Tag Archives: Leadership

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.

 

 

 

 

2016: The Tipping-Point?

It is clear that despite the positive events of the twenty-first century, Russia is still greatly suffering from the consequences of twentieth-century atheism, both from three generations of Marxist materialism and one generation of Capitalist materialism. Nevertheless, a spiritual and cultural renaissance is under way and may in 2016 have finally reached a tipping-point. Thus, although we may not always agree with him, the Russian political leader, inspired by the bimillennial Orthodox Christian Tradition, is now the leader of the worldwide anti-globalist movement, opposing planetary US hegemony and the One World State that it is aiming at.

The question now is if the Russian spiritual leader, the Russian Patriarch, can similarly become the leader of the worldwide anti-apostasy movement, opposing the folly of today’s atheist world? If he can, he will gain the full support of ordinary clergy, ordinary people and monastics. Some of these faithful have been hurt by treacherous, ecumenist elements in Moscow and a few of them are upset with the Patriarch. Despite this, the Patriarch of Moscow is already the de facto Oecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox world, but that status so far depends only on numbers. How can he increase his moral and spiritual authority?

This can only happen through his confession of Orthodoxy. Here, there are two acts which would unite the Church behind him. The first act, as Metr Benjamin of Vladivostok has recently said, is to leave the All-Protestant World Council of Churches. Membership of it, as we in the Church outside Russia have always known, only discredits the Church. On leaving, we should explain why we consider it a council of the impious and its ideology heretical. The second act is to stand up at the Crete meeting in June and refuse to sign any document which betrays Orthodox dogmatics through vague, ambiguous, ecumenist and secularist language.

During Lent Patriarch Kyrill set out on this path of confession by declaring that the main heresy of modern times is the worship of man as God and that this is what lies behind the spiritual catastrophe of the West. As he further said on the news channel, NTV, on 1 May, ‘the world is heading straight for hell’. These are not the words of some local bishop, but the words of the global Christian leader, who, unlike Pope Francis, is not afraid of telling the truth. As he is such, it was at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow that the Paschal Gospel was read in 27 languages, demonstrating the universal mission of the Russian Orthodox Church.

These two acts would definitively reassure those dissidents whose confidence has been shaken by the events of January and February, that is, by the release of the ambiguous draft documents for the Crete meeting and the meeting of Pope Francis with the Patriarch in Cuba. More than this, however, they would make clear, both to the whole Orthodox Church and to the world outside the Church, that the global spiritual leader of the contemporary world is the Russian Patriarch, who is standing up to Western apostasy and its deification of fallen mankind. In this way we can find the path of salvation amid the chaos and folly of today’s world.

Patriarch and Pope to Meet in Cuba on 12 February

It has been announced today in the Third Rome and also in Old Rome that Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Pope are to meet briefly at Havana Airport in Cuba on 12 February. This meeting will take place during the Patriarch’s long-awaited eleven-day pastoral visit to the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Latin America, notably to Cuba, Brazil and Paraguay.

This high-level trip, involving visits to the political leaders of all three countries follows repeated invitations. The 15,000 strong Russian Orthodox flock in Cuba will especially greet our Patriarch, but the Patriarch will also recognize the important role played by Russian Orthodox in Paraguay before the Second World War and in Brazil over the last 100 years. However, beyond pastoral matters, this is also clearly a brilliant diplomatic move – for five reasons:

Firstly, it upstages and sidelines the absurd claims of the tiny Patriarchate of Constantinople to make out that it is somehow the ‘leader’ of the Orthodox world, whereas in reality it is fifty times smaller than the Russian Orthodox Church! It also ends the Phanariot myth that only it can represent the Orthodox Church at the Vatican, the real, de facto, leader of the Orthodox Church is Patriarch Kyrill. There will be anger at the Phanar, as it realizes that after nearly 100 years of trying to monopolize attention its diplomatic end has come.

Secondly, this is clearly a move aimed at further undermining the ridiculous pretensions of the sectarian Ukrainian Uniats, who have done so much and are still doing so much to encourage aggression and hatred towards Ukrainian Christians in the civil war that they have fostered in the Ukraine. They will be extremely worried that their official leader, the Pope of Old Rome, is in fact renouncing them and their psychotic Russophobia.

Thirdly, this meeting marks the enormous concern of the Russian Orthodox Church for Orthodox and other Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, who have been abandoned by the West, which has also abandoned the Papacy. Only the Russian Federation has substantially intervened in the war in Syria to bolster the majority there against the Western-trained, armed and financed terrorist movements intent on genocide, as has been made clear by Catholic leaders in the Middle East. Notably, during his visit, Patriarch Kyrill will lead the service at the Syrian Cathedral in San Paulo.

Fourthly, this meeting is taking place outside Europe in the course of a pastoral visit by the Russian Orthodox Patriarch to Latin America. This marks the internationalization of the Russian Orthodox world before the rest of the world. Having settled many of the outstanding problems of the Church inside the Russian Federation and brought numbers of bishops up to 361 and of clergy to 40,000 from the pitiful few 25 years ago, the Patriarch is now looking further afield outside Eastern Europe and the Federation. The second generation of renewal can begin. We can now expect that the Patriarch will make other high-profile visits to the more distant territories of the Russian Orthodox Church, including, God willing, to ourselves.

And finally, this meeting on the US doorstep, specifically in independent and sovereign Cuba, also marks the fact that the uncompromised Orthodox world does not recognize the globalist power grab of the Neocon Empire based in Washington. This move against the New world Order is an outstretched hand to the independent peoples of the world – the vast majority – in an unprecedented missionary endeavour. We cannot but welcome it.