Sunday, August 30, 2009
Are Atheists Communists, by Anne Humphreys
Are atheists communists? Of course not. Some atheists are communists, and communists have been taught to be atheists, but becoming an atheist doesn't affect your politics.
Many people who have been classified as atheists have simply been raised under a communist regime. These are atheists by default or convenience, not atheists by conviction, personal experience or logical deduction. They are wide open for conversion, partly because they haven't been exposed to any religions, they have very little natural immunity like children raised in over-clean houses. In contrast atheists in Europe and America tend to be atheists by personal choice. Very few people are forced to be atheists against their will, while they are impressionable. Religious indoctrination of children will, one day, be accepted as the crime against humanity that it is.
I regularly get accused of being a communist, this is usually by American Christians. Nobody else seems to be that stupid. They seem to accept the idea that if you are not for capitalist freedom in infinite amounts you are a dangerous subversive who gets his sealed orders from Satan at the KGB (and only the complacent think they've gone away).
In America there are three powerful interlocking myths. The first is The Big Lie, the idea that belief in a god (preferably one with Semitic heritage) is a sign of morality, that people who do not share a belief in God are either amoral, immoral or lead by the nose by the scarlet horned goat himself. The second myth is the American Dream, the fantasy that in America, and only in America, anybody make it to the top and become wealthy, even phenomenally wealthy, simply by being prepared to work hard. The corollary of that is the idea that those Americans who are not wealthy obviously haven't worked hard and so don't deserve any sympathy, or welfare, or soup, or spare change. The third myth is that evil communists are planning to take over the world.
Communism is real and it was a powerful force in the twentieth century. But much of the force of communism was really a bastardized form of The Great Game, Russia's eternal quest for more territory and an escape from encirclement. To understand this fear just meditate for a few minutes, imagining that you are in Russia, imagine the wider world around you. It is around you. Yes, Russia is surrounded on all sides by potentially hostile powers, but this is simply a product of Russia being so big, covering so great an area that it has more time zones than seems fair. In contrast imagining yourself in America is much more soothing, an open ocean to each side and non-threatening neighbours to the north and south. But then ramp up the paranoia and you start to see the whole western hemisphere in the same way Israel regarded southern Lebanon or the Golan Heights.
Many things that were done by dictators in the name of communism were and are thoroughly reprehensible. To call them evil is acceptable usage as long as the word evil is used as an adjective, there is no such thing as evil as a noun. The noun form of evil belongs only in myth and other fiction. Actions can be evil, people can have a high propensity to allow or commit evil acts but there is no such thing as evil people or motivations to act out of evil. The idea of an evil empire is therefore ridiculous. Even Adolf Hitler was not evil. He wanted to achieve great and laudable aims (among others) and was ruthless in his methods. The evil was largely in the ruthlessness. Consider the long term aspirations of Hitler compared to those of Churchill, were they really so very different? Churchill spoke (in his “Finest Hour” speech) of a British Empire lasting a thousand years, is that so very different from a Thousand Year Reich? There were plenty of other nationalist leaders around who thought they had a God-given destiny to lead their country to power, prosperity and a supreme position in the world due to the superiority of its people's genetics. In a way Germany and Japan did the world a favour by showing the moral bankruptcy of this concept as well as the danger to liberty and justice of pursuing it. The downside of the war was the fact that it was justified, which has led Americans in particular to wrongly link the idea of war and justice. World War II was a just war, perhaps the just war, very much the exception rather than the rule. Most wars are fought for bad reasons: greed, aggression, plunder, not for justice and righteous indignation.
In what ways is communism evil?
To the rich of America the threat of communism was expropriation, taking their obscene private wealth and the capital that generated it into social ownership. Of course nationalization and expropriation of privately owned property was a major concern of the American government in regard to the communist revolution in Cuba as lots of Americans owned those assets. It was not a concern in Egypt the year before because those foreign investors were largely French and British, and hadn't Europe learned that the days of (their) empires was over? Didn't they get it? This was the dawn of the American Empire.
Atheism and Communism
Atheism is the official religion of communist countries. Of course atheism is not a religion, it is an absence of theistic beliefs. If atheism is a religion not fishing is a hobby. Atheism is not well placed to be the formal religion of a state. In practice religion in communist countries is replaced by political ideology and the celebration of heroes. Across the former Soviet empire there are thousands of statues of Lenin. Strangely in Cuba they seem to be more Lennonists than Leninists these days.
Communist states also adopted certain philosophical ideas and raised them to the status of dogma. This was particularly damaging in the case of the ideas of Lysenko, whose harebrained (but ever so orthodoxly Marxist-Leninist) biological ideas set back the agriculture and biology of the Soviet Union by decades.
Comrade Lysenko held that conditioning was more important than genetics. If you treated the grandsons of serfs as socialist heroes you get a socialist worker's paradise so it follows that if you treat summer cropping wheat correctly it will happily grow in a Siberian winter. There was only one minor problem with the theory. It was total bollocks. It was also state approved orthodoxy and therefore officially correct. Lysenko's ideas were not allowed to be questioned, so evidence needed to be produced to fit the conclusions that were pre-ordained. The result was as pathetic as the efforts of Young Earth Creationists. Nothing good ever comes from forcing people to accept lies as the truth.
Indoctrination of children, whether with your lies about God or propaganda about the party or the Great Leader is always wrong, dangerous and evil. Unquestionable concepts are always evil. And yes, you are free to question that idea!
In what way is atheism useful to communism?
It isn't. The point is that religion provides an alternative source of authority and moral teachings. A communist or any totalitarian regime wants all authority, morality and virtue to come from the party and the people following the party's guidance. A church, any church, is a rival to the authority of the state.
Hitler was not, as is so often portrayed by Christians, an atheist. He was raised as a Catholic and continued to believe in some kind of a god or divine providence throughout his life, but he didn't have many dealings with the church. Hitler hated communism partly because of its atheism.
For communists it was much simpler, Marxism was always atheistic. Marx was an atheist and God had no role in his thoughts or his teachings. Not only did Marx not believe in any gods but he made atheism a vital part of his ideology. He cast religion as a tool of oppression.
Marx's idea that religion is caused by class conflict doesn't make much sense to me but it has always been obvious to various thinkers that religion can be extremely useful to any leader who knows how to ride that particular tiger.
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true,by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” - Seneca
Religion is an alterative source of legitimacy, if that alternative source bolsters the power of the prince or emperor happy days. Conflicts between church and state are very bad news, each will tend to lean over backwards to avoid conflict, resulting in some of the grubbier episodes of history.
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Labels: Anne Humphreys, Atheism, Religion and fanaticism
# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 8:05 PM 
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