Came across this article and thought it would be a good one for the troops.
It’s hard to hold the minority moral principle in a culture. This article does a great job of comparing the moral blindness of the intellectual left in America to the reality of Communism during the Cold War versus the moral blindness of that same group to the evidence of what the sexual revolution has wrought in the world.
firstthings.com/article/2009/01/002-the-will-to-disbelieve-20
That is indeed a good article “for the troops”.
Not long ago I finished a book by Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder, called
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Oh, what an eye opener! The book focuses on eastern Poland and the western Ukraine and that area makes up what Snyder has named ‘The Bloodlands’. The accounts of cold blooded killing by both the Communists and the Nazis is truly mind blowing. However the really striking feature of the book is how it highlights the willingness of people to suspend all morality, all moral judgements and even credulity itself, for practical and expedient reasons.
In the Bloodlands, occupation waxed and waned between the Germans and the Communists and the enemies of Nazism when Germany was the occupier were not necessarily the enemies of the Communists when Stalin’s troops rolled in. people swapped allegiances and made ‘moral’ judgements according to who was in charge. In the process, they suspended their rational belief systems and did so even in the face of hard, cold, empirical evidence. For instance, when the Ukraine was occupied by the Communists and Stalin was expropriating Ukrainian grain, thousands and thousands perished. Some Ukrainian peasants horded small amounts of grain and so became “enemies of the state”. Those “enemies of the state” were rounded up and shot by other Ukrainians who sided with the Communists. Those Ukrainians who were not “enemies of the state” and didn’t horde grain died on the roadsides and in the streets, turning entire villages into ghost towns. Despite the empirical evidence that the horders of grain, “the enemies of the state” were at least alive and able to serve the state, whilst the “good citizens” were dead and useless to the state, keeping grain to feed oneself was a crime punishable by death.
Similar accounts are given by Snyder of what transpired in the Jewish ghettoes, where some Jews abandoned their morality for expediency, even when they knew that their demise was merely being delayed in the process. A good example is those Jews who formed the Jewdenrat, the “police” who rounded up other Jews for transportation to the gas chambers, or to the firing squads. Whilst doing their job, they often butalised their fellow Jews. When the job was done, it was their turn.
Now to read all that one ponders on just how stupid people are to ignore the reality of what confronts them each day. The article you linked to demonstrates this stupidity all over again. The analogy of how so called “intellectual elites” embraced communism, despite the evidence that Communism was very bad for people and nations, and of how, despite the evidence that moral liberalism is wreaking havoc in our societies, is a good one. Snyder bought to light a whole lot of evidence that lay buried behind Communism’s wall until after the fall of Berlin’s wall. However, he has merely reinforced what most people knew anyway, which was that Communism took away people’s freedoms and to such an extent that thousands sought to flee communism’s thrall and the Ccommunist leaders had to keep the rest locked behind brick walls and guard towers. Today, we see great evidence that the moral liberalism advocated during the 1960s has torn our societies apart.
It is almost as though the advocates of moral liberalism, like the “elites” who embraced Marxism, need to be sent back to Kindergaten and taught how to connect the dots.
