Marxism today

The old story goes … Socialism-You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor. Communism-You have 2 cows. The government takes both and gives you some milk. Capitalism-You have 2 cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell the animals and help others.

During my trip a few months ago to Europe, I thought of the following phrases, “Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims” and “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It was chilling to hear for ten days the chilling results of generations believing the lies of Anti-God Marxist Philosophy. Brilliant scientists, musicians and people didn’t just wake up one day and say, “Let’s build gas chambers!” Yet, millions of dead bodies were spewn all over Europe in the last century because of ghastly lies. Today many young people and university professors are once again buying into the promised utopian dreams of Marxism having forgotten the horrors of the 20th century.

John Stonestreet said, “The false promises of Marxism are compelling. Utopias always are. But, as Os Guinness said … there’s always a gap between the utopia that is promised and the reality that is achieved. Throughout history, that gap is filled by violence, as those in power seek to force the world they envision. Marxism, when applied, is state-sponsored oppression in the form of technocratic rule, which is why Marxism has been responsible for the worst crimes in human history, though all in the name of a good cause.

When Vladimir Lenin came to St. Petersburg in April 1917, he preached “Peace, Land, and Bread!” What the people actually got was war, tyranny, and famine. In his short time in power, millions starved, millions more were killed in the civil war, and the rest lost what little freedoms they had, all in the name of “the Revolution!”

Between taking control in the 1920s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin slaughtered an estimated 20 million people…

China under Mao Zedong recorded the most deaths. He killed somewhere between 45 and 65 million of his own people … His “Cultural Revolution” enshrined the worst kinds of intolerance, suppression, and torture imaginable.

Everywhere Marxism has been tried, the story is the same. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot murdered as many as three million Cambodians, or 25% of their entire population. The Ethiopian famine of the early 80s was the result of flawed Marxist practices. From the thousands of students killed at Tiananmen in 1989 to the 2020 suppression of protests in the once free city of Hong Kong, China’s Marxism always returns to tyranny.”

My walk through Dachua Concentration Camp, Hitler’s Eagles Nest, the beaches of Normandy and Winston Churchill’s War Room shook me to the bones and reminded me, “Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims” and “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Righteousness exalts a nation (Prov. 14:34)

Chaplain  Michael Srague