Paul Kengor - The Devil and Karl Marx

THE DEVIL AND KARL MARX

THE DEVIL AND
KARL MARX

COMMUNISMS LONG MARCH OF DEATH,
DECEPTION, AND INFILTRATION

PAUL KENGOR, PHD

TAN BOOKS
GASTONIA, NORTH CAROLINA

The Devil and Karl Marx: Communisms Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration 2020 Paul Kengor

All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the BibleSecond Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition), copyright 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Caroline Green

Cover image: Karl Marx by Alevtina_Vyacheslav/Shutterstock

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936885

ISBN: 978-1-5051-1444-7

Published in the United States by
TAN Books
PO Box 269
Gastonia, NC 28053
www.TANBooks.com

Printed in the United States of America

Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Ephesians 5:11; 6:12

Thus Heaven Ive forfeited,
I know it full well.
My soul, once true to God,
Is chosen for Hell.

Karl Marx, The Pale Maiden, 1837

Look now, my blood-dark sword shall stab
Unerringly within thy soul.
The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain,
Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed.
See the swordthe Prince of Darkness sold it to me.
For he beats the time and gives the signs.
Ever more boldly I play the dance of death.

Karl Marx, The Player, 1841

CONTENTS

Preface: The Dance of Death,
The Communist Killing Machine

A Specter Is Haunting Europe,
The Unclean Spirit of Communism

Monster of Ten Thousand Devils,
Engels Encounters Marx

Satanic Scourge,
The Church on Atheistic Communism

Liquidating Religious Beliefs,
William Z. Foster and CPUSA

Obliterating All Religion,
Louis Budenz and Ben Gitlow Speak Out

The Devil Doth Quote the Scripture,
Manning Johnson on the Infiltration of the Church

Over a Thousand Communist Men,
Infiltration of Catholic Seminaries? Bella Dodds Claims

They Kept a Tab, Seminaries,
Churches, and Clergy Behind the Iron Curtain

The Worlds Wickedest,
Minions, Pagans, Weirdos, Radicals

The Specter of the Frankfurt School,
More Minions, Pagans, Weirdos, Radicals

Fundamental Transformation,
Marxs Enduring Specter

R onald Reagan described a communist as one who reads Karl Marx and an anti-communist as one who understands Karl Marx. Pithy and true, at least at the time, but conservatives in the decades since Reagan won the Cold War have begun to forget just what makes Marxism so wrong, and their failure to articulate Marxs fatal flaw has left an entire generation prey to the deadliest ideology in history, imperiling not only minds but also souls.

The majority of young Americans today hold a favorable view of socialism, according to a 2018 Gallup poll. Socialism is on the rise more than three decades after conservatives thought it had died in the rubble of the Berlin Wall. In just the past few years, admitted socialists have won elected office throughout the country, from the local to the national level. They have succeeded because, while conservatives have blabbered themselves hoarse denouncing the economic effects of socialism, they have ignored the deeper spiritual questions that actually move mens souls. That is why this book could not be published at a more opportune time.

Karl Marx envisioned a merely material world in which religion is the opium of the people and nothing matters but matter. Rather than question this false visionindeed, our ability to question anything at all dispels itmany conservatives have contented themselves to debate Marx on his own materialist terms. Socialism destroys economies, they observe. Then, Socialism distorts markets. And finally, Socialism just doesnt work.

But whether or not a political system works depends on what its working toward. Socialism strives to tear down traditional society. At that task, socialism has succeeded everywhere it has been tried, at least for a time. The problem with socialism isnt the inefficiency; its the evil. Marx did not set out to tinker with markets and redistribute some wealth. He sought to radically transform society by changing human nature. He hated religion because he opposed God, the author of human nature. He sided with Satan, as he confessed in letters and ghoulish poetry quoted in these pages. Ex-communists such as Arthur Koestler and Richard Wright came to call Marxism the god that failed. Karl Marx erred not through mere miscalculation but through sin and heresy.

Unfortunately, the same softening on Marxism that took place in the realm of politics infected the Church as well, at times through misunderstanding and at others through outright infiltration. The Church has condemned Marxism since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet in 2019 the leading Jesuit periodical in the United States published The Catholic Case for Communism. Around the same time, the Holy Father made common cause with communists, according to the left-wing Italian newspaper La Repubblica. If anything, Pope Francis reportedly told the papers founder Eugenio Scalfari, it is the communists who think like Christians. One wonders if Karl Marx could hear the Popes compliment amid the wailing and gnashing of teeth in Marxs eternal abode.

Still, Pope Francis has refused to count himself among Marxs followers. Marxist ideology is wrong, he affirmed flatly in 2013. Franciss predecessors spoke even more forcefully against communism in years past. Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist, declared Pope Pius XI, who considered socialism irreconcilable with Christianity. His predecessor Pope Leo XIII condemned socialists as a wicked confederacy, a pest, a plague, a hideous monster that threatens civil society with destruction, and an evil growth that attempts to steal the very Gospel itself with a view to deceive more easily the unwary. Bl. Pope Pius IX, writing even before Marx, decried communism and socialism with the same vigor.

Communists read Marx, anti-communists understand Marx, and no one understands Marx better than Paul Kengor. His was the unhappy task of wading through such diabolically inspired drivel, and for that we owe him a debt of gratitude. Kengor knows, like few others writing today, that terms such as collectivism and individualism only take the debate so far. Quibbles over marginal tax rates have never inspired a soul, least of all Karl Marx. Ultimately the fight comes down to spiritual warfare: good versus evil.

In his most famous Cold War speech, Ronald Reagan, quoting Winston Churchill, warned, The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn were spirits, not animals. And spirits must choose a side.

Euphoria at the fall of the Berlin Wall made utopians of otherwise hard-nosed conservatives, who declared the end of history as such, ironically echoing the grandiose rhetoric and barmy theories of the ideologue they claimed to have defeated. But history did not end. If anything, it has begun to repeat itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, just as Marx predicted in