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‘Men Had Forgotten God’: Solzhenitsyn on How Communist Revolutions Happen

(AP Photo, File)

How did Russia fall to the Communist Revolution? How does any country fall to Communism? How does any nation turn into a Marxist tyranny? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an anti-Communist writer and survivor of a Soviet concentration camp,  said it forty years ago: “Men had forgotten God.” And the same disaster is about to befall America today, as belief in God drops and Satanists, atheists, and perverts overtake the public square.

During a 1983 speech accepting the Templeton Prize, the brilliant  Solzhenitsyn said the following:

Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older 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 what was 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 had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.”

It is tremendously significant that Solzhenitsyn went on to point out all the signs that the West had turned from God in the 20th century. The “free world” had also forgotten God. And so the free world has become much less free and is heading toward outright totalitarianism.

Last year, Americans’ belief in God fell to an all-time low. Young people are particularly inclined toward doubting God’s existence. That’s a sobering reality, and a problem we must face.

The Pride Night that the L.A. Dodgers hosted Friday with Satanist, anti-Catholic drag queens is a perfect illustration of both the problem and the solution. On the one hand, a Major League Baseball team preferred celebrating a group of sexual perverts, who define themselves by their blasphemous anti-Catholic displays, to offending Christians. On the flip side, we see the solution. Thousands of Catholics, with other Christians and Jews, showed up to protest, and the report is that the baseball stadium was largely empty when the drag queens were there because the crowd of protestors blocked traffic. Breitbart reported that there “were easily 50 times as many people outside the stadium protesting as there were inside watching the ceremony – on a night the stands should have been packed for a game against an archrival.”

Americans are starting to realize that we are battling not just for our institutions, but for the soul of this nation. The Communists understand that religion is at the heart of this struggle. Do we?

If Communism does triumph, it will be our fault as well as our enemies’. As Solzhenitsyn noted, the West helped along the triumph of Communism by doing trade with Marxist states and overlooking their horrendous crimes. We see that now with U.S. economic dependence on Communist China, our greatest enemy. Solzhenitsyn:

Only once in this century did the West gather its strength — for the battle against Hitler. But the fruits of that victory have long since been lost. Faced with cannibalism, our godless age has discovered the perfect anaesthetic — trade! Such is the pathetic pinnacle of contemporary wisdom…

We are witnesses to the devastation of the world, be it imposed or voluntarily undergone. The entire 20th century is being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction…To achieve its diabolic ends, communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails a destruction of faith and nationhood.

And so the godless Marxists in America attack patriotism, pretend that a Betsy Ross flag is a marker of extremism, denigrate our Founding Fathers—and most especially attack Judeo-Christian values. As long as Americans sang with fervor “Protect us by thy might, great God our King,” we could overcome our struggles and sins. But now that we have turned from God, the Communist flood is sweeping the nation.

If we are to save this country from the Marxists, our solution cannot be solely political. We had better return to our Judeo-Christian roots and beg God for His help and mercy, or we, too, could soon suffer the same bloody and oppressed fate as Soviet Russia.

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