Category Archives: Dewesternisation

Reconstruction Begins (1914-2014)

1914 – 1939 – 1964 – 1989 – 2014. The hundred-year nightmare of four generations of decivilisation is coming to an end. The generational change is becoming apparent and the cycle of historical injustices is being broken. True, we are now witnessing only the first timid signs of this transformation, but there is the promise of much more to come. After the recent expression of the free choice of the people of the Crimea, we are now witnesses to a historic moment throughout the Russian Federation and indeed throughout the Eurasian Union. The attempt to westernise, that is, to secularise, Christian Russia by violence, that which began 100 years ago in 1914 by dragging the then Russian Empire into the contagion of a decivilising Western imperialistic war, has failed.

The attempt to destroy the millennial underlying belief system which held together the East Slav and other peoples of the Russian Empire had begun with the influx of Western materialism among the upper classes long before 1914. What was new in 1914 was the spread of Western materialist ideology in a most extreme form. First, from 1914 a foreign invasion (as in 1812 and 1854) led to weakness. However, this time the weakness became so great that in 1917, just as the Russian Empire was on the brink of victory, it led to the overthrow of the legitimate government by upper-class traitors, orchestrated from the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg (just as the recent overthrow of the legitimate government in the Ukraine has been orchestrated from the US Embassy in Kiev). lmmediately, after a good many deaths, this ‘bloodless’ revolution took the legitimate ruler captive and pressure was put on the Church to compromise and accept the coup d’etat.

This first coup d’etat was followed some six months later by the seizure of power from these upper-class incompetents and traitors. This second coup d’etat was operated by a group of extreme and violent materialists, the brainwashed heirs of Voltaire, Darwin and Nietzsche, imported into Russia through and by Germany in a train (not sealed, as the myth would have it). lmmediately, the Church, which had always supplied the belief-system of the Russian Lands, came under bloody and unheard of persecution and the former ruler and his family were slaughtered. The materialists abolished the Russian Empire and founded the Soviet Union. There followed a generation of the most violent persecution, sweeping away millions of innocent lives, including 600 bishops, nearly 200,000 priests, monks and nuns and millions of faithful Christians. Mass shootings, artificial famine in Russia and the Ukraine to enforce collectivisation (on the model of the ‘Enclosures’ in England and the ‘Clearances’ in Scotland), torture chambers and concentration camps were the rule of the day. The Western world, birthplace of the ideology behind this holocaust, was mainly silent and eagerly traded with the new country.

This generation of violence ended in 1941, when the contagion that had yet again started in Western Europe, this time in 1939, also spread to the Soviet Union with yet another invasion, the fourth bout of anti-Russian Western imperialism in the five generations since 1812. On the feast-day of All the Saints of the Russian Lands, expansionist Nazi Germany invaded the former Russian Empire, causing 27 million mainly civilian victims, the greatest holocaust and genocide known to the history of humanity. However, it was also this holocaust that began to bring the new rulers of the Soviet Union to their senses. lt was a very slow and extremely painful process that lasted two generations and although direct persecution of the Church more or less ceased, indirect persecution continued most viciously. However, during that period, most stopped believing in atheism – when they had believed in it at all – and even their atheist rulers began to realise that their ideology was bankrupt.

It was in 1989, exactly two generations after the Second European War of 1939, that the signs of imminent collapse became obvious. This culminated in 1991, exactly two generations after the most recent Western invasion of the Soviet Union, that the atheist regime collapsed and the country fell apart. The West was triumphant and now, having divided, it tried to rule through its present ideology. So there began that disastrous period when Western materialism, now in its liberal consumerist form of individualist egoism, spread anarchically into the newly divided countries of the old Soviet Union. The spiritual and so moral decivilisation of the West took over. There was a decade of shame, when capitalist oligarchs (the old nomenklatura, the new aristocracy) stole the public assets and the poor were created. ABCDE – alcoholism, abortion, corruption, drugs and emigration – prevailed. Many of the best left, many of the worst seized assets and power. Only in recent years have we begun to see light, culminating now in the freedom and return home of the Crimea.

Four generations, one hundred years, since the attempt to destroy the Russian Orthodox world began in 1914, its geographical reunion has started. Christianity, in its original form and not in the apostate and compromised forms of the second millennium, is rising up against the whole tide of atheist secularism that seized power in Saint Petersburg in 1917 and in Kiev in 2014. lf those who are apostates and those who are compromised do not wish to join this movement, they are free not to do so. Thus, if the Roman Catholics of former Poland, now the far west of the Ukraine, wish to leave the Ukraine for the Poland of the secularist and bankrupt EU, let them do so, taking their Galicia with them. But let them leave the rest of the Ukraine, the other 80%, alone. As regards the rest of the smaller and weaker Orthodox Christian world in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it can now look to the Russian Orthodox Church to lead it away from the mess of pottage of the European Union and the USA, back to Orthodox Christian roots and the free and uncompromised calendar and practices of the Orthodox Tradition in the coming Inter-Orthodox Council. The Restoration, Reconstitution and Reconstruction of the world that was lost in 1914 are in the air. Our vision is clear.

Outposts of the Empire: A Brief Catechism of the Christian Resistance Movement

1. Question: It is said by the atheist globalists and secularist indifferentists that there is only One God. How do Orthodox Christians respond to this statement?

1. Answer: There is indeed only One God. And as a result of this fact all members of the Church of God, all Orthodox Christians, are different from others.

2. Question: How are we Christians different from Buddhists?

2. Answer: We are different from Buddhists, for they do not believe in any god, they worship a dead Indian prince, the Buddha.

3. Question: How are we Christians different from Hindus?

3. Answer: We are different from Hindus, for they worship thousands of mythical gods or demons, for they do not know the One God.

4. Question: How are we Christians different from Jews and Muslims?

4. Answer: We are different from Jews and Muslims for they only have their own partial understanding of the Old Testament – an anthropomorphic Old Testament god, the god of vengeance and hatred – not the real Old Testament God, who is made completely known in the New Testament. Rejecting the Revelation of the New Testament, they do not know that God is Love and Forgiveness, as expressed in the unique revelation of the Holy Trinity, Which is the Revelation that God is Love.

5. Question: How are we Christians different from Roman Catholics?

5. Answer: We are different from Roman Catholics, for they secularised the Holy Trinity, blasphemously replacing God with a mere man, an earthly substitute and replacement, a ‘Vicar of God’, who could, for instance, issue infallible decrees to massacre, for Roman Catholicism asserts that the Holy Spirit proceeds from him.

6. Question: How are we Christians different from Protestants?

6. Answer: We are different from Protestants for they replaced the Holy Trinity with themselves, rejecting man made in the image of God and instead making God in the image of each man, each making their own manmade ‘church’ according to their own imagination, this creating today’s secularist culture of egoism, the ‘iChurch’.

7. Question: How are we Christians different from Western secularists?

7. Answer: We are different from Western secularists, for they have replaced God with Gold, Materialism and the worship of the Holy Dollar. This is idolatry.

8. Question: So Who is the One God?

8. Answer: There is indeed only one God and He is the God of the Orthodox Church and Orthodox Christianity.

9. Question: What today is the main enemy of the Church of God, Orthodox Christianity?

9. Answer: Today, and for a thousand years already, the main enemy of the Church, of the Orthosphere, of the Eurasian Christian Empire, is Western secularism. Firstly calling itself Roman Catholicism, its ‘crusaders’ filled Jerusalem with blood, sacked the Eurasian Christian Capital of New Rome and then sank their greedy claws into Russia through more ‘crusading’ knights. Secondly, in part receiving the name of Protestantism, it set about secularising and nationalising the Churches of Christ through political meddling, finally bringing about the Western materialist Revolution of 1917. Thirdly, in its ultimate secularist form of modern Western atheism bent on world hegemony, it is set on destroying the final centre of resistance to its worldwide evil and the reign of Antichrist it wishes to establish by annihilating the reviving force of the Orthosphere, centred in what for the moment is called the Russian Federation.

10. Question: What specific forms of attack on the Church does Western secularism take?

10. Answer: Its attack takes a two-pronged form, the ancient pagan Roman prongs of divide and rule.

11. Question: How does attack by ‘Divide’ work?

11. Answer: Secularism’s first form of attack – ‘Divide’ – works through those who have a conservative, but not Traditional, mentality. ‘Divide’ takes two different approaches. This can take the form of nationalism and nationalistic division. The nationalist attack conditions its victims to believe that the most important thing in Church life is not Christ and so Unity, but their nation, in other words, that being Greek, Russian, Romanian, Serb etc, is the most important thing of all. But the nation is an attachment to the world, a form of worldliness, and to put any nation above the Church is idolatry. This attack can also take the form of ghettoisation, conditioning its believers to divide themselves from others, for some obscure reason, whether of language (converts), calendar (new calendarism or old calendarism), or dogmatisation of personal opinions regarding, for example, the toll houses or the interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Whether nationalists or ghettoists, the victims of ‘Divide’ are all people who cannot see the wood for the trees and divide themselves from the rest of the Church, this weakening her collective witness and also making their tiny sects and subgroups irrelevant.

12. Question: How does attack by ‘Rule’ work?

12. Answer: Secularism’s second form of attack – ‘Rule’ – works through those who have a liberal, but not Traditional, mentality. It involves substituting ‘Halfodoxy’ for Orthodoxy, using liberalism, modernism, renovationism and ecumenism to secularise Orthodoxy. Halfodoxy is used by the American or Western Empire, centred in the USA but with a very powerful tentacle in its puppet EU, to attack continually the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Orthodox world through the temptation of money. This means bribing those areas of the Orthosphere that are on the fringes of Eurasia Christendom, always its weakest and poorest parts, whether in Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, the Middle East, the Western Diaspora, Romania, Bulgaria, or more recently in Serbia, Georgia, Syria and the Ukraine. By creating Halfodoxy, the only form of the Church beloved of, not feared by but courted by and also mocked by, secularists, secularism can rule. This is because Halfodoxy is spiritually neutered and castrated, a balkanised toy, a petty nationalistic and provincial ethnic plaything of secularism, with no more spiritual force than pathetic Uniatism, the tiniest and most mocked provincial branch of secularist Roman Catholicism.

13. Question: How does Orthodoxy fight back against Secularism and its ‘Divide and Rule’, its dividing into sectarian conservative ghettos and ruling over liberal ‘Halfodoxy’?

13. Answer: We fight back with the fullness of the Tradition, with Patristic Orthodoxy, Spiritual and Incarnational Sovereignty and Orthodox International Identity. We fight back by striving to restore our Orthodox Empire, avoiding nationalistic or ghettoistic dividing and ruling by the secularists through Halfodoxy.

14. Question: Who is the Head of the Orthodox Empire?

14. Answer: Christ.

15. Question: Why do we at present have no earthly head of the Orthodox Empire?

15. Answer: Because Orthodox in Russia fell to the apostasy of Western secularism and murdered the last earthly head of the Orthosphere. Until we have all repented for this, we will be unworthy to have a new earthly head, unworthy of the Final Restoration.

16. Question: What is the role in this process of Final Restoration of our monasteries and parishes in the Diaspora?

16. Answer: We in the Diaspora are outposts of the Eurasian Christian Empire, oases, islands and missions of the Orthosphere, embassies of spiritual resistance to Antichrist, spokespeople for our Christian civilisational values against atheist Western secularism. Our role is to gather together all the spiritually vital forces in these last times, to save and convert whatever we can for Christ and His Holy Orthodox Church from the tide of atheist Western secularism.

The Gathering of the Nations

Fear not, for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west.

Isaiah 43, 5

What is astonishing to the still loyal and uncompromised Orthodox heart and mind is not that the Western world lovingly cherishes its illogical prejudice that the Russian Orthodox Church is wild, backward and lacking in culture, as it so clearly expressed in local media coverage of the 2006 Sourozh schism. What is astonishing is rather that the Western world lovingly cherishes Antichrist and unstintingly and at every turn consistently advances his cause. For his primary aim is the destruction of the integrity of the Orthodox Church, a cause already advanced by the venality of some in many smaller Local Churches outside the canonical territory of Rus, and which he is desperately trying to advance inside that territory, especially on its outer fringes, using as his tools the madcap schemes of his Western and Westernised dupes.

What the Western world does not understand here is that the downfall of Orthodoxy would lead automatically to the last stage of its own spiritual and so cultural suicide, followed by the eradication of all Christian Faith universally. This is because the Western world, like the rest of the world, is wholly dependent on the rays of light that shine, as if from the Sun, from the Orthodox Church, the One and Only Church, the One and Only Spiritual Sun.

The Western world has long been enslaved to Antichrist, worst of all, without even noticing it. This is the most perilous of states because it indicates total self-delusion. This is the self-delusion of him who says ‘the devil does not exist’, so proving not only that the devil does exist, but also that he is his main servant. The destruction of Russian Orthodoxy, attempted, but by not attained by the Western world from 1917 on, would mean that the forces engulfing it would then engulf the Western world and the rest. Russian Orthodoxy sees the fate of the Western world in its latest foolish outburst of short-sighted self-destructiveness, called consumerism, and knows that thus it dooms itself to destruction – unless it repents before the end, so redeeming itself from its repeated sinful attempts to destroy Sovereign and Imperial Rus since 1917.

If this repentance is weighty enough, then there is still even the chance before the end of gathering together the remnants of all the nations, Orthodox, heterodox and even pagan, and bringing them under the spiritual reign of a restored Sovereign and Imperial Rus. If not, then we will be forced to take refuge, fleeing ‘into the mountains’ from the floods of iniquity and the tides of destruction, our last hope remaining only in the Second Coming.

The Second Generation of our Revolution Begins: 1989-2014

A new survey by the independent Levada Centre in Russia shows that the proportion of the population of the Russian Federation identifying themselves as Orthodox Christians has risen by 400% in the past 24 years. The poll of 1,603 people found that 68% said that they were Orthodox Christians, up from 17% in 1989. The proportion of Muslims has also risen from about 1% in 1991 to 7% today. The number of Russian Catholics and Protestants remained roughly the same, at about 1%. 19%, stated that they were not religious, compared to 75% in 1989, when atheism was still the official State ideology. However, only 4% say that they attended services once a week and only 8% said that they took communion a few times a year.

Levada ran the poll on 15-18 November 2013 in 130 cities, towns, and villages across the Russian Federation and does not include the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the 58 other countries in the world which spiritually belong to Rus. The poll shows how far Russia has come in one generation, but also how very far there is still to go: The spiritual revolution has only just begun.

24 December 2013

RIA-Novosti

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131224/185903098/Orthodox-Christian-Belief-Rises-among-Russians–Poll.html

Against Western Elitism: Not Against Western People

Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.

(Genesis 11, 4)

Introduction

To be opposed to or to dislike any particular people as a whole is defined as racial prejudice, since nobody can know a whole people. Thus, ‘anti-Semitism’, now usually defined as hatred of Jews, is racist. In the last century millions of Jews were slaughtered by anti-Semites in Western Europe. On the other hand, anti-Zionism is not racist; many devout Jews are anti-Zionists and Zionism was long ago condemned as racism by the United Nations. This is because Zionism is a political belief that Jews are a people superior, ‘exceptional’, to others. Similarly, to be opposed to Western people is racial prejudice; but to be opposed to Western elitism, the racist belief that Western people and values are superior to others, is not racist.

Indeed, Western peoples have always been the first victims of Western elitism, ever since it was developed as an ideology in the eleventh century. First to suffer were Western people in Sicily, then in England, Wales and soon after in Scotland and Ireland. Only after this came the oppression, by Western elitism, of Non-Western peoples. The first of these suffered at the very end of that same eleventh century. These were Jews in Western Europe and Muslims in the Middle East. After them, and throughout the second millennium, came new victims – in Africa and Asia, in the Americas and Australasia, in India and China. Our question then is twofold: What precisely is Western elitism and how should we react to it?

Western Elitism and Opposition to it

Western elitism is the result of a debased or secularised religious ideology. This developed firstly into Roman Catholicism, secondly into Protestantism, which withdrew religion from the public domain, promoting morality at home and secularism in public, and finally into atheist secularism. Western elitism founded a humanistic culture that is dehumanised because it is heartless and irreligious. It is secularist, materialistic, mechanical, idolatrous, acquisitive, individualist, rationalistic, intellect-bound, exploitative, capitalist, usury-bound, globalist. It has only a truncated, discursive, rationalistic and atheistic way of thinking. With only superior science and technology, it has cleverness, but no wisdom.

Western elitism thinks it is universal and looks on others as irrational, backward and superstitious. It has brought forth a way of life that is cold, calculating, soulless, faithless, rootless, immoral, mindless, cowardly, philistine, shallow, superficial, trivial, banal, artificial, frivolous, selfish, greedy, hedonistic, effete, fashion-addicted, corrupt, decadent, degenerate, promiscuous and money-grubbing. It is the essence of spiritual mediocrity and moral emptiness and has no sense of destiny, creative depth, ideals or lofty ambition. It has commerce, comfort and amoral pleasure, an idolatrous faith in its own creation, but not faith in the Creator. Godless, it has become proud, arrogant and full of hubris.

Western elitism, expressed in imperialism and colonialism, now called globalisation, has created many perverted reactions, ironically conditioned by forms of Western elitism such as Marxism. These reactions see the world in black and white, are violent, fundamentalist, terroristic and nationalistic. They regard not just Western elitism but all Western people as savage and barbarous. Such perversity defines the suicide bombers (kamikaze) of Shintoism, Hinduism and Islamism. The destruction by Islamist terrorists of the Twin Towers and mass murder of people of all races and all creeds working for global capitalism in the Capital of the American Empire is the most classic case of such anti-Western terrorism.

Conclusion

There is no justification for a racially, nationally or religiously exclusive attitude to the Western world, especially one involving violence and terrorism. Discerning opposition to the West is valid, never terrorism. Moreover, opposition is to be directed at Western elitism, not at victimised Western people, and opposition must be guided by Faith. Faith tells us that there is not only discursive, intellectual thought, but also non-discursive, noetic thought, the thoughts of the soul. Faith tells us that experience of reality is more important than mere rationalism, that the wisdom of a simple and pure heart and spiritual heroism are far mightier than any technology, that repentance is required for thinking that we are mightier than God.

Western elitism is not a civilisation because it has lost its spiritual roots and so a unified spiritual culture. It is without Faith or Tradition. It is neither authentic, nor profound, having no spiritual values or ambition to seek salvation and Paradise. The contemporary spiritually and morally aimless West needs an inclusive world view and way of life based on its own Orthodox Christian roots. This world view is noble, integral, holistic, organic, it has historical tradition, spiritual depth and health and understands inevitable suffering and death. Today’s Western world, dominated by Western elitism and its illusory technology, is called on to reverse history by repentance, returning to its roots in the Faith and the Tradition.

On Recovering the Lost Provinces of Western Europe

In the fifth century the westernmost provinces of Europe were lost by the Christian Empire to barbarian Germanic invaders. However, in the sixth century St Justinian the Great was Emperor in the Christian capital in New Rome from 527 to 565. The last Roman Emperor to speak Latin as a first language, Justinian sought ‘renovatio imperii’ or the restoration of the Empire by recovering the lost western provinces. This ambition was expressed by reconquering the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa as well as the Ostrogothic Kingdom, and restoring Dalmatia, Sicily, Italy and Rome to the Empire after more than half a century of barbarian control. His forces then reclaimed most of southern Iberia, establishing the province of Spania. Unfortunately, this recovery was to be all too short-lived

At the end of the sixth century, seeing that physical recovery was impossible, in Old Rome, itself provincialised, Pope Gregory the Great set about the spiritual recovery of the provinces, starting with Britain. This recovery succeeded and spread, but was fragile. Already towards the end of the eighth century the Germanic leader Charlemagne had changed the Creed and fallen into iconoclasm. Although he soon died, in the mid-eleventh century the Germanic iconoclasts not only returned to power, but took over the Roman see, creating the definitive Schism of 1054. No help could come from those who had remained faithful in New Rome, so oppressed were they, and indeed in 1204 the Christian capital was sacked by the barbarians, finally falling in 1453, its leaders having compromised themselves with the barbarians.

At this, the task of the spiritual recovery of the lost Western provinces fell to small and oppressed Russia as the only free country in the still Christian world. It, however, was faced with the hostility of the rulers of Western Europe and it was not until the nineteenth century that Russia was able to begin to preach the Christian Faith to the captive peoples of the Western provinces. However, the leaders of Western Europe became even more aggressive and invaded Russia in 1812, 1854 and again in 1914. This last invasion led to the fall of Christianity there in 1917, which came about through the treachery of the westernised upper classes, who betrayed their own ruler. In 1941 Western countries again invaded now fallen Russia, but with the sobering result that it began a fifty-year process of return to Christianity.

It is since 1991 then that Russia has been undergoing a long period of regeneration, painfully striving to re-establish at least something of Christianity. Although this process is far from complete, it provides hope that the spiritually sensitive in the lost Western provinces can return to the Church of Christ, especially if Russia is regenerated in full. This return can neither be on the basis of an uninteresting nationalistic form of Russian Christianity, nor on the basis of a minimal and opportunistically compromised form of Russian Christianity, as among some in North America, Paris, Finland and Estonia. It can only be on the basis of the maximal Christianity, the fullness of Orthodoxy. In this way, the lost provinces of Western Europe, including our own East of England province, can reintegrate the Church of God.

On the Importance of Sobriety (2)

Edited E-mail Correspondence Following the Questions and Answers of 17 September

Q: In your answers in the correspondence in ‘On the Importance of Sobriety’ (17 September) you seemed to be defending ROCOR as a Church of moderation, which is why the extreme Greek and convert old calendarists left it between 1986 and 2007. But surely there were extremists among the Russians in ROCOR, for example, people who actually seriously believed that there was no grace in the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church? And they did not leave in 1986.

A: On the ROCOR side I knew of only two Russians (admittedly very senior figures) who asserted that the Patriarchal part of the Russian Orthodox Church had no grace. But I met hundreds, if not thousands, of ordinary ROCOR clergy and laity who believed otherwise, freely gave the sacraments to anyone from Russia and indeed were scandalised by such an absurd thought of gracelessness. So let us look at all this in proportion. You will always find a few extremists in any group of human-beings, but that does not mean that the vast majority are extremists. By definition they are not.

However, it is also true that a few members of ROCOR at that time (I am speaking about the Cold War period before 1991) appeared to be more interested in anti-Communism than in Christianity. However, the members of that generation have either died out or else have left ROCOR since 1991. The problem for them after the fall of Communism was that they no longer had any motivation to be active in Church life. You cannot be anti-Communist when Communism is no more. They had lost their raison d’etre, and so they gradually disappeared from Church life. This was most regrettable for them, but on a human level it was a great relief to us because they had put us ordinary ROCOR laity and clergy under pressure, trying to politicise the Church, which we resisted.

And I would like to add to all this very important qualification. Those few who previously claimed that there was no grace in the Patriarchate after 1991 received several clergy from it without ordaining them, let alone baptising them! And they gave the sacraments to Patriarchal laypeople without dreaming of baptising them. So it had all been empty words, rhetoric, political propaganda and not actions. In reality, they full well knew that the Patriarchate preserved apostolic succession. They rejected their own absurdity, which had only ever been a purely political ploy. I seriously think that the ludicrous concept of a graceless Church inside Russia may even have been invented by the CIA. It is simply not theological, but purely secular.

Q: You have said before and also in ‘On the Importance of Sobriety’ that all Russian Orthodox parishes outside Russia will eventually come under ROCOR administration. But why should not all, including ROCOR ones, come under the administration of the Church inside Russia instead?

A: There are three reasons why not. First of all, the agreement of 2007 was crystal clear: all parishes outside Russia will come under ROCOR, all parishes inside Russia will come under the Church inside Russia. Secondly, there is the name, ROCOR. It is only logical: only ROCOR is the Church Outside Russia, it is absurd to have parishes outside Russia that belong to the Church inside Russia. It is literally inside out or, if you prefer, outside in.

However, there is a third and moral reason. During the Cold War period (I mean, after 1945 and until well after 1991) the Church inside Russia was under KGB administration and there appeared outside Russia very many unworthy representatives of the Patriarchal Church, at best Soviet bureaucrats, at worst liars and renovationists, politically or morally compromised or just plain corrupt. (The notable exception was Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) of Brussels). And I am afraid that the Church inside Russia lost all the trust of the world outside Russia at that time. In a word, it shot itself in the foot and ever since it has had to pay the price for the distrust that it created.

As a result, even today, I cannot think of a single person in ROCOR who would go under the Patriarchal administration outside Russia. Even today, virtually the only people under the Patriarchate outside Russia are those who have come out of the former Soviet Union over the last 20 years

I mentioned Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) of Brussels as an exception, but it must also be said that his integrity was wasted, as that of other sincere people. He had the nominal title of Archbishop, but his diocese consisted of little more than two priests, two deacons and about a dozen laypeople. And in general, until 1991, the Patriarchate only had tiny churches outside Russia. Russian Orthodox outside Russia would have nothing to do with a KGB-sponsored organisation. That is not a secret and not a theory. It is simply a fact of history.

An example of such corruption is the case of the late Archbp George (Wagner), who was a victim of it. A priest of the Patriarchate in 1950s Berlin, he was asked by it to become a Soviet spy. To his credit he refused and left for the Paris Jurisdiction. He was just one in a very long series of sincere people who left the Patriarchate because of its corruption. Another even more striking example is the present Metr Hilarion of ROCOR, who was brought up in the Patriarchate in Canada and left it when he realised that it was not free.

And that was all a great loss of talent for the Patriarchate. But it was their own fault; they did it to themselves. In general, the Patriarchate, whether in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, London or New York, lost many people, the best friends of Orthodox Russia in the West, because of its unworthy representatives, with their political and moral compromises and corrupt personality cults. It lost the best friends of Orthodox Russia precisely because its representatives were not the best friends of Orthodox Russia. This is why ROCOR is an autonomous part of the Russian Church. If ever, things go badly in Russia again – as they could, the situation is still relatively fragile – ROCOR will retain its independence. That is very important.

Fortunately, virtually all such unworthy representatives had died out before the reconciliation of 2007, sometimes well before. Now we are waiting for a new generation. The Patriarchate outside Russia has been expanding with the new emigration. We believe that the majority of the new representatives are and will be more worthy, will at least be up to the standard of ROCOR and so prepare the Patriarchal churches outside Russia for their transfer to ROCOR.

Q: Do you feel bitter about this waste during the Cold War due to the captivity of the Patriarchate at that time?

A: Of course not! A Christian cannot feel bitter because he believes in Divine Providence, the ever-present, intervening love of God. This makes all mistakes into opportunities, all negatives into positives.

Q: What is your view of the murder of Fr Pavel Adelheim in Pskov last August

A: On average one priest a year is murdered in Russia and every murder is a tragedy and a crime, including that of Fr Pavel. I saw a Russian programme about the murder. His matushka appeared and spoke of the tragedy with great dignity.

However, Fr Pavel Adelheim himself was a well-known dissident and controversialist, a marginal figure and in that sense a bit like the late Fr Alexander Men, who is believed by many to have been a Catholic. The latter is a hero to all those who are anti-Orthodox, especially since he asserted that ‘it is better to be a Hare Krishna than to be like Fr Seraphim Rose’. (By the way, under the old regime the London Patriarchal Cathedral on Ennismore Gardens refused to sell his books, just as they refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs; that has changed now). Murder is a tragedy, but it is does not absolve anti-Church views. I am not saying that Fr Pavel was like Fr Alexander Men, he was not pro-Catholic, but nevertheless he was very much a fringe personality. It is very interesting that although deaths like that of the late Orthodox priest Fr Daniel Sisoev are hardly mentioned in the West, Fr Pavel’s was widely reported and by two groups.

The first group was the freemasons of the Russophobic Rue Daru with their Western supporters and the second was the equally Russophobic old calendarists. It is disgraceful that such anti-Russian-Church groups opportunistically and self-justifyingly try and make capital of a tragic murder, which was carried out by a satanist. You cannot justify schism. What such sectarian groups as Rue Daru and old calendarists, two sides of the same coin, do not understand is that the Church is not an exclusive club for those with eccentric views, but it is for all who believe in Christ. The fact that Fr Pavel had peculiar views and was then tragically murdered does not for one moment mean that those views are justified.

Q: Russophobia has been in the international spotlight recently. What would you say about the civil war in Syria and President Putin’s recent intervention that averted US missile attacks?

A: First of all, this is not a civil war. The original legitimate protests against the dictatorial Syrian government were hijacked by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey (all Israeli-backed). 1200 murderers, rapists and bandits were released from Saudi prisons, armed and trained by Western Special Services in camps in the Jordan and Turkey and paid over $1000 dollars a month to murder, maim and cannibalise innocent Syrians. Together with them there are tens of thousands of fanatical foreign mercenaries, Chechens, Tunisians, Libyans and many Muslims from Western countries like Britain, France, Belgium and Germany. (These terrorists, who use chemical weapons in Syria, are the same people who prepare chemical weapons in Somalia). The war in Syria is a war between Syrian patriots on the one hand and foreign-financed traitors and foreign mercenaries on the other hand.

As regards the intervention of President Putin, the man who is so hated by Rue Daru and the old calendarists, what is remarkable is that for the first time, someone has stood up to resist the New World Order, that will lead to the enthronement of Antichrist in the rebuilt Temple on Zion. (Speaking of Russia, called the ‘Heartland’ in geopolitical science, Zbigniew Brzezinski said that the ‘New World Order’ would be built on its ruins). President Putin may even have averted a Third World War and certainly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, unlike President Obama who should be stripped of his.

It was not a billion-peopled China or India or Africa, representing half the population of the planet between them, but Russia that stood up to the New World Order. President Putin has played the role of the Orthodox Tsar, of ‘him who restrains’ (2 Thessalonians 2, 6). This is remarkable on the part of a mere politician. Moreover on 19 September the President went on in his Valdai Speech to explain that the role of Russia is in Orthodoxy and that this is her Christian civilisational role against the secularist and suicidal West which has opted for Sodom.

The West has two great enemies in Russia today. The first is President Putin, the second is Patriarch Kyrill. It will do its utmost to bring them both down, as it has already done.

Q: Why?

A: Because the secularist West knows that if either of them is successful or both of them are successful, they will with time be replaced by even more powerful Orthodox figures in Russia. They will not only resist the New World Order even more successfully, but will actually reverse it, restoring the Russian Orthodox Empire in Eurasia and worldwide Orthodox unity. That will be the end of the Antichristic, unipolar global project, of Orthodox countries eternally indebted and enslaved to the European Union, the end of absurd new calendarism and masonic puppet Orthodox bishops, the beginning of freedom for Orthodoxy in China, financial support for the Orthodox missions in Latin America, Africa and Asia, the building of tens of thousands of churches there and, if God wills and the world lasts long enough, the foundation of new autocephalous Churches. In a word, this will be the great gathering of all Orthodox Christianity before the end.

Q: It is 20 years since the attempted coup of October 1993 in Moscow, with the bombardment of the White House and the Yeltsin era. What are your thoughts?

A: The 1990s were a disgraceful period, when Russia went from Communism to Consumerism, from lies to theft. Russian public assets were stolen by those whom we now call oligarchs through so-called ‘privatisation’. These oligarchs, international criminals, now live in asylum under British government protection in London and elsewhere in the Western world that so adored their stolen billions that so impoverished Russia. This was massive, State-sponsored theft. In the 1990s the West tried to dismember and destroy the Russian Lands, just as it had tried to do under the seven months of the Provisional Government of 1917. It is said that these new Kerenskys, Harvard-educated privatisers, the cowboys of the ‘Wild East’, actually rigged the election of 1996 so that the drunkard Yeltsin could win. It is possible. The CIA has plenty of experience in rigging elections all round the world. In 1917 the decadence lasted seven months; in the 1990s it lasted seven years until the Jubilee Council of August 2000 and the canonisation of the New Martyrs in Moscow.

Q: Some conservative convert Orthodox, especially under the Patriarchate of Antioch in the USA, would perhaps be shocked by your words. They think that privatisation is good. What would you say to them?

A: Conservatism is not the same as the Tradition. To use American vocabulary, neoconservatives or ‘neocons’ (unprincipled Money Tories or economic liberals in Britishspeak) worship God and Mammon against the Gospel. Indeed, monetarism is just another word for Mammon. And even the so-called Paleoconservatives (High Tories, UKIP, noblesse oblige, the Patriarchal) are not the same as Orthodox. Firstly, paleoconservatives have a tendency to racism. Secondly, unlike Orthodox, they have little sense of social justice. (If socialism exists, there are reasons). And thirdly, the paleoconservatives tend to attract a lunatic fringe, people who are obsessed with conspiracy theories, hate the Jews, admire Hitler and other such nonsense

Q: What are your hopes and fears for the revival of the Russian Church in Russia today?

A: We must understand that the revival of the last 25 years, although spectacular, has only just begun. As Patriarch Kyrill said last week, at the present rate it will take 100 years just to build enough churches to catch up with the number of churches that existed in the Russian Empire before the Revolution. Instead of building 1,000 churches a year, over the next ten years 14,000 churches need to be built every year. That is what would be happening if Russia were not nominally Orthodox, but actually Orthodox. Another example: at the Synod in Moscow on 5 October seven new bishops were nominated. That is very good and it should bring the total to more or less 300 bishops. But if Russia and the Church’s canonical territories were actually and not nominally Orthodox, there would be 200 times more bishosp being nominated – 1,400 new bishops. Then any future Inter-Orthodox Conference (falsely called a Pan-Orthodox Council by the Phanariots) would be Orthodox

Q: One last question. Earlier you mentioned Fr Seraphim (Rose). Do you think he will one day be canonised?

A: God makes saints, not men. It may be that one day God will reveal Fr Seraphim to have been a saint. It is quite possible, judging from his life. But, before this, the monastery at Platina will first have to return to ROCOR. That is what Fr Seraphim would have wanted. That would be justice correcting the historic injustice of Platina leaving ROCOR, something carried out after Fr Seraphim’s repose. I would even say that the main impediment to Fr Seraphim’s canonisation is precisely the fact that Platina has not yet returned to ROCOR. Then everything will fall into place.

Q: Would Fr Seraphim have agreed with the reconciliation between ROCOR and the Church inside Russia?

A: Of course, he would. He was a deeply anti-sectarian person, as you can see by the way in which the proud ‘super-correct’ persecuted him in the 1970s. He was a genuine monk who had no pathological complexes, like many of the super-correct converts at that time. He suffered greatly from them, especially when they insisted on being photographed with him – photographs that they now display in their self-justification! ‘Look at me, I’m standing next to Fr Seraphim, I’m a saint’. That is what they proclaim and yet in his lifetime they were his worst enemies. It was the same with St John of Shanghai. Some of his worst persecutors during his lifetime, those who put him on trial, proclaimed after his canonisation how much they had supported him!

Q: When you see what is being introduced in the Western world, what has been called ‘Eurosodom’, are you pessimistic or optimistic about the future

A: It is a strange fact that all empires end in sodomy because they lose faith, they no longer have any self-belief and so they commit suicide. It happened in Ancient Greece and Rome. And today we are seeing not the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but the decline and fall of the Western Empire. It is a tragedy. And it is the duty of Orthodox to try and save the best of Western culture before it disappears altogether under the tidal wave of atheism.

Am I pessimistic or optimistic? True, it is quite possible that only very little of my above hopes for the future restoration of Orthodox Russia will be realised. I have no illusions. But even so, even despite all this, I remain optimistic because, although man proposes, God disposes, and God has already won, ‘trampling down death by death’. The worst that can happen is that we die. And if, I repeat if, we die repentant, and I underline repentant, we will go to Paradise! Who can be a pessimist? Fear not, little flock!

Neo-Hesychasm and the Struggle for Authentic Orthodoxy

Already before the First World War, British Establishment freemasonry in Cyprus, then 65 years ago, in 1948, the US State Department in Constantinople, and then 32 years ago, in 1981, the EEC (now called the EU) in Greece, have all taken part in their conscious Crusade to enslave the Church. They have wanted to create an artificial, politically correct Orthodoxy, acceptable to the secular powerbrokers of this world. This pseudo-Orthodoxy, a lightweight ‘Diet Orthodoxy’, persecuting of piety, Cross-less, fasting-less, comfortable, consumerist and anti-ascetic, is sterilised, diluted, degutted, neutered, castrated and disincarnate.

It is therefore new-calendarised, uniatised, anglicanised, protestantised, modernised, liberalised, finlandised, often beardless and homosexualised, confessionless and repentance-free because of its self-admiring pride, the sense of the sacred and mystery removed together with the iconostasis, and replaced by plastic, steel and chrome, salt that has lost its savour. The Neo-Frankish neo-colonialist process has so far affected some 20% of the Orthodox world, but not the vast majority of the Russian, Serbian and Georgian Churches, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, or parts of the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches and others.

There is conscious resistance to such humanistic modernism and renovationism. The latter have manipulated shallow, spiritually weak, uprooted and so disincarnate, nominally Orthodox intellectuals in the Diaspora in particular, victims of their own pride of mind and vanity. The ascetic alternative to the above Westernised and Western-supported and financed ‘Orthodoxy’, this alternative for which we have fought for most of our lives, comes in the form of the ever-renewed Tradition of the authentic Orthodox Faith – which we may call Neo-Hesychasm. This means the Trinitarian opposition to all of the above, implying:

The continuing recognition of the Fatherhood of authentic monasticism in Church and society; the Sonhood of conscious commitment to the Incarnational, Orthodox civilisational world view and ethos, with its sense of supra-national Orthodox unity (the Patriarch of Moscow taking on the unifying role of the Tsar until the election of the new and coming Tsar, the Patriarch of Constantinople having lost this role in 1453); the Spirithood of an unshakeable commitment to authentic Orthodoxy worldwide, with, implicit in this, the understanding and openness to heterodox to make missionary work among them possible.

Modernism, Post-Modernism and Post-Postmodernism

Modernism is a very old-fashioned concept, dating back to the nineteenth century. The concept passed through artists like Matisse, Gauguin and then Picasso and a whole school of thinkers. However, its culminating point – and also death – came only some fifty years ago in the 1960s, which itself culminated in the youth revolutions of 1968. ‘Modern’ meant anti-Victorian, the rejection of any kind of ‘old’ value, of anything ‘old-fashioned’, regardless of whether it was worthwhile or not. Typical of this culmination of Modernism were the Second Vatican Council, liberalism, feminism, divorce, drug-taking, alcoholism, pornography, abortion, and the collapse of marriage and stable family life. Most of its revolutionary and rebellious advocates have died from a way of life that was full of vice.

A decade later, after the culmination of Modernism, the rejection of any sort of tradition, good or bad, inevitably came the culmination of ‘Post-Modernism’, that is, cynicism, scepticism, disbelief and nihilistic ‘deconstruction’. Although Post-Modernism is also an old concept, its culminating-point could only come after the 1960s in the cynical destructiveness of the period between the 1970s and 1990s. Typical of Post-Modernism are the lack of belief in anything constructive, spiritual emptiness, depression, nothingness, ‘anything goes’, the mocking of heartfelt belief, irony, throwaway products, shallowness, cheapness, passing fads and fashions and superficiality. Most of its faithless and often bitter, disbelieving advocates are now ageing or else are already dead.

The question is, if Post-Modernism comes after Modernism, what comes after Post-Modernism? This is a question that intellectuals have debated for well over a decade and about which they still have not come to any conclusion. This is because of the faithless and spiritually empty nature of Post-Modernism. After a vacuum, anything is possible. And consensus on what makes an epoch cannot be achieved while that epoch is still in its early stages. On the one hand, it is possibly to continue to wallow in the negativism of Post-Modernism and make a cult or delusional consciousness out of it. On the other hand, it is equally possible to reject something as primitive and negative as Post-Modernism with something positive and constructive.

‘Something positive and constructive’. These are words which have little meaning in Western society, which alone has generated both Modernism and Post-Modernism. Interestingly, it may therefore be that the Western world will have to stop being ethnocentric and look outside its self-absorbed culture to find the qualities to regenerate itself. The fact is that ‘something positive and constructive’ can only be built on Faith, which is the very baby that was thrown out together with the bathwater in the Western Modernist 60s and Post-Modernist 70s and after. ‘Post-Postmodernism’ is an awkward name. ‘Metamodernism’ and ‘Trans-Modernism’ have been suggested. They too seem very awkward. Perhaps a single syllable, ‘Faith’, is what is really needed by this disbelieving Western world.

Praying for the Resurrection of Europe

Already in the nineteenth century prophetic Russian writers and thinkers like Khomyakov and Dostoyevsky described Europe as a cemetery, its gardens well-kept, its lawns manicured, its trees pruned, its cleaned tombs and monuments of great artistic beauty, but still a cemetery, where lie the dead of past history. A cemetery, in Latin languages, cimetière, cimitero, cementerio, (from the Greek for ‘to sleep’), in German Friedhof, in Dutch Begraafplaats, in Swedish Kyrkogard, is, literally, a place of sleep, rest and burial, a churchyard. This is the place where are buried dear ancestors, friends and family, whom we visit and pray for. For the only life in a cemetery is that which we bring there.

A cemetery is the image which conveyed the fact that European culture was already in the nineteenth century dying out because it was rejecting the roots of its culture, and cultural roots are always spiritual. In other words, by rejecting the founding spirituality of its civilisation, Orthodox Christianity, whether actively by fighting against it or passively by not resisting its loss, Europe reduces itself to a land of historic monuments and museums, remarkable, outstanding, but not living. Europe, the historically admirable, far Western corner of Eurasia, is to be visited by becameraed tourists and even pilgrims for its past, but it is incapable of generating new culture in the present and future for lack of spiritual roots.

As the decades have passed, we have found the above prophetic image growing ever truer. The culture of death and the death of culture, whether through wars and concentration camps, whether through abortion and euthanasia, have taken over a secularised but also increasingly Islamised, thus polarised Europe, which is intent on its spiritual and so physical suicide. Our Orthodox churches in Europe are ever more like oases amid the contemporary Western culture of death. They are like cemetery chapels, where, as we pray for the resurrection of Europe’s Orthodox past, we bring the only spiritual life. Today, Europe seems no longer to have any self-belief, any fire in its soul – only ashes where once a fire so keenly burned.

Europe had from the outset the choice between Christ and death. At first Europe chose Christ and many centuries ago before the Great Misfortune, the best of Europe in its hermits prayed to Christ, whether from their lonely rock fastnesses in the wild North Atlantic, from Mediterranean islands or Alpen pastures, or from many other lonely places in Europe. But then Europe replaced the Risen One with a single mortal man, a new Ceasar (‘we have no king but Caesar’, they said), and then replaced Him with all mortal men, thus choosing death over life. Thus, the God of Europe was killed and put to sleep in the great European cemetery. Without God, Europe no longer believes in itself and so is intent on self-abolition

After Europe had killed God, it created a vacuum of faith. And where there is a vacuum, the demons rush in, and so, having pronounced its God dead, Europe then began to kill His creation, man, in the tens of millions. But we do not despair, for one day the hermits will return to the North Atlantic, to the Hebrides, to the whole Kingdom of the Isles, and all over Europe, and they will pray again to Christ for resurrection, just as the hermits of Russia in their forest monasteries and caves pray for resurrection. But this will happen only when the Orthodox Christian Empire is restored. For the restoration of the Christian Emperor in Russia will be the restoration of the Christian Empire, even to the uttermost ends of Europe.