Category Archives: The Ukraine

Tragedy in Belarus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Feast of the Transfiguration 2020

Conclusions

Introduction

When we realize that we may not have much longer to live, it is time to set down for posterity the conclusions that we have reached from our experience of life about the Church, from which all else flows.

For us the Church means the Orthodox Church: there is no other. Outside the Church there are only breakaway fragments with their historic remains, either greater or lesser vestiges of the Church. Similarly, Christianity means Orthodox Christianity or, for short, Orthodoxy – it is the same thing. Outside Christianity there can only be vestiges of Christianity.

Russia

Ever since the fall of the Second Rome (New Rome or Constantinople) in 1453, Russia has been the Third Rome. Some little-believing Russians have interpreted this in a crude, nationalistic way. Such should keep their primitivism to themselves, with their wild ideas that the centralizing Ivan IV or even the odious atheist and executioner of millions, Stalin, might be saints. It is notable that such nationalism is always centralizing, as we saw in the case of the disastrous centralism of the Soviet Union, which was so detested by all its victims. There is no place for such nationalism in the Church, which confesses the unity in diversity of Trinitarian theology and culture.

Since the Apostasy of the Third and Last Rome in 1917, the world has been living on borrowed time, for a Fourth Rome there shall not be. This extra time has been loaned to us so that many new saints, mainly martyrs, could appear, that is, this extra time has been and is still for the sake of repentance. Only when there is no more repentance will there be no more saints, and only then will the world end. Moreover, through the Mercy of God, Who allowed the sacrifice of these saints, it is possible that the Third Rome may yet be restored.

As the Third Rome has not been restored as yet, this must be because the people have only half-repented. Thus, the revolting remains of the atheist monster Lenin lie in Moscow and his name and statues still pollute the whole of the Russian Federation. The areas around Saint Petersburg and Ekaterinburg are still called Leningrad and Sverdlovsk, named after those mass-murderers, just as very many other places and streets are named after other mass-murderers. And all this meets with acceptance by the masses of unrepentant.

Elder Nikolai (Guryanov) said: Russia will not be raised up until people realize who our Tsar Nicholas was’. Indeed, many of those who died for the Royal Martyrs have not yet been canonized and are still despised and denounced, including by so-called ‘theologians’. As mere rationalists, intellectually full but spiritually empty, they do not have the mystical sense of history which is vital to understand spiritual reality. And much else in the restoration of Christianity in Russia is, like such ‘theologians’, still very superficial and nominal. There is much gold in a few places with much corruption, superstition and careerism, and there is still very far to go elsewhere.

The Patriarchate of Constantinople

In 1917 the Tsar was betrayed by the Russian elite in 1917, which event the world calls in its way ‘the Russian Revolution’, though it was in fact nothing of the sort but rather a descent into hell on earth. After this, it was almost inevitable that the leadership of the tiny Patriarchate of Constantinople – and others allied to its worldly spirit – would take, as they saw it, advantage of the situation, so falling into temptation.

Thus, the temptation of its Greek nationalism, which had already led to the initial downfall of the Second Rome in 1453, meant that after the fall of Orthodox Russia the Second Rome would make an uncanonical bid to dominate the whole Church. This would mean once more compromising itself in syncretism, putting its racial pride above Christ, like the Jews of old.

This is what that Patriarchate had already done at the so-called Council of Florence almost 500 years before 1917, just as the Papacy of Rome had already done in the eleventh century. So New Rome tragically engineered its final downfall, just like Old Rome before it. Although the nationalism with which Constantinople is infected is only anti-Christian worldliness, that Patriarchate has fallen to this spiritual disease.

This disease broke out again nearly 100 years ago under the British-appointed Patriarch Meletios (at a cost of £100,000 in the money of that time) and, from 1948 on, under the US-appointed Patriarch Athenagoras and his successors, like the present one (at a cost today, it is said, of $25,000,000). We now see a Patriarchate of Constantinople (and its branch in the Ukraine) which advocates homosexuality – no surprise given that many of its representatives are more or less openly so and are friends with similar – and worse – circles in the Vatican. But we still hope for repentance.

The Western World and Europe

Creating itself 1,000 years ago on the ruins of Roman Imperialist paganism and Germanic barbarism, the Western world was from the start inherently built on racial pride. It claimed, through what it called its ‘theology’, in fact its self-justifying ideology, that God through the Holy Spirit had given it absolute authority over the whole world. Its leader, variously called pope, emperor, king and, today, president, had replaced God. God, apparently, has always whispered in their ears and told them what to do, ensuring that Western leaders have always been right, infallible.

In order to prove this spiritual delusion, ‘the West’ became the ruthless enemy of ‘the Rest’, and so the destroyer of all other world civilizations through organized violence with astonishing military technology, born of its aggressive and arrogant self-belief. It has always attempted to undermine the elites of other civilizations through its ideology and so sabotage the religious foundations of other civilizations (all civilizations are founded on religious belief) by secularizing them and so overthrowing them. This we can see very clearly in the history of Russia and, again today, in the classic case of the Westernization of the once glorious and famous, but now inglorious and shameless, Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Western ideology replaced God with man, for it is Anti-Trinitarian and therefore Anti-God, Anti-Patriotic and Anti-Family. It replaced God the Father with the idol of Money (Mammon), which is why the linchpin of its ideology is called ‘Capital-ism’. It replaced the Incarnation of the Son into social life with the ideology of Power and so created artificial Unions of countries where Power could be concentrated among the oligarchic few of the elite or ‘establishment’. And it replaced the Sanctification by the Holy Spirit of personal life with Sin, disguised with words like humanism, individualism, freedom and democracy. Thus, its idolization of the Anti-Trinity of Money, Power and Sin, which sum up its ideology. And it is precisely these idolatrous values, which began in Europe which will lead to the end of the world.

Europe is a purely artificial construct – it does not exist. In reality, Europe, meaning ‘the West’ is only the north-westernmost tip of the single Continent of Eurasia, meaning ‘the West-East’. Its Asian part is the foundation of all World Religions: Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Today’s European Union is thus an isolationist myth, a power-grab of its elite, and it will not survive. Having now abandoned both its Roman Catholic and its Protestant forms of Secularism, its remaining atheist form of Secularism is bringing it to suicide. Europe can now only survive if it becomes part of a Northern Eurasian Confederation, that is, if it repents for its thousand-year long apostasy and returns to being part of Orthodox Christian Civilization.

England and My Destiny

‘Heaven take my soul, and England keep my bones’.

King John 4, 3. 10

England is my home. My home is not Britain, which is an artificial invention of foreign political elites and establishments, whether pagan Roman, barbarian Norman or atheist Hanoverian. As the political construct of a foreign elite, Britain as a political unit is destined to disappear.

The three countries of the British Isles, England, Scotland and Wales, soon all to gain independence from the British Establishment elite, together with a fourth, the still-to-be-reunited Ireland, may yet one day, after independence, form a loose and voluntary Confederation. This will perhaps be called ‘Iona’, ‘The Isles of the North Atlantic’, as its peoples learn to live together in peace, respecting one another.

I have had a destiny, I have had to follow the law of my being. I have had a very long way to go. The great-grandson of a Suffolk ploughman had to become a Russian Orthodox priest, against all the odds of all the elites.

In common with St John of Shanghai, I have been internationally-minded and have been put on trial by nationalists and secularists hiding inside the Church, who have continually frustrated my hopes.  I could have done so much more, but was not allowed to. A little like the island-Elder Nikolai (Guryanov), I have in my poor little way lived in isolation, as on an island.

Three Miracles

Nevertheless, as only the Truth sets free, I have always battled against injustices, even if I had had little hope of success either in my lifetime or ever. However, as God is great and many others have also fought against the same injustices, I have seen three extraordinary miracles worked in my lifetime.

After a near ninety-year wait, I have seen a Bishop at last appointed for our Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland, as the Church Outside Russia comes to be the Church of the English-speaking world. This I struggled for unceasingly.

After a near sixty-year wait, I have seen the English, Irish and all Western Saints accepted back into the Church. That was a tremendous battle in the pre-internet age against the bishops who were so hostile, even as recently as 2016. Now, with several of these saints included in the Russian Orthodox calendar, the dam has burst. Now others, in the USA, Switzerland and Russia, younger than me and with more time and means, have taken up the writing of their Lives and continue what we began.

After a near thirty-year wait, I have seen the miracle of unity, the reunion of all three parts of the Russian Church, for which, together with thousands of others, I battled. As a result, I have also at last seen a Russian Orthodox Exarchate formed in Western Europe (with another one in South-East Asia).

Conclusion

Everything comes to him who waits and persists, for patience is the mother of virtues. I thank God for these and many other, personal, miracles. What I have prayed for these fifty years, and what others before me have prayed for, has eventually come to pass, in ways and at times far beyond what I expected. God’s Providence is always far greater and far better than we expect. True, the historic injustice of the overthrow of England and its substitution by an alien Establishment, committed in 1066, and the historic injustice of the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas by the betrayal of the Russian elite in 1917, have not yet been righted through restorations, though even here I still have hope.

Today, against the deviations of nationalist and modernist Constantinople, we offer the White Russian and the Old English, the Imperial and the Fair, the Spiritual and the Free, the Noble and the Elegant, the Manly and the Womanly. Whatever they have done to me, it has not mattered, because I have always known that the last words in history will be Christ’s. And if we remain faithful to them, then all will be well.

 

 

 

 

 

Western Tragedy and Christian Victory

After the collapse of Communism 30 years ago, the Western elite, obsessed by its control-freak fantasy of global supremacy, launched an extraordinarily aggressive campaign against the Non-Western 85% of the world, hoping to enslave it to its militant secularism. Thus, in the last 30 years it has constantly trampled on freedom and democracy worldwide, launching two illegal wars against Iraq, invading Afghanistan, promoting its version of ‘free trade’ but imposing illegal sanctions against free trade on states such as China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea and Turkey, implementing violent ‘regime change’ in many countries, committing genocide, creating millions of refugees by creating chaos through proxy wars, as in Iraq, Syria, Libya and the Yemen, sending troops to West Africa, threatening independent countries with invasion and launching cyber-attacks against all competitors, while hypocritically accusing them of doing the same.

The Russian Federation has been a particular victim of Western aggression. Here the West has for example given refuge to billionaire oligarch thieves of Russian public assets, financed violent demonstrations by marginal political groups against its democratically elected government, arranged false flag propaganda assassinations of Russian citizens abroad (the Litvinenko and Skripal cases, which only the very naïve actually believe were carried out by Russia), overthrew the pro-Russian Ukrainian government by violence and so started a bloody civil war there, rejected the decision of the vast majority of citizens of the Crimea to return to Russia by democratic referendum after sixty years of captivity, set up puppet governments in countries surrounding Russia and sent them NATO troops and arms to strut along Russian borders and, more recently, relaunched its self-bankrupting nuclear arms race against Russia, treacherously breaking all its past treaties and promises.

More recently still it has, through blackmail, bribery and flattery of provincial Greek nationalist vanity, created a split in the 220-million strong Orthodox Church. This was done by separating over 100 bishops of the dying Greek Church in Istanbul, known as Constantinople or the Phanar, as well as the elderly Archbishop of Athens, from communion with the multinational Russian Orthodox Church, by having the Phanar create a Church schism in the Ukraine. Using its local ambassadors, the West then tried to spread this schism to other Local Orthodox Churches, especially in Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Georgia. Indeed, in an unprecedented case in the latter Church a homosexual metropolitan has just been defrocked for trying to poison its saintly Patriarch. Thus, the West operates through threatening faithful Christians and buying ‘Phanarodox’ careerists, ecumenists, racists and homosexuals, always using the worst of the worst for its base purposes.

The latter anti-zealots are used to fight against and persecute lovers of Orthodox Christianity, especially ascetic monks, sincere married clergy and faithful laypeople. Therefore, in this Church schism, as in many other matters, Western aggression is failing, for although man proposes, God disposes. In the Ukraine, bankrupted by its civil war which the US-installed regime started against the peoples of this recently-invented country (1), the miserable little schism has come to nothing. And this despite the Nazi-style violence, threats and intimidation which have been used by the State authorities against the faithful over and over again. Moreover, most of the 900 Orthodox bishops outside Istanbul have refused to have anything to do with its corruption. And the French Rue Daru Archbishop Jean and 60 parishes in France, the Netherlands and England, have just quit the bullying of the Phanariots for the joyful embrace of their Russian Mother-Church and canonicity.

This has further strengthened the Russian Orthodox Exarchate of Western Europe, as it moves towards unity, gathering all elements together in order to recreate the Local Church here in place of its present spiritual vacuum. As for the Russian Orthodox Exarchate of South-East Asia, which stretches from Korea to Thailand through Laos and Vietnam to Singapore and the successful missions in Taiwan and the Philippines, it too has just been strengthened through the many parishes of the Indonesian mission. These have just been transferred from the jurisdiction of the basically English-speaking Church Outside Russia to the well-financed and well-organized Exarchate. Thus, we see how the tragedy of secularist Western aggression has been marked by the victory of God’s Church, in West and East. Indeed, man does propose, but God does dispose, and the gates of hell shall not prevail. Victory belongs to Christ, not to petty racist nationalism, bribery, threats and perversion.

We now look more confidently to the future. The present schism, provoked by the US State Department through its Greek puppets in Istanbul and Ukrainian puppets in Kiev is the death rattle of the Phanar before its end. As it finally dies out some 570 years after it lost its significance in 1453, its parishes in the USA, Australia and Great Britain emptying, as elderly immigrants die out, having failed to pass on the Faith to the local generations, the Russian Orthodox Church, uniting Eurasia, faces a huge challenge. From the Western European Exarchate to the South-East Asian Exarchate the need for mission is enormous. Outside the Eurasian landmass, where well over five billion people live, it can also help the Patriarchate of Alexandria in its mission of converting a billion Africans and help the New-York-based Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in its mission of converting the billion who live in the largely English, Spanish and Portuguese-speaking New World of the Americas and Oceania.

May Thy will be done, O Lord.

 

Note:

  1. Invented as an idea by the Hapsburgs for divide and rule purposes at the end of the 19th century, the anti-historical concept of the ‘Ukraine’ (simply meaning ‘border lands’) was implemented by three blood-soaked 20th century dictators, Lenin, Stalin and Khushchov. These anti-Russian mass murderers stole most of the territory of ‘the Ukraine’ from surrounding countries, all the while keenly supported by the Western Powers. Thus, the Ukrainian flag is derived from that of 19th century Lower Austria and its trident emblem comes from a cattle brand used in the same area at the time. The current Ukrainian President, a Jewish comedian, cannot even hold a conversation in Ukrainian.

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.

 

 

The Western God is Dead and Buried, but the True And Living God is Returning

Our God is a consuming fire

Heb 12, 29

I worship and adore the true and living God who created all things.

St Alban of Verulamium

Introduction: The Western God’s Funeral is Over

The thousand year-long funeral of the Western god is over. This much is clear to everyone. True, very small groups of the elderly still huddle in surviving churches, true, other buildings are packed with swaying crowds of happy-clappers – only in reality they are not attending churches, but feel-good American entertainment shows. Thus, former church-buildings have become fitness clubs, restaurants and shopping centres for the cult of the body and ‘wellness’. People are told to ‘spoil and pamper themselves’, because ‘you’re worth it’, with personal trainers, life coaches, leisure centres, spas, hot tubs, jacuzzis, beauty salons, massage parlours, cosmetic surgery, gourmet restaurants managed by ‘celebrity chefs’ and gastropubs with ‘fine wine’. Physical impurity of all sorts must be purged – go vegan and gluten-free; as for spiritual impurity, it has never been heard of. However, all manner of utterly irrational superstitions are available for mental wellness; mindfulness, gurus, astrology, magic crystals, feng-shui, tree-hugging – anything goes, providing it is fashionable. So all Westerners have become ‘fashion victims’. But how did the Western (and Westernized) world reach this point of killing its own god?

Some History

After the Western world had denied and then lost the knowledge of the real God a thousand years ago, it substituted its own rationalist and scholastic god for Him. This substitute god, represented by a Western man called ‘the Vicar of Christ’, from whom, they claimed, flowed all authority, was idolized for hundreds of years. This idolatry came because he justified all manner of Western aggression, from massacres in Western Europe (southern Italy, England, Iberia, Wales, southern France, Ireland) to ‘Crusades’, from Inquisitions to the ruthless genocides of Western ‘explorers’ (=murderous pirates and thieves) like Columbus, Da Gama and Cortez. After a few centuries the self-invented Western god’s authority was extended to others, ‘democratized’, and this justified the plundering and looting of the whole planet outside Western Europe with colonial empires, violent Revolutions in England, France and Russia (including the ‘Industrial Revolution’), World Wars, the Holocaust of the Slavs (30 million dead), the Atomic bomb and the invasion of and genocide in Iraq (which the Western god ‘told’ George Bush to do).

The Nature of Western Civilization

Thus, it can be said that the essence of Western Civilization is self-worship, the worship of Western man, which it calls humanism. After the Reformation this worship was, as we have said, gradually extended down the centuries in the name of ‘equality’, from one Western man to all rich Western men, then later from rich Western men to poor Western men, from Western men to Western women and, much more recently, from Western men to anyone of any colour, race, religion and ‘sexual orientation’, as long as they accept the Secularism inherent in Western ‘Civilization’. Therefore, today, the Western world no longer needs a god to justify itself; it is its own god. This was already recognized quite clearly by nineteenth-century intellectuals like Darwin and then Nietzsche, who openly proclaimed that the Western god ‘is dead’. Today this is repeated by spiritually empty intellectuals like Dawkins, who constantly proclaims that God is a myth. And he is right: the Western god, first proclaimed 1,000 years ago, is indeed a myth, but that god is in no way related to the True and Living God, as proclaimed by the Western Orthodox St Alban, who was martyred by Western pagans for proclaiming this well over 1700 years ago.

Dawkins’ arrogant and preening proclamation is true, but it is also suicidal. This is because, since the Western god, angry, vengeful, racially prejudiced, favouritist, puritanical, persecuting, spiteful, punishing, militaristic and just plain evil as he enjoys seeing the victims of death, is dead, this means that his own Western Civilization is dead, fit only for the museum. For it was this nasty-minded god who lay at the root of post-Christian Western Civilization after 1054. For with his so-called ‘atheism’, Dawkins condemns himself and everything he stands for. His ‘Western values’ are merely the ultimate and most logical development of Western Civilization’s own, self-invented god. This atheism, belief in self, has not brought progress, but simply a return to the old paganism, as among the globalist Romans, who believed in any gods, except in the True and Living God. The new gods of today are simply the old pagan gods revived. Western values mean believing in Anything. Christian values proclaim faith in Something, the Living God. However, only a few Western people have been able to step outside the ‘delusion’ (Dawkin’s word) of the self-justifying bubble of their Western ‘Civilization’ to understand this and accept Christ.

Why? Because repentance is far too hard for them; self-justification is far more attractive. Thus, only a few Western people (though it is quite obvious to those outside ethnocentric Western Civilization) have so far realized that the Western world has not buried the real God, just its own thousand year-old Western false god, its idol. Western people, who, amazingly, call themselves ‘atheists’ (which only means that they no longer believe in the Western myth of god) need to be warned: The real God is not dead and buried, but alive and acting and He is coming back. His return is coming from the Holy Spirit, Who ‘blows where He wishes’ and Who has reconnected the inspired in the West with Orthodox Civilization. This Civilization is quite different from Secularist Western Civilization because this is Christian, whereas Western Civilization has not been really Christian for a thousand years. To find a Western Civilization that was Christian, you have to go back a thousand years, in other words, go back to a time when there was no such thing as ‘Western Civilization’, when Western Europe was simply a small, provincial and little developed part of Orthodox Christendom, whose centre was and is in the East, close to Christ.

The Attempt to Destroy Orthodox Civilization

The essence of Orthodox Civilization is the True and Living God and its direction is heaven, and not some Western self-idolatry, whose direction is hell. For the last hundred years in particular (though it had been patently obvious since 1054 or 1204), we have seen how Western Civilization has tried to destroy Orthodox Civilization, betraying and usurping the most Christian Emperor when he was on the brink of victory in the Western-initiated Great War in 1917 and soon afterwards bribing the Patriarchate of Constantinople into enslavement. It even forced that enfeebled Patriarchate, and any others who were so weak that they would follow it, to abandon the Christian calendar! Thus, the schismatic events in the Ukraine of the last few weeks, actively and openly supported by the US and British ambassadors in Kiev and Athens, are only the latest results of the thousand-year attempt of Western Civilization to divide and rule, and eventually, as they hope, destroy and conquer, Christian Civilization. The centre of this Christian Civilization has for centuries, and at no time more than now, been the Russian Orthodox Church. It is why we belong to Her, defending Her against all and confessing Her faith without hesitation.

Conclusion: The Future

Today, the Russian Orthodox Church is as ever supported by all other faithful Orthodox, especially those in the Patriarchate of Antioch and the Serbian, Georgian, Bulgarian, Polish, Czechoslovak Orthodox Churches, by monastics everywhere and many others. The battle today is between two diametrically opposed Civilizations. On the one hand, there is Western Civilization, which is in fact not a Civilization at all because, unlike all other Civilizations in world history, it is not based on faith in God and the spiritual inspiration behind all culture. Its aim has always been the conquest of the planet (‘globalism’), justified by its imagined superiority, which is leading directly to the destruction of the planet – hell on earth. On the other hand, there is Christian Civilization, whose centre is without doubt the martyred Russian Orthodox Church, supported by all other faithful Orthodox. Our aim is heaven on earth. It is clear that although those on the fringes of the Orthodox Church may be falling away, as they have been for the last four generations, that the chaff is being sifted from the wheat (and so much the better), the Church will be victorious in the end. This is because the Church is not ours, but Christ’s and He is invincible.

 

My Life, the Last Battle and the New Orthodox World (N.O.W.)

‘Tell the people: Although I have died, I am alive.’

St John of Shanghai

Foreword: The War

Forty-five years ago I was told by one who could have known better that, as I had been waiting for years to join the Orthodox Church, I now faced a choice: I could either join the Greek Church of Constantinople or the Church of Russia; it was all the same. But only to him was it all the same, as, in spite of, or rather because of, his great intellect, he was spiritually confused. He lived in an alien compromise, washing his hands before the critical choice. I joined the Russian Church because, since the age of twelve, I had known through revelations to my soul that my destiny was most definitely in the Russian Orthodox Church. However crippled it may have been after 1917, I was destined to share in that agony, indeed, although it seemed foolishness to the Jews and to the Greeks alike, only by sharing in that agony could I hope to find my own salvation. I sensed even then that what he had told me was somehow untrue. At best it could only have been a delusion. It was not all the same – and recent very sad events have shown this to all absolutely clearly. Let me explain:

The Church is not to be found in a people who believe that it is a chosen people. Many Hebrews believed that they were the chosen people, but they stoned the prophets and crucified the Son of God. To this day many of their descendants reject Christ, some considering themselves superior to the rest of humanity. Then the Western European elite came to believe in their ‘exceptionalism’ (that is, their claim that they too were above God) too, all in order to justify their organized barbaric aggression. So a thousand years after Christ, they too fell away from the Church, rejecting the Holy Spirit and seizing control of the Church in the West in order to justify their conquistador power-grab. So, like pirates, they began persecuting us ordinary Christians and conquering the rest of the world by fire and the sword. Then their secularist descendants, in turn the Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, German and finally American elites, did exactly the same, demanding world hegemony (‘globalism’), also rejecting Christ because they consider themselves superior to the rest of humanity. (Hence their anti-Semitism: the other ‘chosen people’, the Jews, were rivals to them, therefore they had to be eliminated). In the Church there has now come the turn of certain Greeks, telling us that only they are Christians, that God speaks only Greek, and, as one very well-known Cypriot archimandrite told me, even that their pagan ancestors had prepared the way for Christ! Many Russians fell victim to the same delusion, in the same way believing in themselves instead of believing in God, taking communion only once a year. So they lost everything and overthrew the God-appointed Christian Emperor in 1917. Only through the blood of the New Martyrs and the tears and sweat of the New Confessors did repentance eventually begin to come to them.

All these ‘chosen peoples’ failed to understand that salvation comes only from the Heavenly Jerusalem of the Church of Christ through the Mercy of God and the Holy Spirit – not from some earthly ‘Jewish Rome’ of some mythical ‘chosen people’. For this reason, once I had chosen the Russian Church, I was to spend the rest of my life at war, in tireless battles, in unceasing strife, in the trenches, on the Western Front, fighting for real Christianity, for the real Russian Orthodox Church, together, of course, with many others. We all fought against the narrow-minded, nationalist delusions and impurities of those who had lost the big picture, who could not see the wood for the trees. They told us that only Russians could be Orthodox, that only their own exclusive little fragments of the great Imperial Orthodoxy, which had not undergone the blood, tears and sweat of others, could be right, that God’s Church needed ‘saving’ or ‘reforming’ (naturally, by themselves!). Some of them even persecuted and took to court as a common criminal the greatest saint among them all, St John of Shanghai. Little wonder that the Lord sent me to a military Church. I never sought any of this; it was all imposed on me. My soul would have died had I not taken part in this spiritual warfare. My life has been unceasing warfare in four battles, all fought beneath the Protecting Veil, which my patron-saint saw and which is the only reason why I am still alive.

Three Battles

My first battle was to take part in the struggle to help free that small part of the Russian Church Diaspora in England, which was dependent on Moscow, from spiritual impurity. After nine years, by 1983, I realized that I would fail in this. It was a task quite beyond me, with my very feeble abilities and from my modest, provincial, rural background; the enemies were invested with the strength of a personality cult, with all the authority of men and their city establishments, they had no time for a ploughman’s grandson. I was knocking my head against brick walls. So I left into exile, seeing my limitations. I understood that it would take far-reaching political changes inside Russia and indeed the departures or deaths of some outside Russia before this battle could be won (I did not know then that this would mean twenty-four years). Victory was inevitable, but only God Who created time, could in time bring the victory. My battle had been premature. By myself I could do nothing. It was good for me to know this.

My second battle was to take part in the struggle to help free that small part of the Russian Church Diaspora, which was dependent on Constantinople (Rue Daru), from spiritual impurity. I fought in Paris and thought that this battle was winnable. It was – almost. However, after six years in 1988 there came a turning-point when I saw that I would fail in this battle too. The intrigues of freemasons in high places meant that I could not help win this battle – all my friends were in low places. I knew then that this Paris group would eventually (I did not know then that this would mean thirty years) disappear into spiritual irrelevance. Those who had betrayed the Tsar and made him and his Family into martyrs had also betrayed the Church. So I left, having understood that here too it would take far-reaching political changes inside Russia and indeed the departures or deaths of some outside Russia before the battle to bring even a part of this group home to the Russian Church could be won. Victory was inevitable, but only God Who created time, could with time bring the victory. My battle had been premature. By myself I could do nothing. It was good for me to know this.

My third battle from the first day of 1989 onwards was to take part in the struggle to help free that part of the Russian Church Diaspora, which was dependent on New York (ROCOR), from spiritual impurity. Here there was a much greater chance of success, for the contaminating Protestant disease of ‘super-correctness’ (as another disciple of St John of Shanghai called it), with its ignorance, phariseeism, extremism, sectarianism, old calendarism, psychological (not theological) deviations of convertitis and Cold War money, had many opponents in the USA itself and even more in Western Europe where I was fighting on the Front. And above all, my Diocesan Archbishop supported me and I supported him. The ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, a spiritual son of and the European successor to St John of Shanghai, was in effect the first real Orthodox bishop I had met. We had an identical understanding of the Church. By myself I could do nothing, but now I was far from being alone; I was simply one of very many, a little cog in a large machine. I did not know then that this struggle would take eighteen years, for only in 2007 did the Church win the day. I was taking part in our first victory, together with millions of others, in the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, to which I had always belonged in spirit. Only geography had ever divided us.

After the Three Battles

Once this battle, in which I had played only a tiny role, eventually from my provincial home-town, had been won by the many, especially by the bishops who had been inspired by the grace of God, I knew that the two other houses of cards where I had earlier lost the day would fall in their turn. I just did not know that it would take another twelve years. Between 2007 and today, in 2019, I have seen both these first lost battles won. History won them. What I knew in the past, that they would be won only in God’s own time, has come to pass. What we have fought long and hard for has been obtained. Thus, we now at last have for our Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland a bishop, pleaded for during over four decades. He is Orthodox, understanding the local language and people, not phyletist, venerating the local saints and not denying them, missionary-minded like us, encouraging us and not destroying us, not under the control of laypeople, in good health, and who will be resident here in just a few weeks from now.

Secondly, the Russian Orthodox Exarchate of Western Europe, awaited for over three decades, was at last established in Paris only a few weeks ago. This means that our House will be built on rock, not on sand, and that the ‘Euro-Orthodox’ fantasy of the Paris Brotherhood is now dead. The future Local Church of Western Europe will be authentically Orthodox. For what we have sought for and fought for since 1988 now is. There is now a real Orthodox Exarchate for Western Europe, with many regional dioceses and young bishops, hundreds of parishes and several monasteries, venerating the local saints and not denying them, the foundation of the new Local Church. Led by Metropolitan John in Paris, who bears the name of our missionary father in Christ, St John of (Shanghai and) Western Europe and so continues in the tradition of Archbishop Antony of Geneva, it will of course need much more time to develop. It consists of the generally newer Russian Orthodox parishes of Western Europe, in many dioceses and with many bishops. However, alongside it and complementing it, also stand the two (Western European and German) dioceses of ROCOR, with their five bishops, two of them younger and active. This consists of the generally older, more integrated, Russian Orthodox parishes of Western Europe, a few of them until recently under Constantinople, but now at last come home. The two parts need each other and hopefully their bishops will meet regularly in order to help each other in their own joint Synod.

However, in this Year of the Lord, 2019, there is the last mystical battle (last for me) in the series of mystical battles in this Hundred Years’ War, which for a century has so deformed Church structures in the Diaspora. This battle is also against spiritual impurity, against masonic ecumenist and modernist intrigues. However, this last battle is the battle inside the Russian Lands, inside historic Rus’; it is therefore not a local battle for English, French and American Rus’ in London, Paris and New York, for part of the small Russian Diaspora, it is a general battle which concerns the whole Church. This is taking place today in the Ukraine, but it affects all. For the Church is the mystical centre of the world and it is the Ukraine which is now the mystical centre of the Church. And this is why we have come here now, sent to fight from the Western Front to the Eastern Front. All will stand or fall by their attitude to what is happening in the Ukraine today, to this battle between Christ and Satan. Whose side are you on?

The Fourth Battle

The internal administrative centre of the false Orthodoxy against which I fought in all our four battles, was formed in Istanbul a century ago. It came into being only because of the long-planned overthrow of the restraining protection of Imperial Tsardom. However, the Western disease which had overthrown the Christian Emperor and so the Christian Empire and then brought that centre into being had already infected Russia and elsewhere before that. For the disease contaminated all nationalities, including many in the Russian Lands and from there in the Diaspora. The disease came to be called renovationism and the renovationists were keenly supported from Istanbul. Today it has become crystal clear that the whole of the supposed Orthodox world has now to side either with real Orthodoxy or else against real Orthodoxy. The time of reckoning has come; the time of compromise is over. No-one can stand by any longer with the indifference and conceit of Pilate. Even though this battle is of exactly the same nature as the series of three battles which we fought in the Diaspora before this one, now it is not the Diaspora, but the Ukraine which is the sword that divides. The battlefield has changed to the Ukraine, but the battle is the same one; it is the battle for spiritual purity, for canonicity, for real Orthodoxy.

Gradually, over the last two months, one Local Church after another has decided to side with spiritual purity, canonicity and real Orthodoxy and so support Metr Onufry and the Church of God of the Ukraine. The rest of the Russian Church with ROCOR was the first to support him wholeheartedly. The Local Churches of Serbia, Bulgaria, Antioch, Poland, the Czech Lands and Slovakia, Cyprus, and unofficial but spiritually free (= non-political) voices in the Churches of Greece, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Georgia, followed. So far, thirteen out of eighteen Athonite monasteries have joined us. And a few days ago the episcopate of the basically Carpatho-Russian OCA (Orthodox Church in America), which had dithered for several weeks and where some had for years even been threatening to desert the Church for Istanbul, decided the same. This is their spiritual victory and our very great comfort after decades of spiritual slumber, of wandering far from the Church with American phyletist delusions. It means that the little OCA is maturing, at last deciding to accept its destiny, abandoning its eccentric spiritual isolation and so finding its positive identity by returning to its roots under St Tikhon. Inspired by the breath of new life, it can at last begin to play a significant and fulfilling role as one of the component parts of the future, united, much larger, multinational Russian Orthodox Churches of the three continents of the New World, of the Americas and Oceania.

This leaves the episcopates of only two Local Churches, the large Romanian and the tiny Albanian, not politically free and sitting on the fence, paralysed like Pontius Pilate ‘for fear of the Jews’. They are silent, neither supporting nor rejecting, awaiting instructions from above on whether to support the petty nationalism of the phyletist schism of Constantinople or not. The false church in the Ukraine, founded by the US-backed separatists in Kiev, is officially under a certain Sergei Dumenko. He is actually a Vatican- and US-approved puppet-layman, therefore both pro-Uniat and pro-LGBT, and not a metropolitan, His false church has been seen to be without grace, without sacraments, without the Holy Spirit. His church is that of ‘the Ukrainian god’, as one Ukrainian minister has put it. His enthronement in Kiev six days ago was ignored by all the Local Churches. His so-called ‘Church’ is only a regime-manipulated charade of empty rituals, just another small ultra-nationalist organization – an absurd anachronism in this global world. It is supported by teams of police-backed Nazi bandits who intimidate and beat up Christians, because Nazis have no concept of the meaning of the word ‘Christian’. And these anti-Christian men of violence are directly supported by an alien and corrupt political regime in Kiev, supported by alien and corrupt regimes elsewhere, and, to their eternal shame, by Greek ‘bishops’ in Istanbul.

Afterword: The Victory

The decadent, self-appointed, Paris-School ‘theologians’ from the past slip away one by one. With them their secularizing ideologies from the past, Ecumenism (anti-Orthodoxy; against the Father), Modernism (anti-Sovereignty; against the Son) and Liberalism (anti-People; against the Holy Spirit), slip away into spiritual irrelevance. Their books of intellectual fantasy-philosophy are ready for the dust of forgotten library shelves. Those who frustrated, wasted, impeded and persecuted us for so many decades are leaving the stage and we are beginning to see the future clearly now. For the New Orthodox World (N.O.W.) is taking shape. The New Orthodox World (NOW) is led not by anachronisms, relics from the past in cities of empires which have not existed for centuries, but by vibrant and missionary multinational Local Churches, Autonomous Churches and Exarchates worldwide. These are not narrow and corrupted nationalist museums for State rituals, flag-waving and cultural nostalgia or the playthings of disincarnate but very aggressive, politicized and politically correct, liberal intellectuals, but living organisms, cleansed to prepare us all to meet the King before He returns in all His glory. And in the New Orthodox World, NOW, there is the Heavenly Jerusalem of the Church of Christ, awaiting Him and resisting the Enemy of Mankind, who comes before Christ in order to create disunity, disorder and distress among us.

The death-threat which I received three years ago, sent me because the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, did not stop me or deter me for a single second. In a dream, come to me after receiving that death-threat, I opened my front door and saw an agent on my doorstep. He at once fired his revolver at me, but the bullet rebounded off my priest’s cross, killing him instead of me. He fell to the ground and his corpse was dragged away to a waiting car by his colleague, who in fear and astonishment uttered powerless curses. I left and hid in a secret and remote place where I could not be found. I was rescued by the prayers of one who long, long ago had also taken refuge in such a place and I was taken to a faraway land. I have never paid any attention to dreams, especially such dramatic ones, but I remembered this one. However, I only really understood its meaning and symbolism on my first day here. It means that, like all of us, I will die when God decides, not when men decide, for though man proposes, God disposes. It means that the bullet rebounds, for if men want to kill the truth, they kill only themselves (exactly as they have done for the last one hundred and five years, with their atheist wars, one after another). And those who try to kill the Church in the Ukraine are committing spiritual suicide; indeed, their death-bearing bullet has already lethally rebounded onto themselves.

Victory has been ours in the Diaspora, because we have been willing to die for the Church of God and our enemies have not – because they are inherently attached to this world and so fear death which is of this world. Victory is ours in the Ukraine, because we are willing to die for the Church of God and our enemies are not – because they are inherently attached to this world and so fear death which is of this world. This is why we shall win this last battle now – because we do not fear death, for we believe and we know that Christ is the Life-Giving God, Who rose from the dead and freed the captives in hell. They, however, have only heard of the Risen Christ as a theory and symbolic myth for their heads. They believe it not in their hearts. Therefore their heads, like their lives, are full of the philosophies and works of death. But we do believe and we know and we tremble in awe before the Living God, Who is the Great God, Who works wonders and Who is with us, so that none is against us. Let the dead bury the dead. As for us, we shall not die, but live, and we shall declare the works of the Lord. The Lord is our Enlightenment and our Saviour, whom then shall we fear?

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

Kiev, 1-8 February 2019

 

 

 

 

‘They will suffer a shameful end’: How St Laurence of Chernigov (1868-1950) foretold the end of the current reign of Satan in Washington, Kiev and Istanbul

St Laurence of Chernigov (Feast: 11 January) said that during ‘the little freedom’ (which we now know to be the period since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and which continues to this day – Ed.), ‘churches and monasteries will open and be restored, but all manner of false teachings will appear, through demons and secret atheists (Catholics, Uniats, self-consecrated Ukrainian schismatics). These will join battle against the Russian Orthodox Church and her unity and catholicity in the Ukraine. The schismatics will be supported by an atheist government’ .

He added that: ‘We must resist the invasion of ‘the civilized world’, that is, dark demonic forces, which will try and penetrate into spiritually undefended areas. They will seize church buildings from the Orthodox and beat up the faithful. Then the Metropolitan of Kiev (unworthy of his name) with his supporting clergy will shake the Russian Church to the foundations. The whole world will be astonished at his iniquity and stand in fear (just as we do today – Ed.). But he will go to eternal perdition like Judas. All these assaults of the evil one and false teachings will disappear in Russia and there will be One Orthodox Church of All Rus’.

‘Kiev, without the great Russia and separate from it, is anyway completely unthinkable. Kiev has never had a Patriarch. Our enemies in Poland so much disliked the word ‘Rus’ that they changed the name of this area to Little Russia and then to ‘the Ukraine’ (meaning ‘the borderlands’), so that we will forget the name Rus and so forever be torn away from Orthodox Holy Rus. In those who have erred or fallen away from Orthodoxy there is no grace of the Holy Spirit, salvation or obtaining of the Kingdom of Heaven’.

‘To break away from the Church is the greatest and unforgiveable sin, for it is the sin against the Holy Spirit’. Towards the end of St Laurence’s life the head priest of the Kiev Caves Lavra, Fr Kronid, said that self-consecrated schismatics and Uniats had disappeared. But St Laurence answered: ‘The demon will enter them and they will attack the Orthodox Faith and Church with Satanic malice, but they will suffer a shameful end and their followers will bear a heavenly punishment from the Lord and King of Hosts’.

‘Then all heresies and schisms will vanish from Russia. The Church will not be persecuted. The Lord will have mercy on Holy Rus because it suffered the terrible period before Antichrist. A great host of Martyrs and Confessors shone forth there, beginning with the highest levels of the clergy and society, the Metropolitan and the Tsar, the priest and the monk, the child and the babe in arms and laypeople. They all beseech the Lord…’.

‘You must be quite clear that Russia is the portion of the Queen of Heaven, She cares for it and intercedes for it especially. The whole host of Russian saints with the Mother of God will ask that Russia be spared. The faith will prosper in Russia and there will be rejoicing as before (though only for a short time, as the Dread Judge will come to judge the living and the dead). Even Antichrist himself will fear the Tsar of Rus. But all the other countries will be under Antichrist’s control and suffer all the horrors and torments described in the Holy Scriptures’.

 

 

 

 

New Jerusalem and All Rus?

Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown. Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God….and I will write upon him….the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem…

Revelation 3, 11-12

And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God…

Revelation 21, 2

Shine, shine, O New Jerusalem! The Glory of the Lord has shone on Thee!

From Easter Matins

The term ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ was to some extent discredited in the Soviet period. For some even now it suggests political compromise with an atheist State, as well as ritualism, bureaucracy and centralization. Indeed, for extremists, the very words are literally anathema. For example, the present Ukrainian crisis is coloured by so-called ‘Christian’ (whether nominally Catholic or nominally Orthodox and actually atheists), now sponsored by the Phanar, chant, ‘Death to the Muscovites!’ It seems to us that their extremist nationalism must be countered by Russian Orthodox Church internationalism. What does this mean? Let me explain.

We can see both from the history books and contemporary newspapers with their Roman Catholic clerical scandals how the First Rome ended up. And now in the last few weeks, after centuries of extraordinary decadence culminating in the Ukraine, we have seen how the Second Rome (‘New Rome’) has ended up. Therefore, the alternative rallying call of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ seems to us less attractive. There is an alternative: This is ‘Moscow the Second Jerusalem’. And outside the secular and post-Soviet Russian Federation government and secular metropolis that is today’s Moscow, this is possible in a place that has now been restored.

After the historic events of the reunion of the Russian Church on Ascension Day in Moscow, soon after, on 18 May 2007 I gave a talk at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy entitled ‘Orthodox Russia and a World Council of Orthodoxy’. This was of the possible future importance of the New Jerusalem Monastery complex outside Moscow, where restoration after the ravages of both Soviet Russian and Nazi German atheism was then about to start. Founded by Patriarch Nikon in the 17th century, the whole complex had been intended to recreate the Holy Land in the area of Moscow by the River Istra, which takes the role of the Holy River Jordan.

In the main church there is indeed a place for the Patriarch of each Local Church to stand. It was conceived as  the Church of International Orthodoxy. I said then that this might one day become the centre of World Orthodoxy, a place of Church Councils. I said: ‘Indeed, we would dare to suggest an actual location for this World Council – at the New Jerusalem complex, west of Moscow. Built in the seventeenth century as a counterbalance to Imperial ideas of the State, this complex, centred around the Monastery of the Resurrection, was chosen to embody parts of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, with the River Istra representing the River Jordan.

It was meant to be open to all peoples and there monks of different nationalities, including those converted from the West, strove together in true catholic unity. Although still to be restored, this site is surely most appropriate, since it is centred around a Monastery, dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ. It stands in stark contrast to Chambesy in Calvinist Switzerland. There, Protestantism financed a basically secular conference centre for the Patriarchate of Constantinople, with its pseudo-Orthodox ‘cinema’ chapel’. Those were my words then, printed in a bilingual booklet in Russian and English. They were spoken with prayer and hope.

As Ukrainian Fascists cry with hatred their slogan ‘Death to the Muscovites’, perhaps the time has come. As the Russian Orthodox Church at the end of December set up two new missionary Exarchates, ‘of Paris and Western Europe’ and ‘of Singapore and South-East Asia’, uniting East and West beneath the double-headed eagle, perhaps the time has come. To do what? In these eschatological times, to rename the Patriarchate of Moscow, ‘The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus’. It seems to us that  nationalism must be countered by internationalism. For, ‘The Lord doth build up Jerusalem: He gathereth together the outcast of Israel’. (Ps. 146, 2).

Saved by Russia in 1941 – and in 2019?

After the defeat of France, the humiliating rout of the British Army and its flight at Dunkirk in May-June 1940, Britain found itself in a desperate situation. 68,000 British soldiers had been killed, wounded or captured in just six weeks between 10 May and 22 June.  Abandoned in France were some 440 tanks, 2,472 guns, 20,000 motorcycles, almost 65,000 other vehicles, 377,000 tons of stores, 147,000 tons of fuel and over 68,000 tons of ammunition. Six British and three French destroyers had been sunk, along with nine other major vessels, and the RAF had lost 145 of its all too few aircraft.

Thus, the tiny British Army had lost much of its inferior equipment. The USA refused to help, as one of its aims was to end all its rival European colonial empires, including the British. Hitler’s sympathizers among the British aristocracy like Lord Halifax and other unprincipled appeasers who cared only for their money wanted to negotiate. For a whole year Britain stood alone against Nazi Europe. Apart from ‘neutral’ Switzerland, Sweden and Ireland, which in fact fully co-operated with Hitler, only the Soviet Union stood in Hitler’s way in Continental Northern Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

On Sunday 22 June 1941, the Feast of All the Saints Who Have Shone Forth in the Russian Lands, a multinational force of three million Germans and nearly one million of their many European Fascist Allies invaded the Russian Lands yet again, just like Napoleon and so many others before them. This was how Britain was rescued from the Third Reich and many at that time, Churchill among them, had been expecting it and relying on it. There is little doubt that Britain would have been crushed or starved into surrender, had Hitler set his mind to it and had not invaded the Russian Lands, but Britain instead.

In 1942 Britain was occupied by the first of two million US troops. It had lost its independence, it was no longer a Great Power. True, it was to emerge from the Second World War on the victorious side. But it was a paper, Pyrrhic victory. Britain was in ruins and bankrupt, forever in debt to banks in the USA, and by 1948 it had abandoned the Indian subcontinent, British-mandated Palestine, Greece and soon its other imperial interests. Today, Europe is still German-dominated, though only economically, for Germany itself is an occupied American vassal, its Chancellor having to swear allegiance to the occupier.

However, in 2019 Britain faces a new Dunkirk, a new flight from Europe, called Brexit. Like Lord Halifax, EU sympathizers among the upper middle-class appeasers, who care only for their money, want to capitulate in view of the EU’s refusal to negotiate. They forget that in 1940 Britain did not negotiate and still won. They also forget that a mafia-led puppet country called the Ukraine, created by the USA and the EU only in order to undermine Russia, is about to collapse. And after its collapse will follow the collapse of the EU and then of the USA. In 2019 everything, good and bad, will be possible.