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Socialism did not kill merely the bodyit sought to extinguish the soul and all belief in anything transcendent in the human person. As we celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is time to remember and reclaim mans oldest faith, a faith in one Almighty God who make each of us in His glorious image. Only then can we challenge the so-called wisdom of this world.

At the end of Volume I of his magnificently disturbing Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote:

Shut your eyes, reader. Do you hear the thundering of wheels? Those are the Stolypin cars rolling on and on. Those are the red cows rolling. Every minute of the day. And every day of the year. And you can hear the water gurglingthose are prisoners barges moving on and on. And the motors of the Black Marias roar. They are arresting someone all the time, cramming him in somewhere, moving him about. And what is that hum you hear? The overcrowded cells of the transit prisons. And that cry? The complains of those who have been plundered, raped, beaten to with an inch of their lives. We have reviewed and considered all the methods of delivering prisoners, and we have found that they are all. . . worse. We have examined the transit prisons, but we have not found any that were good. And even the last human hope that there is something better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope. In camp it will be . . . worse.[1]

Not confined to the Soviets, such bleakness reigned throughout much of the 20th century.

However one chooses to define ita point that Caldwell made very nicely, noting that many think of socialism as a natural human inclinationnational socialism (also known as fascism) and international socialism (also known as communism) are responsible for the largest mass murders in history. Well, responsible might not be the best word. Perhaps, responsible for the poor and evil ideas that prompted the largest mass murders in history.

Advocates of communism claim it is the opposite of Nazism, and advocates of Nazism claim it the opposite of communism. Each form of socialism, however, is simply the flip side of the same coin.

Take, for example, the ideas of Josef Goebbels, the infamous Nazi butcherer. His diary from the 1920s is full of expressions of sympathy for Communism. In the final analysis, he wrote on October 23, 1925, it would be better for us to end our existence under Bolshevism than to endure slavery under capitalism. On January 31, 1926, he told himself in his diary: I think it is terrible that we [the Nazis] and the Communists are bashing in each others heads Where can we get together sometime with the leading Communists? It was at this time that he published an open letter to a Communist leader assuring him that Nazism and Communism were really the same thing. You and I, he declared, are fighting one another, but we are not really enemies.

If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin, wrote T.S. Eliot in 1936. Again, Eliot is worth quoting at length, here from Choruses on the Rock.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic. The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards In an age which advances progressively backwards?[2]

Taken together, these two forms of secularism, atheism, and materialism, national socialism and international socialism, led to the murder (yes, murder is the best term here) of nearly 205 million human beings between 1917 and, circa, 1994, in a variety of gulags, holocaust camps, and killing fields. Those murdered were civilians, usually the citizens and residents of the very countries doing the murdering.

To NKVD, Frunze. You are charged with the task of exterminating 10,000 enemies of the People. Report results by signalread a not atypical Soviet telegram.

Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood, V.I. Lenin stated. And, again, Well ask the man, where do you stand on the question of the revolution? Are you for it or against it? If hes against it, well stand him up against the wall.

Instead of deluding the proletariat as to the possibility of eradicating all causes of bloodbaths, Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini argued, we wish to prepare it and accustom it to war for the day of the greatest bloodbath of all, when the two hostile classes with clash in the supreme trial.

The socialists of all stripes craved blood with nothing less than vampiric lust.

If we add in the number of soldiersthose fighting on the battle fields in uniformduring the same time period (or, a bit broader time period; encompassing the whole of the 20th century), we add an additional 50 million to the list, thus bringing the total to 255 million killed in the twentieth century. Yet, this is worth pondering. After all, governments killed four times the number of persons war did. In other words, the greatest killer of the twentieth century was not war, it was government.

We can break down these governmental killingswhat demographer R.J. Rummel has labeled democide. Communist China murdered 65 million; Soviet Russia slaughtered 62 million; National Socialist Germany butchered 21 million; and Nationalist China killed another 10 million. Nazi Germany certainly murdered the greatest number in the shortest amount of time, with most of its 21 million deaths taking place between late 1942 and early 1945, a denouement, perhaps, of the life of its wicked and Satanic regime. Cambodia, though, wins when it comes to sheer horror. Between 1975 and 1978, it reduced its own population by nearly fifty percent, with forced de-urbanization and insane re-education camps.

Most historians claim that the liberation of various oppressed groups defines the twentieth century. Such a view is pathetically dishonest. From the standpoint of, say, 2200 AD or 2500 AD, however, the twentieth-century will simply be remembered as one hell of a bloody mess. Lets hope it will be properly viewed as an anomaly rather than as the beginning of a diabolic trend.

An age which advances progressively backwards, indeed.

Yet, it must also be rememberedas Alexander Solzhenitsyn claimed in his Gulagthat socialism did not kill merely the body, it sought to extinguish the soul and all belief in anything transcendent in the human person. In volume one of The Gulag, the great Russian thinker listed ten soul-destroying aspects of socialism.

It has suddenly become vogue again, especially among the younger generation, to embrace some form of socialism. At its extremes, some even willingly and openly wear Che Guevarra and, horrifically enough, in this very room on Monday night, a pro-communist t-shirt. How many millions had to die for one ignorant man-child fool to parade his idiocy?

And, yet, we must also remember that this November 9th is the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In 1953, 1956, 1968, and 1979, Eastern Europeans rebelled vehemently against their socialistthe Union of Soviet Socialist Republicsoppressors, with the United States looking on in willful and convenient ignorance. All of this changed on May 17, 1981, when President Ronald Reagan gave the Commencement address at the University of Notre Dame. The years ahead are great ones for this country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization, he said, with utter conviction. The West wont contain communism, it will transcend communism. It wont bother to denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.

Allied with John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, and others, Reagan worked relentlessly to undermine the worlds moral confidence in the Soviet Empire. He knew the struggle was not a materialist one, but a spiritual one, a struggle for the very definition of man.

Though the 200th anniversary of the French Revolutionwhich the Soviets hoped to celebrate through a series of world-wide parades and festivals1989 served as the end of the Soviet Empire, with one satellite country after another falling into the glorious decay of freedom, liberty, and dignity. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland each successfully rebelled against socialist oppression. On November 9, after a series of peaceful protests, East Germany too fell, and 1,000s upon 1,000s of mere Germans tore down the symbol of socialist evil, the Berlin Wall.

Socialism, Whitaker Chambers wrote, is not new. It is, in fact, mans second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: Ye shall be as gods. It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and mans relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of mans mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world.[3]

It is time to remember and reclaim mans oldest faith, a faith in one Almighty God who make each of usand every other human beingin His glorious image. Only then can we challenge the so-called wisdom of this world.

Notes:

[1] Solzhenitsyn, end of Volume 1 of the Gulag.

[2] T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock, in Complete Poems And Play, 1909-1950 (Harcourt, Brace, 1971), 108.

[3] Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952; Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1980), 9.

This essay was delivered as a response to Hillsdale Colleges Center for Constructive Alternatives on Socialism, on November 6, 2019 and was first published here in that same month and year.

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The featured image is The Day the Wall Came Down, by Veryl Goodnight, a 1997 statue depicting horses leaping over actual pieces of the Berlin Wall, courtesy of Wikipedia.

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Remember, Remember, the 9th of November - The Imaginative Conservative