A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Tragedy in Poland

On their way to commemorate the Katyn Massacre, a horrific slaughtering of some 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals at the hands of Stalin and the Soviets, some of the most important modern Polish leaders, including their president and his wife, died in a plane crash yesterday.

This is a tragedy, and we ought to pray for our Polish brothers and sisters this weekend, but just as important in my mind is the historical lesson we ought to learn from the event these foreign leaders were headed to.  The memorial for the Katyn Massacre is a stark reminder of the evil that exists in the world.  Stalin's communist state did not appear out of nowhere.  The intellectual, moral, and even spiritual depravity that laid the framework for a nation to be capable of such atrocities is worth taking note of.

Ideas, ideals, and values matter.  Everyone has them, and some are better than others.  The freedom Poland sought from the Marxist Russians, the kind we've enjoyed for hundreds of years, is one centered around the idea that man, that the individual, is made in God's image and therefore has certain rights that the State are subsurvient to.  As soon as a nation cedes those rights to any Higher Power other than God, it opens itself up to tyranny, totalitarianism, and, eventually, the kind of leaders who are capable of mass murder and genocide.

We think it can't happen here?  Why, because we're so different from the Germans or Russians?  One thing our friends on the Left who tout multiculturalism and cultural relativism forget is that if we're all really just the same, then the American is just as susceptible to going along with the ideologies (i.e. secular humanism, socialism, eugenics, etc.) that bred the horrors the world saw in the 20th century.

People are all basically the same.  Ideas and belief systems are not.