Category Archives: UK

The Boomerang Returns

Assassination Season

Assassination season is here again. All the potential victims are patriots of their countries. The American globalists and their Ukrainian proxies first tried to assassinate and regime change Putin (in July 2014, but they shot down MH17 instead), then Erdogan (in 2016 by the Americans, but saved by Putin), then Fico in Slovakia (in 2024, perhaps also by the Ukrainians and it nearly succeeded), then Orban (by the Ukrainians again, under Brussels orders?) and now Trump (some say by the Ukrainians again). Many now claim that ‘the lone gunman’ was in fact at least two shooters, one possibly on top of a water-tower or else from inside a building. (Snipers usually work together).

As with the assassination of Kennedy, at least two snipers also tried to kill Trump and this was a plot of the Deep State Washington elite. They have only used Biden as their puppet (what better puppet than a senile old man, who will let you do whatever he wants). And they have only used a mentally deranged youth as their ‘patsy’, as the Americans say, killing him to make sure that he did not tell the truth afterwards (like Oswald before him). Was the other sniper (snipers) Ukrainian? Maybe. Whatever the exact truth, and we may never know it, if we are to believe Trump’s own words, he appears to have changed, realising that he is alive only by the grace of God, ‘anointed’. It is the hand of God indeed, a near death experience that has prevented the nuclear war that the Biden regime was threatening.

The USA

The attempt to kill Trump has killed Biden and now it is Biden, not Putin, who is being regime-changed. The boomerang has returned and it is Biden who is being regime-changed. The Liberal Fascists of the Soros-Schwab Globalist Party are seeing their dream slipping through their fingers. Destiny means that Trump has to serve a greater purpose: Peace and Reconciliation. He can now ignore the neocon wing of the Republicans, unlike with his huge mistakes of 2016-2020. And if they try to kill him again, Vance, a sincere Christian half the age of Trump, will be the next President. And that would be even worse for them. Trump is the only candidate who can reverse the calamitous course of the US, which consists of military disasters in Eurasia and moral depravity at home.

President Trump will end the NATO war in the Ukraine and Vice-President Vance will ensure that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metr Onufry will no longer be persecuted and see its thousands of stolen churches returned. It is the end of the road for the fake Phanariot gangster ‘Church’ in the Ukraine. President Trump will not lose face when he ends it on Russia’s terms, because he will point out, correctly, that this was not his war, but Biden’s war. Therefore, he can let Russia win without humiliating himself and Non-Globalist America, but humiliate Biden and the powers behind his throne instead. It means that the acting President (or actor-President) Zelensky and his Neo-Nazis are also finished, since they are only Globalist puppets.

Europe

The Hungarian leader, Viktor Orban, is today the only statesman and diplomat left in Europe. As such, he could lead a Confederation of Orthodox-Hapsburg-Ottoman South-East Europe, from Hungary to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Austria to Cyprus, Slovakia to Turkey, Croatia to Greece, Bulgaria to Czechia, Moldova to Serbia, Slovenia to Albania, Romania to Macedonia, into BRICS. This would link South-East Europe with China – indeed Belarus has been linked with China by joining the SCO (Shanghai Co-operation Organisation) and is carrying out joint Belarusian-Chinese military exercises near the Polish border. Belarus has turned its back on Poland and the West, which wanted to regime-change it and destroy it.

As the Ukraine, where war still rages because of the refusal of the masses of Russians and Ukrainians alike to repent, breaks up in civil disorder and Kiev troops surrender, the war will end. Will Zelensky be able to flee in time to save his skin? With the former Ukraine joining the Union State of the Russian Federation and Belarus and South-East Europe also gone to BRICS, this will leave the two parts of remaining Western third of Europe in its self-imposed isolation. The largely ex-Protestant North, from Britain through Scandinavia and Poland to the Baltics and Finland, and the largely ex-Catholic South-West, from Benelux to Germany, France, Iberia and Italy. In order to survive, if this is what they want, both North and South-West will have to find their way back to their roots.

England

A case in point is England. For decades the British/’Norman’ opponents of the independence and freedom of England have ferociously predicted that in such a case Great Britain will become Little England, as we saw in the hysteria of those who oppose Brexit. This is the nonsense of self-justification. It all depends on your definition of ‘Greatness’. Thus, in the USA, perhaps those who want to make America great again (MAGA) realise that this no longer means bullying the rest of the world, overthrowing democratically-chosen governments, exploiting other countries and forcing them into sexual perversion. Perhaps Greatness means entering into harmony with other countries, replacing Unilateralism with Multilateralism, replacing Global Liberal Fascism with Popular Traditional Patriotism.

The choice between Great Britain and Little England is a false question. Like America, England can be Great again, a Great England. The last time England was Great was under King Alfred the Great (849-899). For Greatness is not in bullying others and invading their countries, but in defending spiritual and moral values and in working together with others. As we have long suggested, England should become part of a Local Confederation with a reunited Ireland, Scotland and Wales, to be called IONA, the Isles of the North Atlantic. Such a Confederation could then join BRICS. The present Starmer, elected by 20% of the electorate, like the unelected Sunak before him, is only a temporary puppet of the globalists, the agent of the Establishment, the City, the BBC and MI5. The future, like it or not, is Farage, one of President Trump’s best friends.

The Great Cleansing of the Church

At my age, three years ago, when it had seemed that all had been won, I was called on to steer  our parishes in the ship of the church in this part of England away from schism and towards canonicity in the mainstream. Our six parishes, and the others to come, had to avoid the deep mud that both the Patriarchate of Moscow and the Patriarchate of Constantinople had mired themselves in. We looked and look to those Local Churches, the vast majority, to steer the Church towards a genuine Council, unmanipulated by the political extremes of both Russian and Greek nationalists. Our churches were saved from the American schism.

The Russian, Constantinopolitan and other Local Churches are yet to be cleansed of sexual perverts, psychopaths, corrupt thieves and schismatics, like the one in London. For decades they have reigned almost unopposed. Patriarch Kyrill, is surrounded by such traitors. That is why he needs our prayers every day, to save him from them. But the time of the ‘lavender mafias’, as the Americans call them, is over. It is all coming out now, first in England, announcing the disaster in the Ukraine, and now in Hungary. Not just the whole Russian Church is to be reshaped now, but the whole of the Orthodox Church, all 16 (for now) Local Churches.

The World

The First World War lasted four years, from 1914-18, the Second began exactly 25 years after the First and went from 1939-1945, the Third also began exactly 25 years after the Second, but was a War of spiritual and moral degeneration which went from 1964 to 2014. The Fourth World War, which began exactly 50 years after the Third, has gone on for ten years, long enough. After the coup in Kiev in 2014, which opened the War and followed with covid, which killed millions of innocent people, the warriors continued their War in the Ukraine. Two and a half years later, that episode of the Fourth World War is ending.

Some eight years ago we wrote a long article called Beneath the Double-Headed Eagle: For Humanity, Truth, Justice and Prosperity. It dealt with the Restored Tricontinental Empire and the Imperial Alliance of the World’s 180 Sovereign Nations. We now know that that Alliance is for now called BRICS. After the ridiculous 75th Anniversary NATO Summit, which turned into a funeral ceremony for it, and amid the incredible decadence of the EU and the UK, a Parliament of the BRICS Alliance, which will replace the now redundant UN, is on the cards. As for the future Council of the Church, who will call it? The coming Tsar.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

City of Colchester

6/19 July 2024

Trump

I am just old enough to remember the assassination of J F Kennedy. I did not understand what was happening then, but my parents told me that the act was typical of a country of cowboys, but they were also sad because Kennedy was a man who, they said, ‘could have changed things’. Perhaps my parents were thinking about Kennedy’s reluctance to make war and so enrich the US military industrial complex, which Eisenhower had a little before warned Americans about.

Now we have the attempted assassination of one who is highly likely to be the next US President. A turn of his head saved him. In England, for the moment, hate figures get drinks thrown in their face. Not in the USA. However, given the hate speech against Farage in the Establishment media, his assassination would not be surprising, even in non-cowboy England. Neither is the widely predicted attempted assassination of Trump surprising. Senior Democrat politicians had, indirectly, been calling for it, as also mainstream media journalists. Having failed to imprison him, some wanted to kill him.

Spiritually speaking, how do we understand this? Trump is hardly a man of piety. Would God save him? A man of his financial and sexual disorders? A man who for four years allowed the 100% Clinton-Obama Democrats’ policy of arming the Ukraine in order to weaken, destroy and dismember Russia to continue?

However, Trump did say something else about the Ukraine more recently. He said that he could bring peace to the Ukraine within 24 hours. Paradoxically, people who call for peace are always the victims of violence. But they are also protected by God. A turn of his head. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God’.

Ironically, however, in order to make peace, we have to fight, fight, fight.

Fight against the Deep State/Establishment and fight for Nation and Family.

Fight against the corruption and homosexualisation of the State and fight for justice and humanity.

Fight against the corruption and homosexualisaton of the Church and fight for Truth and Love.

Quo Vadis UK?

The UK general election results have brought no surprises or change, except for a change of puppets. Most of the electorate, 40% of whom did not bother to vote in an extremely low turnout, simply voted against, not for anyone, thus punishing the Conservative Party for its continual lies. Thus, in the anti-democratic electoral system in the UK, a minority share of the popular vote has given the Labour Party a huge parliamentary majority. The result is, as usual, another minority government, elected by only 35% of those who bothered to vote, fewer than the number who voted for Labour in 2017 and 2019, when they lost. This is not at all a landslide in terms of the popular vote.  In reality, Labour is declining – it is a hollow victory.

This was from an electorate so disgusted and disillusioned by politicians’ lies and incompetence, with three Prime Ministers in five years, two of them unelected, that many did not vote. In other words, the vast Labour parliamentary majority was achieved with the votes of little more than 20% of the electorate. This is hardly democracy, though it is better than the dictatorship in the Ukraine, where a President has become a dictator, other political parties have been banned, opposition journalists like Gonzalo Lira have found themselves in the lethal torture chambers of the Nazi Secret Police and any man can be dragged off the streets to become cannon fodder for the ongoing US arms industry’s war.

By far the largest ‘Party’ is that of those who did not vote. Little wonder, politicians have broken their every promise to the electorate. Brexit (not done), the Covid scandemic (£250 billion wasted), the climate change hoax and support of Fascist Ukraine (causing bankrupting energy and other costs for the economy, people and the armed forces) provides the background. Many people are eating from food banks, amid a collapsing health and educational system, an increasingly third world transport and road system, bankrupt councils and utilities, demoralised police and armed forces and public services become public disservices, even imprisoning honest postmasters. Here are the results of chronic incompetence.

Starmer-led Labour, with policies identical to the Conservatives or perhaps even to the right of them, won the anti-Conservative protest vote. It was a negative vote and very few like the charisma-starved Starmer. The wealthy also protested, by voting as usual for their elitist anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats, who gained relatively few votes but many seats. Whereas the new Reform Party which came third got more votes than the Liberal Democrats, but few seats of the nearly 100 it should have had proportionately. So unfair is the system. Meanwhile, protesting Scots voted against the Fascistic, ultra-woke Scottish Nationalists. Power has passed from one anti-patriotic globalist to another. The same lies will continue. The Uniparty rules.

The new millionaire Labour leader, replacing the millionaire Conservative leader, rules over a bankrupt country, whose debt has accelerated by 150% since 2008. At one time it used to be said that the UK was in managed decline. Today it is clearly in mismanaged decline. Will Starmer, the choice of the banking, business and Israel elite, as he stabbed the former Labour leader the socialist Corbyn in the back, even remain in power for five years? All this is in a world riven by very dangerous wars and everywhere the UK Establishment is on the losing side. The consolation is that all the UK’s allies in the dementia-led Western world of the US and the EU, are in exactly the same mess, with the globalists being rejected by the patriots.

In reality, the UK election results are just another detail in the now rapidly falling Western world, which has been destroyed by its own breath-taking hubris. The UK is now the ninth largest economy in the world, far behind China at No 1, the declining US for the moment at No 2, India at No 3, Russia catching up with India at No 4, and then Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Brazil, and the UK only marginally ahead of France. Turkey and Vietnam will very soon take even their places. The only future in the new equitable multipolar world reality will be for the UK to join BRICS together with many other countries. The days of the globalist dinosaurs, in the UK, France, Germany, Belgium or elsewhere, who advocate the unipolar Western domination of the world are over.

 

Patriotic National Conservatism and Social Justice or Anti-Patriotic Cosmopolitan Elitism and Social Collapse

Introduction: The World

Nowadays the exclusive US-led club of G7 countries have to meet in an isolated huddle. They have been overtaken by the far greater and inter-civilisational BRICS Alliance. According to the US World Bank, three of the four largest economies in the world are members of BRICS. These are China, India and Russia. The latter, although under 16,000 Western sanctions, has overtaken the Japanese and German economies (both members of the G7) and is rapidly catching up with India, which the USA is going to fall behind, as real economic figures for it appear.

Other members of the G7 have seen their economies overtaken by countries such as Turkey, Indonesia and Vietnam, which all want to join BRICS, but not to join the irrelevant G7 club. It is the intercontinental BRICS Alliance that has become the de facto United Nations. This is mirrored by the elitist huddle of the WEF (or rather WWEF – Western World Economic Forum) and the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum, which finished last week, attended by 136 countries, though it was almost completely unreported by the globalist Western media.

The Example of England

A long time ago Norman invaders ‘established’ their capital of aggression in the mercantile City of London, where there was money. (Later this would become the location of the Bank of England and the Stock Exchange). Having massacred or expelled the Old English nobility, they formed an alien, foreign and anti-patriotic ruling class. From this ‘Establishment’ they and their descendants created the UK, with all its exploitation and crimes. The Norman royal family replaced English royalty, brought their Norman Church with them and demolished all the Old English churches. After that, foreign royal families, French, Welsh and Scottish and their aristocratic supporters, were in control of the country.

In the 16th century this alien royalty reinvented yet another Church, murdering, torturing or exiling any who opposed it. In the early 18th century the London merchant class imported easy-to-manipulate royalty from Germany (they had previously imported royalty from the Netherlands, having beheaded and then overthrown the previous Franco-Scottish dynasty). Then they could do their will, which was to get even richer by expanding overseas. In so many ways a fake country, fake royalty and a fake Church had been evolved. Similarly, when the time came, the elitist structure developed political parties, in fact the two sides of the same Uniparty. So they invented fake political parties too.

It used to be said in the 1950s that Britain was in genteel decline, like a once prosperous relative who was now forced to wear shabby clothes for lack of money. Since then the decline has clearly accelerated. Today the ‘Norman’ political parties of the London Establishment are sinking like the Titanic, as they have betrayed the country in favour of globalist corporations. Despite their almost total control of State propaganda outlets like the BBC and the newspapers, the so-called ‘media’, they have lost control of the ‘narrative’, as they call it.

All around in the UK we see collapsing public services and infrastructure, like the vastly underfunded health and education systems, millions of people eating out of food banks, hugely overpriced and failed privatised utilities, cowboy-run electricity and gas suppliers, heavily-polluting water supplies, bankrupt local administrations, third-world roads, degraded and absurdly expensive railways, lies about Brexit so there is now even less control of borders than before, and pathetic armed forces which cannot even find recruits to run the small amounts of their often broken down military equipment.

After the Suez humiliation in 1956, Britain officially became a US satellite, a vassal. Although, at the time in the face of Communism, there was no alternative, this has turned out to be an error. The post-War settlement of the victorious industrial Superpower of the USA established itself and its allies, to become known as the G7, as the world leaders. Even the UN was set up in New York with all kinds of supposedly ‘international’ organisations, like the World Bank, the IMF, GATT (now the WTO), the ICC (International Criminal Court) and the EU, were completely under its control. But this is the past.

Conclusion: The Western World Elite

The catastrophically failed Project Ukraine has led to chaos in Western Europe, not least after the EU elections of 9 June. This is changing its highly-aggressive and Russophobic, pro-Nazi Establishment elite, which is so hated by the European peoples, who are in turn so despised by that Atlanticist elite. The globalist Sunak, a bank-teller sent by the US, and Macron, the Great (Narcissist), the new Napoleon with his globalist agenda, but in fact a bank-teller sent by the Rothschilds, in love with himself and the Parisian elite, are discredited. Meanwhile, the German Scholz is very weakened. All are self-delusional and consider that their peoples did not understand their genius. Sunak is said to be heading to the US after his forthcoming defeat and Scholz retiring to the Bavarian Alps. As for Macron, perhaps he should buy a villa on Elba or St Helena? The Western elite, which tried to export its ideology to the Ukraine is now desperate. This all compares strangely with the landslide election victory of President Putin. The ideology of the Western elite is unexportable. It is, after all, rejected even by many native Western people. For we are the source of Patriotic National Conservatism and Social Justice.

As for the equally narcissistic USA, it is now a crusader state, just like its genocidal vassal, Israel. Everywhere the elite tries to impose its ‘liberalism’ by force. However, there is nothing as intolerant as liberalism. The result is the thoroughgoing ruination of culture in the Western world and its fast collapsing Civilisation. The culprit has always been the pure pride of supremacy and infallibility. This was first proclaimed in about the Year 1075, when the Pope of Rome attributed them to himself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatus_papae). This ideology pf infallibility and supremacy has been handed down in history to various Western leaders, at present to the US President and the Western world which he lays claim to. He lays claims to this narcissist, Darwinist pride of supremacy and infallibility, which claims that ‘we are the ‘fittest’, the exceptional, the exclusive, the indispensable. In Christian language this is called pride, which is evil. For they are the source of Anti-Patriotic Cosmopolitan Elitism and Social Collapse.

 

 

Elections or Insurrections? The Future of the European Elite after its Dramatic Defeat in the Ukraine

In the American organised war against Russia in the corrupt Ukraine, they are now running out of troops, with over 1,130,000 dead or seriously injured Ukrainian proxies. The average age of those remaining is 43, and men (and women) are being kidnapped off the streets. The situation is like that in early 1945 in Berlin. Advised by US and British PR companies since 2014 and directed by NATO commanders, the Kiev regime is killing Russian civilians in terrorist attacks. However, Western mercenaries are also being killed, with sixty French soldiers dying in their hotel in Kharkov last week. Meanwhile, Kiev is persecuting the Church and has stolen or wrecked many hundreds of churches, setting up a US-created fake Church of gangsters instead. The bankrupt West has no arms left to give, so the latest Western idea is to steal $300 billion of Russian assets. In Russia, war crimes trials are being prepared for Western leaders, who created and financed this war.

We see videos of priests praying and giving communion to Russian troops in a forest clearing and Ukrainian troops on horseback, as they have no other transport. These are scenes reminiscent of the Second World War and of partisans. Meanwhile, in Kiev, a palace revolt is under way, which could lead to the murder or else exile of President Zelensky and his replacement by a secret policeman. Zelensky had already banned elections due in March, making of himself a dictator, as he had already outlawed all other political parties and opponents have died in the Secret Police prisons or been assassinated. As for Western Europe, both the anti-democratic EU and the UK, it is in recession from its own suicidal sanctions, supposedly made against Russia. NATO is split, with Turkey, Hungary and Slovakia taking anti-American views. As for the USA, it faces internal chaos from political rivalry (not least in Confederate Texas) and a whole series of foreign wars of its own making. Such are the dramatic times we live in.

The European vassals of the NATO-controlled EU and UK are in total panic. However, the void of leadership is not only in Europe, but also in Washington. Those ‘in charge’ do what they are told by ‘donors’, the financial and military interests who are the power behind the senile throne. The elite has at last realised that it will not win in the Ukraine and has recently admitted this in their New York Times rag. However, the tactical victory is massive: enormous profits made from making useless arms; gutting European industry and sovereignty; reducing Europe to the status of a lowly vassal; time to find new proxy warriors against Russia – from Polish and Baltic fanatics to more ISIS fanatics. Nevertheless, as Max Weber wrote over a century ago, although Protestantism was the path for the rise of the West, its death, following the total loss of faith in it and therefore in Western self-belief, is the cause of its disintegration and defeat.

After 700 days of a tragic conflict, only the time-scale of the Russian victory over the US-installed Kiev regime in the Ukraine is uncertain. Nobody who is not deluded thinks that the defeat of the West in the Ukraine is a matter of ‘if’, only of ‘when’. In the first half of 2024 or in the second half? The Western elite has lost the war it created in the Ukraine and paid hundreds of billions of its taxpayers’ money (without consulting them) for it. Once more it has been humiliated: Saigon, Kabul and now Kiev. As for Non-Russian Europe, US-installed leaders there have bet on the wrong horse, whether von der Leyen, Borrell, Scholz, Macron, Sunak, not to mention the crazy puppet-leaders in Eastern Europe, especially in the Baltics, Poland and Bulgaria. The only exceptions are Hungary and now Slovakia, whose leaders are not US-installed, but installed by the people. Will other European countries follow their lead and become free and independent?

Total Russia victory is coming, with the winner dictating no negotiations, no ceasefire, no stalemate, no frozen conflict, but total Western defeat. Now that the Western attempt to take over the Ukraine has been lost, what are European electorates going to do about it? Ideally, the peoples of Europe could at last get rid of the globalist slaves of the US political and banking elite, whom the US has infiltrated into all levels of European governments over the last twenty years, ever since the ‘old’ Europeans opposed the US genocide in Iraq in 2003. If the hoodwinked and brainwashed electorates awoke, they could elect patriots, even if the globalist-owned media accused them of being racists and ‘far-right’. The ultra-liberal Fascist Establishment perverts who support LGBT, State lockdowns, deindustrialisation, climate change extremism, Ukrainian Nazism, the Zionist genocide of Palestinians and uncontrolled immigration, could at last be cast aside.

All depends on the consciousness of the peoples of Europe and their will for freedom. Will they wake up after the decades of decadence of bread and circuses? How many of them actually realise they are being zombified by the State-run media? How many of them realise that there is no real democracy, only a choice between two candidates of a neo-feudal oligarchy, that they have been labouring all these centuries under the yoke of the rich, now the vassals of US dictators, who want globalist dictatorship? The new multipolar world of BRICS, soon to be 20 or even 40, could help Europeans to wake up, but only if those Europeans want to be woken up and throw off the feudal yoke they have suffered from for a thousand years. In 2024 fifteen countries in Europe will hold elections. It is time for their electorates to look forward, not back, and to elect free patriots who are independent of the globalist poison and want sovereignty.

The US elite appears to want a worldwide war, a world war. It started a war against Russia through its Ukrainian Nazi proxies, it arms Israel to carry out genocide in Palestine, in Gaza and the West Bank, with US aircraft, bombs, shells and bullets, it is bombing Qatari-backed Yemen which has stood up to protect the Palestinians. Now it is threatening Iran, Iraq, China, India, Africa and Latin America which have not attacked anyone. On top of that, it is putting out the myth that President Putin wants to conquer not only the Ukraine, but also the whole of Europe. In reality, President Putin, the most popular man in Russia, wants Europeans to be responsible for themselves, to start behaving as adults, to treat Russians as human-beings, to throw out their US oppressors. Preferably this would happen through elections. The fear is that the European electorates are so frustrated that they may launch violent uprisings, real revolutions against their Establishment elite.

How is the Western elite trying to head off the risk of the insurrection of its peoples, to ensure that the ‘plebs’ do not revolt against it? Bread and circuses, consumerism and the media, worked for a long time, but eventually people have begun to see through them and are now tiring of being lied to constantly. The Western elite’s policy is Project Fear. In the US this Project was called ‘Russiagate’, a non-existent scandal manufactured by the Democratic Party in order to discredit the Republican President Trump. In Western Europe Project Fear is: ‘The Russians are coming to get you’. In other words, the elite continues to use the Ukraine to maintain control of their Uniparty regime, relying on the old fear of the Communist Soviet Union. This only works among very old people who remember the ‘Communist threat’ and ‘better dead than red’. Russia is still the bogeyman, used by patronising parents to intimidate their too independent children.

There are forces in every European country which are resisting. These forces used to be small minorities, however in several European countries they are becoming larger minorities. People are starting to ask questions. If the electorates continue to be insulted and condescended to, using the irrelevant distraction stories of the State-run media, those minorities will grow. If we take the example of the UK, we can clearly see that the Uniparty Establishment of Conservatives, Labour etc have exactly the same policies, none of which is going to solve the real problems of the UK’s ever more rapid decline, State bankruptcy (massive debt), the refusal to implement Brexit, deindustrialisation, the collapse of infrastructure (the failed health system, potholed roads, useless railways, rip-off and bankrupt privatised utilities such as the Post Office), mass immigration, refusal to confront absurd wokeness and the denial of Kiev Nazism and Israeli genocide.

This situation is mirrored in different and yet strangely similar ways in every European country. Will there be elections or insurrections? As the elite at last grasps that it has lost its absurd attempt to extend its Western dominion to the Non-Western Ukraine (just as they lost to extend it to Non-Western Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan), it is in a state of panic. Now it is trying to re-assert its tyrannical control over the parts of the West which it used to control. We shall see in the coming years the misdeeds of the UK and EU dictatorships, themselves merely puppets of the US globalist dictatorship. If the peoples want back their sovereignty and do not want to be absorbed, colonised, manipulated and impoverished by their neo-feudal, oligarchic, globalist, LGBT elites, in one way or another we will reclaim that sovereignty despite them. Revolution is in the air, but it does not have to be violent. It is our hope that the collapse will be peaceful and smooth.

Moscow will win against and finish off not just Nazi Ukraine, but also the much-divided NATO, profiting from the window of opportunity identified by President Putin in early 2022. Then the Ukraine, woken up, will side with Russia against the Western elite who betrayed it. The example of the dezombified Ukraine is to be followed by the peoples of the West, who have also been betrayed by the Western elite. Of course, those who resist the tyrannical elite will be labelled by them and their media hirelings ‘far-right’ or ‘apologists for Putin’. In reality, we have common sense. The elite does not, it has ideologies, fantasies and delusions. We are family people who love our families, we are patriots who love our countries. The elite does not. However, we also have a sense of social justice and compassion for others. The elite does not. Above all, we believe in God. The elite does not. The elite is Europe’s ‘assisted suicide’. We are not.

Bullying Again

The UK Vice-Prime Minister, Dominic Raab, has ‘resigned’ as a result of many complaints into his bullying – see extracts from the report into his behaviour below. It is clear that he did not behave as a Christian. The fact that he is Jewish is not the point. We know so-called ‘Christian’ bishops who bully in the same way and even worse and are actually supported by other clergy for their bullying! As for us, we have always belonged to the Persecuted Church and will never join a Persecuting Church.

Key report details 

Raab was ‘persistently aggressive’ in meeting

One complaint highlighted in the report centred around allegations that Mr Raab acted “in a way which was intimidating, in the sense of unreasonably and persistently aggressive” during a work meeting while foreign secretary.

“His conduct also involved an abuse or misuse of power in a way that undermines or humiliates,” the report added.

The report said Mr Raab went “beyond what was reasonably necessary in order to give effect to his decision and introduced a punitive element”.

Raab described work as ‘useless and woeful’

As justice secretary, Mr Raab acted in an “intimidating” manner when delivering critical feedback on work on a number of occasions, the report found.

The report cites one example where Mr Raab described some work as “utterly useless” and “woeful”.

The report concluded that his conduct was “abrasive” on some occasions which “feels intimidating or insulting to the individual but is not intended to be so”.

His conduct was not “abusive” and behaviour was not “intended and specifically targeted”, it added.

Raab’s gestures ‘not intended to be threatening’

It was claimed Mr Raab extended his hand “directly out towards another person’s face with a view to making them stop talking”. Loud banging on a table and finger-pointing were also among the complaints.

Mr Tolley KC concluded there was “significant scope for misunderstanding” over the physical gestures and he was not convinced Mr Raab used them in a threatening way.

Disciplinary threat ‘intimidating’

Mr Raab whilst at the Foreign Office, was said to have suggested those involved in a project had breached the Civil Service Code, so would have been in breach of their employment contracts.

Senior diplomat Sir Philip Barton told the investigation he had an informal meeting that he should threaten staff with the code.

The report found it had a “significant adverse effect” on a particular individual and Mr Raab’s conduct was “a form of intimidating behaviour”.

Mr Tolley concluded he did not intend to threaten anyone with disciplinary action, but should have known how his comments would be interpreted.

Style

  • Mr Raab’s style was, in his own words, “inquisitorial, direct, impatient and fastidious”

 

 

 

 

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.

 

75 Years Since D-Day

I well remember how on the 22nd anniversary of D-Day, 6/6/66, my mother told me that on that day in 1944 she saw the skies of southern England turn black with aeroplanes. This was D-Day, the greatest naval operation and invasion, 6,000 vessels and 9,000 aircraft, of all time. Tens of thousands of young men were to die in the following three months, together with 20,000 French civilians, tragically killed, mainly by notoriously indiscriminate Allied bombing.

This Allied invasion did liberate Western Europe from the Nazis, a liberation which would have happened anyway, but by the Red Army. Instead of fighting its way from Stalingrad only to Berlin, it would instead inevitably have fought its way from Stalingrad to the shores of Normandy, no doubt by the early summer of 1945 after its conquest of Berlin in early May 1945. Thus, with D-Day, instead of being occupied by the red star of the Soviet Union (SU), Western Europe was occupied by the white star of the United States (US).  The speed of  Allied success after D-Day was greatly helped by the hugely successful Soviet Operation Bagration which began, as had been agreed in Teheran, on 22 June and greatly weakened Nazi resistance in Normandy. It can be said that the real political aim of D-Day for the US was, after having achieved its priority of domination of the Pacific, its desire to prevent the occupation of Western Europe by the victorious Soviet Union, which is why that invasion took place so late in the war.

Today, as Great Britain prepares to leave Western Europe through Brexit, pragmatically and warmly backed by the half-Scottish President Trump who has just visited London, we prepare not for an Anglo-American invasion of Western Europe, but for an Anglo-American retreat from Western Europe. Three generations have reversed the situation of 1944, but the old relationship has been renewed. What is to come is not sure, but the hand of history is upon us.

Fr Andrew

Southern England, 6 June 2019