Introduction: The American Empire of Western Europe

When a man is suicidal, you take away from him any object which he could use to commit suicide. In the first half of the last century Western European governments attempted suicide not once, but twice. In 1917, as soon as the New York-financed Russian Revolution had taken place, the US government entered the Kaiser’s War of 1914 in order to end Western Europe’s first attempted suicide. Little wonder then that after the second attempt, from 1945 on the USA permanently occupied Western Europe. It refused to allow a third suicide attempt, ensuring that it could not succeed by making Western Europe an American dominion.

There was in the establishment of this US protectorate something noble and sacrificial, but there was also national self-interest. Thus, in 1956, when the French and British governments allied together (partly because alone each was too weak) and launched their Suez campaign, the USA at once forbade them to pursue such imperial fantasies. The age of their gunboat diplomacy was now over. Only one Empire would be allowed now – the American. Some British had begun to realise this during the Second World War, but the illusion-rid French only later began to realise it through their humiliations in Indochina and Algeria. Though Great Britain and France might still harbour nostalgic imperial pretensions, as imperial powers they were finished.

Instead of foreign empires or even national sovereignty, in France the USA encouraged the development of a European Common Market, flattering the French by making it seem a French achievement and not simply a French idea, that of Monnet. Thus, the French were fed the illusion that the Common Market was controlled by France, instead of the reality that it was controlled by the USA via Germany. For French national vanity, which both the USA and Germany knew how to flatter, France was told that it dominated Germany, when in reality France was Germany’s vassal. Having signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, France deluded itself into imagining that ‘l’Europe’ was a synonym for ‘la France’.

Instead of foreign empires or even national sovereignty, the USA much encouraged in Great Britain an alliance with itself. Thus, it flattered British national pride with the words ‘special relationship’ (that Britain was now a sub-department in Washington), and appointed it a sort of US marshal for Europe. To the British people, whose leader had signed the Atlantic Charter in 1941 and already then knew that the game was up, the Common Market was presented as a mere Free Trade Association. Only a minority understood this to be a patent lie. In the Common Market the US government saw the possibility of US-controlled European economic prosperity and peace (even before attempting to join it, the British Prime Minister MacMillan had affirmed, ‘you’ve never had it so good’). Effectively this was bread and circuses, under neo-Roman American military and ideological rule.

The Soviet Challenge: 1945-1989

However, even before 1945, from 1939 and until 1989, there was another power which also sought to rule Western Europe. This was the Soviet Union. At first in 1939, seeing the second suicide attempt brewing and necessarily wary of Hitler, it reclaimed lands lost to a vengeful Poland as a result of the Revolution and occupied eastern Poland. Then it turned its attentions to the Baltic States and eastern Finland. Finally, from 1944 on, it turned its attentions to all of Eastern and Central Europe.

Again, the motives were mixed. On the one hand, Russia, despite its legitimate government being usurped by Soviet Communist bandits, wished to stop Western Europe from attacking it again. This it did by ensuring her western borders and creating a buffer zone against the Nazis. In the event this buffer zone proved useless, for the militarily incompetent Stalin had all but destroyed the military capability of the Red Army in his paranoiac purges. It was only Slav Orthodox patriotism that saved the Communist-run Soviet Union from Hitler’s genocide.

Thus, four times in five generations Russia had been attacked by Western Europe: firstly, in 1812 by the French under Napoleon, then in the 1850s by the French and the British in the Crimean War, and then, in 1914 and in 1941, most barbarically by a genocidal and racist Germany. Peaceful Russia had never invaded Western Europe, but aggressive Western Europe had invaded her four times, each time inflicting massive damage and loss of life. Therefore, in 1945 there was an urgent need to avoid yet another invasion from Western Europe. It was time to forestall a fifth attempt. On the other hand, unlike Russia, the Soviet leadership clearly also had an ideological self-interest. Constantly throughout the Cold War, it sought to weaken Western Europe, become the battlefield between US Capitalism and Soviet Communism.

The German Challenge: 1989-2014

When, in and immediately after 1989, the Soviet Central and Eastern European Empire and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself collapsed, another power seized its initiative. This was, once more, the challenge of the German government. Exactly seventy-five years after the First World War of the Kaiser and exactly fifty years after the Second World War of Hitler, Germany saw in the collapse of the Berlin Wall the fruits of nearly twenty years of its laboriously planned Ostpolitik diplomacy. These were: firstly, immediate German reunification; secondly, the chance to dominate its claimed ‘Lebensraum’ in Eastern Europe; thirdly, to throw off the chains of French ideological and political domination. For the French policy had always tried to anchor Germany to Western Europe and make it forget Mitteleuropa and Osteuropa - Central and Eastern Europe.

Here, at last, was the German government’s chance to set up a new and extended ‘Holy Roman’ (= German) Empire. This is what it had already planned by the Treaty of Rome in 1957. This is what both the Kaiser and Hitler had wanted, but this time it would be done by economic, not military means. First, the German government would set about dominating the markets of newly-liberated Central and Eastern Europe and as far as possible Russia. To do this in the east, it would necessarily have to intervene militarily in the one problem area, the Balkans. Here, Germany would have to use military means, supported by its all too willing Croat and Albanian allies of Nazi times. This it did without any guilt, backed by the US-run NATO. Then in the west, German would make the Deutschmark into a Neo-Carolingian European currency, disguising only its name with the word ‘Euro’. In this too, it was successful.

However, in all this, Germany remains a military pigmy, a vassal dependent on the goodwill of the USA, which still pulls all the strings. In the long term, the economic Fourth Reich, the world’s greatest exporter, is ultimately only part of the American Reich. That is why, for the moment, it remains an Empire without an Emperor, despite the wishes of those who wrote the Treaty of Lisbon or the fantasies and ambitions of Antony Blair. And even though Germany now exercises economic and monetary control over most of mainland Europe outside the former Soviet Union, it also faces many difficulties with its Reichsmark-Euro. For the present US-provoked economic crisis has put several small EU countries on the verge of bankruptcy. And just as military control belongs to the US, culturally and ideologically it also completely dominates the European Union. Therefore, the German Empire is unlikely to last long. We give it a single generation from 1989, which ends with the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the Kaiser’s War, that is, the end of 2014. From this point on, there will be new challenges. What are they?

New Challenges: 2014 on

Firstly, there is the ideological challenge from Islam. This is the threat which, though relatively small, has absorbed well over a trillion dollars of US military and other spending since the still mysterious events of 11 September 2001. Whatever the real economic or other reasons for the permanent wars of the USA, the ‘war against terror’ does have some foundation. (However, attacking an innocent country like Iraq and its CIA-installed dictator should not have been part of this war). The Islamic challenge is not so much about numbers, though the US colony of Israel is concerned by that, but about ideology. Islamic ideology is the most radical anti-secular and therefore anti-Western ideology. Little wonder that its most extreme exponents in Iran call the United States ‘the Great Satan’.

There is also an Islamic danger in Western Europe. Blinded by their exploitative greed, Western European governments invited many millions of Muslim immigrants to settle in their countries from the 1950s on. Today, in Western Europe there are large Muslim minorities, the greatest of which is in Germany. As a result, within a generation from now, well over 10% of the population of Western Europe could be Muslim, for this minority has a far higher birth-rate than the rapidly declining native European population.

Secondly, there is the rising power of China, which has bought so many US treasury bonds and equips the Western world with so many of its consumer goods. If China, with a billion and a quarter inhabitants, nearly a fifth of all humanity and a huge army, wished to use its might to break European economies, we can imagine the potential for disruption. Will it be time for China in 2014 or thereabouts to assume ‘civilisational’ leadership of the world, as once before?

We think not. We wonder why China, or for that matter India, the only other billion-strong nation (or the two other contenders, Japan and Brazil) would do this. Without any ideology, for there is today no nation on earth more Capitalist than ‘Communist’ China, why would China want to break Europe? Like India, Japan and Brazil, China has no ideology other than a purely local nationalism. Chinese nationalism gives China an excuse to break Taiwan, but not Europe. Chinese leaders today have only one ideology: imitation Western consumerism. China, like the other nations mentioned above, has no overall ideology to back any global claims.

Thirdly, there is the case of Russia. Today, it is no challenge at all in the battle for the soul of Europe, but in the longer term it cannot be dismissed so lightly. Having opened a window on Europe over two hundred years earlier, through it came in 1917 the plague of Lenin in a sealed train. With this ‘red death’ the Third Rome fell and the Third International took over. However, even after Russia had abandoned the catastrophic Western Communist ideology in 1991, it wasted the rest of the decade of the 1990s in dramatic economic and moral decline. Its substance (and its leader) was ravaged by alcohol, and the nation underwent abortion, criminal plutocrats, called oligarchs, and other Non-Russian parasites. Its prestige was trampled into the dust. Only after the year 2000 did it begin to rise from the post-Communist ruins and return to its Orthodox Christian roots. But this rise has so far affected deeply only a very small minority.

Still the shadows of three generations of Communist corruption, alcoholism and bribe-taking bureaucracy haunt it. Indeed, at present, Russia, with its falling birth-rate, is not even able to hold full meetings of the almost defunct ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’, the ex-Soviet Union. The tiny Baltic States openly persecute their Russian minorities, the Central Asian ‘stans’ ignore them. The Ukraine and Georgia faithfully follow the greenback road. Even tiny Belarus and Moldova do as they want, ignoring much-devalued roubles from Moscow, preferring by far euros from Frankfurt. As for former Eastern and Central European satellites, they long ago turned their backs on Moscow and joined the EU and NATO. But what if?

Conclusion: What If?

That Russia could again compete for the soul of Europe may seem laughable today. But then the suggestion in the early 1980s that ‘the evil empire’, the Soviet Union, was about to fall also seemed laughable. But what if the rise of Russia from the post-post-Communist ruins were to continue and move apace? What if living conditions improved radically? What if suicidal Soviet attitudes to abortion, marriage, divorce and family life finally died out and the birth rate rose to pre-Revolutionary levels? What if, with a new patriotic awareness, Russians gave up their dependency on vodka, invented by the Poles, and on beer, invented by the Tartars? In other words, what if Russians and their fellow-East Slavs in the Ukraine and Belarus were to return en masse to living and breathing the Orthodox Faith, the Faith of the Third Rome?

Only a resurgent Orthodox Russia can give Non-Orthodox Europe something which it once had and then lost. This is not alien Islam, which was never an integral part of Europe. This is not suicidal humanist secularism. That is a purely Western invention of the second millennium. Western Europe not only has not even begun to repent for it, but still even foolishly brags about it, like a suicide who brags about his weapon of choice. The Orthodox Russian gift is the gift of the fullness of the Christian Church and Faith. This is intact inside Russia, even after 75 years of Communism and every attempt to deform it, whether through the ideologies of renovationist modernism or xenophobic nationalism. The Orthodox Church is the only Church and Faith, which is free both of the deformities of Western secularism and of the deformities of Islam.

Indeed, this is the very Faith once confessed by Western Europe itself. Unlike both Islam and secularism, this is the Faith which is at the very roots of Western Europe, but from which that same Europe long ago apostatised. This Orthodox Church and Faith can alone supply the spiritual awareness and therefore moral principles on which a New European Confederation of Sovereign Peoples can be built. This alone can replace ‘nation-states’, the failed imperialist conglomerates like Germany, Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Belgium, or the already disappeared Austro-Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, in which the peoples of Europe all but lost their souls. The need now is for a return to a Western Patriarchate, a spiritually united Patriarchate of sovereign peoples.

For Western Europe, the alternative to a return to the Orthodox Christianity of the first millennium is a full move to militant atheist secularism. This would be imposed by a US-manipulated European Superstate, ruled by a new pagan Roman Emperor, a dictator, a new Charlemagne. This would mean open and bloody persecution of authentic Christianity - the effective end of any form of European civilisation and history. This would mean the final triumph of pagan might over spiritual right, of barbarism over Christ, of Babylon over Jerusalem, the triumph that has been looming for a thousand years.

However, this reign of Antichrist has always been delayed by the presence of the Orthodox Church and Faith, first in the New Rome of Constantinople, then in the Third Rome of Moscow. Hence the barbaric attacks that the apostatic Western world has constantly launched against the Church and Her Orthodox Faith, from 1054 on, through the Crusades to Uniatism, from Napoleon to European World Wars, from the recent war crimes against Serbia to the cunning undermining of the Local Churches of Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus through the EU.

We shall not cease from calling on Non-Orthodox Europe to renounce its millennial secularism, in all its forms, whether semi-Christian (Papal or Protestant), non-Christian or anti-Christian. We shall not cease from calling on that Europe to give up its enslavement to secularism and return to spiritual freedom. We shall not cease from calling on that Europe to turn with repentance to the Church of Christ, to restore Orthodoxy in its midst.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,
Rennes, Brittany

20 July/2 August 2009
Holy Prophet Elijah