Posted on 05/08/2015 10:10:15 AM PDT by wagglebee
May 8, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- Nations and cultures are fragile things. I was reflecting on this some time ago, reading through the work of that great Russian novelist and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who saw with rare clarity of vision what the nihilist secularism of the Soviet state had done to millions of people. Signs of this fragility are everywhere, especially in the former Eastern Bloc, to which I’ve had the privilege of traveling a number of times. These visits are always deeply moving, especially as the scars of history’s destructive rampage are still so visible there. It always forces me to think about our own country, our own past, and our own future. It is not just culture that is a fragile thing—it is also the consciences of the people. Bloodshed has a way of congealing and sealing our consciences and hardening our hearts.
On a crisp but beautiful day a few months ago, I was walking the streets of Belgrade, Serbia. A local, Jorge, had agreed on short notice to take myself and two friends around the city. We tromped down cobblestone streets from castles to museums, noting the architectural signs of the eternal struggle this region has tenaciously survived—Yugoslavian, yes—but always, Turkish remnants of the centuries-long battle against Muslim invaders creeping through. Jorge, an unemployed engineer, points out a wall in the Belgrade Museum embedded with 2,000 skulls—the leaders of a peasant revolt against the Ottoman Empire, still grinning their defiance. “We lose half of every generation fighting the Turks,” Jorge says matter-of-factly.
More recently, bombed-out buildings fronted by black gaping mouths lined with jagged brick teeth reminded us that not so very long ago—I can still remember reading about it in the newspapers, after all—Western countries unleashed their bomber payloads over the city. Jorge doesn’t want to talk about it much. He was in the Serbian army in Kosovo, and all he’d say was that he saw killings--“Lots of them.”
It’s not like other European cities. Some buildings are decaying and broken, with signs in the window announcing that local businesses still exist here—those are contrasted with shiny, flashing modern buildings owned by Western companies like H&M. The Western influence here is regarded suspiciously—it’s not just frivolous material goods that are being brought here. It is our uniquely decadent moral relativism, too. Jorge complained loudly that Pride parades and “LGBT values” were being forced on Serbia by the universally-despised European Union--“I have no problem if you like sex with whoever, but why this is what the West wants us to have? It is bulls**t.”
Abortion is taking its toll, too. “We are now old country,” Jorge noted somberly. “All old people.” And of course, promises of a future are hollow without children to populate it.
It doesn’t matter where you travel, it seems. Humanity’s suicidal civil war has crept in everywhere. Sometimes, it’s visible—Jorge points out the scars and craters left by invaders. Black lamp posts that can still be seen in fuzzy black and white photographs with World War II resistance fighters dangling from them stand solemnly on street corners. And there is the Saba River, where one cold spring day the residents of Belgrade saw thousands of frozen Jewish men, women, and children floating by one by one, two by two, as they thawed out of the ice at their place of execution upstream by the Croats and Nazis and quietly trickled through the city like shrieking accusations.
“Too much dying in this country. Too much,” Jorge says quietly.
It makes me think of my own country, so beautiful and free of the battles that erupt in places like this with morbid frequency. It reminds me that not so very long ago, my own grandparents in the Netherlands saw people shot down in the streets, and saw blood trickling slowly through the gutters. Their people. Our freedom is something we barely notice, and no generation has experienced a peace like ours.
And we don’t deserve it.
We don’t bring our freedoms or our free market to battered countries like this. We are glutted on porn and casual sex and the blood of pre-born children, who are executed for the crime of violating our sacrament of sterile sex. These are our exports. We have forgotten what Solzhenitsyn once said: “Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing what is cheap.”
We Westerners think of places like Serbia and Bosnia with a condescending solemnity. So much conflict, we think, so much killing. And we ignore the fact that our booming free-market abortion industry has turned our bedrooms into battlefields where new casualties are created only to be shredded into tiny corpses. I wonder, as I walk, whether we would think differently about our own sex-driven massacres if we had to see the little frozen bodies float one by one, two by two down the Ottawa River, the Fraser River, the Bow River. We are not better than those people who live in places rocked by warfare, than those men and women on the receiving end of NATO bombs. We’ve simply gotten better, less messy, at killing than they have. Our Revolution has its own victims, but we simply do not recognize them as such. We bury the knowledge of their humanity deep within us, and try to avoid the glaring truth that what we do is kill our own children.
We can’t escape it forever, though. That is why, as Jorge said, so many countries are becoming countries populated by old people, who traded the future for the century of the self. That is why some European countries are changing their “sex education”—to reteach people that the act of reproduction should sometimes result in reproduction, the beginning of the reckoning that Solzhenitsyn knew must come. “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface,” he wrote, “we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
If only people still read Solzhenitsyn.
As Belgrade got darker and it began to get cold, I threw on a coat. “Are you okay?” Jorge asked with concern.
“Of course,” I told him. “I’m Canadian. This isn’t that cold.”
He smiled. “Good,” he said. “I do not want to carry you on my soul after.”
Carry you on my soul after. What a beautiful way of putting it. In broken English, Jorge had found the perfect way of encapsulating our responsibility to one another. Shared humanity means shared responsibility. We have to bear one another’s burdens. Love our neighbors. Carry the responsibility for those around us on our souls. As soon as I could, I wrote those words down in my notebook to remember and reflect.
Nations and cultures are a fragile thing, especially when we forget the urgency and necessity of our responsibility to our society’s victims. In some places, the killing is loud, brash, and obvious. In others, we murder softly and tiny humans pass from this life with barely a whisper. But in every place, we must not allow the voices of our consciences be overwhelmed by the enormity of reality. In every place, our duty is the same. For the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are still as true as they were all those years ago: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties—but through every human heart.”
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Worthy exports.... and this is a partial list.
http://www.faithstart.com/orgs.html
AD2000 & Beyond Global, informal network of Christian missionary agencies, denominations, churches and individuals committed to world evangelism.
Adventures In Missions Interdenominational short-term missions organization that mobilizes and equips the Church for missions by bringing the mission field to the Church’s doorstep.
Bible League Provides Scriptures and training worldwide, so that people will be brought into the fellowship of Christ and his Church.
Caleb Project Serves churches, mission agencies, and campus ministries throughout the United States by educating, assisting, and challenging them to complete their part in the goal of evangelizing the people groups of the world.
Christian Aid Seeks to establish a witness for the Lord in every tribe and nation by supporting indigenous native missionaries.
Compassion International Acts as an advocate for children to release them from their spiritual, economic, social and physical poverty and enable them to become responsible and fulfilled Christian adults.
Fields Intl. List List of many mission agencies.
Habitat For Humanity Brings families and communities together with volunteers and resources to provide affordable housing.
Intercristo Look for meaningful work in a Christian organization, ministry, church or school.
International Union of Gospel Missions Provides meals and lodgings to many homeless and needy people throughout the world. Also has programs for helping with education, job placement, housing and other needs.
Jesus Film Project Seeks to give everyone in the world one chance to hear the gospel in their own language through the use of the “Jesus” film.
Mercy Ships Send ships around the world to serve a local community in diverse cultures and partner with the local people.
New Tribes Mission Focuses on planting churches among unreached people groups.
Operation Stitches Provides tools, training and resources for a complete and effective childrens outreach.
Salvation Army Works in just over 100 countries using more than 140 languages and provides a wide range of social, medical, educational and other community services.
Samaritan’s Purse Provides spiritual and physical aid to hurting people around the world.
World Vision Work with the poor and oppressed to promote human transformation, seek justice and bear witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God.
Wycliffe Bible Translators Helps bring the Word of God translated to every people group in the world.
That’s nice. And it’s not even complete.
And it’s few drops, compared to the flood of filth.
This is the crux of the current culture war. Normal americans are being forced not only to live in the moral sewer of decadence but now having things that are vile and repulsive forced upon them by both popular culture and institutions such as colleges and now churches.
Very true.
Thanks for posting this.
All these issues do not emanate from us as source of origin
Abortion and porn are quite common elsewhere
What we do export are libtard anti Christian pro gay film
The government is sending money for abortions, demanding homosexual "rights", etc.
Organizations like the Gates Foundation are spending billions to promote eugenics.
Yes, as a country we used to export ideas of freedom, democracy, capitalism. That was back when America was a great nation, and perhaps the greatest force of good the world had ever seen. Now we export a sick, deviant culture of decadence, faggotry and moral degeneracy. We’ve gone from being a healing medicine to a noxious poison within a few short generations.
If I were a leader in a foreign country, I’d frankly do just about everything possible to keep American culture and influence as far at bay as humanly possible.
It really sucks when you go to foreign radio stations and they are playing the same crap as our stations play, and their media is just as obsessed with The Kartrashians as ours’ are.
These are the representatives of the modern-day US.
Ouch. My heart hurts.
[Not Exactly] CWII Spark Ping — This illustrates something we should be deeply shamed by, and furious with our leaders that they have done this.
Unfortunately European nations wallow in a moral sewer far deeper than ours with positive glee. Working for the US gov caused me to travel to NATO countries if not frequently than regularly for three decades. West Germany always had a lot more permissive attitudes towards hard core porn and sexuality in general. Over the years such things became more and more commonplace. I remember noting somewhere, Dusseldorf maybe, at a train station an arcade featuring a cafeteria of deviant sex practice films available for the travelers viewing pleasure by feeding DM’s into a slot on the machines. In both Germany and the Netherlands ‘sex education’ materials distributed by the schools are graphic enough to be classified a child pornography in the US. The Netherlands while always a politically liberal and tolerant place was within my lifetime pretty socially conservative. Today its descent into nihilism and perversion is stunning. In NW Europe and Scandinavia abortion, often very late or at birth has become chic and is sexualized in a manner that would stun even residents of Beverly Hills. Finally, and while this is still sort of illegal what is called quite openly ‘inter-generational sex’ has become so common as to hardly merit noting. The truth is the West has fallen under the sway of an evil decadent form of moral relativism. Whether this just indicates what the ‘new normal’ will be or whether it is an indicator of a society sinking into senescence and collapse i do not know. I know looking back over 30+ years the trajectory of our culture and theirs is very, very disturbing.
Remember when Switzerland tried legal heroin
All the needle parks around Zurich
An otherwise pristine city
Prostitution is legal or ignored in most European nations
At least back when I lived there.,,,80s
And porn
Much of Asia as well and Latin America
We’re just spewing dookie into an existing sewer
Worst thing to me is not sex exportation
It’s exporting the progressive mindset that America The west and white Christendom are one big pageant of crimes against all minorities of any nature and owe everyone
When in reality we brought modern civilization to nearly everyone
Interesting article, but I disagree somewhat with the premise. Those who have lived overseas or travelled extensively realize that relatively speaking, America is prudish as compared to other western countries. Yes, we might export some level of filth, but its into an already robust sewer.
The reaction to all this is fairly predictable. Those who are otherwise inclined to embrace debauchery embrace it. Those who aren’t find a way to resist it. And that resistance is where things get interesting. Most of the resistance to societal debauchery abroad is manifesting itself in an embrace of islam.
It doesn’t take genius to figure out where all this goes. As those who embrace debauchery fail to reproduce, they’ll die out. As those who resist it embrace islam and breed like mad, they occupy the vacuum left behind.
Christianity seems to have more or less abandoned the field. Its a very sad realization for me to realize that while I won’t have to choose between my faith and survival, those who are much younger than me or yet to be born probably will. Islam, at least in the demographic sense, has an extremely bright future. Christianity, not so much. The Godless debauchers are pretty much eliminating themselves already.
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