Category Archives: Apostasy

The Real Gregory Rasputin

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of men, in whom there is no hope.

Psalm 145, 3

As the Truth of God begins to be revealed, so everything in Russia will change.

Elder Nikolai (Guryanov)

Foreword

My interest in Gregory Rasputin was first sparked by a television programme fifty years ago on the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination. Although, as a child, I could not investigate the claims made, I knew instinctively that there was something wrong with what was being said. I sensed a manipulation. Forty-two years ago I went to study at Oxford at the oldest college in Oxford, where Prince Felix Yusupov, the supposed murderer of Gregory Rasputin had studied and visited the ‘Yusupov room’ where the prince had lived. I still could not understand the story since, with the Soviet Union and the Cold War still in full swing, I could not access the necessary archives on either side. Others have since done that and their results, given below, provide long-awaited justice.

Introduction

‘Rasputin? A horse thief, a mad monk, a fraud with hypnotic powers, a priest-charlatan who manipulated stupid, hysterical women, a flagellant sectarian and pervert, a criminal who ruled the Russian Empire, dictating all policies and making all political appointments through bribery, a debauchee who organized orgies, a drunkard (like all Russians), a primitive barbarian, a Satanist, a German spy, the reason for the downfall of Russia, even his name means ‘depraved’. I know, I have read the book and seen the film’. So goes the view of the average ‘educated’ Western person, as also largely that of the average Soviet citizen. However, they are all the brainwashed victims of the same slanderer and we recall that the Greek for ‘slanderer’ is ‘o diavolos’, ‘the devil’.

In reality, not one bit of the above has been proved true, including that he was a debauchee and a drunkard, and most of it is patently untrue. It is all classic self-justifying Russophobia which says ‘Russians are primitive, we are superior, therefore we can do anything we like’. He was certainly not mad, never a priest, monk, thief or spy, never a flagellant sectarian or a Satanist, and had very little if any political influence. He was a pious Christian peasant, married with three children, who gave generous alms, understood the Holy Scriptures better than professors of the Bible, and was so pious that God gave him miraculous powers of healing. As for his surname, a nickname, it was common in Siberia and denotes someone who lives where roads meet, a crossroads.

On the other hand, what we do know, and this ever since the publication of the memoirs of Prince Nikolay Zhevakhov in the 1920s, is that he was murdered by British spies, with the co-operation of rich, decadent, jealous and apostate Russian aristocrats, one a transvestite prince who dabbled in the occult and savagely and ritually battered Gregory Rasputin’s corpse, as the sadistic freemason and decadent Prince Yusupov himself boasted of doing, one a more or less Fascist politician, another a Romanov prince of notoriously loose morals who betrayed his relative the Tsar. All of them through their murderous betrayal, indirectly, handed Russia over to the genocidal Bolsheviks and their imported alien ideology for three generations, 75 years of hellish torment.

What we also know is that he was much respected as a holy elder (‘starets’) and wonderworking healer by innumerable clergy and laity and that the incredible slanders against him were invented by corrupt sources, both just before the Revolution and immediately afterwards, when his body was dug up and incinerated by fanatics, frightened that veneration for him would grow. All these slanders and the mindless gossip that spread them have to this day been repeated by the sensationalist mammons of Hollywood, by Western and Soviet hack writers and by embittered émigrés who could not accept their responsibility for their self-punishment of exile. They only furthered their self-justifying lies and scandals, which they knew they could make money out of.

The Sources of the Slander

Recent research since the downfall of the Bolshevik regime a generation ago in 1991 has led to several new studies of Gregory Rasputin by professional historians and even veneration of ‘the Martyr Gregory’ by some, including by the Elder Nikolai Guryanov, with an akathist composed and icons painted. So far unchallenged and also untranslated, because Western publishers only translate scurrilous works like those of the Soviet novelist Edvard Radzinsky, and not professionally-written works or the unsensational lives of the pious, these new Russian studies of professional historians like the seven volumes by Sergey Fomin and the books by Alexander Bokhanov, Yury Rassulin, Igor Evsin, Tatiana Mironova and Oleg Platonov lead us to take a very different view.

All the myths about Gregory Rasputin were invented from 1910 on by those jealous of the Tsar – without much need for imagination, because they attributed to him what they themselves did, that is, they were talking about themselves and their own deeply-held and practised vices. They were jealous because they wanted the power of the Tsar and therefore wanted to discredit the legitimate holders of that power, the Tsar and his family, including his ill heir and his healer, and the Orthodox Christian society that he ruled over, which they so hated. And so these rich hedonists and decadents spread their lies and gossip in the worldly salons of Saint Petersburg, among the futile wealthy and aristocratic debauchees, and in the gutter press of the time.

These sources included the cunning Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich who, rather like the French and British generals on the Western Front, had led his troops to massacre and defeat, trusting in infantry and cavalry against machine guns, and had had to be replaced, the freemasons Maklakov, Dzhunkovsky and the hack journalist Amfiteatrov, the defrocked apostate Sergey (Iliodor) Trufanov, the conscienceless politician Guchkov, the atheists Milyukov and Gorky, the liar Rodzianko, the pervert and occultist Yusupov and the stupid Purishkevich. They were all traitors who wanted to impose their pagan Russia on Christian Russia. These were the very ones who accused Gregory Rasputin of their own sins, which is why their descriptions were so eloquent.

They accused him of lying, of debauchery and of interfering in the affairs of State – everything that they themselves either did or yearned to do. Belonging to the elite, they were in such a state of demonic delusion that they even convinced themselves that they were doing Russia a service by pandering to their own vanity and plotting against the Tsar and those faithful to him, including the healer of the Heir, and so seizing power. They believed their own slander and forgeries, when in fact they were talking about their own sins. Gregory Rasputin was the useful scapegoat invented by ‘princes and sons of men’ to justify their ruthless ambition. If they had not chosen him, they would have chosen another – peasant Russia was there only to be exploited by them.

Views of Those Who Knew Gregory Rasputin

If we look at those who actually knew him, we obtain a different view. Thus, Bishops Barnabas (Nakropin) and Isidore (Kolokolov) were close friends of Gregory Rasputin till the end of his life, trusted him completely and Bishop Isidore celebrated his funeral service, for which he in turn was much slandered. In his memoirs another, General Kurlov, wrote that he had been ‘struck by Rasputin’s profound knowledge of Holy Scripture and theological questions’ and characterized him as a good man who ‘constantly expressed the sense of Christian forgiveness for our enemies’. Such affirmations are confirmed by other devout and well-educated clergy and laity, impressed by Gregory Rasputin’s piety, and they naturally revered him as an elder.

In his memoirs the head of the Police Department, A. T. Vasiliev, wrote that the results of his many investigations confirmed his initial supposition that there was no compromising correspondence with Rasputin, no letters from the Tsarina. Indeed, why should there have been? Rasputin was only semi-literate, he would have had difficulty reading anything. Vasiliev wrote: ‘I also investigated to find out if Rasputin kept any documents, money or valuables in a bank. My investigations were fruitless, another proof of my conviction of the absurdity of the scandalous rumours about Rasputin’. But these witnesses are only the beginning. There are many others of integrity and indeed holiness who say the same, confirming the absurdity of the slanders.

Among these are of course the future saints Tsar Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra, their five pious children, Archpriest Alexander Vasiliev, the spiritual father of the Imperial Family, the pious virgin Anna Vyrubova (later Mother Maria of Helsinki, who is venerated as a saint today), Prince N. D. Zhevakhov, Julia Dehn, other bishop admirers of Gregory Rasputin like the future St Macarius of the Altai, Metropolitan of Moscow, the pious Metr Pitirim of Saint Petersburg, and a great many other righteous, chaste, sober and honest men and women who loved Holy Rus. None of these believed in the Rasputin myth and this for a very simple reason – they knew him personally, had seen him working miracles of healing and prophecy and knew the motivations of the jealous slanderers.

Of course, there were others. There is the case of the young and naïve Bishop Theophan (Bystrov), who first enthusiastically introduced Gregory Rasputin to the Imperial Family. He only changed his mind because he believed slanders told him in confession. Later he was horrified when he discovered that he had been lied to. Then there was the case of the Grand Duchess, Abbess Elizabeth in Moscow. She too believed the slanders, although at the end her sister the Tsarina seems to have persuaded here that, since she lived in Moscow and had been fed slanders, she had been greatly misled. None of those who believed the slanders had met Gregory in person, they had no first-hand experience, they had simply taken part in a slanderous game of Chinese whispers.

Why the Slanders Have Been Repeated To This Day

Why are these slanders still repeated and believed today? First of all, because scandalous sex stories make many people rich and they are what the mob wants. Secondly, because those who believe and repeat them want to believe and repeat them because they are motivated by self-justification. The alternative would be to repent and most do not want to repent. The murder of the Russian Orthodox peasant Gregory Rasputin in fact began the Revolution, not a Bolsehevik Revolution but a Revolution long desired, since at least December 1825, by a jealous aristocracy and a growing middle-class, all apostates from the Russian Orthodox Church. The descendants of all those who thought they would benefit from the Revolution do not want to repent.

These include not just brainwashed former Soviet citizens, not only the descendants of émigré aristocrats in Paris and elsewhere, but also all the other Western victims of Russophobic propaganda who want to believe that the so-called ‘Tsarist regime’ (that is to say, the legitimate Christian Empire, founded by St Constantine) was corrupt, primitive, barbarian, depraved, drunken and plainly evil. Therefore, it was demonized and so could be overthrown by the ‘pure’ West and all was justified. Such Russophobia is in the direct line of the self-justifying propaganda of the secularism of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But what if Gregory Rasputin was the victim, the more or less innocent scapegoat of the machinations of traitors?

If Gregory was innocent, then they, the ideologues of the anti-Christian Western world, therefore most of the Russian aristocracy and the State Duma, most of the generals and even some clergy, most of the journalists and most of the people, as well as the Western-founded Soviet State, are guilty of slandering him, murdering him and are also guilty of the murder of the canonized Imperial Family. Guilty too are all who believed in the lies without question and all who continue to believe in these money-making (money is always a motive for evil) lies and myths and even spread them. After all, these are the people who three months after the murder, on Kerensky’s Masonic orders, dug up Gregory Rasputin’s corpse and on 11 March 1917 incinerated it.

Was this the act the act of Orthodox Christians or any other Christians? Was this the act of Christian patriots who loved the Tsar, the Little Father? Who could have carried out such a blasphemous act, but apostates, occultists and anti-Christian secularists? Even if all or just part of what they claimed had been true, would that have justified such profound hatred for a corpse? Nobody has done this or even proposed to do this with the corpse of the Bolshevik mass murderer and blasphemer Lenin, which, amazingly, still lies in its chemical soup in Moscow. Surely the only people who could have carried out this act were atheists and Satanists? However, in some sense, all who continue to spread these slanders are indirectly taking part in this same blasphemy.

Conclusion

Gregory Rasputin was a symbol of peasant Orthodox Russia, a useful scapegoat for those who wanted to seize power and whose slogan was ‘Demonize your enemies and then anything you do is justified’. His murderers symbolized all that was wrong with Russia – ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’, in the words of the martyred Emperor Nicholas II. Treason came from the elite class and intelligentsia which betrayed the Imperial Family and the Church to the Germans and the Western-financed Bolsheviks, cowardice came from those who were too weak to resist the elite and instead swam with the tide, and deceit came from the supposed Allies who also plotted against the Tsar. All of them slandered the Imperial Family and therefore also Gregory Rasputin.

Through Gregory Rasputin we see exactly who were the enemies of Russia and of the ideals of Holy Rus: all those who believed in and spread the slanders about him and the Imperial Family. The fact that many of these were treacherous and jealous members of the Romanov Family and other millionaire aristocrats makes no difference. Nor does the fact that among these were most of the generals and also senior members of the clergy like Protopresbyter George Shavelsky. The fact that, as Prince N. D. Zhevakhov, the deputy lay head of the Holy Synod, revealed over 90 years ago, Gregory Rasputin was murdered by British spies makes no difference. They could not have operated without the widespread and even popular support for such Russian traitors.

It is no secret that Gregory Rasputin had a gift of healing that medical science could only jealously acknowledge without understanding – it is a fact of history. That he had the ability to heal the Tsarevich Alexei, who could have become the greatest, most merciful and wisest of all Russian Tsars, is a fact of history. That he was a devout man of prayer and pilgrim to Jerusalem and the holy places of Russia who very well knew the Holy Scriptures, the Lives of the Saints and Orthodox services is a fact of history. That he made several prophecies about the future of Russia, the Tsardom, his own murder and the future of the world, all of which came true in detail, is a fact of history. For Gregory Rasputin knew the price of suffering, both moral and physical.

If he was innocent, then the untold suffering after December 1916 makes sense. The foreign Bolshevik yoke and its millions of victims, the murder of the Anointed of God, the second German invasion that began on the forgotten feast of All the Saints of the Russian Lands in June 1941, the taking of Vienna and Berlin on St George’s Day in 1945, which could have happened, without any such comparable sacrifices, in 1917 under the leadership of Tsar Nicholas II, the plagues of alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce after 1945, the collapse of what was effectively the Russian Empire in 1991 and today’s torment in the Ukraine are all part of the long and slow path of repentance still ongoing 100 years after 1916. The end to our suffering has not yet come.

Whose Temple Are They Building?

Over the last two weeks France and Germany have been deeply troubled by revolting murders carried out by Islamist psychopaths. In the latest tragedy, a devout 86-year old priest, ordained 58 years ago in 1958, had his throat slit while celebrating the mass. One of his assailants had been encouraged by the campaign of the Western media and politicians not so long ago to go to Syria and fight against the government there – a campaign now recognized as an error, though still not apologized for by the culprits. Their unpunished irresponsibility has now brought terror to their very doorstep.

The Middle East from Afghanistan to Libya is indeed littered with failed ‘democratic governments’, built in the ruins of stable but undemocratic countries, as created by Western meddlers. As one Iraqi citizen put it recently: ‘Before there was one Saddam Hussein, now thanks to the West there is a thousand’. More than this, the slaughter of Christians, ultimately caused and tolerated by the West all through the Middle East, has now arrived in Western Europe. Tonight, atheist French politicians, many of them lapsed Jews, most of them freemasons, have attended mass at Notre Dame in Paris.

We can only hope that they may one day be brought to repentance for the refugee crisis that they have created. However, at present these selfsame leaders are still backing the daily and unreported terrorism of the Kiev Army against Ukrainian civilians in Donbass, so there is little realistic hope. These leaders belong to the Western world of smartphones and smartbombs, which they do not know how to use wisely, as their ‘smart civilization’ has failed to invent wisephones and wisebombs. Before they act, they should first think what they are building – the Church of God or the Temple of Antichrist. We fear that when they reflect, if they ever reflect, they will find that it is the latter.

On the Curse of Ancestral Sins and Cultural Healing

Introduction: On Healing from the Sins of our Ancestors

Sins always have consequences. Thus, once we have realized that we have sinned, attaining the consciousness of our sinfulness, we have to repent for the sins and make up for, that is, to make reparation for, their consequences. Only thus can we be healed. But what can we say of the consequences of the sins of our ancestors? Although we did not commit the sins, we still have to live with their consequences, which have become an inherent part of the reflexes and attitudes of the culture in which we live. Until we have made an act of cultural repentance and reparation for the misdeeds of our ancestors, our repentance and reparation are not complete, we accept a stained, even cursed, culture, agreeing to live amid spiritual impurity, and the impure consequences of the original sins continue. In other words, we must seek cultural repentance and reparation if we are to heal the consequences of ancestral sins.

Let us take one concrete and most tragic example from European life, the centenary of which has just been recalled, the Battle of the Somme, with its one million victims. Why did that War, of which that Battle was one of the bloodiest events, take place in Northern France and Southern Belgium (Flanders)? Why were millions of Belgians, Germans, Frenchmen and British troops sent to their deaths by their political and military elites in such a cruel, futile and utterly inhuman way, so much so that the shattered bodies of hundreds of thousands of them could never even be found? Because those were the very countries were cursed by the most terrible exploitation and massacres of native peoples in colonies. Thus, just tiny Belgium stood accused of maiming and murdering between one million and ten million Africans in the Belgian Congo. Sins carried out far away still lie like a curse close to home.

Let us take more recent examples. Why did the terrorist massacre of innocents of 2001 occur precisely in the USA on 9/11 that year? Because the USA is where modern Islamist terrorism was invented and it has never been repented for and made up for, 9/11 being the feast of the Beheading of the innocent St John the Baptist by the evil Herod. Why did the demonic terrorist atrocity in Nice occur precisely in France on 15 July this year? Because France is where terror was invented, on 14 July 1789, and it has never been repented for and made up for, but tragically it is actually justified and celebrated – in France every 14 July. Why was Patriarch Bartholomew, forewarned by Washington, forced to flee Turkey on the eve of the recent failed US-organized coup? Because he has still not repented for and made up for the heretical meeting he oversaw in Crete last month and so has lost his spiritual protection.

Cultural Repentance and Reparation Among Lapsed Russian Orthodox

Let us take other, longer-lasting examples. ‘Only repentance will save Russia’. Like the call of St John the Baptist, such was the call of St John of Kronstadt and many others before the so-called Russian ‘Revolution’ of 1917. After it, this was also the unanimous call of countless others, both inside and outside the former Russian Empire, not least of St John of Shanghai. Otherwise, they said, the bloodletting would go on. Indeed, it was only 25 years after the Revolution, with the unspeakable suffering of the Second World War and its 27 mainly civilian million dead, that repentance began, but even today reparation for the impurity is not complete there, as we see below. For he who says repentance for sins also means reparation for, that is, making up for, the consequences of the sins, changing the culture in which people live. Until the consequences of sins are made up for in all aspects of life, repentance is not complete.

In the ex-Soviet context of the twentieth and twenty-first century, repentance has precisely meant people stripping themselves of a whole cultural layer of spiritual impurity. This was the layer of atheism imposed by force by the Soviet-style Westernization of Russia since 1917, which assimilated the spiritual impurity that had gone before it. Thus, in the 25 years since the fall of the Soviet Union and the coming of religious freedom, we have seen massive numbers of ex-Soviet citizens being baptized, that is, mass repentance. Over 100 million lives have begun to change – but not fully. For the Churching of these masses has been harder and slower, as Soviet cultural reflexes, the ABC of alcoholism (drug-taking), abortion (child murder) and corruption (systematic lying), still like a curse. Though several millions have been Churched in Orthodoxy so far, cultural reparation and so healing is only beginning.

In another Russian context, that of the deep-rooted political prejudices of the anti-Russian emigration, repentance would mean descendants of émigrés stripping themselves of two layers of spiritual impurity. The first is the layer imposed by modern life in the West where they have been born and lived all their lives. The second, much deeper, is the cultural layer of impurity, that of the Russophobic Westernization inherited and continued from their emigre ancestors who absorbed that impurity inside Russia well before the Revolution which they greeted. Two layers makes the task of repentance and reparation twice as hard and this is why the politicized descendants of émigrés have still not returned to the Russian Church. Indeed, there are those among them who actually justify their lack of return to the Church, their lack of cultural repentance and reparation, which lies like a self-imposed curse on them.

Cultural Repentance and Reparation Among Western People

Similarly, for Western people to repent and make reparation for their ancestors’ abandonment of the Orthodox Church means not just words, but reparation, that is, actually returning to their ancestral Faith and cleansing their culture of spiritual impurity. And that means not just repentance for personal sins that have blinded them to the Faith in the past, but also making up for the consequences of those sins which infect the culture that they have inherited. We can sum this up by saying that there must first be personal repentance and reparation and then cultural repentance and reparation. In other words, returning to the Orthodox Faith means forming and obtaining a new view of the world and everything around us and living according to it. Only if enough people follow this path, will a whole culture be purified and healed of its deformations, lies and hypocrisy and will the world be transfigured.

In an English context, returning to the Church means stripping ourselves of no fewer than three layers of impurity. The first is the Secularist culture imposed by the last 50 years of modern life in the West where people have lived all their lives, the second is that imposed by some 475 years of Protestant culture before that, the third that imposed by some 475 years of Roman Catholic culture before that. (In a Roman Catholic context, returning to the Church means losing only two layers, but the second is a double layer – as it is 950 years ‘thick’). Such repentance and reparation mean rejecting the inherent spiritual impurities in English culture, all its alien reflexes and mentalities. Just as someone cannot be baptised if he has not first emptied himself of all that is unworthy of baptism, so also a culture cannot be baptised if it has not first emptied itself of all that is unworthy of baptism.

Let us take concrete examples of the three layers that have overlaid Orthodox culture in England. The first layer is the secularism which says that faith is a barely tolerable private delusion or psychological disease that has no objective reality – modern relativist amoralism. The next layer is the secularism which says that faith is a set of private interpretations and personal moral rules that have no consequences in social, political and economic life, which are ruled only by utilitarian self-interest – ruthless Imperialism, the right to theft because ‘we’ are superior. The final layer is the secularism which says that faith is dependent on external obedience to and dependence on an individual. It is only underneath all these three layers that we can find True Faith, which is made up of the revelations of the Holy Spirit, made continually to the community of all the saints, who together are called the Church.

Conclusion: Consequences in the Last Times

There are no fewer than three levels of cultural repentance and reparation here, three layers of cultural attachment to falsehood which people have to rid themselves off to return to the Church and so be healed. And threefold cultural purification is the only repentance and reparation possible for the thousand year curse, for it is precisely on the basis of these three layers of error that Antichrist will come. Firstly, he will ban all ‘private delusion’ (faith in the real God), secondly, he will enforce consumerist self-interest (the law of the jungle) and thirdly, he will ensure that all are obedient to and dependent on his external authority. In other words, the three layers of impurity that deform modern culture create the conditions for Antichrist to come, frighteningly, the ultimate cultural curse. But we should not despair – he will come only if we do not repent for lapsing from our ancestral Orthodox Faith by returning to it.

The EU: A Story of Hubris

Introduction: Recent Examples of Hubris

The recent saga of Patriarch’s Bartholomew’s conference in Crete, organized and patrolled by the CIA and billed as ‘Great’, ‘Holy’ and ‘Pan-Orthodox’, but which was in fact small and unholy and involved representatives from only 20% of the Orthodox world, is a classic story of hubris. This event was marked by the intellectual arrogance, insults of Orthodox as ‘fundamentalists’, vanity, pomp, self-importance and failure to listen that affects all who suffer from the delusional megalomania of hubris, ‘Blairism’ as it can be called, such as the fact that the Patriarch had erected a statue to himself. From it we can see the spiritual importance of the seemingly forgotten Christian virtue of humility. But a far more tragic story of hubris is the generational parable of the USA over the last 25 years.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communist Eastern and Central Europe in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The end of the very expensive Cold War and its very bloody proxy wars, from North Korea to Northern Ireland, from South Vietnam to South Africa, should have been a wonderful opportunity for the USA and its allies to disarm, disbanding NATO. Instead, power went to the head of the New World Order-obsessed US elite. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union, it had invaded Iraq and embarked on aggression worldwide. We now know that this hubris ended – with Clinton, Bush, Blair, Obama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and millions of dead and refugees. Another tragic story of hubris is that of the European Union (EU).

Four Errors

The predecessor of the EU was founded through the Treaty of Rome by the US and its European puppets (like Monnet and Adenauer). It basically re-established a faithless medieval Roman Catholic Empire, a post-Catholic trading organization and antidote to continual wars between Germany and France and satellite countries in Western Europe. Having formed a Neo-Carolingian Empire of six countries, its proud elite then began to imagine some far greater, pan-European, political entity. Flattered and urged on by the US, this, they thought, could become a United States of Europe. This first error appeared in the 1970s when the power-crazed elite began to try and take over excluded (that is, ‘economically excommunicated’) Protestant Europe to the north.

The second error came in the 1990s after the dissolution of the Communist bloc in Central and Eastern Europe, when the EU elite began to dream up a universal ‘European Union’. On 1 January 1993 it by diktat changed the name of their bloc to this. Megalomania began in earnest with the Treaty of Maastricht (called by some ‘Mass trick’), as the EU nomenklatura stamped the passports of its once-sovereign, unconsulted citizens with the sign of the beast, ‘European Union’. It also encouraged civil war in ex-Yugoslavia, whose markets and territories the EU elite wanted to take over. By bullying, bribes, blackmail and war crimes it planned the absorption of ex-Communist Europe into the EU with its US-run military arm, NATO. The Soviet Union had been reborn as the European Union.

Thus, although already having failed to take over Protestant Europe, in their hubris the blinded and megalomaniac EU elite actually imagined that they could take over not only Catholic Eastern Europe, but even Orthodox Eastern Europe. This second error meant absorbing those who had at least in part preserved the Faith from the 1960s materialist consumerism and spiritual degeneration of Western Europe, ironically thanks to Communism. In order to further its hold throughout the Union, the elite then began imposing on its subject peoples a single currency, in effect, a one size fits all Deutschmark straitjacket, regardless of the many differences between the various nations. A German Europe, not a European Germany, was the order of the day. This was the third error.

Next, even after the collapse of naïve Greece, bankrupted by EU, ‘easy-money’, consumerism and enslaving itself to cheap euro credit from German banks become expensive, and even after the risk of Grexit, such was the hubris of the elite that in 2014 it proceeded to its fourth error. Urged on by the US neocon elite which was violently sweeping away the democratically-elected government in Kiev, the EU elite gave naïve Ukrainians, impoverished by oligarch corruption, the idea that the Ukraine too could be forced into the EU straitjacket. A pro-Nazi Galician regime in Kiev (like that in Zagreb in the 1990s) which began another bloody civil war in Europe, with perhaps two million refugees fleeing in despair, was installed; blood was on the hands of the US and of the EU elite.

Brexit

But now Brexit has come to destroy the elite’s fantasies of ‘ever-closer Union’. And they, the ‘democratic’ EU elite, are enraged: the people were never supposed to have their say, only the elite knew better. After over 40 years of oppressive captivity, post-Protestant Europe in the form of the UK has now begun to free and relieve itself from the post-Catholic, centralized EU straitjacket. (Sensibly, Protestant Switzerland, Norway and Iceland never even tried on the straitjacket of rule from ‘Rome’). Now the peoples of post-Protestant Sweden, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands are also thinking of Swexit, Denxit, Fexit, and Nexit and there is much support for Dexit, the Alternative for Germany, notably in the cities of post-Protestant, former East Germany.

In the UK itself the repercussions are huge. The fourth largest political Party, the tiny, largely upper-middle class Liberal Democratic Party, has all but disappeared, virtually wiped out by its own pro-EU suicide, and become a joke. The third Party, the anti-EU protest Party (UKIP), can now disappear with its embarrassingly rude leader, who has already resigned. The second Party, the Labour Party, is split by champagne-socialist, pro-Iraq War MPs, installed by the megalomania of Blair (and Brown), whom many consider a war criminal. These MPs have nothing in common with the grassroots membership, which rightly views them as traitors to the real Labour cause of social justice and to their burning desire for a non-Third World national health service and public transport system.

As for the largest Party, the Conservative and Unionist Party, to give it its full name, it has largely become the Party of Eton toffs, City banksters, big business and neocon Russophobes. It too has been traitorous to its core of working-class patriots, some of whom founded UKIP as a result of the toffs’ betrayal. It anti-democratically signed up the UK to the EU in all its incarnations in the first place. Therefore, it too is utterly split. It is only right that its Establishment elite, in its hubris and conviction that it could easily win the EU referendum, now has to find a ‘Brexit strategy’, that is, a plan for escape from the 43-year old mess that it created. Perhaps it could begin by making a Minister for social justice and a New-York born Foreign Minister for relations with a post-neocon USA and the Commonwealth.

However, more than this, Brexit may not only signal the end of the ‘European Union’, as cracks develop further, not only in Hungary, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia, but also in Scandinavia, France, Austria, Spain, Greece, Cyprus and elsewhere. It may also be the end of the ‘British Union’ (the UK), an oppressively united and centralized British Isles and Ireland, an invention of the alien Norman ruling elite that has occupied and ruled the country for 950 years. We may finally be moving towards the reconfiguration of the Isles, into a Confederation of an at long last independent England, an offshore Switzerland, and also an independent Scotland and Wales and at last a united Ireland. As it was in the beginning, so shall it be now? Perhaps we are indeed turning full circle.

Conclusion: Towards a New Europe

One of the myths of Brexit, repeated in the mendacious and outrageous pages of the pro-globalist British Establishment press like The Financial Times, is that those who voted for freedom were stupid, rural, traditional, old and racist. As though 52% of the electorate could be fitted into this tiny category! You cannot disabuse and trample underfoot the sense of justice of the people for 43 years and expect them not to resist and fight to return freedom. The chaotic EU is collapsing. Bankrupt Italy may be next to break free. Moreover, elections are due in the US in November, where if the anti-neocon, pro-British, maverick and provocative Trump, defeats the anti-US neocon Clinton, all is possible, perhaps a new golden age of Anglo-American relations and even freedom for the Ukraine.

In 2017 there will be elections in France and Germany, which come 100 years after the 1917 Western-engineered coup in Russia. This destroyed the Christian Russian Empire, which, after the previous incompetent military leadership, under the inspired leadership of Tsar Nicholas II was on the verge of victory over the hubristic Kaiser. This victory would have restored the sovereign Germanic states, destroyed by Bismarck’s Second Reich, ended the Austro-Hungarian enslavement of the Slavs, freed Western Europe from genocide, the Balkans from masonic German princelings, Constantinople, Jerusalem and Palestine from the Ottomans and avoided the evil Third Reich and today’s tragic Middle East. Instead, the coup created the horrors of the anti-Christian Soviet Union.

Now the freedom-loving peoples of Europe may be able to restore their sovereignty. At last a Europe of independent, sovereign but co-operating nations, as envisaged by Tsar Nicholas II, is possible. EU propagandists lie: the problems of Europe never came from the nation states that they have dismantled, but from the nationalist, anti-patriotic aggression and will of large Western Europe countries to dominate all the others. As the anachronistic EU and so NATO collapse, perhaps it is time for this Westernmost corner of the Eurasian Continent to stop its navel-gazing. Its nations could yet join the Confederation of Nations of the much broader and more successful Eurasian Economic Union, ceasing to be vassals of the neocon elite and so recovering their own identities.

13 July 2016

The Meaning of our Life is to Postpone the Coming of Antichrist

The last two weeks have brought a series of very important pieces of news.

Firstly, there has been the failed Crete meeting. Far from being a ‘Pan-Orthodox Council’, let alone the ‘Eighth Oecumenical Council’, it turned into disagreements about a series of narrow ‘Zizioulasisms’, philosophical modernisms approved by the US State Department that runs the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Many of the most respected bishops present in Crete, let alone those representing the other 80% of the Orthodox world and not present, refused to sign the documents proposed. This meeting, so secretive that most media were excluded from it, has no authority or acceptance anywhere in the monasteries and parishes in the real Orthodox world. The mismanaged forum, fortunately largely unreported by the mass media, turned it into little more than a damp squib. It does, however, mean that the Church has resisted the secularization that the powerbrokers of this world wanted to impose on Her, as they had imposed on the Vatican. She will not merge with the world in order to welcome the coming Antichrist.

Secondly, there has been the Brexit vote, the people’s bid for freedom from the dying European Superstate and the corrupt Unionist British Establishment which was so enthusiastic about the EU that it had imposed it on the people. And this was in spite of, or perhaps because of, the manipulation of the assassination that preceded the referendum. Some believe that other countries and institutions, even religious ones, may also wish to escape the straitjacket of the EU. Amid all the new opportunities this opens up there has, however, also been much insecurity and even panic and chaos. Freedom comes at a price. The whole UK political Establishment, as usual totally out of touch with the people it was supposed to represent, not least the Labour Party infiltrated and stuffed with careerist Blairite MPs, is being transformed with the resignations and eliminations of several well-known politicians. Brexit, so much resisted by the bullying of Obama and Merkel, has delayed the move towards One World Government by Antichrist.

Thirdly, there has been the long-delayed publication of the Chilcot report which makes clear that the whole of the British Establishment was guilty of the war crimes in invading and occupying Iraq. Its arrogance and hubris have been revealed for the whole world to see. This opens up UK responsibilities for other recent disastrous massacres and chaotic injustices in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine and the Yemen. In the Ukraine British Army equipment is now being used by the Kiev puppet regime in its massacres of the population in Eastern Ukraine. Moreover, the UK Establishment is actively participating in the meeting in Warsaw of the US-led and financed NATO. Russians nervously fear a NATO invasion, as German and other tanks once more mass on the borders of Russia, just as they did 75 years ago. If such a threat did take place, which does seem highly unlikely, it would be one step nearer the One World Government that the neocons in Washington have so ardently been working for ever since they came to power under Clinton in the 1990s.

Two steps forward, one step back? Perhaps. Perhaps there will be a real Orthodox Council that will reject the compromises of Crete. But perhaps not. Perhaps the elite will not allow the UK to leave the EU and the electorate will be browbeaten, bribed and blackmailed into voting again and again until it gets the ‘right’ result. But perhaps the Unionist EU – and the Unionist UK – will collapse and relatively soon. And perhaps then England, freed from the Norman yoke after 950 years, will take its rightful place as an equal among the nations. Perhaps the old Norman-British habit of arrogantly invading, enslaving and exploiting other countries of the world, not least England itself, because it is ‘in the national interest’, that is, in the interest of the elite, will forever pass into the dustbin of history. Perhaps NATO will collapse as the antiquated Cold War structure it is. Perhaps the Christian Emperor will be restored in Russia. But perhaps NATO will invade Russia. There is no point in predicting. We do not know what will happen. What we do know is that if we wish to influence the future, the only thing we can do is to pray – for the meaning of our life is to postpone the coming of Antichrist.

Initial Sorrowful Observations Regarding the Holy and Great Synod by Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus

“The personal opinion of a Primate on any particular issue is not binding on the Hierarchs in the Synod to which he belongs and does not obligate them to fall in line with his opinion. Were that so, the synodal institution would be annulled and every Primate would be transformed into a Pope. It is not the Primate, but the Synod of Bishops that is the supreme administrative organ in the local Orthodox Churches.”

Initial Sorrowful Observations Regarding the Holy and Great Synod by Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus

From the Office of Heresies and Cults of the Holy Metropolis of Piraeus

By way of the mass media we have followed with great sorrow and pain of soul the Holy and Great Synod from its inception at the Divine Liturgy on the Sunday of Pentecost. In what follows we offer some initial and concise observations on the Synod for the benefit of the people of God.

(1) We observe with sorrow the presence and joint prayer of heretical Papists, Protestants, and Monophysites at Matins and the Divine Liturgy of this great Feast of the Lord in the Church of St. Menas in Heraklion. As everyone is aware, this is prohibited by the Sacred Canons. The Orthodox Primates and other participating Orthodox Hierarchs trampled on the Canons of the Apostles and the Synods, wishing from the outset to send a message to the whole world, showing what great respect they have for the decisions of the Oecumenical Synods and, by extension, for the very institution of the Synod, about which they make bombastic declarations.

(2) The presence, at the commencement of the proceedings, of officially invited delegations of heretical Papists, Protestants, and Monophysites was an unprecedented innovation and one foreign to our Synodal Tradition. In fact, Oecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew addressed these delegates as “representatives of Sister Churches” before the Holy and Great Synod made any decision regarding the ecclesiality or non-ecclesiality of the heretical communities in question. Thus, Patriarch Bartholomew, through a fait accompli, sent another message to the members of the Synod: that he had no intention of calling the heterodox heretics. Instead, he called them Sister Churches. Never in the history of the Oecumenical or local Synods during the Byzantine period were “observers” present at such Synods, and as dignitaries, to boot, whose heretical doctrines were condemned by previous Oecumenical Synods. Heretics were, of course, invited, but as persons subject to trial, in order to defend themselves, and not as guests of honor. It was only at the First and Second Vatican Councils that the phenomenon of “observers” made its appearance. The Holy and Great Synod is evidently copying Roman Catholic models.

(3) The Holy and Great Synod began its proceedings in violation of its “Organization and Working Procedure,” which was signed at the Synaxis of the Primates in January 2016. The document in question prescribes that the Synod be “convened by His Most Divine All-Holiness, the Oecumenical Patriarch, with the consent of Their Beatitudes, the Primates of all of the universally recognized local Autocephalous Orthodox Churches” (Article I). Four Autocephalous Churches—those of Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia, and Antioch—justifiably disagreed with the convocation of the Synod and asked for its postponement, thus, the condition “with the consent of Their Beatitudes, the Primates” was been fulfilled. Consequently, there was no justification, on the basis of the aforementioned “Organization and Working Procedure,” for either the Oecumenical Patriarch or all of the remaining local Churches together to convene a Synod, if they wished to be consistent with the “Organization and Working Procedure” that they signed.

(4) The Synod inaugurated its work without first ratifying the Synodal Decrees (Ὅροι) and Canons of all of the previous Oecumenical Synods, so that the present Holy and Great Synod might be truly an organic continuation of the preceding Synods. It should be noted that such reference to previous Oecumenical Synods was a standing procedure upheld by the Holy Fathers of the Synods in question. Through this procedure the Holy Fathers wished to proclaim that they accepted all of the doctrines put forth by the preceding Oecumenical Synods and that they were proposing to continue the work of these Synods. A characteristic example of this is the recognition by the Eighth Oecumenical Synod of 879-880, under St. Photios, of the Synod of 787 as the Seventh Oecumenical Synod.

(5) The Synod inaugurated its work on the basis of an “Organization and Working Procedure” that was not unanimously accepted by all of the Primates at their Synaxis of January 2016, since the Church of Antioch did not sign it. It also commenced its work on the basis of the six unanimously accepted documents of the Fifth Pre-Synodal Consultation, which basis proved to be insecure and unstable. This is because the six pre-synodal documents were unanimously approved by the representatives at the Fifth Pre-Synodal Consultation and by the Synaxis of the Primates (January 2016), but not by all the Hierarchies of the local Autocephalous Churches. When these Churches, and especially those of Bulgaria, Georgia, and Greece, studied the aforementioned documents, they found in them gaps, obscurities, and cacodox formulations, for which they suggested emendations and corrections. For these Churches which proposed the corrections and changes in question it is self-evident that the pre-synodal documents are no longer in force.

The fact that the Primates signed the six documents of the Fifth Pre-Synodal Consultation does not mean that the Hierarchies of the local Churches are bound by their signatures to accept these texts as they stand. The personal opinion of a Primate on any particular issue is not binding on the Hierarchs in the Synod to which he belongs and does not obligate them to fall in line with his opinion. Were that so, the synodal institution would be annulled and every Primate would be transformed into a Pope. It is not the Primate, but the Synod of Bishops that is the supreme administrative organ in the local Orthodox Churches. In view of all that we have said, it is clear that the following assertion by the Oecumenical Patriarch in his opening address is completely erroneous: “We proceed, then, with our work on the basis of documents unanimously approved by our Churches, which each Church has already endorsed.” By “documents unanimously approved” the Oecumenical Patriarch evidently means the documents of the Fifth Pre-Synodal Consultation, which were signed at the Synaxis of the Primates (January 2016), but which have no validity for certain of the Churches after the corrections and changes dictated by their Synods.

(6) The four Churches that did not participate in the Synod were denigrated before an international audience. Their absence was represented both by the Oecumenical Patriarch and by other Primates in their opening addresses as wholly unjustified and reprehensible. To a greater or lesser extent these Churches were portrayed as being responsible, by virtue of their absence, for creating schisms and divisions. However, the Churches in question did not take part, not because they were “piqued,” but because they discovered weaknesses in the pre-synodal documents after examining them in synod. They naturally requested that the Synod be postponed, in order to study the documents in greater depth, make necessary corrections, and thus produce new documents which would be unanimously approved by all of the local Churches. Since their proposal for the postponement of the Synod was not accepted, these Churches understandably did not participate in the Synod.

(7) Most distressing among all of these observations is the acknowledgement, in essence, by way of an obscure and cryptic new formulation in the document “Relations of the Orthodox Church to the Rest of the Christian World,” of the ecclesiality of the heterodox. The Synod unanimously accepted the formulation, “The Orthodox Church accepts the historical name of other non-Orthodox Christian Churches and Confessions,” instead of the formulation, “The Orthodox Church acknowledges the historical existence of other Christian Churches and Confessions.” That is to say, the word “existence” is replaced by the word “name,” and to the phrase “Christian Churches and Confessions” is added the adjective “non-Orthodox.” Archbishop Hieronymos of Athens proposed this change in the formulation after many hours of discussions and deliberations, during which many conflicting views were expressed.

Archbishop Hieronymos states that, by virtue of this new formulation, “we have reached a synodal decision that, for the first time in history, defines the historical scope of relations with the heterodox not in terms of their existence, but solely in terms of their historical appellation as non-Orthodox Christian Churches or Confessions.” This raises a justifiable question: “How is it possible for one to name something, while at the same time denying the existence of that which he names?” Likewise, from a dogmatic standpoint, endorsement of the term “non-Orthodox Christian Churches or Confessions” is contradictory and unacceptable. Heterodox Confessions cannot be called “Churches” precisely because they accept other, heretical doctrines and, as heretics, cannot constitute “Churches.”

Most distressing also is the fact that the delegation of the Church of Greece did not remain unshakably loyal to the decisions of the Synod of Bishops on May 24-25 (2016), as they ought to have done. The Synod of Bishops decided that the phrase “the historical existence of other Christian Churches and Confessions” should be replaced by the phrase “the historical existence of other Christian Confessions and Communities.”

(8) Finally, yet another sorrowful observation: all that Oecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew proclaimed, indeed braggingly, at the conclusion of the proceedings. Among other things, he declared that “the Oecumenical Patriarchate was a pioneer in the realm of the ecumenical movement.” He also adverted to the pan-heretical Encyclical of 1920, “which is characterized by many as the founding charter of the subsequently established World Council of Churches,” and that “the Oecumenical Patriarchate was one of the founding members of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam.”

For the time being, we confine ourselves to the foregoing comments, although that does not mean that the list of sorrowful observations ends here. In view of all that we have mentioned above, the following question naturally arises: What can one expect from a Synod that commenced and proceeded in such a way?

As the Lord observes: ““For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit; for every tree is known by its own fruit” (St. Luke 6:43-44). Let each reader draw his own conclusions.

The Double-Headed Eagle: Orthodox Christianity Incarnate

Foreword: A Real Council is Coming

In view of the shameful masonic and humanist apostasy going on behind closed doors at the robber conference of a few in Crete and which has little or nothing to do with the Church, we have felt it necessary to compose some initial response. The efforts of the secularists and compromised to impose on the Church the same old-fashioned 1960s heresies as were promoted by Vatican II will not be successful, for the gates of hell will not prevail, and a real Council will in time reply. Below is our first response, a response of free Orthodox, to the syncretism and ecumenism of the Teilhard de Chardin Halfodoxy of Crete. This is a vision of the Church that is both Trinitarian and Christological, both local and global, both of the Tradition and also realistic.

Introduction: The Heartland

Orthodox Christianity is by earthly origin Asian. However, within a few years of the Resurrection of Christ, symbolized by the Cross, it had spread to Europe. The symbol of its geographical spread thus soon became the double-headed eagle and it remains so to this day. The double-headed eagle unites north and south and looks east and west, which by the fifth century meant India and Ireland. The centre of the Orthodox Christian world, the Orthosphere, is therefore in Eurasia, what is called ‘The Heartland’. Since the late fifteenth century this has meant the lands of the Russian Empire, with today over 75% of the world’s Orthodox Christian population, the other 25% living in peripheral lands or else scattered through all the lands of the earth.

For the Father: The Orthodox Christian Faith

The word Christian became debased, especially during the second millennium and today it often means Roman Catholic and Protestant, which are transformed and deformed nationalized versions of Christianity. This can clearly be seen in the actions of the imperialistic and bloodthirsty Roman Catholic Crusaders who actually wore a cross on their backs, as they massacred to extend their power-grab. This is why we are obliged to use the term Orthodox Christian. Even here we must be careful, for there are those who, though calling themselves Orthodox, are in fact false Orthodox and are inclined to be Halfodox. Genuine Orthodox Christians are all the faithful who are not controlled and conditioned by the world, whose prince is satan.

For the Son: The Orthodox Christian Sovereign

Orthodox Christianity is Incarnate, lived in daily life, in monasteries, parishes and families. It is not some disincarnate and abstract daydream of intellectuals, ‘spiritualized’, full of spite for the living Tradition, and so irrelevant. We now await the Coming Sovereign Emperor and Tsar, who according to the prophecies of the saints of God will appear soon, but only if we manage to repent and resist the ongoing preparations of the secularists to enthrone Antichrist in Jerusalem. We Orthodox Christians are heirs to the Christian Roman Empire, not to the Pagan Roman Empire and its materialist ideology and idolatry, whether it is called Capitalist or Communist. ‘No man can serve two masters…You cannot serve God and Mammon’.

For the Holy Spirit: The Orthodox Christian People

The Orthodox Christian faithful are of many nations and races, north and south, east and west. The faithful are not nationalists, racists or, in Church language, phyletists. The faithful come from and live in ten different regions of the world: to the centre, the majority live in the Eurasian Heartland; to the far west in North America and to the west in Western Europe; to the far east in China with south-east Asia and to the east in Kazakhstan and Central Asia; to the far south-west in Latin America and to the south-west in Africa; to the south in the Middle East; to the far south-east in Australasia and to the south-east in the Indian Subcontinent. The mere existence of the faithful witnesses to the presence of the Holy Spirit amongst us.

Conclusion: Faith, Throne and People in the Isles

These Isles are distant provinces and yet they were visited by both the first Christian Emperor and the last Christian Emperor. On 25 July 306 the future St Constantine the Great was proclaimed Emperor in York and founded New Rome, between Europe and Asia. And in 1894, 1896 and 1909 these isles were visited by the future St Nicholas II, who was later martyred on 17 July 1918 in Ekaterinburg, a city which straddles Europe and Asia, equidistant between Iceland and the Pacific Coast. Some would say that any hope that the Double-Headed Eagle of the Christian Empire can be restored is fantasy. No doubt they would have said the same if they had been told that the Twelve Apostles would conquer the Pagan Roman Empire. ‘Fear not, little flock!’