Category Archives: The Ukraine

The Last Bastion of Orthodoxy

But that which ye have already hold fast till I come.

Rev. 2, 25

Introduction

For 100 years, ever since 1914, the world has constantly been at war. This is because, before the final and inevitable triumph of Christ, a One World Government must come to power in Jerusalem. Hence the recent preparatory visit there of Pope Francis, accompanied by an imam, a rabbi and a Greek Patriarch. The assaults on all the Orthodox Churches are to be seen in the light of this preparation. However, the main obstacle to the enthronement of that government, and it will be an enthronement, is the resurgent Russian Orthodox Church. This is why the multinational chorus of the Western media, orchestrated and fed as one by the powers that be, so violently expresses its hostility to this last bastion of the Church of God on earth, so proving its importance.

The Seven Ancient Churches

The first phase of the assault, launched as long ago as 1909, was on the Seven ancient Churches. First to be tempted was the tiny and impoverished Patriarchate of Constantinople, weakened by flattering its Greek nationalism or phyletist Hellenism. The assault was then spread to the three other tiny and impoverished but also ancient Patriarchates in the Middle East and the rest of the Greek-speaking world in Greece, Cyprus and Albania. Today, as the Patriarchate of Constantinople is tempted by Uniatism, the faithful in its jurisdiction, led by the monks of Mt Athos, resist and look to freed Russia for deliverance from the chains of modernism, ecumenism and even apostasy, provoking the question: Will these Churches survive until 2054?

The Seven New Churches

The second phase of the assault was on the Seven youngest Churches. It came first in the Balkans, by bombing and dividing Serbia, bribing Romania, Bulgaria, as also the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, into the EU and attempting to undermine Georgia. Then came the attack on the Seventh Church, the Russian. First, they tried to attack her through Syria and the Middle East, but this failed. As President Assad said this week: ‘Russia has saved Syria and the whole Middle East’. So the assault entered a second phase, through the Ukraine, where schism, a civil war and genocide have been instigated, just as they were in Serbia. The aim is to destroy the unity of the Russian Church so that the Russian State, now reviving under the Church’s influence, can also be destroyed.

Conclusion

Thus, the powerbrokers of this world have attempted to destroy the whole Orthodox Church, subordinating it to this world. In the first fifty years of the third millennium they wish to make all fall away from Orthodoxy, just as they made all fall away from Orthodoxy in the Western fifth of the Church in the first fifty years of the second millennium. So they turned to the Russian Orthodox world, undermining its vulnerable, protestantized outer fringes with renovationism. Now they are turning to the marches of the Russian Orthodox world in the western Ukraine, where they continue the genocide of Orthodox under a puppet President who made his oligarch’s fortune not from chocolate, as his PR advisors claim, but from arms-dealing and even worse. Now all is at stake.

The Big Picture Beyond the Ukraine

The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.

George Orwell

The battle for the Ukraine is on. All earnestly pray that there will be no full-scale genocide of the peoples of the Ukraine by the US-appointed neocon regime in Kiev. Those who live outside the Ukraine, including in the Russian Federation, can and should only watch, making sure that there is no NATO invasion, as is threatened. Russian intervention would only be justified in order to protect Ukrainians from such genocide by the US vassals in Kiev. In principle, it is up to the peoples who live in the present-day borders of the Ukraine to decide their destiny, which may even include leaving the country. So far only the Crimeans have done this, overwhelmingly expressing their desire for freedom in their referendum which at last restored them after a 60-year interval to the Russian Federation. Democracy thus denied access to the US fleet which had intended to use the Crimea as its Black Sea headquarters.

Here we should make no mistake. The general US-EU encirclement of Russia is designed to end Russian access to the North Sea, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. By encircling and confining Russia to an isolated landmass without outlets to the sea, bullying US-EU empire builders seek to limit Russia’s role as a rival power centre and possible counterweight to its imperial ambitions for hegemony in the Middle East, North Africa, South-West Asia and the North Atlantic. The bankrupt US and transvestite EU are intent on destroying independent, national and non-aligned governments throughout the world and converting them into imperial satellites by whatever means are effective, ‘divide and rule’ being the favourite. Thus, the US has moved from encircling Russia via ‘elections and free markets’ to terror and economic sanctions in the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Middle East and Asia.

Washington’s (‘the international community’s’) strategic objective is to isolate Russia, undermine its military capability and erode its economy by strengthening NATO’s political and economic collaborators/national traitors/NGOs inside Russia – so dividing it, returning it to semi-vassal status and grabbing its gold. Bankrupt Washington’s One-World goal is to place neo-liberal political puppets in power in Moscow, just like those who oversaw the pillage and destruction (‘privatization’) of Russia during the infamous Yeltsin decade, creating the oligarchs. The US-EU power grab in the Ukraine is a step in that direction. The neo-Fascist junta in Kiev has now unleashed a large-scale military offensive against the pro-democracy, anti-coup, Russian-speaking majority in the east and south of the Ukraine who have been demanding a federal form of government reflecting Ukraine’s cultural diversity.

The US-EU has promoted this ‘military response’ to mass popular dissent and encouraged the coup regime to eliminate the civil rights of the Russian-speaking majority through neo-Nazi terror and to force the population into accepting junta-appointed regional rulers/oligarchs in place of their elected leaders. In response to this repression, popular self-defence committees and local militias quickly sprang up and the Ukrainian Army was initially forced back with thousands of soldiers refusing to shoot their own compatriots on behalf of the Western-installed regime in Kiev. Some even joined the freedom fighters. For a while, the neo-liberal junta had to contend with the disintegration of its ‘power base’. Following the advice of visiting CIA Director, Brenner, the junta then dispatched its elite ‘special forces’, trained by the CIA and FBI, to carry out massacres of pro-democracy civilians and popular militias.

Thus, the puppets of the crumbling US Empire bussed in armed thugs to the diverse city of Odessa to stage an ‘exemplary’ massacre: burning the city’s major trade union headquarters and slaughtering 42, mostly unarmed, civilians who were trapped in the building with its exits blocked by neo-Nazis. The dead included many women and teenagers who had sought shelter from the brutes. The survivors were beaten and imprisoned by the ‘police’ who had passively watched while the building burned. It is clear that NATO strategists who planned the putsch were only thinking about weakening Russia militarily and gave no thought to the costs of sustaining their puppet regime in Kiev when Ukraine had been so dependent on Russia. They appear to have overlooked the dynamics of the predictably hostile east and south of the country, which after the massacres are now utterly lost to the murderous junta.

Today Kiev can barely afford to feed its soldiers and has to rely on neo-Nazi volunteer militias. The junta now lacks legitimacy among most Ukrainians and has lost control of all but a small patch of land occupied by government offices in Kiev (echoes of Baghdad and Kabul). It has even lost the loyalty of the neo-Fascists and other now disenchanted former supporters. In general, their power-base of Uniat or schismatic Galician nationalists from the borderlands (ukraina) in the former Polish far west have decided that they want to leave the Ukraine and join the bankrupt EU. Only it is not at all clear that the EU will ever want them, bankrupt as they are. Meanwhile, in other parts of the Ukraine, the peoples of Transcarpathia (Carpatho-Russia) and Transdnestria would like to join the Russian Federation, though they have no borders with it and are far away, unlike those of the Crimea.

The majority, the peoples of New Russia in the east and the south and the peoples of Little Russia, including Kiev, in the centre, are now alienated; the regime is killing its own and so has lost all legitimacy. Although it is clear that the Ukraine will survive its present turmoil, it will be with a real and non-NATO government, different borders and, quite possibly, a different name. It may be that a new Ukraine will revert to its historic name of Little Russia and consist only of Little Russia, New Russia, Transdnestria and Carpatho-Russia, losing the Crimea and, to its relief, trouble-making Galicia. Such a Little Russia would enter the new Eurasian Economic Union, which will initially consist of the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan and Belarus. That would be the solution to the sorry Ukrainian saga, which is only a delayed result of the fall of the Soviet Union, with its ill-conceived internal borders, a generation ago.

That fall was itself the delayed result of the fall of the Russian Empire, the original geopolitical catastrophe in 1917. And that attempted destruction of Christian (Russian) Civilization was ultimately caused by the apostasy into Catholicism of the once Orthodox Christian West a thousand years ago. In 1204 in its pride it attempted to destroy Christian Civilization by sacking its capital in New Rome. It then degenerated into the Judeo-Christian or Catholic-Protestant world, which has now degenerated into the Euro-Atlantic and openly anti-Christian world. So this is a geopolitical struggle which has been going on for centuries. Thus, in 1854 the Western Powers invaded the Crimea (then, as now, in Russia) to destabilize and weaken the Russian Empire. Then they invaded the Ukraine for a second time in 1914 and for a third time in 1941. And now in 2014, they are doing it for the fourth time.

Thus, it can be said that the First World War of 1914 never ended – it was only ever interrupted. And it is being continued today, exactly one hundred years on and in the Ukraine again. The aim of this new aggression is to destabilize and weaken the unexpected and unwelcomed (for it) resurgence of Russian Orthodox Civilization. This aggression is only the next stage of a four-pronged aggression against the Orthodox Christian world: against the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the other ancient Patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem since 1917; against the Balkan Churches in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and also Cyprus since the 1920s; against Syria in the last three years; and, finally, today again, against the Ukraine. The atheist West cannot allow Russian Orthodox Civilization, which is the hub of the whole Orthodox Christian Church and Civilizational World, to grow strong.

The current aggression, led by the atheist US administration and backed by atheist EU bureaucrats, is then aimed at splitting off the Ukraine from Russian Orthodox Civilization. The latter stretches from the Polish border to the Pacific Ocean, with outposts far beyond in China, Korea, Japan, Alaska and in a great many other countries throughout the world, including in the Western world. And in this matter we faithful Russian Orthodox in the West have to meet our destiny and responsibility by being outposts, oases and envoys of that uncompromised Russian Orthodox Christian Civilization. The main arm being used here by the US is Galician nationalism, a terrain which has been well cultivated ever since the Hapsburgs. Ironically, however, as a result of that nationalism, today’s Ukraine has given up its freedom for dependence on the bankrupt USA and the EU (Berlin).

Just as Berlin organized the invasion of the Ukraine in 1914 and 1941, so it is invading the Ukraine once more in 2014, exactly 100 years after their first invasion. History is being repeated because people have not learned the lessons of history. True, this time the invasion is political and economic, but in fact Germany has always needed the Ukraine for Lebensraum (living space) and as a market for its exports. Thus, ironically, in its attempt to be independent of Russia, the Ukraine has become a vassal of the neo-feudal West. The only way in which Russia can bring most of the Ukraine back is if it can become an economic magnet for it – as also for the rest of the Orthodox world. This means throwing off the tyranny of Western neocon economics by developing the Eurasian Economic Union, which the atheist West is doing its best to undermine, precisely by destabilizing the Ukraine.

The unity of the Russian Lands was first lost with the overthrow of Imperial Russia after the First Germanic Invasion of 1914; they were gathered together after the defeat of the Second Germanic Invasion by the Soviet Union in 1945; then their unity was lost for a second time with the overthrow of that Union in 1991. We wonder if they are not being gathered together once more, in 2014, not this time by military means, but by political and economic means. Thus, nobody in their wildest fantasies has the intention of gathering together the Orthodox and Eurasian Lands militarily into a new Soviet bloc. Nobody wants or needs such mistakes of the past, however much the West wants to provoke a war between the brother peoples of Russia and the Ukraine. But what we do want to see is a new and voluntary Union, a new Empire, based not on Communist values, but on Christian values, on the Church of God.

This new Eurasian Empire, an Empire of the Spirit, but also a political, economic and social Empire based on Orthodox Christianity, would be a centre against the atheist West. The Russian Federation has to meet its destiny and responsibility, creating a centre of independence for Christendom against the forces of Eastern paganism on the one hand and Western atheism on the other hand. This was after all the role of the Tsar’s Russia before the Revolution and this can be the role of a renewed Orthodox Empire once more, a centre for all who do not recognise paganism or atheism, but recognise the Church of God, belong to Her and confess Her Faith without compromise. St Alexander Nevsky, who in the thirteenth century stood alone to defend the Church and Civilization against the barbaric Catholics wrote: ‘We must strengthen our defences against the West and seek friends in the East’.

Today’s Russian Federation has understood this and understood that playing with Western liberalism, that is, with Sodom and Gomorrah and the law of the jungle that has so miserably failed in the last decade in the Ukraine, as it did in Russia in the previous decade, will mean social, demographic, political, economic and industrial decline. The West wants an Arab spring in the Ukraine, a new Libya and Syria. But it has not understood the power of Russian Orthodox Civilization and that borders do not go through artificially constructed countries, but through the faith in human souls. The West may well have recovered its troublemakers of the nationalist, Uniat and schismatic far west Galicia, but it has lost the rest with its massacres. Orthodox Little Russia will survive as an independent sovereign state, outside vassal status to the US/EU cartel and with its soul, culture, identity and language intact.

Through its Ukrainian adventure, as also through its adventures in Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, the Balkans and Syria, where it provokes apostasy through Uniatism, Protestantism and Ecumenism, the West has only reinforced the geopolitical sovereign identity of the millennial, multinational Russian Orthodox Civilizational World. Once pro-Western oligarchs are withdrawing their money from the West and its Israeli proxy and repatriating it, feeling betrayed. Once pro-Western elements in Russia and the Ukraine are beginning to understand that the pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian Orthodox of Holy Rus were right all along. As St Alexander Nevsky also said: ‘God is not in might, but in truth’. And that is something that the Western elites have never understood and never will, for they have never believed in the God of truth, only in their own towering Babylonian pride.

‘Orthodoxy Main Impediment to Western Apostasy’

For us Western Orthodox who have not lapsed into a masonic, Western-manipulated Euro-Orthodoxy/Halfodoxy (masonic because its Western-appointed Patriarchs are all freemasons or do what the freemasons tell them to do), the below marks a very sad day in Western history. It is a historic definition of the new post-Christian Western ‘Civilisation’, which in the first millennium was Orthodox, as the religion of Antichrist. Thus, it marks the day of the final apostasy of the Western world after a thousand years of degeneration.

Coming from Sweden, a country notorious in post-Schism times for its Crusades against Russian Orthodoxy, this report, if it is true, is perhaps no surprise. With the new Western anti-Christian Crusade currently being operated in the Ukraine, Carl Bildt, an ideological disciple of the notorious Christ-hater, Russophobe and geopolitician Zbigniew Brzezinski, has in fact told the truth that we have always known: post-Orthodox Western ‘Civilisation’, in fact Western Anti-Civilisation, is leading to Antichrist and the Apocalypse. See:

http://agora-dialogue.com/rex-carl-bildt-thinks-eastern-orthodoxy-is-main-threat-to-western-civilisation/

If Carl Bildt actually said this, he is correct: the main threat to Antichrist is indeed Christ.

With the current suggestion, under pressure from the part-Jewish John Kerry, that the Israeli State hand over Mt Zion to the Vatican and international control so that the new World Religion can be further prepared, we move a step closer to the preparation of the throne of Antichrist. We also note that in a few days time Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew will be meeting in Jerusalem, thus furthering this World Religion.

However, we should not despair. In Syria the city of Homs has at last been delivered from Western-backed Muslim terrorists. In Germany ARD television has now proved that those killed in Kiev in February were all victims of the terrorists, not of the legitimate government, as we knew all along. In Russia President Putin has just signed a new law, forbidding the use of foul language in all media (the opposite of what has happened in recent years in the West). And in the Ukraine Orthodox forces are every day stregthening against the Uniat terrorists and the Judas Philaret of Kiev. If we pray to him who defeated the Scandinavian apostates in the past, St Alexander Nevsky, and to the great Swedish saint, St Anne of Novgorod, we shall be victorious again.

Freedom for the Peoples of the Ukraine: Freedom for the Peoples of Europe

The Crimea, attached to the Ukraine by the drunken Ukrainian peasant atheist Khrushchov in 1954, chose freedom by referendum. The south and east, known historically as ‘New Russia’ and arbitrarily attached to the Ukraine by other Soviet atheists 30 years before the Crimea, are also choosing freedom against the martyr-making junta in Kiev. Odessa, with at least 46 victims of the Kiev terrorists, wants freedom; as also Donetsk and the region around it. Who is next? Could it be Transdnestria, which long ago declared independence from Moldova? Could it be ‘Transcarpathia’- Carpatho-Russia – which has already declared independence from the Kiev regime? Could it be the centre itself with Kiev, formerly known as Little Russia? Or will it be the freedom of Orthodox Volhynia and the great Lavra of Pochaev through the prayers of St Job?

What will remain is the Roman Catholic and schismatic far west province of Galicia, the only real Ukraine, or borderland, speaking its many regional dialects, much half-Polish, a quarter-Slovak and a quarter-German. Perhaps it should return to Poland, as an unwanted relic (and also invention) of the Hapsburgs. Perhaps the US will subsidise it (the EU has refused to do so). It seems curious that the West wished to preserve an artificial Soviet construct, the ‘Ukraine’, with its artificial borders, not registered internationally anywhere. It can only be presumed that the West was thoroughly ignorant of history, or else had actually started believing in its own myths. However, what is even more curious is that the West should have backed such losers as the incompetent murderers, handpicked by the US State Department and approved by the EU, as those who illegitimately seized power by violence in Kiev.

The unrepresentative US-installed puppet regime that was supposed to hand the Ukraine on a plate to the EU and NATO is collapsing, its soldiers and policemen in revolt, and with blood on its hands. Eurofascism has not won; not because the Russian Federation has invaded to liberate it, but because the peoples of the Ukraine have risen up to protest against the Galician separatists and their mercenaries. Colonialist Berlin and Washington, set to ravage the Ukraine, destroy its industry, dump its consumer goods and nuclear waste there, thought that it had won everything. In fact it is losing everything, once more discrediting itself in the eyes of the free world.

President Putin’s popularity has now risen to an unheard of 82%. Even the US now agrees that the EU has blood on its hands in Kiev. The EU is more discredited than ever, as we will soon see in the European elections. China and India have been drawn ever closer to the Russian Federation. The Eurasian Economic Union, which the EU thought it had for ever sabotaged, is about to be launched and may well expand rapidly, absorbing former US puppets like Georgia and Azerbaijan on the way. The world saw the isolation of the West in Syria when it accused the government there of using poison gas, when it was in fact Western-backed terrorists who used the poison gas. Now it has seen the crassness of the Western world in the Ukraine too.

No more will the Ukraine arm the enemies of the people, as it did the Saakashvili regime in Georgia in 2008, slaughtering 2,000 innocents. No more will politically-backed puppet schismatics like ‘the Patriarch of Kiev’ exist and Church property will at last be returned to the Church; no more will politically-backed Galician Uniatism be free to spread in the Crimea, New Russia and Little Russia. The scheme of the CIA-run Patriarchate of Constantinople to take over the Ukraine has failed. Just as in 1945, so in 2014, Eurofascism has been defeated again.

Where does the process of liberation stop? The Caucasus? The ‘Stans’ of Central Asia? Mongolia? Moldova? The Baltics? Serbia and Montenegro? (After all Galicia is to the Ukraine what Croatia is to Serbia; the Second World War proved that). Hungary? Bulgaria? Cyprus? Romania? Greece? Even Peru and Venezuela have expressed interest, indicating that the new Eurasian Economic Union may not only be geographical, but ideological as well. What we may at last be witnessing is the restoration of the Russian Empire, after the treachery and historic injustice that have now lasted for 100 years. Is freedom on the way? We must pray to the martyred Tsar for his help.

Holy Rus Lives and Calls: Now is the Hour

On 29 May 2014 the Eurasian Economic Union will be formed by the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan and Belarus, with Armenia and many another country waiting in the wings. The implementation of this new Union has been greatly hastened by the tragic events in the Ukraine. The divide and rule instability provoked by the USA, helped by the EU, in the Middle East and Northern Africa over the last few years has now spread there too. Standing on the threshold of global events against the background of the separatist junta in Kiev which is still slaughtering its own people, it is clear that the importance of this new Union is now no longer only economic. It is being dwarfed by its political importance as a centre of security, independence and freedom from potential global dictatorship.

Naturally, this Union is opposed by the fifth column of the Western media, which is still strong in post-Soviet Russia, as above all outside Russia. However, such media do not represent the Russian Orthodox ethos which lies behind this Eurasian Union; they represent only their sponsors. They are angry and fearful, for this new alliance opposes US plans for global hegemony, which is why they censor and block the free Russian media. And that fifth column, liberals, ecumenists and modernists, is looking increasingly old-fashioned. Resurgent Russia, built on Christian civilizational principles and values, is now competing with the atheist West and the decadence it has tried to sow in once Orthodox lands, gathering together different lands of the world beneath the protecting veil of Holy Rus and its consistent belief-system and world view.

The US administration spent a lot of money ($5 billion) and 23 long years to try and split the Ukraine from the Eurasian civilizational world of Holy Rus. Instead, Russia is gathering it together and integrating it, starting with the Crimea. Little wonder that seeing the US losing the Ukraine altogether, two days ago John Kerry agreed with the Establishment-maligned British politician, Nigel Farage, and condemned the EU for creating the chaos in the Ukraine (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIvoq2oZZuU). What he did not mention, of course, was that it was the US that put the EU up to that chaos-creation, which it had itself financed and orchestrated, choosing even the leaders of the junta that seized power from democracy.

Details have their importance, but salvation is now in being together. Sticks can be broken one by one quite easily, but a bundle of sticks cannot. Post-Soviet Russia is turning into resurgent Orthodox Russia and so has begun fulfilling its historic and messianic role, which we have waited so long to see. It is showing an imperial understanding of the global situation – in the best sense of the word ‘imperial’; now the future has hope. We look forward to the moment when Russian leaders, who conquered atheism, address once cultured, educated and intelligent Western peoples, over the heads of their political and media elites who so despise them and feed them bread and circuses. Then they will denounce the lies of those elites about Russia and denounce also the elite’s own misdeeds, calling the Western peoples back to their spiritual roots and holiness. Holy Rus lives and calls. Now is the hour.

A Ukrainian Europe?

Over the last 23 years, ever since the Ukraine was invented to unite completely different peoples, 80% of whom speak fluent Russian and not one of the many regional dialects of ‘Ukrainian’, we have seen its situation go from fragile to disastrous. In the Galician far west the descendants of pro-Nazi Poles have been united with the descendants of anti-Nazi Russians in the south, east and north. As for the centre, known to history as Little Russia, some are not quite sure of their identity. As for the south-west, formerly Czechoslovakia, formerly Hungary, the heroic Transcarpathians (Carpatho-Russians) have declared their independence and look to Moscow for freedom from provincial Ukrainian tyranny. Transdnestrians by the Moldovan border do the same. Meanwhile EU Poland, Hungary and Romania are handing out passports to any who can claim their ancestry.

Bankrupted, ravaged and asset-stripped by a generation of mafioso oligarchs, many young Ukrainians have been forced to emigrate, above all to Russia and Belarus, but also to Poland, Slovakia, Western Europe and Canada. Many older people eke out a living on absurdly small pensions and plots of land, thanks to which they can feed themselves. The ‘thirdworldization’ of the Ukraine, once one of the greatest industrial hubs of the Soviet Union and the pre-1914 breadbasket of Western Europe (80% of Britain’s wheat then came from the Ukraine), has reached crisis point.

Its US puppetmaster is now attempting to turn the Ukraine into a colony, a sub-department of the CIA, ruled by an unrepresentative, self-proclaimed oligarch junta in Kiev, come to power through terrorist violence. The result is chaos and the open revolt of its peoples. Just as in puppet Iraq, Baghdad rules nothing outside a small central area, and in puppet Afghanistan, Kabul has no control over the vast mass of that country, so too the self-appointed regime in Kiev has never controlled the peoples it claims to rule and even its armed forces disobey it.

In all this, however, the Ukraine only resembles the European Union, beneath whose bloodied flag the coup d’etat against the democratically-elected government of the Ukraine took place last February. Thus, just as the east, south, north and parts of the west of the Ukraine want freedom, so too the east, south, north and parts of the west of the European Union also want their freedom. The south and the east of the Ukraine, called by history ‘New Russia’, have been bankrupted, indebted and asset-stripped by the centre (Kiev) and are resisting, restless and angry. So too the south and the east of the EU, bankrupted, indebted and asset-stripped by the centre (Berlin), are resisting, restless and angry. They are saddled by unpayable debts – though less unpayable than the $17 trillion of debts of the USA. This is a noose around the neck of every US citizen, especially if China, Russia and India decide to launch a new reserve currency.

Thus, most of the east of the EU, the Baltics, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus, wants to leave the EU. In fact, their peoples never wanted to join it; it was only their corrupted and bribed politicians and their friends in the brainwashing media that wanted that. There was never any popular consent. Indeed, Cyprus even tried to do what the Crimea has done and escape. Its German owners would not allow that.

Thus, most of the south of the EU, bankrupt Italy, southern France, Spain and Portugal, is tired of Berlin’s exploitation.

Thus, the peoples of the north, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, and even Norway and Iceland, are disturbed at their elite-imposed Islamization and distressed by the corrupt and anti-democratic ways of the unaudited EU.

Thus, in the west of the EU, Ireland resembles Transcarpathia (Carpatho-Russia) in the south-west of the Ukraine. Once a colony, Ireland attained independence through armed struggle, but then became a colony again, bankrupt and feudally dependent again. At least Transcarpathia has declared independence from the US-installed, provincial Fascists in power in Kiev, though its national leader, Fr Dimitry Sidor, has been kidnapped by right-wing thugs sent from captive Kiev.

Thus, the centre of the Ukraine (known to history as Little Russia) is undecided. Benelux, northern France, Germany and Austria in the center of the EU are also undecided. (Though Switzerland is definitely decided – against the EU). The imposition by the elite under a propaganda fanfare of the inflationary euro is resented. The French National party want to drop it and two thirds of Germans never wanted it in the first place.

In the extreme north-west of the EU, even the peoples of the UK were never consulted about membership of the EU. In that they are similar to the people of the west and north-west Ukraine in Galicia and Volhynia. Although the centre of US influence in Western Europe, like Galician Ukraine, the peoples of the UK object to colonial rule from Brussels/Berlin. It does not want to be part of a Europe which includes its south and east.

The Establishment of the EU is symbolized by its unelected President, an unknown Belgian. That Establishments imposed itself anti-democratically on the peoples of Europe. Even the limited referenda it granted were repeated until they obtained the ‘right’ answer. Now that Establishment is opposed by right and left alike, standing in an increasingly narrow, self-proclaimed centre – so narrow that it increasingly looks like a bottleneck.

Movements of the popular national right in Europe (excluding militants, extremists and marginals from the far right) want their national sovereignty and identity back from the neocon transnational elite. That is why in French such movements are called ‘souverainistes’.

Movements of the popular national left in Europe want their jobs and their human dignity back from the neocon transnational elite, who stole their money and asset-stripped and indebted the people to anonymous banksters. That is how they created a huge underclass of unemployed or precariously employed, ‘the precariat’, on zero hours and temporary contacts, or ‘workfare’.

Both left and right resist the global elite. They resist through defending and reclaiming their national sovereignty and Christian identity from the Islamization (sectarianism) imposed on them. They resist through defending and reclaiming their jobs and savings from the creditization (indebtment) imposed on them.

They resist the global elite which has caused interminable chaos in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

They resist the global elite because they still have the vestiges of Christian culture, whereas the mocking and patronizing elite is openly anti-Christian.

They resist the global elite whose aim is to elect from their midst a World Ruler to be enthroned in Jerusalem.

Just like free Ukrainians, those of the peoples of Europe who are still free resist, and with the support of resurgent Russia, in whose Christian roots they share. For the choice that the peoples of Europe, like the peoples of the Ukraine, face is not primarily political and economic, ethnic or social, but spiritual: between Christ and Antichrist.

Why There Will be no World War III Yet

The atheist US elite wants to start World War III in the Ukraine, which it has spent 5 billion dollars destabilising and undermining. With a bankrupt economy, such a war would be the ideal solution for the US military-industrial complex run by the neocons. However, nobody in the international community wants it, neither the Russia Federation, nor China, nor India, nor anyone else, including even the war-weary, German-run European Union. Although the illegal US-funded, head puppet in Kiev, Arseniy Yatsenyuk (called ‘Yats’ by his US neocon puppeteers), has unleashed a civil war against the Ukrainain people, he also wants a World War, but he will not get it. Why?

It is now fifteen years since atheist NATO forces bombed Belgrade, murdering and maiming innocent Serbs, and dismembering Serbia. It is six years since the atheist US tried to take over Christian Georgia and invade Christian Russia – and failed. Since then it has gone on to tear apart and persecute Christians in once relatively prosperous Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria, where the capital Damascus, seat of the Patriarchate of Antioch is in ruins and Christian flee for their lives from Muslim fanatics, armed, funded and supported by the atheist West.

Now the US and EU elite is trying to destroy the Christian Ukraine, where the anti-Orthodox Kievan fanatics, who seized power from the democratically-elected government two months ago, have sent, on US advice, a reluctant army, backed by US mercenaries, to slaughter Ukrainian citizens in the New Russian east of the country. The situation in the Carpatho-Russian (Transcarpathian) south-west and Little Russian north is not so different. Only the people of now Russian Crimea are safe from the ravages of the CIA-controlled, separatist junta in Kiev which is now escalating tensions all over the Ukraine.

The bullying bombast, threats and blackmail coming from Washington have isolated the atheist USA elite from the international community as never before. But however much the pathetic propagandists of the venal Western media scream about a Third World War, to terrify and intimidate the naive Western public and demonise Russia, it is not to be. However many warships with missiles the Washington elite sends into the Black Sea, there will be no Third World War. Whatever the devilish scenario dreamed up by the atheist neocons for the Christian Ukraine, there will be no Third World War there. The atheists will bring Antichrist to power otherwise.

May: A Turning-Point?

The European elections of 22 May are fast approaching, falling just three days before elections in the governmentless and rudderless Ukraine, where a separatist, US-installed junta has seized power by violence. This time the European elections may present a real choice to their electorate. Do Europeans want to continue with the Fourth Reich project, a United States of Europe, a museum and graveyard of dead culture, a Europe without Christ, or do they want to stop the project now and even reverse the catastrophe before it is too late?

The true face of the European Union, a despised colony of the bullying, meddling US elite, who are now using Ukrainians as pawns in their giant geopolitical game, has been recognized by ever more Europeans. The former Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, has indicated how mistaken the EU elite is in meddling in the Ukraine. In Hungary the Jobbik National Party is openly supporting Russia against the USA; its leader, Gabor Vona, said in Moscow in 2013 that ‘Russia is defending European values, whereas the EU is betraying them’, and may join the Eurasian Union. In France Marine Le Pen of the National Front, with between 20% and 30% of support, is saying much the same. Even Nigel Farage, the leader of the Independence Party in the UK, says that he admires President Putin, and in the USA such paleocon (definitely not neocon) leaders as Patrick Buchanan and Ron Paul support the new Russia against the Western Sodom.

The European elites are worried. Despite the propaganda daily pumped out by their European Establishment media, ordinary Europeans are resisting. President Putin’s appeal is to the long hoodwinked, native peoples in the depths of Europe, who have for so long been oppressed by their know-it-all, ‘liberal’, Establishment elites. His appeal is to European roots, to those who wish to live in the Christian, Mediterranean civilisation of Europe, at whose roots lies Orthodox Christianity, which is also the only living belief-system in contemporary Russia.

The peoples of Europe do not want to be taken over by sects, either the Protestant variety – and all Protestantism, a splinter of Catholicism, is sectarian because it is humanist and individualist, based on a humanistic ‘Jesus’ cult, not on the God-man. Neither do they want to be taken over by the Muslim sect – and make no mistake Islam, a splinter of Arianism, is also a sect. This is against a sombre background. In just a few days’ time the Vatican machine is intending to canonize two recent popes, John XXIII and John-Paul II. Both of them represent the protestantising current of modern Catholicism and therefore the canonization of that current. This is the current that denies the Divine, the presence of the sacred. Characteristically, they are being canonized by a Jesuit Pope who venerates the awful mass-murdering Uniat Kuntsevich as a saint and is encouraging Uniat aggression in the Ukraine.

It is now for the Orthodox Churches to reject the personality cults surrounding contemporary and recent philosophers of Orthodox academic ‘theology’ and their associated freemasonry, simony and decadence. It is for the Russian Orthodox Church in particular to show Europe what Church Christianity, and not Christian sects, actually is. For decades Europe has been riding a bicycle in the wrong direction. It is time to stop, turn round and go back to recivilization. If it does not, it will suicidally leap, like a mass of lemmings, into the abyss of its own making.

The Purity of Holy Orthodoxy

The title is an expression used in an inspiring conversation with the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus at the ROCOR Council of San Francisco in 2006. Below are a number of recent conversations, both actual and also from correspondence by e-mail, regarding current Church matters, all of which illustrate the search of all conscious Orthodox for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy in the Light of the Resurrection.

Q: What recent changes have marked the Church inside Russia?

A: A generation has now passed since the commemoration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus in 1988 and the world-changing events that followed it, namely the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result of the passing of that generation, in the last few months there have been major changes, with the retirement in Kiev and St Petersburg of both Metropolitans Vladimir and in Minsk that of Metr Philaret. Thus, all three most senior Metropolitans in the Russian Church inside Russia have retired through age and ill health. This is the end of the old generation of those who were connected with the highly controversial and politically-minded Metr Nikodim (Rotov) of the Soviet period.

Those of his disciples who are still alive have all had to adapt since the Jubilee Council of 2000 with its rejection of sergianism and ecumenism and canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Royal Martyrs, and then the acceptance of the reconciliation between the Church inside Russia and the Church Outside Russia in 2007. In other words we are now entering the second generation since the collapse of secularist-atheist ideology in the Russian Lands and so the resurrection by the purity of Holy Orthodoxy of the crucified Church inside Russia. These three senior posts that have changed hands are symbolic of a more general generational change, as Lazarus’ grave-clothes have fallen off.

Q: What do you mean by ‘Lazarus’ grave-clothes’?

A: I liken the resurrection of the Church inside Russia to the resurrection of Lazarus. This was an incredible and astounding miracle, but we should not forget that Lazarus’ grave-clothes did not smell good because the decomposition of his body had already begun. These grave-clothes are represented by the deathly, Soviet and post-Soviet (not yet Russian), phenomena and problems that have accompanied the resurrection of the Church inside Russia.

Q: What phenomena?

A: For example, inside Russia in the 1990s they were so short of priests that they ordained very easily. There were several disasters here with clearly unworthy ordinations and subsequent defrockings, sometimes for sexual misdemeanours, sometimes for financial misdemeanours. I have met such priests – I know what I speak of. Then there was the confusion between Stalinism and the Church and the total misunderstanding or even rejection of the Royal Martyrs – all as a result of the brainwashing from old Soviet propaganda and lies. Then there have been the phenomena of pro-Catholic clergy (like the assassinated Fr Alexander Men, a suspected Uniat) and the events surrounding Paris-style Russophobes, including the modernist, pro-Protestant Fr George Kochetkov, suspended at one point by Patriarch Alexis as a ‘neo-renovationist’, and the recent scandals concerning Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev and Professor Zubov (a close friend of the late Olivier Clement), who both had to be sacked. These are all people who to some extent still live in the Soviet thought world. They have never managed to shake off the spiritual and intellectual impurity of the past and so make the transition from that old-style Soviet conditioning, paradoxically mixed with a superficial Orthodoxy, to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

The same thing happened outside Russia, where the Church inside Russia had several unworthy and scandalous representatives, uncanonically ordained, or other representatives who are now very elderly as they were appointed in Soviet times. Fortunately, the unworthy ones have mostly died out or been moved, some very recently. According to the 2007 agreement the Church inside Russia has to prepare its parishes outside Russia (except in China and Japan, which is part of its canonical territory) for their canonical handover to ROCOR. His Holiness understandably wants this process to go smoothly, without hurting anyone’s feelings, especially those of the elderly. Therefore it will take a generation before it is completed and all moves to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Q: Surely there were impurities in ROCOR also?

A: ROCOR had from the start two wings. One was the political wing whose identity was nationalistic, cultural and anti-Communist rather than simply Orthodox; the other wing, which could be called the ‘Johannite wing’, as represented by St John of Shanghai, was the mainstream of ROCOR. Our view was and is Christian. I can remember how the political and nationalist wing dominated in certain parishes, for example at the former ROCOR chapel in Paris or at the old London Cathedral, as it used to be, when it had several members who worked for MI5. Significantly, those parishes have not survived, but died.

This was because the politically-minded elements refused reconciliation with the Church inside Russia in 2007 or even before. As one of our archbishops said before 2007, reconciliation with the repentant Church inside Russia, the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, would lead to a ‘purification’ of ROCOR. That is exactly what happened. Spiritual impurities such as extremism, phariseeism, sectarianism and fanaticism could not bear reality and love others or the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, and so that political wing left the Church for various sects. Several of the small communities concerned in North America were dominated by individuals who worked for the CIA or the Canadian Secret Services.

Q: What do you make of current political changes in the Ukraine?

A: Two weeks ago the US removed the gold reserves of the Ukraine. Then the CIA took over a floor in the offices of the Ukrainian Secret Police in Kiev and the head of the CIA, John Brennan, went to Kiev on Lazarus Saturday. The head of the CIA does not visit a foreign country without a very good reason. It was no doubt with the intention of hoping to further destabilise the Ukraine and then run it, just as it did countless Latin America banana republics and Italy and Greece after the Second World War.

Sure enough, just after that, the CIA began issuing black propaganda, sheer lies, for example about alleged persecution of the Jews in the eastern Ukraine or that President Putin had tens of billions of dollars in private bank accounts in the West, implying that he was a thief. Naturally the Western-media were fed those lies and naturally reported them. The Times of London (part of the Murdoch tabloid empire) was especially keen to report these slanders and lies.

For instance, as regards the Jews, everybody knows that the Jews were massacred by the Uniat Ukrainian SS in Galicia, the western Ukraine, which welcomed Hitler and where earlier anti-Jewish pogroms had taken place. These are facts of history. Many members of the Ukrainian (= Galician) SS, with Polish nationality, came to live in the UK and especially the US, after World War II. I know; I met some of them 30-40 years ago; some of them were frightening and admitted to killing Jews.

Today, at least 150 US mercenaries, probably being paid for by the CIA, are active against the people of the Ukraine, given that most Ukrainian soldiers and police refuse to use violence against their own people – indeed 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already asked for Russian nationality. Other soldiers in the eastern Ukraine have simply joined the insurrection of the Ukrainian people against the junta. We cannot see this crucifixion of the Ukraine, orchestrated in Washington and Brussels and carried out by their paid puppets in Kiev, as being successful.

Q: Why not?

A: First of all, the Ukraine is bankrupt, which is why the bankrupt US called on the world to ‘save the Ukrainian economy’. But it is too late. Prices are doubling. The poor people of the Ukraine, exploited and impoverished for 23 years by corrupt oligarchs, are spontaneously rising up against the unrepresentative, US-installed, separatist Kiev junta and its terror tactics. That regime seized power from the democratically-elected government in Kiev by violence and murder; now it is facing opposition from the Ukrainian people, who are using the same techniques as it did, in order to seize back power from it in turn. As it is written, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. But there is chaos.

Q: Does any of this have any significance in Orthodox terms? Is it not all political?

A: All of this is highly significant for us. Today’s Russia is at last just beginning to position itself as a spiritual power, opposing the secularist atheism of the Western elite. This was Russia’s traditional role – to protect Christian civilisation both from Western barbarians and from Eastern hordes. Thus, it repelled the Mongol-Tartar yoke, encouraged moderate Islam, repelled the Charleses, Napoleons and Hitlers, liberating both Paris and Berlin, and supported the Church in the Holy Land, the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch. Outside Eurasia Russia has always helped the peoples of the developing world, aiding them to throw off the yoke of colonialism, as did Tsar Nicholas II during the Boer War in South Africa and also in Tibet, Thailand and Ethiopia. Even the Soviet Union merely continued these policies in Africa (the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria), Asia and Latin America.

The Russian Orthodox civilisational model, the Christian one, is quite different from the Western Catholic/Protestant model, which calls itself ‘Judeo-Christian’. Thus, the ‘civilised’ Judeo-Christian West and ‘Western values’ destroyed the native peoples of the Americas and Africa, enslaving them, massacring them like wild animals, sending them into concentration camps (‘reservations’), as the British were still doing in Kenya and Malaysia in the 1950s. Christian Russia, on the other hand, spreading across Eurasia into Alaska, left the native peoples in peace, not enslaving them or systematically exploiting them, but making them into equal allies. Today Western ‘civilisation’, which has reached its final stage of degeneration in Europe and the USA, has come to a dead end by trying to subjugate the whole world to its ruling transnational atheist elite and its corrupt New World Order pseudo-democracy. That, in fact, only gives a false choice – between one atheist oligarch and another.

Only Russia can potentially deliver the world from this civilisational dead end by providing a Non-Western and spiritual alternative. This is a geopolitical challenge and a historic turning-point. The US military-industrial complex, to use Eisenhower’s terminology, has bankrupted itself with its lust for global hegemony and us finally meeting its match in the resurgent Russian Lands. The New World Order, the near-millennial and ever accelerating movement of the Western world to enthrone Antichrist in Jerusalem, has been stopped for the moment.

The Russian Lands (Rus) are, it seems, returning to fulfilling their destiny as the last restraining force in the world, the last bastion of True Christianity. The Ukraine is a litmus paper, an acid test of this. If the Ukraine were to fall, that is, to lose its Orthodoxy, that would lead to the enthronement of Antichrist. The situation is on a knife edge, which is why so many icons in Russia and the Ukraine are at this moment giving off myrrh. We have to understand that today’s division in the Ukraine exists as the result of two historic injustices, which have to be righted

Q: Which are these injustices?

A: These two historic injustices are the events of 1054 and 1917, which are interconnected. In 1054 semi-barbarian, provincial nationalists, filled with the pride, greed and ambition of Roman paganism, rose up in heresy against the Church of Christ, the Christian Roman Empire, and declared that they were the true Church! And persecution followed 1054, with 1204, the sack of New Rome by barbarian Catholics, which in turn led to 1453, the fall of New Rome, not to mention the Western Crusades against the Russian Lands (including today’s ‘Ukraine’), and all the anti-Church horrors that followed, including Uniatism.

The second historic injustice was in 1917 when the descendants of the same provincials performed a coup d’etat in St Petersburg, overthrowing the legitimate government of the Lord’s Anointed on behalf of traitors, cowards and deceivers from inside the country who had lost their Faith. This atheist coup resulted in the martyrdom of the Christian Emperor and the destruction of his Empire, which had been about to end the First European War and liberate Constantinople (so preventing the Armenian genocide), Vienna and Berlin.

The atheist coup of 1917 also culminated in 1991 in the destruction of the legacy of the Christian Empire which had been built up over centuries by the Tsars and their peoples. That 1991 collapse of the legacy of the former Orthodox Empire, the Soviet Union, was inevitable because its atheism had denied the Faith of a Faith-based Empire. Today, in 2014, we are merely seeing the attempt to deepen that geopolitical fall, again using provincial nationalists, this time from the far west of the Ukraine, as its pawns. All that is happening now was prophesied by Solzhenitsyn in 1998. Thus, as he said then, the US and its EU colony want to dismember and separate the Ukrainian part of the remains of the Orthodox Empire, the Empire’s weakest link.

Q: Why is the Ukraine the weakest link of the former Orthodox Empire?

A: The word Ukraine is composed of two ancient Slavonic words meaning ‘at the border’ – though interestingly it could also be translated as ‘on the edge’. It was first recorded in the 12th century in this sense of a narrow strip of borderland and there exists an interesting academic article on its origins and uses for many geographical areas, including the area near Kazan. However, in its modern and non-historical sense – and so a sense completely unknown to the greatest ‘Ukrainian’ writer Gogol – the word ‘Ukraine’ was invented only in the late 19th century by the Hapsburgs. Then it was reused by the Soviets and the Nazis, and today by the US and the EU – by five empires all thoroughly hostile to the Orthodox Church. Indeed, decades ago I met old Ukrainian emigres, adults before the Revolution, who told me that they had never heard the word ‘Ukraine’ until the 1920s, when the atheists brought it in.

The contemporary Ukraine is the weakest link because at present it includes and is now run by never denazified, ultra-nationalist, Uniat Galicia, which until 1939 was part of eastern Poland. This is a schismatic, Catholicised area, which lived under foreign and anti-Orthodox – Polish and Austrian – rule for centuries. The majority of its population, just like that of the rest of Western Europe, now has no concept of uncompromised, unsecularised, non-1054 Christianity, that is, of Orthodox values. Until that area returns to Poland, or else becomes independent, it will continue to create chaos in the rest of the ‘Ukraine’, the 85% of it which is known to history not as ‘the Ukraine’, but significantly, going from east to west, as New Russia, Little Russia and Carpatho-Russia.

Q: So does this mean we should support President Putin?

A: He is only a politician and, like all politicians, he makes mistakes. The Ukraine, in some form or other, has a right to exist as an independent state, just like Belarus. It is an integral part of threefold Rus – Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus are the primary territory of Rus, the three Russias. I suspect that President Putin thinks the same thing. The last thing he wants to have to do is to send in tanks. However, he has to defend his country and Russian people against extreme Western aggression – which is what he did when he restored the Crimea to Russia amid the jubilation of its people. Otherwise the Crimea would have been invaded and occupied by the US military and its ports would have become NATO naval bases, closing off the Black Sea to Russia.

Our objection is not to an independent ‘Ukraine’, but to its domination and division by an anti-Orthodox and unrepresentative, US-installed, puppet clique in Kiev, which would mean that the Ukraine would become just another bankrupt and pillaged Western colony, like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya etc. Divide and rule is ever the Western policy. Our support should go to the martyred Tsar Nicholas II, as he was the last ruler of All Rus, and not to politicians. We support the saints – politicians only count inasmuch as they support the saints. Again we fight for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, not for politicians.

Q: Why has the BBC been so incredibly biased in its reporting of events in the Ukraine?

A: Since the Second World War the UK Establishment elite has become the poodle or colony of the US ruling elite (a relationship that the UK Establishment has flattered itself into calling ‘the special relationship’!) and it has taken no account of the peoples of these islands. The BBC, even more than other Western media, is biased because it is an inherent part of that Establishment elite, in the pay of a secularist-atheist regime and its secret services. It is therefore hostile to Christianity, especially to uncompromised Christianity, that is, Orthodoxy, just as it is hostile to the people, from which it is ever more distant.

The BBC has become particularly subservient to the Establishment since it dared to criticise the Blair regime’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, for which the Blairites sacked the BBC Director General and intimidated BBC journalists. Now the BBC just seems to parrot whatever MI5 and MI6 tell it. I know two BBC journalists who have also worked for the secret services, which infiltrated the BBC from its inception in the 1920s; there must be many more of them.

Thus the BBC talks of the Neo-Nazi Uniat Galician terrorists in Kiev, who overthrew a democratically-elected government as ‘heroes’, but calls the Ukrainian citizens who are rising up against foreign oppression and US mercenaries in the south-west, south, east and north, ‘pro-Russian activists!’ Nor has the BBC reported on the wave of dissatisfaction in Kiev at the doubling of many prices and the very large anti-junta demonstrations in Kiev….

Q: Some would say that your views on the Ukraine are political and that Orthodoxy should be apolitical. What would you say to this?

A: Precisely by saying that they are ‘apolitical’, such people are making a political statement. For them Orthodoxy is, like Protestantism, just a personal belief, a private affair, a mere theory or hobby, which has no public and practical ramifications, no Incarnational consequences. This is a denial of the Incarnation of Christ. What they are saying is that Christianity should have no influence at all on society, including on economics and politics, and should just be a set of private opinions or personal fantasies for futile discussion and theoretical debate.

In the meantime, they say, we should just swim with the secularist-atheist tide of US/EU apostasy, to which such people, some of them nominally Orthodox, are spiritually enslaved. However, our Faith, if it is real, has practical consequences. This is what these secularists refuse. For those who are secular-minded, religion has no importance, but for us what counts is the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. The many icons now giving off myrrh in Russia and the Ukraine only prove the spiritual significance of these current events.

Q: With the events in the Ukraine and the new puritanism of political correctness, will there be a witch-hunt and persecution of Russian Orthodoxy in the West?

A: Not yet. We have not yet come to this point; that will come later. Then we may need Russian passports and in any case have to take refuge in Russia in order to get baptized and practise our Faith. But we are not there yet.

Q: So much for the contemporary situation of the Church inside Russia. What is the situation of the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR? Some say that it no longer has any reason to exist, since the Church inside Russia also has parishes outside Russia. What is the role of ROCOR in this new reality?

A: The Orthodox diaspora, whether in Europe, the Americas or Australia, and of all nationalities, has experienced two temptation or deviations in the last 100 years or so. The role of ROCOR is to avoid them. These are the deviations of the superiority complex and the inferiority complex.

The first deviation is that of the nationalist ghetto, of the superiority complex. This means that the Orthodox Faith is preserved as if in a museum, without any reference to the surrounding world (because of the superiority complex towards it), to the reality in which the children and grandchildren of the immigrants go to school and grow up. This ethos can be called the ‘three-generational syndrome’, since after three generations such a faith dies out, as it no longer even speaks in a language comprehensible to the descendants of the original immigrants. ‘Three generations and you are out’. I have seen countless Russian parishes in France and England disappear completely because of this mentality. It was the fate of the old London ROCOR Cathedral (but this will not at all be the case of the new parish that has risen phoenix-like from its ruins), exactly as was foreseen by many in the 1970s and 1980s, but also of many parishes abroad under the Church inside Russia, which are not independent of Russia, as is today’s ROCOR.

The second deviation is that of the conformist ghetto, of the inferiority complex. This means the ‘let’s swim with the tide’ mentality. Again I have seen countless examples in France and England. ‘Let’s give communion to Catholics, after all they are Christians’ (Paris jurisdiction). ‘Now we are in England, we baptize our children in the Church of England’ (as one well-known Russian academic in Cambridge did). ‘After all, we really do not want to be different from the others’. ‘The English do cremations, so we’ll do them as well’ (the old Sourozh jurisdiction). ‘The Protestants have pews in church, so shall we’ (Greeks and Antiochians). This is the deviation of those of weak faith, the ecumenists, liberals and modernists, who do not really believe in Orthodoxy, just like the Uniats. Indeed, the atmosphere in modernist churches (as sometimes in Finland, for example) is exactly that of Uniat churches.

It is to be noted, however, that, initially at least, both these deviations are psychological, and not at root theological, though in a second phase, they are then justified theologically, clearly by a false theology. ROCOR must avoid both these deviations.
Q: So what is the role of ROCOR? What is authentic Orthodoxy in the Western world?

A: Authenticity is faithfulness to the best, and not to the worst, in both attitudes. This means being both traditional and open, both strict and merciful, but without excesses and extremes, which would mean being unfaithful. We must be faithful to the incarnation and to the spiritual, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Our calling, the establishment of authentic European Orthodox culture, as also of authentic American and Australian Orthodox culture, means being both faithful and international = fruitful. ROCOR has an opportunity to do this, depending on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, that is, inasmuch as we can be both faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church and also be incarnate, settled and permanent here (unlike most parishes dependent on the Church inside Russia). At least, this can be the case, for as long as our spiritual existence is tolerated in the increasingly intolerant West.

Q: Do you have examples of these deviations in the specific situation of Orthodoxy in the UK?

A: Here in the UK we have two ‘renewed’ jurisdictions, those of the Romanian and Russian Churches, which in recent years have increased in size from one parish or a few parishes to many parishes, simply by immigration. However, we also have the older jurisdictions like the Greek, which used to be the biggest but is now beginning to die out, just like the Russian in the 1970s and 1980s. The Russians immigrated in about 1920 and so after 50-60 years, in the third generation, began to die out. The Greeks (more precisely Cypriots) mainly immigrated here in the 1950s and 1960s – 50-60 years ago – and so too are now dying out. This is the ‘three generational syndrome’, which I mentioned above.

There are also two tiny ethnic English jurisdictions under the Patriarchate of Antioch (anti-Greek, anti-Russian, Antiochian’, as some Anglicans say) and the Paris Exarchate (the old Bloomite Sourozh jurisdiction). These are deaneries because they are both only a few hundred strong and mostly composed of ex-vicars and converts from Anglicanism. The Exarchate is particularly weak and small and is tending to die out. They failing to pass on their ‘Anglican-Orthodox’ Faith to children and grandchildren and so are dying. Their possible possible survival can only come from attracting Greeks, Romanians and others, not from attracting Anglicans.

Here I am much more optimistic about the future survival of the Antiochian Deanery, which is rapidly becoming Romanian. However, it still has to ordain clergy who are not ex-Anglican vicars. Here there is a very useful lesson to learn: all ethnic jurisdictions die out – including ethnic English jurisdictions. In other words, successful parishes – of all jurisdictions – are non-ethnic, that is, they live if they accept those whom God sends to them, without ethnic ghettoism, including Anglican or ex-Anglican clubbishness. In other words, they live only if they put the Faith above nationality, only if they put the Kingdom of God first.

Q: Does this mean that the convert movement in the UK has stopped?

A: The convert movement (I would prefer the word ‘trickle’) in the UK was only ever basically in England and it was always very small, concerning at most 2,000-3,000, many of whom were received by various jurisdictions without preparation and soon lapsed. There is still at least one ex-Anglican priest, like the late Metr Antony Bloom, who perhaps is his model, who receives within one week! You can imagine that his turnover is large. In 18 years he has not grown. It is true that the convert ‘movement’ has declined as the old generation of converts dies out, but it has not stopped. What it happening today is that Anglicans have largely stopped joining the Orthodox Church and trying to become Orthodox, which actually they often did not succeed in doing in any case.

Q: Why have they stopped?

Firstly, because Anglicanism is itself dying out, so there are even fewer Anglicans than before. Secondly, because those who are interested generally find Orthodoxy ‘too hard’ and either do not try to become Orthodox (if they try at all) or else give up very quickly, especially if they have been received prematurely by one of the ethnic English groups.

Q: So there are no more converts?

A: There are still converts, but they come more and more from the vast majority of English people who are not Anglicans. However, though there are fewer converts, they are now generally more serious. They are refreshing, blank sheets, without the cultural prejudices and baggage of Anglicanism. Here there is a future. English Orthodox culture could only be born when that prejudiced Establishment Anglican culture was dead. Authentic Orthodox culture could never be built on a compromised, semi-Orthodox, semi-Anglican faith.

Q: How are people being converted today?

A: There are two ways. One is through information about Orthodoxy which is today on the internet and then brings them to Church services. The other is through Orthodox wives whom they marry and who convert them. Orthodox wives are often very good missionaries.

Q: You have not mentioned those who did not support the reconciliation between the two parts of the Russian Church in 2007 and left to join various sects which existed already. How do they fit into the picture? Do they suffer from the superiority complex of the nationalist ghetto? Surely they do not suffer from the inferiority complex of the conformists?

A: They do not belong to nationalist ghettoes, as much as to ideological or psychological, sectarian, ghettoes, usually very Russophobic and very right-wing – such was the case even before they left ROCOR. In the USA, from what one of their bishops proudly writes and tells me, they seem to be linked to the CIA. There are among these people, and most are converts from Anglicanism or other forms of Protestantism, some very sincere and pious people, but also some with psychological problems. It is tragic. Sects are always based on hurt pride which then turns to hatred.

Such protest sects make themselves irrelevant, not only because they are tiny (often fewer than ten in number over the whole country), but also because they have played into the hands of this world by painting themselves into irrelevant corners. They have no influence because they focus so much on small and often ritualistic detail and individual opinions, with a negative, ‘anti-everything’ mentality. What they lack is a conscious, logically consistent and integral Orthodox world view, an overview. That is very important and all Orthodox need to develop such a world view.

Q: Do you think that the Inter-Orthodox Council will actually take place in 2016?

A: On paper, no, especially since the amazing, absurd and pretentious claims of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Ukraine, as described in the statement of Patriarch Bartholomew on Palm Sunday, which was surely written by the CIA. In the 1970s there could be no Council because the Russian Church inside Russia was controlled by the KGB; now we have Constantinople controlled by the CIA. That statement alone has surely set everything back until after the death of Patriarch Bartholomew.

However, everything is still possible – if the Greek Churches can overcome their vanity and inferiority complex, which the American State Department so plays on and exploits, and if they and the other Balkan Churches can overcome their phyletism (nationalism). Thus, at present three problems are outstanding and until they are solved they will stop this Council taking place.

Q: Which are?

A: Firstly, there is the territorial dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem. Secondly, there is the dispute between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and, thirdly, that between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Orthodox Church in America (OCA).

These three problems all have to be solved before even a proper agenda (rather than the old, secularist, Protestant-style 1970s one) can be agreed. So 2016 is possible, but the Patriarchate of Constantinople will first have to liberate itself from outside political interference from the US government, which is forcing it to interfere in the Ukraine and Mt Athos, and from the Vatican. So Constantinople must demonstrate that it is free and independent and can actually speak with an Orthodox voice and not a Greek nationalist and Uniat voice. Metropolitans Andrew and Seraphim of the Church of Greece have already warned it about this quite clearly in their 89-page letter asking for the repentance of Pope Francis.

Q: Do you think in this context that the Church inside Russia could take back the autocephaly of the OCA in order to ease negotiations with Constantinople?

A: I think that for the Church inside Russia the OCA is a bargaining counter. We all know that there is a problem with the autocephaly of the OCA, the brainchild (not heartchild) of the highly controversial Fr Alexander Schmemann. Firstly, it was granted during the Cold War by the self-same, highly controversial Metr Nikodim (Rotov), whom we mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, and whom the Roman Catholics claim to have been one of their cardinals. So it was dubious from the start.

However, secondly and much more importantly, how can you give a jurisdiction autocephaly when it has been in schism from you for decades (as was the pre-OCA Metropolia) and, above all, when it only includes a minority of the Orthodox who live on the same geographical territory? However, the Church inside Russia will not cede these points if Constantinople does not first abandon its own anti-canonical errors elsewhere, for example on Mt Athos, in the Ukraine, Estonia, Finland and Paris, returning Russian Church property to the Russian Church.

Q: What could happen to the OCA, if Constantinople did stop such anti-canonical interventions?

That would be a miracle, so who knows? I suppose one solution would be to take back the OCA’s autocephaly and grant it autonomy instead. Alternatively, you could wait until the present generation of OCA bishops, many of them in difficult and compromised situations or retired, die out. Then, after that generational change, you could pick up the pieces and reincorporate the ex-OCA into the Russian Church in North America, though letting ultra-liberal, dissident pieces which are perhaps beyond redemption (St Vladimir’s Seminary?) join Constantinople or simply go back to the Episcopalians. The OCA too can only survive if it moves towards being a group based on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Bright Monday 2014

Three Myths

The founding myth of the Western world is that East and West are divided and that the West is far larger and superior to the East. In terms of Church history, we know that this is untrue. Thus, Christianity is an Eastern or Asian religion, and for the first thousand years since Christ, the East dwarfed the small, provincial and backward West, which was still united to the East on which it spiritually depended. Thus, the vast majority of the Apostles and the Church Fathers lived in the East, all the Universal Councils took place in the East, and all the vital movements of Church life in theology, monasticism and liturgical and cultural life, began in the East and colonised the West. Thus, authentic Christianity united, and did not, and does not, divide, East and West.

A second more recent Western myth is that Greek Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodoxy are different. Yet history tells us that authentic Greek Orthodoxy is identical to Russian Orthodoxy, for Russian Orthodoxy comes precisely from Greek Orthodoxy. If some individual Greek Orthodox have in recent decades compromised themselves, that does not affect Greek Orthodoxy itself. Such a myth also demonstrates the total ignorance of those who propagate it, for it suggests that they have never heard of Romanian Orthodoxy, Georgian Orthodoxy, Serbian Orthodoxy etc., which are also identical to authentic Orthodoxy, which is multinational and multilingual, a unity in diversity, and which with all the other Local Churches form the One Church of God.

A third myth being propagated by the ignorant Western media and politicians at present is that the Ukraine is a single historic country. In fact it is an artificial construct, thought up by Austrian imperialism five generations ago in order to divide the East Slav borderlands (‘ukraina’) from the rest of the Russian Lands (‘Rus’) and so rule over them. Three generations ago Nazi German imperialism used this myth in the same way to divide and rule the East Slav borderlands; today American imperialism, to its shame, merely follows the Nazis, who as the Third Reich tried to destroy the much weakened Third Rome. Today, the destabilisation of the Ukraine by the USA is continuing apace and the US administration is spending billions of dollars to undermine the country.

Thus, recently, President Obama has been to see Pope Francis in order to encourage him to use Ukrainian Catholicism to undermine further the Ukraine. However, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Ukraine completely distrust Catholicism, for they know it to be an integral part of a foreign ideology and State, the Vatican, which has always warred against them. And at this moment between 100 and 300 US mercenaries from the notorious Blackwater Corporation are in the Ukraine to kill and punish the Ukrainian citizens who are fighting for freedom for the 80% of Ukrainians from the illegal Galician puppet junta in Kiev. New Russia (the south and east), Little Russia (the centre) and Carpatho-Russia (the south-west) are fighting for their lives against the US-installed Uniat separatists in power in Kiev.

Why do such myths exist? Myths are always cultivated for psychological reasons, for self-justification. Thus, the East/West myth has been set up for this. If it is believed, it means that the West is superior to the East, that the two are irreconcilable and that therefore the West must crush the East. The second myth of a difference between Greek and Russian is a feeble attempt to divide and rule the Orthodox Church and Uniatise or Westernise (it is the same thing) the Church, so that it is no longer able to resist. In this way the West shows how it encourages apostasy and moves towards Antichrist and the apocalypse, for when the Church is no more, the end will come. And the third and final myth is only a continuation of the second, an effort to destroy the last bastion of the Church in the Russian Lands, Holy Rus.