I know God is at work here, just as He was while allowing past tyrannies. What I don’t know is our role before Him in all this. As Americans we’ve been taught to resist tyranny, even been charged with the RESPONSIBILITY to do so by our Founders. Is it wrong before God to fight to the death against oppression, even in the twilight stages as Solzhenitsyn suggested above? Hesitation could leave you in a death camp, “burning” against what might have been.
I struggle with this, since it is also clear from the Bible that surrender is sometimes the “right thing to do” before God. Hebrews speaks of a time when persecuted Christians “joyfully accepted the confiscation of [their] property” and makes an appeal to them to remember that during their present persecution. Now THAT’S a tough sell to an American!
Faith is needed, I suppose. Ultimately I disagree with Solzhenitsyn’s charge of blame. Sometimes a people are overrun simply because God has allowed it for His purposes (this would include their inability to “see” what was happening). “Blame” originates from the Fall, and from that point to now we have deserved every tyrant and yet have not been “treated as our sins deserve”. We demand there be NO tyrants. Barring this fantasy, notice that God DOES cut the tyrant’s reign short. They don’t end well: Suicide, Syphilis, Hanged upside down with their mistress in the public square, Exiled, etc.
And after death? The Judgment!
God gave you a life. nobody else has a right to take it. you don’t let evil run unchecked. those you talk about had no weapons, had no way to defend against anything. we are not in the same boat, by God’s grace. He doesn’t give us freedom and abilities just to chuck them aside and watch others butcher the innocent while we sit around saying “It’s God’s will.”
this amounts to pacifism relying on the “God wants us all to be martyrs” theory. it’s a lot more convenient. even the jews fought going into captivity, they had to be defeated, they didn’t just ignore their ability to defend themselves.
if you think you’re dead anyway, why not make them earn it? they’ll spin you as a terrorist or whatever, if you even get a mention at all.