Tag Archives: history

Joe Sobran On Christianity and History

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The great conservative writer Joseph Sobran passed away on Sept. 30 2010.

I republish here one of his many fine essays on religion and culture, “Christianity and History,” Dec. 2. 2008:

“Ignorance is often hidden behind an urbane surface. Many otherwise educated people lack the most elementary understanding of certain subjects. One of these is religion.

When I was an aspiring Shakespeare scholar during my college days, I was surprised to find that most commentators on Hamlet missed the play’s religious aspect. Prince Hamlet is evidently a Catholic, but he has been a student at Wittenberg, home of the Reformation. He puns on the Diet of Worms. His father’s ghost laments that he was murdered without a chance to receive the sacraments, a fact Hamlet recalls when he hesitates to kill his uncle at prayer; Hamlet later sends two former friends to their deaths without confession. Ophelia, an apparent suicide, is given a Christian burial, to the scandal of her gravediggers.

None of this would have been lost on the ordinary Elizabethan playgoer. Whether the ghost comes from purgatory or hell, whether the old sacraments are efficacious, whether Ophelia is damned — these are questions that would have occurred to everyone in the audience, Catholic, Anglican, or Protestant. Modern scholars consign them to footnotes. But Elizabethans would have agreed with the Anglican Samuel Johnson (writing two centuries later) that Hamlet has descended to a diabolical level by seeking the damnation of his enemies.

Public discussion of three current topics shows how ignorant most Americans have become about religious questions that would have electrified their ancestors. Pope Pius XII and Patrick Buchanan were accused of pro-Hitler sympathies because their critics didn’t realize that Communist persecution of Christians would take precedence, for them, over all other considerations. And in New York, a tax-supported art show stirred controversy because it featured a blasphemous picture of the Virgin Mary, splattered with elephant dung; for liberals, as usual, the only issue at stake was “artistic expression.”

The great vice of liberal thinking is its failure of imagination with respect to Christians. For all their preaching of “sensitivity” and “multiculturalism,” they are belligerently ignorant of Christian culture and Christians’ feelings. In fact they seem to think that there is something specially “artistic” about offending Christians. Offending blacks, Jews, feminists, or homosexuals is “insensitive,” while offending Christians is “irreverent” — a word that has come to suggest a rather cute sassiness.

Yet the whole history of Western Civilization is rooted in religion. Unless you understand Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism, along with the rise of Islam, you don’t understand the events that shaped the modern world. The issues of the Reformation were still alive when the United States was founded, when slavery was debated, when the Civil War tore the country apart, when Prohibition was adopted, when Joe McCarthy assailed “godless Communism,” when John Kennedy became the first Catholic American president.

The Christian Right is closer to its own historic roots than most Americans, yet the media and the history textbooks treat it as a marginal, virtually un-American movement. This isn’t “multicultural”; it’s anti-cultural. It refuses to take America’s real origins seriously, adopting the Supreme Court’s shallow and ahistorical interpretation of the separation of church and state.

Liberal diatribes against “McCarthyism” leave out the crucial fact that American Christians felt deeply betrayed by the outcome of World War II, when our “Soviet ally” won control of a huge section of Christian Europe, just as Pius XII had feared it would. The war began when the Soviets and Germans had invaded Catholic Poland; it ended with Roosevelt’s turning Poland over to “Uncle Joe” Stalin’s tender mercies. It took the leadership of a Polish Pope, John Paul II, to win back Poland’s freedom.

Yet the young pass through our entire educational system without being taught what the Christian perspective was, and is, or how it has shaped the great events of history. Few of them know that many of the authors of the Constitution were clergymen; fewer still realize that the separation of church and state applied only to the federal government, not to the states. (The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” leaving the states free to do so.)

Like Soviet history, American history has been rewritten, with inconvenient facts deleted. In both countries, the “progressive” forces have subverted their subjects’ sense of the past.”

State Terrorism: The Ukrainian Genocide, 1933

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The Ukrainian genocide at the hands of Stalin was as great as the Holocaust engineered by the Nazis, but is much less well known. The silence of prominent Western journalists is one reason why.  Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Pulitzer prize-winner, admitted privately that ten million or so peasants had been intentionally starved and/or killed, but in public he dismissed reports of this as exaggeration and anti-Soviet propaganda. It turned out later that Duranty was being sexually blackmailed by the KGB.

“Estimates of how many people died in Stalin’s engineered famine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale — between seven and 11 million people.

But despite the horrific number of people who died, the world is relatively unfamiliar with this grisly chapter in Soviet history which claimed lives on the same scale as the holocaust. One of the main reasons is that the Germans were eventually defeated, and thousands of eyewitnesses told  their stories  about concentration  camps and massacres.  The experience  was also  captured  unforgettably in photographs, film, and written accounts, and many of those responsible for the genocide were captured and put on trial………

British historian Robert Conquest is an expert on the period and his 1986 study of the famine, “Harvest of Sorrow,” brought much information about the tragedy to Western audiences for the first time. Conquest said another contrast between the famine and the holocaust is that while Adolf Hitler had written down much of what he intended to do, Stalin did not go on record about the famine.

“In the first place, [the Germans] were caught, so it ended and they had themselves got into an operation where they said what they were doing. Stalin never said he was trying to starve anyone to death. He just took away their food. He never went on record. It was all done under the auspices of humanist talk, socialist talk — or else denied altogether. The operations were different. And in other ways they were different, too. Hitler did many horrible things but he didn’t torture his friends to tell lies. The operation was a different one.”

Conquest is in no doubt that the famine was primarily aimed at Ukrainians and that Stalin hated not only the country peasants but even senior Communist leaders, like Mykola Skrypnyk, who eventually killed himself…………

“[Stalin] was trying to break the Ukrainians, as you know, with the leading Ukrainian Bolshevik Skrypnyk committing suicide under the pressures that were put on them when they tried to defend just the ordinary alphabet of the Ukrainians. Here [Stalin] was trying to alter it, things like that. I think he also proved he never trusted Ukrainian Communists. The whole Ukrainian Central Committee was totally purged in 1937, even the ones who supported him. He had this terrific distrust of everybody, but particularly of Ukraine.”

Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has a different theory for why news of the famine never reached the West. He blamed a number of Western journalists based in Moscow at the time who knew of the forced starvation but chose not to write about it or deliberately covered it up.

The journalist he says played the most influential role in the cover-up was “The New York Times” correspondent Walter Duranty. A drug addict with a shady reputation, Duranty was also an avid fan of Stalin’s, whom he described as “the world’s greatest living statesman.” He was granted the first American interview with the Soviet leader and received privileged information from the secretive regime.

Duranty confided to a British diplomat at the time that he thought 10 million people had perished in the famine. But when other journalists who had traveled to Ukraine began writing about the horrific famine raging there, Duranty branded their information as anti-Soviet lies. Conquest believes that Duranty was being blackmailed by the Soviet secret police over his sexual activities, which reportedly included bisexuality and necrophilia.

The year before the famine, in 1932, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, America’s most coveted journalism award, for a series of articles on the Soviet economy. Luciuk says members of the Ukrainian diaspora, as well as Ukrainian politicians and academics, earlier this month launched a campaign to have Duranty’s award posthumously revoked. He said he hopes the campaign will make more people in the world aware of the famine….”