Update May 2023: I adore Abbot Tryphon and hope to meet him one day. He is one of the most courageous voices battling against the spirit of the age and for true Orthodoxy. “Humanism means freedom from God and the search for solutions to problems in this freedom,” the wise monk stated in February 2021. “It is about man and not about God.” So, let us pray for more connection and more localism in this age of rootlessness, so that we are “living the Gospels” as best as we’re able in our own communities and with our kith and kin.
So here I go again, debating Orthodox monks. Nuts, right? You’d think I’d learn after the exhausting undertaking of challenging Hieromonk Gabriel of Holy Cross Monastery in West Virginia.
Actually, that turned out to be quite the fruitful rhetorical effort. The essay garnered some much-needed dialog, got me a shout-out and a share from “verbal swordplay” veteran Ilana Mercer, and might even be translated into Russian per the inspiration of a friend.
But honestly, there’s really nothing more important than resisting the fashions of globalism, especially when it comes to Church matters. So in that vein, I am once again taking on a priest, and this time, and an even more beloved and influential one, Abbot Tryphon of All-Merciful Savior Monastery in Vashon Island, Washington.
The West coast monk first triggered my anti-leftist senses in early October when he wrote “The Homosexual Person.” Here was my comment to his social-justice essay which basically lays the responsibility of LBGT at the feet of a “judgmental” society that “fosters hatred and rejection,” not at the feet of individual sinners.
But it wasn’t until the monk’s recent essay about the perils of “global warming” that I decided to put forth my own Dissident Mama commentary. I mean, why on earth is a person who purports to be against globalism actively calling for globalist interventions to largely government-created problems?
So, I shared his post on my blogger Facebook page and wrote, “The only religion Abbot Tryphon is pushing here with his ‘climate change’ nonsense is anti-human globalism. All hail the solar panel and the carbon tax! Uh, no thanks, Father.”
The ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) monk actually replied to my post via his secular name, and then he and I then had a small, but telling exchange.
You can see that, unfortunately, the priest utilizes a straw-man fallacy like when he casually undergirds the “systemic racism” myth by implying that “inequality” is ultimately the fault of those on the political right (thus, we cannot really blame the the covetous, greedy, power-hungry BLM terrorists and their occult ideology), or when he sets forth the narrative that it’s conservatives who cause LGBT to needlessly suffer. Abbot Tryphon is a good man who so often puts himself out there to take the slings and arrows when defending and proclaiming traditional Orthodoxy. Sadly, though, he misses the mark here by not pinpointing both the cause and cure of our mass consumerism and gluttony problems.
Although he gives a hat tip to their spiritual aspects, Abbot Tryphon either doesn’t get or doesn’t want to admit that our purposefully materialist society is the creation of centralized government. It’s the therapeutic-managerial state, along with their apparatchiks in the borg (legacy media, academia, banking, Silicon Valley, and corporate Murica), that is enriched and empowered by elevating trash and tearing down tradition.
Therefore, the abbot’s remedy to double-down on the cabal that spawned our disposable, dead culture in the first place is deadly wrong and must be called out. This is why eco-obsessed folks claim that people who don’t agree with their obvious political statements are Christians whose faith is “problematic.” This pretense to silence dissent is not free-thinking nor is it nice. It’s dishonest.
Abbot Tryphon, who was physically attacked by a crazed lefty back in April 2019 and at a gas station of all places, says the “evidence is clear” and that the “vast majority of scientists” believe anthropogenic global warming is fact and is caused specifically by “overuse of fossil fuels.” Any intellectually honest person knows that there absolutely is a scientific debate to be had since there is no consensus. Just check out Harris-Mann Climatology and Real Climate Science, or listen to Dr. Judith Curry‘s story and review her and her colleagues’ work for yourself.
I also find it odd that the monk’s bold pronouncements are transmitted via a computer, which is made of heavy metals and minerals usually mined in Third World countries. Its manufacturing process requires toxic chemicals and fossil fuels, emits hazardous gases, and consumes large amounts of water. Green might be deemed “sustainable,” but that doesn’t mean it actually is, nor is it reliable. Scientism doesn’t trump reality.
And that brings me to the ethical implications of Abbot Tryphon’s statement. I touched on this in some of my above response to him, that advocating for governments to “act NOW” against the “‘abundance and prosperity’ theologies” will have long-lasting and deadly implications for the masses, hitting especially hard the poor. Alex Epstein lays out the human exploitation and horrifying “unseen hopes” innate in a global green movement, so I do urge everyone to read “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.”
Enacting Abbot Tryphon’s environmental prescriptions without considering the catastrophic consequences of such radical regulatory changes would require the embrace of immediacy – a hallmark of the very drive-through consumerism he critiques. Instant gratification too is an “addiction” that feeds into the materialist mindset. Think Willy Wonka’s Veruca Salt: “Don’t care how, I want it now!” High-time preference is truly one of America’s falsest of gods.
Pragmatically, we lay people live out here in the secular world and drive to work. Who do you think builds your churches and supports your cloistered monasteries? We do. Who do you think is being fruitful and multiplying and bringing up children in the faith to sustain and grow the Church? We do, and we have to drive to the store for food and clothing, and sometimes to the woods for nature’s solitude. We must also drive to church, which for many of us includes long-distance trips several times a week or more, depending on the Liturgical calendar.
The ROCOR mission I attend is an hour from my home. Even before Wu-flu mania, my family and I had to trek 40 minutes to get to the only English-speaking parish in our area. If you limit my access to fossil fuels, you not only control things like my thermostat and my travel, you control if and when we receive the Eucharist. If you limit carbon, you limit my ability to provide for and feed my family, both food-wise and spiritually. You limit life and fellowship.
If you limit my children’s animal-based protein, you endanger their physical health, increase the likelihood of the further emasculation of straight men, embolden Big Ag and normalize the genetically modified garbage they push, threaten the livelihood of the small livestock farmer, and even increase the likelihood of cattle extinction … all of which fosters globalism.
This is why “Bureaucrats hate the quintessential American culture of family farms,” notes agrarian entrepreneur Josiah Cantrall. “Simply put, people who think for themselves, work hard, and don’t live off the government. Farming is part of our identity. It is our way of life, our heritage, our patriotism, and the foundation of our generational values. Farming is the essence of our loyalty to our families and our God – and there is nothing more sacred than that. That’s why unelected liberal elites don’t want farm kids working on farms.”
Big government delights in the dependent, unhealthy, identity-less “global citizen” who unquestionably obeys the collective. This is why we don’t need more reliance on the environment-wrecking, family-smashing, soul-crushing Leviathan, but waaaaaaay less.
I’m no materialist. In fact, I see industrial-capitalism as an evil imposition of Yankee domination, but I’m also no socialist. I’m a proponent of getting back to roots: a more localist, distributist, agrarian way of living, but without all the starvation and poverty that environmental emotivism would produce. I think if Abbot Tryphon truly opened his mind, he would see that we share many views of what Christian stewardship means in practice on a personal level. I think he’d also benefit immensely from reading “I’ll Take My Stand.”
What we need to break the consumerist, rationalist chains inherent in globalism is more subsidiarity, more regional sovereignty, more political autonomy, more personal responsibility, and yes, a lot more repentance. Centralized mass democracy is our sickness, not fossil fuels.
Fr. Seraphim Rose forewarns us of the manipulation of globalism veiled as “feel good” spirituality in his 1975 book “Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future.” You can see hints of it today when Kamala Harris blathers on about “equity” or Tom Hanks addresses college grads as the “chosen ones.”
In modern puritanical-progressive parlance, it’s known as the Great Reset, which is being called a “conspiracy theory” by the New York Times, even though the Gray Lady featured an article about the devilish design in April. More recently, Time Magazine dedicated an issue to it. Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, excitedly announced her participation in the “Great Reset Dialogue.” And Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau touted covid as an opportunity to “accelerate” the “reset.”
Check out the aptly named book “COVID-19: The Great Reset” by Klaus Schwab, who is World Economic Forum (WEF) founder and executive chairman. Or just listen to Schwab in his own sinister words.
And what is the prime vehicle for moving globalism down the wide path? Why, protecting the environment, of course. Sustainable development. Smart growth. Smashing both food sovereignty and national sovereignty. And ironfisted control of both population and movement. How can one flee the tyranny if his car is a relic, gasoline is “history,” and the entire planet is participating in what UN assistant secretary general Robert Muller predicted in 1995 would become the “first global, cosmic, and universal civilization”? Eco-hysteria is part of the package deal.
“World leaders’ ‘Great Reset’ plan for global economy is the Green New Deal on steroids,” explains Justin Haskins of the Heartland Institute. This type of centralized domination by the “Davos Man” (as Ben Sixsmith of The Spectator calls these new-age leaders) will establish what I call neo-Marxism.
They call it “stakeholder capitalism,” but it’s really universal socialism – an earth-swallowing corporate feudalism with banking elites and technocratic social engineers at the top, and the rest of us “happy,” atomized underlings below. But what exactly is supposed to fulfill the statist serfs in this novel, yet anciently evil paradigm?
Is it God? Nope, Christianity is a superstition of backwoods yahoos. Is it family? Nope, that’s for rubes; we’ve got the global village. Is it pride in your work? Nope, you’ve got your UBI, instead of those antiquated notions of a work ethic. Is it your home? Nope, better get cozy in your government-mandated coffin apartment since private property has been abolished.
Is it living off the land? Nope, enjoy your pre-packaged Impossible Burger. Is it culture? Nope, “Nationhood as we know it will be obsolete,” as US Deputy Secretary of State and a chief architect of the American-led Balkans invasion Strobe Talbott candidly admitted in 1992. Turns out, all this erasing of history is by design. Who da thunk?
Is it simple human interaction? Nope, because “driving to a distant family gathering for the weekend'” will become less acceptable since “the WhatsApp family group is not as fun but … it’s safer, cheaper and greener,” Schwab wrote in his terrifying tome. Upright global citizens gotta build up their carbon credits to get social credits, right?
“Buying a sex doll would be safer, cheaper, and greener than getting married,” notes Sixsmith. “That doesn’t mean it is a good idea.” None of this is a good idea for flourishing – human, environmental, or otherwise.
The dirty little secret is that reset success will be gauged specifically by an increase in goods and services. This mass materialism will distract us from our fake “unity in blankness,” as Fr. Seraphim Rose described the new-age deception. Thus, the very consumerism that Abbot Tryphon bemoans will become your communion, sustainability and safety directives will be your liturgy, and the Davos Man will be your high priest. In CEOs we trust.
It’ll be “scientific world humanism, global in extent” as evolutionary biologist and eugenicist Julian Huxley (and brother to “Brave New World” author Aldous Huxley) called the goals in UNESCO’s 1946 reset statement. In other words, totalitarian nihilism wrapped in recycled packaging. It’ll be “environmentally friendly” and it’s been the plan for a long time.
And it’s been tried before. Just ask the New Soviet Man, who was “completely transformed, free of all Russia’s supposed backwardness and shaped and directed by the state’s leaders at the top.” The idea was to engineer a norm-breaking, pliable populace working toward the “selfless collective … irrespective of the country’s cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity, creating a single Soviet people.” All other hierarchies, especially the one with our Lord and Savior on high, is to become a thing of the past.
Just as the Georgian monk Elder Gabriel Urgebadze, who doused a portrait of Vladimir Lenin with kerosene and set it ablaze in the Tbilisi center square, we Christians must too resist this spirit of the age and combat the rallying cries of the comrades in green, even when they happen to be our fellow Christians or clergy.
Abbot Tryphon says, “We don’t have time to sit around and debate this,” but I say there’s no better time to challenge du jour virtue-signaling before it becomes defacto dystopia. Veritas vincit.
Comments
The Orthodox monk’s attitude shows (extremely ironic) shades of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. As that story-within-a-story drives home, the nature of fallen man allows for a terrible synergy between those who seek to enhance their own power and those who seek to evade their own responsibility. It is as if the political and ecclesiastic tyrants cut an implicit deal with those under them: Surrender up your freedom and place your utter trust in us, as if we were God Himself, and we will take from you the awful burden of responsibility that is part and parcel with that God-given freedom.
In the case of the churches, it leads to empty ritual and virtue signaling replacing genuine faith, as with Washington Irving’s Yankee Tom Walker, who drove men to debt and ruin during the week and at its end “prayed loudly and strenuously, as if Heaven were to be taken by force of lungs,” such that “one might always tell when he had sinned most during the week, by the clamor of his Sunday devotion.” In secular government, it leads to, on the part of the political classes, tyranny and barbarism cloaking itself in the rhetoric of freedom, a la the Inquisitor’s idea of the church ruling in the name of God but with the devil’s principles (who can read about the CIA’s MK-Ultra without feeling that there was no moral difference between them and the Soviet KGB, the threat of whom they used to justify their inhumanly loathsome experiments?); while on the part of the masses to indifference and complacency to the loss of their once beloved Anglo-Saxon freedoms and (again) virtue signaling replacing republican virtue. As the Inquisitor himself puts it, “anyone who can appease a man’s conscience can take his freedom away from him.”
And as government grows the effect becomes self-reinforcing: the more government adds additional far-reaching and myriad functions to its list of powers, the more impossible it becomes for ordinary citizens to critique the effects (and, hence, the morality) of its activities, and the greater their desire to throw up their arms in despair at even trying and place their complete and utter trust in the “experts.”
As that vile fictional Jesuit puts it:
“We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all. They will become timid and will look to us and huddle close to us in fear, as chicks to the hen. They will marvel at us and will be awe-stricken before us, and will be proud at our being so powerful and clever that we have been able to subdue a turbulent flock of thousands of millions.”
I find that last line especially interesting: seems Dostoevsky was prescient enough to foresee how, whether the church swallows and becomes the state or whether (as in our case) the state swallows and becomes the church, its earthly endgame remains the same–i.e., a religio-secular messianism in which the Inquisitoresque elites seek to impose the same conscience-balming submission they achieved with their own masses on the great mass of humans worldwide.
As Christ’s sophist interlocutor tell Him, “The great conquerors, Timours and Ghenghajis-Khans, whirled like hurricanes over the face of the earth striving to subdue its people and they too were but the unconscious expression of the same craving for universal unity.”
Who today can read that sentence without getting unpleasant memories of the Neocons disingenuously courting the religious Right in the late 80s; bragging about having “the empire everyone wants be a part of” dominate a unipolar world order in the 90s; using that empire to try with secular-chiliastic fervor (a la Perle’s and Frum’s insanely titled book “An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror”) to remake the Middle East in the crony-capitalist, phony-democracy empire’s own image in the early 2000s; and threatening to use the empire to spread its trademark brand of consumeristic secularism, sexual deviancy, and pro-forma voting masquerading as freedom and democracy from that time to the present?
But of course, as the Inquisitor admits, all this ultimately “[leads] men consciously to death and destruction” (of a material as well as spiritual sort, to judge by the empire’s massive debt, crumbling infrastructure, and declining standard of living), but allows “the poor blind creatures [to] on the way think themselves happy.”
That both our own Inquisitor class and the masses on whom they push their irreligious opiates will never admit this, not even to themselves, but nonetheless realize it at a deep level is evident in the fanaticism with which the former attack genuine freedom of speech and the latter attack anyone who deny their masters’ narrative du jour, be it COVID or systemic racism.
As much as it might hurt progressive whites to think of themselves as unconscious cogs in a system that oppresses the minorities they take scrupulous care to avoid living around, it hurts far more to think of themselves as having been willful dupes of an ideology that rapes rather than reflects reality, and (what’s even worse) that those deplorables on whose heads they stood and stamped, so that their beloved Other may be allowed to kiss their feet without bending over to an unseemly degree, were right all along. Any progressive worth his salt would much rather stand as captain going down with his intellectual ship rather than find himself in the same lifeboat as the riffraff he spent his life ridiculing.
All that is why our Inquisitor classes damn the South to eternal infamy: from her birth she rejected the puritanic model of the church consuming the state or the state consuming the church (like the Serpent swallowing his own tail); she held morality to be the responsibility of all individuals rather than their governments or elites; she rejected the centralization that would make moral scrutiny of government policy all but impossible for ordinary men in favor of the localism that would make it a responsibility for them; and, of course, she stood in the way of the Northern Inquisitors’ (to paraphrase Lee) aggression abroad, by which they seek to bring to the world’s poor, benighted masses the same conscious-sedating trusting passivity enjoyed by the masses under their own despotic home government.
That those masses too realize this–that they are blissfully walking as a chain gang under the watchful (and cynical) eye of their elite jailors toward death and destruction–at some level is evident by the hatred and fear with which they hear an accurate account of the War of Northern Aggression and the desperation with which they flee back to the official narrative and join its propagators in condemning the South. As the Inquisitor mockingly brags to Christ:
I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have to-day kissed Thy feet tomorrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire.
In the “rebels” who continued to stand up to the Yankee leviathan, even as their wealth and blood was hemorrhaging, the conniving elites and their lazy, passive wards see a living refutation of their own degenerate and effete moral order and a courage and dedication capable of sustaining a genuine one.
Which is why the fictional Grand Inquisitor’s real Northern counterparts, along their active foot soldiers now laying waste to the South’s symbols (and their passive enablers) might well say, in the Jesuit’s only slightly altered words, “[For] coming to hinder us . . . I shall burn Thee. Dixi[e].”
Thank you for your eloquent comment, Kostya. That could certainly be your own blog post, so I appreciate you taking the time to share it here. Deo vindice!
The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia reunited with, and actually became subordinate to, the Moscow Patriarchate back in 2007. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow is on record having given the highest of praise to various left-wing Marxist-Leninist communist organizations, politicians, and movements, as did Patriarch Alexy II before him.
Veronica, can you share those quotes with me? I would like to check out documents, articles, or videos before I can reply in a wise manner. Thanks … and thanks to for commenting.
Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Russian Communist Party, said “Jesus Christ was the first communist”:
https://02varvara.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/video-gennady-zyuganov-jesus-christ-was-the-first-communist
Patriarch Kirill gave Gennady Zyuganov the highest award in the Orthodox Church:
http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/3679826.html
Plenty of Russian Orthodox Russians in Russia are hardcore left-wing communists:
https://youtu.be/M-LCtez3Oc0
https://youtu.be/KrR7-YkhheM
Bolsheviks, Soviets, and Old Believers:
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsees/35/0/35_23/_pdf
Many of the authors of the Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church document were likely KPRF members.
Zyuganov is an avowed commie, but so what? We have commies running around here, but they suck even worse ’cause they pretend to be patriots. Not sure about the what the “highest award” in the Orthodox Church even is (since I can’t read Russian), but what I do know is that it’s no shock that some Orthodox in Russia are commies, just as Orthodoxy in America has its fair share of leftist wackadoodles (i.e. the Wheel, Public Orthodoxy, Fordham, the GOA, etc). And the presence of hammer and sickles isn’t a smoking gun when it comes to Russia. That symbol is still quite prevalent in Russia, so what? When my family and I visited there a couple years ago, it’s simply part of the landscape, as the Russians aren’t wont to tear down every vestige of history the way America does. Hell, I loathe communism, but we bought our kids ushankas donned with hammer and sickle pins on the front while visiting in Russia. We even went to see Stalin’s grave and Lenin’s tomb in Red Square. The Soviet symbol is also important to Russians because it was their identity when the Russian people “beat the Fascists” in the “Great War.” I mean, they did lose 28 million people in WWII, so it’s not something that they so easily will disregard, even though it’s the very thing that tried to squash the the motherland’s people and her Church. It’s complicated, as they say. I also know that the All Russian Council denounced Sergianism, Russia is building about 3 churches a day, the New Martyrs and Confessors are revered in Russia, and Kirill speaks out boldly against Western liberalism and for tradition and roots. I’ll forgive him his fancy watch if he keeps holding the secular-humanist globalists’ feet to the fire.
Zyuganov is an avowed commie, but so what? We have commies running around here, but they suck even worse ’cause they pretend to be patriots. Kirill told him when giving him that award, “All political forces should be together when it comes to the values of faith, morals, culture and our nation’s unity.” I have no problem with that statement. It’s also no shock that some Orthodox in Russia are commies, just as Orthodoxy in America has its fair share of leftist wackadoodles (i.e. the Wheel, Public Orthodoxy, Fordham, the GOA, etc). And the presence of hammer and sickles flying on flags isn’t a smoking gun when it comes to Russia. That symbol is still quite prevalent there, adorning everything from Moscow’s stunning Stalin-built subways to t-shirts for sale at the mall. When my family and I visited there a couple years ago, it’s easy to see that the symbol is simply part of the landscape, as the Russians aren’t wont to tear down every vestige of history the way America does. Hell, I loathe communism, but we bought our kids ushankas donned with hammer and sickle pins on the fronts. We even went to see Stalin’s grave and Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, but we also visited Butovo. It’s all part of the story. The Soviet symbol is also important to Russians because it was their identity when the Ruskies “beat the Fascists” in the “Great War.” I mean, they did lose 28 million people in WWII, so it’s not something that they so easily will disregard, even though it’s the very thing that tried to squash the the Motherland and her Church. It’s complicated, as they say. I also know that the All Russian Council denounced Sergianism, Russia is building about 3 Orthodox churches a day, the New Martyrs and Confessors are revered in Russia, and Kirill speaks out boldly against Western liberalism and for tradition and roots. I’ll forgive him his fancy watch and occasional outings on a yacht if he keeps holding the secular-humanist globalists’ feet to the fire. That’s more that can be said for many American “leaders,” including those preaching from pulpits and from the amvon. Anyhoo, that’s my two cents. Thanks for commenting and thanks for the links.
Oh yeah, no, don’t get me wrong, I pretty much agree with you here (also, check your spam comments, as I commented another comment and I’m not seeing it here).
I wasn’t bringing this up to trash Patriarch Kirill, or even Gennady Zyuganov and the KPRF, but more to call attention to how…different…communism in Russia is as opposed to the LARPy lefties over here. They may wave the red banner but they’d be the first to the firing squad abroad. Does anyone seriously think Gennady Zyuganov likes satanists, abortionists, LGBT activists, southern baptists, Mormons, Zionist Jews, ISIS, Pussy Riot, etc. etc.? I don’t think he does.
In fact, I think his entire political program is about opposing such things.
Zyuganov was even for Trump in 2016.
But this is also why I wish the American Right would shut up about “cultural Marxism”. What’s destroying the West in our time is cultural capitalism. I know you don’t see it that way, but that’s just reality. All you have to do is look at Yeltsin’s attempt at implementing capitalism in Russia, which was backed by the good ol’ U.S.A. Decommunization and privatization was accompanied by nihilism and decadence. If anyone was pushing back against the nihilism over there in the Yeltsin era, it was Limonov’s nazbols. Lenin wasn’t a sweet little angel but “better dead than red” is a meme that gets well-intentioned conservatives keeping company with the worst of the worst.
Putin’s attitude reminds me of how during Bush II’s Iraq War Saddam Hussein called upon Iraqis–via a tape, since he was in hiding by that point–to resist the Americans in the name of Islam. You got the impression that his words were at once genuine and phony: genuine in that he truly realized that the secular Arab nationalism that he’d dedicated his life to was a spent force and that only Islam had the power to inspire continuous resistance to the invasion; phony in that everyone knew that Allah was just a useful abstraction to him.
Likewise, I doubt that Putin’s Orthodoxy runs deeper than a sincere belief that the atheistic communism he dedicated his early life to is dead in the water and would now be counterproductive if it weren’t and that a return to the ancient faith is most likely to make Russia internally cohesive, resilient, and self-confident. My best guess is that he’s a phony Christian but a deeply sincere nationalist who wants to see the Russian people thrive; and with a politician that’s about the best you can hope for. With government officials, it is infinitely better that they do the right thing for the wrong reasons than vice versa!
Well said, Kostya. I will say that an American bishop that I heard give a post-Liturgy talk this summer said that he shared the same spiritual father as Putin, and that priest once told him that Putin was quite devout in his Orthodox faith. Sure, it’s just hearsay, but I’ll take it. And similar to what you wrote, I have no idea what’s in the man’s heart, but if he’s doing the right thing, that works for me.
Veronica, just checked my spam and approved the comment. Sorry about that – been really busy lately.
I do agree with you about cultural capitalism. I am no libertarian. I am a Southern traditionalist in the vein of the Agrarians who wrote nonstop about the dangers of mixing finance and government, or my ancestors who fought against the empire as to protect their home and kith and kin and to keep the industrial-capital Leviathan at bay, or the Jeffersonians who knew that centralization together with national banking would destroy the family and sectional cultures that made up Murica. I loathe corporatism, materialism, consumerism, and technocracy. But … I see all of those things implemented through cultural Marxism. We wouldn’t be in our current hellscape if not just class but also race and gender indoctrination weren’t foisted upon the masses. Sure, do I understand that the oligarchs don’t care two hoots about chicks or black folks or welfare babies? Yep. But I also know that the elites use all of that to destroy the family, which in turns destroys faith and undergirds the ringing in of the new order/the reset of the godless globalists.
So, I guess my point is that we agree on more than you think. Thanks so much for commenting and keeping me on my toes, and hope to hear from you again in the new year!
Here’s a painting of Vladimir Lenin with Old Believers. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c5eb7c447e9ee85aac352bc729c16ddf6aacf28fc01bcb9e75d8fd29a6c3a301.jpg
Here too is a photo a Russian man holding a crucifix in one hand, a portrait of Lenin with another:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ac31b8297124878d1ca5f16c0c5a2611a6e600af6d8907fbd09f7a7eb1d694b3.jpg
In the documentary “The Revolution That Wasn’t”, Orthodox Abbot Evstafy Zhakov of the Tikhvin Diocese of the Moscow Patriarchate can be seen having dinner with prominent National Bolshevik Party members encouraging them to be “crafty” in their (alleged) attempts to bring about a return to Marxist-Leninist violence -violence which the Abbot also endorses in this same clip (skip to around 53:40 on the video linked below):
https://www.bitchute.com/video/FVjftdpEqSkp/
It’s all very worrying that even Christian leaders lose sight of Christ, and assume that human “leaders” are God’s actual solution to our problems.
It ain’t so.
Who among human beings has a right to rule fellow human beings?
Who among human beings is qualified to rule fellow human beings?
I hope this isn’t too out of line, but not many “on our side” — or even on “their” side, truth be told — know the truth of the underside of what our overlords are demanding of us and prepping us for; I think this must be one of the most horrifying Web sites I’ve ever seen — and I’ve been aware of it for about ten years, now. No one else I know is or has been. This is what they want from all of us — this “you won’t own anything . . . and you’ll be happy” Great Reset being established by the “elites”:
http://www.vhemt.org/
How about if all them hoity-toity “elites” who presume to have all the answers for the rest of us, such that it boils down to “save us the trouble — of conscience and physical labor — and contrive to suicide yourselves for us,” instead step up like the elite, superior human beings they want us to believe they are, so much more worthy of life and good things, and ditch all their fine lives — homes, jets, vacations, parties, food, entertainment, amusements, servants, technology, clothes, chauffeurs, collectible cars and other stuff — and set up their simple plain canvas tents right out in the open, and show us ignoramuses using up THEIR “resources,” exactly how it should be done? Teach us. Demonstrate for us — personally, themselves. All by themselves. They, themselves. Without servants or conveniences; without heirloom seeds and someone else to labor for them in the fields, without proper food and meat and water and practical clothing. Without anything but their own two hands and any tools they can make with those hands, and any animals they can catch and tame for food and to do labor for them. Let them live well without all the things they want us to give up for them — and “for the planet.”
Let them SHOW us, not tell us, not coerce us, not demand or command us, to do what they want us to do.
You know, “Be the change they want.”
We can all watch and learn (when we have time or deign to), as they, clueless, try to live without us and our hard-earned knowledge, production, labor, and skill.
No one should ask of anyone else what he isn’t willing to reciprocate in equal value. No one has a right to ask anyone else to give up his property, skills, knowledge, labor, or life, especially without equally reciprocating.
They want us to die for them? First, they must show us, themselves, exactly how it’s done.
Then the world may have peace. And we may have peace, and true Christian justice, and freedom and liberty to pursue happiness and prosperity. In Jesus Christ Almighty God and no one else.
Matthew 4:1-11; Genesis 10:8-11; 11:1-9; 1 Samuel 8; Matthew 20:20-28; Micah 6:8; 7:18-19; Hosea 4:6: 6:6; Isaiah 5:20
Our rightful and rightfully ONLY King is our Creator, not another human being. We are not called to obey evil. We are called to overcome evil with good, NOT cooperate with it or try to harmonize or reconcile with it. Only Jesus Christ Almighty God is good, and He alone He has commanded us to obey.
So what are we Christians really dithering about? There is this level, and growing, of evil only because we rationalize it and allow it. We envy and covet it. We thus participate in it.
Why? When Scripture is so clear, why do we pretzel ourselves to whitewash and embrace evil?
Matthew 23; Luke 11:37-54
(Dear DM: I apologize and ask your forgiveness if this is totally off track. I appreciate what you are doing. You see the danger. Thank you. Our precious LORD and Savior and King bless you and keep you close to His heart, and protect you from harm and from the evil ones.)
Gray Cat,
No apologies at all. I think your comment is right on point. The hypocrisy of the evildoers really shouldn’t be surprising, but to us not-insane folk, the lunacy mixed with their bizarre moral superiority is just too much to bear sometimes. And where do they get their moral standing? Why from themselves, of course.
I’ve never seen that website before. Again, it’s shocking and predictable all rolled up into one putrid mess. Wow. At least when the hot civil war is upon us, we can take on a few of these anti-human freaks in defense of life and love.
Thanks so much for your prayers and encouragement. I do hope to hear from you again in the New Year. God bless!