Category Archives: Corruption

Western Aggression + Russian Naivety = Ukrainian Tragedy + Millennial Transfiguration

Introduction: The End of an Old History

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 should have been a Godsend to the whole world. It should have led to the demilitarisation of the West since, with the fall of its Communist ideological rival, military aggression should have had no more meaning for the Western Capitalist world, if it ever had. Although, at the time, some spoke of ‘the peace dividend’, it became apparent that power had gone to the heads of the Western elite and they actually wanted to implement their ultimate fantasy. This consisted of totalitarian globalist control by the Western elite under the pretence of bringing ‘freedom and democracy’ to the rest of the world through ‘humanitarian intervention’.

To do this, they would as usual use the organised violence of their ever more bankruptingly expensive military to impose it. They wanted ‘the end of history’ with ‘the global victory of the West’ and its messianic Zionism of ‘freedom and democracy’ (= slavery and tyranny), over all other and much older and far more sophisticated Civilisations. Already, even before the formal fall of the USSR in 1991, the Western elite had decided to invade the oil-rich and gas-rich Muslim world through Iraq. There followed decades of Western massacres of millions in various Muslim countries, which continue today, notably in the genocide in Gaza, with nearly 200,000 civilian dead so far.

Russian Naivety

Meanwhile, however, the pro-Western Russian government was dreaming about a common European home ‘from Lisbon to Vladivostok’, made richer by demilitarisation. ‘We are Europeans’, claimed the now anti-Communist Russian governing elite. Even after 1999 the ultra-cautious and legalistic lawyer-leader of Russia, the pro-Russian President Putin, continued to want this common European home and even asked to join NATO. Indeed, for nearly three decades after 1991 Russian leaders continued to speak naively of ‘our Western partners’. With Communism removed, why was such idealistic friendship not possible?

However, naïve Russian leaders did not understand the true and envious nature of ambitious Western aggression. From 2008 on, after the West had aggressively declared that the Ukraine and Georgia would also have to join NATO, after already breaking all its promises to Russia not to expand to the whole of ex-Soviet Eastern Europe, Russia at last began to be alarmed. It had lost its post-1945 buffer zone set up to protect it from continual Western invasions. For the first time it resisted and defeated the aggression of the Western puppet government in nationalist Georgia. Relations between the West and Russia sharply deteriorated, requiring an utterly failed ‘reset’.

The situation came to a head in 2014 with the anti-democratic CIA regime-change coup on Russia’s doorstep, in Kiev. Manipulating Neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, this Western-financed (it had cost ‘only’ $5 billion, as the US politician Nuland publicly boasted) coup was directed at destroying Russia. The aim was to start a proxy war and invade Russia from a highly militarised and NATO-ised Ukraine, then overthrow the Russian government, break this millennial country up, colonise it and seize its huge mineral wealth, thus surrounding China from the north. This was the dream of the Western elite, as openly expressed by the Pentagon’s think tank, the US Rand Corporation.

Such exploitation had already been tried in the 1990s, disastrous for the impoverished and humiliated Russian people, creating the corrupt class of Russian and Ukrainian (in fact, mainly Israeli) oligarchs. Thus, for eight long years between 2014 and 2022, the CIA-controlled Kiev regime and its US and British PR advisors and arms merchants massacred, persecuted and repressed the large Russian minority (about 40% of the population) in the east and south of the Ukraine, arming the Kiev regime to the teeth. During this time naïve Russia still constantly tried to create peace and negotiate, mainly through the Minsk Accords.

Naivety Rewarded by Western Aggression

In these ‘Accords’ the naïve Russian elite was systematically betrayed and deceived by the West, especially by the German and French leaders, behind whom stood Washington. Slowly, the extremely naïve Russian governing elite began to realise what had been obvious to others all along, that the US would not allow peace and that the Western European vassals were entirely in US pockets and no longer had any policy of their own. When at the end of 2021 it became obvious that the Kiev regime was about to invade and genocide Russian majority areas, in February 2022 a small Russian task force was forced to pre-empt Kiev and enter the east of the Ukraine, formerly Russia.

Numbering some 90,000, but facing the largest and perhaps best-trained, best-equipped and best-fortified army in Europe, that of the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime, this force had as its aim not to occupy, but to withdraw, having forced Kiev into realistic peace talks. However, again Russia was betrayed and lied to. In early April 2022 the US, through its UK subsidiary, forbade peace, even forcing Kiev to pass a law to forbid any negotiations with Moscow. In return, it promised to arm the Kiev regime with all the stocks of Western-held weapons, obsolete or not, it could give it, and to train its troops, if necessary, to ‘die to the last Ukrainian’, so killing as many Russians as possible and weakening Russia.

Thus, the Western elite forced Russia to make its small token operation into an operation against the whole of NATO. This meant the huge growth by voluntary conscription and reprofessionalisation and re-equipping of the Russian armed forces. It also meant the end of reliance on the typically post-Soviet private military Wagner mercenary company, run by the crooked Russian oligarch, Prigozhin, which was the equivalent of the US Blackwater. Much more than this, seeing Western hypocrisy, double standards and intense, Western media Russophobia with its Cancel Russia culture, the pro-Western Russian elite was shocked and even traumatised to its core.

At the height of the Nazis, no-one had ever thought of cancelling Goethe, Hegel, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Heine, Wagner or any other giants of German culture. Russia’s dreamed-of friends have turned into nightmarish enemies, who will not even speak to Russians any more. And the diplomat-free Western elite invented 20,000 illegal anti-Russian sanctions and, as true racists, called its patriotic President ‘Hitler’ (who was a Westerner as was his Fascism also Western) and its people ‘Asiatic barbarians’! Russia was forced to turn away from the hostile and uncivilised West to friendly and civilised China and India, becoming the champion of the anti-Western Global Majority.

From the Ukrainian Tragedy

Gradually, the pre-empting, token Russian Special Military Operation sent in to force negotiations on 24 February 2022, had to turn into another Operation, This had not just to liberate the eastern corner of the Ukraine, with its long-suffering Russian people, and demilitarise and denazify the rest of the Ukraine, but to demilitarise and denazify, that is, disarm and defeat, the whole of NATO. This defeat could well lead to its collapse and the eventual withdrawal of the bankrupt US from Western Europe. However, this in turn will mean the collapse of US world hegemony through the dedollarising, Russian-led BRICS Alliance, liberating Africa, Asia and Latin America from Western tyranny.

These will no longer fear a defeated West with its continual regime-changes of colour revolutions (currently involving Serbia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Armenia, Georgia, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru etc). Some Global Majority countries, especially in French colonial West Africa, have already seen the victory of Russian arms over the West in the Ukraine and liberated themselves in turn from French and US troops. In the end, BRICS may well take with it still relatively free European countries, like Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, perhaps the rest of the Central Europe and the Balkans, and perhaps ultimately Italy and others, thus in time collapsing the US Neo-Nazi EU puppet.

In the last few days, at least 12,000 fanatical Kiev regime troops and many NATO mercenaries, still believing in the recently invented myths of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, have been sent on a fool’s errand by the US/NATO, ostensibly in a terrorist operation which threatens the Kursk nuclear power station, in reality an operation which is guaranteed to fail so that Zelensky can be discredited and replaced. They have been sent as cannon fodder to die in a crazy and suicidal incursion across the Russian border to occupy 40 (not 1,000) square kilometres and a few villages in the south of the province of Kursk. Thus, the last of NATO arms sent in this US-promoted PR stunt to ‘invade Russia’ will be destroyed.

However, these last elite troops, the few trained left, supposed to defend the east of the Ukraine and Kiev itself, have been thrown away together with their German (and British) tanks fighting near Kursk again. All they have achieved is to occupy some fields, forests, hamlets and tiny villages in the vastness of Russia. Now they are running out of logistics, air cover, supplies, ammunition, fuel, food and water. Some 2,600 are already dead or wounded and over 300 of their NATO tanks and armoured cars destroyed. Many Ukrainian soldiers, trapped inside Russia, have surrendered. But Russian public opinion is outraged. ‘Go for Kiev’ is the message they are giving the once moderate Russian government.

To Millennial Transfiguration

Some have even suggested that the whole operation was a Russian trap, set to destroy this last gasp of the collapsing Kiev regime. Some compare the operation to the suicidal Nazi operation in the Ardennes, ‘the Battle of the Bulge’, in December 1944. This may be the end for those currently cowering in their bunker in Kiev. Russia never wanted any of this. But the treacherous trauma of Western aggression since 2014 in Kiev, which has led directly to today’s tragic bloodshed, has also made Russia into the linchpin of BRICS. Thus, it has allied itself with the Global Majority, that is, 90% of the world, the Non-Western world. The Orwellian-censored Western elite has been left sulking.

It has set about trying to assassinate any leader it can, apparently in Slovakia, Hungary, Iran and even regime-changing the USA itself, replacing the senile Biden in a palace coup with the unelected Harris, and trying to assassinate Trump. Its State propaganda mouthpieces call ‘war’ ‘peace’, ‘tyranny’ ‘freedom’, oligarchy’ ‘democracy’, and ‘lies’ ‘truth’. (Orwell was forty years too early, 1984 = 2024). Many have commented that this is a transformation which takes place only every 500 years. The period of exploitation and colonisation of the New Worlds, that is, everywhere outside Western Europe, between 1514 and 2014, from Latin America to Asia, from Africa to the Ukraine, is over.

It is the Ukraine that has been the bridge too far, the fat morsel which the greedy West has bitten off and choked on. However, in reality, this is a millennial transformation. For the West began its ascendancy in Rome when on 14 February 1014, the newly-installed Pope Benedict VIII crowned the centralising and imperialistic Holy Roman Emperor Henry in Rome. This was to the reading of the newly-formed dogma of Western ideology, expressed in the new Roman Catholic Creed, at variance with the age-old Creed of the Church. For Henry II had forced Pope Benedict VIII to include the word filioque in the Nicene Creed agreed on by the whole Church in the fourth century.

This is the proclamation that all authority and infallibility, the Spirit of God, proceeds uniquely from Western leaders, who are the replacements (‘vicars’) of God on earth. This is an ersatz humanist religion, replacing God by men, Faith by religion. Moreover, this authority and infallibility has been passed down to all Western leaders, whoever they may be, whether they have been Popes of Rome (up until the sixteenth century) and Western Kings (up until the revolutions of 1688 in England and 1789 in France), and then Western European Emperors (Napoleon), Presidents, Prime Ministers, Chancellors or, since 1917, US Presidents.

Conclusion: The Beginning of a New History

However, what will happen after the Russian Special Operation in the Ukraine is over? How will Russia, which has no intention of occupying the whole of this Communist construct of the Ukraine, win the peace there? Will there be a new Russia-friendly government in the New Ukraine (will it even be called that?), its capital still in Kiev, but perhaps shorn of between five and nine southern and western provinces, gone back to Russia, and of between three and five provinces in the far west, gone back to Poland, Romania and Hungary? And how will the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church cease after the fall of the now illegal, atheist Jewish dictatorship of Zelensky?

What will the new status of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church then be? Will the naïve Russian Church free itself of its corrupt or CIA bishops? Will the New Ukraine join BRICS, as part of the Union State of the Russian Federation and Belarus? So many questions remain, for this conflict is only the beginning, not the end, of a new history. What is certain is that this new history will be led and created not by the West, but by the Global Majority, led by Russia and China. The US will be left isolated and the US-appointed EU Commissars, German and UK ministers will, with their Fascist ‘liberal’ globalist ideology, be as discredited as their Nazi grandfathers, and run away into US exile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Holy Rus in High Suffolk: An Interview with a Russian Count

Over the last fourteen years I have got to know particularly well a couple who are spiritual children and whom I call the Earl and Countess of Orthodox East Anglia. Nobles of Russian extraction, they have made their home in England and chosen to live in the mystical heart of our local East Anglian Orthodox Church and Kingdom. Count (Earl in the English system) Benckendorff, a parishioner since 2010, agreed to this extensive conversation after I interviewed his wife over a month ago. With his permission we have slightly edited his words, though his English is excellent.

On the table in the oak-beamed living room, where we conduct the interview, stands a golden samovar, bought in St Audrey’s Ely, alongside a portrait of the Tsar’s Family. Nearby stands a lovely vase with a bouquet of fragrant roses, which the Countess has picked from the garden of their thatched farmhouse in High Suffolk, near the Norfolk border. The Countess has served us tea from her favourite Royal Albert service, the doors to the garden wide open before us. Such is the setting for this second conversation, the recording of which stretched on into the lengthening shadows of the English summer evening.

 

Q: Can you please tell us something about your family?

A: In 1775 the Benckendorff family was awarded an estate of 8,000 acres in Sosnovka in the Tambov province of Russia for services to the Crown. After the Revolution most branches of the family, like ours, remained inside the USSR, but we had to change our name for fear of being murdered by the Bolsheviks. Indeed, one priestly ancestor is a New Martyr. At first, we remained in Russia, but after 1945 we moved to what had by then become the eastern Ukraine, though that region is now back in Russia again after 100 years of Soviet-imposed exile.

After 1917 one branch settled in England. This was the family of Count Alexander Benckendorff, who was the last ambassador of the Tsar to Great Britain between 1903 and 1917. His family found itself stranded in the White Russian emigration, as Alexander had passed away in January 1917. Unlike his brother Paul, who was very close to Tsar Nicholas in Tsarskoe Selo, Alexander was never Orthodox. He had become a Catholic by conviction from Lutheranism and is buried in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral in London.

Q: Where did you meet the Countess?

A: In the Ukraine. There I, a Benckendorff, met and married another Benckendorff, though the Countess was previously quite unknown to me and her branch of the family had also assumed another name. Some time ago I worked out that we are eighth cousins. The way we met was quite extraordinary, neither knowing that the other was of Benckendorff descent and yet feeling that we were kindred souls. Both of us were divorced, having made bad marriages when we were far too young, like so many who were brought up in the Soviet Union. The marriages did not last very long and there were no children. Some years after we met, in 2008, we left Russia and settled in the West.

Q: Did you know about the English Benckendorffs then?

A: No, we did not know anything about the ‘English’ branch of the family until five years ago. To our surprise, we discovered that they had lived in south-east Suffolk, very close to where we first lived before we moved here. Their choice was because of the agricultural connections of the Benckendorff family. Ransomes farm machinery, made in Ipswich, was used on our estate and there were also contacts with the Suffolk Fisons fertiliser company, which later came to own a very large property called Harvest House in Felixstowe.

And so the family story turned full circle. In any case, Suffolk is where we have made our home and we in no way regret it. This is the land of St Edmund, the patron saint of Suffolk and of England, and we fly his flag here. You introduced us to him and to the other local saints. We respect the Local Church and honour the local saints. That is our Orthodox duty. We had thought of calling our Suffolk home ‘Sosnovka’ from the name of our estate, but we agreed that we must be local and so we named it ‘St Edmund’s House’.

Q: What did you study as a young man?

A: In the 90s I studied history at the University of Kiev and then some years later theology at St Tikhon’s University of the Humanities in Moscow. However, I never taught history, because in the 1990s we had to practise commerce in order to survive. We were fortunate in business because of my knowledge of English and French and my wife’s knowledge of German. We did very well. That is how I came to study as a mature student at St Tikhon’s in Moscow and then we moved to the West in 2008 and England in 2010. Nearly six years ago we bought this old farmhouse. Now I still study theology and the history of the Russian Church and I have also written a novel in Russian under a pseudonym. We also breed roses which involves travel to many places, including to Germany. Financially we have been helped by the investments we made in the past.

Q: As you know, I come from the Suffolk-Essex border where the dry and sunny climate and the soil are ideal for seed growing, which was my father’s profession. He was a sweet pea expert and even has a sweet pea named after him. How did you come to breed roses and not, for example, sweet peas?

A: Like you, Fr Andrew, we love sweet peas, also lilac and many other flowers and shrubs, but both of us have always loved roses more, already in the Ukraine, where in the east the black earth is so fertile and the climate is so good. Some twenty years ago my wife fell in love with roses in a monastery there, where she had the obedience from her spiritual father of maintaining the monastery rose garden. A huge variety of roses is available in Russia and the Ukraine with sturdier stems than in England, even though you have David Austen roses. One of our favourite roses is ‘Zephyr’ from Turchinov. We also love lilacs and again there is a Russian lilac called ‘Beauty of Moscow’. We are introducing Russian roses, lilacs and others into England. This seems to be our mission!

Strangely enough, we discovered that my great-great-grandfather’s cousin, the ambassador Alexander Konstantinovich, and his wife, Sofia Petrovna, who was a Tolstoy, also grew roses. Then their grand-daughter, Natalia Konstantinovna, who passed away only in 2018, grew them. Her husband, Thomas Humphrey Brooke, who was a friend of Sir Alfred Munnings, became an internationally acknowledged expert on roses. He was a close friend of the rosarian Peter Beales at his gardens in Attleborough in Norfolk. Humphrey cultivated over 500 varieties of rose. I know Peter Beales’ son, who has just retired. Roses must be in the Benckendorff genes.

Q: Let us turn to Church matters now. As you follow Church affairs very closely, you know much about the schism between Moscow and Constantinople on account of the Ukraine. Do you see a way out of this?

A: There is always a way out. It is called repentance, the antidote to despair, the antidote that Judas did not take. Beware, he did not take the antidote and hanged himself. What must be done to undo this schism is to work in reverse. This means going back to what caused the schism and reversing it. This means that Constantinople must abandon its pretensions to the territory of the Russian Church in the ex-Soviet Union. These pretensions were formed because the Patriarchate of Moscow refused to grant anyone outside the Russian Federation autocephaly and because Washington paid Constantinople to commit the crime of setting up a fake Church in the Ukraine. Still, if Moscow had given the Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephaly years ago, creating a national Church there, Constantinople would never have meddled, because the Ukrainians would have been satisfied already.

Next, or preferably before that, Moscow must immediately stop its schism with Constantinople, start concelebrating and abandon its excommunications and defrockings, freeing people to act according to their conscience. The schism was quite unnecessary and just brought Moscow into exactly the same isolation and disrepute as Constantinople, losing it all sympathy. Two wrongs do not make a right. How do you say that in English, when both are equally guilty? There is an expression with six and six in it.

Q: Six of one and half a dozen of the other?

A: Yes, that’s it. Anyway, Moscow must also negotiate a canonical solution to the African problem. Either Africa belongs canonically to the Patriarchate of Alexandria or to Moscow, or else the territory must be divided and different geographical regions will belong to one or the other. For example, Egypt, or even all Muslim North Africa, could remain under Alexandria and Moscow could take Black Africa, where it has a lot of political support, though only if it is prepared to set up a real, local, independent African Orthodox Church. You cannot have overlapping jurisdictions on the same territory. We must support the canonical order of the Church internationally.

Q: Is this realistic? Look at the Diasporas, where we have had overlapping jurisdictions for over a century.

A: Things are changing. Look, the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine will be over soon. The Kiev regime is collapsing. Some even say it will all be over for the Dormition, on 28th August. Perhaps not so soon. In any case, the USA is giving up on its Fascist friends in the Ukraine, who have failed. Americans hate failure. What is the way out? One way is if Trump, who is already the real President – some even say that Biden is literally, not just metaphorically, dead – could perhaps denounce the whole Ukraine project. He could say that it was all a fantasy of Biden, ‘Genocide Joe’, as they call him.

Trump must abandon the fake OCU Church that Constantinople set up in the Ukraine with US dollars, denouncing it as created by those who deceived him in Washington in 2018. President Putin will make the freedom of the Church a condition for peace anyway. The Church must be free from the persecution of the OCU, which must return the thousands of churches it has stolen. Trump must give up the illegal sanctions against Russia, release frozen Russian assets and return the stolen interest on those assets.

In this way President Trump can get a photo opportunity of the Two Presidents. He will be shaking hands with President Putin in Moscow (Trump loves having his photo taken) as the great hero, peacemaker and dealmaker, unlike Biden the warmaker and failure. Why, Trump could get a Nobel Prize – those prizes are funded by the CIA anyway, as we saw with Solzhenitsyn. Trump and Moscow can sign an agreement, stating that Washington has no claims to the Ukraine and that Moscow has no claims to the Baltics, Finland, Poland, Romania, or anywhere else west of the Ukraine. This will be historic, but should all have been done 33 years ago in 1991.

Q: What about Moldova?

A: This agreement would include Moldova, unless some minorities who live there along the border with the New Ukraine or Russia vote by democratic referendum to transfer, for example, the Transdnistrians and the Gagauzians. Most of Moldova will eventually go back to Romania. It is historically inevitable. The Patriarchate in Moscow has lost the loyalty of most Moldovans through its centralising racism and many there are already joining the Romanian Church.

Such a deal of the Two Presidents would give both Russia and Western Europe security, making NATO entirely redundant, which is what both President Trump and President Putin want. Such a new security agreement for Europe could be presented as a triumph for Trump (the Americans are experts at PR) and Moscow will be fully satisfied. Russia will set up the third Union State in the New Ukraine, which will be a second Belarus, perhaps also landlocked, as all the south and east of the old Ukraine, which are Russian, as I know, may well rejoin Russia. The Ukraine will be demilitarised and denazified, as Moscow needs. With such a deal both sides will save money and, above all, both will save lives.

Q: Do you think the New Ukraine will retain the western borders of Stalin’s Ukraine?

A: Moscow may well give some extreme western parts of Stalin’s Ukraine, for Stalin’s borders are what Biden and the EU Commissars have been fighting for, back to Poland, Romania and especially to Hungary, our ally. This would be seen as a great victory for the USA and as a great victory for Russia, though it would not be a victory for the Western European elite. But that elite does not count for anything internationally and can be ignored. Moscow negotiates only with Trump, neither with the sick old man before Trump, nor with the Western European puppies who lie and cheat.

With peace in the Ukraine, the Patriarchate in Moscow will also have to negotiate a new relationship with the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kiev, under which I began my Orthodox life. And probably also a new relationship with other parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation. Otherwise, Moscow will lose everything there too. A wave of autocephalies must follow. The age of Soviet central planning is over. It was over with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, only the Church authorities did not keep up with changing times.

Q: Why do you say that this will not be a victory for the Western European elite?

A: The Western European political elite, its ruling class, has for eighty years been living off the USA, licking its heels and barking when told to. It has become dependent on the USA, not only a drug-addict enslaved to the USA, but also a vampire that sucks its blood. As in Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, that elite does not want freedom. But Western Europe is a very expensive slave to keep and the now bankrupt USA can no longer afford it, just as one day it will no longer be able to afford to keep its other vassals, Israel, Japan and South Korea.

The American Empire is like the Roman Empire which in the early fifth century could not afford to keep Britain and had to abandon it. Western Europe will have to find its own way, control its own destiny, defend itself. Actually, it will be able to slash its futile military spending once the new security agreement or non-aggression pact with Russia has been signed. That is also what Russia wants. It is tired of being invaded by the West.

Today the USA is letting go of Western Europe. This means the UK and the EU, minus Hungary, Slovakia, others like Serbia and maybe later many more like Romania, Greece, and perhaps even Italy. The first three have already more or less negotiated their way out of the EU into BRICS. Freedom from the USA will undermine the parasitic globalist Western European elite of puppies and puppets, banksters and gangsters, unprincipled and hypocritical pawns all of them. They backed the Kiev Nazis even to their own detriment, allowing prices for their peoples to double and letting the Americans blow up the Nordstream pipeline.

That ruling class of perverts will have to resign, if they are not first voted out, or better arrested, because they no longer have the protection of Trump’s Washington. The Western European swamp will be drained. That is why they and their globalist media propagandists like the BBC feel betrayed and hate Trump. As a result of all this, we shall at last see new Western European rulers, hopefully far more respectful of the wishes of the native peoples of Western Europe. Then can be abandoned those satanic and blasphemous pagan festivals like Eurovision and the 33rd Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, which openly mocked Christ, Who was crucified when He was 33. No wonder French cathedrals burn down. If that is Western Civilisation, then there is nothing left to defend.

All these countries can then be at peace with the eastern half of Europe, comprised of Russia, the New Ukraine and Belarus. Importantly, this eastern half stretches on into North Asia, to the Chinese border and the Pacific Ocean. Russia is the gateway to Asia, the future, where three of the world’s four largest economies thrive. We are at last seeing the Gaullist vision of a natural unity which stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Western Europe will no longer be unnaturally cut off, but will rejoin the whole of Asia, of which it is only a north-western peninsula.

All this is possible, though if and when it happens is another story. It may all take many years and I trust more in Vance than in Trump. These are just my thoughts and hopes. We shall see.

Q: Will England take part in this New Western Europe, which will at last become a real part of Eurasia, which geographically it always has been?

A: Ah, dear old England. A good question. I really hope so. If the USA rejects England, it will have to leave the USA. It will not be the fifty-first State of the USA. And with the very fragile, violent and divisive situation in the present fifty States with their 35 trillion dollars of debt, that is not an enviable position to be in. I think England should ally itself with the new, post-American, Eurasian Europe of the BRICS Alliance. Ireland, Scotland and Wales surely will. May St Edmund and the English saints guide England towards this.

But for England to become sovereign again, the oppressive British Establishment ruling class will first have to be removed, with its private elite schools, Oxbridge, Westminster, BBC, Financial Times, Economist, tabloid press like the Guardian, the Telegraph, all those other Daily State propaganda mouthpieces, and the Blairs, Camerons, Sunaks and Starmers. As you have very often written, Father, that elite is alien, not Norman by blood, but Norman by mentality, spiritually Norman, made up of spiritual invaders.

Q: We have got into political affairs. To come back to our question, what in your view was the essential error behind the Greek-Russian schism?

A: Lack of communion. It is vital to remain in communion with everyone. It is a great, great sin to break communion, because if you do this, you cause division in the Church. And the Moscow bureaucrats who surround the Patriarch committed this sin, weaponising communion. And look where they are now: isolated, feared, unloved and scandal-ridden. It is all so Soviet. They have lost all their best friends – they even lost you, Father, who spent all your life fighting for communion and the reintegration of the Russian Church.

Q: Why do bishops break communion?

A: It is always because they want more power. And what do they do once they have power? They introduce novelties in order to justify themselves. This was exactly the case of Rome in the eleventh century. All the innovations they introduced after they had broken off communion from the Church were self-justification for breaking communion. And self-justification is the opposite of repentance.

A thousand years on and the Popes of Rome and the Vatican machine have still not repented, still claiming to be rulers of the Christian world, and so they are still out of communion with us, who follow the principle of the Local, which is the principle of Catholicity. They instead imposed the Centre, that is, Rome. Can you imagine, they tried to impose their barbarous Latin on the descendants of the Civilisations of the Incas, Maya and Aztecs! No respect for the Local!

We must be very strict about keeping in communion. The way back, the return, is in respecting the canonical territories of each Local Church. That is what Rome did not do and instead tried to impose itself by the sword on Orthodox territories, with their crusades, inquisitions and so on. Now Constantinople is trying to do the same, imposing centralisation in imitation of Papism. And Moscow Church bureaucrats tried to do the same, but God has intervened, its Soviet Empire over Non-Russians is crumbling.

Q: I would like to come back to my original question, which we did not answer. Do these considerations give us a solution to the divisions in the Diasporas, where there have been several overlapping jurisdictions for over a century?

A: In the Diasporas, where there are mixed Orthodox populations, responsibility for organising new Local Churches lies with the majority ethnic group, but that majority must respect all the customs of the minorities. This is what Bishop Tikhon, the future Russian Patriarch and Saint, did when he headed the multinational Northern American Orthodox Church before the Revolution. Then Carpatho-Russians and Russian-converted Alaskans were the majority, but minorities like the Syrians, Serbs and others were together with them.

Today the Greeks are the Orthodox majority there, as also in Australia, but unity is blocked because of the political and imperialist style of the Greeks. As long as they have that Hellenist style, unity will be impossible. Only when the Greeks have a Non-Greek Patriarch, will they be taken seriously. As regards Western Europe the Romanians are the majority. Here I am hopeful, because respect is what our Romanian Metropolitan Joseph gave our Russian and Moldovan parishes with our calendar, languages and customs, when we had to flee to his canonical protection from pseudo-Russian episcopal persecution. And we in turn greatly respect and love the Romanians. I love their singing and their simplicity! Mutual respect is vital.

Q: One well-known Russian Metropolitan said that the Moscow-Constantinople schism is as big and as permanent as the 1054 Western Schism. What do you think?

A: That was nonsense. This schism is all about personalities and they are temporary. Here today, gone tomorrow, as you say in English. Neither Moscow, nor Constantinople has renounced or changed the Creed, unlike Rome in 1054. So this schism is not at all on the same level as 1054, it is not a dogmatic issue, but a vulgar issue of territory and personalities. And personalities change and are replaced. In any case, the Metropolitan-oligarch who said that, the bureaucrat was in part responsible for the whole fiasco, is now suspended and completely discredited. Nobody is listening to him any more. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Q: Can other Local Churches play a role in healing the Moscow-Constantinople schism?

A: Of course, and a vital role. The Churches of Jerusalem, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, Romania, Georgia, Macedonia, Poland and perhaps others like Antioch, Czechoslovakia and America, and of course the canonical Church of Metropolitan Onufry in the Ukraine, will play a vital role. Even some bishops in Greece and Cyprus are sufficiently non-racist to understand the reality. Some Local Churches are already playing that role, stressing the Conciliar principle, the principle of Sobornost, that is, Catholicity, which, by the way, is the exact opposite of Catholicism and it is precisely the spirit of Catholicism, that is Papism, which caused the schism. Read the interview with the new Bulgarian Patriarch, who was elected after the American candidate lost and was humiliated and the Greeks had to go home like whipped dogs. His words are inspired.

Q: Do you know Metropolitan Onufry?

A: Not personally, only by sight, but I do know Metropolitan Agafangel of Odessa and Archbishop Diodor quite well and they have the same spirit. The further you are from Moscow, the more you find that spirit.

Q: You mention that the essence of the schism is the lust for power on the part of bishops and the spirit of Catholicism or Papism which lies behind it. Can you expand on this?

A: We are all waiting for the restoration of canonical order in the Russian Church, but this cannot happen until the end of what some Russians call ‘Philocatholicism’. This means the fawning admiration by some Russian bishops of the Vatican power-structure, which is the concept of a Church-State, a Church which is a State, or is even more powerful than a State, as history saw at Canossa. However, I am completely against this word because I respect ordinary Catholics, who are Catholics only because they were born in a certain country and I would never insult or disrespect them. The disease inside the Russian Church is not Philocatholicism, the disease is ‘Philopapism’. That is the real heart of the issue, And, by the way, it has nothing to do with ecumenism. Some of the worst Philopapists are anti-ecumenist.

Q: In that case, can you define ‘Philopapism’ for us?

A: Yes, but first understand that Philopapism is not just a Russian disease, it has long infected Constantinople, where it is called ‘Eastern Papism’, and before that it infected Rome, where it has always been called Papism. In Rome the problem was and is Western nationalism, in Constantinople it is Greek nationalism and in Moscow it is Russian nationalism. In Russia, it is not at all a recent Soviet disease, ‘Sergianism’, unlike as some very politicised, anti-Communist emigres used to imagine, it goes back centuries in Russia too, long before Communism.

It existed, for example, just before the Revolution in the awful persecution of the so-called ‘Name of God’ monks on Mt Athos. It was Tsar Nicholas who stopped that persecution, which had been instigated by Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky), who later became the first leader of the émigré ROCOR. The persecution was carried out by bureaucrats who were more or less atheists. The First World War followed it. And most of those very same bishops who had persecuted simple piety, then abandoned Tsar Nicholas at the Revolution and even rejoiced at his overthrow. Later they had to repent, redeeming themselves at the price of martyrdom or of exile. They had to pay the price for their earlier vile persecution.

Q: What about the Soviet form of Philopapism?

A: The post-Revolutionary bout of Philopapism goes back to Metropolitan, later Patriarch, Sergius, who wanted to ‘save the Church’, just like the Popes and the recent Patriarchs of Constantinople. How can you ‘save the Church’? Christ is the Saviour! The Church does not need saving, it is we, including bishops and patriarchs, who need saving. Who do they think they are? The problem is that the Philopapists see the Church as a purely worldly organisation, just like the Popes of Rome, who used to lead armies in order to defend their Church. In order to defeat the barbarians, they themselves became barbarians! Who then was the gentleman?! From Patriarch Sergius this infection spread down to personalities like Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov), who characteristically died in the arms of the Pope. Some say that he was a secret cardinal. Maybe. That is not the point. From him the disease has contaminated further to this day.

This disease is the mentality that bishops are ‘princes of the Church’, in fact they are perverted oligarchs, just like the Borgias in Renaissance Rome. This is poisonous. It is why I refused to go to many churches when I lived in the Ukraine and Russia. They were an immoral business operation and many bishops there are immoral, chosen only because they know how to make money, not because they believe in God, pray, or are monks. I think many of these new Russian Borgias should go to prison. The current Metropolitan Hilarion affair is only the tip of the iceberg. Others must be trembling now too. The truth is coming out and judgement is coming to them all.

Q: You said that Philopapism goes back centuries in Russia. When did Philopapism begin?

A: It came in after the fall of Constantinople, the Second Rome, in 1453. So began the idea of the Third Rome. Fighting against St Nil of Sora and the hesychast Non-Possessors – St Sergius of Radonezh had been one of them earlier on – the situation came to a head at the so-called ‘Raskol’, that is, the Old Ritualist schism 200 years later. Then the administrative centre of the Russian Church in Moscow was contaminated by Philopapism, which was also encouraged by the idea of the Third Rome, which maintains that Russia has a messianic mission. Russia does have a mission, but it takes place within the multilateral Alliance of Civilisations, which is what BRICS is about.

In other words, Philopapists think that Russia is exceptional, indispensable to the world and therefore anything its rulers do is justified. The antidote to this was in the concept of Moscow as a Second Jerusalem, but that option was cruelly rejected by the Moscow bureaucrats. It is not that I am in favour of Old Ritualism, which was a form of ignorant nationalism, but I am against persecution. What difference is there between the State persecution of the Old Ritualists in the seventeenth century and the State persecution of Orthodox in the twentieth century?

The Philopapist mentality creates pharisees and ‘high priests’, as Christ called them in the Gospel, those who like ‘the first places at table’. Philopapists consider that they are the chosen people and so above the law, above the canons, ‘exceptional’. But this mentality is why the pharisees crucified Christ, Who called them to order, what we call canonical order, and told them that our Kingdom is not of this world. He overturned the tables of these new moneychangers, which is what you did, Fr Andrew, when you chased out the new pharisees who were threatening you and screaming at you in 2021 and 2022. All those who persecuted you are one by one being removed. Bishops are not above the canons.

It is the Holy Spirit Who chooses us for mission, not pharisees. Pharisees think only in worldly terms of money and power, and camouflage themselves with messianism as self-justification for their lusts. It is simply lust for money and power that contaminates these people. Once they have money, they want power. It is always the same old sordid story of corruption and perversion. That is Philopapism.

Q: But Phariseeism itself is universal, isn’t it?

A: Yes, of course. It was this same missionary, messianic mentality which inspired the atheist Jew Bronstein-Trotsky, who wanted to spread the Communism of the Third International (which replaced the Third Rome) worldwide. He also persecuted, leading the Red Army and causing the deaths of millions. But it is not only Jewish, it can be Frankish, Norman, Venetian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, German, Soviet, American, or anything else.

For instance, Soviet messianism strangely resembles American messianism. This is because the struggle between Washington and Moscow is in fact the struggle between the First Rome and the Third Rome, for the USA is the heir to the infallible Popes of the First Rome. ‘We are the exceptional people, the indispensable nation’, the infallible US have been saying of themselves ever since the collapse of the SU (Soviet Union), though its collapse had nothing to do with the Americans. (See how even the initials US and SU and their symbols, the white star and the red star, are the same, just the other way round).

Communism collapsed because it is unrealisable and went bankrupt. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union went to the heads of the US elite. They claimed absurdly: ‘This is the end of history and we have won. As the victors, we can set up a World Empire, called Globalism, we have exceptional authority, therefore no laws apply to us, we can carry out genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Libya and Syria, in the Donbass and Gaza, we can ignore the International Criminal Court. We can do whatever we want’. In reality, this is just the same vulgar old imperialism, absolutism, immorality, cloaked in their smug Protestant self-righteousness and infallibility. It is Philopapism.

In reality only God is exceptional. No human being or country is exceptional.

Q: What do you think of what some call the ‘liberal opposition’ in the Russian Church, clergymen like Protodeacon Andrey Kuraev and the popular pastor Fr Alexei Usminsky? They are also opposed to these Vatican-adoring, ‘money and power’ Russian bishops, the pharisaic Philopapists, as you are.

A: The dissident liberals are opposed to the Philopapists, but not for the same reasons as I am. The liberals are opposed to such bishops because the liberals are in reality rationalistic and modernistic Protestants. Like all Protestants, they are naturally anti-Catholic, anti-Papist. However, like all Protestants they are also generally pro-Western and some are traitors to Russia, just like their corrupt enemies whom they fight and are also traitors to Russia (I make exceptions for some who are just extremely naïve and not very intelligent). We disagree with the liberals because we are not Protestants and we follow the historic Orthodox Faith.

We are not traitors, we are patriots of Russia, that is, of the real Russia, of Orthodox Rus. President Putin is preparing the way for that, for the coming Emperor. He took on not just Paris and Berlin, but the whole West and won. We hope that God gives him time to help cleanse the Church next.

However, I do disagree with the appalling way that the liberals have been treated, with their so-called ‘defrockings’ by the selfsame corrupt bishops. You cannot defrock a clergyman because he has different political views from his bishop under the absurd pretext that he is being ‘disobedient’. The threat of defrocking forced them and many others, in the Netherlands, Lithuania, Spain, USA and in Russia into joining Constantinople – they had no alternative. This is yet another example of the Moscow bureaucracy weaponising a sacrament, this time not the eucharist, but the priesthood. But grace is given by the Holy Spirit, not by pieces of paper signed by jealous or wicked bishops. Thank God, Patriarch Kyrill is beginning to remove them, suspend them or retire them. He has  a lot of work to do.

Q: How is authentic Orthodox missionary work different from American missionary work?

A: If you have a missionary message to spread to others, the message of Christ, then you do not spread it by violence and threats. This is what the ‘Roman Union’ of the Vatican did. This is what the ‘Soviet Union’ did. Now this is what the ‘American Union’ (which is USA and NATO – basically the ‘European Union’) does. They have all used violence and threats. This has guaranteed the downfall of all of them. It is what is happening now.

The American Union, usually called ‘The West’, is collapsing, it too has gone bankrupt. They have done it to themselves, just like the Soviet Union. As someone from the Soviet Union, I can see very clearly how the European Union has become the same. The commissars, mentality and lies of its politicians and journalists are exactly the same. But the Godless are always defeated because they are all from Babylon. Their Tower always collapses.

Authentic Orthodox missionary work does not use violence and threats. I have recently discovered the Russian saint, German of Alaska as an example. What a great monk! And how he has been ignored by Church authorities and was resisted by Russian State authorities (long before ‘Sergianism’!). He is unknown in Russia. St German lived among the Inuit people ‘as one of them’. Not even a priest, he did not impose his language or customs by violence or threats against the people. He did not try and steal their property. He was their servant and defender, not their persecutor or a ‘prince of the Church’. He was the real Apostle of Alaska. He was able to convert people, because he was Christlike.

In this he was just like Sts Cyril and Methodius, Apostles of the Slavs, St Stephen of Perm, Apostle of the Zyrians, St Nicholas, Apostle of Japan, or St Macarius, Apostle of the Altai, he respected others. That is the problem of the Moscow Patriarchal bureaucrats today, lack of respect for others, for the Local. And that is why they are losing everything, they put politics above the Church. If I may paraphrase St Matthew’s Gospel: Seek ye first the kingdom of man, and all these things will be taken from you’. They do not deserve to keep it. God will take it away from them because they are unworthy, just as He took Constantinople away from the Greeks in 1453 because of their racism. St German of Alaska’s way is the only way that Russia could convert the world and in no other way. Any other way is Philopapist.

Q: Whenever we talk, I feel nostalgic, as though I am talking to one of the old Russian emigres I knew in the 1970s, like my godfather, Nikolai Zernov. I would sit in his apartment in Northmoor Road in Oxford and look at the huge picture, almost fresco, he had of the Kremlin ‘before the deluge’, as he called it. Then there were Princess Kutaissova, Elizabeth Lopukhina, Dimitri Obolensky, Nadezhda Gorodetskaja or Lydia Slater, Boris Pasternak’s sister. They all had the same mentality. Why is this?

A: This is because we are Russian emigres like them! But I take your remark as a compliment. All I can say is that though we lived in the Soviet Union, we always kept our family traditions from before. Above all, we never, never accepted any Sovietisation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has increased this Philopapist corruption and perversion today. This has made it and those who are too closely allied with it, like those crazy ROCOR Protestant converts in New York, into pariahs. It is so sad and so unnecessary. They have painted themselves into the corner with their notorious scandals, as you say. Now they are complaining because the rest of the Church at best ignores them and at worst openly mocks them. But how else are you going to treat psychopaths?

Q: Do you have any words of hope for our readers?

A: Yes, there is one thing. You know, I never used to like Trump. I thought he was a clown as well as a criminal and a narcissist. He was also a Russophobe and armed the Neo-Nazis against us and sanctioned us. But recently, he said something very Orthodox, no doubt for the first time in his life and without knowing it. He said: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! I even wanted to buy a picture of this moment, but my wife stopped me. She has no interest in politics and says it is all a waste of time. She prefers gardening and our two cats to politics. She says cats are far more intelligent than politicians.

She may be right, she so often is. But I still maintain that the concept of ‘Never surrender’ is Orthodox, because Christ never surrendered. If He had surrendered, there would never have been the Resurrection. So I say that Trump was saved for a purpose by the grace of God, the bullet missed him, but hit Biden instead and stopped World War III, and we should all repeat: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! Another American said something like: ‘Only those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world do change the world’. This is in fact the definition of our fools for Christ. They change the world, corrupt and perverted bishops do not. Why, they cannot even change themselves.

July 2024

 

 

What Will Happen to the Orthodox Church After the Fall of Washington?

The powers of this world have throughout history tried to abuse religious belief by making it into their own nationalist and ritualist institutions. This has been to camouflage and justify their nationalism, that is, their attachment to this world, their worldliness. Chinese, Indians, Jews, Greeks, Japanese, Copts, Syrians, Armenians, Arabs, Latins, Germans, Greeks, Spanish, Russians, French, British, Americans, they have all done it. These are just facts from Church history. How do Christians remain outside and resist an ideology which puts national and worldly issues above Christ, all for the sake of amassing more power and money? There are only two ways of resisting:

Either you are a Confessor, or else you are a Martyr. Thus, St Stephen the First Martyr was stoned to death by the Jews because he upset their nationalism. He was only following the prophets and St John the Baptist, who had told the nationalist King Herod the truth, and Christ Himself, Whom they crucified. Then came such Confessors as St Basil the Great and St John Chrysostom. And in the twentieth-century there were the hundreds of thousands of Martyrs all over Eastern Europe, as well as Confessors like St Nectarios of Aegina, St Luke of the Crimea, St John of Shanghai or St Paisios the Athonite. There is nothing new under the sun. The saints are always the best witnesses.

In recent centuries the Church in the Middle East and the Balkans was oppressed by Ottomans, Poles and Austro-Hungarians. Meanwhile the Russian Church was oppressed by Westernising rulers, even more so after 1917. In the nineteenth century and even before, the main Patriarchate outside Russia, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, was used as a plaything by the British and French ambassadors. The Western Powers also appointed German kinglets to rule the newly-liberated Balkan countries in their name.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has in the same way become the plaything of US ambassadors there. Meanwhile the Patriarchate of Moscow was being used as a plaything by the Soviet State. Neither the US State of the Soviet State was Christian. Both were, whatever the theory, in practice atheist. This situation has continued by centuries of inertia even after the end of the first so-called Cold War in 1991, but in ways even more terrible than before.

Thus, in Moscow, Stalinist centralisation has continued, repelling all Non-Russians from the Church, as Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova openly described in his recent letter to Patriarch Kyrill. For fifty years we too were treated as second-class citizens by the same Russian Church. None of this is because this mentality has been forced on the Church by the State, but because it has become a bad reflex inside the Church. It is nothing to do with the State. For example, a fragment of Moscow, the New York ROCOR has done this too, completely discrediting itself, mistreating Non-Russians. (As one of its bishops said to me recently, ROCOR is ‘a train wreck’).  The mentality to repel all, including many Russians, has been imposed internally. The only real slavery comes from ourselves, not from others.

We can see the same mentality also in the uncanonical, US-orchestrated actions of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ukraine and elsewhere since 2018. Sadly, Constantinople fell to Greek racist hatred and jealousy of Russians.  It could simply have refused to do any of its horrors. But the $25 million bribe was irresistible to the weak. Since then a second Cold War has begun, with US proxy forces trying to weaken and destroy Russia from the Ukraine. It means that the heavy burden of steering the ship of the Church has fallen to those less politicised, more free, to the now 14 other Local Churches. Their role has been dependent on the political freedom which they have.

Thus, under Communism in Eastern Europe and under the US control of the Greek Churches, the Serbian Church stood out as a beacon of relative freedom and theology. Today, in this respect the Albanian Church seems to have taken the lead as the voice of freedom, though the long-overdue visit of Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America to the persecuted Ukrainian Church is also a miracle. The remaining 14 Local Churches are not all united because they do not enjoy the same measure of freedom. They are only relatively free compared to Constantinople and Moscow. For instance, the actions of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople have brought some of the other Local Churches into a state of internal schism.

Specifically, the Cypriot and Bulgarian Churches are now in a state of internal schism as a direct result of the US interference in Constantinople, both direct and indirect. Equally, the US-controlled Patriarchate of Alexandria and Moscow are in schism because of the latter’s interference in Africa. Other Local Churches, like the Romanian and the Georgian, which have a strong national identity, take an independent line, ignoring uncanonical Greek and uncanonical Russian alike. This is despite the attempts by the local US ambassadors, who behave like the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, to interfere in the choice of Patriarchs and policies. This independence is the only way to go. It is freedom.

However, our question is what will happen after the US stops interfering in internal Church affairs. It is our hope that, once political pressure eases, the Greek Churches in particular can take the lead and get out of political distortions and contortions, abandoning imperialist fantasies, recognising new autocephalies, notably that of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and its Diaspora. However, the Russian Church also has to give up its Soviet-style centralisation, which is its imperialist fantasy. It has to grant autocephaly to parts of the Church in now independent countries.

The shadow of the old Imperialism, Russian or Soviet, just like Greek and Latin imperialism, has cast a long shadow on Church life. Its time is up. For the Church does not consist of one Local Church ruling imperially over all the others, but of their entirety, their catholicity – all the Local Churches together. Once political meddling is over, all the Local Churches must hold a Council together. A free and canonically ordered Council, not the 2016 robber-Council farce in Crete. Then the very many long-outstanding issues between the Local Churches can at last be resolved. In freedom. May God’s Will be done!

 

 

Four Steps to Decadence

Introduction: The Church

The Church on earth is composed of the faithful people, the faithful parish clergy and faithful monastics (some of whom are also faithful bishops). Among all of them are prophets and fools-for-Christ, who are not afraid to tell the truth and shame the devil, who is the father of lies. The faithful are opposed by the four following highly overlapping movements, which have been assigned by the evil one to take over the administration of the Church:

  1. Homosexualisation

This movement of immorality has brought into the Church administration pathologically ill homosexuals, and to a lesser extent bisexuals and, thank God, rarely, pedophiles. Whether repressed or not, they have formed gay mafias, called in the US ‘lavender mafias’ and persecute monastics and married clergy, of whom they are very jealous because they have normal lives. They have literally perverted the administration of the Church.

  1. Intellectualisation

This movement has brought into the Church administration intellectuals, whose god is the god of the philosophers. Their faith is generally very weak, for they place the intellectual above the spiritual, the theoretical above the practical, the university above the monastery, the complicated above the simple. This has also perverted the administration of the Church.

  1. Financialisation

This movement has brought into the Church administration ‘administrators’ and ‘effective managers’, like Paul of Samosata who in the third century was a good financier, but a bad theologian. (Yes, the third century – there is nothing new under the sun). These financiers are interested almost only in raising and collecting money, putting their love of material things and love of luxury above the salvation of souls, for whom they even close churches! This has perverted the administration of the Church.

  1. Secularisation

This movement has brought into the Church administration the political extremes of this world and resulted in heresies and schisms. These are always the result of Secularisation, which itself is always caused by immorality. These extremes claim that all others are impure, whether the extremes they confess are Neo-Donatist conservatism, with its fanaticism and phariseeism, or else Neo-Gnostic liberalism, with its modernism and syncretism. Through their spiritual impurity they have politicised and perverted the administration of the Church.

Conclusion: Reserves of Glory

Nearly fifty years ago, on 23 December 1976, after a series of difficult meetings at the seminary, the late Fr Alexander Schmemann noted in his diary:

 

‘My point of view is that a good half of our students are dangerous for the Church – their psychology, their tendencies, a sort of constant obsession with something. Orthodoxy takes on a different, ugly aspect, something important is missing, and the Orthodoxy that these students consciously or subconsciously favour is distorted, narrow, emotional – in the end, pseudo-Orthodoxy. Not only at the seminary, but everywhere, I acutely sense the spread of a strange Orthodoxy’.

A year earlier he had written: ‘What used to be an organic, natural style became stylisation, spiritually weak, harmful. The main problem of Orthodoxy is the constraint due to style, and its inability to revise it; a prevalent absence of self-criticism, of checking the tradition of the elders by Tradition, by love of Truth. A growing idolatry’. Seminarians and clergy, he said, wear their cassocks and beards as an armour against life and thought. A pseudo-Orthodoxy. A strange Orthodoxy. A growing idolatry. These are hard words. Yet, against those who attacked Orthodoxy, Fr. Alexander came to its defence. ‘I feel myself a radical ‘challenger,’ but among challengers I feel myself a conservative and traditionalist’. He could never feel wholly at home in any one camp. ‘I cannot identify with any complete system with an integral view of the world or an ideology. It seems to me that anything finished, complete, and not open to another dimension is heavy and self-destructive. I see the error of any dialectics that proceed with thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, removing possible contradictions. I think that openness must always remain; it is faith, in it God is found, who is not a ‘synthesis’ but life and fullness’.

 

What can we say? We prefer a theological and poetic view. Thus, we quote the words of the Russian poet, Vladimir Dixon (1900-1929): ‘God has reserves of glory for inglorious times’.

 

 

Ideology Versus Faith and the Post-Ukrainian Russian Church

Introduction: Ideology versus Faith

Ideology and Faith are opposed to one another. As an example, I will describe the exact church situation in a small provincial town in eastern Russia today, where there are two churches and which I know well. This situation is very symbolic of my fifty-one years of experience of the Russian Church in Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia and of the Russian Diaspora in Western Europe, the USA and Australia and how that situation has radically degenerated in recent years.

Those who knew and lived in the Russian Church before the last few years of decadence and who for generations had venerated the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia are shocked and disappointed by the unthinkable events that have happened since. The Church was purified by the blood and suffering of those new saints. Now there are those who are trying to sully the Church once more. This is the result of a Church administration which has, purely voluntarily, applied the dead hand of the State with its ever-corrupting ideology of power, money and careerism, to itself, under no obligation whatsoever from the State.

A Church of Ideology

The first church in this small provincial town in eastern Russia is a large, beautifully restored church with frescoes and golden domes. It looks like a picture postcard, a Russian church as it should be and as is portrayed in countless coffee-table books and tourist brochures. It attracts rather well-off people who want to be in such a church; it makes them feel that they are in a ’proper church’ and that they are doing everything ‘correctly’. Thirty years ago, the church was still a ruin, abandoned there by the atheists who had wrecked it and desecrated it before World War Two. Now the church is prosperous, there is an emphasis on donating money, it is frescoed and led by Fr Gennady, a priest who hands over a lot of money to his bishop, seems rather like a businessman, has many awards, is well-off, lives in a nice house and has a smart car.  At the end of every Sunday service he preaches about politics in a way which he believes to be patriotic, but which in fact is nationalistic. He repels the few Non-Russian Orthodox (mainly Ukrainians) who live in the town. It is also rather depressing, certainly for anyone who wants to get away from the oppressive spirit of this world and expects some uplifting words from the Church.

There is no parish life, in the sense that there is no unity among the ‘parishioners’, even the priest’s wife does not attend church because of her depression. The wife of the second priest, aged 33, left him for another man. These are just groups of people who attend the church, fewer in number than in the heady and idealistic days of Patriarch Alexij II and restoration twenty-five years ago. These people do not work together, for there is no sense of community. This church is the fruit of the ideology of ‘The Russian World’. Although the basic ‘Russian World’ ideology had evolved by the Year 2000 and then found favour with the State, it was only in 2009 that it was officially adopted by certain politically-minded Church hierarchs. Since then it has been promoted, has filtered down and some have adopted it, like the priest in this town. It is essentially an aggressive, even militaristic, self-righteous, Stalinistic Russian nationalism, as symbolised by the controversial Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, recently opened outside Moscow.

This ‘Russian World’ nationalism is an exact parallel to the equally self-righteous, political and aggressive Greek nationalism, or ‘Hellenism’, promoted by some in the US-backed Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople and other Greek Church institutions. Ultimately, the Russian World ideology goes back to the nationalistic ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ ideology, which gradually developed after the fall of Constantinople, ‘the Second Rome’, in 1453. Now, Hellenism was rejected by the Apostle Paul in the first century who described how the Cross is foolishness for the Hellenes (1 Cor 1, 23), that is, a form of paganism. As for ‘The Russian World’ ideology, it too has been rejected by the very eminent confessor of the Faith, Metr Onufry of Kiev and all the Ukraine. He has quite rightly said that we should not be aiming at creating a ‘Russian world’, but ‘God’s world’. https://spzh.media/en/news/79477-decr-uoc-comments-on-decree-of-the-25th-world-russian-peoples-assembly

A Church of Faith

The other church in this place is much older, on the edge of town, looks poorish and is really rather plain. There are no golden domes. Inside there is a great number of icons painted on wood and relics. Fr Leonty, the priest, is an older pastor and spiritual father and is ignored by his bishop. He does not have a car and never asks people to donate money. He is not interested in money. His sermons concern the Gospel and he never mentions politics in church, but speaks of repentance and a change of life for the better. He is very traditional in his faith, but is kind and open to everyone. Parish life is strong and people feel united. They love their pastor, as he loves them. The emphasis is on the spiritual, on confession and communion.

The second church is the fruit of the Faith of ‘The Orthodox Christian World’. This Faith goes back to the Resurrection of Christ in Jerusalem in the Year 33 and its Incarnation in the world as a way of life, and not some nationalist ideology or political philosophy, for it is not nationally exclusive. Indeed, on the Day of Pentecost in the Year 33, the apostles spoke in different languages, so that all could understand. No national or racial exclusivity here, for the Orthodox World is multinational and international, the expression of Catholicity.

This Faith has always been expressed by the Church and is lived by all who are devoted to the Church, as seen most obviously in the communion of the saints. In today’s world we could give this Faith the name of ‘The New Jerusalem’. This is simply another word for Orthodox Christianity, which is outside all petty nationalism and concerned with the spiritual and ascetic. It opposes ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ with what has in Russia since the seventeenth century been called ‘Moscow the Second Jerusalem’.

Faith Always Wins

The essential problem with the Third Rome ideology is that the ideal of Rome always degenerates into nationalism. For example, the ideal of the First Rome degenerated into what was at first a Germanic or Frankish-led Western ideology and superiority complex of infallibility in the eleventh century. Passing through Spanish, Dutch, French and then British nationalist leadership, a millennium on, this ideology is now US-led. The ideal of the Second Rome (Constantinople) also clearly degenerated – into a Greek nationalist ideology. The multinational ideal of Moscow the Third Rome has equally been degenerating into Russian nationalist ideology for a long time. This is why in the seventeenth century the then persecuted Russian Patriarch counterbalanced the ideal of the Third Rome with the ideal of the Second Jerusalem. This is the only way.

For the moment some in the Russian Church have rejected Non-Russians, thus rejecting centuries of missionaries and missionary activity outside itself and have degenerated the Christian Commonwealth ideal of the Third Rome into a mere nationalist ideology. Whether in the Ukraine, Latvia, England or elsewhere, all too many in the Russian Church have turned their backs on Non-Russians. Those who love the Church of God are at present often forced to look outside the Russian Church for spiritual life.

However, there is the same situation for those inside Russia who seek the spiritual. In the provincial town I know, they go to the second church, not to the first one. That is why we too have had to go elsewhere, still hopeful that certain Russian Church clergy can cast off the nationalistic and militaristic ‘Russian World’ ideology. Although it is clear that the Russian State is the great winner in the Ukraine, it is the Russian Church that is the great loser and although it is clear that the Ukrainian State is the great loser in the Ukraine, it is the Ukrainian Church that is the great winner. The need is to return to ‘God’s world’, as Metr Onufry of the Ukraine has said.

Conclusion: Towards the Future

This New Jerusalem Faith, the Faith of ‘God’s World’, is also that of the free Metr Hilarion of Budapest and Hungary. He stands out as an exception among the episcopate of the Russian Church. Principled, speaking Western languages and with connections all over the world, he occupies the high moral ground and has not compromised himself in ‘Russian World’ politics. He is surely to become the next, non-political and pastoral, Patriarch and Archpastor of the cleansed Russian Church. Indeed, his first act may have to be to reverse the appalling injustices and persecution committed inside the Russian Church against its faithful pastors in the last three years for their rejection of sectarian schism, greed and politicisation, which have so utterly discredited the Russian Church.

He will also have to stand up to the absurd and novel demands of sectarians and schismatics, who claim to be ‘Russian Orthodox’ and claim that Non-Orthodox Christians, including Catholics, must be rebaptised to be received into the Orthodox Church. Then he can include more Western Orthodox saints into the Russian Church calendar. He will have to decentralise the Russian Church, granting autocephaly or autonomy to the Churches in republics outside the Russian Federation. Above all he will have to re-establish good relations with all the other Local Churches in the spirit of Catholicity and so move towards settling the century-old canonical irregularities within the Orthodox Diasporas through a politically free Council of the whole Church.

 

 

The World on the Brink

With events in the Holy Land following their course, America’s war in the Ukraine is now on the back burner. The Russian Federation is engaged in mopping up operations and President Zelensky will soon no longer be a useful asset and so will be disposed of, in one way or the other.

In West Asia (the former ‘Middle East’) Western propaganda has taken over. It is notorious for its lies. The First World War was justified because the propagandists proclaimed that ‘German soldiers are murdering Belgian babies’. Arming and training Islamists in the 1980s, including Bin Laden, was justified by the US because ‘The Soviets are parachuting bombs disguised as toys into Afghan villages to murder the children’. (More lies) NATO atrocities against Serbia were justified because ‘Serbian soldiers have raped 60,000 Muslim women’. (More lies). The first Western genocide of Iraq was justified because ‘Iraqi soldiers are killing Kuwaiti babies in their incubators’. (More lies and anyway Kuwaitis are Iraqis). ‘All Russians can be killed because of their atrocity in Bucha’ (in fact a Kiev atrocity against Russia-supporting Ukrainians). And so it goes on.

Now Palestinians can be genocided because ‘HAMAS has beheaded 40 Israeli babies’. (More lies, which also ignore that HAMAS was created by MOSSAD, the Israeli secret service and armed with US guns bought in the Ukraine). The last statement also ignores the fact that thousands of babies are murdered by abortion every day in the USA, but that is legal. Let alone that the Israeli Air Force, the creation of the USA, has already murdered hundreds of Palestinian children beneath their bombs. Moreover, according to the Israeli President: ‘There are no innocent civilians in Gaza’. If so, then there are no innocent civilians in Israel. Such extremism means total war. It was the same extremism that led to Anglo-American bombs murdering half a million German civilians between 1942 and 1945. Although civilian deaths are a war crime, the victors are never charged with war crimes, they are still war crimes and will be judged in the Court of the Most High.

Sadly, ‘everybody hates the Jews’, as the Jewish-American singer Tom Lehrer sang nearly sixty years ago. There has to be a reason for the hatred by many (in reality not by all). Could it be because so many Jewish leaders (clearly, Jewish people are another matter) are stuck in the blood of the Old Testament – ‘an eye for an eye’, and firmly reject Christian forgiveness, as also, ironically, did the neo-pagan Western leader Hitler. In 1947 the UN voted for two States in the Holy Land, a Jewish State and a Palestinian State. That resolution has still not been acted on and so here we are today.

However, are so-called Christian leaders any better? The latest disgraceful statement by an Orthodox Patriarch, welcoming the persecution of the Church in the Ukraine and the arrest and imprisonment of its bishops (1) by an atheist Jew suggests that certain so-called Christians are also stuck in the worst parts of the Old Testament. They still do not know Christ, on the same level as the present extremist and very unpopular minority Israeli leader. (Yes, there are lots of Jews who do not support him; there are good and bad everywhere).

That warlike Orthodox Patriarch is not the only Orthodox Patriarch to behave so strangely. Another scatters his faithful bishops to exile in the four winds and scatters his most conscientious clergy to other Local Churches. He also leaves his American Orthodox branch to be rent by extremism and the consequent unresolved American schism, now approaching its third anniversary, with its bishops warring with each other about the heresy of the ‘rebaptism’ of other Orthodox. Sad times. As for us, we shall keep our integrity and not enter the murky swamplands of anti-Orthodoxy, which now appear to be filling with Orthodox bishops.

Sadly, there is nothing new in any of this. Israeli leaders only treat the Palestinians as the Spanish and the Portuguese treated the peoples of what is now called Latin America, as North American settlers (most of them of British origin) treated Native American ‘savages’, as the British treated the natives of Australia and New Zealand (even making extinct the natives of Tasmania, hunting them ‘like vermin’), as the French treated the Arabs, as the Belgians treated the Congolese. And it was the treatment of Native Americans, which Hitler took as his example for his genocide of thirty million Slavs eighty years ago. He needed ‘living space’. That meant ethnic cleansing. And that is what is happening today in Gaza.

The world is on the brink. President Putin is in China, talking about West Asia. Moreover, these two Superpowers of Russia and China are closely allied with the Muslim world, India, Iran and Africa. Meanwhile, the US Secretary of State, the Jewish Antony Blinken was humiliated by the Egyptians and the Saudi Arabians and the octogenarian President Biden had to be called in to Israel to avert (or cause?) a Third World War. But now, after the latest atrocity at the hospital in Gaza, the senile President has nobody to talk to except the Israelis. Unlike President Putin, who in one day spoke to two Arab leaders, the President of Iran, the President of Israel, the President of Vietnam, the Prime Minister of Hungary and the President of China, President Biden is, like Israel, completely isolated – like all narcissists, whether secularists or in the Church.

Did the extremists really think they could get away with this?  We in the mainstream stand for moderation. There is no reason either for chaos in the world or in the Church. I am often asked why the world has gone crazy. I only have one answer: Because its leaders and many others have lost their faith in God. And when you stop worshipping the King of the Universe, you begin worshipping the prince of this world. This also needs saying to certain Orthodox bishops.

Note:

  1. https://spzh.news/en/news/76512-patriarch-bartholomew-approves-criminal-cases-against-uoc-hierarchs

 

The Force of White Orthodoxy

Foreword: Come a Long Way

Ten years ago on a rainy, autumn evening, the deserted, leaf-strewn pavements shining in the streetlight, I arrived at a small hotel in rue Alexandre I in Alencon in Normandy, France. A puzzled Frenchman asked me: ‘Have you come a long way’? To which I replied with a smile: ‘Yes, I have come a very long way…from the other end of history’. I did not add, but could have added: ‘I am a White Orthodox priest. There must come justice and restoration in Russia, after which justice and restoration will come elsewhere, including here in France too.’

Three Russias

In November 1721 we saw the establishment of Imperial Russia with its enslaving westernised aristocracy. In 1922 its injustices led to its fall and the establishment of the Soviet Union, Imperialist Marxist Russia with its enslaving centralised nomenklatura. In December 1991 its injustices led to its fall and the establishment of post-Soviet, American Russia with its enslaving dollarised oligarchate. On 24 February 2022 this Russia in turn fell, the victim of its internal contradictions, caused by its corruption.

The three versions of Russia had lasted 200 years, 70 years and 30 years respectively. Despite great achievements, all three versions ended badly, either in revolution and tyranny, or else in plunder and despair, or else in bloodshed and tragedy. This was because for 300 years none of them had respected its underlying Orthodox Russian identity and its calling to form a Multinational Civilisation. When you go against your true nature, you suffer. That is why Russia has had to suffer for 300 years.

The End of Post-Soviet Russia

The fall of Post-Soviet American Russia is very painful and very bloody, but also inevitable. Of course, there are those who opposed its end. These were the cosmopolitan westernisers and traitors, who last year ran away from Russia, to Finland, to Georgia, to Turkey, wherever they could go. They wanted their American Russia to continue, even though both sides of the Atlantic had ‘cancelled’ Russia. Some of them already lived in the West, some of them were represented in the Russian Church. Over the last year some of them have begun to return, realising that their flight had been based on lack of faith.

On the other hand, there are also the xenophobic Russian nationalists, the Prigozhinites. They too are ending badly, as they desire the restoration by violence of an Imperialist Russia, not understanding that Russia has moved on from Imperialism and Sovietism. They understand neither Orthodoxy, nor the multinational calling of Russia. They do not understand that they will lose everything if they continue clinging on to the disastrous centralism of the past. The Multipolar Age of BRICS has begun. Unipolarity, whether Russian or Western, is over.

The Fall of the Russian Church

The State-minded nationalists, the centralist controllers and their denouncing minders who accompany them everywhere, are over-represented in the Russian Church. Its fate is now on a knife edge because of their errors. Over the last fifty years since 1973, I have written much about the possible restoration of Sovereign Orthodox Russia, the Eurasian bulwark of worldwide Orthodox Civilisation. Shall I see it before I die? Unfortunately, its heart, the Russian Church, is still not free. True, it is no longer captive to anything so crude or primitive as Communism, but instead is captive to something far worse, far more insidious, to 300 years of the dead, corrupting hand of the State.

Thus, the Russian Church is captive to spiritual captivity, practical atheism, love of power and wealth, dictatorship and bureaucracy, arbitrary rule, cultish sectarianism, its believers are exiled, the corrupt take control, intent on destroying the Church. They are Black Orthodoxy. Their feudal despotism, blatant commercialism, clerical careerism, moral corruption and institutional simony are merely symptoms of the sickness, not causes. Here is why we are still very far from the restoration of Sovereign Russia. If it comes, it can only be after the Russian Church has been cleansed by the present very painful and very bloody events in the Soviet-established Ukraine.

The Fall of the West

Over the last fifty years since 1973, I have also written much about the coming millennial turning-point in world history. At last it has come, the fall of the West after a thousand years of its elite’s domination of the rest of the world through their technology of organised violence. It is time for the West to return to itself, to its roots, to its true nature, which is in its saints and in the culture of the spirit. This is the Truth of the West, as I have been affirming for fifty years.

The Truth of the West is not in power and mammon, as, sadly, even some modern Orthodox bishops, self-appointed ‘princes of the Church’, claim. We live far away from the love of luxury, academic theorising and effeminate worldliness of such nominal bishops. We strive to live in accord with the humble spirit of genuine Orthodoxy, of White Orthodoxy, spread from the Egyptian desert to the Atlantic Hebrides, from the East Anglian coasts to the Fen islands, from Sarov forests to Carpathian hermitages.

Afterword: The Multipolar Church

As for me, I shall continue here where God has put me, in the Kingdom of the East of England. It is where I was born and where I belong. Our task is to complete the noble mission allotted us by the last Christian Emperor, to build up the Church multinationally, accepting all inclusively. We are the Free Church, the White Church. We fight off the ‘protocols’ of the evil and the greedy, the scribes and the pharisees, the sectarians and the schismatics, who would close down all our churches and destroy us all. Those who persecuted us and tried to silence us unleashed an irresistible force, the Force of the Spirit, the Force of White Orthodoxy. God is with us.

St Andrew the Fool for Christ

2/15 October 2023

 

 

News from the Orthodox World (2)

As a prison chaplain and clergyman of nearly forty years, I can confidently assert that all the worst individuals I have come across in this world were bishops. On the other hand, I can equally confidently assert that some of the saintliest individuals I have come across in this world were also bishops, including my own bishop. Thank God.

I lived through the Cold War, the 70s and the 80s. Spiritually, it was an awful period – there was no spiritually independent Orthodox Church to belong to. The episcopate of Moscow was subject to the KGB and they often made use of corrupt bishops, on whom they held ‘the dirt’, ‘compromising materials, (‘kompromat’). However, Constantinople was clearly run by the Americans and its episcopate were corrupt or homosexuals, often ecumenists (there was money in that and freemasons (there was money in that too). They are all dead now.

I remember one Constantinople metropolitan who used to celebrate the liturgy by his watch – 45 minutes was enough for him. Another future metropolitan, the late John Zizioulas, was thrown out of Edinburgh Theology Department for his open homosexuality and was forced to teach in Glasgow, where they were not particular. After all, ‘theology’ is just an academic discipline, like any other. Personal morality has nothing to do with academic disciplines. The Russians were no better. One Russian metropolitan had a string of mistresses. Then there was Bishop Gury in Paris who had a love affair with one of his equally homosexual priests. After ten years or so the scandal became so great that he was sacked and sent, literally, to Siberia, becoming the Bishop of Magadan, the equivalent of Australia for dud Anglican bishops in the past.

Talking to two Russian priests recently, one told me that all except one of the four bishops in his Metropolia is homosexual and the other told me that in his Metropolia, two bishops out of the five are utterly corrupt (‘business’ and women, their vices) and one is openly homosexual. There is a well-known pedophile metropolitan in the Ukrainian Church (MP) and another in the Russian Church (MP). The problem with the homosexuals is their hatred for normal married clergy and persecution of them through their jealousy, which causes them to try and destroy the clergy, their parishes and as a result utterly alienates the people, many of whom desert the Church in disgust. Such bishops’ constant demands for money make them especially unloved.

The Russian Church is supposed to be anti-LGBT. This is almost a joke, given some of its episcopate, who rule over a country, whose abortion rate is twice that of Western European countries. Since so many of its bishops are notorious homosexuals and even pedophiles, little wonder that so many of their golden-domed churches are empty. We really have come to the end times, which were prophesied by St Seraphim of Sarov. Churches will be open, but you will not be able to go there.

Little wonder that so many churches of the canonical Church in the Ukraine have been and are being closed down by Nazi thugs, openly backed by the Zelensky regime. Buildings in the Kiev Caves Monastery, where so many saints rest, are continually being occupied and stolen by such thugs who come from the dreaded Secret Police, the SBU, which is trained by MI6 and the CIA. (Indeed, many say that Zelensky is actually an MI6 agent).

Democracy in the Ukraine? Other political parties are outlawed and if you promote freedom for them, you may well find yourself dead in a back street in Kiev. Such is the regime supported by the West. Worse still, it is the Patriarchate of Constantinople that stands behind that ecclesiastical department of the Zelensky regime.

And that regime only has months to go before it collapses in its Kiev bunker beneath the weight of the most advanced armed forces of in the world. They belong to Russia, the most powerful economy in Europe, No 5 in the world, according to the World Bank, and not far behind Japan at No 4. This will be followed by the unconditional capitulation of the Kiev regime and the victory of nationalist Russia, which wants to achieve freedom for and unity with the Russian population in the Ukraine. (Nothing else interests it, despite the propaganda nonsense parroted by demented US and UK politicians about Russia wanting to reconstitute the Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe).

So the Church choice today is no longer the Cold War, but Greek nationalism or Russian nationalism. No choice at all. During the Cold War we chose to belong to a still spiritual part of the Russian Church, where it was still possible to venerate the Saints and Martyrs freely, even if by no means all did so). At that time, that possibility still existed. Now it too has gone, having been taken over by the same types. Corruption, ‘business’, sexual perversion and persecution of the parish clergy are the order of the day. The choice today appears to be Greek nationalism/corruption/perversion or Russian nationalism/corruption/ perversion.

That is also a false choice. There is the third way, the mystical way of the saints, not the way of all those pharisees, of whom Christ said (Jn 8, 44): You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

 

Orthodox Catholicity: Overcoming the Russo-Greek Schism

Introduction: The Church Under Attack

‘The One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church’. Unity, Holiness, Catholicity and Apostolicity are the four characteristics of the Church and at various times in history one or another of them has been overlooked. As a result, the integrity of Church life has suffered – until the restitution of that particular characteristic. That the Faith of the Church is One, that the Church creates Saints, that the Church goes back to Apostolic times is in no doubt now.

However, at the present time, with the Church in crisis, in a state of worldwide administrative and jurisdictional schism, there is no doubt that it is rather the Catholicity of the Church that is being overlooked. This is the Universality of the Church, at all times and in all places. Catholicity is its Unity in Diversity, as at the first Pentecost and Coming of the Holy Spirit, as related in the Acts of the Apostles

Catholicity

The word Catholicity cannot be confused with Catholicism, which refers to Roman Catholicism, for the two words are different, However, there is a problem with the adjective ‘Catholic’. In English, as in all Western languages, this word is often confused with ‘Roman Catholic’, which is a contradiction in terms, as you cannot be universal at all times and in all places and yet attached to only one place, for example, Rome. This is very apparent when the Creed is sung or read in English or in other Western languages in our churches – ‘and in One. Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church’. Here the word ‘Catholic’ can sound strange.

This is not the case in Greek, from which comes the original word ‘katholiki’. Here instead of using ‘Roman Catholic’, they prefer to say ‘Latin’ or ‘Papal’, so that ambiguities are avoided. And Slavonic and Romanian have completely different words for ‘Roman Catholic’ and ‘Catholic’. Perhaps in English we need to translate ‘katholiki’ by ‘Orthodox Catholic’ or perhaps ‘Conciliar’, in order to avoid this ambiguity? For we are Orthodox Catholics, not Roman Catholics, as we confess that the Orthodox Church is ‘Conciliar’, based on Councils. Their decisions come from the Eternal Spirit of God and so are for all time, and not based on some passing administrative figure like a Pope or Patriarch, who is here today and gone tomorrow.

Here we should be particularly careful. For the Papal temptation of Rome, that of an individually or collectively-imposed imperialist superiority, racial, linguistic, cultural or otherwise, of one Local Church over all the others, can be a temptation for any Local Church. Here we do not speak of Roman Catholicism, which by definition long ago succumbed to this, thus losing its Unity with the Church, its Holiness and its Apostolicity. Here we speak of the Orthodox Church, which has not succumbed to imperialism, though certain ‘Orthodox’ personalities are and have been tempted.

In history, and especially at the present time, we have seen this temptation inside the Orthodox Church in both individual personalities and collective groups, notably in the Patriarchate of Constantinople and in the Patriarchate of Moscow. The term for the temptation of ‘Eastern Papism’ is, after all, well-known among Orthodox. There is only one solution to this problem of the ambition, personal or collective, to dominate others and lord it over them, it is the Catholicity of the Church. Indeed, as we have said, a possible translation of the Greek original for Catholicity is ‘Conciliarity’ and for ‘Catholic’ ‘Conciliar’.

Conciliarity

For Catholicity is always revealed at Councils, which are a primary source of the revelations of the Holy Spirit in our post-Scriptural Age. It is precisely this that is lacking in Roman Catholicism, whose head is the Pope of Rome. Now, some will say that Roman Catholicism does have Councils. The problem here is that those Councils are not Orthodox, not free, indeed its First Vatican Council (1869-1870) proclaimed the dogma of Papal Infallibility. In Roman Catholicism the task of Councils is only to rubber-stamp decisions of Popes, for, according to their theology, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Popes, the Vicars of Christ. Councils do not have the same function there as in the Church, but take place only to confirm Papal decisions, being subservient to Popes.

This is not the case in the Church, although it is true that the Church in its bimillennial history has seen plenty of example of ‘Robber Councils’, or false Councils, the best known example of which was at Ephesus in 449, but the latest example of which was the 2016 pseudo-Council in Crete. How can such Robber Councils be avoided? Here we underline that in the Church no conference of bishops can be called a Council until after it has taken place, when its fruits, if there are any, can be seen and received or rejected by the people of God. A conference of bishops is merely a conference of bishops, but a Council of bishops is where the Holy Spirit is present. A conference of bishops is not a ‘Council’ because they forgot to invite the Holy Spirit to it and so can become a ‘Robber Council’. A Council implies the presence of the Holy Spirit, Who binds us together in Catholicity. For the Church is One at all times and in all places, only when She confesses the Holy Spirit.

Below are some suggestions of one who is not a bishop, not even a monk, merely a parish rector, though with nearly forty years of parish experience and having been a speaker at a Local Council (San Francisco, 2006) of the Russian Diaspora Church. There we defeated the spirit of pharisaic pride, made stubborn by psychological insecurity and political rancour. That spirit was rejecting both the repentance of others and Divine Providence, which was offering the long-awaited opportunity to restore canonical unity within the Russian Church.

Perhaps someone with influence may find the suggestions below, together with the many others, of interest.

Towards an Authentic Council

  1. Procedures

 

a. Unlike Crete, all Local Churches must be represented at a potential Universal Council.

 

b. Unlike Crete, no politically-imposed agenda should be presented at a potential future Council, that is, an agenda in the style of a secular meeting, programmed for one week in June 2016.

 

c. Unlike Crete, there should be no timetable to pressure delegates to make decisions within a very short period or to falsify the decisions reached with false signatures. The Seven Universal Councils were free to make decisions, often over many sessions and even months. The Holy Spirit is not limited by human timetables and pieces of paper.

  1. Where?

Like Crete, this Council should be held in a country where a majority of the people are at least nominally Orthodox, that is, there is locally some sense of the Tradition.

  1. Who?

Traditionally, meetings which became Councils were convened by the Emperor of the time. In the absence of an Emperor, they are called by the Patriarch of Constantinople in concert with the leaders of all the other Local Churches. If the Patriarch of Constantinople refuses for political reasons to convene a conference of bishops and many Local Churches still believe that such a conference (and potential Council) is necessary, then let them together call such a conference without the Patriarch of Constantinople. Then there can be a conference of bishops which may at least turn into a Local Council. Let us recall that apart from the Seven Universal Councils, there have in history been many Local Councils, which have reached important decisions, which have then had universal reception and application.

At present only 14 Local Churches are universally recognised. The OCA is disputed by some because it exists in North America, a territory shared by other Orthodox. And the Macedonian Church is disputed by some because of arcane arguments about its name. Perhaps these two Churches could at least be invited to send non-voting delegates to a conference of bishops, that could possibly become a Local or Universal Council, as any decisions reached could concern them very deeply.

Episcopal Corruption

As at Crete, we suggest that not all the world’s 1,000 Orthodox bishops be invited. This was never the case at the Universal Councils. Though attended by hundreds of bishops, they were never attended by all of them and some Local Churches such as the Roman Church, were represented by as few as two delegates. Conciliarity was and is expressed not by the presence of numbers of bishops, but by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Instead, let each Local Church be invited to send, say, a maximum of ten episcopal representatives, if they have that many bishops (a few smaller Local Churches do not). These representatives would have to be chosen beforehand by a Council of all Bishops (not just a Synod, let alone a mini-Synod) of their Local Church.

Here there is a problem, the elephant in the room, of which few speak. We know about this problem from the lives of St Photios (+ 893) and St Gregory Palamas (+ 1357), who were persecuted and whose teachings were opposed by Robber Councils before they were vindicated. We know about this also from the life of St Nectarios of Egina (+ 1920), who, instead of becoming a great missionary Patriarch of Alexandria, was slandered and cast out by jealous fellow-bishops, and from the life of the missionary bishop St John of Shanghai (+ 1966), who was slandered and suspended by his fellow-bishops, so did not become the Metropolitan of the Russian Church in the Diaspora and instead was hounded to an early death. The result was that that part of the Russian Church set out on a path of sectarianism, from which it has not yet been saved.

The world was unworthy of St John. His suspension in 1964 was related to me with great satisfaction 26 years later by one of his continuing slanderers, an extreme right-wing Russian racist from Los Angeles, to whom I had to listen in silence for two hours in a Paris traffic jam. He reminded me of the wise and prophetic words to me of St Sophrony the Athonite seven years before, forty years ago now, in 1983. In Essex Fr Sophrony warned me then of the cross I would have to bear, as he blessed me for my mission in the Russian Church, which he himself had had to abandon on account of persecution, to help work for unity with truth: ‘There are those in that group who lack love’, he said, indicating that we too would suffer like St John.

There is then the problem of the corruption of a significant minority of bishops. Why they are allowed to become and continue to be bishops and are not suspended or defrocked is not a question for us here, though it is a question of vital interest and concern to all responsible Orthodox and whose solution is long overdue. We suggest that delegates or bishop-representatives be chosen according to strict criteria in order to ensure that they are bishops who lead canonical lives.

Criteria for Presence

i. All representatives chosen by a Local Church must at the very least be in communion with all the bishops of their Local Church. Otherwise, they are uncanonical, de facto schismatics and should be suspended and sent to a monastery until they have repented or else defrocked.

ii. All representatives must take a solemn oath that they are bishops by free choice and not political appointees, like Patriarch Sergius of Moscow (+ 1944) (appointed by the Kremlin) or a generation later Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople (+ 1972) (appointed by the White House), as per the Canons of the Holy Apostles. This is to prove their canonicity.

iii. All representatives must take a solemn oath that they respect the three monastic vows of non-acquisition/poverty, chastity and obedience. The first vow means that they cannot be holders of, acquirers of or users of luxurious properties, objects and money, even if on paper, by subterfuge, the property, objects and money ‘belong to’ their diocese or are rented. The second vow means that they cannot be married or homosexual. The third vow means that they cannot be disobedient to the Church by being members of State secret services, masonic lodges or organisations that promote syncretism. This is to prove their canonicity.

iv. All representatives must be free of ongoing court cases for scandalous conduct involving, for instance, financial allegations; sexual allegations; allegations of slander of honest clergy; allegations of outbursts of rage and spectacular rudeness; allegations concerning persecution with threatening demands for more money, intimidation, bullying and even ‘defrocking’ for political reasons or reasons of personal hatred and jealousy of clergy, who have already been publicly accepted by other Patriarchates as legitimate, canonical and unjustly persecuted clergy, as they are faithful to Orthodoxy, but not to schismatic and uncanonical bishops. In other words, there must be no doubt as to the canonical life of the bishop in question (See Canon XV of the First and Second Council).

v. All representatives must be diocesan bishops, not ‘vicar-bishops’, whose status is not strictly canonical, as a bishop is married to his diocese.

vi. All representatives must have been diocesan bishops for at least ten years. Otherwise, they will lack experience.

vii. All representatives must be diocesan bishops of dioceses of at least 25 parishes (a parish being defined as a church where the Divine Liturgy is held at least every Sunday and is attended by at least 40 adult Orthodox each time. In other words, their diocese (whatever may be their pompous titles, ‘of All America’, ‘of Western Europe’ etc) actually has at least 1,000 practising adult Orthodox. (The average Orthodox bishop has a diocese of 200,000 nominal Orthodox). Otherwise, they will lack experience.

The selected representatives of each Local Church should attend the conference with any issues which their Local Church considers need resolving, following discussions and conferring with the other bishops, monks, priests and faithful in their Local Churches. Clearly, these issues would include the refusal at the present time of Russians and Greeks to concelebrate, who has the right to grant autocephaly and autonomy, and the universal recognition of uncanonically ‘defrocked’ clergy. However, other issues could easily arise.

After discussions and conferring with the other bishops, monks, priests and faithful in their Local Churches, bishops could reconvene for another session at a maximum interval of three months. This process could be repeated for as often as is necessary for decisions to be reached and be approved by all bishops of the Local Churches. There should be no pressure of time, just as there was not in the Councils of Church history.

Conclusion: Towards the Holy Spirit

In the light of the above, it would seem that the Crete Conference was in fact a warning, with Providential rewards, which always come to those who have suffered sacrificially from the treachery of those who behaved uncanonically. As with the case of the Tower of Siloam, the meaning was: ‘If you do not repent, you will all finish like this’. For the upshot of the Crete Conference of 2016 was the present schism between the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow.

This resulted from the former’s uncanonical actions in the Ukraine, apparently in revenge for Moscow’s non-attendance of the Crete Conference. This in turn led to Moscow’s uncanonical actions in Africa, technically the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria. It is clear to all that only a Council can break this spiral of uncanonical actions and schisms, with their purely political and uncanonical ‘defrockings’, which everyone ignores. Here the Churches of Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Antioch, Poland, Albania, Czechoslovakia and Jerusalem can play an important role as mediators between the racial clash of Greeks (Greece, Constantinople, Cyprus, Alexandria) and Russians.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where Are You Going, Russia?

‘The situation in the Ukraine is not a regional conflict, but the total opposition of the Collective West and the rest of the world, caused by diametrically opposed views about the future development of humanity…The hybrid war they are waging against us now is their last chance to maintain the status quo in their favour and not to lose their weakened power and influence…The aspiration for independence of the countries of the Global South and East is not at all to the liking of the former colonial powers, which cling to the past with all their might’.

Dmitry Medvedev, 2 July, https://news.mail.ru/politics/56860026/?frommail=1

Introduction: The Communists and Oligarchs of the Past

In Russia today you can still find Communists. They are mainly elderly, sometimes living in retirement homes, sometimes having held high positions in the old USSR, and never recovering from the shock of the collapse of the USSR, which they want back. President Putin long ago stated the obvious majority view of the USSR: ‘Those who are not nostalgic for it have no heart. Those who want it back have no brain’. The Communist Party is then basically the Pensioners’ Party and they have a dream of another 1917 Bolshevik takeover. But where is their leader, Lenin? Lenin is a rotting mummy, embalmed in a chemical soup in his Moscow ziggurat, the Time Museum. These are the dinosaurs – they have no future.

In Russia today, though above all outside Russia, you can still find the next generation, the oligarchs – those who robbed Russia blind (‘privatised’ it) in favour of the West. These are the fifth columnists, all manner of totalitarian liberals, such as the CIA asset Navalny, who worship the so-called values of the West. Most, however, long ago fled to London, New York and Tel Aviv, with some on the French Riviera or in Malaga. Those who remain in Russia and supported Prigozhin (who is one of them and is typical of their age group) may soon be getting a knock on the door from the FSB, which replaced the KGB, about a matter of treachery. The conflict in the Ukraine is the final nail in their coffin and they know it. They too belong to the past.

The Present

Such is the past. What of the present? As a result of constant Western aggression, President Putin, who came to power at the end of 1999, has over the last generation moved from a position that was rather favourable towards to the West to one that is completely hostile to it. This is no surprise, since the West through its organisations like NATO, the EU and the IMF, only even displayed a predatory Russophobia and since 2014 has declared war on Russia through its Nazified Ukrainian proxy, which it has armed to the teeth as an Anti-Russia, openly stating that its aim is to destroy Russia and kill all Russians. Therefore, as the primary Eurasian power and by far the largest country in the world, Russia has over the last fifteen years been forced to ally itself with others, with China, the most populous country in the world, and with what we may in general call the former Western colonies of the Global South and Global East. This means all Afro-Eurasia and Latin America.

Working in close collaboration with China, the world’s No 1 economy, the Russian Federation, the world’s No 5 economy, belongs to a multipolar world. There is no place here either for Soviet Communists or for post-Soviet oligarchs. How exactly will the recently Russian-founded economic and political organisations expand? Here we are speaking of the EEU (Eurasian Economic Union), the SCO (Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, now including Iran) and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). The latter already has many dozens of applicants, from Afghanistan to Algeria, Egypt to Indonesia, and will probably come to include the whole Non-Western world, including most of Eastern Europe, at present in the increasingly dysfunctional and defunct EU. What will that future BRICS be called? What will its common gold-backed reserve currency (unlike the dollar, which is backed only by debt and a printing press) be called? How will China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the Greater Eurasia Partnership work out?

Many such absolutely vital details have yet to be elaborated in the coming years, but clearly this is where Russia is today – defending the new multipolar world whose founding Russia has initiated and helping to elaborate it because Russia is the principal Eurasian Power. Above we wrote that there is no place here either for Soviet Communists or for post-Soviet oligarchs, but in a multipolar world there is no place either for narrow and sectarian Russian nationalism. And that is a huge problem for the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leading figures have got onto bad terms with almost everyone, losing sympathy and support everywhere. That is no way to conduct yourself in a multipolar world. It seems that the senior administration of the Russian Church is stuck in a narrow and sectarian mindset, painting itself into a very dark corner.

Forward to the Future

The two great Super-Power victors to emerge from 1945 were the white star American Empire and the red star Soviet Empire. As we know, after the fall forty-four years later of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Soviet Empire crumbled. As we can see today, after the fall of the US puppet government in Afghanistan in 2021, it is now the turn of the American Empire to crumble. It too has had its day. In the twentieth century, over a period of seventy-five years, former Orthodox Christian countries fell to atheist Communism, ending in 1991. Former Roman Catholic countries fell to Fascism and that ended in suicide in a bunker in Berlin in 1945. As for former Protestant countries, they fell to Capitalism. Led by the USA and its senile President, with its nearly 32 trillion dollars of unpayable external debt (not to mention internal debt), Capitalism too is now failing.

As we have said, former Roman Catholic countries fell to Fascism until 1945. However, at the Second Vatican Council held under American pressure sixty years ago, they next fell to secularist Protestantism. From then on, the Americans began choosing the popes, most obviously the Polish John-Paul II (they appointed an English-speaking actor, just as later they appointed Zelensky). Official Roman Catholicism is like post-Protestantism now part of the Great Western Reset, and it is unclear what its present elderly and ill pope believes in. Conversely, in the twentieth century formerly Orthodox Christian Russia had fallen to Communism, but that ended in 1991. What replaced Communism? For some it was the apostasy of secularist American Capitalism – the ideology of the oligarchs. For most it is today the multipolar, Eurasian path of President Putin. However, there are others, who want to see Orthodoxy fully restored in a monarchy and a new Tsar.

For now this seems to many to be completely irrelevant and even laughable. However, in 2033, ten years on from now and forty-four years after 1989 (remember Communism emerged victorious in 1945 but lasted only forty-four years), President Putin will be 80 years old – if he lives that long. What and who will replace him? One possible answer is this Orthodox monarchist movement in contemporary Russia, which can be called ‘Forward to the Tsar’. This means the restoration of the People’s Orthodox Monarchy, Tsardom. This implies a prominent future role for the Russian Orthodox Church. This movement has support among a minority and there is a huge question mark as to how much support it has both inside and outside Russia. The problem is that the Church administration is severely compromised by the present.

Future Restoration Compromised

The fact is that several senior administrators of the Russian Orthodox Church (not ordinary clergy, monastics and people, who in the past were martyred in their millions and who in the present remain faithful to the memory of those martyrs) have long compromised themselves with the State authorities. Not to the extent of changing the Faith, but to the extent that they have collaborated with State authorities. This is the error of what in Protestant history is called ‘erastianism’, the unprincipled collaboration with the State (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Thomas_Erastus). The most obvious Russian examples up until early 1917 were in seventeenth century Russia, when many senior Church administrators took part in the State persecution of Old Ritualists, and then at the Russian February Revolution, when they abruptly renounced their oath of faithfulness to the Tsar in favour of Kerensky. They were swimming with the tide.

Then, later in the twentieth century, came another example with ‘Sergianism’, named after the Soviet Metropolitan and then Patriarch Sergius (+ 1944). Here supposed churchmen collaborated with the Soviet atheist State, making themselves into ‘Orthodox atheists’, holding to a rite without any Christian content, to the scandal of the faithful. And after the collapse of Soviet Communism, some such senior ‘churchmen’ promptly made themselves into mini-oligarchs, simply copying the example of secular post-Soviet oligarchs. As a result of their yet again swimming with the tide, ‘the Church’ understandably came to be perceived by the masses as a mere Business, a money-making institution, exploiting the zeal of sincere priests and the superstitious and sectarian desire for ritualistic magic of the by then baptised but still unChurched post-Soviet masses. As a result, the huge problems of post-Soviet Russia, alcoholism, abortion, divorce, very low demographics, have not been solved.  The masses do not attend Church or follow Her ways. Simply because they are not led by example. ‘Why should I bother? The senior ones don’t’.

Apart from the corruption of several senior Church administrators, there is also the threefold problem of their homosexuality, their work as minders and assets for secret services (mainly FSB, but also CIA), and their compromises with the Vatican. Curiously, these three problems often go together. It is exactly the same liberalism, homosexuality and collaboration with spies as in the seventeenth century, for example, the notorious Paisios Ligarides, ‘Orthodox’ bishop and Roman Catholic cardinal, business fraudster who sold indulgences and spy, traitor and intriguer, schismatic and sodomite. (https://www.historytoday.com/archive/ strange-case-paisios-ligarides). These liberal, homosexual, secret agent ‘Sergianists’, lovers of the State-Church, quite naturally love the Vatican Church-State. As they say, ‘birds of a feather flock together’.

The Third Rome or The Second Jerusalem?

The Russian Orthodox Church is still cruelly suffering from Soviet-style centralisation – Communists relied on central planning. As a result, the Church has largely ceased to be multinational. This centralisation is key to understanding why so many believing Ukrainians rejected the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church, preferring their own Ukrainian Orthodox Church, sometimes preferring Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Protestant sects, and even atheist secularism. However, the Russian Church has as a result of nationalism lost not only the territory of the Ukraine to its jurisdiction, but also Latvia and is now rapidly losing Moldova (to the Romanian Church) and Lithuania as well as many, many other countries. The Russian Church is then going in precisely the opposite direction to the multipolar President Putin.

A nationalist, and not multinational, multipolar Russian Church, an inward-looking, for-Russians-only ghetto, attracts neither Ukrainians, nor anyone else. Such a Church does not export outside Russia. Moreover, many faithful priests have in recent years been defrocked by the Russian Church merely for protecting their church properties and flocks from corrupt and predatory oligarchic bishops, or simply for expressing different political viewpoints from senior figures. To put it mildly, this does nothing for the reputation of the Church. The absurd and over the top ‘defrocking’ of faithful clergy, as practised by Russian Church administrators all over the world, have made those same administrators the laughing-stock of the world. In other words, nationalist sectarianism repels all Russian Orthodox who are of Non-Russian ethnicity from the Russian Church. And that is some 35% of the whole.

After the fall of the Second Rome, Constantinople, in 1453, the concept of Moscow the Third Rome came to Russia and was first clearly formulated in 1492. However, being Rome is automatically a temptation. The First, Second and Third Romes all fell because power went to their heads. The Gospel says nothing positive of Rome. Salvation came not through Rome, but through the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, which took place not in Rome, but in Jerusalem. Let us stop speaking of a Third Rome. It would be more helpful to speak of a Second Jerusalem. This is why we some time ago suggested that the Russian Orthodox Church administration should change its name from the Soviet-invented ‘Patriarchate of Moscow (MP in Russian)’ to the ‘Patriarchate of New Jerusalem’ (NP in Russian) and move to headquarters in the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow.

Conclusion: The Cleansing of the Russian Orthodox Church

It is clear that Russia and its Church are far from ready to bring forth an Orthodox Tsar even ten years from now. Of course, a lot could happen within future years – nobody predicted the present conflict in the Ukraine between the USA and its vassals on the one hand and Russia on the other hand. The conflict in the Ukraine is clearly a historic turning-point. It could lead to a great cleansing of Russian society and also to the cleansing of its Church. After all, you have to be worthy of a Tsar. The Russian Orthodox Church I grew up in was a Church of Saints, of New Martyrs and Confessors, a Persecuted Church and not a Persecuting Church, the Church of the New Jerusalem, not of Soviet or post-Soviet Moscow. It can still (just) survive as a multinational Church, but only as a decentralised Family of Russian-founded Autocephalous and Autonomous Churches reflecting the broader Family of the sixteen multinational Local Orthodox Churches. Otherwise, it will just slip into sectarian and nationalistic irrelevance.

If the faithful of the Russian Orthodox Church should by some miracle bring forth a Tsar, He will first cleanse its administration of spiritual corruption and nationalist centralisation and so serve the whole multinational Confederation of the fifteen other Local Orthodox Churches. A cleansed Russian Orthodox Church would be a Godsent opportunity to witness to Christ amid the spiritual, moral and financial bankruptcy of the Western world, now led by a senile old man, appointed as puppet by business interests in Washington. In Europe new national-oriented governments have already come to power in Hungary, Italy and Finland. Now France has burned, increasing the popularity of the anti-EU National Party of Le Pen. Germany is in recession and the AdF (the German equivalent of Le Pen’s National Party) is ever more popular. As for the now bankrupt and freedom-hating UK, anti-EU brexiteers see their former leader, Farage, about to be exiled from his native land by the corrupt British Establishment. In a world like this, where populist patriots are making elitist globalists tremble, anything is possible.

St Alban’s Day, 5 July 2023