On President Trump

The election of Mr Trump in the USA is seen as a disaster by some (like the now discredited Mr Cameron), as a triumph by others. History will tell us which it will be. However, whatever we may think, his victory tells us something significant about the Western world. After a generation of ‘liberal’, neocon tyranny that bombed countries back to the Stone Age worldwide, the West is facing the overthrow of the anti-people, anti-democratic, anti-patriotic and anti-Christian political Establishments of the New World Order in a wave of popular revolt. Strangely enough, this worldwide trend began outside London and other elitist centres in the backwaters of the real England, on St Audrey’s day, 23 June 2016.

Following the unpredicted victory of the anti-Establishment outsiders in the EU referendum in the UK last June, Mr Trump said that his victory would be a ‘Brexit plus plus plus’. He was right, because his victory represents another step in the overthrow of anti-democratic political Establishments around the world. All is now possible, in forthcoming elections in neocon-run Italy, France, Germany and elsewhere, despite the unelected EU gerontocrats who forbid other EU countries to hold referenda on freedom. The propaganda and wishful thinking of the opinion polls, of the chattering classes and of the robot-like Establishment-paid journalists of the six companies who control the Western world’s public media have all been proved wrong. The people have spoken. Why has this happened now?

It has happened because we have reached the end of a generation. The abolition of the Soviet superpower almost exactly 25 years ago at once went to the heads of the US Superpower’s neocon elite and they embarked on a generation of a series of invasions of other countries and overthrows of democratically-elected governments worldwide, imagining that they could rule the world in a pattern of unheard of anti-freedom meddling. That nightmare – because it was a nightmare and their hundreds of millions of victims from Serbia (Clinton’s) to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Egypt, from Libya to Syria, from the Ukraine to the Yemen confirm it – is now at an end. The American people are also tired of tyranny and bankruptcy. The old is out and a new wind is blowing through the world.

Today, the arrogant, dollar-greedy elites of puppet regimes of US neocon vassal states worldwide, from Paris to Berlin, from Kiev to Tallinn, from Warsaw to Tel Aviv, in warmongering NATO and neocon EU, in Latin America and Africa, the puppet-leaders shaped by the spiritual revolt of the disastrous 1960s, are in a state of shock. Living in the denial of their elitist cocoon of the past and unprepared to hear the voice of the exploited people to triumph, these globalists are now justifying themselves, hurling insults. But their insults are those of bad losers. What is to come is uncertain, all that is known is that there will now be change: the future has come. We can only pray that the change will be positive.

Red Russia or White Russia?

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union almost exactly a generation ago, the question has often been raised as to what the destiny of Russia is – to be Red or White. For some, called Red Russians, are Soviet-born, and others, called White Russians, were born outside the Soviet Union. Of course, the question is purely abstract, inasmuch as both Red Russia and White Russia are dead. Red Russia died a generation ago, though it had been dying for a generation before that. As for White Russia, I was one of the many priests who buried its last representatives in the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, I am an heir to White Russia, just as there are those who are heirs to Red Russia. And, although it may sound strange to some, I find myself in complete agreement with the heirs of Red Russia and I know and respect them. Why?

Although there were heroic Tsarist figures in White Russia, there were many anti-Tsarist figures also, indeed, many of the latter were atheists. Their only concern in fighting the Reds was not to fight against atheism and for the restoration of the Tsar, but to get their property and money back. In other words, they were capitalists, without spiritual significance. That is how the White Movement was undermined, betrayed and lost – by their spiritual impurity. Their heirs, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, are sometimes shocked to learn that the Tsar’s Russia had free schooling and an advanced educational system, with almost 90% literacy, and more or less free healthcare (a one rouble stamp per year in your passport) and a strong social protection system. Social justice was a priority.

More than this, the Russian Empire of Tsar Nicholas II keenly supported anti-colonial independence movements around the world, whether in Siam (Thailand) and Morocco, Korea and Ethiopia, South Africa and Tibet. The fact is that what the Soviet Union is praised for – its free education, free medicine, social justice and anti-colonialism – was merely its inheritance from the Tsar’s Russia. On the other hand, what it is castigated for, its slaughter of millions of its own citizens in artificial famines and concentration camps, its vicious persecution of the Church, dissidents and minorities, its alcohol, abortion, corruption and divorce epidemics and its initial inability to defend its borders against Hitler’s hordes (in the First World War, the Germans got no further than the western borders of Russia), were not parts of the Tsar’s Russia.

Today, with Red Russia dead, there is no going back to its appalling, genocidal practices, especially in the early Troskyite days of the anti-Russian Zionist Bolsheviks. As for the compromised part of White Russia that was not White at all, the money-grubbing and exploitative part that was anti-Tsar and carried out the February Revolution for its own selfish, nationalistic, political, power-grabbing interests, it too is dead. It withered away in irrelevance and bankruptcy in Paris and elsewhere. What is left? There remains the White Russia in exile that believes in Holy Rus and today encourages and is encouraged by that part of today’s Russia that believes in the same. This, we believe, is the Russia that will yet triumph over the remaining negative vestiges of the Soviet era, its alcohol, abortion, corruption and divorce.

Today, the struggle of the heirs of both Red and White Russia is not against one another. It is a common struggle against the anti-Christian traitors of post-Soviet Russia, the corrupt, power-seeking oligarchs who control so much of the media, industry and bureaucracy. These are those who, in their own selfish interests, act as the puppets of the anti-Christian Western neocons, against whom we heirs of White Russia in the West also struggle and against whom we struggled in 1917. For today’s neocons are the spiritual descendants of the selfsame secularists who betrayed the Church in Western Europe a thousand years ago, splitting it from the rest of the Church, making it first Roman Catholic and then Protestant, and who also betrayed the Tsar’s Russia in February 1917. They all say that Might is Right: but we all say that God is Right.

The Tyranny of Parliament

After the Norman invaders, blessed by the most powerful man in Western Europe, had overthrown and slaughtered the people’s King at Senlac near Hastings just over 950 years ago, they proceeded to install a tyrannical monarchy. This enslaved the people through establishing feudal castles and serfdom. Within 150 years the barons of this Norman Establishment, jealous of the King’s power, decided through Magna Carta to take some of it for themselves. Over 500 years later, in the 17th century, the tyrant Cromwell came, beheaded the King, dispossessed the barons and took power for himself through Parliament. To this day Cromwell, the Hitler of his day and responsible for probably a million deaths even without modern killing technology, is remembered through his statue outside the Norman Establishment Parliament in the Norman capital of London. We the people still await Denormanization.

Today the Norman Establishment has at last allowed the people to vote on our membership of the tyrannical and powerful EU – the EU is only the spiritual descendant of him who blessed their invasion and slaughter in 1066. It allowed this vote only because in its hubris and utter contempt for the people it was sure that it would win. However, since it lost that vote, it is now attempting to deny the people even that freedom. Parliament, in which sits a group of MPs representing a small minority of the voters is said to be superior to the people. This Norman trick to deprive the people of long-awaited freedom is now going to delay Brexit further. It is clear that the battle for freedom from EU tyranny will continue. Clearly and not surprisingly, the Norman Occupation of 1066 is far from over. This is because it is above all a spiritual occupation, an occupation of minds and hearts. And it is only spiritual liberation that will at last bring us real social, economic and political liberation.

On False Spiritual Fatherhood

Although fortunately rare, false spiritual fatherhood exists. In order to understand this, we must first understand what true spiritual fatherhood is.

True spiritual fatherhood is the guiding of the person towards salvation, away from the sins to which it in particular is prone. It is not the suppression of the person and its replacement by a self-serving personality cult of the false spiritual father. In such cases of personality cult, it will be seen that the victim (‘spiritual child’) will start physically resembling the so-called spiritual father. In other words, clones will be produced. This cloning involves not only external resemblance by wearing the same clothes, having the same hairstyle, cultivating the same walk, gestures or mannerisms, repeating the same words, wearing the same glasses, but also psychic resemblance. In such a case, it will be found that the clone will by mimetism (imitation) start to physically resemble the guru, the physical features changing to those of the cult leader.

Such a cult can very swiftly be identified by the exclusivist attitudes of the cult members or adepts to outsiders. These outsiders will not be recognized by them, for they cannot exist. They cannot exist, because no-one has a right to exist outside the cocoon of the exclusive cult. They have no right to exist because they owe no obedience to the idolatrous cult. In this way the cult takes on a sectarian, esoteric mentality, cutting itself off from the wider Church. Its spiritual pride becomes narcissistic, reflecting the narcissism of its idolized founder, who may have suffered from NPD (narcissistic personality disorder – google for details). Eventually, however, the cult begins to wither and die because of its spiritual pride, becoming irrelevant to the wider world. This is summed up by the Gospel words, ‘By their fruit ye shall know them’.

We write the above in order to warn the naïve, often young and intellectual. As we have said above, false spiritual fatherhood is rare – but it does exist.

The Christian Empire, not Zionist Imperialism

Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant: Even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve. (Matt 20, 27-28)

For the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all people, let us pray to the Lord.

Petition from the Great Litany of the Church

The hope for the global unity of all humanity in the Church is expressed in the above petition. For we believe that the voluntary union of all people in unity in diversity can only come through peace in the whole world and the good estate of the Local Orthodox Churches. This is the opposite of the globalism of the New World Order. This presumes the war of the whole world, the bad estate of the Local Orthodox Churches and the forced union of survivors in a global electronic concentration camp, in which all diversity will be destroyed and sameness imposed. All will be forced into speaking the same language, dressing the same way, watching the same images and listening to the same voices. All dissent will be ruthlessly crushed by imperialism.

Like all isms, this imperialism is infected with the secular, that is, with spiritual pride. It does not matter whether an ism started with a Christian motivation, any word ending in ism is so tainted, including Catholicism, Papism, Protestantism, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, messianism, traditionalism, conservatism, liberalism, old calendarism, new calendarism or any other ism. The words Church, Christianity and Orthodoxy are not so tainted because they are not secular, they are not spiritually proud, but humble. Thus, although we belong to the Christian Empire on earth, for nearly one hundred years without an earthly head, our head for now being the Mother of God, we reject imperialism, which is the demonic spirit of imagined superiority.

Imperialism means self-serving domination over other peoples and their cruel exploitation. It is the belief of imperialists that they are a chosen people, exceptional, as in the messianic Jewish exceptionalism of the ideology of ‘the chosen people’ of the Pharisees in the first century AD, today known as Zionism, the papal exceptionalism of the Crusades all over Europe and in the Middle East, (‘Kill them all, God will recognize His own’), the Spanish and Portuguese exceptionalism of the conquest of the Americas, the British exceptionalism of the Victorian Age, French exceptionalism, the German exceptionalism which started two World Wars against the Slavs, and today’s American neocon exceptionalism with its Trostkyite ethos.

Making itself exceptional, imperialism frees itself with impunity from common human morality and laws. All is permitted, from carpet bombing to dropping atomic bombs on civilians, from napalm to Agent Orange, from shock and awe to ‘collateral damage’, for the end justifies the means. Imperialism means the will to dominate others, not the will to serve others. A similar thing has happened in the history of the three imperial centres of the Orthodox Christian peoples. All three have at times been infected with the spiritual pride of Zionism, which destroyed Judaism and brought it to crucify Christ, as He had upset its plans for domination of the whole world, as expressed by the most Zionist, the Pharisees, the neocons of their age.

Thus, Old Rome was infected by the spiritual pride of imperialism and domination, using military force to achieve its aims, starting in southern Italy, Iberia and England (later in the Middle East, Ireland and Russia), and so fell away from the Church in the 11th century. New Rome (Constantinople) was infected and undermined by the spiritual pride of provincial Greek nationalism (Hellenism), which led it into compromises in Florence, bringing about its downfall in 1453, which nationalism is still alive today. And the Third Rome (Moscow) was at times also infected with Russian nationalism, as can be seen in parts of the history of Russian relations with Georgians, Finns and Poles, with the native peoples of Siberia and Alaska, and others.

The roots of exploitative Russian nationalism go back to the Lutheranized, absolutist Peter I, who invented a national Russian flag, replacing the old, multinational, Christian emblem of the double-headed eagle, introduced Western-style bureaucracy, as seen in his Table of Ranks, thus separating the Tsar from the people, and brought in Western feudal enslavement (serfdom), which lasted some 150 years. This is why the Soviet regime adored Peter and violently reintroduced his serfdom, which it called collectivization. Its first victims, just as Peter’s first victims, were the Russians themselves. For the Leninist and Trotskyite Soviet Union was also a Zionist-style Empire, an Empire without Christ, Messianism without a Messiah.

Superimposed on the already betrayed and undermined multinational Christian Empire of Old Russia, the Soviet Union was resented by western Ukrainians, Poles, Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Tartars and many other peoples through its centralized will for domination. All such imperialism is opposed to the beliefs of the Christian Empire. The Christian Empire exists not to serve itself by exploiting the peoples who voluntarily desire and ask to belong to it, nor to promote greed for profit and ecologically catastrophic consumerism, but to fight evil. If you do not fight evil, you are in no way messianic, in no way a chosen people. A chosen people is one that lives for Christ, fights evil, serves others and defends the weak.

The Christian Empire has no desire to conquer and subjugate other peoples, making them its inferior, second-class citizens, belittling their languages and cultures, exploiting their resources. It desires only to serve, defend and respect them, seeing them as brothers and sisters, equal because also created by God, telling them of the Goodness, Truth and Justice of Christ and the acquisition of the Holy Spirit by example. In a word, the Christian Empire is the Empire of the Spirit. The Christian Empire in Russia, as in all its incarnations, fell because its treacherous and self-serving elite, largely no longer Christian, had ceased to do these things, being infected in the last two and a half centuries by exploitative imperialism which had been imported from the West.

Nearly one hundred years after the fall of the Christian Empire in 1917, which was the real aim of the First World War, and then the attempt in 1941 to destroy its territorial integrity, which was the real aim of the Second World War, but which was achieved only in 1991, we are now at a turning-point in history. We are faced by the ravaging of the planet by the messianistic imperialism of the Zionist neocon elite with its Soviet-style ‘bright future’. As it attempts to subjugate and control all humanity, the only thing that stands between us and its Antichristic ethos is the hope for the restoration of the Christian Empire. This is the Empire, freed of provincialist nationalism, ready to fight evil, defend the weak and serve the spiritual needs of humanity.

The End of the New World Order

The victory of the Trotskyite neocons in the Cold War that ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union exactly 25 years ago has turned out to be their self-imposed defeat. This is because the victory, trumpeted as ‘the new world order’ and ‘the end of history’, went to the heads of the neocons, who then, as is the way of all anti-Christian empires, over-reached themselves. In attempting to take over the whole world, the neocons bankrupted themselves, made themselves hated worldwide and so created fanatical terrorist enemies, as was seen on 11 September 2001. As we move into 2017 and 2018, the centenaries of Western-orchestrated events in the Russian Empire which shaped the blood-soaked tragedies of the twentieth century, we are now at a turning-point. We may now be on the eve of a decisive battle.

As the neocon terrorists face defeat in Syria and the Yemen, their arms desperately and bloodily attacking the innocent civilians in the schools and hospitals of Mosul, we see that the attempt to impose their sinister globalist project has failed. The Tower of Babylon, its feet of clay, is falling once more, but those who know that the end is coming for them will not give up their vanity without a struggle. Their pride, expressed in their absurd Russophobic propaganda, will not allow them to admit that they have been hopelessly wrong all along. There are those in Washington who even now threaten nuclear war, taking on Russia and China, despite the chaos and bloodshed they have already created in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. And there are even those in their European vassal states who are so brainwashed that they actually believe them, not least in the UK and among other NATO puppets.

We are not afraid. In 1825 Tsar Alexander I, who vanquished the tyrant Napoleon and liberated Paris, disappeared from public life, and until 1836 lived as a disciple of the future St Seraphim of Sarov. Then, after Fr Seraphim’s repose, he appeared as the much-venerated Elder Fyodor Kuzmich. It is from him that our prophecies clearly say that a last Christian Emperor is to descend and will oppose Antichrist in the last times, uniting all the remaining faithful within the Church centred in Russia. This last Emperor, whose coming is being prepared, will be descended from the Romanovs by his mother (in other words, his surname will not be Romanov). We are now moving towards these times. With the US elections and those in Germany and France, in an EU rejected by the UK, all taking place in the next few months, we await prophetic events.

Hastings 2016

A sermon read before pilgrims in the Church at Whatlington by the site of the so-called ‘Battle of Hastings’ on the occasion of the 950th anniversary of the tragedy, 27 October 2016.

950 years ago, on this very spot, King Harold son of Godwin, the last English King of England, prayed before giving battle to the invader. The latter had a Papal blessing to invade, conquer and forcibly introduce feudal enslavement through castles and knights. This was all in order to bring the Church in England into line with his revolutionary, newly-invented Western European religion, which had already been enforced elsewhere.

The new religion had replaced Christ, making Him unnecessary as Head of the Church, and claimed that the absolute authority of the Holy Spirit now proceeded from its Papal head. For island England was a latecomer to this new religion and the Norman invasion was merely part of a far broader process of subjugation throughout Western Europe that was later to lead to invasion of the Holy Land, called the First Crusade, and determine the pattern of future Western history.

King Harold lost the Battle and died here together with some 7,000 of his men. Massacre and genocide followed the English defeat – 100,000 people, over 5% of the total population, died in the north of England alone, the equivalent of 3.25 million in today’s terms, well over twice the figure of two World Wars combined. The defeat of England and her other regional heroes like Hereward meant that English people became second-class citizens, on the same level as what used to be called Red Indians in North America. As for Wales, Scotland and in the 12th century Ireland, they would also be brought under the same Norman yoke by castle and sword.

Harold’s English people were scattered to the four winds. Some English people fled north to Scotland and Scandinavia, others west to Wales and Ireland. Many of Harold’s surviving military men fled south to New Rome (Constantinople) with the English Navy, at least 235 ships in all. There they settled, as also around the Black Sea coasts, especially around the Sea of Azov near the Crimea, and in Constantinople they founded their own English Church, where a lamp burned before the icon of St Augustine of Canterbury. As for Harold’s daughter, Gytha, she fled east to Kiev, married royally and one of her sons, the grandson of King Harold, founded Moscow.

Today we have gathered to commemorate the some 7,000 men who died in the Battle. They died defending their and our homeland and their and our English Orthodox Christian culture that was in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Christian world. These were real people, they had wives, children and grandchildren, they were flesh and blood, mind and soul, they had names – some of them we know. They died fighting for the culture that had been resurrected in the ninth century by King Alfred from the ruins of the Viking attacks. Let us not forget that Alfred, also called ‘the Lawgiver’ and ‘England’s Darling’, is the only figure in English history to be called ‘the Great’.

Alfredian culture restored Old English Church Civilization, which had been so faithfully recorded by St Bede the Venerable in England’s seventh and eighth century Golden Age. Alfredian culture meant first defeating and then Christianizing pagans, defending towns, rebuilding churches and monasteries, establishing laws, sending alms to the Patriarch of Jerusalem and translating the works of the Church Fathers. King Alfred restored this culture so well that as a result, after his repose, the tenth century became through his descendants the age of the national unity of England and the Silver Age of Church culture, unmatched in its splendour in Western Europe.

However, in the eleventh century the Vikings attacked England again and again and the last Vikings, the Normans, or Northmen, finally destroyed England as it had been, leaving us today with only vestiges of a once great Civilization, as we can see in the remaining books and manuscripts of the School of Winchester, the English capital. These are the rags of a once magnificent and precious raiment of gold and jewels, part of the Old Christian Europe. Today we who are conscious of all this have as our task to tell others these truths which are either hidden from or else indifferent to most.

Today, Orthodox Christian Civilization has its spiritual centres not Canterbury or Winchester, Lindisfarne or Iona, but elsewhere in the east. It is therefore our task to refound spiritual centres here, however modest they may be, for we belong in spirit to this Civilization and keep faith with its values. We live in our spiritual oases here with our heritage of Augustine, Audrey, Cuthbert, Hilda, Theodore, Bede, Edmund, Alfred, Edward, Dunstan, Alphege and all who are present here in their icons. Now we can at the very least pray for the souls who gave up their lives for the Faith, for the King and for England, as well as for the Universal Church, and take inspiration from them.

In the sleep of the blessed grant, O Lord, eternal repose, to the souls of those who fell for the Faith on Senlac Field, King Harold, Princes Leofwyn and Gyrth, Alfwig, Abbot of Winchester, Leofric, Abbot of Peterborough, Deacon Eadric, Aelfric of Huntingdon, Thurkill of Kingston, Godric of Fyfield, Esegar of Middlesex, Hakon, Breme, and all the King’s men, and grant them Eternal Memory!

The Tradition is One

An integral part of the destructive ideology peddled by modernists is to deny the existence of the Tradition. Making out that there is no such thing as the Tradition, they claim that there are therefore only human customs, thus, very typically for them, reducing the Inheritance of the Holy Spirit to relativistic humanism. They are wrong – the Tradition exists and this is precisely the deposit of the Holy Spirit that the Apostle calls us to guard (1 Tim 6, 20).

There is only one Tradition, just as there is only one Church. True, there are local customs, but some of these are bad and come from spiritual decadence. These have come into the Church in recent times through Western influence and can be encountered especially in Greece, Cyprus and in parts of Romania and the Patriarchate of Antioch, which have been exposed for some generations to Western decadence. In their parishes in the USA and elsewhere, some of these groups actually use organs and people sit in pews during Church services! Of course, this is no part of the Tradition and is only justified as a custom because it is what heretics do. Here there are clear cases where the Tradition is being lost. However, modernists justify all this saying that ‘you can have organs or not have organs, you can have pews or not have pews – these are merely differences of custom’. This is a lie.

Such people are simply victims of modernist decadence and have lost the Tradition. Much more seriously, and this is now widespread among those who come from heterodox backgrounds, there is the custom of communion without confession and even persecution of those who do not take communion. This is like saying that communion is medicine which can be administered without a diagnosis. The fact is that if you take the wrong medicine because you do not have a diagnosis, you can die. Though the modernists hate the Scriptures because they are not politically correct, the Apostle Paul wrote about communion for damnation in the first century: ‘For this cause many are weak and sickly among you’ (I Cor 11, 30). Similarly, there is the modernist practice of forcing women to take communion during menstruation, which also goes against the Holy Spirit.

Another widespread modernist practice is to change the services, justifying arbitrary changes contrary to the Tradition. All of this goes hand in hand with the use of the papal calendar instead of the Orthodox calendar. Here too modernists assert that there are two calendars, therefore we can use either. In reality, there is only one Church calendar. The fact that we accept as Orthodox those who use the papal calendar for the fixed services is economy, a dispensation made for the sake of their salvation. Another abuse is celebrating without an iconostasis. This can happen initially in missionary circumstances, but after a few weeks any real Orthodox parish will have an iconostasis. Not to take a blessing on seeing a priest is another abuse – not part of the Tradition. Connected with this is the refusal of women not to cover their heads (I Cor 11, 13) and generally wear improper and immodest dress in church.

It is no good like Anglicans, who do not understand what the Church is, saying that in the Church there are only various human customs and so that we can ignore them or compromise them in amoral ‘pick and mix’ consumerism. In reality, there is right and wrong, good and bad, black and white, and there can be no compromise between right and wrong, just as there can be no concord between Christ and Belial (2 Cor 6, 15). The Tradition is One.

Christian Civilization versus Western Civilization

In his monumental 7,000 pages of historical erudition entitled ‘A Study of History’, Arnold Toynbee, the famous British historian, made an attempt to categorize all the civilizations in the history of the world, both present and past, and followed their rise and fall. He deemed that only five Civilizations are alive today. These are: Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, (Orthodox) Christian and Western, with Western Civilization dominating them all. (Orthodox) Christian Civilization was at the time of his writing, more or less three generations ago, centred in Russia. However, it was in a dying and fragmentary state, since it had been divided and oppressed by imported and imposed Western ideologies such as Fascism (National Socialism), Capitalism and, above all in the centre itself, Communism (State Capitalism).

Today, Orthodox Christian, or simply Christian, Civilization is reviving, with the shackles of both Fascism and Communism long since thrown off. However, what exactly does this term of ‘Christian Civilization’ mean, what are the values of Christian Civilization, what are the differences between them and those of Western Civilization and why does the latter so utterly misunderstand them? It should be said that those who misunderstand them even include Anglican Protestants who, like Uniats, use a form of the Orthodox rite, but still assert that we mainstream Orthodox Christians are not even Christians! This misunderstanding clearly proves that we are not saved by an imitated rite, but by the Orthodox faith which should behind it, for that alone preserves the integrity of the rite, and that they do not share our faith.

This issue has once more come to the fore with last week’s appeal in The Financial Times to Russian oligarchs to overthrow the very popular government of President Putin. Here we see the essence of Western Civilization. It is not based on popular will (‘freedom and democracy’ are a principal Western myth, as we saw with the refusal of EU bureaucrats to allow European peoples to vote on leaving the EU), but on the power of the wealthy few (in Greek ‘oligarchs’). This can be clearly seen in the USA (ruled by a few shadowy billionaires from the military-industrial complex) and in Western Europe (ruled by a few unelected EU bureaucrats). In Western democracy the people are given a choice between two oligarchs or their puppets – and though this is called freedom, it is clearly not.

Clearly, it is the will of the Western elite, and among them are those who run The Financial Times, that (Orthodox) Christian Civilization must be destroyed (just as the Western world destroyed its own original (Orthodox) Christian Civilization during the second millennium of its history). The Western elite intends to do this by turning Christian Civilization into a series of dismembered vassal states or colonies, a process called Balkanization and which it practised in the 19th century. But this became crystal clear already long ago, in the destruction of New Rome by Western barbarians in 1204, in the plundering of the Teutonic Knights in Russia in the 13th century or in the alliance between Western nations and Islam and in the invasions of Western Civilization like those of Napoleon, the Anglo-French-Ottomans, Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler.

As a result of this destruction and dismemberment the natural resources of Christian Civilization can be taken over and ruthlessly exploited by the Western world, so that it can parasitically support itself, just as it does on the resources of the rest of the world. Here, essentially, we see that Western Civilization is a Civilization of Mammon, of materialism. No clearer example of this can be seen today than in the Ukraine, a part of Christian Civilization that the West is now trying to control and colonize. Having overthrown the government elected by a majority of its people, the West has now appointed a group of corrupt oligarchs, each with his own feudal fief, to rule it. These oligarchs, their funds controlled by Western and Israeli banks, are the spiritual descendants of warring princes and later corrupt boyars centuries ago.

In the 18th century these were succeeded by Westernized aristocrats who introduced serfdom, enslaving the people after the Western model. In the 19th century these aristocrats, just like the boyars who in the early 17th century had acted to please Polish invaders, tried to seize power under British and French influence in 1801 (the assassination of Tsar Paul I) and in 1825 under the Decembrists. When the aristocrats lost some of their power as serfdom was abolished by the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II in 1861, they became ever more aggressive and they revolted again, in 1905 and, in 1917, this time successfully. What is happening in the Ukraine today is simply a repeat of the old scenario of foreign meddlers operating through local traitors. Simply today the meddlers are not greedy Poles, British or French, but Americans.

So what is the sign of Christian Civilization (called ‘Byzantine’ or ‘Orthodox’ by Western historiographers)? It is simply in the implementation of the two Gospel Commandments given by the Saviour, to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. These Commandments are quite alien to Western Civilization, for they mean that progress is defined not as technological, as materialist and consumerist, but as our repentance and spiritual transfiguration in preparation for the inevitable meeting with God at the Last Judgement. And the state of our progress can be seen in our non-exploitative and non-aggressive relations with others, for we do not invade other people’s countries or arrogantly instruct them on how to live, but cultivate good relations with them as good neighbours.

This does not mean that we are weak or that we do not resist evil, it means that we defend all those who are weaker. Christian Civilization exists not to exploit others, but to fight evil. The prime example of this today is the defence of Syria by the Russian Federation. This is Christian Civilization at work, unlike Western Civilization that meddles, invades, destroys and exploits, as in countless colonies in Latin America, Asia and Africa, or as today in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine, parading its troops, planes, drones and ships off the Russian coasts and along its borders, constantly sabre-rattling and supplying terrorists with training, arms and finance. Russians, however, send their ships through international waters, even though pestered by Western ships which try and impede their route.

The aim of Western Civilization is to strip the world’s natural resources until they are exhausted. This will inevitably lead to the end of the world, the apocalypse. This is done under the excuse of ‘freedom and democracy’ (freedom for the oligarchs to asset-strip and democracy to vote for one Western oligarch or another, but not to vote for an anti-oligarch). On the other hand, Christian Civilization appoints an Emperor (Monarch or Tsar) who is called on to carry out the will of God on earth, in consultation with the people over whom he reigns. This consultation is represented by the words Conciliarity and Catholicity, meaning that the Monarchy is a popular one, neither absolutist – which is the tyranny of a man-God – nor constitutionalist – which is the tyranny of the few behind a puppet monarchy.

Unlike Western Civilization, Christian Civilization is multinational, not nationalistic, chauvinistic and xenophobic. Such abuses do occur, but only in periods of decadence or in backward provincial areas outside the centre. Examples are in today’s schismatic Western Ukraine, Estonia, Montenegro, Macedonia and also in Greek nationalist Constantinople. In all these cases local nationalism rules in contradiction to Christianity. As a result of following the Gospel Commandments, and not the ideology of Western Civilization, Christian Civilization sees no difference between faith and life, for faith is not a mere abstract ideology to justify guilt, but shapes life in harmony with the Incarnation. The aim of such life, patterned by faith, is holiness, the kingdom of heaven on earth, for the spiritual is more important than the material.

Christian Civilization does not encourage individualism, for our common aim is salvation together, as a community. Our political life is determined by a people’s monarch who is called to be a representative of God on earth, defending the Church and our Christian values. It is clear also that the people belonging to such a Civilization show their patriotism for such a Civilization, which is heaven on earth and we defend it against the Western forerunners of Antichrist like the Teutonic Knights, Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler and those who today admire these tyrants as bearers of ‘Western Civilization’ and are intent on destroying our reviving Christian Civilization. We live in perilous times but, by the grace of God, we shall triumph because we are not afraid of you, however much you try to censor us and intimidate us.

On the Fringes of the Empire

Outside the Lands that were Orthodox Christian, that is, holy, in the second millennium and indeed, sometimes for much of the first millennium also, we in the Isles of the North Atlantic live on the fringes of the Empire. We have our examples of holiness, but they are far in the past. So what happens in the third millennium when the double-headed eagle of the Orthodox Christian Empire once more flies above us, despite a near millennium of apostasy in England?

At first sight it seems that only compromise happens. However, although there may be a need for superficial compromise, for empty platitudes, there are also those who confess the Orthodox Faith despite diplomacy, despite the failure to witness of those who are quoted as witnesses, but who in fact compromised themselves with the Norman Establishment. They may be Jerusalem, but we are Galilee and, without us, they are but stones without living voices.

Who understands us? It is not the personalities who demanded guru-worship, not the philosophers who lived in their intellectual fantasies, not the administrators with piles of gold who have little understanding of pastoral reality. It is the little people in the poor and ignored places who live the Faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, our saints St Elizabeth the New Martyr and St John of Shanghai the New Confessor, who give us food for our souls.