I just finished watching Alfred Hitchcock's humorous thriller "The Lady Vanishes."Set in the late 1930s, the plot features Mrs. Froy, a spry little old British lady spy who tries to get her secret message back to the Foreign Office.
She enlists the assistance of two young, engaging countrymen, Iris and Gilbert, as they travel by train from the remote Balkan enclave of Bandrika. On the train, Mrs. Froy vanishes.
Could mankind also simply vanish?
The recession is bad, but we're okay…right?
Well, maybe! But consider these similarities between the 1930s and today.
They had the Great Depression. We have a worldwide recession.
Many hope it won't match the Depression in severity. Recently the government reports our economy is "turning around."
Maybe! Maybe not! The crash of Great Depression launched in the fall of 1928. The full weight of the stock market crisis didn't hit until 1932.
Maybe we shouldn't count our eggs just yet!
Furthermore, the Great Depression led to other serious international problems.
Forms of government now in flux
During the Depression the "two great democracies"—as Sir Winston Churchill dubbed Britain and America—suffered challenging political attacks from within. Unwisely, some in the working class were attracted to Joseph Stalin's pie crust rhetoric about Soviet communism. "Pie crust" because that form of government actively employed the principle that promises are like pie crusts, made to be broken.
Next, Adolf Hitler launched his fascist dictatorship in 1933. As that decade aged, a predictably gullible element of the Anglo-Saxon intelligentsia hailed Der Führer as a sort of governmental messiah.
Then in 1937, the same year that Hitchcock's film was made, these two frighteningly similar, yet politically opposing forms of government faced off—literally—across the parkway in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris at the International Exposition. The Soviet and the Nazi pavilions were designed for each to trumpet the vast superiority of their respective governmental systems, Communism and National Socialism.
Political steadiness—or instability?
You'd have to live in a sound-proof room to not hear the aggressive liberal versus conservative political debate during this past year in the United States (and elsewhere)! In the United States these two factions are faced off over the future form and shape of the American government and society.
This heated debate threatens to abdicate the stability of the decades old mushroom-cloud dynamic in world politics.
Couple this with the constantly increasing, running battle of America and Europe against the brazen guerilla forces of radical Islam. The dust of the Twin Towers falling in New York City on September 11 eight years ago still swirls in the minds of all involved in this terrorist-centered conflict.
With economic, political and military instability on a worldwide scale—the end of the 21st century's first decade and the 1930s appear to be eerily similar!
The Great Depression's baby
What did the "bad economy" give birth to at the end of the 1930s?
The depressing answer: World War II, with casualty estimates as high as 70 million men, women and children.
Could World War II have been any worse? Oh yes, it could have been fought with thermal nuclear and chemical-biological weapons from start to finish!
Thankfully, nobody knew how to do that in the 1930s.
Fat cities
What if our "bad economy" ignites the modern fireworks of another world war?
Our world is considerably more urbanized than the largely rural 1930s. Our cities are much fatter targets. So casualty rates from nuclear or bio-chemical warfare in the 21st century would be enormous. They would far surpass the 70 million who vanished by the time the Nagasaki fallout exacted its toll in 1945.
These depressing possibilities are at stake in today's national and international problems!
Has hope vanished?
Can the U.S., European and other governments find a way to exit our modern economic, political and military crises peacefully? How well did they do in the past?
We need a happy parallel with Hitchcock's spritely spy in "The Vanishing Lady." She was rescued and reappeared at the British Foreign Office with her secret message.
Mercifully, we have somebody powerful who can prevent mankind from vanishing. Jesus Christ has forecast His own intervention in humanity's mess: "And except those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect's sake those days will be shortened" (Matthew 24:22).
Mankind will suffer, but not vanish.
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