Rod Dreher's Blog, page 109

Defending Christian Armenia

I received this e-mail just now:

I am writing you from Armenia and thank you for this article, even though I am not surprised but I am still greatly disappointed by the response of American Christian organizations (political/religious) to what is really an attempt at a second Genocide in the 21st century. I know they don’t like Orthodox Christians, but I have come to the conclusion that they actually hate us. Thank you again for for posting this article.

The article he’s talking about appears on TAC, and is written by Uzay Bulut, a Turkish journalist who — this is extraordinarily brave for a Turk — is defending Armenia against Turkish and Azeri aggression.

I would correct my Armenian reader: Christians here don’t hate Orthodox Christians in the ancient Christian lands. They don’t know that you exist, and don’t particularly care. Maybe indifference is a form of hatred. Whatever the truth, it is deeply wrong. 

Most Americans have no idea that Armenia was the first nation to receive the Gospel as a nation. This is how long those people have been Christian. I strongly urge you to read Mark Movsesian’s backgrounder on the new fighting in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. 

And let me tell you something about Turkey, which is supporting the aggression against Armenia.

Most Americans have no idea that in the 20th century, the Turks waged a true genocide against the Armenian Christian people. The book to read is 2019’s The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924, by the Israeli historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi. I had to put it down — a lot — because its record of the atrocities the Turks wrought on innocent Armenians in the ethnic and religious cleansing of Turkey was too much to bear.

Here, for example, is an account of a massacre in Urfa in 1895, witnessed by Fitzmaurice, a British consular official:

Nazif [the local Turkish military commander] sent word to non-Armenian Christians “to assemble in their churches and not stir out” and to refrain from sheltering Armenians. In a further sign of official complicity, the captain of the gendarmes finally granted [missionary Corinna] Shattuck permission to leave on a long-planned trip to Antep, after weeks of rejections. (She didn’t go.) The troops were then drawn up at the entrances to the Armenian quarter. Behind them “an armed Mussulman mob [gathered], while the minarets were crowded with Moslems evidently in expectation of some stirring event. The Turkish women, too, crowded onto the roofs and the slopes of the fortress, which overlooked the Armenian Quarter.” The mob was “cheered on by their women, who kept up the well-known zilghit or peculiar throat noise, used on such occasions by Oriental women to encourage their braves.” At around noon a muezzin cried out the midday prayer as “a glittering glass ornament resembling a crescent was seen shining from the top of the fortress ” overlooking the town. “A mullah waved a green banner from a tall minaret overhanging the other end” of the town. Shots were fired and a “trumpet sounded the attack.” The soldiers opened their ranks so that the mob could pour into the quarter, assaulting “males over a certain age.”

According to Fitzmaurice’s investigation, Nazi was seen “motioning the crowd on,” the mob guided by troops who had familiarized themselves with the quarter during the siege. A “body of wood-cutters,” armed with axes, led the way, breaking down doors. Soldiers then rushed inside and shot the men. “A certain sheik,” Fitzmaurice wrote, “ordered his followers to bring as many stalwart young Armenians as they could find.To the number of about 100 they were thrown on their backs and held down by their hands and feet, while the sheik, with a combination of fanaticism and cruelty, proceeded, while reciting verses of the Koran, to cut their throats after the Mecca rite of sacrificing sheep. “Those hiding were dragged out and butchered — stones, shot, and set on fire with “matting saturated with petroleum.” Women were cut down shielding their husbands and fathers. More Armenians were shot as they scampered along rooftops trying to escape. When the killing subsided, the houses were looted and torched. As sunset approached, the trumpet sounded again, calling the troops and the mob to withdraw. …

More:

The atrocities resumed the following day, December 29, with a trumpet sound at dawn. The largest number were killed at the Armenian cathedral, where thousands had gathered for sanctuary. The attackers first fired through windows into the church, then smashed in the doors and killed the men clustered on the ground floor. Fitzmaurice relates that, as the mob plundered the church, they “mockingly call[ed] on Christ … to prove himself a greater prophet than Mohammed.” The Turks then shot at the “shrieking and terrified mass of women, children and some men” in the second-floor gallery. But gunning the Armenians down one by one was “too tedious,” so the mob brought in more petroleum-soaked bedding and set fire to the woodwork and the staircases leading up to the galleries. For several hours “the sickening odour of roasting flesh pervaded the town.” Writing the following March, Fitzmaurice noted, “Even today, the smell of putrescent and charred remains in the church is unbearable.” Shattuck described the horror as “a grand holocaust” and four days afterward watched “men lugging sacks filled with bones, ashes” from the cathedral.

Prior to the massacres, Urfa was home to about 20,000 Armenians. Between 8,000 and 10,000 died over two days — between 2,500 and 3,000 of them inside the Armenian cathedral. The Ottoman government in Istanbul denied that any massacre had occurred at all.

And that was just one event! Morris and Ze’evi conclude that, “It is therefore probable that the number of Armenians killed over the thirty-year period, 1894-1924, exceeded one million, perhaps substantially.” Armenians weren’t the only Christians the Turks killed in that period. Assyrian Christians and Greek Christians also suffered massacres. The Israelis write:

The preceding assessments suggest that the Turks and their helpers murdered, straightforwardly or indirectly, through privation and disease, between 1.5 and 2.5 million Christians between 1894 and 1924.

There is a sense, say these Israelis, in which the Armenian genocide was worse that the holocaust of the Jews:

The anti-Jewish campaign was not based on personal sadism, of the sort exhibited by SS officer Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List (1993). (In this sense, the movie was misleading.) Cruelty was pervasive, of course, and massive suffering was inflicted. But suffering was not the perpetrators’ purpose. In most cases the process was impersonal and cold, and geared only to extermination. The Turks’ mass murder and deportation of the Christians during 1894-1924, on the other hand, was highly upfront and personal and involved countless acts of individual sadism. Where the Nazis used guns and gas, many of the murdered Christians were killed with knives, bayonets, axes, and stones; thousands were burned alive (the Nazis burned corpses); tens of thousands of women and girls were gang-raped and murdered; clerics were crucified; and thousands of Christian dignitaries were tortured — eyes gouged out, noses and ears cut off, feet turned to mush — before being executed. In terms of the behavior of the perpetrators, on the level of individual actions, the Turkish massacre of the Christians was far more sadistic than the Nazi murder of the Jews.

This is the judgment of two Israeli Jewish historians, who have shown more sympathy and solidarity with Armenians persecuted by the Turks and their agents than have American Christians, to our great shame.

Here is a link to a short British TV documentary clip about the Armenian genocide. It’s only 8:29 long, and well worth watching to educate yourself about what those people suffered at the hands of the Turks.

NPR reports on the current fighting in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region:

According to de Waal, two new factors make the current situation more dangerous than before: Turkey’s open backing for one party and the United States’ “unusual disengagement.”

Trump likes Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, by the way, returned the ancient Christian cathedral of the Hagia Sophia to use as a mosque this year, a stinging humiliation to Orthodox Christians.

Why does my country’s government always seem to give the back of the hand to Christians of the Near East? No wonder the Armenians think we hate them.

 

The post Defending Christian Armenia appeared first on The American Conservative.

A New, Tough Kind Of Evangelism

Good morning. More interviews today for Live Not By Lies. Before I get started, I’d like to thank Fran Maier for his review, which runs today in Catholic World Report. Excerpts:

As events would have it, we don’t need an American Caesar or the theatrics of a Rubicon crossing. Our political institutions and public consciousness can be, and are being, transformed from the inside out, without any melodrama. The result, says Dreher, will be a comfortable servitude, a “soft totalitarianism,” run by a technocratic, progressive elite, and supported by Big Data and a compliant capitalism. Everyday life will be far closer to the sunny brain-scrub of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than the shabbiness and goon-squad brutality of Orwell’s Airstrip One.

More:

Dreher has a simple, vigorous, engaging style, backed up by exhaustive research and numerous interviews with survivors of Soviet era repression. His book’s title — “Live Not By Lies” — is taken from a 1974 essay by the great Russian dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And logically so. A survivor of the gulag, Solzhenitsyn committed his life to attacking the mendacity and murderous delusions of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Stalin and his millions of victims were not an “aberration” of the socialist system. They were the inevitable fruit of deceits congenital to Marxist and progressive thought. For Solzhenitsyn, the label “progressive” itself was a misnomer, an example of overweening conceit and skillful self-deception. The materialist view of man was not simply wrong, but a poisonous lie.

Dreher borrows this basic insight and applies it to the smiley-face atheism at the heart of modern technocratic thought. The lie that infects the DNA of atheism kills. Whether the killing is quick and brutal, or a slow, soft strangulation of the spirit, the result is the same.

More:

The chapters in Part One on “Progressivism as Religion” and “Capitalism, Woke and Watchful,” are especially strong. Anyone imagining big business as instinctively conservative need only remember the speed with which corporations jumped on the same-sex marriage and “gay rights” bandwagon. The lavish business support showered on the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement is also revealing, since — beneath its calls for racial justice — the BLM agenda is toxic to what most Americans believe. The lesson here is simple: Absent a grounding in broadly biblical principles, corporations follow profits, wherever they lead. In Part Two, the chapters on cultural memory, families as resistance cells, and “the gift of suffering,” make for essential reading.

The excellence of this text flows not just from the richness of its content, or the clarity and passion of its presentation, but also from the providential nature of its timing. We live in a uniquely weird moment of uncertainty: a time of peril from a changing culture, but also of opportunity to witness, with our lives, the power of what we believe. It demands a new kind of missionary work, done family to family, friend to friend, local church to local church. It’s a moment when many of our Christian leaders, including Catholic leaders, seem too weak, or confused, or coopted — or dealing with regimes like China, too deluded — to inspire trust.

Read it all. 

Until his recent retirement, Fran was the longtime chancellor for Archbishop Charles Chaput, both in Philadelphia and in Denver. Chaput was the most culturally far-seeing prelate in the US Catholic hierarchy, and a lot of that was due to his collaboration with Fran. It’s an honor to receive his praise for the book.

And he’s right about the “new kind of missionary work” needed. I believe that in the years to come — sooner rather than later — among the most effective forms of evangelism available to Christians will be simple, steadfast endurance. It will be the kind that tells other people you don’t have to live this lie, and that encourages those who already know this, but are too timid to say so, to find their voice.

From Live Not By Lies, a story that the Slovak historian Jan Simulcik, who was part of a cell of activists in the underground church, told me as we stood inside a secret sub-basement chamber where the church printed illegal Gospels, prayer books and catechisms in the 1980s. The man Simulcik thought was an “elevator repairman” from his university would secretly go down into that hidden chamber, accessible only through a clandestine tunnel, for years, and spend hours in that cramped room printing these precious books that helped the church stay alive. More:

As a student, Šimulčik knew that the elevator repairman had something to do with the Christian underground, but he wasn’t sure what. That was by design. The underground only shared information like that on a need-to-know basis, so those arrested by the secret police couldn’t compromise the operations if they broke under interrogation. What Šimulčik did not learn until communism fell was that for all those years he was upstairs in that house compiling samizdat, that elevator repairman was down below, spending hours in the tomblike room, printing the words of life at great risk to his own liberty.

In fact, everyone involved with the Christian samizdat project would have been sent to prison had the secret police ever discovered the network. As Šimulčik breaks down for me the complex moving parts of the operation, he emphasizes the extraordinary risks the underground Christians took for the sake of publishing these documents.

Why did you get involved? I ask. You could have lost everything.

“When you ask that question, you are really asking about where we find the meaning of the underground church,” Šimulčik replies. “It was in small community. Only in small communities could people feel free.”

He goes on:

When you were with your friends in these communities, you had freedom. You knew that when you went outside, there was totalitarianism. It controlled everything and oppressed you. People like me who wanted knowledge and freedom, and wanted to know more about our faith, depended on these small communities. They were well organized, and we had strong leaders. This was the only place to find that.

First, I did it because I wanted to experience personal freedom, but this was connected to Christ. After we tasted freedom in these communities, we gradually came to want to fight for freedom for everyone.

Šimulčik tells me that he and his cell of several other young Catholic men were all afraid. You would have been crazy not to have fear.

“The question is, which is going to win: fear, or courage?” he says. “In the beginning, it was mostly a matter of fear. But once you started experiencing freedom—and you felt it, you felt freedom through the things you did— your courage grew. We experienced all this together. We helped one another to gradually build up the courage to do bigger things, like join the Candle Demonstration,” the 1988 mass Christian manifestation that was a precursor to the revolution a year later that peacefully brought down communism.

“With this courage also developed our sense of duty, and our need to be of service to other people,” the historian continues. “We could see the products of our work. We could hold these samizdat books in our hands, and we could see that people really read them and learned from them. We saw what we did as service to God and service to people. But it took years for us to see the fruit of our labor and to see our communities grow.”

Underground or above ground, Christians will be called on simply to be strong, and not deterred by fear of the world’s hatred. That is a form of evangelizing. Churches right now that find their voice, and do not waver from the truth, are going to be attractive to those men and women with stout hearts who want to prepare themselves for the long night ahead. Those churches that prefer not to face reality, or worse, wish to collaborate with the regime (I don’t mean just the state here, but the emerging social order) for the sake of keeping the world’s respectability, or remaining “relevant” to this increasingly anti-Christian order — well, no Christian who can read the signs of the times and wants to be ready will want to be with that lot.

When you spend time with Christians like Jan Simulcik, who as a young man staked his liberty on serving Christ in the underground church, you know exactly the kind of believer you want to be. When I went down into that hidden samizdat room with Jan, and heard his story, he didn’t have to evangelize me, because I was already a Christian. But he did evangelize me, in a way that he didn’t know: he helped me to resolve to be braver than I am.

That’s the kind of book Live Not By Lies is.

By the way, here’s a link to a podcast interview I did about the book with Mark Bauerlein of First Things. And here’s a link to an interview I did with Rob Bluey at the Daily Signal.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I just finished the audiobook of Live Not by Lies and I just wanted to pass along how much I enjoyed it!

Personally I don’t understand why so many people were calling this a “dark” or “depressing” book. I found incredible hope in it! I mean, yes you’re clear about what is facing orthodox Christians in the modern west, and this can sound grim at times. But sometimes the truth is grim. The stories about those saintly Christian dissidents gave me incredible hope for the future, though!

There were several points where I was in tears listening to the stories about how God used people in the most miserable conditions imaginable to show his love and mercy. And how happy and full of God’s love those people were! I second what others have said about this book being almost like a Part 2 of the Benedict Option. To me it seems like Benedict Option explains about how things are turning for the worse so here is what you, your family and community can do to strengthen yourself for the coming adversity. Live Not by Lies witnesses the actions of the confessors and martyrs who should be our muses for when things get really bad.

An interesting dynamic that I experienced while listening to this audiobook was that at the same time I was reading a book you have suggested several times in your blog: The Lost City by Alan Ehrenhalt. While listening to your book throughout my workday and then reading Ehrenhalt’s book after the kids went to bed I saw the incredible comparison with how Christians lived in the same time period but in vastly different conditions.

Reading about the St. Nick’s parish – the working class white parish in southwest Chicago – I was moved by the thought of a neighborhood united in worship and belief, which is something that so very few of our large cities have nowadays. But I was also struck by how incredibly easy it was to be a practicing Christian in that time. It was almost a cultural afterthought, where it was just easier and more fruitful to everyday social life to be active in the local parish than not. The lack of participation would have probably raised more questions than just participating for ease’s sake.

Nobody can accuse those eastern European dissidents with just following a cultural norm, or just swimming with the neighborhood current. I kind of realized that many of us have been looking to that type of 1950’s Christianity for guidance of how we should handle the world as it currently exists for Christians, not realizing that that world no longer exists and will not be coming back. As noble as these pursuits are, being politically active, sending your kids to Catholic schools, and being active in groups like the Knights of Columbus will not lead to a rebirth of public Christianity or cause an end to the Church’s lack of influence in most Americans’ lives (nor will it put a stop to the seeming unravelling of our country). We need to look to a different continent in that time period for our models for behavior, not 1950’s Chicago but the 1950’s Warsaw Pact.

Really interesting thoughts. Thank you, reader.

The post A New, Tough Kind Of Evangelism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Maria Wittner’s Warning

Busy day today doing publicity for the book, but a gratifying day. The message is getting out there. People know that there is something very wrong in our society, and that a shadow has fallen across our civilization. A reader of Live Not By Lies writes that he is loving it. He adds:

We went to Budapest a couple of years ago for my wife’s 40th birthday. I’ll never forget one of our food tour guides, a younger woman who would claim herself to be a progressive liberal, look at us in all seriousness & say to never give up your guns because if you do, you’ll have nothing to fight back with once they come after you. Her demeanor immediately changed as if she was recalling all the horrible stories from direct witnesses of Hungary’s German & then Soviet occupation.

Her words have haunted me, even more so as we march closer to this ontological possibility. It grieves me that so many of us may have to experience decades of this type of rule & then proclaim in the future the same sentiment that she did to me, only not from a place of fear that it’ll happen but from direct experience. Lord, have mercy.

This email brought to mind my afternoon in suburban Budapest with Maria Wittner, a hero of the 1956 uprising against the Soviets. Here she is back then:



From Live Not By Lies :

Defending the right to speak and write freely, even when it costs you something, is the duty of every free person. So says Mária Wittner, a hero of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet occupation. A communist court sentenced Wittner, then only twenty, to death, though this was later commuted to life imprisonment.

“Once I said to one of the guards in prison, ‘You are lying.’ For that alone, I was taken to trial again,” remembers the feisty Wittner. “The state prosecutor said to me, ‘Wittner, why did you accuse the guard of being a liar? Why didn’t you just say, ‘You’re not telling the truth’? I said, ‘It matters that we speak plainly.’”

For her insolence, Wittner was sent back to prison with extra punishments. She had to sleep on a wooden bed with no mattress and was given reduced rations. By the time her sentence was commuted and she was released, Wittner weighed scarcely one hundred pounds. Nevertheless, she insists that a broken body is a price worth paying for a strong and undefiled spirit.

“We live in a world of lies, whether we want it or not. That’s just the case. But you shouldn’t accommodate to it,” she tells me as I sit at her table in suburban Budapest. “You will be surrounded by lies—you don’t have a choice. Don’t assimilate to it. It’s an individual decision for each person. If you want to live in fear, or if you want to live in the freedom of the soul.  If your soul is free, then your thoughts are free, and then your words are going to be free.”

Under hard totalitarianism, dissenters like Wittner paid a hard price for their freedom, but the terms of the bargain were clear. Under soft totalitarianism, it is more difficult to see the costs of compromising your conscience, but as Mária Wittner insists, you can’t escape the decisions. You have to live in a world of lies, but it’s your choice as to whether that world lives in you.

These are real people, not characters in a novel.

A reader sent me this from his Facebook feed:

How about that. What is that person talking about? This:

Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito issued a broadside against the high court’s 2015 same-sex marriage decision on Monday when the court declined to hear a case brought by a former Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue a marriage license for such couples.

The two justices agreed with the decision not to hear the case but used the occasion to take a legal baseball bat to the court’s 2015 decision Obergefell v. Hodges, which declared that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry under the 14th Amendment guarantee to equal protection of the law.

Writing for himself and Alito, Thomas said that the court’s decision “enables courts and governments to brand religious adherents who believe that marriage is between one man and one woman as bigots, making their religious liberty concerns that much easier to dismiss.”

His words came in a case brought by Kim Davis, a former county clerk in Kentucky, who in the aftermath of the same-sex marriage decision refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and was sued.

“Davis may have been one of the first victims of this court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision,” Thomas and Alito wrote. But they agreed that the court properly decided not to take up Davis’ case because, they said, it does not “cleanly” present the issues in the court’s 5-4 decision five years ago.

Nevertheless, they said, the case “provides a stark reminder” of the consequences of the same-sex marriage decision. By choosing to endorse “a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, and by doing so undemocratically, the court has created a problem that only it can fix,” they said. “Until then, Obergefell will continue to have ruinous consequences for religious liberty.”

Thomas and Alito point out that Obergefell is not in the Constitution, but religious liberty is. As the reader pointed out in his note to me, “Nowhere in the opinion do they call for overturning Obergefell. They simply point out the unresolved issues when you create a right from whole cloth and label anyone who doesn’t agree with it a bigot.”

Holding this opinion, though, makes you unfit for public life, according to some leftists. “People like [this] must never be allowed in places of power again.” In his Obergefell dissent, Justice Scalia said he does not believe that the Constitution either mandates same-sex marriage or forbids it. It is a matter for legislatures to decide. This opinion is intolerable. I would never say that the justices who voted for Obergefell must never be allowed in places of power again. But then, I am not an intolerant maniac.

Do you want to know why there are lots of people who have no faith in Donald Trump, but who are going to vote for him anyway because of the judges he will appoint? This. This is the reason. They believe — accurately, I think — that the federal judiciary is going to be the last line of defense for the old First Amendment liberties against what the “impolite progressivism” of the social justice zealots. I said that on my interview this morning on the Hugh Hewitt Show, and I believe it.

A reader writes to quote this passage from Live Not By Lies, about the Bolsheviks in exile:

The comfortable Philistines were not the kind of people prepared to suffer and die for their beliefs. The Bolsheviks were. The tsarist government sent many of their leaders into Siberian exile, which did not break them but made them stronger.

“Exile stood for suffering, intimacy, and the sublime immensity of the heavenly depths. It offered a perfect metaphor for both what was wrong with the ‘world of lies’ and what was central to the promise of socialism,” writes historian Yuri Slezkine. To be a revolutionary in those days was to share a sense of purpose, of community, of hope—and an electrifying bond of contempt, a contempt we see in the social justice movement today toward anyone who differs from its religious claims.

The reader said that in a recent showdown in his workplace with a SJW mob, he felt the power of the “electrifying bond of contempt” that united them in their opposition to him — a man they saw not as a colleague, but as nothing but a bigot who had to be suppressed. The “electrifying bond of contempt” is what holds together and propels people like the unnamed (I took his name out) Facebook zealot forward in their campaign to cleanse society of evil people like us conservatives, Christians, and all who won’t live by their lies.

I received a good review of Live Not By Lies from Barton Swaim in the Wall Street Journal, who cites the book’s claim that these latter-day revolutionaries mean business:

In the bleak future envisioned by Mr. Dreher, infantilized Americans happily repeat dicta they know to be lies—whatever ludicrous “isms” about race and gender the academic and

media elite care about at the moment—and eagerly submit to constant surveillance by

hyper-progressive Big Data companies. I have no idea where an ascendant left will take

America, and, as he freely admits, neither does Mr. Dreher, but he is right to dismiss the

commonplace notion that young progressives are “snowflakes” and “SJWs” (social justice

warriors). They are, many of them, savvy and ambitious political operators. “Unlike their

Bolshevik predecessors,” he writes, social-justice cultists, as he calls them, “don’t want to

seize the means of economic production but rather the means of cultural production.

A student reader of Live Not By Lies e-mails:

My family is strongly conservative and understands that the Leftist ideologies are dangerous, but they don’t understand just how near and powerful the danger actually is.

Many people I respect don’t conceptually link the Russian student radicals who murdered millions with the American student radicals of today. For them, the Bolsheviks were murderers and the students today are misguided. Eventually, “The pendulum will swing back.”

I don’t blame them for this misunderstanding. After all, it’s only in Russia that it seems believable for an ex-seminary student [Stalin] who “evangelized” his classmates into atheism to become the supreme dictator of an ideology that slaughtered millions. But unbelievable things happen every day on campus.

You have to experience the current university climate while you read accounts of the Russian intelligentsia to know what “student radical” means. My school presented me a dress rehearsal for the revolution.

At my school, students fear to tell jokes because anything that doesn’t sound politically correct won’t won’t be forgiven. Classes that were supposed to teach became exercises in ideological conformity, where the purpose of literature was to find the “racism” in every book. Our student newspaper made publishing conservative opinions a Sisyphean struggle and published articles condemning charity events as oppressive without a glance.

Older people in my life say these signs aren’t truly terrifying because the revolutionaries aren’t killers. But they don’t understand the full cultural impact of abortion. My generation is very used to the concept of solving problems by murder.

He goes on, but I’ll stop there. Here’s a related passage from Live Not By Lies:

Few in Russian society, outside of the imperial court’s bubble, believed that the system could carry on. But Tsar Nicholas II and his closest advisers insisted that sticking to the proven ways of traditional autocracy would get them through the crisis. The leadership of the church also ignored internal calls for reform from priests who could see the church’s influence wasting away. Russia’s intellectual and creative classes fell under the sway of Prometheanism, the belief that man has unlimited godlike powers to make the world to suit his desires.

In retrospect, this seems almost unbelievable. How could the Russians have been so blind? It was, in a sense, a problem of the imagination. Reflecting on the speed with which utopian dreams turned into a grisly nightmare, Solzhenitsyn observed:

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

It wasn’t just the tsarists who didn’t see it coming but also the country’s leading liberal minds. It was simply beyond their ability to conceive.

I don’t believe that we are moving to a torture society in the US — though I should tell you that one of the American immigrants from a communist country that I’ve kept up with since researching the book believes that I am very naive on this point — but I absolutely believe that we are quickly moving into a situation in this country that most of us simply cannot conceive. We think it can’t happen here. One last quote from Live Not By Lies:

It only takes a catalyst like war, economic depression, plague, or some other severe and prolonged crisis that brings the legitimacy of the liberal democratic system into question. As Arendt warned more than half a century ago:

There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.

In each one of us, she said. In you and me both. We are not on the precipice of having normalcy restored, if only we can get chaotic Trump out of office (as many people think). We are on the brink of something much more sinister. This does not make Trump a good man or a competent ruler. In fact, like Nicholas II, his mistakes, enabled in part by a misplaced confidence in the stability of the system, may be accelerating the catastrophe. But it should give pause to anyone who thinks that these radicals who stand to be empowered in the wake of Trump’s ouster will be pleasant people who want nothing more than to make America nice and boring again.

Anyway, as they say in Hungary, “Hála Istennek a második módosításért” (thank God for the Second Amendment).

UPDATE: I have to apologize to you all for the way Disqus is behaving today. I’ve never seen anything like it. I keep approving comments that the system takes to spam. One of you even was banned today, and wrote me about it — but I didn’t do it, and I don’t think anybody else at TAC did! This is the worst system, Disqus. The worst.

The post Maria Wittner’s Warning appeared first on The American Conservative.

Trump’s Covid Debacle

The Lincoln Project people can’t stand Donald Trump. Still, this is a powerful ad, because unfortunately, it’s true:

Trump’s COVID-19 Timeline pic.twitter.com/IUDBSOJSA3

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 5, 2020

The president’s handling of his Covid diagnosis has been extraordinarily irresponsible, even for him. All those people he exposed — now many of them are getting sick. The recklessness of this is staggering. A former Republican political strategist I know said none of this makes political sense to him. It is, he said, “gross incompetence.”

I don’t believe it is fair to blame Donald Trump entirely for this country’s botched response to Covid. David Brooks has a powerful essay just out in The Atlantic, about the collapse in social trust as at the core of this broad crisis in American life. I’m going to write about the essay later, but let me quote this part for now:

In March and April, vast majorities of Americans said they supported social distancing, and society seemed to be coming together. It didn’t last. Americans locked down a bit in early March, but never as much as people in some other countries. By mid-April, they told themselves—and pollsters—that they were still socially distancing, but that was increasingly a self-deception. While pretending to be rigorous, people relaxed and started going out. It was like watching somebody gradually give up on a diet. There wasn’t a big moment of capitulation, just an extra chocolate bar here, a bagel there, a scoop of ice cream before bed. By May, most people had become less strict about quarantining. Many states officially opened up in June when infection rates were still much higher than in countries that had successfully contained the disease. On June 20, 500,000 people went to reopened bars and nightspots in Los Angeles County alone.

You can blame Trump or governors or whomever you like, but in reality this was a mass moral failure of Republicans and Democrats and independents alike. This was a failure of social solidarity, a failure to look out for each other.

Alexis de Tocqueville discussed a concept called the social body. Americans were clearly individualistic, he observed, but they shared common ideas and common values, and could, when needed, produce common action. They could form a social body. Over time, those common values eroded, and were replaced by a value system that put personal freedom above every other value. When Americans were confronted with the extremely hard task of locking down for months without any of the collective resources that would have made it easier—habits of deference to group needs; a dense network of community bonds to help hold each other accountable; a history of trust that if you do the right thing, others will too; preexisting patterns of cooperation; a sense of shame if you deviate from the group—they couldn’t do it. America failed.

We did. But it’s human nature to look for a scapegoat, and Trump fits the bill. If you were determined to reinforce people’s fears that you, as president, are responsible for screwing up the federal response to this plague that has killed over 200,000 of us, you would behave exactly as Donald Trump has behaved in this last week.

Why did he do the things he did, even though it would have been very easy for him to have done otherwise, and would have cost him nothing? Who knows? Who ever knows with this guy? The impression he leaves by his actions is that everything revolves around him, and the health and welfare of the people who serve him, and who support him (donors) do not matter. How would you feel if that were you working in the White House, or your husband, or your daughter? How would you feel if you were one of the elderly donors that met with an infected Trump at the Bedminster golf course?

I have mentioned in this space — and I write about in Live Not By Lies — how the Imperial Russian government’s botched handling of the 1891-92 famine was a key turning point in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Why? Because it badly shook the confidence of the Russian people in their government’s competence. Marxist radicals never really got much traction with the broader Russian public until the famine debacle made people wonder if the system really could be counted on to keep them safe. People began to wonder if maybe the radicals were onto something in their critique of the regime. The Tsarist establishment lost a great amount of credibility with the public, and never, of course, got it back.

Trump’s failures on Covid, epitomized by his own failure to manage his exposure with regard to White House staffers and supporters, come at a time of historic loss of public faith in institutions. As Brooks writes in his detailed essay, we are living in an era of great insecurity because of this loss of trust — and Millennials and Generation Z are the most dramatically affected by it. Again, I’m going to explore this in a separate post, but the things Brooks talks about regarding the fear, anxiety, and eagerness for protection running rampant among Millennials and Gen Z are exactly the things that Hannah Arendt observed as present in pre-totalitarian Russia and Germany.

What Trump has done with his own Covid diagnosis is a monumental act of self-sabotage. What he is helping to sabotage is more than his own administration and re-election campaign, I fear.

The post Trump’s Covid Debacle appeared first on The American Conservative.

Schooling For Totalitarianism

Here’s a story about why voting for Donald Trump will not stop wokeness — and through no fault of Trump’s.

Education policy is set primarily by state and local leaders. This is, in my conservative view, a good thing. What works for students in Brooklyn might not be right for students in Tyler, Texas. The people whose kids are going to have to live with their decisions should be the one’s closest to making those decisions.

This is why, though, Trump (and any president) is largely powerless to stop wokeness at the institutional level

Over the weekend I had a conversation with a reader who works in an educational institution, and who is in hot water because he voiced opposition on social media to Critical Race Theory. Good thing that teacher doesn’t work for Loudoun County (Va.) Public Schools, which serve children in Virginia’s wealthiest county. If the school board adopts a proposal coming up for consideration at its October 12 meeting, no employee of the system will be allowed to criticize CRT ever, not even in private — and employees will be required to snitch on each other. You think I’m kidding? I am not kidding. Read more:

The proposed change would cover all communication by Loudoun County Schools’ employees, on campus or off, by telephone, in person or on social media.

According to the draft policy, employee speech that “will not be tolerated ” includes anything that district leaders believe could be perceived as “undermining the views, positions, goals, policies or public statements” of Schools Superintendent Eric Williams or the school board.

These comments could “disrupt the operations or efficiency of LCPS,” the policy argues.

Per the policy, LCPS employees would have a “duty to report” their colleagues alleged free speech violations to the school administration.

The policy acknowledges that employees have a “First Amendment right to engage in protected speech” but says it “may be outweighed” by LCPS interest in “promoting internal..and external community harmony and peace” and  achieving Williams’ “directives, including protected class equity, racial equity, and the goal to root out systemic racism.”

Here are the key lines:

Notice that the words “Critical Race Theory” do not appear in the draft policy. They don’t have to. Here is the Loudoun County School system’s “Detailed Plan To Combat Systemic Racism” — which, of course, is based in part on the work of Ibram X. Kendi, the “antiracist” guru who teaches that anything that is not “antiracist” (in his definition) is therefore positively racist. And here is the “Comprehensive Equity Plan”.

Very little of this is straightforwardly presented. A parent who didn’t understand the jargon would have no idea what is actually being proposed for a vote. Reading this, it would even be possible to think, like debate moderator Chris Wallace and Democratic candidate Joe Biden, that this is only about “racial sensitivity training.” In fact, it’s about something far more radical — and the policy will include firing people who publicly disagree with it in any way, ever. 

If you follow those links and dig deep into the bureaucratese, you’ll find that the “Equity” plan involves manipulating passing grades and school suspension rates to achieve “equity” — that is, to reward or punish people based not on their conduct and accomplishments, but on their race and ethnicity. Equality means giving everyone an equal chance; equity means guaranteeing an equal outcome, or at least a demographically proportional outcome. Look:

This is bureaucratic woke speak for “we’re going to indoctrinate your children in left-wing identity politics.” And look at this:

If your kid goes to a church that is not progressive and LGBT-affirming, she better shut up about her religious views at school, or she will be expelled. If you kid won’t consent to calling a trans student by that student’s preferred pronoun, that could be the end of him at Loudoun County public schools. Anything that the left identifies as a manifestation of “white supremacy” — and these days, what isn’t? — makes students who hold it targets of the system. What if a high school student believes that on balance, Robert E. Lee was a noble, if tragic, figure, and said so in a history class? He would have to fear that Loudoun County public schools, in the state of Virginia, would punish him as a white supremacist.

All throughout the Loudoun County Public Schools documents they talk of “equity” without ever defining it. People not familiar with the way the woke use this word might think of it as neutral, or even positive. Wrong. James Lindsay, in his invaluable Translations From The Wokish dictionary, writes in part:

Notice that, in Critical Social Justice, the meaning of “equity” takes pains to distinguish itself from that of “equality.” Where equality means that citizen A and citizen B are treated equally, equity means “adjusting shares in order to make citizens A and B equal.” In that sense, equity is something like a kind of “social communism,” if we will—the intentional redistribution of shares, but not necessarily along lines of existing economic disparity but in order to adjust for and correct current and historical injustices, both as exist in reality and as have been drawn out by the various critical theories (specifically, Theory—see also, critical race Theory, queer Theory, gender studies, fat studies, disability studies, and postcolonial Theory).

The example given (above) of providing a wheelchair user with privileged access to an elevator is one that few people would find unfair. However, within Critical Social Justice conceptions of the world, specifically disability studies here, invisible systems of power and privilege are understood to hold some people back in often invisible ways because of their race, gender, sexuality, or other marginalized identity factors. Therefore, “equity” requires giving some identity groups privileges in order to redress the perceived imbalance.

In common parlance, this is the difference between attempting to force equality of outcome by enforcing some resource allocation system and equality of opportunity, which Critical Social Justice regards not only as myth but as a harmful ideology that upholds injustices like “white supremacy.”

Because of the blank slatism and simplistic ideas of power and identity found within Critical Social Justice worldviews, all imbalances of representation in desirable areas of work are held to be caused by these perceived power dynamics. Equity is the intended remedy to this problem, and it is made applicable only (and especially) to positions of status and influence. For example, there is no equity program that attempts to increase the number of female sanitation workers, though there are equity programs that seek to increase the number of female doctors and politicians, and these endure even in high-status positions that employ more women than men. Of particular concern are positions that have influence where power is concerned, including in terms of shaping the discourses of society.

For this same reason, the measurement for equity is wholly on assessing the most superficial aspects of outcomes and then ascribing any differences from either demographic parity or parity adjusted upward to “correct” for historical exclusion to systemic bigotry. That is, in practice, an equity approach is almost wholly unconcerned with the root causes of disparate outcomes and merely seeks to identify where they occur and then artificially “correct” them, perhaps through preferential hiring, grading, promotion, pay, etc., by eliminating measurements that reveal disparities like standardized testing, by open, secret, or tacit discrimination against “dominant” group members, or even by installing quotas and specific guidelines for how outcomes must come out, regardless of what leads to them. In that sense, it is a very impoverished theory that is unlikely to achieve any of its stated goals (and will probably hurt most those it claims to help).

Read it all — it’s fascinating. Basically, deep-blue, wealthy, predominantly white Loudoun County in suburban Washington, DC, is going to ruin its public schools by turning them into ideology factories. You’d want to get your kids out of those schools now, if you can — but what about the people who can’t afford private schooling? Their kids are going to be indoctrinated. Anyway, you may send your kid to a Loudoun County private school, but what if the staff there are also woke? The reader with whom I talked over the weekend works as a well-regarded private school which a woke mob within is trying to make it just as progressive as Loudoun County.

The Loudoun County school board paid over $400,000 to diversity consultants to come up with this tyrannical policy, including its provision to threaten people with firing if they criticize it, and its requirement that teachers and staff inform on others who do. It is possible that if the board affirms this policy, they will run afoul of President Trump’s executive order forbidding critical race theory from being taught. The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Loudoun County has come under fire for spending $422,500 on diversity training inspired by critical race theory, which claims racism is inherent in nearly every aspect of America. The school district also received backlash from teachers and parents for teaming up with the Southern Poverty Law Center to create a “social justice” curriculum for kindergartners.

President Donald Trump has promised to defund public schools that promote critical race theory. He also signed an executive order banning federal contractors from doing certain kinds of diversity training.

Manhattan Institute scholar Max Eden told the Free Beacon that the school district’s speech code should not be permitted given the Trump administration’s recent executive order. “If President Trump gets a second term, I think we could expect strong federal action against such totalitarian initiatives,” Eden said. “If Biden is elected, however, I expect that he will use the power of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to coerce school districts to adopt [critical race theory] initiatives.”

I’m honestly not sure how much power Trump has over local school board decisions — and frankly, I don’t want this or any POTUS to be in the position of ordering local school boards around. Yet I do expect Biden to accelerate woke indoctrination throughout the public schools.

In any case, if this isn’t in your public or private school now, get ready, because it’s coming. You are going to have a hell of a fight on your hands with the proponents of this stuff. The fact that in Loudoun County, its advocates want to fire anybody within the system who disagrees, and compel employees to rat each other out, tells you all you need to know about this totalitarian garbage.

In Live Not By Lies, I quote Hannah Arendt as saying the destruction of the institutions that made civilization possible — like, I would say, good schools — was part of the pre-totalitarian madness in Russia and Germany:

Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality. Arendt wrote:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

That’s what we are seeing in Loudoun County Public Schools. And not just there.

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The Church & The Coming Darkness

Before I went to church this morning, I received an email from a friend who said he really loved Live Not By Lies, and expects it to sell well. But, he said, “I wonder how it will compare with The Benedict Option. The message of this book is much more uncomfortable.”

He’s right about that, though the messages of both books are consonant. If you read The Benedict Option, you’ll remember that Father Cassian Folsom, then the prior of the Norcia monastery, said that if Christian families don’t do some form of the Benedict Option (he was speaking specifically of the Tipi Loschi of San Benedetto del Tronto), they aren’t going to have what it takes to make it through the trials to come. In that book, I offered a variety of things people could do to create communities of resistance — and by “resistance,” I meant communities of lively, believing orthodox Christianity within which people could shelter and strengthen themselves for living in a hostile post-Christian world.

As you know, many people (who didn’t read the book) assumed that I was talking about constructing bunkers in the hills within which we could shield ourselves from Bad Things. That’s not what the book is about at all, but for some reason, people have this craving to see things in a binary way. I do not believe, and have never believed, that we lay Christians can fully escape the world, but we can do things that build ourselves, our families, and our communities up so that when we go into the world, we can do so as resilient Christians. That’s what The Benedict Option was about.

Live Not By Lies is an narrowing and intensifying of The Benedict Option. My friend is right: the message is more uncomfortable, but I think this book will be more popular because over the past three years, since The Benedict Option was published, it has become even more difficult for serious Christians to deny the reality of what is happening. Heck, in the past six months, the quickening has become undeniable.

I was praying during the liturgy at church this morning about all this, and it became absolutely clear to me that anybody who comes to Live Not By Lies hoping to find a formula for escaping suffering is going to be disappointed.

I hope that people who read the book will have a better understanding of what’s happening in the world from the first part, and will organize to fight this dragon wherever it raises its head. There are still some victories to be had! Many of us aren’t even aware that there’s a massive spiritual and cultural battle going on. Live Not By Lies should be part of a red-pilling.

But the primary lesson of Live Not By Lies is that suffering is coming, and Christians have to learn to suffer well, even victoriously. The late dissident Vaclav Havel was not a religious believer, but in his Parable of the Greengrocer, he speaks to the power of choosing to suffer for one’s convictions. From Live Not By Lies:

Solzhenitsyn was not the only dissident to make “live not by lies” the core of anti-totalitarian resistance. Czech playwright and future postcommunist president Václav Havel’s most famous injunction to would-be dissidents was to “live in truth.” In his most important piece of political writing, which was secretly passed around by samizdat, Havel wrote about “the power of the powerless,” which was the essay’s title.

Havel knew that he was addressing a nation that had no way to rise up against the might of the Czechoslovak police state. But he also knew something most of them did not: they were not entirely powerless.

Consider, he said, the case of the greengrocer who posts a sign in his shop bearing the well-known slogan from the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the world, unite!” He doesn’t believe in it. He hangs it in his shop as a signal of his own conformity. He just wants to be left alone. His action is not meaningless though: the greengrocer’s act not only confirms that this is what is expected of one in a communist society but also perpetuates the belief that this is what it means to be a good citizen.

Havel goes on:

Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.

This costs him. He loses his shop, his salary is cut, and he won’t be able to travel abroad. Maybe his children won’t be able to get into college. People persecute him and those around him—not necessarily because they oppose his stance but because they know that this is what they have to do to keep the authorities off their backs.

The poor little greengrocer, who testifies to the truth by refusing to mouth a lie, suffers. But there is a deeper meaning to his gesture.

By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power.

He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.

Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.

A Russian Orthodox mystic of the nineteenth century, Saint Seraphim of Sarov, once said, “Acquire the Holy Spirit, and thousands around you will be saved.” In that sense, what the greengrocer has done is a small act of rebellion that may act as the spark of revolution.

A person who lives only for his own comfort and survival and who is willing to live within a lie to protect that, is, says Havel, “a demoralized person.

“The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society,” he writes. “Living within the truth, as humanity’s revolt against an enforced position, is, on the contrary, an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility.”

Living in truth, living not by lies — that concept means nothing without the willingness of individual believers and entire churches to accept suffering as witness to their faith. Over and over in my book, I quote those of the Soviet bloc who suffered for the faith saying that there is no other way out. If you are not willing to endure hatred, deprivation, even pain for the sake of Christ, your faith is built on nothing. We Christians know from the Bible that it is better to die for your faith than to betray Christ. In the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) book of Daniel, we have the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the three Hebrew men who worked for the King of Babylon — but who were willing to go into the fiery furnace to their death rather than apostatize by praying to an idol. The consistent testimony of the Christian martyrs — from St. Stephen, the first martyr, all the way up to the martyrs of the Bolshevik yoke and beyond — is the same.

This morning I heard from a reader whose family left their longtime church because it had veered into teaching politics instead of the Gospel — or rather, to be more specific, they have baptized politics with the Gospel, making it into a false Gospel. I’m not going to tell you whether this reader’s family departed from a left-wing church or a right-wing church. You can find both kinds of churches — and I hear each week from readers who are grieved by the “left wing at prayer” or the “right wing at prayer” aspect of their churches.

You can also find plenty of churches that don’t want to take a side on the left or the right, but in which the leadership and the laity both prefer not to face the crises around us, relying instead on the groundless assumption that This Too Shall Pass. Don’t you be fooled by the spiritual tranquilizers that therapeutic Christianity hands out like opioids.

Dare to accept the idea that the persecutions now coming upon us, however mild at first, might be instruments of our sanctification.  More from Live Not By Lies:

“Bless those who persecute you,” Jesus taught. Vengeance is easier to resist if you have that mindset. In his masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reveals how he and his fellow inmates were beaten, humiliated, deprived of liberty, made to live in filth and freezing temperatures and crawling with lice, and to endure many other grotesque manifestations of communism’s determination to create heaven on earth. That’s why nothing in that epochal book’s pages shocks more than these lines:

And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: “Bless you, prison! . . . Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”

Solzhenitsyn’s audacious claim was that suffering had refined him, taught him to love. It was only there, out of the experience of intense suffering, that the prisoner began to understand the meaning of life and first began to sense the good inside himself.

To be clear, there is nothing in the Gospels that require Christians to seek out suffering. The Word of God is not a prescription for masochism. But life of Christ, as well as the Old Testament’s example of the prophets, compels believers to accept the impenetrable mystery that suffering, if rightly received, can be a gift.

Father Kirill Kaleda, the Russian Orthodox priest who pastors a church dedicated to the memory of the martyrs of the Bolshevik persecution, offers a prudent view on suffering in the life of a Christian.

“Taking up your cross and carrying it is always going to be uncomfortable. We can say clearly that this current ideology of comfort is anti-Christian in its very essence,” says Father Kirill. “But we should point out the fact that the church, not once, ever call its followers to look for suffering, and even made it clear that they are warned not to do that. But if a person finds himself in a situation where he’s suffering, then he should bear it with courage.”

One more passage:

The faith that martyrs and confessors like the Christians cited here is a far cry from the therapeutic religion of the middle-class suburbs, the sermonizing of politicized congregations of the Left and the Right, and the health-and wealth message of “prosperity gospel” churches. These and other feeble forms of the faith will be quickly burned away in the face of the slightest persecution. [Lutheran] Pastor [Richard] Wurmbrand [a survivor of Romanian torture] once wrote that there were two kinds of Christians: “those who sincerely believe in God and those who, just as sincerely, believe that they believe. You can tell them apart by their actions in decisive moments.”

The kind of Christians we will be in the time of testing depends on the kind of Christians we are today. And we cannot become the kind of Christians we need to be in preparation for persecution if we don’t know stories like this, and take them into our hearts.

Order the book and read the whole thing. If you would like to read it with a group at church or elsewhere, this free, downloadable study guide might be helpful. 

Once more: do not come to this book expecting to find a ten-point strategy for avoiding the scorn and hatred of the world, or a game plan for defeating the Left and owning the libs. You may certainly gain insights into how this radical ideology is working its way out in this world, and may come up with ideas for how to resist it in particular instances. But my view is that there are forces at work in this crisis that run far deeper and are much more powerful than mere politics or culture-war skirmishes. There is a reason why the Benda family of Prague turned to reading Tolkien to help them understand better understand the forces at work in their struggle with the Evil Empire. The attentive reader of Live Not By Lies will understand that the shadow has fallen over us too, and we are being called to play our part in this great battle.

This is hard news for people to take, I know, but painful truths are always better than cheerful lies.

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Child Regicide And Jacobin

You may not have heard of the magazine Jacobin. It’s an intellectual magazine of the democratic socialist left — not the liberal left, but the democratic socialist left. It was founded in 2010 by Bhaskar Sunkara, a radical college student born and raised in suburban New York. From a 2016 Vox profile of him:

Jacobin has in the past five years become the leading intellectual voice of the American left, the most vibrant and relevant socialist publication in a very long time. And in 2016 it’s bigger than ever, thanks to Bernie Sanders, who’s making his millions of supporters curious about what democratic socialism actually means. That’s an opportunity that Jacobin is seizing to great effect, even if Sanders isn’t far enough left for their taste.

The Sanders campaign “could begin to legitimate the word ‘socialist,’ and spark a conversation around it, even if Sanders’s welfare-state socialism doesn’t go far enough,” Sunkara wrote earlier this year.

More:

Jacobin, which turned 5 this year, is perhaps the most relevant and important publication of the American political left today. Unlike more academic journals, it is always timely, globally oriented, and topically eclectic.

And:

Sunkara very explicitly does not want to take a line. Instead, he tells me, he draws a “box.” The magazine is not going to defend Stalin’s collectivizations or Mao’s Great Leap Forward or really any other aspect of “actually existing communism,” but other than that, Jacobin is pretty welcoming. It’s a place where social democrats and democratic socialists and Trotskyists and council communists and Chavistas and even the odd liberal can coexist.

Bhaskar Sunkara (The Nation)

That dynamic is a lot easier to foster now that the Cold War is over. When the USSR still existed and China was still meaningfully socialist, there were all kinds of fault lines along which socialist movements could fracture, because there were plenty of socialist nations making major decisions guaranteed to provoke controversy. Do you take Trotsky’s side or Stalin’s? Do you take Khrushchev’s side in the Sino-Soviet split or Mao’s? Do you endorse the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 or stand with Hungarian workers? Do you merely oppose the Vietnam War or actively support the National Liberation Front?

Distance from that history lets Jacobin promote a very different brand of socialism without being overly defensive about the past or feeling a need to redbait those to its left for being insufficiently anti-communist or pro-American. This historical distance is also perhaps the reason young people are so receptive to the idea of socialism today.

Right, so take a look at what Jacobin’s founding editor posted (and then deleted) the other day:

You think? Here, from historian Robert Massie’s great book Nicholas and Alexandra, is how the little Romanov children, their parents, and a handful of servants met their end in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg:

The founding editor of the leading intellectual voice of the American Left believes this was all fine. This is who he is. This is who they are.

And then, today, from the magazine’s account (this was also deleted):

Here’s the story. Excerpt:

The Wall was ugly, menacing, and, for many citizens, no doubt heartbreaking. But the economic and geopolitical stability it ensured also gave the GDR the chance to build a society that was broadly characterized by modest prosperity and social equality between classes and genders. Workers were guaranteed employment, housing, and all-day childcare, while basic foodstuffs and other goods were heavily subsidized. Though wages were only half of what they were in the West, adjusted for prices in relation to earnings, GDR workers’ actual purchasing power was more or less the same. This fact, combined with the chronic lack of certain consumer goods, taught citizens to rely on each other and help each other out in times of need — a reality that still resonates today in polls showing that Easterners are considerably more sensitive to social inequality and the importance of solidarity.

The fact that people were poor and had nothing to buy with what they did make — hey, it made them more caring for each other. Some were so caring that they quietly informed the Stasi when their neighbors, friends, even in some cases their spouses, failed to love Big Bruder.  From the Washington Post:

The secret police, or Stasi, roped in an estimated 190,000 part-time secret informants and employed an additional 90,000 officers full time — in total, more than one in every 50 adult East Germans as of 1990. East Germans who dared to criticize their government — even to a spouse, a best friend or a pastor — could wind up disappearing into the penal system for years.

So, Jacobin. Let’s remember this line from the Vox profile:

Distance from that history [the Cold War] lets Jacobin promote a very different brand of socialism without being overly defensive about the past or feeling a need to redbait those to its left for being insufficiently anti-communist or pro-American.

What they’re counting on is a generation that has never learned what actually existing communism meant.  It meant mass murder. It meant prison camps. It meant walls and constant surveillance. From my book Live Not By Lies:

Recently, a bright-eyed and cheerful twenty-six-year-old California woman told me that she thinks of herself as a communist. “It’s just so beautiful, this dream of everybody being equal,” she gushed. When she asked me what I was working on, I told her about the struggles of Alexander Ogorodnikov, a Christian dissident imprisoned and tortured by the Soviets, whom I had recently interviewed in Moscow. She fell silent.

“Don’t you know about the gulag?” I asked, naively.

Of course she didn’t. Nobody ever told her. We, her parents and grandparents, have failed her generation. And if develops no curiosity about the past, she will fail herself.

She’s not alone. Every year, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit educational and research organization established by the US Congress, carries out a survey of Americans to determine their attitudes toward communism, socialism, and Marxism in general. In 2019, the survey found that a startling number of Americans of the post-Cold War generations have favorable views of left-wing radicalism, and only 57 percent of millennials believe that the Declaration of Independence offers a better guarantee of “freedom and equality” than the Communist Manifesto. The political religion that murdered tens of millions, imprisoned and tortured countless more, and immiserated the lives of half of humanity in its time, and the defeat of which required agonizing struggle by allies across borders, oceans, political parties, and generations—this hateful ideology is romanticized by ignorant young people.

Writing in the The Harvard Crimson in 2017, undergraduate Laura Nicolae, whose parents endured the horrors of Romanian communism, spoke out against the falsification of history that her fellow Ivy Leaguers receive, both in class and in the trendy Marxism of intellectual student culture.

“Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence,” she writes. “Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative.”

Forgetting the atrocities of communism is bad enough. What is even more dangerous is the habit of forgetting one’s past. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera drily observes that nobody today will defend gulags, but the world remains full of suckers for the false utopian promises that bring gulags into existence.

Please order and read my book. It’s important. Just today I was having an exchange with a reader of this blog who talked about his students who are gone into woke militancy. He said that he now understands why Dostoevsky described the young radicals of the 1860s as “possessed.” This identity-politics leftism has seized their minds, and nothing else matters. The professor said that some of them — kids he knew before they got woke, and with whom he got along well — now look at him with inhuman hatred.

It’s the kind of hatred that can justify killing children for the sake of the revolution. And one day, will.

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View From Your Table

Lake Arrowhead, California

The reader is drinking a mint julep, and is to be congratulated for his excellent taste in reading material.

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This Lady Inspired ‘Live Not By Lies’

As regular readers know, the idea for my bestselling new book Live Not By Lies started with a phone call from a stranger. Here’s how the book starts:

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and with it Soviet totalitarianism. Gone was the communist police state that had enslaved Russia and half of Europe. The Cold War that had dominated the second half of the twentieth century came to a close. Democracy and capitalism bloomed in the formerly captive nations. The age of totalitarianism passed into oblivion, never again to menace humanity.

Or so the story goes. I, along with most Americans, believed that the menace of totalitarianism had passed. Then, in the spring of 2015, I received a phone call from an anxious stranger.

The caller was an eminent American physician. He told me that his elderly mother, a Czechoslovak immigrant to the United States, had spent six years of her youth as a political prisoner in her homeland. She had been part of the Catholic anti-communist resistance. Now in her nineties and living with her son and his family, the old woman had recently told her American son that events in the United States today reminded her of when communism first came to Czechoslovakia.

What prompted her concern? News reports about the social-media mob frenzy against a small-town Indiana pizzeria whose Evangelical Christian owners told a reporter they would not cater a same-sex wedding. So overwhelming were the threats against their lives and property, including a user on the Twitter social media platform who tweeted a call for people to burn down the pizzeria, that the restaurant owners closed their doors for a time. Meanwhile, liberal elites, especially in the media, normally so watchful against the danger of mobs threatening the lives and livelihoods of minorities, were untroubled by the assault on the pizzeria, which occurred in the context of the broader debate about the clash between gay rights and religious liberty.

The US-born doctor said he had heard his immigrant parents warn him about the dangers of totalitarianism all his life. He hadn’t worried—after all, this is America, the land of liberty, of individual rights, one nation under God and the rule of law. America was born out of a quest for religious liberty, and had always been proud of the First Amendment to the US Constitution that guaranteed it. But now there was something about what was happening in Indiana that made him think: What if they were right?

It’s easy to laugh this kind of thing off. Many of us with aging parents are accustomed to having to talk them down from the ledge, so to speak, after a cable news program stoked their fear and anxiety about the world outside their front door. I assumed that this was probably the case with the elderly Czech woman.

But there was something about the tension in the doctor’s voice, and the fact that he felt compelled to reach out to a journalist he didn’t even know, telling me that it would be too dangerous for me to use his name if I wrote about him, that rattled me. His question became my question: What if the old Czech woman sees something the rest of us do not? What if we really are witnessing a turn toward totalitarianism in the Western liberal democracies, and can’t see it because it takes a form different from the old kind?

During the next few years, I spoke with many men and women who had once lived under communism. I asked them what they thought of the old woman’s declaration. Did they also think that life in America is drifting toward some sort of totalitarianism?

They all said yes — often emphatically. They were usually surprised by my question because they consider Americans to be hopelessly naive on the subject. In talking at length to some of the emigrants who found refuge in America, I discovered that they are genuinely angry that their fellow Americans don’t recognize what is happening.

And that is why I wrote this book. When I began, the old Czech woman’s son did not want their names out. As I finished the manuscript, I connected with the physician again, just to be sure. Here are two paragraphs from the Acknowledgements in the back of the book:

This book exists because of Dr. John Schirger and his mother, Milada Kloubkova Schirger. It was she, a former Catholic prisoner of conscience in her native Czechoslovakia, who said to her US-born son that she was seeing things happening in America that reminded her of her own homeland under communism. Dr. Schirger passed his mother’s remarks on to me in 2015, but at the time he preferred to keep their identity private. His mother’s story was the genesis of Live Not by Lies. Milada Schirger died in 2019, at the age of ninety-two. In gratitude for her witness, her son gave me permission to identify them both. I hope this book is worthy of her legacy.

My friends Béla and Gabriella Bollobás, who fled Hungary for freedom in Britain in the 1960s, first

confirmed to me that I should take Milada Schirger seriously. This book is theirs too. I am grateful for all I have learned from them over the years.

Today I heard from Catholic writer and broadcaster Tom Szyszkiewicz in Minnesota who, as it turns out, is a friend of Dr. Schirger’s. Tom sent me this 2015 story he wrote for National Catholic Register about Milada and her husband Alex, John’s father. Dr. Schirger had not told me the whole story about his mother and father’s life and struggle for freedom. Tom said to me, “I think they are saints.” Excerpts:

[Alex Schirger’s] life’s story — and his wife’s — can almost seem like a novel, but it was very real. Life for faithful Catholics in mid-20th-century Czechoslovakia was difficult, and the Schirgers’ lives were made more difficult because of a forced 14-year trans-Atlantic separation and even imprisonment and torture.

Alex had been born in Prague but moved to America as a boy. When his parents died in New York, he returned to Prague to be raised by relatives. More:

The two met in a Catholic young people’s group in the late 1940s in Prague and came under the influence of Father Josef Zverina, who stood out in opposition to communism. So influential was he that, when Pope John Paul II visited the Czech Republic in 1995, the Pope recalled that Father Zverina had the “grateful admiration of the whole nation.”

Over time, Alexander and Milada’s friendship blossomed into a romance, but because Alex had become an American citizen when he had previously been in this country, the Czech government would not let them marry.

By 1950, the Cold War had reached the point where American citizens had to get out of communist countries or lose their citizenship. Alexander went to Austria, then Italy, seeking help. The help came in the form of an audience with none other than Pope Pius XII. “What should he do?” he asked the Pope. “Stay in Europe to be as close to his intended as possible? Or go to America?” The Pope’s answer: “Go to America and pray for her.” That counsel would prove providential, in the long run.

Meanwhile, back in Prague:

Milada continued to meet with the group formed by Father Zverina. They were warned numerous times to stop meeting, warnings which went ignored. Along with others in the group, Milada was arrested. She was held in solitary confinement, where she was interrogated and tortured for 18 months. Finally, she was brought to trial and convicted of being an enemy of the state. She was sentenced to eight years of hard labor, but her father died after four years, and she was released.

Read it all to find out how the two were reunited. Dr. Alex Schirger eventually became a physician at the Mayo Clinic, where his son John later worked as a cardiologist. John Schirger served recently as the head of the Catholic Medical Association.

This hero of the faith Milada Schirger is responsible for Live Not By Lies. If my book does any good in the world, it is because of what she endured in that Communist camp, where the regime sent her for practicing her faith — and because her true love, Alex, waited all those years for her to come to him in America, where they had children, including the son who one day called a journalist he didn’t know, because his mother, who had seen so much, believed her adopted homeland was sleepwalking into a living nightmare.

If you buy the book, if you love the book, think of Milada Schirger, and thank God for her life and witness (and that of her faithful husband Alex, who waited). Young Milada could not have known as she shivered in solitary confinement, aching from the communist interrogators’ torture, that one day, seven decades later, God would use her suffering and witness in such a powerful way.

 

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‘Live Not By Lies’ On TV

A little Live Not By Lies publicity news, as a public service. Several of you have written to ask if there is any video of Self on Tucker Carlson Tonight this week. True, the YouTube clips I had up have been taken down (probably because they weren’t from Fox’s official account), but here is a link to the broadcast.

Earlier today I did a Zoom discussion with The Spectator‘s Freddy Gray: here you go.

Last night I was on EWTN’s The World Over With Raymond Arroyo. Behold:

You may be thinking: what kind of weird bookshelf is that, where you have to stack the books? It was built as a CD shelf, but we have so many books that we had to use it for overflow. There’s no rhyme or reason to the book arrangement. You are seeing on the top shelf busts of Dante Alighieri and Ignatius J. Reilly, my heroes.

I need to get my glasses tightened. My mother says they obscure my eyes. “You have my eyes, so people should see them,” she said. OK, I’ll go to the eyewear shop tomorrow and get that sorted before being on Australian TV this weekend — I’ll be live on The Outsiders this coming Sunday morning at 9, for you Aussie readers. Thirteen hours’ time difference between there and me here in the central US; I’ll be Skyping in at 6pm Saturday evening US time.

 

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