Monthly Archives: May 2016

Can Tony Blair’s Soul be Saved?

Dedicated to our Serbian Readers

This is not a subject that I ever thought of writing about. After all, I do not even know if my own soul can be saved. However, on Thomas Sunday, something happened to me that made me think.

After the children’s procession and the Easter parish meal which we have every year on Thomas Sunday, I was standing outside the Church, when a man came from the street outside and spoke to me. He was in his thirties and he asked me what our church was and what we believed. I quickly realized that he was an ex-soldier and had personal problems, perhaps linked with alcoholism or drugs. I should explain that our church is in the military town of Colchester, where there are 4,000 troops and thousands of ex-soldiers, many of whom have psychological problems. (1)

In any case, when I asked the man where he had served as a soldier, he answered Iraq. He then asked me if I believed in forgiveness. I answered yes. He asked me if I had ever seen my best friends blown apart by a bomb. I answered no, but that it had happened to my father at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942 when he had lost his two best friends on either side of him, but he himself had only suffered leg wounds. He asked me again if I could forgive those responsible for murdering his friends. I replied that in a war you have to look at it from the enemy’s viewpoint, that those who had killed his friends were also just obeying orders. He said that he understood perfectly the Iraqi soldiers and he could forgive them, they were simply defending their country against invading and occupying British forces. The problem was not forgiving them, it was forgiving Tony Blair, who had sent British forces to invade and occupy Iraq, ensuring that his friends had been killed. ‘How’, he repeated’. ‘can I ever forgive Tony Blair?’

I did not answer this unexpected question at once. Then I said: ‘Only if he repents’. He answered, ‘You mean, if he says sorry? That’s just words’. I explained to him that repentance does not mean words, but actions. He thought for a moment, grunted and we shook hands and he walked away, an embittered, twisted, distraught and traumatized soul, his life ruined by what he had seen. After this meeting, on Sunday evening I thought about this conversation and lay awake till after midnight, searching for an answer and this is what came to me.

Now Tony Blair is a very rich man. The USA gave him many millions of dollars for taking part in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. According to media reports, he is worth at least £50 million, his money stashed away in tax havens where he does not pay any tax. Yes, it is true that he dare not walk the streets in the UK. At best he would be insulted and have eggs and tomatoes thrown at him. At worst, he would be beaten up and perhaps lynched by people like the ex-soldier I met. Clearly he dare not show his face in Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries which he helped invade and occupy, because he would be blown up or killed immediately. They are Islamic countries, without the concept of Christian forgiveness. They only know bitterness and revenge. However, there is a third country which he invaded and which has a Christian tradition. Could that become for him the place of his salvation?

I am speaking of course of Serbia. Every conscious human-being remembers the photograph of the mindless RAF serviceman chalking ‘Happy Easter’ on a bomb to kill and maim innocent civilians in Belgrade at Orthodox Easter 1999. Everybody remembers the ravages of NATO there, their uranium-tipped shells giving Serbian children cancer to this day. Everybody remembers the hundreds of thousands of Serbian refugees, torn from their ancestral lands by Western-backed ethnic cleansing in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Everybody remembers how Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro were torn from unity with Serbia and how the US State Department created a purely political schism in the Serbian Church, notably in Kosovo, and how the new Serbian Patriarch was humiliated by being forced to visit a synagogue by the US/EU-appointed gauleiters of Serbia.

How could Tony Blair save his soul?

We suggest that if he were to give up his vast wealth and give it to the Serbian bishops in the Serbian Lands, perhaps especially in Kosovo, and then dedicate the rest of his life to working as an unpaid helper among the starving and deprived in Serbian refugee camps, doing the most menial tasks in kitchens and cleaning toilets, looking after and serving children and old people, maimed and traumatized Serbs in all the Serbian Lands, perhaps then he could save his soul. First of all, he could find forgiveness from the Serbian people, but, above all, he could find forgiveness from God for his war crimes, which must surely weigh so heavily on his conscience and haggard face.

We do not know how long Tony Blair has to live. Obviously, he has already had more than half his life. Obviously, every day that he lives he is a day nearer to his death. Obviously, every day that he lives without repentance is a day nearer to hell, the fires of which, judging by his awful appearance, he is already experiencing. Above, we have made a suggestion, that might bring him closer to salvation. It might also being an outraged and embittered soldier in Colchester closer to peace in his heart. And many others too.

We have suggested how Tony Blair could find salvation. We have expressed optimism. The question as to if he will find salvation remains open. Here we feel profound pessimism. None of us wants to stand at the Last Judgement. All of us tremble at the thought. But I would not like to be Tony Blair at the Last Judgement.

Note:

1. One elderly veteran, now dead, came to me in Colchester a few years ago and told me that as a Special Forces soldier he had been in Cyprus in the 1950s and had been ordered to assassinate Archbishop Makarios. The operation had failed and he told me that he was racked by guilt because he had been quite willing to follow British Establishment orders and murder a Christian Archbishop. I advised him to go into our church and light a candle for the Archbishop and pray for his soul every day for the rest of his life and ask for forgiveness for himself.

First Muslim Mayor of an EU Capital

Following the mayoral election in London, the above is the sensational headline in the mind-numbing British tabloids. But is it really surprising? The last Mayor of London was also a quarter Muslim by his Turkish grandfather. If you invite tens of millions of Muslims over nearly seventy years to come and settle in your countries, you can only expect them to dress as Muslims, build mosques and also engage in national and political life, taking over that life in areas in which they are the majority. Let us be honest, it is only a matter of time before an EU country has a Muslim Prime Minister or President. Perhaps Mr Sadiq Khan will be the British Prime Minister one day. As to the wisdom of government elites inviting tens of millions of Muslims to settle in EU countries over the decades against popular will, that is another question. However, if we look at the facts, there is even worse.

What the foreign-controlled British and EU media did not report was that the other main candidate to be Mayor of London was, like David Cameron, an Old Etonian of Jewish origin. Son of a billionaire and one of the richest men in the UK, he is also married to a banking heiress, a Rothschild. Had he been elected, would there have been headlines, ‘Jew elected Mayor of London’? Of course not. Significantly, in the last few days, the foreign-owned British media have launched a vilification campaign both against the new Labour Muslim Mayor of London and against the Labour Party, accusing it of anti-Semitism, whereas in reality it is simply pro-Palestinian (we should note that the Palestinians are Semites) and anti-Zionist (We should note that, according to the UN, Zionism is racism, and we should add that many Jews are anti-Zionist and most Zionists are Non-Jews).

We do not defend the curious views of the atheist Labour leader, who seems to be stuck in hippy fantasies of the 1970s. However, two things are certain about him, that he is sincere and that he is not a racist. It would appear that in a two-horse race between an elitist, Old Etonian multi-hundred millionaire of Jewish origin and a lawyer of humble Pakistani origin, the people chose the latter. That should not be surprising. It seems a pity that there were no leading English candidates. But then, perhaps we should not expect that in London, a city that seceded from England and Englishness when the feudal Normans, founders of the British Establishment, transferred the English Capital from Winchester to London 950 years ago and brought with them 2,600 foreign traders from Rouen, who had financed their invasion and were duly rewarded, later financing the Norman invasion of Ireland also.

2016: The Tipping-Point?

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

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

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

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

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

Let us Protect the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox World!

The most basic trait in the identity of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) is faithfulness to our inherited Tradition. This need for faithfulness to the Tradition is vital precisely because we are outside Russia, where we continually have to ‘guard the deposit’ from the threat of the alien influences which are all around us. Only in this way can we witness to the integrity of our Russian Orthodox Faith and Civilization. Such a need for spiritual purity automatically also entails our independence from local politics. Our need for independence is all the greater precisely because of our international nature, which would be undermined by local nationalist influences. Indeed, on no fewer than three occasions in our ninety-year history our political independence has been under serious threat from local nationalism: firstly, from Bolshevik atheism, secondly from Hitler’s Fascism, and thirdly from the Russophobic politics of the American Cold War.

On the first occasion we were asked to swear loyalty to a militant atheist State which held captive the Church inside Russia and was most cruelly martyring Her. We refused, using the independence granted us by the marvellous foresight of the holy Patriarch Tikhon. On the second occasion the German Fascists wanted us to take part in a war which was in fact against the Slav Motherland. With the exceptions of a few who were deluded by the temptation of Nazi propaganda into thinking that Bolshevik atheism could be defeated by joining with Nazi atheism, we refused. On the third occasion, we were asked to declare ourselves a sect and the Church inside Russia without grace! With the exception of a few politicized by CIA money or deluded by sectarian pride, we again refused. Each time the continued existence of ROCOR as an integral part of the Russian Orthodox world was under threat, but each time we survived, although with the losses of small, isolationist groups.

Thus, exactly ten years ago, the greatest task of the Fourth All-Diaspora Council of the Church in San Francisco was in fact to ensure our independence from local Western politics, from ‘Western values’. At that time, as still today, these were in fact pro-secularist and anti-Christian beneath anti-atheist camouflage. For eighty long years we had undergone an enforced separation from the Patriarchate in Moscow, for long held captive by atheists. We understood that it had become free again through the long-awaited canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors and the rejection of ecumenist and erastian compromises. At that point our independence and survival meant precisely no longer living in separation from it, but returning to canonical communion, as Patriarch Tikhon would have wanted. It is therefore part of our essential identity to ensure that the Patriarchate continues to be free, to protect the Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox world from threats to its integrity.

Although the threat from State atheism is long gone inside Russia, today the Patriarchate faces a new threat from outside Russia. This is the threat precisely from where we are, from the new atheism of ‘Western values’ infiltrating into Russia. Last year it became known that one person who had worked for the Patriarchate’s sometimes controversial Foreign Affairs Department in Moscow, a certain Evgeny Petrin, was a CIA agent. Now there is a rumour that at least one ecumenist who works there may have long ago been recruited by spy services abroad and then passed on to CIA handlers. If this rumour is true, and it is only a rumour for the moment, though he does have contacts with the US ambassador, then there could have been very serious leaks of information. Whether Western agents and traitors in Moscow are acting through foolish naivety, or utter stupidity, or because they are anti-Orthodox, pro-Western liberals and modernists, is here irrelevant. The result is the same – treason.

It is the duty of all Russian Orthodox, and all the more so of us Russian Orthodox outside Russia, to protect our Patriarchate, whose freedom has been fought for with such great sacrifices, from those who may try to infiltrate ‘Western values’ into the Church. As time has passed and the Old West has died out, so has its half-Christianity; it is precisely the New West and its atheistic values that are flagrantly anti-Christian. There is little grey now, as before, and much more black and white, plainly wrong and plainly right. The so-called ‘Western values’, the values of the New West, are marked by the fingerprints of Satan, as was made plain two years ago when they were introduced into the Ukraine by the Western-installed, genocidal junta in Kiev. One of its first acts was to recognize the ‘Church of Satan’, then to attack the canonical Church and intimidate and martyr its clergy, and it is now set on promoting perversions. Every day they hear Satan’s laughter.

At a time when some are trying to infiltrate ‘Western values’ onto the agenda at the so-called All-Orthodox Council in Crete in June, we must tread carefully. Ever since the legitimate Patriarch of Constantinople, Maximos V, was replaced by the CIA in 1948, threatened with death and flown to exile in Switzerland on President Truman’s personal aeroplane, the Patriarchs of Constantinople, who are organizing that Council, have all been carefully vetted by the US State Department with its ‘Western values’. We who live in the West, manning the outposts and oases of the Russian Orthodox world in the Western spiritual desert, know exactly the ravages of the slavery of ‘Western values’, which are the very opposite of Christian values. That is why we stand firmly against them, for, together with our free Patriarchate, we stand for Christ. If ecumenists and liberals try to infiltrate the Church, we shall fight to the last against them to protect the freedom of our Patriarchate! We fear not, for Christ is Risen!