Neocon Aggression Towards Sovereign States is Destroying the Earth

Noam Chomsky, former US Secretary of Defense William Perry, and other sentient observers of neocon aggressive policy towards Russia and China agree with my warning that the neoconservatives resurrected the threat of nuclear Armageddon removed by Reagan and Gorbachyov. Daily, we observe additional aggressive actions taken by Washington and its vassals against Russia and China. For example, Washington pressured Kiev not to implement the Minsk agreements designed to end the conflict between the puppet government in Kiev and the Russian republics in the east. Washington refuses to coöperate with Russia in the war against ISIS. Washington continues to blame Russia for destroying MH17, whilst preventing an honest investigation of the attack on the Malaysian airliner. Washington continues to force its European vassals to impose sanctions on Russia based on the false claim that a Russian invasion of the Ukraine caused the conflict there, not by Washington’s coup in overthrowing a democratically elected government and installing a puppet answering to Washington.

The list is long. The USA suborned even the International Monetary Fund (IMF), allegedly a neutral non-political world organisation, into its fight against Russia. Under Washington’s pressure, the IMF abandoned its policy of refusing to lend to debtors who are in arrears in their loan payments to creditors. In the case of the Ukraine’s debt to Russia, this decision removes the enforcement mechanism that prevents countries (such as Greece) from defaulting on their debts. The IMF announced that it will lend to the Ukraine to pay the Ukraine’s Western creditors despite the fact that the Ukraine renounced repayment of loans from Russia. Michael Hudson believes, correctly in my view, that the IMF will apply this new policy to those countries to whom China has made loans. The IMF’s plan is to leave Russia and China as countries who lack the usual enforcement mechanism to collect from debtors, thus permitting debtors to default on the loans without penalty. In other words, the IMF is presenting itself, although the financial media won’t notice it, as a tool of American foreign policy. What this shows, and what should concern us, is that the institutions of Western civilisation are, in fact, tools of American dominance. The institutions aren’t there for the noble reasons stated in their founding documents. The bottom line is that Western Capitalism is simply a looting mechanism that successfully suborned Western governments and all Western “do-good” institutions. As in George Orwell’s 1984, the IMF divided the world into warring factions… the West vs the BRICS.

To avoid the coming conflict that the neocon pursuit of American hegemony is bringing, the Russians have relied on fact-based, truth-based diplomacy. However, neocon Washington relies on lies and propaganda and has many more and louder voices. Consequently, most of the Western sheeple believe Washington’s lies, not Russia’s truth. In other words, Russia was misled by believing that the West respects and abides by the values that it professes. In fact, these “Western values” are merely a cover for the unbridled evil of which the West consists. The Western peoples are so dim-witted that they haven’t yet understood that the “war on terror” is, in fact, a war to create terror that the West will export to Muslim areas of Russia and China to destabilise the two countries that serve as a check on Washington’s unilateral hegemonic power.

The problem for the neocon unilateralists is that Russia and China… although misinformed by their “experts” educated abroad in the neoliberal tradition, people who are de facto agents of Washington without even knowing it… are powerful military powers, both nuclear and conventional. Unless Russia and China are content to be Washington’s vassal states, for the neocons who control Washington and, therefore, the West, to press these two powerful countries so hard can only lead to war. As Washington isn’t a match for Russia and China in conventional warfare, the war would be nuclear, and it’d result in the end of life on earth. Whether ironic or paradoxical, the USA is pushing a policy that means the end of life. Yet, the majority of Western governments support it, and the insouciant Western peoples have no clue.

However, Putin caught on to this, and Russia isn’t going to submit. Soon, China will understand that American dependency on China’s workforce and imports isn’t a protection from Washington’s aggression. When China looks beyond its MIT and Harvard miseducated neoliberal economists to the writing on the wall, Washington is going to be in deep trouble. What’ll Washington do? Confronted with two powerful nuclear militaries, will the crazed neocons back off? Or will their confidence in their ideology bring us the final war? This is a real question. The US government pays many Internet trolls to ridicule such questions and their authors. To see the people who sell out humanity for money, all you have to do is to read the comments on the numerous websites that reproduce this column. Nevertheless, the question remains, unanswered by the Western presstitute media and unanswered by the bought-and-paid-for stooges in the US Congress and all Western “democracies”.

Indications are that Russia has had enough of American arrogance. The Russian people have elevated a leader, as they always do, and which Western countries seldom, if ever, do. The West triumphed by technology, not by leadership. However, V V Putin is Russia’s choice of a leader, and he is one. Russia also has the technology and a sense of itself that no longer exists in the diversified West. There’s nothing like Putin anywhere in the West… over which presides a collection of bought-and-paid-for-puppets who report to private interest groups, such as Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the Israel Lobby, agribusiness, and the extractive industries (energy, mining, timber).

At the 70th Anniversary of the United Nations (28 September), Putin, backed by the President of China, announced that half of the world no longer accepts American unilateralism. Additionally, Putin said that Russia can no longer tolerate the state of affairs in the world that results from Washington’s pursuit of hegemony. Two days later Putin took over the fight against ISIS in Syria. Putin, still relying on agreements with Washington, relied on the agreement that Russia would announce beforehand its attacks on ISIS installations to prevent any NATO-Russian air encounters. Washington took advantage of this trust placed in Washington by Russia, and arranged for a Turkish jet fighter to ambush an unsuspecting Russian fighter-bomber. This was an act of war, committed by Washington and Turkey, and thereby Washington’s European NATO vassal states, against a nuclear power capable of exterminating all life in every one of the countries, including the “superpower USA”.

This simple fact should make even the American super-patriots, who wear the flag on their sleeve, wonder about the trust they place in “their” government and in Fox “news”, CNN, NPR, and the rest of the presstitutes who continually lie every minute of every broadcast… but it won’t. Americans and Europeans are too insouciant. They’re locked tightly in The Matrix, where the impotent creatures are content to live without understanding reality. Realising that it’s pointless to attempt to communicate to the Western sheeple, who have no input into their government’s policy, Putin now sends his message directly to Washington. Putin’s message is loud and clear in his order directed against any US/NATO operations against Russia in its Syrian operations against ISIS, “we will immediately destroy any targets threatening the Russian groups of forces or land infrastructure”.

Putin followed up this order with another order to the Russian Defence Ministry, “We must pay special attention to strengthening the combat potential of the strategic nuclear forces and implementing defence space programmes. It is necessary, as outlined in our plans, to equip all components of the nuclear triad with new arms”. Minister of Defence S K Shoigu reported at a Defence Ministry meeting that 56 percent of Russian nuclear forces are new and that 95 percent are at a permanent state of readiness. The few Western news sources that report these developments pretend that Russia is “sabre-rattling” without cause.

To make it clear even for the insouciant Western populations, everything that Reagan and Gorbachyov worked for has been overthrown by crazed, demented and evil American neocons, whose desire for hegemony over the world is driving the world to extinction. These are the same bloodthirsty war criminals who destroyed seven countries, murdered, maimed, and displaced millions of Muslim peoples, and sent millions of refugees from the neocon wars into Europe. None of these war criminals are protected from terrorist attack. If the alleged “Muslim threat” was real, every one of the war criminals would be dead by now, not the innocent people sitting in Paris cafés or attending parties in California. Neocons inhumans created the “war against terror” on purpose to gain a weapon against Russia and China. You can witness these inhumans every day on talk TV and read them in the Weekly Standard, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the British, German, Australian, Canadian, and endless Western newspapers.

In the West lies prevail, and these lies could drive the world to extinction. An expert reminds us that it only takes one mistake and 30 minutes to destroy life on earth.

12 December 2015

Paul Craig Roberts
Sputnik International

http://sputniknews.com/columnists/20151212/1031662320/neoconservatives-sovereign-counries-nuclear-destroy-earth.html

The End of the Ukraine

Introduction

History proves that artificial states do not survive. Sooner or later they disappear because they do not have popular consent, but are based on centralized imposition and oppression. Thus, Spain is today disintegrating with the desire of a majority of Catalans to recover their own country. The Basques may follow. The UK, already broken up in 1921 by the secession of a majority of the Irish who wanted their freedom back from the British myth, is soon to be further dismantled by a majority of Scots. One day Wales and then England too will recover their sovereignty from Norman-British oppression – though that may only be at the Second Coming.

As for Germany, the Tsar’s plan after the coming Russian victory in 1917 was to dismantle the Satanic unification of Bismarck which led directly to huge European wars of unheard of bloodshed. And the artificial and violence-guaranteeing divisions of the Middle East imposed by Great Britain and France on the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago are daily being undone as civil wars or strife rage in Syria, Iraq, the Lebanon and Turkey. Now, another similar artificial State, which has also existed for less than 100 years and without popular consent, is collapsing. This is the Ukraine.

The Coming Collapse of the Ukraine

The word ‘Ukraine’ simply means borderland, ‘the marches’. In history it has been used to describe many marginal Slavic areas, from the borderlands of Serbia to the borderlands of Poland and Kazakhstan. To create a ‘State’ from marginal borderlands is never realistic. A viable State always need a centre that has consensus, popular consent. That is something that the newly-founded ‘Ukraine’, achieving independence only a generation ago, has never had.

Formed in the 1920s from Novorossiya (south-western Russia), Malorossiya (Little Russia, where the language is ‘Surzhik’, a Russian dialect), in 1939 from eastern Poland (Galicia – the only authentic Ukraine or borderland) and in 1944 from part of Hungary (now miscalled ‘Transcarpathia’, but before that called ‘Ruthenia’ and part of pre-1939 Czechoslovakia) and part of Romania, such an artificial conglomerate cannot survive. And this despite the billions of dollars that successive US governments have pumped into its life support machine over the last decade or so.

Though the US elite has given plenty of money to the Ukraine’s artificial centre in Kiev, where they have established a Galician puppet government for their new banana republic, in fact the regions of the Ukraine decide all the questions. They do not need Poroshenko. The Americans only need their mythical Ukrainian State for propaganda purposes. The US that controls the Ukrainian government and all its policies wants to maintain a single player, which they can show to the world and say: Here is the Ukraine.

They do not want Odessa, Zaporizhia, Uzhgorod, Lviv, Zhytomyr, Kharkiv, but the whole of the Ukraine. However, the Ukraine is in fact composed of precisely a patchwork of local territories controlled by corrupt oligarchs, in much the same way as the rival principalities which warred with each other in the 12th century, forcing a new centre to rise up and take control from its anarchy – Moscow. History is repeating itself. In reality, the Americans have to play with Filatov in Dnepropetrovsk, the Balogh brothers in Transcarpathia, Kolomoysky in the east, Saakashvili in Odessa and the others, and forget about Kiev and its Western oligarchs.

The inherently unstable Ukraine is no longer sustainable, indeed no longer a State, and continues to exist only to the extent that it is recognized by external players. Outside Kiev, it has no reality. Although it is unprofitable for Washington, Brussels and Berlin to preserve Ukrainian Statehood, to admit its dissolution would be to lose face altogether. But since the US, the EU and their IMF puppets have now not found $3 billion to pay off Ukraine’s present debts to Russia, they will certainly not find the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars required to fund the existence of the bankrupt Ukraine for another 5-10 years.

Everyone understands that the Poroshenko regime is not something that is sustainable – it is not alive any more, the recent local elections in Ukraine have shown that the central regime and its secret police retainers cannot compete with the regional elites. In all regions the elections returned local and regional elites. Therefore, when Biden came to the Ukraine he said that there was no longer any need to hold elections, he did not want the reality, that the Ukraine is an artificial conglomerate of provinces, to surface.

US politicians, who have more education and experience than their Ukrainian counterparts, are well aware that any subsequent elections will lead to the disintegration of Ukraine. This process can be slowed down, but it cannot be ignored, and though it may be possible to to maintain the State with intravenous injections of US cash, it is no longer possible to stop the process of decay and reverse it.

Although the ‘Western world’ can still pretend that the Ukraine exists as a country, for some time, even if nominally, collapse is inevitable. However, the fact is that a real State is not just a newly-invented anthem, coat of arms and flag. It is an internal consensus and that exists only when the government represents its peoples. As the Americans rightly proclaim: ‘No taxes without representation’. And that does not exist in the Ukraine.

Here is a situation where central government, that refused confederation and so began a civil war and massacring its own people, has lost control and so is no longer able to attract foreign funding. The economy is in ruins and funding a budget through taxing an incredibly poor and dissident population is impossible. The centre has no importance for the regions depend only on the regional elites and their real and powerful capabilities. The question is: What happens next?

Conclusion

Despite the hysterical and self-justifying claims of the Poroshenko clique, Russia has not invaded or intervened in the Ukraine in any way in the last two years. Some have asked why Russia has not done so amid the chaos of the Ukraine whereas it has done so in the chaos of Syria. The answer is simply because Soviet Russia, with its invasions and interventions in other countries, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, is long since dead. Today’s Russia only intervenes when it is asked to do so – as was the case in Syria. Russia has not been invited to intervene in the Ukraine, so it has not done so.

The unsubtle brutality of old Soviet governments is long gone. Today’s Russia is much more intelligent. As the Russian proverb says about messes: ‘Don’t touch it and it does not smell’. In other words, it waits until the apple tree falls and then picks the apples. And that is what is happening in the Ukraine. It will collapse all by itself and then Russia will pick up the pieces that freely wish to join it or become part of its Eurasian sphere of influence as independent entities, like Belarus to the north or Kazakhstan and Armenia to the south. In the case of the Ukraine, this means not just the already free Crimea, but the east, south and north – most of the country that is called the ‘Ukraine’. And this time may be coming very soon, for the present process of collapse will continue into 2016, as the ‘Ukraine’ returns to its real and pre-Soviet roots.

A Story of Failure and a Story of Success

Introduction

For well over fifty years now, and in virtually every country in Western Europe, that is in countries with a millennium of Catholic-Protestant culture, small numbers of Western Europeans have been joining one or other of the local dioceses of the Orthodox Church. In general it can be said that the numbers joining have been higher in the less traditional and more Protestant countries and lower in traditional Catholic countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal. And numbers have been much higher among more uprooted and cosmopolitan city-dwellers than among more traditional country-dwellers. Here there is something to do with spiritual degeneration. Though there is a detailed thesis here, the full story of this Europe-wide movement has yet to be written – probably because it has so far been very marginal.

In some countries, especially small ones like Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Austria and Luxembourg, where also there has been relatively little immigration from ‘Orthodox countries’ until recent years, numbers of native Orthodox are tiny, often a few dozen at most. In other countries, especially larger ones like Germany, France and Great Britain, which have also received more immigrants from ‘Orthodox countries’ in Eastern Europe, numbers of native Orthodox rise into the low thousands. Indeed, the process has been under way for so long that in all these countries we can find adults who are second and third generation Orthodox of purely Western European origin.

Some of the first generation are now elderly and have been members of the Orthodox Church for between forty years and seventy years. Some have been present for between twenty and forty years. Others are newcomers who have entered into communion with the Church more recently, only over the last twenty years. On the surface, it might seem that there are today anything between 10,000 and 20,000 native Orthodox living in Western Europe. (Here we exclude those who have already passed on). However, such a high figure is very misleading because in order to understand real numbers we have to look at the motivations of those who have joined the Orthodox Church in Western Europe, sociological and not spiritual motivations which sadly have resulted in a majority of those received and their descendants lapsing from the Faith.

Marriage

Firstly, there are those who have had to join the Orthodox Church because they have married an Orthodox. It is true that some of these individuals have come to appreciate the Church and play a part in parish life. In other words, they have not only joined the Orthodox Church, they have actually become Orthodox and spontaneously and naturally have Orthodox values, think in an Orthodox way and live an Orthodox life. However, for the majority that is not the case. Their membership of the Church is purely nominal, often because the membership of the Church of the Orthodox whom they have married is also nominal.

Without an example of Church life, spouses will not take up Church life. Moreover, if their spouses belong to parishes where the whole service is in an inaccessible foreign language (often also largely inaccessible to the second-generation Orthodox spouse), clearly the possibility of their interest is greatly lessened. We doubt if there are more than a few hundred Western Europeans who, though they have joined the Orthodox Church because they have married Orthodox, have actually become Orthodox. The rest, the vast majority, have to all intents and purposes lapsed (though arguably it could be said they never lapsed because they were never part of the Church anyway).

Converts

Secondly, there are those who previously practised Catholicism or Protestantism (including its Anglican variant). They have often been disillusioned by the denomination in which they have grown up and left it for Orthodoxy. These people really are converts. Here we have to look very closely at motivation. Some have left their original denomination disgruntled and angry and then joined the Orthodox Church for negative, purely psychological, occasionally psychopathic, reasons. These people never become Orthodox, for they spend their time looking backwards, either nostalgically and investing themselves heavily in ecumenism and the past, or else in anger, raging against ecumenism and their original denomination. Neither group ever looks forward to the Church and living in Her, but lives off the baggage of the past which they attempt to impose on the Church by trying to ‘reform’ Her! I have met so many like this, who, even after twenty, forty and sixty years, have still never become Orthodox. These are the eternal converts who love being converts and, in one way or another, always lapse from the mainstream, or rather have never been part of the mainstream, blinded by psychological deformations in egomania, producing psychobabble. Needless to say, they do not hand on Orthodoxy to their descendants because they have no Orthodoxy to hand on.

On the other hand, there are those who, with an open mind and without psychological hang-ups or ‘baggage’, have naturally evolved through repentance from some sort of Protestantism or Catholicism (it is much the same thing) and become Orthodox, ever deepening their Faith. They realize that Orthodoxy is simply Christianity and that, before, they were simply not Christians in the fullness of the word, they both had too much of something (phariseeism, moralism, guilt etc) or lacked something (sacramental life, spiritual understanding, simplicity etc). They understand that previously they had been conditioned by deformations of Christianity and that now, at last, they understand what the Church is. Although this group are a minority amongst converts, they are the positive ones because they not only join the Church, but with time actually become Orthodox, ridding themselves of the deformed cultural reflexes of their past. There may be 2-3,000 such Orthodox Western Europeans.

Fantasy

Thirdly, there have been those who have been brought into the Church under false pretences by fantasist proselytists, false ‘elders’, people who love giving themselves titles (‘spiritual fathers’) and exude the desire to be admired. For example we well remember one bishop who, desperate to fill his tiny parish, which most serious Orthodox did not attend once they had discovered what it was about, probably brought in 2,000 people over his lifetime; they mainly lapsed very swiftly. His technique was to attract people, mainly wealthy people from the upper-class Establishment, through his undoubted personal charm and, under the influence of almost semi-hypnosis, he would receive them within a few days or weeks at most. Few lasted more than six months; some only lasted days. I have come across many of his victims (I use the word with reason). Some have never been back to Church since the day he received them; many have returned to various cliques of Anglicanism, where he found them, or invented their own. Since he died, all his fantasies have come to grief and a new generation is growing up, never having heard of him.

Another priest, an ex-Anglican vicar, has been desperate to ‘recruit’ to his tiny community. His technique, sadly common among many of his background who seem not to have any time for the vast majority of Non-Anglican English people, is to receive anyone who shows the slightest interest in the Church. The result is an incredibly high turnover. His tiny flock changes almost completely every six months. A high lapse rate is certain. Outside England old calendarists and others of a sectarian mentality in France (both perennialist Kovalevskians and old calendarists), Italy and Portugal, without any base of faithful, have recruited heavily among traditional Catholics. In Portugal these old calendarists used to include Catholic saints in their calendar! Again turnover, that is, the lapse rate, has been very high. Why remain in a group that is a sect and is not in communion with the Orthodox Church? There have been many pastoral disasters in such groups. Stability is definitely not a word that belongs to the vocabulary of such sectarians, for, once more, they too have built on sand. Nevertheless, there are some issued from false missionaries who have seen through the charlatans and moved on to stable Church life elsewhere.

Descendants

Fourthly, there are those who have so far lost any identity inherited from their parents that, although they are technically not Western Europeans, they are so Westernized that they might as well be. These are the descendants of immigrants from ‘Orthodox countries’., children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren right up to the sixth generation and more. Sadly, it has to be said that, once children lose the Orthodox culture of their parents (often fairly minimal anyway), the assimilation rate is very high. Conditioned by the acid bath of Western schools with their intense secularist propaganda, not to mention television and social media, Orthodox cultural reflexes tend to be quickly worn down, especially as the generations pass. We know of such Orthodox who still occasionally go to church, but they will not attend if it is not on the new or Western calendar and if they cannot sit down at services and they will not take communion if they have to have confess first. Clearly, nothing can be built on such semi-Orthodox.

On the other hand, there are Orthodox of later generations, perhaps especially of the third generation, who have lost the conformist and integrationist inferiority complex and reflexes of the second (‘Schmemannite’) generation and want to return to and understand their roots as well as the first millennium roots of the countries where they live. Obviously their knowledge of their ancestors’ language may be negligible, but this is not a problem in itself. If they have zeal for the Faith and want to go to the roots of the Faith, then such Orthodox, of any generation, including those issued from mixed marriages, can bring a great deal to Church life. There are several thousand such Orthodox in Western Europe and they, together with the first generation of immigrants, are the backbone of the Church, even though they are not, even in part, native Western Europeans.

Conclusion

There are Orthodox in the above categories, admittedly in some more than others, who play a role in Church life in Western Europe, and not just an academic or titular one, but a real one. Whether people have come to the Church of God by marriage and avoided the temptation of nominalism, whether they are converts from one of the heterodox denominations and avoided the temptation of living with the baggage of the past and overcome psychology in favour of theology, whether they have been brought into the Church by false missionaries but seen through them to the real Church, whether they are of ‘Orthodox’ origin, but have resisted the temptations of assimilation and minimalism, there are in all these groups several thousand genuine Western European Orthodox. To them we can add others, also repentant.

For we have not yet mentioned those who simply come to the Church because the Church is their spiritual home. We are not converts, we do not have any baggage with us, we simply want to join the Church in order to be what in our souls we always have been: Orthodox. We enter the Church and are at once at home in Her and cannot live and have never been able to live without Her. We cannot be anything other than Orthodox. We have no desire to ‘reform’ the Church, but are happy with Her as She is. We are the people who simply want spiritual food and have no cultural hang-ups and no heterodox culture with which to create some sort of Halfodoxy, half-Protestant/half-Orthodox’, ‘Anglo-Catholicism with icons’, the Tridentine Mass with icons etc. I can remember how shocked I was over 40 years ago when I was asked by a Greek priest: ‘Who brought you to the Church?’, obviously expecting the name of a bishop or priest in answer. When I answered truthfully: ‘God’, he seemed shocked. I thought how utterly deformed his expectation had been. He could only see an Orthodoxy dependent on some personality cult.

The fact is, whatever our path to the Church anywhere, Church life can only be built on the Rock of Tradition, not on the sand of the compromises of negative traits, of nominalism, pathology, fantasy or minimalism. Though you may be very zealous, you cannot be missionaries if you have nothing of spiritual value to give, your zeal is purely psychological, not of the heart, not repentant. The Church lives by the Holy Spirit, not by fallen human psychology and ideology. Sadly, we have seen many cases where individuals have tried to build the Church in Western Europe on the sand of compromise, without repentance, without leaving false cultural values behind them. All such attempts, and we have seen a great many of them, have ended in failure, they are fantasy swept away by reality, as a result there are well over ten thousand native Western Europeans who have lapsed from a corrupted form of Orthodoxy. Such have been and will continue to be washed away, like so much sand when the tide comes in. That is failure. On the other hand, there are those who are building the real and future Church in Western Europe on the Rock of the fullness of the Orthodox Tradition that no tide can ever wash away. That is success.

Five Digits

In recent years scientists have come up with remarkable discoveries concerning the human body; for example, that over 99% of human DNA is identical to that in chimpanzees. Though this should be put into perspective by the fact that, apparently, some 50% of human DNA is identical to that in bananas! All this merely confirms that all Creation does indeed have the same Creator. In any case, from the first verses of Genesis it is clear that it is not human and animal bodies that are particularly different, for animal bodies and human bodies are all made of the same chemical elements that can be found in ‘the dust of the earth’. The only vital difference between the animal world and the human world is simply that human-beings have an immortal soul, the breath of God (Genesis 2, 7).

This is why the concept of the descendance of the human-being (body and soul) from the monkey (‘animal primates’) is absurd. If it were so, then monkeys would also have immortal souls, which they do not. For the sign of the soul is the presence of the Word, intelligent and sophisticated human speech, far above the instinctive or imitative grunts of the animal world. Of course, there is also another argument against the above absurd argument. If human-beings were descended from monkeys, why do monkeys still exist? Surely they should all have become human-beings by now!

However, there is another and far more interesting question. Why do human-beings (and most jawed vertebrate animals) have five digits? Scientists suggest that the more primitive animals had six to eight digits, so that five digits would be a sign of advance and intelligence. However, this would not explain why many primitive animal species have two, three or four digits. So why do human-beings specifically have five digits? We would suggest that human-beings, who alone among created beings are endowed with souls, have five digits so that they can make the sign of the Cross, thus recognising the Trinitarian God-Creator (‘Let us make man in Our image and after Our likeness’ – Genesis 1, 26) and the two natures of the God-Man Christ. It is as simple as that.

Personalism or Eschatology: Unreal Theology or Real Theology? A Parish Priest’s Point of View

There is a story from the life of the much-revered Elder John (Krestiankin) (+ 2006) of how a young student came to see him from the Theological Academy and introduced himself as a ‘theologian’. Elder John replied: ‘So you are the fourth?’ In his immaturity the young student naturally did not understand, so he asked the Elder what he meant. Elder John answered: ‘There are three theologians in the Church: St John, St Gregory and St Simeon the New. Are you claiming to be the fourth?’ The humbled student was shamefaced.

It is a curious fact that ‘Orthodox’ academic theology (we would rather call it academic philosophy) differs enormously from Orthodox theology. Academics like the late Fr Nicholas Afanasyev, Fr Alexander Schmemann or Metr John Zizioulas and their huddle of followers in New York, Istanbul, Paris and Oxford all concentrate on personalism, in other words the strange mixture of unrepentant fallen human nature (humanism) inside an outward shell of Orthodoxy, or, as we might call it, ‘humanism with icons’. With its resurrection of Origen’s heretical ‘salvation for all’ and intellectualistic Gnostic mystification, personalism is an abstraction that has no life of its own outside academia.

However, real Orthodox theologians, like St Justin of Chelije, concentrate not on humanism (or personalism to give it its disguised name), but on Godmanhood. In other words, this is how fallen human nature must be transfigured by repentance before it can obtain dignity, that is, before the human heart can become worthy of any knowledge of God and so revelation, which it can then pass on to the mind. It is strange indeed that ‘Orthodox’ academic ‘theologians’ should have been inspired by Non-Orthodox humanists like the Lutheran Jakob Boehme via the semi-Marxist philosophy of disincarnation of Berdyayev for their ideas about personalism.

Rather than try to speak to post-Christian and indeed atheistic Western academics in the humanistic terms that they might just be able to understand, though would have very little interest in and would regard as irrelevant, would it not be better to speak to the whole Western world about the fullness of Orthodox theology without compromise? Not only would the spiritually living minority of Western people be interested to hear about undiluted Christianity (which is what Orthodoxy simply is), but also we Orthodox ourselves would be interested. Faith is not deepened by intellectualism; Faith is deepened by the revelations of God to the human heart. That is precisely what the Gospels are about.

The fact is that the average devout Orthodox has never heard of, let alone read, the obscure and poorly-selling books of any of the contemporary academic ‘theologians’ like Metr John Zizioulas who claim to be Orthodox; they would appear only to be for Non-Orthodox intellectual consumption, not for the fishermen of Galilee. But the average devout Orthodox has most certainly heard of and reads and knows and venerates the best-selling St Paisius the Athonite, Fr Seraphim (Rose), Fr Arsenie (Boca) and Elder John (Krestyankin), real Orthodox theologians, who feed our hearts, not our brains, in the spirit of the fishermen of Galilee.

Perhaps the academic ‘theologians’ should address themselves to the real, and not unreal or virtual Orthodox world, by speaking to real Orthodox in the parishes and the monasteries. In the real Orthodox context they would forget the philosophical fantasy of ‘personalism’ (the word is unknown to the Fathers and to all Orthodox) and speak about Repentance, Messianism and the Third Rome. We live, after all, in an age of apostasy, in the last times and in a globalized world, when Repentance, Messianism and the Universality of the Third Rome are as relevant as it is possible to be. In other words, eschatology, the theology of the last times, is what they need to speak and write of.

Orthodox Christianity is Alpha and Omega, speaking not only of the beginning of the world, but of the end too. We speak not of some fashionable ecological crisis or of any other ism, however fashionable they may be in incestuous academic circles, but of the mystery of iniquity and how we can counter the appearance of Antichrist, while awaiting the Second Coming. Today, as we speak of the Universal Civilization of Holy Rus as opposed to anti-Christian Western liberal ideology, we need to speak of the ultimate things, of eschatology, not of humanism, with or without icons.

The Russian Orthodox Church is the last barrier to Globalization and Westernization. This is why Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admits that he wants to destroy her. She is the last bulwark defending her flock from the demonic game of post-modernism, to which virtually the whole Western world is subjugated and with which sickness it decomposes everything it touches. The Russian Church is the last fortress of Faith, which continues to restrain (2 Thess 2, 6), ever since the ‘Council’ of Florence and the internal and external fall of New Rome in the fifteenth century.

Before our very eyes, within the last ten years, Russia has visibly become the Third and Last Rome and the Russian Church has become the Church of the last times. Eschatology, the revelation and knowledge of the last things, is the great contribution of the Russian Church to the contemporary world. This has been arrived at not through the speculations of academics in Non-Orthodox and indeed anti-Orthodox cities, but through the sufferings of millions of New Martyrs and Confessors. This is the ministry and offering of the Russian Church to the contemporary world.

Speaking of Dostoyevsky, the great Serbian theologian and saint, St Justin of Chelije, wrote prophetically: ‘Orthodoxy is the bearer and keeper of the most radiant image of Christ and all Divino-human forces and this is the ‘New Word’ that Russia…must tell the world’. This ‘New Word’ is drawn not from some modernist mishmash of ‘personalism’, but from Eternity and, as such, must be heeded, for ‘when you see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors’ (Matt 24, 33).

The Russian Orthodox Church: Pessimism, Idealism and Realism

Any reading of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, not least from the many volumes of the biography of the Patristically-minded Metropolitan Antony of Kiev and Galicia (1), confirms that there were many negative aspects to her life before the Revolution. Notably, partly because she had been deprived of a Patriarch by Peter I some 200 years before, a careerist mentality had developed within her senior clergy, some of whom had become civil servant administrators on behalf of a bureaucratic State. This meant that many a bishop had been appointed to his position without reference to his zeal for the Faith or to any Faith in general, but only with reference to his ability to ‘administrate’.

Also the Academies and seminaries had become hotbeds of German Protestant and protesting philosophical influence. Some reckon that 90% of pre-Revolutionary seminarists were atheists and revolutionaries – among them many a Bolshevik, including Joseph Jugashvili, later called Stalin, who was ejected from one. An example of a product of an Academy was the very senior Protopresbyter George Shavelsky, a treacherous bureaucrat who had little time for piety, which he dismissed as ‘mysticism’. He was also an enemy of Tsar Nicholas II and the spiritually alive, as is made quite clear in his detailed and self-condemning autobiography (2). In the emigration his sympathies were entirely with the masonic-led Paris Jurisdiction which actually abandoned both parts of the Russian Church!

The paralysing hand of State bureaucracy, eminently disloyal to the Tsar and infected with the Revolutionary virus, with its careerism, conformism and nationalist centralization seemed to penetrate everywhere. These bureaucratic abuses all formed the suicidal basis of the later Soviet regime, in which the old ‘chinovniki’ (civil servants) simply turned overnight into Communist ‘apparatchiki’; their stifling spirit, so detested by the people, was exactly the same. Thus, the State bureaucracy had made the ancient Church of Georgia into a department of the Russian Church! And when Russian forces at last liberated Eastern Galicia (the area centred around Lvov) from Austro-Hungarian control in 1915, incompetent Saint Petersburg bureaucrats soon turned the people away from Orthodoxy and back to Uniatism.

Sadly, there was decadence in many a wealthy monastery too; the stories are legion. As for some village priests, often through no fault of their own, their lack of education, impoverished situation and need for money simply to survive had discredited the Church in many places. The fact is that the Church looked after the State, but for the most part the State did not look after the Church. This was because the State was increasingly run by atheist bureaucrats, which is why they had no problem in serving the atheist Bolshevik State and why the State machine, Duma masons and generals among them, betrayed the Tsar, the Lord’s Anointed. For example, the grandfather of a relative of mine was the last pre-Revolutionary ambassador to Washington – and an atheist….

Indeed, a generation or two ago there was no need to read to read about all this. It was enough to talk to old émigrés who had been adults before the 1917 Revolution or whose parents had accurately described the then situation to them. They were the best remedy for the idealism of later émigrés and others who idealized pre-Revolutionary times for ideological reasons. I well remember one émigré’s grandson who condemned contemporary Russian bishops for having comfortable black cars, driven by their deacons. The ever-memorable patriot and missionary, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, soon corrected him: ‘And what about pre-Revolutionary bishops who each had a black carriage and horses with their driver?’

Another émigré, Prince Boris Galitsin (may his memory be eternal), told me of his youthful naivety and that he only realized that brothels had attached themselves to the First World War Russian Army when he was in his thirties. (Though any reader of the late Archimandrite Sophrony’s version of the life of St Silouan can read of the same and also of how the future saint had lived before the Revolution, not keeping the fasts and getting a village girl pregnant). Another émigré aristocrat told me that the Church in the emigration was like a glass of clear water, inside Russia it was dirty water. I asked him why then we in the emigration had so many defrocked priests and such a severe shortage of priests in general. He had no answer.

The simple fact is that if the members of the Russian Church had all been as they should have been, then no Revolution would ever have happened. The betrayal of the living spirit of the Church is why some bishops then betrayed the Tsar in 1917. This is why the 1917-18 Church Council took place without freedom, under the masonic influence of the democrat Aaron Adler (later called Alexander Kerensky), though it did at least restore the Patriarchate, despite the vigorous opposition of many lay professors of theology and bishops. One of Kerensky’s first and typical acts had been to remove the saintly, such as Metr (now St) Macarius of Moscow. No saints for him! This is why the Bolshevik-sponsored Renovationists (under Metr Alexander Vvedensky and his three wives) prospered for a few short years, many of their clergy being graduates from the decadent pre-Revolutionary Academies and seminaries.

This betrayal is why Metr (later Patriarch) Sergius could make his infamous Declaration of loyalty to a militant atheist government, thus guaranteeing division, so that many inside enslaved Russia and virtually everyone in the entirely free Russian Church in the emigration would not follow him. This is why one small part of the emigration, members of which had created and welcomed the February Revolution, left the Russian Church altogether. And this is why such second generation émigré Parisian academics like the late Fr Alexander Schmemann (born 1921) and their American disciples turned to Renovationism, denying that Holy Rus had ever existed (!), and that the only hope for the Church (!) was in its  American-style Protestantization, that is, Desacralization, which produces not a single saint. These were words he said to me, but also words that he wrote in books.

So much for both second-generation emigre cynicism and second-generation idealism. Fortunately, that is only part of the story and, by far the least interesting part. Beyond the superficial froth of both, academic cynics and naïve and ill-informed idealists there is a far deeper story, a real story, an edifying story, the story of saintliness, of the real Church of God.

Before the Revolution the Russian Orthodox Church was what any real Church should be – a seedbed of saints, a saint-making machine. We only have to think of St Seraphim of Sarov, the Optina and Glinsk Elders and St John of Kronstadt. But above all we can think of the preparation of the millions of martyrs and confessors for the Faith under the Soviet yoke (3), the tens of thousands of martyred and confessing clergy and laypeople, as well as confessor-saints like St Seraphim of Vyritsa, St Matrona of Moscow and St Luke of Simferopol, who had been prepared by the pre-Revolutionary Church. It was their victory that guaranteed the cleansing of the Church inside Russia by blood and persecution from the abuses from before the Revolution and her Resurrection after the atheist Golgotha was over.

However, there was a parallel situation in the emigration. We can say that perhaps 50% of the emigration was not only anti-Orthodox, but also (and as a result) anti-patriotic. These were those who had carried out the Revolution with pride, largely aristocrats. In the emigration, highly politicized, they deserted the Russian Church and Russian history, and went to one or another extreme. Either they became unChristian, narrow-minded nationalists who died out and disappeared, or else they became enamoured of the countries where they lived, lost the Russian language, culture and culture and never even thought of repenting for their treason, cowardice and deceit. Just the opposite – they actually justified their apostasy! Not for the Renovationists either St John of Kronstadt or St John of Shanghai, both of whom they ferociously slandered and rejected, and I am a witness to this.

However, another perhaps 50% of the emigration were not only Orthodox but also, and as a result, patriots. Indeed, the more saintly the Orthodox, the more they were patriots. For them exile was a call to repentance, a chastisement deserved for the sins of the fathers. The cases of the saints of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, St Jonah of Manchuria, St John of Shanghai and the future St Seraphim of Sofia, are well-known. However, there were a great many others, their graves scattered all over the world, seeds of spiritual renewal for the whole earth, from France to Serbia, from Brazil to Australia, from Ireland to New Zealand, from Canada to Germany, from Italy to Venezuela, from the USA to Portugal, from Finland to Tunisia.

Among those I could mention are the repentant hermit Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, buried in the tiny village cemetery of Limeray near Tours in western France. Condemned by some émigrés for his love for the saints, surely the relics of this highly-educated ascetic will be taken up from obscurity and oblivion and moved to the new Russian Cathedral in Paris? What of the White Russian general Anton Denikin, whose last words in distant exile in the USA in 1947 were: ‘So I shall not see how Russia will be saved’, demonstrating his innate faith that Russia would be saved. What of the great Russian philosopher and patriot Ivan Ilyin, whose words are now rightly considered as prophetic?

What about Archbishop George (Tarasov), Bishop Methodius (Kulmann) and Bishop Roman (Zolotov) in France? They all loved the Church and Russia to the core. Then there was Bishop Mitrofan of Boston, a man ingrained with patriotism who desperately wanted to return to Russia. Or Fr George Sheremetiev in London who, as Count Sheremetiev, went from being one of the richest men in Russia to one of the poorest men in England, so that he could repent for the sins of his class, whose betrayals he blamed for the Revolution.

What can I say of the patriot parish priest Archpriest Igor Vernik in Paris? Or, in the same city, Vladimir Ivanovich Labunsky, the last of the 4,000 White Russian officers in our parish. In 1990, on introducing him to the first visiting priest from Russia, he begged him: ‘Bless me with the blessing hand of Holy Rus’. He was typical of so many. And what of the suffering heart of Lyudmila Sergeevna Brizhatova, the delightful Russian émigré poetess, faithful to the end in her lonely Parisian exile? The more saintly, the more Orthodox, the more missionary-minded but also the more patriotic. To some the idea of being both Russian patriots and missionary-minded may seem contradictory, but it is not.

This is because those who were Russian patriots were not simply patriots of Russia, but patriots of Holy Rus, the multinational ideal of the Orthodox Church, the Imperial ideal, the missionary ideal. Not for them nationalism and narrow-minded chauvinism, but the message to the whole world that God is with us. Not for them treason, cowardice and deceit, the slogan of the other 50% of the emigration, but faithfulness, courage and the truth. Faithfulness to Holy Rus, courage in the face of temptation, slander and exile, and words of truth against both the lies spread by the Bolsheviks and against the Russophobic myths spread by Western academics and politicians.

As widespread repentance and so the restoration of Holy Rus begins (and it has only just begun – you have seen nothing yet), old bad habits, a casual and nominal attitude to Church-going, fasting and prayer, a superstitious mentality based on ignorance, a few money-grubbing and compromised clergy, still exist. However, since 1917 the Church has been through a great movement of cleansing. Inside Russia, she has been cleansed by blood and persecution; outside Russia she has been cleansed by poverty and confession. Temptations have been taken away so that we can be faithful.

This is why, in 2007, at the signing of the Act of Canonical Communion by both parts of the Church, inside and outside Russia, there took place not the ‘reunion’ of the two parts of the Russian Church, inside and outside Russia, but the reaffirmation of our mutual unity, which had always existed, for we were always One and never spiritually divided. We, the faithful of the Russian Orthodox Church of all nationalities and tongues, have always believed in the Resurrection, Restoration and Recreation of Holy Rus, not in her national garments from before the Revolution, but in her heavenly raiment all over the world.

The Russian Golgotha delayed us for 100 years, but it has not stopped us, on the contrary it has strengthened us. Thus, one hundred years ago the Russian Church was on the verge of creating Metropolitan districts so that the people and the bishops would be brought together. That is at last happening only today. 100 years ago the most devout and much slandered Metr Pitirim of Saint Petersburg, in charge of churches outside Russia, was proposing to build a Russian church in every Western capital and translate the liturgical treasures of the Church into every Western language. That is at last happening only today. As the deputy of the last lay administrator of the Most Holy Synod in Russia, the spiritually alive Prince D. N. Zhevakhov, wrote prophetically over ninety years ago:

‘Educated society in Russia neglected its duty before God and the Tsar and cast Russia into such a state of terrifying chaos that only God and only a Tsar can extract her from it’ (4).

Notes:

1. See especially the first four of the seventeen volumes of his biography, as compiled by Bishop Nikon (Rklitsky), Jordanville, 1957-1971. Characteristically frank, Metr Antony, who taught in all the Academies, leaves us in no doubt as to the real situation of the Church at the time.

2. Fr George Shavelsky’s autobiography was first published in New York in the 1950s, but is now freely available electronically in Russian and also in a recent French translation.

3. See especially the two volumes of lives of the New Martyrs of Russia by Fr Michael Polsky (original editions in 1957 and 1980) or the thousands of pages in the more contemporary volumes researched and written in Moscow by Fr Damaskin Orlovsky.

4. P. 338 of the first two volumes of his 900-page ‘Reminiscences’ covering 1915-1923, first published in Munich in 1923 and republished by Tsarskoe Delo in Saint Petersburg in 2014. Sadly, the two later volumes are still lost.

The Curious Council

The Inter-Orthodox Council, with a token number of bishops from each of the fourteen Local Churches and supposed to take place in May 2016 to discuss administrative issues, is looking increasingly troubled. First, there is the schism between the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch. Then there were rumours after contacts with top US officials that the US State Department was trying to set the agenda, specifically regarding homosexuality. Then there was news from the Russian Orthodox Church that delegates from several Local Churches, notably the Russian, the Romanian (the second biggest) and the Georgian, had failed to agree on the contents of several points in the seemingly US-determined agenda.

Hierarchs of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church then expressed popular concern that the Council was taking place at all. After all Constantinople had not long before sent schismatic representatives of the Ukrainian Church in Canada (the fraction under Constantinople) to Kiev for reasons which the Ukrainian Church naturally found sinister. After this came the news that the elderly Patriarch Bartholomew had erected a statue to himself and that he would never recognize the Carpatho-Russian Metr Rostislav as the representative of the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia. Then came the Patriarch’s visit to Bulgaria when he insulted the Bulgarian people and a diplomatic incident followed and the Bulgarian Prime Minister refused to meet the Patriarch. Some even asked if Patriarch Bartholomew’s behaviour was designed to sabotage his own Council.

After this the Synod in Constantinople sacked the hierarch appointed only two years before for the modernist Paris Jurisdiction, Archbishop Job. Next came the shooting down by Turkey – some say at US instigation – of a Russian aeroplane. The result of this is that the Russian delegation felt unable to attend the next preparatory meeting in Istanbul for the future Council. Indeed, the question was asked if the Council could even take place in Istanbul, as had been proposed. Some have suggested, as we suggested in our booklet, ‘The World Council of Orthodoxy’ in May 2007, that any future Council take place at the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, where alone a politically free Council could take place.

Next came the Pope’s welcome for the Council – in effect compromising it, making it appear just to be a cheap copy of the Vatican’s disastrously divisive and US-Protestant-style Second Council of 50 years ago. Then came the Pope’s greeting to Patriarch Bartholomew on the Catholic St Andrew’s Day, looking forward to the day when Catholics, without repentance, would be in full communion with Constantinople. Then came the news that a joint commission of the Russian and Bulgarian Churches had agreed that there were no objections to the canonization of the much revered Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), the archbishop in Sofia of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia who was the hero of the Moscow Council of 1948, which denounced ecumenism.

Now news has come that Archbishop Jerome of Athens, the head of the Church of Greece, will not attend the next preparatory meeting in Istanbul. There is speculation that this is connected with the  claims of Patriarch Bartholomew to Greek territory. And also the news that Rome and Constantinople are celebrating (!) the 50th anniversary of the highly controversial (and some would say meaningless) lifting of the 1054 anathemas between Rome and Constantinople does not help. As Patriarch Alexis I of Moscow pointed out at the time this event has no importance whatsoever for the mass of the Orthodox Church as a whole, since it is an event that concerns only the Local Church of Constantinople and Roman Catholicism. Even so the event was rejected at the time and is still today rejected by the devout and politically free of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

It can be concluded without hesitation that the Patriarchate of Constantinople is looking increasingly isolated from the mainstream of the Orthodox Church and its Council project, at least in its old form, is looking increasingly in doubt. As has been said throughout Christian history: man proposes, but God disposes.

On Mr Trump et al

In the UK only last week Parliament decided to bomb IS in Syria. It seemed very strange when only two years ago, it was considering bombing the enemy of the IS, the Syrian Army. How you can change sides in just two years is something of a mystery. However, an even greater mystery is why you should bomb in a foreign country thousands of miles away without asking the permission of its government. Had President Assad requested British help, it would look very different. It seems that the UK Establishment is so arrogant that it thinks that it has the right to bomb other countries regardless of what the local government wishes. For example, the Syrian government does not vote on whether to bomb criminal groups in the UK. Apart from a murderous fanatic in east London, probably no-one is very alarmed by any of this token bombing, however. This is because the tiny number of air strikes by the tiny number of British aeroplanes from the tiny Royal Air Force will make very little difference at all.

In the US, Mr Trump, a Republican candidate for the Presidency has suggested that all Muslims should be banned from the USA. Of course this may simply be an attack on President Obama, whom a majority of Republicans believe to be a Muslim. It is true that at present, whether in the Middle East, or in Paris, or in California or in London, fanatics who are Muslims are murdering the innocent. It is also true that, like Judaism, Islam is inherently an Old Testament religion with an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, ethos, an ethos that encourages violence and revenge, that it has not known the Christian reality of love and forgiveness that flow from the Resurrection. On the other hand, it is also true that there are plenty of so-called Christians who are no less Old Testament in their mentality and have as little idea of love, forgiveness and the Resurrection as the average Muslim. Mr Trump may well be one of them.

Any reader of the history of how Charlemagne slaughtered the Saxons will confirm the Old Testament mentality of many so-called Christians. Any reader of the history of the Crusades will confirm this. Any reader of the history of how the Catholic conquistadors and the Protestant cowboys massacred Native Americans will confirm this. Any reader of the history of how Britain and France carved up the Ottoman Empire after the First World War and created artificial client states like the Lebanon, Syria, the Jordan and Iraq, thus guaranteeing civil wars, will confirm this. And any reader of the history of how the Western Powers have over the last 25 years massacred in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria will confirm this. Sad to say, for many tens of millions of Muslims the only terrorists in the world are the Western Powers which massacre in the Muslim world and bring the Western weapons of mass destruction to their bloodied lands. Mr Trump’s concept shows the sort of xenophobic arrogance and insular ignorance that is familiar in the UK only through its most crass and discredited tabloid newspapers.

At the present time the world is on fire. Madness has seized the world. It is as though new words from the Book of Revelation are being read every month. Hundreds are being massacred every day, in Syria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Mali and in Nigeria, and many others are drowning in desperate escape bids across the Mediterranean. What is required to avert an even more terrible and widespread war than those already taking place in North Africa and the Middle East is water, not oil.

A Destiny

Our destiny is to do God’s Will, each in the way that God has appointed for us. Nobody’s destiny is easy. I started to become aware of my own in early childhood. It was something that I never sought, but that was given to me. A series of revelations more or less every three years heightened my awareness of it, bringing others to call me single-minded. My destiny called me, its signposts were everywhere for me to follow and by my early teens all the essentials without exception had become clear to me.

This individual destiny, like all individual destinies, is merely an infinitely minute part of the world’s destiny and of the overall mystical struggle against spiritual impurity and slander, against Cowardice, Deceit and Treachery. Three groups which were dominated by these three weaknesses tried to stop me fulfilling this destiny. In the order in which I experienced them, they were:

1. The Rejecters, who showed Cowardice through their inward-looking narrowness.

They had no vision of the Universal Christian Empire, Worldwide Rus. They were narrow-minded and sectarian and among those who persecuted St John of Shanghai. They rejected, saying that I was English and too well-educated.

2. The Thwarters, who showed Deceit through their fraudulent claims.

They could brook no rivals and sought only popularity for themselves, so falling into renovationism and a jealous and persecuting upper-class personality cult. They thwarted, saying that I was too young and told the Truth.

3. The Preventers, who showed Treachery through their unfaithfulness.

They were unfaithful compromisers, weak academics and unprincipled anti-patriots, who were frightened of the Truth and so betrayed the Church. They prevented, saying that I was a mystic and had too many children.

But my destiny consisted and consists of three tasks which opposed and oppose them all:

1. To Spread the Message of the Universal Christian Church and Empire despite the Cowardice of the sectarian Rejecters.

2. To Guard the Message of the Universal Christian Church and Empire despite the Deceit of the renovationist Thwarters.

3. To Bring Together into the Universal Christian Church and Empire despite the Treachery of the schismatic Preventers.

For carrying out these three tasks which they never wanted me to do, they will never forgive me, but my destiny is fulfilled despite them all.

In the Ukraine

As for the lion whom you saw rousing up out of the forest and roaring and speaking to the eagle and reproving him for his unrighteousness and all his words that you have heard, this is the Anointed One, Whom the Most High has kept until the end of the days against them and their impieties…He will denounce them for their ungodliness and their wickedness and will cast up before them their contemptuous dealings…He will deliver in mercy the remnant of My people, those who have been preserved within My borders, and He will make them joyful until the end comes, the Day of Judgement…

(3 Esdras 12, 31-32 and 34 – the last book of the Russian Orthodox Old Testament; in the Protestant RSV this appears as 2 Esdras 12, 31-32 and 34)

A week-long visit to the Ukraine has confirmed the impression in me that the average Ukrainian is morose, fed up with his lot, especially with the broken promises of a generation of politicians. Nothing has been done in the Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union: roads are of Third World standards, they flood when it rains because of poor drainage, buildings, shoddy even when new under the old Soviet regime, are falling down, infrastructure is decaying. Anything of value was long ago sold off by bandit-oligarchs.

There is no freedom of speech – speak in public against the government and you will go to prison, and the media are dominated by the crudest government propaganda. African-style nationalism is rife. The Kiev junta, which represents less than a quarter of the country, advertises a credit card in the national colours and printed ‘Glory to the Ukraine’, but where is the glory? Amidst the endemic corruption of the 100 Ukrainian oligarchs who own the ruined and bankrupt country, the mentality is hopelessly provincial, primitive.

Where is the glory? A salary of $200 a month is a dream. Understandably, the local population dreams of the EU. Everywhere there are slogans: Eurovalues, Eurostyle, Eurorepairs, Eurostandards. They dream of a country where corrupt oligarchs languish in prison, where the State is honest, where roads and pavements exist, where the infrastructure works, where there is a future. In reality, the EU does not even want the Ukraine. In any case, the EU is a myth, but then the grass has always been greener on the other side.

In reality, the EU is the most corrupt organization in the world: 100 billion euros disappears yearly and its accounts have never been audited. Ukrainians dream of the EU myth, just as once they dreamed of ‘the bright future’ promised them by Communism, not least by the Ukrainian Communist leader, Khruschov, an ignorant provincial peasant and a brutal persecutor of the Church. In history all manner of bandits have fraudulently promised utopia and given dystopia: the CIA-appointed junta in Kiev is just another one.

In Odessa men sell themselves to foreign companies, hopefully they can work as sailors on the container ships and tankers of foreign companies, not least the Chinese. Young women sell their bodies to Western men, either on the streets or else through dating agencies. Go abroad: Who wants to have and bring up children in such a country? Even by any objective standards, the only beauty in the Ukraine today is in the Church, which, as it is beautiful, is persecuted by the nationalistic junta-supported sects and schisms, which promote ugliness.

Today, with the Ukrainian birth-rate collapsed, where is the glory of this gloryless land? We are reminded of the ever-memorable Fr John Romanides ‘Wyoming syndrome’ parallel. He said: ‘Try to imagine that everything in the USA has disappeared except Wyoming; this is what modern Greece has been since the fall of Constantinople – a provincial fragment of a once great empire. And this is what the modern Ukraine is: a fragment left over from a once great empire. What was that empire and how was its destruction organized?

The Empire was the multinational Christian Empire of Holy Rus and its destruction has been planned by the enemies of Christ over a century, in three different phases:

1. In 1914 there began the first phase in their operation to destroy the Christian Empire of Holy Rus, the Russian Empire, replacing it in 1917 with a militant atheist ideology developed in Western Europe. Three generations passed.

2. In 1991 there began the second phase, for it was to dismantle the successor Empire, the Soviet Union, which contained the Russian Empire’s cultural heritage, reducing it to oligarch corruption, dependence and poverty. One generation passed.

3. In 2014 there began the third phase, as it marked the beginning of the occupation of one of the countries that belongs to the former Christian Empire of Holy Rus, the Ukraine.

The coming months may mark either the End of that Empire or else its Restoration, when on the world stage the Lion will reprove the Eagle. On page 16 of the book ‘Elder Schema-Archimandrite Jonah of Odessa’ (1925-2012), recounting the life of the clairvoyant healer and prophet, we find the Odessa Elder’s words written:

‘We ask all Russians to pray that an Orthodox Tsar be granted us. If there is a Tsar in Russia, then he will be God’s Anointed. The grace of God will be upon him and then there will be a great help for Russia’.

May Thy Will be done, O Lord!