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).

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.

05Mar

100 Years of Communism: Venona Project and McCarthyism

In the last few decades a new debate has emerged among historians, in light of revelations obtained from Communist Archives, the Mitronin Archives, and the Venona Project. The debate centers upon the extent to which in the 20th century the U.S. was facing an existential threat from Communist infiltration in all levels of government and society. Was McCarthy right?

McCarthyism arose during dark times, following the Soviet theft of the secrets of the U.S. atomic bomb, the Communist takeover of China, and the fall of Eastern Europe under the “iron curtain”, seemingly with the complicity of the Truman administration. McCarthy exploited the unease.

Senator Joe McCarthy was an ambitious senator from Wisconsin, from 1947 to 1957. He rose to national fame after a February 9, 1950 speech in West Virginia, in which he claimed to have in his hand a piece of paper that contained a list of Communist spies in the U.S. government. Four years later, he was disgraced. His downfall was heralded by withering criticism from famed journalist Edward R. Murrow, and by a fiery retort on the Senate floor by Army counsel Joseph Nye Welch: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Writing in 2003, senators Collins and Durbin wrote, “Senator McCarthy’s zeal to uncover subversion and espionage led to disturbing excesses.” (Collins, Susan and Levin, Carl (2003). Preface (PDF). Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee On Investigations. U.S. Government Printing Office). McCarthy personally flamed out spectacularly; consumed by addictions to heroin and alcohol, he died of liver failure at Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1957. He was only 48.

McCarthy’s name lingers on as a dirty word, as Harvey Klehr notes:
To accuse someone of McCarthyism or to label a person a McCarthyite is not to issue a compliment. The implication is that a person so named has made scurrilous and unwarranted accusations and is engaged in unethical and sleazy maneuvers. The late Senator from Wisconsin even gave his name to the period. The McCarthy era is commonly depicted as one where America, consumed by a paranoid and irrational fear of domestic communism, went on a witch-hunt. (Harvey Klehr in Frontpagemag.com).

An article in The American Prospect” notes the following:
McCarthy’s claims were ultimately discredited, of course—along with the senator himself. But today the story is taking a new turn. A growing number of writers and intellectuals are beginning to argue that for all McCarthy’s bluster and swagger, he may have been right after all. And I don’t just mean writers on the right. Editorializing in the Washington Post in 1996, Nicholas Von Hoffman concluded that “point by point Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.” Still more dramatically, the London Observer opined that historians who had vilified McCarthy for two generations “are now facing the unpleasant truth that he was right.”. In his book Blacklisted By History, M. Stanton Evans writes: “The real Joe McCarthy has vanished into the mists of fable and recycled error, so that it takes the equivalent of a dragnet search to find him.”

The Venona Papers are one of the sources of information shedding new light on Communist espionage. Venona was a secret counterintelligence program conducted by the National Security Agency and its precursors from 1943-1980. The program, so secret that even Harry Truman was in the dark, intercepted and decoded thousands of messages from the Soviet Union’s secret police (NKVD).

As the Washington Post reported:
The recent publication of a batch of Venona transcripts gives evidence that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were rife with communist spies and political operatives who reported, directly or indirectly, to the Soviet government, much as their anti-communist opponents charged.

… The sum and substance of this growing body of material is that: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed in June 1953 for atomic espionage, were guilty; Alger Hiss, a darling of the establishment was guilty; and that dozens of lesser known persons such as Victor Perlo, Judith Coplon and Harry Gold, whose innocence of the accusations made against them had been a tenet of leftist faith for decades, were traitors or, at the least, the ideological vassals of a foreign power.”

In response to McCarthy’s attack John E. Peurifoy, deputy undersecretary of state, said that in the previous three years the government had investigated over 16,000 of its employees and had failed to find a communist. “If I can find a single one, he will be fired by sundown,” Peurifoy declared. The Venona transcripts contain the code names of about 200 persons, although some of these were clearly persons who had unwitting contact with Soviet agents. The Venona documents indicate that there were perhaps a dozen Soviet agents in the State Department alone. It is now clear that the Truman administration wasn’t looking very hard.”

100 Years of Communism: Infiltration of African-American Churches

Manning Johnson (1908-1959) was an African American who was introduced to Communism by way of a front organization called the American Negro Labor Congress, and saw in Communism a possible redress to ills suffered by his people. An ambitious member of the Communist Party in America in the 1930s, he rose to the highest ranks, gaining a seat on the National Committee, and becoming a candidate for the ultra-elite Politburo. He ran for the U.S. Congress in New York as a Communist in 1935.

He became disillusioned with things when he realized that minorities were being exploited and controlled by white leaders of the party:

“These white communists wielded more power than the nominal Negro heads of the Commission. In a word, they are like white overseers. Every Negro member was aware of the fact that these white overseers constituted the eyes, the ears and the voice of the Kremlin.”

He apparently also felt some remorse about the ruthless tactics employed by the party, including espionage, subversion of well intended “dupes”, and even assassinations:

“Thus, as a participant on the highest level of the communist conspiracy in America, I observed the cold, calculating, ruthless nature of red power politics and political warfare, stripped of all its illusory propaganda and idealistic cover. “

In his autobiography, Color, Communism, and Common Sense, he described shocking inside information about how Communists targeted the African American churches because of their centrality to community life. Moscow-based agents instructed the American Communists to cease denouncing the churches, which had so far failed, and to try to infiltrate them instead. Deception was to be the new policy: “The honeyed phrase replaced harsh words. The smile replaced the smirk. The velvet glove covered the mailed fist.” He stated that from 1934 on, the policy achieved successes:

White ministers acting as missionaries, using the race angle as bait, aided in the cultivation of Negro ministers for work in the Red solar system of organizations. Bribery through gifts, paid lectures, flattery through long applause at staged rallies, favorable mention in the red controlled press were not the only methods employed to corrupt the Negro ministers. The use of sex and perversion as a means of political blackmail was an accepted red tactic.

At the same time that all this was going on at the top, the comrades were building cells below in the church “to guarantee that decisions made at the top would be brought down to the congregation.”

Manning cited documents alleging that some youth organizations and a number of Alabama churches were under Communist control, and could therefore also be used as cover for illegal activities.

The irony is profound. While at the same time they were going about destroying churches and rooting out Christians in Soviet territories, the Kremlin pushed the following message in its efforts to woo American black churchgoers:

The new line went like this: Jesus, the carpenter, was a worker like the Communists. He was against the “money changers,” the “capitalists,” the “exploiters” of that day. That is why he drove them from the temple. The Communists are the modern day
fighters against the capitalists or moneychangers. If Jesus were living today, he would be persecuted like the Communists who seek to do good for the common people.

The end game was to “stir up race and class conflict”. The goal would be either to control a block of people who could be incorporated into a future communist regime or else, at the very least, to destabilize and harass the existing government.

Manning’s book, Color, Communism, and Common Sense, is available at the Internet Archive.

Later sources, such as the Venona files and KGB archives, have corroborated much of Johnson’s testimony about the inner workings of the CPUSA and the concerted efforts at subterfuge and espionage conducted against the US by the Soviet Union in the 1940s-1970s. We are fortunate that there was little chance of success for a full blown Communist revolution in our country. In the subsequent decades the communists would become never more than a dwindling fringe. Yet it is also a marvel what an enormous influence this tiny fringe had in energizing and galvanizing workers, intellectuals, pastors, academics, journalists, and other “fellow travelers.” They planted seeds that we are still reaping. They helped fill the sails of our ship of state and culture with a leftward breeze that is still blowing hard.

09Oct

100 Years of Communism

In October 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought Karl Marx’ radical economic and political views to life. Communism went from abstract theory to abject reality, from world view to world power. In the subsequent decades, wherever it has succeeded in dominating a country’s political processes, very dramatic and mostly tragic changes have occurred. It is grown old, yet remains as fresh a threat as the latest headlines about North Korea.

Supporters would say that the utopian ends justify the means of bringing about a better society–that you have to break some eggs to make omelets. The death toll represented by those broken eggs is so staggering, as to be nearly uncountable. The Black Book of Communism gives an estimate of 94 million killed in the 20th century. The gory brutality of this “progress” dwarfs the horrors of fascism and has given even ardent supporters pause on occasion. (Whittaker Chambers was a notable example, and his tell all book Witness remains a chilling bestseller from the Cold War era of the 20th century).

Even in places where it has not fully succeeded, such as in the United States and Western Europe, we still struggle with its insidious influences on institutions such as the Church and academia, and with its cultural legacy, including divorce on demand and abortion.

Communism has been an implacable foe of Christianity since its conception in the mind of Karl Marx, who criticized religion as the “opiate of the masses”. He found it guilty of anesthetizing people against the painful realities of their economic oppression by powerful capitalists. Communism has tried to stamp out faith. Places that were once cultural centers of Christian belief, such as Moscow, were decimated. Beginning in Russia, churches were looted, and then destroyed or turned into museums, while the priests who served in them were shot or deported. This pattern repeated itself in China, Vietnam, Korea–Some may recall that Pyongyang in North Korea was once known as the “Jerusalem of the East”.

Ironically, Communism as a governing force is largely fulfilling what a young Bolshevik once furiously predicted of his opponents. Leon Trotsky could have been speaking of all his own poisonous ilk, radical communists then and yet to come, when on October 25, 1917 he spat to the Mensheviks, “You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!”

25May

Is Jesus the first Cosmonaut?

The Ascension of Jesus, celebrated today as a major feast day in many churches, remains a deep mystery that both amazes and confounds us to this day.

According to the last verses of book of Luke: And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.

I remember a movie portrayal of Jesus beaming down at his disciples as he rises into a clear blue sky. Though I otherwise liked the movie, I thought this bit of celluloid really looked kind of cheesy.

We are left to wonder, what really happened? Was this just a final flourish as Jesus left our plane of existence? Did Jesus really fly up like Superman? Did he perhaps disapparate in a puff of smoke like those “death eater” wizards in Harry Potter movies? Did he shimmer and fade out like a Star Trek character in a transporter beam? Did he go into orbit around earth and then zip on out into space?

The world’s first human in space, Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union, is reported to have announced in 1961 that when he went into space, he looked around, and didn’t see God up there. (More on this in a minute).

I happened to run across a blog post on Patheos, by Butler University’s Chair of New Testament Language and Literature, James McGrath, which showed some hilarious (if irreverent) pictures of Jesus in a space suit. I take his photos and his accompanying article–somewhat derisive in tone– to be a warning against too simplistic and literal a reading of this (or any) passage. The author states:

Ascension day is a perfect day to draw attention to the fact that literalism is not only problematic, but impossible. Even if someone insists on maintaining the literal truth of the claim in Acts that Jesus literally went up into heaven, they cannot maintain the worldview of the first century Christians which provided the context for the affirmation. They knew nothing of light-years, distant galaxies or interstellar space without oxygen. And it is not possible, through some act of either will or faith, to forget absolutely everything that has been learned since then and believe as they did. Even those who willingly choose to disbelieve modern science are making a choice that the first Christians did not have, and thus accept dogmatically what early Christians naively assumed because they knew no better.”

Now, I would presume that most Christians, including those early ones who witnessed this event, understood this occasion to be something different than space travel, or moving from one spot inside the universe to another. It was not translation through space but the exaltation of Christ that was the main point emphasized in the earliest Christian writings. As St. Paul gushed:

Therefore also God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:9-11).

Famed author C. S. Lewis wittily rebutted the comment attributed to Gagarin:

Looking for God — or Heaven — by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare’s plays in the hope you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play. But he is never present in the same way as Falstaff or Lady Macbeth, nor is he diffused through the play like a gas.
If there were an idiot who thought plays exist on their own, without an author, our belief in Shakespeare would not be much affected by his saying, quite truly, that he had studied all the plays and never found Shakespeare in them. (“The Seeing Eye”, in C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967).

Tim Keller, the famed pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, has further commented on this:

“C. S. Lewis wrote that if there is a God, we certainly don’t relate to him as people on the first floor of a building relate to people on the second floor. We relate to him the way Hamlet relates to Shakespeare. We (characters) might be able to know quite a lot about the playwright, but only to the degree that the author chooses to put information about himself in the play.
“In the Christian view, however, we believe that God did even more than simply give us information. … God, as it were, looked into the world he had made and saw our lostness and had pity on his people. And so he wrote himself into human history as its main character (John 3: 16). The second person in the Trinity, the Son of God, came into the world as a man, Jesus Christ.” (Tim Keller, online at monergism.com).

Jesus isn’t any longer on the set (this world), nor is he in the rafters of the theater, nor is he next door quaffing a pint in the pub with the other actors. Nor is he anywhere floating around in outer space. He is outside the script, outside the story–outside the universe. He conquered death, took a bow, and exited. He is not a cosmonaut but the very author of the cosmos.

Epilogue:
Back to Yuri Gagarin. His friend Valentin Petrov has been interviewed as saying that Gagarin was in fact a devoted Christian at a time when it was dangerous to be such. The quote referenced above is from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev:

It was most certainly not Gagarin who said this, but Khrushchev! This was connected with a plenary session of the Central Committee addressing the question of anti-religious propaganda. Khrushchev then set the task for all Party and Komsomol [Young Communists] organizations to boost such propaganda. He said: “Why are you clinging to God? Here Gagarin flew into space and didn’t see God.” However, some time later these words began to be portrayed in a different light. They were cited in reference not to Khrushchev, but to Gagarin, who was beloved by the people. Such a phrase spoken by him would be of great significance. Khrushchev wasn’t especially trusted, they said, but Gagarin would certainly be. But nothing was ever said by Gagarin about this, nor could he have uttered such things.

(photo credit: Fabrice de Nola, 1996. Yuri Gagarin, oil on canvas, cm 40 x 40).

07Dec

Viva Cristo Rey!

I have felt compelled to highlight a bright spot amid the darkness of Revolutionary Cuba, namely the witness of countless ordinary people who stayed true to their beliefs, and to their Christian faith, in the face of intimidation, imprisonment, and bullets. Many shouted “Vivo Cristo Rey!” (or “long live Christ the King!”) as they were being executed by Fidel Castro and his henchmen. One of those who heard these shouts was dissident Armando Valladares, imprisoned by Fidel Castro. Mr. Valladares is himself a remarkable witness who stated:

I am not an extraordinary man, and I am quite ordinary. But God chose me for something quite extraordinary.

Armando Valladares is a poet who in 1960 was jailed as a political prisoner. After his release he later wrote Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag (Encounter Books, 1985). He also has served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Initially supportive of the Revolution, he had been appointed to a low level position in the new government. Over time he began to have reservations about the human rights abuses of the new regime. He was arrested, for refusing to display a sign on his desk that said, “I’m with Fidel”. He was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to 30 years imprisonment (of which he served 22):

“For me, it meant 8,000 days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement and solitude, 8,000 days of struggling to prove that I was a human being, 8,000 days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain, 8,000 days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instill in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart, 8,000 days of struggling so that I would not become like them.” (Quoted in Richmond Times Dispatch).

With God’s help succeeded, as he later stated: “Even though my body was in prison and being tortured,” Valladares said, “my soul was free, and it flourished. My jailers took everything away from me, but they could not take away my conscience or my faith.” (National Review).

Regarding the executions, Valladares recalled in a Washington Post editorial:

Antagonizing believers is a particular specialty of the Castro regime. To them, faith is especially dangerous, because it kindles the conscience and keeps it burning when enemies advance. “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” were the last words of so many of my friends who were dragged to the shooting wall. Eventually, the government realized this was a battle cry for freedom, one that came from the deepest part of the men they were killing, and one that was only inspiring more men to die faithful to their consciences and to something greater than Fidel Castro. Their executioners realized that an expression of faith was more powerful than the explosion of a gun. So eventually, they gagged them.

The following video is of Mr. Valladares reading a poem that he wrote in prison, using his own blood as ink. The video is produced by the Becket Fund for Religious Freedom, which conferred its “Canterbury Award” upon Mr. Valladares in 2016:

06Dec

Looking Back at U.S. Bishop Visit With Castro

Unsurprisingly, progressive church leaders were as taken with “el Commandante” as were progressive political leaders:

On 28 Feb 2006 Episcopal Church of the USA Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold met Fidel Castro in Havana. Episcopal News Service reported on that glorious occassion, with what can best be described as a tin-ear to the human rights abuses and pervasive atmosphere of fear that pervades Cuban life.

Episcopal News Service reported on the meeting:

…The two-and-a-half-hour conversation — conducted across a long conference table with one delegation on each side — began as Griswold spoke of being a senior at Harvard in 1959 when Castro visited the campus. “You approached in a boat on the Charles River,” Griswold recalled. “I was among a group of students who waved to you from a bridge.”
Recalling the campus setting, Castro asked: “Has anyone blockaded you for 47 years? Has anyone blockaded your thoughts? Lies are an attempt to block people’s minds.
“No one has all the truth,” Castro continued.
“Truth is larger than any one perspective,” Griswold concurred. “The truth is always unfolding.”

Leaders Criticized for Praising Castro

Recently, Canadian leader Justin Trudeau, and to a lesser extent U.S. President Obama, were soundly criticized for statements that seemed to lionize the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Trudeau stated:

“It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President. Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation. While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for “el Comandante”. (You can read the entire statement here).

His warm words have sparked parodies on Social Media, mockingly praising Hitler and Osama Bin Ladin. For example, “Osama Bin Laden was certainly a controversial figure, but his contribution to airport security is unparalleled”, and “Today we mourn the death of Jeffrey Dahmer, who opened his home to the LGBTQ community and pushed culinary boundaries.” One of my favorites is “We mourn the passing of Henry VIII: A man who always kept his head, while all around were losing theirs”.

In slight contrast, President Obama’s words were more measured, but still a far cry from a realistic appraisal of the monstrosity of Castro’s communist dictatorship:

“We know that this moment fills Cubans – in Cuba and in the United States – with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation. History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.”

In Miami, home to much of the Cuban population in exile, those “powerful emotions” were joy and celebration:

It did not matter that it was the middle of the night, or that it began to drizzle. When this city’s Cuban-American residents heard the news, they sprinted to Little Havana. They banged pots and pans. They sang the Cuban national anthem and waved the Cuban flag. They danced and hugged, laughed and cried, shouted and rejoiced. (Read more at New York Times).

These Cubans recall “el Commandante” with a bit less than fondness, after all. It is estimated by historian Thomas Skidmore that 550 people were summarily executed in the first 6 months of Castro’s reign. Over the years spanning 1959 – 2012, at least 3615 people are documented to have died in firing squads, and 1253 in “extrajudicial killings”, according to Cuba Archive. The Black Book of Communism (available in its entirety at Archive.org) estimates the number of political killings at 15,000-17,000. Between 1950 and 1980 over a million Cubans fled the island, mostly to the United States. In 1964, Castro admitted holding over 15,000 political prisoners.

A Washington Post opinion piece summarizes some of the disaster brought upon Cuba by this “legendary revolutionary”:

It began with mass summary executions of Batista officials and soon progressed to internment of thousands of gay men and lesbians; systematic, block-by-block surveillance of the entire citizenry; repeated purges, complete with show trials and executions, of the ruling party; and punishment for dissident artists, writers and journalists. Mr. Castro’s regime learned from the totalitarian patron he chose to offset the U.S. adversary — the Soviet Union, whose offensive nuclear missiles he welcomed, bringing the world to the brink of armageddon. Mr. Castro sponsored violent subversive movements in half a dozen Latin American countries and even in his dotage helped steer Venezuela to economic and political catastrophe through his patronage of Hugo Chávez.

Castro should also be remembered as a relentless persecutor of Christianity. Cuba is officially an atheist state. When he seized power, almost immediately he shut down 400 Roman Catholic schools for teaching “dangerous beliefs.” Christians were initially denied membership in the Communist Party. Due to restrictions in building churches, many people met in homes. Christians were, of course, among the purged. The dissident Armando Valladares, who was locked in a pitch-dark Cuban prison cell for eight years while stripped naked, has recently given his recollections in a Washington Post editorial:

Although the Castro regime eventually moderated its stance toward Christianity, and sought the favor of the Pope, still, as recently as 2015 more than 2300 incidents of persecution–arrests, beatings, demolition of churches, and the like–were reported. (Newsweek)

The Cuban-American singer Gloria Estefan had a “eulogy” for Castro that should have been a model for Trudeau and Obama:

“Although the death of a human being is rarely cause for celebration, it is the symbolic death of the destructive ideologies that he espoused that, I believe, is filling the Cuban exile community with renewed hope and a relief that has been long in coming. And although the grip of Castro’s regime will not loosen overnight, the demise of a leader that oversaw the annihilation of those with an opposing view, the indiscriminate jailing of innocents, the separation of families, the censure of his people’s freedom to speak, state sanctioned terrorism and the economic destruction of a once thriving & successful country, can only lead to positive change for the Cuban people and our world. May freedom continue to ring in the United States, my beautiful adopted country, and may the hope for freedom be inspired and renewed in the heart of every Cuban in my homeland and throughout the world.”

Brother James’ Airs

Tag: Communism