2007: In The Wake of the Titanic
This is a place of mammon and sin, accursed riches...Happiness lies not in wealth, but in an honest, God-fearing life…God shares with us, so that we might share with others…Happy is the man who repents while he still lives and through a little suffering obtains eternal life.
Fr Alexander Dukhnovich
Below follow extracts from an interview with Irina Medvedeva, translated by Fr Andrew from pages 12-18 of the 350-page book In the Wake of the Titanic, by I. Medvedeva and T. Shishova, published with the blessing of His Holiness Alexis II, Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus (Danilovsky Blagovestnik, Moscow 2007). These views seem to us to some up the Year 2007, with historic events in Russia, but also the ever deeper descent of the whole Western and Westernized world (and that includes a good part of Russia itself) into the spiral of Anti-Christianity.
We are for the right to life and against ‘the rights’ to death, for the right to create and against ‘the rights’ to destroy’. We recognize the rights and freedoms of mankind, inasmuch as they help his personality ascend to the good, guarding it against inward and outward evil, allowing it to fulfil itself positively in society.
From the Declaration of the Tenth World Assembly of the Russian People
The world will perish, if we destroy morality.
Metropllitan Kyrill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad
Why did you use the image of ‘The Titanic’ in the title of your book? The Titanic was a huge ship, whose passengers, intoxicated by their power and wealth, failed to think of what could happen to their vessel. Do you think that globalization could end in disaster?
‘The Titanic’ is an image of the liberal West. It can be said of us and all who follow the liberal West that what we are doing is equivalent to buying a ticket for the Titanic, full well knowing what will happen to it.
It seems to me that the other image in the title is even more telling. The various countries of the world are like fragile craft following in the wake of the doomed Titanic. Among them is Russia, a vessel that is powerful but which has been weakened by storms. And if we do not alter course, urgently changing direction, then we will share in the fate of the Titanic together with the other craft. We will quite simply sink into the terrible whirlpool that forms around the sinking ship.
In the last ten years we…have visited several countries in Western Europe. We could not rid ourselves of the feeling that the dead was pulling down the living, Russia included, into the grave with itself, that the stench of corruption and death kept breaking through the perfumes of various deodorants and shampoos…
So to open the window wide to Europe today is to slit your veins. It is suicidal! Western liberal society offers us suicidal ‘values’. Itself it already stinks of death, it is already corpse-like, it is always thinking up ever newer ways of dragging us down into the pit of death with itself.
Indeed, sad though it is, today’s Western world is celebrating the pyrrhic victory of its liberal ideology, it is celebrating its own funeral feast. Disastrous transformations in its concepts of good and evil are happening at lightning speed: white is transformed into black, black into white, sin is called virtue and virtue (for example, virginity outside marriage and marital fidelity) is considered if not a sin, then at least some terrible stupidity, which should have died out long ago.
…In this (upside down) world, it is acceptable to call eternal values old, obsolete, moth-eaten, and the ‘values’, which today are so vigorously being presented as fundamental (for example, sodomy), are called new. But what is new in Sodom? Or have the people who talk like this not read the Old Testament and do they not know that Sodom - a town that existed 4,500 years ago - was consumed by the Lord and wiped off the face of the earth? And to this day there is no life in Sodom, the Dead Sea is there and even bacteria cannot live in that…Who are they trying to hoodwink with this primitive manipulation, calling the eternal old and obsolete, and calling the old, which has already proved to be unviable, contemporary, progessive, vital for the future. And, above all, INEVITABLE.
…This is what an upside down world is – it is when the life that leads to spiritual death is called correct and happy, and the life that prepares the soul for eternal bliss is called idiotic, boring, monastic. Even if a modest, conscientious person does not live in a monastery, they still call him a monk, at the same time mocking his ideal of serving God. An upside down world is where the corruption of children is called education, vital for contemporary life, where premarital sexual relations are considered to be completely indispensable, where the family has become quite unnecessary and children, well, they simply get in the way and stop people from ‘finding pleasure in life’.
Of course, it is very hard to argue with pleasure-seekers, because we have completely different values. For Orthodox it is obvious that man is immortal, that he will rise from the dead, either for eternal bliss or else for eternal torment. And that outcome depends mainly on his earthly life. But if you believe that there is only one life, then the pleasure-seekers are right. You must take pleasure, take your fill of whatever you want, like butterflies that live for one day and then die. Die FOREVER.
Can we talk about the ideology of globalism, which presumes to unify all spheres of human life by force and on the basis of liberal standards?
Of course. This is a diabolical ideology. After all, what we now call globalism has existed for a very long time. At various times in history the concept has been cloaked in various guises, it has appeared under various names and been spread first by gnostics, then freemasons…In the second half of the second century it was called internationalization, today it is called globalization. All these secular euphemisms are one and the same phenomenon, which the faithful know as the construction of the kingdom of Antichrist and which is connected with the destruction of life in all its God-given forms.
This monstrous scheme is hidden beneath all sorts of conveniences for man and mankind. These devilish intrigues would not be dangerous, if they did not hold some sort of convenience and attraction. It is important to understand that the majority of conveniences, which we so like and without which we cannot for the most part even conceive of life, unfortunately all come together in a single package, which has suicidal purposes. It is like an all-in meal. You have to buy the whole meal, you cannot choose what you want. In this case, you have the Internet, mobile phones, the opportunity to travel abroad, to say and write whatever you want. It would all be fine, if it did not at the same time bring with it the destruction and ruin of our country.
If we want to keep the essentials, values that are indispensable for life, the freedom of worship, the freedom to publish spiritual literature, the freedom to bring up our children in an Orthodox way, then we have to free ourselves from Western influence and not be afraid to sacrifice our conveniences, with which ‘the civilized world’ seduces us. Many of those conveniences are in fact not so very necessary at all…
What could the way out of all this be?
First of all, we have to learn to recognize the evil, in whatever seductive form it may be presented to us. Today this form is humanism. Now, secular humanism in the eighteeenth century looked very, very attractive to so-called thinking people, but in fact it was dreadful. Seeing the pink bud of humanism, many thought that it was a rosebud or a peony bud, but now that it has blossomed even the blind can see that it was a thistle bud. Today, secular humanism has quietly developed into a sort of velvet Fascism, though increasingly you would not call it very velvety. When they bomb Kosovo and when they invade Iraq, that has nothing in common with the declarations of humanism, it is just plain Fascism…Those who lived through the Second War inevitably associate only particular phenomena with Fascism, for example gas chambers. But today Fascism comes in all sorts of forms. And it is not a matter of forms, but of the dreadful ideology in which specifically humanism is masked, that is, by equal rights and freedoms for all.
But in reality, the ordinary person, who does not belong to the international elite, has the freedom to choose between different sorts of sausages, or different sorts of sex – these are his real ‘freedoms’, which are presented as the fullness of human freedom. In reality, the media put people in the very difficult situation of an ideology, which is profitable for the world elite. This ideology does not simply further, but foists on us, the freedom of dehumanization, basically, this is a ‘liberal’ DICTATORSHIP, although on the face of it those two words cannot be combined.
Such an ideology is not only incompatible with faith and ethics, but if I may use a medical term, it is incompatible with life. Because when people stop carrying out whatever task the Creator has assigned them and they have reduced themselves to two-legged reptiles, they will die out very quickly. Man, who with all his sins was placed at the centre of creation, has become the IDOL of his own worship and so inevitably becomes its VICTIM.
The implementation of the ideology of liberal globalism is a mass sacrificial offering on the altar of the one who takes pleasure in these sacrifices, that is, the Enemy of mankind.
