For the most part, Sherlock merely copies Hitchens’ arguments out of “God Is Not Great”.
Stalin per Hitchens, via Sherlock:
“Stalin was raised as a Christian under the religious influence of his mother, who enrolled him in seminary school, and that Stalin later took it upon himself to study for the priesthood, as Hitchens and others have pointed out, Stalin merely stepped into a ready-made religious tyranny, constructed by the Russian Orthodox Church and paved with the teachings of St. Paul.
Here then, the central premise of Hitchens’ argument is worthy of reiteration. Had Stalin inherited a purely rational secular edifice, one established upon the ethos espoused by the likes of Lucretius, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Einstein and other free thinking and rational secularists, then the apologist’s argument would hold slightly more weight, but such wasn’t the case. Stalin merely tore the existing religious labels off the Christian Inquisition, the enforcement of Christian orthodoxy, the Crusades, the praising of the priesthood, messianism, and Edenic ideas of a terrestrial religious-styled utopia, and re-branded them with the red of communism. Had this Christian machine not been in place, then it is more than likely Stalin wouldn’t have had the vehicle he needed to succeed in causing so much suffering in the name of his godless religion, Communism.”
But what Hitchens does is revisionist history, and it doesn’t match the work of actual historians. It is not even historian-type writing, because he is completely selective, discriminating in favor of revisionist “history” sources and in favor of protecting Atheism. Hitchens doesn’t give specific references for most of his heated claims; he makes claims using rhetorical devices as does Sherlock, above. Actually Hitchens gives four general references in the back of the book, all of which are prejudicial in the sense of being sources which are only ideological. And he completely ignores the fact that the church was essentially eradicated and its leaders either killed or made captive by Lenin. So there was hardly a church structure left to be useful to Stalin. More importantly, Stalin didn’t need a pre-existing structure from the church: he created his own structure quite effectively.
Consider this from Robert Service, in his massive, “Stalin, a Biography”:
“Although Lenin had founded the USSR, it was Stalin who decisively strengthened and stabilized the structure. Without Stalin, the Soviet Union might have collapsed decades before it was dismantled in 1991.”
Pg 3.
It was not the pre-existing religious structure which enabled Stalin. It was Stalin who enabled an all-new structure in the midst of massive destruction of the old.
From Overy’s “The Dictators”:
“At the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1930, he [Stalin] announced ominously that religion was ‘a brake on building socialism’, but the Central Committee had already decided the previous year that the failure to eradicate religion by argument required a complete overhaul of the anti-religious campaign.(30) Under Stalin the cultural and institutional life of all the Soviet Union’s religions was ruthlessly emasculated and thousands of clerics murdered or exiled. From 1929 onwards the ideological war against religion was intensified using crude inspirational slogans: ‘beat religion on the head every day of your life’.(31) Religion was regarded as a principle obstacle to the modernization of Soviet society and the construction of a communist economy, and religious communities were treated as if they were political supporters of a vestigial capitalism.
The physical assault on religion meant the closure of confiscation of churches, chapels, mosques, synagogues and monasteries. Beginning in 1928, with the closure of a modest 532 religious houses, by 1940 the overwhelming majority had been dynamited, closed down or taken over by the civil authorities for a wide variety of other purposes. The famous Strastnoi monastery in the center of Moscow was converted into the National Anti-religious Museum, where posters and artifacts drove home the message that all religion stemmed from an ancient fount of primitive superstition; smaller exhibitions of godlessness – Museums of Scientific Atheism – proliferated across the Soviet Union.” (32)
Lenin called for a program of “militant Atheism” and “militant materialism”. And here in the Library of Congress is Lenin’s letter prescribing the killing of the religious.
The atrocities were, in fact, in the name of Atheism.
“In 1921 the regime shifted from a policy of political repression to a battle of ideas. Lenin called for the praty to adopt a program of ‘militant atheism’ and ’militant materialism’.(21) Religion was to be defeated by the power of scientific explanation, which represented a ‘single truth’. In June 1923, the party set up the League of the Godless led by Emilian Yaroslavsky an Old Bolshevik who had briefly preceded Stalin as secretary to the Central Committee of the party wan was the most openly atheist of the regime’s new leaders. By 1929 the League had 9,000 cells of atheist agitators a 465,000 members.(22) A year later, in 1924, a Society of Militant Materialists was founded. The party launched a nationwide program of atheist propaganda and scientific demonstrations…. In 1922, the atheist weekly Bezbozhnik(The Godless) was first published and soon had a circulation of hundreds of thousands; a monthly journal Bezbohnik ustanka (The Godless in the Workplace)was targeted at the proletariat; the magazine Ateist, launched in 1925, carried more sophisticated scientific articles to challenge the moral and metaphysical claims of the Church intelligentsia”.
When the intellectual attack failed to staunch religion, the physical attacks began in earnest, with over 8,000 clergy killed, their churches demolished, leaving only those willing to submit to communist Atheism.
What Hitchens would have us believe is that totalitarianism is actually a form of religion. He tries that tack valiantly, as have other Atheists before him, but that is just a pitiful feint away from the truth: Russian Communism was specifically officially Atheist, and their driving philosophy was Atheist, Materialist, and totalitarian. The propaganda was not religious in any sense; it was mind control as diktat, a completely non-theological process. The purges under Lenin were specifically meant to support the installation of Atheism into the culture, while dismantling religious structure and robbing their possessions. The purges under Stalin started as fear generation for the sole purpose of consolidation of power, and became random features of Stalin’s paranoia and desire to keep the population on edge.
It is true that a religion can pervert itself into totalitarianism; it is not true that totalitarianism is a religion or religious.
More from Service’s “Stalin”:
“The fact that he jotted down his remarks in a copy of a work by Lenin may not have been an accident: Stalin measured himself by Lenin’s standard.(27) … Possibly Stalin’s style of amoralism came not from Marxism-Leninism but from a much earlier set of ideas. He read Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and annotated his own copy of it…(28) His insistence on the importance of courage could well have derived from Machiavelli’s supreme demand on the ruler: namely that he should show vertu. This is a word barely translatable into either Russian or English; but it is identified with manliness, endeavor, courage and excellence. Stalin, if this is correct, saw himself as the embodiment of Machiavellian vertu.
Service, p342.
Regardless of Stalin’s source of motivations, it most certainly was not from his Christian roots.
From Overy, pg 266-7:
“In the Soviet union the whole system of Marxist-Leninist thought was predicated on the idea of ‘dialectical materialism’, a term that held an exceptional authority throughout the Stalin years. It was officially defined by Stalin himself in an essay on Dialectical and Historical Materialism that he published in 1938. It’s philosophical essence was simple, even simplistic: everything in nature is part of an objective material world that is both completely integrated and constantly subject to change. The changes occur ‘dialectically’, a term fist used in the modern age by the very un-Marxist nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Hegel, to describe the dynamic contradictions that propel all phenomena from lower to higher forms of existence. Marxists asserted that dialectical materialism could be used to describe not only the development of the natural world but also evolution of history as an unfolding succession of economic systems, each with its own social contradictions generated by class conflict. Stalin took from Marxism the idea that these changes could be defined in terms of observable, scientific laws of history, just as there were scientific laws governing the behavior of the natural world. These laws, Stalin wrote in 1952, are ‘the reflection of objective processes which take place independently of the will of man’.(3) the coupling of natural science and social history, first formulated by Lenin, made the emergence of communism not simply historical accident by historical destiny, a product of the essential nature of things.(4)”
The motivation was false science (social and economic deterministic evolution), molded into an Atheistic creed, Dialectical Materialism.
In all cases, and up until Gorbachev, the motivating philosophy was Atheist Dialectical Materialism, and Gorbachev was removed after a coterie of critics attacked his policies, wanting to preserve Atheist Dialectical Materialism.
Says Michael Sherlock,
” That vast and seemingly bottomless “reservoir of religious credulity,” as Hitchens so eloquently phrased it, which served to subdue the servile Soviets for hundreds of years beneath the yoke of an equally brutal supernatural religion, was the very fountain of boundless unthinking acquiescence that Stalin, having adorned himself in the Tsar’s clothes, utilized to send countless innocent Russians to their deaths. Where would Stalin have found such docile servitude, servitude that fed the flames of his secular religious tyranny, had Lucretius, Thomas Paine, Albert Einstein or Thomas Jefferson bestowed upon these poor religious Russians, their intellectual legacy? To answer in a word, nowhere.”
Unthinking acquiescence? Docile servitude? Hardly. The valiant Russian objectors of conscience and intellect were murdered, en masse, early on, as dictated by the specifically Atheist diktat of Lenin and the Central Committee.
And the existence of a contrary intellectual legacy came in the form of a pre-existing religious culture in the USA where the governing after the revolution was peacefully pursued, whereas the Atheist Enlightenment legacy in France produced the Reign of Terror, bloodbaths against hated classes, and ultimately resulted in a new totalitarian, Napoleon.
Returning to Sherlock, he attempts to give the argument for Atheist Atrocities a set of logical fallacies. Let’s see how that works out.
First, he attempts the Tu Quoque Fallacy, and that would apply if the Atheist Atrocity argument were used only as a rebuttal to charges of Christian Atrocities. However, taken by itself as a stand-alone argument against Atheism means that the Tu Quoque has no meaning; the argument addresses “you”, not “you too”. Thus because the Atheist Atrocity is a valid argument in its own right, the Tu Quoque Fallacy does not apply, and that assertion becomes a Red Herring Fallacy.
Second, he tries the False Analogy Fallacy, claiming that Atheism is not a religion, so the two cannot be compared. But this is the same failure as the Tu Quoque: the argument that Atheists and Atheism slaughtered millions of people is not an analogy; it is historical fact, taken as a single fact and used as a direct argument against Atheism. So this is another Red Herring.
Third, he attempts the False Cause Fallacy, claiming that there is no causality in the relationship between Atheism and the Atheist Atrocities. Yet historically, there certainly is a demonstrable causal relationship, and that case is made above in the discussions surrounding (a)Atheist Dialectical Materialism as the organizing and unifying principle of the state; (b)the specific atrocities on religions in the name of Atheism. Since cause can be demonstrated reliably, this charge is false and fails.
Yet there is another dimension within this charge. Sherlock makes the claim that Atheism is merely a lack of belief; then he sets up an analogy:
” Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were all non-figure skaters. Therefore we can conclude that not being a figure skater causes a person to commit atrocities.”
But Atheism is not merely “non-belief”; it is a rejection of an entire worldview, including its moral authority and its moral principles, leaving the Atheist in a moral void either to be filled with personal choices or left void. [note 1] Further, as demonstrated above, it is the proselytization of that moral void which leads to atrocities, as amoral elitists attempt to force amorality upon entire cultures and civilizations. The initial premise, “non-belief”, is false. Thus the failure is Sherlock’s, with both a false premise and a False Analogy.
So the premise here, “non-belief” is a purposeful false assertion, designed to avoid responsibility for that which is rightly attributable to Atheism: i.e. it is a lie.
Fourth, he asserts the Poisoning the Well Fallacy. Well, no. Either the claim is true, and Atheist atrocities occurred, or they did not. Poisoning the well involves a preemptive Ad Hominem strike directed at the individual. Presenting factual evidence in no way “poisons the well”. What he hopes to do is to disassociate himself from the truth of the accusations and their consequences – even while doing the same false association to religions. But is the association truly false, if the propositions extend to current events today within Atheism, and if the results are demonstrably progressing in the same direction today as they did then? Is the association truly false if there is no difference in the Evolution, Materialism and the Atheist moral void between Leninist positioning and today’s Atheist intellectual positioning? No, the current eliminationist, classist rhetoric of the Atheist Left demonstrates that the well is poisoned by their own identity rhetoric, without any help from external sources. This is not fallacy, it is demonstrable fact.
Fifth, Sherlock attempts one last escape, the Slippery Slope Fallacy. But again, the slope is being traversed, and that downward spiral is called Progressivism, these days. It is exactly Marxism except for the designation of classes other than the proletariat as Victimhood Classes, and classes other than the bourgeoisie as Oppressor Classes. Other than changes in the identities of victims/oppressors, the amoral attack on religion is progressing directly down the slope, toward total amoral behaviors being acceptable, with dissent being purged (currently using demonization of Political Correctness to silence dissent, and legal protection – the extra punishment of hate crime – of victimhood Classes, as well as attacks on free speech and the First Amendment protection of religion).
The slippery slope is a fallacy only if the Precautionary Principle is used without evidence in order to stop an opposing theory from implementation; it is not a fallacy if the slope is observably being slid down. This is another, and final failure in the logic attack which Sherlock is trying to attribute to the use of the Atheist Atrocity argument.
To summarize briefly: Sherlock bases his argument on prejudiced and false revisionist history. He follows this with false premises against which he attempts to apply logic fallacies, all of which fail for the reasons given above.
If an argument, A, is valid and true, then all counter arguments purporting to falsify it are false and will fail. That is what has happened here: the communist atrocities in Russia and then the USSRwere based on Atheism and done in the name of Atheism and its derivatives, Evolution and Dialectical Materialism. Further, Atheism since then has changed none of its worldview beliefs, which include Materialism and Evolution and the superiority of the elite Atheists. Atheism has no restraints on morality (there being no objective Good or Evil), and no constraints on its intellectual positions (there being no objective Truth).
Notes:
1. The moral void is filled with “atheistic science”, which in practice is the scientism of non-empirical Evolution. In the USSR, their science was even a false notion of evolution, and that failure produced even more death due to persistent crop failures.
Atheism and Totalitarian Atheist Mass Slaughters
“One thing that I read on your site is that Atheists such as Mao and Stalin are responsible for the deaths of millions. Atheists would argue that these individuals ambition and drive came from personal origins and was not religious in nature. Basically stating, “Hey Atheism had nothing to do with this!” In order to combat this retort is there any reading material that would allow me to derail the aforementioned?”
The following barely counts as a surface accounting of Atheism and its necessity within Communism, and further the relation of Atheism to Communist Atrocities. The history is readily available to everyone who is free, both physically and intellectually.
The connection is two-fold. First is the nature of Atheist self-derived pseudo-morality, which derives from the elevation of self to the position of elitist moral authority. Second is the use of pseudo-scientific principles in the development of Nietzsche’s ubermench, or in Communist terms, the New Man. Let’s look at how these two intellectual defects happen and their results.
Atheism, its Moral Void and Consequences
Atheism is the rejection of theism and its moral authority. External morality received via religion is rejected. There is no “objective” morality, no objective “good” nor “evil”. Nietzsche proved this in his book, “Beyond Good and Evil”. New Atheists have confirmed this, with Richard Dawkins claiming his inability to say what Hitler did was “evil”.
As a consequence, Atheists have no specific, external moral principles by which their actions are restrained.
Further, Atheists can and do make up their own moral principles. So morality is a personal set of conditions specific to each Atheist, derived or at least approved by the individual Atheist. The Atheist has granted himself moral authority to devise and approve moral principles. The key here is the promotion of the Atheist self to the position of moral authority, an elitist position.
Most sets of Atheist moral principles apply not to the Atheist himself, but to other people. In other words, the Atheist doesn’t restrict himself; he places his own “moral” restrictions on other people. This frequently comes in the form of social reformation of entire populations, except for the reformers themselves, those self-anointed saviors and change agents driving for a utopia under their principles and control. New morality requires new thinking, which the Atheist elites provide.
Examples of this are the use of the terms “freedom”, “tolerance” and “equality”, which permeate Atheist and Leftist moral pronouncements. These terms have been “undefined” from their original meanings, and redefined to mean something entirely outside their original intent.
“Freedom” now means that rights are given by the dominant party, (generally the state), and that rights do not include anything construed as “hate” by the dominant party; hate is to be obliterated. This especially includes dissent which is hate speech and is to be obliterated.
“Tolerance” now means that all behaviors and belief sets must be allowed, except dissent from this decree. Dissent is “hate”, “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic”, etc., and is not to be tolerated: it is to be obliterated.
“Equality” now means that all belief sets, cultures and cultural practices are precisely equal and that there is no one belief set, culture or cultural practice which is more correct or true than the others. Further, dissenting beliefs are false, evil and are to be obliterated.
In each of these cases of redefined moral terminology, two things become obvious: first the terms appear to be “good” when understood under the old standard definitions, thereby the unwary are duped by misunderstanding the Atheist’s actual intent by claiming his morality under these principles. Second, the new definitions do not constrain the Atheist in any manner, they restrict only his dissenters.
Because Atheists are not constrained by any moral principles except those of their own devising, they find themselves free to pursue their heart’s desires, unhampered by any constraints. This is moral anarchy, and it is a direct result of Atheism as a worldview.
The moral anarchy which is the direct consequence of Atheism allows all possible actions to be pursued, with no compunction on the part of the Atheist. Atheism is the enabling function which releases evil from its restraints, and allows it to be called “good”. After all, under Atheism there is no such thing as objective good, nor objective evil. These terms are undefined first, then redefined to suit the needs of the “Progressive” Atheist Social Justice Warrior. (It is internally contradictory for a Progressive Social Justice Warrior to claim Christianity; Christianity is voluntary, where Social Justice is totalitarian).
It is arguable that only mentally disordered persons would become the mass torturers and mass killers which Atheists did, in fact, become en masse. Yet it is also arguable that Atheism results from mental disorders acquired as children, resulting in blanket rejection of authority starting with dominant mothers and absent fathers, and extending to include the authority of theism and common moral principles which derive from religion.
However, it is important to note that it was not just one man involved in the murders of hundreds of millions of people; there were millions of Communists who were involved in these atrocities. They all believed in the premises of Marxist Dialectical Materialism, the Atheist philosophy and worldview necessary to even be a Communist.
Atheists will reject these observations. But they have no objective scientific proof to the contrary, nor do they have a deductive case disproving it. History of Communism shows otherwise. And finally, arguing psychology is a non-starter as will be demonstrated.
They also cannot disprove the Atheist component which is necessarily associated with the massive slaughters within Atheist regimes. Without proof to the contrary, they have no case in their defense. But there is plenty of historical documentary evidence which shows the Atheist principles of Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist/Stalinist totalitarian brutality and mass slaughter.
It is readily acknowledged that Atheism does not of necessity entail Leftist totalitarianism; however, the correlation is so significantly high that it cannot be denied that Leftist totalitarianism does entail Atheism.
Nor does this mean that all totalitarianism is Leftist/Atheist; obviously Islam differentiates itself into a religiously-based totalitarianism.
Further, totalitarianism inevitably involves the perversion of terminology, such as “tolerance, equality, freedom” and “religion of peace”.
Communism and Dialectical Materialism
“The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”
Karl Marx; “Theses on Feuerbach”; https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm
[emphasis added]
Stalin wrote an essay called “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” in 1938 [note 1]. This entails that everything is deterministic in the sense that all of existence is an integrated material unity and yet is changing. History can be scientifically analyzed and the change can be guided. Further, natural change is seen as being toward a higher order, logically, as nature sorts out whatever paradoxes crop up.
“Dialectics” refers to a “logic” complex consisting of Hegelian thesis-antihesis-synthesis (which is taken as a theory of naturally increasing order) which is interpreted via the sciences of Darwinian evolution and Newtonian physics as a continuing motion toward a superior man, a New Man. [note 2]. Materialism is the expression of material-only existence; i.e., the rejection of theist concepts. [note 3]. Darwinism, along with physics and under Hegelian philosophy, is the major rationalizing component of Atheist Communist dialectical “scientific” thought. [note 4].
“The coupling of natural science and social history, first formulated by Lenin, made the emergence of Communism not simply historical accident but historical destiny, a product of the essential nature of things“. And, “Soviet morality, according to Lenin, was determined by the historical struggle of the proletariat. What was moral was anything that served ‘the interests of the class struggle’; what was immoral was anything that hindered the march to communism.”
Overy, p267.
The conclusion of Dialectial Materialism and Dialectical Historicism is that, due to the guidance of the inevitable upward motion of order from disorder in nature (ignoring entropy, of course), a New Man could – and should – result. This New Man would have increased consciousness of his position in history, his position in a collective society, and his position in the scientific guidance of natural processes toward a utopia on earth, inhabited only by New Men. [note 5] Materialism, the default Atheist theory of existence, is a primary fundamental premise for the Communist purging of resistance. Materialism is bolstered by Darwinist story-telling “science” and Hegelian progression from disorder to order: hence, Atheist Dialectical Materialism is the driving force for Communism.
One of the first requirements in the Communist march toward utopia was to obliterate religious oppositional thought; Atheist Materialism was not just a necessity for Communist justification, it was necessary that Atheist Materialism be the only, de facto philosophy of all surviving populace. Even surviving churches became de facto Atheist, teaching only government approved thoughts in order to survive; those religious leaders who did not become de facto Atheists were eradicated. (This also occurred under the NAZIs, where Christianity was perverted into the preached voice of National Socialism, yet claimed to be “Christian”, and Christian theologians and pastors who refused this were eradicated). In 1921, Lenin called for “the party to adopt a programme of ‘militant atheism’ and ‘militant materialism’”. [note 6].
“The physical assault on religion meant the closure or confiscation of churches chapels, mosques, synagogues and monasteries.”
And,
“The Russian Orthodox Church had 46,457 churches and 1,028 monastaries at the time of the revolution[ 1917]; by 1939 estimates vary from 100 to fewer than 1000 still operating… Not even the pro-Communist Living Church’ was spared”. [note 7].
And,
In the course of expropriation over 8,000 clergy were killed and there were more than 1,400 violent clashes with angry parishioners.
Recently the Chinese government declared that Communism and Atheism are in their essences synonymous, and that Communism could not survive without Atheism. [note 8]:
“The editorial, written by Zhou Weiqun, chairman of the Committee on Ethnic and Religious Affairs of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, blasted Chinese academics who suggest that Communist Party members can also adhere to any religion. This prohibition against religion has been a “consistently upheld principle” since Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, declared Zhou. “It’s impossible to have another choice besides the dialectical materialist worldview.”
Zhou warned that if CPC members were allowed to have beliefs in various religions, the Party “would become a loosely bound group that can be broken down due to individual gain.” Consequently, he wrote, members must have “a united worldview.”
Zhou noted: “Without the foundation of the worldview, the mansion of the Party’s ideologies, theories and organizations will all collapse. We could no longer be called the ‘Chinese Communist Party.'”
Without Atheism, Communism will not exist.
It is absolutely false to claim that Atheism had nothing to do with Communist slaughters; Atheist Dialectical Materialism is the founding and driving philosophy which underlies Communism and its slaughters. The slaughters and atrocities were specifically done in the name of Atheist Dialectical Materialism. Atheists who deny this are claiming a fatuous lie in order to preserve a false narrative.
Notes:
1. Richard Overy; “The Dictators”; WW Norton & Co; 2004; p266.
2. Leon Trotsky; “The ABC’s of Materialist Dialectics”; http://www.marxist.com/what-is-dialectical-materialism.htm
“Hegel wrote before Darwin and before Marx. Thanks to the powerful impulse given to thought by the French Revolution, Hegel anticipated the general movement of science. But because it was only an anticipation, although by a genius, it received from Hegel an idealistic character. Hegel operated with ideological shadows as the ultimate reality. Marx demonstrated that the movement of these ideological shadows reflected nothing but the movement of material bodies.”
3. Trotsky, Ibid.:
“We call our dialectic materialist since its roots are neither in heaven nor in the depths of our “free will” but in objective reality, in nature. Consciousness grew out of the unconscious, psychology out of physiology, the organic world out of the inorganic, the solar system out of nebula.”
4. Trotsky, Ibid:
“Darwinism, which explained the evolution of species through quantitative transformations passing into qualitative, was the highest triumph of the dialectic in the whole field of organic matter. Another great triumph was the discovery of the table of atomic weights of chemical elements and further the transformation of one element into another. With these transformations (species, elements, etc.) is closely linked the question of classifications, just as important in the natural as in the social sciences. Linnaeus’s system (eighteenth century), utilizing as its starting point the immutability of species, was limited to the description and classification of plants according to their external characteristics.
The infantile period of botany is analogous to the infantile period of logic, since the forms of our thought develop like everything that lives. Only decisive repudiation of the idea of fixed species, only the study of the history of the evolution of plants and their anatomy prepared the basis for a really scientific classification.”
5.Che Guevara; from gonzalo fernández; “the new man in cuba”; http://www.intrepidmedia.com/column.asp?id=4553
“In a letter to the editor of the Uruguayan weekly Marcha, published March 1965 under the title “Socialism and Man in Cuba”, Che Guevara addressed the issue of the “new man” (in Cuba) saying: “To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man….This is the dictatorship of the proletariat operating not only on the defeated class but also on individuals of the victorious class…. Man under socialism, despite his apparent standardization, is more complete…. In this way he will reach total consciousness of his social being, which is equivalent to the full realization as a human creature…”
6. Overy, Ibid, pg 271.
Pospielovski, “Marxist-Leninist Atheism”: I; pp 30-34.
7. overy, Ibid, pg 273-4.
De Grunewald, “God and the Soviets”, p. 54;
Pospielovski, “Marxist-Leninist Atheism;I, pp. 44-5.
8. http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/asia/item/19567-china-s-communist-party-reaffirms-marxism-maoism-atheism
http://atheism-analyzed.blogspot.com/2014/11/in-china-communism-depends-on-atheism.html
