The Rejection of the Highway of the Cross and the Resurrection Leads to the Byways

Introduction

In His earthly life Christ suffered not only from the cowardly Paganism of the Romans (and Hellenes), but also from the errors of two Jewish sects. These were the deceitful Pharisees, who rejected the possibility of repentance, that is, they rejected the Cross, and the treacherous Saducees, who rejected the Resurrection. Under different names these three errors, Paganism, Saduceeism and Phariseeism, which like all errors separate us from Christ, are still with us today. Human nature has not changed and it is still besieged by pride of mind, which is the origin of all errors.

Time and again we can notice how we make mistakes by pride of mind, lack of humility in our minds. The only guarantee that we are near to the God of Love, to Christ and therefore His Body, the Church, is when we are humble-minded. Pride of mind always results in spiritual catastrophe, separation from Christ and so the inevitable self-imposed obligation to think according to the ways of the world and so follow them. And prince of this world is the cunning devil, who is called Satan, the slanderer. Let us take three examples, one general and two specific to contemporary Russian Orthodox life.

Modern Paganism

Many assert that they cannot believe in a God of Love, Who wants suffering, wars, earthquakes, cancer etc. As a Russian Orthodox priest, I agree with them. For I believe in the God of Love, Who does not want suffering, which is why He became man and was crucified by those who do want suffering. However, unlike these modern pagans, or secularists, whose beliefs are entirely patterned by this world, I believe in the God of Love, Who because He is Love allows freedom of choice. It is not from choice, but from wrong choices that all human suffering stems. It is Satan’s greatest slander that God is responsible for suffering. In reality, it is pride of mind to blame God for suffering and Satan is the source of all pride. It is the refusal to recognize the Fall and so human sin and the sin of our own minds that is to blame for suffering.

Those who reject the God of Love because suffering exists are those who do not believe in the reality of sin, the human capacity for evil. They blame God for everything. They claim personal sinlessness and then make excuses to disguise their actual laziness by asserting that they cannot believe in a God Who allows suffering. For belief in God would entail responsibility, action for self-improvement and love of our fellow human-beings. And they are too lazy for that. So they reject God. This is why their atheism has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions in the 19th and 20th centuries alone, slaughtered by Nazism, Communism and in the abortion holocaust. The rejection of the God of Love because of the Satanic illusion that God creates suffering creates yet more suffering. This Paganism, today known as Secularism, is the rejection of Jerusalem, of both the Cross and the Resurrection.

Modern Phariseeism

I know a very elderly Russian. He is honest, sincere and a model of integrity. But he belongs to a tiny sect. Why? Because he cannot accept the Russian Orthodox Church as She is, given that the pre-Revolutionary Russian State has not been restored. Only when everything associated with Soviet Communism is removed from Russia will he accept the Russian Church, for he confuses Church and State. He wants perfect restoration of the State now. He does not have the patience to wait for the gradual restoration of an Orthodox Christian State and Empire, for which we are all ardently working, and, worse still, he does not understand that we do not want a restoration of what existed before. We want a restoration to something better than there was before, not to those decadent aristocrats (including most Romanovs who were, to the despair of Tsar Nicholas, vain wastrels) and bishop-apostates who welcomed the Revolution and then later went on to become renovationists.

If what existed before were restored, then there would simply be another Revolution. This elderly man does not want to be with the Russian Church today. Why? Because not all Her members are as demanding as he is. And yet the very Church that he rejects is not only the Church of a great many nominal Orthodox, She is also the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors. Here there is pride of mind. He wants a Church that is not made up of sinners who want to become saints, of penitents who are following the Cross, as the Church always has been made up of, but a Church of the pure, of ready-made saints. Here we see the pride of perfectionist idealism. He refuses to recognize that the direction we are going in is right, even though we have to allow for the weaknesses of the people we meet on the way, whose repentance is in progress. Sadly, this is the pride of Phariseeism, which joins up with the pride of Saduceeism, for extremes always meet through their mutual rejection of Christ.

Modern Saduceeism

If we come now to an example of pride of mind, specific in both time and place, we can see the same error in the Paris School of Philosophy (or ‘Theology’ as they self-flatteringly call it). Here a group of Russian revolutionary aristocrats and intellectuals, who rejected their oath of allegiance to the Lord’s Anointed in Russia, and overthrew the legitimate government in order to create a Protestant-type secular State in which they would have all the power. Failures, they were then exiled to Paris by the Bolsheviks and there they applied their liberal, modernist, pro-Protestant politics to Church life. The result was a liberal, modernist, pro-Protestant ‘theology’, that is, the basically secularist philosophy of the Paris School, of which the chief representative was the fantasist and heretic Fr Sergius Bulgakov, a Marxist who never cleansed himself from his Marxism, who continued to think that the only resurrection was a this-worldly resurrection, political, economic and social.

Unlike their renovationist cousins in Russia who, despite the support of the Bolshevik atheists, died out because the people would not follow their fantasies, the Paris renovationists did not die out. By cutting themselves off from the people and abandoning the episcopal and liturgical disciplines of the Russian Church, the Paris renovationists were able to survive and develop their peculiar sectarian philosophy. They and their descendants even infected individuals in the then Soviet-run Moscow Patriarchate in Western Europe (which is how it became so impoverished at that time), across the ocean and elsewhere and still practise their errors today. Beneath a mask of outward piety, they show themselves to be pro-Revolutionary and anti-Orthodox, anti-the People and anti-Russian. Little wonder that Western secularists admire them, for, like them, they too reject the possibility of the Resurrection and the importance of the preparation for it here and now. Sadly, their pride of mind is stronger than their nostalgia for inherited childhood memories of piety, which they have since deformed and distorted. This is the pride of Saduceeism.

Conclusion

Modern Secularism, like Paganism of old, rejects the Cross and the Resurrection. However, there are those who, though outwardly confessing Christ, in some way reject the Cross or the Resurrection through their pride of mind. The lack of humble-mindedness always detaches us from the Church and so from Christ and so from Love. Every heresy and every sect, every ‘ism’, from Gnosticism to Roman Catholicism, from Protestantism to Bulgakovism, is always based on human pride. It is visible in Syria today, where the Pharisaic Islamists reject the Cross and the Saducean Zionist West rejects the Resurrection. And, as usual, these two extremes meet and support one another in their hatred for Christ.

Human pride means the rejection of Christ, whatever the outward piety it may be disguised in. Modern Secularism, like Roman Paganism which it imitates, rejects the Jerusalem of the Cross and the Resurrection on account of its pride. Modern Sectarianism, like the Phariseeism of old, rejects the Cross and so crucifies Christ in His Body, the Church, on account of its pride. Modern Renovationism, like the Saduceeism of old, rejects the Resurrection, conforming itself to this world, so denying the power of the Church to prepare us for the life to come on account of its pride. Humility of mind, obedience to the Church of the Cross and the Resurrection, is the only highway, all other ways are byways, where we are no longer in communion with Christ and the Jerusalem on high.

The Death of the New World Disorder

Life has taught me that love is stronger than hate. I know that evil is a powerful force, but I firmly believe that goodness will triumph even though at times it is long in coming and puts human patience and faith to hard tests.

Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, sister of Tsar Nicholas II,
25 Chapters of My Life, p.12

Recent anti-Russian Western rhetoric has been so absurd that it is actually amusing. Now the CIA-controlled Nobel Institute has awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature to a leading Belarussian atheist Russophobe! And as regards Syria, we have heard all the usual NATO propaganda (= lies), that Russia is ‘weak’, that Russia is aggressive (that coming from the USA which created the Middle East mess with its oil-greedy invasions and blood-soaked revolutions!), that Russia’s mission (at the request of the Syrian government) ‘complicates matters’ (it only complicates the Western policy of ensuring that the war in Syria never ceases), that a Russian missile landed in Iran, that Russian planes invaded Turkish air space, that many of its missions have been totally ineffective, that bombs missed targets (unlike US bombs in Afghanistan which did indeed destroy the hospital they were aimed at) etc etc.

All this when, apparently, ‘the Russian economy is in tatters’, words said by President Obama, whose own economy has $18 trillion dollars of debt, money that will never be repaid, not to mention his tens of millions of citizens who live in extreme poverty. In the UK, with its failed infrastructure of potholed roads, inefficient and vastly overpriced railways and other privatized utilities and underfunded health and education systems, such words sound especially ironic. Particularly to those who have to feed themselves in foodbanks, after successive UK governments wasted £35 billion in Washington’s futile war in Afghanistan, which is now, just as in 2001, largely Taliban-controlled. In other words, we are once more hearing all the usual US-issued inanities which the Western media are paid to repeat. There are none so venal as Western journalists.

Clearly, the Western elite supports Islamist terrorism, which it set up and armed in 1980s Afghanistan. However, the Western elite already openly supported, financed and praised terrorism in pre-1917 Russia. As for support for Islamism, Great Britain supported it in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century Balkans, even invading Russia together with Turkish forces in the so-called Crimean War. True, during the First Western War, Great Britain fought against Turkey at Gallipoli – but only in order to stop Russia from freeing Constantinople and liberating that final corner of Europe from Turkish occupation.

The Western elite has a very long and consistent history of fighting against Christianity, from the barbarian Normans in Sicily and England, from the pagan Crusades and the Teutonic Knights, until today. The Christians of the Middle East, deserted by the West, just as those of Bulgaria 150 years ago, look desperately to resurgent Russia for freedom amid the beheadings and crucifixions carried out by the Turkish/Saudi/Qatari-funded terrorists. When your head is being chopped off, it is of no importance whether your executioners are $500 million, CIA-trained ‘moderate terrorists’ or Turkish-trained ‘extremist terrorists’.

What is happening? We have been granted a brief respite from the coming of Antichrist, whose advent has been under preparation by the Western elite for 1,000 years, but with vastly accelerated rapidity in the last 100 years. A miracle has happened – not that the elite can see this, for its hearts have been blinded by hatred and jealousy. The Apocalypse is for later. It is not that we need more time to preach Christ to the majority of the demented elite, which in its pride has become almost impervious to the Gospel, it is that we need more time to preach Christ to the six billion who do not belong to the Western world and have not yet been poisoned by its toxic wells of atheism.

The Western elite has isolated itself in its pride and taken masses of Western people into its propaganda, brainwashing them through its imposed cult of ugliness and obesity, of tattoos and dressing in rags. But we are not the masses, we are Christians. And when the Establishment and its mob call out ‘To the lions’, we shall go with joy, thus joining the noble Christians of Libya and Syria and Iraq. The New World Disorder that has been imposed on us since 1989 and lasted a generation is now clearly crumbling. The resurgence of the Christian Empire, centred in Russia just as before 1917, is thwarting the plans of the Western atheists and their masters. That is why they are so angry and so full of poisonous words and deeds. They so much fear the New World Order of the renascent Christian Empire that they are even starting to believe their own propaganda.

Our Hope for a Russian Orthodox Church in Norwich (Update 7)

The Update

Can all our generous donors please pay their pledges, which are now required, to our charitable trust: East of England Orthodox Church (Registered Charity No 1081707).

Bank: Natwest
Account Name: East of England Orthodox Church
Sort Code: 60 08 17
Account No: 13674013
IBAN: GB18NWBK60081713674013
IBAN BIC: NWBKGB2L

May God bless you for having considered the Russian Orthodox Community in Norwich in your almsgiving.

Fr Andrew
9 October 2015

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.

We are now waiting for legal documents to be exchanged. Once this has happened we can start building work to transform the building into an Orthodox church. At last a permanent home for Russian Orthodoxy in Norwich after over thirty years of struggles. Thank you!

‘Prelest’ and Conversion

It is strange that a foreign word, the Slavonic (not Russian) word ‘prelest’, should sometimes be used in English. It is only a translation of the Greek word ‘plani’ and long ago in the fifth century it was translated from Greek ascetic works into Latin by the Gaulish St John Cassian as ‘illusio’. So in English it could be translated simply as (spiritual) illusion, but perhaps the English word ‘self-delusion’ is even more exact. ‘Prelest’ simply means a state of mind in which we imagine that we are something that we are not, in other words, we are deluded. There are two states that greatly contribute to the development of self-delusion.

The first is an emotional state, an excess of imagination and strong feelings. Feelings of self-exaltation, sentimentality, vanity, narcissism and superiority, living in the imagination, which are all simply forms of pride, create fertile soil for self-delusion. Ultimately, these feelings can even develop into psychic phenomena like self-hypnosis, levitation and the production of physical marks like ‘stigmata’. On a simpler level, such states produce pomposity and self-love, the person who is absurdly in love with himself and his gifts, not seeing that anything good is God-given. Such people are easily mocked, as they are ridiculous. Clearly, such feelings are based on vulgar pride. The antidote to them is inner sobriety – a quality most characteristic of the Fathers and the Saints, for it is based on modesty and so humility.

The second state is isolation. People who isolate themselves from others and condemn them, because they think that are better than them, soon fall into self-delusion. They cultivate strange and unique practices because they do not belong to the catholicity of the Church, from which they have cut themselves off. They are too good for the rest of the Church. They do not see that such practices are provincial, literally, ‘parochial’. For example, we can think of one tiny community where all four female members have to wear long, down to the floor, dresses and a strange hat and another where all the men have to be bearded. There is one which is known as ‘the pony tail club’, since that is how the men have to wear their hair like their guru. A fourth practices a ‘secret language’, an esoteric code of garbled foreign words which of course the non-initiated cannot understand. Clearly, the smaller and the more self-isolated the community, the stranger the customs. The antidote to all this is to mix with others, to visit other parishes and monasteries, to see what is normal.

Here we can see the connection between this state of self-delusion and conversion (regardless of the nationality of the neophyte). The essential disease of conversion is to identify the Faith with externals. ‘Beard competition Orthodoxy’ is a typical example of this, but so is wearing prayer knots around the wrist or wearing a large cross outside one’s clothes or women wearing an exaggerated head covering. Genuine conversion is all about not being different in externals, not attention seeking, but about converting the inside. Go to any ordinary parish and you will see people dressed anonymously – they could be anyone, but maybe one of them is a saint. Genuine Orthodox Christians do not stand out, except by their example of living a good life.

There is nothing so disheartening as one who has been a member of the Church for 40 or 50 years, but still calls himself a ‘convert’. It is over – move on. St Paul never refers to himself as a convert. Nor does anyone who has got over the first few months of conversion to the Church and its novelties. All must pray for those who are in the early stages of conversion, that they may get through these stages as swiftly as possible. As Psalm 50 says: ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise’ (Psalm 50). ‘The burnt offerings’ were never necessary, so do not make them.

The Empire Strikes Back: The Renascent Christian Empire and Syria

What is the civilization that Russian Orthodox of over sixty nationalities belong to? It is the civilization of the Christian Empire, renascent since the fall of atheist ideology in Russia. In history this Empire has been known as ‘The Third Rome’ and ‘Holy Rus’. The Christian Empire is not some narrow nationalistic ideology, but a multinational Empire. Although its Centre is in Russia, some Russians do not belong to it. To be Russian and to speak Russian is no guarantee at all of identity with the Christian Empire. Precisely in 1917 many Russians rejected it. And yet tens of millions outside Russia, in the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan and numbers in many countries all around the world belong to it.

Those who belong to the Christian Empire belong to it spiritually and so culturally, confessing its Christian values, rejecting narrow chauvinism and balkanized racism, which puts a particular race and language above the Church of God. They also put the defence of the Christian Empire and all Christians above aggressive invasions and ruthless exploitation, the raping of natural resources, as is sadly so commonplace in Western ideology. Roman Catholics and Protestants do not belong to the Christian Empire, for their leaders rejected the now bimillennial Christianity on which the Empire is based a millennium ago, replacing it with the ideologies of Roman Catholicism and then Protestantism.

However, this is no fault of ordinary Catholics and Protestants, who have been hoodwinked and blinded by their elites, and we make no judgement about them. Perhaps there has now come the time when many of them will join us, returning to the Christian Orthodox Faith of their distant ancestors. However, the Christian Empire is one that which we must be ready to die for and not many are prepared to make that sacrifice. Whether the oppressors were Roman pagans, Hellenist intellectuals, corrupt emperors, Muslim Ottomans, Western-inspired atheists or idolatrous consumerists, we have always had to pay with our lives for our faith. But that has also been a joy for us. Thus Western-inspired atheists, called Marxists, massacred us by the million for our sins, but we were saved by the invasion of other Western atheists, Nazis, and 27 million have their lives so that the restoration of the Christian Empire could eventually begin fifty years later.

They take God away from us, but they cannot take us away from God, Who indwells in the hearts of those who remain faithful, ignoring the temptations all around us. For now the ruler of our Empire is the Mother of God in her Sovereign Icon, which appeared in 1917, when the legitimate government of the Christian Empire was overthrown by both Western and apostate Russian traitors. The Christian Empire is summed up in the words of St Seraphim of Sarov: ‘Christ is Risen, my joy’. The Christian Empire is all those who have not compromised and betrayed the Orthodox Faith, whatever our nationality, and not been intimidated by the powers of this world. The Orthodox Empire is in our places of holiness and shrines, in our churches and monasteries, wonder-working icons, miraculous sacraments and our daily life through our cultural, social, economic and political values and in our quest for peace, honesty, justice and responsibility.

The Christian Empire expresses the Civilization of Christ. Those who reject it, consciously and usually unconsciously, enter into the embraces of Antichrist. As the only protector of all the world’s Christians, the renascent Christian Empire has now had to intervene between Jewish fanatics (Zionists) and Muslim fanatics (Islamists), as it did before 1917. After that year the British and French elites, who had long plotted the downfall of the Christian Empire together with others, carved up the Ottoman Empire. They created countries like the Lebanon, Syria, the Jordan and Iraq, so artificial that they would always be divided and so at war and so easily exploitable by outsiders. However, in 1917 history was interrupted, the balance was lost and extremes appeared, whether Marxism, Nazism, Zionism or Islamism.

Today anti-Christian Western aggression is being stopped by the renascent Christian Empire after a period of 25 years when it freely ravaged the world, from Latin America to Yugoslavia, from the Caucasus to the Middle East, from North Africa to the Ukraine. The Syrian government, invaded by terrorists helped by the West and financed by the Western allies, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, has called on the renascent Christian Empire for help. Now Iraq and Afghanistan, also annihilated by Western meddling, have called for help. Only the Christian Empire can free the Middle East and save the world’s Christians. As a result, the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem draw ever nearer to the Russian Church.

The Western elite has shown its true colours by condemning our protection of Christians and supporting phantom ‘moderate’ terrorists (!). NATO, Turkish and Saudi propaganda support Muslim terrorism and, after all, Al-Qaida was founded, trained and armed by the CIA. Not surprisingly, the military action of the Christian Empire, begged for by the Syrian government, has achieved more in a few days in Syria than occasional and selective US bombing in a year. Here is somewhere where the Russian State is protecting the Church, not always the case in post-Soviet Russia which sometimes resembles Soviet Russia. In other words, it is truly becoming the renascent Christian Empire. Today Jerusalem is protected by that Empire and, although the Temple Mount is still temporarily blocked off, Zionists have failed yet again in their attempt to rebuild the Temple. The world has been granted a little longer to turn to repentance.

‘The Mind of Mr Putin’ by Pat Buchanan

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/the-mind-of-mr-putin/

By: Pat Buchanan | October 02, 2015

“Do you realize now what you have done?”

So Vladimir Putin in his U.N. address summarized his indictment of a U.S. foreign policy that has produced a series of disasters in the Middle East that we did not need the Russian leader to describe for us.

Fourteen years after we invaded Afghanistan, Afghan troops are once again fighting Taliban forces for control of Kunduz. Only 10,000 U.S. troops still in that ravaged country prevent the Taliban’s triumphal return to power.

A dozen years after George W. Bush invaded Iraq, ISIS occupies its second city, Mosul, controls its largest province, Anbar, and holds Anbar’s capital, Ramadi, as Baghdad turns away from us—to Tehran.

The cost to Iraqis of their “liberation”? A hundred thousand dead, half a million widows and fatherless children, millions gone from the country and, still, unending war.

How has Libya fared since we “liberated” that land? A failed state, it is torn apart by a civil war between an Islamist “Libya Dawn” in Tripoli and a Tobruk regime backed by Egypt’s dictator.

Then there is Yemen. Since March, when Houthi rebels chased a Saudi sock puppet from power, Riyadh, backed by U.S. ordinance and intel, has been bombing that poorest of nations in the Arab world.

Five thousand are dead and 25,000 wounded since March. And as the 25 million Yemeni depend on imports for food, which have been largely cut off, what is happening is described by one U.N. official as a “humanitarian catastrophe.”

“Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years,” said the international head of the Red Cross on his return.

On Monday, the wedding party of a Houthi fighter was struck by air-launched missiles with 130 guests dead. Did we help to produce that?

What does Putin see as the ideological root of these disasters?

“After the end of the Cold War, a single center of domination emerged in the world, and then those who found themselves at the top of the pyramid were tempted to think they were strong and exceptional, they knew better.”

Then, adopting policies “based on self-conceit and belief in one’s exceptionality and impunity,” this “single center of domination,” the United States, began to export “so-called democratic” revolutions.

How did it all turn out? Says Putin:

“An aggressive foreign interference has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions. . . . Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster. Nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life.”

Is Putin wrong in his depiction of what happened to the Middle East after we plunged in? Or does his summary of what American interventions have wrought echo the warnings made against them for years by American dissenters?

Putin concept of “state sovereignty” is this: “We are all different, and we should respect that. No one has to conform to a single development model that someone has once and for all recognized as the right one.”

The Soviet Union tried that way, said Putin, and failed. Now the Americans are trying the same thing, and they will reach the same end.

Unlike most U.N. speeches, Putin’s merits study. For he not only identifies the U.S. mindset that helped to produce the new world disorder, he identifies a primary cause of the emerging second Cold War.

To Putin, the West’s exploitation of its Cold War victory to move NATO onto Russia’s doorstep caused the visceral Russian recoil. The U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine that overthrew the elected pro-Russian government led straight to the violent reaction in the pro-Russian Donbas.

What Putin seems to be saying to us is this:

If America’s elites continue to assert their right to intervene in the internal affairs of nations, to make them conform to a U.S. ideal of what is a good society and legitimate government, then we are headed for endless conflict. And, one day, this will inevitably result in war, as more and more nations resist America’s moral imperialism.

Nations have a right to be themselves, Putin is saying.

They have the right to reflect in their institutions their own histories, beliefs, values and traditions, even if that results in what Americans regard as illiberal democracies or authoritarian capitalism or even Muslim theocracies.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Americans had no problem with this, when Americans accepted a diversity of regimes abroad. Indeed, a belief in non-intervention abroad was once the very cornerstone of American foreign policy.

Wednesday and Thursday, Putin’s forces in Syria bombed the camps of U.S.-backed rebels seeking to overthrow Assad. Putin is sending a signal: Russia is willing to ride the escalator up to a collision with the United States to prevent us and our Sunni Arab and Turkish allies from dumping over Assad, which could bring ISIS to power in Damascus.

Perhaps it is time to climb down off our ideological high horse and start respecting the vital interests of other sovereign nations, even as we protect and defend our own.

Лидер свободного мира: о том, кто выступил в эти дни в Нью-Йорке

http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2015/10/02/lider_svobodnogo_mira_o_tom_kto_vystupil_v_eti_dni_v_nyujorke/

On ‘The Orthodox Church’ by Timothy Ware

Early editions of this book were excellent at meeting the intellectual needs of its target audience – the Non-Orthodox world, especially of 1960s and 1970s Anglicans. Criticisms launched at it, that it was scholastic, academic, old-fashioned and not aimed at ordinary people, are therefore quite unfair. It was never meant for us, for it was written by an Anglican scholar from Oxford. Similarly invalid are criticisms that it does not cater for Orthodox and that it looks at the Church from the outside – it was after all written from outside in, not inside out. Later editions, expressing the viewpoints of the US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople in the 80s and 90s of the last century, cannot be expected either to reflect the mystical understanding of those on the inside of Church life, that is, of those in the arena. They express rather the spirit of ‘middle of the road’ compromise between this world and the Church.

Today the book urgently needs reformatting, a rewriting away from Anglican scholasticism and the worldly concerns which the Patriarchate of Constantinople was bogged down in during the end of the last century. This is necessary in order to take account of the dramatic changes in the Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Church, since 2000. These changes have moreover had an irresistible effect on the other 25% of the Church, however reluctant secular-minded liberals are to accept the reality of today’s Orthodox Church. It is time for them to abandon the secularist modernism of the last half of the last century, in which they appear to be stuck and nostalgically look back to. They need to look forward to the dramatic spiritual developments and welcome restorations which the 21st century is already bringing us.