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<conspiracyFile>31 page printout
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Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
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This file, its printout, or copies of either
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are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold.
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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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<div> <div>
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Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
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THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 9
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ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
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HOW THE WISKED BOLSHEVIKS SAVE OUR CHRISTIAN WORLD
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by Joseph McCabe
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HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
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GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
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<div> <div>
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CHAPTER
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I The Vatican Courts Russia for years ................. 1
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II The Supposed Persecutuin of Religion ................ 8
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III The Papal Hymn of Hate ............................. 14
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IV Hitler's Magnifient Blunder ........................ 19
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<div> <div>
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Chapter I
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THE VATICAN COURTS RUSSIA FOR YEARS
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On the very morning on which I begin to write this little book
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the news comes that Japan has attacked America. It completes my
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case against the Vatican. Its third big friend and ally joins the
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struggle to destroy all freedom, all enlightenment, all that we
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most deeply prize in what we call our civilization. The Papacy has
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still other friends, it is true. It has Vichy France and Franco
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Spain, those islands of Fascism amidst populations in chains which
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loathe them. It has Salazar Portugal, Leopold of Belgium, the
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miserable new Slovakia and Montenegro, and the rats of Eire,
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Hungary, and Rumania. One hopes it is proud of them. Until today it
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flattered itself that amongst its loyal friends it numbered nearly
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all the Republics of South and Central America but this latest
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outrage on all human decency by one of the big Papal Allies seems
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to have shaken most of them. The powerful friends of the Vatican
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are Germany, Italy, and Japan -- the most brutalized powers of
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modern history, the enemies of the human race.
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It is not nine months since the Pope gave Matsuoka so gracious
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an interview at the Vatican that the wily Jap called it "the most
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beautiful moment of my life" and he put amongst his treasures the
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gold medal which the Pope gave him. Matsuoka had done more than any
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other representative of Japan to fool Americans and delay their
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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1
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ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
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armament. He is a more unctuous liar than Ribbentrop. Last March,
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when he was so affectionately received by the Pope, he had just
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come from interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, in which beyond
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question the date, if not the manner, of Japan's intervention must
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have been discussed. There is here no room for one of those
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"unauthorized" assurances that the Pope was saddened or depressed
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or murmured about barbarous outrages. From the audience he went,
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radiant, to his usual public audience -- ten to fifty dollars a
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head -- and said, according to the Osservatore (his own organ) as
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well as the Italian and German journalists who were present, that
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he had had "a fine conversation" with Matsuoka. And the
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unscrupulous Japs went home to join in the concerting of the plot
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to dupe America to the last moment and fall upon it with all the
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brutal cunning and treachery which have characterized the greedy
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enterprises of the Pope's two other big friends.
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Why call the Pope Japan's ally and friend, your Catholic
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neighbor may ask, I had better recall for you what I said briefly
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on the subject in the second book of this series. When in the most
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fateful hour of this catastrophic development, the rape of
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Manchuria, the first trial of strength of barbarism against
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civilization, Japan looked round a hostile world for a friend it
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found only the Vatican. The new Secretary of State, the present
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Pope, directed French priests in the East to cooperate with the
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bandits. I should not think that any decent American Catholic will
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ask you to believe that the Papacy was merely concerned about the
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spiritual welfare of the few thousand (or hundred) miserable rice-
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converts to the Church in Manchuria. Anyhow, it was the beginning
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of a most edifying friendship. Although there were only 100000
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Catholics in Japan there was soon talk of an exchange of
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ambassadors between Tokyo and the Vatican City, and just when Japan
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exposed its own lies about Manchuria by seizing and corrupting
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other provinces of China the Vatican proudly announced, and the
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Catholic press everywhere joyously repeated, that that proof of
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amity between two "civilizations" had been achieved. Since then, as
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I quoted in the words of a French Catholic, no Japanese of any
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standing visited Europe without calling to pay his respects to "the
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Holy Father."
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By what name will this beastly war be known in the history-
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books of the future? We hope that our great-grandchildren will read
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of it with amazement in their High Schools as "The Last Great War."
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If the men and women of the rising generation who have shuddered at
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its horrors do not make a life-vow of critical vigilance, if they
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again trust priests and politicians to prevent the world from
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drifting into so shameful a surrender to banditry, they are
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unworthy of the years of sunlight which the chances of life have
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offered them.
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Some think that the title will be "The Most Amazing War in
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History." From 1919 onward hundreds of writers thrilled us with
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gruesome pictures of the super-brutalities of the next war, and for
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the last ten years at least there cannot have been a doubt in any
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man's mind which nations were expected to rain down fire and poison
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upon peaceful cities and which peoples were to suffer. Yet the
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aggressive nations openly flaunted their programs of conquest and
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their plainly named victims went from jazz to swing and let even
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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2
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|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
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the weapons of 1918 rot in the fields. When the time came little
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England declared war with an equipment of 18 good planes, quarter
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of a million cardboard-coffins, and 40000000 gas-masks. France
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entrusted its fate to naval and military commanders who allow
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priests to tell them that an appalling national calamity purifies
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the soul of a people and that no price is too high to pay for the
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destruction of Communism and Atheism. Then there was the long spell
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of "cockeyed war" in which profiteers waxed fat. Then, most amazing
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of all, the great power that every other nation in the world had
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maligned and every Church cursed entered the arena in which we were
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supposed to be fighting for Christian civilization and lit it at
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last with valor and heroism.
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Some day historians and military experts will estimate more
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coldly than we can and more boldly than we dare today what chance
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the British Empire, even with what we might call the morganatic
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alliance of America, had of escaping destruction after the
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appalling betrayal of civilization by France. There will be at
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least many who will conclude that if Hitler had at that time
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persevered in his designs against Russia before turning to attack
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Yugo-Slavia, Greece, and Russia, the issue would have been. . . .
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Let me, since I am an Englishman, leave it at that.
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But the most amazing feature of all is the story of the
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relations of the Vatican with the Soviet civilization. In all that
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maelstrom of emotion that agitated the press and peoples of the
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world when mighty Russia entered the war nothing was more
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intriguing than the wavering and discordant note of the Catholic
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press. Even when it was clear, as it must have been to every
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informed person, that the world's peril was mightily relieved, if
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not dissipated, by the accession of this new strength to the forces
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of good, large numbers of Catholics in every country denounced the
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idea of employing it, and a certain reserve or hesitation was found
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throughout the entire Church. You know why. Every Church had
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attacked Russia for its Atheism and its supposed persecution of
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religion, but the others had been temperate in comparison with the
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Church of Rome. Ten years ago it had borrowed and adopted the motto
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which Voltaire had coined against itself, "Wipe out the Infamous
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Thing." We had been reading in Catholic writers for decades that
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the truculence of that slogan was proof of the essential vulgarity
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of the irreligious soul, and suddenly, five or six years ago, the
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gentle voice of Mother Church began its "Wipe out Bolshevism in
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Russia, Spain, and Mexico." Even a Catholic writer does not pretend
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that Voltaire urged men to extinguish the Roman Church in blood.
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But that is the only possible meaning of the Pope's slogan. He
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appealed to "governments." The German hierarchy appealed to Hitler
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to let them add their prayers to the thunder of his guns. The
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American hierarchy appealed to Wall Street, which is believed to
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have some influence at Washington.
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All that is known, but what is your Catholic friend likely to
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say if you tell him that in what his own (as well as general)
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literature calls the very worst years of Bolshevik power, the years
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when priests like Father Walsh, who spent two years in Russia, tell
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him that bishops and priests were murdered by the hundreds and with
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sadistic savagery, the Vatican was straining every nerve to court
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the favor of Lenin and his colleagues? That in the first year of
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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3
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ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
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Bolshevik power, the summer of 1918, Russian Catholics held, for
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the first time in the history of Russia, the most solemn and august
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of their public processions, with the consecrated host, in the
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streets of Leningrad, and no one was allowed to molest them?
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That is really the most amazing feature of the story of the
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Vatican and Russia. As long as the Bolsheviks were Bolsheviks --
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that is to say, as long as Lenin attempted to run the country on
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Communist lines -- and a savage White War and famine did profoundly
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disturb the normal Socialist psychology -- the Papacy was the only
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power in the world that repeatedly attempted to enter into cordial
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relations with them. But when the New Economic Policy suspended
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Communism in Russia, when the passions of the civil war had died
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down and the stately structure of a new and higher civilization
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began to rise from its foundations, the Pope began to denounce
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Bolshevism as the spawn of the devil and call for a crusade to wipe
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it out in blood!
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Yet the evidence for that can be taken entirely from Catholic
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sources, and any man who has read my account -- fully supported by
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the Catholic Teeling -- of the Papal ambition to take over the
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eastern Churches, will be prepared to accept it. To many, however,
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it will seem not merely one of those "libels" of which Catholics
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are taught to complain so pathetically, but a quite impossible
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suggestion. So let us take this attempt of the Vatican to court the
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Soviet government during the four or five years when all the rest
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of the world hated it as our first point.
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From the Catholic Teeling (The Pope in Politics), who is no
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rebel against his Church, I quoted the statement that the Vatican
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was most eager to capture the Greek and other eastern Churches in
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order to counterbalance the growth of democratic elements (chiefly
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American and British) in the Latin Church. He goes on to describe
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how the destruction of the power of the Greek or Orthodox Church in
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Russia by the Bolsheviks -- in fact, the knowledge that they would
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very soon achieve this -- gave the Papacy a wonderful new outlook
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for its anti-democratic ambition. By flattering the Bolshevik
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leaders and thanking them for delivering Russian Pacifists from the
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tyranny of the Orthodox Church it hoped to take the place of the
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discredited heads of the old national Church.
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The somewhat sympathetic American writer George Seldes (The
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Vatican) says the same, with a slight difference. He says that the
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Vatican regarded the rise of the Bolsheviks to power with mixed
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feelings: a loathing of their economic philosophy and rejoicing --
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for which he quotes the Osservatore in the splendid opportunity of
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the Church, Seldes states on the title-page of his book that the
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historical part of it is taken from a work by two French Catholics,
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G. London and C. Pichon (Le Vatican et le monde moderns, 1933). He
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does not explain how 20 small pages of historical matter in the
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French book have become more than 100 large pages in his own book.
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Anyhow, he here retouches their text. They simply say that the
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Papacy rejoiced in the Russian Revolution in so far as it opened
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out a golden prospect to itself. The talk about the infamy of the
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Bolshevik philosophy began later. At the time doubtless Rome had
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just the same idea of Bolshevism but it was prepared to sup with
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the devil.
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Bank of Wisdom
|
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|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
4
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ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
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Another Catholic writer who candidly describes this early
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phase is Miss M.A. Almedingen (The Catholic Church in Russia Today,
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1923). Her little book is valuable not only because the author is
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one of those ardent (in the pious sense) virgins who are the
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treasure of the clergy but because she lived in Russia during these
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years of courtship. She tells us that the Bolsheviks at once
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released the head of the Roman Church whom the Tsarists had put in
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prison -- a Pole who had been guilty of political intrigue, be it
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noted -- and lifted all the restrictions which the Tsarists had
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laid upon Papist activities. It is this same devout Catholic and
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very truthful lady who tells us that in the summer of 1918
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Catholics were allowed to hold, for the first time in Russian
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history, their sacred Corpus Christi procession, a priest openly
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carrying what they call the Blessed Sacrament, in the streets of
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Petrograd and at least one other city. The Bolsheviks actually
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favored the Roman against the Greek Catholics, and there was, this
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ideal witness assures us, no interference whatever with their
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religion until the summer of 1919, nearly two years after Lenin got
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power, and no "persecution" until three years after that. In 1920,
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she says, Rome was still so intent upon friendship with the Soviet
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authorities that bodies of friars waited on the frontiers for the
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signal to march in and win the Russian people for the Vatican.
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I have earlier explained the situation. The Russian Orthodox
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Church was the largest of the sections into which political
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developments in the 19th Century had split the old Greek Church. It
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differed from the Roman in ritual and on one very abstruse point of
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doctrine (the procession of the Holy Ghost) but most emphatically
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in rejecting the Pope's pretensions. That it was, and had always
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been, very corrupt is agreed. "The Orthodox Church was filthy with
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corruption and debauchery," says Seldes (p. 287). The 10000 monks
|
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|
were "very lax," says the Catholic Encyclopedia. But most people
|
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|
have read the very characteristic story of St. Rasputin. Any body
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who carers to look up a copy of The Romance of the Romanoffs which
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I wrote and published in New York in 1917 will find many piquant
|
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|
pages on church-life. Peter the Great had so open a contempt for it
|
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|
that in the drunken debauches he held with his court he and the men
|
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|
often dressed as monks and his loosest women dressed as nuns.
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Catherine the Great had hardly less contempt for it. We recognize
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|
in every age a decent and religious minority in it but it remained
|
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until 1917 so generally corrupt that most educated Russians
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despised it.
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|
The Bolsheviks had another reason to attack it besides the
|
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|
spectacle of so corrupt a body owning "fabulous wealth," as the
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most neutral historians say, and exploiting the ignorant. From the
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|
time of the French Revolution it had drawn closer to the autocracy,
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|
knowing that they would stand or fall together. Every atrocity of
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|
the statesmen and their hirelings who protected the throne of the
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Tsars was blessed by the Holy Synod, and this continued in the 19th
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Century. In the last great revolutionary period, 1904-5, the jails
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|
of Russia, which were supposed to have a capacity of 107000 were
|
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|
crammed with 174000 prisoners, besides 100000 in the Siberian
|
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|
colonies. These prisoners were to a very large extent young men and
|
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|
women of the university-student class. Thousands -- after boldly
|
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|
stitching tabs with their names on their clothes. -- went out on
|
|||
|
the streets to be shot. Hundreds committed suicide or were carried
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
5
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|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
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|
off by epidemics in the fetid jail's every month. Brutal jailers
|
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|
raped the refined young women in their cells. The press abroad put
|
|||
|
these horrors in small paragraphs, if they were mentioned at all.
|
|||
|
The banner-headlines were reserved for the fictitious "Bolshevik
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|
atrocities" of a later date. But you will not be surprised that a
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|||
|
great debt was inscribed in the memory of the Socialists.
|
|||
|
Yet Lenin and his colleagues were content, as long as the
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|||
|
clergy kept out of polities, to disestablish the Church, destroy
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its monopoly, and confiscate the bulk of its superfluous wealth.
|
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|
Beyond that, Miss Armedinger insists, there was no persecution for
|
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|
four or five years, and the complete freedom, and equality of
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|||
|
cults, which the Orthodox hierarchy had refused, were warmly
|
|||
|
welcomed by the Romanists. The Vatican, however, which had from
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|||
|
long experience a cynical distrust of argumentative proselytism and
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|||
|
a decided preference for the knout, wanted more than freedom. The
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|||
|
Orthodox Church had been richer than any section of the Roman
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|||
|
Church, which in Russia was exceptionally poor. A very impartial
|
|||
|
note on the religious situation in Kiesing's Contemporary Archives
|
|||
|
(October 18, 1941, p. 4848) says that the monks and higher clergy
|
|||
|
of the Orthodox Church had a wealth in land alone of
|
|||
|
$8500000000 and the property, jewels, etc. of their churches
|
|||
|
and monasteries represented a vast further sum. The Vatican's dream
|
|||
|
of taking over this was soon dissipated, as the Bolsheviks more
|
|||
|
sensibly transferred it to the people of Russia. But it was said,
|
|||
|
since the census of 1913, that the Orthodox Church had 98000000
|
|||
|
communicants, and doubtless, since the only difference in doctrine
|
|||
|
was one that not one Russian in 100000 could comprehend, a little
|
|||
|
pressure from the Soviet authorities Would help these millions
|
|||
|
(mostly illiterate) to see that the Pope was a far holier person
|
|||
|
than the Orthodox patriarch.
|
|||
|
The Bolsheviks had other designs but for a year or two they
|
|||
|
were not unwilling to see Roman Catholicism, of which they knew
|
|||
|
very little, replace the Catholicism which they had so much ground
|
|||
|
to hate. Meantime, however, the White War, in which passions flamed
|
|||
|
to redness and even conservative writers admit that the Imperialist
|
|||
|
Russians themselves committed appalling atrocities had broken out.
|
|||
|
How this led to what is called persecution we shall see in the next
|
|||
|
chapter, but it is worth noting that we have here a parallel with
|
|||
|
the French Revolution of a very different kind from that which is
|
|||
|
usually, and falsely, pressed upon us. Aulard and other leading
|
|||
|
French historians have shown that Danton and Robespierre, instead
|
|||
|
of trying to destroy religion, made every effort to maintain the
|
|||
|
Church but the people overruled them. In much the same way Miss
|
|||
|
Almedinger, then living in Russia, describes Lenin and his
|
|||
|
colleagues following a policy of religious freedom and the people
|
|||
|
impatient of it. The Red guards, she says, frowned on the public
|
|||
|
Catholic processions of 1918 but did not interfere. In the
|
|||
|
following year they began to disturb services in the churches and
|
|||
|
were checked by the authorities, but these did not seriously
|
|||
|
interfere with religion until 1922, when large numbers of churches
|
|||
|
were closed and priests arrested.
|
|||
|
We shall see why. For the moment let us follow the wooing of
|
|||
|
the Kremlin by the Vatican. In 1922 the Romanists in Russia, who
|
|||
|
were now reduced to one or two millions, mostly Poles and
|
|||
|
Lithuanians, by the formation of the independent republic of
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
6
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
Poland, suffered like the Orthodox for having intrigued with the
|
|||
|
invading Poles and White Russians, and the golden prospect that had
|
|||
|
opened up in 1917 to the eyes of the Papacy was replaced by a fear
|
|||
|
that its Church was doomed to total destruction in Russia. The
|
|||
|
Genoa Conference in 1922, at which the European powers were to meet
|
|||
|
and come to a friendly agreement with representatives of Russia,
|
|||
|
the higher interests of trade and the recovery of debts having
|
|||
|
overruled the world's repugnance to Atheist Russia, gave the
|
|||
|
Vatican a new hope. The Archbishop of Genoa was instructed to get
|
|||
|
in touch with and cultivate Comrade Chicherin.
|
|||
|
London and Pichon, whose account is followed by Seldes and
|
|||
|
Teeling, tell the story. After several futile attempts to meet
|
|||
|
Chicherin the archbishop got himself placed next to the Russian at
|
|||
|
a banquet which the king of Italy gave to the delegates and he was
|
|||
|
as amiable as an Italian prelate knows how to be. He came away with
|
|||
|
Chicherin's autograph on his menu, exchanging it for his own. Bear
|
|||
|
in mind that according to later Catholic literature these
|
|||
|
Bolsheviks had already slaughtered a thousand bishops and heaven
|
|||
|
knows how many thousand priests. Doubtless the archbishop sent a
|
|||
|
roseate account of his success to Rome, but Chicherin was not so
|
|||
|
simple as the prelate imagined. Russia, disgusted at the
|
|||
|
hypocritical patronage and greed of the powers, made a separate
|
|||
|
trade-agreement with Germany, and the conference ended in
|
|||
|
confusion.
|
|||
|
The Vatican still wooed the hated Russians. some men compare
|
|||
|
it to a blond gold-digger pursuing a wealthy gangster but we will
|
|||
|
confine ourselves strictly to the facts, as told by Catholic
|
|||
|
writers. The agents of the Vatican transferred their solicitation
|
|||
|
to the Russian representative in Rome. The civil war had been
|
|||
|
followed by a famine in which millions died, and the Pope pressed
|
|||
|
for permission to help in the work of relief in which many nations
|
|||
|
cooperated. Even Catholic writers do not go so far as to ask us to
|
|||
|
admire the generosity of the Vatican in helping the nation which
|
|||
|
had, it was alleged all over the world, been guilty of an atrocious
|
|||
|
massacre of priests. The aim was so clearly propaganda that the
|
|||
|
Russians exacted an agreement that the members of the Vatican
|
|||
|
relief mission should avoid politics and propaganda before they
|
|||
|
were allowed to enter the country.
|
|||
|
Everyone knows the value of these Catholic promises to refrain
|
|||
|
from propaganda; when, for instance, you send your children to a
|
|||
|
nun's school or an invalid to a Catholic hospital or convalescent
|
|||
|
home. A priest or nun is bound in conscience to get round that
|
|||
|
promise. So the American Jesuit Father Walsh, the head of the
|
|||
|
Vatican mission, set out with a million nice parcels "for the
|
|||
|
children of Russia from the Pope of Rome." So Seldes says, but he
|
|||
|
does not add, as London and Pichon do, that they took also colored
|
|||
|
photographs of the Pope to stick in their relief-centers; and you
|
|||
|
can imagine for yourself what answers the Jesuits gave when
|
|||
|
Russians made inquiries about this picturesque and benevolent
|
|||
|
gentleman. The Russians found that they were proselytizing and in
|
|||
|
1924 conducted them to the frontier. Walsh went back to America and
|
|||
|
published one of the vilest of the attacks on Russia which were now
|
|||
|
beginning to gladden the heart of Wall Street. He swept together
|
|||
|
the wildest and most incredible stories of Bolshevik savagery; and
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
7
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
you will find it interesting to remember that these things are
|
|||
|
supposed to have been perpetrated before or during the two years
|
|||
|
when the Jesuit was working in Russia in friendly relationship with
|
|||
|
the Soviet authorities.
|
|||
|
Still the Vatican hoped. It chose a French Jesuit, Father
|
|||
|
D'Herbigny, whom it turned into a bishop to make him more
|
|||
|
acceptable to the simple Soviet authorities, He and a few others
|
|||
|
got into Russia and were expelled for intrigue, and the long
|
|||
|
courtship, which was now clearly hopeless, ended in a Hymn of Hate.
|
|||
|
D'Herbigny joined the libellers and maybe regarded as the author of
|
|||
|
the Papal bugle-call for "the extinction of Bolshevism." It is
|
|||
|
convenient for Catholics to forget that the Vatican pressed its
|
|||
|
friendship on Russia during these years when the appalling
|
|||
|
condition of the country did give rise to a great deal of violence
|
|||
|
and all the rest of the world was hostile. But the facts I have
|
|||
|
given are quoted entirely from Catholic sources, and we must not
|
|||
|
allow them to be concealed. What the Papacy believed about the
|
|||
|
character of the power with which it sought an alliance did not
|
|||
|
matter to it. All that it regarded was, as it thought, a new chance
|
|||
|
of attaining wealth and power. As soon as that chance was
|
|||
|
definitely lost and Communism and Atheism spread from Russia and
|
|||
|
threatened the Church's wealth and power in other countries it
|
|||
|
turned against Russia and tried to excite a war against It. The
|
|||
|
fact that Russia was now building up a peaceful and humane
|
|||
|
civilization did not matter to it. Indeed, the clearer Russia's
|
|||
|
peaceful and humane intentions became and the greater its success
|
|||
|
the more savage the language of the Vatican became. Did I overstate
|
|||
|
the truth when I said that the first aim of the Black International
|
|||
|
is the protection and increase, by hook or crook, of its own wealth
|
|||
|
and power?
|
|||
|
Chapter II
|
|||
|
THE SUPPOSED PERSECUTION OF RELIGION
|
|||
|
When Mr. Roosevelt recently sent Harriman to Moscow to inquire
|
|||
|
what help Russia required he told his envoy to raise the question
|
|||
|
of freedom of religion. That fact was stated in many papers and is
|
|||
|
duly recorded in the Keesing daily summary of the press. Nothing
|
|||
|
but heavy pressure from the Churches could have induced so broad-
|
|||
|
minded a statesman as Mr. Roosevelt thus to interfere in the
|
|||
|
internal affairs of another nation and, by implication, lay down
|
|||
|
conditions on which he would grant help to a power that was bearing
|
|||
|
the whole brunt of the attack on civilization; and back of this.
|
|||
|
pressure of the Churches is, notoriously, the charge that Russia
|
|||
|
persecutes religion or puts penalties of some sort on those who
|
|||
|
practice it.
|
|||
|
Most of us know the insincerity of that charge. Russia was
|
|||
|
feared and hated, until it entered the war because its rapid
|
|||
|
progress from about 1928 to 1940 discredited two very sacred
|
|||
|
principles of the British and American press, literature, and
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
8
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
politicians. One, the ancient and threadbare charge against
|
|||
|
Socialism, the really fundamental reason why Russia was treated as
|
|||
|
an outlaw nation and the truth about it concealed, was the
|
|||
|
assertion that you cannot make progress without private enterprise
|
|||
|
or, in the ordinary meaning of the word, capitalism. It would not
|
|||
|
do to let the people of the world know that Socialist Russia was
|
|||
|
advancing so rapidly that this most emphatic principle of
|
|||
|
individualism was completely discredited.
|
|||
|
The second principle was that you cannot even maintain an
|
|||
|
existing civilization without religion; and, since in this respect
|
|||
|
we are thinking of the ruling or, guiding class of a nation, the
|
|||
|
principle refers particularly to these. Yet, whatever be the
|
|||
|
strength of religion in Russia today, which we will discuss later,
|
|||
|
no one questions or could question that the members of the
|
|||
|
administration from the Commissars at Moscow to the administrative
|
|||
|
officials of a small town are all Atheists. These Atheists have
|
|||
|
achieved in twenty years one of the greatest feats in history in
|
|||
|
the construction of a civilization. They took over, not a working
|
|||
|
and fairly solid economy as they Fascists and the Nazis did, but a
|
|||
|
country that had been reduced to a state of social and cultural
|
|||
|
chaos, Tsarist Russia had been low in culture and character and,
|
|||
|
for so large a country with such resources, far from rich. But the
|
|||
|
three years of the European War, the ensuing two years of the White
|
|||
|
and the Polish War, and the two years subsequently of famine and
|
|||
|
disease, had made a wilderness of the vast land. Anyone who does
|
|||
|
not realize that ought to look into a good annual, like the Annual
|
|||
|
Register, for 1923 and 1924. It was still a few years before the
|
|||
|
Communist statesmen could begin serious construction, and I repeat
|
|||
|
that what they did between 1928 and 1940 is beyond all historical
|
|||
|
precedents. All the world knows it today.
|
|||
|
Hence when American writers so far removed from Communism as
|
|||
|
John Dewey, Durant, etc. began to assert this fact the anti-
|
|||
|
Socialist slogan was discredited and criticism, to be plausible,
|
|||
|
had to be confined to the supposed interference with religion. Here
|
|||
|
again priests and bankers joined hands, and the most unscrupulous
|
|||
|
priests of all were the Roman Catholic. Although, particularly in
|
|||
|
Britain, the charge of persecuting religion was, as we shall see,
|
|||
|
officially disproved years ago, we must admit that the Church of
|
|||
|
Rome was not the only offender. The entry of Russia into the war
|
|||
|
roused the same ecclesiastical fussiness in England as in, America,
|
|||
|
to which Mr. Roosevelt's unhappy instruction to Harriman bears
|
|||
|
witness. The President of the Baptist World Alliance publicly
|
|||
|
denied Maisky's claim that religion is, and has been for years,
|
|||
|
free in Russia. To that we will return but we, at once, recognize
|
|||
|
one distinction between Protestant and Catholic anti-Communism. The
|
|||
|
Protestant Churches wanted such diplomatic pressure as their
|
|||
|
government could bring to bear upon Moscow, but as I have quoted
|
|||
|
repeatedly in the Pope's own words, the Vatican wanted Communism
|
|||
|
extinguished by war.
|
|||
|
Some of my readers may occasionally regard my language about
|
|||
|
that Church, which is treated with profound respect in most papers,
|
|||
|
as over-emphatic, but candidly, could any man with moderate
|
|||
|
historical knowledge characterize in milder terms the effrontery of
|
|||
|
the Vatican's diatribes against Russia? Hell hath no fury like a
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
9
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
Pope's scorn, of course, but most people do not expect the strident
|
|||
|
and unreasoning language of a rejected suitor from the heads of any
|
|||
|
Church, and for the Popes to complain of persecution is simply
|
|||
|
grotesque. Ever since Europe returned to some degree of mental
|
|||
|
sanity in the 20th Century the Popes have relied on savage
|
|||
|
persecution to maintain their power and of the half-million
|
|||
|
democrats who forfeited their lives for freedom in the 19th Century
|
|||
|
all but a few hundred were victims of Catholic authorities, lay and
|
|||
|
clerical acting together.
|
|||
|
But there is no need to go into history. In our own day, we
|
|||
|
have seen repeatedly in this series of books, Rome follows the old
|
|||
|
policy of persecution wherever it can. We saw that the Catholic
|
|||
|
Church and authorities of Poland maintained a brutal persecution of
|
|||
|
the Orthodox Catholics in the Galician Ukraine, indeed of
|
|||
|
Protestants in Poland itself, from 1919 to 1939. We saw that when
|
|||
|
Pacelli had traversed South America the most terrible persecution,
|
|||
|
including torture, broke out everywhere. It followed the seizure of
|
|||
|
power from the Socialists by the Catholics of Vienna. . . . In
|
|||
|
short, the policy has been enforced wherever the Vatican had the
|
|||
|
power to enforce right down to the time, only a few months ago,
|
|||
|
when the priests of Croatia and Bulgaria fell upon the priests of
|
|||
|
the Serb Church.
|
|||
|
The supreme irony is that, as I have shown until most of my
|
|||
|
readers must be tired. of it, in its Canon Law today the Church
|
|||
|
lays down that it "can and must put heretics to death." Catholics
|
|||
|
in Britain and America are so keen to prevent this from becoming
|
|||
|
generally known that it astonishes most people. Only two days ago
|
|||
|
I had a letter from a businessman asking where he could buy a copy
|
|||
|
of this Canon Law as, if that is impossible -- as it is, for the
|
|||
|
Vatican Press alone publishes it, and only for priests -- whether
|
|||
|
I could get for him a photostat of the page -- there are five or
|
|||
|
six pages -- making the claim! I have not found any priest bold
|
|||
|
enough to deny it in writing for the non-Catholic public. The
|
|||
|
modern world rightly laughs at the idea of Roman priests burning
|
|||
|
heretics, or forcing the police to burn them, in the market-place,
|
|||
|
but there is here a serious question of principle. The great
|
|||
|
majority of people in every advanced modern civilization claim
|
|||
|
freedom to go to church or stay away, to accept a religious creed
|
|||
|
or reject them all. Why do we tolerate all this fuss about "freedom
|
|||
|
of religion" from Catholic writers and priests who say they will,
|
|||
|
wherever they get the power, suppress all freedom of irreligion?
|
|||
|
Clerical-Fascist power has in our own time fallen truculently upon
|
|||
|
tens of millions of seceders from the Church in Italy, Spain,
|
|||
|
Portugal, France, and Latin America, and none are more vehement
|
|||
|
than these countries in demanding the blood of the Bolsheviks
|
|||
|
because they put certain mild restriction's on the propaganda, not
|
|||
|
the personal practice, of religion!
|
|||
|
There is another forgotten aspect which will interest every
|
|||
|
man who wants honesty even in religious propaganda. I said that one
|
|||
|
of the first things the Bolsheviks did was to release the head of
|
|||
|
the Catholic Church in Russia from the jail to which "Holy Russia"
|
|||
|
of Tsarist days had sent him. This was only a last trace of a
|
|||
|
bitter persecution of Roman Catholics that the Orthodox Russians
|
|||
|
had maintained for a century. Catholics now generally suppress the
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
10
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
facts -- though you may read some account of them in the Catholic
|
|||
|
Encyclopedia, since it was written before 1920 -- in order to be
|
|||
|
able to represent the "persecution of religion" as a wicked
|
|||
|
practice introduced into Russia by those terrible Bolsheviks.
|
|||
|
In point of fact, such restrictions as the Bolshevik
|
|||
|
authorities have really laid upon religion, apart from the legal
|
|||
|
punishment of priests for treason, are trifles in comparison with
|
|||
|
what the Greek Catholics did to the Latin Catholics in the last
|
|||
|
century. You will find it amusing to read in the article on Russia
|
|||
|
in the Catholic Encyclopedia how 70 or 80 years ago Pope Pius IX
|
|||
|
was using about his brothers in Christ of the Orthodox Church
|
|||
|
exactly the same abusive language as the Vatican now uses about the
|
|||
|
Bolsheviks! But what was then done out of religious hatred -- we
|
|||
|
must admit that the chief ground was that the Russian Catholics
|
|||
|
were then, as now, mostly Poles and political intriguers -- was far
|
|||
|
worse than Catholic's have suffered in Soviet Russia. Hundreds of
|
|||
|
priests were hanged and whole communities of nuns were raped and
|
|||
|
brutally treated. They were stripped and flogged and in some cases
|
|||
|
burned alive. Young Catholic nuns were put in Orthodox convents,
|
|||
|
and it was hell. One Orthodox mother-superior took an axe to one of
|
|||
|
these stubborn Romanist nuns. At one place a number of nuns were
|
|||
|
put in sacks, and dragged over the surface of lakes in winter, the
|
|||
|
people cheering from the banks. Monks had to let down their pants
|
|||
|
and sit on the ice. I really wonder why Father Walsh did not get
|
|||
|
hold of some of these true stories of 80 years ago and turn them
|
|||
|
into Bolshevik outrages of 1923 and 1924!
|
|||
|
These, things make a mockery of all this modern twaddle about
|
|||
|
cruel Atheists and sadistic Bolsheviks. And when we examine the
|
|||
|
stories which are offered us even by writers who pose as experts we
|
|||
|
find them often grotesque. There is, for instance, a much-consulted
|
|||
|
history of the early Bolshevik years by Lancelot Lawton (The
|
|||
|
Russian Revolution, 1927). Most people know only that he was a
|
|||
|
correspondent in Russia of the Liberal Daily Chronicle and not that
|
|||
|
-- so a Russian official assured me -- he married a White Russian.
|
|||
|
Most of the folk who talk about the horrors of the early years
|
|||
|
would quote Lawton. Well, here is a specimen of his "history." He
|
|||
|
says, "The number of ecclesiastical persons executed from 1917 to
|
|||
|
1920 was 8050 including 1275 bishops." How magnanimous of the
|
|||
|
Vatican to press its friendship upon Russia after such a ghastly
|
|||
|
slaughter! But if you put together the details given in the
|
|||
|
Catholic Encyclopedia and its supplement and the last edition of
|
|||
|
the Encyclopedia Britannica you will be relieved to find that in
|
|||
|
1917 there were not more than 80 archbishops and bishops, of both
|
|||
|
Churches, in Russia, and most of them escaped -- the Encyclopedia
|
|||
|
Britannica describes 15 of them setting up a synod in Belgrade --
|
|||
|
or went to prison for intrigue with the invaders. It is a nice
|
|||
|
example of the "historical" basis for the talk about Bolshevik
|
|||
|
atrocities and persecution of religion.
|
|||
|
As far as the Roman Catholics are concerned we may follow Miss
|
|||
|
Almedinger because she not only lived in Russia at the time but she
|
|||
|
is so really religious that she won't lie even in the good cause.
|
|||
|
She tells us that one Catholic bishop and a number of anonymous
|
|||
|
Catholics were put to death and admits that they were guilty in
|
|||
|
Russian law. Bolshevik law was so wicked that it imposed sentence
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
11
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
of death on traitors or men who intrigued with and helped the
|
|||
|
invaders. One of the most impartial histories of the time, J.H.
|
|||
|
Jackson's Post-War World (1935, p. 189) says that "no case has been
|
|||
|
discovered of a priest or anyone else being punished for the
|
|||
|
practice of religion." Those words, we shall see presently, are
|
|||
|
part of the official report of the British ambassador and were read
|
|||
|
in the British House of Commons by the Foreign Secretary (a vary
|
|||
|
religious man). The charge has been so discredited that it does not
|
|||
|
appear in the supplement of the Catholic Encyclopedia which was
|
|||
|
published after the alleged period of sanguinary persecution, but
|
|||
|
other Catholic writers sustain throughout the world the tattered
|
|||
|
legend of Bolshevik atrocities. It is the chief foundation for
|
|||
|
their gospel of hatred of Russia and their demand (until recently)
|
|||
|
that other powers should make war upon it.
|
|||
|
The period in question is still as obscure as some parts of
|
|||
|
ancient history, for the confusion was such that few authentic
|
|||
|
records were kept while the intense passion on both sides gave rise
|
|||
|
to vast quantities of reckless rumors. There is again a real
|
|||
|
analogy with the French Revolution -- with the true story of the
|
|||
|
revolution for, as I said, Lenin and Stalin no more interfered with
|
|||
|
religion for the first few years, beyond disestablishing the
|
|||
|
corrupt Orthodox Church and nationalizing its superfluous wealth,
|
|||
|
than the leaders of the French Revolution had done. And in both
|
|||
|
cases it was hostile invasion and the intrigues of the clergy with
|
|||
|
the invaders which soured the people and forced the hand of the
|
|||
|
authorities. After the November Revolution Lenin repudiated the
|
|||
|
huge foreign debt incurred by the Tsarists, and foreign armies were
|
|||
|
sent to help the Whites or refugee imperialists. About 300000
|
|||
|
Whites, Poles, Rumanians, Czechs, Japanese, British, American and
|
|||
|
French entered the distressed and impoverished country for the
|
|||
|
purpose of destroying the new regime, and there never was a more
|
|||
|
savage war. As in the French Revolution, again, the refugees told
|
|||
|
wild stories (as is now definitely proved by French histories) of
|
|||
|
the number of victims. The Russians say 50000. Some unprejudiced
|
|||
|
historians suggest between 100000 and 200000. But even so
|
|||
|
responsible an organ as the London Times gave the figure as
|
|||
|
7700000 with just such impossible exaggerations in detail as that
|
|||
|
I quoted from Lawton.
|
|||
|
The Poles continued this war when the other Allies quit, and
|
|||
|
at a time when the country suffered as no other land has done in
|
|||
|
modern times, and it would be absurd to doubt that the Catholic
|
|||
|
clergy and the peasants they controlled did all they could to help
|
|||
|
them. At one time it looked as if the Poles were likely to win and
|
|||
|
restore the autocracy of the Church. In any case the vast majority
|
|||
|
of the Roman Catholics left in Russia after the detachment of
|
|||
|
provinces to form Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, were Poles. How
|
|||
|
many there were no one knows. They were too poor for the Church to
|
|||
|
organize them. The Catholic Encyclopedia claims 5000000 and then
|
|||
|
talks of dioceses in which there was only one priest to 5000 or
|
|||
|
even 10000 Catholics! There were probably not a million subjects
|
|||
|
of the Pope then in Russia, and the number today is negligible. It
|
|||
|
was the heritage of the Orthodox Church for which the Vatican was
|
|||
|
fighting.
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
12
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
The Orthodox clergy and the few Romanist priests continued to
|
|||
|
intrigue with Poland and the White refugees abroad, and there were
|
|||
|
further executions. Any fair-minded man ought to recognize the real
|
|||
|
character of these after the official verdict given in the British
|
|||
|
House of Commons. In 1929 some of the religious members of
|
|||
|
Parliament, under Church pressure, shamelessly ignoring the rule
|
|||
|
that one country does not interfere in the internal affair's of
|
|||
|
another, insisted that the government should inquire into the
|
|||
|
persecution of religion in Russia. This, it will be remembered, was
|
|||
|
the year in which the Papacy signed its Concordat with Mussolini,
|
|||
|
and desperate efforts were made to get Mussolini to forbid the
|
|||
|
practice of any religion but the Roman in Italy. Severe
|
|||
|
restrictions were, in fact, put on Protestantism, and the grossest
|
|||
|
intolerance to seceders from the Church was embodied in the law,
|
|||
|
with the approval of those Catholics in all countries who continued
|
|||
|
to talk about Russian persecution of religion. The oracle of
|
|||
|
American Catholicism, Msgr. Ryan, blandly explained it on the
|
|||
|
principle that truth has rights but error none!
|
|||
|
However, the British government asked its ambassador in
|
|||
|
Moscow, Sir Esmond Ovey, for a report, and it contained this
|
|||
|
sentence which was read to the House of Commons by the Foreign
|
|||
|
Secretary, the pious Henderson -- the government was then under
|
|||
|
that arch-trimmer Ramsay Macdonald, who was at one time a personal
|
|||
|
friend of mine and a complete Agnostic -- on April 23 and reported
|
|||
|
in the press next day:
|
|||
|
"There is no religious persecution in Russia, in the strict
|
|||
|
sense of the word persecution, and no case has been discovered of
|
|||
|
a priest or anyone else being punished for practicing religion."
|
|||
|
It is characteristic of the way in which the public is
|
|||
|
educated by its press in our time, under pressure of Roman
|
|||
|
Catholicism, that a persecution of the Ukrainians by the Poles on
|
|||
|
the ground of religion (as well as nationality) was then at its
|
|||
|
height and only three papers in Britain and America dared refer to
|
|||
|
it. At the most Russia restricted religious folk to their own
|
|||
|
premises while in Poland priests opposed to Rome were flogged,
|
|||
|
grossly insulted, robbed and jailed. But did you hear any outcry
|
|||
|
about the persecution of religion in Poland or any demand that
|
|||
|
American or British authorities ought to make an inquiry?
|
|||
|
To this official assurance that no priest or anyone had been
|
|||
|
"punished for practicing religion" could be added the words of a
|
|||
|
large number of religious leaders, in Russia itself. In a booklet
|
|||
|
published in America (The Soviet War on Religion, 1930) Mr.
|
|||
|
Sherwood gives, with exact reference to the date of publication in
|
|||
|
the Russian press, a number of these admissions. One is signed by
|
|||
|
three archbishops of the Orthodox Church (p. 27), one by 31 Jewish
|
|||
|
rabbis, (p. 28), one by a group of Roman Catholic priests, and so
|
|||
|
on. They insist that there is no persecution, say that the stories
|
|||
|
of atrocities are "inventions and slanders unworthy of serious
|
|||
|
peoples attention" and that there is no question even of "pressure"
|
|||
|
on them, and that there had been general political intrigue on the
|
|||
|
part of the clergy, especially of the Roman Church. The Catholic
|
|||
|
priests, admitting this, actually say:
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
13
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
"The dark era of oppression has disappeared without a trace,
|
|||
|
together with the Tsardom which maintained it, and the star of
|
|||
|
liberty has begun to shine with its bright radiance on the life of
|
|||
|
the Catholic Church" (p. 29).
|
|||
|
This was in 1927 and refutes the strongest claims of
|
|||
|
atrocities, which are located before that date. Yet the Vatican not
|
|||
|
merely encouraged the circulation of those stories in the Catholic
|
|||
|
Church but actually became more vitriolic in its indictment of
|
|||
|
Russia after that date; just at the time when its pets (Spain,
|
|||
|
Portugal, the South American Republics, Italy and Austria) were
|
|||
|
beginning to enforce a policy of persecution of religion.
|
|||
|
Putting aside therefore all stories of execution or outrage on
|
|||
|
the ground of religion, which are thus disproved by the best
|
|||
|
authorities, what is the law or practice in regard to religion
|
|||
|
which, though it ought to be well known at Washington, moves Mr.
|
|||
|
Roosevelt to raise the question of freedom of religion in such form
|
|||
|
as to suggest that there is none, or only a restricted liberty, in
|
|||
|
Russia? The prominence given in the press to the President's
|
|||
|
instruction to Mr. Harriman led Keesing's Contemporary Archives to
|
|||
|
insert at that date (October 18, 1941, p. 4848) one of its
|
|||
|
impartial explanatory notes. It speaks of the "corruption" and
|
|||
|
"fabulous wealth" of the Tsarist Orthodox Church and says that the
|
|||
|
action taken against its clergy after the Revolution was taken on
|
|||
|
the ground of "their secular activities rather than religious
|
|||
|
partisanship." Whatever the ground no one who knows anything about
|
|||
|
the old Church will feel surprise that in June 1918 the Church was
|
|||
|
disestablished, the ecclesiastical property (nearly $4000000000
|
|||
|
worth of land) nationalized, religious education excluded from the
|
|||
|
schools, and missionary activities suppressed. Within these limits
|
|||
|
every Russian was free to follow his conscience. This was the
|
|||
|
extent of persecution of religion in the years of the first violent
|
|||
|
reaction against the foul older era.
|
|||
|
It is complained that the Soviet authorities then gave all the
|
|||
|
unofficial assistance they could to the Atheist League which was
|
|||
|
rapidly weaning the people from religion. It is rather funny to
|
|||
|
read this complaint in countries in which the political authorities
|
|||
|
do everything in their power to help the Churches; and the Soviet
|
|||
|
authorities were more deeply and sincerely convinced that religion
|
|||
|
is prejudicial to progress than democratic statesmen are that it is
|
|||
|
beneficial, to say nothing of the treasonable activities of the
|
|||
|
Russian clergy. It is complained also that, as time went on a large
|
|||
|
number of seminaries, monasteries, and churches were closed. In
|
|||
|
hundreds of instances the churches were converted to more useful
|
|||
|
purposes at the request of the people who used to frequent them,
|
|||
|
and political intrigue sufficiently excuses the closing of
|
|||
|
seminaries and monasteries. The writer of the note in Keesing
|
|||
|
quaintly says that "in spite of all this" the Orthodox Church
|
|||
|
counted 98000000 communicants and the Roman Church 11000000
|
|||
|
members, but "the last census," to which he appeals was taken in
|
|||
|
1913!
|
|||
|
We will try presently to ascertain how many folk in Russia
|
|||
|
still belong to the Churches and will continue here to examine this
|
|||
|
supposedly neutral account. As Russia entered into relations with
|
|||
|
other countries the zeal against religion was modified. In 1935 the
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
14
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
attempt to suppress the celebration of Christmas was dropped, the
|
|||
|
more violent literature of the Atheist League was withdrawn from
|
|||
|
the bookstores, and the famous anti-Christian museums, with their
|
|||
|
caricatures of religion, became respectable museum's of religion!
|
|||
|
In 1939 there was, this writer says, a great religious revival,
|
|||
|
though "not within the framework of the Churches." How Christian
|
|||
|
writers love vague phrases like that. In plain English the Churches
|
|||
|
continued to lose, but there were now large numbers of priests who
|
|||
|
fought to modernize theology, even to combine Communism with a "new
|
|||
|
Christianity," and there was a good deal of fresh discussion of
|
|||
|
religion. At the outbreak of the war with Germany the government --
|
|||
|
the Christian Science Monitor announced -- suppressed the Atheist
|
|||
|
paper (Bezboznik).
|
|||
|
In other words, the increasing danger from Germany induced the
|
|||
|
authorities to take various steps which might mitigate the hatred
|
|||
|
of Russia which the Churches inspired in America and Britain, but
|
|||
|
the law was not altered, and Mr. Roosevelt seems to have been
|
|||
|
persuaded that it contained an element of persecution of religion.
|
|||
|
Senator Smith bluntly put it: "Harriman's job seems to be to try to
|
|||
|
get Stalin to join the Church so we can call him brother." We all
|
|||
|
understood what it really meant. The representatives of Churches at
|
|||
|
Washington thought it a good opportunity to get Russian law made
|
|||
|
more favorable to religion. What is wrong with the law?
|
|||
|
As Maisky, speaking to the American Chamber of Commerce in
|
|||
|
London on September 23, and Lozovsky in Moscow said, its
|
|||
|
fundamental principle is that all religions are free and equal;
|
|||
|
which we were always asked to regard as one of the finest
|
|||
|
achievements of the American Constitution. Let me repeat, as so few
|
|||
|
seem to realize it, that you will not find that just law and
|
|||
|
elementary human right conceded in any Roman Catholic country in
|
|||
|
the world today. Even in Eire and Quebec there is no religious
|
|||
|
equality, and the more docile to the Vatican Catholic states are,
|
|||
|
the more of its Canon Law they admit into their legislation, the
|
|||
|
more intolerant they are. Persecution of religion -- any religion
|
|||
|
that rejects the Pope's authority -- is, we have seen, a first
|
|||
|
principle of Catholic law and theology. And, though we moderns
|
|||
|
insist that the non-religious man has the same right to liberty as
|
|||
|
the members of any Church, the intolerance is in this respect worse
|
|||
|
than ever. The Vatican's first excuse for its demand of the
|
|||
|
extinction of Bolshevism is that the Russians are Atheists.
|
|||
|
Maisky later added to his statement of Russian law. The
|
|||
|
government, which owns all property, puts a building at the
|
|||
|
disposal of any group of worshipers and charges no rent or taxes.
|
|||
|
Certainly a queer kind of persecution of religion! The police
|
|||
|
arrest and the courts punish any who "violate the rights of
|
|||
|
believers." Ministers of all religions have just the Same Political
|
|||
|
and legal rights as other citizens.
|
|||
|
To this the President of the Baptist World Alliance made a
|
|||
|
heated reply, and we may take it that his letter enumerates every
|
|||
|
respect in which he and his colleagues see the shadow of
|
|||
|
persecution. Worshipers, he says, must confine their worship to a
|
|||
|
church. Sunday Schools and religious lesions to children are
|
|||
|
forbidden. The Churches must have no social gatherings, no
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
15
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
lectures, and no libraries. Mr. Rushbrooke might be advised to
|
|||
|
compare these restrictions on priests with the restrictions on
|
|||
|
Protestant Churches and Atheists in Catholic lands; and if he
|
|||
|
replies that Protestants do not do these things the answer is
|
|||
|
simple. They certainly did in England until, in the 19th Century,
|
|||
|
the Church of England, which inspired the law. dropped to a
|
|||
|
minority. We might even raise a question about Baptist tolerance in
|
|||
|
certain states of America, but it is enough to reflect that
|
|||
|
Baptists or Methodists were never yet the majority in any country
|
|||
|
so we must not be too sure what they would or would not do if they
|
|||
|
had the power.
|
|||
|
To sum up the contents of this chapter and give the reader a
|
|||
|
clear idea on an issue that often confronts him in his reading,
|
|||
|
there is no truth in the stories that Catholics, Orthodox or Roman,
|
|||
|
were ever physically persecuted in Russia, that is to say, ever
|
|||
|
sent to, jail, much less executed, for belonging to a Church or
|
|||
|
practicing religion. An unknown number of bishops and priests,
|
|||
|
which in certain cases we have definitely proved to be exaggerated
|
|||
|
fifteen-fold, were put to death in the dark early years, but the
|
|||
|
ground was political, and our religious authorities admit that the
|
|||
|
clergy did quite generally conspire with attempts to subvert the
|
|||
|
government. We do not blame them when they saw a chance of the
|
|||
|
restoration of the Church to wealth and power, but it is silly to
|
|||
|
call this persecution. The law of treason is much the same in every
|
|||
|
country, and Russia was in such circumstances at the time that a
|
|||
|
drastic application of the law was essential.
|
|||
|
As to later years and the present time we frankly admit that
|
|||
|
the Churches are not free to do what they like in Russia. The
|
|||
|
restrictions are mild in comparison with the restrictions on
|
|||
|
religion imposed in Catholic countries, and we very justly resent
|
|||
|
the practice of calling them persecution and implying that they are
|
|||
|
something peculiar to Soviet Russia. That is implied in the great
|
|||
|
majority of reference's to religion in Russia, and not a word of
|
|||
|
appreciation is given the Bolsheviks for their introduction of the
|
|||
|
principle of individual freedom of conscience. The restrictions are
|
|||
|
that the priests must not impose religious doctrines on children,
|
|||
|
who can't argue with their teachers, or do propaganda other than by
|
|||
|
holding religious services which any person may attend.
|
|||
|
Apart from those whose admiration of Russia is so great that
|
|||
|
we might regard their judgment as biased, Atheists would differ
|
|||
|
about the propriety of these restrictions. We must, however, at
|
|||
|
least not judge the Russian authorities in the light of our
|
|||
|
experience in America. The Russian Church, which alone we need
|
|||
|
consider since the Roman brand of Catholicism is nearly dead, has
|
|||
|
been an enemy of the people for a thousand years. It allowed the
|
|||
|
Tsars and the nobles to keep nearly half a million peasants until
|
|||
|
100 years ago in the state of slavery (serfdom) which Europe
|
|||
|
generally abolished 700 years ago. It supported a corrupt and
|
|||
|
murderous autocracy until 1917. It continued for the next 10 years
|
|||
|
to help every attempt to destroy a regime in which, whatever else
|
|||
|
you may think of it, the wealth produced by the people is shared
|
|||
|
amongst the people. To me personally it seems that if the Soviet
|
|||
|
authorities still think it dangerous, they have the right to impose
|
|||
|
these mild restrictions. Please yourself. They do not care the toss
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
16
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
of a coin what you and I think about it. But as a vast amount of
|
|||
|
evil has been done by the Churches, and most particularly the
|
|||
|
Vatican, spreading a hatred of Russia, I have had to show that
|
|||
|
there is no justification for this in any persecution of religion.
|
|||
|
Chapter III
|
|||
|
THE PAPAL HYMN OF HATE
|
|||
|
I invite the readers' particular attention to the
|
|||
|
chronological parallel between the successive phases of the
|
|||
|
Vatican's attitude to Russia and the developments in that country.
|
|||
|
I have briefly referred to it but it deserves careful
|
|||
|
consideration. Until about 1925, when Jesuit Bishop D'Herbigny was
|
|||
|
still trying to get a foothold in Russia, the Vatican made friendly
|
|||
|
approaches to the Soviet government. Apart from the futile gesture
|
|||
|
of the Genoa Conference no other power in the world was so amiable
|
|||
|
with Russia, and the country itself was in a very miserable
|
|||
|
condition. Long after that year our papers and novelists, were
|
|||
|
still serving up pictures of Russians in rags clinging to
|
|||
|
ramshackle overcrowded cars, sadistic officials of the 0.G.P.U. who
|
|||
|
had innocent maids waiting in the ante-rooms until they had
|
|||
|
finished their champagne-orgies, priests boiled in oil or burned in
|
|||
|
lime, and go on.
|
|||
|
During the next ten years the world-hostility to Russia
|
|||
|
moderated. There was always money for a fiery indictment of the
|
|||
|
Soviet system, but level-headed men began to see that Russia had
|
|||
|
got on to a line on which it might travel far. During this
|
|||
|
indecisive period the Vatican had not much to say about Russia as
|
|||
|
far as I can ascertain. Locally members of the Black International
|
|||
|
like the American Jesuit Walsh might inflame sentiment against
|
|||
|
Russia. Business and financial men were not really very sensitive
|
|||
|
about outrages of religion. They were more deeply pained by the
|
|||
|
refusal of the Soviet authorities to pay interest on the Tsarist
|
|||
|
loans and on British and American investments. But if there were a
|
|||
|
few million folk who believed Walsh's stories and helped to swell
|
|||
|
the feeling against Russia, it was all to the good. Still the
|
|||
|
Papacy, as I said, was fairly quiet about Russia. In fact, as lite
|
|||
|
as 1930 the Pope politely summoned the Catholic world, not to
|
|||
|
agitate for war but to pray fervently for Russia, the consequences
|
|||
|
of which I cannot discover.
|
|||
|
About 1934 what we might broadly call the third phase of
|
|||
|
Russia's internal development and relation to other power's began.
|
|||
|
Russia had after so many years of bovine prejudice become rather
|
|||
|
indifferent to the opinion of the outside world but it received a
|
|||
|
large number of visitors from America and Britain every year, and
|
|||
|
men and women of very different schools and respected character
|
|||
|
wrote in high appreciation of its recovery. So neutral an authority
|
|||
|
as the Statesmen's Year Book showed that Russia more than doubled
|
|||
|
its annual production of wealth from 1932 to 1935 -- a feat far
|
|||
|
beyond the achievement of any other country -- and there were no
|
|||
|
rich men to absorb any of it. Duranty has written sympathetic
|
|||
|
accounts for years to the New York Times, and his volume of
|
|||
|
articles (Russia Reported, 1934) made a deep impression. In the
|
|||
|
same year Sherwood Eddy's Russia Today, written from a different
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
17
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
rather conservative angle, confirmed the impression. A lady of the
|
|||
|
Tsarist family who had settled in America, Countess Skaryatina,
|
|||
|
still very conservative and religious, had the courage to go to
|
|||
|
Russia and the honesty to say that the Bolsheviks had made great
|
|||
|
progress (First to Go Back, 1935). An equally conservative British
|
|||
|
general, W.H. Waters, also a lover of the old regime, paid a visit
|
|||
|
and made the same report. Sir Bernard Pares, high British authority
|
|||
|
on the East and for years a heavy critic of Bolsheviks, now gave a
|
|||
|
very appreciative account and joined the "Friends of Russia." He
|
|||
|
spoke of a "hostile foreign diplomat" in Moscow who grudgingly
|
|||
|
admitted to him that "the Bolsheviks have won all along the line."
|
|||
|
We shall see other equally notable impartial witnesses later.
|
|||
|
Naturally, the literature about Russia was very mixed. Some
|
|||
|
writers expressly catered to the chronic demand for blood-curdling
|
|||
|
stories of the O.G.P.U. and the poor folk who wept when their icons
|
|||
|
were torn away from them. Others, with milder prejudice, denounced
|
|||
|
Russia because it had no political elections of the democratic
|
|||
|
purity of those of America or because the workers, who a few years
|
|||
|
ago had been the worst paid and most ignorant in Europe, had not
|
|||
|
yet risen to the high standard of American workers -- not
|
|||
|
mentioning that there was no unemployment in Russia and the workers
|
|||
|
had vast free social services and cheap rents in the cities.
|
|||
|
Typical was the work of Sir W. Citrine, who went with all the
|
|||
|
prejudice which the British Labor Party still stupidly fostered and
|
|||
|
poked into tenements to see if the baths all had stoppers, and
|
|||
|
after traveling hundreds of miles found a woman who seemed no
|
|||
|
better than she ought to be and something like a slum (such as he
|
|||
|
could have found within a mile of his house in London).
|
|||
|
However, my point here is that as appreciation of Russia grew
|
|||
|
in the rest of the world the attitude of the Vatican to it became
|
|||
|
more somber and bitter, Catholic apologists are nothing if not bold
|
|||
|
but I have not yet heard of one who has asked us to admire the Pope
|
|||
|
because he was friendly to Russia when the rest of the world was
|
|||
|
venomous and became critical only when, and in proportion as, it no
|
|||
|
longer needed friends. We might get near the truth if we remember
|
|||
|
that the power behind the Pope, the Secretary of State, was changed
|
|||
|
in 1930. Pacelli, the present Pope, an aristocrat to his toenails,
|
|||
|
then became the dictator at the Vatican, for the Pope was very old
|
|||
|
and feeble. We might remember, too, that Pacelli entered, at the
|
|||
|
end of 1932, into a policy of friendliness to Germans, and Germany
|
|||
|
was pledged by its, bible, Hitler's book, to make war sooner or
|
|||
|
later on Russia.
|
|||
|
When precisely the Vatican began to snarl at Russia it is
|
|||
|
difficult to determine. The Encyclical Quadrazesimo anno of May 15,
|
|||
|
1931 makes the earliest reference that I find, and the hand of
|
|||
|
Pacelli in that vapid manifesto is clear. It is a recommendation of
|
|||
|
the Corporative State to all Catholic countries; in fact, to the
|
|||
|
whole world, as the Pope ingenuously remarks that the truth on even
|
|||
|
the social and economic order can come only from Rome. How
|
|||
|
journalists ever stoop to praise these Papal utterances on Social
|
|||
|
questions puzzles me. They are like the ideas of a Baptist preacher
|
|||
|
in Tennessee blinded with those of Thomas Aquinas and almost lost
|
|||
|
in a jelly of Latin verbiage. There is, as I have already
|
|||
|
explained, no English translation of this Encyclical, because it
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
18
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
approves -- indeed imposes -- such restrictions on capitalism and
|
|||
|
private enterprise as are provided in Mussolini's Corporative
|
|||
|
State, which industrialists in America who are assured by Catholic
|
|||
|
writers that their "freedom of the individual is thoroughly
|
|||
|
Catholic, detest almost as much as Socialism.
|
|||
|
The Pope tells the world, with quite an air of profundity and
|
|||
|
originality, that Socialism has split into moderate Socialism and
|
|||
|
Communism. As we saw, and it may be convenient to repeat, he
|
|||
|
answers the question, on which, he says, Rome has often been
|
|||
|
consulted, whether a Catholic can be a Socialist by saying that
|
|||
|
"Socialism, as long as it remains real Socialism . . . cannot be
|
|||
|
reconciled with the teaching of the Catholic Church." He insists
|
|||
|
that "religious Socialism or Christian Socialism is a contradiction
|
|||
|
in terms," and he winds up by saying that "no genuine Socialist can
|
|||
|
be a good Catholic." That is another reason why the Encyclical is
|
|||
|
not translated into English. It might prevent Catholic writers for
|
|||
|
the workers from continuing to say, as they do, that the Church has
|
|||
|
never condemned Socialism; while Catholic writer's for the wealthy,
|
|||
|
like Ryan, tell them that the Church regards any attack on private
|
|||
|
ownership as a sin.
|
|||
|
However, the Pope is still more drastic when he passes on to
|
|||
|
Communism. It is too "impious" to consider. When it gets power it
|
|||
|
shrinks from nothing "however atrocious and inhuman." As Russia was
|
|||
|
the only country in which it had power this was pointed enough, but
|
|||
|
the Pope goes on to speak of "the massacres (strange) and ruin it
|
|||
|
has brought upon Eastern Europe and Asia." There may be earlier
|
|||
|
pronouncements on Russian atrocities for all I know but this is ten
|
|||
|
years old. A Jesuit writer quotes from the British Communist Daily
|
|||
|
Worker an account of a meeting in the offices of that paper on
|
|||
|
December 30, 1932 which passed a valiant resolution to attack
|
|||
|
religion "considering that the clergy of all creeds and
|
|||
|
denominations are, with religion as their pretext, following the
|
|||
|
lead of the Pope in his call for a crusade against the U.S.S.R."
|
|||
|
They resolved:
|
|||
|
". . . to organize an unflinching resistance to every variety of
|
|||
|
religious attack . . . to vindicate the policy of the U.S.S.R. in
|
|||
|
regard to religion and the Churches against all and every attack .
|
|||
|
. . to urge the complete separation of Church and State and the
|
|||
|
complete exclusion of religion from the school," and so on.
|
|||
|
Communists must feel like biting the carpet when they reflect
|
|||
|
how they abandoned that attitude. A few years later, when I was
|
|||
|
writing my Militant Atheist -- perhaps the most congenial work I
|
|||
|
ever did -- a member of the staff of the Daily Worker asked me to
|
|||
|
call at the office, making a definite appointment, to see him as he
|
|||
|
edited a column of the Dally Worker with that title and would like
|
|||
|
to cooperate. I called -- and saw none but the editors who
|
|||
|
explained that they had changed their policy and no longer thought
|
|||
|
it of any importance to attack the Churches.
|
|||
|
It was a mistake even of Moscow to drop the criticism of
|
|||
|
religion while adhering slavishly to everything else that Marx had
|
|||
|
said. American and British Communists, on whom they relied for
|
|||
|
information, told them that the bitter hostility to them would
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
19
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
cease if they quit criticizing religion. One or two influential
|
|||
|
cleric's like the Dean of Canterbury had taken to patronizing
|
|||
|
Russia, and publishers (skeptics) who felt that Rationalism checked
|
|||
|
trade added their persuasion. In May 1938 the Communist
|
|||
|
International published in England for America and Britain, had an
|
|||
|
article which would, if there were any truth in superstition, have
|
|||
|
made Marx turn in his grave. I am quoting the Jesuit Ryder at the
|
|||
|
Cambridge Summer School of Russian Studies in 1938. The article,
|
|||
|
headed "The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Catholic Masses,"
|
|||
|
recommends the policy of conciliating Catholics and Protestants.
|
|||
|
The Soviet Union, it claimed, was "realizing the ideals of
|
|||
|
Christianity," and Communists must "not ignore the more than
|
|||
|
400000000 Catholics of the world"; which is 50000000 more than
|
|||
|
the more optimistic Catholics claim and double the true figure. The
|
|||
|
writer poured scorn on "the Left phrasemongers" who attack the
|
|||
|
policy of "the outstretched hand" and, by a tour de force, said
|
|||
|
that "we come forward in the defense of religion against the
|
|||
|
Fascist persecution of believers" yet had not the least idea of
|
|||
|
deviating from the teaching of Marx! We recognize the accents of
|
|||
|
the American and British Communists, who were at that time offering
|
|||
|
cooperation to the Catholic Church. Now there is "a smile on the
|
|||
|
face of the tiger." The blood of Communists reddens the earth in
|
|||
|
Catholic Austria, Slovakia, Croatia, Spain, Portugal, Vichy France,
|
|||
|
Italy, Brazil, Peru, etc. etc.
|
|||
|
In so far as Moscow was involved in this change of policy,
|
|||
|
chiefly owing to false information from Britain and America, we
|
|||
|
have an extraordinary situation. The change was carried out just at
|
|||
|
the time when the Vatican was inflaming Catholic sentiment against
|
|||
|
Russia all over the world and beginning to call for war upon
|
|||
|
Russia; and the change brought about no modification whatever of
|
|||
|
the world-cry of "persecution of religion in Russia." What moved
|
|||
|
the papacy to enter upon this more bitter and more dangerous
|
|||
|
campaign? I say more dangerous because it would be difficult to
|
|||
|
exaggerate the profit to the Axis of this Papal preaching of hatred
|
|||
|
of Russia in every Catholic land and amongst the Catholics of all
|
|||
|
countries.
|
|||
|
The reasons given by the Vatican, as in the above Encyclical,
|
|||
|
are puerile. In speaking of the "massacres" -- it is interesting
|
|||
|
that in his Latin text Pacelli uses just the word which the Pope
|
|||
|
put on his gold medal of triumph at the time of the St. Bartholomew
|
|||
|
Massacre -- which the Bolsheviks committed he endorses the wild
|
|||
|
legends and lies which I have disproved from Catholic writers. As
|
|||
|
to their having brought "ruin" upon the land, the Pope, granting
|
|||
|
him sincerity, seems to have been as crudely ignorant of Russian
|
|||
|
affairs as a nun in a Quebec convent. By 1931 the Bolsheviks had
|
|||
|
saved Russia from the real ruin which the White War (zealously
|
|||
|
supported by the two Churches) had brought upon Russia and were
|
|||
|
rapidly restoring prosperity and creating one of the finest
|
|||
|
educational and social services in the world.
|
|||
|
His attacks in 1936 and his broadcasts to Spain in 1939 -- in
|
|||
|
fact, all his characterizations of Bolshevism in his appeals for
|
|||
|
war from 1935 onward -- are just as childish. I quoted elsewhere
|
|||
|
the address of Pius XI to Spanish refugees in 1936, in, which he
|
|||
|
plainly invited the destruction of Bolshevism "from Russia to
|
|||
|
China, from Mexico to South America." The reference to South
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
20
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
America is cool, as Pacelli, who clearly wrote the address, had
|
|||
|
just got Communism violently destroyed in nearly every republic.
|
|||
|
But the whole diatribe is fatuous. Everywhere, the Pope says, there
|
|||
|
is "a satanic preparation" for the work of "subverting established
|
|||
|
orders of every kind" and "attacking every institution, human and
|
|||
|
divine." At that very time, philosophers like Professor Dewey,
|
|||
|
Liberal individualists like Sir Ernest Simon (brother of Sir John
|
|||
|
Simon), and a few clerics like the Dean of Canterbury were
|
|||
|
describing to the public how Russia was creating a new social order
|
|||
|
which in its care for children, women, and the mass of the people,
|
|||
|
had no equal in history.
|
|||
|
We may make allowance for the real ignorance of Pacelli and
|
|||
|
the Vatican. They never even try to get accurate information about
|
|||
|
movements or bodies which are offensive to them on religious
|
|||
|
grounds. They see everything through a red haze of professional
|
|||
|
piety. But there is deliberate policy behind it all. By 1935 Japan
|
|||
|
had got the innocent western powers to support Chiang Kai-shek in
|
|||
|
his costly campaign to crush Communism in China and smooth the way
|
|||
|
for Japan itself. Hitler and Mussolini were wondering how they
|
|||
|
could get the same powers to overlook their proposed intervention
|
|||
|
in Spain. Hitler was repeating in public speeches that the noble
|
|||
|
German race must have the Ukraine. Wall Street wanted a good
|
|||
|
pretext for stirring the country to attack Mexico. Labor and
|
|||
|
Socialist movements everywhere were to be encouraged in their
|
|||
|
tragic policy of attacking and disowning Communists so as to
|
|||
|
prevent the formation of a Popular Front until it was too late.
|
|||
|
This sacred fury against Bolshevism was one of the Vatican's
|
|||
|
greatest contributions to the preparation of the world for the
|
|||
|
onslaught of barbarism.
|
|||
|
But, you may ask, is it possible that the Pope, the Black
|
|||
|
International which forced his slogan upon the Catholic masses
|
|||
|
(which do not read encyclical's) in every country, and the Catholic
|
|||
|
press which made "the extinction of Bolshevism" as familiar to
|
|||
|
Catholics as "Heil Hitler" is to Germans and ... "Mussolini solo"
|
|||
|
to Italians, realized what they were doing?
|
|||
|
You can analyze that for yourself. There is, of course, no
|
|||
|
documentary evidence beyond the very plain evidence that the Papacy
|
|||
|
blessed the rebellion and the intervention of Italy and Germany in
|
|||
|
Spain and just as plainly wanted war on Russia. It must seem
|
|||
|
equally certain to anyone who knows the ecclesiastical mind that
|
|||
|
the Vatican and the Black International in America wanted war for
|
|||
|
the annexation of Mexico. The Knights of Columbus, who may be
|
|||
|
considered unconsecrated members of the Black International, made
|
|||
|
open offers of alliance with Wall Street and called for
|
|||
|
intervention in Mexico. Whether the Pope and the unscrupulous
|
|||
|
Italian branch of the Black International knew in advance of the
|
|||
|
war upon the western democracies we have considered in other
|
|||
|
booklets. As I there said, so objective a review as the Annual
|
|||
|
Record gives it as commonly received information, that Ribbentrop
|
|||
|
told the Pope in April that the Germans would be in Paris in June
|
|||
|
and in London in August. As to the main body of Catholics who
|
|||
|
chanted the anti-Bolshevik slogan, they were probably as hazy about
|
|||
|
what they meant as the average German is about the pure Aryan
|
|||
|
sharing the world with a race of Mongolian-Malayan mongrels.
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
21
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
One of the most ironic features of it all, if there is any
|
|||
|
room for irony in considering the colossal tragedy, is that Russia,
|
|||
|
the irreligion of which is blamed by the Vatican for all the
|
|||
|
world's troubles, is more religious than Great Britain or than
|
|||
|
France was before Vichy.
|
|||
|
The question how many of the people of Russia are still
|
|||
|
religious has been raised innumerable times, and it has invariably
|
|||
|
been answered with all the slovenliness and inconsistency that are
|
|||
|
characteristic of such discussions. Generally the writers spoke of
|
|||
|
"atheistic Russia" as if it were a phenomenally irreligious
|
|||
|
country, but when they recollected that religion was supposed to be
|
|||
|
indestructible or when the plain evidence (which we have seen) that
|
|||
|
there is no persecution of religion and any few dozen men and women
|
|||
|
can get a building from the government for worship was produced the
|
|||
|
writers gave us pictures of crowds packing the churches on
|
|||
|
festivals. As long as there was some dead cat to fling at Russia --
|
|||
|
like the common misrepresentation of the trials, and executions of
|
|||
|
leading Russians for treason -- we were reminded that the governing
|
|||
|
body is solidly atheistic, and when some reputable author testified
|
|||
|
that the social service is the most generous and most humane in the
|
|||
|
world we were told Russia is still far more religious than is
|
|||
|
commonly supposed.
|
|||
|
On one point there is no controversy. The officials, from
|
|||
|
those in the smallest town to Stalin, are all Atheists. The
|
|||
|
Communist party governs Russia -- hence the stupidity of calling
|
|||
|
Stalin a dictator like Hitler and Mussolini -- and all its members
|
|||
|
are Atheists. These officials determine the form and institutions
|
|||
|
of the state. The mass of the people produce the wealth, of course,
|
|||
|
and in that sense create the state, but these atheist officials
|
|||
|
direct the distribution of it and are responsible for all social
|
|||
|
legislation. They have given a form to the state which now elicits
|
|||
|
the admiration of writers of every class. They have lifted the
|
|||
|
average Russian character high above the level at which it was in
|
|||
|
the religious Tsarist days, -- when atheism was confined to a
|
|||
|
relatively small minority, with no influence on the state, in the
|
|||
|
cities. This unquestionable truth is one of the chief reasons why
|
|||
|
the clergy hate or fear it, and why the worst discredited libels of
|
|||
|
it are still in circulation. Russia -- the creative part of Russia
|
|||
|
-- has not merely disproved the common claim that a state decays
|
|||
|
when atheism spreads. It has shown that the reality is the exact
|
|||
|
opposite.
|
|||
|
The question what proportion of the mass of the people are
|
|||
|
still Christians is, therefore, of no importance, but you will find
|
|||
|
it amusing to assure your neighbor whose idea of Russia is taken
|
|||
|
from the press that it is much more religious than Great Britain.
|
|||
|
The Church of England a few year's ago appointed a committee to
|
|||
|
inquire carefully how many people in England go to church or are in
|
|||
|
any definite sense Christians. They reported, and the leaders of
|
|||
|
other Churches agreed: <data type="percent" unit="%">10%</data> in London and <data type="percent" unit="%">20%</data> in the
|
|||
|
rest of England. This -- a total of 8000000 or 9000000 in
|
|||
|
42000000 -- fairly agrees with the statistic's of membership
|
|||
|
annually published by the Churches, and these are always
|
|||
|
optimistic. There is evidence that the Churches put the figure of
|
|||
|
churchgoers too high but let us accept them here. Between three-
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
22
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
fourths and four-fifths of the people of Great Britain are not
|
|||
|
Christians. It was the same in France, and Vichy has made only a
|
|||
|
superficial compulsory change. In America the Churches claim <data type="percent" unit="%">55%</data> of the people, but we know what these claims are worth.
|
|||
|
Allowing for the Bible Belt and the greater wealth and business
|
|||
|
organizations of the Churches in America we should expect a higher
|
|||
|
proportion of churchgoers: say, two-thirds of the total population.
|
|||
|
It follows that Russia is, on the best available estimates, as
|
|||
|
religious as the United States and much more religious than Great
|
|||
|
Britain or France! The best gauge is Yaroslavsky, the able and
|
|||
|
accomplished leader of the Atheist League. He has several times
|
|||
|
estimated that about one-third of the people in the Soviet Union
|
|||
|
are still Christians. The Jesuit Ryder, speaking at the Cambridge
|
|||
|
Summer School of Russian States, said, that this mean's 30000000
|
|||
|
and is a ridiculous under-estimate. It is his jesuitical arithmetic
|
|||
|
that is ridiculous. One-third of the population means nearly
|
|||
|
60000000. But notice what follows. If you call Yaroslavsky's
|
|||
|
estimate too small you must mean that more than a third are still
|
|||
|
Christians, or a far higher proportion than in Great Britain and
|
|||
|
France, and probably America. On any estimate Russia is more
|
|||
|
religious than Great Britain. Now that it is smashing Germany the
|
|||
|
clergy begin to say: We always thought so.
|
|||
|
Maisky, addressing the American Chamber of Commerce in London
|
|||
|
on September 23, 1941, gave some figures which seem at first sight
|
|||
|
to show that Yaroslavsky greatly over-estimated instead of under-
|
|||
|
estimating the number of believer's. He quoted an official
|
|||
|
statement that on June 1, 1941, there were 8338 churches, mosques,
|
|||
|
and synagogues in the Union, and 30000 registered religious
|
|||
|
societies (or, as we should say, parishes) of 20 or more person's.
|
|||
|
But there must be here a serious misprint as to the number of
|
|||
|
churches. Considering that there are about 10000000 Jews and
|
|||
|
Romanists and 14000000 Moslem in the Soviet Union besides members
|
|||
|
of the Orthodox Church the error is apparent. Great Britain has
|
|||
|
more than 40000 churches and chapels to less than 10000000
|
|||
|
churchgoers. America has 200000 religious organizations (organized
|
|||
|
units or parishes) to less than 50000000 church-goers. If the
|
|||
|
figure of 8000 churches, mostly in villages, in Russia were
|
|||
|
correct we should have to allow more than 7000 worshipers to a
|
|||
|
church to make even 60000000. As I have no access to the Soviet
|
|||
|
official announcement (on August 15, 1941) I have to leave the
|
|||
|
matter open, but we may reflect that if the figure of 30000
|
|||
|
parishes is correct it suggests less than 60000000 worshipers.
|
|||
|
We do better to follow the estimate of Yaroslavsky, who has no
|
|||
|
interest in exaggerating the number of churchgoers, and we may
|
|||
|
reflect that the change from the solid orthodoxy of the
|
|||
|
overwhelming mass of the people less than thirty years ago means
|
|||
|
that Atheism spread more rapidly between 1920 and 1940 than any
|
|||
|
religion in history ever spread in 100 years; indeed forty or fifty
|
|||
|
times as rapidly as Christianity spread in the first 250 years of
|
|||
|
its career. We might also invite the attention of some of our
|
|||
|
modern skeptics to the fact that it was mainly effected by pointing
|
|||
|
out the absurdity of the current belief and the monstrous history
|
|||
|
of the Orthodox Black International. Their is no religious revival
|
|||
|
in recent years but there is evidence that suggests that the
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
23
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
extraordinarily rapid progress of Atheism has been slowed. This is
|
|||
|
in part due to the fact that education has won nearly all but the
|
|||
|
hard core of stubborn old folk -- though it is remarkable how
|
|||
|
thousands of villages including nearly all their old folk quit the
|
|||
|
Church and demanded that the chapel be converted into a library or
|
|||
|
debating club -- and in part to the clergy of what calls itself the
|
|||
|
New Church and turns the older Christian teaching inside out. It
|
|||
|
is, however, clear that the discouragement by the government of the
|
|||
|
methods of the Atheist League, which made a very extensive use of
|
|||
|
ridicule and direct satirical attack, has retarded the spread of
|
|||
|
Atheism.
|
|||
|
One would like to draw the attention of those very superior
|
|||
|
Rationalists of our day who say that ridicule of religion "defeats
|
|||
|
its own end" to this phenomenal success of such methods during 10
|
|||
|
or 15 years. The Russian Atheists did not, of course, fail to
|
|||
|
follow up their first direct assault on religious belief with solid
|
|||
|
scientific and historical information. The cultural change in
|
|||
|
Russia is not less remarkable than the economic. The gross general
|
|||
|
ignorance and illiteracy of Tsarist Russia was many shades worse by
|
|||
|
1923, after four years of war and famine. Yet by 1936 the country
|
|||
|
had 164081 schools besides 1797 factory schools, 2572 technical
|
|||
|
schools, 716 workers colleges, 595 higher schools and universities,
|
|||
|
and 794 institutions for scientific research. More than 10000
|
|||
|
newspapers and 2100 magazines (700000000 copies) circulated. In
|
|||
|
1935 the output of books was 42700 and the 53380 free libraries,
|
|||
|
largely in villages, contained more than 100000000 books. Upon
|
|||
|
this vast and finely selected literature the Atheist propagandist
|
|||
|
drew, and he was welcomed in the 71770 clubs (57700 in the
|
|||
|
villages) where the favorite entertainment was a serious debate. As
|
|||
|
the government adheres to its law that religious doctrines shall
|
|||
|
not be taught to children, who must be left to consider religion
|
|||
|
when they have at least a moderate capacity to see through fallacy
|
|||
|
and resent mere dogmatism, the young generation has for the far
|
|||
|
greater part definitely abandoned religion. A very short account of
|
|||
|
the cultural as well as economic development will be found in my
|
|||
|
booklet Economic Gains of the Soviet Union (1937) in the A B C
|
|||
|
Library of Living Knowledge.
|
|||
|
This is what the Pope calls destroying the very foundation's
|
|||
|
of the social order: this is one line of the real program of
|
|||
|
national life which our press until Russia became our ally
|
|||
|
habitually coupled with the gross greed-programs of Germany, Italy,
|
|||
|
and Japan as "the four totalitarian powers." Russia never received
|
|||
|
and never sought to gain a single rouble by the labor of the people
|
|||
|
outside its own Soviet Union, but there were few papers in the
|
|||
|
world which, until we so urgently needed its help, did not class it
|
|||
|
with the three powers which openly boasted they were going to
|
|||
|
dominate and exploit most of the earth. Russia gave better
|
|||
|
conditions to women (see Prof. Susan W. Kingsbury and Prof Mildred
|
|||
|
Fairchild's Factory, Family, and Women in the Soviet Union, 1935)
|
|||
|
than any other nation, while Germany and Italy, and the Pope's new
|
|||
|
subjects states told woman to sacrifice all their hard-won rights
|
|||
|
and confine themselves to cooking and bearing future soldiers.
|
|||
|
Russia gave more sympathetic conditions to children (see Playtime
|
|||
|
in Russia by Ethel Manning and others, 1935) than any other
|
|||
|
country, allowing no distinction of class, giving all a two-month
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
24
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
vacation with entertainments or tours provided every summer, and
|
|||
|
providing special theaters (three in Moscow) and parks (26 in
|
|||
|
Moscow) for them; while Germany and Italy brutalized their lives
|
|||
|
and minds with militarism. Russia encouraged the mass of the
|
|||
|
workers to enjoy art as no other country did, while in Germany and
|
|||
|
Italy art was starved and all culture debased.
|
|||
|
This was the civilization which the Pope taught the Catholics
|
|||
|
of the world to curse and demand war against, and the more it shed
|
|||
|
the imperfections due to its recent rise from chaos, the more it
|
|||
|
won recognition for its splendid social ideals, the more bitterly
|
|||
|
he attacked it, and the more stridently the Black International
|
|||
|
broadcast his sentiments in every land. Is the complete collapse of
|
|||
|
his Church in Russia enough to explain this? Is his failure to get
|
|||
|
the billions of dollars and millions of members of the Orthodox
|
|||
|
Church, the explanation? No, he hates Russia because it was showing
|
|||
|
the world that you could not merely build a civilization without
|
|||
|
priests but you could build a far finer, juster, more peaceful and
|
|||
|
more humane civilization. He hate's Russia because from it there
|
|||
|
spread, as far as China and Indo-China in the east and as far as
|
|||
|
Peru and Chile in the west, that formidable Wave of Atheism which
|
|||
|
I described in the second booklet of this series: because it was in
|
|||
|
Roman Catholic countries particularly that it was effective since
|
|||
|
Papal doctrine and history were as vulnerable as those of Orthodox
|
|||
|
Russia.
|
|||
|
Some may say that a churchman, if his creed is sincere and
|
|||
|
deeply felt, is bound to regard a spread of Atheism as a great evil
|
|||
|
and may be understood even when he thinks war to prevent the spread
|
|||
|
a lesser evil. There is no need for a profane person like myself to
|
|||
|
discuss that question or to try to determine whether the Pope
|
|||
|
really believes (as half the clergy do not) and deeply feels the
|
|||
|
peculiar teaching of his Church about man and his destiny. We ask
|
|||
|
a simple question: Why didn't he say so? Why need he give as the
|
|||
|
pretext for his demand of war upon Russia every lie about Bolshevik
|
|||
|
atrocities and persecution of religion that was current in
|
|||
|
capitalist literature? Why did he assure the millions of ignorant
|
|||
|
Catholics whom he wanted to inflame that the Bolsheviks were out to
|
|||
|
destroy the moral and social order, to advocate cruelty and
|
|||
|
violence, when it was easy for any man, to say nothing of a
|
|||
|
billion-dollar international organization, to find out that Russia,
|
|||
|
with its magnificent and complete resources, had no more reason for
|
|||
|
war than the United States and was building a far finer social
|
|||
|
order than that of the United States? And remember that we are not
|
|||
|
here dealing with the Pope alone. We are considering the action of
|
|||
|
a world-wide Black International that is saturated with skepticism
|
|||
|
and hypocrisy and keener on dollars than harps.
|
|||
|
That is answer enough for most people but (we may go further.
|
|||
|
We moderns -- by which I mean the majority of the men and women who
|
|||
|
live in the cities of the world and have shed the limitations of
|
|||
|
village-life -- will not have our affairs ruled or dictated by men,
|
|||
|
however sincere they may be, who act on the myth that there is
|
|||
|
another world that is far more important to men than this in which
|
|||
|
we find ourselves. Whatever be the truth about religion this life
|
|||
|
and the control of this life are secularized, We turn aside from
|
|||
|
nothing fair and pleasant that it offers us because some of our
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
25
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
less-instructed neighbors think they see flames of hell reflected
|
|||
|
from below the horizon or discern ghostly battlements of some weird
|
|||
|
sort of heaven high above. And the clergy so far know this that
|
|||
|
they plead that Atheism injures us in this life. We are always open
|
|||
|
to argument but we resent lies. The clerical case for hatred of
|
|||
|
Russia on human grounds is based upon a mass of demonstrable lies.
|
|||
|
Its real basis is, as ever, the primary aim of the Black
|
|||
|
International: wealth and power.
|
|||
|
Chapter IV
|
|||
|
HITLER'S MAGNIFICENT BLUNDER
|
|||
|
In September 1934 it was proposed to admit Soviet Russia to
|
|||
|
the League of Nations. Nazi Germany, with Mein Kampf (the brigand's
|
|||
|
guide) for its standard, had been retained in it. Japan had not
|
|||
|
been expelled for its sordid violation of the League's principles.
|
|||
|
Italy was an honored member although it made no secret of its
|
|||
|
glorification of war and aggression. But the proposal to admit
|
|||
|
Russia horrified and brought a shower of insults from the
|
|||
|
representatives of various nations; and these outraged folk were
|
|||
|
subjects of the Pope, and the Vatican warmly approved their
|
|||
|
conduct.
|
|||
|
The attack on Russia was led by the Swiss Motta, a
|
|||
|
representative of the nation that has always been loudest in praise
|
|||
|
of peace -- which is very profitable at Geneva -- and is now making
|
|||
|
much wealth by manufacturing the more delicate mechanisms of German
|
|||
|
planes, tanks, and submarines and selling food to Germany while its
|
|||
|
neighbors starve. At that time, perhaps, not even a member of the
|
|||
|
middle-class that rules or misrules the Swiss would have made this
|
|||
|
disgraceful attack on a progressive and peace-loving civilization
|
|||
|
that could have taught Switzerland a higher idealism but Motta,
|
|||
|
from the small Italian part of the country, was a zealous Catholic;
|
|||
|
and that he acted for the Church is shown by the Vatican comment on
|
|||
|
his vituperative speech in the Osservatore Romano (quoted with
|
|||
|
approval in the British Catholic Universe, October 5, 1934):
|
|||
|
"Mr. Motta faced the problem of the admission of Russia with
|
|||
|
a clarity of vision, a nobility of sentiment, and a rectitude of
|
|||
|
Christian and civil conscience that finds a profound echo in the
|
|||
|
hearts of all, for whom justice and right are still the unshakable
|
|||
|
bases of civil society."
|
|||
|
Nobility of sentiment! The man was striking the first note of
|
|||
|
that Hymn of Hate which the Vatican would soon urge upon Catholics
|
|||
|
everywhere; the stupid chant that was to prevent, or help to
|
|||
|
prevent, a cordial world-alliance against the bandits when the
|
|||
|
crisis came, the chant that was pleasant music in the ears of
|
|||
|
Hitler, Mussolini, and Matsuoka. The Vatican organ rejoiced that
|
|||
|
ten states at Geneva opposed the admission of Russia or pointedly
|
|||
|
abstained from voting for it, and we see Catholic influence in the
|
|||
|
whole group. Holland voted against, and the press recorded that
|
|||
|
this was due to Catholic influence in the cabinet. De Valera's
|
|||
|
representative and Schuschnigg of Austria attacked Russia as
|
|||
|
virulently as Motta but did not vote.
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
26
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
Two months before this Nazi Germany had shocked the world with
|
|||
|
the mass-murder of prominent men, including Catholics, which is
|
|||
|
called the Blood Purge. Did any Catholic orator or power, or the
|
|||
|
Vatican, call it to account at the tribunal of civilization? Oh,
|
|||
|
no; just then the Vatican was trying hard to persuade Hitler to
|
|||
|
observe the Concordat and Catholic German bishops were flattering
|
|||
|
him to his teeth. Two months after the Geneva meeting Japan,
|
|||
|
probably encouraged by this outburst, threatened Russia, and there
|
|||
|
was talk of war. What did Catholics say to that? Here is a
|
|||
|
specimen, from the Catholic Times, November 3, 1934:
|
|||
|
"The Japanese are not anti-God. They have brought freedom from
|
|||
|
persecution to our missionaries in Manchuria and adjacent parts of
|
|||
|
China. They have consented to their settlers in Brazil being
|
|||
|
instructed in the Catholic faith, and, while they dream of
|
|||
|
influencing the world by the spread of Buddhism, they give freedom
|
|||
|
of worship to their own Catholic nationals. In the event of a war
|
|||
|
between Japan and Russia Catholics would sympathize with Japan, at
|
|||
|
least in so far as religion is concerned, so let us beware of an
|
|||
|
Anglo-American bloc against Japan involving us on the side of
|
|||
|
Russia."
|
|||
|
There you have the pure Papal note, the accents of the Vatican
|
|||
|
oracle Japan is "not anti-God" -- as a matter of fact, its ruling
|
|||
|
class is almost as solidly Atheistic as the Russian -- while Russia
|
|||
|
is, and Japan has made small concession's in the interest of the
|
|||
|
Roman Church. So defend Japan and libel Russia in the Catholic
|
|||
|
press of all lands. In that very year, 1934, Upton Close (J.W.
|
|||
|
Hall) plainly exposed to America in his Challenge, with full
|
|||
|
documentary evidence, that Japan was conquest-mad and had removed
|
|||
|
the last shred of disguise from its greedy plan to monopolize
|
|||
|
Eastern Asia and drive out all Christians, particularly Americans.
|
|||
|
And because it hypocritically made promises to the Pope, Catholics
|
|||
|
must be used as its agents in Britain and America to obscure the
|
|||
|
mind of those countries in regard to its aims and divert them into
|
|||
|
hatred of Russia.
|
|||
|
A few months later the same Catholic press went further in its
|
|||
|
deadly work (Catholic Times, April, 1935):
|
|||
|
"Disarmament is dead . . . We can, nevertheless, have thirty
|
|||
|
years' peace in Western Europe if France, Germany, Italy, and Great
|
|||
|
Britain concentrate on Western Europe and its needs. We cannot have
|
|||
|
agreement about Russia, since Germany has lifted the veil which
|
|||
|
hides her ambitions. She wants the Ukraine. Few Catholics in this
|
|||
|
country will approve a war against Russia, bad as her record is,
|
|||
|
but fewer still will be happy if our alliances draw us into a war
|
|||
|
in defense of the Godless. Russia must safeguard her own interests.
|
|||
|
We are not concerned to uphold her. The wretched Franco-German
|
|||
|
quarrel can be composed if France is willing to leave Russia to her
|
|||
|
devices. If France insists on allying herself with the Soviet, she
|
|||
|
should be told that Great Britain will have no part with her ... We
|
|||
|
must choose between two evils, and Russia's possible loss of the
|
|||
|
Ukraine is a much less evil than war-fires all over Europe, whilst
|
|||
|
many would say that the undoing of Godless Sovietism is no evil at
|
|||
|
all."
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
27
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
As the British National Newspaper Library, the finest in
|
|||
|
Europe, has been bombed and burned out of existence by the Germans,
|
|||
|
I cannot verify the three quotations I have just given. I take them
|
|||
|
from Miss E. Moore's No Friend of Democracy (1941) and I know the
|
|||
|
author as a very careful and conscientious student of these
|
|||
|
matters.
|
|||
|
This passage is a typical specimen of the slavery of the
|
|||
|
Catholic press to the Vatican and its Policy of judging all
|
|||
|
international events from the single viewpoint of the interest of
|
|||
|
the Church while professing to consult the interest of the race.
|
|||
|
The statement that few Catholic will approve of war against Russia
|
|||
|
might seem to be written in defiance of the Pope's demand for a
|
|||
|
crusade against that country, but the paper itself repeatedly
|
|||
|
echoed the cry for "the extinction of Bolshevism," and the last
|
|||
|
words of the above passage are plain enough. Not "many" but all
|
|||
|
Catholics, as the writer knew, would rejoice at "the undoing of
|
|||
|
Godless Sovietism." Notice, incidentally how carefully these
|
|||
|
Catholic writers avoid the word Socialism. They know that large
|
|||
|
numbers of Irish workers in Britain -- these workers of Irish birth
|
|||
|
or descent are the main body of "English" Romanism -- belong to the
|
|||
|
Labor Party, and this in rare moments of courage calls itself
|
|||
|
Socialist.
|
|||
|
But the chief point is that this interpreter of Papal wishes
|
|||
|
to the people of England emphatically advocates a national policy
|
|||
|
which would be very acceptable to Hitler and was, in so far as it
|
|||
|
was followed by Chamberlain and Halifax, most disastrous to Europe.
|
|||
|
Russia was the one great European power that sincerely proposed
|
|||
|
general disarmament. When its appeal was unheeded it was the one
|
|||
|
power that began to devote a colossal part of its national
|
|||
|
resources, which were very badly needed for social reconstruction
|
|||
|
and education, to preparation for war. Thus in 1936, when British
|
|||
|
statesmen were beginning to doubt the Baldwin policy of do-nothing,
|
|||
|
Great Britain spent less than a fourth of its budget-revenue on
|
|||
|
armaments and the United States one-tenth. But Soviet Russia set
|
|||
|
aside one-fifth (20000000000 out of 100000000000 rubles) of its total
|
|||
|
annual income -- for in that country the government-revenue
|
|||
|
represents practically the whole of the wealth produced -- to
|
|||
|
defense-measures, and it increased the sum every year until nearly
|
|||
|
a third of the entire wealth produced in the country was devoted to
|
|||
|
preparing for the barbarous and clearly-foreseen onslaught of
|
|||
|
Nazism.
|
|||
|
What an ally Russia would have been from 1936 onward, and what
|
|||
|
a different course of events in Europe might have followed! It must
|
|||
|
be left to the historians of the future to say if a sincere and
|
|||
|
dynamic alliance of Russia, Britain, France Czecho-Slovakia, and
|
|||
|
Poland would not have intimidated Germany and Italy from that
|
|||
|
piecemeal aggressive program upon which they entered. To me it
|
|||
|
seems certain. But the Vatican and the Black International and the
|
|||
|
Catholic press in every country did all in their power to prevent
|
|||
|
it. Had the United States realized that Japan was one of the bandit
|
|||
|
powers -- had the press freely and fully informed the people of the
|
|||
|
open boast of Japanese politicians, military and naval men, and
|
|||
|
editors, and told how highly colored models of the destruction of
|
|||
|
the American fleet were exhibited to the public in Japanese cities
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
28
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
five or six years ago -- and joined the alliance, not in the
|
|||
|
interest of Europe but its own interest, it probably never would
|
|||
|
have known the vile treachery it has now experienced, for the
|
|||
|
people themselves would have demanded adequate armament. But the
|
|||
|
Vatican, the whole Roman Church, was opposed. There must be no
|
|||
|
alliance with Bolshevism.
|
|||
|
Could there be a more terrible demonstration of the evil of
|
|||
|
the sacerdotal viewpoint, the folly of listening to the Black
|
|||
|
International on human affairs? At that time, 1936, the leading
|
|||
|
powers were stirring from their criminal lethargy and beginning to
|
|||
|
expand their armament-budgets. The League of Nations published a
|
|||
|
statement that the world spent about $5000000006 in that year on
|
|||
|
armament, I have shown (What War and Militarism Cost) that it spent
|
|||
|
something like $15000000000 and one-third of this sum was,
|
|||
|
according to the best experts, spent by Germany. What Japan and
|
|||
|
Italy spent we do not know. No one trusts their figures. And the
|
|||
|
two richest powers in the world, the two at which the great
|
|||
|
conspiracy was chiefly aimed, America and Britain, spent (together)
|
|||
|
one half the sum that Germany did. Russia alone spent something
|
|||
|
like the sum that Germany did, though unlike Germany and Italy, it
|
|||
|
did not starve or suppress its social services to find the money
|
|||
|
but maintained and developed them.
|
|||
|
What guidance did the Papacy and its local agents give the
|
|||
|
world? It bleated biennially about peace and between Christmas and
|
|||
|
Easter cried for war on Communism in China, Spain, Mexico, and
|
|||
|
Russia, above all Russia. It maintained its diplomatic alliance
|
|||
|
with Germany, Italy, and Japan but spat poison whenever Russia was
|
|||
|
mentioned. Its hierarchy flattered the ruler's of the three
|
|||
|
aggressive, fully treacherous, and debauched bandit-states and told
|
|||
|
the British and French people that they would have "thirty years
|
|||
|
peace" if they would continue to outlaw Russia and trust Germany,
|
|||
|
Italy, and Japan! What hilarious scenes there must have been behind
|
|||
|
closed doors in Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo!
|
|||
|
Russia patiently, perhaps cynically, bore the hostility which
|
|||
|
the Catholic Church and other interests fostered against it. It is
|
|||
|
needless for me to observe that the Vatican was not the only
|
|||
|
libellous enemy of Russia, but its share in the conspiracy is, on
|
|||
|
account of its claim of lofty and disinterested idealism, in an
|
|||
|
entirely different category from the share of bankers,
|
|||
|
industrialists, and politicians. I am, however, not concerned with
|
|||
|
finding adjectives to hurl at the Church of Rome. I am content to
|
|||
|
establish facts. And if it is not a fact that Rome contributed
|
|||
|
mightily until 1941 to that contempt and ostracism of Russia which
|
|||
|
rendered vast service to the Axis and did incalculable harm to the
|
|||
|
race we may as well doubt that the earth is a globe.
|
|||
|
So persistent and emphatic was this teaching of the Vatican,
|
|||
|
especially during the fateful six or seven years before 1941, that
|
|||
|
the Catholic world was paralyzed when at length Hitler made his
|
|||
|
splendid blunder and attacked Russia. Less than a year earlier the
|
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|
Papal Hymn of Hate had been more strident than ever. There were
|
|||
|
many of us who, imperfectly informed by the press, felt our
|
|||
|
admiration of Russia chilled when it seized part of Finland and the
|
|||
|
little Baltic states. But we did not use the vituperative language
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
29
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
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|
of the Pope's organ, the Osservatore Romano, the paper that had not
|
|||
|
said a word about outrages like those in China, Abyssinia, Albania,
|
|||
|
Czecho-Slovakia, Norway, Denmark, Yugo-Slavia, Greece, and, even
|
|||
|
Belgium and France, for which even a liar could not plead, as we
|
|||
|
now see Russia could truthfully plead, an essential piece of
|
|||
|
defense against an openly-declared aggressor. The Vatican, in its
|
|||
|
paper, not only completely ignored Russia's reasons but wallowed in
|
|||
|
irony and invective as if this were the first aggression in modern
|
|||
|
Europe.
|
|||
|
There is an amusing Paragraph in Stephen Graham's News Letter
|
|||
|
(1940) reproducing the language of the Osservatore when the Russian
|
|||
|
troops took back the Ukrainian and White Russian provinces. The
|
|||
|
Papal organ shuddered to recall the atrocities committed by the
|
|||
|
Russian troops in 1918. The soldiers were then Orthodox Catholics
|
|||
|
almost to a man, and the Osservatore trembles to think what will
|
|||
|
happen now that they are Atheists. And in the next paragraph
|
|||
|
Stephen Graham, a strict member of the Church of England, gives
|
|||
|
this report of an Englishman who Saw the Russian troops enter
|
|||
|
Asthenia:
|
|||
|
"The fears proved to be groundless. The discipline is
|
|||
|
extremely severe, and cases are known when soldiers were shot by
|
|||
|
the political commissars for the slightest breach of discipline."
|
|||
|
The religious mind is weird and wonderful. Stephen Graham
|
|||
|
actually goes on to reflect that this contrast of 1918 and 1940
|
|||
|
suggests that "the atheist soldiers of 1918" were now extinct and
|
|||
|
the Russians were generally Christians! Not for a moment do I
|
|||
|
suggest that atheist soldiers never commit outrages, but what are
|
|||
|
we to think of a Papal newspaper that sheds tears over the
|
|||
|
fictitious outrage's of atheist soldiers -- I earlier quoted the
|
|||
|
Vatican radio (January 22, 1940) bemoaning the "infamy of all
|
|||
|
kinds" perpetrated by the Russian troops in Poland and has not a
|
|||
|
word to say when we get positive Proof that the German soldiers
|
|||
|
perpetrated real infamies and savagery in Russia?
|
|||
|
Here again it is not a question of the Pope or the Vatican
|
|||
|
alone. The Black International everywhere repeated the cry of
|
|||
|
Russian atrocities (made in Germany). In an address by Cardinal
|
|||
|
Hinsely published recently in a work titled The Bond of Peace we
|
|||
|
read of his "deep indignation" at "the enslavement of more than
|
|||
|
eleven million inhabitants of the Polish state by Soviet Russia."
|
|||
|
He talks of a "treacherous attack from behind" and the "Bolshevist
|
|||
|
horror," and says that these "Poles," as he calls them, are
|
|||
|
"reliably reported to be suffering from those persecutions which
|
|||
|
had made our generation the era of unparalleled martyrdom." Perhaps
|
|||
|
we should not expect a cardinal, even if he does pose as an oracle
|
|||
|
on world-affairs, to know that Ukrainians and White Russians are
|
|||
|
not Poles, but is he really ignorant that the "unparalleled
|
|||
|
martyrdom" that these millions, of members of the Orthodox Church
|
|||
|
suffered was inflicted by the Catholic Poles, had been going on for
|
|||
|
20 years, and was at once stopped by the Russians?
|
|||
|
Now, as I have earlier quoted, there are signs of a most
|
|||
|
brazen repudiation of the Hymn of Hate which the Papacy has had the
|
|||
|
Catholic world chant from Montreal to Syria for the last six or
|
|||
|
seven years. Catholics boast that they are in a better position
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
30
|
|||
|
ATHEIST RUSSIA SHAKES THE WORLD
|
|||
|
than Protestants in that they have one clear authoritative,
|
|||
|
unwavering voice to guide them. It sounds like a dictatorship of
|
|||
|
the Hitler sort. The truth is, however, that Rome speaks to them in
|
|||
|
five or six different voices, and one can blandly repudiate the
|
|||
|
other when it goes wrong. The only thing which they cannot
|
|||
|
repudiate is the infallible or ex cathedra utterances of the Pope
|
|||
|
-- but he never makes any. The Pope has several voices -- in
|
|||
|
conversations, addresses, sermons, allocations, encyclicals, etc.
|
|||
|
Then he has, in the second line a daily paper and a radio. In the
|
|||
|
third line he has prelates and Catholic ambassadors, agents, etc.,
|
|||
|
who can repeat conversations with him. On this third line we now
|
|||
|
have Myron C. Taylor whispering that the Pope always recognized in
|
|||
|
private a vast distinction between the naughtiness of the Nazis and
|
|||
|
that of the Bolsheviks. Nazi wickedness is foul and unspeakable --
|
|||
|
though he never cared to say so. Bolshevik wickedness is just
|
|||
|
virtue without a Catholic foundation -- though he has a hundred
|
|||
|
times called it foul and unspeakable.
|
|||
|
The latest audacity attributed to Mr. Taylor, solemnly cabled
|
|||
|
to a London daily by its American correspondent, is this gem:
|
|||
|
"The general belief here is that important Washington-Vatican-
|
|||
|
London-Moscow negotiations are in progress and that they are
|
|||
|
directed towards the consolidation of the Christian front against
|
|||
|
Nazism throughout the world."
|
|||
|
If we allow the Church of Rome to put over a maneuver of that
|
|||
|
kind after its ten years of monstrous libel and vituperation of
|
|||
|
Russia we have learned nothing by the terrible experience through
|
|||
|
which we are passing. The Papacy could not hope to have any success
|
|||
|
with it if it did not believe that we still have, unchanged, the
|
|||
|
mentality with which we indolently contemplated the greediest and
|
|||
|
most unscrupulous bandits of all time equipping themselves to loot
|
|||
|
the world. There is no change in Russia. It is as atheistic as
|
|||
|
ever. The change is in its critics. They have been compelled to
|
|||
|
acknowledge that out of the horrible miseducated Tsarist Russia,
|
|||
|
further demoralized by six years of war and two of terrible famine
|
|||
|
and disease, the "Godless Bolsheviks," as the Catholic press still
|
|||
|
called them only six month's ago, have created the greatest
|
|||
|
civilization of our time; that the magnificent spirit of the
|
|||
|
atheistic Russian people is in as stark a contrast as is
|
|||
|
conceivable to the cowardice, evasiveness, tortuousness, and self-
|
|||
|
seeking of the Black International that poisoned the world against
|
|||
|
them.
|
|||
|
<div> <div>
|
|||
|
Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
|
|||
|
<div> <div>
|
|||
|
The Bank of Wisdom is always looking for more of these old,
|
|||
|
hidden, suppressed and forgotten books that contain needed facts
|
|||
|
and information for today. If you have such books please contact
|
|||
|
us, we need to give them back to America.
|
|||
|
<div> <div>
|
|||
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|||
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|||
|
31
|
|||
|
</conspiracyFile>
|