Curiously, or perhaps not, the regime’s appalling religious intimidation campaign found resonance only in the confused silence of usually quick-on-the-draw Western embassies and human rights defenders [...]
Needless to say, the important and portentous story of the attempted subversion of the Orthodox Church using the intelligence and political instruments still at the disposal of the moribund post-Christian West has gone virtually unreported, uncommented, and uncondemned. It concerns the multi-front offensive currently being unleashed against the most ancient and authentic Christian communion, the Orthodox Church.
The epicenter of this externally induced commotion is at this moment in Montenegro, NATO’s latest “catch” in its persistent effort to secure or at least neutralize the Balkan rear, with a view to the projected conflict with Russia. One of the major remaining targets in Montenegro is the country’s Metropolitanate of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the institution which according to the latest survey is the most trusted by the country’s population. The Orthodox Church, which saw Montenegro through its centuries of confrontation with the Ottoman Empire, is literally the repository of Montenegro’s identity and culture. Russia’s traditional ally Montenegro – just like the Ukraine, which finds itself similarly targeted – cannot be reconfigured and turned into a compliant instrument of the impending Western crusade unless its identity shaped by the Church is first suitably redesigned.
The issue which brought the crisis into the open and moved it to the verge of physical confrontation was the unprecedented law, allegedly to secure “freedom for religious confessions,” which the regime rammed through the rubber-stamp parliament on December 27, 2019, complete with the almost routine arrest of about twenty opposition parliamentarians who objected vociferously to its Orwellian provisions. The core of this legislation is the requirement that all religious property dating back to before 1918 (when Montenegro joined what later became Yugoslavia) would be taken over by the state, which then, from the goodness of its heart, might allow the dispossessed religious community to use it for the performance of its rites. Given Montenegro’s ethnic, historical, and religious landscape, although not explicitly so stated, the new law’s brunt will be borne exclusively by the local Metropolitanate of the Serbian Orthodox Church in that country. The Serbian Church is the only significant religious community with a broad following and any property to be seized, the other faiths’ presence being relatively minor and symbolic.
Unexpectedly for all concerned, once reality sank in that with the passage of the new law the dispossession of the Church, with an intensified assault on the identity of the majority of the population, was becoming imminent, a massive expression of popular outrage erupted and continues on a daily basis. It is possible that the regime simply miscalculated the potential of such a seemingly arcane issue to quickly mobilize vast numbers of the citizenry. Their NATO sponsors surely did, and obviously failed to duly caution their stooges, which is perfectly understandable because religious concerns ceased long ago to play a significant social role in the West. (Both regime stalwarts and their jaded Western mentors must have found this Montenegrin procession, outlining a human “cross” made up of lighted torches, extremely annoying and awkward.) In the event, in all parts of Montenegro tens of thousands of Orthodox believers took to the streets during the holiday season to manifest their disapproval. In a very small country, with an official population of about 600,000, at least a quarter of the citizens defied bitter winter cold and snow to vote with their feet and send the pro-NATO clique the clear message that they are not on board.
Curiously, or perhaps not, the regime’s appalling religious intimidation campaign found resonance only in the confused silence of usually quick-on-the-draw Western embassies and human rights defenders.
But as accurately explained by Alexander Mercouris, the pressure that has been brought on the Church in Montenegro is not an isolated phenomenon but part of a “broader pattern.” That includes unbridled meddling by the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul throughout the Orthodox world, and not just in the recent high profile example of the Ukraine. It also includes high-pressure State Department “religious diplomacy” aiming to align major centres of Orthodox religious authority in the Balkans and the Middle East with Western strategic goals. That can ultimately be reduced to but a single element: politically isolating and blocking Russia by rupturing its ties to the rest of the Orthodox communion because, in the perception of Western strategists, the Russian Orthodox Church is a key lever of Russia’s “soft power” influence.
The pretentious Ecumenical Patriarchate, confined to a few buildings in the Fanar neighborhood of Istanbul, without laity of any consequence to give it weight, chronically strapped financially, with decrees of “canonical recognition” for schismatic sects designated by NATO as future components of its “nation building” operations as its only salable commodity, and dependent entirely upon the toleration of the Turkish government hosting it, is an ideal tool for such geopolitical manipulation and blackmail.
Ukraine, and the infamous “Tomos,” or letter of recognition, granted by the Patriarchate to certain break-away Orthodox factions on its territory, is of course a vivid case in point. But it does not exhaust the subject.
Just recently, in Macedonia the Patriarch in Istanbul became involved in an analogous situation when he officially received a delegation from Skopje and agreed to “consider” granting autocephaly (independence) to the dioceses there that decades ago, as part of a “nation building” scheme promoted by the former Communist regime, had broken away from the Serbian Orthodox Church. The mere fact that Patriarch Bartholomew would have taken such a step (unfortunately no longer unprecedented after the Ukrainian episode) and would have gone over the heads of Serbian church authorities in Belgrade to publicly contemplate such a disruptive step, is highly indicative. With all due respect for Orthodox believers in Macedonia, the advancement of this agenda, in the context of the installation of a slavishly pro-Western government and impending incorporation into NATO structures, is simply too much to be regarded as a mere coincidence. It more likely is part of another political project, only now under different auspices.
Furthermore, a recent scholarly conference held in Salonica, Greece, in October of last year, also demonstrates just how unsubtly the Ecumenical Patriarch is prepared to render valuable political services, again to the Western power block, in disregard of church canons or even the sentiments of his Orthodox coreligionists. Organized by Greek NGO “Byzantine Salonica,” which is close to the Patriarchy and officially is tasked with promoting the Byzantine civilization, the gathering asserted as its official view that Serbia’s breakaway province of Kosovo historically was one of the focal points of the Orthodox faith, but clearly represented as an independent country, separate from Serbia. To drive the point home, the conference began with a liturgy which included the commemoration, and thus official recognition, of the schismatic Ukrainian “metropolitan” Epiphaniy Dumenko, who recently was recognized by the Patriarch in Istanbul as a separate entity in disregard of the views and arguments of the Russian Church.
The slaps in the face of the Serbian Orthodox Church are perhaps best understood in the context of intensifying pressure on Serbia, which is now the only remaining major non-NATO country in the Balkans and also Russia’s traditional ally.
The analogies in the high-handed treatment of the Russian and Serbian churches are striking, even to the politically untrained eye. That, among other things, is what makes this situation particularly tragic because a trained political perspective should never be a prerequisite for accurately assessing the conduct and motives of religious institutions and dignitaries.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
The Israeli historian Benny Morris has been very vocal of late in denying that Palestine was ethnically cleansed of Arabs in order for the “Jewish state” of Israel to be established. In a series of articles in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Morris has debated the question with several of his critics who contend that ethnic cleansing is precisely what occurred. Not so, argues Morris. So who’s right?It’s worth noting at the outset that, while such a debate exists in the Israeli media, the US media remains, as ever, absolutely silent on the matter. Americans who get their information about the ...
One way to understand the effect of 9/11, in most general terms, is to see that it allowed the agenda developed in the 1990s by neoconservatives—-often called simply “neocons”—to be implemented. There is agreement on this point across the political spectrum. From the right, for example, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke say that 9/11 allowed the “preexisting ideological agenda” of the neoconservatives to be “taken off the shelf . . . and relabeled as the response to terror.”1 Stephen Sniegoski, writing from the left, says that “it was only the traumatic effects of the 9/11 terrorism that enabled the agenda ...
The US sanctions against Venezuela, signed into law by President Barack Obama on December 18, 2014, resulted from charges of protestors’ rights being violated by the socialist government of President Nicolás Maduro.The sanctions allow the Obama administration to deny visas and freeze the assets of Venezuelan officials accused of violating the rights of anti-government groups. These groups, comprised mainly of the right-wing opposition, have been leading violent protests in Caracas since last February. US leaders blame the Venezuelan leadership, headed by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, for the deaths of 43 people during such demonstrations, which included both government ...
After the April War of 6−18th, 1941, the Germans, Italians, Bulgarians, and Hungarians occupied and divided the territory of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia into several parts. The Germans annexed North Slovenia and put under their direct occupation the Yugoslav part of Banat and Central Serbia with Kosovska Mitrovica. The Italians occupied South Slovenia, established their marionette regime in Montenegro, and annexed the Gulf of Boka Kotorska, parts of Konavli and Dalmatia. The Hungarians annexed Prekomurje, Baranja and Bachka. The Bulgarians occupied East and Central Vardar Macedonia and South-East Serbia. The Italians established their own marionette state of Greater Albania with ...
There is nothing extraordinary in the science in Serbia. It would not deserve particular attention of the European scientific community, if it were not for the fact that the case of Serbia turns out extraordinary, indeed.Let us start with an extraordinary question: would it be possible a state in contemporary Europe to sucumbe to a fashist rule (or communist or any other totalitarian government)? The answer is extraordinary too - yes. The case in point is Serbia.The trick is marked by Kosovo (see, e.g. P. Grujić, Kosovo Knot, 2014). When this southern province of Serbia, Kosovo and Metohia (Kosovo in ...
The United States approaches the November 2020 election with growing apprehension, even dread.Among the possibilities:Protracted uncertainty about the presidential contest. Think Florida 2000 but with several states’ results unresolved for weeks or even months (“Experts held ‘war games’ on the Trump vs. Biden election. Their finding? Brace for a mess”);A disputed outcome, perhaps with Donald Trump and Joe Biden both claiming victory, compounded by a “blue shift,” where states are claimed by Trump on election night but flip over to Biden as additional absentee and mail-in ballots conveniently turn up days or weeks later;Violent civil conflict, spurred on in the ...
The Supreme Court’s acceptance of a case about the allocation of voting districts will have consequences far beyond the millions of U.S. taxpayers its ruling may deprive of representation. A decision that only counts voters, rather than all persons, will undermine the very foundation of the Republic.The American Revolution was fought over “taxation without representation,” and those who wrote the Constitution carefully apportioned taxation and representation among the states “according to their respective Numbers . . . of free Persons . . . and . . . three-fifths of all other Persons.” The authors clearly equated We, the People with ...
The war machine that is the United States of America, not content with threatening the world with its missile attack on a Syria airbase, not content with massing its forces around the Korean Peninsular and threatening to murder its leaders and massacre its people, not content with its escalating hostility towards Russia and China, decided the world needed one more demonstration of its power today, Thursday, April 13 by dropping its most powerful non-nuclear bomb on an Afghanistan saturated with its bombs.This demonstration, using a GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Blast Bomb (MOAB), that the Americans like to call the ‘mother of ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Part IThe historical background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is going back to 1917 (the Balfour Declaration) and the establishment of the British protectorate over Palestine (the Palestine Mandate) after WWI with its provision for a national home for the Jews, although formally not to be at the expense of the local inhabitants – the Palestinians. Nevertheless, it became in practice the focal problem to keep an appropriate balance between these stipulations to be acceptable to both sides – the Jews and the Palestinians.The people and the landSince the time of the Enlightenment followed by the Romanticism, in West Europe emerged ...
The horrendous bloodshed this week in Gaza is directly related to US President Trump’s controversial decision to relocate the American embassy to the contested city of Jerusalem.The US bears responsibility in large part for the atrocity in which more than 60 unarmed Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli military. This was a cold-blooded massacre.Thousands of others were maimed from live fire. An eight-month-old baby girl, Layla Ghandour, was among the victims after she died from asphyxiation from tear gas fired at the protesters.Washington’s shameless defense of Israel’s brutal use of lethal force as “restrained” and its subsequent blocking of an ...
Millions of white people glorify mass murderers because their sense of identity and place in society is deeply tied to white supremacy.“It is important to name and shame the mass murderers.”The perpetrators of crimes against humanity are often elevated to positions of respect and admiration. It all depends on who did the killing, and who was killed. Now the murderers are being called to account. The new movement in the United States against police and other state violence has inspired this welcome change taking place all over the world. The criminals are being exposed decades and even centuries after their atrocities ...
The outbursts of anti-Russian rhetoric of Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė is certainly very bizarre in view of her curriculum vitae. Dalia Grybauskaitė is a very educated woman. Because of the free education system of the former USSR, she was able to complete her university education at the elite Saint Petersburg State University. She became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1983, some five years before she earned a doctoral degree at the prestigious Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow. It is generally known that not every applicant is routinely accepted to become a Party member.This ...
Types of elections In the USA, elections are organized on a regular basis for the President, both houses of Congress (the House of Representatives and the Senate), and state and local government offices. In practice, candidates in the majority of cases run for office as members of the party (one of two main political parties – the Democrats or the Republicans) in order to get the party’s support for their candidacy. However, in principle, whoever wants to run as an independent candidate can organize a petition. In that case, if it is collected enough signatures, the person can run. According to ...
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949 on the pretext of “containing Soviet influence”, has almost doubled in size within the past two decades alone. In 1998, NATO comprised 16 member states, but with repeated expansions up to Russia’s very borders, it now contains almost 30 countries.Though seldom mentioned in mainstream discourse, NATO is a US-dominated organization, whose orders are issued from Washington and customarily obeyed. The US is by far the largest contributor to the alliance, spending more than all other member nations put together.One of the critical reasons behind NATO’s formation almost 70 years ago, was ...
I am now convinced that the Oligarchy that rules America intends to steal the presidential election. In the past, the oligarchs have not cared which candidate won as the oligarchs owned both. But they do not own Trump.Most likely you are unaware of what Trump is telling people as the media does not report it. A person who speaks like this:- is not endeared to the oligarchs.Who are the oligarchs?— Wall Street and the mega-banks too big to fail and their agent the Federal Reserve, a federal agency that put 5 banks ahead of millions of troubled American homeowners who ...
Last movie by famous French movie maker Paul Moreira on Canal+ (France) broadcasted 01/02/2016.Some French citizens are now shocked after discovering the truth about the Odessa massacre and the Euromaidan bloody coup in 2013/2014.Interview to Paul Moreira:http://www.humanite.fr/derriere-les-masques-de-la-revolution-ukrainienne-597568Preview screening on January, 20th 2016 at FIPA Biarritz 29th edition, selected out of competition in Reportages and Investigation – Panorama of Creation category.Without them, there would have been no Ukrainian revolution.In February 2014, paramilitary groups fought against the police in the streets of Kyev and ousted President Yanukovych. They settled a new government.According to the western media, they were the revolution heroes. They ...
While this excellent analysis by Srdja Trifkovic focuses on the “internal” history of Croatia, it is important to note that four days after Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, Hitler’s staunch ally the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) declared war on both the United Kingdom and on the United States on December 14, 1941. What makes this especially significant is that less than three years later, on April 16, 1944, which was Easter Sunday for the Serbian Orthodox, the Anglo-American forces bombed Belgrade, the capital of their loyal and devoted ally Serbia, even though there was no strategic ...
Fifty years ago this next month (December 1965), with the urging of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the rubber stamp approval of President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the United States Air Force started secretly spraying the forests of Laos with a deadly herbicide that was known as Agent Orange.Operation Ranch Hand, whose motto was “Only We Can Prevent Forests” (a shameful takeoff of Smokey the Bear’s admonition), was a desperate, costly and ultimately futile effort to make it a little harder for the National Liberation Front soldiers from North Vietnam to join and supply their ...
Whether the information originated from hacked e-mails and computer files or Freedom of Information Act requests, the revelations about the political and business activities of Hillary and Bill Clinton and their cronies hearken back to another era, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the crime spree of another unscrupulous couple: bank robbery desperados Bonnie and Clyde.Aside from Hillary Clinton running her own lucrative «off-the-books» foreign policy via her private email servers and e-mail chain of associates and flunkies, it was her and her husband’s joint Clinton Foundation and Teneo Capital operations that scream out the word «corruption.» The servers ...
