New Hitlers?

It was not so long ago that the (so-called) conservative media in America was calling Pres Putin of Russia ‘Hitler’ for opposing the plans of the American Empire-New World Order in the Ukraine and the Crimea.  Now that Spain, France, Germany, and Austria are supporting Russia in opposing those same forces in Syria (see Dr Farrell’s ‘News and Views’ update below), will the leaders of those countries now likewise be demonized as Pres Putin was?

Whatever the case, it is heartening to see divisions amongst the One World Government super class (see also here for another ġe-bysnung (example) http://gizadeathstar.com/2015/08/news-and-views-from-the-nefarium-august-19-2015/). 

Perhaps it will allow Catalonia,

http://www.rt.com/news/316818-catalonia-rajoy-spain-unity/

the South, Scotland, Wales, and other leods (peoples) to peacefully wriggle free from the grip of the synthetic super-nations and live something like a true Christian life.

On the other hand, one must be concerned about the reaction of an upbraided American elite.  Will their hurt pride make them lash out dangerously? Or is it merely 'Mission: Accomplished' once again, now that Syria is a wreck, thousands of Christians have been slaughtered, and the Muslim invasion of Europe has been strengthened?

Are the Days of ‘Cut-Burn-Poison’ (Michael Hoffman) Cancer Treatment Numbered?

Maybe.  Below is part of a story by Natural News on a treatment that looks very promising.

(NaturalNews) A breakthrough cancer treatment appears to be the reason why a handful of holistic doctors were recently found "suicided" is now gaining worldwide attention as a potential universal cure for cancer. And new microscopic footage released by First Immune shows this amazing remedy in action -- the human protein GcMAF is visually seen activating the body's own macrophages, which are then able to attack and destroy breast cancer cells in vitro.

The roughly two-minute video clip, which has been posted to YouTube, reveals the true healing power of GcMAF, a human protein that the body makes naturally but that some people lack or can't produce in adequate volume.

By delivering an activated version of this substance intravenously, scientists have shown that the immune system can be fully invigorated to destroy cancer cells on its own without the need for chemotherapy or radiation.

 . . .

Source:  Ethan Huff, ‘Watch as amazing GcMAF treatment kills cancer cells in real time… holistic doctors ‘suicided’ over this stunning breakthrough’, http://www.naturalnews.com/050972_GcMAF_cancer_cells_Bradstreet.html, posted 28 Aug. 2015, accessed 19 Sept. 2015

Welcoming Hærfest (Harvest/Fall) - 2015

‘Autumn Evening’

By Fyodor Tyutchev

The serenity of autumn evenings

Retains a tender, secret charm:

The presaging luster of motley trees,

Purple leaves lightly, languidly rustling,

The hazy, quiet azure sky

Above lamenting orphaned earth,

And, like an augur of coming storms,

An occasional gusty, chilling wind,

A waning, a languor—and over all

That gentle, yearning, fading smile

That in rational creatures we call

Suffering’s modesty divine.

(From Poems & Political Letters of F. I. Tyutchev, trans. Zeldin, Knoxville, Tenn.: U of Tenn. Press, 1973, p. 40)

Sham Holidays

Having come away so soon in the Union of Conquered States (i.e., ‘America’) from fake holidays like Labor Day and Patriot Day, it behooves us to read a few words from the philosopher Josef Pieper:

The statement is made with certainty: a festival that does not get its life from worship, even though the connection in human consciousness be ever so small, is not to be found.  To be sure, since the French Revolution, people have tried over and over to create artificial festivals without any connection with religious worship, or even against such worship, such as the “Brutus Festival” or “Labor Day,” but they all demonstrate, through the forced and narrow character of their festivity, what religious worship provides to a festival; scarcely nothing could be experienced more clearly than that genuine festivity is only to be seen where there is still some living relationship with religious “cult.”  Clearer than the light of day is the difference between the living, rooted trees of genuine, cultic festival and our artificial festivals that resemble those “maypoles,” cut at the roots, and carted here and there, to be planted for some definite purpose.  Of course, we have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that we are only at the dawn of an age of artificial festivals (Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. G. Malsbary, South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998 [1948], p. 51).

Just as he warned, artificial festivals are abounding:  Boss’s Day, Women’s Equality Day, Doughnut Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and so on.

In this over-writing of the Christian calendar we again hear the death rattle of the West.

But the way of repentance still stands open for Southerners and all Western peoples; we needn’t chain ourselves to the earth and sunder ourselves from God by following the new secular calendar.  We may once more experience a foretaste of Heaven on earth, as did our Orthodox forefathers of Europe and Africa, by following the Orthodox Church’s calendar, which makes time itself a new creation by filling it with the Grace of God. 

So, not Lincoln’s Birthday but the Beheading of St John the Baptist.  Not Constitution Day but the Feasts of the Holy Fathers of the Seven Ecumenical Councils.  Not Arbor Day but the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.  Not Truman Day but St Ælfred’s Day.  As we celebrate in a fitting way these and other festivals that have a root in real holiness, that same holiness from God Himself will begin to fill our lives and the world around us.  And this is what the Most Holy Trinity has called us to do as stewards of His creation.

A Great Southern Weakness towards Antichrist

The God-bearing Holy Fathers and other good teachers of the Orthodox Church are quite clear about one of the events that will happen together with Antichrist’s appearing - the rise of Israeli power and influence in the world:  ‘the Beast of the Apocalypse’ is ‘“Jewish might reborn at the end of time”’ (Fr Sloet, Revue Biblique, 1893, quoted in Archpriest Boris Molchanoff, Antichrist, Liberty, Tenn.: St. John of Kronstadt Press, p. 10).  ‘The initial phase of this plan [Antichrist’s plan to attain worldwide rule--W.G.] will be the achieving of popularity among the Jews’ (Antichrist, p. 6). When Antichrist reveals himself to the world, ‘The triumph of Judaism will be great, for there will be the command to celebrate the Jewish sabbath and follow the Jewish law.  The countless sects, like sheep without a shepherd, will gather to Antichrist as to their own pastor in the re-built temple of Solomon in Jerusalem’ (Apostasy and Antichrist, Jordanville, Ny.: Holy Trinity Monastery, p. 40).

This should put us on our guard, for Israeli power and popularity are indeed rising:

. . .

The twin crises in Syria and Egypt have marked the emergence of a new superpower coalition in the Middle East, the odd-couple alliance of Israel and Saudi Arabia, with Jordon serving as an intermediary and the Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms playing a supporting role.

The potential impact of this new coalition can barely be overstated, with Israel bringing to the table its remarkable propaganda skills and its unparalleled influence over U.S. foreign policy and Saudi Arabia tapping into its vast reservoir of petrodollars and exploiting its global financial networks. Together the two countries are now shaping international responses to the conflicts in Syria and Egypt, but that may only be the start.

 . . .

Source:  Robert Parry, ‘The Saudi-Israeli Superpower’, 29 Aug. 2013, https://consortiumnews.com/2013/08/29/the-saudi-israeli-superpower/

Add to this the beguilement of so many evangelical churches by the false teaching of Dispensationalism (that there will be a ‘rapture’, that ethnic Israel is as important as, if not more important than, the New Testament Church founded by our Lord Himself (which is now the True Israel - Gal. 6:16), etc.), which has made ethnic Israel such a darling of those churches, and one may see that the world is racing toward great danger (if not the greatest danger).

And the danger is acute here in the South, where the Dispensational-evangelical view dominates so many of the churches.  What Southerner of this sort would not be tickled to see a great leader arise in the world who would help the Jewish people live peacefully with their neighbors on terms favorable to the Jews, be at the center of world political decision-making, and rebuild their Temple?  Thus the fondness of these Southerners for ethnic Israel will endear them to Antichrist when he steps out of the shadows onto the world stage.

Already these Southrons cheer men and women like Col Allen West, the Tea Party’s favorite son (he may live in Florida, but he is no friend of Dixie’s), when they say that America should ‘crush America’s and Israel’s enemies’ and ‘bring them to their knees’ and then yell ‘God bless America, God Bless Israel!’ like madmen (see the last 30 seconds of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaHe9PBnFdA).

But to go forward in such a ghost (spirit) only hastens the day of Antichrist, and thus their own fordoing (destruction).

‘Awake thou that sleepest’, O Souðron, and come into the haven of the Holy Orthodox Church while there is yet time.

A One-Thousand-Year-Long Death

Fr Andrew Phillips of England has written an excellent essay on the death of the West and on her possible rebirth.  It begins,

Secularism, the worship of this world, has always existed and always will exist. It comes from the fact that the human-being, part breath of God and part fallen nature, is torn in two directions, towards the Kingdom of God and towards the fallen world. At times in his history he has turned more to the Kingdom of God, at other times more towards the fallen world. The attraction of the fallen world, secularism, is so strong that it can get inside religion, or rather pervert and deform religion into idolatry, for there have always been and are religions which actually idolize the fallen world, mistaking fallen creation for the Creator. They are called paganism. As examples we can mention yesterday’s Baal, Greek gods and Roman emperor-worship, or today’s religion of consumerism and entertainment (fun), bread and circuses.

Indeed, pagan secularism can enter into any religious system in forms as diverse as the physical sensuality of Hinduism or the militant violence of Islam, as the State-serving of Confucianism or the State worship of Shintoism, as the bourgeois capitalism accepted and promoted by Protestantism or the racial nation-worship to be found on the nominalist margins of Orthodox Christianity, even though officially condemned. Humanity, in other words, is capable of defiguring and corrupting anything, making the spiritual pure into the innately secular. The greatest danger is when such corruption becomes institutionalized, an inherent part of the system. It was in order to avoid this that in the fourth century monasticism began to develop very quickly and the capital of the pagan Roman Empire, which Christianity had vanquished through the Martyrs, was moved away from corrupted Rome to New Rome, uniting East and West, Asia and Europe in the Christian Roman Empire.

However, human nature is the same worldwide. Despite the removal of temptation by moving the Christian capital from pagan Rome, the spirit of the old pagan secularism still reached into Christianity there, over the centuries creating a new religion. The revived spirit of pagan Rome, of worldliness and secularism, was actually ingrained into this new religious system, made systematic and institutionalized by it. After earlier temptations it was eventually defined in Rome in the eleventh century, in imitation of the pagan Roman Empire and came to be called Roman Catholicism. This was essentially an attempt to make the former Church in Western Europe more powerful than all worldly rulers, to make the Church into a State – the most powerful State of all, to create a Roman universalism, hence its name. This was the world’s power to defigure, not the Church’s power to transfigure.

The way in which this was done was primitive enough. First it was necessary to assert that the Holy Spirit proceeded from Christ, from Him Who had taken on human nature while still remaining God. In the later eighth century the warlike barbarian Charlemagne found such a mistaken affirmation and tried to use it to assert his authority against the Church. In this he failed. Then in the early eleventh century the same mistaken affirmation was made again, but this time in Rome where within a few more years the Western leader, the Pope, began to call himself the Vicar (substitute) of Christ. This granted the Western leader Divine authority, by both theologically and juridically making him the source of the Holy Spirit. The trick was complete.

With this new ideology, the Western leader, the Pope, was in effect made God on earth, Pontifex Maximus, the infallible bridge between God and man, just like the old pagan Roman emperors. But when this God on earth commanded armies, launched pagan and barbaric military campaigns (called conquests and crusades) that looted, raped, pillaged and murdered hundreds of thousands, destroying higher forms of civilization, persecuted and tortured all those who disagreed with him, claimed to be able to sell places in Paradise, built himself palaces with every luxury, provided himself with male lovers or brothels and poisoned his enemies, people realized that his was not the Church of God.

Essentially then, what had once been the Church in Western Europe started to rot from the head downwards, its ruling warlike elite forming a neo-pagan institution, a servant of the world.  . . .

The rest is here:  http://www.events.orthodoxengland.org.uk/ten-centuries-of-institutional-secularism-the-despair-of-the-contemporary-world-and-the-hope-of-the-church/

'Motor-car'

What would an Old English man think of you?

The land you drive upon you turn to barren stone.

The food in your belly you belch forth as fire,

And worse than fire, befouling the air.

All who touch you on the way you maim or kill.

To the men within you, you give not friþ but wrath.

The sweet sounds of the countryside you embitter.

And when your life is at its end, you do not

Return to the ground from which you were taken

To nourish it, but stand stacked in heaps,

Slowly poisoning year after year soil

And stream and spring and sea.

What would an Old English man think of you?

‘Þu eart bana.’

What would an English man of the New South think of you?

‘You are a boon.’

Notes:

-‘Friþ’ is Old English for ‘peace’.

-‘Þu eart bana’ is Old English for ‘You are a bane.’

-The Old English letter ‘thorn’ (‘Þ’ and ‘þ’) has a ‘th’ sound.

By Walt Garlington

O’Reilly or O’Connor

‘Mobility and television and the sound of Yankee voices on the evening news all gnaw away at the foundations of the regime [i.e., the Southern way of life--W.G.] . . .’ (M. E. Bradford, ‘Where We Were Born and Raised: The Southern Conservative Tradition’, The Reactionary Imperative, Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1990, p. 131).

Two from among the Irish present themselves to the South today.  One tells her that she and others in the American Empire ought to rule all the world because of their divinely given ‘exceptional’ status, and along with this offers her stories and his on-air personal behavior to ignite the fallen passions into flames, making his followers twice-over the children of hell. 

The other, her heart breaking in prayer for the repentance of her people, the Souð, left a rich literary inheritance of letters, novels, and short stories written in her tears, that we as a theod (nation) would be more than simply ‘Christ-haunted’.

It should be no hard decision which of the two the South should follow - the prideful way of the Yankee Bill O’Reilly that leads to separation from God and ghostly (spiritual) death, or the humility of our kinswoman Miss Flannery O’Connor that leads life.  But these are not normal days.

Yet we unhesitatingly ask all to turn away from Mr O’Reilly in favor of Miss O’Connor.  One would understand the world better by reading her works than by watching the ‘analysis’ of the day-to-day news seen on Mr O’Reilly’s program.  He would also be strengthened in his Southernness by reading stories written in his own native tongue, about his own land, and so forth.

As a help, here is Miss O’Connor reading her short story ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’.  If nothing else, enjoy hearing the fair sounds of the landly Georgia speechway.  And pray that the Lord would grant rest to the departed soul of Miss O’Connor after a difficult life struggling with lupus.

A Christian Country Will Have a Christian King

As the heat of the sectional strife between North and South grew stronger in the years leading up to the War of Northern Revolution, the traits peculiar to each began to show forth more and more clearly, as metal purified in a furnace of its dross.  In governlore (politics), the North tended toward a totalitarian democracy with the President as dictator, a scene still being played out today in the Union of Captive States because of the North’s victory in the War. 

Þe South, meanwhile, became ever more devoted to hierarchy, culminating in the desire by more than a few for the establishment of a king in the South (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, Cambridge UP, 2005, pgs. 700-6).  While the argument went both ways (for and against), the fact that such a discussion was had at all, and is still had among Southerners today (see, e.g., Dr Donald Livingston’s essays here http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/david-hume-republicanism-and-the-human-scale-of-political-order/ and in Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century), together with her continued focus on hierarchy in general (Richard Weaver, Andrew Lytle, Fred Chappell), is yet more evidence that the South longs for something better than the politics of the Satan-inspired Western European Revolution, however much she has tried to associate herself with the latter.

This is a good instinct of hers, reaching out for the true Christian social order:

In the Christian order politics too was founded upon absolute truth. We have already seen, in the preceding chapter, that the principal providential form government took in union with Christian Truth was the Orthodox Christian Empire, wherein sovereignty was vested in a Monarch, and authority proceeded from him downwards through a hierarchical social structure. We shall see in the next chapter, on the other hand, how a politics that rejects Christian Truth must acknowledge "the people" as sovereign and understand authority as proceeding from below upwards, in a formally "egalitarian" society. It is clear that one is the perfect inversion of the other; for they are opposed in their conceptions both of the source and of the end of government. Orthodox Christian Monarchy is government divinely established, and directed, ultimately, to the other world, government with the teaching of Christian Truth and the salvation of souls as its profoundest purpose; Nihilist rule--whose most fitting name, as we shall see, is Anarchy---is government established by men, and directed solely to this world, government which has no higher aim than earthly happiness.

Source:  Eugene Rose (before he was ordained Fr Seraphim), Nihilism, http://www.oodegr.co/english/filosofia/nihilism_root_modern_age.htm

Salvation:  This is the one great end any leod (people) are to work toward and ought to be so noted in any constitution they draw up.  Everything else is secondary.  Did not our Lord say that the soul is worth more than all else (Mark 8:36)? 

But since the Great Schism of 1054, when the Bishop of Rome broke troth with the Orthodox Church for the sake of building a worldly empire, the salvation of man (and all the creation) in Christ has been overshadowed by other ends.  From Magna Carta to The Communist Manifesto Western man (Roman Catholic, Protestant, and atheist) has become obsessed with how best to organize a government of ‘the people’, with property and rights and other earthly cares.  This sort of thing will find its fulfillment in the reign of Antichrist (e.g., St Ignaty Brianchaninov, On Miracles and Signs, Holy Trinity Monastery, 1997, p. 18).

But the best form has already been made manifest; it appeared early in the Church’s life - the symphony between church and state, bishop and king.  St Nikolai Velimirovich writes about this in the context of his homeland of Serbia, but it is true of all Orthodox lands:

Serbian history never knew of any struggle between Church and state. There were no such struggles, but bloody wars have filled the history of Western nations. How does one explain the difference between the two cases? The one is explained by theodulia, the other by theocracy.

Let us take two tame oxen as an example, how they are both harnessed to the same yoke, pull the same cart, and serve the same master. This is theodulia. Then let us take two oxen who are so enraged with each other that one moment the ox on the left pulls himself out from the yoke and gores the other one, goading him on to pull the cart alone, while the next moment the ox on the right does the same to his companion on the left.

This is theocracy: the war of the Church against the state and the war of the state against the Church; the war of the pope against kings and the war of kings against the pope. Neither ox wished to be yoked and serve the Master; each of them wanted to play the role of the Master and drive his companion under the yoke. Thus the Master's cart has remained stationary and his field uncultivated and eventually has become completely overgrown with weeds. This is what happened in the West.

Source:  The Serbian People As a Servant of God, http://www.sv-luka.org/library/ServantOfGod.html, ch. 29, accessed 1 Sept. 2015

It is fitting for us to dwell on these things today, for yesterday, 31 August, was the Feast Day of Halig (Saint) Aidan, from Ireland, whose cooperation with St Oswald, king of the English Kingdom of Northumbria, is a wonderful picture of symphony at work among Dixie’s forefathers:

Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne (651)

Around AD 635, Saint Oswald (5 August), King of Northumbria, appealed to the monks of the Monastery of Iona to send missionaries to his mostly-pagan kingdom. (An earlier mission had ended with the death of St Edwin in 633).) The fathers of the monastery chose St Aidan and consecrated him bishop. He founded a monastery (and his episcopal seat) on the island of Lindisfarne, and undertook missionary journeys, always on foot, throughout the kingdom, with King Oswald often accompanying him and serving as his interpreter. He lived in great poverty, using all the gifts he received as alms for the poor or to buy back captives and slaves. He was the spiritual father of St Hilda (17 Nov.), and founded the first women’s monasteries in Northumbria. He reposed in peace in 651, and was buried at Lindisfarne.
Note: Northumbria was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in what is now northeastern England and southern Scotland.

Source:  John Brady, http://www.abbamoses.com/months/august.html, entry for 31 August, accessed 1 Sept. 2015

Fighting about constitutions is a dead end.  Fighting about Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Bernie Sanders is a dead end.  Fighting about rights is a dead end.  What matters is salvation:  ‘But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you’ (Matt. 6:33 KJV).  And the conditions for salvation are best in countries ruled by an Orthodox Christian king.

‘Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls’ (Jeremiah 6:16 KJV). 

Ask for the old paths, Souðron.