Monthly Archives: July 2013

Church dignitary likens NATO to “Fourth Reich”

http://www.b92.net/eng/news/region.php?yyyy=2013&mm=07&dd=01&nav_id=86805
Source: Tanjug

PODGORICA — SPC Metropolitan of Montenegro Amfilohije has referred to the western military alliance NATO as “the Fourth Reich.”

The media in Podgorica are quoting him as saying that NATO represented “a continuation of fascism and a desire to rule the whole world.”

This dignitary of the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) also appraised that it was good that the region was uniting “with Europe” – but noted that this should not happen “as part of NATO.”

“What is NATO’s reason of being? What is NATO, if not the Fourth Reich? What is it, if not a continuation of fascism and a desire to rule the whole world,” Amfilohije said, during a consecration ceremony for a renewed church near the town of Kolašin, northern Montenegro.

“We are going to Europe, but to contribute something, not only to beg around Europe. The first thing that Montenegro could do is to ask the NATO nations to disband the pact. That would be Montenegro’s contribution to Europe,” the media in Podgorica quoted the metropolitan as saying.

As for Kosovo and Metohija, he said the tyranny of Murad – the Ottoman Turkish leader killed during the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 – was “continuing” there:

“Now it is not Murad who is taking part in it, it is NATO, the EU, and the U.S., in other words, all those who continue with the tyrannies of the crusades, the Inquisition, Napoleon, and the Bolsheviks.”

“They defend human rights, and drop bombs on us, and call that a humanitarian bombing. Americans have built one of the largest military fortifications in the world in Kosovo, for humanitarian purposes. Our leaders need to think well. We should go to Europe, but to what kind? Europe such as it is – criminal, tyrannical, trampling on the poor – is that the Europe we need?,” Amfilohije asked.

We idolised money and then went bankrupt – the Church of Greece

Athens 17 July 2013

Metropolitan Amvrosios of the Church of Greece has stated that the fall of Greece began in 1986. His statement coincides with that of the Greek deputy M. Voridis who blamed Greece’s plight on the governments of Andreas Papandreou of 1981-89 and 1993-96. The full text of the statement is given on the Agionoros.ru site.

The Metropolitan reminded people of Papadreou’s words, ‘Give everything to Tzovolas’ (the Minister of Finance from 1986-89). ‘The Metropolitan went to comment: ‘Today we have reached the bottom of the abyss and the present slogan of our creditors is, ‘Greece’ we have taken everything from you!’.

‘Our only salvation is to return to repentance to God’s ways. We idolised money and then went bankrupt! Let us return to God’s ways and correct our lives. May the example of the prodigal son in the Gospel parable inspire us. The Lord who loves mankind awaits us with open arms! Amen!

‘Members Only’: The Church is not a Club

It is well-known that small parts of the Church can degenerate into sects and cults. This can happen when a church is small, set up in private chapels or domestic dwellings, and also when there is no local bishop (stavropegic churches) or where there is contact with only one bishop in a very small diocese. Here it is vital that clergy and people alike have a consciousness of the synodality and broad catholicity of the Church, of what goes on outside their little world, – a particular and shocking problem on a small island like Britain.

Sects can be defined as small groups which put forward a personal opinion or opinions as Church dogma. For example, you may the find the sect of those who only use olive oil in lamps, or only use beeswax in candles, or only have handpainted icons, or in which all men have long hair and beards and all women wear a uniform of long dresses, and which condemn all others who do otherwise. To the normal, outside the sect, all this seems strange, but those inside the cult are cut off from normality and imagine that the4y are normal. Such is fantasy.

Cults can be defined as small groups which put forward a personality in place of Christ, ‘Apollo’ or ‘Cephas’, see I Cor 1, 12. If the personality is strong, self-willed or particularly ambitious, the cult becomes even more well-defined and isolated. Soon intolerance of others is bred and the cult becomes sectarian, casting out and condemning others, often with curious customs or its own uniform. Cults were a particular danger during the Cold War period in the lives of Moscow Patriarchal parishes outside Russia due to their isolation, but not only here.

All sects and cults, ‘private churches’, eventually die out, though it can take time. They generally become increasingly decadent as time goes by – thus sects often become cultish and cults sectarian, especially if the cult founder has died. There is a particular danger in an island like Britain and among ex-Anglicans. Anglicanism can often resemble an insular, middle-class club, with no concept of concelebration and a profound, if often unconscious, racism. However, this bourgeois mentality can also be found among the Continental-based Rue Daru splinter group.

We have already said that it is vital that there be a consciousness of the catholicity of the Church. This has been a problem in an immigrant splinter group, the OCA, in North America. Isolated and with its canonicity not accepted by most Orthodox in North America, some parts of it have wandered far from the Orthodox Tradition. Consciouness of the catholicity of the Church is manifested not by passively being in communion (everyone in the canonical Orthodox Church is in communion with one another), but by actively concelebrating.

Thoughts on ‘Western Rite’

(First published on this site under ‘Orthodox Life’ in 2009)

Introduction

All religions have rites. Rites are necessary because we are incarnate. The bodiless angels do not need rites, but we do. In other words, the outward structures of rites are necessary in order to hold the spiritual content of religion, just as our bodies are necessary in order to hold our immortal souls. It can be said that a rite is a glass; the content is the wine. It is clear which is more important.

But which rite or rites should we use to contain this wine? Clearly, they must be worthy. In the Orthodox Church we have four very ancient eucharistic rites: those of St John Chrysostom, St Basil the Great, St James of Jerusalem (the most ancient of all) and the Presanctified Rite attributed to St Gregory the Dialogist. They all go back to the first century, but were not really settled until the fourth century and a few changes were made to them even after this. But beyond these, we have the rites associated with the many other services of the liturgical cycles of the year. Eucharistic rites are only part of the rites that we use. However important, the Eucharist is only part of Church life.

The question of a Western rite in Orthodoxy goes back generations and has a whole history in Western Europe, in North America and elsewhere. This question of a ‘Western rite’ seems to come up at regular intervals, every ten years or so, and well-rehearsed arguments are presented in favour of it. For the sake of those new to the Church, it would also be helpful to speak of the arguments against. These are not often expressed, all the more so when the arguments come from experience and observation of reality. What are these arguments?

1. Why?

The first argument against a Western rite is ‘why?’ Why have a ‘Western’ rite? Rites do not save souls, it is the spiritual contents of rites that save souls. Thus, Orthodox rites do not save in themselves: the case of Uniatism, which imitates Orthodox rites, proves this. Moreover, if great attention is paid to rites, this leads to ritualism, a particular danger in High Church Anglicanism or Anglo-Catholicism. After Anglicanism had lost continuity with Roman Catholic liturgical rites, this movement tried to recreate them in the nineteenth century.

Inevitably, this resulted in ritualism, the study of dead rites and attempts to revive them through a sort of artificial respiration. Most people find any ritualism irrelevant to their daily lives and boring. They say: Why have another rite in Orthodoxy when we have perfectly good ones already? Why try to breathe life into what has been long dead? Why such interest in the glass, when it is only the wine that is interesting?

2. Chauvinism?

In answer to this last question, we come to a second argument. This is the argument that ‘Western ritualists’ are placing their local culture higher than Church culture. Thus, the concept of a Western rite simply prolongs the East-West myth, beloved of the condemned Anglican branch theory, which heretically declares that the Orthodox Church is merely an ‘Eastern’ Church (and its rites ‘Eastern’ rites and not universal rites) and that the ‘other half of the Church’ is ‘Western’. The fact is that all rites come to us from the ‘East’, that is, from the Temple in Jerusalem through the New Testament and the Lives of the Saints. In other words, our rites come from the Holy Spirit, in Whom there is neither East nor West.

The concept of a Western rite suggests heretically that the Universal Orthodox Church is incomplete. The Western rite places a local culture, specifically a Western one, one which a thousand years ago fell away from the Church, above the catholicity and universality of the Church. Do we then reject Christ because He too came from the Temple in Jerusalem, because He was ‘Eastern’, an Asian, and do we try to replace Him with a ‘Western’ or ‘European’ Christ? Is this talk of ‘Western rite’ simply not all Western chauvinism, racism, the usual Western feeling of ‘superiority’ to the rest of humanity? Siberian peoples, Chinese, Aleuts, Japanese, Kikuyus, Indonesians and Thais all use the rites of the Orthodox Church. What is so special about ‘Westerners’ that they need some special rite?

The Fullness of Living Rites

Thirdly, any rite is much more than what is to be found on paper. Thus, a text of the liturgy of St John Chrysostom gives no idea of the wealth and beauty of this rite in practice. It gives even less idea of the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly liturgical cycles. The paper text of a eucharistic liturgy gives no idea of the pattern of Orthodox Vespers or Matins, the Hours, of the Sanctoral (services to saints), of Holy Week, Easter, Christmas etc.

Furthermore, texts give no idea of the outward beauty of the church building, of singing, of vestments, of ritual actions and, above all, of the atmosphere of prayerfulness a worthy rite creates. Orthodox Christianity is a whole way of life, not a rite taken from a manuscript celebrated inside a church building for two hours a week. Orthodox Christianity has to be transmitted from generation to generation down the centuries by families and monasteries, it cannot be invented from manuscript studies of a dead ‘rite’.

Which Western Rite?

Fourthly, when the term ‘Western rite’ is used, of which Western rite is revival meant? The Roman rite? The Gallican? The Ambrosian? The Mozarabic? Or some later version based on the Anglican Book of Common Prayer? The problem is that the ancient rites only survive in an incomplete manuscript form. Can they ever be restored?

Surely, any restoration would only be partial, leaving a danger for fantasy and lack of authenticity, as was the case with the much disputed revived ‘Gallican’ rite used by the group known as ECOF (‘l’Eglise Orthodox Catholique de France’) in France. How can a rite be restored anyway? Surely a rite must be living, practised in continuity? Would any restored rite not be artificial, self-conscious, unnatural?

Who for? Fifthly, even if it were possible to restore a rite, whom would it be for? In the year 2009, most Western Europeans never set foot in any Church and 99% of practising Non-Orthodox have no historic rite at all. The Counter-Reformation Roman Catholic rite was all but abolished at the Second Vatican Council in favour of a Protestantised rite. Since the 1960s Anglicans have only very rarely used their Prayerbooks, which retain vestiges of the pre-Reformation Roman Catholic rite and have swapped it for happy-clappy, ‘make it up as you go’ rites. Even Gregorian chant is largely an invention of nineteenth century Benedictinism. (And do any rooted Orthodox actually feel at home with that?)

For me, as for 99.99% of Western Europeans, though for different reasons, the term ‘Western rite’ is meaningless. I have never known any other rites than those used by the Orthodox Church, since I have never been Anglican or Roman Catholic. If I were asked to celebrate a service according to the ‘Western rite’, first of all, even before considering if I wanted to and asking my bishop for a blessing to do so, I would have to find out what it is. I would have no idea as to its practical implementation. For Western Orthodox like us, we already have ‘Western’ rites. These are the universal rites of the Orthodox Church, used in Western European languages and also in services to the local Western saints. We need nothing more, for us the ‘Western rite’ is already here and in regular use.

Theory and Practice

However fine the concept of a restored ‘Western rite’ is in theory, it seems not to work in practice. Certainly, the example of ECOF, the so-called ‘French Orthodox Catholic Church’, founded under Mgr Jean (Kovalevsky) and once several hundred strong, sends shudders down the backs of canonical Orthodox who had experience of it. Surely the fact is that ‘Western rite’ simply does not work in practice?

Surely a Western rite would only ever attract a small minority of old-fashioned Roman Catholics or Anglicans? They would be unable to integrate organic Orthodoxy and be unable to transmit anything to the next generation or anyone else outside their closed ‘ritual’ group. These would inevitably be cut off from mainstream Orthodox and find their services ignored by them, as if they belonged to an uncanonical sect.

St Tikhon and St John

Nevertheless, there is a strong argument for ‘Western rite’. This is that a form of the Anglican rite was approved by the Holy Synod of the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church and sponsored by none other than Bishop (later Patriarch and St) Tikhon at the beginning of the last century. And fifty years ago, Bishop (later Archbishop and St) John of Shanghai helped former Roman Catholics into Orthodoxy through Fr Evgraf Kovalevsky, whom he then consecrated bishop, launching a missionary ‘French Orthodox Church’, allowing it a ‘Western rite’ and the new calendar for the fixed feasts.

However, the fact that this small group later left the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in order to go onto the Roman Catholic Easter, sailed through many jurisdictions, causing many scandals, degenerated into ECOF and all but died out at the end of the twentieth century, makes for sobering thoughts. Above all, it has to be admitted that a century ago, Anglicans still had a rite and a sense of Tradition. And fifty years ago, in 1950s France, so did Roman Catholics. Therefore, pastorally, we could see what was done then as justified, even heroic. But surely times have changed? Today Roman Catholics and Anglicans do not have serious, historic rites. Time and again I meet Roman Catholics who come to the Orthodox liturgy and say: ‘At least you have ‘a real mass’, what we have is insulting’. Is there then any actual need for or interest in reviving a ‘Western rite’, even if it were possible?

Conclusion

Whatever reservations most Orthodox have, it must be said that bishops can give their blessing for the formation and practice of a Western rite in the Orthodox Churches. This is if they consider it pastorally necessary, if, in other words, there are people who can be brought into genuine Orthodoxy through it.

It may be that with the dissolution of Anglicanism in particular, there is now a place for a ‘Western rite’ in Orthodoxy. Despite all manner of disadvantages and difficulties, a ‘Western rite’ could perhaps fill a temporary pastoral need for some specific small groups.

However, it is doubtful if this need extends beyond a handful of individuals. In any case, whether we are for or against, interested or bored by the question of, ‘Western rite’, it is not up to us. It is ultimately up to those who have pastoral oversight, our bishops, to encourage or discourage a ‘Western rite’, according to whether they find anyone who needs it or not.

Defending the True West

The free voice of the Orthodox Church can be heard in a number of places today.

The Present Situation of the Orthodox Church in ‘Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition’, July 1989

Introduction

Unlike some, we have over the last forty years of writing always defended the True or Old West and its culture, while always telling the truth about the False or New West. According to this balanced Orthodox view of the world, the True West is that which was and is in communion with, and was and is an integral part of, the Church of God, the whole Orthodox world. The True West is 10,000 glorified saints, listed on this website. They include apostles and martyrs, of Rome, of Lyon, of Agaunum, of Merida and many other holy places, and Church Fathers, St Irenaeus of Lyon, St Hilary of Poitiers, St Ambrose of Milan, St Vincent of Lerins, St John Cassian, and a multitude of confessors and monastics who brought the Light of Christ to the spiritual deserts of the pagan Latin and Germanic world and marked them for all ages with their names.

The True West and the False West

The True West lasted for more or less the first millennium, before the powerbrokers who ruled over this Western corner of Europe, then containing a small minority of the total Christian population, cut it off from communion with the Church. This was in order to launch themselves into their great Western nationalist project consisting of false ideologies, Catholic-ism, Protestant-ism and now Secular-ism. We have had no illusions about the inherently secular nature of this False and New West, that of the secular second millennium and secularist third millennium.

Of course, there are those who do not belong to Christian culture, who attack the West out of insecurity, undiscerningly demonising it. They put their own culture and ethnicity above the Western, failing to discern between the True West and the False West. Islam is in particular guilty of this, but so sometimes is Hinduism, the former especially expressing even violence and fanaticism. Occasionally even some Greek Orthodox take part in this, not only old calendarists and sectarians, but also, for example the philosopher Yannaras. Possibly out of cultural shock and an inferiority complex, these are inclined to condemn even the True West.

All these groups fail to understand the many Western people who themselves have understood quite clearly the failures of the secular West of the second millennium, all the more so in its contemporary secularist form of the third millennium. Having seen the foreign groups which attack the West in a demonising and undiscerning way, it is therefore of interest to see who ignores the True West, or even attacks it, and so defends the False West. There are three groups involved in this operation, but by no means all of their members are actually Western people, for self-interest is involved here. Which then are these three groups?

1. The Self-Established

The first group which defends the False West is composed of those who have voluntarily allied themselves and so compromised themselves with Western Establishments. We can take as an example Anglicans (or ex-Anglicans who still think as Anglicans). They belong to a State-Church, a ruling, erastian ideology. When the State follows a secularist ideology, so do they. As one cynic put it a decade or so ago, ‘In 1900 the Church of England was for fox-hunting and against buggery, in 2000 it is against fox-hunting and for buggery’. Or to take other examples, today the Church of England is for female clergy and homosexual unions and 40% of its clergy, so it is said, do not even believe in the Holy Trinity.

Why is all this? Because the State decrees so and therefore the Church of England swims with the State’s tide. This is why it is ecumenical, for ecumenist syncretism is part of the politically correct ideology of the present State. It is true that there are small and heroic groups of actual believers in the Church of England. However, generally these end up leaving it for variants of the older Western ideology, becoming Methodists at one extreme or Roman Catholics at the other. On the other hand, the self-established are not interested in the authentic Church, refusing even to adopt Her calendar.

2. The Self-Interested

The second group, linked to the first, of those who defend the False West is composed of those who are financed or propped up by Western Establishments on condition that they ape the Western way. Thus, we can think of individuals over the last nearly hundred years in the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Antioch, the ‘Greek Church’, so beloved of conformist Anglicans. A sure sign of their Western Establishment backing is the fact that they are willing to adopt the Western calendar and support ecumenism. Large sums of money are associated with these changes which they attempt to foist on their peoples.

The politically unprincipled will always change for the sake of lucre and power. In only the last few years, months and days we have seen individuals fall in the Churches of the Serbs, of the Czechs and Slovaks and of the Bulgarians, for exactly the same reasons. Political and financial backing attract the spineless ‘diplomat’. ‘Follow the money’. A sure way of identifying who these ‘diplomats’ are, is to question their attitude towards the Council of Florence and St Mark of Ephesus. You will not find an icon of this great and courageous saint among them.

3. The Self-Deluded

The third group, often linked to the first or the second, are the naïve. Sometimes they are outside the Church, sometimes just inside, but on the convert fringes. They are often newly converted, or in any case they have never been grounded in the realities of the Faith. Their lack of awareness and their lack of knowledge of the facts of history mean that they are still connected with the heterodox world. Unable or unwilling to integrate, they suffer from self-delusion. This is not necessarily because they have never lived outside the Western world, it is rather because they have never lived outside the Western Establishment world.

They do not yet understand the difference between Orthodoxy and heterodoxy. They demand censorship of the Orthodox Truth (a good case is the late French Uniat philosopher Olivier Clement who even demanded in ‘Le Monde’ that Patriarch Pavle of Serbia not canonise the new Serbian Saints so as not to offend the Vatican, whose agents had massacred them!). The self-deluded have not yet integrated Orthodox culture, the Orthodox civilizational ethos, they have not had time. They too are very prone to ecumenism. They do not want zeal, only diplomacy. They should ask for the prayers of St Gregory Palamas to enlighten them.

Conclusion

Our task is to return the history of the West to its proper course and order. This means observing the proper balance between the True West and the False West and avoiding extremes. Unfortunately, we have seen time and again how those who do not defend the True West defend the False West. If we do not have a realistic view of the Heterodox West, then we will have a false view of the Orthodox West and vice versa. And a false view of present reality is also a false view of the future that awaits us, with its sorrows and its joys. Let us recall that the Enemy is parasitic; it only uses the West as a base and hates the West as it hates all of humanity, all of God’s Creation. The Lover of Mankind, however, loves all and his grace shines on the righteous and the unrighteous alike; the only question is whether all see it.

The White Ideals of ROCOR

In 1917 Russia was taken over by those who blasphemously wanted Christianity without Christ, Eden without God. Thus, they deformed the Third Rome into the Third International, creating Communism under the American Trotsky and others who in Switzerland and Great Britain had also been free to develop their poison. They thought that this was the correct path for Russia. In fact, they had been deceived into bringing Russia under the heel of international occult forces which wanted to destroy it as a spiritually independent entity and as the only spiritual force in the world which was restraining the coming of their Antichrist.

Thus, after 1917 the consciously Orthodox White emigration left their occupied homeland with three ideals. These were: The Faith, the Tsar and Rus. The Non-Christian, and therefore in fact, the Non-White, Russian emigration distorted these ideals into folklore, capitalist ideology and nationalism. However, the conscious part of the Orthodox White emigration knew better. It knew that Faith means uncompromised Orthodoxy – the Orthodoxy of the Tradition of the Holy Spirit, of the Body of Christ, of the Church of God. It knew that the Tsar means the Sovereign Power of the Lord’s Anointed above all the human invention of the sordid worldly politics of left and right. And it knew that Rus means all nations, the whole redeemable part of the world, that which is prepared to be baptised into Christ in the Orthodox context.

These three ideals have guided the White emigration, to which all ROCOR spiritually belongs, through five generations. Although in that time some have fallen away, all those who spiritually belong to the Church have remained faithful to ROCOR. Thus, the Orthodox Faith has remained integral, without compromise and with a worldwide mission; the Tsar remains an ideal for restoration in the future, perhaps not so far away now; as the ability to speak and write Russian language has been lost, Rus has come to mean what is best in the cultures of the whole world, transfigured by the vital ingredient of the Orthodox Christ.

Why did Western Europe Invade Russia Four Times in 130 Years and why does it Carry Out an Information Cold War against it Today?

Introduction: The Aggressive West

‘Peace-loving’ Western Europe invaded Russia four times in five generations, in 1812, 1854, 1914 and 1941. The three main Western nations, France, Great Britain and Germany were all involved in these invasions, together with many smaller Western nations. Thus, twelve nations were involved in the 1812 invasion of Napoleon I, who ‘filled Europe with graves’; in 1854, France led by Napoleon II, Great Britain and Sardinia invaded together with the Ottomans; in 1914 the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as the new Prussianised Germany invaded; and in 1941 representatives of a large number of European countries led by the Nazi Fascists. What made the West so aggressive? We cannot help but trace back its aggressiveness to its origins as a unique and distinctive phenomenon, born together with the filioque ideology under the upstart ‘Emperor’ Charlemagne in 800.

The leaders of this new Western Europe and its newly devised Old Testament version of Christianity, called ‘the filioque’, could not bear to see the original form of Christianity, Orthodoxy, as a rival to it; therefore, as Satan had done to the Father, it had to be rebelled against, slandered, if possible compromised, and if this were not possible, destroyed altogether as in the ‘Crusade’ of 1204. Today, modern, post-Christian Western secularism, the result of the ever-degenerating filioque ideology, hates Orthodoxy for being authentic Christianity in exactly the same way as its Catholic/Protestant predecessors hated it. Nothing has changed. And yet, Russia saved its aggressors twice. Thus, in 1914, Russian military sacrifices saved Paris, operating the ‘Miracle on the Marne’ by diverting German divisions to the Eastern Front, and in 1941 Moscow saved London. How?

How Moscow Saved London and was Rewarded with the Cold War

1941 was the critical turning point year of World War II for Great Britain. Isolated and bankrupt, it was cornered, dependent on food and supplies coming across the U-boat-infested Atlantic Ocean from North America. Starved into submission, it would eventually have been forced to negotiate with Nazi Germany. At this point, alone and facing Hitler’s might, it was saved. How? After all, by 2 December 1941 German forces had advanced to within a few miles of Moscow and could see the towers of the Kremlin.

However, the Wehrmacht was not equipped for winter warfare. Frostbite and disease caused more casualties than combat, and dead and wounded had already reached 155,000 in three weeks. The bitter cold also caused severe problems for guns and equipment and weather conditions grounded the Luftwaffe. Newly built-up Soviet units near Moscow now numbered over 500,000, and on 5 December, they launched a massive counterattack which pushed the Germans back over 200 miles. It was the beginning of the end.

The invasion of the USSR cost the German Army over 210,000 killed and missing and 620,000 wounded in 1941 alone. A third of these became casualties after 1 October and there were an unknown number of Axis casualties such as Hungarians, Romanians and Waffen SS troops, as well as co-belligerent Finns. This failure resulted in the salvation of Great Britain and ultimately in the end of the Third Reich. However, after this fourth failed invasion of Russia came the Cold War, which still continues today in its anti-Putin propaganda – nearly seventy years of aggression without ceasing.

This Cold War gives a completely distorted view of Russian history, whether it concerns the blood-soaked invasion of the Teutonic Knights (which the West sees as good), Ivan IV (whom jt sees as bad, miscalling him ‘the Terrible’, though he was a hero compared to the far bloodthirstier English Henry VIII who ruled at the same time), the Polish invasion of 1612, Peter I (whom it miscalls ‘the Great’), Paul I (who is seen as bad and was in fact murdered in a plot organised by the British ambassador), Catherine II (this bloodthirsty foreigner it calls ‘the Great’) and more recent figures such as Rasputin ( a devout, married peasant, murdered by British spies with the help of an Oxford-trained Russian transvestite).

Above all, this distorted view includes the much denigrated figure of the heroic Tsar Nicholas II and the twisted story of his death. During the reign of Nicholas II the Chinese Eastern Railway and the South Manchuria Railway were built, plans were laid for the electrification of the whole country, an oil pipeline from Baku to the Persian Gulf was planned, and the White Sea-Baltic Canal was designed. Major industrial zones in the Urals and the Far East were planned and the Baikal-Amur Railroad trunk-line was proposed. The Bolsheviks implemented these great plans afterwards and passed them off as their own ideas. Western sources blindly repeat these same Bolshevik myths. Why?

The Murder of the Imperial Family

The report of the Russian investigator N. A. Sokolov, the book by the English journalist Robert Wilton ‘The Last Days of the Romanovs’, the book by the heroic Russian General M. K. Diterichs ‘The Murder of the Imperial Family and Members of the House of Romanov in the Urals’, and the books by the contemporary modern Russian historian Piotr Multatuli all tell us that the deaths of Tsar Nicholas II and his family and faithful servants were ritual murders. Indeed, in 1905 year a group in Brooklyn in New York had already condemned Nicholas II to death.

Shortly before 17 July a mysterious man with a jet-black beard arrived in Ekaterinburg. This man was seen by many. And shortly before 17 July the Commandant of the House of Special Purpose (the Ipatiev House) Yankel Yurovsky completely changed the guard of this house. In the early hours of 17 July 1918 the Imperial Family was sent to the basement of the Ipatiev house. A squad of murderers arrived – their leader was the mysterious man. The murderers stabbed the family with bayonets and a special ritual knife. The aim of the murderers was to let the blood of their victims.

On the wall of the basement a kabbalistic inscription was left: ‘Here by the order of dark forces a Tsar was brought as a sacrificial offering. All nations are informed of this’. Also on the wall a fragment of a poem by Heinrich Heine was left: ‘Belsatzar ward in selbiger Nacht / Von seinen Knechten umgebracht. (Belsatzar (Belshazzar) was on this selfsame night killed by his servants). The original reads ‘Belsazar’ but here it is ‘Belsatzar’, which refers to ‘bely tsar’ (‘the white tsar’) –an epithet for the Tsar among the Russian people. After the murder, the bodies of the family were loaded onto vehicles and taken to a mineshaft called Ganina Yama.

Here the heads of Tsar Nicholas, the Tsarina Alexandra and the Tsarevich Alexey were ritually cut off and put into jars preserved in alcohol. The three jars were put into suitcases and taken to Moscow where they were shown to the Soviet authorities. What happened to them afterwards is unknown. After cutting off the heads, the bodies of the family were dismembered and then covered in sulphuric acid and burned. As there was not enough sulphuric acid, cars were sent to Ekaterinburg for new batches. Red Army soldiers stood on guard by the fire and would not let anybody near.

The fire burned for two days, after which the remains of the family were reduced to powder. This is why there are no remains of the Imperial Family. In the 1930s there was more mass repression in the Soviet Union, including in the Ipatiev House and on the site of the fire near Ganina Yama, where people were shot. Remains found there are the remains of Soviet citizens shot then. Thus, the remains which were buried in Petropavlovsk Fortress in Saint Petersburg in 2000 are not the remains of the Imperial Family. Soviet archives which are even now secret must be opened in order to find out about what happened to the heads.

Apart from this mystery of the three heads, vanished materials of the Russian investigator N.A. Sokolov must be found and still secret French, British and American archives must also be opened – they contain materials on the murder of the Imperial Family. We should also recall that, like others, Piotr Multatuli, the renowned Russian historian and author of five books on Tsar Nicholas II, writes that that no abdication ever took place. In reality, the Tsar did not abdicate. As the esteemed Russian elder, Fr Nikolay Guryanov, said: ‘There is not a sin of abdication on him’.

In reality, in February 1917 year a group of conspirator-generals, organised by the British ambassador Buchanan, went to the Tsar who was being held prisoner in his train, and demanded that he abdicate. But as an Orthodox Christian and the Lord’s Anointed, the Tsar refused. Then an ‘abdication’ was typed out and a signature was falsified. On 15 March 1917 it was announced that the Tsar had abdicated in favour of his brother the Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich. The latter believed it and on the next day, 16 March 1917, he abdicated in favour of the Constituent Assembly.

Conclusion: Know Your History

Nicholas II was a moral politician and he weighed his policies using the morality of the Gospel as his benchmark. He wanted his subordinates to exercise the same judgement in their care for the destiny of their Motherland. He cherished all the people of the enormous Russian Empire – the best proof of this is that the Russian population grew by 50 million people under his rule. The Tsar was faithful to Orthodoxy, while Orthodox self-consciousness was absent in the uprooted Russian governing élite, which toyed with various substitutes, such as mixtures of Western freemasonry, socialism, mysticism, occultism, esotericism and Eastern religions such as Hinduism. Therefore the discrediting of the Tsar’s name discredits the name of Russia and legalises and justifies the amoral, Western-created, Bolshevik lawlessness that engulfed Russia in the 20th century.

Thus, the discrediting of Nicholas II is part of the self-justifying propaganda war waged against Russia by the ruling factions of the West against the people, both of the West and of Russia. Tsar Nicholas II must be discredited because it was the Western elites themselves that deposed him and ordered his murder. That is why the West, with the assistance of some Soviet story-tellers, circulates tons of slanderous pulp-fiction (e.g. the works of E. Radzinsky), pretending to be new ‘biographies’. Public opinion is still full of deceitful myths about Tsar Nicholas and certain elements inside Russia consciously support these myths. They do not want their people to know the truth about their history. As we know, it is impossible to manipulate a nation that knows its history – and these words need to be taken even more to heart in the West than in Russia.

The World Become an Electronic Concentration Camp

http://www.chronicle.su/news/snowden-unveils-nsa-spy-satellite-sauron-program-targeting-us-citizens/

MOSCOW, Russia – Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who recently unveiled the NSA’s ubiquitous PRISM wiretapping program, unveiled yet another insidious, citizen-targeting surveillance system Friday afternoon, in a chat with Internet Chronicle reporters.

SAURON, or the Semi-Autonomous Ultra-high-Resolution Orbital Network, is comprised of a series of hundreds of low-orbiting cameras that can make out objects on the ground as small as 1 centimeter in size.

There are so many satellites in this network that they are able to effectively monitor the entire planet’s populated surface without interruption. According to slides Snowden shared, taken from the NSA presentation on SAURON, each spy satellite feeds directly into a data bank so large that it is able to retain the captured imagery indefinitely.

SAURON is also a reference to a villain in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, an evil god of discord who appears in the material world as an ever-searching eye.

Snowden, looking as if he hadn’t slept in weeks, spoke with Internet Chronicle reporters in the transit corridor of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. In a near whisper Snowden said, “It is shocking that the U.S. government would appropriate such evil imagery for a so-called security system like this. There is little doubt that this program – I won’t utter the name here – is not concerned with the security of citizens, but rather, it is a bald grab at power for power’s sake.”

Sects Criticise Us

Sects criticise us: ‘You have joined ‘World Orthodoxy’ and so compromised yourself with worldly people’.

Our task is to gather in before the end with compassion. And we say ‘before the end’, for we have no illusions about the direction of the times in which we live. All the more reason therefore for not hiding away in ghettos and making compassionless demands like the scribes, Pharisees and lawyers. ‘But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in…Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves’ (Matt 23, 13 and 15). ‘Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! For ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers’ (Lk 11,46).

Sects criticise us: ‘You have cut corners and broken the canons’.

We call on the world to adapt to the Church; the Church does not adapt to the world. In what way have we cut corners and broken the canons in our mission to the world before the end? We have not undertaken to ordain a host of divorced men or men with divorced wives as priests (or sometimes twice divorced men, a practice favoured only by ‘Parisians’ such as the late Metr Antony Bloom or the retired Archbp Gabriel de Vylder). We have not compromised ourselves by praying with heretics. The canons are certainly to be followed, but not slavishly, in idolatry. Sometimes we have to consider the greater good. ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgement, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone’ (Matt 23, 23).

Sects criticise us: ‘You have contaminated yourself by not ‘walling yourselves off’ from the compromised’.

We already know that we are imperfect. But we do not seek perfection in others. That is an error. We seek perfection only in ourselves, not in others. ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect’ (Matt. 5, 48). Those who make compromises and take part in ecumenism, compromising the integrity of the Faith in religious syncretism do not contaminate us. They will have to answer at the Judgement for their compromises. We will have to answer only for our own conduct, not for the conduct of others.