The Discredit Crisis
Over the last few months much has been said and written about ‘the credit crisis’, the economic crisis which has led to tens of millions losing their jobs and homes worldwide.
In reality, this is not a credit crisis, because it is not caused by a lack of credit. A lack of credit is an effect, not the cause. The cause is an excess of debt. This debt crisis has been caused by irresponisble and greedy lending, which governments refused to regulate (because they were themselves irresponsible and greedy). The effects have been the law of the jungle, ‘market failure’, a crisis of confidence, a crisis of faith in the system, a crisis of ‘discredit’.
As a result of this crisis of discredit, several European countries are now bankrupt or near bankruptcy. These include Iceland, Greece (with rioting on the streets and murders), Hungary, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Latvia (with a government crisis and violent protests) and above all the two particular cases of Georgia and the Ukraine.
Georgia has been affected since last summer by its foolhardy invasion, backed by American logistics and dollars and Ukrainian arms, of territory inhabited by ethnic minorities. These had voluntarily joined the Russian Federation for protection against atrocities and ethnic cleansing. The effective failed invasion of Russia by the anti-democratic clique in power in Tbilisi has bankrupted, ‘discredited’, Georgia.
As for the Swiss-banked Ukrainian kleptocracy, kept afloat only by the USA, it is so short of finance that it has resorted to refusing to pay its gas bills, stealing gas and thus depriving tens of millions in Eastern and Central Europe of heating. Its centralist leaders, who eighteen years ago adeptly transformed themselves overnight from fanatical Communists into fanatical nationalists, also persecute all minorities under the mafia control of their ‘security services’.
The world debt crisis is being ‘resolved’ by transferring the debt accumulated by bankers to governments, in other words, to the public. This makes us all into debt-slaves in a universal society of feudal slavery, controlled by a global elite. All can now see how that central global elite is progressing towards its ideal - One World Rule with universal economic enserfment.
The debt, or rather, ‘discredit’ crisis is leading the spiritually living to the loss of any remaining vestiges of faith (discredit) in the template of Western ‘civilisation’. Is economic discredit has led to its ideological discredit.
We can now see that this Western ‘civilisation’ is the one which will eventually lead to the end of the world, the destruction of the planet. As a result even countries like China and India, which over the last twenty years have so eagerly bought into globalisation, that is, Westernisation, are now seeing the light.
Are there any alternatives to the discredited Western model?
Since virtually all civilisations have now succumbed to Westernisation, that is to globalisation, at first sight it is only Islam, the second largest religion in the world, which seems to provide an alternative. However, for most, Islam too is discredited, not by debt, greed and the worship of mammon, but by its primitive fanaticism. Moreover, this fanaticism will only increase, as elements in the Muslim world will seek revenge for the genocide and war crimes committed in Gaza in recent weeks by the US-armed and financed Jewish State.
The despair of countless Palestinian parents as they search for the pieces of flesh and bone belonging to the mangled bodies of their massacred children can only be imagined. Intolerable suffering breeds intolerance. Little wonder that 70,000 Iranian students last week pledged themselves as suicide bombers against Israel. That State, and its backers, have within a few weeks trained a whole army of fanatics against themselves for future havoc.
In any case, to Christians, Islam is no alternative. Like its opposite, the contemporary neo-pagan West, it too refuses to recognise Christ as the Son of God.
Fortunately, there is still one alternative and the West holds it within itself. This alternative is called repentance. This is the possibility, however remote, that the contemporary Judeo-ex-Christian West might return to its ancient Christian roots in the first millennium, to ascetic Christian Tradition. This was alive before the West’s fatal eleventh-century revolution and apostasy. That was when the Western elite finally and definitively transformed its ascetic Christian heritage into a tool of aggression for pagan Romano-Germanic imperialism. It was then that the revived eagle of pagan Rome became within less than a thousand years the eagle of pagan Nazidom.
This ascetic Christian Tradition is still just alive in a few oases inside Western Europe but, above all, it is alive outside Western Europe, in the Orthodox Churches. It can be seen in its largest, strongest and least compromised form in the civilisation of the multiethnic Russian Orthodox Church, nominally 150 million strong, and in the smaller allied Orthodox Churches, in Serbia, Poland, Slovakia, Japan, Alaska, Jerusalem and on Mt Athos.
This Orthodox Christian civilisation, consistently anti-globalist, is the only one that can provide a convincing alternative to the failed, ‘discredited’ thousand-year-old model of Western civilisation, which was ever inherently uncivilised. The answer to the present debt crisis is then in the fullness of Christian faith and practise, as in the Ancient Western and, today, in the Russian Orthodox, civilisational model.
The lack of faith in people, discredit, can only be resolved by the fullness of faith in God, credit.
Archpriest Andrew Phillips,
Colchester
4/17 January 2009
Feast of the 70 Apostles
