Faith does good works

O it is a living, busy active mighty thing, this faith. It is impossible for it not to be doing good things incessantly. It does not ask whether good works are to be done, but before the question is asked, it has already done this, and is constantly doing them. Whoever does not do such works, however, is an unbeliever. He gropes and looks around for faith and good works, but knows neither what faith is nor what good works are. Yet he talks and talks, with many words, about faith and good works.

Martin Luther, Preface to Romans

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The Dangerous Faith in the ‘New Man’ of Communism

The ‘New man’ under Communism would be unlike any creature ever known. Trotsky thus depicted him in his Literature and Revolution:

He will want to master first the semi-conscious and then also the unconscious processes of his own organism: breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within the necessary limits, will subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiological life will become collectively experimental. The human species, the sluggish Homo sapiens, will once again enter the state of radical reconstruction and will become in its own hands the object of the most most complex methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training…Man will make it his goal to master his own emotions, to elevate his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent…to create a higher sociobiological type, a superman if you will…Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, subtler. His body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more melodious. The forms of life will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. And beyond this ridge, other peaks will emerge.

For such an ideal, was it not worth sacrificing the sorry specimins that populated the corrupt world? Seen form this perspective, existing humanity was debris, the refuse of a doomed world, and killing it off was a matter of no consequence.

Richard Pipes, Communism, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002, p.68

Faith in a False Messiah

Speaking of the terror unleashed by Stalin including his ‘Show Trials’ Montefiore explains who was to suffer: ‘Those without blind faith (in Stalin) were to die.’

In Moscow, 200,000 people, bedazzled by propaganda, massed in Red Square, despite temperatures of -27°C (at the time of the treason trial of Grigory Pyatakov and Karl Radek in January 1937), bearing banners that read, ‘The court’s verdict is (i.e. the ‘Show Trials’) is the people’s verdict. Krushchev addressed them denouncing the ‘Judas-Trotsky’, a line that strongly implied that Stalin was the metaphorical Jesus. (We know from Yury Zhdanov that he jokingly compared himself to Jesus)

“By lifting their hands against comrade Stalin they lifted them against all the best that humanity possesses. For Stalin is hope; he is expectation; he is the beacon that guides all progressive mankind. Stalin is our banner! Stalin is our will! Stalin is our victory!” The country was swept by the ‘eotional effervescence of hatred, fear and blood-lust.

Simon Sebag montefiore, Stalin, 2003, p.187