Denver Catholic

18 NOVEMBER 11-24, 2017 | DENVER CATHOLIC Perspectives Murderers' Row, Soviet-style O ne hundred years ago, on November 7, 1917, Lenin and his Bolshevik Party¹ expropri- ated the chaotic Russian people's rev- olution that had begun eight months earlier, setting in motion moderni- ty's fi rst experiment in totali- tarianism. The ensu- ing blood- bath was unprecedented, not only in itself but in the vast bloodletting it inspired in wannabe-Lenins over the next six decades. And still the Leninist dream lives on: in a hellhole like North Korea; in the island prison, Cuba; in what ought to be one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, Venezuela. Lenin and his disciples created more martyrs in the twentieth century than Caligula, Nero, and Diocletian could have imagined. And yet, somehow, communist bloodbaths have never drawn the continuous, unambiguous, and deserved condemnation visited upon other tyrannies. The horrors Lenin let loose have rarely been as powerfully captured as in Anne Applebaum's new book, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine. In her earlier, Pulitzer Prize-winning study, Gulag, Applebaum demon- strated that the slave-labor camps of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "archipel- ago" were not incidental to the Soviet enterprise, but an integral part of it, economically and politically. Now, Anne Applebaum makes unmistak- ably clear that the Holodomor, the terror famine in Ukraine that took some four million lives in 1932-33, was artifi cially created and ruthlessly enforced by Lenin's heir, Stalin, to break Ukraine's national spirit while providing the faltering Soviet econ- omy with hard currency from agricul- tural exports. Or to put it more simply: Stalin starved some four million men, women, and children to death for ideological and political purposes. That mass murder could take place on this scale was due to the fact that the fires of utopian, revolutionary conviction incinerated many consciences. Here, for example, is the chilling, post-Holodomor testimony of one communist activist who helped implement the catastrophic destruction of peasant agriculture in Ukraine and its replacement by ideologically-correct collective farms: "I firmly believed that the end justified the means. Our great goal was the triumph of communism, and for the sake of the goal everything was permissible – to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to 'intellectual squeamishness' and 'stupid liberalism'."¹ In the moral universe of Bolshevism, two plus two could indeed equal five – or seven, or three, or whatever the Revolution required. And so, like slavery, genocide was baked into the Soviet system. Yet as Ukrainians by the thousands slowly starved to death, their bodies consuming themselves to the point where emaciated people simply fell, dead, on the streets or along the roadside, "Soviet exporters," Anne Applebaum reports, "continued to ship [out of the country] eggs, poul- try, apples, nuts, honey, jam, canned fi sh, canned vegetables, and canned meat…that could have helped to feed Ukraine." But then doing so would have meant recognizing the human- ity of those whom Stalin dismissed as "former people," the members of "moribund classes." The starvation of millions was not, Applebaum con- cludes, an indication that Stalin's policy had failed; rather, "it was a sign of success." The Revolution defeated some of its most-feared enemies, one by one, through the hour-by-hour agony of state-imposed and state-en- forced starvation. As repellant as Stalin's Leninist morality of revolution was, the tacit acquiescence in this mass, artificial famine by western reporters who knew what was afoot in Ukraine but wrote nothing about it, so as not to jeopardize their Kremlin sources and their cushy lifestyles in Moscow, was equally revolting. Here, the chief villain remains the odious Walter Duranty of the New York Times, a principle agent of the cover-up of the Holodomor that continued well into the 1960s – and that is being revived in Putin's Russia today, as part of its propaganda war against a now-inde- pendent Ukraine. Duranty's morals are neatly summed up in one of his 1935 dispatches: "It may be objected that the vivisection of living animals is a sad and dreadful thing, and it is true that the lot of [those] who have opposed the Soviet experiment is not a happy one," but "in both cases, the su¡ ering infl icted is done with a noble purpose." Perhaps the Times, to mark the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolu- tion, could renounce Walter Duran- ty's Pulitzer Prize, in a small gesture of repentance. The least religious generation in U.S. history J ean Twenge's book¹iGen¹is one of the most fascinating—and depressing—texts I've read in the past decade. A professor of psychology at San Diego State Uni- versity, Dr. Twenge has been, for years, studying trends among young Ameri- cans, and her most recent book focuses on the generation born between 1995 and 2012. Since this is the fi rst cohort of young people who have never known a world without iPads and iPhones, and since these devices have remarkably shaped their consciousness and behavior, Twenge naturally enough has dubbed them the "iGen." One of her many eye-opening fi nd- ings is that iGen'ers are growing up much more slowly than their prede- cessors. A baby-boomer typically got his driver's license on his sixteenth birthday (I did); but an iGen'er is far more willing to postpone that rite of passage, waiting until her eighteenth or nineteenth year. Whereas previous generations were eager to get out of the house and fi nd their own way, iGen'ers seem to like to stay at home with their parents and have a certain aversion to "adulting."¹And Twenge argues that smartphones have unde- niably turned this new generation in on itself. A remarkable number of iGen'ers would rather text their friends than go out with them and would rather watch videos at home than go to a theater with others. One of the upshots of this screen-induced introversion is a lack of social skills and another is depression.¹ Now there are many more insights that Dr. Twenge shares, but I was particularly interested, for obvious reasons, in her chapter on religious attitudes and behaviors among iGen'ers. In line with many other researchers, Twenge shows that the objective statistics in this area are alarming. As recently as the 1980s, 90% of high school seniors identifi ed with a religious group. Among iGen'ers, the fi gures are now around 65% and falling. And reli- gious practice is even more atten- uated: only 28% of twelfth graders attended services in 2015, whereas the number was 40% in 1976. For decades, sociologists of religion have been arguing that, though explicit aª liation with religious institutions was on the decline, especially among the young, most people remained "spiritual,"¹that is to say, convinced of certain fundamental religious beliefs. I remember many conversations with my friend Fr. Andrew Greeley along these lines.¹ But Twenge indicates that this is no longer true. Whereas even twenty years ago, the overwhelming number of Americans, including youngsters, believed in God, now fully one third of 18 to 24 year olds say that they don't believe. As late as 2004, 84% of young adults said that they regularly prayed; by 2016, fully one fourth of that same age cohort said that they never pray. We fi nd a similar decline in regard to acceptance of the Bible as the Word of God: one fourth of iGen'ers say that the Scriptures are a compilation of "ancient fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men."¹Her dispiriting conclusion: "The waning of private religious BISHOP ROBERT BARRON Guest Column Bishop Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles. He is the creator of the award winning documentary series "Catholicism." The Catholic Di§ erence George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. GEORGE WEIGEL

• Cover