The Communist Tragedy

In two already classic works, Margarete Buber-Neumann, a German communist who took refuge in Moscow after Hitler’s victory, tells how she was deported to Siberia by Stalin, then handed over as a Jew to the Gestapo by the NKVD in 1940, and held prisoner at Ravensbruck. Upon her liberation from the camp in 1945, she recounts how she wandered around a devastated Germany and more particularly how she met up with French communists to whom she explained her double imprisonment. Their reaction was one of astonishment and then outright hostility and almost panic. What, there was collusion between the Little Father of the peoples and the Fürher, between the liberator of Man and the enemy of men? Between one system and the other there was just a difference of degree, not of nature? This was impossible. Had she herself not been manipulated by a fifth German column without knowing it? How could the doctrine of emancipation, Marxism-Leninism, turn into the doctrine of oppression? This exchange says it all.

Communism is remarkable in that it was criminal out of love for humanity. Which makes it the modern heresy of a certain Christianity and allows us to see in magnified form the flaws of the former. Marxist powers persecuted, and with great ferocity, Christians of all persuasions—Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox—but they took their principal concepts from that faith. What is the working class if not the redemptive class par excellence, the class that, being nothing, becomes everything? Marxist theoreticians envisioned future society as the earthly fulfillment of the scriptures. Rosa Luxemburg took her cue from the Church Fathers and saw in the communist dream the secular religion of the downtrodden. Che Guevara himself appears in his iconography as a modern reincarnation of Christ when he was known for his cruelty during the Castro revolution. In addition, both systems require a fundamentalist adherence that leaves no critical space in one’s consciousness. "Outside the Church, no salvation," said the Council of Trent in 1545, during the Counter-Reformation. Likewise, the various communist parties would not have words harsh enough to criticize reformist parties (social democratic ones or others) guilty of not wanting to be subsumed in them.