The Communist Party cannot be neutral toward religion. It stands for science, and all religion is opposed to science. ~ Joseph Stalin

 The religions are all alike, no matter what they call themselves. They have no future. ~ Adolf Hitler

Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. ~ Mao Zedong

The philosopher George Santayana famously said: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Given the resurgence of socialism in our time, this saying for the most part seems to have been forgotten, or never learned, by the young socialists of today; who it may be said have been willfully deprived by their tutors of certain facts they need to know that would lead them to the truth about how evil atheistic socialism really is. Now there is no better evidence of a pattern of radical socialism adopted and fully wrecking the peace of the world than we find in the philosophy and careers of socialism’s three most infamous champions: Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong.

Joseph Stalin (1878-1953)

Stalin’s early education and the influence of a kindly priest led him to study for the priesthood, but he soon rebelled, converted to atheistic Marxism, and was expelled from his seminary. After the Tsar was assassinated, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in its infancy, Stalin initiated several campaigns over the next few decades to ridicule and suppress religion, close churches, synagogues  and mosques, and imprison or execute Orthodox priests. By 1926 there were no Catholic bishops left in the Soviet Union. During the 1920s and 30s the number of Orthodox churches declined from nearly 30,000 to about 500. Educators were ordered to teach the young that religion is neurotic and anti-scientific. By the 1930s Stalin accelerated the persecution and during the Great Purge alone (1936-38) roughly 106,000 Orthodox clergy were executed. Well documented testimony by Bella Dodd and others indicates that during Stalin’s dictatorship the Communist Party planted young atheistic socialists in Catholic seminaries around the world for the purpose of becoming priests who would rise through the clerical ranks and corrupt the Church of Rome from within.

According to historian Norman Naimark, Stalin managed the execution of a million citizens throughout the 1930s, with millions of others subjected to imprisonment, famine, and forced labor. That a dictator would have such power to destroy was only possible if there was a generally accepted notion forced upon Russians that such destruction was good, not evil. Socialism produces dictators as a shortcut to creating heaven on earth, while at the same time ignoring the fact that the production of a living hell is what they are really after. The goal of creating a new and international world order is only possible by believing that the destruction of the old order must first be accomplished. Such a grand scheme requires murder on a grand scale, and it requires the murder of religion in particular since it is religion that forbids all murder.

During World War II the persecution of religion lessened somewhat due to Stalin’s need to organize the support of all Russian citizens during the Nazi invasion of Russia. However, after the war, hostilities resumed on a large scale. When Pope Pius XII in 1949 prohibited Catholic collaboration with Communists, the Soviet Union’s Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults labeled the pope a “warmonger.” Retaliation did not stop there. A plot was hatched to discredit Pius XII by spreading propaganda that he was a Nazi collaborator, which plot gained considerable steam after the death of the pope. These are just a few facts assembled to show the extent to which socialism began to reveal, at its inception, a malevolence toward religion that has not ceased to this day in certain countries.

Adolf Hitler (1899-1945)

Those who have studied the life and career of Hitler will likely agree that it is difficult to find a more hateful socialist dictator in all of history. The roots of his hatred are not difficult to find. His father was an angry man with great skepticism toward religion. Hitler was rebellious in his youth to all authority, religious authority in particular, as was demonstrated by the childhood mocking of his catechism instructor. Raised a Catholic by his mother, who was concerned for his salvation, his father’s influence prevailed, and by the time of his young adulthood there is no convincing evidence that he was religious at all.

Hitler was by no means a conventional atheist. As a political animal, he would have kept his atheist convictions to himself, since he needed Catholic and Lutheran support for his program of political domination through the Nazi Party (the National Socialist German Workers). What is patently certain is that, while going out of his way to avoid attacking religion in public, his entire career exhibits hateful intent toward Jews, Catholics, and to a lesser degree, Protestants. If a man’s worth can be judged better by his actions than by his words, Hitler passed the test for being classed as a thoroughly godless and satanic figure.

So far as his words are concerned, we have these from a speech before the Reichstag in 1938: “I believe today I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.” But his actions by far exceeded his words. As opposed to “warding off,” he actually exterminated, by most estimates, some six million European Jews, not exactly the Lord’s work. Hitler also brutally persecuted Catholics in Germany and Poland. Catholic schools and printing offices were closed and school children were force-fed Nazi propaganda. Approximately four hundred German priests who were critical of Nazism were sentenced to the Dachau prison camp. Hitler’s hatred of Polish Catholicism was virulent. Close to three thousand clergy were killed, many of them dying in concentration camps. The extent of religious persecution is too vast to describe here.

The Vatican did not fare well with Hitler. Pope Pius XI had approved an agreement with the Nazi government that was supposed to protect Catholic interests in Germany, but the deal was no sooner signed than Hitler violated all the terms and plunged the Catholic Church into collective retreat as persecutions quickened. Immediately tensions developed among the bishops of Germany who were divided on how to deal with Hitler. When Pius XII ascended the throne of Peter, things got worse. After Germany’s invasion of Poland, the pope refused the Nazi demand to fill empty Polish bishoprics with German priests. Hitler ordered wholesale persecution of the Polish Church and all Polish Jews. The Vatican sought to protect Jews with its limited resources. By 1943, Hitler, fearing the pope was an obstacle to his plan of imposing national socialism on the entire world, put out an order to kidnap the pope, which order was disobeyed by the SS general to whom it was given.

Mao Zedong  (1893-1976)

As was the case with Hitler’s father, Mao Zedong’s father was a strict personality who would beat his sons. His mother was a dedicated Buddhist who conveyed religion to her son, which he abandoned before reaching adulthood. Eventually he rejected his father’s influence and became his own master. As his education progressed, he followed Stalin’s example and became a Marxist. Atheism had to follow. Mao said: “Religion is poison. It has two great defects: it undermines the race…(and) retards the progress of the country.” As did Stalin before him, Mao viewed religion as a rival to the supremacy of the Marxist world view. During China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76) Chairman Mao engineered as much as he could the eradication of all religious institutions and the execution of Christians who refused to conform, resulting in the churches going underground as they had during the days of Nero. Atheism permeated every aspect of Chinese life and certainly became obligatory for members of the Chinese Communist Party. According to Maurice Meisner, “Mao was both the Lenin and the Stalin of the Chinese Revolution, both the revolutionary founder and the post-revolutionary tyrant.”

Here are some of Mao’s words that give us a grasp of his intent and methodology:

Every Communist must grasp the truth; “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

We can learn what we did not know. We are not only good at destroying the Old World, we are also good at building the new.

Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.

That everything in China was in utter chaos was true. Though many in the West do not know it because it is not adequately taught, Mao Zedong was by far the most prolific mass murderer of the 20th Century. It has been estimated that during his dictatorship around sixty-five million Chinese died either by execution, imprisonment, or famine, all in the name of building his New World out of the ashes of the Old.

Mao, like Hitler, very much hated the intellectual class as an obstacle to socialist “truth”. According to Mao: “What’s so unusual about Emperor Shih Huang of the China Dynasty? He had buried alive 460 scholars only, but we have buried alive 46,000 scholars.” In his abrupt and fierce determination to transform China from an agricultural to an industrial socialist society, a famine erupted during a two year period that resulted in 40-50 million deaths. When many Chinese people began to commit suicide, Mao remarked they should be left alone to do it as there were already too many people in China. During the Cultural Revolution, when it seemed that the Chinese people were tiring of the status quo, historian Lee Edwards reports:

Gangs of Red Guards — young men and women between 14 and 21 — roamed the cities targeting revisionists and other enemies of the state, especially teachers. Professors were dressed in grotesque clothes and dunce caps, their faces smeared with ink. They were then forced to get down on all fours and bark like dogs. Some were beaten to death, some even eaten — all for the promulgation of Maoism. A reluctant Mao finally called in the Red Army to put down the marauding Red Guards when they began attacking Communist Party members, but not before 1 million Chinese died.

Now of course an entire book could be written about the tyranny of atheistic socialist dictators in smaller countries throughout the world. Think of the atheist Pol Pot in socialist Cambodia, atheist Kim Jong Un in socialist North Korea, atheist Fidel Castro in socialist Cuba, atheist Ho Chi Minh in communist North Vietnam, and so many other instances of cruel regimes that were founded by atheists claiming to have the high moral ground over everyone else, but who were in fact diabolical engineers of suffering, enslavement, and destruction.

The Nightmare of Central Planning

Socialism’s method of exercising economic and political power is through central planning; which means that for socialism to succeed, freedom of religion, thought, and speech must be tightly controlled or the aims of the central planners cannot be achieved. People must obey the politically correct edicts of the central committee. They must begin by learning simple lessons of conformity, which if not learned and learned well, are answered with intimidation, discipline, and if necessary punishment. Orwell’s brilliant satire 1984 (published in 1948) warned about a nightmare reality of the future under a highly planned and controlled society of bureaucrats and government agencies. Most likely of all dangers was the prospect that people could be spied upon (cameras being located everywhere) and turned in to the thought police for wavering from the official party line of the central planners.

This has been the lesson of history we should have learned from the tactics of the police states under Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and all other enemies of human freedom. It was always thought and preached that this could not happen in America. We are presently learning that the very opposite is true; that free thought and free speech are very much under fire today by a league of technocratic giants who regularly spy upon and censor any point of view not consistent with the party line of the powers that be. Television networks, who once pretended to be objective purveyors of news, now brazenly take sides with one party or the other, and their reporting staff, like well programmed robots, faithfully transmit the party line. It is even worse with the hi-tech giants on the Internet who actually do censor free speech and discipline those who dare to introduce information not approved by the bureaucracy of censors, the  praetorian guards of “political correctness.”

Psychoanalyzing Atheistic Socialism

Joseph Stalin once said: “Democracy is not decided by who votes or how many vote; it is decided by who counts the votes.” In this one sentence is contained a clue to the mentality of all socialist dictators … that they are without exception liars and murderers, and will lie about and kill real democracy whenever it threatens their supremacy, but especially when it means tossing into the dumpster ballot boxes that might give democratic victory to their enemies.

There are several theories about why people choose to be atheists, and as many no doubt about why they choose to be socialists. I know of no theory about why people choose to be atheistic socialists who are madly driven to dominate the world and create hell, rather than heaven, on earth. There is a sentence from Thomas Aquinas that may help. “The things that we love tell us what we are.” If we love the gifts sent to us from heaven, we love God. If we love the things sent to us from hell, we love the devil. We cannot live without reaching for joy, Aquinas tells us. If we do not choose to find true spiritual joy, we become addicted to the carnal pleasures of this world.

Socialism offers those carnal pleasures to all, but they can only be delivered by force, because those who see it as their mission in life to deliver utopia cannot succeed in doing so without seizing property from some to distribute it among others. Theft on a grand scale becomes the modus operandi of socialism. But theft is against justice, and therefore it is against the law of God. Do socialists believe it is best to overcome that obstacle by pretending there is no God to object? The great dictators who see it as their mission in life to create a new world order surround themselves with like-thinking apostles to preach their new Gospel, which they pretend is superior to the Gospel preached by Jesus, who never preached socialism (but certainly would have if he thought it was worth preaching). What Christ did preach, and many Christians believe and practice to this day, is that one should voluntarily give to the needy, and that we are damned to hell forever if we do not (read Matthew 25).

The various socialist cults of cruelty surface where opposition to these cults arises. The only way to oppose such opposition is to stamp it out. Thus do the great dictators and their sycophants become allies in the plundering of the producing class, and thus do they plot to lie and kill as a method at the heart of their mission. We have now not only grand theft on a grand scale, but armies of propagandists and executioners unleashed upon the world. Then there is a second wave of grand theft, as the sycophant class, inheriting the legacy of the revolution, begins to line their pockets with gold seized from the producing class. Few will forget forget the waning days of the Soviet Socialist Republics when it was obvious to all that the ruling class lived in splendor while the hungry masses stood in bread lines.

Atheistic socialism not only forcibly mandates seizing money or property that rightly belongs to the middle class, it also reduces abundance in the virtuous character of the people. Or, to repeat Aquinas, because the point is very much worth repeating: “Man cannot live without joy; therefore, when he is deprived of true spiritual joys, it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures.” It may be noticed that in any dominantly atheistic society (whether socialist or capitalist) there is a descent into hedonism (rank pleasure-seeking) of all types: from obesity to indolence, to drunkenness, to divorce, to greed, to drugs, to promiscuity, to abortion, to profligacy, to indifference, to suicide, to cruelty, and to every other mark of cultural depravity; all this because men have rejected the invitation of God to know and love Him, the God of love, Who beyond all else is the true joy of life.

Aristotle said that you cannot have morality triumph over immorality without courage. This is because it often takes courage to do the right thing. Archbishop Fulton Sheen drives the point home: “The refusal to take sides on the great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.” This passionate conviction on the side of the devil’s dishonest disciples is proven to have overshadowed a Church divided against itself. Catholic bishops world-wide refuse to form a united stand in the condemnation of atheistic socialism. All socialism (even the kind that pretends it is Christian) is a product of central planning directed straight from underworld headquarters, even when certain influential Catholic clergy offer themselves as “useful idiots” (so Lenin would have called them) to help advance the cause.

Could Atheistic Socialism Triumph?

According to a recent Axios poll, 61% of young Americans have a positive reaction to the word “socialism.” How is this possible without the national collaboration of teachers and professors with a partisan socialistic media for the purpose of promoting socialism? There is no mistaking the implication. Socialism is always overtly or covertly atheistic, though socialists in America will never openly admit it, or are so ignorant of the nexus that they suppose socialism must be part of the Christian gospel.

Atheistic socialism, like a lion stalking gazelles on the plains, has come again to survey the world with a ravenous appetite. In recent months we have seen socialists brazenly wreak fiery havoc on the streets of our inner cities, topple the statues and emblems dedicated to our history, and promise to burn down all our heritage in order to build their “brave new world” upon the ashes of antiquity. Likewise they have been enlisted in the lunatic crusade to defund police, as if universal riots and anarchy were nothing to fear in the presence of little to no police protection. Then again, there is the socialist horror of, and opposition to, a conservative Catholic woman elevated to the Supreme Court of the United States. We can see that many untutored youths of our time have been seduced by the lure of socialism’s siren call, eager to prove Santayana’s dire prediction. Indeed, the hostile mob seems on the verge of forming a “new and improved” League of the Militant Godless, such as the one that organized the persecution of Christians in Russia from 1925-1941. We must wait to see how hostile the resurrected militant godless can become in the 21st Century.

That hostility toward Christian democracy is already too apparent. In the recent presidential election in the United States, we can be convinced that one of the two major political parties has followed the policy of Joseph Stalin, which bears repeating. “Democracy is not decided by who votes or how many vote; it is decided by who counts the votes.”

Sic transit gloria mundi!

The post An Unholy Triumvirate appeared first on Catholic Insight.