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The Czech Canary

He grew up under communism. He's not impressed with the naiveté of American liberals
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A liberal reader, commenting on another of my posts:

Rod is good writer with lots of interesting and thoughtful articles on culture and especially religion. I mostly skip over the look what those totalitarian college liberals are up to today articles as they tend not to have new thoughts and just seem like attempts to whip up fear.

A reader who grew up under Czech communism, but who now lives in the US:

Hi Rod,

A thought about comments like this one:

“Creating an equivalence between a poster in an American high school promoting understanding, with imagery that can be misunderstood, and Hungarian terrorism, is a huge disrespect to Hungarian terrorism. There is no equivalence”

and many other similar ones …

What your readers do not understand is that horrors of communism did not start with people planning to murder and torture. They started with “posters in … schools promoting understanding, justice, equality”, with starry-eyed people wanting to address societal ills. It was this social reengineering that eventually and inevitably led to murder and torture.

Keep your eyes wide open. People like the Czech reader are canaries in the coal mine.

On the other hand, I keep having a slightly unnerving experience here, both in Hungary and the Czech Republic. People cannot understand the insanity coming from America, the UK, and the EU on LGBT and gender theory. It is literally incomprehensible to them. Just this morning I was talking to a seminary professor of moral theology who said that his thesis on alternative sexualities was laughed at; his colleagues could not believe that anyone would take this stuff seriously. This professor is no advocate for alternative sexualities, but he had lived and taught in the West, and he knows they are going to have to be dealing with this stuff here sooner or later.

I keep telling the people I talk to about this that they should not simply laugh this stuff off as incomprehensible. Several agreed with me that 40 years of communism served as a vaccination against susceptibility to ideological extremism, and that this might be why even atheists (most Czechs are atheists) find the gender theory types to be crackpots. But then, if you had told a lot of Americans in 1998 what would be mainstream in our country on this front in 2018, they would have laughed like the Czechs and the Hungarians laughed. But now look.

UPDATE: Reader Ragnar writes:

I can specifically remember the preacher at the church I attended in the mid 90s warning us about all this new fangled sex stuff that the culture was going to push on us. He had contacts at churches and seminaries in the Northeast and California and was convinced it would hit us soon. He focused on gay marriage and at the time, THAT seemed unbelievable to us. We were not sheltered country bumpkins, this was a city of half a million people. But even in the late 90s, it seemed pointless and crazy. I don’t think any of us took him seriously.

At another church in a smaller city a few years later, I remember a professor who had left a college in a more progressive part of the country to come to ours and he described political correctness at his former place of employment like Maoism. He detailed required employee training where a facilitator would bring faculty to tears in intense small group settings, forcing them to admit their racism, sexism, etc. It was a Struggle Session. He very solemnly said it would eventually follow him to our college but that he hoped to retire by then.

He almost made it! I remember completely dismissing both of these men as chicken littles, but I have seen it happen. They were right. So I no longer laugh at people trying to warn us of what is happening, I laugh at those who deny it.

Reader Mrs. DK writes:

Exactly. I know that we would have laughed at gender ideology when I was in college in the 1980s. As an older friend of mine said recently — The thing about gender theory is that it’s so stupid! Yet my own daughter is now injecting testosterone with the help of her university health center.

I was at an Orthodox monastery in rural Pennsylvania this past weekend, and one of the nuns told me that they have had several parents tell them that their young kids are claiming to be the opposite gender, because of something they heard at school or on the internet.

The rapid onset gender dysphoria support group which I’m in was founded this past January and has as doubled in size already. I have never seen such desperate parents. If people are not alarmed about this — well, they should be.

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