Author Archives: Father Andrew

A Christmas 2023 Q and A

Q: Why is the Church so opposed to sects and sectarianism?

A: By definition, sects consist of those who have cut themselves off from the Church in schisms, because they consider that they are better than, superior to, the Church. In other words, they lack love for others, therefore, expressing hatred. How can you not be against hatred? We can see this very clearly with Protestant sects like Calvinism and Lutheranism. Always negative and doom-laden, they condemn and punish others and enjoy doing this and priggishly justify it. For example, they launched witch-hunts, murdering innocent women.

And we can see the same tendencies with the old ritualists, Greek old calendarists and Russian right-wing émigré groups, whose hatred is palpable. They love to denounce, threaten, intimidate and condemn, telling their victims that they ‘will go to hell’. Such sects always split up into new sects, instead of remaining together, and then they condemn each other to hell! What charming people! However, we should beware that sectarianism as a spirit can spread inside parts of the Church, which are not yet sects. Cutting off from others out of pride, which they call ‘walling off’, causes a lack of communion and that is one of the first and most dangerous warning signs of future sects.

Q: What in your view caused the downfall of ROCOR and does it have any future?

A: Without any doubt this was due to its growing exclusivist political ideology, which, ironically, evolved after signing the Act of Canonical Communion in Moscow in 2007. In desperate search for a self-differentiating identity to stop itself merging with the rest of the Russian Church and its missions, which was its real and inevitable destiny, the elite of ROCOR began to make out that they were the only ‘pure’ and ‘canonical’ part of the Russian Church, rebaptising all, yet all the while pretending to be in communion with it and using this mythical claim to justify themselves. And yet its Americans have openly asked Russia to withdraw its forces from the Ukraine and condemned Russia for re-creating the Russian Union of Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus. They are imposters, Russophobes, only secretly, behind a screen of pseudo-Russian pretence, Russian with an American accent, actually only American and in love with money. They do not think as Orthodox, but have put their American nationality above real Orthodoxy, of which they are embarrassingly ignorant.

This ideology, derived in part from extremist and poorly-educated converts from Calvinist/Lutheran/ Evangelical backgrounds, expressed ethnic hatred for non-converts and non-ultra-conservative Russians, instead of pastoral care for all. It can be said that wolves in shepherd’s clothing destroyed ROCOR. Interestingly, we refugees from the implacable neocon bullies of ROCOR and their cultish sectarian schism and love of money, received and today receive plenty of support behind the scenes from the Russian Church in Moscow, which is waiting for the conflict in the Ukraine to end in order to sort out the ROCOR schism once and for all. Only the very isolated ROCOR remains hostile and in denial. In a word, greedy and cultish sectarianism took hold of ROCOR. Catastrophe was the result.

ROCOR will eventually split into two, the authentic and pro-Russian part in Western Europe going directly under the Moscow Patriarchate, perhaps into separate deaneries, as Moscow has suggested, in North America and Australia going into a Metropolia under the now Archbishop Gabriel, who is Russian-Australian. The Anglo-American Protestant crazies will go off into some ‘True Russian Orthodox Church’ fantasy old calendarist cult and sect.

Q: In Oxford a mixed Greek-Russian-Serb parish failed, splitting into three different groups. Why does a mixed Russian-Ukrainian-Moldovan-Romanian-English parish in Colchester seem to work?

A: Splits always happen because of politics. All three groups in Oxford, and I knew them all, confessed ideologies. The Serbs were post-1945 royalist emigres who believed in restoring Serbia. When the church there was consecrated in 1973, the Serbian people never even took part, despite the presence of their bishop. As for the Greek bishops, they confessed the ideology that the whole Diaspora must submit to them. And the right-wing Russian academic parishioners, who came from wealthy or aristocratic backgrounds looked down on Greeks or Serbs who ran restaurants or worked in garages. In other words, all three groups confessed political ideologies, which prevented them from loving one another.

I have always said to our parishioners that we leave our passports at the Church door. Inside the Church we only have spiritual passports, on which are written just two words: Orthodox Christian. The rest we keep outside.

Q: Why is there a problem with converts in the Church?

A: Converts generally represent zeal without knowledge. This is unlike cradle Orthodox, who often represent knowledge without zeal. Only when zeal and knowledge come together, is there wisdom, that is, discernment. The Church needs both and above all wisdom. In other words, the problem with converts is only if they remain converts, failing to channel their zeal and so integrating the Church.

Q: Is Orthodoxy the same as conservatism?

A: Most definitely not. The last Tsar developed a system of free education, healthcare and labour protection. These were the achievements of Imperial Russia, despite the fact that the Communists tried to take credit for them, just as they tried to take credit for industrialisation and electrification. Today President Putin also stands for social justice in the same way. And all Orthodox peoples desire this. The Orthodox way is very different from conservative right-wingery, which is represented by oligarchs who are the Western elitist way. Read how the first Orthodox lived in the Acts of the Apostles. No capitalism there!

Conservatism in itself is not necessarily Christian at all. For example, it very quickly develops into moralism and then phariseeism. That is not Christian. Christians condemn the sin, but love the sinner. Thus, it is fine to be against abortion, but do you treat pregnant mothers who have been deserted by the father of their baby with compassion and understanding or not? Pure conservatives condemn them because they want to justify themselves and feel their hearts swell with pride.

A couple of decades ago I met some traditionalist Catholics. They liked our liturgy (‘a real mass, much better than the rubbish we have’), liked our values, pro-family, anti-abortion etc. But then they came to know that our clergy are married and that we allow birth control. And they saw in us liberals. In reality, we are above both conservatism and liberalism. We follow the Tradition.

Q: Why are women not clergy in the Orthodox Church?

A: Women are far too important to be clergy. Who will sing?! The whole idea that women should be clergy comes from clericalism (the crazy and deformed idea that the clergy are more important than laypeople) and from lack of veneration for the Mother of God. This at once leads to the Protestant lack of respect for women. This lack of respect is now the norm in Western societies and this is why Western women are obliged to behave like men and work like men to the detriment of their health, well-being and the next generation.

Q: How do you deal with narcissists?

A: You flee them. Fr Sophrony taught me to beware of them in the early 1980s, for narcissists always act by psychological transfer. In other words, as Fr Sophrony said about Chadwick, the Cambridge academic ‘theologian’, who condemned the Church Fathers, when they accuse others of grave errors, they are talking about themselves.

Q: Do you believe in conspiracy theories?

A: Nearly all conspiracy theories exist because people don’t believe either in the human capacity for stupidity or in the correcting Providence of God. I believe in both.

Q: Are all Orthodox services fixed, always the same?

A: They are largely the same, fixed, with the exception of memorial services (panikhidas/parastases) and funeral services. These two latter always seem to be done differently, unlike, for example, baptisms, weddings, or the eucharist, vespers, matins etc.

Q: Is the eucharistic fast from midnight absolute?

A: For those who can keep it, yes. Thus, pregnant mothers, children up until the age of seven and (usually elderly) people who must take medication are excused and are allowed to drink something and even eat a small amount of bread, if necessary – as it sometimes is with certain medicines. In the Middle East clergy usually drink coffee before the Liturgy. This is to do with the climate and it is their custom (I have seen an Antiochian bishop doing it) and they consider that this is fasting, because it is not eating.

In Western countries there is a problem with fasting because liturgies here start late, sometimes as late as 10.00 am or 11.00 and it is difficult to fast. In Orthodox countries liturgies start at 7.00 am, 8.00 and 9.00 and it is easier. However, in the Romanian church in east London, they start at 5.00 am because Anglicans need to use their church at 9.00.

Q: Will Ukraine join NATO and the EU?

A: The question is irrelevant. Soon there will be no Ukraine to join NATO, no NATO to be joined, and no EU to be joined.

Q: Who was St Cedd?

A: Cedd (+ 664) is the Apostle of Essex, the kingdom of the Saxons who lived in the East. He is then the first bishop and patron-saint of Essex, the brother by blood or by monasticism, of St Chad, whose name means ‘protector’. Indeed, St Cedd’s name is pronounced Ched (not Ked or Sed, which are errors) and in other words this ‘Ched’ is probably just another form of Chad. They may even have been twin brothers, which would explain this. Most of St Cedd’s seventh-century cathedral still stands intact, on the marshes where the old Roman fort of Othona stood, at Bradwell-on-Sea on the Essex coast.

Q: Is the existence of different approaches of Western peoples to Orthodoxy acceptable?

A: Of course. We have Greek, Serbian Romanian, Georgian, Arab, Russian. They are all different, but all in themselves have valid approaches to Orthodoxy. As for Western countries, shaped especially by the last 500 years of history of culture, there are different emphases. For example, French Orthodox have an intellectual approach, the Germans emphasise rules (the Typicon was the first book they translated!), the Scandinavians and the Swiss love order, the Italians stress the aesthetic and the artistic, the English the moral, the Spanish the contemplative, the Australians the pragmatic. These approaches can all work, providing that they are not exaggerated and are integral parts of the common Orthodox Tradition.

 

 

The New White Russians

We are the New White Russians.

Unlike the Old White Russians of over 100 years ago, who were often only nominally Orthodox and sometimes even atheists, often Russian nationalists and opposed to the supranational Tsar, loved money more than their country and were morally decadent, we are Orthodox Christians, we are of various nationalities and live by traditional values and morals. We come from a time different to that where we live, but not necessarily from a place different to that where we live. You can recognise us because:

  1. We go to church and lead Church lives.
  2. We have strong links with the churches and monasteries in the lands once known as the Russian Empire and in lands beyond, indeed in all those lands in which we recognise the spirit of ‘Rus’.
  3. We are for the Tsar, whose martyred Family is our model and we seek the restoration of the Orthodox monarchy.
  4. We have family lives, believe in traditional male/female roles and have no confusion about who we are.
  5. Although we are social conservatives, we are for social justice for all, living in the realities of the here and now, not in some imaginary or idealised past.
  6. We are patriotic sovereignists, not money-grasping globalists, who exploit the peoples of the world.
  7. We respect others who live around us, but that does not mean that we agree with them, we simply live alongside them as good neighbours.
  8. We do not drink much, if any, alcohol, we do not smoke, take drugs, gamble, or have tattoos or piercings.
  9. Although we are not rich, we dress traditionally and rather well, at least compared to the local populations.
  10. We are waiting not for the dissolution of the USSR or for the appearance of the Russian Federation, which both happened over 30 years ago, but for the Resurrection of Orthodox Rus’ and the reconstitution of Her Church, without the errors of the past. Our Russia has thrown off the nominalism and social injustices of the Imperial period which began in 1721 and thrown off the violent persecutions of the alien Western atheism imported to create the USSR. Now Russia is fighting for the restoration of Rus’ and the consumerist Western companies which came to exploit Russia and her peoples in the 1990s are leaving Russia en masse. Russia can be left with the best of all those past periods, but above all with her more ancient history, with Orthodox Rus, wherein lie her roots and her future.

 

 

 

The Russian Orthodox Church After the Ukraine

Introduction: After the Special Military Operation

One of the outcomes of the ten-year old American war against Russia in the Ukraine will inevitably be great changes in the Russian Orthodox Church, often known as the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’. The first outcome could be precisely to change the name of the Moscow Patriarchate, which is a temporary Soviet name, perhaps to the ‘Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus’, which refers back to the seventeenth century history of Russia. New Jerusalem is a restored historic monastic centre with an international background just to the west of Moscow. Such a name change would be the final step in the Patriarchate losing its often unpleasant, centralising Soviet associations and Moscow-centric image.

The second outcome could be to restore to the priesthood and diaconate those who were ‘defrocked’ over the last three years, either because they had political disagreements with the Russian State, or because their bishops were schismatics, thieves, perverts, womanisers or persecutors of truth-telling clergy. Before being ‘defrocked’, they had been forced to transfer as refugees to the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople or to the Romanian Orthodox Church, or elsewhere. (Why such bishops are not defrocked for committing such serious misdeeds – priests would be defrocked automatically if they did – is a problem that needs to be addressed by all the Local Churches. Recently we saw yet another example of episcopal impunity in the case of a Metropolitan Joseph of the Antiochian Church in North America. Convicted of such above crimes, he was simply retired!)

The third outcome would be a further and more radical restructuring of the Russian Orthodox Church, in order to take account of the real post-Soviet, international world. The possible forms taken by such a restructuring, overdue by more than 30 years, are outlined below.

Autonomisation and Internationalisation

After 2008 the Russian Orthodox Church went through an initial process of restructuring, which can be called ‘Metropolitanisation’, that is, Localisation, the establishment of Local Metropolias covering large geographical areas, each led by a Metropolitan with an archbishop and several diocesan bishops who help him. This has led to the consecration of over 200 new bishops in the Church. This was a move away from the previous 300 years, when there were few bishops and great centralisation.

It is our suggestion that there should be a further stage in this process, at last recognising ecclesiastically that the old unitary State of the Soviet Union long ago ceased to exist and is now divided into fifteen different, independent republics. Such a further move away from the old centralisation could be called ‘Autonomisation’. This means the granting of Autonomy (Independence) to Russian Orthodox in various ex-Soviet and Non-Soviet countries and groups of countries outside the Russian Federation.

At present Autonomy means that a Church is independent, except that the Mother Church has the right to select the head (Metropolitan) of the Autonomous Church, that all the clergy in the Autonomous Church must commemorate the Patriarch of the Mother Church and that the Autonomous Church must obtain its myrrh from the Mother Church. However, Autonomy could be redefined only to mean that the Mother Church selects the head of that Church. The two second conditions could be made voluntary. Thus, commemoration of the Patriarch by bishops or priests would be voluntary and each Autonomous Church would have the possibility to make its own myrrh, if it so wished.

Some may ask why would only Autonomy be granted and not Autocephaly (full independence)? This is because Autocephaly is only possible on five conditions. These are: If an Autonomous Church is not on a territory shared with other Local Churches, if it is large enough (it should have at least four bishops), if it is in politically stable conditions with fixed borders, if it is spiritually mature, that is, has many parishes and an established monastic life, and, above all, if the majority of its members wants such Autocephaly. (Autocephalisation on territories shared with other Orthodox has to be worked out at a Council of all the Local Churches, though it can come much sooner on non-shared territories).

Two Autonomous Churches already exist within the Russian Orthodox Church. These are the small Church of Japan and the tiny Church of China, both established because of the total political independence of Japan and China from Russia. In order of geographical proximity, ten more Autonomous Churches, recognising international realities, could be:

  1. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This would cover the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox population in the New Ukraine (Malorossija?), now under Metr Onufry of Kiev. This would be the old Ukraine, but probably minus the nine new eastern and southern provinces: Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhie, Kherson, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev, Odessa, which would revert to Russia (five already have done so), and minus the four new provinces in the west: two, Lvov and Ivano-Frankovsk, going back to Poland, one, Chernovtsy, going back to Romania, and one, Zakarpatie, going back to Hungary. In other words, the New Ukraine would basically be the historic, pre-Soviet Ukraine.

However, this Autonomous Ukrainian Church, covering less than half the territory of the post-1922 Soviet Ukraine, could also be responsible for two Exarchates. These would be all the remaining Russian churches in Moldova (most churches there are joining the Romanian Church, perhaps only 15% will end up remaining under the Russian Church) and all the churches in Hungary, which, if the border change happens, would nearly all be from a former part of the Ukraine. Given its size and recent history, this Ukrainian Orthodox Church could probably soon become Autocephalous, if it is desired by clergy and people, once it has found political stability, just like the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches, which received their Autocephaly from the Russian Church in the last century.

  1. The Belarussian Orthodox Church. This would replace the present Belarussian Exarchate and cover the Belarussian Orthodox population in Belarus. Given its size, this Belarussian Orthodox Church could probably soon become Autocephalous.
  2. The Baltic Orthodox Church. This would cover the Russian Orthodox population in four countries, that is, the three Baltic countries and Finland.
  3. The Central Asian Orthodox Church (CAOC). This would cover the large Russian Orthodox population in the five republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
  4. The Western European Orthodox Church (WEOC). This would cover the Russian Orthodox population in the twenty-one countries below. It would include the Paris-based Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of Western Europe and the non-schismatic churches of ROCOR. This group used to be canonically Russian Orthodox, but sadly, after entering into canonical communion with Moscow, it first rejected the Metropolitanisation or Localisation which the Patriarch and all of us wanted, as a result going into schism (from the Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of Western Europe), by introducing the scandalous practice of rebaptising other Orthodox, thus totally discrediting itself and becoming a sect. As we suggested in 1988, the WEOC, centred in Paris, could consist of eight archdioceses and have a considerable number of diocesan metropolitans, archbishops or bishops in the following groups of countries, according to language and culture:

Gallia: France and French-speaking Southern Belgium, Luxembourg and Monaco (centred in Paris).

Germania: Germany and Austria (centred in Berlin).

Iberia: Spain, Portugal, and Andorra (centred in Madrid).

Italia: Italy, San Marino and Malta (centred in Rome).

Iona (Isles of the North Atlantic): The British Isles and Ireland (centred in London).

Scandinavia: Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland (centred in Stockholm)

Netherlandia: The Netherlands and Northern Belgium (centred in Amsterdam).

Helvetica: Switzerland and Liechtenstein (centred in Geneva).

  1. The African Orthodox Church (AOC). Centred in Kampala, this would cover the Russian Orthodox population of the whole African Continent.
  2. The Northern American Orthodox Church (NAOC). This would cover the USA, Canada, Greenland, Bermuda and St Pierre et Miquelon and include the churches of the former OCA, whose tomos of autocephaly will have to be revoked anyway. This revocation will be necessary because, after over fifty years and despite the best intentions and efforts of many, the territorially ill-defined OCA has not been successful in bringing all Orthodox in Northern America together, which is what it was created for. As it is on shared territory, that Soviet-era tomos has never been accepted as canonical by the majority of Orthodox there. In this it has not been helped by a narrow ideology and grave pastoral errors made in the past. There is one Metropolitan in the Russian Orthodox Church, at present much under-used, whose diplomatic and linguistic talents could be of vital import here in solving the problem of this heroic, pioneering, but failed attempt to create a Local Church. Unlike the old OCA, the NAOC would also include churches which are at present under the Moscow Patriarchate and the non-schismatic churches of ROCOR. This group used to be canonically Russian Orthodox, but sadly, after entering into canonical communion with Moscow, it first rejected the Metropolitanisation or Localisation which the Patriarch and all of us wanted, as a result going into schism (from the Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of Western Europe), by introducing the scandalous practice of rebaptising other Orthodox, thus totally discrediting itself and becoming a sect.
  3. The Latin American and Caribbean Orthodox Church (LACOC). This would cover all Russian Orthodox in Latin America and the Caribbean, with populations speaking Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and Dutch, as well as local languages, especially in Central America.
  4. The South-East Asian Orthodox Church (SEAOC). This would replace the present international Exarchate of the same name.
  5. The Oceanian Orthodox Church (OOC). This would cover all Russian Orthodox in Oceania.

Conclusion

A Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus would consist of one Mother-Church, covering the population of the Russian Federation, with a Family or Confederation of Twelve Autonomous Churches. In due course, Autocephalisation on non-shared territories could follow, but only if the five necessary conditions (see above) were met. As we have said above, Autocephalisation on shared territories would have to be worked out at a Council of all the Local Churches and would require great diplomatic skills and an supranational, and not nationalist consciousness.

Delaying the Apocalypse: The Implosion of the West and the World of the Future

It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.

Henry Kissinger

The Beginning: The End

The Western Political Establishment and its vassal media still live in their ‘Ukrainian Fantasy’. This was scripted in Washington and starred an actor and clown who had already played and practised as President of the Ukraine in a TV serial, also scripted by Washington. After 24 February 2022 Russia could have conquered the Ukraine in two weeks. It did not – it never wanted to. Instead, it sent a small group of armed forces to intimidate the Kiev regime into negotiating, which is what it did want. Russia was never defeated, it relieved the military pressure because after five weeks, Kiev had signed the agreement to be neutral, long-desired by the Russians, and to grant Russians in the Ukraine their human rights and to stop massacring them. However, the criminal Washington elite through its messenger boy Johnson forbade the Ukraine to make peace, thus bringing 500,000 Ukrainian dead and 625,000 seriously wounded so far. The West wanted to keep the Ukraine as a military bastion, a battering ram against Russia, a tool to create regime change in Russia and make it into a colony ready for asset stripping, as it had been in the 1990s. And also to make the rest of Europe entirely dependent on the USA, cutting it off from Russian natural resources, oil, gas, grain and fertiliser.

So the West, on orders from that same Washington elite, began supplying tens of billions of dollars of arms, tens of billions of dollars to pay to run the Ukrainian State from day to day and still more billions to pay for tens of thousands of Ukrainians to receive very basic military training. The scriptwriters have now had to rewrite their script (‘the narrative’), for the Ukraine has been routed by the far superior Russian forces, unlike in their original Fantasy. So now they have written the ‘Frozen War’ chapter of the Fantasy, that the Russians will be willing to negotiate with the losing side, granting the losers all that they want, so that Biden can be re-elected next November despite Kabul II. This too is delusional. Russia is not going to negotiate again. That was already done in spring 2022, when Washington forced Kiev to renege on its agreement, as peace had not been in the script. Russia now trusts none of those who have made themselves into enemies of Russia, neither Kiev, nor the EU, nor the US, so it will annex everything that is really the Ukraine, that is, everything except a Non-Ukrainian sliver in the west which belongs to other countries. Washington is now disposing of the Ukraine like a rusty tool. For Washington the Ukraine is a failure which has let it down.

The Present Tragedy

At this very moment, the world is clearly the victim of the disease of the ‘chosen people syndrome’, of the zealot sectarianism of Zionism. This spiritual disease contaminates Zionist Jews (as opposed to anti-Zionist Jews), Evangelicals, Calvinists and Lutherans (the ‘I have been saved’ sects). Some of these latter have even infiltrated into parts of the Orthodox Church in the USA (‘we are the True Church and so have the right to threaten you and bully you’) and made them authoritarian and schismatic, despite the moderation of their Mother Churches. For the sake of this sectarian exceptionalism, American bombs are being dropped by ultra-intolerant occupying Israelis, backed by US Evangelicals, who are massacring tens of thousands of Palestinians and thousands of their children. And because of this ideology nearly a thousand Ukrainian soldiers have vainly been dying in the Ukraine every day for the last 660 days. The hands of the US and the EU elites are dripping with blood.

This ideology of intolerant sectarian zealotry is inherently disrespectful of the freedom of others. It is therefore the enemy of the broad, multipolar, polycentric world, whose age we have entered, despite the opposition to it of the Western Establishments. The adoption of sectarian exceptionalism by the West is simply a repetition of the ‘divide and rule’ ideology of Pagan Rome, so well imitated by the British Empire and by the American Empire (the situation of the US Empire is now very similar to that of the British Empire in 1939, as its stands on the brink of its fall). Moreover, US exceptionalism has suicidally been adopted by unelected EU commissars, who are destroying the prosperity of the EU countries. The solution to this is a new concert of the nations, a harmony which would make the continuation of the Western ‘divide and rule’ ideology impossible. At present its ideology survives only by punitive threats, which separates the globalist cabal of the West in a schism from the rest of humanity.

The Collapse of the American Empire

The American Empire was founded out of the ruins of the British Empire, whose bankrupted mother-country has been occupied by US forces since 1942. However, the British Empire was only the most successful of many overseas European empires, such as the French, the Italian, the German, the Belgian, the Dutch, the Spanish and the Portuguese. In 1945 the US decided to exploit the downfall of all of them, posing as ‘the world’s policeman’, thus becoming hated by all. Like the British Empire (1), the American Empire was long in its making, but its downfall has been swift, especially since the Ukraine in 2014.

Having reached its apogee in 1945, the US became hubristic, thinking it could do everything and would never repeat the mistakes of the British. Thus, there came the US war in Korea, which with its millions of victims turned into an unwinnable frozen war. In 1975, after twenty years of fighting and millions of victims, the US lost its futile war in Vietnam, then also after twenty futile years the war in Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban taking back power. Then there were the US disasters bringing death, destruction and chaos to Iraq, Libya and Syria, which it called ‘the Arab Spring’, but which in fact was the Arab Winter.

The Ukraine

Having orchestrated a coup d’etat and overthrown the democratically-elected government in the Ukraine in 2014 and then armed the new Nazified regime to the teeth, in December 2023 the US dumped the Ukraine, breaking all its promises and betraying its puppets there. The US illegal sanctions of Russia had backfired, its destruction of Nordstream had brought US-controlled Germany into recession. With Eastern Europe now blocking the Ukrainian borders, a bankrupt Washington defeated, and the EU denying that the Ukraine is an ally, the Ukraine today is, unsurprisingly, bitterly anti-Western.

The US abuse of the Ukraine as a battering ram to destroy Russia has failed miserably. The future of the Russian Federation, the New Ukraine (or whatever it will be called) and Belarus is as a Union State of three in one. Moreover, it will be a Union State which faces east and south, not west, for the West has betrayed it again and again and so destroyed all trust in itself. This threefold Union State was prophesied decades ago in the song, ‘My Russkie’ by Zhanna Bichevskaja, with lyrics like: ‘Discussions with the enemy are over’; ‘Risen up with crosses and icons, we shall go and crown the Russian Tsar’ (2).

The Meaning of BRICS

All of this is against the background of a China, which has outstripped the deindustrialised and highly indebted USA by 20% economically, a Russia which has outstripped the US diplomatically and militarily by 100%, and an India, Africa and Latin America which no longer wish to be exploited as Western colonies. The US has also lost the support of its former allies, inherited from the British, in the Middle East (West Asia). The US backing of Israeli genocide of Palestinians was the last straw for them. Thus, on 6 December, the ‘isolated’ (!) President Putin was greeted as a Russian Tsar in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Clearly, Russia and those countries are preparing something big, which must surely concern oil and gas and further steps in the process of dedollarisation. After this triumph, the Iranian President flew to Moscow to sign an agreement. There is now trade unity stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Indian Ocean. The Russian-founded BRICS, which already outstrips the G7, will on 1 January become BRICS +. Next October, under the Russian Presidency, BRICS + will consider the applications of 40 countries to join it at its summit in Kazan. The Non-Western world has united – against the tired old Western world.

The Liberation of Eurasia

This final catastrophic defeat of the Western world in the ultra-corrupt Ukraine (even more corrupt than the unaudited EU), a world which had foolishly backed it to the hilt, is a once in a millennium event. It means that the US and all its G7 and NATO vassals such as the EU and the UK, indeed the whole Western world, have lost all moral respect and are now imploding. As the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, said on 15 November 2023: ‘Wherever Americans come to a region of the planet, they bring chaos’. This includes in Europe and in the US, for Americans are the first victims of their own elite.

The US has only ever managed to control islands in the Eurasian heartland – Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand (the latter two of which it is already losing to China) – and peninsulas – Korea, Vietnam (lost after twenty years in 1975), Western and Central Europe, and a tiny strip of coastland in the Middle East, called Israel. All these fragile toeholds will soon disappear from US control and already are disappearing, though the last to disappear will be the North-West Eurasian peninsula of Western and Central Europe, conquered and occupied by the US between 1942 and 1992.

The Future of Europe

After the defeat of the West in the Ukraine, the US-run military alliance of NATO will be dissolved. Why does it even still exist? The USSR no longer exists. NATO is an aggressive relic of the 1940s. It is already divided, with member-countries like Hungary and Turkey highly critical of it, and even the last US President declaring that it had outlived its purpose – and it also costs the US far too much. As it has catastrophically failed to prevent the Russian victory in the Ukraine, its money wasted and its antiquated but much-vaunted and poor-quality military equipment burning on the steppes, NATO has no future.

In a US-liberated Europe, NATO’s political and economic wing, the EU, will at the same time also be dissolved. Some kind of co-operative European organisations should replace it. Perhaps the ex-Catholic Western part, the ex-Protestant part and the Orthodox part (Romania, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Moldova, Macedonia, Montenegro and Cyprus) with the traditional Catholic part (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia) should become Confederations. All three Confederalised groups could then join BRICS, which is clearly the future as a worldwide body for political co-operation, trade, peace and prosperity.

The Church and Christianity

Although it can be said that the whole tragic adventure of the Western world dates back to Pagan Rome, in fact it only began with its desire to revive and imitate that Pagan Rome. That process was gradual, but by 1054 its desire had culminated in action and at once set Western Europe against the Church and therefore against the Scriptures, deviating it and isolating it from the Church. After a near-millennial process, Western Europe and above all its greatest colony in North America have now been brought to a state of spiritual and moral decadence, equalled only by that of Pagan Rome just before it fell.

The decadence of Pagan Rome is being repeated. We conclude that we should be careful about whom we take as our model and imitate. The remnants of Christianity in Western and Central Europe survive, if only just. There is talk that the present highly controversial Pope of Rome is the last Roman Catholic Pope and that most Protestant groupings will have died out by 2050 (3). Certainly, they are dying out, having been diluted into their child of Secularism. By 2054 it could be over and the remnants of Christianity in Western and Central Europe – and elsewhere – will be absorbed back into the Church (4).

The Theology of Multipolarity: Sovereignists versus Globalists

The world proposed by the Western elites is unipolar. This owes its origin to the ideology of universal union, which first appeared in a mature form in centralising Roman Catholicism. However, this ideology had already begun to evolve at the end of the eighth century under Charlemagne, most of whose advisers had been taught by Jewish intellectuals in Spain. It was Charlemagne who wanted to revive or renew (‘renovatio’) Pagan Rome, invented the self-justifying myth of what became known as the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, although it was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. This ideology of universal union was deeply unChristian, inasmuch as Orthodox Christianity is not an ideology of a universal union, but Trinitarian, which is the model for unity in diversity. It is then no surprise to learn that Charlemagne decried Orthodox Christianity as ‘heretical’ – just as its successor ‘Empire’, the anti-Holy European Union, enforcing secularism, denounces Orthodoxy as ‘heretical’.

It is then precisely the Trinitarian model of Orthodox Christianity which is at the root of contemporary multipolarity. For multipolarity stems from the Orthodox Church, which is a Confederation of Local Churches, not one single Universal Church. Whenever one single Local Orthodox Church, like Rome, Constantinople or Moscow, has tried to dominate the others, it has always ended in other groups, the Non-Western ruling class and Non-Westerners, Non-Greeks or Non-Russians, leaving them and gaining their freedom from oppressive and racist centralism. Similarly, in secular life, the Fascistic ideology of universal union, unipolarity, is promulgated by Non-Christian Western elites. Their ideology is ultimate Trotskyite, for Trotsky, also an atheist Jew, also wanted universal union. Theologically, it is universal union which will bring Antichrist, the One World Dictator, to power. Thus, multipolarity, derived from Trinitarian theology, is delaying the Apocalypse, for it opposes Oneworldism.

The End: The Beginning

Born and bred in Eastern England, my life has been patterned by the divisions in the Russian Orthodox Church, into which its infighting exile groups in the Western world fell after 1917. The smaller Paris part, consisting largely of Westernised aristocrats from Saint Petersburg who had already betrayed the Tsar in 1917, fell into Protestant modernism. Firstly, we had to fight against this left-side deviation from Orthodoxy in England, where the Knightsbridge/Oxford group was strongly coloured by Paris modernism, leading indeed to a serious division in 2006, when some 50% of the group left it to continue in their modernism without hindrance. Secondly, we had to fight for Orthodoxy in the Parisian itself. This combat was successful in 2018, although nearly 50% of the group also left it to continue in their Paris modernism without hindrance. However, the largest part of the exiled Russians was called ROCOR, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. This continually fell into deviations from the right-hand side, leading to extremist right-wing nationalism, ritualism, self-justifying and self-righteous phariseeism and schism, a sort of Old Ritualism or Russian old calendarism, made far worse by Protestant neophytes to it in the USA.

Then there came the post-Soviet problems in the huge Russian Church itself, based in Moscow. These were caused by a Statist mentality and dated far back, over 300 years, to Imperial Russian times, of which the Soviet Imperial period was just a continuation, though a hundred times worse. Though some Russian exiles blamed all Moscow’s problems on ‘Sergianism’, the name for the Soviet deviation of loyalty by supposedly Christian bishops to the militant atheist State of Stalin, the selfsame exiles in the 1930s and 1940s had supported the Brown Nazis, calling themselves ‘White’ Russians! They too were going to ‘save the Church’ by supporting another atheist State, just as many of them had supported compromises by the pre-1917 Russian State, which is why they had for the most part betrayed the reforming Tsar Nicholas, who had long ago rejected those compromises, right-wing extremism (one of the extremists had helped murder a servant of the Tsar) and civil war. Today the administration of the Church, centred in the post-Soviet Russian Federation, is chronically disunited, as its leadership has taken a national, indeed nationalist, line, when its destiny is to be international, whether in the former Soviet Union, in the Western world, in Asia and in Africa.

With the little-known network of real White Russian Orthodox in Eastern England, with whom I have lived, thought and prayed all these many long decades, we await the day of freedom. In villages and towns in Eastern England, in Kedington, Felixstowe, Helmingham, Polstead, Withermarsh Green, Hoxne, Bury St Edmunds, Kersey and a mysterious village in mid-Suffolk, in Rivenhall, Chalkney, Skye Green and Abbess Roding in Essex, in Ely, Witchford, Swaffham Prior in Cambridgeshire, in Reedham, Oxborough, Hevingham and Sheringham in Norfolk, we have been waiting. We know that there will be no freedom until our White Tsar comes. We are outside all three Russian groups, for we will have nothing more to do with mafias, whom we have seen come and go, for we know that everything will come aright despite them. They understand little of any of this, for they are too concerned with their own persons, their properties and their income. When the new Tsar does come, he will cleanse the Church of all the oath-breakers, sectarians, the impure and unrepentant, who wound the Body of Christ through their unfaithfulness and cause so much harm. The day he comes will be the Beginning, for so we shall delay the Apocalypse and gain more time for repentance for all.

 

Notes:

  1. See for example:

https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191737541.timeline.0001#:~:text=British%20empire%3A%201583%20%2D%201997%20%2D%20Oxford%20Reference

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZMtZ3H3C3w

 

У нас с врагом окончена дискуссия,

Мы вновь воспрянем, к подвигам горя.

Россия, Украина, Белоруссия –

Племён славянских три богатыря!

 

Наполнив мир малиновыми звонами,

Взойдёт победы Русская Заря,

И мы, восстав с крестами и иконами,

Пойдём венчать Российского Царя.

 

Мы – Русские, мы – Русские, мы – Русские,

Покаемся – поднимемся с колен!

  1. https://covenant.livingchurch.org/2021/01/11/the-episcopal-church-in-2050/
  1. And how would millions of Roman Catholics be received into the Church in one go? In the same way as hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholics were received into the Church in Belarus and the Ukraine in the 19th and 20th centuries: by confession and communion.

 

 

The Seven Ages of Rus’ and its Future after the Fall of President Zelensky

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2023/12/30/ot_rusi_do_rusi__ot_rasputina_do_putina

Introduction: East Slavdom

Over a millennium ago the West Slav peoples, Sorbs, Czechs, Poles and Slovaks, were gradually forced under German pressure to become proto-Roman Catholics, nowhere so obviously as in Moravia, where Germans forced out Orthodox missionaries. On the other hand, the South Slavs – Bulgarians and Macedonians, Serbs and Serbian Montenegrins, though not the Croats and Slovenes, who again under German pressure had to become proto-Roman Catholics – are members of the Orthodox Church.

Three times more numerous than the West and South Slavs combined, with vast lands, at present called the Russian Federation, Belarus and the Ukraine and known in history as Rus’, the East Slavs are also members of the Orthodox Church. We can identify seven ages in the history of these East Slav lands, or Rus’, of which the seventh age has only just begun. These seven ages are:

  1. Pagan Rus’: – 988

The East Slavs were nature-worshipping pagans until 988, when the first of them were baptised in Kiev by Orthodox Christian missionaries from Bulgaria, Constantinople, Moravia, Hungary and Carpatho-Rus (most of which is for now called Transcarpathia). This event is known as ‘The Baptism of Rus’’. However, in reality the baptism of the whole East Slav people took generations and paganism continued in superstitious vestiges for centuries.

  1. Kievan Rus’: 988-1283

In order to survive, the then main East Slav principality, called Kievan Rus’, had to resist both eastern and western, both Tartar-Mongol and Western Roman Catholic, aggression. The authority of the Grand Princes of Kiev, ‘the mother of the cities of Rus’’, was also undermined by the attacks of treacherous princes from different principalities around Kiev, who with their followers vied for power in fratricidal struggles.

After nearly 300 years, in the mid-13thcentury Kievan Rus’ was finished off by the invasions of the Tartars and Mongols. From there East Slav power was transferred to northern Rus’, to Novgorod and above all to the better protected Muscovy, named after the trading waterway of the Moskva River and its centre in Moscow (meaning precisely ‘waterway’).

  1. Muscovite Rus’ 1283-1682

Geographically, Muscovy, which after being ruled by Grand Princes became a Tsardom under its first Tsar, Ivan IV (reigned 1530-1584), was relatively small in size. However, it began to expand northwards to the shores of the White Sea and then eastwards through Kazakhstan into Siberia, and later would reach the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The Muscovite ideals were ‘Holy Rus’ and ‘the Third Rome’, the ideals of incarnating holiness among the East Slavs and so being a bastion of the True Faith. In order to survive against so many enemies from Western aggression, especially from Poles and Lithuanians, and with a change of ruling house from Rurikids to Romanovs in 1613, which was forced on it by treasonous boyars (aristocrats) and foreign invasion, Muscovite Rus’ became isolated.

After nearly 400 years, from the 1650s on, this isolation led to a split from the Russian Orthodox Church with the formation of apocalyptic Old Ritualist sects. They wanted to keep old rituals, out of keeping with the wider Orthodox Church, seeing themselves as the True Church. The Old Ritualists, often led by merchants, wanted isolation and did not want to know about the majority of Orthodox. Despite this extreme, and the extreme of treasonous boyars, who conversely had become obsessed with Polish and Italian influences coming in from the far west of the present Ukraine, which had been forced into becoming Roman Catholic by the Poles, the Tsardom of Muscovy evolved into an Empire.

  1. Imperial Russia: 1682-1917

Although Russia was not proclaimed an Empire until 1721, in reality Imperial Russia began in 1682 with the reign of Peter I (‘the Great’). Though he did much for Russia’s secular greatness and power, he also denigrated the Church, abolishing the Russian Patriarchate and subjecting the Church to a Protestant-style Minister of Religion, and generally promoted Western influences, such as serfdom. This Imperial period led to the great expansion of Rus’ to the west, taking part of largely Jewish eastern Poland and all Finland, to the Pacific east and to the Muslim south. Hence the need to change its name from ‘Rus’’ to ‘Russia’, in order to include all these Non-East Slavs. The Non-East Slav peoples were controlled by a centralised administration in Saint Petersburg, which caused dissent among them. The end of this period saw rapid industrialisation, making Russia into the fifth largest economy in the world and well on its way to becoming the first, with high levels of literacy among the young.

Seeing the appalling decadence and hedonism of the upper class in Peter I’s capital of Saint Petersburg, its last Tsar, Nicholas II (1868-1918), looked back with nostalgia precisely to pre-Imperial Rus’ and especially to the father of Peter I, Tsar Alexis (1645-1676). Indeed, Tsar Nicholas II named his only son after him, reconciling some of those who used the old rituals with the Church, working towards the restoration of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate, building churches in the national style of that previous age and reforming Italianate church singing and iconography according to the older standards.

Tsar Nicholas II was betrayed by those who disagreed with and openly mocked and slandered his desire to return to roots and revive the old ideal of Holy Rus’. They scorned his Faith and the radical unity of peasantry and Tsar, which he cultivated. These aristocrat-traitors, whose mentality had been spawned by Peter I, allied themselves with the West, with British spies and politics, with French language and culture. This is why most of them ended up in Paris after 1917. The Tsar was left inside Russia, refusing to leave his homeland out of patriotism, and so was murdered with his whole family. Imperial Russia had lasted barely 200 years.

Imperial Russia contained the seeds of its own destruction and was felled by its internal contradictions between Holy Rus’ and a centralised, Western-style Imperial State, so well portrayed in nineteenth-century Russia, which was split between Slavophiles and Westerners. This can be seen in its literature, especially Dostoyevsky’s prophetic novels, ‘The Possessed’ or ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. Nevertheless, Imperial Russia also reached cultural heights, symbolised by the poetry of Pushkin, the novels of Tolstoy, the music of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov and the lives of the last Romanovs, martyred by Western-inspired atheists in 1918.

  1. The Soviet Union (USSR): 1917-1991

Although formally founded only in December 1922, in reality the USSR began with the two Revolutions of 1917. As a result, the word ‘Rus’’ became archaic and even the word ‘Russia’ was largely replaced by ‘Soviet’. With a highly oppressive and militant atheist ideology imported from Germany, it created millions of New Martyrs and Confessors, who died under sadistic Non-Russian dictators, such as Lenin, Stalin and Khushchev. The multinational, but highly centralised USSR was founded on an ocean of blood. However, thanks to the immense sacrifices and patriotism of its peoples, in 1945 the USSR was victorious against Western Nazism. Tired of being invaded by the West, it set up a buffer-zone Empire in Eastern Europe to protect itself, also oppressing the peoples of that zone.

The USSR did prolong the pre-Revolutionary ideals of the last Tsar and his programme of social justice, full employment, free education, free health care, accessible culture and support for exploited Western colonies. However, it fell after only three generations because of its oppressive centralism and the treason, greed and corruption of its elite, the ‘nomenklatura’. The members of this ‘nomenklatura’ were those who wanted Western consumerism: Money, money, money for parasites, thieves and traitors.

The nomenklatura had already come into being by the 1970s. I can remember them then, with their vulgar and amateur aping of bourgeois Western ways and clothes, shopping in Berjozka shops. In the 1980s they helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, betraying the social justice that was its greatest legacy, fighting against the patriots who, curiously, were largely centred in the KGB.  Having lived in the USSR, I was not in principle against its fall, as it had persecuted the Church and all its peoples, but I believed that that fall could only be on condition that something better would first be put in its place. I follow the principle that you do not destruct until you first construct.

  1. Post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine and Belarus: 26 December 1991-24 February 2022

Here we can give very precise dates for the beginning and the ending of this sixth incarnation of East Slavdom, of post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Tragically, instead of keeping the best of the old USSR, full employment, free education, free health care, accessible culture and support for the exploited Third World, once the nouveau-riche nomenklatura had taken long-coveted power and renamed themselves ‘oligarchs’, imitating rich Westerners, they simply put in place a poor-quality imitation of the corrupt West. They kept only all that was worst in the old USSR, its centralisation, alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce on demand. It was the worst of both worlds.

National assets were stolen (‘privatised’) by the ‘oligarchs’ and tens of millions of abandoned Russians found that they had become disliked and discriminated against in new, foreign-controlled countries, especially in the Ukraine, where Russians numbered over 50%. Western companies made a killing inside Russia and the Ukraine, tens of millions of people were robbed of their savings and pensions and millions died of poverty, despair, alcoholism and in nationalist wars in the Caucasus, which were directly provoked and supported by the West. It was one of the greatest thefts of natural resources and identity in the history of the world.

However, from 1994 on in oligarch-free Belarus and from 1999 on in the Russian Federation, but not in the oligarch-owned Ukraine, patriots came to power. They gradually began to develop something better to put in place of the monstrous crimes that had taken place after the collapse of the USSR. However, this was a generational project and could not be rushed. Only in early 2022 was the project ready to be implemented, if necessary. A New Rus’, purged of parasites, thieves and traitors, began to take shape, although some of its institutions still have to be cleansed of corrupt mafias, infiltrators and spies.

These compromising traitors were just like the aristocrats, generals, politicians and professionals who had coveted power in 1917 and overthrew the Tsar. Just as the aristocrat-oligarchs and bourgeois elite of traitors, who had implemented the Western-planned February 1917 palace revolt, caused chaos, civil war and destruction and then irresponsibly ran away to the West, so too did the oligarchs. Post-Soviet Russia ended with their treason, the oligarchs fleeing to London, New York, Tel Aviv and elsewhere.

  1. The New Rus’: 24 February 2022 – Until Repentance Stops

With the New Rus’, we turn full circle, away from Russia and back to Rus’ and the restoration of the fundamental unity of East Slavdom. The New Rus’ was born on 24 February 2022, the first day of the SMO (Special Military Operation), the operation to liberate the one still occupied part of Rus’, the Ukraine. It had to be freed of its US-run, US-financed, US-trained and US-armed Neo-Nazi militarists, largely Galicians from the far west of the Ukraine, formerly part of Poland. These Neo-Nazis were the puppets used by the US elite, who hoped to destroy President Putin, However, in reality, they made him great and destroyed President Zelensky instead.

If the New Rus’ were to survive and thrive, it had to be decompromised and cleansed of the post-Soviet Westernised traitor-oligarchs. Almost at once after 24 February 2022, traitors ran from the birth of the New Rus’. Tens of thousands of the Russian nouveau-riche upper class headed for Georgia, Kazakhstan, Finland, Serbia and elsewhere. They hated the New Rus’, because they could no longer go skiing in the French Alps in the winter, to Florida for summer holidays, to their villas and use their bank accounts in London, Nice, Malaga, Sofia, Nicosia and Podgorica. True, most, it is said 85%, have since returned, realising their error. However, millions fled from the Ukraine, one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

No longer able to sweep the Ukrainian catastrophe under the carpet until the next US elections, the delusional USA and the heavily censored US-run Western media are now abandoning the American proxy war in the Ukraine and its puppet leader. President Zelensky faces assassination, like all dumped US puppets. We are on the threshold of recovering the unity of East Slavdom after the civil strife between brothers in the Ukraine. East Slavdom is what the Belarussian President Lukashenko calls the ’Union State’, but we know it as ‘Rus’’. The Russian Federation and Belarus, stretching from the Polish border to the Pacific, are going to be joined by a New Ukraine, perhaps to be renamed ‘Malorossija’. This latter will be a State similar in size to Belarus and not the Soviet Ukraine, which existed only between 1922 and 2022.

The principle of self-determination would be followed. Thus, the east and the south of the old Soviet construct will return to the Russian Federation. The Romanians of Chernovtsy and the Hungarians of Transcarpathia could well return to their motherlands. As for the only real Ukrainians, who are Greek Catholics and live in their two or three provinces ‘on the edge’, ‘u kraja’, and who have caused all the trouble, they can return to Poland, if the Poles want them back. These ‘Ukrainans’, or border people, are in fact West Slavs. The East Slavs do not want them, for they are not part of Rus’.

Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. As they say in Russian ‘Bog ljubit troitsu’, ‘God loves threes’. This is the New Rus’, the Union State of the East Slavs, of nearly 200 million people, stretching from the Baltic and the Black Sea to the Pacific. There is no intention of taking over other, Non-East Slav, lands. That is only the base propaganda of Western scaremongering of ‘Russians marching through Europe’. The age of the Soviet Union with its imperial buffer-zone in Non-East Slav Eastern Europe is long over, as also is the age of Imperial Russia. We have come to the reconstitution of ‘Rus’, hopefully to be founded on the ideal of ‘Holy Rus’.

What of those East Slavs who live in other countries, outside East Slavdom, in, say, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania or Moldova, where they constitute smaller minorities, of between 2% and at most 25% of the population? The New Rus’ hopes that their human rights will at last be guaranteed and protected through the establishment of friendly relations by their governments with their giant neighbour: The New Rus’. After the Russian liberation of the Ukraine, Russians will surely gain the respect and co-operation of those governments which have oppressed their Russian minorities in the past. In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan such friendly relations already appear to be the case. And the New Rus’ already has great influence outside itself through the Russian-founded BRICS. Once US influence fades in Europe and Central Asia, all these countries will surely be led by new US-free elites which will realise the need to improve relations with the New Rus’.

Thus, we come to the New Rus’, free from the West, knitted together by the Orthodox Faith. Whenever that Faith has been weak or even denied as an ideal, the East Slavs have quarrelled amongst each other, giving rise to civil wars between princes/boyars/aristocrats/oligarchs. As a result, successive enemies have invaded and taken over. Invasions have only happened when there has been no internal unity. For a house divided cannot stand. This is a warning. If repentance for the past ceases, the New Rus’ will also fall.

Conclusion: Towards Holy Rus’

Just over 100 years ago Imperial Russia ended with the murder by British spies, a right-wing fanatic and a transvestite aristocrat of the first victim of the Revolution, a peasant-prophet and healer called Rasputin. His surname means ‘the parting of the ways’. However, the New Rus’ is being founded by a man called Putin, whose name means ‘the way’. The New Rus’ is indeed a national ‘way’. However, the New Rus’ is also an economic, technological, military and diplomatic Superpower and is closely allied with the other world Superpower, China. For in this new world the very troubled USA is being reduced to just a regional power.

Although founded as a national East Slav Union, the New Rus’ can play an international role in the world, especially in an American-free Europe. With the coming collapse of the already panicking American-chosen EU and UK elites and their replacement by patriots and sovereignists, the New Rus’ could call Europe to repent, it could do missionary work. Various countries like Hungary and Slovakia are already showing the way. Perhaps tomorrow this will come in the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Germany, Italy and France.

For this, however, the New Rus’ will need, after ‘the way’, a leader with a spiritual, not a nationalist, vision. A new leader, an actual Tsar, would have to cleanse the Russian Church of American and other traitors, all the fifth columnists and sectarians, supporting those who oppose them instead of persecuting us, and protect all the Local Orthodox Churches, which the Russian Orthodox Church must co-operate with and not dominate. He, the leader of the New Rus’, would be the ultimate destiny of Rus’. If we may paraphrase: ‘Six Ages of Rus’ have fallen, the Seventh stands and an Eighth there shall not be’.

 

The Church After The Ukraine

Introduction: In the Ukraine

The Red Star USSR lasted for three generations after the Western-organised Palace coup of 1917. So too the White Star USA, which began its triumph in 1945, is also collapsing after the same three generations. At present we are all waiting for the end of the totally unnecessary American war in the Ukraine. According to official Ukrainian TV, Kiev losses in killed, wounded and captured troops are now 1,126,652. The Americans, who forbade the Ukraine to make peace in spring 2022, want indeed to fight to the last Ukrainian. However, as most Ukrainians are not going to commit suicide for the US elite, that elite will now have to blame someone else for its failure. In this new Greek tragedy, dramatic events are taking place in freezing and snowbound Kiev at this very moment. The main assistant of the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has already been killed by a hand grenade sent to him as a ’present’ from the President’s office and the wife of the head of the dreaded Kiev secret police has been poisoned. Meanwhile, European elites are panicking, as they face the real possibility that a nationalist President Trump will make peace with Russia, at last dissolve NATO and desert a NATO-free Europe.

Talk in Kiev is of a coup, rejecting both President Zelensky and the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Zaluzhny. The situation is even more dramatic on the front line, which is falling apart, as undertrained and underarmed, unarmed and untrained Ukrainian troops give up the unequal fight. In a war of attrition the collapse can come very fast. By Easter, 5 May 2024, the day before the feast of St George the Victorious, it will surely be over. Some say it will happen even as early as January or February, rather than April or early May. The CIA has always instrumentalised the worst elements in each client state to play the roles of heads of their puppet regimes. Thus, they used drug dealers in Latin America, fascist dictators in Spain and Portugal, mafiosi in Italy, colonels in Greece, gangsters in Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Hussein in Iraq, Bin Laden in Afghanistan, hateful extremist nationalists in the Baltic States and in the Ukraine Galician Nazis with an atheist Jewish actor figurehead. Once the US no longer needs its handsomely-paid war criminals, they are exiled, dumped or assassinated, especially if they fail in a US election year.

This will be the fate of Zelensky and will also be that of the US-appointed and now panicking NATO and EU puppets, Stoltenberg, Scholz, Macron, Sunak, Pavel, the bankrupt Russophobic European elite, which is to be ejected by its electorates. With their tiny militaries, they are irrelevant.  Already largely demilitarised, they have to be denazified. The Europe problem will be solved at last. The political results of the Democrat delusions in Kiev and their open lies in the Western media (they declared President Putin ‘dead’ twice last month alone!) are colossal. Kiev is now spelled K-A-B-U-L, only this is Afghanistan multiplied by ten, because it is happening in Europe in full view of the whole world which can now see ten years of the lies of Western politicians and the Western media. The Ukraine is the European graveyard of the US. Former vassals, which like the Ukraine are dependent on US funds for their existence, such as Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, Kosovo and Kuwait, will also disappear. Eventually, the bankrupt US will have to abandon its peninsula outpost of Western Europe, NATO will disappear and the US-moulded EU will collapse, to be replaced by a Russian-founded, multipolar concert of the nations.

In the Church

However, what interests us much more are the results of the Ukrainian catastrophe for the Orthodox Church. These are the results for both what once was the most prestigious Local Church, Constantinople, and for today’s largest Local Church, Moscow, as well as for the fourteen other Local Churches.

Founded in the fourth century, this once prestigious Patriarchate in Istanbul was tempted by its glorious history a millennium and more ago as the capital of the Christian Roman Empire. Goaded and bribed by the White House in Washington, it thought it could rule over the Orthodox world through nationalist-imperialist politics. Now it is falling from its height and has to face the embarrassment of its fake Ukrainian Church, which is staffed by perverts, gangsters, thugs and Nazis. Was there ever such a shameful event in all of Church history? The existence of the US-established and US-financed fake Church in the Ukraine discredits this Patriarchate. Imperialist and nationalist politics have their price. The only way out would seem to be the ‘retirement’ of those responsible. Denials by papering over the cracks and sweeping under the carpet is no longer an option.

Founded in Soviet times in 1943, this largest Patriarchate in Moscow was tempted by its size, once nearly three quarters of the whole Church. It thought it could rule over the Orthodox world through nationalist-imperialist politics. Prey to the politics of the FSB and the CIA, it was infiltrated by traitors. Now it is falling from its height and has to face the embarrassment of its infiltration by the representatives of various secret services who betrayed it. It has lost, or is losing, many of its territories: the Ukraine, Latvia, Moldova and most of the Diaspora in the West, ultimately everything that it once controlled outside the Russian Federation. Imperialist and nationalist politics have their price. A Council or Synod in Moscow will have to enact a wave of decentralisation. If independence (autocephaly) is not given to Non-Russians by Moscow, it will be taken by them anyway.

Conclusion: The Triumph of Conciliarity

Once the war of America and its NATO vassal elite, launched against Russia and Europe, now coming to an end in the Ukraine, is over, the persecution of the heroic Church of the Ukraine will also be over. A New Ukraine will be established. And a New Ukrainian Church will also be established. And, regardless of what happens in Moscow, an independent Ukrainian Church under Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev will be supported everywhere that matters, not least by the Romanian Church. Independence for it was thirty years overdue, as for all parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation. We await transformations of the centralised structures of the Church, which are now archaic, and await the removal of homosexual mafias of self-interest, corruption and power of the paid Church administrators, exactly those which St John Chrysostom denounced over 1600 years ago.

After the shameful decadence of the minority Orthodox Conference in Crete in 2016, the Church authorities will have to proceed to a real Council to resolve the real problems of the Church. These issues were never even discussed at Crete, where some signatures of the relatively few attendees were even forged. The elites of the two Local Churches which tried to impose their will over all the others over the last thirty years will have to step back, one way or another. That time is over. Now we must proceed to Conciliarity, to reaffirming the Catholicity of the Church, to reaffirming that local nationalisms are always secondary to the Church, which will not be brought down to that level, to reaffirming that in the Church we have Trinitarian unity in diversity, ‘multipolarity’, that we only have one really important passport and identity, our spiritual passport and identity. We shall be victorious, because Christ, the Head of the real Church, is always victorious.

 

What Went Wrong With ROCOR?

In 1974 I asked the then Fr Kallistos (Ware) what the situation in ROCOR was. He told me that he had met the future St John of Shanghai (+ 1966) in the 1950s and had seriously thought about transferring to ROCOR in the 1960s. However, the well-respected priest at the ROCOR Cathedral in London, Fr George Sheremetiev (+ 1971), who had been the confessor of the Tsar’s sister, Xenia Aleksandrovna (+ 20 April 1960), had dissuaded him.

Fr George had told him that the new censoriousness coming from the then CIA-financed ROCOR in the USA was poisoning ROCOR in England and he had better not join it. As an elderly priest, he would stay, for him the old ROCOR was still alive, but it was not a jurisdiction for the young. Consequently, Fr Kallistos remained a priest of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, though also remained priest and confessor at the ROCOR Convent in London until 1976, when the poison from the USA reached a new crescendo. In any case, Fr Kallistos’ witness dissuaded me from joining ROCOR in 1974.

Leaving England for Paris in 1979, there I encountered the old ROCOR, still uncontaminated by the US ROCOR, unlike in England. The ROCOR Western European Diocese, living in the spirit of its former Archbishop, St John of Shanghai, had as its ruling hierarch St John’s successor, Archbishop Antony of Geneva. The Dean for France was Archpriest Alexander Trubnikov, who was priest at the parish of the Resurrection in Meudon in the Paris suburbs. He had a great influence on me, an inspiration, and I knew his matushka and children very well.

Fr Alexander had been born in 1908 in Tsarskoe Selo, where the Tsar and his Family and servants lived, into the noble family of a hereditary Russian imperial officer. During World War I, his father was posted as a military attaché to France. After graduating from a French high school, the future Fr. Alexander had to take on various jobs to make ends meet. At the same time he completed military classes organised by White Russian émigrés in France.

The majority of White Russians went indiscriminately to any Russian church. St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, his vicar Bishop Nathaniel of Brussels, Archbishop Anthony of Geneva and all of us considered that both those in the Paris Jurisdiction, then under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and ROCOR were our common flock in France and Benelux and ignored the minority of freemasons in the Paris Jurisdiction. Thus, we freely concelebrated with it. Fr Alexander was the rector of the Parish of the Resurrection in Meudon from 1954 until 1984, where he inspired several young men to become priests and rebuilt the Meudon chapel, courageously mortgaging his own home to do so. Besides his role as rector, Fr. Alexander served as chaplain to the Russian scouting organisation, the Vitiazi, which educated children from all jurisdictions.

Fr Alexander was also actively involved in inter-Orthodox and inter-Christian relations for many years, publishing books and a newsletter in French that shared news of the Orthodox world. This publishing activity brought Fr. Alexander to participate in the Second Vatican Council in Rome, where he met the then Pope. He wrote books, published his newsletter and attended the Vatican Council, hoping to represent the point of view of the free Russian Orthodox Church to all who would listen, not least to the Roman Catholics who were, and still are, undergoing a crisis, as they threw out the baby, but kept the bathwater. A priest and a diplomat, Fr Alexander reposed 35 years ago in November 1988. Eternal Memory!

After the repose of Archbishop Antony of Geneva five years later, in 1993, the last barrier fell. Thus, the censoriousness began to appear in the Western European Diocese from the USA, but now via Germany. All the clergy at the funeral were profoundly shocked when we found ourselves forbidden from celebrating. Thus, the new order of categorical phariseeism and judgementalism was already remarked at Archbishop Antony’s funeral. We patiently withstood it to defeat it in 2007, at last bringing ROCOR into canonical communion with Moscow. However, a decade later the censoriousness returned and took revenge; communion with Moscow had for them just been a delaying tactic to give their schismatic spirit outward legitimacy.

The new order of the new pharisees was founded on cupidity, jealousy, narcissistic egoism and the love of power of those who manipulate and use others as instruments for their own benefit, before discarding them. Those of the new order corrupted and destroyed everything they touched. Therefore, we did not allow them to touch, out of respect for St John of Shanghai, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, Fr George Sheremetiev, Fr Alexander Trubnikov and all those of the old and traditional ROCOR. You could accept their sectarian and schismatic censoriousness or else resist it. It all depended on whether you were a careerist or someone of principle and integrity. One day it will all be over. Our victory is inevitable because those who occupy the spiritual and moral high ground always win, even though patience will be required in waiting for Moscow to reject the Americanised and schismatic CIA-shaped ROCOR sect.

American ROCOR took over fifty years to spread its tentacles and take over completely. Once the American proxy war in the Ukraine is over, the unprincipled American ROCOR, which has lost so much by sitting on the fence in that conflict, will divide into two camps. On the one hand, there will be the pro-Russian non-schismatics and, on the other hand, the anti-Russian schismatics, the right-wing crazies and persecutors, penetrated by the CIA, heirs to the pro-Hitler Russians of the 1930s and 1940s. This will be the end of ROCOR, as the healthy part will be absorbed into the Moscow Patriarchate or into other Local Churches who obey the canons.

When it is all over, all of us together, from all the Local Churches, will at last be able to build the new Local Church of Western Europe in a US-free Europe, a Sovereign and Confederal Europe, co-operating with all the Local Churches, including a decentralised Moscow, and stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Only then will Europeans be able to recover their lost Motherland of the Church and their lost fatherlands of their own freed countries. At last, with a mother and a father, they will be able to become true brothers and sisters, fleeing the towering pride that created sectarianism and schism, which is what went wrong with ROCOR.

The Difference Between Orthodox Christians and Converts

The Orthodox Christian Man

He may be called Nick, George, Sergei or Jim (= Dimitrios, Dmitry, Dumitrou, Dima) and he works as a builder, carpenter, plumber, electrician or car mechanic (if Serb). He did not go to church very often, apart from to stand outside to smoke cigarettes and talk with his friends, who have the same name as him, until he turned 50, then he started seriously. He once spoke to a convert. The latter told him that his parents were not Orthodox so ‘they will not be saved and will go to hell’. Nick/George/Sergei/Jim said afterwards: ‘He talk crap’ (this sounds more effective when said with a rolled ‘r’ in an Eastern European accent). He added that ‘he look like he need good meal. That make man of him’. He tells everyone that he is the boss (his wife told him so), but he actually knows that his wife is the boss and, secretly, he prefers it that way, but would never admit to it in public.

The Orthodox Christian Woman

Her name ends in ‘a’ (for example Maria), or in ‘na’ (for example, Alina, Arina, Carolina, Ekaterina, Galina, Inna, Irina, Karina, Nina, Marina, Nina, Paulina, Valentina, Christina, Ioanna, Oana, Oksana, Svetlana, Tatiana, Elena) or else in oula (for example, Coula, Foula, Poula, Roula, Soula, Toula). She did not go to church very often until she turned 40, then suddenly she started and now she never misses a service. She is an excellent cook and like her husband is slightly overweight. Her husband says that ‘she comfortable’, which is his word for ‘plump’. She has to be slightly plump for the sake of her many grandchildren, who like sitting on her lap.  She never argues with her husband because she arranges it so he always agrees with her. Her sons, who are builders, fear her and she made sure they all got married before the age of 30. Her daughters, who are beauticians, hairdressers, nurses or teachers, spend as much time as possible with her. She encourages them to have as many babies as possible.

The Male Convert

Although his real name is Bob, Tom or Tony, he calls himself Seraphim, Moses, Vladimir or Silouan. He is single and tends to be frightened of or even despise women (which is why he is single). He has very long hair, tied into a bun at the back, and a very long beard (the parish priest has short hair and a short beard and no-one else in the parish has long hair or a beard). His favourite colour is black and he is very thin. He has a huge number of icons, many ‘Orthodox’ books, several tiny wrist-size rosaries (which for some reason he calls ‘ropes’) and watches podcasts given by gurus who look like him. His favourite word is ‘holy’, and adds it to everything: ‘holy liturgy’, ‘holy canons’, ‘holy icons’, ‘holy tradition’, ‘holy fast’, ‘holy fathers’ etc. He has very right-wing views. He litters his speech with words like ‘prelest’, ‘schema’, ‘stichar’ or ‘omofor’, which he mispronounces and which no-one else in the parish or anywhere else knows anyway. He is not at all practical and gives the impression of being rather autistic. He works part-time and has problems holding down a job. Thank goodness nobody would ever think of making him a bishop. If they did, the power would go to his head and make him crazy.

The Female Convert

Although her real name is Sue or Pam, she calls herself Seraphima or Anastasia. She is single. Although she comes from a well-off family, she usually dresses in long and old skirts. She does not look after her long hair, would never dye it, and never wears any make-up. Her favourite colour is black and she appears to wear tablecloths over her hair, though she calls them headscarves. She is to be found in food shops examining the ingredients of various foods to make sure that they contain no non-fasting foods, the slightest amount of which could cause her to sin mortally. She is vegan and very thin and pale. She does not feel confident with children and may never have any.

 

America, the Ukraine, Russia, the Church: Temptation, Tragedy, Challenge and Opportunity

Foreword

The world is now becoming a post-globalist world. The Globalists (Americans) have been defeated by the Sovereignists. Despite the attempts by the US elite, the power behind the throne, to keep the embarrassingly senile Biden in power until after the next elections, the Ukraine is collapsing (and Gaza genocided by American bombs) and so Biden too will Biden. First in Russia, then in Hungary, then in Slovakia, now in the Netherlands, the Sovereignists are in power. They are increasingly strong in Germany, Italy and France. Union is off the cards. Confederation is the order of the day, as the real New World Order. Sovereignty is beyond the artificial and absurd divisions of left and right, inventions of the Western oligarchies (the mythical ‘democracies’) in order to divide and rule. Sovereignty is what both Russia and China have, though the Globalists falsely call them ‘autocracies’. The Western world has yet to recover its sovereignty. It still can, if it takes the opportunity to return to the Holy Trinity, the model of unity in diversity, what politicians today call multipolarity.

The American Temptation

The American temptation was Empire building, not just in one region, but universally or ‘globally’, as it proclaimed. Let us leave the north to the ice and build ‘from sea to shining sea’, they said. So they stole half a Continent from the natives, whom they slaughtered, bought from a desperate Napoleon, grasped the south from Mexico, began a Civil War with 600,000 dead and invaded small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. This culminated in a four-year war and dropping its atom bombs on the big island of Japan in 1945 in order to dominate the Pacific. At the same time, they conquered and occupied the peninsula of Western Europe in 1944-5, which victory followed its expeditionary experiment of 1917-18. The 1945 double victory meant its victory over half the world. The USA was a Superpower. It still had to conquer the heartland of Eurasia, which it thought it had done in 1991, becoming the only Superpower. This was a delusion and it duly proclaimed it as ‘the end of history’. This proud triumphalism, a Non-Jewish Zionism, was failure, for the fall always follows pride – delusions are always countered by reality.

The American Empire depended on using expendable proxies, puppets whom it flattered and told that they were superior to their neighbours. These puppets were hired do the dirty work for the US. Through them it could divide and rule, sowing chaos and destruction, whether in Latin America, East Asia, West Asia or in ex-Soviet Eastern Europe. However, its agents, from Marcos to Somoza, from Hussein to Bin Laden, from Bolsinaro to Zelensky, would go off script, falling into delusion. The USA has always suffered from a ‘spoilt child syndrome’. The spoilt child always shouts: ‘If I cannot have it, then no-one will have it’. And so they destroy their once much-coveted puppets and toys. This I know from experience with an American. Internationally, it can be seen in Latin America, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Israel, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, Western and Eastern Europe – now isolated from Russia. However, this spoilt-child syndrome only works in a unipolar world of exclusivism, not in a multipolar world. In the latter there is choice and people can escape US despotism, whose policy of containment fails.

The Ukrainian Tragedy

Now desperate the Kiev government wants to mobilise all Ukrainians between the ages of 17 and 70, Berlin-style, and, barbarically, women. The latter are already being killed on the front, where poorly trained and poorly equipped troops without air support, average age 43, are being forced to commit suicide against vastly superior Russian forces. Kiev dead already number between 500,000 and 600,000 and more and more are deserting. The needless death of these troops is a war crime. President Zelensky, like Hitler suicidally forbidding retreat despite military advice, is also isolated and unhinged in his bunker, having banned elections, delusional with his Messiah complex. His PR advisors have told the Western media that Russians have tried to assassinate him five times. Of course, this is nonsense. Zelensky, the brilliant and well-paid actor but utterly incompetent politician, is the greatest asset of the Russians. He may well be assassinated, only by US-backed Ukrainians, which assassination can then be blamed on Russia. The Ukraine has now lost 20%, of its territory, taken back by Russian forces after being ruled by the Ukraine for up to 100 years. But since Kiev refuses to negotiate, it will lose even more.

If the Ukrainians manage to continue losing, they could lose up to 50% of their territory or even more. Russian forces are waiting to fill the vacuum once the Kiev forces collapse and move forward to the River Dnieper and, if necessary, cross it. Whatever happens, Kiev will be forced to surrender unconditionally. There will be no negotiated settlement, as Kiev refused this constantly for eight years. The new, post-Zelensky government in the Ukraine will have to agree to and sign the Russian conditions. It is indeed time to end ‘the magical thinking about Russia’s defeat,’ by which headlines the Wall Street Journal means ending its own delusions and fantasies and those of the whole Collective West and their carefully censored media since 2014. As we have been predicting in over 116 published articles between March 2022 and October 2023, the West is being routed in the Ukraine. Kiev is the second Kabul and even worse in humiliation. As a result, the failed elites in the US and in Europe will fall. NATO and the EU are therefore finished; they were only ever post-1945 relics. Their time is up. Europe’s future is Eurasian and Confederal.

Indeed, the reign of the official Western media like the BBC, used by Western Establishments as propaganda mouthpieces, weapons of mass deception, are over. People are seeing through their lies. The US and the EU made a fatal mistake in forcing Russia into a close alliance with China through their aggression. It was delusional Western hubris that called Russia ‘a gas station with nukes’. Its booming economy has now overtaken the depressed German economy, cut off from cheap energy by US sabotage. As a result of the rout of the Collective West in the Ukraine, worldwide all recognise that there are three Superpowers: China, Russia and USA – and in that order. It is two against one. Queueing up not far behind them are India, the Muslim World, Africa and Latin America, with largely unpopulated Australia left as the natural resource reserve for the great East Asian Superpower – China. Europe discounted itself by allying itself with the US as vassals and client states. Now US failure and humiliation are shared by its lapdogs, Germany, France and especially the UK. France and the UK are to lose their places on the UN Security Council.

The Russian Challenge

Militarily, economically and diplomatically, this is a triumph for the Russian Federation, a Superpower and not ‘a regional power’, as the US President Obama contemptuously called it only a decade ago. Russia is in fact the leader of what used to be called ‘The Global South’, the 90% of the new multipolar world which is Non-Western. Through Russian-founded BRICS +, Russia is the toast of Asia, Africa and Latin America. They too want independence from the neo-colonial West, now that Russia has shown the way through its superiority. It is Russia, backed by China, which with BRICS troops will make peace in West Asia between Palestine and Israel and at last, inevitably, give the Palestinians justice and a homeland. The US is isolated at the UN and has failed because it was one-sided and supported the injustice of Israeli genocide. The US has failed both to divide Europe from Russia and failed to divide and colonise Russia, which was its aim in using Ukrainian soldiers as pawns to attack Russia and die for Washington. However, winning the war in the Ukraine and defeating American Europe is one thing. Russia must also win the peace.

In the Ukraine, this means no occupation of the real Ukraine, where real Ukrainians live, in the north-west and centre-west. It also means that all the Non-Ukrainian parts of the pre-2014 Ukraine, created by brutal Soviet dictators and whose brutality the Collective West has so fervently supported, where Russians, Poles, Romanians and Hungarians live, will at last be able to return to their homelands. They will leave the real Ukraine, about half the Soviet Ukraine. As post-Soviet Russia learned its lesson not to oppress Non-Russian peoples and has never had the slightest intention of occupying the real Ukraine, let alone other Eastern European countries (Zelensky’s Ukraine was in no way defending the West ‘against the Asiatic Muscovite hordes’; that was pure racist propaganda), the peoples of Europe are going to see the real Russia, instead of seeing it through the eyes of their US-selected elite of nonentities, who constantly lied to them. With people’s governments in Europe, a new agreement could be reached, with the abandonment of NATO and mutually beneficial security guarantees.

This means the repeal of the illegal anti-Russian sanctions and respect for the human rights of Russian minorities in all European countries, especially in the Ukraine, where the Orthodox Church has been banned. Tragedy remains. Apart from the unnecessary sacrifice of a whole generation of well over a million Ukrainian men, killed or crippled, Ukraine will need rebuilding – and repopulating. Eight million and more fled Zelensky’s tyranny and his hated SBU secret police and many were needlessly made to fear Russia because of Western propaganda. They emigrated, first to Russia, then to Poland, Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe. The death toll for Russia could well reach 40,000 dead. There were also the 14,000 Russian-speaking civilians massacred by the US-installed Kiev regime in the Donbass since 2014. Apart from this, there is the whole question of the once multinational Russian Church. In February 2022 its leadership took a Russian nationalist stance. This meant that Non-Russians and those Russians who did not agree with the Russian Military Operation in the Ukraine left that politicised Church, some with bitterness.

The Orthodox Christian Opportunity

Clergy and people outside Russia, in the Ukraine, in the Baltics, in Moldova, in Western Europe and one day in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Central Asia, will not return to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian Church will have to decentralise and form a family of new and autocephalous (independent) Local Churches for these peoples. This is the challenge and the only way forward. The Russian temptation was to try and dominate the rest of the Orthodox Church because their Church is by far the biggest and so the most powerful, three-quarters of the whole. God has humbled them and they will be reduced to half of the Orthodox world. Russians will have to return to their saints, to Sts Antony and Theodosius of Kiev, St Sergius of Radonezh, St Nil of Sora, St Paisy (Velichkovsky), St Seraphim of Sarov, the Saints of Optina, St John of Kronstadt, the New Martyrs and Confessors, St John of Shanghai. These are the actual spiritual and moral leaders of the Russian Church. Today the Russian Church is at last heading towards becoming a post-post-Soviet Church, that is, to a Church free of centralisation, nationalism, politics, sect and schism.

However, there was also the Greek nationalist temptation, no less historic in its catastrophic proportions. This temptation, which began as long ago as 1917, was to go the way of the world, that is of the USA. Now God has humbled the Greeks too, making them powerless in worldly terms, for they placed their hope ‘in princes and the sons of men’. Their only greatness is in the saints whom they themselves persecuted, St Nectarios, St Paisios and St Porphyrios, to name but a few. The situation reminds us of the following. Some forty years ago St Paisios the Athonite told a then young man, whom I know well, the following. The young man had been scandalised by the conduct of certain bishops. Fr Paisios told him: ‘When you walk along a path on Athos and come across animal excrement, what do you do? You kick it aside into the bushes so that other passers-by will not tread in it and then you wipe your shoes’. This is what we do today. We shall defeat both sectarianism and modernism, for they all end up in the same way, in the bushes, in sect and schism.

JFK (1963-2023): Though the Man be Gone, that the Promise of his Spirit be Fulfilled

A Personal Introduction: Overthrown in 1917 and Born in 1917

As a seven year old child I remember my father telling me to go to my neighbour’s to watch television (we did not have a television), to watch something ‘very important’. It was the funeral of the President of the USA, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I am surely far from being the only person in the world who has met people who as adults knew both Tsar Nicholas II and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Though certainly, I am the only person from the city where I was born to have done so and probably the only Russian Orthodox priest in the world to have done so.

Still, it is a curious fact that JFK was born in 1917, the year that Tsar Nicholas was deposed by Russian traitors, financed mainly from London and New York. Much more significantly, both their deaths have fascinated generations and spawned a mass of conspiracy theories and black and white ideologies. Most notably, many books of suppositional history have been written about them both, about ‘what might have been’ and ‘Suppose if…’. Could what might have been find its fulfilment? That is our question.

Russia and America

There are people who see everything in terms of black and white. For example, in the Russian context, there are those who declare that everything in Russia was perfect before 1917 and everything was bad after it. Of course, a little logic such as: ‘If everything was so perfect, why was there a Revolution?’ would help such people. Alternatively, read a Russian novel from before 1917, or a newspaper from the period, or else, as was still just possible only a generation or two ago, you could have talked to someone who had been adult in Russia before 1917. The fact is that black and white do not exist outside hell and heaven. This world is unremittingly grey – though, admittedly, there is a huge difference between light grey and dark grey.

The same is true in the American context of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. There are those who say that his 1963 murder (let us call it what it was) was a turning-point, that all was white before it and all was black after it, that he was basically a kind of martyr. I suspect that childhood nostalgia plays a part here in the views of now elderly people. Nostalgia is a funny thing, the sun always shone in childhood. It is called selective memory. We will briefly consider some of the issues below. As for the conspiracy theories as to who murdered Kennedy and why, there are hundreds of them. Of course, that does not mean that one of them is not true. God knows the Truth.

It was in Paris in 1996 that I met an American woman from a well-connected family in Massachusetts. She was then in her fifties. She told me that when she was eighteen, she had met JFK. The story she told me confirmed the stories about Kennedy’s weakness for ladies, including Marilyn Monroe. However, he also had great strengths. Let us recall at least a few more significant facts from the life of this man who promised so much, who was so charismatic and such a brilliant speaker, and was so cruelly murdered on 22 November 1963 at the age of 46.

Cuba

Probably the most famous event in Kennedy’s Presidency is the so-called ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ of 1962, which should have been called the Turkish Missile Crisis. For once the U.S. had publicly promised never to invade Cuba again and secretly agreed to remove its Jupiter missiles from near Soviet borders in Turkey, placed there as a provocation by US hawks, the Ukrainian peasant-leader Khrushchov agreed to dismantle Soviet missile sites in Cuba, subject to UN inspections. Thanks in part to Kennedy’s humanity, the US had backed down, though the Soviet side, with no less humanity, had agreed not to make that climbdown public. The US had not lost face publicly and indeed there are still some naïve people who think that the ‘Cuban Crisis’ was an ‘American victory’! In any case, World War III had been averted and Kennedy was in part responsible for that.

Latin America

As regards Latin America, in 1962, Kennedy had also had the wisdom to declare that: ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable’. He sought to contain Communism in Latin America by establishing the ‘Alliance for Progress’, which sent aid to some countries and sought greater human rights standards in the region.

Vietnam

Regarding Vietnam, in April 1963 Kennedy said prophetically: ‘We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point’. Though Kennedy’s Vietnam policies seem inconsistent, nevertheless the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, stated that Kennedy was strongly considering pulling the United States out of Vietnam after the 1964 election. (McNamara also much too late declared that Vietnam had been a mistake and that he had known it all along and should have gotten out in 1963, when fewer than 100 Americans had been killed). Certainly, Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263, dated 11 October, which ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 US military personnel by the end of 1964 and the bulk of them by 1965. Indeed, Kennedy had been moving in this peaceful direction since his speech on world peace on 10 June 1963.

Israel

Israeli interests were also countered by Kennedy’s endorsement of the United Nation’s Johnson Plan, which wanted to return a number of expelled Palestinians from the war of 1948 into what was by then Israel. This continuation of the justice plan of the CIA-assassinated UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold for Palestinian repatriation disturbed those who had a negative view of Arab resettlement in their own country, let alone full repatriation.

Views of JFK

In general, it seems to us that Kennedy expressed the more collective values of Roman Catholicism over the individualism of Protestantism. This sense of solidarity with the rest of the world and collective responsibility for it, which comes from the Catholicity of the Church, was at his time still present in Roman Catholicism, part of its legacy from Orthodoxy. It is sad that after him the US elite lapsed into an individualistic, not to say a thoroughly sectarian, view of the world. It started in Vietnam and has since gone through Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, and in 2014 reached the Ukraine.

Regardless of the many academic and conspiratorial debates around Kennedy and regardless of whether the great hopes placed in him were realistic, there is no doubt that he was the great hope of a great many in the Western world. It may not be the real Kennedy who is admirable, but rather his spirit and the hope inspired by his spirit. Under Kennedy there could have been Another America and so quite another course of world history over the last sixty years. The fact is that after his murder, the nightmare of the 1960s began, as recalled in the nostalgic Don McLean song ‘American Pie’, and the Western world has not yet woken up from that nightmare.

Conclusion: Hope and Despair

Indeed, though the Western world now proclaims that it is ‘woke’, in reality it is even faster asleep in its delusions. True or false is not the point here. The fact is that it is the youthful and energetic Kennedy, whether his myth or his reality, who represented hope. As John Masefield, the elderly English Poet Laureate of the time, wrote after Kennedy’s murder:

All generous hearts lament the leader killed

The young chief with the smile, the radiant face,

The winning way that turned a wondrous race

Into sublimest pathways, leading on.

Grant to us Life that though the man be gone

The promise of his spirit be fulfilled.

22 November 2023 is the 60th anniversary of JFK’s murder. How fine it would be if we felt that the promise of his spirit might be fulfilled. However, is that realistic?

In Russian:

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2023/11/22/kennedi_60_let_so_dnya_gibeli