Saturday, June 23, 2012

The Existential Terror of Non-Christians

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who forgave
his Russian Communist torturers


Two Indian commentators at the View From the Right, Indian Living in the West (ILW) and Aditya B., wrote scathing, even vicious, posts on Indians and India.

ILW writes:
I don’t know if Aditya B. has ever mentioned this to you, but Indians are very vain and think they are smart.
He later writes:
Indians, even when very bright, cannot seem to think outside set formulas.
Aditya B. writes:
I don’t know enough about Freudianism to analyze this, but a few group traits of these miserable people [Indians] could be illuminating...
He then proceeds to write quite a list.

Later on, Gintas, another commentator at VFR writes:
Solzhenitsyn told the truth, it was clear he loved his people and his land even as they wallowed in the depths of Soviet depravity. Also, he always pointed the way back to good health. Perhaps I make Solzhenitsyn out to be a saint; but he was a Christian, and he knew Russia had once been Christian and could become that again. Aditya’s comments about India are rancorous, whatever their truth.
Aditya B.'s torrent caused me to reflect on why, and how, people turn on their own people. I came to the same conclusion as Gintas. I can never turn against the people I originate from, the Amhara people, although I have no direct physical or psychological link with them anymore. I admire their history and, most specifically, the fact that they embraced Christianity when it was hard and dangerous (the Amharas were a northern African Island of Christians surrounded by Islam or pagan Africans), with very little support to convince them of the rightness of their ways other than their unquestioning belief in God - true Christians, in short.

So perhaps it is this Christian element (mine and the Amharas) that allows me to see them in this light, as does Solzhenitsyn his Russian people, despite the suffering he went through under these same Russians. But, his breed of torturers had thrown out Christianity, which made them the monsters they were. And Solzhenitsyn remembers the originals, and believes that his Russia will return to what it once was.

Aditya B. and ILW do not have this historic and religious ideal to turn to. Theirs is a civilization with no Christianity, with no forgiveness (as we know it), and with no hope of salvation, unless they accept the ever-embracing, and forgiving Christian God. No wonder they are so vicious. They react through existential terror.