May 12, 2021 - Epoch Times
04:22
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| The thread in the title of the book is essentially the thread I'm hoping to use to lasso my son and tie him back to a deeper tradition represented by the sacrifice of Kolbe. | |
| Kolbe, just for viewers who haven't, I know you know this story because you're a Pole, but he was a Franciscan friar who was rounded up by the Nazis during World War II. He lived a remarkable life before all of this. | |
| But his claim to fame is this moment in which he's rounded up, imprisoned in Auschwitz, someone from his prison block escapes, and the usual practice of the camp commandant was that if for every one person who would escape, he would choose ten men randomly to die from that prison block. | |
| St. | |
| Maximilian Kolbe was not among the ten chosen, but when he heard another of the condemned men cry out, my wife, my children, he was a married man, he stepped forward from the line and said, I'll take his place. | |
| And stepped into this kind of horrible punishment bunker where you just die of starvation. | |
| That to me, when I read the story, I was 31 years old and on the cusp of becoming a Christian when I heard that story. | |
| When I heard that, I just thought, it floored me. | |
| It wasn't the kind of story where you think, well, okay, that's very moving, nice, put it away. | |
| I had to do something with it, so I named my son after him. | |
| But more than that, I had to think, what was it about what he did and what made that choice possible? | |
| Because when you're in Auschwitz, I mean, I can't imagine, and none of us can directly, but when you're in a situation like that, your range of choices is very narrow. | |
| You don't get to choose what you eat, how you dress. | |
| That's all predetermined for you by this evil system. | |
| And so if freedom just means having the widest range of just choices in this kind of sense, and fulfilling your own desire for well-being, then you can't be free in a situation like that. | |
| But if freedom means overcoming yourself and achieving a degree of spiritual mastery, Then St. | |
| Maximilian Kolbe at that moment was the freest man in Europe, even though he was in a concentration camp. | |
| And those two accounts of freedom differ. | |
| One of them, which is kind of the relatively modern account, the one that I worry will shape my son, says, just do as you please. | |
| Freedom means to just be unregulated and chase after your own material well-being. | |
| But there's this older and deeper account of freedom that says freedom is overcoming yourself, maybe even overcoming yourself unto death. | |
| And it's that account of freedom that I fear we're about to lose. | |
| Plenty of people make sacrifices like that. | |
| You know, nurses and doctors during the COVID pandemic. | |
| Mothers and fathers all around the world. | |
| But our ideology, the ideology that governs the modern West, unfortunately, I argue, makes an action like Saint Maximilian Kolbe's become insensible. | |
| Why would you do that? | |
| Just look out for number one and that's it. | |
| That's freedom. | |
| So you've just watched a clip from an American Thought Leader's interview, and as you probably know, I pour my heart and soul into these. | |
| YouTube has been censoring some entirely mainstream videos lately, including things like Florida Governor DeSantis' Coronavirus Roundtable. | |
| We've even had some of our own videos removed from YouTube for no clear reason whatsoever. | |
| And frankly, I don't find this to be appropriate. | |
| I don't find this to be acceptable. | |
| I don't want to be sitting around thinking what YouTube may or may not feel like they want to censor. | |
| And beyond that, even, YouTube has demonetized us for the past two months. | |
| Ostensibly, we're working to resolve the issue, but our hopes are kind of fading when it comes to this. | |
| So what is our response to this? | |
| Well, we've started our own platform, Epoch TV. Now, Epoch TV is the premium Epoch Times video platform. | |
| It's got American Thought Leaders, but it also has The Larry Elder Show and Crossroads with Joshua Phillip and a number of other programs. | |
| So you can get Epoch TV for this low introductory rate of $4.99 a month. | |
| And in so doing, you're actually supporting the Epoch Times as an organization. | |
| You're supporting uncensored news. | |
| You're supporting groundbreaking investigative reporting. | |
| And you're supporting these deep dive interviews that I love doing so much. |
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