We cut this from the review for reasons of length, now normally only 3 dollar patrons or above would see the debate but given the lockdown, we've decided to share for the months of April and May. Red text is, of course, your editor and black text your reviewer. I hope you enjoy.
There are Christian communists and socialists. A hell of a lot of Jewish communists. Muslim communists. Not even the USSR banned religion, Cuba hasn’t, Vietnam hasn’t. The closest you get is the PRC and even it doesn’t ban religion, just restrict what particular beliefs are permitted, and of all the communist governments that have ever existed, they are actually the worst at instituting a socialist program with the possible exception of whatever Juche Madness is occurring in North Korea. Again, straight-up Cold War propaganda communism. If you want communist villains, fine I can handle that, but have it be the result of Democratic Centralism in a Marxist-Leninist state leading to a consolidation of power in the hands of a monster. Like what happened under Stalin. That would at least be reasonable.
While the USSR never banned religion, it did make the elimination of religious belief an open policy of the government. Additionally, through many periods of Soviet rule being known as a believer would be enough to ban you from holding positions as a teacher, military officer or various state positions. Which given how all power was centralized in the State, meant that you were a 2nd class citizen. Additionally, public religious behavior was at times harshly cracked down on. I should note that the USSR did liberalize in some respects in the 1960s, although openly religious people would be blocked from certain professions and ranks. In the People’s Republic of China, you are free to believe in any religion that is approved by the state, as long as you do it through the officially sanctioned variant heavily controlled by the government. Dare to pray or believe in a religion not found serving the state’s interest and you will suffer harassment and persecution. The People’s Republic of Vietnam is more liberal in this regard but still declares that the state has the right to suspend or even ban beliefs that undermine the party’s hold on power. Cuba used to exclude any religious believer from party membership and therefore from government positions but has liberalized since the fall of the USSR. In short, I would not regard a communist government with anything else but suspicion when it came to my religious rights. Much like how I suppose a number of minorities would not regard a right-wing government with anything but suspicion in regard to their civil rights.
All of this is true. In your kind of bog-standard unelaborated Marxism, institutional religion is the Opiate of the Masses, a thing that contributes to reactionary attitudes and keeps the working class unaware of their own oppression. However, it isn’t a thing to be forcefully removed, but rather a thing that will go away in the fullness of time. However, let’s just say that conditions on the ground and international diplomacy/espionage/political siege by NATO could also get involved and make things… more complicated/worse. And there are founder-effects too, so the ideology and practice of the USSR influenced other communist states. Sometimes forcefully in the case of the Warsaw Pact. And, without going into a list of terrible crimes, it isn’t like the western powers were as pure as the driven snow on human rights. Far from it. The Cold War turned everyone into dicks.
I'll certainly agree that the western powers have their own lists of sins but that's a topic for another review. That said my view on why the communist powers treated religion as they did is simple. I don't believe they could tolerate any center of power, no matter how weak that power, being outside of the state. Additionally, religion created an identity not dependent on communist ideology and might allow their citizens to develop common ground with capitalists. This was not to be allowed. Communism or socialism, whatever name you give it, as practiced in the USSR and PRC rested on the idea of nearly all power resting in the hands of the state.
And I don’t think it is that simple. There was some of that, sure, particularly in the PRC; but I can’t speak as well to history and such with them. If the Soviets were concerned with a power structure outside the state, they would have done what the PRC did and drag everyone inside the tent pissing out like they did with all the other post-revolution socialist parties - which is why you are more-right with the PRC. Instead, they excluded members of religious organizations - remember, lone-wolf Christians aren’t really a common thing in this place and time - from certain positions of public trust and party membership, which under the Vanguard Party theory of Lenin basically means “A dyed-in-the-wool Marxist-Leninist who is in the government or senior civil service”. This looks like an internal-security measure to me, with an ideological element in the sense that you cannot be a Hardcore ML-like that while also being religious. That doesn’t make it right, clearly. And I obviously disagree with Lenin on a lot of things, not the least of which are Democratic Centralism and his stance on religion, even though I am myself an atheist. However, it does history and bluntly humanity a disservice to reduce it to “Commies Hate God and Christians” or “The USSR was simply power-mad and not responding even quasi-rationally to real conditions.”
I got to point out that neither of those are my position, however. My position is that the USSR was openly stating that they intended to destroy religious belief and forced the populace to choose between being seen as a real member of the Soviet Union or being a second class citizen who was clearly viewed as suspect. In the early phases of the USSR, they most certainly did attack organized religion and worked to destroy the idea of religious identity. The fact that they failed doesn’t change the attempt. Even during the more tolerant phases, it was clear that the Soviet government didn’t like the idea of large groups of believers of any religion being present. This eroded somewhat, as the Soviet Union became more of an Imperial Russian project but never really went away. I also pointed out in my first post that the communist powers differed greatly in their approaches to religion. For example, Vietnam, whose communist government is as much based on Vietnamese Nationalism and resistance to outside control, to the point of fighting a war with the PRC is fairly liberal towards religion, as long as it doesn’t threaten their control of Vietnam. That said, given how every communist government has insisted on at the very least being in full control of any organized religion or religious expression, viewing them as suspect is only reasonable if you are religious.
The suspectness isn’t entirely unreasonable, and all of the Cold-War era communist states that weren’t overthrown in military coups were offshoots of Marxist-Leninism, so the argument can coherently be made that the hostility toward religion is an artifact of that particular ideology, combined with conditions under which those states “grew up” so to speak. Had the leftcoms won in Germany in 1919, for instance, I don’t think we would have seen that same hostility.
I’ll grant the possibility but that’s not what happened for better or for worse and most folks are going to think of a single-party authoritarian state as the default model for a communist state. Because that’s what we’ve seen in our history. Now if you wanted to write stories of a multi-party democratic communist state, go right ahead, in fact, it’s not a bad idea to explore such ideas through science fiction. It’s also not what we’re dealing with in this story, we’re dealing with an authoritarian single-party state, not anything out of Rosa’s book.
Oh don’t worry on that score. I am, though there is a bit of a hiatus going due to writer’s block. Anyway, to sum up, Mr. Gibbs really needs to flesh out his villains. If he wants God-Hating Commies, he needs to actually develop them so we know or can infer what’s going on that grounds their apparent hyperpersecution of all religions in something ideological or political that makes sense. Frigid and I can disagree on the why, the point is, there is a why.
I’ll definitely agree that Mr. Gibbs would be better served to flesh out his villains a bit more. That said, this is the first book of the series so I wouldn’t judge him too harshly as there was a lot of ground to cover. My own thought is that if you’re going to institute a single party world government at the point of a gun, destroying competing sources of common identity and loyalty would make sense but would be a dangerous course of action. It would be interesting if this was just part of a raft of laws they pushed through like banning everything outside of a single language (bonus points if it’s a manufactured language), holidays, ethnic histories, etc. That said, the communist states have a history of persecution of religious groups so I'm not going to protest the idea of a ruthless authoritarian state being savagely opposed to any sort of religious faith. Although as always I would judge the execution of such an idea.
No comments:
Post a Comment