As a survivor of the Communist Holocaust I am horrified to witness how my
beloved America, my adopted country, is gradually being transformed into a
secularist and atheistic utopia, where communist ideals are glorified and
promoted, while Judeo-Christian values and morality are ridiculed and
increasingly eradicated from the public and social consciousness of our nation.
Under the decades-long assault and militant radicalism of many so-called
“liberal” and “progressive” elites, God has been progressively erased from
our public and educational institutions, to be replaced with all manner of
delusion, perversion, corruption, violence, decadence, and insanity.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(detail of Michelangelo’s prophet Isaiah from the Sistine Chapel)
I’ll be the first to admit that I have been known to cry out,
“Oh Lord, where are your prophets of old?”
Where are those mystical voices today?
Where are the Jeremiahs, the Isaiahs, the Obadiahs, the Habakuks,
the Elijahs, the Zechariahs…where is John…
Where are those voices who once cried out in the wilderness?
Where are those voices who made kings and rulers quake?
Where are the voices of Truth?
Where are those whose voices spoke the words of the great I AM?
And yet it has seemed as if we have been living in a silent age.
An age of a Godless void.
Has God turned His back on us?
No.
The Word teaches us that no, no He has not, nor will He.
Yet it appears that He just might just be allowing us to have our own way.
And so I looked back to a post I wrote back in 2014…a post
based on the words of the Russian novelist and historian,
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.
Prophetic words…
So here is that post from 7 years ago:
As a tale-end Baby Boomer and child of the Cold War, the Soviet Union,
the USSR, The Federation of the Russian Republic or simply Mother Russia,
has always been an uncomfortable shadow over my shoulder,
just as it has for most everyone my age and older.
The enigma known as Russia, who most graciously hosted the world last February
for the Winter Olympics only to turn around and shock us all a
few months following with the “invasion” of Ukraine,
has remained a conundrum for the free world since the Russian Revolution
of 1917, which gave way to birth of Communism.
When I was in high school, which seems to be many lifetimes ago,
I had the good fortune of taking a Russian History course—
with the most memorable experience being of my introduction to the
writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
I had the good fortune of reading several of his books…
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago
and Cancer Ward.
Now all these many years later I find myself drawn back to the
writings and words of Solzhenitsyn,
of which I find more prophetic than I had ever imagined.
For those of you unfamiliar with Solzhenitsyn, in a nutshell,
he was a Russian soldier (WWII), Gulag prisoner (for nearly 10 years),
writer and novelist, historian, Soviet dissident,
Nobel Prize recipient and finally, again, Russian citizen.
As a life long member of the Russian Orthodox Church,
Solzhenitsyn was guided by a deeply spiritual moral compass.
He was a very loud and vocal opponent of Totalitarianism,
of which expedited his forced exile from the Soviet Union,
yet he could also be equally critical of the West and its obsession
with Capitalism, Consumerism and Materialism.
All of which reminds me of the chastisement the West often
received from Pope John Paul II, as well as Mother Teresa—
as perhaps those who have suffered more grievously under the
Socialist and ultra Nationalistic Regime of the Nazis and
then that of the Communist Soviets, have perhaps a clearer
perspective of our often blind view of what we consider to be
“the good life”
I am poignantly reminded of Solzhenitsyn,
his words and wisdom as well wise counsel and rebukes of those
who have witnessed first hand the sinister wiles and atrocities of Evil,
particularly during this time of year as it seems the world
always appears to crescendo to a heightened sense of madness–
just as the holidays come into focus.
I don’t know why that is except that as the world seems to not
only witness an abundance of joy and goodwill,
there seems to be an equal measure of evil and chaos.
Perhaps it is because Christians are drawn to the birth
of the Savior and Jews begin the celebration of the miracle of light
and the rededication to the Second Temple–
a time of a tremendous pull of people toward God—
as it seems Evil must have its share of the pie by unleashing
its part of unimaginable pain and suffering in order to
create some sort of sadistic counter balance.
Perhaps our senses are on hyper drive this time of year
as we keenly feel the highs of Joy and Wonder along with t
he bottomless pit of despair and suffering as they each roll in to one.
These thoughts reverberate in my mind just as
Sydney, Australia was held hostage Monday by a radical Islamist
madman leaving 3 individuals, including the gunman, dead.
Then on Tuesday, Pakistan witnessed an unimaginable attack
on a school leaving 132 children and 9 adult staff members
dead all at the hands of the Taliban.
We currently have a menacing cyber attack taking place at
Sony as North Korea is suspected to be retaliating to the
release of a tongue and cheek movie which sadly mocks an
attempted assassination of an, albeit, unhinged world leader.
Sometimes I think we, those of us in the West with our often
sophomoric entertainment industry, have lost our sense of what
is considered off limits or morally wrong when it comes to
the exploitation of movie making and entertainment—
but I suppose a moral compass would be needed in the
first place in order to be reminded of such. . .
We have just marked the tragic anniversary of the
Sandy Hook massacre as we continue reading headline after
headline of local, national and global tragedies.
Just as the world tries to come together in some sort of
unity marking two very sacred holy times of the year
as well as the secular merry making of Santa,
Papa Noel and Kris Kringle’s arrival.
In reading Solzhenitsyn’s book Warning to the West,
which is actually a brief composite and compendium of the
texts to three separate addresses made in the US in the late 1970’s,
it is startlingly frightening noting the parallels of then verses now.
I am keenly reminded of the relevance of Solzhenitsyn’s
words which were uttered almost 40 years ago as they could
very well be spoken on the world stage today regarding today’s global state.
I will leave you with a few pieces of his excerpted texts in
order to ponder and ruminate the relevance and warnings
which echo across our prosaic landscape as we wrestle to make
sense of the tragic events which continue to unfold before
our very eyes this holiday season…
“Is it possible or impossible to transmit the experience of
those who have suffered to those who have yet to suffer?
Can one part of humanity learn from the bitter experience
of another or can it not? Is it possible or impossible to
warn someone of danger?
How many witnesses have been sent to the West in the
last sixty years? How may waves of immigrants?
How many millions of persons? They are all here.
You meet them every day. You know who they are:
if not by their spiritual disorientation, their grief,
their melancholy, then you can distinguish them by their
accents or their external appearance. Coming from
different countries, without consulting with one another,
they have brought out exactly the same experience;
They tell you exactly the same thing:
they warn you of what is now taking place and of what has
taken place in the past. But the proud skyscrapers stand on,
jut into the sky, and say: It will never happen here.
This will never come to us. It is not possible here.”
“In addition to the grave political situation in the world today,
we are also witnessing the emergence of a crisis of unknown nature,
one completely new, and entirely non-political.
We are approaching a major turning point in world history,
the the history of civilization. It has already been noted
by specialists in various areas.
I could compare it only with the turning from the Middle Ages
to the modern era, a shift in our civilization.
It is a juncture at which settled concepts suddenly become hazy,
lose their precise contours, at which our familiar
and commonly used words lose their meaning, become empty shells,
and methods which have been reliable for many centuries no longer work.
It’s the sort of turning point where the hierarchy of
values which we have generated, and which we use to determine what
is important to us and what causes our hearts to beat
is starting to rock and may collapse.
These two crises, the political crisis of today’s world
and the oncoming spiritual crisis, are occurring at the same time.
It is our generation that will have to confront them.
The leadership of your country, which is entering the third century
of existence as a nation will perhaps have to bear a burden greater
than ever before in American history. Your leaders will
need profound intuition, spiritual foresight,
high qualities of mind and soul.
May God granted that in those times you will have at the
helm personalities as great as those who rested your country…”
(excepts taken from a speech delivered in New York July 9, 1975,
at a luncheon given by the AFL-CIO)
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