Stalin and His Chinese Disciple

Rivers of Blood

The twentieth century delivered five case studies in the politics of militant atheism: the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, Communist China, Cuba, North Korea, and Cambodia.  All were remarkably similar in their totalitarian attempts to stamp out the Christian faith.

Stalin’s record of what happens when militant atheism gains control is notorious and well-known.  These days Communist China and the tyranny of Mao Tse Tung is generally given a free pass.  Yet the evidential record shows that Mao was every bit as vicious and hateful to Christians and the Christian Church as Stalin.

A recent biography has traced Mao through the eyes of Stalin and the Soviet Union.  Documentary materials of the Soviet state are now accessible to scholars in Russia.  The truths can be unveiled.
  A sobering  picture of Mao emerges in the book, Mao: the Real Story.  [Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (London: Simon & Schuster,  2012)]  which reveals Mao through his relationship with Stalin and the Soviet Union. A book review written by Frank Kikotter made the following observations.

Firstly, from the beginning Mao faithfully followed the example of Stalin in the Soviet Union and sought to model China upon Stalin’s policies and ideology.

. . .  once the red flag fluttered over Beijing in 1949, Mao wasted no time in imposing a harsh communist order modeled on the USSR. As the authors point out, “he looked upon Stalin as his teacher and the Soviet Union, which inspired fear throughout the world, as a model to imitate.” Mao was a Stalinist attracted to the elimination of private property, all-pervasive controls on the lives of ordinary people, an unlimited cult of the leader, and huge expenditures on the military.

Secondly, Mao’s break with the Soviet Union was provoked by Khrushchev’s rejection of Stalin after the latter’s death.

While the Soviets took down their portraits and statues of Stalin, in China he remained officially in favor for decades after his death in 1953. Until a few years ago the tyrant’s face could still be seen on the walls of bookshops and classrooms, painted in warm tones. He is revered in China to this day, his reputation defended by an army of fierce censors.

Thirdly, Mao imitated Stalin’s reign of terror and death.

Overall, by the authors’ estimate, Mao was responsible for the deaths of some 40 million of his countrymen. During the Great Leap Forward, from 1958 to 1962, they reckon that 30 to 45 million people died, “many along the roads, famished and emaciated.” Over a million perished during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, and here too the authors have no doubt who was responsible: “He was the chief culprit of the senseless and merciless mass terror.”

To this day most Chinese revere Mao but only because the truth is systematically hidden from them.  A good place to start would be to teach them the truth about Stalin.  Then, upon realising that Mao was Stalin’s faithful disciple, they may be able to open their hearts and minds to the truth.

In the meantime, the object lesson for us in the West is clear.  Whenever atheists have gained power, blood has flown down the gutters in an unceasing flood. 

>Lest We Forget

>Sorry, It’s Already Been Forgotten

We recently had the opportunity to watch the DVD, The Soviet Story. http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0615274641&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr Derived from previously secret archival material and from eye witness accounts, it presents a history of the Soviet Union that is chilling and almost beyond belief. For a good deal of the script, Russian academics, particularly historians, present the story.

The West to this day consistently and wilfully blindfolds itself to the horrors of Soviet Communism. If you asked the “person in the street” which they considered more evil, Hitler and the Nazis or Stalin and the Soviet Communists you would almost certainly be told that the Nazis were the greater evil by far. In fact, notwithstanding the evil of Hitler and the Nazis, Stalin and the Communists wreaked unspeakable evil upon the human race.

The Soviet Story documents, for example, the genocidal forced starvation of millions in Ukraine during the years 1932-3. Stalin ordered the Ukrainian border sealed, confiscated all food which could be found in the Ukraine, then waited for the people to starve to death. The entire Ukraine became one vast concentration camp. Over 11 million people perished. The footage is far more grotesque than any that has survived the Nazi concentration camps–if such comparisons can be meaningful in any way. Hitler admired Stalin’s accomplishments in this arena.

What the documentary establishes from the Soviet archives is that in the years prior and during the Soviet-German Non Aggression pact, the Soviet Union regarded Hitler and the Nazi’s as fellow socialists, and constantly aided, supported, and abetted Hitler. This changed only when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and attacked the Soviet Union. Only then, in the official Soviet mind, did Hitler and Nazi-ism become distinguishable from Communism and cease to be part of the de-facto Comintern. It is likely that Stalin’s stubborn refusal to consider that Hitler might attack and his angry dismissal of irrefutable intelligence on Hitler’s plans were due to his inability to conceive that one socialist/communist nation (Germany) would attack another (the Soviet Union).

Claire Berlinski, writing in City Journal, marvels at the indifference in the West to Soviet atrocities.

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

The Soviet Story needs to be shown to every high-school pupil, lest we forget. Actually, it’s too late. We are all socialists now, non? Any disagreement the West may have with Stalin and the Soviets is only the relatively minor matter of arguments over tactics–as was the case between Hitler and Stalin.

>A Tarnished Lily Ungilded

>Rewriting a Falsified Past

It was amusing when, amidst the furore over US Democratic chicanery over Obama health care, when Vlad Putin scoffed at Obama and the US Congress. The fools were turning to socialism, he chortled. Russia had been smart enough to give it up. This is not what one had come to expect from Vlad.

It has been disturbing in recent years to see the re-emergence of the cult of Stalin in Russia. It has been tempting to fear that Putin sees himself as a latter-day recrudescence of Koba the Dread. This recent report upon the pronouncements of Dmitry Medvedyev was therefore both surprising and welcome.

Russian president slams ‘totalitarian’ USSR
May 7 08:10
President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday slammed the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime that suppressed human rights, in the most damning assessment of the USSR by a Russian leader in recent years.  In an interview with the Izvestia newspaper published two days before Russia marks the 65th anniversary of victory in World War II, Medvedev said the crimes of wartime dictator Joseph Stalin could never be forgiven.

“The Soviet Union was a very complicated state and if we speak honestly the regime that was built in the Soviet Union… cannot be called anything other than totalitarian,” he said. “Unfortunately, this was a regime where elementary rights and freedoms were suppressed.”

Medvedev and his predecessor in the Kremlin, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, have until now rarely criticised the Soviet system and instead focused on its achievements. . . . Putin, still seen by most observers as Russia’s de-facto number one leader, once famously described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.

The president — who succeeded Putin exactly two years ago on May 7, 2008 — said that after its World War II triumph, the Soviet Union failed to allow its economy to develop. “This was accompanied by deaths and everything connected with dictatorship,” commented Medvedev.

Medvedev also issued his clearest condemnation of Stalin, who is blamed for the deaths of millions in prison camps, purges and the forced collectivization of agriculture, yet is still admired by many Russians as a strong leader.

“Stalin committed a mass of crimes against his own people,” said Medvedev. “And despite the fact that he worked a lot, and despite the fact that under his leadership the country recorded many successes, what was done to his own people cannot be forgiven.” . . . .

Long criticised by human rights activists and Western historians for painting too rosy a picture of the Soviet past, Russia has over the past months taken cautious steps towards eroding powerful taboos over its wartime history.

Last month it published on the Internet documents proving that Soviet secret police massacred Polish officers at Katyn forest in 1940, a crime the USSR long attempted to cover up by blaming it on the Nazis.

Katyn “was a very dark page…. It is not just those abroad who allow history to be falsified. We ourselves have allowed history to be falsified,” Medvedev said.

Political analyst Alexander Konovalov, director of the Institute for Strategic Evaluations, said that Medvedev was moving little-by-little to change Russian public opinion on history.

“These comments will contribute to re-establish historical truths,” he said.

>The Seed of the Church

>Might and Main To No Avail

The phrase “Church under the cross” was coined during the Reformation. It refers to times and circumstances where Christian believers were subject to persecution. The twentieth century saw some of the most organised and relentless persecution of Christians ever recorded.

In the Soviet Union, religion in general was seen as a symptom of wider and deeper social evils. Just as we in our day may argue that drugs, or crime, or drunkenness signal a deeper malaise so socialist ideology argued that religion was symptomatic of more serious distresses. But people needed to be weaned off dependence upon religion in order for the real, underlying, and more substantial problems to be addressed. So, Marx:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, cited in Trevor Beeson, Discretion and Valour: Religious Conditions in Russia and Eastern Europe (London: Fontana, 1974), p.19.

For Marx (and Lenin, and those who followed in their train) religion was a false solution to a real problem. But you have to get an addict off the drug in the first place before you can make the changes which will make drug dependence no longer necessary. It goes without saying that this sort of condescending pity for Christians has become stock-in-trade for many people today. But in the Soviet Union condescension and pity soon took a more sinister turn. Once the Revolution was successful and (by definition) the underlying “real distress” had been removed there was no longer any need for religion per se. Therefore, to persist in a religion was an implicitly rebellious or seditious act: it was an unwelcome evidence that “real distress” still existed in Soviet society. To persist in religion, therefore, became an implicitly seditious act.

As a result, for over sixty years (three generations) Russian Christians and churches were subject to successive waves of persecution and oppression. The first steps were the “easy” ones for the Communist regime. Firstly, the power and influence of the Russian orthodox church had to be broken. Confiscation of land, plant, and property was announced by decree as early as 1918.

No ecclesiastical or religious association shall have the right to own property. Such associations shall not enjoy the right of legal entity.

All property belonging to churches and religious associations existing in Russia shall become public property. Buildings and objects intended especially for religious worship shall be handed over by special decision of local or central authorities, free of charge, for use by the religious association concerned.
Decree of Separation of Church and State, 1918.

Thus, at one stroke, all plant, property, and equipment belonging to the church was seized; its continued use by Christians was to be at the whim and pleasure of the state. But Lenin understood that to stamp out the Christian faith one had to prohibit the teaching and proclamation of the faith. All schooling and education by churches was therefore prohibited from 1918 onwards. Churches could only give and receive religious instruction privately.

In 1928, Stalin went further:

Religious associations may not organize for children, young people and women special prayer or other meetings, circles, groups, departments for Biblical or literary study, sewing, working or the teaching of religion, etc., excursions, children’s playgrounds, libraries, reading rooms, sanatoria, or medical care.
Beeson, p.40.

The state was starting to focus more attention on teaching and the fundamental aspects of communal or corporate religious life. Application of these laws tended to flow in waves. Oftentimes actual persecution went way beyond the law—draconian though they were. But some of the most severe oppression occurred under Khrushchev who launched a programme of militant hostility against Christians which lasted five years.

It was already illegal for parents to compel their children to attend church against their will. Young people under the age of eighteen were forbidden in any case to be members of religious organizations. Participation by them in church services or religious ceremonies of any kinds which had previously been discouraged was now illegal. Clergy . . . were forbidden to instruct children in any circumstances.
Beeson, p. 40, 41.

Notice the focus upon the children. The authorities had worked out that a considerable power lay in parents being able to lead their children in the faith. Intergenerational faith, and the transmission of the faith from parents to children lies at the heart of the Covenant of Grace. It is an appointed Divine mechanism for sustaining and expanding the Kingdom of God. The Communists came to understand that to extinguish religious faith they must strike at one of its root: cutting children off from the religious instruction of parents would prevent the inter-generational transfer of faith.

At the same time, children were to be subjected to the relentless propagation of militant materialist atheism in the schools (“scientific atheism”). Adults similarly were to be indoctrinated via the media, offices, factories, farms, and the army. Religion was presented as primitive superstition, illegal; the existence of God had been “disproved” by science; religion was a hoax, etc. This effort went on for years and decades.

What was the outcome? Despite all these efforts (or possibly because of them) by the 1970’s it was estimated that the percentage of people attending church in the Soviet Union was higher than in the UK. (Of course there were no reliable statistics). However, anecdotal evidence was striking. Western visitors to major metropolitan centres like Moscow and Leningrad reported that on Sunday one did not need to ask directions to a church service—you just had to follow the crowd.

One English visitor to Moscow in 1973 reported on his experience of visiting churches as follows:

At the first (church) we found that the service would not start until 8 pm and so we decided to return. Nearly two hours before, people were already gathering. The next was St Nicholas. We stood at the back for a while. I do not think I have every seen a church so full, with people standing shoulder to shoulder as at a football match. Where would one see that in England? The priest attracts the young and intellectuals as well as the faithful babushki (grandmothers). The third church, St John the Warrior, we could not get into at all . . . . The crowded congregation was tight-packed and reverent.
Beeson, p. 28.

The same visitor went on to Leningrad and described the singing in two of the services he attended:

. . . how melodiously Russian congregations sing, without any musical accompaniment. Those two congregational settings (Our Father, the Creed) sung by massed soprano voices, pure without being trained, were a foretaste of angels’ voices; they are so clearly part of the life and soul of the Russian people. At each of these services we were just in time to hear the congregations in their full joy of belief in the Risen Christ.
Ibid., p. 29.

The heart of true faith living in the hearts of His people. Decades of successive state persecution, suppression, bloodshed, ridicule, deprivations, indoctrination, and pressure could not extinguish it. One is reminded of the Word of the Lord through the prophet, Isaiah:

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
And do not return there without watering the earth,
And making it bear and sprout,
And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater
So shall My word be which goes forth from My mouth;
It shall not return to Me empty,
Without accomplishing what I desire,
And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.
Isaiah 55: 10,11

>Trumpeting Stalin

>Very Rotten Apples

One of the most disturbing scandals of the previous century was the willing complicity of the English and American intellectual “elite” with the Soviet regime. This elite, which effectively controlled some of the most prestigious newspapers of the day (for example, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the New York Times) willed themselves to believe and assert the beneficence and goodness of the Soviet Union. Their naiveté, credulity, and willing suspension of disbelief leads a detached observer to conclude that they were puerile, but also corrupt in their gullibility. For them, the Soviet Union had to be an exemplar of a new and better world, because it had become a warranting concept, a justification for their own supercilious and bankrupt world-view in which man had the power to create a perfect, sinless utopia.

For example, Martin Amis, in his powerful book, Koba the Dread, described the fawning credulity and blind dishonesty of the founders of the New Statesman. This newspaper was

founded in 1913 by, among others, . . . the century’s four most extravagant dupes of the USSR: H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Wells, after an audience with Stalin in 1934, said the he had “never met a man more candid, fair and honest”; these attributes accounted for “his remarkable ascendancy over the country since no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him”. Shaw, after some banquet diplomacy, declared the Russian people uncommonly well-fed at a time when perhaps 11 million citizens were in the process of dying of starvation. The Webbs, after extensive study, wrote a book which “seen as the last word in serious Western scholarship, ran to over 1,200 pages, representing a vast amount of toil and research, all totally wasted. It was originally entitled, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? but the question mark was triumphantly removed in the second edition—which appeared in 1937 at precisely the time the regime was in its worst phase.” (Robert Conquest). Sidney and Beatrice Webb swallowed the great Show Trials of 1936—38 and the New Statesman was not much less sceptical: “We do not deny . . . that the confessions may have contained a substratum of truth”; “there had undoubtedly been much plotting in the USSR”; and so on.
Martin Amis, Koba the Dread, (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 21. Emphasis, ours

Malcolm Muggeridge later described his eager enthusiasm when he worked as a reporter in Moscow in the early nineteen thirties:

How marvelous the Russian revolution seemed when it happened! A little bearded man wearing a cap, Lenin, had taken over the vast empire of the Tsars on behalf of the workers and the peasants; his Jewish lieutenant, Trotsky, had created a Red Army of legendary valour, without officers, gold braid, bands or any of the other contemptible insignia of militarism. How we rejoiced and cheered and exulted as the time . . . In the distant, fabulous land of the steppes and vodka the proletariat had seized power and the millennium had begun.
Malcolm Muggeridge, Tread Softly, For You Tread On My Jokes, (1972 edition) p. 23.

Muggeridge was married to Kitty, who was Beatrice Webb’s sister. He, of course, was one of the first of the fadishly socialist left-wing-set to face up to the truth about the Soviet Union. When he did he became a tireless opponent of the regime.

People who were supposed to be educated and intelligent came back from visits to the Soviet Union proclaiming it was a paradise. They swallowed the propaganda hook, line, and sinker. They were the regime’s willing cheerleaders in the West. For example, Solzhenitsyn describes how a group of prisoners were transported throughout the streets of Moscow in closed vans with signs on the outside in four languages proclaiming “Bread” and “Meat”.

One of the vans stopped at an intersection. A shiny maroon automobile was waiting for the same red light to change. In it rode the correspondent of a progressive French paper Liberation who was on the way to a hockey match at the Dynamo Stadium. The correspondent read the legend on the side of the van: MYASO—VIANDE—FLEISCH—MEAT. He remembered that he’d already seen more than one such van, in various parts of Moscow. And he took out his notebook and wrote in red ink: “On the streets of Moscow one often sees vans filled with foodstuffs, very neat and hygienically impeccable. One can only conclude that the provisioning of the capital is excellent.”
Cited in L Praamsa, The Church in the Twentieth Century, (St Catherines, Ontario: Paideia Press, 1981), p. 105.

Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, notes that his father joined the British Communist Party in 1941 and remained a “believer” in the Soviet Union for fifteen years. He realised later, with deep embarrassment, that he had willingly shut out the facts, and had credulously and gullibly accepted Soviet denials of famine, enserfment of the peasantry, and slave labour. Overwhelmingly the intellectuals of the West were choosing to believe a lie. Yet the facts and the data were there all along for any who cared to look.

This shameful episode demonstrates the truth of the adage that there is none so blind as those who will not see. There are manifold contemporary instances of the same sickness. For example, almost without exception the Western liberal-academic-media-complex has shown itself gulled repeatedly by Palestinian and Hamas propaganda stunts over alleged atrocities by Israeli armed forces. Now, we do not doubt that atrocities may occur: what is clear, however, is that the liberal-complex itself does not maintain even the slightest scepticism about Palestinian and Hamas propaganda. The complex wilfully believes everything the Palestinians portray to be true.

We suspect that there is a complex of influences at work here. Firstly, there is likely the elite’s condescension towards the Palestinians (they are poor, ignorant, simple, and backward folk. They would not be sufficiently clever or subtle to lie or engage in propaganda). Secondly, there is likely the old Marxist ethic at work which equates good morals with the oppressed and the downtrodden (you can rely on the honesty and integrity of the Palestinians because they are the downtrodden; the Israeli’s, however, being oppressors, are evil and corrupted). Thirdly, there is likely to be the influence of the self-satisfied smugness and sense of superiority which belongs to the intellectual elites (we are too clever to be gulled by anyone; no-one would even try). Finally, there is likely to be the powerful suasion of guilt and pity, which leads the elite to “stand in solidarity with” the oppressed Palestinians no matter what as a means of assuaging their own self-loathing.

Another example is the way the Western liberal-academic-media-complex generally turns a very, very blind eye towards the oppression of women in Islamic society and ideology. It discounts its existence—and if oppression were to exist, it is regarded as a minor matter in the wider scheme of things. This is why the innumerable secular feminists which populate the liberal-academic-media complex religiously ignore the oppression of women in Islam. They have bigger fish to fry. Consistent Islam—the manifestations of Islam that are consistent with the Koran and authoritative Islamic traditions—is widely found amongst the poor and dispossessed. This fact alone demands solidarity and support from the elite feminists of the West, regardless of how they treat their women-folk. They are willing to accept it as mere “collateral damage” in pursuit of more important goals.

The bottom line is that the shamefulness of the adulation of the former Soviet Union by the Western intelligentsia has its direct descendants in our day. The rotten apple has not fallen far from the tree.