When a Serb hears the word “union”, he immediately recalls the forced uniatization of his ancestors — an effort carried out by the Vatican with the help of the Venetians and the Habsburgs, compelling the children of Saint Sava to recognize the Pope of Rome while offering them the chance to keep their “Greek-Eastern” rite. The word “union” reminds us of Matavulj’s Pilipenda, who refuses to accept the “imperial faith,” even if it means dying of hunger. Likewise, we cannot utter this word without remembering all the tricks and deceptions used by Latin missionaries in their attempts to convert the Serbs.
THE MYTH OF THE EU
There has been no topic in our country, from the early 1990s until today, discussed as intensely as the question of the Union. If we do not enter the EU — the club that almost all of Europe has joined (except for “poor” states such as Switzerland, and which even the United Kingdom has left) — we are told that a “frozen death” awaits us in the corner of the “Western Balkans.” We are not in Europe unless we are in the EU. All the crimes the EU, together with the USA, committed during the breakup of the SFRY — driving Serbs from their ancestral homes — are forgotten for the sake of “entering Europe.” Even now, when the EU openly states that it has no intention of further enlargement, the EU mantra in Serbia remains intact.
The myth of the EU as the only Europe deserves to be reexamined.
THE ORIGINAL UNITY OF EUROPE AND BYZANTIUM
Europe, in its beginnings, was one — as the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire did not simply “evaporate”: it continued to exist through St. Constantine the Equal-to-the-Apostles, who founded the New Rome, Constantinople. As George Ostrogorsky writes, describing the condition of the West which, during the “migration of peoples,” fell under the rule of the barbarians: “The Emperor (in Constantinople) continued to consider himself the ruler of the entire Roman Empire and of all Christendom.”
The lands that had once belonged to the Roman Empire were regarded as the eternal and inalienable possession of the Roman emperor in Constantinople. Therefore, St. Emperor Justinian (526–565), according to Ostrogorsky, sought “to reclaim his Roman inheritance, to liberate Roman lands from the power of the barbarians and Arian heretics, and to restore the Empire within its old borders as the sole Roman and Orthodox state.” The foundation of this unified Europe consisted of “Roman state order, Greek culture, and the Christian faith” (though in Ostrogorsky’s enumeration, this order should be reversed: the Christian faith, Greek culture, and Roman state order). That is why the Byzantines did not consider themselves “Greeks,” but “Romans” — Romei — preserving the entire European heritage intact. As our distinguished geopolitician Miloš Knežević notes: “Byzantium could not, nor did it wish to, destroy the Western Roman Empire; it was its separate, second, and more powerful part. Rome fell under the invasions and devastation of the northern barbarians. The Roman West was re-barbarized — in other words, made primitive again. Between the culture of the newcomers and the achievements of Rome there was no cultural continuity or synthesis; those achievements were mediated and inherited by Byzantium. The direct successor of Byzantium later became Russia and several Eastern, that is, Southeastern European nations.”
But what happened to Byzantium?
In the West, it was scorned, rejected, and denied as part of Europe. Hegel reduced the entire history of the Eastern Roman Empire to “a repugnant picture of weakness, wherein miserable, indeed absurd passions prevented the emergence of great thoughts, deeds, and individuals.” Knežević points out that “Western Europe ignores, belittles, and disparages Byzantium — and has done so for a very long time,” despite Byzantium having existed longer than ancient Rome; it overlooks the fact that “Roman-ness was extended for many centuries through Romeian-ness.”
METROPOLITAN HIEROTHEOS PROVES IT
The distinguished Greek theologian, Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, explains this clearly in his essay “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Politics in Europe”:
“It is obvious that today’s EU is largely governed by papists and Protestants, since Orthodox Christians make up a minority. Certainly, we should recall, as many modern historians say, that the majority of Europeans are descendants of the ancient Romans who were conquered by the Germanic tribes, which seized the western part of the Byzantine Empire. Thus, today, the greater part of Europeans are of Romeian origin, while the so-called ruling class consists of the descendants of Frankish conquerors. Therefore, in the construction of today’s Europe, the Europe of Charlemagne re-emerges — and he is, incidentally, the father of modern Europe, who hated the Romeian tradition with a deadly passion. It is well known that French–German forces lead Europe today.
However, on the other hand, much of European society carries within its national subconscious memories and archetypes rooted in Hellenism, which is why they respect and appreciate the Orthodox tradition.”
It would indeed be worthwhile to cooperate with such awakened Europeans in an effort to restore the original unity of spirit and culture, for the common good of all Europeans. Alas, this is not happening. And, most likely, at the moment of the “decline of the West” (to use Spengler’s expression), it cannot happen.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN EAST AND WEST
According to Metropolitan Hierotheos, the East and West developed in different directions, something evident to this day. The West chose materialism; the East chose the person. The West is rationalism; the East is apophaticism — the transcendence of mere rationality. The West is juridical moralism; the East sees ethics as the healing of the soul. The West is papism and papal-like centralization; the East is conciliarity. The West began as racist feudalism; the East knew the state as the guarantor of legal equality among citizens. That is why Vlachos says:
It is finally becoming clear that there exists a vast difference between the Western and Eastern traditions in all fields — in thought, in state organization, and in behavior. This is, of course, the consequence of the great change that occurred in the West after the transfer of the capital of the Byzantine state from West to East (Constantinople), which created a spiritual void in the West.
Thus, Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos speaks of the greatest tragedy of Europe: in the first millennium it was united by the same faith and the grace of God, from North Africa to Ireland. In the second millennium, it became brutally divided — and that division persists to this day. For true unity is possible only in Christ and His saints, with whom the Church of the East and West was adorned during the first thousand years after the birth of the Lord.
THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN WASHINGTON AND THE VATICAN
The essence of today’s EU lies in the way it presents itself as the true and complete Europe — a Europe beyond which no other exists. In reality, as Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy noted in his book Europe and Mankind, the Romano-Germans proclaimed their own civilization to be the best, the highest, and the only one worthy of humanity, and began referring to that civilization as “Europe.” As Hannes Hofbauer shows in his study on EU enlargement to the East, Romano-Germanic “Europeanization” lies at the core of the modern idea of creating the European Union.
In truth, the European Union as we know it today emerged from a major agreement between the United States and the Vatican, reached at the end of the Second World War, when Roosevelt’s America obtained the consent of Pope Pius XII for the Vatican to abandon its support for the Axis Powers in exchange for an agreement with Washington.
The White House committed itself to turning a blind eye to Roman Catholic clerical fascists and clerical Nazis and to continuing the Axis struggle against Bolshevism, while the Vatican promised wholehearted assistance to Washington in the Americanization of European integration after the war.
THE VATICAN, EUROPE, AND THE THIRD REICH
An excellent study on this topic, based on archival materials, was written by French historian Annie Lacroix-Riz (A. L. Riz, “The Vatican, Europe, and the Reich from World War I to the Cold War,” Službeni glasnik, Belgrade 2006).
From the book we learn that Pope Pius XII strongly intervened to stop the process of denazification in Germany, because — according to him — it amounted to “revenge.” He demanded that the Poles, who were Roman Catholics, forgive the Germans, and insisted that the same should be done by other nations trampled by Hitler’s boot:
Although these nations suffered harshly and terribly during the war, they must be magnanimous, forget the past, and give you — as well as the rest of Europe and humanity — hope in a better tomorrow marked by love.
A well-known protégé of Pope Pius XII, Monsignor Hudal, the pro-Nazi “leader of the German Catholic community in Rome,” openly supported Hitler in his fight against Bolshevism, for which he received praise from Alfred Rosenberg himself. In his posthumously published diary, “The Life Confession of an Aging Bishop,” Hudal expressed admiration for the German nation’s struggle against Bolshevism and thanked God for enabling him to procure forged identification documents that helped Nazis escape to “happier lands” (as Hudal himself phrased it). He personally saved Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps, by providing him a Red Cross passport. Also involved in this work was Monsignor Munch, a German-American bishop born in Wisconsin, who served as the “priest of the American occupation forces” in Germany.
With the help of the Vatican, the Americans revived the work of German Christian Democratic parties and appointed, as statesmen of the new Germany (which would become the “driving engine” of the European Union), Roman Catholic politicians — some of whom had previously supported the Nazis. Among them were figures such as Konrad Adenauer, former mayor of Cologne; Kolb, mayor of Munich; Siebeck, mayor of Marburg; and others. This was invaluable assistance to Washington.
A BULWARK AGAINST RUSSIA
General — and later U.S. President — Dwight Eisenhower visited Pope Pius XII and expressed his wish that America build its policy in Germany on cooperation with the Vatican, thus fulfilling the Pope’s plan: “the re-Christianization of the German masses, the participation of Catholics in political life, the consolidation of what remained of the German organism — which the Vatican considered a bulwark against Soviet expansion — and the defense of Germany’s unity.”
The famous intelligence officer Hoover came to Pope Pius XII in 1946 and 1947, on behalf of Wall Street bankers, to inquire about the possibilities of investing in the German economy. Afterwards, everything was done to create the myth of an alleged resistance of Roman Catholic bishops to Hitler’s policies. Germany did not remain ungrateful: around 1965, it was paying the Vatican three hundred million dollars annually as a sign of gratitude.
WERE THEY REALLY AGAINST COMMUNISM? NOT QUITE!
In the mid-1980s, Pope John Paul II and U.S. President Ronald Reagan continued cooperation in the field of “Euro-Atlantic integration,” coordinating the dismantling of communism in Eastern Europe. The collapse of communism also entailed the destruction of Yugoslavia — a state in which the Serbs lived with the hope that they could preserve the country that, for the first time in their history, had united them.
The EU has long been a totalitarian project that deprives states and nations of their freedom. This is no accident: its origins make that clear. Leaving aside the fact that today, the Masonic Brussels listens more to the Masonic Washington than to the papal state, the Vatican is a state — and although the Brussels elite does everything it can to suppress Christianity within the EU, the Pope’s word is still heard. When it comes to fighting a common enemy — above all, the Orthodox East — the Vatican, Washington, and Brussels join forces.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Who was the first to advocate the idea of a Central European Union and a “European economic area” with “fixed currencies”?
Walter Funk, Minister of Economics of the Third Reich.
Who was the first to organize a scientific conference on the European Community, from which an extensive volume was published, where it was emphasized that no European state “can by itself achieve the highest level of economic freedoms necessary to meet all social needs,” and therefore goals such as the free movement of goods and capital in Europe (including England), a customs union, a new system of crediting, payment transactions, coordination of taxes, prices, and payments of agricultural production in Europe should be pursued?
Walter Funk, Minister of Economics of the Third Reich.
Who was the first to dream of “the widest economic unification of Europe,” already in 1940?
Joachim von Ribbentrop, Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Who was the first to establish a special Office for European Planning and to foresee the standardization of travel documents in Europe?
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS.
Who uttered the following words: “How many problems humanity, and especially the peoples of Europe, would have been spared if the natural and obvious conditions of life had been respected when the political shaping of the European living space and economic cooperation was taking place! The peoples of Europe are one family in this world! It is not very wise to imagine that such a full house as Europe, a community of nations, can maintain for so long different legal systems and various legislative concepts”?
Adolf Hitler, of course.
Who said that “in the year 2000 Europe will be a united continent”?
Joseph Goebbels.
LET US REMIND OURSELVES AGAIN
Walter Funk was indeed the first person to call for the establishment of a Central European Union with a “fixed currency,” already in 1940.
That same Walter Funk, a close associate of Hitler, in 1942 organized a scientific conference in Berlin, at which many recognized experts from various fields participated, after which the volume European Community was published.
Hermann Göring, on June 22, 1940, ordered that a plan for the “broad economic unification of Europe” be urgently drawn up.
Ribbentrop, in the Reich Ministry of Foreign Affairs, indeed founded the European Commission, led by W. Deitz and A. Six, authors of plans for a European Confederation and a draft for its future Constitution.
Himmler, within his staff, had an Office for European Planning, which worked on the preparation of the Handbook of European Social Policy. Hitler dreamed of a unified Europe and spoke about this in the Reichstag on March 7, 1936.
And, of course, Goebbels foresaw that Europe would be a unified state by the year 2000, which he published in the magazine Der Angriff on January 30, 1945.
In 1943, Ribbentrop’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs drafted its proposal for a Union of European States: “The unification of Europe, which has long been outlined in history, represents a necessary development (…) Europe has become far too small for mutually isolated and warring sovereignties (…). The Union of European States must be a community of, if possible, all European countries.” One can read about all this, and much more, in Rodney Atkinson’s book The Enchanted European Circle / Corporate Elites and the New Fascism (Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1996).
WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH THE SERBS?
Romano-Germanic Europe, as Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy called it, both during the time of the Third Reich and today—when its mouth is full of “anti-fascism”—treats the Orthodox peoples, above all Russians and Serbs, in a similar way. The European Union celebrates as its holiday May 9, the day of victory over Nazism and fascism, which supposedly laid the foundation for its democratic future (supposedly, that is today’s EU reality).
Given that the EU is to a great extent an integral part of the NATO Empire, there has long been an attempt within its ideological laboratories to revise established historiographical facts: they try to remove Russia, which had a key role in liberating Europe from Hitler’s hordes, from the anti-fascist horizon of European history, even though it suffered the greatest human and material losses in the fight for Europe. The USA and the EU are waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and the return to Nazi ideas and practices is no longer foreign to them.
The Serbs, a people who had two anti-fascist movements (royalist-legitimist and leftist-revolutionary—Chetniks and Partisans), continue to be demonized by the EU, which seeks to reduce Serbia to the “Belgrade Pashaluk.” One of the methods is accusing the Serbs of “fascism.”
THE EU AND THE SERBS AS “FASCISTS”
Historical truth, however, is indisputable: the Serbs, unlike their fellow citizens (such as Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians) in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which Hitler dismembered, had no sympathy for Hitler, Mussolini, and the Axis Powers. Hermann Neubacher, Hitler’s special envoy for the Balkans, was completely clear in his memoirs: the only peoples whom Rome and Berlin occupied in the Balkans were the Serbs and the Greeks; all others were allies of the Axis Powers (for example, from the Croats and Bosnian Muslims, following Himmler’s instructions, the SS division “Handžar” was formed, and from the Albanians the SS division “Skanderbeg”).
Even the Serbian collaborator, General Milan Nedić, was not a Germanophile. The pre-war leftist, leader of the Agrarian Party, Dragoljub Jovanović, in his memoir book People, People, claims that already in 1940 Nedić contacted, through him, the Soviet ambassador in Belgrade, Plotnikov, and informed him that Germany was preparing an attack on the Soviet Union. Nedić refused to send, even symbolically, any Serbian unit to the Eastern Front against Russia.
WHAT AWAITS THE SERBS?
The Serbs, at the time when the SFRY began to disintegrate, had a clear conscience: they had been allies of the Western democracies in both world wars, as well as victims of German expansionism in the First, and fascist–Nazi occupation in the Second World War. Yet it turned out that the former allies from the West found themselves on the side of the Serbs’ enemies. Even today, when Slobodan Milošević, who supposedly caused Western Serbophobia, is no longer there, the war against Serbian interests continues, this time under the auspices of the EU. That is why most Serbs are no longer surprised that United Europe, in 1995 and 1999, together with its ally America, bombed us with depleted uranium, just as they are no longer surprised that German soldiers in occupied Kosovo and Metohija stand in the same places where their grandfathers stood from 1941 to 1944.
For the Serbs there is no place either in Hitler’s Europe or in NATO’s EU, no matter how much local euro-fanatics tell pitiful fairy tales about our future under yellow stars on a blue background. But, as the poet Desanka Maksimović sang, “Serbia is a great mystery.” That is, in the words of Milovan Danojlić: “Do not look at the stars, nor the newspapers./Take a small board of linden wood,/And carve into it a deep notch./Where something once stood, it will stand forever!”
For, as Bishop Nikolaj said, Serbia is a neighbor of Europe, but it is not Europe. Especially not the Europe that, with equal zeal, once fought against Russia under the swastika, and now continues to wage war against her under the flag of the NATO pact.
