Category Archives: Secularism

The World That Was Lost in 1917

Tell them that the evil that is in the world will grow, but it is not evil that will triumph, but only love.

Holy Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II

The Emperor and Empress thought that they were dying for their Homeland. In fact, they died for all mankind.

Pierre Gilliard

Introduction: 1917 the Turning Point

It is often said that the world was lost with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This is not accurate. In fact, the world was lost in 1917 and since then has been plunged into suffering and continual warfare. For the real aim of the First World War, the aim of the Satanic Manipulator behind all the petty aims of his human puppets, was not to find a solution to the tribal, territorial disputes of kindred but rival peoples at the tiny, western end of Eurasian Continent, but to destroy the vast Eurasian Russian Orthodox Empire and its Tsar. This Heartland-Empire stood for the averting of wars, spiritual life, unity and balance; therefore it had to be slandered so that it could be destroyed. It alone stood in the way of what the technologically advanced but spiritually dwarfed Western peoples chose to describe as ‘universal progress’. This ‘universal progress’, since 1917 unchecked by the Russian Empire and its Tsar, is the history of all the wars and catastrophes of the last 100 years.

Above East and West

The symbol of the vast Russian Orthodox Empire, the double-headed eagle, combined East and West. This was and is the symbol of Christ worldwide. Thus, with its western borders peaceful and stabilised for many years, the Tsar and the Empire embarked on the Great Asian Plan to secure the Pacific coasts of Siberia, ensuring the security of Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea and fragile China against rapacious Japan with its British and American financed military machine and British-built Navy. It was this Japan that stabbed the Empire in the back, as, ironically, it later did America and Britain. Elsewhere in Asia the Empire supported the sovereignty of Afghanistan, Tibet and Siam (Thailand), and in Africa, Ethiopia and South Africa. And, most importantly, it supported the Orthodox Christians of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and especially the Holy Land. The Empire stood above and united East and West; it was universal, which is why our own salvation is in her salvation.

Above Left and Right

The Sovereign Monarch towered above the petty combats of self-interested political parties and the vainglorious personality politics of corrupt parliamentarianism. Only the Anointed Sovereign had a vision beyond left and right and saw the whole. Only he was strong-willed and independent enough to reign and responsible to God for the well-being of the Empire. He had to fight both against leftist terrorists and decadent and hugely wealthy aristocrats, including members of his own extended family. These latter, because they already had immense riches which their hard hearts would not give to the poor, wanted the power of the Sovereign for their own futile and vainglorious ends, and so overthrew the whole Empire, whose destiny was also that of the betrayed Tsar. Thus, they handed all to the ruthless and terroristic atheists, who thought that they could create a paradise on earth if only they could seize power by violence, however many millions they might have to kill in the process.

Above Provincialism and Degeneration

The best of the Church of the Russian Orthodox Empire was international, stretching around the world into the Americas and Western Europe. It stood above petty Balkan nationalism and its provincial Greek phyletism, not to mention the warring tribalism of Western Europe, which the Empire had tried to overcome with peace-making at the Hague. The Orthodox Rus’ of the Empire was international. The aims of the First World War that had been imposed on the Empire became to free others, Germans, Poles, Czechoslovaks and Serbs, from centralised tyranny, and to gather all the Orthodox Christian lands, including Constantinople and Carpatho-Russia, together. The Royal Family, European and Orthodox, stood above such provincialism and the spiritual and so moral degeneration linked to it. The family life of the Sovereign was exemplary and showed elegance, purity and beauty, a model for family life today; they prayed together, they became saints together, an icon of the family.

An Unbalanced World led to the ‘Balance of Terror’ of Left and Right

In 1917 the traitors took Russia out of the First World War and so the world became unbalanced. The old hope of Nicholas II of allying Russia, Germany and France in peace was for ever lost. And the immediate results were the USA entering the war, taking over decadent Europe, and Zionism triumphing with the support of the bankrupt British government. This has since ensured permanent warfare between the West and the Muslim world. The result was then the disaster of Versailles, which directed its vengeance against the misled German peoples, who had lost their homelands, instead of the centralising Prussian elite. Europe did not learn the lesson of its attempted suicide and so the Second World War was made inevitable. The world became divided between Left and Right, East and West, Communist and Fascist, and even after the Second War, it went on to live for almost another fifty years in terror of being obliterated by nuclear warfare, the costs of which were bankrupting.

Provincialisation and Degeneration

Two sayings state that ‘united we stand, divided we fall’ and ‘divide and rule’. The ‘Balkanisation’ of division has been exactly the policy of today’s anti-Orthodox Powers. Thus, Constantinople, like other ancient but tiny Patriarchates, has since 1917 become a Western-controlled puppet and the once Orthodox or partly Orthodox Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria, Baltic States, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland have now lost their sovereignty and enslaved themselves to EU colonialism and economic, spiritual and so moral degeneration. Today the heavily Polonised, heavily Uniatised, Galician-centred westernmost borderlands, the western 20% of the ‘Ukraine’, for the moment belonging to the real Europe of Orthodoxy, seek slavery to the same, false, anti-Orthodox ‘Europe’ of the US-founded ‘European Union’. The broken family life of the provincial and degenerate EU is anti-exemplary and shows vulgarity, impurity and ugliness; it is an anti-icon of the family.

Conclusion: Treason and Cowardice and Deceit

The Tsar-Martyr, from whom the elite and then the people abdicated, said: ‘All around – treason and cowardice and deceit’. These are the anti-Trinity that destroyed the Russian Empire and led to his triumphal martyrdom and that of millions of Russian Orthodox Christians. Tsar Nicholas faced the treason and cowardice of unprincipled, anti-Orthodox aristocrats, who had lost their faith, and of left-wing terrorists, and the deceit of the Western Powers who, Allies on paper, rejoiced at his downfall. However, all have been punished: the left-wing terrorists betrayed and killed each other; the faithless, anti-Orthodox aristocrats were shot, exiled and chose schism; and the Western Powers, colonised by their colonies, deceived themselves and are now dying powerless. None of the above three groups has so far been able to recognise the Tsar as a saint, for to do so would mean repenting for all their errors and lies of the last 100 years and more – and they are too proud to do that.

Free Nelson Mandela

Another secular saint has been created. Nelson Mandela will now join the gallery of other secular saints and ‘icons’ of secularism, together with President Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Princess Diana and a multitude of other dead celebrities.

What is outrageous is first of all the sheer hypocrisy of many who now pay him tribute. Thus, President Obama reigns over Guantanamo Bay, where there are untried political prisoners, whose fate is similar to Nelson Mandela under the apartheid regime. Similarly, Anglo-Saxon and other leaders fawn on Nelson Mandela’s memory and yet surely all know that racist South Africa would never have survived, if it had not for decades been supported by various Western and Western-allied countries, especially Great Britain and Israel. Now that a great man is dead, they all say that they always supported him. That is a lie.

There is also a second lie. This is to make Nelson Mandela into an ‘icon’ of secularism. Why was he great? Not because of his lack of discernment, gullibility or broken family life – but because of his Christian faith. Like countless other Christian prisoners in the atheist Gulag of the Soviet Union, he spent over 25 years in captivity. (True, they spent their captivity in far worse conditions, many of them dying there; however the Western establishment and media ignore them because they were Orthodox Christians and so not ‘politically correct’). And like these countless others, because of his Christian background, he had the ability to forgive his captors. In this way, South Africa, although today extremely violent, extremely corrupt, with huge numbers of extremely poor people and ravaged by AIDS, at least did not embark on the disastrous and suicidal course of anti-White vengeance and terrorism, like Zimbabwe and many other ex-African colonies.

We can hope that the many faults and errors in the youth of Nelson Mandela will be forgiven him at the Last Judgement, since he forgave others their many faults and errors. This is Christian; but the rabid secularists of the USA, Canada and the EU will never admit to this. It is a pity; they could learn something and stop their nasty persecution of Christians in their own countries, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa. Free Nelson Mandela from the strangulation of the secularists; let him be seen as what he was: a Christian.

The Struggle for Holy Orthodoxy: Secularism, Nationalism and Nominalism

Introduction

‘The struggle for Holy Orthodoxy’ was a phrase of the ever-memorable Metr Laurus. No doubt the many who knew this saintly hierarch much better than us could speak more about how he used it. The phrase, however, is very apt to describe those who seem to be crashing onto the rocks around the Church, without ever attaining Her. Today Holy Orthodoxy is threatened by two external threats, but above all by one internal threat. Only by struggling against all three of them can we win the struggle. What are these threats?

Secularism

The first threat is symbolised by the recent announcement that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a pan-European group, has passed a resolution condemning circumci-sion of children as a violation of human rights. The resolution was passed a few days ago with 78 votes in favour to just 13 against. 15 abstained from the vote. This wave of anti-Semitism against all Semites, Jews as well as Arab Muslims, may seem to some Orthodox Christians not to be our concern. However, it is.

Now, as we have seen with the furore around the practice of homosexuality, all faith is under threat from Western secularism, which is being spearheaded by the EU. This ‘secularism’, in fact just another name for atheism, threatens the catholicity, integrity and freedom of the Orthodox Church. Today it is against Jew and Muslim, tomorrow it will be the banning of Orthodox baptism, which will mean that the prophecy of St Seraphim of Vyritsa (+ 1949), that Europeans will be forced to go to Russia for baptism, will come true.

Without the sense of catholicity, integrity and freedom the Local Orthodox Churches are threatened by the development of personality cults, which we saw developing when the Russian Church was not free under the Soviet yoke; then those who did not want the Russian Church to be reduced to a personality cult, left for freedom. But when the personality in question died, those who had created the cult also left, for their only attachment to the Church had been the dead personality whom they had culted.

Without the sense of catholicity, integrity and freedom, the Orthodox Churches are also threatened by homosexualisation, the result of the lack of monastic life. We saw this with the notorious Archbishop German Aav in Finland in the 1920s and the ensuing ‘Finlandisation’ of many parishes there, which have still not recovered. We have seen similar problems in the recent past in the USA and today the horrible problems created by homosexual plotters in the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, who slandered and ejected their Metropolitan.

Nationalism

Nationalism anywhere is a spiritual danger. Nationalism in the Church leads to the ethnic religion of the narrow and self-centred cultural ghetto, the petty religion of the pharisee and the sectarian. It belongs to a primitive world of isolation, for it says that one’s tribal group is above Christ. Soviet nationalism, still infecting Russia, is a good example of this. However, this is also a generational phenomenon which does not last, because it is incapable of bearing fruit in the next generation, which rejects it, unable to bear its constricting narrowness.

We well remember at the end of the 1970s studying at St Serge in Paris and the views of the late rector, Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev, on the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the very Patriarchate to which he belonged. Having suffered in the 1960s from that Patriarchate’s three-year long abandonment of his diocese, he had been to the Phanar and asked for proof that the Patriarch there really did have universal authority among the Local Orthodox Churches as he claimed and was not simply, as he put it, ‘a petty Balkan bishop’.

He did not receive any proof and so in the 1970s tried to bring his jurisdiction back to the Russian Orthodox Church. Today’s paranoid misreport in the ‘EU Greek Reporter’ (http://eu.greekreporter.com/2013/10/21/conflicts-in-the-orthodox-ecumenical-council/) says indeed that the Patriarchate of Constantinople missed its unitive vocation during the Cold War through its nationalism. The article confirms that petty nationalistic jealousy on the part of the US-run Greek Patriarchate is delaying the convening of an Inter-Orthodox Conference.

The political jealousy of the Phanar with regard to Russian Orthodox Ukraine, which it recently tried to take over with US and EU backing, with regard to Russian Orthodox missionary work carried out for well over a century in Japan, China and the USA (as also in Poland and Czechoslovakia) and with regard to Russia’s present vital role in the Middle East in supporting the now Arab-run Patriarchate of Antioch against American interventionism, is not conducive to inter-Orthodox co-operation.

Nominalism

Despite the external irritants of Secularism and petty Nationalism – and not only Greek – the real enemy of the Church is internal. It is called Nominalism. This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as three visits to church per lifetime, for baptism, marriage and funeral. This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as a fifteen-minute visit on Easter Night. This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as a thirty-minute visit once a month to ‘listen to the choir’.

This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as belonging to the 80% who sometimes attend but do not contribute, and not the 20% who take an active part in Church life and without whom the Church would not exist. This is also the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as living the consumerist lifestyle of this world; the Church is a supermarket, from which the consumer is free to choose whatever they like, that is, only ‘the nice, comfortable parts’.

Such a consumerist distortion of Church life in particular affects the demographics of any country that has fallen to nominalism, including once Orthodox countries. There, a large family is considered to be a burden, even a curse, by the consumerist. They say: How can you ‘enjoy’ life when you have a large family? Thus the world has fallen to the greatest holocaust in human history, greater than that of Hitler, Stalin and Mao; this is the holocaust of abortion, the greatest genocide and suicide in history.

All the once Orthodox countries have been infected by this holocaust. Thus, Russia cannot populate its expanses; China will do it instead. It has been calculated that if the atheist Revolution had never taken place, Russia would today have a population of over 600 million. How then can it be that in such a country the prophecies of rebirth will come right? Those who ask this question forget that prophecies are always conditional on repentance. Even so, it is true that Russia may not have quantity, but it may at least have quality.

Conclusion

Today Europe has finished its history. By its own choice it has nothing more to say; so it is no longer a civilisational choice. As for the USA, it has, like its films, only technology, the ‘shock and awe’ of special effects. As for other lands, they have people and productivity, but their cultures, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Animist, have lost the original impetus that came from faith and have only nationalism or violence. Only the multinational Church of Rus still bears a creative civilisation. The world will choose that – or die.

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?

Neo-Hesychasm and the Struggle for Authentic Orthodoxy

Already before the First World War, British Establishment freemasonry in Cyprus, then 65 years ago, in 1948, the US State Department in Constantinople, and then 32 years ago, in 1981, the EEC (now called the EU) in Greece, have all taken part in their conscious Crusade to enslave the Church. They have wanted to create an artificial, politically correct Orthodoxy, acceptable to the secular powerbrokers of this world. This pseudo-Orthodoxy, a lightweight ‘Diet Orthodoxy’, persecuting of piety, Cross-less, fasting-less, comfortable, consumerist and anti-ascetic, is sterilised, diluted, degutted, neutered, castrated and disincarnate.

It is therefore new-calendarised, uniatised, anglicanised, protestantised, modernised, liberalised, finlandised, often beardless and homosexualised, confessionless and repentance-free because of its self-admiring pride, the sense of the sacred and mystery removed together with the iconostasis, and replaced by plastic, steel and chrome, salt that has lost its savour. The Neo-Frankish neo-colonialist process has so far affected some 20% of the Orthodox world, but not the vast majority of the Russian, Serbian and Georgian Churches, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, or parts of the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches and others.

There is conscious resistance to such humanistic modernism and renovationism. The latter have manipulated shallow, spiritually weak, uprooted and so disincarnate, nominally Orthodox intellectuals in the Diaspora in particular, victims of their own pride of mind and vanity. The ascetic alternative to the above Westernised and Western-supported and financed ‘Orthodoxy’, this alternative for which we have fought for most of our lives, comes in the form of the ever-renewed Tradition of the authentic Orthodox Faith – which we may call Neo-Hesychasm. This means the Trinitarian opposition to all of the above, implying:

The continuing recognition of the Fatherhood of authentic monasticism in Church and society; the Sonhood of conscious commitment to the Incarnational, Orthodox civilisational world view and ethos, with its sense of supra-national Orthodox unity (the Patriarch of Moscow taking on the unifying role of the Tsar until the election of the new and coming Tsar, the Patriarch of Constantinople having lost this role in 1453); the Spirithood of an unshakeable commitment to authentic Orthodoxy worldwide, with, implicit in this, the understanding and openness to heterodox to make missionary work among them possible.

Modernism, Post-Modernism and Post-Postmodernism

Modernism is a very old-fashioned concept, dating back to the nineteenth century. The concept passed through artists like Matisse, Gauguin and then Picasso and a whole school of thinkers. However, its culminating point – and also death – came only some fifty years ago in the 1960s, which itself culminated in the youth revolutions of 1968. ‘Modern’ meant anti-Victorian, the rejection of any kind of ‘old’ value, of anything ‘old-fashioned’, regardless of whether it was worthwhile or not. Typical of this culmination of Modernism were the Second Vatican Council, liberalism, feminism, divorce, drug-taking, alcoholism, pornography, abortion, and the collapse of marriage and stable family life. Most of its revolutionary and rebellious advocates have died from a way of life that was full of vice.

A decade later, after the culmination of Modernism, the rejection of any sort of tradition, good or bad, inevitably came the culmination of ‘Post-Modernism’, that is, cynicism, scepticism, disbelief and nihilistic ‘deconstruction’. Although Post-Modernism is also an old concept, its culminating-point could only come after the 1960s in the cynical destructiveness of the period between the 1970s and 1990s. Typical of Post-Modernism are the lack of belief in anything constructive, spiritual emptiness, depression, nothingness, ‘anything goes’, the mocking of heartfelt belief, irony, throwaway products, shallowness, cheapness, passing fads and fashions and superficiality. Most of its faithless and often bitter, disbelieving advocates are now ageing or else are already dead.

The question is, if Post-Modernism comes after Modernism, what comes after Post-Modernism? This is a question that intellectuals have debated for well over a decade and about which they still have not come to any conclusion. This is because of the faithless and spiritually empty nature of Post-Modernism. After a vacuum, anything is possible. And consensus on what makes an epoch cannot be achieved while that epoch is still in its early stages. On the one hand, it is possibly to continue to wallow in the negativism of Post-Modernism and make a cult or delusional consciousness out of it. On the other hand, it is equally possible to reject something as primitive and negative as Post-Modernism with something positive and constructive.

‘Something positive and constructive’. These are words which have little meaning in Western society, which alone has generated both Modernism and Post-Modernism. Interestingly, it may therefore be that the Western world will have to stop being ethnocentric and look outside its self-absorbed culture to find the qualities to regenerate itself. The fact is that ‘something positive and constructive’ can only be built on Faith, which is the very baby that was thrown out together with the bathwater in the Western Modernist 60s and Post-Modernist 70s and after. ‘Post-Postmodernism’ is an awkward name. ‘Metamodernism’ and ‘Trans-Modernism’ have been suggested. They too seem very awkward. Perhaps a single syllable, ‘Faith’, is what is really needed by this disbelieving Western world.

On Saving the Peoples of the West from their Elites

Time and again in recent weeks, we have heard it said, ‘Thank God for President Putin’, often adding, ‘though I never thought I’d say this’. They refer to two issues: the new Russian child protection law that forbids the spreading of homosexual propaganda among minors and the Russian stand on Syria. On these issues suicidal Western elites, who also stand behind mass abortion, deludedly proclaim that they represent ‘the international community’, have earned the hostility of Western peoples and the real international community. Today, the one voice that is standing up to these suicidal elites – political and media – is coming from Russia. That voice is standing up for Christian values, which are being persecuted by Islamist fanatics in Syria and by secularist fanatics in the Western world.

It is to be noted that both the above positions taken by Russia are immensely popular both inside and, it seems, outside, Russia. Once again it proves how democratic Russia is, in that its official policies reflect the will of its people, and how undemocratic Western countries are, in that the policies of its bullying elites do not reflect the wills of their peoples. Thus, as regards attacks against war-torn Syria, it appears that about 90% of American people are against, the figures only slightly lower in the most pro-American European countries, France and Britain. As regards the rest of bankrupt Western Europe, in Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland etc, support for attacks on Syria is invisible. Indeed, twelve NATO countries have already declared that they will have nothing to do with such aggression and murder.

Similarly, the peoples of many countries in the Western world would support the introduction of child protection laws just as in Russia. (This does not include over thirty countries in Africa and Asia which actually have anti-homosexual laws). Such a gap between elites and peoples can only exist because Western elites, supported by huge PR spending and voted into power only by minorities of the electorate, are cut off from the peoples whom they supposedly represent. In reality, huge numbers boycott Western ‘democratic’ elections (which in any case only offer a choice between two individuals), for lack of any convincing candidate to vote for. The gap between elites and peoples must be the result of the Western cultural Marxism, called political correctness, which the elites profess.

In reality, the Soviet-style, decivilising Western elites, their heads turned by political power and banksters’ gold, have lost contact with the roots of Western civilisation, Christianity. The latter still commands at least the cultural respect of whole sections of Western societies. This is why that part of the Western world, which is still faithful to the roots of its civilisation, has become reliant on Russia to speak on its behalf. This is the only country which, having fallen into the delusion of Western political Marxism, rejected it. Having done this and so also seen off Western cultural Marxism, it has returned to its own Christian roots. Today once-atheist Russia is calling on the once-Christian Western world to return to its roots, with the dire warning of what will follow if the Western elites do not heed it.

Defending the True West

The free voice of the Orthodox Church can be heard in a number of places today.

The Present Situation of the Orthodox Church in ‘Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition’, July 1989

Introduction

Unlike some, we have over the last forty years of writing always defended the True or Old West and its culture, while always telling the truth about the False or New West. According to this balanced Orthodox view of the world, the True West is that which was and is in communion with, and was and is an integral part of, the Church of God, the whole Orthodox world. The True West is 10,000 glorified saints, listed on this website. They include apostles and martyrs, of Rome, of Lyon, of Agaunum, of Merida and many other holy places, and Church Fathers, St Irenaeus of Lyon, St Hilary of Poitiers, St Ambrose of Milan, St Vincent of Lerins, St John Cassian, and a multitude of confessors and monastics who brought the Light of Christ to the spiritual deserts of the pagan Latin and Germanic world and marked them for all ages with their names.

The True West and the False West

The True West lasted for more or less the first millennium, before the powerbrokers who ruled over this Western corner of Europe, then containing a small minority of the total Christian population, cut it off from communion with the Church. This was in order to launch themselves into their great Western nationalist project consisting of false ideologies, Catholic-ism, Protestant-ism and now Secular-ism. We have had no illusions about the inherently secular nature of this False and New West, that of the secular second millennium and secularist third millennium.

Of course, there are those who do not belong to Christian culture, who attack the West out of insecurity, undiscerningly demonising it. They put their own culture and ethnicity above the Western, failing to discern between the True West and the False West. Islam is in particular guilty of this, but so sometimes is Hinduism, the former especially expressing even violence and fanaticism. Occasionally even some Greek Orthodox take part in this, not only old calendarists and sectarians, but also, for example the philosopher Yannaras. Possibly out of cultural shock and an inferiority complex, these are inclined to condemn even the True West.

All these groups fail to understand the many Western people who themselves have understood quite clearly the failures of the secular West of the second millennium, all the more so in its contemporary secularist form of the third millennium. Having seen the foreign groups which attack the West in a demonising and undiscerning way, it is therefore of interest to see who ignores the True West, or even attacks it, and so defends the False West. There are three groups involved in this operation, but by no means all of their members are actually Western people, for self-interest is involved here. Which then are these three groups?

1. The Self-Established

The first group which defends the False West is composed of those who have voluntarily allied themselves and so compromised themselves with Western Establishments. We can take as an example Anglicans (or ex-Anglicans who still think as Anglicans). They belong to a State-Church, a ruling, erastian ideology. When the State follows a secularist ideology, so do they. As one cynic put it a decade or so ago, ‘In 1900 the Church of England was for fox-hunting and against buggery, in 2000 it is against fox-hunting and for buggery’. Or to take other examples, today the Church of England is for female clergy and homosexual unions and 40% of its clergy, so it is said, do not even believe in the Holy Trinity.

Why is all this? Because the State decrees so and therefore the Church of England swims with the State’s tide. This is why it is ecumenical, for ecumenist syncretism is part of the politically correct ideology of the present State. It is true that there are small and heroic groups of actual believers in the Church of England. However, generally these end up leaving it for variants of the older Western ideology, becoming Methodists at one extreme or Roman Catholics at the other. On the other hand, the self-established are not interested in the authentic Church, refusing even to adopt Her calendar.

2. The Self-Interested

The second group, linked to the first, of those who defend the False West is composed of those who are financed or propped up by Western Establishments on condition that they ape the Western way. Thus, we can think of individuals over the last nearly hundred years in the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Antioch, the ‘Greek Church’, so beloved of conformist Anglicans. A sure sign of their Western Establishment backing is the fact that they are willing to adopt the Western calendar and support ecumenism. Large sums of money are associated with these changes which they attempt to foist on their peoples.

The politically unprincipled will always change for the sake of lucre and power. In only the last few years, months and days we have seen individuals fall in the Churches of the Serbs, of the Czechs and Slovaks and of the Bulgarians, for exactly the same reasons. Political and financial backing attract the spineless ‘diplomat’. ‘Follow the money’. A sure way of identifying who these ‘diplomats’ are, is to question their attitude towards the Council of Florence and St Mark of Ephesus. You will not find an icon of this great and courageous saint among them.

3. The Self-Deluded

The third group, often linked to the first or the second, are the naïve. Sometimes they are outside the Church, sometimes just inside, but on the convert fringes. They are often newly converted, or in any case they have never been grounded in the realities of the Faith. Their lack of awareness and their lack of knowledge of the facts of history mean that they are still connected with the heterodox world. Unable or unwilling to integrate, they suffer from self-delusion. This is not necessarily because they have never lived outside the Western world, it is rather because they have never lived outside the Western Establishment world.

They do not yet understand the difference between Orthodoxy and heterodoxy. They demand censorship of the Orthodox Truth (a good case is the late French Uniat philosopher Olivier Clement who even demanded in ‘Le Monde’ that Patriarch Pavle of Serbia not canonise the new Serbian Saints so as not to offend the Vatican, whose agents had massacred them!). The self-deluded have not yet integrated Orthodox culture, the Orthodox civilizational ethos, they have not had time. They too are very prone to ecumenism. They do not want zeal, only diplomacy. They should ask for the prayers of St Gregory Palamas to enlighten them.

Conclusion

Our task is to return the history of the West to its proper course and order. This means observing the proper balance between the True West and the False West and avoiding extremes. Unfortunately, we have seen time and again how those who do not defend the True West defend the False West. If we do not have a realistic view of the Heterodox West, then we will have a false view of the Orthodox West and vice versa. And a false view of present reality is also a false view of the future that awaits us, with its sorrows and its joys. Let us recall that the Enemy is parasitic; it only uses the West as a base and hates the West as it hates all of humanity, all of God’s Creation. The Lover of Mankind, however, loves all and his grace shines on the righteous and the unrighteous alike; the only question is whether all see it.

Sects Criticise Us

Sects criticise us: ‘You have joined ‘World Orthodoxy’ and so compromised yourself with worldly people’.

Our task is to gather in before the end with compassion. And we say ‘before the end’, for we have no illusions about the direction of the times in which we live. All the more reason therefore for not hiding away in ghettos and making compassionless demands like the scribes, Pharisees and lawyers. ‘But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in…Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves’ (Matt 23, 13 and 15). ‘Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! For ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers’ (Lk 11,46).

Sects criticise us: ‘You have cut corners and broken the canons’.

We call on the world to adapt to the Church; the Church does not adapt to the world. In what way have we cut corners and broken the canons in our mission to the world before the end? We have not undertaken to ordain a host of divorced men or men with divorced wives as priests (or sometimes twice divorced men, a practice favoured only by ‘Parisians’ such as the late Metr Antony Bloom or the retired Archbp Gabriel de Vylder). We have not compromised ourselves by praying with heretics. The canons are certainly to be followed, but not slavishly, in idolatry. Sometimes we have to consider the greater good. ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgement, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone’ (Matt 23, 23).

Sects criticise us: ‘You have contaminated yourself by not ‘walling yourselves off’ from the compromised’.

We already know that we are imperfect. But we do not seek perfection in others. That is an error. We seek perfection only in ourselves, not in others. ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect’ (Matt. 5, 48). Those who make compromises and take part in ecumenism, compromising the integrity of the Faith in religious syncretism do not contaminate us. They will have to answer at the Judgement for their compromises. We will have to answer only for our own conduct, not for the conduct of others.

A Centre for the Christian World

Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Department for Church and Society of the Russian Orthodox Church, believes that Russia is moving in the direction of greater self-sufficiency, which would allow it to become the centre of world Christianity. As he wrote in an article published in the newspaper Sovereign Rus, ‘It is no coincidence that many today see Russia as a defender of Christian ideals and traditional morality, as a place that can offer a real alternative to the world’s golden calf and its destructive concepts of freedom. To begin with, Russia should act as though it were the centre of the Christian world. That is the only way it can work. Anything else, firstly, is petty, and, secondly, self-destructive’.

Fr Vsevolod went on to say, ‘During the past few months, Russia has shown the world that she can speak confidently, as a strong and independent nation with a tradition and experience of life that gives it the right to its own path. Russia is not only entitled to defend its vision of social order, but also it can offer it to the world’. He also pointed out that fringe groups based on foreign ideologies are trying to pressure the Russian authorities. They claim to act ‘on behalf of Russia’s future’, in the name of the ‘other Russia’, for the ‘real Russia’, but they accomplish nothing.

Fr Vsevolod noted, ‘Today, despite the West’s objections and reproaches, we mean it when we say, ‘We insist that we must protect our children from premature sexual awareness, and even more, from the promotion of homosexuality. We hold that the adoption of Russian children by foreign families at a time of demographic crisis is a highly irrational move. We do not want perverts to adopt these children, so that they will lose the faith into which they were baptised, to lose the hope of a normal life’’.

1 July 2013

Interfax-Religion

http://interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=51775