In the first chapters of The Race to Save Our Century, you will read a vivid and at times chilling account of the brutalities inflicted on innocent lives across virtually every continent from 1914 to 2014. In the last 100 years, nearly 60 million preborn human beings have been lost to abortion in the United States alone, over 130 million civilians have been intentionally murdered by national governments worldwide, and countless soldiers have lost their lives in war.
With each terror, you will ask yourself the same question I asked on 9/11: How could such horrible things happen? The book wastes no time in introducing you to the five toxic ideas that shaped the last century, and threaten to shape the next. As you continue, you will discover the roots of the “subhumanist” lies that led people to see each other as nothing more than lab rats, beasts of burden, or animals to be slaughtered to make way for Utopia.
Where did subhumanism come from? “That’s easy,” write Jones and Zmirak:
It came from us; we fathered it. It grew out of Christian failures, and post Christian movements of ‘liberation’ that arose to subsist as parasites on the vast moral capital accumulated over centuries in which the humblest beggar was affirmed as the moral equal of an emperor—until it was at last exhausted.
These toxic ideas are still in the air today, and just as they led to the violence we’ve seen, they also cause the apathy that makes us continue to look the other way. In The Race to Save Our Century, you will learn to fear and hate the lies of subhumanism:
Total War.
Racism and Nationalism.
Utopian Collectivism.
Radical Individualism.
Utilitarian Hedonism.
The authors take you on a thoroughly researched, brutally honest tour of each of these lies—a tour of the house of horror that was the 20th Century. You trudge through gulags, concentration camps, the offices of corrupt politicians, and dark, bloodied “healthcare” clinics. The injustices you will find in these places continue to this day, and just when you can’t bear any more, and feel like shouting “Stop!” the authors introduce you to the “rescuers,” the men and women who stood against the lies, both by refuting them and by disobeying them in active protest.
These heroes embody the authors’ Five Whole Life Principles that promote the peace, freedom, and culture of life that were abandoned during the 20th century:
The innate dignity of every human person, regardless of race, age, or handicap.
The existence of a transcendent moral order, by which we judge the justice of all laws and policies.
The need for a humane economy that embraces freedom in a context of social responsibility.
The crucial importance of decentralized, responsive government that preserves civil society and freedom.
The need for solidarity, for a sense of fellow feeling and common obligation toward each and every member of the human race.
While the beginning of the book is given to the villians – the five subhumanist philosophies – ultimately, the Race to Save our Century is a call for heroic action. As the authors write:
If we live out these principles day to day, let them direct how we do business, how we spend money, and how we vote, we can rebuild our society as a more humane place for our children. If we neglect them, the next hundred years will prove even more horrific than the last. The options are clear. It is time to Choose.
These Whole Life Principles aren’t just another stump speech or social program. They make up the fundamental moral truths that guard human rights and the common good against the massive violations that cost the world countless millions of innocent human lives. In light of that recent history, do we even dare deny these principles?
How many unborn lives could be spared if instead of insisting on Radical Individualism’s “right to choose”, we understood the innate dignity of the child? What will happen if a deeply felt solidarity with our fellow human beings replaced the inhuman tactics of total war, and the battle front is kept away from homes, churches, and schools? Can you imagine a humane economy that helps the poor lift up their heads and make their way upward instead of trapping them in relentless cycles of generational welfare systems? The Race to Save our Century gives the answer. Yes, we can work to correct the course of human events. Yes, we can fight the reign of Subhumanism. And if we don’t fight?
The world has never seen a shortage of injustice, but today it often plays its role in the corners of our eyes. We may not commit crimes ourselves, but neither do we have the courage to face down the criminal or protect the victim. The occasional chill goes through our bones when we hear of wars and rumors of wars, or see the homeless man or the teenage mother, or even the preteen girls who endure slavery while their own government tends to matters that it thinks are more important. We close our eyes, shake our heads, and look the other way. After all, what can we do?
“Even the stories of heroes who risked all they had in the fight for human dignity can seem impossibly out of reach,” the authors write. “We can tell ourselves that we are not made of the same kind of stuff, the fiber that lets a man defy his nation’s government, its ruling elites, its secret police.” After all, we’re “just regular Joes and Janes, and life will not ask us to make this sort of sacrifice. It had better not, because we will fail.” But that, Jones and Zmirak insist, “is a lie. It’s the same kind of lie that subhumanism tells us about each other, about our neighbors and spouses and children, and especially about strangers who look or think or pray just a little bit different.”
CS Lewis once said that “Courage isn’t simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” Perhaps even now, as we soften into complacency in our relatively prosperous and peaceful country, the toxic lies of subhumanism that we like to think receded into the past have only been waiting for our courage to be at its lowest ebb—waiting to conquer every virtue at the ideal testing point.
With vastly improved technologies of war, America now stands in a tense stalemate with its allies and enemies overseas, while the constant violence against innocent human beings, from the infants in America’s healthcare clinics to the preteen girls of Rotherham, England, to the unarmed Christians in Iraq and Syria, go largely unchecked. The sun rises red behind me, casting bars of flame through the window shade onto The Race to Save Our Century. The words of Jason Scott Jones and John Zmirak ring in my head:
We will feel from the depths of our hearts to the highest flights of our imagination a love of the good, a hatred of cruelty and smallness of soul, and a loyalty to each and every member of our family, the human family. We will fight to enshrine the basic principles of decency in our political, economic, and personal lives. We will have courage. We will prevail.
The testing point is now.