Category Archives: The Ukraine
Stories of the great miracles narrated by the rector of St. Elijah’s Church in Chernobyl, Archpriest Nikolay Yakushin
(Received from the Ukraine)
A chapter from the book “Teraturgima, or Miracles of the New Century”
The first great omen of the Chernobyl disaster, which shook the entire planet in 1986, was revealed at a time of the rapid development of nuclear energy, long before the explosion of the 4th reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Witnesses recall it happened exactly ten years before the accident, on April 26, 1976. It is interpreted as a sign sent by the Lord and Our Lady 40 years ago. A local newspaper “Prapor Peremohy” (“The Banner of Victory) published an article at the time, titled “Fairytales of Clergymen.” An author referred to a cloud of an unusual shape appearing in the sky that day, which the clergymen interpreted as an apparition of the Virgin Mary. However, it was not merely an atmospheric oddity.
That evening many locals witnessed an unusually shaped cloud floating above the ground. The figure of the Virgin Mary could be discerned in it, with her face and brightly coloured raiment clearly visible. She was holding a tuft of dried wormwood, which the locals also call “chernobylnik.” Holy Mary dropped the wormwood over the town. Then the bright radiant cloud moved towards the forest and stopped over the church of the Holy Prophet Elijah. Blessed Virgin Mary faced the church and blessed it twice with both hands. As she appeared in the sky, it stopped raining and the weather became warm and mild. This phenomenon was interpreted by the local priest, Father Alexander Prokopenko. He explained that only Mother of God may give her blessing with two hands. Bishops also have the privilege of blessing with two hands; however the vision in the sky was not that of a male.
The locals interpreted this phenomenon as a forecast of a dry summer and a poor harvest. Some people have found and picked up pieces of wormwood that fell from the sky. Many years later it became clear that this was a prediction: exactly ten years later the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. But when the disaster struck, nobody made a connection between the events ten years apart. People recalled the story much later and came to recognize it as a sign from God.
In 2002 His Beatitude Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev and All Ukraine blessed the creation of an icon which captured the apparition of Blessed Virgin Mary over Chernobyl. It was painted by a servant of God, an artist from Kiev named Ioan, who also created the rest of the artwork in our church. Ioan, who is an orphan, is very religious, pious and earnest. He had been fasting and took communion before starting the work. The icon portrays the church of St. Elijah with the Queen of Heaven and Archangels Michael and Gabriel on both sides, rising in the sky above it. She holds chernobylnik (wormwood) in her hands. Two capsules with wormwood picked in the Chernobyl area are affixed on both sides of the icon. His Beatitude Vladimir blessed the image as one of Chernobyl’s locally revered icons.
A vision of the Chernobyl Saviour icon is revealed to the leader of the Chernobyl Power Plant Communist party section on his deathbed
Another famous icon of St. Elijah’s church is the Chernobyl Saviour, which has a special history. This icon is said to have originated directly from the local people. They have survived one of the greatest tragedies of modern history. After the initial panic subsided, people were looking for support and sympathy. Many of them became very ill.
Yuri Andreev, who is now deceased, was the leader of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant Communist party section at the time. A Communist with a strong attachment to his party’s ideas, he became very ill after receiving huge doses of radiation. He was suffering greatly; the doctors did not expect him to live much longer. Yuri kept seeing a recurring dream: an image of an icon. He described it to the artist and gave instructions on how it had to be painted. He also told of his dream to me, and I passed his message to His Beatitude Metropolitan Volodymyr. Being seriously ill, the Communist leader kept asking for the icon to be painted. He saw the image with his inner spiritual vision and felt a strong need for it to be created. His Beatitude gave his blessing.
The icon was painted at the Trinity-Sergiev Lavra in 2003 and sanctified at Kiev-Pechersk Lavra on the feast day of the Dormition of the Mother of God. When His Beatitude Metropolitan Vladimir blessed the image of the Chernobyl Saviour, three signs appeared in the sky. A dove flew above the icon before hundreds of witnesses, then a rainbow appeared in the sky, and finally the sign of the cross became visible, with the sun shining at its centre. Curiously, Yuri Andreev, the terminally ill leader of the Communist party section of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, greatly recovered after this event. The Lord healed him. It is surprising that a staunch Communist, later the president of the “Chernobyl – Ukraine” Union, was chosen for this mission. Thanks to him the icon of the Chernobyl Saviour came into the world, and the Lord has continued to heal the sick and afflicted people who come to venerate this image.
Vladislav Goretsky, a well-known iconographer, was chosen to create this icon. The image is truly sublime, expressive and spiritual. It is also exceptional in that it depicts ordinary people alongside the image of God for the first time in the history of iconography. The souls of the survivors of the Chernobyl tragedy are portrayed on the right, while the souls of the deceased victims are on the left. His Beatitude Vladimir requested the permission of Patriarch Alexiy II to paint the images of the people in the icon. Permission was granted.
The subject of the icon is deeply symbolic. It is a visual rendition of a theme from the Book of Revelation. At the centre of the image is a “star of wormwood” falling from the sky against the backdrop of the ominous glow of the explosion. Another focal point is a crucifix-shaped pine tree. This extraordinary sign of the upcoming tragedy grew on Polissya’s land decades before the accident. This large, old tree was fully grown before the Second World War. Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant was built just two kilometres away from this huge living cross, growing at the forest edge.
After the tragedy, when the so-called “red forest” poisoned by radiation was cut down, an opening revealed a stunning spiritual vision: two symbols of the universal disaster – the exploded fourth nuclear reactor and the giant tree-cross – became connected in one.
This vision is reminiscent of the Old Testament cruciform tree watered by Lot, which was to become Christ’s cross two thousand years later. The tree is believed to have grown from the three staffs given to Abraham by the Holy Trinity, Who was revealed to the forefather in the form of three angels. Four thousand years later the Chernobyl Cross arose as a symbol of the nuclear crucifixion that would come in 1986. To the left and right of the cross are the living and the deceased liquidators of the nuclear catastrophe. Above them is the Lord Jesus Christ with a scroll of the Apocalypse, open on the page that holds the prophecy, as well as the Holy Virgin and the Archangel Michael. This is the exact vision that came in a dream to the Communist leader of the Chernobyl nuclear plant.
The Chernobyl Saviour icon mystically communicates that the One holding the scroll holds the keys to the grand design and to every detail in the lives of those born into the world, as well as the events and defining moments of history, including the tragedy of Chernobyl.
The Saviour looked at the priest every night, leading him to where His image was hidden
There is another extraordinary icon, which I have never mentioned before. It is the image of the Saviour from St Michael the Archangel’s church in the village of Krasno, located in the exclusion zone.
This wonderful icon has an unusual history. After the accident all the villagers from Krasno were evacuated due to very high levels of radiation brought on by the radioactive cloud moving towards Belarus. One of Krasno’s inhabitants ended up in St. Petersburg, where he became a priest at one of the local churches.
Eleven years ago he found my phone number and called. “Father Nikolay, I’d like to ask you for a favour,” he told me. “I have a recurring dream, in which I see the eyes of the Saviour from an icon left in the exclusion zone in Krasno. I would like you to find it – it is a large icon of Christ painted on wooden board.” “How will I find it?” I asked. “I’ll tell you where to go,” he responded.
He described the location with great precision. He named the house and the place in the house where the icon was hidden. One had to be a local to give such exact instructions for navigating the village that by now had become contaminated and abandoned.
The priest’s grandfather used to serve in St Michael the Archangel’s church for many years. The extraordinary old icon of the Saviour had been stolen from the church once, but was later miraculously restored by the Lord. The remarkable wooden church itself, built in 1800, was plundered after the Chernobyl disaster. But the grandfather, now deceased, had an opportunity to hide the antique icon, although the location remained unknown. The Lord Himself gave a sign and taught how to find the sacred icon that was dear to Him.
Thousands of kilometres away, in St. Petersburg, a priest and a native of the Chernobyl zone began to dream of this icon, the Saviour looking at him every night. I drove to the village and found the abandoned house as it had been described over the phone. Everything turned out to be true. I pulled the icon from the attic and brought it to our local church. When the icon was restored, the priest from St. Petersburg came to our church to worship and to witness his dream, which became reality.
The image of Jesus Christ in this icon is truly alive and unforgettable, his gaze forever vivid in your memory.
Angels lead a church service in the exclusion zone
The old church in the village of Krasno has long been abandoned. However, we have had multiple witness accounts of church services being held there by the angels and the heavenly host. Staff members of the Chernobyl police force have come to me on multiple occasions between 2005 and 2009, asking to explain the meaning of what they had witnessed.
Police officers have recounted the following events. On one occasion a police unit that patrols the exclusion zone approached the village church and heard voices. They thought it was an illusion, since settlers had long left the village. There is also an abandoned checkpoint at the entrance to the village. The surrounding forest has grown thick and dangerous, making it impossible to get into the village by any other route.
The patrol vehicle moved forward towards the church. Officers could hear beautiful singing coming from the church and saw a mild glow of the lights inside the building. The men came out of the car and froze, overcome with religious fear. The Chernobyl police unit is a well-trained professional force, prepared to respond to a variety of emergency situations. Yet, these hardened men felt so overwhelmed with fear that they left the scene immediately. They went back to the same location again, but this time the church looked quiet. They did not dare enter the church and sent a report to their chief.
The police officers later came to my church and asked me to explain the nature of the event they had witnessed. I told them that the history of the church has multiple accounts of such events. Angels do not leave the holy altar until the end of time. When people have to abandon a church for any reason, angels come to worship there instead. The church in Krasno has special significance to them, since it is dedicated to the Archangel Michael, the head of the heavenly host. The place, although burned by lethal doses of radiation, still remains a sacred site, where God’s grace abides. The Lord’s will was to bring responsible witnesses to recount this miracle to the wider world. All subsequent witness accounts of the liturgy in the empty church were identical to the first description.
I have been going to the church in Krasno to lead services on feast days ever since. During one of my visits I found an icon of the Archangel Michael. I went into the loft between the church’s cupolas. It is a difficult spot to reach and quite dangerous to walk through, because of the rotting old floor boards. I prayed and walked as far as I could go, when I suddenly felt as though someone was looking at me closely. I raised my head and saw the icon of the Archangel Michael with a fiery sword in his hand, placed on a decrepit old shelf. The church had been previously plundered by looters, but this icon had remained mysteriously concealed from their sight. The icon was placed there to protect the church. It is unknown who hid the image; perhaps, the angels themselves.
The Apparition of St Seraphim of Sarov and the blessing of the annual liturgy in Chernobyl on April 26th
This event happened in 2001 and shook me deeply. I have seen many things in my lifetime; however, this story was important unlike anything else. It helped me understand the place of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the history of the Church and the life of the universe as a whole. There is a deep spiritual interconnectedness between this explosion, the history of the Church and the history of the world at large.
The fishermen who were in their boats on the Pripyat River at night on April 26th saw a bright explosion of light above the church of St. Elijah the Prophet, followed by another explosion above the nuclear power plant. This was a sign described in the book of Revelation as “a great star, blazing like a torch” (Rev. 8:10-11).
When I came to serve in this church after the tragedy, the building and grounds required a lot of restoration. We worked hard to rebuild the church, and I conducted regular liturgies, even though there were very few parishioners. On April 26th, my first anniversary of the tragedy at this church, I prayed and went to bed. There were people keeping vigil in town and remembering the victims through secular rituals, concerts and feasts. I fell asleep.
My window overlooks a cliff above the Pripyat River. I remember suddenly waking up at night and looking out of the window. I saw an old man in white robes with a white beard and a staff walking towards my house. I recognized St Seraphim of Sarov, his face, gait and bearing looking exactly as depicted in the icons. St Seraphim approached my house, stopped in front of my window and looked at me closely. He hit the ground three times with his staff, then turned towards the river and walked off through the church gates towards the power plant. Then I remember finding myself in bed again. I turned on the lights and saw it was 1.30 a.m. – the precise time the nuclear disaster struck. The Lord has sent St. Seraphim to wake me up and call me to prayer and vigil that night.
I immediately had an insight: the nuclear catastrophe was one of the watershed events in human history, described in the Book of Revelation: “The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water – the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter” (Rev. 8:10-11). Wormwood is a wide-spread plant in this area, also known as “chernobylnik,” hence the name of the town.
There is also a direct link between the apparition of the Holy Virgin above Chernobyl ten years before the tragedy. This land was meant to be a place where the Holy Scriptures culminated, and the Lord’s word split human history into “before” and “after” the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. I kept trying to understand why the Lord has chosen St Seraphim to reveal the spiritual meaning of the tragedy and wrote a letter to Patriarch Alexiy II. We corresponded for two years. As a result, our church officially received part of St. Seraphim’s holy relics, which I personally brought from Diveyevo. St Seraphim was a devout monk, but also an active participant in all the important events of his time. He began his spiritual journey in Kiev, where he worshipped at the holy places and the saints of the Kiev Caves monastery. He wanted to join the brothers at the monastery and received a blessing to go to Sarov. He always remained involved in the affairs of his homeland.
Ever since St Serpahim’s apparition on the anniversary of the tragedy we have conducted all-night vigils and the Holy Liturgy on the night of April 26th in Chernobyl. Numerous archbishops, bishops and members of the clergy have joined us over the years to remember the victims. Among them is Pavel, the Metropolitan of Chernobyl and the bishop of the Kiev Caves Lavra, who ordained me to the priesthood. I believe the Lord has purposefully made him the first church leader in Chernobyl.
Numerous pilgrims are also drawn to Chernobyl on this day. We usually go to the cemetery to have a funeral service for the firefighters who were the first to face the blazing nuclear reactor. Thus, through St Seraphim, the Lord has blessed us to stay awake and pray during the hour our planet suffered a nuclear explosion. In 2016 this tradition will be 30 years old.
It is unlikely we will ever be able to grasp the fullness and the importance of signs and events surrounding the history of the nuclear tragedy in Chernobyl. Yet, there is clearly a direct spiritual link between all of them. The Lord reveals all that is necessary in His own time. We must remain patient and steadfast in our prayer, as we wait to receive His knowledge.
Comments from a Correspondent in Wales
‘And the Ukraine, then and now? Who will answer for the murders of laypeople and priests? Who set up the violent demonstrations on Maidan Square in Kiev? Was it not the Uniat clergy? And the Pope? Of course, he is completely innocent. He only cares about Christians in the Middle East, but he could not care a less about the Orthodox Slavs, he has more important things to do like not upsetting the gays and flattering the Jews, ‘his elder brothers in the faith’. Even infants know that all the recent popes have been puppets of those who hold global power behind the scenes. Their task is to level Orthodoxy down because it is the only power in the world that can stop Antichrist’.
Priest Savva Mikhalevich
http://ruskline.ru/special_opinion/2016/fevral/katolicheskaya_cerkov_i_genocid_serbov_vo_vtoroj_mirovoj_vojne_i_posle/
Below we quote comments from a letter from a correspondent in Wales. We quote from it because it raises some very relevant questions, to which we give answers, which may be of interest to all our readers.
Comment: First, on occasions you have written apologies/explanations of your positions which, whilst providing new looks at the development of these thoughts/positions, are not really required: it is clear to any neutral or good-willed reader that you are a Truth seeker and that you are a servant of the Church. Those readers that don’t belong to these groups – we can only pray for.
Answer: You would be surprised how many people there are who are neither neutral, nor of good will, but, very sadly, are full of fantasy and spite.
Comment: On the ‘historical’ meeting of Patriarch Kyrill and Pope Francisco: I think I can see where your position comes from….There are two ways of looking at it, a diplomatic-humanitarian way and an Orthodox way.
Answer: That is why, as I said, a diplomatic or political agreement is binding only on the signatory and no-one else. It is a personal opinion and no more. What you call a diplomatic-humanitarian way’ says ‘we love the sinner’, but there is also a need for what you call ‘an Orthodox way’, that is, a dogmatic statement, which says ‘we hate the sin’.
This situation reminds me of the publication of the heretical ‘Thyateira Confession’ forty years ago by Archbishop Athenagoras of Thyateira. I remember a young convert at the time who told a pious Greek granny that her Archbishop had said that all religions were the same and therefore he was a heretic. She simply replied: ‘If that is so, I will go to church and light a candle for him’. The convert, who came from a Protestant background, was not satisfied. Why? Because those of a Protestant and literalist background do not have the concept of hierarchy, of the episcopate. When they disagree with their ‘church’, they simply go off and start a new ‘church’.
This is why old calendarist sects have not had much ‘luck’ in developing in Orthodox countries, but much more in Protestant countries or in ex-Protestant Africa. This Protestant mentality is alien to the Church. Just because we disagree, we do not leave the Church. Did St Gregory of Nyssa leave the Church? Did St Maximus the Confessor leave the Church? Did St Mark of Ephesus leave the Church? Of course not, they stayed and defended the Church and became saints of the Church, they did not go off and start new ‘churches’. The spirit of sectarianism, phariseeism, intolerance and the ghetto is not part of the Church. We stand and fight as soldiers of Christ inside the Church. All that is permitted is to change dioceses.
In other words, the personal opinions of individual members of the clergy as such do not concern us. We do not have a clericalist view of the Church like the heterodox. The Church is not the clergy, let alone the bishops. The Church is everyone. On the other hand, it is true that if a priest or a bishop or a Patriarch says that he believes AS A DOGMA that all religions are the same and that we do not need the Church for salvation, then of course he is a heretic.
This is why we need not worry about diplomatic and political PR documents signed by clergy, but we do have to worry about the draft document on heterodoxy that is being proposed for the Crete meeting next June, because that claims not to be a diplomatic or a political document, but a document expressing the Orthodox Faith. It is completely unacceptable as it stands because it claims in its first words that there is only One Church, the Orthodox Church and then goes on to contradict that statement in a haze of vagueness.
But even here we should be reassured. More and more simple parish clergy, people and monastics are speaking out against this draft document, let alone bishops like Metr Vladimir of Kishinev or Metr Athanasius of Limassol. One thing we have to understand is that the teachings of the Church are always set out very clearly, without any diplomatic fudging, which is the problem of the draft documents for the June meeting. They are written in Chancelleryspeak, they have no dogmatic clarity and are therefore not Church documents.
I think that the June meeting, if it happens, could be very useful, however. This is because all meetings can be useful, though not always in the way intended. Let us take the so-called ‘Council’ of Florence as an example. What was the use of that? First of all, it revealed the traitors who publicly shamed themselves. All became clear who they were. But above all the ‘Council’ of Florence was useful because it revealed St Mark of Ephesus and he revealed God’s Will. What do we remember about the ‘Council’ of Florence? Only St Mark of Ephesus, who defined the Truth. God can always make good out of bad.
Let us look concretely at what good can come of this June meeting and how even it could become by the grace of God a real ‘Council’ by ‘dogmatizing’, clarifying and defining the Truth.
First of all, it is clear that everything that needs to be said has already been said at the Seven Universal Councils. (We do not talk about ‘Ecumenical’ Councils because that word has been corrupted in modern English. Therefore we speak of ‘Universal Councils’). Roman Catholics like to attack us, saying ‘the Orthodox Church is dead, they have not had a Council since the eighth century – the proof that they need the Pope to give them life’.
Of course, this is nonsense. We have not needed to have a Universal Council because the truths of the Faith have been expressed for all time by the Seven Councils. There will never be an ‘Eighth Universal Council’. On the contrary, Roman Catholics constantly need new councils because they are always changing, ‘updating’, their beliefs, reinventing themselves – because they lost their apostolicity when they invented themselves in the eleventh century and consciously rejected the integrity of the Church heritage of the first millennium.
The Seven Councils dealt with the truths of the Faith for all time. They began by defining the first articles of the Creed, that is, by defining the Holy Trinity and then went on to the Person of Christ and His two natures and then to the Holy Spirit. Yes, it is true that there was the anti-filioque Council of Constantinople in 879, agreed on by all the Patriarchs, including the Pope of Rome, and the so-called ‘Palamite’ Council of 1351, which some pious Greeks unofficially call the ‘Eighth and Ninth Universal Councils’. However, in fact, these simply elaborated on earlier Councils, defining in detail the relations between the Persons of the Trinity, especially the Son and the Holy Spirit, and then in 1351 the nature of the Holy Spirit.
Thus, in the Orthodox Church we have local councils, at which only some bishops are present, that can elaborate on, explain and affirm aspects of the Faith expressed by the Seven Councils. In other words, these councils elaborate on the words of the Creed. And this is what needs to be done today, only not as regards the beginning and middle of the Creed (that has already been elaborated on), but as regards the end of the Creed. There will never be any ‘Eighth Universal Council’, but there could be a ‘Council of Crete’. But what will it be about?
We do not need meetings of hundreds of bishops to tell us that fasting is important or to administrate the granting of autonomy etc. What we need today is a Council to elaborate on one of the last articles in the Creed, concerning the Church. ‘I believe…in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church’. This article is what is misunderstood today. In technical terms, what we need is a statement on Ecclesiology. For we believe in ONE Church; there are no Churches, not two or three Churches, only ONE. To say otherwise and talk as the heretics do of ‘the two lungs of the Church’ or ‘the Invisible Church’ or ‘the division of the Churches’ is to reject the Creed. It is as simple as that.
If the present anti-dogmatic diplomatic language and vagueness continues at Chambesy or elsewhere, I can foresee a time when a petition is going to circulate around the 80,000 or so Orthodox parishes of the world, saying: ‘There is only One Church, the Orthodox Church and we do not recognize any statements to the contrary’, and it will be signed by all and then presented at Crete. This is what the present vagueness and haziness could easily lead to. There is only one ‘Undivided Church’ – the Orthodox Church, which lives today because it is the Church of Christ, there is no other, there are merely fragments that have broken away from Her. I hope our bishops are listening.
I have no time to draw up such a petition. I am too busy doing Orthodoxy, looking after grandchildren, doing the washing up, baptizing, visiting the sick, blessing homes, celebrating services and visiting and confessing those in prisons throughout the 5,000 square miles of my three counties of parish. I have covered 300 miles in the last three days alone. But there are those who have more free time than I.
Comment: Metr. Nikodim’s end, at the feet of the Pope, is symbolic…’
Answer: I totally agree. But Metr Nikodim is dead and actually largely forgotten. Personally, I do not even know anyone who prays for him – perhaps they do that in the Vatican. But the real meaning of the Cuba meeting was not about old-fashioned ecumenism. It was firstly to ward off a World War in Syria, secondly to defeat Uniatism in the Ukraine, thirdly to prepare the world to see the leader of the Orthodox Church as the Russian Orthodox Church before the meeting in Crete, and finally it was part of a very successful pastoral visit by Patriarch Kyrill to the Russian Orthodox flock in Latin America, including meeting three local Presidents (completely unreported by the secular media).
And I think that was successful. Syria is all the talk and the Saudis and Turks have been warned off invading Syria to the fury of the neocons, the Uniats are also furious, as are the American diplomats who stand behind the scenes at the Phanar, whereas the Orthodox flock in Latin America is delighted. I think we may now at last see great Orthodox missionary developments in this very, very neglected part of the Orthodox world.
Comment: Do we really believe that the Vatican and the (Jesuit) Pope, those examples of strict hierarchical organisation based on careful cultivation of all levers of power and manipulation, have no influence on the Ukro-Nazi Uniats who are burning and stealing Orthodox Churches? Or on the Ustashoid Catholic church in Croatia?.…Some complaints or discontent of the faithful papist flock after the Cuban meeting should be interpreted cautiously; most likely they are simply down to the effectiveness of Jesuit tactics…
Answer: I think the Uniats really are very disillusioned. Of course, apart from them, we can ignore the sincerity or insincerity of expressions of discontent elsewhere. They are not our problem.
The Road from Cuba to Crete
Now that the Patriarch’s meeting in Cuba is over, we can begin to look at the deeper significance of the encounter and look ahead beyond the minor details to the big picture.
Firstly, it took place at an airport, on neutral territory.
Secondly, the Havana Declaration was signed in front of an icon of the Kazan Mother of God, which is associated with the expulsion from Moscow of the Catholic Poles 400 years ago.
Thirdly, it was signed by ‘Francis, Bishop of Rome, Pope of the Catholic Church’, not by someone pretentiously claiming universal authority.
Fourthly, the agreement is unanimous in its condemnation of liberal Western values, with their consumerism and exploitation, which are ruining the world environmentally, politically, economically and socially.
Fifthly, with this Declaration the much weakened and humiliated traditional West, in the form of the Vatican, is today in fact asking Russia for help. The Church has gained an ally in Roman Catholicism in defending traditional values.
Sixthly, there is the significance that this meeting took place in Cuba, the location of the largest Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Latin America. This symbolizes the universality of the Orthodox world, in particular of the Russian Orthodox world, on today’s planet.
Finally, given that about one fifth (not one half, as Roman Catholic journalists absurdly claim!) of Russian Orthodox live in what is called ‘the Ukraine’, as we predicted, the Uniats in the Ukraine (living mainly in a small area which formerly belonged to Poland) are very disappointed. According to the Havana Declaration they are more or less destined to die out as a grievous mistake in the dustbin of history.
There is more than this, however. Cuba is where in 1962 US aggression almost started the Third World War and avoided doing so only by removing its missiles that it had deliberately and threateningly sited by the Russian border in Turkey, at which point the Soviet Union removed its response from Cuba. And today we see another and similar risk of a Third World War, beginning only a hundred miles or so from the Holy Land and Armageddon, in Syria. Here US-controlled and NATO Turkey, having already illegally shot down a Russian plane and committing genocide against the Kurds, is now invading. The other US ally, that well-known beacon of freedom, democracy and multiple beheadings, Saudi Arabia, is threatening the same, having been routed in the Yemen and miserably failed to bankrupt Russia by drastically lowering the oil price.
The Western-founded and -trained and Saudi-and Qatari-financed Islamic State organization is facing rout at the hands of Syria and Russia. The latter are successfully defending Aleppo and are freeing areas of Syria from terrorist control. Of course, the Western State media have, on orders from their masters, gone berserk, relaying anti-Russian propaganda on behalf of the terrorists. Apparently the Russians are bombing hospitals and killing children – exactly what the USA did in Afghanistan last year. Once again the Western propaganda machine is talking about itself and imputing to others its own crimes. This reflects the equally nonsensical propaganda spouting forth from the bankrupt Galician Uniats and sectarians whom the US put in control of Kiev two years ago and the hysteria that NATO hawks are self-justifyingly whipping up in the Baltics about some mythical Russian invasion.
Beyond all this, there is even deeper significance. This year two events are due to occur in the Church: the first event is this February’s meeting between the de facto leader of the Church and the head of Roman Catholicism that has already taken place on the island of Cuba. The second event is the meeting due to occur in June on another island – Crete. That meeting was supposed to have taken place in Turkey in premises no doubt bugged by the CIA and taking place according to the agenda of its puppets. If the meeting does take place, it will now take place in different, bug-free premises and according to an agenda very different from the humanist one, redolent of the 1960s, that had been set by powers alien to the Church.
It is now clear that the meeting in Cuba, decided last September and with its pre-arranged Havana Statement, has in fact been preparatory to the Crete meeting. There is now no longer any ambiguity as to who leads the Church on earth and who will in fact lead the meeting in Crete. And so it is equally clear that the US-appointed clericalists on the fringes of the Church will not be even setting the agenda at the meeting in Crete, let alone taking decisions. The Church is awake and we the people are now having our say.
123: Rome, Istanbul, Moscow
According to Canon III of the Second Universal Council and Canon XXVIII of the Fourth Council, the Metropolitan primacy of honour goes not to Jerusalem, but to the City where the Emperor lives. Thus, in the first centuries the Imperial Capital of Rome took the primacy and second place was taken by the Second Rome, New Rome, which the first Christian Emperor had founded and where he soon went to live. However, in the eleventh century Rome fell away from the Church and Holy Orthodoxy and lapsed into a paganised, barbarianized, so-called ‘Christianity’. This new pseudo-Christianity is what lay behind Papal corruption, violence and heresy in the first half of the eleventh century.
Thus, in the second half of that century it fell into the Invasion of England in 1066 and ensuing genocide throughout the Isles, pagan Aristotelian Scholasticism, the Crusades in the Holy Land and Eastern Europe, the human sacrifices made to Satan by the Inquisition, indulgences and mass genocides in ‘religious wars’ in Western Europe and the world’s greatest genocide (75 million dead?) in what became Latin America. Thus, New Rome, the City of the Emperor, took the place of Old Rome. Then in its turn, four hundred years later, this Second or New Rome fell away by betraying the faith to Old Rome and was duly occupied by the Ottomans. Thus, primacy passed to the Third Rome in Moscow, become in its turn the City of the Emperor.
The Emperor is the Defender of the Faith and the real, and not fictitious, Capital of the Church, of Holy Orthodoxy, is the City which extends its protection to all Christians and whose ruler is not ashamed to confess the Orthodox Faith. Since the fifteenth century this has meant Moscow, despite, or in a sense because of, all the Western attacks on it. These attacks were especially ferocious during the twentieth century and paralyzed it for three generations after the Western-organized ‘regime-change’ coup in 1917 and the ensuing genocide by the materialist Bolshevik regime. Today, with revival and restoration at last beginning in an increasingly sovereign Russia, the protection of Christians is exactly what the ruler in Moscow is doing in Syria.
This action has been very successful, with the result that the disastrous Obama regime is now pleading with Russia to allow a truce there; the end-game is approaching. The neocons have failed to effect regime change in Syria, just as the regime-change in the Ukraine, which they effected by toppling its democratic government, has proved to be the catastrophe that we all knew it would be. The defence of Christians in the Ukraine and Syria: this is why Russia is today the object of vicious propaganda attacks from the Western Powers and their demonic masters. The miracle of restoration of the Church inside Russia, however partial, hesitant, fragile and merely beginning, is abhorrent to the demons, for all their hopes of destroying the Church on earth and enthroning Antichrist are having to be postponed.
As regards the meeting of the Patriarch of the Third Rome and of the Pope of the First Rome, all is becoming clear. Both old Romes are now reluctantly ceding their places to the Third Rome, if only by force of circumstance. For it is not the Patriarchs of the First or Second Romes who lead the Church, it is the Patriarch of the Third Rome. He is free of submission to the Pope of Old Rome and to the USA. Thus several Western news agencies have presented the meeting at Havana Airport as the ‘first between the leaders of the two confessions since 1054’ (ABC News). Fox News says much the same. In France ‘Le Journal du Dimanche rightly asserts that the leaders of ‘the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches have not met since the age of the Schism’.
Thus, in reality even for the secular media the regular meetings between the Popes of Rome and the Patriarchs of the Second Rome, today Istanbul, do not count. The Patriarch in Istanbul, a Turkish citizen whose policies are dictated by Joe Biden and the US State Department, is not taken seriously even by the secular media. A compromised faith does not count: the Pope of Rome wants to talk to the real thing. In Italy the newspaper Corriere della Sera quotes the Pope: ‘Russia has imperial blood and so it can give the world a great deal’. The Pope is in fact calling on help from Russia, just as over 200 years ago his predecessor called on help from the Russian Emperor Paul to fight against the atheist Napoleon.
Not least Pope Francis now has to find a way of controlling the devilish hatred for the Church of the Uniats, whom the Vatican has so foolishly again unleashed in the Ukraine. Indeed, the first price for any help that Old Rome needs from the Third Rome in its battle to survive against Secularism, the illegitimate child of its illegitimate Protestant child, will be justice in the Ukraine. There Uniats have stolen churches, maimed and killed – all in the name of the Vatican: a story familiar elsewhere, for example in Serbia. This is why all the Uniat journalists are running scared today: could the South American Pope sabotage their xenophobia, which is justified by their Uniat ideology and their absurd pretence of being Orthodox, and tell them to convert to proper Catholicism or else abandon them?
Catholicism is all but finished in the West: if it is to survive, it has now to look to a restored Russia, the protector of the Church. It has to repent for its millennial and contemporary crimes, not least its co-operation with the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, for which in 1945 it had to pay very dearly after its collaboration with Hitler, pleading for and receiving Orthodox protection. Catholicism is at the crossroads, it can continue on the path of modern secularization, on which it has been for over fifty years, or it can return to the Church of God, incarnate in the first millennium of Western history. Having seen that in Istanbul there is only a minor ethnic cult, multinational Old Rome is now looking to multinational Third Rome for survival.
The Spiritual Empire versus the Neocon Empire
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Gandhi
Introduction: Towards an Orthodox Christian World View
I have over the last forty-three years tried to express an Orthodox world-view for English-speakers. No doubt, I have at times, perhaps often, been wrong in my assessments. However, that is not the point: as a human-being I have no hope at all of always being right and have no desire at all to get people to agree with me – all the more so as I can so often be wrong. On the contrary, I have always listened with attention and respect to the reasoned views of those who disagree but sign their names (I never answer or even read in full the illogical and often laughable views of anonymous brainwashed Establishment trolls who are ashamed to give their real names; delete is good for them).
The fact is that disagreements are essential for reformulating views. That is how we can draw closer to the truth, which is the only thing that is important. That can only come from praying about events, not from the secular media in themselves and assuming that they may actually occasionally be telling the truth. Above all, what I have hoped to do in all five decades of writing is to provoke people to think and pray for themselves. If I have contributed in any way to forming living souls and not zombies, then that alone has been positive. At this point in history, one so very different from the situation of the 1970s when I consciously began this task, how can I sum up in a few words an Orthodox view of the present world? Below are some thoughts on the present state of the world.
1. Today’s Russian Federation
Russia has been through several phases in her development. It has passed from seventeenth-century Orthodox Muscovy, isolationist and nationalist because forced into a virtual ghetto by Western and then Eastern aggression, to the Imperial Orthodox period which ended in the pro-Western coup d’etat of 1917. Organized from the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg, that coup handed power to the murderous thugs, bank robbers and bandits of the equally Imperial but atheist period that ended officially in 1991. However, in reality, its banditry continued in even fuller flow until 2000 with the utterly corrupt, ‘ex-Communist’, Western-backed oligarchs who pillaged the public assets of the Soviet Union, no longer restrained by Stalinist leaders. (That is the only reason why they hate Stalin). With the miracle of 2000, this phase ended and we have moved to the far more promising period of Sovereign revival that has been unfolding over the last sixteen years.
As a result of the 300 year-old Imperial past, today’s Russia suffers from empire-fatigue, whether Imperial Orthodox or Imperial atheist. It has learned from its previous mistakes and also from the tragic hubris of today’s Neocon Empire, run from Washington, which seeks totalitarian global control. The last thing that the most perceptive and patriotic thinkers and doers of Russia want is the revival of a physical Empire. The only Empire they want is a spiritual Empire, the chance to spread the Light of Orthodox values, beyond the artifices of left and right, throughout itself and around the world, protecting Orthodoxy (as today in the Holy Land) and founding new independent Local Churches. However, for this to take place, the Russian Federation first still needs to restore in full its own sovereignty, that is, to wean itself off its post-1917 dependency on the Western world. This is only possible through referring to its pre-Imperial past in the spiritual Empire of ‘Rus’, before the Imperial Peter I and the Westernizers.
Russia knows that it is only part of this spiritual or Orthodox Rus, which was once even called Holy. Indeed, today’s Rus still consists of five parts: Great Rus (the Russian Federation); Little Rus (most of the north-west and central region of today’s ‘Ukraine’); White Rus (Belarus); Carpatho-Rus (the main part of which is still under occupation and is called by its Kievan occupiers ‘Transcarpathia’; and ‘Rus Outside Russia’. This is the rest of the Russian Orthodox world, in places as far apart as Japan and Latvia, China and Iran, Thailand and Lithuania, Latin America and Tunisia, Kazakhstan and the Philippines, Estonia and Central Asia, North America and Indonesia, Western Europe and Australia. Indeed, there is even a special part of the Russian Church, called the ‘Church Outside Russia’ to look after Russian Orthodox in these last four Western-controlled regions.
Russia’s Fifth Column
Sovereign Russia’s existence has always been challenged by its traitors, humiliated by their Western-imposed inferiority complex; princes from Western Rus bought out by Papal bribery and flattery in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; rationalizing judaizers in Novgorod; Kurbsky and greedy boyars and their Polish advisors who wanted power for themselves and whose first victim was Patriarch Nikon; Chaadayev and aristocrats (many of them ethnic Germans and masons with the title of baron), who became Decembrists in 1825 and their descendants who in 1905 wanted the victory of Japan and in 1917 showed ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’ (the martyred Tsar’s description of their traits) and implemented the Russian ‘Revolution’; oligarch-bandits (mainly Non-Russians) of the 1990s; and today’s fifth column of egoistic ‘liberals’ and ‘pro-Westerners’, orchestrated from the US Embassy in Moscow. These are the Euroatlanticists, the playthings of the Western Powers and they are entirely unprincipled. And they are still powerful in today’s Russia, largely controlling banking, the media and education.
All these traitors have always desperately wanted to be accepted by the West, but they never have been, except as what they are – traitors. The West has only ever used the greed and vanity of traitors as that of ‘useful idiots’ like Litvinenko, Berezovsky or Nemtsov. Believing in nothing except themselves, they are worthy of the maxim of Martin Luther King: ‘If you do not believe in something worth dying for, then you are not fit to live’. Together with these traitors there are other involuntary traitors, the narrow Nationalists and ‘National Bolsheviks’, who on account of their divisive chauvinism also tend to act as ‘useful idiots’ for the West. Although a few of them may be paid by the CIA, MI6 and Mossad, most are simply so enamoured by the vanity of their divisive and sectarian ideologies that they do not need to be paid at all. They cannot see the wood for the trees. Ironically, ‘ultra-Orthodox’ ‘Catacomb’ Orthodox like Nazarov and even thinkers like Dushenov and Dugin sometimes fall into this error of involuntary treachery, which would shock them if they realized it.
Having sold out the sovereignty, that is, spiritual independence, of Russia to Western materialism in 1917, that sovereignty has begun to be regained only since the miracle of 2000 – since the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors, that is, the canonization of all who have resisted Western materialism in death and in life. For they witnessed and witness to eternal and spiritual values, the values that are independent of this world. The restoration of Russia as a sovereign power promises sovereignty for all Eurasia, east and west, and calls to sovereignists in China and Western Europe alike: Join us and refind your sovereignty, independence and freedom from the common enemy – the Neocon Empire (see below). The salvation of real European patriots, as also real of real American patriots, whom we entirely respect, is in the hands of the present Russian attempt to restore its sovereignty and the values of civilizations based on religion and tradition, that is, based on spiritual independence.
Russia’s Allies: Real Islam, China and the Non-Western World
Since Peter I the Russian elite class, whatever its name, aristocracy, intelligentsia or oligarchy, has looked to the West. In other words, it looked in the opposite direction to its homeland and people. Given the multiple barbaric Western invasions and aggressions of the Russian Lands, from the Teutonic Knights to the Swedes, from the Poles to the hordes of Napoleon, from the Anglo-French-Islamist Crimean War to the Kaiser and NATO, passing through the 27 million dead left by the Fascist Germans and their allies, the foolishness of that elite class is apparent to all – except to itself. It is clear that the single and selfsame battle-standard of the West, Catholicism-Protestantism-Secularism, is not at all close to the Church and her Orthodox Tradition. Indeed, it appears that in many respects genuine Islam is much closer than it.
This may seem surprising, but it should not. The facts of history speak for themselves. Russia has always lived with a substantial Muslim minority, centred to its east. That minority did not launch blood-soaked ‘crusades’ against Russia, it did not burn down and pillage monasteries and churches and martyr those inside them like crusaders, it actually fought together with St Alexander Nevsky against the barbaric feudal knights. Amazingly, some of the best allies of Orthodoxy today are Iranian Shia Muslims, Sufis and traditional Sunnis (all totally different from the Islamists of Syria, Kosovo and Bosnia). The proof of this is not only in the common support for the traditional family or the way that Churched Russian women and nuns and traditional Muslim women dress and behave, but also, practically, in the Caucasus and in Syria, where Orthodox and traditional Muslims are allied together against the Western-financed, -trained and -armed terrorists of the pseudo-Muslim IS.
However, Russia also has friends throughout what was once called the ‘Third World’, whether it is in the Eurasian Economic Union, Latin America, Africa, Iran, in Buddhist lands (also closer to Orthodoxy in some respects than the Non-Orthodox West) and, above all, in China – in other words, in well over half the world. The new alliance between Russia and China, forced on Russia by the recent extreme Western aggression on its NATO-threatened borders in Eastern Europe and in the collapsing Ukraine and the US-installed Nazi regime in Kiev, is especially significant. It means that Russian natural resources and technological know-how are being exchanged in local currencies (not in petrodollars) for Chinese manufactured goods. Russia, China, India and the majority of the world stand united together against Neocon imperialism and colonialism.
2. The Neocon Empire
A photograph showing President Obama and the other leaders of the Western G-7 huddled together in Hitler’s former villa outside Munich last June symbolizes their total isolation from the Russian Orthodox world and its allies. They represent what can today be called ‘the Neocon Empire’, the contemporary financial, political and military secularist empire of the Western world, now centred in Washington, but before in London. The photo shows how the Neocon dictators had to shut themselves away from a large Western city, as usual, out of fear of popular protest. The politically correct Neocons are in reality intellectual terrorists (they call themselves ‘liberals!’), they are the modern-day Trostkyists who spread international terror and anarchy through their Nazi, Zionist and Islamist activities. Their plutocratic Empire, based on the dictatorship of banking capital, secularism and military violence, and urged on by their demonic masters, is utterly hostile to the Russian civilizational model that is based on voluntary collaboration, religion and tradition. The Neocon Empire is therefore opposed to all traditional civilizations worldwide.
These ‘progressive’, self-appointed ‘leaders of humanity’ kill millions of babies every year in their abortion holocaust. They illegally seize power in other countries in order to strip them of their natural and human resources. And this they do with virtual impunity, beneath the cover of the corporate media of their propaganda machine. There toil the regime-paid media stooges, such as those locally who write their laughable, tabloid articles for The Times and The Daily Telegraph or who ‘report’ for the BBC, whose voices only the brainwashed heed. Since the early 1980s, when they first started to come to power in the USA, the Neocons have run a Gulag, in which nearly one per cent of US adults are now locked up, and nearly another two per cent are on parole or probation – nearly 7,000,000 people in all. At exactly the same time, from about 1982, the Neocons began to indebt the USA (and other Neocon-ruled countries) through ludicrous militaristic projects and filling their own pockets, a debt now standing at 19 trillion dollars in the USA. This will never be paid off. Outside North American countries, which were stolen by the slaughter of the tens of millions of their native inhabitants who had lived there for thousands of years before they were so cruelly ‘discovered’, the next colonial bastion of the Neocon Empire is the EU of Western Europe.
The takeover of Western Europe began in 1916 when a bankrupt Great Britain was bailed out by the transnational bankers in the new capital of the elite, New York. Then, anti-English figures in Britain like Milner and Balfour seized power behind the scenes in London. This virtual coup d’etat led to Britain becoming the European base for the then New-York-based elite and later led to the US invasion of mainland Europe in 1944. This in turn led to the takeover of Germany in 1945, forcing all German leaders to take an oath of allegiance to the USA (similar to the situation in US-occupied, nuclear-devastated Japan) and the takeover of France by the CIA coup which ousted the anti-NATO French leader de Gaulle in 1968. This was an act of regime change, as the US regularly also practised in its mafia-ridden Italy after 1945; De Gaulle had to go, for he had refused to celebrate the US D-Day invasion of France, seeing that invasion as a US occupation, and he had also defied NATO.
The Patriotic Resistance
The EU is today a project that is dying from its own hubris. That hubris has led it to create and impose the euro and expand imperialistically to Eastern Europe, trying to absorb countries with a spiritually living culture that can never be absorbed by the EU’s secularist straitjacket of death. It was difficult enough for its original lapsed Catholic core acting under US orders to take over rebellious, post-Protestant Britain and Scandinavia; Norway, Iceland and Switzerland it never tried. But even in Western Europe national resistance or sovereignist movements, of both left and right, are now fighting for freedom, and with Russian support. And large minorities in EU-ravaged Greece and Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania, Hungary and Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, all countries that in some way or other defied Hitler’s Third Reich, now also defy the EU Fourth Reich. On the other hand, Croatia and the Baltic States, with their puppet American governments of today, were countries that generally neither defied Hitler’s Third Reich, nor today’s EU Fourth Reich.
As the EU’s power-crazed elite tries to take over Christian Montenegro and Macedonia, Serbia and Moldova, they are finding spiritual resistance all the greater. However, the bridge too far is the EU attempt to seize power in the Ukraine, a fictional country invented by Popes and Jesuits. Its far western, Galician inhabitants also welcomed Hitler’s Third Reich, which recruited two SS divisions there, and so who now also welcome the EU Fourth Reich. Urged on by its pro-Galician US masters, the EU created catastrophe in the Ukraine, awakening the Galician nationalist demons of the 1940s. With blood on its hands, the EU promised what it can never deliver, raising false hopes among a people sorely tried for over twenty years by corrupt, Western-backed oligarchs. Now the junta that the Neocon Empire set up in Kiev is responsible for the genocide of its own people on a massive scale. It is clear that once this EU adventure is over – and that may be very soon – the people of the Ukraine will have to ensure the denazification of Kiev and of the Galician Uniats who were given power by the immoral Neocons.
However, resistance to Neocon colonization and exploitation is also coming from elsewhere. In Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and above all in war-torn Syria, there are many who also want decolonization. The case in Syria is at present the most significant. War began there as a result of attacks from pseudo-Muslim Islamists, trained by the CIA in NATO-controlled Turkey (which despite its civil war the fanatics are now urging to invade Syria) and financed by fanatical Neocon allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and quite probably Israel. The Syrian people strongly resisted, which was totally unexpected by the Neocon elite. Now they are being aided by the Russian Air Force, which is fighting to keep the Christian presence in the Middle East, despite Neocon opposition, their lies about it doing harm and despite Turkish violence and invasion threats. Nevertheless, as a result of Neocon meddling, millions and millions of wretched Syrians have had to seek refuge in neighbouring countries, now as far as Western Europe, whose peoples are also having to pay the price for Neocon policies.
The Neocon Allies: Nazism, Zionism, Islamism and LGBT
We come now to the allies of the Neocon Empire. First of all, there are the Nazis, who, however ironic it may sound, are just like the Zionists. (For we use the latter word in the sense of racist supremacists who want global domination, which is what the Neocons want. This has nothing to do with the Jews, for most Neocons are of course not Jews, just as very many Jews are anti-Zionists). As for the Nazis, they have always claimed that they are racially superior to all others: that is why they can in their eyes be eradicated by Neocon weapons of mass destruction. (The only WMD in Iraq were those taken and used there by the invading Neocon forces). The Western Empire always supported the Nazi sadists, giving them shelter after World War II, whether they were German (like the war criminal Werner von Braun), Croat (like Stepinac, whom they have beatified!!!) or Galician (‘Ukrainian’) sadists. (It is precisely the descendants of the latter who today are active in promoting and supporting the Nazi regime in Kiev).
Secondly, there are the pseudo-Muslims, known as ‘Islamists’. An invention of the CIA in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Islamists included the US-trained Saudi terrorist Bin Laden. It was he and the Saudis who attacked the USA on 9/11 and yet the US elite refused to invade Saudi Arabia and change its barbaric regime. Perhaps because the Neocons already control Saudi oil and gas? Traditional, religious Muslims are not addicted to violence and do not commit suicide. These evil fanatics, who have existed at many points in Muslim history, for example as Ottoman janissaries, are not Muslims, they are Islamists. In other words, they have no more interest in religion than the ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ terrorists of Northern Ireland – they are pseudo-religious thugs, motivated only by banditry, egoism, sadism and power politics. And these terrorists, from Afghanistan to Kosovo, from Iraq to Tunisia, from Nigeris to the Sudan, from Bosnia to Syria, from Kenya to Mali, are being used as the shock-troops of the Neocon Empire.
However, the Neocons are not only allied with such sadists, but also with another dysfunctional group; those who designate themselves as LGBT. In history, sexual deformation, like plutocratic luxury, has always been associated with degeneracy, from Sodom to Ancient Greece, from Egypt to Rome, from the Renaissance Vatican to Paris, from pre-Revolutionary Russia (Yusupov and his ilk) to contemporary San Francisco. Such dysfunctional deformations are always the sign of the end of empire, they are always what happens just before empires collapse. We only have to look at the prevalence of another sexual deformation and also crime – pedophilia – in the present British Establishment. It is LGBT-ism which is now being aggressively used by the Neocon Empire as cultural imperialism and homosexual colonialism in order to corrupt and degenerate healthy societies worldwide.
Conclusion: The Coming Collapse of the Neocon Empire
More and more people all over the world and of all political views, not least in Western countries themselves, are now consciously calling for regime change in the US and the EU. They want to say good-bye to dictatorship, to the Neocon oligarchic plutocracy and its myth of democracy. The Western world today very strangely, but very closely, resembles the USSR in the 1970s, just before its dissolution. Inside the Soviet Union we saw then that although the ruling ideology was Communism, nobody believed in it, so, as Solzhenitsyn said, all lived a lie through fear. The collapse of the USSR came about not because of history’s puppets like Reagan or the CIA’s Polish Pope, but precisely because nobody believed in its lie any more.
Naked egoistic self-interest, the degenerate grab for money and power, is no policy for long-term survival, and yet that is the policy of the Neocons. The Soviet Union that was dissolved was replaced by the European Union. And that is why it too will be dissolved and for the same reason – nobody believes in it. Thus, the collapse of the Neocon Empire is coming, just as the collapse of the USSR came, for nobody believes in it any more either. For no empire lasts – all empires are always killed by their own hand, the hand of hubris. The present suicide of the EU makes this clear; the Empire does not have long to live and its collapse is inevitable. We should now be looking ahead, preparing for the aftermath of the Neocon Empire and its replacement.
Patriarch and Pope to Meet in Cuba on 12 February
It has been announced today in the Third Rome and also in Old Rome that Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Pope are to meet briefly at Havana Airport in Cuba on 12 February. This meeting will take place during the Patriarch’s long-awaited eleven-day pastoral visit to the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Latin America, notably to Cuba, Brazil and Paraguay.
This high-level trip, involving visits to the political leaders of all three countries follows repeated invitations. The 15,000 strong Russian Orthodox flock in Cuba will especially greet our Patriarch, but the Patriarch will also recognize the important role played by Russian Orthodox in Paraguay before the Second World War and in Brazil over the last 100 years. However, beyond pastoral matters, this is also clearly a brilliant diplomatic move – for five reasons:
Firstly, it upstages and sidelines the absurd claims of the tiny Patriarchate of Constantinople to make out that it is somehow the ‘leader’ of the Orthodox world, whereas in reality it is fifty times smaller than the Russian Orthodox Church! It also ends the Phanariot myth that only it can represent the Orthodox Church at the Vatican, the real, de facto, leader of the Orthodox Church is Patriarch Kyrill. There will be anger at the Phanar, as it realizes that after nearly 100 years of trying to monopolize attention its diplomatic end has come.
Secondly, this is clearly a move aimed at further undermining the ridiculous pretensions of the sectarian Ukrainian Uniats, who have done so much and are still doing so much to encourage aggression and hatred towards Ukrainian Christians in the civil war that they have fostered in the Ukraine. They will be extremely worried that their official leader, the Pope of Old Rome, is in fact renouncing them and their psychotic Russophobia.
Thirdly, this meeting marks the enormous concern of the Russian Orthodox Church for Orthodox and other Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, who have been abandoned by the West, which has also abandoned the Papacy. Only the Russian Federation has substantially intervened in the war in Syria to bolster the majority there against the Western-trained, armed and financed terrorist movements intent on genocide, as has been made clear by Catholic leaders in the Middle East. Notably, during his visit, Patriarch Kyrill will lead the service at the Syrian Cathedral in San Paulo.
Fourthly, this meeting is taking place outside Europe in the course of a pastoral visit by the Russian Orthodox Patriarch to Latin America. This marks the internationalization of the Russian Orthodox world before the rest of the world. Having settled many of the outstanding problems of the Church inside the Russian Federation and brought numbers of bishops up to 361 and of clergy to 40,000 from the pitiful few 25 years ago, the Patriarch is now looking further afield outside Eastern Europe and the Federation. The second generation of renewal can begin. We can now expect that the Patriarch will make other high-profile visits to the more distant territories of the Russian Orthodox Church, including, God willing, to ourselves.
And finally, this meeting on the US doorstep, specifically in independent and sovereign Cuba, also marks the fact that the uncompromised Orthodox world does not recognize the globalist power grab of the Neocon Empire based in Washington. This move against the New world Order is an outstretched hand to the independent peoples of the world – the vast majority – in an unprecedented missionary endeavour. We cannot but welcome it.
The Project to Destroy the Russian Orthodox Church
The Project
If Antichrist is to come, first historical Russia and her independent Christian civilization and values must be destroyed, since they cannot be combined with the globalist project of those who want to destroy all sovereign nation-states and authentic faith (as opposed to mere thisworldly, rationalistic ‘religion’ with its tame, dependent State-manipulated institutions). For authentic faith means faithfulness to the other world and so opposition to this world – which Antichrist cannot tolerate. This was the meaning of the genocidal events of 1917 in the Christian Russian Empire, organized, financed and unanimously welcomed with glee by the warring, internationalist Western Powers, and the massacre and martyrdom of millions after it, which were either praised or else ignored by the West. Now all civilizations are dependent on a spiritual source, And the civilization of historical Russia, which is miraculously being resurrected by the New Martyrs and Confessors after the murderous Bolshevik obscenities, can only be destroyed if its spiritual source, the Russian Orthodox Church, can be destroyed, as the neocon ideologue Brzezinski has clearly stated. But how can Russia and the Russian Church be destroyed?
Certainly not with nuclear weapons because Russia can defend herself against them. Such destruction can therefore only be carried out by ‘soft power’, that is, by Western propaganda. The BBC ideology, with its systematic repetition of racist propaganda myths (e,g. Russians are ‘Asiatics’ (how charming for real ‘Asiatics’, like the 100 million massacred Native Americans), Ivan ‘the Terrible’, who, they say, killed about 3,000 and was far worse than Henry VIII (Defender of the Faith’?) or Elizabeth I who killed 150,000 between them, or Cromwell who killed well over a million, the myth that the architect of the so-called ‘St Basil’s Cathedral’ on Red Square was blinded by the Tsar after building it, the myth that Saint Petersburg was built on the bodies of over 100,000 ‘serfs’, non-existent Potiomkin villages etc), its denigration of the Romanovs, praise for the 1917 obscenity and the evil and stupid Khrushchov and Gorbachov and insistence that today’s Church is merely a tool of the Russian State (just as the Church of England is a tool of the British Establishment), is a good example, but not the only one, for all the Western media obey the same Satanic master. For the project means Westernizing enough ‘useful idiots’ of the Gorbachov-Yeltsin type, so that Western liberals and atheists can then take over in Moscow, forming a puppet government, exactly as happened in Saint Petersburg in February 1917 and in Kiev in February 2014. But how can the Church be undermined?
Remove the Patriarch
The history of Western terrorism around the world has always followed the same pattern. Its strategy is always to discredit and then remove the enemy leaders, whether political or spiritual, hoping that the masses will fall for the myth and lie of ‘democracy’, created by Western PR companies. This is exactly what they did in Kiev in 2014. In the case of the Russian Church, this means discrediting the Patriarch. Now His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill was elected after the repose of Patriarch Alexei II six years ago. The dream of Western liberals was that he would prove to be a liberal, since he is a highly-educated man with a profound knowledge and understanding of the Western world and great diplomatic skills. He greatly disappointed them. In 2012 Western embassies orchestrated an attack on the Russian State and Church, including subsidized street demonstrations with tens of thousands out of the 15 million population of Moscow. And so at the same time US-controlled media invented several stories (mainly financial) against the Patriarch personally and there took place the Western-orchestrated Pussy Riot protest, whose obscene name is so deeply symbolic of the Western sex and violence ideology.
The results were catastrophic for the West; there would be no coloured revolution in Russia, as in 1917. The street protests petered out as Hillary Clinton turned off US taxpayer subsidies to the mob; the Pussy Riot demonstrators, adored by the BBC and other Western media and the inveterate Russophobe Senator McCain, were proved to be blasphemous degenerates or mentally ill. As for His Holiness, he proved that he was much more than a diplomat as he turned for support to the masses of devout Orthodox who long ago saw through liberalism, modernism and ecumenism. Indeed, His Holiness spoke then of ‘traitors in cassocks’, when referring to lapsed individuals who had been ‘turned’ by Western spies. Just as the 2006 Sourozh schism, plugged by the BBC, The Times and The Daily Telegraph in the UK, turned out to be the end for the fifty years of aggressive renovationist modernism in the Moscow Patriarchate Diocese in the UK and so at last allied it with the traditional ROCOR, so also the 2012 attack on the Patriarch only consolidated the Church in Russia. Similarly, the 2014 attack on the Ukraine only consolidated Russian relations with China, which had once been sabotaged by Khrushchev.
The Failure
Now, as 2015 turns into 2016, the project has been relaunched. Having failed to steal the Crimea to set up NATO bases there, having failed to create full-scale civil war in the Ukraine and spread it to Russia, Western command and control has sent out the message that the Russian Patriarch must be removed ‘by 2017’. This at least is the message from the dismissed political commentator Fr Vsevolod Chaplin who, like the embittered marginal liberals Protodeacon Andrei Kurayev and Sergei Chapnin, has shown extraordinary disrespect for His Holiness and also for the ordinary clergy and people of the Church. The powers which are conspiring against the Church desire to usurp the all too solid and intelligent Patriarch, replacing him with a naïve, if possible English-speaking, liberal. At the same time, they wish to provoke the Churched masses with a ‘Pan-Orthodox Council’, which appears to have a US-imposed secularist agenda, and so create a schism in the Ukraine. However, the conspirators cannot succeed, whatever the views of a few, off-centre individuals who are in love with the liberal media; the Orthodox Church is the Body of Christ, not some secular Western organization, which can simply be beheaded.
First of all, the Patriarch of Moscow is elected for life (unlike, for instance, Pope Benedict of Rome) and the people can see through naïve and manipulated liberals. As for the bishops’ meeting (‘Council’) which may or may not take place this year in some still undisclosed location, it may come to nothing and, indeed, it will certainly come to nothing, if the people do not receive its decisions. The Orthodox Church is not the Vatican, where whatever a Western-installed Pope of Rome says can be applied. Saints like St Justin of Chelije and St Kuksha of Odessa have already said that any novelty at a ‘Council’ will be dismissed. As for schism in the Ukraine, it is not going to happen – the Church there is faithful to the multinational, Imperial Church, centred in Moscow. Neither the Russophobes in the West and their provincial nationalist puppets in Kiev, nor narrow secular-minded nationalists and liberals in Moscow, will succeed. The mainstream, the monasteries, the ordinary parish clergy and faithful, will conquer, for our Faith is founded on Christ, His Mother, the Saints and the New Martyrs and Confessors. Like Julian the Apostate and all the others, the Western tyrants will also one day confess: ‘Thou hast conquered, O Galilean’.
One Thousand Words on 2016
As 2015, with its interminable wars, terrorist horrors and torrents of wretched refugees, the results of rapacious Western invasions of countries which the West itself created by its abandonment of Christ’s commandment to love our neighbour, draws to an end, what hopes are there for 2016? Many are downcast and have little hope in the darkness, fearing yet another worldwide conflagration through the apostasy expressed in the anti-Christian New World Order imposed by genocide a generation ago. However, for those of us who are Christians, there is always hope in the darkness, for we know that if we pray and do our best, the rest is in God’s hands. And with Him what is impossible for mankind can become possible.
In Muslim countries where disastrous chaos and rage for revenge have been generated by the injustices of the Western Powers, there seems to be little cause for hope. In Iraq and Afghanistan the chaos-creating forces of NATO were routed by the Taliban and had to abandon their lost wars. They were evacuated to their distant homelands, having in vain sacrificed thousands of lives and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, leaving only darkness. In Libya, its government overthrown by Western greed and injustice under the cloak of ‘humanitarian intervention’, there reigns chaos and bloodshed. In Turkey, its authoritarian and warlike regime being provoked to war by NATO, but also threatened by Russian sanctions and full-scale civil war with the Kurds, the future seems bleak. But this darkness is only part of the story.
In Syria, the government of President Assad has invited Russian support to defeat the Muslim terrorists, founded and until recently fully supported by the Western Powers. There is now cause for hope as the first areas have been liberated and refugees are returning. In the Ukraine, with the Fascist regime in Kiev bankrupt and unable to pay its international debts, there is hope that freedom will come to that sorry land, perhaps within only a few months, and millions of refugees will be able to return home. Meanwhile, spiritually healthy forces in Serbia, Montenegro and Moldova are fighting off quisling governments and NATO and EU colonialism. Much the same is happening in Central Asia, Georgia and Armenia.
‘Defend yourself in the West and find friends in the East’, said St Alexander Nevsky over 750 years ago. Thus, China and Russia have allied themselves after both became the victims of wild US aggression. Both countries are resisting the New World Order of the Zionist neocons and, together with them are allied India, much of the rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America, all the former Western colonies. These are all rejecting the US dollar as a currency. Only the crazed apostate leaders of the Western world, with their Israeli and Sunni vassals in Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, are still fully enslaved to the Machiavellian Prince of this world.
Throughout Eastern Europe, in the Baltic States, the Czech Lands, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, the peoples with the free governments, though not with corrupt puppet governments, are resisting EU tyranny and the Muslim invasion. Even in Western Europe, in France, Spain, Italy, the UK and Denmark, there are everywhere forces for national sovereignty and restoration that are at last waking up and wanting to return to their cultural roots. They say, ‘Enough, we want our countries back’. Such national liberation and globalist resistance movements, wishing to restore their countries’ sovereignty, look to Sovereign Russia for support.
Spiritually there are small numbers of heterodox in Western Europe who are at last awakening to Orthodoxy. They are finally realizing that the remnants of Orthodoxy in the West, in the form of Catholicism, have been so debilitated by filioquization (which makes the Church into a purely thisworldly institution, subjecting God to fallen human nature) and then by the virus of Protestantism and its Old Testament moneymasters, that they cannot return to the Church en masse. They must now make their path to the Church and so national restoration through personal repentance.
In the Church world, we prepare for the 2016 ‘Council’, much-feared since Washington has been trying to impose its agenda through its pawns, the State Department-appointed bishops and their paid hirelings. Here too there is good news. On 21 December Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church, three-quarters of the Church and the only part that is completely free, stated categorically that our Church will hearken to the voice of the people, the guardians of the Faith, and will resist any attempt at apostasy from the Christian Faith.
If this so-called Council does take place (no-one is yet sure exactly where or when), this guarantees that it will be the opposite of the Vatican’s masonic Council over fifty years ago, it will be the affirmation of the Faith, not its rejection. And in that case it will be a real Council, a Council of St John the Baptist, a last rallying call to the whole world to enter the Church to fight against the world’s preparations for Antichrist. And if the secular-minded do attempt to corrupt the Faith, then either no ‘Council’ will take place or else this second ‘Council of Florence’ will be rejected by the boycott of the faithful clergy and people.
Thus, although there is much darkness in the world, there are also glimmers of light, indeed, the promise of brightness for ‘those that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death’. For now we repeat the words of the Prophet and Forerunner: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’ and we say to the Pharisees and Saducees: ‘O generation of vipers, who has warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’ Unlike the renovationist ‘infil-traitors’ of the fifth column, there are those of us who fear nothing and will resist to the end in faithfulness to Christ and His Church, whatever the cost. For we shall win in the end, make no mistake.
The End of the Ukraine
Introduction
History proves that artificial states do not survive. Sooner or later they disappear because they do not have popular consent, but are based on centralized imposition and oppression. Thus, Spain is today disintegrating with the desire of a majority of Catalans to recover their own country. The Basques may follow. The UK, already broken up in 1921 by the secession of a majority of the Irish who wanted their freedom back from the British myth, is soon to be further dismantled by a majority of Scots. One day Wales and then England too will recover their sovereignty from Norman-British oppression – though that may only be at the Second Coming.
As for Germany, the Tsar’s plan after the coming Russian victory in 1917 was to dismantle the Satanic unification of Bismarck which led directly to huge European wars of unheard of bloodshed. And the artificial and violence-guaranteeing divisions of the Middle East imposed by Great Britain and France on the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago are daily being undone as civil wars or strife rage in Syria, Iraq, the Lebanon and Turkey. Now, another similar artificial State, which has also existed for less than 100 years and without popular consent, is collapsing. This is the Ukraine.
The Coming Collapse of the Ukraine
The word ‘Ukraine’ simply means borderland, ‘the marches’. In history it has been used to describe many marginal Slavic areas, from the borderlands of Serbia to the borderlands of Poland and Kazakhstan. To create a ‘State’ from marginal borderlands is never realistic. A viable State always need a centre that has consensus, popular consent. That is something that the newly-founded ‘Ukraine’, achieving independence only a generation ago, has never had.
Formed in the 1920s from Novorossiya (south-western Russia), Malorossiya (Little Russia, where the language is ‘Surzhik’, a Russian dialect), in 1939 from eastern Poland (Galicia – the only authentic Ukraine or borderland) and in 1944 from part of Hungary (now miscalled ‘Transcarpathia’, but before that called ‘Ruthenia’ and part of pre-1939 Czechoslovakia) and part of Romania, such an artificial conglomerate cannot survive. And this despite the billions of dollars that successive US governments have pumped into its life support machine over the last decade or so.
Though the US elite has given plenty of money to the Ukraine’s artificial centre in Kiev, where they have established a Galician puppet government for their new banana republic, in fact the regions of the Ukraine decide all the questions. They do not need Poroshenko. The Americans only need their mythical Ukrainian State for propaganda purposes. The US that controls the Ukrainian government and all its policies wants to maintain a single player, which they can show to the world and say: Here is the Ukraine.
They do not want Odessa, Zaporizhia, Uzhgorod, Lviv, Zhytomyr, Kharkiv, but the whole of the Ukraine. However, the Ukraine is in fact composed of precisely a patchwork of local territories controlled by corrupt oligarchs, in much the same way as the rival principalities which warred with each other in the 12th century, forcing a new centre to rise up and take control from its anarchy – Moscow. History is repeating itself. In reality, the Americans have to play with Filatov in Dnepropetrovsk, the Balogh brothers in Transcarpathia, Kolomoysky in the east, Saakashvili in Odessa and the others, and forget about Kiev and its Western oligarchs.
The inherently unstable Ukraine is no longer sustainable, indeed no longer a State, and continues to exist only to the extent that it is recognized by external players. Outside Kiev, it has no reality. Although it is unprofitable for Washington, Brussels and Berlin to preserve Ukrainian Statehood, to admit its dissolution would be to lose face altogether. But since the US, the EU and their IMF puppets have now not found $3 billion to pay off Ukraine’s present debts to Russia, they will certainly not find the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars required to fund the existence of the bankrupt Ukraine for another 5-10 years.
Everyone understands that the Poroshenko regime is not something that is sustainable – it is not alive any more, the recent local elections in Ukraine have shown that the central regime and its secret police retainers cannot compete with the regional elites. In all regions the elections returned local and regional elites. Therefore, when Biden came to the Ukraine he said that there was no longer any need to hold elections, he did not want the reality, that the Ukraine is an artificial conglomerate of provinces, to surface.
US politicians, who have more education and experience than their Ukrainian counterparts, are well aware that any subsequent elections will lead to the disintegration of Ukraine. This process can be slowed down, but it cannot be ignored, and though it may be possible to to maintain the State with intravenous injections of US cash, it is no longer possible to stop the process of decay and reverse it.
Although the ‘Western world’ can still pretend that the Ukraine exists as a country, for some time, even if nominally, collapse is inevitable. However, the fact is that a real State is not just a newly-invented anthem, coat of arms and flag. It is an internal consensus and that exists only when the government represents its peoples. As the Americans rightly proclaim: ‘No taxes without representation’. And that does not exist in the Ukraine.
Here is a situation where central government, that refused confederation and so began a civil war and massacring its own people, has lost control and so is no longer able to attract foreign funding. The economy is in ruins and funding a budget through taxing an incredibly poor and dissident population is impossible. The centre has no importance for the regions depend only on the regional elites and their real and powerful capabilities. The question is: What happens next?
Conclusion
Despite the hysterical and self-justifying claims of the Poroshenko clique, Russia has not invaded or intervened in the Ukraine in any way in the last two years. Some have asked why Russia has not done so amid the chaos of the Ukraine whereas it has done so in the chaos of Syria. The answer is simply because Soviet Russia, with its invasions and interventions in other countries, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, is long since dead. Today’s Russia only intervenes when it is asked to do so – as was the case in Syria. Russia has not been invited to intervene in the Ukraine, so it has not done so.
The unsubtle brutality of old Soviet governments is long gone. Today’s Russia is much more intelligent. As the Russian proverb says about messes: ‘Don’t touch it and it does not smell’. In other words, it waits until the apple tree falls and then picks the apples. And that is what is happening in the Ukraine. It will collapse all by itself and then Russia will pick up the pieces that freely wish to join it or become part of its Eurasian sphere of influence as independent entities, like Belarus to the north or Kazakhstan and Armenia to the south. In the case of the Ukraine, this means not just the already free Crimea, but the east, south and north – most of the country that is called the ‘Ukraine’. And this time may be coming very soon, for the present process of collapse will continue into 2016, as the ‘Ukraine’ returns to its real and pre-Soviet roots.