Tag Archives: Hope

Regrets and Hopes in 2025

Q: In the New Year we tend to look both forwards and backwards. Can you tell us what regrets you have about the past? And what hopes do you have for the future?

A: I have three regrets, but a hope that far outweighs them all!

My first regret is the killing off of the Western European Archdiocese of ROCOR. We always used to concelebrate with everyone, with Constantinople, with the Serbs etc. We also had parishes on the new calendar with us. There was no problem with any of this and we were pleased to live like this. This was our tradition of being on good terms with all the Local Churches, faithfully handed down to us without change from pre-Revolutionary Russia. It used to be the norm for the whole Russian Church.

However, the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who ordained me and whose spiritual child I am, was attacked by sectarians from the USA for keeping to this tradition, just as his predecessor, Archbishop John (Maximovich), was suspended and put on trial by those very same CIA-financed sectarians in the USA. There are narrow and racist, politically-minded pharisees, who cannot tolerate openness to other nationalities, unlike St John and his successor.

In 2007 we finally defeated the US fanatics, we ‘drained the swamp’, as they say, and brought ROCOR back into canonical communion with the rest of the Russian Church. However, ten years later, the CIA, working hard through its Cold War-founded select but powerful network of clerical agents in New York and elsewhere – their names are well-known to us, for many of them were recruited long ago – subverted our victory. They did this by having collected ‘dirt’ on individuals (they especially like to recruit homosexuals, who are then compromised and in debt to them), for, as they like to say, ‘every man has his price’, often literally. In this way they infiltrated the Church and created what they had long wanted – sectarianism and schism.

I realise that the New York group was desperate to find bishops, but there is a minimum level. They should exclude CIA agents by thoroughly vetting and training candidates for the episcopate in seminary and monastery, and also exclude homosexuals, narcissists and money grubbers, before they consecrate anyone. The liturgical, historical and legal ignorance of the CIA generation of recruits should not be such that they get arrested twice in one day in two different countries! Candidates should also understand the canons, especially those of the First and Second Council under St Photios. And they should also be equipped linguistically, which is so important in Europe. Communication by google translate has made a laughing-stock of that jurisdiction.

Then came the shock of 2017, a very recent convert, knowing little apart from American culture, which he tried to impose on everyone together with his American language. This was teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. Lacking all respect for local traditions, the new convert made nasty racist attacks on all Orthodox nationalities, Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians and Moldovans, demanded ever more money at every stop, persecuted the faithful, tried to close our churches, flew off into hateful rages, insisted on ‘protocols’ and micromanaged bureaucracy, and set himself up as a guru, just like the invaders of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan had done before him. ‘I’m American, I know everything and you owe me complete obedience’. That was the attitude. There is nothing Christian in any of this, just neophyte arrogance.

In December 2020 he went into schism. That was the last straw for all of us. Despite his guru claims, he was not followed. Clergy in Western Europe ignored him and continue to concelebrate with others, including with the Moscow Patriarchate, from which he had also gone into schism. But for us who have always fought against sectarianism, this was the end. We will ever uphold the traditions of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe and of his successor Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who would have supported us. We will never, on principle, support schism and sectarianism. As St John Chrysostom said: ‘The sin of schism cannot be washed away even by the blood of martyrdom’. We pray for him that he will repent before the end.

My second regret is that so much time has been wasted by others. I have been held back. I could have done so much more, but was not allowed to, for reasons of racism, jealousy and politics. I hope I have a long life because there is so much more to do towards building the Local Church of Western Europe. Thirty-six hours a day would not be enough. Parishioners are praying for me that I live to 100. They want me to baptise their grandchildren. Of course, maybe I won’t live until next week, I don’t choose. As God wills.

My third regret is that the Moscow Church administration, with all its vast potential, fell into exactly the same nationalist and racist trap as the Greek Church administration. It began to exclude Non-Russians, not just Ukrainians, but even their own children, from their once multinational Church, despite the warnings of my dear friend, the late Fr Vsevolod Chaplin, who died in mysterious circumstances in Moscow in 2020, aged just 52. This ‘Russian world’ concept is exactly the same racism as Hellenist nationalism. They have lost everyone outside themselves, Ukrainians, Moldovans, those from the Baltics, those from Western Europe, isolating themselves from the mainstream, just like the Greeks.

As a result, the responsibility for building the Local Church of Western Europe has fallen to the Romanians, together with the old calendar, Russian-speaking Moldovans and those of other nationalities, including canonical Russians, who are likeminded, like ourselves. Will we manage to do it, overcoming nationalism, keeping our hundreds of thousands of Western European-born Romanian and Moldovan children in the Church through a new Local Church? We shall do our best to do so.

And this is my great hope, far greater than all these details of history, that I shall live to see our Local Church emerge from the hundreds of thousands of Orthodox children, not just Romanian and Moldovan, but those of many other Eastern European nationalities and of those whose ancestors have lived in Western Europe for generations and centuries, including our own six children, six sons and daughters-in-law, and twelve grandchildren so far.

Thus, we hold firmly to the tradition of the Western European diocese of ROCOR, of the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church. Nothing will be lost. This year we have an important project towards this. It is all under way and hopefully it will be completed and revealed before the end of 2025. Unity, not sectarian schism, is the way forward and that is our way and always has been!

Thank God for the Romanian Church. Through our Church we have been able to keep Russians and Ukrainians together (only a few nationalistic and ritualistic Muscovites did not stay with us), just before their conflict hotted up on 24 February 2022, not to mention Moldovans, Romanians and others. I know that we are very grateful to Metr Joseph and he is grateful to us, as he wants to build a multinational Church. In a few days’ time our new Archbishop Athanasy, a Russian-speaking Moldovan, will be enthroned for us. Glory to God!

 

A Prayer for the USA

O holy right-believing Alfred, Great King of Wessex and father of the English nation, hear our supplication.

Thou hast shown us an indelible example of courage and faith in the marshes of Athelney, when all England was suffering the depredation of the heathen Danes. Thou didst build up the defenses of thy kingdom as thou didst also strive to increase the Christian Faith in thy kingly heart, showing an example of true wisdom to friend and enemy alike; enlightening thy people, showing mercy to thy vanquished foes, wisely preparing for war, but striving always for a holy peace.

Thou didst love learning and render into English many holy books, sending them out to all thy people, raising up their minds and hearts in the light of true knowledge.nThou didst renew the ancient laws of England, becoming a new Justinian, showing an example of the righteous judgment required by God of all who are in seats of power.

We, thy spiritual children in America, ask now thy strong intercession before the King of kings; help us in our time of trouble.  Be like Elijah and grant us a double portion of thy spirit that thirsted after these virtues of courage, faith, steadfastness in the face of uncertainty and fear, the love of the Lord that brings holy wisdom, and righteous and merciful judgment in the fear of God.

O Alfred, wise king, do thou entreat Him to guide us steadily, as He guided thee, and to grant order, justice, peace and tranquility to our native land.

In the name of the Father to Whom thou drawest nearer every day, the Son Whose Love thou didst teach to all, and the Holy Spirit Who fillest thy heart, now and ever and unto the ages of ages.  Amen.

Priest Christopher Johnson

 

Cain’s Technology of Death and the Spiritual Decomposition of the Western World

Weapons Technology

After the Fall and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the next tragedy in the next generation of human history is the story of how Cain rose up and killed his brother Abel. It was the beginning of murder, with stones, clubs and axes, knives and spears, then bows with flint-tipped arrows. Much later, after the year 1000 AD, as the Western Middle Ages began, these ‘primitive’ weapons of death developed into sophisticated castles with armoured horsemen, crossbows and long bows. These were followed in the years before and after 1500 by the discovery of more killing technology, by artillery and muskets, leading in the nineteenth century to the invention of repeating rifles and powerful mortars, machine guns and semi-modern artillery, with an immense range and killing power. The battles of the Middle Ages which killed 5,000 became wars, like that in the USA only some 150 years ago, which killed 500,000 and more.

What happened after this, in the twentieth century, is well-known, with its battleships and submarines, aeroplanes and bombs, poison gas and howitzers, shells and rockets, chemical and biological weapons, atomic bombs and smart bombs, what are now called, ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The wars that had killed 500,000 became wars that killed 50,000,000 and more. For over fifty years now, evil people have been able to destroy all human life on the planet with such weapons in just a few hours. This is the ultimate suicide, called MAD, mutually assured destruction. This technology of killing is ‘Cainization’, the technology of Cain, the technology of murder, the technology of death. And it is absolutely clear that such revolting weapons, battles and wars, just as primitive as in ancient times in their ability to maim, mutilate and murder, but with 1,000,000 times the power, have been inspired only by Satan, who is the Father of Death.

The Degeneration of Christian Civilization in the West: 1000-1500

In 1000 AD provincial forms of the Christian Civilization still existed in the extreme western tip of Eurasia. They had not yet separated from its great centres radiating out around Asian Jerusalem, though it was sorely tempted to do so by Satan, who would inspire its technology of death and so its Might. And for it, Might was, and is, Right. It was this once Christian society that after c. 1000 became apostate and degenerated, self-justifyingly aggressive and attacking all others. Within a century the spiritual integrity of these extreme Western provinces had dissolved and what has been called ‘Western Civilization’ based on aggression and plunder formed. In its aggressive violence this Wild West ‘Civilization’ soon came to expand behind a border line of feudal castles and Gothic, inhabited by horsemen with their technology of death, from Finland to Estonia, Latvia to Lithuania, Poland to Slovakia and Hungary to Croatia.

Its violence and aggression began with the massacre of Jews in what is now northern France and western Germany soon after the start of the millennium, then the massacre of Muslims in Spain, southern Italy and the Middle East, then of Christians in England and the Eastern Mediterranean, all by the year 1100. However we may explain its origins, once this intolerant aggressiveness had been unleashed, it resulted in more genocidal massacres and semi-permanent wars, both internal to the various, ex-Christian tribes in this extreme Western tip of Eurasia and also carried outside it by violent and primitive horsemen (‘knights’) with their ever-developing technology of death. The violence of this post-Christian culture increased immensely after about 1500. However, its amoral violence and plunder had already become apparent in 1453, with the destruction and pillage of what was then the capital of the Christian Empire, in New Rome.

The Degeneration of ‘Western Civilization’: 1500-2000

Egged on by the opportunity to steal gold in ‘El Dorado’ outside their own world, in 1492, with the first voyage of the ruthless Italian gold-seeker Columbus, this aggressiveness and destruction were to be carried even outside Eurasia, to ‘New Worlds’. Their greed for conquest, justified only by religious and racial arrogance, had begun. In 1500 there had still existed many civilizations on the planet. There were those in China, those in South-East Asia, those in what is now Australia, those in the Pacific, the Hindu and Muslim ones in the Indian subcontinent, those in Africa, that in the centre of North America with its huge temple mounds, those in what is now Mexico and Central America with their pyramids, those in the Andes, that along the Amazon River, the Muslim and Ottoman, and also the remaining Christian Civilization from Jerusalem, restricted by violence to the Eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Russian Lands.

These were to be largely destroyed over the next 500 years in an orgy of slavery, pillaging (‘asset-stripping’) by Western killing technology, camouflaged by words like ‘adventure’, ‘exploration’, ‘trading’, ‘imperialism’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘globalization’. The Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the British, the French, the Germans, the Belgians, the Italians and the Americans all took part in these plunderous genocides. The most ‘primitive’ civilizations, in South and Central America, were conquered first, followed by North America, large parts of Asia, Australasia, Japan and Africa. Their destruction was followed in the early twentieth century by Western machinations which destroyed Imperial China and, in 1917, the Russian Empire, which under Tsar Nicholas II had been the only protector of still independent (‘uncolonized’) countries like Siam (Thailand), Ethiopia and Tibet, and the defender of the Boers and exploited native peoples in Africa.

Hope in the New Millennium

However, China and Russia were never annihilated like the others and they survived by adopting Western technology. Thus, in the 1940s China defended itself from Western-developed Japan using the same technology and after 1941 the former Russian Empire defeated yet another Western invasion and onslaught with the same. In the 21st century the current and still fragile revival of Christian Civilization in what is left of the Russian Empire, now called the Russian Federation, 100 years after its Western-engineered collapse, may last, but that is not certain. As a revival, it has far to go and far to spread, for it has only just begun. The future here is still unclear. What, however, is clear is that if the revival of Christian Civilization under way in Russia falters, then the end of the world cannot be far. Cain’s technology of death has been so far developed and spread worldwide (‘globalized’) that the Russian Abel may not be strong enough to resist it.

Thus, over a thousand years, we have witnessed the ‘Cainization’ of the Western World. Already in the nineteenth century the Russian thinker Dostoyevsky called his travels to Western Europe ‘visits to the cemetery of dear friends’. Although holy relics remain, corpses in cemeteries decompose. The decomposition of the once Orthodox Christian Western European world has come about because, having lost its beliefs and ideals, it has no inner life, no culture of its own, it is purely superficial. Now it is just an imitation of the new Wild West, the USA, which is marked by Cain’s desire for plunder, jealousy, futility and ugliness. Six virtues have left today’s Westernised world: depth, justice, dignity, nobility, beauty and elegance. All spring from Abel’s spiritual and moral values and so all depth, justice, dignity, nobility, beauty and elegance are fled away. This is why our hope amid this destruction is in Russia, where Christian Civilization is reviving.

What Will Replace the EU?

When Guy Verhofstadt, a former Prime Minister of Belgium who now heads the alliance of ‘Liberals and Democrats for Europe’ in the EU Parliament, described British political figures leaving the EU ‘as rats leaving a sinking ship’, he revealed what he really thought. Like other EU bureaucrats, he knows that time is up, that the EU is indeed a sinking ship. Its disappearance into the dustbin of history is not a question of if, but only of when. The post-War invention of the EU (though not at that time under that name) was clearly only a temporary accommodation provoked by the USA. It is amazing that it has gone on for so long, especially after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and then of the Soviet Union exactly 25 years ago, the existence of which, like that of NATO, was the EU’s only raison d’etre.

The deception perpetrated on the British people in 1972 by the then Prime Minister Edward Heath (then awarded a £40,000 yacht for his treason and now being investigated for pedophilia) in submitting the United Kingdom to the alien authority of the Treaty of Rome could not stand. Let us remind ourselves that it was another Belgian politician, Paul Henri Spaak, who had been entrusted with drawing up proposals for a European Common Market. Spaak was a revolutionary who had held talks with Trotsky. His right-hand man in the project was one Baron Robert Rothschild (not to be confused with the New York banker of the same name). In 1954 Rothschild had been appointed Spaak’s chef de cabinet at the Belgian foreign ministry and for two years worked with Spaak on the Treaty of Rome.

Not only did Spaak and Rothschild draft the Treaty, they also had the opportunity of deciding where it would be signed. They chose the main first-floor room of the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the southern peak of the Capitoline Hill in Rome as their venue. They knew that the Palazzo had been built in the Middle Ages right on top of the Temple of Jupiter. The site had immense pagan, spiritual and political significance. Every year, the pagan Roman Senate used to hold their first meeting in the Temple. Jupiter was the protector, the ‘Conservator’ of Rome. Not only that, he was the Roman successor to the head of the Greek pantheon, Zeus, and if the altar to Zeus in Pergamos was said in the New Testament (Revelation 2, 13) to be ‘Satan’s Seat,’ this was Rome’s satanic equivalent.

However, although the teeming millions of Europeans (condemned by the judases as ‘populists’) will rejoice when the hated tyranny of the EU finally does disappear, this does not answer the question as to what will replace it. However, before such a question can be answered, another question must first be answered: What will replace the Soviet Union? After all, the EU only ever came into existence as a US-designed, anti-Soviet and anti-Russian bloc. Clearly, the present hotchpotch of unviable countries that replaced the Soviet Union is not going to last. They too, like the temporary Soviet Union, are only temporary. In order to find positive answers to both these questions, it seems to us that we must search in history before the First World War which ruined the Paris-Berlin-Saint Petersburg axis of unity.

It is clear that the countries included before 1917 within the Russian Empire form a territory that needs some sort of loose confederal unity and economic co-operation. Clearly, this does not mean the sort of centralized, tyrannical ideological unity of the Soviet Union, nor does it mean recreating the Russian Empire as such. There are already the beginnings of such a loose unity and such voluntary co-operation in the countries that form the Eurasian Economic Union. However, in 1914 in the western tip of the Eurasian Continent there were then empires and countries of Europe that were never part of the Russian Empire and have now mostly been absorbed into the failed European Union. Strangled by the political and monetary ideology of the EU, the peoples of these countries now look to freedom.

Surely they need look no further than the selfsame Eurasian Economic Union. Western Europe has in its pride and arrogance for a thousand years lived in self-chosen isolation from the wider Eurasian Continent. As it now faces collapse beneath the weight of its own spiritual and ideological bankruptcy, known as Secularism, and the self-inflicted invasion of Islamism, which will never recognize Christian values, it is now time for it to reintegrate the Eurasian Continent. This, vitally, contains the roots of its Christian Faith and thus its spiritual and so cultural identity. However, even more than this, Eurasia also contains its political and economic salvation. Eurasia, stretching to the Pacific, contains the mineral and energy resources which alone can save it from its dependency on the unstable and ever-warring Middle East.

The dream of many a European politician, not least of Charles de Gaulle, was a Eurasia from Lisbon to Vladivostok. This is now becoming possible. In the East, the bankrupt ideology of the German Jew Marx was abandoned 25 years ago. It is now for the West, the remaining countries of the EU, to give up its bankrupt ideology of Secularism. The time for isolation is over. It is now time to return to roots. The dream of a Eurasian Confederation of Free and Sovereign Nations, voluntarily working together, is possible. The alternative is what the EU has created in the Ukraine: a land of inherent corruption, inflation and self-inflicted civil war. The only question is whether the EU leaders will have the courage to repent before their folly reduces their countries also to the state of the Ukraine, creating a Europe-wide Ukraine.

In the Ukraine

As for the lion whom you saw rousing up out of the forest and roaring and speaking to the eagle and reproving him for his unrighteousness and all his words that you have heard, this is the Anointed One, Whom the Most High has kept until the end of the days against them and their impieties…He will denounce them for their ungodliness and their wickedness and will cast up before them their contemptuous dealings…He will deliver in mercy the remnant of My people, those who have been preserved within My borders, and He will make them joyful until the end comes, the Day of Judgement…

(3 Esdras 12, 31-32 and 34 – the last book of the Russian Orthodox Old Testament; in the Protestant RSV this appears as 2 Esdras 12, 31-32 and 34)

A week-long visit to the Ukraine has confirmed the impression in me that the average Ukrainian is morose, fed up with his lot, especially with the broken promises of a generation of politicians. Nothing has been done in the Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union: roads are of Third World standards, they flood when it rains because of poor drainage, buildings, shoddy even when new under the old Soviet regime, are falling down, infrastructure is decaying. Anything of value was long ago sold off by bandit-oligarchs.

There is no freedom of speech – speak in public against the government and you will go to prison, and the media are dominated by the crudest government propaganda. African-style nationalism is rife. The Kiev junta, which represents less than a quarter of the country, advertises a credit card in the national colours and printed ‘Glory to the Ukraine’, but where is the glory? Amidst the endemic corruption of the 100 Ukrainian oligarchs who own the ruined and bankrupt country, the mentality is hopelessly provincial, primitive.

Where is the glory? A salary of $200 a month is a dream. Understandably, the local population dreams of the EU. Everywhere there are slogans: Eurovalues, Eurostyle, Eurorepairs, Eurostandards. They dream of a country where corrupt oligarchs languish in prison, where the State is honest, where roads and pavements exist, where the infrastructure works, where there is a future. In reality, the EU does not even want the Ukraine. In any case, the EU is a myth, but then the grass has always been greener on the other side.

In reality, the EU is the most corrupt organization in the world: 100 billion euros disappears yearly and its accounts have never been audited. Ukrainians dream of the EU myth, just as once they dreamed of ‘the bright future’ promised them by Communism, not least by the Ukrainian Communist leader, Khruschov, an ignorant provincial peasant and a brutal persecutor of the Church. In history all manner of bandits have fraudulently promised utopia and given dystopia: the CIA-appointed junta in Kiev is just another one.

In Odessa men sell themselves to foreign companies, hopefully they can work as sailors on the container ships and tankers of foreign companies, not least the Chinese. Young women sell their bodies to Western men, either on the streets or else through dating agencies. Go abroad: Who wants to have and bring up children in such a country? Even by any objective standards, the only beauty in the Ukraine today is in the Church, which, as it is beautiful, is persecuted by the nationalistic junta-supported sects and schisms, which promote ugliness.

Today, with the Ukrainian birth-rate collapsed, where is the glory of this gloryless land? We are reminded of the ever-memorable Fr John Romanides ‘Wyoming syndrome’ parallel. He said: ‘Try to imagine that everything in the USA has disappeared except Wyoming; this is what modern Greece has been since the fall of Constantinople – a provincial fragment of a once great empire. And this is what the modern Ukraine is: a fragment left over from a once great empire. What was that empire and how was its destruction organized?

The Empire was the multinational Christian Empire of Holy Rus and its destruction has been planned by the enemies of Christ over a century, in three different phases:

1. In 1914 there began the first phase in their operation to destroy the Christian Empire of Holy Rus, the Russian Empire, replacing it in 1917 with a militant atheist ideology developed in Western Europe. Three generations passed.

2. In 1991 there began the second phase, for it was to dismantle the successor Empire, the Soviet Union, which contained the Russian Empire’s cultural heritage, reducing it to oligarch corruption, dependence and poverty. One generation passed.

3. In 2014 there began the third phase, as it marked the beginning of the occupation of one of the countries that belongs to the former Christian Empire of Holy Rus, the Ukraine.

The coming months may mark either the End of that Empire or else its Restoration, when on the world stage the Lion will reprove the Eagle. On page 16 of the book ‘Elder Schema-Archimandrite Jonah of Odessa’ (1925-2012), recounting the life of the clairvoyant healer and prophet, we find the Odessa Elder’s words written:

‘We ask all Russians to pray that an Orthodox Tsar be granted us. If there is a Tsar in Russia, then he will be God’s Anointed. The grace of God will be upon him and then there will be a great help for Russia’.

May Thy Will be done, O Lord!

Ten Centuries of Institutional Secularism: The Despair of the Contemporary World and the Hope of the Church

Secularism, the worship of this world, has always existed and always will exist. It comes from the fact that the human-being, part breath of God and part fallen nature, is torn in two directions, towards the Kingdom of God and towards the fallen world. At times in his history he has turned more to the Kingdom of God, at other times more towards the fallen world. The attraction of the fallen world, secularism, is so strong that it can get inside religion, or rather pervert and deform religion into idolatry, for there have always been and are religions which actually idolize the fallen world, mistaking fallen creation for the Creator. They are called paganism. As examples we can mention yesterday’s Baal, Greek gods and Roman emperor-worship, or today’s religion of consumerism and entertainment (fun), bread and circuses.

Indeed, pagan secularism can enter into any religious system in forms as diverse as the physical sensuality of Hinduism or the militant violence of Islam, as the State-serving of Confucianism or the State worship of Shintoism, as the bourgeois capitalism accepted and promoted by Protestantism or the racial nation-worship to be found on the nominalist margins of Orthodox Christianity, even though officially condemned. Humanity, in other words, is capable of defiguring and corrupting anything, making the spiritual pure into the innately secular. The greatest danger is when such corruption becomes institutionalized, an inherent part of the system. It was in order to avoid this that in the fourth century monasticism began to develop very quickly and the capital of the pagan Roman Empire, which Christianity had vanquished through the Martyrs, was moved away from corrupted Rome to New Rome, uniting East and West, Asia and Europe in the Christian Roman Empire.

However, human nature is the same worldwide. Despite the removal of temptation by moving the Christian capital from pagan Rome, the spirit of the old pagan secularism still reached into Christianity there, over the centuries creating a new religion. The revived spirit of pagan Rome, of worldliness and secularism, was actually ingrained into this new religious system, made systematic and institutionalized by it. After earlier temptations it was eventually defined in Rome in the eleventh century, in imitation of the pagan Roman Empire and came to be called Roman Catholicism. This was essentially an attempt to make the former Church in Western Europe more powerful than all worldly rulers, to make the Church into a State – the most powerful State of all, to create a Roman universalism, hence its name. This was the world’s power to defigure, not the Church’s power to transfigure.

The way in which this was done was primitive enough. First it was necessary to assert that the Holy Spirit proceeded from Christ, from Him Who had taken on human nature while still remaining God. In the later eighth century the warlike barbarian Charlemagne found such a mistaken affirmation and tried to use it to assert his authority against the Church. In this he failed. Then in the early eleventh century the same mistaken affirmation was made again, but this time in Rome where within a few more years the Western leader, the Pope, began to call himself the Vicar (substitute) of Christ. This granted the Western leader Divine authority, by both theologically and juridically making him the source of the Holy Spirit. The trick was complete.

With this new ideology, the Western leader, the Pope, was in effect made God on earth, Pontifex Maximus, the infallible bridge between God and man, just like the old pagan Roman emperors. But when this God on earth commanded armies, launched pagan and barbaric military campaigns (called conquests and crusades) that looted, raped, pillaged and murdered hundreds of thousands, destroying higher forms of civilization, persecuted and tortured all those who disagreed with him, claimed to be able to sell places in Paradise, built himself palaces with every luxury, provided himself with male lovers or brothels and poisoned his enemies, people realized that his was not the Church of God.

Essentially then, what had once been the Church in Western Europe started to rot from the head downwards, its ruling warlike elite forming a neo-pagan institution, a servant of the world. Of course, it took time for the rot to spread and the former Church kept some of the outward structures of the Church that it had once been. There survived church buildings and monasteries, bishops, priests, sacraments and saints – without them it could never have kept the loyalty of simple and uneducated good souls faithful to the old Church and from whom the iniquity of the new system was hidden by ignorance and then indoctrination. However, gradually the old church buildings and monasteries were demolished or uglified into castle-like, military styled, barbarian Gothic and then worse, sections of the episcopate and the priesthood were perverted by sodomy and pedophilia, the sacraments were deformed and communion withheld.

As for the ancient saints, like their churches, they were forgotten or else remade, buried beneath layers of new and strange fashions, promoted by the elite. As even the outward structure of the Church was slowly deformed through the trick of gradualism, so that the people would not notice, the fullness of life went out of it and it began to resemble a dead formula, a mere ritual. The highest form of human life, the spiritual, gained through the ascetic, was replaced by lower forms of human life, the anti-ascetic, whether the intellectual, the psychic, the emotional or the pietistic, with which in their simplicity and naivety many of the simple people, kept in ignorance of the real, were conditioned to be satisfied.

Pagan barbarism had triumphed, disguised by the name of the Church, the Roman, the Papal, the pious, the canonical and the classical. It said that there was no difference between it and the Church of the first millennium, claiming that it had always been thus, that no revolutionary transformations had occurred in the eleventh century and the Church had never been altered! In reality, a subtle form of desacralization and so decivilization had all along been under way. As the former Western Church was gradually clericalized and turned into a mere institution, the world was divorced from the spiritual, thus leaving the political, economic and social life of the world to be secularized. Thus, the Incarnate Christ was driven not only out of the Temple, but out of all Jerusalem, which with time was turned into Babylon.

However, this idolatry of the old Roman paganism that had united Western Europe by military conquest in the name of ‘the Church’ attracted the imitation and envy of others. ‘If the Papacy can operate this trick, then so can we; we other humans can also proclaim ourselves gods on earth and call ourselves ‘humanists’. Thus, Europe drifted even further from the heritage and memory of the old Western Church as it had been. The new imitators tried to imitate the old Roman paganism in their own way, setting up a new Roman Empire which they called ‘Holy’, but which was not, but Unholy and secular. They in turn were followed by others who in protest set up still more forms of Christianity, allying themselves with princes and economic power, subjugating ‘primitive’ and ‘ssvage’ peoples outside Europe (‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ because they were not yet gods on earth like Western men) and becoming worshippers of Mammon.

There is no better example of this than the Victorian Imperialist in Britain, who stamped his pennies with the image of Roman Britannia and who just like the pagan Roman Imperialist, once a simple and honourable farmer, left his homeland to conquer and reorganize the ‘savages’ and so lost his own soul in the process. Just like the pagan Roman Imperialist, he learned Latin, he had strict and narrow moral views, a devotion to imperial duty and what he saw as the public interest – res publica. He was firmly convinced of his moral superiority over the clever but immoral ‘Greeks’ (French and Germans) and over the idle and superstitious ‘Orientals’ (Latins and Indians), over the backward and savage (all other races, as in ‘Darkest’ Africa), whom it was his business and duty to conquer. ‘God is an Englishman’, he wrote, for he had created a god in his own image. Moral censoriousness, sense of duty, xenophobic national glory and devotion to money-making, and so to ruthless and predatory exploitation, were his only goals. His Bible was the Bible of Mammon.

There were many other imitators who also deified themselves. There had already been Napoleon who dressed himself as a Roman Emperor and crowned himself from the hands of the Pope and later there would be Hitler, both paganized Catholics, who tried to re-establish the pagan Roman Empire in Europe by military conquest – and failed as soon as they had to face even the weakened remnants of Christian Russia. All these ideologues were deluded, whether they called themselves Capitalists, Liberals, Darwinists, Socialists or Nazis. Little matter what they called themselves, the secularist aim of worshipping this world has always been the same, including among those who today are for the moment re-establishing the pagan Roman Empire in Europe, a Fourth Reich, by economic conquest. They too are failing but only because again they have to face the weakened remnants of Christian Russia.

Thus, the conspiracy of rejection and concealment of ten centuries of the Faith of the Christian saints in Western Europe and their relics, condemned as living in the ‘Dark Ages’, as unsaintly, uninteresting, obscurantist and primitive, followed by ten centuries of barbaric institutional secularism, extolled as ‘Western culture’, have brought the Western world back to where it was 2,000 years ago, to the new, or rather old, paganism of today. This ‘new world order’ is thoroughly undermined by its narcissistic self-admiration, selfish exploitation, its utter lack of any spiritual purpose, dynamism and leadership, its spiritual futility. So, almost as if by sleight of hand, an anti-spiritual world order has been established. The West has gone from Christ to Antichrist in 1,000 years and turned full circle back to its paganism of 2,000 years ago.

Today’s remaining Western Christians are still little conscious, still largely shackled by their idolatrous attachment to their culture rather than to the purity of the Gospel of the Kingdom. Thus, they are still in denial of the inherent responsibility for the contemporary situation of their gradual thousand-year apostasy. Some have reacted to the contemporary acceleration of the apostasy, for which they still do not see their responsibility and see as due only to a recent process, with apocalyptic and depressing pessimism – the depressive Protestant philosopher Kierkegaard and the Catholic writer Bernanos did so. Others, superficial ‘feel-good’ Protestant evangelists or the deluded, Origenistic Catholic philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and Catholic modernists and even a few Orthodox, fallen away from the Church, have gone to the opposite extreme of idealistic naivety. They have imagined like pantheists that the world is merging into some great Universal Church which will bring the spiritual unification of humanity. Of course, they are right, only the Universal Church in question is the Church of Antichrist, not of Christ.

What is the Orthodox view? How do Orthodox view the future of the world that has become repaganized by ten centuries of systematic Western secularism made global? Orthodox say that, of course, the Apocalypse is potentially upon us and the West has potentially created the Kingdom of Antichrist. However, we should also know that the Church, and the Church alone, has the Power that provides hope of transfiguration and can resist the ten centuries of secularist repaganization that have brought the world to its present state. That is why we do not recognize as part of the Church the movements, delusions and so-called ‘saints’ of the second millennium, for they do not belong to Her spirit but to the spirit of apostasy, even if ever so subtly and under the cloak of good. For we know that the Church alone has the Power to change the world that Power has been lost to the institutionalized and the secularized.

For, behold!, just as the Church conquered the pagan Roman Empire, so in our own time She has conquered the pagan Soviet Empire. Thou hast conquered, O Galilean! Thus, all may not be lost. This conquest of both the Roman and Soviet Empires came about precisely by the spiritual vitality of the Commonwealth of Christian Peoples, by the Power of the Saints – the Power of the Holy Spirit. And Victory over two Pagan Empires can yet be extended to a Victory over a Third, today’s Western Empire. The victory of the Saints is not in numbers but in heroic Power, the Holy Spirit’s Power to see deeper and further than the secularists, to make the impossible possible. This isolates them from the world which ignores them, as it has isolated from the blinded world both the Saints of the West of the first millennium and the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, but this isolation is always triumphant.

The Western world never totally threw off the yoke of pagan Rome. And once it had abandoned the Faith of the Church, Orthodoxy, in the eleventh century, it could no longer preserve itself intact from the temptations of that yoke. They all came back, one by one. Through them the Christian way of life gradually became reduced to a legalistic philosophy, a hypocritical puritanism and a powerless and sentimental pietism. The pagan principle of secularism has once more become inherent in Western culture over the last ten centuries as that pagan yoke has gradually crept back into Western life through becoming institutionalized, an ingrained and systematic part of the Western Establishment.

The Divinely-inspired values of the Saints, of noble selflessness, of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, of Hope, Faith and Love, are the strongest-known values known to world history. They are the only values that can destroy the ignoble selfishness, vulgarity, unreason and evil, the despair, apostasy and hatred of the lunatic asylum of the contemporary world. That deranged world has been made powerful through usury and technology, but it has been made powerless spiritually because it has emptied its soul. The values of the Saints conquer because they are inspired from outside this world by the Power of the Holy Spirit, by the real world, that is, by the Kingdom of God, to which the Orthodox Faith and Church alone direct us. And this is the Faith in the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory that will triumph at the end of history, showing us that all else was mere illusion.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

1016-2015: A Royal Birth and a Commons Election

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

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

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

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

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

Shipwreck or Salvation on the Rivers of Babylon?

Introduction: Shipwreck

Whenever groups have left the Church for political, that is, for secular, reasons, they have inverted the values of the Church and so found themselves shipwrecked. Thus, the founding values of the Christian Empire, long ago defined as ‘Orthodoxy, Sovereignty (deliberately misunderstood by secularists as Autocracy) and the People’, are all derived from our Trinitarian Orthodox Christian Faith. ‘Orthodoxy’ refers to our Christian Faith in the Father of Love, ‘Sovereignty’ refers to the Incarnation of the Son in the world but sovereign and free from the world, and ‘the People’ refers to the sanctification of the peoples by the Holy Spirit.

We can see the inversion of these principles in the values of the renovationists and modernists on the fringes of the Orthodox Church, like those around the Paris Archdiocese of ‘Rue Daru’. They deform the values of ‘Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and the People’ into their opposites, ‘Anti-Orthodoxy, Secularism and Russophobia’. With Faith in the Father rejected in favour of fallen humanity, Faith in the Incarnation of the Son in the Christian Empire rejected in favour of the secularism of disincarnate private delusions, and Faith in the Holy Spirit rejected in favour of intellectuals, Orthodoxy is reduced to mere rationalist humanism.

Anti-Orthodoxy

Anti-Orthodoxy is expressed by liturgical modernism in imitation of heterodoxy. This includes the use of the Catholic calendar (so-called ‘new’ calendar), the celebration of evening Liturgies and the deliberate absence of iconostases (‘to be more like the Catholics’), defective knowledge and ignorance of how the services are celebrated, sometimes even of the Eucharistic Liturgy) and the substitution of knowledge of the Typikon by abbreviations and fantasies, such as conducting the Proskomidia in the centre of the church or the interruption of the Liturgy by ‘charismatic’ calling out of names of anyone to be prayed for.

It includes a lack of musical culture, poor behaviour in church (sitting on the floor; children running about without discipline), the use of colloquial Russian instead of Church Slavonic in the Liturgy, the disappearance of confession and obligatory communion for all, including that of practising homosexuals and Non-Orthodox. This is not only not the Russian Tradition and certainly not the Greek Tradition of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, in fact it is no Tradition at all. To liturgists like the late Archbishop George (Wagner) of the Paris Archdiocese (‘Rue Daru’) it was, and to others like him it is, only ignorance.

Secularism

Archbishop George (Wagner) used to complain to me that the problem of Rue Daru was that it had been founded by individuals who had wanted the Revolution. In other words, among them left-wing politics (liberalism and freemasonry) had replaced Churchliness. Indeed, their whole approach to Church life was marked by politicization. Their movement was, after all, part of a political foundation before the Russian Revolution which created that Revolution. In their movement the values of the Kingdom of Heaven are replaced by heterodox fashions and dependence on secularism in its basically atheistic, Western liberal form.

We can see this in the recent Charlie Hebdo and Copenhagen murders. These sparked massive demonstrations, but the murders of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya, as those of thousands of Christians in Iraq, Syria and the Ukraine, were dismissed by the propaganda-filled Western media, which are so keenly followed by these secularists. In Paris the secularists, ‘Orthodox’ among them, decided on the slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’ and those who rejected this slogan in favour of ‘Je ne suis pas Charlie’ because it would mean that they supported blasphemy, were dismissed as terrorists and their lives were threatened by atheists.

Russophobia

In the days of the atheist regime in the Soviet Union, all agreed that the ideology of the materialists who had usurped legitimate power was abhorrent because they persecuted the Church. However, there were those who opposed it for purely political reasons. They were those who had usurped authority, then lost the power that they had seized to the Bolshevik bandits and were exiled to Paris. They did not care very much about the persecution of the Church, of the martyrdoms of the Tsar and the clergy, only about ‘human rights’ and the persecution of minorities, liberals, freemasons, Uniats, heretics, Jewish intellectuals etc

In those days they detested the Church inside Russia because the bishops lied, as they were held hostage by the regime. They should rather have had sympathy for the Church inside Russia, including captive bishops. Today they justify their continued isolation and rejection of the Church through their Russophobia. They say: ‘We cannot return to the Russian Church because She is still not free but is held in feudal subjection to Putin’. The absurdity and sheer ignorance of such arguments is apparent to the rest of the world, but not to the politicized, who are an integral part of the anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox Western Establishment.

On the Rivers of Babylon

The saddest thing about the Paris Archdiocese, ‘Rue Daru’, is that those bishops who founded it and led it for decades, Metropolitans Evlogy and Vladimir, Archbishop George (Tarasov), Bishops Methodius (Kulmann), Alexander Tian-Shansky and Roman (Zolotov), full well believed that their jurisdictional attachment to the Patriarchate of Constantinople was only a temporary arrangement which would last only as long as the Church inside Russia was not free. They would be horrified if they could see where its extremists have wanted to take it in recent decades. A group that has lost its way now only has self-justification left to it.

In exile they sat down ‘on the rivers of Babylon’, on the banks of the Seine, and there they wept. The emotional Metr Evlogy could not wait and, in 1945, he rejoined the Russian Church – too early, for the persecution had not yet ended. Bishop Methodius, like Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev, Archpriest Igor Vernik and many others, was also tempted, tired of isolation. There is no doubt that if any of them were alive today, they would have rejoined the Russian Church in the last fifteen years, as Archbp Sergiy (Konovalov) also wanted. However, there were always forces present which prevented the inevitable return.

The Past

I have known Rue Daru since 1979. The first thing that struck me was how isolated and insular it was, unlike anything else in the Orthodox world, which I already knew quite well. And yet that there were people at Rue Daru who saw themselves as being in the centre, instead of the reality, that they were on the margins. Parisian intellectualism was their ethos and their lost grasp of reality caused them to dwell in fantasies. Archbishop George (Wagner) used to remark to me that one day at Rue Daru lists of names of those to be prayed for would contain not only titles like ‘the sick’, but also ‘the intellectual’ (‘intelligent’ in Russian).

A lifeboat was offered Archbishop Sergiy’s Rue Daru by Patriarch Alexey II in 2003. Through no fault of his own and his untimely death, it was rejected. It has seemed ever since that the Paris Archdiocese has chosen a suicidal course of drift and shipwreck. With the Rue Daru Cathedral belonging to the city of Paris, most of its active people from the ex-Soviet Union, with unintegrated and politicized converts (though many of them later see through it all) manipulated by the descendants of liberal emigres who have themselves never known the Tradition but only delusional fantasy, it seems to have little future, having become marginal.

The Present

Today the once prestigious St Sergius church and Institute are in crisis, most students transferred to the new seminary of the Russian Orthodox Church. A new Cathedral and Diocesan centre, already blessed by Bishop Nestor of the Russian Orthodox Church and Archbishop Job of Rue Daru, is about to be built. Only 80 and 90 year olds, living in the past, still believe that Rue Daru, now very small and rather irrelevant, can be the foundation for a new Local Church in Western Europe. This is part of their delusional fantasy that Constantinople will one day grant Rue Daru autocephaly and create a ‘Western European Orthodox Church’.

Constantinople was never going to and never will grant them their pipe-dream fantasy. At last the ruling bishop, Archbishop Job, is doing exactly what Archbishop George (Wagner) promised us what he would do in 1981, but let us down and doing the opposite through weakness. 33 years have been lost. Over the decades so many have been chased out by the intolerant ideology of the liberals and modernists that only a few faithful are left. At last now, problematic individuals who caused so many huge difficulties in the past and forced serious Orthodox to leave, have been removed. And some serious clergy have come from Russia.

The Struggle

As I have written before, we must all intensify our prayers for Archbishop Job. He bears a name of much suffering. Can he right the errors and weaknesses of the last fifty years? Renovationism, a Vatican II Orthodoxy in the Finnish-Lutheran style, is what the extremists want. Over fifty years they have step by step come to power, making the lives of the Archbishops miserable, intolerantly chasing out the Orthodox, making Rue Daru ever more sectarian and marginal. Instead of being inclusive, their intolerance has forced many to leave. Why do they not simply join the Uniats? This at least would be honest on their part.

The present disciplinary actions of Archbishop Job and his courageous attempt to restore the isolated Rue Daru jurisdiction to canonical Orthodox norms after a decade of disastrous drift are to be welcomed. As one senior priest of the Paris Archdiocese in England said to me last year, the first thing that Archbishop Job has to do just in England is to defrock three members of the clergy. In France perhaps too. We must pray for Archbishop Job. Can he steer the ship of the Church away from the rocks of the irrelevant, renovationist meanders of the past towards its future of helping to witness to authentic Orthodoxy in Western Europe?

The Future

The most Churchly elements in the Russian emigration understood its providential mission and future – to witness to authentic Russian Orthodoxy in Western languages. Thus St John of Shanghai spoke of the Russian mission to witness to the rest of the world. Metropolitans Antony and Anastasy, like Archbishop Seraphim of Chicago and many others, also knew that God has sent us forth to convert the world. Thus, in Western Europe the great task of the Russian Orthodox Church is to become an autonomous Metropolia, the foundation of a future Western European Orthodox Church under the loving guidance of our Patriarch in Moscow.

We wish Archbishop Job every good thing in his long and arduous struggle to at least attempt restore all of Rue Daru to the canonical norms and traditions of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, which it claims to represent, but in large part, clearly does not. He has the youth to attempt to reverse the marginalization of Rue Daru that has gone on for far too long and so return it to the mainstream of the Orthodox Church. After a decade of disastrous drift and ever smaller numbers, only his actions can prepare it to reintegrate the Russian Church and to take at least a modest part in the great task of witnessing to authentic Russian Orthodoxy.

Conclusion: Salvation

The reunited Russian Church in Western Europe goes from strength to strength. It has many historical monuments, large churches and large numbers of Orthodox. In Western Europe the two German Dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church alone are at least twice as big as the whole Rue Daru group, which has been built on tiny communities which gather in private or rented rooms, usually fewer than twenty in number. The whole jurisdiction is only a few thousand strong and most of these would leave tomorrow if the Churches they actually feel allegiance to, mainly the Russian and Romanian, were equipped to look after them.

In 1980 I married in St Nicholas church in Boulogne Billancourt in Paris. Among the guests was Archbishop George Tarasov, to whom we were close. I often think of the future Archbishop, flying on the Western Front one hundred years ago. What was he fighting for? For Russia and Her Church; not for the project of today’s iconoclastic renovationists. His life as Archbishop in Paris was made a misery, he was publicly booed and hissed by the Brotherhood and he lived in poverty. Can his humble tears ‘on the rivers of Babylon’ help steer Rue Daru from shipwreck to salvation? We pray that it may be so.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,
Colchester, England

4/17 February 2015

Sad News and Hopeful News

The Eurozone is bankrupt, so much so that it now has to go to the inflationary last resort of printing a trillion euros (a process known by the euphemism of ‘quantitative easing’), just like the bankrupted US and the UK before it. And yet many colonized countries in the feudal Eurozone, like France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, have already been ravaged by the debt caused by printing money before, debt which they will never pay off. Much of the eastern and southern Eurozone, although much less in debt than the US and the UK which will never pay off their debt either, has become a region of inevitable emigration for the young. It has reverted to poverty beneath the austerity programmes imposed on it by Berlin, which is at the top of the feudal Fourth Reich pyramid in Europe.

In countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland especially, young people are being forced to flee abroad to seek work as wage-slaves doing jobs that local people no longer want to do. Then their governments can declare that ‘unemployment is falling’ (only because the population is falling) and the young in question can send money home to their elderly parents, thus propping up the governments. In France, governed by a supposedly Socialist regime, almost every day they pick up the frozen corpses of those who died in the streets the night before (15,000 last winter). Even in the apparently prospering UK, as in the US, tens of thousands of people are living off foodbanks in a situation unthinkable only a few years ago.

Meanwhile, in the luxury resort of Davos, outside the ravaged Eurozone, it is said that 1700 private jets have flown in many of the world’s billionaires, including the arms-dealer Poroshenko, to talk about the state of the world. Elsewhere in Europe a war between the US-financed separatist Galician junta and the Ukrainian people rages. Thousands are already dead. American arms are found by the liberators of the Ukrainian people at Donetsk Airport. Ukrainian children are dying in bombardments at the hands of that neo-Nazi puppet Poroshenko and other murderous and anti-Christian oligarchs, most of them based abroad. They are keenly supported by the grandchildren of US and Canadian Galician Nazis who guarded Auschwitz, liberated 70 years ago by heroic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians.

The US has launched anti-Russian economic sanctions and a currency war, a declaration of economic war, against Russia because the people of the Crimea massively and democratically voted to join Russia. Now, at US behest, Saudi Arabia is pumping so much oil that the oil price has fallen by over half in the last few months. The objective is to bankrupt oil-rich countries perceived by wealthy neocons in Washington as enemies – countries like Russia, but also Venezuela and Iran. The objective behind this is ‘regime-change’ – manipulating and setting up pro-Washington puppet regimes in those countries, whose natural resources can then be stripped, or, if not, simply creating chaos and mayhem in them, as has so successfully been done in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Yemen, the Sudan, Nigeria etc.

The first problem with all this is that both US-imposed sanctions and cheapened oil are more likely to bankrupt EU vassal states and even US oil corporations first. The second problem is that the US elite seems to have learned nothing from the fate of the puppet governments in the banana republics it has always created in Latin America, as well as in South Vietnam fifty years ago and in Iraq and Afghanistan ten years ago. It has forgotten that as one corrupt oligarch after another fell there, Washington had to send ever more of its young men to kill and then die there in the name of ‘freedom and democracy’, but in reality all for nothing. The result of it all is that a now bankrupt (by $17 trillion) USA is reducing itself to becoming no more than a regional power, with an economy already second to that of China.

The First World War, whose inglorious centenaries of the slaughter of the youth of Europe are being so noisily remembered just now, is commonly considered a war of futile deaths. And yet what could be more futile than the deaths of the millions of men, women and children who are dying today at the hands of pseudo-Muslim psychopaths and criminals, trained, armed and financed by the anti-Muslim West, its secret agencies and its allies? Has the West not understood that the terrorism of the pseudo-Muslim fanatics it has created in Syria and elsewhere will rebound on it again and again? In the globalized world that the West has created, it is no longer insulated from its own crimes. The secularist and atheist West has made its own worst enemies and dug its own grave for itself in its self-imposed old age.

Fortunately, outside the insular-minded West, healthy forces are gathering, not just in Russia, but in Iran, China, India, Brazil, in several Muslim countries including Turkey, as well as on the disillusioned fringes of the EU and Europe itself, in Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Greece, Serbia, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia. And those forces are all saying the same thing – enough. Thus, ignored by the enslaved Western media which has no free speech, in the Chechen capital Grozny, 800,000 Muslims and Russian Orthodox Christians march hand in hand against the Western blasphemies of spoilt infantiles. Here is hope for the future, that spiritually healthy forces worldwide will yet unite against the Great Western Apostasy, which Satan has so cunningly prepared these last thousand years. All is not yet lost.