Currently, we are witnessing a phenomenon, largely ignored or misinterpreted in the Western media, a phenomenon which some had thought unthinkable in 21st Century Europe, namely, an open and direct attack by a regime on a religious denomination with the aim of destroying it. As stated in the petition presented recently on this site, the Canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (which has the largest number of followers) has been faced with a campaign of delegitimisation, bullying, humiliation and destruction/violent takeover of its properties by the unrecognized “Orthodox Church in Ukraine” backed by the SBU (Ukrainian Security Service). As spun by the anti-Russian Western media, this wave of religious destruction, indeed extermination, is a consequence of Russian “aggression”. This of course is not only fallacious but represents a conscious attempt to protect the spiritual descendants of the criminals who have been attacking Russian and Serb Orthodoxy for over half a century.
The same thing happened in the West’s break up of Yugoslavia when In December 2019 Montenegro’s parliament passed a law titled “On freedom of religion,” the legislation gave a portion of the Serbian Orthodox Church’s property to the canonically non-recognized Montenegrin Orthodox Church, which was created in 1993. The Serbian Orthodox Church effectively lost the right to all of its buildings that were built before 1918.
The Russian Special Operation in the Ukraine has given rise to a myriad analyses and speculations about the essence of the conflict. Many analysts favour geopolitical (e.g. the mastery of the Eurasian landmass, ocean-rimmed vs. land-based empires), unipolarity vs. multipolarity, economic (dollar’s dominance, oil, war for resources), political (rise of China, India and the “Third world”, future of neoliberal “democracy”, threat to world peace), military (hybrid and next-generation warfare) and cultural interpretations (weaponisation of artificial national identities).
All of these factors are of critical importance but underneath all of these layers of explanation lies another cause, which while almost completely ignored by most experts and commentators is of great significance – the religious element. For the purpose of this short essay, I shall call this factor “psycho-religious disposition”.
Although dismissed by modern thinkers as a vestigial superstition and primitivism of previous ages, it is the religious dimension that allows one to connect the dots and place the conflict in a proper historical context. One’s psycho-religious disposition is not confined to religious beliefs and church attendance. It is a psychological disposition that is jointly formed by deep civilizational influences and by the dominant religion to which a person is exposed. In the case of Russia, this has created a mentality or a national psyche that is warm (if not demonstrative), non-materialistic and spiritual. At the same time though, the experience of many wars and tragedies has resulted in a certain toughness and ability to endure the unendurable. A good description of this uniquely Russian moral psychology was given by the Scottish geologist Sir Roderick Impey Murchison who had conducted extensive research into the geology of Russia. In 1853, speaking at a rally against Britain’s participation on the Crimean war, he said:
“Even as Russia expands her possessions at the expense of her neighbouring colonies, unlike the other colonial powers she gives to these her new acquisitions more than she takes from them (italics mine). This is not because it is driven by some kind of philanthropy or anything like that.
The original aspirations of all empires differ little, but wherever a Russian man appears, everything miraculously takes an entirely different direction. The moral norms developed by the Eastern Slavs since pre-Christian times do not allow the Russian person to violate someone else’s conscience and infringe on the property which does not belong to him by right.
More often out of an ineradicable sense of compassion rooted in him he is ready to give up his last shirt than to take it away from someone else. Therefore, no matter how victorious the Russian weapons may be, in purely mercantile terms, Russia always loses.”
Thus Murchison described the Russian understanding of religion and morality. In general, while the Russian empire pursued earthly goals, its essence was not extermination, enslavement or forced religious conversion but a live-and-let-live attitude which has ensured that today almost 200 ethnic groups co-exist peacefully in Russia, having preserved their languages and customs.
It is this combination of old Slav traditions (connected to ancient India) and Orthodox Christianity that has compelled the Russians to stand up against hegemony and tyranny many times in their history and defend their country against massive invasions from both the East and in particular the West.
Despite being Caucasian and largely “European”, the Russians have always been treated with suspicion and disdain by the West. A pathological combination of fear, hatred and contempt has coloured Western attitudes ever since the Western Slavs were cleansed from Germanic lands starting in 8th Century N.E.
The Russian people refused to bow before the Teutonic knights and Roman Catholic priests. They also stubbornly refused to worship Mammon – the two unforgivable sins in the eyes of an increasingly expansive and “mercantilist” West. I do not intend to idealise Russia, only to offer hints as to why it has been the target of three crusades in the last 100 years. The first one began in 1914 and was motivated by the Austro-German ambition to curtail Russia’s influence in the Balkans and neutralise it as a great power. It could be said that this crusade was led by “Central Europe” – as Germany and Austria-Hungary liked to describe themselves. The religious character of this war was reflected in the full support of Pope Pius X for the Austro-German war aims, inhuman crimes of the Roman Catholic Austrians against Orthodox Serbs and Ruthenians as well as the establishment of a wholly artificial Ukrainian state by the German General Staff, based on a manufactured Galizian Uniate nationalism which provides the black thread connecting all three genocidal invasions.
The second crusade in 1941 (which was even named after a crusading Holy Roman emperor Friedrich Barbarossa) involved a Franco-German European Reich led by a Roman Catholic—Adolf Hitler (note the growth of the Crusading power relative to 1914). The consequences of this, probably the greatest crime in modern history (60 million dead of whom up to 30 million were Slav), are well known. The stirrings of Ukrainian nationalism of 1918 transmogrified into an orgy of mass slaughter and terror by the followers of a Uniate Fuehrer Stepan Bandera and his henchmen. The 13th Waffen SS Division Galizien was blessed by the leader of the Ukrainian Uniates, Andrey Sheptytsky. The horrific slaughter of approximately 100,000 Poles of Volyn has been erased from the collective memory of the current Polish establishment which leads the world in Catholicism-inspired Russophobia.
Although in 1945 it seemed that the evil of Nazism had been defeated forever, the Crusade against Soviet Russia continued unabated with the death of Franklin Roosevelt. In a couple of years, the United States took over the role of the crusading empire from Hitler’s Germany. A largely Roman Catholic CIA took over the Ukrainian and Western Byelorussian terror networks with the help of Reinhardt Gehlen and continued the campaign of the destabilisation of Russia by all methods short of war. MI6 was involved too since most of the Nazi Galizien veterans had been sent to England following the intervention of Pope Pius XII who described them as “good Catholics”, and then to Canada. Further, the British controlled the Prometheus stay-behind networks in the Baltics and elsewhere.
In other words, World War II never ended. It only went underground as long as the Soviet Union existed. This “Cold war” was given “spiritual” leadership by the Vatican and especially Pius XII and John Paul II. The former was labelled “Hitler’s Pope” by English Catholic historian John Cornwell and the latter was directly involved in Ronald Reagan’s CIA’s anti-Soviet operations in Poland. Together with assorted Austro-German politicians (Waldheim, von Habsburg, Kohl, Kinkel and Genscher), he played a pivotal role in the destruction of Yugoslavia which resulted in a total cleansing of the remaining Serbs from Croatia in 1995. The key development in this interlude was a gradual rapprochement between the former enemies—Anglo-Americans and Germans—which would enable the next Crusade.
To the naïve among us, it appeared that the animosities of the 20th Century would peter out with the fall of the Soviet Union. It was not to be. The Western stay-behind networks took over the Baltic states, Poland and the Ukraine where Banderite extreme nationalism started to raise its ugly head again.
The rabidly Russophobic Ukrainian emigres in Canada became active in infiltrating the newly independent country and preparing it for integration into the EU in NATO. Thanks to Rodney Atkinson, we know that the EU is practically a copy of Hitler’s Europe whose expansion to the Russian borders was made possible by the American military backing provided through NATO. Both organisations were stuffed with rehabilitated Nazis and both grew like aggressive tumours on the back of a weakened, supine Russia.
The growing threat to Russian security became acute in 1999 when NATO unconscionably and illegally attacked Yugoslavia and bombed it for 78 days. Aside from the suffering and death inflicted on the people of this country, the invasion was important for two reasons. First, Germany invaded a country for the first time since World War II and second, a Slav Orthodox country was attacked by a united West—also for the first time. This time, German Europe was led by the Americans and the British who exhibited extraordinary zeal in punishing the Serbs by creating a malignant quasi state called Kosovo on Serb territory. This was the key moment in world history which elucidated the process underlying the increasing anti-Russian and anti-Serb belligerence. From two “Central Powers”, Russia’s enemy expanded to include most European countries and finally—the entire West (plus vassals).
Why did all this happen given that the West faced a different Russia each time: an Empire, a socialist federation and finally, a capitalist one? As Russia contracted, its enemy expanded throughout the century, and it became clear as early as 1999, that no matter what form Russia took, its existence was unacceptable to the West.
This raises the question of what is “the West”? Simply, it is an amalgam of Roman Catholicism and a defanged, purposeless establishment Protestantism which has long ceased to “protest” against Catholic imperialism and has happily joined forces with its arch enemy in order to fight Russia—which never acted as an aggressor towards it. The symbiotic relationship between the two Western interpretations of Christianity can be understood only as a form of the Stockholm syndrome on the part of the Protestants as well as the increasing affinity of the Anglo-Americans for Catholic Nazism as a potent anti-Communist force. Either way, the “united West” is a frightening prospect for anybody who loves freedom and abhors tyranny.
To support my thesis, NATO has been advancing towards Russian borders only to reach the lines occupied by Hitler’s forces in the summer of 1941. This it achieved by using the Ukrainian Nazis and Uniates as the core of its proxy force which finally came to power via a CIA-funded coup in 2014. That year marked the beginning of the third and in my view, last, Crusade. The West started equipping, training and propagandising the Ukrainians (who are mainly of Russian descent) into a frenzy of anti-Russian hate. “Einsatztruppen” drafted from the Uniate (Orthodox who seek union with Rome) west of the Ukraine were sent to the Donbas to kill and terrorise civilians. While even the lethargic Russians started to realise that they must prepare for the inevitable, a tragic stab in the back came from the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (the nominal leader of World Orthodoxy) who in 2019 granted autocephaly to the unrecognised schismatic “Orthodox Church in Ukraine” thus completing his work on weakening the Russian Orthodox Church and the Canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church which he had begun decades ago.
The religious essence of this conflict was revealed recently. The following picture has been widely circulated on social media. On the door of one of the churches forcibly taken over by the SBU and the nominally Orthodox schismatics, a new statement of the Nicene Creed (The Symbol of Faith of Orthodox Christians) was displayed. Here is the original statement of the Nicene Creed formatted to correspond to that in the picture below:
- I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible;
- And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages; Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not created, of one essence with the Father, through Whom all things were made;
- Who for us men and for our salvation came down from the heavens and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man;
- Crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, He suffered and was buried;
- Rising on the third day according to the Scriptures,
- And ascending into the heavens, He is seated at the right hand of the Father;
- And coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
- His Kingdom shall have no end; (missing from the Ukrainian version)
- And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Creator of life, Who proceeds from the Father, Who together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, Who spoke through the prophets;
- In one, holy, catholic (in the sense of universal), and apostolic Church;
- I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins;
- I expect the resurrection of the dead;
- And the life of the age to come. Amen.
Point 9 of the Creed (shown as point 8 in the picture) contains the infamous Filioque clause—the trigger for the Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christianity. Specifically, the clause states (in Ukrainian): I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Creator of life, Who proceeds from the Father and from the Son (compare with the highlighted statement in the original). Orthodox churches do not accept “and from the son” (Filioque) suggesting that Bartholomew’s fake Orthodox Church is a crypto-Papist project, a weapon with which to destroy Orthodoxy in the Ukraine by turning the schismatic Orthodox church into an adjunct of the Vatican. The meaning is clear and confirms my contention that the aim of the united West is to crush Russia and that the important part of that aim is the conversion “with fire and sword” of the Orthodox Slavs who are naturally sympathetic towards Russia.
Bartholomew’s and the Vatican’s crusade fought by NATO weapons and Ukrainian bodies has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and threatens to ignite a global nuclear war. This crusade led by the millennial enemies of Russia and Orthodoxy will be the last one. The Russian people and those who love justice must not allow the evil of religious Nazism to keep festering in the West as a permanent threat not only to Russia but to the people of the West themselves.
By Ken Leslie