and St John Chrysostom, more recently by Patriarch Nikon in Russia in the 17th century or the martyred St Gregory, Patriarch of Constantinople in the 19th century.
They all believed that the Church should remain separate from the State, but also should incarnate the Church’s values into State life, while keeping Her integrity, thus creating a people’s monarchy and harmony or symphony. The Church is not an idea, a philosophy, a distraction for intellectuals, a plaything for idle minds. The Church is the Body of Christ, the Kingdom of Heaven made Incarnate. This is why the Church has always been persecuted, both from outside and from inside, by heresy and schism, by ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’.
In particular, there are those who lapse from Orthodox Christianity and fall into the heterodox error of caesaropapism, kow-towing to the Establishment. However, the 20th century gave millions of examples of confession of the Orthodox teaching, the New Martyrs and Confessors in the former Russian Empire, Greece, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria. Our consciences dictate to us to resist the persecuting and anti-Christian States or Establishments which detest us, bully us and threaten us for contradicting their this-worldly ideologies.
Let us take the case of Fr Vsevolod Shpiller. In 1970s Moscow this well-known priest and pastor, who put the Kingdom of God first, was arrested by the KGB and interrogated. His charge? He had paraphrased what Christ had said to Pilate (Jn. 19, 11), that if it was God’s will, the Roman (in 1970s Moscow, the Soviet) Empire could cease to exist in an instant. The KGB had taken fright, for they took it as a threat to the Soviet State and this turbulent priest had to be arrested for his ‘threat’ of proclaiming that God is greater than any Establishment.
The Struggle to Free England from the Oppression of the British Establishment
Forty years on the situation is becoming much the same in the West. Some followers of the British Establishment are, amazingly, frightened of us. The corrupt British Establishment, an invention of the Normans, has always detested the people (whom they call by the public school term ‘plebs’), especially when we enter Establishment organs like Oxbridge, once the preserve of the Norman elite. They still patronizingly resent meritocracy and the ascent of common mortals, whom they try to ‘freeze out’ through cliquishness and clubbishness.
As they believe their own propaganda, what they really dislike is anyone who contradicts their Establishment line and tells the Truth. So ‘liberal’ are they that they attempt censorship and its agents carry out death threats, as David Kelly found out. When adventurers accuse you of being ‘political’, then you know that you are close to the truth. As patriotic subjects loyal to what is beyond the Establishment, the England on high, we pray for the Royal House, the government and the armed forces, that they may be guided by the Heavenly King.
Next year, 2016, will mark the 950th anniversary of the Invasion and Occupation of England, when the country was finally dragged into the Great Western delusion and the establishment of the Establishment. Unlike the idolators of the British Establishment, we put the Kingdom of God first, above this-worldly values, for, like the disciples, though we are in the world, we are not of the world. We feel no hatred or condemnation for the followers of this world and its Establishments, only sorrow and compassion for the deluded, wherever they may live.
After all these centuries we are still fighting for freedom for England and all these Isles and all the Western Lands, that we may win our lands and peoples back for the King of Heaven and His saints. Like the Great Alfred, English Orthodoxy is still calling from Athelney. Incredibly, the British Establishment is frightened by us little people. Why? Because the pen is mightier than the sword, our Faith is mightier than all their threats. Unlike them, we are not afraid to die. God is with us. They are right to tremble. As Chaucer said: the truth will out.
Conclusion: Three Revelations
In 1969 I read Seton-Watson’s book about the Russian Revolution. Despite his clear bias, it was revealed to me, even then, that all the insidious ideas for that historical error had come from the West and hoodwinked faithless Russians. In 1971 I bought in Colchester the book of interviews by Ian Vorres with the sister of the martyred Tsar, Olga Alexandrovna, who had died in Canada eleven years before. On P. 240 she revealed her fondness for England, but her disgust at the ‘utterly vile’ anti-Russian politics ‘of successive British Parliaments’.
Finally, in 1984 I was, with others, followed by the KGB in Paris and labelled by the follower as ‘a dangerous counter-revolutionary and monarchist’. Revelation! How times change in just thirty years! Today the demons which infested the Soviet Empire, cast out by the prayers of the New Martyrs, infest the Western Empire, with its New World Order. Motivated by the desire for global control and so the destruction of the sovereignty of the peoples and of faithfulness to Christ, Who is outside their control, the Western leaders are blinded.
The demons cast out by the New Martyrs and Confessors, by our recognition of them and so our prayers to them, went to the West, where they were welcomed. Now, as at Gennesareth of old, the demons have entered into those who welcomed them and they, like a herd of swine, are rushing to their suicide all over the Western world, shouting ‘Je suis Charlie’. Now is the time to redouble our prayers to the Saints of the Western world who belong to the Church. Together with all the heavenly hosts, they can send these demons back to their place in hell.
The Final Battle is coming. Every day the Second Coming draws closer, but the miracle of repentance is no less possible today than yesterday. The end may be only a few years away, but it may also be a thousand years away. The demons can still be cast out of the West ‘by prayer and fasting’. We do not fear, because whatever happens, we know that the real end of history, and not the end imagined by an American academic a history-filled generation ago, will be the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The last words in world history are Christ’s.
The Triumph of Orthodoxy 2015