The coming Russian millennium
“Russianism” is the promise of a future culture as the evening shadows grows longer and longer over the Western world. The distinctions between Russian and Western spirit cannot be drawn too sharply. As deep a cleavage as there is between the spirit, religion, politics, and economics of England, Germany, America, and France, when compared with Russia these nations suddenly appear as a unified world[1]Oswald Spengler, Prussian Socialism, 1919, p. 67..
So wrote Oswald Spengler in Prussian Socialism, published in 1919, between the two volumes of The Decline of the West. In the latter, Spengler also predicted that after the collapse of the “Faustian West”, a new civilizational force would arise in Russia.
The Faustian West opposes this with all its might. But whatever happens, the sun will rise in the East for European peoples. The revival of faith and moral values in Russia are there to stay, thanks to a strong alliance between State and Church for the defense of traditional family values. To measure the distance with the West, let me simply recall the federal law ratified in 2013 prohibiting and punishing “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations in front of minors” We can only dream of it here. On December 4, 2015, Vladimir Putin, addressing the Federal Assembly of Russia as every year, put at the top of Russia’s priorities “healthy families and a healthy nation, [and] the traditional values which we inherited from our forefathers.” For this alone Russia has now become the axis of civilization toward which Europe should gravitate.
“Our salvation will come from Russia,” stated French opposition leader Alain Soral four years ago (watch it here, and more videos with English subs here). Given the moral degeneracy of the French population, Soral wished that NATO’s warlike provocations against Russia would ultimately force Putin to wage a preventive blitzkrieg on Western Europe. This, he said, could “create the conditions for a national revolution to restore France.” Soral’s predictions have often proven right, for example when, in Understand the Empire, published ten years ago and now translated in English, he saw the West moving toward “global governance in the name of public health under the diktat of the World Health Organization,” using pandemics as “another phony construct that will allow the global oligarchy to terrorize entire populations and subjugate them to authoritarian policies: mandatory vaccination under the supervision of armed forces, assembly bans, and so on.” Spot on!
The view that a spiritual and moral revival may come to Europe from Russia appears more convincing every day. Russia fulfills all the conditions for a fruitful equilibrium between nationalism and Christianity. Russian Orthodoxy is the union between a nation and her Church. This makes a whole difference with Catholicism. Imagine that Putin had to seek the blessing of an Argentinian pope in Rome! No patriotic momentum could come out of it. More than 70 percent of Russians identify as Orthodox Christians because Orthodoxy means Russianness.[2]Scott M. Kenworthy and Alexander S. Agadjanian, Understanding World Christianity: Russia, Fortress Press, 2021, p. 8.
The Russian Church also has karma on her side: a heavy toll of martyrs under Lenin and Stalin. Although it has not absolutely lived up to this role, the Russian Church symbolizes the resistance of faith against the Communist dictatorship and its ideological materialism, and it can claim to have been resurrected on the blood of the martyrs.
Very cleverly, some would say, the Church canonized the Romanov family, who are now honored at the Church of All Saints, built on the site of their execution by Jewish Bolsheviks. While America unbolts the statues of its heroes, Russia discovers new ones and makes demigods out of them. Just imagine a Catholic church being consecrated in honor of JFK on the site of his execution by the Jewish mafia.
Building and rebuilding churches is a key part of rebuilding the Church. The first and most symbolic of the tens of thousands of beautiful churches opened since 1991 is the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, not far from the Kremlin. It had been blown up in 1931, and rebuilt 60 years later thanks to massive investments by both the government and private businesses.
Admittedly, the fusion of religion and patriotism, encouraged by Church and State, reaches alarming forms, unseen in czarist times, such as the Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, celebrating the “Victory in the Great Patriotic War.” It was inaugurated on June 22, 2020, the anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, which is the “Day of Remembrance and Sorrow.” It features no statue of Stalin, but Red Army orders on its stained glass windows, a clear reminder that the State-sponsored history of World War II is sacred, pour les siècles des siècles. Revisionism à la Suvorov is blasphemy. That is regrettable, especially since Putin’s reason for invading Ukraine preemptively is very similar to Hitler’s reason for invading Russia in 1941, if Suvorov and Sean McMeekin are right, as I believe they are.
The architecture of most Russian churches, old or new, bears a decidedly national character. The domed basilicas are in fact an elaboration of the Byzantine style. And this is quite natural, because Muscovite Russia is the spiritual heir of Byzantium. The double-headed eagle on the coat of arms of Russia was given to Ivan the Great (1462-1505) as a dowry when he married the niece of the last Byzantine emperor. The dying Constantinople thus entrusted her soul to Moscow. From then on, Russia was the only Orthodox kingdom. Assuming Moscow was now the Third Rome, Russian rulers took the title “tsar”, the Slavicization of “Caesar”.
The conversion to Byzantine Orthodoxy dates back to Kievan Russia, when King Vladimir (980-1015) was baptized and wedded to a sister of the Byzantine Emperor Basil II. It is told that Vladimir embraced Christianity rather than Islam or Judaism after his emissaries told him of the beauty of Byzantine worship in Constantinople:
“we knew not whether we were in heaven on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and were are at a loss how to describe it. We only jnow that God dwells among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations.”[3]Kenworthy and Agadjanian, Understanding World Christianity, op. cit., p. 64.
Vladimir and his son Yaroslav had Byzantine architects build in Kiev a Saint-Sophia basilica inspired by that of Constantinople. From that time on, explains John Meyendorff in Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: “the influence of Byzantine civilization upon Russia became the determining factor of Russian civilization.”[4]John Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, Cambridge UP, 1981, p. 10. During the schism of 1054, and during all the vicissitudes of Constantinople, Russia remained faithful to the Byzantine rite. Even after 1261, when Constantinople was only a shadow of its glorious past, it retained its prestige and influence over Slavic lands, and in particular over the great principality of Moscow.
As Nicolai Berdyaev wrote in The Russian Idea (1946), Russia “unites two worlds, and within the Russian soul two principles are always engaged in strife — the Eastern and the Western.” In this inner tension also, Russia is heir to Byzantium, the former bridge between Asia and Europe.
Russia never forgot Constantinople. Catherine II, Empress of all the Russias from 1762 to her death in 1796, hoped to rebuild the Byzantine Empire by including Greece, Thrace and Bulgaria, and pass it on to her grandson Constantine. If the Ottoman Empire survived, it was mainly thanks to the British. In the Crimean War (1853-1856), the Sultan received help from the United Kingdom and France, who imposed the Treaty of Paris on Russia. Twenty years later, Tsar Alexander II once again went to war against the Ottomans who had just drowned the uprising of the Serbs and the Bulgarians in a bloodbath. The Ottomans capitulated with the Russians at the gates of Istanbul. But the British Empire and Austria-Hungary came to the Ottomans’ rescue and, at the Congress of Berlin, returned to them the Christian nations emancipated by the Tsar, including Armenia, for her greatest misfortune.
In this article, I wish to show that the geostrategy of the Great Game, by which the British and now the Americans are trying to dig a trench between Russia and Europe, is the continuation of a war waged by Western Europe against the Byzantine Empire from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. This thesis seems paradoxical if one thinks that Constantinople is now called Istanbul, but not if one understands the spiritual filiation between Constantinople and Moscow. And if we understand this filiation, then a thousand-year-old background suddenly appears behind the geopolitical conflict that is currently taking place. It is this background that I would like to draw here in broad strokes. Or rather redraw, because it is known in the West in an inverted version which is, obviously, the version of the victor. This kind of revisionism is, in my opinion, a necessary condition for Europe to come to terms with her Eurasian destiny.
Russia is somehow haunted by imperial Byzantium. It is so despite herself, for Russians themselves do not feel an imperial calling, and might actually suffer in their national identity for going imperial. It is Europe that needs Russia as a new beacon of civilization, like it needed Constantinople throughout the Middle Ages. For Europe cannot exist without some form of imperial or federal unity; and since there can be no unity without leadership, the choice is now between the US (ruling through NATO and the UE) and Russia.
In The Origins of Nationalism (a book I learned about in James Lawrence’s interesting article), Caspar Hirschi puts forward the thesis that political thought in Europe throughout the Middle Ages was dominated by the imperial vision: “medieval culture, at least on the upper strata, can be described as a secondary Roman civilisation.” The great European nations emerged while trying to inherit the Empire, through “an intense and endless competition for supremacy; all major kingdoms aimed for universal dominion, yet prevented each other from achieving it.”[5]Caspar Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism: An Alternative History from Ancient Rome to Early Modern Germany, Cambridge UP, 2012, p. 14. I find this perspective quite enlightening. However, when Hirschi describes the order that emerged in the twelfth century as “the product of an enduring and forceful anachronism,” he is misled by the prejudice common to Western historians: the Roman Empire was not then — or not only — a distant memory, but a living reality. Rome was then Constantinople. This is why, until the Great Schism, all the pretenders to the Roman heritage competed for matrimonial alliances with the Byzantine dynasty, starting with Charlemagne (who wanted to marry his daughter Rotrude to the son of Empress Irene), Otto Ist (who married his son, the future Otto II, to the Byzantine princess Theophanu, mother of Otto III), then Hugh Capet (who solicited a Byzantine princess for himself, without success).[6]George Duby, Le Chevalier, la femme et le prêtre. Le mariage dans la France féodale, Hachette, 1981, p. 87. Until Frederick II Hohenstaufen (1215-1250), the last hope for reuniting East and West, Western imperial ceremonial rituals were borrowed from Byzantium.[7]Sylvain Gouguenheim, Frédéric II, Perrin, 2021, p. 250. It is only to the extent that, by mimetic rivalry, Western kings assumed an imperial posture (Philipp II by calling himself August, for example), that they saw their kingdoms as more than just territorial possessions. Civilization always belonged to the empire.
Whether we like it or not, Europe has never really been a Europe of nations without imperial unity, at least as a vision and goal. She never will. Ever since the Second World War, after Germany’s failure to gain leadership and the ruin of the British empire engineered by Roosevelt, Europe has de facto been part of the American imperium. To break free from it, Europeans have only one way to go: being pulled into the civilizational field of Russia, which, like Byzantium, is less an empire than an Oikoumene, a community. And this requires an overture to Russian Orthodoxy, for it is the root of Russian civilization.
Unknown Byzantium
We, Westerners, don’t know what Russia is, because we don’t know what Byzantium was. The Byzantine civilization was at the center of the known world during the thousand years of the Middle Ages, yet you can spend years studying “the Middle Ages” at university without ever hearing about it. Nothing has really changed since Paul Stephenson complained in 1972: “The excision of Byzantine history from medieval European studies does indeed seem to me an unforgivable offense against the very spirit of history.”[8]Paul Stephenson, The Byzantine World, Routledge, 2012, p. xxi.
When Western historiography mentions the Byzantine Empire, it is almost as a ghost of the Western Roman Empire. According to the paradigm of the translatio imperii fabricated by Catholic historiography, the Eastern Roman Empire is only the transfer of the Roman Empire from Italy to the Bosphorus, soon to be transferred again to Aachen. But this representation is misleading. When Constantine established his capital at Byzantium, Rome had ceased to be the capital of the Empire for half a century, having been replaced by Milan after the “Crisis of the Third Century”. It is admitted that Constantine himself set foot in Rome only once, to conquer it from Maxentius. Like his father Constantius Chlorus, Constantine was from the Balkans (born in Naissus, today Niš in Serbia), in the region then called Moesia. So did his predecessor Diocletian, who is given as “ Duke of Moesia” in Byzantine chronicles, and whose palace can still be seen in Split, today in Croatia.
The common idea that Constantinople is a pale copy of Rome is therefore singularly lacking in historical perspective. Constantinople was the daughter of Athens, not Rome. Its philosophical, scientific, poetic, mythological and artistic traditions came directly from classical Greece, without any Roman contribution. It was Constantinople that transmitted the cultural wealth of Greece to Rome. Without the conservation work of the Imperial Library of Constantinople, we would not know Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, or Euclid. In Constantinople, the light of classical Greece has never suffered an eclipse. While Constantinople knows the conflict between Christianity and humanism, the dual culture has never been questioned,[9]Jonathan Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades, 2nd ed, Bloomsbury, 2014, édition kindle, k. 465-94. and it was Photios, Patriarch of Constantinople from 858 to 867, who became the best advocate of the Macedonian Renaissance by his work of conservation of ancient Greek books.
Greek culture radiated from Constantinople to the confines of the known world, from Persia to Egypt and from Ireland to Spain. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a vast movement of translation from Greek into Latin of philosophical and scientific works (medicine, mathematics, geography, astronomy, etc.). In Aristote au mont Saint-Michel. Les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne (translated in German and Greek, but not in English), historian Sylvain Gouguenheim debunks the common opinion that the spread of Greek philosophy and science in the Middle Ages is to be credited mostly to Muslims. The Greek heritage was transmitted to Italian cities directly from Constantinople.[10]Sylvain Gouguenheim, Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel. Les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne, Seuil, 2008. Between the fifth and thirteenth centuries, Europe gravitated towards Constantinople.
If this reality escapes us today, it is because of our incurable eurocentrism, that Oswald Spengler denounced, but in vain:
The ground of West Europe is treated as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it — and great histories of millennial duration and mighty far-away Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets. We select a single bit of ground as the natural centre of the historical system, and make it the central sun. From it all the events of history receive their real light, from it their importance is judged in perspective. But it is in our own West-European conceit alone that this phantom “world-history,” which a breath of scepticism would dissipate, is acted out.[11]Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 1, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1926, p. 17.
To understand what separated Constantinople from Rome, let’s first keep in mind that Constantinople was born Christian, while in Rome, Christianity was an imported Oriental cult. It was Constantinople that gave Christianity to Rome, not the other way around. The doctrinal unity of the Church was elaborated and agreed near Constantinople, through the so-called “ecumenical councils” (connecting the Oikoumene, that is, the world placed under the authority of the emperor), whose participants were almost exclusively Easterners. Christopher Dawson reminds us of this evidence in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (1950), and insists:
Thus, unlike Christian Byzantium, Christian Rome represents only a brief interlude between paganism and barbarism. There were only eighteen years between Theodosius’ closing of the temples and the first sack of the Eternal City by the barbarians. The great age of the Western Fathers from Ambrose to Augustin was crammed into a single generation, and St. Augustine died with the Vandals at the gate.”[12]Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Doubleday, 1950, sur archive.org, pp. 29-30.
The political structure of Constantinople is also very different from that of Rome. The Latin military terms of imperium and imperator are inadequate to describe the Byzantine world. What we now call the Byzantine Empire called itself a basiliea, a kingdom, headed by a basileus, a king — a Persian-style “king of kings” of sorts. Byzantium scholars describe the Byzantine world as a “Commonwealth”, that is, in the words of Dimitry Obolensky, “the supra-national idea of an association of Christian peoples, to which the emperor and the ‘ecumenical patriarch’ of Constantinople provided a symbolic leadership — even if each of these peoples was fully independent politically and economically.”[13]Quoted in John Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, Cambridge UP, 1981, p. 2. Contrary to Romans, says Anthony Kaldellis, “The Byzantines were not a warlike people. […] Money, silk, and titles were the empire’s preferred instruments of governance and foreign policy, over swords and armies.”[14]Anthony Kaldellis, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade, Oxford UP, 2019, p. xxvii.
Byzantine power has a two-headed structure, which Western historians pejoratively call “Caesaropapism”, but which Byzantines defined as a symphonia, a harmonious collaboration; supreme authority is held by the basileus, but on the condition of the blessing of the patriarch of Constantinople. The patriarch is the protector of orthodoxy, but the basileus is the keeper of all Christians. This balance of political and spiritual power means that, while the patriarch may occasionally play a diplomatic role, he does not exercise direct political power, and has never called for a “holy war”, nor for the burning of heretics. Thus coexist, on the margins of the Orthodox Church, a variety of independent Churches, such as the Armenian or the Maronite Churches. Even fully “Orthodox” churches still maintain a strong national identity, like the Serbians, with for example their family feast of Slava, a survival of ancestor worship.
The Great Schism
During the period called the “Byzantine Papacy” (537-752). Rome was a declining town, while Ravenna, taken back from the Ostrogoths by Justinian (527-565), was the western capital of the Byzantine Empire, ruled by the representative of the emperor called the “exarch”. The bishop of Rome (who shared with all bishops the affectionate Greek title of pappas) was directly appointed by the Byzantine emperor or his exarch, usually from among the “apocrisiaries” (ambassadors in Constantinople) of his predecessor.
Ravenna is a Byzantine city, as evidenced by its Basilica of San Vitale, with its mosaics. The reason icons of the emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora are displayed there is because a basilica means a “royal” (basilikos) building intended to house public meetings under the authority of the basileus. Etymology betrays what textbook history is hiding.
The first serious crisis in the conciliar unity of the Church was initiated by Pope Gregory I (590-604), notoriously Hellenophobic like his mentor Augustine. He challenged the Patriarch of Constantinople on the use of the title “ecumenical”, then, in 602, when the Emperor Maurice was slaughtered with all his family by a factious general named Phocas, he congratulated the usurper. The latter, shunned by the patriarch, seized the hand extended by Rome and issued an imperial proclamation officially placing the Church of Rome at “the head of all the Churches”.[15]Andrew Ekonomou, Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes: Eastern Influences on Rome and the Papacy from Gregory the Great to Zacharias, A.D. 590-752, Lexington Books, 2007 , kindle, e. 1322-31.
In 751, the Lombards captured Ravenna and, twenty years later, marched on Rome. Charlemagne subdued the Lombards and exploited the supremacist claims of the bishop of Rome for his own imperial ambition. On the ground that the Franks were absent from the Second Council of Nicaea (787), he ignored it and sparked a liturgical dispute by defending a version of the Creed different from the Nicene Creed; according to the latter, the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father” (ex Patre procedit), but a different formula originating from the Visigoths affirmed that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and of the Son” (ex Patre Filioque procedit). The variant, although unquestionably heterodox, did not arouse serious controversy until Charlemagne decided that it would be the only authorized and compulsory one. The Filioque became the pretext for the Frankish emperors and popes to undermine the authority of Constantinople, and for the schism of 1054.
In 1048, the Germanic Emperor Henry III (1017-1056) appointed as pope his cousin Bruno of Eguisheim-Dagsbourg. But after the death of Henry III, popes and emperors (all Franks) entered into a power struggle. This started the Gregorian Reform, named after Gregory VII, whose project was to make the papacy the seat of a new imperial power. He proclaimed himself the sole head of the universal Church and postulated, in his Dictatus Papae in 27 proposition:
2. That only the Bishop of Rome is by law called universal. 3. That he alone can depose or reinstate bishops. […] 8. That he alone may use the imperial insignia. 9. That the Pope is the only man whose feet shall be kissed by all princes. […] 12. That he may depose Emperors. […] 19. That he must not be judged by anyone. […] 22. That the Roman church has never erred, nor, as witness Scripture, will ever do so.
The new psychological weapon of excommunication, by which the pope could stir popular unrest and release the subjects of the emperor from their oath of loyalty, forced Henry IV to kneel before the pope at Canossa (1077).
As they gained ascendancy over emperors and kings, popes conspired against Constantinople, with not only theological weapons, but also military might, by mobilizing the formidable Frankish warrior class in holy wars. Byzantines were justifiably worried when, in 1095, they saw the coming of the army raised by Pope Urban II for the “liberation” of Jerusalem, under the command of a papal legate. “[Emperor] Alexios and his advisers saw the approaching crusade not as the arrival of long-awaited allies but rather as a potential threat to the Oikoumene,” writes Jonathan Harris.[16]Jonathan Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades, Hambledon Continuum, 2003, p. 56.
The First Crusade resulted in the establishment of four Latin states in Syria and Palestine, which formed the basis of a Frankish presence which lasted until 1291. In 1198, Jerusalem having been recaptured by Saladin, the young Pope Innocent III proclaimed a new crusade, the fourth according to modern numbering. This time, the Byzantines’ fear of a hidden agenda proved fully justified. In 1204, instead of going to Jerusalem via Alexandria as officially announced, the Frankish knights moved toward Constantinople, took it by force and sacked it during three days. Palaces, churches, monasteries, libraries were systematically pillaged, and the city became a shambles. British historian Steven Runciman wrote:
There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade. Not only did it cause the destruction or dispersal of all the treasures of the past that Byzantium had devotedly stored, and the mortal wounding of a civilization that was still active and great ; but it was also an act of gigantic political folly. It brought no help to the Christians in Palestine. Instead it robbed them of potential helpers. And it upset the whole defense of Christendom … In the wide sweep of world history the effects were wholly disastrous. Since the inception of its Empire Byzantium had been the guardian of Europe against the infidel East and the barbarian North. She had opposed them with her armies and tamed them with her civilization. She had passed through many anxious periods when it had seemed that her doom had come, but hitherto she had survived them.[17]Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3: The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades (1954), Penguin Classics, 2016, p. 130.
As a whole, the Crusades not only dealt a mortal blow to the Eastern Christian empire they claimed to save. They have also dug an unbridgeable divide between the Muslim world and the Christian world. The crusaders’s massacre in Jerusalem in 1099, in particular, left an incurable wound, as Runciman noted:
It was this bloodthirsty proof of Christian fanaticism that recreated the fanaticism of Islam. When, later, wiser Latins in the East sought to find some basis on which Christian and Moslem could work together, the memory of the massacre stood always in their way.[18]Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 1: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1951), Penguin Classics, 2016, p. 229.
The Franco-Latin Empire of the East, built on the smoking ruins of Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade, lasted only half a century. The Byzantines, entrenched in Nicaea (Iznik), slowly regained part of their former territory and, in 1261, under the command of Michael VIII Palaiologos, drove the Franks and Latins from Constantinople. But the city was only the ghost of her former self. Pope Urban IV immediately preached a new crusade, this time directed explicitly against the Byzantines. His call aroused few vocations. But in 1281, Pope Martin IV supported the project of Charles of Anjou to retake Constantinople to found a new Catholic empire. Ultimately, Constantinople would fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
The falsification of history
Although the Fourth Crusade caused the destruction of priceless treasures (two thirds of the books mentioned by Photios in his Bibliotheca are lost forever), it was the starting point of a cultural transfer that culminated in the Council of Florence in 1438. “Culturally,” writes Jerry Brotton in The Renaissance Bazaar, “the transmission of classical texts, ideas, and art objects from east to west that took place at the Council was to have a decisive effect on the art and scholarship of late 15th-century Italy.”[19]Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo, Oxford UP, 2010, p. 103. And when, after 1453, the last byzantine scholars and artists fled the Ottoman domination, many came to contribute to the Italian Renaissance.
But at the same time as they appropriated the Greek heritage, the Italian humanists and clerics affected to ignore their debt to Constantinople, even using philhellenism to denigrate the Byzantines.[20]Sylvain Gouguenheim, La Gloire des Grecs, Éditions du Cerf, 2017, p. 62. As Runciman writes:
Western Europe, with ancestral memories of jealousy of Byzantine civilization, with its spiritual advisers denouncing the Orthodox as sinful schismatics, and with a haunting sense of guilt that it had failed the city at the end, chose to forget about Byzantium. It could not forget the debt that it owed to the Greeks; but it saw the debt as being owed only to the Classical age.[21]Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453, Cambridge UP, 1965, p. 190.
There was not only a denial of the debt to Constantinople, but a systematic falsification of history. Even today, the sack of Constantinople in 1204 is commonly blamed on an unfortunate series of unforeseen events which drew the crusaders to Constantinople against their will; or else the Venetian bankers, creditors of the crusaders, are designated as the sole instigators of this diversion. Applied to contemporary history, the first theory would amount to asserting that the United States destroyed Iraq, Libya and Syria inadvertently, while trying to bring them Democracy. The second theory, on the other hand, forgets that it was mainly Franks who destroyed Constantinople, and that even Western chronicles admit that the papal legates embarked with the Crusaders did nothing to discourage them. All of Latin Christendom was in fact invited to rejoice in Rome’s victory, and hymns were sung to celebrate the fall of the impious city, likened to the Biblical Babylon.[22]Steven Runciman, The Eastern Schism: a Study of the Papacy and the Eastern Churches During the Xith and XIIth Centuries (1955), Hassell Street Press, 2021, p. 141
Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 2: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East (1100-1187) (1952), Penguin Classics, 2016, p. 115.
Concerning the First Crusade, we are still taught that it was the generous response of the Roman Church to a desperate appeal from the Byzantine emperor Alexios Komnenos struggling against the Seljuk Turks. This is indeed how Latin chroniclers presented it, quoting a letter from Alexios to the Count of Flanders in which the first humbly implored the help of the second. This letter is now considered a forgery.[23]Einar Joranson, “The Problem of the Spurious Letter of Emperor Alexis to the count of Flanders,” The American Historical Review, vol. 55 n°4 (July 1950), pp. 811-832, on www.jstor.org. The thesis that “the first crusade did not have as its initial goal the constitution of organized states in the Holy Land [but] delivering the Holy Places,” to quote a recent book on the subject,[24]Thierry Delcourt, Les Croisades. La plus grande aventure du Moyen Âge, Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2007, p. 60. is utterly naive and does not stand up to even superficial scrutiny. The truth is that, just like today, the holy war against Islam hid a project of destabilization and conquest of the Middle East. To take just one example: one of the main crusading leaders, Bohemond of Taranto, was the son of the Norman Robert Guiscard who, with the blessing of the pope, had already tried to seize Constantinople in 1081. During a diplomatic tour of Europe in 1105-1107, Bohemond raised funds and troops for a new expedition directed expressly against Constantinople, by distributing copies of the Gesta Francorum, an account of the crusade written for his own glorification and presenting “the Abominable Emperor” Alexios as a traitor whose every action was motivated solely by the destruction of the Crusader army.[25]Jonathan Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades, Hambledon Continuum, 2003, kindle ed., 2091-2113. This seminal text of the historiography of the Crusades, which contributed more than any other to the negative image of the Byzantines, effeminate and deceitful, and to the heroic image of the Franks, is a good example of medieval propaganda.
Crusades were not only directed to the East. In the wake of the Fourth Crusade, Innocent III decreed a new holy war against all heretics (meaning Christians who rejected his absolute authority) in the South of France. With unheard of cruelty, Simon de Montfort, a petty lord of Île-de-France, grabbed huge parts of the vast County of Toulouse, and forced the population to attend Catholic mass “in its entirety” every Sunday (Statuts de Pamiers, 1212).[26]Michel Roquebert, Simon de Montfort, bourreau et martyr, Perrin, 2005, p. 120. Several crusades were also directed against the Baltic region, and one against Orthodox Russia itself, led by the Teutonic Knights, repelled by Alexander Nevsky (1221-1263), today a national saint.[27]Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades: The Baltic and the Catholic Frontier (1980), 2nd edition, Penguin, 1997.
The falsification of medieval history goes far beyond the Crusades. The Catholic version of the doctrinal controversies that preceded them is singularly biased. It is founded on a forgery of industrial scale. The first biographies of Roman popes included in the Liber Pontificalis, presenting them as occupying the “throne of Saint Peter” in an unbroken chain going back to the first apostle of Christ, are now considered fictitious, and so is the Acta Petri, which transposed in Rome the contest between Peter and Simon Magus located in Samaria in Acts 8:9-23. The legend of Peter in Rome tells us nothing about real events, but rather informs us about the propaganda deployed by the papacy to claim precedence over the Eastern Church. (Constantinople responded by claiming, as founding bishop, Peter’s brother Andrew, whom the Gospels designate as the first to have responded to the call of Christ.)[28]Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders, trans. Patrick Geary, University of Chicago Press, 1991 (German edition 1984), p. 13.
The most famous medieval forgery of the Frankish popes is the Donation of Constantine the Great, by which the Emperor supposedly ceded to the “Pope of the Universe” all “the western provinces”, and entrusted him with the government of “all the churches of God throughout the world”.[29]Sylvain Gouguenheim, La Réforme grégorienne: De la lutte pour le sacré à la sécularisation du monde, Temps Présent, 2010 , kindle, e. 457-66. This forgery was the centerpiece of a hundred other forged decrees or synodal acts, attributed to early popes or other dignitaries of the Church, and known today as the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals . The main purpose of these forged documents was to invent precedents for the exercise of the sovereign authority of the Bishop of Rome over all bishops, on the one hand, and over all sovereigns, on the other. We must also mention the Symmachians Forgeries, fictitious legal precedents used to immunize the pope against any accusation. Charlemagne’s father was also put to use with the false Donation of Pepin.
It was not until 1440, when Byzantium was besieged by the Ottomans and had just surrendered at the Council of Florence, that the fraudulent nature of the Donation of Constantine was recognized. But nothing changed fundamentally in the Western narrative, marked by an almost total amnesia concerning Byzantium, by an incurable Eurocentrism, and by a willful blindness to the enormity of Roman fraud.
To repeat: Constantinople’s near-complete obliteration from the European history books is arguably the greatest deception in all of European history. The reasons for this concealment have changed, but have not disappeared. For, as I said, our ignorance and prejudice about Constantinople feeds our ignorance, prejudice, and hostility toward her spiritual heir: Orthodox Russia. History repeats itself.
The story that the bishop of Rome created for himself as the head of Christendom needs some serious work of revisionism. This is a work that Greek historians have naturally taken up. Jean Meyendorff and Aristeides Papadakis remind us that before the twelfth century, “the pope’s fragile hold upon Western Christendom was largely imaginary. The parochial world of Roman politics was actually the papacy’s only domain.”[30]John Meyendorff and Aristeides Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, p. 27.
Roman Catholicism has now come full circle. Who listens to the pope, nowadays? It turns out that the Catholic church, by deliberately sabotaging the conciliar organism of the Church, has ultimately failed in her hegemonic plan and now finds herself cut off from the Orthodox revival.
Roman Catholicism, as a belief system and as a worship practice, is almost dead. The same is true of its Protestant offshoots. Oswald Spengler wrote in Prussian Socialism (1919):
For us citizens of the Western world, religion is finished. In our urban souls what was once true religiosity has long since been intellectualized to “problematics.” The Church reached its fulfillment at the Council of Trent. Puritanism has turned into capitalism, and Pietism is now socialism. The Anglo-American sects represent merely the nervous businessman’s need for theological pastimes.
On the other hand, Russian Orthodoxy is full of life, and breathes a vigorous soul into Russian society. So it seems to me that Europe can only be pulled out of its current spiritual and moral crisis by entering into Russia’s orbit. Therefore, Catholics should work with humility toward the reconciliation of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. For that, they need a history lesson, which I just gave them. French Catholics, in particular, must understand that their roman national (France as the eldest daughter of the Church) is, just like the papal narrative on which it is dependent, a construction that borders on falsification and, in the eyes of the Orthodox, the sign of a diabolical arrogance. It is a sterile and dangerous delusion.
I am not qualified to judge the respective merits of Catholic and Orthodox theology (the very possibility of a “science of God” escapes me). But the hell with the Filioque! Personally, I wish for a beautiful Russian church, or even a Greek one, in my town. I like icons, Orthodox chants, and the contemplative style of Orthodox masses. Otherwise, I will continue to walk in the footsteps of Simone Weil, a passionate Hellenist scholar who converted to Christ because she saw in him the most sublime Greek hero, but refused baptism because Rome embodied for her the spirit of Yahweh — which she knew well, being raised a Jewess. “The curse of Israel weighs on Christianity [she meant Catholicism]. The atrocities, the Inquisition, the extermination of heretics and infidels, that was Israel,” she wrote in Gravity and Grace.
Laurent Guyénot, PhD in Medieval Studies, is the author of From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018, and JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, 2014. He has collected some of his earlier Unz Review articles in “Our God is Your God Too, But He Has Chosen Us”: Essays on Jewish Power.
Notes
[1] Oswald Spengler, Prussian Socialism, 1919, p. 67.
[2] Scott M. Kenworthy and Alexander S. Agadjanian, Understanding World Christianity: Russia, Fortress Press, 2021, p. 8.
[3] Kenworthy and Agadjanian, Understanding World Christianity, op. cit., p. 64.
[4] John Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, Cambridge UP, 1981, p. 10.
[5] Caspar Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism: An Alternative History from Ancient Rome to Early Modern Germany, Cambridge UP, 2012, p. 14.
[6] George Duby, Le Chevalier, la femme et le prêtre. Le mariage dans la France féodale, Hachette, 1981, p. 87.
[7] Sylvain Gouguenheim, Frédéric II, Perrin, 2021, p. 250.
[8] Paul Stephenson, The Byzantine World, Routledge, 2012, p. xxi.
[9] Jonathan Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades, 2nd ed, Bloomsbury, 2014, édition kindle, k. 465-94.
[10] Sylvain Gouguenheim, Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel. Les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne, Seuil, 2008.
[11] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 1, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1926, p. 17.
[12] Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Doubleday, 1950, sur archive.org, pp. 29-30.
[13] Quoted in John Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, Cambridge UP, 1981, p. 2.
[14] Anthony Kaldellis, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade, Oxford UP, 2019, p. xxvii.
[15] Andrew Ekonomou, Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes: Eastern Influences on Rome and the Papacy from Gregory the Great to Zacharias, A.D. 590-752, Lexington Books, 2007 , kindle, e. 1322-31.
[16] Jonathan Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades, Hambledon Continuum, 2003, p. 56.
[17] Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3: The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades (1954), Penguin Classics, 2016, p. 130.
[18] Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 1: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1951), Penguin Classics, 2016, p. 229.
[19] Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo, Oxford UP, 2010, p. 103.
[20] Sylvain Gouguenheim, La Gloire des Grecs, Éditions du Cerf, 2017, p. 62.
[21] Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453, Cambridge UP, 1965, p. 190.
[22] Steven Runciman, The Eastern Schism: a Study of the Papacy and the Eastern Churches During the Xith and XIIth Centuries (1955), Hassell Street Press, 2021, p. 141
Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 2: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East (1100-1187) (1952), Penguin Classics, 2016, p. 115.
[23] Einar Joranson, “The Problem of the Spurious Letter of Emperor Alexis to the count of Flanders,” The American Historical Review, vol. 55 n°4 (July 1950), pp. 811-832, on www.jstor.org.
[24] Thierry Delcourt, Les Croisades. La plus grande aventure du Moyen Âge, Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2007, p. 60.
[25] Jonathan Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades, Hambledon Continuum, 2003, kindle ed., 2091-2113.
[26] Michel Roquebert, Simon de Montfort, bourreau et martyr, Perrin, 2005, p. 120.
[27] Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades: The Baltic and the Catholic Frontier (1980), 2nd edition, Penguin, 1997.
[28] Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders, trans. Patrick Geary, University of Chicago Press, 1991 (German edition 1984), p. 13.
[29] Sylvain Gouguenheim, La Réforme grégorienne: De la lutte pour le sacré à la sécularisation du monde, Temps Présent, 2010 , kindle, e. 457-66.
[30] John Meyendorff and Aristeides Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, p. 27.
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Notice how when we seem to be nearing the ends of things the hater of mankind seeks to divide e.g. Evangelicals v Catholics or Orthodox v Catholics etc (not forgetting the evangelical atheists) . The reason why the Catholics always feature in legitimate critiques, but more often through calumny (excepting the current “pope”), is because Satan knows the promise was only ever given to Peter in the Gospels as does any honest scholar of scriptures not weighed down by sectarian or apologetic bias.
All this is religion and not love of the divine. This root is not love but hate and as Paul declared it is love which is transcendent and love which enters eternal life. Only a spiritually blind person can fail to observe that virtually the entire West is in grip of a spirit of lies and chaos. The tribe think all their Talmudic hate filled dreams are coming true but instead we are witnessing what Jesus said would happen when the Jews took the offer of Satan, i.e. the world, but lost their souls in doing so. The tribe were known in the ancient world as the “Haters of Mankind” and nothing has changed.
2023 LOL
1
(The overarching architectural spiritus rector in Ravenna – and in Aachen, hehehe –
is Sassanid, not Byzantine; the mosaics are varnish. IIRC the first true dome was
Herod´s bathroom in his dacha at Masada, so “Byzantine” is a bit like
the al-Hamra actually being Visigothic)
– A microcosm of the problem can be seen in the late and unlamented Yugoslavia:
Undeniably one people, divided by a measly stream two millennia ago for
reasons none of their concern; even the much later Turkish participation
can be seen at scale: The Bosniaks were Croats who preferred worshipping
carpets (“balja“) and forgoing slivovica(!) – well, not really –
to being ruled by wild-eyed orthodox psychos.
And alien they are, using some wacky Sumerian script while even the Turks
write like Christians nowadays, having a heathen calendar, worshipping the
Holy Miron of Schkrepkoutz Victor over the scourge of head lice, and eating and drinking things that curl the keyboard.
(I view the problem as a measure of the cultural destruction that Christianization
has wrought, while at the same time lacking a coherent (“revealed”) doctrine).
– About the one thing we can learn from the schismatics is the idea of a national church
i.e. the Church and the People are One, as laid down in Acts and some 19th century
German ideas (cf. Wilhelm Busch, “Pater Filucius”).
For better or worse we have lost that unity (i.e. we have et from the Tree) and
are now in no position to reach out to our erstwhile brethren; but the least we can do
is oppose the witch hunt against them and wish them all the best 🙂
Here is a short video of the Destruction of the Christ the Savior mentioned in this article. Perhaps the burning of Notre Dame is symbolic in our days.
Video Link
Thank you. This is a huge breakthrough article to understand the historical background of current events. The current rift between the Patriarchate of Constantinople, now a “trojan horse” tragically captured by western globalists, versus the Moscow Patriarchate, is a continuation of this long struggle between two different kinds of Christianity, a struggle even taking place inside the Orthodox church itself.
Many of the attacks on Christianity one sees on Unz are really attacks on it’s “western” form, and ignorant of its “eastern” form. On the surface level they may seem similar on the level of doctrinal statements, but the underlying ontological, epistemological, and anthropological worldviews are quite different. Even the very understandings of the role of doctrinal statements, the nature of language itself, the meanings of words, and how symbolism works are different.
Simplifying for brevity’s sake, Orthodoxy emphasises the bodily assimilation and transmission of
spiritual light, acquired as a gift via spiritual praxis, facilitated by what St. Symeon the New Theologian calls the “golden chain” of transmission of such light from a spiritually realized elder to a disciple. The entire Orthodox tradition is, as put by St. Seraphim of Sarov, the means to this end of this “acquisition of the Holy Spirit”.
Thanks again for bringing up this critically important topic.
Constantinople was the daughter of Jerusalem.
There is nothing virile or European in that wretched un-Aryan mind disabling virus from Palestine.
Is this the erstwhile chronological revisionist enthusiast?
Rome was always Rome, even depopulated. See the Code of Justinian. Pope St. Gregory is a saint of the Orthodox Church.
https://orthodoxwiki.org/Gregory_the_Dialogist
We care about the medieval world of the West because the Western World existed long before the Renaissance. The world of the Middle Ages absorbed that Byzantine world and what was left in the East was a captive population led by clergy whose bigotry was intensified by their dhimmi status. Putin says “I am a Lak, I’m a Chechen, I’m a Jew . . .” We can feel gratitude for Russia, even as Russian chauvinists hate us and our Catholic heritage, which they conflate with the current Judeomasonic dictatorship, they know enough to know that The WEST is civilization and the remnants of Christendom (and that Francis does not represent Catholicism but the Anti-Christian power in society, the base of his support). And they are a people who were held captive by the Tartar and Soviet Yokes. And yes it is our Catholic heritage which is the basis of Western civilized life.
“falsification of history” – still sound like the daft “chronological revisionist.” And that abortion loving Jewess, you praise! Filthy french rat.
The calumniation of the Catholic Church and its history only intensifies as the enormities resulting by the murder Christian Civilization become apparent. The demise of our very nations now threatened. We must be rid of these people with their notions of epicene Greek youths. Pseudo-intellectual degenerates.
This is just the First Battle between Devils of New Khazaria vs. the People of Christ.
Buckle your chinstraps.
You mistake Simone Weil with Simone Veil. Two different persons.
Charlemagne “subdued” the Lombards; he did not “submit” them!
Thanks. Forgive my poor English.
This localization of Christianity is why Imperialists and international Zionists fear and loathe Christian Russia. Authentic Christianity can really only be practiced locally. Like Moses’ summary execution of decadent, freewheeling, grifter Hebrews under the influence of alien customs and values, like the the Tower of Babble, imperial operations are necessarily big and “inclusive,” whereas Christianity can’t maintain its integrity and authenticity past a certain point.
Again, imperialism and international Zionism are at the crux of the destruction of America’s heritage, including its traditional peoples, and including its (one) semi-conservative oriented Catholic president. I wonder if America’s Founders would have done something more to preserve the racial heritage of the people, had they known what the Imperialists and international Zionists had in store for them? I kind of doubt it, given that they’d already made a Faustian bargain with Talmudisfs vis-a-vis the Transatlantic slave trade.
Thanks for your prodigious efforts. I much enjoyed your Yahweh to Zion book as well as your persuasive linking of Mossad and 911.
I see this very differently. Russia and the U.S., in my opinion, actually have to decide whether they want to remain linked to the European civilizational field or be pulled into the civilizational field of Asia/China (e.g. “Chimerica”, and presumably “Chiussia”).
It appears that Russia/Putin has decided to focus on Asia/China over Europe, and the U.S. appears to have been forced by Russian aggression to reoriented itself back towards Europe/NATO under Biden.
The two main global civilizational fields and “hotspots” of geostrategic importance are Northwestern Europe and Northeastern Asia: “there are only two places in the world that Really Matter in the sense that the world could be ruled from there (instead of, presumably, from North America): northwest Europe (Britain, France, and Germany) and northeast Asia (Japan, Korea, and China).” – https://www.unz.com/isteve/daily-mail-infiltrates-secret-bilderberg-confab-finds/#p_1_4:1-123
All other (junior) Civilizations (Russian/Orthodox, Indian/Vedic, Islamic, African, North+South American, etc.) will always only play second fiddle to the European or the Northeast Asian Civilizations in the long-term, even though one of the junior Civilizations might escape its civilizational backwaters temporarily and experience moments of relative global dominance (e.g. the U.S.’s military dominance after the fall of the Soviet Union, which is about to change with Europe’s upcoming (mostly German and French) rearmament).
More details in the following lecture:
Lieutenant General William E. Odom, Director Security Studies, Hudson Institute; Adjunct Prof, Yale
Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs
Video Link““American and the World: Guns vs. Butter”
May 6, 1992”
Rusia had an authoritative regime that has now turned into a full-blown dictatorship.
It might be that Putin is a benevolent, practical, or whatever absolute ruler.
Let’s hope so for the sake of the Russian people.
But once such a regime is in place, it is no different from other similar systems (e.g. absolute monarchy) and subject to the same weaknesses, namely, there is no guarantee that the next guy in line might not be a Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc, in other words, a genocidal madman.
There is nothing to celebrate here.
This is what dying gentile goyim Europe doesnt want to understand Ucraine its the death struggle of WHITE Western Christianity democracies vrs ZIOjewishglobalists.. Putin and Russia blessed country peoples culture are the last bastion of resistance against the Ziojewish control and its Noahide talmudic prophesies ….a supreme Jewish only oligarchy to rule and be served by the NONjewish goyim. IF Putin/Russia falls then white western christian nations will perish Holdomor II, another 20MILLION white christian aryans will be exterminated..
“J’attends les Cosaques et le Saint-Esprit.”
“L’Europe viendra réellement frapper à notre porte, pour que nous nous levions et allions chez elle sauver l’ordre”, dit Dostoïevsky.
”I wish for a beautiful Russian church in my town”. There are two in Paris:
Alexandre Nevski 12, Rue Daru, 8th arrondissement.
Cathedrale de la Sainte-Trinite, 1 Quai Branly, 7th arrondissement.
Both are now under the Moscow Patriarchy. It might be dangerous to approach any of them. But probably they will be closed.
How could ” the common opinion that the spread of Greek philosophy and science in the Middle Ages is to be credited mostly to Muslims” exemplify “incurable eurocentrism”?
You people just contradict yourselves with death-defying panache.
Reluctantly I must agree.
The original Greeks accepted and nurtured the Divine One of Plato and Plotinus as seen in a great prism of sub-deities, heroes, demigods and patrons. The “union” demanded by Christianity just put us at each others’ throats.
The gods never left us. We left them for a Levantine cash-cow. It never worked well and now it is exposed as our most expensive detour.
Abandon the saviors and rekindle the heroes.
Go Iran! Long live Soleimani.
https://gab.com/ASBMilitary/posts/107946361969094884
(The allusion to defunding the police in Baltimore was … hilarious; and yes,
I would trust a well-armed neighborhood watch a lot more).
Odom left out a third model, the orthodox Marxist one (Adolf Kozlik, “Der Vergeudungskapitalismus“1966) i.e. military spending is a way of destroying surplus capital, thus avoiding capital overproduction crises (spacefaring not in the long run being justifiable before the melanin-enhanced sheeple) in much the same way as having to pay for the halfricans on the periphery serves as a tonic for the German economy.
With the US no longer exporting anything but inflation and capital accumulation in runaway (as shown by net negative interest rates) this can no longer be upheld, and US military spending has devolved into a pure extortion racket, holding down the only two potential competitors.
All that is left is the question of when it comes crashing down.
(And don´t the two “cockpits” contradict MacKinder´s “Heartland”?)
Romanesque architecture is indeed a primtive provincial version of Byzantine High Art.
Also note, the Renaissance was set in motion by Byzantine refugees after 1453. after all who was El Greco and where did he learn his craft ?
The “Faustian West” looks like a useful concept.
Well, Europe can exist fine without Imperial hegemony. The problem isn’t Russia, it’s the US ZioGlob Empire. Putin offered friendly and respectful relations to Europe but was attacked and undermined from the start by the West’s Jewish elite – working through their media, their corrupt and blackmailed politicians, the EU and NATO. They had been busy looting Russia under Yeltsin and didn’t like the fact that Putin threw them out.
An interesting article, but this strange argument keeps appearing on UR.
Just because Hitler finished with the Jewish traitors of Weimar doesn’t mean that he was planning to liberate the Russians from the Bolshevik Jews. In 1942 he had the most powerful army in the world. If the Wehrmacht had established solid defensive position on short supply lines (new German/Soviet border) there was nothing conceivable that the Russians could have done to successfully invade Germany – even if they wanted to. Also Hitler was ahead of the Russians in the development of nuclear weapons.
Putin obviously isn’t planning to conquer the whole of Western Europe in order to displace the existing populations and introduce ethnic Russian settlers. Russia already has more than enough “lebensraum”.
Historian David Irving has a researched Hitler better than anyone, and as he wrote in the foreword to “The Warpath: Hitler’s Germany 1933 – 1939”:
If I have to choose between Irving and McMeekin/Suvorov then it has to be Irving.
Interesting,but ” all over the map”. Russia did inherit Byzantium, anyone familiar with her redtape knows this. Trying to do anything here takes patience. But,from her conversion until a few decades ago,Russian Orthodoxy is Russian. Not Byzantine. It has no resemblance to any other Christianity,maybe Serbian. Read Sinyavskys Ivan the Fool, a collection of lectures he gave ,I think,at the Sorbonne. Like the murals at Marfo Marinsky Convent in Moscow, the Christ on the walls is in Russia. He is Russian,Martha,MRy,the beggars,the poor,all Russian in a birch forest. For centuries,Russian Orthodoxy,away from the urban centers, was distinctly Russian. It was believed on Theophany that Christ was being baptized in Russia, not that his baptism in the Jordan was a desd historical act but a living act that occurred only in Russia,because Russia alone was and is a holy land.
Greek theoligians visiting Russia in the 1860s complained that the Christianity they witnessed in the rural regions bore no semblance to anything Christian anywhere else. Russian Orthodoxy had icons of Damp Mother Earth.Moscow forbade it,but it kept going into the 1960s. Russian khristyanin( peasants) saw Christ as Russian,Mary and Marys maternalism as Russian and more holy than her virginity. She is the God bearer,Theorokos,but also simply Mother. Russian Orthodox will shriek that its not so, nut Russian Orthodoxy retained more of the paganism than the Catholics,the Byzantines,the Protestants. The religion here is localized,the saints we oray to are saints birn and raised and murdered in Russia. I ons anandoned the Greek style and elongated the faves,put Russian colors onto icons,…Finally, you are wrong in stating that taking back what has always been ours,Ukraine, we are like Hitler.
Too late, Laurent. When you realise that the woman you woo is an irredeemable ‘salope’, you feel foolish, you feel disenchantment, and then, you move on. B/c that’s how we Orthodox Slavs see Europe, as an irredeemable ‘salope’.
Astounding, how Laurent‘s articles continue to provide key missing pieces of a puzzle we always thought we had all the pieces of. In reading them I discover that I could never have understood it all because I never knew I was missing the bigger picture.
I wish he would put these historical building blocks into a couple of books.
Interesting how the duplicitous image of Byzantium and Rome are a mirror image of each other, and probably true of both at different times in their history.
Maybe with some luck, alternating in ascension and ‚descension’ over the course of history.
You are right about the incomplete reference to the Eastern Roman (and not Byzantine) Empire in the stories of the West.
The reason is because the Orthodox Christians, in their ceremonies, included many events from the ceremonies of the believers in the previous worship (Olympian gods), as well as studies of ancient Greek philosophers (as you have already mentioned).
We, the young Greeks, have now embraced the Westerners, and betrayed the religious Russians.
When the barbaric Turks occupied half of Cyprus in 1974, our “friends” the westerners did nothing.
When the Westerners bombed the interfaith Yugoslavia, we let them pass through our country (NATO).
What a brilliant overview, and essentially an entirely correct one (I could argue about some details but certainly not with the overall picture)! It is almost hard to imagine such a clear vision of history by a person who claims little understanding of theology… Bravo!
Thank you for an excellent essay, Laurent Guyénot.
“Oikoumene” is a term not understood in western individualism (a synonym for ego-based greed) as it has been whittled down by the usual suspects to “Economy”, meaning matters solely to do with money management.
“It’s the Economy, Stupid” (in their naturally charmless/savage manner)
No.
“It’s the Oikoumene, Citizen.”
And this healthy precept will prevail.
The deadly RCC/masonic pope thankfully looks near its end.
A poster here recommended the book below.
I followed his advice, bought and can also recommend it for outline history.
As I’ve said many times before, the Talmudists, Bolsheviks, The Tribe, whatever you want to call them, hate Putin for one thing above all other reasons, and there are many, and that is his reestablishment of Christian Orthodoxy in Mother Russia.
Russian cultism, mysticism, different flavors of spiritualism, and selective morality, imposed through an authoritarian symbiosis, will likely be rejected by the well-educated population in Europe. Those perspectives are widely viewed as antiquated and inflexible. They tend to be inconsistent with modern Western values, including science, rationality, and freedom of choice.
Though recent statements by the Russian Orthodox patriarch confirm the strong union between the idiosyncratic Russian government leadership and its church, this peculiar “revival” appears less convincing even to other related Orthodox churches, as reported in the following article, so it appears unrealistic that Europeans would be yearning for this kind of alien hegemony.
I was raised a Christian but have left that faith by something I think better suits me a belief in “Spirit” – everyone and everything having some sort of driving spirit. Having said that, I do still think of morality. We now here in the US are losing, or have lost our moral compass. So now we’re seeing a wild movie headlong into a moral sewer. We must attempt to regain our moral underpinnings or we will finally come to an end as a viable society.
Thank you Laurent. A very informative article, as usual, requiring more than one reading.
You wrote about Simone Weil that she:
”
“raised a Jewess”? I thought that, though of Jewish origin, she was brought up in a secular, agnostic household. However she didn’t need to be “raised a Jewess” to come to the conclusion about catholicism she did.
Supporters of Christianity (and Orthodoxy) can begin by supporting the liberation of northern Cyprus from Turkish military 0ccupation–a result of the Turkish invasion in 1974 that caused the deaths and disappearance of 7,000 Greek Cypriots–a war and numerous Turkish atrocities that went unnoticed by the American and Western press. (One could also demand UK remove its two “sovereign” military bases from the Republic of Cyprus). Cyprus has some of the most beautiful Byzantine churches and Byzantine art to be seen anywhere.
Very interesting information. Thanks.
You are right. My formulation was misleading. “Born in a secular Jewish family” would have been more accurate. In any case a great French philosopher, who died at age 34. She should be in Paris’s Pantheon, instead of Simone Veil.
The timing of this remarkable article by Guyenot at these troubled times between the West and Russia could have not been timelier. It cuts through many lies that we were taught in history classes about the crusades and their initiation by the Byzantines when they asked for Western help against the advancing Muslim Seljuks.
As a Catholic of Orthodox descent, I see in Laurent Guyenot a great European hero who can undo the dark side of the legacy of a Catholic Church that transcended from a spiritual enterprise to worldly power pursuits, where popes sought political domination of European politics as prelude to world domination under the guise of spiritual rectitude.
Guyenot’s article rhymes well with a recent article written by Catholic dissident Archbishop Vigano that exposes the hidden reality of the current Ukrainian issue and the fraudulence of the Catholic papacy with her deafening silence about the issue of the day amidst the cacophony of poisonous lies spewed out by the Zionist Western Media:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/03/no_author/abp-vigano-globalists-have-fomented-war-in-ukraine-to-establish-the-tyranny-of-the-new-world-order/
Putin’s description of the Anglo Zionist empire as an The Empire of Lies goes beyond the media war that accompanies any real war, straight into the realm of ethics, a first for the past decades since the passing away of the last Christian Western European protagonist, the exceptional French leader Charle De Gaulle. And that is not surprising considering that Putin is about the only current practicing Christian leader among those of the major Western powers.
The unity of the Christian Churches is about the surest way to revive spirituality and morality in the West, as long as it is not done under the current syncretism of the current Vatican who is clearly under the thumb of the agents of the New World Order.
20 million Whites perishing is an awfully optimistic estimate.
The depiction of Mother Earth (as a naked woman with a snake and a toad,
usually euphemed as “Sin”) graces the front of the Cathedral in
Santiago de Compostela too; St. Stephen´s in Vienna sports Freyr and Freya
in the form of a male and female genital (!). So there, braggart 😀
(and no, you are nothing like Hitler)
Thanks for your interesting and constructive criticism. It actually reinforces my view about the need of Christianity to go national, which somehow goes counter to the essence of Christianity seen from the Catholic standpoint: Catholicism is actually synonymous with globalism and, in French history, has always been an anti-national force.
I just ordered Andrei Sinyavsky’s Ivan le Simple.
Regarding my comparison with Operation Barbarossa, I see your point.
Thanks. I admit my remark is over-simplistic and out of place.
Laurent, I’m in the middle of From Yahweh to Zion right now. It reads like a murder mystery [because it is], with the information density of a college textbook – great work, thanks.
I agree with most of what you’ve said though I have some issues
I note you constantly decry Europeans having a European centric world view.. should I decry the Russians for having a Russo centric view? Eurocentrism is just another meaningless leftist concept.
Also, in my experience.. it is the Orthodox who harbor hatred for Catholics.. not the other way around… I’ve tried talking to them many times in the past and it always seems to devolve with papist insults and displays of hatred.. I’ve always found this regrettable.. orthobros have quite a bit to be upset with us over.. no doubt.. but it always falls to treating the Commons like shit for the actions of the elite.. but hey.. it’s fashionable to hate us, right?
Also, my view on the void in western taught history represented by Constantinople is because it was completely woke to the JQ and highly antisemitic.. which is also why the ((venetian merchants)) redirected a crusade against the city just as they redirected the war against Japan to a war against Germany.. Jews have no new tricks.
Historical facts are not “calumniation.” For the ” the murder Christian Civilization” and “the demise of our very nations” look at the Catholic Church and see Bergoglio’s active participation. It is in the Catholic Church, not in the Eastern Orthodox churches that you find “epicene Greek youths.”
Russia has always had autocrats.
“ Both are now under the Moscow Patriarchy. It might be dangerous to approach any of them. But probably they will be closed.”
As long as the French will re-elect Macron or any competing candidate, Asselineau excepted. The succession of European Eurocrats to the leadership of European nations does not bode well for the European population. Those so called leaders are by and large smart technocrats who lack cultural perspective and are in hock to their masters in the WEF or the CFR or the RIIA aka Chatham House or the Bilderberg Group… Democracy has moved from a sober farce to an unabashed vaudeville.
Until the spirit of such greats as Colbert, Mazarin, Victor Hugo, Alfonce De Lamartine and Charle De Gaulle, is not revived among the younger French generation, France’s slide into mediocrity will be enhanced by the Empire of Lies and Chaos.
Hilaire Belloc wrote : ‘ The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith .’ When the Church denied the Faith at Vatican II, Europe’s fate was sealed.
Grygor Lukacs also wrote something to the effect that as long as WESTERN man retained their belief in their individual creation by God they would not attain the degree of alienation necessary for the acceptance of communism. From the widespread acceptance of the COVID lie, I think western man has achieved that state. Obviously, the Marxists must have concluded that the Russians had already achieved that state before starting their revolution there.
Lol.. the inquisition and the extermination of heretics was about finding and removing Jews.
Why do they always do this inversion game?
“Russian cultism, mysticism, different flavors of spiritualism, and selective morality, imposed through an authoritarian symbiosis, will likely be rejected by the well-educated population in Europe.”
By ‘well-educated” you must mean dumbed down, indoctrinated, and under a barrage of ideological campaigns meant to destroy their national and personal identity. The cult imposed is a globalist worship of such concepts as “equity,” “gender theory,” eternal victimhood of designated minorities with its corrolary — eternal guilt required to be abjectly professed and expiated by the majority of white Christians (males in particular), in which “normal” becomes “ oppressive, normative White patriarchy”.
“Those perspectives are widely viewed as antiquated and inflexible. They tend to be inconsistent with modern Western values, including science, rationality, and freedom of choice.”
Those are not “values,” but mere slogans: Western “science” today is not the pursuit of knowledge through investigation, open debate and verification, but political decrees from regime-appointed “experts;” “rationality” is incompatible with absurdities like “math is racist,” inconvenient dissent is heretical “denial”’ and the sinners are subjected to auto-da-fe; “freedom of choice” is a sardonic joke in any Western country today– you cannot be serious.
Let me clarify: the point is that Western Europe, ever since the eleventh-century schism, obliterated its own debt to Constantinople: that is what may be called “incurable eurocentrism” (although I used this expression only to paraphrase Spengler). The fact that recent scholars chose to recognize and exaggerate instead the West’s debt to Muslim scholars is not due to an “incurable eurocentrism”, obviously, but to the perpetuation of our old “cancel culture” against Constantinople.
Yes, but 911 is an emergency phone number.
When referring to the false flag attacks of Black Tuesday, September 11, 2001, please use the 9/11 designation, as most Americans do.
Your only problem is in defying the Gospels, which quite clearly declare that Christ changed the name of Simon to “rock” or Peter and declared him to be the rock on which he built His Church, giving Peter the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. Or maybe those Gospels, of which we now only have copies are also “forgeries”.
The differences you see between the Russian and Greek orthodox faith are superficial. Yes, the Russians see Mary as Russian, so what? I have been to a Greek Church where a mural showed Mary having a striking resemblance to … Maria Calas. To be fully assimilated the universal must be made local. The Russians, the Serbs and the Romanians paint their Eastern eggs in bright colors and elaborate designs as if they were Fabergé eggs, whereas the Greek Church does not allow such impious frivolity: the Easter eggs can only be solid red (Christ’s blood)! No colored wax candles for the Greeks either… Even the Russian religious calendar is different from that observed by the other Orthodox churches, so what?
Assimilating distinct local pre-Christian myths and rituals into the Orthodox religious practice of various countries does not create barriers between the autocephalous Orthodox churches.
Mircea Eliade described the rituals of some Romanian peasants of throwing the eggshells of Easter eggs into the river to announce the Resuscitation of Christ to their ancestors dwelling in the deep underground (clearly a pre-Christian, possibly Gaetic or Dacic belief of immortality deep down underground, not in the skies).
The doctrine is the same. The faith is the same.
Ample illustration of the “well-educated” and their “values”:
https://thesaker.is/the-menticide-manual-stupidiocracy/
What I am challenging is not that Jesus nicknamed Simon the Rock or Rocky, but that Peter ever went to Rome, let alone die there. It is not in the Gospel nor in Acts. It is indeed the original fraud. Although, I know, Orthodox do not challenge it. But nor did they ever challenge the False Donation of Constantine, to our knowledge (based on the Byzantine chronicles that Franks and Turks did not destroy).
So you, on your own hook, challenge the meticulously preserved records of the Roman Catholic Church, beginning with the Gospels. The statement above is so ludicrous that nothing you write has any further credibility.
All the Catholic martyrs, many of whom were those successors of Peter (nickname?), witness the diabolical nature of your demented drivel.
“For Europe cannot exist without some form of imperial or federal unity; and since there can be no unity without leadership, the choice is now between the US (ruling through NATO and the UE) and Russia.”
Is it going to be the homojewiniggerization or the spiritual Christianity?
“It was this bloodthirsty proof of Christian fanaticism that recreated the fanaticism of Islam.”
Sure, the Arabs came to Spain around 700 and tried to advance into France solely to give candy to the children.
Runciman is an idiot.
Only a fool can believe that monks of the Middle Ages who lived as peasants would have the time or interest to waste their time copying ancient Roman and Greek manuscripts and hiding them in the basement until a millennium later, when these documents would come to light in the Renaissance, whose nobles used to pay a lot for them. Worse is the belief that the manuscripts eventually copied would not have been modified to justify the elite’s greed.
Oh, BTW, excellent article, very edifying.
Another historically illiterate nonsense.
Most artistic & scientific culture is Western:
* sonnet
* opera
* all musical instruments (organ, piano, violin,…)
* musical notation
* modern mathematical notation
* all early modern to modern arms (various guns, canons, rifles, machine guns, planes, tanks, missiles, computer systems in those functions,..)
* universal calendar
* all modern sciences & all important discoveries (Newton, Gauss, Mendel, Maxwell, Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac, Watson, …). From mathematics & physics to genetics & medicine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_inventions
* Tsiolkowsky was doubtlessly very important, but so were Goddard, Oberth, von Ardenne, Korolyov & von Braun.
The West is in crisis. We can analyze ad nauseam why is West now in crisis, but there is no doubt that even in crisis-affluent West (US, Canada, Germany, Britain, Italy, France, Scandinavia,..) is far superior to the lands of Eastern Christians (Russia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine,..). Everybody wants to go to that faggy, decadent & pedo West, while no one would go to Eastern Christian historical lands. And I won’t even mention other races & cultures.
The West created a global universal culture all others (India, China, Russia, Japan, Islamic world…) had adopted.
As for the current crisis, not just shitholers, but affluent Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, Iranians, eastern Europeans,… are scrambling to go to the West (faggy, decadent etc.) & no one goes to Russia except Russians & a few crackpot celebrities.
Dear Laurent, thank you for this masterful article. I would very much like to know your opinion about the french historian Pierre Hillard’s view of Vladimir Putin. He considers Putin to be part and parcel of the globalist agenda and under the control of the Jews too, but not the Rostchild faction but the Chabad Lubavitcher faction which is powerful in Russia.
According to Hillard’s view then, the current Russian intervention in in Ukraine is just a fight between two Jewish clans for preeminence and for their particular strategy for world domination to prevail. Putin is therefore considered to be no more than pawn in the hands of Russian Jewish oligarchs and not an independent player who has helped revive the orthodox Christian church in Russia. I know that Xavier Moreau who has been living in Russia for twenty years believes that Putin is a great leader and a Russian nationalist. My question to mr hillard and to you is: what tangible evidence do we have of Putin’s being under the control of chabad Lubavitcher?
This is a very very crucial topic for our understanding of the whole situation
There is indeed a resentment and distrust of the Catholics among the Orthodox and even more so in the clergy. But the anti-Orthodox slant of the Catholic Church is institutional, aggressive, and historical. Moreover, it is violent. The Crusades were actually against the Orthodox church; Islam was secondary, and less important. Islam was more tolerated than Orthodoxy. The Crusades followed the Schism of 1051 as a direct consequence and were an extension of policy. In Europe, there were forced conversions from Orthodoxy to Catholicism along the historical line of contact which, very often, amounted to bloody persecution. Not to mention the Teutonic Knights sent by, and with, the blessings of the Pope for earthly political reasons. Even now the Catholic Church still engages in aggressive attempted proselytism—poaching— which is not Christian but political and subversive in nature and substance.
So, would you expect the Orthodox to have a high opinion of the Pope and the Catholic Empire? Nowadays, anywhere you look, who does? This is not to say that the Orthodox Patriarchs are not corrupt. The Patriarch of Constantinople is an officer in the Turkish Army. The Patriarch of Moscow is a political hack and a blatant instrument of the Globalists. True spirituality can only be found at the lowest level. The higher you go in any hierarchy, the more corrupt it is.
This arouses my suspicion that the Talmudic Termites could have funded this sacking for a multitudinous benefit, another stab in Corpus Christianus, direct monetary gain, and divide and conquer-separation of East and West. They are still using that playbook today.
The ongoing destruction and dissolution of the West can be related to the Hindu-Buddhist concept of Karma, the Eternal Equation.
Brilliant! Give that man a cigar!
This article provides an excellent historical background of the Orthodox church. It would be great to also analyze why Russia is trying to revive the church.
After 70 years of communist suppression of the church, Russia was left, not only economically ruined, but also suffering from a social collapse. Alcoholism, divorce, falling population etc.
In order to prevent a catastrophic breakdown in society the Russian government has been trying frantically to revive religion, including both Christianity and Islam. New churches are being built, and so are mosques. A few years ago they built a huge new “cathedral” mosque in Moscow.
Things are beginning to improve, but in the year 2021 the population of Russia still declined by 1 million. The divorce rate in Russia is still the highest in the world at 73%.
So, there’s a long way to go before a healthy society can be built. The question is whether reviving the Orthodox Church can do the job, or has Christianity been so damaged by neglect and abuse, both in the West and in Russia, that its moral code cannot be resurrected any more. In that case switching to Islam may be an option to look at.
damnit laurent, you’re so cold. you know that? almost blatantly obtuse while coming off as acute. cold as siberia. russia doesn’t commit fraud ever, but it’s only those romans that do. gotcha. Jesus Christ, with insight like that it’s not a surprise the “west” is in its current state.
imagine trying to paint over mongol-mutt-russiyan geopolitics over the last 1000 years by pretending they are spiritually superior. LOL. if the State and the russian church are tied together, then it’s not a surprise russia has AIDS.
ruski protestants fighting anglo protestants is the same result. dead people fighting other dead people.
this article is potemkin, bro.
The problem with Irving, for all of his great work, is that he sees things through his British eyes. For example, while claiming to be critical of the saturation bombing of German cities, he waxes eloquently on how effectively it was run and it being a large part of the reason for victory. He also caved on his “Hollow-co$t denial”.
Suvarov defected. Part of his stated reason was the discovery of the lies about the Soviet build up to WWII and the myth of the Great Patriotic War. Suvarov was a native Russian speaker and was reviewing Soviet archives through Soviet eyes. He understood the size and strength of the Soviet forces, which were massive compared to Germany, including superior weaponry.
What Hitler said in 1933 is in German. I am aware Irving speaks German, but another revisionist Carlos Whitlock Porter is/was an official translator. He has been critical of most translations of NSDAP speeches, because they are not in context with what German speakers of the NSDAP’s age group meant. Geezers like me have to put up with words like “gay” or “bigot” meaning something different than when I was growing up over 60 years ago. People seem to forget that a large part of Ukraine was once in the Austrian Empire, just as large parts of Poland were. If Hitler’s secret speeches really meant something else, why had he already ceded parts to Poland and made a peace offer, by way of plebiscite, that would likely have ended up ceding West Prussia, given the Polish ethnic cleansing?
Years ago I saw graffiti painted on a wall – TALK – ACTION = 0 . Whatever Hitler may have said, there is a lot of evidence to demonstrate that realpolitik replaced talk.
The answer to the wests spiritual problems(and other problems) is Hitlers National Socialism with its strong racial policies. Religion is dead and I don’t see how it can come back and don’t think it should. That doesn’t mean atheism as an alternative. You can believe in God without having a church and religion. National Socialism did not fail but was conquered. If people can’t get into their heads that the answer is right in front of us then they are lost forever. National Socialism was one of the greatest movements in history. A true Renaissance. It didn’t contradict Christianity. A true Christian would have supported National Socialism for its high morals and keeping its policies consistent with nature’s laws.
I’m sorry, but I beg to differ in your categorizing Islam in the list of second fiddle civilizations. For a thousand years prior to the industrial age, Islam was pretty much dominant in the world.
Islam can incorporate all races and nationalities. So, if what you say is correct and only Europeans and Northeast Asians can built a great civilization, it still does not preclude a dominant Islamic civilization in the future. This civilization will be made up of European Muslims.
Read I. I. Smirnov, “The Paths of History”. It is a common sense of conspiracy theory to satanize Venetians. The author claimed attention on Genoan bankers too (remember that Columbus was declaerd Genoan).
Bullshit. Jews control the West and Russia via Jesus cult. Russia will never be free until the Jesus cult is eliminated.
When referring to the revival of the East, don’t stop at Russia but go further. To China and Asia, where the Jesus cult is absent. Hence China is emerging as a great power. If China can innovate, which it has shown that it can, it’s unstoppable. Most importantly, China has no Jews, therefore you can never beat it.
I’m a traditionalist Catholic convert. I agree with the Vatican losing its way in persuit of temporal powers.. but I want to explain my support for the idea, at least, of a Pope.. it goes back to the protestantism of my youth. Protestants will create a new denomination over who is bring what to a pot luck supper.
There is a need for a final decider on issues of doctrine to prevent such division which ultimately leads to schism. In the time it took me to write that four new protestant denominations were born. I jest of course.. Seriously though, you cannot tell me Jesus wanted his church so divided..
I have more in common with an Orthodox Christian than a protestant christian. I was taught to regard our Orthodox Christians as brothers on the ramparts of the fortress of Christ.. but sadly I don’t think Orthodox are taught to see us in such a light. It’s unfortunate.
Don Curzio Nitoglia is unlikely to say the same as you, because he was Priebkhe’s confessor and is avowedly on the side of the Lubavitchers against Rothschild. Putin is really doing his best to save Russia, but unfortunately, other scoundrels are controlled by Lubavitchers, like the Trojan Horse clown that held the White House until 2020. In addition, the Lubavitchers are denialists and responsible for helping to spread covid-19 because they do not care about control measures, they promoted the chloroquine hoax and are opposed to the vaccine, which is why Israel was unable to control the pandemic.
The Bible was cobbled together from a hodgepodge of disparate beliefs and cults in 325 AD at the First Council of Nicea under Roman Emperor Constantine, who was himself a follower of Sol Invictus, a pagan cult.
There is no credible historical account of the mythical figure Jesus Christ.
My sophomore year in Catholic high school, we were working our way through world history, and Father S., my Jesuit instructor, was lecturing about Gutenberg’s printing press and Gutenberg’s Bible, and how the invention of movable type and the printing press would ultimately change the lives of the common man. I think the good Father then made some quip about Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which went over my head, but I was on another track, and I raised my hand.
“Before Gutenberg invented the printing press,” I asked, “… how did they make Bibles?”
The good priest’s reply has stayed with me over the years.
The oldest extant Bible, the Codex Sinaiticus, shows evidence of multiple erasures and changes:
In your book, that may rate as “meticulous preservation,” but it doesn’t in mine.
I have always said and will always say the Orthodox opinions of us carry the weight of history.. the only thing I wish of the Orthobros is that they show charity towards the Catholic laity… as I interceed when I see one of my brethren speaking ill of Orthodox. Even if one only studies the western view of historical discourse with Othodox east, one can plainly see that we were not the ones behaving in good faith. After learning the history, Constatinople became a wound in my heart as well.
Here is the source link for that bit I quoted near the end of my comment:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/the-big-question-what-is-the-codex-sinaiticus-and-what-does-it-reveal-about-the-bible-1734439.html
I’d rather Rothschild’s Macron than Lubavtcher’s Zemmour. If the latter wins, Notredame will be a Mormon’s church.
Well, well, this is damning. Why isn’t this mainstream knowledge?
My friend, UraFecalLberal recently disparaged a snotty European who demeaned the American attitude of a lost child on theoccidentalobserver.net. He reminded him of the same as mentioned by this essential and valiant author. That comment was not published.
There seems to be some sort of phobic, irrational, timid, criteria inferred by the moderator at that website. Most likely the moderator-be it Dr. Kevin McDonald or other-has not existed or been tried outside of a walled off garden of academia or similar sequestration.
no it’s not.
they chose the Christianity that everyone else was practicing, before the russian geopolitical induced 1054 schism years later. all that schism over words? that is some pathetic geopolitical ambition shrouded behind “we don’t like these words”.
you said it yourself the russians are obsessed with “constantinople” because they showed up uncouth and dirty and were mesmerized by it’s golden beauty. the shiny object. do you even russia? nothing has changed. they are only attracted to shiny objects. byzantium was never russian. it’s just an object for them. an imperial empire object. that they are told to like, because it was shiny for them, one time a long time ago.
also, you leave out the bit about why they didn’t choose judaism: vladmir rejected judaism because their loss of jerusalem in 70 ad was proof god abandoned them.
well, what do you think about russian civilization losing “istanbul” to a turkish horde? did god abandon them? (russia has AIDS, laurent)
russia has been spiritually dead since 1054, england since henry VIII, and germany since luther.
The idea that Putin, who supports Russian Orthodoxy in extraordinary ways, is controlled by the Lubawitchs, sounds ludicrous to me (and very Catholic). He surely controls them more than they control him.
Xavier Moreau knows what he is talking about.
I found no such tome on any search engine. But following Paths of History by Igor M. Diakonoff.
Are you sure that you are not referencing the history of vodka?
Several terms you mentioned in the arts are Italian, whether of Latin origin or not (sonetto, opera, allegro ma non troppo, belvedere, acquarella, etc.), because the Italian commercial cities (Venice, Genoa, Florence) received the heritage of the Byzantine diaspora, that from Italy passed to France through Catherine Medici, who married King Francis I. Later, there was England’s contribution to men’s clothing and the rest is well-known history.
Smirnov, I.I. Paths of History: The Cryptoanalysis of Deep Power. Moscow: KMK Scientific Press. 2020. 473 p.
That’s my view too! I don’t know if Pierre has changed his view since the Russian intervention in Ukraine. He seems to think the Jews already control all the world are just fighting between each other for supremacy using their respective goyims as cannon fodder.
I asked him the question after he posted his last article on E&R at the end of February, but it wasn’t published on the website. Pierre is very knowledgeable on globalism and Zionism but he’s very possibly wrong on Vladimir Putin.
The only thing that must be said though is that Putin in Syria hasn’t opposed the Israeli Air Force’s almost quasi daily bombing raids against Iranian targets, eventhough the Russian air defence systems could easily down all the Israeli fighter jets, and that the Iranians are his allies and he’s not defending them.
Maybe he came to an understanding with Netanyahu. To be sure, the relationship between Russia and Israel is far from easy or clear to understand. I don’t know to what extent Putin has to accommodate their interests.
For example , eventhough the whole power structure in Ukraine that has worked non-stop to undermine Russia for the last 20 years is Jewish-Zionist (from the puppet president Zelinski to the oligarch igor kolomooski, to Victoria Nuland, Anthony blinken, George Soros and others), Putin despite his big balls, stopped short at calling a spade a spade by saying explicitly and publicly to his people and the rest of the world that it is Jewish Power that has worked non stop to undermine and destroy Russia because it stands against Talmudic Jewish total hegemonic goals. Why didn’t he state the obvious? Is he also somewhat fearful of their power? Or preferring to proceed by stages in his confrontation with Jewish power?
Nobody cares about Ukraine it is not a crucial strategic interest for the USA, England or Germany or France. It is the Russian sphere of influence and the only reason it is an issue it is because of Jewish power. Putin knows this full well, yet he isnt saying it.
Consider the agreements with Brazil, Orban and Trump, which are controlled by Lubavitchers. Also consider the failure of Covid vaccination in Russia, which was the first nation to vaccinate in 2020 and is now being decimated by Covid. Perhaps Putin is not controlled but has strong ties to them. In Smirnov’s book that I mentioned in my previous post, there’s a theory that Russia always turns abruptly the route to fall when things start to take off. In addition to the vaccine, they suddenly lost the space race for America in 1966. The West is invincible and other countries only progress if our elite allows it. Look at China now, which with the sanctions, will run out of microchip making machines because these are from Europe.
The Gospels, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, are not “forgeries” because they are originals. Being originals they are the result of creative thought, which to be interesting, has to bear some relation to reality. The really good stuff which bears a lot of relation to reality, is attributed to divine inspiration. But creative literature is not historic fact. While the prototype of “Simon called Peter” is actually an appropriation of the popular support for a celebrity Zealot or bandit executed by the Jewish Roman General Julius Alexander in 46 AD (along with his accomplice Jacob called James), to literally believe that he is “God’s Viceroy on Earth” is silly.
Thank you for your superb research.
May I ask which transnational organizations you’d consider adding to the following list?
The Pyramid of Power
Who Rules Today’s “Governments”?
1 – Bank of England (1694-today) https://edu.bankofengland.co.uk/about/history
2 – Rothschild (1769-today) https://www.rothschildarchive.org/exhibitions/timeline
3 – Brotherhood of the Covenant (1843-today) https://www.bnaibrith.org/175th.html
4 – WZO (1897-today) https://www.wzo.org.il
5 – Federal Reserve Bank (1913-today) https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/history_article.html
6 – CFR (1921-today) https://www.cfr.org/book/continuing-inquiry
7 – CCP (1921-today) http://english.www.gov.cn/19thcpccongress
8 – BIS (1930-today) https://www.bis.org/about/history.htm
9 – World Bank Group (1944-today) https://www.worldbank.org/en/about/history
10 – UN (1945-today) https://www.un.org/en/about-un
11 – ISIS (1948-today) https://www.mossad.gov.il/eng/history/Pages/default.aspx
12 – NATO (1949-today) https://www.nato.int/nato-welcome/index.html
13 – Bilderberg Group (1954-today) https://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/background/brief-history
14 – EU (1967-today) https://europarlamentti.info/en/European-union/history
15 – Trilateral Commission (1973-today) https://trilateral.org/page/3/about-trilateral
16 – ECB (1988-today) https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/history/html/index.en.html
Welcome to the COVID WORLD ORDER.
https://PlandemicSeries.Com
Goddamn Rationalist idiot. No spiritual sense whatsoever. Obvious Neo-Darwinist. Not a whiff of common sense. Obviously an over misedumacated urbanite. Fedah.
Recognize that sleepy joe was selected by the hidden dictatorship of the west, as were Boris and Emanuel. Europe is ruled by the selected Ursula Von Der Lyen who is the farthest thing from benevolent and stupid to boot!
A clear case of “gas lighting” to think we in the west elect anyone.
“Come on man”
Does anyone really think voting machines connected to the web run by a company called Dominion is on the up n’ up?
Who is pulling the strings?
Anyone know who it is?
Continuing my first reply to you, although I agree that the Modern Age is an unsurpassed Western creation, the question here is not that, but about the origin of civilization, whose path seems to start in the East and end in the West. Russia, as Third Rome, inherited the spiritual authority of the Byzantine Empire, which gave the basis for the nowadays unsurpassed Western Civilization, but which is also undeniably falling.
Very interesting for a lego in medieval history like me. Came here from Martianov´s blog through a link posted there.
Have you read The Crusades Seen by the Arabs by Amin Maalouf?
The West hit its absolute peak with Leonardo, who happened to be a pederast who lived with his enamorate’ the 14 y.o. scion of the Melzi Estate until his death. So this simple fact of history totally demolishes your entire premise. Leonardo, the Florentine (title of a book by Rachel Annand Taylor in ca.1925) was most certainly the fruit of Western Civilization, as expostulated by the late Dr. Leonard Shlain, a brain-surgeon in his “The Brain of Leonardo”.
Shlain essentially described Leonardo as the ideal androgyne, whose left-brain was at an almost unbelievable level of engineering and mechanical genius—the greatest ever—and his holistic, intuitive, feminine right-hemisphere created masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. Leonardo, was essentially the perfectly balanced human.
True, genius levels (on one dimensional plane only) have arisen since Leonardo, but even there evince such samesexers as Whitman, Thoreau, Byron, Tchikovsky (oops, a Russian) and numerous others such as Cocteau, Gide, Baldwin, Gore and numerous others. Go back to Greece and say hello to a gentleman known as Plato. Should you prefer military men consider Alexander, Caesar, Richard the Lionhearted and Frederick the Great.
In other words, monsieur, you have succeeded in throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
You noticed that Putin did not prevent Israeli forces from attacking the Syrians. Why is it so difficult for you right-wingers to understand the obvious? The dualism between “goods” (Arians, Christians, etc.) versus “evils” (Jews, Freemasons, etc.) does not exist except in simplistic minds. There is only one thing for sure: power belongs to the Western elite and not to Thule, Atlantis, Hyperborea, Shamballah, Agartha, Russia, China or even the Zionists. And for a while there is nothing to deny that it will be so as long as one is still able to think.
But the very word “Islam” signifies SUBMISSION. Fuck that. My ancestors were Norse Vikings and we have never submitted, even to so-called St. Olaf and his torturing of dissidents to the Roman Catholic Imperium. Organized religion is often based on depictions of spiritual way showers such as Jesus, but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, they are the products of priest-crafty control freaks. Same thing happened with Mohammed.
Of course Eastern cultures with their eunuchs are the champions of male pride.
Perhaps this fellow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFw_SwWupNM
well exactly. it all stems from the fact the “eastern orthodox church” is just a russian geopolitical bag of hammers they like to beat slavs and fickle inferior greeks with. it’s easier to do over in the east, since they abandoned God in 1054 AD. God never abandoned the russians; they abandoned God in 1054 AD.
1000 years of russian history is evident that they abandoned God en masse.
you people think if russia talking big about orthodoxy scares the west? no, if that russian bear ever did stop the errors and bow down to the true real immaculate heart of mary and not some fraud ruski version of marys, it really would be a superpower. and now that is terrifying to eel slurpers in london, because they will be left with an impotent bag of rainbow dildos they’ve been trying to beat people into submission with. it’s all so gay, really. protestants just cause problems wherever they go.
so in the meantime, anglo protestants will attack russian protestants and hide behind the other euros caught in between. and russian protestants will attack catholics because they don’t know shit about anything having been stuck behind a frozen iron wall being fed crappy russian State propaganda for 1000 years.
When you say this, without addressing the root issues driving the perpetual, obsessive animosity of the west against the east, it is as nonsensical as saying people should stop stealing so the world will be a better place.
Many people, who are trapped in poverty, steal. When you reduce poverty, you reduce theft. This is what I mean by addressing root causes of a problem.
I didn’t see any explanation of the root issue driving the perpetual obsessive animosity of the western christians against the eastern christians. How are we to resolve this issue without understanding the root causes?
~
You imply the Europeans, and their descendants, have a genetic disposition to egomania and a compulsion to force others to submit to their personal authority.
If blacks can have a genetic inclination to impulse control problems, then why can’t Europeans have a genetic inclination to a different kind of personality problem?
Is this true? It would explain why the west can’t stand it that there are whole countries of christians who don’t bow down to their authority, and strenuously resist the authority of the west.
Most black people in the US have some European genes along with their African genes. If a black person inherited problems with impulse control, egomania, and a need for others to submit to their personal authority, then it would explain a lot of the extreme gang violence among blacks in the US.
You described many examples of the west canceling/erasing Constantinople, and refer to the endless wars among European nations to compete for the top dog position. This is what I mean by implying the root issues driving the perpetual, obsessive animosity of the west against the east.
You can add to that the fact that European nations often bankrupted themselves in their wars with each other, and at one time had colonized most of our Earth.
You could say that a disposition to egomania and a compulsion to force others to submit to their personal authority are the fatal flaws of European culture. Europeans are in real trouble if those traits are genetically based.
~
I had hopes of a reconciliation between Europe and Russia. This has been wrecked on the rocks of their subservience to US imperialism.
Why is Russophobia so addictive to Europeans that they would rather destroy their economy than to make peace with Russia?
I read somewhere that no country in Africa or South America has joined in the sanctions against Russia, so Russophobia really does seem to be a European problem, along with countries dominated by European descendants.
The world will be a better place if we can figure out how to heal Russophobia.
Submission to God, the creator of the universe. Everyone submits to him, willingly or unwillingly–planets, stars, laws of nature, and even Vikings.
The issue is that post-Christian Western civilization is collapsing morally. Some are adopting left-wing ideologies, like LGBTQ, and some are adopting right-wing ideologies like Norse gods, white pride etc. It’s not working. Reviving Christianity is also looking impossible.
In the future wise people will realize the futility of adopting man-made ideologies like communism, liberalism, socialism, hedonism, wokeness, etc. and go back to the user manual from the original equipment manufacturer, the Quran. When they’re ready Islam will be there patiently waiting for them.
What a parade of idiocies. But this is the cartoonish image of Russia that the collective ‘West’ relish. Their incapacity of appreciating the real rapport of forces face led to all criminal decisions in respect to Russia with the attendant catastrophes inflicted on Russia, but which boomeranged on the same ‘West’.
In fact, three with Saint-Serge, 93 rue de Crimée, Paris 19.
There was a now obscure US book published in 1853 called The New Rome; or, the United States of the World which claimed the US would defeat Russia in a future war, and thereby establish itself as the center of a global empire, ie the ‘New Rome’. In Russia in 2006 a corresponding book, also somewhat obscure now, entitled The Third Empire: the Russia That Was Meant to Be, was published claiming that it would be Russia instead that would defeat the United States in a future war, and make itself the center of a global super state, ie the ‘Third Empire’.
Though I would rather be wrong, what if these two books (see links below) represent ‘suggestions’ being placed in the US and Russian people’s minds, by someone (or something) that is attempting to manipulate Russia and the United States to destroy each other, rather than either ‘a New Rome’, or, a ‘Third Rome’ winning and prevailing?
If so, people have their refusal.
From the Third Empire article, though this question could equally be asked of the New Rome book of the mid 19th century:
https://today.i-n24.com/entertainment/books/25968.html
https://archive.org/details/newrome00poes/page/108/mode/2up
This is pure gobbledygook. You are certainly not in a position to assess genius.
Back to basics: A plane is inherently two-dimensional and can therefore never be one-dimensional.
Nice try but whatever you choose make sure that it follows the laws of nature or it isn’t true. National Socialism strictly follows nature’s laws. For instance whites can only legally have offspring in their own likeness as is true amongst all creatures on this earth. Any belief system that doesn’t follow nature’s laws is false.
The site at which JFK was assassinated is consecrated with a Saturnian Cube!
It’s the ultimate tribute-cum-mockery by the Jewish Mafia and Saturday Tribe.
The elephant in the room is that Putin is in no way pro-European and he cannot be expected to be a defender of the European people. His Christianity seems to be the same as those in the west: 1 mile wide, 1 inch deep, so he can’t be expected to be a defender of the Christian people. As long as the only resistance to globohomo comes from a guy who is up to his “Christian” neck in Chabad Lubavitch, we don’t have any help (on earth) at all.
This whole affair (East vs West, NATO vs Russia) is nothing more than 2 predators, a bear and a lion, arguing over who gets to eat us (European Christians).
The Vatican is one of the major tentacles of evil. They have a blood-soaked history. You are prejudicially Roman Catholic. Not good Karma. Constantine was demonic.
You have absolutely no basis on which to assess spiritual levels of reality. You are stuck with a “One Dimensional Mind” as per Marcuse, who endured the whole Marxist crappola.
“the U.S. appears to have been forced by Russian aggression to reorient[] itself back towards Europe/NATO under Biden”
“(And don´t the two “cockpits” contradict MacKinder´s “Heartland”?)”
Not necessarily, I believe the G7/”The Two Cockpits” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_Seven have simply become the successor to or the evolution of MacKinder´s “Heartland.”
America’s Inadvertent Empire
By William E. Odom and Robert Dujarric
Yale University Press, 2004
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2004-03-01/americas-inadvertent-empire
However, this has never been exclusively or even remotely America’s empire, in my opinion, but rather a more or less voluntary association of “The Two Cockpits” or the “Axis Powers” (predominantly Germany and Japan) under U.S. military (NATO) protection. The U.S. is the Axis Powers’ way to link up with each other without having to conquer or control the “Heartland.”
Western Europe via North America linked with Japan (and South Korea and to a lesser extent Taiwan) is an alternative, peaceful “World-Island” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_History , so to speak.
The G7, basically, is a a type of “The Man in the High Castle” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle scenario in real life, without the U.S. being openly partitioned by the Axis Powers, but the rather the U.S. being used and shared as a business and military link and platform between “The Two Cockpits.”
How Japan almost took over the United States in the 1980’s.
https://coleschafer.medium.com/how-japan-almost-took-over-the-united-states-in-the-1980s-a727801fa766
China is trying to replace Japan as the head of the Northeast Asian Cockpit and take control of the U.S. via “Chimerica”, but, at the moment, “Japan is [still] the largest foreign holder of public U.S. government debt, owning $1,304 billion in debt as of December 2021.”
Even though there are only about 1.5 million Japanese Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Americans and over 5 million Chinese Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Americans today, there are over 40 million German Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans many of whom control important levers of power in the U.S. and have much political influence, one prominent, contemporary example is Peter Thiel (who was born in Germany), therefore I don’t see China taking over the U.S. any time soon, especially now that Putin has strengthened NATO/G7 through openly attacking Ukraine and linking up the Russian/”Heartland” “Pivot Area” with China.
Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_History
Greater Germanic Reich | Man in the High Castle
The Templin Institute
Video Link
Creator does not take sides. Creator is not a physical entity, but a sublime intelligence, all-encompassing. No Creator in his right mind would engender a “Chosen” people. Yahweh, may he drown in a vat of burning excrement, was the self-created Tribal WarGod of the ancient Hebrews. He was evil and bloodthirsty—Moloch, in fact. If you dare to, read the book of Leviticus—purely racist and genocidal. That book was the basis for the system of substitute redemption foisted on the world by the Emperor Constantine and his stooges.
Mohammed had a few good ideas, but was ultimately overcome by the Hadith and other elements of priestcraft. This is easily verifiable by the practice of mass circumcision which was not even cited by Mohammed. Though less radical than neonatal sex-abuse blood-sacrifice as practiced by the Judaics and way too many unthinking American parents; the three to 8 year-old practice among Islamics is but little better, as it too, induces psycho-sexual trauma, which militaristic cultures seem to prefer as it cuts them off from the very roots of existential manhood. Wounded weenies and psyches do make for the mass mindset of dedicated warriors. Thus, Islam does not offer peace.
Yep.
Or “nothing more than two lords arguing over who gets to shaft us”.
Say….House of Mormont and House of Lannister.
The problem is: these have nukes instead of medieval weaponry. Nowhere to run if goes bad.
It all went according to plan: the USSR was pushed back, and Axis Germany was overextended until the whole thing came crashing down on Berlin. Europe was divided and the Soviet Union guarded the East in a weakened state for the next 40 years, only to recede on cue and allow NATO to expand, hence the present days. A lot of people only see contradictions where the math is an obvious solution.
I admit that I didn’t know what you said above. On doing some research I found it to be true that circumcision is not obligatory in Islam. I used to think it was. So, anyone converting to Islam should have no fear for their willy.
I respect a lot of what Laurent Guyenot has to say on Judaism, Europe and spirituality but I disagree with both LG and Spengler to the extent that they see a “Russian Era” approaching for Europe or consider Europe to have a “Eurasian” destiny in the Duginist sense.
European cultures are distinct from Asian cultures, Faustian, as Guyenot acknowledges. The traditions of Aryans syncretized with older European populations and filtered through the religions, ideologies and folkways of the Greeks and Romans have created something that may not necessarily be at odds with Asia/the “East” but it markedly contrasts with those cultures.
Oil and water aren’t antithetical but they don’t mix.
I see the future of Russia as one of natural separation of its European/Slavic races and cultures (remaining Orthodox) and Turkic and Mongol/Asian populations which will continue Islamicizing.
A multipolar world is fortunately replacing American hegemony, but on a decades-long timeline, the idea of Russia as a Eurasian hegemon will founder on the shoals of biology/race and culture.
Jamais deux sans trois! It passed under the jurisdiction of Moscow Patriarchate, anyway.
But you can see that Mgr. Jean de Doubna fell back on the defunct Rue Daru/Saint Serge position. They have to stay open. Chances are that we’ll see another schism.
Thank’s Laurent for the very refreshing perspective and for the references.
My attention was first raised when you mentioned the spirit. “Spirit” was the the word that came to my mind a couple of weeks ago to des ribe the attitude of Putin when faced with Western agression.
Concurrently I am reading the excellent “L’église des apôtres et des martyrs” by Daniel-Rops (1948) who makes so many fine observations from the time of the early church and those apply very well to the actors of the current conflict in Ukraine.
You may be right. A renewal of their lost spirituality may be the best gift Russia can offer to those who currently harbour hate in their hearts.
It was the Catholic Church that organised the defense of Europe from numerous Muslim invasions from the Battle of Tours in 732 onwards. At the siege of Vienna the Protestants joined forces with the Ottomans. Look up the Martyrs of Otranto if you want an example of what Catholic men were prepared to do to forestall the Muslim invaders. But you modern day Vikings under the thumb of feminists, with your atheism and nihilism are incapable of defending your women and girls from Muslim rapists!
😀 😀 😀
Thanks for going to these lengths (heh) to educate me – so in essence you argue the Axis won WWII and kind of acquired the US as an external symbiont muscle to provide positive sea power and nukuler umbrella under which to ply their machloikes. It´s a bit like the evolutionary biologist´s conundrum “did man domesticate the wheat or is it not in reality the wheat that parasitizes on man, making him spread the seed and remove the competition?”
Only American paleocons argue like that; seen from the outside it´s more Little Britain 2.0, only larger and stinkinger: And just like when Little Britain lost the edge in manufacturing and sea power (manifest by 1908, postponed slightly by the Dreadnaught class) it was over, the Usual Suspects´trajectory can readily be seen.
Japan is [still] the largest foreign holder of public U.S. government debt
… while this is technically correct, it means the opposite of what is commonly understood. To the Japanese, the Plaza “Accord” 1985 is right there with the Treaty of Portsmouth 1905; once more the US took away a victory that was theirs by right of blood, sweat and tears – just because they could. And don´t get me started on the hundreds of billions the Germans pay to the Jew and its little helpers every year (the actual number, like the number of holocaust survivors receiving pensions, is a closely guarded secret).
Germany and Japan are hostages – the Russia-China coalition is unnatural but the US are scared shitless of the logical tripolar world (Russia will become even more of a player when the Northeast Passage becomes viable – until then the “Heartland” is of little consequence). Unless the Usual Suspects start a war, Nature will work her course.
@Laurent Guyénot
Thank you for writing this article.
It’s fascinating to see the millennial propagandization within Western historiography against the Byzantine Empire; even to this day it deliberately receives little to no attention from historians. Through our Western history courses, we were endlessly regaled about pagan Rome and the HRE, but the Eastern Roman Empire was a mere passing note despite reigning for 1000 years. We hear about the Dark Ages of Europe but never about the concurrent Golden Age of Byzantium.
I believe the West could value greatly from understanding this missing aspect of OUR history. Looking toward the Russian system of Byzantine Symphonia is a good start and something we can learn from. The Western secular notion of ‘Separation of Church and State’ (a Luciferian inversion of Symphonia) has been a disaster for the ethical/moral fibre of its nations; leading to the modern soulless deracinated “individual”: the Homo-economicus.
“Only American paleocons argue like that”
“The G7, basically, is a [] type of “The Man in the High Castle” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle scenario in real life, without the U.S. being openly partitioned by the Axis Powers, but [] rather the U.S. being used and shared as a business and military link and platform between “The Two Cockpits.””
I don’t believe my above comment/observation is a paleocon argument… since I don’t think American paleocons like or appreciate Emmanuel Macron like we do 😉 “I would like to explain what led me to conclude that Emmanuel Macron has an “Alt Right” worldview.” – August 3, 2017 at 10:11 pm GMT • 900 Words https://www.unz.com/article/collateral-damage/#comment-1955020
“so in essence you argue the Axis won WWII and kind of acquired the US as an external symbiont muscle to provide positive sea power and nukuler umbrella under which to ply their machloikes.”
Not quite, it’s more like that the Axis powers realized and were forced to acknowledge — by military defeat — the power and superiority of the U.S. system of governance, that Russia/Eurasia was/is a lost cause, and that therefore embracing the “American System” instead of resisting it, was the smart and sensible thing to do, in order to regain (really maintain) global economic and military power, within a shared, yes most definitely symbiotic, alternative security architecture.
What is not on too many people’s radar is that Japan, like Germany and France, has been reasserting its power status again as well, recently. I believe, this is a signal to both Russia and China (Eurasia), that it still sees itself as the ruling and dominant power of the Northeast Asian Civilization, and will actively and if necessary maybe even militarily (with the assistance of NATO) oppose their alliance and agenda to take control of Northeast Asia:
Japan claims sovereignty over Russia controlled Kuril Islands | DW News
Mar 10, 2022
Video Link
“While the world focuses on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, tensions between Moscow and Tokyo are rising. Disagreement over who owns the Kuril Islands just off the coast of Hokkaido is one of the world’s longest-running territorial disputes and has parallels with the Ukraine crisis.”
Also highly recommended from the Brown Journal of World Affairs Archive:
Understanding America’s Empire (If it Really Has One)
by William E. Odom
https://bjwa.brown.edu/11-1/understanding-americas-empire-if-it-really-has-one/
Screenshoted excerpt from the article on how America’s (temporary) Empire could and would end, “but this is not a destructive threat” according to General Odom:
Emmanuel Macron is the most vocal proponent of this vision of a federal Europe and a European army based on shared values with the U.S. (“American System”), and I believe, Putin’s aggression in Ukraine has pretty much guaranteed his reelection https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/macron-surges-in-election-polls-as-race-for-runoff-tightens so he will likely have another 5 years in office, at a minimum, to make his vision of a strong, respected and united Europe a reality, that would also remain allied/linked via the G7 and the U.S./NATO with Japan.
So glad you mentioned this. It seems to me that the Catholic Church is the ultimate hidden factor behind this horrible confrontation. I’m certain that when Biden visited Rome last year he must have spoken with the Pope at length about their plans for Ukraine.
The Catholic Church is doing what it always has done, utilizing Jewish power and money to promote its ideological interests. I know devout Catholics who are prepared to die on the hill over the schism with Eastern Orthodoxy, contending until this day that the Eastern churches must submit to the supremacy of the Pope in Rome, no matter how corrupt he is.
They see nothing good in Russia, even it’s spiritual restoration and revitalization under Putin. They are blinded by their dreams of Papal supremacy (first rather than first among equals).
The Jews find it all amusing and stand aloof from the Christian ideological struggles while they are more than happy to enrich themselves feeding the fires of confrontation.
From my interaction with American Roman Catholics, they will always favor Catholic interests, no matter how corrupt and debauched their culture is, over the interests of the Eastern Orthodox sphere, completely unwilling to acknowledge virtues operating in those cultures that are absent from our own.
So in my view the Catholic Church is The Hidden Hand directing this tragic confrontation with Russia. I’m certain they’ve encouraged the expansion of NATO eastward. Those newly absorbed countries are the front line of the long running historic confrontation between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
I suspect the Catholics would rather foment Global nuclear Holocaust rather than concede their dreams of spiritual authority over the world.
According to a YouTube talk I saw from a Chinese pastor in Singapore, China in the 16th century was on the verge of converting to Catholicism when the church authorities in Rome recalled the Jesuit evangelist Mateo Ricci and shut down his culturally sensitive outreach to the Chinese people. This provoked the Chinese Emperor to ban Christianity and expel all Christians from China. As usual Catholic overreach and tyranny crippled the cause of Christ, as they have done repeatedly throughout their sorry history of greed arrogance pride and contempt.
Watch here about 30 minutes from the end:
Stop this ridiculous good versus evil Manicheism. In 1453 Catholic gunsmiths working for the Pope made cannons for the Muslims to take Constantinople. In 1917 Lenin returned to Russia using the official papal wagon. Crusades targeted more Byzantium than Islam. Mexican Cristeros shoot all the teachers they found in the villages they entered.
I’ve never understood the logic behind the claim, nor, to the extent there might be some truth in it, why it should be ‘celebrated’. It was Islamics after all who were largely responsible for the fall of Constantinople after centuries of unprovoked and incessant wars of agression made upon Byzantium.
I liken it to a city’s fine arts museum being burned down by an arsonist, who manages to snag (ie loot) a few of the priceless items from the fire they themselves set, and who then pompously proclaims themselves to be a benefactor of the arts.
Thanks for nothing.
Though of Viking extraction, I am a Vestlander. Viking DNA is common in England, Scotland, Ireland and Normandy. The Upper Midwest includes a large Scandinavian element. WE are not atheists, or particularly pussywhipped, at least in rural areas. Needless to say, we despise Rome, though we all have some Catholic friends—most of them lapsed, for a series of good reasons.
Monsieur,
i had almost given up, but then this. What an impatient fool i am! May the Lord forgive me.
Your understanding of the Old Testament, its purpose and reasoning, is wrong. The New has to come after the Old. Read it in its proper context, in the time frame of a fallen world when mankind had gone astray. The Holy Scriptures were written by people of Faith who were inspired by God the Holy Spirit. We need Faith to correctly understand them.
Without faith and baptism, there is no hope of salvation. Why do we always have to make everything difficult when we are instructed to do something so straightforward?
John 3:5
Jesus answered, “Verily, verily I say unto thee, unless a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.
What profits a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul? S.V.P. – if you save yourself, by the grace of God, then France is saved – one soul at a time. As King Louis 14th said, “I am France.”
As with the individual, the nation has to constantly balance her worldly affairs with the spiritual duty without ever forgetting which one is eternal and should take priority. If Russia were to become militarily, economically, psychologically weak, then the wolves would finish her. But, if she neglected her spiritual calling then she would become lost and turn into another wolf.
“The Church is Europe and Europe is the Church.” (Belloc)
It is a great balancing act and i pray that President Vladimir Putin and his great nation have found the correct formula.
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,
The people He has chosen as His own inheritance. Psalm 33:12
Virtually every time you choose to throw unwarranted accusations at me, it is to your own detriment, because you expose that you can’t get your facts straight. For most children with stereoscopic vision (two eyes), perception is at least already four-dimensional in light of the additional time dimension. Only one dimension still contains infinite shades of gray, but you seem to be stuck in a binary mindset, reduced to the duality of just black and white.
Your superfluous name-dropping has back-fired on you. Herbert Marcuse did not “endure” Marxism, but wallowed in it. He emigrated to the US from Germany n 1934 and then promoted what is now referred to as “Cultural Marxism” or “Critical Theory”, an attempt to synthesize selected thoughts of Freud and Marx, which one of his early books, Eros and Civilization, contributed toward.
Marcuse was a popular proponent of the “New Left”, a predominantly Jewish movement from the Frankfurt School of Social Research, which later moved to Columbia University. His 1964 book, One Dimensional Man, was essentially an attack on consumerism and human commodification. He wrote it during the time he was working, for at least a decade, at Brandeis University, which is overwhelmingly Jewish.
Thanks for that clarification – I was getting all confused by dogma. I read on rt.com (and here on unz.com) about the changes going on in Russia, and am a bit envious of them.
I’ve spent my life on the west coast of North America, and tend to take a more relaxed approach to surface appearances. In short, I find spirituality more easily in the woods than in a building.
However, relaxed doesn’t mean nihilism, and deep down I have strong spiritual beliefs. While not christian, my basic values are more aligned with the eastern form of Christianity, than the western form. Which gets back to being envious of Russians.
Its amazing that a billion Catholics put up with such a corrupt church that is the antithesis of the teachings of Jesus. When thinking about the popes, I keep coming back to wondering about the antichrist. It doesn’t make sense to me that the Jesuits founded thousands of schools and are adept in teaching people to think, and so many Catholics blindly support their church regardless of how corrupt and criminal it is.
A sign that christians in the US have been sucked into the jewish worldview is their tendency to ignore the teachings of Jesus about brotherhood and instead focus on the vicious, hurtful, elitist teachings in the old testament, which Jesus was intent on reforming.
The big question is, why has there been a millennia long, insane, obsessive animosity of the west for Byzantium/Russia?
Pretty good writing, Laurent. Especially is interesting your observation of falsified European history. There is so much to research in this field, but please let me give some examples that you can ignore or do the research yourself.
First, you know that the term ‘Byzantine’ is invented by German Hieronymus Wolf 150 years after the fall of Constantinople. The proper term is East Roman Empire, and the previous term was invented to prevent ‘Easterners’ to claim any heritage of the Roman Empire.
There is a hidden period of the Roman Empire between Rome and Constantinople, which was located in today’s Serbia, where 40 km from Belgrade was a Roman capital city, Sirmium where all Empire’s money was minted for centuries, and in which proximity 17 Roman Emperors were born. In Sirmium, St Peter established the first Christian diocese and from there he went to Rome. The official history hides that Diocletian, Constantine, Justin, Justinian and few dozens of other Emperors were Serbs, and Moesians and Thracians were Serbs. The Vatican’s falsification is that Serbs came from an unknown place to Balkan in the 7th cAC, and there is no one single account of this. It is unbelievable that this event, which is a cornerstone of European (and world) history, is not supported with single evidence.
Justinian built St. Sophia in Constantinople and introduced the Roman Law which is still the basis for the European (except Anglo-Saxon) law systems.
Other names mentioned here (Empress Catherine II, Vandals, Thucydides, Macedonians (e.g. Alexander the Great)) were also Serbs.
These history falsifications are pretty much still alive, and any mentioning of previous facts still cause furious reactions from some commenters. That is, in fact, a reflection of the phenomenon described in the first paragraph of the neighbouring M.Whitney’s text, considering that Russians and their language are Serbian derivatives. We should go back to history when all this started. That is when nomad ancestors of today’s westerners came from Russian steppes to Europe and conducted genocide on European indigenous people of much more advanced Vincha civilisation.
(Deutsche Welle, like Deutsche Bank and a host of others, is roughly as deutsch
as Drafi Deutscher; of course Japan is strategically dependent on the fisheries,
and Russia is strategically dependent on not having US bases there; as always
a solution is predicated on the Usual Suspects buggering off)
I see … USrael´s global tentacles are justified by superior governance.
[evil scientist´s laughter, long and hard]
You know, you´re not bad with a computer, for a five-year-old. You do realize
however that civilized nations (it´s a kulchur thing – you wouldn´t understand)
get a serious case of the semi-solid hiccups at the sight of your “governance”.
It might be time to take the lobbyists, PACs, United Citizens, Matterers ™ , Sibbyl Rites,
Rules-Based Order ™ and what have you and apply them rectally;
because, see, if you wait for your victims to do it it will be sideways and without
astrolube ™ (maybe even without WD-40, the brutes) and hurt a lot more.
When the dollar goes USrael will go the way of Little Britain – retire to
Monroe Island and quietly rot there; Odom is right about one thing –
there will be no invasion. What for?
Religion and religiousness are correlated.
The “greater” Religion becomes (golden temples, centers, orgs etc.) the littler religiousness is.
Vice versa, when Religion is zero, religiousness is one; one is all where the religious individual (devotee of truth and love) stands and not “all over the place”. Hence the Russian religiousness appears so facetted, i.e. localized with countless angels, holies, martyrs; faithfuls often purer and closer to the spring then the priest. (Suffering makes religious or bitter or even vicious).
Sourced religiousness (truth & love) can do without religions, but religions appear dead without religiousness.
When a Shudra tries to think the results are awful.
That was the view of Benzion Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu's father, a historian (of sorts).
When Simone Weil talked about the persecution of heretics she was in the first place thinking of the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of the Languedoc in Southern France – a mass murder which took place at the beginning of the thirteenth century. These Cathars had little or nothing to do with Jews. Their beliefs were supposed to originate in the Byzantine Empire – perhaps one reason for the Roman Catholic hatred.
I agree our elites have problems with egomania.. that said it is largely the result of the cousinocracy of the middle ages and the nature of the aristocracy to become inbred.. hello Hapsburg jaw.
I believe our elites are beyond self redemption and need to be cut down..
Remember European elites enslaved Europeans for centuries via feudalism..
The royal houses aren’t even from the the blood of the people they ruled.
And a nation whose laws do not reflect natural law will never know domestic tranquility.
The Russian Orthodox Church merited but being ruined. It had taught nothing to the peoples it catered to but submission to abusive authority. Alcoholism was already rampant to the utmost under its domination, family life was already a horror, population was stagnating or declining : actually, for all practical purposes the Russian Orthodox Church had taught the populations negro-like behaviour as some kind of ideal to be achieved : contempt for long-term planning, instant gratification, fatalism, envy towards one neighbour’s excessive education or culture. As long as the Soviet regime endured in its Stalinist form, population grew, and it is precisely when then faith in that regime’s future crumbled and an interest was revived for Orthodox spirituality that family life in the Eastern Bloc countries gave way to African-American-style demoralization. There is a manifest flaw indeed in the definition and practice of orthodoxy. Their refusal to incorporate the Filioque clause in their Credo translated most logically in the practical purpose than man cannot exert any positive or creative influence as a person and that wherever a good Christian shows up his sole purpose in life is to die and let die as a preparation for the destruction of all cosmos. Wherever that religion prevailed peoples grow politically dependent either to conquerors either to empires claiming to be universal and unchangeable (i.e. : globalist).
I giggle with laughter at these ”Axis won” types.. if they had, I don’t think the Japanese and Germans would be in the peril they are in.. right along with us Americans. The only one who won WWII was the Jews.
More than a million younger women who have been fleeing Ukraine in the past few weeks, many with young kids, must instinctively perceive (“feel“) this phenomenon. They surely also want to avoid the possibility of being gang raped by Russian soldiers during the course or aftermath of their attempted hostile conquest.
So does that screed vs. Marcuse virtue signal that you are pro consumerism (as in this nation is dying of consumption) and human commodification? You seem unable to discriminate between Jewish people who are awakening and those stuck on Talmudism.
Bullshit as usual from you. Those women are deprived of their husbands who are being conscripted by the terrorist Ukie state. They have no protection from the Banderista rapists. As you perfectly invert everything, you do appear to be much of a Babylonian Talmudist pilpul pusher or a terminally deluded Shabos Goy.
What do you disagree with? Isn’t it accurate to state that the Catholic Church organised the defense of Europe from the Muslim invasions. Why does that upset you?
Give me the references for your assertions.
You are stating that Lenin who received the gold to finance the Bolshevik Revolution from Paul Warburg the Jewish banker was conveyed there in a train belonging to the Pope?
I can up that with the Canadian authorities had arrested Trotsky at Halifax but were ordered to release him to continue on his way by the British authorities.
Total lie to say that Byzantium was targeted more than the Islam. ONCE Constantinople was sacked during the crusades and not on the orders of the Church.
Your pathetic accusations against the Church are nothing besides the facts that it was the Church that founded western civilization .
Most Northern European towns and cities grew up around sites cleared for agriculture by the monks.
It was the monks that gave the Scandinavians their written language.
It was the Church that founded the first universities like Paris, Oxford, Cambridge etc. The first astronomers, philosophers, chemists, botanists, geographers, economists etc were all Catholic monks. It was the monks that developed the best agricultural practices, musical notation and if it weren’t for the monks faithfully copying the extant Greek and Roman literature we would have had no access to Greek and Roman civilization.
See. Kenneth Clarke ‘ Civilization’
You don’t even understand the word manequeism which was a heresy combatted by the Church.
And the fruits of the Protestant Reformation are the legalization of usury, the privatisation of the issue of the currency with the establishment of the central banks; capitalism, communism, socialism fascism, two world wars and various genocides and so-called democracy which is our voluntary acceptance of our condition as bond slaves to the usurers.
Hasn’t this idea been rather thoroughly gutted by more recent historical studies?
It is true that Western culture is centered on Christianity, whose greatest expression is undoubtedly the Roman Catholic Church. The other branches, unfortunately, have a lot of gnosis in their creed, even if we cannot make a generalization. But this does not mean that the RCC throughout history, in order to ensure its hegemony, has not often allied itself with infidels against other Christians. Blaming the priests rather than the organization is questionable, because the way the RCC has acted over two millennia is what one would obviously expect from an imperial institution.
So, the solution for Europe is to create its own House (or rather, to clean its old house from the unwelcome guests who are abusing the owner’s hospitality) and seat at table with their peers of House of Mormont and House of Lannister.
After that, perhaps other groups of smaller states around the world will form too their Houses, around their common regional interests.
But the future idea should be rather to look for ways to cooperate and exchange with mutual benefits, not on living from disputing resources and feeding on instability.
An example of the first might be the Belt and Road Initiative. Of the second, the wars fomented by US and Nato around the globe.
Laurent Guyenot is absolutely brilliant – it is clear that the perennial key to Russian history, culture, and policy is the tradition of “Pravoslavie Rus” (Orthodox Russia). And it explains how Putin sees his role – his mother took him, the future KGB counter-intelligence officer, to be baptized in Leningrad in 1952, when Stalin was still alive. Westerners need to learn about how the world looks from the Orthodox perspective, because their ignorance has been weaponized by a pack of evil shysters trying to destroy everything beautiful and noble in the world. Interesting that Edgar Cayce also said in one of his trances that “From Russia comes the hope of the World.” We are seeing that now in the Ukraine “war” (actually a giant military police operation to wipe out the Khazarians and their duped slaves).
What about Berkut’s New Jerusalem project? Interesting that Russia focuses on the coast, where the new state would be founded. Ukraine’s poverty, forcing many people to emigrate (also to Israel), would help to accept the new state as a savior. Israel did not participate in the sanction against Russia. Perhaps the latter will populate the region with Israelis.
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Two sides of the same coin.
Do not forget that ‘the coast’ from Bessarabia to Abkhazia (including Crimea and Azov) was slated to become the ‘Soviet Jewish Republic’ after the ‘Russian’ Revolution (but Stalin had none of it) and again after WW2, this time with the support of “the Jewish masses of all countries, in particular the United States [which] would give substantial aid”(and again Stalin had none of it).
The ‘New Jerusalem’ was projected to be on the Dnieper, more exactly in Dnipro, where Kolomoysky built the Menorah, the biggest Jewish cultural center in the world.
Do you understand the induced mass hysteria of the ‘international community’ (aka Comintern) of shabbos-goys about “Ukraine”? The rage of the Kagans who see a new Stalin-Putler frustrating their efforts to ‘liberate’ their ancestral home from the barbaric Russkies?
Unbeknownst to the public since they remain as discreet as possible, there are quite a few native Orthodox congregants in the Languedoc, Auvergne and Catalonia. Back in 1996, I attended the opening / consecration of the Orthodox monastery Le Skite de Sainte Foy near Saint-Julien-des-Points in the Cévennes, France. The chapel of the monastery became crowded for the vespers with people living in the surrounding area. The few I talked with described themselves as descendants of Cathars.
But as I said, Israel did not adhere to the sanctions. Perhaps there must be Israeli mercenaries on both sides. The difference is that only Ukraine will give independence to the new state, while Russia will only accept colonization (who knows if Israel would prefer the latter option to avoid depopulating its territory for the new one).
But the idea of the Soviet Jewish Republic was ventilated well before the existence of Israel. Its antecedent was the Zionist project of the ”League of East European States” or ”Federation of East European States” (German: osteuropäischer Staatenbund) proposed in 1914 by the ”German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews” for a German-dominated consociational buffer state to be established in the Russian Partition of the multi-ethnic territory of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
In fact already in 1902 the President of the Zionist Association for Germany, Max Bodenheimer wrote a memorandum to the German Foreign Ministry in which he claimed that Yiddish, spoken by millions of East European Jews, who lived in the provinces annexed from Poland by Russia and Austria, was “a popular German dialect,” and that these Jews were well disposed to Germany by linguistic affinity. Bodenheimer stated that Zionism was currently controlled by pro-German leaders, and that Germany’s support for Zionist goals would be a boon to German ambitions in the Near East and would earn the gratitude of the entire Jewish people. “The influence of Jewry in foreign lands would accrue to the benefit of Germany…”
This was the hidden origin of WW1 and ‘Russian’ Revolution (and 2 as well -) and threatens to throw the world in WW3. Of course people would continue to bloviate about the encirclement of Germany, Russian aggression, Russians dreaming about Constantinople and the like.
Or maybe restoring the most successful system in the history of the world, National Socialism.
The Gospels are not ”creative literature” but statements of reliable witnesses taken under oath to serving as evidence for a court of justice.
Mr. Guyenot made remarkable progresses in trying to acquaint himself with Orthodoxy. But some of the ‘missing pieces’ of the puzzle that he puts in place are the wrong ones. One can hardly blame him, viewing that he gleans his information from the writings of representatives of the ‘School of Paris’ (the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute) founded by Russian emigrants in the wake of the Revolution. Their ‘Orthodoxy’ was too much influenced by western philosophical and ‘spiritual’ currents (some downright heretical, like ‘Sophianism’, or utopian like ‘Russia the Third Rome’, ‘Russian messianism’, ‘L’Idée russe’, ‘L’ame slave’), but they come to be considered as representative of the ‘true spirit of Orthodoxy’. That shaped to a large extent the misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the real Russia, of its history, culture and civilization and present politics. Ditto for all Orthodox countries, heirs of Byzantium. And actually of Orthodoxy itself.
Thanks as always for your informed and Spirit-led comments. May I ask if you have any views on the the Slavophiles and Alexei Khomiakov, of whom I am very fond?
God bless in this holy Lenten season.
Thanks for your very erudite addendum, Seraphim.
I do realize that the real answer may be somewhere closer to the middle, but I appreciate hearing both sides of the issue. Or, maybe that both sides have been right in their criticism of each other, but that their criticisms have applied alternatively over the course of history.
It’s very hard for anyone to argue for the Catholic position currently, for example.
Thought he was just a nasty old queen who liked to tinker, sketch, & paint himself in drag – good to know, thanx.
I followed your lead and found a a French translation of some of Khomiakov’s essays. Aleksei Stepanovitch Khomiakoff, L’Église latine et le protestantisme au point de vue de l’Église d’Orient, 1872,
What he writes about the papacy’s hubris deeply resonates.
On the “Western Schism”:
« Un état terrestre avait remplacé l’Église du Christ. La loi unique et vivante d’unité en Dieu fut remplacée par des lois partielles empreintes d’utilitarisme et de rapports juridiques. Le rationalisme se développa sous la forme de décisions d’autorité : inventant le purgatoire pour expliquer la prière pour les morts ; établissant entre l’homme et Dieu une balance de devoirs et de mérites ; mesurant les péchés et les prières, les fautes et les actes d’expiation ; faisant des reports d’un homme sur un autre ; sanctionnant des échanges d’actes nommés méritoires ; introduisant enfin dans le sanctuaire de la foi tout le mécanisme d’une maison de banque. Pendant ce temps, l’Église-Etat établissait une langue d’État : le latin ; puis se mettait à juger le temporel : puis prenait les armes, mettant en campagne d’abord les milices désordonnées des Croisades, plus tard les armées permanentes des ordres de chevalerie et finalement, quand le glaive eut été arraché de ses mains, la troupe disciplinée des jésuites. »
On the protestant reformation as logical consequence of the schism:
42 : « Il serait bien facile de montrer que l’empreinte romaine a marqué de son caractère indélébile les doctrines réformées, et que le même esprit de rationalisme utilitaire, qui était celui de la papauté, est encore celui de la Réforme. »
On Roman forgeries:
71 : « Les premières armes du nouveau pouvoir, les fausses Décrétales, mises au jour par la conscience peu timorée du pape Nicolas 1er, avaient été tirées d’un arsenal de faussaires ; la défense de ces premiers titres donna naissance à d’autres faux. Un système de mensonge naquit involontairement de ce mouvement, auquel les siècles suivants obéirent par une loi historique dont les conséquences se font sentir jusqu’à nous jours. »
Do you have other authors to recommend?
I think that the first thing to do in understanding the ‘Slavophils’ is to get out of the conceited western mental bubble that ”Their ideas grew from a sense of a crisis of identity engendered in Russia by the process of westernization” and that ”Slavophilism can be seen as an offshoot of German Romanticism in particular… Slavophilism was only in fact mirroring a process that was also going on or had gone on elsewhere in Europe”, a hotchpotch of copied western philosophical ideas cobbled together by dreamers suffering from a complex of inferiority towards the ‘West’, to forge a fantasist ‘identity’ for a people deprived of history, culture, originality, you name it.
There is much to say about that, but in a nutshell it was a reaction against the detractors of Orthodoxy, against the relentless attempts of the ‘Enlightened West’ to ‘Catholicize’ Russia and ‘cancel’ the Russian state, traditions, culture and appropriate its riches, while openly and brazenly defaming and insulting the Russians. The trigger for ‘Slavophilism’ was the shock of the publication of the so-called “Philosophical Letters’ of Pyotr Chaadaev and of the “La Russie en 1839′ of the Marquis de Custine.
The trend grew in intensity after another Napoleon attacked Russia (and in alliance with the enemies of Russia at that, the Ottomans) to deny the Russian protection of the Orthodox peoples subjected by the Ottomans, among other things, like the ejection of the Russian from the control of the Holy Sepulcher.
Lots of people want to go to Vegas. Is Vegas the pinnacle of civilization?
Viva Las Vegas!
Adios lost ’Murika!
Both the famous Czech division in Russian Revolution and the refuse of several Czech troups in fight against Russians in WWI show that paneslavism was strong and above religious splits. Jews, on other hand, considered Bismarck’s Germany their archaetypic Eden.
It is important to note that Khomiakov wrote three brochures in French and published in France and Germany between 1853 -1858:
”Quelques mots par un chrétien orthodoxe sur les communions occidentales à l’occasion d’une brochure de M. Laurentie”, Paris, C. Meyrueis et compagnie, 1853;
”Quelques mots sur les communions occidentales à l’occasion d’un mandement de Mgr. l’archevêque de Paris par un chrétien orthodoxe” Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1855;
”Encore quelques mots d’un chrétien orthodoxe sur les confessions occidentales à l’occasion de plusieurs publications religieuses, latines et protestantes”, Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1858.
He addressed directly to the ‘West’, and the years are of importance, the years of the Crimean War.
The intention of the publication is clearly expressed in the Letter to the publisher and in the introduction to the first brochure:
”Dans le conflit des opinions religieuses qui se partagent l’Europe, la voix de l’Eglise orientale ne se fait jamais entendre, et ce silence n’a rien que de très naturel, vu que tous les organes de la pensée européenne , écrivains ou éditeurs, appartiennent à la confession romaine ou aux différentes communions protestantes. Désirant, autant que je le puis, remplir cette lacune de la pensée religieuse générale et n’ayant cependant aucun rapport avec qui que ce soit hors de mon pays, je prends la liberté de m’adresser à vous, Monsieur et de vous prier de vous charger de la publication d’une petite brochure que j’ai écrite sur quelques questions religieuses…
Quand la calomnie attaque un pays , les citoyens de ce pays ont le droit d’y répondre ; mais ils ont également celui de se taire et de laisser au temps le soin de justifier leur patrie. Elle ne perd rien à leur silence et trouve d’ailleurs dans son gouvernement et dans ses organes officiels un pouvoir chargé du maintien de sa dignité et de la défense de ses intérêts . Quant à l’humanité , elle ne perd rien aux accusations plus ou moins calomnieuses portées par l’ignorance ou la malveillance contre un pays ou une nation quelconque.
Il en est autrement de la religion ou de l’Eglise . Révélation de la vérité divine sur la terre , destinée par son essence à être la patrie commune de tous les hommes, elle ne permet à aucun de ses enfants le silence devant une calomnie qui attaque et dénature ses dogmes ou ses principes”.
“But once such a regime is in place, it is no different from other similar systems (e.g. absolute monarchy) and subject to the same weaknesses, namely, there is no guarantee that the next guy in line might not be a Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc, in other words, a genocidal madman.”
I suppose we would have the same guarantee in a democracy, or democratic republic, that an election wouldn’t be stolen, or the masses deluded by corrupt media into electing a demented candidate.
Until God rules, we are defectives suffering the effects of our defects.
Maranatha.
Amen!
Thanks so much for your brilliant essay and telling quotes from Orthodox standard bearer Khomiakov. Wish I had read it years ago. It would have steered me in the right direction and spared a lot of confusion in sorting out the western and Orthodox churches.
Orthodoxy, it seems to me, is prayer: the soul’s joyful communion with God through Christ. So the books I like are usually aids to prayer, especially oneness with God in love and in the Church. Khomiakov was known for spending hours in prayer, whether travelling or at home.
A classic of prayer is based on the simple Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”) Way of the Pilgrim. It follows a traveller thru Russia who finds sustenance in the name of Christ.
On the life of the Spirit are the sermons of Photios and Gregory Palamas, great defenders of Orthodox ecclesial and mystical tradtion. And there are gems of the Spirit by the beloved Seraphim of Sarov, On Acquisition of the Holy Spirit and Little Russian Philokalia.
Another brilliant defense of the Orthodox Church against papal supremacism is by Abbe Guettee, The Papacy.
One finds the life of the Spirit abounding in the desert (and also the snows and woods of Russia). So there is the great classic of the desert Fathers, The Philokalia (5 Vols). Also the poetry of Ephraim the Syrian.
On the disastrous effects of the filioque, Vladimir Lossky: The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church and In the Image and Likeness of God.
Glad you got to read the delightful Letters of Khomiakov, co-founder of the Slavophile movement. He is known also for the little classic, The Church is One. It espouses sobornost, freedom within the organic unity of the Church. For me it is an anchor of the faith.
Also A S Khomiakov et le Mouvement Slavophile. Vol 1: Les Hommes. Vol. 2: Les Doctrines.
A remarkable but lesser known Russian philosopher, Konstantin Leontiev, wrote Byzantinism and Slavdom. Influenced by the Slavophiles, it argues that the Orthodox Church is essential to the survival of Russia as a state. It also addresses the place of Orthodoxy among the arts.
Am blessed to have a lovely Russian church in my hometown. And if I cannot be there for health reasons, they stream the Lenten and Sunday services, which is a godsend. Another blessing was a retreat at a monastery, though during Lent the food might be a little spare. The monastery for Orthodox in many ways is the root of the faith.
One place I love for its chanting is Valaam Monastery, Russia, “Athos of the North.” Here they sing Agni Parthene, a beloved hymn revealed to a monk on Athos…
Thanks so much again for your essay, which I believe will be a path to many to green pastures and still waters. God bless your spiritual endeavors and writing. Be well.
Thanks. I will start with Guettée’s The Papacy on archive.org, which I found on archive.org, and will explore your other recommandations. Best wishes to you.
This is muscovite messianic eastern-orthodox propaganda. 3rd Rome nonsense.
Later I may disprove your claims.
Disprove away, my friend! As a young logical positivist, I sought to debunk the Christian faith. Yet the more I did, the more real the faith became. Then a friend invited me to a little Russian church. Upon hearing the majesty and produndity of the Divine Liturgy, I was hooked. I had arrived home. God bless your spiritual search this holy Lenten season.
I find the Church hymns are a grace-filled path to the sounds of Heaven.
Italian commercial and cultural wealth was homegrown and preceded the fall of Costantinople by many centuries.
Reneaissance started way before Costantinople fell. The Byzantine Empire had been in decline for centuries while Italy and France prospered.
Romanesque is its own thing, while Byzantine architecture is a simplified, poorer, uglier version of classical architecture with Persian influences.
You’re insane. All the things you wrote are the words of a lunatic with inferiority complexes which cause him to cope with conspiracy theories and megalomania.
Strange to find so many Christian (and other Abrahamic) believers on Ron Unz’s site. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the author that the decline of belief that has even become rapidly negative in the US is going to sink the Russian church’s prospects of maintaining much respect or influence in future generations. Still I saved myself a lot of time by pausing to check one of the enthusiastic amateur author’s suspect factoids.
Not even something as simple as that is right unless you think somewhat under 20,000 qualifies (and that they are all beautiful).
The Orthodox Church is reviving in Russia because it is an organic whole, the Body of Christ, born of water and the Spirit, nourished by sacraments, Word, and Divine Liturgy, carried on by the living tradition of Fathers, monks, confessors, martyrs, and the Communion of Saints.
Orthodoxy rejects the gross materialism, institutionalism, selfism, rationalism, scientism, and legalism that have wrought havoc on many churches in the west.
She transcends such errors because she proclaims, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by by death,” and with childlike faith she is raised up with Him and in Him.
I used to recit the Apostle’s Creed until just after I was confirmed and realised the monstrous Abrahamic God was a man-made fiction.
Or because you didn’t have the opening experience which would confirm your belief…
A sad situation affecting the great majority of people of our times.