From Zeitgeist to Poltergeist, Part 8 of 13

life is only preserved because other living things perish through struggle.In this struggle, the stronger, the more able,

win, while the less able, the weak, lose

-Adolf Hitler 1

What Smith and Dawkins Did Not Bother Mentioning
Here I will provide a partial list of certain facts that both Richard Smith and Richard Dawkins did not bother mentioning in their comments of Hitler, Christianity and the Holocaust.

One of the very many things not mentioned by neither Richard Smith nor Richard Dawkins is just how influenced Hitler was by the concept of social Darwinism and Herbert Spencer’s concept of “survival of the fittest” (which Darwin preferred over his own term “natural selection”).
The only mention that Richard Dawkins makes of anything that comes close to assigning Darwinian-evolution inspiration to Stalin or Hitler is one sentence referencing the “unscientific eugenics theory.”2 Incidentally, Richard Dawkins seeks to pave the way for neo-eugenics (From the Afterword).

Also not mentioned was H. G. Wells’ vision of a racist utopia, New Republic (1917):

And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black?…the yellow man?…the Jew?…those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go….And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favor the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity-beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds….And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness…is death….The men of the New Republic…will have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while.

This is the same H. G. Wells who upon meeting Joseph Stalin in 1934 described him as “candid, fair, and honest,” and noted that “no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him.”3

Not one single mention of Freidrich Nietzsche’s visions of ubermensch-supermen and the death of God. While it has never been reported that Hitler handed his henchmen copies of the Bible it has been reported that he did hand them the works of Nietzsche. “Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and published his veneration for the philosopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man.”4

A handsomely bound copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra, now become a Bible for the goose-stepping, straight arm-saluting adolescents of Hitler-Jugend, had been solemnly placed, alongside Mein Kampf and Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, in the vault of the Tannenberg-Memorial (commemorating the German’s decisive victory over the Russians in the Autumn of 1914) as one of the three ideological pillars of German’s Third Reich.5

The SS also studied the Bhagavad Gita and the Japanese Samurai (Bushido). “Tibetan Buddhism was particularly popular among the SS.”6 Moreover, the race and nationalism based National Reich Church decreed that “On the altars there must be nothing but ‘Mein Kampf’, which is to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book, and to the left of the altar a sword” (Encyclopedia Database).

Not one mention of those who had previously attempted to construct secular religions based on humanism, reason, science and enlightenment such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Auguste Comte (1798-1857).

No mention of Thomas Malthus’s “An Essay on The Principles of Population” (which influenced Charles Darwin, amongst others).

No mention of Francis Galton the originator of the “science” of eugenics.

No mention of Joseph Gobineau’s “Essays on The Inequality of The Human Races” with his characterization of the Aryan race as, “A branch of the white race which had originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength.” Nor any mention of the German “Gobineau Associations.”

No mention of “The Volkisch Movement” with its exaltation of nationalism and racial purity.

No mention of Madame Blavatsky’s “Theosophical Society” with its focus on promoting the study of Aryan and other Eastern literatures, religions, and sciences. They also published the anti-Semitic book “The Hebrew Talisman.”

No mention of Friedrich Eckstein’s Viennese branch of the Theosophical Society.

No mention of Rudolf Steiner’s “Anthroposophical Society.”

No mention of Guido von List’s “Arisophy” with its belief in a pantheism-like god-energy that found perfect expression in blond haired blue eyed Aryans and thus, lent support to eugenics.

No mention of Herbert Reichstein who saw Hitler as a god ordained establisher of the occult.

No mention of the astrologer Wilhelm Wulff whom SS Reich Commander Heinrich Himmler consulted. Nor that Himmler held to the Buddhist doctrine of Karma and incarnation.

No mention of F. Wehrmann who formed the “Swastika Circle” which was committed to exterminating inferior races.

No mention of Lanz von Liebenfeld’s “Theozoology” and its influential occultism and anti-clerical books.

No mention of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” (1899) and its combination of eugenics and occultism. The Kaiser ordered this work to be read by all army officers.

No mention of Mathilde von Kemnitz’s antichristian “German God-Knowledge.” She once visited Hitler in prison and lectured to the Nazi Party Congress on “religion” in 1924.

No mention of the Theosophist Yuliana Glinka who may have inspired the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory known as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” In any case, Hitler was highly influenced by this conspiracy theory.

No mention of Grigori Bostunitsch who came to be known as Schwartz-Bostunitch when he joined the SS (he became an SS colonel). He concocted a mixture of occultism and anti-Semitism.

No mention of Alfred Rosenberg’s “The Myth of the Twentieth Century,” which to Nazism was considered second in importance only to Hitler’s own “Mein Kampf” and which referred to the Old Testament as “stories of pimps and cattle traders.” A phrase later popularized by “German Christian” Nazi supporter, Reinhold Krause. Rosenberg was also influenced by the “The Protocols” and mixed nationalist and occultism. While Hitler was in prison he appointed him as party leader and later appointed him as official Nazi party philosopher.

No mention of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), the father of “Liberal Protestantism,” who wrote that “belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of religion without God, and it would be pure contemplation of the universe.”7 It may be of interest to note that Hitler stated, “When understanding of the universe has become widespread…Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.” 8

No mention of Richard Wagner whose German nationalism was joined with the concepts of Gobineau and Chamberlain and whose works Hitler greatly admired.

No mention of Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), concocter of the “Documentary Hypothesis” (upon which Richard Dawkins appears to rely, see essay here). “Solomon Schechter, the founder of Conservative Judaism, stated his concerns in a 1903 seminary address titled ‘Higher Criticism-Higher Anti-Semitism.’ Schechter believed that the Documentary Hypothesis would lead to an attack on Judaism and ultimately an assault on the Jewish people. Jewish historian Marc Zvi Brettler summarized Schechter’s comments, which in hindsight seem rather prophetic: [He] equated Wellhausen’s approach with ‘professional and imperial anti-Semitism,’ calling it an ‘intellectual persecution’ of Judaism.9 In The History of Israel and Judah, Wellhausen predicted that Judaism and the Jewish people would become extinct: The…emancipation [i.e. assimilation] of the Jews must inevitably lead to the extinction of Judaism wherever the process is extended beyond the political to the social sphere. For the accomplishment of this centuries may be required.10“11

No mention of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s second in command, and an adherent of “Anthroposophy.”

No mention of Karl Wiligut, Himmler’s mythology advisor, and member of the “Thule.”

No mention of F. Krohn, member of the “Thule” and the “Deutschen Arbeiterpartie” the “German Workers’ Party.” He compiled a collection of books for the Nazi party, “Volkischer” books from which Hitler read.

No mention of Lanz von Liebenfeld’s “Ostara” which was read by Hitler.

No mention of Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) who though that retaining the Jew’s Old Testament was a mistake, “to conserve it after the nineteenth century as a canonical text in Protestantism, was the result of a religious and ecclesiastical paralysis.”12

No mention of Gottfried Feder, another member of the “Thule,” whom Hitler praised in “Mein Kampf” and who formulated the program of the Nazi Party.

No mention of “Thule” member Dietrich Eckart who influence Hitler’s Nazism.

No mention of Reich Bishop Ludwig Muller, who in 1934 stated, “We must emphasize with all decisiveness that Christianity did not grow out of Judaism but developed in opposition to Judaism. When we speak of Christianity and Judaism today, the two in their most fundamental essence stand in glaring contrast to one another. There is no bond between them, rather the sharpest opposition.”13

Not one mention of the Norse and Aryan mythology which influenced Nazism.

No mention of SS colonel Walther WW&#bc;st who based the concept of a Nazi religion on Vedic and Buddhist writings.

No mention of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, SS captain and founder of the “German Faith Movement,” who based his vision of the Nazi war machine on the Bhagavad Gita and Buddhist works.

No mention of SS brigadier Karl Maria Wiligut who claimed to work with the Tibetan Lamaist monasteries.

No mention of Ernst Schafer and Bruno Beger who were SS Tibetan researchers who lead the SS Tibet expedition and who were highly influenced by the concepts of war in Tibetan Buddhism.

No mention of Karl Haushofer, who based Nazism on Shinto state fascism.

No mention of Eugen Herrigel and Karlfried DD&#bc;rckheim who taught Zen Buddhism as a corollary between Nazism and Zen philosophy.

No mention of Julius Evola, who based his fascist philosophy on Buddhist and Tantric concepts.

No mention of Otto Rahn, SS mystic, who was heavily influenced by Buddhism.

No mention of Jean Marques-Riviere, Head of the French secret police who collaborator with the SS and who was heavily influenced by Tibetan Kalachakra Tantra.

No mention of Jacques Bergier, Louis Pauwels and Trevor Ravenscroft, who conceived the “Nazi mysteries” and drew correlations between Nazism and Indo-Tibetan Shambhala myths.

No mention of Wilhelm Landig, Rudolf J. Mund and Jan van Helsing who correlated Nazism with Tibetan – Mongolian Lamaism and stated that the esoteric teachings of Nazism both have their source in Atlantis.

No mention of Miguel Serrano who was influenced by Tantric works and considered Hitler to be an avatar of Krishna-Vishnu.

No mention of Eugen Herrigel and Karlfried Durckheim, who correlated Zen Buddhism and Nazism.

Lastly, no mention of a litany of philosophers who influenced Hitler which I quote from Joe Keysor who has conducted an survey of these and beginning with a reference to H. S. Chamberlain (1855-1927) as:

the racist anti-Semitic philosopher who endorsed Hitler and had a lot in common with him…wrote at length on the Jewish threat. His views were close or identical in many ways to those of his father-in-law, Richard Wagner [(1813-1883) who]…had a deep hatred of Jews, saw them as the source of Germany’s social ills, and is claimed by many to have had a deep influence on Hitler through his anti-Semitic writings….[Chamberlain] wrote a book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (published in 1899), that contained many parallels to Hitler’s thought (not only Aryan supremacy, but also anti-Semitic phobias…). He fervently embraced Hitler and identified him as the coming savior of Germany when the latter was still a minor figure with no apparent chance of success….the 25 points of the Nazi party platform were identical to Wagner’s agenda….

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)…expressed the idea that the Jews wanted to obey God only for the sake of the blessing she would give them, for material benefit…they were ‘materialistic,’ indifferent to higher philosophical truths, and selfishly sought nothing but their own earthly advantage. This became a standard theme of later Folkish anti-Semites and of the Nazis as well. Hitler stressed it in Mein Kampf [ vol. 1chapt. 11, ‘Nation and Race’]….

It has been asserted that Kant set the stage for modern secular anti-Semitism…Kant’s fundamental antinomy (free enlightened humanity versus Jews enslaved to materialism) provided the framework for future anti-Semites, notably the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and the musician Richard Wagner. Since Wagner in particular was a cultural hero for Adolf Hitler, Kant’s own anti-Semitism can be seen as having a far-reaching effect….

If someone who lived 400 years before Hitler and wrote in the Protestant Reformation could have a great influence, or if someone who lived many centuries before in Roman Palestine could have an influence, could someone who died less than a century before Hitler was born also have an influence? Luther made negative comments about Jews-so did Kant. Hitler used the latter’s reasoning, not the former’s…
‘Kant was a particular favorite among academic philosophers of the Third Reich!’ This seems rather improbable, yet at his trial Adolf Eichmann made some comments about Kant that indicate how this might have been possible. Discussing Kant’s ethics, Eichmann said ‘for someone like myself fit is not possible to understand all of the subject of Kant completely; instead, I only took from these writings what I could understand, and what my imagination could somehow grasp’…

[French philosopher and champion of the Enlightenment; Voltaire (1694-1778)] His views of Jews were less enlightened: ‘They are all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and The Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not someday become deadly to the human race.’ Voltaire went on to condemn Jews for ‘their stubbornness, their new superstitions, and their hallowed usury.’ Addressing the Jews directly, Voltaire wrote, ‘You have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct, and in barbarism. You deserve to be punished, for this is your destiny’….

Gobineau (1816-1882), a Frenchman, has been called the father of modern racism. His belief that racial purity was essential to the survival of a people, that pure races rose and dominated while impure races decayed and fell, was popular in Germany and became central to the Folkish movement. It was also a theme Hitler stressed in Mein Kampf and was basic to his ‘philosophy’…historian Paul Johnson states that just as Marx presented a theory of history driven by material, economic forces, so Hitler presented a theory of history driven by racial conflict (p. 296). He doesn’t mention the importance of Gobineau, who articulated this idea long before Hitler. This is not to deny significant differences between Gobineau and later German racists – Gobineau was not anti-Semitic, for example. Lenin also modified Marx’s ideas, but the connection is still indisputably there…

Dietrich Eckart, known by historians to have had a significant influence on the young Hitler, wrote ‘The Jew has no sense of the experience of what is eternal or of the need of immortality. Ergo: he has no soul, and is therefore the opposite pole of the Germans, who are always striving for something higher. They are as light is to darkness’…

In The Antichrist at any rate, Nietzsche described Jews as bloodsuckers and vampires who destroyed Roman civilization through their invention of Christianity. He found some good qualities in the warlike early Hebrews (hence a few positive comments about Jews that Nietzsche’s defenders emphasize), but saw later biblical Judaism as a traudulent invention of the priests. He identified Judaism as the source of Christianity which he loathed, and explicitly equated Jews with Christians. The Antichrist, which not only reveals a flaming hatred of Jews but also advocates the extermination of the weak and glorifies pitiless cruelty as a virtue, has been consistently misrepresented by Nietzsche’s disciples…

Georg von Schonerer (1842-1921) was the leader of the Austrian Pan-Germans, a racist and anti-Semitic organization that has been identified as an immediate ancestor of the Nazi party. Hitler commended von Schonerer for his correct understanding of the Jewish question, but criticized him for his inability to connect with the masses and for his lack of effectiveness as a political leader [vol. I chapt. 3, ‘General Political Considerations Based on my Vienna Period’].
Von Schonerer had an ‘Away from Rome’ policy, and Hitler’s comments on this shed light on his own policy toward the churches. Hitler stated that von Schonerer’s policy served only to alienate large numbers of people and cost him much valuable political support. Moreover, von Schonerer’s attacks on Rome did not harm the church in the least but only intensified the devotion of its followers. It was much better, Hitler stated, to focus on a single enemy and thus draw supporters from different camps. The relevance of this to Hitler’s policy of trying to limit the churches without attacking them head on does not need to be elaborated on.”14

From Zeitgeist to Poltergeist, Part 9 of 13

“National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable”
-Martin Borman, Head of the Nazi Chancellery1

The Topics Covered in This Essay Are As Follows:
Anti-Christian Nazism

Anti-Christian Nazism
Albert Einstein:

“Being a lover of freedom, when the (Nazi) revolution came, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks…Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.”2

Joe Keysor wrote:

“There is another concept of God – Martin Bormann’s:
When we National Socialists speak of a belief in God, we do not understand by God, like naive Christians…a human-type being, who sits around somewhere in space…The force of natural law, with which all these innumerable planets move in the universe, we call the Almighty or God. The claim that this world force is concerned about the fate of every single being, of every smallest earth bacilIus, or can be influenced by so called prayers or other astonishing things, is based on a proper dose of naivety or alternatively on a commercial shamelessness…The more accurately we recognize and observe the laws of nature and of life, the more we adhere to them, so much the more do we conform to the will of the Almighty….”3

Joe Keysor further notes,

“It is commonly assumed that since Germany was a fundamentally Christian culture, any references by Hitler to ‘God’ should be understood in that context. This mistake derives from three sources: (a) eagerness to discredit Christianity; (b) ignorance of German cultural history; and (c) ignorance of biblical Christianity.”4

Also,

“Wagner thought that Christianity had originated in India, and sought-like Chamberlain-to purify it of its Jewish corruptions. Needless to say, when he was finished with his ‘purifications,’ Christ was nothing more than a philosophical symbol of dying to self, ‘divine’ in a limited sense only. The reader may recall Hitler’s attempt to ‘purify’ the Bible in his page of study notes discussed in chapter I of this study. The extent to which Hitler mayor may not have read Wagner’s numerous writings is debated. Viereck, who unlike some read a lot of Wagner, sees strong evidence that Hitler not merely read Wagner but studied him and was deeply influenced by him….
It is one of the most important yet little-known aspects of modern German anti-Semitism, that it included hostility to the Jews for having introduced false concepts via Christianity. This can be seen in the writings of Haeckel, Wagner, and Chamberlin…[and] Nietzsche.”5

Joseph Goebbels had noted:

“The Pope has made a Christmas speech. Full of bitter, covert attacks against the Reich and National Socialism. All the forces of internationalism are against us. We must break them.”6 He also viewed the Vatican as the “spiritual competitor of Nazism.”7

Peter Reydt, “Nazism and the myth of the ‘master-race’” – Britain’s Channel Four Secret History documentary on “Hitler’s search for the Holy Grail”:

“Himmler set out to re-establish an ancient Aryan religion within Germany in opposition to Christianity, as a basis for Nazi ideology…On 10 March 1937, SS officers gathered in Munich to listen to a lecture by Professor Wust [Walter Wust, a leading expert on India], with the title ‘Mein Kampf as the mirror of the Aryan worldview’. In it, Wust claims a ‘similarity between the words of the FF&#bc;hrer and those of that other great Aryan personality, the Buddha…the basic idea of racial identity and the sacred concept of ancestral heritage.'”

See part 8 for more on this.

The Nazis planned “to capture and use church organization for their own purposes” and “to secure the elimination of Christian influences in the German church by legal or quasi legal means.”8

“Italian generals said that ‘no country can ask Italy, cradle of Christianity and law, to be associated with these (Nazi) acts.'”9

Baldur von Scvhirach (lead the group which became the “Hitler youth”), “the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement.”10

Claire Hulme and Dr. Michael Salter, The Nazi’s Persecution of Religion as a War Crime: The OSS’S Response Within the Nuremberg Trials Process (Humle is a current LLM research degree candidate at the University of Central Lancashire. LLB University of Central Lancashire. Slater is a Professor of Law, University of Central Lancashire. LLB Southampton University; Ph.D. University of Sheffield).


“Christian Churches were amongst the early victims of Nazi war criminality….

Throughout the period of National Socialist rule, the Nazis employed a combination of ‘lawful’ and criminal devices to persecute the Churches in a cynically opportunistic manner designed to minimise damage to their other interests…

The various Christian Churches were systematically cut off from effective communication with the people…

measures taken against the Christian Churches were an integral part of the National Socialist scheme of world conquest…

senior members of the Catholic Church had resisted Hitler’s policies by insisting – through their priests – on the essentially unchristian character of National Socialism. [Fabian Von] Schlabrendorff recalled that ‘quite a number of the lower clerics ended up in prison or in a concentration camp’11…

Through a series of incremental stages, this [totalitarian] system abolished the very distinction between the Nazi Party and the institutions of the German State and other public institutions within civil society, including the Churches, which could otherwise mediate or limit the Nazi’s political authority…planned ultimate destruction of the Christian Churches included a campaign of persecution of the Christian clergy together with ‘a large body of anti-Semitic and discriminatory laws’…
the SA [Sturmabteilungen: Stormtroopers] persecuted and destroyed Christian and Jewish institutions and other perceived enemies of the Nazi state as an integral part of a militaristic campaign…

The Nazi conspirators, by promoting beliefs and practices incompatible with Christian teaching, sought to subvert the influence of the Churches over the people and in particular over the youth of Germany. They avowed their aim to eliminate the Christian Churches in Germany and sought to substitute therefore Nazi institutions and Nazi beliefs and pursued a programme of persecution of priests, clergy and members of monastic orders whom they deemed opposed to their purposes and confiscated Church property…

This statement [a document dated 11-19-1945 containing statements by five German Generals] claims that the majority of the Army’s officer corps rejected and opposed many of the Nazi’s domestic policies as ‘unworthy of the German nation,’ including all forms of religious persecution. The Nazi’s leadership undertook such persecution with neither the advice nor the consent of the Army, who – in common with many Church leaders – represented one of the many semiautonomous institutions of German society that the Nazi regime had to subvert in order to fulfil [sic] its own political and genocidal programs…

the persecution of the Churches is represented as one part of a wider unacceptable programme involving Hitler’s policies on Jews, the indoctrination of youth…

domestic atrocities against the Churches, Jews and others civilians committed from 1933 onwards…Baldur von Schirach, the Hitler Youth Leader…had, as Gauleiter of Vienna, initiated wartime measures persecuting the Churches in Austria, administered slave labor programmes and deported remaining Viennese Jews.”

Alfred Rosenberg (Nazi ideologue, German politician, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories and prominent member of the neo-pagan Thule Society) “drew up a thirty-point program for a new ‘National Reich Church’, which he hoped could replace Christianity entirely following victory in the war” (Encyclopedia Database). Following are some of his 30 points which make is undeniably clear that the Nazi plan was to supplant the Christian church by replacing the Bible, Christian symbolism and rituals with a race and nation centered focus. Whoever the “God” which this church served was, one thing is undeniable, it was certainly not the Biblical God of the Judeo-Christian Bible.

“The National Reich’s Church of Germany categorically claims the exclusive right and the exclusive power to control all churches within the borders of the Reich; it declares these to be national churches

The German people must not serve the National Reich Church. The National Reich Church is absolutely and exclusively in the service of but one doctrine: race and nation

…The Church will do everything within its power to secure the adherence of every German soul. Other churches or similar communities and unions particularly such as are under international control or management cannot and shall not be tolerated in Germany.

The National Reich Church is determined to exterminate irrevocably and by every means the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800.

The National Reich Church has no scribes, pastors, chaplains or priests but National Reich orators are to speak in them…National Reich Church orators may never be those who today emphasize with all tricks and cunning verbally and in writing the necessity of maintaining and teaching of Christianity in Germany…National Reich Church orators hold office, government officials under Civil Service rules.

The National Reich Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany as well as the publication of Sunday papers, pamphlets, publications and books of a religious nature. The National Reich Church has to take severe measures in order to prevent the Bible and other Christian publications being imported into Germany. The National Reich Church declares that to it, and therefore to the German nation, it has been decided that the Fuhrer’s ‘Mein Kampf’ is the greatest of all documents. It is conscious that this book contains and embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation. The National Reich Church has made it its sacred duty to use all its energy to popularize the coeternal ‘Mein Kampf’ and to let every German live and complete his life according to this book. The National Reich Church will clear away from its altars all crucifixes, Bibles and pictures of Saints. On the altars there must be nothing but ‘Mein Kampf’, which is to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book, and to the left of the altar a sword.

The National Reich Church does not acknowledge forgiveness of sins. It represents the standpoint which it will always proclaim that a sin once committed will be ruthlessly punished by the honorable and indestructible laws of nature and punishment will follow during the sinner’s lifetime.

The National Reich Church repudiates the christening of German children…abolishes confirmation and religious education as well as the communion the religious preparation for the communion…The marriage ceremony of German men and women will consist of taking an oath of faithfulness and placing the right hand on the sword…The National Reich Church rejects the customary day of prayer and atonement

On the day of its foundation, the Christian cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels within the Reich and its colonies and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol of Germany the ‘Hakenkreuz’ (swastika).”

Heinrich Himmler wrote,

“I am to prepare a new Nazi religion. I am to draft the new Bible, the Bible of the faith …The Fuhrer has decided that, after the victory of the Third Reich, he will abolish Christianity throughout Great Germany, and establish the faith on its ruins. The latter will preserve the idea of God, but it will be very vague and indistinct. The Fuhrer will replace Christ as the savior of humanity. Thus, millions and millions of people will say only Hitler’s name in their prayers, and a hundred years from now nothing wi1l be known but the new religion, which will endure for centuries.”12

BBC News, “Nazi Trial Documents Made Public“:

“documents used as evidence in the Nuremberg war crimes trials…shows how the Nazis planned to supplant Christianity with a religion based on racial superiority…

The report, prepared by the Office of Strategic Services – a forerunner of the CIA – says: ‘Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked… complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion.’ ‘The best evidence now available as to the existence of an anti-Church plan is to be found in the systematic nature of the persecution itself,’ it said. ‘Different steps in that persecution, such as the campaign for the suppression of denominational and youth organisations [sic], the campaign against denominational schools, the defamation campaign against the clergy, started on the same day in the whole area of the Reich…and were supported by the entire regimented press, by Nazi Party meetings, by travelling party speakers.’

Project editor Julie Seltzer Mandel believes the first instalment [sic] presents a different perspective on Nazi persecution. ‘A lot of people will say, ‘I didn’t realize that they were trying to convert Christians to a Nazi philosophy’, Ms Mandel, a third year law student, told Philadelphia’s The Inquirer newspaper.
‘They wanted to eliminate Jews altogether, but they were also looking to eliminate Christianity.'”

Cornell Law Library, “Relationship of the German Churches to Hitler,” this document is Fabian Von Schlabrendorff’s memo to General William J. Donovan dated 25 October 1945. “The German Churches” referred to are the Catholic Church which “was politically represented by the Center-Party (Zentrumspartei), the Bavarian People’s Party (Bayerische Volkspartei) and the Christian Trade-Unions (Christliche Gewerkschaften)”:

“these three groups stood in opposition to Hitler from the beginning, the Catholic Church before 1933 found itself in quite an obvious enmity towards the Nazis. As for the Protestant Church, this was not true in the extent it was in the Catholic church. Because there are no politics in the Protestant church. Therefore it may be said that before 1933 there was no relationship, either of a friendly or of an enemy nature, between Hitler on the one hand and the two churches on the other hand…

Immediately after Hitler had seized the power, National Socialism showed itself as an ideology plainly opposed to Christianism. Only a minority among the princes of the Catholic Church like for example Bishop Berning from Osnabruck and later Cardinal Innitzer from Vienna tried to show a friendly attitude towards Hitler. The majority of the princes of the Catholic Church left no doubt in their declarations and pastoral letters that there was no bridge between Naziism and the Catholic Church. As the years went by, the attitude of the Catholic Church became ever clearer. The rejection of Hitler became more and more obvious. Because of the hierarchic organizations of the Catholic Church, the denunciation of Hitler was propagated by the majority of the Catholic clergy in the land. The result of this was the [sic] enmity towards Hitler was promulgated not only by the high clerics but was also carried to the masses by the low clerics. This decisive credit for this attitude ought to be given to Cardinal von Faulhaber from Munich and whose personal sermons branded Naziism as the enemy of Christendom…

quite a number of the lower clerics ended up in prison or in a concentration camp. Also in the political resistance movement did the representatives of the Catholic Church play an important role…

Joseph Muller [lawyer and political representative of the Archdiocese of Munich] had orders from the Catholic Church to negotiate with representatives of the Protestant Church in order to harmonize their measures in the struggle against Hitler…

The Protestant Church in Germany does not have hierarchic but a democratic constitution…That is why the struggle of the Protestant Church against Hitler became much more difficult. If it was the clerics that bore the brunt of the struggle within the Catholic Church it was the congregation which became the nest of resistance within the Protestant Church…

All these men [various Protestant ministers] had taken up the fight against Hitler in speeches and in writings. But the majority of them was [sic] silenced by being put into the concentration camp or by being prohibited to speak or write. That did not prevent their followers from continuing the struggle…In spite of all prohibitions the Protestant Church…created an organization which helped to save the life of thousands of Jews…

Dietrich Bonhoffer…contacted the Protestant churches in Europe outside of Germany, informed them about the events in Germany and so created a common bond between resistance movements in Germany and Hitler’s enemies outside of Germany…He was later executed…

The resistance movement of the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Germany had the following:A. The Churches have furnished the political resistance movement with spiritual and religious weapons.B. The Churches have carried the idea of the resistance against Hitler into the large masses of the people. Many ministers of both churches have become martyrs because of their resistance.

C. The Churches, thru their connections with foreign countries, have informed the world of the events that took place in Germany and have constantly kept contact with non-German resistance-groups.”

Martin Borman, head of the Nazi Chancellery, wrote the following in a publication entitled, “Relationship of National Socialism and Christianity”:

“National Socialist and Christian concepts are irreconcilable. Our National Socialist ideology is far loftier than the concepts of Christianity, which, in their essential points, have been taken over from Jewry. For this reason also, we do not need Christianity. If, therefore, in the future our youth learns nothing more of this Christianity, whose doctrines are far below ours, Christianity will disappear by itself. It follows from the irreconcilability of National Socialist and Christian concepts that a strengthening of existing confessions and every demand of originating Christian confessions is to be rejected by us. A differentiation between the various Christian confessions is not to be made here. For this reason, also, the thought of an erection of an Evangelical National Church by merger of the various Evangelical churches has been definitely given up, because the Evangelical Church is just as inimicable to us as the Catholic Church. Any strengthening of the Evangelical Church would merely react against us.”

“For the first time in German history, the Fuehrer consciously and completely has the leadership of the people in his own hand. With the Party, its components, and attached units, the Fuehrer has created for himself, and thereby the German Reich leadership, an instrument which makes him independent of the Church. All influences which might impair or damage the leadership of the people exercised by the Fuehrer, with the help of the NSDAP, must be eliminated. More and more the people must be separated from the churches and their organs, the pastors. Of course, the churches must and will, seen from their viewpoint, defend themselves against this loss of power. But never again must an influence on leadership of the people be yielded to the churches. This influence must be broken completely and finally.”

“Only the Reich Government and, by its direction, the Party, its components and attached units have a right to leadership of the people. Just as the deleterious influences of astrologers, seers and other fakers are eliminated and suppressed by the State, so must the possibility of Church influence also be totally removed. Not until this has happened, does the State leadership have influence on the individual citizens. Not until then are people and Reich secure in their existence for all the future.”

In a 1940 letter Bormann wrote:

“Christianity and National Socialism are phenomena which originated from entirely different basic causes. Both differ fundamentally so strongly, that it will not be possible to construct a Christian teaching which would be completely compatible with the point of view of the National Socialist ideology; just as the communications of Christian faith would never be able to stand by the ideology of National Socialism in its entirety.”

In 1941 Bormann’s office issued a letter recommending the replacing of “the confessional and general prayers…by national socialist mottos.”

Joe Sharkey, “Word for Word/The Case Against the Nazis; How Hitler’s Forces Planned To Destroy German Christianity“

“In the 1920’s, as they battled for power, the Nazis realized that the churches in overwhelmingly Christian Germany needed to be neutralized before they would get anywhere…

the Nazis simply lied and made deals with the churches while planning a ‘slow and cautious policy of gradual encroachment’ to eliminate Christianity. The prosecution investigators describe this as a criminal conspiracy. ‘This general plan had been established even before the rise of the Nazis to power,’ the outline says. ‘It apparently came out of discussions among an inner circle’ comprised of Hitler himself, other top Nazi leaders including the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and a collection of party enforcers and veteran beer-hall agitators…

This facilitated plans ‘to capture and use the church organization for their own purposes’ and ‘to secure the elimination of Christian influences in the Evangelical Church by legal or quasi legal means’…

Of course, the churches stayed in Hitler’s good graces for only as long as the Nazis considered their cooperation expedient. Soon after Hitler assumed dictatorial powers, ‘relations between the Nazi state and the church became progressively worse’…

The Nazis ‘took advantage of their subsequently increasing strength to violate every one of the Concordat’s [that was signed between the Reich and the Roman Catholic Holy See] provisions’…

In 1937, Pope Pius XI denounced Nazi treachery in an encyclical that accused Hitler of ‘a war of extermination’ against the church. The battle had been joined on some fronts. Nazi street mobs, often in the company of the Gestapo, routinely stormed offices in Protestant and Catholic churches where clergymen were seen as lax in their support of the regime…

‘The Catholic Church need not imagine that we are going to create martyrs,’ Robert Wagner, the Nazi Gauleiter of Baden, said in a speech, according to the O.S.S. study. ‘We shall not give the church that satisfaction. She shall have not martyrs, but criminals’…the Nazis [also] arrested 700 Protestant pastors.”

‹ From Zeitgeist to Poltergeist, Part 8 of 13 up

From Zeitgeist to Poltergeist, Part 11 of 13

“The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing
his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel”
-Adolf Hitler1

The Topics Covered in This Essay Are As Follows:
Atheist and Darwinist Communists

Subsections Are As Follows:

Of Vladimir LeninOf Joseph Stalin

Of Frederick Engles, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, et al

Atheist and Darwinist Communists
We have seen that Richard Dawkins argues that when individual atheists commit atrocious acts they are not doing so in the name of atheism. We will now see that this is not the case. Of course, the simple retort is that even if they did claim that they were doing it in the name of atheism they still were not committing those acts motivated by atheism because atheism is merely non-theism. However, the fact is that there are atheists who disagree, as we shall see, and do claim to do that which they do in the name of, and motivated by, atheism. This is because what atheism is turns out to be up for interpretation. There are various sects of atheism and there are even some that claim that the others are wrong. In reality, there are as many versions of atheism as there are individual atheists. Each, in turn, decides what atheism is for themselves and fills the void left by God with something of their choosing. Atheism is not merely a lack of belief, it is a blank canvas upon which individuals pain worldviews of their choosing.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, “Men Have Forgotten God” – The Templeton Address

“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.”

Of Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), the first leader of the USSR who modified Marxist doctrine as a Communist theoretician:

“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-DD&#bc;hring, which Marx read in manuscript, is an indictment of the materialist and atheist DD&#bc;hring for not being a consistent materialist and for leaving loopholes for religion and religious philosophy. Let us recall that in his essay on Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels reproaches Feuerbach for combating religion not in order to destroy it, but in order to renovate it, to invent a new, “exalted” religion, and so forth. Religion is the opium of the people-this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion…At the same time 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…[Engels considered] vociferous proclamation of war on religion a piece of stupidity, and stated that such a declaration of war was the best way to revive interest in religion and to prevent it from really dying out…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. We must combat religion-that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way…A Marxist must be a materialist, i. e., an enemy of religion…By declaring…that religion is the opium of the people, our Duma group acted quite correctly, and thus created a precedent which should serve as a basis for all utterances by Russian Social-Democrats on the question of religion.”2 [italics in original]

“Darwin put an end to the belief that the animal and vegetable species bear no relation to one another, except by chance, and that they were created by God, and hence immutable.”3

“Atheism is a material and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific Socialism. In accordance with their fundamental philosophical outlook, Marx and Engels always called themselves materialists.”4

“when people charge us with harshness we wonder how they can forget the rudiments of Marxism.” 5

In this regard, it may be 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”6 and “Look at World War II, at Hitler’s cruelty. The more cruelty, the more enthusiasm for revolution.”7

Lenin further stated:

“Whatever helps the world Communist revolution is good; whatever hinders it is bad. Religion, through its insistence upon individual responsibility to the Creator of all things, interferes with the advance of world collectivism. It is, therefore, irredeemably evil.”8

“We deny all morality taken from superhuman or non-class conceptions. We say that this is a deception, a swindle, a befogging of the minds…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.”9

“When people talk to us about morality we say: For the Communists, morality consists entirely of compact united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters. We do not believe in eternal morality, and we expose all fables about morality.”10

“A Marxist must be a materialist, i. e., an enemy of religion, but a dialectical materialist, i. e., one who treats the struggle against religion not in an abstract way, not on the basis of remote, purely theoretical, never varying preaching, but in a concrete way, on the basis of the class struggle which is going on in practice and is educating the masses more and better than anything else could.'”

Lenin wrote the following in, The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion11:

“It is the absolute duty of Social-Democrats to make a public statement of their attitude towards religion. 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-DD&#bc;hring, which Marx read in manuscript, is an indictment of the materialist and atheist DD&#bc;hring for not being a consistent materialist and for leaving loopholes for religion and religious philosophy. Let us recall that in his essay on Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels reproaches Feuerbach for combating religion not in order to destroy it, but in order to renovate it, to invent a new, ‘exalted’ religion, and so forth. Religion is the opium of the people-this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion12…

At the same time Engels frequently condemned the efforts…to introduce into the programme of the workers’ party an explicit proclamation of atheism, in the sense of declaring war on religion…Engels called…vociferous proclamation of war on religion a piece of stupidity, and stated that such a declaration of war was the best way to revive interest in religion and to prevent it from really dying out…

Engels insisted that the workers’ party should have the ability to work patiently at the task of organising and educating the proletariat, which would lead to the dying out of religion, and not throw itself into the gamble of a political war on religion.13 This view has become part of the very essence of German Social-Democracy, which, for example, advocated freedom for the Jesuits, their admission into Germany, and the complete abandonment of police methods of combating any particular religion. ‘Religion is a private matter’: this celebrated point in the Erfurt Programme (1891) summed up these political tactics of Social-Democracy…

Social-Democrats regard religion as a private matter in relation to the state, but not in relation to themselves, not in relation to Marxism, and not in relation to the workers’ party14…

Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion…This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels…applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of history, to the domain of the social sciences. We must combat religion-that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching…It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion…

No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way. Does this mean that educational books against religion are harmful or unnecessary? No, nothing of the kind. It means that Social-Democracy’s atheist propaganda must be subordinated to its basic task-the development of the class struggle of the exploited masses against the exploiters…

Atheist propaganda in such circumstances [a labor strike in which the workers are divided into atheists and Christians] may be both unnecessary and harmful…class struggle, which in the conditions of modern capitalist society will convert Christian workers to Social-Democracy and to atheism a hundred times better than bald atheist propaganda…

A Marxist must be a materialist, i. e., an enemy of religion, but a dialectical materialist…

[dealing with the question “whether a priest can be a member of the Social-Democratic Party or not”] We must not only admit workers who preserve their belief in God into the Social-Democratic Party, but must deliberately set out to recruit them; we are absolutely opposed to giving the slightest offence to their religious convictions, but we recruit them in order to educate them in the spirit of our programme…

In Russia conditions are quite different [than in Social-Democrats in the West]…while Engels was comparatively mild in correcting the opportunism of the German Social-Democrats who were substituting, for the demand of the workers’ party that the state should declare religion a private matter, the declaration that religion is a private matter for the Social-Democrats themselves, and for the Social-Democratic Party, it is clear that the importation of this German distortion by the Russian opportunists would have merited a rebuke a hundred times more severe by Engels…

By declaring from the Duma [representative assemblies] rostrum that religion is the opium of the people, our Duma group acted quite correctly, and thus created a precedent which should serve as a basis for all utterances by Russian Social-Democrats on the question of religion.”

Of Joseph Stalin
I have already quoted professor of philosophy Daniel Dennett (during his debate with Dinesh D’Souza, “Is God (and Religion) a man-made invention?”) in this regard in part 4 yet, I thought to reproduce it here where it seemed again to be relevant as we consider Stalin in particular:

“…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.”

Emilian Yaroslavsky (President and Founder of the Union of the Militant Godless) wrote of Stalin:

“At a very early age, while still a pupil in the ecclesiastical school, Comrade Stalin developed a critical mind and revolutionary sentiments. He began to read Darwin and became an atheist. G. Glurdjidze, a boyhood friend of Stalin’s, relates: I began to speak of God, Joseph heard me out, and after a moment’s silence, said: ‘You know, they are fooling us, there is no God….’
I was astonished at these words, I had never heard anything like it before.’How can you say such things, Soso?’ I exclaimed.’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,’ Joseph said.’What book is that?’ I enquired.’Darwin. You must read it,’ Joseph impressed on me.”15

Stalin also stated,”Of course, we are far from being enthusiastic about the fascist regime in Germany”16 and “I know how much the German nation loves its Fuhrer; I should therefore like to drink to his health.”17Karl Radek, Bolshevik Communist propagandist,

“There are magnificent lads in the SA and SS. You’ll see, the day will come when they’ll be throwing hand grenades for us.”18

Stalin further stated,

“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.”19

In 17 Feb. 1936 Time Magazine 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, Joseph Stalin has uttered officially such lukewarm words as these: ‘The Party cannot be neutral toward Religion because Religion is something opposite to Science’…

[Archbishop Nicholas John Kedroff, Dean of the Cathedral of St. Nicholas in Manhattan a US affiliate of the Soviet Russia’s Greek Orthodox Church wrote,] ‘In some ways the Church has more freedom in Russia now than it had under the Tsars…The clergy in Russia today are not so poor as you might think. Not long ago I received a letter from a priest who wanted some new parts for his Buick.’ The prosperity in Russia of even one priest able to require new parts for his Buick drives the League of the Militant Godless into tantrums [they see the ‘New Menace’ as being priests who were preaching a blend of Communism and Christianity]…

[despite the church’s “more freedom”] by an alteration of the law made in 1929, any public propaganda of religion apart from services and sermons in church is made a penal offense…

In stirring up the police to inflict upon unchurched preachers of religion the full penalty of Soviet law, the Godless are especially active. Last week they boasted at their Jubilee of fresh success in a Western Siberian village. They have at last got its ‘chief evangelist,’ P. M. Golofast, sentenced to ten years in jail along with two minor evangelists, jailed respectively for two and five years…

Roman Catholic missionaries in Russia today are under the direct and exceedingly discreet patronage of His Holiness Pope Pius XI. At the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Manhattan, a prelate declared last week: ‘No one except Rome knows just who is doing what and where in Russia. If it were known, the Soviets would chop their heads off. As for such churches as are open in Russia, they are only to make it appear to tourists that there is no persecution’…Pius XI is considered by the Godless their personal and potent foe in the great battle for Russian souls…

Russia’s militant Godless campaign against all gods and all faiths. Excruciating is their stage skit Buddha-on-the-Telephone…tolerated by Communism in Leningrad for visiting religionists, are a beauteous Moslem mosque and an elaborately carved Buddhist temple…

Until the recent Soviet innovation of sending out bits of ‘human interest’ material about Bolshevik leaders, Comrade Yaroslavsky was not known to have any other interests than stern Party duty, pouncing on priests and Godlessness…

Yaroslavsky aphorisms: ‘We make no distinction between our struggle against Capitalism and our struggle against Religion!…Decent conduct has nothing to do with Hell or Heaven….Religion is adopting-the disguise of Communism! We even hear it said that Christ was the first Socialist, or the first Communist!…

While Prof. Daniel Dennett’s statements regarding the atheist Stalin’s theism are clearly fallacious. They appear all the more wayward now that we have considered Stalin and his system of Communism in greater detail.

Of Frederick Engles, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, et al
Robert M. Young, Darwin scholar and Marxist, Darwinian Evolution and Human History

Young writes, “Marx and Engels were very interested indeed in Darwinian evolution, and that there is no unequivocal answer to the question of its meaning to them.” The issue is the various ways in which Marx and Engels described their utilization of Darwinism namely: as a “basis,” or a “conjuror’s trick,” or an “analogy” (between the history of life and human history).

Young continues thusly:

“At the moment it is all too apparent that right wing and liberal points of view are seeking in biological science legitimacy for their beliefs about the limits of human nature and the limits of equality…[biology is used] as support by racists and other elitists…It is worth pointing out that there is also a long tradition of claiming that the laws of evolution make socialism inevitable…20

Darwin was crucially influenced by T. R. Malthus, whose gloomy population theory gave Darwin the key idea of population pressure in competing for scarce resources [see interesting considerations here]. In his later work on the Descent of Man, it is also true that Darwin’s views on human tribes were decidedly racist…

in the Soviet Union, where the enforced social engineering of Stalinism led to repression and to the Gulag Archipelago…in China where the Maoist slogan ‘Throw off nature’s insolent yoke’ led finally to a powerful reaction and the present policies which are decidedly technocratic. In Eastern Europe we have had demands for more traditional human rewards – goods and rights – mitigating the harshness of socialist discipline, notably in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. And, of course, the most appalling recent example of failure to gear social change to second nature and its refractoriness was the systematic murder of millions of Kampucheans who did not become instant socialists on the Pol Pot model…

Now 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. For example, the work of the Russian philosopher George Plekhanov was considered by Lenin to be ‘the best there is in the whole international literature of Marxism’, and Plekhanov regarded Marxism as ‘Darwinism in its application to social science’. This sort of appeal to science in the realm of social policy is scientism21…It provides the legitimacy for arguing for a ‘correct line’ – the scientific management of society. Some of the most appalling things have occurred in the name of socialism and have been justified by the ‘correct line’. When their wrongness has been acknowledged, it is said that a ‘mistake’ has been made…

Here I come to the crux of the problem of Darwinism for Marxists. 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…”

Frederick Engles’ preface to The Communist Manifesto,

“The proposition which in my opinion is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology.”22

Engels 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.”23

Emilian Yaroslavsky,

“The program of the Communist International also clearly states that Communists fight against religion…Remember that the struggle against religion is a struggle for socialism.”24

Mao Zedong,
“Chinese socialism is founded upon Darwin and the theory of evolution.”25

Karl Marx,
“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.”26

Leon Trotsky, The ABC of Materialist Dialectics (1939):
“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.”

Daniel J. Flynn quoting “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression” (published by Harvard University Press, written by eleven scholars).
“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.”

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, “Men Have Forgotten God” – The Templeton Address

“In its past, Russia did know a time when the social ideal was not fame, or riches, or material success, but a pious way of life. Russia was then steeped in an Orthodox Christianity which remained true to the Church of the first centuries. The Orthodoxy of that time knew how to safeguard its people under the yoke of a foreign occupation that lasted more than two centuries, while at the same time fending off iniquitous blows from the swords of Western crusaders. During those centuries the Orthodox faith in our country became part of the very pattern of thought and the personality of our people, the forms of daily life, the work calendar, the priorities in every undertaking, the organization of the week and of the year. Faith was the shaping and unifying force of the nation. But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter’s forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened…

The 1920’s in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy…Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of God, were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate tundra of the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between. For tens of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from their children and thrown into prison, while the children were turned from the faith by threats and lies.

For a short period of time, when he needed to gather strength for the struggle against Hitler, Stalin cynically adopted a friendly posture toward the Church. This deceptive game, continued in later years by Brezhnev with the help of showcase publications and other window dressing, has unfortunately tended to be taken at its face value in the West. Yet the tenacity with which hatred of religion is rooted in Communism may be judged by the example of their most liberal leader, Krushchev: for though he undertook a number of significant steps to extend freedom, Krushchev simultaneously rekindled the frenzied Leninist obsession with destroying religion…

The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy, leaving us at a dead end.”

Daniel J. Flynn again referencing “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression“:

“The more representatives from the reactionary clergy and the recalcitrant bourgeoisie we shoot,” Lenin wrote in March of 1922, “the better it will be for us. We must teach these people a lesson as quickly as possible, so that the thought of protesting again doesn’t occur to them for decades to come”…

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…

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,” co-author Karel Bartosek reports. “Some had their heads repeatedly plunged into a bucket of urine and fecal matter while the guards intoned a parody of the baptismal rite”…

Moreover, from 1917 to 1969, the Communists destroyed 41,000 of Russia’s 48,000 churches.

From Religion in the Soviet Union Part One and Part Two, by Trotskyite, Denzil Dean Harber aka Paul Dixon (first published in The Workers International News, October 1945):

Marx said, ‘Religion is the opium of the people’ – and this postulate is the corner stone of the whole philosophy of Marxism with regard to religion. Marxism always regarded all modern religions and churches, and every kind of religious organisation as instruments of that bourgeois reaction whose aim is to defend exploitation, stupefying the working class. (The Attitude of the Workers’ Party towards religion, May, 1909)…

[CPSU’s (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) 1919 Programme]:
‘to secure the complete breakup of the union between the exploiting classes and the organisations for religious propaganda, thus co-operating in the actual deliverance of the working masses from religious prejudices, and organising the most extensive propaganda of scientific enlightenment and anti-religious conceptions. While doing this, we must carefully avoid anything that can wound the feelings of believers, for such a method can only lead to the strengthening of religious fanaticism’…

The clergy…were entirely cut off from Soviet life. Priests had no right to vote in Soviet elections or to be elected to Soviet organisations. For the class-conscious Soviet worker the Church was a relic of the past which was destined gradually to wither away under the influence of the rising material and cultural standards of the masses…

A.B.C of Communism – the text book issued by the CPSU in the days of Lenin and Trotsky –
‘the transition from the Society which makes an end of capitalism to the society which is completely freed from all traces of class division and class struggle, will bring about the natural death of all religion and all superstition’…

[Stalinist policy made] an attempt was made to liquidate the Church and its influence by government decree. Starting in 1929 churches were forcibly closed and priests arrested and exiled all over the Soviet Union. The celebrated Shrine of the Iberian Virgin in Moscow – esteemed by believers to be the ‘holiest’ in all Russia was demolished – Stalin and his Government were not afraid of strengthening religious fanaticism by wounding the feelings of believers as Lenin and Trotsky had been! Religion, they believed, could be liquidated, like the kulak, by a stroke of the pen. The Society of Militant Atheists, under Stalin’s orders, issued on May 15th 1932, the “Five Year Plan of Atheism” – by May 1st 1937, such as the ‘Plan’, ‘not a single house of prayer shall remain in the territory of the USSR, and the very concept of God must be banished from the Soviet Union as a survival of the Middle Ages and an instrument for the oppression of the working masses’…

In the New Constitution of the U.S.S.R. of 1936 priests were given the right to vote and to be elected in Soviet elections. Nevertheless the alliance between Stalin and the Orthodox Church was not yet finally cemented. In the period of mass purges of 1937 the attack upon the Church was for a short time resumed. Once again priests were arrested and banished and in January 1938 the “Society of Militant Atheists” accused the Clergy of being in the service of the military staffs of Fascist States, of disorganising the Army, of trying to wreck railways, etc., etc…

Inevitably, under the conditions of the rule of the Bureaucracy, the Church must command the support of broad sections of the population; Stalin cannot destroy this support by administrative means-he has tried and failed. He must therefore secure an agreement with this Church which he cannot crush in order to secure the hold of the Bureaucracy over the Soviet masses, for the nature of his regime does not permit the existence of an independent and potentially hostile force within the Soviet State…

Stalin who in his interview with the First American Trade Union Delegation (September 1927) once stated ‘The Party cannot be neutral with regard to religion, and it conducts anti-religious propaganda against any and all religious prejudices because it stands for science, while religious prejudices go against science, since every religion is something contrary to science.'”

Harber/Dixon also made reference to, “the materialist basis upon which Marxism stands.” He pointed out 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 “The Left zig-zag of the bureaucracy was inevitably followed by a turn to the right.” He also mentions that the CPSU established the “Society of Militant Atheists” who published a journal: The Atheist.