Russian Nationalism Loses Control of the Russian Church

After the 1917 Revolution and the dissolution of the Russian Empire, the Russian Orthodox Church, formerly the Church of the Russian Empire, was forced to decentralise and give up various territories like eastern Poland and Finland, and the churches in them. Thus, the new country of Poland (and also Czechoslovakia) came to form its own independent (autocephalous) Local Orthodox Church. As for Russian Orthodox in Finland, like the emigres centred in Paris, and later Ukrainian emigres, they joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

However, the bulk of the Russian emigration, then in China (from here many later moved to Australia) as well as in Western Europe (from here many later rejoined others already in North America), became independent of Moscow. Eventually the descendants of this emigration became known as ROCOR or the New York Synod. Despite the fact that in 2006 several parishes in England and France had left the jurisdiction of Moscow itself to join Constantinople, in 2007 most of this New York Synod formally returned to Moscow, though a minority went to various old calendarist sects. In 2019 many of the descendants of the Paris emigres also rejoined Moscow, though a very large minority remained with Constantinople.

Despite reunification as recent as 2019, five years on, the 2024 situation mirrors the post-1917 chaos, when parts of the Russian Church refused to be subject to the politically-driven Russian Church administration.

Firstly, the Church in the Ukraine declared itself fully independent of Moscow. So much so that it set up nearly 100 parishes for its emigration in Western Europe, quite independently of Moscow. As for the Russian Orthodox Church in Latvia, it did much the same inside Latvia. In Moldova many parishes also left politically-coloured Moscow for the Romanian Church. Abroad many Moldovans went to Romanian churches, where they are not abused by Russian racism.

There is also dissidence in Lithuania and Estonia and even in Russia itself, where some Russian Orthodox also joined Constantinople. As regards the Russian Orthodox centred in Paris, now under Moscow, most there do not commemorate (or respect) their own Russian Orthodox Patriarch, whom they see as a politician, not as a churchman. More radically, the bulk of the old Russian emigration, now centred in New York and highly Americanised (they openly advise people to vote for Trump and support other post-Protestant phenomena), are also protesting. Some of its bishops openly called on the Russian Federation to withdraw its troops from the Ukraine!

Many suspect that several bishops and senior priests of this New York group has yet again been infiltrated, just as it was between the 60s and 80s, by the CIA. In any case its American or American-linked bishops parrot anti-Russian CIA propaganda, despite the fact that they call their fragment of the Church ‘Russian’! As a result, many Russian Orthodox patriots have been obliged to leave the New York Synod for other Local Churches, since the Moscow-centred Church, suicidally, refused to accept these patriots!

Thus, scandalous corruption in the New York Synod forced quite a number of patriotic Russian Orthodox in the USA, who also objected to the CIA hold over the group and yet were abandoned by politically-driven Moscow, to join the Church of Constantinople. In England, scandalous persecution from New York forced patriots in half the local diocese, abandoned by Moscow, to leave for the canonicity of the Romanian Church, thus skilfully avoiding politically-driven Constantinople. Here they continue to live exactly as before, as Russian Orthodox using the old calendar, but in exile as Russian Orthodox, as Moscow abandoned them. They are much supported by Moldovans, who are tired of being mistreated by Russians.

Ukrainians and Moldovans alike, tired of Russian racism, have been leaving, the Ukrainians setting up their own churches, the Moldovans, as we said, going to the Romanians. Making Non-Russian Orthodox feel like second-class citizens, usually deliberately, is suicidal for the Russian Church. The Russian Church is not only becoming a National Church, but rather a Nationalist Church. Suicidal politically-motivated and nationalistically-motivated actions by individuals in, or sent from, Moscow means that it has lost the loyalty of literally tens of millions of former Russian Orthodox.

At the present time, it is difficult to see how Moscow can ever get these tens of millions back. All this seems particularly strange when the Russian Church is supposed to be the Church of the multinational Russian Federation, part of the multipolar BRICS Alliance! And yet the Russian Church appears to be unipolar and uninational! Surely a Federation would be better represented by a multinational, and not nationalist, Church? Perhaps, once the conflict with the USA and its vassals in the Ukraine is over, the Russian Church, just like the Russian military with its four corrupt and now arrested generals, will also be cleansed of treacherous corruption, CIA bishops and all the rest?

 

 

The Russian Federation Offers Peace for the Last Time

On 14 June President Putin gave a very generous and face-saving last opportunity to the US elite and their vassals to make peace in the Ukraine, where they are fighting against the Russian Federation. This last chance peace offer is a repetition of and development of all those made continuously from 2014 on. This last offer consisted once more of the condition of the neutrality, demilitarisation and denazification of the Ukraine and its recognition of the five Russian provinces in the east and south whose Russian inhabitants have by referendum already chosen to join the Russian Federation.

This peace offer was at once dismissed by the Western elite in favour of their plan to escalate the anti-Russian war further. ‘Make war, not peace’, said Washington’s messenger-boy Boris Johnson in Kiev in early April 2022, using as his pretext the amateurishly British-staged ‘massacre’ in Bucha, selected only as its name is similar to the English word ‘butcher’. So they put paid to the already initialled Istanbul peace agreement between the Ukraine and Russia. Peace was never on the Washington agenda. In 2019 Washington had already published its plan to destroy and dismantle Russia completely, though this had been its scheming ever since 1991.

In reality, this intention of destroying Russian unity actually goes back to the British-orchestrated overthrow of the Tsar in 1917. That tragic overthrow, which led directly to the massacres of Lenin and Stalin, was greeted by the then Prime Minister Lloyd George in the London Parliament at the time as ‘the achievement of one of our aims’. However, it had in fact been the intention of the Victorian Imperialists as early as the 1840s, which had led to the British invasion of Russia in 1854.

After all, the American Empire only inherited and continued the British Empire, the turning point and transatlantic handover of power going back to Milner’s Round Table Movement agreement of 1916. That provided US backing for the British overthrow of the Tsar and at once the US entry into World War I, thus the US replacing Russia. Of course, the present Western ‘narrative’ (a new word for fairy-tale or parallel world) is that Russia wants to recreate the Soviet Union and invade all of Europe. This is nonsense. The failed Marxist experiment in the USSR with its buffer zone in Eastern Europe to protect it from continual Western invasions is dead. Sadly, the equally failed US Empire experiment is not quite over.

When will the tragedy in the Ukraine end? The end must be close, but no politician can say when; only a psychiatrist can do that. With the US rejection of the peace plan, a rejection swiftly followed by the rejection of the same by US NATO client-states, the US will soon lose its war against the Federation. The latter has now been obliged by Western stubbornness to reject the Russian ultimatum and Russia will now take control of the whole of the Ukraine. And as a result, the US elite and Co will lose face. And the whole of Western Europe will never be the same again. This transformation will affect the Church. See the next commentary.

 

Q and A: The Ascension of the Lord 2024

Orthodox Christianity Before and After the Western Schism

Q: Was England Orthodox before 1066?

A: I think the question is misleading. Firstly, how can a country be Orthodox? Only people can be Orthodox. Secondly, what do you mean by Orthodox? Jewish? If you mean Orthodox Christian, then it is true that before 1066 English people could and did make pilgrimages to Jerusalem and New Rome (Constantinople) and elsewhere in the Orthodox Christian Roman Empire, of which they were by faith a part, and Greek clergy are recorded living in England at the same time. English people could and did take communion anywhere there, their priests concelebrating.

This concerned not least the exiled refugees from England who went to live there permanently after 1066. This was because all held the same Orthodox Christian Faith, East and West, despite different rituals and customs. Of course this was true not only of the faithful in England, but more or less true of the faithful anywhere in Western Europe, even after the Year 1000. In other words, Roman Catholicism did not exist as such at that time, though its origins can be traced back to about the Year 1000 and even some aspects of it right back to the end of the eighth century under ‘Charlemagne’, who wanted to revive pagan Rome. In fact, that was exactly what his spiritual descendants did so successfully.

Q: Which Local Church will take the leadership of the Orthodox Diaspora in Western Europe?

A: I don’t know. The Greeks rejected their golden chance to prove that they really are ‘Oecumenical’ during the very long years of the Soviet captivity between 1917 and 1992. Instead, they showed that they were only ‘Ecumenical’ and so compromised and discredited themselves. Next, between 2007 and 2020, the Russians were given the same golden chance to assume the leadership of the Diaspora. And they threw their golden chance away too, into the selfsame dustbin of nationalism. It was offered to them on a plate and they rejected it, just like the Greeks before them. To quote the suicidal words of the time pronounced by a very young and spiritually untried bishop from Moscow, which he said against those who belong to other Local Churches, but which in fact he said to his own loss: ‘Too bad for their souls’. So the ship of the Church locally for now continues to be rudderless.

Apologetics

Q: Why do we pray for the monarch or government and armed forces? They are generally a bunch of crooks.

A: You forget that we are Christians and so pray for our enemies! For example, the early Orthodox prayed for suchlike as the Emperor Nero. We must pray for our persecutors. I always do it. We are Christians. We always pray for the powers that be, including the armed forces, as the Apostle Paul instructs us (‘Honour the King’), and this is so that they do not do evil.

Q: How has the word Christian become so discredited?

A: The word Christian is generally used to express Roman Catholic or Protestant, only very rarely Orthodox Christian. Instead of that term they use ‘Eastern Orthodox’, as though Christ (the Head of our Church) were some exotic oriental guru. In other words, the word ‘Christian’ has been instrumentalised and even weaponised by the powers of this world.

For example, I am (Orthodox) Christian because I reject feudalism with its serfs, massacres and inquisitions (so cannot be Roman Catholic); I reject Imperialism with its slavery and exploitation (so cannot be Protestant); I reject Capitalism with its paid serfs, kept quiet with the bread, sugar and salt of supermarkets and circuses of TV and the internet (so cannot be Secularist). So are you a Christian?

However, there are also bad clergy in every part of the supposedly Christian world. They discredit the word ‘Christian’. For example, there is in Colchester a Polish taxi-driver. He had the same job when he lived in the Church city of Krakow in Poland. His job was to transport Catholic clergy and seminarians to prostitutes. This industry was well developed there. On the other hand, we have here a very nice Roman Catholic lady from eastern Poland near the border of Belarus, whose husband is Orthodox. He refuses to go to church because the priest in his Orthodox village is a drunkard, who steals money from the church and lives a dissolute life. That this exists is nothing new; Russia had many such priests before the Revolution and there are many in the Ukraine today. The only question is why such men are ordained by bishops and then NOT defrocked. It suggests that the bishops themselves are corrupt. And I certainly know cases of this. It is all about money.

Q: What do you think of Jordan Peterson as an Orthodox missionary and ‘the surge’ towards Orthodoxy?

A: This Non-Orthodox gentleman does not lead a Church life. He preaches an ideology. However interesting it may be and however sincere it may be and however close some of it may be to Orthodox views, it is not Orthodox Christianity because it is not living Orthodoxy. Thus, over the last years or so, I have been contacted as a priest by many young men (not a single woman), between the age of 16 and 40, who claim, under the influence of Jordan Peterson, they want ‘to become Orthodox’. When I have told them that they have to attend Church services for this to happen, they immediately lose all interest. In other words, they are in love with a podcast theory, ‘internet Orthodoxy’, not the Church. This is totally different from practice and reality.

There has been no surge towards Orthodoxy at all. I must add that some of those young men were very strange individuals, narcissistic, misogynistic, family-hating, sometimes, I suspect, repressed homosexuals and sometimes downright weird. I think they live in a virtual world of the fantasy, not the real one. It appears to be a generational problem, a result of the internet, a lack of contact with reality. Podcasts are not a Christian way of life. By their fruits, ye shall judge them.

Q: Why does the Bible not mention dinosaurs?

A: For the same reason that the Bible does not mention locomotives. Both words were invented about the same time in the 19th century. The books of the Old Testament were written down over 3,000 years before that. However, the Book of Job (40, 15-24) does mention a ‘behemoth’, with an exact description of a very large dinosaur (most dinosaurs were very small according to the fossil record). Elsewhere the Bible often mentions dragons and, in all the cultures and folk-memories of the world, dragons are the old name for dinosaurs.

Q: Was the Flood local or universal?

A: This is not a dogma of the Faith, so believe as you will. Personally, I think it was universal, because every culture in the world has a flood story and because how else can you account for worldwide fossils, 95% of which are sea creatures (for example, fossils of sea creatures found on high mountains), stratification of rock, plate tectonics, or the Ice Age? And then, if it had been global, why did Noah not simply move away from the area and why did he bother to preserve the animals anyway? Personally, I cannot imagine how a geologist cannot be a Christian.

Q: When was the Earth created and how long did it take?

A: Nobody knows. The traditional Orthodox date is 7,532 years ago. You can interpret that literally or figuratively. How long did it take? Six days or six ages. No such speculations, or even certain knowledge, helps us to salvation. Do not waste your time!

The Russian Church

Q: Why does the agony of the Russian Church continue even 33 years after the fall of Communism?

A: This is because of the lack or repentance of the Russian Orthodox masses, who are baptised but untaught. Thus, in the centre of Moscow the corpse of Lenin, that forerunner of Antichrist, continues to rot in public in its ziggurat. Everywhere statues of monsters like him and the names of the murderers are recalled in metro stations, streets and whole regions. Meanwhile the relics of the Imperial Martyrs are held, the faithful barred off, in Saint Petersburg and it is impossible for the faithful to venerate them. This is spiritual captivity. Relics make miracles only when they are venerated.

Q: Why was Gregory Rasputin hated by most of the Russian emigration?

A: This was because most of the Russian emigration hated the Tsar and the Tsarina. They blamed their loss of money, position and property on the Imperial Family and all who had supported them. In the words of St John of Shanghai (and also in my experience) only about 10% of the Russian emigration were for the Tsar or went to church, and probably far fewer than 10% of the aristocracy, who had lost the most through the Revolution. Although all the emigres have died out, this attitude continues among their descendants of the second, third and fourth generations, to whom they passed on their old prejudices.

Q: Why does the West hate Russia?

A: Simply because Russia has refused to be colonised by the West. True, it has not remained entirely independent. The Russian Empire (1721-1917), the Soviet Empire (1922-1991) and Russian Capitalism (1992-2022) were all the results of Russian aping of various Western ideologies of materialism. However, this 300-year period is now over. Russia has now reverted to being a National Russia.

Q: Did you ever meet Metr Antony of Sourozh? What would he think of the present situation in the Russian Church?

A: I not only often met him quite often, but he tonsured me reader over 42 years ago, in January 1981. As regards the present, all I can say is that he must be spinning in his grave at the sight of how Sergianist politicians who think like the State have taken over the Russian Church and principles thrown out of the window. The New Martyrs and the New Confessors have been betrayed by those who prefer money and luxury and the corruption that follows from those passions.

Q: Is the schismatic American ROCOR still in communion with any other Orthodox?

A: As far as I can see, this tiny US-based group of 300 churches and small communities is now openly preaching that you must be nasty in order to be nice! This is of course psychopathic, which is what we have come to expect of the new American ROCOR. It has lost so many normal Russian Orthodox that it now consorts occasionally only with certain politically very conservative, usually ex-Protestant, members of the Antiochian Jurisdiction (200 rather wealthy churches and communities in the USA). Both have stronger links to the USA than to Europe and West Asia and actual Orthodox Tradition. Both appear to be out of communion with the huge Russian, Romanian and Greek Churches. Birds of a feather flock together.

Two Spiritual Battles for Church Life in Western Europe

I have been forced, despite my own very considerable preference for a quiet and peaceful life, to fight two spiritual battles. As I have always fought for the Centre, these battles were fought against the extremism of both left and right. Both of them meant helping to fight for the unity of the Church.

The reason for these battles is that tragically, after the 1917 Russian catastrophe, there was far less protection of the Church as restraint had been removed. As a result, the ability to cleanse the Church of extremes was greatly reduced. Part of the Church administration fell to pressure from the powers of this world, from its politics of Capitalist (CIA etc) and Communist (KGB etc), and their inevitable moral corruption, lust and greed, especially homosexuality and love of money. For this fall influenced both the teachings and practices of those affected. Only the saints of the Church remained free of them, as these battles were essentially for the Holy Spirit, which this world wishes to quench.

The first battle was to help defeat freemasonry, with all its associated ecumenist modernism and liberalism. The masons wanted to swim with the tide and walk the same path as the vast majority of Protestants and Roman Catholics, who had before them already adopted Secularism as their ethos and successfully emptied their own churches of spirituality and people. We always ask them: Do you venerate all the saints?

The second battle was to help defeat sectarianism with all its associated nationalist ritualism and phariseeism. The sectarians wanted to ‘wall off’ their particular jurisdiction from the Church and condemn the mainstream mass of Orthodox who fill our churches, locking themselves away in their tiny, warring ghettoes in rented rooms and sheds, falling out of communion with the masses. We always ask them: Who are you in communion with?

The two battles have always been for the golden mean, the middle way, for the canonical teachings and practices of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. The freemasons oppose the Holiness and Apostolicity of the Church. The sectarians oppose the Unity and the Holiness of the Church. This means fighting:

For Her Unity against the proudly divisive forces of sectarianism.

For Her Holiness against the morally corrupting forces of secularism.

For Her Catholicity against the narrowly xenophobic forces of nationalism.

For Her Apostolicity against the rootlessly anti-Tradition forces of modernism.

Some would say that none of this is important, that you can be a sectarian, a secularist, a nationalist or a modernist, and it makes no difference. This is quite untrue. The fact is that all those who retreat to the fringes of the Church and then end up outside the Church, and even justify their presence there, are known to Church history as schismatics and heretics, are full of hatred.

This hatred is always expressed by their persecution of those in the Centre. Why is this? It is because the Centre of the Church is closer to Christ and so is governed by Love. The further you are away from Love, the more you are consumed by psychopathic hatred. As the fourth-century Church historian Ammianus Marcellinus rightly wrote: ‘No wild beasts are so hostile to men as Christian sects generally are to one another’. Here there is something satanic.

 

Patriotic National Conservatism and Social Justice or Anti-Patriotic Cosmopolitan Elitism and Social Collapse

Introduction: The World

Nowadays the exclusive US-led club of G7 countries have to meet in an isolated huddle. They have been overtaken by the far greater and inter-civilisational BRICS Alliance. According to the US World Bank, three of the four largest economies in the world are members of BRICS. These are China, India and Russia. The latter, although under 16,000 Western sanctions, has overtaken the Japanese and German economies (both members of the G7) and is rapidly catching up with India, which the USA is going to fall behind, as real economic figures for it appear.

Other members of the G7 have seen their economies overtaken by countries such as Turkey, Indonesia and Vietnam, which all want to join BRICS, but not to join the irrelevant G7 club. It is the intercontinental BRICS Alliance that has become the de facto United Nations. This is mirrored by the elitist huddle of the WEF (or rather WWEF – Western World Economic Forum) and the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum, which finished last week, attended by 136 countries, though it was almost completely unreported by the globalist Western media.

The Example of England

A long time ago Norman invaders ‘established’ their capital of aggression in the mercantile City of London, where there was money. (Later this would become the location of the Bank of England and the Stock Exchange). Having massacred or expelled the Old English nobility, they formed an alien, foreign and anti-patriotic ruling class. From this ‘Establishment’ they and their descendants created the UK, with all its exploitation and crimes. The Norman royal family replaced English royalty, brought their Norman Church with them and demolished all the Old English churches. After that, foreign royal families, French, Welsh and Scottish and their aristocratic supporters, were in control of the country.

In the 16th century this alien royalty reinvented yet another Church, murdering, torturing or exiling any who opposed it. In the early 18th century the London merchant class imported easy-to-manipulate royalty from Germany (they had previously imported royalty from the Netherlands, having beheaded and then overthrown the previous Franco-Scottish dynasty). Then they could do their will, which was to get even richer by expanding overseas. In so many ways a fake country, fake royalty and a fake Church had been evolved. Similarly, when the time came, the elitist structure developed political parties, in fact the two sides of the same Uniparty. So they invented fake political parties too.

It used to be said in the 1950s that Britain was in genteel decline, like a once prosperous relative who was now forced to wear shabby clothes for lack of money. Since then the decline has clearly accelerated. Today the ‘Norman’ political parties of the London Establishment are sinking like the Titanic, as they have betrayed the country in favour of globalist corporations. Despite their almost total control of State propaganda outlets like the BBC and the newspapers, the so-called ‘media’, they have lost control of the ‘narrative’, as they call it.

All around in the UK we see collapsing public services and infrastructure, like the vastly underfunded health and education systems, millions of people eating out of food banks, hugely overpriced and failed privatised utilities, cowboy-run electricity and gas suppliers, heavily-polluting water supplies, bankrupt local administrations, third-world roads, degraded and absurdly expensive railways, lies about Brexit so there is now even less control of borders than before, and pathetic armed forces which cannot even find recruits to run the small amounts of their often broken down military equipment.

After the Suez humiliation in 1956, Britain officially became a US satellite, a vassal. Although, at the time in the face of Communism, there was no alternative, this has turned out to be an error. The post-War settlement of the victorious industrial Superpower of the USA established itself and its allies, to become known as the G7, as the world leaders. Even the UN was set up in New York with all kinds of supposedly ‘international’ organisations, like the World Bank, the IMF, GATT (now the WTO), the ICC (International Criminal Court) and the EU, were completely under its control. But this is the past.

Conclusion: The Western World Elite

The catastrophically failed Project Ukraine has led to chaos in Western Europe, not least after the EU elections of 9 June. This is changing its highly-aggressive and Russophobic, pro-Nazi Establishment elite, which is so hated by the European peoples, who are in turn so despised by that Atlanticist elite. The globalist Sunak, a bank-teller sent by the US, and Macron, the Great (Narcissist), the new Napoleon with his globalist agenda, but in fact a bank-teller sent by the Rothschilds, in love with himself and the Parisian elite, are discredited. Meanwhile, the German Scholz is very weakened. All are self-delusional and consider that their peoples did not understand their genius. Sunak is said to be heading to the US after his forthcoming defeat and Scholz retiring to the Bavarian Alps. As for Macron, perhaps he should buy a villa on Elba or St Helena? The Western elite, which tried to export its ideology to the Ukraine is now desperate. This all compares strangely with the landslide election victory of President Putin. The ideology of the Western elite is unexportable. It is, after all, rejected even by many native Western people. For we are the source of Patriotic National Conservatism and Social Justice.

As for the equally narcissistic USA, it is now a crusader state, just like its genocidal vassal, Israel. Everywhere the elite tries to impose its ‘liberalism’ by force. However, there is nothing as intolerant as liberalism. The result is the thoroughgoing ruination of culture in the Western world and its fast collapsing Civilisation. The culprit has always been the pure pride of supremacy and infallibility. This was first proclaimed in about the Year 1075, when the Pope of Rome attributed them to himself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatus_papae). This ideology pf infallibility and supremacy has been handed down in history to various Western leaders, at present to the US President and the Western world which he lays claim to. He lays claims to this narcissist, Darwinist pride of supremacy and infallibility, which claims that ‘we are the ‘fittest’, the exceptional, the exclusive, the indispensable. In Christian language this is called pride, which is evil. For they are the source of Anti-Patriotic Cosmopolitan Elitism and Social Collapse.

 

 

Two Sorts of Bishops

I met my first Orthodox bishop exactly fifty years ago, in 1974. Since then I have met perhaps 100 more bishops, 10% of the current total. Although in 1974 I was naïve enough to think that all bishops were Christians and did not tell lies, I soon learned otherwise. Indeed, I have learned that there are two sorts of bishops: those who tell the truth and the liars.

For example, a young and inexperienced bishop told a pack of lies about his priests for two and a quarter years. He told these lies to all the bishops in this country and in his own country and was believed even in Moscow and Antioch. People believed him because naïve people believe a bishop, imagining that he is a Christian, and think that the priest is lieing. But, as Chaucer said, the truth will out. Now he has been found out. We were telling the truth. His schism has been found out. And he has shown himself to be a liar.

After the Collapse of the Ukraine

Introduction

Even the wishful thinkers are now losing their self-imposed delusions and fantasies. Reality is at last dawning even on them: The Kiev regime has lost its futile ten-year old war. For some commentators it is a question hanging on till the US election in November, for others there remain only three or four months, for others only a few weeks. We do not know who is right. But what will happen when this tragic nightmare is over, when the mass killing of largely untrained Ukrainian men, sent to the front by the Kiev regime on Western orders, has stopped? What ultimately happens when the West has stopped hammering in the last nails into its own coffin?

Referenda

Obviously, all churches in Malorossija/New Ukraine stolen by violence from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church by the fake, US-founded ‘Church in the Ukraine’ with its new Protestant calendar will have to be returned and the culprits punished. Then referenda will surely have to be held all over the pre-2024 Ukraine with one vital question: Which country do you wish to belong to? The choices could be: The Russian Federation or Malorossija/New Ukraine, and in western border areas, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and possibly Belarus and Slovakia. The majority will no doubt wish to belong to the Protectorate of Malorossija/New Ukraine, with its capital in Kiev. This will have two official languages, Russian and Ukrainian.

For those who wish to leave for countries to the west, there will have to be Russian negotiations with the countries concerned first. Hungary and Romania would be advised that any new areas must remain demilitarised zones and that any NATO bases should in general be removed from their soil, although those countries could perhaps remain members of NATO for as long as that fragile organisation lasts. In the case of Romania, Moldova should also enter into the deal. Here there should also be a referendum with three choices: Do you want to join Russia (Transdnistria and Gagauzia massively will), join Romania or remain as an independent nation?

BRICS

Kazan, 22-24 October 2024. This city and date will go down in history. Here will take place the next BRICS Summit under Russian chairmanship. Here dedollarisation will take a huge step forward. Here many new countries will join BRICS, which could become the multipolar Alliance of 20, 30 or even 40 countries. This will be a turning-point. This will mean the consolidation of the Heartland, the ‘world island’ of Afro-Eurasia. For Eurasia itself contains three of the four largest economies in the world, according to the latest World Bank figures: China, India and Russia (the US is second, Russia has overtaken Japan).

Already China and Russia have formed an Alliance. Africa is on its way. Latin America too. Iran has joined, as will Afghanistan and the five stans of Central Asia. They may be followed by Mongolia, Pakistan, and Iraq. The Arab Union and Turkey may follow too. The chauvinism of the Caucasus, which has allowed outsiders to divide and rule it for so long (like that of the Balkans), is also coming to an end. Next may follow Japan and South Korea, which latter is yet to reunite with the North. Finally, even isolated Australia and Oceania will join in due course.

South-Eastern Europe

The amazing anachronism of NATO is already in disarray and will dissolve, as Trump has promised. This will leave the forty or so countries of Western Europe (Eastern Europe is Russia, Belarus and Malorossija/New Ukraine) to resolve their problems. The fact that the Danube flows into the Black Sea, which will be dominated by Russia, will mean that Hungary and Serbia will join BRICS first. This will open the whole of South-East Europe to BRICS, from Romania and Moldova to Bulgaria, from Austria (following its old partner, Hungary) to Cyprus, from Greece to ex-Yugoslavia, from Czechia and Slovakia, from Albania to Turkey. With a population of over 160 million, including Turkey (86 million), this is a viable Economic Confederation. BRICS will transform and reshape this whole region, overcoming the old chauvinism, linking the whole region to China via Eurasian Russia.

North-Eastern and North-Western Europe

This will leave North-Eastern Europe in disarray. All five countries here, Finland, Poland and the three dying and bankrupt Baltic statelets, have had complex and tragic histories with Imperial and Soviet Russia. One way out would be to ally themselves with North-Western Europe, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland (soon to be reunited at last) and Iceland. These seven countries already have large numbers of economic refugees from North-Eastern Europe and also a similar (though in their case quite unjustified) fear of Russia. Once having rid themselves of their NATO-appointed puppet governments, these twelve largely post-Protestant countries could ally. Perhaps the Baltic States would at last have the courage to grant their Russian minorities basic human rights. With a population of over 160 million, these twelve countries could form an Economic Confederation.

Western Europe

Western Europe, isolated, will then need to get together. Between Germany and France the old recriminations could easily surface once more. Clearly, the time of the tyrannical, anti-democratic and failed EU with its unelected commissars will be over. Some looser organisation must replace it. However, beyond these two there are just as many again, another 150 million people, in Benelux and Switzerland and then in the South-West, Spain and Portugal, Italy and Malta. The total population of these countries is 300 million. Together, in a loose Confederation, they could at last move forward independently from Northern America.

Northern America

All these world-changing events will leave the isolated USA and Canada to sort themselves out. It is to be hoped that their new arrangements will not be violent, though in a USA with some 300 million guns in circulation, we can only fear. The huge inequalities there between very rich and very poor, black and white, are worrisome in the extreme. Canada may survive intact, but perhaps not the USA, which was united only by the incredible violence of the Civil War. If it does divide, may it be in peace.

 

 

What Will Happen to the Orthodox Church After the Fall of Washington?

The powers of this world have throughout history tried to abuse religious belief by making it into their own nationalist and ritualist institutions. This has been to camouflage and justify their nationalism, that is, their attachment to this world, their worldliness. Chinese, Indians, Jews, Greeks, Japanese, Copts, Syrians, Armenians, Arabs, Latins, Germans, Greeks, Spanish, Russians, French, British, Americans, they have all done it. These are just facts from Church history. How do Christians remain outside and resist an ideology which puts national and worldly issues above Christ, all for the sake of amassing more power and money? There are only two ways of resisting:

Either you are a Confessor, or else you are a Martyr. Thus, St Stephen the First Martyr was stoned to death by the Jews because he upset their nationalism. He was only following the prophets and St John the Baptist, who had told the nationalist King Herod the truth, and Christ Himself, Whom they crucified. Then came such Confessors as St Basil the Great and St John Chrysostom. And in the twentieth-century there were the hundreds of thousands of Martyrs all over Eastern Europe, as well as Confessors like St Nectarios of Aegina, St Luke of the Crimea, St John of Shanghai or St Paisios the Athonite. There is nothing new under the sun. The saints are always the best witnesses.

In recent centuries the Church in the Middle East and the Balkans was oppressed by Ottomans, Poles and Austro-Hungarians. Meanwhile the Russian Church was oppressed by Westernising rulers, even more so after 1917. In the nineteenth century and even before, the main Patriarchate outside Russia, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, was used as a plaything by the British and French ambassadors. The Western Powers also appointed German kinglets to rule the newly-liberated Balkan countries in their name.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has in the same way become the plaything of US ambassadors there. Meanwhile the Patriarchate of Moscow was being used as a plaything by the Soviet State. Neither the US State of the Soviet State was Christian. Both were, whatever the theory, in practice atheist. This situation has continued by centuries of inertia even after the end of the first so-called Cold War in 1991, but in ways even more terrible than before.

Thus, in Moscow, Stalinist centralisation has continued, repelling all Non-Russians from the Church, as Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova openly described in his recent letter to Patriarch Kyrill. For fifty years we too were treated as second-class citizens by the same Russian Church. None of this is because this mentality has been forced on the Church by the State, but because it has become a bad reflex inside the Church. It is nothing to do with the State. For example, a fragment of Moscow, the New York ROCOR has done this too, completely discrediting itself, mistreating Non-Russians. (As one of its bishops said to me recently, ROCOR is ‘a train wreck’).  The mentality to repel all, including many Russians, has been imposed internally. The only real slavery comes from ourselves, not from others.

We can see the same mentality also in the uncanonical, US-orchestrated actions of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ukraine and elsewhere since 2018. Sadly, Constantinople fell to Greek racist hatred and jealousy of Russians.  It could simply have refused to do any of its horrors. But the $25 million bribe was irresistible to the weak. Since then a second Cold War has begun, with US proxy forces trying to weaken and destroy Russia from the Ukraine. It means that the heavy burden of steering the ship of the Church has fallen to those less politicised, more free, to the now 14 other Local Churches. Their role has been dependent on the political freedom which they have.

Thus, under Communism in Eastern Europe and under the US control of the Greek Churches, the Serbian Church stood out as a beacon of relative freedom and theology. Today, in this respect the Albanian Church seems to have taken the lead as the voice of freedom, though the long-overdue visit of Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America to the persecuted Ukrainian Church is also a miracle. The remaining 14 Local Churches are not all united because they do not enjoy the same measure of freedom. They are only relatively free compared to Constantinople and Moscow. For instance, the actions of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople have brought some of the other Local Churches into a state of internal schism.

Specifically, the Cypriot and Bulgarian Churches are now in a state of internal schism as a direct result of the US interference in Constantinople, both direct and indirect. Equally, the US-controlled Patriarchate of Alexandria and Moscow are in schism because of the latter’s interference in Africa. Other Local Churches, like the Romanian and the Georgian, which have a strong national identity, take an independent line, ignoring uncanonical Greek and uncanonical Russian alike. This is despite the attempts by the local US ambassadors, who behave like the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, to interfere in the choice of Patriarchs and policies. This independence is the only way to go. It is freedom.

However, our question is what will happen after the US stops interfering in internal Church affairs. It is our hope that, once political pressure eases, the Greek Churches in particular can take the lead and get out of political distortions and contortions, abandoning imperialist fantasies, recognising new autocephalies, notably that of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and its Diaspora. However, the Russian Church also has to give up its Soviet-style centralisation, which is its imperialist fantasy. It has to grant autocephaly to parts of the Church in now independent countries.

The shadow of the old Imperialism, Russian or Soviet, just like Greek and Latin imperialism, has cast a long shadow on Church life. Its time is up. For the Church does not consist of one Local Church ruling imperially over all the others, but of their entirety, their catholicity – all the Local Churches together. Once political meddling is over, all the Local Churches must hold a Council together. A free and canonically ordered Council, not the 2016 robber-Council farce in Crete. Then the very many long-outstanding issues between the Local Churches can at last be resolved. In freedom. May God’s Will be done!

 

 

Towards the Civilisation of the Resurrection

Introduction: The Obvious Russian Victory in the Ukraine

It was from the outset clear that there could only be one winner in the conflict in the Ukraine – the Russian Federation. This is because it is fighting on its doorstep – so there are no logistic issues – in a country where nearly half the population is pro-Russian anyway. Russia, by far the largest country in the world, certainly does not need more territory. Indeed, it is not fighting for territory, but for security by demilitarising and denazifying the very threatening Russophobic Kiev puppet regime, which exists only because of the support, finance and arms of the US elite. And Russia is ideally placed to conduct a war of attrition, which is what it is doing, as Kiev suicidally throws its few arms and few troops into the direct lines of Russian fire.

Russia also has seven times the present Ukrainian population and is completely independent in terms of natural and human resources. It also has one of the best educational systems, very advanced technology and one of the largest militaries in the world. It has most of the world’s most advanced and cheapest arms, such as hypersonic missiles, outmatching NATO’s absurdly expensive and obsolete arms. Russia can provide these arms to others who wish to protect themselves from US threats, it has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world and is supported diplomatically by China and indeed the Non-Western 90% of the world. The deindustrialised West stands no chance against it. However, it is one thing for Russia to win a war, quite another, as all should know from the recent US invasions of West Asia, for Russia to win the peace.

Why the Ukraine?

Essentially the conflict in the Ukraine is a civilisational war. Who does the Ukraine belong to? Does it belong to Western Civilisation, first Catholic, then Protestant, and now Secularist? Or does it belong to (Orthodox) Christian Civilisation, which stretches up from Gaza and Jerusalem northwards to the White Sea and eastwards from the Montenegrin shores of the Adriatic, from eastern Slovakia and eastern Poland to Vladivostok? History tells us that the Ukraine is a strange amalgam, an artificial country, invented at the end of the 19th century by the Austro-Hungarians in order to divide and rule, justifying their domination. In reality, over 80% of the Ukraine is part of Christian Civilisation, for the south and the east of what is now called the Ukraine was part of Russia until 1922 and all the Ukraine is an invention of Communist dictators since then. It is the decisions of these Communist dictators which are being so keenly supported by the US and NATO governments today.

These dictators were Lenin (in 1922), Stalin (in 1945) and Khruschev, who at a drunken party in 1954 gave the Russian Crimea to the Ukraine. Obviously, none of these evil and brutal dictators ever consulted the Russian population whether they wanted to belong to the Ukraine, let alone if they wanted to abandon their own language and be forced to speak Ukrainian. Perhaps the greatest error was that of the atheist Stalin, who in 1945 stole a small area of the far west of what is now called the Ukraine, called Western Galicia. It was this Western Galicia which Tsar Nicholas II had intended to give to the newly independent Poland after the Russian victory in the First World War. This Western Galicia had for centuries been part of the Habsburg Empire and then, after 1918, of Poland. At the same time, he stole smaller areas that had long belonged to Romania and another part called Carpatho-Rus, also miscalled ‘Ruthenia’, which had belonged to Hungary, before that to Czechoslovakia, and before that to the Habsburgs who had oppressed it.

The West Galician Tragedy

The West Galicians alone spoke authentic Ukrainian (a language different from Russian and Polish) as their first language. Like nearly all Catholics in Europe at the time, from de Valera’s Ireland to the Catholic priest Hlinka’s Slovakia, the murderous Pavelic’s Croatia, Salazar’s Portugal, Franco’s Spain, Petain’s France and to Mussolini’s Italy) these Galicians, some of them joining the SS, had been ardent Nazis under the German Occupation from 1941 to 1944, as they were also ardent anti-Communists. With Nazi encouragement they ethnically cleansed, massacring Jews, Poles (over 100,000) and Russians alike, in huge numbers. The Galicians gradually rose to power, armed by parachute drops of arms from the CIA and MI6 after 1945 right up till the late 1950s, oppressing others and their languages, Hungarian, Romanian and Carpatho-Rusyn. The Galicians were nearly all Uniats (also known as Greek Catholics), which is a fanatically nationalist religion, different from the rest of the Ukrainians who are Orthodox and from the Poles who are Catholics.

The rise of the pro-Nazi West Galician Uniats became a steep and victorious ascent under the Americans from 1991 on. So that they could Americanise the population, the Americans sent a host of Protestant missionaries. When this failed, in 2018 the Americans set up a fake Orthodox Church, staffed by gangsters and other dollar-paid thugs, and then imposed the Western calendar on it. Of course, virtually nobody has joined it, everyone knows it is an American fake. In other words, after Western European countries had been forced to give up their settler colonial empires around the world after 1945 (the Dutch, the British, the French, the Belgian, the Portuguese and the South Africans), the US set up an apartheid colonial empire in the Ukraine, using the fanatical pro-Nazi Galicians as their enforcers, a battering ram against Russia, just as the British had used the Sikhs in India and the French the Harkis in Algeria against the rest. However, this was not the first case in the late 20th century, for the US has already done the same thing with Israel.

The Western Civilisation of Suicide

However, the period of the domination and exploitation of the world’s peoples by the Western elite, essentially the elite of the USA and of the very narrow strip of land north of it where 90% of Canadians live, and Western Europe, is largely over. The spirit of Cruel Britannia and Cruel America and their forever wars is ending. However, the Western elite resists the death of its domination and refuses to accept constructive change and co-operation, seeking confrontation instead. Its resistance to inevitable change on account of its denial that it is inevitable is leading to suicidal actions in its death agony. And it has exported that agony. Thus, the Western strategy in the Ukraine which has never been to help that wretched country, but to try and weaken US rivals, Russia and, through it, China.

So the Ukraine shares in the same demographically suicidal trap. Since the bloody Western coup overthrowing the democratically elected government in Kiev in 2014, the Ukraine has already lost half its population, down from 40 million to 20 million, also losing one and a half million dead or wounded troops in two years. It is no longer a viable State and cannot even pay the salaries of its civil servants, which are paid by the US and the EU. Who wants to live there or have children there? There is no future. However, the owner of the Ukrainian State, Biden, also lives in a country of suicide in a mixture of bankruptcy and fentanyl. Biden’s US cannot even defeat the Houthis of Yemen. Biden’s term that began with the humiliating US rout in Kabul is ending with the humiliating US rout in Kiev.

European Suicide

However, the same suicide is also taking place in the US colony in Israel, which commits genocidal blunder after genocidal blunder and loses all sympathy worldwide. This suicide is also happening in Europe. Self-imposed sanctions against Russia have meant an 84% increase in European energy costs, equivalent to a loss of one trillion euros. Meanwhile, Russia simply sells its energy to many other willing buyers outside the Western world. Poland and the Baltic statelets have bankrupted themselves helping Ukrainian ‘refugees’, who have run away from the suicidal danger of having to serve in the Ukrainian Army. The German elite has committed economic and social suicide by allowing the US and its allies to destroy its source of cheap energy, the Nordstream pipelines. Germany, once the locomotive of the EU, is now losing its strength, its manufacturing industry. Russia has overtaken the German economy. The French elite, led by the banker Macron, has committed suicide with its racist ideology of superiority towards its colonial empire in West Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, where in nickel-rich Kanaky (New Caledonia) revolt against France is again on the streets.

In the UK, with its collapsing infrastructure, reducing parts of its town and city administrations, water supplies, railways, roads, hospitals and schools to Third World levels, as in the USA, the unelected and extremely unpopular Sunak has given up. First, there was his self-humiliation, while standing in the pouring rain, of declaring that he will hold an election on 4 July, US Independence Day, for the UK has outsourced its Independence to the US. Now Sunak the bank teller has declared that he does not want any young people or people with children and grandchildren to vote for him by absurdly decreeing that he will reintroduce National Service for young people. (Something that Germany had rejected just before him). He and his Party are dead. But then the anti-Left wing Labour ‘Opposition’ which also supports the anti-Ukrainian genocide in the Ukraine and the anti-Palestinian genocide in Gaza is just as dead.

The Ukrainian Myth and Western Self-Esteem

Western politicians declare: ‘We cannot let Russia win in the Ukraine’. Why? Russians, keenly supported by long-oppressed Eastern and Southern Ukrainians, consider that they are fighting to liberate Russians who live on ancient Russian territory, that is, in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. The sacked and disgraced British Prime Minister Johnson has explained: ‘We are at risk of losing Western hegemony’. Admitting Western hegemony, he believes in what can only be called the ‘Western ideology’, that is, the myth that the West is superior to the Rest. This is the ideology of hubris, rejected by the seven billion people of the Global Majority and also by many in the West itself (see below). And that ideology, like all ideologies which apply narrow human imaginings to ever-changing reality, makes those who believe in it stupid.

Western politicians have replaced the old ideological opposition between Capitalism and Communism with a new and mythical opposition between ‘Democracy and Autocracy’. And yet the Ukraine is not a democracy. Its President is a martial law dictator, whose term in office ended on 20 May, who has banned other political parties, the free media, and has had murdered those who disagree with him or else sent them to the torture-chambers of his secret police. His Neo-Nazi military pressgang ordinary Ukrainians into the Army, which is why some ten million of them have either fled abroad (ironically, above all, to Russia), or else are in hiding in their apartments, leaving the streets empty of men. No Ukrainian man wants to face almost certain death by being pressganged into serving in the Ukrainian Army.

Western Fascist Ideology

However, which Western leader has been elected by over 50% of his citizens, let alone represents their views? Not a single one. They are all minority leaders. In fact, so-called Western ‘Democracy’ is a unipolar hegemony, a Uniparty, supported and run by wealthy oligarchs. For in so-called ‘Democracy’ there is no value higher than profit. There is no-one to vote for, both parties are run by the ‘Deep State’, that is, by the Establishment. The West is living in Communist times. There you could vote for anyone, as long as they belonged to the Communist Party. So in the modern West you can vote for anyone as long as they belong to the Establishment/Deep State. Not the Soviet Union, but the Western Union. As for ‘Autocracy’, ‘authoritarian government’, it forms a multipolar world of sovereign patriotisms, supported by the people. (This is why ‘democrats’ deride them as ‘populists’). For ‘Autocracy’ there is no value higher than patriotism. Thus, the actual division in the modern world is not between Democracy and Autocracy, but between Transnational Oligarchy and National Sovereignty, or, put more simply, between Globalism and Patriotism.

In the former French colonies they know this, they at least have no illusions. That is why they are kicking French (and American) troops out. They know it in Armenia, where, led by a patriotic archbishop, they are trying to kick out EU meddlers and their anti-patriotic, EU puppet-leader. None of this is described in the delusional Western media, since globalist oligarchs own them. The Western ideology is supremacism, of which Nazism is only the best-known form. This ideology is espoused by Western supremacist EU officials, many of them grandchildren of actual German Nazis, and the disgraced liar, the British Prime Minister Johnson. He openly praised Ukrainian Nazis as ‘heroes’ and had his photograph taken with them and their Nazi Azov flag. This is the disease of exceptionalism, ‘we are above the law’, as seen in the Western decision to ignore the findings of the International Criminal Court against the genocidal Mileikowsky (who hides behind the alias of Netanyahu). This is satanic pride.

The World on the Nuclear Brink

As a result, we face a situation potentially worse than in 1962, when the world was threatened by nuclear war on account of US missiles positioned near the Soviet border in Turkey. Once the US President Kennedy had removed those missiles, the USSR removed its threat to position its missiles in Cuba. Today some in NATO are threatening to bomb Russia through their Kiev proxies and Russia is therefore threatening to reply in kind. A simultaneous triple war is threatened, in the Ukraine, in the Middle East and in Taiwan, plus the probability that the West will lose Slovakia (where it has tried to assassinate the Prime Minister), Hungary, Georgia (ruled by a Frenchwoman and CIA-run NGOs and whose patriots are threatened by EU assassination), Central Asia, Kosovo, Armenia, Syria, all of Africa (in uranium-rich Niger, Burkina Faso and the Congo in particular), most of Latin America and even the rest of the now bankrupt EU. This includes the US-run Baltics, Poland, Bulgaria and Moldova, which are in fact for the moment run by their US ambassador-governors.

To describe all this, they use the absurd term ‘Cold War’ or ‘Cold War II’. This never existed. Wars were and are always hot, whether in Korea, Africa, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq or today in the Ukraine and Gaza. Western politicians declare that there is a Russian threat to ‘Western Civilisation’, i.e., if defiant Russia does not agree to be bombed by NATO without reply and back the direct and indirect Western massacres which have taken place in Korea, Vietnam, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine and Gaza, and Western colour revolutions, which use small numbers of dollar-paid protestors in Belarus, Kazakhstan, today in Georgia, and tomorrow perhaps in Slovakia and Hungary, then, indeed, that particular exploitative and corrupt form of ‘Western Civilisation’ will collapse. Thank God.

Christian Civilisation

However, that does not mean that Civilisation in the Western world will collapse. On the contrary, it will become civilised, renewed, recovered and restart its long-ago interrupted existence. Clearly, we who are Western and were born in the West do not belong to that ‘Western Civilisation’ of Fascist superiority and impunity, of Nazi hubris and arrogance. That can be called ‘Zionism’ (this is nothing to do with Jews), which proclaims that anything it does is justified because it is ‘superior’, ‘indispensable’ and, just like its ancestor the Roman Papacy, ‘infallible’. For example, the leader of the British Labour Party, an Establishment multi-millionaire, proudly states that he is a ‘Zionist’. So do the Catholic Biden and the atheist Johnson.

We are not Zionists, for we belong to another Western Civilisation, whose sign is not pride, but humility. This Civilisation is called Christian Civilisation. Here we are not speaking of ‘Western Christian Civilisation’, which does not exist as such, but of Christian Civilisation in the West. This Civilisation is part of that same worldwide Orthodox Christian Civilisation which was founded in Jerusalem in AD 33 and existed almost all through the Mediterranean world in the first millennium and still exists in parts of the Middle East and large parts of Eastern Europe. And we too still belong it, this Civilisation of the Resurrection. It does not matter whether we are in the East or the West, we are Orthodox Christians.

The Renewal of Orthodox Christian Civilisation

The definition of Orthodox Christian Civilisation is that it produces saints, for saints are the product of the Holy Spirit, Who makes the Church live. Some say that this Orthodox Christian Civilisation is corrupted, that is, that it no longer produces saints. This is not true. Within the last 100 years, we have seen many new saints on Mt Athos, in Greece, Serbia, Romania, in Carpatho-Russia and everywhere in the former Communist lands. True, there are parts of the Church where we do not see any saints for the moment, but we do see persecuted Confessors of the Faith, bishops, monks, nuns, priests and laypeople and Martyrs for the Faith – clergy and laity. Critics will point to individuals, especially in the heights of Constantinople or Moscow, who have been corrupted and created scandals, either financial or moral, through being tempted by money or power.

However, it is notable that after his landslide election victory and new mandate, President Putin is now strong enough to begin resolving the problems caused by post-Soviet corruption in Russia. Within two weeks, he has had four generals arrested for stealing large amounts of money and equipment. He has now appointed a new Minister of Defence, an Orthodox Christian economist, who is said to be incorruptible. After purging the military, perhaps next the President will purge the post-Soviet Church administration, with its top-heavy centralism, corrupt individuals and scandals, including those infiltrated by the CIA. All these ‘princes of the Church’, with their love of clerical luxury, ignore the grassroots and have made the Church in Russia very unpopular. Their only use for priests is as an army of moneymakers for themselves. We the monastics, the parish clergy and the people have no time for this disgusting froth. If the new Christian Civilisation is to take shape and take root once more in the West and in the East, it must not be corrupt.

Conclusion: A Way Forward

We have spoken about winning the peace. This will be essential for the Church in the Ukraine after the military conflict is over. ‘For the peace of the whole world, the peace of all Rus and victory over the forces of evil, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all, let us pray to the Lord’. Here in bold are the words that we thought should have been added to the great litany of the Russian Church for the duration of the conflict. And the Communist-period named Patriarchate of Moscow should have been renamed ‘The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus’, its administrative headquarters being removed to the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. As Russia is now a national State, albeit multi-ethnic, the Russian Orthodox Church should at once have granted autocephaly to Churches outside its national borders, thus forming the Ukrainian Church, the Moldovan Church and the Baltic Church (covering Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland).

Thus, it would have established three new Autocephalous Churches, outplaying US-orchestrated Constantinople schisms in Lithuania, the Ukraine and Estonia, just as the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches were created for newly-independent countries in the last century and so avoided schisms. And if Belarus and the five countries of Central Asia also desired autocephaly, they too should receive it, creating two more Autocephalous Churches, the Belarussian and the Central Asian. And schism should never have been encouraged by Moscow in ROCOR or in Africa. And senior hierarchs could have adopted the attitude of St Nicholas of Japan during the Japanese War against Russia in 1904-5, who locked himself away and prayed. This is the Civilisation of the Resurrection. Here was a way of winning the peace. None of this has been done. And that is why all is now so delicate.

Afterword: Russia’s Lost Time and the Magic Mountain of Europe

In 1913 the famous French economist Edmond Thierry (1854-1925) predicted that by 1950 Russia would dominate Europe politically, economically and financially. In other words, if Russia had not undergone the 1917 ‘revolution’, 33 years later, in 1950, Russia would have dominated Europe. What happened? Quite simply, Russia lost 74 years (1917-1991) under the Soviet regime. Only now, in 2024, has it overtaken Germany and become the largest economy in a Europe which it also dominates politically and soon will dominate financially.

Exactly 100 years ago the German author Thomas Mann wrote his novel ‘The Magic Mountain’. It is about a group of Europeans in a sanatorium. It is about all the problems of a Europe in disarray. The novel was perhaps written prematurely. Perhaps it should have been written today, for Europe is now in an even greater disarray than after the slaughter of the Great War. There is only one hope for the present Europe which is now in its self-made sanatorium of civilisational collapse: that hope is to head for the Civilisation of the Resurrection.

 

 

 

 

A Russian Tragedy of Errors

 

Introduction: Three Fragments of the Church

After the overthrow of the Tsar by traitors in the so-called ‘Revolution’ of 1917, and the ensuing substitution of the Russian Empire for the Soviet Union, parts of the Russian Orthodox Church broke away from it. Although divisions of tiny, temporary ‘catacomb’ church communities formed inside the USSR, divisions were nowhere so obvious as outside the USSR, where there was the political freedom to choose which part of the Church to belong to.

The anti-Soviet Russian emigration split into two warring groups, one quite independent of the rest of the Orthodox Church, the other under the British-controlled and, after British bankruptcy from 1948 on the US-controlled, Patriarchate of Constantinople (1). In any case, both groups were independent of the vast majority of the Russian Church, which was under the enslaved and enhostaged administration of the 99% of the Church inside the Soviet Union. Why did these divisions develop?

  1. The Moscow Patriarchate: Bride of Christ or Concubine of the State?

Like all other Churches the Russian Orthodox Church has had a long history of both dependence on and independence from the State. In this respect, people may think of the independence from the State of St Nil of Sora (1508) and the Transvolgan Non-Possessors (1), of Metropolitan Philip of Moscow (murdered in 1569 on the orders of the centralising Tsar Ivan IV) and of the Old Ritualist schism of the 1660s, which was largely created by reaction to the persecution of the centralising State, which demanded absurd ritual conformity. By 1917 some 10% of the Russian population were declaring that they were Old Ritualists, thus showing the strength of opposition to the centralist State. All the above showed independence from the nationalist State, and many showed faithfulness to Orthodox Tradition, placing the Holy Spirit above corruption.

Under the imperialist Emperor Peter I (‘the Great’) (+ 1725), the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate was abolished and replaced by a Protestant-style Minister of Religion. Soon after this there began the persecution of monastic life, when some two-thirds of monasteries were closed by the German Empress Catherine I (‘the Great’) (+ 1796). Nevertheless, the Church continued to live, under the great St Paisius (Velichkovsky), forced into exile in Romania, and in the Russian Lands, in Sarov and Optina, where new saints appeared, and in Kronstadt, where there began the eucharistic revival, and elsewhere. The grace of the Holy Spirit was active and the deadly bureaucrats of the State apparatus did not manage to quench it, despite their best efforts. They were opposed by Tsar Nicholas II, who, despised and mocked by the bureaucrats in cassocks, had such great saints as Seraphim of Sarov canonised.

However, during this Imperial period most Russian Orthodox omitted to take communion more than once a year and lead an active life of prayer and fasting. Church life became largely an empty ritual, an exercise in ritualism. Here is why the Soviet atheists (most of them, like Stalin, were also ritually Orthodox) came to power: there was no Orthodox conscience and so spiritual resistance to the myths and practices of atheism. Under the Soviet regime, which unsurprisingly admired the imperialist Peter I as their centralising model, the Church was run by the Secret Police. Therefore, the enslaved Church hierarchy of the time adopted a subservient pro-State policy called ‘Sergianism’, in order to ensure its survival. Sergianism was massively rejected by the politically free emigration: hence the divisions. Meanwhile, inside the Soviet Union, ordinary bishops, priests, monastics and faithful people were martyred in their hundreds of thousands.

The remnants of these State-subservient attitudes are still very present in the Russian Church today. For instance, churches in towns and cities usually have professional choirs (if parishioners want to sing, they are forbidden, as in the Russian church in Chiswick, a suburb of London, for example), which reduces the church to a ritualist theatre with a choir to listen to. For example, many ordinary Orthodox in Russia today reproach the Church which appears to be run like a business, the main interest seeming to be profit. Also the centralised hierarchy in Moscow actively opposes clergy who have dissident political opinions from the State about the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine. This only creates more scandals.

This centralisation has led to those parts of the Church in independent countries outside the Russian Federation wanting to break away from the centralised control of Moscow. This is for national reasons, for example, there is resistance to the Moscow centralisation on the part of Non-Russians in the Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and elsewhere. They all seek Church independence and devolution. However, there are also cases of sectarian and schismatic groups which break away from central authority for purely political, right-wing reasons, both inside the Russian Federation, but also outside it, above all in the highly Americanised ROCOR (see below).

  1. ROCOR: Orthodox or Right-Wing?

In 2007 we all at last managed to get the New York-based ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) to rejoin the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate. Otherwise, it would have become a schismatic sect, out of communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. When it reunited with Moscow, it lost some 5% of its 300 parishes. These 5% were extremists who really wanted to be in schism, out of communion with everyone, claiming like pharisees to be ‘True Russian Orthodox Churches’. There were then, and perhaps still are, about four of these tiny squabbling sects, formed in 2007, all cursing each other.

After the wonderful God-sent opportunity of reunion with the bulk of the reviving Russian Orthodox Church and life-giving canonical communion with it for a decade between 2007 and 2017, very sadly, the ROCOR authorities gradually lapsed back into their sectarian temptations from before 2007. Step by step these sectarians took control of ROCOR’s New York Synod in an internal coup d’etat, effectively isolating its ill but charismatic Metropolitan, rejecting all his decisions and using his electronic signature to justify their very strange and deeply uncanonical decisions.

Very sadly, the extremists had learned nothing from being in communion with the Mother-Church for ten years. They had simply camouflaged and justified their pharisaical, schismatic and sectarian tendencies behind their alleged unity with the Moscow Patriarchate. Today ROCOR is out of full communion with Moscow, and so its second state is worse than its first. Instead of Orthodoxy, it has espoused the sectarian American right-wingery of woman-despising ‘Orthobros’ and Trumpism, totally confusing Divine Orthodoxy with mere human conservatism and its lust for money and power.

This pharisaical state of schism and fanatical sectarianism was encouraged by deluded Non-Russian neophytes, who want to be more royalist than the King, more Russian Orthodox than real Russian Orthodox. In reality, these Lutheran and Calvinist sectarians have ended up outside full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate, the King they betrayed. They have painted themselves into their own corner, apparently feeling very comfortable in their isolation. Thus, they have renounced their own saints, who were internationally-minded, not isolated, and concelebrated with and gathered together all Orthodox. These include St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, whom the US right-wingers so cruelly suspended and persecuted, leading to his premature death in 1966.

Some suspect that the new ROCOR division has been encouraged by the CIA, of whose largesse ROCOR was a well-known recipient for a generation between 1966 and 1991, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. As participants in the San Francisco ROCOR Council in 2006 we all know that the CIA virulently opposed the ROCOR reunion with Moscow in 2007 and from 2017 on tried to censor and then close this anti-CIA (and anti-FSB and anti-MI5) Orthodox England site through an amateur agent. For a few months he succeeded, causing an international scandal and making ROCOR a laughing-stock among the other Local Churches. Perhaps money exchanged hands here too.

  1. Paris: Orthodox or Left-Wing?

The second part of the Russian emigration which split away from the enslaved Church authorities in Soviet Moscow was the group founded by Saint Petersburg aristocrats and intellectuals and centred in Paris. (Some of them spoke better French than Russian; all spoke fluent French). Originally less than a third of the size of the now US-centred ROCOR, today it is called the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Russian Tradition. In reality it is very small outside France, as it is practically forbidden to expand elsewhere, and now has only some sixty parishes.

In 2019 it too at last rejoined the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate, leaving behind in Constantinople, to our open relief, its masonic and modernist wing with its uncanonical practices, losing not 5% of its parishes, clergy and people, as with ROCOR, but over 40% of its parishes, clergy and people. If ROCOR had lost 40% of its body, then it would have remained in full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate after 2017. Too much of the pharisaical, ‘onetruechurchist’, sectarian and schismatic had remained in ROCOR, thus poisoning its potential. Conversely, the much smaller Paris Archdiocese not only remained in communion, but also, to its credit and unlike ROCOR, remained politically free of Moscow centralisation.

Conclusion: Disloyalty to the Testament of the Tsar

In the history of the last generation of pre-Revolutionary Russia under the last Emperor, it is clear that right-wing extremists played as negative a role as left-wing extremists. For example, plotting together, they murdered the Tsar’s adviser, Gregory Rasputin, who was helping him bring the Old Ritualists back into the Church. But this treacherous extremism can above all be seen in the ensuing history of the tragic Civil War between ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’. Then both sides committed awful atrocities, as described in any history of that dreadful war, where brother killed brother.

Sadly, just like the Reds, most of the Whites did not support the Tsar: it is reckoned that only 10% of them did so. They were the only real Whites. Most simply wanted their land, property and wealth back from the Marxists. Many ‘Whites’ were quite as openly atheistic as the Reds. As a Russian patriot and real Orthodox, the Sovereign Tsar stood above both Reds and Whites, above and outside the vulgar extremes of both left and right, above and outside their centralisation and nationalism. This is his Testament. This is our heritage. Under him there would have been no tragic war between Russian and American-proxy Ukrainians today.

Notes:

  1. https://orthodoxwiki.org/Maximus_V_of_Constantinople
  2. It is interesting that the enemies of the Non-Possessors accused them of stealing money! Nothing has changed. We know of a very greedy bishop in England today who accused a Non-Possessor priest, who subsidised his parish from his own money, of exactly the same thing! Of course, the bishop never apologised.