Category Archives: DeNormanization

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (October 2015)

Q: What is happening in the Serbian Orthodox Church at present?

A: As far as I can see, the Western neocon elite, which has been trying to manipulate the Serbian government ever since it bombed Serbia, is continuing the same old Communist policy of divide and rule. Just as the Communists separated Macedonia and set up an ‘Orthodox’ nationalist sect there in the 1960s, so Washington and its allies have since separated Montenegro and Kosovo from Serbia and are trying to set up nationalist sects there through their local puppets. Opposition is coming from the people. In Montenegro the people do not want to become another NATO base and in Macedonia they do not want to become another Muslim republic like Kosovo. This political opposition creates opposition to the nationalist and schismatic sects, as people realize that is what they are.

This is the very policy that the US is trying to implement in the Ukraine also. There, three different small, foreign, politically-concocted sects, one of which has a very aggressive leader, Denisenko, who has visited the State Department in Washington as an honoured guest, are trying to undermine the vast majority. They belong to the only Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is led by Metropolitan Onuphry.

Q: Isn’t it strange that the Yugoslav Communists fifty years ago under the Croat Tito and today’s neocons follow the same policy?

A: Not at all. The Yugoslav Communists were put into place by the Western Powers during World War II, with Churchill switching sides to them from the Orthodox Serbs and supporting them. The Communists and the neocons share the same basic materialistic ideology. The only difference is that the Communists promoted the materialistic concept of amassing State wealth, the neocons of amassing personal wealth. State Capitalism or individualist Capitalism, Mammon is the same everywhere.

Q: What can be done?

A: I am an outsider, so it is difficult for me to say anything about the Serbian Church. That is an internal matter. However, it does seem vital to me that in general all of us, whatever Local Church we belong to, must keep to Orthodox canonical principles and resist US/EU, or any other, political interference and, at the same time, we must advance non-nationalist, confederal structures. This is what the Russian Church did over 20 years ago, granting extensive autonomy to its local parts, for example to the Ukrainian Church, the Moldovan Church, the Latvian Church and the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). If this is not done, there will be new schisms or else old schisms will continue.

Q: On the subject of schisms, who were the small groups of dissidents who went into schism from the two parts of the Russian Church at their reconciliation in 2007?

A: As I have said before, there were two groups. The first left English and French communities officially dependent on the Church inside Russia. Their leaders (and their naïve followers who knew no better) were renovationists, who had been poisoning Church life in the Diaspora for decades, in obedience to their by then mainly dead Paris-School ideologues. They left for the US-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople, where freemasons, semi-Uniats and anti-Russian political or nationalist dissidents seem to be made welcome. The second group left ROCOR and were a strange mixture of operatives of the CIA and other Western spy services, right-wingers of the Peronista type in South America and ideologically-minded old calendarist converts who did not love the Russian Church and persecuted those of us who do.

Q: Looking back on your own life in the Church, do you regret the things that happened to you in the 70s and 80s?

A: If the things that happened to me had not happened, I would not know now what I have learned from bitter experience, however painful. So, in a sense how can I regret anything? Everything was necessary to learn a little wisdom and see through the myths of the ‘Orthodox’ Establishment. However, if we are to daydream (!) and I had known then what I know now, I would in 1971 have joined the London ROCOR parish. Then, having finished studies at University in London in 1977, I would have asked to go to Jordanville in 1977.

I greatly regret not only that in those pre-internet days I was given no facts, no guidance, but instead was given active misinformation and misdirection. Such was the spiritual corruption and prejudice against the Russian Church at that time. The scribes and pharisees of the Establishment did not want a Church outside its control, a free, uncompromised and spiritually independent Russian Orthodox Church, free of both left-wing renovationism and right-wing politicking. They wanted an impure, spiritually degutted and compromised Establishment organization. This is why they did their best to undermine us from both outside and, through their agents of both left and right, from inside.

Q: How do you see the future for the Russian Church in the East of England?

A: In recent years we have encouraged the establishment of both what became the little rural mission with Fr Anthony in Mettingham in Suffolk and of St Panteleimon’s skete outside Clacton in Essex. This latter is under Fr Sergei, whose simplicity is an example to us all. Now, with God’s help and that of many kind and generous benefactors, we are buying property for a church in the city of Norwich and hope to have a man ordained for the new parish in God’s good time. Perhaps this is all we can do; certainly we need more clergy in order to expand. One or two candidates now seem to be appearing at last, but we need more.

We can dream of parishes in the county centres elsewhere in the east: a church building for Suffolk in the county centre of Bury St Edmunds, a church dedicated to Sts Peter and Paul in Peterborough for Cambridgeshire, a church of the Resurrection in Bedford for Bedfordshire, a church dedicated to St Alban in St Albans for Hertfordshire, a church dedicated to St Nicholas in east London, a church dedicated to Sts Constantine and Helen in York for Yorkshire and a church dedicated to All the Saints in Canterbury as the centre for Kent. However, realistically, if that is not God’s will, none of this will happen.

Q: Why is it important to have property in central and populated places?

A: Because if we do not, the communities will die out as property promotes continuity. This is a law. When you have your own property, then you also have spiritual freedom. I have seen dozens of parishes closing in England and France over the last forty years. Why? Because they had no property. It is just a fact of life. And communities must always be in centres, in cities and large towns, where the people are. You do not open a church where no-one lives. Church buildings follow the people, for they are the Church. It is not the other way round. That is common sense.

Q: Some people fear the coming Pan-Orthodox Council in 2016, calling it the ‘Eighth Oecumenical Council’ that was denounced in the prophecies. What would you say?

A: There is a certain hysteria and paranoia among some who seem to know very little of Church history with respect to this meeting, which is most certainly not the ‘Eighth Oecumenical Council’. It is pure fantasy to call it that. The Inter-Orthodox meeting next year is not a Council, but a meeting of a minority of Orthodox bishops, about 25% of the total. It will discuss administrative and canonical issues; all the dogmatic issues have already been decided for all time by the Seven Universal (‘Oecumenical’ is a misleading translation) Councils.

No meeting can become a Council if its resolutions are not received by the faithful, but sadly we the faithful have never been consulted about the discussions leading to this present meeting. The whole thing is happening behind closed doors in Calvinist Geneva (of all places), a situation unheard of in Orthodox practice, and I think this is why a certain hysteria and paranoia is growing up in some circles. They are inevitable, given the near-total lack of transparency.

The faithful are the guardians of the Faith, which is why a meeting can only become a Council if its decisions are received by the faithful. If a meeting is a Council, then it means that the Holy Spirit is present there, as He is among the faithful. At present it seems that some of the 1960s-style liberal Protestant agenda being promoted by the Phanariots and which frightened us in the 1970s, has already had to be dropped at the preparatory meetings. That is good. We do not need any more old-fashioned modernism. However, there is no agreement among representatives of the Local Churches who are preparing this meeting on several important issues. Moreover, with the latest condemnation by Constantinople of Metr Rostislav of the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, this meeting may never even take place, for it cannot if one of the fourteen Local Churches is absent. So Greek nationalism may yet put an end to the meeting altogether.

More generally, the situation is so highly politicized that one wonders if anything meaningful can take place even if these bishops do meet. Let us recall that no fewer than three patriarchs of Local Churches are now US appointees (against the canons of the Church) and they repeat the policies of the State Department, that is, of Obama, who may be an atheist or may be a Muslim (no-one is sure), of the abortionist Biden and of the warmonger Kerry. Parts of the Church are simply not free to meet. Just as St Justin of Chelije called for a boycott of any such Inter-Orthodox meeting in the 1970s because so many Local Churches, notably the Russian, were then enslaved by the atheist SU, so today other Local Churches are enslaved by the atheist US.

Q: So can any meaningful meeting take place?

A: I think that in the longer term it may be irrelevant whether a meeting takes place or not. I see a different outcome. As the number of bishops in the Russian Church climbs inexorably to 400 and more, and the total will soon exceed 50% of the total number of Orthodox bishops, the meeting in Constantinople is becoming irrelevant. It may be that the Russian Orthodox Church, as the one and only obvious Centre of Orthodox Civilization, may soon hold an episcopal meeting together with the other free Local Churches, Antioch, Georgia, Poland, Czechoslovakia etc.

Such a meeting of over 500 bishops would be far more representative that that the Geneva-prepared one in the Phanar, and would be more likely to become a Council. It could take place at the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, which is now nearly fully restored. This is what the Russian Church intended the Monastery for in the seventeenth century, as a centre of World Orthodoxy, but was prevented from becoming by the interference of the Russian State both then and since. Such a Council could speak freely, without reserve ‘for fear of the Jews’, that is, unintimidated by the Soviet-style censorship of political correctness.

Such a situation would reflect the reality of the Church today, not the situation of a thousand years ago when Greek ruled the roost. It is time to catch up with reality. The Greek-ruled Churches, mostly with flocks of scarcely a million and nationalist outlooks, are simply unable to cope with the reality of today’s global world. In order to respond, the Church today must also be global. Only the Russian Church is that.

Q: Some would call that ‘Russian Imperialism’.

A: Imperialism of any sort is to be condemned because it is nationalism. What we are talking about is an Imperial Church, the Church of the Christian Empire. Imperial means multinational unity in diversity, with new autocephalous Local Churches being born through missionary activity, whereas Imperialism means nationalism, central control and the ‘one size fits all’ mentality of the papist model, which, sadly, now exists in Istanbul.

Q: What is the situation after the latest round of episcopal consecrations announced by the Russian Church on 23 October?

A: The news that Fr Tikhon (Shevkunov) is now a bishop is most welcome, and the news that Italy now has for the first time ever a resident Russian Orthodox bishop in Bishop Antony (Sevryuk) is historic. It seems that we are at last seeing the appearance of a young generation of bishops, all at least trilingual (the local language, English and Russian), resident in the country, with an understanding of the local culture and politically free. We also noted that Fr Gennady Andreyev of the Sourozh Diocese in Manchester has been nominated bishop.

But there are other welcome events. Despite vigorous French political opposition which much delayed the project, the cupolas are now on the new Russian Cathedral in Paris and all should be finished within twelve months. We are moving ahead at last.

And as regards the veneration of the local Western saints, 60 years after St John, we are now moving forward to their inclusion in the Russian calendar inside Russia and perhaps even elsewhere. It is not just a case of better late than never, this represents real repentance on the part of those who resisted, reproached and actively persecuted us for venerating them for over 40 years. It is sad that several of the persecutors are now dead and therefore cannot repent, so we will have to pray for them, for Christ calls us to pray for our enemies, regardless of whether they are dead or alive. It is the same situation as with those who refused to venerate the New Martyrs and Confessors and put icons of them in their churches. They have all been proved wrong as well.

Q: Many people are very pessimistic about the situation in Russia and criticize it. What would you answer them?

A: There is a huge amount to criticize in post-Soviet Russia, the old classic of ABC – Alcoholism (nearly as high as in Finland), ‘Bortion (abortion) (near Asian levels) and Corruption (about the same as in Italy), to which could be added D for both Divorce (nearly as high as in the USA) and Drug-taking (not yet at the levels of Western Europe). However, the Russophobes and their propaganda deliberately omit the vital fact: the direction Russia is going in is right, whereas the direction that the West is going in is wrong. It is a huge historical irony that in proportion as Russia is deSovietized (a process well under way despite the propaganda, opposition and fear of the West), the West is being Sovietized.

Q: Who are these Russophobes who criticize?

A: There are two groups. Firstly, there are the neo-colonial Western ideologues who, still living in the imperialist arrogance of the nineteenth century, are convinced that ‘West is best’ and as for ‘the rest’, they can go to hell. These people are in reality mere primitive racists and extremists, like the Russophobe Senator John McCain who has now been photographed at a meeting with Islamic State, so anxious is he to be anti-Russian! (Here is the proof that the Westernists are at one with Islamists, whose movement they founded in Afghanistan in the 1980s and who have always supported the murderous regime in Saudi Arabia with its beheadings, crucifixions and massive bombings, with US warplanes and British bombs, of civilians in the Yemen. The extremes always meet, in the same way that the British imperialist and Jewish convert Disraeli backed the Ottoman massacres of Bulgarian Christians in the 19th century).

Secondly, there are the Russian Westernizers, many of them oligarchs, Jews or homosexuals. They are often to be seen at the US embassy in Moscow. They represent the same aristocratic, military and industrialist class (senior Romanovs among them), and also renovationist career clergy in the Church, that betrayed Russia in 1917 (when they were to be seen at the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg), overthrowing the Tsar because they wanted power (and even more money) for themselves.

They have their exact parallel in the Ukraine today, where the legitimate and democratically elected Yanukovich government (whatever its many shortcomings) was overthrown by the nationalist Galician Uniat minority, led by oligarchs like the Jewish Poroshenko and other billionaire industrialists who sold their souls to the CIA in exchange for its backing. Elected by 25% of the people, and that was only achieved with harsh Secret Police repression and US PR propaganda, these people are ruthless because they are completely without principle. That is why they hate the Ukrainian people and Orthodoxy. Unlike them, we Christians have principles.

In fact, it would be more exact to call such individuals Orthodoxophobes than Russophobes and Ukrainophobes, because that is the essence of their hatred, hatred for Christ, however deludedly they may claim that they are for Christ. As with the Bolsheviks in Alexander Blok’s revolutionary poem, ‘The Twelve’, they think that they are following Christ, but in reality they are following Antichrist. And he will lead them to the perdition of their souls in Gehenna. That is how serious their situation is.

Q: What is happening to the ‘British Orthodox Church’?

A: The so-called ‘British Orthodox Church’, in fact neither British, nor Orthodox, was a tiny group of vagantes and other eccentric Anglo-Catholics, whose leader used to call himself ‘the Patriarch of Glastonbury’(!). However, they were received and ordained by the Coptic Church some 20 years ago. In 1999 they had one bishop, 18 vicars (clergy) and 72 faithful! In early October this year they left the Miaphysite Church and, apparently, have now gone back to being vagantes. The problem was that the ex-Anglicans in question could not accept the inherent anti-Chalcedonianism which is now once more coming to the fore among the Copts in what I think is an outburst of nationalism. (Anti-Chalcedonianism goes hand in hand with local nationalism, which to a great extent caused it).

I am told that the group now has one bishop, 2 priests and about 100 faithful, mainly Establishment ex-Anglicans, mainly, I am told, elderly, though I am not sure if that is true. What the group will do now is unclear. Sadly, I doubt that they will wish to join the Orthodox Church because that would mean accepting catechism and being received as laypeople. I very much hope that I am wrong in this pessimistic view of their clericalism. There is one ex-Anglican group which they might join; it ordains ex-Anglican vicars almost immediately and virtually without training. Who knows? I think it will make little difference because it is such a tiny group, not even one normal parish.

Q: Given its critical situation, it has been suggested that the Rue Daru jurisdiction be directly governed by the Patriarchate of Constantinople and join the local Constantinople dioceses, like that of Metropolitan Emmanuel in Paris. What do you think of that?

A: I agree. I think that this is so logical that it is inevitable. Once all those who love the Russian Tradition have left Rue Daru, as they have been doing over the last thirty and more years since the repose of the saintly Archbishop George (Tarasov) and the fall into decadence after him, what will be left? Freemasons and naïve converts, new calendarist modernists and ecumenists. Obviously, they should all be together in Constantinople’s local diocesan structures and lodges. On the other hand, they should first have the honesty to hand back Russian Church property, which they are effectively occupying.

Q: What do you make of the recent Roman Catholic Synod in Rome?

A: Catholicism is now at a turning point. Will it keep the remnants of Catholicism (which date back in one form or another to Orthodoxy), or will it become completely Protestantized, a process that was initiated by wealthy US, German and other liberal cardinals over fifty years ago at the Second Vatican Council. With the present Jesuit Pope, for whom the means seem to justify the ends and who seems to agree with everyone and no-one, it is impossible to say what will happen, but that is what is at stake. This is important because Roman Catholicism is the very last Western European institution with an Orthodox past to survive. However, today Roman Catholicism, Uniatism included, looks so weak, so Americanized, that is, so Protestantized, that there seems little hope for it. I have always believed that only Orthodoxy can fill the spiritual abyss left by it.

Its situation is symbolic of Western Europe in general, whose cities now seem to be on the verge of disappearing beneath the tidal wave of the Muslim invasion. This was brought about by Western interference in the Middle East and North Africa, the notorious CIA-orchestrated ‘Arab spring’, which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands. Will Western Europe survive at all? That is now the question. However, I would like to disagree with the Western xenophobes, who blame ‘Arabs’ or ‘Muslims’. These wretched people are not the cause of the problem. The cause of the problem is Western apostasy, the fact that Western people have abandoned Christ. As nature abhors a vacuum, so it is being filled – and by Islam. If Western people had not abandoned Christ and Christian culture, there would be no spiritual vacuum and no Muslims here to fill it.

Q: How should we look at the situation in Syria?

A: We live in times when the prophecies are being accomplished before our very eyes – in Iraq, in Syria and in Turkey. The present catastrophe began in 1991 with the beginning of the fall of Babylon (Iraq) in the first Gulf War. This was accomplished in 2003. In 2000 Iraq had nearly 2,000,000 Christians, now there are fewer than 200,000. Even someone as obtuse and deluded as Blair is just now beginning to admit that he is partly responsible. As for Syria, it is next to Armageddon. The third player is Turkey, whose fall is also prophesied. Then will come the drying up of the Euphrates. Before that I think we shall also see changes in the Ukraine next year.

Following Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya have all called for Russian help. It is difficult to know whether Russia will be able to put out all the conflagrations started by incredible Western hubris, but we shall see. It is not easy to be the world’s fireman when you face American arsonists.

Q: What lies behind this hubris which is inherent in the West?

A: Historically, it is a mixture of the imperialist superiority of the pagan Romans mixed with the ruthless plundering of the barbarian Germanic peoples being harnessed by Satanic powers. Thus, what is at the origin of the British Establishment? It is the Norman mentality, in other words, the mentality of a Viking warband, which is what the Normans were. When they came to England in 1066, having already destroyed the older Christian traditions of pre-Norman Normandy, they came to plunder the gold and riches of a Christian kingdom and destroy its half-millennial Church.

The gleam in Norman eyes then was the same as that in the eyes of the gold-hungry Spanish conquistadors five centuries later, and the same as that in the eyes of Texan oilmen when they got their greedy hands on Iraqi oil five centuries after that. Even modern Western science fiction talks of asset-stripping and strip-mining other planets in exactly the same way. Exploit the mineral resources of a country until they are exhausted and then move on to the next country, or planet, and strip it bare too, plunder and pillage ruthlessly – all under the pretext of freedom and democracy. As the imperialist British Prime Minister Palmerston said 150 years ago, Britain has ‘no friends and no enemies, only interests’. In other words, the Western Establishment is nothing but a Viking warband intent on plunder and pillage, intent on its own interests, and without any principles whatsoever.

Q: What would you say of the general situation? Doesn’t it make you despair?

A: No. The world, as ever, is divided into three groups: God’s, Satan’s and the undecided. This means: the real Orthodox (those who are willing to die for Orthodoxy); Satan’s people (including so-called ‘Orthodox’ apostates); and the rest, including many nominal Orthodox, who have not made up their mind whose they are. Some among the rest are two-faced and agree with everyone, but among the rest there are also those who one day will be willing to die for Orthodoxy. It is in the hope of the repentance of all that the world continues through the mercy of God.

I think in dealing with the things of the world (political events etc), we have to be in the know, but not despair. Be as gentle as doves and wise as serpents, says Christ. We must always remember that though man proposes, God disposes. Satan’s forces do what they want, but it does not mean that they will win. They will not. We know that for a fact. The scheme of the prince of this world and his over-educated minions is obvious – their great plan is to restore the Temple in Jerusalem so that they can enthrone Antichrist there. But it may be hundreds of years till they achieve that, even though there are days when it seems that it is going to happen within just a few years.

God, not man, disposes. Do not despair. We have already seen one miracle – the fall of militant atheism in the old Soviet Unionand the beginning of the restoration of the Christian Empire there. Other miracles are possible. Never underestimate either the wisdom of God or the foolishness of man. Never doubt God’s power.

How Western Culture Reverses Spiritual Progress

All heresies reverse spiritual progress because by their very nature they contain spiritual impurity. That is precisely why the Church, which as the Body of Christ is spiritually pure, perceives heresies as ‘wrong choices’, in Greek ‘heresies’. Essentially, what we are logically saying is that every choice that is not Christocentric contains spiritual impurity, for only Christ is without sin, all else is therefore tainted by sin. This includes all cases when groups of human-beings put their humanistic, impure cultures above Christ, so becoming ethnocentric instead of Christocentric. When humanity does this, it also condemns all other cultures and civilizations, whether existing today, in the past or possibly in the future, including Christocentric culture.

This why the famous Dr Johnson wrote that ‘patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel’, meaning that scoundrels always use flag-waving nationalism as an excuse for their base deeds. In particular, scoundrels make cheap propaganda which demonizes their enemies, making them less than human, ‘subhumans’, ‘Untermenschen’ in Hitler’s language. This is merely a justification for the genocides which they commit. This is what Catholics did when slaughtering Christians (100,000 in England alone in the decade after 1066), Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages, what Protestants did to Black Africans to justify slavery, what the Nazis did to Slavs (30 million of whom they slaughtered), Jews and Gypsies, what the Croats did to Serbs (some 800,000), and the Americans have done to umpteen peoples around the world, from Native Americans to Mexicans, from Japanese to Vietnames, from latin Americans to Iraqis, from Serbs to Russians. ‘They’, ‘the rest and not the West’, were and are all ‘subhuman’. Why? Simply in order to justify their power-grabbing and land-grabbing.

However, if nationalism (which is what Dr Johnson meant when he misused the word ‘patriotism’) is the last resort of the scoundrel, what is the first resort? The first resort of the scoundrel is always religion. This we saw very clearly in the anti-Christian Catholic ‘Crusades’ of the Middle Ages, which sacked and looted the Christian capital in Constantinople, in the Spanish plundering of the Americas in the name of God, in British empire-building (‘civilizing the natives’), in the blasphemous US dollar bill inscribed ‘In God we trust’ (meaning in Mammon we trust), in the German First World War soldier with ‘Gott mit uns’ (‘God with us’) inscribed on his belt, or in the Western-founded Al-Qaida and Islamic State, which use Islam (which as an Old Testament religion in spirit hardly has a record of tolerance in any case) to justify the most abhorrent crimes committed while land-grabbing and power-grabbing.

It is this that certain Western semi-converts to Christianity belonging to the various Local Orthodox Churches have to beware of. For long in this country, for example, we have seen an old generation of ex-Anglican semi-converts who reject ‘foreigners’ (i.e. anyone who has never been an Anglican), proposing their own unOrthodox and crypto-Protestant agenda, rejecting the Church as She is. These Establishment types regard the whole of England as their ‘territory’, set up small congregations of half a dozen here and there in order to justify their presence, try to eject others who do not belong to their mafia-like brotherhood, condescend and patronize, slander and backbite. Fortunately, that generation is dying out and we are now coming to a new generation of real Orthodox, who are not compromised by the ethnic religion of Establishment Anglicanism, which puts its culture above the Church, Which it condemns as ‘foreign’. Christ is indeed foreign to the racially and ethnically narrow, for in His human nature He was an Asian, not a Westerner.

Where did this ethnocentric Western mentality, which condemns all other civilizations and rejects the Christian condemnation of war as an absolute evil, as the Church Civilization of the Orthodox Christian world does (1), come from? Its origins are precisely in the eleventh century, of which the apostates of the Western world so proudly boast as the beginning of their much-vaunted Western ‘civilization’, from which ‘the Holy Spirit proceeds’ (2). That century marks the falling away of Western Europe from Church Civilization and the Christian Faith, the beginning of its spiritual degeneration, which it has since spread worldwide like a degenerative epidemic. It was that century which marked the beginning of the Western world as the future technological giant but spiritual pygmy. Until they purify themselves of that mentality of pride, which asserts that all Western actions are justified because of the imagined ‘innate superiority’ of Western culture over Christ and acquire a conscious and consistent Orthodox world-view, there will be no authentic conversion of such Western converts to the Church of God.

Until then, the abysmal Western genocides of people and culture around the world will continue, from Spain to England in the 11th century, from Jerusalem to Cyprus (3) in the 12th century, from Constantinople to Novgorod in the 13th century, from the Cathars of France (‘kill them all – God will recognize His own’) to the peasants of England in the 14th century, from Italy to Germany in the 15th century, from Amazonian natives (‘kill them – they do not have souls’), to French Protestants in the 16th century, from West African slaves to Carribean plantations in the 17th century, from Bengal to Native Canadians in the 18th century, from starving Irish peasants, the Plains Indians (4), New Zealand Maori, Tasmanian Aborigenes (‘animals’) to Sudanese Muslims in the 19th century, from the Belgian Congo, Boer South Africa (5), Carpatho-Russia, European Slavdom and Jewry to Vietnamese peasants in the 20th century, from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria to the eastern Ukraine already in the first grim years of this 21st century.

As a recent popular historian but no friend of the Church as he writes about himself and those like him, has put it quite accurately and apocalyptically:

‘The road to modernity stretches clearly from the first Millennium onwards, marked by abrupt shifts and turns, to be sure, but unriven by any total catastrophe such as separates the year 1000 from antiquity. Though it might sometimes appear an unsettling reflection, the monks, warriors and serfs of the eleventh century can be reckoned our (sic) direct ancestors in a way that the people of earlier ages never (sic) were. (This book) Millennium, in short, is about the most significant departure point in Western history: the start of a journey that perhaps (sic), in the final reckoning, only a true apocalypse will serve to cut short.

Millennium, Tom Holland, p. xxix, 2008

Notes:

1. It was in the summer of 1053 that for the first time in history a Pope of Rome, ‘St’ (sic!) Leo IX, the Schism-Maker, formally blessed a standard of battle. Absolution from the stain of bloodshed – ‘an impunity for their crimes’- was promised to all who answered the call. This was the first launching of a papally-sanctioned ‘holy war’. This was to be repeated in England 1066, then in the Crusades, and today has been repeated by Western countries, which also ‘replace God’ and arrogate to themselves papal infallibility in wrecking Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the Ukraine, to name but a few examples. On the other hand, when in his book ‘Tactics’, the Christian Emperor Leo VI ‘the Wise’ of New Rome (866-912) called ‘religious war’ simply ‘a licence to loot in religion’s name’, he was expressing the immutable Christian teaching that had been universal until the 11th century before the foundation of Catholicism.

Thus, as Sir Steven Runciman noted, Orthodox Christian history was remarkably free of wars of aggression. Peaceful methods were always preferable, even if they involved tortuous diplomacy or the payment of money. To Western historians, accustomed to admire barbarian militarism, the actions of many Orthodox statesmen appear cowardly or sly; but the motive was usually a genuine desire to avoid bloodshed.

Unlike the Christian view, the Catholic view had developed out of the militarism inherited from pagan Rome. The military society that has emerged in the West out of the barbarian invasions has always sought to justify its habitual pastime of bloodshed and interventionism, just as it does today. It gave prestige to the military hero; and the pacifist acquired a disrepute for which he has never recovered. Already Pope Leo IV, in the mid-ninth century, had declared that anyone dying in battle for the defence of the Church would receive a heavenly reward. Pope John VIII, a few years later, had even ranked the victims of a holy war as martyrs; if they died armed in battle their sins would be remitted.

2. We recall the famous words of Gandhi, who, when asked what he thought of ‘Western civilization’, replied: ‘An excellent idea’.

3. Including the cannibalism of the sadistic French King of England, Richard ‘the Lionheart’.

4. In 1866 General Sherman wrote to President Grant that, ‘We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children’. And, as quoted by his biographer Marszalek, he added that ‘during an assault on an Indian village the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age. As long as resistance is made, death must be meted out’. Together with the other Indian fighter, Philip Sheridan, it was he who wrote that ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’. The descendants of the same Plains Indians have recently supported the Russian Federation against the US government’s anti-Ukrainian and also pro-pedophile policies.

5. In the letter of Tsar Nicholas II to King Edward VII of 27 May 1901, we find the last Orthodox Emperor expressing his concern in English that although his ‘principle is not to meddle in other people’s affairs’ (unlike the modern West), his ‘conscience obliges’ him ‘at last to speak openly’ and that the Boer War ‘looks more like a war of extermination’ and that Britain must ‘put an end to this bloodshed’.

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (May 2015)

Q: Your writing seems to have become less apocalyptic and more optimistic in the last 10-15 years or so, why is that?

A: In the 70s, 80s and 90s, we thought that was probably it, that there was little hope for any revival of Orthodoxy inside Russia and that therefore outside Russia, little ROCOR would just have to hold on to the end, which could only be a few generations away at most. For example, I remember meeting in 1977 the elderly widowed matushka of the philosopher and inventor of ‘eucharistic theology’, Fr Nikolai Afanasiev, from Paris (she was much more Orthodox than he was). She told me despairingly, ‘Russia is finished’. Of course, many in her generation who had lived through the Revolution and exile thought exactly that.

Indeed, I too had great doubts as to whether I would see a revival in my lifetime. The 90s under Yeltsin brought little hope; it seemed as though after the obscenities of atheism Russia was just going to copy the West in terms of continuing apostasy. And yet we have, ever since the Jubilee Council of August 2000 and the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors, begun to see the long-awaited transfiguration. Everything changed on that day as was seen in the miracle of the Cross in the sky that appeared then. Russia is the key, if Russia is restored, then the restoration of the rest of the Orthodox world from decadence and Halfodoxy will follow. It is the signs of this process that we are so eagerly following now.

Q: Are you not over-optimistic? Look at all the problems in Russia, abortion, alcoholism, crime, mass nominalism, the Ukraine.

A: I have always said that the revival on Russia is on a knife-edge. Everything can still go one way or another. The Ukraine is a huge warning that shows just how fragile the situation is. What lies behind the civil war in the Ukraine is the spiritual crisis of nominalism which shows that fragility. So-called Orthodox Ukrainians are defending statues of Lenin, the monster who created the Ukraine! What sort of Orthodoxy is that? It is no more Orthodox than the Uniats who want to put up statues of Hitler.

Washington can still undermine everything, as we have seen in Constantinople since 1948 when its agents deposed the Orthodox Patriarch and replaced him with their puppet. Now, throughout the Balkans and the Middle East, Washington, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through its EU vassal, is attacking the soft underbelly of the Orthodox world. Whether in decadent Syria, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, the Ukraine, it is trying to destroy the Orthodox Church as the last bastion against Antichrist, whom neocon Washington is aiming to enthrone in its Israeli client-state. Wherever there is decadence in the Orthodox Church, there Washington and its colonies are attacking and intimidating. We have to be strong and consciously resist – then they cannot attack us.

Q: Does this explain the present situation in Macedonia?

A: Yes. Washington was so angered when Russia freed Bishop Jovan from his Macedonian prison and when Russia proposed to send a pipeline through Turkey, Greece and Macedonia (since Washington had bribed corrupt Bulgarian politicians not to accept it there) that it decided to organize a coloured revolution in Macedonia using its Albanian mafia clients from Kosovo. That is what is happening there now.

Q: How is the Serbian Church reacting?

A: It is in a dilemma. The Americans had already vetoed the election of Metr Amfilochije of Montenegro as Serbian Patriarch, but not everything is going their way, just as in the Romanian and Greek Churches, despite their manipulations there. Notably in Greece, the veneration of the relics of St Barbara by hundreds of thousands is greatly irritating the Americans. Anything traditionally Orthodox annoys them immensely because it automatically shows solidarity with the Russian Church, which it is desperate to destroy, as its neocon leaders openly proclaim. However, they have been annoyed above all by the resistance of Ukrainians to their puppet show in Kiev and its mass murder. The Orthodox seem to be winning there. That is a miracle. We are hopeful that the prophecy of Elder Jonah of Odessa will yet come true. But like all prophecies, it will need mass repentance to come true.

Q: What prophecy?

A: That victory for Orthodoxy will come in the Ukraine, but only after a bloody Easter (in 2014) and a hungry Easter (in 2015), at Easter 2016.

Q: All of these events are happening far away, in the Balkans or the Middle East, surely it does not affect us here in the West?

A: Oh, yes it does. For instance, the Russian Church faces immense opposition to the establishment of even a single new parish in the Western world. On the other hand, the West supports the establishment of parishes of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Why? Because it fully controls them through freemasonry etc. This is the case locally in the east of England, as all over the Western world. Beware of the fifth column. Look at how many years we have had to wait for the new Russian Cathedral in Paris. The foundation stone has just been laid – five years late, twelve years after it was first mooted with sorts of delays, some created by the homosexual former mayor of Paris.

Q: How do you resist? How do you achieve anything against the establishment of a masonic Orthodoxy which has been promoted in the West? Why has an ‘Establishment Western Church’ not appeared, when so much has been done to create it?

A: Thanks to the immigration of real Orthodox from Eastern Europe, a ‘Eurochurch’ has not been formed. Immigrants have come to the West in the last 15 years and saved the situation, supporting us, the once small minority, on whom the Establishment used to spit and turn its back in contempt and condemnation. Real Orthodox can no longer be ignored in the West – much to the fury of the Halfodox. They had counted on establishing a kind of degutted ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’, an ‘Orthodoxy Lite’, a Constantinople-controlled (that is, US State Department-controlled) Finnish Orthodoxy throughout Western Europe. This was to be built on protestantizing half-converted Europeans and on lapsed second and third generation Orthodox. This was as crazy as a chain-smoker trying to build an American Orthodoxy on half-converted ex-Episcopalians and former Uniats.

Q: Why is the West so opposed to the Russian Church in particular?

A: Precisely because we do not represent some sort of Establishment-approved Balkan folklore or masonic lodge, but the uncompromised Church of God. The devil is angry with us and so uses his agents against us. Wherever there is compromise in matters of the Faith, there is the devil. He does not want integrity. As the old proverb says, ‘the devil always builds a chapel next to a church’. This became crystal clear in 2006 when the British Establishment and media so vigorously approved the schism in the Sourozh Diocese in this country and launched a vitriolic campaign against the Russian Church. Their hatred was really quite shocking, all for a tiny and spiritually irrelevant schism! But the Establishment always defends its own, as it is always shaken when it is resisted; this world does not want any witness to the other world.

The same situation prevails in all other Western countries, where certain senior clerics, academics and laypeople of the OCA in the USA and of the Paris Jurisdiction in France work for those countries’ Russophobic secret services. We must never lose our freedom in the Russian Church, as they have. Once you have lost your freedom, you are spiritually compromised. And let us be frank, this also happened to a few individuals in ROCOR between the 70s and the 90s. It can happen anywhere. As the secret services say: ‘Every man has his price’. That is the cynical level they work on.

Q: So how do we resist?

A: As a new Catholic acquaintance said to me only a few days ago, ‘Orthodoxy? That’s an advanced form of Catholicism, isn’t it?’ I was struck by this view from the outside. What is certainly true is that there are individuals on the fringes of the Orthodox Church who do not at all confess ‘an advanced form of Catholicism’, but confess a modern Catholicism, i.e. a debased form of Protestantism, in fact, more or less secularism.

Q: So what do we have to do?

A: We have to reverse the processes by which the Church in the West was debased into Catholicism and then the processes by which Catholicism in turn became debased. That means going back to before 1054.

Q: Can you explain that in more detail?

A: Growing up in England, the one historical date I knew even as a small child, like all children, was 1066, the Battle of Hastings. I realized that it was very important locally, but did not understand its general context until some years later through the Church. Later placing that date of 1066 in its historical context as an Orthodox, I realized that it was all linked with the processes that had taken place during the eleventh century, through which Catholicism had been founded and, through it, a Western European world quite independent of and separate from the Church of God, with its own fake Christian institutions.

In other words, I discovered that 1066 was not some isolated date unconnected with everything else, it was part of a much wider process, of which provincial England was just a part. Locally, it meant the final debasing of England as an Orthodox country, but this was the same thing that had happened elsewhere before, in ‘Frankland’, Northern France and Western Germany, then in southern Italy and Spain, and happened elsewhere later, in the Crusades in the Middle East and with the Teutonic Knights in Eastern Europe. The aim was to turn the whole world into ‘Frankland’ – which is what Washington is now trying to do in the Ukraine and Macedonia at this very moment, 950 years later.

Moreover, the situation that developed in 1066 in England has lasted until today; we are still occupied by the Normans because there has been no repentance. Incredibly, 1066 is still marked by Establishment types as some sort of progress or victory, the birth of England, instead of its death! That is the result of a total lack of repentance. Lack of repentance always justifies evil. Look at the neocons in the USA today as examples of lack of repentance and justification of evil! Remember Madeleine Albright who said that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children was ‘a price worth paying’. The Nazis said the same sort of thing. Little wonder that the neocons support Neo-Nazis in Kiev. They come from the same stable.

And no repentance means no restoration. So what do we have to do to restore Truth? We have to deNormanize or, to express it in its general European and world context, deFrankize, in other words, we have to return to the Church and the Church way of thinking. That is absolutely vital if we are ever to found a Metropolia in Western Europe, the basis for a new Local Church.
Q: You mention 1066, behind which hides 1054, are there any other concealed dates in history like that?

A: Definitely yes and many of them. You see, a correct understanding of the Church is the key to understanding the past, just as a correct understanding of the Church is the key to understanding the future. What makes no sense in secular terms always makes sense when it is put into the light of the Church – or into the darkness of the absence of the Church. 1066 makes no spiritual sense until you understand that 1054 lies behind it, that it was all part of the same process of spiritual degeneration in Western Europe that had begun with Charlemagne and has still not ended. For example, today’s civil war in Syria makes no sense until you understand the spiritual degradation that went on in Syria before it. Another example, much closer and more obvious to us, is 1918, behind which hides 1914.

Q: 1918? Can you explain that?

A: 1918 marked the killing and martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II, a date which changed world history because it created the Soviet Union and all that that entailed, including Communist China. There is no going back to before that until repentance and so restoration. Behind 1918 is concealed 1914 with the German (or rather Prussian – ‘Prussia ruined Germany’ as the Hessian princess the Tsarina Alexandra said in 1914) declaration of war. And that meant the spiritual suicide of Europe.

Q: On this subject, Western sources more or less all assert that the fall of the Romanovs was their own fault, for instance that it was Tsar Nicholas’ weakness that led to the Romanovs’ downfall. Is this true?

A: Of course not, this is all just self-justifying propaganda. Yes, it is true that Tsar Nicholas II came to the throne young and unprepared after the totally unexpected death of his father, Alexander III. It is true that in the first years of his reign he suffered much from the cabal of his power-seeking uncles, the corrupt Grand Dukes, who took advantage of his youth and great kindness. But the real reason for the downfall of Imperial Russia was the treason of the aristocracy and the generals, including, it is true, of a great many of the extended Romanov family and many Grand Dukes, because of their apostasy from Orthodoxy, which caused jealousy, greed, gossip, slander and the murder of the peasant Rasputin.

These aristocrats wanted to overthrow Tsar Nicholas, the legitimate authority, because they wanted power for themselves. Seeing Tsar Nicholas’ strong will and resolution, they slandered him and carried out a coup d’etat, accusing him of a weak will and irresolution. This was mere self-justification. Their agreement to a Revolution that had been prepared by Buchanan, the British ambassador in Saint Petersburg, who soon regretted his foolishness, created the nightmare. Of course, they punished themselves because they lost everything. It was their own fault. The best of them understood it and had time to repent for it in the Bolshevik Gulag or else in exile, in Berlin, Belgrade, Paris, London (like Fr George Sheremetiev) and elsewhere. Others never repented of the blood on their hands.

Q: So are you saying that the West was responsible for the Revolution?

A: Directly, through its agents, and indirectly, through the westernized aristocrats, yes. Fopr example, directly because of German funding for the Bosheviks (just as the Japanese had funded the 1905 Revolution and the British and Americans had stood behind the Japanese, using them as vassals – as the USA still does). Directly because the British wanted revenge on Russia because Russia had supported the Boers and the Americans wanted revenge because the Russians had supported the Native Americans (as they still do), so they sent Trotsky. Directly because the British did not want to see Constantinople freed by Russia in 1917. But also indirectly because of the treason of the Russian aristocracy, blindly anglophile like the murderous Oxford graduate the transvestite drunkard and parasite Yusupov, one of the richest men in Russia. His ideal was not Holy Rus, but Oscar Wilde! What hope was there with such as Yusupov?

Q: What was Russia’s aim in the First World War?

A: It was, as Tsar Nicholas said to the treacherous French ambassador in 1914, the destruction of German militarism. The Tsar actually predicted that if it was not defeated, there would be another war. Tsar Nicholas had already targeted it in his proposed Hague peace and disarmament conference at the end of the 19th century. Russia knew that once militarism was defeated, peace could prevail in Europe and thus worldwide. However, the West, especially Berlin but also London, did not want peace, and so slaughtered its youth. And nor did the bankers of New York want peace. However, with Russia taken over by the Wall Street backed Bolsheviks, only war could prevail, which is exactly what has happened ever since 1918, indeed since 1914. The world has not known peace for 101 years. That is not Russia’s fault.

Q: What are the temptations which could stop Russia’s revival today?

A: On the one hand, there is westernization, such as that which infected the pre-Revolutionary aristocracy and today infects the US-controlled puppet oligarch-bandits, the modern aristocrats, who actually are mainly Jewish. On the other hand, there is the threat of a narrow Russian nationalism, such as that which prevailed in parts of ROCOR between the 1970s and the 1990s. This could prevent Russia taking imperial responsibility for the rest of the Orthodox world, parts of which have fallen into such great decadence since 1918. All is still on a knife-edge. We make no predictions. All we can say is what we have to do is clear – to fight for the Orthodox Truth without compromise; as to whether we can be successful and so delay the coming of Antichrist in the near future, that is not clear. All we have is hope, faith and love.

1016-2015: A Royal Birth and a Commons Election

The birth to the Duchess of Cambridge of the French-named Princess Charlotte, brother to the English-named Prince George, marks another turning point in the history of the Royal Family. Never since the near 950-year Norman Occupation which began in 1066 have the heirs to the English throne been almost three-quarters English.

After all, Prince Charles and his ancestors are all Saxe-Coburg-Gotha Germans, disguised under the pseudonym of Windsor, but the two sons attributed to him are almost half-English. With the Norman-named Prince William marrying the most English Kate Middleton (what name could be more English than Middleton?), the third and fourth in line to the throne are not French, Welsh, Scottish, Dutch or German like all the other monarchs since 1016 (excepting the brief rule of Harold Godwinsson, before all these foreign monarchs Edward the Confessor was also foreign, half-Norman, and those before him Vikings like Harald, Sven and Knut). In fact we have come to the most English future monarchs since Edmund Ironside – who ruled until 1016 – almost exactly 1,000 years ago.

The UK elections have also been of historic interest. Firstly, a government has been elected which for the first time ever claims that it is actually going to allow the people of the UK to say whether they wish to be members of the European Union or not. This is a kick in the teeth for the Brussels Establishment tyrants. Secondly, the people of Scotland have voted out the Westminster elite. This is a kick in the teeth for the British Establishment tyrants. Some 100 years after the Irish tragedy, when Ireland was forced to leave the Island Unity because of the tyranny of Norman London, there is a new chance to see a Confederation of the Isles and reject the tyranny of Britain; the old dream of Four Nations living together in peace, in the unity and diversity of the Holy Trinity, has moved just a little closer.

Could the tyranny of Norman London (the English Capital was in Winchester) be coming to an end? Could the eighteenth-century Imperial project of the Hanoverian tyrants, who collectivized the land of the English and Scottish peasantry, so oppressed the American colonies and enslaved half of Africa and India (the Camerons were among the slave-owners), at last be over? Could all this be leading to the reshaping of the UK? Could all this be leading to a reshaping of UK politics, with the now degutted, Blairized, neocon, anti-working-class Labour Party dead and the Conservative Party, enslaved these 35 years to philistine Dickensian economists, their minds the size of grocer’s shops, and to US colonial wars, be reformed? If so, is perhaps even the reshaping of Europe and the end of EU slavery, not also possible?

We do not know. We know only that man proposes, but God disposes. And that we sense a breath of hope.