Monthly Archives: June 2024

After the Collapse of the Ukraine

Introduction

Even the wishful thinkers are now losing their self-imposed delusions and fantasies. Reality is at last dawning even on them: The Kiev regime has lost its futile ten-year old war. For some commentators it is a question hanging on till the US election in November, for others there remain only three or four months, for others only a few weeks. We do not know who is right. But what will happen when this tragic nightmare is over, when the mass killing of largely untrained Ukrainian men, sent to the front by the Kiev regime on Western orders, has stopped? What ultimately happens when the West has stopped hammering in the last nails into its own coffin?

Referenda

Obviously, all churches in Malorossija/New Ukraine stolen by violence from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church by the fake, US-founded ‘Church in the Ukraine’ with its new Protestant calendar will have to be returned and the culprits punished. Then referenda will surely have to be held all over the pre-2024 Ukraine with one vital question: Which country do you wish to belong to? The choices could be: The Russian Federation or Malorossija/New Ukraine, and in western border areas, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and possibly Belarus and Slovakia. The majority will no doubt wish to belong to the Protectorate of Malorossija/New Ukraine, with its capital in Kiev. This will have two official languages, Russian and Ukrainian.

For those who wish to leave for countries to the west, there will have to be Russian negotiations with the countries concerned first. Hungary and Romania would be advised that any new areas must remain demilitarised zones and that any NATO bases should in general be removed from their soil, although those countries could perhaps remain members of NATO for as long as that fragile organisation lasts. In the case of Romania, Moldova should also enter into the deal. Here there should also be a referendum with three choices: Do you want to join Russia (Transdnistria and Gagauzia massively will), join Romania or remain as an independent nation?

BRICS

Kazan, 22-24 October 2024. This city and date will go down in history. Here will take place the next BRICS Summit under Russian chairmanship. Here dedollarisation will take a huge step forward. Here many new countries will join BRICS, which could become the multipolar Alliance of 20, 30 or even 40 countries. This will be a turning-point. This will mean the consolidation of the Heartland, the ‘world island’ of Afro-Eurasia. For Eurasia itself contains three of the four largest economies in the world, according to the latest World Bank figures: China, India and Russia (the US is second, Russia has overtaken Japan).

Already China and Russia have formed an Alliance. Africa is on its way. Latin America too. Iran has joined, as will Afghanistan and the five stans of Central Asia. They may be followed by Mongolia, Pakistan, and Iraq. The Arab Union and Turkey may follow too. The chauvinism of the Caucasus, which has allowed outsiders to divide and rule it for so long (like that of the Balkans), is also coming to an end. Next may follow Japan and South Korea, which latter is yet to reunite with the North. Finally, even isolated Australia and Oceania will join in due course.

South-Eastern Europe

The amazing anachronism of NATO is already in disarray and will dissolve, as Trump has promised. This will leave the forty or so countries of Western Europe (Eastern Europe is Russia, Belarus and Malorossija/New Ukraine) to resolve their problems. The fact that the Danube flows into the Black Sea, which will be dominated by Russia, will mean that Hungary and Serbia will join BRICS first. This will open the whole of South-East Europe to BRICS, from Romania and Moldova to Bulgaria, from Austria (following its old partner, Hungary) to Cyprus, from Greece to ex-Yugoslavia, from Czechia and Slovakia, from Albania to Turkey. With a population of over 160 million, including Turkey (86 million), this is a viable Economic Confederation. BRICS will transform and reshape this whole region, overcoming the old chauvinism, linking the whole region to China via Eurasian Russia.

North-Eastern and North-Western Europe

This will leave North-Eastern Europe in disarray. All five countries here, Finland, Poland and the three dying and bankrupt Baltic statelets, have had complex and tragic histories with Imperial and Soviet Russia. One way out would be to ally themselves with North-Western Europe, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland (soon to be reunited at last) and Iceland. These seven countries already have large numbers of economic refugees from North-Eastern Europe and also a similar (though in their case quite unjustified) fear of Russia. Once having rid themselves of their NATO-appointed puppet governments, these twelve largely post-Protestant countries could ally. Perhaps the Baltic States would at last have the courage to grant their Russian minorities basic human rights. With a population of over 160 million, these twelve countries could form an Economic Confederation.

Western Europe

Western Europe, isolated, will then need to get together. Between Germany and France the old recriminations could easily surface once more. Clearly, the time of the tyrannical, anti-democratic and failed EU with its unelected commissars will be over. Some looser organisation must replace it. However, beyond these two there are just as many again, another 150 million people, in Benelux and Switzerland and then in the South-West, Spain and Portugal, Italy and Malta. The total population of these countries is 300 million. Together, in a loose Confederation, they could at last move forward independently from Northern America.

Northern America

All these world-changing events will leave the isolated USA and Canada to sort themselves out. It is to be hoped that their new arrangements will not be violent, though in a USA with some 300 million guns in circulation, we can only fear. The huge inequalities there between very rich and very poor, black and white, are worrisome in the extreme. Canada may survive intact, but perhaps not the USA, which was united only by the incredible violence of the Civil War. If it does divide, may it be in peace.

 

 

What Will Happen to the Orthodox Church After the Fall of Washington?

The powers of this world have throughout history tried to abuse religious belief by making it into their own nationalist and ritualist institutions. This has been to camouflage and justify their nationalism, that is, their attachment to this world, their worldliness. Chinese, Indians, Jews, Greeks, Japanese, Copts, Syrians, Armenians, Arabs, Latins, Germans, Greeks, Spanish, Russians, French, British, Americans, they have all done it. These are just facts from Church history. How do Christians remain outside and resist an ideology which puts national and worldly issues above Christ, all for the sake of amassing more power and money? There are only two ways of resisting:

Either you are a Confessor, or else you are a Martyr. Thus, St Stephen the First Martyr was stoned to death by the Jews because he upset their nationalism. He was only following the prophets and St John the Baptist, who had told the nationalist King Herod the truth, and Christ Himself, Whom they crucified. Then came such Confessors as St Basil the Great and St John Chrysostom. And in the twentieth-century there were the hundreds of thousands of Martyrs all over Eastern Europe, as well as Confessors like St Nectarios of Aegina, St Luke of the Crimea, St John of Shanghai or St Paisios the Athonite. There is nothing new under the sun. The saints are always the best witnesses.

In recent centuries the Church in the Middle East and the Balkans was oppressed by Ottomans, Poles and Austro-Hungarians. Meanwhile the Russian Church was oppressed by Westernising rulers, even more so after 1917. In the nineteenth century and even before, the main Patriarchate outside Russia, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, was used as a plaything by the British and French ambassadors. The Western Powers also appointed German kinglets to rule the newly-liberated Balkan countries in their name.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has in the same way become the plaything of US ambassadors there. Meanwhile the Patriarchate of Moscow was being used as a plaything by the Soviet State. Neither the US State of the Soviet State was Christian. Both were, whatever the theory, in practice atheist. This situation has continued by centuries of inertia even after the end of the first so-called Cold War in 1991, but in ways even more terrible than before.

Thus, in Moscow, Stalinist centralisation has continued, repelling all Non-Russians from the Church, as Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova openly described in his recent letter to Patriarch Kyrill. For fifty years we too were treated as second-class citizens by the same Russian Church. None of this is because this mentality has been forced on the Church by the State, but because it has become a bad reflex inside the Church. It is nothing to do with the State. For example, a fragment of Moscow, the New York ROCOR has done this too, completely discrediting itself, mistreating Non-Russians. (As one of its bishops said to me recently, ROCOR is ‘a train wreck’).  The mentality to repel all, including many Russians, has been imposed internally. The only real slavery comes from ourselves, not from others.

We can see the same mentality also in the uncanonical, US-orchestrated actions of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ukraine and elsewhere since 2018. Sadly, Constantinople fell to Greek racist hatred and jealousy of Russians.  It could simply have refused to do any of its horrors. But the $25 million bribe was irresistible to the weak. Since then a second Cold War has begun, with US proxy forces trying to weaken and destroy Russia from the Ukraine. It means that the heavy burden of steering the ship of the Church has fallen to those less politicised, more free, to the now 14 other Local Churches. Their role has been dependent on the political freedom which they have.

Thus, under Communism in Eastern Europe and under the US control of the Greek Churches, the Serbian Church stood out as a beacon of relative freedom and theology. Today, in this respect the Albanian Church seems to have taken the lead as the voice of freedom, though the long-overdue visit of Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America to the persecuted Ukrainian Church is also a miracle. The remaining 14 Local Churches are not all united because they do not enjoy the same measure of freedom. They are only relatively free compared to Constantinople and Moscow. For instance, the actions of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople have brought some of the other Local Churches into a state of internal schism.

Specifically, the Cypriot and Bulgarian Churches are now in a state of internal schism as a direct result of the US interference in Constantinople, both direct and indirect. Equally, the US-controlled Patriarchate of Alexandria and Moscow are in schism because of the latter’s interference in Africa. Other Local Churches, like the Romanian and the Georgian, which have a strong national identity, take an independent line, ignoring uncanonical Greek and uncanonical Russian alike. This is despite the attempts by the local US ambassadors, who behave like the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, to interfere in the choice of Patriarchs and policies. This independence is the only way to go. It is freedom.

However, our question is what will happen after the US stops interfering in internal Church affairs. It is our hope that, once political pressure eases, the Greek Churches in particular can take the lead and get out of political distortions and contortions, abandoning imperialist fantasies, recognising new autocephalies, notably that of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and its Diaspora. However, the Russian Church also has to give up its Soviet-style centralisation, which is its imperialist fantasy. It has to grant autocephaly to parts of the Church in now independent countries.

The shadow of the old Imperialism, Russian or Soviet, just like Greek and Latin imperialism, has cast a long shadow on Church life. Its time is up. For the Church does not consist of one Local Church ruling imperially over all the others, but of their entirety, their catholicity – all the Local Churches together. Once political meddling is over, all the Local Churches must hold a Council together. A free and canonically ordered Council, not the 2016 robber-Council farce in Crete. Then the very many long-outstanding issues between the Local Churches can at last be resolved. In freedom. May God’s Will be done!