fall of the Soviet Union

‘Why Are People So Obedient?’ (Video)

leeduigonSeptember 16, 2023

The short answer is, most of us want to conform. It makes us nervous, to stand out from the crowd. There’s safety in numbers. So we conform.

And for those who would take away our freedom, it’s music to their ears.

Replace the blindfolds with face masks and you’ve got a typical sidewalk scene from 2020.

Y’know who knew this, top and bottom, in and out? Alan Funt, the creator of Candid Camera. How many times did he show us people trying to comply with silly rules he made up? Like “no stepping on the black linoleum squares.” Or “Backwards Zone.” Goofy stuff like that, patently senseless… and yet they complied.

Yeahbut! The bad guys will kill us if we don’t comply! Or at least throw us into jail, or wreck our businesses.

No one in his right mind denies that.

But the Soviet Union and the communist governments of its satellite states: those are all gone. The people stopped complying. Remember Lech Walesa–and Solidarity? It can be done! And without a civil war. It wasn’t a victorious army that tore down the Berlin Wall. It was the people of Berlin. The same people who used to get shot down by the East Berlin police if they got caught trying to flee to West Berlin.

There comes a point where violence is not strong enough to stand between the people and their freedom.

If liberty could have been wiped out, someone would have done it thousands of years ago.

Chinese Protest–Without Words

leeduigonNovember 28, 2022

Can’t censor blank sheets of paper, can you, comrade?

In what the Reuters news agency called a “widespread outpouring” of public protest, Chinese objecting to perpetual lockdowns–a feature of China’s “zero COVID” policy–are displaying blank sheets of paper (https://www.reuters.com/world/china/blank-sheets-paper-become-symbol-defiance-china-protests-2022-11-27/).

“The white paper represent(s) everything we want to say but cannot say,” a protester told Western reporters. The protests have been especially “widespread” in major cities like Beijing and Nanjing. The blank sheets of paper, of course, are an attempt to defeat censorship and repression.

The images of the protests bring to mind those we saw during the collapse of the Soviet Union. It would be a good thing for the whole world if China’s communist tyranny drowned in its own COVID policies and was replaced by… liberty! That was Sun Yat-sen’s dream, over 100 years ago. We pray in Jesus’ name that at long last the people of China gain their liberty.

‘The Doctrine of Despair’ (2018)

leeduigonJuly 29, 2021

See the source image

This was bad when I wrote about it in 2018, and it got a lot worse after the 2020 travesty of an election. That really crushed America.

Lately I found myself wondering, though–“Is this what God decided we needed–social chaos, a stolen election, a freakin’ pandemic–to wake us up? Could anything less have stirred us off our fainting couch?”

The Doctrine of Despair

Armed with the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, we must never give in–never, never, never. If it takes 100 years to get our country back, then we must fight for it–and pray for it–every day of those hundred years.

Our generation saw the fall and extinction of the Soviet Union. We grew up believing that would never happen, but it did. And quick, too!

Leftism in America will fail.

It would be a shame to surrender to such pipsqueaks.

Rushdoony, ‘The Religious Foundations of Culture’

leeduigonAugust 30, 2020

The Soviet Union voted itself out of existence in 1991. In his book, The One and the Many, published in 1978, Rushdoony wrote this sobering little essay.

https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/the-religious-foundations-of-culture

Who else in 1978 was predicting that the mighty U.S.S.R. would collapse, and soon? The Carter administration was trying to work out the best surrender deal that it could make with Russia. And Rushdoony didn’t just predict the collapse; he told his readers why it would collapse.

All societies founded on humanism will collapse, because their foundation is not Jesus Christ, the rock, but just a lot of shifting sand.

Observing the chaos in our country’s streets today, and hearing the lunatic outcries of the Far Left Crazy–well, think about this essay. Think hard.

‘They Still Like Communism’ (2017)

leeduigonFebruary 28, 2020

Image result for images of khrushchev pounding his show

Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe at the U.N. How quickly we forget.

I remember when Khrushchev threatened America, “Your grandchildren will live under communism.” He must’ve had a subscription to the New York Times.

They Still Like Communism

Two years ago, this alleged newspaper rekindled its long love affair with communism by celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, one of the chief calamities of the 20th century.

And last week an audience of Democrats booed Michael Bloomberg for timidly suggesting, “Communism doesn’t work.”

Have we forgotten how deliriously happy people were when their countries’ communist regimes collapsed, all over the world? There’s still China, North Korea, Cuba, and a few other places. But people rejoiced at the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the sudden death of the Soviet Union.

It wasn’t that long ago. Surely someone on the Times must remember it.

Unless maybe they all get their brains wiped from time to time.

Some Good News, For a Change

leeduigonJuly 19, 2018

Image result for images of crowds in kiev praising jesus

2017: Hundreds of thousands gather in Kiev to praise Jesus Christ Our Lord

(Thanks to Susan for the news tip)

This happened last fall, and somehow we missed it. Not that the mainstream nooze media in the West made anything like a big deal over it.

The president of the Ukraine signed an order recognizing the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, and in the streets of Kiev, hundreds of thousands of people gathered to praise Our Lord Jesus Christ and the gospel (http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/cwn/2017/september/hundreds-of-thousands-gather-in-the-streets-of-ukraine-to-praise-the-name-of-jesus).

Not long ago in my own lifetime, the Ukraine was a slave state of the Soviet Union, site of Josef Stalin’s man-made famine that killed millions in the 1930s. The official religion was atheism. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Ukraine has had its troubles since gaining independence. Russia has seized Crimea and occupied Ukrainian territory on its borders. Russian troops are still there.

But even that couldn’t depress the spirit of the Ukrainian people, who turned out in vast numbers to celebrate the one and only king whose right it is to rule: Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And there were surely many in those crowds who remembered a time when such a celebration would have gotten them all shot or packed off to the gulags in Siberia.

We here in America would do well to remember it, too.

Symbol of Hope and Sanity

leeduigonSeptember 27, 2017

This is the Cathedral of the Epiphany in Irkutsk, Siberia, and this is the music of its bells.

Built in the 17th century, the cathedral survived 70 years in the Godless Soviet wasteland, the communists having shut down religious services and converted it into a bread factory.

When I was growing up, there was no hope whatsoever that the Soviet Union would ever pass away. But it did! I was still in bed when Patty came running upstairs with the news: “There is no more Soviet Union!” It was as if God had simply plucked it off the table.

He can do things like that.

And the bells, so long silent, ring again. God hears them. He did not forget them, nor His people who were waiting for the day when they could hear them, too.