The Road Hosea 6:5: "Therefore have I hewed them by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of my mouth: and thy judgments are as the light that goeth forth."
Genesis 11:1-4: “And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”
“Rome went to pieces because they began to transplant Greece among themselves; beginning with luxuries, fashions, and various sciences and arts, it ends with sodomy and general corruption.”
–Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.”
–Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Templeton Address
“To be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and lastly, to be magnanimous and brave; so to be the opposite of all these is the same as to be a slave; and it usually happens to the appointment, and as it were retributive justice, of the Deity, that that people which cannot govern themselves, and moderate their passions, but crouch under the slavery of their lusts, should be delivered up to the sway of those whom they abhor, and made to submit to an involuntary servitude.”
–John Milton, Second Defense of the English People
Colonel Douglas MacGregor in a recent interview with Judge Napolitano, “Once you move past Europe, particularly western Europe and north America, the rest of the world is largely aligning with Russia.”
Below is a slightly older interview with Colonel Douglas MacGregor, this one on the YouTube channel “Interesting Things,” but one that is still worth watching.
At around the 24:00 mark in this video, the narrator says that Ukraine will not recover its eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk; Russia and Syria are recognizing the People’s Republic of Eastern Ukraine:
II Chronicles 20:22-24: “And when they began to sing and to praise, the LORD set ambushments against the children of Ammon, Moab, and mount Seir, which were come against Judah; and they were smitten. For the children of Ammon and Moab stood up against the inhabitants of mount Seir, utterly to slay and destroy them: and when they had made an end of the inhabitants of Seir, every one helped to destroy another. And when Judah came toward the watch tower in the wilderness, they looked unto the multitude, and, behold, they were dead bodies fallen to the earth, and none escaped.”
For some reasons and for some observers, Putin’s move was quite unexpected. Many analysts, including us, were quite convinced that the Russian President would take time before recognizing the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics.
The previous weeks were riddled with a wave of fake news over an imaginary “Russian invasion” against Ukraine.
The fake news floated on Bloomberg’s website for about 30 minutes and it is quite hard to think that this decision was unintentional.
It’s quite likely that Bloomberg deliberately chose to publish this bogus story in order to enact a strategy made of unstopping provocations against Russia.
The proportions of the mayhem perpetrated in these regions have become simply intolerable for Moscow.
There is a genocide presently being carried out in these two Republics against the Russophone populations.
The Western world that now hypocritically pretends to lecture Russia about “peace” has turned a blind eye over this massacre.
And this massacre was carried out with the deliberate complicity of the EU and NATO. The so-called Euro-Atlantic block has openly been backing the Nazi regime that has been ruling Kyiv during this past eight years.
Putin’s decision was explained by the Russian President with a speech that ended an age and opened another.
We could say that Putin’s speech represents what for Julius Caesar was the crossing of the Rubicon.
For both of them, the die was cast.
President Putin has just led us into a new era, where the Euro-Atlantic block no longer has absolute power.
For almost 30 years, the power of NATO and of the Washington deep state has been basically unmatched.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall only strengthened the power of the Atlanticist side that kept expanding even in the 90s despite the fact that the old adversary was gone.
Putin accurately calculated his decision and established that in this moment, the adversary is weak and divided. NATO has lost something that was vital for its existence. The United Stated distanced itself from the Atlanticist area when Donald Trump was elected to the White House in 2016.
That moment was the first crossroads in the history of international relations that changed the course of contemporary history.
For the first time, in Washington, there was a President who was not picked in the rooms of the Council for Foreign Relations, the organization financed by the Rockefellers that up to now has practically elected every US President.
The second crossroads was the one where Putin recognized the independence of the former Ukrainian separatist republics and by doing so, he has drawn the end to NATO’s history.
In this regard, we may say that both Trump and Putin have been working together to dismantle the political, economic, and military ideology that drives the New World Order.
We are talking about the pillars erected by Washington and London in the post-WWII era.
Those pillars have been torn down.
Before speaking of the first turning point in 2016 that Trump’s election represented, we should elaborate more on the decision Putin took and the reasons behind it.
Euromaidan: the beginning of the Ukrainian chaos
The recognition of the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics was the natural conclusion of the Euromaidan coup that took place in Ukraine in 2014.
At that time, Ukraine was governed by President Yanukovich who established excellent relations with Moscow and this foreign policy line is certainly the one that assures the best interests of Ukraine.
Ukraine had, still has, no political reasons to keep a sour relationship with Russia because the former depends upon the latter for many aspects, including the natural gas supply.
Those who were not happy about the Ukrainian-Russian friendship were the EU and NATO bureaucrats and the Obama administration.
Kyiv was distancing itself too much from the Euro-Atlantic block and this is something that the Western architects of chaos could not tolerate.
Therefore, they chose to carry out a so-called colored revolution, one of those subversive operations in which the American deep state is particularly skilled at.
Both the US Department of State and the US intelligence agencies ordered the ousting of President Yanukovich.
The Soros financed NGOs took care of the more practical aspects of its enforcement.
In this regard, Soros can certainly be defined as the “master” of international chaos and revolution.
His mission is to spread disorder on behalf of the powerful banking families for whom he works for.
Unfortunately, the operation was successful. The streets of Kyiv were flooded by a horde of foreign professional paramilitaries that sow unprecedented violence.
Former President Yanukovich was forced to flee the country to save his life and sought safe haven in Russia.
Since that moment, Ukraine has been ruled by a series of Presidents handled by the Nazi battalion of Azov, the EU, and NATO.
The first of this series was Poroshenko, a name that perhaps many readers already recognize for his involvement with the Hunter Biden probe.
Poroshenko is the President that ordered the cover-up of the investigation about Hunter Biden’s illegal business with the crooked Ukrainian gas company, Burisma.
Poroshenko did so on behalf of his “master”, the then US vice-president Joe Biden who blackmailed him by threatening him to halt US funds to Ukraine had he not stopped the probe.
The probe was stopped and corruption infected every corner of the Ukrainian society. The Nazi battalion of Azov started to persecute and kill the Russian populations of Eastern Ukraine with the blessing of the hypocritical Western world.
This genocide has never reached the pages of the liberal European and US mainstream media. Not a single word has been spent to condemn these barbaric killings.
Therefore, Vladimir Putin has had no choice. He has had to recognize the independence of these territories to protect their civilians from further massacres.
By doing so, Putin has given a very thorough lesson to the liberal West. He was forced to remind it that Ukraine is formally Russia.
The history of Czarist Russia began in Kyiv and the Bolshevik terrorists who were generously bankrolled by Wall Street banks performed the separation of Ukraine from Russia, quite brutally.
This is another page of history that we should elaborate more deeply in another article, but for now, we will keep focusing on contemporary history.
The Donbass killings are the direct cause of Putin’s decision to authorize a chirurgical military operation in Ukraine.
Russia is not bombing cities or civilian areas. If one wants to know more about this modus operand, he may research more about the Clinton and Bush administration that bombed Serbian and Iraqi cities and killed innocent children.
The West is affected by a disease called “projection”. It is projecting its own crimes upon Russia. And in order to “prove” its point, it is relentlessly fabricating fake news like the one about the bleeding woman who was wounded by an alleged Russian bombing.
But if we look at the background of the picture of this bleeding woman, we can see a building collapsed in Magnitogorsk, Russia.
It is a shameful fabrication. By hyping this hysterical campaign of fake news over Ukraine, the Euro-Atlantic probably hopes to smear Russia before the eyes of the world.
However, this is not changing some simple facts. The Ukrainian people are not opposing Russia. On the contrary, they are cheering and supporting the Russian army probably because they were fed up with years of abuse, murder, and violence committed by the Nazi terrorists.
The alliance between Trump and Putin has dismantled NATO and the NWO
Likewise, the Euro-Atlantic block has lost its power on the geopolitical chessboard, and it is no longer the main actor.
This is also the natural result of the Trump administration that has separated America from NATO’s chokehold.
Trump’s policy is founded upon the principle of national sovereignty and the independence of nations.
It is in total contradiction with the doctrine of the globalist powers that used America for decades as a mainspring of chaos.
After WW2, Washington became the headquarters of the international revolution. Whoever was considered a threat by the lords of globalism was bombed, ousted, and often killed by the web of US intelligence agencies conceived and bankrolled by families like the Rockefellers.
Many politicians and heads of State fell at the hands of the deep state.
It was the destiny of Salvador Allende, the Chilean President who was ousted in 1973 on the orders of Henry Kissinger, one of the leaders of the Bilderberg Group.
It was the destiny of Aldo Moro, former Italian PM who was threatened by Kissinger and killed in 1978 by the Red Brigades.
The same destiny was reserved for Slobodan Milosevic and Muammar Gheddafi who were overthrown and killed by the power of NATO.
NATO is not in any way an alliance to protect Europe and the United States from external threats. NATO is none other than a terrorist organization whose only purpose is to hit all those who can endanger the globalist doctrine.
NATO is basically the military branch of the New World Order.
This is the reason why the American deep state has launched a subversive “crusade” to oust Trump from the White House.
Never in the history of the US has there been a President who underwent at least three life attempts, two attempted impeachments, and two coup d’état, like the Spygate and the 2020 electoral fraud.
The CFR, the Bilderberg Group, and the Bohemian Grove knew that Trump could completely foil their plans to rule the world.
That’s why they have been desperately trying to get rid of Trump in any possible way. With the 2020 electoral fraud they were sure that the “job” was finally done. They even cheered about it with a Time magazine article that called the fraud a “democracy operation”.
However, these circles didn’t take into account Trump’s countermove. On January 2021, Trump signed the Insurrection Act and froze Biden and his administration out even before he was sworn in.
We have had several confirmations on that and the clearest evidence comes from the policy of the Biden administration itself.
Biden is simply not responding to the deep state. By completing the Afghanistan troops withdrawal and by rejecting to send US troops to Ukraine, he has kept distancing the US from NATO.
This administration is controlled by the military whose loyalty still abides by Donald Trump, the real commander in chief.
These are also the reasons that prevented the Great Reset plan achievement. In 2020, Davos was sure that the pandemic farce was the perfect-engineered crisis to pave the way to the one-world totalitarian government that globalism aims for.
The failure of the Great Reset plan
However, Davos didn’t’ take into account the fact that Russia and the US had something to say about it and they did not agree to surrender their sovereignty over the altar of this global Leviathan.
Washington and Moscow left the COVID terrorist operation in 2021 and isolated the EU governments that have become so weak and isolated to have no choice other than lift COVID restrictions as well.
Even China has distanced itself from the Great Reset due to its irreconcilable differences and clash of interests with the Western elites.
Therefore, the globalist doctrine has realized that it doesn’t have the backing of the superpowers, without which every hypothesis of global government is simply inconceivable.
At this point, we could say that we are living the final act of the globalist ideology and its political, economic and spiritual offshoots.
Ukraine could be considered the act that closes the age where NATO and the Western élites rule unmatched. The feeble European Union, which is the last organization in the hands of globalism, cannot do anything to stop what seems to be an irreversible mechanism.
In these latest years, a new philosophy is born. Not one that wants to enslave mankind but rather one that aims to free it from the bondage of the occult sects that pretend to choose the fate of the world in their private and secret palaces.
In this regard, Trump and Putin have formed a sort of mutual alliance to restore the principle of the independence of nations. An alliance that could be defined a katehon to prevent the manifestation of the Beast, the biblical term to define the future world tyrant.
Likewise, Archbishop Viganò has represented a spiritual guide who has gathered around him all the lost Catholics, abandoned by the false masonic church of Bergoglio, who has prostituted himself to this anti-Christian ideology.
It must have been a shock for Davos. They went to sleep in 2020 while they were convinced to wake up with their global tyranny world accomplished and they have awoken in 2022 and they have found that their plans are gone in smoke.
“So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“If you love all things, you will also attain the divine mystery that is in all things. For then your ability to perceive the truth will grow every day, and your mind will open itself to an all-embracing love.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby’s face.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“To love another person is to see them as God intended them to be.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God!” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth , which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“It’s not miracles that generate faith, but faith that generates miracles.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbour actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbour, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Love is such a priceless treasure that you can buy the whole world with it, and redeem not only your own but other people’s sins. Go, and do not be afraid.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Only the heart knows how to find what is precious.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don’t harrass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Do you know I don’t know how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it? How can one talk to a man and not be happy in loving him! Oh, it’s only that I’m not able to express it… And what beautiful things there are at every step, that even the most hopeless man must feel to be beautiful! Look at a child! Look at God’s sunrise! Look at the grass, how it grows! Look at the eyes that gaze at you and love you!” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul-then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate… the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself. And avoid fear, though fear is simply the consequence of every lie. Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love, and meanwhile do not even be very frightened by your own bad acts.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying – lying to others and to yourself.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Pray to God for gladness. Be glad as children, as the birds of heaven. And let not the sin of men confound you in your doings. Fear not that it will wear away your work and hinder its being accomplished. Do not say, ‘Sin is mighty, wickedness is mighty, evil environment is mighty, and we are lonely and helpless, and evil environment is wearing us away and hindering our good work from being done.’ Fly from that dejection, children!” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
“But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty 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.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The prophetic words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn resonate like thunder across the history of man. “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Thus summarized the Nobel laureate, Orthodox Christian author, and Russian dissident the main reason why the communist revolution was able to enslave, terrorize, and murder tens of millions of innocent people. An atheistic mentality and a long process of secularization gradually alienated the people from God and His moral laws. This lead them away from truth and authentic liberty and facilitated the rise of tyranny.
Tragically that same process is now at work in America and many other parts of the world. Too many unfortunately refuse to see it or believe it.
America has long been a beacon of freedom for millions of souls who came here seeking liberty and opportunity. It achieved this unique place in history by recognizing the authority of God and His moral laws and declaring that men have the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Founded by faithful and God-fearing men who despised government tyranny and sought religious freedom and individual liberty, America incorporated these universally true principles in its Declaration of Independence and Constitution. These ideals eventually became the bedrock upon which all our laws, government, and institutions were originally built.
“All rights came from God alone, not governments.”
America’s Founding Fathers understood and proclaimed that all rights came from God alone, not governments. They insisted that government must always serve man and that man was created by God to be free. Their deep faith and reverence of the Almighty inspired and guided their actions and motivated their decisions. It is this belief and trust in God’s authority and wisdom that ultimately transformed America from a tiny British colony with a handful of refugees, to the mighty economic and military superpower and an oasis of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity for tens of millions of immigrants.
The Founding Fathers, like Solzhenitsyn, understood the dependence of freedom on morality. A virtuous and faithful people who placed God at the center of their lives and the foundations of their institutions helped America become that shining city on a hill “whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere”, said President Ronald Reagan. “We’ve staked the whole future of American civilization not on the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us…to govern ourselves according to commandments of God. The future and success of America is not in this Constitution, but in the laws of God upon which the Constitution is founded,” wrote James Madison.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.”
This same theme is found throughout the writings of the Founders. John Adams clearly understood that our “Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” “He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country,” observed Samuel Adams. Patrick Henry wrote that “virtue, morality, and religion … is the armor that renders us invincible[.] … [I]f we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed[.] … [S]o long as our manners and principles remain sound, there is no danger.”
Solzhenitsyn warned that by forgetting God, America and the West faced a “calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness” that would weaken their foundations and make them vulnerable to moral decay and internal collapse. Only by turning back to God from the self-centered and atheistic humanism where “man is the touchstone [measure] in judging and evaluating everything on earth” would the West have any hope of escaping the destruction toward which it inevitably moves.
Unfortunately America did not heed Solzhenitsyn’s warnings. In the last several decades America has been rapidly transformed from a God-fearing and worshiping nation, into a secularist and atheistic society, where communist and atheistic ideals are glorified and promoted, while Judeo-Christian values and morality are attacked, ridiculed, and increasingly eradicated from the public and social consciousness of our nation. Under the decades-long assault and militant radicalism of many so-called “liberal” and “progressive” elites, God and His moral laws have been progressively erased from our public and educational institutions, to be replaced with all manner of delusion, perversion, corruption, violence, decadence, and insanity.
“Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.”
“Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants,” warned William Penn. Throughout history, the most serious threats to man’s freedom always arise when men refuse to acknowledge that God is ultimately the source and protector of real and lasting liberty and freedom. When that timeless truth is erased from men’s consciousness, when God’s wisdom and laws are forgotten, when morality is no longer a virtue to be treasured and emulated, when human life is no longer sacred, and man becomes the only standard of all that is true, then genuine freedom will begin to vanish from any group, institution, community, or society. Carnality, greed, selfishness, and worldly pleasure and power become the main goals of human existence. The moral and ethical clarity, conviction, and courage required to defend freedom and protect genuine liberty ultimately disappear, to be replaced by the most cruel, unethical, tyrannical, and godless ideologies.
Godlessness is always the first step to the concentration camp.
It is no coincidence that advocates and followers of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism – all secular, immoral, atheistic, and godless ideologies – enslaved and murdered the greatest number of people in the history of mankind. All produced some of the most cruel, violent, and evil tyrants this world has ever known, despots who persecuted their own citizens, slaughtered the innocent, destroyed their own people, and brought calamities to other nations. All subjugated the liberty and property of men to the absolute power and control of the state. All were enemies of God and blasphemers of His Holy Scriptures. All viciously persecuted the most devout and religious members of their societies, primarily the religious Christians and Jews who righteously and faithfully followed the Lord.
This is the lesson the 20th century expended so much blood to teach us. It appears that without a marked change in course, the Western world is going to have to learn it again.
_____
“Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.”
–Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Templeton Address
“To be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and lastly, to be magnanimous and brave; so to be the opposite of all these is the same as to be a slave; and it usually happens to the appointment, and as it were retributive justice, of the Deity, that that people which cannot govern themselves, and moderate their passions, but crouch under the slavery of their lusts, should be delivered up to the sway of those whom they abhor, and made to submit to an involuntary servitude.”
–John Milton, Second Defense of the English People
Proverbs 14: 34: “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.”
“When a man receives something Divine, in his heart he rejoices; but when he receives something diabolic, he is disturbed. The Christian heart, when it has received something Divine, does not demand anything else in order to convince it that this is precisely from the Lord; but by that very effect it is convinced that this is heavenly, for it senses within itself spiritual fruits: love, joy, peace, and the rest (cf. Gal. 5:22).”
–St. Seraphim of Sarov, Little Russian Philokalia
Galatians 5:22-25: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.”
Dostoyevksy’s novel is the culmination of grey morality
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is not only the most famous novel in Russian literature, but one of the most renown in world fiction. It tells the story of Rodion Raskolnikov, a twenty-three year old peculiar, student who leaves law school prematurely due to financial burdens and lives in a small, destitute flat in Russia’s then-capital Saint Petersburg.
Raskolnikov hatches a plan to murder Alyona Ivanovna, an old pawn-broker hag for her money. However, despite all his planning and internal moral justification for the impending crime, he isn’t prepared for the mental anguish that follows when he realises it isn’t all black and white, but dirty shades of grey.
Crime and Punishment exceeds the linearity of being a murder-mystery and actually peaks as a novel with its focus on philosophical notions instead. To truly appreciate Dostoyevsky’s work, it’s imperative to understand this philosophy behind it. In 19th century Russia, nihilism was growing, equating to a notion of people no longer believing in God. With the disregard of this upper-being’s existence, someone more powerful than mortal humans that’d shape their ethics and morals with a religious code, it left an unanswered question; who would replace this creed? The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche provided a solution in his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with the concept of an “Übermensch” – which, in English, translates to ‘superman’ and ‘overman’.
Nietzsche believed that in the wake of these new revelations about God and what ethical tenets humans should abide by, it’s now the task of extraordinary ‘super’ men to take up the mantle and create the new values that humanity would follow – i.e. they become someone who shapes society so drastically they’re God-like consequently. Dostoyevsky, being religiously conservative, stuck by the conventional view that there was still an existing God who shaped human morals. Whilst Nietzsche wrote that “God is dead”, Dostoyevsky instead stated that “If there is no God, everything is permitted”. Much of Dostoyevsky’s strong religious faith can be linked back to the time he was almost executed, and his following years in a Siberian labour camp:
Having been sentenced to death by Tsar Nicholas I for being part of an underground group of intellectuals, Dostoyevsky was taken along with twenty-one others to Semyonovsky Square to be shot. However, as he was third in line, new orders were issued by the Tsar: he stated that as opposed to execution, all prisoners were instead to be sentenced to Siberia for four years hard labour. The trauma behind this near-death experience was so severe that a prisoner, Grigoryev, lost his mind and never recovered. This brush with death and his duration in Siberia made Dostoyevsky believe that it gave his existence a purpose. He began to see the need for a thing that exceeds the common person, a thing that humanity should strive for and zealously praise, but never fully obtain. In a sense, he was so convinced in the belief of a God, that he wrote Crime and Punishment as a testament to his disregard of Neitzsche’s nihilistic Übermensch theory and to religion’s power in the path of redemption.
Raskolnikov epitomises Dostoyevsky’s perception of the flaw in Nietzsche’s theory. This is done so in many ways, most notably by Raskolnikov’s hubris and disdain for society, whom he deems as sheep following the herd. Raskolnikov himself believes that he is an Übermensch destined for greatness and the novel mentions that he had even previously written an article about this idea – this acting as Crime and Punishment’s way of relaying it to the reader. He cites historically-extraordinary figures as templates to be inspired by and to follow, such as Napoleon:
“I simply hinted that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right… that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep… certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity).”
“… legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Muhammad, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short of bloodshed either, if that bloodshed – often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defence of ancient law – were of use to their cause.”
Unlike Napoleon’s campaigns of war with the French army, Raskolnikov’s test of Übermensch endurance is of course about whether or not he should murder Alyona Ivanovna. Following Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s idea of the extraordinary man – which parallels Neitzsche’s Übermensch – ‘elite Hegelian men’ are inherently good and should always try to eradicate all that is bad in society, with a quasi-Machiavellian emphasis on if the ends justifying the means (the ends, of course, only being for good and not for one’s self).
Though Hegel’s theory is perhaps fundamentally naïve, following it, all the signs of Alyona being bad for society are there: she hoards money, doesn’t give back to any charitable cause except for appearances sake and routinely abuses her disabled, half-sister, Lizaveta, who slaves away tirelessly for her. Raskolnikov also assumes Alyona’s money could be used to benefit society: for example, he could continue his law studies and thus form a career that helps humanity, or alternatively, altruistically give away to the poor and needy.
“I SIMPLY HINTED THAT AN ‘EXTRAORDINARY’ MAN HAS THE RIGHT… THAT IS NOT AN OFFICIAL RIGHT, BUT AN INNER RIGHT TO DECIDE IN HIS OWN CONSCIENCE TO OVERSTEP…“
Even though these seem like individual thoughts at first, it’s not until he hears a student have an exact same hypothetical conversation with a police officer about Alyona that his resolute on the matter is complete:
“Kill her [Alyona], take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange – it’s simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence? No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm.”
So with Hegelianism to convince himself, and the student forming society’s wider-justification, Raskolnikov is willing to commit murder. However, it is in fact these very same influencing factors that foreshadow the reality that Raskolnikov is not who he thinks he is, and it’s this hypocrisy that Dostoyevsky uses to show perhaps the transparency of the theory. This hypocrisy comes from the fact that the process of becoming ‘extraordinary’ includes a complete mental dissociation/independence from the will of others, and to be able to do what one feels is right without a need for gratification – essentially, being completely cut off from humanity. Though, the ultimate test of Raskolnikov’s will doesn’t even come until after he’s committed his crime.
Going to Alyona’s flat with a stolen axe, he brutally murders her. Half-way through the robbery, the entirely-innocent Lizaveta walks in and so is consequently also killed. Even though he escapes with the money and successfully eludes the judicial system, it’s now a matter to try to do the same for his conscience. In the days and weeks after the murders, Raskolnikov begins to enter fits of delirium, and remorse, he subconsciously maybe wants to be caught.
The guilt consequently eats at him and it’s through this that he begins to realise that he isn’t the Übermensch he’s made himself out to be. This tear away from humanity proves to be so fierce and tough for Raskolnikov that he can’t handle the disconnect, and it eventually leads him to confess to the authorities so he can be sentenced to prison. Although he fails his test to become an extraordinary man, he now is able to enact redemption for his crime in the eyes of society, and God, and importantly, can reconnect with humanity again to start anew. It’s almost symbolically a way of reinserting God into their position as the upper-being, showing that no human could replace them.
Though Raskolnikov was all about a person internally battling with their-self about trying to fulfil an idea of what they should be – and therefore the unrealistic expectation to try to be a thing that exceeds God (at least in Dostoyevsky’s eyes), it is perhaps Svidrigalov who represents an even greater flaw with the Übermensch theory. Svidrigalov is almost an exaggerated caricature of the same theory, an Über-übermensch of sorts. See, with this idea of there being no God, and thus no wider moral code, Svidrigalov knows that he can exert his will all he wants and can continue doing so as there is no greater will beyond his own.
This philosophy leads him to sexually-assault a fifteen-year old and cause the demise of one of his servants because he knows he can simply get away with it without wider, afterlife punishment. It’s a complete paradox to Hegelianism because unlike Hegelianism, which supposedly is meant to be humanity at its very best, Svidrigalov is it at its worst. It’s this lack of definitiveness that equates to the flaw that Dostoyevsky maybe wanted to point out after all.
Crime and Punishment can inherently be reduced down to a scenario: is an act of murder justifiable if the consequences will help better society? And following this, Neitzsche’s Übermensch can also be put to the same standing: essentially that there is no black and white, only shades of grey. Sure, society could create and abide by its own new doctrine themselves and set out to make sure it’s only for humanity’s betterment, but with the gamble of the evil alternative, perhaps it’s a risk too big to take. This is why Dostoyevsky saw the need of a boundary, religion, that was more than humanity’s will, as it allowed it to remain in moderation consequently.
Even throughout history when we look at people who mightn’t have necessarily been familiar with Nietzsche’s theory, but had themselves similar self-illusions of grandeur, we can see that it’s not all so simple. Whilst Napoleon was successful in helping establish France as a republic and assisting in overthrowing the aristocracy, he turned into the very thing he once aimed to abolish, becoming a dictator and declaring himself the First Emperor of France. It’s examples like these that form the argument for figures like Fyodor Dostoyevsky as to why there is truly no being that can exceed God, because if there is no God, everything is permitted.
For months, I have inwardly debated writing something about the times we are living in and have— until now— come out on the side of keeping my thoughts to myself. But I just read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address to Harvard in 1978, and the prescience and relevance to our own era are too uncanny not to comment on. He could give the same speech today, and we would have no idea it was written over thirty years ago.
Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago from his experience in the prison camps under Communist Russia. It is a scathing critique of Communism, and Solzhenitsyn pulls no punches. Even in his speech at Harvard, he states unequivocally,
“I hope that no one present will suspect me of expressing my partial criticism of the Western system in order to suggest socialism as an alternative. No; with the experience of a country where socialism has been realized, I shall not speak for such an alternative. The mathematician Igor Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliantly argued book entitled Socialism; this is a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.” [emphasis mine]
However, this Harvard speech is targeted at the West rather than the East (his book does plenty of the latter). He is disgusted by the West’s materialism and reliance on freedom without any sense of responsibility or accountability. His main argument is that, by embracing the humanism put forth during the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment (“…the pro-claimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.”), the West has neglected the spiritual self for the purely physical, and this has had dire consequences for us.
“Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtle and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.”
Because we have emphasized freedom, we have become confused about what that word means. It is not uncommon to hear demands for free things– like education and healthcare– out of the same mouths that are demanding lesser or no penalties for crimes. Freedom does not guarantee that we will be given anything; we are responsible for acting morally when given freedom. But that concept has been bulldozed for one demanding more more more while demanding that even less be asked of us.
“And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.
[. . .]
It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.”
Evil has been given free rein for the very reason we have refused to acknowledge it. If we were to bring it up in everyday conversation, it would be dismissed as superstitious residue from an obsolete religion, one with no relevance to our modern-day lives. The truth is much more serious, and we ignore our spiritual selves at our peril: “But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?”
It is easy to avoid the spiritual side of existence. We have plenty of distractions, plenty of other people’s lives to obsess over. But though we may feel entitled to these distractions and even to the details of other people’s lives, Solzhenitsyn believes that we would do far better to exercise our self-restraint and our right not to look, “not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.” [Marxist mainstream media, social media]
The sad thing is, I can think of very few who have no need for the “excessive and burdening flow of information.” It is incessant, and it is very often wrong. Yet this is what we base our opinions and sensibilities on– this misleading, unreliable, factually-confused barrage of information that we have insufficient filters for and an inability to entirely contain. Then policies are made in alignment with these unverified ideas, and the domino effect has begun.
“Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.”
We cling even tighter to these ideas because we believe they are legitimized by society’s acting on them. But we are just part of the herd, being pushed along with no idea of where we are going. We believe there is safety in numbers, and we don’t want to know what it’s like to be alone by ourselves.
Therein lies the danger. We need to stop eating the lies we are fed; we need to start fighting for something deeper than material happiness and more eternal than this finite life. There is a lot wrong with the world right now, but it is not what we are being told is wrong. Solzhenitsyn saw clearly what our weaknesses are. If we haven’t gotten better in the thirty years since he showed them to us, what will it take for us to finally understand?
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Excerpt from page 154:
He lay with his head near the window, but Alyosha, who slept next to him on the same level, across a low wooden railing, lay the opposite way, to catch the light. He was reading his Bible again.
The electric light was quite near. You could read and even sew by it.
Alyosha heard Shukhov’s whispered prayer, and, turning to him: “There you are, Ivan Denisovich, your soul is begging to pray. Why don’t you give it it’s freedom?”
Shukhov stole a look at him. Alyosha’s eyes glowed like two candles.
“Well, Alyosha,” he said with a sigh, “it’s this way. Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don’t get through or they’re returned with ‘rejected’ scrawled across ’em.”
Outside the staff quarters were four sealed boxes–they were cleared by a security officer once a month. Many were the appeals that were dropped into them. The writers waited, counting the weeks: there’ll be a reply in two months, in one month. . . .
But the reply doesn’t come. Or if it does it’s only “rejected.”
“But, Ivan Denisovich, it’s because you pray too rarely, and badly at that. Without really trying. That’s why your prayers stay unanswered. One must never stop praying. If you have real faith you tell a mountain to move and it will move. . . .”
Shukhov grinned and rolled another cigarette. He took a light from the Estonian.
“Don’t talk nonsense, Alyosha. I’ve never seen a mountain move. Well, to tell the truth, I’ve never seen a mountain at all. But you, now, you prayed in the Caucasus with all that Baptist society of yours–did you make a single mountain move?”
They were an unlucky group too. What harm did they do anyone by praying to God? Every damn one of them had been given twenty-five years. Nowadays they cut all cloth to the same measure–twenty-five years.
“Oh, we didn’t pray for that, Ivan Denisovich,” Alyosha said earnestly. Bible in hand, he drew nearer to Shukhov till they lay face to face. “Of all earthly and mortal things Our Lord commanded us to pray only for our daily bread. ‘Give us this day our daily bread.'”
“Our ration, you mean?” asked Shukhov.
But Alyosha didn’t give up. Arguing more with his eyes than his tongue, he plucked at Shukhov’s sleeve, stroked his arm, and said: “Ivan Denisovich, you shouldn’t pray to get parcels or for extra stew, not for that. Things that man puts a high price on are vile in the eyes of Our Lord. We must pray about things of the spirit–that the Lord Jesus should remove the scum of anger from out hearts. . . .”
Page 156:
“Alyosha,” he said, withdrawing his arm and blowing smoke into his face. “I’m not against God, understand that. I do believe in God. But I don’t believe in paradise or in hell. Why do you take us for fools and stuff us with your paradise and hell stories? That’s what I don’t like.”
He lay back, dropping his cigarette ash with care between the bunk frame and the window, so as to singe nothing of the captain’s below. He sank into his own thoughts. He didn’t hear Alyosha’s mumbling.
“Well,” he said conclusively, “however much you pray it doesn’t shorten your stretch. You’ll sit it out from beginning to end anyhow.”
“Oh, you mustn’t pray for that either,” said Alyosha, horrified. “Why do you want freedom? In freedom your last grain of faith will be choked with weeds. You should rejoice that you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul. As the Apostle Paul wrote: ‘Why all these tears? Why are you trying to weaken my resolution? For my part I am ready not merely to be bound but even to die for the name of the Lord Jesus.'”
_____
“The thoughts of a prisoner—they’re not free either. They kept returning to the same things. A single idea keeps stirring. Would they feel that piece of bread in the mattress? Would he have any luck in the dispensary that evening? Would they out Buinovsky in the cells? And how did Tsezar get his hands on that warm vest?”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich
A few days before the 17th of May, the Lord showed me the number 17. It bore witness with my spirit that it meant the 17th of May.
This is what happened on the 17th of May:
I was walking east out of Missoula, Montana on I-90 when this truck driver picked me up. His name was Rusla and he was originally from Belarus (near Russia and the Ukraine). He was a Christian who lived in Mount Vernon, Washington. During that trip, the Presence of God became very powerful. Rusla dropped me off in Belgrade where I camped out that night.
The next day (May 18th) I hitchhiked to Jackson, Wyoming where I camped out for one night. The next day (May 19th) I hitchhiked to West Yellowstone, Montana and camped out in the woods just north of town. That night I was attacked probably by several demons in my sleep. Before I went to sleep, there was this sense of foreboding or sense of dread. Later this evil presence came upon me and I became paralyzed and then the demons attacked me. It may have lasted fifteen minutes to half an hour.
Why did the demons attack me that night? Probably because the Presence of God was so strong on the 17th of May. I believe some demonic bondage was broken inside me on the 17th and that is why Satan was so furious.
I hitchhiked out of West Yellowstone the next morning (May 20th). A Christian friend picked me up outside of Belgrade and let me stay at his place in Three Forks for one night. I was using his laptop that evening and noticed that the number of page views on my High Plains Drifter blog (Google) was down drastically. The previous several months, I averaged between 250 and 400 page views per day on my High Plains Drifter blog. After May 20th, my average page views has been around 40 to 70 per day.
Something serious happened in the heavenly realm in the past several days for Satan to attack me like that. Praise the Lord! That’s good news. If Satan attacks you, that means you are destroying some aspect of his kingdom.
The next day (May 21st) I hitchhiked from Three Forks to Helena, Montana. Outside of Helena, this truck driver picked me up. He was originally from Russia; his name was Alex and he was from Mount Vernon, Washington. He later told me that he knew Rusla, the other truck driver, very well. We had a good laugh. It’s a small world. To me, this was confirmation that something definitely happened on the 17th of May: two truck drivers picked me up from Mount Vernon, Washington; they knew each other; they were both Christians (went to different churches); they both spoke Russian and English; Rusla picked me up just outside of Missoula, Alex dropped me off in Missoula. In the mouth of two or three witnesses, let every word be established.
Alex dropped me off on the east side of Missoula. I hitchhiked to Lolo and camped out there that night. Before I went to sleep, I went through a fascinating deliverance from a demon. It was like the demon was in a death throe when it manifested (it felt like I was dying); finally the demon came out. It lasted for about an hour. Praise the Lord! I am still being delivered from demons; curses are being broken.
When I think back on the power of the Presence of God in Rusla’s tractor cab on the 17th of May, I think of these scriptures:
Isaiah 10: 27: “And it shall come to pass in that day, that his burden shall be taken away from off thy shoulder, and his yoke from off thy neck, and the yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing.”
I Corinthians 4: 20: “For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power.”
Matthew 17: 21: “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.”
Revelation 2: 24: “But unto you I say, and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as have not this doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan, as they speak; I will put upon you none other burden.”
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Recent Page Views Per Day (High Plains Drifter blog):
The Road 