Devil and Karl Marx

[Skull]

Still reading this biographical survey of Marx, Lenin, Engles etc; those evil folks who brought communism to this world. Here is an interview with the author Paul Kengor:

 

[Skull]

An excerpt:

“Communism begins where atheism begins,” declared Marx. In the Communist Manifesto, he and
Engels remarked, “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality.”
The apostles of Marx and Engels took that to heart. In communist Russia, the Bolsheviks in particular
picked up the spear.
“A fight to the death must be declared upon religion,” asserted Nikolai Bukharin, founding editor of
Pravda and one of Lenin’s and Stalin’s leading lieutenants, adding counsel to “take on religion at the tip
of the bayonet.”
Bukharin spoke for the Bolsheviks: “Religion and communism are incompatible, both theoretically
and practically. … Communism is incompatible with religious faith.” He also spoke for Marx: “‘Religion
is the opium of the people,’ said Karl Marx. It is the task of the Communist Party to make this truth
comprehensible to the widest possible circles of the laboring masses.”
The Bolsheviks would do just that. Communists worldwide would do just that. Such was the atheist
legacy bequeathed by Marx.
One of the most brutally restricted rights by communist governments was, and remains, the freedom
to worship, which communists always and everywhere have attacked with a wild fervor and devotion. In
a sense, it is strange that atheistic communists felt so mortally threatened by their people believing in
something they insisted did not exist. Yet, communists not only cared about that worship but became
utterly obsessed with stopping it. Belief in God stood in the way of the totalitarian desire to transform
human nature. God was a competitor to communist control of the body, mind, and spirit of man that Marx
and Lenin wanted to redefine in their own image.
In other words, the communists rightly recognized that belief in God was the chief impediment to the
imposition of their atheist creed.

 

[Skull]

An interview with Paul Kengor, with both transcript and video. This Devil and Karl Marx book is the main topic:

Karl Marx Meets the Devil: A Conversation with Historian Paul Kengor

 

[Skull]

Shortly after Ben Gitlow testified before Congress came Manning Johnson, who, like Gitlow and Louis
Budenz, was a prominent ex-communist. He was particularly well-known as a leading African-American
communist. Johnson, too, witnessed “Uncle Joe” Stalin (as FDR affectionately called Stalin) and his
USSR ordering around Communist Party USA. He left the party in disgust.

Johnson had served on the National Negro Commission, an important subcommittee of the National
Committee of the Communist Party. It was important because of the vigorous push by CPUSA and the
Comintern to attempt to organize black Americans into a segregated “Negro Republic” in the South.
That National Negro Commission, said Johnson, was created “on direct orders from Moscow to facilitate
the subversion of the Negroes.” He soon realized the full extent to which “the Negro is used as a political
dupe by the Kremlin hierarchy.”

Several top white communists, such as James S. Allen (an alias used by Sol Auerbach), Robert
Minor, and Elizabeth Lawson were placed on the commission and ran the show. These white communists,
said Johnson, “wielded more power than the nominal Negro heads of the Commission. In a word, they are
like white overseers.” Moreover, “Every Negro member was aware of the fact that these white overseers
constituted the eyes, the ears and the voice of the Kremlin.”

From Chapter 10