‘There has always been this fallacious belief: “It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.” Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.’ – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
‘In each one of us there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents…What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.’ – Hannah Arendt
Rod Dreher’s newest book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, widens his focus from the Czechoslovakian resistance to the anti-Communist resistance throughout the Soviet Bloc. In addition to studying the works of world-famous dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (from whom the title of the book is borrowed), Mr. Dreher traveled to the former Soviet states of Russia and Georgia, as well as to the former Warsaw-Pact states of Hungary, Poland, Romania, and – of course – the Czech Republic and Slovakia[1] to interview living survivors of Communism. Mr. Dreher believes that these survivors of ‘hard totalitarianism’ (which wielded force to deprive people of political liberty) can teach Americans how to survive the ‘soft totalitarianism’ (which seduces people into surrendering their political liberty for personal liberty) that is creeping through the Western world. The Benedict Option teaches Christians how to resist passive assimilation, but Live Not by Lies teaches Christians how to resist active persecution.
More @ The Abbeville Institute
No comments:
Post a Comment