Page 15 - The Basic Conflict between Christianity and Communism

the possessors of power have misused it—rulers have oppressed their subjects, the

rich have exploited the poor, the money-lender has squeezed the life-blood out of the
borrower, can make his case with the greatest of ease. The agonized cries of millions
of sufferers at the hands of their fellow-men, echo down the corridors of time. But
that every struggle in human annals has been a class-struggle or that “Every upheaval

in history was due to an economic cause” (Marx) or that every disturbance has been
occasioned by the exploitation by those who controlled “the means and sources of
production” of the laborers, is a masterpiece of over-simplification, a monstrous
perversion of the historic record, to be accepted and taken seriously only by the

fatuous, the ignorant, or the vicious.

Rather does human history show that struggles, wars, disturbances have been
between rival leaders within nations on about the same social level, impelled by the

sin of their own ambition, greed of territory, lust for power, or, cutting across national
boundaries with the same evil motivations Kings and rulers have sought universal
conquest and dominion.

Only in isolated cases is there a record of revolt of the lower classes against the
upper classes and those mostly in more recent centuries such as the Peasants War in
Germany in the sixteenth century and the French Revolution of the eighteenth century.
Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, the Holy Roman Empire of

Charlemagne, the conquests of Napoleon, powers ancient, medieval and modern
attained their positions of strength by international wars. Conflicts between economic
classes as such do not appear with any prominence at all. The most ancient nations on
earth yet in existence show economic grades from the very rich to the very poor that

have continued age-long, with very little change, which in spite of inequalities and
injustices innumerable have been accepted by the poor as well as by the rich. Marx’s
theory that in class-struggle is to be found the true interpretation of history is an
unfounded myth.

The very methods employed by the Marxists in their effort to establish their
socialist utopia in the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is further proof of the fallacy of
the thesis. They must agitate the working classes incessantly, slandering their

employers, inciting to strikes and violence and ultimate revolution, fanning into flame
the basest instincts of nature. If the revolutionary mind is the natural attitude of
workers toward their employers or to those who “control the sources and means of
production” and has always been so, then there should be no necessity to stir it up: it

would come about automatically: there would be no need of a loud and repeated shout

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