Materialist Philosophy
by Dr. Fred Schwarz, part 3

      The second factor in the creation of a Communist is materialist philosophy.  The student-intellectual is taught that there is no God; that matter in motion is the sum total of all being; that each individual is a body in which a stomach secretes gastric juices, a liver secretes bile, and a brain secretes emotion and thought.  There is no soul; there is no spirit; there is no heaven to gain, no hell to shun.  A new scientific age has been born, and the need for God has been abolished.  The modern outlook is materialism.
      Speaking at a university, I outlined these basic, Communist materialist beliefs of communism:

a)      Godlessness
b)      The material nature of man
c)      The environmental nature of man’s intellectual and so-called spiritual qualities.

      A woman jumped to her feet and said, “Why, I hear these things taught in this university every day.  The professor of psychology goes to the board and draws a diagram.  He says, ‘You are only a machine.  You are no more and no less.  You are a pattern of conditioned behavior.  The machinery of your body is very complex.  Indeed, your brain is so complex that it gives the impression of freedom, choice, and volition.  But actually, you are as automatic as an automobile.  You have no soul, you have no spirit, and, in the last analysis, you have no mind.’  He laughs at God and he laughs at morality.”
      That man is not necessarily a Communist.  He may even consider himself an anti-Communist.  But every student who believes what he teaches will find the Communist program logical and appealing.  For Communism carries this teaching to its logical conclusion.
      Communism says that every characteristic and attitude of the human personality emerges from the brain.  The brain is formed by the accumulation of experiences in the form of conditioned reflexes.  These experiences are provided by the environment which is predominantly economic.  What we think, what we feel, what we believe, whom we love, and whom we worship merely reflect our economic environment.
      Once you accept this, it follows, as night follows day, that if you can control completely the environment, you can generate the mind and character you desire.  Thus Communism becomes a program for scientific, materialistic regeneration.
      This program for regeneration opens a wonderful vista for the human mind.  The Russian Communists already claim to have successfully regenerated many people.  One book they have published is entitled Peoples Regenerated. They claim they will produce perfect people with perfect bodies, perfect

v minds, and perfect characters, living together in perfect happiness.  This is to be done by means of science.
      The first step in the program is to face realistically the scientific needs.  The present environment is Capitalistic and evil, creating degenerates, criminals, and sundry vicious characters.  While that environment continues, human nature cannot be changed.  To try and persuade people to be different while they live in an environment that determines how they act is fatuous nonsense.  It is like trying to dry the baby while he is still lying in the bath water.  To be successful, you must take him out of the water first.  Similarly, if man is to be changed, he must be removed from his Capitalist environment.  To do this, the Communists must conquer the world and utterly destroy the Capitalist environment.  Capitalism will then be replaced by Socialism which is built not on profit, greed, and self, but on service, cooperation, and others.
      In the new environment of Socialism, the babes will receive new experiences which will condition them to unselfish, voluntary service.  The babes will grow to children, the children to adolescents, and the adolescents to adults.  How different things will be!  Everyone will work because he loves to work.  Everyone will give because it is better to give than to receive.  The hand of none will be raised in anger against his brother.  No longer will there be a need for a police force, for there will be nothing for the police to do.  There will be no income tax to pay, because people, working willingly, skillfully, and creatively, will produce total abundance, but will partake merely to the extent of their limited needs.  All that mars the happiness of man will be gone forever.  Vice, crime, famine, pestilence, and war will be merely words from a forgotten past, while abundance, brotherhood, and mutual, co-operative service will bind lives together in the golden day of Communism that has dawned upon the earth.
      Frequently after depicting this promise of Communism, I am accused of making it appear too attractive.  This is exactly the way it appears to the student.  That is why student-intellectuals join the Party.  This is just how Communism is presented to them, and on their materialist foundation, it is logical.  Liu Shao-Chi in his book, How to Be a Good Communist, writes:

What is the most fundamental and common duty of us Communist Party members?  As everybody knows, it is to establish Communism, to transform the present world into a Communist world.  Is a Communist world good or not?  We all know that it is very good.  In such a world there will be no exploiters, oppressors, landlords, capitalists, imperialists or fascists. There will be no oppressed and exploited people, no darkness,

ignorance, backwardness, etc.  In such a society all human beings will become unselfish and intelligent Communists with a high level of culture and technique.  The spirit of mutual assistance and mutual love will prevail among mankind.  There will be no such irrational things as mutual deception, mutual antagonism, mutual slaughter and war, etc.  Such a society will, of course, be the best, the most beautiful and the most advanced society in the history of mankind.  Who will say that such a society is not good?  Here the question arises: ‘Can Communist society be brought about?’  Our answer is ‘yes.’  About this the whole theory of Marxism-Leninism offers a scientific explanation that leaves no room for doubt.  It further explains that as the ultimate result of the class struggle of mankind, such a society will inevitably be brought about.

      It is on the foundation of materialism that this scientific program for human regeneration is built.
      There are, of course, one or two unpleasant steps on the way to this glorious goal.  One of these is the problem of dealing with those who populate the world when the Communists conquer it.  These people, formed in the old environment, will think, feel, love, and worship in an established pattern.  If they are allowed to raise their young, they will reproduce in them their own qualities, and the Communist aim of generating new characters and perfect human society will be thwarted.  Obviously, therefore, they cannot be allowed to remain where they are.
      Some of them will be segregated and used to do some useful work until they die.  Some of them can be re-educated in re-educational institutions, namely, the labor hospitals.  The disease of Capitalist character, according to the Communist, is determined by the false labor relationships of the Capitalist system.  In Capitalist society, labor is associated with profit or reward, whereas labor should be its own reward.  The unfortunate victims of Capitalist society will be taken in their diseased state, and put into Communist institutions of pure labor.  There they will rise in the morning to labor, and will go to bed at night weary and exhausted with never a thought of any reward.  The therapeutic of labor will cure them of their grievous Capitalistic disease.  The Communists consider themselves humane in the extreme for providing these therapeutic institutions of labor to regenerate diseased Capitalist mankind.  It is our bourgeois ignorance that causes us to classify them as slave labor camps.

      It is only the young, however, who merit the curative process.  The older members of the diseased classes who are established in their ways must obviously be destroyed.  This the Communists believe to be their duty.  Such people would not be happy in the new environment.  It is kindness to destroy them—a type of social euthanasia.  The Communists have no conscience about it because, according to their materialist philosophy, it is but a step towards the glorious goal of the regeneration of all mankind.  This step may seem a little unpleasant to the process of regenerating mankind.
      The record of Communism is one of recurrent fratricide and genocide.  Their contempt for individual human life has known no bounds.  Whether the life to be sacrificed was that of friend or foe appears to have been immaterial.  The Communist Party of Russia devoured its own creators.  Stalin put to death a majority of the original Bolsheviks.  The Communists destroyed not only landlords and Capitalists, but peasants and workers, Kalmucks and Balts with equal ferocity.  In spite of knowing this, the allegiance of many educated, apparently cultured American Communists has not been shattered.  Many people are amazed that they do not turn from Communism in loathing and repulsion when confronted with its unutterable barbarism, brutality, and intellectual prostitution.
      To the dedicated Communist, however, these are but the temporary necessary sacrifices which the glorious future demands.  To wipe out the residual Capitalist debris is not murder but social science.  Since any individual man is a mere historic accident, an undergraduate beast, it is stupid to regard him as of infinite value.  It is the species and the class that are important.  The Capitalist class has been rejected of history and must be destroyed.
      Capitalism in America has developed to a greater degree than Capitalism in many other countries.  Therefore the number infected by the Capitalist virus is larger than in other lands.  A greater program of elimination will thus be needed.  It is probable and natural that, should Communism prevail in America, a program of class liquidation will ensue that will dwarf similar programs in other countries.
      To those Capitalists who can regard the triumph of Communism with equanimity, I would ask the question: What will be your attitude when you and your family face destruction because of your membership in the historically rejected Capitalist class?  As the wide-bore revolver with the soft-nosed bullet is placed at the nape of your neck to shatter your pattern of Capitalistically conditioned reflexes into a bloody oblivion, will you be able to comfort your dying hours with the thought that you are dying in a good cause, in the interests of the scientific regeneration of the animal species homo sapiens and the birth of the classless society?

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      The specific political economy a Christian finally endorses cannot be pulled from a hat.  Rather, one’s political view ought to be chosen by careful reflection upon Christianity’s fundamental truths and upon the relationship of those fundamental truths to the presuppositions of the political or economic theory under consideration, as well as upon that theory’s historical record.  But of those varied historical and philosophical considerations, the ethical must predominate.  Mere economic productivity and efficiency are not enough.  Christians can properly endorse only those policies that are just both in their ends and in their means.  Thus, while assisting the poor is a morally admirable and theologically sound endeavor, coercion and confiscation are not.  The Biblical means of alleviating another’s distress is not coercive redistribution by the state, but rather the generous acts of selfless charity practiced by the good Samaritan:  personal involvement and compassionate private largesse (Luke 10: 30-37).  The good Samaritan himself came to the aid of his suffering brother.  He did not lobby Congress to fund another massive, ineffective and wasteful giveaway, made possible only by a large-scale, coercive confiscation of private property.
      Those who depend upon the state to be an effective means of philanthropy must first ignore the fact that the modern state is not normally an agency of Christian love.  Quite the contrary; the modern state has been the cause of more deaths (upwards of 100 million in the 20th century alone) than apparently in all other centuries combined.  Nor do the socialist redistributers of other people’s property seem to realize that despite his good intentions, Robin Hood was a thief.

Marxism entails a faulty view of private property
      By abolishing private property rights, Marxism has cut economic rewards loose from risk taking, from effort, and from saving.  Human beings simply cannot be relied upon to make the careful and painstaking evaluations necessary to assess the real possibilities for success or failure before taking entrepreneurial risks when neither the profits gained from such risks nor the losses incurred from such risks are theirs.  Nor can investment capital be accumulated except from the profits of prior endeavors, the present use of which has been sacrificed in order to make possible (but not inevitable) even greater prosperity in the future.  In a low-efficiency system like Marxism, where profits already tend to be very small, workers will be unwilling to work harder to raise a company’s profit margin or to endure intensified deprivation for the purpose of funding future endeavors that are not likely to be successful, or, if they are successful, will not yield profits to the workers themselves but to the state. A socialist economy

does not permit people to reap for themselves the rewards of their hard work, shrewdness, and abstinence.  For that reason, if for no other, socialism will never be as successful as democratic capitalism.  When private property rights disappear, so does the entrepreneurial spirit.  Incentive is tied inextricably to ownership.
      The Marxist denial of private property rights is not only inefficient, it is unbiblical and contradicts the clear teaching of both Testaments.  In the Hebrew scriptures, for example, the Decalogue forbids both theft and the evil desires that frequently give rise to theft by declaring “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not covet” (Exodus 20:15, 17).  As John Chamberlain correctly explains,

“Thou shalt not steal” means that the Bible countenances private property — for if a thing is not owned in the first place it can scarcely be stolen.  “Thou shalt not covet” means that it  is sinful even to contemplate the seizure of another man’s goods — which is something which socialists, whether Christian or other, have never managed to explain away.  Furthermore, the prohibitions against false witness and adultery mean that contracts should be honored and double-dealing eschewed.  As for the commandment to “honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long,” this implies that the family, not the state, is the basic continuing unit and constitutive element of society.²

      The New Testament is no different.  In his parables on the talents (mentioned above), on the unjust steward (Luke 16: 1-13), and on the pounds  (Luke 19: 11-27),  Christ was concerned to underscore the virtue of properly managing and utilizing one’s resources in the best interest both of oneself and the Kingdom of God.  From these and other passages, it is clear that Jesus does not condemn private property, work, business, investment, saving, or wealth.  He does, however, condemn covetousness, greed, and neglecting both the needs of others and those of one’s own soul.
      Christ is well aware of the spiritual hazards of wealth, and He warns us against them.  But that does not mean that money is evil or that possessing it is wicked.  The love of money, not money itself, is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6: 10).  By the same token, spiritual hazards also attach to poverty, such as crime, envy, and bitterness.  After all, it is not the poor, but the poor in spirit — that is, the spiritually broken-hearted and repentant — who inherit the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 5: 3).  Jesus condemns not wealth, but avarice.  In the former instance, you have money; in the latter instance, money has you.

      In short, the New Testament does not view private property as a problem in itself.  Rather, it endorses it.  In the one instance where the New Testament era Christians practiced community of goods (Acts 2: 44ff), the experiment seems to have proved a colossal failure, for shortly afterward we discover that bureaucratic miscarriage in the redistribution of goods as well as increasing poverty in the ranks (conditions not at all unrelated or atypical of socialist systems on any scale) led to complaints and to divisions among believers (Acts 6: 1).  In other words, socialism is a system that not even the apostles themselves could make work.
      But here I must digress for one paragraph.  Like the Marxists, the secular libertarians make a fundamental error with regard to private property.  They do so by believing that their bodies and their lives are in fact their own, and that, because they are their own, they can do with them as they please.  But the secular libertarians are wrong.  Neither the bodies we have nor we ourselves belong to us.  These things are doubly, even trebly, God’s.  That is, what a man makes belongs to a man.  He owns the fruit of his labor.  What a man purchases is his.  He owns what he buys.  By the same token, we ourselves are God’s.  He both created us and purchased us from sin at the cost of his own Son.  In Paul’s words, “You are not your own; you were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6: 19, 20).  Furthermore, we know we must not despoil a man of his domicile, his home.  Our bodies, so to

speak, are the domicile of God. As Paul asks in the same passage, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?” (1 Corinthians 6: 19).  We also know that ownership entails the privilege of both use and disposal.  Because it does, and because we are God’s, the secular libertarian cannot do with (or to) himself anything he sees fit and then try to justify his actions on the grounds that they injure no one else and are therefore morally acceptable.  They are not.  Secular libertarians expropriate from God what is rightfully God’s — the very action those same libertarians properly condemn when done to them by the state.  Nor can a pregnant feminist any longer claim that the fetus growing within her is her own body and that she may do with her body whatever she pleases.  Abortion, in other words, not only despoils the rights of the one growing within her, it is a trespass against the property rights of God.  So also is suicide.
      Marxists (and others) make egregious errors regarding the expropriation of private property, but that failing is not exclusively Marxist.  Nor is that failing Biblical.  As in all things, Scripture knows better.

ENDNOTES
      ¹Brian Griffiths, The Creation of Wealth: A Christian’s Case for Capitalism (Downers Grove: IVP, 1984) p. 78.
      ²John Chamberlain, The Roots of Capitalism (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1959/1976), pp. 70, 71.

MISSION TO KIEV, UKRAINE

      I want to take a few paragraphs in this Report to share with you an opportunity that has significant consequences for the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade.
      As some of our longtime readers know, the Crusade has supported mission projects in Africa and India for many, many years.  These include orphanages and schools along with a preaching and teaching ministry.
      There is now a mission project in the Ukraine that I am directly involved with, and would love to interest some of our Crusade family to help bring this particular vision to reality.
      Our textbook Understanding the Times (abridged edition) has been translated into Russian and I have been to Russia and the Ukraine in the last few years teaching grade school and high school teachers how to teach their students to discern and develop the Christian worldview, contrasting it with the Communist worldview.  The acceptance of this approach has been overwhelming.  A Christian university in St. Petersburg and Campus Crusade for Christ ministries in Russia are presently using our textbook.
      We have a wonderful opportunity in Kiev, Ukraine to establish a headquarters with enough room to educate hundreds of teachers from around the area (including the Baltic states).  The property and its unfinished building can be purchased for $47,000.  It will take some further work to complete the building, but we need to purchase the property before we lose it.  A foundation in Colorado Springs has given $10,000 and two other sources have pledged $7,000 more.  We need 30 of our Crusade friends to give $1,000 and we can proceed to buy it.
      If you are interested in helping us please send me your name and address and express your interest in this project.  Do not send money until I contact you.  Write: David A. Noebel (Kiev Project), P.O. Box 129, Manitou Springs, CO 80829.

The Black Book of Communism

      Over the next few issues of The Schwarz Report we will review one of the most important works on Communism —The Black Book of Communism.  We will begin these reviews with one by K. Lloyd Billingsley, which appeared in the November/December 1999 issue of Heterodoxy.

      As Alexander Ulanovsky, U.S. station chief for Soviet military intelligence from 1931 to 1934, lay ill during the late 1960s, his wife brought him her own translation of The Great Terror, by Robert Conquest.  “Now I can die in peace,” Ulanovsky said after seeing Conquest’s history of Stalin’s monstrous reign. “The story is known and it will survive.”
      The story of communism is one of crimes, terror, and repression, the subtitle of The Black Book of Communism, an important work that forms a story in itself.  The book was a sensational best-seller in Europe but remains barely known in the United States, where it took more than a year to appear.  That lapse is understandable because The Black Book chronicles what the American Left, whose sensibility is still present in publishing, media, and the academy, has denied or defended since the 1920s, what the authors call “politically correct mass slaughter.”
      Stephane Courtois, editor of the review Communisme, esteemed historian of Communism in France, and director of the Centre National de la Research Scientifique, heads the list of eleven authors, whose political profile could be described as anti-Communists of the European Left.  This is a work in the tradition of George Orwell and Bernard-Henry Levy (Barbarism with a Human Face) but backed with new revelations, many from the perpetrators themselves.  The detail and documentation upholds the truth of Stalin’s cynical perception that one death is a tragedy but one million deaths is merely a statistic.  “History should never forget the names of ordinary people,” says Karel Bartosek, historian of the Prague uprising and author of the section on central and southeastern Europe.  Though global in scope, The Black Book takes the trouble to name names.
      Consider Vassily Klementovich Sidorov, a merchant who owned one cow and four sheep, and who had committed no crime.  In 1938, he was charged with saying that Stalin killed and arrested people.  The verdict, from Soviet archives: “SHOOT Sidorov Vassily Klementovitch; confiscate all his goods.”  This innocent man was one of 20 million victims of

Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist terror in the USSR.  As the record makes clear, this was a terror planned and executed by the Communist state in keeping with its principles, not in departure from them.  
      “It is of supreme importance that we encourage and make use of the energy of mass terror,” Lenin told Zinoview, who himself remarked that “to dispose of our enemies, we will have to create our own socialist terror.  For this we will have to train 90 million of the 100 million Russians and have them all on one side.  We have nothing to say to the other 10 million; we’ll have to get rid of them.”  Or consider these lines from The Red Sword, newspaper of the Soviet secret police.  “Blood?  Let blood flow like water!   Let blood stain forever the black pirate’s flag flown by the bourgeoisie, and let our flag be blood-red forever!  For only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves forever from the return of those jackals!”
      Orders to “pacify” Tambov province included “Shoot on sight any citizens who refuse to give their names” and “execute immediately the eldest son in the family.”  Further, “these orders are to be carried out rigorously and without mercy.”  Those who took refuge in the woods were gassed.  “This must be carefully calculated,” said the order, “so that the layer of gas penetrates the forests and kills everyone hiding there.”
      During Stalin’s planned famine of 1932-33, tortures to force people to hand over food included stripping people bare and leaving them in the cold, or dousing skirts of women with gasoline and setting them on fire.  That famine, also documented in one of two photo sections in this book, killed six million in a period of several months.  At that very time, The Black Book helpfully notes, Soviet apologists in the West were covering up the crime.  Soviet “populicide” during World War II, a largely untold story receives thorough treatment here, as does Soviet anti-Semitism.
      Readers may eavesdrop on Moscow adviser Mikhail Likhachev, who says, “Why worry about these Jewish s***s anyway.”  The Black Book takes the reader through the Slansky trials, all the way to the hanging of 11, most of them Jews.  Their bodies were incinerated and their ashes scattered on frozen roads around Prague.  The authors portray Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign as part of a “pedagogy of corpses,” a pre-Krushchev “we will bury you” message to the West.
      Detailed maps show the far-flung gulag system of concentration camps, where millions perished, and which housed 5.5 million people in 1945, the peak of Soviet adulation and Stalinary.  The section on Afghanistan is

particularly valuable, revealing that it was Soviet commandos who assassinated Hafizullah Amin.  “Soviet-occupied Afghanistan was effectively transformed into a giant concentration camp,” say the authors, who document how the Soviets bulldozed the dead into mass graves, and in some cases buried prisoners alive in latrines.
      The authors devote particular care to an aspect of Communist repression long denied by the American Left, the persecution of religious believers.  Romanian Communists forced victims to torture their own friends and take part in blasphemous rites.  In Lovech camp in Bulgaria, prison guards clubbed prisoners to death and their bodies fed to pigs.  That is perfectly consistent behavior for people who share the ideology of Greek Communists Are Velouchiotes.
      “Everyone described me as a killer–that’s the way we were,” he said.  “Revolutions succeed only when rivers run red with blood, and blood has to be spilled if what you are aiming for is the perfectibility of the human race.”  Or as Spanish Stalinist La Pasionaria put it: “It is better to kill one hundred innocents than to let one guilty person go.”  Under Communism, people were not arrested because they were guilty.  Rather, they were guilty because they were arrested.
      That was the practice in China, where Communism still reigns, and where the Red Guards marched to this song:

If the father is brave, the son will be a hero
If he’s a reactionary, the son will be an a**hole
If you’re a revolutionary, step forward and join us
If you’re not, get lost!
Get lost!
We’re gonna chase you out of your f***ing job
Kill! Kill! Kill!

      The Black Book documents how the Chinese Communist regime, which introduced the obscurantist ideas of Trofim Lysenko, was responsible for the most destructive famine in history, one that drove people to cannibalism, as it had in Ukraine.  In the decade before Mao’s death between 12 and 20 million people were forcibly ruralized, including one million from Shanghai alone.  Harry Wu remembers one man executed in 1970 whose brain was eaten by a member of the security forces.  His crime was to write “Down with Chairman Mao” on a wall.
      Citing the Dalai Lama and matching accounts they describe as “beyond challenge,” the authors document how in Tibet the Chinese Communists beat to death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled, hanged, boiled alive, buried alive, and beheaded their victims.  The atrocities of the Khmer Rouge make perfect sense in light of their national anthem:

Bright red blood that covers towns and plains
Of Kampuchea, our motherlands
Sublime blood of workers and peasants,
Sublime blood of revolutionary men and women fighters!
The blood, changing into unrelenting hatred.

      The section on Vietnam notes that Communists there executed women for the crime of marrying someone from France.  The mass atrocities of Col. Mengistu’s Stalinist regime in Ethiopia are represented in The Black Book, as are Communist regimes in North Korea, Angola, and Mozambique.  A helpful section even documents Soviet links to terrorists groups such as the Japanese Red Army.  The murderous Sendero Luminosos are not forgotten, nor the Sandinistas, nor the loathsome regime of Fidel Castro, whose elitist colleague Che Guevara here is accurately portrayed as a vengeful killer and founder of Cuba’s concentration camps, still functioning.
      By The Black Book’s accounting, the USSR is responsible for 20 million deaths, China 65 million, Vietnam one million, North Korea two million, Cambodia two million, Eastern Europe one million, Africa 1.7 million, Afghanistan 1.5 million, for a total approaching 100 million worldwide.  The authors are well aware what this vast holocaust means.  And it is not the old story of a universalist idealism betrayed by bad leaders.
      Communism deploys a “sociopolitical eugenics,” a form of social Darwinism that “scientifically” decides who has been consigned to the dustbin of history and therefore deserves to be liquidated.  That is why terror and mass death are an inherent feature of Communism.  “The informer, the torturer and the NKVD executioner did not denounce, cause suffering, or kill people,” note the authors, “they merely eliminated some sort of abstraction that was not beneficial to the common good.”
      The Black Book is the most thorough and devastating documentation of what happens when men believe themselves to be the vanguard of history.  This is a book capable of establishing “never again,” as the creed of a world entering a new millennium.  It shows that a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep.
      For the left, still possessed by the utopian vision, history is not something to be studied but created.  In the ongoing struggle against tyranny, the battle for the past is now the front line and will escalate every time a Soviet archive or mass grave is opened.  That is why The Black Book of Communism should be the standard college text for the major political movement of our time and the staring point for all discussion of this subject.