Tag Archives: Humility

Hope Without Prayer = Leadership Without Authority

Foreword: Fukuyama 0 Huntingdon 1

The End of History and the Last Man was the 1992 work of the US thinker Francis Fukuyama (born 1952). In it he proposes the victory of US/Western liberal Globalism, expressing the myth that it is universal (originally a French myth) and so must be adopted by all. In 1993, another US academic, born exactly a generation earlier, the late Samuel P. Huntingdon (1927-2008), proposed another world view in his ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, the view of a multipolar world of nine civilisations. The events in the Ukraine since 2022 and the rapid development of BRICS since have proved Huntingdon right. The Unipolar world of one only Great Power, the USA, was only ‘a moment’, now over, as the US Secretary of State has at last publicly recognised.

Fundamentally, the argument between the two academics was between Centralisation and Decentralisation, Unipolar Globalism and Multipolar Sovereignty. Sovereignty has won in Washington and the transitional, but still anti-Globalist, figure of Trump is retreating from the overextended US Empire to its natural sphere of influence in a united Northern America, consisting of the USA, Canada and Greenland, with island possessions extending from Hawaii to Bermuda. (The second-rate UK will quickly cede Canada and Bermuda). Greenland is falling into Trump’s pocket and he has already talked to the Premier of Alberta in Canada, Danielle Smith, whose grandfather was Carpatho-Russian. (In Canada any province has the right to leave that ‘Dominion’).

Huntingdon’s Error

However, Huntingdon still made one error. Huntingdon’s error was not his analysis that the world is multicivilisational, but that he wanted the West to go back to being a reactionary conservative institution in order to survive alongside the other world civilisations. Having recognised that Western Secularism is merely one among many civilisations, he just wanted to go back to his youth, to the ‘golden age’ before Vietnam, when the USA was the undisputed leader of the Western world (the ‘Free World’, as it absurdly called itself), in fact, it was the imperialist boss of the whole Non-Communist world. However, its Civilisation was already bankrupt, because it had already wandered very far from its roots, which it then renounced.

And since Huntingdon’s time in 1993, over the last thirty years the remains of Western Civilisation have proved their bankruptcy. The only solution is for Western Civilisation to return radically, not to a generation or two ago, to Huntingdon’s youth, which just means being old-fashioned, but to return to its roots in the first millennium. And that means a spiritual solution, which is exactly what we have been advocating for the last fifty years. Whether the West is actually willing to return from its spiritual apostasy and decadence, or not, is another question. For the last fifty years the West has just gone down to the bottom, the floor of hell. Will it remain there or will it start its ascent? Only the history of the future will answer this question.

 

Introduction: Hope and Prayer

According to cynics, hope is like a carrot which is dangled in front of a donkey. Therefore, they say, we should give up the carrot of hope and start acting independently instead, doing things for ourselves, not being drawn forward by empty promises. Christians say that it is not hope that we should give up, it is being a donkey that we should give up. For a donkey is one who hopes blindly, because he does not pray. Hope without prayer is the hope of the donkey. In other words, we should accompany hope with prayer, which alone raises us above the level of animals, such as donkeys, and alone makes us into human-beings using our immortal souls. And hope without prayer is like being a leader without authority, of which more below.

The Collapse of the Kiev Regime

According to the anti-Russian Mediazona organisation, the conflict in the Ukraine has now led to 100,000 dead on the Russian side, that is, 100,000 dead eastern Ukrainian and Russian Federation soldiers. However, what Mediazona agents do not add is that the number of Ukrainian dead and crippled totals over 1.05 million. This huge human tragedy results from the fact that the Western elite wanted to see Ukrainians killed like sacrificial lambs ‘to the last Ukrainian’, in Biden’s proxy war, begun in 2014, to topple the Russian government. However, there are also the consequences of this war for Western Europe and its Russophobic ruling class. Its pre-Trumpian, US-appointed elite hates Russia so much that it has bankrupted its own peoples.

For well over four decades Western Europe survived and even prospered on cheap manufactures (consumer goods of all sorts) from China and energy and raw materials (oil, gas, metals, diamonds, minerals and fertilisers) from Russia. However, in the last three years Western European elite has suicidally cut itself off from Russian products, allowing the US to blow up the Nordstream pipeline and Kiev to shut off its Russian gas. It is true that Western Europe (especially Germany) is hypocritically importing ever greater amounts of Russian LNG, Russian gas via Turkiye and Russian oil via India. But it is all more expensive than before. And so Western Europe is collapsing economically, deindustrialising, and its infrastructure is failing – while China’s is advancing.

The Collapse of Western Europe and the Future

The result is the same in all European countries, from Hungary to Croatia, from Slovakia to Italy, from Romania to France, from Austria to Spain, from Germany to the UK. The Globalist elite, whether in Brussels, Paris, Berlin, London or anywhere else in Western Europe, is being challenged by strong national Sovereigntist parties and small but serious left-wing parties. Moreover, the Sovereigntists are supported from the new anti-Globalist Washington, where Trump is now busy draining Biden’s swamp. Though the Sovereigntists are always called ‘far right’ by the Globalists, who are actually so woke and intolerant that they are Fascists, the Sovereigntists are not that, indeed they have much in common with the small left-wing parties.

The close parallels between the Big Three, Germany, France, UK) in Europe are striking. The detested French Macron, the hopeless German Scholz and ever-changing British nonentities, such as May, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, are all the same. In France, Macron lost the elections last year, but clings on to power like a dictator, even though he was rejected by the people. Now the would-be future German Chancellor, Merz (like Scholz) and Starmer (like May, Truss, Sunak etc), is so utterly charmless as to be defined as anti-charismatic. The Trump government, whose spokesman is Musk, appears to intend to regime-change Germany and the UK, its two closest satellites in Europe, and both of which the USA occupies. Hence his talks with the AfD and Reform.

Regime-Change in Germany and the UK

In both these countries, this would actually be popular. Here the fact that the UK is not formally in the EU is irrelevant, since the end-of-EU Brexit was never implemented by the EU-bribed British Establishment, which knew that Brexit could be the first step to the end of the EU and their income. In Germany there is the small left-wing Wagenknecht Socialist Party and in the UK the small left-wing Galloway Workers’ Party. However, both countries have big Sovereigntist Parties. In Germany there is the AfD (very popular in former East Germany) and in the UK, the Reform Party. Both are now at about 25%-30% of the vote in the polls. The German AfD Party has a lucid and highly-educated leader, Weidel, and the UK Reform Party has some strong personalities.

Reform already has nearly 200,000 members, overtaking the dying Conservative Party at 130,000 members, and is catching up with the rapidly shrinking Labour Party. Should such parties reach 35% in the polls, they may well form the next governments. After all, the Labour government was elected by only 20% of the electorate. However, leadership without authority is in fact no leadership at all, just as hope without prayer is no hope at all. In Germany, the AfD, threatened with real censorship and even legal banning by the Fascists in power, continues to grow, challenging especially in the East the bourgeois CDU and CSU Parties of former West Germany. The fact is that those who lived under Communism, as in East Germany, are socially conservative, not woke.

The Church Leadership

This political situation has parallels in the Church. There are Local Churches which have solid and even remarkable leadership, such as the Romanian (Patriarch Daniel), the Serbian (Patriarch Porfiry), and now the Bulgarian (Patriarch Daniel). Archbishop Anastasios of Albania, eternal memory!, and his Synod also played a remarkable and honest role. The Polish Church too, and the American, whose Metr Tikhon alone had the courage to visit the much-persecuted Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The Churches of Antioch under the Athonite Patriarch John and of Jerusalem, and the elderly and saintly leader of the Georgian Church have also played a role of leadership, not to mention individual bishops in Greece and Cyprus.

On the other hand, there are those who have played with the canons for political self-justification. They have uncanonically abused the canons for purely political and nationalistic reasons, acting at times with personal hatred and jealousy, accepting bribes and invading each other’s canonical territory, trying to wind back history by hundreds of years. This is all mere self-justification. All they have done through their scandalous actions is to compromise the unity of the Church and to discredit themselves and their Local Churches before the people as well as before the secular world. This has been a case of leaders without authority. As a result, in those places authority has passed to the people and their shepherds, the pastors, priests, monks and nuns.

Conclusion: Humility

The choice, in other words, is Centralisation or Decentralisation. However, the latter means giving up a large amount of power and wealth. This is called humility. Some might think that Church leaders would find this easy to do. Are they not Christians? Sadly, just as among the world’s political leaders, that is not the case. And yet if Church leaders want authority, they must have humility. We only have to think of the saintly Patriarch Ilia of Georgia, Patriarch Porfiry of Serbia, who solved the Macedonian schism in an instant, and many other holy hierarchs, both living and departed – like Patriarch Pavle of Serbia, who always used public transport, refusing to have a car, as many of his priests do not have cars. Here is the solution, old and yet eternally new: Humility.

 

 

 

 

On President Erdogan and the Church of the Holy Wisdom

I have been asked by a US correspondent about our attitude to President Erdogan of Turkey, who has recently spoken about the massacre of Muslims by a Fascist fanatic in New Zealand and about turning Agia Sofia into a mosque again. Now, we have in our parish three Turkish Orthodox parishioners and soon there will be a fourth. Interestingly, they all have the same attitude to President Erdogan, the neo-Ottoman ‘Sultan of Turkey’: they consider that he is a nationalist dictator and find him very unpleasant and distasteful.

In this way, he is perhaps similar to many another tyrannical Middle Eastern ruler. We think immediately of the rulers of Saudi Arabia, who behead people by the dozens every year, keep most of the people dirt-poor and the rich ultra-rich, and have carried out a huge genocide (with enthusiastic Western backing) against the people of the Yemen. Not to mention the fact that they tortured and cut into little pieces a Saudi journalist in their consulate in Istanbul last October. Apparently this barbaric behaviour is quite agreeable to the Saudis and their Western sponsors and guardians. In other words, there is always worse than Erdogan, but, true, there could be better, only be careful – you may end up with worse. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine are outstanding examples. Thus, in Turkey, the US attempt to assassinate President Erdogan in July 2016 would surely have led to incredible strife and thousands of deaths.

Of course, there are Orthodox who strongly dislike President Erdogan, not because they are Turkish, but because they hate his threat that the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Istanbul, for long a tourist site, may yet again become a mosque. However, this is a false problem. The real problem is that the Orthodox have shown themselves unworthy of having an Empire and a Capital. Until the Russians repent for their betrayal in 1917, there will be no Orthodox Emperor, and until the Greeks repent for their betrayal of Christianity which led to 1453, they will never have any power, and until they repent for their latest crimes in the Ukraine in 2019, Agia Sofia will become a mosque. The same is true for apostate Greek Cypriots, the northern third of whose island was occupied 45 years ago by Turkey, with full Western backing, and true for the Serbs in Kosovo, who forgot their Faith and were outpopulated by Albanians.

You always lose your territory when you show yourselves unworthy of having it. You bring it on yourself. Territory does not belong to us, it belongs to God and is only on loan to us for as long as we remain faithful to Him. Thus, Belgium was devastated in the First European War because of its crimes in Central Africa (millions of Africans mutilated or murdered), Britain lost its Empire because it swapped the Bible for the exploitation of natural resources and the same can be said for umpteen other empires throughout history, ancient and modern, from China to Babylon, from the Hindus to the Egyptians, from Timbuktu to Machu Picchu, from the Mayas to Zimbabwe, from France to Austro-Hungary. Power hangs by a thread; it is an illusion to think we have any power, we only have what is granted by God. The USA will lose its power for the same reasons. Spiritual and moral decadence is always followed by catastrophic collapse.

When Greeks or Russians begin converting Turkey to Christ, instead of hiding in their ethnic corners, then Istanbul will become Constantinople again and the Church of the Holy Wisdom will echo to praise for Christ in Turkish from the Turkish Orthodox faithful. But until then, expect only worse and worse. The fruit of non-repentance and self-justification is humiliation. It is the only thing that can bring humility to the unrepentant. In other words, there will be no Church of the Holy Wisdom until you have shown Holy Wisdom.