The bezbozhniki.
Supposedly extinct, they live among us yet today.
The bezbozhniki were the members of the League of the Militant Godless (Soyuz voinstvuyushchikh bezbozhnikov) formed in the early 1920’s by the Soviets as one of their first major efforts in social engineering (the “militant” part was added in 1929 as Stalin’s cultural revolution began to gain steam).
At their peak in the early 1930’s, the organization claimed over 5.5 million dues paying members.
Peter Hitchens, in a brilliant Christmas Day article headlined “The last Noël in the USSR” (originally published in 1990), noted how the organization mysteriously disappeared during the German assault on Russia during WWII.
It seems, as my father and grandfather asserted, there are no atheists in foxholes.
Whatever success was attributed to the League and its organizing against religion was more likely due to the raw exercise of state power that resulted in the closure of tens of thousands of churches and the arrest of many priests. The League was invented to get the people to do the dirty work themselves, but the state eventually grew weary of their slow progress and just used the organization as cover to do what they wanted to do in the first place - remove God from the Soviet playing field.
Conventional wisdom says the League of Militant Godless was a failure. Perhaps as an organized movement against God, the League is a footnote of history, but as Encyclopedia dot com notes that despite its ultimate failure:
“…the League put into clear relief the regime's fundamental approach to the task of social transformation. Highlighting Bolshevism's faith in the power of organization and building on the tradition of Russian bureaucracy, the regime emphasized the organizational manifestation of a desired sentiment to such an extent that it eventually superseded the actual sentiment. The state of atheism in Soviet Russia was essentially the same as the state of the League, as far as the regime was concerned. As long as the League was visible, the regime assumed that it had achieved one of its ideological goals. Moreover, the atheism promoted by the League looked a great deal like a secular religion. Here the regime appeared to be taking the path of least resistance, by which fundamental culture was not changed but simply given a new gloss. This approach boded ill for the long-term success of the Soviet experiment with culture and for the Soviet Union itself.”
Notice how there is nothing new under the sun?
You should because today’s bezbozhniki use the same 1920’s playbook.
As an ideology (maybe a theology?), the impetus behind the League still exists today. Recent examples are all the hate filled, condescending comments left on many people’s Facebook and other social media posts that were merely wishing people a Merry Christmas.
But it isn’t just limited to social media.
A few days ago, Tiffany Cross, a MSNBC host, asked Michael Harriot, a Guardian columnist, about his Christmas/New Year's plans. Harriot said he was raised celebrating Kwaanza, then added:
"I'm always having the woke Christmas. So, you know, I'm always hating on Christmas, and telling everybody that Kwaanza is a better holiday than Christmas. So that's my favorite thing to do, just hating on Christmas. Christmas would have your children believe an obese white man broke into your house and left presents for them. Is that what you want your kids to think about the gifts you worked hard all year to buy?"
So, not only anti-Christian, but racist, too.
Got it.
Christmas celebrates the birth of Christ, the redeemer of every soul (regardless of race) who accepts Him. Kwanzaa is a holiday invented by Maulana Karenga, a Marxist activist and black nationalist, that in his words, is rooted in “the best in nationalist, Pan-Africanist, and socialist thought”.
So, its own creator defines Kwanzaa as a socialist, black nationalist holiday, which is not surprising as Kwanzaa and Critical Race Theory share the same racist intellectual foundations and arose together as movements.
It seems important to note that Karenga was born Ronald McKinley Everett, was convicted of felony assault, torture, and false imprisonment in 1971, paroled in 1975 and followed many unrepentant felonious Marxists into academia, he now chairs the Africana Studies Department at California State University, Long Beach.
Not that there is anything wrong with that. I’m sure he was a political prisoner just as he claimed.
But I digress.
In practice, today’s bezbozhniki follow an asymmetric movement, the targets of which are as ubiquitous as they are opportunistic. The only unifying themes are that the targets must be anti-capitalist and anti- Judeo-Christian – essentially anything rooted in Western civilization, culture or rituals is fair game.
It may sound like something out of the DC or Marvel universes, but the contemporary movement is more accurately tagged as the League of Militant [X], with “X” a variable with infinite boundaries, one standing in for any idea, speech, action, or entity giving offense to the bezbozhniki at any point in time.
“X” in the League of the Militant [X] could be:
Vaccinated Faucites
Maskers
Critical Race Theory Believers
Brandonites
But there is one replacement for that variable that works no matter what – united by their ultimate goals, somewhat unsurprisingly the same as the goal of the original League of the Militant Godless – just replace “X” with the word “Statists”.
I have faith the contemporary League of the Militant Statists is just as much a Potemkin village as the old League.
These movements all suffer from the same critical structural weakness. Their motivating and organizing force, their reason for existing, is statism, and statism has never and can never work for one simple reason – its imposition requires contradicting every single civilizational and societal value it claims to deliver.
The name may change, but the game remains the same.
The only thing that changes is the level of pain people are willing to endure through these historical cycles before realizing any form of statism, whether it is called collectivism, socialism, Marxism or communism, is not in the interest of humanity and decide to stop it.
Tick tock.