ONE-HUNDRED YEARS OF COMMUNIST RULE
1917 was a year of momentous events for the world and for the Jewish people. It was the year when the Balfour Declaration was issued by Great Britain and the year of America’s entry into World War I. It was also the year that the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia and created the first Communist government and society in the world.
Communism
was messianic vision incarnate. It was the ultimate utopian dream
realized. It promised prosperity for all, the abolition of war and
bigotry, and the end of the exploitation of the working class, and a
society where no one would own anything privately but everyone would own
everything collectively.
Its “bible”
consisted of the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with an
overlay of commentary and dicta by Lenin. A small group of hardened
violent revolutionaries hijacked a country of over one-hundred million
and immediately began killing those who it suspected of not being true
believers in the Communist dream.
Lenin
famously said: “One cannot make a successful revolution without a
firing squad,” and he was a man of his word. The violence used in
enforcing Communist rule created a civil war that lasted for years and
consumed hundreds of thousands of lives. But the Communists eventually
prevailed and the Soviet Union, as Russia was now to be called, became
the workers’ paradise and the wave of the future for humankind
generally.
Communism
was never intended to be limited to Russia alone but rather it was an
international movement that promised to remove all nationalistic
territorial borders and all religious differences since there would only
be enforced atheism in the Communist new world.
The toll of
human lives over the past century in countries under Communist rule has
been horrendous. Between Lenin, Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pat, Fidel
Castro, etc. it easily surpasses one-hundred million. In spite of this
tremendous cost, the longed for paradise never quite arrived. The main
Communist states, Russia and China, have long since abandoned the
nonsense of Marxian economic theory in order to survive. All states that
clung to Marxist theology have failed and failed miserably.
Communism
became and to a great extent still remains the engine of anti-Israel and
anti-Semitism on the world, especially in academia and other befuddled
islands of Leftist belief. What makes this so ironic and troublesome is
the fact that a great many Jews in past generations believed in Marxist
theory and marched militantly under the red banner.
Many Jews
were seduced by the messianic aspect of Communism and its pronounced aim
of ending bigotry amongst human societies. But reality intervened and
reengineering human nature proved to be much more difficult than the
Communist theoreticians ever imagined. So, more terror had to be invoked
to reach the unreachable goal of utopianism. The system collapsed in a
welter of poverty, inefficiency and state sponsored murder. A century
later we are able to look back and wonder how a world could have gone so
mad for so long and ignored the realities and followed the false
prophets.
History is a
brutal teacher. It does not support false doctrines and eventually
exposes all of the weaknesses that are part of any and all human
propositions. But history is too late to restore the lives and fortunes
of those ruined by Communism over the past century. The professors in
the Western world’s universities who continue to spew the Communist line
of thought do a great disservice to their mostly naïve students.
The history
of Communism as it really existed over the past century should be
enough to make any rational thinking person understand its failure and
falsehood. Instead it is often presented as a truth whose time will yet
come and its utopian dream is simply waiting around the corner of human
experience to be realized. This is especially important regarding the
Jewish left that has become increasingly and belligerently anti-Israel
and anti- Jewish traditional values and life style.
After a century of Communist rule and
unparalleled human destruction, an honest and hard look backwards at the
history of Communism over the past century is certainly in order. There
are over one hundred-million lives and souls that demand at least this
from us.
http://www.rabbiwein.com/blog/post-2039.html?utm_source=Newsletter+email-Parshat+Toldot+5778+-+Rabbi+Wein&utm_campaign=Weekly+Parsha&utm_medium=email
READ MORE:
http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Communism
THE UOJ ARCHIVES - JUNE 2012:
As the Ten Commandments instruct, envy is corrosive to the individual and to those societies that embrace it.
READ:
https://theunorthodoxjew.blogspot.com/2012/01/what-bible-teaches-about-capitalism.html
Jews and Communism
Communism was committed to equal rights for Jews, while at the same time opposing Jewish nationhood. Communists rejected Judaism, along with all other religions, as an “opiate of the masses,” and opposed Zionism, Bundism, and other forms of what Communists regarded as Jewish nationalism. Nevertheless, many people associated Jews with communism. Indeed, such different political figures as Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, mortal enemies in World War II, seemed to share the view that communism was somehow a Jewish conspiracy. Shortly after the Russian Revolution, Winston Churchill wrote, “The international Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. . . . This world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization, this band from the underworld . . . have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire” (Illustrated Sunday Herald, London, 8 February 1920). Adolf Hitler, who regularly ranted against Jews and Bolsheviks, wrote, “In Russian Bolshevism we see the attempt undertaken by the Jews in the twentieth century to achieve world domination. . . . Marxism systematically plans to hand the world to the Jews.”READ MORE:
http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Communism
What the Bible Teaches about Capitalism!
As the Ten Commandments instruct, envy is corrosive to the individual and to those societies that embrace it.
READ:
https://theunorthodoxjew.blogspot.com/2012/01/what-bible-teaches-about-capitalism.html
And yet today if you wear a hammer or sickle or fly the Soviet flag in public no one comments. But if you display a swastika?
ReplyDelete