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Greek police, at the instigation of Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul, recently made an aggressive attempt to occupy the Orthodox monastery Esfigmenou, located on the territory of the autonomous monastic republic of Mount Athos. Their main objective was to forcefully eject the traditionalist monks who live and pray there. The secondary purpose of the raid was to create a pretext for permanently stationing Greek government forces in the proximity of each of the monasteries on the Athos peninsula. The disgraceful assault was a copy/paste replica of a similar operation that previously had been carried out by the Kiev regime against the monks of the Kiev Caves Lavra in Ukraine.

The analogies are striking and they go considerably further than mere eviction. In both instances the ultimate objective behind the unseemly attack on a peaceful religious community was to physically wrest it from legitimate users in order to transfer it to the control of another, illegitimate but cooperative group. In the Ukrainian case, the illegitimate beneficiary is the uncanonical Orthodox Church of Ukraine that was set up in 2018 following a questionable procedure improvised by the self-same Patriarch Bartholomew. On Mount Athos a few days ago, the intention behind the attempted takeover was to install in the vacated Esfigmenou monastery a small group of compliant monks professing allegiance to the Istanbul Patriarchate. So again we see here Bartholomew’s footprint.

Just as the outrage perpetrated by the Kiev regime against the Lavra received scant attention in Western mainline media, the same sources of “information” also remained conspicuously silent about the persecution of the Orthodox monks of Esfigmenou and the threatened invasion of their monastery by the Greek police.

There are two common threads that connect these events, the “Orthodox” Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul and NATO.

Bartholomew has aroused much opposition in the Orthodox world on account of his blatant promotion of ecumenism as well as a wide array of fashionable worldly causes, such as the “green agenda,” in which he has engaged. Those activities are viewed by many as undermining the dignity and uniqueness of the Orthodox faith, which it is the duty of his see in Istanbul to represent and defend. Equally disruptive of the tranquillity of the Orthodox communion has been Bartholomew’s increasingly strident advocacy of the globalist religious ideology, on which point he is fully in tune with the Vatican. Bartholomew’s tenure has also been marked by a policy of aggressive interference in the affairs of other autocephalous Orthodox Churches and attempts to centralise the Orthodox world under his auspices. An example of that is the arbitrary creation on the canonical territory of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine of a competing church organisation entirely dependent upon himself.

The ultimate objective of these manoeuvres is to elevate the Patriarch of Istanbul to the level of an “Eastern Pope.” He would subsequently merge his domain, consisting of formerly autocephalous Orthodox churches, with the structure headed by his counterpart at the Vatican. According to this plan, the implementation of which is intended to commence in 2025, both major communities of Christendom would in the end be subsumed as components of an overarching globalist religious entity, whilst being purged of their traditionalist elements. The synthetic new “religion of the future” clearly is on the drawing board. It was being promoted discretely, but now it is done with increasing openness. It will be configured to function comfortably and inoffensively in the dystopian world envisioned by globalist avatars such as Klaus Schwab and his “prophet” Yuval Harari.

The monks of Esfigmenou do not fit within this scheme. They have opposed those trends with great determination since the 1960s, declining to participate in the debasement of their ancient faith. They thus became a thorn in the flesh of Bartholomew, and his predecessors before him, for not bending the knee to hierarchs they regard as heretical and for the categorical refusal to show obeisance by commemorating them in their liturgies. Sooner or later, the decision to crush, “cancel”, and disperse those obstinate clerics was bound to be made and as we recently saw that is exactly what happened.

This however is an issue that goes well beyond the confines of an arcane ecclesiastical dispute. That is because the other major factor in this controversy is NATO, the mailed fist of the post-Christian collective West, of which Greece is an obedient member and Ukraine a dependency. The sacrilegious spectacle of the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games in France, also a member of NATO and imbued with the same aggressive neo-pagan spirit, suggests with remarkable clarity the identity of the occult master whom that spirit and its terrestrial instruments serve, in both Greece and Ukraine.

Churchly trappings and secular politics aside, the police invasion of Esfigmenou in NATO Greece was in direct retaliation for the monastery’s unyielding defence of the traditional faith. It can be understood only in the context of the intensifying opposition between traditional religion and its counterfeit occultist adversary. Identical considerations explain the Kiev regime’s incursion onto the sacrosanct territory of the ancient Orthodox Lavra, except that it was executed much more crudely, leaving even less ambiguity about its true background and nature.

But even though the Greek police raid on Mount Athos was called off at the last moment because of the intense protests of the Orthodox laity throughout Greece, the assault on Esfigmenou has merely been put on hold, not abandoned. The ultimate objectives behind the operation remain unchanged and they are essentially indistinguishable from the rationale for the Ukrainian regime’s takeover of the Kiev Lavra. The plan was for Greek police contingents to be stationed everywhere in the monastic republic of Athos after the raid to ensure “security,” whilst its autonomous status, guaranteed by international conventions, which even the Ottomans did not violate, was to be abrogated. The planners of the raid even went to the preposterous length of claiming that a Russian special forces unit had clandestinely taken up a position on the grounds of Esfigmenou monastery.

A religious complex of powerful spiritual significance such as Athos, comprising twenty large monasteries with ties to most Orthodox nations, guarding jealously the purity of the Orthodox faith, and for over ten centuries observing strictly the traditional rules of monastic life, has no place in the ominously emerging new Europe. It is incompatible on many levels with the globalist ideological concepts that are being ruthlessly implemented wherever resistance to their imposition is insufficiently strong to block it. And, of course, the earthly resources available to the monks of Esfigmenou to resist the forcible reformatting of their spiritual fastness, as to their co-religionists in Kiev, are between minimal and non-existent.

The powers that be and their ambitious collaborators within the church hierarchy are well aware of that correlation of forces, so unfavourable to the defenceless guardians of Orthodox tradition. NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg and several prominent Alliance generals are on record identifying the Orthodox Church as a formidable spiritual adversary in the current contest for global supremacy. It is therefore natural that its strongholds are being targeted, both physically and symbolically.

We already saw that principle at work in Ukraine when the Nazi junta, which does nothing on its own, acting without the consent of the legitimate church authorities, removed the bulk of the reliquary of the Kiev Lavra and shipped it off to the collective West for “safekeeping”, in a manner reminiscent of the sacking of Byzantium and its religious and artistic treasures by the Crusaders. As for Mount Athos, for some time prior to the most recent desecrations plans were being discussed to rescind its autonomy as a “relic of the past” and to incorporate it fully into the political system of Greece and thus also of NATO and the European Union. That would facilitate the imposition of EU precepts and regulations in order to fundamentally transform one of the major remaining enclaves of a religious tradition which is clearly incompatible with neo-pagan modernity.

The ultimate intention is to obliterate Athos by turning it into a religious theme park for tourists, where the monastics would be reduced to mere curiosities for the amusement of visitors, as were the Africans brought from the Congo and put on display in the “human zoo” staged at the World Fair in Brussels in 1958.

It would be fair to say that the mockery of human dignity made evident for that occasion in Brussels sixty years ago was but the precursor to the general moral and spiritual implosion that would soon follow to encompass the whole of Europe, now headquartered collectively also in Brussels, as well as the remainder of the Western world. That sad reality was reflected a few days ago in the deliberately selected maleficent imagery on display in Paris at the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games, from which Russia was fortunate to be excluded.

Tucker Carlson made a keen observation when he said that in the contemporary world most significant conflicts are essentially of a religious nature, suggesting that the malefactors are also acting in the service of a “god”, albeit a bogus one. Carlson hit the nail on the head. The ominously intensifying and increasingly public activity of the followers of the other “gods,” and their minions in high places, bears him out.