The ideology which the Western world is so proud of and ants to impose by force on the rest of the world calls itself ‘Capitalism’. In other words, however much it may be disguised by humanitarian concerns trying to justify its ruthless exploitation of the rest of the world, this ideology is the Gospel-forbidden worship of money, of capital, of Mammon, Mammonism. For we are expressly taught by the Son of God that we cannot worship God and Mammon. Some here are deaf and blind.

Essentially, this Western ideology began in the eleventh century as a power grab, asserting that since Christ was absent, he had therefore been replaced by a ‘Vicar’, from whom, moreover, proceeded the Holy Spirit! Very conveniently, the ‘Vicars of Christ’ just so happened to be the successors of the pagan emperor of Rome, ‘pontifex maximus’, and they were also close relatives of the emperors of what was basically Germany, where lived the most powerful and richest race in Western Europe. However, any power grab must be financed. The popes of the late eleventh century developed such finance, as Charlemagne, the first German Emperor of the ‘First Reich’, had tried but failed to do before them. The popes were therefore the first to develop banking to finance their international power grab.

For example, the Papal shock-troops, the Normans, financed their 1066 invasion of England through Jewish usurers in Rouen. And other Papal shock-troops, the Templars, had large land-holdings across Europe starting from about 1100 on, so giving rise to the beginning of Europe-wide banking. In the twelfth century, the general need to transfer large sums of money to finance the Crusades stimulated the further development of banking in Western Europe. Increasingly, Roman Catholicism became not so much an organization to shepherd the flock as an organization to fleece it. Thus, anyone who refused to pay tithes to the Pope could be excommunicated and, as with the case of the Cathars, was also exterminated by crusades.

The Papacy itself was the object of finance by corrupt Italian families. Merchants in Florence, Genoa and Venice in particular set about using their financial power to grab political power. Thus, the greedy Venetians lay behind the Fourth ‘Crusade’ (= the fourth act of organized banditry and mass killing), which resulted in the looting of the Christian Capital in New Rome, in 1204. Indulgences, beginning in about 1170, were also essentially a financial rip-off. In their ‘Renaissance’ art, families like the Medici in Florence would even paint themselves as apostles. This mentality continued to be shared by the Roman Catholic Columbus, who was financed by the greedy to go and steal gold from the New World, where he hoped to find ‘the gold one’, El Dorado.

A few years after him, in strict continuity, the Protestants were no different. Thus, the evil murderer and privatizer, Henry VIII, switched religions so that he could grab monastic money and lands for himself and his cronies. This continued, as Cromwell, the massacrer of hundreds of thousands, financed his murders through Dutch Jews, rather as the atheist Napoleon financed his two million murders through the Rothschilds. The whole British Protestant colonial project was about ruthless exploitation, disguised as a benign and pseudo-religious plan to bring ‘civilization to unenlightened savages’. Thus, in India, members of the ‘Honourable’ East India Company painted themselves literally as Christ’s apostles. As the Indian Gandhi later answered, when asked by British journalists what he thought of Western Civilization, ‘It is a very good idea’.

Or as a South African Protestant has said: ‘They brought us the Bible, but when we turned round we found that in return they had stolen our land’. We might add, ‘and gold and diamonds too’. The same obsession continued in the post-Roman Catholic, post-Protestant, atheist twentieth century, when Wall Street financed the mainly Jewish Bolsheviks, hoping to plunder the riches of the former Russian Empire. Seeing the refusal of Stalin, who had massacred the Jewish Bolsheviks, to co-operate, Wall Street then, ironically, financed the Anti-Jewish Hitler, whom they hoped would in his turn allow them to plunder the riches of the former Russian Empire. How can you be so wrong twice?

Of course, Orthodox should be careful. If the Western world for a millennium has fallen to Mammon, conveniently disguised as God, the same temptation could befall us. There is too much gold in some of our Orthodox churches, not to mention precious stones, silver and marble. Beauty in worship is important, as it inspires prayer, which is why we give our best to God, but let us use gold paint and coloured glass. The real thing can be sold and given to the poor. We reject God and Mammon, which odious combination has been the downfall of Christianity in the Western world. Rather we face the choice of God or Mammon and we know what we choose.