Its message is arguably more urgent ten years on, because of the spiritual and moral kinship between Stalinism and political correctness, whose tendrils have now more deeply penetrated the foundations of Western democracy.
Mr Amis, whose descriptions of the terror cannot but get under the skin of any thoughtful person, wrote (pp30-31):
It has been said that the Bolsheviks ruled as if conducting a war against their own people. But you could go further and say that the Bolsheviks were conducting a war against human nature. Lenin to Gorky:
'Every religious idea, every idea of God...is unutterable vileness...of the most dangerious kind, "contagion" of the most abominable kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions...are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of God decked in the smartest "ideological" costumes...'
Religion is reaction, certainly (and wasn't the Tsar meant to be divine?). But religion is also human nature. One recalls John Updike's argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so. The war against religion was part of the war against human nature, which was prosecuted on many other fronts.
Clearly, Nicene Christians would disagree with the notion that the objective existence of God depends upon human nature. The truth is rather that the human yearning for the transcendent flows from our dependence upon the almighty and self-sufficient Trinitarian God, not from his depedence on us.
But that Lenin's and then Stalin's terror against humanity stemmed from their hatred of the God whose eternal Word became human flesh in Jesus Christ is an urgent insight.
It is a spiritual insight that shows why godless political correctness, which harbours the same hatred, must ineluctably lead to terror if it is allowed to gain control of the state.
This piece - The Church and the re-moralisation of Britain - appeared on Christian Today.
Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, is a must read on Stalin's purges. I read it about 30 years ago, and there is a newer edition now. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Terror
ReplyDeleteSimon Cotton
Thank you very much Simon. The Amis book begins with his reminiscences of his father's friendship with Robert Conquest and an emigree Russian family who had been victims of the terror.
ReplyDeleteThank you for stating the hard truth in your final sentence.
ReplyDeleteSo few seem to understand that the USA and British Commonwealth have been overrun by Cultural Marxism, as opposed to Political Marxism.
Lenin and Stalin both sponsored the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism when they witnessed the ability of the West to resist and counter-attack Communism.
They supported Antonio Gramsci's thesis that religion, family and nation must be destroyed before revolution could take place and private property be abolished.
That process is now so far advanced and understanding of it, let alone resistance to it, so weak as to suggest that the current generation of Western Christians will witness to their faith with their blood.