Whittaker Chambers, Communism, and Islam

Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam… Those who accept Bolshevism become impervious to scientific evidence, and commit intellectual suicide. ...Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Islam rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world.

Monnerot made very explicit connections between pre-modern Islamic and 20th century Communist totalitarianism. ...He elucidates these two primary shared characteristics of Islam and Communism: “conversion”—followed by subversion—from within, and the fusion of “religion” and state.

…There is a resemblance between the use made of Marxism by the present masters of the totalitarian world and the conversion of nomadic barbarians… they threatened, namely…Like Stalin’s Marxism, their conversion [to Islam] gave them the pretext for disrupting civilization from within]; as converts they were able to attack in the name of the true Faith the very societies which had brought the Faith to them. In the same way the Marxist chiefs of totalitarian Russia attack Western society from within, attempting to destroy the social structure of European countries for the sake of the socialism to which these countries themselves gave birth…Communism takes the field both as a secular religion [emphasis in original] and as a universal State [emphasis in original]; it is therefore…comparable to Islam…Soviet Russia (to use the name it gives itself, although it is a mis-description of the regime) is not the first empire in which the temporal and public power goes hand in hand with a shadowy power which works outside the imperial frontiers to undermine the social structure of neighboring States. -------------------- Whittaker Chambers (April 1, 1901-July 9, 1961)

"Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom."

“Both groups profess a totalitarian doctrine, with complete and final answers to all questions on heaven and earth; the answers are different in every respect, alike only in their finality and completeness, and in the contrast they offer with the eternal questioning of Western man....” The humorist who summed up the Communist creed as “There is no God and Karl Marx is his Prophet” was laying his finger on a real affinity. The call to a Communist Jihad, a Holy War for the faith — a new faith, but against the self-same Western Christian enemy — might well strike a responsive note.”

"One of the first acts of the new Communist International was to call a 'Congress of the Peoples of the East' in Baku in September 1920. Although the emphasis at this congress was on antiwesternism rather than on a 'proletarian' revolution, the leaders were Comintern figures: Zinoviev, Radek, Bela Kun. About 2,000 easterners were present, including 235 Turks, 192 Persians, 157 Armenians, and a few Chinese.

....Zinoviev brought a long speech to a passionate oratorical climax with the following outburst: 'The real revolution will blaze up only when the 800,000,000 people who live in Asia unite with us, when the African continent unites, when we see that hundreds of millions of people are in movement. Now we must kindle a real holy war against the British and French capitalists.....We must say that the hour has struck when the workers of the whole world are able to arouse tens of millions of peasants, to create a Red Army in the East, to arm and organize uprisings in the rear of the British, to poison the existence of every impudent British officer who lords over Turkey, Persia, India, China.' At this moment the audience, mostly clad in colorful oriental costumes, sprang up. Swords, sabers, and revolvers were flourished in the air, while the vow of jehad, or holy war, was pronounced. Radek endeavored to conjure up the spirit of Tamerlane and Genghiz Khan. After saying that the East, under capitalist oppression, created a philosopy of patience, he added:

'We appeal, comrades, to the spirit of struggle which once animated the peoples of the East when they marched against Europe under the leadership of their great conquerors. And when the capitalists of Europe say that there is the menace of a new wave of barbarism, a new wave of Huns, we reply: Long live the Red East, which, together with the workers of Europe, will create a new culture under the banner of communism.'

Although the immediate results were limited, the congress showed the direction and trend of the Comintern's drive in the Orient."

FACTS ON COMMUNISM, Volume II, The Soviet Union, From Lenin to Khrushchev, Committee On Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Sixth Congress, Second Edition, December 1960

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