A Democratic Republic Is the Worst System of Government...Except All The Others

Olivia Murray at the American Thinker today notes that As history has shown, communists always go for the churches first. Marx sneered that "religion is the opiate of the masses" meaning that the huddled poor comforted themselves that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. Marx was an atheist. And so are most of his followers.

Attacks against the Christian church and her people are nothing new. Christians in imperial Rome were fed to the lions and other wild beasts in the Colosseum, and they were burned alive on posts to light the streets—but what we saw in Minnesota was communism, through and through, as we’ve seen this same movie play out across time and place for more than a hundred years. Communists always go for the churches first.

In late 1917, the communist Bolsheviks overthrew imperial Russia, and just a few months later (January 23, 1918), Vladimir Lenin enacted the “Decree on the Separation of Church and State” (American leftists love that phrase still today), which was a systematic attack against the religious order of Tsarist Russia. That campaign promoted atheism as a core tenet of a new Bolshevik nation, and saw mass arrests, the confiscation of church property, and mass murders of religious teachers. (A few very interesting photos from the time can be found at this link, with one in particular looking eerily evocative of the smug mob that just barged into Cities Church in St. Paul, MN.) This war against the churches continued apace under Joseph Stalin, who, among other measures, ordered more mass killing against church leaders.

Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution waged a war on the “Four Olds” of traditional China, which included the destruction of Christian churches, and the prohibition of Christianity (a ban which effectively exists still today).

Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia during the 1970s intentionally decimated the Christian population. According to Persecution.org, Pol Pot “established a medieval regime of terror and restlessly hunted Christians.” The same site reveals that before the Khmer Rouge rose to power, there were around 170,000 Christians in Cambodia; in just a few years, that number dropped to a staggering low of only a couple thousand. Christians were “outsiders” accused of being too Western, so they had to go.

(I could go on with the anti-church policies of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, but I’m running out of room.)

Murray has noted every communist experiment with the exception of some of the smaller countries that have tried it. Then she asks a key question, one that gets to the heart of communism/socialism/progressivism/fabianism/fascism (the system has gone by many names, but they all come down to one reason.)

So why do communists hate the Christian church so much? It’s simple: Without an authority higher than man, they can be god. They want to be the moral arbiter, making moral claims on what’s right and wrong. So, the real moral arbiter (God), and anyone who believes in Him, is an obstacle to the communist and his political goals.

So, it is the original sin.  They want to dethrone God and sit in his place. They have listened to the Devil and are following his instruction and not God's. There is so much that is wrong with communism, I don't understand why people think it is better than our own system. Oh, I understand that ours isn't so great, but any other is worse, far worse.