What does communist China and Russia, fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and pre-WWII Japan have in common?
This is not the beginning of a riddle or a joke. It is concerning red flag for American culture. All these nations became increasingly committed to a political climate in which opposing parties and individuals were treated with violence, imprisoned, and murdered.
In decades past, when the right accused the left of fascism, it was often in reference to the expansive use of governmental power and programs, of planning, and paternalistic patterns of legislation. But a more ironic and insidious form of fascism has emerged in recent years, one which is largely taken from the playbook of Hegelian Marxism, as it was practices in Russia, Germany, Italy, etc.
Essentially, the claim is that ends always triumph over means and that those who stand in the way of a party’s goals are enemies of the state and can be treated with the full prejudice of the instruments of war and violence.
We can keep in mind that in these nations during the last century, this led to the wholesale slaughter of people, to imprisonment and torture of millions, and to a life ruled by fear and lies.
The grave irony is that while men like Charlie Kirk are accused of fascism and racism, the actual tactics used by Russia, by Nazi’s, by nations which imprisoned and exterminated, and terrorized their people by the millions are now being used by radical liberals.
What are those tactics:
- Falsifying what their opponents say
- Vilifying them
- Inciting violence against them
- undermining our societies rightful prejudice against murder
- undermining the rule of law in favor of a politics of violence
We have perhaps the ironic recognition that if they succeed most men will be eaten alive by their own wicked machinery: one reptile shall devour another, as Dostoyevsky wrote. But this is small comfort for the violence which results and dismantling of an imperfect but relatively glorious tradition of democracy, real liberalism, rule of law, and respect for divine law.
God will not be mocked, though we mock ourselves in thinking we can stand in his place.
I encourage you not to be fooled. When you here rhetoric which does not explicitly disavow and condemn violence, which does not ultimately respect rule of law, which argues that such extremism is simply the only way to show tolerance and respect for the marginalized and obtain justice, what you are hearing are literal echoes of the attitudes which brought on the wholesale slaughter of men and the moral and spiritual downfall of nations.
This is the newspeak of 1984. In this respect, I recommend Orwell’s book, along with Gulag Archipelago and Paul Johnson’s Modern Times. The readiness to pardon violence and threats of violence is not merely the voice of a morally misguided minority, or a frustrated liberal class, it is the voice of a revolution. It is the irony of fascist rhetoric which accuses its enemies of precisely what they do–threaten justice at its core.
When men insist that murder is justice and that we have no time for law, they do not speak with a profounder sense of moral urgency, they speak in the language of demonic deception, which has no ultimate interest in justice.
Thomas More reminds us in Man for All Seasons, that it is law which keeps us from the total tyranny of Satan. This is in fact what God teaches us in Romans 12, that the law is there for our good. Secular law or rule may not be able to wholly reform our hearts, but it prevents us from reaching the extent of wickedness we are brought to when we turn our back wholly upon the order of things.
Be not fooled, when men advocate the murder of those around them or their children because they disagree with them, and when the leaders of a nation and its people do not cry out against it and to God to have mercy on them, we are not in the midst of a deeply complicated mora situation as many would like to suggest. We are in the midst of rebellion against God and divine judgment.
I encourage any readers not to vitriol or to violence, but to prayer and repentance, and the courage to speak the truth in love: that such attitudes toward violence are not merely unamerican, but inhuman and ungodly and ought to be condemned publicly and privately.
It is no accident that in forgetting God, we forget those basic truths that make us human and bind us together in the human family. Let us not forget whose image we each bear and the honor due his name.
Same & Other 