Some Facts About the Worst Mass Murderers in History: namely, Secular States in Pursuit of Socialist Utopias

The triumph of secular humanism has led to a complete shift in the way people in British society think, speak and live. Under secular humanism the control and regulation of life by the State will continue relentlessly. It has to because this is the logic of the idolatry of man as his own God. This is why individual freedom is ultimately an obsolete concept for secular humanism. Even the terminology has now shifted decisively away from freedom to rights. This means that there has been a shift from the real, the tangible, the individual, to the abstract and the ideal, which must be embodied in some institution that has absolute control and authority.

This move to the abstract is inevitable because individual men disagree and dispute with each other and their rights cannot be harmonised on an individual basis. Therefore the many (individuals) must always give way to the one, the abstract idea of human Will, which is embodied in the State.[1] The one and the many cannot be reconciled on the basis of man as his own ultimate principle, man as God.[2] The question therefore is this: can the abstract, the ideal, as embodied in the State, guarantee the freedom of the individual? The answer is that it cannot. In enforcing the rights of one it must negate the freedoms of another. The State, therefore, must rule as an absolute authority and suspend the liberty of the individual in principle.

This is the only alternative to total anarchy for secular humanism.[3] Ultimate authority has to reside somewhere, and if there is no God then ultimate authority must belong to man. But such authority cannot belong to each man. Ultimate authority is therefore embodied in the State as the realisation of the abstract idea of human Will, and the one (the State) takes precedence over the many (individuals), thereby abridging the God-given liberty of the individual. The State, therefore, as Hegel tells us, is its own motive and absolute end; and the highest duty of the individual, over whom the State exercises a supreme right, is to be a member of the State.[4] The State is “the objective spirit, and [the individual] has his truth, real existence, and ethical status only in being a member of it.” [5] This is where Great Britain is heading. The increasing control and regulation of life by the State is all part of the religious apostasy of the age, all part of the politics of man. Slavery is the end product of the politics of man. It always has been, and it will be no different in the societies of the Western nations as they increasingly reject the Christian faith. The thin veneer of liberty that we still have in Western society is being relentlessly stripped away by the modern secular State. “[W]hile under the old order the state had recognised its limits as against a spiritual power, and had only extended its claims over a part of human life, the modern state admitted no limitations, and embraced the whole life of the individual citizen in its economic and military organisation.” [6]

The consequences for mankind of this idolatry of political power by modern secular States have been immense, from the reign of terror unleashed by the French Revolution to the mass murder programmes of national and international socialism. Leaving aside those killed by the two World Wars, over 100 million people were murdered in the twentieth century alone by secular States in pursuit of the religious ideals of secular humanism. This is a fairly conservative figure, though not the most conservative. Gil Elliot, writing in 1972, estimated the total number of “man-made deaths” in the twentieth century up to that point, including both World Wars, between 80 and 150 million [7] and assumed a mean figure of 110 million, with World War One accounting for about 10 million and World War Two accounting for about 40 million deaths.[8] A more recent conservative estimate, again including both World Wars, has put the total number killed by the State in the twentieth century at 188 million.[9] A less conservative estimate puts the figure at 231 million.[10] According to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday the Chinese Communist State alone was responsible for over 70 million peacetime deaths under the leadership of Mao Tse-Tung.[11] Alexander Solzhenitsyn claimed that a similar number perished in the Soviet Union.[12] Commenting on State activity in the twentieth century Paul Johnson writes:

“The state has proved itself an insatiable spender, an unrivalled waster. It has also proved itself the greatest killer of all time. By the late 1990s, state action had been responsible for the violent or unnatural deaths of some 135 million people during the century, more perhaps than it had succeeded in destroying during the whole of human history up to 1900. Its inhuman malevolence had more than kept pace with its growing size and expanding means.” [13]

Likewise, Niall Ferguson states that the “hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in modern history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era.” [14] The secular humanist State has been responsible for more deaths, both in war and as a result of the various secular humanist inquisitions and witch-hunts carried out in the twentieth century, than any other form of religious establishment in history. In 1957, only half way through the twentieth century, Denis de Rougemont stated that “The wars of this century killed more men than all the other wars of our history.” [15] Even the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm acknowledged that the twentieth century was “an era of religious wars, though the most militant and bloodthirsty of its religions were secular ideologies of nineteenth century vintage, such as socialism and nationalism, whose god-equivalents were either abstractions or politicians venerated in the manner of divinities.” [16] 

The modern secular State has proved to be the most brutal and murderous form of political rule that the world has ever seen. “Every idol, however exalted,” said Aldous Huxley “turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.” [17]


NOTES
  1. See for example Jean Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the “general will” in The Social Contract, Bk, I, chapters vi–ix; Bk II, i–iv.
  2. On the philosophical question of the equal ultimacy of the one and many and the irreconcilable nature of these concepts outside of Christian thought see R. J. Rushdoony, The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy.
  3. According to Ernst Nolte, “The word ‘totalitarian,’ in the sense of laying full claim to, and obligation on, a human being, is applicable to every religion, every outlook on the world and on life, even the liberal. But only in the eyes of liberalism is this form really purely formal—that is, not ultimately concretizable and hence Kant’s categorical imperative is its classic formulation. It leaves religions free, tolerates them, because it does not regard truth as demonstrable or personal freedom as definable. The only reason it is non-totalitarian in the material sense, and appears to abandon man to the mere whim of his moods, is because, from a formal point of view, it is more totalitarian, that is, more inexorable, than other ideologies. In an analogous sense Western Christianity is also liberal. By distinguishing between God’s sphere and the emperor’s, it leaves many possibilities open to political man; but it lays unyielding claim to his soul for its path to salvation. The ancient world never knew this kind of separation, this kind of freedom, even the polis was ideally a completely totalitarian unity of the spiritual and the political” (Three Forms of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965, trans. Leila Vennewitz), p. 219). But in the West it appears now that the more liberalism has become disconnected from the Christian cultural matrix from which it originated the less its totalitarianism has remained purely formal and the more it has sought to realise this totalitarianism in concrete social forms, and consequently the less freedom the liberal political establishment is willing to grant to Christians in the modern liberal societies of the West. Britain’s increasingly institutionalised apathy and even hostility to Christianity and the growing restriction of previously recognised fundamental freedoms stemming from its Christian past are testimony to this fact. It is precisely this trend that gives modern liberal Western States the character of totalitarianism similar to that of ancient Rome. But because of its relativism liberalism is weak and cannot provide a stable foundation for civilisation, and it is becoming apparent now that Western liberalism is a transitory phenomenon, a mere staging post on the road from one civilisation to another.
  4. “The state, which is the realised substantive will, having its reality in the particular self-consciousness raised to the plane of the universal, is absolutely rational. This substantive unity is its own motive and absolute end. In this end freedom attains its highest right. This end has the highest right over the individual, whose highest duty in turn is to be a member of the state” (S. W. Dyde, trans., Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, p. 240 [§258]).
  5. Ibid., p. 240f. [§258]. According to Hegel “The State is . . . the embodiment of rational freedom, realizing and recognizing itself in an objective form . . . The State is the Idea of Spirit in the external manifestation of human Will and its Freedom” (The Philosophy of History [New York: Dover Publications, Inc., (1899) 1956, trans. J. Sibree], p. 37). Bertrand Russell described Hegel’s doctrine of the State as “a doctrine which, if accepted, justifies every internal tyranny and every external aggression that can possibly be imagined” (A History of Western Philosophy [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946], p. 768f.).
  6. Christopher Dawson, Enquiries into religion and Culture (London and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1933), p. 111.
  7. Gil Elliot, Twentieth Century Book of the Dead (London: Alan Lane/The Penguin Press, 1972), p. 1.
  8. Ibid., p. 215.
  9. Matthew White, “Wars, Massacres and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century” in Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat8.htm; accessed on 26 March 2007).
  10. Milton Leitenberg, Deaths in Wars and Conflicts in the Twentieth Century (Cornell University Peace Studies Occasional Paper No. 29, Third Edition, 2006), p. 1.
  11. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), p. 3. Of all secular political systems it is the socialist States that have proved to be the most oppressive, both economically and socially, and the most murderous. Yet ironically Lenin predicted in 1917 that the Communist State would be transitional, eventually “withering away,” that it would cost mankind less than the capitalist State, and that it would engage in less bloodshed: “during the transition from capitalism to Communism suppression is still necessary; but it is now the suppression of the exploiting minority by the exploited majority. A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the ‘state,’ is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state; it is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word; for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage labourers, and it will cost mankind far less. And it is compatible with the extension of democracy to such an overwhelming majority of the population that the need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear . . . the state will also wither away” (The State and Revolution [Peking: Foreign languages Press, 1973], p. 107f.).
  12. “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations” in Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ed., From Under the Rubble (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1975), p. 119.
  13. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the year 2000 (London: Phoenix Giant, 1999 [1982]), p. 788.
  14. Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (London: Alan Lane/Penguin Books, 2006), p. xxxiv.
  15. Denis de Rougemont, Man’s Western Quest: The Principles of Civilization (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1957), p. 156.
  16. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), p. 563; my emphasis.
  17. The Devils of Loudun (London: Chatto and Indus, 1952)