“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of man is a requisite for their real happiness." Karl Marx (page 5)


Marx to  Gramsci

   Excerpts from

"Was Marx a Satanist?"

This book was written by Richard Wurmbrand, a faithful Romanian Christian who spent eight years in a Communist prison for sharing the Gospel and refusing to deny his Lord. His best known book is Tortured for Christ, his testimony of God's triumph in the midst of Communist persecution.

See Communist Exploitation of Religion: The Congressional Testimony of Richard Wurmbrand

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First, some background information about the uncompromising faithfulness of Pastor Wurmbrand from Voice of the Martyrs:

"Two months after the Communist 'People’s Republic of Romania' was established, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand was arrested. Labeled 'Prisoner Number 1,' he was locked in a solitary cell, where he endured horrendous torture at the hands of the brutal secret police. More than eight years later, 'a doctor masquerading as a Communist Party member discovered Richard alive.' Released in 1956, he 'resumed his work with the ‘underground’ churches....He was re-arrested in 1959 through the conspiracy of an associate, and sentenced to 25 years... accused of preaching ideas contrary to Communist doctrine."

"In 1967, Richard and Sabrina Wurmbrand founded a ministry that would serve the persecuted church. Its name was eventually changed to Voice of the Martyrs. By the mid-1980s, it was reaching out to "80 restricted nations with offices in 30 countries around the world." His book, Tortured for Christ, became a source of encouragement among the persecuted throughout the Soviet system."

Richard Wurmbrand's book about Karl Marx (1818 – 1883), a German "revolutionary socialist," begins with a rebuttal to this misconception: that Marx himself was a compassionate visionary who truly cared for the poor. In reality, both Marx and Engels grew up in wealthy families, far removed from the life of poverty. Together they pursued an anti-Christian utopia that -- from the beginning -- focused on political power, not on meeting the needs of the poor. Like today's seductive vision of change, their socialist/communist transformation required a "crisis" and a "purpose" that would capture public attention and provide the needed momentum.

Thomas Sowell summarized it well in his 1993 book, Is Reality Optional (Hoover Institution, p. 81):

"Running left-wing movements has always been the prerogative of spoiled rich kids. This pattern goes all the way back to the days when an over-indulged and affluent young man named Karl Marx combined with another over-indulged youth from a wealthy family named Friedrich Engels to create the Communist ideology.

"The phoniness of the claim to be a movement of the working class was blatant from the beginning. When Engels was elected as a delegate to the Communist League in 1847, in his own words, 'a working man was proposed for appearances sake, but those who proposed him voted for me.' It may have been the first rigged 'election' of the Communist movement but it was certainly not the last.... The anointed have always wanted to create their own kind of people, as well as their own kind of society."[13]

Next, ponder the following excerpts from Was Marx a Satanist?  Notice that Karl Marx was introduced early to Christianity. In his youth, he even appeared to be a devout Christian. But his views had radically changed soon after he finished the German high school.

Today one third of the world is Marxist. Marxism in one form or another is embraced by many in Capitalist countries, too. There are even Christians, yes, and clergymen, some of high standing, who are sure that while Jesus might have had the right answers about how to get to heaven, Marx had the right answers about how to help the hungry, destitute, and oppressed on earth.

"Marx, it is said, was deeply humane. He was dominated by one idea: how to help the exploited masses. What impoverishes them, he maintained, is capitalism. Once this rotten system is overthrown, after a transitional period of dictatorship of the proletariat, a society will emerge in which everyone will work according to his abilities in factories and farms belonging to the collective, and will be rewarded according to his needs. There will be... no wars, no revolutions, only an everlasting, universal brotherhood.... [p.5]

"Marx writes: "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of man is a requisite for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their conditions is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusion...."[p.6]

"Marx was anti-religious because religion obstructs the fulfillment of the Communist ideal which he considers the only answer to the world's problems."[p 6]

"...a new Marx began to emerge. He writes in a poem, “I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.”[p.7] So he was convinced that there is One above who rules....

Marx belonged to a relatively well-to-do family. He had not hungered in his childhood. He was much better off than many fellow students. What produced this terrible hatred against God? No personal motive is known.  ...why should he have written these lines in his poem Invocation of One in Despair[p.9]

So a god has snatched from me my all
In the curse and rack of destiny.
All his worlds are gone beyond recall!
Nothing but revenge is left to me!

I shall build my throne high overhead,
Cold, tremendous shall its summit be.
For its bulwark -- superstitious dread.
For its Marshall -- blackest agony.
[p.8]

The words “I shall build my throne high overhead” and the confession that from the one sitting on this throne will emanate only dread and agony, remind us of Lucifer’s proud boast: 'I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God.” (Isaiah 14:13)

But why does Marx wish such a throne? The answer is found in a little-known drama which he also composed during his student years. It is called Oulanem. To explain this title a digression is needed.[p.9]

There exists a Satanist church. One of its rituals is the black mass which Satanist priests recite at midnight....An orgy follows... [pp.10-11]

We will be able to understand the drama Oulanem only in the light of a strange confession which Marx made in a poem called The Player, later down-played by both himself and his followers:

The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain,
Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed.
See this sword? The prince of darkness sold it to me. -
For me beats the time and gives the signs.
Ever more boldly I play the dance of death.
[p.12]

Now I quote from [Marx's] drama Oulanem:

And they are also Oulanem, Oulanem.
The name rings forth like death, rings forth
Until it dies away in a wretched crawl.
Stop, I’ve got it now! It rises from my soul....


Yet I have power within my youthful arms
To clench and crush you [i.e., personified humanity] with tempestuous force,
While for us both the abyss yawns in darkness.
You will sink down and I shall follow laughing,
Whispering in your ears, “Descend, come with me, friend.”
[p.12]

The Bible which Marx had studied in his high school years... says that the devil will be bound by an angel and cast into the bottomless pit (abyssos in Greek: see Revelation 20:3). Marx wishes to draw the whole of mankind into this pit reserved for the devil and his angels....[pp.12-13]

Marx had loved the words of Mephistopheles in Faust, “Everything in existence is worth being destroyed.” Everything — including the proletariat and the comrades. Marx quoted these words.... Stalin acted on them and destroyed even his own family. [p.13]

The Satanist sect is not materialistic. It believes in eternal life. Oulanem, the person for whom Marx speaks, does not contest eternal life. He asserts it, but as a life of hate magnified to its extreme. It is worth noting that eternity for the devils means 'torment.” Thus Jesus was reproached by the demons: “Art you come hither to torment us before our time?” (Matthew 8:29)....

[Marx'] correspondence with his father testifies to his squandering great sums of money on pleasures and his constant quarreling with parental authority about this and other matters. Then he might have fallen in with the tenets of the highly secret Satanist church and received the rites of initiation. Satan, whom his worshippers see in their hallucinatory orgies, speaks through them. Thus Marx is only Satan’s mouthpiece when he utters in his poem Invocation of One in Despair the words, “I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.

Listen to the end of Oulanem:

If there is a Something which devours,
I’ll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins—
The world which bulks between me and the abyss
I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses....

In Oulanem Marx does what the devil does: he consigns the entire human race to damnation. Oulanem is probably the only drama in the world in which all the characters are aware of their own corruption, which they flaunt and celebrate with conviction. In this drama there is no black and white... All are satanic, corrupt, and doomed.[p.15]  

When he wrote these things, Marx... was eighteen. His life’s program had already been established. There was no word about serving mankind, the proletariat, or socialism. He wished to bring the world to ruin. He wished to build for himself a throne whose bulwark should be human shudder.[p.16]

   Wurmbrand found some "cryptic passages" as he read the letters between Marx and his father:

The son writes, "My holy of holies was rent asunder and new gods had to be installed."[p.16]

On March 2, 1837, Marx’s father writes to his son: “Your advancement, the dear hope to see your name being once of great repute, and your earthly well-being are not the only desires of my heart.... Only if your heart remains pure and beats humanly and if no demon will be able to alienate your heart from better feelings, only then will I be happy.” [p.16]                                                                  

What made a father express suddenly the fear of demonic influence upon a young son who until then had been a confessed Christian? Was it the poems he received as a present from his son for his 55th birthday? The following quotation is taken from Marx’s poem On Hegel:

Words I teach all mixed up into a devilish muddle.
Thus, anyone may think just what he chooses to think.
[p.17]

In his poem The Pale Maiden, he writes:

Thus heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well.
My soul, once true to God, is chosen for hell.
[p.20]

   Connections that led to socialism, then Communism

Marx met Moses Hess, the man who... made him embrace the Socialist idea. Hess calls him "Dr. Marx--my idol, who will give the last kick to medieval religion and politics."...[[p.20]

Georg Jung, another friend of Marx at that time, writes in 1841... that Marx will surely chase God from his heaven.... Marx calls Christianity one of the most immoral religions.
[p.20]

One of his partners in the First International was Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian anarchist, who wrote: "...here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds...[urges] him to disobey and eat the fruit of knowledge."... He writes: "In this revolution we will have to awaken the devil in the people, to stir up the basest passions."
[p.22]

Bakunin reveals that Proudhon, another major Socialist thinker and at that time a friend of Karl Marx, also “worshipped Satan.” ... Proudhon...declared that God was the prototype for injustice. "... Every step forward is a victory in which we overcome the Divine."... [p.23]

In Marx’s poems Invocation of One in Despair and Human Pride, man’s supreme ‘supplication is for his own greatness. If man is doomed to perish through his own greatness, this will be a cosmic catastrophe, but he will die as a godlike being, mourned by demons.

Marx' ballad The Player records the singer’s complaints against a God who neither knows nor respects his art. It emerges from the dark abyss of hell,

bedeviling the mind and bewitching the heart, and his dance is the dance of death....

Art emerging from the dark abyss of hell, bedeviling the mind.... This reminds us of the words of the American revolutionist Jerry Rubin in Do It: We’ve combined youth, music, sex, drugs, and rebellion with treason — and that’s a combination hard to beat.” [p.24]

In his poem Human Pride, Marx admits that his aim is not to improve the world, reform or revolutionize it, but simply to ruin it and enjoy it being ruined:

With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the face of the world,
And see the collapse of this pygmy giant whose fall will not stifle my ardor.
Then will I wander godlike and victorious through the ruins of the world
And, giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.
[p.24]

...The overriding reason for Marx’s conversion to Communism appears clearly in a letter of his friend Georg Jung to Ruge. It is not the emancipation of the proletariat, nor the establishing of a better social order. Jung writes: “If Marx, Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach associate to found a theological-political review, God would do well to surround himself with all his angels and indulge in self-pity, for these three will certainly drive Him out of heaven..." [p.24]

The man who convinced Engels to become a Communist was the same Moses Hess who had convinced Marx before. Hess writes after he met Engels in Cologne, “He parted from me as an over-zealous Communist. This is how I produce ravages.“ To produce ravages — was this Hess’s supreme purpose in life? It is Lucifer’s, too."
[p.28]

See From Marx to Lenin, Gramsci & Alinsky and

Communist Exploitation of Religion: Congressional Testimony of Richard Wurmbrand


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