Category Archives: Britain and Ireland

The War on the Church and the Revolt of the Hobbits

The first war on the Body of Christ began with the Birth of Christ, His Flight into Egypt, the Slaughter of the Innocents and the rest of Christ’s Life on earth. This culminated in the Crucifixion of the actual Body of Christ in Jerusalem and then His Resurrection some two thousand years ago. This first war continued with three centuries of martyrdom and direct persecution of the Body of Christ, the Orthodox Christian Church. The second war on the Body of Christ began in Western Continental Europe some thousand years ago during the course of the eleventh century. This entailed the final apostasy from the Orthodox Christian Church of the barbaric Frankish elite of Western Europe and their delusional substitution of a false ‘Church’ and a false ‘Christianity’ for the real Church and real Christianity.

In this way, this elite dragged its subject peoples away from the authentic Church and Christianity. It literally enslaved them to their mafia protection racket – filioquist feudalism and the delusion of the substitute ‘Church’ under its control. Thus, like all the other Western lands which one by one fell away from the Church under the Frankish conquistadors, England became a conquest state. Indeed, since the first occupation by the bandit Conqueror in 1066 and his genocidal introduction of feudalism, the people have been overlaid and enslaved by an alien Establishment and the whole country has gradually degenerated into pagan Britain. The most recent alien waves of occupation, those that began in 1942 and 1973, now pose the question if the remaining vestiges of England can survive at all.

Those last vestiges of England, much in retreat and now to be found mainly only in the remoter places, can only survive if they are reintegrated into Church values after nigh on a thousand years of separation. Alarmed by this possibility, the British Establishment elite, as is its wont, has tried to take over the Church, to infiltrate it with its nationalistic, ‘British’ Establishment representatives, its calendar, spiritual and moral compromises and secularism, removing Her from the control of the spiritually free abroad. The corrupted Establishment elite wants to castrate the Church, to give Her a ‘nice, polite’ exterior and polish, but to spiritually deaden Her from inside, so incorporating Her into its lapsed Establishment self. However, despite all the attempts to suppress the Church and the people, we are still here.

The still Frankish elite sneeringly calls all attempts to bring the ordinary people back to the values of the Church ‘populism’. However, populism is crowd-pleasing, seeking to please the majority, whereas we are a minority who do not seek to please the masses, but to express the Truth, which is so hated by the elite. We grew up in the West with the essential values of the vestiges inherited from our forbears, we tried to understand them and worked out their consequences through prayer, study and travel. We followed history back to understand how the Frankish elite had westernized the West and we renounced the results of that Westernization, having received the great revelation – that the True West is identical with the Church and so understanding why the world is in its present catastrophic situation.

Today we are suffering the third war on the Body of Christ, the Church. This is not a war against one minority part of the Church, as in Western Europe one thousand years ago, it is total war against the whole Church on earth. Orthodox Christians in Syria, the Holy Land, Africa, Istanbul, in the Local Churches in Greece, Albania, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Georgia are all under attack at the same time. Now too the Russian Church is being attacked not only in the Ukraine, but now also in Moldova, Belarus and Russia itself. But Russia, Syria, Greece, Cyprus and others are preparing an alliance, ignoring the ‘Orthodox’ apostates and hirelings who have been bribed and blackmailed into becoming puppets of the neo-Frankish neocons and their Satanic master.

Their military arm, NATO, once justified its existence as a counterbalance to the Warsaw Pact – just as its political arm, the EU, opposed COMECON. So why do they still exist when the Warsaw Pact and COMECON were long ago dissolved? Why does a ‘North Atlantic’ organization terrorize Yugoslavia, the foothills of the Himalayas and now the Ukraine? Under its cloak, the militarization of Europe is under way, more spending on more offence (‘defence’) is being urged by the neo-Frankish elite, the neocons in Washington. So they summon up a demonized fantasy bogeyman, President Putin, for their new Cold War, designed to increase the profits of their military-industrial complex. This hubristic elite is now flooding all of Eastern Europe with its propaganda, troops, tanks, arms and instructors.

The elite wants to create ever more ‘shock and awe’, its euphemism for its State terrorism and genocidal chaos, as we have seen in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere. However, the ‘hobbit peoples’ of Europe are in revolt. We, the faithful Orthodox and peasants of Europe, reject the filioque yoke of the neo-feudal elite. We choose freedom and the Church, Whose Truth has set us free. Among the neo-Frankish elite religion may be everywhere, but faith among them is utterly absent. However, we have Faith and they can never take that away from us. That is why they hate us. But we already have our places to go to in readiness for the persecution and are prepared for the great day. We believe and we know that eventually the Shire will conquer Mordor through the Church of God.

Last Chance for Europe

‘The countries which today so criticize Russia are in fact trying to deprive Russia of her traditions, memory and territorial logic. It is commonly said that in order to control and deceive peoples and countries with impunity, they must first be deprived of their memory and hope. In my view, such games will end badly – above all for those who play them. Everyone will become the same and lose their initiative, particularities and individual roots, all for the sake of a few international slogans. And, if I may put it like this, they want to ‘sloganize’ Russia. Fortunately, Russia has a solid Slav foundation. And I consider that in defending its independence, Russia is at the same time defending our independence too’.
Prince Sixte-Henri de Bourbon-Parme

The Western world is isolated. Although it likes to call itself ‘the international community’, it is no such thing. Indeed, even the phrase ‘the Western world’ is inappropriate because a great many Western people are wholly opposed to the policies of ‘the Western world’. In fact ‘the Western world’ is not a geographical construct, but an ideological one. The phrase ‘the USA’ is also totally inappropriate, since many Americans are thoroughly opposed to today’s ‘Western world’, not least native Americans. In fact, by ‘the Western world’ we are talking about a small but immensely powerful global elite which controls the politics, economies and media of ‘Western countries’, despite their peoples, and wants hegemony over the whole world. But what does even the phrase ‘Western countries’ mean?

Today the phrase ‘Western countries’ means the elite of the USA, Canada, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and most EU countries. This elite also has agents in other countries, sometimes though by no means always Jews, such as Petro Poroshenko (real name, Waltzman) and Igor Kolomoysky in the Ukraine or the vilely murdered Boris Nemtsov in Russia. Here we immediately affirm that we utterly detest all anti-semitism and resolutely stand in defence of ordinary Jews who have suffered so much in history, pointing out that Western elite Jews are not Jews at all in the historic or religious sense, but uprooted Zionists. And the difference between a Zionist and a Jew is as huge as that between a neocon bankster and the average US citizen struggling to avoid foreclosure or between a Brussels bureaucrat and the average EU citizen struggling to pay bills.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union a generation ago, this hubristic Western elite has embarked on its ambitious ‘New World Order’ campaign to acquire worldwide hegemony. As regards Eurasia, the Western elite has since 1945 controlled the vassal archipelagos at either end of Eurasian Continent – Japan and the British Isles. Thus, as regards Great Britain, the US elite first dismantled its Empire in order to build a US Empire in its place, then it forced it to join the future European Union. It has recently strongly objected to any attempt by the British people to liberate itself by referendum from EU slavery, has strongly objected to the desire of many Scots to liberate themselves from the tyranny of London and has recently protested at any attempt to reduce defence (= offence) spending, since the British armed forces are in fact only ‘partner’ forces under US orders. The UK is in fact just a US aircraft carrier off the coast of Western Europe.

The US elite has used the elites of both the UK and Japan against the national interests of their subject populations to penetrate further into the Eurasian mainland, whether into Siberia, in the US-encouraged and British-financed anti-Russian war of 1904-5 and in the 1950s in Korea, or into Western Europe. Indeed, since the US invasion of Western Europe in 1944 (carried out in order to prevent the Red Army arriving on the shores of the Atlantic), the US elite has been trying to control the Western tip of Europe, penetrating ever more eastwards since 1989, using the puppet EU as its Trojan Horse. However, there are now active forces in the EU, which are at last awake and are opposing vassalization. Curiously, these forces belong politically to both left and right.

Thus, mainly in southern or ex-Catholic Europe, in Spain, the Basque Country, Catalonia, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland – we can see left-wing movements resisting US colonization. On the other hand, mainly in northern or ex-Protestant Europe, in England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, we can see right-wing movements resisting US colonization. Why this difference between left and right? It all depends on their local history since 1945. By and large, in countries where oppressive right-wing ideologies have been in power, resistance comes from the left. By and large, in countries where oppressive left-wing ideologies have been in power, resistance comes from the right.

In a similar way, in recently colonized Central and Eastern Europe, there is increasing nostalgia for Communism, oppressive, but everyone had a job and a dwelling, there was little crime or insecurity, there was free education and medical care and the young were not forced to leave their homes and families to emigrate in order to find work. Here, where US vassalization has gone further, including in Non-EU countries, with American ministers appointed in Georgia, Estonia and the Ukraine, the US takeover of the media in Serbia, CIA torture camps in several Eastern European countries such as Lithuania, US or EU political appointees in Sweden, Finland, Romania, Bulgaria and Montenegro, generously-financed US regime-change agents in the Ukraine, Armenia and Turkmenistan, resistance is also growing. The adoption of Wild West capitalism and mafia politics, the law of the jungle where there is no social justice, has not brought happiness.

On the left-wing of resistance and sovereignty stand thinkers and politicians like the Americans Noam Chomsky and Paul Craig Roberts, the Canadian Naomi Klein, in Germany Gregor Gysi, in Scotland Alex Salmond, in Czechia Milosh Zeman, in Greece the leaders of Syriza and in Spain of Podemos. On the right wing of resistance and sovereignty stand thinkers and politicians like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan in the USA, Philippe de Villiers, Marine Le Pen, Alain de Benoist and the late Dominique Venner in France, Nigel Farage in England and Viktor Orban in Hungary. Whatever we think of their politics or personal eccentricities and however much we may disagree with them, they at least all stand united in their opposition to the one size fits all globalization of the elite and against the post-modernist neocon ‘war against all who disagree with us’.

The more spiritually sensitive European resistance workers are beginning to realize that only the return to European roots, ultimately to the European Tradition of the first millennium, can act as the antidote to the ‘Western’ elite, with its EU totalitarian ‘liberalism’ and NATO military hysteria, which have both been artificially created by the neocon warmongers of Washington. The Brave New World of the New World Order which the elite has sought to create for a generation is nothing but the justification for its own greed and depravity. And that is precisely what all the saints of Jerusalem and Rome, Greece and Italy, Egypt and Syria, Gaul and Ireland, Wales and England, Bulgaria and Serbia, Russia and Romania have always fought against – greed and depravity.

However, having infiltrated and largely vassalized the Western tip of Eurasia, the real aim of the elite is to go much further. It is to acquire control over the huge natural riches of what the geopoliticians call ‘the heartland’, that is, northern Eurasia, which stretches half-way around the world – the Russian Federation, over one eighth of the planet’s land mass. As a result, the Russian Federation is trying to create friends all around its frontiers, forming the Eurasian Economic Union, creating alliances with China, Syria, Iran, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, and also further afield, with Latin America and Africa. It wishes to create a network on its periphery, a global alliance of sovereign nations which believe that their civilizations and traditions, their national cultures and identities, are more important than the Western elite’s idols of the US dollar and the ‘freedom’ to be greedy and depraved. As Nigel Farage, who comes from the land of Thatcherite monetarism, bravely said: ‘Some things are more important than money.’

All of this would be mere politics and therefore have little place on this website if it were not for one vital fact. Standing far beyond the petty interests of provincial and narrow-minded Russian nationalists, the multinational Russian Federation is by far the largest Orthodox Christian country in the world, sole heir to the Christian Roman Empire. Although its spiritual rebirth is only beginning and is still being held back by the weight of the recent past and has far to go, its positive direction, unlike that of the Western world, is clear. Russia’s destiny as the Third Rome of the Last Times, the last Christian Empire, is to rebalance a divided and tormented planet, to resist Satan in the last times though the traditional values which it is now recovering after the three generations of the demonic possession of Western-imposed atheism. And those values are love, mercy, non-acquisition, personal righteousness, social justice, generosity, hospitality and self-sacrifice.

For this reason, healthy spiritual forces in the Western world, as elsewhere outside it, today defend the Russia which is being reborn and also seek her support. Europe in particular stands at the crossroads. Is Europe to survive or not? After more than three generations of Americanization on the one hand and more than one generation of Islamization on the other hand, can it survive? Only if it refers back to its roots in its historic identity in Christianity because the roots of all civilizations are in spiritual inspiration, in Faith. Any civilization which abandons its spiritual roots withers and dies. This is the inevitable law of history. To throw off the modern yoke of the idolatry of the dollar, the law of the jungle, and return to the truths of Galilee is the only way in which Europe can be saved.

To Leave for Russia or to Remain in the West?

First there was the US puppet regime in Georgia which tried to invade Russia in 2008. Then there was the US attempt to bomb Syria in 2013. Then the US overthrew the democratically-elected government in Kiev and replaced it with a puppet-oligarch. Then there was the US attempt to set up a NATO base in Sebastopol. Then came the shooting down of an airliner by the Kiev regime, so that it could be blamed on the Ukrainian freedom-fighters. Then came anti-Russian Western sanctions and NATO ‘exercises’ off the Russian coast in the Baltic. This was followed by the US attempt to destroy the Russian economy by halving the oil price and so bring about ‘regime-change’ in Russia, just as they did in Kiev. Then NATO troops and tanks entered Romania. Then they started to prepare coloured revolutions in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

The British Minister of Defence, following his idol Obama, compared ‘the Russian threat’ to that of the Western-founded IS. Then came the decision by the US-appointed Patriarch of Constantinople to create an ‘alternative Synod’ in the Czechoslovak Church and his promise to establish a ‘united’ Church in the Ukraine, which he now claims to be his canonical territory, like Estonia. Then US and UK troops paraded in Estonia 300 metres from the Russian border. Now comes the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, which bears all the hallmarks of the CIA, just as the assassination of the British spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 bore all the marks of a British assassination. Western intelligence agencies are expending their assets.

What was unthinkable five years ago has happened. The West has declared war on Russia. The announcement by Cameron, a Washington poodle like Blair before him, that he has sent British armoured cars to Kiev and is sending British military advisers to Kiev also puts us Orthodox in England in a difficult position. Anti-Russian hysteria in the UK has begun, drummed up by the State-run media, such as the BBC. Two of our families have already returned to Russia. One Russian Orthodox priest, an Englishman, received a death threat ten days ago. Yesterday a young man, an Englishman, asked me what he should do if the war becomes even more open, explaining that he did not want to find himself ‘on the wrong side of the border’.

Questions arise: Do we continue to pray for the civil powers and the armed forces? Yes, of course we do. To pray for the government and the armed forces in no way means that we agree with them. Indeed, we should pray for them all the more at this time, since our prayers for them may prevent evil. In any case we have to pray for our enemies. Should we prepare to leave the West for Rus, so we do not find ourselves ‘on the wrong side of the border’? If we are single, Russian-speaking and free of attachments – yes, the time has come to prepare an escape route, if it is necessary. But the rest of us must stay here and fight as witnesses to the Orthodox Truth.

I will not abandon my family and my parishioners. I will not abandon the minority in the Western world who are favourable to us, those who have seen through the EU and the US and look to Russia with hope. The time has not yet come when Russian Orthodox may have to be apply to the Russian Embassy in London for refugee status or be rescued by Federation submarine off the coasts of England. For now we stay and fight. We are not cowards. What is the worst that Eurosodom can do to us? Imprison us? Assassinate us? So what? We fear nobody because we do not fear death: I shall not die, but live, and make known the works of the Lord!

The Triumph of Orthodoxy 2015

The Final Battle is Coming: The Truth Will Set You Free

Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.
(Matt. 6, 33)

You are of this world; I am not of this world.
(Jn 8, 23)

I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.
(Jn. 12, 47)

If the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love his own; but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you…And you also shall bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning.
(Jn. 15, 18-19 and 27)

For many shall come in My name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many…Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and you shall be hated by all nations for My name’s sake.
(Matt. 24, 5 and 9)

Faith is a gift from God; Religion is a gift from the Devil.
(Anon)

Olga was burdened with the consciousness that those same people who so warmly befriended her belonged to a nation which had refused justice to her country.

The Last Grand Duchess (Olga Alexandrovna) by Ian Vorres, P. 240

There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.

Conan-Doyle, His Last Bow

Russia is the only centre of an unenslaved civilization capable of showing itself to be Christian. Therefore our patriotism…is above all the understanding of the importance of the unique Christian mission for which our people lives and of which it is convinced…Do today’s Western European elites belong to the real Europe? Alas! Theirs is not Europe. Theirs is Babylon…The goal of the real Europe is us, people who remember the presence of eternal and unchanging values, people who know what we live and die for. Such knowledge has virtually been lost in the west of the European continent.

Interview with Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin on Politrussia on 25 February 2015

Introduction: The Sovietization of the West

In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet Empire used to arrest Russian Orthodox for ‘anti-Soviet activities’, such as printing the Gospels and other Orthodox literature. Referring to a passage like I Peter 2, 17, its KGB agents would try to intimidate them with sly questions like: ‘Why do you not obey your own Apostle Peter and ‘honour the ruler?’ A few younger ones among those arrested were confused by their cunning. Others, older and with a clearer understanding of the New Testament and so Church teaching, would answer approximately thus:

‘We certainly honour our rulers and all men by praying for them, we never harm or hate others or use violence, we pay our taxes, we are law-abiding, but we put the laws of the Kingdom of Heaven above the laws of the kingdoms of this world. If the State and its appointees persecute us, try to silence us, order us to renounce our Faith and not go to church, then we refuse, accepting imprisonment or death for the sake of the Truth. This is the story of the Crucifixion and of the martyrs and of all Church history and nothing has changed today’.

Theirs is the answer that faithful Orthodox give in today’s world too. Wherever apostasy from Orthodoxy has occurred since 1917, throughout the Western Empire, in Estonia, in the Ukraine, in Czechia and elsewhere, we answer the same. We pray for our enemies, we utterly condemn violence and terrorism, we honour all, but we put the laws of the Kingdom of Heaven above the laws of the kingdoms of this world. ‘Blessed are you when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for My sake’.

Given the speed of the present Western apostasy from the vestiges of Orthodox Christianity conserved in heterodoxy, especially over the last fifteen years, it seems as though Western States are now setting out on the path of the old Soviet State. They are trying to silence us through intimidation. Orthodox Christians here must be prepared for persecution in the future, sooner than we thought. Why does this possibility of persecution concern heterodox less than us Orthodox? The answer lies in two different teachings on Church and State.

Heterodox Teachings on Church and State

Inherent to the filioque Trinitarian theology of heterodoxy are the twin heresies of papocaesarism and caesaropapism, which are the two sides of the same false coin. The first heresy is that of Catholicism, which puts the Bishop of Rome, called the Pope, above the rulers of the world and makes him the infallible source of the Holy Spirit. This simply makes his ‘Church’ into a State in its own right. In other words, what was once the Church is deformed into a mere religion, a worldly institution and so is deprived of the Holy Spirit.

The second heresy is that of Protestantism, which subjects the Church to the rulers of this world. This makes their ‘Churches’ into simple departments of State, Ministries of Morality which soon turn into phariseeism. This was what was introduced into Russia from Holland by Peter I, who greatly admired Protestantism, often preferring it to authentic Christianity. It also explains why most Anglicans, belonging to an erastian, State-founded institution, do not understand the Incarnational spirit of the Orthodox Faith and accuse us of being political!

these heresies represent the ideology of ‘in the world and of the world’. In other words, both are inherently secular. The reaction to them is in abstract, spiritualist, disincarnate philosophies, which are very attractive to intellectuals who lapse from the Catholic/Protestant coin and fall into spiritual illusion. They can be characterized as ‘not in the world and not of the world’. These pseudo-mystical, spiritually irrelevant currents were originally represented by the Gnostics and Origen and in the Western Middle Ages by such as Boehme and Eckhart.

In more recent times such futile speculations have been represented by masonry and Swedenborgianism, in modern times by the orientalisms of Sufism, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Kabbalah and various disincarnate movements like anthroposophy, occultism and hippy movements with their ‘mind-expanding’ drug-taking. These movements were very popular among the uprooted, disincarnate Russian elite in early twentieth century Russia, being pioneered by the pseudo-Catholic philosopher, the alcoholic Vladimir Soloviov.

The Christian Teaching on Church and State

Papocaesarism and caesaropapism, ‘in the world and of the world’, as well as disincarnate, anti-Holy Spirit illusions, ‘not in the world and not of the world’, oppose the balanced Gospel and so Church teaching on the Incarnation, ‘in the world but not of the world’. The Gospel, Orthodox view was represented in ancient times by those like St Basil the Great, St Ambrose of Milan and St John Chrysostom, more recently by Patriarch Nikon in Russia in the 17th century or the martyred St Gregory, Patriarch of Constantinople in the 19th century.

They all believed that the Church should remain separate from the State, but also should incarnate the Church’s values into State life, while keeping Her integrity, thus creating a people’s monarchy and harmony or symphony. The Church is not an idea, a philosophy, a distraction for intellectuals, a plaything for idle minds. The Church is the Body of Christ, the Kingdom of Heaven made Incarnate. This is why the Church has always been persecuted, both from outside and from inside, by heresy and schism, by ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’.

In particular, there are those who lapse from Orthodox Christianity and fall into the heterodox error of caesaropapism, kow-towing to the Establishment. However, the 20th century gave millions of examples of confession of the Orthodox teaching, the New Martyrs and Confessors in the former Russian Empire, Greece, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria. Our consciences dictate to us to resist the persecuting and anti-Christian States or Establishments which detest us, bully us and threaten us for contradicting their this-worldly ideologies.

Let us take the case of Fr Vsevolod Shpiller. In 1970s Moscow this well-known priest and pastor, who put the Kingdom of God first, was arrested by the KGB and interrogated. His charge? He had paraphrased what Christ had said to Pilate (Jn. 19, 11), that if it was God’s will, the Roman (in 1970s Moscow, the Soviet) Empire could cease to exist in an instant. The KGB had taken fright, for they took it as a threat to the Soviet State and this turbulent priest had to be arrested for his ‘threat’ of proclaiming that God is greater than any Establishment.

The Struggle to Free England from the Oppression of the British Establishment

Forty years on the situation is becoming much the same in the West. Some followers of the British Establishment are, amazingly, frightened of us. The corrupt British Establishment, an invention of the Normans, has always detested the people (whom they call by the public school term ‘plebs’), especially when we enter Establishment organs like Oxbridge, once the preserve of the Norman elite. They still patronizingly resent meritocracy and the ascent of common mortals, whom they try to ‘freeze out’ through cliquishness and clubbishness.

As they believe their own propaganda, what they really dislike is anyone who contradicts their Establishment line and tells the Truth. So ‘liberal’ are they that they attempt censorship and its agents carry out death threats, as David Kelly found out. When adventurers accuse you of being ‘political’, then you know that you are close to the truth. As patriotic subjects loyal to what is beyond the Establishment, the England on high, we pray for the Royal House, the government and the armed forces, that they may be guided by the Heavenly King.

Next year, 2016, will mark the 950th anniversary of the Invasion and Occupation of England, when the country was finally dragged into the Great Western delusion and the establishment of the Establishment. Unlike the idolators of the British Establishment, we put the Kingdom of God first, above this-worldly values, for, like the disciples, though we are in the world, we are not of the world. We feel no hatred or condemnation for the followers of this world and its Establishments, only sorrow and compassion for the deluded, wherever they may live.

After all these centuries we are still fighting for freedom for England and all these Isles and all the Western Lands, that we may win our lands and peoples back for the King of Heaven and His saints. Like the Great Alfred, English Orthodoxy is still calling from Athelney. Incredibly, the British Establishment is frightened by us little people. Why? Because the pen is mightier than the sword, our Faith is mightier than all their threats. Unlike them, we are not afraid to die. God is with us. They are right to tremble. As Chaucer said: the truth will out.

Conclusion: Three Revelations

In 1969 I read Seton-Watson’s book about the Russian Revolution. Despite his clear bias, it was revealed to me, even then, that all the insidious ideas for that historical error had come from the West and hoodwinked faithless Russians. In 1971 I bought in Colchester the book of interviews by Ian Vorres with the sister of the martyred Tsar, Olga Alexandrovna, who had died in Canada eleven years before. On P. 240 she revealed her fondness for England, but her disgust at the ‘utterly vile’ anti-Russian politics ‘of successive British Parliaments’.

Finally, in 1984 I was, with others, followed by the KGB in Paris and labelled by the follower as ‘a dangerous counter-revolutionary and monarchist’. Revelation! How times change in just thirty years! Today the demons which infested the Soviet Empire, cast out by the prayers of the New Martyrs, infest the Western Empire, with its New World Order. Motivated by the desire for global control and so the destruction of the sovereignty of the peoples and of faithfulness to Christ, Who is outside their control, the Western leaders are blinded.

The demons cast out by the New Martyrs and Confessors, by our recognition of them and so our prayers to them, went to the West, where they were welcomed. Now, as at Gennesareth of old, the demons have entered into those who welcomed them and they, like a herd of swine, are rushing to their suicide all over the Western world, shouting ‘Je suis Charlie’. Now is the time to redouble our prayers to the Saints of the Western world who belong to the Church. Together with all the heavenly hosts, they can send these demons back to their place in hell.

The Final Battle is coming. Every day the Second Coming draws closer, but the miracle of repentance is no less possible today than yesterday. The end may be only a few years away, but it may also be a thousand years away. The demons can still be cast out of the West ‘by prayer and fasting’. We do not fear, because whatever happens, we know that the real end of history, and not the end imagined by an American academic a history-filled generation ago, will be the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The last words in world history are Christ’s.

The Triumph of Orthodoxy 2015

Western Terrorism: The Real and Present Danger

The present wave of State-orchestrated hysteria in the West against President Putin has its origins in the neocon overthrow of the legitimate democratic government in Kiev a year ago, at a cost of $5 billion to the US taxpayer. This was followed by the installation of a Kiev puppet regime ‘elected’ with 15% of the vote, garnered by the US-run PR machine, and since then NATO aggression against the Ukraine, with the slaughter of tens of thousands. Thus, when the Cameron regime recently took part in NATO operations in the Baltic, flying and sailing just off the Russian coast, sent over 50 armoured cars to the corrupt oligarch junta in Kiev and laughably accused President Putin of wanting to invade the Baltic States, it was only natural that the Russian Federation would then show that it can defend its peoples against Western terrorism in the Ukraine, where 80% of the population is fundamentally Russian. As a result, Federation planes and ships have been flying and sailing in international airspace and waters off the British coast – doing exactly what the UK government has been doing off its coasts and its borders.

The campaign of character assassination and demonization of President Putin has been led in the UK by tabloids like the MI5-fed Daily Telegraph, accused this week by one of its own journalists of corruption in the HSBC money-laundering scandal. The right-wing Telegraph has been closely followed by the Murdoch propaganda tabloids and the State-dependent BBC, which has revealed that in 1981 it was already vetting 40% of its staff through MI5. (Two of my career-minded colleagues from the 1970s, now working for the BBC, were recruited by MI5). The Establishment has also timed a relaunch of the enquiry into the death of the British spy Litvinenko after an SIS cover-up lasting nine years. We are reminded of the long-delayed Establishment enquiry into the Blair regime’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, which helped lead to a million deaths. (We will hardly mention the futile invasion of Afghanistan which cost hundreds of British lives and cost the British taxpayer £35 billion). Indeed, the same Establishment is still unable to launch the long-awaited enquiry into its own deep-rooted pedophilia, an enquiry stretching back only over the last forty years.

Of course we are not suggesting that President Putin, once a lowly KGB operative (unlike several American Presidents, who were actual heads of the CIA), is anything more than a politician. (Let us recall the old Cold War dictum that the only difference between the CIA and the now defunct KGB was that only the CIA actually believed its own lies). Only a politician, for today that ex-KGB colonel is the President of a country, where corruption is everywhere rife, especially in its notoriously dishonest elite and the media. (Although we should not forget either that the debt-ridden US economy has for years been shaken by corrupt banking and accounting practices of its elite and EU elite’s accounts are so corrupt that they cannot even be audited). It is obvious that President Putin leads a country that has far to go in order to rise from the ruins of Western-imposed Soviet atheism and immorality. However, once contested, that President has been made incredibly popular by the crass miscalculations of recent Western aggression. 85% + support him. Nevertheless, he is only a train on the tracks, not the destination. Orthodox only support him inasmuch as he supports the Church.

The present neocon policy is at the stage of appointing American ministers in Eastern European countries, especially in the Baltic States (the current Estonian President is American and Lithuania allowed itself to be used for CIA torture centres), Poland, the Ukraine, Romania and Georgia. Such is the process of US empire-building, which has such a long history in Latin America, Asia and Southern Europe. In Serbia the US has already bought up 30% of the media in order to weaken the country by ‘soft power’. Wait for the next stage of American ‘advisers’ there. However, in the Ukraine the situation for the hubristic neocons is disastrous. The rout of the Kiev junta forces in Debaltsevo (which the BBC cannot even spell) is clear. Some 3,000 died, 1,000 surrendered with huge amounts of US and other arms and equipment and the Ukrainian freedom fighters are now even talking of going all the way to Kiev to liberate it from the American banana-republic regime, leaving the far west Galicia and pro-Nazis to return to Polish rule. The Kiev Army is all but finished. The CIA’s unique talent for picking English-speaking local losers, demonstrated worldwide from Vietnam to Saddam Hussein, from Greek colonels to Pinochet, has yet again been repeated with Poroshenko-Waltzman.

As for Russia, it has steadfastly refused the trap set for it by the neocons – to make it invade the Ukraine. The Ukraine will liberate itself. It is already doing so. The neocons in Washington are faced with the choice – to escalate their aggression hugely with ‘mission creep’ and make their new Cold War into a Hot War, or to give up on the Ukraine as a bridge too far, yet another Vietnam, this time in Europe. If the neocons who control Washington do escalate the war they have started (US arms merchants would love that), they must expect a Russian response, but still worse, they will finally alienate and destroy the EU, which they so openly despise. However, in reality they cannot afford to lose the EU, which they have already divided and which is in a state of crisis with Greece and with the rise of other popular liberation movements of both left and right throughout its empire, in Germany, France, England, Cyprus, Denmark, Scotland, Catalonia, Italy, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Cyprus and almost everywhere.

The outcome of the situation in the Ukraine is not clear. If Russia and the Ukraine can repent for their immoral and cynical Soviet past, there is hope. As Dostoyevsky said some 150 years ago, a Russian without Orthodoxy is dross. The fact is that an ‘Orthodox’ people without Orthodoxy is God-less – corrupt, immoral and cynical, and this is the same in every ex-Orthodox country, as in Greece. Noted for its notoriously anti-Orthodox and therefore corrupt and immoral elite, the German and French banks of the EU threw billions of euros at Greece so that it could then buy German and French consumer goods, which it could not otherwise have afforded. Responsible people do not give bad children billions of euros, but the EU was irresponsible, loaned the money and so bankrupted Greece. It is not the Greek people who were to blame, but the corrupt Greek elite and the irresponsible and short-sighted EU banksters, who sought only short-term profits. The people were and are their victims. Now the people have elected a government of their choice, having seen through the past corrupt EU elite and its PR myths. The same will happen in utterly corrupt Romania and Bulgaria.

In the twentieth century, once-Orthodox peoples all wandered far from the Faith, imitating the atheist materialism which had already corrupted the West. This occurred most dramatically of all in Russia, with an initial coup d’etat directed from the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg in 1917, which was to lead to the deaths of tens of millions. Only by repenting and returning to the Faith like the Prodigal, asking the Father for forgiveness and then living the Faith, can Orthodox demonstrate to all the traditional civilizations of the planet that only Orthodox Christian Civilization can defeat the twin threats of Western secularist terrorism and the Islamist jihadist terrorism that the West created. If there is no mass repentance, we shall demonstrate only our own apostasy. Then there will be no liberation of Kiev, no Triumph of Orthodoxy and there will follow the literal end of history with the long-planned enthronement of Antichrist in Jerusalem. Too late the West will realize its mistake, that it has only been a pawn, stooge and puppet manipulated by the hands of Satan. True, the triumph of Babylon will be short-lived because the Second Coming will follow it, but then we shall be judged for our lack of repentance, our corruption and our failure to witness to the Truth of the Church of Christ. It would be better to repent now while there is still time.

On the ‘Radicalization’ of Young Muslims in the UK

The Western Establishment’s attempt to take over the world goes back to the 11th century with the ‘crusades’ and their invasions, massacres and occupations. Its first victims were in the West – ordinary Christians in the Iberian Peninsula, the south of Italy and Sicily, England (in 1066) and the rest of the British Isles and then in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. This was the age when the Western leader declared himself to be the substitute for the Son of God and claimed that even the Holy Spirit proceeded from him! In other words, already then, the Western world arrogated to itself the Divine right to conquer the world, a world in which the West (and its puppets, the Westernized) would reign supreme and all others would be reduced to living in a giant Indian Reservation, that is, a glorified concentration camp.

Next in line were the Jews and the Muslims. Indeed, anti-Western Muslim resentment goes back to the Crusades. In recent times it has gained much strength from Western support for Zionism and the occupation of Palestine, which has taken place to the profound disapproval of anti-Zionist Jews. Even more recently, it has gained in intensity thanks to the Western oil grab of 1991, when the forces of the CIA-appointed Saddam Hussein were repulsed from the purely artificial oil terminus state of Kuwait, after the entrapped Hussein had cunningly been misinformed by the US ambassador in Baghdad that he could occupy it freely. A few years later came the Western invasion of Afghanistan. However, it is clear that it is the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that was the turning-point in the scale of anti-Western Muslim resentment.

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, young European-born Muslims have become increasingly militant. In some cases they have been prepared to carry out appalling acts of terrorism in the face of Western Establishment aggression against Islam. Indeed, Western State terrorism against Muslim countries, which has killed over a million people and created millions more refugees, has provoked attacks by Muslim terrorists in response, killing tens of thousands of innocent Christians, mainly in Syria and Iraq. This destabilizing Western genocide in Iraq in 2003, openly called by the then Italian leader Berlusconi a ‘crusade’, has done even worse. It has set all North Africa and the Middle East on fire, from Nigeria, Niger, Mali, Cameroun, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt to the Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Now the Western Establishment has yet again launched a new ‘crusade’ in Eastern Europe, committing genocide in the Ukraine through its puppet regime in Kiev. The contagion has spread. Europe is split. Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary are looking to free themselves from EU tyranny. Powerful minorities in Eastern Europe, in Serbia, Moldova, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, the Baltic States, and also in Western Europe, in Germany, France, the UK, Spain and Italy, are now calling for freedom from the US political and economic straitjacket imposed in it by the US vassal Germany. And so Mrs Merkel, the head of the EU, has been summoned to her master in Washington. But why have Muslims, and not Ukrainians, launched attacks in the West in revenge for injustices committed?

It is because Islam, like Judaism, is an Old Testament religion. And Old Testament religion is marked by violence – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Hinduism and Buddhism (though not a religion, but a philosophy) also fall into this, as can be seen among Hindus in India and Buddhists in Burma. And modern religions like Atheism, for example, Communism and Nazism, are marked by extreme violence. Globalist Capitalism does the same – only not in Western countries. Only the Christian Faith, practised in most of the Ukraine, has the unique revelation that God is not Vengeance, but Love, Mercy and Forgiveness, and that is why in Christianity alone there is the Resurrection, proving that Love is stronger than death, as the martyred Tsar Nicholas wrote before his own martyrdom.

Of course, Non-Christians will criticize this and at once point to the Crusades, the Inquisition, Catholic ‘missions’ in Latin America and to the violent ravages of Protestantism in Africa and Asia; did not the meddling Methodist George Bush declare that God told him to invade Iraq? Is not the West, the inventor of the concentration camp and the Atomic Bomb, ‘Christian?’ However, such Non-Christians should know that institutional Catholicism and Protestantism and even more the modern West, are not part of the Christian Faith, they are anti-Christian reversions to an Old Testament in which God is the West. (Here we are not speaking of individual Catholics and Protestants, many of whom are fine and unfilioquized Christians, but about institutional ‘religions’, ‘isms’, Catholicism and Protestantism).

In other words, humanity has in large part either never received, or else openly rejected the unique revelation of the New Testament, that God is Love and Resurrection, Mercy and Forgiveness. Much of humanity has preferred religions of Hatred and Death, Cruelty and Vengeance. Large parts of the Western world, a thousand years ago in principle Christian, have since gradually reverted to the Old Testament religion of Phariseeism (self-righteous fanaticism which justifies its technological terrorism) and Saduceeism (indifferentism and hedonism which justifies itself with the word ‘tolerance’). And so they meet opposition from terrorists whose technology may be far more primitive but whose terrorist bloodthirstiness is just as appalling as the terrorism of the apostate, post-Christian Western world.

What should be done with ‘radicalized’ young Muslims in Western Europe? Those who flocked in their thousands to fight with IS terrorists against the Syrian government with, until recently, the support and training of Western governments. Those who have been armed and paid by the closest of Western allies, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Perhaps first the West should stop supporting IS terrorism and the finance and support for it by the Western puppet dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. After all, in the last few months the Saudi monarchy has beheaded twice as many people as IS. Some hypocritical politicians here have suggested that Muslims be taught ‘British values’. Does this mean that they should be taught to invade any country in the world and massacre its peoples? That is the history of the ‘British’ Empire.

There is no such thing as ‘British values’, because there is no such thing as ‘British’. ‘British’, like ‘Britain’, is an oppressive and purely political construct of Establishment imperialism. Ireland only escaped it with much bloodshed, Scotland is desperately trying to escape it and large minorities in Wales and England also want to escape it. In the struggle between McWorld and Jihad, between Atheist Secularism and Old Testament Fanaticism, both equally aggressive, there are no winners, all are losers. If you want to start taming Muslim youths, then start by channelling them into theological study and active charity work in the Muslim community. As for the rest, there is only one rule: ‘Do as you would be done by’. If you do not want to be massacred by others, do not massacre them first.

The Sad Case of Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry, a Briton of Jewish origin, is an actor, TV celebrity, darling of the BBC, Cambridge intellectual, manic-depressive who has attempted suicide several times, well-known homosexual ‘married’ to a man half his age and also a passionate atheist.

What does his atheism show? First of all, his recent diatribe showing his hatred for all faith, that is, for awareness of spiritual reality, shows that he has no concept of God. He may be an intellectual with a vast knowledge of abstract facts, but he certainly has no experience of spiritual reality. In a word his heart is, it seems, dead. His notion that if there is a God, He is responsible for all the appalling suffering of humanity, is as primitive a concept of faith as is possible. It reminds us of the spiritual level of the brutal peasant Khrushchev. He, on Gagarin’s return from space, declared that clearly God did not exist, since Gagarin had been into space and not seen Him!

However, God saw Gagarin and soon after He received both Khrushchev’s and Gagarin’s souls.

Essentially, the deformation here is that of the humanist and rationalist brainwashing of modern Western ‘culture’ that Fry has undergone.

Firstly, he has been conditioned to think that humanity is never responsible for evil and even apparently incapable of evil. He ignores the fact that all wars are caused by human beings who have fallen into atheism (however they may cloak their atheism), most obviously the Second World War, and that faith (or rather manmade ‘religion’) is only ever used as an excuse to justify wars, which are in fact all motivated by human greed for territory and power, however motives are camouflaged. Evil motives always cloak themselves in what is good and noble.

Secondly, he has been conditioned to think that humanity can understand everything. What he has failed to understand here is that we can know very little in general and nothing at all about faith with our brains. Faith (unlike manmade ‘religion’) depends on the spiritual experience of a different organ, not on the intellectual experience of our brain, but on the spiritual experience of our heart, and if our heart is not working, then our brains are blinded, disfunctional. Either our hearts are alive and have that experience, we have met God, or else they are not alive and we have not had that experience and not met God. Clearly, he has not.

Therefore it would be better if Stephen Fry kept his silence until he has had some experience in the deeper realm beyond the superficial, beyond the mere brain and the mere emotions, in the realm of the Spirit, sensed by the living heart which then inspires faith which then inspires the brain. However, Stephen Fry, created by God, first needs to know that this is not possible until he has purified his heart of his passions, and so cultivated his inner sight and met God. And only he can begin to purify and cultivate his heart. It is a process called repentance.

Churchill: Inconvenient Truths

I remember a conversation in 1976 about the English character with the late Nicholas Zernov, a prominent representative of the Paris School of disincarnate Russians. He recalled that the reputation of the English among Russians of his generation was that of ‘hypocrites who will stab you in the back’. My protest to him that, although this was a perfect description of the Establishment Anglicanism of the ruling class with whom he mixed, it was not a description of the English and certainly not of the down to earth English among whom I had been brought up, elicited from him complete astonishment; after nearly fifty years of naïve and disincarnate life in the country he had never realized that most English people were not and never have been Establishment Anglicans.

An example of such Establishment hypocrisy is the recent celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Churchill’s death. Billed as ‘the greatest Englishman’ by a certain tabloid (ignoring the fact that he was half-American), can we really think anything of the sort about him? Of course there are a great many people in this country, now in their 80s and 90s, who agree with the title bestowed on him by that tabloid. But then I have met similar elderly Italians who call Mussolini a genius and elderly Russians who say the same of Stalin (‘there was order and no crime in those days’). I have even met elderly Vichy French, as well as Germans and Austrians, who have a very high opinion of Hitler. Perhaps they are all victims of brainwashing propaganda and nostalgia for a vanished past and youth.
Whatever our balanced conclusions about Churchill, we do have to consider some facts:

Churchill took part in Kitchener’s massacre (‘battle’) at Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898 (at least 27,000 Sudanese cruelly slaughtered by ‘modern’ military technology, including Maxim guns) and even more afterwards in the plundering of Khartoum, with many being burned to death.

Churchill supported the genocide of 28,000 Afrikaaner women and children in British concentration camps in the Boer War between 1899 and 1902.

Churchill’s utterly misconceived and mishandled Gallipoli campaign in 1915 led to the deaths of 200,000 Allied and Turkish soldiers, all for nothing.

Churchill’s encouraged the British suppression of the Arab revolt in Iraq (invaded by Britain in 1914 and later partitioned with disastrous consequences), which included the bombing of the Kurds and the use of poison gas against them. This has led to repeated violent British involvement there to this day. He reckoned the massacre of the Kurds as of no importance since they were ‘a degraded race’ – but then he thought much the same of all Non-European peoples.

In 1941 Churchill knew Singapore was undefendable, yet 8,000-15,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers and citizens were killed and 130,000 captured in his futile and humiliating Malaya campaign and the greatest surrender and defeat in British military history.

Churchill deliberately did not warn the USA about the Pearl Harbour attack by the Japanese in 1941 because he needed it to be involved in the War on the British side.

Churchill rejected scientific advice and ordered the appalling bombing of German civilians in Hamburg, Dresden… (600,000 German civilians and 160,000 young allied airmen killed). Many reckoned Churchill as no better than a gangster for this unpunished war crime.

In WW2 Churchill allowed 6 to 7 million Indians to starve to death in the Bengali holocaust, when he could have saved the majority of those lives. (Churchill – racist and imperialist to the core – also seemed to have no concept of the previous horrors of British India – with 10 million dying in post-1857 India Mutiny reprisals and 6-9 million starving to death in the 1895-1900 famines, saying that ‘the Indians breed like rabbits anyway’ – let alone horrors like the British responsibility for the 1840s Irish Potato Famine in which 1 million died).

In 1944 Churchill rejected the Brand plan to save Hungarian Jews (between 200,000 and 400,000 were killed by the Nazis and Hungarian Fascists).

In 1944 Churchill decided on the partition of Palestine (in 1878 Jews had been 5% of the Palestine population; in 1948 they were 1/3 of the population; 67 years on, there are now over 7 million Palestinian refugees), ensuring the permanent Middle East crisis.

Churchill acknowledged the crucial importance of dividing and ruling in the Indian subcontinent, that is, maintaining Hindu-Muslim antipathy, in order to preserve British rule in there. Eventually 1 million died in the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.

Sobering facts.

Looking Back on Old Sourozh

These are four interview answers given to a student who is at present working on a Ph D concerning the History of the Sourozh Diocese.

Q1) The Sourozh troubles (as they have been called) are regarded as a crisis almost entirely precipitated by the arrival in the diocese of large numbers of ethnic Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. How far is this really the case or did this event merely act as catalyst to previously existing tensions in the diocese?

A1) Sourozh troubles? At the time His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II called them a ‘schism’ in public pronouncements, which I translated as the official translator. True, the crisis was precipitated by the arrival of Russian Orthodox from the ex-Soviet Union, but this was only a catalyst – its cause lay far, far deeper and had been festering for decades. The recent arrivals merely lanced the deep boil.

Essentially the whole problem was a problem of insularity, of being cut off from Russian Orthodox reality, a problem which had historical roots in the general captivity of the Church authorities in Moscow and their inability to control their own tiny Diaspora, let alone the majority of the Russian Orthodox Diaspora which belonged and belongs to a completely autonomous ROCOR. However, there was the specific case of island Britain, which was even more cut off than the rest for the usual geographical reasons, and where a personality cult had developed. So when reality struck the cloud cuckoo land of the largely exclusive, upper class Anglican-style clique/club which the rulers of the ‘Sourozh Diocese’ by the early 2000s largely were, this was a long overdue encounter with reality.

What had happened until then had resulted in the exiling (in a typically hypocritical, racist, backbiting and sending to Coventry way) of all ‘dissidents’, i. e. of all those who knew what Russian Orthodoxy was actually about and would have nothing to do with insular fantasy and the personality cult which was at the heart of the so-called Sourozh ‘Diocese’. The problem came to a head because the dissidents were no longer a small minority who could be got rid of by making them leave (and sometimes find refuge in ROCOR), but were the vast majority, composed of all the new arrivals from the ex-Soviet Union who knew what Russian Orthodoxy was actually about and rightly ‘wanted the Church back’.

In this way those who had ruled the roost in Sourozh for decades before, oppressing the faithful Russian Orthodox minority and forcing them out, suddenly themselves became the minority – and a very small one at that. Realizing that they were now cornered and had lost power, they left, as they had forced so many into doing before them. What goes round, comes round. In this way they proved the ‘big fish in a small pond syndrome’ – anyone can remain a big fish as long as they make their pond very small. And that is what they did, made a very small pond for themselves.

Of course, the trouble was that the by then free Patriarchate had allowed such a situation to develop. With many others, I too made public several articles in the early 2000s, warning and pleading with the Moscow authorities to do something about their own Church locally. They did not do anything until it was too late. I doubt whether that was deliberate policy (waiting until the troublemakers had left of their own accord), as conspiracy theorists would have it, more it was a result of inertia and above all a lack of suitable individuals in Moscow to take over (see the answer to Question 2 below). This was why the new Sourozh bishop had to be nominated by the ROCOR Archbishop Mark, who was possibly the only Russian Orthodox bishop who knew the reality of the situation.

The ultimate historical roots of the Sourozh schism lay in the Diaspora schism between the minority of Russophobic, liberal, politicized elements in the Diaspora (in Europe called Evlogians and based in Paris) and the majority of the Diaspora in ROCOR. This schism took place in London in the 1920s, as elsewhere in Europe. (Though the roots of this schism lay in turn in the liberalism, modernism and fringe Orthodoxy of pro-Revolutionary intellectuals and aristocrats in Saint Petersburg before the Revolution. It was these individuals who emigrated to Paris after 1917). After 1945 the London Evlogians returned to the Patriarchate, but mainly without enthusiasm.

The situation was then saved, from the Patriarchate’s viewpoint, by sending a young priest, precisely from Paris (the heart of the Evlogian/Saint Petersburg schism) after World War II, who would be acceptable to the London ex-Evlogians and secure the situation, so that the ex-Evlogians would not return to the Paris schism. This priest was Fr Antony Bloom, around whom, especially after his mother’s death, there grew up a unique and utterly insular personality cult. This would inevitably result in clearly predictable difficulties after his death, since the death of the subjects of personality cults always results in difficulties, as it shows that they are not immortal.

Personally, I became fully aware of this situation (I had already been disturbed by several things I had seen) only in 1976, when during a six-week study visit to Russia I saw Russian Orthodox reality. The last scales fell from my eyes and I saw how peculiar and eccentric the Sourozh Diocese was. This was reinforced after 1976 when I had contacts with ROCOR – far bigger in Britain than the Sourozh ‘Diocese’ in terms of numbers of Russians, but not in terms of English people, because Metr Antony Bloom had created a mini-diocese (‘Sourozh’) largely through some 1,000 English converts, mainly of Anglican background, to his personal and peculiar brand of Orthodoxy, and by ordaining men whom other bishops would not touch for canonical reasons – and then by living in Greece and studying at St Serge in Paris. I realized that the Russian Orthodox reality inside Russia and ROCOR were identical; it was Sourozh that was out of kilter, just like the Evlogian group based in Paris.

The last straw came in 1982 when I and my wife had personal contact with Metr Antony and we clearly realised that he was a morally compromised individual and that the whole thing was a personality cult. At the same time in 1982 the then Fr Basil Osborne, whom I had first met when he was a young deacon in 1972, told me that the clear intention of the ruling clique of liberal academics in Sourozh (mainly convert clergy) was to ‘go over to the Greeks’ as soon as Metr Antony was dead. It was at that point that I left the Sourozh diocese, as so many others before me and after me, long before 2006. It was only in 2012 that I received an apology for my treatment thirty years before from His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill in Moscow. What a disaster – the Russian Orthodox Church authorities in England had been chasing Russian Orthodox away from them!

Q2) Several priests have told me that the arrival of Metropolitan Hilarion in the diocese was the main reason that events came to a climax when they did as his short but intense sojourn in the parish polarised the debate. Is this a fair assessment?

A2) Entirely true, but again he was only a catalyst. If it had not been him, it would have been someone or something else. The polarization had always been there. And we should remember that Bp Hilarion was made bishop and sent by Moscow at the specific request of Metr Antony. However, that does not excuse Moscow. You do not send a newly-baked, very naïve, very young and very inexperienced bishop into a hornets’ nest – which is exactly what they did.

Q3) In all the documents and interviews I’ve conducted both sides accuse the other of the same methods – i. e. it is seen as a coup by small (or even miniscule, four or five people) but highly influential group who ‘masterminded’ the activities. Is this a fair assessment? It seems to me that both can’t be right?

A3) The schism was fomented by a small clique of individuals. Bp Basil as a very weak individual was as much a victim as anything else of that very small group. He had been under control for as long as his very practical wife, whom I knew well and respected, had been alive. Once widowed, he began going off the rails. Altogether 300 people left in the Sourozh schism (the other 700 or so individual whom Metr Antony had converted had very quickly lapsed, often after only a few months), but only a few, four or five, led them; most, converts and often elderly, were unconscious of the game being played with them and were deluded and therefore deserve compassion. They had been hoodwinked all along.

It is true that on the ground in London and England in general, the other side, the pro-Russian Orthodox, was also led by a very small group of individuals. However, the latter were massively supported by the whole of the Church inside Russia, all those in ROCOR in England who were conscious of the situation and above all, by the vast mass of recent arrivals from the ex-Soviet Union in England. Whether Churched or unchurched, they instinctively knew, as we had known for decades, what was right and what was wrong.

Q4) The influence from the Motherland: This spectre rides high in the belief of many of the ‘anti-Moscow’ people – e g. the Russian State (FSB) seeks to control the Russian Diaspora though the Church. It seems to me that this can’t be discounted as fantasy as the Russian State and Foreign Office does seem more interested in ‘consolidation’ of the Diaspora – and it could be argued, why shouldn’t it? Diasporas are increasingly important to every motherland these days and the Russian Diaspora punches below its weight in terms of numbers (at least in the political sphere).

A4) This is without doubt paranoid fantasy and self-justification (‘we are leaving the Russian Church because it is not politically free’). Not in the sense that there must surely be Statist/nationalist, politically-minded individuals in the Russian State/FSB/Establishment who would like to control the Russian Diaspora, but it takes two to tango. They can fantasize, but if the Diaspora does not want to play ball, their fantasies are irrelevant. And the Russian Diaspora (as is proved by the history of ROCOR both before and since 2007) does not want to be embraced by such individuals. However, as I also know from contact as an official ROCOR representative in meetings with His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill, Metr Hilarion and Archbp Innokenty (formerly in Paris) in Moscow, the Patriarchate is equally independent and utterly resistant to attempted encroachments by nationalistic individuals – it remembers the State protestantization of the Church before 1917 and does not want a repeat of that. The Church inside Russia much enjoys the freedom She has from State interference.

The people who make such fantastic statements about a Russian State ‘takeover’ are thinking in Anglican terms, in other words in terms of a State Church, founded by the State and directed by erastians. They are the ones who are not politically free and not culturally free. They are talking about themselves and indeed, such people are often Anglicans, who have little concept of how the Orthodox Church actually works. Interestingly, the Sourozh schism was taken up at the time by the British Establishment press, with newspapers like The Times and the Telegraph defending the Russophobes and making the whole story into base, simplistic tabloid-style propaganda of the cowboy sort. ‘Greek = good; Russian = bad’.

This is in tune with the whole Anglican, US and generally Western view of the Orthodox Church. In the 19th century, the Victorians already saw the Russian as bad, as propaganda for their imperialistic ‘great game’ (unheard of in Russia), of which the Western invasion of the Crimea was part. Between the 1920s and 1948 the Patriarchate of Constantinople was largely under the Anglican thumb, since 1948 and the US deposition of the legitimate Patriarch Maximos (abducted into exile in Truman’s personal presidential plane to Switzerland) and replacement by the US candidate (what better example of Western, not Orthodox, erastianism?), it has been CIA controlled. And it is to the Rue Daru branch of Constantinople that the schismatics went. The Western problem has always been that it does not control the Russian Church, hence the remarks by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Tony Blair that the Russian Church is the greatest enemy of the West. Anyone showing independence is an enemy!

Sourozh was a political plaything for the British media, just another opportunity for the British Establishment to justify its politically-motivated Russophobia. It is in the light that we should ultimately see the Sourozh schism, as playing into the hands of the Russophobic British Establishment. And it was basically carried out precisely by individuals whose sympathies were wholly with the British Establishment, including one who, to my knowledge, had worked for MI5. (I exclude the Russian paranoid fantasy that Bp Basil, as an American citizen, was a CIA agent – though you can see how some could end up thinking like that).