Monthly Archives: November 2013

Sow the Wind: Reap the Whirlwind

The present internal British political controversy about high immigration from Central and Eastern Europe into the UK raises three points.

First of all, if the UK wishes to regain its sovereignty and control its borders, it must leave the EU. It is no good being a member of a club, if you do not agree to its conditions of membership. Those conditions state that all EU countries are borderless and must accept any immigrants from any other EU country, including from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, who wish to work here. It is as simple as that. Rather than playing the xenophobia card, we would recommend that British politicians of all parties stop being hypocritical; they have constantly forbidden the British people from voting on whether they wish to be members of the EU. Since the politicians, supported by the business and financial lobby, have imposed EU tyranny on the UK for forty years despite popular outrage at the loss of freedom, they will now have to accept the consequences of their unpopularity.

Secondly, the present waves of immigration from Central and Eastern Europe into Western Europe were all predicted over 20 years ago after the fall of Communism there and in the Soviet Union. If Western Europe did not want such immigration, then it should never have fought for so many decades for the fall of that system. Although it is quite true that religious freedom was severely limited under Communism, educational and often health systems there were far better than in Western Europe today. Moreover, there was full employment, safety and cleanliness on the streets and lack of zombifying advertising. And families could stay together, rather than being scattered throughout Western Europe by their corrupt, local, EU-bribed political masters, as today. They did not want to have to emigrate, to be scattered abroad. Little wonder that throughout Central and Eastern Europe many want to return to ‘the good old days’.

Thirdly, if British politicians do not want immigration, why are they supporting the present aggressive, US-orchestrated EU crusade, working mainly by bribery, to force Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Moldova, the Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and other still free Non-EU countries to give up their freedom and accept EU slavery? Why do those politicians object when the overwhelming mass of Ukrainians reject EU tyranny and NATO threats to invade, and instead choose to keep their freedom and sovereignty – the very freedom and sovereignty that British people themselves would so much like to regain. Why do British politicians support the German move to use the Ukraine as a source of cheap labour and food, destroying family life there too, just as Germany did during the Second World War? (We pay no attention to the CIA-financed rent-a-mob pro-EU demonstrations in Kiev, so loved by the Western media).

Is it possible that all British politicians are corrupt and hypocritical short-termists, or are there among them real thinkers and people of principle? The question is open.

Words not Actions

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/smi/66203.htm

Today’s announcement of the opinion of Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokalamsk that the Orthodox Church and Roman Catholicism are not rivals but allies is to be welcomed. Certainly, embattled Roman Catholicism in the Western world desperately needs the support of the Russian Orthodox Church in the fight against Westernisation and so DeChristianisation. It does indeed therefore need to become an ally of the Orthodox Church instead of trying to destroy us, as it does throughout Eastern Europe and in the Middle East.

It is clear that as long as there exists a single Uniat (Greek Catholic), Roman Catholicism views the Orthodox Church as a rival, not as an ally, even to the point of supporting virulent atheism against the Russian Orthodox Church, as in the 1920s Soviet Union. We look forward to the day when the present Pope Francis announces the ending of the disastrous Uniat experiment and proselytisation which has poisoned relations between Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox Church for centuries. If you wish to become Roman Catholic, so joining a secularised and compromised form of the Orthodox Church, that is up to you. But Uniatism, the pretence of Orthodoxy, is simply dishonest and against all Christian sense of morality. After this has happened, we will welcome him as a penitent pilgrim to Holy Russia.

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/news/66232.htm

Today’s announcement from Constantinople that Patriarch Bartholomew has nothing to do with freemasons is also to be welcomed. This is the first denial of the rumours that have been so widespread about him for decades.

Unfortunately, it does not explain why there are so many clergy and laity freemasons in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, who unrepentently persecute us non-masons, and why yesterday Patriarch Bartholomew asked that Orthodox who wish to see the Church freed from the heresy of ecumenism change their minds.

Sir John Tavener

The death of Sir John Kenneth Tavener (28 January 1944 – 12 November 2013) has just come to our attention. Sir John was a composer, known for his religious works which were influenced by Russian Orthodox music and themes. Said to be ‘among the very best creative talents of his generation’, he became one of the best known composers of his age and was knighted in 2000 for his services to music. He was one of the very few Orthodox in this country to have a title.

Born in London in 1944, John was something of a musical prodigy and in 1961 he became organist and choirmaster at St John’s Presbyterian Church, Kensington, a post he held for 14 years. He first came to prominence as a composer in 1968 and fame followed. He was deeply affected by his brief 1974 marriage to a Greek dancer and then was influenced by the playwright Gerald McLarnon, who was a convert to the Orthodox Church. He himself converted to the Orthodoxy of Metropolitan Antony Bloom in 1977, soon after which we met him and formed an opinion. Thereafter he was much influenced by the philosophy of a rather tragic figure, the late Greek Orthodox Mother Thekla, who lived near Whitby in Yorkshire.

From this point on the customs of the Orthodox Church affected his work until in the early 2000s he became interested in a more universalist philosophy and sought inspiration elsewhere. Thus, in 2007 he composed ‘The Beautiful Names’, a setting of the 99 names of God in the Muslim tradition, sung in Arabic. He also explored a number of other different religious traditions, including Hinduism, and became a follower of the philosopher Frithjof Schuon. However, he did remain a Christian and was still very interested in Orthodoxy.

Called by one newspaper ‘the mystic who drives a Rolls-Royce’, Sir John’s interest in Orthodoxy was similar to that of many who remained firmly in the British Establishment and yet liked the form of Orthodoxy that was promoted among mainly wealthy Anglicans and others between the 1960s and the 1990s by various figures in certain Orthodox groups (though not in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), both in Western Europe and North America. Thus, Sir John recognised the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, also a convert to a certain form of Orthodoxy, as ‘a kindred spirit’ and shared his philosophical and religious views.

We remember talking to Sir John on the telephone in the early 2000s about education. This made clear where he belonged in the Establishment. His generation of converts and sympathisers with Orthodoxy, like his friend Prince Charles, were bridge-figures. They did not integrate the Orthodox Church, but belonged to their own groups on the fringes of the Church and are now mostly in their 60s and 70s. Several have died in recent years and Orthodoxy in this country is now moving on, giving freedom to the next generation, after decades of blockage.

Those of my generation and younger tend to have come from no religious background and have little attachment to the dying Establishment. The future of English-language Orthodoxy in this country is not with converts from the heterodox world, who often confuse and merge Heterodoxy with Orthodoxy. It is with the younger and more culturally open, who have Orthodox roots but use English as their first language, or else with the 95% of the local population who come from no religious background at all and are free of cultural baggage.

To the servant of God John, Eternal Memory!

The Ukraine Chooses Freedom

The Ukrainian government today decided to suspend the signing of an association agreement with the European Union. Instead, the decision was made to study and work out measures to recover lost production volumes and directions of trade and economic relations with Russia and other member states of the Eurasian Union: ‘With a view to protecting and enhancing the economic potential of the State, active dialogue should be resumed with Russia and other members of the Customs Union and CIS countries to revive economic and trade relations’, said a spokesman. As a condition of the association agreement, the EU had demanded the release of the former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, the pro-American puppet who was imprisoned for corruption.

The decision followed an open letter addressed to President Viktor Yanukovich by Orthodox citizens of the Ukraine, Russia, Moldova and Kazakhstan, warning him that the Ukraine faced a choice between light and darkness, Christ and Antichrist. By associating itself or integrating with the EU, the Ukraine would enslave itself, as have Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria. In its new slavery, the Ukraine would lose its cultural roots in Christian civilisation, betraying this unique faith for the mess of secularist pottage offered by the US-backed EU, which the authors of the letter called ‘Eurosodom’.

They noted that supporters of the EU were the spiritual descendants of Catholicised and Polonised ‘Ukrainians’ (= border-dwellers) in the extreme west of the Ukraine, who had persecuted the Carpatho-Russians during the First World War and fought with the Nazi SS in the Second World War. The authors also noted the anti-Christian nature and practices of the EU with its secularist policies and open support for bandits in Syria and the Middle East, who were intent on the genocide of Christians there, and its persecution of the remaining Christians in Western Europe. The authors considered the possibility of the Ukraine associating itself with the EU as a new Unia and a new betrayal of millennial Orthodox Christianity, the Holy Rus that began with St Vladimir in Kiev 1025 years ago.

Suffolk Restores St Edmund

The county of Suffolk was buzzing with activities yesterday in celebration of (the new style) St Edmund’s Day. Downpours failed to dampen the spirits as different events honoured the King of East Anglia, who was martyred by Viking invaders on 20 November 869.

Greater Anglia’s St Edmund train was rededicated at Ipswich railway station yesterday morning by the Precentor of St Edmundsbury Cathedral. In Bury St Edmunds, Greene King marked the day by opening its new £750,000 St Edmund Brewhouse at its headquarters in the town. Elsewhere, St Edmundsbury Cathedral hosted a performance of Courage of a King and held a special communion service. Author Mark Taylor was at the Cathedral and at Waterstones signing copies of his new book Edmund: The Untold Story of the Martyr King and his Kingdom, and prizes in the St Edmund’s Day Awards were handed out yesterday evening. Thousands of schoolchildren across Suffolk took part in activities to promote the Saint. And finally councillors from Suffolk and Norfolk, the bulk of the old East Anglian Kingdom, met to discuss uniting several of their services.

St Edmund has always been the patron saint of England, even though St George the Great-Martyr eclipsed him from the 14th century on. In the last few years, however, throughout East Anglia, St Edmund has been promoted and begun to eclipse St George as the local favourite. The Bury St Edmunds MP, David Ruffley, and The East Anglian Daily Times have backed a campaign to get him reinstated as the nation’s patron saint, which has been led by BBC Radio Suffolk.

Dr Carey and the Church of England

Today’s reports in various tabloid and semi-tabloid British newspapers that the Church of England is just ‘one generation away from extinction’, in yesterday’s words of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, do not make news. We have known this for some time. Nor is the agreement with him of the Archbishop of York, who has told the Church of England General Synod that compared to the need to attract new worshippers, ‘everything else is like re-arranging furniture when the house is on fire’. However, the later was correct in stating that the Synod spent too long ‘arguing over words and phrases, while the people of England are left floundering amid meaninglessness, anxiety and despair’.

The Church of England was only ever a sixteenth-century Establishment fix, invented to prevent civil war between Catholics and Protestants, to keep ‘the plebs’ in order. The fact that it has survived into the twenty-first century was surely never meant to be; it is a historic anachronism. Its only hope of survival is if parts of it display real faith in historical, and not ‘make it up as you go’, Christianity. It is commonly said that 40% of Church of England clergy, including bishops, do not believe in God, let alone in the Holy Trinity, the Divinity and Incarnation of Christ, the Resurrection, the Virgin-Birth, the Communion of Saints or the devil.

If that is the case, it would perhaps be more honest if the Church of England closed itself down and handed over its vast fortune to believing Christians, whether Protestant, Roman Catholic or Orthodox. Unlike the tabloid reports, the former Archbishop never said that Christianity faces extinction – it is only the Church of England – and that is a very different thing from the Church in England.

A Letter from the Russian Orthodox Church

The Nation was in need of a Great Fast
To cleanse a fallen consciousness.
To remind all of both God and Tsar,
To save the ‘civilised’ and self-satisfied,
To reconcile all with the Cross and the Truth, –
To give new birth to all in forgotten truths.
For there is love, faithfulness and beauty,
There is faith – that which does not decay.

Nina Kartashova (1953- )

Scattered Abroad

The times appointed from on High will pass, Communists will disappear, the Revolution will vanish into the past; but the White Cause, born in this struggle, will not disappear; its spirit will be preserved and merge organically into the way of life and building of the New Russia.

Ivan Ilyin (+ 1954)

One third of the 164 million Russian Orthodox have passports that do not say ‘Russian Federation’, but the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Estonia or, more exotically, Japan, China, Thailand….As for our passports, they are even more varied; they say Portugal, Canada, Luxembourg, Tonga, Chile, France, USA, Spain, Haiti, New Zealand, Venezuela, UK, Switzerland, Argentina, Belgium, Australia, Pakistan, Germany, Mexico…

Scattered outside Russia, we speak Russian with varying accents and degrees of competence, some not at all, and our churches use Church Slavonic to varying degrees, some not at all, using a local language instead. However, apart from our secular passport, we also have a spiritual passport. And on that passport, next to ‘Place of Residence’, it says ‘Rus’. And all who know that we live in Rus are at the heart of the Church, not on its fringes.

Rus

I am a part of Rus on the southern fringes of the sea:
With me is my sword, black hussar’s jacket
And portrait of the Tsar, like an eternal spectre of grief,
And in my heart the trace of wounds I have survived.

I am a part of Rus which tribulation
Flung like a ball beyond the ocean-sea,
I am the faithful son of a great nation,
A soldier in soul and a bard of the days of old.

Vladimir Petrushevsky (+ 1961), Australia

For the Churched, this spiritual passport is much more important than our secular passport, for we see our secular place of residence through the eyes of Rus, through spiritual eyes. Thus, there is European Rus, American Rus, Australian Rus….The words ‘Outside Russia’ in ‘Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia’ mean outside the old Russian Empire, not outside Rus – as our spiritual passports show.

Our residence in Rus also shows that our Faith did not come from Russia, but through Russia, just as it did not come from Constantinople, but through Constantinople. (To say that our Faith is ‘Russian’ or ‘Greek’ is a great mistake; such a nationalistic spirit is how the ‘Greeks’ alienated many peoples and lost the Second Rome). We serve another spirit. Where did our Faith come from? It came from Christ, like our Church.

Why?

The Apostles

It is not by chance that blind fate
Has scattered us among foreign lands,
It is not by chance that life has imposed on us
The cheerless lot of the slave.

It is not by chance that in crowded markets
We bear in silence the cross of sufferings
And tread a thorny and toilsome path
To goals that are unknown to us.

No! – A great and wise mystery
Is hidden in our feat as slaves,
And believe me, our destiny,
Unprecedented, is not by chance…

Heavenly powers guide us,
The Leader who is everywhere leads us
Along the way, where graves do not bring fear,
Where neither bread nor home are required.

In this sorrow of hard privations,
In this torment of bodily exhaustion,
A wondrous lot has been appointed for us,
A lot of humiliations, threats and doubts.

In the darkness of this servile world
We bear in triumph the beacon of the spirit
And loudly summon God’s chosen ones
To the bridal chamber of the Orthodox feast.

We tread a thorny road,
We soar above worldly vanity,
We are the apostles of the faith of Christ,
The heralds proclaiming holy truth.

We summon the races and the peoples,
Clothed in the crimson of brotherly blood,
To the kingdom of true and everlasting freedom,
To the kingdom of goodness, light and love.

S.S. Bekhteev, 1928

Why do we live in all these lands scattered across the face of the Earth? The reasons are many – but all result from the pogrom, first of the betrayal of the Faith, then of Rus and then of the Tsar. Whatever our exact story, our reason for being scattered in the lands where we live is ultimately because God has allowed it. We stand, looking at 1,000 years of Western history, a history without the Church of Christ, but with its vestiges; in Europe we look back beyond those 1,000 years of wandering, to the first millennium, when the roots of Europe, and so the roots of the whole Western world, were in Christ and His Holy Church.

We have been sent to live in these lands to gather in the harvest of all these vestiges into the granaries of the churches of Rus before the end. The harvest of sincerity, of righteousness, of virtue, of nobility, of inner beauty, of spiritual culture, of piety, of holiness, the harvest from 2,000 years of history of Europe, is here in our churches, in our oases in the desert, in our lighthouses on the far distant shores of Rus, shining out to the lost world. We are among the gatherers and keepers of Rus, for it is time to gather the scattered stones together (Ecclesiastes 3, 5), and restore what has been destroyed, defiled and profaned.

Our Future

I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not nigh.
Numbers 24, 17

Our Russian Orthodox Faith, our ideal of Rus, is our international response to globalisation. No other part of the Orthodox Church is large enough or strong enough or free enough to resist the tide of globalisation and provide such a response. Other parts of the Church are responsible for only one nationality; there is no Orthodox response to globalisation other than Rus. No other part of the Orthodox world has been crucified for the sins of the world and for faithfulness to Universal Orthodoxy as have we. This is why Rus is the meaning of world history and world destiny, the key to salvation in the last times.

This is why we who have come out of the White Cause continue to further the process of healing inside Russia, the independence of the Church from State interference and from secularist, Western ideologies, and seek the continuing canonisation of all the New Martyrs and Confessors, led by the martyred Royal House. The Church inside Russia is Lazarus, the miracle of the Resurrection, the Four-Day Dead, dressed in Soviet rags, but still the Friend of Christ. Now together we make ready and pray and hope and wait for the restoration of legitimate authority in Rus, the Orthodox Tsar restored by the Sovereign Mother of God.

Our Hope

Arise, O saint-haunted Europe, the one thousand years have passed!

There was once a Europe where peoples were still free to follow Christ and their own innocent ways, a Europe where Englishmen played cricket, Portuguese sang fado, Carinthians dressed in folk costume, French people tasted wine from all over, Italians sang opera at work, Scottish people wore kilts, Spaniards were noble, Germans were helpful and Dutch people were informal; as for Russians, they named their children Nicholas and Alexandra. And it seemed that this would continue until Kingdom come…

But then there came a grey Europe, a homogenous Union, in which centralised bureaucrats try to regulate and control every detail of our lives. This is an anti-Europe which plays at Hitler’s game of divide and rule, which now attempts to balkanise and provincialise the next victims of EU debaptism and gay parade colonisation, the weak countries of the soft underbelly of the Orthodox world, Montenegro, Macedonia, the Ukraine and, if only it were possible for the eurocrats, Moldova, Georgia and even Belarus.

But there is coming a Rus of all the East Slav peoples, reunited in a single Tsardom, opposed to the electronic concentration camp of the New World Order in formation. This will be a Rus where the media are not controlled, as now, by foreign, anti-Orthodox propaganda, which brainwash, debauch and zombify the people, where the families with many children will be protected from countries that have renounced Christ and seem to be crawling towards hell, of their own so-called free but indoctrinated and conditioned will.

This is yet to be a Rus under a Tsar chosen by the Queen of Heaven, as Elder Nikolai Guryanov foretold, a Romanov by his mother, as the prophecies tell us, where Siberia will be transformed, the Church cleansed and joined by many peoples, including the Greek, as Elder Joseph of Vatopedi foretold. Rus will be the Ark for all faithful Orthodox when Orthodoxy will have faltered elsewhere. And there, from Europe, Asia and America, people will gather to live according to the Church and preach the Orthodox Gospel to the ends of the earth.

Let us pray to Christ, the Mother of God and the holy, martyred Tsar Nicholas, his family and all the New Martyrs and Confessors that this may soon be so.

A Mystery Solved?

The Passionate Attachment

America’s unrequited love for Israel
Were Arafat and Litvinenko killed by the same people?

http://thepassionateattachment.com/2012/07/05/were-arafat-and-litvinenko-killed-by-the-same-people/

­By Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
July 5, 2012

In Guilt By Association, a thoroughly researched analysis of a transnational crime syndicate whose members “share an ideological bias sympathetic to Israel,” Jeff Gates challenged the consensus view on the murder of former KGB colonel Alexander Litvinenko. Questioning the media’s eagerness to link Litvinenko’s poisoning to former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin, Gates suggested:

Who, if not the syndicate profiled in this account had the means, motive and opportunity to murder Litvinenko in London? Two days after Khodorkovsky lieutenant Leonid Nevzlin arrived at Newark airport on Christmas Eve 2006, Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika issued a press release identifying Nevzlin as a murder suspect in the Litvinenko poisoning and seeking his extradition. Litvinenko met with Nevzlin in Israel just weeks before his death.

The recent Al Jazeera investigation indicating that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat may have been killed by the same toxic substance as Litvinenko lends further credence to Gates’ suspicions. Rather than follow this obvious path of inquiry, however, the Israel-friendly media are far more likely to blame Putin for Arafat’s death.