Those of us who grew up during the Cold War and were taught “how the world really works” by the public schools were in for several surprises when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. Instead of being one giant country full of vodka-swilling white guys, the Soviet Union had 15 separate, diverse nations hiding inside it all along. Where did those come from?!
And when the Union was dissolved, and those 15 nations declared their
independence from one another, none of them liked each other much. The obvious parallel to the arguments of our current “Let’s have open borders because we’re all alike and yet diverse” lunatics makes this worth studying.
Nazi-killing soldier and intellectual Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was jailed and sent to the gulags by the Soviet government for politically-incorrect thoughts that he expressed in private correspondence to a friend. Decades later he earned a Nobel prize for literature, writing about his time in the work camps.
As Solzhenitsyn beautifully expressed it, “The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all peoples were made alike, with one character, one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, they are its generalized personalities: the smallest of them has its own particular colors and embodies a particular facet of God’s design.”
Solzhenitsyn got to see a lot of open-borders diversity, up close and personal, in the gulags as he was busy trying to not starve or freeze to death. Rather than a bunch of vodka-swilling fellow white guys, the gulags were filled with Turkmen, Armenians, Georgians, Kyrgyzstanis, Russians, Ukrainians and so on. In a glass-half-full fashion, Solzhenitsyn noted that there wasn’t any glue holding the “Soviet” experiment together.
For those of us who were taught that Russia was one nation filled with vodka-swilling white guys, we could never have imagined that a country like Turkmenistan existed. If we had ever heard it mentioned during the Cold War, we were likely to have mistaken it for Turkey.
Turkmenistan is a repressive Islamic country where Christianity is completely banned and criminalized. Religious and press freedoms are nonexistent there. The Islamic nation of Eritrea in Africa is the only country on earth that is considered more repressive than Turkmenistan. Barack and Michelle loved it when they visited Turkmenistan during his first term in the White House.
Yet following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Turkmen are happy. Their economy is 500% larger than it ever was under Soviet rule and they get to be their own people with their own language, customs and heritage.
That’s what nations and borders are for. Turkmenistan’s neighbors are happy with this arrangement because the Turkmen can now stay on their side of the border and vice versa.
Unlike the open-borders crowd at the now-bankrupt “Weekly Standard” and the Hillary Clintons and Barack Obamas of the world, Solzhenitsyn understood that individual nations built around an “idea” are not nations at all. People and families who are related to one another by blood are the stuff that creates and holds nations together.
Just as the Soviet Union believed it could jam Turkmen and Albanians together and pretend they were all loyal to “Mother Russia,” our current globalists believe they can take the population of Honduras and stuff them all in Cleveland, and pretend we are all “Americans” who will love each other. It won’t work now any more than it worked for Lenin and Stalin.
To look at it like Solzhenitsyn, Honduras has an individual beauty as a nation and many fine qualities, despite its dysfunctional government. Cleveland is nice, too. But jamming them together and pretending they are “one nation” (or Guatemala and America, Mexico and America, Peru and America, etc., etc.) will only end in disaster and starvation. This has held true from the time of the Egyptian Pharaohs through the Soviet Union, but we’re supposed to believe it will be different this time.
Amanda Gill, a British woman vacationing in Mexico this month, sadly became ill from complications due to diabetes and died in the hospital. Her intact remains were sent to the police station in Mexico City before being transported back home to Great Britain. Her family was horrified to discover upon its arrival that her body had been desecrated. Her eyes had been cut out, her skull cracked open and her brain removed, and her chest cavity was pried apart, so her heart and other internal organs could be stolen. Organ thieves working with the Mexican police had chopped her up for spare parts.
Throwing open our borders to Mexico and Central America would destroy the beauty of all of the individual nations involved. It also invites the horror of the nations, which America has largely avoided thus far, to come inside and camp out among us. God Himself has created the “bounds of our habitation” (Acts 17:26), and we would do well to observe those bounds (borders).
