Raymond Oliver Dreher Jr. is an American writer and editor. He is a senior editor and blogger at The American Conservative and author of several books, including How Dante Can Save Your Life and The Benedict Option. He has written about religion, politics, film, and culture in National Review and National Review Online and now has published a book about how communist ideology has infiltrated western culture – ‘Live not by Lies’.
Reviewer, Renato Cristin, writes:
‘Communism has two histories: its history as an idea and its history of regimes. Both are centered on a crucial point: the persecution and elimination not only of political opponents but also those who may represent even a vague threat merely by affirming their religious freedom or their freedom of expression in art or literature … communists have always persecuted Christians, millions of them, most of whose names we will never know. The Nazis hated Jews and killed at least six million in a decade. The communists hate Christians and have killed, in a century, tens of millions more.Live Not by Lies confronts us with an alarming scenario. Current Western weakness, both toward communist ideology and toward what Richard Millet called angelic totalitarianism, is the premise for an illiberal and anti-Christian future. That Western civilization is going through a historical phase of crisis has been well documented. No one who lives his faith in public can be unaware that being a Christian in the modern world can mean a slow martyrdom of encroaching pariahdom. It is not precisely the “sunset” of the West theorized by Oswald Spengler; the sun is not all the way below the horizon, at least not yet. But certainly we are living in an era of decadence, a fatal decline if we fail to defeat the most dangerous enemy of the West: communism and all its lies and empty show.’
