Solzhenitzen Was Right.........Redux

The following post was written on October 18th, 2010, exactly 3 1/2 years ago:

Solzhenitsyn Was Right!

         It's hard to assess what people might think upon stumbling upon this blog. My only source of advertising is the magnetic bumper stickers that I transfer from one car to another as I drive them. Well actually there's another, the cards that I leave when travelling. The message is very pessimistic as far as the world and our nation is concerned. The coming election is only a tourniquet and there may be far too much blood lost already. It is difficult to write this way and even harder to face the reality of what I believe. I want to be mistaken and that is not a very pleasant situation to be in.
          Shakespeare wrote uneasy lies the head that wears the crown but uneasy also lies the head that sees madmen take advantage of the gullible. Churchill probably had more peace when he wore the crown during war than when he was ridiculed for the warnings he gave on Hitler's intentions. I am unabashedly a firm believer in God's providence and that He often uses even the most unlikely sources and undeserving people in his plans. As best as I can recall, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells this story of his conversion. He was a prisoner in the gulag system that he would eventually expose. He became ill and a doctor, a fellow prisoner, worked on him throughout the night. That doctor openly talked about his Christian faith while he worked on the future Nobel Prize winner in Literature. A guard came by and warned him to stop. When Solzhenitsyn awoke in the morning he asked for the doctor but was told that he was dead, killed for his testimonies of Jesus Christ. This was the beginning of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's gift of literature to the world from the eyes of a Christian. He later wrote the following on the condition of his country...Russia......
          Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat : "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
          Our national debt is the result of bailouts and stimulus packages applied with no wisdom. There are economies around the world that might survive the conditions but the world is so intertwined that unless most of them succeed they all will fail. Economic upheavals bring on revolutions in both governments and societies and there are those in high places who are primed for this chaos to bring about a new world order that they have envisioned for quite some time. Terrorism is directed to societies that follow Robert's Rules of Order while they themselves kill wantonly knowing that they will not have to face anyone as ruthless as they are. Iran will process weapons grade uranium, if they haven't already done so, and the resulting bomb (s) will be used somewhere, sometime. China will not be submissive if their economy collapses. They will use economic blackmail and their ever increasing military power if necessary and Putin's new Russia fooled Solzhenitsyn and many others.
          All of these problems went from the warning stage to the imminent stage since 1992 and the end of the Reagan era. There are signs, some significant, that peoples and governments want to right their ships of state but enemies of these nations also see these changes in attitude and that forces them to act while they have the upper hand. There is only one question in all of this and that is the American people. Was the reputation that we have had as a people...hype...generated from its enormous successes, or was it real? Well, it was real but the further question is whether we still possess those traits. We are probably going to find out. We know one thing for sure. When people of many former nationalities become one people united in the common bond of liberty, and acknowledge God as their creator and benefactor, they can become an enormous force for right.
          Germany's Angela Merkel said yesterday that multiculturalism is a failure. It has failed us also as it tore us apart and sapped our strength. Liberty has become an entitlement rather than a reward for vigilance. We have sat in awe at the feet of those who proudly boast that there is no God. It is hard, if not impossible to judge whether Americans bear the traits of their fathers or whether they have followed other gods. Polls cannot answer this question, only trial can. Speaking for myself, I probably do not have those traits but I have something more sure. I acknowledge that God is the source of our strength. He may, as he has done in the past, make it very evident to us that we cannot sustain ourselves without His guiding and protecting hand upon us, and that He moves within those who acknowledge where the power comes from. All these problems, this perfect storm has come upon us because we have forgotten him. Solzhenitsyn was right on this.