Category Archives: DeChristianisation

Eurosodom or Euro-Vision?

The news reached me in the USA on Sunday. The Eurovision Song Contest, usually inane but relatively innocent, had been won by a bearded transvestite who could not even sing. There was a clear political conspiracy of systematic jeering of the innocent Russian song. This was sheer provocation. The accelerating repaganization of Europe is now headlong, as it hurtles towards its suicide. What was unthinkable only ten years ago is now a reality. Satanism is here and we can smell his sulphur.

Those who applauded this transvestite declaration of ‘peace and freedom’ and thought that it was a declaration of human rights and democracy could not have been more wrong. As one whom I know who has never liked President Putin told me: ‘I will now vote for him’. The message has indeed struck home in the troubled and divided Ukraine: As President Putin told the Ukrainians: ‘Is this what you wanted: Eurosdom? Then you can have it, but we will remain Christians’. As Europe sinks ever deeper into the pagan degeneracy of Ancient Greece and Rome, the fate of Pompeii threatens it.

Russia is today offering all Western peoples, inside and outside Europe a vision, the true Euro-Vision: a Eurosodom or the vision of a Europe of Tradition. This Song Contest has crystallized the polarization of the Western world. For months now conservative Republicans – paleocons, not the opposite neocons – in the USA have been praising President Putin and ironically and amazingly condemning their own country as ‘the evil empire’. The once implacable enemies of the Soviet Union are becoming the implacable friends of Russia. The same has been happening in Europe. There is developing here a broad coalition of Western citizens, let alone Ukrainian citizens, who now look to Russia for salvation and rescue from Eurosodom.

The clear and deliberate provocation of Eurovision has backfired. It has created support for true peace and freedom, not the ‘peace and freedom’ of Antichrist, but those of Christ, which ‘pass all understanding’ of the new pagans. The Western world thought to make the Ukraine into the battleground between Christ and Satan; in reality it has made itself into that battleground. As never before in the whole of history, Western people who are still spiritually alive, who still have a conscience – and not just the Orthodox among them – are looking to Russia for leadership and support.

Exactly 200 years ago Russian troops liberated Paris from the tyranny of the atheist Napoleon after he had tried to enslave Russia with a multinational European army, 90% of whom died in the attempt. Today, Orthodox Russia is being called on to liberate ‘Paris’ – that is, the whole Western world that is enslaved by its apostasy – once more. In 1814 Paris rang to the cries of Christ is Risen; in 2014 these are once more the only words that can change the Western world. Protestantism is all but dead; Catholicism, its former Pope rejected, has utterly discredited itself despite its recent public relations campaign; there remains only the Church of God, without which there is indeed no Christianity, and Russia is at the heart of the Church, as it has not been since 1917.

The Tortuous Path of Western Religion in the Global World

This April’s canonization of two twentieth-century Popes of Rome has only served to underline the gulf between the Church and Roman Catholicism as regards the criteria for sainthood. The first pope to be canonized, a jocular Italian peasant, and the second, a highly politicised Polish nationalist philosopher, were both enemies of the Orthodox Church. The first took part in anti-Orthodox activities in Bulgaria, the second in Yugoslavia and the Ukraine. This is no surprise, since both have been canonized by a Jesuit pope, who is a form backer of Galician Uniats and last weekend received the self-appointed Premier of the Ukraine, the scientologist and promoter of anti-Ukrainian terrorism Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

The present Pope’s support for the disintegration of the Ukraine probably comes under US orders, following President Obama’s recent visit to Rome, just as John Paul II made himself available to the US to help bring down the Soviet bloc in the 1980s. It was under the latter’s pontificate in particular that Catholicism was penetrated by pedophile priests, whose activities were camouflaged by Rome. Naturally, the double canonization in Rome was attended by a bishop from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, who sat with the other Uniats, not with the Protestants (Lutherans and Anglicans). In this way that Patriarchate can see what its fate will be if it does entirely join Rome – it will become just another Roman Catholic colonial subculture.

These papal canonizations, like that to follow later this year, illustrate the confusion of the Vatican of the last fifty years. It is not exact to say that Catholicism has lost the way; rather it has found a multitude of false ways. As they say: when you stop believing in something, you will believe in anything. The gap between official Vatican proclamations and what ordinary Catholics actually believe has grown and grown. However, the overall trend of the last fifty years has been towards a Catholicism that is ever more secularized, protestantized, politicized, turned away from God, symbolized by their priests who now turn their backs to God during their services and face the world instead. The Catholic merger with the world is also symbolized by the ‘modern’ ‘design’ of its church buildings, furnishings and vestments. And the modern designs of the 60s and 70s look very old-fashioned in today’s post-modern world.

Overall, Catholicism has shown a loss of the sense of the sacred, of Divinity, of holiness, a movement towards protestantization and so secularization. In the face of that, many of the most devout Catholics – as well as many ordinary Catholics – have abandoned Catholicism, since they have felt abandoned by their own hierarchy. Catholicism has lost the Western world. Its reality today is in Latin America, Africa and Asia, though here too there are losses, for example Brazil, where 40% of the population is said to have joined Protestant sects. Of the future it is hard to speak. The sectarian Muslim world and Hindu India remain mysteries, though it is said that by 2030 China will be the largest Christian nation on earth. And there, as everywhere else, the spiritually sensitive and the historically-minded will see through Western mythology and find their way to the Orthodox Church.

As a result of the collapse of Catholicism in the Western world, over the last two generations right-wing Catholics have joined the Catholic traditionalists; as for the moderate and the younger generation, faced with the spiritual desert of the West, they have been drawn into any number of sects and cults. There they seek a sense of belonging. The degeneration of modern Catholic worship, characterised by infantilism, the entertainment mentality, and the lack of spiritual understanding are reflections. They are reflections of the modern consumer mentality. This has conditioned and shaped modern Catholicism, like modern Protestantism, making it into a ‘cafeteria religion’, a ‘pick and mix’ consumerist supermarket. Today Western religion faces a civilizational dead end; the thread of its manmade life has been unwound. If the West wants to continue as a spiritually-based entity, and so a morally-based entity, it will have to look outside its apostatic self for sustenance.

The Purity of Holy Orthodoxy

The title is an expression used in an inspiring conversation with the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus at the ROCOR Council of San Francisco in 2006. Below are a number of recent conversations, both actual and also from correspondence by e-mail, regarding current Church matters, all of which illustrate the search of all conscious Orthodox for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy in the Light of the Resurrection.

Q: What recent changes have marked the Church inside Russia?

A: A generation has now passed since the commemoration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus in 1988 and the world-changing events that followed it, namely the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result of the passing of that generation, in the last few months there have been major changes, with the retirement in Kiev and St Petersburg of both Metropolitans Vladimir and in Minsk that of Metr Philaret. Thus, all three most senior Metropolitans in the Russian Church inside Russia have retired through age and ill health. This is the end of the old generation of those who were connected with the highly controversial and politically-minded Metr Nikodim (Rotov) of the Soviet period.

Those of his disciples who are still alive have all had to adapt since the Jubilee Council of 2000 with its rejection of sergianism and ecumenism and canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Royal Martyrs, and then the acceptance of the reconciliation between the Church inside Russia and the Church Outside Russia in 2007. In other words we are now entering the second generation since the collapse of secularist-atheist ideology in the Russian Lands and so the resurrection by the purity of Holy Orthodoxy of the crucified Church inside Russia. These three senior posts that have changed hands are symbolic of a more general generational change, as Lazarus’ grave-clothes have fallen off.

Q: What do you mean by ‘Lazarus’ grave-clothes’?

A: I liken the resurrection of the Church inside Russia to the resurrection of Lazarus. This was an incredible and astounding miracle, but we should not forget that Lazarus’ grave-clothes did not smell good because the decomposition of his body had already begun. These grave-clothes are represented by the deathly, Soviet and post-Soviet (not yet Russian), phenomena and problems that have accompanied the resurrection of the Church inside Russia.

Q: What phenomena?

A: For example, inside Russia in the 1990s they were so short of priests that they ordained very easily. There were several disasters here with clearly unworthy ordinations and subsequent defrockings, sometimes for sexual misdemeanours, sometimes for financial misdemeanours. I have met such priests – I know what I speak of. Then there was the confusion between Stalinism and the Church and the total misunderstanding or even rejection of the Royal Martyrs – all as a result of the brainwashing from old Soviet propaganda and lies. Then there have been the phenomena of pro-Catholic clergy (like the assassinated Fr Alexander Men, a suspected Uniat) and the events surrounding Paris-style Russophobes, including the modernist, pro-Protestant Fr George Kochetkov, suspended at one point by Patriarch Alexis as a ‘neo-renovationist’, and the recent scandals concerning Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev and Professor Zubov (a close friend of the late Olivier Clement), who both had to be sacked. These are all people who to some extent still live in the Soviet thought world. They have never managed to shake off the spiritual and intellectual impurity of the past and so make the transition from that old-style Soviet conditioning, paradoxically mixed with a superficial Orthodoxy, to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

The same thing happened outside Russia, where the Church inside Russia had several unworthy and scandalous representatives, uncanonically ordained, or other representatives who are now very elderly as they were appointed in Soviet times. Fortunately, the unworthy ones have mostly died out or been moved, some very recently. According to the 2007 agreement the Church inside Russia has to prepare its parishes outside Russia (except in China and Japan, which is part of its canonical territory) for their canonical handover to ROCOR. His Holiness understandably wants this process to go smoothly, without hurting anyone’s feelings, especially those of the elderly. Therefore it will take a generation before it is completed and all moves to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Q: Surely there were impurities in ROCOR also?

A: ROCOR had from the start two wings. One was the political wing whose identity was nationalistic, cultural and anti-Communist rather than simply Orthodox; the other wing, which could be called the ‘Johannite wing’, as represented by St John of Shanghai, was the mainstream of ROCOR. Our view was and is Christian. I can remember how the political and nationalist wing dominated in certain parishes, for example at the former ROCOR chapel in Paris or at the old London Cathedral, as it used to be, when it had several members who worked for MI5. Significantly, those parishes have not survived, but died.

This was because the politically-minded elements refused reconciliation with the Church inside Russia in 2007 or even before. As one of our archbishops said before 2007, reconciliation with the repentant Church inside Russia, the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, would lead to a ‘purification’ of ROCOR. That is exactly what happened. Spiritual impurities such as extremism, phariseeism, sectarianism and fanaticism could not bear reality and love others or the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, and so that political wing left the Church for various sects. Several of the small communities concerned in North America were dominated by individuals who worked for the CIA or the Canadian Secret Services.

Q: What do you make of current political changes in the Ukraine?

A: Two weeks ago the US removed the gold reserves of the Ukraine. Then the CIA took over a floor in the offices of the Ukrainian Secret Police in Kiev and the head of the CIA, John Brennan, went to Kiev on Lazarus Saturday. The head of the CIA does not visit a foreign country without a very good reason. It was no doubt with the intention of hoping to further destabilise the Ukraine and then run it, just as it did countless Latin America banana republics and Italy and Greece after the Second World War.

Sure enough, just after that, the CIA began issuing black propaganda, sheer lies, for example about alleged persecution of the Jews in the eastern Ukraine or that President Putin had tens of billions of dollars in private bank accounts in the West, implying that he was a thief. Naturally the Western-media were fed those lies and naturally reported them. The Times of London (part of the Murdoch tabloid empire) was especially keen to report these slanders and lies.

For instance, as regards the Jews, everybody knows that the Jews were massacred by the Uniat Ukrainian SS in Galicia, the western Ukraine, which welcomed Hitler and where earlier anti-Jewish pogroms had taken place. These are facts of history. Many members of the Ukrainian (= Galician) SS, with Polish nationality, came to live in the UK and especially the US, after World War II. I know; I met some of them 30-40 years ago; some of them were frightening and admitted to killing Jews.

Today, at least 150 US mercenaries, probably being paid for by the CIA, are active against the people of the Ukraine, given that most Ukrainian soldiers and police refuse to use violence against their own people – indeed 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already asked for Russian nationality. Other soldiers in the eastern Ukraine have simply joined the insurrection of the Ukrainian people against the junta. We cannot see this crucifixion of the Ukraine, orchestrated in Washington and Brussels and carried out by their paid puppets in Kiev, as being successful.

Q: Why not?

A: First of all, the Ukraine is bankrupt, which is why the bankrupt US called on the world to ‘save the Ukrainian economy’. But it is too late. Prices are doubling. The poor people of the Ukraine, exploited and impoverished for 23 years by corrupt oligarchs, are spontaneously rising up against the unrepresentative, US-installed, separatist Kiev junta and its terror tactics. That regime seized power from the democratically-elected government in Kiev by violence and murder; now it is facing opposition from the Ukrainian people, who are using the same techniques as it did, in order to seize back power from it in turn. As it is written, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. But there is chaos.

Q: Does any of this have any significance in Orthodox terms? Is it not all political?

A: All of this is highly significant for us. Today’s Russia is at last just beginning to position itself as a spiritual power, opposing the secularist atheism of the Western elite. This was Russia’s traditional role – to protect Christian civilisation both from Western barbarians and from Eastern hordes. Thus, it repelled the Mongol-Tartar yoke, encouraged moderate Islam, repelled the Charleses, Napoleons and Hitlers, liberating both Paris and Berlin, and supported the Church in the Holy Land, the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch. Outside Eurasia Russia has always helped the peoples of the developing world, aiding them to throw off the yoke of colonialism, as did Tsar Nicholas II during the Boer War in South Africa and also in Tibet, Thailand and Ethiopia. Even the Soviet Union merely continued these policies in Africa (the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria), Asia and Latin America.

The Russian Orthodox civilisational model, the Christian one, is quite different from the Western Catholic/Protestant model, which calls itself ‘Judeo-Christian’. Thus, the ‘civilised’ Judeo-Christian West and ‘Western values’ destroyed the native peoples of the Americas and Africa, enslaving them, massacring them like wild animals, sending them into concentration camps (‘reservations’), as the British were still doing in Kenya and Malaysia in the 1950s. Christian Russia, on the other hand, spreading across Eurasia into Alaska, left the native peoples in peace, not enslaving them or systematically exploiting them, but making them into equal allies. Today Western ‘civilisation’, which has reached its final stage of degeneration in Europe and the USA, has come to a dead end by trying to subjugate the whole world to its ruling transnational atheist elite and its corrupt New World Order pseudo-democracy. That, in fact, only gives a false choice – between one atheist oligarch and another.

Only Russia can potentially deliver the world from this civilisational dead end by providing a Non-Western and spiritual alternative. This is a geopolitical challenge and a historic turning-point. The US military-industrial complex, to use Eisenhower’s terminology, has bankrupted itself with its lust for global hegemony and us finally meeting its match in the resurgent Russian Lands. The New World Order, the near-millennial and ever accelerating movement of the Western world to enthrone Antichrist in Jerusalem, has been stopped for the moment.

The Russian Lands (Rus) are, it seems, returning to fulfilling their destiny as the last restraining force in the world, the last bastion of True Christianity. The Ukraine is a litmus paper, an acid test of this. If the Ukraine were to fall, that is, to lose its Orthodoxy, that would lead to the enthronement of Antichrist. The situation is on a knife edge, which is why so many icons in Russia and the Ukraine are at this moment giving off myrrh. We have to understand that today’s division in the Ukraine exists as the result of two historic injustices, which have to be righted

Q: Which are these injustices?

A: These two historic injustices are the events of 1054 and 1917, which are interconnected. In 1054 semi-barbarian, provincial nationalists, filled with the pride, greed and ambition of Roman paganism, rose up in heresy against the Church of Christ, the Christian Roman Empire, and declared that they were the true Church! And persecution followed 1054, with 1204, the sack of New Rome by barbarian Catholics, which in turn led to 1453, the fall of New Rome, not to mention the Western Crusades against the Russian Lands (including today’s ‘Ukraine’), and all the anti-Church horrors that followed, including Uniatism.

The second historic injustice was in 1917 when the descendants of the same provincials performed a coup d’etat in St Petersburg, overthrowing the legitimate government of the Lord’s Anointed on behalf of traitors, cowards and deceivers from inside the country who had lost their Faith. This atheist coup resulted in the martyrdom of the Christian Emperor and the destruction of his Empire, which had been about to end the First European War and liberate Constantinople (so preventing the Armenian genocide), Vienna and Berlin.

The atheist coup of 1917 also culminated in 1991 in the destruction of the legacy of the Christian Empire which had been built up over centuries by the Tsars and their peoples. That 1991 collapse of the legacy of the former Orthodox Empire, the Soviet Union, was inevitable because its atheism had denied the Faith of a Faith-based Empire. Today, in 2014, we are merely seeing the attempt to deepen that geopolitical fall, again using provincial nationalists, this time from the far west of the Ukraine, as its pawns. All that is happening now was prophesied by Solzhenitsyn in 1998. Thus, as he said then, the US and its EU colony want to dismember and separate the Ukrainian part of the remains of the Orthodox Empire, the Empire’s weakest link.

Q: Why is the Ukraine the weakest link of the former Orthodox Empire?

A: The word Ukraine is composed of two ancient Slavonic words meaning ‘at the border’ – though interestingly it could also be translated as ‘on the edge’. It was first recorded in the 12th century in this sense of a narrow strip of borderland and there exists an interesting academic article on its origins and uses for many geographical areas, including the area near Kazan. However, in its modern and non-historical sense – and so a sense completely unknown to the greatest ‘Ukrainian’ writer Gogol – the word ‘Ukraine’ was invented only in the late 19th century by the Hapsburgs. Then it was reused by the Soviets and the Nazis, and today by the US and the EU – by five empires all thoroughly hostile to the Orthodox Church. Indeed, decades ago I met old Ukrainian emigres, adults before the Revolution, who told me that they had never heard the word ‘Ukraine’ until the 1920s, when the atheists brought it in.

The contemporary Ukraine is the weakest link because at present it includes and is now run by never denazified, ultra-nationalist, Uniat Galicia, which until 1939 was part of eastern Poland. This is a schismatic, Catholicised area, which lived under foreign and anti-Orthodox – Polish and Austrian – rule for centuries. The majority of its population, just like that of the rest of Western Europe, now has no concept of uncompromised, unsecularised, non-1054 Christianity, that is, of Orthodox values. Until that area returns to Poland, or else becomes independent, it will continue to create chaos in the rest of the ‘Ukraine’, the 85% of it which is known to history not as ‘the Ukraine’, but significantly, going from east to west, as New Russia, Little Russia and Carpatho-Russia.

Q: So does this mean we should support President Putin?

A: He is only a politician and, like all politicians, he makes mistakes. The Ukraine, in some form or other, has a right to exist as an independent state, just like Belarus. It is an integral part of threefold Rus – Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus are the primary territory of Rus, the three Russias. I suspect that President Putin thinks the same thing. The last thing he wants to have to do is to send in tanks. However, he has to defend his country and Russian people against extreme Western aggression – which is what he did when he restored the Crimea to Russia amid the jubilation of its people. Otherwise the Crimea would have been invaded and occupied by the US military and its ports would have become NATO naval bases, closing off the Black Sea to Russia.

Our objection is not to an independent ‘Ukraine’, but to its domination and division by an anti-Orthodox and unrepresentative, US-installed, puppet clique in Kiev, which would mean that the Ukraine would become just another bankrupt and pillaged Western colony, like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya etc. Divide and rule is ever the Western policy. Our support should go to the martyred Tsar Nicholas II, as he was the last ruler of All Rus, and not to politicians. We support the saints – politicians only count inasmuch as they support the saints. Again we fight for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, not for politicians.

Q: Why has the BBC been so incredibly biased in its reporting of events in the Ukraine?

A: Since the Second World War the UK Establishment elite has become the poodle or colony of the US ruling elite (a relationship that the UK Establishment has flattered itself into calling ‘the special relationship’!) and it has taken no account of the peoples of these islands. The BBC, even more than other Western media, is biased because it is an inherent part of that Establishment elite, in the pay of a secularist-atheist regime and its secret services. It is therefore hostile to Christianity, especially to uncompromised Christianity, that is, Orthodoxy, just as it is hostile to the people, from which it is ever more distant.

The BBC has become particularly subservient to the Establishment since it dared to criticise the Blair regime’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, for which the Blairites sacked the BBC Director General and intimidated BBC journalists. Now the BBC just seems to parrot whatever MI5 and MI6 tell it. I know two BBC journalists who have also worked for the secret services, which infiltrated the BBC from its inception in the 1920s; there must be many more of them.

Thus the BBC talks of the Neo-Nazi Uniat Galician terrorists in Kiev, who overthrew a democratically-elected government as ‘heroes’, but calls the Ukrainian citizens who are rising up against foreign oppression and US mercenaries in the south-west, south, east and north, ‘pro-Russian activists!’ Nor has the BBC reported on the wave of dissatisfaction in Kiev at the doubling of many prices and the very large anti-junta demonstrations in Kiev….

Q: Some would say that your views on the Ukraine are political and that Orthodoxy should be apolitical. What would you say to this?

A: Precisely by saying that they are ‘apolitical’, such people are making a political statement. For them Orthodoxy is, like Protestantism, just a personal belief, a private affair, a mere theory or hobby, which has no public and practical ramifications, no Incarnational consequences. This is a denial of the Incarnation of Christ. What they are saying is that Christianity should have no influence at all on society, including on economics and politics, and should just be a set of private opinions or personal fantasies for futile discussion and theoretical debate.

In the meantime, they say, we should just swim with the secularist-atheist tide of US/EU apostasy, to which such people, some of them nominally Orthodox, are spiritually enslaved. However, our Faith, if it is real, has practical consequences. This is what these secularists refuse. For those who are secular-minded, religion has no importance, but for us what counts is the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. The many icons now giving off myrrh in Russia and the Ukraine only prove the spiritual significance of these current events.

Q: With the events in the Ukraine and the new puritanism of political correctness, will there be a witch-hunt and persecution of Russian Orthodoxy in the West?

A: Not yet. We have not yet come to this point; that will come later. Then we may need Russian passports and in any case have to take refuge in Russia in order to get baptized and practise our Faith. But we are not there yet.

Q: So much for the contemporary situation of the Church inside Russia. What is the situation of the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR? Some say that it no longer has any reason to exist, since the Church inside Russia also has parishes outside Russia. What is the role of ROCOR in this new reality?

A: The Orthodox diaspora, whether in Europe, the Americas or Australia, and of all nationalities, has experienced two temptation or deviations in the last 100 years or so. The role of ROCOR is to avoid them. These are the deviations of the superiority complex and the inferiority complex.

The first deviation is that of the nationalist ghetto, of the superiority complex. This means that the Orthodox Faith is preserved as if in a museum, without any reference to the surrounding world (because of the superiority complex towards it), to the reality in which the children and grandchildren of the immigrants go to school and grow up. This ethos can be called the ‘three-generational syndrome’, since after three generations such a faith dies out, as it no longer even speaks in a language comprehensible to the descendants of the original immigrants. ‘Three generations and you are out’. I have seen countless Russian parishes in France and England disappear completely because of this mentality. It was the fate of the old London ROCOR Cathedral (but this will not at all be the case of the new parish that has risen phoenix-like from its ruins), exactly as was foreseen by many in the 1970s and 1980s, but also of many parishes abroad under the Church inside Russia, which are not independent of Russia, as is today’s ROCOR.

The second deviation is that of the conformist ghetto, of the inferiority complex. This means the ‘let’s swim with the tide’ mentality. Again I have seen countless examples in France and England. ‘Let’s give communion to Catholics, after all they are Christians’ (Paris jurisdiction). ‘Now we are in England, we baptize our children in the Church of England’ (as one well-known Russian academic in Cambridge did). ‘After all, we really do not want to be different from the others’. ‘The English do cremations, so we’ll do them as well’ (the old Sourozh jurisdiction). ‘The Protestants have pews in church, so shall we’ (Greeks and Antiochians). This is the deviation of those of weak faith, the ecumenists, liberals and modernists, who do not really believe in Orthodoxy, just like the Uniats. Indeed, the atmosphere in modernist churches (as sometimes in Finland, for example) is exactly that of Uniat churches.

It is to be noted, however, that, initially at least, both these deviations are psychological, and not at root theological, though in a second phase, they are then justified theologically, clearly by a false theology. ROCOR must avoid both these deviations.
Q: So what is the role of ROCOR? What is authentic Orthodoxy in the Western world?

A: Authenticity is faithfulness to the best, and not to the worst, in both attitudes. This means being both traditional and open, both strict and merciful, but without excesses and extremes, which would mean being unfaithful. We must be faithful to the incarnation and to the spiritual, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Our calling, the establishment of authentic European Orthodox culture, as also of authentic American and Australian Orthodox culture, means being both faithful and international = fruitful. ROCOR has an opportunity to do this, depending on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, that is, inasmuch as we can be both faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church and also be incarnate, settled and permanent here (unlike most parishes dependent on the Church inside Russia). At least, this can be the case, for as long as our spiritual existence is tolerated in the increasingly intolerant West.

Q: Do you have examples of these deviations in the specific situation of Orthodoxy in the UK?

A: Here in the UK we have two ‘renewed’ jurisdictions, those of the Romanian and Russian Churches, which in recent years have increased in size from one parish or a few parishes to many parishes, simply by immigration. However, we also have the older jurisdictions like the Greek, which used to be the biggest but is now beginning to die out, just like the Russian in the 1970s and 1980s. The Russians immigrated in about 1920 and so after 50-60 years, in the third generation, began to die out. The Greeks (more precisely Cypriots) mainly immigrated here in the 1950s and 1960s – 50-60 years ago – and so too are now dying out. This is the ‘three generational syndrome’, which I mentioned above.

There are also two tiny ethnic English jurisdictions under the Patriarchate of Antioch (anti-Greek, anti-Russian, Antiochian’, as some Anglicans say) and the Paris Exarchate (the old Bloomite Sourozh jurisdiction). These are deaneries because they are both only a few hundred strong and mostly composed of ex-vicars and converts from Anglicanism. The Exarchate is particularly weak and small and is tending to die out. They failing to pass on their ‘Anglican-Orthodox’ Faith to children and grandchildren and so are dying. Their possible possible survival can only come from attracting Greeks, Romanians and others, not from attracting Anglicans.

Here I am much more optimistic about the future survival of the Antiochian Deanery, which is rapidly becoming Romanian. However, it still has to ordain clergy who are not ex-Anglican vicars. Here there is a very useful lesson to learn: all ethnic jurisdictions die out – including ethnic English jurisdictions. In other words, successful parishes – of all jurisdictions – are non-ethnic, that is, they live if they accept those whom God sends to them, without ethnic ghettoism, including Anglican or ex-Anglican clubbishness. In other words, they live only if they put the Faith above nationality, only if they put the Kingdom of God first.

Q: Does this mean that the convert movement in the UK has stopped?

A: The convert movement (I would prefer the word ‘trickle’) in the UK was only ever basically in England and it was always very small, concerning at most 2,000-3,000, many of whom were received by various jurisdictions without preparation and soon lapsed. There is still at least one ex-Anglican priest, like the late Metr Antony Bloom, who perhaps is his model, who receives within one week! You can imagine that his turnover is large. In 18 years he has not grown. It is true that the convert ‘movement’ has declined as the old generation of converts dies out, but it has not stopped. What it happening today is that Anglicans have largely stopped joining the Orthodox Church and trying to become Orthodox, which actually they often did not succeed in doing in any case.

Q: Why have they stopped?

Firstly, because Anglicanism is itself dying out, so there are even fewer Anglicans than before. Secondly, because those who are interested generally find Orthodoxy ‘too hard’ and either do not try to become Orthodox (if they try at all) or else give up very quickly, especially if they have been received prematurely by one of the ethnic English groups.

Q: So there are no more converts?

A: There are still converts, but they come more and more from the vast majority of English people who are not Anglicans. However, though there are fewer converts, they are now generally more serious. They are refreshing, blank sheets, without the cultural prejudices and baggage of Anglicanism. Here there is a future. English Orthodox culture could only be born when that prejudiced Establishment Anglican culture was dead. Authentic Orthodox culture could never be built on a compromised, semi-Orthodox, semi-Anglican faith.

Q: How are people being converted today?

A: There are two ways. One is through information about Orthodoxy which is today on the internet and then brings them to Church services. The other is through Orthodox wives whom they marry and who convert them. Orthodox wives are often very good missionaries.

Q: You have not mentioned those who did not support the reconciliation between the two parts of the Russian Church in 2007 and left to join various sects which existed already. How do they fit into the picture? Do they suffer from the superiority complex of the nationalist ghetto? Surely they do not suffer from the inferiority complex of the conformists?

A: They do not belong to nationalist ghettoes, as much as to ideological or psychological, sectarian, ghettoes, usually very Russophobic and very right-wing – such was the case even before they left ROCOR. In the USA, from what one of their bishops proudly writes and tells me, they seem to be linked to the CIA. There are among these people, and most are converts from Anglicanism or other forms of Protestantism, some very sincere and pious people, but also some with psychological problems. It is tragic. Sects are always based on hurt pride which then turns to hatred.

Such protest sects make themselves irrelevant, not only because they are tiny (often fewer than ten in number over the whole country), but also because they have played into the hands of this world by painting themselves into irrelevant corners. They have no influence because they focus so much on small and often ritualistic detail and individual opinions, with a negative, ‘anti-everything’ mentality. What they lack is a conscious, logically consistent and integral Orthodox world view, an overview. That is very important and all Orthodox need to develop such a world view.

Q: Do you think that the Inter-Orthodox Council will actually take place in 2016?

A: On paper, no, especially since the amazing, absurd and pretentious claims of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Ukraine, as described in the statement of Patriarch Bartholomew on Palm Sunday, which was surely written by the CIA. In the 1970s there could be no Council because the Russian Church inside Russia was controlled by the KGB; now we have Constantinople controlled by the CIA. That statement alone has surely set everything back until after the death of Patriarch Bartholomew.

However, everything is still possible – if the Greek Churches can overcome their vanity and inferiority complex, which the American State Department so plays on and exploits, and if they and the other Balkan Churches can overcome their phyletism (nationalism). Thus, at present three problems are outstanding and until they are solved they will stop this Council taking place.

Q: Which are?

A: Firstly, there is the territorial dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem. Secondly, there is the dispute between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and, thirdly, that between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Orthodox Church in America (OCA).

These three problems all have to be solved before even a proper agenda (rather than the old, secularist, Protestant-style 1970s one) can be agreed. So 2016 is possible, but the Patriarchate of Constantinople will first have to liberate itself from outside political interference from the US government, which is forcing it to interfere in the Ukraine and Mt Athos, and from the Vatican. So Constantinople must demonstrate that it is free and independent and can actually speak with an Orthodox voice and not a Greek nationalist and Uniat voice. Metropolitans Andrew and Seraphim of the Church of Greece have already warned it about this quite clearly in their 89-page letter asking for the repentance of Pope Francis.

Q: Do you think in this context that the Church inside Russia could take back the autocephaly of the OCA in order to ease negotiations with Constantinople?

A: I think that for the Church inside Russia the OCA is a bargaining counter. We all know that there is a problem with the autocephaly of the OCA, the brainchild (not heartchild) of the highly controversial Fr Alexander Schmemann. Firstly, it was granted during the Cold War by the self-same, highly controversial Metr Nikodim (Rotov), whom we mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, and whom the Roman Catholics claim to have been one of their cardinals. So it was dubious from the start.

However, secondly and much more importantly, how can you give a jurisdiction autocephaly when it has been in schism from you for decades (as was the pre-OCA Metropolia) and, above all, when it only includes a minority of the Orthodox who live on the same geographical territory? However, the Church inside Russia will not cede these points if Constantinople does not first abandon its own anti-canonical errors elsewhere, for example on Mt Athos, in the Ukraine, Estonia, Finland and Paris, returning Russian Church property to the Russian Church.

Q: What could happen to the OCA, if Constantinople did stop such anti-canonical interventions?

That would be a miracle, so who knows? I suppose one solution would be to take back the OCA’s autocephaly and grant it autonomy instead. Alternatively, you could wait until the present generation of OCA bishops, many of them in difficult and compromised situations or retired, die out. Then, after that generational change, you could pick up the pieces and reincorporate the ex-OCA into the Russian Church in North America, though letting ultra-liberal, dissident pieces which are perhaps beyond redemption (St Vladimir’s Seminary?) join Constantinople or simply go back to the Episcopalians. The OCA too can only survive if it moves towards being a group based on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Bright Monday 2014

Whose Side is God on Now?

http://vdare.com/articles/putin-vs-cultural-marxism-whose-side-is-god-on-now

Oligarchs and Western Ambassadors

According to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, once human biological and physiological needs, safety needs and love needs have been met, the next human needs are esteem needs and self-actualisation needs. These last two groups of needs basically mean money and power. The latter need is the need that in 1917 incredibly wealthy and decadent Russian aristocrats sought to fulfil by overthrowing the Lord’s Anointed and that in 2014 incredibly wealthy and decadent Russian oligarchs seek to fulfil by overthrowing democratic government. Moreover, their decadent and anti-people ambitions are fully backed by Western media moguls, politicians and ambassadors. Thus:

In 1612, during the Time of the Troubles, Russia was invaded by Poland and betrayed by boyars (aristocrats).

In 1801 Emperor Paul I was assassinated in a plot set up by the British ambassador and carried out by Russian aristocrats.

In 1917 Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown in a plot set up by the British ambassador and carried out by Russian aristocrats.

In 2014 Kiev is under siege by Western ambassadors, supported by Russian oligarchs.

Is there a pattern here?

2014: Towards the Realignment of the World

Introduction

Once upon a time the West was Christian. It is no longer, not even hypocritically. The long and complex process of DeChristianisation, that is, the fall from Orthodox Christianity known as Westernisation, has gone on for 1,000 years and is now coming to its bitter end. The last fifty years, my own lifetime, which followed two Western Wars, called World Wars, have seen a most dramatic turn. As we come to the 100th anniversary of the First Western War, we are now actually seeing a realignment of the world into only two blocs – one Western and Secularist, in other words, Neo-pagan, the other Universal and Traditional, in other words, Christian. However, the basis of this second bloc is in fact the Russian Orthodox Church with its integral Christian values and ensuing world view.

Why Only Two Blocs?

There are many competing religious ideologies in the world, but in reality they are too compromised, too weak or too local to withstand the Western Secularist onslaught. Thus, the heresies of Catholicism and Protestantism (and make no mistake, apart from a few eccentrics, the whole Russian Orthodox world categorically views these as heresies), have no chance of survival because they are at the roots of Western Secularism itself and so are inherently compromised; Buddhism is a psychic philosophy, not a religion; Hinduism depends on the inward-looking nationalism of Hindustan (India); Animism is even more primitive than Secularism itself. Of all the great religions there remains only Islam. But Islam, like its cousin Old Testament Judaism, operates on far too primitive a level of violence, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, to convince anyone beyond its own fanatical nationalists. And in any case, fatally divided into Sunni and Shia, Islam is a house that is destined to fall, its divisions now ruthlessly exploited by the Western Secularist Powers.

What remains? Only the Church of Christ. Its Empire, weakened by the deliberate export of Western Secularism, in its Communist form, 100 years ago, followed by the worst persecutions and massacres in the epic 2,000 year history of Christianity, is now reviving, as we hoped it would 20 years and more ago, under the name of the Eurasian Union. The spiritual foundation stone of this Union is the Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Orthodox world, and it stands out as the critic of Western Secularism.

With the political, economic and social project of the Eurasian Union under way, we are now more and more seeing the spiritual and therefore moral aspects of the project. This is essentially the first stage of the Reconstituted Roman Christian Empire – the rebirth of that which existed before the blasphemies of 1917. Standing completely outside the heterodox Christian world with its Scholasticism, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and Modernism, and uncompromised by Western interference as in some of the smaller Local Orthodox Churches, the Russian Orthodox Church is in fact the only consistent and consequent Christian critic of Western Secularism.

The Thirst for Revenge

Seeing the dangers for itself of any form of opposition, especially if that opposition has a real, that is, a spiritual and so moral, basis, the Western authorities, using their security services, subservient media and zombified populations, have therefore launched a typically underhand attack on Russia. This routine, highly aggressive Western Drang nach Osten (Drive against the East) comes on the exact 201st anniversary of the victory of Rus against the 1812 invasion of its domains by the French and their allied 12 Western tribes. This not only liberated the Russian Empire from the atheist scourge, but also resulted in the liberation of Paris by Russian troops in 1814. This was 100 years before Russian troops again relieved Paris, though then, in 1914, this was from the might of the Catholic-Protestant German Second Reich, rather than from the God-less, revolutionary hordes of Bonaparte.

This routine Drang nach Osten comes after the brilliant victory of Russian diplomacy last August which averted a possible Third World War being started by the USA in Syria. The Western revenge for the victory of peace has come in the last few weeks with the attempted invasion of the Ukraine, using Galician dupes financed by the CIA and encouraged by a series of foolish Western politicians, showing their usual militant intolerance for a Sovereign State. However, this too has failed.

So there has been the attempt to surround the Eurasian Union with missiles, to which the Russian Federation has replied by installing missiles around Kaliningrad. So now we are left with absurd and pathetic Western accusations about ‘political prisoners’, such as the billionaire bandit Khodorkovsky, who has shown his hatred for Russia by fleeing to Germany, or the yobbish and blasphemous female dupes of the CIA-orchestrated, sex and violence ‘Pussy Riot’ group, or the release of the detained trespassers from Greenpeace. If these silly slanders do not work, the all too predictable Western politicians will then try and spoil the Sochi Olympics.

The Fruits of Western Intolerance

Meanwhile, in the real world, millions of Syrians are starving and freezing as a result of the Western-fomented invasion of their country by savage Islamist mercenaries, paid for by the Sunni fanatics of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Islamist Afghanistan, 80% controlled by Taliban and the Western troop contingents holed up as prisoners in their own highly fortified ghettos, looms; ruined Iraq explodes in violence – like Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. The whole Middle East is a powderkeg of Western-encouraged division and terrorism. Moreover, this terrorism is spreading throughout Africa; the Western-armed fanatics who have seized control of parts of Libya have now spread to Mali, as all along the long Muslim-Christian watershed of Nigeria, the Central African Republic and South Sudan.

In Central and Eastern Europe, it is now clear that although a generation ago so-called ‘perestroika’ led to the collapse of the dictatorship of Communist Materialism, it also led to the foundation of the dictatorship of Consumerist Materialism. The whole thing was, in the end, only treachery and the exchange of one God-denying tyranny for another. Thus, the former Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe have been ravaged; as the ‘losers’ of the Cold War, they are owned by European Union ‘investors’; there is no work, villages and towns have been destroyed, young people have fled as refugees to the ‘winners’ of the Cold War in Western Europe, where they work on minimum wages in menial tasks like Christian slaves in Ancient Rome, and their countries are ruled by utterly corrupt, but EU-approved, ‘parliamentarians’. Full employment, culture, low crime rates, social security, an excellent education and free health care, are lost and are bitterly regretted by all who knew them

Ironically, the greatest advocates of the internationalist rape of former Communist Europe are nationalists, often, as for example in the Ukraine, Hungary and Latvia, resettled there from their old emigrations. Like robots, they do whatever the CIA and their US ambassadors tells them to: support the drug dealers, human organ merchants and gun runners who run occupied Kosovo; open a secret prison where we can render and torture Islamists; allow poppy fields in Afghanistan to flourish; support genocide in Iraq and Libya; vote for the massacre and bombardment of Syria; visit a synagogue for a photo opportunity; hold a ‘Gay Parade’ and impose homosexual ‘marriage’; be nasty to Russia: and instantly the EU-installed elites of the new Central and Eastern Europe grin and vote yes, just as they used to grin and vote yes when before some Communist gerontocrat from Moscow told them to destroy themselves.

Against the European Suicide

These countries are today occupied by the colonists and integrationists of the EU Fourth Reich, just as they were once occupied by the Nazi Third Reich. Their conquered and foreign-owned media spread their lies to captive populations, their education systems are zombified, children are taken from their fathers and mothers, in Lithuania known as ‘parents No I and No 2’, assets perhaps to be sold abroad for adoption, perhaps to be adopted by homosexual couples, perhaps to be debauched by compulsory ‘sex education’, certainly to be taught that men and women are the same, for your very gender is, apparently, merely a social construct, a fruit of conditioning. So say all those who have been brainwashed by the conditioning of Western Secularism and so are unable to think for themselves.

Europe dictates that these countries too must be destroyed, they must lose their national identity and sovereignty and their national traditions. So, like Greece, they must be flooded with Muslims so that their Christian identity can be trampled underfoot. It is no good claiming that there is no alternative. There is. It is called the Eurasian Union. It rejects sodomy, moral decadence, liberalism, oligarchy, capitalist consumerism and proclaims the Tradition. This is not anti-Western, for all in the West who support just, healthy, traditional values, those of the ancient saints of the West, will join it – providing, of course, that the nascent Union can finally free itself of the systemic corruption spawned by the old Communist errors. After all, Christianity is itself an Asian religion that came to Europe and in the symbolism of the double-headed eagle supported the unity of East and West, Asia and Europe, Eurasia.

Western Europe continues its suicidal policies, resulting in ultra-low birth rates, homosexual marriage and senile dementia. Western Europe is dying out of its own will, reaping the millennial fruits of its apostasy, becoming a corner of irrelevance and Fascist intolerance before the face of the rest of the world. It is opposed by the ever-growing spiritual and moral importance of the Russian Orthodox world, incarnate in the Eurasian Union. This combines States with social values and traditional values, freedom from the anti-family sodomocracy and gender dictatorship of the barren European Union.

Conclusion

The essential Western heresy was to promote itself as independent of Asia, that is, independent of Christ, replacing Him with its ethnic leader in Rome, from whom it made to proceed the Holy Spirit, God himself. This is Sodom, the land of intolerance of real men and real women. We of the Eurasian Union utterly reject its tyranny of lies, injustice, stupidity and vulgarity, To its ideology of materialist Consumerism, Western and Secularist, we oppose the ascetic and ecological principles of Orthodox Christianity, Universal and Traditional, which are so hated by the decadent, self-indulgent and dying contemporary West. As we stand on the brink of 2014, the 100th anniversary of the first Western War, we issue a rallying cry: Those who are not with us are against us. Where do you stand?

25 December 2013

American Traditionalists Rethink their Attitudes

http://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2013/12/17/is-putin-one-of-us-n1764094

On the Pivotal and Worldwide Importance of the Martyred Tsar Nicholas II

Introduction

I was recently asked by a group of pilgrims from Russia how I, as an Englishman, had come to spiritual awakening and the understanding that Tsar Nicholas II is a saint. I answered them briefly, though giving all the essentials of a fifty-year long process, but then realised that the question deserved a more detailed and systematic answer, as it may interest others too. Here now is that detailed answer.

First Impressions

The first event was when as a child I collected stamps and I remember a stamp with the portrait of Tsar Nicholas on it. His face seemed to stare out at me and it struck me as different from all other stamps; why I could not tell, but it was the first impression and memory of the Tsar and it has always remained with me.

The next stage was after seeing the film Dr Zhivago in 1968, I began reading about the Russian Revolution. This was because that Revolution was clearly the essential turning point in the creation of the whole Cold War world which then surrounded me and terrorised so many. I wanted to understand how it had come about.

Pro-Bolshevik accounts that I read then stood out as false; it was clear that any work that justified the bloody genocide of millions by Marxism-Leninism could not be trusted. However, the only other books available in English, mostly written by Western academics, were no less ideologically-motivated. They all seemed to think that the February 1917 ‘Revolution’, or treason by aristocrats and generals, which had deposed the Tsar (and later led to the October 1917 power grab by Bolshevik bandits) was an excellent thing. The sole book with some interesting content was that by Robert Wilton.

However, even my soul could see that this view was only because their authors imagined that every country in the world should be westernised and have the same constitutional monarchies or else republican governments as in Western Europe and North America. But I already knew these regimes to be spiritually corrupted. In other words, the views of these academics merely reflected their subjective and self-interested agnostic or atheistic materialist cultural prejudices; they did not represent objective reality, but merely the psychological conditioning of their authors. But what could that objective reality be? Although I instinctively sensed that the truth was other and profound, I was still searching in the dark for details.

The Emigration in England

On meeting émigré Russian Orthodox in Oxford in 1974, I began to enquire further. Here I heard three different views among those whom I encountered:

The first émigré view was a minority Patriarchal one which said that the Bolshevik coup d’etat was a triumph, that the Soviet Union was remarkable, that there was no persecution of the Church in Russia and that the Tsar had got what he deserved. This was the pro-Communist view. This was the absurd self-deception of blind Soviet nationalism which put the Soviet Union above the Church. This view held no water with me.

The second émigré view, the majority one, was that, although the Bolshevik power grab had been a disaster, the removal of the Tsar by the February treason had been an excellent thing, since the Tsar had held up ‘progress’. Although he and his family had not deserved to die, there was little pity for them, since those who held this view considered that if they were in exile, it was ‘the Tsar’s fault’. This was the pro-Western or ‘Parisian’ view, as I would later learn to call it. These emigres reckoned themselves as apolitical, but in fact they were highly political. In Oxford, for example, this was the view of Anglophile exiles who admired the Western Establishment, who loved Anglicanism and read ‘The Daily Telegraph’, the newspaper of the Conservative Party. This was the absurd self-deception of blind Western nationalism, a worldly, sociological manipulation, which put the West above the Church. This view held no water with me.

The third view, also political and not spiritual, held in Oxford by only two people, but by some others who attended the church in London, was like the second one, but more extreme. These people had a symbolic respect, but little real love, for the Tsar, but what they wanted above all was revenge, their property and their money back from ‘the evil Soviets’. Some of these exiles had worked for MI6 in that spirit of revenge, which knew no forgiveness or prayer for enemies. The Church for them was in many respects a social and ethnic club. This was a rabidly anti-Communist, purely political view which knew only black and white. Typically, many in that London parish rejected the later 1981 canonisation by the Church authorities. This view held no water with me.

I was disappointed. I had expected to find some kind of spiritual sensitivity and spiritual understanding of Tsar Nicholas II among Russians who were connected with Church life. I had not found it. However, in Oxford I did find out about Fr Nicholas Gibbes, former tutor to the Tsarevich, the first Englishman in the 20th century to become a Russian Orthodox priest and the first such priest in Oxford. Arriving in Russia with typically English prejudices about constitutional monarchy, he had been so influenced by his meeting and life with the exemplary Royal Family, that after many years of reflection he had later joined the Russian Orthodox Church. Moreover, on entering the Church, he had taken the name Alexis after the Tsarevich and then, when he became monk and priest, he took the name Nicholas after the Tsar-Martyr. This was a definite influence on me.

Having read about the New Martyrs and Confessors in a book about them published by ROCOR in North America, I was shocked to realise that the fact that they had still not been canonised was clearly only for political reasons, not only inside Russia, but also in the emigration. In 1976 I therefore created my own calendar, adding the names of the New Martyrs, including the Royal Martyrs. I still have that calendar. However, at this point my understanding was still limited; I understood the Tsar only as a martyr and, out of ignorance, did not yet see the holiness in his life and policies as Tsar, which were the preparation for his martyrdom.

Towards a Deeper Understanding

The next stage was in 1977 reading about Vladyka John of Shanghai and his veneration for the Tsar-Martyr. If this saintly bishop, with his international breadth of vision and gift of prophecy, held such views – and he had wanted to see the Tsar canonised at least as early as the 1930s – then there was more for me to understand. After this I obtained copies of ‘Pravoslavnaya Rus’, the bimonthly Jordanville journal. There I read many articles in preparation for the long-awaited canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Royal Martyrs. One article, written by Archbishop Antony of Geneva, on the international repercussions of the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II with the active support of the Western Powers, particularly struck me.

After the long-awaited canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors by ROCOR in 1981, I began praying openly to the Royal Martyrs and reading more and more in Russian about the reign of Tsar Nicholas II. My mind and soul began to be illumined. One by one the Western/Bolshevik (essentially the same) anti-Tsar myths, dissolved. The stampede at Khodynka, the myths of the ‘weak’ Tsar and the ‘hysterical’ Tsarina, the pogroms, the Russo-Japanese War, ‘Bloody Sunday’ and the 1905 Revolution, violent mutinies, strikes and outrages, the myth that the Tsar opposed the re-establishment of the Patriarchate and canonical Church order, the myth of the ‘backwardness’ of the Tsar’s Russia, Rasputin, the First World War, the 1917 ‘Revolution’ and then the Bolshevik coup d’etat – all of these had a completely different interpretation from that which had been given to them by Western and Soviet anti-Tsar propaganda. My instincts had long told me this, but I had lacked the facts to piece it all together.

Living by that time in Paris, I was shocked by the views of Russophobic Paris Jurisdiction emigres, many from aristocratic families in St Petersburg, who actually agreed with the anti-Tsar propaganda and blasphemously slandered the Tsarina and Rasputin. Many of them were descendants of those who had carried out the February 1917 Revolution; they therefore had their own axe to grind. It was at this time that I finally clearly grasped that Tsar Nicholas II had lived his life as a Confessor before ever becoming a Martyr. Reading the pre-Revolutionary prophecies of holy elders, I finally understood that the Tsar had been first slandered and then removed by Satanic forces because he and the Russian Empire had been the last obstacle to universal apostasy. And those who agreed with such slanders were actually, though perhaps unknowingly, participating in a form of Satanism.

This became more and more obvious when in the 1990s materialistic Communism (the Tartar Yoke) collapsed as a result of the canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors in 1981. What is most to be repented for in the Church Outside Russia is that this canonisation had not taken place much earlier. After the disastrous post-Communist period of the 1990s, when the countries of the former Russian Empire were ravaged by the materialistic Capitalism of Western-supported bandit-oligarchs (the Mongol Yoke), in 2000 that canonisation was at last effectively recognised by the then freed Church in Moscow. Thus came the mystical last chance when all Russian Orthodox, of all nationalities, were called on by the Lord to prepare for the last and worldwide Orthodox harvest before the Second Coming.

And so this recognition made negotiations and then unity with our Church Outside Russia possible. It also meant that it was now only a question of time before the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church would go further and influence the political, economic and social life of the countries where it is in the majority. What is most to be repented for is that some, especially in the Patriarchate outside Russia, rejected that canonisation. How well we remember, for example, being told in 2001 that there were still no icons of the Royal Martyrs at the London Patriarchal Cathedral because there was ‘no space’ on their blank Anglican walls.

The Last Pieces of the Puzzle

Books written about the reign of Tsar Nicholas II over the last fifteen years by professional historians who have access to the archives in Russian Federation, such as Bokhanov and Multatuli (definintely not the absurd Soviet myths of the venal scandalmonger and non-historian Radzinsky, so beloved of Western Russophobes) have supplied me with the last pieces of the puzzle. Like the Jordanville historian E.E. Alfer’ev’s excellent ‘Emperor Nicholas II as a Man of Strong-Will’, Pierre Gilliard’s ‘Thireteen Years at the Russian Court’, Prince Zhevakhov’s memoirs (in Russian) and S. S. Oldenburg’s ‘The Reign of Tsar Nicholas II’ (also in Russian), they supply details, truths which primitive Western (= Soviet) anti-Tsar mythology still reject. I hope that one day the sources will be translated into English. For example

The stampede at Khodynka was caused by the greed of a small element in an unprecedentedly huge crowd of hundreds of thousands, not by the Tsar or his administration.

The Tsar was not weak or incompetent, but an incredibly strong-willed, brave, faithful and courteous man who survived War and Revolution, and, as his contemporaries noted, had his own independent vision, uninfluenced by anyone except the Gospels. Only those who deny the Gospels – like most Western academics and politicians – deny this.

The Tsarina was a self-sacrificing, pious and noble mother and Russian Orthodox patriot, like her sister the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, an example to all Russian Orthodox in the West. She was not a hysterical fanatic or pro-German traitress; only militant atheists and anti-Orthodox think of her as this.

Anti-Jewish pogroms were Europe-wide; the worst ones were in Vienna and Berlin. In the Russian Empire they took place mainly in Poland and among Romanian-speakers. Some of them were indeed started by Jews against Non-Jews and as many Non-Jews died as Jews – about 1500 on each side. The mere fact that so many Jews lived in the Russian Empire is proof of the tolerance of Jews, who had long before sought grateful refuge in the Russian Empire from Western intolerance.

The Russo-Japanese War was treacherously started without a declaration of war by the Japanese. They had been financed and armed by Britain and the USA who wanted to dominate the Pacific and Asia and use Japan as a proxy to weaken Russia. Although non-militaristic Russia spent very little on arms – about a fifth as much as other countries – and its Navy was small and very old-fashioned, by 1905 it was winning the war against a highly militaristic Japan, with its latest British ships, but which was going bankrupt as a result of the costs of the war it had initiated. Russia ended the War on very favourable terms, decided entirely by the strong-willed Tsar Nicholas, who would have continued the struggle, had it not been for the treacherous sabotage inside Russia by a foreign-financed fifth column. Even so, in Japan the peace treaty that ended the War was seen as a defeat.

‘Bloody Sunday’, not at all a peaceful demonstration, but also far less deadly than the propagandists maintain, the 1905 Revolution, violent mutinies, strikes and outrages were terrorist provocations. They had relatively little support outside certain anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox groups in St Petersburg and a few other large cities and they were successfully and courageously put down.

The Tsar had himself in 1904 proposed the re-establishment of the Patriarchate. Those without vision had rejected it. The Church had to wait for the Patriarchate until 1918, because senior representatives, used to the Synodal system, had not been ready for it before.

The Tsar’s Russia was not ‘backward’. In 1914 it was already the breadbasket of Europe and rapidly becoming the greatest industrial power in Europe. 90% of the land then belonged to the people. By 1920 90% of the population would have been literate. By 1950 it would have become the most powerful country in the world, overtaking even the USA. By 2000 it would have had a population of 600 million. What was good in the Soviet system, its world-class education, its health system and sense of national and international social justice were not inventions of the Bolsheviks – they were all inherited from the Tsar’s Russia. And that is precisely why in 1914 the Western Powers wanted to destroy it.

Rasputin was not a ‘mad monk’, but a devout married peasant layman, a good Orthodox family man with three children, who was granted an extraordinary gift of healing by God. His torture and brutal murder by British spies, supported by a transvestite, Oxford-educated Russian aristocrat, was justly seen by the Orthodox peasantry as the anti-people and anti-piety act of decadent aristocrats that it was.

The First World War was forced on the peace-loving Russian Empire by an Austro-Hungarian Empire, backed by an ultra-militaristic, Prussianised Germany, which did not want peace but conflagration. Russian setbacks against Germany, because of the small Russian military budget, lack of guns and munitions and promises on supplies broken by Britain, were matched by successes against Austro-Hungary and the planned campaign of 1917 which would almost certainly have led to victory and the end of the War in that year. Instead of this, the Western Allies chose another year of warfare by encouraging and backing treason by aristocrats.

The Revolution was not caused by the Tsar-loving masses who were suffering some sort of social injustices, but by immensely wealthy and treacherous spoilt aristocrats – conservative but anti-Traditional. Most of these right-wingers ruthlessly exploited the masses, hated the Tsar for his measures of social justice and wanted to grab power for themselves. The Tsar did not abdicate, but they treacherously abdicated from the Tsar and his legitimate authority. Then, in their incompetence, not understanding that the Tsar, God’s Anointed, was the only glue that could hold the Russian Empire together, scarcely six months later, they handed over that power to a bunch of utterly amoral bandits and terrorists – the Bolsheviks.

The Consequences

Retribution came to all the traitors: after 1917 retribution came to the aristocrats who had betrayed the Tsar – they were killed or went into bitter exile, having lost the source of their wealth; retribution came in 1940 to France and Great Britain which had betrayed the Tsar with the humiliating defeat of France and the British humiliation of Dunkirk and the Blitz; retribution came to the Bolsheviks in 1941 when the Soviet Union was treacherously invaded on the feast of All the Saints that have shone forth in Rus; in the Pacific retribution came to the USA in the humiliation at Pearl Harbour and to Great Britain in the humiliation at Singapore, when the Japanese did to them what they, then backed by the USA and Great Britain, had done to Russia at Port Arthur in 1904; retribution came again to Great Britain with the Battle of the Atlantic when the country was nearly starved into submission in 1942 by German U-boats, for the country which until 1914 had been fed by abundant grain from the Russian Empire now depended on North America; retribution came to Austro-Hungary and Germany when the Red Army took Vienna and a devastated Berlin in 1945.

And then all received further retribution in the Cold War, with its ‘balance of terror’, bankrupting arms race and the last generation of paranoiac American hubris, for which the whole world is still paying in 2013. None of this would have happened if Tsar Nicholas II had remained in power in 1917. They are all consequences of his illegitimate overthrow, which the whole world is still suffering to this very day. Are these evil, worldwide consequences not reason enough for universal repentance, repentance for our own sins and for those of our ancestors and nations?

As for the Orthodox Church, the consequences were catastrophic. With the Tsar removed, the Russian Orthodox Church was attacked both by the atheists from outside and by the renovationists inside. With the key Russian Orthodox Church martyred, paralysed and captive, the other much smaller and much weaker Local Churches were attacked by decadence one by one. Above all, the old but spiritually enfeebled Patriarchate of Constantinople fell under the control of Western and masonic agencies, encouraged modernist schism inside and outside Russia, enslaved by the flattering myth of the absurd interpretation of Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon.

And so Uniatisation of calendar and ritual began to follow. The aim was a spiritually neutered and neutralised Orthodoxy, a bland, decadent and unsalted ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’, that no longer presents any danger to militant secularism or, ultimately, to the forces of Antichrist. The consequences of this are still being played out in the Phanariot interference in Russian Church life in Paris, the Ukrainian diaspora, Finland and Estonia; in all the new calendar Local Churches; and even in Serbia, Georgia, and at this very moment on the streets of Kiev and in the chancellery of the Czechoslovak Orthodox Church.

Conclusion

The recognition as saints of St John of Kronstadt and the prophetic St John of Shanghai, both firmly of the Orthodox calendar and both firm monarchists, has been a lodestone of Orthodoxy. It was – and is – sometimes hard for supporters of the new calendar, let alone modernism, to venerate these saints honestly and conscientiously. Today, it is the veneration of Tsar Nicholas II as a saint that is a lodestone for contemporary Orthodoxy, a sign of the spiritual awakening to authentic Orthodoxy, or, wherever it is lacking, a sign of the spiritual slumber of semi-Orthodoxy.

To recognise Tsar Nicholas II as a saint is to awaken spiritually and recognise him as the greatest sacrificial victim of the great 20th century apostasy. It is to renounce all the lies and spiritual impurity of the twentieth century and to repent for them. There may yet come a time in this faltering 21st century, which may not end, when the holy martyred Tsar will be recognised not just as a Martyr and the Martyred Lord’s Anointed, representative of all the New Martyrs, but also a Great-Martyr, as was prophesied at Optina.

On Overcoming the Paris Captivity

On Friday 6 December, the Interfax News Agency reported that Fr Vsevolod Chaplin has called on certain Russians to overcome ‘the Paris Captivity’ of academic theology and to give priority instead to the legacy of the New Martyrs. Fr Vsevolod, the Social Affairs spokesman for the Church, is seen by many as the right-hand man of Patriarch Kyrill.

Fr Vsevolod called on certain Russian Orthodox to pay more attention to our own theological tradition instead of to that of the Paris Jurisdiction and its branches, which reject the millennial, monastic-based Russian Orthodox Tradition and prefer Protestant-based philosophies and speculations. He said that if ‘even Muslims and Protestants wonder what to do when there are contradictions between Russian and foreign traditions, and usually choose the Russian’, then it was for Russians themselves to opt for their ‘millennial tradition of Orthodox thought, learning and piety, for the Tradition’.

Like the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, he too inside Russia is convinced that it is time to overcome ‘the Paris Captivity’ of Russian theology and return to ‘the tradition of Orthodox countries in periods of freedom’ and do not have ‘to adapt to domineering Western surroundings, nor to totalitarian atheist regimes’. He recommended all to look at Russian Orthodoxy just before the Revolution (Metr Antony Khrapovitsky and his Patristically-minded followers) and Serbian Orthodoxy (Sts Nicholas of Zhicha and St Justin of Chelije), but above all to devote particular attention to the legacy of the New Martyrs, which ‘provides answers to many present-day issues’. He added that ‘by definition’ the Paris School was ‘marginal in the context of free Orthodox peoples’. (http://www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=53710)

Living outside Russia, we can confirm the truth of Fr Vsevolod’s words and the consequences of such Protestant and Catholic-based ‘theology’ on a practical day to day basis. Thus, one parish of the Paris Jurisdiction in England is losing its premises and so public mission for lack of parishioners, and yet in the same city, there are dozens of Russian Orthodox who regularly travel over a hundred miles at weekends so that they can get to the nearest Russian Orthodox liturgy. They are in fact boycotting an ex-Anglican group of four (with two priests!) who refuse to put up an iconostasis, to confess before communion and celebrate on the Orthodox calendar. They prefer to travel great distances to a busy priest so that they can receive pastoral care as Orthodox, and not as Protestants or Catholics.

Another Paris Jurisdiction parish in France is boycotted by local Russian Orthodox because it also refuses to celebrate on the Orthodox calendar and have an iconostasis, and there communion without confession is obligatory for all (those who do not commune every Sunday are humiliated and made to feel guilty) and little girls are forced into being acolytes. In a monastic group of the same Paris Jurisdiction in France, a woman with a grave sin on her conscience was refused confession last weekend and told: ‘As long as you have not killed anyone, you do not need confession’. This glaring lack of pastoral care and understanding of Orthodoxy in many – though not all – parishes of the Paris Jurisdiction has set it on a course of Uniatisation. This is why Russian Orthodox have been leaving it for decades.

Sadly, such ‘theology’, in fact merely a lack of faith that weakly swims with the heterodox tide, has also spread to convert parts of the Antiochian Jurisdiction in this country, where, in addition to the above practices, there are pleas to celebrate Easter on the Roman Catholic dating and intercommunion is openly practised. Such practices attract only a few unChurched and lapsed Orthodox, who do not know their own Tradition and already take communion in Anglican and Roman Catholic churches.

Regeneration or Degeneration

Spiritual nihilism is a major threat to European civilisation…yet not all values can ever be destroyed among mankind. There are still those who care who will kindle the flame and pass it from hand to hand until the country is flooded by a new wave of regeneration.

New Martyr Alexander of Munich (+ 1943)

Russia

The greatest geopolitical and human catastrophe and the cause of the worst genocide in the last century was undoubtedly the Russian Revolution. It led to the satanically-inspired murder of all that was best in the near-millennial Christian culture of Rus, East Slavdom; this was indeed ‘spiritual nihilism’. For without the Revolution there would have been a Russian victory in 1917 and Russian troops would have freed Prussianised Germany and the peoples of Austria-Hungary from the tyranny of their emperors and upper classes. There would have been no fateful Versailles Treaty and no unjust mistreatment of the German and Austrian peoples, no Lenin and no Stalin in the former Russian Empire, no Hitler and no Second World War. True, there would have been the terrible losses of a three-year First World War, but they could at least have been repented for by the instigators of that war throughout the 1920s. Instead, they were never repented for and so were never made up for.

The atheist Soviet Union was an interruption of all East Slav history, a break with the destiny of Rus. Although the Soviet Union is no more, its utterly mismanaged collapse was yet another disaster and so the paths of Russian destiny have still not been resumed in full, far from it, and the effects of discontinuity are still present. They can for example be seen in the self-defensive and ignorant Soviet nationalism of the brainwashed elderly, which admires the genocidal war-leader Stalin. But this is a generational phenomenon that is dying out, just as the admiration of brainwashed, elderly Britons for their compromised war-leader Churchill is also dying out. However, the break with the destiny of Rus can also be seen in the fact that the remains of Lenin have still not been disposed of, in atheist place-names that still abound everywhere, in still existing admiration for all those who so shamelessly co-operated with Stalin, not to mention in the luxurious wastefulness of today’s Russian elite.

In criticising the wastefulness of that elite, we should not forget that there were also abuses before the Revolution. Oligarch is only a new name for aristocrat. That Revolution was caused by the self-serving, decadent and corrupted upper class. On the other hand, we should not think that all was corrupted before the Revolution – the problem was in the wealthy, westernised classes. If all had been corrupted, then from what trees could the spiritual blossom of the New Martyrs have come? The modernist Russophobes who think that all was corrupted before the Revolution are those who do not venerate the New Martyrs, who ‘have no space for their icons’, as in the former Sourozh Diocese. And if all had been corrupted, where also could the best of the culture of émigré Russia have come from? From where could the heartfelt music of a Rakhmaninov, the lament of the emigration for what was and what might have been, the endless melody of nostalgia for a vanished civilisation, have come?

What is the situation today? President Putin has been admired by some for his foreign policies. That admiration may perhaps be justified. But his internal policies seem to be little more than empty words, promises without substance – as we can see from the present Muslim immigrant troubles in Moscow. There still hang over Russia the old and huge problems of ABC, alcoholism, abortion and corruption, the first two vestiges from the atheist period, the last mostly from the abysmal decadence of the Capitalist Yeltsin period. All these problems lie behind the unresolved and severe demographic crisis. However, critics of contemporary Russia, and we have no illusions that there is much to criticise there, for we have seen it ourselves, tend to forget that what survives in Russia today survives miraculously, after the worst persecution of Christ known to history. All of us who seek a Tsar restored must show patience, recognising that the processes of repentance and regeneration are painfully gradual.

Europe

Once Europe was strong, but today it is degenerating, which in many respects makes it even more fragile than regenerating Russia. Through the European Union Europe is entering a period which resembles in its tyranny the old Soviet Union. Europe’s future survival as a living, and not as a dead, culture is dependent on its willingness to overcome the cumulative degeneration of its spiritual nihilism. This is exactly what the still fragile process of spiritual regeneration in Russia has come from – the willingness of at least some there to overcome the spiritual nihilism of the past. And this is what Europe must learn from Russia – if it wants to survive. Europe is a poem – in its little, hidden, underground parts dating from before the Schism, in the beauty of its nature and culture, from the mountains of Norway to the fado songs of Portugal, from the shores of the Hebrides to the forests of the Tyrol, from the palaces of Paris to the fountains of Rome. But now the very existence of that poem is at risk.

This is because Europe is also a gigantic museum of the effects of the Schism. Having forsaken the Church, it declined into Catholicism and from there descended to Protestantism and so to atheist Secularism. Europe is littered with the remarkable monuments of its millennial Schism, its cathedrals and its churches, its castles and its fortifications, its museums and its galleries, its statues and its adornments. All this it can and should keep, as witnesses to its past culture, both good and bad. But Europe’s cultural evolution has come to a dead end because its spiritual evolution has reached a dead end, the end of the process of its Schism, which has descended during a millennium from total faithfulness to total faithlessness. So now Europe is at a turning-point and faces a choice between total self-destruction and the renunciation of its atheist Secularism and the millennial process behind it and so the return to the fullness of its founding Orthodoxy of a thousand years ago.

Nowhere today can the threat of atheist Secularist Europe be seen in more black and white terms than in the Ukraine. For, bribed by the EU, the Ukrainian puppet elite is now turning its back on 1025 years of East Slav history and its choice of civilisation – the choice for Christ – made in 988, and is instead choosing Eurosodom. For what was a vulgar commercial union forty and more years ago, at first tyrannically removing the freedom for Europeans to be themselves, is now altogether destroying fundamental Christian morality. The EU tyranny has never had any respect for local culture, as we know from the recent past of Western Europe, and as can be seen in its present manipulation of the Ukrainian media, similar to its past manipulation of the media of one victim country after another. The Ukraine and its Church also are heading for ‘Europeanisation’, ‘Hellenisation’, the same illusions as in bankrupt Greece, the Baltic States, Hungary, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania.

In the Ukraine, we see face to face the stark choice: Christ or Eurosodom. No group there faces a greater inner contradiction than the Uniats, with their hideous new Cathedral in Kiev. On the one hand, they claim to belong to Christ, but on the other hand, they support Eurosodom. If Stalin had left to Poland the largely Uniat, far-west Polonised provinces, the only ones which are truly ‘Ukrainian’, that is borderlands, none of this would have happened. If the European Union does invade the Ukraine, then the vast majority of the Ukraine may well join a regenerating Russian Federation, welcoming it as liberation. Then too, in the far south-west, faithful Carpatho-Russia, ‘Transcarpathia’, will at last be established as an Autonomous Republic of the Federation, righting Stalin’s historic injustice against it. The Ukraine may soon face a choice: Spiritual Regeneration with the Russian Federation or Spiritual Degeneration with the European Union. Whither goest thou, Ukraine?

Orthodox England

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