The Dream that Gave Us the Periodic Table of Elements
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Back in the ’80s, I visited Soviet Russia and saw firsthand the effects of relentless power wielded by atheistic lies and worked into a totalitarian political system. No one knew that their system would utterly collapse within a few years of that visit, but it was clear to me that the whole Russian society was in a state of abject decay: degraded buildings, material shortages, depressed people at every turn, among other maladies.
Oh, our hosts from the Ministry of Tourism did a good job whitewashing these things, but the dynamics were inescapably clear to the unbiased eyes of visitors. They were the fallout from some seven decades of the Great Soviet Lie—i.e., that God does not exist—bolstered by its ancillary lie that the State is the sole arbiter of right and wrong. Messaging such as this justified the totalitarian control of the populace in a kind of tight circular logic.
During that visit, however, I had occasion to visit the Roman Catholic parish of St. Louis in some remote neighborhood of Moscow. I believe it was the only Catholic church allowed to operate in one of the largest cities in the world.
There, at the imperial center of the Great Soviet Lie, I witnessed a small platoon of babushkas (grandmothers!) lighting their thin Eastern-style taper candles and placing them in sand-filled trays as votive offerings for their loved ones and undoubtedly also for their country. They were all bowing, crossing themselves, and praying in an unbelievably pious fashion that could not have been feigned. Some of them, I guessed, might have been old enough to have childhood memories of a pre-Soviet Russia.
These grandmothers were nonthreatening, nonviolent devotees of the Truth of Jesus Christ. They lived in the midst of the Great Lie of Communism but had not been not swayed by that Lie, even if their lives and families had been drastically affected by it.
Lies as such never end in any human culture, but, as we know, the political system of Soviet Communism very much ended in 1991. Seemingly overnight, everything burst apart and the walls of the Great Soviet Lie and its caricature government came tumbling down. Sic transit gloria communismi.
Memories of those holy Russian ladies flooded back into my consciousness on November 5th of last year when it became apparent that God had truly heard and answered the prayers of all the American babushkas who had for years prayed for an end to the American version of that same Great Lie.
By American babushkas I mean, metaphorically, the millions of faith-filled people who never bought the Great Lie. They saw American society on the brink of a new tyranny and got on their knees to pray for their beloved country. They knew that the Lie would utterly crush our country and reduce it to a kind of Sovietical parody dressed up as “democracy”, and they met it with righteous action and prayer.
We all know that America is a constitutional republic, but the pathological drumbeat of the left-wing establishment falsely characterizing our government as a “democracy” meant that the seemingly innocuous term had become part of the Great American Lie tool kit. It was being wielded as a sharp instrument to intimidate patriots into passivity and to force all people and institutions to kowtow to the illusion that the Left’s brand of tyranny was actually freedom.
Given the general level of deception of the reigning media establishment, the doublethink slogans in George Orwell’s epic novel, 1984, had suddenly and vividly come to life: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength,” etc. But the illusions, as powerful as they were, swept up the tyrants most of all. The elites seemed to be totally oblivious as to how they were fulfilling, in real time, Orwell’s dire prophecies about the Left.
But the babushkas were not deluded. They were awake to the Lie—and voted accordingly.
I literally shudder to think what America would be like right now if the 2024 election had gone the other way. This is hardly a partisan political position. It is a seeing-reality-for-what-it-is position. But here’s the problem with reality when you’re dealing with the Left.
As in Soviet Russia, “reality” is what so-called progressives claim to have a lock on each time they gain a measure of power over people, politically or otherwise. They immediately claim the mantle of truth-tellers, reality overlords, purveyors of novelty and relevance, who lecture their inferiors on the proper way to conduct a government, a society, a community, a business or university, you name the controlled entity.
And the arrogance of the Great Leftist Lie was tangible. I’m old enough to remember when little George Stephanopoulos was Bill Clinton’s first Press Secretary. My recollection of him as a young guy with bad hair standing at the podium haughtily peering down his nose at anyone who dared pose a challenging question is an image from a B-rate horror flick that’s hard to dislodge from the brain.
George hasn’t gotten any better in 40 years either. In a profusion of symbolic justice, his media company was recently forced to pay $15 million to a military veteran and his company because Old George et al. viciously defamed the patriot’s rescue efforts amid the horribly botched Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021. Their reporting literally destroyed the man’s reputation and business.
As I say, it’s a question of reality. The recent Stephanopoulos affair is a surreal paradigm for the alternate reality the Left has promoted for decades but in hyper-drive during the last four years. A few of its tenets are known to all of us:
It’s also telling that the largest and most “progressive” state in the union, at the very tail end of the old Administration, found itself engulfed in flames without the slightest idea of how to stop it. “Out of control” is a term that applies to more than wildfires when institutions and governments are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Great Lie.
But if there’s something I’ve learned through all this—the real lesson of Soviet Russia—it’s that the Truth isn’t as easily perverted as the deceivers think it can be. It has an immense power to endure and enlighten, if you just give it time. St. Augustine said that “the Truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Just let it loose, and it will defend itself.” Nowhere has that statement been more fully vindicated than in the last American election.
Truth can be known merely by the use of human reason and common sense without the aid of faith, but human nature is easily corrupted and therefore not powerful enough to be Truth’s staying power. Some of the most intelligent human beings in history were evil sociopaths whose minds and hearts had been infiltrated by the Great Lie of their age…and then left millions of dead bodies in their wake.
In our case, what has been called the government-media industrial complex, despite its immense persuasive power, was not able to convince a majority of our citizens to vote for the Great American Leftist Lie. To me, that’s both fascinating and exhilarating.
That short list of lies above (just three out of so many) illustrates some of the truths Americans woke up to in the last four years, almost as if some incandescent lightbulb went on for a whole culture that collectively said, “No, this just can’t be right.” And then added a typical American edge to it: “And we refuse to live this way.”
People were and are capable of coming to those conclusions without the aid of supernatural faith, but the immense clarity of the awakening of our culture and the vehemence of the outcome (an unmatched political/cultural landslide!) shows that something more than mere logic gave the Truth its power this time around.
I think it was the prayers of millions of American babushkas.
The Truth wins out and emerges afresh each time wicked ideologies run their course. It endures whether criminal systems approve of it or not, whether the activist purveyors of the Great Lie in any age try to stamp it out or not. But admittedly, Truth’s victory takes time and is always hard won, as evidenced by seventy years of Communism’s destructive rampage through human culture.
On the other hand, Truth prevails more quickly and gloriously when it is sustained by prayer, as if Truth itself has its own force multiplier. Prayer: what a novel idea.
Most of those who will read this piece were part of the American babushka brigade, no doubt, but despite the universal sigh of relief we all felt after the recent inauguration, it’s important to see the repudiation of the Great American Lie both for what it was and for what it wasn’t.
Above all, we did not just elect a more palatable tyranny as many nations have done throughout history whenever they’ve thrown off the old bad guys and welcomed a new set of bad guys with a ticker tape parade. Our new good guys need to be held accountable to the Truth like all leaders in history because power corrupts everyone and everything in time. So, while our task of shining a new light into every nook and cranny of governance has started well, it is not finished by a long shot.
Perhaps the more urgent task is for each of us to infuse the light of Truth into our surrounding culture—the spheres where we actually have influence—because everything around us is deeply imbued with a thousand iterations of the Great Lie.
The perversity that drove the old tyranny didn’t just disappear with one election. Anyone with eyes can see that the dark Lies of the Left still hold massive sway in our culture and need to be uprooted, or rather, enlightened by the Truth of Christ with generous doses of radiant Truth, beauty, and goodness by those of us who embrace these values as our very life.
Reforming institutions to conform to the Truth is the job of good government. But shining the radiant light of Truth on the darkness of culture is the work of babushkas.
We already know the Truth wins out in the end, but it should be our goal to make it win gloriously in the present.
Please visit Peter Darcy’s Sacred Windows website and Substack page and sign up for his weekly newsletter.
Peter Darcy is a writer and editor who spent thirty years in the non-profit sector and various business enterprises. His great passion is educating others about the power of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. In 2020 he launched the Sacred Windows website for this purpose.
He has written or ghostwritten a dozen books, of which Natures of Fire: God’s Magnificent Angels (2021) is his latest. In 2020, he published The Seven Leadership Virtues of Joan of Arc and No-Nonsense Non-Profit.
Visit Sacred Windows at www.sacredwindows.com and his author’s website at www.peterdarcywriting.com.
