Socialism to Communism: The history

Socialism and Communism: A short history lesson

*See notes on the ‘Christian socialist movement’ at the bottom of this page

HEADLINE: Communist Party USA high on Obama

An anti-communist activist is not surprised that the Communist Party USA has written a glowing editorial about Barack Obama.

http://www.cpusa.org/article/articleview/975/1/27/

I have posted this information and disseminated it via Email many times in the past. But now that Bernie Sanders a democrat and an avowed socialist is running for president and drawing large crowds, it is time to post this again. PLEASE READ THE INFORMATION BELOW. Then do some more research on each and every country that has tried or is practicing a socialist or communist form of government.

This table shows the murders by communist regimes, worldwide, committed in the name of Communism. THIS IS WHERE SOCIALISM LEADS.

The Communist Manifesto

Article 1.

The Communist manifesto proclaims that the first necessary step to communism is socialism which uses democracy as its means to that end.

( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1321075/posts )

Valdimir Lenin: “The goal of socialism is communism. Socialism and democracy are inseparable steps to communism”

Rudolph Joseph Rummel (born October 21, 1932) is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He has spent his career assembling data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.J._Rummel )

(This information from http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM)

Article II.

It is time to do some accounting of the human cost of communism as an ideological alternative to democracy.

Few would deny any longer that communism — Marxism-Leninism and its variants — means, in practice, bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and genocide. It is also widely known that as a result millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood.”

The total is 259,432,000 murdered at the hands of communism

Museum of Communism FAQ

By Bryan Caplan at http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/museum/comfaq.htm

The purpose of the Museum of Communism is to for Communism what the Holocaust Memorial Museum does for Nazism: namely, to educate the public about

  • mass murder,

  • widespread slave labor,

  • and other human rights violations committed by Communist regimes.

As it currently stands, a fair percentage of the Western population knows almost nothing of the human rights record of Communist regimes, considering Communism is considered a noble ideal by people who aren’t virtuous enough to practice it’s tenents and doctrines.

What were the most significant human rights violations committed by Communist regimes, and who was responsible for them?

All Communist governments have practiced

  • widespread killing of non- combatants.

  • The extermination of the bourgeoisie and wealthy “as a class” has been most loudly proclaimed, although in actual fact peasants have been by far the majority of the victims.

  • In addition, Communist governments have ordered the genocide of numerous ethnic minorities deemed disloyal or anti- Communist.

  • Finally, Communist governments have frequently killed large numbers of rival Communists. In most cases, the official reasons given for mass killings have been economic or political rather than racial, but punishment has rarely been inflicted for individual infractions of the law. Rather, Communist governments would judge “enemies of the people” to be common in one’s class, family, or ethnicity, and respond with blanket repression of the entire suspect group. As the democratic socialist historian Carl Landauer notes in his discussion of Stalin’s “dekulakization” campaign.

Does Communism retain any practical political implications?

History has a way of repeating itself. For this reason alone, it is important for the future of the world that the basic facts about Communist regimes become common knowledge.

While admirers of Hitler’s Germany still exist, the public knows enough about the Holocaust to make a revival of Nazism far less likely than it otherwise would be. Greater awareness of the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao could similarly inoculate the world against any future Communist revival.

I would also suggest a stronger and more controversial set of practical implications:

  • Government is at best a necessary evil and at worst an intolerable one. Nothing could better confirm the truth of Thomas Paine’s dictum than the experience of Communism; it is virtually a controlled experiment.

Remove the checks upon government power, and government quickly produces hell on earth.

  • Not only did Communism kill millions of people.

  • It created poverty rather than plenty,

  • drove human creativity underground,

  • and turned hypocrisy into a basic survival skill.

This provides a powerful argument for viewing all government power with intense skepticism.

Article III.

Free markets lead to prosperity and socialism leads to poverty.

In the real world, all societies have a mixture of free markets and socialism.

This can make it difficult to figure out which institutions lead to prosperity. Communism again provided the world with a controlled experiment: Give the government total control over the economy, and see what happens.

The results were typically mass starvation, followed by stagnation. The contrast was particularly stark when historical chance split Germany, Korea, and China into distinct politico- economic units. The culture and initial living standards of the fragments were initially the same. As the Communist countries’ prosperity lagged ever further behind that of their more capitalist counterparts, even many skeptics concluded that the difference was not coincidental, but systemic.

The history of Communism provides one important argument for libertarianism.

Communism deprived its people of both personal and economic freedom. It thereby provided a third controlled experiment – a moral experiment testing the value of freedom. Imagine a society with any conceivable properties, but utterly lacking in “bourgeois” freedom. It would remain a profoundly evil society. The experience of Communism makes it possible to conduct this thought experiment without taxing the imagination.

In American politics, liberals typically argue for more personal freedom and less economic freedom, while conservatives argue for less personal freedom and more economic freedom. The moral controlled experiment which was Communism suggests that both popular positions are confused. Each only appreciates half of what was wrong about Communism. A political philosophy recognizing the supreme value of both personal and economic freedom – in a word, libertarianism – provides the clearest insight into why Communism was wrong in principle as well as practice.

Article IV.

“What is the difference between communism and socialism?”

From: The MAOIST INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT ( http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/faq/commievssoc.html )

According to Marx, socialism is a stage on the way to communism, which is the more advanced stage of human organization not yet achieved in China or the Soviet Union, even according to Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

Many calling themselves socialist would like to stop with the nationalization of the means of production and not move on to communism. They also often oppose the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the name of democracy.

Socialism and Communism

The quick ‘n’ easy way to remember the difference between Socialism and Communism is: Socialism is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their DEEDS,” whereas Communism is “from each according to their ability to each according to their NEEDS.”

Socialism is the stage between Capitalism and Communism. It builds upon the previous system (Capitalism) by nationalizing the “means of production” (i.e. corporations, resources, banks, etc.), but not by making everyone equal. (quote by Todd Tolleson)

Quotes on Communism by influential people:

“Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.” – John F. Kennedy

“Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak.” – Pierre Joseph Proudhon

“A common danger tends to concord. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence.” – Pierre Joseph Proudhon

For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.” – Joseph Stalin

“Let’s not talk about Communism. Communism was just an idea, just pie in the sky.” – Boris Yeltsin

“Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.” – Mao Zedong

“I am a communist because I believe that the Communist idea is a state form of Christianity.” – Alexander Zhuravlyov

During his 1945 election campaign Winston Churchill stated that:

…a socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom. Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the object worship of the state. It will prescribe for every one where they are to work, what they are to work at, where they may go and what they may say. Socialism is an attack on the right to breathe freely. No socialist system can be established without a political police. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.

…a socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom.

  • Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and

  • the object worship of the state.

  • It will prescribe for every one where they are to work,

  • what they are to work at,

  • where they may go and

  • what they may say.

  • Socialism is an attack on the right to breathe freely.

  • No socialist system can be established without a political police. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance

Article V. Christianity and Communism

This is particulary interesting since President Obama call himself a ‘christian’ as do many others in government and society, but who do not practice traditional Christianity. They have put a new “spin” or have redefined Christianity to fit their worldview and politics. (For more on the re-defining of the Gospel, visit our page http://www.whitestone2014.com/#!what-is-this-strange-new-gospel/cztd )

from http://www.orthodoxphotos.com/readings/law/christianity.shtml

Let us now examine the question of the relationship of Christianity with Communism more precisely, to that particular form of communism which has now appeared as an attempt to realize the ideas of socialism.

This form of communism emerged in history as a sworn and bitter enemy of Christianity. For its part, Christianity recognizes it as completely alien and inimical with itself.

The history of the Church in apostolic times reveals that, in those times, it had its own Christian communalism and the faithful held everything common, as the Acts of the Apostles says. Even now, this Christian communalism exists in the form of Koenobitic monasticism.

Both the concept and reality of communal property is a bright, idealistically elevated type of Christian inter-relationship, examples of which have always existed in the Orthodox Church.

How great is the difference between such Christian communalism and Soviet communism? One is as far from the other as the heavens are from the earth.

Christian communalism is not an independent self-motivated goal to which Christianity might strive. Rather, it is an inheritance bred of that spirit of love by which the Church has breathed from the first. Moreover, Christian communalism is totally voluntary. No one says, “Give us what is yours, it belongs to us,” rather, Christians themselves sacrificed so that “none of them considered any of their possessions to be their own.”

The communalism of property in communism is a self-motivated goal which must be attained no matter what the consequences and regardless of any considerations.

The builders of this type of communism are attaining it by purely violent means, not balking at any measure, even the slaughter of all those who do not agree. The bases of this communism are not freedom, as in Christian communalism, but force; not sacrificial love, but envy and hatred.

In its struggle against religion, Communism goes to such excesses that it excludes even that most elementary justice which is recognized by everyone.

In its class ideology, Communism tramples on all justice. The object of its work is not the common weal of all the citizens of the state, but only the interests of a single class. All the remaining state and social groupings of citizens are “thrown overboard,” outside the care and protection of the communist government.

The ruling class has no concern for them. Listen to these quotes by president Barak Obama:

  • We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

  • It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

  • I opposed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. It should be repealed and I will vote for its repeal on the Senate floor. I will also oppose any proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban gays and lesbians from marrying.

Thomas Jefferson: “He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.”

President Bill Clinton on the Constitution: “We can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans …”
Bill Clinton (USA TODAY, 11 March 1993, page 2A)

Communist, Lenin, once said, “Atheism is a natural and inseparable portion of Marxism, of the theory and practice of Scientific Socialism.”

Where there is a supreme God, there is a less supreme man who is necessarily under subjection to the supreme God. Therefore, where there is a supreme God, man has limited power, especially since the supreme God may “interfere” at any time and take charge, predictably, according to His own counsel.

In other words, as the anti-Communism expert, Dr. Fred C. Schwarz, put it, “If God exists and is in supreme command of the universe, He possesses discretionary power, and His actions cannot always be calculated accurately in advance.” The reality of a ruling God topples Communism’s man-centered, predictable-circumstance-based sandcastle; so the idea of God must go, as a “law.”

( http://www.aggressivechristianity.net/articles/means.htm )

Obama’s church for years was the Trinity United Church of Christ. The “pastor” of this church is Jeremiah Wright. He teaches a form of Liberation Theology. Black Liberation Theology uses words similar to or the same as traditional Christianity but does not teach traditional Christian / Judeo thought, disciplines or doctrines. It is, in fact, incompatible with Protestant Christianity.

From the Trinity United Chruch of Christ:

Dr. Wright’s talking points (3.1.7) for Trinity United Church of Christ its Web site and the Black Value System (in response to Erik Rush’s comments (2.28.07) on the Hannity and Colmes show):

• One of the biggest gaps in knowledge that causes the kind of ignorance that you hear spouted by this man [Erik Rush] and those like him, has to do with the fact that these persons are completely ignorant when it comes to the Black religious tradition. The vision statement of Trinity United Church of Christ is based upon the systematized liberation theology that started in 1969 with the publication of Dr. James Cone’s book, Black Power and Black Theology.

• Black theology is one of the many theologies in the Americas that became popular during the liberation theology movement. They include Hispanic theology, Native American theology, Asian theology and Womanist theology.

• I use the word “systematized” because Black liberation theology was in existence long before Dr. Cone’s book. It originates in the days of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. It was systematized and published by theologians, Old Testament scholars, New Testament scholars, ethicists, church historians, and historians of religion such as Dr. James Cone, Dr. Cain Hope Felder, Dr. Gayraud Wilmore, Dr. Jacqueline Grant, Dr. Kelley Brown Douglas, Dr. Renita Weems, Dr. Katie Cannon, Dr. Dwight Hopkins, Dr. Linda Thomas, and Dr. Randall Bailey.

• These scholars, who write in various disciplines, also include seminary presidents like Dr. John Kinney and professors of Hebrew Bible, like Dr. Jerome Ross. Black liberation theology defines Africans and African Americans as subjects – not the objects which colonizers and oppressors have consistently defined “others” as.

• We [African Americans] were always seen as objects. When we started defining ourselves, it scared those who try to control others by naming them and defining them for them; Oppressors do not like “others” defining themselves.

• To have a church whose theological perspective starts from the vantage point of Black liberation theology being its center, is not to say that African or African American people are superior to any one else.

• African-centered thought, unlike Eurocentrism, does not assume superiority and look at everyone else as being inferior.

• There is more than one center from which to view the world. In the words of Dr. Janice Hale, “Difference does not mean deficience.” It is from this vantage point that Black liberation theology speaks.

From ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_theology )

Overview

Black theology is a form of liberation theology that has its center in the theme of oppression of black people by white people.[1] According to James H. Cone, it came out of the “need for black people to define the scope and meaning of black existence in a white society”[citation needed], and emerged in the last two decades in the wave of liberation movements as an expression of “black consciousness”. Black theology is focused on the issues that blacks are confronted with on a daily basis.

Beliefs and doctrines

God

Intricate and largely philosophical views of God are largely ignored in preference for the concerns of the oppressed. White Christian concepts taught to black persons are to be disregarded or ignored. The aspects of God’s person, his power and authority, as well as “subtle indications of God’s white maleness” are said not to relate to the black experience, to the extent of sometimes being antagonistic. While trinitarian theology is a big concern, Jesus is still considered to be God. The focus is given to God’s actions, and his delivering of the oppressed because of his righteousness. Immanence is stressed over transcendence, and as a result God is seen to be “in flux” or “always changing”. [1]

Christ

Jesus is seen as a non-white, social liberator who focused on the emancipation of the poor and of the marginalized, and many parallel are made with the emancipation efforts of black people in the United States. Christ’s message is interpreted as encouraging “black power” (Henry). His intrinsic nature and spiritual activity receive little or no attention. Some even deny his role as the atoning sacrifice for the world’s sins and provider of eternal life (Shrine).

Revelation

Black theology is not bound to biblical liberalism, but is of a more pragmatic nature. Only the experience of black oppression is the authoritative standard.

Salvation

Salvation is freedom from the oppression and pertains to blacks in this life. Proponents of black theology are concerned specifically with the political and theological aspects of salvation more than the spiritual. In other words, salvation is physically liberation from white oppression, or “The white enemy” (Cone) rather than freedom from the sinful nature and acts of each individual person. Presenting heaven as a reward for following Christ is seen as an attempt to dissuade blacks from the goal of real liberation of their whole persons.

Church

The church is the focus of social expression in the black community where the blacks can express freedom and equality (Cone). Thus the church and politics have formed a cohesion where the theological expression of the desire for social freedom is carried out.

BLACK Liberation Theology as well as The Emergent Church and the teaching of a Social Gospel come from essentially the same root of thought: Gnosticism.

The Social Gospel: The 21st Century

In the United States, the Social Gospel is still influential in mainline Protestant denominations such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church; it seems to be growing in the Episcopal Church as well, especially with that church’s effort to support the ONE Campaign. In Canada, it is widely present in the United Church and in the Anglican Church.

Social Gospel elements can also be found in many service and relief agencies associated with Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church in the United States. It also remains influential among Christian socialist circles in Britain in the Church of England, Methodist and Calvinist movements.

In Catholicism, liberation theology has similarities to the Social Gospel. In the Anglican Church, the social gospel has found expression in pacifism.

Christian socialism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_socialism

Christian socialism generally refers to those on the Christian left whose politics are both Christian and socialist and who see these two philosophies as being interrelated.

This category can include

The term “Christian Socialism” is used in this sense by organizations such as the Christian Socialist Movement (CSM), a specifically Christian grouping affiliated with the British Labour Party.

Christian socialists draw parallels between what some have characterized as the egalitarian and anti-establishment message of Jesus, who — according to Christian Gospel — spoke against the religious authorities of his time, and the egalitarian, anti-establishment, and sometimes anti-clerical message of most contemporary socialisms. Some Christian Socialists have gone as far as to become active Communists (see Christian communism).

Socialism and Communism are the antithesis of Christianity and have the goal of replacing God with the State, by any means necessary.