Daily Archives: February 24, 2016

An Old Man Remembers

The Englander, 31 January 2100

In this, the last week of the 21st century, we continue our series in which centenarians sum up for us their most vivid memories of turning points in the past century. Today, we hear from Tim Smith, aged 103, who recalls the events of 24 June 2016.

‘Even at my age I remember it well, though I was only a youngster then. The greatest turning-point of this ending century came for our country on 24 June 2016. There were masses of people celebrating in London, well over a million, they say, and of course millions of others in every town, city and village across the country. Everywhere we had Freedom parades and Victory meals – that’s what they were called. I was with the group on Freedom Square (in those days it was called Trafalgar Square), which we filled as well as all the streets around it.

One group there had a whole lot of European Union flags, some said they had been stolen from the offices of the Mayor of London, others said that the Mayor had personally donated them, and these were being burned. Huge cheers went up, as each one was burned. Then they burned effigies of various politicians, one of the old Prime Minister – sorry I’ve forgotten his name but I know it was Scottish – another of the German leader, a woman, though I can’t remember her name now either. It was all filmed, some of the footage must have survived. We were chanting ‘Freedom, Freedom’ and ‘Down with Tyranny’, until we were hoarse. That’s how 24 June came to be a national holiday in England.

Of course, lots of political changes followed, a new Prime Minister, a new political system, new alliances. I mean, think about it: the European Union, as it was called then, collapsed a few years afterwards. Now some say it would have happened anyway, but even if that’s true, the decision of what was then called the ‘United Kingdom’ – doesn’t that sound so old-fashioned! – to leave certainly hastened the end. Then Scotland became independent, a few years after that Ireland was reunited and Wales left in the 2030s. That’s how England got her independence back. But there were lots of other changes, I mean who could have predicted the break-up of what was then still called the United States of America?

The arguments that won? Well, of course there were some nationalists who said ‘we want our country back’. They were mainly poorer people, not very well-educated, unemployed and so on. Then there were the people who had principles, who just wanted freedom from Establishment tyranny – they were calling on Alfred the Great and other figures from history. They were called the ‘Anti-Normans’. Then there were right-wingers called ‘sovereignists’ and left-wingers called ‘anti-globalists’, but they were a mixture of left and right, as it used to be called. But that was far from the majority. Most people who voted for freedom said that we should continue as a global country and not be locked into a customs union in a little corner of Europe. They were internationalists – I was one of them – we wanted more trade with China, India, Russia and so on. They said staying in the Union would mean suffocation.

The people who did not want to leave were generally rich, in those days, they were what was known as ‘Establishment people’, people in Big Business and organizations that have long since disappeared like ‘The Church of England’ and the ‘BBC’, if you’ve heard of them – they were people who had second homes in Italy and France, that type. They used scare tactics, told everyone we would be dirt poor if we voted for freedom and left.

Then there were the Americans; in those days they controlled everything. They were furious with the vote for freedom and tried to make out the vote had been corrupted. They had various organizations under their colonial control, one was called NATO, another one called the IMF and another one called the World Bank. They’re all dead and buried now. Anyway, from that day on, 24th June, everything changed. I’ve told my great-great grandchildren about it – of course they can’t believe it!

The main thing is in those days a lot of people were very pessimistic, they used to say, if we go on like this, the world will end soon. Well, I’m going to be 104 next year and the world is still here and so am I!’

On the Foolishness of Schism

There is now almost hysteria among a few, as we predicted in our article after the release of the draft documents for the Crete meeting, as regards relations between the Church and the heterodox world. This hysteria began when those draft documents were released, but since then there has also been the meeting between Patriarch Kyrill and Pope Francis and its joint statement. What we have seen so far is that a few simple and little-educated, seeing everything in terms of black and white, sometimes out of insecurity in the faith, sometimes out of an incredible lack of faith and loyalty, have been very upset by the vagueness of expressions used in documents issued at both events. We agree that vagueness of terminology is to be avoided, but we would never agree with making schism out of vagueness.

The Gospel of St Matthew tells us that we are to be ‘as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves’. On the left side there are those who are only doves and on the right side there are those who are only serpents. We are told to love the sinner but hate the sin. On the left side there are those who love the sinner but also love the sin. On the right side there are those who hate the sin but also hate the sinner. In other words those who have created schisms from vagueness of words, lack subtlety and have over-reacted – just as the enemy wanted. They have fallen into the hands of the enemy! What is the real problem?

The real problem is very simple: the Patriarchate of Constantinople had throughout the nineteenth century been a plaything of the British and French ambassadors in Istanbul and their rivalry to control was exploited by the Ottomans. In the early 1920s the Anglicans actually handed over £100,000 to get the British freemason Meletios Metaksakis elected as Patriarch. He then pushed through various modernist and anti-Orthodox changes, for which he was chased out of the City by the enraged faithful, though too late. However, in 1948, with Britain bankrupt, the US took control of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The late Greek Bishop of Birmingham in England was the Patriarch’s deacon at the time and as an eyewitness told us the story.

Flying in on the personal aeroplane of President Truman (he who had massacred almost 250,000 Japanese civilians with just two bombs in three days), a group of CIA gangsters (there is no other word for them) told Patriarch Maximos that he had to leave for Switzerland and that if he resisted he would be tortured and killed. He left, saying the words, ‘The City (= Constantinople) is lost’. On the aeroplane that had flown in sat the next Patriarch, the freemason from the US Greek Archdiocese, the notorious modernist Archbishop Athenagoras. Since then the City has indeed been lost.

The US elite wants to finish off the Orthodox Church, just as it did Roman Catholicism 50 years ago, reducing most of it to the malleable, spiritually empty Judeo-Protestant culture of the West. This takeover of all ‘organized religion’ is merely an excuse for the longer-term plan, already obvious in the 1960s, to promote secularism and through it anti-Christianity. In order to finish off the Orthodox Church, the US elite is using the ‘weak underbelly’ of the Church, that which has been weak ever since the fifteenth-century treachery at the ‘Council’ of Florence, elements in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and also elsewhere by interfering in Patriarchal elections.

Sadly for the US elite, the plan is doomed to failure (although it can create a lot of chaos and division on the way). This is because the Orthodox Church is the Church, not an ‘organized religion’, that is, not a top-down clericalist club, like the Protestant denominations or Catholicism. With them, all they had to do was infiltrate the leaders and future leaders, the episcopate or the Vatican, spread some money around, blackmail the corrupted, and they had complete control. In the Orthodox Church, on the other hand, the episcopate is only a very small part of the Church. We can already see how the US plan is failing:

Firstly, the Russian Church insisted that no document could be accepted by any future ‘Council’ without unanimity. Individuals in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, urged on by Biden, launched a propaganda campaign using Greek clerics in the USA and the compliant, State-controlled US media, to cast the Russian Church as the villain that would sabotage ‘the Council’, because it does not want to be friendly to Non-Orthodox and in any case, is ‘only a tool of the Russian State’. To that last September the Russian Church replied by organizing the February meeting between Patriarch Kyrill and the Bishop of Rome.

Secondly, the Russian Church and others threw out the pro-gay agenda that Obama and Kerry tried to impose on the future ‘Council’. This was a defeat for those who were trying to promote it for personal reasons.

Thirdly, the Russian Church has forced individuals in the Patriarchate of Constantinople in a humiliating climbdown to accept Metr Rostislav as leader of the Church of the Czechs and Slovaks.

Fourthly, the Russian Church has obliged the Patriarchate of Constantinople to promise never to interfere in the Ukraine, as the US State Department was urging it to do.

Fifthly, the Russian Church has forced the venue for the meeting to be moved from premises in NATO Istanbul, filled with CIA bugs, to Crete. Here the premises can be swept for bugs by Russian security men.

Sixthly, the Patriarch of Constantinople has now stated that not all the Local Churches have to be represented for there to be a Council. The Russian Church and others are resisting this by refusing any change to the original agreement.

On each occasion the Russian Church has replied to the attempts to weaken Orthodoxy and has won the day.

Those hotheads who are too simple to see this and are entering or are promoting schism are not strategically-minded, but literally-minded. Their danger is that of phariseeism – an enemy of the Church. For phariseeism always divides, which is exactly what the devil wants because it weakens the Church. Today the draft documents for the Crete meeting are being torn apart by the Churches of Georgia and Antioch, not to mention the severe criticism they are undergoing throughout the Orthodox world, not least in Greece and Cyprus. For the moment at least the Russian Church can leave protests at the draft documents for Crete to others.