ESSAYS IN TRUE ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY – VOLUME 6 (2018) Vladimir Moss © Copyright. Vladimir Moss, 2018. All Rights Reserved. 1 1. APOCALYPSE NOW 4 1. The West 5 2. China 9 3. The Islamic World 13 4. Russia 16 Conclusion 20 2. HOW THE RED TERROR SAVED THE RUSSIAN CHURCH FROM ECUMENISM 23 3. THE REVOLUTIONARY AS GOD: NAPOLEON 25 4. THE ORTHODOX ANATHEMATIZATION OF ISLAM 33 5. CLASSICAL ROMANTICISM: GOETHE AND BEETHOVEN 35 6. EAST EUROPEAN ORTHODOXY AND THE KGB 47 7. MERCY AND JUDGEMENT 53 8. KING HAROLD AND THE NORMAN CONQUEST OF ENGLAND 61 9. THE FLOWERING BRANCH 78 10. PUTIN, THE COMMUNIST CHRISTIAN 88 11. THE NATIONS, NATIONALISM AND THE RUSSIAN IDEA 94 12. THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND CULTURAL MARXISM 122 13. RELIGION AND MORALITY IN FIFTH-CENTURY GREECE 137 14. WHY THE MODERN WORLD-VIEW MUST BE WRONG 148 15. THE WORST EVIL 152 16. A VERY SHORT EXPOSITION OF THE LORD’S PRAYER 154 17. ST. CONSTANTINE’S NEW CONCEPT OF THE STATE 155 18. THE BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY 163 19. ART, ETHICS AND OSCAR WILDE 168 20. THE WIDOW OF ZAREPHATH 176 21. AMERICA, BRITAIN AND THE BIRTH OF THE EUROPEAN UNION 178 22. FREEDOM OR FREE WILL? 191 23. THE FALL OF PATRIARCH KIRILL OF MOSCOW 192 24. THE END OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION? 195 25. HAS PATRIARCH BARTHOLOMEW OVER-REACHED HIMSELF? 197 27. THE WIDOW OF NAIN 204 28. MEDITATION ON A PRAYER 206 2 29. WHO WON THE COLD WAR? 208 30. THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST IN HEBREWS 214 31. THE ROOTS OF ATHEISM 219 3 1. APOCALYPSE NOW The final warning bell for western civilization sounded on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Twin Towers in New York were destroyed in a terrorist attack. It is still not known for certain who perpetrated the catastrophe. But that question is less important than the disaster’s symbolical – indeed, eschatological – significance. For New York today is the city that most closely symbolizes the Babylon of the Apocalypse, not only in its nature, but also in its final destruction. Not only is it the true capital of modern Jewish-Masonic civilization: as Denis Geoffroy points out, it "so resembles the description of Babylon in the Apocalypse of St. John that it is hard to believe that this is a simple coincidence." As for its destruction, the destruction of New York’s twin towers both looks back to God’s destruction of the Towers of Babel and forward to the coming destruction of the whole of contemporary western civilization. The date of this tragedy, September 11 – August 29, according to the Orthodox calendar – highly significant. It is the feast/fastday of the Beheading of St. John the Forerunner. St. John is the prophet of repentance, and his beheading signified the attempt by Herod to cut off his preaching of repentance. And so the time of repentance for the apostate Herodian West is near to being cut off… * In his magisterial work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order1, Samuel P. Huntingdon showed that since the end of the Cold War the underlying structure of World Order has changed from being bipolar and ideological to being multipolar and civilizational. In his view, which he backs up with a very impressive array of data and argumentation, the ideological liberalism vs. communism struggle was a comparatively superficial “blip” in the tide of history. After all, both liberalism and communism are products of western civilization, and the Cold War can be seen as a civil war between two outcomes or stages of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Both systems offer a utopian vision for mankind based on rationalism, science and education, in which religious belief has no place. Liberalism is relatively more individualistic than Communism, gives more place to individual initiative in economic and social life, and is more tolerant of individual differences and idiosyncracies, such as religion. But the similarities between them are more striking than their differences. And from the point of view of traditional Christianity, the main difference is that while the one destroys faith slowly, the other does it relatively quickly. Thus Stuart Reed writes: “In the Cold War, an unworkable revolutionary creed, communism, yielded to a workable revolutionary creed, liberal capitalism. Now liberal capitalism has replaced 1 London: Touchstone Books, 1996. 4 communism as the chief threat to the customs, traditions and decencies of Christendom…”2 World politics, argued Huntingdon, has now reverted to the more traditional, long-term pattern of struggles between civilizational blocs based on profound differences in values and religion. Huntingdon identified the following main contemporary civilizations: Western, Orthodox (Russian), Islamic, Sinic (Chinese), Japanese, Buddhist, Hindu, Latin American and African. Of these the most powerful were, in his opinion, the Western, Islamic and Sinic civilizations. Accepting the thesis on the clash of civilizations in principle, and agreeing that the ultimate aim of the western globalists is evil, we may ask: to what extent are they succeeding in coming close to their goal? Or are they in fact being thwarted by the revival of older, clashing civilizations? And the surprising answer is: since the end of the Cold War, in spite of some tactical successes, the goal of the globalists appears to be receding away from them; three rival centres of power that explicitly reject western ideology and the West’s NWO are rapidly growing in power and influence: China, the Islamic world and Russia. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse, these four civilizations are set to clash and set the world ablaze… 1. The West Let us begin with the West, the common “bogey” of the other three… As the world turned into the third millennium AD, it was clear that to speak of “the End of History” in the shape of the complete, global triumph of democracy and free trade was premature to say the least, and that opposite tendencies were developing fast. True, there were more nominally democratic countries than ever before, - “by 2000, 60 per cent of the world’s population lived in democracies, a far higher share than in 1974,”3 - and the Chicago- school-style liberalization of the financial and commodity markets had proceeded apace. But on the horizon, like clouds that gradually draw nearer, becoming larger and darker all the time, several distinct threats to the New World Order, some old and some relatively new, were emerging. America’s emphatic but pyrrhic and costly victory over Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 was a turning point; thereafter, her prestige has plummeted… Moreover, the western way of life as a whole does not seem to be making people significantly happier; it is no longer something that people from other countries strive for – if we exclude the higher income levels and security, which are still envied. Thus “one well publicized finding,” writes Peter Watson, “is that although the developed Western nations have become better off in a financial and material sense, they are not any happier than they were decades ago. In fact, in The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to 2 Reed, “Confessions of a Fellow-Traveller”, The Spectator, 23 September, 2000, p. 45. 3 Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, London: Allen Lane, 2013, p. 505. 5 Be Happy (2010), Michael Foley argues that modern life has made things worse, ‘deepening our cravings and at the same time heightening our delusions of importance as individuals Not only are we rabid in our unsustainable demands for gourmet living, eternal youth, fame and a hundred varieties of sex, we have been encouraged – by a post-1970s “rights” culture that has created a zero-tolerance sensitivity to any perceived inequality, slight or grievance – into believing that to want something is to deserve it.’ Moreover, ‘the things we have are devalued by the things we want next’…”4 Of course, this begs the question whether “happiness” should be the aim of life. The right to happiness is enshrined in the American Constitution, but western civilization before the Masonic eighteenth century had a far higher ideal: eternal life in Christ, which is as much higher than “happiness” as heaven is higher than the earth. But even if we judge the West by its present, base and purely secular ideals, it has obviously failed. The sins of the West in relation to the peoples it once colonized are generally recognized – which is not to say, forgiven. Among the most serious death-tolls were those of the Indians of North America at the hands of the White Americans, and the Mayans and Incas of Central and South America at the hands of the Spaniards. Several western nations had a hand in the slave trade from Africa to America. In Africa itself, the Congolese suffered horrific genocide at the hands of the Belgians, and the Hereros of South-West Africa at the hands of the Germans. Later slaughters in Africa included the Ethiopians at the hands of the Italians, the Mau-Mau of Kenya at the hands of the British and the Algerians at the hands of the French. The British killed millions indirectly: through neglect of the Irish famine, through the destruction of the native Indian textile industry, and through the imposition of the opium trade on China at the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The Europeans were supposed to bring Christianity to the pagans. But the reality was that the non-European civilizations were sacrificed on the altar of European profit. It was not so much Christianity as revolutionary teachings such as socialism and nationalism that the West instilled into its colonies – which, by the Justice of God, would later be turned against them.