What would you do to survive under torture? What would you be willing to do to make the pain stop? In this episode, we discuss the horrors of torture and how to survive it, and how the saints managed to do just that.
00:00:23.840And that all you have to do to make your torture stop or threats against your family or whatever stop is just a little denunciation of your neighbor that's unjust.
00:00:38.660You know, just a pinch of incense to the gods.
00:00:42.200And just injection with an experimental vaccine that might be linked to abortion somehow.
00:01:07.700We were looking down the barrel of a gun.
00:01:10.480Governments around the world were requiring their populations to stay home, to wear masks, to close their businesses.
00:01:16.520And worst of all, forcing churches to close and forbidding the holy sacrifice of the mass and other sacraments.
00:01:24.340But one of the most insidious measures in the time that we just experienced was the vaccine mandates, which were appearing in different countries and actually causing people to lose their jobs for refusal to comply.
00:01:37.560You will refuse the ability to go and visit your relatives, sometimes even see your children if you're in a hospital.
00:01:45.640The rhetoric around these mandates was simply shocking.
00:01:50.300What we saw at the time looked like the beginning of a global communist tyranny in which we were going to be the ones thrown into the gulag.
00:02:25.260So let's see why it's not exaggerated at all to say this.
00:02:31.220Take Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, where I live.
00:02:35.160He had the government freeze the bank accounts of the brave truckers who were protesting against these tyrannical mandates and tried to make their stand about them being Nazis.
00:03:38.440In August of 2021, she locked down the entire country over one single COVID case as part of her, you could say, dystopian zero COVID policy.
00:03:49.960But the things she came out with were, well, at the start of COVID.
00:03:57.500She told New Zealanders that her government was your single source of truth and to disregard anything to the contrary.
00:04:06.520That sounds incredible, but here's it in her own words.
00:04:10.100I want to send a clear message to the New Zealand public.
00:04:13.240We will share with you the most up-to-date information daily.
00:04:17.380You can trust us as a source of that information.
00:04:21.080You can also trust the Director General of Health and the Ministry of Health.
00:04:25.760For that information, do feel free to visit at any time to clarify any rumour you may hear, covid19.govt.nz.
00:04:56.280So long as there's people who are eligible who haven't been vaccinated, we've got work to do.
00:05:00.320You know, I don't think I'll ever be satisfied so long as there's someone who's too, you know, who is eligible and hasn't been.
00:05:06.040And that's why I've said this, there's not going to be an endpoint to this vaccination program once we've, obviously, we're rolling up boosters now.
00:05:13.880So we've got another, you know, wave of people that we need to make sure that we're protecting again.
00:05:18.560So those who were vaccinated six months ago, we really need them to come back or we need to go to them.
00:05:23.860So she said, so long as there are people who are eligible who haven't been vaccinated, we've got work to do.
00:05:29.940She said, I don't think I will ever be satisfied as long as there's somebody who is eligible and hasn't been basically jabbed.
00:05:56.280So you basically said this is going to be like, well, it's almost like you probably don't see it like this, the two different classes of people.
00:06:02.780If you're vaccinated or if you're unvaccinated, you have all these rights.
00:06:10.400Dan Andrews, the premier of the state of Victoria in Australia, was also notorious for introducing crazy rules, arresting pregnant women in the night for breaches of COVID rules, deploying what spiked news called some of the most potent sub-lethal weaponry in the world.
00:06:30.120Against protesters and speaking like a crazed tin pot tyrant.
00:06:35.100He said the same thing as Ardern about a different, about different classes.
00:06:50.620There's Michael Gunner of the Northern Territory in Australia slamming, and with a passion that looks kind of demonic, anyone who disagreed with his vaccine mandates.
00:07:01.980The guy looked like he was about to kill someone.
00:07:34.620And it was in this guy's jurisdiction that the Northern Territory that Australia was setting up quarantine camps, sorry, quarantine hotels, in places like Howard Springs.
00:07:47.660So, when you see people like Gunner and the other ideas just set out about two-tiered societies and so on, what sort of direction do you think these camps would be heading in?
00:07:59.280Like I said before, it looked like the direction was the gulag, the prison camp, the labor camp, the concentration camp, the death camp, with us, with you and me as inmates.
00:08:12.060What an incredibly dark time that was.
00:08:14.780And I don't know if you remember, but there were a number of 54-day, 15-decade rosary crusades around that time.
00:08:24.620And at different times, they seemed to drive back the threats or at least keep them at bay.
00:08:30.400But all of this basically came to an end on February 22nd, 2022, when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.
00:08:38.420And just like that, the focus changed and the talk of the vaccine mandates either disappeared or faded away.
00:09:11.620All the infrastructure is in place or simply suspended and ready for another global crisis.
00:09:18.680In other words, we may soon find ourselves looking down the barrel of mandates and thinking about camps again.
00:09:24.680And that's what brings us to the second and main part of the show.
00:09:28.460Getting ready for the rise of what you might call the regime or whatever you want to call it.
00:09:33.320In this video, I'm going to talk about the regime, by which I'm going to mean whatever tyrannical regime it is that rises in the future and tries to oppress us.
00:09:53.900But as the sun rises in the east, we can know that one regime or another will rise again too.
00:10:01.920And so, you know, even though we're spared right now here, our brothers in the Holy Land, in the Far East, they're suffering.
00:10:09.820They're going through exactly this, which can come upon us at any time.
00:10:14.500We need to realize now that unless Almighty God decides to spare us, we are still on a trajectory toward global to territorial revolution and truly atrocious persecution and suffering.
00:10:29.920So we need to prepare ourselves now to adhere to the good, the true, and the beautiful above all things, even in the face of suffering and death.
00:10:50.420How do we try to open ourselves, dispose ourselves, if you will, to Christ's grace?
00:10:58.240And to answer that question, I want to share with you some articles written by my colleague at LifeSite News, Sean Wright.
00:11:04.700Amazing articles about what I'm going to share with you today.
00:11:08.720Sean Wright's articles encourage us to look at those who lived under tyranny and intense suffering, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the Russian gulag system.
00:11:20.240Sean and I have worked together on this presentation, which is all about internalizing the lessons that these heroes learned in the fire,
00:11:30.140and thus immunize ourselves as far as possible from the coming darkness of the regime.
00:11:35.840And this is a dark topic, but it doesn't have to be gloomy.
00:11:43.060Yeah, we're going to talk about how to get through really horrible things.
00:12:16.720As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was the Babylon regime we're slouching towards.
00:12:22.640So, this is not a counsel to despair or surrender after all.
00:12:27.540It may be that none of this comes to pass in our lifetimes, God willing.
00:12:32.200In many places, the sun is setting, but it's not yet night.
00:12:37.420And even under those currently living under tyrannical regimes, they can still hope for the right things,
00:12:44.000like the return of true liberty, the disruption of the tyrannical machine that is harming them right now.
00:12:50.400So, we also have to keep fighting against these tyrannies to our, you know, well, really to our deaths and try to prevent the monstrous regime from rising again.
00:13:02.280But even if none of this comes to pass in our lifetimes, we're going to see that these lessons, these methods are going to be beneficial for our lives on the spiritual and natural levels, and they can help us draw closer to God.
00:13:54.000Thank you for your support, and may God bless you.
00:13:57.260So, let's talk about the start of the process of preparing for tyranny, getting ready now for being arrested by the regime.
00:14:06.560Solzhenitsyn's famous work, The Gulag Archipelago, is a history of really crazy time, in which people were being arrested, left, right, and center.
00:14:20.020They were tortured, interrogated, sent off to the gulag slave camps.
00:14:26.900Really for nothing, on the basis of the most trivial and flimsy charges possible.
00:14:31.640Often, they'd be arrested on the basis of false charges made by friends or enemies or families or colleagues.
00:14:38.320And in the first volume, Solzhenitsyn spends about 40 pages recounting the methods used by the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, to extract such false confessions and denunciations,
00:14:51.920which were often made in some deluded hope that they would help the accuser himself or his loved ones.
00:14:58.600And that's really what we're going to get into, because they make these false confessions, you know, to save their lives or to save the lives of their loved ones.
00:15:09.480So, after the grueling accounts that he gives in The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn asks this question.
00:17:34.080He says that once we are in prison, we have to put our cozy past firmly behind us.
00:17:39.500We must give up all personal petty hopes that we will save our own skins and return to the outside world.
00:17:45.960So, we all know that hope is a virtue, but that's when it's applied to our eternal reward in heaven.
00:17:53.720It's very misleading to apply this to everyday things like a return to liberty, comfort, or loved ones.
00:18:00.660We must not despair of our salvation or of the defeat of this wicked rebellion against both God and his creatures.
00:18:08.520But once we have fallen into the gears of the machine, let's say, our only hope is to stop this kind of worldly hoping.
00:18:18.040We must decide that we will only do what is right, and that we will do nothing that is wrong,
00:18:25.740and discount all the hopes of escape through some kind of good behavior for the guards, confessions,
00:18:31.860or doing whatever we have to do to, you know, get freedom.
00:18:37.300Our only hope, once we have reached that stage, is to stop hoping in worldly things and to wait,
00:18:44.800all the while trying, with God's grace, to make ourselves into a little piece of unbreakable iron.
00:18:50.960One way to do this is to ask ourselves, why would we even want to be free?
00:18:56.240Why would we want to live in the outside world of freedom if it becomes freedom of tyranny, vaccine mandates, denial of Christ?
00:19:04.160It would be better to have internal spiritual mental freedom in a slave labor camp than to pay the price of internal spiritual mental slavery in the free world of the regime.
00:19:16.740It really seems that Zolzhenitsyn reached a point of realizing that the freedom of the Soviet Union outside the camps,
00:19:25.360which was built on the progressive destruction of the integrity of its citizens, was a greater hell than the gulag itself.
00:19:33.800And really, why would we want to live freely in the monstrous regime which the globalists, technocrats, and servants of Satan are seeking to build?
00:19:44.180Well, Zolzhenitsyn, for example, returned himself, when he was released, to a marriage in which he and his wife no longer knew each other,
00:19:51.980and this marriage actually broke down.
00:19:54.380However, he also lived for many decades more and under reasonably good conditions,
00:20:00.180and, you know, the kind that we've spent in most of our lives, and so he was able to write and inspire us today.
00:20:07.200But in any case, the crucial reason that he managed to return to the world is that, in a certain sense, he had stopped hoping that he would return to the world.
00:20:18.400So, how do we stop hoping without giving in to despair?
00:20:51.720So, there are some great comparisons here with the Japanese samurai text Hagakure.
00:20:58.000That text famously said, the way of the warrior is death.
00:21:02.120So, these samurai warriors held themselves ready to die or sacrifice themselves at any moment, having already considered themselves to be dead,
00:21:10.480and when given the choice to be always ready to choose death over life, to prefer death to life, if given the choice for the sake of their lord.
00:21:21.020Now, you might say that's morbid, but not for us Catholics.
00:21:26.040We have a lord greater than any samurai had.
00:21:30.760And our lord, Jesus Christ, also told us,
00:21:34.340He that will save his life shall lose it, and he that shall lose his life for my sake shall find it.
00:24:56.200Unlike the Russians in the early 20th century, we know how these revolutionaries proceeded.
00:25:02.960We know that the instigators of the regime will not be able to be trusted in any promise they make,
00:25:10.160whether to liberate us or to spare our lives or to spare us physical suffering or to spare our families.
00:25:15.520We must trust in the only thing we can trust in, and that's in God, not in tyrants.
00:25:22.880You can't make plea bargains with devils.
00:25:26.600It is cold, it is hard, it is brutal, but those inside will have to accept that they are now powerless to help those outside and vice versa.
00:25:36.520If, when inside the machine, we can consider our property and our loved ones to have already gone,
00:25:43.240perhaps it will be easier to deal with the temptation to do something stupid to save ourselves or them.
00:25:50.760The paradox is that, in this situation, the only hope of seeing our loved ones again is for us and them to consider each other already dead
00:26:02.220and to refuse any pointless, foolish attempt to deny this paradox.
00:26:07.380But here's a temptation that will come if we don't internalize this attitude.
00:26:12.060There are accounts of prisoners on worthless promises doing grossly immoral things for their jailers or torturers.
00:26:22.020There are even accounts of the spouses of prisoners doing the same, committing even sexual impropriety with officials or prison guards
00:26:31.740on the promise of getting better conditions for their loved ones.