When I left the cult, an IMT cultist taunted me on Facebook for lapsing back into lost Christian faith. I had been very open about my Christian upbringing and how I resented the fundamentalist nonsense with which I was indoctrinated. Now it was being used against me, in typical cult-like fashion. Of course, Christianity had nothing to do with my abandoning Trotskyism and deciding that it was false. It is particularly rich for this accusation to be levelled by people who are themselves in a quasi-religious cult that revolves around not one, but two dead Jews (Trotsky and Ted Grant) who made false prophecies of a coming paradise on earth, one of whom died horribly like Jesus Christ. Moreover, they have a cult leader, Alan Woods, who is fond of quoting the Bible in his ‘lead-offs’. The jokes write themselves. These people are nicknamed Jehovah’s Leninists for a reason.
The accusation stung for a good reason, but I have given it thought over the last several months. I have come to the conclusion that Marxism is even worse than Christianity, and that I would sooner return to the Christian faith of my parents, for all its flaws, than return to Marxism, especially the Marxism of the IMT. For what is Marxism but a secularised form of Christianity, with all the things that make Christianity tolerable taken out? Bertrand Russell compared it to Islam in the time of Muhammad, and indeed, one can draw parallels between 20th-century communism and Islamic extremism in our own day. It is a take-no-prisoners philosophy that preaches endless war and conquest, that fetishises the purifying and vivifying quality of violence and destruction, that wants to bring about an apocalyptic end to the corrupt present order in favour of a millenarian, utopian future – itself the restoration of a lost world of complete social unity – on the basis of modern technology. The similarities with fascism and Islamism are obvious. Whereas Christianity preaches love for one’s fellow man, forgiveness, tolerance, understanding and peace, Marxism preaches class conflict, unbridled aggression, demonisation, dehumanisation and resentment. Everything that is sick about Christianity – the demand for self-abnegation, the nauseating vision of a Christian heaven, excessive, mawkish compassion – is a million times worse in Marxism. Proud and vigorous individualism is denounced as ‘petty-bourgeois’, and such headstrong men are called upon to subordinate themselves to ‘party discipline’ and imaginary ‘laws of history’. Even the notion of the individual is denounced as a fiction, or at the very least a temporary creation of bourgeois society, doomed to pass away in the socialist future. The Christian heaven is secularised and the illusion of eternal peace and harmony on earth is used to justify continuous war and bloodshed in the name of the revolution. Compassion for the oppressed leads them, not to charitable works, but the wholesale destruction of society out of a sense of grievance. They don’t care if this leads them to destroy an entire culture or civilisation, or kill millions of innocents, including the people they supposedly seek to liberate. After all, are they themselves not the corrupted products of the old order? Millions must die in the purifying flames of what Engels called the ‘revolutionary holocaust’. As Trotsky put it in Terrorism and Communism:
As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the “sacredness of human life.” We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.
I will allow the reader to judge for himself whether the Bolsheviks succeeded in making human life ‘sacred’ by their pitiless killings and massacres, or whether they in fact succeeded in making human life more cheap. Orlando Figes discusses precisely this issue in his book, A People’s Tragedy:
Death was so common that people became inured to it. The sight of a dead body in the street no longer attracted attention. Murders occurred for the slightest motive – stealing a few roubles, jumping a queue, or simply for the entertainment of the killers. Seven years of war had brutalized people and made them insensitive to the pain and suffering of others. In 1921 Gorky asked a group of soldiers from the Red Army if they were uneasy about killing people. ‘No they were not.’ “He has a weapon, I have a weapon, so we are equal; what’s the odds, if we kill one another there’ll be more room in the land.”‘ One soldier, who had also fought in Europe in the First World War, even told Gorky that it was easier to kill a Russian than a foreigner. ‘Our people are many, our economy is poor; well, if a hamlet is burnt, what’s the loss? It would have burnt down itself in due course.’ Life had become so cheap that people thought little of killing one another, or indeed of others killing millions in their name. One peasant asked a scientific expedition working in the Urals during 1921: ‘You are educated people, tell me then what’s to happen to me. A Bashkir killed my cow, so of course I killed the Bashkir and then I took the cow away from his family. so tell me: shall I be punished for thw cow?’ When they asked him whether he did not rather expect to be punished for the murder of the man, the peasant replied: ‘That’s nothing, people are cheap nowadays.’
Other stories were told – of a husband who had murdered his wife for no apparent reason. ‘I had enough of her and there is the end of it,’ was the murderer’s explanation. It was as if all the violence of the previous few years had stripped away the thin veneer of civilization covering human relations and exposed the primitive zoological instincts of man. People began to like the smell of blood. They developed a taste for sadistic forms of killing – a subject on which Gorky was an expert:
The peasants in Siberia dug pits and lowered Red Army prisoners into them upside down, leaving their legs to the knee above ground; then they filled in the pit with soil, watching by the convulsions of the legs which of the victims were more resistant, livelier, and which would be the last die.
In Tambov province Communists were nailed with railway spikes by their left hand and left foot to trees a metre above the soil, and they watched the torments of these deliberately oddly-crucified people.
They would open a prisoner’s belly, take out the small intestine and nailing it to a tree or telegraph pole they drove the man around the tree with blows, watching the intestine unwind through the wound. Stripping a captured officer naked, they tore strips of skin from his shoulders in the form of shoulder straps, and knocked in nails in place of pips; they would pull off the skin along the lines of the sword belt and trouser strips – this operation was called ‘to dress in uniform’. It, no doubt, demanded much time and considerable skill.
…’There are twelve-year-old children who already have three murders to their name,’ Gorky wrote to Lenin in April 1920.
…Children also made excellent soldiers. The Red Army had many young teenagers in its ranks. Having spent the whole of their conscious lives surrounded by the violence of war and revolution, many of them had no doubt come to think that killing people was part of normal life. These little soldiers were noted for their readiness to do as they were told – their commanders often played the role of surrogate fathers – as well for their ruthless ability to kill the enemy, especially when led to believe that they were avenging their parents’ murder.-pp.774-775, p.782
The sacredness of human life indeed. No doubt Marxists will argue that all of this violence was historically-necessary and was bound to dialectically transform into its opposite, perhaps in the same way as the Evil Queen in Snow White was bound to dialectically transform from an aging grand dame of malicious intent into a ravishing young woman of pure heart, or Boris Johnson is bound to dialectically transform from a uniquely shambolic and narcissistic buffoon into a brilliant statesman and superb judge of character. I’m not sure if in 70 years of the Soviet experiment we did see Trotsky’s vision come into being, but again, I leave that to the reader to judge.
Both Marxism and Christianity are, as Nietzsche argued, forms of resentment. Marxism is a form of resentment expressed outwardly, in the form of violence against a ruling class and all the manifestations of its existence and influence in society. Christianity, by contrast, is a resentment that is turned inward. In NIetzsche’s telling, the slave, who secretly resents the wealth and privilege of the master, but is not strong enough to attain such a life for himself, rationalises his misfortune, tells himself that his poverty and misery is a virtue, and by this means gains a strange form of revenge on the master, but only through poisoning his own soul. Nietzsche argued that this attitude, which demonised riches and pleasure, and counterposed a heavenly paradise to the misery of life on earth, gained ground in Ancient Rome as an ideological slave revolt against imperial oppression, helping to bring down the great classical civilisation of the past, and carrying over the baleful influence of Socrates (introduced by St. Paul, who Nietzsche accuses of distorting the teachings of Jesus) to our modern era. Both Marxism and Christianity are unhealthy coping mechanisms used to deal with these resentful feelings. Both have been responsible for their share of misery, and even mass murder (especially during Christendom’s most militant centuries, when it was blessed with real temporal power). But Marxism has done far more damage than Christianity ever did. Certainly, it has killed far more people. It can at least be said that the bad aspects of Christianity were tempered by everything that was good in the pre-Christian civilisation of old, whereas Marxism is based on an outright rejection of this old world of ‘class oppression’. Did Paul not speak with pride of his Roman citizenship? Did he not counsel his followers to obey the authorities? Did Jesus not tell his disciples to ‘render unto Caesar’? At least the framework of Christianity allows for some measure of compromise with the status quo and therefore for civil harmony. We see in it the basis of today’s secular liberalism. By contrast, Marxism preaches that this is all a sham, that compromise with the status quo is never possible and that there must be endless revolution until class society has ceased to exist.
At least Christianity has room for the individual, even if he is regarded as a slave to an imaginary God. The Protestants of the early modern period preached that every individual was able to speak to God directly, without requiring a priest as an intermediary. This allowed for different interpretations of scripture, and for the development of critical thought and scepticism. Granted, in its early days, Christianity was a very collectivist religion – the early Christians lived in proto-communist communities in which everything was owned in common. Eventually, Christianity adapted itself to the mainstream and reached a compromise with the material reality of hierarchy and class differentiation in society. The call for humility and self-abnegation proved useful in suppressing the rebellious spirit of the masses. It is against this injunction to ‘turn the other cheek’ to oppressive rulers that the secular Enlightenment ideologies of revolutionary socialism (and liberalism in its heyday) preached in favour of violent vengeance against the ruling order. But whereas the liberals recognised that a society based on class resentment was untenable, and created societies that balanced competing interests, in which all men were to be regarded as equal before the law even if they were unequal in practice, the revolutionary socialists argued for a society in which class differentiation and the plurality of competing interests would be totally annihilated in favour of a complete union between the atomised individual and the herd. This attitude can be traced to Rousseau, who blamed modern society for corrupting man and destroying the peaceful, united community that had existed in the past, creating instead envy, division, hierarchy, inequality, and all the evils we see in our societies today. What is this but a secularised version of the Christian tale about the Fall of Man and the break-up of paradise? We see therefore that, whilst both liberalism and socialism are secularised versions of Christianity, one goes further than the other in pushing the spirit of resentment to its logical conclusion. They seek to destroy anything that may arouse resentment by eliminating all classes and all ranks of men, so as to attain not mere legal equality, but real equality, which is of course impossible to bring about without totalitarian means.
Liberal humanism is the secular culmination of that aspect of Christianity that preaches the spiritual equality of men, despite the earthly differences that exist between them. Communism is not satisfied with this state of affairs, and seeks not merely spiritual or legal equality, but earthly, material equality too. This goes even beyond Christianity, which has always insisted that inequality is an ineradicable aspect of human societies, and that full equality will only be enjoyed in heaven. For Communists, any means are justified to bring about this order, including mass murder, deception, terrorism. At least Christians are theoretically bound by a moral code that restrains them from going too far. Human nature being what it is, even Christians have been guilty throughout history of monstrous brutality – often justified in religious terms – but it is balanced by the pacifist side of Christianity, which preaches that war is evil and a last resort at best, and that all men should strive to live peaceably. Moreover, the Christian acceptance of an inherent human nature means that they are predisposed to oppose the utopian experiments of Marxist atheism, which have always resulted in unhinged tyranny. Pre-Marxist socialism (hypocritically dismissed by Marxists as ‘utopian socialism’) was strongly influenced by Christianity, but this strand of socialism went in a very different direction from Marxist atheism, culminating in the social liberalism and social democracy of the 20th century, best represented by the U.S. Democratic and British Labour Parties. Marxist socialism, by contrast, sought to replace Christianity with Marxism as a new secular religion, with dialectical ‘laws of history’ substituting for God, and the state legitimising itself as the product of these historical laws. If I have to choose between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Clement Attlee on the one hand, and Lenin and Stalin on the other, it’s no contest.
The Christian concept of forgiveness means that, instead of endless war and the ceaseless quest for vengeance, men who were once enemies can live together in peace. Marxists say that this is a cynical attempt to disarm the working-class, and preach class vengeance in the name of building a better world. Even once the revolution is over, the quest for vengeance does not end, because even once the ruling class has been overthrown, new ‘class enemies’ must be discovered so as to legitimise the new revolutionary dictatorship and justify its continued existence. Imaginary enemies must be created everywhere, even among the ranks of the working-class. New scapegoats are found, new adversaries identified and targeted for destruction, so that society quite literally consumes itself, like a cat chasing its tail, seeking out new opponents to destroy and people to humiliate. The new ‘cancel culture’ is a quasi-Marxist attempt to do precisely this. All monuments to the great men of the past must be torn down and destroyed because they have sinned against the ethics of our present, despite the fact that they lived in a different moral universe. By no means all of the people engaged in this campaign are Marxists. Most of them are probably well-meaning liberals and progressives who have been taken in by this preposterous agenda. Moreover, those who transgress against the trendy opinions of today’s liberal elite find themselves being struggle-shamed on social media and having the vile multitude campaign for them to be sacked from their jobs and have their careers destroyed. There is no room for forgiveness or for making amends – those set upon by the mob must be totally and utterly annihilated. Nothing less will do. Suddenly, Christianity doesn’t look so bad compared to this new and more hideous form of slave morality, which is nothing more than an excuse for pathetic nobodies to virtue-signal and bring down people more accomplished, educated and successful than them. Even the Spanish Inquisition looks good compared with our current enforcers of morality and proper conduct. Once you have unleashed the forces of grievance-mongering and vengeance, nothing will satisfy them.
I have experienced both Christian fundamentalism and Marxism. I was raised by Ghanaian parents who became part of the Pentecostal movement in their native country. This relatively young branch of Christianity has increased in popularity throughout the Third World in recent decades. It is an interpretation of Christianity that emphasises miracles – ‘signs and wonders’ such as faith healing, speaking in tongues and the gift of prophecy. It rejects the mainstream idea that the gifts of the Spirit, promised by Jesus to his disciples, are no longer in operation. It is a world away from the sobriety of, say, Anglicanism. My parents indoctrinated me to believe in a lot of this superstitious garbage, and when I lost faith at age thirteen (mainly due to struggles over my sexuality), it was a harrowing event. I kept it a secret from my parents for the next four years. My father was a Pentecostal minister. Only after my father’s death did I confess to my mother that I had been an atheist all this time. Needless to say, it is not something she will ever accept. I can at least say that for all our differences, she has not shunned me or kicked me out of the house for daring to dissent with her on the issue of religion, which would not be the case had I been brought up in a cult like the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That is more than can be said for the members of the IMT who shunned me after I deserted their corrupt enterprise. My own experience tells me that Christians are more loving, more generous and kinder than Marxist atheists. The claims of Christianity may be false, and the Bible may be a load of nonsense, but I can say so openly and not have my entire believing family disown me. In all the churches my parents dragged me to over the years, I have never endured ill-treatment from any of its members – certainly nothing like the horrors to which my ‘comrades’ in the IMT subjected me. I have only experienced genuine warmth and appreciation. In the IMT I experienced slander, bullying, abuse, ostracism and Stalinist repression of my critical faculties.
If I had to choose between reconverting to Christianity, but suppressing my sexuality in the process, and rejoining the IMT, I would choose the former. I would be miserable, but nowhere near as miserable as I would be in a Marxist cult. My Christian family has done more for me than any Marxist cultist ever did, and I am far more loyal to them than I will ever be to the loathsome entity that calls itself Socialist Appeal. As it happens, the Marxist historian and activist E.P. Thompson almost agrees with me:
If I thought Althusserianism was the logical terminus of Marx’s thought, then I could never be a Marxist. I would rather be a Christian (or hope to have the courage of a certain kind of Christian radical). At least I would then be given back a vocabulary within which value choices are allowed, and which permits the defence of the human personality against the invasions of the Unholy Capitalist or Holy Proletarian State. And if my disbelief, as well as my distaste for churches, disallowed this course, then I would have to settle for being an empirical, liberal, moralistic humanist.-E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London: The Merlin Press, 1995), p.254
Thompson believed that Althusserianism was a form of Stalinism, and that Trotskyism was not essentially different from Stalinism either. In other words, he believed that even Christianity and liberalism were preferable to the kind of Marxism that led to Stalinism of any kind. This is a brave admission for a Marxist revolutionary like Thompson to make. Part of me wishes I could bring myself to believe in Thompson’s libertarian Marxism, but I do not think that it is at all possible for a socialist society to be constructed which is compatible with individual freedom. Like Thompson, I see in Christianity a religion that at least gives the individual moral autonomy. The Christian concept of free will is incompatible with the Marxist belief in ‘laws of history’ to which human beings must always subordinate themselves.
When I was in the IMT, I would think of the coming revolution, and how my ‘reactionary’, Christian fundamentalist family would no doubt be victims of any purge. I viewed this possibility with indifference. I didn’t even think of what might befall my devout mother. Now I am out of the cult, I can say with Albert Camus that if mass murder and social destruction is ‘justice’ to them, then I prefer my mother to justice, and I prefer Christianity to Marxism.