Monthly Archives: June 2015

In Gethsemane

(Our Acknowledgements to Don Mclean)

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/donmclean/vincentstarrystarrynight.html

Starry, starry night
By the walls of Zion grey,
You look out at end of day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.

Shadows on the hills,
See the homes and the twinkling light,
Feel the breeze and the starry night,
Beneath the olives on the darkened land.

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me,
And how you suffered for eternity
And how you tried to set them free.

They would not listen, they did not know how,
Perhaps they’ll listen now.

Starry, starry night,
Shooting stars that brightly blaze,
Scudding clouds in fearful haze
Reflect in Christlike eyes of china blue.

Colours changing hue,
Morning fields of amber grain,
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the Saviour’s loving hand

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me,
And how you suffered for eternity
And how you tried to set them free.

They would not listen, they did not know how,
Perhaps they’ll listen now

For they could not love you,
But still your love was true,
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night

You gave your life, as only Christ can do
But I could’ve said, O Saviour,
This world was never meant for
One as beautiful as you.

Starry, starry night,
Icons hang in holy halls,
Famous heads on famous walls,
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget,

Like the strangers that you’ve met,
The ragged men in ragged clothes,
The crown of thorns and bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me,
And how you suffered for eternity
And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will.

A Vision for the Future Orthodox Church in Western Europe

Sadly, vision has all too often been in short supply when it comes to a future Orthodox Church for Western Europe, On the one hand, there have been those, whom I have known personally, who failed to rise to the challenge and simply rejected the concept, preferring the ethnic ghetto and nationalist club and hiding behind Slavonic or Greek. On the other hand, there have been those who wanted to create ‘une structure d’attente’, a temporary structure waiting to be absorbed into Roman Catholicism, in the notorious and legendary words of one Jesuit-educated senior priest of the Paris Jurisdiction over 35 years ago.

At present one view is that the US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople should make autonomous its Western European group or ‘brotherhood’, as it has already done in Finland and Estonia. This would be based on extreme liberalism and a copying of modernist Roman Catholicism (Roman Catholic calendar, no confession, intercommunion, no iconostasis, clean-shaven clergy, masonry, an upper middle-class pseudo-intellectual ethos with as many members as possible holding degrees in philosophy etc). Such an exclusive club is in fact just as ethnic as the ethnic ghetto; worse, it is class-ridden as well.

Only recently, I have come across two cases of Russian Orthodox being refused confession by such groups because they did ‘not have any sins’. One 25-year-old Romanian priest- ‘theologian’ actually told one that confession was ‘no longer necessary’. The other was told that ‘since you have not murdered anyone, you do not need confession’. Others have been told that they must abandon the Orthodox calendar. Another who attended the chapel of a tiny convert group defined it as ‘an upper class club for Anglicans’. All that happens is that the faithful are scandalized and quit such groups in search of ‘real Orthodox’.

I quote these sad examples because it is clear that the Church of the future can never be built on such practices because they are exclusive. Just as nothing can be built on a mononational and monolingual (be it Greek, Slavonic, Romanian, English, French or German) ethnic narrowness. The future will be built on inclusivity. And that inclusivity will not be built on a modernist, anti-Orthodox ideology, whose tone is set by the CIA, but on respect for the feelings of the faithful (and not lapsed) Orthodox people. The Church is the people; we are not clericalists in the Orthodox Church.

The Church of the future will be built on uniting different nationalities of Orthodox, not on dividing them by minimalism, built on being inclusive, not exclusive. The most anti-pastoral aspect of this is the attempt to impose on faithful Orthodox a degutted, pseudo-Orthodox, modernist ideology. If convert and semi-Uniat Orthodox want faithful Orthodox to come to their churches and chapels, then they must first become Orthodox themselves. ‘Halfodoxy’ has no attraction to us whatsoever. We do not ask for an acceptance of another language, simply an acceptance of the Orthodox Faith and Tradition.

How the World Was Turned Upside Down

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls. (Bill Bryson)

Many may have heard of the slogan that the Nazis erected over their slave camps: Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Makes your Free. So Slavery was proclaimed to be Freedom and Life became Death. However, it is not only the Goebbels-run Public Relations of the Nazis which, Orwellian-like, made truth into lies and lies into truth. As they say: ‘A commentary on the times is that the word ‘honesty’ is now preceded by the word ‘old-fashioned’. Thus:

Feminism is anti-Feminine, since it has led only to the masculinization of women and their subjugation to the tyranny of GDP: ‘Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen’ (Compton Mackenzie).

The end of the Cold War, which was supposed to lead to freedom, was achieved by colossal debt-enslavement to bankers.

The European Union is anti-European, since it has led to the destruction of the identities of the peoples of Europe.

The Educational System, become a tick-box exam-factory, has made pupils stupid, into zombies unable to think for themselves.

In the words of R.A. Knox: ‘It is stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the devil, when he is the only explanation for it’.

Why I Am Russian Orthodox

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats

Most people belong to one religion or another simply because they were born to a particular family in a particular country. Thus, most Indians are Hindu, most Arabs, Afghans, Indonesians and Iranians are Muslim, most Tibetans are Buddhist. Similarly, most, though not all, Catholics have connections to Latin countries and their colonies (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Angola, Niger, Brazil, the Philippines etc). And most Protestants belong to Germanic countries (Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, Britain and the countries of the former British Empire, the USA, Canada, Australia, Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa etc).

Similarly, most of the 216 million Orthodox Christians, belonging to the family of the at present 14 Local Orthodox Churches, are Orthodox because they belong to certain nationalities – mainly in the Middle East and Eastern Europe (Syrians, Serbs, Albanians, Greeks, Georgians, Romanians, Bulgarians etc). These are mononational Churches. But even most of the non-mononational flock of 164 million Russian Orthodox of 65 different nationalities, are Orthodox because they have been born to a particular family.

However, with prayer, experience of life and thought there are those Russian Orthodox who become conscious Russian Orthodox and come to have a consistent and logical Russian Orthodox world-view. In my own case this is what began to happen to me when I was twelve years old and, living in England, saw the film ‘Dr Zhivago’. This, curiously, was the beginning of my own pilgrimage. By the time I was in my twenties, after experience, prayer and thought, I had worked out a consistent and logical Russian Orthodox world view and I have tried to live by it ever since, despite my human weaknesses.

Such a world-view takes into account our universal Orthodox Christian beliefs, found in the Scriptures, that the universe and mankind were created by God; that mankind fell from bliss into sin and so paganism (institutionalized sin); then was cleansed by the Flood in the time of Noah; restored by the Coming and Resurrection of Christ the Son of God Who trampled down death by death, which truth we live by following the Church, the Body of Christ, through the Holy Spirit Who was sent down to us; but that nevertheless near the end of time the world will be destroyed by sin and the apocalyptic coming of Antichrist, who will be enthroned in Jerusalem, only to be dethroned by the Second Coming of Christ at the very end.

The knowledge through faith that the world will end through the rejection of Christ (for Antichrist is by definition the rejection of Christ) means that we have always known that mankind will fall back into paganism. In other words, sin will be institutionalized, it will become systematic and accepted as the norm. This is exactly what was prophesied already in the New Testament. For example: ‘But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of stress. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without natural affection, truce-breakers, slanderers, profligates, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of religion, but denying the power of it: from such turn away’ (2 Tim 3, 1-5).

Today’s question then is how can it be that the Western world – once Christian – has fallen into such a state of depravity, which its elite is now spreading by force and bribery throughout the world? How has the Western world become the ‘missionary centre for institutionalized sin’, the centre which, like an anti-St John the Baptist, is preparing the way for the coming of Antichrist, the building of whose Temple in Jerusalem US Protestants, for instance, are actively funding? It is very difficult for one who belongs to the Western Catholic/Protestant world to understand this paradox.

The understanding of this paradox is and always has been abundantly clear to Christians who do not belong to the Catholic/Protestant world, but belong to the Orthodox Church. We look at the world from ‘outside the box’. Thus, the Orthodox Church has for centuries believed and prophesied that Antichrist and the end of the world will come as a result of the activities of Non-Orthodox outside Her. To take but a very recent example, we have St Seraphim of Vyritsa (+ 1948). At the height of the dark night of Stalinist persecution of the Church in Russia he prophesied that the port of Saint Petersburg would one day fill with ships of Western people who would not be allowed baptism in their own countries and so would come to Russia for baptism. Eighty years on that time is now coming.

The question may be asked why Orthodox, though respecting the sincerity, beliefs and values of individual Catholics and Protestants and eagerly co-operating with them in the areas where we fully agree, cannot be Catholic or Protestant, but insist on belonging to the Orthodox Church. The answer is simple: for Orthodox Christians, Catholicism and Protestantism are part of the problem: of course it is the isms that are the danger, not the individual people, whom we regard not as enemies, but as naïve victims brainwashed by their isms. Thus, where did the modern secular, anti-Christian and repaganized world come from, how did it all come about, where were its seeds sown?

The secular, anti-Christian world came into being because it is a degeneration from Protestantism, it is post-Protestantism. And Protestantism is a Western cultural phenomenon of the 16th century, in England for instance created by the bloodthirsty monster Henry VIII. Protestantism created modern Capitalism (Mammonism) and commercial empires like the British and the American with their massacres of Hindus, Native Americans, Confederates, Africans, Boers, Vietnamese, Iraqis etc. For Orthodox who have belonged to the Orthodox Church since the day of Pentecost in 33 AD, Protestantism has in any case no attraction whatsoever, as it is a recent invention and, moreover, is conditioned by simply being anti-Catholic. Since Orthodox have never been Catholics, that cultural conditioning which created Protestantism by reaction to Catholicism is completely irrelevant.

If Protestantism is at the root of the modern world and is fundamentally a sort of anti-Catholicism, what then is the Orthodox view of Catholicism? Surely it is closer to Orthodoxy? Catholicism is clearly older, more historic, it existed before the 16th century, it has a veneration for the Mother of God, the saints, it has a liturgical sense, sacraments and a priesthood – it has so much spiritual wealth, like Orthodoxy, that Protestantism simply does not have. However, for Orthodox, Catholicism has existed only since the 11th century – it too is recent, albeit less recent. It too is ultimately a manmade adaptation of Christianity and the Church, a compromise which has put local culture above the Eternal Truth of the Church of God. Relative to Protestantism, it is a step nearer Orthodoxy, but it is still a step away.

For Orthodox, Catholicism is a religion adapted from Orthodoxy (hence the closer connections than with Protestantism, which is an adaptation of Catholicism, a step further away) for the justification of aggressive Western political aims. This we saw with the Papal-encouraged Norman Invasion of England in 1066, the next Crusades soon after, the invasion of Ireland, the sacking of the Christian capital of New Rome (Constantinople) in 1204, the invasions of the Teutonic Knights, the Inquisition, the cruel conquest of what we now call Latin America etc. The centre of (Roman) Catholicism, Rome, was not where Christianity began; that was Jerusalem, which is the spiritual and historic centre of the Orthodox Church. In Orthodox eyes Rome is reminiscent of pagan Rome, Babylon, which is why the first Christian administrative capital was in newly-established New Rome, a city without a pagan past, a new city for a new, Christian era.

Thus, for Orthodox, Catholicism, is also part of the problem. Catholicism is simply the first stage of the degeneration of the Western world after it had left the Orthodox Church. The second stage, even further from Orthodoxy, as we can see with ‘women-priests’ or the practice of homosexuality, which large branches of Protestantism, unlike Catholicism, accepts, is Protestantism. The third stage is the aggressive secularist ideology of the anti-Christianity of the modern, post-Protestant Western world with its imperialism and colonial exploitation; militarization; genocidal World Wars; the removal of Tsar Nicholas, ‘he who restrains’ (2 Thess 2,7), through the anti-Orthodox Revolution in Russia and creation there of a Zionist-run militant atheist State, which had been so carefully planned and financed from London and New York; concentration camps; atomic bombs; puppet regimes; banana republics; invasions of peaceful countries; revolutions (‘regime changes’); massacres; search for absolute global domination through debt-enslavement to bankers etc.

In a word, the leaders of the Western world, the global elite, are attempting to spread worldwide their ideology of anti-Christianity, which has carefully and progressively been built up on the foundation of a thousand years of Western history. Through deformation after deformation after deformation we have turned full circle, from a Western Europe which was Orthodox Christian at the end of the first millennium after Christ to one whose elite is today not only anti-Christian but increasingly openly Satanic in its promotion of and reversion to paganism. What are we to do? We, in the Orthodox Church, and particularly in by far the largest and strongest Orthodox Church, the Russian, are those who lead resistance to the project of the global elite, who wish to see the enthronement of Antichrist in their rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem so that they can rule the world by deception.

That is why the global elite, in the literal words of its representatives like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Tony Blair or Carl Bildt, speak quite openly of their desire to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church. They want to do with us what they long ago did to the Protestant world and, since the protestantizing Second Vatican Council over fifty years ago, to the Catholic world, in other words, to castrate us spiritually, to degut us and neutralize us as the centre of spiritual resistance to their One World Project. They want to do with the Russian Orthodox Church what they have already tried to do with two or three of the much smaller and weaker Local Orthodox Churches, replacing the Patriarchs with their own candidates, telling us what to say and do, destroying our Faith, ‘modernizing’ us. They will not succeed – because our Master is Christ; theirs is Satan.

The Fight for Freedom in Europe Continues

The article below was written within days of the G7 meeting in Germany. Thus, those who support the neo-Nazi puppet regime in Kiev, issued a proclamation from Hitler’s villa outside Munich (!)proclaiming a fight against ‘corruption’! Of course, in the real world the ghetto-like G7 is now irrelevant, surpassed by the economies of the five BRICS countries. Indeed, there are those who fight for freedom from US/EU/NATO tyranny and corruption and work for the liberation of the peoples of the Ukraine from the CIA-run Kievan dictatorship. Reader, read on:

Slovak volunteer in the Donbass: “It’s our way of fighting the EU and NATO.”

Posted: 12 Jun 2015 12:05 PM PDT

Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten
June 11, 2016

Translated from the German by Tom Winter

A surprising melange is coming into view at the Ukraine front: Mercenaries from the Czech Republic and Slovakia have shifted over to the Donbass to fight against NATO. Their home countries are powerless: the rebels apparently pay better.

The Slovaks and Czechs who are currently fighting in eastern Ukraine with the volunteer militias against the Kievan Army intend to put together their own unit that would be part of the so-called International Brigade of the 15th Army.

“The Brigade has a lot of Czechs and Slovaks. They get around 350 Euros a month; they live in barracks and are equipped with tanks and armoured personnel carriers,” reports the Slovakian news portal aktuality.sk.

The news portal conducted an interview Monday with a Slovak mercenary soldier, who says that the most prominent Slovak fighter in Ukraine was Martin “Sojka” Keprta, but that he is now hospitalized with injuries from the fighting.

So far as equipment is concerned, the Slovak source says there are old Mosin-Nagant repeating rifles from Soviet times, plus Kalashnikovs of two different calibres, 5.45, and 7.62 mm, and anti-tank weapons, including PTURs,** grenade launcher RPGs, and all the other weapons that they have captured.

When asked about the involvement of Russian officers or commanders in the Eastern Ukraine conflict, the man says: “In our unit there is no Russian commander. Russia helps us politically and morally. They also provide us with humanitarian aid, which is more than necessary. The Russian military doesn’t have to be here on the spot: Every day the admissions committee in Donbass registers five to twenty people, who are signed in and are going to serve. We have, in contrast to the opposite side, of course, a shortage of motorized transport. ”

Then the Slovak mercenary shares the political motivation behind his service in eastern Ukraine. The mercenary, literally: “We see the EU as a dictatorship and NATO as an aggressive pact. This is our way of fighting the EU and NATO.”

On the same day, the Slovak government released an opinion on the investigative report of aktuality.sk. The Slovak newspaper TERAZ Slovensko quoted the Foreign Ministry in Bratislava: “Such adventurers act alone and actively contribute to the destabilization of Ukraine and the undermining of diplomatic efforts. They hurt the foreign policy interests of the Slovak Republic.

“The government keeps an open and clear distance from these adventurers. The priority of the foreign policy of Slovakia remains the stabilization of the situation in Ukraine in order to achieve a peaceful solution to the crisis through diplomatic negotiations. We support the independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and condemn all attempts to escalate the conflict. ”

The spokesman for the Slovak Interior Ministry, Petar Lazarov, on the other hand wanted weigh in “for security and tactical reasons:” “Slovaks who are fighting for a foreign military or their units without authorization from the president face a prison sentence of two to eight years.”

In eastern Ukraine there are numerous mercenaries from Europe. They are fighting against one side or the other. There are also mercenaries of the US company Academi, formerly Blackwater, among them.

**Mosin-Nagant is a five-shot, bolt action rifle first developed in 1891, corresponding to an American Winchester; the PTUR (“bassoon”) is a wire-guided rocket launched from a tripod-mounted tube. Big enough to require a three-man team.]

Translator’s note: There are European politicians pushing for independence from NATO, Wagenknecht in Germany, and Fillon in France, for instance. They won’t go to jail. Mercenaries from Academi won’t go to jail either.

A Reply to Fr George Mitrofanov

http://www.rocorstudies.org/interviews/2015/06/04/the-outcasts-unite-with-the-outcasts-on-the-eight-anniversary-of-the-reestablishment-of-canonical-communion-within-the-russian-orthodox-church/

In his strangely-titled interview “The Outcasts Unite with the Outcasts” (see above), Archpriest George Mitrofanov, himself perhaps something of an outcast, has declared that the two parts of the Russian Church united far ‘too late and far too fast’. With all respect, I am surprised by both these views.

Firstly, ‘too late’ is only from the viewpoint of those who want the past back. The past was of course dead 90 years after the Revolution. It is totally unrealistic to imagine that the past could be alive after 90 years, after a human lifetime. And why would you wish the past to be alive? It was the decadence of the past that caused the Russian Revolution. Recreate the past and all you will do is create another Revolution. All parts of the Church have moved on, we live in the here and now, united by the New Martyrs and Confessors created by the Revolution, not united by some unrealistic nostalgia for a past that had many faults.

Our unity is not that of ‘outcasts with the outcasts’, and even less of ‘the marginal with the marginal’ (as in the original Russian), but of the mainstream with the mainstream. It was precisely the marginal (whether marginal extremists of the old calendarist sort in ROCOR or marginal extremists of the renovationist sort in the Sourozh Diocese and elsewhere belonging to the Patriarchal part of the Church) who rejected unity.

Too late? Our unity became inevitable after the long-awaited Jubilee Council of August 2000 and the implementation of that Council which took the Church inside Russia several years. I would say that unity came just at the right time; had we waited longer, many in ROCOR would have joined the Church inside Russia; had we not waited, many in ROCOR would have objected to the haste and there could have been a schism splitting ROCOR down the middle.

Secondly,‘too fast’? Here again we see the idealism of Fr George concerning the principles of the All-Russian Church Council of 1917-1918, and that they (!) had formed the foundation of the life of the diaspora of the Russian Church. In reality, some decisions of that Council were based on the democratism and liberalism of Protestant-style Kerenskyism; thank God they were not all implemented, we do not want the negative aspects of the 1917-18 Council.

Here Fr George also writes that ‘and we most certainly overestimated your ability to influence our situation here’. It would have been an amazing piece of pretentiousness on the part of ROCOR if we had ever imagined that, small as we are and engaged in the mission to bring Orthodoxy to the Non-Orthodox world as we are, which is the real mission of the emigration, we could ever have influenced the situation in Russia.

Internal Russian problems can only be solved by Russians inside Russia; we have no such pretensions. We did not produce the New Martyrs – they were produced in Russia and they will provide healing inside Russia, not us. We have our own problems to solve and we look to our own saints, like St John of Shanghai, to help solve them.

Finally, Fr George writes that, ‘our belated unification’ resulted ‘in members of both parties becoming either at best idealists, or in the worst case just a product of the circumstances’. No doubt there are individuals on both sides who belong to these categories, but only on the fringes. The mainstream knew perfectly well what was happening. The scandals on both sides, for instance, the names of those who had worked for and were compromised by the KGB and the CIA (and MI5 and the DGSE in France), were well known to us; but the mainstream on both sides we had very pragmatic, Incarnational, views.

Inside Russia they knew that they could not go on without those who represented the unSoviet past and outside Russia we knew that we could not go on in isolation, that our mission to the world outside Russia had to be supported from inside Russia. It was precisely the dreamers who refused unity, whether the disincarnate, old calendarist (and sometimes CIA-financed) sectarians on the fringes of ROCOR or the Parisian-inspired disincarnate Russophobes on the fringes of the then Patriarchate (also very clearly supported, at least morally, by CIA-type organizations).

To paraphrase the Irish poet Yeats: Things did not fall apart; the Centre could hold. In other words, since 2007 on the mainstream has won the day.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

Speaker at the Fourth All-Diaspora Council, San Francisco 2006
Concelebrant at the Signing of the Act of Canonical Communion, Moscow 2007

An Appeal to Buy a Russian Orthodox Church for Norwich

In the East of England there is at present only one multinational and multilingual church faithful to Russian Orthodoxy with its own urban premises. This is St John’s Church in Colchester. God willing and with your support, we may now be able to buy a second one, in Norwich, exactly 60 miles, 100 kilometres, to the north of Colchester.

Why Norwich? For the last four years I have been visiting Norwich and some of the 200 Russian Orthodox there, mainly recent immigrants from the Baltic States, especially from Estonia. I have baptized several in their homes, married couples in Colchester, buried, blessed houses, listened to confessions, visiting every few weeks, sometimes twice a month.

We have thought of dedicating our community to St Alexander Nevsky. We attempted to begin liturgies using the Greek Orthodox church building in Norwich, but were impeded. How are our people and English people and others interested in the witness of the Russian Orthodox Church, to be cared for pastorally? Only from a church building.

Now we have found such a suitable building. At present offices, it is a single-storey building near the town centre, so with free parking, about 10 metres (30 feet) long by 6 metres (15 feet) wide. It has heating, lighting, a kitchenette and toilet, all in good condition. Although small, it seems ideal as a basis for starting Russian Orthodox life in Norwich.

And such life is required not only by Russian speakers, but also by Romanian, Bulgarian and English Orthodox. Most of our regular parishioners, only one of whom has a car, live within easy walking distance of this building. With our low offer of £42,500 miraculously accepted, this building, we estimate, would cost a total of £55,000 to buy and convert.

Within 24 hours of viewing the building, eight parishioners had already pledged £5,000. For those for whom £50 is a lot of money, this is a considerable sum. Archbishop Mark has enthusiastically blessed us to start public fund-raising. And so we are launching a campaign to gain pledges to raise the extra £50,000 required.

Perhaps you know someone who is wealthy? Perhaps we can find ten people who can each donate £5,000? Perhaps we can find 250 people who can each donate £200? Can you help us by making pledges? May God bless you for considering the Russian Orthodox Community in Norwich in your alms.

All donations, when required later this year in August or September, will be made to our charitable trust: East of England Orthodox Church (Registered Charity No 1081707). But please remember that we do not want donations now, only pledges. To make a pledge, please inform us at this address: frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

2 June 2015

How Western Culture Reverses Spiritual Progress

All heresies reverse spiritual progress because by their very nature they contain spiritual impurity. That is precisely why the Church, which as the Body of Christ is spiritually pure, perceives heresies as ‘wrong choices’, in Greek ‘heresies’. Essentially, what we are logically saying is that every choice that is not Christocentric contains spiritual impurity, for only Christ is without sin, all else is therefore tainted by sin. This includes all cases when groups of human-beings put their humanistic, impure cultures above Christ, so becoming ethnocentric instead of Christocentric. When humanity does this, it also condemns all other cultures and civilizations, whether existing today, in the past or possibly in the future, including Christocentric culture.

This why the famous Dr Johnson wrote that ‘patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel’, meaning that scoundrels always use flag-waving nationalism as an excuse for their base deeds. In particular, scoundrels make cheap propaganda which demonizes their enemies, making them less than human, ‘subhumans’, ‘Untermenschen’ in Hitler’s language. This is merely a justification for the genocides which they commit. This is what Catholics did when slaughtering Christians (100,000 in England alone in the decade after 1066), Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages, what Protestants did to Black Africans to justify slavery, what the Nazis did to Slavs (30 million of whom they slaughtered), Jews and Gypsies, what the Croats did to Serbs (some 800,000), and the Americans have done to umpteen peoples around the world, from Native Americans to Mexicans, from Japanese to Vietnames, from latin Americans to Iraqis, from Serbs to Russians. ‘They’, ‘the rest and not the West’, were and are all ‘subhuman’. Why? Simply in order to justify their power-grabbing and land-grabbing.

However, if nationalism (which is what Dr Johnson meant when he misused the word ‘patriotism’) is the last resort of the scoundrel, what is the first resort? The first resort of the scoundrel is always religion. This we saw very clearly in the anti-Christian Catholic ‘Crusades’ of the Middle Ages, which sacked and looted the Christian capital in Constantinople, in the Spanish plundering of the Americas in the name of God, in British empire-building (‘civilizing the natives’), in the blasphemous US dollar bill inscribed ‘In God we trust’ (meaning in Mammon we trust), in the German First World War soldier with ‘Gott mit uns’ (‘God with us’) inscribed on his belt, or in the Western-founded Al-Qaida and Islamic State, which use Islam (which as an Old Testament religion in spirit hardly has a record of tolerance in any case) to justify the most abhorrent crimes committed while land-grabbing and power-grabbing.

It is this that certain Western semi-converts to Christianity belonging to the various Local Orthodox Churches have to beware of. For long in this country, for example, we have seen an old generation of ex-Anglican semi-converts who reject ‘foreigners’ (i.e. anyone who has never been an Anglican), proposing their own unOrthodox and crypto-Protestant agenda, rejecting the Church as She is. These Establishment types regard the whole of England as their ‘territory’, set up small congregations of half a dozen here and there in order to justify their presence, try to eject others who do not belong to their mafia-like brotherhood, condescend and patronize, slander and backbite. Fortunately, that generation is dying out and we are now coming to a new generation of real Orthodox, who are not compromised by the ethnic religion of Establishment Anglicanism, which puts its culture above the Church, Which it condemns as ‘foreign’. Christ is indeed foreign to the racially and ethnically narrow, for in His human nature He was an Asian, not a Westerner.

Where did this ethnocentric Western mentality, which condemns all other civilizations and rejects the Christian condemnation of war as an absolute evil, as the Church Civilization of the Orthodox Christian world does (1), come from? Its origins are precisely in the eleventh century, of which the apostates of the Western world so proudly boast as the beginning of their much-vaunted Western ‘civilization’, from which ‘the Holy Spirit proceeds’ (2). That century marks the falling away of Western Europe from Church Civilization and the Christian Faith, the beginning of its spiritual degeneration, which it has since spread worldwide like a degenerative epidemic. It was that century which marked the beginning of the Western world as the future technological giant but spiritual pygmy. Until they purify themselves of that mentality of pride, which asserts that all Western actions are justified because of the imagined ‘innate superiority’ of Western culture over Christ and acquire a conscious and consistent Orthodox world-view, there will be no authentic conversion of such Western converts to the Church of God.

Until then, the abysmal Western genocides of people and culture around the world will continue, from Spain to England in the 11th century, from Jerusalem to Cyprus (3) in the 12th century, from Constantinople to Novgorod in the 13th century, from the Cathars of France (‘kill them all – God will recognize His own’) to the peasants of England in the 14th century, from Italy to Germany in the 15th century, from Amazonian natives (‘kill them – they do not have souls’), to French Protestants in the 16th century, from West African slaves to Carribean plantations in the 17th century, from Bengal to Native Canadians in the 18th century, from starving Irish peasants, the Plains Indians (4), New Zealand Maori, Tasmanian Aborigenes (‘animals’) to Sudanese Muslims in the 19th century, from the Belgian Congo, Boer South Africa (5), Carpatho-Russia, European Slavdom and Jewry to Vietnamese peasants in the 20th century, from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria to the eastern Ukraine already in the first grim years of this 21st century.

As a recent popular historian but no friend of the Church as he writes about himself and those like him, has put it quite accurately and apocalyptically:

‘The road to modernity stretches clearly from the first Millennium onwards, marked by abrupt shifts and turns, to be sure, but unriven by any total catastrophe such as separates the year 1000 from antiquity. Though it might sometimes appear an unsettling reflection, the monks, warriors and serfs of the eleventh century can be reckoned our (sic) direct ancestors in a way that the people of earlier ages never (sic) were. (This book) Millennium, in short, is about the most significant departure point in Western history: the start of a journey that perhaps (sic), in the final reckoning, only a true apocalypse will serve to cut short.

Millennium, Tom Holland, p. xxix, 2008

Notes:

1. It was in the summer of 1053 that for the first time in history a Pope of Rome, ‘St’ (sic!) Leo IX, the Schism-Maker, formally blessed a standard of battle. Absolution from the stain of bloodshed – ‘an impunity for their crimes’- was promised to all who answered the call. This was the first launching of a papally-sanctioned ‘holy war’. This was to be repeated in England 1066, then in the Crusades, and today has been repeated by Western countries, which also ‘replace God’ and arrogate to themselves papal infallibility in wrecking Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the Ukraine, to name but a few examples. On the other hand, when in his book ‘Tactics’, the Christian Emperor Leo VI ‘the Wise’ of New Rome (866-912) called ‘religious war’ simply ‘a licence to loot in religion’s name’, he was expressing the immutable Christian teaching that had been universal until the 11th century before the foundation of Catholicism.

Thus, as Sir Steven Runciman noted, Orthodox Christian history was remarkably free of wars of aggression. Peaceful methods were always preferable, even if they involved tortuous diplomacy or the payment of money. To Western historians, accustomed to admire barbarian militarism, the actions of many Orthodox statesmen appear cowardly or sly; but the motive was usually a genuine desire to avoid bloodshed.

Unlike the Christian view, the Catholic view had developed out of the militarism inherited from pagan Rome. The military society that has emerged in the West out of the barbarian invasions has always sought to justify its habitual pastime of bloodshed and interventionism, just as it does today. It gave prestige to the military hero; and the pacifist acquired a disrepute for which he has never recovered. Already Pope Leo IV, in the mid-ninth century, had declared that anyone dying in battle for the defence of the Church would receive a heavenly reward. Pope John VIII, a few years later, had even ranked the victims of a holy war as martyrs; if they died armed in battle their sins would be remitted.

2. We recall the famous words of Gandhi, who, when asked what he thought of ‘Western civilization’, replied: ‘An excellent idea’.

3. Including the cannibalism of the sadistic French King of England, Richard ‘the Lionheart’.

4. In 1866 General Sherman wrote to President Grant that, ‘We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children’. And, as quoted by his biographer Marszalek, he added that ‘during an assault on an Indian village the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age. As long as resistance is made, death must be meted out’. Together with the other Indian fighter, Philip Sheridan, it was he who wrote that ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’. The descendants of the same Plains Indians have recently supported the Russian Federation against the US government’s anti-Ukrainian and also pro-pedophile policies.

5. In the letter of Tsar Nicholas II to King Edward VII of 27 May 1901, we find the last Orthodox Emperor expressing his concern in English that although his ‘principle is not to meddle in other people’s affairs’ (unlike the modern West), his ‘conscience obliges’ him ‘at last to speak openly’ and that the Boer War ‘looks more like a war of extermination’ and that Britain must ‘put an end to this bloodshed’.