Paul Kengor sets out in his newest book,“The Devil and Karl Marx” (TAN Books, 2020), to expose the fundamental conflict between religion and Marxism-Leninism, and he succeeds.
But the book, in the end, turns out to be both academic and utilitarian, applicable directly to what’s happening in the burned out and bloody streets of modern America in 2020 as it explains the push behind the current civil unrest that springs like a specter from the disaffected, lazy, and malignant brain of the founder of Communism himself, Karl Marx.
If anyone was willing not to take Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors at her word when she admitted she and co-founder Alicia Garza were “trained Marxists,” a read of Kengor’s engaging history of the Communist Party USA’s (CPUSA) strategic infiltration of American churches in the early part of the 20th Century should disabuse them of any doubt.
Because the same Trojan horse tactics used by both classical Marxists to bring atheism to America’s churches during the 1st Red Scare – deceit, feigned cooperation, secret agendas, fomenting of discord over class and race division, the perpetual search of a victim class, duping the masses into following the program, and many more – are now being used by cultural Marxists “in the vapid ideology of class warfare,” says Kengor, to overthrow the established order to achieve “fundamental transformation.”
Kengor, a university professor and noted Catholic writer, gives credit where its due and points out Marx (who, he noted, was miserably incompetent as an economist as every socialist nation can attest) understood the only way to dismantle the established order so everything old would perish (and that was ultimately, as painstakingly detailed in the book, Marx’s goal) was to go where the people are: the churches.
And Kengor makes no bones about the fact there can be no cooperation between Socialism/Communism with religion of any kind, but most especially with Christianity because Marxism – in all its forms – is militantly atheistic. Any attempt to sell it otherwise is a ruse to dupe potential converts, Kengor says.
Modern Marxists like Cullors et al, fed by 60s radicals handing down their affection for cultural Marxists like Marcuse and Gramsci, recognized says Kengor, “the Western world is comprised of legions of sycophants to the anonymous power of changing moods and current fashions.” He’s taking the idea directly from Joseph Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict XVI. Recognizing that, cultural Marxists took the cue from their elders and went to where the modern people are: universities, theaters, libraries, museums and encouraged discussion of topics such as sexual orientation and “critical” theory over worker’s rights and economic theory.
But the old goals are the same: fundamental transformation of the existing system.
What’s less clear – and Kengor noted it wasn’t clear to lazy old Marx himself – is what happens after the glorious revolution. History shows Communist Russia was run quite poorly indeed (hence all the killing), and Communist China seems beset by similar challenges.
Marx didn’t really offer a blueprint for how to lead utopia. In some of his earliest writings, the German revolutionary invokes his doomed soul, his pact with “the Prince of Darkness,” and his fondness for the words of Geothe’s Mephistopheles as he declares he simply wanted to “throw a gauntlet at the world and watch it crumble,” as Marx biographer Robert Payne notes, adding The Communist Manifesto was that gauntlet. From there, Marx would “wander through the kingdom of ruins.”
Using today’s vernacular, Marx might be called a man that simply wants to watch the world burn. And after the gauntlet is hurled and the burning turns to ash, Kengor says Marx apparently believed utopia would justcome.
Perhaps that’s what modern cultural Marxists leading the dupes in the street are expecting as well despite a whole history full of reasons to think otherwise. But they, like their ideological grandfather, are willing to toss the miserable gauntlet of destruction and wait and see.
The good news is the bulk of Kengor’s book details the Congressional testimonies of many ex-Communists who were questioned as to the extent of the CPUSA’s success during the controversial Second Red Scare of the 1950s, reminding readers America finally reacted to the attempted infiltration of its institutions. Some may argue the nation overreacted, but the result nonetheless was the turning of the tide against a poisonous ideology that would go on to kill millions. It remains to be seen if – and how -- it will be turned back this time.
Sarah Lee is a freelance writer and policy wonk living and working in Washington, DC.
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