Coram Deo movie watching

My husband and I watched the movie GOOD today (with Viggo Mortensen) and it turned out to be a pretty GOOD movie. Very unsettling and thought-provoking, just the way I like it. In general, I have been thinking, reading, watching a lot lately on the history of Nazism (the book about Bonhoeffer and The Soviet Story movie kept me occupied for a while). Probably because I never studied "real history" in a Soviet school, nor had I the Christian worldview at the time to place historical events into the big CORAM DEO picture of life or understand what lessons should be learned from the past. That's why as a student I always hated history and found it incredibly boring. Now I am enjoying studying it in a new way, looking at it with the new eyes and the new mind graciously given to me by the Great History Maker. In the movie the main character who is a writer and a university professor is being slowly but steadily seduced and sucked up by the emerging Nazi regime, without being aware of it for several years. At the beginning he seems to be a man of well-defined convictions and ideas, though untested. In the course of the movie he goes through a series of tests/seductions where his officially professed convictions prove non-functional. He is drifting, and in the course of his drifting he leaves his terminally sick wife and two kids for a young woman who is fascinated with the new regime, he unmaliciously betrays his best friend, who happened to be a Jew and ended up disappearing in the abyss of a concentration camp, he serves the new regime with his literary gift helping portray to the masses euthanasia of the weak and handicapped as a highly humane and ethical thing. He drifts and drifts and even enjoys it at first, until he finds out that his new wife, "the embodiment of Arian motherhood", pregnant with a child "for Fuhrer", was the one who turned his Jewish friend in. At the end of the movie the guy stands in the center of the concentration camp where he has come using his gestapo privileges in hope of finding his Jewish friend and watches in complete horror how people are being treated like cattle, tortured and killed. It's his moment of awakening, his moment of looking straight in the ugly face of the gods he has been serving.
I feel greatly for the main character and for his moral drama. Mainly because I see how susceptible he turns out to be to the great force of the fear of men (the ancient biblical concept), how alive to flattery, lust and just plain desire to be comfortable and enjoy life free of suffering. All these human weaknesses and ills were skillfully played upon by the Nazis, helping them acquire great numbers of obedient, utterly scared and enslaved followers. I see myself in him, in his weak, depraved human nature that walks and trembles before men rather than God. Fear of men/people-pleasing has been a big theme of my life, in big part because I grew up in a communist country where fear of men has been a big cultural component and driving force for generations. Humanly speaking, when I think about the possibility of history repeating itself and some new "hideous strength" taking control of the world, and I try to picture myself looking in the face of some neo-fascism demanding my full worship, I tremble in utter weakness and feel that moral compromise would be very easy for me, especially if the threat to my children is present or physical suffering is involved. On the other hand, my only hope is that I have Christ and He has me, and He is the only One who can strengthen the spineless worm like me to stand up for His truth in the face of an ugly, insolent and seemingly omnipotent evil. Only He can help me see the invisible reality with my spiritual eyes when my physical eyes have to witness the most excruciating scenes of human suffering and humiliation, even of the most loved ones. So, I am sobered, unsettled, questioning myself, praying that He may keep me from the sweet seduction of moral compromise, from self-deception, from drifting, and that THIS day may prepare me for THAT day, so that I am able by His power, to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand (Eph. 6:13). My prayer is also for this country, that through "the good men doing nothing" and letting their rights and freedoms quietly taken away and their base appetites being played upon the gate for unprecedented evil may not open wide, and that the awakening may not come too late.