Was JFK a Power-Hungry Monster? Do Socialists Hate America?

With socialism sailing through the Democratic Party like a Viking ship manned by Norwegian fans at a World Cup ("Ro!"), now may be a good time to analyze how one sailor aboard that longboat understands (or misunderstands) the voyage he has embarked upon.  Why does he impute such vile motives to American presidents of both parties?  How does he see Karl Marx, and the stormy history of socialism?  

I take for my study a young philosopher named Eric Van Evans.  I hope he won't mind my picking on him again, as I have before when discussing Theology of Religions, the Resurrection, and Marx and the Gulag.  Nor do I expect much response, anymore: but like my old sparring partners (John Loftus, Richard Carrier, Hector Avalos, Stephen Law) and Jesus Seminar and New Atheist writers whose work I have challenged in books, Eric sets the ball up to the net nicely, and I can't resist taking a shot.  

Anyway, this is a vital set of questions, as one of America's major political parties is increasingly taken over by Marxists.  The mayors both of New York City, and my hometown of Seattle, are now avowed socialists, and it looks like we'll be seeing many more in Congress next year.  The arguments Eric made show why the American left is turning on the traditional Democratic Party, and demonstrate both the cynicism and historical folly behind their Marxist conversion and critique of American history.  

My proximate target is Eric's recent Substack on "The Shocking Truth Behind Vietnam," In that article, Eric claimed that we are "conditioned to believe" that America is "fundamentally good." 

"Here in the US, the prevailing story behind the war has always been one of good intentions, that is to say, our involvement was about protecting South Vietnam from a communist takeover by the North. If we did not intervene, not only would South Vietnam fall, but communism would continue spreading not only there, but possibly here as well."

I doubt we are universally conditioned to believe in the goodness of America.  Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and their disciples and comrades have exerted a different impact on the thinking of many young Americans: the older of the Boston Bombers, for instance, was tight with a friend of Howard Zinn who saw his task as a promoting a Marxist critique of America in his Social Studies class.  

But it seems to me the New Left combines cynicism with a high degree of gullibility. 

"The war, and this will surprise many of you, was largely fought against South Vietnam. (1) However, our intervention was framed as though we were protecting South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. According to Noam Chomsky, what US policymakers feared the most was not simply communism,(2) but the possibility of a successful and independent movement outside American influence. “Precisely what they were afraid of,” wrote Chomsky, “was that the ‘takeover’ of South Vietnam by nationalist forces would not be brutal.(3) They feared it would be conciliatory and that there would be successful social and economic development, and that the whole region might work. This was clearly a nationalist movement,(4) and in fact a radical nationalist movement which would separate Vietnam from the American orbit. It would not allow Vietnam to become another Philippines. It would trade with the United States but it would not be an American semi-colony."

Let's stop for a moment for some fact-checking.  

(1) I begin with the obvious: Chomsky is not telling the truth.  In fact, the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam was planned from North Vietnam and began already in the late 1950s.  Of course they used tried-and-true "United Front" tactics (as essential to communists as baptism is the Baptists) to rope in as many South Vietnamese as they could.  But the weapons, and many of the soldiers, came from the north, often through Laos.  The war was instigated by the northern government, and would likely have died out without it (along with support from the USSR and China), as communist insurgencies ultimately petered out in other Asian countries not proximate to China.    

(2) Why did JFK send advisers to South Vietnam and provide air support?  Not because he feared communism?  

It takes just a little knowledge of history, and of Kennedy's own story, to see that the official line is overwhelmingly more probable than Chomsky's cynical yarn.  

Kennedy had himself been a frontline soldier, or rather sailor, in the fight against Japanese imperialism.  He skippered a PT boat, cut down by a Japanese destroyer, then risked his life to save a crew member.  

The Japanese attacked their neighbors, tried to conquer Asia, occupied Vietnam, much of China, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the Philippines, tortured and murdered millions, set up concentration camps, and allied with the Nazis.  Kennedy insisted (with some difficulty) on risking his life to take part in the war to reverse those conquests.  

Kennedy could hardly help but recognize the communists as a similar but perhaps even more dangerous force.  FDR had supported the Soviet Union with vast munitions and supplies during World War II, and indeed had acted quite gullibly towards Stalin.  But American leaders came to understand that Stalin was doing most of the same terrible things that Hitler had been guilty of.  He ruthlessly destroyed his class and ethnic enemies.  He tortured and murdered millions in slave labor camps.  Early on, he even allied with Hitler and attacked Poland and Finland, the latter with 600,000 troops.  The Comintern supported revolutionary parties around the world.  Eastern Europe then fell to the communists, then China, then North Korea, which tried to conquer the south.  

Kennedy could hardly have failed to recognize the communist attempt at worldwide revolution and expansion as being the same sort of thing he had fought against in the Pacific.  

(3) Did Kennedy fear that the communist invasion "would not be brutal?" 

That would have been a bizarre worry, indeed.   

Communists had consistently proven quite brutal by 1962: millions murdered in the Soviet Union, a heavy hand in Eastern Europe, then in Asia, that bloody communist revolution in China, followed by mass murders, the Anti-Rightist campaign, then the Great Leap Forward (Nobel Prize winning author Mo Yan tells a marvelous fantasized version of this history in Life and Death are Wearing Me Out) -- along with conquests of Tibet and ruthless suppression of minority peoples, many of whom had fled to Thailand.  The Stalinist Kim cult had taken power in North Korea, imprisoning people for the lightest infractions against the image of Kim Il Sung, who also created a rigid and cruel caste system, closed churches, banned Bibles, and murdered Christians.    

Nor had North Vietnam proven a complete outlier.  Land reform was brutal.  (For another good fictional version, see The Mountains Sing.)  So was the Viet Cong, which conducted assassinations and terror in the south.  Ho Chi Minh was not so great a monster as Kim Il Sung had proven or Pol Pot would prove, granted, but the fear that the communists would prove too kind-hearted in Vietnam, unlike all past experience, is a wild terror to ascribe to John F Kennedy.  Marilyn Monroe may have kept him up at night, but that concern surely did not.  

(4) The Viet Cong, or Vietnamese Communists, were of course "nationalistic" in the sense that they were Vietnamese and wanted control of their country.  But they were also "communist" as "Cong" implies, and were supported by the Soviet Union and China.  

The Sino-Soviet split had begun by this time, but took years to mature.  While communists did quarrel and split into factions, Marx and Lenin were internationalists, and Stalin had inherited that spirit enough to lead an international communist movement.  Ho Chi Mihn was also an international communist, who worked in various jobs in Brazil, Boston, and the UK, studied some in France where he helped establish the French Communist Party, and lived as a revolutionary worker in the Soviet Union, China, and Thailand.  He recounted how a union leader in Brazil sang The International, the trans-national hymn of communism, after he was shot by police:

Arise, wretched of the earth
Arise, convicts of hunger
Reason thunders in its crater
This is the eruption of the end
Of the past let us wipe the slate clean
Slave masses, arise, arise
The world is about to change its foundation
We are nothing, let us be everything

To depict Ho as merely nationalistic and ignore the international side of his career and movement, is ahistorical and absurd.    

And why would JFK and LBJ have such intense fear that Vietnam and whatever other countries the communists conquered (the Vietnamese communists were invading Laos and working with Cambodian revolutionaries like Pol Pot) would be overwhelmingly successful and peaceful?  That dark fate had not befallen any other communist country.  Nor had the US attacked most other countries that tried peacefully developing outside its orbit -- say, Burma or Bangladesh.  

Nor were South Korea or Vietnam, or even Taiwan, of such overwhelming economic value that American intervention in saving them from communism was an obviously clever commercial move.  They were all dirt poor.  None had oil or other vital resources.  South Korea and Taiwan only developed long after America protected them from communist takeover. 

Some more of Van Evans, channeling Chomsky, as he transitions from Kennedy and Johnson to George W Bush and an alleged Republican atrocity, to balance things out.  Then we'll offer more comments, draw conclusions, and wrap up: 

"One of the most crucial things to understand when examining wars is the role of what are called, 'pretexts.'  If a state intends to invade a country, destroy infrastructure, and inflict enormous violence upon its people, it must first come up with a morally compelling story. (5)  In Vietnam, the story was about both the defense of South Vietnam and the defense of the US.  What this sort of story does, of course, is that it casts America as both a protector and a savior. This is a powerful story, and usually, the public buys into it.

"Similar rhetoric appeared decades later with the Iraq War, which many consider one of history's greatest atrocities. (6)  The invasion was justified by stories about democracy, freedom, and security. The Bush administration repeatedly claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat.” And yet, these weapons were never found. (7)"

(5) Again, the US didn't need to "come up with" any "story" by the presidency of John F Kennedy.  Americans were heartily sick of war.  But the history, and character, of the communist threat was clear to almost everyone -- up to and including nuclear weapons positioned on a newly Bolshevized Cuba and pointed at America cities.  This is not any awake and aware person could ignore, not even children doing "duck and cover" exercises in school. 

(6) I cannot access this interview in Jacobin Magazine.  Anyone who believes that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime was "one of history's greatest atrocities," is free to try to defend it in the comments section below.  Good luck.  

(7) Van Evans, echoing Chomsky, accuses Bush in the same cynical and historically unimaginative manner they accused Kennedy and Johnson.  

Saddam Hussein had, in fact, not only developed but his forces used WMDs on his own Kurdish citizens, killing thousands of civilians horribly.  This is not a guess, it is a fact.  

Why shouldn't George W Bush have believed his CIA director George Tenet when the latter said it was a "slam dunk" that Hussein still had the things?  Tenet was mostly wrong, but why suppose even he was simply lying?  There seemed to be evidence that Saddam was up to his old tricks again.  And if Tenet did not believe his own warnings, how could he not know that his error would come around to bite him, as it did? 

Saddam was our enemy, a sponsor of terror, and a man who had launched attacks on four neighbors.  It is arguable that we should have merely continued sanctions and hoped for the best.  (And now be hearing from the Left about all the Iraqis who had died from those sanctions, which they were complaining about before the invasion!)  But why doubt that Bush saw those factors as reasons to approve the attack, along with his Clinton-appointed CIA head's confidence about WMDs, more than vague and cynical remarks about "business interests, strategic influence, and regional power?"

Eric argues: 

"Such motivations are rarely, if ever, stated explicitly. Instead, governments employ lofty moral language that obscures their actual intentions."

Whereas Marx, it seems, was sincere in his concern for the downtrodden.  That seems to be the rule: a foreign tyrant, or teacher of tyrants, who inspires the murder of millions, is given every benefit of the doubt, while a freely elected American leader is given none whatsoever, but rather the most far-fetched and dire motives are ascribed to him, while ignoring obvious and more creditable explanations for American actions.  

If American leaders start wars merely to enhance their power, why it is always the worst regimes in the world that we end up fighting?  Shouldn't we invade Canada?  Why didn't we keep Iraq's oil?  Why did we help Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan to prosper after those wars, importing billions of dollars of their goods? 

True, it would be naive to assume that our motives were purely altruistic.  Motives are almost always mixed in the best of cases.  Results are usually mixed, too.  

But this combination of cynicism and gullibility, not in one person but in a whole political movement, raises questions about motivation and psychology.  What is going on with American young people?  Besides, in some cases, a bad education?  

Why the Selective Cynicism? 

We must ask why young American leftists embrace such cynical and historically-dubious beliefs about the democratically-elected leaders of their own country.  It is surely not because Chomsky, or Van Evans, are stupid.  (Though most young socialists, including those who call themselves intellectuals, do seem to lack much historical awareness, and Van Evans may be in that position, though he has an MA in Global Security and International Affairs, whatever in particular he studied.  I am told it was modern Hungary.  Chomsky cannot be easily excused.) 

It is astounding to me that people of good will still defend Marx, and Mohammed, given the record of bloodshed and cruelty both men inspired. It is even more amazing that a person who declares them innocent, would then turn around and accuse democratically-elected American presidents of starting wars just to bully other countries, as if opposing the spread of communism were an implausible or ignoble motive in the 1960s, or overthrowing Saddam Hussein after 9/11. In fact, given that astounding reversal, one is inclined to choose between several hypotheses:

1. That the speaker really does have it in for America.

2. That he loves America, as claimed, but knows little about history.

3. That he loves America and knows some history, but holds to some odd value system.

4. That he's a decent sort, but young and foolish, and wants to fit in with Europeans who despise MAGA and love Sweden. He may feel Scandinavian countries really do get some things much better than the US -- like health care -- and conflate "big government" with "socialism."

5. That all in all, he is a bit brainwashed, and hasn't thought about the matter very clearly yet.

6. That he is so convinced of the immorality of "capitalism" that he sees shadows of that dark force everywhere, and reads pernicious meaning even into the most responsible and careful, if inevitably flawed, decisions made by leaders of the world's chief "capitalist" nation.

I am open to other hypotheses. And some of these may be true of one young American socialist, while others are true of someone else.

But to make such vile accusations against American presidents, while ignoring all such facts, really does make the question about the person launching the accusations, as much as about his targets.

How the Brothers Grimm Overthrew the Evil Empire

 The following was originally published in Books and Culture, in September / October, 2005. 

How the Brothers Grimm Overthrew the Evil Empire

A fairy tale.

September/October 2005

It is rumored that, due to the cumulative effect of small atmospheric variations, downdraft from a butterfly's wings on one side of the world may cause a typhoon on the other. Similarly, Ray Bradbury told how a tourist traveled in time to the Jurassic Era and stepped on a butterfly. He returned to the 20th century to find tyranny had replaced democracy. The Butterfly Effect, as it is called, thus refers to "sensitive dependence on initial conditions," in particular the spell cast by small causes on large events at a distance.

What good is a fairy? In an era when fantasy was under suspicion, Bruno Bettelheim wrote an ingenious and fruitful book with a title, Uses of Enchantment, that justified Tinkerbell in just such utilitarian terms. Bettelheim argued that fairy tales not only entertain, but "enlighten (a child) about himself" and help him "find meaning in life." J. R. R. Tolkien had already pointed out that fairy tales teach children the wonder of simple things. If we lend credence to the Butterfly Effect, we may add a further use of enchantment: Grimm fairy tales helped win the Cold War.

What did Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have in mind when they gathered, edited, and rewrote their collection of Central European folk tales? Bettelheim hinted at spiritual dynamics beneath his own gently Freudian reading of the Grimms. In The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimm's Magic Fairy Tales, Jesuit scholar Ronald Murphy explored those depths.1 Within the gingerbread of beloved tales—"Hansel and Gretel," "Sleeping Beauty," "Little Red Riding Hood"—he detected strangely familiar dogmatic latticework. Most obviously, perhaps, in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves":

Once it was the middle of winter, and the snowflakes fell from the sky like feathers. At a window with a frame of ebony a queen sat and sewed. And as she sewed and looked out at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell in the snow. And in the white snow the red looked so beautiful that she thought to herself: "If only I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood in the window frame!" … When the child was born, the queen died.

Snow symbolizes purity, and Snow White the young, innocent but vulnerable soul. The drops of blood from the queen's finger are Trinitarian: her death hints at divine purpose in suffering.

Like a traveler admiring a mountain stream, one can attend to the surface flow of the story or focus on the spiritual bedrock over which it pours. Snow White finds refuge among seven dwarves with seven candles (the church, which exists to warn and protect lost travelers). She undergoes a series of temptations, the first two—"Pretty things for sale!" "Now, for once, I'll comb your hair properly"—appealing to the vanity that ensnared her stepmother. Giving in, she falls down "as if dead," only to be revived by the dwarves. The third temptation involves an apple. Like Eve, Snow White falls, not "as if dead," this time, but "dead, and she remained dead." The dwarves anoint her with water and wine, but cannot revive her. They place her in a glass coffin on a hill, where owl, raven, and dove watch over her still form.

Scanning the Greek New Testament that Wilhelm Grimm read in morning devotions, Murphy found themes from the Grimm fairyland in the passages Wilhelm underlined: "The Spirit of God, divine providence, love of God and of neighbor, faithful confidence, ecumenical acceptance of other faiths, the Resurrection to eternal life."

One passage Wilhelm highlighted was the "Mars Hill" narrative in which Paul quoted Greek poets about a God who transcended culture: "As even some of your poets have said, 'For we are indeed his offspring.'"

At first glance the owl, raven, and dove by Snow White's grave may seem as ornamental—and even more incidental to the story—as Flower the skunk to Bambi or the English sheep dog to Disney's Little Mermaid. But in fact their presence carries deep theological meaning. By them, the Grimms symbolically address the great question that confronted Paul in Athens, and confronts us today: How do the religions of the world fit together? Should we simply reject other beliefs and (with Karl Marx) "abolish all eternal truths?" Should we welcome all beliefs to an undifferentiated and indifferent parliament of sectarian fowls?

The Grimm birds bring three spiritual civilizations to the grave of Snow White: Greek (owl), German (raven), and Hebrew (dove), the traditions on which the brothers drew for their stories. The cultures of the world, this scene implies, are beautiful, and can lead (like the white duck that carried Hansel and Gretel home) toward truth.

Yet in the end, salvation itself comes from another source: "A king's son happened to come into the forest and went to the dwarves' house to spend the night." The Prince, Lord of the seven churches, brings Snow White to life. (Wilhelm also marked the Johannian phrase, "en auto zoe en … phos ton anthropon": "in him was life, and the life was the light of men.") Confessing his love, the Prince took Snow White to his "father's palace" as wife. The evil stepmother put on "red hot slippers" and danced till she dropped dead.

The Brothers Grimm thus hint at what Paul Tillich called a "universalism" that "did not mix" but subjected other beliefs to "an ultimate criterion." That criterion is Christ, the King's Son (who appears in various guises in many of their most popular tales). Not only Jewish Scripture and Greco-Roman philosophy and poetry but also German folk tales could serve as "tutors to Christ," in Justin's famous formulation. And the stories do not fail to note the fate of wicked stepmothers, because Christian tradition is a free, therefore perilous, universalism: the cross stretches in all directions, yet still crucifies.

Adults who keep a foot in Never-Neverland continue to enjoy the simple narrative flow of these childhood stories. We may also sense their psychological depths. But before Murphy's detective work, few I think recognized the spiritual bedrock over which the stories flowed. Yet this quietly redemptive Grimm subtext set in motion a chain of events, like dwarfish dominos, or an avalanche released by the tread of leprechauns across powder snow, that ultimately toppled the castle of one of the most wicked philosophical "stepmothers" of our day.

Domino one. In Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton explained how fairy tales brought him to Christian faith. "The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now," he confessed in a chapter called "Ethics of Elfland," "are the things called fairy tales." Chesterton tipped his hat to "the fine collection of Andrew Lang," senior romantic at the Illustrated London News.2 But his examples were mainly drawn from the Brothers Grimm: "That giants should be killed because they are gigantic." "The terrible allegory of Sleeping Beauty … how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death, and how death also may perhaps be softened to sleep." Beyond specific lessons, the air of Fairy awoke in Chesterton a childlike wonder at the elementary phenomena of nature. "These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."

Fairy tales led Chesterton to five theological conclusions: "This world does not explain itself"; "There was something personal in the world"; "This purpose is beautiful in its old design, in spite of defects, such as dragons"; "The proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint"; and "All good was a remnant."

Just as owl, raven, and dove perched by the coffin of Snow White but could not save her, so Chesterton argued, in Everlasting Man, that mythology, while beautiful, had by the birth of Christ been "drained to the dregs." "Pan was dead and the shepherds were scattered like sheep." Christ himself gathered enchantment into the fold of redemptive history.

Domino two. J. R. R. Tolkien's understanding of fairy tales and their relation to faith owed much to Chesterton. In his essay "On Fairy-Stories," he mentioned Chesterton several times, and (in a passage that could almost serve to list the material assets of Hobbiton) echoed "Ethics of Elfland": "It was in fairy stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; trees and grass; house and fire; bread and wine."

"Snow White"'s happy denouement suggested a conclusion even beyond the magic of nature. This Tolkien christened the "eucatastrophe," the good disaster. Fairy tales not only breathe the magic of renewed sight into earthly beauty, but hint that God will breathe life into mankind again:

It has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt-making creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories … But this story has entered History and the primary world … The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation.

Domino three. Reprieved from trench warfare in France, C. S. Lewis read Everlasting Man and "for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history" in a form that made sense. Echoing New Testament passages that Wilhelm Grimm underlined, Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy:

The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, "Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?"

When Lewis returned to postwar Oxford, he fell in with "Tollers," and it was Tolkien who helped him see Christ as the answer to that question. (Phantastes, a "Fairie Romance" by another Grimm disciple, George Macdonald, also played a role.)

Domino four. Charles Colson is the first person in the lineage I am tracing to hold political power. He read Lewis' Mere Christianity just as he lost that power—the very moment students of Fairyland know to anticipate great things. In Born Again, Colson described the transforming impact of his conversion to Christ at that moment when he had hit bottom.

Domino five. A few years later, an imprisoned Filipino senator, Benigno Aquino, read Born Again and experienced spiritual renewal. Exiled to the United States, Aquino heard sociologist Tony Campolo speak on "Authority and Power in Social Change." Campolo argued that God redeems society through love, not force. (Without, however, specifically mentioning the prince's kiss in "Sleeping Beauty.") After the lecture, Aquino told Campolo he was "willing to die" for truth: "You have given me hope," Aquino said. "I know that when I return to my homeland I will be powerless: but you have helped me to see that I will have authority." Recounting their conversation in his book The Power Delusion, Campolo reflected, "I will be anxiously waiting to see how this once powerful leader affects the people in his native country."

Neither anxiety nor hope were misplaced. Aquino was shot to death at Manila International Airport. (Now named in his honor.) When the dictatorial President Ferdinand Marcos attempted to steal the subsequent election from Aquino's widow, millions of citizens poured into the streets and gave birth to what was called "People Power." Like the huntsman in "Snow White," Marcos' soldiers refused to fire on the demonstrators, and their king and queen (known, by the way, for her collection of slippers) danced off the archipelago to political doom.

Copy-cat revolutions erupted soon afterward in Burma and China and were suppressed. Then, on the turn of an autumn tide, the masses of Eastern Europe, inspired by People Power revolts, toppled statues of Lenin and smashed the Berlin Wall, fragments of which were sold in Western department stores to stuff stockings on Christmas 1989.

Redemptive history moves in mysterious ways. Events set in flow by the Incarnation touch individual lives, but the full causal pattern is (as Paul hinted) greater than those lives, and ultimately beyond human comprehension. Now and then, some small part of that great pattern comes to light.

"The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road," Chesterton whimsically informed us. The line of causation I have traced may appear (as his poem put it) to "ramble round the Shire." But in the company of such as Tolkien and Grimm, what better place to wander? As that great Shire rambler, Bilbo Baggins himself, remarked, "Step into the Road, and … there's no knowing where you might be swept off to." If you follow my hobbit logic, it may be that a spell cast on the world by the Greek Prometheus (to whom Marx and Engels were in thrall) was broken by the angelic wings of German fairies, beating in tune to the canonical, and still useful, multiculturalism of St. Paul.

David Marshall is director of Kuai Mu Institute for Christianity and World Cultures. His newest book is entitled Why the Jesus Seminar Can't Find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Could: A Populist Defense of the Gospels (Kuai Mu Press).

1. Ronald Murphy, The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms' Magic Fairy Tales (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).

2. Aside from his famous "color" collections of fairy tales, which remain popular with children, it was also Andrew Lang who cast doubts on two standard anti-Christian arguments of his day: Edward Tyler's theory of the evolution of religions, and James Frazer's theory that the gospels belonged to a common mythological pattern of "dying and rising gods."

Christ, Marx, and the Liberation of Slaves

I have received some pushback on my previous article, which argued that Karl Marx was, indeed, largely to blame for the horrors of communism.  A young philosopher named Eric DeJardin wrote a rebuttal on my Facebook page, which I will answer later.  But first, let me respond to a second and closely-related challenge he issued:  

DM: "And my demonstration of how Marx was to blame for the Gulag, which enslaved tens of millions, remains untouched."

ED: "I responded to it pretty extensively on your FB page. We're in the middle of discussing it, so it's not exactly 'untouched.'  Anyway, by your own criteria a better case can be made for holding Christianity responsible for slavery in Christian nations than can be made for holding Marx responsible for atrocities in Marxist nations.  Heck, we can point to texts plainly supporting slavery in the Bible while, as you have admitted, you can't even say that Marx would have supported what was done in his name." (emphasis mine)

My mistake.  Eric did try to rebut my arguments.  Good for him.  This is a better forum for more in-depth discussions, so I intend to answer his arguments here.  (Though one gets the feeling, with Marx and these young philosophers, that pushing them away from Marx, is like trying to talk Juliet into keeping from Romeo, after she has been smitten by Cupid's arrow.)

But first, let's tackle Eric's claim that by my six criteria for historical causation, given in that article, Christianity is more responsible for slavery than Marx is for communist atrocities.  The evidence points overwhelmingly in the opposite direction, I will argue.  

I. Judging Christianity and Marxism, Half a Dozen Criteria

1. Precedence.  "First, A must precede B, to cause it . . ."

"Christianity cannot be blamed for the general phenomena of inquisitions, or credited for the institution of marriage, since people were abusing others, marrying, or doing both at the same time, long before the first noel range out . . . 

"What belongs to our species as a whole cannot be credited to or blamed on any particular belief system . . . "

Nothing about slavery in Christian countries was unusual, except its ending.  Human beings had been enslaving one another since the dawn of time.  And the particular forms slavery took in Christian countries (including chattel slavery) were not unusual, either.  So by the criterion of precedence, it is hard to say Christianity caused slavery -- though easy to argue that it caused the abolition of slavery.  Slaves had often been set free before Christianity, but abolition movements were unusual.  (One finds hints of them here or there, such as under the rebel Wang Mang who temporarily overthrew the Han Dyansty.)      

Communism combined common and original elements, as I said: 

"KKK-like secret societies, and scapegoating, are common in world history, especially in the wake of a cataclysmic conflict like the Civil War.  So neither Christ nor Marx could have invented scapegoating or secret societies as a whole, but could have inspired or influenced the form a particular such phenomenon took . . . 

"Some other aspects of communism-in-practice were also common: dictatorship, mass murder, scapegoating, mass human bondage (when technology allowed).  But other parts of the system were fairly unusual.  Communes were established in most communist states.  They were not the first communes in history, but they were unusual in being established on a top-down basis, and the extreme to which, say, the Maoists and Kmer Rouge took them.  The attempt to put the proletariat in charge (or intellectuals in the name of the proletariat) was also unusual.  Attacks on one religion or other are not unique, but wholesale destruction represented a stark break from the past.  Rule by the communist party, and party organization from the top down to the village, school, and platoon levels, did not I think have close parallels in prior Russian or Chinese societies."  

So the Criterion of Precedence does not encourage us to blame Christ for slavery.  But it is easy to see how Marx's teaching may. in theory, have caused many of the evils of communism.  

2. Proximity.  "Second, like magnetism, the closer you stand, the harder a social influencer pulls.  Mohammed preached against idols, and before his death, Mecca had been cleared of them.  Marx advocated revolution, and seventy years later, the October Revolution erupted.  Most often, we are influenced by teachings we see lived out around us.  A hurricane spawned near Africa may break on Cape Cod, but only when warm water lies between source and destination.  Similarly, an ancient scripture may build great force over millennia, but only when the “warm water” of a practicing community of believers keeps it going . . . Proximity matters."

Early Christians did not, so far as I know, bring about any upsurge in slave-trading, or in slave ownership.  Indeed, in another post on this site, "Abolition of Slavery: The Early Years," I describe opposition to slavery in the Early Church.  And a reader cited a letter (which I have now verified) telling how St. Augustine's congregation liberated 120 slaves, a common sort of thing for them to do, Augustine implies:  

"About four months before I wrote this letter, a crowd of people collected from different regions, but particularly from Numidia, were brought here by Galatian merchants to be transported from the shores of Hippo (It is only, or at least mainly, the Galatians who are so eager to engage in this form of commerce). However, a faithful Christian was at hand, who was aware of our practice of performing acts of mercy in such cases; and he brought the news to the church. Immediately, about 120 people were set free by us (though I was absent at the time), some from the ship which they had to board, others from a place where they had been hidden before being put on board. We discovered that barely five or six of these had been sold by their parents. On hearing about the misfortunes that had led the rest of them to the Galatians, via their abductors and kidnappers, hardly one of us could restrain their tears." 

So there is no positive link between early Christianity and an increase in slavery: on the contrary, some push-back already occurred, including from the greatest early Christian thinker after St. Paul, and from others whom I cite, like Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Patrick.  

By contrast, as mentioned, revolution followed Marx within decades.  And after revolution, communes, abolition of private property, attacks on "religion," Dictatorship of the (alleged) Proletariat, secret police, mass arrests, and all the rest.  Not all of this was unique to communism (Point One), but much of it was highly unusual in European history, as was widely recognized at the time. 

So by the Criterion of Proximity, too, Marx can be credibly blamed for the Gulag, but Christ cannot reasonably be blamed for any increase in slavery.  (Which did not, it seems, occur for 1500 years.)    

3. "Third, duration.  Sometimes a religion is quickly accepted, but its deeper implications take generations to sink in." 

I should have made a distinction with this criterion, which is in some conflict with Criterion Two.  If the agents of social change gain great political power, change is often instituted quickly.  For instance, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young overthrew American tradition within their community, and instituted polygamy from the top down.  Chairman Mao overthrew the "Four Olds" and Confucian traditions within three decades.  However, both reforms proved short-lived: Mormon polygamy, because the larger American culture refused to admit Utah until they banned it, Maoism, because in later years, the Chinese Communist Party began to find Confucius useful.  (Though some reforms stuck, for instance, few Chinese now burn incense to ancestors.)  

I would argue that abolition of slavery was one of those "deeper implications" that took a while to sink in among Christians.  It was not imposed top-down when Christians finally took power, centuries after Christ.  But as shown above, and in the rest of that article, the anti-slave logic of the Gospel began having an effect early on through thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa and even (in a less sweeping manner) St. Augustine, an effect which grew, though there was often push-back, due to various forms of self-interest.  

Because Marxists gained dictatorial power, the effect of their thinking revealed itself early on, when zeal was still fiery, and then began to die down.  Early social experiments tended to be far infused with radical ideology, early in the revolutionary periods in Russia, China, Peru, Vietnam, and Cambodia.  Then reality began to set in.  People became exhausted by revolutionary fervor, and old ways reasserted themselves.  

Read The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, for an account of how that process played out in   

North Vietnam.  

4. An active ingredient.  "Fourth, something in the alleged cause should explain its supposed effect.  If Islam is blamed for encouraging prepubescent marriages, one should find something in the life of Mohammed or early Muslim teaching that encourages or allows men to marry young girls.  (Such as records of his consummating marriage to the nine-year-old Aisha.)  If Christianity is credited for saving girls from foot-binding in China, that claim will be strengthened if we find Jesus or the apostles helping women in analogous ways in the New Testament . . . "

Eric addresses this important criterion by claiming that the Bible clearly justifies slavery, while Marx opposed it.  (Forgetting, perhaps, that my argument against Marx does not particularly focus on slavery, though yes, his followers did resurrect it on a massive scale, for fairly predictable reasons.)  

So this is a key criterion, which I will focus on a little more than the others.  (But don't worry, I will be brief -- a thorough treatment would take a book!)   

In that previous article, I pointed to many "active ingredients" in Marx's personality and teaching which led to the Gulag and other horrors.  I need not repeat or explain them all again here.      

What does the Bible say about slavery?  Many think that the Bible is all over the map on the subject.  I wrote: 

"Perhaps religious texts are mere Rorschach ink blot tests: Mother Theresa and the Grand Inquisitor read the same Bible, then depending on their character or upbringing, reach opposite conclusions about how to treat folks.  Yet as novelist Tom Wolfe noted in The Kingdom of Speech, from Mohammed to Marx, history demonstrates the power of words to shape society.  A linguistic artist himself, Wolfe recognized Jesus as one of five men whose words have cut most deeply . . . " 

As for words that cut deeply, note how Jesus' sayings struck: (a) A black slave in a pre-Civil War novel; (b) a white traveler in the same novel; (c) the author, and (d) Americans outside the South.  

Uncle Tom's Bible

Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is often credited with helping form an anti-slavery consensus in the North before the Civil War, surprised me when I first read it.  I knew several men in Harriet's family were famous preachers and Bible teachers, and vocally opposed slavery.  (I had even spoken in a forum at Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, where one brother served as pastor.)  But I didn't know that the novel was actually a kind of theological debate and a Bible study, not just a story.  

In Chapter 12, for instance, two white Christians on a boat on the Mississippi which is transporting slaves cross swords over slavery, as onlookers take the side that suits their interests: 

A. “It’s undoubtedly the intention of Providence that the African race should be servants,—kept in a low condition,” said a grave-looking gentleman in black, a clergyman, seated by the cabin door. “‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be,’ the scripture says.” 

"I say, stranger, is that ar what that text means?” said a tall man, standing by.

“'Undoubtedly. It pleased Providence, for some inscrutable reason, to doom the race to bondage, ages ago; and we must not set up our opinion against that.'

“'Well, then, we’ll all go ahead and buy up niggers,' said the man, “if that’s the way of Providence,—won’t we, Squire?'”

Here a preacher, obviously part of the Establishment, cites an obscure Old Testament passage which actually has nothing to do with slavery, to justify what the South wished to see justified.  Then slave-traders echo that reasoning to justify their lucrative line of work.  (Which they would have gone on doing without such help, or found other ideological support for.)  

Then a young man, whom Beecher may model on one of her brothers, or her theology-teaching husband, responds:

B. "A tall, slender young man, with a face expressive of great feeling and intelligence, here broke in, and repeated the words, 'All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.’ I suppose,” he added, “that is scripture, as much as ‘Cursed be Canaan.’”

Beecher is greatly understating her point, as she no doubt intends readers to recognize.  (Thus the satirical, "Is that ar what the text means?" Followed by the glib, "Undoubtedly.")  

"Do unto others" are the words of Christ himself.  And they obviously apply to the pitiful case described onboard, of an old lady whose only remaining child is snatched from her arms and sold to another owner.  (While the first passage is, again, not about slavery at all.)  Beecher knows that the words of Jesus trump a mis-cited and irrelevant Old Testament passage. She then satirically goads her readers not to be hardened to such evil for the sake of national unity, even: 

"The trader had arrived at that stage of Christian and political perfection which has been recommended by some preachers and politicians of the north, lately, in which he had completely overcome every humane weakness and prejudice.  His heart was exactly where yours, sir, and mine could be brought, with proper effort and cultivation. The wild look of anguish and utter despair that the woman cast on him might have disturbed one less practiced; but he was used to it. He had seen that same look hundreds of times. You can get used to such things, too, my friend; and it is the great object of recent efforts to make our whole northern community used to them, for the glory of the Union."

This passage satires how Scripture is abused to justify what Beecher shows it cannot justify.  Later in the same chapter, Beecher shows her hand more clearly, through the Christ-figure of Uncle Tom himself: 

C. "Tom had watched the whole transaction from first to last, and had a perfect understanding of its results. To him, it looked like something unutterably horrible and cruel, because, poor, ignorant black soul! he had not learned to generalize, and to take enlarged views. If he had only been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity, he might have thought better of it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a lawful trade; a trade which is the vital support of an institution which an American divine tells us has “no evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life.” But Tom, as we see, being a poor, ignorant fellow, whose reading had been confined entirely to the New Testament, could not comfort and solace himself with views like these."

Beecher's point is that a hardened, establishment preacher, motivated by social standing, money, or national interest, can indeed find warrant for slavery in the Old Testament, even if he has to twist things a little.  And some verses, taken out of the full context of Scripture, may help even more.  But Christians are supposed to look to Christ for their example, and interpret Scripture through him.  And no one with any sense could read the New Testament -- not just this one verse, but hardly any of it -- and deny that the practices of American slavery were the opposite of what Christ taught and modeled -- and his disciples. 

For Augustine's animus against slave traders is explicitly affirmed in the New Testament, and would apply to those on that boat in Uncle Tom's Cabin, if the preacher were courageous enough to tell the truth:  

"We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers . . . "

There is nothing in the New Testament to explain any upsurge in slave-trading under the Christian watch, which would in fact not occur for more than a millennia, and then only after the Muslim slave trade had primed that pump for centuries.  

Eric cites the verse that instructs slaves to obey their masters, not to kill them.  And really, would Christianity be Christianity, if it instructed people to kill their bosses?  Hierarchy is part of life, and must be observed, within the bounds of Christian law.  But Eric omits this following set of instructions: 

"And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him."

This is pretty revolutionary, in itself.  Masters should treat slaves "in the same way" as slaves treat masters?  And not only don't beat them, but don't even threaten them?  What's to keep them from running away, then?  

And slavery is not, a la Aristotle, a fundamental marker of human character.  We are all equal before God, who is the real boss.  

I already showed that there are many "active ingredients" in the life and teachings of Marx that explain the evils of communism: Marx's violent, arrogant character, his self-worship, his justification of class violence, his naivete about human nature, his over-generalizations, his absurd prophecies, his talk about the "dictatorship of the proletariat," his refusal to admit error, his hatred of God, etc.  

So by the fourth criterion, too, Marx can very reasonably be blamed for tyranny.  But Christ should be credited for the liberation of slaves, which began earlier than most people realize, and is still not complete.  

I might add that as a young missionary, I was inspired to try to liberate sex slaves in Asia, by passages in the Old Testament.    

5. Energetic motion. "Fifth, causation is also clearer if change moves uphill against so powerful an element in human nature.  Why would any man sleep with more than one woman?  The answer is too obvious, to most men, to need stating.  Lust and philandering need no explanation, nor do rape, conquest, polygamy, or enslavement of the weak . . . It takes moral energy to move society uphill against the gravitational resistance of political power."

This criterion, too, helps explain why Marx was in fact to blame for the Gulag.  Just to take one instance: common ownership of property, which led to so many millions of deaths and so much misery in China, was emphatically not normal for Chinese. They had to be forced into it, by Marxist ideologues.  The communes moved radically against human nature, and thus demonstrate ideological causation. 

By contrast, as noted, it has been normal since the dawn of time for the powerful to exploit the weak, including by enslaving them.  This requires no explanation by itself.  Chesterton, indeed, said early in the 20th Century that enslavement was very human, and could be expected again.  Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler would soon prove him a prophet.  

Of course, it did take some ideological energy to upset what had become European norms against slavery by that time, and Marx and Hitler did provide that energy.  But having established a dictatorship, demonized whole classes, and destroyed the economy by communizing property, mass slavery became a fairly natural expedient.  You have to blame someone for your mistakes!  (When did Marx ever accept blame?)  You have to make someone do the work once incentive is gone!  

Slavery was ubiquitous in the world in which Christianity first appeared.  Half of ancient residents of Athens were slaves.  If anything, early Christianity began fitfully to apply some brakes to human enslavement. 

So by this criterion, too, Eric has things backwards.  Marx's life and teachings help explain the radical, often anti-human, policies of his followers, which fairly quickly led into the old grooves of tyranny and slavery.  But Christ's disciples acted against human nature and interest to free slaves against opposition, then bring about abolition or effective near-abolition of slavery.  (The first time during the "Dark Ages.")       

   

6.  Citations.  "Finally, if reformers cite or allude to a text while instituting reform, that may indeed point to the source of their inspiration."

As I showed, Marx' disciples did cite Marx extensively, and translate and print his works, to justify and explain their actions. 

Yes, as mentioned above, Christians who wished to justify slavery also looked for, and found, verses which helped them do so.  Some of those citations were, no doubt, stronger than the one Stowe quoted.  

But I agree with Stowe, as did Wilberforce, and as did northerner abolitionists who were inspired by Scripture to risk their lives (against interest and Nature) to liberate slaves.  Read honestly, as Uncle Tom did, it is impossible to justify slavery from the life and teachings of Jesus, which are for Christians the heart of the Bible, from which all else must be interpreted.  Not just that one verse, but the tone and implications of the entire New Testament, and a deeper understanding of the Old, set world civilization up for what in fact occurred: a worldwide abolition movement, led by pious Christians like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom.    

So five of the six historical criteria I mentioned clearly show why Marx's teachings and example led to so much misery, so quickly, under the lead of his radical disciples.  Solzhenitsyn points out that some of the "losers," like Trotsky, were if anything worse!  The other criteria is ambivalent, and analyzed carefully, also indicts Marx.  But Jesus liberated slaves, he did not capture or mistreat them.