If the proletariat wishes to attain communism, then it must do such and such, as does the carpenter in building a bench. And whatever is expedient from this point of view, this must be done. “Ethics” transforms itself for the proletariat, step by step, into simple and comprehensible rules of conduct necessary for communism and in point of fact, ceases to be ethics.
This very logic brought about Bukharin’s torture and death.
The same might be said of Leon Trotsky, who sneered in Their Morals and Ours in 1938:
Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ or Mohammed; whoever is not satisfied with eclectic hodge-podges must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character.
Trotsky also—rightly—pointed out that Christians often manipulate their own precepts to suit themselves. But, in the way of Marxists, he could not see that this was a criticism of their humanity, not of their Christianity. If they had stuck to their beliefs, they would have been unequivocally better than any Bolshevik. It was their failure to do so that rightly opened them to his derision. His old foe Stalin, employing the same moral code, thought it served the proletarian cause to have Trotsky murdered in 1940.
Those familiar with Marxist squabbles will know that there is no final court of appeal on such matters. “History,” written by the victors, is said to be the judge. This means that those who win are also right, which is and must be the core of all ad-hoc human-based moral codes.
Leaders Who Abuse Piety for Non-Christian Ends
The distinction between such regimes and those that have employed the church as a moral police force is enormous. One replaces God with itself. The other seeks to conscript God into its service and is happy to allow conscience to flourish in large areas of private life, because it is not interested in total power. We might cite the Presidency of George W. Bush, which combined noisy religiosity with ruthlessness, as a modern example of the second type. Something similar could be said about Britain’s Prime Minister Anthony Blair, who was ostentatiously pious while conniving with his intelligence services to manufacture pretexts for aggressive war. Such governments are repellent. The conscription of God into unjust wars does grave harm to faith.
But these leaders were—as they found out—limited in their actions by the very Christianity they exploited.
Both Mr. Blair’s New Labour Party and George W. Bush’s Republicans were gravely injured by their blasphemous attempt to enlist heaven in aggressive war. Mr. Bush also undoubtedly hurt Christianity in America by allying it to his war and his administration. The ultimate effects of this error on the part of many church leaders may take years to emerge, just as the European churches’ support for the First World War took decades to devastate those churches. But among younger people especially, I believe great damage has been done.
No such problems—no limits placed on them by faith—troubled the Soviet Communist authorities when they set out to crush and marginalize Islam in Soviet Central Asia, a few hundred miles north of Iraq. Stalin’s atheist conquest of this vast Musim region, confidently immoral and wholly secular, endured for decades. It succeeded in forcibly unveiling and educating women (compulsory mass burnings of headscarves were held in city squares) and driving the Imams of Islam into the farthest corners of their societies. Yet one does not hear the supporters of the “War on Terror” endorsing this action or using it as an example to be followed, even though it was far more successful in weakening Islam than anything they have ever done or ever will do. And why should it not have been? Without God, many more actions are possible than are permitted in a Godly order. Atheism is a license for ruthlessness, and it appeals to the ruthless.
The Dangerous Intolerance of Supposedly Enlightened Atheists
Is this ruthlessness to be directed only against Islam? It seems not. As I will show, some of the arguments of atheists also lead them into a dangerous intolerance of Christian moral opinions and of the Christian education of children, which does not sit well with their self-image as apostles of enlightenment and liberty. Like all foes of liberty, they are all for it except when they are really, really against it. This leads them to say some very unpleasant and dangerous things. It is in these practical and logical consequences of their thinking that the true nature of their campaign—which some of its partisans perhaps conceal from themselves or simply do not know—becomes clear.
I hope and pray that they (especially my brother) will one day choose differently, and I would be pleased if the case I make here helps them to do so. But I think it important for my opponents in this debate to recognize that it is a choice. The great metaphor of the Light of the World, standing at the door and knocking for admission, remains as true as it always was. In Holman Hunt’s painting, there is no handle on Christ’s side of the door. There never has been. There never will be.
But the new brand of militant atheism seems anxious to insist that there is no such choice. It adopts a mocking and high-handed tone of certainty, sneers at its Christian opponents, and states, or implies, that they must be stupid. This style of attack conforms to the irreverent spirit of the age and so is not very carefully examined. It is not widely recognized that secularism is a fundamentally political movement, which seeks to remove the remaining Christian restraints on power and the remaining traces of Christian moral law in the civil and criminal codes of the Western nations. It campaigns with increasing energy against the existence of specifically Christian state schools, not least because such schools are usually superior to their secular equivalents. It employs the cause of “equality” among sexual orientations to accomplish this, allocating the privileges of heterosexual marriage to homosexual civil partnership (and by implication, unmarried heterosexual couples) and so making them cease to be privileges. It makes it impossible for Christian churches to operate adoption societies, despite their effectiveness in this task, because it is no longer lawful for them to “discriminate” against homosexual couples who wish to adopt. It harasses and persecutes government employees who do not wish, on religious grounds, to solemnize homosexual unions. It compels the keepers of guest houses to welcome homosexual couples beneath their roofs, regardless of any moral objections they may have. It even punishes hospital nurses for offering to pray for their patients. All these things have taken place in Great Britain in recent years.
Secularism disingenuously disguises this restless reformism as a desire to be “left alone” by the religious. The religious would in fact happily leave atheists alone if not constantly under pressure to adapt their actions to atheist norms.
What is the real significance of this new and energetic movement? Is this something entirely new? Or is it something quite old, advancing under a new banner? Let us look further at the revealing fact of its reluctance to recognize the atheist elements of Communism.
Part 3
The League of The Militant Godless
Introduction
I promised earlier in the book that I would explain in more detail why I think it is absurd for my anti-theist brother to insist that the cruelty of Communist anti-theist regimes does not reflect badly on his case. After all, Soviet Communism used the same language, treasured the same hopes, and appealed to the same constituency as Western atheism does today.
Soviet power was, as it was intended to be, the opposite of faith in God. It was faith in the greatness of humanity and in the perfectibility of human society. The atheists cannot honestly disown it.
My brother Christopher suggests that Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union was in fact a religious state. The specifically anti-religious character of the Soviet system under Stalin makes such a claim nonsensical.
The chapters that follow provide a detailed response to this argument. They constitute the foundation of the answer to my brother’s position. They are based on the most important direct experience of my lif
e. When you have finished reading these chapters, I hope you will understand and share the urgency I feel about this matter.
CHAPTER 12
Fake Miracles and Grotesque Relics
“Set thou an ungodly man to be ruler over him.”
(THE 109TH PSALM)
How the materialists like to jeer at the naïve faith of the peasant, fooled by relics, faith healers, and the general hocus-pocus of some branches of Christianity. As I am unmoved by alleged pieces of the True Cross or snippets of St. Bridget’s fingernail, vials of liquefying blood, or mysterious cures at holy wells, this does not strike at the heart of my faith, though I do know people who take such things perfectly seriously, and I suspect—in spite of my robust English Protestantism—that miraculous healing does sometimes take place even in this skeptical age.
But the peasant’s willingness to believe in such fancies is as nothing to the materialist intellectual’s gullible open-mouthed willingness to believe anything. The biggest fake miracle staged in human history is the claim that Soviet Russia was a new civilization of equality, peace, love, truth, science, and progress. Everyone now knows that it was a prison, a slum, a return to primitive barbarism, a kingdom of lies where scientists and doctors feared offending the secret police, and that its elite were corrupt and lived in secret luxury. I saw this myself firsthand when I lived there.
Yet it was the clever people, those who prided themselves on being unencumbered with superstition, those who viewed religion as a feature of the childhood of humanity, who fell for this swindle in the tens of thousands. The more educated and enlightened they were (by their own judgment, anyway), the more likely they were to be fooled. Some were deceived at a distance. Some were deceived after going there and somehow failing to notice what was going on. One correspondent of the New York Times, Walter Duranty, denied the existence of the great Ukrainian famine of 1932 – 33 even though he knew, directly and personally, that it was taking place. Others, who must have had their suspicions, willingly believed those denials and haughtily disbelieved truthful accounts of the misery that were published elsewhere by honest men and doubters of the Soviet miracle.
Denial of the existence of actual starvation, murder, persecution, and injustice seems to me to be much more distressing than believing that a wooden image of the Virgin Mary moved, when it did not, or seeing the face of Christ in a tree-stump, where it is not. Faith in the myth of progress can be just as strong as faith in God, though not necessarily so kind in its effects. At least the belief in miracles sometimes produces genuine cures. Lying about Leninism only abets murder and oppression.
A Mass of Self-Deceiving Lies
Any student of gullibility among the intelligent and worldly should study first of all the work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb on the Soviet Union. Their perfectly enormous book Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? purports to be a respectable and carefully researched account of the USSR under Stalin. Its picture of a rational paradise of human progress is so wholly and completely false and can now be shown to be so at every turn by libraries full of records and by mountains of human skulls. Yet, on publication in the late 1930s it was generally greeted as a respectable work of scholarship and research. It is a sore shame that its authors did not live to see their work thoroughly shown up for what it was, a mass of self-deceiving lies. These lies served a filthy despotism, but perhaps more importantly encouraged the rational, materialist intellectuals of free nations in dangerous delusions, which still trouble us.
In realizing this, we need to remember that the Webbs were not themselves revolutionary Marxists or even former Trotskyists, but gentle Fabian social democrats, believers in lawful, democratic process, in the inevitability of gradualism, honorable in their personal dealings, honest according to their own lights. They were kind to their domestic servants, modest in their lives, studious, responsible, and serious, by no means stupid or ill-educated or personally callous. Nevertheless, thanks to their utopian opinions, they persuaded themselves (for instance) that the 1937 Moscow show trials were genuine criminal prosecutions. How could they have done that? These were state-sponsored stage-plays, transparently fictional. During these exhibitions, intelligent, educated men, formerly loyal servants of the Soviet regime, made unhinged confessions—after months of torture—to incredible catalogues of sabotage and conspiracy. Much of this was easily proved false at the time. All of it is now known to be untrue. The Webbs also once pronounced that the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, an assembly of lawless toadies and gangsters shivering in fear of the despot Stalin, “may not unfairly be regarded as corresponding to the [British] House of Commons.” The House of Commons has suffered a severe loss of reputation in the years since this was written, but even so, this is a horrible slander on it.
The Webbs’ successors live on today and share many of their attitudes, though they lack a proper fatherland to admire, to tell lies for, or to make fools of themselves over. Cuba, it is true, still just serves for some of them, and the strange continuing cult of Fidel Castro, in defiance of all facts, gives us a faint hint of what the Soviet delusion must have been like when it ruled the minds of so many. The reverence for the tyrant (invariably referred to as “Fidel,” as if a personal friend) and the misrepresentation of his impoverished prison island as a paragon of medical and social achievement are examples of the power of self-deception interesting to any psychologist. But the wretched truth is too widely known, and Cuba is plainly sinking into the past, not striding into the future. China, ludicrously praised by gullible Westerners under the worst years of Mao Zedong, is now plainly a despotism and a police state. But because it is not a utopian despotism, foreign radicals are no longer willing to defend it. Regrettably, they see no need to apologize for their past praise, hoping that it will be forgotten.
Most of the people who would have apologized for Stalin in his day have now found other causes—the cultural and sexual revolution, campaigns to tax the Western poor to provide money for Africa’s rich, and above all, the intolerant and puritan secular fundamentalism that gathers around the belief in manmade global warming. Others are devotees of the idea that the introduction of Western democracy into the Muslim world is possible. These beliefs allow their supporters to feel superior to others and to pursue a heaven on earth whose righteousness reflects on them. It is quite dangerous to challenge them, even though it is not dangerous at all to challenge Christianity or faith as a whole. The danger is not usually melodramatic or fatal, though it sometimes is. The climate change zealots (for example) issue no Fatwas, order no assassinations, and do not drag filmmakers from their bicycles and stab and behead them. They simply seek to drive their opponents from public debate by scorn, misrepresentation, and smears.
One of the fiercest orthodoxies of modern times was for a short while the state-sponsored cult of regime change that led to the Iraq invasion. The British weapons scientist David Kelly dared to cast doubt on the official justification for war in a confidential meeting with a journalist. Having been detected, he was exposed to interrogation and humiliation in public and soon afterward killed himself, presumably after intolerable pressure of some kind was put on him. This is perhaps the most frightening example of modern secular intolerance. But the facts later refuted that cult so utterly that—too late, alas, for Dr. Kelly and thousands of victims of the war—it lost its state-derived power to punish and marginalize.
The Homeless Utopians
The twenty-first-century successors of the Webbs can best be described as Homeless Utopians. They are sure there is no heaven, and they are coming to fear that there may be no earthly paradise either. But they continue, despite all previous failures, to hope for one. It may not offer them any great delights, but their faith enables them to feel superior to their neighbors. Holding tightly to the idea that what science cannot explain does not need explaining, they are still as ready as their fellow-traveling forebears were to slander the kingdom of heaven while mistakenly praising the fanciful utopia
s of man. They also like to believe that reason is all on their side.
The Webbs do us the great favor of explaining why people of this kind have always—at least in the years since the French Revolution—been so attracted to utopian states and to utopian movements and leaders. They declare that “it is exactly the explicit denial of the intervention of any God, or indeed of any will other than human will [my italics] in the universe, that has attracted to Soviet Communism, the sympathies of many intellectuals, and especially of scientists in civilised countries.”
The Cult of “Science” in the USSR
The Webbs did express some very mild doubts about the Soviet system, but it is clear from their tone that they were exhilarated and inspired by explicit denial of God. It swept away one of the great obstacles they themselves faced in their own country. They plainly envied the Bolsheviks the freedom this gave them. Consider this approving reference to the thoughts of Lenin—the absolute atheist, lover of violence, and begetter of the 1917 putsch—that brought the Russian Bolsheviks to power:
The Rage Against God Page 13