I recently found and read three great book reviews related to 20th Century Communism. I thought I would share them. I don't really have to make much of a comment on them right now, as they can certainly speak for themselves.
However, there is one quote in particular from the second review that stands out to me in light of the "religion causes war" line used by so many people nowadays:
"In a dense analysis of how violent terror became a way of life under Lenin and Stalin, Courtois concludes that "the real motivation for the terror ultimately was Leninist ideology, and the perfectly utopian will to impose a doctrine that was completely at odds with reality." This totalizing ideology, Courtois argues, generated murderous intolerance toward all those who were perceived as obstacles to the new regime: "Terror involves a double sort of mutation. The adversary is first labeled an enemy, then a criminal, and is excluded from society. Exclusion very quickly turns into the idea of extermination." That basic outlook, he writes, has been present, "with differing degrees of intensity, in all regimes that claim to be Marxist in origin.""
Why is this significant?
A couple of reasons:
1) Political ideology is inherently anti-religious (anti-Christian specifically in this case since Communism is a Western-originated idea), and it is also very often murderous, sometimes even inherently murderous as in the case of Communism
2) A person governed by religious beliefs could never embrace a political ideology (such as Soviet Communism)
3) When a political ideology is accepted, religious restraints in the minds and consciences of leaders on how power may be abused are eliminated
So when someone points at the French wars of religion in the 17th century or Islamic suicide bombers and says "see, that proves religion is uniquely responsible for war", they are not only cherry-picking just a couple of bad events in human history, they are also ignoring all the times when religion restrained people from war or all the times that absence of religion made war/evil much worse than it would have been otherwise. Lenin would not have perpetrated his horrendous, beyond-evil crimes if he had any religious conscience whatsoever.
Here are the book reviews. They are pretty short. I am interested to hear what everyone has to say about them:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/asreview.htm
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/lelivrenoir.htm
http://www.stanford.edu/group/sreview/Archive/XXIVno1/books.html
However, there is one quote in particular from the second review that stands out to me in light of the "religion causes war" line used by so many people nowadays:
"In a dense analysis of how violent terror became a way of life under Lenin and Stalin, Courtois concludes that "the real motivation for the terror ultimately was Leninist ideology, and the perfectly utopian will to impose a doctrine that was completely at odds with reality." This totalizing ideology, Courtois argues, generated murderous intolerance toward all those who were perceived as obstacles to the new regime: "Terror involves a double sort of mutation. The adversary is first labeled an enemy, then a criminal, and is excluded from society. Exclusion very quickly turns into the idea of extermination." That basic outlook, he writes, has been present, "with differing degrees of intensity, in all regimes that claim to be Marxist in origin.""
Why is this significant?
A couple of reasons:
1) Political ideology is inherently anti-religious (anti-Christian specifically in this case since Communism is a Western-originated idea), and it is also very often murderous, sometimes even inherently murderous as in the case of Communism
2) A person governed by religious beliefs could never embrace a political ideology (such as Soviet Communism)
3) When a political ideology is accepted, religious restraints in the minds and consciences of leaders on how power may be abused are eliminated
So when someone points at the French wars of religion in the 17th century or Islamic suicide bombers and says "see, that proves religion is uniquely responsible for war", they are not only cherry-picking just a couple of bad events in human history, they are also ignoring all the times when religion restrained people from war or all the times that absence of religion made war/evil much worse than it would have been otherwise. Lenin would not have perpetrated his horrendous, beyond-evil crimes if he had any religious conscience whatsoever.
Here are the book reviews. They are pretty short. I am interested to hear what everyone has to say about them:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/asreview.htm
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/lelivrenoir.htm
http://www.stanford.edu/group/sreview/Archive/XXIVno1/books.html
. The point was music , or religion inspired music is some of the best in the world. Way too many to cite here...
