Posted on 06/04/2004 10:50:05 AM PDT by RockDoc
One of the most powerful lessons in spiritual warfare comes to us from none other than a former president.
The lesson is that naming evil -- citing it specifically, out loud, with courage -- often causes it to disappear.
This lesson came, of all places, in Orlando, Florida, at the Citrus Crown Ballroom of the Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel on March 8, 1983 at 3 p.m. -- the hour of mercy. Ronald Reagan was about to shock the world.
Standing at a podium there that March day, America's fortieth president was addressing the National Association of Evangelicals when he requested prayer "for the salvation of all those who live in that totalitarian darkness."
It was a pet cause of his: the tragedy of Communism. He was referring, of course, to the U.S.S.R. -- and he prayed "that they will discover the joy of knowing God."
Until they did, warned President Reagan, we had to beware of them -- for at the same time that they preached the supremacy of the state, declared its omnipotence over individual man, and predicted its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they formed what Reagan rightly and boldly called "the focus of evil in the modern world."
And could anyone doubt it? There are few better examples of evil -- the actual smoke of Satan -- than the former Soviet Union. It was a diabolic regime right up there with Hitler -- exceeded, perhaps, only by China. By the most conservative estimates, at least twenty million and perhaps as many as 65 million had been killed by Communists in the U.S.S.R. by the time of that speech. This didn't count the dozens of millions more killed by totalitarians in China.
Countless priests, nuns, ministers, and other faithful had been thrown into the notorious, hellish gulag or cruelly put to death -- in some cases nailed to walls.
It had been an empire that strapped its citizens into a straitjacket of atheism, treated its people as machines (or animals), fomented violence around the world -- and tried to expunge the very essence of love from humanity.
As Reagan pointed out, it wasn't a competing system; it wasn't just a different "philosophy." It was evil -- true evil -- and when President Reagan called it what it was, the dominoes started falling.
Rallying his fellow Christian soldiers, Reagan rebuked those who considered the two systems of free America and Soviet Communism equally at fault for the Cold War, saying that doing so was "to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire."
There it was: the words "evil empire" -- soon to reverberate from the Ivy Towers in America to the collectives in Ukraine. The president had called it what it was. Soviet Communism was not equal to U.S. democracy. It was evil.
Reagan went on to cite a quote to the effect that Marxism-Leninism was "the second oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, 'Ye shall be as gods.'"
He was identifying the Soviet Communists with the serpent!
And the effect?
Decried at first by liberals as extremism, the words hit home with both Soviet politicians and its tyrannized citizenry. As author Paul Kengor points out in a fascinating new book, God and Ronald Reagan, when news of the speech spread, his words were "carved indelibly" and immediately into the Soviet consciousness.
It was if millions suddenly admitted what truly had been happening.
And soon, the Soviet Empire would be no more.
For Reagan's words, coupled with actions by the Vatican -- which was consecrating the world to the Immaculate Heart and backing Solidarity in Poland -- brought down one of history's most nefarious governments!
Take it from the Soviets themselves. As Kengor recounts, at one meeting between arms negotiators from the U.S. and Russia, the group began speculating on which straw had finally broken the bear's back, when a former senior general in the Red Army, a little flush with vodka, heatedly interrupted. "You know what caused the downfall of the Soviet Union?" he thundered, slamming his fist on the table. "You know what did? That speech about the evil empire! That's what did it. It was an evil empire. It was!"
The word "evil" had penetrated the Russian soul -- and within 24 hours, the reaction was spreading throughout Soviet society.
"Why did you in the West laugh at him?" asked Arkady Murashev, Moscow's police chief, of those, especially liberals, who were disdainful of the speech. "It's true!"
And so it was. And so it teaches us the lesson. When we name evil -- when we stop covering it up with psychological terms, when we stop glossing it over with intellectual terms, when we halt complicating a simple truth, and rationalizing bad behavior -- we suddenly have power over it. It lances a boil.
Is it time we do it in our own errant society?
It was soon after the speech that the Soviet Union began to crumble -- in a way that was nothing short of miraculous.
This society that had murdered nuns, that had pillaged entire regions, that had killed millions through deliberate famine, that had thrown priests in jail for decades -- for hearing a single Confession -- was at its end.
And so was the immediate threat of nuclear war.
Will it remain this way?
We can only pray. It isn't over yet.
But we have had the threat of Russia removed now for two decades.
"He called it an Evil Empire," admitted one U.S. liberal, Gary Wills, and overnight, "it evaporated."
I posted this on Friday, the day before President Reagan died. I have yet to hear anyone on TV today with this same assessment of the fall of the Evil Empire.
Come to think of it, Bush named the Axis of Evil, right before Congress - and caught hell for it from the pundits. These two cowboys have a lot in common - thank God - but Reagan handled the media better.
IAC, naming ("coming to terms with") evil does have a lot of spiritual power.
There's a parallel here with the rite of exorcism. Demons must name themselves before they're expelled.
Actually, it's more than a parallel, since the Soviet regime was truly demonic.
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