Daily Archives: June 16, 2024

Russian Nationalism Loses Control of the Russian Church

After the 1917 Revolution and the dissolution of the Russian Empire, the Russian Orthodox Church, formerly the Church of the Russian Empire, was forced to decentralise and give up various territories like eastern Poland and Finland, and the churches in them. Thus, the new country of Poland (and also Czechoslovakia) came to form its own independent (autocephalous) Local Orthodox Church. As for Russian Orthodox in Finland, like the emigres centred in Paris, and later Ukrainian emigres, they joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

However, the bulk of the Russian emigration, then in China (from here many later moved to Australia) as well as in Western Europe (from here many later rejoined others already in North America), became independent of Moscow. Eventually the descendants of this emigration became known as ROCOR or the New York Synod. Despite the fact that in 2006 several parishes in England and France had left the jurisdiction of Moscow itself to join Constantinople, in 2007 most of this New York Synod formally returned to Moscow, though a minority went to various old calendarist sects. In 2019 many of the descendants of the Paris emigres also rejoined Moscow, though a very large minority remained with Constantinople.

Despite reunification as recent as 2019, five years on, the 2024 situation mirrors the post-1917 chaos, when parts of the Russian Church refused to be subject to the politically-driven Russian Church administration.

Firstly, the Church in the Ukraine declared itself fully independent of Moscow. So much so that it set up nearly 100 parishes for its emigration in Western Europe, quite independently of Moscow. As for the Russian Orthodox Church in Latvia, it did much the same inside Latvia. In Moldova many parishes also left politically-coloured Moscow for the Romanian Church. Abroad many Moldovans went to Romanian churches, where they are not abused by Russian racism.

There is also dissidence in Lithuania and Estonia and even in Russia itself, where some Russian Orthodox also joined Constantinople. As regards the Russian Orthodox centred in Paris, now under Moscow, most there do not commemorate (or respect) their own Russian Orthodox Patriarch, whom they see as a politician, not as a churchman. More radically, the bulk of the old Russian emigration, now centred in New York and highly Americanised (they openly advise people to vote for Trump and support other post-Protestant phenomena), are also protesting. Some of its bishops openly called on the Russian Federation to withdraw its troops from the Ukraine!

Many suspect that several bishops and senior priests of this New York group has yet again been infiltrated, just as it was between the 60s and 80s, by the CIA. In any case its American or American-linked bishops parrot anti-Russian CIA propaganda, despite the fact that they call their fragment of the Church ‘Russian’! As a result, many Russian Orthodox patriots have been obliged to leave the New York Synod for other Local Churches, since the Moscow-centred Church, suicidally, refused to accept these patriots!

Thus, scandalous corruption in the New York Synod forced quite a number of patriotic Russian Orthodox in the USA, who also objected to the CIA hold over the group and yet were abandoned by politically-driven Moscow, to join the Church of Constantinople. In England, scandalous persecution from New York forced patriots in half the local diocese, abandoned by Moscow, to leave for the canonicity of the Romanian Church, thus skilfully avoiding politically-driven Constantinople. Here they continue to live exactly as before, as Russian Orthodox using the old calendar, but in exile as Russian Orthodox, as Moscow abandoned them. They are much supported by Moldovans, who are tired of being mistreated by Russians.

Ukrainians and Moldovans alike, tired of Russian racism, have been leaving, the Ukrainians setting up their own churches, the Moldovans, as we said, going to the Romanians. Making Non-Russian Orthodox feel like second-class citizens, usually deliberately, is suicidal for the Russian Church. The Russian Church is not only becoming a National Church, but rather a Nationalist Church. Suicidal politically-motivated and nationalistically-motivated actions by individuals in, or sent from, Moscow means that it has lost the loyalty of literally tens of millions of former Russian Orthodox.

At the present time, it is difficult to see how Moscow can ever get these tens of millions back. All this seems particularly strange when the Russian Church is supposed to be the Church of the multinational Russian Federation, part of the multipolar BRICS Alliance! And yet the Russian Church appears to be unipolar and uninational! Surely a Federation would be better represented by a multinational, and not nationalist, Church? Perhaps, once the conflict with the USA and its vassals in the Ukraine is over, the Russian Church, just like the Russian military with its four corrupt and now arrested generals, will also be cleansed of treacherous corruption, CIA bishops and all the rest?

 

 

The Russian Federation Offers Peace for the Last Time

On 14 June President Putin gave a very generous and face-saving last opportunity to the US elite and their vassals to make peace in the Ukraine, where they are fighting against the Russian Federation. This last chance peace offer is a repetition of and development of all those made continuously from 2014 on. This last offer consisted once more of the condition of the neutrality, demilitarisation and denazification of the Ukraine and its recognition of the five Russian provinces in the east and south whose Russian inhabitants have by referendum already chosen to join the Russian Federation.

This peace offer was at once dismissed by the Western elite in favour of their plan to escalate the anti-Russian war further. ‘Make war, not peace’, said Washington’s messenger-boy Boris Johnson in Kiev in early April 2022, using as his pretext the amateurishly British-staged ‘massacre’ in Bucha, selected only as its name is similar to the English word ‘butcher’. So they put paid to the already initialled Istanbul peace agreement between the Ukraine and Russia. Peace was never on the Washington agenda. In 2019 Washington had already published its plan to destroy and dismantle Russia completely, though this had been its scheming ever since 1991.

In reality, this intention of destroying Russian unity actually goes back to the British-orchestrated overthrow of the Tsar in 1917. That tragic overthrow, which led directly to the massacres of Lenin and Stalin, was greeted by the then Prime Minister Lloyd George in the London Parliament at the time as ‘the achievement of one of our aims’. However, it had in fact been the intention of the Victorian Imperialists as early as the 1840s, which had led to the British invasion of Russia in 1854.

After all, the American Empire only inherited and continued the British Empire, the turning point and transatlantic handover of power going back to Milner’s Round Table Movement agreement of 1916. That provided US backing for the British overthrow of the Tsar and at once the US entry into World War I, thus the US replacing Russia. Of course, the present Western ‘narrative’ (a new word for fairy-tale or parallel world) is that Russia wants to recreate the Soviet Union and invade all of Europe. This is nonsense. The failed Marxist experiment in the USSR with its buffer zone in Eastern Europe to protect it from continual Western invasions is dead. Sadly, the equally failed US Empire experiment is not quite over.

When will the tragedy in the Ukraine end? The end must be close, but no politician can say when; only a psychiatrist can do that. With the US rejection of the peace plan, a rejection swiftly followed by the rejection of the same by US NATO client-states, the US will soon lose its war against the Federation. The latter has now been obliged by Western stubbornness to reject the Russian ultimatum and Russia will now take control of the whole of the Ukraine. And as a result, the US elite and Co will lose face. And the whole of Western Europe will never be the same again. This transformation will affect the Church. See the next commentary.