No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist.
Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931)
Before he became a famed author of children’s books in the 1930s, Arthur Ransome spent five years in Russia as a British correspondent for the Guardian newspaper. During those years, he witnessed the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the Bolshevik Revolution, all with unprecedented access to the revolution’s perpetrators, including Lenin, Trotsky and Karl Radek whose secretary Ransome eventually married. It was a brutal, bloody and formative period in modern history led primarily by Vladimir Lenin whose powerful influence, Ransome believed, would come to be regarded as the greatest in world history, eclipsing that of Peter the Great, Napoleon and even Adolf Hitler.
That conviction was reinforced when he attended Lenin’s eerie funeral in 1924.
“I had the curious feeling that I was present at the founding of a new religion,” Ransome recalled. He also recounts a conversation with Lenin that haunted him for the rest of his life. It began when Ransome expressed doubts that, despite what he`d witnessed in Russia, the Communist revolution would ever happen in England. To which Lenin chillingly replied:
“We have a saying that a man may have typhoid while still on his legs,” Lenin said. “Twenty, maybe thirty years ago, I had abortive typhoid and was going about with it, had had it some days before it knocked me over. Well, England and France and Italy have caught the disease already. England may seem to you untouched, but the microbe is already there.”
What Lenin was speaking of was the pernicious Communist virus designed to infect the mind and soul of every person who entertains it. As such, it’s had many names and permutations over the years: Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Socialism, Soviet Communism, Chinese Communism, Liberalism, Progressivism and so on.
It’s also had many goals: the obliteration of God, the deification of science, the overturning of the natural law and its social order and the reduction and enslavement of humankind. And its many tools, used to advance its agenda, include environmentalism, evolutionism, secularism, feminism, racialism, humanism and pan-sexualism – that portmanteau of sexual theories contrary to the natural law.
Lenin’s prediction
Lenin’s prediction to Ransome – that the Communist virus was already infecting the post-World War I world in a permanent way – was demonstrated again this month at a gathering in Ottawa promoting the revolutionary Leap Movement, spawned by the Leap Manifesto of Canadian activists Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis. Courage to Leap was the title of the February 15th event. It coincided with the opening of the NDP convention and on hand to promote the cause was prominent disrupter Becky Bond, senior adviser to Bernie Sanders and co-author of Rules for Revolutionaries.
As for the Manifesto itself, it’s a declaration calling for sweeping policies to deal with global problems such as climate change, income inequality, an end to all pipelines and international trade deals, and calls for a national child care program along with studies into a basic, guaranteed income.
None of this is accidental, of course, as Leap activists can be expected to impose pressure on the NDP party and its new leader Jagmeet Singh to push even further Left, thereby further jeopardizing Canada`s oil industry, now suffering under the interference of environmental activists oblivious to the disastrous consequences of their ideology on the economy.
And here again is another example of this anti-human ideology in action, as it boasts humanitarian concerns while camouflaging itself in the language of science, a tactic it’s been using for more than a century. A tactic referenced by Pius XI in Divini Redemptoris (1937) and anticipated nearly a century earlier by Pius IX who had already spotted this noxious cloud looming on the horizon. Hence his 1846 encyclical Qui Pluribus in which he solemnly condemned “the infamous doctrine of so-called communism which is absolutely contrary to the natural law itself, and if once adopted would utterly destroy the rights, property and possessions of all men and even society itself.”
And what timing! Not only did Pius IX’s condemnation come two years before the publication of Marx & Engel’s Communist Manifesto in 1848, it forecast in detail the true nature of what was coming: “A very bitter and fearsome war against the whole Catholic commonwealth (is) being stirred up by men bound together in a lawless alliance. … They are experienced and skillful in deceit, which they use to set in motion their plans to quench peoples’ zeal for piety, justice and virtue, to corrupt morals, to cast all divine and human laws into confusion, and to weaken and even possibly overthrow the Catholic religion and civil society. They teach that the most holy mysteries of our religion are fictions of human invention, and that the teaching of the Catholic Church is opposed to the good and the prerogatives of human society. They are not even afraid to deny Christ Himself and God.”
How prescient. And how utterly contemporary!
Later on, Leo XIII – who’d also watched the advance of this atheistic philosophy of the Industrial Age which sought to divorce science from the Faith and the very life of Holy Mother Church – condemned it again in his 1878 Encyclical Quod Apostolici Muneris when he defined communism as “that fatal plague which insinuates itself into the very marrow of human society only to bring about its ruin.”
Lenin’s threat fulfilled
Thus it was that, from a great distance, the Catholic pontiffs had seen what was coming and how it eventually materialized in its full horror when Lenin and his Bolsheviks who, in the name of atheistic international communism, destroyed Russia’s royal family – an attack simultaneously symbolic and real – and plunged Mother Russia into an agony of blood and soul destruction from which it has yet to fully recover.
And the carnage continued under Stalin and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR 1922) until the body count had risen to well over 100 million people, millions of whom died after once prosperous farmers were forced to practice inefficient collective farming. And millions more were executed in political and religious purges simply for harbouring thoughts that contradicted the official Communist Party line.
Meanwhile, spectators inside and outside the USSR cheered the Soviets in their belief that with the aristocracy out of power, capitalists would no longer exploit workers and the ‘People’ would prosper together. How naïve. What the ‘People’ got instead were secret police, five year plans, food shortages and starvation, incompetent bureaucracy, religious and ideological purges, persecution and mass murder. For seventy years.
Then came the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the much ballyhooed collapse of the Soviet Union in 1993 which, in turn, gave rise to the Biggest Lie of the past century: That communism was dead.
And people believed it!
Soviet Collapse
What really happened was this: After the Soviet system collapsed under the staggering dysfunctionality of its atheism and iniquity, the West – long infiltrated and subverted by Leftist influences throughout Western culture – picked up the Marxist banner publicly, all the while pretending, like fish denying the existence of water, that the communism of old no longer existed.
Again, with predictable results: The entire West now appears to be failing and falling in the same way as the former USSR while its advocates, some sporting Che T-shirts and convinced of their own moral superiority, march into bondage after fighting hard for what they thought were essential ‘freedoms’. Such as banning prayer from their schools, secularizing the culture and the public square, aborting babies by the millions, extinguishing the home fires by sending women into the workplace and corrupting the entire society by encouraging wholly destructive sexual hedonism of every kind.
Never mind that Communism kills wherever it’s practiced and that, despite its myriad configurations, it has never worked, Never mind that its godless immorality hasn’t changed a bit as it continues to destroy. Millions still believe in the false promises of this lying ideology and all its Hydra-like bastards, despite all the evidence. Evidence that should prompt a sane person to kneel before God and ask forgiveness.
Lenin was right to think that international communism would prove triumphant, not because communism is a force for good but because it is a virulent spiritual virus that tempts and spreads like sin. Literally.
Not only is communism intrinsically evil, as Pius XI explained. Its enduring appeal rests largely in the fact that too few have been able to grasp its nature.“The majority instead succumb to its deception, skilfully concealed by the most extravagant promises,” Pius writes. “By pretending to desire only the betterment of the condition of the working classes… and by concealing when convenient the repulsive crudity and inhumanity of communist principles and tactics, the communist ideal wins over many of the better minded members of the community. Who, in turn, become apostles of the movement among the younger intelligentsia who are still too immature to recognize the intrinsic errors of the system. The preachers of communism are also proficient in exploiting racial antagonisms and political divisions and oppositions … And, taking advantage of modern agnostic science, they burrow into the universities where they bolster up the principles of their doctrine with pseudo-scientific arguments.”
Isn’t that exactly what’s happening even today?
Political Correctness
This deeply entrenched movement even has its own thought police known as political correctness which is actually a form of mental martial law wherein individuals made in the image and likeness of God, each with a soul who knows his Creator, censor their own words and thoughts to conform with the compulsory Leftist doctrines of the day, most of which focus on so-called equality which does not exist in nature and on so-called sexual liberation (read: unaccountable carnality) which has normalized behaviours once regarded as deviant.
Sadly too, those afflicted with this mentality soon become ruthless and often violent in service to their cause which seeks a new kind of human being – a quantum leap in the evolutionary process of Man into a higher species – and which can also justify unlimited brutality, even total annihilation, as no more immoral than stamping out the small pox virus.
All aided with money and with propaganda Pius XI described as ‘truly diabolical’: “It has at its disposal great financial resources, gigantic organizations, international congresses and countless trained workers. It makes use of pamphlets and reviews, of cinema, theatre and radio, of schools and even universities. Little by little it penetrates into all classes of the people and even reaches the better-minded groups of the community, with the result that few are aware of the poison which increasingly pervades their minds and hearts.”
Eighty years on, nothing has changed. Communism is not dead. It lives and still infects new generations of the gullible and the godless. This is the same ideology the Popes warned about and that infected the Bolsheviks and their progeny of the past century and is still playing a hugely successful role in the destruction of what was once known as Christendom. All with the assistance of today’s true believers – among them, a new generation of millennials who believe in Bernie Sanders-style socialism with little idea of what Socialism really is; university professors; and teachers from JK to high school who see no irony in their demands for a ‘diversity’ that tolerates no deviation from political correctness. Nor do they see the harm in identity politics as it continues to divide and fragment society into raging conflicts between the races and the sexes. Or the assault on gender relations and masculinity, resulting in an emasculated society too timid to defend itself.
All this tyranny – and yes, it’s tyranny – is the consequence of a wilfully blind insistence on fulfilling the goals of revolutionary Marxism/Leninism (and its many manifestations) without any rational analysis of the failed enterprise itself.
Marxism without Marx
This is Marxism without Marx. Leninism/Stalinism without Lenin or Stalin. The virus Lenin spoke of. Nor has the defeat of communism in the USSR and its satellites assured its defeat in the world. Instead, the release of the West from its conflict with the East appears only to have further emancipated utopian communism across the West. Which means that the struggle for the preservation of western civilization has entered a new —and far more dangerous — phase. And without a return to God, it has also entered the point of no return.
Bottom line: In its folly, the World, which has long ignored the many, hugely informed and informative papal warnings against Communism and all its godless bastards, has long been paying the price. Which means the World either returns to the Faith of Our Fathers or proceeds at its own peril.