The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception and Infiltration
Paul Kengor
Tan Books, 2020
xxiv + 461 pages
A more appropriate title for this book is The Devil and Marxism, since it only focuses on the “father” of communism for the first hundred pages or so. My guess is that the publishers wanted something punchy to move the books out of the Amazon warehouses. Regardless of the misnomer, this was an eye-opening read. I know a lot about Marxism. I have read a lot of Marx. I have read a lot of criticisms of Marxism. Yet, I only knew a bit about his personal life. I knew he was a lazy parasite who lived off his literary partner Engels. Yet, I had no idea how much of a scoundrel he was: brazenly mooching off anyone who would give him a penny whilst refusing to take up honest work; allowing his family to live in squalor; cheating on his wife, impregnating the maid and having his friend Engels claim paternity; dropping the N-word like a clansman; and spouting anti-Semitism which Herr Hitler would have nodded in approval, “Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.” None of this is speculation from the author. He is quoting directly from the father of communism. How surprising then that professors of the Left do not share this Karl Marx with their students at university. Surely some mistake!
As the title suggests, Kengor focuses his book on Marx’s and Marxism’s attack on religion, in particular Christianity. That Marx rejected God is obvious. That he embraced Satan as a teenager is less well known. Take for instance, a stanza from “The Pale Maiden” which the author examines along with Marx’s other verses:
Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited,
I know it full well.
My soul, once true to God,
Is chosen for Hell. (p. 51)
Lest a reader think that the author or I are cherry-picking data, let me state that Kengor spends over a dozen pages surveying this poetry. Was Marx a Satanist? Our author isn’t sure, though he mentions that some historians answer yes. What’s more important is the fact that “the theoretical-ideological utterances of the revolution have roots in the personal-private lives of the founders.” (p. 103)
Once he gives the reader a grounding in Marxist thought and Marx’s hatred of religion, Kengor takes us on a tour of communism’s war on religion: the murders, the tortures, the destruction of thousands of churches, the enslavement of priests and nuns; it’s all there, and any student familiar with Bolshevik Russia and the Eastern Bloc will find much that is familiar. Still, there were hair-raising stories of which I was wholly ignorant. For instance, the despicable torture of Christian seminarians at Pitesti prison in Romania was news to me. Kengor has done his readers a great service pulling together information from so many disparate sources; however, there are some things I want to forget:
Performances on religious subjects, black masses staged at Easter or Christmas, horrified the detainees. On such occasions, it was the theology students who were to suffer the most, dressed up as ‘Christs’, clothed in cassocks smeared with excrement. They were made to take ‘communion’ with urine and faeces, and instead of the Cross, a phallus was fashioned of soap, which all the others were made to kiss. Alongside them hymns were sung with scabrous words, in which the commonplaces were insults against Christ and the Virgin Mary. Sometimes the detainees would be stripped naked. (p. 132)
After taking us through the horrors at Pitesti, the author asks, “Who would say that the devil wasn’t present there at Pitesti?” Who indeed?
Once Kengor covers the long march of death, he delves into deception and infiltration. This is really the meat of the book and will be the less well known aspect of communism for many readers. Stalin and the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (formerly the Communist International) made it one of their goals to undermine, twist and distort Christianity in Western countries through infiltration and the manipulation of leftist priests and ministers. Although, the Cominform failed in cracking the Catholic Church, the had a lot of success with Protestant ministers in the United States. How do we know? Because some die-hard communists turned to Christ and testified to the US Congress. Ben Gitlow, a former Communist Party USA figure who served on the Executive Committee of the Soviet Comintern, stated the following when asked about communist methods of infiltration:
Certainly. The Russian Communists were the first to exploit ministers of the United States and through them, the church organizations, for the purpose of spreading propaganda in favor of Communist Russia and for the building up of a pro-Soviet sentiment among church people in America and among Americans generally.
I will, if I may, make mention of a few of the prominent American religious leaders who were used for that purpose in the early 1920’s: Dr. Kirby Page, Dr. Sherwood Eddy, Jerome Davis, Dr. Harry F. Ward, the Rev. Albert Rhys Williams, and others. In reference to Albert Rhys Williams, it is interesting to note his biography. Albert Rhys Williams was a graduate of the Hartford Theological Seminary. He was a minister and director of the Maverick Church and Forum of Boston, Mass. When he went to Russia he became a Communist and got a job as assistant in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in the Soviet Government. He became a secret member of the Communist Party of the United States. He worked for the Communists in preparing propaganda to foment a Communist revolution in Germany. He organized the International Legion in the Red Army.
In 1943 and 1944 Albert Rhys Williams, a paid agent of the Soviet Government, a secret member of the Communist Party, nevertheless, had such prominence in the United States that he became a lecturer at Cornell University for the years 1934 to 1944. He was also a contributing editor to the Survey Graphic, the leading magazine in the field of philanthropy and social service in the United States. (p 231)
Taken together, this is an important and unique book. Several historians have examined aspects of Marxism’s war on religion, and indeed the religious nature of Marxism itself, but I don’t think there is anything out there this comprehensive. Near the end of his work, Kengor takes us through two chapters on weirdos, radicals and pagans who hated Christ but loved Marx. I wasn’t aware how prominent Marxists were in the gay and paedophile communities. The author finishes with the misnamed phenomenon of “Cultural Marxism” and the influence of the Frankfurt School. Big surprise these Marxist professors, realising that the workers simply were not embracing communism, adopted the strategy of undermining Western Christian culture from within. Many were given cushy university posts once they were hounded out of National Socialist Germany. We are living with their legacy today.