The ideology which brought the greatest harm to mankind in the violence and savagery-filled century we have just left behind, and the most widespread in the world, was without doubt Communism. Communism, which reached its historical peak with the two German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century, spilt so much blood in the world that it left even the Nazis and the imperialists behind. It led to the deaths of innocent people and spread violence, fear, and hopelessness among mankind. No matter how much Communism is thought of as having been torn down in 1991, the debris it left behind it still exists. No matter how “liberalised” one part of the “unrepentant” Communists and Marxists may be, materialist philosophy, the dark side of Communism and Marxism and which turned people away from religion and morality, still continues to influence these people.
This ideology which spread terror to every corner of the world actually represented an idea which goes back to ancient times. Dialectics was a belief that all development in the universe arose as the result of conflict. Based on this belief Marx and Engels set about analysing the history of the world. Marx claimed that the history of man was one of conflict, that the current conflict was one between workers and capitalists, and that the workers would soon rise up and build a Communist revolution.
The most striking feature of the two founders of Communism was that, like all materialists, they nurtured a great hatred of religion. Marx and Engels were both confirmed atheists and saw the doing away with religious beliefs as essential from the point of view of Communism.
But Marx and Engels lacked one important thing: in order to attract a wider public they needed to give their ideology a scientific appearance. And the dangerous alliance which gave rise to the pain, chaos, mass murders, turning of brother against brother, and separatism of the 20th century emerged at this point. Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in his book The Origin of Species. And how interesting it is that the basic claims he put forward were just the explanations Marx and Engels were looking for. Darwin claimed that living things emerged as a result of the “struggle for survival” or “dialectical conflict.” Furthermore he denied creation and rejected religious beliefs. For Marx and Engels this was an opportunity not to be missed.
In a letter Marx wrote to Lassalle, a socialist friend of his, on January 16, 1861, he said: “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.” [1] thus revealing the importance of the theory of evolution for Communism.
In one of his works, Engels stressed the importance of Darwin’s having developed a theory opposed to religion:
He (Darwin) dealt the metaphysical conception of nature the heaviest blow by his proof that the organic world of today – plants, animals, and consequently man too – is the product of a process of evolution going on through millions of years. [2]
The American researcher Conway Zirckle explains why the founders of Communism immediately accepted Darwin’s theory”
Marx and Engels accepted evolution almost immediately after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Evolution, of course, was just what the founders of communism needed to explain how mankind could have come into being without the intervention of any supernatural force, and consequently it could be used to bolster the foundations of their materialistic philosophy. In addition, Darwin’s interpretation of evolutionéthat evolution had come about through the operation of natural selectionégave them an alternative hypothesis to the prevailing teleological explanation of the observed fact that all forms of life are adapted to their conditions. [3]
As we have seen, Marx and Engels were delighted to believe that Darwin’s concept of evolution formed a scientific support for their own atheist world view. But this delight proved to be premature. The theory of evolution saw wide acceptance because it was proposed in a primitive 19th century scientific environment and was full of errors lacking any sort of scientific proof. Science, which developed in the second half of the 20th century, revealed the invalidity of the theory of evolution. This meant the collapse of Communist and materialist thinking as much as it did of Darwinism. (For further details see The Evolution Deceit by Harun Yahya).
Marx and Engels’ followers, who brought about the deaths of millions of people accepted the theory of evolution with great joy and interest.
It was Lenin who made Marx’s project of Communist revolution come true. Lenin, aimed to bring down the Tsarist regime in Russia by force of arms. The chaos after World War I gave the Bolsheviks the opportunity they had been seeking. With Lenin at their head, the Communists seized power by the use of arms in October 1917. After the revolution Russia was the scene of a bloody three-year civil war between Communists and supporters of the tsar.
Like the other Communist leaders, Lenin often stressed that Darwin’s theory was the fundamental basis of dialectical materialist philosophy.
Darwin put an end to the belief that the animal and vegetable species bear no relation to one another, except by chance, and that they were created by God, and hence immutable. [4]
Trotsky, counted the most important architect of the Bolshevik revolution after Lenin, again attached great importance to Darwinism. He declared his admiration for Darwin in the following way,
Darwin’s discovery is the highest triumph of the dialectic in the whole field of organic matter. [5]
Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin, widely regarded as the bloodiest dictator in the history of the world.
Stalin’s first important move was to take over the fields of the peasants in the name of this policy of collectivization which was intended to do away with private property. All the Russian villagers’ crops were collected by armed officials. As a result these was a terrible famine. Millions of women, children, and the elderly who could find nothing to eat ended their lives writhing in hunger. The death toll in the Caucasus alone was 1 million.
Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of people who tried to resist this policy to Siberia’s dreadful labor camps. On the other hand tens of thousands of people were executed by Stalin’s secret police. Millions of people were forced to migrate to the furthest corners of Russia.
In Stalin’s period the Soviet Union had turned into an environment of chaos where for millions of people life was permanently under threat, and where they could be taken away, though innocent of any crime, at any moment, to suffer unimagined torments. Not just Communism, but the history of Fascism, too, is full of such attitudes.
Some commentators on history fall into the error, when evaluating these events, of trying to show that the basic cause of all this savagery and mercilessness was that as people, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and Mussolini had unbalanced and psychopathic natures. What kind of coincidence is it, that the whole world should have fallen into the hands of psychologically unbalanced people at the same time?
It is an obvious and definite truth that these people and ideologies all drank from the same well and that they were all portrayed as justified and the only way by the same source. In short there was another guilty party behind these people. The cause of these inhuman and unbalanced leaders dragging millions along behind them, and which allowed them to commit crimes, was the apparent scientific force and support given to them by materialist philosophy and Darwinism. (For further information on the subject, see “Disasters Darwinism Brought to Humanity” by Harun Yahya)
Notes:
[1] Conway Zirkle, “Evolution, Marxian Biology and the Social Scene“, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959, pp.85-87
[2] Friedrich Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, Foreign Languages Press, Peking 1975, p. 67
[3] Conway Zirkle, “Evolution, Marxian Biology and the Social Scene“, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), pp.85-86
[4] Marshall Hall, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao et al: The Role of Darwinian Evolutionism in Their Lives, http://www.fixedearth.com/hlsm.html
[5] Alan Woods and Ted Grant, “Reason in Revolt: Marxism and Modern Science”, London:1993
Harun Yahya is a prominent Turkish intellectual.
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