By Theodore Shoebat
In America, there is a rise of Marxist and National socialism amongst millennials and Gen. Zers. When we say socialism, we use the term acknowledging that there is a plethora of different interpretations of “socialism.” So, to clarify this from the beginning, when we bring up “socialism,” we will either put the words in between quotes or use the terms millennial socialism, Marxist Socialism, National Socialism, or Progressivist socialism. Moreover, in this article, we acknowledge the importance of having a balance between capitalism and government intervention for the prevention of the exploitation of the poor and for the assistance of the poor. We will not continue the common narrative and trope of the Right-wing and just bash the general term “socialism” and glorify capitalism as though capitalism does not deserve criticism or need not be constrained by the government. Rather, we will briefly present the Catholic position on the dangers of both capitalistic and socialistic ideologies, the necessity for a harmony between private rights and the arm of the state against injustices, and give my viewpoint on the darwinistic nature of such nefarious worldviews.
This trend towards “socialism,” be it Marxist or Nationalist, is a vicious movement with reverence for Sodom, infanticide and a dangerous hatred for the wealthy. A surge in millennial socialism is reflected in the electoral situation in the east coast of the United States. In May of 2018, three women, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, gained primary election victories. These were Summer Lee, Sara Innamorato and Elizabeth Fiedler. Also, you had what took place in New York with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez winning an election for U.S. Representative for New York’s 14th congressional district.
Since the 2016 presidential victory of Donald Trump, the membership for the Democratic Socialists of America has boomed, from 7,000 members to more than 37,000. One recent pole shows that 61 percent of Democrats between 18 and 34 view “socialism” positively. What is happening is that with a rise in the Right-wing in the United States, there has sparked an inspiration for victory on the Leftist side of the political spectrum. When you have a Right-wing surge, it makes for an image of a rising enemy which is perfect for propaganda to provoke the Left to boost its numbers and market itself.
There is also the financial problems that a lot of millennials face. Most of them are in debt with school and house loans. With such a financial fetter wrapped around them, these young people, already entrenched in rebelliousness and vacuous of guidance, look to the image of Marx — with its trendy and hip appearing imagery of Che Guevara and the like — as an alternative. What so few people ever tell these millennials (and not even their parents will tell them this) is that the reason why so many of them are financially burdened is because, for one, their parents never helped them, in the name of “making them tough”; in turn, their parents allowed them to get loans from banks and become slaves to bankers (so, instead of “toughening them up”, they only made them slaves left to the mercy of the banks), and here you have an entire generation of slaves. The millennial zombies will then do what every past American generation has done, and that is to look up to government as the solution, and so they will revere another scam artist like Bernie Sanders as a savior.
Going all the way back to the independence of this country, the population of the United States has always had a habit of going to government as the solution to their problems. After America defeated the British empire, people already were working to raise taxes (so much for fighting over “taxation without representation”) and debtors were already voting for politicians who they thought would help relieve them of their debt. There was also a tremendous amount of corruption, lobbying and politicians running on points that would only please their constituents (there is nothing new under the sun), and not for the welfare of the nation. As the very reputable historian on the American revolutionary war, Gordon Wood, details:
Everywhere the gentry leaders complained of popular legislative practices that today are taken for granted — logrolling, horse-trading, and pork-barreling that benefited special and local interest groups. Each representative, grumbled Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, was concerned only with the particular interests of his electors. Whenever a bill was read in the legislature, “every one instantly thinks how it will affect his constituents.” Instead of electing men to office “for their abilities, integrity and patriotism,” the people, said Stiles, were much more likely to vote for someone “from some mean, interested, or capricious motive.” … Taxes in the states were two to three times higher than they had been before the Revolution, and many people were angry, especially since many of the taxes were laid directly on polls and property. Thus farmers in debt urged the lowering of taxes, or at least greater reliance on tariffs rather than direct taxes on persons and land; they also advocated the suspension of court actions to recover debts and the continued printing of paper money. …Merchants and creditors called for higher taxes on land in place of tariffs, less paper money, the protection of private contacts, and the encouragement of foreign trade. … Bondholders and those with money out on loan were especially vulnerable to inflation, which is why many leaders became so frightened by the paper money emissions and other debtor relief legislation passed by the state assemblies in the 1780s.” (Wood, Empire of Liberty, ch. 1, pp. 17-19, ellipses mine)
So, one can easily see that from the beginning of the United States’ existence there were people lobbying for “debtor relief legislation,” and today — just like then — politicians have been appealing to those in debt and enslaved to banks. The marketing of socialism as hip and trendy is not something new, but rather it is a reflection of the ways of American society that has existed since its beginning. In the twentieth century, socialist ideas were enveloped as “progressivism” or in a form of collectivism in which society is bound by the state. Marxism is becoming appealing, because we are a nation of slaves. As the Proverb says: “the borrower is servant to the lender.” (Proverbs 27:7)
A CATHOLIC POSITION
Catholicism means universalism, and it is indeed a collectivist religion, but it is so in the sense that humanity is one in Christ and His Kingdom. Collectivism is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. It would be a good thing for humanity to be united by the words of St. Paul: “There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” (Ephesians 4:4-6)
The problem is not collectivism by itself, rather it is the worldview under which the collectivism is governed. A Catholic collectivism is a good thing. The Catholic societies of Medieval Europe were collectivist societies that did not have the adulation of individualism that we have today. In fact, we would go so far as to say that there is no such thing as a society that is not collectivist. There is a reverence for an idea of individualism. But this individualism is more of an illusion than a reality. Human beings are naturally united by a common admiration for something, if not religion than fads. We pressure our piers to acquiesce to fads and trends. We apply peer pressure to one another to do certain things: to take a loan from the bank to ‘increase our credit,’; to go to university to ‘find ourselves’; to not get married because ‘we have our whole lives ahead of us for that’; to enslave ourselves to banks; to have a lawn in front of our houses and to mow it; to pledge allegiance to a flag; to revere the military and at times to not question its actions; we will even go so far as to pressure one another to embrace Sodom when sodomites have become a trend. This is the modern collectivism, where people are coerced to conform to a set of ideas, while proudly exclaiming a position of “individualism.” There is no such thing as individualism. We are all pushed into the zeitgeist — the spirit of the age — while we are told that we are individuals.
There is nothing wrong with a society conforming to a set of beliefs and traditions, as long as these things are good. In Christian collectivist thought, there is no such thing as a society “without class” as the Marxist fantasize about, but rather there is an embracing of the natural state of man, where differences of talents, abilities and socioeconomic position, are accepted as contributions to the betterment of humanity. All members have not the same office, and having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us (Romans 12:4,6), with a diversity of gifts comes a diversity of benefits. The advocates of Marxist Socialism pursues a utopia where there is no rich nor poor, while Christ says: You will always have the poor with you (Matthew 26:11). In Christian doctrine there is no push for a hatred between the classes, but rather there is an acknowledgment of class differences, an appreciation for their own gifts, and an understanding of the necessity for justice and harmony between the classes.
The Scripture speaks of the wicked and lazy servant (Matthew 25:26), and it also says:
“Better is a dry morsel with quietness,
Than a house full of feasting with strife.” (Proverbs 17:1)
It does not argue for a sentiment of superiority between the classes — such as, ‘The poor are better than the rich,’ or ‘the Rich are better quality people than those of lower financial status’ — rather it exhorts all people, of all classes, to better themselves morally and spiritually, and to use their gifts for good, for justice and peace. As the Proverb reads:
“Better is the poor who walks in his integrity
Than one perverse in his ways, though he be rich.” (Proverbs 28:6)
Christ declares: You cannot serve God and mammon. (Matthew 6:24) But if a wealthy man does good with his wealth, then he is not serving mammon. Rather he is like that “rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who himself had also become a disciple of Jesus.” (Matthew 27:57) It is not about rich or poor, but about what the rich and poor do for each other, and thus what they do to please God. The blessings on a society come from the beauty of the diversity of gifts. But there is an insidious drive destroying all class differences in a chimerical vision of complete equality, where men are like a mass of units working for “the common good,” that is, the financial condition of ‘the community.’
There is an inequality that is imposed by despotism, and there is an “equality” that can also be imposed, and its always done by those who make the loudest screams against inequality. They will try to force Jerusalem to be equal with Sodom, only to coerce the former to be subservient to the latter in a conniving manner of simply placing good in a position inferior to evil. Inequality still continues, only this time it is toxic inequality, one where Bar-Jesus (a Jewish wizard in the Book of Acts) is given an audience and St. Paul is exiled. It is this time of imposed “equality” that ushers in a society of masses working for power of finances rather than moving in harmony for the betterment of humanity’s soul. This is what Pope Pius XII warned against when he wrote:
“In a people worthy of name, those inequalities which are not imposed by arbitrary will but arise from the very nature things, inequalities of culture, fortune, social position — without prejudice, of course, to justice and mutual charity — oppose no obstacle whatever to the existence and prevalence of a genuine spirit of common fellowship and brotherhood. Indeed, far from impairing civic equality in any way, they give that equality its true meaning, which is, that in the eyes of the State every man has the right honourably to live his own personal life, in the situation and circumstances in which the plans and dispositions of divine Providence have placed him.
Such is the democratic ideal of liberty and equality in a people whose government is in honest and provident hands. But what a contrast when we turn to a democratic State given over to the arbitrary will of the mass! Here liberty, instead of being a personal moral right, degenerates into a tyrannical claim to give free scope to impulse and human passion at others’ expense. Equality is degraded to a mechanical process of leveling and to a colorless uniformity; the true sense of honour, personal activity, respect for tradition, dignity—everything, in a word, that gives life its true value, sinks out of sight and disappears. Nothing survives except, on the one hand, disillusioned victims, deluded by an outward semblance of democracy which they had artlessly mistaken for its true spirit, for its liberty and equality; and, on the other, the more or less numerous profiteers who, by the power of wealth or by means of organization, have contrived to assure a privileged position for themselves and even to gain complete power over the remainder.” (Democracy and Peace, 1.17)
A people who acknowledge their gifts and live a life in which human beings work within their own place and in their own way, and understand their own responsibilities and honor their convictions, are people of true liberty. Whereas those who have become a mass within the chimera of false equality, in the words of Pius XII, “waits to be impelled from without, and, like a plaything at the free disposal of anyone who chooses to exploit its instincts and impressions, is ready to change its allegiance from day to day.” (Ibid, 1.14)
How has the United States caused revolutions in countries it wishes to destabilize? By exploiting the inner tensions and dysfunctions of those countries. An example of this is when the CIA, wanting to remove Mohammad Mosaddegh from power in Iran, even pretended to be socialists and nationalists, threatening Muslim leaders with “savage punishment if they opposed Mossadegh,” making the Muslim masses think that Mosaddegh was an enemy of the Muslim people. This accelerated the polarization of society and made a revolution much easier to facilitate. There are ideologies that are used by powerful entities to split countries apart and bring them closer to violence. What Marxist and National Socialists do is bring about violent division in society and between countries. Marxists exploit tensions between rich and poor; National Socialists take advantage of animosities between different tribes. This is the evils of these ideologies. The evil is not having the state give welfare to assist the poor, single mothers or the unemployed; the evil is not a richer nation giving aid to a poorer country. These are not evils. The evil of these ideologies is their exploitation of people, their use of people as slaves, their violent hatred and enmities, their pushing of others to do violence to their fellow men. That is the evil.
There is nothing contrary to Christianity for the state to assist the poor, or for a wealthy country to help a poorer country. Even Pius XII acknowledges this when he says:
“It is only by a rational and generous exchange of resources between the strong nations and the weak that a state of world-wide peace will become possible, and all centres of conflagration and infection, which might give rise to new conflicts, be eliminated.” (The Rights of Man, iv)
There is nothing contrary to Christianity to criticize capitalism. Indeed, there are abuses that occur within a capitalist context (just look at Trump’s use of his financial influence to seize the property of others), and the Church expresses condemnation against both the evils of Marxist Socialism and capitalism, and also acknowledges the need for a balance between private financial wealth and that which pertains to the necessities of the society. To reference Pius XII:
“Guided always by religious motives, the Church has condemned the various systems of Marxist socialism, and she condemns them still today, for it is her permanent duty and right to save men from currents of thought and from influences which jeopardizes their eternal salvation. But the Church cannot fail to know and to perceive that the worker, in his efforts to improve his condition, finds himself confronted by a system which, far from being conformable with nature, is contrary to the order established by God and to the purpose which He has assigned to earthly goods. …When God blessed our first parents He said to them: ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.’ And to the first father of a human family He said later: ‘In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread.’ Therefore the dignity of the human person normally demands the right to the use of earthly goods as the natural foundation for a livelihood; and to that right corresponds the fundamental obligation to grant private property, as far as possible, to all. The positive laws regulating private property may change and may grant a more or less restricted use of it; but if such legal provisions are to contribute to the peaceful state of the community, they must save the worker, who is or will be the father of a family, from being condemned to an economic dependence or slavery irreconcilable with his rights as a person. Whether this slavery arises from the tyranny of private capital or from the power of the State makes no difference to its effects; indeed under the oppression of a State which controls everything and regulates the whole of public and private life, which encroaches even upon the sphere of thought, conviction, and conscience, this lack of freedom may have consequence even more disastrous, as experience shows.” (The Rights of Man, ii)
A regulation of the power of private wealth for the betterment of society and for prevention of monopolies, as well as freedom to exercise the right to private property, is maintained in Catholic thought. An acknowledgement of the reality of classes and different socio-economic conditions is also within Catholicity. There is no rush to destroy classes, because you will always have rich and you will always have poor. This is contrary to the radical socialistic views of Karl Marx who said:
“Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.”
The erasing of classes is an impossibility. You will always have poor, rich, people in the middle, and an elite class. A socialist revolution only will make a new class of poor and a new elite.
What makes socialistic systems evil is not necessarily their emphasis on welfare. “For”, writes Pius XII, “it is the proper duty of the State and of politics to assure for families of every class in the community the conditions in which they can develop as economic, juridicial, and moral units.” (Women’s Duties in Social & Political Life, ii) What clearly indicates the evil of an ideology is its view on the value of humanity as solely something of utility for some kind of temporal gain. As Pius XII said: “During the past decades a damaging economic policy subordinated the whole of civil life to the profit motive; today a conception rules which is no less detrimental to society, regarding as it does everything and everybody from the standpoint of utility to the State, to the exclusion of all ethical and religious considerations.” (The Rights of Man, i) Pius XII also openly criticized excessive capitalism:
“And what of a regime in which capitalism is dominant? Does it offer a prospect of real welfare for woman? We have no need here to describe the economic and social consequences of this system. You know its characteristic signs and you yourselves labour under the burden it imposes: the excessive crowding of the population unto the cities; the ever-growing and all-invading power of big business; the difficult and precarious condition of other industries, especially the crafts and even more especially agriculture; the disquieting spread of unemployment.” (Women’s Duties in Social & Political Life, i)
The Church criticizes excessive capitalism just as it abhors Marxism. Just because someone criticizes capitalism does not mean that they are communists. We must have a balanced view between capitalism and socialism, and not be extreme on both sides. The problem with a socialistic system is not giving money to assist the poor; the problem with capitalism is not someone becoming wealthy from his own work. Rather, it is the Darwinistic viewpoint that the extremists of these systems have regarding humanity. Both the fanatic socialists and the extreme capitalists have a “survival of the fittest” mentality. Herbert Spencer, the coiner of the term, “survival of the fittest,” taught:
“Society advances where its fittest members are allowed to assert their fitness with the least hinderance, and where the least fitted are not artificially prevented from dying out.”
Marxist socialism is predicated upon Darwin’s work. Marx himself wrote in 1860:
“These last four weeks, I have read all sorts of things. Among others, Darwin’s book on natural selection. Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis on natural history for our view.”
And in 1861, Marx wrote:
“Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.”
Radical socialist ideas and Darwinism are inseparable. Pius XII made an observation similar to this when he pointed out: “Some imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution, which has not been fully proved even in the domain of natural sciences, explains the origin of all this, and audaciously support the monistic and pantheistic opinion that the world is in continual evolution. Communists gladly subscribed to this opinion so that, when the souls of men have been deprived of every idea of a personal God, they may the more efficaciously defend and propagate their dialectical materialism.” (Of the Human Race, 5)
Adolf Hitler, the most infamous eugenist, was also a staunch socialist who had this to say about Marxist socialism:
“We did not defend Germany against Bolshevism back then because we were not intending to do anything like conserve a bourgeois world or go so far as to freshen it up. Had communism really intended nothing more than a certain purification by eliminating isolated rotten elements from among the ranks of our so-called ‘upper ten thousand’ or our equally worthless Philistines, one could have sat back quietly and looked on for a while.”
Hitler, like Marx, also envisioned the removal of all classes:
“We have endeavored to depart from the external, the superficial, endeavored to forget social origin, class, profession, fortune, education, capital and everything that separates men, in order to reach that which binds them together.”
The prominent National Socialist, Gregor Strasser, affirmed:
“We are socialists. We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalistic economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money, instead of their responsibility and their performance, and we are determined to destroy this system whatever happens.”
Notice what Strasser focuses on when it comes to people: “their performance”. This is because, while they had lots of rhetoric in support of ‘removing classes’ and against “exploitation of the economically weak,” they judged people by how much they could work themselves in camps or be experimented on.
Victims of human experimentations were called “pigs” by the Nazis. When Georg August Weltz was having people forced into freezing cold water, he would write: “alcohol in pigs does not increase or accelerate the loss of warmth.” When he wrote one time of a “large pig,” Weltz was in fact referring to a Polish Catholic priest named Leo Michalowski who suffered through and survived these experiments (See Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip, ch. 7, pp. 128-129). Human beings are seen solely for their expediency and utility. Its like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, a saying of whom was: “Keeping new people is no benefit … Losing them is no loss.” Such words are similar to what came out of the frothing mouth of Valdimir Lenin, the face of the Bolshevik Revolution (which is financed and backed by the German government), who stated: “There is no morality in politics. There is only expediency.”
He indeed saw humans as expedient when he had 10,000 people butchered in Georgia and 50,000 people exiled to Siberia. Going beyond all of the emotionalism of helping the peasants, Lenin expressed his true objective when he exclaimed in a speech: “What we want is power! Power that is limited by nothing!” He turned to his men and said: “We want a merciless mass terror against all enemies of the Revolution!” With Lenin, it was not about reforming the government for the cause of justice, but for slaughtering those who opposed his ways: “We do not need justice. We need the annihilation of all counter-revolutionaries.” (See Brownwell, The First Nazi, ch. 6, pp. 101-105)
Seeing people being annihilated as something is innate within Marxist ideology. Friedrich Engels, the one who collaborated with Karl Marx in the development for their world order, wrote in 1849:
“The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”
Genocide is the inevitable result of extreme Marxist or National Socialist control of a society. There is indeed a connection between extreme socialism and Nazi ideology. Hitler himself admitted this when he said regarding National Socialism: “From the camp of bourgeois tradition, it takes national resolve, and from the materialism of the Marxist dogma, living, creative Socialism”. So National Socialism was simply socialism for “the volk” or ‘the race,’ with a Marxist envisioning of a classless society, while Marxism focused more on a war between the proletariat and the wealthy.
Eugenics and Progressivist socialism go hand in hand. Sidney Webb, a pioneer behind the Fabian Socialist movement, affirmed that you could not separate eugenics from his ideology. “No consistent eugenist,” he explained, “can be a ‘Laissez Faire’ individualist unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere!”
The wicked shall say:
Let us oppress the righteous poor man;
let us not spare the widow
or regard the gray hairs of the aged.
But let our might be our law of right,
for what is weak proves itself to be useless. (Wisdom 2:10-11)
There is a system of government assistance to the poor that is a good thing, but then there is a conspiracy for a collectivist system against human liberty and for the slaughter of the innocent. Bernie Sanders, probably the most famous of present day America’s open “socialists,” backs partial birth abortion and has a post on his website entitled, “Abortion is Health Care”, which means socialism being done for infanticide. The Medicare for All Act which Sanders introduced in 2017 also covers abortion since, in his eyes, it is “healthcare.” Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, backed the bill calling it “a groundbreaking advancement for a simple truth: we will never solve our healthcare crisis until women have full access to reproductive services,” in other others, a socialism for the funding of infanticide which coincides with the darwinist nature of Marxist drives.
What is the boost in popularity for materialistic or Darwinistic socialistic ideas indicate? The trend towards Marxist socialism does not only mean a trend towards socialism amongst the Left, but also amongst the Right as well. Right-wing style socialism, given our materialist society, would mean a rise in Darwinistic Nationalist Socialism. An increase in one political sentiment means a rise of the competing side. A boost for Marxism means a boom for National Socialism.
It is the rise of merciless in the name of might makes right. As the Tuareg song, Ténéré Tàqqàl, sings:
The strongest impose their will
And leave the weakest behind
Many have died battling for twisted ends.
And joy has abandoned us
Exhausted by all this duplicity.
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