‘That Hideous Strength’ - Yvonne Lorenzo

‘That Hideous Strength’ –

Before I became a contributor to LewRockwell.com, I found the site posted excellent articles, essays, and opinion pieces that provided explanations for much that is going on in our world, especially by the powers I’ve referred to in the past as the ruling class, that is to say the individuals who dominate the military-industrial-financial-media-political complex, people who influence so much of our daily lives, whether we like it or not. In addition, I think LewRockwell.com serves as part of what is good and noble in what I refer to as the “electronic Polis,” which means a community of people that can share and connect with one another, a venue where ideas going against the falsehoods and violence of the unthinking masses can be given voice, perhaps even wing, and bring strength and courage to those who would resist harm and doing harm, and most of all, to be aware of and resist evil.

Recently, the potential of imminent military conflict with Iran is in the news. As in my posts discussing the work of Professor Stephen F. Cohen, Washington is in a new Cold War, or perhaps to use a British term, something even more dangerous—a “war of nerves” with Russia, a war with casualties, war using terror tactics as this recent post by Manlio Dinucci details: Rand Corporation: How to Destroy Russia.

And of course there is also the trade war with China. Truthfully, I was unforgivably naïve and optimistic once Trump was elected, hoping he’d keep his promises on ending more wars: I’d never anticipated the Trump administration would be so belligerent to so many countries. Now my primary concern is that because many decades have passed since the last global military conflagration there is the possibility of a new conflict with even more devastating consequences, less to the perpetrators, as usual, and more to the innocents caught up in the conflict.

While I will address below a secular discussion of this issue that might appeal more to those readers of this site who aren’t interested in the Christian perspective of contributors including Lawrence M. Vance, Jack Kerwick and Joseph Sobran, I believe an unfortunate answer to whether there will be more war initiated by Washington’s masters was provided in a recent post Lew Rockwell himself made on Political Theater. It was headlined “Disney’s New Film ’Tolkien’ Erases the Christian Faith,” also adding “And the Western Literary Tradition From the Story of the Author of ‘The Lord of the Rings.’

Reading the article I became aware of a book I’d never read despite my interest in Tolkien’s work, because of commentary in the article by the author Joseph Loconte; the work is entitled A Hobbit, A Wardrobe and a Great War. What to me makes the work both unique scholarship and especially powerful is it explains contrary to the perspective presented in this new film about the young Tolkien, Loconte makes clear Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’s Christianity influenced their understanding of the forces behind the great war in which they fought; and perhaps these forces are only understandable to be very real to the very young and the old who have become wise, and to those who have experienced the horrors of war themselves. I believe the heart of this understanding is explained in this excerpt from Loconte’s book:

The German artist Otto Dix survived combat in Champagne, the Somme, and Russia, but it changed him. “Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: that is what war is,” he wrote. “It is the work of the devil.”

Tolkien and Lewis would essentially agree. Central to their experience was an encounter with the presence of evil: the deep corruption of the human heart that makes it capable of hunting down and destroying millions of lives in a remorseless war of attrition.

A conviction emerged in both these authors, however, that the problem of evil was not explainable only in natural terms. Rather, evil existed as a darkness in the soul of every human being and as a tangible, spiritual force in the world. “The Shadow of that hideous strength,” wrote Scottish poet Sir David Lyndsay, “six miles and more it is of length.” Like the war they knew on the Western Front, the Shadow is a dehumanizing force. It seeks to dominate and destroy anything that resists its will. This is the irrepressible fact behind their stories, the reality that flings the characters into action.

Both Tolkien and Lewis knew that evil is very real, that it is a force both outside and within human beings and that we ignore its existence at our peril. Without the armor of a true Christian faith, without constant connection to the shield of love and power of the Holy Spirit, human beings are vulnerable. Hence while we can and others do try to explain events and anticipate the future using only secular reasoning, those like Tolkien and Lewis who have experienced the true horrors of war understand that there is something far more grave taking place; the battlefield on Earth is secondary to the battlefield within every living human soul. And it is the ones who in the words of author Ray Bradbury who “give their souls away” who are bringing us ever closer to ruin.

Unconsciously, when writing my own fantasy novels, I had very much the same perspective as these two greats. Unfortunately, popular modern iterations of fantasy fiction serve different agendas, as this wonderful essay on the end of the television series Game of Thrones by Tom Luongo makes clear:

“Game of Thrones was a story built on classic archetypal, mytho-poetic storytelling ideas. But with the goal of undercutting them, of taking a more post-modernist approach, to just show chaos without structure and purpose, no ending could ever be satisfying…Heroic storytelling requires heroes to rise to their pivotal moments and, through their actions, create the opportunity for radical change. They are born out of and rise above the chaos of their times to make the hard choices and sacrifices necessary to preserve the world and build the foundation for the next one.”

However, aside from fantasy fiction, as Loconte makes clear in his book, including the participation of churches in supporting war, “The Myth of Progress” and the abandonment of the sense of the sacred, of God, of the nature of the Prince of Peace that preceded the First World War—all are factors that helped create the environment in which previously unimaginable horrors were born. At least there was the reaffirmation of the true Way of Jesus Christ in the all too brief Christmas Truce, which I have written about and also most eloquently on this site by the late William Norman Grigg entitled The Truce of God. Yet if anything, our current world is even more godless than the time before World War I, more focused on technology as the solution to life’s difficulties, and human beings are being taught in America by a constant bombardment of propaganda, especially in movies and books, to view “the other” as enemy, be they in our times Muslim, Iranian or Russian; the demonization of not just Putin but Russians and Iran is unrelenting and China is now being included.

If indeed there is a greater force than the merely human behind triggering war, as Tolkien and Lewis believed, that dark power is still in the world today; certainly those who subscribe to Christian teaching understand. When I was young I thought the concept of demonic forces and “the prince of this world” outlandish mythology. Yet a young person isn’t frequently brought face-to-face with the worst human evil; and one can observe something beyond a mere human soul’s corruption when that evil is at its most violent: it does not have to be in war alone.

I recently wrote an article for LewRockwell.com on the nature of human consciousness that appeared on this site. I do not think it’s a great leap to then see those who do evil as souls connected to a spiritual “darknet” and we cannot ignore the fact of the ruling class’s love of occult symbols and events as discussed in these articles (I advise caution due to disturbing images) on the Economist, UNICEF’s bizarre masqarade and most recently end of April “human sacrifice” which discusses the Notre Dame fire. Excerpted from the article is the following observation by the author:

Today, the ancient practice of blood sacrifices still exists. However, in this age of mass media, the occult elite partakes in mega-rituals made to be witnessed by the entire world. Why? For increased magical potency.

“The human sacrifice required during many of these occult dates needs to contain the following elements, each one of which is exaggerated to the highest possible degree:

1. Trauma, stress, and mental anguish, sheer terror

2. The final act in the drama should be destruction by a fire; preferably a conflagration.

3. People must die as human sacrifices, especially children, since The Darkness views younger human sacrifice as most desirable”

– Ibid.

What greater corrupt occult event to trigger the above responses, then, than an unjust war of aggression resulting in mass murder? I cannot, not being an investigative journalist, say that members of the ruling class use occult images and actions because of actual belief and worship of the occult and evil, or as a psychological instrument of terror. The imagery from the articles I cited is very anti-Christ. Yet as Monsignor Charles Pope wrote on this site in Sobran Examines Hatred of Christ: Disbelievers can be His best witnesses:

To every secularist and atheist, I direct these questions: Why do you protest Christ and His Church so much? Why do you exaggerate our power? If we really are irrelevant, if our “day is over” and we are laughably outdated, then why the fear, anger, and protest? Do our “myths” scare you? If they are mere myths, then why fear them? Why don’t you direct the same anger toward Buddha or Muhammad? Is it that still, small voice in your conscience?

What is it? Why your sleepless wrath?

For that reason, although articles appear that are hopeful that war, which in the case of America against Iran would mean a bombing campaign and not the sending of millions of ground troops to invade, I believe conflict between the two nations is only a brief matter of time. Retired British diplomat Alistair Crooke wrote most recently on the website Strategic Culture an article entitled Bolton’s Trap: Iran Cast as a Nuclear Threat, Diverting us from his Occulted Project. I found this excerpt chilling:

The project to realise Greater Israel – resonating with metaphysical destiny, and redolent of special status, as when “all the nations” will pay tribute “to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the god of Jacob,” when “the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem” – is music to Christian Zionist ears, since they believe this precisely is what will advance the return of their Messiah and bring Rapture closer.

Of course, any such project – implicit or explicit – could be expected to be opposed by a civilisation-state such as Iran, with its own very powerful, but contrasting metaphysics. For Greater Israel to be actualised, Iranian opposition to the Israeli ‘divine election’ plan must be curbed.

Bolton is no Evangelical, but is closely allied with the Israeli Right. Ben Caspit, a leading Israeli commentator, expands:

“The US has no intention of invading Iran,” [my] Israeli source clarified, “but the Iranians are trying to signal to the Americans that [any escalation] … could cause serious damage to American interests and at a steeper cost than anything Saddam Hussein’s regime was able to achieve…”

Alistaire Crooke is also featured in this interview with Peter Lavelle, The End of the Unipolar moment, in which he states that the “elites” have two options: the collapse of their failing bubble making financial system or war.

Yet we must not lose hope; most of all we must not “be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

And we have to remember God’s abundant blessings in our daily lives.

Regarding the price of war and the costs even to Americans who wage it, this Memorial Day I had an encounter with an indirect victim. My brother took a different route and found an estate sale taking place at a large rambling old house only a few miles from my home, a house years ago had been owned by a physician. To his surprise, the current owner was a classmate from a private school that we attended, although I was four years ahead of them both. After he bought a piece, he picked me up to meet her and of course attending the same school we had in common teachers and students that we discussed. She had been taking care of her elderly mother who died late last year after a long illness. We shared memories of classmates who had passed.

Then I learned her ex-husband was in the Special Forces; I didn’t learn if he is still alive but she described as a good, loving and kind man. Yet she also discussed the toll of being a soldier’s wife on herself and her children, most of all for the children who were so often separated from their father, who could be called up without explanation and gone for an extended period of time, a time of not knowing.

I was surprised to learn that when my brother mentioned the true reasons of war and I discussed Butler’s “War is a Racket,” and that the wars are not fought for the good of the nation but for corrupt interests, including the Military-Industrial complex, other nations—the usual suspect—she heartily agreed. I suspect her husband knew that as well. She is a warm and kind person; I made a new friend.

On the way home a solitary blue heron flew, clearly visible only a few feet overhead through the sunroof of my brother’s car, a beautiful bird very much like a crane. I have written about cranes, wars, and the souls of the dead before here.

To me, it felt like a benediction.

The post ‘That Hideous Strength’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

– June 3, 2019 at 01:53AM