With regards to the correlation between atheism and Communism; it would be fallaciously simplistic to claim that atheism is the only motivating factor behind Communism and yet, it is certainly a major factor and the very premise upon which Communist ideology was built.
Let us simply consider the words of Communists leaders themselves and then the opinion of a major scholar in the research of Communism.
Karl Marx stated,
“Darwin’s book of Natural Selection. Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view … Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.”
Leon Trotsky elucidated further in, The ABC of Materialist Dialectics:
“We call our dialectic, materialist, since its roots are neither in heaven nor in the depths of our ‘free will’, but in objective reality, in nature. Consciousness grew out of the unconscious, psychology out of physiology, the organic world out of the inorganic, the solar system out of nebulae … Darwinism … was the highest triumph of the dialectic in the whole field of organic matter.”
Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the USSR who modified Marxist doctrine as a Communist theoretician (1870–1924):
“Social-Democracy bases its whole world-outlook on scientific socialism, i.e., Marxism. The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism … a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion. Let us recall that the whole of Engels’s Anti-Dühring, which Marx read in manuscript, is an indictment of the materialist and atheist Dühring for not being a consistent materialist and for leaving loopholes for religion and religious philosophy … Religion is the opium of the people—this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion … Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as was the materialism … This is beyond doubt … it applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of history, to the domain of the social sciences.”
Lenin also pointed out that “Engels frequently condemned the efforts of people who desired … to introduce into the programme of the workers’ party an explicit proclamation of atheism, in the sense of declaring war on religion” because this would merely “revive interest in religion and to prevent it from really dying out.”
‘The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists, three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war, and individual crime in the entire twentieth century combined.’—Vox Day
The logical and moral absurdity of charging Leninists with “harshness” while presupposing absolute materialism was well stated by Lenin himself, “when people charge us with harshness we wonder how they can forget the rudiments of Marxism.”
In this regard, it is interesting to note the words of Mao Zedong:
“You’d better have less conscience. Some of our comrades have too much mercy, not enough brutality, which means that they are not so Marxist. On this matter, we indeed have no conscience! Marxism is that brutal … .We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution” and “Look at World War II, at Hitler’s cruelty. The more cruelty, the more enthusiasm for revolution.”
Lenin considered religion “irredeemably evil” because it hindered “the world Communist revolution”. This was because his morality was premised upon his movement, “Whatever helps the world Communist revolution is good; whatever hinders it is bad.”
And this was because, “We deny all morality taken from superhuman or non-class conceptions … In what sense do we deny ethics, morals? In the sense in which they are preached by the bourgeoisie, which deduces these morals from god’s commandments. Of course, we say that we do not believe in god” and “We do not believe in eternal morality, and we expose all fables about morality.”
Joseph Stalin became Soviet Union leader following Lenin’s death (1878–1953). In a very odd twisting of logic, atheist professor of philosophy Daniel Dennett argues that the atheist Stalin was a theist:
“ … it occurred to me—let’s think about Stalin for a moment. Was he an atheist? You might say well of course he was an atheist. No, on the contrary. In a certain sense, he wasn’t an atheist at all. He believed in god. Not only that, he believe in a god whose will determined what right and wrong was. And he was sure of the existence of this god, and the god’s name was Stalin.”
His point was to attempt, as many of atheism’s activists do, to pretend that atheism is perfectly pure and unspotted while laying blame for Stalin’s brutality in the camp of theism. While this is utterly irresponsible, particularly for a professor of philosophy, may we not grant it and agree that every atheist is a theist who sees God in their own mirrors and thus, determined what is right and wrong?
President and Founder of the Union of the Militant Godless, Yemilian Yaroslavsky (né Minei Israilevich Gubelman), made it clear that Stalin,
“At a very early age … began to read Darwin and became an atheist” and that Stalin stated, “You know, they are fooling us, there is no God … I’ll lend you a book to read; it will show you that the world and all living things are quite different from what you imagine, and all this talk about God is sheer nonsense … Darwin. You must read it.”
Note that here again we see the connection between atheism, Darwinism and Communism.
Therefore, he ended up combining “science” with atheism to the point of concluding,
“The Party cannot be neutral towards religion, and it conducts anti-religious propaganda against all religious prejudices because it stands for science, whereas religious prejudices run counter to science, because all religion is the antithesis of science.”
Time Magazine, 17 Feb. 1936, reported (“Godless Jubilee”) that there was a, “celebration by massed Communist delegations from all over Russia of the tenth anniversary of the founding in
Moscow of the Union of the Militant Godless … active profession of atheism is the badge of a Communist.”
Darwin scholar and Marxist, Robert M. Young, wrote,
“I want to come back to Darwinian evolution. The connection is this: science and appeals to scientific socialism have been rooted in Darwinism by those who claimed that it provided a basis for Marxism … Aspects of evolutionism are consistent with Marxism. The explanation of the origins of humankind and of mind by purely natural forces was and remains as welcome to Marxists as to any other secularists … ”
In the preface to The Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels wrote of Communism as, “The proposition which in my opinion is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology.” He also wrote:
“The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes’s doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes [a war of all against all] and of the bourgeois economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus’ theory of population. When this conjuror’s trick has been performed . . . the same theories are transferred again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved.”
Mao Zedong affirmed:
“Chinese socialism is founded upon Darwin and the theory of evolution.”
He further stated:
“I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others … People like me want to … satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me … People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people … Some say one has a responsibility for history. I don’t believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself.”
Daniel J. Flynn wrote the following whilst referencing The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,
“The roots of Marxist-Leninism are perhaps not to be found in Marx at all, but in a deviant version of Darwinism … applied to social questions with the same catastrophic results that occur when such ideas are applied to racial issues … In 1922 alone, more than 8,000 priests, monks, and nuns were executed in the Soviet Union … In 1967, Albania declared itself the world’s first officially atheist nation and reduced more than 2,000 churches and mosques to rubble or expropriated them for state use [from 1917 to 1969, the Communists destroyed 41,000 of Russia’s 48,000 churches] … Almost fifty percent of all Catholics were killed in Cambodia … Moslems saw more than 40% of their co-religionists killed. Mosques and The Koran were burned and Pol Pot’s henchmen sadistically forced followers of Islam to eat pork … The Romanian Secret Police encouraged prisoners to devise ‘reeducation’ programs. The leader of one such program named Eugen Turcanu devised especially diabolical measures to force seminarians to renounce their faith … Some had their heads repeatedly plunged into a bucket of urine and fecal matter while the guards intoned a parody of the baptismal rite.”
Trotskyite, Denzil Dean Harber (aka Paul Dixon), writes of, “the materialist basis upon which Marxism stands” and that there were “anti-religious tests for the Army and Civil Service” that were later abolished due to a tentative policy which he described as due to “The Left zig-zag of the bureaucracy [which] was inevitably followed by a turn to the right.” He also mentions that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union established the Society of Militant Atheists which published a journal: The Atheist.
In 1983 Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) described his credentials thus:
“I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval.”
We therefore, come to Solzhenitsyn’s conclusion from his Templeton Address, Men Have Forgotten God :
“It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that ‘revolution must necessarily begin with atheism’. That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot …
“But there is something they did not expect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today people are sent to the labor camps for their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells—they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia. It is true that millions of our countrymen have been corrupted and spiritually devastated by an officially imposed atheism, yet there remain many millions of believers: it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out, but, as is always the case in times of persecution and suffering, the awareness of God in my country has attained great acuteness and profundity …
“The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short lived value. It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system …
“Western societies are losing more and more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to atheism …
“Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society …
“All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek it in vain.”
‘All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek it in vain.’—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The best response that atheists have been able to muster against the logical, ideological and historical correlation between atheism and Communism is to state that since atheism is merely a lack of belief in god(s) it does nothing, inspires nothing and is therefore, responsible for nothing. This is either the greatest scholarly hoax since The Jesus Seminar or the utter bankruptcy of atheist activists’ attempts to play on the ignorance of history of their adherents. Firstly, this is only one, conveniently self-serving, definition of “atheism”. Secondly, even granting the lack of belief in god(s) interpretation of atheism we note that this makes atheism a blank canvas upon which each atheist, Communist leader or not, can paint a particular worldview of their choosing and completely unrestrained by any god(s).
Other atheists actually make reference to higher population levels and sophisticated weaponry in explaining away the fact that the most secular century in human history was also the bloodiest. That there are merely more people to murder is certainly a fascinating excuse as bloodthirsty regimes have never been at a loss for victims. That sophisticated weaponry is to be blamed means that atheists are blaming scientists/engineers for inventing ever more efficient ways of committing mass murder. However, this pseudo-counterargument does not take into consideration that one of the unique features of Communist regimes was that millions upon millions of their comrades where not killed whilst fighting wars but were systematically murdered by their own leaders. And this was often carried out by very primitive means and employing very rudimentary weapons: starvation, lack of healthcare and executions by torture and single bullets fired from rifles or even machine guns does not need sophisticated weaponry.
Vox Day notes:
“Apparently it was just an amazing coincidence that every Communist of historical note publicly declared his atheism … .there have been twenty-eight countries in world history that can be confirmed to have been ruled by regimes with avowed atheists at the helm … These twenty-eight historical regimes have been ruled by eighty-nine atheists, of whom more than half have engaged in democidal acts of the sort committed by Stalin and Mao … .
“The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists, three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war, and individual crime in the entire twentieth century combined.
“The historical record of collective atheism is thus 182,716 times worse on an annual basis than Christianity’s worst and most infamous misdeed, the Spanish Inquisition. It is not only Stalin and Mao who were so murderously inclined, they were merely the worst of the whole Hell-bound lot. For every Pol Pot whose infamous name is still spoken with horror today, there was a Mengistu, a Bierut, and a Choibalsan, godless men whose names are now forgotten everywhere but in the lands they once ruled with a red hand.
“Is a 58 percent chance that an atheist leader will murder a noticeable percentage of the population over which he rules sufficient evidence that atheism does, in fact, provide a systematic influence to do bad things? If that is not deemed to be conclusive, how about the fact that the average atheist crime against humanity is 18.3 million percent worse than the very worst depredation committed by Christians, even though atheists have had less than one-twentieth the number of opportunities with which to commit them. If one considers the statistically significant size of the historical atheist set and contrasts it with the fact that not one in a thousand religious leaders have committed similarly large-scale atrocities, it is impossible to conclude otherwise, even if we do not yet understand exactly why this should be the case. Once might be an accident, even twice could be coincidence, but fifty-two incidents in ninety years reeks of causation!”
