Hello. I am Gregory Davis, author of Antichrist: The Fulfillment of Globalization: The Ancient Church and the End of History from Uncut Mountain Press, released in 2022. My book is available though their website as well as at Amazon. You can find more of my talks at orthodoxethos.com.
The overwhelming question that confronts us today is how the individual is to conduct himself in a world of increasing global totalitarian control, including manufactured epidemics, the western war on the slavic world, 15 minute cities or really 15 minute prisons, the ongoing climate scare, growing technocracy and trans humanism, rigged elections, and the persecution of traditional Christianity and freedom of conscience.
As an Orthodox Christian, I believe that the war we are fighting is firstly a spiritual battle against the forces of evil that have tried to destroy mankind since the time of our ancestors in the Garden of Eden, though today they command far greater technical and material power.
Still, the struggle is qualitatively the same. Liberty-minded people have always been the target of oppressive governments and systems of power. We need only look to the history of the Church and the millions of martyrs who gave their lives through the centuries rather than deny their faith, a majority of whom perished at the hands of totalitarian regimes in Orthodox lands in the twentieth century. More than anything, the modern era has been the era of martyrdom. While the world spirals downward toward its end, yet we cannot rule out that the blood of the martyrs of the twentieth century may yet water a spiritual revival of the Orthodox Church in the twenty first.
When confronted with overwhelming central state power, we ask, what is the individual to do? Sacrifice surely will be necessary. If we insist on clinging to all of the comforts of modern material society we will almost certainly be lost, we will yield our consciences to the powers that be in order to preserve our short term happiness. We must be willing to resist. But how can the individual stand against the growing apparatus of global totalitarianism? Are we not condemned to a future of Orwell’s 1984?
In my book, I have written about the apocalyptic traditions of the Orthodox Church, which have taught for twenty centuries that someday a unified global empire will emerge, one of unprecedented power and reach, with a particular man at its head, namely, the Antichrist.
We can see the antichristian world state being constructed around us at both the national and supranational levels, the latter in the shape of such organizations as the UN, the World Health Organization, and World Economic Forum, whose designs unabashedly prescribe the destruction of individual liberty, freedom of religion, freedom of movement, and freedom of thought. Their vision for the future is in fact an ancient gnostic dream of paradise on earth that entails the suppression and destruction of much of the world’s population and soul-killing control of those left behind. They are what HG Wells described nearly a hundred years ago as the open conspiracy. Theirs is not an occult plot or a conspiracy theory, for what they seek to accomplish they espouse largely in plain sight.
Antichrist and his empire will one day take shape around us, but the future is not set in stone. We can and must resist: through civil disobedience when appropriate but I believe firstly through spiritual resistance. We must remain faithful in our hearts and minds to the traditions of Orthodoxy as passed down through the generations. We must cling to God’s one true Church. Even should we prevail at some political level, it profits a man nothing to gain the world at the expense of his soul. It is ultimately our souls that we must preserve at all costs.
I believe that the totalitarian danger growing around us is, at least for the time being, coming in three basic forms in the political sphere: the scare of climate change, the fear of so-called white nationalism, and the widespread faith in so- called democracy.
The issue of climate change is perhaps the most dangerous to civil liberties because it has a pretense to include all forms of human activity, from eating, to traveling, to how one lives at home. Furthermore, due to its vague and fundamentally unscientific nature, climate change can never be disproven precisely because the climate is always changing in one way or another. Any weather event, from floods to droughts to freak storms, from heat to cold, can be spun as evidence of climate change. Global warming due to manmade carbon emissions, a somewhat more specific scientific theory, itself ignores centuries of global warming and cooling that predated human industrialization. Few are aware that CO2 is but a trace gas in the atmosphere that is actually indispensable to life on earth. That the public understanding of CO2 has been transformed from being a necessary part of human existence to an atmospheric poison is surely one of the greatest lies of our time.
The scare of white nationalism, endlessly repeated by representatives of the left throughout the west, is in fact a means for furthering an ideology diametrically opposed to it. Virtually any political expression that does not kow-tow to the elitist trope of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is code for discrimination against whites, Christians, and heterosexuals, is systematically excluded from mainstream discourse. All realms of perversity, especially those targeting the most innocent, namely children, which includes pedophilia, transgender mutilation, and abortion, are tolerated as normal and merely a reflection of individual choice.
The obsessive fear of white nationalism leads ineluctably into the bromide of modern democracy and so-called democratic values. In practice, modern mass democracy directly implies not the rule of the people, or government for, by, or of the people, but precisely its opposite. Democracy has morphed into an Orwellian phantasm in which private elites and mega corporations freely manipulate the political process and any attempt to break their stranglehold is dismissed as dangerous populism with its connotation of white nationalism. Politicians have been reduced to salesmen for the latest crisis, emergency, or whatever ploy is next in line to consolidate power and exclude the common man from civil society.
The military industrial complex, about which the western world was warned by President Eisenhower decades ago, has morphed into the military industrial intelligence media complex, in which virtually no aspect of contemporary life remains untouched by a holistic, systematic shaping of ideas and policy by those who derive private profit from public administration. The latest American imperial adventure, the war in Ukraine, is proving a veritable field day for defense contractors, mercenaries, black operatives, and finance companies who underwrite both the war and the presumed rebuilding of a shattered country.
While the slavic world is subsidized to the tune of a hundred billion dollars to slit its own throat, America can’t muster the funds to house or feed its own population or even to provide adequate medical care. When trying to untangle the Ukraine conflict, it is worth bearing in mind that the contested territories ― including Crimea and the Donbas regions ― were entirely Russian until the Bolsheviks decided to make them parts of Ukraine for internal political reasons in the USSR.
While I am in no way a pacifist, I reject the counsel of taking matters into one’s own hands and going down the path of political violence. I believe that we have seen that violence begets violence and moves us further down the line of totalitarian control. There is nothing that the modern state desires more than for true patriots to undertake desperate acts of violence, real or imagined, that can then be used to justify greater repression. We have instances of successful nonviolent resistance to look to: far from being a failure, the Canadian truckers movement brought significant change to the Canadian political landscape as has the farmers’ revolt in Holland. Change is still possible even though difficult and though it comes with a cost.
The greatest single technical danger facing not only the globalizing western world but seemingly everywhere is the introduction of central bank digital currencies. These hold the promise of de-banking undesirable individuals and troublemakers by excluding them from the world economic system, much as St. John the Apostle foresaw in his Apocalypse, in which the mark of the beast will be necessary to buy and sell anywhere in the world. Already we are seeing certain PEPs, or politically exposed persons, having their access to the banking system systematically cut off. In such situations, the individual is virtually helpless against the consolidated might of the financial state apparatus. A solution, still really in its infancy, may be Bitcoin, which affords the promise of truly neutral digital money that cannot be turned off by any central authority.
While there remain some holdouts from the western dominated political order, such as Russia and China, and even the other BRICs countries, yet the trajectories of these countries appear eerily similar to their western counterparts. None have so far decisively declared themselves against the reach of the tentacles of the supranational elites that truly rule the world.
So far on the political historical front. But what of the spiritual dimension?
Analogous to the ever advancing centralization of power at the political level, I believe the greatest threat on the spiritual and ecclesiological level is the burgeoning heresy of ecumenism. Ecumenism distorts the Church’s message to love one another and to make disciples of all nations into a pleasant fiction that all religions are essentially the same, that all roads lead to the same destination. The heresy of ecumenism seeks to unite the world’s religions into one amorphous mass that will set the stage for the coming of its final king and high priest, Antichrist. The Church’s message has always been a universal one; one of love toward God and neighbor; but not at the expense of the truths she holds about salvation, redemption, and individual moral behavior. Nowhere other than in the Christian Gospel is redemption and salvation made available to man, and nowhere other than in the Orthodox Church has the Gospel been preserved intact from its beginning.
As Christians, we must struggle in love and truth: love for one another, even for the enemies of God, and in the truth of the Church as witnessed to by her saints through the generations.
We must cling to the transcendent truth of the Orthodox Church, herself the kingdom of heaven on earth and accept no worldly substitutes. While the world seeks to transcend its earthly limits through transhumanism, we seek inward transformation into the image of Christ. Terrible times may yet befall us, but the eternal Church will remain in her essence until the end of time, even if perhaps only at the edges of society, as she once existed in the catacombs. We must look to her and to one another, our brothers and sisters in Christ, to navigate these perilous times.
I am grateful for the having had the opportunity to speak to you. I wish to close with a prayer from St. Anatole the Younger of Optina monastery written against the Antichrist. I believe that we would do well to include this prayer in our daily devotions:
O, Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, deliver us from the seductions of the coming Antichrist, abhorred by God and crafty in evil, and from all his snares. Protect us, and all of our Christian neighbors, from his devious nets ― keeping us in the hidden refuge of Thy salvation. Grant, Lord, that our fear of the devil may not be greater than the fear of Thee, and that we not fall away from Thee and Thy Holy Church. But instead, grant us, O Lord, to suffer and die for Thy Holy Name, and for the Orthodox Faith, and never to Deny Thee, nor to receive the marks of the cursed Antichrist, nor to worship him. Grant us, O Lord, day and night, tears and lamentation for our sins. And on the day of Thy dread Judgement, O Lord, grant us pardon. Amen.
Thank you and God bless.
