The Realization of Reasonable dreams

VirtueOnline-News' guest columnist Uwe Siemon-Netto discusses the "Warped Souls in de-Christianized E. Germany"

To recount his story of his home region's desolation in one sentence:


"Welcome to the desert of the Real."

He notes the spiritual cancer that has withered the once noble character of East Germans. The fruit of Nazi and Communist occupation has left the people bereft of the culture that once was proudly their own:

No sooner had this region been handed to the Soviets in 1945 following the disastrous Yalta and Potsdam accords, then the Communists set out to deliberately drive away the traditional elites - the nobility, the patricians, the bourgeoisie, academics and independent craftsmen.

In villages like Brieskow-Finkenheerd independent farms were abolished; peasants who did not leave were turned into proletarians working for farming collectives and living in soulless housing estates.

The Church, traditionally the center of village life, was no longer allowed to have a place there. Children who still went to Sunday school were regularly beaten up at the urging of teachers, as happened to this writer. "There are three Christian swine in this class, clobber them to a pulp until they come to their senses," a class teacher admonished his students every morning when I was ten years old.

As the saying goes in Germany, the de-Christianization campaign was the only "success story" of the Communist regime in the East, where today only one-fifth of the population belong to the Protestant or Catholic Churches, compared with 98 percent at the end of World War II. While two-thirds of all Western Germans still profess a belief in God, a mere 30 percent of their Eastern compatriots do so.

With the Church relegated to the margins of society, there was no institution to teach children any values. Hence the impression of many Westerners - or "Wessis" in German parlance - that there is something wrong with the Easterners, called "Ossis." Or, as an East German psychologist said immediately after reunification, "Our souls are warped."

The experiences of a Lutheran vicar (pastoral intern) teaching religion in an Eastern middle school show the devastating extent of the damage caused by 40 years of Communist dictatorship following a dozen years of Nazi tyranny.

His students were so unruly that he found them almost impossible to handle until he discovered the reasons for their disruptive behavior. One teenager told him point-blank, "I want you to call the police to arrest me. At least then I will not have to return home to my filthy, dirty drunken mother and her present lover who beats her up every day."

This occurred at the outskirts of Leipzig, for centuries one of the world's leading center of music, the arts, higher learning, trade and rich Lutheran theology.

This is the reality to which Reasonable secular leftists remain blind. This desolation they would conceal from the rest of the world could they see it. It reveals the withered consequences of their morally bankrupt and intellectually corrupt ideology. The only lasting contribution Stalinist Communism has made is the ruin of once civilized cultures.

How could it not? The Stalinist philosophy denies the truth about humanity. It ignores the fundamental dignity of the person in favor of the collective. It decries as delusion the truth of God and the inviolable dignity of a person's freedom of conscience. Indeed, human rights are only what the Stalinist State says that they are. Unmoored from the reality of Natural and Moral law, this decrepit ideology can only rip apart the consciousness of people encultured in the norms of Natural and Moral law.

When the love of Christ for us all has been banished by the State, all that remains is the horrendous law of Karma: What goes around, comes around. The absence of Faith has led to the death of virtue. The East Germans, so enslaved to the Nihilism that has for so long been imposed upon them, become slaves of any vice that offers the salve for the void in their hearts. Their hopes remain frustrated; nothing transient can satisfy an eternal hunger.

East Germany's present is the future for all should the Reasonable impose their Agenda upon the societies of the world. That, or something even worse. Arise, Fools, and laugh them off the world-stage. Let their ideology, so divorced from reality as it is, wither on the vine like the rotting fruit that it is. Let them sceam and foam at the mouth for their lost paradise, for the future must never be the desert that is today's East Germany. Let the Fools together shout the good news from the Rooftops. This way, when Christ returns, he will indeed find Faith on Earth.