WHERE WE ARE HEADED IN 2024 AND BEYOND

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Fifty years ago last week, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was released in Paris. Far more than simply an account of the Soviet prison camps, Solzhenitsyn’s work still stands both as an extraordinary testimony about the past and as a stark warning for the present.

Like all of Solzhenitsyn’s prodigious output, the questions at its heart echo those Leo Tolstoy posed in War and Peace: “What does it all mean? Why did it happen? What made these people kill their own kind?”

And, it is precisely because Solzhenitsyn focused on those questions that The Gulag Archipelago is not merely a searing indictment of Soviet communism but a work of moral analysis.

The Bolsheviks’ murderous mindset did not emerge from thin air. Rather, it was the outcome of the philosophy that gained absolute sway over the “progressive” Russian intelligentsia of the 19th century. Epitomised by Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? (1863), which Lenin considered a masterpiece, that philosophy rejected God, the notions of free will, human nature and personal responsibility, instead asserting that people’s behaviour depended entirely on their circumstances.

Chernyshevsky’s reasoning, which became an integral part of Soviet Marxism’s dogma, left no room for any transcendental morality. The contention that some actions could be absolutely right or wrong was, said Lenin, “moralising vomit”; all that mattered was their results. And since “there can be no middle course” between communism and reaction, “nothing, however vile, should be condemned that (advances) the working people’s struggle against the exploiters”.

Seen within that prism of Manichean logic, incarcerating and even executing those who might undermine “the struggle against the exploiters” was more than justifiable: it was, regardless of their actual conduct, an obligation. So when Dmitri Kursky was formulating the new Soviet legal code, Lenin cautioned him that “the law should not abolish terror; it should be legalised, without evasion or embellishment”.

The code therefore treated potential crime as crime, extending culpability to “(1) the guilty, (2) persons under suspicion and (3) persons potentially under suspicion”, with NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov’s infamous Order No.00486 specifying that the wives of “traitors of the motherland” were to be sentenced to forced labour, and even their children, who might wish to take revenge, were to be imprisoned.

The goal of mercilessly “hanging bloodsuckers” was, wrote Lenin, to ensure “that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble and cry: they are and will go on killing”. But that, explained Lenin’s close associate, Nikolai Bukharin, was not terror’s only objective: “Proletarian compulsion, beginning with shootings and ending with labour conscription, is a method of producing a communist humankind out of the detritus of the capitalist era”: millions of inmates were to be “moulded into a new type of human being”.

There was, however, a fundamental problem with this attempt to play God: even under the most horrifying conditions, its victims might resist its delusions of omnipotence. At some point, Solzhenitsyn observes, every prisoner faced a choice: should one “survive at any price”, that is, “at the price of someone else”?

“There lies the great fork of camp life. The roads go right and left: to the right – you lose your life; to the left – your conscience.”

Reality thereby put Marxism’s claim that it could secure the “total surrender of our souls” to the ultimate test – and more often than one might have imagined, when utterly powerless convicts had “to declare the great Yes or the great No”, the claim failed.

Never did it fail more frequently than with people of faith, who were largely the humble of this earth. Like the self-effacing Alyosha, the gentle Baptist in Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, they were the ones with the moral courage to choose the path of truth over that of living a lie.

And while the regime’s pre-eminent intellectuals “all too often turned out to be cowards, quick to surrender, and, thanks to their education, disgustingly ingenious in justifying their dirty tricks”, ordinary “zeks” (as the convicts were known) led mass rebellions, which Solzhenitsyn scrupulously documented, for the first time, in The Gulag Archipelago’s magnificent third volume.

But there is, Solzhenitsyn well knew, “this terrible strength of man, his desire and ability to forget”; and he also knew that “a people which no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul”. He therefore dedicated The Gulag Archipelago, as record, tribute and threnody (dirge or funeral song), to “those who did not live to tell it: and may they please forgive me for not having remembered it all”.

That is why Solzhenitsyn would have been appalled by the Putin regime’s whitewashing of Soviet history, which culminated late last year in the unveiling of a monument to Felix Dzerjinski, the founder of Lenin’s secret police and of the Gulag, that Solzhenitsyn branded a mass murderer.

The duty of bearing witness also impelled Solzhenitsyn’s stark warnings to the West. To say he despised the West is nonsense. It was because he valued it so highly that he feared for its condition.

The fact that so many of its “leading thinkers (are) against capitalism”; that “under the influence of public opinion, the Western powers (have) yielded position after position”, hoping “that their agreeable state of general tranquillity might continue”; the supineness to “brutally dictatorial” China; the intelligentsia’s “fierce defence of terrorists”, “greater concern for terrorists’ rights than for victims’ justice” and habit of calling terrorists “militants” (in response to Hamas brutal attack on Israeli civilians, we get children marching for the Palestinian cause) – all these are symptoms of calamitous moral decay.

That “fashionable ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and without ever being forbidden, have little chance of being heard in colleges”, only made the rot deeper and more pervasive.

Little wonder that Solzhenitsyn, having expressed those views, was savaged for ignoring America’s “vibrantly pluralistic society”, with The New York Times ridiculing his reminder that moral relativism leads to moral oblivion as the ravings of a “religious enthusiast”. And little wonder today’s Australian students are far less likely to have read Solzhenitsyn than to have pored over the idiotic scribblings of Leninism’s contemporary epigones.

Yes, Solzhenitsyn had his failings. But five decades after The Gulag Archipelago’s publication, the verdict of that other brilliant Russian Nobel laureate, Iosif Brodsky, who disagreed with Solzhenitsyn on many things, fully retains its validity.

“It is possible that two thousand years from now reading The Gulag will provide the same insight as reading the Iliad does today,” Brodsky wrote. “But if we do not read The Gulag today, there may, much sooner than two thousand years hence, be no one left to read either.”

Article by Henry Ergas AO in The Weekend Australian 05/01/2024 Fifty years on, a warning the West still needs to heed. Ergas is an economist who spent many years at the OECD in Paris before returning to Australia. He has taught at several universities, including Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

I would have liked Ergas to have made reference to how the Bible, God’s Word was treated by Communist leaders. It had to be burned/destroyed which shows they were demonically driven. They were totally under the power of Satan and his demons. Moreover, it is obvious to Ergas and should be to Christians that we are in prophesied end times and that God is refining His church, luke-warm Christians (Laodicean church) will not be raptured, before the wrath of God is poured out on an unrepentant world.

“Then they will deliver you (Christians) up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” Matthew 24:9-13

COMMUNISM HAS WON IN AMERICA

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Dr. Ben Carson identifies seven ways communism has won in America

Dr. Ben Carson warned that many of the decades-long goals of communism have come to fruition in the United States as he urged the American people to have courage and fight back against efforts to subvert the nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage.

Carson, a former neurosurgeon and presidential candidate who served as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Trump administration, addressed the crowd at the Family Research Council’s Pray Vote Stand Summit Friday. He told the audience that troubling events in American society “have been going on for quite a while.”

Retired neurosurgeon, academic, author, and politician, Dr. Ben Carson, who served as the 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 2017 to 2021, speaks about the importance of education at the Pray Vote Stand Summit at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., on September 15, 2023

During his speech, Carson read aloud a portion of the Congressional Record from Jan.10, 1963, which included a list of “Current Communist Goals” as laid out in an excerpt of a book titled The Naked Communist. He drew particular attention to the goal to “capture one or both of the political parties [in] the United States,” lamenting that it “seems like they’ve done a good job there.” Carson’s analysis reflects the belief that communism has taken root in the Democratic Party.

Carson also highlighted how communists sought to “get control of the schools” and “use them as transmission belts for socialism and current communist propaganda.” He read about how communists worked to “soften the curriculum,” “get control of teachers’ associations” and “put the party line in textbooks.” He identified another one of the goals as to “infiltrate the press, get control of book review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.”

After he outlined another one of the communists’ goals to “gain control of key positions in radio, TV and motion pictures,” he encouraged the audience to “think about that.” The Congressional Record from 1963, as shared by Carson, identifies the 32nd communist goal as being to “support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture — education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics.” 

The 40th installment of the list of “Current Communist Goals” consisted of an effort to “discredit the family as an institution” and “encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.” The 41st item on the list emphasized “the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents” and “attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.” 

“Does any of that stuff sound familiar?” he asked. “This is all the things that are happening in our society today,” he added, noting that “we think we won the Cold War.” Carson surmised that allies of communism “had a longer plan.” 

Carson mentioned that this plan involves “driving wedges between us on the basis of race, income, age, gender, political affiliation, religion, you name it” as part of an effort to make people view each other as “enemies.” He encouraged the audience to reject that line of thinking, maintaining that “We are not each other’s enemies.” 

The retired neurosurgeon then pointed to an effort to “fix it” and cause people to think that “this system doesn’t work, therefore we need something else.” After citing statistics finding that 23 public schools in Baltimore, Maryland, had zero students who could perform math at grade level, he suggested that such abysmal academic performance by public school students was by design.

“This is not a new phenomenon. This has occurred historically in other countries, too, particularly before they became socialist and communist countries. It’s called dumbing down the population because if people are ignorant, it’s easy to tell them anything.” 

“You know what it’s going to require for us to get back on the right track?” he posited, declaring that the answer is “courage.” “It’s going to require us to understand what our history is.” 

“This is a country that was founded on Judeo-Christian values and principles,” he added.  “Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, says that our rights come from God and not from government.”

“If our system is going to be fixed, it is going to be we the people,” he added, encouraging those assembled to “be courageous” and “vote the right way.” Courage, he said, comes from God.”

Carson concluded his remarks by proclaiming, “If we’re going to be the land of the free, we must also be the home of the brave.” 

The reality is that God would say to most of the churches in America depart from me I don’t know you. Moreover, God told us in advance that this would happen, much of the church falls away (apostasy), in the last days before Jesus returns. God refines His church during the coming prophesied tribulation period. We need to consider now how we will act during this period. We need to trust God regardless of the circumstances we face knowing that He will be with us through it all and He will use it for His good purposes.

“Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” Matthew 24:9-13

The following scripture is being fulfilled in our day. The world has rejected God and His commandments.

“But understand this, that in the last days, there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.” 2 Timothy 3:1-5