Castro’s Cuba: The Communist Poster Boy

The Socialist Workers Party had a book table at the Brooklyn Book Fair. Predictably, they identified capitalism as the prime problem confronting humanity. I was surprised to hear that their representative still held up violent revolution as a possible means to deal with the “injustices and oppression” of capitalism.

I was deeply disturbed by this, but tried to address the communist with a bit of humor:

• Okay, capitalism has been a source of  oppression. But your “progressive” top-down solutions do not seem to have proved any better. I’m sure you still remember names of Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot.

He did, but countered:

• Our model is Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Admittedly, it is a poor country, but it is one where there has been a lot of popular participation in government.

This was the first time I had heard of such laurels placed on Castro’s neck. “Why then did so many try to escape this ‘worker’s paradise,’” I countered. He answered that these boat people were those allowed to freely leave Cuba.

Clearly, my knowledge of Castro didn’t measure up to his. I asked about the reports of genocide. The communist responded that these had all been fabricated. However, returning home, I googled many of these “fabrications.” One reported that 85,675 had been the victims his genocide. This number didn’t include the 16,282 additional deaths due to combat or missing in action. http://www.cubaverdad.net/genocide.htm#Other%20Sources:

Conservapedia.com adds:

• Castro's policies imposed poverty and slavery on millions. In 1959, Cuba was the second richest country in Latin America; today, it is the second poorest. Most pharmacies in Cuba do not even have aspirins. Cuba is plagued with a humanitarian catastrophe involving massive and widespread malnutrition and lack of basic goods; death, suffering, and misery is the result. The streets are now choked with scenes of starving peasants frantically pleading for food. In September 2010, Castro admitted that "the Cuban model doesn't even work."

Sadly, this admission can only after the murder of many thousands:

• Castro has been accused of genocide by Genocide Watch. He has been sued for genocide in Belgium and Spain. The estimated number of deaths attributable to the Castro regime varies according to different sources—but not by much. The number of named, documented victims (with 2 or more sources) established by recent scholarship is 86,000, excluding an estimated minimum of 16,282 deaths in war and combat, for a conservative total of 112,000. R.J. Rummel, in his book Statistics of Democide estimates a range of 35-141,000 killed, which may underestimate the full toll by as much as 50%, since it only covers the years 1959-87. The most comprehensive survey, by Armando Lago, puts the total at 116,730-119,730 killed. The majority (85,000) of these deaths were caused by drowning; the firing squads account for some 30,000. Adding combat deaths to his calculations, we arrive at a total of some 136,000 Cubans killed by the Castro regime. Little effort has been made to calculate boat people deaths in recent years. Cuban exiles claim that as many as 200,000 have been murdered altogether. The death toll from Cuban interventions abroad can be numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

Although decrying imperialism, Castro’s foreign interventions proved costly:

• Cuban military intervention to save the communist MPLA dictatorship in Angola from collapse led to decades of civil war that cost as many as 1 million lives. Castro also dispatched Cuban troops to fight on behalf of the Communist dictatorship in Ethiopia, which killed 1.25 million people through massacre and forced starvation. Soviet and Cuban support for communist violence caused civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Support from the Cuban government was also given to terrorists from the PLO. 

What human good has come from all of this? (What human good has come out of any communist revolution?) Nevertheless, Castro remains a role-model for the Socialist Workers Party. I guess when you only have Pol Pot, Stalin and Castro to choose from, Castro wins!

However, all of this raises a more fundamental question – “Don’t these educated people have anything better on which to place their hopes for a better world?” What is the source of their blind insanity that prompts them embrace hopeless solutions?

I think that this reflects the fact that, fundamentally, this battle is spiritual and not economic. Had it merely been economic, anyone could have weighed the costs and benefits and concluded that capitalism offers the better hope for the oppressed.

However, this battle is far more than economics! It represents the hidden things of our psyche. The editor of World Magazine and former communist, Marvin Olasky, admitted that jealousy had been a key motivator in his adoption of communism.

Olasky subsequently found liberation through Christ, who enabled him to recognize his enslavement to the hidden things of the heart. How will our own progressives come to this freeing awareness?

The Deadly Implications of Atheism

Does atheism lead to genocide? It seems to! Just look at Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot and the 100,000,000 they exterminated to accomplish their ideal progressive society. However, atheists claim that there is no association between atheism and the horrors committed by atheists:

• Whenever an atheist points out that a lot of people have died in the name of religion, a theist’s first response is always that people like Mao Zedong and Pol Pot were atheists. Therefore, atheism is responsible for a shit load of deaths too. This would be a good point, if not for the fact that atheism simply doesn’t have enough to it in order to condone or encourage genocide.

• Atheism is defined as a lack of belief in any deity or higher power. That’s it. There is nothing in that sentence that calls for atheists to murder anyone…Atheism simply doesn’t have enough in it to be a world view or something that can support a psychopath’s rage. http://godswillchurch.com/2013/08/atheism-actually-isnt-responsible-for-mass-murder/#sthash.XNRgY2Mj.dpuf

Truly, there isn’t anything in the etymology of the word “atheism” that translates into killings millions. However, when someone rejects the concept of God, it seems to create a worldview avalanche, a veritable mental tsunami. When the idea of God is rejected:

Naturalism takes the place of super-naturalism. Instead of God creating, a new creation myth is required – Everything came into existence naturally (even before the existence of natural law – go figure!) uncaused, and out of nothing.

Secular Humanism takes the place of theism. Instead of God defining meaning and morality, each human being becomes his own court-of-last-resort. Hence, each one of us becomes the creator of our own destiny – the captain of our own ship - and sole determinator of meaning and morality.

Moral relativism takes the place of immutable, universal moral law. This means that moral “truth” is relative to the way we might feel on a particular day. It also can be relative to whatever an authoritarian regime might deem as “good” or what the majority decide. If the regime or the majority decide to eliminate the capitalist as vermin, there is no reasoning left that can deter this action as “evil.” After all, evil no longer exists, but merely what is expedient. Therefore, it might be deemed expedient to destroy the “enemies of the state” and redistribute their money.

Lenin had been asked, “What constitutes morality?” He simply answered, “Whatever promotes the revolution is good; whatever interferes with it is evil.” This kind of pragmatic thinking can justify anything, and it did! Besides, there is no longer any objective moral rationale that can challenge this thinking!

Materialism replaces the Transcendent. Although atheists seek to elevate humanity, they have degraded him, esteeming him as no more than an animal, albeit a sophisticated animal. We are no longer esteemed as having been created in the image of God, full of glory and worthy of all protection and dignity.

Instead, we are regarded as purposeless bio-chemical machines, free perhaps, but free for no transcendent purpose. However, we are not even free. As bio-chemical machines, materialism deprives us of our freewill and freedom of thought. After all, such things are just the product of a serious of chemical reactions!

If we are simply animals living in an amoral, atheistic world, then there is no reasoning or rationale that can prevent us from being treated as animals to be used, manipulated and even destroyed for the “good” of the powerful. If we are machines, then the State is justified in getting whatever use it can out of us before it deposits us on the junk heap along with other useless machines.

Atheistic Communism and Genocide

As the West continues to move in a more totalitarian direction – bigger government, control, spying on its citizens, political correctness as the membership card, social group-think - I think that it would do us well to examine the possible implications of such a move. Ironically, these moves are justified in the name of creating a more progressive society.

This also had been the claim of atheistic communist regimes. However, genocide reached unprecedented levels under these regimes. Wikipedia claims:

• Mass killings occurred under some Communist regimes during the twentieth century with an estimated death toll numbering between 85 and 100 million.

The human toll has been unbelievably high. While Western civilization is very ready to remember the fascist Third Reich – they will not call them what they had called themselves (“National Socialists”) – they are very ready to downplay the communist atrocities. However, I think that it is important to revisit these and to ask “why.”

Many historians have tried to explain the almost uniform horrors that had been committed by atheistic communism. According to Rudolph Joseph Rummel, the communist genocides were a product of absolute power and Marxism.

• "Of all religions, secular and otherwise," Rummel positions Marxism as "by far the bloodiest – bloodier than the Catholic Inquisition, the various Catholic crusades, and the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants. In practice, Marxism has meant bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and murderous forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and fraudulent show trials, outright mass murder and genocide." He writes that in practice the Marxists saw the construction of their utopia as "a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality – and, as in a real war, noncombatants would unfortunately get caught in the battle. There would be necessary enemy casualties: the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, 'wreckers', intellectuals, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, the rich and landlords. As in a war, millions might die, but these deaths would be justified by the end, as in the defeat of Hitler in World War II. To the ruling Marxists, the goal of a communist utopia was enough to justify all the deaths."

What we believe determines how we behave. The cognitive/belief conditions in the West seem to be ripe for these kinds of atrocities. There is the necessary identification of the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” those who need to be eliminated from any public influence – the “religious bigots,” the “homophobes,” the Wall Street” folks, anyone who is opposing the dawning of the new age, a sexually free, guiltless society.

Just recently, the military – they had placed Catholics and Evangelicals on their list of terrorist organizations along with Al Qaeda – threatened Christians with court marshal if they tried to proselytize.

It is common today to regard the Stalinist purges as merely the product of Stalin’s alleged mental illness and not the ideas of atheistic communism. However, the evidence tends to argue that he was merely following in Marxist-Leninist footsteps:

• Robert Conquest stressed that Stalin's purges were not contrary to the principles of Leninism, but rather a natural consequence of the system established by Vladimir Lenin, who personally ordered the killing of local groups of class enemy hostages. Alexander Yakovlev, architect of perestroika and glasnost and later head of the Presidential Commission for the Victims of Political Repression, elaborates on this point, stating that "The truth is that in punitive operations Stalin did not think up anything that was not there under Lenin: executions, hostage taking, concentration camps, and all the rest." Historian Robert Gellately concurs, saying: "To put it another way, Stalin initiated very little that Lenin had not already introduced or previewed." Said Lenin to his colleagues in the Bolshevik government: "If we are not ready to shoot a saboteur and White Guardist, what sort of revolution is that?"

According to this world view, the “bad guys” stand against progress and the common good. In his book, The End of Faith, Sam Harris writes that “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.” “Kill people?” His obvious contempt for Christianity makes us wonder whether he has us in mind, as many atheists in the past have had and have gladly acted upon their contempt. However, it is safe to say that we are not the only “bad guys”:

• In The Lost Literature of Socialism, literary historian George G. Watson saw socialism as conservative, a reaction against liberalism and an attempt to return to antiquity and hierarchy. He states that the writings of Friedrich Engels and others show that "the Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism, which in advanced nations was already giving place to capitalism, must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire nations would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age, and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history."

Judging from the extreme and inflammatory language coming from our U.S. administration and those closely associated, it seems that they have a very clear idea of the identity of the regressive “bad guys.” We are the “homophobes,” the “hate-mongers,” the “bigots” – those who are prejudicially denying others their “human rights.” We are the enemy, and we know, only too well, the fate of the “enemies” of national socialism and atheistic communism. Who will be “fit…for the [next] dung-heap of history?" A warning to the revolutionary: The revolution also has a venerable history of turning against its own!

We are what We Think: The Case of Communism/Atheism

If we are what we think, then our mental diet is critical. Increasingly, we are finding that a steady porn-diet exerts a powerful influence. One commentator writes:

• Among males, exposure to pornography is associated with addictive behaviors traced to the release of chemicals in the brain, stimulating arousal and excitement. In the larger context, pornography is also associated with an exaggerated masculinity, negative attitudes toward women, and relational breakdowns due to unrealistic sexual expectations.

Serial killers have had notoriously poor mental diets. Ted Bundy’s diet was fed by massive doses of hard-porn. Before his execution, he commented about the effects of his “education”:

• Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self. (Christian Research Journal, Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32)

In contrast to this, Western culture has become broadly anti-intellectual. Feelings and experiences, not thinking, are given the place of honor in social gatherings. However, what we believe determines what we do. Even our experiences, as important as they might be, require some form of mental interpretation before they are able to provide guidance.

Once we fail to appreciate the power of ideas and convictions, we fail to understand the flow of human history. According to Wikipedia, University of Oklahoma political scientist Allen D. Hertzke writes that:

• “The collapse of the religious impulse among the educated classes in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, he [historian Paul Johnson] argues, left a vacuum that was filled by politicians wielding power under the banner of totalitarian ideologies – whether 'blood and soil' Fascism or atheistic Communism. Thus the attempt to live without God made idols of politics and produced the century's 'gangster statesmen' – Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot – whose 'unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind' unleashed unimaginable horrors.”

The influence of our beliefs is incontestable:

• Daniel Goldhagen argues that 20th century Communist regimes "have killed more people than any other regime type." Other scholars in the fields of Communist studies and genocide studies, such as Steven Rosefielde, Benjamin Valentino, and R.J. Rummel, have come to similar conclusions. Rosefielde states that it is possible the "Red Holocaust" killed more non-combatants than "Ha Shoah" and "Japan's Asian holocaust" combined, and "was at least as heinous, given the singularity of Hitler's genocide.

Estimates of how many Communism has exterminated usually center around 100 – 150 million non-combatants. How could something that had such an idealistic façade, something that had attracted so many intelligent and idealistic people, have produced such horrors? The Russian writer and Nobel laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, offered the following explanation:

• “Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.' Since then I have spend well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'” (Conservapedia)

Without the belief in God, restraint is removed in favor of promoting our agendas. Can we equate communism with atheism? Vox Day claims that this equation is undeniable:

• “Apparently it was just an amazing coincidence that every Communist of historical note publicly declared his atheism … .there have been twenty-eight countries in world history that can be confirmed to have been ruled by regimes with avowed atheists at the helm … These twenty-eight historical regimes have been ruled by eighty-nine atheists, of whom more than half have engaged in democidal acts of the sort committed by Stalin and Mao …

• The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists, three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war, and individual crime in the entire twentieth century combined.

• The historical record of collective atheism is thus 182,716 times worse on an annual basis than Christianity’s worst and most infamous misdeed, the Spanish Inquisition. It is not only Stalin and Mao who were so murderously inclined, they were merely the worst of the whole Hell-bound lot.

• Is a 58 percent chance that an atheist leader will murder a noticeable percentage of the population over which he rules sufficient evidence that atheism does, in fact, provide a systematic influence to do bad things? If that is not deemed to be conclusive, how about the fact that the average atheist crime against humanity is 18.3 million percent worse than the very worst depredation committed by Christians, even though atheists have had less than one-twentieth the number of opportunities with which to commit them. If one considers the statistically significant size of the historical atheist set and contrasts it with the fact that not one in a thousand religious leaders have committed similarly large-scale atrocities, it is impossible to conclude otherwise, even if we do not yet understand exactly why this should be the case. Once might be an accident, even twice could be coincidence, but fifty-two incidents in ninety years reeks of causation!” (Conservapedia)

Is it really so difficult to explain? Employing Machiavellian logic – the ends justify whatever means - the atheists believed that any form of terror was permissible if it advanced their communist revolution:

• "Violence in itself is not evil. It depends on what its purpose is. In the hands of Socialists, it is a progressive force." Boris N. Ponomarev - Communist Party Secretary.

• "The energy and mass nature of terror must be encouraged." V.I. Lenin.

• "The capitalists will supply us with the materials and the technology which we lack. They will restore our defense industry, which we need for our future victorious attacks upon our suppliers." V.I.Lenin. 

• "The struggle between world proletariat and bourgeoisie will continue until the final victory of Communism on a world scale." F. Rhyzhenko "peaceful Coexistence and the Class Struggle", Pravda, 22 August, 1973.

• "Marxist-Leninists decisively reject the assertions of certain bourgeois theoreticians who consider nuclear missile war unjust from any point of view." General Major A.S. Milovidov and Dr Ye A. Zhdanov, in 'Questions of Philosophy', a Soviet Journal, 1980.

• "... on the Communist side, nuclear war will be lawful and just ... the natural right and sacred duty of progressive mankind to destroy imperialism . . . It will resolve not just specific limited interests but a crucial historical problem, one that affects the fate of all mankind." Colonel B.A. Byely in Marxism-Leninism on War and Army.

These troubling statements are perfectly understandable from the perspective of The Heart, Mind and Soul of COMMUNISM by Dr. Schwarz:

• “The Communists have always been perfectly frank on this subject. Beginning with the Communist Manifesto, which says, ‘We openly declare that our ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions,’ the identical sentiment has been repeated ad-nauseam in all the writings of the Communist hierarchy and in official pronouncements of the Comintern and the Cominform. They categorically reject any suggestion that the transition from Capitalism to Socialism can be by the peaceful pathway of reform. One of the principal epithets of abuse in a somewhat extensive vocabulary is the word "reformist," a term of ridicule and contempt. Scientific law [in the socialist concept of science] has written that the change-over must be both revolutionary and violent. This is determined both from their philosophy of dialectical materialism and from a fake evaluation of the economic forces in society. To use a Marxian analogy: ‘Force is the midwife to deliver the socialist order from the womb of a decadent Capitalism’ ... Lenin, the founder of Bolshevism, and thus of Fascism, substituted the idea that the revolution was to result from the scientific planning and execution of the party, which was the class-conscious vanguard of the Proletariat. He replaced the idea of spontaneity with the idea of planned conspiracy. Every party member became a disciplined conspirator dedicated to the goal of the overthrow of the government by force and violence.”

Our beliefs are like a horse’s bridle, guiding us to the left of the right. Why was the Apostle Paul a man of peace? Why didn’t he rail against his oppressors and seek revenge? He didn’t have to resort to unethical means, because he knew his Savior:

• That [serving Christ] is why I am suffering [persecution] as I am. Yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day. (2 Tim. 1:12)

He knew that if he was to be deprived of everything, even life, he was deprived of absolutely nothing. Instead, he remained confident:

• We also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in his presence. (2 Cor. 4:13-14)

Without such knowledge, we would become desperate and resort to any means to provide for and avenge ourselves. However, our Lord has assured us:

• "But a time is coming, and has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me. I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." (John 16:32-33)

Jesus taught us that, in order to have peace, we need to know and believe certain truths. Without such knowledge, we will not be able to continue in peace.