Brainwashing

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Another example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the preface to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:


Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

It is the opium of the people.
Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function as a way of expressing and coping with social inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo.


Political economy


Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism.

Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity — when peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land.

People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive.

Those who must sell their labor power are "proletarians." The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeoise." The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists.

Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy goods in one market and sell them in another.

Since the laws of supply and demand operate within given markets, there is often a difference between the price of a commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practice arbitrage, and hope to capture the difference between these two markets. According to Marx, capitalists, on the other hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor market and the market for whatever commodity is produced by the capitalist.

Marx observed that in practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices.

Marx called the difference "surplus value" and argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus labour, the difference between what it costs to keep workers alive and what they can produce.

The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies.

Marx considered the capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly revolutionized the means of production. But Marx argued that capitalism was prone to periodic crises.

He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor. Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit falls below a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which certain sectors of the economy would collapse.

Marx understood that during such a crisis the price of labor would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth of new sectors of the economy.

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Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution would in general be required, because the ruling class would not give up power without violence. He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat - a period where the needs of the working-class, not of capital, will be the common deciding factor - must be created on a temporary basis. As he wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program", "between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." [4] Yet he was aware of the possibility that in some countries, with strong democratic institutional structures (e.g. Britain, the US and the Netherlands) this transformation could occur through peaceful means, while in countries with a strong centralized state-oriented traditions, like France and Germany, the upheaval will have to be violent.


Influences on Marx's thought
Marx's thought was strongly influenced by:

The dialectical method and historical orientation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel;
The classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo;
French socialist and sociological thought, in particular the republican conception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau;
German Idealism and the young Hegelians, in particular Ludwig Feuerbach.
Antique materialism (Democritus and Epicure's theory of clinamen)
Marx believed that he could study history and society scientifically and discern tendencies of history and the resulting outcome of social conflicts. Some followers of Marx concluded, therefore, that a communist revolution was inevitable. This conception, shared by the young Marx whom formulated it in the Communist Manifesto, but which was latter abandoned, didn't entail, however, fatalism. In the eleventh These on Feuerbach (1845), Marx had famously asserted that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it": he thus opposed praxis (the unity of theory and practice) to idealist interpretations which opposed themselves as various philosophical Weltanschauung. Marx thus cut with Prussian university in order to work with the labour movement in order to try to alter the word. Consequently, most followers of Marx have been activists who believed that revolutionaries must organize social change.


G.W.F. HegelMarx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism (controversially adapted as the philosophy of dialectical materialism by Engels and Lenin, a term never used by Marx himself) is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically. Hegel believed that the direction of human history is characterized in the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a movement towards greater and greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps — episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. For example, Hegel strongly opposed slavery in the United States during his lifetime, and he envisioned a time when Christian nations would radically eliminate it from their civilization. While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that it was necessary to set it upon its feet.

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Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel's idealism was greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that God is really a creation of man and that the qualities people attribute to God are really qualities of humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the material world that is real and that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideology prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly.

The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism was Engels' book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to conceive of the historical dialectic in terms of class conflict and to see the modern working class as the most progressive force for revolution.


Marx's influence
See also: Marxism

Statue of Marx and Engels in Alexanderplatz, Berlin.Marx and Engels' work covers a wide range of topics and presents a complex analysis of history and society in terms of class relations. Followers of Marx and Engels have drawn on this work to propose a grand, cohesive theoretical outlook dubbed Marxism. Nevertheless, there have been numerous debates among Marxists over how to interpret Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and conditions. Moreover, it is important to distinguish between "Marxism" and "what Marx believed"; for example, shortly before he died in 1883, Marx wrote a letter to the French workers' leader Jules Guesde, and to his own son-in-law Paul Lafargue, accusing them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of denying the value of reformist struggles; "if that is Marxism" — paraphrasing what Marx wrote — "then I am not a Marxist").

Essentially, people use the word "Marxist" to describe those who rely on Marx's conceptual language (e.g. "mode of production", "class", "commodity fetishism") to understand capitalist and other societies, or to describe those who believe that a workers' revolution as the only means to a communist society. Some, particularly in academic circles, who accept much of Marx's theory, but not all its implications, call themselves "Marxian" instead.

Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the "Second International" as a base for continued political activism. This organization was far more successful than the First International had been, containing mass workers' parties, particularly the large and successful German Social Democratic Party, which was predominantly Marxist in outlook. This international collapsed in 1914, however, in part because some members turned to Edward Bernstein's "evolutionary" socialism, and in part because of divisions precipitated by World War I.

World War I also led to the Russian Revolution in which a left splinter of the Second International, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took power. The revolution dynamized workers around the world into setting up their own section of the Bolsheviks' "Third International". Lenin claimed to be both the philosophical and political heir to Marx, and developed a political program, called "Leninism" or "Bolshevism", which called for revolution organized and led by a centrally organized "Communist Party."

Marx believed that the communist revolution would take place in advanced industrial societies such as France, Germany and England, but Lenin argued that in the age of imperialism, and due to the "law of uneven development", where Russia had on the one hand, an antiquated agricultural society, but on the other hand, some of the most up-to-date industrial concerns, the "chain" might break at its weakest points, that is, in the so-called "backward" countries.

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In China Mao Zedong also claimed to be an heir to Marx, but argued that peasants and not just workers could play a leading role in a Communist revolution in third world countries still marked by feudalism whose majority of workers were peasants, not industrial workers. This was termed by Mao as the New Democratic Revolution. As a departure from Marx's understanding of the socialist revolution that maintained that the revolution must take place with countries that have already gone through the captialist stage of development first and have produced the proletarian class as the majority, which is to carry out the revolutionary transformation of society into a socialist country and communist world. Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao came to be internationally known as Maoism.

Under Lenin, and increasingly after the rise to power of Joseph Stalin, the actions of the Soviet Union (and later of the People's Republic of China) came in many people's mind to be synonymous with Marxism, with its attendant suppression of the rights of individuals and workers in the name of the struggle against capitalism, including the execution of larges numbers of people under Stalin, a fact which has been exploited for propaganda purposes by anti-Communists. However, there were throughout dissenting Marxist voices — Marxists of the old school of the Second International, the left communists who split off from the Third International shortly after its formation, and later Leon Trotsky and his followers, who set up a "Fourth International" in 1938 to compete with that of Stalin, claiming to represent true Bolshevism.



The Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists, including Lenin and Bolshevism in several key ways.

First, writing at the time of the ascendance of Stalinism and fascism, they had grave doubts as to the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian class consciousness. Second, unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected economic determinism. While highly influential, their work has been criticized by both orthodox Marxists and some Marxists involved in political practice for divorcing Marxist theory from practical struggle and turning Marxism into a purely academic enterprise.

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Influential Marxists of the same period include the Third International's Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci, who along with the Frankfurt School are often known by the term Western Marxism.

In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded Monthly Review, a journal and press, to provide an outlet for Marxist thought in the United States independent of the Communist Party.

In 1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend Marx's thought as a coherent and scientific theory of history by restating its central tenets in the language of analytic philosophy. This gave birth to Analytical Marxism, an academic movement which also included Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski and John Roemer. Bertell Ollman is another Anglophone champion of Marx within the academy, as is the Israeli Shlomo Avineri.

The following countries had governments at some point in the twentieth century who at least nominally adhered to Marxism (those in bold still do as of 2006): Albania, Afghanistan, Angola, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Laos, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam. In addition, the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal have had Marxist governments.

Marxist political parties and movements have significantly declined since the fall of the Soviet Union, with some exceptions, perhaps most notably Nepal.

Marx was ranked #27 on Michael H. Hart's list of the most influential figures in history.

In July 2005 Marx was the surprise winner of the 'Greatest Philosopher of All Time' poll by listeners of the BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time.[5]

Criticisms

Many proponents of capitalism have argued that capitalism is a more effective means of generating and redistributing wealth than socialism or communism, or that the gulf between rich and poor that concerned Marx and Engels was a temporary phenomenon. However this criticism is flawed as the gap between rich and poor has grown greatly since Marx's time and supporters of capitalism argue that the gap between rich and poor is essential.

Some suggest that self-interest and the need to acquire capital is an inherent component of human behavior, and is not caused by the adoption of capitalism or any other specific economic system and that different economic systems reflect different social responses to this fact. The Austrian School of economics has criticized Marx's use of the labor theory of value. In addition, the political repression and economic problems of several historical Communist states have done much to destroy Marx's reputation in the Western world, particularly following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the Soviet bureaucracy often invoked him in their propaganda. Although others argue that the former USSR had degenerated from its socialist origins.

Marx has also been criticized from the Left. Some have argued that class is not the most fundamental inequality in history and call attention to patriarchy or race, as not being, as Marxists argue, dependent on class. Anarchists, on the other hand have always opposed Marxism, even its most libertarian forms, as being too authoritarian, and missing the basic necessity of rebellion against authority by concentrating on economic matters.

Some today question the theoretical and historical validity of "class" as an analytic construct or as a political actor. In this line, some question Marx's reliance on 19th century notions that linked science with the idea of "progress" (see social evolution). Many observe that capitalism has changed much since Marx's time, and that class differences and relationships are much more complex — citing as one example the fact that much corporate stock in the United States is owned by workers through pension funds. However Marx never held a simplistic view of class that these critics advance. Critics of this analysis retort that the top 1% of stock owners still own nearly 50% of the nation's publicly traded company stocks.[6]

Still others criticize Marx from the perspective of philosophy of science. Karl Popper has criticized Marx's theories as he believed they were not falsifiable, which he argued would render some particular aspects of Marx’s historical and socio-political arguments unscientific, although Popper's falsifiability standard has itself always been controversial. Popper also criticised Marx for historicism, that is, a relativisation of truth to a particular historical period.

A common critique of Marx points out that the increasing class antagonisms he predicted never actually developed in the Western world following industrialization. While socioeconomic gaps between the bourgeoisie and proletariat remained, industrialization in countries such as the United States and Great Britain also saw the rise of a middle class not inclined to violent revolution, and of a welfare state that helped contain any revolutionary tendencies among the working class. Marxists argue that the development of the welfare state was due to the workers' movement and the ability of capitalism to grant concessions to that movement due to the post-war boom. While the economic devastation of the Great Depression broadened the appeal of Marxism in the developed world, future government safeguards and economic recovery led to a decline in its influence. In contrast, Marxism remained extremely influential in feudal and industrially underdeveloped societies such as Czarist Russia, where the Bolshevik Revolution was successful. [7] This problem with classical Marxist theory was known from the beginning of the 20th century, and much of the work of Vladimir Lenin was dedicated to answering it. In essence, Lenin argued, taking the theory from several other contemporary Marxist writers, that through imperialism the bourgeoisie of wealthy countries is using "superprofits" from the imperial colonies to effectively bribe the working class back home in order to appease it.

Critics argue that the Soviet Union's numerous internal failings and subsequent collapse were a direct result of the practical failings of Marxism. Marxists say that it was precisely the abandonment of Marxism in the Soviet Union that led to its demise. Others, like Avineri, have argued that it was the pre-capitalist structure of 1917 Russia, as well as the strong authoritarian traditions of the Russian state and its weak civil society, which pushed the Soviet revolution towards its repressive development. The absence of successful revolutions elsewhere in Europe and the civil war involving the major capitalist powers were also to blame for the development of a Stalinist bureaucracy.

[Sharing Lights]

References


Stephen Jay Gould, A Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral - E. Ray Lankester, Page 1, Find Articles.com (1999). (Marx's tomb)
Little, Daniel, 1986. The Scientific Marx. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0816615055. Marx's work considered as science.
Duncan, Ronald, with Wilson, Colin, eds., 1987. Marx Refuted. Bath, U.K. ISBN 0906798-71-X
David McLellen, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought
Avineri, Shlomo, 1968. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge University Press.
Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (4 volumes). Monthly Review Press.
Boris Nicolaevski & Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, Penguin books.
Maximilien Rubel, 1975. Marx without myth: A chronological study of his life and work. Blackwell. ISBN 0631157808
Francis Wheen, Karl Marx, Fourth Estate (1999), ISBN 1857026373 (biography of Marx)
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment.
Muller, Jerry Z., 2002. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought. Anchor Books.
[edit]
Notes
^ Several authors elucidated this for long neglected crucial turn in Marx' theoretical development, lastly Ernie Thomson: The Discovery of the Materialist Conception of History in the Writings of the Young Karl Marx, New York, The Edwin Mellen Press 2004; for a short account see Max Stirner in a nutshell
^ McLellan, D. (1973) Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, Basingstoke: Macmillan, p. 274.
^ Ibid, p. 451.
^ Francis Wheen, "Introduction", Karl Marx: A Life, New York: Norton, 2002.�UNIQ132164943f3e0be7-HTMLCommentStripe2d374a5ea3136600000005
Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1968)

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Chapter 12


Violent Remedies


As populaces, in general, understand that violence is
necessary
in the handling of the insane, violent remedies seem to
be
reasonable. Starting from a relatively low level of
violence,
such as straitjackets and other restraints, it is relatively
easy to
encroach upon the public diffidence where violence is
concerned by
adding more and more cruelty to the treatment of the
insane.

By increasing the brutality of "treatment", the public
expectation of
such treatment will be assisted,
and the protest of the individual to
whom the treatment
is given is impossible, since immediately after
the treatment he is incapable.

The family of the individual under
treatment is already suspect for having had in its midst an insane
person.

The family’s protest should be discredited.

The more violent the treatment, the more command value the psychopolitical
operative will accumulate.

Brain operations should
become standard and commonplace.

While the figures of actual
deaths should be repressed wherever possible, it is nevertheless of no
great concern to the psychopolitical operative that many deaths do
occur.


Gradually, the public should be educated in electric shock, first by
being led to believe that it is very therapeutic, then by believing that
it is quieting, then by being informed that electric shock usually
injures the spine and teeth, and finally, that it very often kills or at
least breaks the spine and removes, violently, the teeth of the patient.


It is very doubtful if anyone from the lay levels of the public could
tolerate the observation of a single electric shock tre a t m e n t .

Certainly they could not tolerate witnessing a prefrontal lobotomy or
transorbital leucotomy. However, they should be brought up to a level where this is possible,
where it is the expected treatment, and
where the details, of the treatment itself can be made known, thus
adding the psychopolitical prestige.


The more violent the treatment, the more hopeless insanity will
seem to be.


The society should be worked up to the level where every recalcitrant
young man can be brought into court and assigned to a psychopolitical
operative, given electric shocks, and reduced into
unimaginative docility for the remainder of his days.

By continuous and increasing advertising of the violence of treatment,
the public will at last come to tolerate the creation of zombie
conditions to such a degree that they will probably employ zombies,
if given to them.

Thus a large stratum of the society, particularly that
which was rebellious, can be reduced to the service of the psychopolitician.


By various means, a public must at least be convinced that insanity
can only be met by shock, torture, deprivation, defamation, discreditation,
violence, maiming, death, punishment in all its forms.


The society, at the same time, must be educated into the belief that
insanity is increasing within its ranks.

This creates an emergency and
places the psychopolitician in a savior role that will eventually put
him in charge of the society.

[Sharing Lights]

Chapter 13

The Recruiting of Psycopolitical Dupes


The psychopolitical dupe is a well-trained individual who
serves in complete obedience to the psychopolitical operative.


In that nearly all persons in training are expected to undergo a
certain amount of treatment in any field of the mind, it is not too difficult
to persuade persons in the field of mental healing to subject
themselves to mild or minor drugs or shock.

If this can be done, a
psychological dupe can immediately result from the use of pain-drug
hypnosis.


Recruitment into the ranks of "mental healing" can best be done by
carefully bringing to it only those healing students who are, to some
slight degree, already depraved, or who have been "treated" by psychopolitical
operatives.


Recruitment is effected by making the field of mental healing very
attractive, financially and sexually.
The amount of promiscuity that can be induced in mental patients
can work definitely to the advantage of the psychopolitical recruiting
agent.

The dupe can thus be induced into many lurid sexual contacts,
and these, properly witnessed, can thereafter be used as blackmail
material to assist any failure of pain-drug hypnosis in causing
him to execute orders.
The promise of unlimited sexual opportunities, the promise of
complete dominion over the bodies and minds of helpless patients,
the promise of complete lawlessness without detection, can thus
attract to "mental healing" many desirable recruits who
will In that the psychopolitician has under his control the insane of the
nation, most of them with criminal tendencies, and as he can, as his
movement goes forward, recruit for his ranks the criminals themselves,
he has unlimited numbers of human beings to employ on
whatever project he may see fit.


In that the insane will execute
destructive projects without question, if given the proper amount of
punishment and implantation, the degradation of the country’s
youth, the defamation of its leaders, the suborning of its courts
becomes childishly easy.


The psychopolitician has the advantage of naming as a delusory
symptom any attempt on the part of a patient to expose commands.


The psychopolitician should carefully adhere to institutions and
should eschew private practice whenever possible, since this gives
him the greatest number of human beings to control to the use of
communism.

When he does act in private practice, his practice
should be limited to contact with the families of the wealthy and the
officials of the country.

[Sharing Lights]

Chapter 14


The Smashing of Religious Groups


You must know that until recent times the entire subject of mental
derangement, whether so light as simple worry or so heavy
as insanity, was the sphere of activity of the church and only
the church.


Traditionally, both in civilized and barbaric nations, the priesthood
alone had complete charge of the mental condition of the citizen.

As
a matter of great concern to the psychopolitician this tendency still
exists in every public in the Western World and scientific inroads into
this sphere have occurred only in official and never in public quarters.


The magnificent tool welded for us by Wundt would be as nothing
if it were not for official insistence in civilized countries that "scientific
practices" be applied to the problem of the mind. Without this
official insistence or even if it were to be relaxed for a moment, the
masses would grasp stupidly for the priest, the minister, the clergy,
whenever mental conditions came into question. Today in Europe
and America "scientific practices" in the field of the mind would not
last moments if not routinely enforced by officialdom.


Care must be taken to hide the fact that the incidence of insanity
has increased only since these "scientific practices" started to be
applied.

Much mention must be made of "the pace of modern living"
and other myths as the cause of the increased neurosis in the world.


We care nothing about what causes it if anything does. But we must
tolerate no evidence of any kind to get out and drive the public back
to the church.

If given their heads, if left to themselves
to decide, ndependent of officialdom, where they would place their deranged
loved ones the public would choose religious sanitariums and would
avoid as if plagued the places where "scientific practices" prevail.


Given any slight encouragement, public support would instantly
sweep all mental healing back into the hands of the churches.

And
there are churches waiting to receive it, clever churches. That terrible
monster, the Roman Catholic Church, still dominates mental
healing throughout the Christian world and well schooled priests are
always at work to draw the public back to the fold. Among
Fundamentalist and Pentecostal groups healing campaigns are conducted,
which, because of their results, win many to the cult of
Christianity.

In the field of pure healing, the Church of Christ Science
of Boston, Massachusetts excels in commanding the public favor and
operates many sanitariums.

All these must be swept aside.

They
must be ridiculed and defamed and every cure they advertise must
be labeled a hoax.

A full fifth of a psychopolitician’s time should be
devoted to smashing these threats.

Just as in Russia we had to
destroy the Church after many, many years of the most arduous
work, so we must destroy all faiths in nations marked for conquest.


Insanity must hound the footsteps of every priest and practitioner.

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The best testimonials to his skill must be turned into gibbering madmen
no matter what means we have to use.
You need not care what effect you have upon the public.

The effect
you care about is the one upon officials. You must recruit every
agency of the nation marked for slaughter into a foaming hatred of
religious healing.

You must suborn district attorneys and judges into
an intense belief as fervent as an ancient faith in God that Christian
Science or any other religious practice that might devote itself to
mental healing is vicious, bad, insanity-causing, publicly hated and
intolerable.


You must suborn and recruit any medical healing organization
into collusion in this campaign.

You must appeal to their avarice and
even their humanity to invite their cooperation in smashing all religious
healing and thus, to our end, care of the insane. You must see
that such societies have only qualified Communist-indoctrinees as
their advisors in this matter.

For you can use such societies. They are
stupid and stampede easily.

Their cloak and degrees can be used
quite well to mask any operation we care to have masked. We must
make them partners in our endeavor so that they will
never be able to crawl out from under our thumb and discredit us.
We have battled in America since the turn of the century to bring
to nothing any and all Christian influences and we are succeeding.
While today we seem to be kind to the Christian remember that we
have yet to influence the "Christian world" to our ends.

When that is
done we shall have an end of them everywhere. You may see them
here in Russia as trained apes.

They do not know their tether will
stay long only until the apes in other lands have become unwary.
You must work until "religion" is synonymous with "insanity".
You must work until the officials of city, county, and state governments
will not think twice before they pounce upon religious groups
as public enemies.
Remember, all lands are governed by the few who only pretend to
consult with the many. It is no different in America.

The petty official,
the maker of laws alike can be made to believe the worst. It is
not necessary to convince the masses.

It is only necessary to work
incessantly upon the official, using personal defamation, wild lies,
false evidence, and constant propaganda to make him fight for you
against the church or against any practitioner.
Like the official, the bona fide medical healer also believes the
worst if it can be shown to him as dangerous competition.

And like
the Christian, should he seek to take from us any right we have
gained, we shall finish him as well.
We must be like the vine upon the tree. We use the tree to climb
and then, strangling it, grow into power on its flesh.
We must strike from our path any opposition.

We must use for our
tools any authority that comes to hand. And then at last, the decades
having sped by, we can dispense with all authority save our own and
triumph in the greater glory of the Party.


to be continued to Chapter 15