Monthly Archives: November 2015

TERRORISM IS SATANISM

Metropolitan Hilarion’s (Alfeyev) address to the Russian Parliament

On November 20, 2015, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s department for external church relations (DECR), addressed the united session of the Federation Council and the State Duma devoted to problems involved in the struggle against terrorism.

Met. Hilarion, emphasized that the perpetrators of these heinous acts are not religious but satanist, and all of us must transcend politics to form a united front against this current evil. Excerpts from his address can be found below:

War has been declared on Russia. It has been declared by a criminal terror grouping which names itself ‘Islamic State’ and which has been notorious for its monstrous evil deeds throughout the world.

We must clearly realize that it is not a war of one religious confession against another. The very notion of ‘religious terrorism’ can only lead us astray. There is no religious terrorism whatsoever. Those who have unleashed this war do not deserve to be called the faithful. They are Satanists because they do the will of the Devil, bringing to people grief, death and destruction.

They are cursed by both religious leaders of all confessions and ordinary people – believers and non-believers alike throughout the world. And the only way to cope with them is to destroy them systematically and purposefully, tracking them down wherever they are hiding and eliminating them collectively and individually, for each of them poses a threat to tens, hundreds and thousands of lives.

War against terrorism is a war in the spiritual field. The principal frontline goes through people’s souls. For this reason, we should struggle against terrorism not only in the theatre of hostilities, but in the first place in the battlefield for souls and hearts.

What are these measures? First of all, it is the education of children and youth for respect of traditional religions. It is no secret to anyone that extremism under the banner of religion is developed first of all on the ground of complete illiteracy with regard to religious matters, when people without conscience or positive moral guidelines claim as Islam what is not Islam and call upon people in the name of Allah to commit grave crimes running contrary to the very essence of religion.

It is time at last to decline the understanding of separation of the Church from the state and school from the Church which presupposes that religion should not be directly present in the secular education space. Today as never before the teaching of the Basics of Religious Culture is needed in school and this experience should be broadened. Our children must know the truth about religions, not the falsehood that Satanists dressed up as believers may inculcate in them.

We should complete the work to create the academic field of theology in the secular education space with all the ensuing consequences including the right to be granted state-recognized academic degrees in this discipline. How does it bear on the problem of terrorism? Most directly. In the Russian context, theology – not secular, nor ‘super-confessional’, as some seek to impose on us after the western fashion, but bound to traditional confessions – may become a unique platform for cooperation among the traditional religions of our country.

It is time to reject liberal clichés. The thing to be afraid of is not religion but ignorance in the matters of religion. The thing to be afraid of is not the much-talked-about ‘clericalism’, which is used by westernizers to intimidate our public, but the thing that may happen if our children and youth are cut off the source of true knowledge about religion.

Special responsibility lies today with the clergy of various religious confessions. An important role belongs to Islamic leaders who are called to tirelessly show to their faithful that what terrorists present as Islam is not Islam in reality.

It is necessary for the state and religious communities, through their common efforts, to promote the preservation of the traditional values in our people on which their life has been built for centuries. Young people in Europe could not be recruited in the ranks of militants so massively if spiritual values and the institution of family have not been ruined and if consumerism, sexual perversions and the ideology of profit have not been inculcated in them so consistently in the last decades.

Multiculturalism, so popular in Europe, presupposing not only the equality of all religions but also their absence from the public space, has fully exhausted and discredited itself today. Ideologically Europe has nothing to set against terrorists. It is only a Europe, strong and not ashamed of her roots and her own religious identity, that will be able to oppose fanatics who are so sure of their rightness that they do not spare their own lives to destroy the lives of others.

Russia has a unique role to play today. Millions of people in the Middle East are looking to Russia with hope. Indeed, they have pinned their hope on the West for a long time but have ended up with nothing. Russia has become a world leader today in the struggle against the plague of terrorism, and in this we see the historic role of our people brought up on Christian spiritual and moral values and ideals with full respect for the faithful of other traditional religions.

Yet because Russia has found herself in the forefront of the struggle with global evil, risks are growing too, as the tragedy in the sky over the Sinai showed. Bowing our heads before the memory of all the dead, let us give a promise today, no, not to avenge them but to do everything that depends on us to prevent such a thing from recurring.

Prophetic Times

As for the lion whom you saw rousing up out of the forest and roaring and speaking to the eagle and reproving him for his unrighteousness and all his words that you have heard, this is the Anointed One, Whom the Most High has kept until the end of the days against them and their impieties…He will denounce them for their ungodliness and their wickedness and will cast up before them their contemptuous dealings…He will deliver in mercy the remnant of My people, those who have been preserved within My borders, and He will make them joyful until the end comes, the Day of Judgement…

(3 Esdras 12, 31-32 and 34 – the last book of the Russian Orthodox Old Testament; in the Protestant RSV this appears as 2 Esdras)

The shooting down of an anti-terrorist Russian aeroplane by Turkey’s anti-Kurdish, NATO-run forces has implications far beyond the obvious one – that it was preventing IS from selling cheap oil to Turkey’s corrupt businessmen-politicians and therefore had to be destroyed.

First of all, it reminds us that Western secularism has always allied itself with militant Islam against Holy Rus. It was thus in the thirteenth century when St Alexander Nevsky fought simultaneously against the Teutonic Knights, who stabbed Christian Russia in the back while it was already fighting the Mongol Tartars from the East. It was thus in the nineteenth century when Imperial Britain fought against the liberation of the Balkan Christians by Russia, and allied itself with the Muslim Ottoman oppressors.

It was thus in 1915 when German’s ally, Turkey, massacred a million Armenians, who had been protected by Russia alone. It was thus in the 1970s when the US and the UK allowed Turkey to invade and occupy northern Cyprus, wrecking its Christian shrines. It was thus in the 1980s when the CIA created, funded, trained and armed Al-Qaida in Afghanistan and in the 1990s when its Western-funded and protected offshoots fought Serbia in the Balkans and Russia in the Caucasus. It is thus today in Libya and Syria. Western secularism and Islamic fundamentalism are simply the two sides of the selfsame coin.

Secondly, it reminds us of the prophecies of the saints, of St Cosmas of Aitolia and, more recently, of St Paisius the Athonite (+ 1994), who foresaw war between Russia and Turkey, the Russian liberation of Constantinople from its physical enemies and also from internal enemies who, though Orthodox in name, are in fact apostates from the Faith, being rather paid agents of the Washington-Vatican axis. These prophecies speak of bloodshed, of a third of Turks converted to Orthodoxy, a third being driven away to Mesopotamia and a third dying.

Thirdly, it reminds us that Eden, Paradise, was ‘in the east’, somewhere in Mesopotamia, and that anti-Eden, anti-Paradise, is also in the east, in today’s blood-drenched Iraqi Mesopotamia. It reminds us that the war that is going on in western Syria, created by the West, is dangerously close to the place in occupied Palestine called Armageddon and that the war that is continuing there is a war against those who hate Christ and His teachings, including those who are planning to rebuild the Temple on Zion, ready for the enthronement of their master Antichrist.

The consequences are far-reaching. The Church meeting that the US-guided Phanariots want for next year may now not happen. With the meeting already threatened by the Phanariot rejection of the Carpatho-Russian Metropolitan Rostislav in Czechoslovakia, how now can Russian delegates enter Turkey? Does this mean that the Russian Church will instead hold a real Council for all free Orthodox in the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, as we suggested in our speech in Moscow in 2007? The situation in the Ukraine, on the northern shores of the Black Sea just across from Turkey is also concerned. The CIA-installed and funded junta in Kiev looks ever more discredited, as it welcomes the illegal Turkish aggression, but it is also fragile and bankrupt. How can the weak Western world still support the junta when isolated Western Europe is faced by mass Muslim invasion and the isolated USA by the joint might of Russia, China and India?

Today the minority of Orthodox, for so long undecided and ambivalent on the fringes of the Church, as well as all others who call themselves Christians, are being asked to face reality and decide whom they support: the pro-Islamic Western elite and its bandit consumerism, or resurgent Holy Rus, the Christian Empire. No more so in the Paris Jurisdiction, whose Archbishop Job has just been removed. Those on the fringes can hesitate no longer. Are they Halfodox apostates from Orthodox Christianity, or are they patriots of the worldwide Holy Rus that is, by the grace of God, being born?

Today is the time of St John the Baptist. We are being called on to prepare the way for the enthronement of the new Emperor of the Christian Empire of Rus. He will be, by the grace and anointing of the Church, the only protector of Christians from those who are preparing the coming of Antichrist on Zion, even arranging in Paris the largest gathering of world leaders in history. Our destiny is to fight in the mystical battle against spiritual impurity and slander.

Last week I prayed in Odessa as a pilgrim at the grave of the humble Elder Jonah (+ 2012). Are his prophecies regarding the Ukraine and all Rus in 2016 to be realized? All depends on our repentance. All the fragments of Holy Rus, ‘the footstool of the Kingdom of Heaven’, in the words of St John of Kronstadt, are to be guarded, propagated and gathered together before the end. All Orthodox of all nationalities who know what is prophesied in the holy book of Esdras (3 Esdras 12, 30-34 and 3 Esdras 15, 8-63), the enthronement of the last Christian Emperor before the end, are to repent and show the way.

Vladimir Putin: The New World Order Worships Satan

By Jonas E. Alexis

Kevin Barrett: “It is worth noting that Russia and Iran – the two nations most successfully resisting NWO regime change – are doing so in the name of God…. Putin’s reference to Satanism was a pointed rebuke to the New World Order elites, who – though they push militant secularism on the societies they are trying to undermine – are closet Satanists.”

“So, you want to worship Satan? By all means, but leave Russia out of it. Rest assured that I will be your worst nightmare. You can quote me on that.”

During the Cold War, the United States and much of the West argued that the Soviet Union was a “godless nation.”[1] Last year, Vladimir Putin took that pendulum, swung it on the other direction, and landed it on the Zionist regime. As Patrick Buchanan put it then, “In the new war of beliefs, Putin is saying, it is Russia that is on God’s side. The West is Gomorrah.”[2] Putin said:

“Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values. Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation.”[3]

If you think that Putin is just pulling your leg here, then get this:

The Washington Times reported then:

“In his state of the nation address, Mr. Putin also portrayed Russia as a staunch defender of ‘traditional values’ against what he depicted as the morally bankrupt West. Social and religious conservatism, the former KGB officer insisted, is the only way to prevent the world from slipping into ‘chaotic darkness.’

“As part of this defense of ‘Christian values,’ Russia has adopted a law banning “homosexual propaganda” and another that makes it a criminal offense to ‘insult’ the religious sensibilities of believers…

“Although Mr. Putin has never made a secret of what he says is his deep Christian faith, his first decade in power was largely free of overtly religious rhetoric. Little or no attempt was made to impose a set of values on Russians or lecture to the West on morals.”[4]

Certainly Putin put the moral equation back on the table. Kevin Barrett declared that Putin here was trying to “put the fear of God in the New World Order.” Barrett moved on to make the forceful argument that much of the Zionist establishment in the West is afraid of Putin because the establishment lives in fear. “Russian President Putin is resisting,” said Barrett. “That is why the Western propaganda machine is calling him names.” Barrett continued to argue cogently:

“It is worth noting that Russia and Iran – the two nations most successfully resisting NWO regime change – are doing so in the name of God…. Putin’s reference to Satanism was a pointed rebuke to the New World Order elites, who – though they push militant secularism on the societies they are trying to undermine – are closet Satanists.

“Anyone who doubts this should run the name ‘Lt. Col. Michael Aquino’ through a search engine. Aquino, an avowed Satanist and credibly-accused mass child abuser, was rewarded for his crimes against children with an appointment as Chief of Psychological Warfare for the US military…

“The shock troops of the NWO’s war against religion and tradition (and Russia and Iran) are the neoconservatives. Operation Gladio terrorist Michael Ledeen explains:

“‘Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace … We must destroy them to advance our historic mission.’

“Putin is stopping New World Order ‘creative destruction’ in Syria and Ukraine. He is part of a growing coalition opposing the NWO – not just religious traditionalists, but also progressive anti-globalization forces, including Hugo Chavez inspired anti-imperialists in Latin America.”

Kudos for Barrett here. The regime proved Putin right by applauding the Pussy Riot,[5] a Trotskyite group that ended up having sex (literal pornography) at the Moscow National Museum. (We have discussed this issue in the past.) As always, Neocons like Seth Mandel of Commentary were on the front line defending their brethren.[6]

But the crucial point here is that Putin, like Emmanuel Kant and even John Adams and others, understands that a nation cannot exist without objective morality, and objective morality cannot exist without Logos,[7] the essence and sustainer of the moral universe.
In that sense, and whether he notices it or not, Putin was implicitly or indirectly attacking the Neo-Darwinian ideology, which states that objective morality is an illusion and has no metaphysical basis. It is here that we find again that Neo-Darwinian metaphysics is intellectually useless and worthless because it denies the very essence of a moral universe.

As we have noted in the past, serious Darwinists agree that objective morality is an illusion. The noted biology philosopher Michael Ruse once again said that “there are no grounds whatsoever for being good…. Morality is flimflam.”[8] Yet like his intellectual antecedent Charles Darwin, Ruse ends up contradicting himself in the very next sentence by saying, “Does this mean that you can just go out and rape and pillage, behave like an ancient Roman grabbing Sabine women? Not at all. I said that there are no grounds for being good. It doesn’t follow that you should be bad.”[9]

Well, duh! If there are no grounds for objective morality, then good and bad are also illusion. There is not such a thing as rape or bad behavior. What is good for you may not be good for me, and there is no way of adjudicating competing explanations. In that kind of world, might makes right. Ruse does not really have a problem with this argument here. In fact, he moves on to say that morality “is something forged in the struggle for existence and reproduction, something fashioned by natural selection. It is as much a natural human adaptation as our ears or noses or teeth. It works and it has no meaning over and above this. If all future food were Pablum, we would probably be better off without teeth.

“Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothache and marking student papers. But it is, and has to be, a funny kind of emotion. It has to pretend that it is not that at all! If we thought that morality was no more than liking or not liking spinach, then pretty quickly it would break down.

“Before long, we would find ourselves saying something like: ‘Well, morality is a jolly good thing from a personal point of view. When I am hungry or sick, I can rely on my fellow humans to help me. But really it is all bullshit, so when they need help I can and should avoid putting myself out. There is nothing there for me.’ The trouble is that everyone would start saying this, and so very quickly there would be no morality and society would collapse and each and every one of us would suffer. “So morality has to come across as something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though really it is subjective.”[10]

Ruse, like some genetic theorists, really believes that “morality is an illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator…”[11]

This, by the way, is logically congruent with Darwin’s survival of the fittest. And survival of the fittest is logically congruent with Zionism. If evolutionary theory “explains how warfare contributed to fitness in the course of the evolution of Homo sapiens,” as scholar Bradley A. Thayer maintains,[12] then how can a serious Darwinist say that social Darwinism or even Zionism is really bad on a consistent and logical basis?

Thayer, of course, struggles mightily to rationally defend the thesis that “Warfare contributes to fitness”[13] and that “people wage war to gain and defend resources”[14] while maintaining that social Darwinists were wrong in taking social Darwinism to its logical conclusion. He says that “social Darwinists perverted Charles Darwin’s argument” and “distorted evolutionary explanations because they misunderstood Darwin’s ideas and were ignorant of or consciously chose to ignore the naturalistic fallacy. Those who use evolutionary theory to explain aspects of human behavior must recall the social Darwinists’ errors. Doing so makes it possible not only to avoid repeating errors but also to advance scientific understanding.”[15]

But Thayer moves on to make this argument: “The ultimate causation for warfare is anchored in Darwinian natural selection and inclusive fitness….warfare can increase both the absolute and relative fitness of humans…From the classical Darwinian perspective, warfare contributes to fitness because individuals who wage war successfully are better able to survive and reproduce.”[16]

Thayer repeats this thesis over and over in the course of the book:

“An ultimate causal explanation for warfare based in evolutionary theory begins with the recognition that warfare contributes to fitness in certain circumstances because successful warfare lets the winner acquire resources.

“For evolutionary biology, a resource is any material substance that has the potential to increase the individual’s ability to survive or reproduce. As such it may be food, shelter, or territory, especially high-quality soil or wild foods; abundant firewood; or territory free of dangerous animals, such as lions, or insect infestations, or disease; and also status coalition allies, and members of the opposite sex.”[17]

And then this: “Warfare might be necessary then for offensive purposes, to plunder resources from others. In these circumstances, an individual becomes fitter if he can successfully attack to take the resources of others.”[18]

Thayer cites evolutionary theorist William Durham saying that “War is one means by which individuals ‘may improve the material conditions of their lives and thereby increae their ability to survive and reproduce…Thus successful warfare would help the tribe gain resources, and for an agricultural economy land is critically important.”[19]

So, is Thayer really against social Darwinism? Ideologically, yes. Consistently and logically? No. I honestly don’t blame him, for his intellectual grandfather could not solve that problem either and had to live in contradiction until his dying day. Darwin declared at the end of his Origin of Species:

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”[20]

Correct me if I am wrong here: isn’t he saying that war and famine and death are things that will get the higher animals ahead?

Scholars of all stripes agree that this is Darwin at his best. Yet when social Darwinists took his thesis and spread it across the political spectrum, Darwin disagreed![21]

If the Dreadful Few are in the struggle for survival, then the Goyim must swiftly be eliminated. That is certainly consistent with Darwin’s grand scheme. If people cannot see this and try to avoid this vital contradiction, then you can be sure that they are not to be taken seriously or they do not understand logic.

So, when people are trying to maintain an objective morality by either appealing to the so-called “evolutionary theory” or even DNA, then you can be sure that those people either are out of touch with the scholarly literature, are not well equipped to understand or articulate their own position, or are just deliberately lying.

Furthermore, to appeal to reciprocal altruism to prove objective morality, a central protocol in Darwin’s grand scheme,[22] is also a dead end because the life of Mother Theresa and countless other examples prove that this idea will not work. I was hoping that modern Darwinists would make some good improvement on this warfare theory, but so far virtually everyone has failed.

I am certainly not asking people to drop their cherished belief. In fact, there are many people who believe in the tooth fairy. But so long that this neo-Darwinian ideology remains intellectually stupid and morally indefensible, they can leave me out of it.

Going back to Putin, he said in 2013:

“People in many European countries are ashamed, and are afraid of talking about their religious convictions. [Religious] holidays are being taken away or called something else, shamefully hiding the essence of the holiday.”[23]

The Zionist regime, of course, made the false accusation that Putin was persecuting homosexuals. But Putin moved on to diffuse the regime’s silly argument this way: “We need to respect the rights of minorities to be different, but the rights of the majority should not be in question.”[24]

So, yes, Patrick Buchanan. Putin is one of us. Any serious politician who stands against the Mephistophelian establishment is one of us. As Friedrich Hansen of Asia Times put it, “Make no mistake, Putin is not targeting homosexuals, as he made clear with his welcoming them to the Sochi Olympics. It also seems only fair to remind Western readers that ever since the 1980s, Sochi has been the center of Russia with a vibrant homosexual subculture. Rather, Putin is addressing the whole gamut of post-modern incarnations of the ‘sex and drugs’ revolution: binge drinking of both genders until the doctors move in, elite illicit drug use, unmanageable crime rates, surging divorce numbers, Hook-Up sex on campus, out of wedlock births, fathers and mothers in puberty, abortion on demand, public nudism and human copulation in parks, gay promiscuity with a good conscience, swinger clubs and darkrooms, ruthless Internet dating and pornography and what have you.”[25]

How does the regime respond? Well, you know the drill. Owen Matthews, a useful idiot, declared in the Spectator that Putin has a “new plan for world domination”![26] In order to slander Putin, Matthews indirectly linked him with Willi Munzenberg, a revolutionary Jew who wanted to take the Western world to perdition at any cost. Munzenberg was so passionate about his revolutionary goal that he wrote:

“We must organize the intellectuals and use them to make Western Civilization stink! Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

When Putin said that Russia will “defend traditional values that have made up the spiritual and moral foundation of civilisation in every nation for thousands of years,” Matthews declared that Putin “is on to something.” What is it? Matthews told us:

“Putin’s new mission goes deeper than political opportunism. Like the old Communist International, or Comintern, in its day, Moscow is again building an international ideological alliance.”[27]

He again emphasized this point so that readers could get it: “And again, like the Comintern, Putin appears convinced that he is embarking on a world-historical mission.”[28] He moved on to talking about “Putin’s conservative Comintern.”

At the other end of the political spectrum, David Cameron likened Putin to Hitler.[29] John McCain, Lindsey Graham, among other usual suspects, have all placed Putin and Hitler on an equal footing.[30]

Historian Paul Johnson (sad to say) even went so far as to say that Putin and Hitler are basically two sides of the same coin. Johnson said that Putin “believes in a strong Stalinist state. His goal is to reverse the events of 1989–the end of the Soviet state and dissolution of its enormous empire. He seeks to do this by using what remains of Russia’s Stalinist heritage: the military, a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and immense resources of natural gas and other forms of energy.”[31]

Johnson is sad because “there is no Churchillian voice to sound the alarm and call the democratic world to action.”[32] Johnson has got to be kidding. What he ends up saying is that someone like Churchill needs to step up and start lying to the West about Putin. It is so sad to read silly comments such as this by a good historian like Johnson.

But the real question is this: why do the regime and their puppets hate Putin so much? Well, Putin suggested back in 2013 the Soviet government was guided by a dark force whose “ideological goggles and faulty ideological perceptions collapsed.”[33]

“The first Soviet government,” Putin added, “was 80-85 percent Jewish.”[34] Sounds like Putin has read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together. If so, then it seems clear that he will continue to challenge the Zionist regime. Perhaps Putin has been encouraged by Solzhenitsyn’s bravery. It was Solzhenitsyn who said:

“And thus, overcoming our temerity, let each man choose: will he remain a witting servant of the lies, or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?”[35]

Perhaps Putin is saying enough is enough. And this maybe one reason why nearly all the major news outlets have been relentlessly slandering him. Kevin Barrett ended up his excellent article saying, “God bless President Putin, who is putting the fear of God into the New World Order.” Let us hope that he will never be weary in well doing, for in due season he shall reap, if he faints not.

[1] Actually it was a Marxist/Leninist state.
[2] Patrick J. Buchanan, “Vladimir Putin, Christian Crusader?,” American Conservative, April 4, 2014.
[3] Marc Bennetts, “Who’s ‘godless’ now? Russia says it’s U.S.,” Washington Times, January 28, 2014.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Peter Pomerantsev, “For God and Putin,” Newsweek, September 10, 2012.
[6] Seth Mandel, Contentions: Putin Vs. the Punk Rockers,” Commentary, August 17, 2012.
[7] E. Michael Jones has made this very point in his article “Ethnos Needs Logos: or Why I spent Three Days in Guadalajara Trying to Convince David Duke to Become a Catholic,” Culture Wars, June 2015.
[8] Michael Ruse, “God is dead. Long live morality,” Guardian, March 15, 2010.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Bradley A. Thayer, Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 96.
[13] Ibid., 99, 100, 107, 114.
[14] Ibid., 99.
[15] Ibid., 102.
[16] Ibid., 103, 104.
[17] Ibid., 108.
[18] Ibid., 109.
[19] Ibid. 110, 111.
[20] Darwin, Origin of Species, 459.
[21] For a decent historical study on this, see for example Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1962). Darwin was not as open-minded as people thought he was. “Former Darwin enthusiast St. George Mivart published anonymous articles critiquing Darwin’s theory. A gifted zoologist, Mivart would eventually publish a volume titled The Genesis of Species, an influential book that raised serious questions about the limits of natural selection, especially in its application to man. Far from rejecting Darwin wholesale, Mivart continued to embrace evolution and believe that the physical capacities of human beings had developed from the lower animals. But he continued to insist—like [Alfred] Wallace—that man was radically unique from the rest of creation and had a soul. Egged on by Thomas Huxley, Darwin became increasingly bitter over his former disciple’s criticisms, despite Mivart’s attempts to be personable in private correspondence and his public praise of the ‘invaluable labours and active brains of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.” John G. West, Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2007).
[22] See Denis L. Krebs, The Origins of Morality (New York: Oxford University, 2011), 41-42.
[23] Neil Buckley, “Putin urges Russians to return to values of religion,” Financial Times, September 19, 2013.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Friedrich Hansen, “Putin Stands Up to Western Decadence,” Asia Times, February 28, 2014.
[26] Owen Matthews, “Vladimir Putin’s new plan for world domination,” Spectator, February 22, 2014.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Owen Jones, “David Cameron and the cynicism of comparing Putin to Hitler,” Guardian, September 3, 2014.
[30] Michael Kelley, “11 Prominent People Who Compared Putin To Hitler,” Business Insider, May 23, 2014.
[31] Paul Johnson, “Is Vladimir Putin Another Adolf Hitler?,” Forbes, April 16, 2014.
[32] Ibid.
[33] “Putin: First Soviet government was mostly Jewish,” Jerusalem Post, June 20, 2013.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Solzhenitsyn Reader (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2007), 55
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Can Western Europe Repent?

Last Friday evening The Eagles Death Metal band was playing in Paris. Just as they began playing ‘Kiss the devil’ with the opening words ‘I have met the devil and this is his song’, an atrocious massacre began.

As a result, the Schengen Agreement is de facto dead. As a result, much to the horror of the US government, Western European countries are now ready to repent and co-operate with Russia in destroying the US-founded IS in Syria. As a result the Western support for the anti-democratic rogue junta in Kiev has all but been forgotten. As a result anti-Muslim nationalist parties, like the National Front in France, have become even more popular.

As a result some at least in Western Europe are beginning to question if there is indeed only one choice, between the blasphemous Charlie Hebdo and fanatical and murderous Islamism, or as it was expressed over 20 years ago, between McWorld or Jihad (1).

In Eastern Europe, whether in Russia, Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria or elsewhere, there has never really been any doubt to that question. For all these countries and their peoples knew from their history all about Islam and, ironically behind the screen of Communism, had also long protected their Christian tradition, sovereignty and identity from McWorld. Hence their attitude to the immigration invasion of recent months.

The only question is if in Western Europe there are those who are honest enough and rooted enough in their historical Christian tradition to do the same.

Note:

1. See the 1994 ‘The Healing of Civilizations: Orthodox Christianity, Western Capitalism and Islam’ in ‘Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition’.

Rue Daru: The Final Chapter?

The immense tension between Archbishop Job of the small Rue Daru jurisdiction in Paris and the rebels who in most unChurchlike manner oppose him, reported in the French religious media (La Croix, for example) and widely in the internet, has its roots nearly thirty-five years ago.

Then after the repose of the humble and saintly Russian-born Archbishop George (Tarasov) in 1981, the nearest I have ever had to a spiritual father, a new Archbishop was elected. This was a Berliner of a Roman Catholic and academic background, Archbishop George (Wagner). Breaking his promises to the faithful, he uniquely managed to alienate both the Russians and the Non-Russians in his jurisdiction. This he managed to do by setting himself against any return to either part of the Russian Church, which the inherently unstable Rue Daru group had left four times! (in 1927, 1931, 1935 and 1945) and at the same time most vigorously opposing the liturgical use of Western European languages and also opposing the veneration of local Western saints (as well as a few Eastern ones, who he dismissed as ‘apocryphal’, not to mention the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia). I speak, as usual, of facts, of which we were eyewitnesses and abused victims. There is no space for polemics in this tragedy.

The very aggressive attitude against the liturgical use of Western languages was a factor in the loss of the large Ghent parish and the Peckstadt family in, I think, 1986. It went straight to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, fed up with abuse and insults from its Archbishop in Paris. They were by far from being the only ones, as we, and our children named after local Western saints, knew only too well. At a time when, after recent consultations in 2015, His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill is urging the inclusion of these very Western saints into the general Russian calendar, much as our beloved St John of Shanghai did sixty years ago, it all seems very ironic, not to say anachronistic. Such was the total lack of vision and mission of that time and the very real and unrepented for persecution against those who had either or both.

As a result of Archbishop George Wagner’s disastrous policies, control of the Rue Daru group was handed over to the masonic and Russophobic Fraternite Orthodoxe, many of whose ancestors had originally fomented the Revolution in 1917, breaking their oaths to the Tsar. I was told in 1985 by Archbishop George’s Belgian deacon that the Archbishop had been appointed by the Patriarch of Constantinople to ‘close down’ the Rue Daru group, so that it could go directly under the local Greek bishop. In my youthful naivety, I foolishly disbelieved him. He was of course right. I was told by a millionaire who later became another Rue Daru bishop that I had ‘been too close to the engine room, where it smells’. True.

Although Archbishop George died unexpectedly young in 1991, the policy of Constantinople, thoroughly logical from its own viewpoint, has not changed and indeed, in an anti-monastic Rue Daru incapable of generating a serious candidate of its own as archbishop, it has now been strengthened. The present Archbishop, the protégé of the present Patriarch of Constantinople who imposed him on his rebellious jurisdiction, is now carrying out the same policy. If Rue Daru does not want him, irony of ironies, then the under-employed Metropolitan Athenagoras (Peckstadt) in Brussels is available to take over. All the more so, as only last week he ordained a vicar-bishop for himself in Belgium, where his diocese is not much bigger than the average Russian parish.

Hellenization, the seamless merger of the Rue Daru so-called Exarchate of ‘the Russian Tradition’ (though the Russian Tradition seems largely invisible in many areas with their Greek calendar, Greek vestments and Greek liturgical customs) is the only logical outcome. Elsewhere the same thing is already being done with ACROD, the equally small American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, which now also has a Greek bishop. Any who feel that they do not wish to become Greeks are welcome to return to the Russian Orthodox Church, whose new Paris Cathedral is opening next year, its cupolas already in place, or go and study at its seminary in Paris (now the only Orthodox seminary in Western Europe). Hopefully, the Rue Daru group will, before it finally becomes Greek, hand back Russian church property, notable on Rue Daru in Paris, in Biarritz, San Remo and Florence. After decades of neglect these churches will needs millions of euros spending on them, however, unlike some, the Russian Church will look after its heritage. So, it seems, will close the book of the history of Rue Daru.

Satan’s Hand

If our government in Libya must end, millions of Africans will flood illegally into Italy and France…Europe will in a very short time become black…We are impeding immigration and are restraining the advance of Al-Qaeda. In such a way, if the stability of Libya is broken, then the negative consequences will immediately affect Europe and the Mediterranean. Everyone will be in danger.

Colonel Gadhaffi

Satan’s hand has struck again, this time in Paris, though in recent days in the Lebanon and Kenya too – and as regards Syria, every day for nearly five years. Satan stands behind both the bombing of the Russian airliner on Halloween and the appalling Paris atrocities on Friday 13. The hysteria of the Western media shows their appalling hypocrisy and xenophobia. Let 130 Syrians die every day at the hands of terrorists financed by the Western allies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but not Frenchmen. The everyday tragedy and horror committed by Islamic State in Syria have been brought to a Western capital.

Yet only three years ago the West wanted to destroy the Syrian government and army by massacring them with bombs, thus supporting the Islamic State terrorists! Meanwhile, in the Yemen the Western governments are sending Saudi-piloted US planes and British bombs to commit genocide against the people there, just as they did in Serbia some sixteen years ago and in Libya more recently.

Who is caught between Western terrorist governments and Islamist terrorists? The peoples of the world, Syrian, Iraqi, Asian, African, European….

Even one of the arch-terrorists, Tony Blair, has admitted that Islamic State is partly a product of the Western invasion of Iraq and the seizure of its natural resources. In 2003 Pandora’s box was opened and the evil genie released, just as all the experts warned in 2002. In the last few years chaos has been unleashed in North Africa and throughout the Middle East as far as the Himalayas. The USA may have committed apostasy under its atheist?/Muslim? President who advocates worldwide sodomy, but surely Western Europe, with its bimillennial history of Christianity that the USA do not have, can still step back from the precipice. However, this will mean returning to its Christian roots and identity and making a pact of solidarity with the only large Christian country left, the Russian Federation, instead of trying to destroy it with sanctions, sodomy and the invasion of the Ukraine.

Let him who has ears hear.

On Atheism

I have always found atheism extremely irrational. Logically, no-one can disprove the existence of God.

On the other hand, agnosticism seems logical. If you have no spiritual experience, then it is reasonable to conclude that you do not know if God exists or not. Clearly, atheism has its roots in psychology, or rather pathology.

We can safely conclude that:

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot cope with the reality of God.

The Russian Orthodox Church: Yesterday and Tomorrow

The Emperor and the Empress thought that they were dying for their homeland. But in fact they died for all mankind.

Pierre Gilliard, Swiss tutor to the Tsar’s children.

Foreword

Ten years ago, in 2005, debate raged in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) about our relations with the Church inside Russia. Was it at last free and so could we enter into canonical communion and work together, building the future? Such was the debate that a Pan-Diaspora Church Council was called in San Francisco in 2006 in order to answer the questions posed. At that time we had to counter some very false arguments which were advanced in favour of sectarian self-isolation, arguments that were shaped by the impurity of politics and psychology, and not by the purity of theology. Below are examples.

Yesterday

The human weakness of Metropolitan (later Patriarch) Sergius (+ 1944) and his followers, as revealed in compromises with the atheist persecutor Stalin, known as ‘sergianism’, was erected by some into a ‘theological’ heresy. In fact, it was just another form of erastianism, of placing the State above the Church, of which there had already been so many examples in other forms in the Old Testament and in 1900 years of Church history. There was nothing theological in this, for it was only human weakness on the part of one who had found himself under huge pressure from a militant atheist State. No-one is to judge him for his weakness, there is no place for phariseeism here, for God is the Judge of all.

Though there was nothing of a dogmatic or theological nature in such compromises, certain individuals, partly under the influence of North American political puritanism, even concluded that the present-day sacraments of the Church inside Russia had somehow mysteriously ‘lost grace’ on account of this compromise of three generations before. As a ROCOR priest, I first came across this astonishing piece of politics masquerading as theology in 1992 from someone who was under the influence of this North American error. In fact, of course, sergianism is not a heresy, whereas puritanism, with its inherent impurity of Novatianism, Donatism and Eustathianism, as seen in the light of the canons of the Council of Gangra of 340, most certainly is.

The political and diplomatic support which a few in the Church inside Russia sought from Roman Catholics and Protestants, and called ecumenism, was also condemned. However, it was a very curious idea that the opinions or actions of a handful of individuals could be held up as a sign that the whole of the Church inside Russia, 160,000,000 people, was therefore somehow tainted by the heresy of ecumenism! In reality, most of the faithful inside Russia had never heard of ecumenism and those who had were utterly opposed to it. This was all the stranger, in that by 2005 ecumenism had in any case come to mean something very different from in its political heyday between the 60s and 80s. Instead of concerning itself with politically-enforced syncretistic compromise, in fact heresy, it had turned to having good-neighbourly relations with heterodox, something that ROCOR, with the many mixed marriages among parishioners and regular need to use heterodox premises for services, had always cultivated.

The strangest argument heard at that time was that we could not associate ourselves with the Church inside Russia in any way because of the compromises of a few individuals in it. This was an appalling error, for it would have meant that we could not associate ourselves with the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors. True, we, in freedom, had canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors first, in 1981, 19 years before the Church inside Russia had been able to do so by freeing itself. However, many, including myself, had wondered why we in the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), living in freedom, had so scandalously not canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors long before, from the 1920s on. We felt shame for ourselves.

The sad reason for the delay had been because elements in ROCOR were themselves contaminated with politics. Indeed, I well remember how in 1981 certain parishioners at the ROCOR Cathedral in London, as also elsewhere, had actually been opposed to the canonization. And in any case, the ROCOR canonization had only ever been a first step, a beginning. As I wrote at the time: What has begun in New York must come to completion in Moscow. Moreover, for lack of trustworthy information we had canonized only some 8,000; the Church inside Russia, with greater access to archives, has canonized well over 30,000 and that number is increasing.

Others said that we in ROCOR could have nothing to do with a Church whose bishops belonged to the KGB. I would have agreed with this – if any had belonged to the KGB, such as, we suspect, the defrocked schismatic Filaret Denisenko, now the darling of the CIA. In fact, they did not. The senior bishops inside Russia merely had KGB code names – in the same way as Western secular leaders, whom we prayed for in our services as civil leaders, had KGB code-names. The Church inside Russia could just as well have said: ‘We will have nothing to do with ROCOR because you pray for individuals who have KGB code-names’. It would have been just as false an argument.

Some in ROCOR admitted that there were members of our Church, in good standing, who worked or had worked for the CIA and other Western spy services. They countered this by saying that there were members of the KGB in churches inside Russia. This was totally false: the only KGB members who attended churches there were those who went there to spy, to note down names of priests or young people and create problems for them.

Sectarian elements in ROCOR objected that if we entered into canonical communion with the Church inside Russia, we would then be in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church! I first heard this incredible argument, I think, in about 1999, when a ROCOR priest from London concelebrated with a priest of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This had raised an objection from a sectarian priest trained in North America. In the Western European Diocese of ROCOR, where I had been ordained and celebrated until 1997, such concelebrations were perfectly normal and happened regularly. As a ROCOR priest, I was amazed at this sectarian spirit, which I had hardly met before. The logic of this argument would be that we in ROCOR were no longer in communion with Mt Athos, which is in the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Absolutely unthinkable! (Naturally, such sectarians later left ROCOR).

On a much more serious and practical level, there were those who pointed out that among representatives of the Church inside Russia in the Diaspora there were still corrupt and renovationist clergy at even the highest level, even though several had by then died out. This was a problem. Although these renovationists called us slanderers for telling the Truth and so shaming their false idols (as renovationists elsewhere still do), the problem was largely overcome in 2006, when most such clergy in England and France left the jurisdiction of the Church inside Russia in a schism which they created; since then, two or three other such individuals have simply been removed, so they can no longer cause scandal and can at last learn the basics of the Faith.

Finally, there were those who said that we could not work together with the Church inside Russia because the situation in Russia was not as it had been before the Revolution. Soviet practices had infiltrated Russian society, alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce were rife, the mummy of the Russophobic murderer Lenin still lay on Red Square, and the squares and streets of Russia were littered with his statues or named after his henchmen. They demandingly demanded in fact that the post-Soviet Russian State (in charge of such matters) behave as though it were part of the Russian Church! In the face of this argument we pointed out that pre-Revolutionary Russia had not been ideal either (otherwise there would never have been a Revolution), we asked for compassion for a people deprived for three generations of a free Church, asked for patience and said that with time the Church will influence the State, since repentance, which we too are in need of, changes people.

Victory

The above arguments were rejected, with repentance for ever having entertained them, by well over 95% of ROCOR, dismissed as the arguments of schismatic impurity, of a tiny, sectarian, inward-looking and politicized minority, which had been trying to take over ROCOR, holding us back and impeding us from fulfilling our universal calling together with the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church, the great majority. As we know, in 2007 the vast majority of the hierarchy, clergy and people of our little ROCOR were happy to enter at last into canonical communion with the vast majority of the rest of the Church, of which we had always spiritually been a part. The separation, caused purely by political events exterior to the Church, was over. We were sure that the Church inside Russia had freed itself, as had already been made evident by the Jubilee Council of 2000. At long last, our inward unity could become outwardly apparent and, impediments removed, we could progress together towards our common destiny and ever more urgent mission.

Tomorrow

A generation after the fall of State atheism in the Russian Federation, we see in Russia today most interesting developments, promising for the future. After the awful period of ‘law of the jungle’ capitalism in the 1990s, with its rule of seven bankers, ‘Wild East’ bandit privatizations and the appearance of pro-Western criminal oligarchs and liberals, Russia has largely seen through that alternative to Communism that was offered it by the consumerist Western world, which we too, living in the Western world itself, had already seen through.

Thanks largely to the chaos and misery that the Western Powers have been causing in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, Syria and above all in the Ukraine, Russian society has seen through Eurosodom and Gomorrhica. If the CIA-installed Poroshenko junta, set up in Kiev, the Mother of Russian cities, wants the suicide of ‘European values’, it can have them. We will remain faithful to the values of St Vladimir and St Olga of Holy Kiev. Believing in Christ, Who trampled down death by death, we choose life. Believing in satan who tramples down life by death, they choose death. That is the difference between us.

Providentially, through the Western attacks on Holy Rus, Russian society has for the most part now come to understand that the West is not the solution. Russia must follow its own, historic, God-given way, the way that our saints and other lucid elements in ROCOR have always preached. As for Russia, it must heal itself and restore Holy Rus. Outside Russia, we can only pray and encourage, learning as we go, for our main task is to spread Orthodoxy outside the Russian Lands in faithfulness to Holy Rus. We are only humble disciples who follow the precepts of Holy Rus.

Interestingly, voices have been saying that Russian society today resembles 1917 Russia. However, unlike in 1917 the direction of today’s Russia is not 1918, but 1916. In other words, although the situation is delicate, Russia is not heading towards catastrophe as it was in 1917, but is heading back from it. Here is the difference. If, God willing, we continue on this God-given path, the Church of Russia will lead us to our destiny. What is this?

On account of the utter failure of imposed Western ideas there, we can say that Russia has seen the future and knows from bitter experience that it does not work. Today it is struggling its way back up from the pit, at the same time as the Western world, led by the United States, is hurtling headlong into it. Today, some of the more aware Western politicians and thinkers are going to Russia or following events in Russia in order to learn. Gerhard Schroeder, Nicolas Sarkozy, Phillippe de Villiers, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Paul Craig Roberts, Franklin Graham and others all follow events in Russia closely or visit.

Russia’s mystical and historic role now is to act as an intermediary between East and West, between China and Western Europe. For the spiritual destiny of China is to enter the authentic Orthodox Christian world, becoming the Eastern provinces of Holy Rus, just as the spiritual destiny of Western Europe, with its roots in Orthodox Christianity, is to return to it, with the help of its ancient saints, by becoming the Western provinces of Holy Rus. True, the towering national pride of Europeans largely prevents this, for where there is no humility, there is no salvation. Indeed, Russia’s task is now not to save Europe from the USA, as some have put it, but to save Europe from itself. Just as Russia, and not the West, was to blame for choosing the Western ideology that created the Russian Revolution in February 1917, we do not blame others for the present misfortune that Europeans have chosen for themselves.

The key to universal salvation in these last times is atonement, in the restoration of Holy Rus and in Holy Rus becoming universal. Following the Holy Trinity, we are called on not only to be Guardians and Gatherers of Holy Rus, following the Father and the Son, but also Spreaders of Holy Rus, following the Holy Spirit. Those, in East and West, who want to work with the Russian Orthodox Church and so, by following the Tradition, build up new Local Churches are welcome to do so. If some do not wish to do so and set themselves against the prophetic and mystical Church Tradition in tired, old, secularist and humanist neo-renovationism, then God be with them. We shall do God’s Will without them. We force no-one to follow the Church; the Church sails ahead without those who reject Her.

In 1917 the last Christian Emperor, the Tsar, did not abdicate. In 1917 Russia and the whole world abdicated from him, from the Christian Emperor and Christian Empire, and so from Christ. Since then there has been no peace on earth so that we have all had to atone, each receiving our penance in order to learn humility. Inside Russia the people faced the penances of persecution and Nazi invasion, outside Russia those in the emigration faced the penances of exile and isolation. As for Europe, like today’s USA also, it has faced the penance of war and humiliating loss of power and greatness. As for the rest of the world, it has faced constant strife and war, ever since ‘he who restrains’ (2 Thess 2, 7) was in 1917 removed. All the suffering of the world since 1917 has been the opportunity of all to learn humility.

Our destiny, mystical and prophetical, is to preach Holy Rus, the message of the last Christian Emperor, to the whole world for repentance before the end. The time is coming when the world will at last be ready to hear of Holy Rus, of the universality of the Incarnate Christ, authentic Christianity, and not the two diluted isms shaped by Western heathenism, pagan Romanism and northern barbarianism, that is, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

Afterword

My great-grandfather was born in the same year as Nicholas II, the last Christian Emperor who was martyred in Ekaterinburg in 1918. One hundred years after the Emperor’s birth and fifty years after his martyrdom, I, born on the anniversary of the day when the remains of the Imperial family were finally destroyed, received the message from the east that I was to learn and then go and speak of Holy Rus, Christ Incarnate, to those whom I met. This is not only my personal destiny, but also that of many others, as described so well in the poem ‘The Apostles’, written in exile in 1928 by the bard of the Tsar, Sergey Bekhteev:

Amid the darkness of the slavish world
We bear the spirit’s torch in victory
And we call loud to those chosen by God
To enter the hall where the Orthodox feast.

We walk along a road of thorns,
We soar above worldly vanity,
We are the apostles of Christ’s Faith,
We are the heralds of holy truth.

We call the races and the peoples,
Made scarlet with their brothers’ blood,
To the kingdom of true, eternal freedom,
To the kingdom of goodness, light and love.

The hopes and prayers for the future turn to Ekaterinburg, to restoration and coronation.