Tag Archives: The Future

Four Lives in One Life

1956 to 1974: The Last of Old England

I was born into the rolling countryside of the Essex-Suffolk border, amid the green fields, whispering woods, gentle hills, cold springs and clear streams of water. And then it still was the country, still England, far from the smoke of alien British London, with its tiring bustle and very sinister finance. I grew up with people born in the nineteenth century, or at least those born before 1914 and saw the last horses and milkmaids. I was brought up with the clear knowledge that there had once long before been saints here, where I lived. This was Paradise, the summer sunshine of my life, but it was also the end of Paradise.

1974 to 1997: The End of an Era

In this world of England, we had met a Russian exile family, the Benkendorffs, who lived outside Ipswich. Both my father, for his roses and sweet peas, and my aunt, for her ladies’ clothes, had dealings with them. I learned this in the revelation of 2019, a few days before my aunt passed. Everything made sense at last. Great-great uncle Pavel Benkendorff had been faithful to the Tsar and we are proud of him. His book about the Last Days is a favourite. Like them, the last living Russian emigres who had been adults before the Revolution, were by now all aged over 70. Now, in this ending era, I met a whole gallery of such as they.

Like the Benkendorffs, they too came from the old aristocratic families, representatives of the Golitsyns, the Obolenskys, the Lopukhins, the Kutaisovs, the Zernovs, the Gorodetskys, the Dolgorukys, the Rehbinders, the Bobrinskys, the Tiesenhausens, the Ossorgins, the Shidlovskys, the Breverns, and of very many other distinguished families from Russian history. Most such emigres were constitutional monarchists. In the UK they voted Conservative, in the US Republican and in France for the conservative RPR. They were not Republicans, but neither were they for the Tsar, whom they blamed for their loss and exile.

That they were not at all mystically-minded was the result of their spiritual impurity. And after the 1990s young Orthodox, newly arrived out of the hellfires of the Soviet collapse, among them cousins of the Benkendorffs and venerating the Tsar, were shocked by the compromised, Westernised and sometimes downright treasonous values of the old aristocrats. The newly come were true nobles and mystics. We were on the same wavelength. No surprise here. We had long thought exactly the same as them. So all turned full circle. From Benkendorff to Benkendorff. Providence always gives poetic justice.

1997 to 2022: The Inbetween Time – Caught Between Too Late and Too Early

By 1997 it was too late to build the Local Church with the Russian emigres, as the last of those who had been adults before 1917 were buried – as a priest in Paris I had helped bury them. In Europe they had transmitted the Faith to only a handful of their children and grandchildren because they had wanted not to transmit the Faith, but a political and nationalist ideology. That was meaningless to those born in the Western world. In 2007 I helped create unity between the remaining not yet Americanised emigres and Moscow – the last chance for the Russian Church in the emigration, if were not to collapse into sectarianism.

It was the last drop of our blood to be sacrificed, for a few years later we were to be met with bullying and betrayal for helping to create that unity. True, we had only put off the schism of the now decadent émigré Church for a decade, for in 2016 persecution by the new schismatics began. This was pathological and political and we realised that there was no future in the face of this spiritual disease. That spiritual disease could only attract the pathological, who, ex-Protestant by mentality, wanted self-justification, ‘justification’ being the Protestant sickness. The Russian Church of the emigration was going nowhere.

It had been taken over. The schismatics and sectarians were turning it into a ghetto of decadence. Already in 2016 the dry as dust, bad-tempered, pharisaical, ritualistic ‘Feraponts’ of Unholy Protocol were taking over the Russian Church in the emigration from the fresh, loving, spiritual, charismatic ‘Zosimas’ of Holy Optina. These two trends had already been portrayed penetratingly in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.  So the Russian Church in the emigration made itself spiritually irrelevant to the great task of converting to real Orthodox Christianity those of goodwill in Europe, who sincerely sought for Christ.

Shamefully, they had deserted the reality of the mission of St John of Shanghai in favour of sectarian ideology, of might and mammon. In early February 2022 a Metropolitan of the Russian Church whom we had known for 43 years, advised us, with regret, but also with envy, to turn to the Romanian Church for the future, after our 47 years of faithfulness to the Russian Church. Facing the betrayal by internal enemies we had met with, it was the only logical, though radical, thing to do. It was the turning point in the history of the Russian Diaspora and mission. A plague on both your houses of nationalist politics, of Russians and Greeks alike.

But this period was also too early to build the Local Church, as Western people were still not ready to receive the Light from the East, brought back to us from Russia, and so to return to their roots. Our words fell on deaf ears amid the deafening roar of the secularist, manipulating propaganda of the media of the Western elite, which stridently proclaimed atheism instead of Christ. Having sacrificed tens of millions of ordinary people in their absurd European Wars, which they even made into ‘World Wars’, they wanted blood as tribute to the satan they idolised, for satan hates Christ and slanders Him, ‘diabolising’ Him.

As for pathological Westerners, who sought self-justification in the Church of God, they were certainly not able to hear those words either, as pathology is by definition deaf to reality. The new world was not yet ready to be born. As the Italian philosopher Gramsci famously wrote in his Prison Notebooks: ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters’. This was indeed the inbetween time and the time of egomaniac monsters, who still clung to the dead conservative past and refused the Holy Spirit, Who in streams of living water was leading us into the Kingdom to come.

2022 to R.O.M.E., the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia of Europe

Providentially, eight days before the NATO war against Russia in the Ukraine, initiated in 2014, turned even more violent on 24 February 2022, with NATO plans for a full-scale genocide of eastern Ukrainians and the resulting Russian pre-emptive incursion, twelve of us clergy transferred to the Romanian Church. For over two-thirds of our thousands of parishioners were by then Romanians and Moldovans and one of them had already become a deacon and another a priest. The Romanian Orthodox Church provided the essential balance between the purely political and nationalist narratives of both Greeks and Russians.

We rejected their absurd and quite unChristian politics, masquerading as Orthodoxy beneath the camouflage of their mutual nationalist ideologies, called ‘Hellenism’ and ‘the Russian World’. We were merely the first of many to go to the Romanian Church and for the same reasons. After persecution from the schismatics and after the slander from those newcomers who were contorted by jealousy and who did not want to be set free by the Truth of Christ, but wanted convert ideology, we stood on the moral high ground. For as Orthodox Christians, we confess the Four Signs of the Church: One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic:

One: We confess what the Church is. The Church is One, living in spiritual unity in Heaven and on Earth, in Oneness, not in nationalism, not in political and racial arguments, in proud schisms and cultish sects, which refuse to tolerate others with generosity of heart and concelebration in love.

Holy: We confess where the Oneness comes from. It comes from the Saints, from Holiness, from the ever-fresh breathing of the Holy Spirit, Who is now so very close in these pre-apocalyptic times, and not from some ‘jurisdictional’ protocols and bureaucratic legalism, which will cause them to lose their souls.

Catholic: We confess how this Oneness is expressed. Oneness is expressed in Councils, for the Church is Conciliar/Catholic, expressing its Oneness in all places and at all times. Individuals may express these truths, but they must be confirmed by the common mind of the Church, inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Apostolic: We confess when the Church is. It is in the ‘Tradition’, that is, the continuous succession and legacy of identity, from the times of the apostles until our very own apostolic days, as we too await the Coming of Christ. For the Tradition contains the whole inspiration of the Holy Spirit to all humanity.

Glory to God for all things!

 

The Rome Congress Celebrates Twenty-Five Years of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe (MOREOM)

800 Metropolia Delegates in Rome

From 7 to 10 October 2026 we took part in the biennial Congress of our Metropolia. This year the Congress took place in Rome, though only 800 of the 3,000 clerical and lay delegates could attend. Previous Congresses took place in Rome in 2012, Lisbon in 2014, Rome in 2016, Paris in 2018, (covid restrictions forbade the Congress in 2020), Madrid in 2022 and Dublin in 2024. In 2028 the Congress will be taking place in England and there are hopes to hold an even bigger Congress. This will be in venues with large hotels with at least 250 rooms, meeting halls and restaurants, catering for between 1,000 and 3,000.

All eight bishops of our Metropolia participated in the Congress and the theme was Faith, Communion and Mission, with a strong emphasis on family life. Metropolitan Joseph told us of the foundation of the Metropolia by the Patriarchate of Romania in 2001. At that time there were only seven parishes in Italy (today there are over 400) and how he used to stay at parishioners’ homes, as he could not afford a hotel and scarcely had enough money for petrol. Today the Italian Diocese is about to obtain official recognition from the Italian government,

The participants were mainly aged between 20 and 45, with only a few older. I was the third oldest present and I am considerably older than any of the bishops. On the evening of Thursday 8, the priests organised a football tournament between Spain, Italy and England (France were not able to organise a team), refereed by Archdeacon Paul. England won and Archbishop Atanasie declared England the champions! The Congress was notable for the presence of many women (sometimes priests’ wives), babies and small children.

Married clergy all have short hair and trimmed beards, as they are expected to have. Only monastics have long hair and beards. This is quite unlike the anti-woman attitudes at Russian Church Conferences and Councils, many of which I have attended since 1981, with their rigid, parade-ground, even militaristic spirit. There everyone has to stand to attention in full dress uniform and nobody is allowed to express themselves freely because of ‘protocols’. Otherwise, they will be shouted at and intimidated, as they are supposed to be monks and to dress as monks. Those who do not pretend to be monks are treated as second-class citizens.

On Friday 9, an episcopal liturgy was celebrated in Romanian, Slavonic, English, Italian, French, German and Spanish. Bishop Nectary of Dublin presided. This tied in with the presentation to all the bishops of our multilingual booklet, also in seven languages, of the Akathist to All the Saints of the Western Lands and copies of the Icon ‘Saints of the Western Lands’. The original Icon, which is unique, is venerated in Colchester, as a result of our association with St John, who as Archbishop of Western Europe revived the veneration of these saints in the 1950s.

Some Statistics: Towards ROME – the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe

There are about 5,000,000 Romanians (including some 1,000,000 children born in Western Europe) and 1,000,000 Moldovans and their locally-born children, all with Romanian passports in Western Europe. Romanian Orthodox far outnumber the Orthodox of other nationalities in our countries. In the UK there are 1,500,000 Romanian nationals according to official statistics and Romanian has overtaken Polish as the second language in the UK.

The wave of emigration has now stabilised, though Romanians are still coming to the UK from Germany, Italy, France and Spain, where the economies are in recession because, ironically, of anti-Russian sanctions. These have rebounded on Western countries which enforced them, thus they shot themselves in the foot. In other words, over 80% of all Orthodox in the UK belong to the Romanian Archdiocese and the proportion is similar in other Western European countries.

Romanian Orthodox are divided into two Autonomous Metropolias, one for Central and Northern Europe (three bishops and some 220 parishes for Germany, Luxembourg, Austria and Scandinavia), the other for Western and Southern Europe (eight bishops and over 1,060 parishes and 24 monasteries for Portugal, Spain, Andorra, Italy, San Marino, Malta, France, Monaco, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Ireland and Iceland). It is clear that eight Archdioceses are beginning to take shape, two for the German lands (Germany and Switzerland-Austria), one for Scandinavia, one for the UK and Ireland, one for Italy, one for France, one for Iberia and one for Benelux.

Conversations with Romanians living outside Romania were interesting. As we know, Romanians help to staff the UK Antiochian and Greek dioceses, which are very short of clergy. Indeed, the Greek Archbishop Nikitas in London has publicly said that he is very grateful to Romanians who fill some of his emptying and elderly parishes. In the same way, Romanian-speaking Moldovans make up the vast bulk of the clergy and people who are under Moscow in the Diaspora.

However, the same thing is also happening in Greece and Cyprus. Thus, a Romanian lady who has lived in Cyprus for 20 years told me at the Congress how there are now no fewer than 17 Romanian priests in the Diocese of Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol. A few years back Metr Athanasios was chosen by the Cypriot people to be the Archbishop of Cyprus, but the US Embassy intervened to stop him and appointed their pro-schismatic Ukrainian candidate instead. As a result, there is more or less a schism in the Church of Cyprus between the Orthodox and the pro-Constantinople CIA appointees.

The End of Empire

Introduction: The Emperor of the USA

Like some new cruel and evil Genghis Khan, or a megalomanic pagan Roman Emperor, who wishes to build a Triumphal Arch (and gold-plated ballroom) to his own glory in his Capital, the warmongering US President rants at the ‘United’ Nations and threatens to ‘annihilate’ a civilisation and genocide 93.5 million Iranians. Instead of being led away in a straitjacket to a lunatic asylum, he remains in power. But perhaps not for much longer, as elections and the release of the Epstein papers loom. There are just as many Brutuses in Modern Washington as in Ancient Rome, and they are now sharpening their knives.

The Pravda of the UK

Like the other pygmy political leaders of the Western European client states, the UK’s unelected Prime Minister proposes to extend State censorship even further than todays ‘Official Secrets Act’, D-notices, and 2001 ‘Anti-Terrorism Act’. Burnham has announced plans for a new ‘National Centre for Information Defence’ to fight so-called ‘disinformation’ about the UK. He wishes to prevent a ‘distorted and untrue ‘narrative’ about Britain’, by working with spy agencies, Government departments, the police and social media firms. This Orwellian proposal is nothing but the establishment of a ‘Ministry of the Truth’.

Rees-Mogg, an extremely wealthy right-wing Roman Catholic aristocrat, who when a Tory MP and minister was known as ‘the honourable member for the 18th century’, wants to send the working classes to fight in an upper-class war of aggression against Russia. He promises them ‘glorious’ death. Nobody can understand why this should be so, when Russia presents no threat to us, though the elite does to Russia. In the Second World War we and Russia were allies together against the Nazis. But today the ruling classes are actually supporting those in Kiev who rebury Nazis as part of their war against Russia.

And then how will a bankrupt and deindustrialised UK fight this war without weapons? Who will train the pressganged recruits, who do not want to fight and do not how to fight? In a country with a rapidly shrinking army, only about 100 working tanks, more admirals than ships, ships without sailors, aircraft carriers without aircraft, submarines that cannot sail, rented aeroplanes and nuclear weapons that can only be used with US permission, how exactly will all this work? And in any case who wants to die for the sake of a corrupt ruling class and media oligarchs? The upper class may yet provoke mutiny.

Like anyone else, we patriots would be happy to defend our own country – if it were attacked. But whyever would anyone want to die for the ‘Britain’ of a foreign clique of anti-patriotic Globalists, for whom we did not vote and who hate our native lands of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales? Is it not time for the alien British upper-class invaders to leave? It may be 1914 in the minds of the parasites who rule us, but it is not. It is 2026 and we the people, whom they call ‘the plebs’, are not willing to die for the Heart of Darkness Belgian or Fascist Polish elites and invade other countries and murder and maim.

Conclusion: The Empire is Over

The ruling elites of Western Europe, whether inside the EU or not – it makes absolutely no difference, as has been proved by the myth of ‘Brexit’ and the anti-democrats who rule Switzerland and Norway – live in the past. True, there were, in times past, warriors who led armies into battle, and if they were victorious, became wealthy aristocrats. Today that is not the case. Those who create wars stay safely at home; others are killed in their name. The British elite already admits to abetting Ukrainian terrorism, rigging elections in Moldova and banning democracy in Romania. But they will not murder us.

The Last Stand of the Last Western Empire and the Great Church Project

End of Empire

Since the European suicide preceding 1945 the remnants of the last two European empires, the British and the French, survived only by riding on the coat tails of the American Empire. This has been even to the point of being humiliated by it, as at Suez in 1956 or pleading with Trump for diesel, and supporting US imperialism, however unprincipled. The American Empire has continually operated by setting up mafia regimes of oligarchs, supported by Fascist thugs, with hollowed out economies. Commonly called ‘banana republics’, these have existed not only in Latin America, but everywhere under the US Empire, from the Philippines to Vietnam, Iran to Kuwait, Africa to Western Europe. In the 1990s, it tried to set up exactly such a regime in the former Soviet Union. Here it failed, as the Patriots led by President Putin reclaimed Russia, but it did set one up in tiny, bandit-controlled Kosovo.

However, all such regimes survive only as long as there are enough US dollars to feed them, whether it is the colonels in Greece, Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain or regimes in Italy. Once the supply of dollars dries up, the regimes collapse and that very suddenly. We saw this in the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Now we are seeing it in the Ukraine, the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and, in time, it will happen in Israel. These are wars of attrition, as were the First and Second World Wars. For years millions of troops sat in trenches or battled backwards and forwards without any decisive collapse. And then it all happened. Both the First and Second World Wars were decided in the last four months. The same thing happened almost overnight in ‘South’ Vietnam, Afghanistan, with the dramatic scenes of the departure of the last helicopters or transport planes, now this is about to happen in the Ukraine.

The US/NATO proxy war in the Ukraine was triggered because greedy banks and CEOs of transnational corporations like Blackrock, Palantir, Starlink and Vanguard could see how rich they could become, if only they could break up Russia and pillage its natural resources, as they had already done in the Ukraine, and as they had already done in the enslaved Russia of the 1990s. This greed was entirely supported by EU politicians and businessmen for the same reasons. The British elite, always very sycophantic to the US, as they have since 1916 viewed the American Empire as their own Anglo-American Empire, had a special reason for supporting the wars in Afghanistan and the Ukraine. In the first case they wanted revenge for losing all three of their Afghan Wars (1840-1919). In the second case, they wanted revenge for the stalemated Crimean War (1853-56), seeing the present war as a Part Two continuation of that War.

The Western defeat in the Ukraine is a story of the hubris which lies behind Western lies and delusions. Convinced that the ‘end of history’ had come as a result of their ‘triumph’, Western elites persuaded themselves that Russia’s economy was the same size as Spain’s (in reality, it is the same size as Germany’s, France’s and the UK’s combined, and its industrial capacity is greater than the whole of Western Europe’s), that unarmed Russian troops fought with shovels, that Russians fought in ‘human waves’, that millions of them were dead, that Russians were taking computer chips from washing-machines because they had none, that the rouble was ‘rubble’, that Russia had no more fuel, bullets, tanks or missiles, that President Putin was about to die of cancer, but also that Russia was about to march into Western Europe….In reality, the Western elites need psychiatric help for their delusions.

As the American Empire declines and then finally falls, those who have had their imperial pretensions extended by riding on American coat tails, will also collapse. We can see this in Western Europe today. The UK has had six Prime Minister in ten years, in Germany the autocratic militarist Chancellor Merz is hated and in France Napoleon-Macron the dictator, who has lost French Africa, refuses to leave and allow a democratically-elected government. As the US retreats and abandons the artificial countries and mafia regimes it has set up worldwide, armies will surrender, political collapse and economic chaos will ensue. It is a repeat of the aftermath of the USSR. The Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and the tiny Gulf States, then Israel, will fall. Then will fall Western Europe, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, the Baltics and the whole US-founded EU itself. All will have to adapt to an empireless world. Traumatic, but inevitable.

Church Freedom

In 1980 I had a long conversation with the late Fr Alexander Schmemann, whose books I had read in the 1970s and members of whose family, all belonging to ROCOR, except for his very conservative Parisian brother Andrei, I had met. In 1980 ten years had passed since Fr Alexander had implemented the autocephaly from Moscow for the largely Carpatho-Russian Metropolia in North America, which then became the OCA (Orthodox Church in America). He was able to do this, as he, a highly educated Paris aristocrat who spoke fluent French and taught Latin and had a strong character, dominated the Carpatho-Russian episcopate, which was generally poorly educated and also morally compromised, as Fr Alexander knew in detail. This is why to this day the OCA is still to this day dominated by its protopresbyters and not bishops, a bit like congregational, but not episcopal, Churches.

Fr Alexander was keen to get me to St Vladimir’s Seminary in New York, perhaps seeing me as a supporter for himself and a future seminary teacher. I thanked him, but informed him that I was not interested, even though I admired much of what he had done for the reorganisation of Orthodoxy in North America along canonical lines. My task, I told him, was to help in the building of a Local Church in Western Europe. Even then, I also knew that mistakes had been made in the construction of the OCA in 1970 and that if ever we were to have our own Local Church in Western Europe, we would have to learn from those mistakes and not repeat them. Those mistakes were in the ecumenistic, modernistic, anti-monastic and anti-ascetic compromises, resulting from a certain Protestantisation and Second-Vaticanisation of the would-be, ‘All-American’ conformist members of the OCA.

However, no Local Church can be built on such attitudes. All Local Churches began with monasticism. Although I never thought that I would live to see a Local Church of Western Europe, I needed to help in its construction, in this Great Project, for the sake of our children and their children. Although I had come to see in the 1970s that the CIA-run Patriarchate of Constantinople would never help in building new Local Churches, but only try to dominate, interfere and destroy, I sincerely believed that the Russian Church could do something. This I believed right up until 2021. Then that hope was dashed, as I saw that part of the New York Russian Church was compromised by that same CIA as of old and the main part was compromised by Russian nationalism and Russian politics. Until all were free of politics, there could be no hope here, there would be only compromise, impurity and Papist attitudes.

But precisely now is coming the defeat of the American Empire as a result of the backfiring or ‘blowbacking’ of its own ideology, for example, as in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and today in the Ukraine and Iran. So used to treating other countries as vassals, like Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, and receiving tribute from them in dollar payments, US ideology never took into account the existence of sovereign nations. All were supposed to submit to its domination. But there are nations that refuse to be dependent on the American Empire and despite US sanctions, have become powerful, especially Russia, China and Iran. According to US plans, China was supposed to have been eliminated by US-bred covid, Russia dismantled by the NATO-supplied Ukrainian proxy, and Iran eliminated by assassinations. All these plans failed. Man proposes, but God disposes. With this reality, all changes in the Church.

The American Empire is declining more and more rapidly. This also means that the Greek Churches and the New York Russian Synod can, after eighty years of enslavement, repent and free themselves of CIA control. In turn, this means that the Russian Church inside the former USSR will no longer be obliged to counter the Greeks and could abandon Russian nationalist ideology outside the Russian Federation. With the depoliticisation of the Greeks and the denationalisation of Russians after the NATO campaign against them has been defeated, there is hope that long-awaited new Local Churches in the Diaspora can come into being. Delayed for so long by the political systems weighing on Greeks and Russians alike, those born outside the Russian Federation and in the Diaspora, will at last be free to establish their own Local Churches. We 50 million Orthodox and their 250 bishops could at last have our own Churches.

 

 

The Icon of the Saints of the Western Lands

With the blessing of Archbishop Atanasie, after the Liturgy and a wedding on 20 September 2026, the new Icon of the Saints of the Western Lands, 90 cm x 70 cm, was placed in its wooden shrine in St John’s Church in Colchester. After the Liturgy of the Nativity of the Mother of God on 21 September 2026, the Icon was blessed. It was painted by one of our deacons, Antonie Brailescu, who is also an iconographer and the shrine was made by a parishioner-carpenter, Daniel Radu. Around Christ, Who holds a cross over Western Europe and is accompanied by the Mother of God, St John the Baptist and the holy Apostles Peter and Paul of Rome, 30 main saints from all over Western Europe are depicted around the four sides. They are:

St James the Apostle, St Martin of Tours, St Irenaeus of Lyon, St Clement of Rome, St Ambrose of Milan, St Hilary of Poitiers, St Benedict of Nursia, St Eulalia of Barcelona, St Genevieve of Paris, St Julia of Corsica, St Lucy of Sicily, St John Cassian, St Vincent of Lerins, St Columba of Iona, St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, St Martin of Braga, St Hosius of Cordoba, St Patrick of Ireland, St Alban of Britain, St Maurice of Agaunum, St Boniface of Germany, St David of Wales, St Edmund, King of East Anglia, St Severinus of Noricum, St Anschar of Hamburg, St Sigfrid of Sweden, St Olaf of Norway, St Willibrord of the Netherlands, St Lambert of Maastricht, St Brendan the Voyager.

This Icon exists because our Church is dedicated to St John of Shanghai and Western Europe and the iconostasis already depicts his many friends, like St Nicholas of Zhicha and St Alexis of Carpatho-Russia, and of course here is the Kursk Root Icon of the Mother of God, before which St John reposed. We also have many relics of St John, such as his London cassock, placed in a full-length shrine, with an icon of him, and covered with his archbishop’s mantle, his paraman, decrees with his signature etc.

In the 1950s St John was instrumental in renewing the veneration for the Orthodox saints of the Western Lands. Thus, we are continuing his heritage, as we have been doing ever since 1973. Our Church is the Church of St John and All the Saints of the Western Lands. It will be consecrated as such by our Patriarchate of Romania, once the frescoing of the walls is complete, now that the ceiling repainting with its 2,000 stars is nearly done.

100 A4 copies and 500 A5 copies of this Icon have been printed. With the blessing of Archbishop Atanasie, the Icon is accompanied by an A5 book of akathists to All the Saints of the Western Lands, in Romanian and the six most common Western European languages, spoken by 90% of Western Europeans: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. This akathist is based on our full service to these saints, which we composed over twelve years ago. All this comes ahead of the Congress of our Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe, with its 1,000 parishes and 8 bishops, which will take place in Rome from 6 to 9 October. The akathist was published on Amazon, as was a second book of activities in English, A4 format and 100 pages long, designed for children so they can understand the saints of this Icon. An extract from the akathist:

Akathist to All the Saints of the Western Lands 

Kontakion 1

We sing the praises of all the saints who from time immemorial have pleased God, shining forth in the Western Lands and receiving crowns of glory in the heavens. You who have great boldness before the Lord can free us from all misfortunes, and therefore we call out to you:

Rejoice, all the saints of the Western Lands, and pray ardently to God for us.

Ikos 1

The saints of the North, the South and the East were added to by you, the saints of the West. Together you go forth in bright triumph and call the whole world to spiritual joy. We offer veneration, as we call out to the saints of the Western Lands in this way:

Rejoice, O saints, shining with the light of the Sun of Righteousness and making the sign of the Cross over the lands of the West.

Rejoice, O saints, who shine with the purity of the Orthodox Faith through your life in the Holy Trinity.

Rejoice, O saints, who call us to return to the roots of our first confession of the Holy Spirit in the bright Sunrise of Orthodoxy.

Rejoice, O saints, who pray to God for our repentance and return, restoration and resurrection.

Rejoice, O saints, who instruct us to leave aside the things of men and the fallen fleshly mind, bereft of the Saviour and the Spirit.

Rejoice, O saints, who brighten the ever-darkening shades of the Churchless night.

Rejoice, all the saints of the Western Lands, and pray ardently to God for us.

For photographs, see:

www.saintjohnsorthodoxchurch.com

www.facebook.com/stjohnsorthodoxcolchester

Instagram: @st.john.maximovitch.colchester

App (available from the Appstore): ROARCH

 

 

The Irrelevant Meeting of 30 November 2026?

Patriarch Bartholomew has disclosed that he has invited the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem to his Constantinople for a ‘brotherly Synaxis’ on 30 November 2026. The All-Greek meeting of these four tiny old Patriarchates is that of the unelected leaders of 3% of the world’s 200 million Orthodox. Is such a meeting is therefore irrelevant? So why will they meet? We suspect that they will meet to discuss the consequences of Constantinople’s disastrous decision to set up a fake Church in the Ukraine in 2018.

Now that the CIA regime in Kiev, which has viciously persecuted the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, is collapsing under the weight of Russian arms. A new democratic government will be established in the post-War Ukraine, so that fake Church is heading for the dustbin of history. However, this in turn means that the CIA-sponsored Patriarchates of Constantinople and Alexandria will have to start resuming normal relations with the 97% of the other Local Churches, notably with the Russian, to which 70% of Orthodox belong.

Perhaps the Arab Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem will be able to mediate between those two and the Russian Church? And what of the other eleven Local Churches? Not only does the Patriarchate of Constantinople have to renounce the thugs of its fake Church in the fake Ukraine, but it also has to renounce its fake churches in Estonia and elsewhere. On the other hand, the Russian Church will at last have to sort out its deep infiltration by the CIA and the mess it has made outside Russia, notably in the Ukraine and in Africa.

Africa has been claimed for nearly 100 years to be the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria. That is disputed. Who is capable of taking responsibility for the Evangelisation of the African Continent? It is our suggestion that it is Orthodox Africans themselves who should do this and not outsiders, neither Russians, nor Greeks, though their financial support and infrastructure could be welcome. Once that has been done, perhaps all sixteen Local Churches could talk about the real problems of Church life.

These consist of the fact that some 50 million of the world’s Orthodox, represented by some 250 bishops, do not have their own Churches, but have to rely on someone else’s Churches. This would not matter if ‘someone else’s Churches’ were politically free. They are not. This concerns the Orthodox who live on the vast territories of the Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics, Belarus, Central Asia, the whole of Africa, Western Europe, North, Central and South America and Oceania. There is a need for new and politically free Local Churches here.

Perhaps initially these would be Autonomous, perhaps later they could become Autocephalous. Here is the real problem. Invading other Local Churches’ territories is not where it is at. The real problem is the lack of Evangelisation, the lack of pastoral care and the lack of political freedom for Orthodox and those who wish to join the Orthodox Church. Let us have a real meeting between all the Local Orthodox Churches. Who knows, if there is a free and non-political agenda, maybe that could evolve into a Church Council?

 

The Three Illusions of Russia

First Published in Russian at: https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2026/09/14/tri_illyuzii_rossii

Introduction: White Man Speak with Forked Tongue

I have known Russia and two of its incarnations, the Soviet and the post-Soviet Capitalist, for fifty-three years, since my first visit to the USSR in 1973. I also used to know the last Russians, now no more with us, who had been born in its previous incarnation, that of the Tsars’ Russia. One constant question throughout this time is why Russia has made so many tragic mistakes in its history, why it has been so misled and believed in the illusions sold to it. It often seems as though Russians have behaved like naïve Native Americans.

The latter sold their lands and their natural resources to the first colonists in exchange for strings of beads and other shiny toys from manufacturing industries, whether metal axes, rifles or fire-water whisky. It is rather as one South African Protestant Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, put it: When white missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray’. We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land. Russians too have believed in shiny beads.

  1. The Imperial Illusion: Nine Generations

The first illusion began around the year 1700. Members of the Russian elite, the boyars, were forced to shave off their beards and change their dress, selling out their national identity in order to imitate Western feudalism and its aristocratic ideology. Thus, Imperialism began, serfdom was introduced and a profound inferiority complex vis a vis the West appeared. The Russian elite parroted Western aristocrats, enslaving and exploiting their own, all in exchange for Constitutionalist Anglomania and Republican Gallomania. For Russia, for the Russian language and for Russian people they had only contempt.

The Russian aristocracy fell for Western toys and many came to speak French as their first language and speak Russian like Frenchmen. Some light came in 1861, when one Tsar had the courage to abolish serfdom. In the age of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, vast amounts of land were returned to the people, despite the treacherous aristocrats. Like him, the intelligent realised how they had been tricked and needed to return to pre-Imperial Russian Tradition, in Church architecture, iconography, singing and to the spirit of St Seraphim of Sarov, so despised by the elite. This illusion lasted essentially for 200 years until 1917.

  1. The Soviet Illusion: Three Generations

Then, in 1917, the intellectual elite, made up of the most Westernised elements of the aristocracy and the middle class, (‘the intelligentsia’) was sold another Western ideology. This time it was the old-fashioned German philosophy of Marxism, which promised ‘a bright future’, paradise on earth. And the natives accepted this new illusion and believed in it, many dying as a result, including themselves. For those who did not escape into exile died before firing squads and in camps, or starved to death in Saint Petersburg, besieged by another German ideology, the new-fashioned philosophy of Fascism.

It was only as a result of this Western genocide in the 1940s that the Soviet elite started out on the path to Russian sobriety. But this was also a path that was undermined by economic stagnation, the inevitable result of Marxist ideology, with its ideological blindness and so failure to recognise human nature and basic human needs. Thus, it was that after 75 years, three generations, of a fairy tale of economic illiteracy, at the end of 1991 Soviet Marxism collapsed into bankruptcy. It was not defeated militarily, it destroyed itself. But then yet another illusion would be naively accepted.

  1. The Capitalist Illusion: One Generation

From 1992 on, the Zionist billionaires who rule the USA and their vassals who rule Western Europe sold naive ex-Soviet people ‘freedom and democracy’, with the poisoned fruits of consumerist Capitalism and privatisation. Another shiny new toy for the natives. Again, the Russians accepted it all and believed it. And so treacherous oligarchs, CIA lovers, appeared together with a vicious bandit mafia. Lawlessness prevailed. Millions died prematurely in the 1990s epidemic of mafia murders, alcoholism and despair. However, unlike the first two illusions, this one began to end fairly quickly. In little more than 35 years it was over.

In 2015 the Zionist billionaires and their political vassals who rule the West persuaded President Putin to accept a new toy, the Minsk Accords. He agreed to these in the hope that peace and justice would come to the Donbass. Instead, the CIA-run Kiev regime continued its genocide there and simply gained time to build huge defences, minefields and trench systems, planned by NATO, which only after four and a half years the Russians are finishing off. Such naivety, as President Putin has himself admitted to, is now ending. In 1700 Russia turned West. After believing three Western illusions in thirteen generations, it is at last returning to its roots.

Conclusion: Tsar Nicholas II

Tsar Nicholas, who was the first to understand the error of the Imperial illusion and wanted to return to Russian roots, was betrayed by virtually his whole country, including most of the State-loving bishops. Aristocrats, like members of his own family or the pervert Yusupov, rejected him and joined in with the slanders. Only a few individuals remained faithful and most of them, like Patriarch Tikhon or our own Count Pavel Benkendorff, soon died or were martyred. And there was little repentance for any of this.

Neither among many old emigres, the last of whom I knew in exile in Paris, who went on justifying themselves and maligning the Tsar, nor among the majority of post-Soviet people, was there repentance. Russia and the whole Orthodox world are still suffering from that treachery, self-inflicted suffering. Healing will only come through repentance, for treachery cost millions of lives. All this goes back to the first illusion and spreads to the second and third illusions. Without the return to its roots, the Russian tree will die.

 

 

 

The Great European Suicide: Discussions with Exiled Ukrainians in Poland

For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

Matt 24, 7

See then that you walk carefully, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.

Ephesians 5, 15-16 

Better an honourable death than a shameful life.

St Dmitry Donskoy (+ 1389)

On our knees only before God.

Chant of the Pochaev Pilgrims in the Ukraine

Foreword

I have been asked why I speak of politics. Well, first of all, that was my secular profession as a lecturer in France. But in the Church, we must also know what and who. You could easily accuse St Cyril of Alexandria, St Maximus the Confessor, St Photius of Constantinople, St Mark of Ephesus and St Gregory Palamas of being political. I do not think they were, but they had to know their enemies and understand their motivations. My life has been spent avoiding politics, both the KGB sort and the CIA sort. But in order to avoid that, you first have to be aware of it, in order to keep to the royal path, avoiding extremes because they are spiritual diseases against communion. In terms of the Sixteen Local Orthodox Churches, this means Conciliarity, Catholicity, avoiding exclusivism, which leads to isolation on the fringes.

Krakow, Poland and Eastern Europe

In mid-August I was invited to Krakow. Old Krakow, with its Wawel royal castle, was the historic capital of Poland before Warsaw and is still the capital of the Polish Catholic Church. It has a typically Habsburg city centre, like Prague, Budapest or Vienna. On the River Vistula and not far from the Tatra mountains, the Beskids and the Slovak border to the south, this city of about one million is a tourist city, a University city, and is full of churches, its monks, nuns and priests walking in their cassocks, as used to be the case in Western Catholic countries until the early 1960s. Poland kept its traditions thanks, ironically, to the Communist Party. Conversely, Catholicism in ‘the Free World’, the Western countries, seems to have become as spiritually empty and vapid as Protestantism, thanks to Capitalism.

I am here for a week with Ukrainian friends, whom I have known since 2020 and who have introduced me to the Orthodox Ukrainian community here. Their interest comes because I am Russian Orthodox, but not Russian, and was forced to flee the Russian Church after 47 years to the Romanian Patriarchate for canonical protection from schism, sect and persecution. The centralised and politicised Russian Church administration does not protect its own, but persecutes them. As we communicate in Russian, suspicious Ukrainians ask to see my passport to check that I really am an Englishman. I recommend to them the Polish Orthodox Church and its local priest, Fr Rostislav, who is building a very large new and beautiful church on the outskirts of the city, retaining the present smaller city centre church.

Krakow and Poland bring me to reflect on Eastern Europe, of which I have visited every country and where I have travelled widely over the last five decades. Overwhelmingly, it seems to me that instead of joining the German Fourth Reich of the Western European EU club, which the UK left, and Switzerland, Norway and Iceland never even joined, Eastern Europe should have created its own Eastern European Confederation, a broader and formal ‘Visegrad Four’. Eastern European nation-states with their strong patriotic identities have so much in common with each other and so little in common with atheist and Globalist Western Europe. Of course, the USA would not allow that. This is their tragedy, that Eastern Europe once again became colonies and vassals, of the US via its German puppet.

Even in Catholic Krakow, a home to the Polish Sovereignist Party, hostile to the Polish-American puppet leader Tusk, there are ‘vape shops’, cannabis stores, tattoo parlours, a few young people dressed as Goths, burgers and fries and MacDonalds, and all the trappings of international tourism, brought to it by the Zionist/Globalist elite in Brussels. Today Poland is fighting for its national identity. I was pleased to see Polish folk dancing in the city centre, to see Catholic churches attended, to see the national sense of identity of the refusal of some to dress like Americans. Some of what I see has virtually disappeared in the West since the 1950s. But how long can Poland, like the rest of Eastern Europe, retain its identity and keep its sovereignty? How long can Eastern (like Western) Europe survive without Russia?

The Ukraine

Ukrainian refugees here expressed many different views to me. One was an ex- soldier who had deserted, others had saved themselves as soon as possible in 2022, in order not to have to die in the Kiev Army. They are refugees not from the Russians, but from Zelensky, protecting themselves, their husbands and their sons. Of course, there are others, those who just wanted to get out of the grinding poverty and corruption of Kiev as soon as possible, some were realising their cherished dream of living in an EU country, since the Ukraine itself will never be allowed to join the EU. I found all well-informed and they provided me with confirmations of my impressions, but they also gave me some surprising details, which I had not expected. They also needed to talk to a priest from outside about Church life.

First of all, all twenty people I met dislike, or rather hate, Zelensky above all. Elected by PR only because he had promised peace, instead he delivered a horrifying war. All confirmed to me their belief that the number of dead Ukrainian troops is about 2 million. They have seen some of the massive new Ukrainian military cemeteries all over the country, not least outside Kiev. One of the Ukrainians told me that in the recent exchanges Kiev has so far returned the corpses of 600 Russian troops, but Russia has returned the corpses of 18,500 Ukrainian troops, a ratio of 1 to 31. They detest Zelensky, since he chose war for the huge financial opportunities it gave him and his cronies to pocket billions of US dollars, EU euros and GB pounds and buy villas and casinos on the Mediterranean and in Florida.

The war continues only because of Western money. If it dried up for the already bankrupt Ukraine, the war and the tens of thousands of Ukrainian deaths every month would end at once. Here is why the second most hated man for them is Boris Johnson. This was a surprise for me, as here he was sacked in disgrace for his lies and has gone into the dustbin of history, almost forgotten. Not so in the Ukraine. For them he is the worst of the Western war criminals who have so much blood on their hands, blamed for persuading Zelensky not to sign the Istanbul peace agreement made at the end of March 2022. Since then, 2 million Ukrainians and 160,000 Russians have died. Only in third place of hatred for them came Putin (and Patriarch Kyrill alongside him, for the Ukrainians I spoke to, they are indistinguishable as murderers).

Few canonical churches in the Ukraine now commemorate the Russian Patriarch. They call him ‘the Muscovite’. He is the Russian enemy, ‘not one of us’. The Ukrainians I speak to, who all belong to the canonical Church, envy the Polish Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Sava of Warsaw. They eye autocephaly and the official non-commemoration of Russian enemies. Here we come to what so many nations, victorious in war, forget. You must also be victorious in peace. The Americans failed in this in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the Russians think that they can take the whole of the Ukraine, apart from the four or five far western provinces, in which Russians have no interest and which will surely be returned by referendum to Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania (from whom Stalin stole them), they are wrong.

All the Church Ukrainians I spoke to want an independent Ukraine. Of course, this means at last a Ukraine independent of the EU and America (unlike the situation since 2014, since when the Ukraine has been a fully dependent Western vassal and colony), but also independent of Russia. In Church terms, this means either an Autocephalous Ukrainian Church, or, at the very least, an Autonomous Ukrainian Church with the right for all clergy not to commemorate the Russian Patriarch, except for Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev, who alone would have to sacrifice himself to do that, as now. One Ukrainian told me that he has friends in Belarus who want the same thing for Belarus. Instead of being an Exarchate, as at present, the Belarussian Church should also be an Autonomous Local Church.  So they said.

This would mean the development of a Russian Orthodox Church with four Autonomous Churches, two in the west, the Belarussian and the Ukrainian, and two in the east, as now already, the Japanese and the Chinese. This would mean the Baltics and the Moldovans (jointly with the Romanian Church, which has already given autonomy) alone receiving autocephaly – for that is the only way for them. Perhaps. What is certain is their admiration for Metr Onufry. He is a real monk, a man of silent prayer. He says only: ‘Pray!’ When will the war end? This was a very debated topic. One was certain that it would be next month, in September 2026, one said 2027. Another said 2030. Another said it would drag on for ten years. What is for sure is that all are fed up, they just want it to end as soon as possible, so they can live normal lives.

The Ukrainians are well informed through the internet. Ignoring US-controlled Kiev PR and propaganda, which is fed to and actually believed in by gullible Westerners, they know far better than Western people what is happening and just how corrupt the Ukraine is. Everything is for sale, not least Ukrainian women’s wombs, which provide 25% of the world’s surrogate children, and then there is the highly organised organ harvesting of dying soldiers. Another surprise for me is how much they consider that Jews run the Ukraine. Zelensky is of course a Jew, but he has also settled Israelis to live there and spoken publicly of the Ukraine literally as ‘A Big Israel’ and ‘A New Jerusalem’. They tell me that the Ukraine is run by ‘The Tribe’. And the Tribe has, they say, monetised death. But is this not racist?

Violence against a Jew now gets you eight years in prison. To insult a Jew costs you a lot. But surely that is the way it should be? And yet insults of and violence against Russians are encouraged, not fined or punished. Is this not racist? But the Ukrainians know that Russian military equipment is much better than that of the obsolete NATO. The Ukraine resembles Germany in 1945. They know they are lost. 66% want peace talks now, but they live in a dictatorship, surrounded by barbed wire. The bankrupt Ukraine is committing national suicide, demographically and economically. And, in moral suicide, the bankrupt West does not care how many Ukrainians die – they are just cannon fodder. War is business. They cannot say this out loud in the Ukraine, if they do, they will be arrested by the dreaded SBU Secret Police.

Last year one of the Ukrainians, in his 30s, escaped in the back of a lorry, wedged between fridges going to Romania, and from there made his way to Poland via Slovakia. For this privilege he had to pay $8,000. It was the seventh time he had tried to escape. As he was in IT, he would otherwise have been co-opted at once as a drone operator. He did not want to lose his soul. (See below). Some may say that in that case he could have deserted or surrendered. But the reality is that if you do this, you are likely to be shot in the back by the SBU Secret Police at the Front. The Russians have horrible weapons, artillery, drones, glide bombs, thermobaric weapons. They are awful. You do not stand a chance. If you can surrender, do so. If you cannot, you will die as a result of the horrible and brutal killing technology of the Russians.

They tell me: If Ukrainians in the Crimea and in the east who cannot even speak Ukrainian and do not want to learn it, since they, as Russian imperialists, disrespectfully regard it as a dialect, and they want to join Russia, let them. ‘We do not want to die to keep them’. We are Ukrainians and the Ukraine is only for Ukrainians, for us, not for Russians, but also not for Zelensky and his foreign Zionist oligarchs. Ironically, in Latvia, where they tried to ban Russian in public places, including on the street, they were swamped with Ukrainian ‘refugees’ who spoke Russian. Unlike local Russians, they could not be touched when they spoke Russian in public, however, because they were ‘refugees’ (refugees from Zelensky’s pressgangs sending them to die as cannon fodder). They could not be fined or spat on like native Russians.

A special hatred goes towards the recruiter thugs who pressgang men, and now some women, off the streets to fight. Social media show a multitude of these horrible videos. They draft the sick, the mentally handicapped, anyone, for they are paid for the number of bodies they can abduct, as they have quotas to fill. They are so violent that some ‘recruits’ die from beating and kicking on the way to the recruitment centres before they even get to training. Who cares, at least their organs can be taken and sold before they die. It compares so badly with the now professional Russian army of paid and trained volunteers, a far cry from Wagner Group cannon fodder. Training abroad in Germany, France or Britain is valued, as it gives the Ukrainian ‘recruits’ a chance to ask for asylum. This is why only very few are now being trained abroad.

The recruiters search especially for future drone operators, many of whom are now women (dronshchitsy). For any who like video games, being a drone operator seems very attractive – at first. However, it is the path to insanity. When pilots drop bombs, they do not see the horror on the faces of those whom they kill and maim. Drone operators do. It is frightening. They cannot sleep at night. However, all this nightmarish death fills the coffers of European politicians and spies, grandchildren of Nazis, like the Ukrainian-descended Metreweli of MI6, Western arms dealers and Ukrainian bureaucrats. Little wonder if, when it is all over, Ukrainians will treat Zelensky like the Italians did Mussolini. Will Western politicians and journalists then be asked why they lied for twelve years and will they be put on trial for those lies?

The clearly stated Western aim, of such as Brzezinski, the Rand Corporation, von der Layen and Kallas, is to destroy and dismantle Russia, stripping it of its assets. What cheaper way to murder Russians, as the dead US Senator Graham said quite openly, than using Ukrainians to do the job for us? But no Ukrainian wanted a ruined Ukraine, no Ukrainian wanted to die, few wanted to join NATO. This is enforced suicide. I am shown the video of a funeral in the Ukraine. The traffic stops. People get out and kneel down in respect. Not because they agree with this war, but because for them the Ukraine is the victim of the West, which wants to kill it. This is why the defeat of the Ukraine, about which the West is in denial, will be the end of NATO, the EU and the unelected Western autocrats, who work for and feed off the oligarchs.

These servants of the oligarchs include NATO generals, hated European politicians, such as the unelected British Prime Minister, and also the whole Western journalist class who sold out their profession for thirty pieces of silver. They do not care that the Ukraine is surrounded by barbed wire, like a giant concentration camp. I am shown a video of this. If you do manage to climb over it using carpets and thick gloves, beware. If you are seen, you will be shot by the dreaded border guards, who are also paid by quota. All paid for by the generous West. I was told of two women ‘back home’. Both lost their sons at the Front. One hates all Russians and the Russian language, as a result. The other, a believer, accepts it in humility: ‘This was for our sins’. She just prays for his soul and gives alms twice a week.

No Ukrainians I meet support the absurd fake church of Dumenko, founded and sponsored in 2018 by the CIA via the Greek Patriarch in Turkey. They know they are just a bunch of gangsters. But again and again the Ukrainians ask: ‘The Bulgarians have a Patriarch, so do the Georgians. They are very few. Why don’t we more numerous Ukrainians have a Patriarch? The Poles, Albanians, Czechs and Slovaks have their own Churches, why can’t we’? They want a Sovereign Ukraine and a Sovereign Church, neither a puppet of the Greek Patriarch, nor of the Moscow Patriarch. What is also clear is the hatred of Ukrainians not just for Johnson, but also for the elites of Germany, Britain and France, who have all paid for the deaths of Ukrainians, ‘to the last Ukrainian’. Here is the same very old Aryan racism against Ukrainians.

Apocalypse

Another aspect of these Ukrainians is their sense of the Apocalypse. After the covid disaster, which we now know to have been an American virus experiment from North Carolina that (accidentally?) escaped from a Chinese laboratory, the involvement of the Jewish people in the Ukraine, the birthplace of Trotsky (Bronstein) and Zionist Trotskyism, which in the USA became the ideology of the neocons, called Globalism, the rumours of ritual murders in the Ukraine, blood and organs being taken out of dead bodies, the open occultism and proud neo-paganism of leaders in Kiev, the involvement of Persia-Iran, Turkey, the war in the Holy Land, the recent uncovering of the relics of St Dmitry Donskoy in Moscow, all this is apocalyptic, signs of the times. And it is all amid the suicide of the Ukraine and Ukrainianised Western Europe.

Surprisingly, two Ukrainians mentioned the name of the eccentric and insulting Russian nationalist geopolitician Zhirinovsky to me. ‘He was a prophet’, they say, ‘and a fool for Christ’. And then they turn to blaming Putin. ‘He is incompetent’, ‘too cautious’, ‘a coward’. ‘He could have finished it all in a few weeks, instead he has dragged it out for nearly five years and two million are dead’. ‘He should have killed Zelensky at the start and taken Kiev, then we would have lived in peace’. This ignores the fact that in 2022, Russia was not prepared for a full-scale war against NATO, its army disorganised and part-privatised, and many of its military leaders were corrupt or incompetent, getting soldiers killed. Perhaps Putin was simply naïve? All that can be said is that Ukrainians are desperate for peace. They just want it all to end.

Perhaps, the present, third incarnation of Russia in 300 years, the Russian Federation, founded in 1991, which followed the Soviet Empire, founded in 1922, which followed the Russian Empire, founded in 1721, is also doomed to fail. 300 years of failure. Its Wild East Capitalism of the 1990s, producing the mafia oligarchs, the new aristocrats or boyars, is its final failure. Sadly, that spirit in turn infected the Russian Church. As in the 1990s, let alone today, any Russian will tell you that the Russian Church is run as a ‘Business’, that many bishops and senior clergy just want to play at ‘bandits’, ‘mini-oligarchs’. The problem with the 280 new Russian bishops appointed in the last 17 years is that the old bishops chose quantity, not quality, perhaps in a failed attempt to get a dominating majority of the 1,000 bishops of all the Orthodox Churches.

Pilgrimages and processions of the faithful have taken place in Russia, in Belarus, and to Pochaev in the Ukraine. For the faithful, the Mother of God has been in charge ever since the faked abdication of the Tsar and the immediate appearance of Her Sovereign Icon in 1917. The faithful oppose the overt Nazi satanism of the elite in Kiev, of Zelensky with his personal wizard. We also oppose the will to dominate, the Imperialism of elites who claim to be above the Church, above Christ, imagining that they have some sort of exclusive and infallible Divine Papal right to control all others. ‘Three Romes have fallen, a Fourth there will not be’. Surely, that all the Imperial Romes have fallen is the best thing possible for the Church, which has in history been riven only ever by the Imperialism of personal and national pride?

Afterword

The Sixteen Local Orthodox Churches are a Family, but families are sometimes split by arguments. Brothers and sisters fall out for a time. They may not talk to each other for a while, but eventually they can get back together. Our unity is in the Holy Spirit, not in an individual, Patriarch or Pope, whatever his title, for we are not an earthly organisation, not a profit-making corporation, not worshippers of Apollo and Cephas, but of Christ, the Head of the Church and the King of kings. And our model is the Holy Trinity, unity in diversity, praying for the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all people. All we know, and from very recent examples, is that through the Church we can become saints. And that if we are not saints, then we have only ourselves to blame.

God Always Has the Last Word in History: The New World after the Ukraine

When a clown moves into the King’s Palace, he does not become the King, the Palace becomes a circus.

Turkish proverb

Foreword

There is a cliché which says that ‘History repeats itself’. Some strongly deny this and prefer to say that ‘History echoes’, or that people repeat History, because they fail to learn its lessons. However it is phrased, three things are clear: That human nature does not change (for example, money and power remain great motivations), that geography does not change (for example, mountains, plains and oceans do not move) and that the facts of history cannot be changed (for example, that country X invaded country Y three times). Thus, in 1904 Europe used Japan as a proxy to attack Russia – now the US wants to use Japan to attack China. and Europe uses the Ukraine to attack Russia. And here we are again back to Europe, with its two recent attempts at suicide, in 1914 and 1939, and now a third and final one in 2022. After a millennium of self-declared superiority, proud Europe is now faced with repenting for its millennial past and redesigning the present and the future.

The Ukraine Tragedy

The Ukraine is a failed State with crumbling infrastructure, a disastrous war which it has already lost, debts that it will never pay back and huge areas of the country sold off to foreign corporations. Moreover, from over 52 million in 1993 to 31 million in February 2022, its population has gone down even further to at most 23 million (some say even fewer) today, with millions of young men escaping to Russia and the West, fleeing from suicidal military service as soon as possible in 2022. Its birth rate is less than 0.8 per woman. Why bring children into a world where the land belongs to Blackrock, where rent-a-womb surrogacy, child-selling and organ-harvesting are common, thugs pressgang men on the street, a land of oligarchs’ corruption, widows and poverty? Its pensioners, civil servants and military survive on foreign handouts and weapons. According to the Ukrainian Constitution, its Autocrat-President, elected only because he promised peace, has been illegal for over two years.

Thanks to mainly foreign oligarchs, this Jewish comedian President became a multimillionaire media mogul and actor, learned how to speak Ukrainian and then English, and with US help became an expert on Public Relations. (Russians are useless at that). However, Public Relations does not alter reality, all it does is alter the perception of reality among the ignorant and the naïve. They think that Western propagandist narrative makers, Fox News, CNN, BBC, Sky News, the FT, Economist, Telegraph, Bild, Le Monde, Figaro and umpteen other State-censored tabloids, tell the truth. But there are the racist Russophobic hirelings who so hate truth and so love money that they can claim at the same time that, ‘Russia is weak and primitive and send its soldiers in human waves to die without guns and fight with shovels, but is so advanced that it will soon invade Lisbon’. The truth is that Kiev is losing the War that it has been fighting on behalf of rich Westerners, who envied Russia its vast lands and natural riches.

Those Westerners are going to go bankrupt together with their Kiev puppet. In reality, the Collective NATO West has never cared about the victory of the hopelessly provincial and bigoted, but very convenient Western Ukrainians – most in the West do not even know where the Ukraine is – they care only about the victory of Zionist Globalism, of which they are the American Empire’s agents, which pays them. Equally, Globalism is the movement in which the ultra-nationalistic Western Ukrainians have no interest, and yet for the sake of which those racist xenophobes have made millions of Ukrainian men into cannon fodder, as useful idiots. The Western Ukrainian elite loves pocketing billions of dollars, foreign passports and seaside villas on the Mediterranean and in Florida. ‘Daddy’ Trump has probably already understood that the bankrupt US has been backing a losing horse in Kiev. This is why he made his Western European vassals pay for vastly overpriced, obsolete US weapons.

After the Ukraine

As for the Western European elite, it is still unable to pursue reality, as it is blinded by its millennial ideology of ‘we are superior to all others’ and a Spanish racist proclaims that, ‘we are the garden and all the others are the jungle’. The reality is just the opposite: for instance, the Spanish created the jungle from the Amazon garden. Like all narratives, this is an ideology, and all ideologies are untrue and irrational, blinding those who cling on to them. However, Western Europe is not the only loser, for karma has also made the Hormuz of 2026 into America’s Suez of 1956. Seventy years have passed and now history has brought the betrayed British and the French their revenge. Not that they, or anyone else in Western Europe, wants to rejoice. The US Empire agents, who in France began with Sarkozy, have lost: Starmer was vomited out, Merz will be next, then Macron. The Zionist/Globalist clone factory is running out of identikit puppets like Burnham, who so strangely resembles Starmer.

We have come to a worldwide reshuffling of the cards. Non-Western countries have overtaken the ‘West is Best’ West. This is still stuck in its triumphalist myths of the Second World War, which in reality it did not win, but only created, for Fascism is an inherently Western European invention. It believes in its own virtual reality delusions. The Non-West is ahead of the West. Non-Western resources, rare earths, technology, AI, hypersonic missiles, fighter jets and diplomacy are all far in advance of those of the backward, increasingly Third World West. The institutions of the post-1945 world which the Western Powers, led by the USA, created for their own benefit, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the EU, NATO, the G7, are all disappearing into the dustbin of history. Crippled by debt, this narcissistic and so racist West has yet to face up to the New World, of which it will not be the centre and so is traumatised by it. Hence its violent tantrums, cancelling and demonising Russia, poking the bear.

The future means developing a new security architecture all over the world. The defeated US will have to retreat to North America, without, or perhaps with, Greenland. Like post-Suez Britain and France, all that the US will have left elsewhere is a few minor colonies and islands. Asia will be dominated in the North by Eurasian Russia, Eurosiberia, in the East, together with Oceania, by China, in the South by an internationally-minded India, in the West by Iran. Africa is already going its own way, throwing out the economic colonialism of the French, on whose behalf Ukrainian mercenaries are now fighting there, and Latin America is also declaring independence from the US Empire. Both have China helping them to independence. Europe will collapse, or rather, the old European elites will collapse, violently or peacefully replaced by the New Europe, divided into four regional communities of north-west, north-east, south-west and south-east, more or less allied with Russia and so with China.

Afterword: The Future

For the Western European elite this will be a catastrophe. After a thousand years that elite and the 20% of the population who self-servingly and subserviently cling on to it, will lose. Their millennial ideology will be shown to have been wrong all along and so will be rejected. Now the Western European elite is falling. Within twenty-five years Western Europe will be transformed, having faced the ideological and spiritual vacuum that the Soviet Union faced after it fell in 1991. This is because all of Western Europe has literally become a ‘European Union’, a second Soviet Union, run by a dictatorship, regardless of whether it managed to manipulate its peoples into accepting the Soviet ‘European Union’ as such or not. It is anti-patriotic and anti-democratic, running like its ancestor, pagan Imperial Rome, on bread and circuses. For the humble people, this will be an opportunity, for just as after pride comes the fall, so after the fall comes God. And God always has the last word in history.

 

The Russian Nationalist and Imperialist Church or a Trinity of East Slav Orthodox Churches?

By this all men shall know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

Jn. 13, 34

You ask why I commemorate Patriarch Aleksei of Moscow. You say, ‘He’s a Soviet!’ I tell you, ‘Inside Soviet Rus is Holy Rus! God has not abandoned our people’.

St John of Shanghai and Western Europe

Foreword: ‘Princes of the Church’

I was brought up in the old, persecuted Russian Orthodox Church of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, who himself was persecuted, suspended and put on trial by nationalist and imperialist ROCOR bishops, who also wanted to defrock him. For forty-seven years I remained faithful to that Church, until it became abundantly clear, in early 2022 before operations in the Ukraine, that the once Persecuted Church, which we had so loved, had become the Persecuting Church.

Worse still, the persecutors were shown to be none other than ROCOR’s newly-appointed, untrained, half-baked bishops. Those who called themselves ‘princes of the Church’ were those who loved money, stole, lied, slandered and cheated. The old bishops who belonged to the Tsar and whom we so loved and respected, must be spinning in their graves. How did this happen? Below I recount the story.

The Ukraine Tragedy and the Future of the Russian Church 

The armies of two brotherly peoples, both East Slav and both largely Orthodox Christian by history and culture, have been slaughtering one another for nearly five years in a war of attrition, just as in WWII. As a war of attrition, it will end just as suddenly. Two million have been killed or maimed, some 90% of them Ukrainians. Several thousand civilians have also been caught up in this since 2014 and died, mostly Russians (14,000 between 2014 and 2022 alone), let alone those killed in the NATO-armed Ukrainian invasion of Russia in 2024, run by NATO from Wiesbaden. And well over seven million Ukrainians have fled their country, heading, in almost equal numbers, east to Russia and west to Western Europe. They refused to be recruited by violence and needlessly die for the Globalists, who are being paid for Kiev’s NATO proxy Army to die.

Meanwhile, the majority of baptised Orthodox, whether practising or not, in both countries, as well as in Belarus and other countries in the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church, look on many bishops as bullying bandits, feudal mini-oligarchs (I quote Russian clergy and laity here), who, like the New ROCOR ones, are out to steal their churches. And that mentality feeds down to many priests, obliged to squeeze money out of their flocks for their bishops. Then the clericalist contagion spreads to them and they squeeze some out for themselves. The example comes from the top. Many freshly-baptised, post-Soviet clergy (and then by imitation ROCOR bishops) fell into the money-loving, ‘Wild East’ Capitalism of the 1990s and got stuck there. (There are also the sexual scandals with bishops, but that is another story).

How is all this possible? Only when the majority of ‘baptised Orthodox’ in both countries long ago renounced Christ and are only nominally Orthodox Christians, if Orthodox Christians at all. (As they say, ‘many are Orthodox, but few are Christians’). And only when a majority have patriots and not the politicians, who prefer hundreds of billions of dollars, euros and pounds and huge quantities of lethal Western arms to peace. In reality, most in both countries, baptised but never instructed (despite Christ’s commandment in Matt. 28.20), are pagans who have not accepted Christ, Who told us to love one another. And most want to dominate one another as imperialists, again contrary to Christ, Who told us to serve one another. How do this paganism and imperialism manifest themselves in the Church?

Paganism

The paganism of both peoples can be seen in their superstitiousness, the use of witchcraft and the evil eye, which have always been very widespread in all the Slav (as also in Catholic Southern European) lands. This comes from the underlying paganism, which has never been completely defeated by the Church, as is witnessed to by accounts both in the nineteenth century and in Soviet times, and which then revived enormously in the spiritual vacuum after the ideological collapse of the USSR, with a fascination for ‘extrasenses’, that is, for occultists, magicians, wizards and gurus and their weird, exploitative sects for the naïve and disoriented, who felt lost after the Soviet fall. This paganism is clear in the utter confusion between the spiritual and inward, that is primary, and the material and outward, that is secondary.

This can be seen, for example, in the aggressive preference for secondary Church rituals and customs of dress over kindness and tolerance for one another, in a belief in magic, ‘miracles’, ‘prophecies’ and ‘elders’, rather than in the effort to overcome our sinful, fallen nature. Again, the outward and bodily prevail over the inward and spiritual. And the spiritual is what is required in order to acquire Divine grace. For these pagans, everything is automatic, as in magic – which the devil can indeed provide, if people do not exercise their own will and sell themselves to his occultist magicians and witches. In the real world, nothing comes automatically, including the grace of eucharistic communion. And acquiring grace, as St Seraphim of Sarov said, is the aim of our lives, needs effort – the meaning of the word ‘ascetic’.

This superficiality was also manifest in the Russian Emigration, where One Church split into three warring, spiteful and hateful sectarian groups, not because of any difference in doctrines and beliefs, but because of politics. Love one another, said Christ, but the main practice of each group appeared to be, Hate one another. Similarly, as is well-known, many Russian churches, run by careerists who are devoid of pastoral activity and interest, appear to have a bigoted and ignorant woman or two at their entrance, who enjoy shouting at visitors and insulting them because they have committed some ritual error or are not dressed according to the taste of the insulters. Poorly-trained priests or laity who make others cry through their insults appear to be the anti-pastoral norm in certain churches, especially at confession and during sermons.

In turn, superstition, the almost fanatical attachment to mere outward rites, grew into a love for schism. It is deeply significant that the main, State-enforced schism in Russian Church history is called ‘Old Ritualism’. There was never any difference in doctrine between the Old Ritualists and the majority, who may be called ‘New Ritualists’, all was about ritual differences, all about the arrangement of the fingers in making the sign of the cross. Superstition bred obscurantism, the spiritual disease of pharisaically and joyfully condemning and denouncing others, and the obsession with finding and identifying ‘heresies’ and ‘schisms’, words hatefully and lovingly bandied about in Russian as the ultimate insult. In the land of record numbers of abortions and divorce, all agree on the Creed, but as for someone who differs in ritual…

Here is the origin of the cult of holy water among some Russian Orthodox. Clearly, this relates back to Slavic paganism. Now there is a great need for holy water, to be baptised in it, to drink it and to sprinkle it, but the concept that a child will be magically protected from colds by it, or that you can virtually trample on other people in church in order to get some at the Feast of Theophany or at water-blessing services of intercession after the Liturgy, having ignored confession and communion, is not Christian. And the concept that the use of holy water will magically heal or transform everything is pagan. I remember being asked if I could bless a Russian brothel. I refused. Again, others have been asked to bless the palaces and limousines of Slav oligarchs, who obtained their money over the dead bodies of others. I would refuse.

It has often been said that if the Russian Revolution took place, it was because of the virtual clerical prohibition before it to take communion more than once a year, a practice long conserved by ROCOR, as I only too well remember. In other words, church practice had become a ritual of private services, memorials or intercessions, rather than the common act of taking communion and so becoming a community. The secondary and outward had taken over from the primary and inward. Most Russian town churches today appear to be railway stations, people coming and going, staying for a few minutes to light a candle, or coming only after communion for some private service they have ordered. There are in fact very few parishes in Russia, in the correct sense of communities. Indeed, they are almost unknown.

Imperialism

Like Rome and then Constantinople (the ‘Second Rome’), Russia became an Empire and so was in its turn called the ‘Third Rome’. In other words, all three of these important historical Christian centres were tainted by one and the same Imperialism. The worst case was Rome, which actually developed a systematic, theologically justified and institutionalised structure of centralised power, called Papism, which actually changed the Creed, in order to vindicate its desire to control the whole world. According to this, a mere human-being, the Pope of Rome is the Vicar (Replacement) of Christ, the Head of the Church, the Holy Spirit proceeds from Him, and he is therefore infallible. All this is logical, if you accept a human-being as the replacement for Christ. But that leads to humanist idolatry, as the God-man is replaced by a mere man.

However, if you think that this article is some anti-Roman Catholic polemic, you are mistaken. The Second and Third Romes have exactly the same Imperialism as the First Rome, even if they have not (yet) justified it theologically. Thus, there are virulent Greek nationalists who will tell you in all seriousness (!) that nobody can be Orthodox, if they are not in communion with their favourite Turkish citizen, their Greek ethnarch (‘the first without equals’, as some heretically call him), the Patriarch of Constantinople (by the way, that has not existed for 573 years, it is called Istanbul). However, there are Russian imperialists/nationalists who will tell you that anyone who does not commemorate the Russian ethnarch, the Patriarch of Moscow (his present title), in services is a schismatic. (That favourite Russian word again!)

The Greek case is very strange, since many Patriarchs of Constantinople were heretics, especially in the first ten centuries, until the fall of the City in 1453, though more recently too. So we have to be in communion with a heretic in order to be an Orthodox Christian?! What about being in communion with Christ? As for the equally strange Russian case, it is a result of superstition and in turn of nationalist ignorance. The average baptised Russian Orthodox has no idea that there are 16 Orthodox Churches and that only one of them, the Russian, commemorates its Patriarch or main bishop in the litanies in services. What about commemorating Christ? Does this mean then that the Russian Orthodox Church is the only true Church, as the Old Ritualists claim, and all others are schismatics? (That favourite Russian word again!)

Moreover, the Russian Church had itself to grant independence (autocephaly) to three of the 15 other Local Churches, the Polish, the Czechoslovak and the American – and therefore they do not commemorate the Russian Patriarch. And parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation do not commemorate the Patriarch (as in France), or are not allowed to do so, by law, (as in the Ukraine and Latvia). Indeed, the Russian Patriarch is banned from even visiting such countries. The imperialist ignorance of many Russian Orthodox that there is a much older Orthodox world that exists outside Russia is astounding. Yes, diversity exists. The Church is like a bouquet of 16 flowers, all flowers, but all different. Accept the real Church, instead of living in a narrow nationalist ghetto, ignorant of history and reality.

Here we come to the essence of the ecclesial problem of both Greeks and Russians. Both have reduced the Church to a Greek or Russian Imperialist/Nationalist Church, they have put Caesar above Christ. This explains in the Russian case the aggressiveness, ignorance and even hatred towards Non-Russians, as displayed by Russians who were adults before the Revolution (I knew plenty of them), let alone by those after the process of Sovietisation. That Imperialisation of the local mentality has led to aggressive militarism, as can be seen in the recently-built Military Cathedral near Moscow, as can be seen in the behaviour of preachers such as Fr Andrey Tkachov, who appear to think, like other anti-pastors, Russian bishops and priests, that insulting Orthodox people is normal. How many women did you make cry today?

Some Russians were hated even before the Revolution, most notably in Poland, the Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltics, wherever people had been oppressed by centralised Russian nationalism and militarism. Nothing that happened after 1917 did anything to change that – indeed, Sovietisation made it all much worse. ‘We have the right to do anything we want, and local people must use our language in order to live’, they said, talking exactly like brash American Imperialists from ROCOR. Here is why the Estonian Kaja Kallas, the Pole Donald Tusk, the Moldovan Maya Sandu, the Ukrainian Yuliya Timoshenko and many a Georgian, came to hate Russians. And they found plenty of hypocritical and equally Imperialist Westerners, very jealous of Russia and greedy to steal its resources, to fund them for purely selfish reasons.

Towards the Restoration of Orthodoxy in the East Slav Lands

As the end of the Ukrainian tragedy and the Ukraine in its Soviet form draws near and it is carved up between the different countries, from which parts of it were taken, what is the future for the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’? For this is still the Soviet-invented name for the Russian Orthodox Church. Clearly, both names are incorrect in the sense that a Patriarchate in Moscow and a Russian Orthodox Church can only be relevant to the territory of the Russian Federation. Therefore, it has to stop imperialistically clinging on to territories outside the Russian Federation. Let the Baltics, Moldova, Belarus and the future Ukraine, whatever its actual national borders and future name (Kievska Rus?) will be, have their independence, just as the Orthodox in Georgia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and America had theirs generations before them.

Many Russians, and not only Russians, speak of Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine as a trinity. Indeed, they are, as all are East Slav nations, all speak similar, if not the same, languages, all are Orthodox by culture and history, all are closely related, with intermarriage normal. Now, the Holy Trinity is the model of Unity in Diversity, three Separate Persons in One ‘Undivided and Consubstantial Trinity’ in Church language. Is it not time for the three peoples and countries to have their own independent Churches, a trinity of Churches of Unity in Diversity, as is our model? Let each of them co-exist as friends, not as enemies, loving one another and intermarrying with one another, and not hating and warring against one another. Then we will see that they are really, and not merely nominally, Orthodox Christians.

For the moment, our hope is that all will start referring to the common spiritual heritage of the Russian Orthodox Church, that is, to the saints of all, perhaps especially to the New Martyrs and Confessors. The problem is that at present many only pay lip-service to the latter. The lives of the tens of thousands of those canonised so far are virtually unknown. Significantly, the baptised Orthodox masses still often prefer Stalin to his victims. The reason for this is that in their heads they belong to the Russian Nationalist and Imperialist Church, not to the Russian Orthodox Church. And this concerns not only many people, but also many clergy. The sad fact is that there has not yet been repentance for the past. And that is why they are still killing one another, idolising Lenin and Stalin, and massively aborting, divorcing and swearing.

Afterword: The King is Coming

Those who find this story sad or are scandalised by these truths should take consolation, recalling that the 16 Local Orthodox Churches number nearly 200 million. We, the masses of honest clergy and people, have suffered from or been misled by just a few thousand, who have like bandits seized and cling onto power and riches and war. Now when, as the proverb says, the fish rots from the head, then the head will be replaced by those rejected and placed at the bottom. Those despised, neglected, abandoned and hated at the bottom will replace the head. For when the King comes, and He is coming, the ‘princes of the Church’ will be swept away like so much chaff. This is not our doing, it is the doing of the Lord and it is marvellous in our eyes, for the stone that the builders rejected will become the head of the corner.

In the words of the Tsar’s Archbishop, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, on the 950th Anniversary of the Baptism of Rus:

The reality of Holy Rus is not a delusion or a phantom, but true. The prayer of the saints does not cease to rise up to heaven, those who shone forth in the Russian Lands pray for them now at the throne of God. But not only in heaven, but also here, on our sinful earth Holy Rus continues to exist. The power of those who fight against God has enslaved, but not destroyed Her. The Council of the ungodly who have dominion over the Russian people is alien to them, for it has nothing in common with the essence of Russia.

St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, on the 950th Anniversary of the Baptism of Rus