Category Archives: Communism

Tragedy in Belarus

After ten days of demonstrations, protests are continuing in Belarus. True, they are nothing like as violent or as widespread as the riots in the USA, which have been going on for some two months now, but those in Belarus could topple the democratically-elected dictator Lukashenko. A yesterday’s Communist, a today’s Democrat and essentially a corrupt country bumpkin, like any number of other post-Communist oligarchs, his time is nearly up. Like the equally corrupt Ukrainian fool Yanukovich, who was toppled in 2014, he will surely, sooner of later, go. It is time for a new generation. Post-Sovietism is dead.

However, Western spy services, based in Lithuania (where the CIA has torture ‘facilities’)  and in territory-greedy Poland, are hoping that they will replace Lukashenko with some Fascist billionaire puppet like Poroshenko, as they did in the Ukraine. Thus, they would ensure permanent civil war, mass poverty and chaos in Belarus, just as they did in the Ukraine these last six years. The idea that the Western elite could position its NATO tanks and nuclear missiles along the Russian border, just 250 miles from Moscow, is very tempting to the greedy globalists. After all, their spiritual ancestors a hundred and twenty years ago were already eyeing the mineral wealth of the Russian Empire and so had its Tsar, and tens of millions of others, murdered by their Communist minions. However, this is unlikely to happen in Belarus. Why?

The modern Ukraine is an artificial country created since 1922 for purely political reasons by three Western-backed Communist monsters: Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchov. The eastern, northern and southern three-sixths of the Ukraine are more or less purely Russian and part of what was (Orthodox) Christian Civilisation; the west of centre area around Kiev, two-sixths of the whole, like Belarus, still has the same Civilisation and faith as Russia, though is different from it and mainly speaks a dialect of Russian called Surzhik; finally, the far western sixth (which Stalin stole from Poland in 1939) has nothing to do with Christian Civilisation and Russia. It is the former Hapsburg and virulently nationalistic province of Galicia. Though Polish-hating and once Nazi-supporting, it has far more in common with its Polish neighbour, including its majority religion (also once Nazi-supporting), than anywhere else. This sixth is the only real ‘Ukraine’ (= ‘border land’) and speaks the many dialects of the Ukrainian language, which resembles a very distinctive mixture of Slovak, Polish and Russian.

On the other hand, Belarus is in reality a provincial part of Russia. Over 70% there speak Russian virtually all the time; unlike in the Ukraine the other 30%, who speak Belarussian virtually only at home, also speak fluent Russian. In any case, the language is mostly understandable to Russians, unlike Ukrainian. Moreover,  80% of Belarussians have said that they would be happy to become an autonomous republic, like other such republics, within the Russian Federation.

The Ukraine has now become a largely third-world country, poorer than Kenya; its wealth has been stolen by some thirteen Western-backed oligarch-thieves, who spend most of their time laundering their cash in Tel Aviv, London and New York. Today’s Ukraine resembles the Soviet Union of 30 years ago, only nothing has been done there since, so it is even shabbier than then; the roads are ruinous, as are most of the unrenovated buildings. Its infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, is largely in an unspeakable condition and it survives on handouts from the US puppet called the IMF. As a country with a huge demographic crisis (who wants to have children in a desperately poor, utterly corrupt and Fascist-controlled backwater?), it is possible that its people could actually die out within a century. Millions of young people have fled it for Russia and Poland.

In comparison, Belarus is clean, orderly, has full employment and is more prosperous (thanks to trade with Russia) than the catastrophically poor and run-down EU Lithuania and Latvia or the US puppet state in Kiev. This makes its leader popular with many who vote for him because they fear worse than him. However, Belarus, like the old Soviet Union which it so resembles, only is more prosperous, is also sinsiterly Orwellian.

For Lukashenko is no angel. He is a dictator with a violent streak (just like so many CIA-backed Latin American and Asian puppets) and clearly suffers from North Korean style megalomania. He is also, at times, profoundly anti-Russian. President Putin is fed up with his anti-Russian actions and his oligarch corruption, just like that of the Ukrainian idiot Yanukovich with his golden toilet. But that does not mean that Lukashenko is about to be replaced by some Western puppet, who will make Belarus into just another divided and ruled, CIA-run vassal state. Even the stupidest members of the bankrupt Western elite, now obsessed by the covid virus, realise that they made a terrible mess in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and the Ukraine. They cannot afford to repeat the same mistake in Belarus. The bankrupt EU does not want Belarus, any more than it wants the Ukraine. The EU cannot even absorb hopelessly corrupt and poor Bulgaria and Romania. The West needs President Putin to do something for Belarus.

Let us be clear, there is much better than Lukashenko. But to be honest, there is also much worse – you only have to look at the utterly corrupt Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia for examples. God forbid that worse should happen than Lukashenko. Three (officially) Belarussians have died so far at the hands of  Lukashenko’s thuggish riot police – it is getting almost as bad as the situation in the USA. Let us pray that the Belarussian obscenities, with both sides committing acts of violence, will cease and that Belarus will no longer be a (post-) Communist dictatorship, will not be transformed into just another corrupt and poor CIA/NATO colony, and be transfigured into an Orthodox Christian country. Then a tragedy would become an example to its neighbours.

The Feast of the Transfiguration 2020

The Error of the Triumphalists

When in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and then over the next two years the whole of the remaining Soviet Empire, including the Union itself, fell, there was rejoicing among Western triumphalists. But they were blinded by the error of their own hubris; the fall of Soviet State capitalism and its materialism was also the beginning of their own fall, of Western elitist capitalism and its materialism. This was because the two ideologies have exactly the same origin – in the anti-Christian denial of the fact that mankind has both a spiritual origin and a spiritual destiny. The only difference was that the Western system was more successful in its materialism.

Marxist Communism, imported into the former Russian Empire from the West which had lost its faith, had promised ‘a bright future’, ‘a paradise on earth’. Western Capitalism had promised the same, ‘progress’ and ‘a consumer paradise’. But both resulted in the same collapse of nations, families and personal lives in amoral and infantile self-indulgence, in alcoholism, abortion, constant wars for mineral resources, divorce, drug-addiction, ecological catastrophe, economic injustice, social inequality and suicide. Neither ideology could solve the problem of death; neither, vitally, could provide any meaning to life. Both therefore led to death.

In reality, the meaning of life is in believing in something that is worth dying for. If something is not worth dying for, it is certainly not worth living for. Life without a goal is meaningless. And who wants to die for a new brand of toothpaste and the right to vote for one corrupt fool rather than for another corrupt fool? Any Civilisation that is not worth dying for is doomed to degenerate and die. And this can be seen today all over the Western (and Westernised) world, which confesses only ignoble absurdity and bestiality. Western and Westernised society is not a Civilisation of creators, but of consumers, that is, of destroyers of resources.

Civilisation collapses when it is only a Civilisation of consumer well-being, of health and safety, without risk or challenge, a Civilisation of fear of illness, of lockdown and bankruptcy. However, as long as there is only one person who resists this pseudo-Civilisation and does not surrender his free will to pointless consumerist comfort, the devil has not defeated mankind, for one person has defeated the devil. After the fall of the monstrous Soviet Union, many there refound the meaning of life in the Christianity of before and the rebuilding and building of lives and churches of spiritual beauty, culture and art. Is the same possible in the Western world?

 

Three Western Failures: Communism, Fascism and Secularism

Communism = Christianity without Christ.

The originally Jewish ideology of Communism, imported from Germany into Russia, failed, and Russia began its long and repentant return to authentic Christianity (Orthodoxy). However, its return has been much slowed by the temptation of the illusions of Western Capitalism, which gives out its glittering technological beads to the natives in exchange for their birthright. Some Russians have fallen to this temptation, its most notable victims being oligarchs and other wealthy Westernized liberals.

Fascism = Catholicism without Christ.

Fascism, which also developed in Germany, but in the twentieth century and so well after Communism, failed in 1945. Thus, Catholicism, which had sponsored Fascism as a political and cultural anti-Russian project, was soon after obliged to protestantize itself in order to survive. The alternative, to repent for its nine hundred years of heresies and to return to Orthodoxy, would have been too radical for it, as it would have meant renouncing its inherent secularity, its corrupting power.

Secularism = Protestantism without Christ.

This is the only surviving Western ideology now. This is today’s globalised Plastic Civilization of secularised Protestantism, the ‘human right’ of Consumerism that ransacks and pollutes the globe. We know that this too will fail, simply because Communism and Fascism failed before it and they were merely variations on the same theme of Materialism. They were the same atheist, capitalist Secularism, even if forms of Materialism run by totalitarian States, whether Communist or Fascist.

All these Western failures are simply variations on a theme, that of the same pseudo-rationalistic ideology, which in fact is deeply irrational. The essence of this ideology consists in the misbelief that human-beings have no souls, that there is nothing after death and that our only care can thus be the organization of our life in this world for our comfort. Any such ideology is doomed to failure for it does not take into account spiritual reality, the origin, existence and destiny of our immortal souls.

 

 

The Struggle for the Restoration of the Christian World

‘Western Civilization? That would be a very good idea’.

Attributed to Gandhi

Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.

Samuel P Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilizations, Chapter 12

Introduction: The Christian World

The Christian (also called Orthodox) world covers nearly one seventh of the world’s land surface, numbers 220 million people, 3% of the world population, and is responsible for 6% of world economic output. The core country of the Christian world is the heart of the former Russian Empire, for the moment called the Russian Federation. Outside this core lie various provinces, for the moment cut off from the core by the Western Powers and their manipulations of the petty nationalist vanities of traitors. These provinces are: the Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Greece, Belarus, Moldova, Bulgaria, Georgia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Cyprus. However, millions of Christians also live in countries like the USA, Kazakhstan, Germany, Syria, Poland, Italy, France, Latvia, Australia, the UK, Slovakia, Albania, Kenya and Israel and are scattered in smaller numbers through almost every country and continent in the world.

The Non-Christian World

Our Christian Civilization, often called Orthodox, that is, Orthodox Christian, confesses in our sign of the Cross the Holy Trinity and Christ, True God and True Man. This is unlike the ex-Judeo-Christian and now atheistic Western world, also called Euroamerica. This apostatic world has not in fact confessed the real Holy Trinity for a thousand years, abandoning Christ for humanistic self-idolization and spreading the mythology of its imagined superiority throughout the world. As a result it has ever since aggressively invaded and greedily raped the rest of the world through organized violence. This barbaric violence, from Charlemagne’s slaughter of the Saxons in 782 to that of the Teutonic Knights, from Hitler’s Blitzkrieg to Rumsfeld’s ‘shock and awe’, has known no bounds, as also its greed, from that of the bloodthirsty Crusaders to the sadistic conquistadors of Columbus, from Clive of India to De Beers.

The Great Deviation

Some may criticize and say that even many in the Christian world do not confess the Holy Trinity and Christ: they point to endemic corruption, high abortion and divorce rates or widespread addiction to various drugs. Of course, they are quite right in this respect: in the Great Deviation of the Twentieth Century, that catastrophic aberration of the Western and Westernized elite which cost hundreds of millions of lives of many peoples, the Christian world was overthrown by apostasy and nominalism. However, by the grace of God, it has over the last generation begun its repentance and so its slow return to the Father. Although there is very far to go to the Father’s House, its general direction is diametrically opposed to that of the Great Deviation, when it abandoned its values for the mess of pottage promised by the Apostatic West, which today is ever deepening its atheistic aberrations.

A Destiny and a Struggle

As an Orthodox born and living in the West, it has been my destiny and the struggle of my life to fight for the civilizational values of the Old West, of the Holy Trinity and of Christ, True God and True Man. These values are essential to our conscious Christian world. We have had to oppose Western cultural arrogance and hubris and today its Trotskyite globalism, which has made the West hated by all. This is the result of the terminal moral decline of the West, come about through its rejection of real Christianity, which stood at its own roots a thousand years ago, as we have described in detail over the last 45 years. We have always fought against our external enemies, the secularism inherent in and inherited from the Papal-Protestant roots of the Non-Christian West, as well as the illusions of the Non-Christian East. However, our greatest struggles have always been against our internal enemies. Who were they?

For the Faith

Firstly, we have had to fight for the purity of the Christian Faith against venal conformists, both Soviet and Western. The Soviets said that there is no God and that therefore all was permissible, the Westerners said that there is a God, but He supported their aggressive violence, rapacious greed and hypocrisy, telling them, for example, to invade oil-rich Iraq. There were internal enemies who went along with these out of treason, cowardice and deceit. The treason was that of those who said that they were Christians but, taking advantage of the paralysis in Moscow, in fact behaved immorally, all being permissible, and so persecuted us. The cowardice was that of those who feared not God, but feared their Western-controlled authorities, and so persecuted us. The deceit was that of those who said that they were Christians, but so lacked love that they supported the enemies of Christ and their vices, and so persecuted us.

For the Christian Empire

Secondly, we have had to fight against those who wanted to deny that Christ is True God and True Man. Denying that Christ is True God, the first wanted to secularize and humanize His Body, the Church, making Her into some petty nationalist mascot, no more than a national flag. Failing to understand that the Church of God is international and universal, they tried to provincialize Her, making Her parochial, instead of accepting Her as Imperial. These vain and weak people were played off and ego-flattered by US ambassadors in the Balkans, who, dividing and ruling, appointed their patriarchs and so created schisms. Denying that Christ is True Man, the second ones we had to fight against were those who wanted to disincarnate His Body, the Church, making Her into a dreamy, impractical philosophy, an irrelevant intellectual conceit, not the fire in the belly of the Church of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

For the Emperor

We have fought for the purity of the Christian Faith, resisting the treason, cowardice and deceit of external and internal enemies. We have fought for the Incarnation of the True God and True Man, the Christian values which result from the fact that, although we are not of this world we are in the world, so justifying the future restoration of the Christian Empire. Thirdly, we have also had to fight for the Emperor. In this matter we have had to fight against those who want to deny that the Holy Spirit comes to earth to inspire the representative of Christ on earth, willed into being by the Faithful People of God. This is why we have defended the last Emperor from the widespread calumnies against him. And this is why we explain why we await the next Emperor. He is vital, for He is the future Emperor who alone can resist the Western preparations for the Antichrist and so can delay his coming.

Conclusion: To the Future

Euroamerica has ignored the common sense advice of its own geopolitician Samuel Huntingdon. Some 25 years ago he pleaded with the West to abandon its hubristic arrogance and recognize that its ‘civilization’ of ‘organized violence’ is not at all universal. Its atheistic materialism is not ‘the end of history’, as the foolish and deluded Fukuyama proclaimed after the end of the Cold War. Since then the West has destroyed itself under the fantasist neocons who want to take over the world. In Iraq in 1991 and 2003 it finally lost the Muslim world, in Georgia in 2008 and in the Ukraine and in Syria in 2014 it made an enemy of Russia, in 2016 of Turkey, and so has allied Muslims, Orthodox and Chinese against itself. It is now itself splitting apart, with Brexit, Trump and the fault-lines of the EU and the USA, as the West falls into the abyss of its own moral depravity, caused by its millennial rejection of Christ.

 

Christ or Antichrist: There is No Room for Half-Christ

At the present time the politically-minded representatives of a minority of fewer than 20% of members of the Orthodox Church oppose the representatives of the majority of over 80%. This was clearly seen at the 2016 Inter-Orthodox forum in Crete, boycotted by representatives of over 80% of Orthodox and whose pre-written, ‘Halfodox’ documents respected Orthodox bishops refused to sign. The representatives of nearly 20% are from the Greek and EU parts of the Church that are US/Western run and influenced; the representatives of the 80% are the politically free, who are able to keep to the Christian Tradition, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and who believe in the Incarnation of the Church in the Christian Empire.

The 20% who in fact, consciously or unconsciously, betray the Church are composed of two groups.
The first group is formed of petty nationalists, who fall into idolatry by putting their national flag above the multi-national Church. The result of such nationalism is that those outside their nationalism are swiftly assimilated into surrounding groups. For example in the Diaspora, the descendants of such nationalists, speaking above all the local language and assimilating the local culture, are soon absorbed into the Non-Orthodox majority. Thus the churches of such nominal, nationalistic Orthodox rapidly die out, as the foreign nationalism of nationalist forebears has no relevance to descendants born in the Diaspora and they quit the Church.

The second group is formed of modernists, who have no deep love of the Church, no spiritual life or values, and tell you that it is irrelevant whether you belong to the Church or not – as ‘it is, after all, just another culture’. They are therefore inferiority-complex relativists and so ecumenists. Such people used to baptise their children (if they baptised them at all) into what they perceived to be the majority religion of the country where they lived. In other words, such modernists are relativists because they are conformists, who swim with the tide of the Establishment where they live, whatever it may be. Their Diaspora descendants also have little time for the Church and are quickly assimilated into the atheist masses.

As a result of the defection of one emigre group of such modernists, already dissident before the Revolution, which indeed they brought about, to the US-run, largely nationalist and modernist Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church has had to build a new Cathedral in Paris. This is a Cathedral for those Orthodox who are faithful to the integral Christian Tradition, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and who believe in the Incarnation of Christ and so of the Church in the Christian Empire. Only here, for example, is the Orthodox calendar adhered to, only here is the tradition of confession before communion adhered to, only here do women keep to the Christian Tradition of modest dress. In other words, only here are spiritual ties to the integrity of the Church kept.

After consecrating both the Russian Orthodox Cathedrals in London and Paris in the last two months, it is clear that the Russian Orthodox Patriarch is intent on witnessing to the integral Orthodox Christian Tradition before the Western world. This is a clear rejection of the watered down, modernist, relativist and ecumenist Cretan or Westernized version of Orthodoxy, created by the neocon sponsors of Greek Orthodoxy in Washington. This anti-dogmatic Halfodoxy is unable to witness anything to anyone except its inferiority as a merely exotic version of Western secularism.

Today, 100 years after the blood-soaked Revolution, the Church is returning to witness to the spiritually damaged Western world that the Western-developed, globalist atheism that persecuted it for three generations in the Soviet Union, in the greatest persecution seen in history but which is virtually ignored in the guilty West, is dead. Moreover, this clearly implies that if the Western world continues its adoption of that globalist atheism, then it too is dead. As in 2016 Western people after Western people re-assert their national identities, to the fury of their power-grasping, US/EU political and media establishments, the message of uncompromised Orthodox Christianity is at least being heeded.

On the Meaning of Destiny and the Future of Russia and the West

Introduction: Destiny

The word ‘destiny’ is vague because it has different meanings according to the three parallel universes which exist. The first-created universe is Heaven and here the word ‘destiny’ means God’s Will. The second universe is Earth, now fallen, aptly called in Old English ‘Middle-earth’ (a term more recently popularized by a former Oxford Professor of Anglo-Saxon, J.R.R. Tolkien). Here the word ‘destiny’ can have the pagan connotations of ‘the fates’, indicating fatalism and the buffetting of forces apparently beyond human control, called by the Ancient Greeks ‘the gods’, but by Christians ‘the demons’, but it can also have positive connotations, for on Middle-earth, people can also be inspired to do God’s Will, though this is not always understood. Finally, there is the third universe, which we call Hell, that provides a hellish destiny, what the demons want for us.

The Parallel Universes

Those who listen out for and do God’s will have a heavenly destiny or calling. They follow their heavenly roots of the past and the future. Awaiting Divine inspiration, they can have a prophetic gift and become God’s seers, visionaries. They foresee a hellish destiny for mankind if there is no repentance and a heavenly destiny if there is. (Demons can only foresee the hellish destiny because they have renounced their freewill to do good. This is why demonic prophecies are very often wrong in their dire and depressing prophecies, as they are unable to see the possibility of good. And this is why secular media often depressingly imitate those hellish forecasts). Prophets have their eyes fixed on the future and are not too bothered by the details of the present, which can tie down to the quagmire of this world, and which scandalize the narrow-minded who cannot see long-term.

Christian Destiny

Those who listen to their Divine calling and so have a Christian Destiny, do not live according to the destiny of the Middle-earth, still less to hellish destiny, but according to heavenly destiny. Their prophecies lead heavenwards. Their destiny is, according to the logic of this world, seems strange, irrational, ironic, mysterious. In reality, none of this is true, for it is the logic of this world that is composed of fallen human rationalism and therefore is strange and ironic. God’s logic, heavenly destiny, is quite different, it leads heavenwards.

Men and Women

The general heavenly destiny of men is self-sacrifice, meaning tenderness. That of women is natural beauty, meaning beauty of soul. The general hellish destiny of men is egoism, meaning brutality. The general hellish destiny of women is artificial beauty, meaning vanity. Modern Western society has largely chosen a hellish destiny, so becoming a society of egoism and vanity, that is, the selfie society, a society of narcissism, the self-important, I-society of look-at-me Facebook and MySpace, of i-phone and i-pad, of I love me.

Russia

As regards the destiny of Russia, we can say the following:

The first shot of the so-called Russian Revolution, as stated by one of the assassins, Purishkevich, was fired on 30 December 1916. The countries of the former Russian Empire then went through three 25-year generations of horror, obscenity and hysteria, of turning their backs on their roots. After the bloodshed following 1916, came 1941 and yet another Western invasion, which was a call to repentance, then the abortion holocaust of the 1960s with the whole Soviet ABCD (alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce), the result of 50 years of rejection of pre-Revolutionary values and the demotivation, especially of men, who no longer had any role to fill, as the State had total control, and finally the horrors of perestroika after 1991, in which millions died premature deaths, especially through vodka and suicide, as people were unable to face the banditry of so-called ‘privatization’ and ‘the bright future’, promised for the huge sacrifices made for the Soviet Union, turned into a nightmare. The heaven on earth promised by the Communist ideologues had become hell on earth.

Today, the hangover and vestiges of the hellish destiny of the Soviet past are still alive, but the younger generations are now aware of their Christian roots, of their forgotten and rejected heavenly destiny. Hell stopped in 1991 and a great many stepped back from the brink. Hope sprang. A generation on, there is still uncertainty, but as time passes more and more Russians have not only stepped back from the brink, but are fleeing it as fast as possible.

The West

The same pattern of generational change, every 25 years, has gone on in the West. In 1914 the Western elite rejected Christ and slaughtered and maimed its youth in indescribable conditions. In 1939 it rejected the possibility of repentance and deepened its abysmal tragedy. In the 1960s it rejected inherent Christian cultural values. In 1989 it began to spread its evil to Eastern Europe and worldwide under the slogan of a ‘New World Order’ and the word ‘globalism’. Western Europe, since 1917 under US domination, now became nothing more than a laughable US vassal.

However, in 2016, with the events of Brexit, the election of a Non-establishment politician in the USA and the rejection by Italy of Brussels bureaucrats, there is hope that the Western world is also stepping back from the brink. Having peered over the precipice and seen hell, some at least are coming to their senses. What will 2017 bring? Of course, it may be that the events of 1916 are mere pauses before, lemming-like, the West continues its suicide, but it may be these events mark a sea-change. The West stands on the edge of the cliff, hesitantly. Political elites and their hireling-journalists, who obey hellish voices and destinies, are alarmed: they could lose their well-paid jobs Could the people be reclaiming their freedom despite their alleged manipulation into zombies by the Western media?

Conclusion

In Paris this weekend, a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, Patriarch Kyrill consecrated the symbol of Holy Rus in the Western world, a new Christian Cathedral and spiritual centre. Jerusalem has come to Babylon. Will this help the Western world to come back to its senses and roots? By the grace of God, may it be so.

Christian Civilization versus Western Civilization

In his monumental 7,000 pages of historical erudition entitled ‘A Study of History’, Arnold Toynbee, the famous British historian, made an attempt to categorize all the civilizations in the history of the world, both present and past, and followed their rise and fall. He deemed that only five Civilizations are alive today. These are: Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, (Orthodox) Christian and Western, with Western Civilization dominating them all. (Orthodox) Christian Civilization was at the time of his writing, more or less three generations ago, centred in Russia. However, it was in a dying and fragmentary state, since it had been divided and oppressed by imported and imposed Western ideologies such as Fascism (National Socialism), Capitalism and, above all in the centre itself, Communism (State Capitalism).

Today, Orthodox Christian, or simply Christian, Civilization is reviving, with the shackles of both Fascism and Communism long since thrown off. However, what exactly does this term of ‘Christian Civilization’ mean, what are the values of Christian Civilization, what are the differences between them and those of Western Civilization and why does the latter so utterly misunderstand them? It should be said that those who misunderstand them even include Anglican Protestants who, like Uniats, use a form of the Orthodox rite, but still assert that we mainstream Orthodox Christians are not even Christians! This misunderstanding clearly proves that we are not saved by an imitated rite, but by the Orthodox faith which should behind it, for that alone preserves the integrity of the rite, and that they do not share our faith.

This issue has once more come to the fore with last week’s appeal in The Financial Times to Russian oligarchs to overthrow the very popular government of President Putin. Here we see the essence of Western Civilization. It is not based on popular will (‘freedom and democracy’ are a principal Western myth, as we saw with the refusal of EU bureaucrats to allow European peoples to vote on leaving the EU), but on the power of the wealthy few (in Greek ‘oligarchs’). This can be clearly seen in the USA (ruled by a few shadowy billionaires from the military-industrial complex) and in Western Europe (ruled by a few unelected EU bureaucrats). In Western democracy the people are given a choice between two oligarchs or their puppets – and though this is called freedom, it is clearly not.

Clearly, it is the will of the Western elite, and among them are those who run The Financial Times, that (Orthodox) Christian Civilization must be destroyed (just as the Western world destroyed its own original (Orthodox) Christian Civilization during the second millennium of its history). The Western elite intends to do this by turning Christian Civilization into a series of dismembered vassal states or colonies, a process called Balkanization and which it practised in the 19th century. But this became crystal clear already long ago, in the destruction of New Rome by Western barbarians in 1204, in the plundering of the Teutonic Knights in Russia in the 13th century or in the alliance between Western nations and Islam and in the invasions of Western Civilization like those of Napoleon, the Anglo-French-Ottomans, Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler.

As a result of this destruction and dismemberment the natural resources of Christian Civilization can be taken over and ruthlessly exploited by the Western world, so that it can parasitically support itself, just as it does on the resources of the rest of the world. Here, essentially, we see that Western Civilization is a Civilization of Mammon, of materialism. No clearer example of this can be seen today than in the Ukraine, a part of Christian Civilization that the West is now trying to control and colonize. Having overthrown the government elected by a majority of its people, the West has now appointed a group of corrupt oligarchs, each with his own feudal fief, to rule it. These oligarchs, their funds controlled by Western and Israeli banks, are the spiritual descendants of warring princes and later corrupt boyars centuries ago.

In the 18th century these were succeeded by Westernized aristocrats who introduced serfdom, enslaving the people after the Western model. In the 19th century these aristocrats, just like the boyars who in the early 17th century had acted to please Polish invaders, tried to seize power under British and French influence in 1801 (the assassination of Tsar Paul I) and in 1825 under the Decembrists. When the aristocrats lost some of their power as serfdom was abolished by the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II in 1861, they became ever more aggressive and they revolted again, in 1905 and, in 1917, this time successfully. What is happening in the Ukraine today is simply a repeat of the old scenario of foreign meddlers operating through local traitors. Simply today the meddlers are not greedy Poles, British or French, but Americans.

So what is the sign of Christian Civilization (called ‘Byzantine’ or ‘Orthodox’ by Western historiographers)? It is simply in the implementation of the two Gospel Commandments given by the Saviour, to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. These Commandments are quite alien to Western Civilization, for they mean that progress is defined not as technological, as materialist and consumerist, but as our repentance and spiritual transfiguration in preparation for the inevitable meeting with God at the Last Judgement. And the state of our progress can be seen in our non-exploitative and non-aggressive relations with others, for we do not invade other people’s countries or arrogantly instruct them on how to live, but cultivate good relations with them as good neighbours.

This does not mean that we are weak or that we do not resist evil, it means that we defend all those who are weaker. Christian Civilization exists not to exploit others, but to fight evil. The prime example of this today is the defence of Syria by the Russian Federation. This is Christian Civilization at work, unlike Western Civilization that meddles, invades, destroys and exploits, as in countless colonies in Latin America, Asia and Africa, or as today in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine, parading its troops, planes, drones and ships off the Russian coasts and along its borders, constantly sabre-rattling and supplying terrorists with training, arms and finance. Russians, however, send their ships through international waters, even though pestered by Western ships which try and impede their route.

The aim of Western Civilization is to strip the world’s natural resources until they are exhausted. This will inevitably lead to the end of the world, the apocalypse. This is done under the excuse of ‘freedom and democracy’ (freedom for the oligarchs to asset-strip and democracy to vote for one Western oligarch or another, but not to vote for an anti-oligarch). On the other hand, Christian Civilization appoints an Emperor (Monarch or Tsar) who is called on to carry out the will of God on earth, in consultation with the people over whom he reigns. This consultation is represented by the words Conciliarity and Catholicity, meaning that the Monarchy is a popular one, neither absolutist – which is the tyranny of a man-God – nor constitutionalist – which is the tyranny of the few behind a puppet monarchy.

Unlike Western Civilization, Christian Civilization is multinational, not nationalistic, chauvinistic and xenophobic. Such abuses do occur, but only in periods of decadence or in backward provincial areas outside the centre. Examples are in today’s schismatic Western Ukraine, Estonia, Montenegro, Macedonia and also in Greek nationalist Constantinople. In all these cases local nationalism rules in contradiction to Christianity. As a result of following the Gospel Commandments, and not the ideology of Western Civilization, Christian Civilization sees no difference between faith and life, for faith is not a mere abstract ideology to justify guilt, but shapes life in harmony with the Incarnation. The aim of such life, patterned by faith, is holiness, the kingdom of heaven on earth, for the spiritual is more important than the material.

Christian Civilization does not encourage individualism, for our common aim is salvation together, as a community. Our political life is determined by a people’s monarch who is called to be a representative of God on earth, defending the Church and our Christian values. It is clear also that the people belonging to such a Civilization show their patriotism for such a Civilization, which is heaven on earth and we defend it against the Western forerunners of Antichrist like the Teutonic Knights, Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler and those who today admire these tyrants as bearers of ‘Western Civilization’ and are intent on destroying our reviving Christian Civilization. We live in perilous times but, by the grace of God, we shall triumph because we are not afraid of you, however much you try to censor us and intimidate us.

1916-2016: 100 Years of Saints and Traitors

Introduction

100 years ago there began the last stages in the greatest injustice in world history – the betrayal of Imperial Christian Russia. Then on the point of victory in the First World War and so of liberating New Rome, called Constantinople, and also the Holy Land, it was also about to liberate the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany, so undoing the injustices in Central Europe and the Balkans and in the tyrannical Second Reich of Bismarck, so reconstituting a free Poland, and perhaps also righting the injustices of Western colonization worldwide. Had it not been betrayed, there would never have been any Bolshevik genocide (millions of dead), no Third Reich and no Hitler, no World War Two, no Teutonic holocaust of the Slavs (30 million dead) or of the Jews (over 5 million dead), no American fire bombs and atom bombs on Japanese civilians (1 million dead?), no Communist China (30 million dead?), no abortion holocaust (100 million dead?), no……

In May 1945 one Russian soldier – he later became a priest – was standing in the ruined Reichstag in Berlin. Surrounded by incredible destruction, but also great relief, victory had come at a huge price on the Russian Easter Day, which that year had coincided with the day of the feast of St George the Victorious Soldier-Martyr. There, in the Reichstag, the soldier saw Tsar Nicholas II surveying the scene, examining every detail, thinking that in 1917 he would already have stood there, surrounded however not by destruction but by an intact capital of culture. The ghost of Tsar Nicholas has haunted Europe ever since it betrayed him in 1917. He has been here all the time, to this very day, looking with eyes of pity at the merciless destruction and self-destruction of the Western world, as it sinks into its self-made abyss. Betrayed at the last moment in 1917, according to a plot prepared in detail in 1916, he looks on the lost souls and cultural heritage of the Western world and his heart weeps.

Inside Russia

The first sign that the plot had been implemented was the assassination of the peasant-healer Rasputin in December 1916, betrayed by decadent Russian aristocrats, who hated the Christian peasantry, and murdered by British spies, who hated Russian Orthodox. Financed by its enemies (Germany and Austro-Hungary) and by its ‘allies’ (Britain, France and the US, who had already financed Japan’s transformation into militarism and its murderous attack on Russia in 1904), sabotage and treason laid the Tsar’s Russia low. In 1917 this developed into anarchy (the so-called ‘Revolution’), which was created by ‘liberal’ opportunist traitors in February and exploited by ‘Bolshevik’ opportunist traitors in October. Anarchy (falsely called ‘Revolution’) was fabricated in the salons of the jealous and the ignoble, grand dukes and princes, generals and politicians, freemasons and lawyers, industrialists and bourgeois – ‘have money, want power’ – traitors to the people and their Tsar.

All of them were utterly unfaithful to the three (three because Trinitarian) tenets and principles that had upheld the Christian Empire of the Tsar. These were: the Faith (uncompromised Orthodox Christianity); the Tsar (the Anointed Christian Sovereign); and Rus (the multinational Christian Empire). As atheists and apostates, they committed sabotage and treason with regard to all these values, which represent Faith in the Father, the Incarnation of the Son and the Presence of the Holy Spirit. Those who remained faithful to these three tenets inside Russia were the New Martyrs and Confessors and those who venerated them. The salt of the earth, they were the ones who were to begin the great restoration that has been under way since the official fall of Bolshevism twenty-five years ago, but in fact long before, from the moment of their exploits. Thus the traitors were countered by the saints and, although the traitors still do not understand how or why, the saints always win.

Outside Russia

After the anarchy, there began the resistance and then the defeat and so emigration of those known as ‘White Russians’. Once in the emigration (though even before), it could plainly be seen that here too there were saints and traitors. To the left hand side there fell away those who betrayed the Faith and the Tsar. To the right hand side there fell away those who betrayed the Faith and Rus. On the left hand side were the renovationists, who so hated the Russian Church that they left Her, compromising Her Faith, and so hated the Tsar that they actually justified their treason, which had led them into the self-punishment of exile. On the right hand side were the nationalists, who so hated the Russian Church that they made Her into a narrow nationalist flag, forgetting Her multinational mission, and so hated Rus that they allied themselves with its crazed Teutonic enemy, not understanding that the victory of 1945 was the people’s victory, the victory of repentant Rus.

There were also those who understood that the task of the emigration was to keep faith with all three tenets. We knew that as long as all three principles were respected, all would be well and it would be simple to reunite with Russia once it was free again and restoration had begun, with the New Martyrs and Confessors officially venerated there. We understood that the Faith could not be compromised by heresies, dreamy and disincarnate renovationism and personality cults, regardless of the fact that we lived outside Russia. We understood that the memory of the Tsar, the universal Christian Emperor, had to be kept for restoration, in order for a new Christian Emperor to come and oppose the worldwide evil that has been unleashed ever since Tsar Nicholas was deposed. We understood that our mission is to make Rus universal, worldwide, regardless of race and language, and that our mission is among the people and must not be compromised by political Establishments.

Conclusion

In our own times we are seeing a daily miracle: over the last 25 years we have seen in the Russian Lands what we and those before us had been praying for over the previous 75 years, the slow restoration of the Tsar’s Christian Russia. Yes, it has been a slow and tortuous process, with many hesitations, deviations and falls, but the general direction has been right. This process of restoration is of course far from over, indeed, in many respects it has only just begun, but the icons of the New Martyrs, including those of the Royal Martyrs, are everywhere. As the new Cold War NATO occupies the Ukraine and Estonia, attempting to destabilize governments from Macedonia to Moldova and Armenia to Kazakhstan, and prepares to attack all along the Russian borders, its aircraft and submarines, tanks and troops everywhere threatening resurgent Russia, the last bastion of Christianity in the world, we see the desperation of the world’s elite in its bid to impose its New World Order.

Having destabilized all Latin America and much of Africa, striving to undermine China and India and using tides of poor Muslim immigrants to threaten European identities, having destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya and Syria, and attempting to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church and Faith, the satanic New World Order’s proposed Orthodox Council has led only to our clear identification of the unrepentant traitors in our midst – by waiting for them to reveal themselves, we now know who is ready for cleansing. The tiny but immensely powerful elite that stands behind the USA, the EU, NATO, the whole Western world indeed, and pulls the strings of its media, puppets and all the deceived and gullible, knows that if Russia resists it successfully, its aim of global domination and control will be foiled and the coming of the Kingdom of the Great Deceiver, Antichrist, that it knowingly and unknowingly seeks will be postponed, perhaps even for many years to come. May it be so, O Lord.

2016 Words for 2016: On New Year’s Eve Our Future Hope is Imperial

The Romans…the bandits of the whole world…their greed is excited by an enemy’s wealth, their lust for power by his poverty…robbery, butchery, rape…they create devastation and call it peace.

Words attributed by Tacitus to the British leader Calcagus, after his defeat by the Romans at the Battle of Mons Graupius in AD 84

Introduction: The Last Twenty-Five Years

Many were deluded by the collapse of Communism twenty-five years ago, indeed so blinded that they could not see the ensuing and still impending chaos caused by the hubristic attempt of the USA to rule the world. Their Western vanity flattered, the deluded actually still believe in the myth of American Imperialism, ‘the New World Order’, that ‘liberal-democratic’ secularism has triumphed over all other ideologies and faiths. They actually believe that history has ended, that the global future is with the Imperialism of Washington and its absurd materialist ideology – ‘The West is Best over the Rest’. They have failed to revise their views and still now actually believe that there is no alternative to their primitive, spiteful, soul-destroying and world-destroying fantasy.

In reality, the anti-Christian Zionist elite which bankrupted Communism, through its ability to indebt and so enslave to bankers the peoples that it oppresses, failed many years ago. Its New World Order has become the New World Disorder, in North Africa, the Middle East and now Europe. As Russian aeroplanes and Chinese troops enter Syria, it is already dead. Although that Imperialist elite still governs the US and its bloc of vassal-states, it is utterly discredited. It is not only utterly immoral through its Mammonism, but its global power-grab has visibly ended in catastrophe. Instead of peace and prosperity, it has brought to the world unspeakable wars and misery, exploitation and environmental destruction, chaos and spiritual poverty, as well as uprooting hundreds of millions of families from their ancestral homes worldwide. And this devastation they do indeed call peace. The Imperialist elite has brought not life but death, with the apocalyptic threat of Armageddon in the background.

However, there are those who have not been deluded by the toys and baubles, bread and circuses, of globalist Consumerism and have not given up the struggle to find an alternative. They have sought a way out – though often by violent reaction to Western genocide some of them have also made the most appalling errors. For example, by reaction to global Western Imperialism, fanatical Islamists have turned to the horrors and abominations of terrorism. Nobody in their right mind admires or follows such Satanized individuals. They do not understand that further destruction is no response to destruction, that only construction is positive. Others, also by reaction to the selfsame globalism, have turned to narrow and provincial nationalism, failing to realize that in a globalized world, no small or even large nation can stand alone against the powers that be. United we stand, divided we fall.

Such is the fate of those in European countries who want to reclaim their sovereignty, resisting and abandoning the death-giving embrace of the Imperialist EU beast. For example, there are now strong nationalist political movements in the UK, France, Greece, Hungary, Poland and in many other countries on other continents, as in India and China. In Europe they do not understand that standing alone they will be crushed by the EU tyranny, behind which stands its parent, the Washington elite. In India and China they do not understand that, despite their size, they are still provincial, lacking global reach. However, if the ‘liberal-democratic’ myth of the West can be rejected as the failure that it is, together with the horrors of Islamist terrorism and the provinciality of narrow nationalism, even if that nationalism is on a sub-continental scale like the Hindu or the Chinese, what hope then is left?

The Alternative

Clearly, any hope that is left can only be something that is not immoral like Western Imperialism, that is not violent like Islamism, and that is not provincial like European nationalism, anti-Christian Hinduism or Chinese Communism. We would suggest that what is left can be summed up not by the word ‘Imperialism’, but by its opposite, the word ‘Imperial’. This may seem mystifying, since for many the two words mean the same thing and in any case ‘all empires are destined to fail’. History indeed tends to confirm the latter statement: the Persian, the Egyptian, the Macedonian, the pagan Roman, the ‘Holy Roman’, the Ottoman, the French, the British, the Soviet and many another Empire all rose and then fell.

However, the fact is that all who were not part of such passing Empires had to become their vassals or allies and were obliged to accept their policies. Such is the case today with the EU Fourth Reich (Reich = Empire), which crushes national sovereignty and obliges its members to do whatever its Imperialist US designers order it to do. Today’s ‘democracies’ in Western Europe are so weak that they must obey their Imperialist masters in Berlin and Washington. In the same way Hitler’s Third Reich smashed all the European ‘democracies’ and only another Empire, the Soviet, was able to overcome it, in the same way as only the Russian Empire had been able to overcome Hitler’s predecessor, Napoleon’s Empire.

In other words, only a powerful Empire can withstand another powerful Empire. We can see this today; no European ‘democracy’ has been able to withstand the Globalist Empire of Washington, they have all fallen to it one by one. Today, for instance, once Orthodox Christian but now apostatic Greece has allowed homosexual ‘marriage’, just as Montenegro is being forced by violence to join NATO and the occupied Ukraine is being tempted by its temporary government into the vulgar consumerism and profoundly ungay ‘gay’ parades of American Imperialism. Other countries, like India and China, merely resist that Imperialism in nationalistic words, but in fact imitate it from inside.

In fact, only one country, and one which does indeed have an Imperial, that is, multinational, profile resists and refuses to become a US vassal, and that is the Russian Federation, one eighth of the world. It alone has been strong enough to rebuff without either fanaticism or provincial nationalism. Western Imperialist meddling, which destroys national traditions and identities, local cultures and family life, provoking chaotic conflicts and bloody wars with its attempted imposition of the global MacWorld ‘culture’ of the ‘New World Order’ or ‘New World War’. It has done this on the basis of Christianity. Only that Christianity, restored as a Christian Empire, based in Russia, can resist – on condition, however, that its Imperial Empire does not fall into Imperialism, as it tended to do before the Revolution. Let us explain.

The globalist ‘New World Order’ is not democratic at all, that is a myth. It is in fact the dictatorship of an oligarchic elite, artificially divided into two parts, so providing the myth of democratic choice. It runs political parties, industries, banks, the media, the whole Establishment, and threatens those who counter it. Founded on the genocide of millions of Native Americans, the abhorrent slave trade in millions of Native Africans, a genocidal civil war, the bloodshed of two World Wars and the countless local wars of the twentieth century, it is trying to control the world. It subjugates peoples and countries by military aggression, colour revolutions, juntas and propaganda lies, ‘banana republicanizing’ by using local mafia networks to support itself and living off the resulting chaos. This is Imperialist – not Imperial.

For the mark of Imperialism, colonial or neo-colonial, is the suppression of local cultures and the genocide of peoples who resist the monoculture that it imposes. However, the one Empire that has lasted by far the longest has been Imperial, that is multinational and indeed multi-religious, accepting diversity. Quite different from the pagan Roman Empire, this is the Christian Roman Empire. Founded in the early fourth century in New Rome, it continued until it was interrupted by decadent Greek nationalism in 1453, then soon after restored in the Third Rome until it was interrupted by decadent Russian nationalism in the early twentieth century. Its restoration is now under way. It has survived interruptions precisely because, despite deviations in periods of decadence, it has not been based on Imperialism, but has been Imperial, that is, it has been founded on the Christian revelation of the Holy Trinity, unity in diversity.

Conclusion: The Next Twenty-Five Years?

Only in the framework of the Imperial and Trinitarian concept can sovereignty and ethnic differences be combined and the identity of diverse peoples be protected from corrosive, centralizing Imperialist globalism, terrorism and provincial nationalism. Such globalism was precisely the error of the neo-Khazar Bolshevik Empire, which lasted scarcely three generations because it was based on genocide as it imposed a single centralized model on Central Asians, Eastern Europeans, Baltic peoples, Finns and Ukrainians alike. The question of the restoration of the Russian Empire is vital to preserving the national identities of a hundred and more peoples, not least that of Little Russians. The alternative is that they all become second-class citizens, cannon fodder and pawns in the game of chaos of American Imperialism, as we can see is happening to Ukrainians, Syrians, Libyans, Iraqis, Afghans, Mexicans and many other peoples worldwide.

The fact is that the Russian Federation is today the only country in the world which is defending Christian values. And this despite, or rather because of, the fact that twenty-five years ago it lived under the oppression of an imported atheist regime which was responsible for the multi-millioned martyrdom of Christians, by far the greatest known to history, and despite the fact that it is still suffering from the dreadful though now dying hangover of that atheism. This miracle has always been ignored by the Western world. Why? Because that world is in fact by ideology anti-Christian, having violently quit the Church 1,000 years ago. That is why all surviving remnants of authentic Christianity among the non-deluded peoples of the Western world look to the Russian Orthodox Church with hope. That is also why Russia is hated by the Trostskist post-modernist ideology of the Western liberal-neocon elite and is slandered by its closely-controlled media. For them ugliness has become beauty, noise has become music, discord has become harmony and lies have become truth.

An Imperialist Empire, in words first uttered by the Victorian Imperialist Palmerston, has ‘no permanent friends, only permanent interests’. However, an Imperial Empire does have friends, for it is a symphony of peoples, cultures and beliefs; but it needs an Emperor and that is what is lacking in the still post-Soviet Russian Federation today. Why? Firstly, because only an Emperor can act as the unique focus of belief and so channel his subjects, elite and people alike, into the service of the Empire. Secondly, because only an Emperor can control and limit the oligarchs or aristocrats and stop them becoming too powerful and so tyrannizing and exploiting the people. And thirdly, because only an Emperor can act as the unique commander-in-chief in the event of war.

As to who will become the Emperor of the restored Christian Empire that alone can restrain growing evil worldwide, we do not know. Only Providence can reveal him after repentance of the whole people. What we know is that only an Emperor, in the name of his repentant Orthodox people, can prove the Imperial truth that ‘Right is Might’ and disprove the Imperialist lie that ‘Might is Right’. The peoples of the Russian Federation, like all other peoples all over the world, have a choice to make: to subject themselves to barbaric Imperialism and accept the same fate as Yugoslavs, Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians, or else to unite and repent. If so, then we can await with hope the Emperor who will restore and defend Imperial Christianity, authentic Christianity, soaring like the double-headed eagle above East and West alike. And that is why, unlike unfaithful, compromised, Establishment Halfodox, all faithful Orthodox, wherever we live scattered across the face of the earth, are Imperial.

The Russian Orthodox Church: Yesterday and Tomorrow

The Emperor and the Empress thought that they were dying for their homeland. But in fact they died for all mankind.

Pierre Gilliard, Swiss tutor to the Tsar’s children.

Foreword

Ten years ago, in 2005, debate raged in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) about our relations with the Church inside Russia. Was it at last free and so could we enter into canonical communion and work together, building the future? Such was the debate that a Pan-Diaspora Church Council was called in San Francisco in 2006 in order to answer the questions posed. At that time we had to counter some very false arguments which were advanced in favour of sectarian self-isolation, arguments that were shaped by the impurity of politics and psychology, and not by the purity of theology. Below are examples.

Yesterday

The human weakness of Metropolitan (later Patriarch) Sergius (+ 1944) and his followers, as revealed in compromises with the atheist persecutor Stalin, known as ‘sergianism’, was erected by some into a ‘theological’ heresy. In fact, it was just another form of erastianism, of placing the State above the Church, of which there had already been so many examples in other forms in the Old Testament and in 1900 years of Church history. There was nothing theological in this, for it was only human weakness on the part of one who had found himself under huge pressure from a militant atheist State. No-one is to judge him for his weakness, there is no place for phariseeism here, for God is the Judge of all.

Though there was nothing of a dogmatic or theological nature in such compromises, certain individuals, partly under the influence of North American political puritanism, even concluded that the present-day sacraments of the Church inside Russia had somehow mysteriously ‘lost grace’ on account of this compromise of three generations before. As a ROCOR priest, I first came across this astonishing piece of politics masquerading as theology in 1992 from someone who was under the influence of this North American error. In fact, of course, sergianism is not a heresy, whereas puritanism, with its inherent impurity of Novatianism, Donatism and Eustathianism, as seen in the light of the canons of the Council of Gangra of 340, most certainly is.

The political and diplomatic support which a few in the Church inside Russia sought from Roman Catholics and Protestants, and called ecumenism, was also condemned. However, it was a very curious idea that the opinions or actions of a handful of individuals could be held up as a sign that the whole of the Church inside Russia, 160,000,000 people, was therefore somehow tainted by the heresy of ecumenism! In reality, most of the faithful inside Russia had never heard of ecumenism and those who had were utterly opposed to it. This was all the stranger, in that by 2005 ecumenism had in any case come to mean something very different from in its political heyday between the 60s and 80s. Instead of concerning itself with politically-enforced syncretistic compromise, in fact heresy, it had turned to having good-neighbourly relations with heterodox, something that ROCOR, with the many mixed marriages among parishioners and regular need to use heterodox premises for services, had always cultivated.

The strangest argument heard at that time was that we could not associate ourselves with the Church inside Russia in any way because of the compromises of a few individuals in it. This was an appalling error, for it would have meant that we could not associate ourselves with the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors. True, we, in freedom, had canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors first, in 1981, 19 years before the Church inside Russia had been able to do so by freeing itself. However, many, including myself, had wondered why we in the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), living in freedom, had so scandalously not canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors long before, from the 1920s on. We felt shame for ourselves.

The sad reason for the delay had been because elements in ROCOR were themselves contaminated with politics. Indeed, I well remember how in 1981 certain parishioners at the ROCOR Cathedral in London, as also elsewhere, had actually been opposed to the canonization. And in any case, the ROCOR canonization had only ever been a first step, a beginning. As I wrote at the time: What has begun in New York must come to completion in Moscow. Moreover, for lack of trustworthy information we had canonized only some 8,000; the Church inside Russia, with greater access to archives, has canonized well over 30,000 and that number is increasing.

Others said that we in ROCOR could have nothing to do with a Church whose bishops belonged to the KGB. I would have agreed with this – if any had belonged to the KGB, such as, we suspect, the defrocked schismatic Filaret Denisenko, now the darling of the CIA. In fact, they did not. The senior bishops inside Russia merely had KGB code names – in the same way as Western secular leaders, whom we prayed for in our services as civil leaders, had KGB code-names. The Church inside Russia could just as well have said: ‘We will have nothing to do with ROCOR because you pray for individuals who have KGB code-names’. It would have been just as false an argument.

Some in ROCOR admitted that there were members of our Church, in good standing, who worked or had worked for the CIA and other Western spy services. They countered this by saying that there were members of the KGB in churches inside Russia. This was totally false: the only KGB members who attended churches there were those who went there to spy, to note down names of priests or young people and create problems for them.

Sectarian elements in ROCOR objected that if we entered into canonical communion with the Church inside Russia, we would then be in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church! I first heard this incredible argument, I think, in about 1999, when a ROCOR priest from London concelebrated with a priest of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This had raised an objection from a sectarian priest trained in North America. In the Western European Diocese of ROCOR, where I had been ordained and celebrated until 1997, such concelebrations were perfectly normal and happened regularly. As a ROCOR priest, I was amazed at this sectarian spirit, which I had hardly met before. The logic of this argument would be that we in ROCOR were no longer in communion with Mt Athos, which is in the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Absolutely unthinkable! (Naturally, such sectarians later left ROCOR).

On a much more serious and practical level, there were those who pointed out that among representatives of the Church inside Russia in the Diaspora there were still corrupt and renovationist clergy at even the highest level, even though several had by then died out. This was a problem. Although these renovationists called us slanderers for telling the Truth and so shaming their false idols (as renovationists elsewhere still do), the problem was largely overcome in 2006, when most such clergy in England and France left the jurisdiction of the Church inside Russia in a schism which they created; since then, two or three other such individuals have simply been removed, so they can no longer cause scandal and can at last learn the basics of the Faith.

Finally, there were those who said that we could not work together with the Church inside Russia because the situation in Russia was not as it had been before the Revolution. Soviet practices had infiltrated Russian society, alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce were rife, the mummy of the Russophobic murderer Lenin still lay on Red Square, and the squares and streets of Russia were littered with his statues or named after his henchmen. They demandingly demanded in fact that the post-Soviet Russian State (in charge of such matters) behave as though it were part of the Russian Church! In the face of this argument we pointed out that pre-Revolutionary Russia had not been ideal either (otherwise there would never have been a Revolution), we asked for compassion for a people deprived for three generations of a free Church, asked for patience and said that with time the Church will influence the State, since repentance, which we too are in need of, changes people.

Victory

The above arguments were rejected, with repentance for ever having entertained them, by well over 95% of ROCOR, dismissed as the arguments of schismatic impurity, of a tiny, sectarian, inward-looking and politicized minority, which had been trying to take over ROCOR, holding us back and impeding us from fulfilling our universal calling together with the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church, the great majority. As we know, in 2007 the vast majority of the hierarchy, clergy and people of our little ROCOR were happy to enter at last into canonical communion with the vast majority of the rest of the Church, of which we had always spiritually been a part. The separation, caused purely by political events exterior to the Church, was over. We were sure that the Church inside Russia had freed itself, as had already been made evident by the Jubilee Council of 2000. At long last, our inward unity could become outwardly apparent and, impediments removed, we could progress together towards our common destiny and ever more urgent mission.

Tomorrow

A generation after the fall of State atheism in the Russian Federation, we see in Russia today most interesting developments, promising for the future. After the awful period of ‘law of the jungle’ capitalism in the 1990s, with its rule of seven bankers, ‘Wild East’ bandit privatizations and the appearance of pro-Western criminal oligarchs and liberals, Russia has largely seen through that alternative to Communism that was offered it by the consumerist Western world, which we too, living in the Western world itself, had already seen through.

Thanks largely to the chaos and misery that the Western Powers have been causing in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, Syria and above all in the Ukraine, Russian society has seen through Eurosodom and Gomorrhica. If the CIA-installed Poroshenko junta, set up in Kiev, the Mother of Russian cities, wants the suicide of ‘European values’, it can have them. We will remain faithful to the values of St Vladimir and St Olga of Holy Kiev. Believing in Christ, Who trampled down death by death, we choose life. Believing in satan who tramples down life by death, they choose death. That is the difference between us.

Providentially, through the Western attacks on Holy Rus, Russian society has for the most part now come to understand that the West is not the solution. Russia must follow its own, historic, God-given way, the way that our saints and other lucid elements in ROCOR have always preached. As for Russia, it must heal itself and restore Holy Rus. Outside Russia, we can only pray and encourage, learning as we go, for our main task is to spread Orthodoxy outside the Russian Lands in faithfulness to Holy Rus. We are only humble disciples who follow the precepts of Holy Rus.

Interestingly, voices have been saying that Russian society today resembles 1917 Russia. However, unlike in 1917 the direction of today’s Russia is not 1918, but 1916. In other words, although the situation is delicate, Russia is not heading towards catastrophe as it was in 1917, but is heading back from it. Here is the difference. If, God willing, we continue on this God-given path, the Church of Russia will lead us to our destiny. What is this?

On account of the utter failure of imposed Western ideas there, we can say that Russia has seen the future and knows from bitter experience that it does not work. Today it is struggling its way back up from the pit, at the same time as the Western world, led by the United States, is hurtling headlong into it. Today, some of the more aware Western politicians and thinkers are going to Russia or following events in Russia in order to learn. Gerhard Schroeder, Nicolas Sarkozy, Phillippe de Villiers, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Paul Craig Roberts, Franklin Graham and others all follow events in Russia closely or visit.

Russia’s mystical and historic role now is to act as an intermediary between East and West, between China and Western Europe. For the spiritual destiny of China is to enter the authentic Orthodox Christian world, becoming the Eastern provinces of Holy Rus, just as the spiritual destiny of Western Europe, with its roots in Orthodox Christianity, is to return to it, with the help of its ancient saints, by becoming the Western provinces of Holy Rus. True, the towering national pride of Europeans largely prevents this, for where there is no humility, there is no salvation. Indeed, Russia’s task is now not to save Europe from the USA, as some have put it, but to save Europe from itself. Just as Russia, and not the West, was to blame for choosing the Western ideology that created the Russian Revolution in February 1917, we do not blame others for the present misfortune that Europeans have chosen for themselves.

The key to universal salvation in these last times is atonement, in the restoration of Holy Rus and in Holy Rus becoming universal. Following the Holy Trinity, we are called on not only to be Guardians and Gatherers of Holy Rus, following the Father and the Son, but also Spreaders of Holy Rus, following the Holy Spirit. Those, in East and West, who want to work with the Russian Orthodox Church and so, by following the Tradition, build up new Local Churches are welcome to do so. If some do not wish to do so and set themselves against the prophetic and mystical Church Tradition in tired, old, secularist and humanist neo-renovationism, then God be with them. We shall do God’s Will without them. We force no-one to follow the Church; the Church sails ahead without those who reject Her.

In 1917 the last Christian Emperor, the Tsar, did not abdicate. In 1917 Russia and the whole world abdicated from him, from the Christian Emperor and Christian Empire, and so from Christ. Since then there has been no peace on earth so that we have all had to atone, each receiving our penance in order to learn humility. Inside Russia the people faced the penances of persecution and Nazi invasion, outside Russia those in the emigration faced the penances of exile and isolation. As for Europe, like today’s USA also, it has faced the penance of war and humiliating loss of power and greatness. As for the rest of the world, it has faced constant strife and war, ever since ‘he who restrains’ (2 Thess 2, 7) was in 1917 removed. All the suffering of the world since 1917 has been the opportunity of all to learn humility.

Our destiny, mystical and prophetical, is to preach Holy Rus, the message of the last Christian Emperor, to the whole world for repentance before the end. The time is coming when the world will at last be ready to hear of Holy Rus, of the universality of the Incarnate Christ, authentic Christianity, and not the two diluted isms shaped by Western heathenism, pagan Romanism and northern barbarianism, that is, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

Afterword

My great-grandfather was born in the same year as Nicholas II, the last Christian Emperor who was martyred in Ekaterinburg in 1918. One hundred years after the Emperor’s birth and fifty years after his martyrdom, I, born on the anniversary of the day when the remains of the Imperial family were finally destroyed, received the message from the east that I was to learn and then go and speak of Holy Rus, Christ Incarnate, to those whom I met. This is not only my personal destiny, but also that of many others, as described so well in the poem ‘The Apostles’, written in exile in 1928 by the bard of the Tsar, Sergey Bekhteev:

Amid the darkness of the slavish world
We bear the spirit’s torch in victory
And we call loud to those chosen by God
To enter the hall where the Orthodox feast.

We walk along a road of thorns,
We soar above worldly vanity,
We are the apostles of Christ’s Faith,
We are the heralds of holy truth.

We call the races and the peoples,
Made scarlet with their brothers’ blood,
To the kingdom of true, eternal freedom,
To the kingdom of goodness, light and love.

The hopes and prayers for the future turn to Ekaterinburg, to restoration and coronation.