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If you have been reading the excerpts from the late Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand‘s Marx and Satan, I hope that you have found it useful. The book is available online for free at Scribd.
Its content both shocked and amazed.
In an age when we are told that Marxism and the Gospel go hand-in-hand, this book may come as a surprise.
I started learning a lot of left-wing ideas at (Catholic) school from ages 9 – 21 back in the 1960s and 1970s, reinforced by mass-media. It’s not just state schools that teach them. Any church-affiliated school could (and probably is) teach these concepts, therefore, it is important that this book serve as an antidote to whatever our young people are absorbing today. Whether you decide to study this short book together as a family or, even better, use it as a series for a church youth group, I offer below the salient points it offers chapter by chapter. Pastor Wurmbrand asked us to share this knowledge, expanding on it if possible, and to ensure that our families and friends understood that we can choose Christianity or Marxism, but not both.
Wurmbrand introduces the book by saying that he has found clear indications linking Karl Marx with Satanism.
Marxist regimes have controlled over one-third of mankind and remains a fact of life for all of us, even if we live in the free world and support conservative politics.
The Communists have read — and condemned — this book. It has been translated into several languages and was widely circulated in the former Eastern Bloc countries.
Marx and Satan explains the roots of this political philosophy and why every believing Christian should resist it.
This book brings out aspects of Marxism previously unknown to many believers. Wurmbrand explains that very few of Marx’s writings have actually been published. Many are hidden from view. From his research, he could only deduce that they are purposely concealed in order not to reveal their true content — no doubt demonic.
Pastor Wurmbrand was imprisoned and tortured by communists over the course of 14 years from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Eventually, he made his way to the United States (read more about his life story).
Today, a number of clergy believe that Marxism is about fairness and equality, emanating from Karl Marx’s love of mankind. They not only think but preach that communism is a fulfilment of Jesus Christ’s teachings.
Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Marx — who scored highly in religious studies classes at school — turned from Christ as a young man. He came to hate Christianity, God and his fellow man. He wrote that people were ‘human trash’. He often used the word ‘destroy’, which became his nickname in early adulthood.
We do not know why Marx turned against God or what the catalyst was. He came from comfortable surroundings and a God-fearing family.
After finishing school, he began writing plays and poems. These featured verses to Satan and used a number of verbal inversions, often used in satanic speech. He called his own writings ‘sh-t’ and ‘swinish’. In one of his plays, he condemns humanity to destruction.
In his personal life, he fell into debt and quarrelled with his father over finances. Marx’s friends and associates describe him unflatteringly.
When Marx began writing (see Chapter 1) he was only 18. None of what he wrote was about making mankind equal around the world. Nor did he write about improving fairness or the human condition. He merely wanted to destroy the world and preside over it.
When he found he could not make a living from his writing, he abandoned the creative side of it, as did Hitler as a young man. Both turned to political or philosophical subject matter with a dose of satanism. Even then, for Marx, ridding the world of religion was his principal goal. Even once he embraced socialism (see last paragraph in this section), it was but a veneer for atheism, a useful means of luring people to his cause.
With no God, Marx said, there would be no (need for) morals. He continues to use the inverted — satanic — verbiage he used in his poems and plays.
Most of Marx’s familial relationships (these I did not excerpt) were strained or unhappy. He seemed to be closest to his daughter Eleanor.
As to his appearance, which to us looks typical of the 19th century, most men of his time had groomed hair and trimmed beards. Marx would have stood out in a crowd.
He continued making friends with others who shared his tastes for atheism, a love of Satan and a desire to overthrow the world. One of these was a Frenchman, possibly the first person to refer to himself as an anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. They shared a mutual friend, Moses Hess, who was instrumental in teaching Marx about socialism and getting him to embrace it.
Marx meets Friedrich Engels, who, interestingly, shared a number of things in common with him. Engels was also brought up in a comfortable Christian household and wrote religious poetry.
Unlike Marx, however, Engels had a clear reason for departing from Christianity. Then, he read a book by a liberal theologian of the time, Bruno Bauer, who preached atheism, saying that Jesus was not the Son of God, just a man. Bauer clearly realised he blasphemed not only in print but from the pulpit. He wrote in 1841 that he believed himself to be demon-possessed.
Afterward, Engels made Moses Hess’s acquaintance (see last paragraph of the preceding section) and parted from his company a communist. Hess was delighted to have made another convert. Engels then wrote of a ‘devilish spirit’ which had been permeating the world since the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century.
Meanwhile, Marx — who had been brought up as a Lutheran — turned his attention to the Jewish people. (His father had converted from Judaism to Christianity. This was not unusual in that part of Europe. It meant less persecution and better employment prospects.) Marx wrote an anti-Semitic tome, The Jewish Question, in 1856. However, he came out strongly in favour of Jews in other publications.
This next paragraph is extremely important for anyone who fancies Marxism as a panacea for our global ills. As for virtually all nationalities and groups, Marx hated them, too. He loathed most countries and peoples. And he did not like blacks, not hesitating to use the ‘N’ word in print. He hoped certain nations and peoples would be destroyed in his great revolution.
Engels’s writings also tied in with Marx’s, encouraging violence as a means to the revolutionary ends. Neither of them liked the proletariat.
When Marx died, one of his servants explained to a devotee in the US Navy that Marx used phylacteries and had lit candles. She, therefore, assumed that he was devout and prayerful, however only Jewish men use phylacteries. Furthermore, they do not use candles. Marx might have been worshipping Satan or his statue of Zeus in his room.
Zeus, by the way, is the only deity represented in the UN building in New York.
Marx once addressed his son as ‘my dear devil’ in correspondence. Marx’s wife referred to him as a high priest and bishop. Marx lived near several prominent Christians, yet their paths never once crossed.
Marx, Wurmbrand wrote, died ‘in despair’. Not unusual for someone who has not believed in Christ.
As for later communists, Leon Trotsky related that, at the age of 16, Vladimir Lenin tore a cross from around his neck, spat on it and stamped on it. This is common in satanic circles.
Whilst in power, Lenin lamented that the Soviet state was not moving in the way he desired. In 1921, he wrote that he hoped that he and his fellow travellers would be hanged ‘from a stinking rope’. On his deathbed, he was haunted by the blood of his many victims. He said that only ‘ten men like Francis of Assisi’ could have saved Russia.
So much for the communist dream.
Chapter 5 – A Cruel Counterfeit
As a child, Bukharin, who was one of the 20th century’s main Marxist doctrinaires, dreamt of being the Antichrist and tried to co-opt his mother into his ambition. He later wrote that Joseph Stalin was ‘a devil’.
Stalin’s brother-in-law wrote that the iconic Soviet leader was devoid of humanity. Many of Stalin’s state colleagues termed him demonic.
Stalin believed that believing parents, even those only under suspicion of religious convictions, should be separated from their children. He said that he derived the greatest pleasure from drawing people close to him in perceived friendship, only to plant a dagger in their backs. He considered love and forgiveness to be the greatest of crimes.
Milovan Djilas, a Communist leader in Yugoslavia who knew Stalin, said that Uncle Joe ensured a reign of terror through constant ‘confusion and stupefaction’. He said that the USSR had false claims to equality of social classes; the Soviets wanted only one thing — power.
Even Stalin’s daughter, who emigrated to the United States in the 1960s, said her father was possessed by a demon. Interestingly, as a young man, Stalin wrote not under his own name but under pseudonyms for Satan.
Stalin, too, spent time studying Christianity diligently. He went to seminary as a young man, believing he had a vocation. Whilst there, he joined the communists, and left the seminary. He even committed robberies successfully for the Party.
A Soviet official, whom Stalin had shot, had a picture of Satan in his room, where, normally, an Orthodox icon would have stood.
Marx wrote about society’s ‘bloody birth pangs’, which would arise with the revolution. Che Guevara, he of the t-shirts, wrote that a revolutionary must be a ‘cool, calculated and cold killing machine’.
Marx advocated a ‘permanent revolution’. There would be no goal other than ongoing bloodshed. Lenin opined that atheism is part and parcel of communism. Fighting against religion was the main goal. Furthermore, he hoped that the United States would fall into communist hands ‘like overripe fruit’.
Khruschev said that those who believed the philosophy of Marx, Engels and Lenin was dead were deceiving themselves.
Russian children became members of communist youth groups, took the required oaths then informed against their parents, who were imprisoned and sometimes killed. Children learned at school that ‘religion is a capitalist superstition — we live in new times now’. We have the same message today. Each generation thinks it is hearing something new.
Priests and pastors were crucified in prison, just as Jesus was. Some were disemboweled. One had an unborn baby from a female prisoner placed in his stomach. Life is cheap to communists. They do not care about humanity, only themselves and their cult of death.
Elsewhere in the world, similar atrocities occurred. During the Spanish Civil War, the communists killed 4,000 Catholic priests. In Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, tribe members — trained by the North Koreans — were ordered to kill their own sons. Those who refused were killed alongside their sons.
The communists have a number of front organisations in order to lure the unwary and naïve. Wurmbrand says this is an artifice of the Devil. Having no beauty of his own and hating it in equal measure, he must fabricate and deceive in order to get his way.
The last thing the communists wanted were martyrs for Christ. So, they brutally tortured their prisoners in order to get them to blaspheme and to renounce Jesus. They fully intend for Christians to go to Hell and will do everything they can to inflict horrific acts of physical and psychological pain to ensure it happens. Granted, their methods do not always work, but they have the will and many of the ways. They want their prisoners to praise Satan.
When a husband is jailed, his wife normally is, too. Their children are removed from school. Some go to atheistic schools where they can be retrained.
As people who are interested in Satan, communists reword prayers and distort Holy Scripture in order to prey on people’s greed and a false sense of ‘oppression’. These are ways in which they can ‘re-educate’ people. Sometimes they use mass-media broadcasts for this purpose. Sometimes they use school curriculum.
Chapter 6 – A Spiritual Warfare
A Soviet newspaper from 1974 chronicled Latvian schools (which was part of the Eastern Bloc at the time). Pupils at these schools were called, depending on their year, ‘little devils’ or ‘servants of the Devil’.
Although they forbade worship of the one true God and His Son Jesus Christ, they openly encouraged young children to think that devil worship was normal. Those who refused were often sent away to atheist boarding schools.
A branch of the Russian Orthodox Church was given over to Satanist priests. Human blood was used instead of consecrated wine during the blasphemous communion services.
In prisons, guards used various techniques to humiliate and weaken prisoners in an attempt to get them to blaspheme. They knocked a priest’s teeth out with an iron rod. They raped nuns and Christian laywomen, including girls, sometimes anally. Others they forced to perform fellatio.
Marx approved of torture, saying it led to ‘ingenious inventions’. Let it not be said that this man was a humanitarian.
A psychiatrist told a friend of a detainee that he (the friend) was pulling the prisoner towards God. The psychiatrist was pulling him towards the Devil and restricted all contact between prisoner and friend.
Elsewhere — in Angola, Communists invaded a church to perform satanic rituals in front of the congregation. They then killed the pastor and his 150 parishoners.
In Albania, a priest was sentenced to death for having baptised a child. In the former Soviet Union, anyone wishing to have his child baptised had to register his request with the State, ostensibly a member of the church board. The person who placed the request was then persecuted.
Karl Marx called himself the ‘Pope of Communism’.
Marxism became a sort of cultish ‘church’ with its own rituals, including confessions in groups of Party members.
YET, despite this, a number of American seminary professors saw no dichotomy between a seminarian professing both Marxism and Christianity. Sixty-eight per cent of Episcopalian professors and 53% of Lutherans felt that this was acceptable.
Chapter 7 – Marx, Darwin and Revolution
Marx found Darwin’s work useful and inferred from it that Man was concerned only with eating adequately. All else, even family and marriage, was secondary.
To be fair to Darwin, he actually included the words ‘breathed by the Creator’ in second and subsequent editions of Origin of the Species.
Wurmbrand traces objectified man back to the French Revolution. Russia, however, was of a similar mind. Poets of Marx’s time wrote of the Devil. Love, mutual respect and kindness went by the boards. Destruction was viewed positively.
Moses Hess (see Chapters 2 and 3 above) condemned priests for encouraging the oppressed masses to accept their lot in life. He said that revolution could be none other than international. Once the established order had gone in one country, comrades must help each other in the rest of the world to do the same.
He wrote the Red Catechism for the German People. The use of Christian terminology — ‘catechism’ — was no mistake. He intended to lure believers in as useful idiots — as dupes. He said that the Socialist society would be the true fulfilment of Christianity. Not unlike today, then! Once again, we see Satan as the Light-bringer, the false Christ the Book of Revelation describes.
Like Marx, Hess had ambivalent feelings towards the Jewish people. He spoke of them in contradictory terms. Hess despised traditional Zionism and wanted to replace it with a racial struggle where each Jew would see himself as partly divine. Every male Jew could be a messiah. Every Jewess could be Mary. But, contrary to what the Old Testament foretells, there would be no Jesus Christ as Messiah.
Hess wrote that the primary international struggle is based on race. Class struggle is secondary. Like Marx, he hated the idea of nation states and national identity, issues with which we wrestle today. Because socialism was so complete in his eyes, it would replace Christianity. Wurmbrand theorises that Hitler might have obtained some of his ideas from Hess.
Wurmbrand says that one has to understand Hess in order to understand Marx. Both write in a muddled up way. Each contradicts himself and therein lies the problem of discovering what they were really saying.
Marx said that he knew he wrote in a ‘devilish muddle’ and that everyone was entitled to think what he wished. Hegel, his mentor and teacher, was the first author to satirise Jesus Christ. On the other hand, Hegel also wrote complimentary things about Christianity. What do we think? Or is this an eternal puzzle to piece together?
Wurmbrand mentions earlier that Communism revolves around its front organisations in order to maintain credibility. In practice, when one front organisation falls, another rises to take its place. As they say, nature abhors a vacuum.
An early communist, Netchaiev, wrote The Catechism of the Revolutionist. Netchaiev proposed dividing humanity into two groups: 10% would control the other 90%. The 90% must lose their personalities and become sheeple. Not unlike today, then. All institutions, including the Church, would succumb to this new order.
The Marxist idea was — and is — to bamboozle the middle classes and lure the willing and the uninformed to communist ranks through honeyed words and seemingly kind ideology.
For the rest of the story, please click on the Marx and Satan link. It is essential that we bear this content in mind the next time we think about supporting a Socialist or a Democratic Party candidate.
Churchmouse Campanologist 