Category Archives: The West

An Old New Year’s Q and A 2023

Q: Both Russians and Ukrainians are supposed to be Orthodox Christians and belong to exactly the same Church, so why is there this scandal of a war between them, with over 150,000 Ukrainian and over 15,000 Russian dead so far? All Orthodox, but killing each other? What is all this about?

A: First of all, if the dead and the living were actually Orthodox, I would agree with you, but that is not the case. First of all, many of the casualties on both sides are not even baptised. Secondly, on the Russian side, quite a few are Muslims and on the Ukrainian side thousands of the dead are Polish mercenaries and hundreds Canadian, American, British (well over 100 dead) and Croat mercenaries. Thirdly, about half of the Ukrainians are not Orthodox, but Catholics, Protestants or schismatics. And finally, most of the remaining ones, the Orthodox, are Orthodox in name only, that is, they are only baptised, not practising, just nominally Orthodox. This war reminds us of just how few real Orthodox there are. Yes, there are Orthodox, but how many are Christians? That is the key question.

Let us remember that in the First and Second World Wars, many Germans were Protestants, as were most of the British. They still slaughtered each other, just as Catholic Germans and Catholic Poles slaughtered one another in the Second War, or, long before, Catholic Englishmen and Catholic Frenchmen in the Hundred Years War.

And in 1912-1913 Serbs and Bulgarians were killing each other. Both were supposedly Orthodox. And in the Second World War, the Romanian government became Fascist and sided with Hitler, and so Romanian soldiers had to fight against Russians. However, the Russians were Communists. It was not so much a war between Romanian Orthodox and Russian Orthodox, as between a Fascist government and a Communist government. You have to remember that. So today, there is no war between the Ukraine and Russia. The war is between Washington and Moscow. The Ukrainians, like most Western Europeans, are just naïve pawns or proxies in the Great American Game to continue its world domination.

We live in the age of nominal Orthodoxy. The results are to be seen not just in the Ukraine and Russia, but all over Western Europe. There are large numbers of nominal Russian Orthodox of various nationalities, but very few churches for them. Thus, of the 140,000 Ukrainian refugees in the UK, there is only one community – of fewer than 40. Even supposing that half the Ukrainian refugees are not Orthodox anyway, fewer than 40 out of 70,000 is about 1 in 2,000 who go to church! The priest himself told me that he despairs. True, we have about 15 Ukrainians in Colchester, but we find ourselves obliged to teach them fundamentals like how to take a blessing. Some are not even baptised.

Many Orthodox in the Ukraine and Russia are only there for a career and money. There have been so many scandals – I have seen it in the many visits I have made to both countries over the last fifteen years. It is clear that several clergy are probably atheists.

Q: What is the main pastoral problem in the Orthodox Church in general?

A: I think it is the fact that there are hardly any parishes, in the sense of Christian communities. This is a problem all over the world, except in villages, but we can take two examples locally. Russians who attend the two Russian churches in London say one resembles a busy railway station, the other a gloomy and exclusive ghetto. As a result, there is a huge turnover of parishioners, with an almost entirely different group of parishioners every few years. Huge numbers have been through both churches over the last 30 years, but only once or twice in that time. They do not stay. The constant core is tiny.

As a result of this absence of community life, there are huge losses. Many Russians from the Baltics, as well as from the Ukraine, have left both those churches. One of the problems here is mixed marriages. English husbands do not want to attend churches where they cannot understand a word. Some Russians now even attend Anglican churches and tell me that at least they are treated like human-beings there and do not have to endure nasty comments from Russian nationalists and (sometimes) Non-Russian sectarian converts. It seems as though these churches can only keep and only want Russians from Russia or those who want to pretend to be Russian. They live in a ghetto, where the persecution of Russians from outside Russia, by Russians from inside Russia, seems to be allowed.

Q: In that case, the case of ghettos and nationalism, missionary work has become impossible. Who will take up the mission?

A: Missionary work in churches which behave like this is at an end. They are anti-pastoral. It is very sad. It is the total rejection of the work of St Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, who gathered all Orthodox together in the USA at the start of the twentieth century. It is the total rejection of the great and holy legacy of St John of Shanghai and of the authentic old ROCOR outside Russia after the time of St Tikhon. It is the total rejection of the spirit of the New Martyrs and Confessors inside Russia.

Who will take up the mission, since both Russians and Greeks appear to have have cancelled and eliminated themselves for the moment? The Ukrainians? The Romanians? The Moldovans? All have nominal faithful in the millions in Western Europe. That makes them easily the majority of nominal Orthodox, both in the UK and in Western Europe. But do they have faith? And do they have the necessary leadership? All I know is that we shall continue to do missionary work in our own parishes. The rest will have to solve their own problems.

Q: How does the Orthodox Church cope with the assimilation of children born to immigrants in the Diaspora?

A: Sadly, it does not. I remember 30 years ago meeting a youngish man, whose grandparents had been White Russians and come to England in 1919. The youngish man, then in his thirties, had just been circumcised, i.e. become a Jew. He said he had been attracted by Jewish spirituality. Nothing new here, remember Fr/St Sophrony Sakharov, who already before the Revolution had left his upper middle-class family background and become a Hindu for the same reason. He had found no spiritual food in the nominal Russian Orthodoxy around him. He had to be converted by a semi-literate peasant, the future St Silvanus.

Virtually all the descendants of White Russians from after 1917 (and remember that only 10% of them were practising Orthodox) have been assimilated and lost to the Church everywhere. The only older ones you sometimes meet are descendants of the post-1945 immigration. All the rest are from the Soviet emigration, post-1991. This is the case in both the MP and the ROCOR churches in London. Both would have died out completely had the USSR not collapsed and new Russians moved here from all over the old USSR. But already many of their children, who speak to me in English, have lapsed. They have been assimilated and are lost to the Church.

Today in the UK exactly the same has happened to the descendants of Greek Cypriots who settled here in the 50s and 60s. Their parishes are dying out and the clergy are nearly all very old. There are now over twenty Greek Cypriot Anglican vicars. I met one about twenty years ago and asked why he had done this. His first answer was that he did not understand a word of Greek and then on top of that the Anglicans gave their vicars a free house and a good salary. He said: ‘Why not?’

Q: Why are Orthodox so different? Why don’t you have pews and organs like we do?

A: Your question reminds me of someone who came to visit us eighteen months ago and asked us why we don’t have any VIPs or rich people in our church! I answered him that we don’t have VIPs or rich people, but we do have Christ. Similarly, we don’t have pews and organs, we have the Tradition. Nor do we have converts, we have Orthodox.

Q: Why did Communism spread mainly in Orthodox countries?

A: As one Romanian said to me some 20 years ago: ‘Communism is Orthodox Christianity without Christ’. In the same way we can say that: Fascism is Catholicism without the Pope and Capitalism is Protestantism without morality.

Q: What is the difference between the sacramental theologies of Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants?

A: To be very brief and very general:

Protestantism has no sacramental theology because it has no sacraments. (Exceptionally, the sacrament of baptism, by water in the Name of the Holy Spirit, is the only one which can be conferred by a layman).

Catholicism believes that sacraments are conferred only by clergy who have the authority to do so from the Pope, as he alone holds the Holy Spirit. (Some ‘Papist’ Orthodox like to imitate this!). For them there is no Christ and therefore no Church and therefore Holy Spirit and therefore no sacraments without the Papacy.

Orthodoxy believes that any priest who confesses the Creed, established in the fourth century, and has been ordained by an Orthodox bishop who has canonical apostolic succession, that is, who is in communion with all the other bishops of His Local Orthodox Church, can transfer the grace of the Holy Spirit and so confer the sacraments. Hence the grave spiritual danger of being out of communion with other bishops of the same Local Church and even more the danger if he denies the sacraments of the other bishops of his own Local Church., let alone other Local Churches. That is called schism because it denies the catholicity of the Church and isolates from the Holy Spirit.

Q: What practical differences did leaving ROCOR make to your churches?

A: The first and immediate difference was that we could put out for public veneration the icon of St Sophrony, whom I knew very well. Before that we had been banned from putting it out for those who wished to venerate him. But, far more importantly, the difference is the fact that we can now concelebrate with other priests and other priests can concelebrate with us, notably Romanians, Antiochians and Greeks. Previously, that too had been banned by the sectarian and schismatic mentality in charge. As I have worked all my life for the catholicity of the Church and against the spirit of sects, cults and schism, that has been vitally rewarding to me.

Q: Why does homosexuality penetrate Church life?

A: This always happens in periods of decadence, whether in the first century or in the twenty-first century. There is nothing new in it. The Apostle Paul warns of it. Homosexuality and, perhaps even more often, bisexuality, become the norm among the clergy in periods of decadence. The problem always begins among the episcopate, as with the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the twentieth century (Archbishop Athenagoras, for example), as such bishops ordain their friends, homosexuals and bisexuals, to the clergy, and so form a self-protective mafia. In the USA this problem is enormous.

It is curious how these people call themselves ‘gay’, when in fact they are sad. It is rather like those who call themselves ‘woke’, which means (spiritually) asleep (if not actually dead), not ‘awake’ at all. What is also curious is that the open homosexuals are generally associated with syncretism, left-wing liberalism and modernism (Archbishop Athenagoras), and the repressed and angry homosexuals are generally associated with ultra-conservative right-wingery, phariseeism, misogyny, conspiracy theories and even Fascism. Both witness to a total lack of Love, jealousy and hatred.

Q: Do you feel bitter against the Russian Church for the way they treated you after your nearly 50 years of unpaid missionary service on its behalf?

A: Not in the slightest! What concerns me is what is popularly called ‘karma’, or ‘what goes round, comes round’. As Newton said in his third law: ‘To every action there is always an equal reaction’. All those individuals who persecuted us have died, fallen ill, lost their careers or otherwise been punished. And there is more to come for them. As the Apostle wrote nearly 2,000 years ago, ‘God is not mocked’ and ‘Our God is a consuming fire’. You just cannot get away with it. I have seen it so very often down the decades. Sadly, they will all be punished, or rather, punish themselves, and well before the Last Judgement. This is why we pray for them all. I tremble in their place. If you act without integrity, without a conscience, without principles, against the spiritual and moral law, only out of self-interest, you will suffer. It is inevitable. People like that always end up outside the Church.

Our mistreatment is a loss for the Russian Church, but not for Orthodox Christianity. However, the damage the Russian Church has done to itself is incalculable. Everybody now says: Look at Fr Andrew, he sacrificed his life and career and learned to speak almost perfect Russian and they, who spoke Russian very badly, if at all, mistreated him and all his in that way. Such people will say: ‘There’s no way I will ever have anything to do with the Russian Church, especially not with ROCOR, given the way they treated him’. It was all a spiritual death-wish. The point is that if people really want to commit suicide in the Russian Church, you cannot stop them. I know, I tried to stop them – and failed!

If others who call themselves Russian Orthodox, but who are not, lapse from Orthodoxy, we, on the other hand, do not and will not lapse. When the Russian Church is free again after this terrible political war in the Ukraine is over, we shall see. How is it ever going to rebuild itself? Only on the foundations of St Seraphim of Sarov, St John of Kronstadt, St John of Shanghai and the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Imperial Martyrs, who are why I am part of the real Russian Church, the Universal Church. It will mean rejecting politics, careerism, love of money and luxury, big black cars and bling, that the Church is not a business. It will mean understanding that money is for doing good, not for filling churches with gold and marble and sewing vestments with gold thread. The tragedy is that some have repeated exactly the same mistakes as before the Revolution. You can join the prophets or join those who stone the prophets. It is your choice. I know where I stand.

In any case, we have always served and will always serve Christ and His Orthodox Church first and foremost, not some manmade branch of it and all its corruption. We believe in the ‘Orthodox Catholic Church’, not some political and nationalist outlier, however big it may be on paper. Quality, not quantity!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2023: The Future Has Arrived: The End of 500 Years of Conquistador Civilisation

It is often said that the systemic Western European superiority complex, a disease which consists of the self-justified domination and exploitation of the surrounding world, began with the First ‘Crusade’ (1096-1099). Technically, this is true, but before it there were other events which we may call ‘Pre-Crusades’. For example, there was the massacre by the barbarian Frankish leader Charlemagne of 4,500 Saxons at Verden in 782. This bloodbath was the foundation of Frankish Europe, which still survives as the core of the lies of the EU today. After the collapse of Charlemagne’s Europe and a period of consolidation, 200 years later there came the events of the earlier eleventh century which did exactly presage the First Crusade at its end. First, there was the Frankish ‘Reconquista’ Crusade which began to accelerate in the eleventh century in Iberia. Then came the ‘Norman’ (in fact they were the collective campaigns of all the Frankish-made scum of North-Western Europe) Crusades or Conquests in Sicily, Southern Italy and in England in 1066.

Like these ‘Pre-Crusades’, the genocidal ‘conquests’ of the First Crusade essentially took place inside Europe, or else close by in the Near East. These Viking-type raiding and trading military expeditions, led on horseback and operating from castles, were expanded into Western Europe (the Celtic lands invaded from the Frankish base in England) and into Eastern Europe (the Baltics and Russia). However, the revolution came with the export of this aggressive Eurocentric mentality to distant lands through the ‘Conquistadors’ (same word) in what we now call Latin America 500 years ago. They were the fruit of Columbus’ imperialist and capitalist venture of 1492 and were followed by da Gama’s money-seeking ventures to southern Africa and India in 1497. They triggered a global revolution because they led to the worldwide genocide and plunder of other peoples and the destruction of their civilisations. Clive of India, Rhodes of Africa, Clinton of Serbia, Bush of Iraq and Obama of the Ukraine were only the conquistadors of later times. However, today we are seeing the end of their Conquistador Civilisation.

‘They (The West) clearly did not expect such insubordination. They simply got used to acting according to a template, to grab whatever they please, by blackmail, bribery, intimidation, and convinced themselves that these methods would work forever

Extracts from the Speech by President Putin on 30 September 2022 on the arrogance of the US, UK and EU elites, with which we have become so familiar over the last four years:

…We will defend our land with all the forces and resources we have, and we will do everything we can to ensure the safety of our people. This is the great liberating mission of our nation….

…The West is ready to cross every line to preserve the neo-colonial system which allows it to live off the world, to plunder it thanks to the domination of the dollar and technology, to collect an actual tribute from humanity, to extract its primary source of unearned prosperity, the rent paid to the hegemon. The preservation of this annuity is their main, real and absolutely self-serving motivation.

…I want to underscore again that their insatiability and determination to preserve their unfettered dominance are the real causes of the hybrid war that the collective West is waging against Russia. They do not want us to be free; they want us to be a colony. They do not want equal cooperation; they want to loot. They do not want to see us a free society, but a mass of soulless slaves.

…I would like to remind you that in the past, ambitions of world domination have repeatedly shattered against the courage and resilience of our people. Russia will always be Russia….

Russia is a great thousand-year-old power, a whole civilisation, and it is not going to live by such makeshift, false rules.

…The West does not have any moral right to weigh in, or even utter a word about freedom of democracy. It does not and it never did.

Western elites not only deny national sovereignty and international law. Their hegemony has pronounced features of totalitarianism, despotism and apartheid.

…We have never agreed to and will never agree to such political nationalism and racism. What else, if not racism, is the Russophobia being spread around the world? What, if not racism, is the West’s dogmatic conviction that its civilisation and neoliberal culture is an indisputable model for the entire world to follow? “You’re either with us or against us.”

…It is worth reminding the West that it began its colonial policy back in the Middle Ages, followed by the worldwide slave trade, the genocide of Indian tribes in America, the plunder of India and Africa, the wars of England and France against China, as a result of which it was forced to open its ports to the opium trade. What they did was get entire nations hooked on drugs and purposefully exterminated entire ethnic groups for the sake of grabbing land and resources, hunting people like animals. This is contrary to human nature, truth, freedom and justice.

…To emphasise, one of the reasons for the centuries-old Russophobia, the Western elites’ unconcealed animosity toward Russia is precisely the fact that we did not allow them to rob us during the period of colonial conquests and forced the Europeans to trade with us on mutually beneficial terms. This was achieved by creating a strong centralised state in Russia, which grew and got stronger based on the great moral values of Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism, as well as Russian culture and the Russian world that were open to all.

…They called us friends and partners, but they treated us like a colony, using various schemes to pump trillions of dollars out of the country. We remember. We have not forgotten anything.

Western countries have been saying for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other nations. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of bringing democracy they suppressed and exploited, and instead of giving freedom they enslaved and oppressed. The unipolar world is inherently anti-democratic and unfree; it is false and hypocritical through and through….

Recall that during WWII the United States and Britain reduced Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and many other German cities to rubble, without the least military necessity. It was done ostentatiously and, to repeat, without any military necessity. They had only one goal, as with the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities: to intimidate our country and the rest of the world.

It actually continues to occupy Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea and other countries, which they cynically refer to as equals and allies. Look now, what kind of alliance is that? The whole world knows that the top officials in these countries are being spied on and that their offices and homes are bugged. It is a disgrace, a disgrace for those who do this and for those who, like slaves, silently and meekly swallow this arrogant behaviour.

They call the orders and threats they make to their vassals Euro-Atlantic solidarity, and the creation of biological weapons and the use of human test subjects, including in Ukraine, noble medical research.

…In effect, the American elite is using the tragedy of these people to weaken its rivals, to destroy nation states…..

The West clearly did not expect such insubordination. They simply got used to acting according to a template, to grab whatever they please, by blackmail, bribery, intimidation, and convinced themselves that these methods would work forever, as if they had fossilised in the past.

Such self-confidence is a direct product not only of the notorious concept of exceptionalism – although it never ceases to amaze – but also of the real ”information hunger“ in the West. The truth has been drowned in an ocean of myths, illusions and fakes, using extremely aggressive propaganda, lying like Goebbels. The more unbelievable the lie, the quicker people will believe it – that is how they operate, according to this principle….

I want to make special note of the fact that there is every reason to believe that the Western elites are not going to look for constructive ways out of the global food and energy crisis that they and they alone are to blame for, as a result of their long-term policy, dating back long before our special military operation in Ukraine, in Donbass. They have no intention of solving the problems of injustice and inequality. I am afraid they would rather use other formulas they are more comfortable with….

…The current neocolonial model is ultimately doomed; this much is obvious. But I repeat that its real masters will cling to it to the end. They simply have nothing to offer the world except to maintain the same system of plundering and racketeering.

They do not give a damn about the natural right of billions of people, the majority of humanity, to freedom and justice, the right to determine their own future. They have already moved on to the radical denial of moral, religious, and family values.

Let me repeat that the dictatorship of the Western elites targets all societies, including the citizens of Western countries themselves. This is a challenge to all. This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble a “religion in reverse” – pure Satanism. Exposing false messiahs, Jesus Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” These poisonous fruits are already obvious to people, and not only in our country but also in all countries, including many people in the West itself….

…Today, we are fighting for a just and free path, first of all for ourselves, for Russia, in order to leave dictate and despotism in the past. I am convinced that countries and peoples understand that a policy based on the exceptionalism of whoever it may be and the suppression of other cultures and peoples is inherently criminal, and that we must close this shameful chapter. The ongoing collapse of Western hegemony is irreversible. And I repeat: things will never be the same….

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

 

 

Six Months On: The Completely Avoidable Tragedy of the Ukraine and the Curse of Nationalism

‘Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity, but I’m not so sure about the universe’.

Words Attributed to Albert Einstein

 

Foreword

We have never had any doubt that the Russian Federation would win militarily in the conflict in the Ukraine, for which eventuality it had carefully prepared for eight long years. (I stress the word ‘militarily’). During that time the West continually poked the bear and then was surprised when the bear’s patience ran out – on 24 February 2022. That does not mean that I approve of anything that has happened in the Ukraine since 2014. I visited different parts of the Ukraine six times between 2014 and 2021 and my many parishioners from all over the Ukraine only confirmed what I had seen.

I could see only too well its immense problems, the corruption which led to an infrastructure, far worse even than that in the oligarch-dominated UK, and the poverty of the masses, making it poorer than many African countries. In this article I take no sides. All wars are huge human tragedies and cannot be approved of. However, I am interested in the truth, not in propaganda, whichever side it comes from. And here, as everywhere and always on this site, without the burden of any careerism I am free to be interested only in the truth and its causes and consequences for Church life.

Introduction: The Tragedy: 2014-2022

After the 2014 US-organised coup d’etat (cost to the US taxpayer = $5 billion, as officially admitted by the US politician Victoria Nuland), one thing was at once obvious. This was that the new Kiev government needed to carry out internationally-observed referenda. Then they could let the various peoples in the Ukraine, with its purely artificial, Soviet-made borders, assigned to it by the atheist monsters Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchov, freely decide which country they wanted to belong to. Any enforcement of the old atheist centralisation from Kiev would, as in Yugoslavia, lead to exactly the same tragedy and war as in Yugoslavia. Both amalgams, Yugoslavia and the Ukraine, were hangovers from the Communist period with their absurd borders, jamming together peoples who had little in common and no desire to live in the same country as one another.

Sadly, the reality is that this current completely avoidable tragedy in the Ukraine is ‘Yugoslavia II’, that is, it the same thing again, only on a far greater and more serious scale. And here, unlike in Serbia, NATO cannot use its air force, for it will be shot down by superior Russian technology, and its army and navy are shut out.  In 2014 an internationally-observed referendum was held in the Crimea, and all went well, with a clear 97% majority choosing to return to Russia, after 60 years of enforced separation from it. However, Kiev itself refused to allow referenda anywhere, including in the Crimea. Therefore, the Kiev government, or rather those behind them who would not allow referenda, are responsible for today’s catastrophic consequences and tens and probably hundreds of thousands of deaths. They have blood, a lot of it, on their hands. What are those consequences?

The Catastrophe: 2022-

  1. Local Consequences: The Human Cost

In 2014 war broke out in the Ukraine, specifically in the Russian-speaking Donbass, whose language and culture were oppressed and mocked by the racist centralisers in Kiev. Up to 14,000 people, including 400 children, were massacred by the Kiev authorities and the other 6 million were told to leave the Ukraine, if they did not like Kiev’s new ‘democracy’. This year, there has been much worse. Six months of conflict have now passed, though it was clear from the beginning, like it or not, that the small Russian expeditionary force had already won in the first few weeks. Their feint to the North, as if to take Kiev, locked up the Kiev military there (the same tactic as the US used in Iraq with a feint from the sea), enabling Russian forces to achieve their aims of conquering much of the Russian-speaking East and take the Russian-speaking South as far as Kherson, where they were greeted by many as liberators. This was what the Russians had openly stated that they intended doing all along, but they had been disbelieved.

Like it or not, the ensuing decision by the USA/West/NATO to send billions of dollars of their weapons, disarming their own troops, to be destroyed by Russian missiles, sometimes before they can even be unpacked (as on 24 February at Borispol Airport), is only prolonging the inevitable defeat and making the bloodshed far worse. So far the Russians and their Allies have lost over 6,000 troops dead, although over the last two months since they took strategic Mariupol, casualties have been very low, as this has largely become a war of satellites, drones, artillery and precision missiles. On the other hand, the Kiev Army has lost some 250,000, at least 60,000 of them killed, and continues to lose many hundreds of ill-trained, ill-equipped and often very young or very old troops almost every day, whether killed, wounded, or by surrender and desertion.

You should not be fighting a modern war when you do not have air superiority. Kiev does not, as most of its air force was destroyed in the first few days. It is a catastrophe and leaves widows and orphans everywhere. Every son killed had a mother and a father, a brother and a sister. The whole country is in bitter mourning. Its population is now down to 30 million. Of 6 million refugees, Russia is the European country that has taken the most, with 2 million fleeing the bankrupt Ukraine. However, 4 million others have left futureless bankruptcy for various countries in Western Europe, over half going to Poland and Germany. It costs the US taxpayer $5 billion every month just to keep the Kiev government afloat, let alone the billions of dollars of destroyed US military equipment.

Unless the 13% of the world, which is all the Western world/G7/NATO is, really wants a nuclear war to annihilate humanity, as Mrs Truss says she does, the West will just have to accept that Russia has taken back the Russian Lands within the former Ukraine. People like Mrs Truss, with her extraordinary ignorance of the basic history and geography of the Ukraine, simply do not realise that this is an existential war for Russia on its doorstep, even though V. Putin explained this quite clearly. Russians will die to win this war to free their brothers and sisters in the East and South of the Ukraine.

However, despite what Mr Johnson has recently proclaimed, no-one in the UK has chosen to pay 400% more for fuel bills, let alone die for the Ukraine, of which country few in the UK had even heard until six months ago. The result of the UK government’s refusal to buy Russian gas and other commodities and to arm the Ukraine, without consulting the electorate, which is not even allowed to elect the next Prime Minister, is soaring inflation, social disruption, strikes and grinding poverty, which will probably topple the UK government in the near future. Here is the difference with Russia. Nobody in the UK wants to suffer, let alone die, for an unknown country.

Local Consequences: What Does the Future Ukraine Look Like?

It looks something like the following – something that could have happened without any bloodshed, had democratic referenda been allowed back in 2014:

The Real Ukraine of Ukrainian speakers, the ‘Kyiv Protectorate’, or whatever it will come to be called, may take 11 demilitarised central and western provinces of the former Soviet Ukraine: Sumy, Poltava, Kirovohrad, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Rivne, Khmelnytskyi, Ternopil. Population: 11.2 million. This will be a landlocked nation, in effect a Second Belarus, with a population of just over a quarter of the 1991 Soviet Ukraine.

Russia may take the 9 Russian-speaking eastern and southern provinces: Lugansk, Donetsk, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhe, Kherson, Crimea (Crimea of course already rejoined Russia in 2014), Nikolaev, Odessa. Population: 14.2 million.

Poland may, with Russia’s permission, take back the 3 far western ‘Habsburg’ provinces: Volyn (though a small number in the north of Volyn might want to join Belarus), Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk. Population: 3.2 million. This is the historic ‘Ukraina’ – the word that simply means the borderlands (that are next to Poland). Clearly, this real Ukraine would have to receive some sort of autonomy within the NATO-ruled Polish Republic as a demilitarised buffer-zone.

Hungary may take 1 province: Zakarpattia. Population: 0.85 million. This is providing that its mainly Carpatho-Russian people vote for this by referendum, though, true, many have already accepted Hungarian passports. This region would also have to receive some sort of autonomy within Hungary.

Romania may take 1 province: Chernivtsy. Population: 0.6 million. This is providing that its largely Romanian-speaking people vote for it by referendum, which seems highly likely.

  1. Global Consequences: Western Sanctions Cause Chaos in Western Europe

Why is the Russian campaign taking so long, why did Russia not use 25% or even 50% of its armed forces and take the whole of the Ukraine within a few weeks? Because that is not its strategy. By its own admission Russia has never had any intention of occupying the whole of the Ukraine and its capital Kiev. Therefore, only 5%-10% of the highly professional Russian Armed Forces have been engaged in order to take back the Russian-speaking areas, which were separated from it by Marxist diktat exactly 100 years ago. In any case, most of the fighting is being done by the local anti-Kiev Eastern Ukrainians and Chechen allies, who have suffered most of the casualties.

Then there is no hurry – the Russians want to conserve the lives of their own troops and of Ukrainian civilians and to conserve infrastructure. Time in any case is on the Russian side: their greatest ally is, as is usual in Russia, General Winter. By deliberately stretching the conflict out by agreeing to provide arms ‘until the last Ukrainian is dead’, Western European governments have foolishly fallen into the trap of extending the war into the winter. In this way they will have to suffer a winter with little fuel and face national emergencies, probable popular uprisings and riots and the fall of governments. The West has been completely outwitted – by its own stupidity.

Nowhere in Western Europe is the situation as grim as in the UK. With its privatised utilities, which are in reality unregulated, the law of the jungle prevails. For example the energy price cap imposed by the French government on its State energy monopolies is 4%. In the deregulated UK, prices by January will probably have increased by 400%. This is unsustainable. Expect a universal bill boycott, already started, and food riots. In the UK, Johnson’s words of 25 August, ‘You (note, ‘you’ not ‘we’) must endure to defeat Putin’ do not work. Nobody in the UK voted for this. Moreover, in the ‘democratic’ UK, 160,000 mainly elderly, wealthier people are taking two months just to choose the next Prime Minister, the fourth in six years. The UK used to mock political instability in Italy; it had better look at itself.

Global Consequences: Sanctions and Dedollarisation

Europe’s own anti-Russian sanctions, even though forced on it by the USA, are suicidal. Bankruptcy stares it in the face. The rouble has stabilised at a very healthy 60 to the dollar (before the conflict it was over 90 and briefly went up to 120) and money is flooding into Russian coffers as the whole Non-Western world wants its oil, gas, grain, fertilisers, rare earth metals, not to mention its highly effective arms. They are available to anyone in Western Europe who does not sanction them, as long as they pay for them in the Russian currency. On the other hand, the euro has sunk to parity with, or is even below, the dollar. The conspiracy theorists are even saying that the whole conflict was created by the USA to destroy, not Russia or even the Ukraine, but the EU, notably the German economy. Probably crazy, but actually quite logical.

China, India and indeed over 85% of the world have no sanctions against Russia, indeed they basically support Russia. The West is isolated, with its manufacturing dependent on China, which will soon claim back Taiwan. And Russia and other countries are now insisting on payment for their essential commodities in roubles or in their own currencies. The world economy is being dedollarised – that is a disaster for the USA.

  1. Church Consequences

Now we come to the second half of this article, what interests us most. What are the Church consequences of the conflict in the Ukraine, especially, what is happening to the Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Orthodox Church? Here the situation is grim indeed. On 25 August the Russian Church was forced to abandon plans for its Patriarch Kyrill, already sanctioned and banned from visiting the UK and Canada, to meet the Pope of Rome in Kazakhstan in September. Centralised Church authorities in Moscow had totally misread the public mood and the proposition had led to a huge scandal.

However, the misreading, or just plain non-understanding of the views of the local Orthodox grassroots, is far more generalised than this mere detail. The authorities of the formerly multinational Russian Orthodox Church has tried to impose the political views of Russia on its multinational flock. The result? Its Non-Russian flock has largely left it. This is a repeat of what happened in the 1920s when the leader of the Church then, Metropolitan Sergius, tried to enforce loyalty to the atheist Soviet State on his flock outside Russia. Result? He lost his flock outside the Soviet Union. We can see exactly the same result, all over again, in many regions of the world. For instance:

a) The Ukraine.

Few can describe the hatred felt by Ukrainians, mostly from central and western Ukraine, for Russia and Russians. They are simply boycotting the churches where the name of Patriarch Kyrill is mentioned. I speak from what I have seen. Even here, for example, Ukrainian refugees come to us and ask who our Patriarch is. When I reply that last February we were issued with letters of leave to quit the Moscow Patriarchate (its Western European Archdiocese) for Patriarch Daniel of Romania because of political persecution, they smile and say they will return to us. They feel at home with us; we are neutral. However, wherever the name Patriarch Kyrill is mentioned in church services, Ukrainian refugees, like many other Ukrainians who have already been here for some time, vote with their feet and leave. Understandably so.

Even Autonomy for the only canonical Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, that which is led by Metropolitan Onufry, is now no longer enough. It is too late. Moscow has totally lost control. It is Autocephaly that has to be granted, exactly as the saintly Serbian Patriarch Porfiry recently granted to the Church of North Macedonia. This simple message has yet to get through to Moscow, but it is a fact. Otherwise, the Ukrainian Church will simply be an empty shell. This need for Autocephaly is not a top-down case of political manoeuvrings by a nationalistic elite who want their ‘own’ National Church to command and control, as was the case of the Protestant Churches in Western Europe (e.g. the Church of England or those in Scandinavia) or the purely political group founded in the Ukraine in 2018 under the Church of Constantinople.  This is a case of the people demanding Autocephaly, it is a ‘down-top’ movement.

b. The Baltic States

Russophobia here is virulent. There are already two Churches in Estonia and there are about to be two in Lithuania because of nationalism and hatred for Russia. The US-sponsored Patriarchate of Constantinople stands behind both breakaway groups in Estonia and Lithuania. It seems to me that at the very least the three Baltic States must have their own Local, Autonomous, if not Autocephalous, Orthodox Church. Only that will stop the schisms. Again the message is clear to everyone, except to Moscow. Does Moscow really think it can weather the storms and hold on?

The situation in Lithuania is especially disastrous, where priests have been defrocked for a purely political disagreement with Moscow. This is an abuse of the canons. As our bishop, Metropolitan Joseph, said to us in a recent conversation, defrocking happens to clergy for moral, financial or criminal reasons, not because the clergy disagree with their bishop about politics or, as missionaries, are defending their churches from predatory and anti-missionary bishops. Nobody in the free Orthodox world recognises political defrockings. They are not only uncanonical, they are anti-canonical. They are particularly ironical, when those who should be defrocked for molesting women parishioners or stealing money from parish funds are not only not defrocked, but receive all manner of awards!

c. Moldova

Already 20% of churches in Moldova have left the Russian Church for the Patriarchate of Romania. The conflict in the Ukraine is making Moldovans shudder. Will we be next? The tiny Russian Transdnestria was of course long ago lost to Moldova, but what about Moldova itself? It seems inevitable that Moscow will lose the remaining 80% of its parishes there to the Romanian Church. Large parts of the Russian Diaspora are also composed of Moldovans, for example some 70 of the 72 Moscow Patriarchate parishes in Italy are Moldovan. Surely they too will leave for the Romanian Church?

Already in England most Moldovans have had to leave the Russian Church because of Slav nationalism and, sadly, a certain corruption. Here too, Russian nationalism appears to have destroyed the Russian Church’s once multinational character, as everywhere in the Western world. One nationalist bishop of the Russian Church in the Diaspora actually said in public: ‘I don’t like Romanians and I only half-like Moldovans’. That seemed to amuse him: it did not amuse the Romanians and Moldovans, or any of the Non-Russians, present. Here there is cause for the suspension of the bishop, if not for his actual defrocking. As far as I know, Christ never commanded us to hate other races.

d. The Western European Exarchate

In 2018 Moscow at last set up a Western European Exarchate, its centre in its brand-new, purpose-built Cathedral and centre in the most prestigious part of Paris, rumoured to have cost 50 million euros. Today, the Exarchate too is shattered, seemingly destroyed by Russian nationalism. Its first head lived in the Cathedral with his wife and child, and had another vice. He was duly sent away. (Though not sent so far as their Bishop Gury in the 1990s, who did something so serious that he ‘had to go’ and freeze in Magadan, opposite the Sea of Japan). The second head, a very politically-minded and very ecumenically-minded and very young man, who has not spent any time in a monastery and who speaks no French and poor English, now lives in Moscow and does administrative things.

Meanwhile, the Moscow Patriarchate Diocese in the UK no longer has a bishop, he is in Moscow. Few even remember who was the last Englishman to be ordained to the Russian Orthodox clergy in the UK. And the Moscow Patriarchate bishop in the Netherlands also seems to have disappeared. He got into great trouble with the Dutch government for threatening the clergy of his huge church in Amsterdam with ‘the Russian Embassy’, because, as Non-Russians, they had expressed purely political disagreement with the conflict in the Ukraine. As a result, the parish and about 70% of the people transferred to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, as did a parish in Italy and another in Germany. Frankly, it appears as if the Western European Exarchate had its chance and failed. Does it have any future after the events in the Ukraine? That it might become the foundation to set up a future Western European Orthodox Church, as Patriarch Alexiy II wanted twenty years ago, now sounds like a bad joke. Hopes have been dashed by those who have betrayed their pastoral duties.

e. North America and ROCOR

In the USA the Moscow Patriarchate has also lost its bishop. Its forty or so parishes are left without a leader and, it seems perhaps without any possibility of even survival through new ordinations, let alone expansion. However, in general, all parts of the Orthodox Church in North America are in chaos. The largest group by far, the Greek Archdiocese, is facing scandal and disorder with the probable deposition of its new, highly political and secularising Archbishop Elpidiphoros. The second largest group, the OCA, which has Russian origins, is facing many difficulties, mot least the behaviour of its administration in over-zealously closing churches and persecuting clergy during lockdowns. The third largest group, Antioch, sometimes called ‘The Church of the Four Families’, faces a scandal involving allegations against its Metropolitan Joseph.

The fourth largest group, quite small in fact, a Russian group, ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), faces very embarrassing accusations of defamation, precisely from a Ukrainian priest, Fr Alexander Belya. The US courts will clearly favour him, though they must first justify his allegations to find out if they are true. Several other scandals in the USA involving properties and Russian clergy who have fled it for the Greek Church are also left unanswered. On top of all this, questions have been raised about the use of the electronic signature of the late Metropolitan Hilarion of ROCOR. He was clearly very ill for quite some time, at least for a year, if not for several years, before his death in May 2022, and yet all manner of very serious documents were being issued in his name by others. His death also leaves his Western Rite group, already dissolved in England, all at sea.

Moreover, ROCOR faces huge difficulties outside the USA. In Western Europe it lost half its English Diocese, 12 clergy, 5,000 people and two million pounds worth of Church buildings, ultimately to the Church of Romania, which canonically received them all, with the blessing of Patriarch Daniel himself. In 2007 they had already lost their only two monasteries in England to an Old Calendarist Church only because their analysis of the degree of the deSovietisation of the Church inside Russia varied with that of their bishop. On top of that, that English diocese then lost another four clergy to various other jurisdictions. Although still (!!) in complete denial of this reality, ROCOR here has now largely become an internet presence. The churches that left it for the Romanian Church are full and growing in clergy and people. Its very few remaining churches are very small. Meanwhile, in Geneva it also faces yet another court case on internal matters concerning administration and very embarrassing sackings, allegedly illegal, involving its appointment of freemasons.

From 1917-1991 ROCOR existed as the free and unpersecuted branch of the Russian Church outside the Soviet Union. After the atheist Soviet Union fell in 1991, and even more after ROCOR’s long-awaited reconciliation with the post-Soviet Russian Church in 2007, many began to question the reason for its continued existence. Some felt that Providence had given it a chance to justify its continued existence as the missionary part of the Russian Church outside Russia. It had the chance to prove itself as such from 2007 to 2017. Then all was still possible. Sadly, it failed to realise its potential and openly abandoned missionary work in whole areas of the world, such as Latin America, Indonesia and most of Western Europe, and instead concentrated on trying to amass money and striving to obtain impossible-to-obtain properties gained by previous unsupported missionary work. It seems as though the once persecuted Church has become the persecuting Church.

At the same time, some of its members turned inwards and selected Trumpism, and not Christ, as their ideology. It was clear that some in ROCOR had lost their way. Having chosen not faith, but a political ideology, and one which fails to work outside narrow US Republican ghettos, and lost most of itself outside North America, ROCOR may now be obliged to retreat to North America and lick its wounds. A well-known Russian Orthodox Metropolitan wrote to me only last week and told me that he does not think that it can survive at all; ROCOR risks becoming an embarrassment to the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia. This is a Church Titanic, of which Fr Alexander Belya is only the tip of the iceberg.

Conclusion: Lose-Lose?

The curse of nationalism has been lose-lose for all who have taken that particular acid bath. The Kiev government has lost by persecuting its own people and playing with several different nationalist and schismatic ‘Glory to the Ukraine churches’ and persecuting its only canonical Glory to God Church. Its false ‘churches’ have not only not created unity, but they have destroyed all remaining unity by persecuting and striving to seize the properties of the canonical Church (more parallels with the situation in the Diaspora). The Church of Constantinople has lost by playing with Greek and then Ukrainian nationalism. Western Europe has lost by playing with European nationalism (its ‘freedom and democracy’ myths) and enforcing Russophobic sanctions to cut off its nose to spite its face. ROCOR has lost by playing with American nationalism, exactly as the much persecuted St John of Shanghai prophesied. And the once multinational Russian Church has lost most of all by betraying its multinational vocation, that very vocation set by Tsar Nicholas II, with Russian nationalism, thus wrecking its multinational reputation. It will not recover from that for at least a generation.

Everyone is a loser. However, Divine Providence can and does make good out of bad. You will see and are already seeing it. Here is the possible end of schisms in the Ukraine and its opportunity, shorn of its Russian territories, to find its true identity and unite around a liberated and demilitarised Kiev. Here is the opportunity for scandal-ridden Constantinople to become a missionary Church, having understood that nobody is interested in a secular-minded, political and racist Church. Here is the opportunity for Europe, including the UK, to make peace with Russia after nearly 1,000 years of hatred based on jealousy and intolerance. Here is the opportunity for the two parts of the Russian Church in North America, the OCA and ROCOR, together with the bishopless Moscow parishes, to unite and love one another, instead of hating one another. (The apparently still unknown commandment of loving one another is to be found in the Gospels). It is all so simple. Here is the opportunity for the Russian Church, having for now lost Europe, to turn to serious missionary work in Asia and in Africa. God always gives opportunities. Sadly, men do not always take them.

 

The Toppling of the Western Idol: All Lives Matter

The age of the arrogant supremacy of the Western world, now only 10% of the whole seven and a half billion of humanity, is running out. The Western world is now only a small minority and, for the first time in three centuries, its wealth and power are now also in the minority. Worse still, its extraordinary lies over the centuries, which it calls ‘history’, have reduced its moral authority to an all-time low. Time has run out. Western Europe had destroyed itself in its insane suicide by the mid-twentieth century and in 1945 the USA took over as the world’s boss. Today, seventy-five years on, it is already quite clear that the twenty-first century will not be the age of any West, but of its final decline.

Through the amazing aggression and greed in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine of its EU and NATO agencies over the last two decades the West has thrown Russia together with China. And together with a whole series of outraged countries, for example, North Korea, Iran, Vietnam, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Libya, Syria, Pakistan and Venezuela, which it has similarly alienated through its constant meddling, exploitation and calculated policy of causing chaos (‘divide and rule’), these countries are the Superpower majority in all respects. The Western world, suicidally locked down, bankrupt, geriatric, dying out, rejected its own roots in the first centuries and so lost its aims.

After defeat after defeat in all the above countries and many others with their teeming populations, the Western world’s economic collapse and suicide have been hastened by the covid lockdown to protect the elderly. After 1945 the West was at last forced to admit the evils it had done to one especially powerful but outraged race, the Jews, beginning with the late eleventh-century massacres in the Rhineland by Roman Catholics. In today’s global world, the West is at last being forced to review its attitudes to the world’s ethnic majorities (which it slyly calls ‘ethnic minorities’). The Black Lives Matter movement has shown that it believes and acts on what we all knew long ago.

This is that the land-grabbing White colonialism, genocide and enslavement of Non-Whites since the 16th century have been evil. This is in fact the condemnation and rejection of the evils of the whole Protestant Age which is now all but dead. It is now only one step until the evils of the Roman Catholic Age before it are also condemned and rejected. Justice is coming for the Black, Brown, Red and Asian peoples, but also for all the White peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia who were massacred by the wickedness of the anti-Christian Crusades. And beyond that there is only one step to the liberation of White ethnic groups from the myths that their establishments have cultivated.

Thus, the Irish (at long last united), the Scottish, the Welsh and also the English must also liberate themselves from the British Yoke, imposed by the Norman and Roman elites alike. And the peoples of Western Europe must liberate themselves from the Western/Frankish Yoke – that which was invented by Charlemagne, when he revived the pagan Roman Empire, using barbarians to enforce and justify his power-grab. Denormanisation and Defrankisation are at last becoming possible. State-run mouthpieces all over the Western world, like the BBC or CNN – their journalists paid incredibly high salaries for telling lies – such is the price for selling your soul – have lied themselves out.

After the Western defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, after the lies about Brexit and Covid, nobody believes the State-run media any more. The end is nigh for Western supremacy. The domination and exploitation by the West of the vast majority of humanity is over; the Rest have conquered; the West was never the Best. All Lives, not just Black Lives, matter. The West long ago lost in the struggle of ideas. Now it has lost in the struggle of reality. Now is the time for the world to turn to the Real Christ, instead of the manmade Western mythology, invented a thousand years ago to justify Western immorality, greed, genocide and anti-humanity. The Western idol is toppling.

The Error of the Triumphalists

When in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and then over the next two years the whole of the remaining Soviet Empire, including the Union itself, fell, there was rejoicing among Western triumphalists. But they were blinded by the error of their own hubris; the fall of Soviet State capitalism and its materialism was also the beginning of their own fall, of Western elitist capitalism and its materialism. This was because the two ideologies have exactly the same origin – in the anti-Christian denial of the fact that mankind has both a spiritual origin and a spiritual destiny. The only difference was that the Western system was more successful in its materialism.

Marxist Communism, imported into the former Russian Empire from the West which had lost its faith, had promised ‘a bright future’, ‘a paradise on earth’. Western Capitalism had promised the same, ‘progress’ and ‘a consumer paradise’. But both resulted in the same collapse of nations, families and personal lives in amoral and infantile self-indulgence, in alcoholism, abortion, constant wars for mineral resources, divorce, drug-addiction, ecological catastrophe, economic injustice, social inequality and suicide. Neither ideology could solve the problem of death; neither, vitally, could provide any meaning to life. Both therefore led to death.

In reality, the meaning of life is in believing in something that is worth dying for. If something is not worth dying for, it is certainly not worth living for. Life without a goal is meaningless. And who wants to die for a new brand of toothpaste and the right to vote for one corrupt fool rather than for another corrupt fool? Any Civilisation that is not worth dying for is doomed to degenerate and die. And this can be seen today all over the Western (and Westernised) world, which confesses only ignoble absurdity and bestiality. Western and Westernised society is not a Civilisation of creators, but of consumers, that is, of destroyers of resources.

Civilisation collapses when it is only a Civilisation of consumer well-being, of health and safety, without risk or challenge, a Civilisation of fear of illness, of lockdown and bankruptcy. However, as long as there is only one person who resists this pseudo-Civilisation and does not surrender his free will to pointless consumerist comfort, the devil has not defeated mankind, for one person has defeated the devil. After the fall of the monstrous Soviet Union, many there refound the meaning of life in the Christianity of before and the rebuilding and building of lives and churches of spiritual beauty, culture and art. Is the same possible in the Western world?

 

The End of the Western Delusion: 1990-2020: History Begins Again

Since Protestantism denied any sort of collective ‘Church’, it was always concerned with ‘personal’, individual salvation. Therefore it was precisely out of this curious understanding of salvation, that we are not saved together, that modern Western individualism grew up. For as time passed and Protestantism degenerated into Secularism in the revolution that began in the 1960s, individualism rapidly turned into self-interest, self-indulgence, self-flattery, ‘the feel good factor’ and infantilism. This is ‘personal salvation’ according to the individualistic, atheist gospel of Secularism. Everyone is their own god – the ultimate millennial result of the filioque.

Thus, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and then the collapse of the rest of the Marxist nightmare, the self-appointed task of Western ideologues assigned themselves a task. Sure that their ideology of individualism, ‘the free market’, had triumphed, it was simple. Under the delusional camouflage of their slogan of individualism, ‘freedom and democracy’, in other words, do whatever you want, they would conquer the rest of the world.

So they tried to mop up the remains of Imperial Russia (not much left there after 75 years of Western Marxism, they thought), finish off primitive Islam and stride forward, confident that China and India would also fall into their laps like so much ripe fruit. ‘History had ended’, so claimed the bullying triumphalists with their ‘The West is Best over the Rest’.

Now they would conquer the world through the crowd-pleasing, truly populist, idea of selfishness, backed up as usual, of course, with the usual Western organised violence. This hubris was nothing but the old pagan Roman bread and circuses, revamped as materialist consumerism and the Soft Power of Hollywood and modern music. The masses would, like zombies, swallow all this, and agree to be bombed by NATO and exploited by Western companies from the US and the EU, their heads zombified by Rambo, Michael Jackson, Spiderman, Lady Gaga and any other nonsense that the West could produce.

Only it was not as simple as that. Actually, not everybody is a selfish Western ideologue and will agree to anything, just because they have been offered flattery and a million dollars. Some people have principles, some people are not selfish, some people have values greater than the dollar, some people know that ‘freedom and democracy’ are myths. Like the early Christians in the Colosseum, some people still believe in greater things than vulgar consumer goods and Hollywood, they believe in collective, not individual, values, values like historical tradition, patriotism and national identity. And, just like our spiritual forebears, the early Christians, we do not fear death. Even under the threat of coronavirus, whether manmade or natural.

That people may believe in more than bread and circuses and do not live by bread alone has been demonstrated in recent years even inside the Western world, with the rise of what the venal elitists of the snobbish media condescendingly call ‘populism’, for example, as in Brexit and Trump. However, long before this, outside the Western world (the West is always spiritually backward), we already saw resistance to Western Secularism.

For example, although Russia fell into the hands of a drunken Western puppet in the 1990s and although his Harvard advisors created mass hunger, abortion, alcoholism and suicide, Russia has since raised itself up to sovereignty. It now has a certain dignity and we see there the long and slow return to national identity and the traditional Russian defence of peoples whom the West has tried to wipe off the map, for example, in Ossetia and Syria. As for the Muslim world, it too fought back after the anti-Muslim Wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, where the West, despite its mass brainwashing propaganda, disastrously lost the last shreds of any moral authority. The world saw that the only weapons of mass destruction were those that the Western Powers massacred Iraqis with.

Historically, the West had no success in spreading its ideologies of Catholicism and Protestantism in Russia, India, Japan or China. Even after the collapse of Communism, when it sent out its evangelical missionaries to the former Soviet Union, bribing them with free English lessons, all they harvested were a few unstable, uprooted and neurotic souls.

Even successes in Latin America, the Philippines and Africa were very limited: Catholicism and Protestantism there are both anti-secular and have very little to do with wishy-washy, happy-clappy, baby-boomer, self-indulgent, infantile Western Catholicism and Protestantism, which today are simply forms of Secularism, with as much spiritual content as dishwater. The Non-Western world will accept consumer goods and Western Soft Power, its films and music, for amusement’s sake, but nothing on a deep and serious level. The elite may have its traitors, but the people remain loyal to their own age-old Civilisation and culture beneath the surface.

Some may point to the contemporary ‘successes’ of American evangelicals in China, who claim 120 million converts. This of course is nonsense. Just as in Japan, South Korea or Thailand, the only ones in China who ‘convert’ to Protestantism do so because they want to be rich ‘like Americans’ from the land of consumerism and Hollywood. For why are the Americans rich? Because Americans are Evangelicals, ‘God has blessed them’. By adopting the American religion, they too will be ‘blessed by God’ and so be rich. At least that is the myth that is peddled to the simple, ignoring the tens of millions of dirt poor, homeless, alcoholics and drug addicts in the real America, let alone the Gospel call to ascetic poverty and Christ’s statement that Mammon (i. e. the dollar) and God are irreconcilable opposites. All this is just American imperialism.

Today’s Western Secularism is as unexportable as yesterday’s Western religion was unexportable.

For instance, I remember a BBC journalist (and spy) declaring to me that Orthodoxy in Russia is unimportant because fewer than 5% of Russians go to Church. This statistic is true, but he had totally missed the point. Orthodoxy, i.e. Christianity, is important in Russia not because of such a statistic but because it is the Civilisational underpinning of Russian culture. Regardless of how many people go to Church, all (except the elite of English-speaking thieves/oligarchs/traitors who consort with Western journalists and spies) have Orthodox (i.e. Christian) values in some sphere or another. And those values, of the majority, are not those of elitist LGBT Western Secularism and never will be.

The Gospel of Western self-indulgence only works among the corrupt elite. The puppets, traitors and crooks, appointed by the West to run Latin America (Haiti, Cuba, Pinochet, Nicaragua), Greece (the colonels), the Philippines (Marcos), the Ukraine, Lithuania, Montenegro, the Phanar etc, are precisely that. The West has only one technique, corrupt the worst elements in the country and then appoint them as the ruling elite by force and they will allow Western companies to asset-strip the countries involved.

How will this Western perversion be defeated?

Whether the fight is against pseudo-Christian Western religion or one of the forms of Secularism which evolved from it, be it atheist Communism or consumerist Capitalism, there is only one value which can stand up to Western Secularism. And this is not xenophobia and crude nationalism, evil Stalinism in the case of Russia – even among some who claim to be Orthodox!; this is not Maoism in the case of China, where the ruling ideology long ago stopped being Chinese Communism and became Chinese Nationalism, upheld by savage Capitalism; and this is not Islamism in the case of the Muslim world, an Islamism created from the outrage of repeated Western invasions of and interference in Muslim Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

What then is the only value that can stand up to Western Secularism?

It is God, the One Universal Reality and Ideal. Not the false Western god, the idol made in the imagination and image of Western ideologues. The real God is not made in our image, we are made in His image. The Holy Spirit comes from God, not from Western man, nor for that matter from the Islamic god of Mohammed, but from the real God the Father, from Whom alone proceeds Holiness and Truth. This was revealed by Christ, not in Europe, but in Asia, of which Christ was in His human nature a native.

Just because the American elite has little understanding of history, culture, language and faith, it thinks it can impose its individualistic self-indulgence throughout the world. Insulated from reality in their bubble, it underestimates other people. Not all are as selfish as those ideologues. Most of the world has greater and stronger values than the individualistic self, it has a collective value, a belief in its own national identity and destiny, culture and history, values that go beyond space and time, beyond the here and now, back into history and into the future, a Civilisation that is greater than the self and goes on to eternity. Not the Western delusion, but God. Here is the answer. Thirty years have passed since Western ideologues began to claim that the West had triumphed, that History had ended. In reality, History is beginning again. For many around the world the West is not Best. In the age of coronavirus the West is Pest.

 

Questions and Answers from Correspondence (March-April 2020)

Falling in Love

Q: Do you believe that there is only one man for each woman and vice versa, that it is impossible to fall in love and find a new spouse again after widowhood or divorce, that we only have one chance of falling in love and finding happiness?

A: I think that there is only one ideal man for each woman and only one ideal woman for each man – though, of course, here the word ‘ideal’ is relative in our imperfect world. In this fallen world, the real and deep, and not silly and romantic, meaning of ‘to fall in love’ includes loving the imperfections of the other, without illusions. This is ‘ideal’. This does not mean the sort of falling in love repeatedly which teenagers with ‘crushes’ imagine is happening to them.

However, there are cases where widows or widowers remarry and do find a second happiness, perhaps not quite the same as the first, but still great happiness. But this is only because they have found someone very similar to the first, whom they are willing to die for – which is what real falling in love means. On the other hand, there are those who choose badly the first time (usually because they were too young or wanted to escape from parents), divorce but do find happiness the second time. I know of one case where happiness, true love, was found – the third time round.

Pastoral Matters

Q: How do converts stop being converts?

A: Virtually all Orthodox today are converts. After the fall of Communism, tens and tens of millions of people converted to Christ and were baptised in the faith of their ancestors because they were at last free to do so. In Greece too, many people fell away from the Church after the 1960s, but some of them have returned from very far, discovering Orthodoxy for the first time, despite their nationality and presupposed Orthodoxy. All these examples are proof of the obvious truth that ethnicity has nothing whatsoever to do with being Christian, a weird idea that would never have occurred to the apostles, martyrs, saints and Church Fathers.

Converts have to go from neophyte Orthodoxy, a fascination with, what seems to them in their estrangement from normality, to be esoteric or exotic (it is not at all esoteric or exotic for us who live it daily). This involves coming to the realisation that real Orthodoxy is simply the Christian way of life, real Christianity, and that what they may previously have thought was Christianity (Protestantism/ Catholicism) never was. That is a shock to them – yet it is the truth, as many will confirm. And all have to discover that Orthodoxy is not about crosses of gold and hearts of wood, but about hearts of gold and crosses of wood.

Converts may start as Orthodox with flames of zeal, but these flames will sooner or later die down. They will turn to ashes in the face of the difficulties that come to us through reality – unless the converts have the fuel that feeds the heart. And that fuel comes from liturgical life, standing at services, prayer (standing at services forces you to pray, otherwise you will be bored), fasting, the sacraments and loving our neighbour. (Books and theories, obviously, do not feed the heart, they feed only the brain, which just causes headaches, literally, mental constipation).

However, it is precisely the difficulties of life which destroy illusions. Thus, to lose illusions does not mean to become disillusioned or cynical, it means to become realistic. For we owe our faithfulness not to illusions, but to Christ. Our Faith is simply the Christian way of life, the Christian values, the Christian culture, the Christian Civilisation – there is no other.

Q: There seem to be so many rules to Orthodoxy. What is the difference between Orthodoxy and Phariseeism?

A: You are a beginner. Do not let the old Pharisees – who claim to be the only true Orthodox in the world! – make Christianity into rule-bound Phariseeism for you, as it is for them. Do not let them make the Church into a stick for your back. Take things gradually. True, Orthodoxy is strictness with yourself, whereas Phariseeism is strictness with others.

However, as you learn Orthodox life, you will learn that there are two Books. One is the written Book of the Rules, which is made up of many books, such as the Bible, the Canons, the Typikon etc, and the other is the unwritten Book of Exceptions. Just as the first Book is not a Book of harsh punishment which brings black despair, the second Book is not a Book of lax liberalism, which brings cynical indifference. The first is our ideal, the second is our reality. You need to know and have both Books because together they form the One Great Book of Orthodoxy, known as the Book of the Wisdom and of the Love of God. This Book is not available in any bookshop, only time will teach you it, if you have the patience and the humility to learn from experience.

Q: Should Christians be optimists?

A: Of course we should. Christ defeated death. Our faith is built on the positive. However, that does not mean we should be unrealistic or live in our imaginations, we must know our enemies: be as gentle as doves and as wise as serpents. The whole point of our faith is the struggle against death – that makes us realistic – but because Christ was victorious, we too will be victorious, as long as we remain faithful to Christ.

Western European History

Q: If the Schism did not really occur in 1054, which is only a symbolic date, when did it occur?

A: The Western Schism has been a process and is still continuing. Ecumenists and modernists are still falling into it, preferring the anti-Christian secularist mentality, which is the essence of the Schism, to the Church of God, preferring to believe that man is greater than God, which is what the Schism is about. Thus, the heresies promulgated in Crete in 2016 and the 2019 Constantinople Schism are only continuations of the Schism, the falling into secularism, which was formalised, as you say, in 1054.

Thus, in 1054 there was little realisation that the Schism had happened and even in Constantinople itself there was hardly any realisation that its cause was the Western heresy against the Holy Spirit. The few who were conscious of it at the time thought of it in ritual terms, that it was about the Papacy enforcing the use of unleavened bread, fasting on Saturdays, beardless and celibate clergy etc. Even at the top, the Schism was seen as being about Papal arrogance in attributing to itself an absurd supremacy, the universal jurisdiction of Antichrist, which was in fact only the result, not the spiritual cause, of the Schism. So practical results were visible to those who saw at the time, but not the spiritual roots.

Another error in this field is the vocabulary used. For example, some reduce it to a mere geographical division of ‘East versus West’ or even to a racial or ethnic division of ‘Greeks versus Franks’. In reality, this was a spiritual division between Christians and Non-Christians. Many in the West, in Sicily or in Ireland for instance, long remained Orthodox, but in Constantinople itself there were also ‘humanists’ who fell away, as they have again today.

However, as you say, 1054, is only a symbolic date, very much an end-date of the first part of the process of the Schism. There are other dates which mark the falling away of individuals and small groups in the West. Among many others, there are, for example:

782: The barbarous kinglet Charlemagne commits the genocide of the Saxons at the massacre of Verden: the sword or baptism is what they are offered. 4,500 were slaughtered in the name of ‘the Church’.

794: The iconoclast Charlemagne has the ‘Carolingian Books’ published, rejected the Christian creed by promoting the filioque, which had been invented among the Jews in Spain. He accused the (Orthodox) Christians of being ‘Greeks’ / heretics and calling the barbarians (himself and his ruling clique) Christians!

812: The barbarian Charlemagne had an organ, a purely secular instrument which came out of Greek paganism, installed in his chapel in Aachen. By the eleventh century, there were perhaps six organs in use in Western Europe, including one in England, in Winchester. Slowly their use spread until in the nineteenth century virtually all heterodox churches are fitted with them.

867: St Photius explains the filioque heresy against the Holy Spirit, which was aggressively being promoted by political circles in North-West Europe. He also condemned the ‘novel’ practice of using unleavened bread in the Eucharist, which began among the Franks and spread to Rome in the middle of the eleventh century. This use of unleavened bread was also the beginning of depriving laypeople of the Blood of Christ.

946: The first ever statue of the Mother of God is made for Stephen II, Bishop of Clermont in France. It harks back to local pagan statues of Venus and Diana. It is the start of Roman Catholic statuary.

970: The Gero Crucifix, showing Christ-God not as the Vanquisher of Death but as a dead man is installed in Cologne Cathedral. It is the beginning of pietism.

991: In what is now Northern France the ruthless warlord Fulk the Black wins the battle of Conquereuil and anti-Christian feudalism, with its serfdom, evil castles and knights, becomes exponentially ever more visible.

993: Bishop Ulric of Augsburg was the first person to be canonised by a Pope, John XV, rather than by a regional bishop. Papal canonisation did not become the norm until the 13th century.

1009: Pope Sergius IV confesses the filioque, which had spread to Rome from the Franks.

1014: The filioque is sung in Rome for the first time.

1040: Peter Damian records the first case of stigmata, self-inflicted by an individual called Dominic.

1048: The filioquist heretic and warmonger Bruno of Toul is crowned as Pope Leo IX in Rome.

1061: The Normans invade Orthodox Sicily.

1066: The Normans invade Orthodox England with the blessing of the anti-Christian Pope.

1077: Canossa – Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII, probably the grandson of a Jew, declares himself more powerful than emperors and kings.

1095: Pope Urban II declares war and sends barbarians and thugs to massacre Jews in the Rhineland and Christians and Muslims in 1099 in Jerusalem in the name of ‘the Church’.

1102: Anselm writes the first defence of the filioque heresy ‘against the Greeks’.

1123: The First Lateran Council forbids clergy to be married. Beardlessness, which came from Roman paganism and homosexuality, is also enforced as a sign of this celibacy.

The above are just a few dates which illustrate the process of the falling away of Orthodox Christians from the Church in parts of Europe between the eighth and twelfth centuries. There are many more, but they would almost all fall within the same 350 years. Other changes, like Purgatory, invented in 1164, came later. For example, it was not until the 13th century that the Popes changed their title from ‘Vicar of St Peter’ to ‘Vicar of Christ’ and in the same century babies began to be deprived of chrismation and so of communion. Another instance is the reversal of the way that Christians have always made the sign of the cross which began after the 12th century, even though Christ sits on the right of the Father, not on the left.

Q: If, as you assert, Western Europe was fundamentally Orthodox in the first millennium, how did it get into a situation of creating colonial genocide and producing world wars?

A: The short answer to this is because anyone can lose their faith and so can go from Christianity to anti-Christianity. (Look at the now suspended Protodeacon Andrei Kurayev – who wants to be taken into the Phanar – or Fr Cyril Hovorun, as contemporary examples and dire warnings). This happened in the Soviet Union – most members of the Red Army (and of the White Army) were composed of baptised, but not practising, Orthodox, and so they killed each other. A non-practising Christian is but an empty shell, a house of cards, always ready to collapse into practical atheism, as we can see in the contemporary civil war between (baptised Orthodox) Ukrainians today.

Here is a more detailed answer as regards Western Europe:

In the first millennium, Western Europe was poised on a knife-edge between its old, native paganism and the new Orthodox Christianity coming from the East. There were three such pagan influences. They were those of the Ancient Greeks like Aristotle, with his profound racism (only Greek speakers are civilised, the rest are ‘barbarians’ – what today’s atheists Greeks or Hellenists confess), sexism and the justification of cruel slavery, the second was that of ruthless pagan Roman imperialism and conquest, and the third was that of Germanic (first Teutonic, later Viking-Norman) heathenism.

After 250 years of martyrdom, there opened a golden age of holiness between the fourth and eighth centuries, ‘The Age of the Saints’. However, then a 250-year-long decline began and in the eleventh century these forms of paganism finally triumphed over Orthodoxy. As the Roman Catholic historian Christopher Dawson wrote in his ‘The Making of Europe’ (P. 284) some ninety years ago: ‘There is no doubt that the eleventh century marls a decisive turning-point in European history – …..the emergence of Western culture’. In other words, this produced something called ‘Catholicism’, which was just a mixture of these three forms of paganism in a vaguely Christian wrapper. Everything in Catholicism, a local claim to universal empire to be enacted by violence (the definition of the post-Schism West), is Orthodoxy paganised.

Thus, Aristotle and what Roman Catholics like to call ‘Byzantine humanism’ (= Hellenist paganism) dominated the intellectuals (scholastics) like Thomas Aquinas, for the West failed to conquer pagan philosophy with Christ. Roman imperialism dominated the papal administration from Rome, for the West failed to conquer Caesar with Christ. The shock-troops or implementers of this pagan mentality were the thuggish Viking-Norman-Teutonic knights, as can be seen in the Crusades, for the West failed to conquer brute-force with Christ.

It was precisely the combination of all these three influences that triumphed over Christianity (Orthodoxy) in the West, whittling it down to the few sad fragments that remain outside the Orthodox Church today.

When you read the accounts of atrocities of the Normans in England (and later in Wales and Ireland), of the Crusaders or the Spanish conquistadors (whose almost total genocide (50 million dead?) of enslaved native Carribeans and natives of what became Latin America gave rise to the need to replace them with African slaves), of the ‘Wars of Religion’ in Europe (Cromwell, ‘God’s Englishman’, who slaughtered one million in Ireland for example), of the British genocides in North America, India and China (the ‘Opium Wars’ = British genocide in China), of the stories of the Belgian and German Empires in Africa, of the First and Second World Wars, of the Atomic Bombs, of the post-War Dutch genocide in Indonesia, of the French genocides in Indo-China and North Africa, it is clear that the second-millennium West was not Christian at all, but thoroughly pagan and barbarian.

It said: ‘We are the shock-troops of the civilisation of the Vicar (= Replacement) of God, we are God on earth, the Holy Spirit comes from us, all authority flows from us, therefore whatever we do is right, our God is on our side’. It had kidnapped what it imagined to be God, a white European man who sat in the clouds and blessed the genocide of all Non-Western Europeans.

This can also be seen in the later ideologies that justify Western racism, like Puritanism (‘only we are pure, the rest are savages and can be exterminated like wild animals’), Darwinism (‘the survival of the fittest’ = ourselves), Marxism (destroy everyone who does not agree with me) or today political correctness (= persecution and censorship). This is why although the Non-West has always quickly adopted convenient Western technologies, civilisations like the Christian (= Orthodox), the Muslim, the Japanese, the Indian, the Tibetan and the Chinese have never adopted Western religion. It is merely a religion that justifies organised violence. The West never won anything by asserting that it had a superior religion or values – which is why in the end it will fall, just as the other Western ideology of Communism has already fallen.

Q: What makes you show sympathy to Non-Western peoples?

A: Because I am not ‘Western’, that is, because I come from the English countryside, where the ‘Western’ Norman Yoke is still resented as the invention of the aristocracy imposed on us in and after 1066, who made London their capital (our capital, the capital of Alfredian England, will forever be Winchester). The word ‘Western’ is a construct, it is not a geographical term. Therefore I also belong to a Non-‘Western’ people, that is, the Old English people, just like all Non-‘Western’ peoples, Non-’Western’ whether in space or in time.

Russian History

Q: Why did contact with the West lead Russia into Communism?

A: All over the world, from Charlemagne who began the process in the late eighth century (German versus Saxon), to England in the eleventh century (Norman versus English), to the Crusaders in the Middle East (Papist versus Christian, Muslim and Jew), to the Spanish in the Americas, to the colonial scramble for Africa, Westernisation always causes genocide and a profound schizophrenic division in its victim-countries.

Thus, by the late nineteenth century, only six civilisations in the world were resisting Western colonisation and imperialism: the Russian, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Persian, the Ethiopian and the Thai. All were independent Sovereign Empires, centralised monarchies, not controlled by High Finance like the Western and Westernised world – all therefore had to be discredited and slandered as ‘autocratic and tyrannical’ and destroyed by the Mammonist West.

After extensive weakening by native but Westernised traitors, allied with Catholic Poles and then Lutheran Swedes, in the seventeenth century, Russian Christian Civilisation was later attacked successively by Napoleon’s anti-Russian multinational invasion in 1812, by the Franco-Anglo-Turkish invasion of Russia in 1854 in the Crimean War, in 1914 the First ‘World’ (= Western European) War, in 1941 in the Second ‘World’ War and in the Western Cold War after 1945, which finally bankrupted Sovietised Russia.

In the same twentieth century, the other Non-Western Civilisations were also undermined. The Persian Empire began its fall in 1906, the Chinese Empire fell in 1911-12, the Japanese monarchy was finally destroyed by Atomic Bombs (needlessly dropped, in part also to scare the USSR) in 1945, the Thai monarchy was Americanised after 1945, and in the twentieth century the Ethiopian was undermined first by Italian Fascists in 1935 and above all by Marxists in 1974.

In Russia the West first divided society into the pro-Western elite versus the Old Believer people, with whom we cannot but sympathise. In the 19th century this crystallised into the division of Westerners versus Slavophiles, in the 20th century into atheist versus people of faith, in the 21st century into oligarch-thieves and consumerists versus Orthodox. This is the same process as all over the world, where the elite is bribed into submission, its children ‘educated’ (= brainwashed) in Western institutions, and opposed to their own people, whose country and possessions are duly asset-stripped. The booty is shared between this local corrupt English-speaking elite (from Latin American drug barons to Filipino and Ukrainian gangsters – ‘oligarchs’) and Western ‘business’ organisations – which take the lion’s share.

Q: Modern Russia is no doubt a lot better than Russia under the yoke of the Soviet Union, but surely you would admit that it is not an Orthodox country?

A: Of course, it is not an Orthodox country. Since 1917 there has not been a single Orthodox country in the world. Only under the banners of an Orthodox Monarchy will Russia and the surrounding lands, which are dependent on it despite what their petty nationalists claim, rid themselves of the terrible spiritual disease of Western materialism, which has infected the whole world over the last 500 years and more. Regardless of whether it is called Communism or Capitalism, this pestilence says that the only important thing is money – Mammon. Our resistance to this disease, wherever we live and whatever our nationality, is the only seed of tomorrow’s certain Resurrection.

Art

Q: What should our attitude to modern art be?

A: This is a personal question. I am not sure that there is a general answer. I do not want to be moralistic and say that there ‘should be’ any attitude, I can only give a subjective response. This is only how I feel personally:

I really feel deep sympathy with Rachmaninov, who wrote of the post-Revolutionary world: ‘I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien’. That is exactly my feeling too. Already before the First World War in Western Europe, Stravinsky and other modernist musicians had resurrected paganism. Artists had experimented with strange painting techniques, which expressed the disintegration of reality in tiny points, cubes, unnatural colours and jagged, dehumanised forms. All of them were merely expressing the ugly disintegration of their beliefs and values inside their disordered and distressed souls, the ugly disintegration which had come about through their loss of faith. The old Christian-based culture was lost to them and so they had founded the new atheist culture which underlay the ideologies and bloody wars of the twentieth century and all that followed it.

It seems to me that a believer may find ‘modern’ art (now over 100 years old) curious, interesting, even fascinating, but it is not the art which is natural to or expressive of a Christian soul.

 

Conclusions

Introduction

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

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

Russia

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

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

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

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

The Patriarchate of Constantinople

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

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

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

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

The Western World and Europe

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

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

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

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

England and My Destiny

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

King John 4, 3. 10

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

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

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

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

Three Miracles

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

Western Tragedy and Christian Victory

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

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

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

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

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

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

May Thy will be done, O Lord.

 

Note:

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