Bring Back the Tsar!

 

Thanks to the actions of J. Brandon Magoo, the bumbling nincompoop who is the nominal head of the American republic, and, with apologies to Ann Coulter, B. Hussein Obama, who almost certainly is the puppet master pulling Magoo’s strings, the world is the closest to nuclear Armageddon that it has ever been.  To be more precise, these are the two latest in a string of American presidents including the younger Bush and whichever Clinton was really calling the shots between 1993 to 2001 (most likely Hillary as Bill seemed to be caught with his pants down too often to be the one actually wearing them) who for whatever unfathomable reason, possibly having something to do with Russiophobic ethnics having too much influence in their administrations, made a point of poking the Russian bear with a stick by encouraging anti-Russian hostility on the part of her closest neighbours.  In the cases of Bush and Obama, they went so far as to overthrow Russia-friendly governments in Ukraine and replace them with anti-Russian ones by sponsoring colour revolutions in 2004-2005 and 2014 respectively.  Donald the Orange is the exception among the American presidents of the last quarter century which is one of the reasons the Bushes and Clintons and Obamas and Magoos all hate him so much.  Instead of the business as usual of enriching themselves by minding the rest of the world’s business, promoting instability in one region and war in another, he took the position that the United States should mind her own business.

 

Vladimir Putin is the excuse that these bellicose warmongering rejects from both the Peace Academy and the School of Just War have pointed to in order to justify their ramping up anti-Russian rhetoric to levels that were not seen even in the Cold War in which that country was run by a regime committed to a cold-blooded, murderous, atheistic, totalitarian ideology.  A former agent of the legendary secret police of that regime, Putin has led Russia in either the office of prime minister or president – he has alternated between the two – since 1999.  If one were to take seriously what the Clinton/Bush/Obama/Magoo crowd say about him, one would think that he was the corpse of Adolf Hitler, re-animated and zombified by voodoo magic, and hell bent on the quest to conquer the world, seize its lebensraum, and eat its brains.  But then if one were to take that crowd’s opinion seriously, one would have to think that the other Vlad, Zelenskyy that is, the president of Ukraine who jumped into that role after starring in a cheap Ukrainian comic television series in which he played a high school teacher who, well, jumped into the role of president of Ukraine, is a champion of freedom and Western values.  Considering that most countries in Western civilization are currently celebrating every form of sexual perversion imaginable in the name of the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins it is possible that Zelensky actually is a champion of “Western values.”  He is certainly not a champion of freedom but rather the same sort of autocrat that they, rightly or wrongly, have accused Putin of being ever since he first took office.

 

There would neither be a president of Russia nor a president of Ukraine had an earlier revolution not driven the legitimate claimant to the allegiance of both Russia and Ukraine from his throne then brutally murdered him and his family.  I recently reminded a friend that contrary to all the false ideas of the Zeitgeist of the Modern Age government legitimacy does not come from elections, from the “consent of the governed.”  Quite the contrary.  People, not having legitimate governing authority over each other, cannot delegate such to their representatives. All a government can obtain from the support of its people is power, the ability to compel through the force of numbers.  Authority, the legitimate right to lead, can only be passed on from those who had it before.  Moreover, legitimate governing authority on earth should be representative in form of the government of the universe in heaven. (1)  God is the King of His Creation.  Legitimate earthly government is the government of kings, who receive their authority by inheritance from those who went before them and pass it on to those who come after them.  The opposite of the Modern “consent of the governed” theory of legitimacy is actually the case.  Take my country, for example, the Dominion of Canada.  We are a Commonwealth Realm, over which King Charles III reigns, Parliament in Ottawa legislates, and a cabinet of ministers of the Crown chosen by Parliament governs.  Parliament is a democratic institution, obviously, but democracy is not the source of its legitimate authority.  It is the other way around.  Democracy derives whatever legitimacy it has, in our Parliament, the other Commonwealth Parliaments, and the Mother Parliament in the UK, from the king who authorizes Parliament.  Yes, most people don’t think about it this way, but most people are wrong.  Parliament’s value consists not in the fact that it is democratic, but in the fact that its worth has been proven over a very long period of time, and that worth consists of this, that it takes the power represented by popular support, the potentially dangerous and destructive power that in the wrong hands is what we call “mob rule” and enlists it in the service of law and order by tying it institutionally to legitimate authority. (2)

 

The last legitimate king to reign over Russia which at the time included, as it historically had, Ukraine, was Tsar Nicholas II of the House of Romanov.  He abdicated early in 1917 when the first wave of revolution broke out in Russia but the incompetence of the government that was set up in his place meant that the problems, other than World War I, that had produced the discontent exploited by the first wave of revolutionaries persisted and in the follow up revolution of October 1917 the Bolsheviks, an evil gang of terrorists that was committed to the atheist, socialist, ideology of Karl Marx, and which consisted mostly of members of minority groups that had ethnic and religious grudges against the Russians, the Russian Orthodox Church, and their emperor seized power. The largest such minority group represented was Jews, a fact that people who have more zeal against anti-Semitism than brains don’t like being pointed out because they think that nobody is capable of recognizing that neither “all Jews are Bolsheviks” nor “all Bolsheviks are Jews” logically follows from it (unfortunately, since all the schools seem to be teaching people today is gender confusion, sexual perversion, and racism against white people, rather than the old trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, they may have a point).  They then fought a five and a half year civil war to keep and consolidate that power after which they transformed the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union.  Early in the civil war, in the summer of 1918, agents of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, murdered Tsar Nicholas, his wife Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna and their five children, and their attendants in the basement of Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg where they had been held captive.  Their bodies were taken to the nearby Koptyaki forest and disposed of in such a way that the burial site was not discovered for decades.

 

In 1981, a few years after the discovery of the burial site, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia recognized the murdered Imperial Family as martyrs and in 2000 they were formally canonized as passion bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church.  This was most appropriate.  Ivan III Vasilyevich took the throne as Grand Prince or Duke of Moscow in1462 and ten years later married Sophia Palaiologina, the niece of Constantine III Palaiologos, the last Byzantine Emperor who died defending his capital Constantinople against the forces of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453.  Upon this marriage Ivan took the title Tsar, a Russianized form of “Caesar” the title of the Roman Emperor (the Byzantine Empire was the eastern Roman Empire), and while it would be nonsense to claim that he was Constantine’s heir through marriage as there were others in line before Sophia the Tsars did indeed take over from the Byzantine Emperors the role of royal protector of the Eastern Orthodox Church.  Tsar Nicholas II, therefore, was in the same position of royal protector with regards to the Russian Orthodox Church when murdered by her enemies that King Charles I had been in with regards to the Church of England when murdered by her enemies in 1649.  King Charles I was canonized by the Anglican Church when the provinces of York and Canterbury met in Convocation for the first time after his death when King Charles II was enthroned in the Restoration of 1660. (3) 

 

The Romanov heir, who for obvious reasons would not be a descendent of Nicholas II but the closest other kin, has not yet been restored to the empty throne of the Tsar.  Almost a quarter of a century after the canonization of Nicholas II and family it is about time that this be done.  Then the illegitimate offices of the presidents of Russia and Ukraine could be done away with as both countries swear allegiance to their legitimate ruler bringing the conflict to an end.  Putin could be given a minister’s office in the legitimate government of Russia.  Zelensky could go back to his true calling as a television clown.   Then Magoo, Obama, and our idiot prime minister Captain Airhead would have to either mind their own business or find somebody else’s business to mind that is less likely to result in mushroom clouds appearing everywhere.

 

(1)   This is extraneous to the subject of this essay, which is why I am putting it here in a note, but the Church’s worship on earth is supposed to be patterned on worship in heaven too.  See Fr. Paul A. F. Castellano’s As It is In Heaven: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Introduction to the Traditional Church and Her Worship (Tucson: Wheatmark, 2021) for the case for this and an account of what that looks like.

(2)   Stephen Leacock put it this way “This is a problem that we have solved, joining the dignity of Kingship with the power of democracy; this, too, by the simplest of political necromancy, the trick of which we now ex­ pound in our schools, as the very alphabet of political wisdom.” - “Greater Canada: An Appeal” which can be found in The Social Criticism Of Stephen Leacock: The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and Other Essays edited by Alan Bowker (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1973).

(3)  There is a direct connection between these martyrdoms in that the Puritan revolution and murder of King Charles I in the seventeenth century was the inspiration of the Jacobin revolution and murder of King Louis XVI in France in the eighteenth century which in turn inspired the Bolshevik revolution and the murder of Nicholas II in the twentieth century.  King Louis XVI would be another royal martyr although it would have been the Hapsburg Emperor in Vienna at the time whose role in relation to the Roman Catholic Church would have more closely approximated that of Charles I to the Anglican Church and Nicholas II to the Orthodox Church.

Russia, The Royal Martyrs, and Revolutionary Modernity

Russia has been much in the news lately as left-wing wackos have been trying to paint US President Donald Trump’s attempts to get along with Russian President Vladimir Putin and allow the two countries to peacefully co-exist as some sort of treason. In my childhood, Russia was still in the grips of the murderous, totalitarian, ideological, regime bent on global conquest that had seized power in the fall of 1917. How well I remember that at that time, the same people who are crying “the Russians are coming” today, labelled anyone who warned about the Communist Kremlin’s evil designs a “McCarthyite.” The term alluded to Joseph McCarthy, the American Senator from Wisconsin in the 1950s who warned about Communist infiltration of the State Department. “McCarthyite”, as the left used the term, was more or less synonymous with “witch hunter”, although McCarthy has been mostly vindicated by the facts of history. (1) For the left, Russia could do no wrong as long as the Bolsheviks were in power, but once the Soviet regime collapsed, she can do no right. What an absurd and insane way of looking at things.

We have just reached the hundredth anniversary of one of the first in the very long list of monstrous crimes that can be charged to the Bolshevik account. On July 17, 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife Empress Alexandra, and their children the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the Tsesarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, as well as their household servants and the court physician, were shot, stabbed, and clubbed to death in Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where they had been moved shortly before the murders. They had been prisoners for over a year, at first a mild house arrest under Keresnky’s Provisional Government, then a much harsher imprisonment following the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks’ rise to power.

The murder of the Romanovs had been foreshadowed by the beheadings of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette on January 21st and October 16th respectively in 1793, and before that by the beheading of Charles I on January 30th, 1649. There are a number of parallels between these murders. The victims, in each case, included the legitimate Royal Sovereign of the country in which the revolution was being perpetrated. He was also, in each case, the Royal Protector of a Church which claimed descent from the early, undivided, Apostolic Church and which was under attack by the revolutionaries. Charles I was the Protector of the Church of England which was under attack by the Puritan Calvinists. Louis XVI was Protector of the Roman Catholic Church in France which was a target of the Revolutionaries who were disciples of the rationalist Rousseau. Nicholas II was Protector of the Russian Orthodox Church against the atheistic, Marxist, Bolsheviks. In England and France, the revolutionaries tried to give a façade of legality to the murders by holding show trials in which the kings were condemned by kangaroo courts. In Russia, the Bolsheviks didn’t bother with this, they simply declared the Tsar to be guilty of crimes against the Russian people and had him shot. In each case the royal murders failed to satisfy the bloodlust of the revolutionaries, but rather merely whetted their appetite for the mass murders that were to come. (2)

There is a sense in which all three crimes were committed by the same perpetrators. While the term “left” did not develop its political connotations until the French Revolution, when it was applied to the enemies of the Crown, aristocracy, and Church because of where they stood in relation to the speaker in the French assembly, the Puritans were definitely historical antecedents of the French Revolutionaries, just as the Bolsheviks were their ideological descendants. The Puritans, like the Anabaptists of continental Europe, were the “left-wing” of the Reformation, those who thought the Magisterial Reformers had not gone far enough. They were also the first classical liberals, or, as liberals were called at the time, Whigs. In their thinking, and especially the secularized version of it offered in the writings of John Locke, the foundation was laid for the much more radical thought of Rousseau, which inspired the French Revolutionaries, and in turn laid the foundation for Marx, the father of Communism. In this lineage can be seen one explanation for the fact that “left-wing extremism” is a far less commonly heard expression than “right-wing extremism.” The latter expression is, of course, never used in good faith. It is employed by the left, to smear those who hold views that the left has decided are to be considered to be outside the pale of acceptable discourse, by association with the regime that governed Germany from 1933 to 1945, of which regime “right wing extremism” has connotations despite the fact that it was a revolutionary rather than a reactionary regime, that despised the old order of “throne and altar” that “right wing” was historically and traditionally associated with, and even called itself “socialist.” The reason “left-wing extremism” has not caught on is that it is redundant. The essence of the left, its very nature, is the relentless desire for the complete overthrow of all time-honoured institutions, traditions, and order. From royalty, nobility and the Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the middle classes and private property and enterprise in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, to marriage, the family, the nation and even the biological realities of race and sex in the twentieth and twenty-first, the left has moved on from one target to another, seeking only to destroy in its hatred and rage, with its ultimate targets being the Good, the True, and the Beautiful and indeed, God Himself, for, as Dr. Johnson observed centuries ago, the first Whig was the devil. The left is extremism, and extremism is the left.


In the Restoration, the Anglican Church at the 1660 Convocations of the provinces of York and Canterbury, canonized Charles I as a saint and martyr. Similarly, eighteen years ago the Russian Orthodox Church canonized its royal martyrs, all of the murdered Romanovs, as passion bearers. In both cases the honour was far more worthily bestowed than is the “cheap martyrdom” that contemporary evangelicals award to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, let alone the spurious pseudo-sainthood conveyed by the same upon Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi. While their faith was not the sole reason that Charles I and Nicholas II and his family were put to death, it was part of the reason, and in murdering them, their revolutionary enemies sought to kill that which they symbolically represented – the old order of Christendom, with its alliance of throne and altar, church and state. Bonhoeffer, while a clergyman – albeit one who should have been defrocked for his heretical theology which bordered upon atheism at the very end of his life – was executed for taking part in a political conspiracy. The Roman Catholic Church has never canonized Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, perhaps because its canonization process is more elaborate and requires more than mere martyrdom. It is not likely ever to do so as long as the usurper Jorge Bergoglio has his claws all over St. Peter’s vacant throne.

I wouldn’t hold my breathe waiting for Rome to develop enough sense to kick Jorge to the curb, bring back Benedict, and canonize Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Whatever Rome does or does not do, however, we can and ought to honour and remember them, alongside our Anglican Royal Martyr Charles, and the Imperial Family of Russia, and the sacred witness they bear to the truth of the old order, against the bloody, violent, and revolutionary hatred of the progressive left.

(1) For a thorough substantiation of this claim see M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, (New York: Random House, 2007). See also Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, (New York: Free Press, 1999). McCarthy’s famous crusade against Communism began four years into the Cold War, which followed immediately after a lengthy period, which began with the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, in which the American government was incredibly pro-Communist. One of FDR’s first acts as President was to recognize the Bolshevik regime in Russia, to which he sent an ambassador, William C. Bullitt Jr., whom he recalled when Bullitt refused to whitewash the Stalin regime which, just prior to his arrival, had committed the Holodomor (the man-made famine that starved over ten million Ukrainians). In Bullitt’s place he sent Joseph E. Davies, who painted the Stalin regime with roses, even as it was conducting the infamous show trials known as the “Great Purge” under his nose. In 1943 FDR ordered Davies’ odious, pro-Soviet memoir, Mission to Moscow, made into a pro-Stalin propaganda film. While some might argue that FDR was forced into this relationship with Stalin by the necessities of WWII – an argument that would be true in the case of Sir Winston Churchill who knew Bolshevism for what it was and had been speaking against it for decades – FDR was, in fact, a naïve, egotist with a messiah complex, who saw himself and Stalin as brothers in progress, the leaders of two nations founded on modern ideological principles. The records of the Tehran Conference demonstrate how much closer in spirit to Stalin than to Churchill, FDR really was, making it less surprising that the outcome of FDR’s wartime negotiations with Stalin included the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe up to the eastern half of Germany, including Poland, for whose sake Britain and France had gone to war with Hitler in the first place after Hitler and Stalin had made a pact to invade and divide her between themselves. Needless to say, Roosevelt’s administration was overrun with Soviet agents and Communist sympathizers, such as Harry Dexter White. When the Cold War began, shortly after WWII ended, a number of highly placed Soviet spies, such as Alger Hiss, were exposed through the defections of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, and attempts were made in most branches of the American government to remove Soviet agents and other security risks, but the State Department resisted these attempts. Enter Joseph McCarthy, who in early 1950 gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he declared the State Department to be “infested with Communists” and waved a paper which he claimed contained the names of a large number of individuals within the Department known to the Secretary to be members of the Communist Party. The US Senate appointed a subcommittee, headed by the hostile Millard Tydings, to investigate McCarthy’s charges. When the Republicans gained control of the Senate after the 1952 Congressional election, McCarthy himself was named chair of the Senate Permanent Investigations Committee. In 1954, William F. Buckley Jr and L. Brent Bozell went person by person, through the list of those McCarthy had either named before the Tydings Committee or investigated with his own, demonstrating that whether or not they could be shown to be “card-carrying members of the Communist Party” they represented real security risks. McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning, (Chicago: Henry Regnery). Indeed, the majority of those about whom McCarthy raised concerns were later investigated, found to indeed be security risks, and removed from sensitive positions in the State Department. After the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, information from two newly available sources, the Soviet archives, and the declassified-as-of-1995 Venona Project (a counterespionage project that intercepted coded messages between the Soviets and their spies in the West) firmly established the guilt of many individuals such as Hiss, whose innocence the liberal left had loudly maintained for decades, and showed that indeed, the Communist Party USA had been acting as subversive arm of the Soviet Union, and that Soviet penetration of the American government in this era was far more extensive than McCarthy had suggested. See John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1999).

(2) As revolutionary modernity developed from the fanatical Calvinism of the Puritans to the rationalistic democratic egalitarianism of the Jacobins to the dialectic materialism of the Marxist-Leninist Bolsheviks the scale of the atrocities committed by its regimes increased, exponentially so in the final stage with Communism murdering over one hundred million people in the twentieth century. Those who, unlike David in 1 Samuel 24 and 26, are willing to lay their hands on the Lord’s anointed and commit the crime of regicide, will have no greater regard for the lives of those of lesser rank.