College Catholic: Triumph of the Culture of Death, Part II

Fidei Defensor at College Catholic follows up on his outstanding post, "Triumph of the Culture of Death", which I blogged about here, with the even better second part of the series, in which he discusses the origins of the Culture of Death. Here's an excerpt:

THE POLITICS OF DEATH
Still I do not dub this period (roughly from the Boxer Rebellion to the Vietnam War) the “Culture of Death.” Rather this was the pinnacle of the “Politics of Death” (obviously culture and politics have much overlap but for the sake of brevity I will allow these to stand as markedly different.) The Politics of Death, the politics of Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and all the rest went a long way in cheapening the worth of life, paving the way for what was to come. Still people were just people, German, Chinese, Russian, etc, and the vast majority of them still believed in a culture of life, heck what greater motivation does a fighting man have then protecting the weak, especially his family, from the enemy?

The greatest weakness of the Politics of Death was that no matter how much compulsion, conscription, brainwashing, etc, that is forced onto the population, rarely can the innate good in people be completely extinguished. As brutal as the Politics of Death were, they weren’t really working well for Satan. Sure the body counts were high and countless lives were shattered, but as Our Lord says, “fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in Hell.”

Imagine the anger the Devil felt each time a frightened young soldier in a trench or foxhole, faced with his own mortality, turned to God in his moment of peril, imagine the defeat Lucifer suffered every time dying soldiers received the sacraments from courageous Chaplains, even as the bullets whistled around them, or alone and scared, only God knowing what is in their hearts, the dying in their own way made an act of contrition and died in a state of grace. Furthermore, imagine Satan’s rage when persecution of believers only sharpened their resolve, making them steadfast and increasingly devout.

Dragging the likes of Hitler and Mao into Hell was laughably easy for Satan, but for all the evil ones that went down, there were plenty being saved in the nets and lifelines that Peter, his fellow fisherman, and their successors and followers in the form of everyone from Pope’s to peasants, was fervently casting into the blood stained water from atop the impenetrable Rock on which Christ established them.

Killing bodies is easy; killing the soul is a real battle. Winning the governments in the form of winning nut-case dictators for evil was not as proficient as it may have seemed.

My Comments:
I'm going to start sounding like a Marine if I keep saying "Outstanding!".