IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES.
As many of my friends and fellow
students may remember, I have been an avid reader of Russian Writers since I
was about 12 having read Tolstoy (yes I did read WAR and PEACE not just once
but twice as well as Anna Karrenina and so many of his lesser known works) and
my favorite has always been Dostoevsky. I find myself re-reading many of his
stories a great deal because they seem, to me, to be prophetic in nature given
our current national upheaval.
In my opinion, few people in the
last 200 years understood human nature and mankind’s fallen state quite like
Dostoevsky. His uncanny abilities to dissect the pathology of a killer or the
spiritual joy of a contented Russian peasant have inspired generations of
writers, thinkers, and even psychologists for a century and a half.
But more than simply being an
insightful novelist on the human condition, Dostoevsky turned out to be a truly
prophetic voice in his predictions of the dangerous and deadly places where
certain ideologies and philosophies popular at the time would lead his beloved
Russia in particular, and the modern Western world in general. I feel these
ideologies and philosophies are once again gaining a foothold HERE in the USA.
In the course of a number of his books – The Devils (aka The
Possessed) and The Brothers Karamazov,
for example – he foretold of the coming socioeconomic and geopolitical
nightmares that awaited 20th century societies that would adopt
progressivism, nihilism, and socialism as their guiding principles. His words
carry with them a deeper weight since Dostoevsky lived during his youth as a
progressive ideologue eventually sentenced first to death and then, after a
mock execution meant to “get his attention,” to four years of hard labor in
Siberia.
He returned a deeply religious man
and, after spending a few years in Europe investigating the teachings of
leading Western intellectuals, a vehement anti-socialist.
In describing the underlying
motivations of the young, radical, rabble-rousing character Peter Verkhovensky
in The Devils, Dostoevsky said:
He’s a kind, well-meaning boy, and
awfully sensitive…But let me tell you, the whole trouble stems from immaturity
and sentimentality! It’s not the practical aspects of socialism that fascinate
him, but its emotional appeal – its idealism –what we may call its mystical,
religious aspect – its romanticism…and on top of that, he just parrots other
people.
Only someone who has known the
“other side” of the psychological lines, commiserating among those who wish to
tear civilizations and their institutions down from within, can write with such
creative specificity.
But again,
Dostoevsky’s strength remains the predictive quality of his novels. He
identified the strategies the Left would use in the 20th century and their
final destinations. Three of these nightmare prophecies stand out: the war on
the family, the replacement of old theistic religions for a new (thoroughly
secular) one, and the extermination of millions of citizens on behalf of Before
our philosophy of life develops, before our religious worldview forms, before
our political convictions solidify — there exists the family. Dostoevsky’s
novels and short stories are packed with familial themes because, apart from
his later Christian faith, his experiences as a child and young adult had
profound and lasting consequences — just as they do for all of us.
Generational
Sins: The War on the Family
But
where Dostoevsky’s study of the institution of the family and its relation to
society and politics goes from “some fairly obvious observations” to “a wealth
of discerning insights” comes in just how much importance for almost everything
he places at the feet of the family. His respect for this sacred institution
only increased with age as he began to comprehend progressives’ militant
disdain for the family, for marriage, and for any other type of education save
the kind they — the revolutionaries who would one day rule the nation —
provided. Consequently, Dostoevsky’s later books, such as “The Adolescent”,
“Brothers”, and
“ Devils”, focus on these themes with characters overwhelmed by their family’s past.
“ Devils”, focus on these themes with characters overwhelmed by their family’s past.
In “Devils”, the character
Peter Verkhovensky poses as a beguiling and well-connected socialist dissident.
We learn that his father, a former professor named Stepan Trofimovich,
abandoned him as a child to be raised by intellectuals at various academies and
universities. Peter’s odd choice of his own home province in the Russian
countryside for the site of a cultural coup suddenly makes more sense: he wants
to make his dad and those in the community suffer and feel humiliation. He
craves payback for a miserable childhood. (Sounding more like Obama?) And what
better way than to pose as a “man of the people” who is simply trying to
overthrow greedy capitalists and oppressive religious traditions?
The
reality: Stepan Trofimovich did in fact abandon his son. And the seeds of
skepticism and rebellion against authority that Stepan’s generation had sown
appeared fully realized in their offspring.
The results were disastrous. Just as
they are in any culture where abdication of the primal duty to take care of
your own children is tolerated (or worse still, encouraged). ( Take a look at
our liberal views on sex just because it feels good, our welfare system and the
current government stance on abortion. Remember that Obama was quoted as saying
“I would not want to see my daughters punished with a baby”, as he promoted
abortion.) Because Stepan Stepan Trofimovich disregarded his family, consequently
his son grew up to want to destroy everyone else’s.
But the attack on the family, and
the exploitation of the difficult or disillusioned childhoods many young people
in 1870s Russia experienced, was not enough. Progressives knew this, and so did
Dostoevsky. For even in the worst of circumstances, in the most broken of
homes, faith still endured in the hearts of many Russians. Like Alyosha, the
saintly youngest brother in Brothers Karamazov, the spiritual
convictions of millions in Mother Russia would not die only through the
undermining of the family. Something bigger had to be done. Someone bigger had
to go.
They needed to murder God.
2)
Militant Atheism: The War on God
Socialism, the economic and
political theory that advocates for the state to control the means of
production and oversee the distribution of resources, was relatively new back
in Fyodor’s day, and the assumption among small groups of intellectuals from
Moscow to Mexico was that it would inevitably become the way all countries ran
their governments, societies, and economies. Dostoevsky not only believed the
sincerity in their beliefs, but that their convictions would win out in nations
around the globe to cause unprecedented suffering before collapsing under the
weight of internal contradictions and weaknesses.
Dostoevsky held that the inherent
weakness of the Utopian visions of socialism was a rejection of God and the
institution of the family. He saw that for the Left, their politics became
their religion. The members of the progressive-Left were demanding that
standards of Judeo-Christian morality be replaced with new (arbitrary)
standards handed down from central councils and planning committees.
Dostoevsky wrote the following
description of the youngest Karamazov brother Alyosha in “The Brothers
Karamazov”:
The path he chose was a path going
in the opposite direction of many his age, but he chose it with the same thirst
for swift achievement. As soon as he reflected seriously on it, he was
convinced and convicted of the existence of God and of the immortality of the
soul, and at once he instinctively said to himself: “I want to live for
immortality with Him and I will accept no compromise.”
In the same way, if he had decided
that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist
and socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, but it is
before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by
atheism today. It is the question of the tower of Babel built without God,
not to mount to Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth.
Dostoevsky believed that if even
religious nations could commit heinous acts, a secular state would be capable
of unspeakable atrocities.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
would later put it: “A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten
God; that’s why all this has happened.”
3)
Genocide: The War on Man
The unspeakable acts of Adolf
Hitler’s Nazis pale in comparison to the horrors committed by the communists in
the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of
China. Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and their successors
murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 62 million of their
own people. Between 1949 and 1987, China’s communists, led by Mao Zedong and
his successors, murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 76
million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous
regimes is documented on University of Hawaii Professor Rudolph J. Rummel’s
website and in his book “Death by Government.”
The numbers involved stagger the
mind. We must shine a spotlight on a truth our modern education system has
failed to teach American students: these were all secular, socialist nations
that began under the auspices of such lofty-sounding goals as “a workers’
paradise” and “the peoples’ republic.”
Like lambs to the slaughter,
millions went simply because dutiful bureaucrats and foot soldiers carried out
the orders of philosopher-kings who were ready to sacrifice humanity for the
sake of their “rational” and “progressive” and “scientific” system of
governance.
And yet this nightmare did not begin
to play itself out until a few decades into the 20th century. Some fifty years
earlier, a Russian novelist by the name of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
conceived of characters such as the social theorist “Shigalov” in “The
Devils” who announced to the inner circle of socialist revolutionaries he
belonged to the logical long-term plan for ruling the people once the czar was
toppled:
Dedicating my energies to the study
of the social organisation which is in the future to replace the present
condition of things, I’ve come to the conviction that all makers of social
systems from ancient times up to the present year, 187-, have been dreamers,
tellers of fairy-tales, fools who contradicted themselves, who understood
nothing of natural science and the strange animal called man…
I suggest as a final solution of the
question the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys
absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths. The others
have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd, and, through
boundless submission, will by a series of regenerations attain primeval
innocence, something like the Garden of Eden. They’ll have to work, however.
The measures I propose for depriving nine-tenths of mankind of their freedom
and transforming them into a herd through the education of whole generations
are very remarkable, founded on the facts of nature and highly logical.
To this, the aforementioned
ringleader Peter Verkhovensky responds:
“However much you tinker with the
world, you can’t make a good job of it, but by cutting off a hundred million
heads and so lightening one’s burden, one can jump over the ditch of
transforming society more safely. … It’s a new religion, my good friend, coming
to take the place of the old one. That’s why so many fighters come forward, and
it’s a big movement…
I ask you which you prefer: the slow
way, which consists in the composition of socialistic romances and the academic
ordering of the destinies of humanity a thousand years hence, while despotism
will swallow the savory morsels which would almost fly into your mouths of
themselves if you’d take a little trouble; or do you, whatever it may imply,
prefer a quicker way which will at last untie your hands, and will let humanity
make its own social organisation in freedom and in action, not on paper? They shout
“cut off a hundred million heads”; that may be only a metaphor; but why be
afraid of it if, with the slow day-dream on paper, despotism in the course of
some hundred years will devour not a hundred but five hundred million heads?
What’s one-to-five-hundred million
“heads” among friends, right?”
Again, keep in mind Dostoevsky
penned these words in 1872. Great evils like tyrannical monarchies and human
slave-trafficking had existed on planet earth since time began, but this
devious mixture of both with a calculated and cavalier attitude toward human
life startled those in the 19th century like Dostoevsky who first heard the
schemes of the original community organizers (and had the good sense to believe
that they’d carry out their plans should they ever.
It’s very difficult for the current
18 to 35 demographic (and in some cases in the 40-50 as well) to grasp just how much suffering and death and
oppression took place in the 20th century. We do not receive a
comprehensive version of history in our public schools and institutions of
higher education that might shed critical light on ideologies many in academia
support. And to be sure, we can’t count on Hollywood and the entertainment
industry to pick up any such slack in the culture.
But this matters. Ideas have consequences. Tens of millions
died in the last century because of evil ideas.
And if an
epileptic, compulsive-gambling, ex-convict in Russia about 150 years ago could
so accurately peer into the murky future to warn us, the least we can do is
simply turn around to take in the much clearer
