NavigoArmatus.com

October 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik communist revolution in Russia. That led of course to the creation of the Soviet Union, and that as it now turns out in any honest retrospect is one of the darkest chapters of human history. We are looking at the 20th century representing as one major historian has called the century of megadeath, and at the center of that megadeath is the great lie and deception, the great evil that was the communist revolution and the communist regime in the Soviet Union. And now it is high time that Americans amongst others consider honestly the legacy of that Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and remind ourselves of some of the necessary lessons to be learned.

First of all, we need to remind ourselves that the Bolshevik Revolution, that communist revolution of October 1917, did not come out of a vacuum; it didn’t come out of the blue. It came in the context of enormous social unrest and a lack of confidence in the autocratic monarchy of czarist Russia. So, we were looking at one of the crucial hinges of history, the end of one age, the age of autocratic totalitarian monarchies — in this case represented by the czarist in the Romanov dynasty — and we were seeing the hinge turn towards revolution, and in this case a revolution that if anything was even more horrifying than the totalitarian monarch that it replaced. But, of course, in the midst of all this tumult there was a great deal of confusion, and we also have to recognize that the 19th century was in so many ways the century of revolution. Some of those revolutions would harken back to the American Revolution in the 1770s. Some of them would look back to the French Revolution in the early 19th century. Some of them would look to the revolutions that took place in the middle of the 19th century, almost all of them abortive and almost all of them tragic in terms of their outcome. But there was a revolutionary spirit in the air, and it was aided and abetted by the emergence of new ideas and by a worldview, a worldview that was promoted most famously by Karl Marx and by his co-author Frederick Engels, it was the worldview of communism. A worldview that, remember, was described and is rightly described as dialectical materialism. The very idea of communism, the very idea of Marxism, is a denial of the reality of God and an affirmation of the accidental nature of the universe; a denial of the supernatural, and instead an affirmation of the essentially material. That dialectical materialism was based in an intentionally atheistic and godless worldview. That meant that as Marx understood all of the old morality would disappear with all of the old social structures. In the famous words of Marx, “All that is solid melts into air,” and with those words Marx did not mean merely the economic and political structures, even merely the social structures, he meant the entire structure of truth, of being, and of morality that had shaped Western civilization. Marx was absolutely confident that the masses would demand a Marxist revolution worldwide. He had, even in his own secular worldview, as every secular worldview eventually must have, an eschatology. His eschatology promised the emergence of a new age of communism, the emergence of the new communist man; a newly liberated human being who would be liberated by revolution, he would be liberated by a revolution that would eventually lead to a dictatorship as a temporary condition in which the old system had to be broken down, but a dictatorship of the Communist Party that would give way once that eschatological promised utopian reality of the emergence of the new communist humanity had come.

But, of course, as it turned out, the Communist Party, the communist regime in Soviet Russia turned out never to deliver on that promise of the emergence of the New Age of communism; never to deliver on that promise of the emergence of a new communist humanity. Instead, what was supposed to be that brief interregnum of a necessary dictatorship in the name of the people to give way to this utopian reality, instead, it was the dictatorship and the dictators who remained. And of course the communist revolution came about by violence and it came about on a premise of lies, and, yet another thing we need to note is how many Westerners, including even many Americans, thought that when they saw the Soviet revolution they were seeing the future. Famously, one of these Western observers made the statement “I have seen the future, and it works.”

But of course as it turned out that future didn’t work, it wasn’t actually even the future, and the future that did come was a murderous future. We are looking at the fact that Soviet communism almost surely lead to well over 100 million deaths. Add to that about 300 million deaths either by direct action or by starvation that came in the wake of the Maoist communist revolution in China. It’s also important for us to recognize that those deaths were often excused by academics, historians, and other forms of professors who argued that they were simply necessary in order to bring about the revolution. One of the most infamous of these was the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who as late as 1994 said in an interview that, if another 20 million deaths had been necessary to achieve the socialist utopia, then 20 million deaths would simply have been necessary.

In an important article that appears just this week at National Review, Douglas Murray points to a study, a survey conducted in Great Britain, a survey of young people in the age 16 to 24 bracket, and it turns out that even as at least the oldest in that age bracket would have been alive at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, less than 50 percent of those British young people even knew the name of Vladimir Lenin. Seventy percent of those British young people said they had never heard the name Mao, that is the Chinese communist dictator. But what we’re looking at here is the fact that this is a history if unknown that is dangerously unknown, and we are looking at one of the most historic milestones of our times, the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in the Soviet Union. We can look with some satisfaction to the fact that that communist regime failed. The Communist Party’s failure was so spectacular that the Soviet empire fell apart; it crumbled from within, but we also have to note that even as Americans and other Westerners were then celebrating what we thought was the inevitable triumph of democracy that communist autocracy in the Soviet Union wasn’t followed by any kind of lasting or stable democracy; it was followed by what might be considered the feudal totalitarian dictatorship of now Vladimir Putin.

There were keen prophets of the Soviet Union back during the age of its heyday, especially perhaps during the Cold War, the second half of the Soviet Union’s bitter and barbaric experience, but one of the things we need to note is that the most accurate and the most influential of those critics were operating out of an explicitly Christian worldview. One of the most famous of those was the prophetic Russian man of literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who eventually won the Nobel Prize for literature and whose prophetic writings indicted the moral cancer at the very heart of the Soviet Union. And then in one of the most interesting historical turns, Solzhenitsyn, who was exiled from the Soviet Union and was received as a heroic figure in the United States, was invited — no doubt to the regret of the inviters — to speak at Harvard University, and there at the center of American secular thought, it was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who looking at the ruins of the history of the 20th century said to the audience at Harvard, you ask how all this could’ve happened. “Men have forgotten God,” said Solzhenitsyn. That’s how all this has happened.

But those who are seeking to think in terms of a Christian worldview are reminded, as Richard Weaver famously reminded us, “ideas have consequences.”

Ideas always have consequences. Good ideas have good consequences; bad ideas have bad consequences; deadly ideas have deadly consequences. And one of the most deadly ideas in human history is the deadly idea of communism. A deadly idea made deadly by the atheism that is celebrated at it’s very heart, an atheism that was coerced and enforced, even at the point of death in terms of communist regimes. An atheism that even now as demonstrated by the monomaniacal atheism of the regime, the communist regime, of North Korea. The atheism that is even now enforcing a crackdown on Christians in the communist regime of China. We dare not allow the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the most important worldview tests of humanity in the 20th century, a test that so many millions of human beings failed, and of which so many hundreds of millions of human beings were its victims, we dare not fail to observe this 100th anniversary with the amazing reflection upon the fact that that communist regime is no more, but that one set of political demons is often followed by yet another set of political demons. There is no assurance that history is necessarily moving in our direction. And then there is the humbling realization that communism isn’t dead. Just look again at China or North Korea. Look at the fact that the Chinese Communist Party even this week is resurgent and is enforcing its party doctrine in China, not lessening the hold of Chinese communism on the people or on the regime. And of course this comes with the realization that the worst ideas come with the worst consequences. The deadliest ideas come with the deadliest consequences. And of the fact that bad ideas are not only bad, evil ideas are not only evil, but they tend to stay around for a very long time. Their affects long outlasting the death of their promises.