Vladimir Moss – Orthodox Christianity Author

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THE CHRISTIAN CASE FOR BREXIT

Written by Vladimir Moss

 THE CHRISTIAN CASE FOR BREXIT

 

     Introduction.The Kingdom of Christ is not of this world (John 18.36), and it is in general not wise for a Christian to become involved in the dirtiest aspect of the modern world – politics. Nevertheless, there are moments when politics impinges on the faith and spiritual life, whether we like it or not (usually not). Such a moment was the Russian revolution of 1917, when the failure of the Christian people to defend their most Christian emperor against his anti-Christian political opponents led to a catastrophe of enormous proportions that has yet to play itself out to the end. Another such moment is today’s crisis in Britain and Europe, when the British people’s decision to leave the European Union is clearly going to have major political and economic consequences around the world. But what appears to have been overlooked is that it may well have major long-term spiritual consequences, too.

     We sometimes forget that while Christ’s Kingdom, the inner Kingdom of Grace, is not of this world, He most certainly has complete power also over the kingdoms of this world. As He said to Pilate before His crucifixion: “You would have no power at all against Me if it had not been given you from above” (John 19.11).  And as He said after His Resurrection and just before His Ascension into heaven: “All power hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28.18). All power means just that: power over both angels and men, both believers and unbelievers, both souls and bodies. Jesus Christ is the supreme King of kings and Lord of lords, “the prince of the kings of the earth” (Revelation 1.5): there is nothing created that is not ruled by Him.

     What we also tend to forget is that today there are no rulers or nations today that can be called Christian even in the broadest sense of that word. Of course, there are individual politicians who call themselves Christian; there are even parties that call themselves Christian, like the Christian Democrats of Germany or Greece. But all governments – all without exception – are now anti-christian in their dominant tendencies; for all are engaged in implementing, to a greater or lesser degree, the anti-christian programme of what we loosely but conveniently call the New World Order. Some would argue that Russia, for example, is an exception to this rule, in that it openly condemns “Eurosodom” and the godlessness of the West. But anyone even slightly acquainted with the reality of contemporary Russia knows that this is a sham and the grossest hypocrisy: Russia has all the vices of the West, while proudly and impenitently claiming to be the successor of the most evil and anti-christian state in world history – the Soviet Union. Almost all other “Orthodox Christian” countries belong now to the EU – and make no attempt to modify or fight against its “Eurosodomite” tendencies and laws.

     Does this mean that the Lord, while holding all power in His hands, has judged that the world is not worthy of salvation, and that the Antichrist is just round the corner? This would be a natural conclusion to draw from the present, absolutely catastrophic spiritual condition of the world. However, it would be unwise to conclude that the Lord has abandoned His people. Apart from anything else, we must remember that there are still several prophecies to be fulfilled before the Coming of the Antichrist – including the small matter of World War Three. In any case, the Lord is acting in and through international politics – if only we had eyes to see it…

     The purpose of this article is to show how the Lord may be accomplishing His own holy purpose through the political crisis created by Brexit…

     How it All Began. The distinguished journalist Simon Heffer writes: “A senior Ukip figure told me that it wasn’t Mr. Cameron’s pitiful and failed renegotiation [of the relationship between Britain and the EU] that drove Conservatives into the Farage camp, it was his determination to put same-sex marriage on the statute book.”[1] Because of this determination to put same-sex marriage on the statute book, Cameron was facing a massive loss of support from ordinary Conservatives, especially those living in “the Shires”. So he offered them a quid pro quo: in partial compensation for his pushing through same-sex legislation, he offered them a referendum on Europe (many Conservatives who oppose same-sex marriage also oppose the European Union), over-confidently believing - and promising to his European colleagues - that the country as a whole would never vote to leave Europe.

     But he miscalculated: not only most Conservatives, but also large numbers of Labour supporters voted to leave the EU, the Brexiteers won the vote – and Cameron resigned… This, as Jeremy Paxman notes, was probably the worst mistake of any British Prime Minister since the invasion of Suez in 1956[2]. But, as I shall try to demonstrate, it was a providential mistake, creating a causal link between Cameron’s shameful anti-Christian decision radically and not only Britain’s departure from the European Union but also something much more important – the possible collapse of the entire anti-christian civilization of the West.

     And if this seems extreme, let us listen to the words of EU President Donald Tusk, who goes so far as to say that Brexit could spell the end of “western political civilization itself.”But how could that be? How could the friendly (or at any rate, non-violent) separation of one middle-sized country from the EU threaten the collapse of “western political civilization itself”?

     In order to answer this question, we have to know a little about how the EU was formed. At the beginning, the European Project could hardly be described as tyrannical. It began in 1950 with the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community, which created a supra-national organization that controlled the coal and steel industries of France and Germany on a mutually beneficial basis. In itself, the organization was neither big, powerful, nor obviously sinister: on the contrary, the fact that two countries that had been at war with each other so recently were now creating such symbols of mutual trust was plausibly seen as a good sign. But “mighty oaks from acorns do grow”; and the European Coal and Steel Community, which constituted a mini-model of the future EU (it even contained its own Court of Justice), was destined to grow into something much bigger and definitely sinister.

     In 1957 the Treaty of Rome creating the European Economic Community (EEC) was signed. Describing it as an “economic” community was accurate insofar as its main activity at this time was economic; essentially it was a cartel, facilitating trade among the member-states while making it more difficult for non-members to trade with the EEC. Nevertheless, the leading Eurocrats were unanimous that economic unity would be followed by political union. When Britain voted to join the EEC (later the EU) in 1973, this political aspect was carefully hidden from the voting public by the Prime Minister, Edward Heath; some figures on the Right, such as Enoch Powell, and on the Left, such as Tony Benn, protested and warned, but they were ignored. Soon their warnings were being fulfilled: the Single European Act of 1985, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, the establishment of the single currency of the euro (to which Britain secured an opt-out) in 1999 and the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 progressively stripped the member-nations of their veto powers; the unelected Commission became progressively more powerful, while the European Court of Justice, and European legislation in general, took precedence over the laws of the individual states. Soviet President Michael Gorbachev joked that the EU was “the old Soviet Union dressed in Western clothes” or “the new prison of the peoples”. But it was no joke to the British… For over half a century British politics has been racked by huge turmoil over this question. Thus in the early decades the Conservative Party was pro-EU and the Labour Party – anti-EU. Later the roles were reversed: the Conservative Party was anti-EU and the Labour Party – pro-EU. Finally, in the referendum campaign of 2016 both main parties proclaimed their loyalty to the EU – but the British people voted against both parties to leave the EU…

     Let us now approach the question in a little more detail, and from three different directions: economic, political and spiritual.

     I. Economics. The European Union is part of the New World Order, and the essential point about the economic aspect of the New World Order, which was made many years ago by Bishop Gregory Grabbe, is its fragility. In spite of its massive external appearance, and the astonishing growth in prosperity that has taken place all round the world for several decades now, a downturn in one part of the system can threaten the downfall of the whole. This is owing to the extreme interconnectedness of its parts, and also to the fact that almost all countries are massively in debt – a debt so unprecedentedly vast and so difficult to reduce, let alone remit completely, that, in the opinion of many, a world slump on the scale of the 1930s Depression is only a matter of time. Already the banking crisis of 2007-08 very nearly brought the whole world economy to its knees. The Greek crisis of recent years has threatened something similar - the mainly French and German banks that have been over-exposed to Greece have survived (so far) only thanks to the enforced impoverishment and effective economic enslavement of the Greeks. Still more recently, the Italian banks have looked on the edge of crashing… In the opinion of most economists and bankers, another disturbance in trading relations such as Brexit represents could also bring disaster. Hence the extreme volatility of exchange rates and stock markets in the first few days after the Brexit referendum. Some distinguished economists (Patrick Minver, Roger Bootle) have been sanguine about Britain’s prospects: after some initial turmoil, they think that Britain’s economy, freed from the European cartel system, will be able to expand its trading links and prosper even more than before. But that, of course, is on the assumption that the world economic system as a whole does not collapse…

     Now this might seem like a powerful argument against Brexit: “Don’t rock the already unstable boat!” But this fails to take into account another important aspect of the world economic system – its unpredictability. Every purchase, or decision not to purchase, has consequences for the whole system and for the long-term. The problem is: we don’t know what they will be. In meteorology, according to “chaos theory”, even the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings could cause a hurricane in some other part of the world – or drive it away. More likely it will have no discernible effect. But the point is that tiny causes can have huge effects. It is only recently that we have learned that large events such as volcanoes can have huge effects on the weather for many years. The problem is: we understand these effects only in hindsight; we are still a long way from predicting them in advance… Similarly, in the vastly more complex world of human economic actors, where economic decisions are determined by a vast variety of factors, only some of which are purely rational and economic, it is impossible to predict what the long-term consequences of something like Brexit – in itself, an enormously complex change - will be. Even short-term predictions are dicey, as the spectacular failures of most recent economic forecasting (for example, in relation to the disastrous effects of the introduction of the euro) has demonstrated. Of course, one has to do the best one can according to the knowledge one has. But the mind-boggling complexities mentioned above should fill decision-makers with a little more humility than they currently display. Brexit may destabilize the world economic system. On the other hand, it may do the opposite; it may begin the process of removing one of the main distorting and destabilizing factors in the world economy – the economic cartel that is the European Union. 

     Consider one small fact: Indonesia is inhibited from exporting cocoa beans to Europe because of the prohibitively high tariffs that the European cartel sets up. This is the flip-side of the free market inside Europe: an unfree, tariff-protected market for poor countries outside Europe. That is why several African countries, frustrated by European protectionism, have welcomed Brexit… Or consider another serious distorting factor: the fact that poor countries inside the Union cannot devalue their currencies in order to make themselves more competitive with the richer countries, because they are all tied in to the single currency of the euro. Hence the terrible economic devastation that we see in Greece today – with all the still more terrible consequences that may have for the survival of Orthodox Christian civilization. Nor can the Greeks pay off their enormous debts to the French and German banks because the Eurocrats are demanding that they sell off – at rock-bottom prices – those very economic assets that would enable them to pay off their debts. Even the IMF agrees that this is a crazy policy. (We are not denying that the Greeks’ economic profligacy in earlier decades is partly to blame for their present plight, but the fact remains that the European economic system, dominated by Germany, has made that plight much worse.)

     The European Union today is the worst-performing economic continent in the world – except Antarctica; it has 50,000 bureaucrats on huge salaries and gold-plated pensions, and is almost mythically corrupt (10% of its income disappears God only knows where, and auditors have refused to sign off on it for the last 19 years). For years, British eurosceptics and others have been warning, cajoling, pleading – with no effect. As Nigel Farage said in the European parliament this week, the Europeans are “in denial” – in denial of the failure of their utopian, neo-Marxian project.

     How can the British be blamed for trying to free themselves from their economic chains – and thereby help other European countries to free themselves also? The jury is out on whether they will succeed; there is no question that it will be difficult, especially since the European elites, the health of whose bank balances depends on the present system, have already indicated that they are not going to make things easy for them. But nobody can say for certain that they will not succeed: only God knows the future…

     II. Politics. We have mentioned that EU President Donald Tusk has said that Brexit could spell the end of “western political civilization itself.” Political, not economic civilization. And he is right: the heart of the debate is not about economics, but about politics. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes: “Stripped of distractions, [the referendum] comes down to an elemental choice: whether to restore the full self-government of this nation, or to continue living under a higher supranational regime, ruled by a European Council that we do not elect in any meaningful sense, and that the British people can never remove, even when it persists in error.

     “… We are deciding whether to be guided by a Commission with quasi-executive powers that operates more like the priesthood of the 13th Century papacy than a modern civil service; and whether to submit to a European Court of Justice (ECJ) that claims sweeping supremacy, with no right of appeal.” [3]

     As Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, put it, the referendum was about “getting our country back” 

     This is a completely understandable motive – but one that the European elites completely fail to understand. The reason is clear: the New World Order, of which the European Union is a part, has placed the destruction of national sovereignty as one of its main goals. On the excuse that nationalism leads to war, the denationalized Euro elites shout: Cartago delenda est – the nation-state with all its local patriotisms and loyalties and attachments must be destroyed.

     And they are very, very passionate about it – almost as passionate as to start a war over it. Thus the President of Golden Sachs has declared that Brexit must be overturned “in one way or another” – a somewhat sinister threat. Again, Tony Blair has “demanded” a new referendum, and already 2-3 million signatures on a petition for a new referendum (including 77,000 forgeries) have been created. So much for democracy… But then the EU was never a democratic project…

     The journalist Sarah Vine, the wife of Michael Gove, one of the leading Brexit politicians, has described her experience: “The referendum was always going to be a close call. One side was always going to be disappointed. What I had not anticipated, though, was quite how bitterly 

     “The way Remain campaigners have reacted to being unexpectedly on the losing side has shocked even a Twitter-hardened old hack like me.

     “I think it’s because many of the most passionate Remainers are well-educated, articulate people in positions of authority, used to getting their own way.

     “Unlike your average troll, they don’t rely on blunt invective to wound their opponents. Their anger takes the form of keenly worded, rapier-sharp attacks that cut deep.

     “Almost overnight, those of us on the winning side suddenly found ourselves re-cast as knuckle-dragging thugs, small-minded Little Englanders whose shortsighted bigotry had brought the nation to its knees, while making sweet Italian waitresses cry and stopping small Polish children from going to school…”[4 

     We can go a little deeper into the cause of the anti-Brexiteers’ violent passion. Paradoxically, it is a kind of nationalism. For the country of these people, even if they are English by birth and education, is in fact not England but the supra-nation of Europe. Like the socialists who place the unity of the workers of all nations above their own nation, they scorn their birthplace – “Little England” is decidedly not their country. They are true cosmopolitans, “citizens of the world”; but until a world government comes into being they have to be content with the smaller world of the European Union…

     This illustrates an important principle of political psychology: that everyone needs a political home of some kind, a home nation with which they can identify. This need is as ineluctable as sex or food; it cannot be eradicated. And there is nothing wrong with it if two opposing perversions can be avoided. The first is the murderous nationalism of the last two centuries that pits nation against nation in a war to the death; in its most extreme form this is Fascism. The other is the desire to destroy all the local attachments, traditions and patriotisms that have been built up over centuries in favour of an atomized, deracinated conglomerate of all the peoples of the earth; in its most extreme form this is Communism.

     Post-war European democracy was supposed to be a blessed “third way” avoiding both these extremes. And it must be admitted that it had some success for a few decades. But there was a worm in the apple: the socialism of the EU’s real godfather, Jean Monnet, a protégé of American President Franklin D. Roosevelt – the real founder of the United Nations and admirer of “Uncle Joe” Stalin. And so the Treaty of Rome in 1957 prescribed “ever-closer union” between the member-states of the new Union. Since the EU is governed by an unelected bureaucracy that appoints itself and cannot be removed by the people, this is a recipe for despotism. 

     Indeed, as that distinguished veteran of the Soviet Gulag living in England, Vladimir Bukovsky, has pointed out, there are many remarkable similarities between the European Union and the Soviet Union; the former is a (so far) softer, more sophisticated, “up-market” version of the latter, but its despotic essence is the same. He sees only one major difference: the Soviet Union was built up by force, while the European Union has grown peacefully. But, he warns, it has other methods of coercion, and its own kind of Gulag – the ever-growing mental Gulag of political correctness, which increasingly forces dissidents, patriots and traditionalists of all kinds to keep their mouths shut...[5]

     Another important political issue, but one little discussed in the campaign, is a proposed European army of which all the national armies will be parts. This is, of course, a direct threat to the viability of NATO, since it will draw scarce resources away from it. Putin must like the idea enormously…

     But the most important political issue, closely connected with that of sovereignty and independence, is immigration. Stephen Glover writes that large parts of working-class England voted for Brexit because “they feel let down by successive governments which have allowed mass immigration to run out of control, with consequent pressure on public services such as schools and hospitals, a downward effect on wages and, in some cases, the transformation of communities.”[6] Moreover, control of that flow was impossible as long as Britain was in the European Union and subscribed to its principle of free movement across the continent. Now a country that cannot control its own borders is not really an independent, sovereign state. Therefore recovery of control of Britain’s borders is felt to be both a condition and a criterion of the recovery of British sovereignty.

     III. Religion. There was a quasi-religious motivation for the original decision under Tony Blair’s Labour government to open the doors to mass immigration. “According to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair and Jack Straw, New Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multi-cultural country’.”[7] But “multiculturalism” is a code-word for the destruction of the old “mono-culture”, i.e. Christianity; in religious language it is called “ecumenism”. It works in the following way: the Christians are outnumbered and – out of fear of being accused of “racism” or “hate-crimes”, which now go with prison sentences – coerced into a demoralizing acceptance of the immigrant cultures. The only problem with this plan is that if the new immigrants are mainly Muslim, they create a new “mono-culture” which is itself the enemy of all other cultures, including the multiculturism of the European elites…[8]

     It is above all through this multiculturism and ecumenism that the European Tower of Babel is being constructed… But God destroyed the original Tower of Babel – and through Brexit He may be withdrawing the first brick from the unholy building of the new, twenty-first century Babylon; for the European Union is a fundamentally atheist and anti-theist project. 

     Let us see how this is so by comparing the ancient and modern Babylons.

     The State religion of Babylon under her first king, Nimrod, was a mixture of nature-worship and ancestor-worship. Thus, on the one hand, the Babylonians worshipped the stars and planets, and practised astrology as a means of discovering the will of the gods. "They believed," writes Ninian Smart, "that they could predict not merely by earthly methods of divination, but also by a study of the stars and of planets and the moon".[9]  One of the purposes of the temples or towers or ziggurats, whose remains can still be seen in the Iraqi desert, may have been as platforms from which to observe the signs of the zodiac. According to Herodotus, at the top of the Tower was a 23.5-ton statue to Marduk and representations of the signs of the Zodiac.

     On the other hand, the chief god, Marduk or Merodach, “brightness of the day”, seems to have been identified with Nimrod himself. We know, moreover, that the later kings of Babylon were also identified with the god Marduk. [10] This is ancestor-worship. It was probably Nimrod who invented both nature- and ancestor-worship. First he rose to power as a hunter or leader in war; he is described in the Holy Scriptures as “a mighty hunter before the Lord” (Genesis 10.9). Then he consolidated his power by giving himself divine honours. By imposing false religion in this way he led men away from God, which earned him the title given him by the Jerusalem Targum of “hunter of the sons of men”. For he said: “Depart from the judgement of the Lord, and adhere to the judgement of Nimrod!” [11] According to Blessed Jerome, “Nimrod was the first to seize despotic rule over the people, which men were not yet accustomed to”.[12]

     “Nimrod” means "let us rebel", and "it was Nimrod,” according to Josephus, “who excited them to… contempt of God; he was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it were through his means that they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage that procured their happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other method of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his own power.

     “Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod, and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than any one could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners [in the Flood]; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion...” [13]

     The modern Babylon of the New World Order shows a clear kinship with the old Babylon. Of course, the modern Babylonians do not practise astrology - at least, not officially; and officially they are very tolerant of all religions. But they do worship matter as the cause of all being, and they show an inordinate interest in outer space and cosmology (the modern equivalent of astrology, and hardly less deluded). There is even a popular theory that life came to earth from outer space; hence the exorbitant excitement when water was found on a comet. The existence of God is not denied, but they do not “do God”, as the expression goes – and, much to the Pope’s exasperation, there is no mention of God in the European constitution. 

     Nor do God’s commandments have any part in the morality of the New World Order as expressed in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the European Convention on Human Rights (1950). Liberal Christians have a tendency to view human rights as a kind of secular version of the New Testament commandments. Nothing could be further from the truth – the philosophy of human rights is designed to replace and utterly destroy Christian morality; it is a Nimrodian act of defiant rebellion against the living God. 

     This is most clearly seen in its sexual anti-morality. Under the rainbow-coloured banner of “the LGBT community”, every kind of sexual activity, even the most perverse, is not only permitted, but even “celebrated” as if it were something to be proud of. The only restriction is that the perverse sex should be undertaken between consenting adults. But who knows how long before even paedophilia will be generally permitted?

     The family, the foundation of every state, and the chief object of its care and protection, is being deliberately and ruthlessly destroyed on the grounds, as the cultural Marxists put it, that it is an out-of-date, patriarchal, repressive institution. And so, just as the Tower of Babel was followed, in the Biblical narrative, by Sodom and Gomorrah, so the modern Babylon, the New World Order, is now proceeding to the new Sodom of universal licence…

     Conclusion. We know what happened to the Tower of Babel, and we know what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. Therefore the only rational response of the Christian who wishes to save his soul as well as his body is to flee – flee from the whore of Babylon, flee from the burning heat of Sodom. “Come out of her, My people, lest you share in her sins, and receive of her plagues” (Revelation 18.4).

     But what relevance has Brexit to this? In what way could Brexit help us to flee the modern Babylon, seeing that even its most fervent supporters want it for economic and political, not spiritual, reasons? And how could Britain lead the way in exiting the universal Sodom when she was a founding member of the New World Order, and one of its most enthusiastic advocates?

     For spiritual leadership, it must be admitted, we cannot look to Britain; that light can only come from the east, from the Orthodox Christian countries – especially from Russia after she has made her “Russexit” from the final phase of the Russian revolution that Putin’s regime represents. But any rebellion against the New World Order, even if it is inchoate, disorganized, not knowing where it is going or what the ultimate issues are – is to be welcomed. For one thing can lead to another: having asserted her independence in the political field, the British may be encouraged – and encourage others – to think more independently, and then to think more deeply.

     Let us recall Josephus’ remark that Nimrod “gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other method of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his own power”. This exactly reflects the reality of the modern European Babylon. As we have seen, the progression from the tiny European Coal and Steel Community in 1950 to the present 28-nation supranational Union has been gradual, and only a few saw that the original economic free-trade area was turning into a political tyranny. Now almost every aspect of political and economic and religious life in the member-states is dependent on the power of the European Commission, which constantly issues “directives” to them – some trivial (like the correct shape of cucumbers), but others very far from trivial (like enforcing the supposed rights of multiculturalism or sexual perversity).

     Having seen the political evil of the European Union, and hence of the whole New World Order, the Brexiteers and those who follow them in other countries may begin to see its evil in the religious sphere also. For one cannot see the good before one has departed, at any rate to a small degree, from the evil: “Depart from evil and do good” (Psalm 36.27). And having departed from the evil they can already see, they will see more clearly to depart from the profounder evil they cannot yet see.

     The first step is to destroy their “constant dependence on his [the NWO’s] power”: this they have begun to do through the Brexit vote. Now they have to hold on to that sliver of independence against the ferocious backlash which will begin – indeed, it has already begun – from the NWO. If they win this defensive battle – and the British, as their history demonstrates, are well suited to defensive warfare by their individualistic, stubborn, rebellious nature – then, if God wills it, their hearts will be gradually opened to the fear of God and they will return in willing and conscious subjection to the one “Ruler over the princes of the earth,.. Who loved us and washed from our sins in His own blood” (Revelation 1.5), the Lord Jesus Christ…   

 

June 18 / July 1, 2016.

 

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