Why I Am Russian Orthodox

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats

Most people belong to one religion or another simply because they were born to a particular family in a particular country. Thus, most Indians are Hindu, most Arabs, Afghans, Indonesians and Iranians are Muslim, most Tibetans are Buddhist. Similarly, most, though not all, Catholics have connections to Latin countries and their colonies (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Angola, Niger, Brazil, the Philippines etc). And most Protestants belong to Germanic countries (Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, Britain and the countries of the former British Empire, the USA, Canada, Australia, Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa etc).

Similarly, most of the 216 million Orthodox Christians, belonging to the family of the at present 14 Local Orthodox Churches, are Orthodox because they belong to certain nationalities – mainly in the Middle East and Eastern Europe (Syrians, Serbs, Albanians, Greeks, Georgians, Romanians, Bulgarians etc). These are mononational Churches. But even most of the non-mononational flock of 164 million Russian Orthodox of 65 different nationalities, are Orthodox because they have been born to a particular family.

However, with prayer, experience of life and thought there are those Russian Orthodox who become conscious Russian Orthodox and come to have a consistent and logical Russian Orthodox world-view. In my own case this is what began to happen to me when I was twelve years old and, living in England, saw the film ‘Dr Zhivago’. This, curiously, was the beginning of my own pilgrimage. By the time I was in my twenties, after experience, prayer and thought, I had worked out a consistent and logical Russian Orthodox world view and I have tried to live by it ever since, despite my human weaknesses.

Such a world-view takes into account our universal Orthodox Christian beliefs, found in the Scriptures, that the universe and mankind were created by God; that mankind fell from bliss into sin and so paganism (institutionalized sin); then was cleansed by the Flood in the time of Noah; restored by the Coming and Resurrection of Christ the Son of God Who trampled down death by death, which truth we live by following the Church, the Body of Christ, through the Holy Spirit Who was sent down to us; but that nevertheless near the end of time the world will be destroyed by sin and the apocalyptic coming of Antichrist, who will be enthroned in Jerusalem, only to be dethroned by the Second Coming of Christ at the very end.

The knowledge through faith that the world will end through the rejection of Christ (for Antichrist is by definition the rejection of Christ) means that we have always known that mankind will fall back into paganism. In other words, sin will be institutionalized, it will become systematic and accepted as the norm. This is exactly what was prophesied already in the New Testament. For example: ‘But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of stress. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without natural affection, truce-breakers, slanderers, profligates, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of religion, but denying the power of it: from such turn away’ (2 Tim 3, 1-5).

Today’s question then is how can it be that the Western world – once Christian – has fallen into such a state of depravity, which its elite is now spreading by force and bribery throughout the world? How has the Western world become the ‘missionary centre for institutionalized sin’, the centre which, like an anti-St John the Baptist, is preparing the way for the coming of Antichrist, the building of whose Temple in Jerusalem US Protestants, for instance, are actively funding? It is very difficult for one who belongs to the Western Catholic/Protestant world to understand this paradox.

The understanding of this paradox is and always has been abundantly clear to Christians who do not belong to the Catholic/Protestant world, but belong to the Orthodox Church. We look at the world from ‘outside the box’. Thus, the Orthodox Church has for centuries believed and prophesied that Antichrist and the end of the world will come as a result of the activities of Non-Orthodox outside Her. To take but a very recent example, we have St Seraphim of Vyritsa (+ 1948). At the height of the dark night of Stalinist persecution of the Church in Russia he prophesied that the port of Saint Petersburg would one day fill with ships of Western people who would not be allowed baptism in their own countries and so would come to Russia for baptism. Eighty years on that time is now coming.

The question may be asked why Orthodox, though respecting the sincerity, beliefs and values of individual Catholics and Protestants and eagerly co-operating with them in the areas where we fully agree, cannot be Catholic or Protestant, but insist on belonging to the Orthodox Church. The answer is simple: for Orthodox Christians, Catholicism and Protestantism are part of the problem: of course it is the isms that are the danger, not the individual people, whom we regard not as enemies, but as naïve victims brainwashed by their isms. Thus, where did the modern secular, anti-Christian and repaganized world come from, how did it all come about, where were its seeds sown?

The secular, anti-Christian world came into being because it is a degeneration from Protestantism, it is post-Protestantism. And Protestantism is a Western cultural phenomenon of the 16th century, in England for instance created by the bloodthirsty monster Henry VIII. Protestantism created modern Capitalism (Mammonism) and commercial empires like the British and the American with their massacres of Hindus, Native Americans, Confederates, Africans, Boers, Vietnamese, Iraqis etc. For Orthodox who have belonged to the Orthodox Church since the day of Pentecost in 33 AD, Protestantism has in any case no attraction whatsoever, as it is a recent invention and, moreover, is conditioned by simply being anti-Catholic. Since Orthodox have never been Catholics, that cultural conditioning which created Protestantism by reaction to Catholicism is completely irrelevant.

If Protestantism is at the root of the modern world and is fundamentally a sort of anti-Catholicism, what then is the Orthodox view of Catholicism? Surely it is closer to Orthodoxy? Catholicism is clearly older, more historic, it existed before the 16th century, it has a veneration for the Mother of God, the saints, it has a liturgical sense, sacraments and a priesthood – it has so much spiritual wealth, like Orthodoxy, that Protestantism simply does not have. However, for Orthodox, Catholicism has existed only since the 11th century – it too is recent, albeit less recent. It too is ultimately a manmade adaptation of Christianity and the Church, a compromise which has put local culture above the Eternal Truth of the Church of God. Relative to Protestantism, it is a step nearer Orthodoxy, but it is still a step away.

For Orthodox, Catholicism is a religion adapted from Orthodoxy (hence the closer connections than with Protestantism, which is an adaptation of Catholicism, a step further away) for the justification of aggressive Western political aims. This we saw with the Papal-encouraged Norman Invasion of England in 1066, the next Crusades soon after, the invasion of Ireland, the sacking of the Christian capital of New Rome (Constantinople) in 1204, the invasions of the Teutonic Knights, the Inquisition, the cruel conquest of what we now call Latin America etc. The centre of (Roman) Catholicism, Rome, was not where Christianity began; that was Jerusalem, which is the spiritual and historic centre of the Orthodox Church. In Orthodox eyes Rome is reminiscent of pagan Rome, Babylon, which is why the first Christian administrative capital was in newly-established New Rome, a city without a pagan past, a new city for a new, Christian era.

Thus, for Orthodox, Catholicism, is also part of the problem. Catholicism is simply the first stage of the degeneration of the Western world after it had left the Orthodox Church. The second stage, even further from Orthodoxy, as we can see with ‘women-priests’ or the practice of homosexuality, which large branches of Protestantism, unlike Catholicism, accepts, is Protestantism. The third stage is the aggressive secularist ideology of the anti-Christianity of the modern, post-Protestant Western world with its imperialism and colonial exploitation; militarization; genocidal World Wars; the removal of Tsar Nicholas, ‘he who restrains’ (2 Thess 2,7), through the anti-Orthodox Revolution in Russia and creation there of a Zionist-run militant atheist State, which had been so carefully planned and financed from London and New York; concentration camps; atomic bombs; puppet regimes; banana republics; invasions of peaceful countries; revolutions (‘regime changes’); massacres; search for absolute global domination through debt-enslavement to bankers etc.

In a word, the leaders of the Western world, the global elite, are attempting to spread worldwide their ideology of anti-Christianity, which has carefully and progressively been built up on the foundation of a thousand years of Western history. Through deformation after deformation after deformation we have turned full circle, from a Western Europe which was Orthodox Christian at the end of the first millennium after Christ to one whose elite is today not only anti-Christian but increasingly openly Satanic in its promotion of and reversion to paganism. What are we to do? We, in the Orthodox Church, and particularly in by far the largest and strongest Orthodox Church, the Russian, are those who lead resistance to the project of the global elite, who wish to see the enthronement of Antichrist in their rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem so that they can rule the world by deception.

That is why the global elite, in the literal words of its representatives like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Tony Blair or Carl Bildt, speak quite openly of their desire to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church. They want to do with us what they long ago did to the Protestant world and, since the protestantizing Second Vatican Council over fifty years ago, to the Catholic world, in other words, to castrate us spiritually, to degut us and neutralize us as the centre of spiritual resistance to their One World Project. They want to do with the Russian Orthodox Church what they have already tried to do with two or three of the much smaller and weaker Local Orthodox Churches, replacing the Patriarchs with their own candidates, telling us what to say and do, destroying our Faith, ‘modernizing’ us. They will not succeed – because our Master is Christ; theirs is Satan.

The Fight for Freedom in Europe Continues

The article below was written within days of the G7 meeting in Germany. Thus, those who support the neo-Nazi puppet regime in Kiev, issued a proclamation from Hitler’s villa outside Munich (!)proclaiming a fight against ‘corruption’! Of course, in the real world the ghetto-like G7 is now irrelevant, surpassed by the economies of the five BRICS countries. Indeed, there are those who fight for freedom from US/EU/NATO tyranny and corruption and work for the liberation of the peoples of the Ukraine from the CIA-run Kievan dictatorship. Reader, read on:

Slovak volunteer in the Donbass: “It’s our way of fighting the EU and NATO.”

Posted: 12 Jun 2015 12:05 PM PDT

Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten
June 11, 2016

Translated from the German by Tom Winter

A surprising melange is coming into view at the Ukraine front: Mercenaries from the Czech Republic and Slovakia have shifted over to the Donbass to fight against NATO. Their home countries are powerless: the rebels apparently pay better.

The Slovaks and Czechs who are currently fighting in eastern Ukraine with the volunteer militias against the Kievan Army intend to put together their own unit that would be part of the so-called International Brigade of the 15th Army.

“The Brigade has a lot of Czechs and Slovaks. They get around 350 Euros a month; they live in barracks and are equipped with tanks and armoured personnel carriers,” reports the Slovakian news portal aktuality.sk.

The news portal conducted an interview Monday with a Slovak mercenary soldier, who says that the most prominent Slovak fighter in Ukraine was Martin “Sojka” Keprta, but that he is now hospitalized with injuries from the fighting.

So far as equipment is concerned, the Slovak source says there are old Mosin-Nagant repeating rifles from Soviet times, plus Kalashnikovs of two different calibres, 5.45, and 7.62 mm, and anti-tank weapons, including PTURs,** grenade launcher RPGs, and all the other weapons that they have captured.

When asked about the involvement of Russian officers or commanders in the Eastern Ukraine conflict, the man says: “In our unit there is no Russian commander. Russia helps us politically and morally. They also provide us with humanitarian aid, which is more than necessary. The Russian military doesn’t have to be here on the spot: Every day the admissions committee in Donbass registers five to twenty people, who are signed in and are going to serve. We have, in contrast to the opposite side, of course, a shortage of motorized transport. ”

Then the Slovak mercenary shares the political motivation behind his service in eastern Ukraine. The mercenary, literally: “We see the EU as a dictatorship and NATO as an aggressive pact. This is our way of fighting the EU and NATO.”

On the same day, the Slovak government released an opinion on the investigative report of aktuality.sk. The Slovak newspaper TERAZ Slovensko quoted the Foreign Ministry in Bratislava: “Such adventurers act alone and actively contribute to the destabilization of Ukraine and the undermining of diplomatic efforts. They hurt the foreign policy interests of the Slovak Republic.

“The government keeps an open and clear distance from these adventurers. The priority of the foreign policy of Slovakia remains the stabilization of the situation in Ukraine in order to achieve a peaceful solution to the crisis through diplomatic negotiations. We support the independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and condemn all attempts to escalate the conflict. ”

The spokesman for the Slovak Interior Ministry, Petar Lazarov, on the other hand wanted weigh in “for security and tactical reasons:” “Slovaks who are fighting for a foreign military or their units without authorization from the president face a prison sentence of two to eight years.”

In eastern Ukraine there are numerous mercenaries from Europe. They are fighting against one side or the other. There are also mercenaries of the US company Academi, formerly Blackwater, among them.

**Mosin-Nagant is a five-shot, bolt action rifle first developed in 1891, corresponding to an American Winchester; the PTUR (“bassoon”) is a wire-guided rocket launched from a tripod-mounted tube. Big enough to require a three-man team.]

Translator’s note: There are European politicians pushing for independence from NATO, Wagenknecht in Germany, and Fillon in France, for instance. They won’t go to jail. Mercenaries from Academi won’t go to jail either.

A Reply to Fr George Mitrofanov

http://www.rocorstudies.org/interviews/2015/06/04/the-outcasts-unite-with-the-outcasts-on-the-eight-anniversary-of-the-reestablishment-of-canonical-communion-within-the-russian-orthodox-church/

In his strangely-titled interview “The Outcasts Unite with the Outcasts” (see above), Archpriest George Mitrofanov, himself perhaps something of an outcast, has declared that the two parts of the Russian Church united far ‘too late and far too fast’. With all respect, I am surprised by both these views.

Firstly, ‘too late’ is only from the viewpoint of those who want the past back. The past was of course dead 90 years after the Revolution. It is totally unrealistic to imagine that the past could be alive after 90 years, after a human lifetime. And why would you wish the past to be alive? It was the decadence of the past that caused the Russian Revolution. Recreate the past and all you will do is create another Revolution. All parts of the Church have moved on, we live in the here and now, united by the New Martyrs and Confessors created by the Revolution, not united by some unrealistic nostalgia for a past that had many faults.

Our unity is not that of ‘outcasts with the outcasts’, and even less of ‘the marginal with the marginal’ (as in the original Russian), but of the mainstream with the mainstream. It was precisely the marginal (whether marginal extremists of the old calendarist sort in ROCOR or marginal extremists of the renovationist sort in the Sourozh Diocese and elsewhere belonging to the Patriarchal part of the Church) who rejected unity.

Too late? Our unity became inevitable after the long-awaited Jubilee Council of August 2000 and the implementation of that Council which took the Church inside Russia several years. I would say that unity came just at the right time; had we waited longer, many in ROCOR would have joined the Church inside Russia; had we not waited, many in ROCOR would have objected to the haste and there could have been a schism splitting ROCOR down the middle.

Secondly,‘too fast’? Here again we see the idealism of Fr George concerning the principles of the All-Russian Church Council of 1917-1918, and that they (!) had formed the foundation of the life of the diaspora of the Russian Church. In reality, some decisions of that Council were based on the democratism and liberalism of Protestant-style Kerenskyism; thank God they were not all implemented, we do not want the negative aspects of the 1917-18 Council.

Here Fr George also writes that ‘and we most certainly overestimated your ability to influence our situation here’. It would have been an amazing piece of pretentiousness on the part of ROCOR if we had ever imagined that, small as we are and engaged in the mission to bring Orthodoxy to the Non-Orthodox world as we are, which is the real mission of the emigration, we could ever have influenced the situation in Russia.

Internal Russian problems can only be solved by Russians inside Russia; we have no such pretensions. We did not produce the New Martyrs – they were produced in Russia and they will provide healing inside Russia, not us. We have our own problems to solve and we look to our own saints, like St John of Shanghai, to help solve them.

Finally, Fr George writes that, ‘our belated unification’ resulted ‘in members of both parties becoming either at best idealists, or in the worst case just a product of the circumstances’. No doubt there are individuals on both sides who belong to these categories, but only on the fringes. The mainstream knew perfectly well what was happening. The scandals on both sides, for instance, the names of those who had worked for and were compromised by the KGB and the CIA (and MI5 and the DGSE in France), were well known to us; but the mainstream on both sides we had very pragmatic, Incarnational, views.

Inside Russia they knew that they could not go on without those who represented the unSoviet past and outside Russia we knew that we could not go on in isolation, that our mission to the world outside Russia had to be supported from inside Russia. It was precisely the dreamers who refused unity, whether the disincarnate, old calendarist (and sometimes CIA-financed) sectarians on the fringes of ROCOR or the Parisian-inspired disincarnate Russophobes on the fringes of the then Patriarchate (also very clearly supported, at least morally, by CIA-type organizations).

To paraphrase the Irish poet Yeats: Things did not fall apart; the Centre could hold. In other words, since 2007 on the mainstream has won the day.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

Speaker at the Fourth All-Diaspora Council, San Francisco 2006
Concelebrant at the Signing of the Act of Canonical Communion, Moscow 2007

An Appeal to Buy a Russian Orthodox Church for Norwich

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 may now be 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.

We have 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.

Now we have found such a suitable building. At present offices, it is a single-storey building near the town centre, so with free parking, about 10 metres (30 feet) long by 6 metres (15 feet) wide. It has heating, lighting, a kitchenette and toilet, all in good condition. Although small, it seems ideal as a basis for starting Russian Orthodox life in Norwich.

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. With our low offer of £42,500 miraculously accepted, this building, we estimate, would cost a total of £55,000 to buy and convert.

Within 24 hours of viewing the building, eight parishioners had already pledged £5,000. For those for whom £50 is a lot of money, this is a considerable sum. Archbishop Mark has enthusiastically blessed us to start public fund-raising. And so we are launching a campaign to gain pledges to raise the extra £50,000 required.

Perhaps you know someone who is wealthy? Perhaps we can find ten people who can each donate £5,000? Perhaps we can find 250 people who can each donate £200? Can you help us by making pledges? May God bless you for considering the Russian Orthodox Community in Norwich in your alms.

All donations, when required later this year in August or September, will be made to our charitable trust: East of England Orthodox Church (Registered Charity No 1081707). But please remember that we do not want donations now, only pledges. To make a pledge, please inform us at this address: frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

2 June 2015

How Western Culture Reverses Spiritual Progress

All heresies reverse spiritual progress because by their very nature they contain spiritual impurity. That is precisely why the Church, which as the Body of Christ is spiritually pure, perceives heresies as ‘wrong choices’, in Greek ‘heresies’. Essentially, what we are logically saying is that every choice that is not Christocentric contains spiritual impurity, for only Christ is without sin, all else is therefore tainted by sin. This includes all cases when groups of human-beings put their humanistic, impure cultures above Christ, so becoming ethnocentric instead of Christocentric. When humanity does this, it also condemns all other cultures and civilizations, whether existing today, in the past or possibly in the future, including Christocentric culture.

This why the famous Dr Johnson wrote that ‘patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel’, meaning that scoundrels always use flag-waving nationalism as an excuse for their base deeds. In particular, scoundrels make cheap propaganda which demonizes their enemies, making them less than human, ‘subhumans’, ‘Untermenschen’ in Hitler’s language. This is merely a justification for the genocides which they commit. This is what Catholics did when slaughtering Christians (100,000 in England alone in the decade after 1066), Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages, what Protestants did to Black Africans to justify slavery, what the Nazis did to Slavs (30 million of whom they slaughtered), Jews and Gypsies, what the Croats did to Serbs (some 800,000), and the Americans have done to umpteen peoples around the world, from Native Americans to Mexicans, from Japanese to Vietnames, from latin Americans to Iraqis, from Serbs to Russians. ‘They’, ‘the rest and not the West’, were and are all ‘subhuman’. Why? Simply in order to justify their power-grabbing and land-grabbing.

However, if nationalism (which is what Dr Johnson meant when he misused the word ‘patriotism’) is the last resort of the scoundrel, what is the first resort? The first resort of the scoundrel is always religion. This we saw very clearly in the anti-Christian Catholic ‘Crusades’ of the Middle Ages, which sacked and looted the Christian capital in Constantinople, in the Spanish plundering of the Americas in the name of God, in British empire-building (‘civilizing the natives’), in the blasphemous US dollar bill inscribed ‘In God we trust’ (meaning in Mammon we trust), in the German First World War soldier with ‘Gott mit uns’ (‘God with us’) inscribed on his belt, or in the Western-founded Al-Qaida and Islamic State, which use Islam (which as an Old Testament religion in spirit hardly has a record of tolerance in any case) to justify the most abhorrent crimes committed while land-grabbing and power-grabbing.

It is this that certain Western semi-converts to Christianity belonging to the various Local Orthodox Churches have to beware of. For long in this country, for example, we have seen an old generation of ex-Anglican semi-converts who reject ‘foreigners’ (i.e. anyone who has never been an Anglican), proposing their own unOrthodox and crypto-Protestant agenda, rejecting the Church as She is. These Establishment types regard the whole of England as their ‘territory’, set up small congregations of half a dozen here and there in order to justify their presence, try to eject others who do not belong to their mafia-like brotherhood, condescend and patronize, slander and backbite. Fortunately, that generation is dying out and we are now coming to a new generation of real Orthodox, who are not compromised by the ethnic religion of Establishment Anglicanism, which puts its culture above the Church, Which it condemns as ‘foreign’. Christ is indeed foreign to the racially and ethnically narrow, for in His human nature He was an Asian, not a Westerner.

Where did this ethnocentric Western mentality, which condemns all other civilizations and rejects the Christian condemnation of war as an absolute evil, as the Church Civilization of the Orthodox Christian world does (1), come from? Its origins are precisely in the eleventh century, of which the apostates of the Western world so proudly boast as the beginning of their much-vaunted Western ‘civilization’, from which ‘the Holy Spirit proceeds’ (2). That century marks the falling away of Western Europe from Church Civilization and the Christian Faith, the beginning of its spiritual degeneration, which it has since spread worldwide like a degenerative epidemic. It was that century which marked the beginning of the Western world as the future technological giant but spiritual pygmy. Until they purify themselves of that mentality of pride, which asserts that all Western actions are justified because of the imagined ‘innate superiority’ of Western culture over Christ and acquire a conscious and consistent Orthodox world-view, there will be no authentic conversion of such Western converts to the Church of God.

Until then, the abysmal Western genocides of people and culture around the world will continue, from Spain to England in the 11th century, from Jerusalem to Cyprus (3) in the 12th century, from Constantinople to Novgorod in the 13th century, from the Cathars of France (‘kill them all – God will recognize His own’) to the peasants of England in the 14th century, from Italy to Germany in the 15th century, from Amazonian natives (‘kill them – they do not have souls’), to French Protestants in the 16th century, from West African slaves to Carribean plantations in the 17th century, from Bengal to Native Canadians in the 18th century, from starving Irish peasants, the Plains Indians (4), New Zealand Maori, Tasmanian Aborigenes (‘animals’) to Sudanese Muslims in the 19th century, from the Belgian Congo, Boer South Africa (5), Carpatho-Russia, European Slavdom and Jewry to Vietnamese peasants in the 20th century, from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria to the eastern Ukraine already in the first grim years of this 21st century.

As a recent popular historian but no friend of the Church as he writes about himself and those like him, has put it quite accurately and apocalyptically:

‘The road to modernity stretches clearly from the first Millennium onwards, marked by abrupt shifts and turns, to be sure, but unriven by any total catastrophe such as separates the year 1000 from antiquity. Though it might sometimes appear an unsettling reflection, the monks, warriors and serfs of the eleventh century can be reckoned our (sic) direct ancestors in a way that the people of earlier ages never (sic) were. (This book) Millennium, in short, is about the most significant departure point in Western history: the start of a journey that perhaps (sic), in the final reckoning, only a true apocalypse will serve to cut short.

Millennium, Tom Holland, p. xxix, 2008

Notes:

1. It was in the summer of 1053 that for the first time in history a Pope of Rome, ‘St’ (sic!) Leo IX, the Schism-Maker, formally blessed a standard of battle. Absolution from the stain of bloodshed – ‘an impunity for their crimes’- was promised to all who answered the call. This was the first launching of a papally-sanctioned ‘holy war’. This was to be repeated in England 1066, then in the Crusades, and today has been repeated by Western countries, which also ‘replace God’ and arrogate to themselves papal infallibility in wrecking Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the Ukraine, to name but a few examples. On the other hand, when in his book ‘Tactics’, the Christian Emperor Leo VI ‘the Wise’ of New Rome (866-912) called ‘religious war’ simply ‘a licence to loot in religion’s name’, he was expressing the immutable Christian teaching that had been universal until the 11th century before the foundation of Catholicism.

Thus, as Sir Steven Runciman noted, Orthodox Christian history was remarkably free of wars of aggression. Peaceful methods were always preferable, even if they involved tortuous diplomacy or the payment of money. To Western historians, accustomed to admire barbarian militarism, the actions of many Orthodox statesmen appear cowardly or sly; but the motive was usually a genuine desire to avoid bloodshed.

Unlike the Christian view, the Catholic view had developed out of the militarism inherited from pagan Rome. The military society that has emerged in the West out of the barbarian invasions has always sought to justify its habitual pastime of bloodshed and interventionism, just as it does today. It gave prestige to the military hero; and the pacifist acquired a disrepute for which he has never recovered. Already Pope Leo IV, in the mid-ninth century, had declared that anyone dying in battle for the defence of the Church would receive a heavenly reward. Pope John VIII, a few years later, had even ranked the victims of a holy war as martyrs; if they died armed in battle their sins would be remitted.

2. We recall the famous words of Gandhi, who, when asked what he thought of ‘Western civilization’, replied: ‘An excellent idea’.

3. Including the cannibalism of the sadistic French King of England, Richard ‘the Lionheart’.

4. In 1866 General Sherman wrote to President Grant that, ‘We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children’. And, as quoted by his biographer Marszalek, he added that ‘during an assault on an Indian village the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age. As long as resistance is made, death must be meted out’. Together with the other Indian fighter, Philip Sheridan, it was he who wrote that ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’. The descendants of the same Plains Indians have recently supported the Russian Federation against the US government’s anti-Ukrainian and also pro-pedophile policies.

5. In the letter of Tsar Nicholas II to King Edward VII of 27 May 1901, we find the last Orthodox Emperor expressing his concern in English that although his ‘principle is not to meddle in other people’s affairs’ (unlike the modern West), his ‘conscience obliges’ him ‘at last to speak openly’ and that the Boer War ‘looks more like a war of extermination’ and that Britain must ‘put an end to this bloodshed’.

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (May 2015)

Q: Your writing seems to have become less apocalyptic and more optimistic in the last 10-15 years or so, why is that?

A: In the 70s, 80s and 90s, we thought that was probably it, that there was little hope for any revival of Orthodoxy inside Russia and that therefore outside Russia, little ROCOR would just have to hold on to the end, which could only be a few generations away at most. For example, I remember meeting in 1977 the elderly widowed matushka of the philosopher and inventor of ‘eucharistic theology’, Fr Nikolai Afanasiev, from Paris (she was much more Orthodox than he was). She told me despairingly, ‘Russia is finished’. Of course, many in her generation who had lived through the Revolution and exile thought exactly that.

Indeed, I too had great doubts as to whether I would see a revival in my lifetime. The 90s under Yeltsin brought little hope; it seemed as though after the obscenities of atheism Russia was just going to copy the West in terms of continuing apostasy. And yet we have, ever since the Jubilee Council of August 2000 and the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors, begun to see the long-awaited transfiguration. Everything changed on that day as was seen in the miracle of the Cross in the sky that appeared then. Russia is the key, if Russia is restored, then the restoration of the rest of the Orthodox world from decadence and Halfodoxy will follow. It is the signs of this process that we are so eagerly following now.

Q: Are you not over-optimistic? Look at all the problems in Russia, abortion, alcoholism, crime, mass nominalism, the Ukraine.

A: I have always said that the revival on Russia is on a knife-edge. Everything can still go one way or another. The Ukraine is a huge warning that shows just how fragile the situation is. What lies behind the civil war in the Ukraine is the spiritual crisis of nominalism which shows that fragility. So-called Orthodox Ukrainians are defending statues of Lenin, the monster who created the Ukraine! What sort of Orthodoxy is that? It is no more Orthodox than the Uniats who want to put up statues of Hitler.

Washington can still undermine everything, as we have seen in Constantinople since 1948 when its agents deposed the Orthodox Patriarch and replaced him with their puppet. Now, throughout the Balkans and the Middle East, Washington, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through its EU vassal, is attacking the soft underbelly of the Orthodox world. Whether in decadent Syria, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, the Ukraine, it is trying to destroy the Orthodox Church as the last bastion against Antichrist, whom neocon Washington is aiming to enthrone in its Israeli client-state. Wherever there is decadence in the Orthodox Church, there Washington and its colonies are attacking and intimidating. We have to be strong and consciously resist – then they cannot attack us.

Q: Does this explain the present situation in Macedonia?

A: Yes. Washington was so angered when Russia freed Bishop Jovan from his Macedonian prison and when Russia proposed to send a pipeline through Turkey, Greece and Macedonia (since Washington had bribed corrupt Bulgarian politicians not to accept it there) that it decided to organize a coloured revolution in Macedonia using its Albanian mafia clients from Kosovo. That is what is happening there now.

Q: How is the Serbian Church reacting?

A: It is in a dilemma. The Americans had already vetoed the election of Metr Amfilochije of Montenegro as Serbian Patriarch, but not everything is going their way, just as in the Romanian and Greek Churches, despite their manipulations there. Notably in Greece, the veneration of the relics of St Barbara by hundreds of thousands is greatly irritating the Americans. Anything traditionally Orthodox annoys them immensely because it automatically shows solidarity with the Russian Church, which it is desperate to destroy, as its neocon leaders openly proclaim. However, they have been annoyed above all by the resistance of Ukrainians to their puppet show in Kiev and its mass murder. The Orthodox seem to be winning there. That is a miracle. We are hopeful that the prophecy of Elder Jonah of Odessa will yet come true. But like all prophecies, it will need mass repentance to come true.

Q: What prophecy?

A: That victory for Orthodoxy will come in the Ukraine, but only after a bloody Easter (in 2014) and a hungry Easter (in 2015), at Easter 2016.

Q: All of these events are happening far away, in the Balkans or the Middle East, surely it does not affect us here in the West?

A: Oh, yes it does. For instance, the Russian Church faces immense opposition to the establishment of even a single new parish in the Western world. On the other hand, the West supports the establishment of parishes of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Why? Because it fully controls them through freemasonry etc. This is the case locally in the east of England, as all over the Western world. Beware of the fifth column. Look at how many years we have had to wait for the new Russian Cathedral in Paris. The foundation stone has just been laid – five years late, twelve years after it was first mooted with sorts of delays, some created by the homosexual former mayor of Paris.

Q: How do you resist? How do you achieve anything against the establishment of a masonic Orthodoxy which has been promoted in the West? Why has an ‘Establishment Western Church’ not appeared, when so much has been done to create it?

A: Thanks to the immigration of real Orthodox from Eastern Europe, a ‘Eurochurch’ has not been formed. Immigrants have come to the West in the last 15 years and saved the situation, supporting us, the once small minority, on whom the Establishment used to spit and turn its back in contempt and condemnation. Real Orthodox can no longer be ignored in the West – much to the fury of the Halfodox. They had counted on establishing a kind of degutted ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’, an ‘Orthodoxy Lite’, a Constantinople-controlled (that is, US State Department-controlled) Finnish Orthodoxy throughout Western Europe. This was to be built on protestantizing half-converted Europeans and on lapsed second and third generation Orthodox. This was as crazy as a chain-smoker trying to build an American Orthodoxy on half-converted ex-Episcopalians and former Uniats.

Q: Why is the West so opposed to the Russian Church in particular?

A: Precisely because we do not represent some sort of Establishment-approved Balkan folklore or masonic lodge, but the uncompromised Church of God. The devil is angry with us and so uses his agents against us. Wherever there is compromise in matters of the Faith, there is the devil. He does not want integrity. As the old proverb says, ‘the devil always builds a chapel next to a church’. This became crystal clear in 2006 when the British Establishment and media so vigorously approved the schism in the Sourozh Diocese in this country and launched a vitriolic campaign against the Russian Church. Their hatred was really quite shocking, all for a tiny and spiritually irrelevant schism! But the Establishment always defends its own, as it is always shaken when it is resisted; this world does not want any witness to the other world.

The same situation prevails in all other Western countries, where certain senior clerics, academics and laypeople of the OCA in the USA and of the Paris Jurisdiction in France work for those countries’ Russophobic secret services. We must never lose our freedom in the Russian Church, as they have. Once you have lost your freedom, you are spiritually compromised. And let us be frank, this also happened to a few individuals in ROCOR between the 70s and the 90s. It can happen anywhere. As the secret services say: ‘Every man has his price’. That is the cynical level they work on.

Q: So how do we resist?

A: As a new Catholic acquaintance said to me only a few days ago, ‘Orthodoxy? That’s an advanced form of Catholicism, isn’t it?’ I was struck by this view from the outside. What is certainly true is that there are individuals on the fringes of the Orthodox Church who do not at all confess ‘an advanced form of Catholicism’, but confess a modern Catholicism, i.e. a debased form of Protestantism, in fact, more or less secularism.

Q: So what do we have to do?

A: We have to reverse the processes by which the Church in the West was debased into Catholicism and then the processes by which Catholicism in turn became debased. That means going back to before 1054.

Q: Can you explain that in more detail?

A: Growing up in England, the one historical date I knew even as a small child, like all children, was 1066, the Battle of Hastings. I realized that it was very important locally, but did not understand its general context until some years later through the Church. Later placing that date of 1066 in its historical context as an Orthodox, I realized that it was all linked with the processes that had taken place during the eleventh century, through which Catholicism had been founded and, through it, a Western European world quite independent of and separate from the Church of God, with its own fake Christian institutions.

In other words, I discovered that 1066 was not some isolated date unconnected with everything else, it was part of a much wider process, of which provincial England was just a part. Locally, it meant the final debasing of England as an Orthodox country, but this was the same thing that had happened elsewhere before, in ‘Frankland’, Northern France and Western Germany, then in southern Italy and Spain, and happened elsewhere later, in the Crusades in the Middle East and with the Teutonic Knights in Eastern Europe. The aim was to turn the whole world into ‘Frankland’ – which is what Washington is now trying to do in the Ukraine and Macedonia at this very moment, 950 years later.

Moreover, the situation that developed in 1066 in England has lasted until today; we are still occupied by the Normans because there has been no repentance. Incredibly, 1066 is still marked by Establishment types as some sort of progress or victory, the birth of England, instead of its death! That is the result of a total lack of repentance. Lack of repentance always justifies evil. Look at the neocons in the USA today as examples of lack of repentance and justification of evil! Remember Madeleine Albright who said that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children was ‘a price worth paying’. The Nazis said the same sort of thing. Little wonder that the neocons support Neo-Nazis in Kiev. They come from the same stable.

And no repentance means no restoration. So what do we have to do to restore Truth? We have to deNormanize or, to express it in its general European and world context, deFrankize, in other words, we have to return to the Church and the Church way of thinking. That is absolutely vital if we are ever to found a Metropolia in Western Europe, the basis for a new Local Church.
Q: You mention 1066, behind which hides 1054, are there any other concealed dates in history like that?

A: Definitely yes and many of them. You see, a correct understanding of the Church is the key to understanding the past, just as a correct understanding of the Church is the key to understanding the future. What makes no sense in secular terms always makes sense when it is put into the light of the Church – or into the darkness of the absence of the Church. 1066 makes no spiritual sense until you understand that 1054 lies behind it, that it was all part of the same process of spiritual degeneration in Western Europe that had begun with Charlemagne and has still not ended. For example, today’s civil war in Syria makes no sense until you understand the spiritual degradation that went on in Syria before it. Another example, much closer and more obvious to us, is 1918, behind which hides 1914.

Q: 1918? Can you explain that?

A: 1918 marked the killing and martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II, a date which changed world history because it created the Soviet Union and all that that entailed, including Communist China. There is no going back to before that until repentance and so restoration. Behind 1918 is concealed 1914 with the German (or rather Prussian – ‘Prussia ruined Germany’ as the Hessian princess the Tsarina Alexandra said in 1914) declaration of war. And that meant the spiritual suicide of Europe.

Q: On this subject, Western sources more or less all assert that the fall of the Romanovs was their own fault, for instance that it was Tsar Nicholas’ weakness that led to the Romanovs’ downfall. Is this true?

A: Of course not, this is all just self-justifying propaganda. Yes, it is true that Tsar Nicholas II came to the throne young and unprepared after the totally unexpected death of his father, Alexander III. It is true that in the first years of his reign he suffered much from the cabal of his power-seeking uncles, the corrupt Grand Dukes, who took advantage of his youth and great kindness. But the real reason for the downfall of Imperial Russia was the treason of the aristocracy and the generals, including, it is true, of a great many of the extended Romanov family and many Grand Dukes, because of their apostasy from Orthodoxy, which caused jealousy, greed, gossip, slander and the murder of the peasant Rasputin.

These aristocrats wanted to overthrow Tsar Nicholas, the legitimate authority, because they wanted power for themselves. Seeing Tsar Nicholas’ strong will and resolution, they slandered him and carried out a coup d’etat, accusing him of a weak will and irresolution. This was mere self-justification. Their agreement to a Revolution that had been prepared by Buchanan, the British ambassador in Saint Petersburg, who soon regretted his foolishness, created the nightmare. Of course, they punished themselves because they lost everything. It was their own fault. The best of them understood it and had time to repent for it in the Bolshevik Gulag or else in exile, in Berlin, Belgrade, Paris, London (like Fr George Sheremetiev) and elsewhere. Others never repented of the blood on their hands.

Q: So are you saying that the West was responsible for the Revolution?

A: Directly, through its agents, and indirectly, through the westernized aristocrats, yes. Fopr example, directly because of German funding for the Bosheviks (just as the Japanese had funded the 1905 Revolution and the British and Americans had stood behind the Japanese, using them as vassals – as the USA still does). Directly because the British wanted revenge on Russia because Russia had supported the Boers and the Americans wanted revenge because the Russians had supported the Native Americans (as they still do), so they sent Trotsky. Directly because the British did not want to see Constantinople freed by Russia in 1917. But also indirectly because of the treason of the Russian aristocracy, blindly anglophile like the murderous Oxford graduate the transvestite drunkard and parasite Yusupov, one of the richest men in Russia. His ideal was not Holy Rus, but Oscar Wilde! What hope was there with such as Yusupov?

Q: What was Russia’s aim in the First World War?

A: It was, as Tsar Nicholas said to the treacherous French ambassador in 1914, the destruction of German militarism. The Tsar actually predicted that if it was not defeated, there would be another war. Tsar Nicholas had already targeted it in his proposed Hague peace and disarmament conference at the end of the 19th century. Russia knew that once militarism was defeated, peace could prevail in Europe and thus worldwide. However, the West, especially Berlin but also London, did not want peace, and so slaughtered its youth. And nor did the bankers of New York want peace. However, with Russia taken over by the Wall Street backed Bolsheviks, only war could prevail, which is exactly what has happened ever since 1918, indeed since 1914. The world has not known peace for 101 years. That is not Russia’s fault.

Q: What are the temptations which could stop Russia’s revival today?

A: On the one hand, there is westernization, such as that which infected the pre-Revolutionary aristocracy and today infects the US-controlled puppet oligarch-bandits, the modern aristocrats, who actually are mainly Jewish. On the other hand, there is the threat of a narrow Russian nationalism, such as that which prevailed in parts of ROCOR between the 1970s and the 1990s. This could prevent Russia taking imperial responsibility for the rest of the Orthodox world, parts of which have fallen into such great decadence since 1918. All is still on a knife-edge. We make no predictions. All we can say is what we have to do is clear – to fight for the Orthodox Truth without compromise; as to whether we can be successful and so delay the coming of Antichrist in the near future, that is not clear. All we have is hope, faith and love.

Orthodoxy: Creationist or Evolutionist?

Little has been written about the Orthodox viewpoint on Evolution. Why? Primarily because it is not a question that concerns the Church, but rather concerns the various forms of Protestantism outside the Church. Interestingly, the controversy on the theory of evolution also concerns Catholicism less – for the reason that Catholicism, until recently anyway, has conserved more of the sense of the Church than the various Protestant sects.

Thus, unlike Protestant groups, Orthodox are not obsessed with the Old Testament (except for the Psalter), for we see the Old Testament through New Testament eyes, the eyes of the Church. Orthodox are more interested in saving our souls than abstract arguments like how long did each of the Six Days of Creation last and what was the nature of Noah’s Flood. Nevertheless, since we live in a world where secularist, that is, post-Protestant, culture prevails, we have to have answers to such questions.

This is all the more the case when on the fringes of the Orthodox Church we can find individuals influenced by both Evolutionism and Creationism. Thus, the largely Episcopalian-oriented and modernistic St Vladimir’s Seminary in the OCA has looked favourably on Evolutionism, similarly modernists in the Greek Archdiocese in North America or individual modernists of the Paris School or the notorious provocateur and now discredited Deacon Andrei Kurayev in Moscow. On the other hand, under the influence of evangelical ‘missionaries’ working in Russia in the 1990s, some recent converts in Russia (and also in Greece) have fallen under the influence of Creationism.

Does this mean that mainstream Orthodox take an intermediate stance between Creationism and Evolutionism, somewhat like many modernistic Catholic intellectuals? No. Evolutionism (and it is only a theory) is simply anti-Orthodox; it is the atheist product of nonsensical Darwinism (‘man descended from the ape’), which, amoral from the start, soon turned immoral and evil, into Communism and Nazism (‘the survival of the fittest’ i. e. those who hold our atheist ideology or belong to our master-race); since man is merely an intelligent ape, he can be slaughtered by the million, just as we slaughter millions of animals in abattoirs.

The fundamental ideology of Evolutionism is atheism. As Bible-practisers (rather than mere Bible-believers), Orthodox believe in Creation. However, we dislike all ‘isms’ (which are always manmade, not Godmade). Thus, we dislike the literalism and fundamentalism of Creationism. And if we were to use an ‘ism’ to describe ourselves, it would certainly not be ‘Creationism’, but ‘Creatorism’. We believe in the Creator, not in Creation, which is merely the Creator’s handiwork. We confess ‘I believe in One God the Father, the Almighty, Who created the heaven and the earth’, not in ‘One Creation’.

And mention of the Creed should remind us that is the Creed that we confess; everything else is not a dogma. Thus, if Orthodox disagree with what I say below about the Six Days of Creation or Noah’s Flood, that is fine. All I am doing is putting forward suggestions, not dogmatizing what in the end is only opinions. Opinions which in no way contradict the Scriptures (something that modernists constantly do) must be looked at. The Book of Genesis is like a telescope and enfolds all the ‘prehistory’ of mankind into a few chapters and pages, therefore there is room for interpretations and therefore controversy. For example, the Book of Genesis does not contain dates – we can only suggest them. Here we should be careful not to fall into putting scientific theories above Biblical facts.

The first common controversy is what is meant by ‘a Day’ in the Six Days of Creation, 24 hours – or more – or less? The answer to this is we do not know. Apart from St Ephraim the Syrian, who says precisely 24 hours, no Church Father seems to be bothered by such a question. In fact, all we can say is that each day, before the creation of sun and moon on the fourth day, may have lasted exactly 24 hours, but equally may have lasted a split second or else short periods of perhaps thousands of years.

Why must we answer thus? Because we do not know, all we know is that God is Almighty and therefore can do anything. To limit God is mere human rationalism. In general, our feeble human understanding cannot understand what it is meant by a day; together with the Fathers, we would do better to think of ‘Six Acts of Creation’ rather than ‘Six Days’. The Holy Scriptures, and in general the Holy Fathers, are not interested in Chronology, but in facts. God created everything; that is what is important, the when and the how are unknown to our over-tidy and over-inquisitive minds.

When was the world created? We do not know from the Scriptures because they do not say, except that it was five and a half ‘days’ before God made man. However, the Church, not the Scriptures, does give the symbolic date of 5,508 BC – that is, 5,500 years (five and a half ‘days’) before the Birth of Christ) for the date of the Creation. Thus, symbolically, the date of the Creation is five and a half days before the date of the creation of man, who had to wait 5,500 years until his ‘re-creation’ through the Birth of Christ. Some people take all this literally and that is fine because no modern theory can actually and irrefutably contradict.

However, if you prefer modern scientific theories (which are only ever-changing hypotheses) and prefer to believe in billions of years, that is also OK. The age of the universe is not a Church dogma. Nevertheless, a symbolic date does not necessarily mean an unreal date. Given the fact that all techniques of scientific dating have been put into doubt by facts such as that rocks created only 210 years ago by volcanic eruptions have been ‘scientifically’ dated as hundreds of millions of years old, no ‘scientific’ dating can be trusted. The fact is that the universe may have been created in 5,508 BC. Of course, if you prefer to think otherwise, that is fine. It will not endanger the salvation of your soul, which is our only basic concern.

We believe that Noah’s Flood took place. The Bible says so (Genesis 5-10; Matt. 24, 37; I Peter 3, 20; 2 Peter 2, 5 and elsewhere) and indicates that it took place in the fourth millennium BC, between about 3,300 and 3,500 BC. Moreover some 140 different human cultures affirm it, from the very garbled Gilgamesh version of the Flood to the perhaps far more interesting Australian Aborigene version. However, there are difficulties of interpretation – above all was the flood local or universal? Again, there is no Church dogma on the matter and we can believe as we wish. However, I believe, like most Orthodox, that it was universal and this for many reasons.

First of all, if the Flood were only local (and archaeologists like Woolley long ago confirmed that naturally there were local floods in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago), why spend a century building a massive Ark (the largest vessel in world history until the 19th century), why not simply walk away, as Lot did from Sodom? Why were all the animals (except for sea creatures), the whole gene pool of the then animal world (and so of all modern breeds), taken into the Ark, as also the whole gene-pool of humanity (Genesis 10, 1) ? If the Flood had only been local, that would have been unnecessary. Why do the Scriptures speak of the destruction of all humanity and all creatures (Genesis 6 ,7 and 7, 21-22), if they do not mean that?

How else do we explain sedimentary layers thousands of feet deep, fossil graveyards, fossil fuels, the destruction of the dinosaurs, frozen mammoths, glaciations and the ice caps of the Poles, the deepening of the oceans and the raising of the mountains (Ps 104, 8), continental shelves, the later continental drift and separation of continents and so separation of languages after the Tower of Babel, if there was not a universal Flood? All these phenomena witness to the pre-diluvian world, proof of Noah’s Flood, as witnessed to also by countless folk traditions.

Moreover, recent research has suggested that many antediluvian civilizations existed before the Flood, and their remains can be found under the seas as ‘underwater kingdoms’. Folklore from all around the world has always spoken of earlier, pre-diluvian civilizations, such as Atlantis, and they are spoken of in the Book of Genesis (5 and 6, 1-4) before Noah, including a civilization of giants. Archaeologists confirm them, as they also confirm post-diluvian civilizations, of which Western civilization is one, although in the case of Orthodox civilization, it would be clearer to speak of a post-Resurrection civilization.

In other words, we are saying that a universal flood confirms all that has been found on earth. The homing instincts of animals would have directed them to enter the Ark, given that they had a century to gather from the single continent or Pangaea (‘dry land’ – Genesis 1, 10) where they lived. There would have been no problems feeding and caring for them in the huge Ark if they hibernated and the animals would have no problems breathing when the floods rose over the then in any case much lower mountains as the atmosphere would have been raised above sea level.

The amount of water required for such a flood would be explained by the pre-diluvian water vapour canopy over the earth collapsing (Genesis 7, 4) and ‘all the fountains of the great deep’ bursting forth (Genesis 7, 11), water under the earth, breaking. The only reason why none of this could not have happened fewer than six thousand years ago is ‘scientific’ dating, which we know can be be inaccurate by billions of years. Here science, that is, the microscopic amount of human knowledge and understanding, is irrational, as it is built on countless flimsy, hypothetical theories, which are constantly changing. The Bible, however, deals with facts. Only our interpretations vary.

The Disunited Kingdom

Seeing the Christian people of the Crimea overwhelmingly vote for freedom and sovereignty and return to Russia last year, Christian Serbs also voted for freedom from looming EU/US tyranny and asked to be governed by Russia. Now it is the case of the peoples of the UK in their bid for freedom from the Westminster tyranny of the public school elite, from which Irish Ireland separated nearly 100 years ago and won freedom by violence.

Following the successes of anti-Establishment parties in the anti-democratic UK elections on 7 May, the governing elite has been taking its revenge. Last Saturday extensive rioting by crowds in London, Bristol and elsewhere was censored by the State-run media, especially by the BBC and the Murdoch press, who reported it as involving ‘100 people’ and presented them as violent anarchists, when in facts tens of thousands were involved.

In the UK politicians are not assassinated by the Establishment, however their characters are. Hence this week’s extraordinary campaign of vilification against the leader of UKIP, which is in effect the English National Party. The BBC have taken particular glee in digging up a critic of that leader and concentrating on his attacks. UKIP gained nearly four million votes: the Establishment was not amused and therefore it must divide and continue to rule.

Incomprehensibly for the BBC, that leader is very popular among the unknown to them white working class, who have for long been utterly abandoned by the Westminster elite. We now await a campaign of muck-spreading against the leader of the Scottish National Party. No doubt the BBC have been ordered to find dirt and a dissident there, so that the Establishment may also divide and continue to rule in Scotland. No-one has forgotten Casement in Ireland.

Now over 35,000 people from northern England have signed an online petition (change.org), asking to separate from London and join a future independent Scotland. The northerners have more bonds with Scotland than with “the ideologies of the London-centric south” and “the deliberations in Westminster are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the north of England”. Will other regions of England follow? We in East Anglia are ready. Freedom remains the great goal.

There will be a Tsar in Russia!

Introduction: Eight Years

Eight years have passed since Ascension Day, 17 May 2007, and the long-awaited entry into canonical communion of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church, of the vast majority in the Patriarchate centred in Moscow and of the small minority in the Church Outside Russia, centred in New York. Thus, ninety years after the catastrophic overthrow of the Lord’s Anointed, Tsar Nicholas II and the legitimate Russian government, since when the whole planet has been unbalanced and torn apart by unceasing war and terror, there came hope of restoration. This reconciliation was one of the first signs that the historic injustice of the overthrow by its enemies of the Russian Empire, which had been on the verge of victory in the First World War, could be righted and that the Orthodox Empire could at last be restored. But why were the two parts of the One Russian Church separated in the first place?

The Past

As is known, the separation came about only because of the seizure of power in 1917 by aristocratic Western-backed traitors and then by militant atheists who cruelly persecuted the Church in what remained of the former Russian Empire. Thus, when the Church inside Russia, just as outside Russia, fell under attack from renovationism, we stood together side by side, condemning both the heresies of Bulgakov in Paris and of Vvedensky in Russia. When Church representatives inside Russia were forced into lieing and saying that there was ‘no persecution of the Church’, we understood that they were hostages and spoke for them.

In freedom we refused to remain silent and spoke to the world of the persecution of the Russian Church. Understanding the enforced paralysis of the hierarchy of the Church inside Russia, we proceeded with the canonization of saints like St John of Kronstadt, St Xenia of Petersburg and finally the New Martyrs and Confessors. And when the hierarchy of the Church inside Russia was forced to accept unworthy representatives and renovationists abroad, in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, London, New York and elsewhere, and when they engaged in the ecumenist heresy, again we spoke and defended the Orthodox Church and Truth.

Of course, there were small numbers in the Church Outside Russia who also made mistakes. Even though we lived in political freedom we failed to canonize the New Martyrs and Confessors until 1981. St John of Shanghai had wanted it nearly fifty years before! Why did we have to wait for so long? Because of those on the political wing of the Church Outside Russia. These who were politically motivated, mainly on the fringes of the Church, were engaged in anti-Russian politics and schismatic attitudes, notably in the 1990s accepting into the Church individuals living outside our canonical territory in the former Soviet Union.

It was noteworthy that these tiny groups, the renovationist cults and ecumenists on the fringes of the Patriarchate and the schismatic sects and extremists on the fringes of the Church Outside Russia, had fallen away from the Church by 2007, the moment of our unity. Extremists could not stand unity and they lapsed, either crossing into the liberal, ecumenist, new calendarist Patriarchate of Constantinople or else fell away into various pharisaic, uncanonical, old calendarist groups. Thus, both masonic renovationists and politicized schismatics left the golden path of unity of the Russian Mother Church for isolation and separation.

Conclusion: The Future

In the last eight years we have continued to experience the deep spiritual unity of the Russian Church. Outside Russia we have been able to witness to the truths of our uncompromised Orthodox Faith far more deeply than before to the other Local Churches, to the heterodox world and to the apostate West. Inside Russia we have made friends with those who struggle for the Church and for the restoration of the Russian Orthodox State and society. Our united opposition to the onslaught on the Ukrainian people by the American junta in Kiev is evidence of this hope and prayer, as also is our loyalty to His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill, the symbol of our unity in freedom. Ultimately we seek the restoration of the monarchy inside Russia. Only an Orthodox Tsar for all the Russian Lands and indeed for all the Orthodox Lands can combat the apostate Western world and avert the Apocalypse, as ‘the rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’, as Yeats prophesied. There will be a Tsar in Russia!