Category Archives: UK

Sad News and Hopeful News

The Eurozone is bankrupt, so much so that it now has to go to the inflationary last resort of printing a trillion euros (a process known by the euphemism of ‘quantitative easing’), just like the bankrupted US and the UK before it. And yet many colonized countries in the feudal Eurozone, like France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, have already been ravaged by the debt caused by printing money before, debt which they will never pay off. Much of the eastern and southern Eurozone, although much less in debt than the US and the UK which will never pay off their debt either, has become a region of inevitable emigration for the young. It has reverted to poverty beneath the austerity programmes imposed on it by Berlin, which is at the top of the feudal Fourth Reich pyramid in Europe.

In countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland especially, young people are being forced to flee abroad to seek work as wage-slaves doing jobs that local people no longer want to do. Then their governments can declare that ‘unemployment is falling’ (only because the population is falling) and the young in question can send money home to their elderly parents, thus propping up the governments. In France, governed by a supposedly Socialist regime, almost every day they pick up the frozen corpses of those who died in the streets the night before (15,000 last winter). Even in the apparently prospering UK, as in the US, tens of thousands of people are living off foodbanks in a situation unthinkable only a few years ago.

Meanwhile, in the luxury resort of Davos, outside the ravaged Eurozone, it is said that 1700 private jets have flown in many of the world’s billionaires, including the arms-dealer Poroshenko, to talk about the state of the world. Elsewhere in Europe a war between the US-financed separatist Galician junta and the Ukrainian people rages. Thousands are already dead. American arms are found by the liberators of the Ukrainian people at Donetsk Airport. Ukrainian children are dying in bombardments at the hands of that neo-Nazi puppet Poroshenko and other murderous and anti-Christian oligarchs, most of them based abroad. They are keenly supported by the grandchildren of US and Canadian Galician Nazis who guarded Auschwitz, liberated 70 years ago by heroic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians.

The US has launched anti-Russian economic sanctions and a currency war, a declaration of economic war, against Russia because the people of the Crimea massively and democratically voted to join Russia. Now, at US behest, Saudi Arabia is pumping so much oil that the oil price has fallen by over half in the last few months. The objective is to bankrupt oil-rich countries perceived by wealthy neocons in Washington as enemies – countries like Russia, but also Venezuela and Iran. The objective behind this is ‘regime-change’ – manipulating and setting up pro-Washington puppet regimes in those countries, whose natural resources can then be stripped, or, if not, simply creating chaos and mayhem in them, as has so successfully been done in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Yemen, the Sudan, Nigeria etc.

The first problem with all this is that both US-imposed sanctions and cheapened oil are more likely to bankrupt EU vassal states and even US oil corporations first. The second problem is that the US elite seems to have learned nothing from the fate of the puppet governments in the banana republics it has always created in Latin America, as well as in South Vietnam fifty years ago and in Iraq and Afghanistan ten years ago. It has forgotten that as one corrupt oligarch after another fell there, Washington had to send ever more of its young men to kill and then die there in the name of ‘freedom and democracy’, but in reality all for nothing. The result of it all is that a now bankrupt (by $17 trillion) USA is reducing itself to becoming no more than a regional power, with an economy already second to that of China.

The First World War, whose inglorious centenaries of the slaughter of the youth of Europe are being so noisily remembered just now, is commonly considered a war of futile deaths. And yet what could be more futile than the deaths of the millions of men, women and children who are dying today at the hands of pseudo-Muslim psychopaths and criminals, trained, armed and financed by the anti-Muslim West, its secret agencies and its allies? Has the West not understood that the terrorism of the pseudo-Muslim fanatics it has created in Syria and elsewhere will rebound on it again and again? In the globalized world that the West has created, it is no longer insulated from its own crimes. The secularist and atheist West has made its own worst enemies and dug its own grave for itself in its self-imposed old age.

Fortunately, outside the insular-minded West, healthy forces are gathering, not just in Russia, but in Iran, China, India, Brazil, in several Muslim countries including Turkey, as well as on the disillusioned fringes of the EU and Europe itself, in Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Greece, Serbia, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia. And those forces are all saying the same thing – enough. Thus, ignored by the enslaved Western media which has no free speech, in the Chechen capital Grozny, 800,000 Muslims and Russian Orthodox Christians march hand in hand against the Western blasphemies of spoilt infantiles. Here is hope for the future, that spiritually healthy forces worldwide will yet unite against the Great Western Apostasy, which Satan has so cunningly prepared these last thousand years. All is not yet lost.

Looking Back on Old Sourozh

These are four interview answers given to a student who is at present working on a Ph D concerning the History of the Sourozh Diocese.

Q1) The Sourozh troubles (as they have been called) are regarded as a crisis almost entirely precipitated by the arrival in the diocese of large numbers of ethnic Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. How far is this really the case or did this event merely act as catalyst to previously existing tensions in the diocese?

A1) Sourozh troubles? At the time His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II called them a ‘schism’ in public pronouncements, which I translated as the official translator. True, the crisis was precipitated by the arrival of Russian Orthodox from the ex-Soviet Union, but this was only a catalyst – its cause lay far, far deeper and had been festering for decades. The recent arrivals merely lanced the deep boil.

Essentially the whole problem was a problem of insularity, of being cut off from Russian Orthodox reality, a problem which had historical roots in the general captivity of the Church authorities in Moscow and their inability to control their own tiny Diaspora, let alone the majority of the Russian Orthodox Diaspora which belonged and belongs to a completely autonomous ROCOR. However, there was the specific case of island Britain, which was even more cut off than the rest for the usual geographical reasons, and where a personality cult had developed. So when reality struck the cloud cuckoo land of the largely exclusive, upper class Anglican-style clique/club which the rulers of the ‘Sourozh Diocese’ by the early 2000s largely were, this was a long overdue encounter with reality.

What had happened until then had resulted in the exiling (in a typically hypocritical, racist, backbiting and sending to Coventry way) of all ‘dissidents’, i. e. of all those who knew what Russian Orthodoxy was actually about and would have nothing to do with insular fantasy and the personality cult which was at the heart of the so-called Sourozh ‘Diocese’. The problem came to a head because the dissidents were no longer a small minority who could be got rid of by making them leave (and sometimes find refuge in ROCOR), but were the vast majority, composed of all the new arrivals from the ex-Soviet Union who knew what Russian Orthodoxy was actually about and rightly ‘wanted the Church back’.

In this way those who had ruled the roost in Sourozh for decades before, oppressing the faithful Russian Orthodox minority and forcing them out, suddenly themselves became the minority – and a very small one at that. Realizing that they were now cornered and had lost power, they left, as they had forced so many into doing before them. What goes round, comes round. In this way they proved the ‘big fish in a small pond syndrome’ – anyone can remain a big fish as long as they make their pond very small. And that is what they did, made a very small pond for themselves.

Of course, the trouble was that the by then free Patriarchate had allowed such a situation to develop. With many others, I too made public several articles in the early 2000s, warning and pleading with the Moscow authorities to do something about their own Church locally. They did not do anything until it was too late. I doubt whether that was deliberate policy (waiting until the troublemakers had left of their own accord), as conspiracy theorists would have it, more it was a result of inertia and above all a lack of suitable individuals in Moscow to take over (see the answer to Question 2 below). This was why the new Sourozh bishop had to be nominated by the ROCOR Archbishop Mark, who was possibly the only Russian Orthodox bishop who knew the reality of the situation.

The ultimate historical roots of the Sourozh schism lay in the Diaspora schism between the minority of Russophobic, liberal, politicized elements in the Diaspora (in Europe called Evlogians and based in Paris) and the majority of the Diaspora in ROCOR. This schism took place in London in the 1920s, as elsewhere in Europe. (Though the roots of this schism lay in turn in the liberalism, modernism and fringe Orthodoxy of pro-Revolutionary intellectuals and aristocrats in Saint Petersburg before the Revolution. It was these individuals who emigrated to Paris after 1917). After 1945 the London Evlogians returned to the Patriarchate, but mainly without enthusiasm.

The situation was then saved, from the Patriarchate’s viewpoint, by sending a young priest, precisely from Paris (the heart of the Evlogian/Saint Petersburg schism) after World War II, who would be acceptable to the London ex-Evlogians and secure the situation, so that the ex-Evlogians would not return to the Paris schism. This priest was Fr Antony Bloom, around whom, especially after his mother’s death, there grew up a unique and utterly insular personality cult. This would inevitably result in clearly predictable difficulties after his death, since the death of the subjects of personality cults always results in difficulties, as it shows that they are not immortal.

Personally, I became fully aware of this situation (I had already been disturbed by several things I had seen) only in 1976, when during a six-week study visit to Russia I saw Russian Orthodox reality. The last scales fell from my eyes and I saw how peculiar and eccentric the Sourozh Diocese was. This was reinforced after 1976 when I had contacts with ROCOR – far bigger in Britain than the Sourozh ‘Diocese’ in terms of numbers of Russians, but not in terms of English people, because Metr Antony Bloom had created a mini-diocese (‘Sourozh’) largely through some 1,000 English converts, mainly of Anglican background, to his personal and peculiar brand of Orthodoxy, and by ordaining men whom other bishops would not touch for canonical reasons – and then by living in Greece and studying at St Serge in Paris. I realized that the Russian Orthodox reality inside Russia and ROCOR were identical; it was Sourozh that was out of kilter, just like the Evlogian group based in Paris.

The last straw came in 1982 when I and my wife had personal contact with Metr Antony and we clearly realised that he was a morally compromised individual and that the whole thing was a personality cult. At the same time in 1982 the then Fr Basil Osborne, whom I had first met when he was a young deacon in 1972, told me that the clear intention of the ruling clique of liberal academics in Sourozh (mainly convert clergy) was to ‘go over to the Greeks’ as soon as Metr Antony was dead. It was at that point that I left the Sourozh diocese, as so many others before me and after me, long before 2006. It was only in 2012 that I received an apology for my treatment thirty years before from His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill in Moscow. What a disaster – the Russian Orthodox Church authorities in England had been chasing Russian Orthodox away from them!

Q2) Several priests have told me that the arrival of Metropolitan Hilarion in the diocese was the main reason that events came to a climax when they did as his short but intense sojourn in the parish polarised the debate. Is this a fair assessment?

A2) Entirely true, but again he was only a catalyst. If it had not been him, it would have been someone or something else. The polarization had always been there. And we should remember that Bp Hilarion was made bishop and sent by Moscow at the specific request of Metr Antony. However, that does not excuse Moscow. You do not send a newly-baked, very naïve, very young and very inexperienced bishop into a hornets’ nest – which is exactly what they did.

Q3) In all the documents and interviews I’ve conducted both sides accuse the other of the same methods – i. e. it is seen as a coup by small (or even miniscule, four or five people) but highly influential group who ‘masterminded’ the activities. Is this a fair assessment? It seems to me that both can’t be right?

A3) The schism was fomented by a small clique of individuals. Bp Basil as a very weak individual was as much a victim as anything else of that very small group. He had been under control for as long as his very practical wife, whom I knew well and respected, had been alive. Once widowed, he began going off the rails. Altogether 300 people left in the Sourozh schism (the other 700 or so individual whom Metr Antony had converted had very quickly lapsed, often after only a few months), but only a few, four or five, led them; most, converts and often elderly, were unconscious of the game being played with them and were deluded and therefore deserve compassion. They had been hoodwinked all along.

It is true that on the ground in London and England in general, the other side, the pro-Russian Orthodox, was also led by a very small group of individuals. However, the latter were massively supported by the whole of the Church inside Russia, all those in ROCOR in England who were conscious of the situation and above all, by the vast mass of recent arrivals from the ex-Soviet Union in England. Whether Churched or unchurched, they instinctively knew, as we had known for decades, what was right and what was wrong.

Q4) The influence from the Motherland: This spectre rides high in the belief of many of the ‘anti-Moscow’ people – e g. the Russian State (FSB) seeks to control the Russian Diaspora though the Church. It seems to me that this can’t be discounted as fantasy as the Russian State and Foreign Office does seem more interested in ‘consolidation’ of the Diaspora – and it could be argued, why shouldn’t it? Diasporas are increasingly important to every motherland these days and the Russian Diaspora punches below its weight in terms of numbers (at least in the political sphere).

A4) This is without doubt paranoid fantasy and self-justification (‘we are leaving the Russian Church because it is not politically free’). Not in the sense that there must surely be Statist/nationalist, politically-minded individuals in the Russian State/FSB/Establishment who would like to control the Russian Diaspora, but it takes two to tango. They can fantasize, but if the Diaspora does not want to play ball, their fantasies are irrelevant. And the Russian Diaspora (as is proved by the history of ROCOR both before and since 2007) does not want to be embraced by such individuals. However, as I also know from contact as an official ROCOR representative in meetings with His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill, Metr Hilarion and Archbp Innokenty (formerly in Paris) in Moscow, the Patriarchate is equally independent and utterly resistant to attempted encroachments by nationalistic individuals – it remembers the State protestantization of the Church before 1917 and does not want a repeat of that. The Church inside Russia much enjoys the freedom She has from State interference.

The people who make such fantastic statements about a Russian State ‘takeover’ are thinking in Anglican terms, in other words in terms of a State Church, founded by the State and directed by erastians. They are the ones who are not politically free and not culturally free. They are talking about themselves and indeed, such people are often Anglicans, who have little concept of how the Orthodox Church actually works. Interestingly, the Sourozh schism was taken up at the time by the British Establishment press, with newspapers like The Times and the Telegraph defending the Russophobes and making the whole story into base, simplistic tabloid-style propaganda of the cowboy sort. ‘Greek = good; Russian = bad’.

This is in tune with the whole Anglican, US and generally Western view of the Orthodox Church. In the 19th century, the Victorians already saw the Russian as bad, as propaganda for their imperialistic ‘great game’ (unheard of in Russia), of which the Western invasion of the Crimea was part. Between the 1920s and 1948 the Patriarchate of Constantinople was largely under the Anglican thumb, since 1948 and the US deposition of the legitimate Patriarch Maximos (abducted into exile in Truman’s personal presidential plane to Switzerland) and replacement by the US candidate (what better example of Western, not Orthodox, erastianism?), it has been CIA controlled. And it is to the Rue Daru branch of Constantinople that the schismatics went. The Western problem has always been that it does not control the Russian Church, hence the remarks by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Tony Blair that the Russian Church is the greatest enemy of the West. Anyone showing independence is an enemy!

Sourozh was a political plaything for the British media, just another opportunity for the British Establishment to justify its politically-motivated Russophobia. It is in the light that we should ultimately see the Sourozh schism, as playing into the hands of the Russophobic British Establishment. And it was basically carried out precisely by individuals whose sympathies were wholly with the British Establishment, including one who, to my knowledge, had worked for MI5. (I exclude the Russian paranoid fantasy that Bp Basil, as an American citizen, was a CIA agent – though you can see how some could end up thinking like that).

Immigration: The British Political Class Its Own Worst Enemy

Current political debate in the UK is focused on immigration from the EU. So the very politicians who are responsible for mass immigration, without popular consent, now outdo each other to be as anti-immigrant as possible. The infrastructure of this overpopulated little country, especially that in its south-east corner, is bursting at the seams. Huge pressures are being put on housing, transport, roads, schools and hospitals, as the population has increased by millions in just a few years and is continuing to bulge ever faster. Who is to blame? Definitely not the EU. And definitely not the immigrants themselves, who are victims, not culprits. British politicians, forbidding a democratic referendum over forty years on joining and remaining in the EU have again and again betrayed the sovereignty of the UK, selling it for the mess of pottage that is the EU empire, when its terms and conditions of membership were abundantly clear, are to blame.

Worse still – the whole Western world, which gleefully and irresponsibly bankrupted the Communist bloc by a very costly arms race and by artificially lowering oil prices (also bankrupting itself in the process, for which future generations will have to pay), is also to blame. The Western destruction of the economies of Eastern Europe, done to create new markets for Western countries, and the refusal to allow those economies to protect themselves from the ravages of the alien law of the jungle capitalism (the so-called ‘free market’, in fact debt enslavement) has had catastrophic effects on Greece, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland. Families are tragically divided, skype-mothers and fathers sadly having to leave their children, friends and homes to the care of impoverished grandparents, as the young are forced to head for wage slavery in Western Europe, to do the low-paid jobs that Western people do not want to do.

Worse still – the Western world is extending its meddling economic tyranny to the Balkans, Moldova, the Caucasus and particularly the Ukraine. Now ruled by a US-installed junta of oligarch-puppets, mostly with US or Israeli passports, led by a Mr Waltzman (who calls himself Poroshenko), the Ukraine has lost over two hundred and fifty thousand citizens this year alone. They are fleeing the civil war created by the US, which has ringed the Russian Federation with NATO bases, and its EU vassals. Ukrainians are fighting for their lives, homes and identity. Many, trying to earn more than the $100 a month which they may be lucky enough to be earning at present, are fleeing. Once the breadbasket of Europe and an industrial hub of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine has been ruined by imperialistic Western meddling and its citizens are fleeing political, social, economic and military chaos and bankruptcy for Russia or for Poland and then Western Europe.

Worse still – the Western world refuses to back away from the catastrophe that it has created, let alone take responsibility for it. Elements in the US military-industrial complex actually want to unleash not just a new Cold War, but a Third World War and are sending in warships, planes, tanks and infantry for ‘exercises’ all over Eastern Europe. As for the German-run EU, all it wants is to create new markets for German economic imperialism. December 2014 marks a turning point; either NATO will continue its aggression and preparations for war – or else we shall go towards peace. In that case Eastern Europeans will no longer be forced to uproot themselves from their ancestral homes, friends, families and way of life, as the only alternative to unemployment and food banks, and will continue to live their family life together. As for xenophobic British politicians, they will be able to stop moaning about immigration. For that they have only themselves to blame.

St Andrew’s Work

Introduction

A spectre haunts Europe. It is the spectre of freedom. From north-west Europe to south-east Europe, professional politicians of the Establishment elites are quaking: they may lose their jobs and with them all their opportunistic careerism and self-seeking will have been for nothing.

Scotland

Perhaps on orders from a worried Washington, today three English public schoolboys (in fact one a Polish Jew who attended an elite State school, but his manner is still that of an English public schoolboy) have hurried to Scotland in panic. They fear freedom and the people who may vote for freedom. Washington is worried about a new country that, initially at least, will be free of both its political and economic arm, the EU, and of its military arm, NATO. No doubt the CIA, through its poodles in England, is listening in on nationalist conversations, in the hope that it can discredit Scottish leaders. Certainly, the sight of three English public schoolboys in Scotland will bring in a great many votes for the Scottish National cause.

Together with them, all European Establishments are worried. If Scotland does opt for freedom, Wales, Northern Ireland and then at last England will also free themselves, but France, Spain and Italy, at the very least, are also directly concerned, for they too have minorities, from Brittany to Catalonia, from Lombardy to Corsica. All artificial unions are doomed to collapse, whether the Soviet Union, the British Union (UK), the European Union or the American Union (USA). The implications of freedom for Scotland are enormous; little wonder that the Westminster Establishment has scurried to Scotland. However, the more intelligent among them must realize that, whether their last-minute delaying-tactic bribes work or not, Scotland’s departure from the Union imposed on it over 300 years ago is sooner or later inevitable. The game is up.

If a yes for freedom vote is recorded, the UK will no longer exist and the British flag will seem an anachronism. But if the UK no longer exists, then we shall all be free of the EU. The absurdly-named United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP, will have to call itself what it is, the Independence Party. As for the three other political parties in England, they can then at last coalesce into one and rename themselves the single party for EU-appointed careerists and opportunists – which is what they have long been. As for a place on the UN Security Council, perhaps that absurdly biased organization can at last be restructured and places given to the countries that really matter and represent the real world: China, India, USA, Russia, Germany, Brazil and South Africa.

The Ukraine

Kiev’s rag bag ‘army’, composed for 50% of western Uniats and schismatics, and then of Nazis, criminals and US, UK and Polish mercenaries, supported by US and Mossad advisors and rockets, has failed to impose its tyranny on the eastern Ukraine. Having shot down a Boeing airliner, Kiev’s army and air force have been totally discredited. Over 3,000, mainly civilians, are dead, killed by the CIA puppet, the corrupt arms-dealing oligarch Poroshenko, now a war criminal. Even the cream of US PR men could not get him more than 25% of the vote, similar to that obtained by various other US puppets in Latin American banana republics and South Vietnam over the last 65 years. Even the EU, largely responsible for the original fiasco, is realizing that the Ukraine is just another artificial union, a conglomerate formed by the Russophobic Communist Party some 90 years ago, and now ardently defended by the West (which also founded Communism in Russia).

Novorossiya, New Russia, the southern and eastern half of the ‘Ukraine’ (in fact western Russia), the object of these terrifying Western-organized atrocities in 2014, is heading for freedom as part of the Russian Federation. So too are many in central and northern Malorossiya, though in Kiev neo-Nazi bands are still terrorizing the population who seek refuge in the Russian Federation. Carpatho-Russia, miscalled by Kiev ‘Zakarpat’e’, also wants freedom; if it does not join the Russian Federation, perhaps it will return to Slovakia or even Hungary, leaving Ukrainian persecution behind it. This leaves only Galicia, or eastern Poland, where all the troublemaking Uniats and schismatics are. It seems that President Putin would be happy for it to return to Poland, since most Galicians have nothing in common with Orthodox culture.

Moreover, Uniat persecution of the Church in the Ukraine has at last brought realism to the last few remaining ecumenist fantasists and naifs in Russia and also to those in Romania. In neighbouring Moldova the Church has taken a firm stand against the EU and its Satanism, despite the bribed pro-EU politicians there. What an example to Romania. And the EU is not having its way in Serbia and Montenegro either. Despite the presence of CIA-funded Protestant sects in the Ukraine, Moldova and Romania, the people have resisted. It may be that by the end of 2014, we shall see great political changes in Europe, both north-west and south-east.

Conclusion

Both Scotland and the Ukraine, not to mention Romania, are close to St Andrew. Let us pray to the first-called apostle that, come his feast in the secular month of December, we shall have good news in all the countries where he is venerated. Freedom is in the air and sooner or later we shall have it.

Freedom for England?

Whatever the result, the forthcoming Scottish referendum is proof of the forthcoming dissolution of the United Kingdom. Sooner or later the centralized London/Westminster British State is doomed to fail. Invented in 1707 through the bribery by London of unprincipled Scottish opportunists and careerists, the Union with Scotland (in fact the colonization of Scotland by London) cannot last and may even end in a few days’ time. Once it has ended, Northern Ireland will eventually at last be united with the rest of the island of Ireland and Wales too will throw off the colonial yoke.

Little wonder that the Westminster Establishment, shaken out of its complacency by recent polls, is now in panic and making its usual empty promises to the Scottish people. However, the real question for us is whether all of this will lead to the death of the British Establishment and at last to the freedom of England. Ever since 1066 the obsessive idea of Empire has haunted London. First England went under, then Wales, then Ireland, then Scotland. The medieval Anglo-Norman Kings were also intent on subjugating France, naturally, since they were more French than English.

However, the real and ruthless imperialism came under the Germanic Georgian usurpers and the Victorians, who were obsessed with a worldwide Britannia, an obsession which dragged us into two World Wars. Now in the 21st century it is time to give up imperial pretensions and return the lands of the Isles to their rightful status, an island archipelago off the shores of North-Western Europe, forming four independent countries, united by friendship and not political intrigue and bribery. Only freedom from the alien British Establishment and its Norman elite can bring long-awaited freedom to England.

Mr Cameron and British Values

Having realized fifty years too late that the idea of Britain is spiritually dead, having refused to do anything to save it from death and having betrayed it time and time again, it seems extraordinary that the present UK Prime Minister is now trying to do something. Defeated in elections by the anti-EU Independence Party and with 100 days to go to the Scottish referendum, when Britain (and therefore the British flag) may well be abolished, he has now suddenly taken to a love of ‘British values’.

Thus, when asked today which values he would like to see taught in UK schools, he today replied: ‘I would say freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility and respect for British institutions. Those are the sorts of things I would hope would be inculcated into the curriculum in any school in Britain’.

The problem with Mr Cameron’s ‘British values’ is that though they may still be shared by privileged Eton and Oxford Establishment types like himself, they do not mean much to ordinary people who live in the real world of today. First of all, ‘Britain’ itself is a mythical invention of the self-interested Establishment elite of the 18th to 20th centuries. In the 21st century that has little meaning. If he were to speak about English values (or Scottish or Welsh or Irish values), that might have some meaning.

Thus, what does the ‘British’ value of freedom mean in a Britain whose Establishment founded an Empire on slavery, massacre and exploitation?

What does the ‘British’ value of freedom mean in a country where 200,000 abortions – some 6 million since abortion was legalized – are carried out by the State every year?

What does the ‘British’ value of freedom mean in a country whose elite signed away its sovereignty to what is now the EU forty years ago, never allowing the people to vote on it since then?

What does the ‘British’ value of tolerance mean in a country where people are afraid to speak the truth because of the tyranny of political correctness, promoted by every ‘British’ institution, not least its tightly-controlled media?

What does the ‘British’ value of the rule of law mean in a country where we are obliged without consultation to continually meddle in, invade and destroy other countries for no reason at all, where those who oppose such invasions mysteriously die as a result of SIS actions and where our e-mails and phone calls are spied on every day by the ‘security’ services?

What does the ‘British’ value of personal and social responsibility mean in a country where the judiciary, police force, businessmen, the heads of the utility companies and politicians are vetted by the so-called ‘security’ services and are usually freemasons, a closed brotherhood which bars promotion to non-members?

What does the ‘British’ value of respect for British institutions mean in a country where all those institutions are utterly compromised by their history, whether by the ‘Enclosures’ (a legalized collectivist land grab by the rich from the poor), ‘Highland clearances’ (ethnic cleansing), colonial exploitation of Indians and Africans, compulsory deportation of the poor to the ‘colonies’, the British concentration camps of the Boer War, the slaughter of innocent youth in the First World War, the current meddling in and invasions of foreign countries and the massacres of their native populations by bomb and bullet (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya), and subsidized terrorists (Syria) and puppet regimes (the Ukraine), and the continuous lies of corrupt politicians to a people who are not allowed to vote in a system in which their vote would be represented?

Mr Cameron not only needs to define his values before he speaks, but above all he needs to start living them without hypocrisy.

Sow the Wind: Reap the Whirlwind

The present internal British political controversy about high immigration from Central and Eastern Europe into the UK raises three points.

First of all, if the UK wishes to regain its sovereignty and control its borders, it must leave the EU. It is no good being a member of a club, if you do not agree to its conditions of membership. Those conditions state that all EU countries are borderless and must accept any immigrants from any other EU country, including from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, who wish to work here. It is as simple as that. Rather than playing the xenophobia card, we would recommend that British politicians of all parties stop being hypocritical; they have constantly forbidden the British people from voting on whether they wish to be members of the EU. Since the politicians, supported by the business and financial lobby, have imposed EU tyranny on the UK for forty years despite popular outrage at the loss of freedom, they will now have to accept the consequences of their unpopularity.

Secondly, the present waves of immigration from Central and Eastern Europe into Western Europe were all predicted over 20 years ago after the fall of Communism there and in the Soviet Union. If Western Europe did not want such immigration, then it should never have fought for so many decades for the fall of that system. Although it is quite true that religious freedom was severely limited under Communism, educational and often health systems there were far better than in Western Europe today. Moreover, there was full employment, safety and cleanliness on the streets and lack of zombifying advertising. And families could stay together, rather than being scattered throughout Western Europe by their corrupt, local, EU-bribed political masters, as today. They did not want to have to emigrate, to be scattered abroad. Little wonder that throughout Central and Eastern Europe many want to return to ‘the good old days’.

Thirdly, if British politicians do not want immigration, why are they supporting the present aggressive, US-orchestrated EU crusade, working mainly by bribery, to force Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Moldova, the Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and other still free Non-EU countries to give up their freedom and accept EU slavery? Why do those politicians object when the overwhelming mass of Ukrainians reject EU tyranny and NATO threats to invade, and instead choose to keep their freedom and sovereignty – the very freedom and sovereignty that British people themselves would so much like to regain. Why do British politicians support the German move to use the Ukraine as a source of cheap labour and food, destroying family life there too, just as Germany did during the Second World War? (We pay no attention to the CIA-financed rent-a-mob pro-EU demonstrations in Kiev, so loved by the Western media).

Is it possible that all British politicians are corrupt and hypocritical short-termists, or are there among them real thinkers and people of principle? The question is open.

Thoughts on Difficulties Facing the Church outside Russia

Introduction

Of problem areas facing the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia in regions outside Russia, there now remain perhaps four of the original five. The first problem was what to do with the three tiny communities in Australia, still irregularly under the jurisdiction of the Church inside Russia, which had to be canonically unified with the far larger Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). Here the solution was simple, to hand over one community that was happy to come to ROCOR and grant temporary stavropegia (peculiar status) to the other two until they and their problems have been absorbed. What then are the other three problem areas that remain?

1. Asia

Problem One is what to do about China, if the Chinese government does after all grant freedom for Non-Western Orthodoxy in China, as we all hope. Here the problem is even greater because it is clear that at the present time, whichever hierarch is responsible for China, he will also have to be responsible for the moment for a further extension to Russian Orthodox canonical territory – in North Korea, Indo-China (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), Thailand and India. In other words, we are saying that the Russia Church may soon face the question of whom it can appoint as Metropolitan of China and beyond. However, there is perhaps an excellent candidate in Moscow, at present an Archbishop.

2. North America

In North America, the situation is far more complex since this is an area of mixed jurisdiction in which other Local Churches are present. Thus, the first problem is the much disputed autocephaly granted during the politically highly difficult Cold War period to the so-called English-speaking and new calendarist OCA (Orthodox Church in America). Controversially, its territory includes former Russian America (now Alaska) as well as Canada. Moreover, according to the Tomos of autocephaly, the Church inside Russia no longer has any right to found new parishes in North America.

Therefore, it now falls to ROCOR (not party to the Tomos) to open such new parishes and cater for the huge pastoral needs of the many new Russian Orthodox immigrants to North America, as it does already to all, of whatever nationality, who remain faithful to the Russian Orthodox Faith. In this matter ROCOR will certainly therefore need financial help from Russia. The future for the small number of parishes in North America still irregularly under the jurisdiction of the Church inside Russia, is to pass to the appropriate – and only – canonical part of the Russian Church outside Russia – that is, to ROCOR. Except for those who do not wish to go to ROCOR (like the two communities in Australia) and those whom ROCOR refuses as uncanonical (and there are some – perhaps they will join the OCA), the vast majority of parishes at present under the Church inside Russia will in time do exactly this.

This should be particularly easy in Canada, although none of this solves the problem of the huge territory granted to the OCA, including even Alaska. The OCA now also has a huge number of bishops, including four Metropolitans, yet probably numbers fewer than 30,000 active parishioners. We can only pray that in time the Church inside Russia, which is historically responsible for this situation, will find a canonical solution to it. Perhaps this will take the form of a revised Tomos, which will be canonically acceptable to all the Local Orthodox Churches.

3. Western Europe

Here is the most complex problem of all. Western Europe is not dominated by ROCOR, as Australia is, or for that matter North America. Instead the Russian Church presence here is divided into two halves, that of the canonical ROCOR and that of numerous parishes still irregularly under the Church inside Russia, even though they are outside Russia. For historical reasons it is only the German-speaking and French-speaking areas of Western Europe where ROCOR has a real presence and even here limited. Clearly, according to the Russian Orthodox canonical accords of 2007, the parishes of the Church inside Russia will have to be transferred and absorbed into the Church outside Russia with time. But how?

One of the major problems here is the weak episcopal presence on both sides, especially on the part of the Patriarchate. It urgently needs younger bishops who speak the local languages in Italy, Iberia, Scandinavia, Austria-Hungary and perhaps Benelux. It needs younger bishops who are not only bilingual, but also bicultural, thus understanding local people; the disastrous Sourozh episode of the early 2000s, of which the distracted Patriarchate in Moscow had been repeatedly alerted would happen, proves this point of the lack of understanding of the episcopate of local situations. Otherwise, it will simply be a Church of the ghetto, as ROCOR often used to be. As for ROCOR, it urgently needs a bishop in Great Britain (perhaps he could also cover Benelux, thus solving the problems of all Russian Orthodox parishes in Benelux). In Great Britain there has been no resident bishop in good health for nearly fifty years. It is a miracle that anything is left of the diocese here at all. All new bishops, of whatever background, should be trained at least to ROCOR pastoral standards.

Apart from the problems of elderly bishops or bishops who cannot communicate with and do not understand parts of their flocks, there are other Cold War canonical compromises that remain in several parishes in Western Europe which are still under the Church inside Russia – not least among these are also financial problems. However, with time, all these problems can be overcome. The absorption of these parishes into ROCOR can be managed, providing that time is taken over it.

4. Latin America

The difficulty here is that of the Great Britain Diocese writ large – the absence for many years of resident episcopal supervision. Gallantly Bishop John of Caracas carries out his duties in his now small diocese; but the horse has bolted. Meanwhile the parishes under the Church inside Russia that exist in South America have been left without a bishop at all. Latin America desperately needs bilingual Russian Orthodox Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking clergy; a dozen of them, with adequate finance, would make a huge difference. However, that is only the start, millions of Maya in Guatemala and millions of Brazilians want Orthodoxy, but there is no infrastructure to take pastoral care of them. Nowhere are problems as great as in Latin America – South, Central and North (Mexico).

Conclusion

Since the fall of atheist rule in Russia, an enormous amount has been done to sort out the problems of the Russian Church both inside Russia and, in recent years, outside Russia. However, much still remains to be done. A brief outline of the problem areas has been given above. As long as all takes place peacefully and in freedom, in due course the worldwide situation of the whole Church outside Russia, at present with over 820 parishes, many monasteries and two seminaries, will continue to improve.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Moscow, 31 May 2013

EU Independence Movements and the Future of Europe

It seems to some that the political and business elites of many European countries have over the decades sold their souls and sold out their countries for the sake of EU lucre. Today more and more believe this and are deciding to retrieve their independence and freedom. They want no more to do with a ‘Fourth Reich’, as they call it. They do not want a Germanisation of Europe, but a Europeanisation of Germany, the latter being divided into its constituents parts, instead of dominating Europe as at present. Whether the United States, whose project the EU was and is, would allow this, is another question.

In England, where the ‘Conservative’ Party which, in this as in many other areas, has not been conservative for decades, this situation has led to the rise of a political Party called the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). A new movement in Germany, Alternatives for Germany, Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD), also wants to escape from the straitjacket of the EU dystopia. Moreover, these movements are mirrored in new political parties, resistance movements and street protests in other countries in the EU, whether in Poland, Czechia, Greece, Spain, Cyprus, Italy or elsewhere.

All these new parties and protest movements face their problems and temptations, notably of falling into extremism or racism. For example, UKIP seems to want independence from Brussels and yet at the same time seems to refuse independence for Scotland. Brussels is after all only Westminster magnified, with the same anti-democratic and totalitarian ‘one size fits all’ mentality. Indeed, this Party’s error may well be in its very name, UKIP. It would perhaps be better if it were simply called the Independence Party (IP). Otherwise, it may simply be seen as a party of past-worshipping nationalists and racists.

Similarly, in Greece, the EU ‘Golden Dawn’ Opposition appears to have Fascist tendencies, in Germany AfD has been reproached as a party of academics and intellectuals, in Italy the protest movement has been accused of political irresponsibility, and so on. However, it has still not been explained why in 1975, when the UK was granted a referendum on possibly leaving the Common Market, as it then was, the vote counters were sworn to secrecy by the Official Secrets Act, and the majority in favour of remaining in it was astoundingly large. In any case it is easy to criticise the EU.

There is the obvious failure of its absurd euro project; its clear anti-democratic ethos; its openly admitted lack of transparency, especially of financial transparency. Little wonder it has been called a mafia superstate. In a global world, this EU customs union is surely totally out of date, a mere hangover from the reaction to the murderous European tribalism of the Second World War on the part of wealthy politicians who are now all retired – or should be. But what if the EU were to break up? What could it turn into? One possibility might be smaller groups of countries. For example:

A Northern European Confederation of some 140 million with Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

A Central European Confederation of some 165 million with the German Lands, France, Benelux, Switzerland, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania.

A Mediterranean European Confederation of some 185 million with France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Malta.

A Eurasian Confederation of some 350 million with the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan (the present Eurasian Union) and the other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, together with Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Greece, Cyprus, the Lebanon and Syria.

In other words we would suggest that the future of Europe may be in confederations of countries which actually have a shared history and culture, rather than in an unwieldy and centralised bureaucratic conglomerate.