Rod Dreher states in this interview "Could It Happen Here? The Parallels Between Soviet Bloc and Modern US" - "In America, our idea of totalitarianism is conditioned by our memory of the Cold War and Soviet persecution, as well as George Orwell’s '1984.'" But the younger generation has no memory at all of the Cold War – they were born after 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
You can get Dreher's new book Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents at Amazon. Dreher's interview continues: "In the Orwellian, Soviet, Stalinist society, the state controlled people by inflicting pain and terror on them. But in the soft totalitarianism that I see coming here, the state will control people - and not only the state, but even more importantly, corporations and institutions like universities will control people by manipulating their access to the economy and to status and to all the markers of middle-class life.
"They won't need the gulags to force conformity on us. We'll do it because we can't stand the idea of losing our jobs. And look, I don't mean to make light of that. It's huge to lose your job, it's massive, but this is how it's going to happen. We see it happening right now.
"Yesterday, I was doing a webinar with J.D. Vance. [He] told me that friends of his who are liberals are already scared to death of what they can and can't say in their workplace. [He said:] 'This is not the state. This is not [President] Donald Trump coming and telling them they can't do that. These are their companies doing it. And this is their fear of victims who have the power to accuse others.' If we ignore the prophetic voices of those who survived communism, we deserve what we get."
Rod Dreher calls this "Soft Totalitarianism" but I prefer to call it "Snowflake Totalitarianism" because western civilization since WW2 has produced three generations of mostly wimpy-whineys who don't know how to handle hardship. When their smartphones lose a cell-tower connection, they panic: they don't know how to cope with it. If someone innocently utters a "trigger phrase" like "But I have several friends who are Afro-American" – they suffer a huge meltdown and scream, "You're a racist!" They're so conditioned by social media and our educational system to think and speak only "politically correct" thoughts lest their Facebook, Twitter, and/or Gmail accounts be shut down or they be blackballed at school. But not only that, they also demand that you and I - normal people - conform to their fantasy world. This is how today's "Cancel Culture" works. Snowflakes melt at normal room temperature, it doesn't take any special heat or pressure for them to melt down.
A few years ago, I referred to Rod Dreher's earlier book The Benedict Option. If I were to write a book like his, I'd probably title it The Discipleship Imperative because it's not just for monastics like St. Benedict and his followers and it's not at all an option. It's imperative: all Christians are called to discipleship! In Acts 11:19-27 we read how the Gospel was spread to Antioch by ordinary believers. This passage closes with the words - "The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch." So the question we should ask is - "What were they before they were called Christians?" The answer is obvious, it's right there in the text: they were disciples. All real, true, genuine believers in and followers of Christ are disciples. And so, if you're not a disciple, you're not a real, true, genuine believer in and follower of Christ.
I lived less than a kilometer from the East German border in 1962-64 while in the military, listening to Soviet artilliery practicing just across the border. Then after university, I spent 3.5 years in mission work taking millions of Bibles, New Testaments, and other Christian literature behind the Iron Curtain. We visited Czechoslovakia just a couple of years after the 1968 Soviet invasion. I met Christians whose children were driven insane by the incessant anti-Christian, Marxist indoctrination in the schools there. One of my coworkers spent six months in Moscow's infamous Lubianka Prison being interrogated every day by the KGB until he broke. Several other coworkers spent weeks or months in communist prisons, five were killed behind the Iron Curtain. And I met other fake Christians who had actually "gone over to the other side" and would report me to the secret police, as I learned later. Then my wife and I spent 17 years in the USSR as it fell apart and in Russia. I know our phone lines and email accounts were monitored. So I've personally experienced what Rod Dreher is writing about.
Torture is still going on today in some communist countries: the article "Former Uighur Detention Camp Teacher Describes Interrogations, Screaming, Imprisonments" tells of torture and forced sterilization of Uighurs in today's communist China. But in some countries, the Marxists have used and are using more subtle techniques: Rod Dreher describes how believers suffered in Czechoslovakia during the Soviet era. But that country was not made communist by force; rather, because they had been betrayed by Western diplomats who sold out Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler (British PM Neville Chamberlain in 1938 after concluding the Munich Agreement, proclaimed he had secured "peace in our time."), the Czechs welcomed the "liberating" Red Army at the end of WW2. But then the Soviets began quietly installing "their own people" in the news media, government, police, and military leadership. Before most Czechs realized how they had been deceived and infiltrated, they were living under a Soviet-controlled dictatorship.
And so it happens when "peace in our time," free love, free abortions, free housing, free education, free healthcare, free... free... free... is what the lying politicians, educators, and news media keep pumping into our minds -
"Everyone deceives his neighbor, and does not speak the truth: they have taught their tongue to speak lies; they weary themselves to commit iniquity. Your habitation is in the midst of deceit; through deceit they refuse to know me, says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord of Hosts, Behold, I will melt them, and try them; for how else should I do, because of the daughter of my people? Their tongue is a deadly arrow; it speaks deceit: one speaks peaceably to his neighbor with his mouth, but in his heart he lays wait for him. Shall I not visit them for these things? says the Lord; shall my soul not be avenged on such a nation as this? For the mountains I will take up a weeping and wailing, and for the pastures of the wilderness a lamentation, because they are burned up, so that no one passes through; neither can men hear the voice of the cattle; both the birds of the sky and the animals have fled, they are gone." (Ezekiel 9:5-10)
Of course, there's a price to pay when everything's free: after all of the "filthy rich capitalist exploiters" have fled abroad or been executed, after all their industries have been run into the ground, and after all the natural resources have been polluted or plundered, then the government simply resorts to wildly printing so much worthless money that the economy goes belly up and the people begin lying, cheating, and stealing just to survive. We witnessed this first-hand in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the USSR. Construction of apartment blocks for "the proletariat" was so sloppy that the buildings were falling apart before they were finished and just after the first people moved in they looked like 100-year-old slums.
If we replaced a burned-out light bulb in the hallway of our apartment building in Russia, it would be stolen and replaced with another burned-out light bulb by the next morning. (There was a joke: why does a burned-out light bulb cost 10 rubles but a new light bulb only cost 5 rubles? Because you can't buy any new light bulbs.) Telephone lines disappeared from the poles so the thieves could sell the copper as scrap metal. Russians would take the windshield wipers, tires and wheels off and the batteries out of their cars each night, or else they would come out the next morning to find their car propped up on bricks, wipers, batteries, tires and wheels missing. An American friend in Moscow bought a new Russian car late one afternoon, planning to install an anti-theft alarm the next day, but the car was stolen the first night! Orphanages were full of disabled children that their parents simply refused to take home from the hospital, or the parents were alcoholics, so these children were malnourished, socially undeveloped, and barely cared for in the orphanages.
But today we in the West think we have everything: an overabundance of food, big homes, air conditioning, nice cars, high-definition color TVs, high-speed internet, a dizzying array of streaming movie services, modern medicine, antibiotics, the Pill, etc., so that when anything goes haywire, we don't know how to cope. This is what you get when you worship the false gods of Socialism and/or materialism -
"I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman, Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. She teaches and seduces my servants to commit sexual immorality, and to eat things sacrificed to idols. I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality. Behold, I will throw her into a bed, and those who commit adultery with her into great oppression, unless they repent of her works. I will kill her children with Death, and all the churches will know that I am he who searches the minds and hearts" (Revelation 2:20-23).
There are always those nay-sayer pseudo-Christians, even some pastors, who say - "You can believe whatever you want, love whomever you like, and behave however you choose: if you really feel you're a girl although you were born a boy, go ahead and take estrogen injections, have that surgery, and be whatever you want to be, or if you beget a baby with your girlfriend - just get rid of it, go ahead and kill your baby in the womb!" This is the softness of good times and over-ripe liberty that has rotted into license, exactly the sort of thing St. Peter wrote about -
"For, uttering great swelling words of emptiness, they entice in the lusts of the flesh, by licentiousness, those who are indeed escaping from those who live in error; promising them liberty, while they themselves are bondservants of corruption; for by whom a man is overcome, by the same is he also brought into bondage" (2 Peter 2:18-19).
Those false promises of liberty lead to servitude and corruption, as I have just described. But there is a way out of this bondage: it's what the glorified Christ proclaimed to the Apostle John about the lukewarm Christians of Laodicia -
"Because you say, 'I am rich, and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing;' and don't know that you are the wretched one, miserable, poor, blind, and naked; I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may become rich; and white garments, that you may clothe yourself, and that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and eye salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see. As many as I love, I reprove and chasten. Be zealous therefore, and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, then I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with Me" (Revelation 2:17-20).
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Christ is among us! He is and ever shall be!
(4 Oct.) New Zealand. Kiwis will vote in a referendum on voluntary euthanasia on October 17. Parliament backed legislation earlier in the year, but the final decision rests with the public. Whether the next government is led by Jacinda Arderns's Labour Party or the Nationals, the referendum will be binding. In the event of a "yes" vote, the End of Life Choice Act will come into force in October 2021.
(6 Oct.) In September, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg accepted Azerbaijan's unilateral declarations in nine further freedom of religion or belief cases admitting that it had violated human rights and pledging to pay compensation within three months. The Court has already ruled on 21 such cases, accepting Azerbaijan's admissions of violations in 13 cases and finding against Azerbaijan in a further eight. These decisions leave 34 known cases relating to freedom of religion or belief – involving 61 individual applicants and 5 communities - at the Court awaiting decisions.
(8 Oct.) The church of the village of Halynivka, Ovadnovska Territorial Community, was sealed. This happened as the notorious priest of the UOC-MP, Fr Sharan secretly held a service there on October 4.
(5 Oct.) With an unprecedented school year underway, federal officials are weighing in yet again on how educators ought to be serving students with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
(14 Sep.) Churches in old wagons or upcycled garages? Domes rising in between tower blocks? Lavish cathedrals next to shopping centres? Orthodox Chic explores the development of religious architecture in Ukraine since the fall of communism.
(8 Oct.) Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia did not attend the traditional event marking the repose of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, which is marked on October 8, because he is quarantined.
