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

WHAT IS AMERICA BECOMING?

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Freedom of speech is essentially dead on major media and social media platforms, and because they have such a dominant position in the marketplace of ideas, that means that freedom of speech has been severely crippled in US society as a whole.

Freedom of religion is being greatly eroded as well.  States such as California continue to ban large church gatherings in order to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, but meanwhile they don’t have any problem with the large groups of protesters that are gathering night after night in the major cities to riot and commit acts of violence.

If conditions are good enough for thousands upon thousands of rioters to get together and cause chaos, and if conditions are good enough for thousands upon thousands of people to go shopping at Wal-Mart, then conditions are certainly good enough for Christians to go to church.

The way that Republicans and Democrats in Congress are responding to this crisis is deeply un-American. The USA is supposed to be a free market capitalist system, socialists were always regarded as enemies of the Republic. But now there are very few Democrats that are not socialists. One has to wonder at how many Republicans see socialism as the only option left.

This week government announced that another “stimulus bill” is on the way.  This one is going to involve more direct socialist payments to the American people, but at this point hardly anyone is even bothering to point out that this is pure socialism. Never before in American history has such a thing been done.  The USA has been through the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II and a whole host of other difficult times, and yet they have never passed out “free money” to everyone in the country before. And of course the country can’t afford any of this extra spending that Congress is doing.  This new stimulus bill is “only” going to cost about a trillion dollars, but that is another trillion dollars that government will have to steal from future generations of Americans. At this moment, government is more than 26 trillion dollars in debt, and soon it will be 27 trillion dollars.  They are systematically destroying America’s future, and the founders of the USA would be absolutely horrified at what they are doing. Mind you look at household debt levels in the USA they are already at a record high. A country in crisis.

Infographic: Pre-Pandemic Household Debt at Record High | Statista

Of course, the founders have witnessed America abandoning most of the values that they held dear long ago.  What was “right” in their day is now “wrong”, and what was “wrong” in their day has now become “right”. In essence, the nation is literally turning into the exact opposite of what they originally intended for America to be.

It looks like this pandemic is not going away soon. What is next? The government is running out of options. Debt levels are off the charts and interest rates at or below zero. The only feasible option is to hit the RESET button and that is probably what we will see next – a digital currency. Paper money and coins will go, for sure. A microchip is certainly a good option for Governments. It would give them total control over the population. They would not only know how much you have spent, where you have spent it and on what. In fact, they would know your every move. Whatever happens next , let me tell you that it will be one step closer to the “end times” mark of the beast.

AMERICA WAS NEVER GREAT!

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The US educational system has replaced the teaching of American history with anti-American propaganda, a trend in the universities that has trickled down into high schools and elementary schools. Some schools ignore history and civics altogether, leaving students ignorant of their Christian heritage and thus susceptible to the propagandists. In addition, the teaching of evolution and not creation/intelligent design has resulted in this generation turning away from God and His values. He is no longer relevant. However, Satan’s original deception of Eve is still relevant :

“Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3:4-5

The first statement was certainly a lie and the second equally disastrous; believing she can be like God.

The VOC poll (Voice of the Customer Survey). . . found that only 57 percent of millennial’s believe the Declaration of Independence “better guarantees freedom and equality” than the Communist Manifesto. . . .

It is the reason Bernie Sanders with his socialist agenda is so popular with this generation.

Executive editor of the Federalist (and LCMS member) Joy Pullman suggests that as this generation that loved their country through World War II and the Baby Boomers who lived through the Cold War die out, the proportion of Americans who disapprove of their own country and what it stands for will increase.  At some point, the nation might become so delegitimatised in the eyes of its citizens that it dissolves.  This is what happened to the Soviet Union.  A new nation would be established in its place, with the Constitution being repealed and a different kind of government devised to replace it.  Since free, democratic republics are rare in human history, the new American order would probably be a reversion to some kind of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.

For Christians Jesus end times prophecies are beginning to unfold:

“Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name’s sake. And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved.” Matthew 24:9-13

SOCIALISM: A PERILOUS PATH TO ECONOMIC AND SPIRITUAL FREE-FALL

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The following abbreviated insightful article is by Michael Snyder. He is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District.

“Americans are increasingly embracing socialism, and this is particularly true for young adults under the age of 30.

Of course, our society has already been very heavily socialised. We have been trained to believe that if a problem exists, then it is the job of government to fix it, and over time government on all levels of our system has just gotten bigger and bigger (and government debt in the trillions with it).

But what most Americans don’t realize is that the United States never would have become an economic powerhouse without free-market capitalism, and the further we drift away from our roots, the deeper our economic problems will become. We need leaders who are willing to stand up and proudly declare that free market capitalism works incredibly well when the shackles are taken off, and that is precisely what I intend to do.

Not too long ago, a survey of U.S. adults was conducted by the American Culture and Faith Institute, and the most disturbing thing that was discovered was that 40 percent of all Americans now “prefer socialism to capitalism.”

Support for socialism is particularly high among our young people. A Gallup poll conducted in 2016 found that an astounding 55 percent of Americans under the age of 30 “have a positive view of socialism.” Also, a Harvard University study that was reported on by The Washington Post discovered that 51 percent of U.S. adults under the age of 30 “do not support capitalism.”

These numbers help to explain why politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have such high levels of support among Millennials. These young people were raised in schools that taught them that we have a “free-market system” in America today, even though that is not really true at all. And as economic conditions deteriorate, millions of these young people are becoming disillusioned.

The following comes from an extraordinary piece that was published by Business Insider: Wages are stagnant or falling. The costs of health care, child care and tuition continue to rise exponentially. Full-time jobs turn into contract positions while benefits are slashed. Middle-class jobs are replaced with low-paying service work. The expectations of American life your parents had when you were born—that a “long boom” will bring about unparalleled prosperity—crumble away.

Baby Boomers tell you there is a way out: A college education has always been the key to a good job. But that doesn’t seem to happen anymore. The college graduates you know are drowning in student debt, working for minimum wage or toiling in unpaid internships. Prestigious jobs are increasingly clustered in cities where rent has tripled or quadrupled in a decade’s time. You cannot afford to move, and you cannot afford to stay. Outside these cities, newly abandoned malls join long abandoned factories. You inhabit a landscape of ruin. There is nothing left for you.

Years upon years of “training” in our failing system of public education has convinced large numbers of our young people that the solution to our economic ills is to move more toward socialism.

Yet history proves that socialism simply does not work.

If we continue our steady march down the road toward socialism, we will ultimately end up like all of the other failed socialist experiments throughout history.

A man walks past a wall with graffiti that reads “hungry”, in Caracas, Venezuela , Aug. 3, 2017. The most recent evidence for the failure of socialism.

Let us look at the socialist alternative favoured by Sanders and Warren. The miseries, deprivations and backwardness it has inflicted on populations wherever and whenever it has been tried are boundless. They amount to the biggest empirical data set of political and economic failure in the history of humankind. In Venezuela, to take only the latest unfortunate experiment, it has meant the world’s largest oil reserves being wasted and stolen while children starve on the streets. The historical legacy of Soviet socialism, National Socialism and Maoist Communism, to cite the most egregious versions of this poisonous left-wing political ideology, is so well known that it does not need to be rehearsed here.

Even those countries that experienced the more gentle “democratic socialism,” such as modern South Africa and Brazil, socialism has allowed corrupt politicians to pilfer state industries while the poor live and die young in slums. Even in the socialized utopias of Europe, it has meant destructive youth unemployment rates, a dearth of innovation and death panels in hospitals.

Our nation is in deep, deep trouble, and it is getting worse with each passing day.

Now is the time to stand up and fight for the future of our nation, because if we don’t we may wake up one day and discover that the country we all loved so much is gone for good.”

I believe God has given America one last chance with Trump. However, unless there is revival in the church which impacts the youth and transforms communities, further judgement as outlined by Jonathan Cahn in The Harbinger will increase in intensity as “birth pangs”.