For the longest time I’ve had to read, hear and watch religious people rant about how Darwin’s theory of evolution laid out in his book On the Origin of Species is the cause of communism.
I just spent the better part of 2 hours watching what I expected to be a decent account of The Blood History of Communism, but boy was it let down. Enter the underlying Christian bias, effectively blaming all communism, its leaders and their ideology, and the deaths of however many countless millions of humans from the mid-late 1800s to 1970s on Darwin and his theory of evolution.
At one point the narrator translates a section spoken by Sociologist Fatih Kocaman:
…Communist ideologues and dictators such as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin are responsible for the deaths of some 50 million people. Communism literally turned the world into a slaughterhouse. Another ideologue who must share part of that responsibility is Charles Darwin. The man in other words who built the basis in natural history for the communist view as Karl Marx put it, “As they staged the bloody revolutions, committed ruthless massacres and waged their wars, communists were actually bringing Darwin’s theory to life.” That was a theory that regarded human beings as a species of animal. That believe that conflict and fighting were an unchanging law of nature. And that, most important of all, encouraged people to deny God, their Creator. That is why it will only be possible for mankind to be freed from communism and other bloody ideologies when the Darwinian deception is done away with. When mankind is woken from the spell of Darwinism and materialist philosophy it will come to know its Creator, God. And will live by the morality that he teaches. In fact, God tells us that we have to follow only His way. This is my path and it is straight, so follow it. Do not follow other ways or you will be cut off from His way. That is what He instructs you to do so that hopefully you may do your duty.
What absolute garbage. Just because a few powerful but ignorant men who decided to interpret the theory of evolution as illustrative of justifying materialism, and subsequently lead to communist regimes doesn’t mean that Darwin is to blame, nor that the theory of evolution is to blame. As far as I’m aware Darwin never espoused eugenics, or suggested that human were merely one more animal to be herded like sheep. That’s like blaming the deaths of anyone who’s ever been shot by a revolver on Samuel Colt (the man who first designed it). It becomes a non sequitur argument when you blame the founder of an idea or theory for its misinterpretation or misuse by others to justify their ideology, and in this case acts of murderous cruelty that killed millions.
One could just as easily turn to any religion and point at the millions of deaths lost as a result of religious conflict (i.e. the crusades), and say whoever wrote the bible is to blame as much as those leading the slaughters. When it comes down to it the writers of the bible aren’t equally to blame as those who decided to interpret it in a way that justified the killings of their enemies. Such megalomaniacal people would contort, twist, turn and bend any theory or idea in order to justify their actions and strengthen their position of power. We see people doing that with religious texts constantly. However, blaming the authors of such texts is senselessly futile, as would be blaming the assassination of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov on the creator of the umbrella, the instrument used to kill him.
At one point too they have a blatant scoff at atheism when they state that Stalin denounced his Christian beliefs that he was brought up with and became and atheist after having read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Sigh…
This whole connection made by the religious between Darwin, his theory of evolution and atheism with communist dictators has become so tiresome. And has been debunked and smashed time and time again by authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
Going back over the introduction to this ‘documentary’ I noticed something that should’ve tipped me off to the biased nature of this film. Darwin’s imagine put up alongside Stalin, Mao, Lenin and other communist dictators.
Communists do not have a monopoly on Darwinian evolution, or atheism for that matter. The writers of a documentary on communism, of all people, should know that.
