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Did Atheism Contribute to the Deaths of Soviet Citizens?
The role of atheism in the deaths of Soviet citizens caused by government policies of repression has been a controversial topic. The New Atheists® have hotly denied it, but people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn claim there is a direct connection. The deaths of millions of Soviet citizens was the result of the lack of God and morality in the Soviet Union.
This seems like an obvious conclusion to make, especially for those of us who think belief in God is an important restraint on the dark side of human nature, but it becomes hard to substantiate from the historical record.
After delving into the topic, I’ve come to the conclusion that atheism was more an effect of Marxist-Leninist ideology and it’s repression of any and all dissent in the Soviet Union than it was a cause. The ultimate cause was the ideology and those who promoted it, and atheism was just another tool for contesting competing claims to political, ideological, and spiritual authority. As such it was heavily promoted by Soviet authorities.
Lenin was the main source of the evil since it was he who taught the Bolsheviks that Marxism and Communism must be established by whatever means necessary. As David Satter writes:
In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.”
This approach separated guilt from responsibility. Martyn Latsis, an official of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, in a 1918 instruction to interrogators, wrote: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . Do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be to what class does he belong. . . . It is this that should determine his fate.”
It was Lenin who established the policies that led to most of the deaths, especially by exterminating people who belonged to certain political classes including religious leaders and believers. Among other things, atheism was adopted to break the hold of religious authority, which had high prestige before the revolution, and establish Marxist-Leninism as the supreme source of all authority. They even went to the extent of establishing an ersatz state religion complete with atheistic rituals.
The subordination of all law, morality, and spirituality to a supreme ideology, a consolidation of political power, was the main method. Atheism was a label used to describe part of that process.
And so it is today, I think. Atheism is more a symptom of the problem of social and cultural degeneration along with all the other signs of impending doom, i.e., gender bending, falling birth rates, lawlessness, progressivism creeping into churches and synagogues, a loss of will even to police our own borders and streets, corruption of and lost trust in all authorities, and all the rest. Like the Soviet Union, we are in the process of casting aside traditional restraints. The emergence of our dark side will increasingly manifest.
Published in History
That would seem to be consistent with:
Same with the French Revolution. All previous things had to be cast aside. They even made ten hours in a day and new months. That stuff didn’t last long. But it was subsuming all things into the Revolution. That was the point then and ever since when a state of atheism is declared by politicians.
Atheists hate being told that Atheists killed more people than all the world’s faiths combined.
Yet, they did just that. The modern day Atheists all try the “No True Scotsman” argument. Come to think of it, so do modern Commies.
Exactly. Anything not controlled by the state that might bring people together is a potential threat to the totalitarian order. The Chinese Communist Party cracked down on what was essentially an exercise and meditation practice. In Cuba Che Geuvara outlawed rock & roll music. Saddam Hussein would kidnap family members of popular politicians in Iraq who never opposed him on anything, but were perceived to be a potential threat just because they were well-liked.
Americans should be required to study the basis of Marx’s theory by reading what he wrote. It begins with a declaration of a new religion, one that specifically excludes the existence of God. God is replaced by Progress, also called History.
Everything else in Marx’s theory is derived from his atheist religion: his moral system, his economics, and his political philosophy.
To believe that atheism was added on as a political tool is to completely misunderstand communism.
I think it’s true that Marx was an atheist and based his theory on materialism and putting man as the supreme being, but he did not advocate eliminating the bourgeoisie or any of the other extreme policies that Lenin enacted. That came out of Lenin’s will to power and his being a very evil piece of trash. Marx did not advocate or foresee a communist government killing off millions of its own citizens. He thought that the proletariat would take over and then create a classless society in which everyone had equal access to resources and opportunities. Marx didn’t advocate for the forced elimination of religion, he thought it would simply disappear with the advent of communism.
Lenin made it very clear that the top priority was consolidation of power under the Marxist-Leninist banner and the total elimination of all opposition by any means necessary and expedient. This is in contrast to Marx, who thought changes in society would take place organically once classes were eliminated.
Parenthetically, I was able to view Lenin in his tomb in Red Square back in 1999. He was looking a little moth eaten by that time. All of his statues had been pulled down and were piled up in a park in Moscow.
Don’t they give him occasional “makeovers?”
Here’s a guy on Russian TV who says it’s time to bury him.
And so, when Obama quoted MLK Jr, that the arc of history is long, but bends toward justice, he meant exactly the opposite of what King meant, and proclaimed his Marxist and Atheist bonafides. King was optimistic that the world will become a better place, freedom wise. Obama was optimistic that the world would be forced into subservience to the State (eg, him).
The iron clad law of history will lead to socialist/communist equity, just as the ironclad Second law of Thermodynamics will lead to the Warmer Tod (Heat Death) of the Universe. We’ll all be lethally poor, and lethally cold.
Lenin and the Atheist/Communist regimens were just trying to assist history by killing a considerable portion of humanity. Accelerate that Entropy/Heat death thing.
So are the climate change warriors.
The main difference between the US revolution and USSR, France, China … is that the US founders understood the fallibility of humans. They designed a system to guard against these issues. All of the other revolutions, they tried to create rules that went against human nature (e.g. USSR creating “New Soviet Man”).
You have expressed the facts perfectly, thanks.