Transcription
Did anyone else notice that the supreme leader of the orthobros is a Russian Orthodox walking clown emoji named Jay Dyer who uses Stalinesesque threats and intimides?
"What are the Stalinesque threats?" said that the orthobros only use theology as ballistics against the other. "Whoa, or this guy on a Substack said it. Orthobros ended. You can fight a Substack of anybody saying anything. Just funny to me. He didn't even take the time to check out who this guy was, like whether this was a solid source."
"But this is going to really help us understand the reality of the situation of the Soviet bishops, the KGB bishops. How extensive was this? How bad was it?"
The stupidest part of this though is that when you get the trats and the evangelicals who just sort of lobbed these criticisms at you without any knowledge of the subject matter, they've never read a single book on it. They don't know anything about the Cold War. They just out of hand think that everyone was a Soviet, as if every bishop and priest was a Soviet and they were all compromised. They were all, uh, told what to do or else they would go to the gulag. And that's not even close to what was actually going on. Turns out again, according to Western intelligence writers and historians, not according to KGB apologists.
And we also want to stress that, uh, I'm not a defender of the KGB or the NKVD or Stalin or anything like that. I'm trying to come at this with the best appraisal that I can. Obviously, I have my own beliefs and commitments. I can never entirely set apart my worldview from what's going on.
But it's also going to give us an a window into what was really going on with the World Council of Churches because this comes up all the time, uh, and legitimately so, as a stumbling block when people are criticizing different roles and relationships that theologians, pastors, bishops, jurisdictions have with the WCC.
Now, we know the WCC was created, funded largely with Rockefeller money. So there's absolutely a, uh, big oligarchical money play, uh, involved in taking the World Council of Churches, National Council of Churches and really turning it into an engine of ultimately what would what amounts to, uh, US or the oligarchical international elite that run the US, turning it into an engine for them. So they, they thought if we can create these supra-religious organizations, kind of like a religious version of the United Nations.
So, you'll notice the same thing that the Rockefellers are doing, putting their money into the UN. They actually donated the land for the United Nations. Uh, they helped put massive amounts of money into it over the years. After the League of Nations failed, they came back with round two, Empire Strikes Back, with with the United Nations.
So, the thinking is, let's create an ecumenical movement. That's why humanism is once again a geopolitical project. Even perhaps nowadays, even above theology. I actually think that it's not even the theology that's the driving force. Maybe back in the 1800s when you started to have these ecumenical meetings with Anglicans, branch theory proponents, and, uh, some Greek Orthodox, they had some meetings in the late 1800s. I've been reading some books on that. Back in 2008, I was reading Greek, I was reading some Greek systematic theologies and Greek theologians talking about these early meetings with Anglicans and people like Methodius Fuyas, who's a lesser-known Greek Orthodox systematic theologian. Others were talking about these meetings back in the 1800s, and they didn't really produce much. They were kind of ineffective. And perhaps at that, I mean, even perhaps then at that time, there was, you know, British imperial geopolitical designs between these types of meetings. Perhaps the British wanted to get the Greeks, uh, on board with them in regard to the, you know, struggles that they were having with the Ottomans, with the Turks before the Ottomans collapsed. That could play into that.
But perhaps, let's say for the sake of argument, that even then it was largely theologically driven and not geopolitically driven. Nowadays, I don't think that's the case. I don't think that the driver for ecumenism, especially since you had the ecumenical victory in the Roman Catholic world after Vatican II, they pretty much solidified the Vatican to be 100% for 70 plus years, a major engine of the same types of ecumenical mind fops as the World Council of Churches, National Council of Churches were intended to be. This great big Christian community, this big tent Christianity, which is not at all what exists in the first thousand years of Christianity, unfortunately, ends up being, I would argue, just again, largely geopolitical. It's it's really nothing to do with theology. Theology is kind of secondary as a means of kind of getting people on board with usually just some form of liberalism, right?
So we have to understand that this also relates to Laruslon and God logic and IP, not directly but indirectly, because they're all by default some form of ecumenical. And in the background, we will absolutely know and and expect to see money coming from sources that will push people in those directions, right? Whatever's going on with Rouson's fake denomination, whatever's going on with, uh, whoever Middle Eastern country funds David Woods' stuff or whatever, there's a consistent pattern of geopolitical and political background machinations that likes the idea of those things being pushed, not just in the West, but as a form of Americanism. And that's what we're going to see because a lot of this is going to play into the World Council of Churches and the relationship of the Moscow Patriarchate to the WCC, the other bishops, their relationship to the WCC, and what, uh, both the CIA and the KGB wanted to do with the World Council of Churches. Both of them thought, "We could utilize this. We can kind of maneuver this and run this to our advantage."
The Soviets, who did have in many ways a liberal progressive idea about things, specifically in the religious domain, they thought, "Well, we can use this as ultimately a tool of Soviet soft power." Well, guess what? The CIA, especially with the Rockefeller help and funding behind both the OSS, CIA, and the World Council of Churches, they also thought, "We can use this as an engine of soft power for Americanism." Right? So it really kind of becomes, in a way, a Cold War battleground. But it's really, I think, unfair to characterize it as a Soviet playground because it ends up being dominated for the most part, still, um, just by Western liberal interests. And that would that would that's not primarily Soviet interests.
So when I say Soviets had some liberal ideas, I'm not talking about like gay stuff. Um, the Soviet line of argumentation throughout the Cold War, uh, was typically that the West is imperialist. It's racist and colonialist. And it's a little bit correct because when they're calling it racist, they're actually referring to the biological determinism of the British Empire and its, uh, evolutionary, you know, T.H. Huxley, Huxley Darwin, you know, social Darwinism view, because that's the view that was akin to, you know, tiny mustache man's race theory, which said Serbians, Slavs, they're lesser humans. They're lesser races. So that's part of what motivates the Soviet response to the West. However, it's also disingenuous because Russia was an empire. Russia was imperialist, right? Russia had an aristocracy. Russia had a Tsar. It had a monarchy. And so even the Soviets, with the banner of a kind of progressivism, although it wasn't Western neoliberalism, they, they still had elements of what we could call cultural or social liberalism, which is why, for example, if I recall, I think even still under Stalin, anti-semitism was still a crime. It was still punishable. Uh, and of course, that's unclear. It's not exactly defined what counts as that, just like racism as a crime is unclear what. But this is why all the boomers think of racism as a communist thing because many of the Soviets did utilize that in their, uh, their ideological warfare or their active measures type stuff when they sought to infiltrate Uniates, Papacy, World Council of Churches, Ro, you name it, they would, they would try to utilize that line of argument. But the Soviets themselves, especially, you know, with with Stalin, I mean, obviously, they were also seeking a form of empire. So, everybody is imperial. That's the thing that we, I think, we want to realize here is like, world powers, they're never going to not be imperial.
But the West decided that their strategy during the Cold War would be, "We're against the evil atheist empire, and we have freedom." So, Western neoliberalism comes under the guise of economic and sexual freedom, cultural freedom, cultural liberalism, libertarianism. Soviet anti-Western Cold War ideology comes under the anti-liberal, anti-imperial approach. And that's what a lot of people don't understand, especially boomers, trats. Like when they hear, "Soviet, oh, you're a lib, you're a liberal." No, actually, Sovietism is anti-liberal, especially under Stalin. For example, Stalin, uh, when he was, you know, reigning, it was part of the Soviet party's line, you can't be gay. So, the Soviets were anti-gay in their official party statements under Stalin. Now, the reason for that, that doesn't mean there weren't gay Soviets. It just means that, uh, they understood that you could easily be compromised, especially if you're in a high, high-tier position. And the KGB and the NKVD were very skilled at compromising, uh, gay people in the West. So the West's strategy in response to that was, "That's why we got to be pro-gay, right?" In other words, if we're going to be against the Soviet objectivism, Soviet cosmism, Soviet realism, and the Soviet anti-gay stance, we're going to have to be pro-Skittles. We're going to have to be pro-liberation, pro-libertarianism. And what's wild is that that's still kind of going on today. Thus, when the West does a regime change, a coup operation in said countries, you immediately get the gay pride marches. You get the, uh, Skittles butt stuff, right? And but that doesn't make Soviet atheism good. It just means there's a false dialectic at work. Exactly. So, understand the Cold War requires a little more sophistication than buying into the low-level, um, false choices that most people fall into.
As we pointed out many times, if we think about the Yuri Bezmenov talks and the clips that always go around every few years, they go viral. Yuri Bezmenov was a low-level defector who, when he defected, did those talks with G. Edward Griffin, which still get clipped and go around. But you never see the rest of the talk where he says that the CIA is doing a great job, uh, promoting gay rights in Russia and the, and the Soviet bloc countries. They always leave that part out. But that's exactly why he's the mouthpiece of the CIA, is pushing the CIA's line of Cold War economic and sexual liberation and artistic art revolution. This is why the CIA throughout the Cold War, especially with Francis Stonor Saunders' work in terms of the cultural, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, that's why they were pushing postmodern art, modern art, Warhol, Jackson Pollock, um, who's the, Andy Warhol. That's funny. Yeah. So, they were pushing all those guys as well as, uh, weird music. Um, perhaps even New Wave music. Yeah.
"Uh, I asked you to come to to do a debate or..."
"So, you do want to have a conversation now?"
"Yeah."
"I mean, to friendly evangelist, can you tell me why the word 'fuck' is a bad word and the word 'poop' is a good word? I like, I love to hear the, the solid scholastic argument from a Protestant on that."
"Yeah, we can have a conversation. Sure."
So, we're talking about the Metrokin Archive. To get into this, uh, I'm I'm getting too rambly here. Let's get back to the to the point at hand. I want to give thanks to Matthew Nami because he runs the Orthodox History blog, and he's really detailed a lot with more recent stuff in terms of the these Greek Orthodox priests who are very close to the Democratic Party, the Archons. They're very close to the Ecumenical Patriarchate. This is a big point in terms of understanding why the Greeks are so liberal and why, uh, they're so intimately connected to the Democratic Party. A lot of which has to do with the Greeks being immigrants. Um, you know, culturally they're Orthodox. They think that, oh well, the Democrats are, they're for the working people, and the Republicans are the, you know, rich WASPs, right? So that's the history of why they fell into being in the in these circles. But, um, he points out one of the key figures is this guy, uh, Father Alexander, I think his name is Alexander Karlouts, uh, who was a super duper close BFF with Biden. Here he is with, uh, here he is getting medals from Biden. So these people are really just adjuncts of the Democratic Party. A lot of the Greeks, unfortunately, a lot of the really prominent high-tier, uh, Greek people and polit and theologians, uh, even, uh, Romanes was an adamant Democratic Party lifelong member and supporter.
So this article that he did about Stalin's revival of the Moscow Patriarchate is where we're going to begin our story because remember, in, uh, the 19, right after the revolution in Russia, the 1920s and '30s, there was a pretty strict policy of destroying the churches. So there were thousands and thousands of churches destroyed by the the early Bolsheviks after the revolution. The churches were persecuted, thousands of priests, uh, were killed. Many sent to gulags. I'm sure we've all heard this story. So I'm not going to rehearse all that, but we're going to de, we're going to begin our story with 1943.
And if you remember the talks that we did when we talked about Alexandra Kollontai, you know, she was this woman who was a very early pioneer of feminism. She was all about open love, open marriages, full total equality of the sexes. She was the Bolshevik appointee for family, uh, in the, in the Bolshevik government, and her policies were so bad. There were so many, uh, children born from single mothers, and this, the children that were born of the single mothers ended up being thugs, and they were in, there was so much organized crime that Stalin said, "All right, we got to, the whole country's going to collapse from the Bolshevik policies if we don't put a hold on it." This, however, I'm not saying this is right, but this is why some people in Russia still look positively towards Stalin, right? They still think of him as, well, he at least helped Russia not totally collapse. I'm not saying that this is good. I'm just saying this is their line of reasoning that, uh, he knew enough to not take the Marshall Plan aid, which was the West's trap for him. And when he didn't take that aid, that of course kicks off the Cold War. That leads to the national security memorandums by various, uh, State Department and, uh, National Security Council people who write up the doctrine of the Cold War. Nitze and George Kennan and these characters who write these new doctrines that would start the Cold War in the West. But if Stalin had not taken that money, if he had taken that money, he would have been on the hook to the West, right? So he was kind of put in a position where he was forced to either be subservient to the West or position himself to not take the Marshall Plan aid and then go into a Cold War. So that's what kicks off the Cold War.
And one thing I have to, we have to remember is that both sides are essentially atheistic, and that's what a lot of boomers don't get. Yes, there were many people in the West amongst the Cold Warrior field who were Protestants, evangelicals, Roman Catholics, Orthodox. I'm not saying that everyone in the Cold War was atheist. I'm saying that the driving ideology of the West with its libertarian open market capitalism was still essentially an Enlightenment atheist position. It's Enlightenment liberalism. And they're positioned against a version of Marxism, not classical Marxism, but Soviet bloc Marxism, Stalinism, which was anti-liberal. Okay, does that make sense?
But the words liberal and anti-liberal are so confused and so misunderstood. And essentially what we think of think of as liberal, oh, that's AOC. Oh, that's, you know, Peter Singer, right? That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about Enlightenment classical liberalism as the ethos of the West versus Soviet objectivism and the Stalinist doctrine that's guiding the NKVD in the Cold War. And those two things are opposed. That's why when you read actual, you know, white papers and intelligence analysis, they will talk about how the CIA was not right-wing, it was just anti-Soviet. But being anti-Soviet doesn't make you conservative, doesn't make you paleocon, doesn't make you any of those things. That's why most of the heads of the CIA were actually liberals. They were either adherents of Fabian socialism or some form of socialism, progressivism, or perhaps maybe a few libertarians in there. But on the whole, uh, I'm not really aware of any, maybe you could call William Casey, uh, a right-wing tadcat. I don't, maybe William Casey, but for the most part, except under Reagan, none of these CIA directors, national intelligence directors, they're not actually conservatives or right-wingers. And that's one of the things you have to kind of understand when you're reading through the literature because a lot of the literature about this stuff is written by people who are, uh, classical progressives or leftists or liberals. Very few, there's a few right-wingers that write on this stuff. The Owen Ratu book, I mean, he's a consistent right-winger. And of course, his book is one of the best because he understands the bigger picture of it, but there's just not a whole lot of far-right people that actually write on these subjects. It ends up being dominated by academic, uh, liberal types. Usually, not always. I mean, the Wim Hof book is a is a notable exception to this to this field.
But so Stalin realizes, okay, we got to stop the brakes on this degeneracy or else the country is going to collapse. So I don't believe that Stalin instituted these revival of Russia policies out of any kind of like legitimate, like theology. He wasn't repenting. Um, he was just doing it. It's pure pragmatism. And so Stalin gets the idea that instead of trying to destroy all the churches, this is an unrealistic, ridiculous position. And in fact, we need the church, he thought, as a kind of moral guide given the decades of Bolshevik degeneracy. So Stalin begins a massive project to rebuild, uh, with the NKVD's help, uh, many of the churches throughout Russia. He also gets the idea that the Moscow Patriarchate should be reestablished. So there's actually a period where there was a destruction, a vacancy of the Moscow Patriarchate, and, uh, as it's revived, he decides that we actually need to have people in the World Council of Churches, not just as, uh, voices, but also people in as subverters and infiltrators. So rather than the hardline stance of, uh, Trotsky and Lenin, infiltration and subversion was a, a much better practical approach, he thought, because how are you going to stamp out everybody's religious beliefs, right? I mean, it's just kind of to think that we're going to have the workers rise up and we're going to kill all the religious people in the world. I mean, it's just crazy, right? But I mean, the early, you know, Lenin-era people were insane, demonically possessed ideologues. So Stalin realized that it'd be much more effective to try to position the Moscow Patriarchate as a soft power tool for the NKVD or for the KGB.
By 1960, um, many people, uh, were actually unaware of this very heavy presence of the NKVD in the Russian Orthodox Church and in the Moscow Patriarchate. And thus, that's when we begin to see, I think, in 19, it's either 1960, 1962, the Moscow Patriarchate joins the World Council of Churches. Uh, many Russian Orthodox bishops that were in the Soviet Union also, uh, joined the the WCC as well, and they were closely aligned with the KGB. So particularly the ones joining the World Council of Churches are the ones that are closely aligned with, uh, the KGB throughout not just Russia, but also presumably the Soviet bloc states.
One of the key figures, uh, in this period is the controversial figure of, uh, Metropolitan Nicodem. Yeah. So Metropolitan Nicodem is the Metropolitan of Leningrad and Novgorod from 1963 until his death. He was born in West Russia, ordained in 1960, youngest bishop in the world at that time. And he went on to become one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches. Yes, this is him.
According to the Metrokin Archive, uh, which claimed that many of the Russian bishops had been positioned as the KGB, his ecumenical activities with the Roman Catholic Church and the WCC were actually serving the Soviet goals. Uh, according to the archives, his codename is Siasttoslav. Nicodem participated in negotiating the secret 1960 agreement with the Soviets and the Vatican in regard to the authorization of Orthodox participation in the Second Vatican Council in exchange for the non-condemnation of atheism during Vatican II.
And this is also the guy who's present when John Paul I died. And this has led some people, some conspiracy people, to think that the KGB killed John Paul I. They would have no motives to kill him when John Paul I was also, uh, of a mind to not condemn Soviet atheism. Nicodem collapsed and died in 1978 while he was in Rome, uh, for the con, for the, excuse me, he was the one that was poisoned. I take that back. He, he was poisoned and died in Rome apparently when John Paul I was coronated, and that's also, what is it, 32 days later, 33 days later, John Paul I is assassinated or he dies under suspicious circumstances. So both the Soviet KGB Bishop Nicodem dies within one month of John Paul I's assassination, which is pretty wild. Uh, who exactly did this, why it was done, I don't know. It's it's unclear. But, um, the obviously there's some high geopolitical machinations going on there. I mean, how do you have like the KGB Metropolitan and the Pope both dying in Rome within 32, 33 days of each other? I mean, that's crazy.
Also, by the way, his predecessor was Patriarch Pimen. I want to say that he was also, he comes up in this chapter as also, uh, one of the bishops that the KGB was was using. Let me make sure that's right because, yeah, so before you had Nicodem, and his task was, uh, to be the bishop, the first Metropolitan, I think, during the officially atheist Soviet party. Uh, no, that can't be right because he would be after the guy who Stalin reestablished. Let me see who, who his predecessor is. Alexi I. Okay, so Alexi I. This is when Stalin is beginning to revive the Moscow Patriarchate, which had been destroyed for a while under the Bolsheviks. And then we get Pimen I, near the end of his difficult term as head of the Russian Orthodox Church. He organized celebrations for the Christianization of Rus. And I want to say that, we'll look at the notes here.
By 1962, the Soviets had achieved operatives that were present in the Armenian Church, the Russian Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and presumably also Protestant churches abroad. So, uh, we don't know still, I don't think, exactly how how deep that penetration was. Uh, people are still sort of rummaging through declassified things and figuring out things, even, even up to this day. We're learning new things from archives and declassifications about how deep it might have been. We don't know exactly, but, um, it's particularly the figure of Nicodem that we want to focus on because Nicodem becomes such an important role in terms of global geopolitics over these previous dudes. And Nicodem is the first one who, because he was so young, it was precisely because the NKVD was behind him that he rose so, so fast.
One of the things that they really pushed at the World Council of Churches at this time, and this was not unique to the, the Soviets. This was the World Council of Churches' actual doctrine. Get this. Early on in the 1960s, was their whole goal was to end racism. I didn't know Jesus set up a church whose goal was to end racism. But the World Council of Churches' official goal in 1960 was to end racism.
So, let's look real quick at that because remember, the World Council of Churches is not set up by the Soviets. It is not set up by the KGB. The World Council of Churches is set up out of the ecumenical movement by the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910, together with the former Patriarch of Constantinople Germanos V. So this is the Ecumenical Patriarchate, together with Protestant missionaries in Edinburgh, together with Episcopalians, together with the Church of Sweden. All these now totally gay churches. Its official establishment was actually deferred until after World War II, or excuse me, because of the outbreak of World War II. Eventually, we had delegates of 147 churches met in Amsterdam to merge the Faith and Order Movement with the Life and Work Movement. So these are all Protestant missionary movements that are the basis of it. Subsequently, the International Missionary Council, 1961, and the World Council of Christian Education, the Sunday school movement. By the way, a lot of these people were also Fabian Socialists. So that's not NKVD. That's Western-promoted socialism as a Fabian Socialist. Many of these people in these groups were actual Fabian Socialists. And eventually, the World Council of Churches joined together with the World Evangelical Alliance. Uh, at this stage, though, for whatever reason, Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons were forbidden, which is funny because like, well, on what basis are all of these other people allowed, but not, but not these? Uh, Oriental Orthodox also joined. Assyrian Church of the East joined. Um, many of the, uh, Orthodox churches, unfortunately, also joined. And the idea was that we can all come together in a big church movement that's not primarily, um, KGB-run, but actually was Western intelligence founded and funded, but began to be infiltrated, and Soviets and NKVD people began to eventually get very prominent, powerful positions, even chairing the World Council of Churches.
The human rights abuse. And one of the reasons that they wanted to do this was that the CIA was using the, um, World Council of Churches as a means during the Cold War to consistently condemn the abuses of the Soviet Union. So the Soviets saw that they were getting a lot of bad press and a lot of, um, public opinion was being swayed against the Soviets via the ecumenical World Council of Churches. So they thought, "Well, we got to have some people in there. We got to try to use this." And so that's why Stalin changed the position and began to try to see it as a tool. Christopher Andrew says that during the Cold War, many important World Council of Churches representatives of the Orthodox Church from Eastern Europe were actually part of the NKVD, the KGB, and they were beginning to influence the policy of the World Council of Churches. That makes perfect sense.
From 1955 to '58, uh, they were actually preparing to address a disarmament doctrine about nuclear war. By the way, disarmament also means eventually, it's a tool also for world government, right? So when the UN talks about disarmament, oh well, that's just because we don't want nukes. Well, that was a tool that was being used to also disarm and basically tear down the borders of every country. And that's why when you read Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes, and it talks about disarmament, they're talking about getting rid of guns, getting rid of borders. The document argues for open borders, chain migration, etc. All the stuff that Pope Leo says today. So you understand that the Soviet dialectic with the West is what ends up producing these synthesis organizations like the World Council of Churches, which are which are putting out something that is neither fully Western liberal capitalism nor fully Soviet. It's a perfect dialectical synthesis. It's a Hegelian synthesis of the dialectic. But this is happening at the religious level, right? Just like the United Nations is doing this at the political level, the World Council of Churches is doing the same synthesis at the geopolitical level. But because people don't know this and they don't know the history in the books and all that, everybody gets tripped up and they think, "Oh, that was a Soviet thing. Oh, that was a Western Rockefeller thing." No, it's both. It's a both thing.
In 1961, the 32-year-old bishop named Alexi, later elected Russian Patriarch in 1990, Alexi II, was at the conference, and the Romanian Metropolitan Eustathius was also sent as a delegate of the Romanian Patriarchate. Now, on the one hand, the state like attending a theological conference or a debate is not a big deal. The original ecumenical movements, like when you had, uh, the Anglicans meeting with the Greeks in the 1800s, these were about probably actual theological dialogue, at least that's the way they're described. And the original ecumenical movement came out of missionary work, but very wealthy, very powerful, cunning people, power block-minded people, and people from the state, they understood that, no, this actually can be a great tool, especially during the Cold War. And so there's this battle within the World Council of Churches, which I have to say, if you don't remember the Ratu book, Wim Visser 't Hooft was the British intelligence, and he was one of the key figures running the World Council of Churches for many years. He helped set it up. So again, Western intelligence, British intelligence played a key role in this. And if you remember from our talk the other night when we discussed Bonhoeffer, Bonhoeffer's role as a double agent was also only possible because of his ecumenical work because Bonhoeffer was a massive mega-ecumenist. He was able to go and meet with all of these other religious people, uh, under the guise of, you know, telling German military intelligence that he worked for, he said, "Oh, see, I'm just an ecumenist. So this is just part of my religious stuff, my religious beliefs." But then he's going and meeting with, uh, the Bishop, Bishop of Chichester in England because he's passing German secrets to British intelligence. So he's doing to try to take down tiny mustache man. So he's using ecumenism as a cover, just as many of these Soviet bishops are using ecumenism as a cover as well.
So are you, you beginning to see that that this is, it's not all good, all bad. Okay? And anybody telling you that everybody's all good or everybody's all bad, that's not how reality in life actually is, okay? It's much more complicated, much more complex than that. But from the outset, both Western liberals and Soviets sought to utilize the World Council of Churches and turn it to their own power block's designs as a means of soft power, as a means of, uh, social influence in the world. High-level KGB operatives placed, uh, themselves in the World Council of Churches over these years. In fact, they even helped run World Council of Churches policy at certain points. The KGB focused on the WCC because they wanted to turn the organization into a tool of anti-Western ideology. If they could make the WCC soft on the Soviets, they could even then perhaps turn it to be, uh, pro-Soviet at a certain point. And this is what leads a lot of the CIA and Western-minded analysts to say, "Aha, look, the whole thing is Soviet." Well, that's partly true. Um, for example, there was a famous monastic who was named, I can't even read my writing. Yetsen, Yesatsko. He was a monk that the Soviets sent to the World Council of Churches as a representative. So you understand too that, um, both East and West, they were not opposed to utilizing, uh, monks. They were not opposed to utilizing Protestant preachers. Um, I'm not even going to try to spell this guy's name, but many of the Russian Orthodox clergy, uh, actually during this period, though, were not atheist. So, it's it's a mistake to think that all the clergy in the Soviet Union or the Soviet bloc countries were necessarily atheist. And this is a key point that's going to get to, if you remember the point that Metropolitan Jonah made when we did our interview, which was that the, uh, Soviets eventually decided to come up with a three-tiered system of how to classify various members of the clergy. And this is another point that a lot of people miss.
Really, the KGB, now this is a very important point. Listen to what I'm saying here. Just like the Western intelligence operatives, they're going to operate the exact same way with this point. And this is very relevant for today, too. Okay? Okay, so remember what I'm telling you right now is not just Cold War stuff. This is very relevant for today for right now. They were not primarily concerned with most of the clergy. First of all, the average parish priest, they didn't really care about. That was not a big deal to them. The NKVD was mainly concerned with high-level prelates with a lot of power. So primarily obviously the Moscow Patriarchate or the Ecumenical Patriarchate or any of the other major Patriarchates. The CIA also very, very concerned with the Moscow Patriarchate. And as we know from declassified cables that Matthew Nami has, uh, has highlighted over on his website, we know that for example, uh, the mega-ecumenist Patriarch Athenagoras, who had the famous meetings with Paul VI to say that there was no longer a division between East and West, was a, uh, rabid, subservient devotee of the OSS and the cables between him and the Truman administration have been out. We've cited that, shared that, I don't know how many times. "Your directives at the OSS will be faithfully executed by the Mo, by the Ecumenical Patriarchate." Right? So throughout the Cold War, the Ecumenical Patriarchate was 100% uh, it appears, on board with the CIA and under the CIA's, uh, purview. The Moscow Patriarchate throughout the Cold War, it's not as cut and dry because some of the figures during the Cold War in the Stalinist period and then later under Brezhnev and Andropov and Gorbachev, like there's varying degrees of the Moscow Patriarchate's and their subservience to or desire to placate the KGB. In the KGB's classification system, there was only a minority that were totally opposed to the Soviets or KGB. This made up about 15 to 20% of the clergy. Many of the most of the Russian Orthodox clergy were not atheist, but the only ones that were persecuted and oppressed ended up being this 15 to 20% minority of priests and bishops. These are the ones that absolutely refused the KGB and would not participate or wouldn't just keep their head down. The KGB, however, didn't care about most of these people, but their main targets were high-level bishops and hierarchs. They saw that as the the key people to control. And, uh, a lot of people point out as well that for many people on the clergy side, they didn't really see this as a huge issue because under the Tsars, the church was still kind of seen as a supportive pro-state institution. So many of the clergy thought, "Well, there's not a lot that I can do as a parish priest if now we have this new Stalin guy who's, you know, going to at least build the churches. I'm just going to keep my head down and focus on my, uh, my flock and I'm not going to worry too much about what's happening in Moscow." So again, remember Russia is a giant country. So the idea that like everybody and all the priests and all the people were secretly atheists is just, it's not reality. And again, it's only a minority of the clergy that were amongst tons of bishops that were actually these KGB operatives. The KGB ones are the really, really high-placed moles in the very important positions.
In fact, John Paul I admired Nicodem. They were actually apparently friends. Now, I'm not saying that means anything because we don't care about the Papacy. But if Roman Catholics want to get all feisty and sassy and act like, you know, they're the, it's like, well, your Pope who got murdered was a huge fan of Nicodem. So, like, what does that mean for your church, dude?
Now, amongst the categories, there's these three. The first category that the NKVD had for, uh, Russian Orthodox clergy was people that they considered patriots that were fully obedient to the state and would not engage in open evangelism. If you praised the leaders and if you didn't try to push Orthodoxy, uh, they would just let you be. And so there was a strata of them, and this would be people like Patriarch Alexi, Patriarch Pimen. And, uh, I'm not so Nicodem actually isn't even in that category. The KGB had a second category, which was people who were still loyal to the state and they would be obedient to the state, but they still pushed the church and tried to promote it. Now, I'm not saying that Nicodem is a good guy, but, uh, because he seems to be pretty ecumenical, but they actually didn't classify Nicodem as the first category. They put him in the second category as loyal to the state, obedient, even being put in position by the KGB, but he still pushed the church. So, even he didn't make it into the first category. And then the third category that they had was, uh, priests and bishops who were disobedient, but they were tolerated. Uh, there was a famous priest in this category named Father Yakunin. And again, they didn't really care about parish priests apparently as much as they did, uh, much as they did the, uh, high-level bishops. I think this is, yeah, Gleb Yakunin, Russian priest and dissident who fought for the principle of freedom of conscience in the Soviet Union. He was a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group and he was elected to a member of the Supreme Soviet of Russia, State Duma. Uh, interestingly, he was actually classed by the KGB as a dissident, but apparently was, I guess, tolerated. He might have ended up arrested at some point. I'm not sure. Gleb Yakunin was a member of this, uh, committee created for the investigation of the Soviet coup of 1991, chaired by Lev Ponomarev. He gained access to KGB archives, published materials about, uh, Moscow Patriarchate and KGB. He actually published several names of the agents high in high-ranking positions. He was defrocked by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1993. So eventually they decided that he was becoming a problem. Yakunin organized the Democratic Choice of Russia political alliance that called for, that was called by President Yeltsin. So he might have actually been a Western operative because we know that Yeltsin was the, the Western CIA chosen person after the fall of the Soviet Union. So even though they tolerated this guy for a long time, apparently he probably was a Western operative, but, um, you, you see the point here is that there's, there's levels and there's strata and there's, there's nuance that's obviously not all black and white.
The World Council of Churches though at this time, interestingly enough, was way ahead of things because they were pushing the woke agenda. This is what's crazy. The World Council of Churches, as as I was reading this chapter, I couldn't help but realize a lot of what's being pushed at the World Council of Churches is literally just woke stuff, but way ahead of the woke. And I think this shows us that the World Council of Churches was always essentially, uh, just a leftist institution. I mean, you go to the WCC right now and you just see, you know, diversity, gay bishops, like they're pushing for, uh, pretty much all the agendas of the Western power elite. So they might every now and then make a statement that we agree with, but so what? I mean, the Papacy does that too. But I think what's, what's most interesting about the World Council of Churches is that it's a Western operation that nowadays basically is just essentially a, a leftist woke, um, mouthpiece. That's it.
Um, there were other figures at the WCC who were very prominent Western operatives against the Soviets. One of these, uh, characters was Dr. Philip Potter. This black dude, uh, he was a Methodist guy who chaired the World Council of Churches from 1972 to 1984, and my guess would be that he, at the behest of Western intelligence, was pretty consistently pushing, uh, anti-Soviet ideas. Dr. Potter was a major promoter against Russia. He was involved in the Helsinki Accords and he was a major world leader and figure in ending apartheid in ending racism. So you'll notice Methodism, the Methodists have for many many years essentially been an arm of woke leftism, right? The, and you could say liberation theology ties into this. It's it's essentially all just a tool that the World Council of Churches is using. But the Soviets also tried to utilize liberation theology. Both East and West sought to latch on to liberation theology as a as a way to have either Western liberalism or Soviet, uh, non-liberal progressivism as the as the ideology of the future.
So let's look at the Helsinki Accords because they play a key role in this as well. The Helsinki Accords were a landmark 1975 Cold War agreement signed by 35 nations. Isn't it interesting that you got this black woke World Council of Churches Methodist man who's playing a key role in Soviet Soviet pacts? Why is some black dude from the World Council of Churches playing this key role? Aiming to ease East-West tensions. This non-binding pact recognized post-World War II European borders and committed signatories to respect human rights, fundamental freedoms, and economic cooperation. That means Western ideas. So human rights, that's always the the cloak, uh, that the West, CIA uses for their operations, NGO type stuff. The freedoms, freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, religious liberty, that's really important because this is a key point to understand why Vatican II was so important for this as well. Remember, religious liberty is the thing that everybody forgets, which is not just a Reformation teaching, it's a huge element of the Cold War scope against the Soviets. The CIA latches massively onto religious liberty, freedom of worship, freedom of conscience as a means of undermining, uh, perception about the Soviet Union. The agreement was signed in 1975, the conclusion of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Helsinki, Finland. This framework was divided into, uh, basic areas of baskets. This is super stupid and gay. Basket number one is security. Uh, Europe's post-World War II boundaries should be respected and national sovereignty. So in other words, not Soviet, not internationalism. Basket two, economic, except it's Western internationalism using the countries as fronts. Basket number two, economic cooperation, free trade, industrial collaboration. Uh, that's again Western neoliberal open markets. Basket number three, human rights. That's the CIA NGO cover. Obligated nations respect human rights. Freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, freedom of movement, freedom of action. And basket number four, implementation, establishing procedures for, uh, future meetings and follow-ups.
So, this didn't really do anything, but it was sort of a historical signpost that people were, uh, buying into the Western ideas about the problems of the Soviet Union. So, that in other words, the West was beginning to win the ideological Cold War at this point. Um, even though this didn't really technically do anything, it signifies, uh, the beginning of the end of the Soviet ideological, uh, failures. This organization, this meeting actually laid the groundwork for future human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch. These also became vital to undermine the Soviet regimes and Soviet governments throughout the Cold War. So here you go, right here. So you can begin to see that these types of meetings are obviously organized for geopolitical reasons, right? Woke black ecumenical theologians, they're not there because of theology. They're there for CIA soft power in the Cold War. Obviously, today, this framework, uh, established the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, that is now based in Vienna. Uh, so it still continues on in terms of the, uh, human rights organizations, which are all just cutouts and fronts for intelligence stuff and for, uh, their influence operations type stuff.
So, uh, humanism ends up being a battleground for both the CIA and the KGB throughout the Cold War. The KGB, however, did not end, uh, up winning this battle. Obviously, I think you could look at the internal logical contradictions with Soviet anti-liberalism when ecumenism is actually premised on total theological and ecclesial liberalism. So, how are you going to have a Soviet anti-liberal ideology, but you're going to try to take over liberal ecumenism, right? It's just it's just not really going to work. In fact, the West began to position itself during this period to begin to push for various schisms in Soviet bloc countries and in Russia. This going to be very important for where we get up to the point of the Ukraine schism and the other countries where the West and the CIA are pushing for schism. The West sought to cause schism especially within the Russian Church and within churches in Russia, not just the Orthodox Church, but even amongst the Uniates and even reformed Baptists and Protestants that were in Russia. The Soviets responded with what they called active measures against ideological subversion. So the Soviet response was to oppose the attempt at schism with active measures, and they, the SCD or the FCD or what's called the Fifth Directorate. These are three different groups amongst Soviets tasked with targeting church subversion. So they actually established the Fifth Directorate to focus on church subversion because they figured out that people like Father Gleb Yakunin, other key dissidents, uh, would be used very heavily to subvert, uh, the Soviet ideology and the Soviet infrastructure through the church. The height of this KGB attack was in the 1970s. So by 1975-76, the Soviets were, um, really, really focused through the through the Fifth Directorate on filtering out, ferreting out all the Western agents within.
The religious groups. This also begins to explain why Russia and other countries in the Soviet Union and even to this day, even places like China. This is why they have some of the policies against Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientology, Mormons, Western missionaries. It is precisely because those groups are used for planting agents, planting operatives, conduits for the CIA, weapons trafficking, funneling money, all of that. Uh, churches and missionaries are used for that, and they're used by the Soviets, and they're used by the West.
Uh, even though the Soviets had lost the Afghan war, and although this could be potentially a massive embarrassment, the KGB was actually able to contain the loss amongst the optics of the loss amongst the population. Um, another ecumenical assembly met called the Vancouver assembly, and they met to condemn racism. Uh, the Soviets were also present and had penetrated that as well. And Roor, Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. Um, even the KGB and NKVD sought to place operatives and agents amongst the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. How successful they were in this, I don't know. Um, but they were more successful with the MP churches.
So, if you don't know, outside of Russia, there's not just a Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. There's also Moscow Patriarchate churches that are under the Moscow Patriarchate. During the Cold War, it is believed that many of the MP churches were actually loyal to the KGB. Again, how many of them exactly were KGB, we don't know. Patriarch Alexi was definitely pro-KGB during that period of, I think, the 80s.
But one of the key vectors, and this is something that I suspected, but I didn't know for sure. This also might explain why, um, this is just my speculation, but D'Vorneck, as you guys know, didn't just write the interesting revisionist text on St. Photius's schism, right? You probably have all heard, if you know Orthodox theology and theology books, you're probably familiar with Father Francis D'Vorneck. He is the famous uniate medievalist, Byzantineist, and Slavist Catholic priest. So he was a uniate who also wrote the book that we've talked about that nobody knows about for many, many, many podcasts, Origins of the Intelligence Services of the Middle East in Byzantium. Isn't it interesting that a uniate priest is writing a history of intelligence? Why? What does he have to do with that? Why does he care about that?
Well, it turns out that during this period, the CIA had decided to make intense use of uniates for the purpose of dividing and causing schism within the Soviet Union, within the Soviet bloc states by pushing uniatism. So even though there were many compromised Soviet bishops, not so much the priests, but there were several bishops in the Moscow Patriarchate, it might have been in varying degrees under different people, compromat or used. The CIA figured out that well, the best way to subvert this is to just push the uniates, get them under Rome, because we're already in alliance with the papacy, and we all know the papacy was 100% on board with the CIA, especially Paul VI and John Paul II. The previous popes were not as on board. There was the beginning of this alliance with Pius XII and maybe even Pius XI with Western intelligence, but Pius XII for sure with Bill Donovan and Angleton. But the real deeper tie is Paul VI. In fact, the CIA was very, very hopeful and very much reportedly involved in the election of Paul VI. That was something that Kissinger thought was a really good idea. Kissinger met regularly with Paul VI. CIA directors would meet regularly with Paul VI.
And, uh, even ramping that relationship up even more was John Paul II, who met all the time with Kissinger and William Casey, who was director of the CIA under Reagan, because they figured out that John Paul II would be this perfect character to help ideologically win the Cold War. But the CIA was also very adept at figuring out that we must utilize all of the Russian Catholic churches and Greek Catholic churches in Ukraine to undermine Stalin in any way possible. And so many of these bishops were actually working with OSS/CIA and perhaps British intelligence.
One of these characters was Slippy. It's hard to pronounce it here, but let me show you this uniate bishop here. Slippy's got a weird name. Bishop Yosyp Slippy was the Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and was eventually made a cardinal in Rome. But what's not known about him, he was trained at the Pontifical Oriental Institute, went to Pontifical University of Thomas Aquinas, Gregorian, all the top Roman papal institutions. In 1939, with the blessing of Pius XII, he was ordained a bishop, and this ordination was conducted in secrecy due to the Soviet presence there. I'm just curious if Wikipedia will mention his connections to Western intelligence, but probably not. In 1963, he was freed by Khrushchev and administered after political pressure from Pope John XXIII and from John F. Kennedy to be freed. He arrived in Rome in 1963 and was part of the Second Ecumenical Council.
Well, one of the key elements that helped the uniates win the ideological battle against the Soviets was, you got it, John Paul II. John Paul II's rapid ecumenism was rooted in his massive, almost this almost dominates his papacy, is human rights and religious liberty. If you read his encyclicals, I read many of them. If you read his works, The Dignity of the Human and Human Freedom and Human Freedom of Conscience and Religious Work, Religious Freedom, all of which, by the way, are condemned by the previous pre-Vatican II popes like 100 times over. Who cares about that? It's the Cold War. Now we're all about that. And that's why Vatican II was so crucial in solidifying in the Cold War. The Vatican's adoption of freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, ecumenism, Nostra Aetate, Lumen Gentium, that was all at the behest of the ideologues and the oligarchs of the West in the State Department, in the CIA, solidifying the Vatican's position to also be in line with the World Council of Churches' position on ecumenism, human rights, freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, religious liberty. Those now become the essence of the Catholic dogmatic teaching. And even though I think this is heterodox, it was actually enough to win the ideological Cold War via this dude pushing it everywhere at all times, non-stop.
So now you understand that the bigger picture of the Cold War is why ecumenism was so important and why the Vatican was so rabid and obsessive about it. It's because it's about winning the Cold War and defeating the Soviets. That's why John Paul II, and by the way, Roman Catholics admit this. You understand? This is not my going to crazy tinfoil hat. Roman Catholics brag that John Paul II won the ideological Cold War. First of all, because he survived his supposed Soviet assassin, Aliaga, when he was shot and then did a big publicity stunt to forgive him for the TV. Constantinople Ukrainian hierarch. This is the schismatic one that the State Department set up. Awards the former head of the CIA for his pushing for the Ukrainian National Church. You see, this is the CIA's fake church in Ukraine. It's the exact same strategy that the CIA did, according to the Mranen archives written by Western intelligence during the Soviet period. This was an Atlantic Council event. That's high-level CIA stuff. In October, Mike Pompeo, openly head of this Trump's head of the CIA, openly backs the push for the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church because they wanted to support Zelensky, right? I mean, does this not, is this not obvious now? What's going on? People ask me this like all the time. We've had this question about a hundred times, maybe a thousand times. There you go. So, this is the non-canonical CIA to State Department created fake Ukrainian church. And we know it's that because go watch the documentaries on it. Go. They don't even know the prayers. They don't know the Orthodox prayers. The guy that they set up to run it, Domingo, was a defrocked dude that even the EP said was defrocked, right? But the State Department got the EP to support this because they control the EP.