25Jul

The art of the Czars and the Art of Willful Blindness

It is fascinating how an object can embody the best and worst of us. Take this lovely and delicately decorated piece of Russian art. Shown below is an ornate chalice commissioned by Catherine thd Great in 1790. The craftsmanship and beauty are an homage to something higher and better, to God. The Czars under whom this art flourished were, of course, famously cruel and despotic.

This article isn’t about Czars, but rather about events that took place later, in the 1930’s. The art tells us also about a more banal, if no less sinister, form of evil. The reason I saw this little gem is that literally tens of thousands of priceless pieces of art were lifted from Russia during the dark days of Joseph Stalin, by another Joseph, to whom we shall return in a moment.

I have read the fascinating little 2009 book by Tim Tzouliadis called The Forsaken, An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia. This book chronicles the tragic fates of thousands of Americans who migrated to Russia in the 1920’s, in hopes that the Communist experiment might offer them a better life, or because work relocated them there (in the case of an auto factory that Henry Ford moved to Gorky). Upon arrival, their passports were immediately confiscated by Soviet officials. During the purges and horrors of the 1930s, most of these Americans were arrested and either summarily executed with a bullet in the back of the head, or sent to gulags where most of them died of disease and starvation.

The Americans were by no means alone in this nightmare. An internal report by Nikita Khrushchev stated that from 1935 to 1941 the NKVD had arrested 19 million citizens, of whom 7 million were shot immediately. (Tzouliadis, p.159)

The terrified American emigrants tried to turn to the American embassy for help. As the book put it:

In Moscow, the American diplomats understood very well that low-level negotiation with the Soviet Foreign Ministry was entirely useless, given the fact that the entire Commissariat was petrified of the NKVD and were themselves frequent victims of the Terror. Clearly more forceful intervention was required at the very highest levels of government. Had the diplomats been willing, action might still have been taken, and the lives of the American emigrants might well have been saved.

But what was abundantly clear was that if this was about to happen, the “captured Americans” needed a heroically protective figure to intervene on their behalf—someone with the courage of Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg—someone willing to lend sanctuary, to hand out passports, to speak to the president, and to kick up a very loud and very public fuss in a time of peril. Someone, in short, who might hold a protective hand over them when their lives were so evidently endangered.

What they got instead was Ambassador Joseph Davies. (p. 106)

Joseph Davies was happy to praise the Soviets and turn a blind eye to the plight of the Terror victims. He even attended some of the “Show Trials”, and wrote favorably of the proceedings, even as most foreign press and even his own staff differed:

“Ambassador Davies was not noted for an acute understanding of the Soviet system, and he had an unfortunate tendency to take what was presented at the trial as the honest and gospel truth. I still blush when I think of some of the telegrams he sent to the State Department about the trial…”

“I can only guess at the motivation for his reporting. He ardently desired to make a success of a pro-Soviet line and was probably reflecting the views of some of Roosevelt’s advisors to enhance his political standing at home.” (Charles E. Bohlen (1973) Witness to History, New York: Norton. Page 52)

His wife at the time was the heiress and multimillionaire Marjorie Merriweather Post, founder of General Foods. She and her husband lived in the manner to which the richest woman in the world was accustomed. They entertained lavishly at the newly renovated Spaso House in Moscow.

At night, Marjorie’s sleep was disrupted by the noises attending the activities of the secret police.

Only years later, after their divorce, did Marjorie Merriweather Post reveal how she had listened to the NKVD vans pulling up outside the apartment houses that surrounded the Spaso House gardens. In the middle of the night she had lain awake listening to the screams of families and children as the victims were taken away by the secret police. (Tzouliadis, p 120).

Every night she also heard a lot of gunfire emanating from the basement of a nearby Moscow building, due to prisoners being executed. She confronted her husband about this chilling sound and he soothed her by telling her that it was probably just construction noises from the expansion of the subway.

This insomnia perhaps could have been part of the reason that Davies and his wife endeavored to spend most of their time away from the embassy, traveling the world, and sailing the Baltic on their luxury yacht, the “Sea Cloud”. They also scoured the land buying up at discounted prices the art that the Bolsheviks had confiscated from Orthodox churches and the Romanov government. Marjorie had an eye for art, and built from scratch one of the largest private collections of Russian art outside of the Hermitage. The scope of the purchases was breathtaking. In one letter, Mr. Davies recounts the excitement of art collecting:

As usual we cannot resist them [the commission shops] and have been having somewhat of an orgy again of picking up these interesting souvenirs. (Tzouliadis, p118).

Much of the interesting souvenirs, representing this great heritage of art is now on display at Hillwood, the mansion that was Marjorie Post’s final home in Washington, DC. This priceless horde is a testament to the best and worst of humanity.

29Jun

100 Years of Communism: Secret Police Infiltration of the World Council of Churches

The World Council of Churches has long been under attack, and many may remember a scathing 1993 article by Joseph Harriss published in Readers Digest, “The Gospel According to Marx”, which alleged that the WCC was under the thrall of the KGB. Though dismissed at the time as a “rehashing of old issues”, subsequent data shows that he was correct. The WCC has been recently exposed as being heavily penetrated by the KGB during the 1970s and 80s, according to a book based on now public Bulgarian secret police archives. In 2009 historian Momchil Metodiev detailed the relationship between Bulgaria’s communist government and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. His work has been summarized in a review by the Bulgarian Institute for the Study of Recent Past.

Relying upon now declassified archives from the Bulgarian secret police, his book Between Faith and Compromise” details decades-long efforts to destroy and control the Church as a force in Bulgarian society. Of interest to me is the cynical manipulation of the World Council of Churches by this and other atheist Communust governments that sought to infiltrate and control ecumenical councils. Depressingly, they appear to have succeeded.

Participation of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in ecumenical organisations (the World Council of Churches, Christian Peace Conference and Conference of European Churches) was initiated, implemented and guided by the communist state, mainly by State Security.
…participation of the Bulgarian church in ecumenical organisations was not inspired by the idea of interdenominational dialogue and co-operation. Rather it was inspired by the communist state, which wanted to infiltrate the World Council of Churches and push it into the ranks of international organisations that could be used for communist propaganda, especially in the so-called Third World.
Churches from the socialist countries (with the exception of Roman Catholic churches) joined the World Council of Churches in 1961. In the late 1950s, the WCC already had become an “object for penetration” of the Bulgarian State Security services. They also selected the first Bulgarian participants to attend ecumenical training courses in the early 1960s.

This led to an “alternative power center” within the church in Bulgaria. A lay leadership emerged that was in sync with the Bulgarian (Communist) secret police.

The loyalties of this group were also well-known in the World Council of Churches. Despite this, the WCC, manipulated by the representatives of the socialist countries, regularly criticised the policies of the US and Western European countries regarding the Third World countries. Only once, at the Assembly in Nairobi in 1975, was there an unsuccessful attempt to criticise the violation of religious freedoms in the Soviet Union.

Much can be said about these organizations, but I’ll leave it at this. As Mark Tooley, director of the anti-communist Institute on Religion and Democracy writes: “Books like Metodiev’s, based on research in communist archives, increasingly are confirming that the WCC and other religious groups did follow the KGB’s script during much of the Cold War. The question is, as the WCC continues his far-left advocacy, whose script does it follow now?” (FrontPageMag.com).

26Jun

Christians Inhabit Two Worlds: Quote from Harry Ward

“Those who have taken Christianity seriously have never been comfortable citizens; They inhabit two worlds–the one that is and the one that ought to be.”

–Harry F Ward

17Jun

Communist Infiltration of Protestant Churches

“Dr Harry F Ward, for many years, has been the chief architect for Communist infiltration and subversion in the religious field.” (Former communist Manning Johnson, 1953, Testimony before House Un-American Activities Committee).

In a year that marks both the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, and 100 years of Communism, we will examine a nexus between these two mighty movements. In the early 1900s, a large number of clergy had Marxist leanings and were easy targets for manipulation by communists, despite the atheism of the latter. Dr. Paul Kengor, author of Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century is quoted as saying:

When I started researching this book, I asked Herb Romerstein, the veteran investigator of the communist movement, and himself a former communist, which group of Americans were most manipulated. He unhesitatingly answered “liberal Protestant pastors.” He called them “the biggest suckers of them all.”

Harry F Ward

One of the more prominent of these early communist sympathizers was the Methodist Harry F. Ward. He trained at Northwestern University (BA 1897) and Harvard (MS Philosophy 1898). Returning to the Midwest he became a pastor of a Methodist church in the slums of Chicago, where contact with stockyard workers increasingly radicalized him. He joined a fledgling labor union in solidarity with his parishioners. He began preaching sermons that emphasized political and economic themes. In 1905 he took a sabbatical during which time he read the works of Karl Marx. The following year he founded the Methodist Federation for Social Service, joining with like-minded Methodist pastors to promote social change. He taught at Boston University in 1916, and later became a professor of ethics at New York’s Union Theological Seminary (from 1918 to 1941), where he was instrumental in distributing communist literature, according to Comintern archives. He influenced a generation of pastors.

Of Ward’s Union years, an interesting glimpse is provided in a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous theologian and martyr under the Nazi regime, who had trained at Union. Ward was depicted as “decidedly more ideological than any of his Union colleagues”:

Ward and Niebuhr would take dramatically different turns in the decade ahead: Niebuhr abandoning pacifism for Christian realism, and eventually becoming a Cold War anticommunist Democrat; Ward, meanwhile, hunkering down, as he saw things, in the trenches with Jesus and Marx, a defender of the “Soviet spirit” against all its enemies. . . . In the classroom, Bonhoeffer listened closely as Ward enunciated his singular version of Pascal’s wager: Christians had the world to gain from living “as if” there existed an ethical God weighing every human action in the balance. This meant, at least for Ward, a socialist revolution. (Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Vintage, 2015, p 124)

From 1920 to 1940 he was the national chairman of the ACLU, the role for which he is best remembered today. He is also one of the fathers of the ecumenical movement. Along with prominent socialist theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, Ward was instrumental in founding the Federal Council of Churches in 1908, which was a precursor to the current National Council of Churches.

Kengor, who based his work on declassified communist archives, writes of Ward in the Catholic World Report:

One of the more eye-opening early documents now declassified from the Comintern Archives on Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is a four-page December 1920 letter that lists liberal college professors targeted by the Soviet Comintern and American Communist Party. On the list is not only Ward, listed with Union Theological Seminary, but other professors from seminaries or religious colleges, from Mount Holyoke to Trinity College. The liberals are listed by Comintern officials as sources to get their materials on the shelves at seminary and college libraries.

Ward made several pilgrimages to the USSR, where he was given the full Potemkin-village treatment. The progressive pastor was smitten, returning to write more than one book on the marvels of the Motherland. In 1935, he published The Soviet Spirit, a valentine to Lenin and Stalin, which the “Daily Worker” and “New Masses” promoted loudly. The “Daily Worker” did a full-page profile of Ward’s book, along with a glowing feature on the good reverend. The hardcore atheists were enamored of the Methodist minister. As for New Masses, it offered a free give-away of The Soviet Spirit as a complimentary gift for buying a one-year subscription.

In the 1950’s Ward’s name came up in connection with the infamous McCarthy hearings. Former American Communist leader turned defector, Manning Johnson, gave the testimony noted above. He was asked if Ward was a communist. Johnson answered in the affirmative.

“I would say that he is the Red dean of the Communist Party in the religious field.”

Johnson named an organization headed by Ward as a Communist front, namely the “American League Against War and Fascism”. This organization was created by the Communist Party central committee and per Johnson was involved in activities including sabotage, fomenting resentment against law enforcement, conducting espionage for the Soviet Union, and infiltrating and subverting churches, seminaries, and youth organizations. All sensitive information conveyed to this and other front organizations were reported to the Communists in Russia. The end goal of using front organizations was to attempt to radicalize millions of people in support of Communist ends.

Harry F. Ward was selected to head the American League Against War and Fascism. The party conclusion was that because he was a minister, he would be able to draw in churches, and secondly, that he would be able to draw in labor because of his imposing record as a clergyman of some standing and note.

In other words, they considered him the ideal head for the organization. It was proven a good decision because the American League Against War and Fascism was able, through exploiting the antiwar and anti-Fascist sentiments among the clergymen and among church people generally to involve millions of people in supporting the program of the American League Against War and Fascism.

… The majority of the ministers in the American League Against War and Fascism were involved by Harry F. Ward, and the organization which he was connected with, known as the Methodist Federation for Social Action; also the People’s Institute of Applied Religion, and other Communist-front organizations operating in the religious world. The Methodist Federation for Social Service later became the Methodist Federation for Social Action.

The Methodist Federation for Social Change

The secretary of the Methodist Federation, Ms. Winnifred Chappell, was also named as a Communist, and wrote an article in June 1934, that called for workers to refuse to make goods for their governments, and to join in “a joyful international Soviet to supply their own and each other’s needs.” Another prominent member of the Methodist Federation was Jack McMichael, former head of a major Communist front organization known as The American Youth Congress. He was himself later called before the HUAC committee where he vehemently denied being a Communist.

Johnson’s testimony about the Methodist Federation continued:

The Methodist Federation for Social Service or the Methodist Federation for Social Action, headed by Rev. Harry F. Ward, whom I have already identified as a party member, was invaluable to the Communist Party in its united-front organizations and campaigns. It was invaluable because through it the party was able to get contact with thousands of ministers all over the country.

… They had the contact, a wealth of
contact, established and built up over the years with ministers in every section of the country who were easily and quickly involved in various united-front activities, consequently giving these Communist-front movements an aura of respectability the like of which they could not get except for the tremendous amount of faith people have in religion and the church.

Mr. Manning’s full testimony is available at the Internet Archive.

The influence of The Methodist Federation for Social Change is well attested: MFSA attained the height of its growth just following World War II under the leadership of Jack McMichael. By 1950, the MFSA was highly influential in the Methodist Church. While the MFSA had only 5,800 members compared to 9 million in the entire Methodist Church, this membership included half of the church’s 16 bishops, as well as having representatives in all the major seminaries at the time.(Wikipedia). The Methodist Church would be scandalized enough by the MFSA to formally cut ties, though it has persisted as an independent organization and remains a force within Methodism, proclaiming today its mission: “to mobilize, lead and sustain a progressive United Methodist movement, energizing people to be agents of God’s justice, peace, and reconciliation” (MFSA website, accessed 2/28/2018).

Testifying about the MFSA in 1953, Communist Party founder Benjamin Gitlow revealed that its objective “was to transform the Methodist Church and Christianity into an instrument for the achievement of Socialism.” (HUAC transcript is available at Archive.org).

The National and World Council of Churches

As noted earlier, Harry Ward was instrumental in founding the Federal Council of Churches, a precursor to the National Council of Churches, and by extension the World Council of Churches. For decades, the latter organizations were led by Ward’s pupil and fellow member of the MFSS, Bishop Bromley Oxnam (1891-1963).

Oxnam studied under Ward at Boston University (also assisting him in grading papers, and babysitting his children). Oxnam became a socialist–though apparently never a Communist–calling the industrialized capitalistic world “unchristian, unethical, and anti-social”. (As an aside, he apparently also was not one for theological disputes, hilariously referring to them as “one monkey with a mirror flashing it in the eyes of another”). (See Brookhiser, “The Earnest Methodist” in First Things, 1992). Oxnam became president of DePauw University in 1928. Oxnard rose rapidly through Methodist ranks, eventually becoming Bishop of Washington, DC.

The National Council of Churches became the subject of scrutiny in the 1950s. The Air Force Reserve had raised concern, and Secretary of the Air Force Dudley C. Sharp defended his allegations:

…in view of the Secretary’s repudiation of the information conveyed respecting the National Council of Churches of Christ in America, the chairman issued a statement to the effect that the leadership of the [N.C.C.] had hundreds or at least over a hundred affiliations with Communist fronts and causes. Since then we have made careful, but yet incomplete checks, and it is a complete understatement. Thus far of the leadership of the National Council of Churches of Christ in America, we have found over 100 persons leadership capacity with either Communist-front records or records of service to Communists causes. The aggregate affiliations of the leadership, instead of being in the hundreds as the [H.C.U.A.] chairman first indicated, is now, according to our latest count, into the thousands, and we have yet to complete our check.

As an aside, I can remember growing up in small town America and hearing people grumble about the NCC’s left wing agenda. I know of people who left their churches because they “didn’t want to send any tithes to the National Council of Churches.”

In 1990, after the Romanian Communist regime fell, the World Council of Churches issued a tepid apology for its silence on the human rights abuses suffered by Christians under Communist regimes. Rev. Emilio Castro, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, said: “I think we didn’t speak strongly enough, that is clear. That is the price we thought we needed to pay in order to help the human rights situation inside Romania.” (L.A. Times).

Conclusion

As early as the turn of the 20th century, Harry Ward and other zealots for the “Social Gospel” articulated by theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch were turning their attentions toward the abolishment of capitalism and eventual establishment of a world socialist government. They were easy marks for Communists who used them to infiltrate and subvert Protestant Christianity. Their efforts had enormous impact upon the “mainline denominations” such as the Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Episcopalians. These groups have continued to drift leftward ever since, and have paid a price, losing as much as 50% of their membership (see this piece from The Gospel Coalition).

In fairness, I must state that not all socialists were Communists, and not all persons identified as Communists, even under oath, necessarily were such. Ward wrote once, “As for myself, I belong to no social or economic faction. In answer to that question I usually say, I am neither Communist, nor Socialist; I am something worse than that–I am a Christian.”

Some leftists, while sympathetic to socialism and progressive political positions, nonetheless opposed Communists within their organizations. Many people who were Communists in the 1920s later changed their minds.

Probably most of the “red churchmen” listed above were merely “fellow travelers” with communism. They were sympathizers, rather than card carrying members of the party of Lenin. Many ministers were largely unaware of the extent to which sinister and calculating Communist agents were using and manipulating them behind the scenes.

15Jun

Florida Police Frame Teen

Another example of police malfeasance emerged recently. In order to boast of a perfect clearance record, Biscayne Park police chief Raimundo Atesiano and two other police officers resorted to a disgusting tactic.

Atesiano, with the help of two officers from his department, conspired to falsely arrest and charge a 16-year-old with four unsolved burglary cases that year, prosecutors said Monday.

The incident began on June 13, 2013, when Atesiano told Dayoub and Fernandez that he “wanted them to unlawfully arrest T.D. for unsolved burglaries despite knowing that there was no evidence that T.D. had committed the burglaries,” prosecutors said. Dayoub and Fernandez gathered information for the arrest “knowing there was no evidence and no lawful basis to arrest and charge T.D,” officials said.

Loneliness is Rampant According to Study

The health insurer Cigna recently published results of a nationwide survey of 20,000 people, showing that most Americans are lonely.

More than half of survey respondents — 54 percent — said they always or sometimes feel that no one knows them well. Fifty-six percent reported they sometimes or always felt like the people around them “are not necessarily with them.” And 2 in 5 felt like “they lack companionship,” that their “relationships aren’t meaningful” and that they “are isolated from others.”

The results were more pronounced among younger people.

Members of Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, had an overall loneliness score of 48.3. Millennials, just a little bit older, scored 45.3. By comparison, baby boomers scored 42.4. The Greatest Generation, people ages 72 and above, had a score of 38.6 on the loneliness scale.

Loneliness has been shown to be a contributor to heart attacks, strokes, and premature death.

Death in Texas

Even as the royal wedding overshadows all other news today, I wish to reach out in love and sympathy to all the folks in Santa Fe, Texas, who are still reeling after a grisly school shooting, which is becoming a depressingly common occurrence. According to Reuters,

A 17-year-old student dressed in a trench coat and armed with a shotgun and pistol opened fire at his high school outside Houston on Friday, killing nine students and a teacher, before surrendering to officers, authorities said.

May God’s arms of love be around all those affected and disturbed by this violent act.

19May

Professor Tries to Boost Grades Based on Gender

In a new salvo of the assault by the warriors of social justice upon the integrity of higher education, a professor was caught trying to inflate grades based on gender. The culprit was Liping Liu, a professor of information sciences at the University of Akron. According to Insidehighered.com:

In an email to students in his systems analysis and design class that has since been made public, Liping Liu reportedly wrote that women “may see their grades raised one level or two” as part of a “national movement to encourage female students to go [into] information sciences.”

When this blatant effort became known, the university administration praised his “laudable” intentions, but rebuked professor Liu for his methods, and reassured the public that no grades were altered.

17May

Former Transgender Man Embraces The Spirit

Jeffrey McCall was a transgender activist with the alternate name “Scarlet”. In 2016, McCall had hit bottom. He was looking into surgical measures to complete his transformation. He was also contemplating suicide. He had been secretly listening to sermons from an Evangelical pastor and felt a tug from the Holy Spirit:

I had one night where I had been out partying, and I came home and started crying on my bed in March of 2016. And that was the night I said “Lord, I know people really live for you. Not just go to church on Sunday, but they really live for you. They have a relationship with you.”

And I said, through tears: “God, will I ever have a relationship with you?”

And all of a sudden my thoughts in my mind and everything was just interrupted. And I heard the Lord say: “Yes, you will live for me.”
(Christian Post, online here).

We wish him well on his journey.

11May

Ascension Day 2018

“The Ascension” by John Singleton Copley (1738–1815)

Brother James’ Airs

Author: BrJames