End of Empire

Since the European suicide preceding 1945 the remnants of the last two European empires, the British and the French, survived only by riding on the coat tails of the American Empire. This has been even to the point of being humiliated by it, as at Suez in 1956 or pleading with Trump for diesel, and supporting US imperialism, however unprincipled. The American Empire has continually operated by setting up mafia regimes of oligarchs, supported by Fascist thugs, with hollowed out economies. Commonly called ‘banana republics’, these have existed not only in Latin America, but everywhere under the US Empire, from the Philippines to Vietnam, Iran to Kuwait, Africa to Western Europe. In the 1990s, it tried to set up exactly such a regime in the former Soviet Union. Here it failed, as the Patriots led by President Putin reclaimed Russia, but it did set one up in tiny, bandit-controlled Kosovo.

However, all such regimes survive only as long as there are enough US dollars to feed them, whether it is the colonels in Greece, Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain or regimes in Italy. Once the supply of dollars dries up, the regimes collapse and that very suddenly. We saw this in the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Now we are seeing it in the Ukraine, the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and, in time, it will happen in Israel. These are wars of attrition, as were the First and Second World Wars. For years millions of troops sat in trenches or battled backwards and forwards without any decisive collapse. And then it all happened. Both the First and Second World Wars were decided in the last four months. The same thing happened almost overnight in ‘South’ Vietnam, Afghanistan, with the dramatic scenes of the departure of the last helicopters or transport planes, now this is about to happen in the Ukraine.

The US/NATO proxy war in the Ukraine was triggered because greedy banks and CEOs of transnational corporations like Blackrock, Palantir, Starlink and Vanguard could see how rich they could become, if only they could break up Russia and pillage its natural resources, as they had already done in the Ukraine, and as they had already done in the enslaved Russia of the 1990s. This greed was entirely supported by EU politicians and businessmen for the same reasons. The British elite, always very sycophantic to the US, as they have since 1916 viewed the American Empire as their own Anglo-American Empire, had a special reason for supporting the wars in Afghanistan and the Ukraine. In the first case they wanted revenge for losing all three of their Afghan Wars (1840-1919). In the second case, they wanted revenge for the stalemated Crimean War (1853-56), seeing the present war as a Part Two continuation of that War.

The Western defeat in the Ukraine is a story of the hubris which lies behind Western lies and delusions. Convinced that the ‘end of history’ had come as a result of their ‘triumph’, Western elites persuaded themselves that Russia’s economy was the same size as Spain’s (in reality, it is the same size as Germany’s, France’s and the UK’s combined, and its industrial capacity is greater than the whole of Western Europe’s), that unarmed Russian troops fought with shovels, that Russians fought in ‘human waves’, that millions of them were dead, that Russians were taking computer chips from washing-machines because they had none, that the rouble was ‘rubble’, that Russia had no more fuel, bullets, tanks or missiles, that President Putin was about to die of cancer, but also that Russia was about to march into Western Europe….In reality, the Western elites need psychiatric help for their delusions.

As the American Empire declines and then finally falls, those who have had their imperial pretensions extended by riding on American coat tails, will also collapse. We can see this in Western Europe today. The UK has had six Prime Minister in ten years, in Germany the autocratic militarist Chancellor Merz is hated and in France Napoleon-Macron the dictator, who has lost French Africa, refuses to leave and allow a democratically-elected government. As the US retreats and abandons the artificial countries and mafia regimes it has set up worldwide, armies will surrender, political collapse and economic chaos will ensue. It is a repeat of the aftermath of the USSR. The Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and the tiny Gulf States, then Israel, will fall. Then will fall Western Europe, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, the Baltics and the whole US-founded EU itself. All will have to adapt to an empireless world. Traumatic, but inevitable.

Church Freedom

In 1980 I had a long conversation with the late Fr Alexander Schmemann, whose books I had read in the 1970s and members of whose family, all belonging to ROCOR, except for his very conservative Parisian brother Andrei, I had met. In 1980 ten years had passed since Fr Alexander had implemented the autocephaly from Moscow for the largely Carpatho-Russian Metropolia in North America, which then became the OCA (Orthodox Church in America). He was able to do this, as he, a highly educated Paris aristocrat who spoke fluent French and taught Latin and had a strong character, dominated the Carpatho-Russian episcopate, which was generally poorly educated and also morally compromised, as Fr Alexander knew in detail. This is why to this day the OCA is still to this day dominated by its protopresbyters and not bishops, a bit like congregational, but not episcopal, Churches.

Fr Alexander was keen to get me to St Vladimir’s Seminary in New York, perhaps seeing me as a supporter for himself and a future seminary teacher. I thanked him, but informed him that I was not interested, even though I admired much of what he had done for the reorganisation of Orthodoxy in North America along canonical lines. My task, I told him, was to help in the building of a Local Church in Western Europe. Even then, I also knew that mistakes had been made in the construction of the OCA in 1970 and that if ever we were to have our own Local Church in Western Europe, we would have to learn from those mistakes and not repeat them. Those mistakes were in the ecumenistic, modernistic, anti-monastic and anti-ascetic compromises, resulting from a certain Protestantisation and Second-Vaticanisation of the would-be, ‘All-American’ conformist members of the OCA.

However, no Local Church can be built on such attitudes. All Local Churches began with monasticism. Although I never thought that I would live to see a Local Church of Western Europe, I needed to help in its construction, in this Great Project, for the sake of our children and their children. Although I had come to see in the 1970s that the CIA-run Patriarchate of Constantinople would never help in building new Local Churches, but only try to dominate, interfere and destroy, I sincerely believed that the Russian Church could do something. This I believed right up until 2021. Then that hope was dashed, as I saw that part of the New York Russian Church was compromised by that same CIA as of old and the main part was compromised by Russian nationalism and Russian politics. Until all were free of politics, there could be no hope here, there would be only compromise, impurity and Papist attitudes.

But precisely now is coming the defeat of the American Empire as a result of the backfiring or ‘blowbacking’ of its own ideology, for example, as in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and today in the Ukraine and Iran. So used to treating other countries as vassals, like Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, and receiving tribute from them in dollar payments, US ideology never took into account the existence of sovereign nations. All were supposed to submit to its domination. But there are nations that refuse to be dependent on the American Empire and despite US sanctions, have become powerful, especially Russia, China and Iran. According to US plans, China was supposed to have been eliminated by US-bred covid, Russia dismantled by the NATO-supplied Ukrainian proxy, and Iran eliminated by assassinations. All these plans failed. Man proposes, but God disposes. With this reality, all changes in the Church.

The American Empire is declining more and more rapidly. This also means that the Greek Churches and the New York Russian Synod can, after eighty years of enslavement, repent and free themselves of CIA control. In turn, this means that the Russian Church inside the former USSR will no longer be obliged to counter the Greeks and could abandon Russian nationalist ideology outside the Russian Federation. With the depoliticisation of the Greeks and the denationalisation of Russians after the NATO campaign against them has been defeated, there is hope that long-awaited new Local Churches in the Diaspora can come into being. Delayed for so long by the political systems weighing on Greeks and Russians alike, those born outside the Russian Federation and in the Diaspora, will at last be free to establish their own Local Churches. We 50 million Orthodox and their 250 bishops could at last have our own Churches.