COMMUNIST CHINA'S CONTROL OVER EAST TURKESTAN
God does not love corruption.
(Qur'an, 2:205)
COMMUNIST CHINA'S CONTROL
OVER
EAST TURKESTAN
As we have seen, there are many economic reasons why East Turkestan is very important to China. That country's interest in east Turkestan goes back thousands of years and the region has frequently been occupied by China, either fully or in part.
 Mao saluting his army after the communists had captured Beijing. |
The latest Chinese occupation, that is still in existence today, began in the middle of the 1700s. The civil conflicts in East Turkestan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not only damaged popular unity, but also weakened the state itself. At the same time, the Manchus came to power in China and the Manchu dynasty began. Throughout their rule, East Turkestan was run by centrally appointed governors and bureaucrats. In 1911 the Manchu Empire was overthrown and replaced by the Chinese Republic under Sun Yat Sen, the leader of the Kuomintang party, and East Turkestan was totally enslaved.
The cruelty inflicted on the people of East Turkestan by the Kuomintang regime led to a popular uprising and a declaration of independence in 1931. Up until then, the Muslims of East Turkestan, aware of the political realities of the time, avoided any initiatives aimed at securing independence. It was not only China that had its sights set on the region, but Soviet Russia was also waiting for a chance to take it over. The people of East Turkestan were aware of this (and of the sufferings the Russians had inflicted on the Muslims of West Turkestan) and for this reason preferred to accept the status quo rather than fall into communist hands. However, the 1931 move towards independence left the Muslims facing the very threat they had feared. China was able to put the movement down only with help from Soviet Russia, and a large part of the region came under Soviet control.
That interesting outcome was the result of a number of developments: China realized that it would be unable to quell the East Turkestan uprising on its own, and signed a secret agreement with Soviet Russia. As a result it acquired weapons and troops from the Russians. Despite this move, however, it still proved impossible to put the uprising down. In 1933, the Red Army invaded East Turkestan by land and defeated the Muslim forces. Following a number of battles in 1934-1937, East Turkestan found itself under de facto Soviet rule. The savagery and oppression inflicted on the peoples of the Soviet republics were now visited on the Muslims of East Turkestan. The Red Army carried out mass killings, tore down mosques, and even raped women.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, the Russians withdrew their forces from East Turkestan. As the nationalist Chinese government was defeated by Mao's communist guerillas in various regions of the country, it fled to Formosa (Taiwan). China fell to the communists, and East Turkestan with it.
Within the course of that process, the people of East Turkestan once more made a bid for independence, and the independent Republic of East Turkestan was declared in 1944, though it only lasted until Mao took control of China in 1949.
THE "RED" AGE IN EAST TURKESTAN
 The communists slaughtered thousands of innocent people during their take-over in China. |
The first communist government in the world came to power in Russia.
The Muslims of East Turkestan closely followed the developments in West
Turkestan (Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Turkmen and Tajik) territories under
Soviet domination, with which they shared common borders and historical,
religious, ethnic and cultural links. In particular, those such as the
late Isa Yusuf Alptekin (who served in West Turkestan and witnessed the
communist Russian oppression at first hand), warned both the Chinese government
and the Muslims of East Turkestan against the communist menace. It was
a common communist tactic to pay lip service to such concepts as equality,
social justice and the freedoms of nations until they came to power, at
which time things change. Equality would be replaced by the orders of
the Politbureau, social justice by exploitation, and freedoms by expulsions,
torture, labor camps, and mass executions.
Indeed, those same developments were
experienced in East Turkestan. At the 7th Congress in 1945, before coming
to power, Mao declared that when the communists did come to power, they
would allow different ethnic groups to determine their own futures and
establish their own administrations.23 As soon as they
came to power, however, they ignored those promises and declared: "For
two thousand years Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of an indivisible
China; therefore, there would be no sense in dividing China into federated
republics; this is a demand hostile to history and socialism…"24
Cruelty and oppression followed. First, the leaders of the Republic of East Turkestan were killed in a mysterious plane crash on their way to a meeting with Chairman Mao. Later, the Red Chinese government, which regarded East Turkestan as part of its own territory (and was unwilling to let it go) set about a ruthless slaughter of the Muslim population. The first war was waged against the Muslims' beliefs. Schools providing religious instruction were closed, religious leaders were arrested, and the majority of them were killed. Portraits of Mao and Communist Party flags were hung up in mosques, and Muslims were ordered to show them due respect. Some Muslims were arrested and executed on the pretext of being pan-Turkish, others of being pan-Islamic. Another aspect of the repression was forced exile. Many Muslims who were forced off their lands died en route because of the weather conditions. Between 1949 and 1952, 2.8 million East Turkestan Muslims were killed by various means. The figure was 3.5 million between 1952 and 1957, 6.7 million between 1958 and 1960, and 13.3 million between 1961 and 1965.
   Oppression, slaughter and torture are integral parts of the communist regime. Scenes of this savagery against the Muslims of East Turkestan are also frequently witnessed in China itself. |
As the Muslims were being systematically exterminated, Chinese were brought
in to replace them in an attempt to prevent Muslims' rightful claims to
their own land. Another method employed by the Mao regime, which wanted
to turn East Turkestan into a province of China, was "family planning"
by means of forced abortions. This communist brutality, which is still
going on today, will be considered in more detail in subsequent chapters
of this book.
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Prominent Names In East Turkestan's
Struggle For Freedom
The beginning of the twentieth century was a time when national and spiritual feelings in East Turkestan began to stir. This "national awakening" of the Uighur Turks came about thanks to Abdulqadir Damulla, who began his activities following a trip to Muslim countries such as Turkey, Egypt and Syria. One of the most important needs of the time was for the people to be made aware of their sacred values and historical heritage. Damulla opened a school called the Matla'ul Hidayat, and began to teach the young people of East Turkestan about their history, as well as helping to raise the popular consciousness by means of the books he published. Following Damulla, the struggle in East Turkestan was taken on by the "the Three Masters," Isa Yusuf Alptekin, Muhammed Emin Bugra, and Mesud Sabri Baykuzu. Baykuzu's struggle ended with his arrest by the communist Chinese administration in 1951 (and he was killed by lethal injection the following year). Alptekin and Bugra continued the struggle until the very end of their lives.
Alptekin served as the secretary of the East Turkestan Provincial Government, itself subordinate to China, and spent his whole life speaking about the rightful claims of East Turkestan on international platforms and trying to free the Muslims. He started working at the Chinese Consulate in West Turkestan at the age of 26. This was a time when the Soviet oppression of the Turkish Muslims of West Turkestan was at its height, and saw the start of Alptekin's struggle as he witnessed communist mentality and practice first hand. Throughout his time in West Turkestan, he established contacts with people who supported independence for East Turkestan (but had to carry out his activities in secret). One of the subjects Alptekin was most concerned with was protecting the people from communism. He even made contacts within the Chinese government in the belief that this would enable him to operate more effectively against communism. He also represented his country at the Chinese parliament between 1936 and 1945. When the communists first seized Beijing and then marched towards East Turkestan, Alptekin was forced to abandon his country. In 1954 he settled in Istanbul and began to work from there. He traveled to many countries in order to tell the world about the suffering in East Turkestan, and to host conferences, attend panels, and give speeches at universities. Muhammed Emin Bugra's name went down in the history of the East Turkestan struggle with his extensive work Dogu Turkistan Tarihi (The History of East Turkestan). He personally served in the 1931 independence movement, and was instrumental in freeing such cities as Hotan and Yarkent from Chinese occupation. He served as a minister in the East Turkestan state established in 1944, and sought asylum in India shortly before the Chinese invasion. From there he moved to Turkey, and carried on the fight from there. The lifelong struggle waged with honor by these patriots is still going on today. There are currently some 20 associations and organizations active on East Turkestan's behalf in the international arena. These all work together under the umbrella of the East Turkestan National Council (ETNC), and are working to have the voice of the people of East Turkestan heard by the outside world. |
23. Lydia Holubnchy, The East Turkic Review, No 4, 1960, Munich,
p. 94
24. Ziya Samedi, Kommunizim Tugi, Almaty, March 18, 1979
EAST TURKESTAN: A CROSSROAD OF CIVILIZATIONS
God does not love corruption.
(Qur'an, 2:205)
EAST TURKESTAN: A CROSSROAD OF CIVILIZATIONS
The 2,200 years of Turkestan history have played host to some of the most important civilizations in the world. The area is a wide expanse of territory, stretching from the Caspian Sea and the southern part of the Ural Mountains in the west, Siberia in the north, Iran, Afghanistan and Tibet in the south, and China and Mongolia to the east.
Today, the part of Turkestan that includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan is known as West Turkestan, and the area that has been under Chinese captivity for the last two centuries is known as East Turkestan. The geographical and strategic importance of Turkestan is obvious from the great interest shown in the area by Russia and China, the two regional superpowers. Russia and China have both played very important roles in Turkestan history, which is why it is divided into two parts today.
Behind those two countries' refusal to give the region up, no matter what cost, is its strategic position and its rich underground resources. For Russia, the Turkish states in the west, and for China, East Turkestan, are important reserves of raw materials.
Following the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia set up a powerful control mechanism in West Turkestan where states consisting of different Turkish tribes were set up. The area was given the name "Soviet Central Asia," in place of the name Turkestan by which the land had been known for hundreds of years.
The intention was to do away with the Turks' shared national consciousness.
The most important element of Russia's policy in the region was to eliminate
Islam entirely. Throughout this period, a number of sanctions were employed
in an attempt to destroy the Turks' national cultures; mosques and places
offering religious instruction were closed down and religion was entirely
divorced from social life. Crimean Turks were rounded up and exiled to
Siberia in the course of a single night, and Russians were brought in
to occupy their homes and lands. Furthermore, artificial ethnic conflicts
were incited between the nations of Central Asia. Another of the Soviet
regime's measures aimed at assimilating the Turks was to develop a second
language alongside the mother tongues of the Muslims of the Caucasus and
Central Asia. It is for this reason that Russian is now preferred to Turkish
as a means of communication between the communities in question.
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East Turkestan suffered similar oppression to that experienced in West
Turkestan, but in an even more violent form. In the middle of the 1700s,
East Turkestan was invaded by the Chinese. The political changes that
occurred in the region (and the world as a whole) prevented the desire
of the people of East Turkestan for independence from being translated
into reality. China-a country with a total land area of some 10 million
square kilometers-tried to exterminate the people of East Turkestan (also
a giant nation of 2 million square kilometers) by its policies of oppression
and isolation.
Just like the Russians in West Turkestan, the Chinese also changed the
region's name. The new name they used was the "Uighur Autonomous Region
of Sinkiang." They then began to implement the same kinds of policies
used by other imperialist nations. A ruthless war was waged against the
local people's beliefs, customs, and religious practices. Ethnic discrimination
became rife, demands for independence were ferociously suppressed, defenseless
people were exiled from their land, and Chinese settlers were brought
in to replace them. The brutality known as "Chinese torture" and cruelty
soon became reality.
Before going into the details of the oppression, (of which most people are very unaware), we will review East Turkestan's historical, geo-strategic and geo-political position.
EAST TURKESTAN: THE CRADLE OF TURKISH-ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION
The history of the lands of Turkestan goes back to the third century B.C. (the Gokturk and Hun period). The area has been the Turkish homeland since very early in history, and Islamic territory for a thousand years. Although no state or khanate bearing the name of Turkestan was ever established, the area in question, which makes up a large part of Central Asia, has always been called by that name because it has been a Turkish settlement area since very ancient times. Researchers describe East Turkestan in particular as one of the first centers of civilization and, as an area where, due to its geo-strategic position, Western and Eastern cultures intermingled.
These lands, which have been home to great empires all through history, became an indispensable part of the Islamic world after the Turks converted to Islam during the reign of Caliph Abd al-malik Marwan (b. 646/647-d. 705). The years between 751-1216 A.D. in particular, after Satuk Bughra Khan (---/d. 955-6) had accepted Islam, are known as the golden age of East Turkestan. Throughout that period, students from all over the world came to study at the renowned religious schools and educational institutions of Turkestan. Statesmen and scientists who would help shape the world were also trained there. The Turks who migrated from the region to all corners of the world carried Islam with them to many different countries.
Prominent Islamic scholars such
as Ibn Sina (above), Mahmud al-Kashgari (side) and Farabi (large
picture) were just a few of the important figures to emerge from
Turkestan. |
The Qarakhan, Ghazna, Khwarezm-Shah, Seljuq and Saidi tribes that were born in Turkestan set up states under the banner of Islam and provided outstanding examples of Turkish-Islamic culture, thus rendering a great service to human kind. Prominent statesmen such as Satuk Bughra Khan (---/d. 955-956), Seljuq Bey (---/d. 1007), Mahmud Ghaznavi (b. 998-d. 1030), Malik Shah (b. 1055-d. 1092), Timur (b. 1336-d. 1405), and Babur Shah (b. 1483-d. 1530) were among the great figures who emerged from those lands. Imam Bukhari, Imam Tirmidhi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Abu Nasr al-Farabi (Avennasar), Narshaki, Zamakhshari and Marginani, who enriched the libraries of Islam with their works, were among the great thinkers who forged the way for other scientists of the world. Furthermore, Makhmud al-Kashgari, author of the Diwan Lughat at-Turk, Yusuf Khass Khadjib, author of the Kutadgu Bilig, and Ahmad Yuknaki, the writer of the great Atabet'ul Haqayiq, also lived in Turkestan, the cradle of Turkish-Islamic civilization. Scholars such as these, of whom we have cited only a few, are sufficient to demonstrate the importance of East Turkestan to the Turkish and Islamic worlds.
Works such as the Kutadgu Bilig
and the Atabet'ul Haqayiq are considered as important to world history
as they are to that of the Turkish-Islamic world. |
EAST TURKESTAN IS NOT PART OF CHINA
One of the claims made by China in order to conceal its human rights violations and repression in East Turkestan is that the area "forms part of Chinese territory," for which reason events in East Turkestan "need to be considered a domestic Chinese affair." However, historical sources disprove that claim. First and foremost is the Great Wall of China, built by the Chinese to prevent attacks on them by other nations. This was the first time that China had put up an official border between itself and the peoples living around it. East Turkestan falls outside that border.5 Moreover, many sources describe the Jade Gate (so called because of the many jade stones found there), as being at China's westernmost border. One of these sources that describes the gate as opening into East Turkestan is actually a Chinese book, the New China Atlas, published in Shanghai in 1939.6
The region between the Great Wall of China and the Caspian Sea, Siberia and Iran, and the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir and Tibet has been known as Turkestan in not only the earliest Islamic records, but also in old Iranian and Indian accounts. This is also accepted by a great many Western historians. Nikita Bichurin, one of the earliest known Turcologists, has supported that historical truth in these terms: "A nation lives between the Caspian Sea and the Koh-i Nur Mountains. They speak Turkish and believe in Islam. They introduce themselves as Turkish and describe their country as Turkestan."7 Because these lands were given the name of "Xinjiang" or "Sinkiang" (meaning "new borders") following their occupation by China does not change that historical reality.
Over the 2,000 or so years, between 206 B.C. and 1759 A.D., East Turkestan was able to maintain its independence for more than 1,800 years. During the periods when it was linked to the Turkish Hun and Gokturk khanates, local administration lay entirely in the hands of the people of East Turkestan. Between 751 and 1216 it was totally independent. During those periods China periodically occupied East Turkestan in order to win control of the Silk Road. Yet these occupations were always short-lived, and China was never able to establish hegemony over East Turkestan in the true sense of the word. In the 2,200-year history of East Turkestan, (if we take into account the occupation that started in 1934 and which is still continuing today) a little more than 570 years have been spent under Chinese occupation.8
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There are also geographic facts that disprove the claim that East Turkestan is part of China. The make-up of the population of East Turkestan (its language, religion, ethnic origins, plus its national and spiritual heritage) all reveal a picture of total independence from China. Panku, the great historian of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. -- 220 A.D.), expresses this fact:
As for clothing, costume, food and language, the barbarians [Uighurs] are entirely different from the Middle Kingdom… Mountains, valleys and the great desert separate them from us.9
That difference was preserved throughout history. Neither was there any assimilation, even during the periods under Chinese occupation. Today, 54 percent of East Turkestan's estimated population of 17 million are Muslims, including 47 percent of the Uighurs and 7 percent of the Kazakhs. (This figure is from statistics issued by China in 1997, and is not accepted as reliable by international organizations because of China's biased attitude toward this issue). The Uighurs, who make up a large part of the Muslim population, bear no ethnic, religious or linguistic similarity to the Chinese. The Uighur alphabet consists of Arabic letters, they are all Muslim, and they have been living by Turkish customs and beliefs for more than 1,000 years.
 Throughout history, the Silk Road that passed through East Turkestan played an important role in the Chinese economy. Behind present-day China's wish to maintain its rule over East Turkestan lies the strategic importance of the area. |
ll of these historical, geographical and sociological facts make it clear that East Turkestan is not part of China, but rather a separate region that China has sought to assimilate. Even under the harshest and most difficult conditions, the people of East Turkestan never accepted Chinese rule, and frequently sought to regain their independence, at times even resorting to armed struggle. For example, when East Turkestan fell under Manchu rule between 1759 and 1862, the Muslim people rose up and rebelled against the Chinese more than 40 times.
Why is China so determined to maintain its position on East Turkestan in the face of all the facts? This should be discussed before turning to the long years of Chinese oppression.
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Periods
of East Turkestan Independence
Periods of Chinese Occupation of East Turkestan
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WHY DOES CHINA REFUSE TO GIVE EAST TURKESTAN UP?
A basic knowledge of geography makes it easy to understand the Chinese view on East Turkestan. Two important obstacles to communications exist between China and the West: the first is the 5,000-kilometer Taklamakan Desert, and the second is the Great Wall of China that stretches along the entire length of the China border.
East Turkestan is the only Chinese territory beyond the desert and the Great Wall, thus making it China's window to the West. The political effect of its location (and its geographical and strategic advantages) make East Turkestan indispensable to China. That is one reason why, instead of withdrawing from East Turkestan, China is trying to impose their occupation on the local population by means of force and violence. On the one hand, it takes away the peoples' freedoms, including those of receiving news and communications, by closing East Turkestan off and keeping the region as far from the world's awareness as possible.
 East Turkestan is known as the Kuwait of the twenty-first century, because it possesses rich underground mineral reserves. This fact makes the region indispensable for China. |
These lands, which form the westernmost point of Chinese territory, were
used by the Chinese as a buffer zone against the Soviet threat during
the Cold War. These lands are thus of great interest to China for its
own security and that of the other countries in the region. Even if Russia
no longer poses a threat to China, China still maintains its land and
air forces in the region, and also keeps a large part of its nuclear arsenal
there. Another important reason for the continuing presence of China's
forces in East Turkestan is to maintain the necessary control over the
local Muslim population.
However, geo-strategic concerns are not the only reason for China's interest in controlling East Turkestan. As noted, the region also possesses considerable natural resources, and the land is very productive. East Turkestan, known as the Kuwait of the twenty-first century, is of particular interest for its oil, natural gas, uranium, coal, gold and silver mines, and is one of China's most important sources of these resources. Authorities on the subject say that by 2005 East Turkestan will be China's second most important center of oil and natural gas production. The Tarim Basin in the middle of East Turkestan in particular is thought to have considerable petrol reserves. That basin is therefore known as the "Sea of Hope," and is estimated to have potential oil reserves of more than 10.7 billion tons.10 Research carried out by geologists has revealed a 300-million tons of oil and a 220-billion cubic-meters of natural gas capacity.11
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China's dependence on East Turkestan for energy is not restricted to the oil beds in the Tarim Basin. East Turkestan will also be the natural route for any pipeline from the Central Asian Turkish states, which will in turn be of vital importance to Chinese industry. The best way for China to insure its transportation system is effective and secure is to keep East Turkestan under its control.
 All of East Turkestan's underground resources are exploited by China. The Muslim people are unable to enjoy their share of the revenues from them. |
The region's rich natural gas, coal, and copper deposits also make it indispensable for the Chinese economy. Of the 148 different minerals extracted in all of Red China, 118 come from East Turkestan (this is 85 percent of China's mineral production). Among these, coal, with its high quality and energy content, is especially important. The coal reserves in East Turkestan are estimated at some 2 trillion tons, half of China's total coal reserves. One study at the end of 2000 revealed that China's richest copper mines were in East Turkestan. It is a known fact that China's other regions possess little copper, and that which exists is insufficient to meet the country's needs. The rich copper deposits in East Turkestan make the region even more important in Chinese eyes.12
Alongside these mines, the fact that East Turkestan is one of China's largest producers of cotton is another reason why China regards the area as important. The Red Chinese administration is unwilling to hand over the production of cotton, the raw material of the Chinese textile industry, to the Muslim Uighurs, and constantly develops new strategies to maintain control over the region. The aim behind these strategies, which we shall be examining in detail in later chapters, is not to allow East Turkestan to develop, but to make it dependent on Beijing.
East Turkestan's gold, oil and
other minerals are transferred to China, and the use of these natural
resources is totally under the control of the communist Chinese
government. |
RED CHINA'S FEAR OF ISLAM
In the preceding section we saw how East Turkestan is of great strategic and economic importance for China. Yet the frequent arrests of devout Muslims in East Turkestan, not allowing them to live in accordance with their religion, and the pressure put on their religious leaders, make it clear that there is more to their policy of oppression. First and foremost, it means that Red China is greatly concerned by the presence of Islam in East Turkestan.
Although the roots of the Chinese
attacks on Islam and Muslims go far back in history, these policies were
changed into a systematic policy of oppression, and even genocide, with
the establishment of the communist regime. When Mao founded the People's
Republic of China in 1949, all manifestations of Islam were made targets.
This hostility towards Islam began with the closure of mosques, religious
schools and other institutions providing religious education. The situation
worsened after portraits of Chairman Mao were hung in the now empty places
of worship (and Muslims were forced to show their respect for such images).
Some 29,000 mosques were closed during that period.13
The following stage consisted of the arrest of religious leaders on groundless
and baseless charges and accusations. Some of these were condemned to
death, and more than 54,000 religious figures were condemned to work in
the most terrible conditions in Chinese labor camps.14
 Radikal, 24.4.01, As their sources of wealth such as oil, gold and uranium are plundered by Beijing, the Uighurs are also imprisoned in their own land. Unemployment and low levels of education are rife. Eighty percent of the population live below the poverty line. Tiny Uighur babies can at least look to the future with hope if their families have fled abroad, to such places as Turkey. |
Throughout that period, physical and mental torture was inflicted on men of faith. Some Muslims were rounded up into public squares and made to confess the so-called "divinity" of Chairman Mao. The people were forced to carry out practices in flagrant violation of Islamic ideas, such as cremation of the dead. The closed mosques were used as military depots and barracks, or as places of entertainment (such as theatres and cinemas). All forms of public worship, including Friday and other prayers, were prohibited and heavy taxes were imposed on those Muslims who continued to pray in the few remaining mosques. The communist administration confiscated the alms given for the maintenance and restoration of the mosques and all the property belonging to religious leaders. Studying and teaching the Qur'an were completely banned. Religious works were seized from peoples' homes. Writings in Arabic were burned, including a large number of historical handwritten texts.15
With Mao's seizure of power, the oppression of
the people of East Turkestan has turned into a systematic campaign
of genocide. Mao forced the Muslim people to conform to communist
ideology. One of the first steps to achieving this is the way that
mosques and masjids all over East Turkestan were covered with portraits
of Mao. |
Modern Chinese oppression of the Muslims in East Turkestan is felt most heavily in the field of religion. As in all communist regimes, hostility to religion is part of the official state policy of Red China. A document called "The Basic Viewpoint and Policy on [the] Religious Question During Our Country's Socialist Period," circulated internally through party channels throughout China in 1982 by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, openly states that fact:
In human history, religion will ultimately disappear...
All religious organizations in China will bow their heads to the leadership
of the party and the government … The true aim of religious schools
is to produce professional religious officials who support the party administration
and the socialist system … These religious officials must remain loyal
to the party's policy on religion … The fundamental purpose of
religious bodies is to play an important role in spreading the country's
political influence.16
One of the important indications
of the communist regime's hostility to religion is the way that
many mosques have been closed down and used for storage since the
earliest days of the regime. The picture to the side shows a ruined
mosque in Hotan. |
A speech by Ali Jing Jiang, a member of the People's Republic of China Islamic Community, at the 5th meeting of the Islamic Society of North America in the USA on September 1, 1986, shows just how fully the Red Chinese administration has put into effect the decisions set out in that declaration. In his speech, Ali Jing Jiang stated that in China it is legally forbidden to give any religious education, either at home or at school, to minors under the age of 18. Although some religious schools have been opened as the result of pressure from Islamic countries, there are more Marxist, Leninist and Maoist ideas taught in them than Islam. Jiang expressed that all the teachers in such schools are communists and atheists and young people are being raised with no knowledge of religion. In other schools, he said, religion is taught as if it were something that needed to be forgotten, a primitive belief belonging to the lowest levels of Chinese society. That situation has rapidly begun to distance young people from religious belief. He also added that the government keeps a tight rein on Muslims' activities and that the communists are using Islam merely as a tool with which to improve relations with Muslim nations.17
THEY HAD US FEED
PIGS IN THE MOSQUES!... The Chinese cruelty in East Turkestan is never ending. Chinese officials often halt the construction and repair of mosques, ban Muslims from engaging in communal worship, and force them to carry out practices in flagrant violation of Islamic ideas. |
The anti-religious pronunciations of the Chinese Communist Party are not new. The Qur'an reveals that the deniers who opposed the Prophet Noah, peace be upon him, attempted to belittle the believers with the words, "…We do not see you as anything but a human being like ourselves. We do not see anyone following you but the lowest of us, unthinkingly…" (Qur'an, 11:27). In another verse, God describes how deniers believe themselves to be terribly clever:
When they are told, "Believe in the way that the people believe," they say, "What! Are we to believe in the way that fools believe?" No indeed! They are the fools, but they do not know it. (Qur'an, 2:13)
The Chinese Communist Party's attempts to portray religious devotion as "a primitive belief belonging to the very lowest levels of Chinese society," is an example of this foolishness.
While the Communist Party uses such propaganda methods, it also at the same time steps up its oppression of Muslims. Following the initiatives demanding independence in the 1990s, (the Baren uprising, the Gulja uprising) the oppression of Muslims was stepped up even further. The way these uprisings spread to the whole of East Turkestan, and the fact that Turks in public posts also supported the demands for independence, greatly alarmed Red China. It initiated another ruthless campaign against those Muslims who had backed independence movements. Hundreds of thousands of people were detained, thousands executed and tens of thousands were sent to labor camps. Michael Winchester, one of the rare journalists able to enter the region and send out a secret report about the oppression of Muslims, had this to say in an article titled "Inside Story China: Beijing vs. Islam":
Since then they have closed down unregistered mosques; forbidden the use of loud-speakers outside registered ones; banned Quranic classes for children and youths; prohibited foreign money for religious purposes; tightened exit requirements; imposed an age restriction on haj pilgrims; outlawed unauthorized religious publications; and cracked down on Communist party members visiting mosques.18
 
 China constantly increases its oppression of the Muslims of East Turkestan. Young Muslims, religious figures, intellectuals, and even children are detained on meaningless pretexts and usually executed without their families being informed. |
One Turkestan resident interviewed by Winchester (who refused to give his real name) said that since he worked in a state office he was never able to go to the mosque, and that he would be sacked if he were to be seen doing so. The reason was the increased Chinese hostility to Islam which began at the end of the 1980s. A 1997 article in the official East Turkestan newspaper, the Xinjiang Daily, set out what party members' view of religion should be:
Those party members firmly believe in religion and
who refuse to change their ways after education should be given a certain
period to make corrections, be persuaded to withdraw from the party or
dismissed from the party according to the seriousness of their case. In
recent years, 98 religious party members have been dealt with.19
   Despite all the difficulties and tortures they are subjected to, the people of East Turkestan persevere by living their religion and performing their religious obligations. |
In East Turkestan, those who are caught praying or studying the Qur'an are punished, particularly if they are aged under 18, because Chinese law explicitly prohibits minors from studying the Qur'an. In 1999, for example, five 12-year-olds were arrested for reading the Qur'an. When one of them fled from the police station, his family were arrested and tortured by the police (and told that they would not be released until he gave himself up).20 That incident is just one of the many frequently encountered in East Turkestan. Thousands of people have been detained and tortured simply for living in accordance with their religion, or for teaching other people who want to do so. The accusations made against religious figures who have been detained are particularly noteworthy. For instance, on October 28, 1999, Memet Eli, the imam of the Oybagh Mosque in Hotan, was arrested and heavily fined for teaching religion contrary to the Communist Party policy. This is how his "crimes" were set out in the indictment:
During his duty as an Imam, Memet Ali did not study, teach and implement Communist Party's regulations on religion. He pretended he did not see the instructions of department of religious supervision. When related departments organized study and educational activities for religious personals, he did not attend… He allowed people with unclear identity to stay at the Mosque…21
  The Chinese Communist Party banned the teaching of the Qur'an. |
Other articles, as well as "failure to give instruction in communist teachings" (under which six other imams in Hotan were arrested on similar pretexts) are striking examples of the oppression faced by Muslims in Red China:
They said in their prayers: "God rescue your Muslim
believers from the oppression of atheists." They did not stop people when
they came to pray from other neighborhoods. They exceeded the 20 minutes
time limit for Friday prayer and teachings. They failed to inform the
authorities of people who came to get religious education."22
Mao's
Hatred of ReIigion
Like other communist dictators, Mao also denied the existence of God and tried to prevent the people from believing in Him. He had terrible tortures inflicted on many who believed in God, wanted to live by his will or tried to defend his beliefs, and resorted to all kinds of oppression in an effort to turn people away from God. Another side to Mao is the way that he presented himself to the Chinese people as a divine being. This common feature of atheist
dictators was revealed in the Qur'an. The verses describe
|
Pharaoh
as saying
5. Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History,
London, 1962, p. 59
6. New China Atlas, Shanghai, 1939, p. 51. Also see Herman Albert,
Historical and Commercial Atlas of China, Harvard University Press, 1935
7. Opisanie Cuntariy I vostoçnogo Turkestan v drevhem I nineþnem
sostaynaniy, Prevedono s Kitaykogo, Petersburg, 1829, Vol I, pp. 10-11, cited
in Alaeddin Yalcinkaya, Somurgecilik ve Panislamizm Isiginda Turkestan (Turkestan
In the Light of Imperialism and Panislamism), Timas Yayinlari, 1997, Istanbul,
p. 28
8. Isa Yusuf Alptekin, Unutulan Vatan Dogu Turkistan (The Forgotten
Land East Turkestan), Seha Yayincilik, Istanbul, 1999, p. 91
9. Pan Ku, The Account of Hsing-nu, Han-Shu, 91, Sect. 2 p.
32 a-b
10. China Daily, April 26, 1999
11. China Daily, January 4, 1999
12. "China's Largest Copper Reserve Found in Xinjiang," www.uyghuramerican.org/economy/chinaonlineoct62000.html
13. The Los Angeles Times, December 1, 1983
14. The Los Angeles Times, December 1, 1983
15. Yusuf Han, Sotsiyalistik Kazakhstan, Almaty, January 14,
1976, cited in "Chinese Policy, Human Rights Abuses and The Consequences," East
Turkestan Information, A Publication of the Eastern Turkestan Union in Europe,
www.caccp.org/et/etiu1.html
16. The People's Republic of China: Document 19: The Basic
Viewpoint on the Religious Question During Our Country's Socialist Period: Issued
by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on 31 March 1982
17. Radio Free Europe/RL, 01.09.1986
18. Michael Winchester, "Inside Story China: Beijing vs. Islam,"
Asiaweek, October 24, 1997
19. Amnesty International Report, April 4, 1999
20. "Uyghur Boys Were Arrested, Parents Were Tortured," East
Turkestan Information Center, October 30, 1999
21. "Imam Was Punished For Refusing to Teach Communist Doctrines
in Mosque," East Turkestan Information Center, November 19, 1999 (emphasis added)
22. "Islam Treated Same As Falun Gong," East Turkestan Information
Center, November 19, 1999
CHINA: A STATE OF FEAR
God does not love corruption.
(Qur'an, 2:205)
CHINA: A STATE OF FEAR
When the Communist Party came to power in 1949, China rapidly turned into a state that spread terror throughout the world. Its policies based on violence and pressure have continued unabated since those early days. Communist ideology's unfeeling and ruthless conduct towards people and its materialist views that turn relationships between people into purely mechanical intercourse, has led to a ruthless and cruel government instead of a compassionate and just one.
In the communist China established by Mao Tse Tung the belief that order and stability can only be maintained by means of fear and violence prevails. As a result, the state tightly controls all aspects of individuals' lives and ruthlessly punishes anyone it deems appropriate. It is not just citizens who commit serious crimes in China that are punished. The Chinese state even arrested women who sent newspaper cuttings to their husbands abroad, accusing them of disclosing Chinese state secrets.1 It can accuse someone who gave what would appear to be a perfectly harmless quote to a foreign journalist of committing treason and send him to a labor camp. It is perfectly understandable that under conditions such as these fear and insecurity should prevail instead of peace, security, and stability. In the same way that it is not possible to talk about feelings such as love, self sacrifice and compassion in such a social structure, so it is also out of the question to speak of democracy and human rights. Chinese citizens are unable to criticize freely mistakes by the government or freely express their thoughts, and as a result they are unable to effectively push for change or renewal. The fate of those who try is usually a sufficient deterrent.
No matter how much the Western media cite the liberal reforms being carried out in the economy and the claim that China is turning to democracy, the Red Chinese government does not have the slightest intention of giving up its total control over the people. Those living in Chinese territory are the proof, and the peoples of both China and East Turkestan are now the major victims of these ruthless practices.
THE COMMUNIST PARTY OLIGARCHY
The People's Republic of China is a totalitarian regime. Its entire executive and legislative bodies are tied to one single administrative organ, the Chinese Communist Party. Nationally and locally, the major leaders in the police, the army, and civilian organizations are all the Communist Party administrators. Such people are often as influential after their retirement as they are while in office. Thanks to their powerful organization, the Communist Party controls just about all aspects of life. For this reason, it is difficult to deviate from communist ideology in political and social life. Each individual's thoughts, beliefs, and actions must be in line with communist ideology and the instructions of the party. Deviation, and even the possibility of deviation, can be heavily punished.
The British journalist John Mirsky, who has become an expert on China, describes that communist rule in the following terms:
… But to them [Communist Party], stability meant an order in which the elders and the Communist Party were incontestably in charge. Any threat to that would have to be met with what they wielded most effectively: force.2
The most striking example of this occurred during Mao's "Great Leap Forward" and the "Cultural Revolution" campaigns. Ruthless and cruel methods were resorted to in order to make the people submit to communism and translate communist ideology into daily life. Peasants were deliberately left to starve until they handed over their produce to communes and accepted the communist interpretation of production. Those who opposed communism at a time when that practice cost millions of lives were inevitably eliminated. During the Cultural Revolution, which was aimed at the educated and intellectual sections of society, all voices of opposition in China were silenced in the cruelest possible manner. The Cultural Revolution began with Mao's instruction that "There are still people at the highest levels of the state who have not fully turned to communism, and these need to be educated." This instruction became a campaign in which educated people were humiliated, beaten and tortured, and even killed for trivial justifications such as not wearing the uniform expected by Mao, or for being unable to learn communist marching songs by heart. Mao eventually got what he wanted, and communism finally completely entered peoples' minds. (For more detail on the savagery experienced during the Mao period, see Harun Yahya Communism in Ambush, Global Publishing, Istanbul, 2003).
Mao's Cultural Revolution led
to savagery, the like of which has seldom been seen anywhere before.
The revolution's particular targets were educated individuals and
intellectuals. The young people known as the Red Guards killed,
often by torture in full public view, people who failed to carry
Mao's Little Red Book with them or who had not learned communist
anthems by heart. In that period walls were covered with the copies
of the Red Book to ensure that people read its content. |
This regime of oppression, which has lasted since Mao first established
it in 1949 until the present day, has been maintained by virtue of the
wide-reaching organization of the Communist Party. In such an environment,
where there is almost one plain-clothed police officer for every five
to ten people, and where everyone has come to be an informer on everyone
else, the Communist Party has maintained its authority with force and
violence. That is why right from the start a ruthless police force and
army were established. The People's Armed Police (PAP) and the People's
Liberation Army (PLA), attached to the State and Public Security Ministry,
assumed this responsibility. Ever since the day it was set up the PLA
has operated as the armed wing of the Communist Party, and is today the
largest army in the world, with 6 million members.
 During the Cultural Revolution, tens of thousands of teachers, politicians and artists were tortured and killed by the Red Guards. Often good public servants were destroyed in the process. This First Party secretary is just one of the thousands of people to have insulting placards hung around their necks and be publicly humiliated. |
THE IDEOLOGY OF SAVAGERY IN COMMUNIST CHINA
In the following chapters of this book, we shall be considering examples of the repression and torture inflicted on the Muslims of East Turkestan. We shall also be looking at the Chinese administration's oppression of its own people. We will show that ruthlessness is a normal policy tool, and cruelty is regarded as nothing out of the ordinary. In societies where the existence of God is denied, where people believe that they have no other responsibility than to themselves, and where there is no belief in the hereafter, selfishness, ruthlessness and cruelty take the place of love, compassion, forgiveness, and sympathy.
The surest way of putting an end to the cruelty and torture is for people of good conscience to explain religious morality as part of their duty of enjoining good and forbidding evil, and invite others to learn about the teachings of God. In one verse of the Qur'an, God has also revealed that "Let there be a community among you who call to the good, and enjoin the right, and forbid the wrong. They are the ones who have success." (Qur'an, 3: 104). In carrying out that important duty, one important stage of the war of ideas is the total exposure of all aspects of anti-religious ideologies and the destruction of their very foundations in order that proper morality may come to replace them. In the case of East Turkestan and China, that ideology is communism.
According to communist ideology, matter is all that exists and all events, historical, economic and sociological included, are nothing but reflections of different forms of matter. This view holds that everything is in a constant process of change and development. The force behind the change is conflict. The entire universe, including human history, has developed as a result of conflict, which has, in turn, led to human progress. (see Communism in Ambush by Harun Yahya, Global Publishing, Istanbul, 2003)
Maintaining that conflict is the key to development is a step in the direction of endless bloodshed. Followers of such ideologies will be in constant conflict, oppress each other and spill one another's blood (all in the name of progress). Human feelings upheld by religion (such as love, respect, sacrifice and sharing) disappear entirely, together with any possibility of peace and security. In fact, communist philosophy teaches that virtues such as these actually hold a society back. Mao, who brought this philosophy to China, left behind him some 60 million dead, tens of millions of people who had suffered torture, and a ruthless society.
However, the real contradictions and opposites that exist do not justify savagery and slaughter. Opposites exist everywhere: Day and night, dark and light, hot and cold, good and bad. Yet these have been created to emphasize the beauty of the world and to allow moral virtues such as tolerance, peace and forgiveness to emerge. The same thing applies to the world of ideas. The fact that people think or believe differently is no reason for them to ruthlessly slaughter each other. God commands people to behave with kindness, even to their enemies, and to speak good words to people. All contradictions can be resolved in an atmosphere of peace and toleration by people who possess the reason and good conscience that Qur'anic morality brings with it.
Communism relies on force and
violence for its survival. Conflict and war are intrinsic elements
of communism. |
Communism, however, maintains the exact opposite. In fact, when conflict,
which is one of the most important components of communism, joined forces
with Darwinist thought, which regards human beings as a species of animal,
the result was the deaths of millions of people and the ruining of many
more lives. That is why the policies of Mao and his followers were not
changed by the sufferings they caused their people, whom they regarded
as just a herd of animals.
 |
The Darwinist world view which caused Mao to regard those who opposed communism as animals is emphasized in the book China and Charles Darwin by James Reeve Pusey, a historian from Harvard University:
Mao Tse-Tung in an angry moment (as late as 1964) swore that "all demons shall be annihilated." He dehumanized his enemies, partly in traditional hyberbole, partly in Social Darwinian "realism." Like the Anarchists, he saw reactionaries as evolutionary throwbacks, who deserved extinction. The people's enemies were non-people, and they did not deserve to be treated as people.3
Mao's own words confirmed those of Pusey. One of the slogans of the founder of Red China at that time was "The basis of Chinese socialism rests on Darwin and the theory of evolution."4
The Muslims of East Turkestan came to be one of those societies that Mao, inspired by the Darwinist World view, thought had no right to "be treated as human." The reason was because the beliefs of the people of East Turkestan led them to fiercely oppose communism. However, their rightful protest was put down with utter ruthlessness and as a result millions of its children have been killed by the communist regime. East Turkestan is still living under this repression. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been tortured in Chinese prisons, cast out of their homes, and obliged to leave their land.
As Mao himself confessed, the
most important ideological support of the communist regime in China
is Darwin's theory of evolution. In his book China and Charles Darwin,
the Harvard University historian James Reeve Pusey describes the
great influence of Darwinism in China and how it prepared the intellectual
foundations of communism. |
1. A Remarkable Woman is Suppressed," The Guardian,
"March 15, 2000
2. Jonathan Mirsky, "Revolution's Dark Legacy," Asiaweek, Vol.
27, No. 2, January 19, 2001 (emphasis added)
3. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, p. 455 (emphasis
added)
4. M. Mehnert, Kampf um Mao's Erbe, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
1977 (emphasis added)
INTRODUCTION
God does not love corruption.
(Qur'an, 2:205)
INTRODUCTION
China entered the twentieth century as the remains of an empire fragmented and crushed under pressure from especially Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Russia. After imperial rule had been overthrown, no powerful central authority was established for decades. When the Communist Party came to power in 1949, China soon turned into a state of fear. That process cost the lives of tens of millions of people because of the repressive and totalitarian methods the communists used to enforce their bloody ideology. The Chinese Communist Party resorted to violence to remain in power, and implemented one of the most savage and ruthless form of communism ever, enforcing one single way of living and thinking for the entire Chinese people. Throughout that period, those who refused to abide by the rules of their communist leaders were ruthlessly exterminated.
It is commonly assumed that the savage implementation of communism has come to an end. People no longer receive food in return for vouchers, no longer are required to wear uniforms, nor suffer torture because they are unable to learn Mao's "Little Red Book" by heart. Yet communism, adapted by the regime to the new world order, is still alive and well in all its ruthlessness.
In the eyes of the Communist Party, people are of value only as long as they can produce, and are allowed to think only within boundaries set by the Communist Party. They can freely express only thoughts in harmony with the party. The labor camps that exist through China, the system that humiliates and exploits millions of people in those camps, the mass executions in full public view, the torture methods widely employed in the prisons and the sale of the internal organs of those condemned to death, all reveal the ugly face of the communist administration. Despite all this, however, for the last 20 years a number of media outlets have been spreading the propaganda that China is rapidly preceding down a liberal and democratic path. One important point is often ignored: The fact that China has moved to capitalist practices in the economic field and has opened its gates to foreign investors in a number of areas, does not mean that there has also been a change in the country's political structure and ideology. On the contrary, the inhuman practices still common demonstrate that nothing has changed in the mentality of the ruling Communist Party. This will be clarified with a great many examples in subsequent chapters of this book.
A major area of communist savagery is East Turkestan, home to the Muslim Uighur Turks. Located at the westernmost point of China, East Turkestan has been under occupation for the last two centuries or so, and for the last 50 years in particular has suffered great oppression from the despotic regime of the communist Chinese administration. As a result of Chinese propaganda, East Turkestan is known to the world as "Xinjiang," or "Sinkiang" meaning "new borders" in Chinese, and most people are very unaware of the human drama going on there. Yet East Turkestan, the majority of whose population are Muslims of Uighur origin, is the scene of violence and oppression by the communist Chinese administration, the like of which is found in no other region of China. Torture, executions, labor camps and religious oppression have long been features of daily life in East Turkestan.
 In recent years, there has been much talk about the increased freedom and liberalization in the economic arena in China. Yet the freedom is limited to specific areas, and the cruel and oppressive system in China has, in fact, not changed. |
Muslims are arrested, kept for months (or even years) in Chinese prisons, which are notorious for torture, solely because they want to live by their religion. Many of those who fight for freedom and democracy for Turkestan are executed. Moreover, China's assimilationist policies have prevented the majority Muslim population of East Turkestan from speaking their own language, living by their own culture, from going on the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), performing their daily ritual prayers and fasting, and even forbidden them to determine their family size. The help Muslims of East Turkestan expect of people of good conscience all over the world is very easy: The solution to bring an end to this communist oppression lies in the waging of an intellectual struggle and in the unification of the Turkish-Islamic world. Division and fragmentation is a contravention of the moral values of the Qur’an. Muslims must ally themselves together in the awareness that they are brothers and be united by abiding by Qur’anic moral values and the Sunnah of our Prophet (saas). The Turkish-Islamic region is one of the richest in the world in terms of underground resources and surface wealth. The Turkish-Islamic world is a significant force with a young and wide population. These riches and the region coming together under a just, loving, compassionate, democratic and honest authority will of course mean that the Turkish-Islamic world acquires great power. This force to be attained with the establishment of the Turkish-Islamic world will mean the salvation not just of our brothers in East Turkestan but also of the Islamic world and the world as a whole.
China has turned East Turkestan into a closed region by restricting all means of communication, preventing the true dimensions of their human drama from being heard by the outside world. Yet that is no excuse for forgetting and behaving as if nothing were going on. For this reason, it is most important that all possible means be taken to stop the silence that prevails in the whole world on the subject of East Turkestan. If the true dimension of the inhumanity going on behind closed doors is revealed, this will not only help the wronged people to have their voices heard, but will also attract the world's attention to bring justice to East Turkestan.
The aim of this book is both to identify the basic causes of this communist oppression that has been going on all over China for more than half a century, to make the voice of the wronged people of East Turkestan heard, and once again to reiterate the urgency of the foundation of the Turkish-Islamic Union. Initiatives taken to allow the Muslims of East Turkestan to enjoy peace and security can only succeed if the fundamental causes of their oppression are documented and the requisite efforts are made together..
 |
This work documents that the fundamental reason behind the oppression in East Turkestan is the materialist philosophy and communist ideology that dominate the Chinese state. The violence caused by materialist philosophy, which regards life as a fight for survival (and suggests that progress is only possible by means of conflict) can only be eliminated if people turn to, and live by, the morality God commands. God has commanded people to live by justice, tolerance, love, compassion, respect, sacrifice, sharing, self-denial, and forgiveness. God has made it clear that ethnic differences are no justification for conflict, and that people must respect each others' races, languages, and beliefs. The acceptance of that moral code world wide is the only way to secure peace and tolerance. An intellectual war must be waged against the materialist ideology that is the fundamental support behind those who have oppressed others. For this reason this is the most important area required for peace and justice to prevail.
 |
The first thing needing to be done in the present age is the immediate foundation of the Turkish-Islamic Union, together with determined intellectual opposition to all the oppression and injustice in the world and the acceleration of efforts to disseminate the moral values of the Qur’an, the true solution to all these problems. A new age will dawn with the spreading of the morality of the Qur'an, by the will of God, in which injustice and oppression will be replaced by peace, security, and justice. The Qur'an bears good tidings about that new age:
God has promised those of you who believe and do right
actions that He will make them successors in the land as He made those
before them successors, and will firmly establish for them their religion
with which He is pleased and give them, in place of their fear, security…
(Qur'an, 24:55)
The people of East Turkestan have been crushed by the repressive communist system for more than half a century. Muslims are prevented from living their religion, and are trying to survive under particularly difficult conditions.
WARNING The chapter you are about to read reveals a crucial lif
WARNING
The chapter you are about to read reveals a crucial life secret. It should be read attentively and thorougly, for it is concerned with a subject that is liable to make a fundamental change in one's oulook toward the external world. The subject of this chapter is not merely a point of view, a different approach, or a traditional philosophy. It is a fact which everyone, believers and non-believers, must admit to and which has been proven by science today.
The Important Reality that Invalidates Materialism
At the root of the Communists' nightmare of anguish throughout the 20th century lies the Darwinists' materialist creed. Blindly accepting materialist philosophy, Communists regard everything as composed of matter only, rejecting the idea that human beings have spirits. In the same way, their adoption of Darwin's theory of evolution led them to qualify human beings as no more than "advanced animals."
This and the following chapter will explain why this ideology is unsound. First off, we'll consider a very important reality that invalidates the very foundation of the materialist dogma that regards everything as being composed of matter. The second chapter demonstrates Darwinism's invalidity from a scientific standpoint, showing that human beings have always existed on this Earth as humans-distinct from animals-and have a spirit and consciousness God has given them.
First of all, let's take a short look at the system of thought that holds matter as absolute, denying the existence of anything else. As a result of this flawed logic, materialists reject obvious existence of God (surely God is beyond that) and cannot conceive that all things continue to exist by God's will. Materialists' warped philosophy stems from this flawed conception, and is described in the Qur'an (23:37) as the materialists themselves might express it: "What is there but our life in this world? We die and we live and we will not be raised again." Another verse (30:7) describes the great error of these people who deny God and the afterlife: "They know an outward aspect of the life of this world but are heedless of the hereafter."
Why did materialism fall into this error, which gave rise to such flawed conceptions? One reason is that never in their lives have they realized a very important reality. And not being aware of it, they believe that their entire lives are limited by the material world. Therefore, their entire relation to the world is dominated by ambition. In the following pages, we will reveal this important reality, of which godless people are unaware.
The Real Face of Matter
We are about to demonstrate a reality that invalidates the roots of materialist thought: not a philosophy or ideology; but a technical reality that everyone inhabits whether he knows it or not, which has been proved by various branches of science. If approached with care and sincerity, without prejudice, it is very easy to understand. This reality can be summarized like this: "All material existence that form us and our environment is a totality of conception. The concept of what we call "matter" is like a dream, conceivable only as an image in our minds. We can never have any connection with its original that exists outside us."
The "reality behind matter" is not formerly unknown and only newly discovered. Throughout history, God has sent apostles and other deeply aware, thoughtful people to proclaim this reality, which is alluded to in a number of verses of the Qur'an and plays a key role in interpreting still other verses. Texts containing portions of these individuals' proclamations have come down to us today; while various degenerated forms of the true religion-whose original revelations have been distorted-have sought to preserve this reality as a mystical secret.
One can find this reality in surviving texts of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism and Christianity. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato (especially in his Allegory of the Cave), the Eleatic school of philosophy, and a number of the thinkers who followed them all expounded one aspect of this question. In later periods, it has been related and taught by people who, under the influence of differing viewpoints and various interpretations, have thought about it deeply and arrived at the truth.
Those who claim that matter is the one absolute principle of existence, tried to cover up this reality. But George Berkeley, the Irish theologian and philosopher, raised this question again in the 18th century and in so doing, changed the world of ideas after him.
Because materialists-especially Bertrand Russell, the most passionate spokesman of this school-could not refute Berkeley philosophically, they attempted to insult and slander him. Even though Russell was the most representative thinker in materialist circles and the strongest defender of this view, he couldn't disregard this truth. In The Problems of Philosophy, he admitted that: "Berkeley retains the merit of having shown that the existence of matter is capable of being denied without absurdity, and that if there are any things that exist independently of us, they cannot be the immediate objects of our sensations."124
However much Russell might claim the opposite, in his statement above, he basically could not deny this reality, but even openly states that he accepts it.
Actually not only Russell's outlook, but the entire materialist philosophy is about to collapse. As we step into the 21st century, modern developments in physics, quantum physics, astronomy, psychology and anatomy and other branches of science are deeply discomfiting those who espoused the old materialist view of the world. The study of fossils and research conducted in areas like genetics have caused the theory of evolution to collapse. Research in optics and psychology have helped solve the mystery of our cognitive system; as a result of advances in astronomy, the Big Bang theory-proposing that the universe and matter had a beginning-has become generally accepted. Research into atoms and sub-atomic particles has turned classical physics inside out, proving the theory of relativity- that time itself is relative.
Countless scientific discoveries have confirmed the existence of God and His eternal sovereignty over the whole universe, leaving with no recourse those materialist thinkers who represent fanaticism and prejudice. Their powerlessness also continues today. On television, in schools, and at lectures, we encounter scientists and thinkers who feign ignorance of the fact that we can't get in touch with the external world, that our experience is composed of perceptions felt in our brain; and proceed not to inform people of the truth, even behaving as if it did not exist. But ignoring the truth is no solution. Let us examine this reality a little more closely.
What We Perceive As Outside Is Actually Inside Ourselves
 Sitting with his family, watching television, a person is actually at the presence of a great miracle. The miracle is that every image the people sitting in the room see is actually in each person's brain. Is the person in the room, or vice versa? |
Stimuli such as light, sound, smells, tastes and textures from objects assumed to exist in the external world are carried through nerves to sensory centers in the brain. All these stimuli consist of electric signals. During the process of sight, for example, light rays (photons) radiating from the exterior world reach the retina at the back of the eye, which transforms them through a series of processes into electric signals. These signals are transferred along nerves to the center of vision at the rear of the brain. Thus, the colorful, bright, three-dimensional world is perceived within this center of only a few cubic centimeters.
The same process also enables the other senses. Tastes are transformed into electric signals by cells on the tongue's surface. Smells are transformed into electric signals by cells in the epithelium of the nose. Special sensors lodged under the skin transform impulses of touch (such as feelings of firmness or softness) into electric signals, and a special mechanism in the ear transforms sounds in a similar way. All these signals are sent to respective centers in the brain, where they are finally perceived.
To clarify the point, assume you are holding a cup of coffee. Receptors under your skin transform the cup's hardness and heat into electric signals and send them to your brain. Simultaneously, the coffee's strong smell, its taste and dark brown color all become signals sent to the brain. The clink when the cup touches the table is perceived by your ears and sent to the brain as an electric signal. All these perceptions are interpreted in the relevant brain centers, working harmoniously with one another. As a cumulative result of these impulses, you sense yourself drinking a cup of coffee.
Anyone who sits in a room, watching television or dining with his family, experiences a great miracle, even though he is unaware of it. The image of four surrounding walls is, in reality, within that person's brain.
That being the case, are you in the room, or is the room inside you?
Most people are unaware of this great truth, assuming themselves to be sitting in a room, watching television or chatting with their family. Those who do grasp this fact, on the other hand, pretend not to understand this miracle, since they fear it. Yet this fact of which they plead ignorance is undeniable, confirmed by science. Stimuli reaching the eye from the room's four walls, the pictures or paintings on them, the television, carpet, furniture, and light on the ceiling are all transformed by the retina's cells into electrical currents, then transmitted to the visual center in the brain. A person perceives the image of the house, which he thinks he is in, in a tiny space in the rear of his brain.
Never in his whole life can he move outside this space; never can he see another image, apart from the one on the "screen" in his head. He can never hear a sound apart from those transmitted to his brain. A person lives out his whole life within this small, bony room.
 Throughout his life, a person cannot leave this space; cannot see any images in his brain; cannot hear any noises apart from those perceived in his brain. A person's whole life transpires within this little room. |
Everything we see around us is the work of electrical signals producing an image in our brain. To explain this more clearly, imagine that you are looking at the bowl of fruit on a dinner table. When light rays from it reach your eyes, several operations come into play: The rays, converted into electrical stimuli, are transmitted by nerves to your brain's visual center. In this way we can say that we see "fruits of various colors," as can easily be found in any biology or physiology textbook. But what is most amazing is that the visual center is a place of complete darkness. Actually there is no screen in the brain: When electrical stimuli come from the table, no image is formed in the visual center. When we say we see the table and the fruit on it, we are actually seeing electric signals transmitted in total darkness.
Here we meet a fact.
 Light rays from the table reach our eyes, where they are turned into electrical stimuli transmitted by nerves to our brain's visual center. There is no actual screen in our brain, of course: Electrical stimuli coming from the table do not form an actual image in the visual center. We say that we see the table with the colorful fruit on it, but we actually see the electrical signals reaching the pitch darkness inside our brain. |
What we call the visual center is composed of fat, protein and nerves. It cannot perceive incoming electrical signals as images by these. In that case, who is it that sees the electric signals in the darkness of the brain without the need for eyes?
This is what materialism, with its lying attempts to explain everything in terms of basic matter, can never understand. What leads materialists definitely into a blind alley is an extraordinary reality that most people cannot conceive of. In the darkness of our brain is a being that need no eyes to see a table clearer than one projected on the finest television-three-dimensional, life-like and indistinguishable from the original.
What sees this perfect image is also what separates human beings from animals and all other animate and inanimate things is the Spirit that God "breathed into" them when He created them. In the Qur'an (15: 28-30), God reveals the existence of the "spirit" in these words:
When your Lord said to the angels, "I am creating a human being out of dried clay formed from fetid black mud. When I have formed him and breathed My Spirit into him, fall down in prostration in front of him!" Then the angels prostrated all together, every one of them.
Copies Indistinguishable from the Originals
Miraculously, the perceptions of the spirit are completely the same as reality. Despite the fact that the spirit has nothing to do with material originals, but only with electrical signals reaching the brain, it sees shapes and colors and feels hardness and texture, just as they are in reality. So clear are these impressions that he's convinced that he's seeing and touching the original.
For example, a swimmer in the sea's cool, blue waters is actually immersed in a great miracle. He thinks he is swimming in the water, but has never emerged from the darkness inside his brain. From the moment he entered the water, every stimulus entering his body is immediately converted by the cells into electrical current and transmitted to his brain. At this point, something miraculous happens: the spirit, with no arms or legs to stroke with or feel the wetness, senses that water is touching his skin and buoying him up.
However, the person never has any connection with the color of the water, its temperature, and the sound of the waves-all these things are inside the human brain. A person really has no connection with the original of even his own body that exists in the external world; but only perceives electrical signals from inside it. Even though this miraculous reality is taught in schools and written about in textbooks, many people are not aware of this extraordinary reality; and most of those who are aware of it do not want to understand it.
The Reality that Materialists are Afraid to Understand
 Have you ever considered that all the material things you know in this world-your house and belongings, spouse and children, your parents and colleagues-are perceived as images that occur in the darkness of your brain? |
In light of this extraordinary and exciting knowledge, consider that all the material things you know in this world-your house and belongings, spouse and children, your parents and colleagues-are perceived as images that occur in the darkness of your brain. Has it ever occurred to you that you are fixed to an image that occurs in your brain, you can never see the outside, you can see the things listed above only in your brain and you can never get outside this small world?
If the materialists-who deny the existence of the spirit, believing that matter is the only reality-accepted this obvious truth, they would have to throw aside all the principles and goals on which they've based their lives. Angered by this great miracle, they have resorted to many methods to attack it and made irrational claims to obfuscate the facts. Some materialists pound tables with their fists or kick walls to convince themselves that matter is not a perception. Other materialists may claim that a bus hitting someone is no mere perception, but objectively "real." They want to escape the understanding that all feelings of pain from the impact are already perceptions formed in the brain; the victim has never been in contact with the "actual" bus. Again, all the sensations of the blow are perceived in the darkness of the brain, by the human spirit.
The Huge Trap into Which Materialists Have Fallen
Materialist philosophy has always existed throughout history. Very assured of themselves, materialists revolted against God Who created them and maintained that since matter had no beginning nor end, it couldn't possibly have been created. Denying God out of their arrogance, they took refuge in matter which they held to have the only "real" existence. So confident were they in their arrogance and denial that they believed that no argument put forth could ever disprove it. That's why the facts regarding the real nature of matter surprised them so much. Suddenly it destroyed the very basis of their philosophy-matter, on which they based all their lives-and left no ground for further debate. They saw the material world, in which they so blindly believed in, trusted and relied, taken away and could do nothing about it. Since no human being actually sees the reality of matter that exists outside us, hears real sounds, or smells genuine scents, how can we talk of materialism?
One of the attributes of God is His plotting against the unbelievers, as stated in the Qur'an, verse (8: 30):
They plot and plan, and God too plans; but the best of planners is God.
God entrapped materialists by letting them assume that matter exists and in so doing, humiliated them in an unseen way. Materialists grew arrogant against God by relying on their possessions, status, rank in society. They revolted against God by being boastful (surely God is beyond that) and adding to their unbelief by relying totally on matter. Yet, they were so lacking in understanding that they failed to realize that God encompasses them. In the Qur'an (52: 42), God reveals the state to which unbelievers' thick-headedness leads them: "Or do they intend a plot [against you]? But those who defy God are themselves involved in a Plot!"
This is most probably the biggest defeat in history. While growing arrogant of their own accord, materialists have been tricked and suffered a serious defeat in the war they waged against God by devising a monstrous thing against Him.
In another verse (24: 39), God says: "But the disbelievers, their deeds are like a mirage in sandy deserts, which the man parched with thirst mistakes for water; until when he comes up to it, he finds it to be nothing." Materialism, too, becomes a "mirage" for the rebellious when they seek to depend on it. Just as stated in this verse; they find it to be an illusion. God has deceived them with such a mirage, beguiling them into perceiving this whole collection of images as real.
LENIN COMMANDED HIS COMRADES,
The world to which we're connected is composed not of matter, but perceptions. Because this fact knocked the foundations from under materialist philosophy, its ideologues are very uncomfortable and try not to think about it, even recommending that their colleagues not think about it either. Chief among them is Lenin. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a book he wrote a century ago, he warned that materialists should not think about this subject, else they might become "caught up" in religion: Once you deny the objective reality [that is] given us in sensation, you have already lost every weapon against fideism [reliance on faith alone], for you have slipped into agnosticism or subjectivism-and that is all that fideism requires. A single claw ensnared, and the bird is lost. And our Machists [an adherent of Machism, developed by the Austrian philosopher Mach, one of the leaders of modern positivism], have all become ensnared in idealism, that is, in a diluted, subtle fideism; they became ensnared from the moment they took "sensation" not as an image of the external world, but as a special "element." It is nobody's sensation, nobody's mind, nobody's spirit, nobody's will.1 As this quote shows, the only thing materialists can do about the "real nature of matter" is to avoid thinking about it!-the clearest indication that the myth of materialism derives its strength only from people's self-deception. 1- (V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism,
Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970, pp. 334-335) |
All those eminent professors, astronomers, biologists, physicists and others, regardless of their rank and post, are simply deceived and humiliated for having taken matter as their god. Assuming a collection of images to be absolute, they based their philosophy and ideology on them,and involved themselves in serious discussions. They deemed themselves to be wise enough to offer an argument about the truth of the universe and, more importantly, adopted a so-called "intellectual" dispute about God, Who explains their limited intelligence in the Qur'an (3: 54): "And [the disbelievers] plotted and planned, and God too planned, and the best of planners is God."
From some plots, it may be possible to escape. But there is no way to avoid God's plan against the disbelievers. They can never find a helper other than God. As God states in the Qur'an (4: 173), "They shall not find for them other than God a patron or a help."
For materialists, realizing this fact is no doubt the worst possible thing, because it leaves them all alone with God. Thus, they understand that God is always with them and He encompasses all things. With verse 74: 11 of the Qur'an, God calls us to remember that each human is, in truth, totally alone in His Presence: "Leave Me alone, [to deal] with the [creature] whom I created alone!"
This remarkable fact is repeated in many other verses:
And behold! You come to us alone [individually] as We created you for the first time: you have left behind you all [the favors] which We bestowed on you. (Qur'an, 6: 94)
And each one of them will come unto Him on the Day of Resurrection, alone. (Qur'an, 19: 95)
In another sense, these verses state that those who take matter as their god have, nonetheless, come from God and will return to Him. They have submitted their wills to God, whether or not they wanted to. Now-however unwilling they may be to realize it- they await the Day of Judgment, when every one of them will be called to account.
The Importance of the Subject
It is of the utmost importance to understand correctly the secret beyond matter explained in this chapter. Mountains, plains, flowers, people, seas—briefly everything we see and everything that God informs us in the Qur’an that exists and that He created out of nothing is created and does indeed exist. However, people cannot see, feel or hear the real nature of these beings through their sense organs. What they see and feel are only their copies that appear in their brains. This is a scientific fact taught at all schools of medicine. The same applies to the book you are reading now; you can not see nor touch the real nature of it. The light coming from the original book is converted by some cells in your eyes into electrical signals, which are then conveyed to the visual center in the back of your brain. This is where the view of this book is created. In other words, you are not reading a book which is before your eyes through your eyes; in fact, this book is created in the visual center in the back of your brain. The book you are reading right now is a “copy of the book” within your brain. The original book is seen by God.
It should be remembered, however, that the fact that the matter is an illusion formed in our brains does not “reject” the matter, but provides us information about the real nature of the matter: that no person can have connection with its original. Moreover, the matter outside is seen not just by us, but by other beings too. The angels God delegated to be watchers witness this world as well:
And the two recording angels are recording, sitting on the right and on the left. He does not utter a single word, without a watcher by him, pen in hand! (Surah Qaf: 17-18)
Most importantly, God sees everything. He created this world with all its details and sees it in all its states. As He informs us in the Qur'an:
… Heed God and know that God sees what you do. (Surat al-Baqara: 233)
Say: "God is a sufficient witness between me and you. He is certainly aware of and sees His servants." (Surat al-Isra’: 96)
It must not be forgotten that God keeps the records of everything in the book called Lawh Mahfuz (Preserved Tablet). Even if we don't see all things, they are in the Lawh Mahfuz. God reveals that He keeps everything's record in the "Mother of the Book" called Lawh Mahfuz with the following verses:
It is in the Source Book with Us, high-exalted, full of wisdom. (Surat az-Zukhruf: 4)
… We possess an all-preserving Book. (Surah Qaf: 4)
Certainly there is no hidden thing in either heaven or Earth which is not in a Clear Book. (Surat an-Naml: 75)
You have taught us. You are the All-Knowing, the All-Wise."
(Qur'an, 2: 32)
124. Faruk Sukru Yersel, Eskisehir Gazetesi (Eskisehir Newspaper), 1926
COMMUNISM LURKS IN HIDING
COMMUNISM LURKS IN HIDING
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Mention the theory of evolution in the United States, and the first name that usually springs to mind is that of the late Stephen Jay Gould. For years he was professor of Zoology and Paleontology at Harvard University, wrote many books supporting evolution, and made many media appearances to speak about this topic. When there is an argument about evolution, world-famous magazines like Time and Newsweek quote Gould's view. His books appear prominently in bookstores and in the giftshops of natural history museums.
Gould tried to cover up Darwinism's shortcomings and make up for its refutation in the face of the fossil record. Of course, he was not successful. That's why Professor Phillip Johnson of Berkeley, a well-known critic of the theory of evolution, calls Gould the "Gorbachev of Darwinism."114 Gould himself even confessed his lack of success on many occasions. (For more detailed information, refer to Darwinism Refuted:How the Theory of Evolution Breaks Down in the Light of Modern Science, by Harun Yahya, Goodword Books, 2002)
 Stephen Jay Gould, an ardent Marxist, was one of the most prominent Darwinist scientists in the U.S. When the USSR collapsed, he proclaimed that Marxism had only grown stronger. |
Stephen Jay Gould was as attached to Marxism as he was to Darwinism, and admitted this openly. For him, Marxism and Darwinism were two sides of one coin. Darwin explains the "dialectics of nature" and Marx explains the "dialectics of history." Gould's attachment of Darwinism was actually the result of his commitment to dialectical materialism. He rigorously defended Darwin because "Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism to his interpretation of nature."115
In 1992, this famous Marxist-Darwinist went on a trip to Russia. A few years before this trip, the Eastern Block had split up; one year earlier, the Soviet Union had collapsed and the Communist Party no longer existed. The whole world was convinced that Communism had fallen. But Gould interpreted the event otherwise. On his return, he stated to reporters that, "Yes, the Russian reality does discredit a specific Marxist economics,"-but went on to say that Marx has been proven right about "the validity of the larger model of punctuational change."116
According to Gould, Marxism is still alive.
Communism is Alive as Well
Stephen Jay Gould's commitment to Darwinism is not an exceptional case. Among the well-known 20th century scientists who accept the theory of evolution, many have been Marxists. In the first half of the last century, individuals like Alexander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane were all passionate Marxists who carried out their most important experiments in the name of evolution. Western evolutionist scientists like John Maynard Smith and Richard Lewontin are still avid defenders of Marxism.
According to these men, Darwinism and Marxism have the same meaning. Each theory is based on a common philosophical foundation: Dialectical materialism, which Marx applied to history, and Darwin applied to nature. According to these people, the universally held idea that Communism collapsed along with the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc is wrong, only "a false interpretation of Marxism" has fallen. As long as dialectical materialism lasts, a Marxist understanding of politics will endure.
 As long as Darwinism survives, so will dialectical materialism and Communism. Marxist-Darwinist scientists in the U.S. are proof of this assertion. At left, Peter Singer's A Darwinian Left. |
This idea is accepted by many individuals and organizations that still believe in Marxism. While the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc still existed, these contemporary Communists separated Communist regimes from Marxist ideology. They called existing Communist regimes "real" or "living" Socialism, contending that socialist ideology is not integral to these regimes; even if they collapsed, it would remain.
Their claim-still considered valid today-is that according to Marx, a society must undergo particular evolutions, advancing first from capitalism, then to socialism and finally to Communism. Russia and other 20th century Communist regimes, however, experienced a sudden passage from an agricultural society to socialism, omitting the intervening capitalist stage. Therefore, according to Marxists, it's only natural that these regimes did not succeed. Today, these countries have adopted capitalism, to develop through the "stage of capitalism" that Marx spoke of. When socialism finally comes, it will be stronger and more enduring.
Many who still believe in Marxism have adopted this interpretation. Their number includes leading scientists like Stephen Jay Gould to European Communist parties, from Marxist intellectuals and journalists to separatist Communist terror organizations. Therefore, it's very wrong to think that Communism has passed into history with the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, and poses no more threat to the world. Communism is a political expression of dialectical materialism, so that if that theory survives, so will Communism. If a particular philosophy is strong in a society, it is only a matter of its finding an appropriate environment to make itself politically influential. If the philosophy of dialectical materialism becomes strong and widespread, then Communism-its political aspect-may become an influential force.
In today's world, there is generally a strong trust in democracy and a liberal economy. But any international crisis in the liberal economic order could change people's tendencies and psychology. This has happened before. Following the Crash of 1929, a serious economic crisis throughout the whole world quickly increased the popularity of Communism and Fascism in Europe. Communists interpreted the Great Depression as the "collapse" of the capitalist system and used it as an opportunity to influence the masses more easily.
At present, Communists have considerable power, especially in Europe. Communist parties in France and Italy remain strong and in elections, they obtain a high proportion of votes. Almost all the former Eastern Bloc countries have socialist parties led by former Communist party members, who also obtain a substantial number of votes. A new international crisis could push these countries to strengthen their socialist parties and from there, into Communist regimes.
Russia: One Forward, Two Back!
 Russian demonstrators shouting out slogans opposing Russia's new capitalist order and demanding a return to Communism. |
A very narrow line separates Communism and Fascism, which are like two opposite sides of the political fan. Each ideology has a similar social and moral structure and the same model of leadership. Social science includes each in the same class of "totalitarian ideologies." Totalitarianism is a model in which the state controls society with propaganda, oppression and fear, and where opponents are removed by the most merciless methods.
After 1991, Russia's political regime and political culture did not change very much. They just passed from Communism to a kind of Fascism based on the domination of the mafia. Basic changes occurred only in the economy and social structure. Many people became rich very quickly, but most people's living standard fell. A growing chasm formed between the rich and the poor, and Russia acquired a "brutal capitalist" structure similar to that of 19th-century England. With weak state authority and the appearance of organized crime, a kind of "feudal" structure came into being.
Interestingly, these two newly formed structures-"brutal capitalism" and "feudalism"-fulfil the conditions required for the Revolution according to Marxism. From a Marxist perspective, Russia's present structure is "pre-Communist." The Communists who have the majority of the votes and influence state mechanisms, think that in the event of an international crisis that shakes confidence in democracy and a liberal economy, Communists could turn this theory to practice. Russia could once again easily pass into the hands of a Communist regime.
Here, we notice one of Communism's sly tactics: creating an order that arises out of the breakdown of their own chronology of history (the passage from capitalism to Communism). For this reason, they surrendered the Russian people into the hands of the mafia and prepared the environment for the coming of classical capitalism. They crush the people with the very system they've established, trying to make them believe that there is no other solution but Communism.
On the other hand, Communism continues to exist in secret. Russia's present authorities are all former Communists, educated according to Marx's dialectical materialism and have not given up their dreams of a Communist state. On the contrary, they believe that Communism must develop from the capitalist phase and look on while capitalism is exercised because they regard this as a requirement of being a "Communist." They currently support and implement capitalism at this particular time because they are truly Communists.
Those who have adopted the principles of dialectical materialism find it easy to appear to be Communists one day and Fascists the next, in order to eventually achieve their goal. Because the goals of Fascism and Communism are the same-to oppress people-the line between these two ideologies is very indistinct. The only difference is that Communism continues its oppression secretly, under "humanistic" slogans while trying to validate its characteristic oppression and brutality.
Behind these various curtains of secrecy, Communism is still in power in the Russian State, which has a classical Communist structure. The USSR's military control over the Turkic republics still stands. Even in their capitalist system, passionate Communist members continue to oppress the people. Their anti-religious and amoral suggestions alienate society from its moral values and encourage it to dismiss the existence of God. After this, no reason remains for them not to accept Communism.
Russian Communists, who still march carrying posters of Stalin and Lenin, have power that cannot be despised or underestimated. In his 1904 book, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Lenin stated that on the road to any eventual goal, there must be a temporary step backward. This is how the Communists regard the collapse of the USSR in 1991. In this book, Lenin wrote:
One step forward, two steps back. . . . It happens in the lives of individuals, and it happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties. It would be the most criminal cowardice to doubt even for a moment the inevitable and complete triumph of the principles of revolutionary Social-Democracy, of proletarian organisation and Party discipline.117
THE STEALTHY TACTIC OF DIALECTICAL
MATERIALISM: Those who think that Communism collapsed a few years ago and is no longer a danger today are very mistaken. In accordance with its doctrine of Dialectical Materialism, Communism has only taken a tactical retreat. According to Lenin's book, One Step Forward; Two Steps Back, sometimes Communists must take a few steps backwards and appear to be retreating from their goals in order to achieve them. Chinese school children are taught the "dialectical way of walking"- two steps back, three steps forward. One concrete example of this is Communist thinking about the family. According to Karl Marx, founder of Dialectical Materialism, the institution of the family must be abolished in order to achieve Communism. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote, "Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the communists."a and then proceeded to explain their own reasons why the family must be abolished. They proposed that the "bourgeois family" is dependent on capital and private gain, and that when these were removed (that is, after the Communist revolution), the family would disappear too. The family, they claimed, would vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes. In his book Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels tried to show that in the first period of human history, the family did not exist but appeared only later, as an artificial institution for purposes of exploitation. According to this philosophy of Engels, when the Communist revolution came, the family, along with the state and private property, would disappear. To achieve these goals, Communists follow the doctrine of Dialectical Materialism. In order to abolish the family, they need a powerful state. But for a state to be strong, first the family institution must be strong. By first taking one step backward, they strengthen the family and the Communist state grows strong. Then one stage later, it abolishes the family.b Communists are deceiving the people by proclaiming that Communism has collapsed and that family ties have become stronger in Russia. This tactic of Dialectical Materialism is stressed by Lenin in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. Communism has changed its color like a chameleon and is waiting, while it prepares a suitable foundation. For this reason, there must be a serious struggle in the realm of ideas with Dialectical Materialism, Communism's founding philosophy, and with Darwinism-its supposed "scientific" basis. Otherwise, Communism, now waiting in ambush, will take its brutal and bloody steps forward. a- Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Moscow: Foreign
Languages Publishing House, 1957, pp. 79-80. |
Mao Lives!
In Eastern Europe and Russia, Communist systems that collapsed in the 1990's are likely to come back to life. But another kind of Communism never has collapsed and, under the appearance of capitalism, continues to gain strength every day. This version of Communism is the worst and most barbarous kind: Maoism.
 "Mao lives!" With these words, the January 10, 1994 edition of Time magazine characterized the political culture in China. |
After Soviet Russia collapsed in 1991, statues of Lenin and Stalin were toppled from their places. Russia abandoned Communism-supposedly. But in China, such has never happened. From Mao's death in 1976 to the present, the Communist Party still governs. China adopted the rules of a capitalist economy and has made great economic advances as a result, but its political system is still Communist. And strangely, Mao, the murderer of tens of millions of Chinese, is still regarded by the Chinese as a holy figure.
On January 10, 1994, Time magazine published an article, "Mao Lives!" reporting a mass pro-Mao movement in China that it termed "Mao-mania":
Mao to ordinary Chinese is still a sphinx, an idol with a hundred faces whose words, like Scripture, are quoted to almost any purpose. . . . A wave of retrochic has washed over the country as collectors grab up recordings of Mao's preachments, as well as badges, books, cigarette lighters and even yo-yos bearing his image. Not all the souvenirs are gimcrackery: some 5,000 gold-and-diamond watches commemorating his Dec.26 birthday have been selling at the lucky-eight but eye-popping figure of 8,888 yuan: $ 1,530, or 30 times the average monthly wage. . . . In the south-central province of Hunan, the Great Helmsman's birthplace of Shaoshan draws swelling numbers of pilgrims: more than 1 million in 1992 alone. The town recently unveiled a 10-m-high bronze statue of its favorite son.118
In 1997, the American magazine New Republic published an important article entitled "Mao More Than Ever," describing the "idolization" of Mao in China:
Mao Zedong remains the central, dominant figure in Chinese political culture: he is still an imperial presence; he is still revered; he is, even, still cool. The evidence is everywhere in China. In a 1994 poll, 40 percent of Chinese respondents picked Mao as their favorite leader, compared to less than 10 percent for Deng Xiaoping. "Today Chinese youths don't know or take seriously Mao's mistakes," Yan Jiaqi, a former member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told Asiaweek. "They think he was a great leader. They only know Deng's mistakes." In the countryside, new and massive temples have been built to Mao in the Fujian and Guangdong provinces, and another temple is under construction in the northern Shaanxi province of Gushuicun. The temples are frequented by party officials and peasants who believe Mao can do everything from cure illnesses to guarantee a good crop. In 1993, several workers at a Sichuan factory committed suicide on the one-hundredth anniversary of Mao's birth--they were convinced they would join him in an afterlife. Taxicab drivers in Beijing and Shanghai dangle Mao's portrait from their rearview mirrors. Artists are incorporating Mao's image into their works, and a gigantic portrait of Mao still looms over Tiananmen Square. And, most importantly, in the party and in the universities, the fashionable political philosophy isn't democracy; it's the new Maoism.
Mao hasn't made a comeback. He never left. Unlike Germany or Russia, China has never made an attempt to confront its past; it never tried to engage in de-Maoification. The Communist Party has resisted any attempts to confront either the horrors of the late 1950s Great Leap Forward, when a Mao-made famine took tens of millions of Chinese lives, or those of the Cultural Revolution, in which state-sanctioned barbarity reached the nadir of encouraging cannibalism among school children. Efforts to speak the truth about these matters are squelched: when, for example, the Shanghai University journal Society stated in 1993 that 40 million had perished in Mao's famine, that issue of the magazine was instantly recalled.
What informs China's politics is what has informed it for the last fifty years: a philosophy that mixes nationalism and communism and that is built upon the legend of Mao as founding father.119
So, what does this post-Mao capitalism mean? Is it a departure from Maoism in China, or the strengthening of the economic aspect of Maoism? The same article states:
Even after the denouement of the Cultural Revolution-the humiliation of Mao's wife and the other members of the Gang of Four-the cult of Mao lived. Although veneration had, for the time being, receded among the Chinese people, the party continued to occupy itself intellectually with Maoism. Two main groups emerged, Maoist fundamentalists (fanshipai) and nostalgists (huanyuanpai) who yearned for the golden age of the 1950s. The party Maoists kept the faith alive, but, with the barbarity of the Cultural Revolution still fresh in familial memories, they could not much fan it openly. For the nationalist-communist philosophy of Maoism to blossom fully again, there needed to appear a threat to China, an event that would awaken among the people the resting fear that China might lose its greatness, might fall prey to the depredations of the West. This event occurred on June 4, 1989, when Chinese troops mowed down student protesters at Tiananmen Square. In the wake of Tiananmen, the idea of China descending into chaos and collapse prompted the party to revive the idea of class struggle. . . . China, Jiang [Zemin] said, would continue to pursue economic reforms, but no one should be deluded that democratization would take place. Under Jiang's supervision, the party has promoted "thought reform" in the countryside and carried out Maoist-style education campaigns.
Much of the firepower for these attempts to restore Maoism has come from a group of young intellectuals clustered around party elder Deng Liqun. These Marxist fundamentalists control the People's Daily, the ministry of propaganda and numerous journals such as Seeking Truth. . . . In 1995 and 1996, they issued two "ten-thousand-word documents" calling for a return to class struggle and Maoism."120
Obviously, Maoism still dominates China. It's not simply an inheritance of aged Communist Party administrators from Mao's time, but a living inheritance for a younger generation still blindly bound to Marxism. Peasants and the uneducated masses view Mao as a supreme being; most intellectuals consciously espouse and disseminate Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology. Chinese capitalism is simply hiding and strengthening Maoism.
China is the world's most populous country, and its economy continues to grow. Its arms production is such that, in the 21st century, it is thought that China will rival the United States as a superpower. That an ever- stronger China is still Maoist, with "Mao-mania" thriving among its 1.2 billion population, shows once again that Communism is not dead but is only hidden. Worse still, this is Maoist Communism, the most barbarous and brutal version.
The Universal Maoist Movement
Mao is alive not only in China, but internationally. After the Soviet Union's collapse, international Communism's center of gravity shifted to Maoism. Communist establishments in place in both North Korea and Vietnam, still rule according to Maoist ideology. Most noticeably, terror organizations in various parts of the world have adopted Maoism and commit acts of bloodshed in Mao-style guerilla wars. Maoist organizations from different countries have joined together in what is called the "Maoist Internationalist Movement," while European Communist parties have gained great support.
On the official Internet site of the Northern Cyprus Turkish Republic, the following analysis appears about the International Maoist Movement:
According to statistics from the International Terror Research Center, in recent years there has been a notable increase in the number of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist terrorist organizations. Sources monitoring international terrorism report that Maoism is engaged in intense activity, in both words and actions. Foremost in their universal objectives and ruthless anti-Western, anti-democratic mindsets are the Maoist "Tamil Tigers" in Sri Lanka, the "Shining Path" in Peru, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and others whose names are only beginning to be heard.
The Maoists' aim is to spread Mao Tse-tung's teachings by means of bloodshed and replace democratic regimes with a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist state, by means of armed struggle. Their underlying objective, of course, is to spread Maoism throughout the entire world.
Maoist terrorist organizations from East and West met twice, in America and India, during 1996, and vowed to pursue a policy of joint action. Folowing the meeting in America, they decided: :
To overthrow parliamentary democracy in countries where they are active.
In order to achieve their aims, to kill not only soldiers, police officers, and members of the state apparatus, but anyone who is not one of them-making no exceptions of children, women, or the elderly.
To construct a centralist, single-party administration in which human rights are disregarded.
To build a world revolution based on Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology.
Another important decision taken at these meetings was to build a "Maoist propaganda center" in order to lay the foundations of the "world revolution." This center, known as the Maoist International Movement (MIM), is believed to be active in Canada. Within the framework drawn up by "Internationalist Maoists," publications designed to provoke and incite the people in target countries are prepared, then sent to their supporters in those countries for distribution...121
This discovery, based on solid evidence, shows once again that Maoism is engaged in an international effort. The international Communist net stretches back to Red China's bloody dictatorship and continues as a serious threat to the world.
Religion is Communism's main block, and only a society that lives closely bound to its religion can defend itself against Communism's provocations and deceptions. Those with this strong character will lead the world in the 21st century's struggle against materialism.
Conclusion
Communism is still alive, and in our very midst. Communist or Socialist parties will not find it difficult to rise to power in most of Eastern Europe or even in some Western European countries. If they find appropriate social conditions (as when the Nazis came to power in Germany's elections of 1933), they may establish a lasting Communist regime. Russia experienced a development from Communism to Fascism and then towards savage capitalism, but since the boundary isn't clear-cut between these ideologies, Russia can return to Communism as the result of a social movement. China still regards Maoism's ideas as the only truth, and Communism's influence is still strongly evident in Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam.
Today' s Communism, implementing the "one step forward two steps back" tactic, has taken a step back. It continues its activities in various countries under different names, while giving the impression that it presents no threat to the world. But by supporting the "conflict" argument of dialectical materialism, Communism is an endless fountain of bloodshed. Under whatever appearance or name, still it regards the dialectical conflict as an inevitable law of history and can bring humanity nothing but bring cruelty and misery.
The precaution that must be taken is to dry up the Communist swamp that produces this danger. Otherwise, struggling with the mosquitoes (that is, with Communist supporters) one by one will be of no avail. So long as the swamp is not dried up, the mosquitoes will continue to hatch at an increasing rate.
Following this analogy, how is the "swamp" to be dried up?
The common support for Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists or any other version of Communism (even Fascism) is Darwin's theory of evolution. As we have seen, Marx called this theory the "basis in natural science for the class struggle in history." Engels considered Darwin the equal of Marx, from the point of view of his dialectical materialist doctrine. Lenin and Trotsky were each influenced by Darwin and after reading him, the young Stalin-studying to be a clergyman-became an atheist. Maoism's and Chinese Communism's intellectual foundations are rooted in Darwinism.
The Marxist student movement that shook the world in 1968 was inspired by Herbert Marcuse, an ideologue influenced by Darwinism and particularly by Darwin's idea of the "struggle for existence."122 The list of Socialists who accepted Darwin as a guide would include a wide spectrum of names, including the revisionist Marxists Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, and the founder of the famous Fabian Society that is regarded as the source of the English left.123
Without Darwinism, Communism would not exist. Therefore, the only antidote for the Communism that cost the lives of more than 100 million in the 20th century alone, and which is now reorganizing and strengthening in secret, is to refute Darwinism's scientific and philosophical ideas. Once it is established that Darwinian theory is completely bankrupt in terms of science-that living things did not come to be through evolution, but that God created them perfectly-then neither Marx, Lenin, nor Mao, nor the militants who attach posters to their walls and who execute acts of bloodshed, can remain.
By eradicating the deceit of Darwinism, wells of bloodshed like Communism will be destroyed. People will return to God, our true Creator and Lord, and live according to the moral values He has taught. Then, as is commanded in Verse 2:208 of the Qur'an, people will enjoy peace and security:
You who believe! Submit all of you to God and do not follow in the footsteps of Satan. He is an outright enemy to you.
114. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University
Press Cambridge, p. 594
115. R.Payne, The Life and Death of Lenin, London:1967, p.609-610
116. Edward E. Ericson, Jr., Solzhenitsyn - Voice from the
Gulag, Eternity, October 1985, p.23-24
117. Alan Woods and Ted Grant, "Marxism and Darwinism," Reason
in Revolt: Marxism and Modern Science
118. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution
and the Meaning of Life, Touchstone, New York, 1996, p.309
119. V.I.Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back; http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/ch06.htm
120. James Walsh, "Mao Lives!," Time, January 10, 1994
121. Jacob Heilbrunn, "Mao More Than Ever," The New Republic,
April 21, 1997
122. Jacob Heilbrunn, "Mao More Than Ever," The New Republic,
April 21, 1997
123. Northern Cyprus, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Defence,
www.pubinfo.gov.nc.tr/h040199b.htm.
COMMUNISM'S HOSTILITY TO RELIGION
COMMUNISM'S HOSTILITY TO RELIGION
 |
 Bolshevik militants tearing down the Georgievsky church in the city of Gorky. |
In the Qur'an, it is revealed that throughout history, cruel and tyrannical leaders have arisen who have denied God and religion. In one verse (28: 41), God calls them "leaders summoning to the fire." This kind of character typified by the person of Pharaoh in various accounts about Moses in the Qur'an. There have been other cruel rulers who opposed Prophet Abraham and the Companions of the Cave (a group of believers recounted in the Qur'an) and who, just like Pharaoh, killed people simply for having faith in God. It's possible to find these tyrannical characters in every era of history. These leaders of irreligion have committed similar acts of cruelty against their societies, used the same methods in trying to alienate people from religion, and led the unwary to destruction in this world and the hereafter.
Looking at ideologies of the last century that have brought the most trouble, pain, cruelty and brutality, we find merciless and irreligious leaders at their head. Those 20th-century leaders who most resemble Pharaoh as described in the Qur'an are the bloodthirsty, irreligious leaders of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and the fathers of their ideas, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Charles Darwin exercised leadership in irreligion in yet another way by his theory of evolution.
Communism's hostility to religion is beyond dispute. Look at the writings of any Communist ideologue, and you will find this expressed openly. Marx himself called religion the "opium of the people," described it as created by the ruling class to narcotize the poor, and proposed that religious belief must be destroyed if Communism were to advance. Engels wrote that human beings are descended from monkeys, claiming that religion developed as merely a stage in the process of evolution.
 According to Lenin, Communists are responsible for translating and publishing the works of ardent opponents of religion like Feuerbach. |
To destroy religion, what kind of policies do Communists implement? Lenin gave the first comprehensive answer.. In 1900, as leader of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (later to become the Communist Party), he wrote an article titled "The Attitude of the Worker's Party to Religion," published in the Proletary magazine. In that article he wrote:
Social-Democracy bases its whole world-outlook on scientific socialism, i.e., Marxism. The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany -- a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion. Let us recall that the whole of Engels's Anti-Dühring, which Marx read in manuscript, is an indictment of the materialist and atheist Dühring for not being a consistent materialist and for leaving loopholes for religion and religious philosophy. Let us recall that in his essay on Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels reproaches Feuerbach for combating religion not in order to destroy it, but in order to renovate it, to invent a new, "exalted" religion, and so forth. "Religion is the opium of the people" -- this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion.102
In 1905, he published an article entitled "Socialism and Religion" in the magazine Nozvaya Zhizn in which he called religion a "fog" that must be dispersed. In that article, he also described the atheist propaganda that Communists must spread against religion:
Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. . . . Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work. We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.103
Note that Lenin said the battle Marxists much wage against religion has to start by disseminating "scientific literature" and the writings of the 18th-century Enlightenment atheists. "Scientific literature" means theories that impose materialism in the guise of science (such as Darwinism); and these "French Enlighteners" include Diderot and D'Holbach, who wrote materialist propaganda against religion long before Marx.
Among Communists, this method Lenin taught is still in use. If we examine certain publishing houses, scientific magazines and media institutions throughout the world, we clearly see that Marxists are behind publications that espouse Darwinist and Enlightenment philosophy.
Communism's Hidden Hostility to Religion
While Marxists are not in power, their currents of thought don't usually follow a definite aggressive policy against religion. It's even possible for some Communists to seem to show respect for religion and its adherents. What is the purpose for this moderation?
The answer to this question can be found among the writings of Lenin. In "The Attitude of the Worker's Party to Religion," he wrote that, starting with the interpretations and practices of experts like Marx and Engels, war must never be openly declared against religion. This was an unnecessary "gamble of a political war."104 Other materialists (for example, the anarchists or "bourgeois atheists") had voiced hostility to religion and initiated anti-religious campaigns. Lenin found their activities simple and naïve. He rejected the accusations of "moderation" and "inconsistency" these people leveled against Marxists and stated that the "Marxist tactics in regard to religion are thoroughly consistent, and were carefully thought out by Marx and Engels."105
 COMMUNIST HOSTILITY TO SANCTUARIES Bolsheviks destroyed the Georgievsky church in Gorky. Throughout the country, Communists destroyed some 50 thousand such places of worship or turned them into stables and warehouses. |
Lenin continued this moderate stance until the Communists came to power in 1917. But after this, his moderation disappeared and replaced it with widespread oppression of religion and religious people throughout the Soviet territory. Earlier, Lenin had stated thatCommunists must not openly declare themselves to be atheists and must even accept believers in religion into their ranks. But once he came to power, he followed a much different path. In The Harvest of Sorrow, the American historian Robert Conquest describes some of the main points of Bolshevik religious policy:
Priests and clerics were declared, under another article (65) of the 1918 Constitution, to be 'servants of the bourgeoisie' and disfranchised. This involved their receiving no ration cards, or those of the lowest category; their children were barred from school above the elementary grade; and so on.
A decree of 28 January 1918 forbade religious instruction in schools, though it was permitted to 'study or teach religious subjects privately.' This last was further restricted by a decree of 13 June 1921 which forbade the religious instruction anywhere of groups of persons below the age of eighteen. . . .
. . . A law of 8 April 1929 forbade religious organizations to establish mutual assistance funds; to extend material aid to their members; 'to organize special prayer or other meetings for children, youths or women, or to organize general bible, literary, handicraft, working, religious study or other meetings, groups, circles or branches, to organize excursions or children's playgrounds, or to open libraries or reading rooms, or to organize sanatoria or medical aid.' In fact, as an official comment put it, church activity was reduced to the performance of religious services.
On 22 May 1929, Article 18 of the Constitution was amended; instead of 'freedom of religious and anti-religious propaganda' it now read 'freedom of religious worship and anti-religious propaganda'; at the same time the Commissariat of Education replaced a policy of non-religious teaching in schools by orders for definitely anti-religious instruction. . . .
. . . Collectivization 'usually involved the closure of the local church as well'. Icons were confiscated as a matter of routine and burned along with other objects of religious worship. A confidential letter from the Western Provincial Committee on 20 February 1930 speaks of drunken soldiers and Komsomols [members of the Communist youth organization] who 'without mass preparation' were 'arbitrarily closing village churches, breaking ikons, and threatening the peasants'.
The closures applied to all religions. . . .
. . . Moreover when churches were closed, this did not mean that religious work was permitted outside them. The closure of nine major churches in Kharkov was accompanied by a decision 'to take proper steps to prevent prayer meetings in private homes now that the churches are closed'.
The Kazan Cathedral in Leningrad was turned into an anti-religious museum. . . .
. . . The St Sophia Cathedral and other churches in Kiev were turned into museums or anti-religious centres. In Kharkov, St. Andrey's was turned into a cinema; another into a radio station; another into a machine-parts store. In Poltava, two were turned into granaries, another into a machine repair shop. . . .
. . . These measures applied to all religions. 'Churches and synagogues' is often the phrasing in official decrees in the European part of the USSR. Elsewhere Islam was equally persecuted. . .
. . . In the collectivization evangelical leaders in the villages were excluded from the kolkhozes and denounced as kulaks; and most of them were deported.106
After the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin's tactic of "being moderate towards religion" turned into fanatical hostility. As we saw earlier, to Lenin, the famine of 1920-21 that cost millions of lives would weaken people's faith in God.
Lenin, with his rebellious spirit against God and religion, lost his mental balance and suffered great pain. God returned to Lenin in this world some of the cruelty he inflicted on people with his hostility to religion. The Qur'an (58:5-6) speaks of the terrible recompense that such cruel people will receive on the Last Day:
Those who oppose God and His Messenger will be subdued and overcome as those before them were also subdued and overcome. We have sent down Clear Signs. The disbelievers will have a humiliating punishment. On the Day God raises up all of them together, He will inform them of what they did. God has recorded it while they have forgotten it. God is a Witness of all things.
When Stalin rose to power, he was just as anti-religious as his predecessor. He displayed his hostility by killing millions of believers, destroying religious institutions and places of worship, and by initiating endless atheist propaganda. One of the most important weapons in Stalin's propaganda attack was the theory of evolution. In his autobiography, he wrote:
In order to disabuse the minds of our seminary students of the myth that the world was created in six days, we had to acquaint ourselves with the geological origin and age of the earth, and be able to prove them in argument; we had to familiarize ourselves with Darwin's teachings.107
In the book Anarchism or Socialism?, Stalin pits Darwin against Cuvier, a creationist scientist and founder of the science of fossils. He writes, "Marxism rests on Darwinism and treats it uncritically, i.e., the Marxists repudiate Cuvier's cataclysms."108
Maoism's Hostility to Religion
Mao, Leninism's and Stalinism's representative in China, nurtured hostility to religion and implemented it in his policies. One of his comments on religion he clearly displays his fanaticism:
. . . [B]ut of course, religion is poison. It has two great defects: It undermines the race . . . [and] retards the progress of the country. Tibet and Mongolia have both been poisoned by it.109
 A Chinese propaganda poster shows Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha with Mao. |
When Mao came to power, he instituted a war against religion and its practitioners. But this was done in "secret," as Lenin's Communists had done. The Communist party initiated a policy called the "Three self movement," meaning that all religious institutions must be structured so that they could be "self supporting, self administrating, and self organized." This policy appeared to be based on granting freedom of religion, but it was actually a campaign designed to destroy religion completely. All religious institutions and places of worship throughout the country-Confucian and Buddhist temples, mosques and Christian churches-came under the control of state controlled management bodies. Within a short time, these religious institutions became "Maoist propaganda centers." A statement given to the American International Commission on Religious Freedom on March 16, 2000 by a Chinese Christian by the name of Harry Wu says:
But because Mao Zedong could not allow any citizen of China to hold allegiance to any authority outside the Communist Party, under Mao these government-run bodies allowed no religious activity. Throughout the three decades that Mao ruled China, the organizations of the "three self movement" worked with the Chinese Communist Party to eliminate religion and to promote the ideology of the Communist Party. Maoism became China's only legal religion, and Mao's "Little Red Book" its primary religious text.110
Both the Uyghur Muslims in eastern Turkestan and the Buddhists of Tibet became targets of bloody brutality. The Chinese Communist Party tried to control them by reducing their populations and destroying their religious beliefs. Other Communist regimes in Asia continued Mao's hostility to religion. In the genocide committed against their own people in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge targeted the minority Cham community of Muslims with particular cruelty. The Black Book of Communism describes the brutality they inflicted against the Cham:
In 1973, mosques were destroyed and prayers banned in the liberated zones. Such measures became more widespread after May 1975. Korans were collected and burned, and mosques were either transformed into other buildings or razed. Thirteen Muslim dignitaries were executed in June, some for having gone to pray rather than attending a political rally, others for having campaigned for the right to religious wedding ceremonies. . . . The more fervent were all but wiped out: of the 1,000 who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, only 30 survived these years. Unlike other Cambodians, the Cham frequently rebelled, and large number of them died in the massacres and reprisals that followed these uprisings. After mid-1978 the Khmer Rouge began systematically exterminating a number of Cham communities, including women and children. . . [It is calculated] that the overall mortality rate among the Cham was 50 percent. 111
In Albania, Enver Hoxha's dictatorship, another Communist regime, displayed Maoism's hostility to religion. Albania came out of World War II as a satellite of the Soviet Union, but during the Sino-Soviet conflict of the 1960s, Albania sided with China and became the representative of Red Chinese Maoism in Europe. Enver Hoxha closed all places of worship (mosques as well as Catholic Churches in the north of the country) and even forbade people from worshipping in their homes. Declaring your belief in any religion became a crime, and those who disobeyed the prohibition were subjected to various kinds of oppression and torture. Enver Hoxha, believing he could eradicate all religious belief by implementing these methods, announced that he had founded the first State in the world that was truly atheist.
COMMUNISM AND THE IRRELIGIOUS SYSTEMS REVEALED IN THE QUR'AN
At the root of the characteristics of the Communist system is its anti-religious ideology. The reason for its brutality and dullness is this same crazed hostility toward religion.
Religion is part of the way of living and thinking that God has given the human beings He created. The best life for Man is one based on religious belief; because the One Who knows the human spirit best is our Lord Who created it. Only a system founded on religion can give peace, while systems rejecting religion will inevitably bring pain, sorrow, fear and insecurity. Above all, these systems opposing all religious truth, trying to force people live in contradiction to it, constitute an even greater danger. Historically, Communism has been one of the most striking examples of just such a system.
Interestingly, Communism shows important similarities to the godless systems that God has described in the Qur'an. Comparing the godless system of Pharaoh given in the Qur'an with some other systems of our age, we see a great similarity.
The Passion for Big Buildings
 An example of Communism's passion for large buildings: the Building of Council of Ministries in Moscow. |
One common characteristic of all irreligious administrations is their seeking to captivate onlookers with grandeur. Their haughtiness and humiliation of other people are expressed in various ways.
As an example, God tells in the Qur'an about Pharaoh's administration in Egypt in the time of Prophet Moses. In his pride, Pharaoh opposed both God and His apostle Moses, while subjecting his own people to oppression. An example of Pharaoh's arrogance was his command to have a "high tower" built. The Qur'an (28:38) reveals Pharaoh's command to Haman, one of his closest man:
Pharaoh said, "Councilmen, I do not know of any other god for you apart from Me. Haman, kindle a fire for me over the clay and build me a lofty tower, so that perhaps I may be able to climb up to Moses's god! I consider him [Moses] a blatant liar."
This desire for a "high tower," an expression of Pharaoh's pride, is also reflected in Communist dictatorships' passion for "big buildings." Beginning with the Soviet Union, all Communist states constructed excessively large state buildings as symbols of the regime's strength and endurance. For a long time, the palace built by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in Bucharest retained the title of the world's largest building. Yet this palace has a very cold and joyless appearance; size was its most important consideration and it remains an expression of the "superiority complex" of Communist ideology.
Forced Migration
In the Qur'an, God reveals some actions that brought destruction upon their perpetrators, including the removal of people from their homelands. For example, those who denied God threatened the prophets that were sent to them: "We will drive you from our land unless you return to our religion..." (Qur'an, 14:13) As is told in verse 22:40, they tried especially to remove Muslims; "those who were expelled from their homes without any right, merely for saying, 'Our Lord is God'…"
Communist regimes have engineered the greatest forced migrations, and Muslims have been the target of most of them. In Stalin's time, first the Crimean Turks and later, many other Muslim peoples were forced to leave their lands overnight and were dispatched, hungry and miserable to the most barren regions of Russia. Hundreds of thousands of innocents died on the way, and those who survived to reach their destinations died of hunger, infectious diseases, and freezing cold.
The Destruction of Freedom of Belief
As told in the Qur'an, one characteristic feature of Pharaoh's administration was its outlawing freedom of belief. The system determined what kind of beliefs people could hold. Pharaoh's question to the magicians who believed in Moses shows this clearly; "Have you believed in Him before I authorized you to do so?" (Qur'an, 7:123) Again, while speaking to his people, Pharaoh said that he taught the people the truth they needed to know, and that they shouldn't search for any other truth besides what he taught them: "I only show you what I see myself and I only guide you to the path of rectitude." (Qur'an, 40:29)
Pharaoh's modern representatives are the Soviet Union and all the other Communist regimes of the 20th century that attempted to establish totalitarian regimes. In any totalitarianism system, society is totally shaped by the State. People are physically governed by State oppression and mentally by propaganda. The model of Pharaoh's totalitarian system, as described in the Qur'an, was revived in the 20th century by dictators like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. The Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, as we mentioned earlier, forbade his countrymen from practicing any religious faith. He closed all places of worship and advertised the government he'd founded as the "world's first atheist State."
The Idolization of Leaders
 Communist propaganda posters idolizing Mao depict him as a "holy person" rising like the sun over all the Chinese people, leading them all on the correct road and bringing happiness and a pleasant life to everyone. |
In the Qur'an (28:38), God tells us that Pharaoh tried to make himself a god in the eyes of the people, as can plainly be seen in Pharaoh's words to those around him: "Councilmen, I do not know of any other god for you apart from me." Egyptian history shows us how its pharaohs described themselves as "gods in this world."
 People prostrating themselves in front of a statue of North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung demonstrate that Communism is really a contemporary form of idolatry. |
Communist regimes wielded the same kind of psychology. Dictators such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and North Korea's Kim Il Sung initiated programs of mass brainwashing to make themselves seem as gods in the eyes of their peoples. This "cult of personality" was an expression of the policy of "idolizing the leaders."
This tendency towards idolization started first with Lenin, leader of the first Communist revolution in Russia. Indeed, some of the writings Lenin left behind show a noticeable "aura of religion"-but a religion of idols. Lenin organized the Communist Party as a kind of non-religious sect. Upon his death, Party members held a huge ceremony in which they addressed Lenin's corpse with liturgical words such as: "Comrad Lenin, we swear we will carry out your orders."112 Lenin's body was mummified, like an ancient Egyptian pharaoh's, and placed in an elaborate tomb.
Stalin and Mao followed Lenin's example. Both leaders had giant statues of themselves erected in every city of their countries, trying to produce a portrait of their people's "god-leader." Mao wrote The Little Red Book, and every Chinese citizen was responsible for reading this "holy" book and implementing its precepts in his life. Many Chinese still visit the statues of the "Great Helmsman" erected in every part of the country, and on Mao's birthday there are mass suicides.
In North Korea, Kim Il Sung was also idolized after he came to power. He was known as the "Sun of the People," who believed he could lead them along the right path without ever making a mistake. The same thing happened with Ho Chi Minh, North Vietnam's Communist dictator.
 COMMUNISM:A CONTEMPORARY FORM OF IDOLATRY People looking at the corpses of Lenin and Mao show Communism's tendency to idolize its leaders, in a way similar to that of the idolatrous system of Pharaoh, as revealed in the Qur'an. Lenin and Stalin, who resorted to brutality like Egyptian pharaohs, were mummified just like them. Lenin's brain was taken out seemingly to "examine how superior his intelligence is" and put in protective storage. |
Oligarchic Structure
 Communism, like the regime of Pharaoh as described in the Qur'an, is an oligarchic system based on minority rule. Communist Party directors look down on the people from above and lead them however they wish. At left, the Soviet oligarchy of the 1920s-the Bolshevik committee saluting on Lenin's mausoleum. |
The system of oligarchy is "minority rule," in which political power rests in the hands of a limited group. A look into the Qur'an shows that godless systems have a basically oligarchic structure. When we examine the many verses that speak of "the chiefs of the nations," we see that these people have taken all political power into their own hands, governing society according to their own ideas. When we look at the verses relating to Pharaoh, we see that his administration was an oligarchic class, composed of advisors, magicians and soldiers. In order to keep the people bound to Pharaoh's administration, the magicians controlled their thinking. The soldiers ensured the same control by brute force.
Communist regimes are the modern counterpart of the godless oligarchic system mentioned in the Qur'an. Communists started out by offering "power of the people," but in every country where they came to power, they established minority power relying on domination. All political power in the country passed into the hands of a party that bore the name of the "proletarian party" or Workers' Party, but had no relationship with the workers. The decision-making mechanisms-known as the Communist Party Central Committee and the Politburo, together with the General Secretary over them-retained all the power and used it mercilessly. In Communist regimes, all the supposedly "democratic" mechanisms, such as elections and party congresses, were only a show.
The "Destruction of Crops and Breeding Stock"
When describing the quality of godless administrations in the Qur'an (2:205-206), God draws our attention to something very important:
When he holds the upper hand, he goes about the earth corrupting it, destroying (people's) crops and breeding stock. God does not love corruption. When he is told to heed God, he is seized by pride which drives him to wrongdoing. Hell will be enough for him! What an evil resting-place!
Notice that "going about the earth corrupting it" and "destroying crops and breeding stock" in these verses precisely describe the slaughters and collectivizations implemented by Communist regimes of the Soviet Union, Red China, and Cambodia. Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot forced an atmosphere of chaos and terror on their countries. By implementing Lysenko's evolutionist nonsense, they destroyed all the products of agriculture, killed countless numbers, and nearly erased a whole generation. Later, this same verse reveals that the people who perpetrated this were arrogant and irreligious. This description perfectly fits these dictators, who regarded themselves as gods.
Conclusion
Communists believe that the world is advancing constantly through evolution, and that older societies were less advanced than our modern ones. For this reason, they try to belittle the holy books revealed through ancient prophets thousands of years ago. Fourteen centuries ago, however, the Qur'an revealed their ideology and spiritual disposition as ignorance, deceit and psychological depravity. No matter how much Communist leaders may count themselves at the most advanced stage of history, they share much in common with Pharaoh, back in the time of Prophet Moses.
Actually, history shows no "advancement" of human intelligence or psychological make-up. People thousands of years ago had the same characteristics as those who live today. From a cultural and technological point of view, there have been both advancements and regressions. For example the technology in the time of Prophet Solomon, and the technique the Egyptians used to build pyramids are yet unknown. From their surviving pieces of art, some civilizations seem to have accumulated very advanced cultures and technologies, but there is never constant progress.
But as we said at the beginning, God has created human beings of different types of make-up, with certain particular ways of thinking. Among them, history develops according to rules that God has determined. The Qur'an (33:62) says that God's pattern (Sunnah), or the natural and social rules that God has imposed, have never changed: "This is God's pattern with those who passed away before. You will not find any alteration in God's pattern."
People's commitment to such a brutal, dark and barbarous ideology as Communism caused them to suffer unimagined torments. Those who believed in Darwin's perversion and chose godlessness, prepared their own end. In one verse (Qur'an, 30:41), God describes this:
Corruption has appeared in both land and sea because of what people's own hands have brought about so that they may taste something of what they have done so that hopefully, they will turn back.
Nobel laureate Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, a passionate critic of Communism, captured in his writings these divine rules' social nature. In a speech delivered in London in 1983, the Russian author stated why disaster had fallen on his people:
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."113
Communism happened because people forgot God. It is a living example that shows how merciless, brutal and barbarous a godless society can be, and what kind of society materialist philosophies like Darwinism give birth to. Looking at the misery Communism has brought, we can understand the great difference between a society with religious moral values and one with none. And this is the means whereby we will understand that, for human salvation, the only solution is to live a life founded on religious moral values.
But as long as people keep denying God and wandering into these philosophies distant from the morality of religion, Communism and other perverted ideologies will find a place to exist. As the verse above says, if people do not want "corruption to appear in both land and sea because of what their own hands have brought about," first they must distance themselves from these ideologies and draw others away from them as well. To achieve this, people must be acquainted with the scientific invalidity and the dark side of Darwinism, accepted as scientific support for the ideologies that have inflicted all this misery on humanity.
In this 21st century, one of the most important duties for people of intelligence, conscience, perception and insight is launching an intellectual struggle against "the disease of materialism and naturalism," as the great Islamic scholar Bediuzzaman called it.
102. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University
Press Cambridge, p. 556
103. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 560
104. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 574
105. V.I. Lenin, The Attitude of the Worker's Party to Religion,
Proletariat, No.45, May 13, 1909
106. V.I. Lenin, Socialism and Religion, Nozvaya Zhin, No.28,
December 3, 1905
107. V.I. Lenin, The Attitude of the Worker's Party to Religion,
Proletariat, No.45, May 13, 1909
108. V.I. Lenin, The Attitude of the Worker's Party to Religion,
Proletariat, No.45, May 13, 1909
109. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow : Soviet Collectivization
and the Terror-Famine , Oxford University Press, New York, 1986, p. 138
110. E. Yaroslavsky, Landmarks in the Life of Stalin (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Publishing house, 1940), pp. 8-12.
111. J.V.Stalin, Anarchism or Socialism?, From J.V. Stalin,
Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954, Vol.1, p.302
112. White Paper, Office of Tibet, London, February 2, 1996
113. Statement of Harry Wu Before the US Commission on International
Religious Freedom, March 16, 2000.
RED TERROR IN ASIA
RED TERROR IN ASIA
 One of the millions of victims of Mao's guerilla war. |
Though
born in Europe, Communism's first revolution took place farther east,
in Russia. In the first half of the 20th century, it moved
even farther to eastward until 1949, when China-the world's populous country-fell
to guerillas led by Mao Tse-tung. For ten years, Mao's militants engaged
in attacks against government forces across China to bring about the world's
second largest Communist revolution. The results of this second revolution
were the same as in the original Bolshevik revolution: criminal assaults,
mass murders, torture, famine, impoverishment, degeneration, resulting
in an introverted, depressed society of fear.
After Lenin, Mao brought the second important change to Communist theory, bringing innovations to Marxism in three important areas:
1) Marx and the Communist ideologues following him laid great importance on the idea of the "working class" proletariat. But Mao believed that the peasant class was the true leaders of the revolution and proposed the idea of "peasant socialism."
2) Instead of following Lenin's idea of a Communist party demonstrating in city centers to prepare the way for revolution, Mao established a "guerilla war" and organized a Communist party based in the countryside and in the mountains.
3) In place of the movement toward internationalism, the foundation of Marxism that Lenin adopted, Mao favored nationalism and developed the idea of "National Socialism."
 Chinese Communism developed and came to power with Stalin's support. But Red China's brutality was worse than Stalin's. |
The reason behind these three different approaches was the conditions in which Mao found himself. In China, where almost the whole population was composed of peasants with a conservative, nationalist frame of mind, Mao had no other choice than to establish "nationalist peasant socialism." Unavoidably, Mao gave priority to the peasants, applied the model of the "country guerilla," and organized among the peasantry.
This explains not only why Maoism was different from Leninism, but why it became an even more savage, barbarous and rigid ideology. The advent of Maoism added to Communism-which was already pitiless and bloodthirsty-a greater degree of ignorance, fanatic nationalism and hostility to culture and civilization. Total calamity was the result. Maoism was the worst kind of Communism; in fact we can say it was the worst of the worst.
Maoism influenced not only China but later passed to Cambodia (in the time of the Khmer Rouge), North Korea, and even Albania. Maoism gained power with Stalin's help, and Soviet-Chinese relations were very good in Stalin's day. But this relationship fell apart in the 1960s, and the two countries became enemies. Sino-Soviet rivalry divided the Communist world, separating allies of China from those allied with the Soviet Union.
What Maoism brought upon China, and those Communist countries that followed China, was as dark and bloody as the Russia of Lenin and Stalin. But as the "worst of the worst," Maoism created much more terrible regimes.
In the following pages, we'll examine the red savagery that embraced Asia.
Darwin's Visit to China
Communism is really a European ideology, first proposed by European philosophers and put into effect for the first time by European activists. It's really nothing more than the result of the materialist hostility towards religion that took root in Europe. It is curious that this ideology reached and took root in an isolated country like China, so distant from Europe in every way. But if we look at China's recent history, a familiar pattern emerges: the coming of Communism to China meant the coming of atheism which took root thanks to Darwinism.
   Darwin, Huxley and Galton were three influential evolutionists who led some of the Chinese intellectuals to Fascism and Communism. |
Until the end of the 18th century, China was an inward- looking society, isolated from Western culture. The coming of English merchants in the 19th century, brought many changes to the country. With them, these merchants brought a substance called opium, unknown in China before. Consumption of opium spread like an epidemic in Chinese society and was the cause of two wars between England and China. Finally, England preponderated over China. Hong Kong and other important Chinese cities fell under English influence.
In this way, English imperialism entered China and with it, came Darwinism that gave imperialism scientific support. In the 19th century, the materialist and Darwinist ideas that had dominated Europe began spreading quickly among Chinese intellectuals. In The Encyclopedia of Evolution, Richard Milner writes:
During the 19th century, the West regarded China as a sleeping giant, isolated and mired in ancient traditions. Few Europeans realized how avidly Chinese intellectuals seized on Darwinian evolutionary ideas and saw in them a hopeful impetus for progress and change. According to the Chinese writer Hu Shih (Living Philosophies, 1931), when Thomas Huxley's book Evolution and Ethics was published in 1898, it was immediately acclaimed and accepted by Chinese intellectuals. Rich men sponsored cheap Chinese editions so they could be widely distributed to the masses.57
 Darwinism fostered Communism and Fascism in China. Fascist leader Chiang Kai-Shek was influenced by Darwinism. |
Just as young Turks were captivated by Western materialist ideas at the end of the Ottoman period, so in China, ideologues appeared who adopted materialism and Darwinism. As a result, the Chinese Empire that had lasted thousands of years was abolished in 1911 and replaced by the Republic of China. Those who founded the republic, no matter how anti-Western their rhetoric and policy may have been, adopted the same racist and Social Darwinist understanding that had justified Western imperialism. In an article in the American magazine New Republic, senior editor Jacob Heilbrunn writes:
The idea of using Western ideas and inventions against the West was at its zenith in those days. In the wake of the famous May 4, 1919, demonstrations in Beijing, calls for modernity and patriotism, science and democracy, gained currency among intellectuals. ..."Lurking behind the scenes," as Tu Wei-ming [a professor of Chinese History and Philosophy] has pointed out in the winter 1996 issue of Daedalus, "was neither science nor democracy but scientism and populism.... [I]nstrumental rationality and Jacobin-like collectivism fundamentally restructured the Chinese intellectual world in the post-May Fourth period." Reformers, such as Liang Qichao, who edited a clandestine journal, were influenced by a debased but popular version of Darwin and Spencer. They saw race war as the key to progress.58
The racist thinker Herbert Spencer, mentioned in the quotation above, was a contemporary of Darwin, whose theory he adapted to social science. Among other violent, unjust and cruel ideas, Spencer proposed the superiority of the European races and the need for continual conflict among races and nations, suggesting that society should not assist its poor and weak members.
Among Chinese intellectuals influenced by Darwin and Spencer were Yen Fu and Ting Wen-chiang, whose ideas greatly influenced the foundation of modern China. In Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, the American historian Benjamin Schwartz emphasizes Yen Fu and his Darwinist ideas significantly. According to Schwartz, Yen Fu takes the Western ideologies and theories he reads such as Spencer, and sees them as prescriptive ways to transform society and achieve the goal of wealth and power.59 Schwartz states that Darwin's theories do not merely describe reality. They prescribe values and a course of action.60
Ting Wen-chiang was another important Chinese ideologue and leader in Communism, whose views were founded on nothing other than Darwinism. Ding was the most important representative of the "New Culture" movement that influenced China in the 1910s and '20s. This movement's most important feature was its opposition to Confucianism, the religion of the Chinese people, and its seeking to replace it with a materialist world view. (Ironically, the New Culture movement was a leading inspiration of both Mao's Communism and its rival, Chiang Kai-Shek's Fascism.)
In Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New Culture, the American historian Charlotte Furth examines Ting Wen-chiang, the dean of the New Culture movement, in considerable detail. According to her, Wen-chiang merely translated the ideas of evolutionist ideologues such as Darwin, Huxley and Spencer into Chinese. For this reason, Furth even refers to Ding as the "Huxley of China."61 (Huxley, Darwin's biggest supporter, was known in his day as "Darwin's bulldog.")
Ting Wen-chiang studied zoology and geology at Glasgow University in Scotland. Returning to China in 1911, he exerted great efforts to spread materialist and Darwinist ideas in the newly-founded Chinese Republic, even supporting the theory of eugenics proposed by Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin.62 (Eugenics proposed the disposal of those within a race who were sick or disabled, thus ensuring so-called universal advancement by the "mating" of the healthy ones. This theory was applied most widely in Nazi Germany.)
James Reeve Pusey, a Harvard professor of history and an important commentator on the New Culture movement, says:
The New Culture Movement's cries were all cries Darwin had backed before, and he now backed them again in the same old way. He [Darwin] was the patron saint of the New Culture Movement. . . [H]is theory, so the New Culture Movement's leaders still insisted, "proved". . . that "the present surpasses the past, and the future surpasses the present." That was the faith behind the Anarchists' injunction to tsun chin po ku (respect the present and belittle the past) and the Communists' later injunction to hou chin po ku (extol the present and belittle the past). 63
As a result of the spread of Darwinism in China, the emergence of this kind of Chinese ideologues at the beginning of the 20th century gave birth, first, to the Chinese nationalist Kuomintang party with its fascist tendencies, then to Chinese Communism. In an article written in the periodical New Scientist, Michael Ruse, a Canadian philosopher wrote:
These ideas took root at once [In China], for China did not have the innate intellectual and religious barriers to evolution that often existed in the West. Indeed, in some respects, Darwin seemed almost Chinese! …Taoist and Neo-Confucian thought had always stressed the "thingness" of humans. Our being at one with the animals was no great shock…Today, the official philosophy is Marxist-Leninism (of a kind). But without the secular materialist approach of Darwinism (meaning now the broad social philosophy), the ground would not have been tilled for Mao and his revolutionaries to sow their seed and reap their crop.64
"China And Charles Darwin"
 In China and Charles Darwin, Harvard University historian James Reeve Pusey explained that Darwinism had great influence in China and prepared the foundation for both Communist and Fascist ideas. |
Darwinism's influence on 20th century China was so great that the famous Harvard historian, James Reeve Pusey, devoted a book entitled China and Charles Darwin to this one subject. In this book he relates how Darwin's Origin of Species, published in England and translated into Chinese 36 years later in 1895, spread with incredible speed among Chinese intellectuals, with immense social and political effects. in the preface to his book, Pusey writes:
"The weaker go down before the stronger" - After 1895, the Japanese-Chinese translation of the famous Spencerian slogan, "the survival of the fittest," yu sheng lieh pai (the superior win, the inferior lose), ...was to force its way into a thousand essays and dominate for a time the Chinese editorial mind as the argument for almost any course of action.65
In the same book, Pusey examines the currents of thought developing in China in the first half of the 20th century and tells how they established the foundation for Maoism. One of the people he considered was Liang Chi-chao, was a well-known writer of the time who was captivated by Darwinism and materialist philosophy.
He [Liang Ch'i-ch'ao] mentioned idealism and materialism at least as early as the October 16, 1902 issue of the Hsin min ts'ung pao [a Chinese journal]. Probably he had mentioned them somewhere before, for he gave no explanation of their meaning, and yet he did imply that materialism was the better and that it was winning out over idealism, thanks to Darwin. "How great," he wrote, "is the world of the last twenty-four years, a world belonging to the theory of evolution. Materialism has arisen and idealism has cowered in a corner..."66
China and Charles Darwin relates how Darwinism was responsible for establishing China's disputatious revolutionist culture and its great influence on bringing Maoism to power:
Darwin helped inspire a true renaissance of Chinese thought by specifically challenging (or seeming to challenge) certain favorite traditional ideas and by discrediting all ancient authority...But it was cut short-by the early imposition of a neo-orthodoxy, the Thought of Mao Tse-tung.
That "imposition," of course, also owed much to Darwin. For Darwin had legitimized violent change and revolution. Surely that was one of the most momentous things Darwin did to China... At any rate, those Chinese who were convinced that China needed rebellion were desperately in need of some legitimizing theory, for without the Mandate of Heaven rebellion for three thousand years had been one of the two cardinal sins (the other being filial impiety). It was that powerful sense of sin that Mao Tse-tung, Wu Chih-hui, Sun Yat-sen, and even Liang Chi'i-ch'ao combated so strenuously in all their Darwinian protestations that revolution was legitimate. Mao Tse-tung finally claimed that Marxism-Leninism could all be boiled down to one sentence, tsao fan yu li-"To rebel is justified" ...[That expression] meant that rebellion was a natural law, and that lesson had been taught to Mao Tse-tung not by Marx but by Sun Yat-sen and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, who had learned it, rightly or wrongly, from Darwin.
Darwin justified revolution and thereby helped the cultural revolutions of Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Hu Shih and Mao Tse-tung (and, of course, so many others), and the political revolutions of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang K'ai-shek, and Mao Tse-tung....
Marxists I assume, would not like this analysis. They would probably say that Social Darwinists were not responsible for their victory... There was indeed "people power" at work at the end of the Communist Revolution, people power generated by landlord oppression, capitalist exploitation, and imperialist (at the last, Japanese) aggression. But that people power could have been tapped by many forces. (The Nationalists could have tapped it.) It was tapped by Marxists because there were Marxists ready to tap it. But the Marxists were intellectuals. ...Marxism converted intellectuals-but intellectuals who were already converted to Darwinism. If the intellectual Marxists were the "prescient," the hsien chich hsien chueh, who awakened the masses, China's earlier Social Darwinists, Yen Fu, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Sun Yat-sen, Li Shih-tseng, Wu Chih-hui, were the "prescient" who awakened the Marxists....
The question remains, "In fitting China for Marxism and the Thought of Mao Tse-tung, what did Darwin do to China?" This question must be asked.67
His analysis clearly shows how Darwinism became the basis of Chinese Communism. For thousands of years, China had been an isolated empire. In a matter of ten years it became Red China, and the motive power behind this change in thinking was Darwinism.
But what did Darwinism do to prepare China for Maoism?
How did Mao Become a Communist?
 A Chinese Communist propaganda poster. |
  He inherited Darwinist ideology from Sun Yat-sen. After reading Darwin, Mao became an ardent Communist. |
Up to now, we've examined the change in ideas that prepared China for Maoism. But a personal dimension of this also needs to be examined: Mao himself.
Mao Tse-tung was born in 1893 to a family in a southern China village. From his childhood he always wanted to see Beijing and imagined living there. At age fifteen, he began to read young people's magazines published in the capital, and especially liked New Youth, a publication of the New Culture movement. This magazine was filled with articles by Darwinist ideologues such as Yen Fu and Ting Wen-chiang.
In 1918, Mao visited the city he always wanted to see. There he made friends with Yang Changzhi, a teacher from Beijing University who recognized the young man's talent and got him a job at the university library. Mao began his job of cataloguing and dusting the books and cleaning the rooms. He became friends with Li Dazhao, the director of the library, whose articles in New Youth he had read and liked. Li Dazhao had Communist ideas; for this reason, the university library became known as the Red Room. Chinese Communist theoreticians often met there, where Mao heard the names of Marx, Engels and Lenin for the first time.
But the man who brought the young Mao to embrace Communism was not from Beijing. After spending a few months at the Beijing library, Mao went to Shanghai and met Chen Duxiu, a classical scholar and a friend of Li Dazhao who had made a special study of Darwin.68 This Communist leader's most striking feature was that he was an ardent Darwinist. He can be considered as China's most important advocate of Darwinism and became Mao's most important tutor. Years later, Mao was to say, "He had influenced me more than anyone else."69
In her book Mao, Clare Hollingsworth, a historian at the University of Hong Kong said that Mao was greatly influenced by the Darwinist views of Chen Duxiu and even in the 1970s he looked back nostalgically to the studies of Darwin he did in his youth.70
 After a bloody revolution, Mao announced the establishment of the People's Republic of China. |
Chen Duxiu educated Mao in the scientific aspects of Darwinism; on the political level, he was influenced by Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese leader of the time. Interestingly, Sun Yat-sen, regarded as the founder of modern China and of the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Chinese Party), was also a Darwinist. In an article in The New Republic, the American researcher Jacob Heilbrunn writes:
...[I]t was the great Chinese revolutionary and nationalist Sun Yat-sen who decisively influenced Mao. Sun held that the Chinese had to embrace nationalism in order to defeat the Western powers, and he preached a doctrine of political Darwinism: "although natural forces work slowly, yet they can exterminate great races."
As a young organizer for the communists in Hunan in the early 1920s, Mao supported Sun, who was the patriarch of the Kuomintang (KMT). Sun created a temporary alliance between his nationalist party and the communists, and, in 1926, Mao was even briefly given control of the KMT's propaganda department.71
Brainwashed by the ideas of Darwin and Marx, Mao became an active, passionate Communist from 1920 onward. With eleven friends who thought as he did, he founded the Communist Party in Shanghai in 1921. Afterward, he strengthened the Communist Party by various alliances, skirmishes, guerilla battles and propaganda. For a while, the Communists under Mao cooperated with the Nationalist Party, but in the second half of the 1920s, each side became hostile to the other. Mao relocated his militants in Jiangxi province in southern China and there formed a "liberated zone" outside the central authority.
The struggle between the two sides lasted for years. After World War II, the Communist "liberated zone" continued to grow, to the point that it encompassed almost all of China. In 1949, Mao and his Communists entered Beijing and proclaimed the "People's Republic of China." With this, the world witnessed the second Communist Revolution after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917-a second revolution at least as bloody as the first.
The "Great Leap Forward" and the Great Famine
 A Red Chinese propaganda poster: Communist ideology-begun by Marx and Engels, continued by Lenin and Stalin-was finally taken over by Mao. What Marx and Engels actually transmitted to Lenin, Stalin, and Mao was Communism's "well of bloodshed." Lenin and Stalin murdered 50 million people; Mao, 60 million. |
Until 1949, Mao had conducted a long guerilla war, organizing a campaign in the countryside and in the mountains against the central administration, which controlled the large cities. In order to do this, he established good relations with the villagers, promising them land and freedom and assuring them that once Communism was established in China, they would enjoy great prosperity and happiness. The peasants believed him and supported him and his guerillas.
 Mao's "Great Leap Forward" was a senseless, cruel project that paralyzed the county's agriculture and economy. Over 30 million died of starvation. In Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, Jasper Becker-who was the Beijing bureau chief of the South China Morning Post-gave a detailed account of the famine. |
But after Mao came to power, everything changed. In the first years after the revolution, he wanted to take over the whole of China and set up Communist authorities in every area. In the meantime, thousands were arrested as "class enemies" and hanged in public. In the mid-fifties, Mao designed a system similar to Stalin's collectivization and put it into effect in 1958. This was called the "Great Leap Forward," but all it succeeded in doing was to bring torture and a great famine upon the Chinese people.
The Great Leap began with slogans about doubling all of China's agricultural and industrial production. Working hours were increased, and machines worked endlessly. Workers weren't permitted to inspect or repair the machines, and within a short time they began to break down.
Agriculture suffered disaster from lack of intelligent planning. With the idea that the "abolition of private property would increase production," all peasants were forced to surrender their land to cooperatives. The confiscations of Stalin's Russia were repeated. Moreover, Mao punished peasants in some parts of China for not accepting collectivization voluntarily. Their punishment was being starved to death.
Within a short time, the Great Leap disintegrated into a great famine. Like the famine that Stalin fabricated in the Ukraine, this famine was also man-made. The Black Book of Communism comments on China in the period of the Great Leap:
 In the years of the Great Leap, many Chinese who resisted Mao's savagery were brutally executed. Many were killed by a bullet to the back of the head. |
The fact that the famine was primarily a political phenomenon is demonstrated by the high death rates in provinces where the leaders were Maoist radicals, provinces that in previous years had actually been net exporters of grain… Like Mao himself, Party activists in Henan were convinced that all the difficulties arose from the peasants' concealment of private stocks of grain. According to the secretary of the Xinyang district (10 million inhabitants), where the first people's commune in the country had been established, "The problem is not that food is lacking. There are sufficient quantities of grain, but 90 percent of the inhabitants are suffering from ideological difficulties." In the autumn of 1959 the class war was momentarily forgotten, and a military-style offensive was launched against the peasants, using methods very similar to those used by anti-Japanese guerrilla groups. At least 10,000 peasants were imprisoned, and many died of hunger behind bars. The order was given to smash all privately owned cutlery that had not yet been turned to steel to prevent people from being able to feed themselves by pilfering the food supply of the commune. Even fires ware banned, despite the approach of winter. The excesses of repression were terrifying. Thousands of detainees were systematically tortured, and children were killed and even boiled and used as fertilizer-at the very moment when a nationwide campaign was telling people to "learn the Henan way." In Anhui, where the stated intention was to keep the red flag flying even if 99 percent of the population died, cadres returned to the traditional practices of live burials and torture with red-hot irons.72
Mao began with the slogan of "peasant socialism." Before coming to power, he'd promised Chinese peasants land, food, and protection. But his power subjected them to levels of pain and torture never to be seen in modern history:
This campaign took on the proportions of a veritable war against the peasantry… Deaths from hunger reached over 50 percent in certain villages, and in some cases the only survivors ware cadres who abused their position. In Henan and elsewhere there were many cases of cannibalism (63 were recorded officially): children were sometimes eaten in accordance with a communal decision.73
The death rates accross the country reached to incredible levels:
 A Communist Party militant delivering Communist propaganda in the years of the Great Leap. |
For the entire country, the death rate rose from 11 percent in 1957 to 15 percent in 1959 and 1961, peaking at 29 percent in 1960. Birth rates fell from 33 percent in 1957 to 18 percent in 1961. Excluding the deficit in births, which was perhaps as many as 33 million (although some births were merely delayed), loss of life linked to famine in the years 1959-1961 was somewhere between 20 million and 43 million people…This was quite possibly the worst famine not just in the history of China but in the history of the world.74
In the course of the Great Leap, an eighteen-year-old Red Guard, who was pursued by the authorities and took refuge with his family in a village in Anhui, described Maoism's cruel face:
We walked along beside the village. The rays of the sun shone on the jade-green weeds that had sprung up between the earth walls, accentuating the contrast with the rice fields all around, and adding to the desolation of the landscape. Before my eyes, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which the families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people's children. The children who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field seemed to be the reincarnation of the children devoured by their parents. I felt sorry for the children, but not as sorry as I felt for their parents. What had made them swallow that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of other parents-flesh that they would never have imagined tasting, even in their worst nightmares? In that moment I understood what a butcher he had been, the man "whose like humanity has not seen in several centuries, and China not in several thousand years": Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong and his henchmen, with their criminal political system, had driven parents mad with hunger and led them to hand their own children over to others, and to receive the flesh of others to appease their own hunger. Mao Zedong, to wash away the crime that he had committed in assassinating democracy, had launched the Great Leap Forward, and obliged thousands and thousands of peasants dazed by hunger to kill one another with hoes, and to save their own lives thanks to the flesh and blood of their childhood companions. They were not the real killers; the real killers were Mao Zedong and his companions.75
The Influence of "Evolutionist Science" in Mao's Famine
In the years between 1958 and 1961, as a result of Mao's Great Leap policy, all of China suffered what's accepted as the greatest, most deadly famine in history. It is estimated that as a result, as many as 40 million died. (Such numbers equaled and even surpassed the entire population of many countries of that time.)
 A propaganda poster for the Great Leap depicts Mao as an agricultural genius in a rich field. However, Mao's reliance on and implementation of Lysenko's methods resulted in an agricultural disaster. |
What was the cause of this disaster? As mentioned above, Mao's militants forced the peasants into collectivization and founded communes of between 100 and 300 families-which greatly reduced agricultural productivity. In some areas, Maoist administrations punished peasants with deliberate starvation.
Another important reason for this calamity is that Mao tried to adapt to Chinese agriculture the "Lysenko model" applied in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s. When he forced these experiments on the peasants, the result was huge losses in agricultural production.
We examined Trofim Lysenko before. As a result of the nonsensical "proletarian science" of the Stalin era, Soviet biology was entrusted to Lysenko, an ardent evolutionist. Lysenko rejected the science of genetics adopting instead a theory by Lamarck, a leading Darwinist who believed in the "inheritance of acquired traits." When Lysenko's myth was applied to Soviet agriculture, the losses were immense.
But Mao did not learn from this disaster of the Stalinist period-on the contrary he and his supporters, educated from their youth on a strict Darwinism, continued to believe in "proletarian science" and to distort real science, according to the requisites of the theory of evolution. The Great Leap imitated Lysenko's model, and Chinese peasants were forced to perform agriculture according to principles of "evolutionist science."
Jasper Becker, Beijing bureau chief of South China Morning Post, in his book entitled Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, relates in detail the Lysenkoist agricultural enterprise put into effect during the Great Leap. These attempts, each of which resulted in a separate disaster, were:
Close Planting: Lysonko, thinking that seeds evolve by adopting to their habitat, declared that planting seeds very close together would create "socialist solidarity" among them. The Maoists undertook to apply this myth. Until that time, in Southern China, about 1.5 million seeds were sown on any one acre of land. In 1958, the Communists ordered this amount to be increased to between 6 and 7 million seeds. In 1959, they again increased the amount, to between 12 and 15 million. As a result, a very large number of seeds went to waste, and agricultural production suffered a severe decline.
Deep Plowing: One of Lysenko's assistants, Teventy Maltsev, claimed that deep plowing would allow plants to establish better root systems. Chinese Communists adopted and applied this Lamarckist claim. During the Great Leap, Chinese peasants were ordered to plow their fields to a depth of 1.5 meters. As a result, tens of millions of peasants were forced to spend months hoeing. Again, the outcome was great loss of production, resulting in famine.
The Sparrow Hunt: Mao initiated a campaign to eliminate various species of animals that damaged agricultural production. Sparrows became the main target of this campaign. Special methods were employed to hunt and kill sparrows throughout the whole of China. But as a result, there was an explosion in the number of insects and other pests that the sparrows had been eating, and they damaged agricultural production much more than the sparrows ever had.
Agriculture Without Fertilizer: Following Lysenko's recommendations, Chinese Communists stopped using chemical fertilizer. (It was imagined that when seeds were deprived of fertilizer, they would "evolve" by adapting to this new situation thus ensuring the same yield without the use of fertilizing additives.) This experiment caused yet another great loss in agricultural production.
All these initiatives, relying as they did on Lysenko's myth of evolution, caused the greatest famine in history. But although millions were dying of starvation, no one dared criticize the regime or the calamity it caused. One individual, General Peng Dehuai, the defense minister, wrote Mao a letter in which he tried to describe this disastrous famine. Later he was accused of being a "rightist" and was eliminated. During the famine, official reports all falsified the situation by saying that brilliant results had been achieved in agricultural production. Moreover, in order to convince the world of this lie, China exported vast amounts of grain. While people were dying of starvation in some areas of the country, grain and rice were being kept in warehouses, later to be exported.76
Later, the same agricultural policy was put into effect in Communist Cambodia and North Korea, with the same results: a great lack of productivity, famine and mass death. Blindly and without awareness or intelligence, Communists applied Lysenko and Stalin's "Communist leap in agriculture," because the theory of evolution at the base of their materialist philosophy demanded it.
Mao's Darwinist Tyranny
The theory of evolution is closely related to all the disasters Mao brought upon China. As we have seen, the great famine of 1958-61 resulted from the application of Lysenko's model of "evolutionist science." Meanwhile, Mao and the Communist establishment ruled China with incredible cruelty and mercilessness. What kind of horrifying thinking lies behind a policy that deliberately leaves people to starve and forces them into cannibalism?
No doubt this relates to the whole Communist view of human nature. Earlier, the idea that human beings are animals lay at the basis of Soviet terror, and the same applies to China was mentioned. With Darwinist prejudice, Mao viewed those opposed to Communism as "animals" and so, Maoists were not at all touched by the anguish of people they regarded as a herd. To them, this was a logical, normal operation of nature. After revealing how low harvest levels had fallen in the Great Leap, The Black Book of Communism gives Mao's view in this regard:
Mao, in the tradition of Chinese leaders, but in contradiction to the legend that he encouraged to grow up around him, showed here how little he really cared for what he thought of as the clumsy and primitive peasants.77
James Reeve Pusey also stresses Mao's Darwinist philosophy: "The thought of Mao Tse-tung was and remains a powerful mixture of Darwinian ironies and contradictions."78 Elsewhere, he writes:
Mao Tse-tung in an angry moment (as late as 1964) swore that "all demons shall be annihilated." He dehumanized his enemies, partly in traditional hyperbole, partly in Social Darwinian "realism." Like the Anarchists, he saw reactionaries as evolutionary throwbacks, who deserved extinction. The people's enemies were non-people, and they did not deserve to be treated as people.79
Whoever views humans as animals has no qualms about performing experiments on them. During the Great Leap, new ways of nutrition were considered and mercilessly tested on people who were starving:
In 1960, after one year of famine, ...the survivors were reduced to searching through horse manure for undigested grains of wheat and eating the worms they found in cowpats. People in the camps were used as guinea pigs in hunger experiments. In one case flour was mixed with 30 percent paper paste in bread to study the effects on digestion, while in another study marsh plankton were mixed with rice water. The first experiment caused atrocious constipation throughout the camp, which caused many deaths. The second also caused much illness, and many who were already weakened ended up dying.80
The "Great Leap" was actually a kind of experiment in natural selection. Mao forced the Chinese into the most difficult conditions in order to eliminate the weak and those opposed to Communism. On the one hand, he tried to brainwash the peasants by starving them so as to make them dependent on him and the Communist organization. This basis of this attempt was Darwinism. At the same time as he began the Great Leap, Mao also initiated a "leap in education." The dialectical materialism and Darwinism played the main roles in this education campaign. In a speech from this period, Mao revealed the principles supporting his savagery when he said, "The foundation of Chinese Socialism rests on Darwin and the theory of evolution."81
Immediately after the Great Leap, on January 30, 1962, Mao explained the parallels between the Chinese Communist Party and Darwin in a speech delivered before members of the Party:
In history doctrines of natural scientists such as Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin were for a very long period not recognized by the majority of people, but instead were thought to be incorrect. In their time they were in the minority. When our Party was founded in 1921 we only had a few dozen members; we were also in the minority, but these few people represented the truth and represented China's destiny.82
In these words, Mao compared his party's efforts to Darwin's enterprise and expressed his respect and admiration for him. At first, he stated, few accepted his Communist Party's ideas, just as few people accepted the theories of Darwin. But that would not change the validity of either man's ideas.
But just as in Darwin's case, Mao's ideas were all myths.
In the Great Leap, between 30 and 45 million people died because of the famine. Many peasants who resisted collectivization died of torture. Tens of thousands, because they showed the slightest negative attitude towards Communism, were labeled "class enemies," arrested and tortured. Chinese prisoners were treated like animals and finally executed.
In these prisons, the savagery of Chinese Communism was especially evident.
Mao's Prisons
Mao's China had totally become a society of fear. The majority of the millions accused of an offence, even with no concrete evidence of a crime, were arrested and imprisoned as opponents of Communism. Later they were executed in huge ceremonies held in the open squares of large towns. An estimate of between 6 and 10 million people were unjustly killed on Mao's directives. About 20 million "counter-revolutionaries" spent a great part of their lives in prison as enemies of the state. But as The Black Book of Communism says, living in these prisons was often worse than death:
Up to 300 in cells of 100 square meters, and 18,000 in Shanghai's central prison; starvation-level rations and overwork; inhuman discipline and a constant threat of physical violence (for instance, people were beaten with rifle butts to make them keep their heads high, which was obligatory when marching.) The mortality rate, which until 1952 was certainly in excess of 5 percent per year-the average for 1949-1978 in the laogai-reached 50 percent during a six-month period in Guangxi, and was more than 300 per day in one mine in Shanxi. The most varied and sadistic tortures were quite common, such as hanging by the wrists or the thumbs. One Chinese priest died afer being interrogated continuously for 102 hours. The most brutish people were allowed to operate with impunity. One camp commander assassinated or buried alive 1,320 people in one year, in addition to carrying out numerous rapes. Revolts, which were quite numerous at that time (detainees had not yet been ground into submission, and there were many soldiers among them), often degenerated into veritable massacres. Several thousand of the 20,000 prisoners who worked in the oilfields in Yanchang were executed. In November 1949, 1,000 of the 5,000 who mutinied in a forest work camp were buried alive.83
Nien Cheng, a former inmate of a Shanghai prison, describes the the pysical violence in the Chinese prisons:
To put those special handcuffs tightly on the wrists of a prisoner was a form of torture commonly used in Maoist China's prison system. Sometimes additional chains were put around the ankles of the prisoners. At other times a prisoner might be manacled and then have his handcuffs tied to a bar on the window so that he could not move away from the window to eat, drink or go to the toilet. The purpose was to degrade a man in order to destroy his morale . . . Since the People's Government claimed to have abolished all forms of torture, the officials simply called such methods "punishment" or "persuasion."84
This savagery's main purpose was to instill fear, first in opponents of the regime and then in society in general. Another goal was to destroy people's personalities, to dehumanize and "bestialize" them by fear and torture. By these methods, Mao wanted to turn of China's entire population into a herd of animals he might control.
The important turning point that gave life to Mao's totalitarian project was China's "Cultural Revolution."
The Cultural Revolution: China's Communal Folly
 The Cultural Revolution was a murderous frenzy designed to destroy every idea and every person opposed to Communist ideology. The propaganda poster on the right depicts this feast of bloodshed: anti-Communists being crushed by the fists of Red Communists. |
Following the disaster of the Great Leap, Mao announced that he was "high above daily politics." He decided to withdraw from matters of state to concentrate on so-called "greater and more important issues." Mao's silence ended in 1966. He announced that the Chinese revolution had not yet achieved success because he, the "great helmsman," had not completely instilled Communism in people's minds; that even in the highest echelons of the state, there were elements who did not understand Communism. A cultural revolution was needed to correct this situation.
The shock of the Cultural Revolution was to destroy the whole Chinese state and society. Mao's suggestions had great influence on the ignorant youth in the low ranks of the Communist Party. They became known as the Red Guards and began wreaking terror in all parts of the country. Singing "The East is Red," they marched through the streets, ready to display their aggression and arrest everyone they thought was anti-Communist. Thousands of high-level bureaucrats, university professors, scientists and intellectuals were arrested, humiliated after undergoing horrible tortures, and executed.
  THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION: A MADNESS THAT TERRORIZED CHINA The Red Guards recognized Mao's Red Book as their only guide. During the Cultural Revolution, they overwhelmed the country with blood and fear. Propaganda posters also depicted the Red Guards' barbarism. In the poster at top, university professors, arrested and tortured by the Red Guards, are depicted as parasites that degenerate society. |
Even Liu Shaoqi, one of Mao's closest friends and a former chairman of the People's Republic of China, was arrested on Mao's orders, publicly beaten, subjected to long torture and thrown into a cell where he received no medical attention and died in agony. Deng Xiaoping was one of Mao's oldest comrades, among those who were going to take over the rule of China after Mao. His son Pufong, a brilliant physics major at Beijing University, was interrogated by the Red Guards. During the process, he was sodomized, beaten to a pulp, and later thrown out the window of the interrogation chamber. Although he survived, his back was broken and he spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair with an impaired hearing.85
A witness describes the inhuman torture inflicted on a university professor during the Cultural Revolution:
I ran inside. On the athletic field and farther inside, before a new four-story classroom building, I saw rows of teachers, about 40 or 50 in all, with black ink poured over their heads and faces so that they were now in reality a "black gang." Hanging on their necks were placards with words such as "reactionary academic authority so-and-so," "corrupt ringleader so-and-so," "class enemy so-and-so," "capitalist roader so-and-so": all epithets taken from the newspapers. On each placard was a red cross, making the teachers look like condemned prisoners awaiting execution. They all wore dunce caps painted with similar epithets and carried dirty brooms, shoes, and dusters on their backs.
  Young members of the Red Guards brainwashed by Mao's Communism. |
Hanging from their necks were pails filled with rocks. I saw the principal: the pail around his neck was so heavy that the wire had cut deep into his neck and he was staggering. All were barefoot, hitting broken gongs or pots as they walked around the field crying out: "I am black gangster so-and-so." Finally, they all knelt down, burned incense, and begged Mao Zedong to "pardon their crimes."
I was stunned by this scene and I felt myself go pale. A few girls nearly fainted.
Beatings and torture followed. I had never seen such tortures before: eating nightsoil and insects, being subjected to electric shocks, being forced to kneel on broken glass, being hanged "like an airplane" by the arms and legs.86
  UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS BEING EXECUTED Throughout the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards tortured tens of thousands. University professors, statesmen, artists and writers were arrested, and publicly humiliated with insulting placards hung around their necks, before being executed. |
The Cultural Revolution also applied the "human bestialization" policy implemented earlier under Lenin and Stalin. Opponents identified as "enemies of the people" were forced to imitate an animal in public. Some professors under arrest had their hands tied behind them and, after being thrown to the ground, were forced to "graze," pulling up grass with their teeth. In August 1967, the Beijing press declared that anti-Maoists were "rats that ran through the streets" and should all be killed.87
 Another political execution in China: A woman named Wang Shouxin was arrested as an opponent of the regime, bound by soldiers, forced to her knees and killed with a single bullet. As a rule, the money to buy the bullet for executions like these was taken from the victim's family. |
 In Red China, political executions were everyday occurrences. Many were accused of "not following Mao's way" and executed in the streets. |
The Cultural Revolution was a mass folly never before seen in the history of the world. The Red Guards arrested, tortured and executed tens of thousands for praying, just listening to music, or feeding a domestic animal. People were sent into a trance in which they supported every manner of savagery; they would shout their support as they watched people being murdered. The Black Book of Communism describes this savagery in these words:
The whole people were invited to public trials of "counterrevolutionaries," who almost invariably were condemned to death. Everyone participated in the executions, shouting out ""kill, kill"" to the Red Guards whose task it was to cut victims into pieces. Sometimes the pieces were cooked and eaten, or force-fed to members of the victim's family who were still alive and looking on. Everyone was then invited to a banquet, where the liver and heart of the former landowner were shared out, and to meetings where a speaker would address rows of severed heads freshly skewered on stakes. This fascination for vengeful cannibalism, which later became common under the Pol Pot regime, echoes a very ancient East Asian archetype that appears often at cataclysmic moments of Chinese history. 88
 Another innocent Chinese executed during the Cultural Revolution. |
The Red Guards' only source book was the Little Red Book containing the words of Mao. Every one of them knew this book by heart; moreover, those who did not know it were denounced as "class enemies" and could be beaten or even executed on the spot. Even the most normal and legitimate activities could be declared "anti-Communist" and punished:
The Red Guards, who took themselves extremely seriously, thought it was a good idea to ban "wastes of revolutionary energy" such as cats, birds, and flowers. . . In big cities such as Shanghai, teams shaved the head of anyone caught in the streets with long or lacquered hair, tore up trousers that were too tight, ripped high heels off shoes, slit open pointed shoes, and forced shops to change their names. . . . Red Guards stopped passersby and forced them to recite their favorite quotation from Mao. Many people were afraid to leave their houses.89
The Cultural Revolution reached such levels of insanity that finally the army had to intervene and reestablish order in the country. Throughout the 1970s China tried to bandage the wounds inflicted by the Cultural Revolution and repair its damage. Mao died in 1976, joining more than 60 million who were already dead, victims of torture, slaughter and benighted ideology.
  Propaganda posters showed Mao as the red sun rising over China. In reality, Maoism brought famine and torture and made China a Darwinist arena in which "the weakest" died. Mao murdered 60 million. On the right, a photograph of him in the last years before his death. |
China's Savagery in Occupied Countries
  International sources reported in detail China's brutality in eastern Turkestan. A special report published by Amnesty International stated that the goal was to eradicate the Uyghur Muslims through torture and execution. China has subjected Eastern Turkestan's Muslim Uyghur population to decades of genocide. As a result of nuclear tests deliberately conducted in the region, large numbers of children are born deformed. |
The scourge of Maoism was not limited to the Chinese people. Countries occupied by China or people forced to live under permanent occupation were also targets of Red brutality. One of these areas was the "Uyghur Autonomous Region" in the west of China; in other words, the Uyghur Turks living in Eastern Turkistan. Because these Turks were both Moslems and an ethnic minority, the Beijing administration targeted them and subjected them to systematic genocide from the time Mao came to power in 1949.
The Uyghurs were not allowed to perform their religious obligations. Schools and places of prayer were closed. In many areas, religious leaders were arrested and a large number of them murdered. Without taking any precautions, China carried out 46 nuclear tests in the Uyghur Autonomous Region, starting in 1964. As a result, cancer among Uyghurs has risen by a remarkable degree, with many children born dead or with physical defects.
To murder the Muslim Uyghur Turks, the Chinese employed various methods: Between 1949 and 1952, 2,800,000 Uyghurs died; between then and 1957, 3,509,000 died; between 1958 and 1960, the number was 6,700,000 and in the four years from 1961 to 1965, 13,300,000 Uyghurs were murdered. In eastern Turkestan, families were forbidden to have more than one child. Any woman who became pregnant in contravention of this law had her child aborted.
These measures, begun in Mao's time, are still in effect. As a result of forced migration, family planning and killings, the Uyghurs in Eastern Turkestan have become a minority. Due to the policy of assimilation in effect since 1949, the proportion of Muslims in the Uyghur Autonomous Region has fallen from 75% to as little as 35%. Today, more than 25 million Muslims in eastern Turkestan live under Chinese oppression. In an area where thousands of Muslim are political prisoners, many of those arrested are not heard from again.
Another country that fell under the Communist regime's brutality is Tibet, occupied by the Chinese army just one year after the establishment of a Communist regime. With the acquiescence of its people, Tibet became an autonomous region bound to China. But Chinese oppression of the Tibetans has gradually increased. The Chinese administration has obliged Tibetan peasants to sell their produce at very low prices, put Chinese immigrants in all of the country's important institutions, and answered the least resistance with a cruel and bloody response. The Dalai Lama, who for years has inspired Tibetan resistance to China, describes the brutality committed by Communist China on his people:
Tibetans not only were shot, but also were beaten to death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled, hanged, boiled alive, buried alive, drawn and quartered, and beheaded.90
THE SAVAGERY OF RED CHINA CONTINUES A state with a Darwinist-Communist way of thinking oppresses its fellow citizens and kinsmen, lets them starve and leads them into misery and poverty, and murders them-all for its own advantage. To Russia and China, two modern examples of this brutal concept of the State, what is important is not the people's comfort and well being, but the strengthening of their own rule.
Towards the end of the year 2000, a newborn baby was taken from its family by Chinese officials and strangled while the family watched. Similar atrocities continue to be committed against Muslims in Chinese-occupied Eastern Turkestan. The starting point for this brutality lies in Darwinism's doctrine that human beings are animals unworthy of respect, that life is a field of struggle. To be rid of all this horror, and in order for people to live in peace and well-being, this Darwinist ideology must be wiped out. |
Cambodia-the Pinnacle of Red Insanity
Communism, already a pitiless, contentious, cruel and bloodthirsty ideology, reached its worst expression of advanced brutality in Maoism. To understand more clearly why Maoism's "traditional" Far Eastern brutality was joined to Communism, we must look at another example from the Far East-the Cambodian regime of the Khmer Rouge, which came to power with Chinese support and adopted Maoist methods..
 Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, murdered three million Cambodians. |
Cambodia, a small and poor country, is located between India and China. This region is also called Indo-China. For centuries the majority of its people eked out a living by agriculture, whose principal element is the rice paddies throughout the country. But between 1975 and 1979, these rice paddies became "killing fields." About three million people in this country of nine million were murdered. Some were shot in the head, others had their skulls crushed by axes, or left to starve. Still others were smothered with plastic bags put over their heads.
The perpetrators of this unparalleled brutality were the Cambodian Maoists, or the Khmer Rouge, a Communist party founded and led by a Maoist by the name of Pol Pot. For years the Khmer Rouge had been organizing in Cambodia's forests and dreaming of coming to power. Finally in 1975, their dream came true. They established a regime that was more cruel and totalitarian than Stalin's Russia or Mao's China-a pinnacle of Communist insanity.
For the good of the country, the party decided that a Communist's sole duty was to work in the rice paddies as much as possible. Cambodia's entire population was forced to work in those fields. Tens of thousands living in the cities-statesmen, bureaucrats, teachers, intellectuals-were driven to the villages and made to work on collective farms under very severe conditions. To avoid work, say prayers, or even to eat the smallest piece of food from what was being collected without permission was regarded as "rebellion against the state," and under this pretext, people were killed every minute.
  The Khmer Rouge came to power after a bloody civil war. These photos were taken during the bloody civil war as the Khmer Rouge attacked the capital, Phnom Penh. This was the harbinger of terrible brutality. |
The Khmer Rouge called their party Angkar, and to the millions of people working themselves to exhaustion in the fields gave the impression that "Angkar is always watching you." A Cambodian who managed to escape the Khmer Rouge brutality describes those who lived in the so-called "democratic" Cambodia:
In Democratic Kampuchea, there were no prisons, no courts, no universities, no schools, no money, no jobs, no books, no sports and no pastimes . . . There was no spare moment in the twenty-four-hour day. Daily life was divided up as follows: twelve hours for physical labor, two hours for eating, three hours for rest and education, and seven hours for sleep. We all lived in an enormous concentration camp. There was no justice. The Angkar regulated every moment of our lives . . . The Khmer Rouge often used parables to justify their contradictory actions. They would compare people to cattle: "Watch this ox as it pulls the plow. It eats when it is ordered to eat. If you let it graze in the field it will eat anything. If you put it into another field where there isn't enough grass, it will still graze uncomplainingly. It is not free, and it is constantly being watched. And when you tell it to pull the plow, it pulls. It never thinks about its wife or children…"91
Obviously, the Khmer Rouge put into effect the "human bestialization" project that lay at the base of Communism. As the above quote shows, people were forced to be like oxen ploughing a field. At the same time, much importance was given to eradicating such concepts as religion and morality. The Black Book of Communism describes the measures the Khmer Rouge took to destroy the love between the family institution and its members:
The regime did all it could to break family ties, which it saw as a threat to the totalitarian project of making each individual totally dependent on the Angkar. Work teams had their own houses, which were often simply barracks or collections of hammocks or mats for sleeping located near the village. It was very difficult to get permission to leave these compounds, and husbands and wives were often separated for weeks or longer. Children were kept from their extended families, and adolescents sometimes went six months without seeing their parents. Mothers were encouraged to spend as little time as possible with their children. Because the postal service had stopped altogether, it was sometimes months before people learned of the death of a relative. Here again the example came from above, as many of the leaders lived apart from their wives or husbands. 92
These measures are actually nothing more than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' interpretation of the origin of the family, put into action. Marx and Engels viewed human beings as animals evolved from monkeys, for whom concepts of religion, morality and family were not necessary. These were "superstructure institutions" that came to be as the result of economic relations. A Communist society promised to destroy these concepts. So the Khmer Rouge's project was nothing else than to put life into the nonsense proposed by Marx and Engels.
The Khmer Rouge wanted to destroy the religion and the family, bestialize human beings and make them like "oxen that plough the fields". Khmer Rouge once again applied measures used earlier by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao by deliberately letting people go hungry, thereby destroying their wills and personalities. Later, after being fed by Angkar, they would come to worship the Khmer Rouge as gods:
The hunger that crushed so many Cambodians over the years was used deliberately by the regime in the service of its interests. The hungrier people were, the less food their bodies could store, and the less likely they were to run away. If people were permanently obsessed with food, all individual thought, all capacity to argue, even people's sex drive, would disappear. The games that were played with the food supply made forced evacuations easier, promoted acceptance of the collective canteens, and also weakened interpersonal relationships, including those between parents and their children. Everyone, by contrast, would kiss the hand that fed them, regardless of how bloody it was. 93
A Cambodian witness stated:
This hunger was deliberately caused. Even while many died of hunger, only one fifth of the fields suitable for sowing was put into production!94
 |
 |
 |
After the Khmer Rouge took power, nearly the
whole population of Phnom Penh was forced to leave the city. |
The people were driven into the country to work the fields. |
In a few days, the capital turned into a ghost
town. |
For the regime, death by starvation was no problem, it was a goal. Khmer Rouge leaders often said, "All we need to build our country is a million good revolutionaries. No more than that. And would rather kill ten friends than allow one enemy to live."95
The hostility to "love, beauty, aesthetics and culture" that had showed itself in Mao's Cultural Revolution reached the point of insanity with the Khmer Rouge. Anyone who combed his hair, took a little care in his appearance, or even wore glasses was regarded as an "enemy of the people." The excerpt below is taken from a speech made by the director to the prisoners in a Khmer Rouge camp:
In Democratic Kampuchea, under the glorious rule of Angkar, we need to think about the future. We don't need to think about the past. You New People must forget about the pre-revolutionary times. Forget about the cognac, forget about fashionable clothes and hairstyles…
We don't need the technology of the capitalists. We don't need any of it at all. Under our new system, we don't need to send our children to school. Our school is the farm. We will write by plowing. We don't need to give examinations or award certificates. Knowing how to farm and how to dig canals-those are our certificates.
 VICTIMS OF KHMER ROUGE BRUTALITY The Khmer Rouge attached numbers to some of those they were about to execute and took their photographs. Thousands of mass graves were found in the Khmer Rouge's "killing fields." The bones in the photo on the right belong to Cambodians suffocated with plastic bags over their heads. |
We don't need doctors any more. They are not necessary. If someone needs to have their intestines removed I will do it. It is easy. There is no need to learn how to do it by going to school.
We don't need any of the capitalist professions! We don't need doctors or engineers. We don't need professors telling us what to do. They were all corrupted. We just need people to work hard on the farm!
And yet, comrades, there are some naysayers and troublemakers who do not show the proper willingness to work hard and sacrifice! Such people do not have the proper revolutionary mentality! Such people are our enemies! And, comrades, some of them are right here in our midst!
These people cling to capitalist ways of thinking! They cling to the old capitalist fashions! We have some people among us who still wear eyeglasses. And why do they use eyeglasses? Can't they see me? If I move to slap your face and you flinch, then you can see well enough. People wear them to be handsome in the capitalist style. They wear them because they are in vain. We don't need people like that any more. People who think they are handsome are lazy! They are leeches sucking energy from others!96
The Maoist psychopaths who seized Cambodia with China's support murdered almost three million innocents. At first, those to be killed were shot in the head. Later, however, this was decided to be a "waste of bullets," so more brutal methods were resorted to. Besides "saving bullets," these methods were preferred so that Khmer Rouge militants could satisfy their sadism. Fifty-three percent of victims had their skulls crushed with iron bars, axe handles, or sometimes hoe handles; six percent were hanged or asphyxiated with plastic bags, and five percent had their throats slit.97
In 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime came to an end when Vietnam occupied Cambodia. To show the brutality of the earlier regime, the Vietnamese dug up the rice paddies known as the "killing fields," exhumed the bodies, and put them on display. The bones and skulls of all the thousands killed by the Khmer Rouge are now on display in a museum in the capital, Phnom Penh.
Communism, which found its "scientific" foundation in a book by Charles Darwin, took shape from the nonsense of Marx and Engels, became a world power through the brutality of Lenin and Stalin, reached its pinnacle of madness under Mao, and showed its real face to the world in the savagery practiced in Cambodia.
North Korea and Vietnam
In Asia, Communist brutality was not limited to China and Cambodia. The regime of North Korea also inflicted merciless terror on its own people. An estimated 1.5 million were killed under the dictatorship of Kim Il Sung. Hundreds of thousands were subjected to torture in North Korea's terrible prisons. The Black Book of Communism describes how prisoners were treated like animals:
In her penitentiary, some 6,000 people, including 2,000 women, worked as slave labor from 5:30 a.m. until midnight, manufacturing slippers, holsters, bags, belts, detonators, and artificial flowers. Any detainees who became pregnant were brutally forced to have abortions. Any child who was born in the prison was smothered or had its throat cut.98
A camp guard who fled to Seoul describes the torture and executions inflicted in the concentration camps of North Korea:
 North Vietnam under Communist rule, 1968 |
Who carried out the executions? The choice was left to the discretion of security agents, who shot when they did not want to dirty their hands or killed slowly if they wished to prolong the agony. I learned that people could be beaten to death, stoned, or killed with blows from a shovel. Sometimes the executions were turned into a game, with prisoners being shot at as though they were targets in a shooting competition at a fairground. Sometimes prisoners were forced to fight each other to the death and tear each other up with their bare hands . . . With my own eyes, I saw several atrocious deaths. Women rarely died peacefully. I saw breasts slashed with knives, genitals smashed in with shovel handles, necks broken with hammers . . . In the camps, death is very banal. And political criminals do whatever they have to do to survive. They do anything to get a fraction more corn or pig fat. Even so, every day four or five people would die in this camp, of hunger, by accident, or through execution.99
Another characteristic of the North Korea's Communist regime was its adoption and cruel implementation of the eugenics theory, which was another product of Darwinism. As we saw earlier, eugenics was proposed by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, and appeared as a scientific enterprise at the beginning of the 20th century. The aim of eugenics is to sterilize people who are sick, disabled, or of a particular race and to have healthy people reproduce. It was imagined that in the end, this process would bring a healthier race into being. The first country to implement eugenics as an official policy was Nazi Germany. At first, Hitler gathered congenitally ill and disabled people into "sterilization centers," and later had them killed.
North Korea's Darwinist-Communist regime implemented this cruelty under the name of "accelerating evolution." The Black Book of Communism described eugenics, North Korean style:
Anyone who is handicapped in North Korea suffers terrible social exclusion. The handicapped are not allowed to live in Pyongyang. Until recently they were all kept in special locations in the suburbs so that family members could visit them. Today they are exiled to remote mountainous regions or to islands in the Yellow Sea. Two such locations have been identified with certaintly: Boujun and Euijo, in the north of the country, close to the Chinese border. This policy of discrimination has recently spread beyond Pyongyang to Nampo, Kaesong, and Chongjin.
 Ho Chi Minh, the dictator of North Vietnam. |
Similar treatment applies to anyone out of the ordinary. Dwarves, for instance, are now arrested and sent to camps; they are not only forced to live in isolation but also prevented from having children. Kim Jong II himself has said that "the race of dwarves must disappear."100
Vietnam was another bloody Communist dictatorship in Asia. North Vietnam carried on a long war first with the French and then with the Americans. In 1975 it took South Vietnam and formed a single united Communist Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh, the founder of North Vietnam, and those who followed him did not hesitate to torture their own people and subject them to severe oppression. Between 1975 and 1977, a Vietnam writer opposing the regime wrote a letter in which he described the conditions of the country:
Conditions inside the prisons are unimaginably bad. In the Chi Hoa prison, the official Saigon prison, 8,000 people under the old regime were kept in conditions that were universally condemned. Today there are more than 40,000 people in the same prison. Prisoners often die from hunger, lack of air, or torture, or by their own hand…
There are two sorts of prison in Vietnam: the official prisons and the concentration camps. The latter are far out in the jungle, and the prisoner is sentenced to a lifetime of forced labor. There are no trials, and hence no possibility of using a legal mechanism in their defense.101
Similar instances of cruelty were suffered when Vietnam occupied Laos in 1975 and turned it into a Communist regime. The Pathet Lao Communists gained strength in this poor country in the middle of Indo-China and, after they came to power, subjected opponents of regime to oppression. As a result, tens of thousands became refugees.
The Maoist Danger Continues
Throughout its history, far-eastern Asia has been a scene of serious severe armed clashes, blood feuds, and savage acts of vengeance. With the advent of Communist ideology, which supported violence and regarded brutality as legitimate and even necessary, the result was disastrous. Communism turned the rice paddies into killing fields. In far-eastern Asia, moreover, its hostility to culture and civilization was even more marked. Its unthinking ideology rejected civilization in favor of ignorance, ugliness, and monotony.
Interestingly, many organizations and currents of thought would blindly adopt such a cruel and primitive ideology and spread it throughout the world. Today, a number of Maoist terror organizations and ideological groups are operating in various countries. Maoists claim that the collapse of the Soviet Union revealed the "failure of a false interpretation of Communism" and proved that Maoism is right. They close their eyes completely to Mao's brutality, crimes, famines and terrible acts of cruelty and try to argue that this benighted ideology is the only alternative for the world's future. Maoists organize particularly in underdeveloped countries, implementing their outmoded theory they call "Third Worldism," and try to seduce these countries into the darkness of Communism.
Clearly, these Maoists aren't satisfied with the tens of millions whom their namesake tortured to death. They want more bloodshed.
In this book's last section, we'll examine Maoism's subtle growth in greater detail.
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79. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, New
York: The Free Press, 1996, p. 75
80. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, New
York: The Free Press, 1996, p. 92
81. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 491
82. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, p.456
83. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, p.455
84. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 494-495
85. K. Mehnert, Kampf um Mao's Erbe, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
1977
86. Talk at an Enlarged Central Work Conference, January 30,
1962 (http://www.maoism.org/msw/vol8/mswv862.htm)
87. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 481-482
88. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 509
89. Malachi Martin, The Keys of This Blood, p.406
90. Ken Ling, Miriam London and Tai-Ling Lee, La Vengeance
du Ciel: Un Jeune Chinois dans la Revolution Culturelle, Paris, Laffont, 1981.
(Original English version 1972) Pages 20-23.
91. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 520
92. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 470-471
93. Nien Cheng, Vie et mort a Shangai, Paris, Albin Michel,
1987, p.86
94. Donnet, Tibet, p.63
95. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 317
96. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 604
97. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 601
98. Laurence Picq, Beyond the Horizon: Five Years with the
Khmer Rouger, trans. Patricia Norland (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989),
pp. 147-148
99. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 248
100. Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, pp.139-140
101. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p.553.
THE DULL WORLD OF COMMUNISM
THE DULL WORLD OF COMMUNISM
 |
Communist ideology has produced a noticeably conservative, rigid, colorless society. To understand this, one needs only recall Communists' attitude toward their own citizens. As stressed earlier, the materialist philosophy at the root of Communism sees a human being as composed only of matter. It denies the existence of a human soul or spirit, claiming that human consciousness is nothing more than a product of "matter in motion." To the materialist, therefore, human beings are only advanced machines. All their thoughts and feelings are deemed to be the results of chemical reactions happening within the machine.
In other words, materialists believe that the cells and the atoms composing us have consciousness, the ability to think, see and hear, take pleasure in beauty, and feel sorrow when confronted with bad experiences. If you asked these people if an atom can think, they would certainly say no, but they do think that thinking ability arises when some atoms come together to form the brain.
Moreover, Marxist ideology supposes that all of human culture and consciousness is materially based. According to Communist thinking, no independent consciousness exists apart from the material world around us. On the contrary, human consciousness is experienced completely within the world of matter. Marx claimed that, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."54 Ludwig Feuerbach, one leading Marxist thinker, summed up the nonsense of materialist logic when he declared, "a person is what he eats."
Because of their materialist prejudice, Marxists view human society in terms of material criteria. They concentrate much of their attention on the idea of "class" as a material concept. Class refers to the various economic levels in a society and, for Marxists, is the only important criterion. According to Marxists, for example, workers make up a single class called the "proletariat"; capitalists compose the "bourgeoisie" class. Because all workers live in unsuitable conditions, therefore, they must share the same "proletarian consciousness." In the same way, capitalists must all share a "bourgeois" consciousness because they all share in the same wealth. Marxists don't accept that a worker or a factory owner might possibly have a totally different consciousness arising from his own independent character or world view.55
 The cold faces of Lenin, Engels and Marx adorning important places in every Communist regime. |
A natural result of this point of view is to divide people into separate material categories and evaluate them accordingly. For a Marxist, the only existing categories-such as the bourgeoisie, the little (or petite) bourgeoisie, the proletariat, imperialists and compradors-are completely based on material factors. If a person works in a factory with his own hands, his existence is determined by the work he does. If a villager works in the fields, his only consciousness is that of a villager.
Because of this point of view, Marxists claim that the course of history's only determinant is the "means of production." Marx's famous Das Kapital tries to interpret history in terms of means of production. According to Marx, "primitive society" was a group of hunter-gatherers. With the switch to agriculture, a society of "serfs" was born. Later "feudal society" developed, along with new changes in the kind of production. When machines were invented, a new kind of production called industry came to be. With it came "capitalist society." According to Marx, such concepts as religion, state, law, family and morality all arose and developed from differences in the kinds of production.
Marxism's narrow view of history has been disproved by the explanations of many thinkers, to say nothing of concrete experience. Therefore, there's no reason to demonstrate that invalidity here, only to focus on the conservative, dull, rigid, colorless society that a materialist enterprise produces.
Contrary to the Marxist belief, the human spirit or soul isn't a material product. On the contrary, what we call matter is seen, heard and felt by spirit. Therefore, it's not possible to define the human spirit in terms of the material conditions in which it finds itself. God created the human spirit with various aspects and tendencies, such as intelligence, imagination, feelings and desires. No matter what circumstances a person finds himself in, these tendencies will not change; they will only be expressed in a different way.
God created the first man and gave him the same qualities and skills as today's human beings. For this reason, our level consciousness does not differ according to the place or time we live in. The will, feelings, thoughts and mind of the very first human being in history are the same as for anyone living today. The only difference is the means he uses to express them. An individual's level of consciousness varies according to how he uses the mental skills he has been given and the urgings of his conscience. Muslims, who are conscious of this, are not limited by time, location, environment or particular ideological ideas. As God has commanded them in the Qur'an, they ponder everything that happens to them, trying to grasp its subtleties and see its beauty. In the Qur'an (2:164), God describes the believer's consciousness:
In the creation of the heavens and earth, and the alternation of the night and day, and the ships which sail the seas to people's benefit, and the water which God sends down from the sky-by which He brings the earth to life when it was dead and scatters about in it creatures of every kind-and the varying direction of the winds, and the clouds subservient between heaven and earth, there are Signs for people who use their intellect.
For this reason, those who believe in God have a wide horizon. They always think freely, and are endlessly creative in various fields of art and aesthetics.
Unable to grasp this truth, Marx and his followers tried to cram human consciousness in the extremely narrow, fabricated mould of "class-consciousness." They forced everyone they could influence to think and live in these imaginary terms. In every country where Marxism took root, just as it murdered tens of millions with no remorse, so it froze human expression in art, aesthetics, and other expressions of the human spirit.
The Lifelessness Of "Communist Art"
  Aleksander Rodchenko, a leader in "Socialist Realism." |
With the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, Russia established the world's first Marxist regime. First with Lenin, then under Stalin's steel fist, Communist ideology reshaped the whole country. Its influence can be seen in the most important elements of culture such as art, aesthetics and architecture.
Immediately after the revolution, the idea of "proletarian art" came to the fore. In a magazine called Iskusstvo Kommuny ("Commune Art"), Communist artists announced their intention to produce works of art to serve proletarian culture. They expressed similar ideas in the organization called Proletkult ("Proletarian Culture").
They began to discuss the meaning of "proletarian art." From the beginning of the 1920s, well-known Russian artists like Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin and Aleksandr Mikhailovich Rodchenko defended the idea that an artist must be a technician who gives practical solutions to problems of the proletariat. Lenin supported this idea and suppressed many areas of art regarded as useless from the point of view of the proletariat. For example, Tatlin and Rodchenko determined that an artistic representation would be of no use to a worker in his day-to-day life and decided that painting was an invalid form of art!
 A 1927 painting by Russian artist Aleksandr Deyneka entitled "The Defense of Petrograd." |
In 1921, this new understanding of art, called "constructivism," became the Soviet Union's official art policy. Tatlin, in the forefront of this way of thinking, thought it was necessary to do something "useful" like designing houses and furniture, instead of painting useless pictures. To contribute to the life of the proletariat, he designed clothing for them to wear during their long working hours, to provide them with the greatest warmth and flexibility with the least weight and expenditure of raw materials. He also designed a kind of stove, which would give the greatest heat with the least amount of fuel.
All artists did not become "engineers" like Tatlin, but they did accept the idea of "proletarian art" and used their talents to serve Communist ideology. Almost all Soviet artists of the time produced posters, signs and slogans for use in workers' clubs and small gatherings called "soviets." All shared common images: vigorous, well-muscled Soviet villagers and workers with a hammer or a sickle in hand, angry proletarian figures standing up and breaking their chains into pieces, armed soldiers marching beneath red banners under Lenin's leadership. . .
In this new understanding of art, the concept of "aesthetics" was absent, even regarded as a dangerous bourgeois attachment. The esthetic ideal was far removed from all pictures, statues, posters, interior decoration and architectural design. The Encyclopedia Britannica says that an "anti-estheticism" ruled Communist art, which became characterized by a plethora of rough, dull and crude features.
In Stalin's time, this understanding of art became the even more conservative official policy known as "Socialist Realism," described as the view that art is dedicated to the 'realistic' representation of the principles of the Soviet revolution (that is Communist ideology) in the daily life of the proletariat. According to Socialist Realism, novels should depict Communist militants as decisive, courageous and self-sacrificing, describe their supposedly exemplary struggles, and show how happy villagers and workers are, thanks to the revolution.
  Under Communism, art lost all esthetic meaning and turned into a mechanical means of propaganda. These drawings purport to depict the model person-a crude, strong, dull worker or peasant who thinks of nothing beyond obeying the system. |
Artists of Socialist Realism had no compunction about depicting the direct opposite of the truth-that the revolution did not bring the people happiness, but hunger, oppression and death. Actually, Socialist Realism is not realism, but an expression of romantic fantasy. According to The Encyclopedia Britannica, "Socialist Realism looks back to Romanticism in that it encourages a certain heightening and idealizing of heroes and events to mold the consciousness of the masses."
Socialist Realism, defined in 1932 during the bloodiest days of Stalin's regime, remained the Soviet Union's official state art policy until the 1980s. Throughout this entire period, Communism's cheerless, cold and stagnant atmosphere dominated Soviet art. In order to gain international recognition, the Soviet regime encouraged artists and stressed the importance of the production of new works of art. But because of Socialist Realism's dogmatic approach, these works remained pressed in their narrow, cheerless and ugly moulds. From 1949 onwards, Socialist Realism passed to China where a Communist regime had taken power. The same dull, crude understanding of art prevailed there too.
  Soviet propaganda posters from the 1920's: "The Ten Commandments of the Proletariat" and "The Lie of International Imperialism." |
In the period before the revolution, however, Russian society had produced some excellent works of art and magnificent architecture. The world-famous Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg contained an outstanding collection of art, albeit largely by European artists. But Communism froze Russian art in 1917 and even reversed its development.
The cheerlessness of Communist art results from the materialist philosophy that determines the Communist world view. Materialist philosophy, superficial thinking that regards a human being as only an assortment of matter, tries to reduce everything to the material. Applying materialist philosophy to art has been a fiasco, as in every other area where it's been applied.
Real art is a God-given esthetic pleasure through which humans can express their love of beauty and other feelings and emotions. In order to produce works of fine art, the human spirit must be able to express, in the freest way possible, the innate tendencies created within it. The Communist dictatorship founded in the Soviet Union-later copied by regimes in China, the Eastern Bloc, Indochina and Cuba-completely removed this free and comfortable environment. They killed art by subjecting their peoples to constant oppression.
By alienating them from religion, moreover, Communism delivered art yet another blow. Foremost of those feelings that inspire art is the spiritual pleasure and fervor derived from religion. All of history's greatest artists, sculptors and architects created works based on religious themes and drew strength and inspiration from their spiritual beliefs. They did not regard a human as a species of animal that would perish with death, but as a being that God endowed with spirit. They loved to extol humanity in their works and show reflections of God's artistry in creation. In societies with no religion, people inevitably lose this fervor and sense of pleasure and become encompassed by a spiritual purposelessness. This has been experienced in every Communist regime. As a result of irreligion and the ideas that a human being is a species of animal, human life has no value and an individual ceases to exist when his body dies, such societies have become dominated by pessimism, melancholy, cheerlessness and meaninglessness.
   Communist leaders are always depicted with a cold, rigid and pitiless expression. These portraits of Lenin, drawn by Soviet artists, express Communism's dark spirit. |
 |
|
 |
An example of the "anti-estheticism" of Communist
art, a work created in the 1920's by Soviet artist Vladimir Tatlin. |
Another example of Communist anti-estheticism:
the depiction of a proletariat by a Soviet artist of that era. |
A propaganda poster for the Third Communist
International, organized by the Soviet Union. The cold world of
Communism is reflected on the face of the militant carrying the
flag. |
Mao's Red China (which we'll examine later) displayed further striking examples of Communist conservatism and narrow-mindedness. Everyone had to wear the same kind of clothing and during the Cultural Revolution, it was forbidden to keep domestic animals.
The Nonsense of "Communist Science"
 Because Lysenko rejected the laws of genetics for the the theory of evolution, Soviet agriculture remained backward for decades. |
Science was another field that received a great blow from Communism. Stalin's regime, along with inventing the concept of "proletarian art," also proposed the idea of "proletarian science." According to this theory, there is bourgeois science and there is proletarian science. The differences between the two will lead to different results. We might compare this to Nazi Germany's rejection of findings by Jewish scientists-Einstein, among others.
Proletarian science is actually nothing more than science corrupted according to the exigencies of materialist philosophy. One obvious demonstration was the "Lysenko affair," which put its stamp on Stalin's Soviet regime.
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was educated in various agriculture schools in the Soviet Union. He came to Stalin's attention in the 1940s and assumed the total domination of Soviet policy in agriculture and biology. Most importantly, Lysenko rejected the laws of genetics discovered by the Austrian priest-botanist Gregor Mendel at the end of the 19th century and demonstrated by further experiments in the 20th. Lysenko dismissed Mendel's laws as "bourgeois science" and instead supported the thesis of the 18th century French evolutionist biologist Lamarck on the "inheritance of acquired traits."
Lysenko's idea was based on no scientific proof. But because the Soviet Union was experiencing a major agricultural crisis in the 1930s, Lysenko began to attract attention. He promised that implementing his theory would ensure a much larger and efficient grain production than other biologists believed. He claimed, for example, that when grown under the proper conditions, wheat would produce rye seeds-and he made preparations to achieve this. (This is like saying that dogs living in the wild will eventually bear litters of foxes-a claim that's totally contrary to science, of which no instance has ever been observed.) In 1940, Stalin put Lysenko at the head of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and he held this chair for twenty-five years. Lysenko also headed the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, one of the Soviet Union's most important institutions.
 Lysenko (top right) explains to Soviet experts the agricultural project based on "proletarian science." |
In 1948, it was forbidden to be educated or do research in the area of classical genetics. Those geneticists who rejected Lysenko's evolutionist thesis, and continued to support Mendel's genetic discovery, were secretly arrested and executed.
Meanwhile, Lysenko's agricultural policy created widespread lack of productivity. For example, he claimed that putting seeds in cold water for a while before being sown, would make them gain resistance to cold weather conditions. To test this hypothesis, he had tons of seeds immersed in cold water and then sown on the Siberian steppes. Of course, none of the seeds sprouted. Similar experiments all ended in disaster, but these failures were never spoken of until the 1960s. Finally, in 1964, it was officially acknowledged that Lysenko's theory was wrong. Great efforts were expended to have Mendel's genetic discoveries taught and applied again. Russia moved to the American type of mixed hybridization management, using dung to fertilize the fields. Even though their nonsensical thesis had dealt such a great blow to Soviet science and agriculture, Lysenko and his supporters didn't abandon their ideas. In fact, they maintained their positions and titles in the Soviet scientific establishment.
Generally, modern evolutionists make no mention of the Lysenko affair, a historical documentation of the great damage that can be inflicted by a blind attachment to materialism and the theory of evolution. When they do speak of Lysenko's ideas, they dismiss them as a dogmatic form of Lamarckism. But he and his supporters were not only Lamarckists, they were also Darwinists, regarding Lamarck and Darwin as two complementary evolutionist theoreticians.
 Here, Lysenko's nonsense theories are explained in detail to Russian peasants who are forced to implement them. The result was a huge fiasco. |
When Lamarck's theory of "inheritance of acquired characteristics" was abandoned as baseless, they realized that left Darwin's theory with no foundation. Therefore, they blindly continued to support Lamarck.
In his article "Darwinian Evolution and Human History," the Marxist and Darwinist thinker Robert M. Young comments:
Moving nearer to our own time, the belief that society and nature followed laws which were both evolutionary and communist led to one of the most disastrous episodes in the Stalinist regime in the 1930s and 1940s-Lysenkoism. Nature's laws were said to be dialectical, and any biologist who adhered to non-orthodox views lost his job, often his liberty, and sometimes his life. Lysenkoism was an evolutionism which ignored or opposed the interesting developments in genetics in the rest of the world. But this was done in the name of Darwinism…56
The resistance to the laws of genetics that Soviet administrators of Lysenko's time displayed is just one example of materialist fanaticism. In the same way that Lysenko and his supporters refused to accept the laws of genetics, many of today's materialists also close their eyes to the "design" (that is, intentional creation) that science has discovered in all living things just because of their own ideological prejudices. To produce a viable opposing theory, they have squandered millions of dollars and many years of labor on research that has come to nothing.
Communist Ideology's Effect on Social Life
 Communism is a regime of fear. The people are continually intimidated by stern-faced uniformed officials looking down from above. |
In the 20th century, Communist fanaticism has had very negative influences on the social life in countries under their regimes, forcing on people a hellish life devoid of compassion, denying the existence of God, alienating them from religion and discounting all spiritual and moral values. It has imprinted on societies a mentality that thinks of human beings as chunks of matter that will perish after death, establishing one of the most inhuman institutions in history. The Communist system-as observed in the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries and Red China-intends to create model societies that regard their citizens as herds of animals, just as the materialist-Darwinist theory intended.
Some of Communist society's basic tenets can be listed as follows:
* Darwin's theory of evolution and Engel's "natural dialectic" regard human beings as an advanced species of animal. Therefore, the idea that society is a herd of animals is expressed at every level. Communist regimes produce a cheerless, spiritless, lifeless person, somewhere between a human and a machine.
 The special Djzhernsky Unit, used to suppress public demonstrations in the Soviet Union. |
* The Communist system places no value on individuals. Since there are so many in the herd, the loss of one cannot matter. The disabled or those who cannot work are expelled from the herd and left to die. Those in ill health are regarded as detriments. Because there is no forgiveness, mercy, or sense of loyalty, everyone fears old age and death. The aged receive no attention, pity, or respect in the suggestion that they should be like "elephants that go to the graveyard before they die."
* As with animals in a herd, society is composed of one kind of person only. Clothing, cars and houses are all the same. The whole of society is dominated by an intense monotony, with no sense of esthetics. Athletes, artists, academics and workers all share the same of lifestyle. Houses are constructed like shelters for livestock, and clothing is tailored like a pelt to keep off the cold.
* The system is founded totally in the material concept of "labor and production." What is most important is not an individual citizen's qualities, but the contribution he can make to society. The ideal person is a hardworking laborer or hardworking villager. The guiding idea is that "production strengthens the herd." No attention is paid to humans' moral values, intentions, or spiritual condition.
 The eastern side of the Berlin wall before it was torn down. With its barbed wire, mines and tanks, the wall was a symbol of Communist despotism. |
* Seeing life as a struggle of existence, this way of thinking has no problem with doing away with the weak. On the contrary, this is regarded as necessary. Just as there is a brutal struggle for survival among animals, everyone considers himself first, and so there is no advancement. Because human beings lack compassion, society cannot possibly attain peace and well-being. Lack of compassion and mercy coupled with fear for the future, cause hopelessness and pessimism to dominate.
* Due to "herd psychology," people from the lowest to the highest live in a constant state of fear and quickly react fearfully to everything. They fear the man at the door wearing an overcoat; they fear being called before the authorities. But the source of their fear is not clear, and no one can define it.
* In place of the fear of God, there are various "fear centers." In the Soviet Union, for example, the KGB (and secret services like Checka and NKVD before it) tried to instill mortal fear throughout society. Millions can be sent to their deaths without trial or defense. The conviction that these organizations hear and see everything dominates citizens' minds. Such organizations develop a system of selective cleansing, based on the law of the jungle.
* Because fear of God is systematically eradicated, individuals repress their deepest urges insofar as they fear the system. If the system did not detect or could not punish, they would commit thievery, corruption, embezzlement and every kind of illegal act.
* Anxiety, fear and panic occasioned by the environment they live in put people under stress. They cannot sleep at night and in the daytime, everything makes them anxious. They quickly lose bodily strength. Intense pressure and difficult living conditions exhaust men and women at an early age and sometimes cause their premature death. Because of hopelessness, they cannot enjoy the good things in life, but tranquilize themselves with alcohol and live their hellish lives in a state of intoxication.
* Believing that they will perish after death, people hold on to life tenaciously. In their struggles for life, they regard everyone else as a rival, if not an enemy, and begrudge every act as a slight against themselves. They experience socialism's basic tenets, such as "mutual aid" and "support," only in slogans. In fact, everyone regards others with a suspicion that condemns them to a life of loneliness.
* Because the individual has no faith in God, he can't attach himself to anyone in a meaningful, trusting relationship. The Darwinist-Communist system always crushes individuals, who are hostile to one another, since everyone may at any moment take away what they have. In a Communist state, the only one an individual can trust is himself. But because he knows he is weak, he doesn't trust even himself and is dominated by intense hopelessness. Therefore, he is forever complaining about his life, but cannot try to change it.
* Because people in a Communist society have closed minds, there are defects in every aspect of their lives, whether at school, at home, or in entertainment. They can act only in accord with what they've been taught, and so cannot come up with any original ideas to deal with new issues that confront them. If they do, in fact, they are answered with violence.
* Unthinking people have unorganized minds and can't use resources productively. They waste resources on utopian fantasies, as in the case of Lysenko.
* Communism destroys families, the basic unit of society. There are no marriages in the true sense of the word, only mating and propagation. Marriage is not entered into for the sake of morality; its purpose is the continuation of the species. Families do not look after their children; the state or those appointed by it perform this function. A child is seen as a new addition to the herd and is trained to fight for it and protect it. Because the mother hates her home and environment, she passes her harshness on to her offspring. Children growing up deprived of family love become pessimistic and aggressive. In the place of love and respect in the home, hostility reigns. The child has no one to trust.
* In a society with no concept of marriage, fidelity, or chastity but only a mating mentality, prostitution becomes widespread.
* The police-state oppression controlling Communist society cannot take the place of conscience and the fear of God. For this reason, the crime rate soars; thievery is rampant everywhere. People steal from factories, farms and cooperatives collectively as a matter of course.
* However much Communist ideology may claim otherwise, racism is widespread in Communist society. In the Soviet Union, for example, there was antipathy to anyone who was not Russians, especially Muslims. Quietly adopting the racist Darwinist theory, Russians regarded various Muslim minorities and other minorities as "ethnic groups that were not completely evolved" and subjected them to mass slaughter, under the name of deportation. Communist ideology thinks of murder as "natural dialectic"-a natural component of evolution.
* Communism sees human beings only as productive animals. It reserves a special hatred and loathing for villagers. Marx called villagers inferior "potato sacks." As we saw earlier, Lenin and Stalin murdered millions by deliberately letting them starve. To them, villagers were only herds of animals that produced grain and cotton. Confiscating what they produced (collectivization), including the honey from their beehives, was seen as legitimate and reasonable.
These generalizations are only a broad sketch of a society without religion. In nations where disbelief prevails, no matter what they call themselves, this way of life must unavoidably prevail. People are not respected as worthy beings whom God created and endowed with spirit. With people regarding one another as advanced animals that will perish with death, a society cannot experience well-being, peace, security, cooperation or brotherhood. No one considers anyone else's comfort, health, or well-being. Moreover, in such societies removed from religion, it is impossible to find just administrators and people who work on behalf of all. Everyone looks out for his own interests and tries to profit as much as he can.
THE DARWINIST-COMMUNIST ESTABLISHMENT
Because a Darwinist-Communist State regards human beings as animals, it neither respects nor trusts them. Accordingly, it establishes an environment of fear, oppression, false danger and terror in order to control them. It views everyone with suspicion, regarding them as guilty and potential traitors. In such a state, a person need not commit a crime, only to be suspected, in order to be punished, brutalized, or killed. The famous historian Tzvetan Todorov describes how states with this philosophy behave towards their people: The enemy is the great justification for terror, and the totalitarian state needs enemies to survive. If it lacks them, it invents them. Once they have been identified, they are treated without mercy . . . Being an enemy is a hereditary stain that cannot be removed. . . . Communism is no different. It demands the repression (or in moments of crisis, the elimination) of the bourgeoisie as a class. Belonging to the class is enough:there is no need actually to have done anything at all.a These words of Lenin are important for understanding the attitude of a Communist State towards its people: In reality, the state is nothing but a machine for the suppression nof one class by another. Dictatorship is rule based directly on force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained through the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.b
As Lenin stated in his own words, the Darwinist-Communist Soviet regime did not trust its own people and regarded them as worthless animals-thus, it caused the death by torture or starvation of tens of millions and plunged the nation into decades of terror and darkness. Today's Russian people are still enduring anguish for the same reasons, because there are still certain officials within the Russian State mechanism who maintain a Communist mentality, regarding a person as an animal or valueless object. An event that took place in the year 2000 in Russia is a proof of this and shows once more the dark side of the Darwinist-Communist mentality inherited from the Soviet period. After a submarine sank, for a long time Moscow did not try to rescue those on board. For reasons of supposed "state security," not until much later was the disaster announced to Western nations that could have given assistance. Russia knowingly abandoned its sailors to death, and a Russian mother reacting to this horror was given an injection and sedated by security forces. This is a striking instance revealing that the Stalinist mentality still holds sway over the Russian state authorities. a- Tzvetan Todorov,
L'homme dépaysé, Paris, Le Seuil, 1995 p. 33 (emphasis added) |
In a society where the moral values of the Qur'an are observed, however, everyone values one another as servants of God. No one desires any reward from doing good. On the contrary, they perform good works continually and, in their efforts, try to win God's approval. They hope for a good life in the Hereafter, confident that "those who enjoin charity, or what is right, or putting things right between people . . . seeking the pleasure of God," will be given "an immense reward." (Qur'an, 4:114) They do so, not with any expectation of gaining profit from others; but look for their reward only from God.
In the Qur'an (76:8-10), God describes this exemplary moral state:
They give food, despite their love for it, to the poor and orphans and captives: "We feed you only out of desire for the Face of God. We do not want any repayment from you or any thanks. Truly We fear from our Lord a glowering, calamitous Day."
Conclusion
Mental conservatism is the main impediment to a society's development of arts and science. If a particular nation is continually conditioned by narrow ways of thinking, its art and science will freeze. In order for art and science to develop, people must be broadminded, looking at the world with new horizons.
Some interpret the conservatism that impedes art and science wrongly and try to attribute it to religion. But the true religion taught in the Qur'an is totally against this conservatism, and affords the widest and freest horizon of thought. It frees them from all anxiety, other than the fear of God. Art, science, and thought develop to their greatest heights where people think deeply as urged by the Qur'an, using their minds to consider the universe, and what they encounter in nature. Moreover, religion establishes an understanding of service to God, giving people great pleasure, excitement and desire for producing art, advancing science, and generating ideas. For this reason, the Islamic world's first centuries were truly a great Golden Age.
But Communism, establishing a totally rigid political and social system, destroyed people's faith in God, thereby destroying their pleasure in living together with a reality that gave meaning to their lives. Marxism's oppression and constraints rooted out art, science, and investigative thought and hacked them to pieces.
In the far corners of Asia, there are examples of Communism that let us to see this in a far more striking way.
54. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University
Press Cambridge, p. 752
55. Karl Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy; Jozef Stalin
56. Surely Marxists see that the current situation is not like
this. Therefore Marxists claim workers who do not see themselves as "proletariat"
is deceived by a "false consciousness" and this is a trap of capitalists trying
to impede the proletarian revolution.
How Did Stalin Become a Communist?
How Did Stalin Become a Communist?
 Stalin was brought up to be a priest, but at a young age was drawn into atheism by some books he read, the most influential of which was Darwin's Origin of Species. |
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was born in 1879, in a poor family in Gori, a small town near Tbilisi in Georgia. He began to use the name of Stalin, which means "man of steel" in Russian, after 1913.
His mother was a religious woman. She she used all her strength to rear her son to be a priest, so she enrolled him in a church school in Gori. He graduated after five years there, and entered the seminary in Tblisi to begin his studies to become a priest of the Georgian Orthodox Church.
During this period, however, Stalin read a few books that changed his world view. Up to then, he had been the devout son of a religious mother, but he lost his faith in God and religion and became an atheist after reading Darwin's The Origin of Species.
In his book, Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union, the Oxford University historian Alex de Jonge shows Darwin's vital role in shaping Stalin's youthful outlook. According to Jonge, he was "a theological student who had lost his faith; Stalin would always maintain that it was Darwin who was responsible for that loss."28 Stalin's adoption of Marxism happened not long afterward. Jonge states that Stalin often emphasized this point in his private conversations.
In his book Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, the English historian Alan Bullock compares these two men, saying that, in his youth, Stalin was very influenced by the works of Karl Marx and Auguste Comte, which he read in Russian translations.29
 After Stalin had joined the ranks of the Communists, he was arrested several times under the Tsar's regime. At left, a series of photographs of one of those arrests. |
Actually, this deception happened not only to Stalin, but to the majority of a generation of Russian students and other young people. The myths in scientific garb proposed by Darwin, Huxley, and Lamarck led many young Russians to become atheists. In A People's Tragedy, A history of the Russian Revolution, historian Orlando Figes says, "The scientific materialism of Darwin and Huxley . . . had the status of a religion among the Russian intelligentsia during Lenin's youth."30 Figes relates how Semen Kanatchikov, a young worker who later joined the Bolsheviks, abandoned his religion as the result of evolutionist propaganda:
One young worker "proved" to him that God had not created man by showing that, if one filled a box with earth and kept it warm, worms and insects would eventually appear in it. This sort of vulgarized pre-Darwinian science, which was widely found in the left-wing pamphlets of that time, had a tremendous impact on young workers like Kanatchikov… "Now my emancipation from my old prejudices moved forward at an accelerated tempo," later he wrote. "I stopped going to the priest for confession, no longer attended church, and began to eat 'forbidden' food."31
 Stalin became close to Lenin in his latter days and tried to advance within the party. Upon Lenin's death, Stalin overcame his rivals and became the Soviet Union's sole ruler. |
Such examples as the one quoted above, used to support the claim that God did not create life and that everything came to be by chance, were sheer bogus. Worms and insects did not arise by happenstance-out of nothing, as the medieval belief in spontaneous generation had it-but from eggs laid in the ground. But because the scientific world was not yet aware that living creatures could never be generated from lifeless matter, such myths as these arose like a flood, drowning the half-ignorant Russian youth in atheism.
Members of the atheist generation that grew up in Russia in the 19th century, emerged in the 20th century as passionate Communists. One of them was Stalin. In 1898 he joined a secret Communist organization and began to write for a Communist magazine, Brdzola (The Struggle), in 1901. By 1917, he was an active militant of the Communist movement led by Lenin. After the October Revolution of 1917, he became one of the five members of the Politburo, the highest degree of membership in the Communist Party. While Lenin lay ill in 1923, Stalin's power continued in the party to grow and upon Lenin's death, he became the supreme authority. In the five years between 1924 and 1929, he cleared the party of all his opponents by assassination, execution, or exile. Even Trotsky, one of the architects of the October Revolution, became the object of his rage and was driven out of the Soviet Union.
After consolidating his power, Stalin turned his iron fist on society. Lenin had tried to nationalize all the agricultural land in Russia, but the devastation caused by the great famine of 1920-1921 forced him to postpone this undertaking. Stalin, determined to put his plan into effect, began to apply a policy called "collectivization." Its aim was to nationalize all of the villagers' property, seize and export their crops, and use the revenue to bolster Soviet industry and strengthen the military.
Stalin carried out his collectivization policy by torture, murder and starvation. Six million people died of famine, while he exported hundreds of thousands of tons of grain. Once again, Stalin documented the savagery of Materialist-Darwinist ideas, which regarded humanity as an animal species that had to be trained by inflicting pain as corrective punishment.
The Savagery of Collectivization
 Peasants in Ukraine in 1929 listening to collectivization propaganda. Collectivization was presented as a way to increase agricultural yield, but its implementation caused a terrible famine. |
This policy of Stalin's began in 1929. According to his plan, all private property was to be abolished. Every villager would have to give to the state a certain quota of his production and was prohibited from selling his own produce. The villagers' quotas were very high and to meet it, most had to surrender everything they had. The tyranny Lenin had begun in the 1920's resumed once more.
To implement collectivization, Stalin employed the cruelest methods. Those who resisted were killed, exiled to Siberia (essentially, murder over the long term) or left to starve (slow murder). Throughout the whole country, kulaks (rich landowners) who resisted collectivization-and, therefore, Communism in general-were hunted down. The Black Book of Communism describes this policy:
The kulaks who resisted collectivization were shot, and the others were deported with their wives, children and elderly family members. Although not all kulaks were exterminated directly, sentences of forced labor in wilderness areas of Siberia or the far north left them with scant chance of survival. Several tens of thousands perished there; the exact number of victims remains unknown. As for the great famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, which resulted from the rural population's resistance to forced collectivization, 6 million died in a period of several months.32
The savagery inflicted on the kulaks included the most horrendous tortures. In a letter to Stalin in April 1933, the writer Mikhail Sholokhov wrote:
 |
In the Napolovski kolkhoz [a collective farm in the Soviet Union] a certain Plotkin, plenipotentiary for the district committee, forced the collective workers to stretch out on stoves heated till they were white hot; then he cooled them off by leaving them naked in a hangar. 33
Stalin's regime, like Lenin's before it, created imaginary enemies they called "kulaks." They targeted anyone they wanted to eliminate by stamping them with this name. It was easy for the Communists to categorize those they didn't like as "kulaks" and to send orders to every city, commanding that a certain number of these "kulaks" be rounded and executed. This is described in The Black Book of Communism:
In such conditions, it is not surprising that in certain districts between 80 and 90 percent of those victimized by the dekulakization process were serednyaki, or middle-income peasants. The brigades had to meet the required quotas and, if possible, surpass them. Peasants were arrested and deported for having sold grain on the market or for having had an employee to help with the harvest back in 1925 or 1926, for possessing two samovars, for having killed a pig in September 1929 "with the intention of consuming it themselves and thus keeping it from socialist appropriation." Peasants were arrested on the pretext that they had "taken part in commerce," when all they had done was sell something of their own making. One peasant was deported on the pretext that his uncle had been a tsarist officer; another was labeled a kulak on account of his "excessive visits to the church." But most often, people were classed as kulaks simply on the grounds that they had resisted collectivization. At times confusion reigned in the dekulakization brigades to an almost comic extreme: in one city in Ukraine, for example, a serednyak who was a member of a dekulakization brigade was himself arrested by a member of another brigade that was operating on the other side of the town. 34
At the top of the list of those branded as kulaks were the clergy. In 1930, more than 13,000 priests were "dekulakized." In many villages and towns, collectivization began symbolically with the closing of the church and the the removal of local religious leaders.35
Collectivization had two major results: famine and exile.
Famine Brought About by Stalin
 This Russian child has lost the use of his legs as a result of hunger caused by Stalin's policy of deliberate famine. |
Like Lenin before him, Stalin intended to wield collectivization as a weapon against society. By collecting as much grain as he wanted from any section of the country, he subjected any people in those areas to starvation. Because Ukraine resisted Communism, it became the target of collectivization. This region suffered the greatest man-made famine in history, with a total of four million dying of starvation.
How this occurred is significant. First, according to the state's general collectivization policy in 1931, a total of 7.7 million tons of grain was demanded from a Ukrainian harvest which collectivisation had brought down to 18 million tons. This brought the already overburdened villagers almost to the point of starvation and the villagers of Ukraine began to resist Stalin's troops-which made Stalin even more pitiless. In July of 1932, he issued a virtual death order against the whole of the Ukraine by increasing the previous quota demanding another 7.7 million tons of grain to be delivered to the State. Millions of people were condemned to die of starvation. This policy is described in Brian Moynahan's book, The Russian Century: A History of the Last Hundred Years:
 While Russians were dying of hunger, the Communist Party's barns were crammed full. At left, a church used as a storehouse for grain during the implementation of collectivization in the 1930s. |
Requisitioning gangs of Communist activists, armed with steel rods up to ten feet long, swarmed over the Ukraine. 'They searched in the house, in the attic, shed and cellar,' a victim recalled. 'Then they went outside and searched in the barn, pig pen, granary, and straw pile...' Crude watchtowers were put up in the fields, posts with a hut of wood and straw atop them. Here guards armed with shotguns would look out for snippers; those who were driven by hunger to cut off ears of corn with scissors. Those who were caught got a minimum of ten years under the Law of Seven-eighths; some were shot. One Kharkov court issued fifteen hundred death sentences in a month; a woman was given a ten-year sentence for cutting 100 ears of corn from her own plot, two weeks after her husband had died of starvation. The remaining chickens and pigs were eaten in the early winter of 1932. Then the dogs and cats went. 'It was hard to catch them,' wrote Vasily Grossman. 'The animals had become afraid of people and their eyes were wild. People boiled them...' … Only 4.7 million tons of grain had been delivered by the end of 1932. A new levy was announced. ...Meteorologists were arrested for issuing false weather forecasts to damage the harvest. Veterinarians were shot for sabotaging livestock. Agronomists were accused of being kulaks and deported to Siberia...
Mass starvation started when the snow melted in March 1933. People ate rats, ants, and earthworms. They made soup with dandelions and nettles. The New York Evening Journal correspondent visited a village twenty miles from Kiev. 'In one hut they were cooking a mess that defied analysis,' he wrote. 'There were bones, pigweed, skin, and what looked like a boot top in the pot.'...
 Above, a mother and child starving to death. Below, small children who died from the famine. As a result of Stalin's deliberate famine, four million Ukrainians died. |
People abandoned their villages. They squatted along rail tracks begging for crusts to be thrown from carriage windows, and inundated railroad stations. They followed troops on maneuvers. They crawled about on all fours in towns. Carts went through the streets of Kiev each morning collecting the corpses of those who had died in the night. The children had thin, elongated faces like dead birds...
Still the activists searched for grain; shot mothers who they found digging up potatoes; beat those who were not swollen up in the tell-tale sign of starvation to make them reveal their source of food. 'We were realising Historical Necessity,' wrote the activist Lev Kopolev. 'We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland... I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses-corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov...'
...Word of the famine reached the West… An international relief committee was set up under the archbishop of Vienna. It could do nothing, however, for the Soviet government denied that any famine was taking place.36
These savage scenes affected the Russian author Michail Sholokhov, who wrote a letter to Stalin demanding an end to this cruelty. But Stalin had done all these things deliberately, of course:
In April 1933 the writer Mikhail Sholokhov, who was passing through the city of Kuban, wrote two letters to Stalin detailing the manner in which the local authorities had tortured all the workers on the collective farm to force them to hand over all their remaining supplies. He demanded that the first secretary send some sort of food aid...
 STALIN'S LIE... ... AND STALIN'S TRUTH One characteristic of Communism is its reliance on officially produced and disseminated lies. As a result of the famine Stalin fabricated in the Soviet Union, six million died of hunger, and tens of thousands of children were targets of this disaster. This photograph documents the "standard of living" deemed acceptable for Russian children in Stalin's era. But propaganda posters depicted Stalin as a kind, concerned leader receiving gifts of flowers from happy children. |
In his reply on 6 May, Stalin made no attempt to feign compassion...In 1933, while these millions were dying of hunger, the Soviet government continued to export grain, shipping 18 million hundredweight of grain abroad "in the interests of industrialization."37
Famine caused the death of six million-men, women, children, old people and infants-not because Soviet farms produced insufficient grain, but because the Communist party wanted this man-made famine to happen. In other words, it was mass murder. Stalin didn't want Western countries to learn of the famine because he feared that any aid campaign would only weaken the punishment he had determined for Ukraine. In the periodical magazine Soviet Studies, historian Dana Dalrymple comments:
The Soviet Union, in fact, has never officially admitted that the famine existed. American and English studies on the USSR occasionally mention a famine in Ukraine but generally provide few or no details. Yet, previous famines in the USSR have been acknowledged by the government and have been well recorded elsewhere. Why the difference? The answer seems to be that the famine of 1932-34, unlike its predecessors was a man-made disaster.38
As a result of collectivization, peasants of Ukraine suffered the greatest losses, with at least four million people dead. In Kazakhstan, one million starved as a result of collectivization. In Northern Caucasus and the Black Earth region, there were a million deaths. With one single order, Stalin had sent six million people to their deaths.39
Exiles and Work Camps
Stalin murdered millions of others who resisted Communism by sending them into "exile." The Soviet Union singled out many minorities, including Crimean Turks, forcing them from their homes at night and sending them to their deaths, thousands of kilometers away. Those who died on the way numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
 Below left a gulag prison in the Magadan region of Siberia. Here, millions lived and died under appalling conditions. STALIN'S DEATH CAMPS These photos show some scenes of Stalin's death camps. Those who showed the least resistance to Communist Party policy were sent to labor camps called gulags, where prisoners were worked to death. |
In the notes below, written by an instructor of the Party committee in Narym in western Siberia, we see that exile in Russia meant "mass murder":
On 29 and 30 April 1933 two convoys of "outdated elements" were sent to us by train from Moscow and Leningrad. On their arrival in Tomsk they were transferred to barges and unloaded, on 18 May and 26 May, onto the island of Nazino, which is situated at the juncture of the Ob and Nazina rivers. The first convoy contained 5,070 people, and the second 1,044: 6,114 in all. The transport conditions were appalling: the little food that was available was inedible, and the deportees were cramped into nearly airtight spaces… The result was a daily mortality rate of 35-40 people. These living conditions however, proved to be luxurious in comparison to what awaited the deportees on the island of Nazino (from which they were supposed to be sent on in groups to their final destination, the new sectors that are being colonized farther up the Nazina River). The island of Nazino is a totally uninhabited place, devoid of any settlements… There were no tools, no grain, and no food. That is how their new life began. The day after the arrival of the first convoy, on 19 May, snow began to fall again, and the wind picked up. Starving, emaciated from months of insufficient food, without shelter, and without tools, … they were trapped. They weren't even able to light fires to ward off the cold. More and more of them began to die…On the first day, 295 people were buried. It was only on the fourth or fifth day after the convoy's arrival on the island that the authorities sent a bit of flour by boat, really no more than a few pounds per person. Once they had received their meager ration, people ran to the edge of the water and tried to mix some of the flour with water in their hats, their trousers, or their jackets Most of them just tried to eat it straight off, and some of them even choked to death.These tiny amounts of flour were the only food that the deportees received during the entire period of their stay on the island. The more resourceful among them tried to make some rudimentary sort of pancakes, but they had nothing to mix or cook them in… It was not long before the first cases of cannibalism occurred.40
  (Left) In the Stalinist era, millions of Russian citizens were loaded into trains and taken away. (Right) Industrial projects in the Soviet Union were carried out by the forced labor of prisoners. This photograph shows Uzbek children among those working under terrible conditions on the construction of the Fergana tunnel. |
Stanford researcher Robert Conquest's book, The Harvest of Sorrow, has this to say about the exiles of Stalin's time:
 What made Stalin become so merciless was the materialist philosophy he believed in. An unsmiling portrait of Marx hung in the office where he signed millions of death warrants. |
Up to 15 and even 20%, especially young children, are reported dying in transit, as was to be the case again in the 1940s, with the mass deportations of minority nationalities. Of course, the deportees were in every sort of physical condition, some of the women pregnant. A Cossack mother gave birth on a deportation train. The baby, as was usual, died. Two soldiers threw the body out while the train was on the move. Sometimes the deportees were taken more or less directly to their final destination. Sometimes, they remained in local towns…
In Archangel all the churches were closed and used as transit prisons, in which many-tiered sleeping platforms were put up. The peasants could not wash, and were covered with sores. They roamed the town begging for help, but there were strict orders to locals not to help them. Even the dead could not be picked up. The residents, of course, dreaded arrest themselves. In Vologda city too, forty-seven churches were taken over and filled with deportees.41
Another method of mass murder used against exiles were the labor camps. Between the years 1928 and 1953 (when Stalin died), an estimated more than 30 million individuals whose ideas differed from those of the Soviet administration were arrested and sent to gulags, generally established in regions like Siberia where conditions were unlivable. More than two thirds of these-that is, at least 20 million-died in these camps. Inmates living on the edge of starvation were worked between 14 and 16 hours a day, and were executed by camp guards on the least excuse. Some inmates were deliberately starved to death; others died, their physical health broken from lack of nourishment and terrible living conditions. Many others were made to work in light and shredded clothing, froze to death in the Siberian cold. First a prisoner's fingers and toes would freeze and fall off, then his ear or nose would "break off." Hundreds of thousands are known to have suffered and died in this way. In The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, the famous Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gives further examples of this horror.
Red Terror in the Eastern Block
 A MESSAGE OF FEAR TO SOCIETY: MASS EXECUTIONS In Stalin's era, prisoners were sometimes executed in public to send a message of fear to the people. This picture shows opponents of the regime, hanged by the secret police in a public square in 1946. |
Stalin died in 1953. The terror begun by Lenin, which he had continued and extended, left tens of millions dead and subjected dozens of different ethnic groups to torture and anguish. The Black Book of Communism gives a broad outline of Communist savagery in the Leninist-Stalinist era:
The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners without trial, and the murder of hundreds of thousands or rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 and 1922
The famine of 1922, which caused the deaths of 5 million people
The extermination and deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920
The murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps from 1918 to 1930
The liquidation of almost 690,000 people in the Great Purge of 1937-38
The deportation of 2 million kulaks (and so-called kulaks) in 1930-1932
The destruction of 4 million Ukrainians and 2 million others by means of an artificial and systematically perpetuated famine in 1932-33
The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldovans, and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941, and again in 1944-45
The deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941
 SKULLS WITH BULLET HOLES Stalin's secret police carried out most executions secretly. These skulls, taken from a mass grave in Chelyabinsk, belong to people killed by a bullet in the head by Stalin's secret service (NKVD) You can see the bullet hole in the skull on the right. |
The wholesale deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1943
The wholesale deportation of the Chechens in 1944
The wholesale deportation of the Ingush in 1944 42
After Stalin's death, the Soviet regime entered a softer period, limited though it was. But his "reign of fear" continued to govern a society founded on fear. In a later section, we'll examine more closely the fear that held sway in the Soviet Union and all other Communist societies, and how it was organized.
The Soviets did not limit terror to their own people. The outbreak of World War II let the Soviet Union spread throughout Eastern Europe. When the war ended, a number of countries had fallen under Soviet influence. Within a few years, by means of various political plots and maneuvers, Moscow took them all under its hegemony. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and East Germany fell into the clutches of Stalin's bloody legacy.
The red savagery inflicted a hellish life on these countries. Those opposed to the regime were arrested one by one and subjected to torture and execution. In a short time, fear and horror pervaded the whole of society. Long after in the early 1990's, after the fall of Bulgaria's Communist regime, a woman filmed in a Bulgarian documentary describes what happened to her in the autumn of 1944:
The day after my father was first arrested, another policeman arrived around midday and instructed my mother to go to Police Station No. 10 at five o'clock that afternoon. My mother, a beautiful and kind woman, got dressed and left. We, her three children, all waited for her at home. She came back at half past one in the morning, white as a sheet, with her clothes tattered and torn. As soon as she came in, she went to the stove, opened the door, took off all her clothes, and burned them. Then she took a bath, and only then took us in her arms. We went to bed. The next day she made her first suicide attempt, and there were three more after that, and she tried to poison herself twice. She's still alive, I look after her, but she's quite severely mentally ill. I have never found out what they actually did to her. 43
Prisoners suffered terribly. The Black Book of Communism describes the torture inflicted by Nicolae Ceausescu's regime in Romania:
Romania was probably the first country in Europe to introduce the methods of brainwashing used by the Communists in Asia. Indeed, these tactics may well have been perfected there before they were used on a massive scale in Asia. The evil goal of the enterprise was to induce prisoners to torture one another. The idea was conceived in the prison in Piteþti. The experiment began in early December 1949 and lasted approximately three years… The goal of the organization was the reeducation of political prisoners, combining study of the texts of Communist dogma with mental and physical torture.44
 The Soviet Union brought Communism and brutality to occupied countries of the Eastern Bloc. Every movement against Moscow was repressed with bloody reprisals. After an independence movement sprang up in Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1968, the Red Army occupied the country. (Above) Soviet tanks in Prague during the occupation in August 1968. |
The purpose of this was to destroy the prisoners' religious faith; at the end of it they were expected to deny the existence of God:
The Securitate, the Romanian secret police, used all the classic methods of torture during their interrogations: beatings, blows to the soles of the feet, hanging people upside down, and so forth. But in the prison built in the 1930's in Piteþti, about 110 kilometers from Bucharest, the cruelty far surpassed those usual methods: The philosopher Virgil Ierunca recalls: "The most vile tortures imaginable were practiced in Piteþti. Prisoners' whole bodies were burned with cigarettes: their buttocks would begin to rot, and their skin fell off, as though they suffered from leprosy. Others were forced to swallow spoonfuls of excrement, and when they threw it back up, they were forced to eat their own vomit.
...According to Virgil Ierunca, reeducation occurred in four phases. The first phase was known as "exterior unmasking." The prisoner had to prove his loyalty by admitting what he had hidden when the case had been brought against him and, in particular, admit his links with his friends on the outside. The second phase was "interior unmasking," when he was forced to denounce the people who had helped him inside the prison. The third phase was "public moral unmasking," when the accused was ordered to curse all the things that he held sacred, including his friends and family, his wife or girlfriend, and his God if he was a believer. In the fourth phase, candidates for joining the OPCB [Organization of Prisoners with Communist Beliefs] had to "reeducate" their own best friend, torturing him with their own hands and thus becoming executioners themselves.
...Eugen Turcanu [head of the OPCB, the purpose of which was the reeducation of political prisoners, combining study of the texts of Communist dogma with mental and physical torture] devised especially diabolical measures to force seminarians to renounce their faith. Some had their heads repeatedly plunged into a bucket of urine and fecal matter, while the guards intoned a parody of the baptismal rite.45
People in every country of the Eastern Bloc were subjected to Communism's crazed murderous impulse and passionate hatred of religion. The Darwinist-Materialist philosophy that regards human beings as animals and maintains that constant violence, torture, and fear are needed to subdue these so-called "animals," brought about a terrible regime of torture in Communist prisons.
This is why those who regard Darwinism as no danger, or think its theories are harmless, must read this book carefully. The Darwinist-Communist ideology's final aim is to turn people against one another, to alienate them from every moral and spiritual value, thereby bestializing human society into a "herd" that can easily be domesticated and governed. No matter with what ideology they disguise themselves, their aim is all the same, as history has witnessed.
Darkness in Cuba
 Cuba's Communist revolution, brought about by the combined efforts of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, is usually presented as a romantic episode in a heroic legend. But Communism brought only misery and torture to Cuba. |
During the Cold War period, the Soviet Union supported the dictatorship of Fidel Castro's Cuba, another Communist regime. The guerilla movement led by Castro and supported by the Argentine guerilla leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara seized power in 1959. Castro protected his regime with political and military support from the Soviet Union, and even when the USSR collapsed, Castro was able to survive.
The Communist movement in Cuba, and in Latin America in general, had an aspect of romanticism. Che Guevara's guerilla movement in particular was portrayed as the "story of a hero." Many young people mounted posters of Che struggling for Communism and sang Latin American Communist songs. Apparently the Cuban revolution was a "freedom struggle" to save people from cruelty and torture under the Cuban dictator Batista.
That was hardly the truth, however. If we look behind the romantic legends of Che and Fidel, we see the dark face of Cuban dictatorship. The Black Book of Communism describes Communist Cuba's labor camps and prisons:
Working conditions were extremely harsh, and prisoners worked almost naked, wearing little more than undergarments. As a punishment, "troublemakers" were forced to cut grass with their teeth or to sit in latrine trenches for hours at a time.
 In 1979, the Red Army occupied Afghanistan, putting into effect a brutal policy of genocide that took no account of women and children. Above, a so-called victory march by the Red Army in Moscow in 1984. |
The violence of the prison regime affected both political prisoners and common criminals. Violence began with the interrogations conducted by the Departamento Técnico de Investigaciones (DTI). The DTI used solitary confinement and played on the phobias of the detainees: one woman who was afraid of insects was locked in a cell infested with cockroaches. The DTI also used physical violence. Prisoners were forced to climb a staircase wearing shoes filled with lead and were then thrown back down the stairs. Psychological torture was also used, often observed by a medical team. The guards used sodium pentathol and other drugs to keep prisoners awake. In the Mazzora hospital, electric shock treatment was routinely used as a punishment without any form of medical observation. The guards also used attack dogs and mock executions; disciplinary cells had neither water nor electricity; and some detainees were kept in total isolation…
...Visits by relatives provide another opportunity to humiliate prisoners. In La Cabaña prisoners were made to appear naked before their family, and imprisoned husbands were forced to watch intimate body searches carried out on their wives.
Female inmates in Cuban prisons are especially vulnerable to acts of sadism by guards. More than 1,100 women have been sentenced as political prisoners since 1959. In 1963 they were housed in the Guanajay prison. Numerous eyewitness statements attest to beatings and other humiliations. For instance, before showering, detainees were forced to undress in full view of the guards, who then beat them.46
After the 1959 revolution, about ten thousand were executed. More than 30 thousand were imprisoned under the conditions described above. And, just as wherever else a Communist regime was established, it brought pain, torture and fear. Meanwhile, the Cuban people gradually grew impoverished, despite the massive aid from the Soviets.
Soviet Massacres in Afghanistan
To fully examine Marxist-Leninist Bolshevik ideology and its record of savagery, we must also look at the countries invaded by the Soviet Union. Afghanistan was one of those subjected to the greatest cruelty.
In 1978, Communist army generals and some Communist civilians organized a coup in Afghanistan, announced that henceforth, the country would be run by a Communist regime. They also initiated a ruthless war against religion. The Black Book of Communism describes this policy as follows:
Shortly afterward, the government began an antireligious crusade. The Koran was burned in public, and imams and other religious leaders were arrested and killed. On the night of 6 January 1979 all 130 men in the Mojaddedi clan, a leading Shiite group, were massacred. All religious practices were banned...47
Afghanistan Communists were paid by the Soviet Union, inflicting mass murder on their own people according to directives sent by "advisors" from Moscow. After a short time in power, they inflicted great terror. Afghanistan scholar Michael Barry describes one such incident:
In March 1979 …1,700 adults and children, the entire male population of the village [of Kerala], were all assembled in the town square and machine-gunned at point-blank range. The dead and dying were thrown into three mass graves and buried with a bulldozer. For a while afterward, the women could still see the earth move slightly as the wounded struggled to escape, but soon all movement stopped. All the women fled to Pakistan.48
At the same time, terror reigned in Kabul. On the eastern outskirts of the city, the Pol-e-Charki prison became a concentration camp. In The Black Book of Communism, the situation in the prison is described in this way:
As Sayyed Abdullah, the director of the prison, explained to the prisoners: "You're here to be turned into a heap of rubbish." Torture was common; the worst form entailed live burial of prisoners in the latrines. Hundreds of prisoners were killed every night, and the dead and dying were buried by bulldozers. Stalin's method of punishing entire ethnic groups for the actions of some of its members adopted, leading to the arrest on 15 August 1979 of 300 people from the Hazaras ethnic group who were suspected of supporting the resistance. "One hundred fifty of them were buried alive by the bulldozers, and the rest were doused with gasoline and burned alive." In September 1979 the prison authorities admitted that 12,000 prisoners had been eliminated. The director of Pol-e-Charki told anyone who would listen: "We'll leave only 1 million Afghans alive-that's all we need to build socialism."49
All these efforts were directed from Moscow. Indeed, all Afghanistan's inner turmoil was first planned by the Soviets. They had incited the Afghani Communists to make the coup, which they then used as an excuse to invade the country in order to support the so-called "democratic" regime. Most political historians accept that the motive behind Moscow's plan was regarding Islam as a source of danger to the Communists.
On December 27, 1979, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, with the excuse of supporting the Afghani Communist regime against its Muslim "opponents." With this, the savagery inflicted on the Afghani people grew. The Red Army remained as an occupying force in Afghanistan for ten years, during which time it used cruel and pitiless methods in its attempt to destroy opposing groups that rightfully resisted it. One Afghani opponent describes these methods:
The Soviets attacked every single house, looting and raping the women. The barbarism was worse than instinctive, and appeared to have been planned. They knew that in carrying out such acts they were destroying the very foundation of our society.50
Against the Afghani Muslims, the Red Army used the basest methods: They made mines look like toys in order to get Afghani children to play with them, subjected captive opponents to terrible tortures, and bombed civilians without hesitation. The end of their ten-year occupation left tens of thousands of maimed and dead. This is why many Afghani young people are without arms or legs, and why today, Afghanistan is the country that manufactures the most prosthetic limbs. But the Soviets' withdrawal left a power vacuum, and a bloody civil war ensued. In short, the savagery begun in the 1970's at Soviet instigation brought Afghanistan a half century of cruelty and pain.
As mentioned earlier, Communist Russia saw the gradual spread of Islam as a danger and inflicted cruelty to prevent this spread. It forbad Afghanis to worship, burned Qur'ans and murdered those who practiced their Islamic faith. But the invaders did not take into account one important point: Those with no faith at all cannot conceive of a believer's intimate relationship with God. They assume that by destroying holy books, they can make faith disappear too. But faith lies in the heart. Those who truly believe know that all the adversities they suffer are tests from God; therefore, they bear them patiently.
In the Qur'an (2: 155-157), God says to those who believe:
We will test you with a certain amount of fear and hunger and loss of wealth and life and fruits. But give good news to the steadfast: Those who, when disaster strikes them, say, "We belong to God and to Him we will return." Those are the people who will have blessings and mercy from their Lord; they are the ones who are guided.
As this verse states, the faithful are tested in many ways in this world, but in every difficulty they turn to God and ask His help. For this reason, no Muslim worries or feels hopeless in the face of the difficulties he encounters. On the contrary, he takes pleasure in the knowledge that God has revealed His promise in the Qur'an and that, in the hereafter, his joy will be overflowing.
The Philosophy behind Communist Savagery: The Bestialization of Human Beings
 COMMUNISM'S GOAL: TO BESTIALIZE HUMAN BEINGS Communists regard human beings as animals that must be controlled and believe that torture, starvation and intimidation are necessary to control the herd. This cruel ideology, an implementation of Darwinism, brought poor workers and peasants only more pain and cruelty than they had known under the Tsars. |
The 20th-century Communist lie, proposed by materialist philosophers like Marx and Engels, has been a death machine with an insatiable thirst for blood. Communism has committed terrible crimes, submitting human beings to social pressures, fear, exile, torture, labor camps, famine, and slaughter. But in order not to experience this same savagery again in the future, we must consider its true cause. Is it merely a question of the cruelty and personal ambition of dictators like Lenin and Stalin? Or of the implementation of a Darwinist-based Communist ideology?
As you'll see, the second alternative is the correct one. Savagery is the evident, natural result of the Communist idea that a human being is just another "species." As Marx never tired of pointing out, Communism is based on Darwin's theory of evolution, which describes human beings as advanced animals and which suggests that conflict and struggle among peoples, oppression, cruelty, use of force are natural and legitimate. If someone who accepts this philosophy has enough power and resources, he will find it easy to commit all kinds of cruelty. About this idea, The Black Book of Communism has this to say:
Putting people to death required a certain amount of study. Relatively few people actively desire the death of their fellow human beings, so a method of facilitating this had to be found. The most effective means was the denial of the victim's humanity through a process of dehumanization. As Alain Brossat notes: "The barbarian ritual of the purge, and the idea of the extermination machine in top gear are closely linked in the discourse and practice of persecution to the animalization of the Other, to the reduction of real or imaginary enemies to a zoological state."
Alain Brossat [French philosopher, author] recalls that European shivarees and carnivals had begun a long tradition of the animalization of the other, which resurfaced in the political caricatures of the eighteenth century. This metamorphic rite allowed all sorts of hidden crises and latent conflicts to be expressed. In Moscow in the 1930s, there were no metaphors at all. The animalized adversary really was treated like a prey to be hunted, before being shot in the head. Stalin systemized these methods and was the first to use them on a large scale, and they were adopted by his heirs in Cambodia, China and elsewhere. But Stalin himself did not invent these methods. The blame should probably rest on Lenin's shoulders. After he took power, he often described his enemies as "harmful insects," "lice," "scorpions," and "bloodsuckers."51
As Marx, Engels and Lenin emphasized many times, Communist savagery is nothing more than the implementation of Darwinism's view that humans are merely animals.
 Red Army prisoners being treated like caged animals. |
According to Stéphane Courtois, research director of The National Scientific Research Center (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique-CNRS) in France and an expert in the history of Communism:
In Communism there exists a sociopolitical eugenics, a form of social Darwinism. In the words of Dominic Colas, "As master of the knowledge of the evolution of social species, Lenin decided who should disappear by virtue of having been condemned to the dustbin of history." From the moment that a decision had been made on a "scientific" basis (that is, based in political and historical ideology, as well as in Marxism-Leninism) that the bourgeoisie represented a stage of humanity that had been surpassed, its liquidation as a class and the liquidation of the individuals who actually or supposedly belonged to it could be justified.52
At the end of his comments, Courtois points out,
The roots of Marxist-Leninism are perhaps not to be found in Marx at all, but in a deviant version of Darwinism, applied to social questions with the same catastrophic results that occur when such ideas are applied to racial issues.53
Certainly it can be related: Communism is definitely rooted in Darwinism-not a "deviant version of Darwinism," but authentic Darwinism. The source of the ideas that humans beings are a species of animal, that history progresses through a natural and inevitable conflict, that no one is responsible for his actions is Charles Darwin. Darwin simply proposed the theory; the Communists implemented it. The bloody account of 20th-century Communism, which presents all the nonsense of dialectical materialism in the guise of "science," is in reality applied Darwinism.
28. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University
Press Cambridge, p. 125
29. Alex de Jonge, Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union,
William Collins Sons & Limited Co., Glasgow, 1987, p.33
30. Allan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, Fontana
Press, London, 1993, p.13
31. Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy, A History of the Russian
Revolution, p. 733
32. Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy, A History of the Russian
Revolution, p. 65
33. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 9
34. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p.166
35. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 148
36. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 172
37. Brian Moynahan, The Russian Century: A Photographic History
of Russia's 100 Years, Random House, New York, 1994, p.152
38. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 166-167
39. Dr. Dana Dalrymple, "The Great Famine in Ukraine," 1932-33,
Introduction
40. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 154
41. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow : Soviet Collectivization
and the Terror-Famine , Oxford University Press, New York, 1986, p. 138
42. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 9-10
43. Tzvetan Todorov, Au nom du peuple (Paris: L'Aube, 1992),
pp. 52-53
44. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 420
45. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 420 - 421
46. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 657 - 659
47. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 711-712
48. Michael Barry, La Resistance Afghane, du Grand Moghol à
l'invasion Soviètique, Paris, Flammarion, "Champs" series, 1989, p.314
49. Michael Barry, La Resistance Afghane, du Grand Moghol à
l'invasion Soviètique, Paris, Flammarion, "Champs" series, 1989, p.306-307
50. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 719
51. Alain Brossat, Un Communisme Insupportable, Paris, L'Harmattan,
1997, p.265
52. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p.750
53. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge,
p. 752