Although the BRICS opted to use the dollar as the currency for its new development bank, the paramount position of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency nonetheless faces substantial challenges. In addition to reports of Russia and China dumping large amounts of its dollar holdings, many countries are opting to replace the dollar’s world reserve currency status. China and South Korea, announced an agreement for the creation of a market for direct trading of the yuan and won, their respective currencies. In Chinese President Xi Xinping’s visit to South Korea, a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between China’s central bank and the Bank of Korea to create a yuan clearing system was signed. This Sino-Korean agreement was by no means alone. A few days earlier the French Central bank also signed an MOU with China establishing a yuan payment system for clearing and settlement in Paris. China also signed similar MOU with Germany and Great Britain earlier.

Notably, France, American ally and NATO country, inveighed against the US dollar’s monopoly in international transactions. French Finance Minister Michel Sapin called for a “rebalancing” of currencies used in global payments. “I think a rebalancing is possible and necessary, not just regarding the euro, but also for the big currencies of the emerging countries, which account for more and more of global trade,” the finance minister told London’s Financial Times. In a lengthy interview to French magazine Investir, the governor of the French National Bank Christian Noyer echoed this sentiment. Noyer explained:

A movement to diversify the currencies used in international trade is inevitable. Trade between Europe and China does not need to use the dollar and may be read and fully paid in euros or renminbi. Walking towards a multipolar world is the natural monetary policy, since there are several major economic and monetary powerful ensembles.

This pointed anti-dollar reorientation from France came as a result of US punitive blackmail over the sale of France’s Mistral ships to Russia—an indication that France would be among European countries hesitant to mimic the US’s  aggressively anti-Russian position in tangible terms.

Mistral Amphibious Assault Ship

Overall, not only France, but the general European response to the US’s aggressive anti-Russian position and bid for its “isolation” remained tepid. Additionally, Germany, Europe’s biggest economy and de facto leader, approached a rift with the United States. Despite passing symbolic sanctions against Russia in solidarity with the American “Empire of Chaos,” Europe’s overall economic interdependence with Russia, especially in the field of energy, banking, and its exports to Russia, made it reluctant to proceed with deeper sanctions involving the economy.

From the onset of the announcement of unilateral US sanctions, the European business community lobbied to protect Russo-European economic ties. This is typified by Germany’s Siemans traveling to Russia to reaffirm to this partnership.  As the New York Times reported, the European business community lobbied “energetically” to “to head off or at least dilute any sanctions,” thereby impeding American efforts for a more aggressive posture against Moscow. As a result, the EU passed no substantial economic sanctions against Russia. Prior to the MH17 disaster 9 European countries opposed the imposition of additional sanctions.

In addition to this tepid response to the US’s call for confrontation, Europe maintained economic cooperation with Russia, and proceeded apace with plans for economic development projects. In Italy Russian businessmen joined the board of major Italian auto tire producing company Pirelli & C. S.p.A., with three representatives of Russian energy giant Rosneft joining its board of directors.

Russia notably continued with its designs for the construction of the South Stream gas pipeline to bypass Ukraine–while Washington labored to derail it. In June Russia and Austria signed an agreement for the development of a joint company to construct the Austrian arm of the $45 billion South Stream project, expected to deliver 32 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to the country. Meanwhile in Serbia, Russia reconciled all issues regarding Serbia’s involvement in South Stream. As a result, the companies South Stream Serbia AG and Russia’s Tsentrgaz signed a contract in Belgrade for the construction of the main section of the pipeline in Serbia with a contract valued at nearly 2.1 billion euros. Italy also reaffirmed its support for the project. Russia and Italy stated they would continue work on South Stream and were ready “to settle all of the issues, including those that concern dialog with the European Commission.” Italian ambassador to Russia Cesare Maria Ragaglini, confirmed in an interview with Interfax news agency that Italy “broadly supports” the South Stream project “both because of the project’s importance in diversifying gas supply routes, and because of Italy’s industrial and technological involvement in the project.”

The Dutch—who had the largest amount of nationals to die in the plane tragedy—also maintained economic ties to Russia despite rhetorically speaking of a “united front” with the US. Ben van Beurden, Chief Executive of Royal Dutch Shell, traveled to Moscow in early April to meet Russian President Putin. The Shell executive reportedly reassured Putin the energy giant would proceed with ambitious plans to expand oil and gas exploitation projects in Russia’s far east, despite Western sanctions. Shell was already partnered with Russian gas giant Gazprom in developing the Sakhalin-2 Project, reputed to be one of the world’s largest oil and gas exploration ventures. Notably, the project was aimed at developing Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) for South Korean and Japanese markets in direct competition with the US. As part of its anti-Russian strategy, is America’s quixotic ambitions to supplant Russia’s preponderance in the European energy market through its shale gas boondoggle. This is in addition to the US’s Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership plan. The MH17 tragedy, blamed on Russia by the West, bolsters this American economic strategy.

In Germany, while Chancellor Angela Merkel engaged in anti-Russian rhetoric, elder statesmen such as former chancellors Gerhard Schroeder and notably Helmut Scmidt, as well as many in the German populace, expressed understanding for the Russian position. Additionally, before the MH17 tragedy, substantial frictions between the US and Germany were manifest. The German-American relationship faced a qualitative deterioration, with scandals over rampant US spying along with Germany’s general unwillingness to pursue stronger antagonism against Moscow for America’s aggrandizement.

A sampling of headlines vis-à-vis German-American relations is instructive. Germany’s Die Welt reported of a German intelligence employee arrested on suspicion of spying for US on the Bundestag NSA committee. NSA agents-turned-whistleblowers testified before a German parliamentary committee investigating America’s wiretapping methods against Germany that the NSA’s approach was “totalitarian.”  Die Welt also reported that Germany was the NSA’s main target for spying. Germany’s Der Spiegel referred to the American embassy in Berlin as a “nest of spies” with the rooftop of the embassy apparently having been converted into a listening post. The New York Times reported that Germany canceled its contract with Verizon Communications. “The links revealed between foreign intelligence agencies and firms after the N.S.A. affair show that the German government needs a high level of security for its essential networks,” the German Interior Ministry stated.

In Germany, the constitutional court defines privacy as a basic human right. Thus, the arrogance of American spying is met with opprobrium in Germany, including among politicians. “If the reports are true, then we’re not talking about trifles,” the country’s foreign minister remarked. Meanwhile German President Joachim Gauck offered perhaps the sharpest rebuke stating “one really has to say, enough is enough.”  The CIA’s station chief in Germany was subsequently asked to leave the country.

With Germany already having a general aversion to war—augmented with the commonplace notion of “never another war against Russia”—the US’s arrogant spying gave impetus to anti-American sentiment and unwillingness to antagonize Moscow. In truth, Germans, like much of the world, “tend to see the U.S. as a rogue state that poses more of a threat to global security than either Russia or Iran.”  With a continuity of American militarism in both the Bush and Obama regimes, Germany was faced with the prospect of reassessing the value ties to America. Although relegated to the status of vassal with limited sovereignty since the postwar period, Germans are loathe to become entangled in America’s confrontations with Russia. Indeed, Germany stands to lose economically while the US would remain relatively insulated.“Germany’s Choice: Will It Be America or Russia?” Germany’s Der Spiegel posited in its July 10th article.  It argued: “Following the NSA spying and other political scandals, many Germans want greater independence from the US. But does that mean getting closer to Moscow?” In this context, international relations theorist Immanuel Wallerstein offered:

The basic problem is that the United States is in geopolitical decline and has been for some time. It doesn’t like this. It doesn’t really accept this. It surely doesn’t know how to handle it — that is, minimize the losses to the United States. So it keeps trying to restore what is unrestorable: U.S. leadership (read: hegemony) in the world system. This makes the United States a very dangerous actor…

That is what Europeans in general and now Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in particular are realizing. The United States has become a very unreliable partner. So even those in Germany and elsewhere in Europe who are nostalgic for the warm embrace of the “free world” are reluctantly joining the less nostalgic others in deciding how they can survive geopolitically without the United States. And this is pushing them into the logical alternative, a European tent that includes Russia.

As the Germans and the Europeans in general move inexorably in this direction, they have their hesitations. If they can no longer trust the United States, can they really trust Russia? And more important, could they make a deal with the Russians that the Russians would find worthwhile and necessary to observe? You can bet that this is what is being discussed in the inner circles of the German government today and not how to repair the irreparable breach of trust with the United States.

Faced with this pressing question of proceeding lockstep with the American “Empire of Chaos”— intransigently preoccupied with exporting chaos—or tighter partnership with Russia, the MH17 tragedy has doubtless tipped the balance back towards the US. Certainly, before the MH17’s doomed flight, American officials quietly expressed agitation at the languidness of the European response to American calls for sanctions on Russia’s key economic sectors. The New York Times reported, “The Europeans declined to go as far as the United States.” Following the downing of MH17, Western media pundits began talking of a “game-changer.” As a Reuters editorial comment explained, “While the West has imposed sanctions on Russia over Ukraine, the United States has been more aggressive than the European Union in this respect. Analysts believe the response of Germany and other European powers to the [the MH17 tragedy] — possibly imposing more sanctions — could be crucial in deciding the next phase of the stand-off with Moscow.”  The Russo-European cooperation now stands to be upended with European bellicosity becoming as vociferous as the American in the aftermath of MH17.

Washington’s Puppet Kiev Junta Faces Defeat

As the attempt to “isolate” and checkmate Russia faltered, on the ground, Kiev’s armed forces faced tremendous losses and encirclement. As the Russian Foreign Ministry remarked, “The events in Ukraine have not developed the way Washington scripted them.” Mounting awareness of the atrocities of its so-called “ATO” increased as well. Domestically, the palpable human costs of the so-called “ATO” began to mount with the mothers and family members of conscripts staging protests and roadblocks. The Ukrainian economy faced the early stages of neoliberal austerity with it poised to face more dislocation after signing an EU Association agreement.

In early July following the cessation of the faux “ceasefire” plan, the junta’s army escalated attempts at routing anti-Kiev forces by planning to sever them from the Russian border and surround them. The result of this junta assault was defeat. Their designs while operating on a thin line of logistics worked against them. Repeated artillery and grad attacks as well as disorganization left them incapable of further advances. The Kiev junta regime’s forces were hit hard after the Ukrainian 79th and 24th brigades from western Ukraine were concentrated in Zelenopliya between rebel positions in the south east and the Russian border. Facing a barrage of grad rockets fired from the anti-Kiev militias, many of these units were largely annihilated. Available pictures  and video showed the remnants of many destroyed vehicles such as battle tanks, APCs, and trucks. The initial casualty count was made out to be 67 killed and 175 wounded Kiev junta forces.

Wreckage from the Southern Cauldron

Further, Ukrainian troops subsequently found themselves surrounded and cut off from their resupplies in the so-called “Southern Cauldron.” Attempts to break out of this encirclement were abortive. The journal of Colonel Cassad offers one of the best analyses of the encirclement of junta forces. In his estimation of situation of the Ukrainian troops trapped in the “Southern Cauldron”:

[The] defeat of the junta groups which were advancing on Luhansk and Izvarino, and also the degradation of the South cauldron, became obvious to everybody.

In essence the offensive that started on July 1st and which had decisive goals concluded with a significant defeat, which has a number of signs of a catastrophe. A portion of forces ended up in an operational encirclement and with severed communications. Instead of a united front, the junta forces currently exist as a number of scattered and weakly coordinated groups, which perform some tactical operations which are weakly connected with the joint plan of closing the border and of surrounding Lugansk.

In the junta’s own estimation, “We understand that there are losses. The battle is continuing, our guys are fighting on but it is very hard there so far,” Andriy Lysenko spokesman for the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council stated. That the junta forces faced devastating losses and desperation was confirmed by a phone call from a Ukrainian solider on the battlefront on post-coup President Porochenko’s own television channel 112. The soldier explained:

I am currently the area of Sverdlovsk, Krasno-Partisansk and Izvarino. There are only 400 of us left out of almost 800.

Since 02:00 am we are being pummeled with Grads. Right now, there was mortar shelling that lasted about two hours. We don’t have anything to respond with. All we have are the two wretched SAUs [Self-Propelled Artillery System]. We are sitting here and taking it. We are sustaining losses. There are dead and wounded. Yesterday there were dead; today there are dead. Yesterday there were wounded; today there are wounded.

There are no reinforcements. There is no food. They got us only 800 … 400 liters of water for four hundred men. It’s just a liter a day per person, or what? And that’s how it is here. And you write that everything is fine and we are attacking Sverdlovsk. We are not fucking attacking – we are retreating for the forth day in a row!

There is no order to withdraw. There are killing us like cannon fodder. They know where we are, but we have no idea who it is that we are fighting against! We can’t see them! They are hitting us and picking us off.

Commander of the 72nd Brigade, he gave the order to stand ground. Colonel Grishenko. Out of one company, a full company, only 35 men are left and only one unit of military equipment. And by protocol, there must be 10 units of equipment and 90 men. Can you imagine our losses? And that’s how we fight here.

Additionally, with the mainline of the Ukrainian armed forces treated as cannon fodder, the human costs of the so-called “ATO” began to mount, especially in the western regions. The mothers and family members of conscripts became increasingly discontent and began calling for an end of the deployment of troops to the eastern region with many even burning conscription writs en masse.

Fighters of the Novorussia Army

The dramatic downing of MH17 conceals these defeats of the junta forces and redirects attention from the continuing economic dislocation in the country under the Western neoliberal regime–which has only begun. It also burnishes the Kiev regime’s enemy image of Russia which has been its stock-in-trade since seizing power. After all, the reflexive blaming of Russia by the Kiev junta has gone so far as to blame Russia for everything from discontent over austerity—with the Prime Minister claiming those opposed to the austerity regime are Russian FSB agents–to the continued breakdown of law and order and drug production on the Maidan in Kiev. Most notably, the MH17 tragedy legitimizes the junta’s atrocities against the population of the eastern regions under the banner of an “Anti-terrorists Operation.” In fact, the junta forces have already stepped up their atrocities against civilians in Donbass under the so-called “ATO.”

Dangerous Confrontation with Russia

MH17 prompts a qualitative escalation in the US’s ongoing effort to checkmate Russia. First, MH17 initiated a new wave of massive demonization against Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the immediate aftermath of MH17 sensationalist headlines dominated with demagogic titles such as “baby’s death on your conscience,” and “Putin’s victims.” Western press is now inundated with hysterical screeds, including by French warmonger Benard Henri Levy, vilifying Putin as a state sponsor of terrorism (while mounting evidence points to the Kiev junta’s direct culpability). The “liberal” New Republic attempted to compare the shooting down of MH17 to the Lockerbie bombing (falsely attributed to the late Muammar Qaddafi of Libya.  New Republic argued, “The plane’s downing is an international incident of no less consequence than the Lockerbie bombing ordered by Muammar Qaddafi in 1988, which transformed someone regarded as an eccentric despot into a lethally dangerous international pariah.”  Taken to its logical conclusion, if Putin is akin to Qaddafi, then is the denouement his execution by the West? Doubtless, the escalating infantile celebrity profile demonization campaign against President Putin is preparation for Western public opinion to regard President Putin as “evil.” In fact, echoing the hysterical sentiments of the Kiev junta, corporate media outfit CNN has gone so far as to suggest Putin is literally “evil.”

In this unsubtle epoch of endemic Russophobia, these Manichean characterizations and latest wave of demonization sets the stage for military and strategic escalation. With Russia balking at intervening militarily in eastern Ukraine, the US was deprived of a pretext to justify its increasing militarization and recruitment of Europe expressed through its 1 billion dollar hammer and intensified military exercises on Russia’s peripheries. The strategic and military situation continues to escalate. With Ukraine already a NATO partner, and NATO announcing it will reform the Ukrainian armed forces, it is now poised to receive US military advisers to help direct the junta’s assault against the restive eastern region. The Dutch are also preparing to set the stage for military intervention into eastern Ukraine under the pretext of securing the MH17 crash-site–meaning a direct NATO military presence. In the US Congress the so-called  “Russian Aggression Prevention Act” sets the stage for an aggressive escalation in the effort to smash the Russian state via an intensification of all existing vectors of subversion and encirclement. Meanwhile, in Russia public opinion of the United States is unsurprisingly at an all time low. Many circles in Moscow are coming to recognize that confrontation with the West is inexorable.

As the “Empire of Chaos” reeled in defeat, the MH17 tragedy could not have arrived at a more opportune time for its machinations to checkmate the Russian Federation. As the crisis continues to unfold, the US will intensify its efforts to export chaos and cynically use the deaths of the 298 MH17 passengers to do so. Ominously, 100 years ago World War I–the Great War–began. Despite striking parallels to this tragic big power confrontation, the bellicosity in Western Atlanticist circles becomes shriller. Regardless–as many erring adventurers have discovered throughout history–Russia can defend itself and it will.

The following interview derives from a piece that originally appeared in issue six of Aleksandr Dugin’s journal ‘Elementy’ (Elements) in 1995. Here, the former Iranian ambassador to the Vatican, Muhammad Masjid Jamei, gives his view on the events of the Yugoslavian crisis and the Iranian understanding of the Orthodox Church. Nearly twenty years later, as the West is replicating the Balkan template in the Ukraine, this piece retains all of its relevance and evidences significant foresight on the part of the ambassador. Translated by Evgeniy Filimonov.

Elements: What role, in your view, should the Orthodox Church play in the contemporary world?

Muhammad Masjid Jamei: Orthodoxy is more than a church, it is more than merely a denomination. It comprises the axis of history, culture and identity of the Orthodox peoples. It is precisely for this reason that the Orthodox Church plays or will play a crucial role. Russia and the greater part of the former Eastern Bloc countries, from a historic and cultural point of view, are truly not part of the Western world nor could they be. In my view, the past rivalry between the Western and Eastern blocs was not only due to the antagonism between Capitalism and Marxism. National and ethnic factors played a key role in the conflict of the two systems. Of course now, because of the strong pressure from existing political regimes, these factors do not have the opportunity to fully demonstrate their real weight on affairs. But this does not mean that they don’t exist. On the contrary, after the fall of Marxism they found a new strength. It is this that the West fears. Marxism, regardless of what form it takes, could not pose a threat to the West since there no longer exists the danger that Marxist regimes could once again regain strength within the countries of Eastern Europe. Far more likely is the resurgence of a nationalism which will oppose the West and, as in the past, give rise to a new clash of values.

Now, a serious increase in the role of the Orthodox Church depends only on itself. Furthermore, much also depends on how many of its original features can be retained, without modernizing beyond what is necessary and staunchly opposing propaganda, through which the Mondialists would seek to westernize Orthodoxy, as has happened with other Christian denominations. It is in this sense, from my point of view, that the Orthodox Church is one of the important forces inherently opposing Mondialism.

Serbs and Russians alike assume that the Yugoslavian crisis, resulting in the dismemberment of the country and the war with Bosnia, is an expression of aggrandizement against the Orthodox Church. Do you agree with this point of view?

M.J.: The point here is not whether to be in agreement or disagreement. It is, rather, to understand the way of thought and sentiment of the Orthodox. This should be done, regardless of the other issues, and this will help end the crisis. From the Orthodox Serbian point of view, the crisis began with the separation of Croatia from Yugoslavia, which they assume was supported by Germany, Austria, and the Vatican. They consider that the Vatican’s invasion is due to the fact that the peoples of this region are Catholic, and argue that the expansionism of the Catholic Church was at the heart of the war and led to its intensification. From their point of view, it comes down to an unfair and unequal war between two denominations. Subsequently, the war spread to Bosnia. The Orthodox Serbs first fought against the Muslims and their allies, the Croats. From the Orthodox point of view, the Muslims were provoked by the Catholics under false pretenses to fight against the Serbs with the goal of suppressing Orthodoxy. Such forms the basis of their attitude towards the war in Bosnia. Naturally, they are aware of the existence of other factors, but in relation to the role of Catholicism in this conflict they are almost unanimous in their sentiment.

What do you think about the future of the Orthodox Church?

M.J.: Despite its factors of weakness, which it owes to the Communist regime, the Orthodox Church is internally strong and rich, especially in relation to its mystical elements and Orthodox way of thinking as well as its traditions, which have survived in a large part of the population. Conservatism and the delayed adaptation of Orthodoxy to modern conditions is simultaneously a weak point and a great merit: the Orthodox Church remains true to its original principles, while other denominations have done the opposite and modernized to the point of degeneration. Moreover, the national character of the Church determines its powerful structure, which contributes to the preservation of the cultural and political independence of its flock. Today, it is those who reject the advance of the West and its humiliating attitude towards Russia and its traditions as well as those who wish to live independently and with dignity that look to the Church. We can therefore conclude that the Church will undoubtedly play a fundamental and active role in the life of the Orthodox and especially the Slavic peoples. Any regimes striving to manage the countries of Eastern Europe must take the Church into consideration, which is now going through a transitional period, but it will surely and successfully overcome all of the difficulties and, in the end, appear even stronger and more powerful than ever.

What do you think about the relationship between the Orthodox Church and Islam?

M.J.: Despite the fact that there has been a multitude of conflicts between the Orthodox and Muslims, especially in the Balkans, the last decades have seen a trend towards an improvement in relations. These relations were not in conflict under the Communist regime, and it seems that they have remained good after the fall of the iron curtain. The situation in Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia and Kosovo, is of course, an exception, and I hope for the fastest possible resolution of a crisis that would affect an even greater improvement in relations between Islam and Orthodoxy.

The fact is that despite their existing differences, the Orthodox and Muslims share common problems and common enemies. With the fall of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Western militarists are attempting to destroy the last few small remainders of national, cultural, and religious independence which may interfere with their aspiration towards global hegemony. From their point of view, Islam and Orthodoxy are the essence of a power bloc whose existence is incompatible with their plans, it is for this reason that such efforts are expended on the weakening or even destruction of these two religions.

The best way towards the accomplishment of this goal is the imposition of disputes and wars between them. Therefore, given this situation, we can safely say that there are deeply justifiable reasons for the cooperation of the Orthodox Church and Islam. The most important thing here is that both sides should deepen their ties and wisely and objectively study the international situation, thus contributing to peacemaking, agreement, and the elimination of any sort of possible conflict.

What do you think about the relationship between Russia and Iran?

M.J.: Since ancient times, Iranians are a religious people which, as history will tell you, maintain excellent relations with other religions, especially Christians, primarily the Orthodox. Iran wants to continue to develop these good relations, and has, on the basis of such a goal, spent two religious meetings at the highest level with the Greek Orthodox Church. Iran is interested in the continuation of this dialogue.

Last year, President Hashemi Rafsanjani sent a congratulatory message on the occasion of Christmas to the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, and many other Iranian officials have sent congratulatory messages to other hierarchs of the Orthodox Church. I want to emphasize that Iran is very much interested in a more active dialogue with the Christian world, especially with Orthodoxy, which, in turn, should also be interested in these relationships.

Read Evgeniy Filimonov’s blog Read What You Sow.

Two thousand years have now passed since the death of Emperor Caesar Augustus, yet the heritage of Rome still echoes in the historical consciousness of the peoples of Europe. The great Russian scholar and premiere Slavophile Aleksey Stepanovich Khomyakov (1804-1860) provides us a fine summary of how Europe’s tribes forged their cultures across the sweep of history, from the fall of Rome into the early Middle Ages. Translated by Mark Hackard.

Rome, of a character brisk and dominating, contained within itself all the history of Europe and the fate of humanity.

In the times of the Caesars, it reached an extraordinary degree of power, and at that moment its weakness was revealed, a natural property of any collective identity. In order to continue its dominion over the world, Rome had to be embodied in one person. The Republic gave way to the Empire.

The lord of the whole civilized world could not remain a Roman for long. His relation to his motherland vanished before a new approach to the peoples subdued by the Republic and passed into the hands of the Emperor.

The successors of Augustus expanded little by little the right of citizenship to all of their subjects, and Rome disappeared in its territorial possessions. But the state, founded on force and bound by the ties of external unity without any interior connections, could not endure. The Empire began to decline toward decadence.

In this age of downfall, Constantine the Great raised over the Roman world the banner of the Cross. The Empire assumed a new human spirit. But Christianity, having within itself sufficient strength for the founding of new states and their protection from any foreign pressure, did not accommodate itself with the old Rome. The Empire was destroyed.

From the Empire survived its Eastern half, more enlightened and independent from the Roman world in the spiritual sense and therefore more deeply and keenly assuming the Christian principle. But the Byzantine Empire already could not contain within itself the entirety of Roman power and fell little by little into the rank of second-degree states – akin to individuals in a human community, at one time obedient to the sovereign unity of Rome.

Rome’s Legions vs. Magna Germania

With the fall of Rome begins the life of Europe properly speaking. Little by little, sovereign life encompasses all of the Empire’s provinces up to the furthest North. The Gallic and Britannic Celts and the Spanish Iberians, famed in their ancient traditions and at one time shocking the enlightened states of the South, already had utilized the Roman heritage. They had absorbed into themselves a foreign education, had adopted a foreign language, and had lost all the elements upon which the possibility of independent activity was based. The fate of Europe went from the Roman into the hands of two great and native European tribes: the Germans and the Slavs. The first movement of peoples, and the first blows dealt to Rome with the exception of the soon to be vanquished Dacians, belonged to the Germans. Their movement was an incorrect counteraction to the conquering onslaught of a world power. At the same time the clans of the Franks and Alemanni crossed into Roman provinces and crashed into Gaul; other lesser bands broke through the Alps, and the great Goths, having overcome the barrier of the Danube, threatened Byzantium. An excess of new strength flaring up in the Germanic race threw it simultaneously into the Roman world and the eastern sphere. Ermanaric subdued the coast of Evksin, a land on the Danube and the middle part of Russia’s northern zone, where Jordanes already knew names that would in more recent times receive major historical repute.

The raids of the great Huns changed the direction of the Germans’ movement. Whoever these warlike arrivals from the Volga region were, the results of their onslaught were clear. Attila’s strikes were directed more at the Germanic world than at Rome. He left Byzantium completely at peace, and it seems that the Western Empire only brought about his wrath by granting assistance and refuge to the Germans. The weakened and terrified Goths, Burgundians, Suevi, and Alans all plunged toward the West. Even after the death of the great conqueror, they could not, nor did they dare to, return to the eastern lands whence the Hunnic storm swept upon them. And they settled forever in the provinces they had just subdued – beyond the Pyrenees and the Rhine, in Italy and the British Isles, where the mixed Germanic tribe of Anglo-Saxons and hardly Germanic Varini destroyed the kingdom of the Celts, who were already without protection from the Romans and powerless in defense of themselves. After the invasion of the Huns and the flight of the Germans to the West, in the East of Europe there suddenly appeared an entire world of Slavic peoples.

Abutting the Finno-Turkic tribes on their northern and eastern borders, the Slavs borrowed much from them in the ways of war. Meeting the Byzantine Empire in their southern reaches, they peacefully accepted from Constantinople many elements of enlightenment despite frequent and hostile clashes. Finally, to the West the Slavs bordered the Germanic world, thrown back into their previous natural boundaries by the Hunnic invasion. It is doubtless that on all the borders dividing not states but rather settled peoples, there formed over a span of time a mixed population equally belonging to both worlds, however distinct they were amongst each other. In such a way the Germans and Slavs at their meeting composed a multitude of minor tribes that history can ascribe to neither Germany nor Slavdom, and consequently, the positive borders of both regions cannot be defined with the mathematical strictness which, not being completely necessary for human education, makes for the best delight of all in the lives of lettered men.

We can consider the flow of the Elbe and the mountains of Bohemia the eastern limit of Germany and the western frontier of the Slavs, although there is no doubt that a few Germanic offshoots lived between the Elbe and the Oder and a great number of Slavic communes were interspersed into the Germanic sphere from the Elbe up to the very Rhine. A few, though historically important, remainders of the Celtic race and the Caucasian-Sarmatian (Ombri, Gotini, Iazyges) were contained within the Slavic sphere. But the warlike spirit of the Celts launched the greater number of them south beyond the Danube barrier, although some provinces such as Galicia, for example, kept the memory of them in their name. The few Sarmatians disappeared in an endless world of Slavic clans.

Sarmatian Cataphract (Heavy Cavalry)

As we have already said, the western and greater part of Southern Europe went to the Germans; to this race belongs all recent development and almost the whole history of the European Enlightenment. But pure Deutschtum could only be found in the old boundaries of the tribe, and outside of them was confusion and abnormality. Whatever the structure of societies between the Rhine and the Elbe was, beyond the Rhine and the Alps it could already be nothing other than military. It is probable that even previous to our time, the constant clashes of Germans and Romans, as well as the ages-long struggle between the Empire and clans who would consequently form the confederation of the Franks, introduced into the very interior of the Teutonic lands a savage way of life – the preeminence of force, the organization of the war-band and all those conditional elements upon which states are built, though without the moral principles by which states are consecrated.

The clans further removed from Roman frontiers preserved with greater purity the principle of family and that of human personality. Such especially were the Saxons, whom neither by language nor by customs and religion we should consider as pure Germans. Unfortunately, namely those clans who were subordinated to Roman authority, who had already lost much from their identity and primitive virtues in mercenary service, in the enjoyments of decadent, luxurious Rome, and in rebellions where only the treachery of the savage alone could challenge the cultured force of the Romans (as, for example, in the German Arminius’s revolt and the destruction of the Varian Legions). These very clans, more than others accustomed to war and having cultivated within themselves the energy of conquering peoples, occupied the center stage of life in Western Europe.

Having captured Gaul, the Franks, checked from the south by the Goths and thereafter by the unstoppable force of the Arabs, swiveled again eastward and after a long struggle annihilated their Alemanni and Saxon rivals, who stood indisputably higher in every moral respect than the victors. Germany was corrupted by the return of an already corrupted Germanic element into her heartland. Such was the fate of Middle and Western Europe; but also in the northwest, on the islands where the best of the Germanic clans settled, fate did not allow a peaceful principle and pure communal organization, transferred by the Saxons to England and preserved by them despite long wars with Celtic outsiders, to develop. The Normans, without homes, families or souls before the judgment of men, Normans disinterestedly evaluating animal bravery and animal valor, destroyed the old England and brought all the vile depravity and inhuman ways imparted to them in France, customs that the Franks had taught the whole of Europe.

Ancient Slavs

Our view of the Germanic world defines the significance of their eastern neighbors, the Slavs. Undisturbed by Rome, which only touched upon their southern lands and did not penetrate into the depth of their endless dwellings, and never scattering into alien regions or corrupting their internal life through the tempting crime of conquest, the Slavs kept inviolable the habits and customs of time immemorial. The arbitrariness of the war-band model, founded on savage force and unrestrained by any moral laws, was unknown to them. Human feelings and sacredness of family life were cultivated simple-heartedly between the grave of one’s fathers and the cradle of one’s children. Tilling of the earth, by whose labors the world was fed, and trade, the enterprise of which connected its ends, flourished in organic communities under the organic laws of tribal organization. Such was the character of the regions from the Don to the Elbe. Successful struggle with the Finns and Sarmatians did not corrupt the Slavs, because sacred war for one’s motherland does not resemble in its consequences the unrighteous war of the conqueror. The northeast of Europe awaited Christianity.

Read Part II.

When the banksters who run America set their sights on the newest designated enemy of democracy, without fail the assault is preceded by information operations to convince a clueless public of the target state’s burning hatred for “freedom.” Momentarily torn away from corporate entertainment spectacle, enlightened citizen-consumers will be fed phony news stories of atrocities, green-screened crisis coverage set to dramatic music, and helpful cues to identify heroes, victims and villains in the unfolding morality play. Washington is said to be Hollywood for ugly people, and the ugly people have proven remarkably adept at statecraft as stagecraft, selling their brand of international banditry as feel-good humanitarian uplift for decades now.

But just as Hollywood has lurched into creative senility, so too is the template for overseas intervention fraying as US global dominance enters its terminal phase. No longer yielding to “leadership” from the wolves of Wall Street, independent powers have begun to challenge the foundations of the Washington consensus. At the forefront of this movement has been a revived Russia, which in the face of NATO encirclement and with survival on the line, has shown itself willing and able to confront the Pax Americana. But the show must go on; as the United States positions forces ever closer toward Moscow’s frontiers, with furrowed brows and feigned concern, the talking heads on our telescreens mechanically inform us of Russian aggression. It’s springtime again for Russophobia in the West.

Kiss your Golden Arches goodbye, Yankees!

With its roots in the Great Game of espionage and intrigue between Victorian subalterns and the Tsar’s Cossacks in Central Asia, a systemic antipathy to Russia as such only took root in America from the time it assumed Britain’s imperial mantle at the dawn of the Cold War. The hostility, of course, has been mutual, and Russians have not forgotten how their land suffered through the “peace dividend” of US unipolarity in the 1990s. Promised that the North Atlantic alliance would never contemplate expanding eastward, Mikhail Gorbachev starred in pizza commercials and Boris Yeltsin headlined summits with his trademark vodka-soaked buffoonery. It was then that a weakened, bankrupt Russia could be looted by multinationals, its people impoverished and demoralized, and the state further subverted by forces from “civil society” NGOs to cutthroat jihadist mercenaries waging holy war in the North Caucasus.

Those days of humiliation are over, and that’s what has Washington worried. During his 15 years of “authoritarian” rule, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin set his country on a new path after a disastrous post-Soviet decline. Early on he thwarted the ambitions of oligarchs and regional separatists; since then he has moved to counter US/NATO plans for controlling Eurasia and its energy transit networks. This struggle has played out through espionage, color-coded revolutions, pipeline double-crosses and proxy wars. After a naval task force dispatched by Moscow effectively deterred the West from bombing Syria in 2013, US foreign policy planners decided to upend Russian resurgence through a quick and dirty route to destabilization: Ukraine.

By orchestrating a coup in Kiev in February of this year, American strategists were gambling on the seizure of Crimea, home to the Black Sea Fleet. Sevastopol in NATO hands would have drastically curtailed Russian influence in the Eastern Mediterranean while ensuring Russian vulnerability to US missile defense and first strike assets. Moscow’s hold on the North Caucasus (and even the Volga Basin) would also inevitably come under challenge, given Washington’s history of generating chaos through webs of foundations and aid agencies. Due to Putin’s quick action, instead of evicting the Kremlin from Crimea, the State Department and CIA unwittingly played catalyst to the peninsula’s reunion with its historical motherland. This bloodless victory constituted an intolerable affront to the vanity of America’s policy elites, sending their demonization campaign into overdrive.

For leading Russia’s return to prominence and refusing to bow to US pressure, Vladimir Putin has been made the focal point of this propaganda barrage. Any enemy of the “international community” (globalist plutocrats speaking through political ventriloquist dummies) must be cast as evil incarnate, which for contemporary man translates first and foremost to one name: Adolf Hitler. As if on cue, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – the woman who demanded that her husband cluster-bomb Serbia as an act of righteousness – ordained the Crimea crisis as a reprise of the Sudetenland.

Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30s … All the Germans that were … the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.

Other figures from the unbalanced Senator John McCain to Prince Charles also joined in to label Putin as “another Hitler” for daring to defy the New World Order. Running afoul of American geopolitical designs triggers the Reductio ad Hitlerum mechanism – it’s a multipurpose tool of manipulation used against public opinion and handy for practically any occasion. Thus Gamel Abdel Nasser; Fidel Castro; the Ayatollah Khomeini; Manuel Noriega; Saddam Hussein; Slobodan Milosevic; Kim Jong-Il; Mohamar Gaddafi; and Bashar al-Assad, to name just a few, have all been affixed with the Austrian corporal’s toothbrush mustache of infamy when it suited US objectives. In comparing Putin with Hitler, the most genocidal Russophobe to walk the earth, the limits of absurdity stretch still further. Since he resolutely opposes the Western oligarchy mastering Russia and all of Eurasia, a dream shared by a certain twentieth-century Reichskanzler, Putin is by some wonder of logic akin to Hitler. Here’s a helpful checklist to demonstrate the similarities:

• Stands against international capital stripping the people of their national wealth. What is this guy, a Nazi?
• Asserts traditional identity of Russia and native cultures within Russia; supports pro-natal policies and strengthening the role of the Orthodox Church in society. Well, that sounds just like something Hitler would do.
• Upholds the stabilizing role of Russia as a sovereign Eurasian power with its own natural sphere of interests. Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.

A strange reality comes into focus amidst endless inane Hitler rhetoric deployed in the service of universal conquest: more than any other deity in its pantheon, the liberal order needs Hitler for its continued existence. Leave aside the fact that Anglo-American financial elites underwrote the Führer’s rise to power, or the inconvenient story of Project Paperclip. Even if only for a moment, look past ongoing US sponsorship of Ukraine’s neo-fascists, the direct heirs to the 14th Waffen-SS Division Galizien, who have been pulverizing Donetsk and Lugansk with artillery to fulfill IMF loan conditions and clear the Russian east for shale drilling by Exxon-Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell. Beyond all this, Hitler is secretly the Postmodern Imperium’s most valued ally, a dark totem wielded to exact psychological compliance from the nations of the West both in aggression abroad and in their very own dissolution.

In decadent madness the Pax Americana seeks to subjugate Russia, yet its advance is the same rush toward ignominy of Napoleon’s Grande Armée or Hitler’s fearsome Wehrmacht. Atlanticist elites dread not only Russian power, but the liberating potential of an ancient Russian ideal articulated by legendary thinkers like Fyodor Dostoevsky: traditional faith instead of sectarian extremism or materialist fanaticism; national and ethnic solidarity instead of either toxic chauvinism or corrosive cosmopolitanism; and a just sovereignty instead of our pleasure-dome police state. Rediscovery of these principles can move entire peoples toward nobility and sanctity, affording them true freedom and a fighting chance to crush the cult of Mammon.

How did the West’s centuries-long journey from the Christian faith rooted in the tradition of the Church slide into atheism and outright theomachy, the war against God? In my twenties, I was completely invested in the fortified religio-philosophical system known as Thomism. Catholicism was an unassailable castle of argumentation that was impervious to any skeptical challenger that might bombard the system with (what I assumed were) futile attacks. I recall reading that  in his dissertation on Aquinas’ aesthetics, Umberto Eco commented that he, too, was once an ardent Thomist until he came to the conclusion that the system just didn’t work. At that time, I couldn’t understand why anyone would come to that conclusion. How could something so vast and, as my friend James Kelley said, “elegant,” be fundamentally flawed? That was some ten years or so ago, and in that span of time, Thomism was completely dismantled.

Furthermore, the Thomistic schema is precisely what led to the Enlightenment and the subsequent deism and atheism of the West.  We are examining neither Augustine’s nor Aquinas’ motivations or psychology, nor Calvin’s for that matter.  What’s in question is the actual published position of Aquinas (and Augustine by extension) in terms of whether it exercised an instrumental influence on the Enlightenment and the trek Western philosophy took into modernism and the endless word-sludge we see in philosophy today. It is my contention that this is correct: the lesser known Eastern critique is right in making the strong claim that Thomism is a pivotal step in the Western trek from what might be termed a revelational epistemology to Enlightenment empiricism, scientism, deism and atheism.

We’re assuming knowledge of Thomism on the part of the reader, too, since those interested in an abundance of footnotes and citations can easily search our archives for numerous articles full of citations. It is here that we’ll directly address the system’s golden chain of internal “Dumb Ox” logic. This also doesn’t mean that I think the Eastern view is itself free from all problems or difficulties, but rather that it provides a strong enough critique that I doubt I would ever be reconciled to Thomism again, just as I would never be brought back to Protestantism. Indeed, it is quite evident to me (and has been for the last several years unchallenged) that Thomism, for whatever good points might be salvaged from it, is so fundamentally flawed that it actually propelled the West down its spiraling path of dissolution.

The key issue to investigate in order to understand this problem in Thomism is God’s relation to, and action in, the world.  Aquinas starts with the assumption of divine simplicity meaning that God is what God has, and God is what God does.  God is actus purus, or pure act, with no potentiality.  His essence is utterly simple, such that anything predicated of God is only distinguished logically.  That means the distinctions made between attributes are only distinctions suited to human finite cognition, and not actual distinctions in reality.  Thus, God’s act of creating might be distinguished from His justice or foreknowledge in the human mind, but in actuality, those acts, attributes and predicates are strictly identical to the divine essence, or ousia, in reality.  This is a fundamental law in Thomism, as well as in Augustine, and should be without question to those who are studied Thomists.  This is abundantly clear in both Summas, as well as in other works like De Veritate.

How, then, does a Being so constituted operate in a world of flux and temporality?  Aquinas’ answer is dominated by the idea of the analogia entis: we know God by His created effects in the world.  This is why causality plays such a large role in his theology.  God is not only the First Cause, following Aristotle, but also the providential sovereign over history and temporal causality within history, too.  God’s foreknowledge is His justice and love, and all history is in the process of its summation in the grand telos of all things returning to their source, the First Cause, in the beatific vision of eternity where his renewed rational creation will see all things in that singular, supremely simple divine essence.  That is an accurate, general statement about the totality of the Thomistic system, but what emerges is a serious problem: how does a deity so defined actually act in this world?

For Augustine, Thomas’ chief theological mentor, God acted through created effects such that even the apparently direct actions were still created effects.  Or, to be more accurate, created special effects: in De Trinitate, Augustine stipulated that the manifestations of the Angel of the Lord could only have been temporary angelic holograms.  They could not have been the Logos (despite what other patristic writers had said).  This conclusion was reached because it was impossible for the divine to manifest directly in time and space, since that would mean God was no longer simple.  Any being located in a certain place at a certain time was a being composed or parts, and therefore not absolutely simple.  For Aquinas this law holds as well, inasmuch as the analogia entis is a central component of his superstructure: God is only known by analogy to created things because we have no access to the divine ousia in this life.  God grants illumination, to be sure, but those gifts He gives are still a created effect of supernatural grace.  Knowledge of God and participation in divine life are theologically precluded from any direct divine experience until the beatific vision.  That is not to say that God can’t speak to men or convey blessings, but these are still, for us, created effects.

To be fair to Aquinas and Augustine, they do speak of “divine life,” “deification,” etc., but how this is possible in both theologians is often very hairy.  Sometimes it sounds as if believers are participating in the divine essence, and other times the impossibility of such an idea precludes them from really making sense.  The Roman divisions of grace into all the “categories” like prevenient, sanctifying, supernatural, etc., are often marshaled as explanations, but none of these serve to answer the problem at hand: how do we participate in this divine life if there is no access to the divine ousia in this life?  Indeed, when Christ was resurrected in classical Christian theology, what was the divine light shown radiating from Him?  The answer of the East is quite different from the answer of the West.  For the West, the light is a created effect, while for the East, it is the divine energy itself.  The question of Tabor really serves to solidify these two positions, since the question of the “deification” of the flesh of Christ is the same issue as the deification of the believer.

Likewise, for Aquinas, revelation of God can only be had through created effects because of his empirical approach to theology.   Since he accepts the basically Aristotelian approach to the human psyche, man’s knowledge, even of God, comes through sense experience.  Since the human mind, even in obtaining of natural knowledge, does so by abstracting a universal concept from the phantasm presented to the mind through sense experience, the same problem as above arises for epistemology due to where Thomas locates the universal.  Universal concepts are located in the divine Mind, which, as you can now see, is also the divine essence.  In classical and medieval philosophy, this is called exemplarism.  It means that the ideas behind things, often functioning as the essence of a thing, are ultimately contained in the Mind of God.

For Aquinas and Augustine, exemplarism is true, and the exemplars, or forms of things, are located in God.  Thus, for Aquinas, even the knowledge men have naturally is had through empirical experience that ultimately draws upon a universal concept located in God.  But a dilemma emerges: how is the human mind supposed to abstract the universal in its little mirror in the human mind, when it has no access to the divine directly?  The only way this can work is if there is some bridge between the phantasm and the actual concept in the divine Mind.  But even if it’s said to be a faint mirror of the “real” concept in the divine mind, it wouldn’t matter, since the definition of divine simplicity has already precluded distinctions in the divine Mind (because it is the divine essence).   In other words, the problem is moved back a step, since no mind in this life has access to the beatific vision. For Thomas’ scheme to work, he needs access in this life to the divine directly in some form or fashion.  But remember: his working definition of simplicity absolutely precludes such a direct, revelational experience of divinity itself. All that can be known of God in this life are His created effects in the world which in a faint way are supposed to show us some analogy of His essence. This is also why Maximos the Confessor identifies the logoi (his version of exemplars) as divine energies, not the divine essence.

Where’s the energy in this place? Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government.

Another problem this view has is that the analogia entis sets up God as somehow operating on a continuum of being where, because Aquinas interprets ‘I Am that I Am” as oddly meaning “I am Pure Being,” that therefore God’s being is like all other being. This is the basis of the analogia entis, wherein the assumption is made that things “be,” and God “bes,” so there is some kind of faint analogy of “being” that can be grasped between created being and divine being. However, the same pesky problem emerges again with the question of absolute divine simplicity. How can there be any similarity in the “being” of created, temporal being and uncreated, eternal “being”?  There is no similarity at all.

Indeed, apophatic theology, which Aquinas professes to hold to, dictates that the infinite and uncreated is only understood by negation – by what it is not.  “But wait,” you might retort, “that means we cannot know God, since there is no analogical predication. Aquinas rejects univocal and equivocal predication of God, opting for analogical predication. See, it’s the happy medium!”  Mr. Thomist, you’ve missed the point.  Aquinas has not solved his dilemma, but compounded it, by making the divine essence somehow analogical to created being (which is idolatry).  It’s the divine energy that is known, not God’s essence.  The divine essence is utterly impossible to know or fathom, precisely because the created mind will always be finite. No man or angel could ever take on omniscience or omnipresence or omnipotence.

So what presents itself is a two-fold path Thomism can take with all these working assumptions.  It can 1) say that the divine is confined to its realm, only interacting in this world through created effects and created grace and various created causes, but this path would mean the fundamentals of Christianity are no longer possible.  The divine Person of Christ could not really deify flesh, the sacraments are just conduits of more “created grace,” and  human knowledge this life is never really a divine illumination, or 2) it can make the divine essence become something to be shared in by created being, in which case pantheism would ensue.  Either path is a dead-end, and either path is necessitated because of the rejection of the essence/energy distinction and the inflexible, rigid Neo-platonic definition of what simplicity is.  I want to stress that it is the same problem throughout these examples because it’s constantly the question of how to relate Thomas’ idea of an absolutely simple being of Pure Act to a created world of flux and time.

Once this framework is grasped, it now becomes clear how this might lead to Enlightenment skepticism, deism, rationalism, and atheism.  If all that is ever known of God are created effects in this life, or if God is placed on a continuum of “being” where the divine essence is likened to created being, then it makes no sense to believe in this God, especially when the starting point for theology is empirical.  How could empirical sense-data ever give any “evidence” for a being that, even according to Thomas’ definition of divine simplicity, bears no real relation to created being?  The absolutely simple divine essence itself has no cause, and is not itself caused or a cause, so what use is the analogia entis in saying it’s a “First Cause”?  It’s a meaningless phrase, as it tells us nothing and still never bridges the impenetrable gap of Thomistic simplicity.  What use is it to say that human knowledge is grounded in the untouchable exemplar in the divine essence?  Again, it’s worthless and tells us nothing – indeed, it’s impossible on this systems’ own grounds!  Those who have read Palamas’ argumentation with Barlaam the Calabrian will immediately be familiar with the similarities of argumentation.  In fact, it is precisely these points that Palamas makes to Barlaam that lead him to prophetically conclude that the track of the person who adopted this would be atheism, logically carried out.  Regardless of one’s view of Eastern theology, Palamas was prescient when it came to where Western theology would go.

The path to Enlightenment skepticism, deism, rationalism and scientism proceeds directly from the empirical theology that even preceded Aquinas in thinkers like Abelard and was contemporary with Aquinas in people like Ockham.  Though Thomas was not a nominalist, he accepted the same epistemic starting point of the nominalists, namely, empiricism, and empirical based theology, that, again, derives from the analogia entis.  Nominalism is absurd, and certainly worse than Aquinas in many respects, but insofar as the two systems of thought shared the same empirical starting point, they were more consistent.  If God is banished from being directly present in the world through His immanent energies, all that is left is a material world of causation presided over by an unknown deity locked within itself.  That position is deism, and deism quickly leads to atheism.  If sense-data is the only source of human knowledge, and sense-data is therefore the source of knowledge of God, none of these created causal effects amounts to real knowledge of the divine itself.  The divine is never accessed or experienced at all, but rather just a series of created causes. That, my readers, is the view of David Hume – and it is how Thomism leads to Enlightenment atheism.

*For further reading, I recommend Dr. Sherrard’s criticism along the lines above of Teilhard de Chardin - another shining example of the end result of empirical Roman theology.

Read all Jay Dyer’s work on philosophy, science, geopolitics, conspiracies, and culture at Jay’s Analysis.

The profound Russian thinker and founder of the Slavophile movement Aleksey Stepanovich Khomyakov (1804-1860) continues his survey of how Europe’s peoples developed their civilizations in the early Middle Ages. His analysis of the religious, ethnic, and cultural roots of the struggle between East and West is just as relevant to events today as at the time of its writing. Translated by Mark Hackard.

Read Part I.

The Slavic land of the Getae and Dacians on the banks of the Danube received a new name with a new influx of kinsmen moving together with the Huns from the banks of the Volga – the Bulgars. Vengeance for the oppression of the Danube basin’s original inhabitants by the Romans at the time of their dominion, the new movement given by the Huns to the entire Slavic world, and finally the indisputable admixture of Turkic elements in the Bulgar tribe forced it to enter into fields of conquest wholly alien to the Slavs. Pitilessly the Bulgars attacked the Eastern Empire, which only just barely withstood their onslaught.

During the time of this doubtful struggle, there came forth from the foothills of the Caucasus westward a nomadic horde of warlike Avars, equally foreign to the Germans and the Slavs. They threatened the Slavs with war while simultaneously offering their force of arms as protection against neighbors. The weakest clans and those less accustomed to combat accepted the offer. The stronger and more warlike Antes and Bulgars were defeated and coerced into an alliance against their will. The uninvited protectors soon turned the Slavs into instruments of their conquests. Once-peaceful tribes fell upon a weakened Byzantium like an unstoppable current. From the Adriatic to the Aegean Sea, from the Danube to the southern tip of the old Greece disappeared villages and cities, the people and the monuments of the ancient nation.

The Empire was perishing. She was first defended by the Avars themselves, who did not allow the Slavs to finish a conquest which would place them in dependency upon their false allies; but she was finally saved by other Slavic tribes, the Serbs and the Croats, who had been invited by Heraclius into the Danube’s wastelands. The enslavement of the deceived and oppressed Slavs continued around a century. The violence of the Avars and their brazen violation of the conditions of alliance exhausted the patience of the Carpathian clans, and a general revolt of the subjugated out an end to Avar power – the people that had stormed all southern and middle Europe disappeared almost without a trace.

Again arose the power of the Bulgars in the form of a state that was already stable and ready to accept the grace-filled principle of enlightenment. The waves of the raging sea subsided. And the Slavs, the conquerors of ancient Hellas, soon fell away from the warlike ways given to them from without and returned to the pacific existence of their ancestors. They gave new names to the rivers and mountain ranges, and they called the old Peloponnese their seaside (Morea); but soon, taken with the Hellenic culture and illuminated by the light of its gentle faith, they adopted both the language and customs of the conquered nation. History points to the Slav in the Moreot; the modern world sees in him the Hellene.

Saints and brothers: Cyril and Methodius.

After long and bloody feuds, there came a time of peace and alliance between the Slav and the Byzantine. From the walls of Byzantium, from mountain monasteries, and from small Slavic tribes that already adopted Christianity, there set forth gentle conquerors armed with the good news of faith. With joyous submission they were accepted in the free communes of the Slavic world. From house to house and region to region, eastward, westward, and to the Far North went the preaching of the Gospel, triumphing in the spirit of love and speaking the language of the people. Bulgars and Croats, Czechs, Moravians, and Poles all joined one brotherhood of the Church. The limitless newly-born Rus, still connected only by the conditional union of sole authority in the prince’s war-band, received in the unity of faith a seed of vital unity expressed through the name of Holy Rus.

The Western patriarchate, having already broken away from universal equality, did not want to concede to Orthodoxy the latter’s new and expansive gains. Missionaries sent by Rome entered into competition with the preachers sent unto their feats at the inner behest of a warm faith and spiritual love. The difference in confessions was unnoticeable for the newly-converted Christians, and Western doctrine little by little was installed in the Orthodox sphere. The Western clergy, following their longtime policy, chose new inroads for their activity. And meanwhile, as Orthodoxy addressed the tillers of the earth, Catholicism entered through the wealthy courts of landowners and princes of clans, promising not only spiritual rewards, but also the strengthening of worldly power. Orthodoxy organically created Christian communities, leaving the election of a bishop as the last wreath for already completed communities; Catholicism sent a missionary-bishop as a conqueror summoning a regiment of proselytes.

In such a way, together with the Western confession there also crept in seduction by the Western aristocratic element that easily tempted national rulers in Western Slavic communities. The Czech lands, Moravia, and the less purely Slavic Poles were subordinated to the Roman court, having forgotten their first teachers, men who would neither gratify the pride of human passions nor promise any rewards besides those of heaven. Rome distorted the spiritual principle; Germany distorted the communal. Fortunately, the temptations of the West did not penetrate into Russia, Serbia, and Bulgaria, regions far from the Germanic world, and they weakly affected the mountain tribes in the Illyrian and Croatian lands. As a result, a part of these areas was torn away from the Orthodox Church by the unheard-of violence of the Latin Crusaders, the stories of whose cruelties are barely believable.

In the South the tribe of the Serbs gained ascendancy over the Bulgarians and consequently founded a strong state that would lose its independence under the Turkish advance, but maintain its vital elements and the security of its future development.

To the north of Serbia, the rich plains along the Danube and the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains went under the dominion of the Finno-Turkic tribe of the Magyars, and the ancient native Slavs were deprived of their sovereignty. But even still, like the Serbs, they lost neither their national character nor their rights to communion with the Slavic world.

Moving further along, the Czech lands and Moravia, intermittently fusing into a unitary state system or dividing again, continued for several centuries running an obstinate, and not inglorious, but vain struggle against the assault of the German world and the most ruinous inroads of their kinsmen the Poles. There is no doubt that the mighty state of Svyatopolk of Moravia could have easily withstood the disjointed exertions of a Holy Roman Empire forever prey to internal conflicts: the fall of the Czech lands and Moravia depended not upon the power of foreign enemies, but upon the inner distortion of society itself, which had at one time accepted the alien element of German aristocracy and a Western spiritual doctrine that subordinated faith to the rationalism of the Roman world and the church to the structure of the princely retinue and all the passions of the Germanic world. Svyatopolk’s kingdom vanished in the system of German states; but even before its final collapse, through the principle of spiritual reform personified by Huss and the aspiration to return to the bosom of Orthodoxy, it dealt a grave blow to the Roman court that had once repressed the original development of the Czechs and Moravians.

The Prince’s Druzhina, by Vitaly Grafov

Still further, the warlike tribe of the Lechites [Poles], more than others assuming the admixture of foreign elements (Celtic and Sarmatian) and therewith the character of aristocratic war-bands, fell fully under the influence of the Roman clergy and consequently the Western world, from which it received its one-sided direction. Not unwillingly and not resulting from violence, Poland agreed to join Germany and degrade itself to the state of a vassal, being made the instrument of Roman and German lust for power – but according to the internal sympathies of the upper classes, who had long been ashamed of the Slavic name and took pride in the title of Sarmatian conquerors.

Catholicism, alien to the remaining Slavic tribes, found in Poland, or it is better to say in its governing military elites, fervent and simultaneously deceived upholders. Beyond all that, Poland’s false and un-Slavic tendency depended not so much upon the native tribe of the Lechites as upon foreign elements that mastered them. It decided the historical destiny of Poland, but it itself must disappear therein inasmuch as the true national and Slavic character strengthens, just as, despite an age-old struggle, the Saxon element is gaining the upper hand against the Norman oppressor. The dominance of the Romano-German element in Poland decided the fate of her northwestern neighbors.

In the 10th century, the Germanic world, triumphing throughout West except the on the Iberian Peninsula, began to advance in force upon the Slavs of the Elbe Basin. A distorted Christianity, disguising its self-interest with obliging hypocrisy, raised the banner of the cross before conquering bands of warriors. The Church, washed in the blood of the martyrs and founded on their bones, took up the sword of the Roman Caesars. The Slavs, martyrs for their motherland and freedom, came to hate Christianity; they could not know it in a church that had forgotten its holy beginnings. A blind and fierce struggle commenced on the Elbe between the worlds of the Slavs from the East and the Teutons from the West.

At first victorious by their experience in battle and then vanquished by the power of a mighty tribe standing for truth and the liberty of their race, Germany under Henry II awaited its fall with trembling. The Baltic Wends coalesced into a strong alliance. The Czechs called upon their brothers for a final fight with the Teutonic oppressors. And then Poland, having forgotten her duties to her kinsmen and at that time engrossed with the ambitions of her rulers and the even greater ambitions of the Roman clergy, gave over her military strength to the service of the Germans, having reserved herself the right only to destroy her brothers. The Empire accepted the proposed conditions, and the Western Slavs perished. The community that betrayed a fraternal alliance and twice saved Germany, first from the Slavs and then from the Turks, reaped in consequence the fruits of its false tendency and its treachery, but the Wendish coast and the clans of the Elbe were lost and never to return.

It may be that by not blessing the exploits of the Wendish land, Providence saved the Slavic element from perversion. Conquerors of the Germanic sphere, Slavs, would have repeated in the history of our world those very same phenomena that accompanied the triumph of the Teutons over Rome, and would have distorted within them the human principle.

Long suffering but finally saved in fateful struggle, more or less in all its communities corrupted by foreign admixture but nowhere branded with the mark of transgression and unrighteous gain, the Slavic world maintains for humanity if not the germ of renewal, then its possibility.

In his classic novel 1984, the 20th century British writer George Orwell depicted a repressive, single-party state that sought to justify and expand its total domination through perpetual war against distant foes, employing the tactic of rallying the masses “around the flag.” It was never entirely clear why the wars were happening, and the identities of allies and enemies were switched back and forth according to the situational requirements of the Party. Moreover, it was entirely unclear how real the war was beyond the official state propaganda.

While his dystopia was supposedly fiction, Orwell was documenting essential practices among the ruling elites of modern nation states. And although the book is not intended as a manual, one could rightfully suspect America’s foreign policy elites of using 1984 in just such a way, particularly in relation to the Middle East.

Last week President Barack Obama announced a “strategy” to counter the establishment and expansion of the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in parts of Iraq and Syria. This news had been preceded by several weeks of media hysteria, which insisted that the Islamic militants of ISIS were going to set off bombs in major American cities. ISIS by this time had already gained notoriety for its vicious massacres of Christians, Yazidis, and Iraqi policemen. The appearance of dubious videos allegedly showing the beheading of two American journalists was the final nail in the coffin needed to mobilize enough popular outrage to urge Obama to “take action” against ISIS.

Lost in all the war hype, and perhaps quite deliberately, was any serious discussion of the terror group’s origin. Instead, we were left to assume that ISIS spontaneously emerged from the dusty deserts of Mesopotamia, much like Athena springing from the head of Zeus. In actuality America’s newest terrorist bogeyman was armed, trained, and funded through the combined efforts of Gulf Arab states and the CIA, just as Al-Qaeda is the outgrowth of a decades-long US covert action program to control Eurasia and its energy pipelines.

That ISIS is the direct product of America’s ongoing efforts to destabilize and ultimately oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by arming various militant Muslim factions is left unacknowledged by the American war party. Indeed, oddly enough, Obama’s strategy seeks to continue this policy of arming and empowering the rebels in Syria, provided they claim they are “moderate.”

Of course, the White House’s entire strategy leaves us to wonder if there will be any real confrontation at all. The noble, liberty-loving rebel factions that he seeks to further arm have declared a truce with ISIS and insisted they will not fight their more infamous counterparts. America’s other major Muslim ally, Turkey, refuses use of its territory to stage an air campaign against ISIS. Indeed, Obama’s response consists of little more than piecemeal airstrikes for TV news and more vacuous rhetoric.

The driving element of this phony crusade is the continuing push to topple Assad and take Damascus. One would think that if the US was actually serious about ending the “threat” on ISIS they would want to come to terms with Assad, but Obama insists he will not cooperate with the Syrian leader. Others go even further, with Zionist-backed Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham seeing in ISIS an opportunity to strike their desired target, Assad himself, thereby facilitating a “moderate” jihadist takeover of Syria and the doubtless slaughter of ever more Christians, Alawites and other minorities.

Obama’s “war” against ISIS is yet another case of what the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard identified as simulacrum, a copy without an original in the grand tradition of Disneyland.  In the same way, Orwell observed that it did not matter if the war was real or if it was not. The war itself might, objectively speaking, not even exist; all that mattered is that the masses believed it did and derived some sort of emotional comfort and distraction from this perception. With ISIS and imbecilic pop stars alternately featuring as the lead topics of the news cycle, we are already submerged in the hyperreality described by Baudrillard.

More will undoubtedly die in the Brave New War, especially if (or more likely when) Obama and the neocons launch an air campaign against Syria. But even this is merely a side show. Bashar al-Assad currently fills an assigned role previously held by other international luminaries, from Saddam Hussein to Slobodan Milosevic to Osama bin Laden to Mohamar Gaddafi. The music changes, but the song remains the same, and so another dastardly neo-Hitlerian dictator/terrorist must be stopped to save our McCivilization.

Though not necessarily physical victims of the simulacrum war, the greatest spiritual victims of the elites’ manufactured “reality” are Americans themselves, the ultimate test subjects of a dark experiment upon the collective psyche. Their existence and “way of life” are ever in need of foreign conflicts and enemies to justify consumption as identity and resulting spiritual impoverishment. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s great testament to the West, “Live Not By Lies,” is ignored at great peril. A decadent and self-satisfied people would rather be lied into aggressive war than face harsh realities: that they are willfully relinquishing their freedom and passively accepting enslavement.

The White émigré Ivan Solonevich (1891-1953), author of Popular Monarchy, saw firsthand how the “moderate” ideology of liberalism led to national collapse, revolution and tyranny in Russia in the aftermath of the First World War. An agent of the White underground and Soviet prison camp escapee, Solonevich knew monarchical sovereignty as the force that upheld the faith and culture of his fatherland and protected it through centuries of war. Translated by Mark Hackard.

Humanity met the great holiday of the twentieth century’s onset in a state of optimistic jubilation. By the middle of this century, it became clear that Europe’s program of conquest was significantly worse than the corresponding plans of the Mongols in the thirteenth. The Mongols came simply to pillage, while enlightened Europe set an agenda to physically enslave half Russia’s population and physical destroy her other half. It seems that precisely this is called the political and moral progress achieved in practice through the ages-long efforts of various Descartes and Kants.

The experience of the first half of the twentieth century, just as the experience of those previous, proved with utter clarity the incapability of democracies for fighting, or at very least that the democratic state was totally unadaptable to resolving questions of war and peace. Questions of war and peace in our Russian case are questions of life or death. For if European wars meant the struggle for some “succession,” or the political hegemony of the Hapsburgs, Bourbons, Hohenzollerns or Wittelsbachs, then we will repeat again – the wars we waged were basically wars to the death, moreover in the twentieth century taking an even more acute form than those of the thirteenth.

Making use of her geographical inaccessibility, Great Britain, Europe’s classic democracy, conducted its wars almost exclusively through mercenary forces. Those “Englishmen” who waged war for England on the Crimean Peninsula were in significant part recruited in Hamburg. France, having become a republic, utilizes her Foreign Legion, the most combat-capable formation of the “French” army. Sikhs and Gurkhas, Moroccans and Sub-Saharan Africans were the “cannon fodder” that democratic capital could – through various means – buy up in all parts of the world. In Russia we have never known hired armies, and we have no purchased cannon fodder of our own.

In the First World War, the two individual forms of rule – the German and Russian monarchies – in various conditions and on various premises, bled themselves dry, and it only remained for the democracies to finish off the vanquished. In the Second World War, two other forms of personal rule, Hitler’s dictatorship and Stalin’s, decided the outcome of the war. The “second front” was artificially delayed until that moment when the Wehrmacht already no longer had even rounds for its rifles. Both wars were won by two different but nonetheless authoritarian regimes. The Czech democracy surrendered without a shot fired. French democracy ran away after several shots, and the more minor democracies hardly fought at all. The one battle-worthy exception proved the Grand Duchy of Finland, under the command of the Russian general Carl Mannerheim. Aside from that, the Soviet-Finnish War was essentially only a part of our Civil War that began on Finnish territory in 1918 and hadn’t yet ended in 1939-40.

For the peaceful development of the country, Kerensky’s democracy was incomparably better than Stalin’s dictatorship. But Kerensky would have lost World War II just as he lost the campaign of 1917. At the time of the US economy’s “mobilization” for the needs of the future war, New York governor Dewey demanded himself appointed America’s “economics czar.” At that very moment Truman announced to the Senate and Congress that in the case of necessity he could do without them for further appropriations and address the American people. From that we can conclude that according to the notions of the president of the United States, neither the Senate nor the Congress represent the will of the nation.

Speaking for ourselves, we cannot adopt the US political mechanism (“the political machine”) without committing guaranteed national suicide. Independent of whether this machine is good or bad in itself, we cannot allow for such inflexibility, such sluggishness, such monstrous political mistakes, and such time for disputes, reflections, decisions and their deferment. All eleven centuries of our history, we were either in a state of war or on the threshold of war. There is no basis to think that in the future this will be otherwise. And we could lay our heads on the stenographic records of a future League of Nations and drift into what would already be our last slumber.

A strong and firm authority is necessary. This may be monarchy or dictatorship – power by the grace of God, or at His sufferance.

If there is one common theme to be found among the great minds of the East from the 19^th and 20th centuries – men such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolay Danilevsky, Konstantin Leontiev, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Ivan Ilyin, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as like-minded contemporary greats from the West like Edmund Burke, Joseph De Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortes, Oswald Spengler and Julius Evola – it is the quest to salvage essential meaning and purpose for man’s existence. In critically investigating matters associated with the great social and political upheavals in the post Enlightenment/Early Modern era, these thinkers placed themselves by definition at odds with most of the prevailing social trends of their time. So far ahead were they in both depth and rigor of analysis, we rightly regard them even today as contemporaries, as visionaries with powerful imagination and proven ability to peer into the future. It is therefore natural for the believer in an eternal Tradition, despite all particular modes and circumstances of life which may surround him at any one period of known time, to hold steadfast to the enduring wisdom and guidance these men of depth can provide.

Let us place this assertion into perspective: Exactly one hundred years ago, what was essentially pivot of power of all known human civilization – a Europe of empires and colonies – erupted, contrary to all expectations of ordinary people throughout the Continent at the time, into fratricidal war of titanic scale. The diligent historian evidently knew more than the everyday citizen, though even he could not pinpoint exactly what triggered a chain reaction to change the entire course of known history. In any case, this disaster was wholly contradictory to the very fiber of imperial order so entrenched right up to the eve of the conflict, with practically every known European monarchy at the time in actual familial relations with one another via individual members of their respective households. Three of the greatest known monarchs of the time – Nicholas II of Russia, Wilhelm II of Germany and George V of Great Britain – were all cousins. For this reason alone, Europe, cherished and esteemed the world over, should have endured much longer than it actually did. Instead, it suffered total collapse in four years of total war.

Nicholas II attends to his men in a field hospital. Painting by Pavel Ryzhenko.

Man cannot place a padlock on his destiny, however strong the iron he would weld to that purpose. And we must not take for granted what defies all common expectations, whatever the most widely held perception of reality might be in our age. This notion is shared among all who have their origins in what we once knew as Christian Europe. Paradoxically, all the carnage and turmoil of the Great War, acknowledged as a failure in itself, did not halt the advance of modern technology in fundamentally reshaping human society. Rather, the war propelled us into an altogether different existence, a state that has endured up to the present moment. Imagine, for example, that the Great War was by some freak occurrence halted as quickly and arbitrarily as it had begun, and that the old world would have continued to exist and to move at a steady, customary pace. Computers might not exist as we know them, car motors would be rare and unpopular, and railways would be highly developed and well-maintained. The utterly destructive and traumatic phenomenon of war can produce changes of extraordinary magnitude; the feverish race to obtain ever more effective weapons of killing and subduing the enemy can also in turn permanently transform the entire civilian landscape through technological development.

Here we must examine the factor of permanence – mysteriously it coincides with the opposing eventuality of uprooted expectations mentioned earlier. Tectonic change occurs quite suddenly, yet as soon it has taken shape a new “permanence” ensues, one differing wholesale from circumstances prior to the moment of transition. Going back is impossible, whatever lingering impulses or affinities remain in our present. Perhaps this is the main objective of the adherent of Tradition, to explain with both clarity and depth what is always essential in man and for man, to withstand and even command change, expected or otherwise. One cannot fail but to notice a manifest desire for change in a postmodern world seemingly starved of ideas and ruptured in values, yet in that very situation we also contend with a  myriad of conflicting desires regarding its nature and character. Some of those desires have already begun to yield results, even before a wholesale transformation has yet to capture the popular consciousness.

Just one visible case is the convergence of Muslim fundamentalist fighters from multiple countries onto Syria and Iraq. Each of these jihadists answered the same call, with the aid of power brokers in Washington, Europe, and the Gulf states, to wage holy war and shape the future of the world according to their principles. The results so far, needless to say, are an utter atrocity, a complete failure for one segment of humanity realize a just and peaceful society. Perhaps the biggest mistake of the mujahedin, apart from their woefully blind ignorance, is their utmost determination to return all life to the past – and not just any past, but one ruled by a particular tribe of people, along with the dominance of their language, customs and way of being, everything, to the last letter, if possible. And even if they were to manage to achieve every single one of their objectives, it is still not at all guaranteed that such a triumph would bring them contentment. Reversion to the life of another epoch is a fruitless endeavor, as it negates the value of all things intrinsically beneficial to man which have been achieved or invented in the years and centuries following the idealized era, not to mention the inability to hide the evidently unideal tendencies of that given time.

With a parallel nihilistic end, the Western liberal assault on the human essence through the propagation of homosexuality and the ultimate dissolution of gender, has evolved successively through a century’s worth of social engineering, particularly with regard to the forcible erosion of the family as society’s core unit for survival. Among both the jihadists and the equality warriors we find a misguided, irrational need to tailor our nature to preconceived modern notions of human existence and interaction rather than acknowledging the intrinsic characteristics and needs of humanity as a whole, timeless qualities not constricted by particular circumstances and lifestyles. Whatever its pretenses, modernity cannot herald the complete erasure of the past ad nihilo, but neither can it ever lead us back to a past already lived.

Tradition even in its socio-political aspect seeks to recapture the essence of man, fulfilling his transcendent purpose while providing assurance for homeland, family and identity. In its growing resistance to Western aggression, Russia more and more becomes the focal point of Traditional revival, seeking to restore the best elements of a monumental legacy. This is, of course, in Russia’s interest, but it would also benefit an altogether new generation of mankind – all in conjunction with preserving what is good from the present era, East and West, as a matter of historical continuity. The old pagan Rome crumbled but eventually found new life in Constantinople, the New Christian Rome. And so today the geographical pivot of human civilization is shifting decisively from the decaying Euro-Atlantic to a new and budding Eurasia, to the East once again. Revival through Tradition directs the way forward; Tradition is our future.

Popular Monarchy, the call for a traditional Russian state adapted to contemporary challenges, was an articulation of the ancient ideal of a just Christian realm by White emigre thinker Ivan Solonevich (1891-1953). Like the French counter-revolutionaries, Solonevich understood that an aristocracy diverted from its original purpose, valiant service, would only come to destroy the achievements of the nation. Knowing the terrible experience of the Revolution and its roots in the decadence, abuses, and godlessness of the elites, he points the way toward an organic unity of the people and their Tsar, called alike to glorify God on earth as in heaven. Translated by Mark Hackard.

Russian monarchical authority, beginning with the death of Peter the Great and ending with the overthrow of Emperor Nicholas II, was always in an extremely unstable position. This instability was caused by that objectively given political situation that Vasily Klyuchevsky characterized as the monarchy and masses’ drive to “democratic autocracy,” the monarchy’s technical reliance on the aristocratic element, and its own struggle with this element. However, the Muscovite monarchy, directly appealing to the “democratic” element – in particular the population of Moscow – succeeded in dealing with the country’s aristocratic circles. Precisely for this reason the capital was transferred to St. Petersburg and the throne isolated from the “masses.” The throne came to be at the disposal of the “palace guard.” And from the murder of Aleksei Petrovich; through the murder of Paul; the revolt of the Decembrists; the assassination of Alexander II; and the dethronement of Nicholas II, the Russian nobility attempted to halt the development of the Russian monarchy towards democratic autocracy. Not once did the Russian demos, the Russian people, ever rise up against the monarchy. The coup d’état of 1917 was the result of a palace conspiracy technically composed by the Russian military brass. In the February Revolution, our revolutionaries were decisively useless – not only had they not prepared this revolution, but they didn’t have any notion that it was drawing near.

The “palace coup” grew into a “revolution” only when the complete absence of any points of support whatsoever for the generals and aristocracy among the masses became clear, as well as the absence of any sort of popularity among the army and people. The men who organized this takeover thought they were “shining with their own light,” but this was only the reflected light of the monarchy. The monarchy was extinguished, and so were they.

March 13th, 1613: The Land Assembly of the people chooses Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov as Tsar.

From Peter the Great to Nicholas II, the Monarchy was deprived of that “system of institutions” of which Lev Tikhomirov spoke, and this system was replaced by a “barrier between the Tsar and the People.” The state assemblies [Dumas] of all four convocations were only one of the types of this division: they reflected the opinions of parties, but not of the Land.

In an environment where only One Man in the entire ruling class of the country – only the monarch and he alone – expressed through himself the basic aspirations of the popular masses, the idea of removing the monarch to change the course of history was politically too tempting. This enjoyed success in the murder of Tsarevich Aleksei Petrovich, an act that cleared the way for the serfdom of the peasantry. It was also a success with the killing of Tsar Paul, which delayed the liquidation of serfdom. The Decembrists did not succeed, but the assassins of the Tsar-Liberator did, by their murder interrupting Russia’s return to the principles of Muscovite Rus.

In Muscovite Rus, acts of regicide would have first of all been pointless, for the Tsar’s authority was only one of the components of a “system of institutions,” and they system could not be changed by the murder of one of its components. According to Aksakov: to the Tsar belonged the force of authority, and to the people the force of opinion. Or according to Lev Tikhomirov: monarchy derived “not from the arbitrary rule of one person, but from a system of institutions.” By the force of authority, the Muscovite Tsars realized the opinion of the Land. This opinion, organized into the Church, into ecclesiastical councils and Assemblies of the Land, and in its unorganized form represented by the population of Moscow, did not change over a regicide. Assemblies never claimed power (a completely incomprehensible phenomenon from the European point of view), and Tsars never went against the “opinion of the Land,” a phenomenon of a purely Russian order. Behind the monarchy stood an entire “system of institutions,” and all of this taken together presented itself as a monolith impossible to shatter through any regicide.

Therefore the Popular-Monarchist Movement sees in the “restoration of monarchy” not only the “restoration of the monarch,” but also a whole system of institutions from the Throne of All the Russias to the village assembly. It would be that system in which the force of authority belonged to the Tsar and the force of opinion to the people.  This cannot be achieved by any “written laws” or “constitution,” for both written laws and constitutions are followed by men only until that time when they gain the strength to NOT follow them. The Popular-Monarchist Movement is not engaged in publishing the laws of a future Russian Empire. It attempts to establish basic principles and ideationally compose the country’s future ruling class, which would be equally devoted to the Tsar and the people, a ruling class organized into a system of institutions to realize these principles in practice and truly become the bulwark of the throne, not visitors to prayer services who conceal in their boots the daggers of regicide.

The main problem of restoring a stable monarchy is found in the organization of this class. And because in internal struggles no class of the nation ever acts from purely altruistic motives, this class should be set in conditions under which its freedom of action would coincide with the real interests of the country, while attempts at overthrow would be punished in the legislative and judicial order with the most ruthless severity.

A system of monarchical institutions should begin from territorial and professional self-government (land councils, municipalities, trade unions) and end in central representation composed according to the same territorial and professional principle rather than by parties. The Russian monarchy can be restored only by the will of the people and nothing else. If this will shall be monarchical, then its local organs shall also be monarchical. The purely technical task consists of ensuring that no “barriers” arise – class, bureaucratic, party, or any others. The technical apparatus of the Petersburg monarchy was organized in a way glaringly unsatisfactory. It could not even manage tasks such as the personal protection of the Tsar. It left a yawing emptiness between the throne and the nation. Instead of a businesslike staff that was the retinue of the Muscovite Tsars, the Petersburg monarchy was surrounded by a “court” made up of idlers.

Tsar Nicholas II’s farewell to his Cossack bodyguard. By Pavel Ryzhenko.

In the terrible days of Pskov, Emperor Nicholas II came to be in absolute isolation, betrayed by his court, his generals, the Duma, the government – finding himself in the Pskov trap and having no physical possibility of addressing the people or the army. The restoration of this system would mean restoring the tradition of regicide and suicide.

The Russian monarchy of the Petersburg period tried to become popular, stable and of full value; it did not succeed. The forces of division removed or attempted to remove the best monarchs, just as they did with their best deputies (M.M. Speransky and P.A. Stolypin). Now this same group has ended its life in regicide and suicide. It represents a certain propaganda danger against the restoration of the monarchy, but after restoration it represents absolutely none. Instead of this, with a great degree of clarity, there appears before the future Russia the danger of bureaucracy.

The reality of this danger consists of the fact that today’s ruling class is in essence almost purely bureaucracy. In all ballots, both empire-wide and local, this class will vote for that party guaranteeing as great a quantity of “sinecures,” “services,” “posts,” and power. It will vote against any party relying on private and local initiative. And it will be a class that will manifest maximum political activity, just as this has already happened in emigration, for any functional property is daily bread for this class, and any attempt to affirm the rights of private initiative will be an attempt to take it away.

One favored slogan among American conservatives and libertarians is that “the answer to 1984 is 1776.” Yet the Enlightenment political ideals of liberty and equality constructed today’s pleasure-dome police state; 1776 led directly to 1984. Contemporary writer Fr. Yuri Pushchaev analyzes the classical liberal model of republicanism and why it brings about the ruin of souls and nations, while showing that outside this vicious dialectic and against it stands sacral monarchy. Translated by Mark Hackard.

The Gospel and Politics

It is spoken completely correctly that in the Gospel there is not a word regarding preference for one or another political regime. But is it correct to thence draw the conclusion that democracy, monarchy, a republic, etc. can all be bypassed in the context of the living water of the Gospel teaching and the Church –  as if there was simply nothing to discuss?

If this is so, then it seems that any political problems and institutions would have exactly zero meaning in the context of the main question: how do we save our souls? If no political form or regime can stop man from coming to God, then in principle what difference should it make, as a poet once said, what kind of millennium awaits us?

However, does this indifference from the Gospel not set a certain approach toward politics? After all, indifference is in matter of fact also an attitude, and it requires certain political conditions. Does it not prompt us in a paradoxical way to prefer a political regime in which there is the least amount of politics? That is, does it not advise us to choose such a social structure where there will be as little public-political life as possible?

No Politics without the Image of an Enemy

The word politics derives from the Ancient Greek word polis. The Greeks considered politics the concern with arranging the commons for all in the polis, the city-state. This moment of concern for the commons is reflected in the Latin name of the state, res publica, which word for word means the public, or popular, “thing.”

The political concern for the commons always has a shadow side, like the dark side of the moon. Such a concern seemingly should unite, though there is no politics without enemies. That is, politics not only unites, but also divides – into various parties and sides, including those who enter into deadly hostilities.

Among the ancient Greeks and according to the great Aristotle, the conception of “political friendship” occupied an important place in political theory. By his notion, the polis can exist only if the majority of citizens are united between each other through political friendship. However, in politics friendships are always directed against someone. It can’t be otherwise, for without enemies political friendship is meaningless. It turns out that worldly concern for the common good is in principle impossible without wars and lethal divisions.

A fellow priest I’m acquainted with gave an ingenious (in my view) definition of politics: it is the art of ordering relations between people in conditions when people have fallen and are radically corrupted. At the very essence of politics and its objectives lays radical corruption, since it is oriented toward a fallen world. And therefore we must not take politics as the highest meaning of human activity and life.

At the same time, the delegation of authority and the “professional” concern with political organization are a heavy cross. Political power is necessary for the good of men – simply so that there is order in society and not anarchy: “All power is from God.” (Romans 13:1) But the political path is composed of a multitude of temptations and dangers, and so Christians are called to render their rulers support in prayer. Beyond other matters, by their prayers they ask God to help politicians overcome temptation and that in their activity the radical corruption inherent to politics be minimized.

However, it is just this radical corruption of politics as such that prompts Christians to choose such a social-political structure in which there will be as little as possible of politics itself (the necessity of “the noble lie,” divisions into parties, enmity, etc.). And in comparison with monarchy, the republic is a much more political form of sovereign organization, whereby all citizens should be engaged in politics.

Republics Have No Need for God

In democracy and a republic, all citizens are called to politics, to participation in power. Democracy is the power of the people. The ideal of the republic is born from the aspiration that the people govern itself – through its representatives, as now, or in antiquity, through direct democracy.

The metaphysical underpinnings of this are what the well-known twentieth-century political philosopher Hannah Arendt called the drive of people from the masses, the lower classes, to also “come into their own,” signifying their existence and appearing to the world as a full participant. Here people already begin to be directed primarily not by the aspiration “to live a pacific and quiet life in every piety and purity,” but rather the desire to be noticed in the world, to enter stormy political life full of passions, anxieties, and temptation. Incidentally, the prominent nineteenth-century Swiss historian of culture and one of the founders of cultural research Jacob Burckhardt termed the polis the “chattiest” of all sovereign forms. What a sharp contrast this is to the aspiration to live a calm and quiet life!

And most centrally, as soon as the people establish or constitute a republic and comprehend that they now claim to govern themselves and their fate, religion then inevitably begins to play ever less a role in social and political life. This is logical – after all, in a republic the one source of authority is the will of the people, which as the final source already needs no religious sanction. The people themselves begin to occupy the highest place: vox populi, vox Dei. The Christian monarch, meanwhile, is the anointed of God, and “a man submits to the authority of the monarch not only from fear, but also from a conscience enjoined by God Himself.” Monarchy needs religion, and it naturally flows from the premises of a religious worldview.

The ongoing displacement of religion in Europe for over 200 years into the “private sphere,” where everyone can supposedly decide for himself which religion to hold, is not accidental. The state promises to uphold the rights of religion within the confines of personal space, but therein is a palpable deception. Historically, the republican form of sovereignty, secularization and the loss of influence by religion and the Church are tightly connected and mutually dependent processes that developed to their full potency in the modern age.

We could hope for the soundness and inviolability of personal religious convictions only under the condition that every man possessed the necessary inner strength – if he was on the whole not a fallen creature and could always confidently oppose any temptations. If, for example, the ideal of the wise stoic, able to withstand any external influences and inviolably maintain his inner world, was realistic rather than a philosophical fantasy.

Yet this is not so. The ordinary man cannot shut himself off from the world (the passions) and live in the “monastery of his own spirit.” Generally speaking, the fear of personal sin and distrust of oneself can be considered, as Konstantin Leontiev thought, as a necessary indicator of humility. “From those places serving you an opportunity to fall, run away as from a scourge, for when we do not see the forbidden fruit, then we do not desire it so strongly.” This ascetic rule speaks to the fact that it is best to prudently avoid such seductions from fear of them because “each man is a lie,” that is, he is inclined to self-gratification, weak, and easily given over to temptation.

The Democratic Republic as Freedom of Temptation

Therefore, yes, on the one hand, no political regime – and more broadly no external conditions altogether – can predetermine man’s freedom unto finality. But at the same time, they can exert a very strong influence and incline us toward a choice in one direction or another. And therefore, when religion is not supplanted in a dissembling manner to the private sphere only, when its position is strengthened by public authority as well, then more people may turn to faith and consequently be saved. We will risk to assert that under unfriendly social conditions (when man remains alone with his corrupted nature), very few are able to endure that pressure of temptation that overwhelms ordinary men in the situation of so-called liberty.

As an illustration we can recall Milos Forman’s famous film The People vs. Larry Flint. In the movie it’s clearly shown that contemporary democratic society and freedom of speech within it are impossible without freedom for erotica and pornography. The existence of a liberal democratic republic means permission not only for legal (brothels and prostitution have always existed under all political regimes) but also mass circulation of erotica and pornographic services by the media when this in one way or another affects every person. Therefore, whether we like it or not, we must arrive at the conclusion that under a republic and democracy, there will be more of those affected and those given over to this type of temptation than in a so-called unfree or authoritarian society.

Russia’s Residual Monarchism

Other things being equal, monarchy is more hospitable to the cultivation of humility in a man. The stratified society is a system of hierarchies of obedience. Here a person in principle is adapted and obligated to subordination, not claiming the prideful government over his own fate and an entire society in the name of the people and according to his own will.

Of course, if we are to speak of the modern world and contemporary Russia, then a more or less full monarchism today is simply impossible. Yes, Russia as previously is in fact neither a liberal nor a democratic country. For example, until this time people vote for the party in power, for those who already are authority. It is precisely a residual monarchist feeling maintained in Russia until this time that secures victory to the current party in power and preserves Russia overall, for she cannot be a liberal and democratic country. If liberal principles win out in practice and not just on paper in a written constitution, then the country would immediately disintegrate into various national formations and cease being united.

However, our poorly concealed monarchism of today, for obvious reasons, is residual and partial, distorted and corrupted. For true monarchism requires religious sanction, the consciousness of which now is for practical purposes totally absent in the ordinary man.

“Go fearlessly, Prince, and believe in God’s help.” St. Sergius of Radonezh in his blessing to Dmitry Donskoi

In entirety we are all likely too corrupted and incapable of humility both in the political sphere and the realm of the spirit. Yet if we will not recognize this inability within ourselves, then it is already a mortal sickness – when a man considers himself healthy and therefore seeks no treatment. As a result he dies from the disease he never even admitted to, one that would kill him off so quickly because it met no obstacles in its path.

Although no one knows, of course, how God will judge men. Will He be more lenient to those who were constantly in an environment of temptation, who had more cause to sin, and for whom therefore it had been so difficult not to fall and stand firm? But in any case, it would be more correct in my view that a Christian prefer such a form of rule or political organization under which the occasions for temptation and sin would be less.

In summation, we can logically present my basic thesis in such a way. When speaking about “a republic or the salvation of the soul,” I do not assert a strict “either – or,” that there is genuinely only one of two. These are intersecting multiplicities, meaning that salvation of the soul is also possible under a republic. In formal logic this is called a non-rigorous disjunction. Like the proposition, “either snow or rain,” it is not excluded that there is sometimes snow with rain, although more often than not it rains or snows separately. However, the whole meaning of my reflections is that in the case of a similar logical chain like “monarchy or the salvation of the soul,” the number of those saved will be greater. There are those saved outside of monarchy and many who perished under monarchy. But we nonetheless must take account of the following, despite fashionable modern tendencies: Monarchy (even more definitively, autocratic Christian monarchy) in comparison with a republic is more hospitable to religion and its main task – the salvation of man and his preparation for eternal life.

If you have been following the Western media line on Russia lately, you might believe that not only is the Kremlin plotting continental conquest, but that Russian policy is driven by a dark, irrational “paranoia” centuries in the making.

There’s a second round of the Cold War in production, and we’re all supposed to buy into the scare story that Vladimir Putin and his fellow KGB veterans have pounced on a courageous but hapless Ukraine yearning only for freedom, French fries, democracy and Disneyland. (Never mind that the US State Department openly installed the current regime in Kiev by way of a liberal-nationalist coup in February 2014.) Moreover, Putin was labelled a power-mad dictator for protecting the Russian-majority Crimea and facilitating its reunion with Russia by referendum this spring. In the following months, NATO furiously hyped Novorussia’s rebel movement as the prelude to an invasion that never materialized. What, then, is the real context behind Russian “aggression” and “paranoia?”

Washington would never dream of a naval base in Crimea. That’s just paranoid!

Seemingly so obvious as to be overlooked, the historical record provides prime insights as to why Moscow would be so distrustful of Western strategic designs. Geopolitical directives from the 160-year-old Crimean War (control of the Black Sea/Caucasus and access to the Eastern Mediterranean) remain roughly the same as today, a fact duly noted when Russian paratroopers and GRU spetsnaz units secured Sevastopol in March. Every hundred years or so for the whole modern era, a major Western power has seized upon the utterly crazy idea of attacking and conquering Russia. So let’s take a stroll down memory lane, century by century:

1. 17th Century – Poland: In the early seventeenth century, the mighty Rzeczpospolita of King Sigismund III exploited Muscovite Russia’s Time of Troubles and went so far as to occupy the cathedrals of the Kremlin until finally being expelled in 1612. Few of us have ever heard of the massacres and persecutions inflicted upon the Russian lands by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but the Russians themselves remember all too well.
2. 18th Century – Sweden: While now submerged in decadence, early eighteenth-century Sweden was the superpower of its day. Led by the swashbuckling Charles XII, the Swedes fought for dominance over the Baltic against Peter the Great and his men, who through a brutal and close-fought contest won Russia’s “window” to Europe.
3. 19th Century – France: In 1812 warlord extraordinaire Napoleon Bonaparte took the Grande Armée all the way to Moscow, expecting submission from a vanquished populace. Instead, Russian forces under Marshal Kutuzov would chase the Little Corporal all the way back to Paris.
4. 20th Century – Germany: The twentieth century, the age of total war, saw Germany invade Russia twice in massive campaigns of unparalleled ferocity. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa remains the largest-scale military action ever undertaken, one that cost 20 million Russian lives before Soviet soldiers ascended the Reichstag amidst the ruins of Berlin in May 1945.
5. 21st Century – USA/NATO: The Cold War policy of “containment” never ended – the United States and the NATO alliance it controls are actively pursuing a policy of destabilization along Russia’s periphery with an eye to dominating Eurasia and its hydrocarbon riches. Western oligarchic elites dream of somehow eliminating Russian-led resistance to their New World Order; thus, CIA-engineered color revolutions, covert wars using jihadist proxies and humanitarian bombing from the Balkans to the Hindu Kush are all par for the course.

Upon assuming responsibilities as the new Secretary-General of NATO, Atlanticist functionary Jens Stoltenberg declared that the alliance would continue projecting power “wherever it wants.” The Russians, doubtless, will beg to differ, as they are the inheritors of a strategic culture shaped by successive wars for national survival. Even if you are paranoid, someone out there still might be gunning for you.

Twentieth century German author and patriot Ernst Jünger once observed that we now “live in times in which war and peace are difficult to distinguish from one another.” (A lack of clarity extending to every aspect of modernity, not just matters of war and peace.) Jünger’s words ring true as ever, with Washington’s so-called war against the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) a perfect case in point. Despite the Obama Administration’s boasts that its operations against the noxious terrorist entity are succeeding, it is proving difficult for the outside observer to identify whether such a campaign is even taking place. Aside from a few bombed Toyotas and scattered reports of civilian causalities, there has not been any discernible assault on ISIS.

A non-existent war, a contrived media stunt against a contrived enemy; or to borrow from Jean Baudrillard, the war “is not really taking place.” ISIS would not even exist were it not for US incitement and support for the so-called Syrian rebellion. From the Maghreb and Levant to the Caucasus and Central Asia, America is ever eager to sponsor the same radical Islamic groups that attacked it hardly a decade ago as a chaos agent in the Eurasian Great Game.

With ISIS never a substantive issue in itself, globalist oligarchs and their corporate media sycophants have already shifted mass attention to other supposed outrages. The introduction of Ebola into the United States has consumed the imagination of both the media and public, even though the number of victims can be counted on a single hand from an over 300-million strong population. Meanwhile America’s borders remain wide open and flights from West Africa arrive in the country daily. Elite-promoted paranoia over Ebola, like the ISIS scam, serves to keep the masses chasing after virtual phantoms, oblivious to their state of degeneration.

Indeed, the sickness at the heart of the modern West is not Ebola, or any other media-fueled excuse for hysteria. Rather, the very soul of our culture is stricken with a deadly affliction reaching to the very essence of Western man. In ruthless pursuit of utopian technocracy and fanatically applying desacralized humanism, discarding spiritual transcendence at “the ash heap of history,” we have progressed down a dark road with only one end; our disease will be fatal without treatment.

The Serbian Orthodox Christian Fr. Justin Popovic understood the disastrous nature of Western humanism, which in its boundless pride declares man the measure of all things. As he foresaw, the glorification of man would descend into vampirism and anthropophagy, with mere self-preservation the highest value:

As there is neither God nor immortality, a man is allowed anything for the sake of self-preservation. Sin is permitted, as are evil and crime.

Ideologies are weapons; the ruling elites understand the consequences of humanism and act accordingly. They exploit the spiritual bankruptcy of the society they dominate through a combination of shallow amusements appealing to man’s basest desires and endless fears of terrorists, third world diseases, and other scarecrows conjured as needed. “Liberated” from traditional morality, they are free to deceive and enslave for the sake of raw power.

Thanks to technocratic social engineering, Occidental man has become what the Hungarian traditionalist philosopher Thomas Molnar, in his study of the utopian impulse, identified as the “transparent man,”

…whose vacuousness no longer presents obstacles to the scrutinizers and manipulators. In a way, man lives outside himself, as if he were all in surfaces, with no gravitational center…. [he] does not notice he has become their plaything, in truth their soulless accomplice.

We sadly note that Western man is a full participant in his manipulation and exploitation by parasitic elites. Willingly he has embraced spiritless humanism, this spiritual disease, and fallen from the divine path God appointed him.

Instead of allowing ourselves to be carried along with every wind of mass panic and fear generated by the corporate media and cynical, warmongering politicians, we should contemplate the very real sickness that rots the soul of society and civilization – and actively repent. It is not ISIS or Ebola that spell our doom.

In order to successfully navigate the raging seas of the media storm, one must be ever-mindful of the overall designs of mass media without getting lost in endless details and rabbit trails that will be forgotten in a month. Remember Bowe Bergdahl? The press furiously researched his back story to make details match up, all of which proved a futile effort. Remember the Malaysian planes? These recent reality-television news events come to mind because they are so illustrative of the present Ebola crisis, playing in all theaters 24/7 near you. Just as the details of the Bergdahl stories didn’t matter – he went right back to a military post – so Al-Ebola, our new minuscule terrorist organization, presents details that do not and will not match up. Al-Ebola will probably fixate the mass gaze until vaccination season ends, when a new lineup of all-stars for Team Fear are announced.

In usual form, we’ll analyze the emergence of the formation of the mass consciousness through mass media from its ritual and cultic connections, paying close attention to the pop symbology, but this time around, we shall consider ritual itself. Let us travel out of the media circus for a moment to the realm of liturgy, or communal ritual working. Comparative religion luminary Mircea Eliade sheds light on this primal art in the following section of his The Sacred and the Profane:

…[S]ince religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnated with the sacred, we must expect to find large number of techniques for consecrating space. As we saw, the sacred is preeminently the real, at once power, efficacy, the source of life and fecundity. The religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact his desire to take up abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in real and effective world, and not in an illusion…But we are not to suppose that human work is in question here, that it is through his efforts that man can consecrate a space. In reality the ritual by which he constructs a sacred space is efficacious in the measure in which it reproduces the work of the gods. (pg. 28)

Eliade is invoking the primal urge in man to consecrate sacred space – a space where the gods of old come to communicate meaning, morality and telos to mankind, where upon the high places, the heavenly realm of celestial intelligences might make a theophanic manifestation to shape earth into the form of the above, imposing order upon unruly chaos. Yet modern man is no longer superstitious, we are told, and with the dawn of the “Age of Reason,” he abandoned ritual and liturgy for the reasonably rational life of being an “informed citizen” of his Enlightened Democratic Republic, intimately involved in forming and shaping his local, social-contracted propositional government covenant. However, if we reflect a little further on Eliade’s comment, we begin to see that space age man is just as religious, if not more so, than ignorant, savage ancient man. The difference emerges as merely one of form and medium, not substance.

Is this a ritual or a music award show? Taylor Swift emerges from her Goddess Temple.

Most of us do not seek out the village shaman or hierophant for messages from the spirit realm, yet do we not daily gaze into our handheld magical mirrors and screens that transmit the messages of the priests, shamans and ascended media masters, with little opprobrium? The liturgical icon of old is now become the moving icon of the vivacious info-babe and the holy mothers of Channel 5 Monastery. From the towering cathedrals of the major films studios, CNN and Fox, the word of the gods issues forth to guide the supplicant masses with a bevy of tales on the lives of new patron civic saints and mythologies of Hollywood heroes who subsist in the realm of the unattainable forms.

Our new gods do not always issue messages of hope and salvation, unfortunately. Our devas are very much gods of wrath and vengeance, inflicting upon the mass psyche a continual barrage of spells and incantations geared toward confusion and hysteria. Just as the priest’s ritual dagger divides the sacrifice, so the priests of our day divide the psyche on the edge of the ritual athame, channeling endless streams of fear and destruction. As the sacrifice is cut in half and “doubled,” the mass psyche is divided into incoherent double-mind and double-think.

Rather than concern for the virus of media mythology and mind control, the populace is concerned about a few cases of so-called viral Ebola. Few are those concerned with the virus of programmed liturgical psychodrama by which their magical mirror screens enchant them as they are lulled under the voodoo spell of the zombie. It should never be forgotten that the zombie mythology arises from the shaman’s ability to drug the unlucky victim, causing the unwitting to become subject to the suggestions of the shaman’s new narrative – that he is under the shaman’s mind control. In this regard, the explosion of the zombie phenomenon the last decade is a manifestation of this divine revelation from our rulers on high – you are under the spell, under the thumb of the obeah, a doll for the media voodoo worker’s nefarious machinations. Shamanic Network, Inc.’s designs are not the mystical unknowns of a deus absconditus: the zombie is a parasitical entity that feeds on the living. The designs of the media papacy are to divide and slaughter your psyche, transforming you into a zombie who in turn divides and consumes his fellow man. Thus, the zombie is under the spell that death is life, that parasitism will grant power, that sex is death, when in reality zombies are death feeding their own death, the fullest blossoming of the covenant of death, which is self-destruction.

Voodoo Obeah Baron Samedi from Live and Let Die.

Eliade illustrates this well with an example from African comparative religion:

Among the Mandja and the Banda of Africa, there is a secret society named Ngakola. According to the myth told to the candidates during their initiation, Ngakola was a monster who had the power of swallowing men and then disgorging them renewed. The candidate is put in a hut that symbolizes the monster’s body. There he hears Ngakola’s eerie voice, there he is whipped and tortured, for he is told that he is now in Ngakola’s belly and is being digested. More ordeals follow; then the master of the initiation proclaims that Ngakola, who had devoured the candidate, has disgorged him. (Ibid., 192)

There is no Ngakola – he is the invention of the deviant priest-class that sought total mind control over his candidate through the ritual psychodrama of torture, deprivation and (I feel sure) drugging. The “secret society” of priests exercise their control of the tribe through dividing the psyche of their supplicants and devotees with the very same ritual psychodrama the mass media mavens of our day utilize, only our ascended Hollywood hegumen are more technologically sophisticated. For them, the wires and waves of electrical signals and currents are the medium for their message, and the medium’s message is the medium – to further its own existence as the source of meaning through its faithful presentation of its own mystagogical psychodrama. A striking example of this form of psychological operation is found in Ian Fleming’s Dr. No, where the villainous Dr. No constructs a “dragon” out of a tank and flamethrower to scare the local superstitious populace from snooping his organized crime racket. Fleming’s imagery recalls a real-world example mentioned in Victor Marchetti’s classic The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, which describes a manipulation scenario in the Phillipines. As always, the tactics 007 and his handlers attribute to Dr. No’s crime syndicate are the very tactics those handlers utilize in the real world for their crime syndicate:

When I introduced the practical-joke aspect of psywar to the Philippine Army, it stimulated some imaginative operations that were remarkably effective…One psywar operation played upon the popular dread of an asuang, or vampire…When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man of the patrol…They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail. When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed that the asuang had got him and that one of them would be next…When daylight came, the whole Huk squadron moved out of the vicinity.

It’s just a coincidence!

With that in mind, and the intelligence agencies’ associations with media have long documented, think now of ritual. Liturgical ritual is the continual re-presentation of some primal event of timeless significance, and for this reason mass media is our new liturgy, re-presenting the self-perpetuating mythos that it is our source of meaning and gnosis. Is it not all one and the same process? The drugs of today’s obeah are not the poison of a blowfish, but the tinctures and potions of big pharmaceutical pharmakeia. Its saints and monastics wear suits and sing the chant of the TaylorSwiftianGagaMileyCyresian serpentine doxological refrain.  Its priests are the dramaturgical actors who play the role of incarnating our gods and goddesses.

While we gaze into our screens and await the latest download and update from our overlords on what the orthodox consensus reality is, let us not forgot it is a ritual psychodrama that is playing out, lest we be swept up into the religious rapture of the beatific television. The iconography of the screen is the crafted narrative and mythology of the establishment’s choosing. It is the cacophonous echo chamber of the Holy Mammon Foundation and is under the think-tank theologians’ purview.  Its ritual is the one in which we daily tithe our time and thoughts and attention, as we await with mystical gaze for the new revelations Olympus will dictate from its metallic stellar satellites. Its present soothsaying word from beyond is that of viral doom and zombie programming, a flagellant torture and scourge as it howls the eerie voice of Ngakola. What is the solution? The realization the real virus is the psychical belief that for truth and meaning to be obtained, we must gaze at the gods of mass media and kneel as neophyte communicants at the tele-altar techno-theatrical cathedrals, like zombies or sorcerer’s apprentices. Modern man is far from being irreligious. He has, as Foucault said, simply changed his old priests and gods for new ones.

Read all of Jay Dyer’s work on theology, geopolitics, science and the cryptocracy at Jay’s Analysis.

Fyodor Dostoevsky was more than just a writer, but a penetrating philosopher and metaphysician who passed through the abysses of the spirit in search of divine perfection. In his work Dostoevsky: The Metaphysics of Crime, Russian scholar Vladislav Bachinin examines Dostoevsky’s kinship with Plato, the pagan philosopher honored in Orthodox civilization and thought for his quest after the Divine Logos, Who would be revealed incarnate to the world – and more beloved by Dostoevsky than life itself – as the God-Man Christ. Translated by Mark Hackard.

Longtime European tradition has accustomed theoretical thought in the humanities to primarily use the causal-consequential method of knowledge, yet its limited possibilities have far from always troubled scholars. They have tried not to notice the circumstance that a causal connection is capable of stretching into an endless chain, and that it has therefore always been necessary to forcefully chop it off at an arbitrarily chosen spot. Otherwise, there would exist a danger of getting lost in the retrospective reaches of causal preliminary study and losing any tangible connection with the subject of one’s research.

Oswald Spengler, reflecting in The Decline of the West on the imperfection of the causal-consequential approach, asserted that in comprehension of the essence of cultural forms and phenomena, the method of analogy has been quite productive. Diverse comparisons allow for objects of contemplation placed alongside one another to mutually illuminate one another. Spengler simultaneously lamented the fact that very few master the art of refined and profound analogy, and that the technique of comparison in the humanities has been practically undeveloped.

From then not a little time has passed. However, despite the appearance of a seemingly independent genre of comparative studies, the cultural analogy continues to remain more a matter of art than science. The productivity and heuristic utility of comparisons undertaken in philological, cultural-historical, philosophical and other disciplines depend to an enormous degree on the talent and insight of researchers and in much less measure upon the use of proven methodological instruments, since the latter have not yet been formed to their proper role.

Meanwhile, elemental comparisons, and the reservoirs of knowledge which are sensed by many scholars, did not leave Dostoevsky unaffected. And this is natural, since the grander in scale the artist’s figure, the greater the number of living ties that unite him with the past, present, and future.

Dostoevsky has been compared alongside Shakespeare and Cervantes, Kant and Hegel, de Sade and Nietzsche, and many others. And there is every basis to assume that this scholarly tendency will continue, for his figure as an artist and thinker is already immense.

Dostoevsky’s Unconscious Platonism

What ties Dostoevsky to Plato? The circumstance that the writer was familiar with the ideas of the Ancient Greek philosopher[i] is still not a sufficient foundation to set them together. Besides that, the temporal interval between them of two thousand-some years, over the length of which a myriad of cultural-historical ties have been broken, forces us to approach quite guardedly the formulated question and the proclaimed attempt to carry out such an analogy along with it.

Our reticence, however, will doubtless begin to dissipate if we remember that the Platonic tradition is one of the most stable in philosophical thought and that in Silver-Age Russia, it had a striking and powerful continuation. Many major Russian philosophers of the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century were genuine Neo-Platonists. Dostoevsky was no exception, with Vyacheslav Ivanov writing of his “unconscious Platonism.”

Reality was conceived by Dostoevsky, like Plato, as consisting of two worlds. In the first approximation, this was the visible, perceptible, lower reality of the natural-social continuum and the men immersed in it. He was additionally sure of the existence of a higher, supra-natural world of eternal, absolute primary forms, and also that the waves of metaphysical reality and the causal impulses birthed by them wash over all that is and penetrate into every atom. He recognized that only man is endowed with the capability of perceiving the supra-physical influences of the higher world and vesting them in words and symbols, turning them into the objects of speculation.

If the spirit and soul allow man to be conscious of his participation in the most sacred meanings of being, then faith as a function of the soul, this immortal metaphysical essence, allows us to have an unshakable conviction that the transcendent world exists and that it is more significant than the physical world.

Creative work for Dostoevsky was the means of clarifying relations with both worlds. Our writer had no use for grounded, naively realistic poetics that preferred only to touch on the empirically perceptible and obvious while ignoring the higher, ideal reality. His polemics with critics are characteristic – it was they who demanded that artists express only “reality,” and only “as it is.” But there is “no such reality,” writes Dostoevsky, “and there never was on earth, because the essence of things is unreachable to man, and he perceives nature as it is reflected in his idea, having passed through his senses; so it is that we must set the idea in motion and not fear the ideal.” (Notebooks, 21, 75)

Dostoevsky used the conception of the idea in the Aristotelian sense, as in the given case, and utilized it in its Platonic significance, a supra-physical essence living an autonomous life independent of men.

In the majority of his artistic-philosophical constructions, Dostoevsky appears as a metaphysical thinker of Platonist orientation. For him, as for Plato once, of primary significance is the higher world of immortal ideas that fertilize our gray and dim earthly reality. Coming from a mysterious world, “ideas fly through the air, but without fail according to laws; ideas live and expand according to laws too difficult for us to apprehend.” (24, 51)

Dostoevsky’s sense of the inauthenticity of men’s earthly, everyday reality at times reached the point of hallucination in his soul. And at times it began to seem to him that there would be no impediments to physical reality, endlessly distant from the higher world, suddenly dissipating in the space of a moment. This frame of mind was facilitated by scenes of city landscapes disappearing in the mists of St. Petersburg’s fog.

A scene of Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg. Painting by Ilya Glazunov.

Through the protagonist of A Raw Youth, the writer voiced one of his inmost thought-dreams:

‘A hundred times amidst this fog there came to me a strange and haunting dream: If the fog scattered and departed toward the sky, might not this entire decaying, mucous-oozing city depart with it, rising with fog and disappearing like smoke, for there only to remain the prior Finnish swamp, and perhaps amongst it, for décor, the Bronze Rider on his hotly breathing, baying steed? In a word, I cannot express my impressions since this is all fantasy, ultimately poetry and, it could be, nonsense; nonetheless, I have asked myself and still ask one completely pointless question: Here men flail and thrash about, and how are we to know if all this isn’t someone’s dream and there are no genuine, no real people, and no actual deeds? Suddenly someone will wake up, someone will dream this, and suddenly everything will vanish.’ (13, 113)

The likeness between Dostoevsky’s metaphysical outlook and Plato’s metaphysics is impossible not to notice. However, there is nothing strange in this if we remember the uniqueness of the atmosphere in which Russian artists and thinkers worked in the last third of the nineteenth century. Something else impresses us, namely the surprising likeness of the two geniuses’ biographical and creative destinies.

Two Pivotal Personalities

Both Plato and Dostoevsky are individuals of colossal scale, complex and contradictory along with being extraordinarily gifted with respect to their creativity. These are two true giants of the spirit, one of whom stood at the source of European philosophical culture, and the other who was at the source of Russian metaphysics. From Plato there essentially came all ensuing Western metaphysics. In this sense A. Whitehead’s statement that one can view European philosophy of subsequent centuries as a footnote commentary on Plato is symptomatic.

In equal measure we can say that from Dostoevsky came all ensuing Russian philosophy, and it is also permissible to interpret it as a detailed commentary on Dostoevsky.

For both thinkers, the life of the human spirit served as a main theme of reflection – life in a troubled era of transition that in the terminology of Karl Jaspers represented an “axial age,” with the only difference that for Plato this was a pivotal time for world history, while for Dostoevsky it was pivotal for local Russian civilization. These two epochs were drawn together by a common characteristic – transition, when both underwent a painful isolation from old tribal roots and patriarchal traditions, when the “bond of time” came apart and considerable special spiritual efforts were required for its restoration.

For Plato the transitional nature of his age consisted also in the fact that this was the eve of future social-historical shocks. The system of city-states, having just barely succeeded in its own establishment, without notice entered into a pre-crisis condition. The Macedonian conquest was not far off, and after it the gradual decline of Greek civilization. Speeches by the Sophists and Cynics exacerbated a pre-catastrophe mindset and heralded the “beginning of the end” of an entire cultural world.

Alexander III of Macedon, pupil of Aristotle. Illustration by Peter Connolly. 

For Dostoevsky the transition of his time absorbed on the one hand the beginning decline of Petersburg culture, and on the other, the ever-more visible assertion of a new cultural paradigm that would receive the name of proto-modernity. And all this happened in a social context of clear anomie; nihilism; cynicism; total permissiveness; general moral degradation; and an unseen number of suicides and crimes.

In both of these social-historical situations similar in spirit, there advanced to center stage a new type of personality possessing a strikingly expressed will to transgression, i.e., an untamable inclination toward overcoming extant normative restrictions.

The transgressive personality, driving toward free self-definition and fearing no obstacles, having a mature sphere of motivations and tending toward independent thought, preferred to decide autonomously whether or not to reckon with existing norms, traditions, and laws. Its characteristic passionate desire for the new was revealed in a readiness for justified “overstepping” of boundaries of the tolerable and permissible, the extraordinary boldness of the creative spirit, and also in an “unusual aptitude for crime.”

The transgressive personality manifests particular keenness for cynical sophisms, various types of “corrupting ideas” in the air, ideas threatening to destroy any humanity in man.

The primary moral-legal reality established by Plato’s time, along with the sovereignty of the city states, did not take long in revealing its imperfections. Amidst a background of many dramatic social metamorphoses and collisions, the need for a more effective regulative system that could restrain the transgressive personality from dangerous steps and counter “corrupt ideas” of the sophists and cynics announced itself with special acuity. This demanded of Plato mastery of an enormous mass of moral and legal problems. And he, the direct descendant of the legislator Solon, actively led a “brainstorm” over a corpus of ethical and philosophical-legal issues in his magnificent dialogues The Republic and The Laws.

Not by accident and mostly due to similar reasons, Dostoevsky placed moral-legal and criminal dilemmas at the center of his work. He was moved by the aspiration to uncover the metaphysical and anthropological bases of man’s tendency toward destructive transgression and simultaneously delineate the means by which one could neutralize this devastating potential.

Two axial ages relating to two civilizations divided by space and time not only left their mark on the personalities of both heroes, but also allowed their gifts to develop in full measure. Plato succeeded in his realization as a thinker and metaphysician who as well possessed the singular, powerful talents of the poet, dramatist, and mythmaker. Not overshadowed by Plato in the scale of his own creative identity, Dostoevsky showed himself an artist and thinker with the original repertoire of a powerful philosophical mind and genial metaphysical intuition.

[i] Ivanov, Vyacheslav. Dionis i Pradionisiistvo. St. Petersburg, 1994. Pg. 11.

The mysterious figure of Col. Igor Strelkov, a former Russian special forces officer, has struck a chord of fear in the liberal-nationalist Kiev regime and its Western patrons. A veteran of Bosnia and the First and Second Chechen Wars, this spring and summer Strelkov showed himself a superb tactician and operational commander against numerically superior and more heavily armed Ukrainian armed forces in the battle for the Donbass, a pivotal moment in the fate of reborn Novorussia. The following interview was conducted on October 9^th between Strelkov and Orthodox journalist Igor Evsin at the Monastery of St. John the Theologian in Ryazan. Orthodox, monarchist, and patriot, Strelkov is no mercenary, but a centurion of the Third Rome. Translated by Mark Hackard.

***

Igor Vasilevich Evsin: Igor Ivanovich, I’ll honestly say that in recent days I can’t escape the thought that the Minsk Agreements resemble the Khasavyurt Agreements that set down the “beginning of the end” of the First Chechen War and led to the Second.

Igor Ivanovich Strelkov: It looks like this is so…Now we are trying not to permit another “Khasavyurt” in the Donbass.

In general I came to this opinion when I saw that the militia’s broad and victorious offensive was stopped over political reasons of some kind. What do you think, what would have been if it wasn’t stopped?

Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, which we left to preserve our military potential, would today be ours, not to speak of Mariupol. Do you know that when they stopped the offensive, advance detachments of the militia had already entered Mariupol? The Ukrainians just ran away from our onslaught. Mariupol was empty…And then there you are! They stopped the offensive, and the peace negotiations in Minsk began, and they had me “leave” at that time because I was categorically against stopping the offensive. But my fears were completely justified. Today, thanks to the “cease-fire,” Ukrainian forces regrouped, brought up heavy armaments and prepared for new battles. Now this is not the same panicked army that, if we had not stopped our offensive, would already have been defeated.

Overall for the people of the Donbass, the greatest tragedy is that the referendum on the creation of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics was not recognized by Russia as the referendum on Crimea’s annexation was. And already no one thought that the rebellion would lead to such a shameful result as the Minsk Agreements.

Igor Ivanovich, one other question worries me among all the “incomprehensibles” happening in the Ukraine. Why are Ukrainians not revolting against the Kiev government that, having unleashed war in the Donbass, is killing civilians – women, the elderly, children. Or do they not know about this?

They know. They even know very well. They are constantly shown television scenes of the bombardment of Donetsk and Lugansk, shown murdered civilians, and constantly it’s drummed into their heads, “Look at what Russian terrorists are doing on Ukrainian land.” The people are hypnotized and believe; they are enraged and support the Kiev government fighting these very “Russian terrorists and separatists.”

But there still must be something humane in the Kiev security forces…After all, they know that what they’re doing is simply beyond imagination, simply isn’t subject to comprehension.

Igor Vasilevich, what do you expect from them? The most genuine Satanists came to power in Kiev. And that’s why their methods of waging war are satanic.

I have the sense that Ukrainians have been seized by some kind of possession resembling the Russian people’s possession, when after the 1917 Revolution, Russians were shooting Russians…

The militia is not party to this possession. Otherwise you’re wholly correct. There is a civil war underway in the Ukraine, one like the Civil War in Russia.

But there is the opinion that it’s an international war or even the Third World War.

I don’t think so. Among the general number of Ukrainian forces, mercenaries are a very small percentage. Two-thirds of Ukrainian soldiers are Russians whom one can even call ethnically Russian. They speak Russian, and many of them think as Russians. Moreover, real Russian volunteers from Russia are fighting on the Ukrainian side. That’s how it is…

Then how then can these “Russian Ukrainians” fire on peaceful cities and conduct punitive actions against their own brothers?

If we’re speaking of the artillery bombardment of peaceful cities, then those who are firing don’t know what they are firing on. They hit wherever they’re given guidance. They don’t know the consequences of their strikes. But the punitive actions are conducted by already totally ferocious nationalists, drugged, brainwashed, and unaccountable for their actions. No reasonable arguments have an effect on them. There develops the impression that methods of neuro-linguistic programming are being practiced on them. This also concerns the volunteers from Russia who are fighting alongside the Ukrainians.

But what are the Ukrainians fighting for?

The Ukrainians? They think they’re fighting for the liberation of the Donbass from “Russian separatists and terrorists,” for national sovereignty, for a unified and indivisible Ukraine, for her independence from Russia. Although among them there are more than a few who understand the situation and that they are fighting their own people. And therefore they only make an appearance of fighting. Generally there are also many who don’t want to fight for anybody. But behind them are the blocking detachments…And there have already been cases when draftees who didn’t wish to fight and left the army were shot by these blocking detachments. They’re killing their own men…

And the people of the Donbass? What are they fighting for?

Note that the Donbass people didn’t attack the Ukrainians, but the Ukrainians attacked them. The people of the Donbass are fighting for their land, the land of their ancestors. And I know with certainty that they will defend it whatever may come. Even if a second “Khasavyurt” occurs, even if Russia refuses to help, they won’t lay down their arms. The Donbass people fight for justice, for the right to be Russians, for Russian culture, for Orthodoxy. And I believe they will win, because truth is with them and God is with them. In the final analysis, the militia are fighting against a satanic Kiev government supported by the West and the United States.

How can we in Russia help the Donbass militia today?

Soon it will be winter. Therefore the militiamen will very much need warm winter sleeping bags, warm-weather items, food, and medical supplies. And of course the Donbass army greatly needs heavy armaments, but that is already another issue…

Collections for humanitarian aid to the Donbass are ongoing throughout Russia, and very actively. And nonetheless is this not enough?

It would be sufficient if the aid collected in Russia was fully delivered to the Donbass. The problem is that it is partially stolen by fraudulent “assistance funds” and partially it just “evaporates.” Meaning that in Russia there exist forces opposed to delivery of aid to the Donbass. People who today are officially engaged in issues of aid, men such as Vladislav Surkov, for example. These people are impeding the delivery of the collected aid packages to the Donbass with all their strength. That’s why the Donbass people should prepare for basic survival…From my part, I am trying to expose this gang of traitors. They’re not going to be able to quietly throw Novorussia to the wolves.

And how probable is a betrayal of Novorussia?

I will say again that even if Russia refuses to help, the men of the Donbass won’t lay down their arms. But I think that the matter won’t reach a betrayal of Novorussia. In Russia there are still concrete people and influential forces that are counteracting this. Even the result of the Minsk Agreements can be considered a Pyrrhic victory of the “treachery faction” of the tribe of Judas, to which Surkov belongs.

Those who signed off on the regulation plan for the situation in the Ukraine’s southeast, i.e. Chubais, Gref, and others, are they also part of this Judas tribe “treachery faction?”

Yes, they also are. They are speculating that Putin doesn’t want a major war and major losses. He doesn’t want Russia to be thought of as an occupied nation. And he’s right in this. But I hope he will do away with the treachery faction. Observing Putin’s actions, I see that he doesn’t plan on leaving the militia to the whims of fate, and he’s not planning to “betray” Novorussia. He is rendering her any assistance that one could in the situation that’s arisen.

Can we ourselves directly send aid to the Donbass, for example, by transferring money to the militia’s financial accounts?

And how will you know if this isn’t a fraudulent account? Plenty of those have been created. Therefore it’s best to give over aid through the churches. We still have such churches where they are collecting aid for the Donbass.

Today in the media they’re whipping up the theme that among the militiamen there are also “bad apples.” Is this so?

Among the militiamen? Well…Not everyone’s a saint there. There are those who instead of fighting guzzle vodka. And then among the commanders…I already said that I’m simply ashamed of some of the commanders.

But most important is nevertheless that those who rebelled in their majority know they are fighting for an idea. They understand that Novorussia is part of the Russian world. And we should all understand that the Donbass up to and including Odessa is part of Russia, a region torn away by coercion in 1991 by traitors to the Russian world. Even more so, to speak of Novorussia as a sovereign entity separate from Russia, and even more as Ukrainian territory, is simply impermissible. Novorussia today is a bastion of Russia.

If we return to the “bad apples,” many have the existing hope that you can return to the Donbass and bring about order there. Many are awaiting for the moment when “Igor will arrive and settle things.”

I have already spoken about this in other interviews. There’s simply no possibility of me returning to the Donbass, if only because no one will allow me to. I wasn’t removed from Novorussia in order to return. And I must disappoint those who are waiting for “Igor to arrive and settle things.” But I have opportunities in Russia to render effective assistance to Novorussia. I didn’t come here to sit in inaction. I will do everything so that the militia is victorious. And we will be victorious. Truth is with us, and God is with us.

Roll over, monarchs! The world is now run by virtuous, informed citizens who jealously guard their liberties and work tirelessly to keep themselves abreast of the latest legislation and geopolitical developments. Thanks to the Enlightenment, humanity was awakened to its own inner potential. We saw the divine spark within ourselves, and realized we are our own true masters. I am the Captain Crunch of my own destiny. Humans across the globe for the first time in history became conscious of their political sovereignty and rose up to install masonic republics where the hallowed institution of law would rule.

Prior to that moment, all men were trapped in a dark age. This gloomy epoch of aeons past was one in which kings ruled, and these kings were vile, religious brutes who persecuted innocent witches, all based on phallocentric superstitions. Truth be told, these power-hungry men feared the divine potential of the vajayjay and knew if woman was released from her domestic prison, the triumph of human rights would break the chains of global self-imposed bondage. Billions of innocent witches were burned by entities like the Catholic Church, which in Salem alone killed a million fearless women at the Witch Trials, as recorded for posterity by Arthur Miller.

The liberty of the enlightened citizen also showed the world the folly of belief in races, gender and patriarchal sexual tyranny. All of us are to a degree homosexual, and on the sexual spectrum, we enjoy the gender freedom we so desire. Great heroic women of the French Revolution were martyred to bring you Internet porn, freeing you from the prison of relationships, marriage and actual sexual interaction.

Progress is sexy!

In our own day, we are subject to the tyranny of unsustainable population growth and right-wing religious fanatics. Religion still reigns in the minds of the backwards and superstitious, who are incapable of recognizing that science has already left them behind. Through science, we will soon be able to download our minds into a zip drive, and science has proven this. As in the film Lucy, we will be able to achieve immortality through technologies akin to Aladdin’s genie lamp. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence and cloning, we will soon be able to have sex romps with dinosaurs and robots, as well as dinobots, just as wo-man was always destined to do. Let freedom ring!

So today, I want you to take a deep breath, meditate with me, and believe in yourself. Stop for a moment and smell the flowers – touch that unicorn. Feel it, let the bodacious unicorn slowly take over your mind. Now very slowly, find your heart in your mind. Let your heart skip freely into a field, singing in exaltation. Sashay after your heart into a dark glade. Now tackle your heart, and slowly punch it until blood runs forth. Kick the ever-loving crap out of your heart. In its place, let the unicorn spirit arise. You have now conquered your dreams! If you think it, it will come…like that one movie said.

Read all of Jay Dyer’s work, from geopolitics, philosophy, and science to the esoteric in culture as well as satire, at Jay’s Analysis.

We continue Russian academic Vladislav Bachinin’s analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky as metaphysician and his kinship to Plato, the pagan philosopher who illuminated classical man’s vision toward a higher world of immortal essences. What ultimately unites Plato and Dostoevsky is the former’s anticipation and the latter’s glorification, even through a crucible of darkness and suffering, of Christ the Eternal Logos. Translated by Mark Hackard.

Read Part I.

Execution as an Introduction to Metaphysics

Impressive is the likeness between existential sketches of Plato and Dostoevsky’s destinies. Personal tragedy awaited each of them at their life’s upward ascent, tragedy accompanied by trial, prison, and the most severe psychological shocks. For Plato this was the trial, imprisonment, and execution of his teacher Socrates, who became his spiritual father and to whom was assigned the role of the Platonic alter ego in his dialogues. For Dostoevsky the tragedy was his own passage through the cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress, an unjust trial, mock execution, and hard labor in Siberia.

Semenovsky Square, scene of Dostoevsky’s 1849 execution, commuted by the Tsar to hard labor.

After Socrates’ execution, Plato left Athens for a protracted period. Years later he returned to his native city, already a different man with new views and internally prepared for the discovery of a second philosophical “compass” that would enable him to direct all the strength of his spirit toward proof of existence of the supra-sensory world of immortal ideas, and most of all, the idea of supreme justice.

After he fulfilled his sentence, Dostoevsky spent many years far from Petersburg and also returned to full-fledged creative life as an internally changed man with a totally different worldview. His first “compass,” when he sympathized with the socialists and was partial to the ideas of Fourier and the views of Belinsky, remained in the past. He transformed into a thinker and metaphysician with an accentuated receptivity to the realities of the transcendent world and basic metaphysical problems – God, the immortality of the soul, and freedom. In his reflections on the turning point in Dostoevsky’s worldview, an event that occurred as a result of his “invitation to execution” by the authorities, Lev Shestov recalled a legend about the angel of death, who was covered entirely with eyes. If the angel arrived for a soul and became convinced that he had come too early, he would depart for an unspecified time, leaving the one he spared a second pair of eyes. Consequently the man who had stood on the edge of death began to acutely perceive a reality otherworldly, metaphysical, and inaccessible to normal sight, and with seriousness would ask himself the most difficult metaphysical questions.

The metamorphosis that took place with Dostoevsky was interpreted in a similar way by Vyacheslav Ivanov. He assumed that death drawing near in earnest played the role of midwife to free the writer’s metaphysical ego. After initiation into the mystery of death came the desire to touch the higher secrets of being. Just the author of the Divine Comedy once discovered the mysteries of hell and death through his love for Beatrice, so for Dostoevsky at the scaffold there was revealed the secret of Love as the highest first principle of the world, unconquerable to the forces of evil.

These trials indeed made an indelible mark on the writer’s personality, his worldview, and his creative activity. They changed in essence the content of his existential experience, replaced many points of reference in his values, and changed the ideational contours of his most important existentials. In their light everything became darker and more significant. The acquired gift of metaphysical conception opened before Dostoevsky a world of higher existentials and allowed him to understand much of what was hidden from the majority of men.

Much later Dostoevsky spoke directly on the ability of the existential of death, drawing immediately near to man, to change the essence of his worldview. This happened after he read Lev Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina:

There came the scene of the heroine’s death (later she again recovered) – and I understood the entire essential part of the author’s goals. At the very center of this mediocre and insolent life there appeared a great and eternal vital truth, and it at once illuminated everything. These small-minded, worthless, and mendacious people suddenly became true and upright people worthy of the human name, solely by the force of a law of nature, the law of human death. All their outer shell vanished, and their one truth appeared…The reader felt this as a vital truth, the most real and unavoidable in which we need to believe, and that all our life and all our worries, both the most petty and shameful and equally those we frequently consider as supreme, all are more often than not only the most small and fantastical vanity that falls away and disappears without even defending itself before a moment of truth in life. The primary idea was in pointing out that there is in fact this moment, though it rarely appears in all its illuminating fullness, and even in some lives never at all. (Notebooks 25, 52-53)

After this “Copernican revolution” had occurred within Dostoevsky, not only he but also his characters became different. Henceforth all those close to him in spirit will reveal an inclination toward a metaphysical worldview. Raskolnikov, consciously stamping it out within himself, will have it. It would come to be possessed by the “vile Petersburgers” from the novellas Notes from the Underground, Bobok, and Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and neither can it be denied to Svidrigailov nor Stavrogin with their dark fantasies. And of course, in the highest degree it is found characteristic of Ivan Karamazov, who established a grandiose metaphysical panorama inside his own ego.

Aside from these “dark” metaphysicians, there are also those of “light” – Prince Myshkin, Zosima, Alesha Karamazov. Behind both groups is the metaphysical ego of Dostoevsky himself. Like Goethe, who once split into Faust and Mephistopheles, Dostoevsky the metaphysician also splits into his “dark” and “light” doubles.

Painting by Ilya Glazunov.

Dostoevsky’s metaphysical ego evinced a talent for metaphysical contemplation, speculation, and imagination. This capability for metaphysical contemplation allowed the writer to perceive metaphysical reality in entirety and in its separate components. In him we uncover qualities of a special type – an ear for metaphysics in order to hear the ineffable, and metaphysical vision in order to see the unseen, i.e. to perceive that which was hidden behind the curtain of exterior material reality. First discovered as the ability to contemplate phantoms in the story The Double, in the future it would show itself in each of the author’s works. Behind the younger Golyadkin there appears the phantom image of the “underground man” from Crime and Punishment, one that nearly drives Raskolnikov insane:

Who is he? Who is this man who came out from under the earth? Where was he, and what did he see? He saw everything, of this there was no doubt. Where then did he stand, and whence did he watch? Why does he only now come out from under the ground? And how could he see – is this really possible? A fly was flying, and it saw! Is that possible? (6, 210)

One can build various psychological and metaphysical hypotheses in the drive to explain the nature of these phantoms. But beyond them we see without doubt an unconditional truth: there is always someone in the world who knows the whole truth of what happens to us.

In the twentieth century Georges Florovsky noted that a sharp metaphysical ear at all times listens through the shroud of everyday life, hearing how the eternal metaphysical storm rages. With Dostoevsky this sense of hearing was intensified to an extreme. Perhaps like none of his contemporaries, he proved sensitive to the mysterious hum of the metaphysical world.

This was facilitated by a mature talent for metaphysical speculation, i.e. the ability to structure demonstrative conclusions with the help of intellectual-metaphysical intuition, in the light of which images that were a result of metaphysical contemplation took shape in integral ideational, normative, and evaluative models of the extant and the ideal. As a result there arose new spiritual forms – metaphysical thought-images that gave a fuller and deeper representation of the place and role of metaphysical reality in human existence.

And finally, the third spiritual-creative talent with which Dostoevsky proved endowed in the highest degree was a metaphysical imagination. This permitted him to complete developing models of thought-forms of the extant and the ideal toward a necessary integrality of poly-semantic symbols and full-scale symbolic pictures.

The metaphysical imagination is always an act of spiritual transgression, a rupture beyond the limits of the visible into metaphysical reality, the transcendent spheres of higher absolutes, and the world of the reality of the subject. Simultaneously this is a departure beyond the frontiers of space and time, the results of which are shown as symbolic pictures of a providential character. Such, for example, was Raskolnikov’s dream in the labor camp, which consequentially showed all the signs of a terrible prophecy on Russia’s fate in the twentieth century.

In Dostoevsky’s symbolic universe, things represent something more than what they are by their nature. Within it an axe can not only lie under a counter in a workshop or hang in a loop under Raskolnikov’s coat, but it can also rotate around the earth suspended over the heads of all the planet’s inhabitants (Brothers Karamazov). And this is not the supra-sensory idea of an axe, but a fully material axe capable of splitting the heads of millions of old women. At the same time it is a symbol of the awful danger that threatens the multitude of men. The menacing connotations concentrated therein leave the naive symbolism of Nechaev’s People’s Retribution, which had made an axe its emblem, far behind. In such a manner Dostoevsky’s “realistic symbolism” reveals itself; it allowed him to peer beyond the real into what was most real, to see ontology beyond politics, and beyond criminality to metaphysics.

For Dostoevsky the metaphysical imagination was one of the most important instruments of creative work. He clearly recognized that the real is not divided into reason and intellect to the exclusion of all else, and that within social realities, much does not conform to any logical schemes. The powerlessness of rational explanatory means was uncovered in full measure when it was necessary to investigate the anthropological irrealities of human existence.

Distinct from re-productive sociological reasoning, the metaphysical imagination is genuinely productive. It allows the spirit to not only look beyond the manifest, thereby demonstrating a transgressive character unknown to sociological reasoning, but also to tell in the language of symbols about what was seen. Meaning that the creative spirit acts in the role of a “messenger” (D. Andreev) and demonstrates a special providential, prophetic intuition.

For Dostoevsky the existential direction of metaphysical imaginings held special meaning – it allowed him to see his own life’s path and the biographies of his characters as destiny organically inscribed into the objective context of metaphysical reality and into a theocentric picture of the world, thereby organically uniting the relative with the absolute, the personal with the supra-personal, and the particular with the universal.

Dostoevsky greatly valued his aptitude for metaphysical imagination, since it allowed him to search out and often sense the taste of metaphysical freedom. In a most essential way it expanded the space of his personal metaphysical experience, both light and dark. With its participation he placed the social and anthropological realities that interested him into the context of metaphysical reality, where an event was transformed into fate, wrongdoing into sin, punishment into retribution, etc.

Painting by Viktor Vasnetsov.

By its unique nature, literary work itself predisposed Dostoevsky to a metaphysical conception of the world. His relation to each of his characters resembled God’s relation to his own creatures. The novel appeared as a world where everything is run by the sole will of the author, where every character’s fate is already predetermined and not one hair can fall from his head except by the will of the novelist. The author acts in the role of creator and providence: he judges and decides who among the characters is to live, and who to die. Relating to the world of the novel, the author dwells in another, transcendent dimension. For his characters he is unseen, unheard, and located beyond their reach. Yet if (let us imagine this) the characters come upon the idea that they exist unto themselves and independent of their creator, they will have fallen into the deepest delusion.

Plato, able to receive a second pair of eyes that allowed him to view the metaphysical world of ideas, acquired them to a large degree as a result of the tragic death of his teacher. Socrates, who saw in his own death a departure to another world, helped his pupil thereafter to become firmly convinced of the notion that only the other world, in which man lives not with his body but his spirit, is primary. That reality in which innocent sages are sentenced to execution cannot be the true and chief one. Therefore there absolutely must exist another higher and ideal world where justice is not trampled, but rules supreme. This collision of Platonic destiny is deeply felt and explained by Vladimir Soloviev in his lecture “Plato’s Life Drama.”

The principle of two worlds becomes the driving one in Plato’s metaphysics. His ideas appear as higher values of being in which all the best that has the chance of realization in the existence of nature, man, and civilization is concentrated. The ideals of order, measure, harmony, perfection, the greater good, and universal justice are focused into Platonic ideals to the highest degree. With concern to all that is earthly and purely human, those things are only the weak imitations of idea-exemplars and far from true perfection.

For men, form-giving first principles that derive from ideas serve as a source of hope that our earthly world has the possibility of being less imperfect. Moreover, with Plato ideas act as a unique metaphysical guarantor that evil never succeed in totally subordinating the world to turn it exclusively into a nest of vice, crime, suffering, and darkness.

Interdependence is supposedly cause for celebration in our era, and there can be no doubt that the peoples of Earth are more interconnected now than they ever were before.  Today, the culture of the so-called developed world is governed by ideas of egalitarianism and materialist cosmopolitanism. It’s believed more honorable to call oneself a “citizen of the world” than a staunch defender of any one tribe or group, because by definition, drawing a line of preference for those within one’s own group would imply that some faraway other is excluded. A centuries-old trend of assimilation in the interests of economic progress is reaching its apex, set to become one of the primary sociological concerns in the near future.

As we see in the jungles of Brazil and the streets of Europe alike, native populations are quickly becoming foreigners in their own lands, their environments radically changing before their eyes. We often hear that the West must absorb more immigrants to support an aging population at home, or that indigenous tribes ought to relocate from their ancestral lands in order to feed some other land’s addiction to natural resources. Now, there are serious doubts as to the long-term effects of an unrestrained and constantly-burgeoning global economy of material wealth, one driven by the globalist principle of free movement of human capital. As a result, the world is quickly becoming one and the same, while individual cultures and ethnicities are either bred out of existence or forcibly assimilated into the mass. Yet we see that this renewed focus on tradition is paving the way for events like the recent rise in popularity of identitarian parties in Europe or the avowed dedication to traditional values and customs by world leaders, as echoed in the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin of Russia or India’s Nahrendra Mohdi.

The most striking question presented by these events concerns the inherent importance of tradition. Why does this matter and why should it have any role in global affairs or even in the lives of everyday people? In a purely materialistic world as ours (both in the economic and philosophical sense), the goals and needs of a society seem to accomplish the exact opposite of stated intentions. The abundance of resources for easier living creates worsening conditions in the place those resources were produced; as it becomes easier to travel the world and see other lands, those lands are becoming more and more identical to the rest of the world; mass immigration to create more jobs, give an area “diversity”, and expand the economy does the opposite after several generations, when immigrants have assimilated and the favorable economic impact of their immigration has been absorbed or even reversed; the constant drive for individuals to present themselves as wholly different from the crowd creates one mass demographic ready to be sold something in order to validate modern individuality. To compare the amount of languages and ethnicities across the world in the 18th century versus today shows that this process of economic globalization has not only proved detrimental for the West, but for all other civilizations as well, and this trend will continue, with an estimated ninety percent of languages spoken today projected extinct by century’s end. In practical reality, the only possible and logical end to this is the consolidation of humanity into a single homogenous group with no differentiating characteristics between regions or even individuals.

Rots your teeth, rots your soul.

The Rev. Jim Jones, dialectical bedfellow of corporate oligarchy and rainbow warrior for monoculture.

Globalization has increasingly eroded these national boundaries and made it structurally impossible for individual nations to sustain independent, or even autonomous, economies, polities, and social structures. A key feature of the current epoch is the supersession of the nation-state as the organizing principle of capitalism.

Some people of anti-consumerist mind understand now the detrimental effects of this global economy on how people live and exist on this earth, and they’re aware of the environmental harm it does as well as the often unfavorable economic conditions it provides to one nation for the benefit of another. But as it stands, hardly one of them will link this trend to the decline of distinct cultures and seek their preservation throughout the coming centuries. Understandably so, as many people, particularly in North America, have lived generations without any connection whatsoever to their original heritage. As such, the people of the modern world have no sense of belonging left but brand loyalty and perhaps the parade of vapid “identity politics” that dominates public discourse today, though even then we see how quickly tiresome such “identities” become. The reversal of the global liberal order will not mean peace in itself; it does not imply that disputes between peoples will ease, or that cultures will suddenly thrive and become the realms of supermen, but it does mean that differences are saved and that some sort of breadth of viewpoint will remain among man. Likewise, nothing guarantees that the culture of one nation or ethnicity will look the same as in a hundred years’ time. Yet this is essentially the point – that there is room for individual peoples to develop and progress. If diversity is as truly valued as some claim to believe, then the notion of a manufactured “brotherhood of man” ought to be discredited.

For more thoughts and essays, visit Evgeniy Filimonov’s blog Read What you Sow.

Dejan “Deki” Beric is a Serbian volunteer fighter serving with the Novorussia Armed Forces in defense of the Donbass. In this interview with journalist Ivan Maksimovic, Beric, a sniper, explains his motivations and the political atmosphere in his homeland. For centuries now Serbs and Russians have fought alongside one another, and the journey of Beric and other Serbs can be viewed as a continuation of this fraternal bond. Translated by Mark Hackard.

***

Why are you here in Novorussia? What was your motive in coming to the edge of the world, about which we knew almost nothing until recently, in order to risk your life? How and because of what?

I’ve told why I’m in Novorussia many times already. So I’ll be brief right now. I came to help our Orthodox brothers and fight against the NATO criminals who bombed our land, just as more than anyone they have saber-rattled and threatened to attack Crimea. I had forgotten then the fact that NATO and the countries supporting this organization are the usual cowards. They can enter a conflict only where there’s the possibility of bombing from afar, if possible against 90% civilian targets to sow fear and panic. So they haven’t directly participated, but their influence is clearly visible here. And so several American officers were wounded here. They weren’t in battle – they’re located a bit further from the frontline and explain how important it is to destroy civilian targets. I’ve heard this from more than one Ukrainian POW, with a multitude repeating the same words.

Dejan “Deki” Beric

How do you see events today in the former Ukraine? If you had waited up to the present moment, would your decision today be the same as it was when you came to Novorussia?

The situation in Ukraine is more than horrible. If it weren’t for the awful censorship in the Serbian press, then you would be able to see all the horrors of civil war. What we are shown is more than 50% lies.

I can find a simple explanation for this: in Serbia the objective press hasn’t been bought by foreigners.  But there is none, so whatever’s not bought is controlled through the government, which is not Serbian and is pushing Serbia to the precipice. I’d like to be wrong…If I hadn’t come over from the very beginning, I would have after the first photos of children murdered in the streets and in schools…

Everyone has a different awareness. I will never forget what the criminals from NATO did in Serbia. I’ll always repeat this – not so that people know I haven’t forgotten, but to remind those who have forgotten. I simply can’t imagine myself sitting in a warm room and playing on the computer when vampiric fascism is awakening in its worst form.

Dejan was “hiding” from the press for a long while until he went on a highly important mission with Motorola’s group of Novorussian fighters. From that moment his life from a standpoint of popularity entered a new phase.

The Serbian public found out about you when it was announced you had blown up a Ukrainian junta armored transport with your rifle. Was this one of the most important events during the war in former Ukraine for you as well?

I was hiding skillfully until we came to help Motorola’s group, which is when we punched through a corridor for the towns Snezhnoe-Stepanovka-Marinovka. They had a reporter with them, and he recored what happened on a small video camera. He asked me for an interview and said it was only for them, and already the next day it turned up on Youtube.

I’ve gone through all the sectors where battles were engaged. Among Serbs in battle I’ve met only one man, Slavisha from Belgrade. Unfortunately he’s not with us now; he’s resting, since when an airplane bombed the house they were in, he got shrapnel in the stomach. He’s alright now, but he’s still not adequate for hard work.

Dejan tells us that in Novorussia he’s not with the Chetniks or any other group, but with the people for whom he came, and it’s very important to him that the local populace accept him as their own.

I proudly wear a five-pointed star on my beret next to my bat reconnaissance pin. Some in Serbia don’t like this, but it’s my choice. Here people are proud of this.

I can’t set apart a most important event. Maybe in Marinovka, when I was able to blow up an armored transport carrier with shots from my sniper rifle. I was using armor-piercing incendiary rounds. It wasn’t some feat like they ascribe to me – the carrier was attacking our positions and I was firing from a heavy-caliber weapon. It passed us by, so we moved forward a bit further than planned. I shot it up more from the disadvantage of having no anti-tank weapons on me. The armor proved weak. I don’t know where I hit, but after a pair of bullets, it caught on fire.

It’s a widespread opinion that in war, snipers find themselves concealment and from there “calmly” shoot at moving targets by choice. What really is a sniper in war?

This opinion is mistaken. I’m a normal soldier, like others with automatic rifles. I became a sniper by force of circumstances. A sniper at the famous airport in Donetsk was killing two to three civilians a day. For four days they couldn’t get him. In four days that balance had reached twelve killed, and of them only one man – the rest were women and children. I grabbed a sniper rifle and went to wait for him. I studied where he was operating from and designated the point where I’d lie in wait for him. I was lucky that I had calculated correctly and saw him after his first shot. He wasn’t firing anymore after that. Then I was given an assignment to destroy snipers. And that, I suppose, is my main task. Or the hardest one, in any case. Sometimes I read comments in the press that some people see a sniper as murdering civilians. It’s painful to read such things, but as a smart man said, “it’s not important what is said, but who says it.” And so as before, I’m a sniper in a reconnaissance-sabotage brigade named Ryazan in honor of our commander. We were a recon-sabotage group with one armored carrier, and now it’s a brigade with three hundred combatants and solid hardware.

How do the people of Novorussia and how do you look upon the reaction in Serbia? Including both the people and the government.

I don’t want to speak of how people here view the reaction from Serbia, because I can’t explain the actions of the Serbian government.

I’ll say only that it’s unimportant what the government thinks – what the people thinks is important. There is a lot of moral support, which is very important. The government gave away Serbia, so how can it be an indicator of attitudes after that? We are normal people who have always shed blood for one another; we are the measure of relations between the two peoples. Just as during the criminal bombardment of Serbia, when the government in Russia didn’t represent the Russian people. Russians came to help as volunteers. Many of them married in Serbia and Republika Srpska.

Recently a law was passed that envisages criminal punishment for participants in wars outside Serbia. This law doesn’t concern Serbian soldiers, who together with NATO forces “guard the peace,” who go on these missions voluntarily and exclusively for money. Those who go in such a way to foreign wars are said to represent their country with pride.

You are in Novorussia to defend the local population from fascism. You’re participating in the defense of Orthodox holy places and nations, and you’re not demanding money for it. How do you view this law?

Your question is relevant. I’ll express my opinion and relay what former soldiers of the criminal NATO army say.

Fighters who had served five years on contract in the French army arrived into our brigade three months ago. The man who was most respected in this group was a Frenchman of Serbian descent, Nicola. Now he’s the commander of an international group. We’re no longer together, but we maintain contact when possible. What is there worth saying anything about NATO after his words: “I was in this criminal army in Afghanistan and I’m ashamed of it. I came here to fight against fascism.”

What must happen with a man in order to leave a well-paid, well-organized army and come to fight in an army where they don’t pay? Concerning organization, there’s still much that needs to be done. When he arrived I told him they fight here, and he didn’t believe it. Some twenty days later, when he went to Donetsk, we met. With a smile he told me what he thought, that we scare him, but everything is precisely so. Perhaps many won’t understand why he did this, but I know. I saw him when he arrived and again recently. No one will drive him from here; his conscience has awakened.

And this conscience should awaken in Serbia. There are arriving ever more men who were in the armies of the NATO nations, and they finally want to struggle for a just cause.

French and Serbian volunteers in Novorussia.

Dejan says that this law forbidding participation in foreign wars was passed on the initiative and wishes of someone outside of Serbia, someone who desires to defend their own interests.

Serbia is no longer the country of its inhabitants. Our beautiful land is managed by foreigners, and their blind followers are in power. I read this law and for me, as a man who knows what loyalty to one’s country is, it’s more than ridiculous. Why? I can’t precisely cite it right now, but it’s written that only the Serbian regular army can participate in wars beyond Serbia’s borders. So the Serbian army becomes one of the cogs in the NATO machine. The Serbian army will be participating in the murder of civilians, just as seventeen armies abused Serbia.

I hope that God will forgive our government for passing such a shameful law. I was horrified when I read it. I didn’t want to engage in politics, but by their actions they force me to… Aleksandr Vucic called upon us to return to Serbia and no longer disgrace her. I don’t know whether he was ashamed of his ancestors when he announced such a thing. Both of his grandfathers fought against the fascists. Struggle against injustice is in our blood, and by their actions they are pushing men to come here. If I understood correctly, and correct me if I’m wrong, but we, arriving here by the call of our hearts, are disgracing Serbia, and those who are mercenaries in armed forces that bombed maternity homes, hospitals, schools, houses, and trains – they are defending Serbia’s honor. In my opinion that’s mad.

Remember the great words said on holy Serbian soil: “It’s not important how many of the enemy there are, what’s important is the sacred place you defend.” And so I remain here in the hope that in Serbia normal men will come to power and change the law so that I can go to my country. I’m interested solely in whether someone will pass a law condemning the government, which by its actions has led people in Serbia to commit suicide because they cannot pay their bills after their already minor pensions or salaries, earned by their labor, were reduced. The government carries direct responsibility for a multitude of lost lives in Serbia. To whom will they answer for this? And to finish with politics: Gentlemen politicians, I wish you long life and robust health, so that you can await the marriage of your great grandsons, and then see how future generations will be ashamed of what you have done.