The Twin Towers of Atheism

There are two separate stories in David Satter’s excellent book, Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Knopf, 1996). There is the story of how the Soviet Union maintained its system of terror against its own citizens; this story is told by the victims, many of whom Satter knew personally. He does an excellent job in presenting the victims’ stories, stories that bear repeating. Solzhenitsyn, of course, has already done yeoman’s work in depicting the plight of the millions upon millions who were victims of the Communist regime.

The second story that Satter reports is one that has not received as much attention, and it concerns the citizens who remained loyal to the Soviet Union while their friends and family members were sent to the Gulag and psychiatric hospitals. What did they think? Why did they finally cease to believe in the Soviet system? This makes for a very interesting story. Satter went throughout Russia in both the pre-glasnost days and the post-glasnost days. Besides talking to victims of Soviet terrorism, he talked to the average Russian ‘Joes,’ the ones who had never been sent to prison or to psychiatric hospitals.

What Satter reports is, at first reading, unbelievable; but after reflection, it squares with what one knows about history and human nature. What Satter found was that the average Russian Joe supported the Soviet regime; he believed the official lie. Russians were willing to put up with bread lines and cramped housing because their government told them conditions were worse everywhere else. They believed the Afghans had invited the Russians into their country to protect them, and they believed that Lenin was a saintly, heroic man.

It was glasnost that changed everything. Gorbachev had no intention of unleashing the forces that would topple the Soviet Union. He was a typical Communist party hack. He thought he could use glasnost as a policy to defeat his enemies within the party, but when the information flow started, when devoted teachers discovered that everything they had been teaching for years was a lie, when citizens learned that Lenin was not a saint but a man with the blood of millions on his hands, when Soviet citizens actually started to visit Western countries – well, then the sacrifices the citizens had made during the years of communism seemed to be worthless. If they were not building the socialist utopia, what were they doing? Where was their metaphysic? Glasnost destroyed the Soviet Union. And the man who ushered it in for his own political reasons, Gorbachev, went down with it.

Echoing what Dostoyevsky and Berdayev have said about the Russian people, Satter maintains that the Russian people need a messianic religion. Russian Orthodoxy was replaced by messianic communism. When the belief in communism was taken away from them with glasnost, the Russian people went looking for a new god:

“In this context, glasnost could not but destroy the Soviet system. It was not that any one revelation proved critical for the regime. It was rather that the very idea of truthful information could only shatter the system of collective delusion that treated the regime as the ultimate arbiter of truth and the Soviet system as the realization of mankind’s historical destiny, in which each citizen was privileged to take part. In creating the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks accepted all three temptations rejected by Christ in the wilderness. But they gained the loyalty of the Soviet people by hiding the fact that they did so in the interests of Satan. The Soviet Union fell because when the long-deceived Soviet people realized, as a result of glasnost, who they had been serving in reality, they threw off their mental bondage to an evil system and began seeking other gods.” (p. 418)

Satter makes no predictions as to what new gods the Russian people might seek. There are anti-Western, Russian nationalist factions that talk about building their own ‘Star Wars’ missiles and conquering Alaska. There are the Western-style materialists, the former Communists, and a tiny minority of Solzhenitsyn-style, Orthodox Christians.

And that last point is the significant one. The majority of Russians did not reject communism in order to return to Christianity, they rejected communism for American jeans and Big Macs. A patriotic Russian Christian now faces, in the seductive American heresy, a more subtle and potentially more dangerous adversary than communism; the American democratic heresy is more dangerous than Russian communism because the American heresy destroys the will to resist. The Russian communists assert, “There is no God,” and send those who contradict them to prison. And in prison many break, but those who don’t become like steel.

In contrast, the rulers of our American democratic oligarchy do not deny the existence of God. Instead they co-opt Him (1): God exists and he is a democratic, racially egalitarian, universalist god. The seductive logic of that assertion tends to produce hapless jellyfish, who flop around and proclaim their contentment. And in order to assure their government and themselves of their “Christianity,” the democratic jellyfish spout racial egalitarian and universalist cant whenever they are asked to speak.

So, we have our own “delirium” in this country. And we need to resist it just a fiercely as the Christian remnant in Russia resisted communism. If we view books such as Satter’s merely as cautionary tales about the evils of communism, we miss the point. The moral of the Russian communist story is that man cannot live without God. And the addendum to the American democratic story is that man needs the living God, not a phony, democratic, multi-racial caricature of God.
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(1) One gets a picture of two devils sent out from hell to try and corrupt the souls of men. One devil is sent to Russia and one to the United States. The Russian devil goes head-on against God and introduces Marxist atheism. He gets C- results. Satan is not very pleased with him. On the other hand, the American devil does not tackle God head-on. He uses the name of God to sell all his Satanic ‘isms’ – like capitalism and racial universalism. When he reports back to hell, he receives an A+ and is given a promotion.

All White Men are Now Collateral Damage

Book Review: Every Knee Shall Bow: The Truth &Tragedy of Ruby Ridge & the Randy Weaver Family, 1996, by Jess Walter

The Weaver story was finally covered by the mainstream press in 1996—it had become too big to cover up—but it never received big, Rodney-King treatment because the press and the Federal government are controlled by sixties’ radicals whose motto is ‘No enemies on the left and take no prisoners on the right.’ This account of the Ruby Ridge murders, written by a journalist with no particular liking for the Weavers’ religious views, is an account of cold-blooded, bureaucratic murder.

The Weavers left Iowa because of the state’s hostility toward homeschooling families. They settled in Idaho with their three children (another was born in Idaho). Why did they run afoul of the Federal government? The Weavers did not believe that the age of prophecy ended with the death of John, the apostle. For them, the Bible, especially the Old Testament, was the means through which God spoke to them. The Weavers believed in Christ but called him Yahweh. They ate no pork and believed that the Federal government was evil and that white Christians should form their own separate state.

It was that last belief that caused the Federal government to murder Randy Weaver’s wife, Vicki, and his twelve-year-old son, Samuel. Apparently mainstream blacks, like Tony Brown, can advocate that blacks be given a separate homeland and still eat lunch with Newt Gingrich, but if a poor, uneducated yet decent man, like Randy Weaver, believes that whites should have their own homeland, then our government feels it has the right to hunt him and his family down and kill them.

The Weavers had some very good years in the mountains of Ruby Ridge, Idaho. But a spy for the ATF, looking for bigger game, Aryan Nation types, asked Randy Weaver if he would illegally alter some shotgun barrels for him. Randy, needing money to support his family, did so. The ATF then informed him that they would not prosecute him on the gun charge if he was willing to be a snitch for them. Randy Weaver refused the ATF’s offer. They, the wonderful madcaps, then proceeded to bring charges against Randy Weaver. After the preliminary hearing, Weaver’s lawyer incorrectly told him that if he lost, the government could take his home. Randy never came back to be tried; he stayed on Ruby Ridge.

When the Federal marshals and the FBI finally went in to Ruby Ridge to get Weaver, an incredible order was given. Never before in the history of the FBI, Walter says, was such an order given; the agents were told that they should shoot anyone seen with a gun. And the FBI knew that all the Weavers, including the children, carried guns.

There were two factors that made the government act in such a cruel, paranoid fashion. First, they made the mistake—and the ATF agents at Waco would make the same mistake with the Branch Davidians—of regarding the Weavers as criminals who would immediately do the streetwise thing, that is, cave in to overwhelming force. They didn’t bargain on meeting people willing to die for their beliefs. Second, the agents were able to demonize the Weavers as racist right-wingers with no humanity who could be exterminated like vermin.

The shoot-out left Vicki Weaver dead, Samuel Weaver dead, a Federal agent dead, Randy Weaver wounded, and Kevin Harris, houseguest of the Weavers, wounded. The subsequent trial found Harris not guilty of murder and conspiracy charges, but Weaver served 1½ years on the “failure to appear in court” charge.

The FBI was later fined for funding a massive cover-up during the trial. There were a few suspensions, but no member of the FBI was ever held accountable for the murders of Vicki and Samuel Weaver. (Subsequent to the writing of this book, of course, Randy Weaver sued the Federal government for the wrongful death of his wife, and the Feds settled out of court, paying Weaver $3.1 million.)

This is a gut-wrenching book to read. The liberal author in his two page introduction draws some conclusions from the whole tragedy that I would not draw, but one is free, after reading this well-written account, to draw one’s own conclusions.

My conclusion is that our materialist, democratic, capitalist government uses, in contrast to the masculine approach of the old U.S.S.R., the feminine, seductive method of coercion to get its citizens to mesh in the gears of the mechanized utopia called the U.S.A. But when an individual, or a group of individuals, resists the seductive method, the U.S. government responds with all the fury of a woman scorned and calls out her masculine pit dogs. “Now you can be men again. Destroy those vermin!” Our government cares very little about real crime in the streets but seems obsessively concerned with what is in the minds of its citizens. There must be no bad thoughts about the government or about black people in our heads, or Aunt Samantha (Uncle Sam was demoted) will be very hurt and upset. And she might send some men with helicopters, laser guns, bulldozers, and tanks to visit us.(1)
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(1) The reason the government uses repression is because it works! Without his wife, who was the heart and soul of the family, Randy Weaver adjusted to the norms of society, announcing one year ago: “I am an atheist.”

The Gingerbread House

I would dispute those liberals who claim fascism is from the Right; it really has nothing in common, as Nicolai Tolstoy points out in his book, Stalin’s Secret War, with the Christian right. It is, however, to the right of socialist liberalism. Fascism incorporates some old pagan elements (Mussolini changed his allegiance from communism to fascism, for instance, because he claimed communism lacked virility) that the socialists eschew; therefore, to the modern mind, fascism is to the right and communism is to the left.

Most of ‘apocalyptic’ literature, warning us of the dangers of totalitarianism, such as Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, warn us of a fascist government (Orwell’s Animal Farm of course warns us of socialist totalitarianism). But whether the authors warn us of a communist or fascist dictatorship, they all perceive totalitarian societies as based on non-subtle (overt?), masculine force. They all have failed to envision a totalitarian society that was subtle, seductive, and feminine. The most successful totalitarian government in history has been the United States. Using feminine coercion rather than masculine, the U.S. has accomplished much more than Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or any other 2-bit dictator ever hoped to accomplish.

In Fahrenheit 451, my favorite of the apocalyptic novels, Bradbury correctly notes that a totalitarian government must, if it is to maintain itself, kill history. There must be no historical consciousness; there must only be the reigning government, which has always been, and always will be, world without end. In Bradbury’s novel, the government kills history by burning all books from the past.

But a colony of rebels keeps the past alive by having each member of their rebel band memorize a book. In the novel, naked force is effective to a certain extent, but it is not all-powerful because there is a resistance movement that could eventually destroy the existing regime.

The U.S. has conquered by using the ‘Gingerbread House’ technique used by the witch in the story “Hansel and Gretel.” Books about the past are not banned, they are simply packaged in scorn and printed with ridicule, while modernism comes in a gingerbread house. And in the modern American gingerbread house, no one has enough sense to realize that the feminine force responsible for the gingerbread house is demonic. In the corner of the house, little Joey Brill is munching on democracy cookies; Joe Average American is eating blood-and-circus candied apples, while Mr. Good Solid Citizen eats constitutional brownies and capitalist donuts. And who is that on the roof? Why, it’s the ever-evolving and revolving Sally Cupcake eating the gingerbread house chimney made of progressive dough and feminist icing. Munching on the cinnamon door is race-mixing Lou, and over by the stove is… Well, you get the picture.

The great satanic wisdom of American totalitarianism is this: if you ban the old books and the old traditions, the people might still love them enough to fight for their restoration. But if you give them a gingerbread house to munch on and coat the older books and traditions in monkey vomit, the people will joyfully let the old books remain unread and the old traditions die.

We are in a much more sorry plight than the doomsday prophets predicted. Traditions cannot be simply dug up to settle a contemporary score with an opponent. They can only come to life if they are loved. Pinocchio will always be more relevant than Darwin.