New wine, new wineskins

National Socialist German Workers' Party

The warm embrace of Communism by Gen Z is entirely baffling to those of us in the Boomer Generation. "How can they be so naive?" we ask.

Some of that is because as Boomers we saw movies like The Killing Fields and Sophie's Choice. We saw reenactments of recent events; 1975 for The Killing Fields and 1941(ish) for Sophie's Choice. People were murdered because they wore eye-glasses or because their hands were soft. We saw mothers having to choose which children might live and which were sent to concentration camps.

We have no illusions about what happens when totalitarians consolidate their control over the government. They murder on an industrial scale. They eliminate everybody who is invested in the old regime, much like a male lion kills every male lion in the pride when he takes over. Only his genes will survive.

Even Jesus observed "No one patches an old cloak with a piece of unshrunken cloth, for its fullness pulls away from the cloak and the tear gets worse.

People do not put new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise the skins burst, the wine spills out, and the skins are ruined. Rather, they pour new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.”  -Matt 9:16,17 NAB

 

The Gen Z point to Scandinavian Socialism and claim "It will be like that!"

 

My beef with that argument is that the Scandinavian countries had very strong, national identity and pride as they implemented socialism. Gen Z has been taught to hate the United States and to repudiate our history. They are fully primed to liquidate ties to the past. Many people under 40 are very angry and very envious of "rich people" who are statistically quite likely to also be "old people".

 

The twist in Sophie's Choice is that her family were ardent supporters of the new regime but were liquidated nonetheless. They were perceived as a threat and as "compromised" and were destroyed. They were "snowflakes" and it was incomprehensible to them that they would be killed with no more thought than a camper slapping a mosquito. 

 

It is very unfortunate that a movie like TKF or SC has not been made in the life-time of Gen Z and the Millennials.