How Democracy Can Be Evil

Some, seeing the above title, will be surprised. They should look more carefully. It does not say that Democracy is evil, only that it can be evil. And it can be evil when it is taken out of its ethnocentric context. By this I mean that Democracy is a culturally-limited product, a product of Protestant history and Protestant societies only, first of all of England, then Great Britain, the Netherlands, northern and eastern Germany, Scandinavia and above all, of course, of the USA and the rest of the Anglosphere, from Canada to Australia and New Zealand. I would not suggest that Democracy is evil in that context, although there are debates even about that, given the monolithic bipartisan corruption inherent in the Establishment elites of all Protestant societies.

What I am suggesting, however, is that Democracy becomes evil outside the context of Protestant culture. Democracy (Demonocracy, as it is called in today’s Russia) only works in Protestant and Protestantized societies. We only have to consider the fact that by 1939 every single Roman Catholic country in Europe had become Fascist, admiring the democratically-elected Roman Catholic Adolf Hitler – a dictator like the Roman Catholic Napoleon before him. This is why, after 1945, the USA decided that it would Protestantize Roman Catholicism, which it successfully did a generation later in the Second Vatican Council, which desacralized and secularized the Vatican machine, though it left deep corruption in all ex-Roman Catholic countries such as Italy and France.

We can take as an example the Western attempt to export Democracy to the theocratic Russian Empire in 1917. Deriding Russian autocracy, which it never understood as something positive and balanced because of its cultural blinkers and kneejerk prejudices, the West arrogantly and patronizingly decided on regime-change for Russia. To do this, it exploited the fifth column of wealthy internal traitors who greedily wanted power for themselves (just like Navalny today). Western-imposed Democracy very quickly resulted in tens of millions of deaths through the Western ideology of Marxism. When the Soviet Union collapsed bankrupt, after the ‘victory’ of Democracy, millions then died prematurely of despair through suicide, alcoholism and lack of medical care. ‘Democracy’ again was to blame.

However, the CIA sent thousands of Protestant missionaries to the ex-Soviet Union in order to ‘prepare’ the new countries for Democracy. Although local people were happy to take their pathetic bribes of dollar notes for stadium evangelism, the missionaries failed miserably, for Protestantism is a Western cultural phenomenon; the few authentically Christian missionaries among these Western agents actually ended up joining the Orthodox Church, most others, all blind emotion or cultural imperialism, disappeared. The same has happened in China and Iran, where culturally illiterate, disrespectful, US Protestant and sectarian missionaries were also sent as dupes of Western influence, have failed. In some cases they have been arrested, as the CIA agents they are.

We can take as another example the 2003 Anglosphere attempt to impose Democracy on Iraq (and also to strip it off its natural resources) by murdering the earlier CIA-imposed dictator, Hussein. The result has been hundreds of thousands of dead in the ensuing civil war, millions of refugees, many of them Christians, and the development of horrific terrorism under ISIS. It is the same tragedy as in Latin America, Vietnam, ex-Yugoslavia (still a powderkeg waiting to explode), before that and since then throughout the Muslim world, including in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine. The result of the imposition of Democracy on Non-Protestant cultures is always the same: US puppets, client strongmen, with their corrupt dictatorships which divide and slaughter their own peoples.

Ultimately, arrogant and incredibly ignorant, ethnocentric, culturally blinkered Western ‘Democrats’, who understand nothing of any culture and race and history other than their own, must take responsibility. Blood is on the hands of all these neocons, of the Clintons, of Albright, Powell, Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, Obama, Kerry, Kagan and all their EU vassals in NATO-controlled Brussels and Berlin. These neocons thought themselves ‘morally superior’, but in fact they showed their moral inferiority in their utterly stupid meddling, so making themselves puppets in the hands of the devil to whom death and violence are so sweet. In addition to everything else, they now have the blood of tens of thousands of Ukrainians on their hands. A lot of blood.

Patriotism and Treason: On Resisting the Mystery of Iniquity

In the face of today’s treasonous Babylonian globalist threat, not only is Russia having to return to its patriotic roots, but so too are all other Western countries. In the case of Russia, her roots are clearly in the Tsar’s Russia, in Orthodoxy, which was finally, after many threats, betrayed only 100 years ago. In the case of Western European countries, these patriotic roots are much less clear because those countries have been through so many different permutations, secularist, Protestant or Roman Catholic, in many phases.

Thus, in England, there are those who wish to return to the recent nationalist Protestant-imperialist past. However, this was an invention of the treasonous merchant-class slavers, who brought in foreign monarchs after their usurpation through the Dutch invasion in 1689, the bribery of the Scottish elite into the Union in 1707 and after, with their mean ‘Rule Britannia’. But these are not real and patriotic English roots, and neither are English roots in more distant discredited Roman Catholicism, nor in ancient Germanic paganism.

English roots are in the English period of English history, that is, before it was tainted by the Norman occupiers with their imperialist, pagan Roman revivalist ‘British’ Establishment. The greatest political representative in English history is thus St Alfred the Great (+ 899), its Church representatives ranging from St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne to St Edward the Martyr. In other words, patriotic English roots are in the 450 years of the Old English saints, just as the roots of other Western European cultures are also in their Old European saints.

Patriotic movements all over Europe, from the Urals to Iceland, from Finland to Cyprus, as well as in the USA, are marching against the treason of secularist globalism. However, they will not win their battles of national resistance if they are not underpinned by Christian roots, that is, if they are merely nationalist and not patriotic. In order to understand their real roots, they must consider the Russian battle for roots because that battle is more advanced, as the secularist-globalist Babylon did not begin in Russia, but in Western Europe.

Indeed, there are already many in the secularist-globalist West who are so blinded by their ethnocentric arrogance that they have been deluded into willingly taking part in the process of their own self-destruction. They deny patriots even the freedom of speech, all under the mask of political correctness, calling real patriots Fascists. And yet they hypocritically support real Fascists, in the form of their petty nationalist puppet-strongmen, like those in the Ukraine and the Baltic States, as also in the Third World.

The secularist support for recently-invented, artificial countries comes because their petty nationalism can undermine the national identity and culture of real countries, making them ready for secularist-globalism. The treasonous secularist-globalists are thus forerunners of the Antichrist. Thus, we have the Holy Spirit, Who unites mankind in God, without cancelling out human diversity, unlike the spirit of Satan, which creates the new Tower of Babylon, destroying all national identities, personalities and local cultures.

That spirit reduces all to the lowest common denominator, levelling humanity down to the level of the beasts. The Holy Spirit makes people angelic, but the spirit of Satan makes them bestial, demonic. The spirit of Satan rejoices in ‘freedom’ from the commandments of God. This is what is today disguised under the name of ‘liberalism’, whose aim is to bestialize humanity, making it the slave of the demons. ‘Liberalism’ thus means enslavement, for the laws of Satan are always perverse, contradicting all human common sense.

How can we resist the secularist-globalist spirit? It is by cultivating the local, but only in the anti-secularist Spirit of the Church, in the Holy Spirit. This is why the local saints are especially dear to us. And this is why we should love all the local saints everywhere, for they are all invested with the same Spirit of God. This is diversity in unity and unity in diversity. And this is why Old Europe is also the Tsar’s Orthodox Europe, both of which are reaching out and calling to us from across the darkness of the new pagan age of the secularist globalists.

Putin: It’s “my duty” to attack the New World Order for degrading “family values”

Putin: “As head of state today, I believe it’s my duty to uphold traditional values and family values. But why? Because same-sex marriages will not produce any children. God has decided, and we have to care about birth rates in our country. We have to reinforce families. That doesn’t mean that there should be any persecutions against anyone.”

For source, see: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/06/09/putin-its-my-duty-to-attack-the-new-world-order-for-degrading-family-values/

Please do not read the above too far.

Just Another Miracle from the Orthodox World

In Sochi, a shoal of dolphins has returned the icon of the Virgin of “The Sign” to the people …

On May 17, a colonel, along with his wife, were sitting on the seashore in Sochi, enjoying the clean sea air and the vastness of the water. Suddenly their attention was attracted by a shoal of dolphins that swam to the shore: the couple even managed to count them – exactly a dozen. Soon it became clear why these intelligent marine animals had gathered here – they were pushing something out of the water, and when they had done their job, they immediately swam away.

The strange thing that the dolphins brought ashore was all mud and looked very unpresentable at first sight, which made few people pay attention to him, although not only the colonel and his wife were resting near the sea at the time. Eventually, the wife asked her husband to see what the dolphins had pushed out of the sea.

The witness of the event decided to consider the unexpected gift of the marine inhabitants. The colonel raised a mysterious object, cleared it of mud and … experienced a real shock, as a moment later, his wife too. It was an icon of the Mother of God (later it was revealed – of the “Sign”).

The eyes of the Mother of God looked at the man from the ancient icon. As the shrine must have been on the seabed – no one knows, and scientists could not understand why the dolphins realized that it must be urgently delivered to the shore and given back to people. It turns out that dolphins perfectly understood the value of this icon for people and that it does not have a place at the bottom of the sea …

Found in such a miraculous manner, the icon was taken to Moscow by the same person who stands next to Barnabas’s father (in a sweatshirt) – a retired colonel, a veteran of the Alpha group. Her want to show His Holiness the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kyril, while telling him this truly fantastic story about the miracle …
Nikolai Kaklyugin, Ph.D., a psychiatrist-narcologist

For pictures, see: http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2017/06/10/chudo_chudnoe/

St Alban and the Salvation of Europe

The following talk was read at the symposium of SOPHIE (The Society of Orthodox Philosophers in Europe) in Frankfurt in Germany just before today’s All Saints’ Day Feast

Foreword

25 years after the disappearance of the Soviet Union and 25 years after the appearance of the European Union, we are facing great generational changes. The lands of the ex-Soviet Union continue to suffer from chauvinist strife, instability and extreme unemployment and poverty, not least the Ukraine and the rapidly emptying EU Baltic States. As one Russian put it to me some years ago: ‘Under Communism we had no political freedom, but we did have security. Today, under Capitalism, we have political freedom, but we have no security’. And also: ‘We knew that the Communists were lieing to us about Communism, but we did not know that they were telling us the truth about Capitalism’.

Further events are unfolding in Russia today, on the centenary of the catastrophic, so-called ‘Russian Revolution’, which gave rise to the alien, Marxist Soviet Union, with its Red terror, artificial famines, Gulag, alcoholism, abortion, corruption, divorce and environmental degradation. Equally, some wonder if the European Union will ever recover from Brexit, as other countries also eye freedom from the straitjacket of EU centralization. However, all this comes against the background of the new US President, who is half-Scottish, whose wife is a Slav from ex-Communist Slovenia, and who is apparently anti-EU and pro-Brexit. The world for some people has been turned upside down. Or perhaps rather the world was upside down and is now gradually being turned the right side up?

Against such a contemporary political background, my talk today is based on the only recorded words of a saint who lived nearly 1800 years ago, at some point between 209 and 305, historians, as usual, cannot agree exactly when. Perhaps we can simply say that he lived in the third century. His words, only eighteen of them in their modern English translation, seem to me to prophesy a possible future for this Europe that now seems to be lost and drifting. For although the European Union is largely discredited and rejected, few wish even to think about the Modern, Alternative Europe to replace the outdated, post-Hitlerian, failed, centralized EU Europe. However, there are the words of this saint, from what might be called ‘Brexitland’, who may provide an answer.

This saint in question is the Protomartyr of the British Isles, a Romano-British citizen called Alban, who lived in the Roman city of Verulamium, just north of London. Having given shelter to a Christian priest fleeing persecution, Alban was so moved by the priest’s faith and courage that he asked to be taught more about Christianity, then a forbidden religion, and was baptized by the priest. Before long the authorities came to arrest the fugitive. But Alban, inspired by his new-found faith, exchanged clothes with the priest, allowing him to escape.

Thus, instead of the priest, it was Alban who was arrested and brought before the magistrate. Alban refused to sacrifice to the emperor and the Roman gods and was flogged. When asked to identify himself, he declared these eighteen words: ‘I am called Alban and I worship and adore the true and living God, Who created all things’. The magistrate ordered that Alban receive the punishment due to the priest. He was taken out of the town and up the hillside to the site of his martyrdom and beheaded. His town is today called St Albans and is a mere 20 miles, 30 kilometres, to the north of London. St Alban’s Day is celebrated on 22 June.

I Am Called Alban

I am interested in these eighteen words, the first four of which are: ‘I am called Alban’. The Romano-British name ‘Alban’ means ‘White’. The Latin word ‘alba’ is at the root of many words and names, not least Albion, a name for Britain that stems from the white chalk cliffs of south-eastern Britain, the first view of the country for Roman and other invaders. However, the word ‘White’ has in the Russian Orthodox context another meaning, referring to the White Movement after 1917. True, the White Movement was betrayed by those who claimed to be White, but were not White at all, and were mainly killed or went into exile. However, the best White representatives, although only a minority, sought the restoration of the Orthodox Christian Empire in Russia. These true Whites sought the restoration of ‘the White Tsar’.

The word ‘White’ in this context thus stands for faithfulness to our roots and Christian inheritance, to the Faith that is to be made incarnate in the countries in which we live. ‘White’ means faithfulness to the incarnate integrity of the Faith. This means not just vaguely Christian, but Orthodox Christian, and not just Orthodox Christian, but Orthodox Christian to the point of working to incarnate the Faith, socially, economically and politically. Thus, ‘I am White’ can be taken to mean the confession of the post-Constantinian Civilizational values of the Church, as expressed in the spiritual ideal of Romaiosini in the New Rome that St Constantine founded to unite Europe and Asia and which were continued in Holy Rus, the spiritual ideal of the Eurasian Christian Empire.

And I Worship and Adore the True and Living God

These ten words of St Alban express his Faith, a Faith that he was prepared to die for and did die for, in the worship and adoration of the Christian God, the True God, the Holy Trinity. Today all sorts of things are worshipped: money is worshipped, technology is worshipped, convenience is worshipped, sex is worshipped, food is worshipped, social networking is worshipped, television is worshipped, sport is worshipped, celebrities are worshipped, the self is worshipped, as in the selfie. ‘Because I am worth it’ is indeed the slogan of today’s narcissistic society.

However, St Alban’s worship is of the True and Living God. St Alban worshipped the Living God. He did not worship pagan gods or goddesses, who intervene in human affairs whenever some passion of pride, greed, lust or other, which as demons they embody, seizes them to meddle for the perdition of mankind. They never sacrifice themselves for mankind, but only take advantage of mankind, as parasites. These demons are dead gods, gods of death, not the God of Life. The Living God is He Who defeated death by death, sacrificing Himself and so proving that He is not only the God of Life, the Life-Giver, but also that He loves mankind, the Love-Giver.

Who Created All Things

Following on from the darkness of the eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’, which proposed a distant, theistic God, Who in no way plays a part in human affairs and so offers humanity autonomy to practise all its sins with impunity, virtually the whole of nineteenth-century Western thought was devoted to denying and rejecting the above words. Almighty man creates, not a weak, Nietzschean-imagined God, so weak that He allowed Himself to die famelessly on the Cross. This human assumption of God’s creative power resulted in the twentieth century in destructive manmade World Wars, concentration camps, nuclear bombs and the abortion holocaust. Essentially, modern times have replaced God with man, construction with deconstruction. Man, reverting to idolatry, has replaced the sinless Creator with sinful creation.

This idolatry, the denial of the Living God Who created all things, the last four words of St Alban, has resulted in the heresy of what might be called ‘self-creation’. Far from the innocent, God-inspired inventions of such things as the wheel, the boat, the plough or the windmill, self-creation has led not just to the deafening and blinding inventions of the Industrial Revolution that poisoned human life, the earth and the sea and the sky, as in China today, not just to the Satan-inspired invention of killing and maiming machines like the Maxim gun, poison gas, napalm and the cluster bomb. It has led to the prophesied possibility that humans will so interfere in the chemical elements and genetic codes of life that they will create beings that are monsters and food that is poisoned, apocalyptically killing the Planet and all life.

Afterword

We have entitled our talk, ‘St Alban and the Salvation of Europe’. Of course, we are not proposing that a saint alone can save Europe. But it is our belief that Europe can be saved by Christ acting through the assembly of Europe’s saints because they all proclaim the same truths as St Alban. Next Sunday is precisely the feast of All Saints, who are the fruit of the Holy Spirit, Who came down at Pentecost. The British Isles has St Alban, but Germany has St Ursula, Ireland St Patrick, France St Denis, Belgium St Gertrude, the Netherlands and Luxembourg St Willibrord, Denmark St Anschar, Sweden and Norway the two St Olafs, the Czech Lands have Sts Ludmila and Viacheslav, Switzerland St Maurice and the Legionnaires from Thebes, Austria St Severinus, Hungary St Martin, Italy the Apostles Peter and Paul, Spain St Eulalia, and Portugal St Martin of Braga. All of these proclaim the same thing: Not, as one American President nearly fifty-five years ago, in June 1963, proclaimed, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, but, ‘Ich bin Alban’, in other words, ‘I belong to Christ’.

Some years ago we composed a service to all the Saints of the Western Lands. Here are five stichira from Lord, I have cried from that service, which summarize our thoughts:

For one thousand years the light of the Sun of Righteousness shone forth from the East on the lands of the West, forming a Cross over Europe, before they fell beneath the darkening shades of the Churchless night. Let us now return to the roots of our first confession of the Holy Spirit in the bright Sunrise of Orthodoxy, which is brought again from the East, and so shine forth the light of the Everlasting Christ once more.

O all the saints of the Western Lands, pray to God for our repentance and return, our restoration and resurrection. Tell the people to leave aside the things of men, the fallen fleshly mind and all its vain musings, for they are without the Saviour and the Spirit. And so, through your life in the Holy Trinity, shall we find salvation in the purity of the Orthodox Faith before the end.

Now do we sing to all the saints of the lands of the West and at their head the apostles Peter and Paul, the true glory of Old Rome, and, like stars in the dark night sky, to the constellation of the martyrs and fathers who followed in their apostolic footsteps, leaving behind them the great treasury of holy relics. O First Rome, who art glorious in thy saints alone, do thou return to the eternal faith of Orthodoxy through the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the Father, as the Saviour tells us.

Thus from the fountainhead of the East through Old Rome flowed streams of the Holy Spirit to all the lands of the West, through Gaul and Spain, to the uttermost isles in the far ocean and to all the lands of the north, where the darkness saw the light of Christ and all the trees of the forest bowed their heads before the Wisdom and Word of God, forsaking the superstitions and proud errors of the pagan past.

O constellation of all the saints of the Western lands, who shine forth in the night sky, together we gather in your name, in praise to ask you to intercede for us with your prayers. Bring back the Western peoples from the inglorious darkness of their unwisdom to the Wisdom of God, that they may cast aside all the illusions of the fallen reason and know again that the only true glory and enlightenment is in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.

A Cornish Orthodox Parish?

The pagan ‘Celts’, a group of cruel and warring tribes, invaded the British Isles and Ireland only a few centuries before the Romans came, some arriving not much before them. However, by the first centuries AD these ‘Celts’, some Christian, some, according to St Gildas, definitely not, had separated into two main groups. These were the Irish (in Ireland, and then by emigration, in what is now Scotland) and the Brittonic (in Wales, Cornwall, and then by emigration, in Armorica, the future Brittany in France, and also in Galicia in Spain). The Church in all these lands was represented then by Irish and Brittonic, both Latin-speaking, but both with a strong monastic ethos. So much for the ‘Celtic Church’ myth, about which so much new-age nonsense is talked.

What can we say of Brittonic Cornwall specifically? The word Cornish (Cornovii) is itself Latin, meaning those who live in the ‘horn’, that is to say, those in the horn-shaped peninsula of south-west Britain. Later, by deformation, ‘Corn-wall’ came to mean the land of the ‘Welsh’ (= Non-English) who live in the horn. Cornwall was first taken into England, though only on paper, in the tenth century by King Athelstan. However, in some ways it would be truer to call Cornwall an island, for, surrounded by the sea on three sides, on its fourth side it is separated from Devon and so from England by the River Tamar. Only 70 years ago, and perhaps still today, those who lived on the Cornish side of the Tamar and crossed it spoke quite naturally of ‘going to England’.

Today, it is true that those who have grandparents born on the Cornish side of the Tamar have very different DNA from those born on the English side in Devon, even though the Cornish language has been lost. This is because, Cornwall lies between Wales and Brittany and so became a land through which saints passed, coming from north and south. Thus, Cornwall is a land of local saints and of their names – 140 in all unique to Cornwall. Unfortunately, most of these names are precisely only names. Usually, virtually nothing is known of the saints behind the names, sometimes if they were even saints at all, not even the correct form of their name, not even the century when they lived (usually the sixth or seventh), and sometimes even their gender is unknown.

As for their Lives, when they exist – and that is rare – they were often written over 600 and up to 1,000 years after the saints lived. In other words, most of their Lives are almost completely untrustworthy and sometimes absurd. All that remains is speculation without edification, ‘games with names’, as in the booklets on them, written by the Anglican researcher G.H. Doble in the last century. Here we see all the sadness when people forget their saints, their tradition of holiness. All we can say is that a large number of mainly Welsh monks, nuns, hermits and ascetics came to live in Cornwall in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, and that that was a golden age of holiness. In all this two Cornish saints stand out, St Piran and St Petroc.

St Piran (Perran) (+ c. 480) came from Ireland or Wales and settled in the north of Cornwall, giving his name to Perranporth, where he had his hermitage. He is commemorated on 5 March and is now considered to be the patron saint of Cornwall. St Petroc (Peter) (+ c. 564) was a sixth-century abbot who for long was considered to be Cornwall’s most famous saint. He came from south Wales and lived near what is now Padstow (Petrocstow), where he founded a monastery. He later founded another monastery and then lived as a hermit on Bodmin Moor. He was famed for his closeness to the natural world and founded other monasteries. At his repose his relics were venerated in Padstow and later at the main Cornish monastery in Bodmin. His feast is on 4 June.

Any Orthodox who wish to set up a parish in Cornwall would perhaps wish to start in Truro, the capital of Cornwall and which is located relatively centrally. As for a dedication, we would suggest, quite simply, All Saints. However, in any such parish there should be a large icon of Sts Piran and Petroc.

All the Saints of Cornwall, known to the Lord, pray to God for us!

Towards a Social Brexit

The UK election results once again show the blind over-confidence and imperialistic hubris of the Conservative leadership. The Conservative Party may be trusted to negotiate Brexit (though that is not certain, since they have already wasted a whole year doing nothing about it), but they are not trusted to deliver social justice. And yet decent infrastructure, good roads and, above all, a proper health system, educational system, police force, prison service and proper regulation of privatized railways, telecom and water, electricity and gas companies are demanded. Perhaps, as it is seen by many as the party of the rich and NATO warmongers, the Conservatives should go into coalition with the Labour Party, so creating a government of national unity in this time of national crisis.

However, whatever the politicians decide, the real question is that Western electorates everywhere are rejecting the rule of the neocon oligarchy, the global elite of banksters, warmongers and businessmen, of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. People are rejecting Anonymous Globalism, and choosing National Identity instead. However, parties that promote identity politics will only be successful if they also work for social justice and welfare. This was the error of the Conservative Party: it lost sight of the needs of the majority, over 50% of the population, who want those needs to be met, even if it will cost more. Especially, if the costs can be met by taxing the many rich and also businesses, who have so benefited over the last 35 years from rule by pro-business monetarists. What is needed is a Social Brexit.

100 Years On: The End of Anglican Orthodoxy and Reality

Within a few years of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing enslavement of the Russian Church inside Russia centred in Moscow, some 2,000 Russian émigrés had settled in England, mainly in London. They split into two Church groups, both independent of enslaved Moscow, a larger group of various origins, and a much smaller group, mainly of liberal aristocrats and intellectuals, mainly Anglophiles and mainly from Saint Petersburg. The first group formed a parish in London under the initially Moscow-established Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), which had four Metropolias, in China, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Americas, catering for all emigres. The second group also formed a parish in London, but under the small Parisian Rue Daru breakaway jurisdiction, outside the Russian Church, under the then largely Anglican-run and financed (now US-run and financed) Patriarchate of Constantinople.

After the Second World War the first group, under ROCOR, formed more parishes for several thousand refugees with Polish nationality, mainly Ukrainians and Belarussians but also some Russians, who all awaited freedom in the Russian Church inside Russia. (This was to come in 2007, only after most of them had died, bringing reconciliation between the Church inside Russia and the Church Outside Russia). On the other hand, after the Second World War the second group returned formally to the still unfree Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, but on a special basis under the unique Parisian personality of the then Fr Antony Bloom, and developed into an independent group of several small communities. After he died in 2003, this group split in 2006, the majority remaining under Moscow and as a result, by 2007, the majority in the second group and the first group had entered into the unity of canonical communion with one another.

However, some 300 people, often of Anglican background and in small scattered communities, returned to the breakaway Paris Rue Daru group in 2006. Why did they avoid the reconciliation of the vast majority? It was because their leading ideology was that of an English-language Orthodoxy, which was in fact a Russophobic Anglican Orthodoxy. This has largely been invented by an Oxford Anglicanophile academic called Nicholas Zernov. Indeed, it could be called ‘Zernovism’, though in truth many individuals were involved in its formulation. This consisted of a sociological dream, that of reconciling a certain ‘embourgeoisé’ Russian Orthodoxy, liberal, intellectual, aristocratic and conformist, with an upper middle-class Anglo-Catholicism. This was a phyletist (racist) ideology that put a bourgeois and effete Russian Orthodoxy and the Anglican ‘public school and cricket’ Establishment, first – above Christ and His Truth. For when all is compromise, there is no place for Truth….

Those who had never been Anglican felt totally out of place in this group, indeed rejected by such a narrow and forced sociological concept of the Church. Today, their dream (a nightmare for others) is over. It has been made irrelevant by reality – for we do not live in the past. It is not at all that English-language Orthodoxy in itself is irrelevant, in fact just the opposite, today it is all the more important. For in today’s England there are not 2,000 or even 5,000 Russian Orthodox, but 300,000 Russian Orthodox. These come mainly from the Baltics, Moldova and the Ukraine, not to mention 220,000 Romanians and 80,000 Bulgarians, totalling 600,000 Orthodox from these three areas of the Orthodox world. This recent immigration, together with their English-born children, dwarfs all previous Orthodox emigrations, including the mainly 1950s-1960s 200,000-strong Greek-Cypriot immigration, which is now largely dying out after almost complete assimilation.

With 600,000 new Orthodox and their children, mainly in England, there is a huge mission-field for English-language Orthodoxy. However, most of these immigrants work on building sites, in car washes, in hotels and catering, or in farming and horticulture and food-processing factories. They certainly have no interest in an effete and intellectual-dream philosophy of Orthodoxy, but rather in a hands-on, down-to-earth Orthodoxy, which alone meets their simple and practical needs. They need an English-language Orthodoxy to meet the needs of their children, who are being brought up on council estates and in rented flats in the East End of London and the crowded suburbs of modest working towns up and down today’s England. We clergy will be judged on how well we meet their needs, keeping faith with Orthodoxy, but at the same time speaking in the language that their children and increasingly the immigrants themselves, communicate and socialize in. History moves on.

Who will win the UK General Election on 8 June?

Of course we do not know. The opinion polls apparently suggest the Conservatives, but who trusts opinion polls? What is certain is that votes will be cast differently according to what part of the UK people live in.

In Northern Ireland, Catholics will, as usual, vote Catholic (pro-Ireland and pro-EU), Protestants will, as usual, vote Protestant (pro-UK and pro-Brexit).

In Scotland, pro-EU Scottish Nationalism may well have peeked. This means that Labour and the Conservatives may gain back some votes.

In Wales, only a few will vote Nationalist and only in the Welsh-speaking areas. Elsewhere Labour and the Conservatives will win votes.

In England, the Conservatives are trusted to negotiate a good Brexit deal and to tighten security in the face of the terrorist threat that has largely been brought to this country by the anti-Muslim policies of successive governments. After all, the latter were a few years ago quite happy to encourage Muslims to leave this country and as ‘moderate terrorists’ fight against the democratically-elected governments of Syria and Libya, which were so hated by the British Establishment. However, as a Party renowned for social injustice, ruining the police force and the prison service (done under the then Home Secretary Theresa May), and threatening the mere existence of the social system, the grossly underfunded health service, and wasting even more billions on Offence (cynically called Defence) in their new Cold War, can we really vote for them?

The Labour Party is led by a 1970s hippy-style, ex-Marxist idealist, who never quite grew up, and divided between many supporters of its leader and 200 purely Blairite (left-wing Conservative) and so treasonous Members of Parliament. As the Party of Social Justice, everybody likes the Labour promises of money for everything, as against mean Conservative cuts, but how will its promises be paid for? Labour has a long-established reputation for regularly bankrupting the country with fantasy economics. And can Labour be trusted to deliver Brexit and security?

Alternatively, there are various protest parties, such as the Liberal Democrats (an effete, politically correct, pro-EU group for the very middle-class and upper middle-class), UKIP (the anti-EU protest party, which most now consider is finished in the post-Brexit world) and the Greens. It is possible that all of these groups will be wiped out in what is in reality a straightforward two-horse race.

Some people, in disgust, will no doubt spoil their vote. Three Orthodox have told me that they will vote for Vladimir Putin…….

On the Resurrection of Europe: The Message of the Christian Empire to Europe

There was once a Christian Empire. At the far Western tip of the Eurasian Continent, Europe was an integral part of that Empire, giving birth to the light of ten thousand saints to combat and defeat native European darkness. This was Holy Europe. But Europe fell away from those saints, that ideal of holiness and its Empire, replacing holiness with the darkness of idolatry, out of envy not tolerating that it was not at the centre of the Empire. In revolt and falling back into its old darkness, Europe successively laid waste to both centres of the Christian Empire, New Rome in 1204 and the Third Rome in 1917, slaughtering even the Russian Ruling Family, who were Europeans. To allow them to be killed, on orders from New York, was suicide for Europe, but as for the Christian Empire, it miraculously survived.

Now, one hundred years on, in 2017, Europe is at a turning-point. Will the yearnings of Old Europe be heard or will the New Europe, atheized and so homogenized, altogether wipe out the Old Europe of the saints and their heritage of holiness? The message of what survives of the Christian Empire, of Russian Orthodoxy, to Europe is that its Resurrection, the salvation of the best of Old Europe, that which is compatible with the Church, is still possible. Once Europe was Holy Europe, just as the Russian Lands were Holy Rus. The Saints of the Russian Lands speak to Europe and the Saints of Europe speak back to the Russian Lands. The Russian Orthodox message to Europe is to give it back the Orthodox Trinitarian commandments in order to save it. These Trinitarian commandments are:

Faith: To keep faith with the integrity of Orthodox Christianity, avoiding manmade substitutes, mere religions, recent constructs of the fallen mind.

Sovereignty: To be loyal to the Incarnation of the Faith in the Christian Empire, rejecting manmade substitutes, false and idolatrous empires based on envy.

The People: To respect the gifts and restore the destinies of each individual European people, inasmuch as they are inspired by the Holy Spirit.

From north to south, passing from Oslo to Madrid, from west to east, passing from Dublin to Vienna, passing over the centre of the Cross in Paris, we make the sign of the Cross over Europe and entrust it to the Church of God. It is our belief that we are approaching the end of the world and that that end will come, if another Christian Emperor is not soon restored. And for the Tsar to be restored, we require the Cross of Repentance in the west, Return in the east, Redemption in the north, Rebirth in the south, and so Resurrection in the centre. And if the Tsar is not restored, then the Tsar of Tsars will come.