In2-MeC

Sridhama Mayapur, West Bengal, India
23 February 2004

From the Internet

Why communism is atheistic, and why it produced a holocaust

Marx (1818-1883) was influenced considerably by Hegel�s dialectic concept. George Hegel (1770-1831) held that religion, science, history, and �most everything else� evolves to a higher state as time progresses. ⁵⁴ It does this by a process called the dialectic, in which a thesis (an idea) eventually confronts an antithesis (an opposing idea), producing a synthesis or a blend of the best of the old and new ideas. ⁵⁵ Marx concluded that capitalism is the thesis, and the organized proletariat is the antithesis. Essentially, the central conflict in capitalism was between those who controlled the means of production (the owners, the wealthy class, or the bourgeoisie) and those who did the actual physical work (the workers or the proletariat). Marx�s central idea was that the synthesis (i. e. communism) would emerge from the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This is illustrated by Marx�s famous phrase, �workers of the world unite and overthrow your oppressors�.

Marx concluded that the masses (the workers--those persons who worked in the factories and the farms) would struggle with the business owners, the wealthy and the entrepreneurs. Since there were a lot more workers than owners, Marx believed that the workers eventually would overthrow the entrepreneurs by violent revolution, taking their factories and wealth. The result would be a dictatorship by the proletariat. Marx then believed that private property would be abolished, and the workers would collectively own the country, including the farms and the means of production. All the workers then would share equally in the fruits of their labor, producing a classless society in which everyone earned an equal amount of money. This philosophy obviously appealed to millions of people, especially the poor, the downtrodden, and many middle class people who had a concern for the poor.

Communist revolutions resulted in forcibly taking the wealth from the land-owning classes, the wealthy, the industrialists and others. Appropriating the land and wealth from the property owners in general resulted in an enormous amount of widespread resistance.

Many of these people had built their wealth from hard work and astute business decisions, and were not willing to give up what in many cases they had worked very hard for years to obtain. A bloodbath resulted that took the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Those murdered often included the most talented entrepreneurs, the most skilled industrialists, and the intellectual backbone of the nation. The workers were put in charge of the companies and factories once run by what Marx called the bourgeoisie; many of these workers lacked the skills and personal qualities necessary to run these businesses. Consequently, inferior products, low productivity and an incredible amount of waste was the rule for generations in the Communist world.

As Jorafsky notes, however harshly history may judge Marxism, the fact is Marx�s theory unified Darwinism and revolution intrinsically and inseparably:

. . . an historian can hardly fail to agree that Marx�s claim to give scientific guidance to those who would transform society has been one of the chief reasons for his doctrine�s enormous influence. �⁵⁶

Chinese communism

Darwinism also was a critical factor in the communist revolution in China: �Mao Tse-tung regarded Darwin, as presented by the German Darwinists, as the foundation of Chinese scientific socialism�. ^20,57 The policies Mao originated resulted in the murder of as many as 80 million people. The extent that Darwinism was applied is shown by Kenneth Hs�. When he was a student in China in the 1940s, the class would exercise to make their bodies strong, and for the remainder of the hour before breakfast, they were harangued by the rector. �We had to steel our will to fight in the struggle for existence, he told us. The weak would perish; only the strong would survive. �⁵⁸

Hs� added that they were taught that one acquires strength not through the acceptance that his mother prescribed, but through hatred. Hs� then points out the irony of the fact that

At the same time on the other side of the battlefront a teenage German boy listened to Goebbels�s polemics and was inducted into the Hitler Jugend. According to both our teachers, one or the other of us should have prevailed, yet it would not have surprised my mother to discover that we are now colleagues, neighbors, and friends. Though both of us survived the war, we were victims of a cruel social ideology that assumes that competition among individuals, classes, nations, or races is the natural condition of life, and that it is also natural for the superior to dispossess the inferior. For the last century and more this ideology has been thought to be a natural law of science, the mechanism of evolution which was formulated most powerfully by Charles Darwin in 1859 in his On the Origin of Species. . . Three decades have passed since I was marched into the schoolyard to hear the rector contradict my family�s wisdom with his Darwinian claim to superiority. ⁵⁹

Hs� concludes that in view of what happened in the war, and since then (and what may happen in the future), �I must question what sort of fitness is demonstrated by the outcome of such struggles. As a scientist, I must especially examine the scientific validity of a notion that can do such damage�. ^60,58

The importance of Darwinism, Hs� reports, was indicated by Theo Sumner�s experience on a trip with German Chancellor Helmit Schmit to China. Theo was astonished to personally hear from Mao Tse-tung about the debt Mao felt to Darwinism, and especially to the man who also inspired Hitler, Darwinist Ernst Haeckel. ⁶¹ Hs� concluded Mao was convinced that �without the continual pressure of natural selection� humans would degenerate. This idea inspired Mao to advocate �the ceaseless revolution that brought my homeland to the brink of ruin�.

Summary

In the minds of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, treating people as animals was not wrong because they believed that Darwin had �proved� humans were not God�s creation, but instead descended from some simple, one-cell organism. All three men believed it was morally proper to eliminate the less fit or �herd them like cattle into boxcars bound for concentration camps and gulags� if it achieved the goal of their Darwinist philosophy. ⁶²

Darwin�s ideas played a critically important role in the development and growth of communism. While it is difficult to conclude that communism would not have flourished as it did if Darwin had not developed his evolution theory, it is clear that if Marx, Lenin, Engels, Stalin and Mao had continued to embrace the Judeo-Christian worldview and had not become Darwinists, communist theory and the revolutions it inspired never would have spread to the many countries that they did. It follows, then, that the holocaust produced by communism (which has resulted in the death over 100 million people) likely never would have occurred. In Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn�s words,

. . . if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our [Russian] people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "men have forgotten God; that�s why all this has happened". ⁶³

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Bert Thompson, Ph. D. , Wayne Frair, Ph. D. , Clifford Lillo, and John Woodmorappe, M. A. , for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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