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I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. It cannot be in accordance with the interest of the safety of Russia that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of south eastern Europe, That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia.- Winston Churchill

Mother Russia, dance of the czars;
Hold up your heads, remember who you are;
Can you release the anger, the grief?
Can you be happy now your people are free?

-Iron Maiden, Mother Russia

The Western world, once upon a time defined by Christian life, is no more and has not been so for centuries. Wars, conflicts, political manipulation, and the perversion of religion for social purposes have with her destroyed what was left of Christendom, leaving a weak and godless shell in its place. The few Christian peoples who are left, mostly in the eastern parts of Europe, are under increasing attack and if not stopped will likely fall to the secularists, the new pagan barbarians of our times.

It is in this situation that many people in the West have looked to Russia, the other great European power, in the East for inspiration and hope. Could the former communist nation, under President Putin who openly speaks of “Christianity”, “Christian values,” and against “liberalism” become what the West once was and stand up for the truth of Christ against the ravages of a world returning to the barbarism of the ancient world which Christ came to save her from? Or is Russia a great deception, perhaps worse than one can imagine, which is using the name of Christianity to advance, in her own context, a revival of these same evils worse than what they were before and is preparing to spread them, intentionally or not, around the world?

The answer may surprise you.

Perhaps the easiest way to start this investigation is to understand the Russian mindset, and that is to look at them through their history as a migratory people bound to an unforgiving geography and harsh neighbors.

The history of the Slavic peoples is written by the melancholic temperament so often associated with them. They are a people whose history is defined by vicious inter-tribal wars, widespread poverty, mass deaths or murders, and mass enslavement by her neighbors or those from distant foreign lands. Such troubles have reinforced cultural ideas of a particular kind of insularity, nationalism, and cultural autarchalism in order to protect and provide for themselves in the face of a harsh and unforgiving world.

The first records of possible Slavic peoples in Europe begin around the first century AD with a pagan people called the Veneti who lived in the area of what is today western Poland and eastern Germany. Many more Slavic tribes migrated to Europe, especially during the 4th and 5th centuries, as a part of the larger migrations of peoples from Central Asia and the Caucasus. From the 5th to the 7th century they expanded throughout Eastern Europe into the lands today of Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Russia, and all the way into the Balkan Peninsula to the lands of Bulgaria, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Macedonia.

The ancient Byzantine historian Procopius wrote about the hard life of the Slavic peoples in his history:

They live in pitiful hovels which they set up far apart from one another, but, as a general thing, every man is constantly changing his place of abode. When they enter battle, the majority of them go against their enemy on foot carrying little shields and javelins in their hands, but they never wear corselets. Indeed, some of them do not wear even a shirt or a cloak, but gathering their trews up as far as to their private parts they enter into battle with their opponents. … And they live a hard life, giving no heed to bodily comforts, just as the Massagetae do, and like them, they are continually and at all times covered with filth; however, they are in no respect base or evil-doers, but they preserve the Hunnic character in all its simplicity. (source, source)

Much of the Slavic migrations to Europe seems to have been driven by the expansion of a Turkic people known as the Avars (who now populate the regions of Chechnya and Dagestan in the Caucasus) through the expansion of the Gokturk Empire, which reached to the borders of the Danube and penetrated through what is today southern Poland, all of Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic and as far east as Korea. The Slavic tribes were known for fighting off Turkic attempts to force them into submission while at the same time fighting to establish their own territories.

St. Adalbert manumitting enslaved Slavic people before Polish King Boleslaus

Some modern historians, especially from Russia, have been attempting to erase the fact that during these conflicts, not only did the Slavs many times lose, but were in fact enslaved in massive numbers for centuries. The name “Slav” comes from the Greek “Sklavnoi” (and “Saqaliba” in Arabic), meaning “slaves,” because the Byzantines, Germanic peoples, and Turkic Avars alike were known for enslaving and selling Slavic people either as captured in war or during village raids to each other as well as into the harems, farms, and palaces of the various kingdoms of North Africa, the Middle East and Far East.

It should be noted that the trade in Slavic people persisted until the end of the 18th century in the form of raids between Turkic tribes from Siberia throughout Russia, Ukraine, and Poland that worked in cooperation with Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. The Journal of Jewish Studies points out that while there are many tales of Jews supposedly ransoming non-Jewish Slavs from slavery, these have no historical basis save for what appears to be a 20th century mythos, and that it was Jewish merchants and communities who were instrumental in keeping the slave trade alive as they greatly profited from it for centuries, which was only put to its final and long-overdue end by the forceful intervention of the Russian government during the 18th century:

The sources testify that Jewish population played a highly significant role in the trade in slaves and captives of the Crimean Khanate in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The ways, in which the Jews were engaged in this business, were varied and diversified—from mediators in trade and money-lenders to commandants of the Jewish fortress of Çufut Qaleh, from wealthy slave-owners to misfortunate victims of the Tatar predatory raids. Moreover, the Jews played important role in international trade and were sometimes appointed influential state officials of the Crimean Khanate. A Jewish merchant was highly important for those who wanted to redeem their relatives at a lesser price than that that was offered by Tatar officials (see the testimony of Martinus Broniovius). A Jewish merchant could also be sent to solve financial matters of important captives as far as Sweden(e.g. the case of the Jewish merchant Arslan); he could purchase captives to use them as his domestics of sell them to Jewish merchants from other countries. A Jew could also be a commandant of the whole mountainous fortress housing important prisoners belonging to Tatar khans (e.g. the Karaite qapuci Saltık). (source, source)

Geography also played a significant role in the constant problems with the Slavic peoples, especially those of Russia and Ukraine, with their neighbors.

Russia is, geographically speaking, very similar to China. She is a large low-lying plain surrounded by very high and flat mountains on the edges and in the central regions. This flat but mountainous plain region in the center, called the Altai, is the ancestral homeland of the various Turkic peoples. It is difficult to circumnavigate save for a series of strategic mountain passes giving access to the plains below, with Russia to the north, China to the southeast, and the various routes to Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan through points south and west.

The Altai itself is a vast land of nothingness where wild horses gallop alongside men on horseback seeking to wrangle them and upon catching and taming one, traverse about the cold and dry plains, sometimes as individuals and other times as small tribes. It is where bandits and bands of people stake claims, fight with each other and against each other, much like the old American western stories of cowboys, Indians, and high adventure and dangers on the great plains and southlands heading towards Mexico.

The “American cowboy”, which would be the modern and North American relative to what the Altaic people of the plains were for millenia

Those who migrated to these lands had to fight to survive, for it was a place of danger and freedom as well as well as much potential, for those who were able to survive, if they could, gathered at times into armies that would then go out and raid the low-lying plain civilization peoples. Hardened by the life of struggle and war, these armies were often times perceived as almost invincible monsters who swept out of nothing and, like a “thief in the night”, overturned entire nations one after the other, installing themselves as rulers as they went about forming great empires from the Sea of Japan to the Slavic lands of Europe. This is what the Assyrians referred to as the fearful “Umman Manda,” meaning “the horde from who-knows-where”, that seemed to come from nothing as much as they returned into nothingness, but not without leaving a trail of destruction. The dominance of one empire would end after more bandits from the Altai would repeat the same process, through blood and struggle forming a great army to once again sweep down onto the cities previously conquered to repeat the same cycle.

The song, whose lyrics can be read here, is about the “awakening” and uniting of the Altaic peoples, which historically precedes military action.

What I have described above is a consistent pattern throughout human history that was noted over a century ago by the British geostrategist Halford Mackinder, who pointed out that it was this area, the Altai, from which a great number of the world’s empires had come. This is what constantly beleaguered the Slavic peoples, for having fled from the yoke of the Turkic tribes of Central Asia and the Caucasus, they found themselves still forced to be subject to their harassment and abuse. While a more isolated geography and the ability to be aware of the coming Turkic hordes often times served to protect Western Europe, Eastern Europe did not have this luxury. She would be hit first and constantly overrun by invaders. In order to survive, her peoples had to develop a clear concept of who her tribal identities were and how to distinguish herself from those peoples who overran her. It is in this crucible of blood, fire, and nationalism that the Slavic concept of religion was forged.

The Christianization of the Slavs

Sts. Cyril (Kirill) and Methodius

The Christianization of the Slavs was similar to that of the other Nordic nations in how it took centuries of efforts to be realized. The first serious missionaries to the Slavs were the Sts. Cyril and Methodius, after which the Cyrillic alphabet derives her name, and was based on a variant of the Greek alphabet. The Christianization and subsequent development of literature among the Slavs corresponded with the particular missionaries being sent. In the case of many of the south Slavs in the inlands of the Balkan peninsula and around the Black Sea, it was the Cyrillic alphabet whose influence held dominance. In the case of the Slavic tribes who settled in Central and Northeastern Europe, they were evangelized by Italian or Germanic missionaries, and the literary culture was developed under a modified version of the Latin alphabet.

Historically speaking, Slavic Christianity has been closely associated with governmental authority, making for many of the peoples adherence to the religion an acceptance of the governmental power of a given region. The first Slavic peoples to be converted were those in the land of what is today Moravia and Bulgaria in 863 and 864 AD respectively, and the other tribes gradually followed. The Rus’ tribe, which was settled in Kiev in what is today Ukraine and later became the Russian people, was one of the later tribes to convert with the Baptism of Prince Vladimir of Kiev in 988. The last of the Slavic tribes to become Christian were the Pomeranians in northern Poland, who fiercely resisted in the name of national identity and was not converted until the mid-11th century.

The baptism of Prince Vladimir of Kiev in 988

Because of the close ties between Church and state in addition to the respective associations of said peoples with either the Holy Roman or Byzantine Empires, the former of which sent Latin-speaking missionaries and the latter Greek speakers, the Great Schism of 1054 separated the Slavic nations along the basis of national identity.

The question of national identity and her role in religious life was always one that had beleaguered Eastern Christianity, as just with the Slavic peoples, faith was often times considered, officially or not, to be an extension of obedience to governmental authority. While many will make issue with various points, it is not an exaggeration to say that the central element to the rebellion of 1054 was one of power in light of Scripture. Christ explicitly says in the New Testament, in blunt and direct language not unlike that used in John 6 to describe the meaning, role, and importance of the Eucharist, that the rock upon which He will build His church is St. Peter, and it is this Church built upon him is the one over which the gates of hell will not prevail and who has power to bind and loose on Earth:

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”- Matthew 16:18-19

While the other Churches established by the apostles indeed proceed from them and have a direct connection to Christ, the physical entity entrusted with custody of the whole body of Christian teaching for the universality of the human race’s salvation- which Christ promised cannot fail as He built it -is the Church that He built from St. Peter’s efforts. The Orthodox Churches- as there is no proper concept of an “orthodox church” as a single definition that, like Protestantism, cannot be cohesively explained outside of the rebellions of 431 (for the Assyrian Church of the East), 451 (for the Oriental Orthodox) and 1054 (for the Eastern Orthodox) -retain apostolicity but reside in the error schism in their deference to national identity and the governing bodies which preside over them in the particular territories in which they reside.

The Orthodox Churches as a general rule will viciously deny any lack of universality and will claim “Catholicity” in the concept of a universally shared faith in Christ rooted in “tradition.” Yet Christ did not come to establish a series of nationalistic churches divided on the basis of race and deference to a particular governmental authority over human-defined land boundaries in which a given people have residence. The Orthodox churches will deny the existence of this in spite of the obvious divisions along said racial and national lines, calling it “phyletism,” and say that “anybody” can become “Orthodox” of a particular national Church, and that “phyletism” was condemned during the 19th century. This is true in the technical sense, but then it does not answer the insistence upon having churches who are continually defined in racial and nationalistic terms.

Georgians, who are overwhelming Georgian Orthodox, protesting the arrival of Sergei Gavrilov, a Russian Orthodox member of Parliament, speaking in Georgia at an Orthodox event. The distinction between political power and state church is for all practical purposes non-existent in many of the Orthodox lands.

It also does not address the clear lack of union and vicious history of fighting between other Orthodox Churches on the basis of racial and nationalistic lines that continues even through today. The split between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church is just one small example. Indeed, one might proclaim that there is a “union” between the Orthodox Churches, but it is only words. Ask a Georgian Orthodox if he says that Russian Orthodox Christians are fellow Orthodox and he may say “yes,” but attempt to have the Russian Orthodox speak alongside fellow Georgian Orthodox and the entire country will erupt into nationalistic fervor and accuse, and rightly so based on history, Russian governmental and Russian Orthodox Church attempts at manipulation of Georgian national politics and subversion against the Georgian Orthodox Church. There is the entire history of wars between Bulgaria and Serbia, with the respective Orthodox Churches supporting their particular nations, the current seeking of Macedonia to have her own “autocephalous” Orthodox Church, much to the anger of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has pronounced her as schismatic in spite of support from other Orthodox Churches. Such things, while sad, are not new, and the history of much of Eastern Christianity and especially the “Orthodox” post-1054 can be written not as Orthodox unity, but the idea of unity against the “Latins” with a practical reality of the absolute fragmentation of each church along racial and national boundaries.

In the western world, while the Catholic Church has worked with the governments, sometimes very close, the Church has always maintained a separation from her, and thus partakes of both the rulers and the ruled, functioning as an agent who binds but also separates. This division has been a source of constant tension between the Church and the state, for just as Christ taught that a man must be “in the world but not (of) the world,” so it also is how the Church has always functioned in her idiom. This is not so with the Orthodox world, where submission to state authority and being a Christian are veritably synonymous and the Orthodox Patriarchs of old have argued in favor of this:

The holy emperor has a great place in the church, for he is not like other rulers or governors of other regions. This s so because from the beginning the emperors established and confirmed the [true] faith in all the inhabited world. They convoked the ecumenical councils and confirmed and decreed the acceptance of the pronouncements of the divine and holy canons regarding the correct doctrines and the government of Christians. They struggled boldly against heresies, and imperial decrees together with councils established the metropolitan sees of the archpriests and the divisions of their provinces and the delineation of their districts. For this reason the emperors enjoy great honor and position in the Church, for even if, by God’s permission, the nations [primarily the Ottoman Turks] have constricted the authority and domain of the emperor, still to this day the emperor possesses the same charge from the church and the same rank and the same prayers [from the church].

…

Therefore, my son, you are wrong to affirm that we have the church without an Emperors for it is impossible for Christians to have a church and no empire. The Baslleia [empire] and the church have a great unity and community – indeed they cannot be separated. (source, source)

To the Orthodox Churches, government and religion are theoretically separated but in reality not separated at all, and is a reality demonstrated by history in spite of the denial of doing such. As noted above in modern times, the current split between the Russian Orthodox Church versus the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the latter being supported by the Patriarch of Constantinople, is a manifestation of this. It is the continuation of the historical pattern of fragmentation in religion coming as a direct product of nationalism, for asserting one’s “Ukrainian identity” is also equivalent to asserting a separate Church for Ukraine.

A similar situation happened recently in the tiny nation of Georgia, who has her own Orthodox Church and since 1815 has been under the political influence of the Russians. During this time, the Georgian Orthodox Church, while it was still allowed to exist, was under constant pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church to the detriment of her own national church. During Communist times, the Georgian Orthodox Church continued to suffer, and it was Georgian Orthodox Christians and self-professed nationalists such as Zviad Gamsakhurdia who, in the name of both nationalism and Christianity, led opposition to Communism and by extension, Russian rule and the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church among the Georgian Orthodox. Thus when a recent Russian representative and self-professed Russian Orthodox “Christian”, Sergey Gavrilov, recently went to speak in Georgia to address a conference on Orthodoxy, his presence prompted massive protests and near riots because while he is a fellow “Orthodox” Christian, the Georgians saw his presence as an attempt by the Russians to assert the inseparable political and spiritual domination over their nation and particular ethnic church again.

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During the Protestant Revolution, the split between the Catholic and Lutheran Churches, then the later splits in the British Isles and Western Europe, was driven by nationalism. National identity became synonymous with religious identity, and thus to be a “good German” was also to be a good Lutheran just as a member of the Anglican Church was to strive to be a model British citizen. This equivocation of faith with national identity prompted a breakdown in the necessity for belief in the religion’s objective teachings as far as morality is concerned and replaced it with a mutually agreed upon social ethos that served as a dual tenet of religious adherence and patriotism. It is also why the Catholic Church was so persecuted with systematic vengeance and Catholics were called traitors as they were in the days of the pre-Christian Roman Empire, since a Christian’s morality works with but is not dependent on any national ethos.

The Orthodox world has always had this problem that the Protestant revolution caused in the West. The difference is that while Protestantism combined rebellion with the acceptance of heresies, the Schism of 1054 (and those before it) were justified on the basis of a rigid adherence to the statements of past holy men and “tradition”. But the particular reality is that “tradition” is defined as that tradition which reinforces her particular conception of separation, which is fundamentally based on race and national identity even if it is not admitted as such. One only needs to look at the phrase “extra ecclesiam nulla salus“, and how saints even venerated in the Orthodox Churches such as Fulgentius assert the Catholic Church as being the particular Church by which one is saved and that those in schisms aren’t. Hence is the need to assert that the Catholic Church is in “heresy,” only to repeat often one of the above three types of statements while persisting in a refusal to answer them.

The other problem with a separation based on “tradition” that has shown itself throughout time is an incurable intellectual stagnation that fails to address contemporary issues throughout the passage of time and circumstance. While the essence of truth in its specific and objective nature does not change and neither do the fundamental challenges to it, their physical forms mutate with each passing age based on the conditions of the society they reside within. It is similar to pouring chocolate into different moulds, for while the essence (chocolate) remains the same, the shape it takes varies by the mould it is put in. Thus while “tradition” is important and good, it has been used as a tool to distinguish and also accuse the Catholic Church of infidelity to “true Christianity” while at the same time hiding a intellectually moribund approach unable to adapt to the shifting forms of sin and her challenges throughout the ages under the cover of history, pointing to what somebody else said instead of attempting to define their context in the present time.

One only needs to look at the issue of abortion, in which the Moscow Patriarchate on its own website (here, here) condemns abortion yet recommends an unspecified “leniency” in the event of a “direct threat to the life of the mother.” So what is the answer- is abortion permitted or not? Many such Orthodox will attack the Catholic Church over minor issues of emphasis in theological doctrines, but like the Pharisees and Sadducees will openly ignore or give license by inaction or the lack of a clearly articulated answer to horrendous moral evils. If the moral authority of the Russian Orthodox Church cannot clearly condemn the “willful murder of the innocent,” a sin which “cries out to Heaven for vengeance” regardless of the reason, what other sin cannot be justified by such intellectual philandering?

As Fr. Munkelt writes:

I aver that the truth is, Orthodoxy is singularly unable to confront the moral anarchy of liberalism because of its crypto-fideism and appalling disdain of the venerable Theory of Natural Law. As such, it continues to slide on issues of bioethics, marriage, contraception, and even abortion.

…

On the other hand, the Catholic tradition has a settled and well-defined body of doctrine in faith and morals that can be found in a single book for all the world to see and by which even popes can be judged. Moreover, the Church is also prepared to meet the rational challenge of modernity with right reason. There is simply no unifying magisterium and no single definitive universal body of teaching in Orthodoxy, apart from the first seven ecumenical councils, which were not sufficient of themselves to stem the plethora of heresies and liturgical changes periodically endorsed by caesaropapist emperors, up to and beyond Peter the Great. (source, source)

When confronted with this issue, there generally seems to be three camps among the Orthodox. The first camp will say that the Catholic Church has gone “too far” in her exegesis, with the implication (stated or not) that she has gone into heresy. The second camp will say that the Orthodox do not need to do exegesis because, for whatever reason implied, it is not for man to attempt to explain further doctrines. The third camp will say that it is the fault of the Catholic Church for causing a situation in which future ecumenical councils could not be called outside of the first seven, and so future councils cannot be called until she “repents” of her schism.

All of these answers are canards that deflect from answering the fundamental issues of the union between church and state and the consistent deference of the church to state power while lacking development on moral and theological issues. The first camp attacks the Catholic Church’s attempts to deal with the problems of modernity, yet will ignore the utter failure of the Orthodox Churches to craft a cohesive, theological, practical response to the same issues outside of declaring in a strongly-worded and toothless (in the practical sense) sermon that “Saint So-and-So-the-great of Somewhere said (insert quote here)”.

The second camp answers with asserting that ignorance in the face of attempting to answer such questions is good, and aside from such an answer being un-Christian in denying the power of reason given by God for man to ascertain truth using his intellectual faculties, it also gives ammo to the atheists who say that Christianity is just a bunch of fools blindly chasing beliefs and ideas they neither understand or make intellectual attempts to understand.

The third camp is an attempt to re-direct the failures of the Orthodox Churches to convene a council and answer questions of morality and theology in a practical way onto the Catholic Church, for indeed, if the Catholic Church truly is in a state of heresy (as many Orthodox who hold this imply), what do the so-called “Orthodox” Christians- those who truly follow the real tradition -have any need to depend on a Church in heresy in order to hold a council? The Catholic Church certainly has not been stopped in holding councils, so why would the Orthodox have any need to base their behavior around that of Rome’s unless they know deep within their bosoms that they are in a state of rebellion and yet are too prideful to humble themselves from racial and nationalist arrogance?

The effects of the Great Schism on the Slavs

When the Great Schism happened, the problems extended to the Slavic peoples who were converted by the missionaries. The Catholic nations among the Slavs were not as effected, for while they all retained (and still do) strong national identities, the universality of the Church provided for them both an understanding of themselves that allowed them to assert their identities as unique groups but while also integrating and not separating themselves from the greater corpus of the Church as a general rule.

To use one example, it was the Catholic Faith that provided the basis for the Polish nation to preserve herself after being torn apart by a “Protestant” Prussia, “Orthodox” Russia, and “Catholic” Austria, for while one did not necessarily have to be Catholic in order to be Polish, it was the unity of the Faith that kept her people together and allowed her to re-emerge as a nation multiple times in spite of severe persecution. Yet the Catholic Poles did not limit their concept of religion in a practical sense to only national boundaries, but took it around the world to many missions and still does today with her abundant missionary priests. Such examples include men like St. Maximilian Kolbe, who was martyred by the National Socialists, had previously been working as a missionary among the Japanese. It has also been a tempering force on Polish nationalism, that while strong has historically been defined thanks to the influence of the Faith by a paradigm of first an expression of the inward will of a people to live, not by outward gestures of militarism.

The Orthodox Slavic nations were similar to the Poles in that their national churches helped them to maintain a sense of identity, but the already latent tendencies of caesaropapism and then being cut off from the greater corpus of the Church allowed for the immediate development of a Protestant-type scenario where citizenship and patriotism was defined through religion. The Ottoman Empire recognized this issue immediately, and so when many Orthodox Slavic nations were conquered, people were separated by religion with an ethnic designation attached to it as part of what was called the “millet” system. Thus a “Turk” was used to identify people as Muslims regardless of race, while “Christian” in the case of Greece meant a person of Greek extraction whether or not he believed in Christianity. In this way, being an “Orthodox Christian” among the Slavs was similar in its ambiguity to the definition of “Jewish” used by Jews today, where it can mean a racial classification, a religious belief, or both.

Thus while the same problems of identity and faith existed among Catholic Slavs, including in Poland, the near absolute equivocation of race and national identity with religion was in the Catholic case a clearly defined error on behalf of the person or group who committed it and was not a problem with the structure of the religion itself. Certainly there were also many Orthodox people of good will who believed and valued their religion before racial or national identity, but this was in spite of their Churches who while officially might deny any sort of de jure racial or national equivocations with religion, would consistently give de facto support to such causes even if the philosophy being propagated within them was contradictory to the faith they claimed to espouse.

The case of Orthodox Churches and their seamless and submissive union to state power in a racial and nationalistic context gives rise to an interesting question: Can an Orthodox Christian support paganism or pagan ideas if such paganism is directed at the welfare of a given people in which a particular church operates? In other words, can the Russian Orthodox Church, as an example, support racial or nationalistic ideas rooted in paganism if they are being done for the benefit of the Russian people?

The immediate answer to this would seem to be no. Indeed, it was missionaries from the Byzantine Empire who converted many of the Slavic tribes, who as Procopius noted were absolute pagans that lived in dirty, miserable conditions. Ibn Fadlan, a 10th century Iraqi Muslim traveler and cultured man who traveled to Ukraine to visit the pagan Slavs, wrote his own account of them where he described them as living in filthy conditions, engaging in drunkenness, sexual extremes, and even alluded to the practice of suttee among some. These things were among the conditions that the missionaries helped to alleviate.

However, there is also evidence to the contrary. Consider that the recently established Ukrainian Orthodox Church has not only aligned herself with National Socialists in Ukraine through the openly pagan and Christ-hating Azov battalions, but even went to far as to “bless” images in churches filled with symbols directly related to National Socialist occultism. Another of such supporting political causes by the Church to the detriment of the faith was in the case of the Serbian Orthodox Church during the Bosnian war. While there is much righteous and well-deserved criticism that the Orthodox have said of members of the Catholic Church on the Croat side, there is veritable silence when discussing how the Serbian Orthodox Church openly supported at the same time the genocide of Bosnians.

One will note that in the above cases and as alluded to earlier, there is a persistent example of many in the Slavic and Orthodox world that involves genuinely holding one de jure position as a matter of truth and asserting it as such while de facto holding and advancing but refusing in the face of solid evidence to acknowledge the direct opposite counter position at the same time and having no concept of cognitive dissonance in doing this.

It is unclear if this particular trait among the Slavs was adopted as a result of the influence of the Orthodox Churches, whether it came by way of the Germanic and Turkic tribes that influenced them, if it was a belief that always persisted with them, or what combination of these factors and in what proportion they may exist. What is clear is that this idea manifested itself quickly among the Slavs who were in the Orthodox Churches and it has remained with them since, and arguably more so than among the Byzantines and Middle Eastern Orthodox Churches since the Slavs constitute the majority of Orthodox Christians in the world.

Paganism has always existed in the West and East, for it never truly died in Europe, merely changing forms. In the Western context, there has always been a clear struggle between paganism and the Church, and which many times would result in the persecution of the Church, even during periods when she wielded great power in society. While the corruption of priests and bishops seeking their own power is a story that thankfully is often discussed, there was the additional fact that the Kings and Emperors of the West wanted to control the Church to make themselves head of the Church in order to promote ideas acceptable to the prolongation of their own power and thus, in doing so, to introduce paganism. For while genuine pagan religion is a corruption of the True Religion given by Christ, this is often the exception, for the rule is to provide a means by which the powerful control those beneath them with threats of supernatural retribution while the leaders may or may not have any beliefs. The hatred of the Pope and the legitimate criticisms of bad Popes, however understandable or accurate it may be, was often times a cover for advancing a far more nefarious agenda in the same way that many of the legitimate criticisms the left and right make of each other, which while they may be true, are not about fixing the problem discussed, but displacing the other so they can fill the vacuum of power created and simply perpetuate the same or their own errors but with them in charge.

The Russian Orthodox Church is the most powerful and influential of the Orthodox Churches. Yet in spite of the claims of “Holy Rus'” that she and other Orthodox Churches or her supporters will make, or in spite of the attempts to spread the Orthodox Church in Russia, at the same time the Orthodox Church is silent, submissive, and comes to the defense of her own Russian caesaropapist emperors who openly embraced paganism or other heinous actions.

Ivan the Terrible

One of the most interesting and obvious of these is Emperor Ivan IV, also known as “Ivan the Terrible”. His reign was defined by the establishment of Russia as an Empire as much as his irascible, explosive, temper and his penchant for indulging in the suffering of those he had tortured or executed, including having the Orthodox Metropolitan of Moscow executed after an argument. There are some Orthodox writers who praise Ivan for “defending orthodoxy against the Vatican,” but even they are forced to admit that Ivan was a monster and who loved violence and on a personal level accepted and indulged in witchcraft at his court.

Nobody who wants to be honest- not even the most anti-Catholic and pro-nationalist Russian Orthodox -can deny that Ivan the Terrible was a monster who loved witchcraft before he was a man of God. At the same time, Ivan the Terrible also summoned the Russian Orthodox Church to a council in 1551 in which many forms of witchcraft were condemned and books concerning them were burned. Thus, Ivan the terrible was opposing the very things he supported while denying his support and yet supporting them at the same time in a seamless way with no sense of cognitive dissonance between his words and actions. Today there are many Russians who aggressively uphold him as a great social figure, and the Russian Orthodox Church today also supports him by commemorating his memory such as supporting in 2016 a statue to be erected of him while there are Russian Orthodox laity who oppose it on the same moral grounds:

The head of the Russian Orthodox church has backed what is planned to be Russia’s first monument to Ivan the Terrible, the controversial ruler who killed his own son.

The governor of Oryol, a city of 320,000 south of Moscow, had planned to unveil the monument this week during the 450th anniversary of Ivan the Terrible’s decree that a fortress be built there. But the monument has been delayed after a protest in July by local people holding signs such as: “We don’t need a monument to a tyrant.”

Ivan the Terrible, who ruled from 1547 to 1584 and founded and expanded the Russian tsardom, is best known for his long campaign of terror against the nobility and populace, as well as for killing his son during an argument.

Patriarch Kirill supported the monument last week at a meeting with the Oryol governor, Vadim Potomsky, a statement on the Orlov region website said. Kirill spoke out against the canonisation of Ivan the Terrible “because of his methods of governing” but said “as the founder of the city of Oryol he deserves a monument here”, according to the statement. (source, source)

There is no reason at all that the Orthodox Church should give even so much as a single word of support to this statue of Ivan. If anything, they should completely oppose it. Why, therefore, do they not say anything about it? Does not the Patriarch of Russia, or a local Metropolitan, or even a bishop or priest with a public platform, desire to come out and say “Ivan the Terrible was an evil man who loved paganism, this statue is not a good thing”?

Russia and the syncretist “dvoeverie” of Orthodoxy and Paganism

Yet the treatment shown here to Ivan the Terrible in history and modern times is a lesson in the Russian mindset and to that, the mindset of much of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church will de jure oppose such things and make reference to the past- “tradition” -to justify themselves, but they will then support de facto the opposite position many times, and when confronted with it they will claim the former position while simultaneously adhering to the latter. This position of duality extends to religion and has been noted in Russian culture for centuries and is called the “dvoeverie“, meaning “two religions,” referring to how the Orthodox Church will support Christianity as well as paganism if it serves the interests of the Russian people.

Bernice Rosenthal writing in 1993 for the National Council for Soviet and East European Research by way of Fordham University argued that pagan and occult practices were never eliminated by the Orthodox Churches, but were tolerated most likely due to the reasons above. This gave rise to the formation of such a dual-faith system that following the influence of Western thought during the 19th century and with the rise of Russian Imperial power had a fertile ground to grow into further doctrines on the occult. While she notes the problems with occultism in Western or historically Catholic nations, such ideas were not tolerated by the Catholic Church within them:

Occultism in Russia was part of a larger cultural tradition that was philosophically reinforced from within. Russian Orthodoxy did not discourage personal religious experience; it tolerated gnostic speculations by clerical and lay theologians that would have been condemned as heresy in the Roman Catholic Church . Gnostic elements became embedded in Eastern Orthodox theology in the 6th century and were reinforced in the 16th century by the thought of the German mystic, Jacob Boehme, then popular in the Orthodox seminaries.

Boehme’s thought (very likely in combination with mystical Freemasonry) influenced the reformer, Count Mikhail Speransky, the Slavophile Ivan Kirrevsky, whose father was a Mason, Vladimir Odoevsky (author of Russian Nights), and also Alexander Golitsyn and Rodion Koshelev, both close associates of Tsar Alexander I. Boehme also influenced Russia’s greatest philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, sometimes called “the last Gnostic,” and through Soloviev, the art and thought, including religious philosophy, of the early 20th century.

On the popular level, the dvoeverie (dual faith) combined pagan pantheism with Christianity. Pagan rituals designed to assure a good harvest, prevent harm, restore health, or harm an enemy, survived well into the 20th century. The basic distinction of the dvoeverie was not between good and evil, but between clean and unclean. In Medieval and Fatly Modern Russia, people of all classes turned to witches and sorcerers to prevent “spoiling,” ward off the “evil eye,” and cast spells on enemies and rivals. Witches and sorcerers, incidentally, were often male. As late as the 16th century, the oath of loyalty to the Tsar included the renunciation of sorcery . The peasant’s universe was populated by all sorts of nature spirits, e.g. rusalki (mermaids), wood sprites, creatures who inhabited house and barn, and had to be propitiated….These beliefs were not part of a coherent system but their emphasis on invisible forces and other worlds created a mind-set receptive to the sophisticated occult doctrines described below. (source, source)

This condemnation and support of paganism makes sense if one considers the role of the Russian Orthodox Church as a spiritual entity in the context of the dvoeverie. Both the Orthodox Church and Russia’s variant of Slavic paganism exist to serve the needs of the Russian nation and people, so there is the acceptance of both so as they function under the concept of the Russian nation and her people, who descend from a theoretical common race. This is, in an unstated way, the same end of which the Lutheran Church historically was for the Germanic nations or the Anglican Church for England, which is a marker of racial and national identity that also tolerated the growth or existence of paganism. The difference is that as owing largely to the historical influence of the Catholic Church and alluded to by Rosenthal, the development of doctrine in pagan ideas that took place in the West provided a framework for immediate adoption and integration of them into the Orthodox east.

All of modern “western occultism” is rooted in the Kabbalah, as it was brought from the Jews following the diaspora that mixed with varying forms of pagan beliefs that have links with shamanistic practices from Siberia as well as Hindic beliefs from India. The same must be said about the East, albeit there was a greater and stronger influence from shamanism because of the constant historical contact through economic interchange or subjugation by Turkic peoples in Russia. The modern concept of pagan ideas in Russia, while always existing, was much like the Russian Orthodox Church in that in the name of “tradition” there was not a development of doctrine to address contemporary problems. The rebellious insistence of the Russian Orthodox Church against the Catholics kept her stagnated in the same name of “tradition.”  Thus when occult doctrines which had been intellectually developed in the West reached Russia, they found fertile ground among a people who had never fully given up paganism and were seeking answers from the self-inflicted intellectual vacuum created by the Orthodox intelligensia in favor of racial and national pride. The Catholic Church may be faulted for her allowing the decline of Christianity in the German lands that lead up to Luther’s revolt, but the Russian case never needed such a decline because she was fertile ground who only needed to await planting of the seeds.

Modern Russian occultism as a organic transplant from the West

Ivan the Terrible is considered to be the founder of modern Russia, as it was with him that the various warring states in Russia west of the Urals were united and after which he began a massive expansion into Siberia eastward that continued for centuries. This was not the end of paganism, but rather the spread of it with the people. As occultism became popular across Western Europe, she spread in proportional strength in Russia. Freemason lodges found in France, Germany, and England were prolific all throughout Russia during the 18th century and after a brief period of suppression in 1815, re-emerged until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Jakob Boehme

It was in the crucible of 19th century anti-Christianity in the West and its subsequent influence on the east that occultism in Russia blossomed with the creation of her own system of occultism not different from but merely a unique cultural expression of that which already existed through the Theosophy movement and Helena Blatavatsky, which grew out of the work of German kabbalist Jakob Boehme, whose writings since the 16th century were highly influential among Russian Orthodox clergymen. In spite of being members of the Russian Orthodox Church but not surprisingly so, Blatavatsky’s family was already deeply involved in the occult at the same time, and so her transition to her later philosophy is not truly the creation of a new religion, but the realization of what was already present.

Helena Blatavatsky

Occultism was present well within the revolutionary movement in Russia that eventually overthrew the Tsar and also had reached well into the highest ranks of the Russian state rulers and as such, the technical “head” of the Russian Church. This was present no stronger than with the last Tsar, Nicholas, and his wife, Alexandra. While the occultist and sexual deviant Grigori Rasputin is most often cited as proof of this, there were far more men than just him at the Russian imperial court involved in this, and it even caught the attention of outsiders. Baron Rothschild on visit to Nicholas II’s court in 1902, before Rasputin’s presence, reported that he was disturbed by the “bizarre mysticism” he saw:

Occult beliefs and practices played a prominent role at the Imperial Court. The influence on the royal couple of the faith-healer Rasputin is well known . Robert Warth has shown that Rasputin was preceded by a long chain of charlatans and mystics, including a Baron Phillippe, from France. In 1902, before Rasputin’s arrival at court, Baron de Rothschild told Serge Witte, then Russian envoy to France, that “great events, especially of an internal nature, were everywhere preceded by a bizarre mysticism at the court of the ruler.” (source, source)

It is interesting that Tsar Nicholas was “canonized” by the Russian Orthodox Church, for a saint becomes a saint not because he was perfect, but that his life was a model of saintly behavior, especially following a conversion. This does not seem to have happened with Tsar Nicholas, who repeatedly relied on occultists at his court as well as those he hired in order to help him see into the future up until the end of his reign and life. (1)

Gerard Encausse

One of those occultists was Gerard Encausse, a French theosophist who was contracted by the Tsar in 1901, 1905, and 1906 to help him see the future of Russia and what he must do. In an ominous “prophecy” that would seem to have been taken straight out of the doomed King Saul’s encounter with the witch of Endor (see 1 Samuel 28), the occultist at the request of Nicholas conjured up the spirit of his deceased father, who is said to have told his son that he will be overthrown and his kingdom destroyed by the Bolshevik Revolutionaries. The Tsar was so concerned by this- and such a believer in occult powers -that he gave special protection to Encausse, thinking that so long as Encausse was kept alive, his prophecy would have the hope of being averted.

As Rosenthal noted, Russian occultism distinguishes less between “good and evil” and more so between “clean and unclean,” or perhaps, success as opposed to failure. The Communist overthrow of Russia did not end the occultism, but it simply changed forms. The NKVD exploited this persistent theme in order to give a religious undertone to the propagation of Bolshevism. The state was the new god and supreme life force, and in so by glorifying the Russian state and purifying her of “rebellious elements” so was one serving an act of worship to god. The magic of the peasant was transmuted to the concept of Soviet technological advances in the name of building a “perfect” society. This quality further developed with Stalin and his enforced cult of personality, where a combination of humanistic actions enforced by the early Bolsheviks mixed with a created mythos of Stalin’s personal abilities to present him as a demi-god.

This is not a joke, but a real icon from a Russian Orthodox Church (full story here, here) that has caused controversy as it portrays Stalin in a saintly context. There are many Russians in the Orthodox Church who revere Stalin with such reverence and more.

But all demi-gods and promises made on false premises eventually crash, and Bolshevism’s promises led to empty stomachs and massive underdevelopment in rural areas, leaving the poor to suffer much as they have throughout Slavic history. It was among these people that the traditional Russian pagan practices survived in folk tales and daily life, and so began to grow again as people searched for means to help feed themselves as well as alternative medicine, since the Soviet government in spite of her promises could not care for the needs of her people.

When the Soviet Union broke up in November 1991, the newly afforded freedom of speech to the Russians brought about another explosion of Russian occult literature and an open interest in paganism, much happening at the same time the Russian Orthodox Church experienced a “boom” of revival. This should not be considered co-incidental, because the two throughout history have worked in an un-unified union with each other. It should also not be considered something new or old, but simply a continuation of the Russian ethos in the context of the current age without losing its potency despite having had the potential to change after the fall of the USSR but did not.

Enter Aleksandr Dugin

Aleksandr Dugin

Contemporary Russian occultism is thus as much a thing of the past as it is of the present, just under different manifestations. Rosenthal in 1993 touched on this connection with “traditionalism” and noted that an occult revival would likely precede another Russian revolution type scenario with different names, and directly named future Putin confidant Aleksandr Dugin as one of the forces behind helping to revive this:

“Some Russian occultists are developing a new form of Russian messianism, an occult version of “The Russian Idea.” Steiner’s appeal to Russians, it will be recalled, was that he assigned a special role to Russia in the new era. Roerikh once stated that the new Russian spirituality will benefit the whole world . Russian astrologers often quote the American astrologer, Alice Bailey, who stated that “out of Russia will emerge [a] new magical religion.” Valentin Kuklev maintains that “the roots of the new age movement are undoubtedly in Russia.” He predicts a “third culture” that is different from and superior to Marxism and liberalism . 27 Such views recall the Slavophile position that Russia must follow its own path, rather than imitate the West, but they are also disquietingly reminiscent of Italian Fascist claims to have found an alternative to both communism and capitalism .” (source, source)

This idea of a “Russian messianism” combined with a fatalistic idea of “Russia against the world” is consistent with the autarchal-based approach of Russia during the communist years and has echoes of the Germanic concept of “Ragnarok“, the day of judgement where the nations of the earth turn against Germany to devour her and Germany, after a heroic battle, succumbs to them in a struggle of epic proportions after which the human race is wiped out in the struggle and just as the ancient Phoenix, the great bird which rises from the ashes of battle to be reborn through a firey holocaust returns to her splendor, so does the Russian nation emerge again as the dominant political and spiritual force in the world whose power penetrates to all ends of the globe. As Dugin wrote:

“The meaning of Russia is that through the Russian people will be realized the last thought of God, the thought of the End of the World. . . . Death is the way to immortality. Love will begin when the world ends. We must long for it, like true Christians. . . . We are uprooting the accursed Tree of Knowledge. With it will perish the Universe.” (source)

Dugin’s chosen flag for his “Eurasian Youth Movement” represents this idea as well as the warning of Rosenthal. The flag consists of four arrows, or eight arrowheads (depending on how one counts it) pointing in various directions.

Dugin’s “Eurasian star” flag

The flag has been referred to by Dugin himself as the “Eurasian thunderbold.” However, a quick research on the flag shows something evil.

Crowley’s “Ruin” card from the Thoth deck.

Just as the Russian east, in spite of her insistence otherwise, is historically influenced from the West, it appears that Dugin’s own symbol is not his own. Its origins appear to be found in Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot card deck for the symbol of “Ruin”, which gives an eight-pointed start type figure to mean rebirth or karmic renewal. This also appears to have been turned into the “star of chaos” that is used in “chaos magic” rituals that emerged during the 1960s counterculture and of which Dugin appears to have directly copied the “Eurasian star” from.

The symbol of “chaos” used in chaos magic

But why would Dugin intellectually associate with such people as Aleister Crowley, witches, or the occult of any type? This is the man who constantly condemns “liberalism,” and wrote on a Russian Orthodox and (obviously) pro-Russia think tank that “liberalism” is the “fifth column of the West” (“Либералы – пятая колонна Запада.”) and that “to tolerate [liberals] in positions of responsibility in society is just suicide” (” терпеть их в обществе на ответственных позициях просто самоубийство”) (source, source). He defines his “fourth political option” as saying itself “We are against liberalism,” (“4ПТ предлагает сделать важный шаг: сказать «мы против либерализма»”) (source, source)

Was Dugin thinking of such concepts when he had them in mind? One does not know. However, it is a fact the Dugin, for his presentation of himself as a Russian Orthodox “old believer”– a sect in the Orthodox Church who rejected the Russian Orthodox reforms of the mid-17th century under Patriarch Nikon for being “anti-traditional” -he is an equally devoted adherent of the occult philosophies of Italian writer Julius Evola, who advocated for paganism and hated Christianity and especially the Catholic Church with open vitriol, and for many years was a supporter of National Socialism, which he said he did as a “reactionary” measure to the Soviet Union:

It was in this milieu that Dugin came upon Evola, whose books, oddly enough, were available off the shelf in the Lenin Library, not far from where he and Golovin’s other zombies would meet. Dugin, who taught himself French and other languages, grabbed a copy of Evola’s Pagan Imperialism, the German edition, and quickly produced a samizdat edition of the work.[13] This was the beginning of a career that would unite occultism with far-right politics in an often dizzying mix. He would later write books about Evola and Guénon, linking them to the Russian Orthodox Church, of which he is a firm believer. In fact, he is an Old Believer, joining the branch of the faith that maintain the rituals and practices prior to the reforms of the seventeenth century. As Guénon advised, he stuck close to the roots of tradition, even to wearing the beard and peasant dress associated with the sect. (source)

This is not the first time that Dugin was caught with an interest in Crowley or satanism. In 1995, he participated in public in what some called a “black mass” where he read in praise of satan worship:

In the early 1990s, he became editor of the Eurasian magazine Elementy. The front cover of the magazine’s second issue featured a portrait of Baphomet, the goat god who is also the symbol of the US-based Church of Satan. Dugin frequently wrote about the occult within the pages of Elementy, as well as praising the “spiritual and transcendental side of fascism”.

In 1995, during an unsuccessful attempt to get elected to parliament, Dugin took part in a pre-election concert – described as a “black mass” by participants – in memory of the British occultist Aleister Crowley, notorious for his sex “magick”. During the performance, Dugin’s supporters read aloud from Crowley’s Book of the Law (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”). Dugin is also reported to have met with figures from the Ordo Templi Orientis, a worldwide occult organisation that once boasted Crowley among its ranks.

Dugin’s press secretary declined to forward my request for an interview with her boss on the theme of the occult when I contacted her. “He is a devout Orthodox Christian,” she told me, who had only become interested in the occult out of “intellectual curiosity”. (source, source)

But could these just be baseless accusations against Dugin meant to slander his name and the good he- presumably -wants to bring to Russia, or to at least a Christian ideal he is attempting to aspire to for the Russian people, who were tormented for nearly a century under the yoke of Communism?

Yevgeniy Golovin

If these were just lies, or exaggerations, then Dugin would have to explain his close associations with Yevgeny Golovin. This is not the Yevgeny Golovin of 19th century Russian history, but a figure that one can find almost nothing on in the English language- he remains in large part a mystery to the anglosphere and really, non-Russian speaking world. Even in Russian, it can be difficult to find out information on who he is or his past, and the reason for this is because Dugin was the intellectual protege of Golovin.

As noted before, the transmission of occult ideas into Russia came largely by means of Western sources, capitalizing on an already receptive audience in Russia. The crowlean idea of “sex magick” as presented in his books likewise came to Russia in a similar way during the 1960s when it was being popularized again in occult circles through the “hippie” countercultural movement and its related branches. Golovin along with two friends, Yuri Mamleev and Haidar Jemal, were major individuals who transmitted these ideas into Moscow in the 1960s. For the next twenty years, Golovin was recognized as a part of the “Moscow mystical underground” where at the apartment shared by all three occult rites were conceived, practiced, and attracted devoted seekers of the arcane. Dugin was considered one of the most devoted adherents of Golovin.

Dugin with Golovin (second from right)

In 1974, Golovin developed his occult worldview by founding a National Socialist cult called the Black Order SS, based off of the similar occult society from Germany created by the National Socialist occultist Himmler during the Second World War and of which Dugin was a willing participant. Dugin does not like to discuss this aspect of his past and says that it was part of his “rebellion” against Communism, but this was more than just a simple opposition to governmental policies. The Black Order SS made frequent use of “sex magick” rituals which integrated homosexuality, urine drinking, and anti-Christian rituals into a national socialist philosophy which Dugin embraced:

And Golovin, with his survivors of the dispersal (Dugin and Dzhemal still remained the most loyal), went underground and created the “Black Order SS,” reminiscent of the occult order of the Third Reich with its hierarchy, conspiracy and Nazi greetings. Golovin proclaimed himself Reichsfuhrer. At the seminars, he plowed his faithful assistants no longer vague myths about the great Atlantis and the Holy Grail, but fascist ideology. It was very difficult to get to the newly made SS men.

One of the former members of the Golovin Order once admitted to me drunk that the Führer urinated in the mouth of his young fascist students. It encouraged homosexuality and drunkenness to stupor. Only in this way could all the followers be tied into a single bundle, a mystical union (by the way, the “mystery” comes from the Greek verb myein “keep silent”) and subordinate to the leader’s will. By the mid-80s, Dugin and Jemal were already pretty bored by the SS orgies. They were about to flee to Libya, but then perestroika broke out, and they both rushed into politics.

They say that it was Golovin who thought them in 1988 to join Dmitry Vasiliev’s Pamyat Society. The great Duce himself moved to Gorki-10 near Moscow, to a tiny apartment where the hermit lives. He still has a minimum of furniture and a lot of books, and there is a swastika on the wall. Mamleev, returning to Russia after perestroika, immediately noted himself in Gorki near Golovin, who, like his godfather, is still an indisputable authority for all his students. (source, source, source, source)

But perhaps could Dugin have had a change of heart? After all, does not Christian doctrine say that even the worst sinners can become saints? In the Catholic Church. Bl. Bartolo Longo was a satanist who was involved in black magic and occult societies during the time of the Italian Revolution in the 19th century, and yet he died and became a saint. Could there not be such a hope for Dugin, that he found God and wants to reform his life?

Golovin and Dugin together in 2003 (source, source)

If this is so, then it would be visible by a change in life. Dugin says that he has renounced his associations with National Socialism, and by extension it would suggest his connections to Golovin. However, a quick visit to his website shows this is not the case. Dugin has two pages (here, here)- on his personal website -dedicated to articles in adoration of Golovin and other topics such as the infamous English occultist John Dee, hermeticism (Crowley), and about the “end of the world” where it is “Russia against the world” in a cataclysmic struggle resulting in a massive death by fire followed by a rebirth in which Russia conquers the world, a strikingly similar idea to the Germanic pagan concept of “Ragnarok”, the “rise of the male” over the female (masculinity movement), and an entire section dedicated to “Russian philosophy,” of which he describes the basis of it as “chaos philosophy” while holding to the symbols of “chaos magick”.

Now “chaos” is the opposite of “Logos,” for it was the Logos pronounced into the chaos of Genesis 1:1 that God brought order out of. Christ, the Logos made incarnate, is not merely the opposite of chaos, but is truth itself, and thus chaos is a perversion of good, which is also the definition of evil. Chaos is not good- it is evil, and yet this is what Dugin embraces:

“For Dugin, logos is replaced by chaos, and the very symbol of chaos magic is the symbol of Eurasia: ‘Logos has expired and we all will be buried under its ruins unless we make an appeal to chaos and its metaphysical principles, and use them as a basis for something new.’ Dugin dressed his discussion of logos in the language of Heidegger, but his terminology cannot be read outside of a 2,000-year-old Western, biblical tradition which associates the Logos with the Christ, and Dugin’s invocation of chaos against logos leads to certain inevitable conclusions regarding his doctrines.”

In short, Dugin’s Eurasianism is a satanic cult. (source)

Dugin’s “Eurasianism” cannot be reconciled with Christianity at all because his Eurasian philosophy is a veritable attempt at “chaos magick” in the name of reviving Russia. Thus the migration crisis, the social crises, and all of the problems in Russia, while Russia does not want them and both she and Dugin oppose them, they need not necessarily be seen as a “bad” thing from this perspective because just as the Freemason occultists of Europe used the phrase “Ordo ab Chao”, the western occultism influenced Dugin seems to be adopting a similar philosophy in order to, given his support of Trump and close ties with the equally occult-tied Steven Bannon, to “make Russia great again.”

But what does the Orthodox Church have to say about all of this? Surely given the violence that the Orthodox Church saw at the hands of socialist revolutionaries and now with Dugin, a new socialist revolutionary – remembering that nationalism and communism are but two fingers on the same hand -would not have more to say about it, as they were greatly victimized and many holy people went to their deaths? Likewise, would not the Russian Orthodox Church have any interest in issuing any statement at all in criticism of Dugin and his evil activities, for darkness cannot have fellowship with light (2 Corinthians 6:14), and no man can serve two masters (Matthew 6:24)?

As noted earlier, there has always been an unhealthy relationship between the Orthodox Church and the government, whereby the former would subjugate herself to the latter in a pattern not found in the Catholic Church, and in that sense was directly a reflection of the later Protestant revolutionary movements and the “state churches” that arose. Dugin himself notes this, where he praises the anti-Catholic Ghibbeline revolutionaries of Medieval Europe who were a later precursor of the Protestant nationalist revolutionaries in Germany:

In some sense, the “Ghibelline archetype” was realized in Russia with the Sacred Emperor as the center of the state and the Patriarch fulfilling strictly sacred functions.

Thirdly, this “Ghibelline archetype” mentioned above was embodied in the sacred attitude towards the Russian Tsars. It was the Tsar who was the sacred center of the Russian imperial ecumene in whose figure were concentrated all of the immanent religious energies of the [empire’s] peoples. Unlike Catholic eschatology, in which the “anti-Pope” and the usurpation of the throne of St. Peter are discussed in an apocalyptic sense, Orthodox prophecies never mentioned an “anti-Patriarch.” Instead, all negative, counter-sacred forces are gathered in the singular personage of the “anti-Tsar,” the “Antichrist-Emperor.” In principle, this “Ghibelline” aspect is typologically close to the Shiite understanding of the sacred nature of Authority, as Shiite doctrine (unlike Sunni) insists on the rule of only the Aliites, the sacred descendants of the first of the Imams. The Shiites believe that no-one outside of this line has any “sacred” or “initiatic” right to rule. (source, source)

Following the sacking of Constantinople, the subjugation of the Patriarch to the Ottomans, and the fleeing of many Eastern Orthodox clergymen and scholars to Venice and Moscow, Ivan the Terrible- remembering that he is the founder of the modern Russian nation -proceeded to call Moscow the “third Rome.”

Likewise, as noted above, the Russian Orthodox Church refused to take measures to stem the flow of occult and pagan practices among the Slavs who she evangelized. The fruit of this was the dvoeverie, and creating a fertile group in which pagan practices that were more organized and defined could grow in and which happened repeatedly.

The Bolshevik Revolution was a huge blow to all of religious life in Russia. The Orthodox Church was hit very hard as well as the Catholic Church, with thousands of priests and bishops killed, many who fled, and millions of Christians put to death by the overwhelmingly atheist and Jewish-led movement. While religion was at times permitted, one had to always be careful because the KGB was known to infiltrate Churches by sending agents to become priests or bishops, and in so doing to take over the Church from within.

The Catholic Church has acknowledged this throughout the 20th century in former Soviet bloc countries. There are entire books dedicated to this subject (see for example the work of convert Bella Dodd), and the estimate was about 15% in the worst cases of priests either selling out or being involved as a direct agent of the KGB. The Orthodox Church as spoken about this, but far less and yet, they were far more affected. It is admitted that in the Russian Orthodox Church alone, up to 50% and possibly more priests were either KGB agents or on the KGB payroll.

Now as noted before, there has always been a Protestantesque relationship between the Orthodox Churches and the nations they inhabited in so far as the political element is concerned. The concept of an “orthodox identity”, while presented as the “correction” to the open pronouncement, from the mouth of Christ Himself, that He would establish His Church on St. Peter, has never been able to be separated from a concept of nationalism and likewise, never been able to stand up to severe pressure from without. More proof of this is in the long and sad decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam, where Mohammedan armies continued to subjugate the former lands of the Byzantine Empire and other Christian territories. Once they gained political power, the Muslims allowed for Christians to exist under their rule, but the Christians of these lands, often times bound within the confines of their particular ethnic group, did not oppose or eventually fight back against the Muslims, but slowly succumbed to them over centuries of decline. The main exception to this was the Maronite Church, which maintained its particular place in Lebanon and interestingly accepted the authority of both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The Catholic nations, while many were conquered, showed a consistent history of active opposition to Islamic rule and were realized through events such as the Crusades, the Iberian Reconquista, the conquest of Sicily, and the expansion all around the world.

The Russians can be considered in part an exception to the Islamic rule, as they were ruled by the various Mongolian hordes and the later Khanates that emerged from them for centuries until the 1550s when Ivan the Terrible, as noted above, violently united Russia’s various kingdoms and then laid siege and captured the already weakened Kazan Khanate. It is of note that while there were and are many Muslims in Russia, mostly of Turco-Mongolian extract through the various tribes, great numbers of these people are shamanistic pagans (even today) and those who are Muslims often times practice a blend of Islam and shamanism similar to the various Afro-Caribbean forms of witchcraft in the Caribbean Islands, Brazil, and parts of the Americas.

It is absolutely true that the Russians brought their Church with them, but to a large extent the peoples they encountered were not evangelized. This compares with the Catholic missionaries evangelizing and setting up long-term religious missions that converted most of the peoples of the Americas and many people in various outposts where they went such as the eastern regions of Indonesia, parts of southern India, and the Philippines. While religion and political power can operate on a shared continuum with each other, the eclipse of Spanish political power in the Americas and abroad did not eclipse the presence of the Church, as it is not an extension of her but the glue that binds rulers and ruled. In the Russian case, the Church often acted as an extension of the government.

If the destruction of the “Second Rome” of Constantinople was a tremendous loss, the Bolshevik conquest of Moscow, put to death the concept of Moscow as a “Third Rome”. They not only did this with persecution, but through the systematic infiltration and subjugation of the Orthodox Church by filling her ranks with members of the Communist Party to such a point that the Church was no longer even run by Christians, but a wholly controlled shell of the government with no independence, something that had never happened before in its history. The broad gates of hell, which there are many ways to enter into and one of which at the time was the Lubyanka, had prevailed over the Russian Church.

But this is not my fantasy or desire to say this. To the contrary, this sentiment has been stated by many Russian Orthodox Christians. Consider that of General Konstantin Preobrazhensky, a former high-ranking member of the KGB from an Orthodox family who defected to the West in 1991. He has given many talks and answered questions about his experience for years, and said in 2010 that the current Russian Patriarch, Kirill, does not even believe in God:

: In the article “spy church” you wrote about the Chekist priests who, during the service, suddenly really began to believe in God. Please tell us what sanctions the authorities applied to them for this? Do you think that Patriarch Alexy ll was a believer?

Konstantin:

1. Such cases were, of course. True, no one officially declared their faith. Such security officers were no longer appointed to critical positions, but everyone pretended that nothing was happening.

2. People close to the circle of Alexy claim that he was not a believer. As for Cyril [ed. Kirill], he certainly does not believe in anything. (source, source)

…

Konstantin Preobrazhensky : This is an illusion that is alive not only in the West, but even in Russia. She is very harmful. The KGB has not disappeared. And, alas, the Soviet Union also did not disappear, only decreased. Putin has completely recreated the KGB. As you know, now the FSB is in power in Russia. Her powers are much broader than those of the Soviet KGB. The ideology is almost communist – the destruction of the bourgeoisie, the destruction of private property, business is taken under state control … Yes, this is the Chekist mafia, but only worse. How can we talk about the cooperation of the KGB with the church in the past, when even now in the church all the leading posts are occupied by KGB agents? Wherever you look, you will see an agent everywhere. Both the patriarch and all his deputies are all agents of the KGB.

Inna Dubinskaya : You wrote that in the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, all bishops are agents of the KGB and its successor to the FSB. Where did you get this information?

K.P. : From the KGB. As for the bishops, all Soviet bishops are appointed by the state. More precisely, the KGB. Because the bishop is a regional leader. The leaders of the regional scale, we affirmed the Central Committee of the CPSU, its ideological department. Documents for staff appointments were prepared by the KGB with the Central Committee – for everyone, not only for church leaders, for anyone. As for the bishops, a letter about him was written by the Fifth KGB Directorate, which was responsible for the general supervision of the church, and the First Main Directorate (intelligence), if the candidate for the bishops had been abroad at least once, because agent contact was also maintained with him. Each certificate ended with the same phrase: “Collaborates since such and such a year.” It was she who was the most important for the Central Committee of the CPSU, and not at all the church merits of the bishop. On the contrary, the fewer the better. And when a bishop is appointed by the state or even uses secular authorities for his appointment, he cannot be a bishop, as the church rules say. Therefore, all Soviet bishops are illegal from a church point of view.

I.D. : This is all the past. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than one hundred clergymen appeared in the Russian Orthodox Church who had nothing to do with the Soviet church. Do you exaggerate when you say that to this day there are intelligence agents in the bosom of the church?

K.P. : The church has nothing to do with this. That they stood in line, filed applications to be made bishops? Not. There is another mechanism: the bishop is nominated by other bishops. That is, they were nominated by the Soviet bishops, who were agents of the KGB and who are still them.

To your question, am I exaggerating that there are KGB agents in the Moscow Patriarchate, I have two answers. By the way, the term itself is Stalinist: there has never been a Moscow Patriarchate in Russia, it was Stalin who invented it, the KGB invented it. The KGB term of the 30s and 40s. As for the new bishops, they are proteges of KGB agents. And of course, they are very loyal. And now in Russia there is the principle of a “symphony” of the state and the church. Why were priests recruited in Soviet times, although they were originally all KGB proteges? It would seem absurd. The reason is purely ideological, communist. The church was considered a hostile environment, such as the mafia and so on. There it was necessary to recruit agents. This was called “agents in a hostile environment.” Now there is a “symphony” in relations between the church and the state: the patriarch and the church support all, even the most disgusting, most illegal actions of the current Russian government. Therefore, they no longer need to be recruited: they will fulfill any order without any recruitment.

Well, as for the old bishops of the Soviet consecration, who were agents, they are now agents. They would cease to be if they openly repented. Then they would be expelled for decryption. But if they did not repent, then no one excluded them. So – an active agent. (source, source)

…

Interviewer: To what extent did the KGB interfere in church affairs and, in particular, the work of the Moscow Patriarchate?

–Konstantin: I knew that in 1993 it was made public. Then the archives of the Communist Party were opened, and it turned out that many bishops of the Church, including the current Patriarch Alexy II, then Metropolitan of Leningrad, were KGB agents. Then became known operational nicknames of the bishops of the MP. Drozdov was the nickname of Alexy II, and Mikhailov was the archbishop of Smolensk, Cyril.

The infiltration of the KGB into church politics was completely natural. The fact is that the KGB also considered itself to be something like a “church,” for it was in control of human souls. He tested the communist faith in people for its sincerity. That is why KGB officers called themselves “healers of souls” as if they were priests. As the civilized world is now aware, some of them really were and remain such.

-Interviewer: Why was the KGB interested in the infiltration of the Moscow Patriarchate?

–Konstantin: The main goals were foreign espionage and recruitment, although, of course, the KGB also wanted to weaken the Church from the inside. In the early 1960s The Moscow Patriarchate joined the World Council of Churches (WCC). Thus, the WCC provided a “roof” for various intelligence operations, as it brought the Russian Church into the political arena of Western Europe and the rest of the world.

-Interviewer: What can you say about the impending unification of the Moscow Patriarchate and ROCOR? Is the KGB involved in this?

-Konstantin: The KGB is very actively involved in the union between the Moscow Patriarchate and the ROCA Metropolitan Laurus.

-Interviewer: How?

–Konstantin: In the second half of the 80s. I learned about the operational plans for the takeover of the Russian Church Abroad in order to better control Russian emigration and its churches. And all this is in good agreement with Putin’s vision of global dominance. (source, source)

But Preobrazhensky is not the only one talking about the massive KGB infiltration into the highest levels of the Russian Orthodox Church and the allegations of Alexey II as being a KGB agent. The high-ranking former KGB agent Ion Mihail Pacepa in his book Disinformation notes that not only was Alexey II known as a KGB agent, but that the next patriarch installed, Kirill, was also with the KGB:

On December 5, 2008, Aleksi II, the fifteenth Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia and the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, died. He had worked for the KGB under the codename “Drozdov” and was awarded the KGB Certificate of Honor, as was revealed in a KGB archive accidentally left behind in Estonia when the Russians pulled out.^^ For the first time in its history, Russia had the opportunity to conduct the democratic election of a new patriarch, but that was not to be.

…

When the bells at Christ the Savior Cathedral tolled to announce that a new patriarch had been elected, Kirill/“Mikhaylov” proved to be the winner. Regardless of whether he was the best leader for his church, he certainly was in a better position to influence the religious world abroad than were the other candidates. In 1971, the KGB had sent Kirill to Geneva as a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church to that Soviet propaganda
machine the World Council of Churches. In 1975, the KGB infiltrated him into the Central Committee of the WCC, which had become a Kremlin pawn. In 1989 the KGB appointed him chairman of the Russian patriarchate’s foreign relations as well. He still held those positions when he was elected patriarch. (source)

The Russian Orthodox Priest Vladimir Moss, who runs Orthodox Christian Books, has written extensively about the ties between Putin, Dugin, the Church, and occultism,

Trump and Putin are both essentially crooked businessmen turned politicians. Trump is a real-estate businessman (with several bankruptcies to his name); Putin is in the same business (he owns a fabulous number of palaces) but with a finger in the pie of almost every other form of organized crime. They unite through their common worship of Mammon – but with Putin as the senior partner controlling the Russian-American organized crime syndicate – and most of the world’s nuclear weapons

…

A third major change of tactics that Putin’s revolution has necessitated is in relation to religion… In order to understand this change, we must first inquire into Putin’s personal religion (if he has any)…

When Putin became president, he presented himself as “all things to all men”: a communist to the communists, a capitalist to the capitalists, a democrat to the democrats, a nationalist to the nationalists, and an Orthodox to the Orthodox. And yet Putin is no believer. On September 8, 2000, when asked by the American television journalist Larry King whether he believed in God, he replied: “I believe in people…”

This refusal to confess a faith in God is not surprising. It should be remembered, as Konstantin Preobrazhensky points out, that Putin “began his career not in the intelligence ranks but in the ‘Fifth Branch’ of the Leningrad Regional KGB, which also fought religion and the Church. Putin carefully hides this fact from foreign church leaders, and you will not find it in any of his official biographies… The myth of Putin’s religiosity is important for proponents of ‘the union’. It allows Putin to be characterized as some Orthodox Emperor Constantine, accepting the perishing Church Abroad under his regal wing. For his kindness we should be stretching out our arms to him with tears of gratitude…”

“For those who claim,” writes Professor Olga Ackerly, “that the ‘CIS is different from the USSR’ and Putin is a ‘practising Orthodox Christian’, here are some sobering facts. The first days and months Putin’s presidency were highlighted by the reestablishment of a memorial plaque on Kutuzovsky Prospect where Andropov used to live. The plaque was a symbol of communist despotism missing since the 1991 putsch, bearing Andropov’s name – a former head of the KGB, especially known for his viciousness in the use of force and psychiatric clinics for dissidents. On May 9, 2000, Putin proposed a toast to the ‘genius commander’ Iosif Stalin and promoted many former KGB officers to the highest state positions…

“Important to note is that the Eurasian movement, with ties to occultism, ecumenism, etc. was recently revived by Putin, and a Congress entitled ‘The All-Russian Political Social Movement’, held in Moscow in April of 2001, was ‘created on the basis of the Eurasist ideology and inter-confessional [sic!] harmony in support of the reforms of President Vladimir Putin.’ The movement is led by Alexander Dugin, a sexual mystic, National Bolshevik Party member, son of a Cheka cadre, personally familiar with the so-called ‘Black International’, advisor to the State Duma, and participant in Putin’s ‘Unity’ movement.”

Again, while claiming to be a devout Orthodox, as George Sprukts wrote in 2004,

“1) he lights menorahs when he worships at his local synagogue;

“2) he has worshipped the mortal remains of Kin Il Sung in North Korea;

“3) he has worshipped the mortal remains of Mahatma Gandhi;

“4) he ‘believes not in God, but in Man’ (as he himself has stated);

“5) he was initiated into an especially occult form of ‘knighthood’ in Germany;

“6) he has restored the communist anthem;

“7) he has restored the bloody red rag as the RF’s military banner;

“8) he has not removed the satanic pentagram from public buildings (including cathedrals);

“9) he has plans of restoring the monument to ‘Butcher’ Dzerzhinsky;

“10) he has not removed the satanic mausoleum in Red Square nor its filthy contents.”

Although Putin is clearly not an Orthodox Christian, he has many reasons for pretending to be one and for protecting the official Orthodox church. First, the MP hierarchs are his partners in organized crime and fellow agents in the KGB. This is illustrated by the activities of “the tobacco metropolitan”, now Patriarch Cyril Gundiaev, KGB Agent “Mikhailov”, who, as the Bulgarian Prime Minister pointed out recently with some disgust, is a billionaire who imports tobacco and alcohol duty-free.

The MP’s enormous property portfolio, of which the hotel Danilovskaia is only one small element, is beginning to elicit unfavourable comment in the country. However, Putin is not yet ready to throw his ecclesiastical colleagues to the wolves. Besides, they are useful to him in important ways.

Thus Patriarch Cyril is useful, first, as a diplomat serving the interests of Putin. He does a considerable amount of external diplomacy, mainly among church leaders, both Orthodox and heterodox, but also with State leaders. (source, source)

Patriarch Alexey II

Alexey II was the first patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church following the fall of the USSR and was followed by Kirill. In this sense, the “revival” of the Russian Orthodox Church, while many people returned to an interest in it, was really a non-revival. It was a church who, while being under persecution during the Communist years and always in a tenuous relationship with the state, was now formally a state asset who since at least the 1970s had her leadership not be one of the spiritual, but the direction of the will of the Kremlin. This is not to besmirch the good will of the common people, but to note that the Church herself is arguably at the lowest point in her history, having been overpowered by, as Preobrazhensky describes, the “Chekists,” and infiltrated to such a point that there is veritably no separation between the two save on paper. Given the nature of the Russian relationship with the Church throughout history, would be difficult to “unbind” the two at this point, for as sad as what has happened above is, it is a natural fruit of processes established for centuries and arguably since the inception of the Russian nation.

Patriarch Kirill

Dugin is widely known as President Putin’s “right hand man”. This makes sense, for while Putin has been in power since 2000 and functions less as a President and more as an autocrat, it is arguable that Putin is to Dugin as Bush II was to Dick Cheney and Bush I. Putin represents the government and he certainly wields power, but it is widely reported that he is a product of Russia’s intelligence services, and most ironically, his career with the government started as an anti-Church agent targeting religious groups, including the Russian Orthodox Church. As such, it seems that Putin’s outward examples of “religiousity” and Christianity are as real as the photos of him shirtless and riding on a bear, carrying guns in the wild, or going on a dive and coming up with “ancient Greek artifacts”- a giant publicity stunt to boost a image that is absolutely divorced from reality.

Putin is the face of Russia, but Dugin is the mind. He is in the literal sense of the term a “warlock” in a very historically Russian sense, as he shows either a clear profession, history of involvement or both with the Russian Orthodox Church and the pagan underground in Russia as it has been for so many common people. What makes this particularly worse is that while in the past there would be members of notable power in Russian Orthodox Church that in some way would have likely stood up to Dugin, especially given his power, the Orthodox Church is completely silent. The exception to this are lone and often isolated groups or individuals, particularly those involved in groups affiliated with the now-integrated into the main church of ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia), who have stated that the situation in the Russian Orthodox Church now is even worse than in the past because of the level of power that the Kremlin now controls the Church with (being unprecedented in her history) as well as the fact that ROCOR, having been absorbed into the ROC, is now captivity to the next generation of socialist leaders.

In the meantime, witchcraft and the occult continue to rise rapidly in Russia. Again, it is a world that remains largely invisible unless one speaks Russian, but a brief look into the situation of paganism will show a great number of people who are performing various forms of magic with the intention of bringing about a nationalistic revival of the Russian nation, such as in February 2019 when a group of witches in Moscow gathered to cast a spell to give strength to Putin and the government:

Russian witches and seers performed on Tuesday one of their most powerful rituals, “the circle of power,” to pass on their mystical energy to President Vladimir Putin.

Dozens of people who claim to have supernatural powers stood side by side, reading spells in their effort to support the Russian head of state.

Self-proclaimed leader of the Russian witches Alyona Polyn said the main intention of the gathering is to enhance quality of life in Russia, the whole world in general and to support the president.

“We have gathered here to make the world better off through Russia,” Polyn said.

“Come up with the greatness, power of Russia, direct the way of Vladimir Putin right and correctly throughout the word of mine,” she intoned during the ceremony.Russian traditional culture has various mentions about people who were attributed to have certain magical powers and derive their strength from mystical sources. (source, source)

Magic rituals abound with such types of spells being cast by people with nationalistic inclinations and to spurn on the “fall of America” but the “rise of Russia” (such as here, here, here, here for examples). Then there are the cases where, just like in Africa, people are blaming witches for casting spells on them to ruin their lives and are taking violent revenge against them (here, here).

Rasputin

Scarcely a century ago, the so called Russian Orthodox “holy man” and “mystic” Rasputin, known for his insatiable lusts and perversions, exercised great influence over the court of the late Czars before the Bolshevik Revolution. Now Rasputin has not only returned with Dugin, but even worse, for Dugin is not only acting in the ways that Rasputin did, but he is a sodomite and a revolutionary in the same philosophical tradition as the Bolsheviks themselves but under a different name and so few people can see what he is doing and what the end result will be, which is another and potentially worse revolution, war, possibly the complete end of the Church herself in Russia.

The West is not an answer

So what is to be done about Dugin’s new Russia that he is creating if he is indeed such a threat? For many years, the answer was that America is the antidote to “worldwide Communism” threatening to destroy religion. But is she?

Ted, Walid, and I wrote an massive expose in 2017 on the “counter-jihad” movement and the right wing in which drawing on our years of experience, we put together a piece that nobody on either the left or right will discuss, which is the involvement of National Socialist occultism into the highest ranks of the Conservative movement. Our piece, which you can read here if you have not already read it, discovered a massive network of occultists through a tip off from Iceland, where a warlock named Gudmundur “Sigurfreyr” Jonasson with a history of occultism as well as being one of the largest voices in Europe for the legalization of drugs was found in direct contact with major members of the anti-Islam movement including Robert Spencer and Pamela Gellers SIOE (Stop the Islamization of Europe). This lead us to show direct connections between the “counter-jihad” movement and National Socialist paramilitary groups in the Balkans as well as occult Nazi paramilitary groups in Ukraine.

But the involvement is far greater than just the anti-Islam movement. The entire neo-right wing movement- be it called the “alt-right”, the “neo-nationalist”, or another -is the open revival of 19th century racialism and eugenics in the context of the socialist movements of the 20th century. While it is known that the eugenics movement in the USA provided inspiration for the National Socialists, the modern state was created in large part following World War II by the USA as a part of Operation Gladio. Known as “stay-behind” operations, the US government working with the Germans and her allies backed National Socialist paramilitary groups around the world to create “standing armies” that would be able to fight the USSR if she decided to invade. These “stay-behind” groups were all over the world and many of them included the support of Islamic terror groups. These included the mujahideen in Afghanistan as a part of Operation Cyclone against the Russians in the 1980s and the groups that became ISIS in Syria and Iraq as a part of Operation Timber Sycamore during the Obama years.

This is just a short list, as there are many sub-plans that go into each one but all work towards the same end. For example, I have been writing since 2016 at Shoebat.com that the entire “refugee crisis” was a fake, it was subsidized by the governments of Europe and that the reason they did it was because they knew it would bring instability and as such it would be able to cause enough social chaos in order to revive nationalism and militarism. The intelligensia on the right as so much as openly admitted that they eventually are going to see to the genocide of the migrants, and that doing so would allow for the creation of a new Reich:

So what answer is there? For example, the Russian Dugin is a warlock who speaks of committing genocide against the Ukrainians, much like how Stalin did during the 1930s. Yet who are the paramilitaries coming to fight the Russians in Ukraine other than US and German backed National Socialists through the Azov Battalions, who wear the occult wolfsangel symbol and sing the praises of mass murderers such as Stepan Bandera?

The Left wing and the Right wing are two wings on the same bird, which in this case is socialism, eugenics, and the paganism. These things are well-known and openly practiced in the left-wing circles, but not so discussed on the right, which presents herself as the “antidote” to it, often under the name of “traditionalism,” a term used by Dugin as well as former Trump adviser Steven Bannon, who since leaving his post in the Trump administration has been going through Europe helping right-wing political leaders in Italy and supporting such major political figures in the new right such as the Lega Nord affiliated Matteo Salvini.

Dugin and Bannon are both lovers of the Italian satanist, anti-Catholic revolutionary Julius Evola, whose writings are very popular among those on the right. Dugin noted this in a 2017 interview with the Daily Beast, where he said that he and Bannon read the same books and are as such “ideological allies”:

The Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin is banned from traveling to the United States because his calls for violence helped inspire the pro-Moscow insurgency in eastern Ukraine in 2014. But if America’s leading ideologue today, Steve Bannon, were to visit Moscow, Dugin, a 55-year-old with a long beard and ultra-conservative views, would gladly sit down and talk with him. Dugin says he sees Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, as his “ideological ally.”

One day would not be enough for them to cover all the geopolitics they have in common, Dugin told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview. First their conversation would be purely philosophical, Dugin imagined, “as Bannon and I read the same authors, we are united by the entire treasury of European conservative culture and history.” (source, source)

Who will be the savior?

The answer is already given by the context. Men are looking towards an earthy Jerusalem, a kingdom made of men by men for men to save them. But men always fail, and while Christ can stand with men or groups of men, a quick examination of the facts of both West and East show that this is not the case. What one see is not good against evil, but men seeking to tap into the powers of the netherworld using the very means that the Catholic Church has condemned for their own benefit. It is two groups of witches fighting for power seeking their source from the devil himself and seeing who can show himself to be a better slave to the sins that Christ came to set man free from.

These same people, who make sales pitches for their own souls to the devil, now want you, the common man, wherever you are and whoever you are, to freely offer your being and bodies to them in support of their wicked ideologies. If you are too old, they want your children to go to war for them, for that is where all of the nationalistic fervor that moral perverts masquerading as righteous patriots such as Dugin and Bannon, both wolves in sheep’s clothing, want you to believe.

In the prophecies of Our Lady of Fatima, she told the three holy children of Fatima that if Russia was consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the nation would be converted and peace would be granted to the world, and if not, her errors would spread, causing the persecution of the Church and the annihilation of nations:

“If My requests are heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated.” (source, source)

Is there anybody who could not disagree with this, that the socialist revolution that politically began its establishment in Russia has now come to the US in the form of the institutionalization of the policies established by Gladio, not to mention that a majority of the American people now support socialism? Even the Orthodox Church in Russia, schismatic as she was, still greatly resisted the Communists, but has now been completely absorbed by them, and the resistance that was no longer is, and yet the same socialists are again returning to power under a new name and with different faces but the same essence. This does not even include the situation of the rest of the world.

Likewise, there was also a warning given in 1929 by the Blessed Virgin to Sr. Lucia, in which she said that if her words were not realized, it would result in a destruction of the world by fire in language seeming to suggest a second deluge to that of Noah:

“As I told you, if men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity. It will be a punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful. The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead. The only arms which will remain for you will be the Rosary and the Sign left by My Son. Each day recite the prayers of the Rosary. With the Rosary, pray for the Pope, the bishops and priests.”

“The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres…churches and altars sacked; the Church will be full of those who accept compromises and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord.

“The demon will be especially implacable against souls consecrated to God. The thought of the loss of so many souls is the cause of my sadness. If sins increase in number and gravity, there will be no longer pardon for them” (source)

In the Bible, in the fifth chapter of the Second Book of Kings, there is the story of Naaman the Syrian, a pagan general who was afflicted with leprosy and had searched extensively for cures but could find none. Finally, a slave girl told him that he should go and speak with the prophet Elisha. He told Naaman to bathe seven times in the Jordan River in order that he would be cured. Naaman initially dismissed this as silly, but his servant corrected him, saying that he should at least try what Elisha said. When he did, Naaman was immediately cleansed and was humbled from it:

But Naaman went away angry and said, “I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me of my leprosy. 12 Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Couldn’t I wash in them and be cleansed?” So he turned and went off in a rage.

Naaman’s servants went to him and said, “My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, then, when he tells you, ‘Wash and be cleansed’!” So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy.

Then Naaman and all his attendants went back to the man of God. He stood before him and said, “Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel. So please accept a gift from your servant.” -2 Kings 5:12-15

Right now both the West and the East are hostages to a satanic group- if one would a cabal -of witches whose Cabbalistic magic and their material and metaphysical supporters are driving the world towards a massive war. So far there has been no feasable solution or serious answer to stop the current crisis that is taking place, which will likely result in the murder of hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of people.

Russia is not the answer, and America is not the answer. Christ is the answer, and so far the prayers that Christians have offered, the few faithful ones that are left, clearly have not stemmed the waves of destruction smashing upon the walls of what is left of civilization.

Regardless of who you are, what you believe, agree or disagree with, would you be willing like Naaman, to try a solution that seems strange, foolish, or if one would say it, unorthodox, in order to try and seek the good will of all people?

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said at the end of the Communist Manifesto that those who would consider rebellion to establish a socialist nation had “nothing to lose, and a world to gain.” What then is to be said of such a promise from Our Lady, who cannot lie and only does the will of her Most Holy Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ? The worst will be nothing- anything else will be a blessing, and possibly, by a miracle, the long overdue abortion of the murderers in government and the granting of peace to the world.

Or is racial, national, and egotistical pride more important?

The choice is yours.

(1) Such equivocations of sainthood with nationalism were not just in Russia but other Orthodox nations. In the case of Russia’s southern and much smaller but equally nationalistic neighbor Georgia, “St. Illa the Righteous”, who was canonized by the Georgian Orthodox Church in 1987 and is considered the “Father of the Fatherland of Georgia”, while he seems to have been assassinated by the Bolsheviks, was inspired in his support of Georgian nationalism by the efforts of the anti-Christian Italian Freemason and revolutionary occultist Giuseppe Garibaldi. Thus is should not be a surprise today that Ivan the Terrible, in spite of his evils, has among factions in the Orthodox Church a movement to have him canonized.

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