Restoring the nations

An important post by Alexander Mercouris describes important speeches by both President Putin and Defence Minister Shoigu in Moscow. As the title, Putin, Shoigu Pitch Russia as Main Opponent of Globalisation indicates, the Russian Government is now pitching itself squarely against the globalisation pushed by the WEF and the ever-mysterious “them,” which so many of us have come to see as a major threat, if not an end-times climax to history.

Briefly, for the first time Putin publicly identifies Russia’s enemy (and in his thinking, the enemy of the world) as a globalisation ideology being executed by Western elites, which because it is the conclusion I came to independently back in 2019, I consider to be confirmation of my views rather than disinformation. And if it is disinformation, it’s orders of magnitude more credible than our government’s disinformation. Incidentally, not long ago I dared, in a sermon, to express my view that Russia was, far from being the antichrist, the one powerful nation with a spiritual interest in holding him back, and I had a surprisingly positive response from several people.

As I start, bear in mind that these speeches were given for a Russian, primarily military, audience, and not for the West, which has censored all Russian output. They are therefore intended, primarily, to envision the Russian people, and particularly those people who have to fight in any wars. Russian politicians, unlike ours, are canny enough not to immerse their army in a complex tissue of lies they don’t believe themselves, which would be easily exposed in a real conflict. I’m sure the two speeches employ the rhetoric of emphasis, but not the mind-games we have come to experience in modern propaganda.

A few matters arise directly from these speeches. The first is that they lay to rest the suspicion that Putin is (as Klaus Schwab has in the past suggested) secretly an ally of the globalist cause. Moscow’s words directly contradict the WEF position, and its actions speak even louder than its words. There are clear signs of an evolution in Putin’s, and Russia’s, thought over the years, from the attempt after the collapse of the USSR to integrate with the West in a unified world, to profound disillusionment with it, to which I’ll return.

Although it is possible to point to the globalists’ exploitation of Russia’s recent political activities in furthering its agenda, it is hard to see the activity itself as other than hostile to globalism. For example, NATO’s fomenting of the Ukraine war and the imposition of sanctions were intended to destroy Russia as an impediment to the Great Reset, but also gave the globalists the opportunity to weaken the economic power of Europe and reduce the population and its moral resistance, in line with Schwab’s published aims and the UN’s Agenda 2030. But Moscow has throughout sought to mitigate the effects of the sanctions on the peoples of Europe, whilst necessarily defending its own interests.

The second and newest development is that Putin (and Shoigu) do not identify the West as their enemy, but only a small, if powerful, faction primarily within the West. In fact, their stress is all upon the right of all nations to follow their own development models, culture and customs, which globalism increasingly seeks to suppress – and who can argue from recent events that that is not the case? I find it interesting that recent speeches by Russian politicians make respectful allusions to the English literary heritage at a time when our own scholars are trying to cancel it. This perspicacity about the real villains is comforting, given that the British political establishment is singled out, after the USA, as the worst player in the game.

So Russia does not see the world in terms of rivalry between Eastern and Western blocs, but between globalists and nationalists: hence BRICS, not a new grouping incidentally, includes “right wing” Brazil and “left wing” South Africa among its founders. It also includes China, on which I must comment.

But first I want to return briefly to the spiritual dimension of all this, which is not mentioned by Mercouris, nor probably by Putin, because although the latter’s own views as an Orthodox believer on opposing the spirit of antichrist have been made known in the past, he represents in his speech a Russian Federation that is religiously pluralistic (Orthodox, Muslim and Buddhist). But one of the commenters on the thread, calling himself Sciagurrato, does make a connection with which I agree:

Christianity is despised by the atheist western elite, it is easy to smear Russia in the west. This a point that some people sense intuitively, but to discuss the importance of Christian (New Testament) belief underpinning Russian culture and leadership is very difficult in the controlled speech circumstances of US/Europe and their mimicry-satellites (Japan, S Korea etc).

Well OK, but what about Communist China? Sciaguratto suggests it has a genuine ideological parallel with Russia’s views as stated, despite our impression of the CCP as a repressive hangover from the Cold War days:

On the side of China, the beliefs are not Christian per se but very much arrive at the same understanding of the role of morality, sanctity and justice, through a complex belief of Buddhism and Confucianism. Of course, these ideas are quite alien to the non-Christian west…

…Russia represents what is left of the highest and best of western spiritual and cultural values, and China is its coeval in Asia. Despite its early fascination with the US, China under Xi has restored the culture of Confucianism and is revivifying its ancient moral precepts as foundations for human relations. Between these two powers, the remaining US satellites are irrelevant (even India is too much in disarray).

I’m truly not informed enough about the real situation in China to know how much of a pinch of salt to take with this opinion. On the one hand we have Hong Kong repression, extreme lockdowns, social credit systems and Uighur genocide. But on the other we have the fact that virtually all our information on these things comes from a Western media that has lied to us about everything else. Might it be true, for example, that Uighur terrorists were, like other Islamists, trained by the West to undermine China? If so, might the infamous camps be directly comparable to Guantanimo Bay rather than Auschwitz?

But even if Russia and China turn out to be uneasy bedfellows thrown together by the double-dealing of the West, as Churchill and Stalin were thrown together by Hitler, that need not alter the genuineness of Russia’s ambition to enable a multi-polar world which throws a large monkey wrench in the New World Order many of us have been fearing.

Let me add that the history of Russia does not preclude its now being a benign influence. Whilst all imperialism is morally ambiguous, many empires start out good and become corrupt, or vice versa. Rome began as a vigorous culture liberating nations from Seleucid oppression (see the books of Maccabees), became a stabilising, though cruel, force for civilisation, and finally degenerated into corruption. Russia under communism may have hoped to be the centre of a socialist world empire, but Bolshevism collapsed, Russia was abased, and many lessons were learned.

My conclusion is, as I have tentatively suggested in a recent post, that the conscious rise of Russia as the nemesis of The Great Reset, or whatever we choose to call it, makes it a great deal less likely that we are in the final days of apostasy and deception described in Scripture. If so, we are “merely” going through yet another of the periodic convulsons that sin has put into human history, as the spirit of antichrist, abroad in the world for two thousand years, brings periods of misery to tribes of sinful humanity.

This does not mean we are soon entering a Golden Age – utopias are the stuff of the globalist ideologues, not the Christians. No, this would be more a return to common grief of mankind, and we can handle that because it’s nothing new. For a start, whilst the blocking of a New Globalist Order might reawaken the possibility of escaping persecution by moving to where there is currently more light (one of the most depressing features of the COVID oppression was that there seemed nowhere to emigrate to!), it does not prevent the West becoming the kind of ideological prison that the Soviet Union was for 70 years and North Korea is now. We may yet own nothing, and be told we are happy: but rumours will still get through that in Delhi, or Durban, or Kazan, things are different.

Neither does it mean that the BRICS alternative is either perfect from its inception, or free from the possibility of becoming yet another global tyranny in the future. “The poor you will always have with you.” All powerful nations contain the seeds of their own downfall, and what better example can there be than the USA, whose astonishingly wise constitution has not prevented it from becoming the “Empire of Evil” in our time? Sooner or later, antichrist himself might indeed arise in Moscow or Beijing – but I don’t see that time as now, if only because their leaders are preaching against one world government.

Instead, it seems to me that those of us who have awakened to what has been poisoning our culture, and have been despairing of its reversal, now know that we have been given powerful allies elsewhere in the world. Who would have thought?

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About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.
This entry was posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology. Bookmark the permalink.

5 Responses to Restoring the nations

  1. Robert Byers says:

    It is, as I posted e;sewhere, a global opinion on this wat. tHe same ones who agree with inbasion/by way of sanctions in South Africa. no respect of boundaries there.
    It is a opinion of the elities of the world that russia is the bad guy. THEY ARE. Yet I say its because russia is overthrowing, in nations that matter, the dominance of a elite establishment called globalism. i say its not old fashioned opposition to invasion/killing of a innocent nation they oppose but oppose Russia DECIDING these things.
    Russia is bad and wrong INDEED but for the merits and not for a bigger sin of opposing collection opinion of left wing globalists.
    I suggest this is why the media is so weirdly distorting and gangbusters on fighting Russia. In facr the same attitude in the covid problem.
    In short I suspect if russia and Ukraine let the globalists to have decided these boundary issues, before the invasion, they happily would of said Russian speaking Ukrainians have a historic right to live separate from Ukraine and in Russia. no problem. nor is it the deaths by the invasion that matters. Its about whose moral will is to prevail in a new global world. THATS THE RUB. i strongly suspect this. Something is fishy abut the craze against the invasion eh.

    • Avatar photo Jon Garvey says:

      One thing I could have emphasised more in the OP is the “lesser of evils” aspect. Our experience with COVID, media censorship and cancellation, and the abundance of wars “we” started to get our way over small countries – as well as the stated aims of bodies like the WEF, UN and NATO – make the globalist project a potential reduction to serfdom of every nation in the world.

      Even if Russia were still the Soviet Union, suppressing its own people under a communist ideology (which it is not, once you disabuse yourself of the media spin), then having two evil empires competing prevents either one ruling the world, and furthermore keeps the ideas of freedom alive in both.

      On the actual comparison of the current “systems,” it is highly significant that Russia and China combined have 32 foreign military bases. The US and Britain have over 900! So who are the real warmongers?

      • Robert Byers says:

        I don’t agree bases equals warmongering. its about imposing ones will and in the post commie world america has done too much with the military. I don’t think you said America was a evil empire.
        I simply see a collective opinion amongst the left wing across nations imposing its will. on South Africa and Syria and now Russia and many mote I think its done due to general apathy of most citizens. Your blog does a good job of making a noise and I have confidence in the people. But they must be interested otherwiuse they slavly agree with the left wing and its media buddies.

  2. Peter Hickman says:

    ‘… antichrist himself might indeed arise in Moscow or Beijing – but I don’t see that time as now …’

    Jon, I’m aware from your writings that you hold a Futurist (as opposed to a Preterist) perspective of ‘the last times’ and so you see the antichrist as a person who has yet to be manifested and whose arrival will herald an imminent return of Christ. This post interests me because you, correctly I believe, identify a spiritual context to current events and this highlights the fact that the kingdom of God is ‘at hand’ in all manner of ways that we may fail to recognize.

    Christians sometimes trot out the old canard that ‘things are getting worse’ with little or no reference to history, particularly that of the last 150 years, or to contemporary facts ‘on the ground’. Clearly, even now, not everything is ‘worse’. As you referenced, civilizations have come and gone over the last few millennia, first flourishing, and then dying. We do not know how the current degeneration of Western civilization, as we perceive it, fits into the trajectory of God’s overview of history, past and future. It is possible that folk like us will be having a conversation like ours in a thousand years’ time.

    I’m conscious that I might be accused of being a ‘scoffer’ who says, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.’ No, that particular Scripture refers to people who are ‘willingly ignorant’. It is not ‘willingly ignorant’, even for a Futurist, to admit that we are incapable of correctly identifying ‘the times’ that we are in; indeed, given the innumerable failed past attempts to predict the return of Christ it behooves us to do so. It is somewhat different for Preterists, for whom the individual referred to in 1&2 John as the antichrist came and went long ago.

    • Avatar photo Jon Garvey says:

      Yes Peter

      To me it makes most sense that history has a trajectory towards the return of Christ, but the “already but not yet” aspect includes the opposition of Satan’s power (through John’s “spirit of antichrist”) throughout that time, but reaching a final climax – Jesus returns when the restraints to evil have been for a brief time, removed.

      That gives me the attention to current events that brings preparedness, with the sober realisation that every crisis before the last is, in that sense, a “false alarm.” I was much helped by the realisation that my own church, formed around 1650 in times of massive national crisis, built their praxis around an apocalyptic expectation that served them well, even though it proved in the end to be mistaken.

      The present turmoil begins to look as though it may be stopped in its tracks, or at least slowed… but history has a way of surprising us all, doesn’t it? As the old hymn says, “Live each day as if ’twere thy last” – and I think that includes having an eye on the geopolitical ball in a prophetic way.

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