Live not by lies

By Steve Woodward

The famed dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn urged brave souls living under Soviet tyranny to “live not by lies” before he was sent into exile in 1974.

Tyrannical movements demand the opposite. Accept and embellish the lies. Socialism. Communism. Marxism. Totalitarianism. These faded into oblivion in Eastern Europe and within a crumbled Soviet Union after 1989. But their advocates never became extinct like a species can. The lies never were buried, dead and gone.

Like a gene that mutates, the gospel according to Socialism never evaporated. It lurked like a virus. In 2020, it has been revived in ways its old guard might never have imagined. Socialism is more virulent, even more difficult to contain, than Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Wuhan “virus”.

Under Fauci, and the legions of governors and mayors who have embraced his rhetoric, the lies have become the only way to live. If you deny them, you die. Probably. Maybe. At a rate of .1 percent.

I write from the Florida Keys where, tonight, I watched arriving guests taking in a glorious sunset, masked, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. They are willing to spend thousands of dollars to be pampered in a resort, yet they do not, will not, push back on the absurdity of the mask. A spa employee had no comeback when I noted that she demanded a mask be worn, by me, during a massage but only when I was face up. “I should have requested a facial instead,” I said. She laughed. Did the hypocrisy actually register within her hijacked brain?

It would encourage me to warn that Socialism is at our doorstep in the United States. But I can’t in good faith say that. Socialism is deep inside, in the church pew, in the school board meeting, in the board of elections, in the examination room where you meet privately with your physician. It is more widespread than than the Chinese Virus.

If you doubt the severity of the moment, read “Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents” by Rod Dreher (2020, Sentinel Books).

Excerpts:

“Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege. A softer, bloodless form of the same logic is at work in American institutions.”

“The social justice cultists of our day (the mask wearers) are pale imitations of Lenin and his fiery disciples. Aside from the ruthless Antifa faction, they restrict their violence to words and bullying within bourgeois institutional contexts. They prefer to push around college administrators, professors, and white-collar (today, soft-collar) professionals. … Social Justice Warriors get their way not by shedding blood (like Bolsheviks) but by shedding tears.”

“(Karl) Marx likened religion to a drug because it bunted the pain of life for the masses, and in his view, took away from them the consciousness that they had the power to overturn the social order that immigrated them. … This why Christians today must understand that, fundamentally, they aren’t resisting a different politics but rather what is effectively a rival religion.”

The Biden voters did not vote for a man, for a platform, or for “change”. They voted, and their corrupt enablers helped them, “vote” for the religion of social justice. Thus, we must not back down from overturning this hijacked election. Socialism is here, beyond the doorstep. Lock your doors. Open your minds.