Tangents

An interesting article by Vox Day, whose views sometimes align with those of Catholicism. Check out the entire article on-line for links to the other articles he cites.

Communist deniers

Over the course of the last week, I have been engaging in a debate of the theory of evolution by natural selection with a biology teacher and evolutionary enthusiast named Scott Hatfield. It has been an interesting and civil debate and you can read two of my primary posts here and here, while two of Mr. Hatfield's more recent ones are here and here.

But one disturbing tangent that has come out of these debates is the shocking tendency of some evolutionists to attempt to disavow the significant historical impact that Darwin's dangerous idea had on some of history's most dangerous men. While the National Socialist enthusiasm for evolution-inspired eugenics is too well known to be credibly disputed, the direct link between Darwin and communism is less well understood. Devious evolutionists have been quick to exploit this general ignorance in an attempt to distance Darwin and his theory of evolution from the crimes of the communist killers of the previous century.

In doing so, they are following the dishonest lead of some of the more shameless atheists, such as Sam Harris, whose lies on behalf of his atheism stand in more blatant contrast to the historical record than those of any Holocaust denier. Like Lady MacBeth, these atheists and evolutionists frantically attempt to scrub and scrub away at the historical record, desperate to wash the blood of tens of millions off the hands of their stained ideologies. But it will not work, not so long as man remains literate.

The atheism of communist killers such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Choibalsan and dozens of other mass-murderous rulers is unquestionable. Explaining how their atheism was the causal factor of their lethal actions is a matter I shall address in detail at a later date. In this column, I am content to demonstrate that Darwinism was, and is, a core element of Marxist ideology.

Lenin declared that the three component parts of Marxism were "German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism", while its fundamental philosophy was "materialism." This is why Marxism is often described as dialectical materialism and why Darwin was so highly valued by the Marxists and post-Marxian communists. Marxist theoreticians considered Darwinian evolutionary theory to be the most powerful argument for materialism as well as the direct inspiration for the German philosophy component, specifically Hegelian dialectics.

Pedants think the dialectic is an idle play of the mind. In reality it only reproduces the process of evolution, which lives and moves by way of contradictions.
– Leon Trotsky, introduction to "The History of the Russian Revolution, Volume Two"

Darwin was not a Marxist himself, of course, nor even a socialist. His communist-denying defenders point this out and attempt to argue that since capitalism is a form of survival of the fittest, Darwinism is essentially capitalist and therefore entirely anti-socialist. This argument is interesting in that it appears superficially reasonable while demonstrating a near complete ignorance of both evolution and socialism. But Stalin ridiculed the maleducated individual who makes these sorts of arguments when describing the development of socialism in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific."

In the many explanatory additions I have made here, I have had in mind not so much the workers as the "educated" readers ... who are governed by the irresistible impulse to demonstrate again and again in black and white their frightful ignorance and their consequently understandable colossal misconception of socialism. ... Such readers will also be surprised to encounter the Kant-Laplace cosmogony, modern natural science and Darwin, classical German philosophy and Hegel in a sketch of the history of the development of socialism.

Marx declared socialism to be the inevitable result of capitalism. One of Lenin's primary challenges was to explain how socialism could possibly appear in a pre-capitalist society like Russia. Mao faced the same theoretical problem with socialism in China. But in any case, to argue that socialism is anti-capitalist is simply incorrect; speaking in proper Marxist, Leninist or Maoist terms, it is post-capitalist.

Like Darwin, Hegel was no Marxist, but only a complete historical illiterate would dare to assert there is no direct relationship between Hegel and Marxism. The fact is both men are considered to be the premier pre-Marxist intellectuals and worthy of every socialist honor. Darwin is second only to Hegel in terms of his importance to basic Marxist theory and some post-Marxists even considered him to be more important. Stalin felt the need to defend Marxists from the charge of treating Darwin "uncritically", while in a collection of his 1958 speeches published by the Red Guard entitled "Long Live Mao Zedong Thought", Mao praised 26 men he considered to have demonstrated a fearless intellectual spirit in advancing human knowledge. The only three westerners he saw fit to name were Marx, Lenin and Darwin.