Foreword: Superiority versus Humility

Ever since Cain and Abel the world has been divided into strong and weak, between those who consider that Might is Right and those who believe in justice and righteousness. The real revolution in world history here was the coming of Christ and His giving of the Beatitudes, which turned Cain’s law of the jungle upside down. However, for a thousand years now, the elite of one Civilisation, the Western, has proclaimed its superiority over all others and implemented its belief through multiple acts of violence, both locally and globally. This obsession with superiority is clearly in contradiction with the Christian Gospel of love for our neighbour and humility, despite their claims.

Introduction: Fukuyama versus Huntingdon

After the economic and then political collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991, two schools of US geopolitical thought emerged. Firstly, there was Francis Fukuyama, who proclaimed that the Soviet collapse was ‘the end of history’ – the Triumph of the West, since the whole world would now apparently adopt the ‘superior’ Western ways, ‘the West is Best’ and ‘the Rest’ would have to slavishly follow. On the other hand, the conservative academic Samuel Huntingdon pessimistically declared that now there would be a ‘Clash of Civilisations’ and that the West would have to reinvigorate its decadent self in the new world, if it were to survive.

Fukuyama’s thesis was clearly wrong, but was Huntingdon’s civilisational clash inevitable? Clearly, it was unnecessary, but sadly, and credit is due to the prophetic Huntingdon here, clashes caused by the hubristic and therefore unreinvigorated West are what have happened. At present, there is a first armed clash between the West and Russia in the Ukraine and a second armed clash between the West and Iran. And apart from that, there are tensions between the West and China in Taiwan, between the West and Latin America in Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela, and between the West and Africa, especially in former French colonies like Mali and Niger.

Two Local Orthodox Churches Contaminated by Geopolitics

It is as a result of this geopolitical background that the life of the sixteen Local Orthodox Churches has also been contaminated and overshadowed by the aggressive conflict between two of them, which are now in schism with one another. This conflict is the result of extremist clerical tendencies and the vain, but divisive attempts to try and dominate the other fourteen Churches on the part of both de facto schismatic groups. The two warring Local Churches at the heart of this problem are the Russian Patriarchate of Moscow and the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople. What are possible solutions for their future healing? Surely this schism cannot last much longer?

First of all, we must understand that the problems in both Local Churches are symptomatic of the wider problems in both their secular societies, which sadly have been reflected in their Church life. Both sets of problems were caused specifically by the former Russian and Greek Empires and their spirit of Imperialism which tried to dominate other races and which made the words, ‘Soviet’ and ‘Hellenism’, into dirty words among Non-Russians and Non-Greeks. Thus, the problems of Russian society are largely caused by Soviet imperialism, though that problem originated in the 200-year Imperial enslavement of the Church, even before Sovietisation under Stalin.

Similarly, the problems of Greek society, in Constantinople, Greece, corrupt Greek Cyprus and in the Greek Diaspora, are the result of intensive American Imperialism. Thus, all Greek Patriarchs since 1948 and all Greek politicians since the 1950s, and not only the Fascist Colonels of the 1960s, have been puppets of the US Deep State. This is also true of NATO Greek Cyprus, 40% of whose land was invaded by NATO Turkey, without the US lifting a finger to protect it. (Some say that the UK is at fault here; indeed, it was originally at fault, but now its two military bases in Cyprus are slavishly operated only for the US to bomb Israel’s Middle Eastern enemies).

The Patriarchate of Moscow desperately needs destalinisation, of which it is the last museum, that is, it needs liberating from its Russian nationalist centralisation, with its catastrophic failure to grant autocephaly to Non-Russian Churches. This has made Moscow detested in the Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics and in the Diaspora. Moscow’s militaristic (Stalinist?) and anti-lay clericalism, ritualism, episcopal taxes and bureaucracy are detested. Only by ridding itself of these Non-Christian attitudes can the Russian Orthodox Church be restored, as it was before it was made into a mere department of State, both of the Imperial State and then of the Soviet State.

As part of official delegations to the Russian Church in 2007 and then in 2012, I was shocked to see the potential degeneration in just five years then. In 2007 all was still possible. After the fall of the USSR, freedom had come and the faithful enthusiastically took up building and rebuilding churches, learning to sing. This was the People’s Church. By 2012, all had been put under central control and censorship, professionalised and clericalised. The old enthusiasm was going. People gave up trying: they could not fight against Church officialdom, who made them cry. Archpastors had been replaced by Archpoliticians. This was no longer the Church of the People.

The very term ‘Patriarchate of Moscow’ is a Soviet, or rather Stalinist, term. Therefore it has negative connotations among all Non-Russian peoples, in the Ukraine, the Baltics, Moldova and among lifelong Orthodox faithful in the Diaspora, who experience Moscow as a Persecuting Church. Let it be replaced as the ‘Patriarchate of New Jerusalem’, its headquarters transferring to the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. All parts of the Russian Church, including its Lutheran-style New York Synod, should return to canonical communion with all the Local Churches, to the catholicity of the Church, as an equal, thus overcoming nationalist domination, schism and the sect.

In the same way, the Patriarchate of Constantinople desperately needs deamericanising, that is, it needs liberating from its absurd hegemonic Papist ambitions, ecumenist secularism and indifference to the Church Tradition of the Holy Spirit. These have been reflected in it and imposed on it by its love for transatlantic dollars. Let Constantinople at last be reunited with the Greek Orthodox Church and transfer its administration to Greek Thessaloniki, near the benign influence of Mt Athos, returning to canonical communion with all the Local Churches, to the catholicity of the Church, as an equal, thus overcoming nationalist domination, schism and sectarianism.

Conclusion: Towards the New BRICS World

The New World of BRICS is all about building a worldwide Community of Nations, everything that the United Nations, with its inbuilt bias of three out of five nations on the Security Council being Western warmakers, never has been and never can be. This is also what the sixteen Local Orthodox Churches should also be – a Community. However, when Constantinople invaded Russian territory and Moscow cut off communion with it in 2018, that was hardly Communion. That the two Patriarchs refuse to take Communion together is their affair, but why involve all the bishops, let alone ordinary Greek and Russian pious priests and pious faithful, who have been scandalised?

All this is against the background of the collapsing US hegemon. The latter has refused to recognise the reality of its downfall, incompetence and inability to win any war, against the peasants of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, let alone against the advanced military technologies of Russia and Iran. Once it was ‘The West is Best against the Rest’. But today the Rest is grouping as BRICS, with ten full members and six partner countries, many who want to join, and three central members, the RIC: Russia, Iran and China – no longer India, which fell to Zionism and has now put itself on the fringes of BRICS, leaving Iran as the new moral leader of the Global South.

Afterword: A World Without the American and Soviet Empires

In other words, the Greek Orthodox world, just like the present Kiev puppet regime and its proxy soldiers, is losing America and American support. But equally today’s Russia is no longer Stalinist, despite the nostalgia of the elderly, including many bishops, as it is just one of many in BRICS. In other words, both the Soviet and the American imperialist mentalities belong to the past, and although not dead, they are dying. Ecclesiastical administrations, whether in Moscow or Constantinople, are to heed the fools for Christ, whose prophetic role is to call to repentance the rich and powerful, including rich, powerful bishops, who sinfully imagine that they are ‘princes of the Church’.

Unless you want your souls to die, let repentance begin!