Putin, Post-Modernism, Wokism, World War II, the decline of the West; but where do we find hope?
To many people’s ears in the West, Putin’s long monologue about the history of Russia in the Tucker Carlson interview was superfluous and strange, beginning in 862 (altogether eleven hundred and sixty years of history) and going forward to today. But Putin was directly attacking the abysmal ignorance of world history, particularly in the US, but more generally in the Western World.
As a friend of mine pointed out recently, what is strange about everything that is happening between Ukraine and Russia, and the present woke insanity in the Western World, and even the Israeli incursion into Palestine, is that every part of this is a consequence of, and a response to, World War II1.
Let me start with Post-Modernism, which is the (completely unstable) intellectual foundation of Wokism.
Germany and the German people in the 1930s may well be seen as the culmination of Western Modernism, and in some ways this is the peak of Christendom as well. The Germans were the most highly cultured and educated people in the world. From Germany and Austria had come Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Schiller; in other words, the great names of music and philosophy. But as someone once said, if you educate a devil, you just end up with a clever devil (it might have been Caspar Ten Boom who said this, actually; I think I read it in one of Corrie Ten Boom’s books.)
That so many Germans were duped into following Hitler is enough to make anyone doubt that education and culture and good music and philosophy can do anyone any good whatsoever.
In any case, I believe Post-Modernism was Western intellectuals’ gut-level response to the clearly failed idea that culture and education can actually make people better: it clearly failed to do so in Germany in the 1930s. What was missing, of course, in their education, at this stage, was the gospel of Christ. Kant’s philosophy, as Kierkegaarde pointed out, was law-bound, in a sense; it was about the natural law: the grace of God and the forgiveness of sin did not have a place in Enlightenment philosophy. God was gradually shut out as the world was defined philosophically and scientifically without Him.
And without God, no one can see clearly to reject lies and accept only the truth.
Now, when the intellectuals of the 1950s, 60s and 70s began to think about the Holocaust, the shocking part of it that they began to realise was that it was civilised, educated, normal people who cooperated with this monstrous act. This core doubt about Western values and the ideal of progress so essential to the nineteenth century became a canker, a worm eating at the rotten heart of the Western World. It was clear that self-righteous, ‘good’ people, the product of the Enlightenment, obedient to the German State, had carried out genocide, but if this was so, what would we do? What could we replace the ideals of the Enlightenment with?
This is why Post-Modernism is essentially a self-defeating, circular-thinking, cynical, suicidal and self-hating intellectual movement. The fruits are obvious: abortion, euthanasia, hatred of white people and the intellectual underpinnings of Western civilisation. It is easy to forget that much good came from Enlightenment thinking, when it was combined with a Christian heart: Winston Churchill kept England from being defeated in World War II.
The truth is, however, that the Western World was never very Christian. The Enlightenment, which was more of a turning away from the Bible and Christendom, than an outgrowth or development of it, was in many ways just a working out of the anti-God movement that had always been in Christendom; if it was sometimes veiled behind piety; many of the Popes were highly secular men who knew not a word of the Bible and kept mistresses and lived profligate lives, but then again, King Henry VIII’s motives for joining the Protestant movement were hardly Christian, either. Nonetheless overall the Protestant did better when one compares the number of heretic burnings etcetera (the Spanish Jesuits burned a lot.)
But because so many of the Enlightenment figures (Rousseau, Voltaire, Descartes, Goethe himself) actually clung to the idea of God (for some this was a convenience so that people would not reject their ideas, others like Rousseau and Goethe seem to have had some sort of real faith in Christ) when people rebelled against the Enlightenment in the nineteen sixties, they were actually rebelling against the reign of God, or possibly thought they were, because of the identification of secular philosophy with the secular political establishment and Christendom.
But people have short memories. Nearly everyone knows about the rise of Hitler, the complicity of the German people in the Holocaust, and World War II, and it is very true that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and it is also true that those who do know history are doomed to watch everyone else repeat it, but how this knowledge applies today is the great question: the Ukrainians actually revere Nazis and Nazi collaborators, like Stepan Bandera, who they celebrate with a State holiday every year, with public marches attended by many thousands of people in the cities. This is what Putin was talking about in his speech when he was mentioning ‘denazification’ as a condition of peace.
But the West sees the image of Hitler in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — they see him as another Hitler, an ambitious tyrant who wants to take over the world — this in itself is clearly an inaccurate comparison at least and probably an insane delusion — but again we see that this paranoid delusion also comes from fears of a renewal of World War II — and has infected people’s thinking like a mind-virus — which is not dissimilar from the way Putin fears Ukrainian nationalism, which the Western elites humour for some reason, despite calling any Western citizen who even dares to question the prevailing narrative “Nazis” and “right wing nationalists” (which just means “Nazis” anyway ) — these idiots are indeed like the man who strained out a gnat and swallowed a camel — so the insane Western oligarchs look suspiciously at Putin and cannot distinguish between Hitler, who was an insane psychopath intent on ruling the world, and Putin, who is little different from any medieval Russian king or Roman emperor who has the interests of his kingdom at heart, and who it would seem to me (and to Tucker Carlson also) is not possessed by the desire to take over the world, but instead simply wants to protect his own people, and the Eastern Ukrainians are certainly his own people; they identify as Russians, they always were Russians, they speak Russian, and they even die as Russians, as Putin pointed out in the anecdote of the Russians who surrounded a squadron of Ukrainian fighters and told them to surrender or die; the Ukrainians cried out, “Russians never surrender!” Whether this is true or not, is not the point; the point is that the Eastern Ukrainians at least are very much Russians, which is why the Ukrainian government was bombing them since 2014.
Tucker Carlson’s latest interview with Mike Benz puts a spotlight on how the West rules by deception these days. Unfortunately, this cannot last; we have to believe the truth will triumph; a government that practices transparency and puts in place justice is ultimately the only government that can endure. Our governments, full of hubris and scorning justice and God, will ultimately be judged.
The Israeli military response to the traumatic October 6th attacks is surely also a consequence of World War II and particularly the Holocaust. Not only was Israel formed by a resolution of the United Nations in a move that was really a sort of horrified compensation by the Europeans to the Jewish people for the Holocaust, but the desire so often expressed by the Palestinians for a new genocide of the Jews (“from the River to the sea, Palestine will be free”) stirs the memory and the fears of a horror that is still only a generation old for many Jews.
I myself met the parents of David and Les Helfgott and saw the tattoos on their arms from the Holocaust and talked to them a little about it once, when they lived in the little windmill in South Perth. David Helfgott, you may remember, was the West Australian virtuoso pianist featured in the movie Shine; Les, his younger brother, was a brilliant folk violinist with whom I played in a folk band for quite a few years.
Where do all these events fit into the scheme of things? Is there a plan to history? What is going on? The only one who knows the plan, ultimately, is God, and there is certainly a plan.
Speaking of the time of the end, Jesus said,
“When you hear of wars and rebellions, do not be alarmed. These things must happen first, but the end is not imminent.” Then He told them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines, and pestilences in various places, along with fearful sights and great signs from heaven…” (Luke 21:9-11)
In Matthew’s gospel note that the parallel passage (Matt 24:7) says these are just the birth pangs of the end…
Well, World War I was certainly Nation rising against Nation: it is culturally true and widely acknowledged that Nationalism was what motivated this first world-wide conflict. It was nationalism that led to a small incident, in the scheme of things, being blown up into a huge war that killed maybe 40 million people.
World War II, on the other hand, certainly looks like Kingdom rising against Kingdom: the only nation involved in World War II that I know of that was not a kingdom at this time, apart from France which was conquered very early in the piece, was the US, which at that time was a republic, and which did not even enter the war until quite late in December 1941, the day after the Pearl Harbour attack. Japan was a kingdom, Germany called itself a kingdom, the Third Reich (Reich=kingdom), England was a kingdom, all the Commonwealth countries and most of the European countries still acknowledged monarchs, so it is hard not to see World War II as the birth pangs of the end, if this is indeed what Jesus meant.
One might fear as well, with the ubiquity of genetic engineering and gain-of-function research on viruses, that the pestilences mentioned in Jesus’ words in Luke’s gospel might well be caused by the activities of evil human beings.
Whatever it all means, the only hope we can have to see it through — by which I mean, to live through it with hope and some joy and meaning in our lives — is actually to seek God. If this is indeed what Jesus was speaking about, then He foresaw everything that is happening today, two thousand years ago.
He is the Person whose words we can trust.
But there is one thing that is happening that should give everyone hope: because I think we can see Ezekiel 37:1-14 is coming to pass, and perhaps Romans 11 as well.
Ezekiel 11 is a kind of parable, a word picture, depicting the return of Israel, when hope was completely cut off:
The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.”
Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”
So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.
Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’” So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.
Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.’” Ezekiel 37:1-14
Now the thing is, many people would say that this passage was fulfilled in the time following the Babylonian exile. But if so, it is being fulfilled today in an even more remarkable way.
And “One For Israel” may well be the beginning of God breathing his breath into Israel: “One For Israel”, to my knowledge, is the first united group of Jews to preach the gospel to fellow Jews since the apostles; and many Jews in Israel have been watching the “One For Israel” videos, and many, reportedly, have been coming to the belief that Jesus is the Messiah.
Since the time of the apostle there have been many individual Jews who were influential in bringing the gospel to many Gentiles: St Patrick is the most notable, and Richard Wurmbrand, whose ministry still thrives. Benjamin Disraeli and Bob Dylan are two other notable examples of Jews who came to believe in Jesus as Messiah, and who had some influence. There is a much bigger list of Messianic Jews through the ages here.
But now, there are so many…
Even as we see the Western World slip further into apostasy, something that we should be praying against, by the way, the resurrection that is currently taking place in Israel and the Jewish people (as in Ezekiel, first the dry bones are revived — the people return — and then the breath of God is breathed into the people of Israel — God’s Spirit is poured out on them ) — this resurrection is a sign of hope that God has not abandoned this world. And the truth is that Romans chapter 11 (if you read it you will see what I am talking about) gives us hope that this resurrection might even have consequences for all the other countries as well, “life from the dead.” But in any case, we shouldn’t be jealous of the Jews: if God is reviving them, we should behave like the man who has just gotten divorced and must go to his best friend’s wedding and rejoice nonetheless.
Just because the gentiles are abandoning God (although Russia certainly acknowledges Christ, even if the Ukraine doesn’t — they have schismed2 from the Russian Orthodox church, of which the Patriarch of Moscow is the head ) - I say again - just because the gentiles in the West are abandoning God doesn’t mean we should not rejoice that so many Jews — and their cousins, the Moslems as well, are coming to faith in Christ.
One for Israel even has Jews and Palestinians working in Hebrew at their bible college, studying the Scriptures together in order to follow Jesus. This is something we should rejoice to learn, and take hope in seeing, for if the Jews are returning to their Messiah, then it may be that Jesus’ return is imminent. Even if His return is not imminent, this is surely a great sign of God’s resurrection power. Who could have believed even a generation ago that there would be Jews preaching the gospel once again in the world? This is a great sign3.
Jesus, the Lion of Judah, roars, and the whole world will hear it.
A small coda: we should not despair of our efforts to keep faith in Christ alive, and keep our governments honest, in the West, despite the fact that we seem to be losing. The turnaround might come, when we least expect it. Perhaps it will happen when Israel turns to Jesus.
I acknowledge here, by the way, that my friend D.E. sparked this essay with this very observation.
I am aware that schismed is not a word yet, but it is so convenient to turn a noun into a verb, that I am going to do it unrepentantly.
“Just because the gentiles are abandoning God (although Russia certainly acknowledges Christ, even if the Ukraine doesn’t — they have schismed1 from the Russian Orthodox church, of which the Patriarch of Moscow is the head ) - I say again - just because the gentiles are abandoning God doesn’t mean we should not rejoice that so many Jews — and their cousins, the …”
Interesting post, however, there is no evidence of the gentiles abandoning God. Last week I spoke with a pastor just returned from ministry in an Asian nation, and from his report there is clear evidence of the exact opposite. Indeed, I receive weekly posts from Africa of the murder of converted muslims by their families because they became followers of Jesus. If gentiles were really abandoning God then they are being slaughtered for nothing. No, in actuality there is an increase of gentiles becoming followers of Jesus, just not in the developed west, but certainly elsewhere in the world. Perhaps, that some more Jewish people are now following Yeshua is a sign of a greater harvest happening that would not be complete without the return of the ancient people of God as promised by the prophets of the older covenant. Also, the horrors of October 7th has probably been the means that God has used to awaken the predominately secular atheist Nation of Israel to this point, from October 2023 at least, to seek the One who alone gives meaning to life. Could evidence be assumed of this by the commissioning of battalions at the western wall, and public prayers there for the return of the hostages?