The Primary Fact of the 20th Century: Murder by Government
“Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That is it an inassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?,” Solzhenitsyn asks in volume one of the Gulag Archipelago. “The universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: ‘You are under arrest.’”[1] Arrest could many anything in the terror regimes of the twentieth century: interrogation, torture, loss of employment, deportation, forced labor, or execution. Worse, it could mean the death of a friend or family member, supposedly corrupted by the infection of the “thought crimes” of the one arrested. Arrest could mean anything.
The twentieth century witnessed the shattering of innumerable individual universes as the very real infection of the ideologues and their ideological regimes spread throughout the developed and developing world. It began in earnest and unabated with the assassination of a central European archduke and the consequent destruction of the Old World in 1914. But, in truth, the forces that would imprison much of the world’s population from 1917 to 1991 (but continues, to be sure, through the present), have their origins with the French disciples of Jean Jacques Rousseau and their assault on a Parisian prison in the summer of 1789. Dawson explained its significance:
The history of the nineteenth century developed under the shadow of the French Revolution and the national liberal revolutions that followed it. A century of political, economic and social revolution, a century of world discovery, world conquest and world exploitation, it was also the great age of capitalism; and yet saw too the rise of socialism and communism and their attack upon the foundation of capitalism society. . . . When the century began, Jefferson was president of the United States, and George III was still King of England. When it ended Lenin already was planning the Russian Revolution.[2]
More than any other event in world history to that point, the leaders of the French Revolution murdered history, virtue, and tradition. Indeed, the Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke, called the introduction of the French revolutionary spirit the “most astonishing [thing] that has hitherto happened in the world.”[3] Other scholars saw it as well. “A confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of Christ as in a net, and preparing the way for a general Apostacy from it,” John Henry Newman feared in 1838.[4]
Stormfields 