Every attempt to bring the peoples of Europe under central control has always been catastrophic. Whether it was the centralizing military might of pagan Rome 2,000 years ago, the feudal papal project that opened in the 11th century and lasted until the 16th century, Napoleon 200 years ago, the Central Powers 100 years ago, the Third Reich 75 years ago or the EU Fourth Reich today, centralization under Rome, Paris or Berlin has always brought disaster in its wake. Blinded by their arrogance to the point of self-delusion, the centralizers have never learned from history, but always think that they are cleverer fools than the fools who went before them. Elitists to the core, they have always ignored the people and their thirst for freedom.

The fault-lines of Europe have always been clear. In the Western corner the Protestant North and the Catholic South will never see eye to eye. However much Latin bureaucrats try to force individualistic Protestants into their jesuitical collectivist straitjacket they will not fit, and however much Lutheran-Calvinist Merkels tries to foist Lutheran-Calvinist austerity on Catholics, they will not accept it either. However, beyond that, the 11th century dividing line between Orthodox Europe and the secularist rest in the Western corner is far older and far more fundamental. The attempt by Berlin-Brussels to absorb even the 17% of the Orthodox world of Romania, Greece, Bulgaria and Cyprus, let alone the 83% of the Orthodox world in Russia, Serbia, Georgia and the Middle East, has been disastrous. As for the Ukraine, the Eurocrats have blood on their hands.

Through its totally unrealistic promises, which it has been encouraged to make by Washington and its NATO legions, the EU has de facto unleashed a civil war in the Ukraine. This opposes the 80% of the Orthodox Ukrainians with foreign volunteer fighters from Russia, and even from France and Catalonia, to the 20% of the far west Catholic Galicians (formerly in Poland) and their US-paid junta in Kiev. Thousands are dead. In the east dead bodies in NATO uniforms (no doubt belonging to those trained in NATO camps in Lithuania and elsewhere) have been found at Donetsk airport, together with the bodies of foreign mercenaries paid for by the oligarch Kolomoisky, and quantities of US arms.

Meanwhile, young Ukrainians are fleeing abroad from recruiting parties looking for cannon fodder for the junta’s hugely expensive and wasteful war; others who have enough money simply pay the $1,000 as a bribe to get exempted. Civil war threatens to spread to Kharkov in the north and Odessa in the south and in Kiev itself an oligarch coup d’etat against the disastrous puppet Poroshenko is rumoured. Cold and bankruptcy menace the whole country. As for Russian sanctions, they are hitting the EU hard, whether it is Greek fruit-growers, German carmakers, French tourist-operators or Welsh dairy farmers. Indeed, Russia has received open support from seven EU countries, notably from Hungary, Austria, Slovakia, Czechia and now from the new democratically-chosen government of Greece.

Thus, Gabriel Avramidis of the right-wing Independent Greeks Party (ANEL) has said that Greece must adjust its geopolitical priorities and turn towards Russia. And ANEL has joined a coalition government with the left-wing party (SYRIZA) which won last Sunday’s parliamentary election. Avramidis said, ‘We believe that Greece should make a geopolitical turn towards the Russian Federation’. It is no coincidence that their leader Panos Kammenos visited Moscow on 15 January. The Russian Minister of Agriculture stated that if Greece comes under EU pressure, Russia is ready to lift the embargo and begin to buy Greek agricultural products with a 30-year treaty. Avramidis also described recent statements that Russia plans to build a gas pipeline to supply natural gas to Central and Eastern Europe via Turkey and Greece and to end the transit of Russian gas to Europe through the Ukraine by 2019 as very important.

Interestingly, the first meeting of the leader of SYRIZA, Tsipras, with a foreign ambassador since being elected Greek Prime Minister was with Russia’s Andrey Maslov. And his first act as PM was to visit a rifle range where the Nazis executed 200 Greeks on 1 May 1944. We have further evidence that Tsipras will substantially realign his country’s national interest away from the west and towards the east. The Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias is due in Brussels on Thursday to discuss possible additional sanctions on Russia over the conflict in Ukraine. Before the cabinet even met for the first time, the Greek government said that it disagreed with an EU statement in which Donald Tusk raised the prospect of “further restrictive measures” on Russia.”

In recent months Kotzias has written on Twitter that sanctions against Russia are not in Greece’s interests. And he said in a blog that a new foreign policy for Greece should focus on stopping the ongoing transformation of the EU ‘into an idiosyncratic empire, under the rule of Germany’. Meanwhile, left-wing parties in Scotland and Catalonia want freedom from colonial centres, and right-wing parties in France, England and elsewhere want freedom from Brussels-Berlin. They defy the EU Superclass and fight for faith, heritage and sovereignty. The war for freedom which began in the Ukraine last year is spreading.