Leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Asks for Boycott of All-Orthodox ‘Council’

Speaking at the Diocesan Meeting in Kiev on 28 December, Metropolitan Onuphry, the ascetic and leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (representing some 30,000,000 souls in the Church of Rus’ (75% of the whole Orthodox Church) to abstain from the forthcoming All-Orthodox Bishops’ Council. He revealed that this is currently pencilled in to take place (in a still undisclosed location) next June.

The Metropolitan noted that there had been no agreement at pre-Council meetings on issues such as the order of seniority of the Local Churches, the granting of autocephaly, the calendar and the possibility of allowing a second marriage for clergy. He said that if there is no agreement on such issues, then they should be removed from the agenda. (We should note that only certain bishops have even been consulted on the need for such a meeting, let alone on the agenda, and that many in the parishes have never even heard of this forthcoming ‘Council’; an excellent recipe for its non-reception and/or schisms). Metropolitan Onuphry stated that only where there is full agreement, that is, consensus, can such issues remain on the agenda. Otherwise there would be schisms and public disagreements at the meeting. He also mentioned the possibility of trickery, that propositions that had already been rejected would be resubmitted for signature, but in Greek, before there was time for correct translations to be made. He was also concerned that issues which had not been discussed before the meeting could be added to the agenda at the last minute, resulting in what he called ‘farce’.

He declared that the Council of Bishops of the Church would therefore discuss refusing to take part in the ‘Council’ at all. He asserted that participation could become a greater evil than refusing to participate. If a Local Church refused to take part, then such a meeting could not be considered to represent all Orthodox. Calling the so-called ‘Council’ (organized by the elderly and ill Patriarch of Constantinople, who represents only a few million Orthodox) a ‘temptation’, the Metropolitan called on us to pray to God that this temptation be removed from the Church. He added that there was no need to ‘seek a new faith, but to seek the renewal of the human-being, for our faith is holy’. Mentioning the number of saints, he said that they prove that ours is ‘a saving faith’, that we ‘do not need to seek a faith more attuned to our passions’. ‘We do not need to break our faith because of our weakness and pride, but to break ourselves by adapting ourselves to the faith’. He added: ‘God has given us the faith, let us keep it and if someone else makes another faith, then that is his problem, he will have to answer to God’.

Source:

http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2016/13/20160104/nado_vozderzhatsya_ot_uchastiya_v_etom_sobore/

Bishops of the Church of Greece Condemn the Anti-Christian EU

The extracts below show that some in Greece are at long last waking up to the inevitable destruction of their country by the EU and coming persecution. However, this is only the beginning. Other formerly Orthodox, new calendar countries like Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria, which are also selling their souls for the EU mess of pottage, failing to heed the warnings of the spiritual forces in their countries, now face having to introduce exactly the same policies as apostatic Greece just has, probably in 2016. If Montenegro, Serbia, Moldova and the Ukraine are also spiritually feeble enough to fall into EU apostasy, the first stage of which is violently enforcing the Catholic-Protestant calendar and joining the US-run NATO, they too will inevitably have to institute anti-Christian laws.

Athens, 17 December 17 2015

Metropolitan Ignatios of Larisa and Tyrnavos:

“Sin is being officially legalized in our country… Homosexuality…leads people to inevitable spiritual death… The politicians are following the stench coming from “civilized” countries which before us recognized that black is white, that bitter is sweet, and that unlawful is lawful…

Thus, “Let us attend”. “Let us lift up our hearts”. This is Orthodox Greece. This is our treasure. They envy us and intend to take this treasure from us. Let us not fall into this trap! Let us not be traitors!”

Metropolitan Pavlos of Sisanion and Siatista:

“Perhaps it is time to close our doors before those ‘politicians’ who visit us allegedly for respect, but in reality for populist purposes?

“Does anyone sincerely believe that the Church can betray its eternal values and adapt to the momentary needs of each historical era?

“The undeniable right of the Church is to bear witness to the truth. And homosexuality is inconsistent with Church life.

“Gentlemen of the government! Perhaps tomorrow you are going to demand that the Church accepts bestiality and pedophilia? Some expect that as soon as ‘the Free Cohabitation Law’ is adopted, you will be forced to legalize pedophilia.

“Europe will put pressure on you. And you are ready to do anything. Do you really think that we will ever agree with this?”

Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus:

“The adoption of the new law is officially opening the page of state persecutions against our faith. The politicians shamelessly refer to the European consensus concerning legalization of sodomy, but they conceal the fact that post-Christian Europe has become Sodom and Gomorrah. Persecutions are approaching. We will be threatened, we will be reviled, we will probably be imprisoned and murdered. But we must remain faithful even unto death. We ought to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29), remembering that In the world you shall have tribulation (Jn 16:33), because the world hates you, for the Lord has chosen you out of the world (Jn 15:18-19). And we should not forget the words: And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul (Mt 10:28).

“On behalf of the Holy Metropolis of Piraeus we officially announce to all the politicians who will vote for legalization of the moral insanity, that all contact with them will be stopped.”

Our Hope for a Russian Orthodox Church in Norwich (Update 9)

The Update

As of 1 January 2016 we are still waiting for legal documents to be exchanged for the premises we are buying in Norwich. After a three and a half month wait to receive planning permission from Norwich City Council, we have now had to wait an additional three and a half months for exactly the same organization to send our solicitor the lease. This means that the entire process has been delayed by over three months. Once we have signed for the premises and bought them, we can finally start building work to transform them into an Orthodox church. At last a permanent home for Russian Orthodoxy in Norwich after over thirty years of struggles. Thank you!

History

In the East of England there is at present only one multinational and multilingual church faithful to Russian Orthodoxy with its own urban premises. This is St John’s Church in Colchester. God willing and with your support, we have now been able to buy a second one, in Norwich, exactly 60 miles, 100 kilometres, to the north of Colchester.

Why Norwich? For the last four years I have been visiting Norwich and some of the 200 Russian Orthodox there, mainly recent immigrants from the Baltic States, especially from Estonia. I have baptized several in their homes, married couples in Colchester, buried, blessed houses, listened to confessions, visiting every few weeks, sometimes twice a month and am Orthodox chaplain at Norwich Prison.

We thought of dedicating our community to St Alexander Nevsky. We attempted to begin liturgies using the Greek Orthodox church building in Norwich, but were impeded. How are our people and English people and others interested in the witness of the Russian Orthodox Church, to be cared for pastorally? Only from a church building. And such life is required not only by Russian speakers, but also by Romanian, Bulgarian and English Orthodox. Most of our regular parishioners, only one of whom has a car, live within easy walking distance of this building.

On Friday 8 May, Fr Andrew saw a leasehold property for sale on the rightmove website for £50,000 at 134, Oak Street, Norwich. It measures 88 square metres externally and is at present used as offices and rooms for a cultural centre. It has electricity, heating and water and is in very good condition. It is so cheap because it is leasehold, in other words, you have to pay £100 rent per month for the ground it is built on. This amount is fixed until 2032. The lease itself is even longer – it lasts until 2047.

On Wednesday 13 May we organized a visit to these premises, attended by 9 local Russian Orthodox.

By Friday 15 May, Orthodox in Norwich had generously promised to donate £5,250.

On Monday 18 May Fr Andrew received Archbishop Mark’s blessing to buy the building if possible, meaning we could start obtaining pledges to donate.

On Thursday 21 May we heard from the surveyor that it would cost £3,000-£5,000 to knock down the internal walls and make good the floor and ceiling, so we could use this building as a church. This was lower than Fr Andrew had estimated.

On Wednesday 27 May we heard that our offer of £42,500 had been accepted. However, since conversion and furnishing costs will come to £12,500, this meant that we would need £55,000 in all.

On Friday 29 May we submitted the planning application for change of use from offices to a place of worship. This, we were told then, would take at least 6-8 weeks but should result in a positive answer.

On Wednesday 3 June we launched an internet appeal for £55,000 in order to set up our own church in Norwich.

By Wednesday 29 July, eight weeks after the appeal launch, total gifts and pledges had reached £55,000.

On Tuesday 29 September, after over three and a half months!, we finally received planning permission to convert the building into an Orthodox church.

A New Year Message: Flee Extremes!

One of my favourite photographs in our Church hall shows the Serb St Justin of Chelije standing side by side with the Romanian Fr Cleopa (Ilie). The former lived and became a saint on the old calendar. The latter, his saintly fellow-ascetic, lived on the new calendar. Despite his views that this calendar was an error, he naturally, as all must, preferred humble obedience to the pride of schism. The photograph shows the balance that I have always sought, away from the ridiculous extremes of the trolls, be they naïve and deluded amateurs or paid and hardened professionals. Although I have only ever seen physical violence from two old calendarists, it is today the new calendarist ones who are the most violent verbally, even to the point of issuing a death-threat. It is interesting that such people call themselves Orthodox Christians!

Looking back at controversies in the USA in the late sixties, seventies and onwards, the state of polarization between those on the old calendar and the new calendar made such photographs and such harmony impossible. Why? Because of extremism, that is, not so much because of the old calendar and the new calendar as because of old calendarism and new calendarism. The dread isms again. In the 70s and 80s I met representatives of the two groups, who summed up the two extremes for me. One was Bishop Gregory (Grabbe), an old calendarist. I met him and discovered in him an incredible and depressing negativity. He later died tragically, in a sect outside the Church. The other was Fr Alexander Schmemann, a new calendarist. I met him in 1980 when he was dressed as an American businessman and discovered that he was a chain-smoker who was not strong-willed enough to give up the deadly habit.

The old calendarist tendency was profoundly negative and gloomy, indeed depressing. It appeared to have no hope, mankind was doomed, almost Calvinistically. (And Calvin is a heretic). Everything new was bad, mankind faced the Apocalypse tomorrow. Possible salvation could come only through hiding out in ghettos. For the rest of the world there was only criticism and censorious condemnation; conspiracy theories thrived. This was the ideology of the sect and the pharisee. The attitude to regular communion was singularly negative – only with the strictest preparation could it possibly be contemplated. I remember well being told that I was unacceptable to membership of such groups – apart from being the wrong nationality (!), I was too young and too well-educated. Two cardinal sins, ‘unforgivable’, as one such senior and very elderly ‘Christian’ said to me in 1986! I was certainly destined for hellfire.

The new calendarist tendency was over-positive and over-optimistic to the point of fantasy. Everything was possible, the modernist fantasy of salvation for all (the heresy of Origenism, so beloved of Protestants claiming to be Orthodox) was on the agenda; no room for gloom and doom here. With an unreal ideology, it was over-open to the world, wanting somehow wanting to merge the Church with it, it was ecumenically-minded, wanted to revolutionize and change everything and had only spite for those who thought otherwise. The attitude to communion was singularly positive – it was more or less open to all without any preparation at all. I remember being welcomed on first meeting members of such groups – I was young and well-educated. As to whether I believed in anything, that seemed to be totally irrelevant. Far from the dark, all was light. With them I was certainly destined for heaven.

The two things that both tendencies had in common were intolerance and narrow-mindedness.

Looking back, as a Non-American, ironically I see in the culture of Bishop Gregory (Grabbe) and Fr Alexander Schmemann, both apparently Russians, the extremes of American culture. Bishop Gregory appeared not so much to represent Russian Orthodoxy as New England doom and gloom Calvinism (Let us remember that the Calvinists left England because of their intolerance). The world was predestined to perish and there was no hope. Ahead there was only darkness. Fr Alexander, as his Swiss cousin, a faithful of ROCOR, said to me in 1989, had ‘become a Protestant’. For him, in typical 60s, Kennedy-like fashion, the future was with the young and everything was possible for such ‘All-Americans’, as can be heard in SVS recordings of the time. Sometimes Fr Alexander sounded like a US self-help manual: ‘Just do it’ seemed to be his slogan.

All of this was alien to sceptical Europeans who found such Americans naïve and extreme. Fortunately, both tendencies are now dying out, apart from among the to be ignored, anonymous trolls, as we mentioned above. Thus, the extremist fringes and margins of the Church Outside Russia, infected by old calendarist sectarianism, have gone, just as the extremist fringes and margins of the Orthodox Church in America are apparently being buried with the plastic 1960s, where they came from. The Church, now in unity with the freed Church inside Russia, has moved on and both extremes now seem hopelessly old-fashioned, museum-pieces, indeed, totally irrelevant to the new generations.

The extremes forgot that Christ is both the Merciful Saviour and the Just Judge, that both Truth and Mercy are met together (Ps 84, 11). To the old calendarists let us recall that we are called to save the one lost sheep among the ninety-nine (Luke 15), that, as the proverb says, it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness, that repentance happens even on the death-bed, for God does not want the death of a sinner (Ezekiel 33, 11) and with Him all things are possible (Luke 18). To the new calendarists let us recall that death is the one thing inevitable, that the Apocalypse and the Second Coming are drawing closer with the passing of every single day, that the Last Judgement will certainly follow and that not all will be saved, for not all will repent.

2016 Words for 2016: On New Year’s Eve Our Future Hope is Imperial

The Romans…the bandits of the whole world…their greed is excited by an enemy’s wealth, their lust for power by his poverty…robbery, butchery, rape…they create devastation and call it peace.

Words attributed by Tacitus to the British leader Calcagus, after his defeat by the Romans at the Battle of Mons Graupius in AD 84

Introduction: The Last Twenty-Five Years

Many were deluded by the collapse of Communism twenty-five years ago, indeed so blinded that they could not see the ensuing and still impending chaos caused by the hubristic attempt of the USA to rule the world. Their Western vanity flattered, the deluded actually still believe in the myth of American Imperialism, ‘the New World Order’, that ‘liberal-democratic’ secularism has triumphed over all other ideologies and faiths. They actually believe that history has ended, that the global future is with the Imperialism of Washington and its absurd materialist ideology – ‘The West is Best over the Rest’. They have failed to revise their views and still now actually believe that there is no alternative to their primitive, spiteful, soul-destroying and world-destroying fantasy.

In reality, the anti-Christian Zionist elite which bankrupted Communism, through its ability to indebt and so enslave to bankers the peoples that it oppresses, failed many years ago. Its New World Order has become the New World Disorder, in North Africa, the Middle East and now Europe. As Russian aeroplanes and Chinese troops enter Syria, it is already dead. Although that Imperialist elite still governs the US and its bloc of vassal-states, it is utterly discredited. It is not only utterly immoral through its Mammonism, but its global power-grab has visibly ended in catastrophe. Instead of peace and prosperity, it has brought to the world unspeakable wars and misery, exploitation and environmental destruction, chaos and spiritual poverty, as well as uprooting hundreds of millions of families from their ancestral homes worldwide. And this devastation they do indeed call peace. The Imperialist elite has brought not life but death, with the apocalyptic threat of Armageddon in the background.

However, there are those who have not been deluded by the toys and baubles, bread and circuses, of globalist Consumerism and have not given up the struggle to find an alternative. They have sought a way out – though often by violent reaction to Western genocide some of them have also made the most appalling errors. For example, by reaction to global Western Imperialism, fanatical Islamists have turned to the horrors and abominations of terrorism. Nobody in their right mind admires or follows such Satanized individuals. They do not understand that further destruction is no response to destruction, that only construction is positive. Others, also by reaction to the selfsame globalism, have turned to narrow and provincial nationalism, failing to realize that in a globalized world, no small or even large nation can stand alone against the powers that be. United we stand, divided we fall.

Such is the fate of those in European countries who want to reclaim their sovereignty, resisting and abandoning the death-giving embrace of the Imperialist EU beast. For example, there are now strong nationalist political movements in the UK, France, Greece, Hungary, Poland and in many other countries on other continents, as in India and China. In Europe they do not understand that standing alone they will be crushed by the EU tyranny, behind which stands its parent, the Washington elite. In India and China they do not understand that, despite their size, they are still provincial, lacking global reach. However, if the ‘liberal-democratic’ myth of the West can be rejected as the failure that it is, together with the horrors of Islamist terrorism and the provinciality of narrow nationalism, even if that nationalism is on a sub-continental scale like the Hindu or the Chinese, what hope then is left?

The Alternative

Clearly, any hope that is left can only be something that is not immoral like Western Imperialism, that is not violent like Islamism, and that is not provincial like European nationalism, anti-Christian Hinduism or Chinese Communism. We would suggest that what is left can be summed up not by the word ‘Imperialism’, but by its opposite, the word ‘Imperial’. This may seem mystifying, since for many the two words mean the same thing and in any case ‘all empires are destined to fail’. History indeed tends to confirm the latter statement: the Persian, the Egyptian, the Macedonian, the pagan Roman, the ‘Holy Roman’, the Ottoman, the French, the British, the Soviet and many another Empire all rose and then fell.

However, the fact is that all who were not part of such passing Empires had to become their vassals or allies and were obliged to accept their policies. Such is the case today with the EU Fourth Reich (Reich = Empire), which crushes national sovereignty and obliges its members to do whatever its Imperialist US designers order it to do. Today’s ‘democracies’ in Western Europe are so weak that they must obey their Imperialist masters in Berlin and Washington. In the same way Hitler’s Third Reich smashed all the European ‘democracies’ and only another Empire, the Soviet, was able to overcome it, in the same way as only the Russian Empire had been able to overcome Hitler’s predecessor, Napoleon’s Empire.

In other words, only a powerful Empire can withstand another powerful Empire. We can see this today; no European ‘democracy’ has been able to withstand the Globalist Empire of Washington, they have all fallen to it one by one. Today, for instance, once Orthodox Christian but now apostatic Greece has allowed homosexual ‘marriage’, just as Montenegro is being forced by violence to join NATO and the occupied Ukraine is being tempted by its temporary government into the vulgar consumerism and profoundly ungay ‘gay’ parades of American Imperialism. Other countries, like India and China, merely resist that Imperialism in nationalistic words, but in fact imitate it from inside.

In fact, only one country, and one which does indeed have an Imperial, that is, multinational, profile resists and refuses to become a US vassal, and that is the Russian Federation, one eighth of the world. It alone has been strong enough to rebuff without either fanaticism or provincial nationalism. Western Imperialist meddling, which destroys national traditions and identities, local cultures and family life, provoking chaotic conflicts and bloody wars with its attempted imposition of the global MacWorld ‘culture’ of the ‘New World Order’ or ‘New World War’. It has done this on the basis of Christianity. Only that Christianity, restored as a Christian Empire, based in Russia, can resist – on condition, however, that its Imperial Empire does not fall into Imperialism, as it tended to do before the Revolution. Let us explain.

The globalist ‘New World Order’ is not democratic at all, that is a myth. It is in fact the dictatorship of an oligarchic elite, artificially divided into two parts, so providing the myth of democratic choice. It runs political parties, industries, banks, the media, the whole Establishment, and threatens those who counter it. Founded on the genocide of millions of Native Americans, the abhorrent slave trade in millions of Native Africans, a genocidal civil war, the bloodshed of two World Wars and the countless local wars of the twentieth century, it is trying to control the world. It subjugates peoples and countries by military aggression, colour revolutions, juntas and propaganda lies, ‘banana republicanizing’ by using local mafia networks to support itself and living off the resulting chaos. This is Imperialist – not Imperial.

For the mark of Imperialism, colonial or neo-colonial, is the suppression of local cultures and the genocide of peoples who resist the monoculture that it imposes. However, the one Empire that has lasted by far the longest has been Imperial, that is multinational and indeed multi-religious, accepting diversity. Quite different from the pagan Roman Empire, this is the Christian Roman Empire. Founded in the early fourth century in New Rome, it continued until it was interrupted by decadent Greek nationalism in 1453, then soon after restored in the Third Rome until it was interrupted by decadent Russian nationalism in the early twentieth century. Its restoration is now under way. It has survived interruptions precisely because, despite deviations in periods of decadence, it has not been based on Imperialism, but has been Imperial, that is, it has been founded on the Christian revelation of the Holy Trinity, unity in diversity.

Conclusion: The Next Twenty-Five Years?

Only in the framework of the Imperial and Trinitarian concept can sovereignty and ethnic differences be combined and the identity of diverse peoples be protected from corrosive, centralizing Imperialist globalism, terrorism and provincial nationalism. Such globalism was precisely the error of the neo-Khazar Bolshevik Empire, which lasted scarcely three generations because it was based on genocide as it imposed a single centralized model on Central Asians, Eastern Europeans, Baltic peoples, Finns and Ukrainians alike. The question of the restoration of the Russian Empire is vital to preserving the national identities of a hundred and more peoples, not least that of Little Russians. The alternative is that they all become second-class citizens, cannon fodder and pawns in the game of chaos of American Imperialism, as we can see is happening to Ukrainians, Syrians, Libyans, Iraqis, Afghans, Mexicans and many other peoples worldwide.

The fact is that the Russian Federation is today the only country in the world which is defending Christian values. And this despite, or rather because of, the fact that twenty-five years ago it lived under the oppression of an imported atheist regime which was responsible for the multi-millioned martyrdom of Christians, by far the greatest known to history, and despite the fact that it is still suffering from the dreadful though now dying hangover of that atheism. This miracle has always been ignored by the Western world. Why? Because that world is in fact by ideology anti-Christian, having violently quit the Church 1,000 years ago. That is why all surviving remnants of authentic Christianity among the non-deluded peoples of the Western world look to the Russian Orthodox Church with hope. That is also why Russia is hated by the Trostskist post-modernist ideology of the Western liberal-neocon elite and is slandered by its closely-controlled media. For them ugliness has become beauty, noise has become music, discord has become harmony and lies have become truth.

An Imperialist Empire, in words first uttered by the Victorian Imperialist Palmerston, has ‘no permanent friends, only permanent interests’. However, an Imperial Empire does have friends, for it is a symphony of peoples, cultures and beliefs; but it needs an Emperor and that is what is lacking in the still post-Soviet Russian Federation today. Why? Firstly, because only an Emperor can act as the unique focus of belief and so channel his subjects, elite and people alike, into the service of the Empire. Secondly, because only an Emperor can control and limit the oligarchs or aristocrats and stop them becoming too powerful and so tyrannizing and exploiting the people. And thirdly, because only an Emperor can act as the unique commander-in-chief in the event of war.

As to who will become the Emperor of the restored Christian Empire that alone can restrain growing evil worldwide, we do not know. Only Providence can reveal him after repentance of the whole people. What we know is that only an Emperor, in the name of his repentant Orthodox people, can prove the Imperial truth that ‘Right is Might’ and disprove the Imperialist lie that ‘Might is Right’. The peoples of the Russian Federation, like all other peoples all over the world, have a choice to make: to subject themselves to barbaric Imperialism and accept the same fate as Yugoslavs, Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians, or else to unite and repent. If so, then we can await with hope the Emperor who will restore and defend Imperial Christianity, authentic Christianity, soaring like the double-headed eagle above East and West alike. And that is why, unlike unfaithful, compromised, Establishment Halfodox, all faithful Orthodox, wherever we live scattered across the face of the earth, are Imperial.

America Is Being Destroyed By Problems That Are Unaddressed

By Paul Craig Roberts

One hundred years ago European civilization, as it had been known, was ending its life in the Great War, later renamed World War I. Millions of soldiers ordered by mindless generals into the hostile arms of barbed wire and machine gun fire had left the armies stalemated in trenches. A reasonable peace could have been reached, but US President Woodrow Wilson kept the carnage going by sending fresh American soldiers to try to turn the tide against Germany in favor of the English and French.

The fresh Amerian machine gun and barbed wire fodder weakened the German position, and an armistance was agreed. The Germans were promised no territorial losses and no reparations if they laid down their arms, which they did only to be betrayed at Versailles. The injustice and stupidity of the Versailles Treaty produced the German hyperinflation, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Hitler.

Hitler’s demands that Germany be put back together from the pieces handed out to France, Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, comprising 13 percent of Germany’s European territory and one-tenth of her population, and a repeat of French and British stupidity that had sired the Great War finished off the remnants of European civilization in World War II.

The United States benefitted greatly from this death. The economy of the United States was left untouched by both world wars, but economies elsewhere were destroyed. This left Washington and the New York banks the arbiters of the world economy. The US dollar replaced British sterling as the world reserve currency and became the foundation of US domination in the second half of the 20th century, a domination limited in its reach only by the Soviet Union.

The Soviet collapse in 1991 removed this constraint from Washington. The result was a burst of American arrogance and hubris that wiped away in over-reach the leadership power that had been handed to the United States. Since the Clinton regime, Washington’s wars have eroded American leadership and replaced stability in the Middle East and North Africa with chaos.

Washington moved in the wrong direction both in the economic and political arenas. In place of diplomacy, Washington used threats and coercion. “Do as you are told or we will bomb you into the stone age,” as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told President Musharraf of Pakistan. Not content to bully weak countries, Washington threatens powerful countries such as Russia, China, and Iran with economic sanctions and military actions.

Consequently, much of the non-Western world is abandoning the US dollar as world currency, and a number of countries are organizing a payments system, World Bank, and IMF of their own. Some NATO members are rethinking their membership in an organization that Washington is herding into conflict with Russia.

China’s unexpectedly rapid rise to power owes much to the greed of American capitalism. Pushed by Wall Street and the lure of “performance bonuses,” US corporate executives brought a halt to rising US living standards by sending high productivity, high value-added jobs abroad where comparable work is paid less. With the jobs went the technology and business knowhow. American capability was given to China. Apple Computer, for example, has not only offshored the jobs but also outsourced its production. Apple does not own the Chinese factories that produce its products.

The savings in US labor costs became corporate profits, executive renumeration, and shareholder capital gains. One consequence was the worsening of the US income distribution and the concentration of income and wealth in few hands. A middle class democracy was transformed into an oligarchy. As former President Jimmy Carter recently said, the US is no longer a democracy; it is an oligarchy.

In exchange for short-term profits and in order to avoid Wall Street threats of takeovers, capitalists gave away the American economy. As manufacturing and tradeable professional skill jobs flowed out of America, real family incomes ceased to grow and declined. The US labor force participation rate fell even as economic recovery was proclaimed. Job gains were limited to lowly paid domestic services, such as retail clerks, waitresses, and bartenders, and part-time jobs replaced full-time jobs. Young people entering the work force find it increasingly difficult to establish an independent existence, with 50 percent of 25-year old Americans living at home with parents.

In an economy driven by consumer and investment spending, the absence of growth in real consumer income means an economy without economic growth. Led by Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve in the first years of the 21st century substituted a growth in consumer debt for the missing growth in consumer income in order to keep the economy moving. This could only be a short-term palliative, because the growth of consumer debt is limited by the growth of consumer income.

Another serious mistake was the repeal of financial regulation that had made capitalism functional. The New York Banks were behind this egregious error, and they used their bought-and-paid-for Texas US Senator, whom they rewarded with a 7-figure salary and bank vice chairmanship to open the floodgates to amazing debt leverage and financial fraud with the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

The repeal of Glass-Steagall destroyed the separation of commercial from investment banking. One result was the concentration of banking. Five mega-banks now dominate the American financial scene. Another result was the power that the mega-banks gained over the government of the United States. Today the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve serve only the interests of the mega-banks.

In the United States savers have had no interest on their savings in eight years. Those who saved for their retirement in order to make paltry Social Security benefits liveable have had to draw down their capital, leaving less inheritance for hard-pressed sons, grandsons, daughters and granddaughters.

Washington’s financial policy is forcing families to gradually extinguish themselves. This is “freedom and democracy “ America today.

Among the capitalist themselves and their shills among the libertarian ideologues, who are correct about the abuse of government power but less concerned with the abuse of private power, the capitalist greed that is destroying families and the economy is regarded as the road to progress. By distrusting government regulators of private misbehavior, libertarians provided the cover for the repeal of the financial regulation that made American capitalism functional. Today dysfunctional capitalism rules, thanks to greed and libertarian ideology.

With the demise of the American middle class, which becomes more obvious each day as another ladder of upward mobility is dismantled, the United States becomes a bipolar country consisting of the rich and the poor. The most obvious conclusion is that the failure of American political leadership means instability, leading to a conflict between the haves—the one percent—and the dispossessed—the 99 percent.

The failure of leadership in the United States is not limited to the political arena but is across the board. The time horizon operating in American institutions is very short term. Just as US manufacturers have harmed US demand for their products by moving abroad American jobs and the consumer income associated with the jobs, university administrations are destroying universities. As much as 75 percent of university budgets is devoted to administration. There is a proliferation of provosts, assistant provosts, deans, assistant deans, and czars for every designated infraction of political correctness.

Tenure-track jobs, the bedrock of academic freedom, are disappearing as university administrators turn to adjuncts to teach courses for a few thousand dollars. The decline in tenure-track jobs heralds a decline in enrollments in Ph.D. programs. University enrollments overall are likely to decline. The university experience is eroding at the same time that the financial return to a university education is eroding. Increasingly students graduate into an employment environment that does not produce sufficient income to service their student loans or to form independent households.

Increasingly university research is funded by the Defense Department and by commercial interests and serves those interests. Universities are losing their role as sources of societal critics and reformers. Truth itself is becoming commercialized.

The banking system, which formerly financed business, is increasingly focused on converting as much of the economy as possible into leveraged debt instruments. Even consumer spending is reduced with high credit card interest rate charges. Indebtedness is rising faster than the real production in the economy.

Historically, capitalism was justified on the grounds that it guaranteed the efficient use of society’s resources. Profits were a sign that resources were being used to maximize social welfare, and losses were a sign of inefficient resource use, which was corrected by the firm going out of business. This is no longer the case when the economic policy of a counry serves to protect financial institutions that are “too big to fail” and when profits reflect the relocation abroad of US GDP as a result of jobs offshoring. Clearly, American capitalism no longer serves society, and the worsening distribution of income and wealth prove it.

None of these serious problems will be addressed by the presidential candidates, and no party’s platform will consist of a rescue plan for America. Unbridled greed, short-term in nature, will continue to drive America into the ground.

A New Generation

Introduction

News from Moscow over the last two weeks has brought word that two figures who have figured quite prominently in Church life in Russia over the last generation have effectively been sacked from their posts. One of them is Sergei Chapnin and the other, bearing almost the same surname, is Fr Vsevolod Chaplin. As one of the few – I hesitate to say the only person – in England who knew them both, perhaps I should express some view on what lies behind their dismissal.

Sergei Chapnin

Sergei Chapnin was a Church journalist, the editor of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, an official publication of the Patriarch. When I first met him, in 1997, he was a young convert, zealous but not yet stable in the Faith. Meeting him a second time, ten years later, he had come to prominence, but his Faith, as that of some intellectual converts can do, had already by then taken, to put it mildly, a liberal turn, putting him at the margins of the Church.

Sadly, in the last few years, he had become quite notorious and there had been at least one petition asking for his removal on account of personal views which less and less represented the views of the Church. His increasing modernism and ecumenism and finally, his views expressed only weeks ago in a forum sponsored by the US Embassy, notorious for its attempts to undermine and protestantize the Russian Orthodox Church, were the last straw. He now has time for repentance and so the opportunity to reintegrate the mainstream of the Church, returning from his errors.

Fr Vsevolod Chaplin

Fr Vsevolod was for a generation more or less a spokesman for the Church and a prominent member of a host of committees where he represented the Church’s views on political affairs. Obviously, such a sensitive position brought temptations and dangers, particularly the risk of secularization, seen for example, in his smoking, never a good sign in a priest. Speaking to Fr Vsevolod eight years ago, I became aware of a strong, indeed, militant personality. It is this that has been his downfall.

His lack of sensitivity on problems in the Ukraine and in Syria upset many in the Church. Priests in Belarus called for his dismissal, as he was upsetting the faithful there and he also disturbed many in both the Ministry of the Interior and the Foreign Ministry with his description of Russian military action in Syria as a ‘sacred war’. The fact is that Fr Vsevolod was more and more becoming a Russian nationalist, forgetting that the Russian Church, unlike the other, much smaller Local Orthodox Churches, represents over 60 different nationalities. Russia is an Imperial Power, not a nationalist Power.

Maturity

In the dismissal of both these figures we see the growing maturity of Church life inside Russia, the awareness that marginal views, expressed freely in the 1990s and early 2000s, have now been outgrown. A generation has now passed since the collapse of atheism as a State ideology in Russia. The Church has moved on there in the same way as outside Russia Russian Church life has matured since the battles between 1965 and 2005, when there were disputes between sectarian old calendarists and equally sectarian new calendarists. The extremes fell away and where they have not, they are falling away. Maturity has come; the growing pains are over.

Outside Russia, in the emigration, the old generation of marginals and fringe figures began dying out in the 1980s. Today, those who are left are very elderly, in their 80s and 90s. Some of these were figures compromised in some way with Western Establishments and their baggage. Some were even connected with Western spy services, or at least, they swallowed Western propaganda whole and parroted it without any kind of critical intelligence. In England they made themselves beloved of Establishment institutions like the Church of England, The Times and the BBC, for example.

A second, ‘spiritual’, group was composed of fantasists, linked with perennialism, theosophy, Hinduism, Sufism. All these wore the Emperor’s New Clothes and few had the honesty to criticize their wayward books, which were often unreadable. A third group was notorious for its corruption, either financial or else sexual. I remember one naïve convert proposing the canonization of one such individual. He was dumbfounded when I asked him if we should canonize his mistresses as well. Homosexual mafias abounded in certain small jurisdictions and, sadly, there were two pedophile bishops among them – both converts from Anglicanism, where pedophilia abounds.

Conclusion

We feel that 2016 is bringing a new generation. A new time is coming. Those who have been frustrated for decades by those who held on to power for too long are now coming to the fore, whether in the Russian Church or in the small Local Churches. Those formed by the modernism of the 1950s and 1960s and have failed to adapt have missed the boat. This is now becoming apparent as the Local Churches prepare for some sort of Inter-Orthodox consultation in the coming years. Billed as ‘The 2016 Council’, no-one is sure if, when or where it will take place, since there has been no agreement even on the agenda. At long last the new generation is having its word to say and we shall not fall silent. The time for the extremists is over; the time for the mainstream is here.

Note:

Is it perhaps apt that the 500th article on this blog should concern the passing of the old and the coming of the new?

One Thousand Words on 2016

As 2015, with its interminable wars, terrorist horrors and torrents of wretched refugees, the results of rapacious Western invasions of countries which the West itself created by its abandonment of Christ’s commandment to love our neighbour, draws to an end, what hopes are there for 2016? Many are downcast and have little hope in the darkness, fearing yet another worldwide conflagration through the apostasy expressed in the anti-Christian New World Order imposed by genocide a generation ago. However, for those of us who are Christians, there is always hope in the darkness, for we know that if we pray and do our best, the rest is in God’s hands. And with Him what is impossible for mankind can become possible.

In Muslim countries where disastrous chaos and rage for revenge have been generated by the injustices of the Western Powers, there seems to be little cause for hope. In Iraq and Afghanistan the chaos-creating forces of NATO were routed by the Taliban and had to abandon their lost wars. They were evacuated to their distant homelands, having in vain sacrificed thousands of lives and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, leaving only darkness. In Libya, its government overthrown by Western greed and injustice under the cloak of ‘humanitarian intervention’, there reigns chaos and bloodshed. In Turkey, its authoritarian and warlike regime being provoked to war by NATO, but also threatened by Russian sanctions and full-scale civil war with the Kurds, the future seems bleak. But this darkness is only part of the story.

In Syria, the government of President Assad has invited Russian support to defeat the Muslim terrorists, founded and until recently fully supported by the Western Powers. There is now cause for hope as the first areas have been liberated and refugees are returning. In the Ukraine, with the Fascist regime in Kiev bankrupt and unable to pay its international debts, there is hope that freedom will come to that sorry land, perhaps within only a few months, and millions of refugees will be able to return home. Meanwhile, spiritually healthy forces in Serbia, Montenegro and Moldova are fighting off quisling governments and NATO and EU colonialism. Much the same is happening in Central Asia, Georgia and Armenia.

‘Defend yourself in the West and find friends in the East’, said St Alexander Nevsky over 750 years ago. Thus, China and Russia have allied themselves after both became the victims of wild US aggression. Both countries are resisting the New World Order of the Zionist neocons and, together with them are allied India, much of the rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America, all the former Western colonies. These are all rejecting the US dollar as a currency. Only the crazed apostate leaders of the Western world, with their Israeli and Sunni vassals in Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, are still fully enslaved to the Machiavellian Prince of this world.

Throughout Eastern Europe, in the Baltic States, the Czech Lands, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, the peoples with the free governments, though not with corrupt puppet governments, are resisting EU tyranny and the Muslim invasion. Even in Western Europe, in France, Spain, Italy, the UK and Denmark, there are everywhere forces for national sovereignty and restoration that are at last waking up and wanting to return to their cultural roots. They say, ‘Enough, we want our countries back’. Such national liberation and globalist resistance movements, wishing to restore their countries’ sovereignty, look to Sovereign Russia for support.

Spiritually there are small numbers of heterodox in Western Europe who are at last awakening to Orthodoxy. They are finally realizing that the remnants of Orthodoxy in the West, in the form of Catholicism, have been so debilitated by filioquization (which makes the Church into a purely thisworldly institution, subjecting God to fallen human nature) and then by the virus of Protestantism and its Old Testament moneymasters, that they cannot return to the Church en masse. They must now make their path to the Church and so national restoration through personal repentance.

In the Church world, we prepare for the 2016 ‘Council’, much-feared since Washington has been trying to impose its agenda through its pawns, the State Department-appointed bishops and their paid hirelings. Here too there is good news. On 21 December Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church, three-quarters of the Church and the only part that is completely free, stated categorically that our Church will hearken to the voice of the people, the guardians of the Faith, and will resist any attempt at apostasy from the Christian Faith.

If this so-called Council does take place (no-one is yet sure exactly where or when), this guarantees that it will be the opposite of the Vatican’s masonic Council over fifty years ago, it will be the affirmation of the Faith, not its rejection. And in that case it will be a real Council, a Council of St John the Baptist, a last rallying call to the whole world to enter the Church to fight against the world’s preparations for Antichrist. And if the secular-minded do attempt to corrupt the Faith, then either no ‘Council’ will take place or else this second ‘Council of Florence’ will be rejected by the boycott of the faithful clergy and people.

Thus, although there is much darkness in the world, there are also glimmers of light, indeed, the promise of brightness for ‘those that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death’. For now we repeat the words of the Prophet and Forerunner: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’ and we say to the Pharisees and Saducees: ‘O generation of vipers, who has warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’ Unlike the renovationist ‘infil-traitors’ of the fifth column, there are those of us who fear nothing and will resist to the end in faithfulness to Christ and His Church, whatever the cost. For we shall win in the end, make no mistake.

The Emperor is Coming: Orthodox Christians, Make Ready!

The Visionless

I remember in the 1970s, both in England and France, meeting certain Soviet-conditioned members of the ‘Patriarchate of Moscow’ who were either Paris-style renovationists or else Soviet nationalists. According to the latter the atheist Bolsheviks had never persecuted the Church and were heroes. Trapped in their narrow thought-world, they had no concept of the multinational reality of the Russian Church and Her leadership of the rest of the Orthodox world, and indeed they even deliberately cut themselves off from the mass of the Russian Church outside the Soviet Union, which had preserved pre-Revolutionary Russian Orthodox reality. Buried in the life of the Soviet Union, they had no vision of our coming Christian Empire and the spiritual authority of our coming Christian Emperor.

At the same time, I also met certain members of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) who were either sectarian-minded Russophobes or else lived in cultural nostalgia for an irretrievable past. Trapped in their narrow thought-world, they had no concept of the multinational reality of the Russian Church and Her leadership of the rest of the Orthodox world, and indeed they even deliberately cut themselves off from the Russian Church inside the Soviet Union, which contained post-Revolutionary Russian Orthodox reality. Buried in the past, which had been lost because of ‘traitors, cowards and deceivers’ before the pre-1917 Christian Emperor, nostalgists and sectarians alike had no vision of our coming Christian Empire and the spiritual authority of our coming Christian Emperor.

At that time, I also met intellectuals from the other much smaller Local Orthodox Churches. Here were fringe elements who formed the renovationist fifth column in the Church, Balkan nationalists, apostate Paris Russians, with their anti-Incarnational freemasonry, hypnotism, occultism and Hinduism, and converts from Establishment Anglicanism. They had all sided with the millennial apostasy of the West. Trapped in their disincarnate perennialist dreams, they had no vision of our coming Christian Empire and the spiritual authority of our coming Christian Emperor. These individuals were set on a course of Uniatization of the Orthodox Church by cunning and stealth, well-known ‘theologians’ and bishops among them, and they have committed ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’, which is leading them to full apostasy.

The Envisioned

However, among all these three groups, there were many who had the vision. Thus, in what was then called the Patriarchate of Moscow, there were those patriots of Orthodoxy who were patiently waiting their time, waiting for the Resurrection of the whole Russian Orthodox Church after Her atheist Golgotha. Not for them Paris renovationism or Soviet nationalism. In the Church Outside Russia there were those patriots of Orthodoxy who knew that they were not in exile, but had actually been sent out all over the world as missionaries of the whole Russian Orthodox Church. Not for them introverted sectarianism or backwards-looking cultural nostalgia. And among those from the small Local Churches, there were the patriots of Orthodoxy who looked to Eternal Russia, to the Tradition and the Holy Mountain and awaited the Resurrection of the Christian Empire and the coming Christian Emperor in Russia. Not for them disincarnate renovationist philosophy and futile narrow nationalism, so encouraged by the apostate West and its desire for Antichrist.

Forty years on, as I travel early in the mornings through the 5,000 square miles and 3 million people of the three counties of the East of England, on missionary travels and visits to the faithful, I go past homes where I know that parishioners are reading their morning rule. Their prayers rise up like columns of light rising to heaven. True, there is the small, mainly old portion of the East of England that is still heterodox, though it is dwarfed by the huge, mainly modern portion that is secular and atheistic, part of Eurosodom and Gomorrhica. However, for me neither of them exists, only one East of England exists, the East of England that is part of Rus’. Of all nationalities and tongues, we are all readying ourselves to become the subjects of the Coming Christian Empire and Emperor, based in Russia. Make no mistake, our coming Emperor will, as is prophesied, cleanse the Church of the disincarnate renovationists and the narrow nationalists, of all who want Orthodoxy to become Westernized and Uniat so that it will worship Antichrist in his Temple on Zion.

Let the Sovereign Orthodox Christian Empire of Rus Arise!

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