[Claverhouse]

Yes, yes he was an atheist.



However... more to the point he was not some ordinary atheist who simply disbelieves in any God, he was one of those sad little atheists who have a profound hatred of the God in Whom they disbelieve: a mixture of ressentiment and rejection to the point of rebellion rather than rational disbelief. He wasn't as bad that way as bitter little Lenin however, who distorted Marx's legacy into something Marx would not have recognised.

On the other hand, from an atheist perspective the crimes of Lenin and marxism do not exist, any more than an atheist would condemn Hitler and naziism's crimes; since all actions are temporary meaningless transactions in an empty void without either reward or punishment. And too, 'Evil' is meaningless applied when the premises of the actors ( be they communists or nazis or whatever ) are completely different from your premises of good and evil. F'rinstance, communists rejected any right to life, liberty and property, as they were entitled so to do: therefore they cannot be condemned for not following the morality they rejected.

They should though be condemned for enforcing their own morality upon others --- but then again, leftism's entire basis is compulsion: without compulsion it is nothing.


I was saving this for a blog post, which I guess I'll now have to do *sighs*.

Here is a riotous, magnificent article, three long pages, on Marx's goofy, repellently idealistic, millennialistic eschatological process by the atheist libertarian Murray N. Rothbard. You can note that Rothbard was, despite his politics not anti-soviet and excused them rather than the West for the Cold War ( although he thought Soviet Man as an ideal as dreary and repulsive as Randian Man, in his famous attack on the Disciples of Ayn ) however, when it came to analysing Marx's ridiculous religiosity, he let himself go...

( Obviously, anti-semites get excited saying Karl was a jew... Actually, he was not one: his parents were lutheran converts and he was brought up in excitable early nineteenth century German Romanticism [ which was kinda awesome in many ways ] rather than in excitable jewish meaningless wrangling for the sake of wrangling... )


Murray N. Rothbard : The Secret Truth About Karl Marx and His Disciples



Excerpts:



In contrast, I hold with the growing consensus in Marxist studies that, at least since 1844 and possibly earlier, there was only one Marx, and that Marx, the "humanist," established the goal that he would seek for the remainder of his life: the apocalyptic triumph of revolutionary communism. In this view, Marx's exploration later into the economics of capitalism was merely a quest for the mechanism, the "law of history," that allegedly makes such a triumph inevitable.

But in that case, it becomes vital to investigate the nature of this allegedly humanistic goal of communism, what the meaning of this "freedom" might be, and whether or not the grisly record of Marxist-Leninist regimes in the 20th century was implicit in the basic Marxian conception of freedom.


Marxism is a religious creed. This statement has been common among critics of Marx, and since Marxism is an explicit enemy of religion, such a seeming paradox would offend many Marxists, since it clearly challenged the allegedly hard-headed scientific materialism on which Marxism rested. In the present day, oddly enough, an age of liberation theology and other flirtations between Marxism and the Church, Marxists themselves are often quick to make this same proclamation.


Certainly, one obvious way in which Marxism functions as a religion is the lengths to which Marxists will go to preserve their system against obvious errors or fallacies. Thus, when Marxian predictions fail even though they are allegedly derived from scientific laws of history, Marxists go to great lengths to change the terms of the original prediction.


...


But the nature of Marxism as religion cuts deeper than the follies and evasions of Marxists or the cryptic and often unintelligible nature of Marxian writings. For it is the contention of this article that the crucial goal – communism – is an atheized version of a certain type of religious eschatology; that the alleged inevitable process of getting there – the dialectic – is an atheistic form of the same religious laws of history; and that the supposedly central problem of capitalism as perceived by "humanist" Marxists, the problem of "alienation," is an atheistic version of the selfsame religion's metaphysical grievance at the entire created universe.


...


Then, finally – and here we come to eschatology, the science of the Last Days – there will eventually be a mighty reunion, a reabsorption, in which man and God are at last not only reunited, but reunited on a higher, on a perfected level. The two cosmic blobs – God and man (and presumably nature too) – now meet and merge on a more exalted level. The painful state of creation is now over, alienation is at last ended, and man returns Home to be on a higher, postcreation level. History, and the world, have come to an end.


A crucial feature of reabsorption is that all this "perfecting" and "reuniting" obviously takes place only on a species-collectivist level. The individual man is nothing, a mere cell in the great, collective-organism man; only in that way can we say that "man" progresses or fulfills "himself" over the centuries, suffers alienation from "his" precreation state, and finally "returns" to unity with God on a higher level. The relation to the Marxian goal of communism is already becoming clear; the "alienation" eliminated by the inevitable communist end of history is that of the collective-species man, each man being finally united with other men and with nature (which, for Marx, was "created" by the collective-species man, who thereby replaces God as the creator).


...


Hegel was a theology student at the University of Tübingen, and many of his fellow Romantics, friends and colleagues, such as Schelling, Schiller, Holderlin, and Fichte, began as theology students, many of them at Tübingen.


The Romantic twist to the reabsorption story was to proclaim that God is in reality man. Man, or rather the Man-God, created the universe. But man's imperfection, his flaw, lay in his failure to realize that he is God. The Man-God begins his life in history unconscious of the vital fact that he is God. He is alienated, cut off from the crucial knowledge that he and God are one, that he created, and continues to empower, the universe.


History, then, is the inevitable process by which the Man-God develops his faculties, fulfills his potential, and advances his knowledge, until that blissful day when man acquires Absolute Knowledge, that is, the full knowledge and realization that he is God. At that point, the Man-God finally reaches his potential, becomes an infinite being without bounds, and thereby puts an end to history. The dialectic of history occurs, again, in three fundamental stages: the precreation stage; the postcreation stage of development with alienation; and the final reabsorption into the state of infinity and absolute self-knowledge, which culminates, and puts an end to, the historical process.

...

[ Chap called Jan Bockelson took command of the Anabaptist Revolution in 1534 --- it ended as one would expect, as it always ends... ]


It is not surprising that the deluded masses of Münster began to grumble at being forced to live in abject poverty while King Bockelson and his courtiers lived in great luxury on the proceeds of their confiscated belongings. Bockelson responded by beaming propaganda to justify the new system.


The justification was this: it was all right for Bockelson to live in pomp and luxury because he was already "dead" to the world and the flesh. Since he was dead to the world, in a deep sense his luxury didn't count. In the style of every guru who has ever lived in luxury among his poor, credulous followers, he explained that for him material objects had no value.


More importantly perhaps, Bockelson assured his subjects that he and his court were only the advance guard of the new order; soon, they too would be living in the same millennial luxury. Under their new order the people of Münster would soon forge outward, armed with God's will, and conquer the entire world, exterminating the unrighteous, after which Jesus would return and they would live in luxury and perfection. Equal communism with great luxury for all would then be achieved.


Greater dissent meant, of course, escalated terror, and King Bockelson's reign of "love" and death intensified its course of intimidation and slaughter. As soon as he proclaimed the monarchy, the prophet Dusentschur announced a new divine revelation: that all who persisted in disagreeing with or disobeying King Bockelson shall be put to death, and their very memory extirpated forever. Many of the victims executed were women, who were killed for denying their husbands' marital rights, insulting a preacher, or daring to practice polygyny – which was considered to be a solely male privilege.


...


To Morelly, man is everywhere good, altruistic, and dedicated to work; only institutions are degrading and corrupt, specifically the institution of private property. Abolish that, and man's natural goodness would easily triumph. (Query: where did these corrupt human institutions come from, if not from man?)

Similarly, for Morelly, as for Marx and Lenin after him, the administration of the communist utopia would be absurdly easy as well. Assigning to every person his task in life, and deciding what material goods and services would fulfill his needs, would apparently be a trivial problem for a Ministry of Labor or of Consumption. For Morelly, all this is merely a matter of trivial enumeration, listing things and persons.


And yet, somehow things are not going to be that easy in the Morelly utopia. While Mably the pessimist was apparently willing to leave society to the voluntary actions of individuals, the optimist Morelly was cheerfully prepared to employ brutally coercive methods to keep all of his "naturally good" citizens in line. Morelly worked out an intricate design for his proposed ideal government and society, allegedly based on the evident dictates of natural law, and most of which was supposed to be changeless and eternal.


In particular, there was to be no private property, except for daily needs; every person was to be maintained and employed by the collective. Every man is to be forced to work, to contribute to the communal storehouse, according to his talents, and then will be assigned goods from these stores according to his presumed needs.


Marriages are to be compulsory, and children are to be brought up communally, and absolutely identically in food, clothing, and training. Philosophic and religious doctrines are to be absolutely prescribed; no differences are to be tolerated; and children are not to be corrupted by any "fable, story, or ridiculous fictions." All trade or barter is to be forbidden by "inviolable law." All buildings are to be the same, and grouped in equal blocks; all clothing is to be made out of the same fabric (a proposal prophetic of Mao's China). Occupations are to be limited and strictly assigned by the State.


Finally, the imposed laws are to be held sacred and inviolable, and anyone attempting to change them is to be isolated and incarcerated for life.


It should be clear that these utopias are debased, secularized versions of the visions of the Christian millennialists. Not only is there no ordained agency of social change to achieve this end state, but they lack the glitter of messianic rule or glorification of God to disguise the fact that these utopias are static states, in which, as Gray puts it,


Nothing ever happens; no one ever disagrees with any one; the government, whatever its form may be, is always so wisely guided that there may be room for gratitude but never for criticism. Nothing happens, nothing can happen in any of them.






This idealist crap is so exquisitely described I could quote far more from this article, but as you can see we have reached the End of History in that description of communist nirvana...








Claverhouse