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On the perils of leaving one’s basement

On the perils of leaving one’s basement

Last updated on: October 23, 2026 at 2:32 pm by Dan Peterson

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On the perils of leaving one’s basement 2026-10-23T14:32:10-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Berlin, shortly after the end of the Second World War (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

We had a number of guides and assistants in Hungary, Serbia, and Romania. Some of them were local and with us for only part of a day or for a day or two (or, in one case, for three), and some, also from Eastern Europe, were with us for the entire duration of the cruise and the after-cruise tour.

Not one of them had anything positive to say about the years of Communist rule in their respective countries. Sometimes, they were hilariously cynical about the period. But they were quite willing to discuss, seriously, the disappearances and executions, the oppression, the astounding incompetence, the grandiosity, the cults of personality, and corruption that came right out of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. There were many points where I found myself thinking of the 2017 film The Death of Stalin, a portrait of mass-murdering buffoons that, because of its vulgarity, I cannot recommend, but that I found screamingly, devastatingly funny.

In Berlin at the end of World War Two (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

The guides repeatedly called attention to the shoddily-built and very ugly concrete apartment blocks erected by the Communists, with their tiny and poorly-furnished living spaces. It’s sometimes offered in the Communists] defense, of course, that their countries had been devastated in the Second World War and that they urgently needed to create housing for the soldiers who were returning from the war, and so on and so forth. At first glance, that might seem to explain the haste with which such buildings were thrown up, and the striking unattractiveness of socialist architecture in these areas. But Western Europe was also terribly damaged during World War Two — arguably, perhaps, even more so — and the results of its postwar reconstruction were far less drab and inhuman than those to the east. In fact, the contrast between the former Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the former People’s Democratic Republic of Germany (East Germany) offers something of a laboratory test for comparing the two economic systems and their ability to cope with the catastrophe visited upon Germany by the United States, Great Britain, France, Canada, and the Soviet Union in the closing months of the Third Reich. And, in an even more concentrated way, the stark dissimilarity between East Berlin and West Berlin — it’s been several years since I’ve been to Berlin, but the visible differences between the two persisted and were glaringly obvious for a long time, and they may still be patent yet today — is impossible to deny.

In the lower righthand corner of this NASA photograph is South Korea. It looks like an island, but, of course, it’s not. Note the seeming sea that extends beyond the brilliant lights of Seoul. That’s not ocean water. It’s North Korea, the insular, repressive Communist tyranny that’s reduced its people to virtual starvation. Although at least one important anonymous online commentator may not realize it, North Korea still seems to be beyond our missionary reach.

I was amused to see a post earlier today — from somebody who, so far as I can tell, was once an active and believing Latter-day Saint — in which he argues against serving as a missionary, overseas at least, because it’s just too dangerous out there. I’ll paraphrase him, but pretty closely:

With all of the wars and the inflation, etc., he says — and those really are the two specific dangers that he cites — it’s becoming significantly harder these days to return from travel abroad than it once was the world is genuinely getting harder to get back home in with all the wars and inflation, etc. So if, for whatever reason, you really want to preach the Gospel, you should do it virtually, online. That way, you have at least a chance of returning safely. Otherwise, why take the risk?

He specifically mentions Russia, Ukraine, and “the Gulf states” as too dangerous to visit. I assume that, by the latter, he’s referring to the Arab states that border the Persian Gulf — that is, to Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and possibly Iraq — although we don’t typically send missionaries to any of them. But it’s also possible that he has Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida in mind, because all of them have coastal areas on what we non-MAGA types persist in calling the Gulf of Mexico.

He then proceeds to mention Africa, Venezuela, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Greenland, both North and South Korea, and, astoundingly, Canada [!] as places in which it is too dangerous to spend any time.

Wartorn Canada is, of course, notoriously dangerous. And Greenland? Well, it makes Somalia look like something right out of the book of 4 Nephi.

I’ve never been to North Korea, so I can’t speak with any degree of authority about conditions on the Korean Peninsula above the thirty-eighth parallel north. Do we have anybody out there among the readers of this blog who perhaps served in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Pyongyang Mission and who might be able to offer some perspective on this matter? And, while we’re at it, is it true that Kim Jong Un is receiving the missionary lessons? What kind of candles do North Koreans favor for nighttime illumination? And can you share any favorite North Korean recipes for preparing grass dishes?)

These days, he says, foreign missions “quite literally” represent potential death sentences.

With such a view of the world outside, I think that it might be very difficult ever to leave one’s house.

At this point, just as an addendum, I should probably report that we’ve managed to avoid all of the war zones and all of the regions of run-away hyperinflation in England, Switzerland, Hungary, Serbia, and Romania, and, thus far at least, in the Netherlands. There still seem to be at least a few relatively safe places left in the world beyond one’s closet.

A view of Amsterdam canal houses on the Herengracht just after the sunset of a winter evening. Photograph by Anne Dirkse, http://www.annedirkse.com; ://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herengracht,_Amsterdam_in_the_Blue_Hour.jpg

But there are still massive dangers out there, and we shouldn’t be complacent. Consider this atrocity, for example, which has been drawn from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™: “Bishop Budge on the use of tithing funds to save, exalt and bless God’s children: ‘I testify that the use of Church funds is overseen by those whom the Lord has appointed,’ he said in a BYU devotional”

Posted from Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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