Joseph Stalin – Anthony G. Flood

Stalin: Apostate, terrorist, tyrant . . . philosopher

Mugshot, 1901 (age 23) © David King Collection, London

Realizing that there’s more sand at the bottom of my life’s hourglass than at the top, I’ve been reflecting on that life’s inflection points. One was my conversion to Marxism.

I’ve been thinking about Josef Stalin (1878-1953) for over fifty years, that is, for about as long as I’ve studied philosophy, by which I mean the pursuit of answers to questions of the greatest generality (being, knowledge, goodness), whether or not my philia of sophia (or, as has too often been the case, moria) has ordered that pursuit.

I had rebelled against my Christian inheritance to embrace Stalinist Marxism while attending a Catholic military high school—just as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili—whom the world knew as Joseph Stalin—had given himself over to Marxism at Tbilisi Seminary in Sakartvelo (Georgia to Westerners, Gruzia to Russians). He had succumbed to Lenin’s malign influence; I, to that of Herbert Aptheker, who came of age in the decade following Stalin’s consolidation of power at the end of 1929. Continue reading “Stalin: Apostate, terrorist, tyrant . . . philosopher”

Newsflash: They’re godless commies!

Bingeing these days on YouTube lectures by Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin, I had a flashback when I heard his answer to Uncommon Knowledge host, Peter Robinson:

. . . it occurred to me that you have probably spent more time reading Soviet archives than any other person. And I said to you, Stephen, what’s the one central finding? And you replied immediately, “They were communists.” The leaders of the Soviet Union really believed that stuff and they really wanted to achieve the communist goal of worldwide revolution.[1]

This reminded me not only of Kotkin’s documented evaluation of the Bolsheviks in general and Stalin in particular—they were not cynics, but convinced Marxists who expressed themselves behind closed doors as they did in their propaganda—but also of the opening paragraph of Murray Rothbard’s, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist.”

The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist. A seemingly trite and banal statement set alongside Marxism’s myriad of jargon-ridden concepts in philosophy, economics, and culture, yet Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial focus, far more central than the class struggle, the dialectic, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest. Communism was the great goal, the vision, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, will put an end to history and establish a new heaven and a new earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history. And just as for post-millennial Christians, man, led by God’s prophets and saints, will establish a Kingdom of God on Earth (for pre-millennials, Jesus will have many human assistants in setting up such a kingdom), so, for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints, will establish a secularized Kingdom of Heaven on earth.[2]

They weren’t cynics, but dreamers. The real-world nightmare that claimed hundred million lives and enslaved billions in the 20^th century began as a 19^th-century Christian apostate’s dream. As Gary North summarized Marx’s legacy:

Karl Heinrich Marx, the bourgeois son of a bourgeois father, was born in Trier, in what is now Rhineland Germany, on May 5, 1818. He was a Jew by birth, but in 1816 or 1817, his father joined the state’s official Christian church, and he saw to it that his children were baptized into his new faith in 1824. After a brief fling with a liberal, pietistic form of Christianity, young Karl became a dedicated humanist. He took his humanism to revolutionary conclusions. Karl Marx, the grandson of rabbis, would become the rabbi of Europe’s most important religious movement: revolutionary humanism.[3]

He inspired generations of murderous missionaries, counter-evangelists—dysangelists, if you will—proselytizers of the bad news of this world’s God (2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 2:2; John 12:31). Remember that the next time of “social justice warriors” nonchalantly claim to be “trained Marxists.”[4] Their corrupt plans do not stop at exploiting “white guilt” for pecuniary gain, but extend to society’s every nook and cranny.

Notes

[1] Uncommon Knowledge, 5 Questions for Stephen Kotkin, February 5, 2022. See Robinson’s other interviews of Kotkin, “Hoover Fellow Stephen Kotkin Discusses Stalin’s Rise To And Consolidation Of Power,” October 6, 2015.

[2] Murray N. Rothbard, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist,” in Rothbard and Walter Block, eds., The Review of Austrian Economics. 1990, Springer. Republished as Chapter 22 of Rothbard, The Logic of Action Two: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School, Edward Elgar, 1997. Free pdf.

[3] Gary North, Marx’s Religion of Revolution: Regeneration through Chaos, Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989, 7-8. Free pdf. On North, however, see my “Dominion Theology: Salvation or Snare for Liberty?,” April 20, 2020.

[4] Jason Morgan, “Black Lives Matters Goes Full Marxist,” Crisis Magazine, April 19, 2021

C.L.R. James: still Stalinism’s “Invisible Man”

The following review of Gerald Horne’s Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois appeared on Amazon today.

Horne’s ability to amass and organize resources is again on display here — he’s a veritable academic book factory. Also again, but unfortunately, his considerable skills serve the Stalinist narrative. This orientation invites the question of what has been distorted to that end.

Horne refers to C.L.R. James as the “writer” (252), but nowhere as the author of the pioneering Black Jacobins. Horne’s descriptor for James is not the respectful “Trotskyist,” but “veteran Trotskyite,” the slur Stalinists coined for their Leninist rivals. We learn that Stalinist historical researcher Herbert Aptheker was “relieved” when Mrs. Du Bois “terminated” her relationship with James before the 1974 Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania, but not why Aptheker was relieved or why he “was worried about the James association” or what possible reason she could have had to accuse James—once a denizen of Ellis Island awaiting deportation in 1953—of “unadulterated McCarthyism” (252). That era witnessed, Horne says, the “persecution” of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for “alleged atomic espionage” (146-147). Graham Du Bois made it her business to find someone to adopt the kids whom the spies’ execution orphaned. The right word, of course, is prosecution: the Rosenbergs were convicted by a jury based on evidence that meant nothing to Communists like Graham Du Bois. Since the Venona decrypts settled the matter of the Rosenbergs’ guilt in 1995, no scholar mentioning their case in 2000 should have referred to their espionage as “alleged.”

Should the sympathetic reader share in those concerns? Horne is mute. To have shed light on this, however, might have required him to at least mention James’s published criticisms of Aptheker in his area of specialization, his failure to acknowledge the significance of the aforementioned work by a Black scholar fourteen years his senior, and perhaps defend Aptheker’s passive dissing of James, which is what the Stalinist ethos demanded (and apparently still does).

To acknowledge the horrors of the African slave trade and its consequent evils does not require one to ally with, let alone sing the praises of, perpetrators of equal or greater enormities. That, however, seems to be the bargain the Du Boises were willing to make to advance Pan-Africanism. They were enamored of mass murderers. Yes, Stalin killed millions but, as Horne once encapsulated this attitude, he “was no worse than the Founding Fathers” (Chronicle of Higher Education, October 25, 2009).

The books by one who believes that need to be scrutinized for other outrages. For example, in his Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963, Horne documents Pan-Africanist George Padmore’s interactions with Du Bois, but Padmore’s friend and fellow Trinidadian James is invisible. (The prolific Du Bois never took literary notice of “Black Jacobins”; Aptheker merely followed suit.)

Race Woman is a work of solid research and serviceable writing. I took off a star because he offended on a point I know something about. Time will tell whether other discoveries would justify deducting another.

Kaepernick’s Cachet

Colin Kaepernick’s back in the news (assuming he ever left). Known more for his anti-police protests than gridiron prowess, he’s aligned himself with history’s worst police states (and never notices the irony). On October 11, 2018, he was the recipient of the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal, about which I blogged at the time. (I’ve appended the post below.) Once in power, the type of political creature he admires would demand absolute submission to their agenda on pain of incarceration or execution. Until then, they’ll find him useful. (I’m charitably assuming, until there’s contrary evidence, that he’d be a victim rather than victimizer.) Given the totalitarian urge inspiring so much political activism today, I thought my old post worth dusting off. For a study of a major instance of communist hypocrisy on race, see my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. —Anthony Flood

Kaepernick’s Du Bois Medal: How Fitting

(First published October 11, 2018)

I don’t know whether any recipients of this year’s W. E. B. Du Bois Medal, to be awarded tonight at Harvard’s Sanders Theater, care to qualify their admiration of the medal’s namesake. Probably not. And that’s understandable, given his many notable accomplishments over the course of 95 years.

The least likely to demur, I’ll bet, is “athlete and activist” Colin Kaepernick. A man who has a tee shirt adorned with photos of Fidel Castro chatting with Malcolm (“By any means necessary”) X probably has no reservations about getting a Du Bois Medal, certainly not any more than that “Un-American” scholar and civil rights activist had about his 1959 International Lenin Prize.

The Castro regime may have been responsible for murdering anywhere from 35,000 to 141,000 souls (with a median of 73,000), but the enormity of Joseph Stalin’s reign exceeded Fidel’s by orders of magnitude: its unit of measure is “tens of millions.”

The breadth of Stalin’s mass murder, rivaled in the last century only by Hitler’s and Mao’s, could have been ascertained in 1953 by any competent researcher like Du Bois. Yet that was the year Du Bois penned a defense of Stalinism in the form of a eulogy upon the passing of Koba the Dread.

“Joseph Stalin,” Du Bois wrote, “was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.”

Continue reading “Kaepernick’s Cachet”

Kaepernick’s Du Bois Medal: How Fitting

“Joseph Stalin,” Du Bois wrote, “was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.”

Continue reading “Kaepernick’s Du Bois Medal: How Fitting”