Daily Archives: December 3, 2024

On Delusions: Western, Ukrainian, Russian and Clerical

For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom…and the stars shall fall from heaven…

Matt. 24

Introduction

The appalling conflict in the Ukraine marks a turning-point in world history. The choice offered by it is between transnational Globalism, which could lead to the eventual enthronement of Antichrist, or else National Sovereignty, which may be healthier, but brings many of its own violent dangers and nationalist temptations. The battleground and victim of this struggle is the tragic Ukraine, a country composed of different peoples, thrown together in the same geographical space by the tyrants of the twentieth century, and whose views and beliefs contradict one another, and who are now killing one another.

As one commentator has put it: ‘They are all Orthodox, but none are Christians’. When will it all end? We have finally discovered the true form of the prophecy of Elder Iona of Odessa (+ 2012) (the first part is often omitted) who said the following: ‘There will be a cold Easter, a hungry Easter, a bloody Easter and a victorious Easter’. It seems he was referring to 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Many misinterpret the last part of the prophecy, misunderstanding that a victorious Easter means a ‘Russian victory’. It does not. It means peace, for the only victory is peace, when Ukrainian and Russian alike will repent and help one another.

The Western Delusion

Meanwhile, senior bishops of the Russian Moscow Patriarchate are criticised by Western politicians and journalists and their Russian liberal servants, some of them traitors or who are CIA-paid, for spreading the nationalist, ‘Russian world’ ideology. This promotes the unity of the Russian-speaking world, regardless of where it may be, inside or outside the Russian Federation. However, in truth, this is no more nationalist than the ideology of Hellenism, which has been spread for generations by the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople. And yet none of the liberals denounces the Greek nationalists or calls them ‘heretics’ – as the Greeks and the liberals call the Russians! Strange, because they are exact equivalents with exactly the same exclusivist, racist and nationalist ramifications.

This ‘Russian world’ ideology means the nationalisation of the formerly multinational Moscow Patriarchate, excluding Non-Russians, just like Hellenism, which excludes Non-Greeks. This clearly means that Russia has no interest in invading Non-Russian countries, like Moldova, the Baltics, or the western, that is, truly Ukrainian, part of the Ukraine. Russia today is nationalist, not imperialist. This totally contradicts the absurd Western ‘narrative’ that ‘Russia wants to invade’ the rest of Non-Russian Europe further west, re-establishing the failed Soviet Empire. Never has any Russian official said such a thing, indeed quite the opposite – nobody wants to repeat the clear failure of the Soviet Union, ‘only someone without a brain wants it back’, as President Putin has said.

This Western narrative of Russian imperialism contradicts the other Western propaganda myth that ‘the Russians have no more fuel, shells, tanks, missiles, artillery, soldiers etc’, ‘the people do not want to fight’, and ‘Putin is dying of a serious illness’ and more recently that, ‘North Korean troops are fighting in Russia because so many Russians have died in ‘human waves of cannon fodder’’. We have heard all this propaganda, most of it dating back to World War II, for nearly three years, without the slightest proof of any of it, indeed everything points to exactly the opposite. It has to be one, the Russians are going to take over the whole of Europe, or the other, the Russians are exhausted, defeated and have nothing left. In fact, it is of course neither. Both are clearly lies.

The Ukrainian Delusion

The great Western delusion is centred on the Ukraine. The old Ukraine was the artificial creation of three Soviet tyrants, Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchov, between 1922 and 1954, set up so that it could be controlled all the more easily by those tyrants. Before that, the nineteenth-century Austrian-invented ‘Ukraine’, or Malorossija, to give it its real historic name, existed, but only in what is now the north-west of the present Ukraine, centred around and to the west of Kiev. As we have been saying for years, the future of the Soviet Ukraine would be to divide it into three parts. A Russian part, a Ukrainian part and another part, which could, conditionally, be given back to three neighbouring countries – Poland, Hungary and Romania. Only the details of such partitions are not clear.

For example, the Russian part could consist of at least six provinces or administrative areas (two in the Crimea). These have largely already been taken back by Russian forces, but there could be another four or even seven provinces in the east and south of the old Soviet Ukraine which might wish to go back to Russia. The Ukrainian part could include between eighteen and a half and eleven and a half provinces and areas out of the original twenty-seven. This part would be centred around Kiev, the north and west of the old Soviet Ukraine. Two and a half western provinces could return to Poland (Lviv, Ivanofrankivsk and the southern part of Ternopil – the northern part, called Kremenets, with the Pochaev Lavra, would rejoin Volyn/Rivne, where it was in 1939).

One province (Zakarpat’e, or properly Subcarpathian Rus) would go back to Hungary and one (Chernovtsy, or properly North Bukovina). would go back to Romania. The return of the areas to Poland would be conditional on their deNATOisation. As regards the Hungarian area, the Russian Church could then establish a Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Church for it, its territory including all Austro-Hungary. This would right the historic injustice of their Austro-Hungarian persecution. As regards the Romanian area, the conditionality could depend on Moldovan deNATOisation and on Transdnistria, Gagauzia and any other border areas of Moldova wishing by referendum to pass to Russian control being allowed to do so. The Russian world would thus respect the Romanian world.

The Russian Delusion

The conflict in the Ukraine has highlighted the underlying division between the clerico-administrative layer and the leftist-intellectual layer of the Russian Orthodox Church as a whole. This division is in fact between the pro-Catholic Conservative and the pro-Protestant Liberal layers in the Church. The first, the Conservatives, rule in Moscow, where politicians have replaced pastors and managers have replaced monks. The Conservative administrators are composed of such mini-oligarchs, who promote a militarised – and militant – Church, and propose admirals and generals as saints. They forget that before the Revolution people spoke of the worst bishops as ‘good administrators’ and then there was a Revolution. Now they speak of ‘effective managers’ (see Note 1 below).

So now there is a war in the Ukraine – the clear result of ‘effective management’. Nothing has changed. However, if there is to be no Revolution this time, there must first be a great cleansing of the Church, by the grace of God, through the coming Tsar. Now the ‘princes of the Church’ are proposing a ’Church’ which looks like a cross between folklore and an army – superstitious magic ritualism for women and Stalinist militaristic nationalism for men. That would be a Church which could only attract the brainless. We saw the ‘princes’ at the time of the ‘covid’ plot. The episcopate in Russia, closely followed by that outside Russia closed churches! It is something that even the Communists did not achieve so well. This was the persecution of the people of the Faith by bishops of little faith.

Then came the conflict in the Ukraine. The Liberals of Public Orthodoxy, including the sincere but very naïve Sergei Chapnin, Fr Alexei Uminsky, Fr Andrei Kordochkin are one thing. But many anti-Russian Liberals are, directly or indirectly CIA-funded, indirectly allied to the USA and sometimes to its vassals in Constantinople. Many anti-patriots think they are against the war, for they do not realise that they are for the war, but for the war of the Western elite against the Russian Federation. Both the Conservatives and the Liberals propose a Religion, but not Faith, a State manipulation, whether of the Russian State or of the American State, not the life in the Holy Spirit. Neither the pro-Catholic Conservatives, nor the pro-Protestant Liberals are of the masses of the Church.

The Clerical Delusion

The Liberals with their dissident congregationalism and anti-clericalism are clearly Protestant in spirit, but the Conservatives are clearly Roman Catholic in spirit, ‘Philopapist’, as can be seen in their misogyny (2) and homosexuality. Their clericalisation of the Church, obvious from website pictures seemingly showing more clergy than people at some services, is typical of the Vatican. This goes back at least to the later Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov), who died in the arms of the Pope in Rome in 1978. This Philopapism with its sexual perversions is a disease that has spread among some in the Russian episcopate, both inside and outside Russia. As lifelong admirers of the power and money of Papism, which is full of sexual perverts, such bishops want to live as State bureaucrats.

Western critics of the Russian Orthodox Church imagine that it is a kind of Erastian Church, like the Church of England, where all the bishops are nominated by a Prime Minister, who may be a Hindu, or a Jew, or more often an atheist. This is nonsense. The Russian Church is not a State Church. It is free. Sadly, the truth is even worse than Anglicanism, for the free have given up their freedom. The need to kowtow to the State does not come from the State, it comes from such bishops themselves. In this way the senior Russian episcopate is exactly like that of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The faithful in both Churches, including in the New York Synod, which parrots the love of power and money of its masters in Moscow (Note 1 below), have been let down – all voluntarily (3).

Thus, we see why the great saints of the Russian Orthodox Church were persecuted and lived far from the centres – with the exception of fools for Christ. St Paisius was forced to flee to Moldavia. Others lived in Sarov, Optina, Glinsk etc. In the twentieth century Elder Nikolai (Guryanov) lived on a remote island on the Pskov Lake. As for St John of Shanghai, he lived far away from Russia, ‘in the provinces’. The problem is the great abyss fixed between most of the episcopate and monastic life, and yet the episcopate is supposed to be composed of monks. The lack of monasticism is why today the Russian Church has embraced both the Vatican and Russian nationalism and is no longer multinational, but mononational. And that is how it has lost the Ukrainians.

Conclusion

When did all this recent decadence of Conservatives and Liberals begin in the Russian Church, formerly the Church of the New Martyrs and New Confessors? Without doubt, it all began in the 1990s, when the Church became a business, selling tobacco and alcohol – make money from anything. Then in about 2010, having obtained money, they made the huge mistake of turning from money to politics for more power. The new money-changers in the Temple ignored the Gospel again: ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s’. And so came chastisement, in the form of covid and then of the Ukraine.

One of our parishioners considers that any candidate for the episcopate should first have to spend two weeks with two small children. Alternatively, perhaps every bishop should be forced to spend two weeks every three months cleaning the toilets or working in the kitchen garden of a real, down-to-earth monastery. Or else bishops must delegate far more to senior priests in deaneries, who decide who will be ordained and will call in the by then defeudalised bishop (they are for now feudal lords) when needed. Or else have a married episcopate – though that radical change would need the decision of a Universal Council.

Notes:

1.

The Four-Stage Moscow Business Plan for the ‘Effective Manager’ – copied to the letter by Russian bishops outside Russia.

a) An older bishop chooses a candidate for the episcopate, sometimes this may be a boyfriend (there are many examples of this, whom we could name), but in any case a candidate who is usually just as narcissistic or as sociopathic as himself. Then the older bishop obtains approval for his consecration. (At this point money often changes hands; 35 years ago Constantinople was charging was $20,000 a time – who knows how much Moscow charges now).

b) The new bishop enters his diocese, acquires a nice property and a nice car, if possible a cook and a chauffeur, and then gets rid of all those who were there before him, sometimes by retiring them, however young they may be. It does not matter even if they have been faithful for fifty years or more, if their large families are examples of Orthodoxy, if they have been good pastors, if they are popular (all the more reason), if they have written books, given international conferences – they must be destroyed through fictitious ‘suspensions’ and ‘defrockings’ (defrockings for no canonical reason are spiritual murder), for they know more than the young upstart bishop and are more popular than him. The young careerist will brook no rivals. The Church must be destroyed by him, as by all those who in their delusion do not even know that they are working for satan, but imagine that they are supporting the Church.

c) A young new priest, who owes his ordination to the new bishop (often literally, he owes him money for his ordination), is sent to a place without a church and told to build one, or to a place with a ruined church and told to restore it. For this privilege he has to pay a heavy annual tax to his bishop. If he does not do this, he will be bullied, intimidated and publicly humiliated with anger and cruelty. This puts pressure on him to extort money from his parishioners, charging for sacraments and anything else, and also puts pressure on the family of the priest. We know cases where such financial pressure has led to divorce. It is not uncommon. This same technique, like the rest of the Business Plan, is commonly used in all parts of the Russian Church, both inside and outside Russia, including in the USA and Western Europe. We have seen it.

d) Even if the young priest manages to do this and establishes a parish composed of loyal and enthusiastic people, he is then thrown out of the new church and replaced with a favourite of the bishop who can pay more for that privilege. This ruins the parish, but who cares? Money rules and real estate counts.

All four stages are marked by a total lack of Christian Faith and Love, accompanied by vice, exploitation, betrayal, bullying and cloning – clones being priests similar to the bishop and to his greed. Sometimes this similarity is even physical – in style of dress, shape of beard etc.

  1. There is perhaps no sadder example of the hatred of women and even vulgarity than that of the now fallen Fr Andrei Tkachjov, who at the start was respected and used to say helpful things. Pray for him in his temptation.
  2. Thus, the Pope of Rome has now suggested a concelebration with the Greek Patriarch in Turkey in summer 2025 to mark the 1700th anniversary of the First Universal Council in 325. We would suggest that any meeting, let alone concelebration, should first be made conditional on the Pope restoring the Nicene Creed in Roman Catholicism and renouncing once and for all the filioque heresy. Then we shall know if the Greek Patriarch is Orthodox or not.