Part II of Chapter One “A Cultural Prophecy: Socialism” from Chapter One of David Jeremiah’s book, Where Do We Go From Here?”
How, then, should we view socialism today? How should we define it? Listen to the definition offered by the World Socialist Party of the United States: “The establishment of a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of society as a whole. . . . We call this common ownership, but other terms we regard as synonymous are communism and socialism.” 7
Socialists believe the world’s means of production—including infrastructure, farms, factories, energy, natural resources, medicines, and more—should be under the control of “the people.” In other words, society as a whole should own the raw materials and the systems that produce wealth. In a free market system, these materials are usually controlled by companies or individuals, but in socialist countries they are owned by “the people.”
Of course, there’s no way to make decisions based on such a loose concept as “the people.” So under socialism, the government becomes the sole authority and controller of the means of production. Unfortunately, governments are controlled by specific people—often the kinds of people who seek out power. And those people are entirely corruptible by greed, selfishness, lust, vindictiveness, violence, and the overwhelming desire for authority. As more power flows to the government, the handful at the top become dictatorial.
While I was writing this chapter, a news network ran a story about a Chinese woman named Xi Van Fleet. She had survived the brutal communist regime of dictator Mao Zedong. In an impassioned speech to a Virginia school board, she elaborated on the similarities between what happened in China during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and what is happening in the United States right now. She said, “They use the same ideology, and same methodology, even the same vocabulary. And with the same goal. The ideology is cultural Marxism. And we were divided into groups as the oppressor and oppressed. . . . And the take out methodology is also very similar. It’s cancel culture. We basically canceled the whole Chinese civilization pre-communism.” 8
In his book We Will Not Be Silenced, Erwin Lutzer helped us understand the kind of Marxism we’re seeing.
Today we face what is known as cultural Marxism. It is not being imposed on people on the war battlefields; instead, it’s a form of Marxism that wins the hearts and minds of people incrementally by the gradual transformation of the culture. Bombarded with exaggerated and illusionary promises, people accept it because they want to; they welcome it because they are convinced of its “benefits.” It promises “hope and change,” income equality, racial harmony and justice based on secular values rather than Judeo-Christian morality. It is known for professing inclusion rather than exclusion and promoting sexual freedom rather than what they view as the restrictive sexual ethics of the Bible. It is not stifled by allegedly narrow religious traditions but espouses progressive ideas that are deemed worthy of an enlightened future. 9”
The Roots of Socialism
To understand socialism, we must first understand Karl Marx. When you understand who he was and what he believed, you’ll be able to trace much that’s happening back to him.
If you study the life of Karl Marx, you’ll learn he wasn’t just a hater of God; he was a cheerleader for the devil. His family thought him possessed by a demon. A biographer described him like this: “He had the devil’s view of the world, and the devil’s malignity. Sometimes, he seemed to know that he was accomplishing works of evil.” 10
On one occasion, Marx’s own son sent him a letter and addressed it “My dear devil.” 11 Marx’s partner, Friedrich Engels, declared that ten thousand devils had Marx by the hair. 12
In 2020, Paul Kengor wrote a book titled The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration. Frankly, it was difficult to read, so dark was its subject. According to Kengor, Marx was a tyrant, a racist, and a misogynistic radical who hated God and wanted to see the world burn.
In his 1837 poem “The Pale Maiden,” Marx composed these self-descriptive words:
Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God, Is chosen for Hell. 13
Four years later, in 1841, he wrote these lines, which are even more damning:
Look now, my blood-dark sword shall stab Unerringly within thy soul. . . . The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed. See the sword—the Prince of Darkness sold it to me. For he beats the time and gives the signs. Ever more boldly I play the dance of death. 14
In 1849, one year after publishing his crowning work, The Communist Manifesto, Marx was evicted by his landlord who was fed up with his filthiness. “Karl drank too much, smoked too much, never exercised, and suffered from warts and boils due to lack of washing. He stunk . . . As for the family apartment, everything [was] broken down, busted, spilled, smashed, falling apart—from toys and chairs and dishes and cups to tables . . . and on and on.” 15
Karl Marx fathered an illegitimate child by his maid, Helene Demuth. He blamed the child on Engels, who thought it was a great joke. Since Marx never had a job, he mooched off everyone—his parents, Engels, and anyone else that he could find. His wife, Jenny, was so miserable in their marriage she wanted to die, a wish she pondered daily. His daughters, Jenny and Laura, fulfilled their mother’s wish. Jenny poisoned herself when she was just forty-three. And in a death pact with her husband, Laura also committed suicide when she was sixty-six.
Marx died in despair on March 14, 1883. Just before his death, he wrote to his friend Engels, “How pointless and empty is life, but how desirable!” 16 He was buried in Highgate Cemetery, considered the center of satanism in London.
I wonder how many who are championing socialism and Marxism are aware of the poisonous roots of this doctrine. Their founder was a hideous person; and what he was, socialism became! This is a spiritual battle of truth versus lies. It brings to mind Ephesians 6: 12: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”
As many have noted, Karl Marx is ruling the world from his grave. Here are some of the characteristics of his hellish ideology.
Marxism Is Anti-God
Karl Marx hated Christianity, which he saw as a source of oppression. To him, religion was “the opium of the people.” For communism to succeed, loyalty to the church had to be replaced by loyalty to the state. On one occasion, he described the church as “medieval mildew” which must be scraped away. 17
Other socialist leaders have followed the same path, including Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, and beyond. Each of these men saw organized religion as an enemy—a competitor that needed to be controlled or eliminated. As one scholar noted, “Religion was the enemy, a rival to Marxist mind control, and it had to be vanquished regardless of costs and difficulties.” 18 In the Soviet Union, one of their favorite slogans was, “Let us drive out the capitalists from earth and God from heaven.”
Another historian noted: “[ In Russia] as early as the spring of 1918, an open campaign of terror was launched against all religions, and particularly against the Russian Orthodox church. [It was a] policy of terror . . . felt by every religious faith.” 19 In the following years, countless Orthodox bishops and priests were murdered, and those who survived were denied their civil rights and subjected to economic oppression.
Despite what many claim to believe or propose, Marxism is not compatible with the free expression of religion.”
Marxism Is Totalitarian There’s another general fact about Marxism we should grasp. It quickly becomes totalitarian. The term totalitarianism was first used by supporters of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who summed it up this way: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” 20 Rod Dreher adds, According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is. As Arendt has written, wherever totalitarianism has ruled, “[ I] t has begun to destroy the essence of man.” Today’s totalitarianism demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs, many of which are incompatible with logic—and certainly with Christianity. Compliance is forced less by the state than by elites who form public opinion, and by private corporations that, thanks to technology, control our lives far more than we would like to admit. 21 Marxism Is Divisive Marxism thrives on division. In historic Marxism the division was promoted between classes of people: the oppressors against the oppressed; the bosses against the workers. Men like Hugo Chávez went out of their way to ensure that the poor hated the wealthy. In today’s cultural Marxism, the exploited divide is often racial, sexual, and/ or gender-related. I believe that’s one of the reasons we’ve lost some of the progress we’ve made on race relations. Whatever it is or however far it might be removed from actual racism, whenever a socialist or Marxist can’t figure out how to respond to an issue, they always—and I mean every time—call it racist. This is tragic for many reasons. It’s very hurtful to be branded a racist if one has done or said nothing that would lead a rational person to make such an accusation. Once racism has been pinned on a person, it’s almost impossible to get rid of it, no matter what you do. But there’s another seldom-discussed sadness with playing the race card: if everything is racist, nothing is racist. All of us know there are still racial issues that need to be dealt with in America and around the world, but the true issues get lost in the avalanche of unwarranted accusations. Marxism Is Deadly In 1999, The Black Book of Communism attempted to calculate a Marxist-Leninist death toll for the twentieth century. It revealed the most colossal case of political carnage in history: Latin America: 150,000 deaths Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths Vietnam: 1 million deaths Africa: 1.7 million deaths Cambodia: 2 million deaths North Korea: 2 million deaths USSR: 20 million deaths China: 65 million deaths The butchers who led this assault on humanity included Joseph Stalin in Russia, Mao Zedong in China, Kim II-sung and Kim Jong-il in North Korea, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, and others. The death count that resulted from Marxism between 1917 and 1979 would “equate to a rate of multiple thousands dead per day over the course of a century. Even Adolph Hitler got nowhere close to that. In fact, neither did the two deadliest wars in history, World War I and II, which need to be combined and doubled to get near Communism’s butcher bill.” 22 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was fooled by none of it. He taught that “socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.” 23 Next time, Part III of Chapter One focuses on “What Does This Mean?” Headings include 1.) The Destruction of Monuments; 2.) Cancel Culture; 3.) The Dismantling of the Nuclear Family; 4.) The Redistribution of Wealth; & 5.) Defunding the Police. After Part IV, all the footnotes for the Introduction and Chapter One will be listed. You might ask “Why Merlin are you promoting this book so strongly? Because time is late and I unequivocally believe every Christ Follower should buy and read this book to help remove our cultural blinders. We are being blindsided. If convicted as I, you will then buy several copies and loan them to friends to read for further discussions. ThriftBooks last night had 19 hardcover for $7.19; new is $26.99. Three used for one new! Invest your loose change this month in books and change lives. Living & Building the Kingdom of God TODAY! |
Well said, brother! Another great one also easily to be found for low money on the web is “Seven Men Who Rule the World From the Grave.”
The elephant in the room is what the Internet does to exalt self-love which thrives on the lure of hot links and the “avatar.”
Merlin, you are nudging me to re-read “We Will Not Be Silenced” which I have shared with family. Then I will consider reading David Jeremiah’s book on socialism! Thanks for blogging truth.