The Russian Church to Recruit Missionaries for the Philippines

Bangkok: The Dependency of the Russian Orthodox Church in Taiwan is to recruit young people who wish to bring the news of Christ to the Philippines. The Dependency Press Service stated that:

‘The Lord has now brought about extremely favourable conditions for such a witness in the Philippines, where thousands of people wish to join the Orthodox Church’. ‘Young people of both sexes who wish to do missionary work in the Philippines must be prepared to serve the Church with zeal and self-sacrifice, must have a profound faith and be loyal to the traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church and possess high moral qualities’. ‘The missionary must be ready to spend two months or more there. Knowledge of English and experience of missionary work are welcome but are not essential. It is vital to have the recommendation of your confessor, parish priest or diocesan bishop’.

A Decisive Moment in History

In order to wipe out the Russians, we must not only destroy their army, wreck their towns and liquidate their State, but it is also vital to kill their culture, deprive them of moral direction, belittle their heroes and force them to forget all their achievements. Only then can this people finally be defeated.

Josef Goebbels

If people lose faith in God, it is a tragedy, and if they do not repent, they die and disappear off the face of the earth. Many peoples have disappeared, but Russia exists and will continue to exist. Pray, entreat and repent! Then the Lord will not leave you; He will save the whole Earth!

Blessed Matrona of Moscow

We live at a decisive moment in history, at an exceptional time, when prophecies are taking flesh before our very eyes. When the Washington puppeteers sent their junta on its blitzkrieg against the people of the eastern Ukraine, it thought that if it used carpet bombing against an intimidated population and destroyed their infrastructure, then they would rise up against the ‘separatists and terrorists’.

This plan did not work. Poroshenko’s (Waltzman’s) American advisors grossly miscalculated when they thought that they knew his subjects’ psychology – they thought that the people would settle for the mess of pottage of comfortable consumerism, for bread and circuses, like Western people. They will not. Like the Mongols, the Swedes, the Poles, Napoleon and Hitler before them, the CIA are wrong again.

Every day the war in the Ukraine takes the lives of civilians, including children. Spilled blood is marking out the future borders. However, although the régime continues to massacre the people in its occupied territories, it has failed to stamp out resistance. In captured Slavyansk and Kramatorsk they have staged mass shootings of residents and of the mothers of Home Guardsmen. Already the angel of vengeance has erased the names of the executioners from the Book of Life.

From a spiritual perspective, a pathological hatred of Russia is understandable. Stating a commitment to ‘traditional values’, in fact to Orthodoxy and Christ, Russia has made Satan gnash his teeth. For more than twenty years he believed that Russia was his. Then, after nearly a generation, at the State level we have seen spiritually informed decisions. Satan wanted Orthodox to continue to bow down before his golden calf, to have no other god but it. He decided to punish Russia with sanctions until it changed its mind.

In the eastern Ukraine we are seeing the Resurrection of Orthodox Rus, a new social system, that which the Tsar-Martyr had tried to introduce before the Revolution, that is, before the Western-organized coup d’etat of February 1917. As then the aristocrats resisted that social system, so today the oligarchs resist it. The oligarchs now face a new generation brought up on the Orthodox White Idea – and that generation is the future Orthodox political élite of Russia. People in the Ukraine long endured economic slavery under the oligarchs without a murmur, but they rebelled against spiritual slavery, against the bloodthirsty Nazi idol erected on the independence of the Ukrainian nation. For idols collapse onto the heads of their devotees.

The thesis of the Russian Orthodox thinker and prophet Ivan Ilyin was that after the collapse of the USSR twenty quasi-states would exist on the sacred sites of Holy Rus, but then ‘a new Russian union would implement a policy based on religious contemplation and spiritual freedom, on justice and fraternal patriotic feelings, and on the dignity of the government, on its power, strength, and universal trust’. He was right. The plans of the global hegemonists are coming to naught.

The Nazi bandits sent by Washington through Kiev are only victims of their own ignorance; the time will come when they will realize who and what drew them to the slaughter. The world’s grandmasters calculated that President Putin would play by the rules of this world. He has not. According to the law of Russian Orthodoxy, when the country is in danger, God chooses to bring the things of this world to naught, the commoner trumps the powerbroker, and those who calculate according to the rules of digital culture the consequences of disobeying the golden calf are proved wrong.

The Poles and the French walked around the Kremlin, then, the fickleness of fate struck them – they had to eat horse-feed. When Napoleon sat in the Kremlin, the French desecrated the holy places, ravaged Russia, but the scales on the eyes of the Russian elite, the allure of the West, fell away. In 1941, the Germans admired the Kremlin through their binoculars. In 1942, Ivan Ilyin wrote the article ‘Why We Believe in Russia’. In 1943, anyone could have written it, but in 1942, in defeat, only Ilyin did. That is, faith saves.

Orthodoxy is not only a gift; it is also a cross. Some people drink the cup of suffering in the name of Russian Orthodox faith, while at the same time others blithely lead carefree lives, wasting their time, not knowing why they are Orthodox. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? (Lk. 13, 4). The Lord warns us. God judges people. His Judgement comes about at the time of our actions, but He does not execute His sentence immediately, God gives people time to repent.

Political frontiers reflect human truths, but often they do not coincide with the frontiers of spiritual civilization. Between Galicia and the rest of the Ukraine there is a frontier, it is a spiritual frontier, that between apostasy and faith. Satan deceives nations with the spirit of national pride. This is symbolized by the Ukrainian Army, most of which refuses to fight or simply joins those whom it is supposed to be fighting. Another 300 have now joined the side of freedom against their CIA paymasters. The worst thing for the hopelessly provincialist nationalist Uniat Galicians is that they still do not realize that they have been judged by God.

War often gives a nation a painful shock. Such a painful shock stopped the Vietnam War. When burial crosses dot the Western and Central Ukraine, serving to subsequent generations as a reminder of how dear the cost of the Nazi hallucination was to the people, then, the mothers of the dead and maimed soldiers will stop the war. Hubris and blind hatred led them to reject federalism, which alone would have allowed people to live within a shared common frontier, as heirs of Kievan Rus.

Feelings overrode reason. Hatred destroys, and only love can create. Thus, Nero hated the Christians, he wanted to immortalize himself in grand architectural monuments and wipe Christians off the face of the Earth, but the persecution only strengthened Christianity in a phenomenal way, while there is nothing left of Nero’s grandiose buildings. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous: but the way of the wicked will perish (Psalm 1, 6).

Adapted from an article by Sergey Moiseev.

A Time of Decision for Members of the Church of England

If the ‘Church of England’ is, as we Orthodox believe, merely a group of sectarian Protestant congregations, then the decision to introduce female ‘bishops’ is long overdue. The only reason for its delay can be misogyny. After all, the first female ‘bishops’ in the Anglican Communion were introduced over a decade ago and the first female pastor seventy years ago. As for the head of the ‘Church of England’, she is a woman and all the ‘bishops’ of the ‘Church of England’ are nominated by the Prime Minister who may be a woman and may be an atheist. If the average ‘Church of England’ vicar is really just a social worker, then it is purely sexist to forbid the heads of social work departments to be female.

On the other hand, if the ‘Church of England’ were part of the Orthodox Church, that is, of the Body of Christ, then its female clergy would be heretical. For the Bible makes it clear that Christ, Who overturned every human institution, chose only men as his apostles, making it clear that the difference between men and women is not due to any human institution, but is Divinely ordained and relates back to the Creation as described in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis. However, since the ‘Church of England’ is not part of the Body of Christ, but merely a nationally manipulated Reformation sect, which by definition has swum with the secularist tide ever since it was founded by the serial adulterer, murderer and bandit, Henry VIII, then all is well.

If any members of the Church of England did not know this and still believe in the absurd ‘branch theory’, they will have to carry out a revolution in their lives and civilizational values, if. that is, they wish to live honest lives consistent with the Christianity of the Church. Very nearly forty years ago I can remember the late Fr Sophrony (Sakharov), who was never allowed to receive any member of the Church of England into his Greek Orthodox church, saying to one former Anglican who was complaining that she suffered in the Orthodox Church: ‘The Church hurts’. For some reason quite beyond me, she was upset by this fact. Of course, the Church hurts. The Church means being crucified. However, it also means being raised from the dead.

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

On the Spiritual Disease of Guruism

The title of this article was suggested by a priest in Moscow who, when asked what he thought about the followers of a certain pseudo-monastic movement, replied: ‘They are all spiritually ill and with the same spiritual illness’. Here he referred to the fact that the archimandrite who had founded and then led the group had fallen into spiritual delusion (prelest/plani/illusio) and his weak-minded adepts had simply followed in the footsteps of their guru, conforming themselves to his illness of disincarnate ‘spiritualism’.

For any ism is by definition a spiritual disease and guruism is no different (nor, for that matter, is anti-intellectualism). Guruism in the Church context is spiritually dangerous because it replaces the repentant heart with the blinded head (whereas anti-intellectualism gives complete priority to irrational emotions). What are the signs of the spiritual disease of guruism? They come in three stages and affect the fallen mind (and imagination), the fallen body and the fallen spirit, that is, all fallen human nature or ‘the flesh’. These stages are:

1. Blind certainty that the guru and therefore the adepts are right. This results in a blinkered attitude towards others, as well as an imagined superiority, pretentiousness and pompousness, producing an army of identical clones devoid of individual personalities, who are full of themselves in self-righteous priggishness. This entails contempt, condemnation and slander of others, with profound anger and hatred towards those who disagree with the ideology of their cult. This may take the form of racism or a number of other isms.

2. The lack of any spontaneous, heartfelt feeling because of the cold guruism which results from the lack of love, the love produced by a warm heart. This is itself the result of the confusion caused when the indoctrination of the head with the teachings of the guru replaces the cleansing of the heart as the focus of Christian life. This is in direct disobedience to St Silvanus the Athonite’s dictum that we are ‘to keep our minds in hell’, and so not to focus on our minds and our imaginations (fantasies), which produce so many delusions.

3. Depression which is the inevitable result of the realization of the disincarnate disconnect between the diseased conviction of rightness (in fact, of the escapist fantasy or daydreaming imagination) and the real world (fallen reality). This is accompanied by fanaticism, as can be seen in strangeness of dress (in fact a uniform) and demeanour, rigidity of pose and walk, and the refusal to be sociable or mix, including eating and drinking, with others who are not part of the clique and the refusal because of pride to talk to them about everyday life.

As can be seen, the overwhelming trait here is pride – absence of humility and simple humanity. It seems that the Epistle to the Colossians has been forgotten: ‘Let no-one beguile you of your reward, insisting on self-abasement and worshipping of angels, taking his stand on those things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind…These things have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting rigour of devotion and self-abasement and severity to the body, but they are of no value in satisfying the flesh’ (Col 2, 18 and 23).

A Miracle in Austria

28 June 2014 marked the centenary of the tragic assassination, planned by freemasons, of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his spouse Sophia, Duchess of Hohenberg. This was the spark that lit the powderkeg of Europe and so led to the First World War. Carefully planned by international freemasonry and carried out by a manipulated young Bosnian student, the assassination successfully destroyed the old Europe for ever and led to the fall of Christian monarchies. Although warned not to visit Sarajevo by the Russian Imperial government, with whom the Archduke had been on excellent terms since his most cordial visits to St Petersburg in 1891 and 1907, he still went ahead with the visit.

The Archduke had become the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne on 19 May 1896, the feast of St Job and the birthday of the future Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II. In 1900 the pious Archduke married his future spouse Sophia for love and was totally devoted to her. In 1906 he put forward a plan to take power from over-powerful Hungarian aristocrats who so oppressed the Slavs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and set about granting autonomy to over 12 different nationalities. Only such decentralization could ensure the survival of the Empire. He resisted pressures from the Hungarian elite and wanted to ensure peace with Russia and so Serbia, knowing that powerful French and Hungarian freemasons did not want that, but instead sought an Austro-Russian war. Hence their well-planned assassination in Sarajevo.

After the War the Hohenberg family was able to keep only the castle of Artstetten (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artstetten_Castle). During the Second World War, as convinced monarchists and therefore anti-Nazis, descendants of the family were imprisoned in Dachau, where they helped Jews and gypsies. This year, from 9 to 11 May 2014 the great-grandchildren of the Archduke invited to Austria an advisor of Metropolitan Hilarion of the Church Outside Russia, together with the Myrrh-Giving icon of Tsar Nicholas II from Moscow. It was here that a miracle took place. On 10 May at the castle of Artstetten in Lower Austria, towering with its onion domes over the Danube, before members of the family and the tomb of the Archduke, the akathist was read before the icon.

It was at this moment that ‘the background of the icon changed and the halo around the Tsar-Martyr’s head gave out rays of golden light; in turn his clothing shone and his face seemed as if it were alive, his mouth seemed to open and his lips moved as if he were speaking. His hand made the sign of the cross in blessing and a strong fragrance was given off; it seemed as though his figure was about to move forward from the background’. (Written by Princess Rosalia von Hohenberg). A deep impression was left on all present.

An Orthodox Future for Finland?

Foreword

Nearly 100 years since the aggressive Western attempt to take over the last bastion of Christendom in Russia in 1917, there are reasons for pessimism and for optimism. On the one hand, in the south, the West has taken over the Patriarchate of Constantinople and made it into a hub of Diaspora aggression against the fullness of Orthodoxy. It has tried to subvert the other ancient Patriarchates, the Churches of Greece, Cyprus, Albania and now the US and the EU are trying to subvert the Churches of Georgia, Romania, Serbia and even Russia.

On the other hand, we have witnessed the miraculous Resurrection of the multinational Russian Church, 75% of the whole Orthodox world and the champion of all who follow the Orthodox Tradition. Savaged by base attacks from nationalism, liberalism and foreign-controlled Constantinople in France, the USA, Estonia, the Ukraine and England, she has not only survived but is responding to her calling to preach the Gospel and consequent unique Church Christianity worldwide, speaking the ‘Russian Word’ to the world at large.

The fault-line between two spiritual tectonic plates, those of atheist/secularist Europe and Christian Eurasia, has never been absolutely clear. This we have seen in recent years in what is now called Bosnia-Herzegovina and the western Ukraine, where aggressive Westernization is still trying to conquer the Orthodox borderlands. However, in the north, along the Russo-Finnish frontier, it is clear. On the eastern side are the remains of Orthodox Christianity; on the western side is standard Western atheist secularism and the few oases of Orthodoxy.

Introduction

The fact is that the first millennium of the history of Europe is by and large the history of its depaganization or Christianization. However, the second millennium of the history of Europe is by and large the history of its repaganization or deChristianization. This de-Christianization or loss of integral faith has been expressed by humanism, that is, the worship of fallen and sinful humanity, a history which is now being definitively completed by the through-going paganism and worship of sin in this opening third millennium.

Another fact about Europe is that the international names of several of its countries are not the names given to them by their native peoples. For example, as regards France and Bulgaria, they are known by names of very small groups of invaders, for the French are really Gauls, not Franks, and the Bulgarians are really Slavs, not Bulgarians (a Turkish tribe). Also, Germany is in fact Deutschland, Hungary is Magyarország, Greece is Ellatha and Romania is a recent, German-invented name for Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania.

Yet other European countries are known by the Germanic word ‘land’ and yet they are not inhabited by Germanic peoples. Thus, the Gaelic peoples of Ireland and Scotland do not use the word ‘land’ for the native names of their countries. Similarly, Lettland (Latvia), Estland (Estonia) and, especially, Finland are not Germanic ‘lands’. In the case of Finland, the name for the country is ‘Suomi’, probably related to the word for land, similar to the Slavic ‘zemlya’, which is completely different from its foreign, but international name. Why?

The West

The reason for this strange name of ‘Finland’ is due to the country’s position between East and West. Finland was in fact only a small area in the extreme south-west of present-day Finland, conquered by the Swedes who gave the name to the whole country and then conveyed this Swedish name to the Western world. By that time Sweden had renounced its early 11th century heritage of St Olaf and St Anne of Novgorod, in the late 11th century abandoning that Orthodoxy of its youth to join the new Roman Catholicism.

This meant that Finland never encountered the still at heart Orthodox first millennium Christianity of the West, but only that of the second millennium. For by then there had developed a deviant form of Christianity in the West which had broken away from the Church and Church Christianity remained dominant only in the then majority East. And here it was developing apace, above all in the Balkans and in the Russian world, a world that included Slavic and Finnish tribes alike. A coming clash was inevitable.

In the 12th and 13th centuries the now Roman Catholic Sweden began to launch its own imperialistic crusades and the Swedish Establishment imposed a ‘patron saint of Finland’, the English papist Henry of Uppsala (+ 1156). Thus, as elsewhere in Western Europe, the local aristocrats introduced feudalism and the Finnish peasants were exploited. In the 16th century, following the latest Germanic fashion, Sweden adopted Lutheranism and began lutheranizing the Finns and set to massacring the Orthodox in eastern Finland or Karelia.

Notably, on Christmas Day 1590 they martyred St Jonah and 115 other monks and laymen at Pechenga. The 17th century was a period of more Protestant fanaticism and Sweden, then a great force, expanded both south and east. In Karelia the Swedish forces destroyed and burned to the ground the monasteries of Valaam and Konevsky. The monks that did not flee were martyred and many peasants met the same fate. The Swedes took over Karelia, Ingermanland, Estonia and Latvia, refusing to allow the people to practise Orthodoxy.

After this came the neo-pagan ‘Enlightenment’ and atheistic French influence which the Swedish aristocrats now in turn forced onto the Finns. Although after 1809 the Swedes lost their influence to Russia for over a century, such was the hold of Lutheranism that Finland still left the Russian Orthodox world after 1917. Over the last century it has gradually adopted typical, post-Protestant, Scandinavian modernism and secularism, the world of plastic, steel and glass, for the most part losing its wood-solid traditions and old pieties.

The East

Unlike in the West where the authentic and unsecularized Orthodox Christian Tradition had been disrupted and interrupted, in the East it continued. Orthodox Christianity had started to spread to Finland at latest at the beginning of the 12th century. Some of the earliest excavated crosses in Finland, dating from the 12th century onwards, are similar to a type found in Novgorod and Kiev. It seems certain that Orthodox parishes were established as far west as Tavastia in central southern Finland.

The main missionary work fell to the monasteries in the wilderness of Karelia. Two monasteries were founded on islands in Lake Ladoga which centuries later became famous: these are Valaam and Konevsky. The Karelian and Finnish forests were also inhabited by spiritually advanced hermits. Often around the hermit’s hut or skete there settled other ascetics and so a new monastery was founded. Notably, in the far north, St Tryphon of Pechenga (+ 1583) became the Enlightener of the Lapps (the Sami).

Another important example of this process was the Karelian St Alexander of Svir (1449–1533), who struggled in the ascetic life for 13 years at Valaam and then founded another monastery on the River Svir. However, after such spiritual figures there came Lutheran persecution of the Church. It was only in 1809 that a newly powerful Russia took over the whole of Finland from Sweden. However, although some beautiful Orthodox churches were built, these were mainly for Russian soldiers and merchants; missionary work was weak.

Thus, the Church became identified in the minds of many Finns with the imperialism of Westernized Russian aristocrats and bureaucrats. When Finland became independent of Russia after 1917, the 24 Orthodox parishes in Finland were taken under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Lutheran calendar was adopted and decadence began, associated with freemasonry, modernism and unmentionable practices. In the 1940s Russia was further discredited as a result of the wars between Finland and the atheist Soviet Union.

And so for political reasons the parishes in Finland, and later a small monastery and a convent, came to have a life independent of their roots in the Russian Mother-Church. Finnish became the norm – clearly a good thing for missionary work in Finland. However, from the very start under the foreign-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople, modernism set in, which increasingly took over the liturgical life of the churches. Many wondered if the salt had lost its savour under pressure from renovationism and ‘finlandization’.

Conclusion

The last two centuries of Finnish-Russian relations have produced the predictable Russophobic reactions. The ugly nationalism of unChurched Russians who yet claimed to be Orthodox has created by reaction a local nationalism. The same process as in Finland has also been visible in diasporas in France, the US and elsewhere, where most still do not understand that in the Church the word ‘Russian’ means multinational and multilingual. Today in Finland there are 140 priests and some 58,000 Orthodox outside the Russian Church.

Although services are now in Finnish, we see a limited future in a Lutheranized and secularized Orthodoxy, a ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’ or ‘Halfodoxy’, a ‘Diet Orthodoxy’, rationalized, homogenized, sanitized, degutted, neutered, castrated, serving even the Easter cycle on the Catholic/Lutheran calendar. We see the future with the great defender of Orthodoxy in the North, St Alexander Nevsky (23 November/6 December), who warned that ‘God is not in power, but in truth’, and with the Karelian/North Russian monastic tradition.

Will the Russian-built churches of Finland one day return to integral Orthodoxy? Modernist Lutheran and Uniat-style Finnish churches, for example, in Oulu, Lintula, Espoo and Pori can stay with Constantinople. The Cathedral of the Dormition (the largest Orthodox church in Western Europe) and Holy Trinity church in Helsinki, the magnificent wooden church in Joensuu, St Alexander Nevsky (as it originally was) church in Tampere and the churches in Tornio, Vaasa and Hamina, all stand as witnesses to and reminders of authentic Orthodoxy.

Afterword

The question of our Church is not primarily a geopolitical question, but a spiritual question. The question is not whether the Orthodox world is with Europe (the EU) or against Europe, but whether the Orthodox world is with Christ or against Christ. As for us, we will remain with Holy Rus, because there is nothing higher than holiness, not even ‘Europe’. Our task is to preach the ‘Russian Word’, as Dostoyevsky put it, that is, to preach the Orthodox word to the whole world before the end, as the Gospel bids us.

Orthodox Christian values are not those of the Western world, which forsook Orthodoxy nigh on 1,000 years ago. We do not print ‘In God we trust’ on our banknotes, for we trust in the God of the Holy Trinity, not in the god of Mammon. In the West, they believe in what you have; we believe in what you are. In the West, they believe in Number 1; we believe in the family. In the West they believe in ambition, career and money; we believe in life, for Christ said: ‘I am the Life, the Way and the Truth’.

We Orthodox in the West, whether in Finland or elsewhere, will remain here for as long as our missionary witness is not persecuted out of existence. When that happens, then we shall flee back to Holy Rus, of which we have always been the truest patriots. Moreover, we shall remain faithful to Orthodoxy, just as the Church Outside Russia has remained faithful to Orthodoxy for 94 years already. We shall not change, whatever the world and all its Establishments think, for we do not fear the institutions of apostasy, but rather we fear God.

Why we do not speak of ‘British’ Orthodoxy, but of the Orthodoxy of the Isles

In contemporary England the word ‘British’ signifies the ‘Establishment’ as in ‘the BBC’, the propaganda-driven British Broadcasting Corporation. It thus refers to all the pitiful, imperial aspects of the history of this little country, whether in the period of the Romans, the Normans, the Georgians with their ‘Rule Britannia’ chant, or the Victorians who physically identified the figure of Queen Victoria with the mythical figure of Britannia and their cruel, worldwide empire.

Outside England, in particular in Scotland and even more in Ireland, the word ‘Britain’ means imperialist exploitation and the barbaric colonialism of the past. Thus, the Irish Embassy in London actively discourages the use of the term ‘The British Isles’ to refer to Ireland; for the Irish it is an insult. In the Orthodox context we note that the term ‘British Orthodoxy’ is used only by Establishment, ex-Anglican convert types among the tiny British Coptic group and a few others elsewhere.

Those elsewhere are usually under the once Anglican-dominated Patriarchate of Constantinople or else are connected with the former British Middle East and British-imposed freemasonry and new calendar. Often such people are connected with the Duke of Edinburgh, a Greek Orthodox freemason, and the current Prince of Wales, who appears to follow in his father’s footsteps; certainly he hates President Putin, absurdly identifying him with the Nazis.

The hatred of the Russian Church by the British Establishment became abundantly clear at the time of the extraordinarily biased British press coverage of the 2006 Sourozh schism, when former Anglican Establishment converts abandoned the Russian Church for Greek Orthodox freemasonry. What term then do we use to describe the Orthodoxy of those who live in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales and their dependent islands and of the saints who dwelled in these islands?

Quite simply we use the term the Orthodoxy ‘of the Isles’ (of Britain and Ireland), and the Saints ‘of the Isles’ of Britain and Ireland. This term is not only inclusive of the whole archipelago of the British Isles and Ireland, but also avoids the sad connotations of the past, which saw scenes of the burning of British flags for arrogant, ‘British’ colonialist meddling. Ex-Anglican ‘British Orthodoxy’ is one thing, but Insular Orthodoxy, the Orthodoxy of the Isles, is quite another.

Nineveh is Fallen

Wasted is Nineveh; who will bemoan her? Whence shall I seek comforters for her?

Nahum 3, 7

And he will make Nineveh a desolation, a dry waste like the desert.

Zeph. 2, 13

When US forces together with others from servile poodle-governments in London and the new Eastern Europe were sent to Iraq, they appeared to have four aims.

The first aim was to overthrow the CIA-installed Saddam Hussein, who had become too popular for the West’s liking. He had after all, with Washington’s tacit approval, originally tried to reunite to Iraq the province of Kuwait, which had been cut off from the rest of the country by oil-greedy British colonial authorities. That made him no longer useful to the West.

The second aim was to control Iraq by ‘bombing it back to the Stone Age’, depriving its citizens of normal education, not to mention water, electricity, petrol and other staples of modern life.

The third aim was to oversee the election of a ‘democratic’ government.

Washington duly achieved all three aims, spending $3 trillion in the process and almost bankrupting the USA.

Firstly, Saddam Hussein, hardly a pleasant man – the CIA should know – they created him – was farcically murdered (just as the all too popular Kaddhafi was later murdered in Libya).

Secondly, the Iraqi people was effectively deprived of all the essentials of modern life, completely dividing the country, so that the West could then rule it, pumping out its oil and gas.

Thirdly, ‘democracy’ was created with the election of the present leader al-Maliki.

But now, just as all the experts predicted, Washington is very unhappy.

Firstly, the overthrow of the strongman, Saddam Hussein, has created an Iraq full of terrorists, many of whom were supported, financed, trained and armed by the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government, just as it supported, financed trained and armed Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan to overthrow its government.

Secondly, having divided Iraq and utterly embittered the Sunnis, the West now sees it splitting into its three natural parts in a horrendous civil war.

Thirdly, having created ‘democracy’ in Iraq, the West now wants to overthrow its democratically-elected government (just as it did in the Ukraine, where it also overthrew the democratically-elected government in order to install a pro-American, neo-Nazi clique).

Nineveh, today called Mosul, is now fallen and its surviving Christian population has fled. Founded by Nimrod, a descendant of Ham (Genesis 10), Nineveh heeded the holy prophet Jonah who went there at the words, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me’ (Jon. 1, 2) and its 120,000 people repented. Our only hope now is that both those who laid waste to Iraq in 2003 and those who are now laying waste to Nineveh will cease their futile and hypocritical self-justification and also turn to repentance.