A Greek Drama
After I finished university in 1977, a close friend in Russia, Archpriest Lev Lebedev, suggested to me that I study at the Moscow Theological Academy. However, I soon discovered that as a result of the Cold War, Russia was out of bounds for study to a British passport-holder [1]. Therefore, I decided to go and help, and also learn, in missionary work in Kenya with Andreas Tyrillides (now Archbishop Makarios of Nairobi) Unfortunately, in August 1977, Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, the great sponsor of Orthodox missionary work in ex-Commonwealth East Africa, reposed. That possibility was also therefore ruled out.
So, after these setbacks, from 1978 to 1979 I spent a year teaching in Thessaloniki in northern Greece, living not far from the Theological School, meeting and learning from some of its students. There I was able to worship in Greek churches, frequent Mt Athos and learn everyday Greek and everyday Greek life. It was there that I decided to study at a Russian seminary, though since the Church Outside Russia in Great Britain had refused to allow me to join their Church and the Theological Academies in Russia were out of bounds, I was not sure where to go.
At that time in Thessaloniki, just after the earthquake, the memory of the colonels’ junta was still fresh. That regime had been abandoned by the US administration in 1974 after its disastrous attempt to free Cyprus from Turkey, the key US ally. Anti-Communist was OK, but not anti-Turkish. Everywhere in 1978, I saw on the walls of Thessaloniki graffiti in praise of PASOK, the anti-US Greek Socialist Party.
Even then, as it does with other European countries it later drops, the American administration was forcing Greece to prepare to enter the US-created European Economic Community, as it was then called. Church people, regretting the loss of Fr Justin Popovich on 25 March 1979, foresaw the trouble ahead. The European Union, merely an extended First Reich (the Carolingian Empire) was in fact a Fourth Reich. Greece was about to join the successor Empire to Charlemagne’s Empire, set up as a rival to the Christian Empire centred in Constantinople. The EU would be disastrous for a country of Orthodox culture. Indeed, the chickens that were hatched in 1981, when Greece was finally bribed and forced into joining what is now the EU, have since 2008 come home to roost.
The current Greek President, Karolos (the same name as Charlemagne) Papoulias was re-elected to a second term in 2005. His Prime Minister, Kostas Karamanlis came to power in 2004 after Konstantinos Simitis, who had been in power since 1996. Through pandering to the EU, in the 13 years since 1996 the Greek economy has been ruined. Urged on by the EU, Greece has opened its borders and allowed hundreds of thousands of Albanian Muslims and than Pakistani, Afghan and Arab Muslims to enter Greece as a cheap source of labour for the same political elite of traitors and thieves that can be found in all other EU countries.
Next came the introduction of the euro. The richest 2% of Greece watched as their fortunes soared, while the fortunes of the remainder of Greece, a nation heavily dependent on Western tourism, sank. Western tourists, among them drunkards and debauchees who fly there for weekend discos, stag and hen parties and public displays of depravity, as well as rich pensioners in their villas, obviously have no concern for Orthodox values. All they do is distract Greeks from their own Christian traditions. The only visitors who did to some extent care for Greek Christian values and who came in numbers were Russians. However, unable to afford the doubling of prices when Greece adopted the euro, they left for Turkey for holidays and there visited ancient (Orthodox) ruins. As for other Western Europeans, they continued to visit neighbouring France, Italy and Spain.
For a time economic catastrophe was averted in Greece by inflows of Soviet-style EU subsidies for government projects. But State-run economies cannot survive for long – as the ex-Communist countries know. One of the key events that helped take minds off the economic mess was the neo-pagan Olympic Games. However, once the event was over, sceptical voices were heard. Promised new uses for insanely expensive investments and short-term gains did not materialise and a hangover ensued when the bills had to be paid.
Next came the fires of 2007, which consumed hundreds of thousands of hectares, dozens of villages and cost hundreds of Greek lives. The whole of this tragedy, which found the government scandalously unprepared, would have been much worse, if it had not been for the aid sent to Greece by Russia. This will not be forgotten, for while Western (EU/US/NATO) aid was tiny and late in coming, Russian water bombers and social aid poured in.
The Greek government could have survived all this, but then came the financial crash of 2008. While Greece did not suffer heavily from the toxic results of many years of Anglo-American financial speculation, it did suffer from the collapse of international trade and transport, something which Greeks once dominated. The final blow came with the cut-off of euros which had once come from Western tourists.
In the closing months of 2008, university graduates who faced a 20% + unemployment rate, took to the streets in a revolt that has continued to this day. While their cause commands much sympathy in itself, the tactics of mass demonstration and anarchist destruction of property and businesses have brought the Greek economy to its knees, stopping tourism and the inflow of euros. The government has shown extraordinary restraint, forcing the police to stand outside universities and dodge Molotov cocktails which the students threw at them. Bombings have continued throughout Greece to this day. But even this did not bring a divided Greece to open revolt.
However, now an Islamic mini-jihad is exploding in Athens, provoking and uniting all Greeks. Why? The reasons are simple, logical and obvious - only the West in its arrogant ignorance and denial of Balkan history, simply does not get it. Thus, during the West’s war against Orthodox Christian Serbia in defence of Islamic jihadists in Bosnia and Macedonia and then Kosovo, funded by Saudi Arabia and supported largely by fanatical Pakistani and Afghan canon fodder, Greek volunteers went to fight alongside their Serbian co-religionists and historic allies. Greek civilians changed signs so that NATO convoys, coming up from Greek ports into NATO-occupied Kosovo, would get lost in the mountains. Other ordinary Greeks pelted the trucks with mud and stones. Did the West understand? No.
In 2006, under further EU pressure, the Greek government gave permission to build the first mosque in Athens since Greece threw off the 400-year old Muslim yoke in the century before last. Mass demonstrations forced the EU puppet government to back off. On the site of the proposed Saudi mosque now stands a newly-built Orthodox chapel. The locals flatly stated they did not want another Kosovo in their country. They have learned to what ends the West will go in its service of the oil-rich Saudis. Today, Greece has riots from Islam, imported both legally and illegally. Illegally, especially through thousands of Afghan refugees, entering Greece via Turkey. They are desperate to flee their homeland, which has been ruined by the NATO war there.
Less then 200 years ago and in the north less than 100 years ago, Greece experienced 400 years of the Turkish Yoke and it has not forgotten it. The West, ever blindly ignorant in its arrogance, has pushed Greece to the brink again. Only when, perhaps quite soon, parts of the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany experience life under an Islamic regime and Sharia law, will the West begin to understand the Balkans. This will be a just punishment for its attempts to destroy the Christian Balkans, at the end of the second millennium bombing Christians into subservience to tyranny on their Easter Day. ‘Happy Easter’ was what was chalked on one NATO bomb on Serbia that day. The Barbarian West, indeed.
In Athens, public anger has spilled out into the open in recent days. An impromptu Muslim prayer centre in a shop has been torched. Extremists have attacked Muslim immigrants and anarchists have set fire to everything in their paths, setting off bombs daily. The Western secularists of the EU/US/NATO, whether Greek or Non-Greek, have lost control of Greece. Once more it will be up to patriotic forces in Greece to restore order and its borders. But this can only be without the EU. Now that there is no Soviet threat across the border and US support is therefore no longer required, is it possible that a friendly and helpful, co-religionist Russia, Greece’s historical ally, will help Greece, establishing a Free Europe, an alternative to the dread and failed anti-democratic and anti-patriotic EU experiment?
Many times Russia has tried to repay its huge debt to the Greek people, who a thousand years ago converted it from paganism to Orthodoxy. For centuries, Russia had to fight for its life against the twin threats of Papism and Islam, then it was thwarted by Protestantised monarchs in the 18th century, later it was prevented by the Anglo-French support of Islam in the Crimean War in the 19th century, and finally it was halted by the German export of neo-pagan Western Communism into Russia in the 20th century. Over a thousand years ago my patron saint, St Andrew the Fool for Christ, spoke thus in New Rome: ‘A fair-haired people is destined to conquer Constantinople’. Is the time coming now in the 21st century for Russia to repay its debt to the Greek nation?
Archpriest Andrew Phillips
14/27 May 2009
St Isidore of Chios
Note:
1. As, it may be added, the present Metropolitan Hilarion (a Canadian citizen) and the present Archbishop Mark (a German citizen) had already discovered in the 1960s.
