Category Archives: The Middle East

Double Standards

The beheading of an American journalist by a British Muslim should surprise no-one. For over two years now hundreds of British Muslims, let alone French, Belgian, German and other European Muslims, have been slaughtering the innocent in the interventionist war in Syria, which has been encouraged by the Western Powers and their subservient media. That is not so much a civil war as a war between Syrians and hordes of foreign mercenaries paid for by Saudi and Qatari Sunnis and well supported by Western ‘Special Forces’ in training camps in the Jordan and Turkey.

Indeed, it is only a year since Western governments were prepared to bomb Syria back into the Stone Age over the poison gas / ’red line’ affair, thus probably bringing Muslim fanatics to power there and replacing the popular government. When it was discovered that the poison gas (invented and used by the West for the first time nearly 100 years ago) had been used by the terrorists and not by the government, the Western hypocrites fell silent.

Now that the terrorists are victorious in eastern Syria, they have tried to take over Iraq (which the West did bomb back into the Stone Age), the West is alarmed and is beginning to realize that it should have been supporting the Syrian government of President Assad all along and not trying to annihilate it, as they did to the governments in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The West was wrong all the way down the line. (It is almost as if after its fifty years of self-imposed cultural nihilism which began in the 1960s that the West wants to annihilate the cultures of all other countries).

Therefore, today the British government is worried that its self-created (by immigration) Muslim ghettoes have produced jihadists. However, the problem of the radicalization of young British Muslims has only two basic self-created two real causes. The first cause is the fact that British ‘governments’ (more correctly ‘regimes’), have, without popular consent, invaded, occupied and committed genocide in several Muslim countries, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The second cause is that British regimes have consistently supported the genocide of native Palestinian Muslims by Zionist Israel, not least over the last month. The outrage of young British Muslims is actually understandable; their violence, however, is only to be condemned, as is the whole Muslim (and Zionist) anti-New Testament eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth ideology.

The hypocrisy of the British Establishment at the terrible beheading is also blatant. However barbaric it is, beheading is at least instant death. On the other hand, to be slowly slaughtered or grossly maimed by NATO uranium-tipped shells in Serbia or by NATO cluster bombs and shells in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya is, if anything, even more barbaric. And to be victims of the Atomic Bombs which the ‘high-minded’ West dropped on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is even more barbaric.

The hypocrisy is even worse, when one considers that at this very moment the Western world is supporting a civil war in Europe, unleashed by the Western-backed regime in Kiev, planned by the CIA and other US ‘military advisors’ and executed mainly by Western mercenaries. Well over a thousand have been slaughtered, often burned to death (as earlier in Odessa) in the Western-sponsored genocide against freedom-fighters and civilians in the Ukraine in the last two months, and refugees (no support from the New York-based UN here) number over 150,000. The fact, as we now know from German sources, that the Malaysian Airlines plane was brought down by the Western-backed Ukrainian junta is also irrelevant, conveniently buried with another invented ‘red line’. The Ukrainian train of death is to be forgotten.

Apparently, genocide in the Ukraine, as in Gaza, does not matter, because those who are committing the genocide are pro-Western and are equipped with Western bombs and bullets to do it. There is one standard for the vast majority not so barbaric Non-Western world and quite another for the minority barbaric Western world. How the Western world will deal with this genocide in the Ukraine when the Ukrainian junta goes bankrupt and the gas runs out in the approaching winter, we shall see.

Answers to Questions from Letters

Below are some answers to questions in recent correspondence.

Q: In your recent article ‘Truth and Mercy’, were you expressing prophecy or just wishful thinking?

A: As usual, I wanted to make people think outside the restrictive box that the secular media offer and also to comfort the weaker from the despair that is offered by those media. In both these respects from feedback it is clear that the article was successful. That article describes a possible and spiritual outcome of present world events.

Obviously, I am not a prophet, but it is clear that what is being played out in the world today, in Gaza, with massacres by US-armed Zionists, in Iraq and Syria, with massacres of Christians by Qatari-financed terrorists, and in the Ukraine, with massacres of Ukrainians by CIA-organized terrorists and mercenaries (all these events are very closely interconnected) is of vital importance. This year we are reaching another huge turning point in history, as great as that of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

However, there is a prophetic element. That article, ‘Truth and Mercy’, was based on prophecies of several holy people, of St John of Shanghai, Schemamonk Aristocleus, Blessed Pelagia of Ryazan, Fr Paisios the Athonite, Elder Jonah of Odessa and others. However, we must remember that all prophecies, theirs too, are conditional on repentance – and repentance is not certain. What I am saying is that if we do not go in the direction of ‘Truth and Mercy’, then we will go in the direction of the end of the world. There is no middle way, no compromise, as people of fantastical Anglican culture always imagine that there is. Today, we are going either towards repentance, or else, to Sodom and Gomorrah and unspeakable catastrophes before Antichrist. I want to give people hope. Catastrophe is not inevitable.

Those who think with worldly criteria do not understand that article, they find it fantasy. This is because they think in secularist, political terms only, which by definition exclude Providence, the Divine and the miraculous, from their thought processes. This is because their thought processes are not Orthodox, not Christian, they are deceived, for processes in the real world are not directed by secular forces. In reality, human affairs are directed by spiritual forces, either Divine or else, as we can see around us and throughout the history of the last 100 years, Satanic. The Divine is possible, but the Satanic, what in the Old Testament is called ‘the wrath of God’, is also possible. It is our choice. Such is human freewill.

Q: You mentioned St John of Shanghai. Why does he stand out as THE saint of the emigration?

A: Firstly, because he was a saint. That in itself is exceptional, especially with all the pseudo-saints and pseudo-elders of the Russian emigration, with false claims and personality cults, developed by themselves and then, much worse, by their disciples after their deaths. Secondly, because he was universal. He affected all Continents and spoke to all nationalities, Eastern (Chinese, Japanese and Filippino) and Western (European and American). And thirdly, because he was a monarchist, a ‘Tsarist’ to the core.

Q: Why is that significant?

A: Because that is the litmus test for the understanding of Orthodoxy today. The restoration of the monarchy in Russia for the benefit of the whole Orthodox world and indeed for the benefit of the whole world is the only direction in which we can go. Those who have not understood this have not really become Orthodox. They are disincarnate, semi-Protestant, they do not understand that Orthodoxy is the religion of the Incarnation, of the last two fingers when we make the sign of the cross. They think that Orthodoxy, and religion in general, is just a private matter, a personal theory, without any practical and public ramifications. That is a heresy. I wonder if they know how to make the sign of the cross properly. They may be full of doctorates, but I am sure they do not hold the last two fingers, representing the Divine and human natures of Christ, together. They would do well to learn from the last illiterate village greybeard in Moldova, or for that matter in Galilee.

St John is the guide to this as he possessed the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. So many converts treat Orthodoxy as ‘comfort Orthodoxy’, a kind of part-time hobby or ego-trip. Christ, that is, Orthodoxy, is not that. A hobby or ego-trip is starters, comfort eating; what we have to do is to get to the main course, the meat dish, which is in the arena. Only when we have been in the arena with the wild beasts that attack us, as they do because they are our main course – can we get to the sweet, dessert, which is paradise. As they say, you cannot get to paradise in a Rolls-Royce.

Q: What is the situation among new Orthodox (those who have been baptized in the last 20 years or so) in the Church inside Russia? Have they come to what you have called ‘the arena’, ‘the main course’?

A: That is an interesting question and the answer varies. I can remember how in the 1990s, many newly-baptized in Russia (and they numbered tens of millions) read books by Metr Anthony of Sourozh and other Russian purely intellectual and theoretical writers who wrote for Non-Orthodox in the West. In other words, they read what was appropriate for outsiders and beginners, introductions. Fortunately, a great many in Russia now, especially because of the influence of authentic monasticism (that is so sorely and disastrously lacking in the West) have got past that stage. They are no longer outsiders, converts, but insiders, Orthodox. Now they read the lives of the saints and of elders like Fr Paisios, Fr John Krestiankin and Fr Nikolai Guryanov. In other words, they have indeed got to the main course. This is encouraging.

Q: A historical question regarding the Tsarism of St John: Why did the White Counter-movement fail after the Revolution?

A: It failed precisely because it was not White. It had no single and unitive leader (that could only have been a Romanov) and it was not even firmly monarchist behind Tsar Nicholas. Even individual Whites like Wrangel and Kolchak were compromised by people around them, who were not white. Few had a pure motivation and so the White movement failed. Archbishop Averky writes very clearly about this, as several other Church writers too.

Q: Some say that St John would have been against the Church inside Russia. What would you reply?

A: The Slavonic service book that I have always used is that published under Metr Anastasy, the second First Hierarch of ROCOR. According to it, in the great litany we pray for ‘all the Orthodox Patriarchs’ before we pray for our own ROCOR bishops. This was the real Church’s position before sectarianism started creeping in through US old calendarism in the 1960s (I strongly suspect that that old calendarism was financed by the CIA), which tried to surround, abduct and divert spiritually the noble and venerable Metr Philaret, before being partly rejected by Metr Vitaly (who was then surrounded, abducted and diverted literally by it), and then rejected completely by Metr Laurus.

This traditional ecclesiological position was also the position of St John. One whom I knew, Fr Vladimir Rodzianko (later Bishop Basil), recorded St John’s words: ‘Every day I pray for Patriarch Alexis at the proskomidia. He is the Patriarch. And our prayer is still the same. By force of circumstance we have been cut off from one another, but we are still one liturgically. The Russian Church, like the whole Orthodox Church, is united in the eucharist, we are with Her and in Her. Administratively, for the sake of our flock and well-known principles, we have to take the way that we have taken, but this in no way breaks the sacramental unity of the whole Church’.

You see pre-2007 ROCOR had two parts – the main patriotic part (those who loved Russia because she is called to be Orthodox and to save the world) and a smaller, but powerful political/ideological part (nationalists who always put their personal advantage and interests, financial or political) above the Church. Remember how it was that political wing that actually put St John of Shanghai on trial in San Francisco in the early 60s.

As a result of the actions of this political, ideological wing, many left ROCOR in England, for example, in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The sectarians tried to take over in London and elsewhere. We lost at least four priests at that time as a result of them – and that was just in one small diocese. The older generation were squeezed out; the situation by the mid-1980s was dire.

Q: Were you affected by that situation in England personally?

A: Very much so. We emigrated as a result of it. I came to ROCOR not through the situation in England, but through Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who had nothing to do with the old calendarist nonsense that had come over from America. He had remained faithful to the Tradition, to the ecclesiology of St John, who had preceded him in Western Europe. Like St John, he received by chrismation. Vladyka Anthony said that we must belong to a ROCOR that did not concelebrate with Moscow, but only as long as the Church inside Russia was not free. But he and his clergy concelebrated with everyone else, with all other Local Churches. Before he died 20 years ago, I know that one priest from inside Russia had already concelebrated with him, while remaining in the Patriarchate. Vladyka Antony, like St John, was a disciple of Metr Antony of Kiev, whom both had known in Belgrade. They are my spiritual lineage, my spiritual ancestry, that of Universal, and not sectarian, Orthodoxy. Metr Laurus belonged to the same spiritual family.

Such were the views too of hierarchs like Bp Alexander (Mileant) and Bishop Mitrofan (Znosko-Borovsky) of the generation before, whom I met. They were ardent patriots, not of Russia, but of Orthodox Russia. And that was the reason why we could not be under what was then called the Moscow Patriarchate, which outside Russia was dominated by individuals who displayed Soviet patriotism, which came from fear, and so was alien to us. All of us thought like Dostoyevsky – that a Russian who is not Orthodox is not a Russian. So there was no indiscriminate nationalism for us.

Q: What happened to the political wing?

A: It left the Church over a period of 20 years, from 1986 on, mainly leaving for various sects, including various old calendarist sects. I would remind all that both St John and Archbishop Antony had parishes under them on the new calendar (for the fixed feasts). In St John’s case, they were Western rite parishes.

Q: What about St John and the Western rite? Surely his support of Western rite means that we too should support Western rite today?

A: People who say such things have completely forgotten the historical context. St John’s Western rite worked with former Catholics (not with Anglicans and other Protestants) and he did this before the revolution of the Second Vatican Council, before, in other words, before the Protestantization or rather Americanization of Catholicism. At that time, in the 1950s, there still was a Western rite. That is the fundamental difference between then and now. St John was striying to save those who were at the end of a culture and bring them to Orthodoxy. Today that culture is all but dead – it only exists among a few upper class people or the very elderly and dying. There is no future to it, which is why the Western rite is also elderly and dying, where it is not actually dead.

For fifty years there has not been a living Western rite and you cannot renew and then modify a rite that is no more. This is why all Western rite experiments, though motivated by pastoral concerns, the best of intentions, have ended in failure. There is only one living rite today and that is the Orthodox rite. I know. I have seen the Western rite failure in France.

Q: How and why does the Russian Orthodox view of Catholics and Protestants inside Russia differ from that in the Church Outside Russia?

A: There is not a great deal of difference, but there is a difference. I would say that the view inside Russia is more pro-Catholic, but more anti-Protestant (indeed Protestants there are called ‘sectarians’). The reasons for this are as follows.

The Russian (not Ukrainian) experience of Catholicism is that of a pre-Vatican II, Eastern European confession which has a hierarchy, monastic life and sacraments, clergy who dress as clergy, believes in the Mother of God and the saints and even venerates icons. It therefore sees in Catholicism an admittedly provincialized and primitivized but still potentially Orthodox Church. It has no experience of the reality of the protestantized and infantilized Catholicism of the post-Vatican II world, as it is in Western Europe. When it discovers that, it is in a state of culture shock.

On the other hand, the Russian experience of Protestantism is that of sects which are rabidly anti-Orthodox and can hardly be recognized as Christian at all. This experience was much reinforced by aggressive American evangelical preachers who came to Russia in the 1990s and tried to bribe Orthodox into joining them. Clearly, the experience was entirely negative and hence in Russia Protestants are called sectarians.

Q: So who is right?

A: The Church inside Russia is right in Eastern Europe. The Church Outside Russia is right in its domain, in Western countries, among Western people. Catholicism and Protestantism are so variable, they are not monolithic; we have to look at the local realities of both before we decide on our attitude and the use of economy or akrivia.

Q: In various Local Churches you can find heterodox customs. How can we tolerate them?

A: We can tolerate them because we are not sectarian, but tolerant! However, that does not mean that we observe such provincial customs ourselves. We do not cultivate the fringes, but the broad mainstream of the Church. For example, I remember an ex-Anglican Antiochian priest (in England they are all ex-Anglicans, virtually without training), wanting to introduce little girls to serve in the altar because he had seen a bishop in Syria doing this! I told him that just because others had adopted Uniat customs out of pan-Arab nationalism, that did not mean that we have to. The same goes for so many customs, from certain Carpatho-Russian chants preserved in their emigration in the US and which are pure old-fashioned Catholic chants (which the Catholics have now lost), or Bulgarian icons, which are not iconography, but folk art, or beardless Ukrainian clergy as in the OCA (another Uniat hangover) etc. In other words, we do not prolong decadence, but let it die out by itself.

The lack of discrimination is typically Anglican. It is the inability to distinguish between the essential Tradition and eccentric local customs which may have nothing at all to do with Orthodoxy. Thus, in one community of the Rue Daru group in England an ex-Charismatic, ex-Anglican priest, also untrained, has his converts calling out names for commemoration during the service! It would be better if he joined the Pentecostals, especially since he maintains that he is better off without a bishop (who is in distant Paris), so that ‘I can do whatever I want’.

In general, Rue Daru claims to be of the ‘Russian Tradition’, but that was thrown out of the window there 26 years ago in 1988. If you are of the Russian Tradition, then you must be part of the Russian Church, observe the Orthodox calendar, have confession before communion, wear Russian vestments, have women wear headscarves, keep the canons and traditions of the Russian Church. As one correspondent in France wrote to me, the Russian Tradition never stayed a single night in the vast majority of the tiny convert Rue Daru communities, which Russians simply boycott because there is no Orthodox Tradition there. Once you have seen and above all experienced the real thing, you know what is false as soon as you see it.

Western Peoples, Awake!

We see crucifixions in Syria and decapitations in Iraq, where the Iraqi-Syrian caliphate has been created by Western meddling – for the only ever weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were those taken there by the genocidal Western forces sent by Bush and Blair. In Israel the US-subsidized genocide of the Palestinians – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – continues, only Nazi-style, with 100 eyes for one eye, 100 teeth for one tooth.
Then there is the Taliban restoration in Afghanistan, made inevitable by the departure of Soviet forces a generation ago, then there are the murderous Islamist fanatics in Nigeria, the bombing of ancient Nubian Christians in Sudan, the Western-sponsored caliphates in Libya and Saudi Arabia and the persecution of Christians in Malaysia and Indonesia….

All these events are little reported and even deliberately ignored by the Western media and the sodomized Western world as a whole. For they have nothing but contempt for Christians and are in any case too frightened of their self-created Islamic minorities, 5%-10% of Western Europe now, and of their oil-rich paymasters in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

However, even less reported and indeed deliberately ignored by the Western media, is the use of poison gas and phosphorus bombs in the Ukraine, as criminals are released from prisons and employed by the CIA-installed Nazi junta in Kiev to murder their own civilian population during and since their recent pseudo-ceasefire.

Armed and financed by the US and Galician Uniats, the criminals sent from Kiev, together with Western mercenaries and Western ‘Special Forces’ (i.e. trained killers) have slaughtered thousands, creating the worst refugee problem in Europe since 1945. And all this in order to implement the ‘plan’ of the Californian ‘think tank’ RAND Corporation for the destruction and then colonization of the third-worldized Ukraine, sowing it with GM crops and using it as a dumping-ground for Western nuclear waste and unwanted immigrants.

Above all, what the Western world does not want to admit is that all the present troubles are the beginning of Armageddon, of World War III, and that this War, just like the previous two World Wars, has been started by the sheer imperialist greed of the Western world. Only this time, unlike the previous two times, the whole of the West is united, not divided as before, against Christian civilization, and is fighting on the side of Antichrist.

100 years ago it was the Germanic world that began the First World War and again 75 years ago it was that same world. But today it is the whole Western world that has joined the Nazis. Some will say that peace-loving Russia is at fault. If in the 1990s it had stood up to the Western invasion and genocide in Yugoslavia, then today there would have been peace in a Non-Yugoslavized Ukraine. But in the 1990s decadent Russia was under the jackboot of a pro-Western regime and not free.

The time may be coming when we, the last Christians in the West, all of us Orthodox, whatever our nationality, will have to make plans to take refuge in our only earthly spiritual homeland, in Orthodox Russia, from the Western Antichrist. We now ask the Russian authorities to prepare to issue us with Russian passports. Only the prayers of us, the people of God, for our own repentance and for the restoration of Russia as the Orthodox Sovereign Power, the last bastion of Christianity left in the world, can now delay the coming of Antichrist, Who is so eagerly supported by all the Western elites. Western peoples, awake – it is now or never!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Holy Apostles Peter and Paul 2014

Déjà Vu

After the flight (‘the exit strategy’) of defeated Western forces from Iraq, they left behind them a weak and bickering sectarian puppet regime. This had only limited control of the centre of the country around Baghdad and everywhere else the invasion left chaos, bitterness and the desire for revenge. Now that that regime looks like falling to Sunni forces, some in the West must be repenting. Just as the CIA founded Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s, so the West, through its puppet allies in utterly corrupt Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, has trained and armed Sunni forces in Libya, Egypt and Syria. And now look what is happening.

Western-trained Sunni forces have spread to Iraq and look like seizing power. The Western elite has swiftly dropped all its propaganda rhetoric about an ‘Arab spring’. Its ‘freedom and democracy’ mantra has unleashed a Pandora’s box from Afghanistan to Tunisia, via Libya, Yemen, Bahrein, Syria and Iraq – just as many Middle East experts precisely predicted before the genocidal Bush-Blair 2003 invasion of Iraq. It looks as though the West may now have to ally itself with Iran and the Assad Syrian government in order to defeat the Sunni terrorists, which it itself trained and armed on American bases in Qatar, Turkey and Afghanistan.

In Iraq we now also see exactly what will happen next year in Afghanistan once the humiliated Western forces have fled from there too and when its puppet regime, which even now controls less than one tenth of the country, falls to the people. They will in turn take their revenge on the local, English-speaking, CIA-installed traitors. Just as with a host of CIA puppet-regimes over the last 65 years, in Latin America, South-East Asia, Greece and Italy, it too will fall quite quickly. The same is already happening to the CIA-installed junta in the Ukraine, which it is also trying to turn into yet another banana republic.

Having in the Ukraine found an unprincipled and power-mad English-speaking bandit, who made his money from drug-dealing, prostitution rackets and arms sales (rather like the corrupt rulers the CIA backed in Saigon half a century ago), it backed him. Telling the ignorant and hoodwinked Western public that he had made his billions from ‘chocolate’ (!), the US administration had him elected President with fewer than 25% of the votes, despite a massive US-style PR campaign and strict media censorship. However, he has already slaughtered hundreds in the civil war that he has undertaken and now he faces bankruptcy.

This is because his corrupt regime cannot even pay the foreign, US-trained mercenaries whom it has had to engage to massacre the Ukrainian people – mercenaries are necessary because most of the Ukrainian forces themselves will not kill their own people, as he will. What the West has overlooked in the wars that it created first in Georgia, then in Syria and now in the Ukraine, is that all these countries, unlike Afghanistan and even Iraq, have a large population which has great veneration for the Mother of God. It is She Who has apanages in both Georgia and the Ukraine and a great shrine in Orthodox Syria.

Just as the US failed in its promotion of the tinpot Georgian dictator and torturer, the English-speaking, US-trained Mikhail Sakaashvili, so too it is failing in Syria and the Ukraine. The Russian Crimea, given to the Ukraine by an atheist dictator sixty years ago against the will of the people, did not want to become a US naval base. Now the south and east of the Ukraine, called by history Novorossiya (New Russia), given to the Ukraine by an atheist dictator ninety years ago against the will of its people, does not want to become a US missile base. The US policy of destabilization and genocide is not working in the Ukraine and will not work – as long as its people pray to the Mother of God.

The West is Alienated from Christ and Therefore Intolerant

Many people worldwide have been amazed at the Western indifference and even hostility to the plight of massacred and fleeing Christians in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and now in the Ukraine. There, 55,000 refugees have fled to Russia in the last 24 hours from the devilish massacres by foreign mercenaries of the Christian people of the Ukraine. The neo-Nazi junta in Kiev, under strict Western control, sends in tanks, murders and maims Christians, refusing to talk to its own people.

Where do this intolerance and hatred for Christianity come from? Surely the West supports Christianity? It used to. And why does President Obama meddle in the UK’s possible decision to leave the atheist EU and Scotland’s possible decision to leave the atheist UK? Why does he threaten and intimidate even Western peoples? Where does this bullying arrogance come from? These riddles have today been answered by the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov.

As reported by the Interfax Religion agency and the sedmitza.ru website, the Russian Orthodox Foreign Minister considers that the West has become antagonistic to Russia because of its return to the Church of Christ. He noted the Russian amazement that the West still equates the Russian Federation with the atheist Soviet Union, whereas ‘the new Russia is returning to traditional spiritual values, rooted in Orthodoxy’.

At the same time, he noted that the ever clearer contradiction ‘between the multipolarity of the world which can be objectively affirmed, and the desire of the USA and the historic West to hang on to their habitual positions of domination, the ever clearer contradiction between the cultural and civilizational diversity of the contemporary world and attempts to foist Western values on everyone’. He added that the West ‘is increasingly breaking away from its own Christian roots and is less and less receptive to the religious feelings of people of other confessions’.

The Mission of Orthodox Civilisation

Following the 1917 Western-organised coup d’etat, before which the Russian Empire had stood on the brink of victory in the Great War and of freeing Constantinople, and after the imperial martyrdoms of 1918 and the lost Civil War, by 1920 it seemed to many White Russians that all was over. The old Russia appeared to be finished, as the new Soviet Russia set out on the path of the atheist materialist ideology which had been imported into it by ‘sealed’ train. The ideals of Holy Rus, preserved in their integrity in the Church Outside Russia, seemed to have no future in the Russian Lands themselves. And so began many a lonely decade of exile, bitter repentance and isolation in the Church Outside Russia, while we hoped and prayed that the Church Inside Russia might not only survive persecution and captivity but also revive, and then we could join together with it.

True, from 1941 there began something of a revival, though it was beneath yet another colossal and tragic onslaught from the hordes of Western Europe. But by 1945 it could be seen that though in many respects the worst was over, there was still far to go. The next two generations were to be years of frustrating stagnation. Then in 1991 there came another tragedy. Through the utter incompetence of the last atheist leaders what remained of the Russian Empire (most of it) was divided. Under the new Communist/Capitalist opportunists, it appeared that the Russian Lands were to face the final phase of Westernisation, wholly losing their identity under the tide of American consumerism. It seemed as though this might be the end even for the remaining Orthodox cultural values, a heritage which had ironically been preserved by the cultural emptiness of Communism.

Thus, the West could impose the ‘restructuring’ (‘perestroika’) in Russia that it wanted. This would involve the destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church, which geopoliticians like Brzezhinski knew is the source of resistance to the West, of the ideal of Sovereign Holy Rus. The end, it appeared, was near. Then, in August 2000, with the Jubilee Council of the once captive Church and the canonisation of the Imperial Martyrs, the New Martyrs and New Confessors, there came hope. Just as Orthodox Russia had defeated Napoleon and Hitler, so it could defeat apostasy again. Outside Russia the processes of apostasy in the USA and its Western European colonial satellites (NATO), set on the New World Order which destroys national, family and personal identity, go forward. And although Russia since 2000 has not yet reversed those processes of apostasy, it has stopped them.

The fifth column of the anti-Russian oligarch-thieves, most of them not Russian and living abroad, who stole the people’s assets through ‘privatisation’, criminals protected by the West with its myth of democracy ( = aggressively atheist, elected dictatorship), has been defeated inside Russia. Inspiration came from the spiritual treasury of both parts of the Russian Church, from figures like the ever-memorable Archbishops Seraphim (Sobolev) and Averky of Jordanville and Metropolitan John (Snychev). They all knew that Russian Orthodox Civilisation is founded on the ideal of the Church of All Rus, on Holy Rus, the spiritual foundation for the rebirth of the Orthodox Empire. This is the only remaining bulwark of the unadulterated Christian Faith anywhere, which alone can fight against the evil of apostasy that now walks abroad. Such figures explained that Holy Rus is:

Spiritual integrity – the uncompromised Orthodox Faith lived out in daily life; the primacy of the spiritual and therefore of the moral over the material; the incarnation of this Faith in State life, that is, in social, political and economic life; the Sovereign, Imperial ideal of the people’s monarchy; the kingdom of heaven incarnate on earth in a multinational and multilingual Orthodox Empire. Here, as all the authentic representatives of Holy Rus have explained, we are not talking of Russian nationalism, but of the united patriotism of the many different peoples of Holy Rus. All who identify themselves as Russian Orthodox, regardless of nationality, belong to this world, the Orthosphere, and to the uncompromised service of the spirit and aims of the Church. The rebirth of Holy Rus as a Spiritual Empire is our ideal, the ideal of all Russian Orthodox Civilisation.

In this we are quite different from Western civilisation. Its ideal is progress, defined as material development based on science and technology. Its purpose is to increase human physical comfort and material wealth. On the other hand, Russian Orthodox Civilisation has as its ideal the transfiguration of the human will and soul and mind, which is only possible through spiritual and moral progress. Material progress denotes only that the human-being becomes a thing, part of matter, part of the material and biological world. Hence Darwinism, in which man is promoted as an animal, a mere biological and physiological entity, without an immortal soul, and whose only aim is the acquisition of things, or consumerism, as it is now called. This is the opposite of the spiritual and moral values of the New Testament and therefore of Russian Orthodox Civilisation.

It is thus clear that progress, in the Western material sense, is a movement to apostasy, to the end of the world, to the Last Judgement. This is the opposite of the spiritual and so moral transfiguration of humanity, which is the ideal of the Gospel and of Holy Rus. In the words of the great ecclesiologist and New Hieromartyr St Hilarion (Troitsky): ‘The ideal of Orthodoxy is not progress, but transfiguration…The New Testament does not know of progress in the European sense of this word, in the sense of moving forwards in the same dimension. The New Testament speaks of the transfiguration of nature and consequently moving not forwards, but upwards, heavenwards, Godwards’. This must also be the ideal of the Orthodox State, which is to restrain evil and apostasy by taking on the values of the Church. This is the alternative to the way of the world proposed by globalised capitalism.

The aim of Orthodox Christian economic life consists not of making a profit, as in crude monetarism, but of better ordering our spiritual and so moral life. Instead of Western economics, based on the race for profit through stripping finite natural resources and egoistic consumerism, Russian Orthodox Civilisation proposes sufficiency, but no more, for all. Economic development is to be regulated not by money-lending banksters and speculators on stock exchanges, but by the Lord’s Anointed. Private enterprise is not for individual profit, but for public well-being. Instead of futile and parasitic consumerism, based on the exhaustion of natural resources and the sullying of God’s Creation, we would then have a just distribution of natural wealth and social contentment. For this to happen, we need a State founded on the values of Orthodox Civilisation.

The Atheist War Against the Multinational Orthodox Church Continues

The seizure of power in Kiev by a tiny minority of extremist Galician Catholics (Uniat Ukrainians from the far west, formerly eastern Poland) had been carefully planned. Through the violent overthrow of the democratically-elected Ukrainian government with generous US financial backing ($5 billion) and EU support last February, it opened a Pandora’s Box. Now the three parts of the Ukraine, the small Polonised and Neo-Fascist Galicia, central Malorossiya (Little Russia) and purely Russian southern and eastern Novorossiya (New Russia) are divided. The vast majority of the inhabitants of the Ukraine do not recognise the unrepresentative Kievan junta.

The nature of the modern Ukraine as an artificial construct, a nationalist divide and rule Western project, has been revealed. This is despite the empty and pathetic sabre-rattling by the head of NATO, which is still licking its wounds from its defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Ukraine is a puppet made in Austria just over a century ago and founded on xenophobic pride and hatred. Its puppet leaders, whose ancestors fought with Hitler and have been handpicked by the US politician Victoria Nuland, are incompetent and cannot control their peoples. Russia now waits while what remains of the ‘Ukraine’ goes bankrupt, its gold reserves yesterday transferred to Switzerland and the USA in the final act of twenty-three years of asset-stripping by corrupt oligarchs.

The events in the Ukraine must be seen as part of the whole, Western-orchestrated, geopolitical war against the Church of Christ. That began in North Africa, spread to the Middle East, especially Syria, the only place on earth where the language of Christ, Aramaic, is still spoken, and has now been spread to Little Russia, the south-western corner of the Russian Lands, Rus. This attempt to divide historic Rus by the Western atheists uses Ukrainian nationalism, so recently founded on a provincial identity and a regional language from the Polish borderlands (‘Ukraine’ in Russian). All this is in order to cut off this potentially rich area, where natural gas has just been discovered, from its kindred Russian Lands and their peoples.

Western atheism is outraged that the Russian Lands are united, their unity founded not on ethnicity, but on over a thousand years of Christianity, the common and multinational Russian Orthodox Faith, thus making those lands into Holy Rus. It has not forgiven its peoples for throwing off Western atheism in its Soviet form. This is why Western atheism has now set out to use its puppet Patriarchate of Constantinople to undermine the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, the majority of whose members are Carpatho-Russians – another part of Holy Rus. However, in failing to recognise the Czechoslovak episcopate and even absurdly daring to call itself its ‘Mother-Church’ (!), that sorry Patriarchate has indicated that no Inter-Orthodox Council will be held in 2016. Such a Council could only take place if all the Local Churches are represented there, and not just the ones that the CIA allows.

Holy Rus is by definition multinational and not nationalist, the heritage of the Roman Christian Empire, and not some provincial localism. It unites 62 different nationalities. Unlike Ukrainianism (or for that matter Hellenism, Montenegrinism and Macedonianism etc – other artificial Western constructs from the 19th century on), Holy Rus does not put a regional national identity and language above the Universal Church of Christ. In the Second World War Hitler instructed his occupying administrators to set up a separate church in each village of the Ukraine. This is still the Western project, so coloured by Protestant separatism, today. It will not succeed.

Some are concerned that the Russian Orthodox Church and those with it, the Georgian Orthodox Church, the Polish Orthodox Church, the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and supporters in Alexandria, Antioch, Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, will be isolated by Western meddling. They should not be concerned by this. We recall how the ‘democratic’ majority shouted out ‘Crucify him, Crucify him’; we are happy to be ‘isolated’ from that majority. Today the Russian Lands are rising from the ashes of the past. A generation has passed since the dissolution of Soviet atheism. Now that the Church is being reborn, its values are beginning to be embodied in social, political and economic life and so the Russian State is also being reborn, returning to Orthodox roots and traditional values.

2014: Towards the Realignment of the World

Introduction

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

Why Only Two Blocs?

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

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

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

The Thirst for Revenge

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

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

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

The Fruits of Western Intolerance

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

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

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

Against the European Suicide

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

25 December 2013

On the Importance of Sobriety (2)

Edited E-mail Correspondence Following the Questions and Answers of 17 September

Q: In your answers in the correspondence in ‘On the Importance of Sobriety’ (17 September) you seemed to be defending ROCOR as a Church of moderation, which is why the extreme Greek and convert old calendarists left it between 1986 and 2007. But surely there were extremists among the Russians in ROCOR, for example, people who actually seriously believed that there was no grace in the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church? And they did not leave in 1986.

A: On the ROCOR side I knew of only two Russians (admittedly very senior figures) who asserted that the Patriarchal part of the Russian Orthodox Church had no grace. But I met hundreds, if not thousands, of ordinary ROCOR clergy and laity who believed otherwise, freely gave the sacraments to anyone from Russia and indeed were scandalised by such an absurd thought of gracelessness. So let us look at all this in proportion. You will always find a few extremists in any group of human-beings, but that does not mean that the vast majority are extremists. By definition they are not.

However, it is also true that a few members of ROCOR at that time (I am speaking about the Cold War period before 1991) appeared to be more interested in anti-Communism than in Christianity. However, the members of that generation have either died out or else have left ROCOR since 1991. The problem for them after the fall of Communism was that they no longer had any motivation to be active in Church life. You cannot be anti-Communist when Communism is no more. They had lost their raison d’etre, and so they gradually disappeared from Church life. This was most regrettable for them, but on a human level it was a great relief to us because they had put us ordinary ROCOR laity and clergy under pressure, trying to politicise the Church, which we resisted.

And I would like to add to all this very important qualification. Those few who previously claimed that there was no grace in the Patriarchate after 1991 received several clergy from it without ordaining them, let alone baptising them! And they gave the sacraments to Patriarchal laypeople without dreaming of baptising them. So it had all been empty words, rhetoric, political propaganda and not actions. In reality, they full well knew that the Patriarchate preserved apostolic succession. They rejected their own absurdity, which had only ever been a purely political ploy. I seriously think that the ludicrous concept of a graceless Church inside Russia may even have been invented by the CIA. It is simply not theological, but purely secular.

Q: You have said before and also in ‘On the Importance of Sobriety’ that all Russian Orthodox parishes outside Russia will eventually come under ROCOR administration. But why should not all, including ROCOR ones, come under the administration of the Church inside Russia instead?

A: There are three reasons why not. First of all, the agreement of 2007 was crystal clear: all parishes outside Russia will come under ROCOR, all parishes inside Russia will come under the Church inside Russia. Secondly, there is the name, ROCOR. It is only logical: only ROCOR is the Church Outside Russia, it is absurd to have parishes outside Russia that belong to the Church inside Russia. It is literally inside out or, if you prefer, outside in.

However, there is a third and moral reason. During the Cold War period (I mean, after 1945 and until well after 1991) the Church inside Russia was under KGB administration and there appeared outside Russia very many unworthy representatives of the Patriarchal Church, at best Soviet bureaucrats, at worst liars and renovationists, politically or morally compromised or just plain corrupt. (The notable exception was Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) of Brussels). And I am afraid that the Church inside Russia lost all the trust of the world outside Russia at that time. In a word, it shot itself in the foot and ever since it has had to pay the price for the distrust that it created.

As a result, even today, I cannot think of a single person in ROCOR who would go under the Patriarchal administration outside Russia. Even today, virtually the only people under the Patriarchate outside Russia are those who have come out of the former Soviet Union over the last 20 years

I mentioned Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) of Brussels as an exception, but it must also be said that his integrity was wasted, as that of other sincere people. He had the nominal title of Archbishop, but his diocese consisted of little more than two priests, two deacons and about a dozen laypeople. And in general, until 1991, the Patriarchate only had tiny churches outside Russia. Russian Orthodox outside Russia would have nothing to do with a KGB-sponsored organisation. That is not a secret and not a theory. It is simply a fact of history.

An example of such corruption is the case of the late Archbp George (Wagner), who was a victim of it. A priest of the Patriarchate in 1950s Berlin, he was asked by it to become a Soviet spy. To his credit he refused and left for the Paris Jurisdiction. He was just one in a very long series of sincere people who left the Patriarchate because of its corruption. Another even more striking example is the present Metr Hilarion of ROCOR, who was brought up in the Patriarchate in Canada and left it when he realised that it was not free.

And that was all a great loss of talent for the Patriarchate. But it was their own fault; they did it to themselves. In general, the Patriarchate, whether in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, London or New York, lost many people, the best friends of Orthodox Russia in the West, because of its unworthy representatives, with their political and moral compromises and corrupt personality cults. It lost the best friends of Orthodox Russia precisely because its representatives were not the best friends of Orthodox Russia. This is why ROCOR is an autonomous part of the Russian Church. If ever, things go badly in Russia again – as they could, the situation is still relatively fragile – ROCOR will retain its independence. That is very important.

Fortunately, virtually all such unworthy representatives had died out before the reconciliation of 2007, sometimes well before. Now we are waiting for a new generation. The Patriarchate outside Russia has been expanding with the new emigration. We believe that the majority of the new representatives are and will be more worthy, will at least be up to the standard of ROCOR and so prepare the Patriarchal churches outside Russia for their transfer to ROCOR.

Q: Do you feel bitter about this waste during the Cold War due to the captivity of the Patriarchate at that time?

A: Of course not! A Christian cannot feel bitter because he believes in Divine Providence, the ever-present, intervening love of God. This makes all mistakes into opportunities, all negatives into positives.

Q: What is your view of the murder of Fr Pavel Adelheim in Pskov last August

A: On average one priest a year is murdered in Russia and every murder is a tragedy and a crime, including that of Fr Pavel. I saw a Russian programme about the murder. His matushka appeared and spoke of the tragedy with great dignity.

However, Fr Pavel Adelheim himself was a well-known dissident and controversialist, a marginal figure and in that sense a bit like the late Fr Alexander Men, who is believed by many to have been a Catholic. The latter is a hero to all those who are anti-Orthodox, especially since he asserted that ‘it is better to be a Hare Krishna than to be like Fr Seraphim Rose’. (By the way, under the old regime the London Patriarchal Cathedral on Ennismore Gardens refused to sell his books, just as they refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs; that has changed now). Murder is a tragedy, but it is does not absolve anti-Church views. I am not saying that Fr Pavel was like Fr Alexander Men, he was not pro-Catholic, but nevertheless he was very much a fringe personality. It is very interesting that although deaths like that of the late Orthodox priest Fr Daniel Sisoev are hardly mentioned in the West, Fr Pavel’s was widely reported and by two groups.

The first group was the freemasons of the Russophobic Rue Daru with their Western supporters and the second was the equally Russophobic old calendarists. It is disgraceful that such anti-Russian-Church groups opportunistically and self-justifyingly try and make capital of a tragic murder, which was carried out by a satanist. You cannot justify schism. What such sectarian groups as Rue Daru and old calendarists, two sides of the same coin, do not understand is that the Church is not an exclusive club for those with eccentric views, but it is for all who believe in Christ. The fact that Fr Pavel had peculiar views and was then tragically murdered does not for one moment mean that those views are justified.

Q: Russophobia has been in the international spotlight recently. What would you say about the civil war in Syria and President Putin’s recent intervention that averted US missile attacks?

A: First of all, this is not a civil war. The original legitimate protests against the dictatorial Syrian government were hijacked by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey (all Israeli-backed). 1200 murderers, rapists and bandits were released from Saudi prisons, armed and trained by Western Special Services in camps in the Jordan and Turkey and paid over $1000 dollars a month to murder, maim and cannibalise innocent Syrians. Together with them there are tens of thousands of fanatical foreign mercenaries, Chechens, Tunisians, Libyans and many Muslims from Western countries like Britain, France, Belgium and Germany. (These terrorists, who use chemical weapons in Syria, are the same people who prepare chemical weapons in Somalia). The war in Syria is a war between Syrian patriots on the one hand and foreign-financed traitors and foreign mercenaries on the other hand.

As regards the intervention of President Putin, the man who is so hated by Rue Daru and the old calendarists, what is remarkable is that for the first time, someone has stood up to resist the New World Order, that will lead to the enthronement of Antichrist in the rebuilt Temple on Zion. (Speaking of Russia, called the ‘Heartland’ in geopolitical science, Zbigniew Brzezinski said that the ‘New World Order’ would be built on its ruins). President Putin may even have averted a Third World War and certainly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, unlike President Obama who should be stripped of his.

It was not a billion-peopled China or India or Africa, representing half the population of the planet between them, but Russia that stood up to the New World Order. President Putin has played the role of the Orthodox Tsar, of ‘him who restrains’ (2 Thessalonians 2, 6). This is remarkable on the part of a mere politician. Moreover on 19 September the President went on in his Valdai Speech to explain that the role of Russia is in Orthodoxy and that this is her Christian civilisational role against the secularist and suicidal West which has opted for Sodom.

The West has two great enemies in Russia today. The first is President Putin, the second is Patriarch Kyrill. It will do its utmost to bring them both down, as it has already done.

Q: Why?

A: Because the secularist West knows that if either of them is successful or both of them are successful, they will with time be replaced by even more powerful Orthodox figures in Russia. They will not only resist the New World Order even more successfully, but will actually reverse it, restoring the Russian Orthodox Empire in Eurasia and worldwide Orthodox unity. That will be the end of the Antichristic, unipolar global project, of Orthodox countries eternally indebted and enslaved to the European Union, the end of absurd new calendarism and masonic puppet Orthodox bishops, the beginning of freedom for Orthodoxy in China, financial support for the Orthodox missions in Latin America, Africa and Asia, the building of tens of thousands of churches there and, if God wills and the world lasts long enough, the foundation of new autocephalous Churches. In a word, this will be the great gathering of all Orthodox Christianity before the end.

Q: It is 20 years since the attempted coup of October 1993 in Moscow, with the bombardment of the White House and the Yeltsin era. What are your thoughts?

A: The 1990s were a disgraceful period, when Russia went from Communism to Consumerism, from lies to theft. Russian public assets were stolen by those whom we now call oligarchs through so-called ‘privatisation’. These oligarchs, international criminals, now live in asylum under British government protection in London and elsewhere in the Western world that so adored their stolen billions that so impoverished Russia. This was massive, State-sponsored theft. In the 1990s the West tried to dismember and destroy the Russian Lands, just as it had tried to do under the seven months of the Provisional Government of 1917. It is said that these new Kerenskys, Harvard-educated privatisers, the cowboys of the ‘Wild East’, actually rigged the election of 1996 so that the drunkard Yeltsin could win. It is possible. The CIA has plenty of experience in rigging elections all round the world. In 1917 the decadence lasted seven months; in the 1990s it lasted seven years until the Jubilee Council of August 2000 and the canonisation of the New Martyrs in Moscow.

Q: Some conservative convert Orthodox, especially under the Patriarchate of Antioch in the USA, would perhaps be shocked by your words. They think that privatisation is good. What would you say to them?

A: Conservatism is not the same as the Tradition. To use American vocabulary, neoconservatives or ‘neocons’ (unprincipled Money Tories or economic liberals in Britishspeak) worship God and Mammon against the Gospel. Indeed, monetarism is just another word for Mammon. And even the so-called Paleoconservatives (High Tories, UKIP, noblesse oblige, the Patriarchal) are not the same as Orthodox. Firstly, paleoconservatives have a tendency to racism. Secondly, unlike Orthodox, they have little sense of social justice. (If socialism exists, there are reasons). And thirdly, the paleoconservatives tend to attract a lunatic fringe, people who are obsessed with conspiracy theories, hate the Jews, admire Hitler and other such nonsense

Q: What are your hopes and fears for the revival of the Russian Church in Russia today?

A: We must understand that the revival of the last 25 years, although spectacular, has only just begun. As Patriarch Kyrill said last week, at the present rate it will take 100 years just to build enough churches to catch up with the number of churches that existed in the Russian Empire before the Revolution. Instead of building 1,000 churches a year, over the next ten years 14,000 churches need to be built every year. That is what would be happening if Russia were not nominally Orthodox, but actually Orthodox. Another example: at the Synod in Moscow on 5 October seven new bishops were nominated. That is very good and it should bring the total to more or less 300 bishops. But if Russia and the Church’s canonical territories were actually and not nominally Orthodox, there would be 200 times more bishosp being nominated – 1,400 new bishops. Then any future Inter-Orthodox Conference (falsely called a Pan-Orthodox Council by the Phanariots) would be Orthodox

Q: One last question. Earlier you mentioned Fr Seraphim (Rose). Do you think he will one day be canonised?

A: God makes saints, not men. It may be that one day God will reveal Fr Seraphim to have been a saint. It is quite possible, judging from his life. But, before this, the monastery at Platina will first have to return to ROCOR. That is what Fr Seraphim would have wanted. That would be justice correcting the historic injustice of Platina leaving ROCOR, something carried out after Fr Seraphim’s repose. I would even say that the main impediment to Fr Seraphim’s canonisation is precisely the fact that Platina has not yet returned to ROCOR. Then everything will fall into place.

Q: Would Fr Seraphim have agreed with the reconciliation between ROCOR and the Church inside Russia?

A: Of course, he would. He was a deeply anti-sectarian person, as you can see by the way in which the proud ‘super-correct’ persecuted him in the 1970s. He was a genuine monk who had no pathological complexes, like many of the super-correct converts at that time. He suffered greatly from them, especially when they insisted on being photographed with him – photographs that they now display in their self-justification! ‘Look at me, I’m standing next to Fr Seraphim, I’m a saint’. That is what they proclaim and yet in his lifetime they were his worst enemies. It was the same with St John of Shanghai. Some of his worst persecutors during his lifetime, those who put him on trial, proclaimed after his canonisation how much they had supported him!

Q: When you see what is being introduced in the Western world, what has been called ‘Eurosodom’, are you pessimistic or optimistic about the future

A: It is a strange fact that all empires end in sodomy because they lose faith, they no longer have any self-belief and so they commit suicide. It happened in Ancient Greece and Rome. And today we are seeing not the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but the decline and fall of the Western Empire. It is a tragedy. And it is the duty of Orthodox to try and save the best of Western culture before it disappears altogether under the tidal wave of atheism.

Am I pessimistic or optimistic? True, it is quite possible that only very little of my above hopes for the future restoration of Orthodox Russia will be realised. I have no illusions. But even so, even despite all this, I remain optimistic because, although man proposes, God disposes, and God has already won, ‘trampling down death by death’. The worst that can happen is that we die. And if, I repeat if, we die repentant, and I underline repentant, we will go to Paradise! Who can be a pessimist? Fear not, little flock!

Local and Faithful, or Westernised and Hellenised

Since the Russian Revolution the Patriarchate of Constantinople has taken into its jurisdiction a variety of Russophobic dissidents. Their schisms have come about because the dissidents have been too spiritually weak to remain faithful to the Russian Tradition and so have been dragged down into party politics or personality cults. Thus, they have either been virulent nationalists or else anti-Tradition liberals and freemasons, cultivating political and theological schisms caused by that Revolution. Having lost sight of the big picture of Orthodox civilisational values, the Orthodox world-view, they have been brought down into petty, provincial concerns.

Some of the dissidents have been Slavs – Russians, Ukrainians or ex-Catholic Carpatho-Russians – others have been Western converts – Finnish, American, French, Estonian or ex-Anglican. Here we look at the dissidents, originally Russophobic, pro-Kerensky aristocrats from Saint Petersburg, who, leaving Russia, then the Church outside Russia and then the Church inside Russia for Constantinople, over 80 years ago formed the Rue Daru jurisdiction in Paris. After nearly a year without a leader, they are now hoping to elect a new archbishop in November 2013.

Although issued from the Russian Tradition and even claiming to belong to it, since they left the Mother-Church these dissidents have gradually become more and more Westernised and absorbed into the US and Turkish-controlled Greek Patriarchate in Istanbul. This can clearly be seen in their forsaking of the Orthodox liturgical calendar and Orthodox liturgical, dogmatic and pastoral practices for modernist, Western, secular practices. This simultaneous Westernisation and Hellenisation is inevitable and can only be avoided by their leaving schism and taking the path back to the Mother-Church.

If, after the election of a new archbishop, they cannot return to the Mother-Church, they will consign themselves to remaining a small archdiocese of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, perhaps 5,000 in number in all, most of their parishes set up in temporary or rented premises and less than 25 strong. Their ethos will continue to be intellectual, not spiritual, philosophical, not theological, disincarnate, not incarnate, with mainly untrained clergy, without a living Tradition and without a Mother-Church, yet dependent on the Russian Church for vestments, literature, musical culture and people to fill its small parishes. Clearly, eventually, they will disappear, absorbed into Greek Church structures and practices.

However, if, after the election of a new archbishop, they can return to the Mother-Church, they will be able to rejoin the multinational and multilingual free Russian Orthodox Church, fifty times bigger than the tiny and captive Patriarchate of Constantinople. They will be able to take part in the construction of the Metropolia of Western Europe, with its hundreds and hundreds of real parishes and historic churches all over Western Europe, the stepping-stone to a future new Local Church and yet at the same time authentically faithful to the Russian Orthodox Tradition and Church in all ways. Local and Faithful, or Westernised and Hellenised: this is the choice that they face.