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Two decades after the publication of The Black Book of Communism, nearly everyone is or at least should be, aware of the immense evil produced by that devilish ideology first hatched when Karl Marx penned his Communist Manifesto two centuries ago. Far too many people, however, separate Marx the man from the evils wrought by the oppressive ideology and theory that bears his name. That is a grave mistake. Not only did the horrific results of Marxism follow directly from Marx's twisted ideas, but the man himself penned some downright devilish things. Well before Karl Marx was writing about the hell of communism, he was writing about hell. "Thus Heaven I've forfeited, I know it full well," he wrote in a poem in 1837, a decade before his Manifesto. "My soul, once true to God, is chosen for Hell." That certainly seemed to be the perverse destiny for Marx's ideology, which consigned to death over 100 million souls in the twentieth century alone. No other theory in all of history has led to the deaths of so many innocents. How could the Father of Lies not be involved? At long last, here, in this book by Professor Paul Kengor, is a close, careful look at the diabolical side of Karl Marx, a side of a man whose fascination with the devil and his domain would echo into the twentieth century and continue to wreak havoc today. It is a tragic portrait of a man and an ideology, a chilling retrospective on an evil that should have never been let out of its pit.

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Publié par	TAN Books
Date de parution	18 août 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781505114461
Langue	English

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T HE D EVIL AND K ARL M ARX
THE DEVIL AND KARL MARX
C OMMUNISM’S L ONG M ARCH OF D EATH , D ECEPTION, AND I NFILTRATION
P AUL K ENGOR , P H D
TAN B OOKS G ASTONIA , N ORTH C AROLINA
The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration © 2020 Paul Kengor
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition), copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Caroline Green
Cover image: Karl Marx by Alevtina_Vyacheslav/Shutterstock
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936885
ISBN: 978-1-5051-1444-7
Published in the United States by TAN Books PO Box 269 Gastonia, NC 28053 www.TANBooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. … For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Ephesians 5:11; 6:12
“Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God, Is chosen for Hell.”
—Karl Marx, “The Pale Maiden,” 1837
“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.”
—Karl Marx, “The Player,” 1841
C ONTENTS
Foreword
Preface: “The Dance of Death,” The Communist Killing Machine
Part 1 The Specter
    1 “A Specter Is Haunting Europe,” The Unclean Spirit of Communism
Part 2 Karl Marx
    2 “My Soul Is Chosen for Hell,” Marx’s Verse
    3 “Governed by a Demon?” Marx’s Miseries
    4 “Monster of Ten Thousand Devils,” Engels Encounters Marx
Part 3 The Bolshevik War on Religion and the Church’s Resistance
    5 “We Do Not Believe in God,” Lenin’s Necrophilia
    6 “Satanic Scourge,” The Church on Atheistic Communism
Part 4 Infiltration and Manipulation
    7 “Liquidating Religious Beliefs,” William Z. Foster and CPUSA
    8 “Outstretched Hand,” Earl Browder’s Backhand
    9 “Obliterating All Religion,” Louis Budenz and Ben Gitlow Speak Out
10 “The Devil Doth Quote the Scripture,” Manning Johnson on the Infiltration of the Church
11 “Over a Thousand Communist Men,” Infiltration of Catholic Seminaries? Bella Dodd’s Claims
12 “They Kept a Tab,” Seminaries, Churches, and Clergy Behind the Iron Curtain
Part 5 They Are Legion
13 “The World’s Wickedest,” Minions, Pagans, Weirdos, Radicals
14 “The Specter of the Frankfurt School,” More Minions, Pagans, Weirdos, Radicals
Part 6 Conclusion
15 “Fundamental Transformation,” Marx’s Enduring Specter
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Index
F OREWORD
R onald Reagan described a communist as one who reads Karl Marx and an anti-communist as one who understands Karl Marx. Pithy and true, at least at the time, but conservatives in the decades since Reagan won the Cold War have begun to forget just what makes Marxism so wrong, and their failure to articulate Marx’s fatal flaw has left an entire generation prey to the deadliest ideology in history, imperiling not only minds but also souls.
The majority of young Americans today hold a favorable view of socialism, according to a 2018 Gallup poll. Socialism is on the rise more than three decades after conservatives thought it had died in the rubble of the Berlin Wall. In just the past few years, admitted socialists have won elected office throughout the country, from the local to the national level. They have succeeded because, while conservatives have blabbered themselves hoarse denouncing the economic effects of socialism, they have ignored the deeper spiritual questions that actually move men’s souls. That is why this book could not be published at a more opportune time.
Karl Marx envisioned a merely material world in which religion is “the opium of the people” and nothing matters but matter. Rather than question this false vision—indeed, our ability to question anything at all dispels it—many conservatives have contented themselves to debate Marx on his own materialist terms. “Socialism destroys economies,” they observe. Then, “Socialism distorts markets.” And finally, “Socialism just doesn’t work.”
But whether or not a political system “works” depends on what it’s working toward. Socialism strives to tear down traditional society. At that task, socialism has succeeded everywhere it has been tried, at least for a time. The problem with socialism isn’t the inefficiency; it’s the evil. Marx did not set out to tinker with markets and redistribute some wealth. He sought to radically transform society by changing human nature. He hated religion because he opposed God, the author of human nature. He sided with Satan, as he confessed in letters and ghoulish poetry quoted in these pages. Ex-communists such as Arthur Koestler and Richard Wright came to call Marxism “the god that failed.” Karl Marx erred not through mere miscalculation but through sin and heresy.
Unfortunately, the same softening on Marxism that took place in the realm of politics infected the Church as well, at times through misunderstanding and at others through outright infiltration. The Church has condemned Marxism since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet in 2019 the leading Jesuit periodical in the United States published “The Catholic Case for Communism.” Around the same time, the Holy Father made common cause with communists, according to the left-wing Italian newspaper La Repubblica . “If anything,” Pope Francis reportedly told the paper’s founder Eugenio Scalfari, “it is the communists who think like Christians.” One wonders if Karl Marx could hear the Pope’s compliment amid the wailing and gnashing of teeth in Marx’s eternal abode.
Still, Pope Francis has refused to count himself among Marx’s followers. “Marxist ideology is wrong,” he affirmed flatly in 2013. Francis’s predecessors spoke even more forcefully against communism in years past. “Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist,” declared Pope Pius XI, who considered socialism “irreconcilable with Christianity.” His predecessor Pope Leo XIII condemned socialists as “a wicked confederacy,” “a pest,” a plague,” “a hideous monster … that threatens civil society with destruction,” and “an evil growth” that attempts to “steal the very Gospel itself with a view to deceive more easily the unwary.” Bl. Pope Pius IX, writing even before Marx, decried communism and socialism with the same vigor.
Communists read Marx, anti-communists understand Marx, and no one understands Marx better than Paul Kengor. His was the unhappy task of wading through such diabolically inspired drivel, and for that we owe him a debt of gratitude. Kengor knows, like few others writing today, that terms such as “collectivism” and “individualism” only take the debate so far. Quibbles over marginal tax rates have never inspired a soul, least of all Karl Marx. Ultimately the fight comes down to spiritual warfare: good versus evil.
In his most famous Cold War speech, Ronald Reagan, quoting Winston Churchill, warned, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits, not animals.” And spirits must choose a side.
Euphoria at the fall of the Berlin Wall made utopians of otherwise hard-nosed conservatives, who declared “the end of history as such,” ironically echoing the grandiose rhetoric and barmy theories of the ideologue they claimed to have defeated. But history did not end. If anything, it has begun to repeat itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce,” just as Marx predicted in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon . The Evil Empire collapsed, but evil spirits continue to prowl about the earth seeking the ruin of souls because we contend in the end not against flesh and blood but “against the spirits of wickedness in the high places,” which will endure until the end of the world. In the meantime, we must know our enemy. In The Devil and Karl Marx , Paul Kengor masterfully helps us to do so.
Michael Knowles Los Angeles, CA
N OTES ON S TYLE
S tyle guides differ on the usage of upper- or lowercase for the word “communist.” Some use exclusively uppercase (a bad choice). This book uses uppercase if describing a person who was a formal member of the Communist Party vs. lowercase for someone who was a communist ideologically but not a party member. The distinction is very important. Everyone throughout the history of the communist movement knows that an uppercase “Communist” is a major distinction from a lowercase “communist.” The vast majority of communists ideologically refused to go so far as to join the Communist Party and become uppercase “Communists” because doing so required them to take a formal sworn loyalty oath to Stalin’s USSR, to the Kremlin, to the Soviet Comintern, and to Communist Party USA. They were unwilling to do that. Those Communists who did swear the oath took a huge step beyond those communists who refused to take the leap. (Public education pioneer John Dewey, to cite just one example, objected to “Communism, official Communism, spelt with a capital letter.” He had been a lowercase communist.) Thus, regardless of what rigid style guidelines might demand, we must be careful to make this crucia