Communism’s war on Christianity and Islam
By Daniel Kalder, UnHerd:
The Soviet Union’s long campaign against religion anticipated Dawkins and Hitchens.
The anti-religion campaigns of Richard Dawkins and co. seem like a modern phenomenon, very much a 21st century internet sort-of thing. But, like pretty much every social trend, it’s all been done before, with the same arguments and counter-arguments regurgitated, and on numerous occasions.
The most vicious and sustained of these campaigns began around a century ago, part of a huge social experiment in state atheism that is largely forgotten or ignored. Although I know that the people who create our curriculums would prefer to skip over the complete failure of the utopian regimes that cast such a long shadow over the 20th century (the body count was only 100 million or so, and it was so long ago after all) I confess I am always a little taken aback whenever I discover how little otherwise well-educated people know about that grand experiment in human misery.
In fact, for generations on the left, God was generally viewed as an obstacle to progress, and religious faith a superstition to be liberated from — Marx’s “opium of the people” and all that. Recently, however, I was chatting with a smart young man who described himself as a socialist, and he had no idea that the USSR had repressed religion throughout its existence. But then, he was under 40, couldn’t remember the Cold War, and his generation’s Left has grown exquisitely sensitive to religion (or at least the most intolerant forms of one religion in particular).
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