Category Archives: Terrorism

‘Religion Breeds Violence’: Another Myth

After the atheist President Macron of France with his usual tact insulted Muslims, several outrageous terrorist attacks have occurred, especially in France and Austria. As a result we hear all the usual: ‘Well, what do you expect from religion, they’re all fanatics. If there was no religion, there wouldn’t be any terrorism. Religion just encourages them’. What do we answer such nonsense?

First of all, religious faith is not responsible for terrorism or any other sort of violence. To this we will hear, ‘What about Charlemagne and the Saxons, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Protestants and the Catholics, the Hindus and the Muslims, the Jews and the Catholics? Always at each others’ throats’.

However, in reality, the simple fact is that scoundrels always use the name of God for self-justification. (As, similarly, the writer Samuel Johnson long ago also remarked, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’, not in any way meaning that patriotism is bad, but quite the opposite, that scoundrels use noble patriotism to justify their base actions).

After all, if I want to steal money, conquer territory or plunder oil reserves, murdering millions in the process, I am not going to say that openly, rather I am going to say, like George Bush’, ‘God told me to do it’, or else ‘I am bringing them ‘freedom and democracy’, or else as the Western European imperialists used to say, ‘I am bringing them civilisation’.

In other words, as religious faith is the highest and noblest instinct of mankind, it is always used as a pretext for the lowest and ignoblest actions.

The repulsive Islamist terrorists who murder the innocent do not believe in God. They are atheists, filled with hatred, anger, vengefulness, greed, jealousy and frustration. The same was true of ‘Catholic’ crusaders, inquisitors, Protestant cowboys, Hindu terrorists who murder Christians, Thai Buddhists who murder Muslims etc etc. None of them has any religious faith, just a flag or label, behind which they hide their base motives for organised violence.

Does anyone believe that Napoleon and Hitler were Catholics or that Stalin was Georgian Orthodox? Of course not, they were all persecutors of God and of God’s Creation, ruthless mass murderers, who not only did not believe in God, but espoused atheist ideologies which gave them the logical right or self-justification to murder God and anyone who believed in God.

Today they are no more, but instead we are governed by people who, under-reported, worldwide murder over a million babies a week (1) (about fifty times more than the over-reported death toll of covid-19, which, incidentally, leaves babies and children alive) because these unborn babies are inconvenient. Terrorists and murderers may claim to be Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, but they are not. ‘By their fruits you shall know them’.

Atheism breeds violence.

Note:

  1. https://www.abort73.com/abortion_facts/worldwide_abortion_statistics/

 

 

The Centre Can Hold Because of the Cleansing of the Church

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

William Yeats, The Second Coming

 

All three groups of Russian Orthodox émigrés have now been cleansed off their extremes:

In 2006 the Patriarchate of Moscow suffered schism in Great Britain and France as the vestiges of old-fashioned modernism and ecumenism finally cast themselves off. Those who adhered to their Russophobic cultural prejudices and desire to dilute Orthodoxy into just another department of Western Establishment ideology left the Russian Orthodox Church for the pseudo-Orthodox US-run Phanariot group in Turkey. The Church was cleansed of those who had no love for the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Christian Empire of Orthodox Civilization and preferred compromised Western secularism to the fullness of the Church of God.

In 2007 ROCOR, the Church Outside Russia, in turn at last lost its censorious, sectarian fringes in tiny schisms to various strange and extremist sects which justify phariseeism. The Church was cleansed.

Now, in 2019, the Rue Daru Archdiocese (the former ‘Paris Jurisdiction’) has lost its extremists, in fact rather a large minority of modernist marginals. Why has it taken so long? Because this was the group most deeply infected by extremism, in this case, of the ‘liberal’ kind, so well-known for its intolerance and terrorist witch-hunts against faithful Orthodox over the decades. As a result, many had already left, even decades ago, persecuted by modernists and freemasons in the group. The minority dissidents, who prefer to celebrate Parisian philosophers who died 60-80 years ago rather than the Saints of God, will now fully merge with the US-run Turkish group in the Phanar (if they have not already done so).

Many of this dissident group are in England. There is also one parish in Brussels that has left for the Romanian Church (its Russophobic priest had already been suspended by the Turkish group a few years back, so he could not return there) and some parishes in France which still remain undecided. However, the fact is that Church has been cleansed, with the Orthodox returning to the Russian Church, the extremists falling away. Moreover, many in Paris who had left in disgust that the Church there was not commemorating the Orthodox Patriarch Kyrill, the leader of the Orthodox world, already returned last Sunday to congratulate Archbishop Jean, who was in tears of joy, on his final decision.

As perhaps the only priest who had suffered from ‘the blood-dimmed tide’ of all three groups of aggressive, troll-like extremists, I cannot but rejoice with our brothers and sisters who have at last escaped the clutches of the Phanariots. The plot of the Phanar to hand over St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris to Ukrainian schismatics and rededicate it to apostate traitors and mass-murderers like the robber of souls, Andrei Bobola or Josaphat, has failed.

Meanwhile, the Phanar’s incoherent and schismatic head, Patriarch Bartholomew, yesterday met Pope Francis and the head of the Ukrainian Uniats in Rome to discuss merging the Uniats with his tiny and failed OCU organization in the Ukraine. A joint Phanariot-Papist Galician Synagogue of Fascist Ukrainian xenophobes may soon be formed there, uniting all haters of the Church of God. It will be financed by the State Department in Washington, which has already sent out its ambassadors in the Balkans to bully and bribe Local Churches into recognizing the Galician Synagogue. In this they failed.

The centre can hold – because only extremes fall apart, and this is how the Church is cleansed. Glory to God for His Providence, for the evil inflicted by the Phanariots has had the reverse effect. The Orthodox have been strengthened, being cleansed from the pseudo-Orthodox fringes who have fallen away.

 

 

Patriarch John of the Church of Antioch Condemns Western Aggression

Patriarch John X and other Christian representatives in Syria have issued a statement, condemning the treacherous attack against Syria by the USA and the former colonial powers who divided the Ottoman Empire, the UK and France, on the absurd pretext that the Syrian government uses chemical weapons. He has stated that ‘this cruel aggression is an obvious infringement of international law and the UN Constitution’, as it is an unjustified attack against a sovereign country, committed by countries which Syria in no way threatened. He also stated that there was absolutely no proof that the Syrian government has or uses any chemical weapons. (Obvious, because the airstrikes did not release any chemicals into the air – Editor).

The statement says that the strikes have delayed the investigation by the International Commission on chemical weapons, merely escalates the conflict, ruins hopes of peace and that the unjust attack encourages terrorist organizations and their barbarism. The Patriarch called on the UN Security Council to guarantee peace instead of furthering escalation of wars. He called on ‘all Churches to carry out their Christian duties, according to the Gospel, and condemn the aggression’. We hope that the Antiochian Diocese in these islands will express support for their brave Patriarch, who is a true Athonite monk.

 

 

Actions Have Consequences

After the huge success of Tsar Nicholas’ 1916 offensive against the Austro-Hungarians (known to post-1917 history as the Brusilov offensive) which could have taken Vienna (29 years before it happened in a very different way in 1945), Western capitals decided on regime-change in Russia. As the British Prime Minister Lloyd George stated in the London Parliament after the success of the British-orchestrated 1917 coup, ‘we have achieved one of our war aims’, for rival Russia had to be destroyed. However, in usurping the legitimate Russian government of Tsar Nicholas by backing corrupt aristocrats and stupid intellectuals, the West created for itself the Soviet Union, its greatest enemy. Actions have consequences.

Sadly, Western powerbrokers have learned nothing from their mistakes. Thus, in 1960s and 1970s Vietnam, their support of ultra-corrupt Vietnamese led to the victory of Communism there. In the 1990s, their crass mishandling of Yugoslavia produced the terrorist and mafia enclave of Kosovo. More recently, in the Ukraine, where again the West usurped a democratically-elected government and replaced it with a clique of oligarchs who are bleeding the country dry, the impoverished country faces a war against the regime’s own people, a massive refugee problem, endemic corruption and bankruptcy. Actions have consequences.

Western support of corrupt Afghans and Iraqis has killed and maimed and forced to flee millions, given birth to corrupt puppet regimes in both countries that have little control over their countries outside their capitals, destabilized the whole of the Middle East, especially Libya and Syria, and produced ISIS. Now an insane terrorist, prepared precisely in Libya and Syria, has struck Manchester. Former British Prime Ministers Blair (who helped ruin Afghanistan and Iraq and so Syria) and Cameron (who helped bomb Libya back into the Stone Age) must take responsibility. Actions have consequences.

Forgiving, but not Forgetting

Another appalling Muslim terrorist incident, this time in Manchester, has taken the lives of over twenty young people. Some ask, ‘Why is that Muslims always carry out such attacks?’ The question is false. True, certain Muslims do carry out such attacks, but so also do Shintoist Japanese kamikaze (suicide bombers), as well as warped Fascist White supremacists, like Breivik in Norway (77 dead) and McVeigh in Oklahoma (168 dead).

The fact is that all religions and ideologies that do not have forgiveness as their central tenet are capable of producing fanatics who carry out mass murder. This includes unforgiving Western State terrorists, who carry out carpet bombing, atomize Hiroshima and Nagasaki, spread Agent Orange and fire uranium-tipped shells into Serbia and invade Iraq, all exemplified by the US general, Curtis LeMay, to whom is at least attributed the quote, ‘let us bomb them back into the Stone Age’.

What is the unique Christian attitude? It is to forgive, because God is in charge of judging history, not men, and God forgives, otherwise He would not have died for humanity on the Cross. Thus, Roman Catholics pillaged and raped their way through New Rome (Constantinople), invaded Russia with their Teutonic Knights and created Uniatism in the Ukraine, from which thousands of people are still dying today, and seventy-five years ago slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Serbs just for making the sign of the cross correctly. But we forgive them because a Higher Justice will deal with them. We tremble at the mere thought of hellfire.

However, we do not forget. The facts of history are the facts of history. They cannot be altered – to the eternal shame of all those who commit such atrocities, like those above. We do not forget because there is only one mistake that we human-beings can avoid, and that is, the mistake of not learning from our mistakes and so making the same mistake again.

Panic in the Establishment from which Only the Truth Will Set it Free

The Western Establishment, politicians and media alike, is in a state of panic. Having first lost the UK and now the US to the people, who are waking up from their generations of lemming-like trance, the neocon-run CIA, for generations expert in cyber and all manner of other attacks against sovereign countries around the world, has been ordered to issue fake news (= lies) about Russian cyber attacks and non-existent compromising materials on Mr Trump’s private life. These lies are being peddled by State-run Western media outlets, such as Fox News, CNN and the ever-manipulable BBC. This is being done in a massive and co-ordinated operation to discredit the next US President, presenting him as a national security risk, in order to prevent him from being inaugurated.

Meanwhile in Poland, according to US and German media, in a last-ditch military attempt by the Western Establishment to cling on to power, on the Polish borders of Russia and Lithuania 250 US tanks and large amounts of other military equipment are being massed from Bremerhaven by NATO in order to prepare a possible invasion of the Russian Federation. Volker Wieker, the commander of the German Army (Bundeswehr) has stated that the invasion could begin any time within the next six months. This follows years of ridiculous fake news about non-existent Russian invasions of Georgia and the Ukraine and threatened invasions of the Baltic States, Finland and Sweden! Spreading mass psychosis is the old and new norm for globalist Western propaganda outlets.

Why all this? Because the CIA, the Pentagon and NATO, with their trillions of dollars of debts to the military-industrial complex, cannot in their pride accept their recent failures on all fronts, military, political and diplomatic, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Russia, Libya, Egypt, Iran, Syria, China, the Ukraine, the Yemen and Turkey. Hubris has brought them low. Little wonder that the editorials of propaganda outlets like the long ago prestigious Times of London now call for Russian news services to be censored and closed down. The last thing they want is the Truth. Anti-Christian Fascism (according to Mr Trump the CIA is ‘Nazi-like’) has returned; the ‘liberal’ Establishment has brought it back.

The Western elite, led by the Nobel Peace (!) prizewinner Obama, knows that all its failures are catastrophic for its reputation, which worldwide (outside its own tightly-controlled colonies) is now that of an organization that promotes terrorism. Whether in Afghanistan (the CIA-trained and financed Al-Nazi-like Qaida and the Gulf of Tonkin-style Twin Towers attack), Syria (the Western-trained and armed ‘moderate’ terrorists), the Ukraine (Western-trained and financed Nazi terrorists sent from the Kiev puppet regime to torture and murder in the south and east), Ankara (the CIA-assassination of the Russian ambassador) or Istanbul (a bomb in a night club in order to overthrow the Turkish government).

Now the Western elite and its enslaved propaganda outlets are terrified by what might happen in the coming democratic elections in France and Germany this year. Suppose the peoples there also dare to defy the Western Establishment (‘the international community’!) and so elect free and not vassal governments of their choice? Real democrats (‘populists’) might win. It will be the end for the Fourth Reich EU. Their flocks of corrupt bureaucrats and professional liars would lose their jobs and vast incomes. Thus, the media hirelings slander both the candidates and the peoples, presenting them as ‘Christian’ idiots, attempting to spread panic with terrorist attacks and the bogeymen of mythical Russian hackers.

Will the Truth set them free? After generations, nay, a thousand years, of systematic self-justifying lies, the Western Establishment that has lived for all that time in the post-Truth world of its own making is still running scared of the Truth. For it does not want to be set free from the sway of the Prince of lies that it long ago chose as its one and only lord. Perhaps living in its pre-Truth, that is, post-Lie era of today, it may yet be vanquished by the Truth and at last find freedom from its millennial lies.

Stephen Lendman Reports President Putin’s Response To Obama’s New Sanctions

We republish the following article since it shows what a bad loser and gross hypocrite soon to be ex-President Obama is. Having interfered in democratic elections all over the world, unseating the democratically-elected President of the Ukraine in 2014 through mob law and massacre, he then tried to interfere in the UK’s Brexit referendum, threatening us with being ‘at the back of the queue’ in the ridiculous and arrogant attempt to intimidate the UK public in the ‘Project Fear’ campaign of Cameron. Obama then accused Russian hackers of interfering in the US election. Bad losers always explain away their incompetence with excuses. After all the CIA employs teams of hundreds of hackers and trolls to interfere in other countries’ elections. Why not explain away your loss by accusing others of what you yourself do?

Obama’s present Russophobic actions seem to be linked with his thirst for petty revenge after he lost the war in Syria, which now has a ceasefire brokered by the three countries who are not thousands of miles away, but are concerned neighbours: Russia, Turkey and Iran. This ceasefire has been carried out without the US. It now counts for little in the Middle East, for it comes after the US financing and arming of the now defeated ‘moderate rebels’ (= terrorists from all over the Muslim world), who in their war in Syria are responsible for the deaths of 315,000 people, blood that is on the conscience of the White House (if they have a conscience). Syria is now divided into zones of influence between these three neighbours, with Russia protecting the Christians in the Syrian east, fulfilling its historic destiny as the protector of Christians in the Holy Land. (This came about after the massacre and expulsion of virtually all the Christians in Iraq, where the USA infamously meddled in 2003. seeing the anti-Christian and irresponsible Western indifference to their tragic fate, who but Russia could then defend the Christians of Syria?).

Obama’s crass hypocrisy means that he leaves the White House a loser and miserable failure, his only ‘achievement’ having been to increase the US national debt to a staggering $20 trillion. Russia awaits common sense from the USA.

It is clear enough who is the real leader of the world. That person is not in the White House. Putin’s Response to Obama’s New Sanctions

by Stephen Lendman

What Is The Obama Regime Up To? — Paul Craig Roberts

Both leaders are polar opposites – a person of dignity and honour in Moscow on the right side of history compared to a US menace in Washington waging war on humanity.

In response to Obama’s new sanctions, a same day article quoted Sergey Lavrov, saying Russia “cannot leave unanswered insults of the kind, reciprocity is the law of diplomacy and foreign relations.”

He recommended Putin respond tit for tat while blasting Obama’s deplorable action. It seemed certain, but didn’t happen. Putin took the high ground, in stark contrast to his disgraceful US counterpart, issuing a statement, saying:

“We regard the recent unfriendly steps taken by the outgoing US administration as provocative and aimed at further weakening the Russia-US relationship.” “This runs contrary to the fundamental interests of both the Russian and American peoples. Considering the global security responsibilities of Russia and the United States, this is also damaging to international relations as a whole.”

“As it proceeds from international practice, Russia has reasons to respond in kind. Although we have the right to retaliate, we will not resort to irresponsible ‘kitchen’ diplomacy but will plan our further steps to restore Russian-US relations based on the policies of the Trump Administration.” “The diplomats who are returning to Russia will spend the New Year’s holidays with their families and friends. We will not create any problems for US diplomats.” “We will not expel anyone. We will not prevent their families and children from using their traditional leisure sites during the New Year’s holidays.” “Moreover, I invite all children of US diplomats accredited in Russia to the New Year and Christmas children’s parties in the Kremlin.” [The Russian Orthodox Church uses the Julian calendar for religious holidays, which puts Christmas on January 7.] “It is regrettable that the Obama Administration is ending its term in this manner. Nevertheless, I offer my New Year greetings to President Obama and his family.” “My season’s greetings also to President-elect Donald Trump and the American people.” “I wish all of you happiness and prosperity.”

Judge for yourself. Who’s the man of dignity and honour and who’s the menace? Which way will Trump go?

My personal year-end greetings and thanks to President Putin for doing the right thing consistently on major geopolitical issues. I proudly support his pre-eminent world leadership.

A Final Comment

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova explained that Obama’s expulsion order disrupts the lives of 96 Russian nationals – 35 diplomats and family members.

Some targeted diplomats only arrived in America two months ago. “It is not clear how they could have participated in (alleged) activities that, according to the secret services, took place in the spring of 2016,” Zakharova explained. They have until January 1 to leave – Obama’s happy new year greeting.

THE DEATH RATTLE OF GLOBALISM?

The neocon globalists, led in the USA by the defeated Clintons and Obama, in the EU by the discredited Hollande (popularity rating – 4%) and the reviled Merkel (as for Cameron, who has heard of him?), are showing all the signs of being bad losers. Having lost the war in Aleppo, they are now turning to desperate measures and not just propaganda lies about hacking or Russian ‘threats’. Having failed last summer in the CIA-run Gulenist coup to overthrow and murder the Turkish President Erdogan, they have now had the Russian ambassador, Andrey Karlov, murdered, a terrorist shooting him in the back in typically cowardly fashion.

Designed to spoil Russian-Turkish cooperation, it will not. This situation is not the same as last year, when a Russian pilot was killed by the Gulenist network. After the murder of the ambassador by a Gulenist, the Turkish side sent its apologies to the Russian people and government immediately. Vladimir Putin directly blamed the CIA-backed network of Islamists that were behind the murder and sympathized with the anti-NATO President Erdogan. On the same day there was a terrorist attack in Germany, organized by ISIS. We are witnessing the death throes of anti-Christian globalism, forced out of the White House by popular consent.

The US organizer will pay a huge price for this assassination. Russia and Turkey will work together in Syria and create peace in the cradle of Christendom, the Middle East. The Russo-Turkish alliance is deepened, as is the acceleration of the Turkish withdrawal from NATO, creating a new Central Asian alliance, together with Iran. Our enemies – the globalists – fear this more than anything else. Nothing will stop progress to the creation of a multi-polar, democratic world order against the globalists and their pathetic, Neo-Cold War, bad loser propaganda. The regiments of CIA hackers always accuse their enemies of doing what they do.

Having thrown off the Western-imposed, Soviet yoke, Russia’s agricultural exports are now returning to those before 1917, the exports bringing in more than its arms sales: Russia is independent. Obama, who supported the terrorists (‘resistance-fighters’) in the Middle East, especially against the democratically-elected and very popular Assad government (‘regime’ in CIA mediaspeak) has lost. The neocons’ meddling has lost the USA not only Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt and Syria, but now also Turkey. Eurasia will now be united under Chinese and Russian leadership. A diplomat assassinated: a new Empire is born.

Whose Temple Are They Building?

Over the last two weeks France and Germany have been deeply troubled by revolting murders carried out by Islamist psychopaths. In the latest tragedy, a devout 86-year old priest, ordained 58 years ago in 1958, had his throat slit while celebrating the mass. One of his assailants had been encouraged by the campaign of the Western media and politicians not so long ago to go to Syria and fight against the government there – a campaign now recognized as an error, though still not apologized for by the culprits. Their unpunished irresponsibility has now brought terror to their very doorstep.

The Middle East from Afghanistan to Libya is indeed littered with failed ‘democratic governments’, built in the ruins of stable but undemocratic countries, as created by Western meddlers. As one Iraqi citizen put it recently: ‘Before there was one Saddam Hussein, now thanks to the West there is a thousand’. More than this, the slaughter of Christians, ultimately caused and tolerated by the West all through the Middle East, has now arrived in Western Europe. Tonight, atheist French politicians, many of them lapsed Jews, most of them freemasons, have attended mass at Notre Dame in Paris.

We can only hope that they may one day be brought to repentance for the refugee crisis that they have created. However, at present these selfsame leaders are still backing the daily and unreported terrorism of the Kiev Army against Ukrainian civilians in Donbass, so there is little realistic hope. These leaders belong to the Western world of smartphones and smartbombs, which they do not know how to use wisely, as their ‘smart civilization’ has failed to invent wisephones and wisebombs. Before they act, they should first think what they are building – the Church of God or the Temple of Antichrist. We fear that when they reflect, if they ever reflect, they will find that it is the latter.

On the Curse of Ancestral Sins and Cultural Healing

Introduction: On Healing from the Sins of our Ancestors

Sins always have consequences. Thus, once we have realized that we have sinned, attaining the consciousness of our sinfulness, we have to repent for the sins and make up for, that is, to make reparation for, their consequences. Only thus can we be healed. But what can we say of the consequences of the sins of our ancestors? Although we did not commit the sins, we still have to live with their consequences, which have become an inherent part of the reflexes and attitudes of the culture in which we live. Until we have made an act of cultural repentance and reparation for the misdeeds of our ancestors, our repentance and reparation are not complete, we accept a stained, even cursed, culture, agreeing to live amid spiritual impurity, and the impure consequences of the original sins continue. In other words, we must seek cultural repentance and reparation if we are to heal the consequences of ancestral sins.

Let us take one concrete and most tragic example from European life, the centenary of which has just been recalled, the Battle of the Somme, with its one million victims. Why did that War, of which that Battle was one of the bloodiest events, take place in Northern France and Southern Belgium (Flanders)? Why were millions of Belgians, Germans, Frenchmen and British troops sent to their deaths by their political and military elites in such a cruel, futile and utterly inhuman way, so much so that the shattered bodies of hundreds of thousands of them could never even be found? Because those were the very countries were cursed by the most terrible exploitation and massacres of native peoples in colonies. Thus, just tiny Belgium stood accused of maiming and murdering between one million and ten million Africans in the Belgian Congo. Sins carried out far away still lie like a curse close to home.

Let us take more recent examples. Why did the terrorist massacre of innocents of 2001 occur precisely in the USA on 9/11 that year? Because the USA is where modern Islamist terrorism was invented and it has never been repented for and made up for, 9/11 being the feast of the Beheading of the innocent St John the Baptist by the evil Herod. Why did the demonic terrorist atrocity in Nice occur precisely in France on 15 July this year? Because France is where terror was invented, on 14 July 1789, and it has never been repented for and made up for, but tragically it is actually justified and celebrated – in France every 14 July. Why was Patriarch Bartholomew, forewarned by Washington, forced to flee Turkey on the eve of the recent failed US-organized coup? Because he has still not repented for and made up for the heretical meeting he oversaw in Crete last month and so has lost his spiritual protection.

Cultural Repentance and Reparation Among Lapsed Russian Orthodox

Let us take other, longer-lasting examples. ‘Only repentance will save Russia’. Like the call of St John the Baptist, such was the call of St John of Kronstadt and many others before the so-called Russian ‘Revolution’ of 1917. After it, this was also the unanimous call of countless others, both inside and outside the former Russian Empire, not least of St John of Shanghai. Otherwise, they said, the bloodletting would go on. Indeed, it was only 25 years after the Revolution, with the unspeakable suffering of the Second World War and its 27 mainly civilian million dead, that repentance began, but even today reparation for the impurity is not complete there, as we see below. For he who says repentance for sins also means reparation for, that is, making up for, the consequences of the sins, changing the culture in which people live. Until the consequences of sins are made up for in all aspects of life, repentance is not complete.

In the ex-Soviet context of the twentieth and twenty-first century, repentance has precisely meant people stripping themselves of a whole cultural layer of spiritual impurity. This was the layer of atheism imposed by force by the Soviet-style Westernization of Russia since 1917, which assimilated the spiritual impurity that had gone before it. Thus, in the 25 years since the fall of the Soviet Union and the coming of religious freedom, we have seen massive numbers of ex-Soviet citizens being baptized, that is, mass repentance. Over 100 million lives have begun to change – but not fully. For the Churching of these masses has been harder and slower, as Soviet cultural reflexes, the ABC of alcoholism (drug-taking), abortion (child murder) and corruption (systematic lying), still like a curse. Though several millions have been Churched in Orthodoxy so far, cultural reparation and so healing is only beginning.

In another Russian context, that of the deep-rooted political prejudices of the anti-Russian emigration, repentance would mean descendants of émigrés stripping themselves of two layers of spiritual impurity. The first is the layer imposed by modern life in the West where they have been born and lived all their lives. The second, much deeper, is the cultural layer of impurity, that of the Russophobic Westernization inherited and continued from their emigre ancestors who absorbed that impurity inside Russia well before the Revolution which they greeted. Two layers makes the task of repentance and reparation twice as hard and this is why the politicized descendants of émigrés have still not returned to the Russian Church. Indeed, there are those among them who actually justify their lack of return to the Church, their lack of cultural repentance and reparation, which lies like a self-imposed curse on them.

Cultural Repentance and Reparation Among Western People

Similarly, for Western people to repent and make reparation for their ancestors’ abandonment of the Orthodox Church means not just words, but reparation, that is, actually returning to their ancestral Faith and cleansing their culture of spiritual impurity. And that means not just repentance for personal sins that have blinded them to the Faith in the past, but also making up for the consequences of those sins which infect the culture that they have inherited. We can sum this up by saying that there must first be personal repentance and reparation and then cultural repentance and reparation. In other words, returning to the Orthodox Faith means forming and obtaining a new view of the world and everything around us and living according to it. Only if enough people follow this path, will a whole culture be purified and healed of its deformations, lies and hypocrisy and will the world be transfigured.

In an English context, returning to the Church means stripping ourselves of no fewer than three layers of impurity. The first is the Secularist culture imposed by the last 50 years of modern life in the West where people have lived all their lives, the second is that imposed by some 475 years of Protestant culture before that, the third that imposed by some 475 years of Roman Catholic culture before that. (In a Roman Catholic context, returning to the Church means losing only two layers, but the second is a double layer – as it is 950 years ‘thick’). Such repentance and reparation mean rejecting the inherent spiritual impurities in English culture, all its alien reflexes and mentalities. Just as someone cannot be baptised if he has not first emptied himself of all that is unworthy of baptism, so also a culture cannot be baptised if it has not first emptied itself of all that is unworthy of baptism.

Let us take concrete examples of the three layers that have overlaid Orthodox culture in England. The first layer is the secularism which says that faith is a barely tolerable private delusion or psychological disease that has no objective reality – modern relativist amoralism. The next layer is the secularism which says that faith is a set of private interpretations and personal moral rules that have no consequences in social, political and economic life, which are ruled only by utilitarian self-interest – ruthless Imperialism, the right to theft because ‘we’ are superior. The final layer is the secularism which says that faith is dependent on external obedience to and dependence on an individual. It is only underneath all these three layers that we can find True Faith, which is made up of the revelations of the Holy Spirit, made continually to the community of all the saints, who together are called the Church.

Conclusion: Consequences in the Last Times

There are no fewer than three levels of cultural repentance and reparation here, three layers of cultural attachment to falsehood which people have to rid themselves off to return to the Church and so be healed. And threefold cultural purification is the only repentance and reparation possible for the thousand year curse, for it is precisely on the basis of these three layers of error that Antichrist will come. Firstly, he will ban all ‘private delusion’ (faith in the real God), secondly, he will enforce consumerist self-interest (the law of the jungle) and thirdly, he will ensure that all are obedient to and dependent on his external authority. In other words, the three layers of impurity that deform modern culture create the conditions for Antichrist to come, frighteningly, the ultimate cultural curse. But we should not despair – he will come only if we do not repent for lapsing from our ancestral Orthodox Faith by returning to it.