On the green lawns of Hyde Park an old tramp walks about and carries a scruffy cardboard poster, ‘The End is Nigh’. He has done it for years, if he is still the same tramp I spotted some thirty years ago. But a broken clock will sooner or later show the right time. Could it be that this ominous moment has arrived? The magic pentagram has been broken and Tower of Babel had collapsed on 9/11. Jews lord over the Holy land. Dollar is high, but the creativity of Christendom reached its nadir; its shops are full but the churches are empty; there are many dealers, wheelers and brokers, but no new artists, poets, saints. Floods and draughts, summer snows and winter heat, poisoned rivers and dried-up lakes remind us that our Mother Earth is very, very ill. The Apocalypse is now, many people felt vividly during last months.

Justin Raimondo wrote last week of a piece in the Weekly World News, “that ludicrously lurid tabloid no one will admit to reading on the supermarket check-out line, and its oddly prescient story: "Face of Satan Photographed Over US Capitol!" There was even a picture that oozed sheer malevolence: a thin, mocking face that peered out of a black swirling cloud, manic eyes ablaze and the mouth twisted into a satanic sneer. The Weekly quotes "one unidentified veteran CIA operative" as saying: "The image is a portrait of terror unlike anything we've ever seen in this country. Is it something supernatural? Is it some kind of life form? Is it - and hell yes, I'll ask the question - is it Satan himself?"[i]

This feeling, once a sole preserve of highly imaginative and sensitive persons, or devoted readers of the Weekly World News, now splashes across the social checkerboard. In Moscow and New York, Jerusalem and Baghdad, Paris and Berlin, secular and practical people greet each other with the question, ‘Is it the end of the world?’

- Yes, it is, - replied to this question an important American philosopher, Immanuel Wallerstein, but added a careful caveat in the title of the aptly named book, The End of the World as We Know It[ii]. He came to the conclusion that a very long period of human history has reached now an unpredictable end. The world as we, or our parents and grandparents, know it is about to end, indeed.

Wallerstein thinks ‘the world as we know it’ came into being some 500 years ago in the Western Europe and has come to its crescendo in the United States of America. It is characterised by a specific aberration of human development, called ‘Progress’. Wallerstein bravely refused to accept the axiom of ‘unavoidable positive development’, and stated, it wasn’t a necessary process, but a negative development. In plain words, this development is a celebration of unlimited greed and domination drive, a denial of God and Man.

This development caused the great destruction of nature and society, has ran its course and brought us to the brink of the abyss. Probably we would have arrived there long ago, under the Iron Heel of the oligarchy, as Jack London felt in 1910, but the Russian Revolution of 1917 shook the world and offered an alternative, writes Wallerstein. That is why peoples of the Western Europe and North America had a chance to form their welfare society with prominent middle class and rather content workers, while the Third World got a respite from punitive actions and colonial conquests. Before 1917, England did not hesitate to shell a Japanese city of Shimonoseki as a revenge for assassination of the British diplomat. Before 1917, social differences in the European society were as big as those in the modern Third World. After the collapse of the socialist system in 1991, this great respite of history was over. We are back at 1914, according to Wallerstein.

It is possible to view the world events in a rather different light. With all respect due to the Russian revolution, there was an additional powerful player who meanwhile changed sides. In the beginning of 20th century, a new social and spiritual force came into being. In an article of mine[iii], I called it ‘the Mammonites’, the worshippers of Mammon. The Mammonites fought against the old elites across the checkerboard of the entire world. In Russia, they exterminated and sent to exile the traditional Russian elites. In England and Scandinavia, the old elites lost their power due to advent of social democracy. Germany and Italy had their elites destroyed in the WWII. As long as the old elites still existed, the Mammonites were promoting a pro-equality agenda, and transfer of resources from the old elites to people in general.

That was the time of great hope. The great force of Mammonite wealth and networking assisted the forces of equality, and not too many people gave a thought what are the true plans of the powerful allies. As long as the New York bankers, lawyers and media owners supported the humanist agenda, one could ignore their deeper thoughts.

After the failed revolution of 1968, the Mammonites obtained their goals and integrated with the old elites. Afterwards, they scraped the nice talk of equality and civil rights; instead, they adopted a new agenda, the enslavement of man. In a similar way, the bourgeois utilised the power and anger of the low classes in the French revolution of 1789. The workers and peasants removed the old aristocratic elites, and then the new bourgeois elites gave them the push and took the power by using the military genius of Napoleon. After 1968, the relentless History began its new turn.

The Mammonites do not need democracy or welfare state anymore. Now they need a Napoleon, to entrench their rule. That is why, after 9/11, the forces of oligarchy are erasing the Bill of Rights, democratic freedoms, the UN Charter and international agreements, and create a new world of few millionaires, a squeezed middle class, pauperised workers, a powerful army and police. They plan to emerge unassailable at the end of the turmoil. But this darkest hour is also a time of hope.

Tomorrow is hidden from our eyes for a good reason. We have reached now the great bifurcation of history, says Wallerstein, a historic crossroads, one of those that happens once in a millennium. By definition, forking is the time of instability. That is the time when even a puny effort of a lone man can change things. In the periods of stability, even huge efforts do not change much. For a few hundred years, people believed in the predestined and unavoidable outcome of history: the Marxist dream or Welfare state or Second Coming. This time of certainty is over. We could fall into the New Dark Ages, into one of the bleak anti-Utopias, and our children will not forgive us for our passivity. We still could pull and push, and hope for the best.

A Jewish joke tells of two men who failed to move a trunk as they pushed and pulled in the opposite directions. Certainly one has to know where and when to push and pull, otherwise the trunk will stay put. That is why the following outline is a proposal for constructive thought and action. The US bombing of al-Jazeera TV station, coming so soon after their bombing of a Serb TV, is added proof that words are important. Once, Karl Marx described human history as a history of class struggle over ownership of the means of production. I would describe it as a war of ideas.

We can imagine two great protagonists, familiar to us from the Book of Job, playing with new ideas on the big checkerboard. Satan could pervert every idea of God; God could turn every idea of Satan into a wonderful thing, i.e. love to the land of Christ caused murderous Crusades, but materialist Communism brought great uplifting of hearts. The players have no hands, and it is our, human task to make moves, to make right choices, to help God to win the game. Conceited warriors of yore used to say `God’s with us’. Humble thinkers of the present, we should say, we are with God.

II

Wallerstein made a heroic effort, not altogether successful, to describe the end of the world in materialistic terms. I am not sure whether it is possible. Our world in general evades such description. Moreover, I do not think it desirable, for the reasons stated below. We are conditioned to accept materialistic reasoning only, and reject explanations that defer to forces of a different plane. It is an important part of the aberration that people came to reject the spiritual component of the world. Until the Aberration the very idea of a totally materialistic world, explainable by sheer materialistic laws, would have been an oddity. Man’s vision of the world varied with time and place, but it never was so purely materialistic.

The ancient thinkers saw the world as a spiritual-material, multi-layered continuum where forces of Good and Evil, Virtues and Sins, Nations and Ideas have their own semi-independent existence. Sometimes, these forces were described as gods, or angels, or demons. The New Testament speaks of the Prince of the World and other forces that confront Man. St Paul was aware of troubles to come, as ‘our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms’[iv].

Their vision seems to me to be better adapted to reality. It is easier to explain calamities and salvation, catastrophes and prosperity by interaction of different Higher forces, than by purely material factors or by God’s changes of mood. It is easier to explain why the Trojan War lasted ten long years by the struggle of pro-Trojan Gods with pro-Greek ones, allowing for the pretexts of Helene’s beauty or commercial interests. The Cold War could be seen as the struggle of the Russian Communal Spirit with the American Mammon. The forthcoming WWIII against peoples of the Third World can be spoken of by a religious mind as ‘Armageddon’.

Serge Averintsev, the prominent modern Russian thinker, reminds us of the paradox of Biblical faith and asks: ‘How could the omnipresent, transcendental and spiritual God bless by His Presence a specific place, be it the Holy of the Holies, or Mary’s womb, body of Jesus the Man or bread and wine of Eucharist?’ He points out that it is one of tenets of faith, ‘I will dwell among the Israelites’[v], said God of the Old Testament, and the same verb is used again in Gospels: ‘the Word became Flesh and has dwelt among us^[vi]’. Averintsev reveals a God-inspired thought: ‘The Prince of the World[vii], that is, the force hostile to God’s Presence, attempts to separate Transcendent and Immanent, to close the doors of Creation in face of Creator, and in this way, to cleanse Nature from all that is Super-natural. He is supported by an unwilling ally: that is zealot theologian rationalism who strives to remove all traces of popular beliefs or esoteric plurality and to reach pure transcendentalism[viii]’. It is a deep thought: Satan supports (or generates) ideas that exclude God’s Grace from our life.

Coming back to our two protagonists over the checkerboard, we could say: Satan wins (God save us!) when all traces of Divine Presence are eliminated from our world. However, Averintsev missed a point. Nature is a source of divine inspiration, and God, Who dwelt in the tents of Israelites and in Mary’s womb, also dwells in a spring below mountain shrine in the Highlands, as well. It makes the task of Satan even more formidable, but he does not shrink from the challenge. He has two options, to destroy Nature, or to destroy Man’s capacity to communicate with Nature, and he tries both.

In order to understand the events and the outcome, we have to make a daring step, one that we were taught not to make, ever. For 500 years, the material research and spiritual quest were separated, and we were indoctrinated in keeping them separate. This proposed treatment of reality is not the dualistic Manichean approach now peddled by the proponents of the Apocalyptic WWIII. There are more shades of grey than a simple Black and White picture. Let us try and integrate these two lines, of Immanent and of Transcendent, and achieve a whole picture of the world.

We shall discover, to our amazement that the two lines run parallel, as two different languages describing one reality. For instance, modern re-discovered love of nature, called by the long word ‘environmentalism’ or by colour-code ‘green’ could be translated by Christian society as ‘love of the Virgin Mary’. Indeed, Dostoyevsky identified Our Mother Earth with the Mother of God. Destruction of nature could be connected with rejection of the Virgin. Averintsev’s ‘all traces of popular beliefs or esoteric plurality’ point to the local spirits still worshipped by the less materialistic part of the mankind.

The New World Order is, in religious terms, the beginning of the Kingdom of Anti-Christ, based on removal of all spiritual elements from our life. In practical terms, it is an ambitious attempt of total enslavement of Man.

III

It is not as easy as it seems. A man is connected by four ties to this world: he has roots in the native soil, he belongs to his family, his territorial community, and to God. While the ties survive, a man can not be enslaved. These four pivotal points represent the ancient figure of Cross, as it was depicted by ancestors of modern Palestinians on the rocks and walls. Long before it served as a tool of execution, Cross was a great mystic sign of old, hidden from the laymen. It was known to Moses, who put a sign of cross on forehead of his people while the angel of death roamed outside. The cross is found in the oldest levels of Palestinian and Egyptian digs.

In the Chalcolithic Age, over five thousand years before Christ, ancient Palestinians, cave dwellers of Tel Abu Matar near Beersheba laid the sign of the Cross with small pebbles, each one of them also carried a sign of the Cross. ‘The cruciform mark was intended as a sign to avert evil and give protection’, wrote the noted archaeologist Jack Finnegan^[ix]. In the days of the Bible, it was called ‘tau’, while Greeks named it ‘chi’. King David made a sign of the Cross (tau) while in danger^[x] . Prophet Ezekiel[xi] promised salvation to good people who would lament over injustices committed (by Sharon and Olmert?) in Jerusalem. These good men will have their forehead marked with the saving sign of Cross (it is still done nowadays by Egyptian and Ethiopian Christians).

The Essenes of the Damascus Covenant quoted these lines of Ezekiel, as apparently they knew of this ‘sign of protection, deliverance and salvation’^[xii]. Thus it was understood by the Church Fathers, Origen and Tertullian, who could ask their Palestinian contemporaries. Priests of Jerusalem Temple were anointed by drawing Cross on their foreheads by pure olive oil[xiii] , as if the name of Christ (X) was written on them. The choice of the Cross for the execution of Christ was, therefore, meaningful: his enemies wanted to disprove and undermine the idea of salvation. But followers of Christ accepted the challenge and made this secret sign public. They drew it on their foreheads: ‘It is a tradition from the Apostles’, said the Christian Palestinians of Jewish origin to Basil of Caesarea in AD 375. Gnostics preserved these ideas in their texts.

The spiritual meaning of the Cross, as we said, was a sign of four ties of a man. A man is tied to the earth, to his family, his folk and to god. As long as a man retains but one of these ties he will never be totally suborned, totally corrupted, totally enslaved. Still he needs all four, and in the right balance. If he cares about his family and forgets his community; if he loves God, but neglects the soil, and vice versa, he is doomed in the long run.

The new proponents of the ancient subjugation paradigm wish to do the Satan’s work and remove Divine Presence from our world. For this reason, they fight Faith, they destroy Nature, and they uproot Man by breaking his territorial, social and familial ties. They do it everywhere, from Vermont to Afghanistan. But Palestine is the pilot project for the new world order, as Spain in 1936 was the pilot project of rising fascism.

They do it in the Holy Land for a reason, as its native people are deeply rooted in its soil and daily witness God. Holiness of the land is not a historical coincidence, but a feature of its unique landscape and people. At this hill, by this spring, under that old tree, the Palestinian heroes Abraham, David and Jesus united with God. Villages of Palestinian Highlands are the anchors of mankind, and without them we shall be thrown on the reefs.

IV

Men fight the uprooting, but their measures are often ill-perceived and erroneous. Modern nationalism is a failed mechanical defence against uprooting. When the real thing – love of one’s community and soil – is gone, it is supplanted by a fiction of a nation. German nationalism offers us a case study.

While German society retained its roots, the Germans loved their towns and villages, their small kingdoms and duchies. They listened to Beethoven and Bach, ate their wurst mit sauerkraut, they were happily parochial and content. When the fabric of the society had been damaged, the Germans chose the phantom of German patriotism as a healing balsam. The Viennese painter, Adolf Hitler was an uprooted immigrant in Germany, a man who severed ties with his soil and his community, with his family and his Church. Even worse, he was not aware of his loss. His love of Germany and of German people excluded the landscape, the soil of Germany from his consideration. That is why he dreamt of conquest of Eastern Europe and Russia in order to create on these lands a new Aryan Master Race Empire, as Anglo-Saxons created the United States on the lands on the Native Americans. He did not understand that Germans removed from German soil would lose the qualities he admired. Expansion to the regions outside of the natural landscape of the people is a deadly trick.

His nationalistic ideas were borrowed from the vast arsenal of Jewish thought. The idea of racial superiority, of Master Race and Untermench could be found in many fervent Jewish religious teachings. Genocide is permitted, nay, ordered by the Old Testament, and the commandment ‘Exterminate the nation of Amalek’ still is listed as No. 604 out of 613 commandments of Orthodox Judaism. Recently the orthodox Bar Ilan University Rabbi published a concise treatise called The Commandment of Genocide in Torah, elucidating and elevating the concept of genocide to the level of positive commandment for believers. (We shall not enter now a separate question of praxis, practical applications of the theories).

As many copy-cats, Hitler failed to observe the difference^[xiv]. The Jews are a non-territorial group, while Germans were formed and based on their territory. Territorial people do not have to expand beyond their natural limits; moreover, they can not exist outside of it. A proof of it was provided by descendents of Germans in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the US: they lost their ethnicity and became Americans.

One can understand his error. Hitler was horrified by Jewish success, by ‘the rise of the Jew’, and decided to emulate the Jewish strategy. His boycott of Jewish shops and enterprises was an emulation of boycott of Gentile enterprises and lockout of Gentile employees by the Zionist Jews in contemporary Palestine. His idea of mass expulsion of the Jews copied the concept of transfer of Palestinians, as envisaged by Zionists since Theodor Herzl and executed in 1948.

An American psychologist, Kevin McDonald, described the Nazi doctrine, ‘a mirror image of Judaic strategy’ and therefore the greatest threat to Jews. He predicted that in future, Gentile Europeans and Americans worried by ‘the rise of the Jew’ ‘will emulate aspects of Judaism by adopting group-serving, collectivist ideologies and social organisations^[xv]’. McDonald was right in stating that ‘it will constitute a profound impact of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy on the development of Western nations’. His conclusion is deeply pessimistic: the Judaic strategy is doomed to win, whether carried out by the Jews, or by the host nations.

For a white supremacist, this conclusion calls for speedy action of applying the Judaic strategy in the interests of the host nations. For a Jewish supremacist, the Judaic strategy should be applied by Jews only. But for us, non-racists, the Judaic strategy is bad per se, whether applied by Germans, Jews or WASPs. There is a possibility of totally different, non-Judaic response. While copy-cat strategy is self-defeating, there are other strategies, based on non-Judaic concepts of territory and local content.

Nationalism is the difference between real and perceived national content. A fully rooted Englishman has no need for English nationalism, as he breathes England. He is a vessel full of local content, with no place for ‘Englishness’. When an Englishman feels he has lost part of his ties, he tries to make it up by love of the English idea. Nationalism rises on ruins of local ties. When the ties of a man with Tuscany, Kent, Burgundy weaken, he needs the substitute of Italy, England, France. Eventually nationalism turns into chauvinism and forgets its real local content altogether.

American super-patriots, Neo-Cons, are totally devoid of American national content. Their jingoist flag-waving comes instead of love for the real America and of Americans. They support unlimited immigration into the US, as they do not care for their fellow-Americans. They do not care for the rest of mankind either, as they would nuke Iraq, the homeland of Abraham, for the sake of Israel. People justly repelled by the Cyclopean aggressiveness of this sect are being manoeuvred into an anti-nationalist, universal and cosmopolitan agenda. Could it be that we are doomed to make our choice between facelessness and jingoism?

There is a real alternative to both diseases, to Scylla of nationalism and to Charybdis of the ubiquitous rootlessness, and that is: love to specific region and village. Faulkner’s love to Yoknapatawpha and Barth’s to Maryland, Joyce’s obsession with Dublin, Rolland’s passion for Burgundy, the Florence-centred world of Dante and Botticelli, gave us the key to universal human nature, as local content verily exists, as opposed to abstract generalities.

Zionist leaders with their cheap sophistry used to claim, “there is no Palestinian People”. As every sophist, they spoke some truth, but not all the truth. Palestinians’ local content was so rich that they had no need for the uprooted man’s nationalism. Palestinians are the people of their villages, for them, their Jifna and Taiba, Nasra and Biram are irreplaceable. We get an inkling of this concept by recalling the plaque on the cross: ‘Jesus of Nazareth’.

That is one of the many things we can learn from Palestinians. Love of our territorial communities, villages and towns, and its people instead of a glorious idea of the nation and the state. In an American context it means giving priority to the rights of states vs. federal power, priority for county vs. state authorities, support of village vs. county. One can learn some good ideas from the Swiss: one can not immigrate into Switzerland unless one is accepted by one of the territorial communities. It is fair: if some rich liberals or Neo-Cons support immigration, let them take the immigrants into their neighbourhoods as their neighbours. I guess it would stop immigration almost completely.

Local content exists as opposed to the abstraction of the nation. It also provides a secure protection against the alienating and unifying plague of Globalisation. I agree with the critics of the nationalism and nation state: nationalism failed profoundly everywhere, from Italy to Japan, from Serbia to Israel. This 19th century invention produced rivers of blood, created mafia-like structures, oppressed liberties and caused strife. But what is the alternative? Is it a Mammonite universal super-state rising nowadays on the base of Pax Americana? Is it emulation of Jewish strategy of national uprooted groups in a multicultural society? No, it lies in unique character of our villages and cities. Power should be devolved down, to the level of local community. On this level, there will be no room for bureaucracy and manipulative ‘democracy’. It will save ordinary people from the dictatorship of clever experts and rich moguls^[xvi]. We should learn from our Palestinian brothers to love our villages and cities, and to make them as unique as Jifna and Florence. One can not be a true patriot of one’s land unless one loves one’s town. Not in vain, Ulysses longed for his own Ithaca, rather than for Greece.

V

Many good men object to Zionism and compare it with colonial settler movements or with the German National Socialism. Certainly, its praxis despoiled the lovely land of Palestine and acted as a great concentrating tool in the hands of supremacist Jewish leadership in America and elsewhere. However, Zionism had its reason, alas, unmentionable in the age of Political Correctness. Let us dare and state it. Zionism and anti-Semitism have not only supported and nourished each other, as anti-Zionists are wont to say. Early Zionists thought that some peculiar Jewish qualities are bad, and should be eliminated, preferably by removing Jews into harsh environment of Palestine, or Uganda. Zionists called the traditional Jewish mindset, ‘Galutiyut’ (Diaspora features), but it was basically identical to the Jewishness, as seen by anti-Semites.

Recently, the witty American Jewish anti-Zionist Lenni Brenner commented on Chaim Weizmann’s letter of 1914. Weizmann, the leading Zionist and first president of Israel, had an important talk with Lord Balfour (of the Balfour declaration) and Balfour confided that ‘he shared many anti-Semitic ideas. <Weizmann> pointed out to him that Zionists too are in agreement with the cultural anti-Semites’. Brenner triumphally concluded, ‘translated into blunt English, Balfour thanked Weizmann for confirming his anti-Semitism’.

It could sound odd for young readers used to sycophantic Jewish writing, but the first Zionists were very strict with the Jews they knew. For them, a plethora of Jewish lawyers, porn dealers, currency traders, lobby activists, bankers, media lords, real estate moguls, liberal journalists were ‘an undesirable, demoralizing phenomenon’, in the words of Weizmann, or ‘scum of the earth’, in harsh words of David Ben Gurion. Zionism accepted the main premise of anti-Semitism, and offered a remedy, Mao-style ‘re-education’ in an isolated remote countryside.

However, History decided otherwise. Galutiyut, the (Diaspora) Jewishness turned out to be a winning strategy in the Mammon-worshipping West. The named lawyers and media lords captivated America’s mind and became the model for many Americans, Jewish and Gentile. Israeli Zionism lost its spirit, degraded into military dictatorship and survives only thanks to subsidies of the captivated America. Still, it does not mean that ‘anti-Semitic’ diatribes of the early Zionists were all wrong, as worldly success is not the only measure of things.

There was one feature of (Diaspora) Jewish mindset that was particularly strange and unique. When good Russian Jewish kids of fin-de-siècle left the sheltered life of Jewish townships and entered the Gentile world, they became aware of a tragic element of Jewish existence, its almost total divorce with Nature. Jews were not interested in Nature at all, they did not describe in verse or prose, they did not paint it, they did not connect to it; they did not care for landscape outside their schtetl. Young men and women felt it has to be changed. Some of them moved to Argentina, where Baron Hirsch tried to attach Jews to land. Others established colonies in Crimea, or in Palestine.

They planned to get rid of their Jewishness. They did not mind the name (well, some did, and demanded to be called Israelis or Hebrews, or Canaanites), they minded the qualities of ‘the Jew’ and wanted to get rid of them, and reunite with Nature. Not being strict Zionists, we would say that some people of Jewish origin succeeded to get rid of this feature without going to Palestine (probably they could be described as ‘descendents of Jews’ rather than as ‘Jews’). Majority of Israeli Jews failed to attach themselves to the land in Palestine, as well, as it hardly could be done without fusion with the local inhabitants.

The reason of Jewish divorce with Nature was explained in different terms, but to the same effect by an important Russian historiographer, ‘Russian Toynbee’ Lev Gumilev. He considered an ethnos as a group connected to its landscape. Ethnos can’t exist outside of its ecological niche. Gumilev defined Jews (or unreconstructed Diaspora Jews, a Zionist would say), as people of anthropogenic (man-made) landscape. That is why it is so easy for a Jew to change his place of living: he disregards the Nature, while modern cities are basically all the same. That is why a Jew has an advantage in competition: while a part of, say, English mind refers to skills needed in the natural environment of the British Isles, a Jewish mind is wonderfully concentrated on advance in man-made environment.

Gumilev replaces the traditional dichotomy of Jews vs. Gentiles by another one, people of man-made landscape vs. people of Natural landscapes. It does not coincide with a city/village division, as a city dweller can be integral part of its landscape. Such men live in the old beautiful cities, Florence and Oxford, Jerusalem and Mecca, Suzdal and Leon. These cities grew like flowers in their setting, they created art, built cathedrals and mosques; they were unique, and local, and universal in the same time. There is also a place for great cities of the world, Paris, London, New York, Bombay, Shanghai – they are meeting places for civilisations. However, modern man-made cities, Milton Keynes, Luton, St Denis, the suburban spread of New Jersey, our Holon and Afula are faceless, similar to each other and devoid of culture.

An ethnos is successful in its own ecological niche, and unsuccessful in a foreign one. In order to win in the competition with other ethnic groups, an ethnos tries to adapt oneself to environment or to adapt environment to its needs. We observe a similar process while fishing a big fish: a fish tries to pull the fisherman into its own environment, water, as it rightly presumes it can win there. A fisherman tries to pull a fish into his own environment, dry land, as he is certain he can win there.

That is why (Diaspora) Jews are wont to exclude foreign (for them) natural landscape and supplant it by a man-made one, where they know how to apply their strategy. It is as instinctive a move as the attempt of a fish to pull the fisherman into the sea. An example of such strategy is provided by the Canadian Jewish dynasty of Reichmann.

This pious Orthodox Jewish family was active in real estate in Canada, England and elsewhere. They immigrated into Canada from Austria in Hitler’s days, and in 1980s their assets were assessed at $40 billion. Reichmanns invented a shopping mall, the urban design that changed lives of people all over the globe. Malls undermined socially integrated inner cities, killed small traditional shops, devastated artisans and supported brand names, big companies, car ownership, suburban living and social disintegration. Malls eliminated the advantage of a local product or producer over an imported or centrally produced one, as in the mall there is no traditional shop or traditional shopper, no loyalty or age-old craftsmanship.

Malls made Reichmanns fabulously rich, and Canadians used to say, there are rich, super-rich and Reichmanns. They supported various Jewish charities and Israeli projects, spent much money on Russian (‘Russian Jews’) immigration to Israel. But they caused more harm than good to the nascent Israeli society. Their malls devastated Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem, as relatively affluent shoppers switched to malls, while local shops, and after them local cafes, local social meeting points lost their clients. Israeli society, once rather cohesive, disintegrated into an amalgam of various groups. Children of immigrants, with their tentative and dubious connection with local landscape, stopped playing on the slopes of Judean Hills, and spent their free time wandering the malls, getting used to man-made environment and to shopping as entertainment. Mall kids can easily move from a mall in Jerusalem to a mall in Toronto, with the same brand names, built by the same Reichmanns. Thus (Diaspora) Jewish trend succeeded to undermine the Zionist utopia, as well as social life and traditions in many countries around the globe.

VI

The Mall did not appear on the empty space. Shoppers for the future malls grew in mass-produced rectangular standard housing blocks, built after the WWI. Inspired by Gropius, Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, they are basically the same all over the world, including my native Novosibirsk. These housing blocks brought us into man-made environment, divorced from local content, national traditions and natural surroundings. Faceless cities rebuilt after great destruction of the World Wars are particularly depressing, but even cities untouched by war madness were often ruined by the modernist trend.

The Swedes invited Oscar Niemeyer, a Brazilian-born son of immigrants, a disciple of Lucio Costa and Gregory Warszawchik, to contribute to the beauty of Stockholm. He proposed to demolish the medieval core of Gamla Stan, the Old City, and replace it by an accurate row of rectangular blocks. This project was scraped, but as a compromise, nice 19th century central area of Hotorget was erased and transformed into identical blocks. The same blocks were erected on the site of beautiful 18th century Arbat area of Moscow. A friend of the Soviet Union, Niemeyer influenced big scale housing building programme in post-Stalin Russia that turned many Russians into man-made landscape men.

Once I took a Russian TV director, a pretty Russian girl from Moscow, for a walk in En Jedi canyon, one of the most charming and delightful spots in Palestine with its springs and wild goats, lush greenery and small pools. ‘Couldn’t you make a replica of this canyon in an Eilat hotel spa’, she complained after the walk. She was serious: this city dweller had no need of nature with its beauty. She was not alone. While showing to the Russian tourists gorgeous Arab mansions of Jerusalem, I heard sceptical remark, ‘well, probably one can live there, if there is no choice’. But standard housing blocks on the outskirts of Jerusalem brought out their enthusiastic acclaim.

Rural Russia was transformed as well by introduction of standard housing, by collectivisation and mass shift of population to cities. Eventually, Russia became a land of two paradigms, of man-made and of natural landscapes. The division was felt in arts, literature, politics, preferred economics and social structure. Dominance of man-made was almost total, as the post-Stalin Communist leaders were increasingly Western in their desires. The dissident opposition supported even more thorough man-made policies. Natural landscape writers and artists were marginalized.

The consequences of this advent of man-made paradigm were grievous for Russia. Its nature was destroyed; rivers were poisoned by industrial waste, villages erased as economically unviable. 1991 completed the transfer of power and influence into man-made hands, as it was signalled by meteoric rise of Jewish oligarchs, few super-rich bankers and industry moguls.

Similar process took place elsewhere as well, and the man-made paradigm became the dominant of the world. Now, I do not think that Niemeyer, Reichmanns and other creators of man-made environment were consciously labouring for the sake of the (Diaspora) Jewish world domination, as conspiracy fans would have. Some of them acted subconsciously by creating an environment they would be able to prosper in, i.e. man-made environment. Others could not even understand that man-made environment is deadly for the Natural Man and explained the resistance by people’s prejudice. Strong-willed and stubborn, they thought they know better what is good for the people. Probably they did not even understand that it was good just for them.

Instinctively, as fish pulls the fisherman into the deep, the Jewish media owners formed public opinion for the man-made; Jewish financiers provided funds for man-made projects; Jewish real-estate developers built and promoted housing estates, as they sympathised with the man-made world, and felt that they will prosper in this new world. I think these actions were instinctive rather than conscious as they took place in the Jewish colony in Palestine as well. There is no doubt these people had deep sympathy for Israel, and Niemeyer lived for a while in our country, but their activities in Israel were as destructive as anywhere else.

One can compare this process with a similar development that took place earlier, when the British immigrants colonised North America. They had to compete with local inhabitants, the Native Americans, who lived in perfect symbiosis with the nature. In order to survive, the colonists had a choice: to change themselves or to transform environment. The Pathfinder of Fennimore Cooper was a man who adapted to nature and to the ways of Native Americans. If Native Americans would be strong enough to block or limit immigration from Europe, if the English colonists would share the French excitement with the Savage, there would be a possibility of adjustment.

However, the English settlers, fervent Protestants, devotees of the Old Testament, were inspired by the idea of their Chosenness, of being a New Israel repeating the conquest of Joshua. Local people were, correspondingly, ‘Canaanites’, who should be ‘dispossessed’ (Ch. 33:53 and «utterly destroyed” (Ch 21:3). The paradigm of the Old Testament (overturned by the New Testament and Koran) is the paradigm of total war, annihilation, dispossession and domination. By reverting to the Old Testament, the colonists declared war on less chosen ones. That is why they killed and dispossessed the Native Americans whenever they had a chance, but they also destroyed the environment: killed bison, poisoned wells, ruined the prairie. Destruction of environment is a natural mode of takeover by a foreign group.

VII

The reasons for landscape destruction are frequently presented as purely financial. Whenever a beautiful spring dries up, a river swells with industrial waste, a forest is cut off and a hill has been desiccated, we are supposed to blame human greed. However, one witnesses this process in the absence of profit motif, as well. In my native Siberia, many villages were destroyed and whole landscapes ruined by creating man-made lakes and hydraulic power systems. In Soviet Siberia, there was no profit motif, and vast supplies of electric power were not needed[xvii].

One can offer thousands of examples, as nature destruction goes on without real profit being sought or taken. One of the most inspired writers of the Web, Diane Harvey, asked in despair: ‘The purposeful relationship between the ruling minds of Earth and the agonizing death of the natural world is mystifying. What could motivate the present owner-operators of this globe to allow planetary life-support systems to degrade into a state of toxic shock? The death-throes of nature intensify, yet the fatally destructive human operations continue unabated, as if this state of affairs had nothing to do with human life. We must ask ourselves if those powerful men at the helm of this sinking ship, responsible for the poisoning of an entire planet, have genuinely lost their minds. We wonder if such ardent devotees of greed have finally been overwhelmed and driven mad altogether by this master-vice. Are we being carried along in a slipstream of reasonless chaos, toward the abyss? ^[xviii]’ ’

Diane Harvey, as Immanuel Wallerstein, makes a heroic effort to see reason in the apparently unreasonable behaviour and she almost succeeds by stretching the concept of greed. She concludes, ‘the global corporate power structures… have engineered the destruction of nature as the greatest business opportunity of all times. They have in mind to force mankind into total dependency on their replacements, and to control us absolutely through these very substitutes for natural existence they plan to sell us. I propose that the forces of corporate totalitarianism are deliberately destroying this entire world in order to sell their simulated version of it back to us at a profit’.

Her diagnosis is bleak, but it is not bleak enough. Who promised Ms Harvey she will be sold the replacements, air and water, in the dark tomorrow of our nightmares? After all, greed and profit, even capitalized, presuppose a lasting mode of operation. It calls for an effort to recognize that greed is not an elementary particle, neither a simple force. Beyond it, there is an older and darker figure, the domination drive. For domination, greed is just means to the purpose. Yes, it is nice to sell air to Miss Harvey and to make a handsome profit. But maybe it is even nicer to refuse to sell her air and watch her dying throes? After all, my ancestors, obsessed with domination drive, paid good money for the Christian captives after the Persian sack of Jerusalem, and slaughtered the prisoners, refusing the profit-taking^[xix] . Profit is not the last word; greed is not the ultimate sin. No greed can explain a drive of billionaire to make more billions. He is after different game, domination.

As we said, domination calls for slaves, and no man can be enslaved while he is connected to nature. That is the reason of nature destruction; it has to be done to enslave a man. But beyond domination drive, beyond destruction of nature, we observe something else. As a Columbus’ sailor at landfall, we rub our eyes in disbelief: it just can not be so!

For two hundred years, or more, Christendom tried to live without God. Some denied His existence, some didn’t, but believers and unbelievers explained our existential problems without appealing to God’s presence in Universe. Our good and bad drives and desires would suffice, normally. There is an adage ascribed to various scientists, from Newton to Einstein, saying, ‘I had no need to introduce God into my formulas’. A medieval English scholar from Surrey, William Ockham (he served as a prototype for the principal character of Umberto Eco’s thriller, Name of the Rose), stated a principle called Ockham’s Razor, ‘Do not multiply entries beyond necessity’. He meant that of two competing theories, the simplest explanation is to be preferred. That is why we do not usually appeal to the spiritual categories while explaining mundane events.

While we relaxed in our totally material world, another principle of medieval logic, Law of Manifestation, prepared us an ambush. This law states, ‘An existing entity will eventually manifest itself’. A non-manifesting entity could be called non-existent as well, without loss. Theoretically we knew that at certain speeds, the space won’t conform to age-old Euclid’s rules. Instead, a new geometry established in 19th century by a brilliant son of Hanover priest, Bernhard Riemann, will became operative. Practically, our mind refused to accept it – until it became a reality.

Theoretically, a believing man should be prepared to observe a manifestation of spiritual world, of God and lower Forces. Practically, we refused to believe in such a possibility. A Swedish lady pastor was asked, what she would do if she would be granted the vision of St Birgitta. ‘I’ll have two beers, a big steak, and if it will not help, I’ll take myself to a psychiatric clinic’, she replied. If that is an approach of a priest, what can one expect from laity?

While we turned away from God’s presence, and screened Him off our life, we helped His adversary at checkerboard. Now, his influence and plans became palpable, and no amount of steaks and beer would change this fact. The latest developments in human history, gratuitous destruction of nature, and war against spirit can not be plausibly explained by rational material causes. Beyond all-too-human figures of big corporations, beyond capitalised Greed, beyond the paradigm of Domination, the faceless Destroyer made his appearance, as Lord Darth Vader on the captive planet.