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The Future of Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe

Introduction: Orthodox Church Immigration to Western Europe

Since 1917 there have been three large-scale waves of immigration of Orthodox Christians from Eastern Europe to Western Europe. These have been: the Russian-speaking, mainly since 1917, though in four sociologically very different generations, the Greek-speaking, mainly since 1950, and the Romanian-speaking, mainly since 2000. This latest immigration is composed of well over four million Romanians with a million and a half Moldovans, probably six million people in all. Nearly half of these now live in Italy, Spain and Portugal, since Romanian is very similar to those languages. This recent immigration dwarves all previous Orthodox immigrations to Western Europe, not just the Russian and Greek, but also the much smaller ones, like the Serbian, the Ukrainian, the Belarussian, the Macedonian, the Bulgarian, the Antiochian (Arab) and the Georgian.

The Greek-speaking (Greek and Cypriot) immigration has remained very closed to others and remains stuck in its ethnic identity, but its leaders also have very strong pro-US politics. Both these factors alienate nearly everyone else from it. It does not in general and cannot in reality attract many native Europeans to its religious practice. As regards the Romanian and Moldovan immigration, it is still too early to say whether it will attract others to it in any number, though there are some promising signs of openings to others, as a result of its youthfulness, its ten bishops, including a French one, and some Non-Romanian clergy and people. The Romanians are helped here by their Latin language and by being very open and welcoming, but the infrastructure remains weak.

The Russian Immigration

What of the oldest, most political and most complex immigration, the Russian-speaking? In four waves, this consisted of anti-Bolsheviks from pre-1917 Russia, anti-Stalinists from pre-1945 Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, those from the small, largely ethnically Jewish, dissident intellectual immigration of the 1970s and 1980s, and those from the post-USSR but still Soviet immigration, especially from the Baltic States, Kazakhstan and Moldova. These waves of immigration are sadly divided into three different and quite disjointed ‘jurisdictions’ with separate episcopates, one of which (ROCOR) since January 2021 has officially decided to be in schism with and not concelebrate with one of the others (WEA). (See below).

  1. The MP

Firstly, there is the largest jurisdiction, that of the Mother-Church, the Moscow-based Moscow Patriarchate (MP), which is 99% of the whole Russian Church, mostly in the ex-Soviet Union, but also has eight bishops in Western Europe. This is organised under a Paris-based Exarchate and its people come from all over the ex-Soviet Union, especially from Moldova and the Baltic States, but also from the Ukraine, though in the last two years many Ukrainians have left it to help found yet another group of over eighty quite separate new Ukrainian Orthodox communities, mainly composed of Ukrainian refugees (most of whom appear not to be baptised Orthodox – the Orthodox have stayed in the Ukraine or in Eastern Europe). This MP Exarchate has been patterned by a number of Exarchs and bishops, who have embarrassingly compromised themselves in some way or other and so have met with failure.

One of the great current problems here is the dramatic events now going on in Moscow against the background of the war in the Ukraine. Here, ‘traitors’ are being tried by Church courts. These include the once senior Metropolitan Leonid (Gorbachov), the former Exarch in Africa, who is under suspicion of various misdeeds (1). If treachery to the Russian State is the real charge, then there must also be bishops in the very divided New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) (see below) who must also be trembling. Astonishingly, several of the latter have from the outset publicly called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Ukraine and openly supported anti-Russian US policies and persecuted pro-Russians. If there is one thing that Russians cannot support, it is treachery.

  1. b) The WEA

Secondly, there is by far the smallest group, the Paris-based Western European Archdiocese (WEA) with only three bishops, whose aristocratic founders from Saint Petersburg created it in the 1920s. This elitist intellectual group is now very small outside Paris. It has either not been able, or perhaps not wanted, to take off and expand outside the intellectual group. At the present time, most believe that its often elderly leaders will die out within the next generation. Essentially it has only three church properties of its own and these are all in Paris. The death or removal of two individuals would hasten the takeover of those properties by the much larger MP and its inevitable absorption of the small remains of this group.

  1. ROCOR

Thirdly, there is the New York-based ROCOR, which was formed over 100 years ago, in 1919 and has its own Synod, now of only thirteen active bishops. In Western Europe it has four bishops. By 2001 its first generation had essentially died out. Thus, in order to survive it had to reinvent itself. A few very elderly individuals, including its own Metropolitan, were expelled in what was essentially a coup d’etat. Having taken over, the new Synod, which had accepted large numbers of new immigrants from the ex-USSR, was then forced to reconcile itself with Moscow. However, it was also recruiting converts, especially in the USA. Unfortunately, it purposely recruited some very strange and right-wing extremist converts, many of whom it made priests and even bishops, putting them into oppositions of power. These now form a very powerful group and are harshly persecuting those who are Russian-speaking, pro-Russian and anti-schism.

Apart from about 150 communities, many of them very small, mainly in the USA, and about 30 communities in Australia, the other main centre of ROCOR is its 70 or so communities in Germany, where it has many historic and beautiful churches and a large flock, with both clergy and laity nearly all from the ex-USSR, especially from Kazakhstan. As well as these churches, it also has a few historic churches in Switzerland, two historic churches (recently taken from the WEA) in northern Italy and one in Brussels. Elsewhere it has virtually nothing, apart from some very small and often unstable communities, making some 300 communities in all and at least 50,000 people. It is clear that the MP is waiting to take over the historic churches in Western Europe from the declining ROCOR and add them to its Exarchate of Western Europe. The death or removal of two very divisive and very aggressive, US-trained individuals in Western Europe, who have very strong anti-Russian political backgrounds and connections, would hasten this process.

At the present time the New York Synod is very divided, not least about its heretical programme of rebaptising other Orthodox, in defiance of the teachings and practices of the Russian Church and of the whole of the Orthodox Church. Although there are three Russian bishops against a break with the MP (they have already broken with the WEA part of the MP), there are three bishops for, and the other seven are fence-sitting. We expect further events.

Conclusion: The Future

Most countries in Eastern Europe already have their own independent Local Orthodox Churches. It seems quite likely that the small Orthodox population (3% ?) from among the eleven million people of the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and from Nordic Finland, whose language is related to Estonian, will form their own Local Baltic Orthodox Church. All these Eastern European countries have strong historic Russian connections and a current Russian presence and historic churches. Similarly, Eastern European Hungary, to which Carpatho-Russian Transcarpathia and its 600 Orthodox parishes may soon return, may also obtain its own Local Orthodox Church. This is just like the Church of Czechia and Slovakia, the main part of whose traditional flock also consists of Carpatho-Russians.

This would leave a geographical West of Europe, with an eastern border stretching from Norway down to Sweden, Germany, Austria and Italy, enclosing the at present twenty-one countries of Western Europe, with its population of 400 million and area of 3.5 million square kilometres. This has a population of some 10 million nominal Orthodox, about 40 bishops and perhaps 2,000 communities. If they banded together into eight multinational dioceses and worked towards forming their own Local Orthodox Church, they would then form the fourth largest Local Orthodox Church, after the Russian, Romanian and Greek.

These eight dioceses could cover the territories of: Italia (Italy, Malta and San Marino); Iberia (Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar); Germania (Germany and Austria); Gallia (France, Wallonia (Southern Belgium), Luxembourg and Monaco); The Isles (the British Isles of England, Scotland, Wales etc, as well as the island of Ireland); Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland); the Netherlands (the Netherlands plus Flanders (Northern Belgium)); Helvetia (Switzerland and Liechtenstein). The main task here would be to maintain Orthodox and their descendants in the Faith, protecting them from the surrounding ocean of ever more aggressive Western secularist atheism. However, it would also be for these dioceses to conduct missionary work among the native peoples of their territories, though in this profoundly atheist (ex-Catholic and ex-Protestant) region, the results of that work would be modest, for sadly few want real Orthodox Christianity, often preferring at best a virtual version of podcasts, internet nonsense and negativity.

Note:

  1. The retired Metropolitan Leonid (Gorbachev) of the ROC said the upcoming trial against him will be a betrayal of the Church and Fatherland” and “all who participate in this lawlessness are traitors”.

    Former African Exarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Leonid called the upcoming hearing on his case in the Supreme All-Church Court “a betrayal of the Church and the Fatherland” and said that “all those who participate in this lawlessness are traitors”. He wrote about this on his Telegram channel.

    According to him, with the upcoming trial, “we have passed the line of realisation of good and evil”.

    “Now everything is possible if you have uncontrolled power in your hands,” the retired bishop said, without specifying whom he meant.

    The hierarch is convinced that his work in the African Exarchate was “the first breakthrough since 988,” and Gorbachev appreciates its results very highly.

    The hierarch also noted that his trial benefits the Vatican and is “giving up one’s own people”, and that all those involved in it are “traitors”.

    The metropolitan threatened to “provide details afterwards,” adding that he “did not want this”.

 

 

 

Elections or Insurrections? The Future of the European Elite after its Dramatic Defeat in the Ukraine

In the American organised war against Russia in the corrupt Ukraine, they are now running out of troops, with over 1,130,000 dead or seriously injured Ukrainian proxies. The average age of those remaining is 43, and men (and women) are being kidnapped off the streets. The situation is like that in early 1945 in Berlin. Advised by US and British PR companies since 2014 and directed by NATO commanders, the Kiev regime is killing Russian civilians in terrorist attacks. However, Western mercenaries are also being killed, with sixty French soldiers dying in their hotel in Kharkov last week. Meanwhile, Kiev is persecuting the Church and has stolen or wrecked many hundreds of churches, setting up a US-created fake Church of gangsters instead. The bankrupt West has no arms left to give, so the latest Western idea is to steal $300 billion of Russian assets. In Russia, war crimes trials are being prepared for Western leaders, who created and financed this war.

We see videos of priests praying and giving communion to Russian troops in a forest clearing and Ukrainian troops on horseback, as they have no other transport. These are scenes reminiscent of the Second World War and of partisans. Meanwhile, in Kiev, a palace revolt is under way, which could lead to the murder or else exile of President Zelensky and his replacement by a secret policeman. Zelensky had already banned elections due in March, making of himself a dictator, as he had already outlawed all other political parties and opponents have died in the Secret Police prisons or been assassinated. As for Western Europe, both the anti-democratic EU and the UK, it is in recession from its own suicidal sanctions, supposedly made against Russia. NATO is split, with Turkey, Hungary and Slovakia taking anti-American views. As for the USA, it faces internal chaos from political rivalry (not least in Confederate Texas) and a whole series of foreign wars of its own making. Such are the dramatic times we live in.

The European vassals of the NATO-controlled EU and UK are in total panic. However, the void of leadership is not only in Europe, but also in Washington. Those ‘in charge’ do what they are told by ‘donors’, the financial and military interests who are the power behind the senile throne. The elite has at last realised that it will not win in the Ukraine and has recently admitted this in their New York Times rag. However, the tactical victory is massive: enormous profits made from making useless arms; gutting European industry and sovereignty; reducing Europe to the status of a lowly vassal; time to find new proxy warriors against Russia – from Polish and Baltic fanatics to more ISIS fanatics. Nevertheless, as Max Weber wrote over a century ago, although Protestantism was the path for the rise of the West, its death, following the total loss of faith in it and therefore in Western self-belief, is the cause of its disintegration and defeat.

After 700 days of a tragic conflict, only the time-scale of the Russian victory over the US-installed Kiev regime in the Ukraine is uncertain. Nobody who is not deluded thinks that the defeat of the West in the Ukraine is a matter of ‘if’, only of ‘when’. In the first half of 2024 or in the second half? The Western elite has lost the war it created in the Ukraine and paid hundreds of billions of its taxpayers’ money (without consulting them) for it. Once more it has been humiliated: Saigon, Kabul and now Kiev. As for Non-Russian Europe, US-installed leaders there have bet on the wrong horse, whether von der Leyen, Borrell, Scholz, Macron, Sunak, not to mention the crazy puppet-leaders in Eastern Europe, especially in the Baltics, Poland and Bulgaria. The only exceptions are Hungary and now Slovakia, whose leaders are not US-installed, but installed by the people. Will other European countries follow their lead and become free and independent?

Total Russia victory is coming, with the winner dictating no negotiations, no ceasefire, no stalemate, no frozen conflict, but total Western defeat. Now that the Western attempt to take over the Ukraine has been lost, what are European electorates going to do about it? Ideally, the peoples of Europe could at last get rid of the globalist slaves of the US political and banking elite, whom the US has infiltrated into all levels of European governments over the last twenty years, ever since the ‘old’ Europeans opposed the US genocide in Iraq in 2003. If the hoodwinked and brainwashed electorates awoke, they could elect patriots, even if the globalist-owned media accused them of being racists and ‘far-right’. The ultra-liberal Fascist Establishment perverts who support LGBT, State lockdowns, deindustrialisation, climate change extremism, Ukrainian Nazism, the Zionist genocide of Palestinians and uncontrolled immigration, could at last be cast aside.

All depends on the consciousness of the peoples of Europe and their will for freedom. Will they wake up after the decades of decadence of bread and circuses? How many of them actually realise they are being zombified by the State-run media? How many of them realise that there is no real democracy, only a choice between two candidates of a neo-feudal oligarchy, that they have been labouring all these centuries under the yoke of the rich, now the vassals of US dictators, who want globalist dictatorship? The new multipolar world of BRICS, soon to be 20 or even 40, could help Europeans to wake up, but only if those Europeans want to be woken up and throw off the feudal yoke they have suffered from for a thousand years. In 2024 fifteen countries in Europe will hold elections. It is time for their electorates to look forward, not back, and to elect free patriots who are independent of the globalist poison and want sovereignty.

The US elite appears to want a worldwide war, a world war. It started a war against Russia through its Ukrainian Nazi proxies, it arms Israel to carry out genocide in Palestine, in Gaza and the West Bank, with US aircraft, bombs, shells and bullets, it is bombing Qatari-backed Yemen which has stood up to protect the Palestinians. Now it is threatening Iran, Iraq, China, India, Africa and Latin America which have not attacked anyone. On top of that, it is putting out the myth that President Putin wants to conquer not only the Ukraine, but also the whole of Europe. In reality, President Putin, the most popular man in Russia, wants Europeans to be responsible for themselves, to start behaving as adults, to treat Russians as human-beings, to throw out their US oppressors. Preferably this would happen through elections. The fear is that the European electorates are so frustrated that they may launch violent uprisings, real revolutions against their Establishment elite.

How is the Western elite trying to head off the risk of the insurrection of its peoples, to ensure that the ‘plebs’ do not revolt against it? Bread and circuses, consumerism and the media, worked for a long time, but eventually people have begun to see through them and are now tiring of being lied to constantly. The Western elite’s policy is Project Fear. In the US this Project was called ‘Russiagate’, a non-existent scandal manufactured by the Democratic Party in order to discredit the Republican President Trump. In Western Europe Project Fear is: ‘The Russians are coming to get you’. In other words, the elite continues to use the Ukraine to maintain control of their Uniparty regime, relying on the old fear of the Communist Soviet Union. This only works among very old people who remember the ‘Communist threat’ and ‘better dead than red’. Russia is still the bogeyman, used by patronising parents to intimidate their too independent children.

There are forces in every European country which are resisting. These forces used to be small minorities, however in several European countries they are becoming larger minorities. People are starting to ask questions. If the electorates continue to be insulted and condescended to, using the irrelevant distraction stories of the State-run media, those minorities will grow. If we take the example of the UK, we can clearly see that the Uniparty Establishment of Conservatives, Labour etc have exactly the same policies, none of which is going to solve the real problems of the UK’s ever more rapid decline, State bankruptcy (massive debt), the refusal to implement Brexit, deindustrialisation, the collapse of infrastructure (the failed health system, potholed roads, useless railways, rip-off and bankrupt privatised utilities such as the Post Office), mass immigration, refusal to confront absurd wokeness and the denial of Kiev Nazism and Israeli genocide.

This situation is mirrored in different and yet strangely similar ways in every European country. Will there be elections or insurrections? As the elite at last grasps that it has lost its absurd attempt to extend its Western dominion to the Non-Western Ukraine (just as they lost to extend it to Non-Western Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan), it is in a state of panic. Now it is trying to re-assert its tyrannical control over the parts of the West which it used to control. We shall see in the coming years the misdeeds of the UK and EU dictatorships, themselves merely puppets of the US globalist dictatorship. If the peoples want back their sovereignty and do not want to be absorbed, colonised, manipulated and impoverished by their neo-feudal, oligarchic, globalist, LGBT elites, in one way or another we will reclaim that sovereignty despite them. Revolution is in the air, but it does not have to be violent. It is our hope that the collapse will be peaceful and smooth.

Moscow will win against and finish off not just Nazi Ukraine, but also the much-divided NATO, profiting from the window of opportunity identified by President Putin in early 2022. Then the Ukraine, woken up, will side with Russia against the Western elite who betrayed it. The example of the dezombified Ukraine is to be followed by the peoples of the West, who have also been betrayed by the Western elite. Of course, those who resist the tyrannical elite will be labelled by them and their media hirelings ‘far-right’ or ‘apologists for Putin’. In reality, we have common sense. The elite does not, it has ideologies, fantasies and delusions. We are family people who love our families, we are patriots who love our countries. The elite does not. However, we also have a sense of social justice and compassion for others. The elite does not. Above all, we believe in God. The elite does not. The elite is Europe’s ‘assisted suicide’. We are not.

Greece: Towards a Europe of Free Nations

Yesterday I spoke at length over lunch to the Chancellor so that I could explain to him my new Europe, that is to say, the camouflage for our determination to gain power. The Central European Empire of the German nation. The system of entanglements, of corporate rules; the German Empire, a limited corporation in which Prussia is the main shareholder…That is why we must create a Confederation of States around the German Empire… We do not even need to talk of annexation to the central power. If we implement the European idea to its logical conclusion, it will lead to such a result…

Kurt Riezler, speaking to the Prussian militarist ideologue and Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, almost exactly 100 years ago on 15 April 1915.

The EU elite imposed the euro almost everywhere on its subject countries without popular consent. Now has come the time of reckoning. The Greek government has in effect allowed its people to vote on whether they wish to continue to be intimidated and humiliated by the EU, or whether they wish to choose freedom. Following the advice of Mt Athos, they have chosen freedom. However, it could be that Greece will still not be allowed freedom. But this could also be the beginning of the unravelling of the Fourth Reich, which has been so painstakingly and cunningly constructed ever since the end of the Third Reich.

It could be that Greece will show the way even to poor, deluded vassal Britain. It could be that other countries in Eastern and Southern Europe, from Latvia to Estonia, from Lithuania to Slovakia, from Hungary to Bulgaria, from Romania to Italy, from Spain to Portugal, will also choose democracy and turn their backs on the bullying feudal masters in Northern Europe. It could be that Greece will choose to join the Eurasian Economic Union, freeing itself from EU tyranny. All is still possible. Now is the time to pray that Greece will repent and find its soul once again. Because if it does not, it will find itself on the side of Antichrist in the great and coming battle. And so will we.

May: A Turning-Point?

The European elections of 22 May are fast approaching, falling just three days before elections in the governmentless and rudderless Ukraine, where a separatist, US-installed junta has seized power by violence. This time the European elections may present a real choice to their electorate. Do Europeans want to continue with the Fourth Reich project, a United States of Europe, a museum and graveyard of dead culture, a Europe without Christ, or do they want to stop the project now and even reverse the catastrophe before it is too late?

The true face of the European Union, a despised colony of the bullying, meddling US elite, who are now using Ukrainians as pawns in their giant geopolitical game, has been recognized by ever more Europeans. The former Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, has indicated how mistaken the EU elite is in meddling in the Ukraine. In Hungary the Jobbik National Party is openly supporting Russia against the USA; its leader, Gabor Vona, said in Moscow in 2013 that ‘Russia is defending European values, whereas the EU is betraying them’, and may join the Eurasian Union. In France Marine Le Pen of the National Front, with between 20% and 30% of support, is saying much the same. Even Nigel Farage, the leader of the Independence Party in the UK, says that he admires President Putin, and in the USA such paleocon (definitely not neocon) leaders as Patrick Buchanan and Ron Paul support the new Russia against the Western Sodom.

The European elites are worried. Despite the propaganda daily pumped out by their European Establishment media, ordinary Europeans are resisting. President Putin’s appeal is to the long hoodwinked, native peoples in the depths of Europe, who have for so long been oppressed by their know-it-all, ‘liberal’, Establishment elites. His appeal is to European roots, to those who wish to live in the Christian, Mediterranean civilisation of Europe, at whose roots lies Orthodox Christianity, which is also the only living belief-system in contemporary Russia.

The peoples of Europe do not want to be taken over by sects, either the Protestant variety – and all Protestantism, a splinter of Catholicism, is sectarian because it is humanist and individualist, based on a humanistic ‘Jesus’ cult, not on the God-man. Neither do they want to be taken over by the Muslim sect – and make no mistake Islam, a splinter of Arianism, is also a sect. This is against a sombre background. In just a few days’ time the Vatican machine is intending to canonize two recent popes, John XXIII and John-Paul II. Both of them represent the protestantising current of modern Catholicism and therefore the canonization of that current. This is the current that denies the Divine, the presence of the sacred. Characteristically, they are being canonized by a Jesuit Pope who venerates the awful mass-murdering Uniat Kuntsevich as a saint and is encouraging Uniat aggression in the Ukraine.

It is now for the Orthodox Churches to reject the personality cults surrounding contemporary and recent philosophers of Orthodox academic ‘theology’ and their associated freemasonry, simony and decadence. It is for the Russian Orthodox Church in particular to show Europe what Church Christianity, and not Christian sects, actually is. For decades Europe has been riding a bicycle in the wrong direction. It is time to stop, turn round and go back to recivilization. If it does not, it will suicidally leap, like a mass of lemmings, into the abyss of its own making.

EU Independence Movements and the Future of Europe

It seems to some that the political and business elites of many European countries have over the decades sold their souls and sold out their countries for the sake of EU lucre. Today more and more believe this and are deciding to retrieve their independence and freedom. They want no more to do with a ‘Fourth Reich’, as they call it. They do not want a Germanisation of Europe, but a Europeanisation of Germany, the latter being divided into its constituents parts, instead of dominating Europe as at present. Whether the United States, whose project the EU was and is, would allow this, is another question.

In England, where the ‘Conservative’ Party which, in this as in many other areas, has not been conservative for decades, this situation has led to the rise of a political Party called the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). A new movement in Germany, Alternatives for Germany, Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD), also wants to escape from the straitjacket of the EU dystopia. Moreover, these movements are mirrored in new political parties, resistance movements and street protests in other countries in the EU, whether in Poland, Czechia, Greece, Spain, Cyprus, Italy or elsewhere.

All these new parties and protest movements face their problems and temptations, notably of falling into extremism or racism. For example, UKIP seems to want independence from Brussels and yet at the same time seems to refuse independence for Scotland. Brussels is after all only Westminster magnified, with the same anti-democratic and totalitarian ‘one size fits all’ mentality. Indeed, this Party’s error may well be in its very name, UKIP. It would perhaps be better if it were simply called the Independence Party (IP). Otherwise, it may simply be seen as a party of past-worshipping nationalists and racists.

Similarly, in Greece, the EU ‘Golden Dawn’ Opposition appears to have Fascist tendencies, in Germany AfD has been reproached as a party of academics and intellectuals, in Italy the protest movement has been accused of political irresponsibility, and so on. However, it has still not been explained why in 1975, when the UK was granted a referendum on possibly leaving the Common Market, as it then was, the vote counters were sworn to secrecy by the Official Secrets Act, and the majority in favour of remaining in it was astoundingly large. In any case it is easy to criticise the EU.

There is the obvious failure of its absurd euro project; its clear anti-democratic ethos; its openly admitted lack of transparency, especially of financial transparency. Little wonder it has been called a mafia superstate. In a global world, this EU customs union is surely totally out of date, a mere hangover from the reaction to the murderous European tribalism of the Second World War on the part of wealthy politicians who are now all retired – or should be. But what if the EU were to break up? What could it turn into? One possibility might be smaller groups of countries. For example:

A Northern European Confederation of some 140 million with Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

A Central European Confederation of some 165 million with the German Lands, France, Benelux, Switzerland, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania.

A Mediterranean European Confederation of some 185 million with France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Malta.

A Eurasian Confederation of some 350 million with the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan (the present Eurasian Union) and the other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, together with Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Greece, Cyprus, the Lebanon and Syria.

In other words we would suggest that the future of Europe may be in confederations of countries which actually have a shared history and culture, rather than in an unwieldy and centralised bureaucratic conglomerate.

The End of a Civilisation: The Beginning of a Civilisation

After a thousand years, Europe is ending. And where the old European culture is not ending, it has already ended. This is because Europe has stopped believing in its ethno-religious ideology which drove it to worldly ‘greatness’, to conquer the world, in crusades, in exploration, in exploitation, in wars, in empire-building, in invention, in colonisation. That ideology killed itself during and in the aftermath of two great European Wars, which Europe spread to its colonies worldwide and called World Wars.

Europe’s ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the two generations before 1914 ‘worked’ because it used machine guns against spears and bows and arrows. But in Europe’s ‘Scramble for Europe’ in 1914, machine guns faced machine guns and so Europe slaughtered the flower of its own youth. It took America to end that slaughter. Ignoring its opportunity for repentance, Europe was not content with one slaughter, and so a generation later it began another slaughter, which was ended by an American invasion and occupation.

Today’s Europe no longer believes in Something. Therefore it believes in Anything. It has sold its cultural birth-right to others, whom it invites to live in its midst. Its native birthrates are in permanent decline and the statistics would be declining even further if many European men were not marrying Eastern European and Asian women, who unlike many Westerners did not forget their instincts in the 1960s, in order to have children, and if many Muslims and Africans did not live and have large families in Europe.

The seeds of Europe’s destruction were contained in its very ideology, which asserted that the European human-being is god. As a result, today Europe is itself being colonised – because others have simply imitated its ideology and asserted themselves and not Europeans, as gods, only more efficiently, more rationally, more logically. Already an American colony, is Europe now to become an Asian colony, as America, itself an imitation of Europe, in turn declines in bankruptcy? Where does Europe go from here?

For fifty years Europe has imitated America, spoken like America, built like America, dressed like America, eaten like America, drunk like America, listened to America and watched American television. For fifty years Europe has lived on borrowed time. But now time has run out and so we speak of the end of its civilisation. But he who says that a civilisation is ending also says that now there is space for a new civilisation to begin. But which civilisation can this be? Surely not the old European paganism?

Europe cannot go forwards to find a new civilisation. Therefore, it has to go backwards, not as far back as to its old paganism, but to that time when its now failed ideology of the fallen human spirit did not exist, that is, to a thousand and more years ago. That age still exists, for Europe is still haunted by that civilisation of its saints, which ended a thousand years ago. And it is this saint-haunted Europe, inspired by the Holy Spirit, which contains the key to the survival of Europe – because that Europe is its spiritual essence, its very soul.

The Glimmer of Light on the Road Ahead: On Tsar Nicholas II and the Restoration of the Christian Imperium

The following contains replies to various comments and questions in recent e-mails from Russia, Holland, Great Britain, France and the USA

Q: Why are there so many misunderstandings about Nicholas II and so many strident criticisms of him?

A: In order to understand Tsar Nicholas II, you have to be Orthodox. It is no good being secular or nominally Orthodox, semi-Orthodox, ‘hobby Orthodox’ and retaining your unconverted cultural baggage, whether Soviet or Western – which is essentially the same thing. You have to be consistently Orthodox, consciously Orthodox, Orthodox in your essence, culture and world view.

In other words, you have to have spiritual integrity – exactly as the Tsar had, in order to understand him. Tsar Nicholas was profoundly and systematically Orthodox in his spiritual, moral, political, economic and social outlook. His Orthodox soul looked out on the world through Orthodox eyes and acted in an Orthodox way, with Orthodox reflexes. So we too have to be Orthodox from inside in order to understand him.

Q: Is that why academics are so negative about him?

A: Western academics, like Soviet academics, are negative about him because they are secularists. For example, I recently read the book ‘Crimea’ by the British historian of Russia, Orlando Figes. This is an interesting book on the Crimean War, with many well-researched details and facts, written as senior academics should write. However, the author starts out from unspoken, purely Western secularist criteria, that since the Tsar of the age, Nicholas I, was not a Western secularist, he must have been a religious fanatic, and that his intention was to conquer the Ottoman Empire. Through his love of detail, Figes overlooks the main point – what the Crimean War was actually about from the Russian side. All he can see is Western-style imperialist aims, which he then attributes to Russia. This attribution is a projection of his Western self.

 What Figes misunderstands is that the parts of the Ottoman Empire which Nicholas I was interested in were those where an Orthodox Christian population had for centuries suffered under the Muslim Yoke. The Crimean War was not a colonial, imperialist Russian war to expand into the Ottoman Empire and exploit it, like those conducted by Western Powers to expand into Africa and Asia and exploit them. It was a struggle to liberate from oppression – in fact an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist war. The aim was to free Orthodox lands and peoples from oppression, not to conquer someone else’s empire. As for Nicholas I being a religious fanatic, in the eyes of secularists all sincere Christians must be ‘religious fanatics’. This is because secularists do not have a spiritual dimension. They are always one-dimensional, unable to see beyond their own secular cultural conditioning, ‘to think outside the box’.

 Q: Is this secular outlook why Western historians charge Tsar Nicholas II with being weak and unfitted?

 A: Yes. This is Western political propaganda, invented at the time and still parroted today. Western historians are educated and paid by Western Establishments and cannot see outside that box. Serious post-Soviet historians have disproved these charges, invented by the Western and the Westernised, gladly repeated by Soviet Communists, as their justification for the dismantlement of the Tsar’s Empire. The only justification for the charge that the Tsarevich was ‘unfitted’ is the fact that he was at first unprepared to be Tsar because his father, Alexander III, died suddenly and at a young age. But he soon learned and became ‘fitted’.

 Another favourite false accusation is that the Tsar started wars, namely the Japano-Russian War, called the Russo-Japanese War, and the Kaiser’s War, called the First World War. This is untrue. He was the only world leader who wanted to disarm, he was anti-militaristic. As regards the war against Japanese aggression, the Japanese, financed, armed and encouraged by the USA and Britain, started the Japano-Russian War. It attacked the Russian Fleet without warning in Port Arthur – a name that almost rhymes with Pearl Harbour. And, as we know, it was the Austro-Hungarians, urged on by the Kaiser who was desperate for any excuse to start a War, who triggered the First World War.

 Let us recall that it was Tsar Nicholas who for the first time in world history had urged disarmament at The Hague in 1899, because he could see that Western Europe was a powder keg, waiting to explode. He was a moral and spiritual leader, the only world leader then who did not have narrow, national interests at heart and was not rearming at huge cost. Instead, as the Anointed of God, he had at heart the universal interests of all Orthodox Christendom, to bring to Christ all God-created mankind. Why else make sacrifices for Serbia? To have survived, he must have been incredibly strong-willed, as, among others, the French President Émile Loubet remarked. All the powers of hell unleashed against the Tsar would never have been unleashed to remove him if he had been weak. Only the strong have to be destroyed, as is confirmed by those who knew him at the time.

 Q: You say that he was profoundly Orthodox, but it is true that he had very little Russian blood, isn’t it?

 A: Forgive me, but that statement contains a racist presumption, that you have to have ‘Russian blood’ to be Orthodox, a universal Christian. The Tsar was, I believe, one 128th Russian by blood. And so what? The Tsar’s sister answered this very challenge very adequately over fifty years ago. Interviewed by the Greek journalist, Ian Vorres, in 1960, his sister, the Grand Duchess Olga explained: ‘Did the British call George VI a German? He had not a drop of English blood in him…Blood is not everything. It is the soil you spring from, the faith you are brought up in, the language you speak and think in’.

 Q: There are some Russians today who describe Tsar Nicholas as a ‘Redeemer’. Do you believe that?

 A: Certainly not! There is only one Redeemer, the Saviour Jesus Christ. What can however be argued is that his sacrifice, and therefore that of his Family, of his servants and of the tens of millions of others who were murdered by the Soviet and Fascist regimes that followed, was redemptive. Rus was crucified for the sins of the world. Indeed, the sufferings of Russian Orthodox have been redemptive in their blood and in their tears. However, it is true that all Christians are called on to redeem themselves through living in Christ THE Redeemer. Interestingly, the pious but not well-educated Russians who call the Tsar a ‘Redeemer’ also call Rasputin a saint.

 Q: Speaking of this, what should we think of Rasputin?

 A: Hundreds of books have been written about Rasputin – nearly all of them by people who never knew him. I would only repeat the words of the Tsar himself, ‘He is a simple, good, religious Russian’, and the words of the Tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Olga, ‘He was neither saint nor devil…he was a peasant with a profound faith in God and a gift of healing’. The fact that Rasputin was later atrociously slandered, and finally in December 1916 tortured by Russian aristocrats – a sign of just how sick the upper class was – and assassinated by British spies, only helps him in eternity. However, God has not revealed his destiny after this world. We do not pre-empt the Judgement of God. When that Judgement has been revealed to us all, then we will be able to say more. At present it is, I think, best to keep silence. Rasputin is still a mysterious figure – we leave him to the Judgement of God

 Q: But what about all the charges that he was a drunkard, a thief and a debauchee?

 A: Soviet and Hollywood fiction writers, like the Soviet novelist Radzinsky, love this image of Rasputin. Contemporary historians inside deSovietising Russia have proved that virtually all, perhaps all, of these charges were slanders, fiction. Moreover, they were made up not to discredit Rasputin – he was only a pawn in the hands of the slanderers – but to discredit the Imperial Family.

 Their logic was that if the Friend of the ruling family could be presented as a thief, drunkard and debauchee, therefore the Family must also be like that, and that therefore they were unworthy, and that they the slanderers should have power. Such slander was very simple and very primitive. People, decadent and without any spiritual depth, believed in it because they wanted to believe in it, because such always prefer slander, scandal and gossip to the Truth of Christ.

 Q: You say that we should leave Rasputin to God’s Judgement. Would you compare those who call Rasputin a saint to those who call Ivan IV and Stalin saints?

 A: No. To call those figures saints, especially Stalin, is ignorance and blasphemy. This is caused by a politically-motivated desire among a few to merge the old atheist Soviet mentality with the new Orthodox one. That is impossible, total spiritual confusion, theological illiteracy. On the other hand, the Rasputin question is rather a case of a few individuals with zeal but little knowledge.

 Q: If we can come back to our main point, what is the relevance of Tsar Nicholas II today? Orthodox Christians are a small minority among all Christians. Even if he were important to all Orthodox, he would still be a minority interest among Christians.

 A: Of course, we Christians are a minority. According to the statistics, of seven billion human beings on the planet, Christians number 2.2 billion – 32%. And Orthodox Christians are only 10% of all Christians, so only 3.2% of the world population, about one in thirty-three.

 However, if we look at these statistics theologically, what do we see? For Orthodox Christians, all Non-Orthodox are lapsed Orthodox, who were brought involuntarily by their leaders, for all sorts of political reasons, worldly reasons of convenience, to become Non-Orthodox. For us, Catholics can be defined as Catholicised Orthodox and Protestants as Protestantised Catholics. We unworthy Orthodox are the leaven that leavens the lump.

 Without the Church, there is no light and warmth of the Holy Spirit to radiate out into the rest of the world. Just as, even though you are outside the Sun, you can still feel the Sun’s light and warmth, so too the 90% of Christians who are outside the Church are still aware of the effects of the Church. For example, most of them confess the Holy Trinity and Christ as the Son of God. Why? Because of the Church which established such teachings long ago. Such is the grace of the Church that shines out of Her. Now, if we understand this, we will begin to understand the importance of the leader of Orthodox Christianity, the last successor of the Emperor Constantine, Tsar Nicholas II. His deposition changed the whole history of the Church, as also his Golgotha and his glorification today.

Q: If this is the case, why then was the Tsar deposed and then murdered?

A: Christians are always persecuted in the world, as our Lord told His disciples.

Pre-Revolutionary Russia ran on the Orthodox Faith. This was the oil that made the whole engine run. However, that Faith was rejected by the mass of the Westernised ruling elite, the aristocracy, and many others in the growing middle class. The Revolution was caused by a simple loss of faith, the engine ground to a halt and exploded for lack of oil.

 Most of the Russian upper classes wanted power for themselves, in the same way that wealthy merchants and middle classes wanted power for themselves and so caused the French Revolution. Having obtained wealth, they wanted to mount the next rung in the hierarchy of values – the rung of power. In the Russian context this lust for power, which had come from the West, was therefore based by definition on a blind admiration of the West and a hatred of Russia. This we can see from the very beginning with figures like Kurbsky, Peter I, Catherine II and Westernisers like Chaadayev.

 This lack of faith was also what poisoned the White Movement, which was disunited by its lack of a common and binding faith in Orthodox Tsardom. In general, Orthodox self-consciousness was absent in the Russian governing élite, which substituted various surrogates for it, whimsical mixtures of mysticism, occultism, freemasonry, socialism and a search for ‘truth’ in esoteric religions. Incidentally, these surrogates lived on in the Paris emigration, where various figures distinguished themselves in theosophy, anthroposophy, sophianism, name-worship and other very eccentric, but also spiritually dangerous fantasies.

 These had so little love for Russia that they actually went into schism, breaking away from the Russian Church and justifying themselves for so doing! The poet Bekhteev wrote very sharply of this in his 1922 poem, ‘Come to your senses, upper classes!’, comparing the privileged situation in Paris to that of the people of crucified Rus in the homeland:

 And once more their hearts are full of intrigue,

And once more treachery and lies are on their lips,

And life writes into the chapter of the last book

The vile treason of the grandees who knew it all.

 These members of the upper classes (and not all were traitors) were sponsored from the beginning by the West. The West considered that once its values of parliamentary democracy, republicanism or constitutional monarchy were introduced into Russia, it would become just another bourgeois Western country. For the same reason, the Russian Church had to be Protestantised, that is spiritually neutralised, or rather neutered, as the West has tried to do with the Patriarchate of Constantinople and other Local Churches fallen under its power since 1917, as soon as Russian patronage was removed. These attitudes were caused by the arrogant presumption that somehow the Western model could be universal. Incidentally, this is the arrogant presumption of the Western elites to this day, as they try to impose their model worldwide, presenting it as the ‘New World Order’.

 The Tsar, the Lord’s Anointed representing the last bulwark of Church Christianity in the world, had to be removed, as he was blocking the power grab of the Western and Westernised world. However, in their incompetence, the aristocratic revolutionaries of February 1917 soon lost control of the situation and within a few months power had descended from them to the lowest of the low, to the criminal Bolsheviks. These set out on a course of massacre and genocide, of ‘red terror’ – just as in France five generations before, only now with far more murderous, twentieth-century, technology.

 It was in this way that the motto of the Orthodox Empire was deformed. I remind you that this is ‘Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and People’. This was deformed by Westernised Russians and Western secularists, both then and now, into: ‘Obscurantism, Tyranny and Nationalism’. Atheist Communists deformed it even further into ‘Centralised Communism, Totalitarian Dictatorship and National Bolshevism’. What did this motto in fact mean? It simply meant: ‘(Full-bodied, incarnate) Authentic Christianity, Spiritual Independence (from the powers of this world) and Love for God’s People. As I have said above, this motto is the spiritual, moral, political, economic and social programme of Orthodoxy.

 Q: A social programme? But surely the Revolution came about because there were so many poor people and so much exploitation of the poor by the super-rich aristocrats, and the Tsar was at the head of that aristocracy?

 A: No, it was precisely the aristocracy that was opposed to the Tsar and the people. The Tsar gave away much of his personal wealth and taxed the rich to the hilt under his brilliant Prime Minister Stolypin, who did so much for land reform. Sadly, the Tsar’s programme of social justice was one of the reasons why many aristocrats hated the Tsar. The Tsar and the people were one. They were both betrayed by the Westernised elite. This is clear from the assassination of Rasputin, which was the preparation for the Revolution. In it the peasants rightly saw the betrayal of the people by the upper classes.

 Q: What was the role of the Jews in this?

 A: There is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that only Jews were – and are – responsible for everything bad in Russia (and everywhere else). This contradicts the words of Christ. First of all, the Jews who were involved in the Russian Revolution – and it is true that most of the Bolsheviks were Jews – were apostates, atheists, like Marx, and not real, practising Jews. However, those Jews who were involved worked hand in hand with Non-Jewish atheists, like the American banker Morgan, or with Russians and many others and depended on them.

 Thus, we know full well that Britain organised the Revolution of February 1917, applauded by France and financed by the USA, that Lenin was transported to Russia by the Kaiser and financed by him, and that the masses who fought in the Red Army were Russian. None of these were Jews. Some people, captives of racist myths, simply refuse to see the truth – that the Revolution was Satanic and that Satan can use any nationality, any of us, for his poisonous works, Jews, Russians and Non-Russians. Satan favours no nationality, but makes use of any who surrender their free will to him for his ‘New World Order’, in which he will be the Universal Ruler of the fallen world.

 Q: There are Russophobes who say that there continuity between the Tsar’s Russia and Communist Soviet Union. Is that so?

 A: There is certainly continuity of Western Russophobia! Read copies of The Times newspaper from 1862 and 2012 for example. You will see 150 years of xenophobia. Yes, it is true that many in the West were Russophobic long before the Soviet Union came into being. There are the narrow-minded among all peoples who are simply racist. Any nationality other than their own must be demonised, whatever their particular political system and however that system may change. We saw that in the recent Iraq War. We can see it now in the tabloid reports on Syria, Iran or North Korea, which try to demonise the peoples of those countries. We do not take those narrow minds seriously.

 Now, let us turn to the question of continuity. Following the generation of obscenities after 1917, continuity did re-emerge. This was after Germany had again invaded Russia on the Feast of All the Saints who have shone forth in the Russian Lands in June 1941. Stalin realised that he could only win the war with the blessing of the Church, by recalling the victories of Orthodox Russians in the past, like those of St Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy, that any victory would have to be the victory of his ‘brothers and sisters’, the people, not of his ‘comrades’ and his idiotic Communist ideology. Geography does not change, so there is continuity in Russian history.

 It is just that the Soviet period was an aberration from that history, a falling away from national destiny, especially in its violent first generation. What is important is the way that the Soviet Union acted that was so perverse, not necessarily what it did, but how it did it. I was struck by the words of the Tsar’s sister, the Grand Duchess Olga, who in her 1960 biography stated: ‘I have always followed Soviet foreign policy with great interest. Hardly anything in it is different from the course adopted by my father and by Nicky’ (by Alexander III and Nicholas II). The difference is that Soviet policy worked through violence and lies, the Tsar’s policies worked through peace and sincerity.

 Q: Can you give an example of this?

 A: What would have happened if the Revolution had not taken place? We know (and Churchill expressed it very well in his book, ‘The World Crisis 1916-1918’) that Russia was on the verge of victory in 1917. This is why the revolutionaries took action then. They had a very narrow window in which to operate before the great spring offensive of 1917 began.

 Had there been no Revolution, Russia would have defeated the Austro-Hungarians, whose multinational and mainly Slav army was on the point of mutiny and collapse anyway. Then Russia would have pushed back the Germans, or rather their Prussian warlords, to Berlin. In other words, the situation would quite possibly have been similar to that in 1945 – with one vital exception. That is that the Armies of the Tsar would have liberated Central and Eastern Europe in 1917-18, not invading it, as in 1944-45. And so they would have liberated Berlin as they liberated Paris in 1814, peacefully and respectfully, without the errors and drunkenness committed by the Red Army.

Q: What could have happened then?

A: The liberation of Berlin, and so of Germany, from Prussian militarism would surely have led to the demilitarisation and regionalisation of Germany, restoring something of pre-1871 Germany, the Germany of culture, music, poetry and tradition. This would have been the end of the Second Reich of Bismarck, which itself was a revival of the First Reich of the militaristic heretic Charlemagne and which led directly in its turn to the Third Reich of Hitler.

 If Russia had been victorious, there would have been a humiliation of the German / Prussian government, the Kaiser being sent perhaps into exile to some remote island as was Napoleon. But there would have been no humiliation of the German peoples, the result of the terrible Treaty of Versailles, which led directly to the horrors of Fascism and the Second World War. And that, by the way, has led directly to the Fourth Reich of today’s European Union.

 Q: Would France, Britain and the USA not have objected to victorious Russia’s dealings with Berlin?

 A: France and Britain, bogged down in their blood-soaked trenches or perhaps by then reached the French and Belgian borders with Germany, could not have objected to this, because the victory over the Kaiser’s Germany would above all have been a Russian victory. As for the USA, it would never have entered the War, if Russia had not first been knocked out of it – partly by the US financing of revolutionaries, it must be said. And that in itself is why the Allies did their best to eliminate Russia from the War, because they did not want a Russian victory. All they wanted from Russia was cannon fodder to exhaust Germany, in order to prepare it for defeat by the Allies, so that they could finish Germany off and take it over.

 Q: Would the Russian Armies have retreated from Berlin and Eastern Europe soon after 1918?

 A: Yes, of course. Here is another difference with Stalin, for whom ‘Sovereignty’, the second element in the motto of the Orthodox Empire, had been deformed into Totalitarianism and that meant occupation, oppression and exploitation by terror. After the fall of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, there would have been freedom for Eastern Europe with population transfers in border areas and the establishment of new countries without minorities, like a newly-reunited Poland and Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Carpatho-Russia, Romania, Hungary and so on. This would have created a demilitarised zone throughout Eastern and Central Europe.

 This would have been an Eastern Europe with rational and protected frontiers, so avoiding the errors of conglomerate States like the future, and now past, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. As regards Yugoslavia, in 1912 Tsar Nicholas had already set up a Balkan Union in order to avoid further Balkan Wars. True, this failed because of the intrigues of the German princeling Ferdinand in Bulgaria and nationalist intrigues in Serbia and Montenegro. We can imagine that after a First World War in which Russia had been victorious, such a Customs Union, established with fair borders, could have become permanent. Involving Greece and Romania, it could at last have established peace in the Balkans, its freedom guaranteed as a Russian Protectorate.

Q: What would have been the fate of the Ottoman Empire?

A: The Allies had already agreed in 1916 that Russia would be allowed to free Constantinople and control the Black Sea. This was only what Russia could have attained sixty years before, preventing Turkish massacres in Bulgaria and Asia Minor, had it not been for the Crimean Invasion of Russia by France and Great Britain. (We recall how Tsar Nicholas I was buried then with a silver cross depicting Aghia Sophia, the Church of the Wisdom of God, ‘so that in heaven he would not forget to pray for his brothers in the East’). Christian Europe would at last have been freed of Ottoman oppression.

 The Armenians and the Greeks of Asia Minor would also have been protected and the Kurds would have had their own State. But more than that, Orthodox Palestine and much of the future Syria and the Jordan would have come under Russian protection. There would have been none of the permanent war that we see in the Middle East today. Perhaps the situations of today’s Iraq and Iran could have been avoided. The implications of this are huge. Can we imagine a Russian-controlled Jerusalem? Even Napoleon recognised that, ‘he who controls Palestine, controls the whole world’. This is known today to Israel and the USA.

 Q: What would the implications have been in Asia?

 A: Peter I opened a window on Europe. It was the destiny of Nicholas II to open a window on Asia. Despite his generous Church-building in Western Europe and the Americas, he had only a limited interest in the Catholic/Protestant West and its extensions in the Americas and Australia, because it had and has only a limited interest in the Church. In the West, there was and is relatively little potential growth for Orthodox Christianity. Indeed, today, only a small proportion of the world population lives in the Western world, even though it covers a huge territory.

 Tsar Nicholas’ aim to serve Christ was therefore more concerned with Asia, especially with Buddhist Asia. He had former Buddhist citizens in the Russian Empire who had converted to Christ, and he knew that Buddhism, like Confucianism, is not a religion, but a philosophy. The Buddhists called him ‘The White Tara’ (King’). So he worked with Tibet, where he was called ‘Chakravartin’ (The King of Peace’), Mongolia, China, Manchuria, Korea and Japan, countries of potential. He was also concerned with Afghanistan, India and Siam (Thailand). The King of Siam, Rama V, visited Russia in 1897 and the Tsar prevented Siam from becoming a French colony. This was an influence that would have spread to Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia. In population terms these countries have nearly half of today’s world.

 In Africa, with a seventh of today’s world population, the Tsar had diplomatic relations with Ethiopia and successfully protected it from Italian colonialism, also intervening on behalf of Morocco and also the Boers in South Africa. His detestation of what the British did to the Boers, killing them in concentration camps, is well known. We can think that he must have thought the same about French and Belgian colonialism in Africa. He was also respected by the Muslims, who called him ‘Al-Padishah’, ‘The Great King’. In general, sacral, Eastern civilisations had far more respect for ‘the White Tsar’ than the bourgeois West.

 It is significant that later the Soviet Union also opposed the cruelties of Western colonialism in Africa. Here there is also continuity. Today there are Russian Orthodox missions in Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, India and Pakistan, as well as churches in Africa. I think that the contemporary BRICS group, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is also very representative of what Russia could have achieved 90 years ago, as a member of a group of independent countries. Indeed, the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Duleep (Dalip) Singh (+ 1893), had asked Tsar Alexander III to free India from British exploitation and oppression.

 Q: So Asia could have been colonised by Russia?

 A: No, definitely not colonised. Imperial Russia was anti-colonial, anti-imperialist. We only have to compare Russian expansion into Siberia, which was basically peaceful, with European expansion into the Americas, which was basically genocidal. The same people –native Americans are basically Siberians – were treated in totally different ways. Of course, there were in Siberia and in Russian America (Alaska) exploitative Russian merchants and drunkard fur trappers who behaved like cowboys towards the local population. This we know from the life of St Herman of Alaska and missionaries in eastern Russia and Siberia, like St Stephen of Perm and St Macarius of the Altai, but this was not the rule and there was no genocide.

 Q: All of this is very well, but it is not very relevant to talk about what might have been. It is all hypothetical.

 A: Yes, it is hypothetical, but hypotheses can give us a vision for the future. We could view the whole of the last 95 years of world history as a hiatus, a catastrophic aberration of tragic magnitude that has killed hundreds of millions. This is because the world became unbalanced after the fall of the bulwark of Christian Russia, whose fall was implemented by transnational capital in order to create a ‘unipolar world’. And that is simply code for the New World Order of a One World Government, that is, a Universal, anti-Christian Tyranny.

 Only if we understand this, can we have a vision for the future. This vision is to suppose that after July 2018, we may still be able to resume where we left off in July 1918, and gather the fragments and oases of Orthodox civilisation worldwide together, before the end. However terrible the present situation is, there is always the hope that is born of repentance. Repentance means going back, and that is what we have been talking about, resuming from where the world left off on that terrible, world-changing night in Ekaterinburg in July 1918.

 Q: What would the fruit of such repentance be?

 A: A new Orthodox Empire, centred in Russia, with Ekaterinburg, the centre of repentance, as its spiritual capital, and so the chance to rebalance this whole tragic, unbalanced world.

 Q: You could be accused of being far too optimistic?

 A: Yes, this is very optimistic. But look at what has happened over the last generation, since the celebration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus in 1988. The situation of the world has been transformed, or rather transfigured, by repentance among enough of the people of the old Soviet Union for the whole world to change. The last 25 years have seen a revolution, the only true revolution, a spiritual revolution, the return to the Church. Suppose the next generation continues in that revolutionary repentance? Given the historic miracle that we have already seen, which seemed like a ridiculous dream for us who were born during the nuclear fears of the Cold War and can remember the spiritually grim 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, why should we not envisage at least some of the possibilities outlined above?

 In 1914 the world entered a tunnel. During the Cold War we lived in that tunnel and we could see neither light behind us, nor in front of us. Today we are still in the tunnel, but we can now actually see a glimmer of light on the road ahead. Surely this is the light at the end of the tunnel? Let us recall the words of the Gospel: ‘With God all things are possible’. Yes, humanly, all the above is highly optimistic and there is no guarantee of anything. However, the alternative to the above is not just pessimistic, it is apocalyptic. That time is short is our chief anxiety. We hurry in a battle against time. And that must be a warning and a call to us all.

 

 

 

One Thousand Words of a Lament for Europe

Though blind the seed and dull the earth,
Yet sweet shall be the flower.

John Masefield, The Box of Delights

Seventeen hundred years ago the Roman world, and so Europe, accepted the Edict of Milan, meaning that it accepted Orthodox Christianity as the Faith in the Incarnation of God. So Orthodox Christianity left the catacombs and became the faith incarnate in the Roman Empire. Having given up on ever Christianising pagan Rome, the Emperor Constantine moved his Capital from the spiritually provincial West, eastwards to Jerusalem, to the heart of things. Here, uniting Asia and Europe, he founded New Rome, the Centre of the Christian Roman Empire, its symbol the double-headed eagle, looking east and west. And so the Dark Ages became the Age of Light, the Age of the Saints. Although this Age of Light was to darken in the eleventh century at the Western end of Europe, it has continued in the Centre and all around it, spreading far to the north and east, despite all the assaults from left and right.

It was much later, at the dawn of the thirteenth century, that in a rage of jealousy the barbarian forces of Old Rome bloodily looted the Capital of the Christian Roman Empire. Thus, they set themselves against Orthodox Christianity, ever since attempting to desecrate her, most notably invading her new northern Centre in 1612, 1812, 1854, 1914 and 1941. Today the new Roman Empire is based in the former European colony in Washington, but its local representative is the EU. Using the global media as its paid subservient tool, it sets about demonising its enemies, that is, those who have natural resources which it covets, and then attacks them with its legions, both electronic and physical. After Russia 95 years ago, today Syria is the latest victim of the Empire’s intolerance, according to which everyone must be the same – an imitation of it. A new, debaptised Soviet Union reigns in the West, its obsessing and possessing demons in charge.

Over the last century, we have seen the old demons of Europe resurfacing from beneath its smooth, polite, but superficial facade, as can be seen in its Hollywood reflections. We feel as if the wheel of history is drawing ever nearer to its full revolution – and the end. Old Europe is starting to die, the best of the European culture, which we have tried to save, sung out in a fado, a nostalgic lament, crossways, from Tromso to Valetta, from Dublin to Warsaw, from Reykjavik to Zagreb, from Lisbon to Tallinn. As Old Europe gradually throws off the last vestiges of its Christian culture and New Europe rises from its ancient murky depths where we thought we had buried it for ever, it returns to the pride of Roman pagan times. With the speed of thought, it returns to its self-justified and legitimised depravity and permanent war, sending out its legions to destroy peace-loving peoples all over the world, returning to Sodom and Gomorrah.

The old watchwords are forgot, as step by step new ones take over human minds, their hearts emptied so that there can be no resistance. Within our lifetimes we have seen the Americanisation of Monetarisation, which first appeared in Europe in its United Kingdom colony in 1979. This movement of greed, the idolatry of Mammon, spread throughout Europe and came to rule the world until its bubble crashed five years ago. Now it is too late to go back, human relations are ever more governed by money and debt. Plutocrats and banksters handed out money that did not exist, indebted deluded Europeans and now nobody can pay back even the interest on that non-existent money. So Europe is enshackled in its self-made chains. Europe is seeing its Thirdworldisation through its enslavement to debt. There is a sort of retribution in this. As you do unto others (as Europe did to the Third World), so has it been done unto Europe itself.

In its financial and human aspect, 2012 was a hard year in Europe, especially in the south, in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and in the east, in EU-captive Eastern Europe, in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Baltics, but increasingly everywhere else in the EU. Some Europeans go hungry, but its elite seems to grow fat. And 2013 looks no better, indeed even harder. Having abandoned the thoughts of the heart, the new Europe retains only the thoughts of its wayward reason. Impoverishment is the future, but here too there is a sort of retribution. Just as Europe once impoverished the Third World, so now it is impoverished by itself, caught in the trap of its own making. The problem is that humanity could deal with the Old Magic, but the New Magic, the high-tech sort, is different. Only Divine Intervention can now deal with this Brave New Europe, which is controlled and manipulated by a net which extends all around the planet.

Unfortunately, spoilt European humanity resists that very Divine intervention, like a very sick patient who rejects his medicine. Indeed, he does not even admit that he is sick, but in his delusion protests his good health. Only if this blind and dull Europe digs down deep, finding the way into what was, will it know what is and what will be. So it will postpone its apocalypse, which it is now creating for itself by its ‘crusading’ and meddling in the Middle East, where it is preparing the coming of him who will be. But Europe could still find its sweet flower once more. For if the West does dig down, there, underneath all its delusions it will find the very beautiful and wise people of the Age of the Saints, whom it long ago drove out from itself in its intolerance. Always in hope, we await that time, for then Wisdom will replace wayward Western reason, Goodness its evil, Beauty its ugliness, Mercy its greed, and Joy its pain.

1 January 2013

Monk Moses the Athonite: ‘Europe is Committing Suicide’

12/12/2012

Monk Moses the Athonite has been an ascetic on the Holy Mountain for thirty-five years. He is an icon-painter, poet, critic and writer. He has published 52 books and written over 1,000 articles. His works have been translated and published in many countries around the world. He is the senior secretary of the Sacred Community of the Holy Mountain. For some twenty-five years he has been the Elder of the hermitage of St John Chrysostom and of the hermitage of the holy great-martyr Panteleimon attached to Koutloumousiou Monastery.

monk moses

We are publishing a few extracts from an article by Fr Moses, in which he analyses the contemporary situation in Europe and Greece.

‘Greece has long been in a state of reanimation. The Greek language is being murdered every day. All around reigns the darkness of disintegration and a gloomy and violent national nihilism.

The desire to make money quickly and easily has led many into making tragic mistakes. Impatience and lack of seriousness are costing us dear. The thirst for riches has taken Europeans to extremes. Contemporary Europe is totally deChristianised.

The Vatican is reaping the fruits of deforming Christian teachings. The most horrific cases of child rape are taking place. Western people are running from ‘God is dead’ to Eastern gurus, desperately hoping to find at least some semblance of spiritual life. Some 2,000 branches of Protestantism are competing for a flock. The deChristianisation of Europe is on a very large scale and will lead to even more catastrophic consequences.

Europe has forgotten Christ and is embracing Islam. It seems as if it wants to commit suicide. Mosques are rising up in place of churches.

We are not against other religions, but we do want to defend Orthodoxy. Or do they now want to take away from us even this last right?

We look to the resistance of people who cannot be bought off. There are quite a few of them. It is time to stop being quiet. Our country needs spiritual regeneration.’

Source: http://www.agioritikovima.gr