Hearts of Stone

This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart. They have perverted in themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human heart.

– Edmund Burke

It is one of the great ironies of history that Robespierre, the infamous architect of the reign of terror, was an outspoken opponent of capital punishment before the revolution took place and even after the revolution. How then did he justify what he did during his bloody reign? He used the justification of all utopian zealots. He claimed that for a very short period men had to harden their hearts against all human sentiments and be merciless and cruel in order to usher in a world where there was no need for cruelty and killing, because there would be equality and harmony. Such is always the mantra of the utopian reformers, whether they be French revolutionaries, Russian Marxists, Northern Reconstructionists, or modern day democratic egalitarians. Everything that stemmed from the ancient faith, love of kith and kin, honor, and fidelity to the time worn traditions of one’s nation, all had to give way before the new utopian creed which entailed hatred of kith and kin, a sneering contempt for the code of chivalry, and a hatred for the ancient traditions of one’s nation. The transition period in which there is to be no human sentiment is always supposed to be short. But it never is; it always becomes permanent. Humanity never returns to utopian nations unless the utopian heresy is rooted out of the offending nation. (1)

The abstract principle to which the utopian appeals to justify his bloodletting is “the people.” But of course it is a people narrowly defined. Everyone outside the orbit of “the people” such as French aristocrats, white southerners, or Russian nobles are to become the necessary sacrifices to the new world order that is to be ushered in by Comrade Robespierre, Comrade Lincoln, or Comrade Lenin. All “human respect” must be burned out of the new breed of men so that they can murder every man, woman, and child that stands in the way of “the people.”

And who are the people? That has changed over the years. Initially the people were the proletariat of every race, but the liberals discovered, over the centuries, that it wasn’t just the French nobility, the Southern aristocrats, or the Czar and his Cossacks that were impeding mankind’s onward march to the light, it was all white people – poor, rich, and in-between – who had blighted the world. It does no good to ask the utopians to compare the old, racist, non-utopian regimes to the new utopian regimes in order to show the superiority of the old order to the new order, because the new pigs of Animal Farm are in that “transition stage” during which the heart must be closed to every human sentiment and the mind must be focused on abstract notions of the people, which currently translates to blacks, first and foremost, and then the other colored races.

If the modern Europeans could see Christian Europe next to contemporary Europe, all but the worst, the liberals with the passionate intensity of the possessed, would follow the call of old Europe and old Europe’s God. But the grazers do not see; they have been anaesthetized incrementally. They no longer believe there ever was any other world other than Liberaldom. The halfway-house Christians? They are wedded to liberalism. They feel uncomfortable with some aspects of it, but they remain allied to the liberal succubus because of their inability to see that modern, democratic egalitarianism, in which the negro has been elevated to the status of a God, springs from the same utopian roots as the French and Russian revolutions. We have not dispensed with utopian animal farms because Robespierre was deposed and communist Russia is no more. The hideous, inhuman ideology of utopia still dominates every European country in the guise of an abstraction called democracy, which in reality is a negro-worshipping oligarchy.

It can’t be stressed enough that the transitional stage of utopia, during which the heart must be hardened against the old, antiquated notions of love, honor, loyalty, and faith, is a permanent stage. The liberal’s utopian promised land is a desert in which nothing human can live. If Europeans were not morally anaesthetized, they could see this clearly. Look at our comedy; it is base and degrading. Our drama? We have none. Our great works of art? They celebrate the disintegration of the human personality. A desert would actually be a step up from democratic utopia. We need to go to the Old Testament prophets to describe the “utopia” we live in:

Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overgrown by strangers.

Yes, that succinctly describes the “utopia” that is modern Europe. Strangers devour our land because we do not believe in the antiquated, non-utopian virtues that sustain a land against devouring strangers; faith, hope, and charity. And the greatest of those virtues is the virtue that is so obviously missing from the desolated lands of the European people. Divine charity incarnate reached out to mankind; the Europeans responded to Him and Christian Europe was the result. Is it possible for a heart that has been touched by that divine charity, through the good offices of the antique Europeans, to permit their civilization, which is ours as well, to be obliterated, along with those who are faithful to it, from the face of the earth? No, it is not possible. The hearts that truly love never forget. No Christian European can forget that the interracial utopia of the liberals was built with and is sustained by sacrilege and blood –the sacrileges of a legion of Voltaires and Rousseas and the blood of Christian Europeans that are sacrificed on the altars of the new barbarian gods. But of course, the liberals tell us, the absence of charity in the new utopia is only temporary. Charity will return when the recalcitrant remnant of Europeans are eliminated. Liars! It is the remnant band that must restore the Europe that revered the Man of Sorrows from whom faith, hope, and charity comes.

I do not agree with G. K. Chesterton’s flippant summation of Thomas Hardy’s work, “The village atheist commenting on the village idiot.” Hardy was an atheist, but he was not a sneering atheist. He wanted the Christian faith to be true but could not bring himself to believe that a loving God could permit the suffering that came with the human condition. And the village idiots? They are us. I certainly don’t feel morally or intellectually superior to the characters depicted in Hardy’s novels. Hardy was spiritually akin to Ivan Karamazov: “I don’t reject God, I reject His world,” and to the embittered, blinded Goucester prior to his conversion: “As flies to the wanton boys, are we to th’ gods, They kill us for their sport.” Hardy’s vision is hard to refute. It certainly cannot be refuted by Thomistic rationalism or by the type of Christian apologetics (“let me tell you why God makes you suffer”) practiced by Job’s comforters. But there is a response to Hardy, and the response came from Him, as Alyosha tells his brother Ivan.

“That’s rebellion,” Alyosha said softly, lowering his eyes.

“Rebellion? I wish you hadn’t used that word,” Ivan said feelingly. “I don’t believe it’s possible to live in rebellion, and I want to live! Tell me yourself—I challenge you: let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it? Tell me and don’t lie!”

“No, I would not,” Alyosha said softly.

“And do you find acceptable the idea that those for whom you are building that edifice should gratefully receive a happiness that rests on the blood of a tortured child and, having received it, should continue to enjoy it eternally?”

“No, I do not find that acceptable,” Alyosha said and his eyes suddenly flared up. “But a moment ago you asked whether there was in the world ‘a single creature who could forgive.’ Well, there is. And He can forgive everyone for everything, because He Himself gave His innocent blood for everyone’s sin and for everyone’s sake. You forgot to mention Him, although it is on Him that the edifice must be founded, it is to Him that they will sing. ‘You were right, O Lord, for Your ways have now been revealed to us!”

Our Lord has been condemned for breaking a promise He never made. He promised to redeem our earthly suffering, not to end it. The Jews of the hardened hearts could not forgive Him, despite the fact that the prophets told them of the coming of the suffering servant and not the king of the revels, for not setting up a paradise on earth. And the modern liberals have joined with the Jews in their hatred of the Man of Sorrows. Once again Christ has been rejected by His people. “He came unto His own, and His own received Him not.” But the promise was kept; He has redeemed our suffering. The antique Europeans bore witness to His act of redemption. “Truly,” the ancient Europeans tell us, “this man was the Son of God.”

By seeking to create a world different from God’s world, a world without suffering, the liberals have plunged us into a world in which there is even greater suffering, because it is a world devoid of charity and a world devoid of the faith and the hope that our suffering has some meaning because He has redeemed our suffering through His Holy Cross. We have lost so much by allowing the liberals to replace Christian Europe with their mind-forged paradise on earth, in fact we have lost everything that makes life bearable. Must we accept this brave new world? I don’t accept it. The liberals have convinced the grazers that there never was any other world but theirs, and they have convinced the halfway-house Christians that their advanced Christianity is the real Christianity. But the liberals have not charity; their regime is built on pillage, sacrilege, and murder. If we don’t love our faith and our people enough to fight the liberals and their barbarian allies to the death, we are worse than dead men, we are men without souls.

If we are alive to the Europeans’ Christian journey, the Via Dolorosa, we will know that there is a Man of Sorrows who stands ready to renew the covenant that was so shamefully discarded by an adulterous and evil generation of liberal vipers. We can go home again by simply affirming what Peter affirmed, many months after the night of his denials, “Yes, I know that man, He is the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” We know he said those words or words like them because we know that he was crucified because of his affirmation of Christ. We all suffer and we all die. The great question is whether we suffer and die for nothing, for nada, or whether our pain, suffering and ultimate death in this world has been redeemed by His pain, suffering, and death on the cross. The collective voice of the much-vilified and hated Europeans of the olden times says that we have been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. We will hold to their vision in defiance of the Babylonian liberals and their dark barbarian legions. +

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(1) Neither France nor Russia ever went back to their Christian roots. The French shifted to a more incremental utopian scheme, the democratic egalitarianism of the United States, and the Russians did the same in the latter half of the 20^th century. Only those who equate Christianity with democracy would see Christianity in post-Communist Russia and post-revolutionary France.