With the Olympics taking place in Russia, recently I have been reading a bit about the brutal, oppressive world of Soviet Communism. After a while, the endless stories of gulags, torture, mass killings, mass executions, mass starvation, and the overall random political terror that existed for most people since the inception of the Soviet Union, become rather depressing. I hope to write a longer post on all these things in the near future.

In the meantime, a little bit a of beauty is always nice to elevate the soul. The communist world, even today, is a world mostly devoid of beauty. It is a bleak, stark, hopeless world. Any world which completely denies the existence of the spiritual, or puts the spiritual at complete subservience to the state, always is. I can only thank God that I live in a society where things such as beauty continued to be valued, and I have the freedoms to write about them. Our world is not perfect, but it infinitesimally better than anything the ugly world of communism produced or continues to produce today.