Category Archives: Orthodox Unity

Why the Kiev Dictatorship has not been able to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church

https://spzh.media/en/zashhita-very/79475-why-hasnt-the-authorities-banned-the-uoc-yet

Why haven’t the authorities banned the UOC yet?

28 March 14:01
1264

Author: Kirill Aleksandrov

The campaign to ban the UOC has entered a new stage. Journalists are jailed, MPs can be sanctioned, and the West made the first anti-church publication. What’s going on?

After the attack on March 12, 2024, on UOJ journalists and church rights activists by the SBU, it was expected that this would catalyze the adoption of the anti-church bill 8371 banning the UOC (along with the final seizure of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra). With the journalists being silenced and rights activists intimidated and detained, it should be painless to vote to ban the Church, according to the logic of the orchestrators of these events.

However, something went awry. The vote, slated for March 20, 2024, had to be postponed. MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak announced on his Telegram channel that bills were being removed from the agenda altogether. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, many deputies, including those from the presidential faction “Servant of the People”, simply sabotage meetings and do not come to work in the Verkhovna Rada. Secondly, the Rada has accumulated quite a lot of unpopular, controversial, and scandalous bills. As IT specialists say in such cases, applications begin to conflict with each other.

In other words, using administrative resources, you can push through a vote on one scandalous bill, but not on all at once. Therefore, administrative resources have to prioritize bills, while parliamentarians calculate which bill’s vote could cause them more tangible troubles.

As it turned out, Bill 8371 banning the UOC is the biggest trouble, not only to the country as a whole, but also to each individual deputy personally.

Amsterdam’s warning

On March 15, 2024, UOC lawyer Robert Amsterdam wrote a letter to the parliament speaker and members of parliament, not for the first time explaining that bill 8371 is unconstitutional and unlawful, and its adoption will not only tarnish Ukraine’s image as a non-democratic state but also expose the MPs who vote for it to certain packages of Western sanctions. Moreover, this applies not only to the vote in the Verkhovna Rada but also to other persecutions against the UOC: seizures of churches, beatings of believers, and so on.

One of the most well-known sanction packages of this kind is the so-called “Magnitsky List”. But in many countries, there are similar lists that include officials and public figures who violate fundamental human rights. According to R. Amsterdam, these lists include individuals for much less significant human rights violations than those committed against UOC believers in Ukraine.

Amsterdam’s warning caused a very nervous reaction in the Verkhovna Rada, which the lawyer himself described as apoplectic.

This means that the deputies took the warnings seriously and had second thoughts to the effect whether it was worth playing with fire, as sanctions may involve entry bans to EU countries, the USA, asset freezes, and other dismal consequences.

In view of Amsterdam’s warning, an emergency meeting of the Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy was convened in the Verkhovna Rada on March 18, 2024, and they were so outraged by the activities of the American lawyer that they called his warnings threats and decided to complain to the SBU. MP from the party of former President P. Poroshenko’s “European Solidarity” Iryna Herashchenko called the warnings fake, while pressure on deputies – interference in the work of state institutions. She even wondered if sanctions should be imposed on R. Amsterdam.

However, Mrs. Herashchenko did not consider that, firstly, imposing sanctions against human rights defenders for their legitimate human rights activities is akin to authoritarian, not democratic countries. Secondly, by her excessive reaction to the warnings, she (like other MPs) actually indicates that these warnings sound quite serious and authoritative. Well, and thirdly, if, for example, adults warn a child not to put nails in the socket because it will shock them, does it mean pressure on the child and an infringement of their freedom?

They will take a different path

Apparently, Amsterdam did make an impression on the Verkhovna Rada MPs, as the authorities decided to first prepare Western public opinion for the adoption of the anti-church bill 8371, and only then put it to a vote.

The head of the Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy, Mykyta Poturaev, suggested sending a delegation of MPs and representatives of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches to the US to try to explain to the American establishment that violating the right to freedom of conscience is not considered a violation as long as it is directed against the UOC.

One might assume that this attempt will be unsuccessful, since both the US and European countries are perfectly aware of what human rights are and what constitutes their violation. However, there is still a certain hope for success, as it was the Americans who lobbied for the creation of the OCU and subsequently provided it with active support and assistance. Moreover, this support was demonstrated by representatives of both the Republican and Democratic parties. However, in our opinion, American lobbyists for the OCU did not anticipate that it would come to the point of forcible seizures of churches, mass violations of legislation during the re-registration of communities, and now to the prohibition of the UOC at the legislative level.

On March 21, 2024, Ukrainian political analyst Kostiantyn Bondarenko announced on his Telegram channel that the Office of the President had ordered several Western editions to publish articles against the UOC, in defense of the anti-church bill 8371, justifying the persecution of the Church, as well as discrediting lawyer R. Amsterdam and his human rights activities. K. Bondarenko also mentioned the considerable budget for such an order – over $2.5 million in March and April 2024.

No sooner said than done – and on March 22, 2024, the first customized article appeared in The Wall Street Journal titled “Is Religious Liberty ‘Under Attack’ in Ukraine?” Its author, a certain Jillian Kay Melchior, believes that liberty is not under attack in Ukraine, but “the country faces a dilemma in how to deal with an Orthodox church controlled by Russia” and with R. Amsterdam, who spreads fakes about persecution of the Church.

The text of the article itself gives the impression that it was written by poorly talented authors in Ukraine, offering blunt narratives and unsubstantiated claims. If Jillian Melchior is indeed an American journalist, why didn’t she even bother to edit the following paragraph: “Five years ago, the Patriarch of Constantinople recognized the fully independent, self-governing Orthodox Church of Ukraine. But the ROC and the UOC-MP refuse to recognize the OCU”?

Firstly, there is no UOC-MP in nature (this is an invention of the Church’s internal Ukrainian enemies), there is only the UOC. Secondly, the right to recognize or not recognize the decisions of the Patriarch of Constantinople is part of religious freedom, the right to freedom of belief.

Any community, any believer can recognise or not recognise the decisions of the Patriarch of Constantinople, just like any other religious leader, which is their constitutional right.

The content of the article contains so many unsubstantiated statements and accusations that there will be a significant workload for lawyers and human rights defenders to hold the publication accountable for causing moral harm and baseless discredit. For instance, it claims that the UOC-MP provided material support for Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the East of Ukraine in 2014. Where is the evidence? For such a statement is definitely hazardous for one’s reputation.

In the United States, as in other developed countries, there is a clear distinction between the actions of individuals and the actions of organizations. In other words, we speak about individual responsibility vs. collective responsibility. The fact that individual believers and even priests of the UOC supported Russia’s aggression does not in any way prove the guilt of the entire Church.

In this regard, we cannot ignore the recent statement by the head of the SBU, V. Maliuk. On March 26, 2024, in an interview with “Facts ICTV”, he stated that to date, the court has sentenced 23 clergymen. And a total of 37 suspicions have been announced to representatives of the UOC clergy, with more than 80 criminal cases opened. Let’s reiterate it: 23 convictions! And now let’s compare this figure with the numbers of traitors in the SBU itself. Back in 2016, the SBU published on its website a list of its former employees who defected to Russia, which consisted of 1391 (!) people, including one major general and 47 colonels.

Simon Shuster in his book “Showman” about Volodymyr Zelensky quotes former Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov, who said that at the beginning of the full-scale war, the most desertions among the security forces were in the SBU. The exact number was not given, but it was said that “their departure depleted the ranks of the SBU.” So where are the bills to ban the SBU? Where are the accusations of undermining national security? Where are the calls to hold the entire SBU accountable for the actions of these employees?

It can be assumed that such an experienced lawyer as R. Amsterdam will certainly use these facts as arguments in support of his position.

Actions in defense of the UOC

Supporters of the UOC are also not sitting idly by, but taking vigorous actions to defend their Church. On March 26, 2024, the United Nations Ukraine website published a report from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights “On the Human Rights Situation in Ukraine”. It asserts that over the past three months, “clergymen and parishioners of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church continued to experience intimidation.”

The report describes several cases of violent seizure of temples. On the same day, an interview with the UOC lawyer, Archpriest Nikita Chekman, was published on the YouTube channel of the NGO Public Advocacy, a human rights organization. The interview discusses specific violations of the rights of UOC believers, forcible seizure of temples, searches at the Center for Legal Protection of UOC Believers, arrests of journalists from the UOJ, and so on.

These facts of violations of believers’ rights will be disseminated among international human rights organizations and will also be heard at the UN Human Rights Session.

In other words, defenders of the UOC are doing everything possible to draw the attention of the international community to violations of UOC believers’ rights. And in competition with adversaries of the UOC trying to prove the opposite, defenders of the UOC seem to have a more fair chance to win. After all, there are so many offenses committed over the past 10 years that hiding or misinterpreting them is no longer possible. Moreover, most of them are well documented and formulated as statements to law enforcement and judicial authorities of Ukraine.

In addition, the Ukrainian authorities have decided to take actions that are almost zero-tolerated in the West. We are talking about encroachments on journalistic activity and the work of lawyers. Unfounded arrests of Orthodox journalists and gross unlawful interference in legal practice are perceived extremely negatively in the West.

But relying on the assistance of the international community and the reaction of Western countries to the violation of the right to freedom of conscience in Ukraine is not enough. The most important thing is the steadfastness and fortitude of believers within the country.

The guarantee of the existence of the UOC is not the protection from American or other lawyers, but the fidelity of believers to their Church, the readiness to defend their religious beliefs despite threats and intimidation.

You can take away the temple, but you cannot take away faith. You can illegally re-register a community, but if the community confirms its loyalty to the UOC and its Primate Metropolitan Onuphry, then it remains in the fold of the Church, and people continue to be in communion with all Christians as members of the Body of Christ. This cannot be fought or overcome by any anti-church laws or prohibitions. Our strength is in the fidelity to our religious choice, fidelity to Christ, in fulfilling His commandments.

What might happen next

Most likely, the anti-church bill 8371 will be put on hold for some time. They will wait for the reaction of Western society to the commissioned articles against the UOC and its defenders. Perhaps they will send a delegation of officials and representatives of various denominations to the United States, who will try to convince their counterparts that there is no persecution for faith in Ukraine. Unfortunately, things like church raids and illegal re-registrations of UOC communities in favor of the OCU will continue. But the decisive steps of the authorities to ban the UOC (or the absence of such steps) will mainly depend on the situation on the fronts.

This is all nothing new. Any authority, in various failures, tries to redirect public anger to someone else. It has always been this way. Let’s remember the very first persecution of Christians under Emperor Nero. When in 64 AD almost the entire Rome burned down and the citizens guessed that the emperor had himself set fire to the city, then the authorities, without much thought, accused the Christians of arson.

A new religion, incomprehensible, suspicious – is a very convenient target to redirect the crowd’s anger. The same thing can happen today.

If military failures follow, the authorities may intensify persecution of the Church so that Ukrainian society sees the UOC as an enemy, shifts its focus to dealing with it, and does not ask inconvenient questions from the authorities. But this is only one of many factors that will influence the situation. The opinions of Western countries and the struggle for power within Ukraine will also have their impact, inter alia.

Anyway, the most important thing is God’s providence, which can steer the situation in ways that no one currently anticipates. “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails” (Proverbs 19:21).

Tragedy in the Collective West and Tragedy in the Russian Orthodox Church

A mature great power will make measured and limited use of its power. It will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty, which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention, but intoxicates its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness.

Walter Lippman, US political thinker and journalist, Congressional Record, Vol III, Part 7, 1965

Introduction: The Rise of the Collective West

In 1066 the Papally-backed bandits of North-Western Europe, Normans, Bretons and Flemings, led by Duke William the Bastard, invaded England to oust the ‘schismatic’ English. They were greatly helped by English traitors placed there by the half-Norman King Edward the Confessor. It was one of the first acts of aggression of the Collective West, which was then being assembled and united by its ideological and infallible head, the Pope of Rome. This ‘Crusade’ was followed by other Papally-backed ‘Crusades’, which were also acts of gangsterism and thuggery by the same Collective West. Those Crusades massacred tens of thousands not only in the Holy Land, but also along the Baltic. Here knights and mercenaries of various Western nationalities took delight in murdering the ‘schismatic’ Russians and other Non-Catholics. In the following centuries Poles, Lithuanians, Swedes and Germans took part in further attacks on Russia and in Papally-backed efforts at regime-change, most notably in the Time of the Troubles at the beginning of the 17th century.

However, the greatest examples of violent aggression against Russia by the Collective West were the campaigns of the Papally-crowned Napoleon in 1812 and of the nominally Catholic Hitler in 1941. Napoleon’s aggression was multinational and, indeed, the Russian rout of Napoleon is still celebrated there as a victory over the ‘Twelve Nations’. In 1854, the French, joined by the Ottomans, British and Sardinians, invaded Russia again, this time mainly through the Crimea, the Cardinal of Paris calling it a ‘Crusade against the schismatics’. It was another joint effort of the West. Then in 1914 Germany and Austro-Hungary also attacked Russia. In 1941, having learned nothing from Napoleon’s defeat, Hitler also invaded Russia with an Army of just as many nationalities, but whose losses were many times huger than those of Napoleon. Nearly all of them died and this time instead of troops from the Russian Empire liberating Paris as in 1814, in 1945 troops from the Soviet Empire liberated Berlin and this time stayed there for over forty years.

Today the USA, of which NATO is only a puppet, continues to try and dominate Eurasia. However, the USA island, like Britain before it, is only a maritime power and cannot fight on the Eurasian landmass, but can only attempt to divide and rule it. This is why US allies are on islands like Britain, Japan and Taiwan, on coastal strips like Israel and on peninsulas like South Korea and Western Europe. As soon as it tries to penetrate the Eurasian landmass, it is resisted by huge land-based forces, like those of Russia and China. And because the USA is trying to weaken and destroy Russia through the Ukraine and China through Taiwan, both those countries have now allied themselves to defend each other from the USA.

Some modify the statement that ‘history repeats itself’ and declare rather that ‘history echoes’. Whatever the case, geography does not change. Land-based Russia dominates Northern Eurasia and the maritime island empires, Britain and after it the USA, are still trying to destroy Russia from the sea, whether from the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Ocean, the Black Sea or the Pacific Ocean. The Western ideology of superiority and indispensable exceptionalism remains just as jealous as ever of those who have lived for up to a millennium and a half in the eastern half of Europe. These are the lands of the East Slav peoples, of ‘Rus’, represented above all by the Russians, with their rich agricultural land and abundant mineral resources. Today the Collective West continues, as before, to attack Russia along its northern and southern flanks, with the fantasy of making ‘NATO lakes’ in the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, but also in headlong frontal warfare in proxy warfare with bloody consequences for the hoodwinked Ukrainians, who are simply being used and abused.

However, even the very unpopular elites of the Collective West (Macron and Scholz at about 17%, and Sunak at 9%) are increasingly divided on this issue. This division is very complex, as the forty nations of the western half of Europe are divided by different views and experiences. But all those elites have committed suicide because they have invested so heavily in the lost Ukraine project. Now the US is abandoning the Ukraine and ultimately Europe too. There only ambition now is to stretch out the Ukrainian tragedy until after the US elections. The situation is like that in Britain in the Year 410. Then the Roman Emperor Honorius replied to a request for assistance from Britain against pagan attacks, telling the Roman cities to see to their own defence. It was a tacit acceptance of British self-government. No forces could be spared to protect distant Britain. Roman control of Britannia was entirely lost. So too the declining and bankrupt USA is abandoning Western Europe. Like a pet dog abandoned by his master, the pet dog no longer knows what to do.

NATO – Today’s Collective West

Europe is divided. Apart from the fact that a few European countries are not even members of the US NATO organisation, that is, of today’s Collective West, or else are not members of its political and economic wing, the US-controlled EU, there are those in the western half of Europe who simply want good relations with Russia. Here there stands out Hungary and it has been joined by Slovakia. Remarkable is the aggressive, colonial attitude of the very unpopular Czech regime of Pavel (now more ferociously anti-Russian than even the Americans – perhaps overcompensating for his Communist past?) towards Slovakia. This is why the Slovaks divorced from the patronising Czech elite over thirty years ago. These two countries will not get on until the that elite is removed by the Czech people. More or less openly, Serbia and minorities in every country in the western half of Europe, from Moldova to Germany, from Cyprus to Montenegro, from Bulgaria to Italy, from Austria to Portugal, from Ireland to Sweden, also have pro-Putin attitudes and want to oust their highly unpopular elites.

NATO Romania will become pro-Putin, if he gives it back its land stolen by Stalin in the south of the Ukraine and if it gets back the Romanian parts of Moldova. Many other countries near Russia will also change their attitudes, if their small and unpopular US-elites are removed and, of course, if they can make favourable agreements with Russia about supplies of oil and gas. These include Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Spain, Portugal and above all Germany. I would also include Poland, Finland and the Baltics, whose aggressive Russophobia exists only because their elites believe that they have US backing for it, which for the moment they have. However, Poland is already changing its attitude and its workers are blockading the Ukrainian border. As for Switzerland and Ireland, they too could return to real neutrality. As for Finland and Sweden, they never asked their peoples in a referendum if they wanted to join NATO because they knew that the peoples would have rejected it. Indeed, even their corrupt elites have already declared that they will have no NATO bases in their countries. Their NATO membership is therefore meaningless and unnecessary.

In any case, what is NATO? NATO Turkey does what it wants and NATO Greece arms against Turkey. Denmark has virtually no military equipment left, Slovakia has no air force left, Hungary has no tanks, the Baltics have minute armed forces, France has no howitzers left, Britain has a navy with submarines and aircraft carriers that have become an international joke, is unable to recruit enough sailors to man its small fleet of boats, has had to scrap one third of its operational planes because it has no pilots for them, has no self-propelled artillery left, only 40 tanks that actually work and has to recruit soldiers for its underpaid army in Nepal. In France the mere mention of conscription is greeted by rioting. Could France supply even 15,000 troops to invade the Ukraine? In any case, they would be killed within two weeks. As for deindustrialised Germany, it has little left to give and what it gave, like Leopard tanks, has been shown to be useless. Its increase in military spending does nothing for its own forces, all the increase is given to prop up the Ukraine.

The End of NATO and of the EU

NATO is going to collapse into the grave it has dug for itself by ‘poking the bear’. Its elitist sister-organisation, the EU, will follow NATO, all the quicker if Trump is elected in eight months’ time, but, in any case, it is inevitable. Western Europe is utterly divided, as we saw with Brexit. True, the British elite which hates the English, Scottish, Welsh and most obviously Irish peoples, has refused to implement Brexit. This is because it wants to continue to line its pockets with EU money, which is why it has always loved the EU. Germany, under its much-disliked US puppet Scholz, and France, under its deluded and detested Emperor ‘Jupiter’ Macron, are also divided.

The ‘Big Three’ pygmies, Germany, France and the UK, are at each other’s throats. The cat (USA) is away, so now the (three) mice play. The three are still respectively obsessed with their need to dominate (Scholz), imperialist superiority (Johnson etc) and delusions of grandeur (Emperor of Europe Macron), they are today irrelevant and squabbling clowns. The German elite still dreams about Lebensraum in the east, its tanks are still burning on the steppes of the Ukraine. The proud and arrogant British Establishment still thinks it rules an Empire and is a race apart (which it is, but not in the way it thinks, for no-one has yet told them the sun has set on them). As for preening and pretentious members of the French elite, they are still as narcissistic, self-important and therefore as petulant as ever. However, the last statesman in Europe, De Gaulle, overthrown in the CIA operation of 1968, died soon after. Now, after the US has destroyed Europe, especially since 2022, there are left only European political midgets, all suffering from megalomania.

Unlike in 1914, in 2024 Russia has the biggest economy in Europe and has by far the most powerful military with invincible arms. Russia was forced by the West into liberating the Donbass. NATO then forced Russia into liberating all the Ukraine and the EU. Russia was forced by the West into demilitarising and denazifying the Ukraine. NATO then forced Russia into demilitarising and denazifying NATO. The irony of all this is that the split and unwieldy 32-nation NATO alliance, most members of which refuse to spend more money on their inadequate armed forces, is fighting against Non-Communist Russia. And yet, during the Cold War, NATO never fought a war against the ‘evil empire’ of the Communist Soviet Union. Today Soviet Imperialism is long since dead inside Russia, though not, ironically, in Kiev.

What is alive, however, is the nationalism of democratic Russia, which is a millennial Civilisation. So is the ultra-nationalism of anti-democratic and autocratic Ukraine. But Ukrainian nationalism is artificial, without historical roots, as the Ukraine has no deep historical past, and now exists in a half-Russian country. Moreover, pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, which the West despises as it also despises the failed state of the Ukraine and despises Ukrainians. It has been artificially revived only as a tool of Russophobia for purely political and military reasons, financed with hundreds of billions of dollars, trained and armed by Western Imperialism only in order to weaken and then destroy Russia through ‘regime change’ and to die ‘to the last Ukrainian’.

This opposition of nationalisms is why the conflict in the Russian east and south of the Soviet-created and NATO-defended Ukraine was inevitable. Like it or not, the reality is that Russia was always, and obviously, going to defeat the Ukraine in any military conflict, thanks to its far greater land mass, its world-respected diplomacy and backing from the multipolar BRICS, its population that is now seven times greater and far superior military technology. The self-deluded West, blinded by hubris and contempt and stuck in its bullying, arrogant, ignorant and triumphalist ‘end of history’ myths of the 1990s, lived in a virtual world, a world of wishful thinking. As a result of this fantasy, it totally underestimated the diplomatic and military might of Superpower Russia of the 2020s. As it could not even defeat Iraqi conscripts and Afghan goatherds, what chance does it have against the most advanced military equipment in the world?

Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not first sit down and consult whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him that comes against him with twenty thousand? Or else while the other is a great way off, he sends an embassy and desires conditions of peace?

Luke 14, 31-32

The Tragedy in the Russian Orthodox Church

Today, we are fighting so that it would never occur to anyone that Russia, our people, our language, or our culture can be erased from history. Today, we need a consolidated society, and this consolidation can only be based on sovereignty, freedom, creation, and justice. Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion.

President Vladimir Putin, 30 September 2022

‘Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion’. So proclaims the Russian State, whether you believe it or not. Ironically, against this background of the victorious Russian State and its reconstruction of ‘Rus’ (the Union State of the Russian Federation, Belarus and the New Ukraine), we see the defeat of the nationalistic administration of Russian Orthodox Church. What are the values of this administration? ‘Humanity, mercy and compassion’? The administration of this Church, known as the Moscow Patriarchate, has been to some extent discredited because of its militaristic and nationalistic attitude to the conflict in the Ukraine. As a result, the Moscow Patriarchate has lost the loyalty of many of the multinational faithful outside the Russian Federation and Belarus. And even inside these two countries, it has lost the loyalty of many who are not devoted to Russian nationalism, but put Christ above a nation.

The Church is not an army. However, some in the Russian Church administration is demanding that its clergy and people behave as if they were in an army. That is suicidal behaviour in what is by definition a volunteer organisation. Fewer attend Russian Orthodox churches inside Russia, especially those of the two younger generations, who did not experience the persecution and nobility of the Church in the Soviet past. They see many of today’s Russian clergy, especially the episcopate, as corrupt mini-oligarchs and anti-spiritual bureaucrats and politicians, who are incapable of spiritual values. It is not surprising. What is the origin of the tragedy, this self-imposed defeat, which is so paradoxical in view of the victory of the Russian State?

The tragedy is that after the collapse of the USSR, the Russian State desovietised itself, but the Russian Church did not. The Russian State had to face up to reality in order to survive in the real global world and so became the leader of the multinational, multicontinental and multicivilisational BRICS Alliance of black, brown, yellow and white. This reality was that Moscow, the Russian State, knew that it could no longer hold on to Non-East Slavs, as the USSR had split into 15 independent republics, let alone hold on to its Eastern European Empire, where the USSR had come to be hated. Tragically, however, the Moscow Patriarchate did not realise this and did not desovietise itself, as symbolised by its keeping of its Soviet name, ‘the Moscow Patriarchate’.

We have repeatedly suggested that it be renamed ‘the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem’, which is a monastery just outside Moscow. Instead, many in it has continued to live in the bubble and ghetto of the Soviet past, thinking it had power over all Non-Russians, over whom it still held jurisdiction. In other words, it is to some extent a remnant of Soviet Imperialism in the post-Soviet world. Leaving to one side the glory of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the real Russian Orthodox Church, the senior administration, the Moscow Patriarchate seems to have retained a centralised, Soviet-style bureaucracy with a mentality of subservience, cancelling all independent thinking. Will it really need the interference of the Russian State to desovietise the Russian Church? It would be the irony of ironies.

Nationalism and money-making, which soon turned into oligarch-style corruption, became the order of the day for many. The only qualifications to be a bishop were to be single, have an idea of the Church services and history, and to be good at raising funds, to be ‘an effective manager’. Some were pedophiles or spies, psychopaths or drug-dealers. Spirituality and morality never entered into it. Episcopal money-making means exploiting priests, who in turn are supposed to exploit the people. As the proverb says: ‘A fish rots from the head’. Such exploitation means aggressively grabbing and then micro-managing territory, property and income. The larger the territory, the more the parishes, the greater the number of parishes, the greater the income. This means misusing the canons (which such mafiosi always call ‘holy’!) for purely territorial, ideological, financial and sectarian claims.

Any Russian Orthodox pastors or spiritual fathers who disagree with the canonical deviations or just political opinions of their superiors seem to be ‘defrocked’! This includes ‘defrocking’ those who have left the persecution of the Russian Church without letters of leave, because the Russian Church refused to grant them for no good reason, though the Russian Church itself has received hundreds of clergy from other Local Churches without letters of leave, especially in Europe and Africa. The word ‘hypocrisy’ comes to mind! Such a militaristic, nationalistic, centralised and unipolar command and control system has made some in the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Moscow Patriarchate, and those who imitate it, into something that scandalises. And this is in a country whose State has championed not centralisation, but the non-nationalistic and decentralised multipolar BRICS Alliance! Some claim that Moscow is ‘the Third Rome’. But Rome had the ability to unite different peoples and cultures. This is not what ‘the Third Rome’ is doing, because of its exclusivist nationalism.

The Russian Orthodox Fragments in the Emigration

Given recent events, even before the Russian State launched its Special Military Operation against NATO in the Ukraine, some have asked me if I regret helping to foster the unity of the two émigré fragments of the Russian Church, centred respectively in New York and Paris, with the Russian Orthodox Church, centred in Moscow. The answer is a resounding ‘No’, and for the reasons below:

The New York émigré group, known familiarly as ROCOR, numbering about 60,000, essentially in the English-speaking and German-speaking world, was by the 1990s turning into an old calendarist sect. Our victory was that on its reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Mother-Church in 2007, its then hierarchy rejected its past, self-imposed isolation and its emerging status as a pharisaical right-wing sect. Indeed, as a result of this reconciliation, some 5% of the most extreme part of the New York group left it and created four different tiny and exclusivist sects, which were not in communion with any part of the worldwide Orthodox Church. If it had not been for the reconciliation in 2007, the New York group would not have survived, it would have split into two, a sect and the rest – who, like myself, would have joined the Mother-Church.

The Paris émigré group, known familiarly as Rue Daru, numbering about 15,000, essentially in French-speaking Europe, was by the 1990s turning into a modernist cult. Our victory was that on reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Mother-Church in 2019, it rejected its past, self-imposed isolation and its emerging status as a Tradition-less, make-it-up-as-you-go-along cult. However, as a result of its reconciliation, some 43% of the most extreme part of the Paris group left it, mainly for the modernist section in the Church of Constantinople. If it had not been for the reconciliation in 2019, the Paris group would not have survived, it would have split into two, a cult and the rest – who, like my close friends there, would have joined the Mother-Church.

The Results

Some, reading the above statistics, may say that the reconciliation of the New York group, four times larger than the small Paris group, was by far the more successful. However, the story since 2007 proves otherwise. Having been cleansed of extremists, the Paris group has remained firm. And although only some 5% of the New York group abandoned it, they left behind a large number of others, perhaps about 38%, who still had a sectarian mentality. They just hid behind their paper reconciliation with the Mother-Church as a justification to continue to do exactly as before. Hypocrisy. They had never intended to repent. In other words, there had always been the same proportion of extremists in the New York group as in the Paris group (43%), but the New York group was not cleansed of them. It is this remaining extremist part of the New York group, over a third of the whole, which a decade after the reconciliation, since 2017, began to take revenge for the reconciliation, seized power and caused all the problems. Notably it has actually completely unjustifiably initiated a public schism with the Paris group, supposedly another part of the same Russian Orthodox Church! Moreover, this schism, inside itself, has passively been backed by the administration of the Moscow Patriarchate!

There are already examples of senior clergy and people exiting the New York group, either by ‘retiring’, or else by joining non-schismatic Local Churches. And there are those who have not left yet, but are still suffering the same moral torment as those who have left, seeing the disgraceful behaviour of its new hierarchy. Its pious bishops of the last century must be spinning in their graves. The new sectarian ROCOR hierarchy is reverting to the pro-Nazi or Vlasovite ROCOR mentality in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and to the sectarian CIA-funded, Vlasovite ROCOR of the 1960s to the 1980s. Its degeneration is its own fault. You cannot blame the corruption of individuals in the Moscow Patriarchate for your own corruption. You must take responsibility for yourselves. Individual corruption is a personal choice, not something forced on New York by Moscow, even if New York episcopal corruption follows exactly the same pattern, falling to exactly the same corruption of accumulating territory, property and income. The larger the territory, the more the parishes, the greater the number of people, the greater the income. Power has gone to all their heads.

This pathological micro-management, popularly known as control freakery, also means misusing the canons (which they always called ‘holy’ as part of their absurd self-justification!) as weapons for uncanonical political and territorial claims. Any clergy who disagree because they are Christians are ‘defrocked’ by the corrupt, not least in Non-Russian Moldova, where large numbers of parishes are leaving the Russian Church for their ancestral Romanian Church. Homosexuality and love of money and luxury, living as ‘princes of the Church’ and not as servants of the people, is their choice. Don’t blame Moscow for that. The proof of this is that the Paris group, however naïve some may say that it is, has not followed this path of episcopal and clerical corruption and has no desire to do so. The Paris group has not left to one side the glorious victory of the New Martyrs and Confessors over atheism. It has in no way a centralised, Soviet-style bureaucracy with its mentality of subservience, cancelling all independent thinking. On the contrary, Paris has retained the multinational Russian Orthodox missionary vision. Here is the tragedy of the New York ROCOR group. It has, purely voluntarily, abolished its heritage in suicidal acts of self-destruction.

Conclusion: Quenching the Spirit

Thus, the heritage of multinationality and catholicity of both the Moscow and New York parts of the Russian Orthodox Church have been rejected by their clerical administrations, with the ensuing isolation of the Russian Church. The senior hierarchy of both parts has shut itself off from concelebration with other Local Churches and promoted those of Russian nationality above all others, whom it treats as second-class citizens. Interestingly, the Russian State did not impose any of this. The senior Church hierarchy, acting like a Stalinist Soviet Politburo, did. And quite freely. This has been suicidal. Essentially, the Holy Spirit is being replaced by the human spirit.

The tiny Paris group alone has not chosen that path. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Divine calling of the émigré fragments of the Russian Orthodox Church was firstly to reunite with the freed Mother-Church in Moscow and secondly to call its administration, the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’, to repentance after the nightmare of Sovietisation, by witnessing to Russian Orthodoxy, and so desovietise it. The New York group did the opposite of this. It not only remained silent on desovietisation. It actually imitated and sovietised itself, making itself too into a ‘Soviet tank’. It opposed baptism with the heresy of rebaptism, Christian love with phariseeism, and catholicity with right-wing sectarianism. It could all have been so different, it was all so unnecessary. New York, like Moscow, chose suicidal self-destruction and the living forces of the Russian Orthodox Church are deserting it, as its hierarchy quenches the Spirit.

After reconciling with Moscow, the New York hierarchy copied the worst of it, also becoming corrupt – financially, ideologically and morally. The errors of both Moscow and New York can be measured in the destinies of those who have left them, seeing the unrighteous life lived by bishops and priests and therefore their inability and unwillingness to proclaim Christ. Whatever you think of the inevitable outcome of Russian military victory, the profoundly tragic inter-East Slav war in the Ukraine is Divine punishment for the sins of the hierarchies of both Moscow and New York. The Russian Orthodox Church, let alone Orthodox Rus, let alone Holy Rus, has been torn by civil war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands. This is not pleasing to God. This is hardly the Triumph of Orthodoxy, let alone the Triumph of Orthodox. But it is what happens when there is no repentance for all that went before and when the Russian Orthodox Faith is dominated by corrupt and highly centralised clerical administrations, which compromise everything. However, after the resurrection of the Russian Orthodox Church, we remain convinced that it will shed the bloody graveclothes with which it is still wrapped from the Crucifixion and be cleansed of the unworthy and corrupted.

I tell you, No: but unless you repent, you shall all likewise perish.

Luke 13, 5

 

Church of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe,

England

The Triumph of Orthodoxy, 24 March 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Situation of the Orthodox Church in 2024

Introduction

The Orthodox Church is a Confederation of sixteen Local Orthodox Churches, totalling some 200 million faithful, with about 80,000 priests and 1,000 bishops. Most Orthodox Christians live in Eastern Europe, though there are minorities in most countries in the world.

Of these sixteen Local Churches, the Greek Church of the Patriarchate of Constantinople (now called Istanbul) stands out as the historically most prestigious Local Orthodox Church. For over a thousand years of history until 1453, it was powerful and in Constantinople there lived the only Orthodox Emperor. However, today this Patriarchate is very small in numbers, with a few million faithful at most, of whom fewer than one thousand actually live in Istanbul.

Of these sixteen Local Churches, the Russian Church of the Patriarchate of Moscow also stands out, partly because many see it as the successor to the Church of Constantinople, but above all because it has, or used to have, about 70% of the total number of the faithful, 140 million. This is because it is, or used to be, multinational, with a third of its members Non-Russians of many nationalities. This is unlike the other Local Churches which are in effect National Churches. However, today, this is increasingly less the case, as we shall see below.

The Negative

As a result of the pre-eminent positions of these two Local Churches, the powerbrokers of this world have always striven to take control of their senior clergy.

Thus, after the Ottoman capture of the City in 1453, the Constantinople Church gradually fell under foreign, later French or British, control, with their ambassadors appointing the leader or Patriarch of the Church for payments of money to the Ottomans. After the fall of the British Empire at the end of the Second World War, Constantinople came under the control of the successor Empire, the USA.

In 1948 its Patriarch, Maximos V, was removed by the Americans by force and flown in President Truman’s personal plane into exile in Switzerland, dying there in 1972. He was at once replaced with a Greek-American puppet-patriarch, who proceeded to do anything the Americans wanted. Some forty years ago I got to know a Greek bishop who had been Patriarch Maximos’ personal deacon at the time and was an eyewitness to those events. He told me how the CIA thugs took Patriarch Maximos with violent threats, intimidating him with possible death if he refused to obey them. ‘We have ways of making you come with us’, were their exact words.

As for the Russian Patriarchate, after 1700 it came under the control of Protestant-style laymen, called ‘oberprokurors’, who were appointed by the government. Russian bishops were appointed by politicians, some anti-Orthodox and often strongly anti-monastic, just as in the Protestant Churches, in Germany, Scandinavia or England. For example, in the latter country the Prime Minister, who may be an atheist or a Hindu for instance, is still responsible for appointing all Anglican bishops. As for the former Russian Empire, after 1917 the situation became even worse and Soviet atheist laymen openly persecuted and controlled the Russian episcopate, most of whom it murdered and martyred. After the fall of atheism in 1991, the Russian Church revived, but its senior clergy remained with the subservient mentality of the previous three centuries.

As a result of such politicisation, Orthodox who are part of the Russian Church but who live outside the borders of the Russian Federation and are not Russians, are leaving the various parts of the Russian Church. This is most obvious in the Ukraine, but also in Moldova, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as in Western countries. They do not wish to belong to any part of the Russian Church, which is being nationalised, that is, Russianised. They want to worship Christ, not a national, political system. In other words, the Russian Church is becoming alien to them. As one of its very young but senior metropolitans, filled with ethnic hatred and conceit, said when he expelled some Non-Russian clergy and faithful from the Church recently and handed them to another Local Church: ‘Too bad for them’.

In this way, clergy and people are leaving the Russian Church because of their desire for self-determination, they are ‘voting with their feet’. As a result, the missionary work of the Russian Church has all but ceased. Who wants to belong to a Church which persecutes its own? Only a few extremists. The numbers of the faithful in the Russian Church could eventually go down to 50% of the total number of Orthodox from 70%, as a result of the foundation of new Local, or National, Churches for Orthodox, who live in independent countries or regions outside the Russian Federation. These could be formed in the Ukraine, the Baltics, Moldova, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Western Europe, South-East Asia, Africa, Australia, Latin America or elsewhere.

As a result of the acts of politicians there is at present a serious schism between the Constantinople and Russian Churches, which between them number some 72% of all Orthodox. In 2018 the Constantinople Church, egged on and very generously financed by the US State Department, was told to try and destroy the Russian Church. Therefore, Constantinople created a purely political schism with the Russian Church by opening its jurisdiction on what had for centuries been uniquely Russian territories, namely in Estonia, the Ukraine and now in Lithuania.

Consequently, since then the Russian Church has refused not only any communion with the Constantinople Church, but also with other Greek Churches or bishops who for ethnic, financial or political reasons support Constantinople. This includes the Greek Patriarchate of Alexandria, and the Russian Church has in revenge opened many parishes on African territory, which Alexandria has claimed for nearly a century. Both sides are excommunicating each other and defrocking each other’s clergy tit for tat, quoting the canons in false justification for their own purely political and punitive purposes. There is no Love, only the spirit of revenge, and so the Church is under attack and there is chaos.

The Positive

Some might conclude from the above that the situation in the Orthodox Church is dark and desperate, given the views of senior hierarchs of both the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow and their schism. However, those outside the Church refuse to understand a vital fact: senior clergy are not the Church. This is important because senior clergy die and are replaced. There is no reason to think that the succeeding senior clergy will take the same line as before. All wars sooner or later end in negotiations.

For example, within the Patriarchate of Constantinople there are a great many pious bishops, priests, monastics and people, who remain faithful to Orthodoxy. Many there regret the anti-Russian aggressiveness of their Patriarchal authorities and their uncanonical actions under US pressure, just as they regret the equally aggressive Russian response. When asked by the faithful about those actions which have led directly to schism, such pious Greeks simply reply: ‘It is all politics. Pay no attention’.

In other words, the storm will pass, just as the storms of earlier centuries have also passed. And within the Russian Patriarchate, most also have the same viewpoint. Here there are also many pious bishops, priests, monastics and people who refuse to take part in the politicisation of any part of the Russian Church, either by the Russian secret service, the FSB, or the American, the CIA, which are both trying to undermine the Russian Church, bribing individual corrupt clerics.

As a local example we have for exactly fourteen years been greatly supported by a new White Russian family in East Anglia, Countess Benkendorf, strongly supported by Earl (to give him his English title, which neither of them uses publicly) Benkendorf. They support the Tsar and all the New Martyrs and Confessors, having a new martyr as a direct ancestor, and give no support to mere politicians in any part of the now unfree Russian Church. They are among the new White Russians who now live here in East Anglia, but are in fact relatives of the old White Russians. For the last ambassador of Imperial Russia to Great Britain was Count Alexander Benkendorf (+ 1917) who lived here with his wife Countess Sophia (+ 1928 in Ipswich), whose descendants were also friends of my late aunt in Colchester.

They are devoted to the local St Edmund the Martyr, the last King of East Anglia and have East Anglian rose-growers and sweet pea growers among their close friends. Earl and Countess Benkendorf reject all politics and extremes in the Russian Church, whether of the old politicised and money-minded White Russians, who worked for MI5 and MI6, or of the new nationalistic and secular-minded post-Soviet Russians. They remain in the centre, in the mainstream, following the golden mean, the middle way of the Fathers and the Saints. The Earl and Countess represent us all, they are our Connection, but they are just local examples of a far, far greater and worldwide movement.

Thus, apart from the majorities in both these Patriarchates who reject politicisation, most of the other fourteen Local Orthodox Churches, although slightly more or less close to one side or the other, still keep their independence. Nearly all stand somewhere in the middle, not taking sides, like the traditional Greeks and Russians described above. We note especially the position of the Romanian Church, the second largest Local Church, and of the Albanian Church, together with the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch and the Polish and Serbian Churches. They all show great independence. Here bishops and the faithful insist on the catholicity and conciliarity of the Church. We all call for a Church Council, where the Church can come to unity through depoliticisation, the rejection of bribes and political pressures from States and their secular minions, who wrongly think that they can buy the Church.

Conclusion

Non-believers, as well as those who believe only weakly, overlook Divine Providence in the history of the Church. The greatest proof that the Church is run not by human beings, but by Divine Providence, is that it has survived extraordinary human stupidity, pathological individuals and incompetence for nearly 2,000 years. Human institutions, like clerical elites, survive for a few centuries at best, and often only for a few decades or even a few years. God’s Providence protects us, for the Church belongs to Christ the Son of God, not to mere men, and Christ is always victorious.

 

A New World and Church Order

Kill them all

Words of one of the leaders of the Catholic Crusade which massacred some 10,000 people at Beziers, France, on 22 July 1209

Kill them all

Words of another new Herod, US Congressman A. Ogles, speaking of Palestinian children, 21 February 2024

Introduction: The Real World  

In order to understand the conflict in the Ukraine which the USA began in 2014 at a cost of $5 billion to its taxpayers, we have to understand the background to it. Only then can we appreciate its huge significance for the future, for the result of this American war against the Ukraine and so Russia and so China is a New World Order. This is a millennial turning-point, the first since the ‘revolution’ or ‘transformation’ of the mid-eleventh century, which marked the rise of the West. This is not like the historic changes that took place in, for example, 1096, 1135, 1215, 1378, 1492, 1517, 1688, 1789, 1815, 1919, 1945 or 1991. Although these were all highly important, despite the rhetoric around them, none of them led to a New World Order, but to just further extensions of exactly the same old Western World Order. However, it is this conflict in the Ukraine, the last straw that has broken the camel’s back, that is leading to a New World Order following on from the post-Imperial West. Let us explain this by describing the World Order as it is today, with its division into two, the isolated, minority West versus the Global Majority, North, South and East.

The International Chessboard

On the one hand, in today’s world there are the globalist, amoral-liberal oligarchies, known as ‘the West’. These represent only 12% of the world population of eight billion human-beings. Although just a small minority, this West includes vast territories (especially the largely empty and uninhabitable spaces of Canada and Australia) and many of the richest and most powerful individuals in the world – the capitalist oligarchs of transnational corporations and their bankster politician servants. These elites are renowned for promoting Godless, anti-national and anti-family ideologies: Atheism (as the oligarchs are atheists, they replace God and play at Him), Globalism (= the control of the Globe by oligarchs) and LGBTQ (the oligarchs’ favoured forms of depravity).

On the other hand, in today’s world there are also the sovereignist, national-authoritarian democracies, known as ‘the Rest’. They are democracies, albeit quite militarised but not autocracies, as their elected leaders’ priority is to represent the broad national interests and identities of their peoples, not of the rich and their banks, transnational corporations and decadent liberals. These sovereignist democracies represent 88% of the world population of eight billion human-beings. Although the overwhelming majority, they include most of the disinherited and powerless in the world. However, they are growing less poor and less powerless, as the teeming millions of Asia, Africa and Latin America are brought together by their common values of belief in God and universal moral values, patriotic respect for the Nation, and the importance of the Family, amid the common search for peace, justice and prosperity for all.

Thus, on the black side of the international chessboard, there is the King that is Israel, the Queen that is the USA, with rooks represented by Japan and Germany, bishops by the UK and France, knights by Canada and Italy. The pawns are represented by US-run countries or groups of countries like Kiev regime Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States, most of the rest of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Spain, Taiwan and South Korea.

On the white side of the international chessboard, there is the King that is China, the Queen that is Russia, with rooks represented by India and Brazil, bishops by South Africa and Belarus, knights by Iran and Saudi Arabia. The pawns are represented by countries like the UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, North Korea, Hungary, Serbia, Venezuela and Cuba.

The Deluded Narrative of the West in the Ukraine

The elite of the West lives in a state of delusion, so profound that it actually believes in its own virtual world delirium of propaganda myths or ‘narratives’, as it calls them. For example:

  1. The Western elite believed that it could enforce its own illegal sanctions against Russia. Its sanctions failed miserably, indeed backfired, and have helped isolate and bankrupt European economies, making them into failing States. They did not realise that Russia has autarchy, that it is independent, and is itself a huge source of oil, gas, fertilisers, chemicals and foodstuffs, especially wheat, on all of which the Western world depends. By its boycotts of vital Russian goods, the West has wrecked its own economies, forcing many staples to double in price, so undoing itself. Russia has not attacked it; it has done it all to itself. It believed in its own delusional propaganda, that Russia is just ‘a gas station with nukes’, ‘with the GDP of Spain’ (!), and not a sovereign country and a great diplomatic and military power, already the most powerful economy in Europe, and is supported by most of the world. Thus, the self-destructive sanctions of the West only strengthened Russian sovereignty. Indeed, economists forecast that the Russian economy will overtake the US economy during the present century, to become the world’s third largest, after those of its allies, China and India.
  2. The elite believed that it could enforce regime-change in Russia. In fact, its scheming only made the very popular President Putin, a national representative and sincere patriot, more loved, and made itself even more loathed. Despite the lies (narrative/PR/psyops/propaganda/spin) of the West, which is all it has, President Putin is not dying of cancer, dementia or anything else, unlike the openly senile President Biden.
  3. The elite believed that it could apply the offensive military technology which it had used against Iraq twenty and thirty years before, against Russia, this time using Kiev regime cannon-fodder as its proxies. The elite believed that its ‘game-changing’ weapons, tactics and training were superior to the far advanced Russian, when in fact they were either obsolete or else over-engineered because of its own profit-obsessed, oligarch-driven and suicidal deindustrialisation and decadence. The obsolete or unsuitable weapons and munitions from NATO cannot be replaced because of the deindustrialisation of the West. However, increasingly militarised Russia has a huge military base, with a million well-trained volunteer troops drawn from four times the Ukrainian population, and cannot run out of weapons, missiles, tanks, ammunition, men etc. This is unlike the US colony of the Ukraine, which is running out of all of them, even of ill-trained conscripts abducted by force off the streets. Up to 500,000 Kiev troops (Ukrainians and NATO ‘advisers’ and mercenaries) have died so far and at least another 700,000 have been wounded. On the Russian side the anti-Russian, BBC-sponsored Mediazona project reports the deaths of over 45,000 troops and an unknown number of wounded Ukrainians, Chechens, Russians and Ghurkas, all of whom are fighting for the liberation of the Ukraine from the Kiev dictatorship. The ratio is 1:10. The West has failed miserably, thus falling into the Russian trap, facing yet another humiliating defeat in 2024. It has learned nothing from its previous routs in Saigon and Kabul, still cultivating the seeds of its own destruction.

Restoring the Real Ukraine 

The Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) in the Ukraine was never against the Ukraine, still less was it ‘a war’ against the Ukraine, it was intended to end the war begun by the US against the real Ukraine in 2014. It was never about occupying or destroying the Ukraine, it was only ever about overthrowing the US-installed dictatorship in Kiev and liberating the peoples of the Ukraine, undoing the artificial, centralised, Sovietised Kiev State, as it had been created by Communist tyrants like Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchov, and as supported by pro-Nazi Western elites. Russia had no interest in war, only in applying pressure to begin talks about security, which the Kiev regime and its Western patrons had rejected for eight years.

This is why only a small number of Russian-trained troops, about 10% of its armed forces, many of them Eastern Ukrainians, began fighting in the Ukraine in February 2022, facing huge odds. This was a small-scale operation that had been provoked by the anti-Ukrainian Kiev regime’s genocide of Eastern Ukrainians for eight long years. In this way, after 24 February 2022, the Russians pre-empted the proposed full-scale Kiev invasion of the Donbass by a few days, destroying anti-Slav US biolabs in the Ukraine and gradually grinding down the huge NATO fortifications which had been prepared over the previous eight years. The West forced larger-scale military action on Russia by its aggressiveness, forbidding Kiev to make peace, arming the South American-style terrorist junta and the dread secret police in Kiev, for whom Hollywood, literally, wrote the scripts. It supplied the junta with huge amounts of NATO equipment, munitions and tactics, which were all stuck in the time-warp of the deserts of Iraq of the 1990s.

This ensured the rout of the so-called ‘counteroffensive’ of the Kiev forces in 2023. However, the ‘permanent war’ dreamed up by the West also meant that Russia’s first aim of freeing the Donbass (and protecting the Crimeans, whom Kiev next also threatened) would have to be extended to liberating all the Russian east and south of the Ukraine. Apart from this liberation of the eastern and southern half of the Ukraine, there remained two other vital aims – the demilitarisation and denazification of the rest of the Ukraine. Demilitarisation is now three-quarters done. It has taken much longer than it would have because since 2022 there has been so much extra military equipment from NATO countries to destroy. Now we come to the third and most complex aim – denazification.

Denazification means the removal by the Ukrainian people themselves of the Nazi junta. It is not something that Russia will do directly, it does not go in for US-style regime change manipulations. It will wait until the consciousness of Ukrainian people awakens and they themselves overthrow the US-imposed junta that has been murdering their menfolk in their hundreds of thousands. Signs of this new consciousness are becoming apparent, with an open political split into factions in Kiev. Its removal is necessary because under Washington orders, the junta in Kiev outlawed negotiations with Russia in April 2022. For peace talk to begin, the Russian aim all along, that junta must first therefore be removed. Russia cannot begin peace talks with US-controlled European puppets or the American puppeteers, as they refuse to talk. Talks will be possible only with Free Ukrainians, those who have understood that the West wants to kill them ‘to the last Ukrainian’ for the sake of the West. The West has no love at all for Ukrainians; it prefers Israelis. Peace talks are impossible with the present US-imposed Kiev elite.

The Consequences of the Western Defeat

A Free Ukraine will be established within its new borders. This will be after those who choose by self-determination to belong to Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania (certain people are already gathering like vultures around the corpse of the Ukraine) have returned with their territories to their ancestral homelands. What will happen to the for now forty countries of the north-western peninsula of Asia, which calls itself Non-Russian Europe? Abandoned by their ex-globalist, turned nationalist, puppet-masters in the US, its former European satellites will have to sort out their own national affairs, just as Eastern Europe had to, once it was abandoned by the USSR. What of the twenty-one countries of North-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe? Russia will have a border with Hungary, which in turn has a border with Russia’s past and future ally, Serbia. The way will be open for all the at present sixteen countries of South-Eastern Europe to form an Alliance, helped by the multipolar BRICS Alliance, Chinese investment and Russian energy. This Austro-Hungarian-Ottoman Alliance could stretch from Hungary to Greece, Austria to Cyprus, from Czechia to Croatia, Albania to Moldova (perhaps minus Russian Transdnistria and Gagauzia), Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim, doing away with the old local petty nationalisms and primitive racism, working towards a Confederation for the peace and prosperity of all. However, these are not the only local consequences. There are the local consequences for the five countries of North-Eastern European, which border Russia and Belarus, that is, Finland, the three Baltic States and Poland (whose farmers are at present blockading the border with the Ukraine – for Poles resent Ukrainians and their sense of entitlement). The consequences there will be just as significant, once their US-imposed elites have been removed and popular governments elected.

As for the other for now nineteen European countries, those of Western Europe – and we know what Washington via Victoria Nuland thinks of Europe – they will at last be free to throw off their old Uniparty Russophobic elites, who have between only 10% and 20% of approval, and start all over again, in face of the new reality. The European puppets are now arguing with each other, finger-pointing, like children when the (American) parents have left the room, as they are incapable of doing anything except taking orders. The days of the pygmy von der Leyen, pretending, with others who also had Nazi grandfathers like Baerbok, to be Charlemagne, of the bankrupt pygmies Johnson and Sunak pretending to be Churchill, but with nuclear submarines held together by superglue and aircraft-carriers whose propellors do not work, of the megalomaniac pygmy Macron pretending to be Napoleon and in charge of NATO, but with French farmers pouring manure onto his buildings, and of the pygmy Scholz pretending to be Hitler, are over. And NATO, which does not exist to protect Europe, but to control it, will be over with them, as will the EU with its unelected Commissars. The new reality will be the Union State of the Russian Federation, Belarus and the New Ukraine and, beyond that, the BRICS Alliance. The Alliance has already replaced the old unipolar West as the new, multipolar, economic, political, diplomatic and military centre of the world. Western Europe has yet to catch up with this and reintegrate the Asian landmass, of which Russia is the hub.

Beyond this, there are the consequences for the USA. Since 1945 it has been the leader of the West, with all its decadence, exploitation of others and above all hubris. It inherited the privateering piracy of the failed oligarchy of the global British Empire, with its plundering of others’ raw materials, usury, financial speculation, slave-trading, drug-trafficking and permanent war. The American Empire, which cannot even defeat the Houthis, who do not even have a Navy and Air Force, has failed for all the same reasons. The future President Trump is not going to allow the conflict in the Ukraine to continue until his election in November 2024, though President Biden desperately wants it to continue after he imagines that he will be re-elected. Trump wants to ensure that the USA’s second humiliation in four years, from Kabul to Kiev, will also take place under the Democrats. The American Empire is now collapsing under its senile leader, who symbolises its disgraceful decline, and losing control of its feudal vassals in Europe, Oceania, Asia and Latin America.

And then the USA, shorn of its bankrupting overseas burdens like its NATO vassals and its coastal protectorates, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Israel, will be governed by an American Nationalist (ex-Republican) Party. This will have to sort out the huge mess of abortion, corruption, crime, debt, drugs, deprivation and injustice which its elite has allowed to develop within its own borders. In order to do this and so avoid yet another Civil War, it may have to split up into its constituent parts, returning the south to Mexico, the north-east and north-west to a reformed Canada, making California independent, and returning Alaska to the Russian Federation. The overseas US protectorates, including Australia and New Zealand, will be left to find their own way, making peace with their neighbours and integrating the real world.

The Orthodox Church after the Western Defeat

The leaders of Roman Catholic and Protestant religious institutions were at the root of the Western ideology of racial and religious superiority, that is of Western pride. Outside Western Europe, the clergy of the Orthodox Church have suffered many distortions and much corruption in the second Christian millennium (1033-2033). This is especially where they found themselves in political centres and so became victims of the then much more powerful Western Europe, geographically next door to it. The corrupt forgot the people of the Church, who are soon going to have self-determination. However, today’s reality is that the two most important Local Orthodox Churches, 75% of the whole Church, are in a state of schism and are even trying to drag the other fourteen Local Churches into their schism, and with some success.

For this reason, for instance, the Greek Orthodox episcopate in particular has been subject to the political manipulations of the Western Powers. For example, those who were at the centre of the then Ottoman Empire in Istanbul (Constantinople) found their episcopal posts being traded by the Ottomans and sold to French and British ambassadors who then appointed their puppets. Since 1948 they have in the same way been controlled by the Americans. They have not been politically free, as is evidenced by the lives of St Nectarius of Pentapolis in Egypt or Patriarch Maximos V of Constantinople in the last century. Currently, the political grip of the US secularists on its episcopate seems to be ever tighter.

In the Russian Church, there was no Patriarch between 1700 and 1917 and the Church was governed by laymen, several of whom were either atheists or else enemies of the Church, yet they made appointments to the episcopate and persecuted monasticism. Then, between 1917 and 1991, the episcopate of the Russian Church was under the intense scrutiny and control of the Soviet atheist regime, which appointed many corrupt individuals to it and persecuted those who were not corrupt. The Church was Sovietised and so centralised. After 1991 the episcopate did not de-Sovietise and decentralise and was also subject to all manner of financial and political pressures. This led to many immoral and corrupt actions, which discredited many parts of that episcopate and scandalised the faithful, with the result that fewer and fewer Russian Orthodox attend their churches. The onion-domes, regilded by corrupt oligarchs, may gleam, but the people do not want clergy who live corrupt lives, they want living examples of faith. As regards the Russian Orthodox Church outside the Russian Federation, it is now in a state of self-destruction, under attack not only from the CIA, but also from ‘One True Churchism’, or rather from ‘One True Jurisdictionalism’. Missionary work from the Russian Church is now virtually impossible outside Russia. They seem to have lost it, after wasting their huge opportunities over the last thirty years.

The Church itself, whether in Constantinople, Russia or in the many other parts of the world where it exists, has always survived thanks to bishops who live by the Holy Spirit, monastics who actually live the monastic life inside monasteries and convents, incorruptible and unbribable parish clergy, and the little people. We are those who refuse to sell our souls for money and worldly honours. From here have always come the fearless martyrs and confessors, by whom the Church has always lived despite corrupt bishops and clergy. The latter proclaim the lie that all owe obedience to them, even though they are financially and morally corrupt, undermined by their lusts for power, money or depravity, and create sectarian schisms and even heresies. To gangsters we owe no obedience, for we owe obedience to Christ, who precisely overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple. Let the corrupt bishops be warned even now: We have always won and we always will win. The episcopate of the Church is going to be cleansed. The Great Cleansing is coming, not least in Russia, where the State is being cleansed and the Church is the next on the list.

 Conclusion: The New Church Order

 Once freed from the political pressures of the old Western powerbrokers of this world, from whom the episcopate of the Orthodox Church has suffered so many manipulations and temptations down the centuries, today’s unnecessary internal tensions and disagreements between Local Churches can be resolved. These have been thrust on the Church by those selfsame powerbrokers. On the one hand, there can be decentralisation, with the Church no longer being a plaything of the centralising, imperialist ideologies, which make some in two Patriarchates use the canons for politics, to the scandal of all. Such seem to consider that the Church belongs to them, and not to Christ. On the other hand, there can be a strengthening of the spirit of the Catholicity of the Church, creating a much deeper conciliarity. Then all the Local Churches, whose number could swiftly rise to perhaps twenty-four with new Diaspora Churches, could meet regularly in Councils to resolve disagreements because they will at last be politically free to do so. The opportunities for a New Church Order are here. But will they be taken?

The Future of Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe

Introduction: Orthodox Church Immigration to Western Europe

Since 1917 there have been three large-scale waves of immigration of Orthodox Christians from Eastern Europe to Western Europe. These have been: the Russian-speaking, mainly since 1917, though in four sociologically very different generations, the Greek-speaking, mainly since 1950, and the Romanian-speaking, mainly since 2000. This latest immigration is composed of well over four million Romanians with a million and a half Moldovans, probably six million people in all. Nearly half of these now live in Italy, Spain and Portugal, since Romanian is very similar to those languages. This recent immigration dwarves all previous Orthodox immigrations to Western Europe, not just the Russian and Greek, but also the much smaller ones, like the Serbian, the Ukrainian, the Belarussian, the Macedonian, the Bulgarian, the Antiochian (Arab) and the Georgian.

The Greek-speaking (Greek and Cypriot) immigration has remained very closed to others and remains stuck in its ethnic identity, but its leaders also have very strong pro-US politics. Both these factors alienate nearly everyone else from it. It does not in general and cannot in reality attract many native Europeans to its religious practice. As regards the Romanian and Moldovan immigration, it is still too early to say whether it will attract others to it in any number, though there are some promising signs of openings to others, as a result of its youthfulness, its ten bishops, including a French one, and some Non-Romanian clergy and people. The Romanians are helped here by their Latin language and by being very open and welcoming, but the infrastructure remains weak.

The Russian Immigration

What of the oldest, most political and most complex immigration, the Russian-speaking? In four waves, this consisted of anti-Bolsheviks from pre-1917 Russia, anti-Stalinists from pre-1945 Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, those from the small, largely ethnically Jewish, dissident intellectual immigration of the 1970s and 1980s, and those from the post-USSR but still Soviet immigration, especially from the Baltic States, Kazakhstan and Moldova. These waves of immigration are sadly divided into three different and quite disjointed ‘jurisdictions’ with separate episcopates, one of which (ROCOR) since January 2021 has officially decided to be in schism with and not concelebrate with one of the others (WEA). (See below).

  1. The MP

Firstly, there is the largest jurisdiction, that of the Mother-Church, the Moscow-based Moscow Patriarchate (MP), which is 99% of the whole Russian Church, mostly in the ex-Soviet Union, but also has eight bishops in Western Europe. This is organised under a Paris-based Exarchate and its people come from all over the ex-Soviet Union, especially from Moldova and the Baltic States, but also from the Ukraine, though in the last two years many Ukrainians have left it to help found yet another group of over eighty quite separate new Ukrainian Orthodox communities, mainly composed of Ukrainian refugees (most of whom appear not to be baptised Orthodox – the Orthodox have stayed in the Ukraine or in Eastern Europe). This MP Exarchate has been patterned by a number of Exarchs and bishops, who have embarrassingly compromised themselves in some way or other and so have met with failure.

One of the great current problems here is the dramatic events now going on in Moscow against the background of the war in the Ukraine. Here, ‘traitors’ are being tried by Church courts. These include the once senior Metropolitan Leonid (Gorbachov), the former Exarch in Africa, who is under suspicion of various misdeeds (1). If treachery to the Russian State is the real charge, then there must also be bishops in the very divided New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) (see below) who must also be trembling. Astonishingly, several of the latter have from the outset publicly called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Ukraine and openly supported anti-Russian US policies and persecuted pro-Russians. If there is one thing that Russians cannot support, it is treachery.

  1. b) The WEA

Secondly, there is by far the smallest group, the Paris-based Western European Archdiocese (WEA) with only three bishops, whose aristocratic founders from Saint Petersburg created it in the 1920s. This elitist intellectual group is now very small outside Paris. It has either not been able, or perhaps not wanted, to take off and expand outside the intellectual group. At the present time, most believe that its often elderly leaders will die out within the next generation. Essentially it has only three church properties of its own and these are all in Paris. The death or removal of two individuals would hasten the takeover of those properties by the much larger MP and its inevitable absorption of the small remains of this group.

  1. ROCOR

Thirdly, there is the New York-based ROCOR, which was formed over 100 years ago, in 1919 and has its own Synod, now of only thirteen active bishops. In Western Europe it has four bishops. By 2001 its first generation had essentially died out. Thus, in order to survive it had to reinvent itself. A few very elderly individuals, including its own Metropolitan, were expelled in what was essentially a coup d’etat. Having taken over, the new Synod, which had accepted large numbers of new immigrants from the ex-USSR, was then forced to reconcile itself with Moscow. However, it was also recruiting converts, especially in the USA. Unfortunately, it purposely recruited some very strange and right-wing extremist converts, many of whom it made priests and even bishops, putting them into oppositions of power. These now form a very powerful group and are harshly persecuting those who are Russian-speaking, pro-Russian and anti-schism.

Apart from about 150 communities, many of them very small, mainly in the USA, and about 30 communities in Australia, the other main centre of ROCOR is its 70 or so communities in Germany, where it has many historic and beautiful churches and a large flock, with both clergy and laity nearly all from the ex-USSR, especially from Kazakhstan. As well as these churches, it also has a few historic churches in Switzerland, two historic churches (recently taken from the WEA) in northern Italy and one in Brussels. Elsewhere it has virtually nothing, apart from some very small and often unstable communities, making some 300 communities in all and at least 50,000 people. It is clear that the MP is waiting to take over the historic churches in Western Europe from the declining ROCOR and add them to its Exarchate of Western Europe. The death or removal of two very divisive and very aggressive, US-trained individuals in Western Europe, who have very strong anti-Russian political backgrounds and connections, would hasten this process.

At the present time the New York Synod is very divided, not least about its heretical programme of rebaptising other Orthodox, in defiance of the teachings and practices of the Russian Church and of the whole of the Orthodox Church. Although there are three Russian bishops against a break with the MP (they have already broken with the WEA part of the MP), there are three bishops for, and the other seven are fence-sitting. We expect further events.

Conclusion: The Future

Most countries in Eastern Europe already have their own independent Local Orthodox Churches. It seems quite likely that the small Orthodox population (3% ?) from among the eleven million people of the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and from Nordic Finland, whose language is related to Estonian, will form their own Local Baltic Orthodox Church. All these Eastern European countries have strong historic Russian connections and a current Russian presence and historic churches. Similarly, Eastern European Hungary, to which Carpatho-Russian Transcarpathia and its 600 Orthodox parishes may soon return, may also obtain its own Local Orthodox Church. This is just like the Church of Czechia and Slovakia, the main part of whose traditional flock also consists of Carpatho-Russians.

This would leave a geographical West of Europe, with an eastern border stretching from Norway down to Sweden, Germany, Austria and Italy, enclosing the at present twenty-one countries of Western Europe, with its population of 400 million and area of 3.5 million square kilometres. This has a population of some 10 million nominal Orthodox, about 40 bishops and perhaps 2,000 communities. If they banded together into eight multinational dioceses and worked towards forming their own Local Orthodox Church, they would then form the fourth largest Local Orthodox Church, after the Russian, Romanian and Greek.

These eight dioceses could cover the territories of: Italia (Italy, Malta and San Marino); Iberia (Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar); Germania (Germany and Austria); Gallia (France, Wallonia (Southern Belgium), Luxembourg and Monaco); The Isles (the British Isles of England, Scotland, Wales etc, as well as the island of Ireland); Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland); the Netherlands (the Netherlands plus Flanders (Northern Belgium)); Helvetia (Switzerland and Liechtenstein). The main task here would be to maintain Orthodox and their descendants in the Faith, protecting them from the surrounding ocean of ever more aggressive Western secularist atheism. However, it would also be for these dioceses to conduct missionary work among the native peoples of their territories, though in this profoundly atheist (ex-Catholic and ex-Protestant) region, the results of that work would be modest, for sadly few want real Orthodox Christianity, often preferring at best a virtual version of podcasts, internet nonsense and negativity.

Note:

  1. The retired Metropolitan Leonid (Gorbachev) of the ROC said the upcoming trial against him will be a betrayal of the Church and Fatherland” and “all who participate in this lawlessness are traitors”.

    Former African Exarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Leonid called the upcoming hearing on his case in the Supreme All-Church Court “a betrayal of the Church and the Fatherland” and said that “all those who participate in this lawlessness are traitors”. He wrote about this on his Telegram channel.

    According to him, with the upcoming trial, “we have passed the line of realisation of good and evil”.

    “Now everything is possible if you have uncontrolled power in your hands,” the retired bishop said, without specifying whom he meant.

    The hierarch is convinced that his work in the African Exarchate was “the first breakthrough since 988,” and Gorbachev appreciates its results very highly.

    The hierarch also noted that his trial benefits the Vatican and is “giving up one’s own people”, and that all those involved in it are “traitors”.

    The metropolitan threatened to “provide details afterwards,” adding that he “did not want this”.

 

 

 

Our Common Battle for Holy Rus

The Church is a space of love, freedom and Truth in Christ, rather than an administrative, bureaucratic and punitive apparatus.

https://spzh.news/en/zashhita-very/77938-banning-uminsky-as-a-temptation-by-orthodox-papism

 

Moscow and New York: The Dual Tragedy of Modernists and Sectarians

Fr Alexei Uminsky is a well-known liberal-modernist priest in Moscow, typical of many former hippy idealists who were ordained priests in Russia after the fall of the USSR in the 1990s. We have met several of them and first heard about his activities some fifteen years ago. He is a sincere pastor, nobody could doubt his sincerity, though he has some strange views, which are the fruit of his heady intellectualism. A few days ago, the Moscow Diocesan Court agreed that he should be defrocked, though the paper confirming this decision, which seems very harsh to many, has not been signed by the Patriarch. It is our personal belief that Fr Alexei is not a bad man, just a very naïve man, who has let himself be abused over and over again by the enemies of Russia, including the many US-financed agents there.

His latest error is to refuse to pray for the victory of Holy Rus over its enemies. Like the other very naïve disciples of the late Metr Antony Bloom and of other Russian Parisian liberals such as Fr Alexander Schmemann, in Amsterdam, Madrid, Antioch (via Lisbon, where that one called his faithful ‘Orthodox witches’ and was sacked as a result) and elsewhere, who have mainly left the Russian Church and gone to the US-backed Greeks, Fr Alexey does not understand what Holy Rus is. A pacifist, he imagines that Holy Rus means the temporary political entity of the Russian Federation, which is not at all the case. Although conducting an operation to protect Russians who live in the Ukraine from Nazi genocide, the Russian Federation has never declared war on the Ukraine. However, the West did declare war on Russia through the Nazi proxies it installed and armed to the teeth there, and who created the tragedy. The Russian Church hope is that with the uniting of Rus, the ideal of Holy Rus can be reborn.

However, Fr Alexei and others like him are not the only ones who misunderstand Holy Rus. Today, large parts of the New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia have been taken over by sectarians. These are the spiritual descendants of those of that same fragment of the Church who openly supported the Nazis in World War Two – those selfsame Nazis who took over the Ukraine. Those traitors were known as Vlasovites and the new Vlasovites have the same views as them and so openly express American support for Nazism in the Ukraine. Whether eighty years ago or today, the treachery remains the same. Whether belonging to the Nazi Party or to the CIA (which was largely staffed by ‘former’ Nazis when it was founded in 1947), those who took and take enemy power and money are contaminated by the same disease. These extremists reject Holy Rus, the Orthodoxy of the faithful, and her universal Orthodox practices and traditions. They support only some reactionary, top-down, right-wing sectarianism.

The End of the Old History

Since the fall of the USSR, US leaders appear to have lost their minds. Craziness has taken over from reason with the hubristic desire to divide the whole world through chaos, in order better to rule it and asset strip it. Their chaos, injustice and genocide have been seen in Yugoslavia, the Northern Caucasus, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, the Lebanon, Georgia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Belarus, the Ukraine, Yemen, Iran, Taiwan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Armenia…the list goes on, throughout the countries of Eurasia and North Africa.

Over the last thirty years Western Europe has in turn chosen to turn its back on Russia and to kow-tow to the craziness of US leaders. As a result, today Russia has turned its back on isolated Western Europe and gone out to the 90% of the world, where it has been warmly greeted, unlike in Western Europe. But what does this mean for ‘indispensable’ Western Europe, especially in the near future when Western Europe realises that the USA does not want it either and that Russia has no interest whatsoever in invading and liberating it? Western Europe is not worth a drop of Russian blood, it is no longer important enough. Russia liberated Paris from Bonaparte in 1814 and Berlin from Hitler in 1945, it will no longer send a single soldier to liberate Western Europe from its American demons. Enough is enough. The local electorates must liberate themselves from those demons by ceasing to vote for war criminals, atheists and perverts, however much their zombifying State media tell them to do so.

The millennial domination and exploitation by the West of the Rest (of the world) is now coming to an end – by Western suicide. The West is killing itself. The Millennium of the West is over. It is hardly surprising that some even maintain that the standard-bearer of the West, the Pope of Rome, will be the last Pope. As for the current ideology of the West, it is not Catholicism or Americanism, it is sexual perversion, apparently in some way now supported by that Pope, though rejected by African and other healthy Catholics. Such is the ignominy which stands at the end of the millennium of Western apostasy. The only way forward is, paradoxically, to return to the time before that disastrous millennium began.

The Beginning of the New History

As Orthodox Christians we have a mystical view of the world, that is, mystical in the sense of real Christian. We believe that outward world affairs are defined by the inward state of human souls. Where there is faith in the existence of the world of the spirit, that is, the real world beyond the veil which underpins everyday life and is the world to come, there are different values from the values of this world.

In the Ukraine President Zelensky is an actor, whose script ran out after last week’s murder in a Ukrainian Secret Police prison of the American journalist, Gonzalo Lira. He was left to die by the US because he was telling the truth. In Russia the fight is on against the fifth column. We remember very well that dark time when the Russian Church was infiltrated by the KGB and how we resisted it. Now it is infiltrated by the CIA – and we resist it equally, before the whole world. The Russian Church, like Russia, is populated by patriots, but also infiltrated by those who have been spiritually colonised by the West, which is led by the CIA. Some there are now at last waking up.  The great cleansing of the Russian Church is under way.

The three Russian objectives in the Ukraine were its Demilitarisation, its Denazification and the Liberation of the Donbass from genocidal Nazism. After foolish Western interference, these three objectives have had to be expanded into something much greater: The Demilitarisation of all NATO through its weapons which have been offered up for destruction in the Ukraine; the Denazification of the Western world by the opposition to it of the 90% of the world which disagrees with Western leaders and is joining the multipolar BRICS; the Liberation of the whole of the Ukraine, and not just the Donbass, from genocidal Nazism.

England: The Victory of the New White Russia

We all want the victory of Holy Rus over Spiritless atheism, indifference, left-wing modernism and the right-wing fifth column of sectarians who have infiltrated the Church. This fifth column is the CIA-backed Americans who are also enemies of Holy Rus and have done their utmost to try and destroy us over the last seven years and utterly failed. We have worked all our lives for the victory of Holy Rus, indeed, we want its extension. As we declared at the Fourth and last Council of the then still free Church Outside Russia in San Francisco in 2006:

‘In Carpatho-Russia an elderly man asked me: ‘Father, where is your parish?’ I answered: ‘In Felixstowe’. He asked me a second question: ‘What province is that in?’ I answered ‘In the English province’. Yes, I rejoice that I serve in the English province of Holy Rus. I believe that you too rejoice, that you serve and pray in the American, Argentinian, Australian, Belgian, Brazilian, Canadian, Danish, French, German, Indonesian, Korean, Russian, Swiss, Ukrainian and Venezuelan provinces of Holy Rus. Whatever language we use, whatever local saints we venerate, we strive to preserve the spirit of Holy Rus, the spirit of Christ, our Orthodox roots’.

(http://www.orthodoxengland.org.uk/atcouncil.htm)

Holy Rus is challenged by the extremists of left and of right, as it always has been. We have all this time been on the front line, literally on the military road, fighting from the trenches against them all. We pray for the liberation of Holy Rus, in the Russian Federation, in the Ukraine, in Belarus and everywhere, from the US and its vassals, whether liberal LGBTs or sectarian Nazis. We are waiting and praying for the liberation of the Church, infiltrated by money-grubbing oligarchs, perverted homosexuals and self-admiring CIA agents. Moreover, we know that we shall win, for although man proposes, God disposes. God is with us!

 

 

 

Five Years of Schisms: The Church Torn by Needless Divisions

2024 opens in sadness for all the Local Orthodox Churches.

In 2021 well over half the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) Diocese in England left that New York-based branch of the Moscow Patriarchate. This was because of the new ROCOR schism against the Western European Archdiocese (WEA) branch of the same Moscow Patriarchate. The Archdiocese had accepted a Roman Catholic priest into its clergy in the normal Russian Orthodox way, by confession and concelebration. However, for that reason the new American ROCOR, strongly old calendarist and imposing a quite outrageous and very aggressive policy of Americanisation, to the point of imposing the American language (!), had broken off communion with the WEA. This was unthinkable under the old Russian European ROCOR. This schism then spread Europewide under another ex-Lutheran ROCOR bishop. And then the whole ROCOR Synod backed up its young, inexperienced and non-seminary trained American bishop, ‘converted’ from Lutheranism, who had instigated the schism.

In the meantime, the Moscow Mother-Church, of both ROCOR and the Western European Archdiocese, remained silent, for unexplained reasons known only to itself. Church discipline appeared and appears to be breaking down. However, any number of Orthodox bishops fell over themselves, and are still falling over themselves (too late), to receive the group of six parishes, including with by far the largest church, the senior priest of the Diocese (with nearly forty years of conscientious service), several other clergy and 5,000 people who left ROCOR on account of the American schism. This group are now thriving in the canonical Patriarchate of Romania, despite the absurd ‘suspensions’ and ‘defrockings’, with which they were punished by ROCOR after being received into the Romanian Church. Their position was all about standing up for the Orthodox Truth, canonical Church practice and generations of faithfulness to Russian Orthodoxy.

This is perhaps the fifth time (or is it more?) that ROCOR has faced schisms on account of its adoption of and (too late) abandonment of old calendarist positions on the reception of Non-Orthodox by rebaptism. All these occasions go back to its contamination by the fanatical Greek old calendarist ideology, with its easily identifiable convert language movement (‘Pascha’ for Easter, ‘Nativity’ for Christmas, ‘hierarch’ for bishop, ‘temple’ for church, ‘chant’ for sing etc), in the 1960s. The best-known occasions were perhaps the Guildford (England) schism of 1976, the Boston schism of 1986 and then the multiple schisms of 2007, including that of the Brookwood monastic community and London convent in England at that time.

In any case, the 2021 scandal in England spread back to North America. It turns out that there at least one ROCOR bishop there had actually been receiving unrebaptised Orthodox converts from Non-Orthodoxy by rebaptism, even though these converts (surely, by now former converts?) had been inside the Orthodox Church and receiving communion for years! This is despite the Nicene Creed, which states: ‘I believe in one Baptism for the remission of sins’. The ROCOR Synod appears to be in chaos, split down the middle. Not only does it face responsibilities for its uncanonical actions in England, but also in North America.

Here the recent concelebration of Fr Alexander Belya, (now again bishop-elect) with the Romanian Orthodox Church also has to be faced by the split ROCOR Synod. Fr Alexander, a former ROCOR priest chosen by the ROCOR Synod to be bishop and then suddenly dropped and ‘defrocked’ (!), was persecuted by the ROCOR Synod for still unknown reasons (the court case for libel is ongoing). Before being ‘defrocked’, he had already joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople with a large group of similarly appalled ex-ROCOR clergy and some 20 parishes. His concelebration with the Romanian Church means that, yet again, the Romanian Church does not recognise the actions of ROCOR. The latter is proving to be yet another (irrelevant) irritant to the Romanian Patriarch, who ignores all the increasingly strange letters from the New York group. The Moscow Mother-Church can be none too happy with its New York representatives who are discrediting themselves and the whole Russian Church through their eccentric, indeed scandalous, conduct and persecution of the faithful.

The latest twist to this sorry rebaptism saga is the case of at least one priest of the Antiochian Diocese in England, a certain Fr Matei. Having freely joined the Antiochian Diocese relatively recently, he decided that his bishop (and presumably therefore all Antiochian bishops) are heretical and stopped commemorating him. This was because this bishop follows the Orthodox practice of receiving Protestants who have been baptised by water in the Name of the Holy Trinity, by chrismation. (This is the normal practice of 1,000 Orthodox bishops – the opposite of the abnormal and new ROCOR practice). On top of this, this Fr Matei objects to the old Antiochian practice of giving Non-Chalcedonians communion, which is also a practice of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Although all the Local Churches receive Protestant converts by chrismation, they do not give communion to Non-Chalcedonians. However, they do accept that Antioch and Constantinople do this as their local practice, and that is no reason to break off communion with them. What is very strange is that Fr Matei objects to these practices, as he must surely have known that these are old-established Antiochian practices from long before he so recently joined the Antiochian Diocese. (Here we see the other side of the coin to the ROCOR rebaptism schism, which is a recent innovation and quite unheard of in the old ROCOR in Western Europe). Nevertheless, in the USA, there are now other Antiochians who have suddenly woken up to the reality of long-held Antiochian practices and object to them. Where they have been all these decades remains a mystery.

All of this comes against the background of the 2018 schism between the Russian Church and various Greek Churches, such as the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Alexandria, as well as with individuals in the Greek and Cypriot Orthodox Churches, who supported setting up a fake Church on age-old Russian Orthodox canonical territory. As one correspondent has put it: ‘This is worse than Protestant dissension’.

Clearly, the solution to reverse this chaos is for all to return to canonical practices, namely of:

  1. Not setting up ‘Churches’ on the canonical territory of other Local Churches.
  2. Not refusing to concelebrate with and not breaking off communion with others because of their different practices regarding the reception of Non-Orthodox.
  3. Refusing to rebaptise those who have already been received by another Local Orthodox Church and who have taken communion in it.
  4. Suspending and defrocking only priests who have committed criminal acts (usually, the theft of money or property, or else who work as spies for the CIA or other spy agencies), or who have committed immoral acts (heterosexual, homosexual, or even pedophile), and not because priests refuse not to concelebrate with canonical Orthodox, or because they profess political opinions and vote for political parties, different from those of their bishop. (This, apparently, is considered to be disobedience and is therefore ‘uncanonical’!!).
  5. Suspending and defrocking bishops for criminal or immoral acts, instead of protecting them (for example the late Archbishop Nathanael of Vienna, (ROCOR)), Metropolitan Joseph of the Antiochian Archdiocese in North America. Apart from them, there are other immoral, homosexual and even pedophile bishops of all nationalities, who (out of jealousy?) persecute heterosexual priests and laymen who have normal family lives.

But will any of this return to canonical practices take place?

The Church After The Ukraine

Introduction: In the Ukraine

The Red Star USSR lasted for three generations after the Western-organised Palace coup of 1917. So too the White Star USA, which began its triumph in 1945, is also collapsing after the same three generations. At present we are all waiting for the end of the totally unnecessary American war in the Ukraine. According to official Ukrainian TV, Kiev losses in killed, wounded and captured troops are now 1,126,652. The Americans, who forbade the Ukraine to make peace in spring 2022, want indeed to fight to the last Ukrainian. However, as most Ukrainians are not going to commit suicide for the US elite, that elite will now have to blame someone else for its failure. In this new Greek tragedy, dramatic events are taking place in freezing and snowbound Kiev at this very moment. The main assistant of the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has already been killed by a hand grenade sent to him as a ’present’ from the President’s office and the wife of the head of the dreaded Kiev secret police has been poisoned. Meanwhile, European elites are panicking, as they face the real possibility that a nationalist President Trump will make peace with Russia, at last dissolve NATO and desert a NATO-free Europe.

Talk in Kiev is of a coup, rejecting both President Zelensky and the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Zaluzhny. The situation is even more dramatic on the front line, which is falling apart, as undertrained and underarmed, unarmed and untrained Ukrainian troops give up the unequal fight. In a war of attrition the collapse can come very fast. By Easter, 5 May 2024, the day before the feast of St George the Victorious, it will surely be over. Some say it will happen even as early as January or February, rather than April or early May. The CIA has always instrumentalised the worst elements in each client state to play the roles of heads of their puppet regimes. Thus, they used drug dealers in Latin America, fascist dictators in Spain and Portugal, mafiosi in Italy, colonels in Greece, gangsters in Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Hussein in Iraq, Bin Laden in Afghanistan, hateful extremist nationalists in the Baltic States and in the Ukraine Galician Nazis with an atheist Jewish actor figurehead. Once the US no longer needs its handsomely-paid war criminals, they are exiled, dumped or assassinated, especially if they fail in a US election year.

This will be the fate of Zelensky and will also be that of the US-appointed and now panicking NATO and EU puppets, Stoltenberg, Scholz, Macron, Sunak, Pavel, the bankrupt Russophobic European elite, which is to be ejected by its electorates. With their tiny militaries, they are irrelevant.  Already largely demilitarised, they have to be denazified. The Europe problem will be solved at last. The political results of the Democrat delusions in Kiev and their open lies in the Western media (they declared President Putin ‘dead’ twice last month alone!) are colossal. Kiev is now spelled K-A-B-U-L, only this is Afghanistan multiplied by ten, because it is happening in Europe in full view of the whole world which can now see ten years of the lies of Western politicians and the Western media. The Ukraine is the European graveyard of the US. Former vassals, which like the Ukraine are dependent on US funds for their existence, such as Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, Kosovo and Kuwait, will also disappear. Eventually, the bankrupt US will have to abandon its peninsula outpost of Western Europe, NATO will disappear and the US-moulded EU will collapse, to be replaced by a Russian-founded, multipolar concert of the nations.

In the Church

However, what interests us much more are the results of the Ukrainian catastrophe for the Orthodox Church. These are the results for both what once was the most prestigious Local Church, Constantinople, and for today’s largest Local Church, Moscow, as well as for the fourteen other Local Churches.

Founded in the fourth century, this once prestigious Patriarchate in Istanbul was tempted by its glorious history a millennium and more ago as the capital of the Christian Roman Empire. Goaded and bribed by the White House in Washington, it thought it could rule over the Orthodox world through nationalist-imperialist politics. Now it is falling from its height and has to face the embarrassment of its fake Ukrainian Church, which is staffed by perverts, gangsters, thugs and Nazis. Was there ever such a shameful event in all of Church history? The existence of the US-established and US-financed fake Church in the Ukraine discredits this Patriarchate. Imperialist and nationalist politics have their price. The only way out would seem to be the ‘retirement’ of those responsible. Denials by papering over the cracks and sweeping under the carpet is no longer an option.

Founded in Soviet times in 1943, this largest Patriarchate in Moscow was tempted by its size, once nearly three quarters of the whole Church. It thought it could rule over the Orthodox world through nationalist-imperialist politics. Prey to the politics of the FSB and the CIA, it was infiltrated by traitors. Now it is falling from its height and has to face the embarrassment of its infiltration by the representatives of various secret services who betrayed it. It has lost, or is losing, many of its territories: the Ukraine, Latvia, Moldova and most of the Diaspora in the West, ultimately everything that it once controlled outside the Russian Federation. Imperialist and nationalist politics have their price. A Council or Synod in Moscow will have to enact a wave of decentralisation. If independence (autocephaly) is not given to Non-Russians by Moscow, it will be taken by them anyway.

Conclusion: The Triumph of Conciliarity

Once the war of America and its NATO vassal elite, launched against Russia and Europe, now coming to an end in the Ukraine, is over, the persecution of the heroic Church of the Ukraine will also be over. A New Ukraine will be established. And a New Ukrainian Church will also be established. And, regardless of what happens in Moscow, an independent Ukrainian Church under Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev will be supported everywhere that matters, not least by the Romanian Church. Independence for it was thirty years overdue, as for all parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation. We await transformations of the centralised structures of the Church, which are now archaic, and await the removal of homosexual mafias of self-interest, corruption and power of the paid Church administrators, exactly those which St John Chrysostom denounced over 1600 years ago.

After the shameful decadence of the minority Orthodox Conference in Crete in 2016, the Church authorities will have to proceed to a real Council to resolve the real problems of the Church. These issues were never even discussed at Crete, where some signatures of the relatively few attendees were even forged. The elites of the two Local Churches which tried to impose their will over all the others over the last thirty years will have to step back, one way or another. That time is over. Now we must proceed to Conciliarity, to reaffirming the Catholicity of the Church, to reaffirming that local nationalisms are always secondary to the Church, which will not be brought down to that level, to reaffirming that in the Church we have Trinitarian unity in diversity, ‘multipolarity’, that we only have one really important passport and identity, our spiritual passport and identity. We shall be victorious, because Christ, the Head of the real Church, is always victorious.

 

The Emperor is Coming And He Will Cleanse the Church of Corruption

‘Wherever Americans come to a region of the planet, they bring chaos’.

Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister speaking on RT, 15 November 2023

The American war against the Russian and Ukrainian peoples in the eastern Ukraine is now coming to an end. However, terror and genocide are breaking out in the Holy Land, which is a convenient get-out, or ‘off-ramp’, from their lost war in the Ukraine for the US elite. For that elite, which fights wars with the blood of others, is threatening even more wars and chaos in many other parts of the world with their same imperial ‘Divide and Rule’ policy. The world knows that we are seeing global transformations in these pre-apocalyptic times.

The post-1945 US-controlled world is over and US-led institutions are collapsing, from the EU to the UK, from NATO to the WTO. This is a parallel to the collapse of Soviet institutions from 1989 on, including the Soviet-created Ukraine which is only now disappearing. A great power shift, prophesied by many, is taking place, with the old Western elites falling everywhere. The time of the prophecies has come. These include the promised return of an Orthodox Emperor or Tsar, of whom we will now speak.

Over a century ago, apostate Orthodox Christian Russians betrayed the Orthodox Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, his Family and his faithful servants.  Since then the vast majority of Russians have not yet woken up from their nightmare. The episcopate of the Orthodox Church has sunk into divisions and corruption, as though a mafia had come to reign there. However, prophetic voices have resounded. Thus, the great Elder Nikolai (+ 2002) of the Pskov Lake, answered pilgrims on three occasions that ‘The Tsar is coming’, when they doubted. On the first occasion, they objected:

‘St Seraphim of Sarov also made such prophecies, but there is no sign that a Tsar is coming. That those in the present government do not see him coming is clear, but the most terrible thing of all is that there are priests who are not waiting for the Tsar’. One metropolitan also objected: ‘What monarchy? That time is over, now we live in a democracy’. Fr Nikolai listened and said: ‘The Tsar is coming’. ‘How come? Who is coming?’ And again he answered: ‘The Tsar is coming’. They argued with him for a third time and once more he repeated: ‘The Tsar is coming’.

‘We left perplexed, but a little later this is what happened. We met a priest from Kiev, who told us how he had been in a car crash. The angels took him away, a bright light shone from above, his soul rejoiced and he thought: ‘Glory to God, I am home’. Suddenly he heard a voice: ‘Not yet, you have to go back’. ‘Why?’ ‘You are a convinced monarchist, you will pray for the Tsar’. ‘Who is the Tsar?’ ‘Only I and the Tsar know this. Even his parents and the Mother of God do not know this’. ‘Why?’ ‘Because as soon as people find out, they will immediately kill him’’.

Thus, there will be no revolutions, elections or councils. When the time comes, the Lord Himself will raise up the chosen Tsar. According to the prophecies, this will happen some time after a war. This is the American war that is now coming to an end in the Ukraine. By the prayers of the last Orthodox Emperor and Martyr and all the New Martyrs and Confessors, the Tsar will be enthroned in the coming years. Then he will cleanse the Church of corruption. As for us, we are simply forerunners, sent to announce this message, though we are unworthy even to untie his shoelaces.

 

The Coming Synod in Moscow: An Example to the Vatican?

Introduction

The Synod of the Patriarchate of Moscow will meet in just a few days’ time. Of the many issues the Synodal members will have to decide is that of possible autocephaly for the Orthodox in Moldova. As we know, Metr Vladimir of Moldova has asked for autocephaly in order to overcome the problems in his country. He fears either that the Moscow Patriarchate will be banned in Moldova or else that his flock will transfer en masse to the Patriarchate of Bucharest. This is difficult for Moscow. This thorny problem is, however, only the tip of the iceberg.

In the last century the Patriarchate of Moscow granted autocephaly to Orthodox in Poland, Czechoslovakia and to Carpatho-Russians in Northern America (the ‘OCA’). Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union into fifteen different republics 32 years ago, it has not given autocephaly to anyone. It seems to us that the granting of autocephaly to Orthodox who live in now independent republics is long overdue.

Thus, we would suggest that Orthodox in the Ukraine (all those on territory under the political control of the government in Kiev), Moldova, and the three Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) should all receive autocephaly, but not be allowed a Diaspora presence (see below). This would mean that the Orthodox in Belarus would remain in their Exarchate, as they have not requested autonomy (as they have in Japan and China), let alone autocephaly.

However, if this Synod in Moscow were to become a Synod of Decentralisation, that is, of Autocephaly, Autonomy and Exarchate, we would suggest that perhaps further decentralisation should take place:

 

Why not give up the remaining thirty or so Moscow parishes in North America and give them to the OCA, on condition that the whole Autocephalous Church there be renamed the NAOC – the Northern American Orthodox Church? (Northern America being the USA, Canada, Greenland and a couple of dependent islands). Local bishops and parishes of the American Synod (called ROCOR)in Northern America should be informed that they must in time, say, over the coming five years, obey the Patriarchal Synod and also join, or else fall out of communion.

Thus: Three New Exarchates, making Four Autocephalous Churches: The Ukrainian, the Moldovan, the Baltic and the Northern American.

Why not grant the Western European Exarchate Autonomy, merging that Exarchate with the Archdiocese of Western Europe? With autonomy would come long-overdue internationalisation and the organisation’s indispensable acceptance by Non-Russian nationalities. This Autonomous Western European Orthodox Church would also include all bishops and parishes of the Ukrainian, Moldovan and Baltic Orthodox Churches. Local bishops and parishes of the American Synod (ROCOR) in Western Europe should be informed that they must in time, say, over the coming five years, obey the Patriarchal Synod and also join, or else fall out of communion.

Thus: One New Exarchate, making Three Autonomous Churches: The Western European, the Japanese and the Chinese.

Why not create one single Exarchate for the Metropolia of Kazakhstan and the Metropolia of Central Asia? Why not create an Exarchate for all parishes in Latin America, from Argentina through Central America to Mexico? Why not suggest creating an Exarchate of Oceania, based on the Russian parishes in Australia (at present under the American Synod)?

Thus: Two New Exarchates, making Five Exarchates: The Belarussian, the Kazakhstan and Central Asian, the African, the South-East Asian and the Latin American. And one new potential Exarchate for the future.

 

Conclusion

Such a Synod in Moscow would surely set an example of decentralisation to the current Roman Catholic ‘Synod on Synodality’, which is, among other immense problems of its own, also grappling with its historic and spiritually deadening problem of centralisation, caused by Papism.