Devil and Karl Marx

[Skull]

One of Paul Kengor's great books, came out last year.  Not only was Marx personally a thug & brute, but seemed to actually like Evil.  The book also covers other early Commies and their tactics of infiltration of nations.  Highly recommended!

From his Foreword:

Ronald Reagan described a communist as one who reads Karl Marx and an anti-communist as one who
understands Karl Marx. Pithy and true, at least at the time, but conservatives in the decades since Reagan
won the Cold War have begun to forget just what makes Marxism so wrong, and their failure to articulate
Marx’s fatal flaw has left an entire generation prey to the deadliest ideology in history, imperiling not only
minds but also souls.
The majority of young Americans today hold a favorable view of socialism, according to a 2018
Gallup poll. Socialism is on the rise more than three decades after conservatives thought it had died in the
rubble of the Berlin Wall. In just the past few years, admitted socialists have won elected office
throughout the country, from the local to the national level. They have succeeded because, while
conservatives have blabbered themselves hoarse denouncing the economic effects of socialism, they have
ignored the deeper spiritual questions that actually move men’s souls. That is why this book could not be
published at a more opportune time.
Karl Marx envisioned a merely material world in which religion is “the opium of the people” and
nothing matters but matter. Rather than question this false vision—indeed, our ability to question anything
at all dispels it—many conservatives have contented themselves to debate Marx on his own materialist
terms. “Socialism destroys economies,” they observe. Then, “Socialism distorts markets.” And finally,
“Socialism just doesn’t work.”
But whether or not a political system “works” depends on what it’s working toward. Socialism
strives to tear down traditional society. At that task, socialism has succeeded everywhere it has been
tried, at least for a time. The problem with socialism isn’t the inefficiency; it’s the evil. Marx did not set
out to tinker with markets and redistribute some wealth. He sought to radically transform society by
changing human nature. He hated religion because he opposed God, the author of human nature. He sided
with Satan, as he confessed in letters and ghoulish poetry quoted in these pages. Ex-communists such as
Arthur Koestler and Richard Wright came to call Marxism “the god that failed.” Karl Marx erred not
through mere miscalculation but through sin and heresy.

[Skull]

From Kengor's Preface:

“THE DANCE OF DEATH”
THE COMMUNIST KILLING MACHINE

The purpose of a preface is to briefly set the table for what is to follow. In a book on the evil that is
communism, that is a tall order. The blood banquet that is communist ideology could not be sufficiently
laid out in a vast hall of volumes let alone a mere preface. To adequately convey the array of victims of
communism is humanly impossible. I will restrict these opening observations to a few pages sketching
only generally “the dance of death” (to borrow from Marx’s strange poetry) orchestrated by the
handmaidens of this killer ideology.

It is important to start with a presentation of the numbers—the estimated number of victims. They
speak for themselves—that is, for communism. Any ideology with a trail of rot like this is not of God but
of the forces against God. It is not of God’s creation but a fallen angel’s anti-creation. It is not of the light
but of the dark.

No other political ideology has produced as much wretched poverty, rank repression, and sheer
violence. In country after country, implemented in varying forms across wide-ranging nationalities,
traditions, backgrounds, faiths, and ethnicities, communism coldly and consistently violated the full sweep
of most basic human rights, from property to press, from speech to assembly, from conscience to religion.
So restrictive was communism in the twentieth century that its implementers routinely refused to allow
citizens the right to exit (that is, escape) the destructive systems imposed within their borders. In some
cases, they erected walls to herd and fence in the “masses” they claimed to champion.

That bears repeating: so restrictive was communism that its advocates had to build walls—poured
with cement, topped with barbed wire, patrolled 24/7 by secret police with automatic weapons turned on
their own citizenry—to keep their people from fleeing. The ultimate symbols of that repression were the
Berlin Wall and the frozen people-zoo that was the Soviet Gulag. Even then, those are just two symbols of
the repression. We could point to so many more: the killing fields of Cambodia, Romania’s Pitesti prison,
the NKVD’s Lubyanka basement, Fidel’s and Che’s La Cabana execution house, and modern concentration
camps such as North Korea’s Camp 22 or China’s Laogai. Where to start, where to end?