Monthly Archives: October 2023

The Isolation and Collapse of the USA: The Tragic Story of Imperial Over-Reach

Introduction

The tragedy of the modern USA is that after the fall of the USSR in 1991 its ruling elite could have done anything. It could have recast the world, creating a New World Order, a system of seven equally balanced world civilisations: Western (Catholic-Protestant-Secularist) / Muslim (North African-Middle Asian) / Hindu (Indian) / Buddhist-Confucian (Chinese, Japanese, South-East Asian, Tibetan) / African / Latin American / Orthodox Christian (Eurasian, Eastern European, West Asian). Instead, the US ruling elite fell into the narcissistic hubris of exceptionalism and chose the evil of warmongering, adopting an aggressive Imperialist dictatorship at the expense of its own people and of all the peoples of the world.

The US ruling elite was so narcissistic that it refused peace and chose an extremely violent and bullying policy of creating worldwide wars and chaos, arrogantly entering other countries as though they owned them and ‘suspending’ them. It declared ‘We are the only True Church’ and we all know how that ended up for the American side. This narcissism was such that today the US has no friends because, like all narcissists, it is isolated, with no-one to talk to. It has only the enemies that it has created and those who feel sorry for them from a distance. Its only friends are their own tiny US-appointed political, financial and media elites in Western Europe and in a few peripheral vassal states on the edges of Eurasia, like Japan, South Korea and Israel, which are just as corrupt and unpopular as the US elite. The US ruling elite faces specifically four areas of crisis as a result of its hatred for others.

West Asia

The Palestinian people who are now being massacred by US bombs in Gaza, are supported not only by the whole Arab world, but by the whole Muslim world. This includes Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria (all former enemies, but now united against Israel and the West), but also countries like Egypt and nuclear-armed Pakistan.

The Palestinians also command great support among Western European peoples, though not among their elites. Here the Western elites, in the US, the EU and the UK, are especially isolated and derided. This is not least at the UN, where free countries are trying to force the US to abide by international law.

Eastern Europe

America’s war in and on the Ukraine has affected all of Eurasia, from Vladivostok to Eastern Europe. The peoples of several countries there are now awakening (Hungary and Serbia had never fallen asleep) and realising how they have been fooled by their US-appointed puppet elites. These include Slovakia, Croatia, other parts of ex-Yugoslavia, the Czech Lands, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and even Poland and the Baltic States.

Moreover, Russia, attacked by the West in the Ukraine, as well as in Georgia, Armenia and elsewhere, was thrown into the welcoming arms of China by Western aggression. Russia is supported by the whole Non-Western world, including Africa, Latin America, Iran and North Korea. The West is isolated, or rather, has isolated itself. And the US is isolated in its support for Israel at the United Nations. If Israel is turning into a rogue state, the USA is turning into a pariah state.

East Asia

The US elite’s aggressiveness and threats towards China, using the excuse of Taiwan, brought China to realise that its real target was not Russia, but China itself. It intended to use Taiwan as China’s Ukraine, a battering-ram to go after China. Thus, Russia and China, which overtook the US economy several years ago, formed an alliance and they work hand in hand. Under Russian leadership, BRICS + has been formed and includes over half the world population. With eleven members, totalling 36% of the world economy, they are far greater than the ever-dwindling Western economies.

Next autumn in Kazan, BRICS + may grow from eleven members to at least twenty members. Possible additions include Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Bolivia, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Hungary and Greece. But that number could be quadrupled to include Nigeria, Mexico, Uzbekistan and virtually all of Latin America and Africa. The multipolar world has been born, the unipolar world is history. Moreover, the old divide and rule strategy of the US elite, creating war and chaos everywhere, no longer works. Saudi Arabia and Iran are friends, as are China, India and Vietnam. The irresistible Inter-Civilisational Global Alliance is here, despite Western opposition and exclusivist fanaticism.

Western Europe

The Commissars, the unelected bureaucrats and gerontocrats of the Brussels EU, the UK and the US military wing in Brussels, NATO, get little respect from their peoples. When and if free elections come, the elites may all be thrown out by their peoples. This is already beginning in Italy and Switzerland, and there are strong trends in Germany and France. The Russian cause, like the Palestinian cause, commands support among a growing minority of Western European peoples, though not among their elites. The peoples are slowly beginning to see through the brainwashing propaganda of the Western media which are completely controlled and owned by the elites. Few Ukrainian flags fly in Western Europe today, except from the homes of the upper middle-class and the brainwashed who do not know how to think for themselves.

Even in the UK, people are beginning to see through their Anglo-Norman elite, known as the ‘Establishment’. Backing for the Conservative-Labour-Liberal Democrat Uniparty is flagging. Having mishandled first Brexit and then Covid, next it imposed without any popular consultation illegal sanctions on Russia, which Russia at once shrugged off, but which have crippled the UK economy and the public, the UK is reaching a turning-point. Disastrously indebted, with high taxes, unheard of inequality between rich and poor, tightly-controlled and slavish media, government corruption, both financial and moral, the Heath Service and Education falling apart, bankrupt councils, useless train services, young people priced out of housing, people eating from food banks, facing uncontrolled illegal immigration from the EU, a pathetically depleted military, potholed roads, its State mouthpiece, the BBC, undermined by obvious Establishment bias and numerous pedophile scandals, the Establishment Uniparty now has no credit among the thinking UK public. The English, the Scottish, the Welsh and the Irish more and more want freedom from the Anglo-Norman elite.

Conclusion

Despite the almost total control of Western mainstream media by six media corporations, the truth is getting out. In the language of the ruling elite the truth is called ‘disinformation’. We are in the same situation as the Soviet Union. Everyone knew the truth, but they lied. ‘Do not live according to the lie’, said Solzhenitsyn fifty years ago. It is time for the Western elites and peoples to listen to him. The US-based Western Union became the Soviet Union, the evil empire. World War III is, for some, looming on the horizon. The US itself faces social collapse, a drug and poverty epidemic and mass illegal immigration. If only its elite had chosen not to interfere in other countries, and instead had turned to solving its own problems….

In the face of all this, some despair. Despair, however, is the product of weak faith. All we know is that human history is in the hands of Christ and all the intrigues of men will, sooner or later, come to nought. Christ is always victorious, so we will keep with Him.

A New Booklet: The Force of Simple Orthodoxy

Recent Articles by

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

St John’s Orthodox Church, Colchester, England

‘No Cross, No Crown’

This 65-page spiral-bound booklet The Force of Simple Orthodoxy is available from: frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk for £6 or $12 post-free, payable to Paypal at the above e-mail. The contents are listed below.

The last five years have been catastrophic for the administrative elites of the Orthodox Church. First, we witnessed the trampling down of the most basic canons by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ukraine and the falling out of communion with the Russian Church of almost the whole Greek Orthodox administration (not the simple clergy and people – hence the title), under foreign political threats and the financial pressure of vulgar bribes.

Then there followed no less cowardice in the face of the absurd covid manipulation and scare. The incredible and repeated scandals of Eastern Papism involved here, in terms of financial irregularity, moral perversion and the dogmatic compromises of ecumenism, have brought the spiritually weak to abandon the Church. ‘If they behave like that, why should I bother?’ However regrettable, this attitude is quite understandable, given the scandalous conduct of those on high, who were supposed to set us an example.

Then, in 2022, the American elite’s war in and on the Ukraine that had begun overtly in 2014 sucked in the Russian Federation. We witnessed at once the collapse of the once multinational, but tragically centralised Patriarchate of Moscow into authoritarian Papism and nationalism. Having discredited itself, nearly all Non-Russians, a third of the total, left it or were expelled from it. Until it purifies itself and peels off its post-Soviet, Soviet and pre-Soviet deviations of love of oligarchs’ money, fawning love of Sergianist power and love of possession respectively, nothing will change. Still stuck in the museum quagmire of the recent past, the Church administration has yet to become multipolar, as the Russian State has already become.

The Moscow collapse concerns not least its once respected American branch. In the last five years it too sold itself out for post-Soviet money, sovietising itself, then tragically fell into schism, followed by persecution, slander and open lies, and is now on the verge of repeating the Donatist rebaptism heresy. (Heresy always follows schism, just as schism always follows moral iniquity, as sure as night follows day). Many who had been faithful in blood, sweat and tears to the old Russian Church for fifty years and more have been expelled from it. The rest, like its last ever-memorable Metropolitan, are spinning in their graves.

Given the shameful apostasy of Heterodoxy over the last sixty years, what are Orthodox to do in the face of the no less shameful spiritual and so moral collapse of both the Greek Orthodox and the Russian Orthodox administrations, supposedly responsible for the majority of the Church? Have we really come to that point when, ‘When the Son of man comes, shall He find faith on the earth? (Lk 18, 8). Indeed, ‘Let them that are in Judea flee into the mountains’ (Matt. 24, 16). This booklet suggests some answers, to be found from the Hebrides to the Carpathians.

Contents

Foreword: Memories are Made of This

The Force of Simple Orthodoxy
The First 250 Years of Orthodox Suffolk
The Fen Thebaid
Who Betrayed the Europeans?
The Struggle for the Inevitable Local Church
How the Orthodox Church Was Restructured
An Interview
Beyond the Three Romes: The People’s Orthodoxy

Afterword: On Edmund the Martyred King

The End of a World

Politics

Catastrophic predictions and apocalyptic undertones are here. Even the name of a place in the Holy Land, Armageddon, is on some people’s lips. The US elite is threatening to invade Chinese Taiwan ‘in order to protect it from China’. In the US-backed ‘democratic’ Ukraine, that ‘bastion of Western ‘Civilisation’’ the most corrupt country in the world, which is now banning Christianity, 20,000 untrained and poorly-equipped Ukrainian conscripts are dying every month for the sake of dependence on the US, thousands more are shot in the back by the Ukrainian secret police for retreating, or else are deserting or surrendering. The Ukrainian birthrate has plummeted to 0.7 per woman and the population is now under 20 million, whereas just over thirty years ago it was 52 million.

Then there is the Holy Land, where Israeli colonists, 100% backed by US and Western European financial, and therefore political and media elites, but not by their peoples, are planning to genocide two million native Palestinians. Men, women and children are being murdered or dismembered by US bombs, dropped by US aircraft with Israeli insignia. The whole once disunited and warring Muslim world, from Morocco to Pakistan, from Iran to Turkey, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, from Yemen to Syria, is united against the Israeli military machine and its Western sponsors. Mass demonstrations in support of the genocided Palestinians, largely unreported by Western State media, are taking place all over the world, including in Western countries. The US is isolated, faced down by the Global Majority, from Brazil to South Africa. Heads of countries even refuse to speak to the senile President Biden. It has sent aircraft carriers, but China has sent warships, as Russia also. Iran is threatening isolated Israel and its corrupt political leaders with destruction, if Israel invades Gaza. In Syria, part of which is illegally occupied by the US Army, which is pumping out stolen oil, Russian forces, present at the invitation of the Syrian government, are threatened by the US. They will react.

The problem is ‘Gentile Zionism’. This is the Non-Jewish, Western fantasy that all political decisions taken by Western countries are infallibly correct and that the superior Western ‘liberal’ world, as ‘an exceptional civilisation’ with ‘a manifest destiny’, must rule the planet as the unique model for all. All Non-Westerners are as nothing, just folklore to look at in a Disneyland zoo. The Global Majority, seven billion out of eight billion, do not agree with this Nazism and is at this moment preparing to intervene in the Holy Land to bring about a ceasefire. There has only ever been one way out of this, ‘the two-state solution’: one homeland for Jews and one homeland for Palestinians, as was agreed by Resolution 181 of the UN in 1947, but which has ever since been vetoed by the US.

Christianity

The largest nominal religion in the world, though still covering only a minority of the world, is Christianity. Two forms of it used to predominate in the Western world. The first, Roman Catholicism, invented a thousand years ago, has been undermined by unending scandals involving papal and episcopal corruption, clerical pedophilia and crime, misogyny and racism. Few Roman Catholic laypeople actually believe in or observe its controversial ideology. The second form, Protestantism, invented 500 years ago after dissatisfaction with Roman Catholicism, has nearly completely dissolved into the anti-Christian Secularism which both spawned. Protestant leaders widely predict that their own religion will die out by 2050. Who believes in the Western form of Protestantism any more? Most Protestant churches in the Western world are empty and many have been sold or are for sale.

As for the Non-Western, Orthodox Church, some of its main leaders are only politicians and not pastors, whose only concern seems to be power and money. Thus, the Greek Patriarch, out of communion with the Russian Church, set up an uncanonical Church in the Ukraine for a $25 million bribe from the US and his Patriarchate has been undermined by incessant sexual and financial scandals. Meanwhile, the Russian Patriarch, out of communion with the Greek Patriarch, thanks St Seraphim of Sarov for nuclear weapons! (1). His once multinational and united Church, undermined by centralisation and Russian nationalism, is utterly divided. It suffers from constant moral and financial scandals with bishops, divisions or schisms everywhere outside Russia, in Estonia, the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova (2). Tomorrow divisions may well begin in Belarus and Kazakhstan. Moreover, the Russian Church’s small, sectarian American branch has been in schism from its even smaller French branch for nearly three years. Nothing has been done about this schism except to encourage it, despite the appeals of its clergy to its now wealthy bishops to return from schism, the consequent collapse of the American branch in one country and the open persecution of theologically-educated and conscientious Orthodox. One of the American bishops scandalously and openly rebaptises, not just Non-Orthodox, but even other Orthodox (!). This is a sect, not part of the Church. Yet, apparently, the leaders of the Russian Church find this arrogant Americanisation and ‘One True Church’ sectarianisation normal.

We have seen it all before. Those who have not seen it all before can read about it in the history books. Although all may become a lot worse, we do not believe the apocalyptic hype. In the Holy Land the Global Majority (miscalled by some the ‘Global South’), Russia, China, India, Africa, Latin America, can still make peace between the two warring sides in the Holy Land. If US dollars were to be withdrawn from troubled places, Taiwan would peacefully return to China, the Ukraine would peacefully return to Russia, and the south and west of Israel would peacefully return to Palestine. There are solutions.

As for Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, these were only ever temporary, politically-shaped Western deviations of Christianity, with some very strange traits. Having served their time, they can now disappear and be replaced, perhaps even by historic Christianity and the historic Church. Their roots from the first millennium are still present. As for the Orthodox Church, we have also seen all the polarised divisions and sectarianism before (3). Leaders come and go. The head of the Church is Christ, not men. When men refuse to deal with the problems they have created, Christ will step in. All racism, schisms and sects can be overcome and dissolved by new, Christ-appointed leaders. We do not believe that this is the end of the world. However, it is the end of a world. We are surely present at the remaking of the world, at its reconfiguration, not at its end.

Notes:

The full version of the still unanswered letter from 5 September, which is in fact an urgent appeal for autocephaly, with its clear emphasis on continuing Russian racism towards Moldovans, is available in Romanian-style Russian (Metr Vladimir’s native language is Romanian) on Facebook. If the Russian Patriarch ignores the appeal, the whole Moldovan Church may well join the Romanian Church. The absurd and uncanonical ‘defrockings’ of Moldovan (and other) priests who have already joined the Romanian Church will be rescinded – as they always are when they are purely political.

For example, there was the scandal of the rebaptism of Orthodox by the selfsame Americanised branch of Russian Orthodoxy of neophytes in Guildford, England in 1976. The remnants of that Guildford group of pseudo-Orthodox are still rebaptising Orthodox today. Just another story of primitive neophytism, openly encouraged by its bishops, of whom some are themselves neophytes, despite the canons against the consecration of neophyte bishops. But the heretical rebaptism of Orthodox is itself only a repeat of the age-old phariseeism of the sectarian heresy of Donatism from the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. There is nothing new under the sun. What is disgraceful that the leadership of the once theologically respectable Russian Church countenances such a heresy in its midst and the persecution and slandering of those who oppose it. Those who start receiving Non-Orthodox Christians by baptism end up receiving Orthodox by baptism too!

The World on the Brink

With events in the Holy Land following their course, America’s war in the Ukraine is now on the back burner. The Russian Federation is engaged in mopping up operations and President Zelensky will soon no longer be a useful asset and so will be disposed of, in one way or the other.

In West Asia (the former ‘Middle East’) Western propaganda has taken over. It is notorious for its lies. The First World War was justified because the propagandists proclaimed that ‘German soldiers are murdering Belgian babies’. Arming and training Islamists in the 1980s, including Bin Laden, was justified by the US because ‘The Soviets are parachuting bombs disguised as toys into Afghan villages to murder the children’. (More lies) NATO atrocities against Serbia were justified because ‘Serbian soldiers have raped 60,000 Muslim women’. (More lies). The first Western genocide of Iraq was justified because ‘Iraqi soldiers are killing Kuwaiti babies in their incubators’. (More lies and anyway Kuwaitis are Iraqis). ‘All Russians can be killed because of their atrocity in Bucha’ (in fact a Kiev atrocity against Russia-supporting Ukrainians). And so it goes on.

Now Palestinians can be genocided because ‘HAMAS has beheaded 40 Israeli babies’. (More lies, which also ignore that HAMAS was created by MOSSAD, the Israeli secret service and armed with US guns bought in the Ukraine). The last statement also ignores the fact that thousands of babies are murdered by abortion every day in the USA, but that is legal. Let alone that the Israeli Air Force, the creation of the USA, has already murdered hundreds of Palestinian children beneath their bombs. Moreover, according to the Israeli President: ‘There are no innocent civilians in Gaza’. If so, then there are no innocent civilians in Israel. Such extremism means total war. It was the same extremism that led to Anglo-American bombs murdering half a million German civilians between 1942 and 1945. Although civilian deaths are a war crime, the victors are never charged with war crimes, they are still war crimes and will be judged in the Court of the Most High.

Sadly, ‘everybody hates the Jews’, as the Jewish-American singer Tom Lehrer sang nearly sixty years ago. There has to be a reason for the hatred by many (in reality not by all). Could it be because so many Jewish leaders (clearly, Jewish people are another matter) are stuck in the blood of the Old Testament – ‘an eye for an eye’, and firmly reject Christian forgiveness, as also, ironically, did the neo-pagan Western leader Hitler. In 1947 the UN voted for two States in the Holy Land, a Jewish State and a Palestinian State. That resolution has still not been acted on and so here we are today.

However, are so-called Christian leaders any better? The latest disgraceful statement by an Orthodox Patriarch, welcoming the persecution of the Church in the Ukraine and the arrest and imprisonment of its bishops (1) by an atheist Jew suggests that certain so-called Christians are also stuck in the worst parts of the Old Testament. They still do not know Christ, on the same level as the present extremist and very unpopular minority Israeli leader. (Yes, there are lots of Jews who do not support him; there are good and bad everywhere).

That warlike Orthodox Patriarch is not the only Orthodox Patriarch to behave so strangely. Another scatters his faithful bishops to exile in the four winds and scatters his most conscientious clergy to other Local Churches. He also leaves his American Orthodox branch to be rent by extremism and the consequent unresolved American schism, now approaching its third anniversary, with its bishops warring with each other about the heresy of the ‘rebaptism’ of other Orthodox. Sad times. As for us, we shall keep our integrity and not enter the murky swamplands of anti-Orthodoxy, which now appear to be filling with Orthodox bishops.

Sadly, there is nothing new in any of this. Israeli leaders only treat the Palestinians as the Spanish and the Portuguese treated the peoples of what is now called Latin America, as North American settlers (most of them of British origin) treated Native American ‘savages’, as the British treated the natives of Australia and New Zealand (even making extinct the natives of Tasmania, hunting them ‘like vermin’), as the French treated the Arabs, as the Belgians treated the Congolese. And it was the treatment of Native Americans, which Hitler took as his example for his genocide of thirty million Slavs eighty years ago. He needed ‘living space’. That meant ethnic cleansing. And that is what is happening today in Gaza.

The world is on the brink. President Putin is in China, talking about West Asia. Moreover, these two Superpowers of Russia and China are closely allied with the Muslim world, India, Iran and Africa. Meanwhile, the US Secretary of State, the Jewish Antony Blinken was humiliated by the Egyptians and the Saudi Arabians and the octogenarian President Biden had to be called in to Israel to avert (or cause?) a Third World War. But now, after the latest atrocity at the hospital in Gaza, the senile President has nobody to talk to except the Israelis. Unlike President Putin, who in one day spoke to two Arab leaders, the President of Iran, the President of Israel, the President of Vietnam, the Prime Minister of Hungary and the President of China, President Biden is, like Israel, completely isolated – like all narcissists, whether secularists or in the Church.

Did the extremists really think they could get away with this? We in the mainstream stand for moderation. There is no reason either for chaos in the world or in the Church. I am often asked why the world has gone crazy. I only have one answer: Because its leaders and many others have lost their faith in God. And when you stop worshipping the King of the Universe, you begin worshipping the prince of this world. This also needs saying to certain Orthodox bishops.

Note:

https://spzh.news/en/news/76512-patriarch-bartholomew-approves-criminal-cases-against-uoc-hierarchs

The Force of White Orthodoxy

Foreword: Come a Long Way

Ten years ago on a rainy, autumn evening, the deserted, leaf-strewn pavements shining in the streetlight, I arrived at a small hotel in rue Alexandre I in Alencon in Normandy, France. A puzzled Frenchman asked me: ‘Have you come a long way’? To which I replied with a smile: ‘Yes, I have come a very long way…from the other end of history’. I did not add, but could have added: ‘I am a White Orthodox priest. There must come justice and restoration in Russia, after which justice and restoration will come elsewhere, including here in France too.’

Three Russias

In November 1721 we saw the establishment of Imperial Russia with its enslaving westernised aristocracy. In 1922 its injustices led to its fall and the establishment of the Soviet Union, Imperialist Marxist Russia with its enslaving centralised nomenklatura. In December 1991 its injustices led to its fall and the establishment of post-Soviet, American Russia with its enslaving dollarised oligarchate. On 24 February 2022 this Russia in turn fell, the victim of its internal contradictions, caused by its corruption.

The three versions of Russia had lasted 200 years, 70 years and 30 years respectively. Despite great achievements, all three versions ended badly, either in revolution and tyranny, or else in plunder and despair, or else in bloodshed and tragedy. This was because for 300 years none of them had respected its underlying Orthodox Russian identity and its calling to form a Multinational Civilisation. When you go against your true nature, you suffer. That is why Russia has had to suffer for 300 years.

The End of Post-Soviet Russia

The fall of Post-Soviet American Russia is very painful and very bloody, but also inevitable. Of course, there are those who opposed its end. These were the cosmopolitan westernisers and traitors, who last year ran away from Russia, to Finland, to Georgia, to Turkey, wherever they could go. They wanted their American Russia to continue, even though both sides of the Atlantic had ‘cancelled’ Russia. Some of them already lived in the West, some of them were represented in the Russian Church. Over the last year some of them have begun to return, realising that their flight had been based on lack of faith.

On the other hand, there are also the xenophobic Russian nationalists, the Prigozhinites. They too are ending badly, as they desire the restoration by violence of an Imperialist Russia, not understanding that Russia has moved on from Imperialism and Sovietism. They understand neither Orthodoxy, nor the multinational calling of Russia. They do not understand that they will lose everything if they continue clinging on to the disastrous centralism of the past. The Multipolar Age of BRICS has begun. Unipolarity, whether Russian or Western, is over.

The Fall of the Russian Church

The State-minded nationalists, the centralist controllers and their denouncing minders who accompany them everywhere, are over-represented in the Russian Church. Its fate is now on a knife edge because of their errors. Over the last fifty years since 1973, I have written much about the possible restoration of Sovereign Orthodox Russia, the Eurasian bulwark of worldwide Orthodox Civilisation. Shall I see it before I die? Unfortunately, its heart, the Russian Church, is still not free. True, it is no longer captive to anything so crude or primitive as Communism, but instead is captive to something far worse, far more insidious, to 300 years of the dead, corrupting hand of the State.

Thus, the Russian Church is captive to spiritual captivity, practical atheism, love of power and wealth, dictatorship and bureaucracy, arbitrary rule, cultish sectarianism, its believers are exiled, the corrupt take control, intent on destroying the Church. They are Black Orthodoxy. Their feudal despotism, blatant commercialism, clerical careerism, moral corruption and institutional simony are merely symptoms of the sickness, not causes. Here is why we are still very far from the restoration of Sovereign Russia. If it comes, it can only be after the Russian Church has been cleansed by the present very painful and very bloody events in the Soviet-established Ukraine.

The Fall of the West

Over the last fifty years since 1973, I have also written much about the coming millennial turning-point in world history. At last it has come, the fall of the West after a thousand years of its elite’s domination of the rest of the world through their technology of organised violence. It is time for the West to return to itself, to its roots, to its true nature, which is in its saints and in the culture of the spirit. This is the Truth of the West, as I have been affirming for fifty years.

The Truth of the West is not in power and mammon, as, sadly, even some modern Orthodox bishops, self-appointed ‘princes of the Church’, claim. We live far away from the love of luxury, academic theorising and effeminate worldliness of such nominal bishops. We strive to live in accord with the humble spirit of genuine Orthodoxy, of White Orthodoxy, spread from the Egyptian desert to the Atlantic Hebrides, from the East Anglian coasts to the Fen islands, from Sarov forests to Carpathian hermitages.

Afterword: The Multipolar Church

As for me, I shall continue here where God has put me, in the Kingdom of the East of England. It is where I was born and where I belong. Our task is to complete the noble mission allotted us by the last Christian Emperor, to build up the Church multinationally, accepting all inclusively. We are the Free Church, the White Church. We fight off the ‘protocols’ of the evil and the greedy, the scribes and the pharisees, the sectarians and the schismatics, who would close down all our churches and destroy us all. Those who persecuted us and tried to silence us unleashed an irresistible force, the Force of the Spirit, the Force of White Orthodoxy. God is with us.

St Andrew the Fool for Christ

2/15 October 2023

The Former World

The twenty-first century has so far been a century of dreadful and continual wars, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, Niger, now Gaza and tomorrow perhaps Taiwan. Each of these wars has threatened the conflagration of a whole region, even of the whole world in the case of Gaza, where two million Palestinians are menaced with genocide. Some predict that we are heading towards the Apocalypse, Armageddon. These are the pessimists.

There is another, more optimistic view, that all this suffering and bloodshed are going to bring forth a better, more balanced and more just world. For the fact is that for the moment the Western world is not run by Westerners, but by those who consider that they are superior to the rest of humanity, a race apart. They have had many names in history, barbarians, crusaders, Nazis and exceptionalists, but they are all possessed of the same demonic ideology of pride.

We have long spoken of the former Soviet Union and of the former Yugoslavia, which both ended in unresolved injustices. However, today we are heading towards something far more important, not just towards the former Ukraine, but also towards the former USA, the former EU, the former UK, the former Israel, indeed, the former Western world, even the former world. For good or for ill? All we know is that Christ is the same yesterday, today and for ever.

How Not to Run a Franchise

It was at the Great Rebranding Meeting at their US headquarters in 2017 that the MacSonalds Corporation decided not to rename itself. ‘Our reputation is based on Tradition’, agreed the executives. ‘If we rename ourselves to ‘The True MacSonalds’, as some have suggested, people will realise we have changed the ingredients. We must at all costs keep the same name, so that nobody notices anything’. All agreed that the franchises in North America and in their Australian colony were firmly under their rebranding control and that the only problem would be in Asia, always a thorny problem. ‘They need to follow the successful American business model’, declared the executives. ‘They’re very backward in Asia. They raise hardly any cash for us’.

Therefore, the Board voted to send a new manager to Asia to reform their small franchise operation there. But who? There seemed to be only one candidate. Several executives opposed the new manager (‘he’s too young’, ‘he’s untrained’, ‘he hates everyone except for himself’, he’s too aggressive’, ‘he’s a jealous narcissist who’ll meet an empath’, ‘he’s a control freak’, ‘nobody likes him’, ‘he’s toxic and will rub them all up the wrong way’, ‘they’ll figure out his real game’, ‘he doesn’t even speak their languages’, and ‘he’s a fake’). However, most of the rather elderly managers were blinded by the new manager’s dynamism and excellent command of English. ‘Over there it’s out of control, why, those Asian guys don’t even behave like Americans’, they said, ‘the boy will sort them all out and bring them into line. He says he’s been to college and he can even speak in what sounds to me like a British accent. Leave it to him. Send in our sheriff and he’ll clean them out’.

So, soon after the Meeting a small trail-blazing group duly went over from the US to the Asian head office and brutally sacked the senior manager, who had been there all his life, in order to make way for their go-getter protege. ‘We know best’, they proclaimed. After all, ‘regime change’, kicking out the old hands who have dedicated their whole lives to the franchise and know the people, is essential to any ‘modernizing’ American operation abroad. Of course, that all created scandal and the old Asian hands left MacSonald’s at once, in a state of shock. ‘We’ve started the ball rolling. Now, wait for the fireworks to start – shock and awe’, said the old hands, rubbing their hands with glee and adding: ‘He may be an upstart who knows nothing, but he’s sure got energy and loves money. He’ll rake in the dollars and that’s exactly what we need. We’re princes and we have to live like princes’.

So the young whippersnapper, now with the fancy title of ‘Head of Asian Operations’, came over and at once rented an expensive residence and smart car. At the very first meeting with the locals, who had been there even before the new boss had been born, he began insisting that everyone speak American. Then he revealed that he did not even know the name of the territory he was in charge of and so insulted several nationalities. He also made it clear that he would brook no opposition to his absolute rule, especially from the experienced, and would impose strict censorship on any dissenters. ‘I’ll be checking on you all and this is how you must contact me. Remember: I know everything and you know nothing’. A stereotypical nasty American – and an embarrassment to nice Americans.

Next he tried to take over the properties of the franchisees, not realising the latter had put their own money and great efforts into their properties over the decades, that the properties did not belong to him. As the lawyer commented: ‘That’s illegal, it’s a property grab’. In return: ‘The keys, give me the keys!’, he shouted down the telephone. When he could not get his hands on the property, he began to demand ‘absolute obedience’, meaning worship of himself, as if he were some sort of cult leader. Then he turned really nasty, raged, and was spectacularly rude, bullying and gaslighting, projecting all his faults onto others, demanding as much money as possible. In one of the few remaining Filipino outlets, they asked each other: ‘Who does he think he is, an infallible Pope?’ In the two Singapore outlets they called him ‘the cowboy’.

He clearly did not understand that being a successful business is not just about making a quick buck in the short term, but about looking after your customers in the long term, from generation to generation. What really enraged the jealous young man was when the local franchisees expanded because of their own success, without him. Either he would have full control or else he would close you down. It seems that he had never been told how a franchise operation works. What a pity they had not instructed him in the basics of respect for other human beings first. He would take no advice.

From that point on, all went from disaster to catastrophe. He expelled nearly all the outlets in the Philippines because they ‘did not make true burgers’. However, so much had he hoodwinked, some would say hypnotised, the oldies in the US, that they not only let him get away with this, but even approved of it. Word soon got around all the similar corporations in Asia as to who he was and they sat back and waited for him to fail. The whippersnapper found himself very isolated and he would complain about being lonely. Despite the fact that he used to alter the minutes of all the meetings to make himself look good before he sent them back to the US, the Board in the US was made aware of what had been going on.

However, they ignored what the Asian whistleblowers had politely presented and backed their protege, asking him to punish those who had warned them what was going on. It was on their own heads. No surprises then when the franchisees did exactly as they had warned and left MacSonalds after decades. The Board had not only ignored them, but also punished them for telling the truth, the very thing they hated the most. The franchisees joined the competitor, MacTonalds, which was already seven times bigger anyway and, above all, Pan-Asian and not foreign. The franchisees commented that ‘leaving had been like getting out of a straitjacket’. The whippersnapper began shouting: ‘They’re all fired!’ (too late – they had already left and joined the rival). Then the trigger-happy foreigner added frantically: ‘Only our burgers are true. All the others are fake’. Everybody laughed and laughed at him for that. The psychiatric ambulance was on its way.

When some time after all this, as had become inevitable, MacSonalds went into administration, one of the old hands commented ruefully: ‘The boy messed up big time. I guess it’s our own fault, we never taught him how to say sorry and then we backed him up. He hoodwinked us’. But it was all far too late for such regrets about the lack of any moral sense. And all because, from the very outset, they had not listened to the local people and the local managers.

Sic transit gloria mundi…

The Coming Synod in Moscow: An Example to the Vatican?

Introduction

The Synod of the Patriarchate of Moscow will meet in just a few days’ time. Of the many issues the Synodal members will have to decide is that of possible autocephaly for the Orthodox in Moldova. As we know, Metr Vladimir of Moldova has asked for autocephaly in order to overcome the problems in his country. He fears either that the Moscow Patriarchate will be banned in Moldova or else that his flock will transfer en masse to the Patriarchate of Bucharest. This is difficult for Moscow. This thorny problem is, however, only the tip of the iceberg.

In the last century the Patriarchate of Moscow granted autocephaly to Orthodox in Poland, Czechoslovakia and to Carpatho-Russians in Northern America (the ‘OCA’). Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union into fifteen different republics 32 years ago, it has not given autocephaly to anyone. It seems to us that the granting of autocephaly to Orthodox who live in now independent republics is long overdue.

Thus, we would suggest that Orthodox in the Ukraine (all those on territory under the political control of the government in Kiev), Moldova, and the three Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) should all receive autocephaly, but not be allowed a Diaspora presence (see below). This would mean that the Orthodox in Belarus would remain in their Exarchate, as they have not requested autonomy (as they have in Japan and China), let alone autocephaly.

However, if this Synod in Moscow were to become a Synod of Decentralisation, that is, of Autocephaly, Autonomy and Exarchate, we would suggest that perhaps further decentralisation should take place:

Why not give up the remaining thirty or so Moscow parishes in North America and give them to the OCA, on condition that the whole Autocephalous Church there be renamed the NAOC – the Northern American Orthodox Church? (Northern America being the USA, Canada, Greenland and a couple of dependent islands). Local bishops and parishes of the American Synod (called ROCOR)in Northern America should be informed that they must in time, say, over the coming five years, obey the Patriarchal Synod and also join, or else fall out of communion.

Thus: Three New Exarchates, making Four Autocephalous Churches: The Ukrainian, the Moldovan, the Baltic and the Northern American.

Why not grant the Western European Exarchate Autonomy, merging that Exarchate with the Archdiocese of Western Europe? With autonomy would come long-overdue internationalisation and the organisation’s indispensable acceptance by Non-Russian nationalities. This Autonomous Western European Orthodox Church would also include all bishops and parishes of the Ukrainian, Moldovan and Baltic Orthodox Churches. Local bishops and parishes of the American Synod (ROCOR) in Western Europe should be informed that they must in time, say, over the coming five years, obey the Patriarchal Synod and also join, or else fall out of communion.

Thus: One New Exarchate, making Three Autonomous Churches: The Western European, the Japanese and the Chinese.

Why not create one single Exarchate for the Metropolia of Kazakhstan and the Metropolia of Central Asia? Why not create an Exarchate for all parishes in Latin America, from Argentina through Central America to Mexico? Why not suggest creating an Exarchate of Oceania, based on the Russian parishes in Australia (at present under the American Synod)?

Thus: Two New Exarchates, making Five Exarchates: The Belarussian, the Kazakhstan and Central Asian, the African, the South-East Asian and the Latin American. And one new potential Exarchate for the future.

Conclusion

Such a Synod in Moscow would surely set an example of decentralisation to the current Roman Catholic ‘Synod on Synodality’, which is, among other immense problems of its own, also grappling with its historic and spiritually deadening problem of centralisation, caused by Papism.

The Moldovan Church Saga Continues

Moldova’s population is now only about 2.5 million after the immigration of some 1.2 million Moldovans to Western Europe began after the fall of the USSR, especially since Romania joined the EU. (Most Moldovans have Romanian passports; some 15 years ago they could be bought quite simply for only $10).

The Orthodox Church in 95% + Orthodox Moldova is divided into two. Firstly, since the Soviet Occupation that began in 1941 there has been the Moldovan Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, with seven bishops and some 1200 parishes. Secondly, since the fall of the USSR there has been a second Church, the Metropolia of Bessarabia. This reconstitutes the Church as it was before 1941 as part of the Patriarchate of Romania (over 80% of the Moldovan population is Romanian). Over the last thirty years that part has gradually built up, though even now only about 250 parishes belong to it. However, that number has increased particularly over the last eighteen months, since the conflict in the Ukraine entered its latest phase.

Metropolitan Vladimir (Cantarean), the leader of the Moscow part of the Church, is losing on 2 fronts; at home and abroad. At home priests and parishes are leaving for the Metropolia of Bessarabia, which is supported both by the Romanian government and by the pro-Western Moldovan government. His ‘competition’, the Metropolia of Bessarabia, is fully canonical. This is despite the usual absurd Russian propaganda from the extremists, who ridiculously claim that those in the Romanian Church are ‘schismatics’ or ‘have no grace’!

Abroad, Metr Vladimir is also losing: young people and clergy are leaving corrupt and impoverished Moldova for a better life and so churches back home have less income and few children. Abroad, the hundreds of Moldovan parishes, especially in Italy, Spain and Portugal, have to be under the Patriarchate of Moscow, which funnels money to Moscow – not to Metropolitan Vladimir.

What can Metr Vladimir do?

He could adopt the Latvian scenario, which is to get the Moldovan State to grant him ‘autocephaly’ (independence) and stop commemorating the Russian Patriarch, as Metropolitan Alexander, the leader of Russian Orthodox in Latvia, did. Now everybody, even in the first year of seminary, knows that this is uncanonical. Only a Mother-Church can grant autocephaly. Indeed, Metr Alexander’s policy in Latvia has proved to be disastrous.

A great many churches in Latvia are now empty. The Orthodox people, nearly all of whom are Russians, are boycotting a Church where their Russian Patriarch is not commemorated. Some Orthodox are travelling to church in Lithuania and Estonia to go to church. There they do commemorate the Russian Patriarch. The income of the Church in Latvia has dropped dramatically. Of the three priests I know who continued to commemorate the Russian Patriarch despite the instructions of Metr Alexander, one has stopped commemorating under pressure, a second has been suspended and the third continues for the moment.

Therefore, in the meantime, Metr Vladimir in Moldova has written a letter to the Russian Patriarch Kyrill asking for autocephaly. On top of that he has recently been travelling to parishes abroad, notably to England and Ireland to try and get Moldovan support for an Autocephalous Moldovan Orthodox Church. If he gets autocephaly (highly unlikely, it seems), then he can claim the Moldovan parishes abroad, which are at present under the Moscow Patriarchate’s Exarchate, which is centred in Paris. This would virtually wipe out that largely Moldovan-dependent Russian Exarchate in southern Europe and pose many questions for it in Switzerland, France, England and elsewhere.

The situation has not been helped by the racism that Moldovans have experienced on the part of Russians in Western Europe and the years-long corruption involving sums of Moldovan money funnelled to Moscow. That has already quite naturally made for bad feeling on the part of Moldovans towards Russians (‘I don’t like Romanians and only half-like Moldovans’, as one young and particularly tactful (!) Russian bishop said three years ago to an audience mainly of Romanians and Moldovans!)

Most likely of all, centralist Moscow will either ignore Metr Vladimir’s letter requesting autocephaly or reject it. If so, then Metr Vladimir has an alternative which Metr Alexander in Latvia does not have; that is, to join wholesale the Patriarchate of Romania and to become an Autonomous Church within that Patriarchate, which could give him the right to autonomous parishes in Western Europe. But what happens then to relations between Bucharest and Moscow? Especially when Moscow desperately needs Romanian support against Constantinople in Church matters in the Ukraine.

Orthodox England

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