Politics and the Church – The Church and the Liberal / Progressive / Communist Threat [Part 47]

As I prepare to write “Politics and the Church” each week I must do lots of research to make sure that my commentaries are factual and beneficial in helping the reader make personal decisions about life choices.  Recently I have been writing about liberalism/progressivism/and communism.  It is beyond me to understand how civil, educated citizenry can fall for such philosophy of life.  Is it the desire to get something for nothing?  Or is it a failure to be able to recognize the blessings and opportunities we have already been granted?  Are our churches taking the time to point these out or is the focus so much on the afterlife that there is no time to remind people of the blessings we already have on earth?  We do not have to search far to see that some of the driving forces in the world today are greed. envy, and the pursuit of power; the same forces that drive Satan.

     Today we will look at the efforts by one man who has done more, if not the ultimate, to destroy mankind.  He is a man that many believe has even beat out Adolph Hitler, as his conquest for power has had worldwide impact.  That man is Khrushchev.  He presented himself to the world as an able leader of his nation while behind the scenes he used tyranny of an extent almost unheard of throughout history.

     By 1955 it was apparent that the most vicious kind of political in-fighting was being waged in Moscow by the Communist contestants for Stalin’s ‘throne’. Already one of the players, Beria, and his aides had been shot.  Of all the power shifts and secret battles behind the scenes in Moscow and the Kremlin, a personality emerged on top of the conspiratorial heap.  That was Nikita Khrushchev.  At the time he was not well known in the West.  A US Congressional committee wanted to know about this new leader, so they invited witnesses who had known him to come and testify.  The stories they told were gruesome and ugly.  He was revealed to be a creature of criminal cunning with an all-consuming passion for power.  This was the man that millions of people would line up behind for leadership.  What they wanted was not what they got; and what they got they soon learned was what their ignorance deserved.

     Khrushchev’s loyalty to Communism was the blind, senseless kind.  He was raised almost as an illiterate.  He did not get an elementary education until after he had become a full-grown adult.  As a boy he was a shepherd but later learned the trade of blacksmith and locksmith.  At 17 he ran away from his home village in Ukraine.  For several years he was a roaming itinerant worker, but in 1918 he joined the Communist Party and fought with the Red Army during the Russian Civil War.  Finally in 1922 he started his formal education which lasted three years.  By 1929 his dogged party loyalty had won him a berth in the Joseph Stalin Industrial Academy, and by 1931 he had become a local party official in Moscow.  He won favor with Stalin by joining the drive to purge Stalin’s enemies from the local party machinery.  More than 500 men and women were turned over to the secret police for execution.  Stalin was impressed with Khrushchev’s capacity to kill and turn on old friends when party policy demanded it.  Khrushchev was assigned the task of going back to the Ukraine and forcing his own people to live under the lash of total Communist suppression.  The Red leaders there had been using wholesale executions to stifle resistance.  Khrushchev had a better way.  He would use mass starvation!

     Evidence of the man-made elimination efforts by Khrushchev were told by witnesses… stories of famine, suffering, and death:

Nicholas Prychodoko, a past resident of Kiev, said…”I observed covered wagons moving along the street on which I lived and also on other streets.  They were hauling corpses for disposal…These were peasants who flocked to the cities for some crust of bread…My personal friend…was a surgeon at a hospital in the Ukraine…he put a white frock on me, just as he was in a white frock, and we went outside to a very large garage in the hospital area.  He and I entered it.  When he switched on the light, I saw 2,000 to 3,000 corpses laid along the walls…. they were victims of starvation.”  The reason for such deaths was punishment for the various kinds of resistance to the Communist government in Ukraine.  They starved as the result of a man-made famine in the thirties.  It is estimated that the totals in Ukraine alone were 6 to 7 million, most of them peasants.  (The Crimes of Khrushchev, House Committee on Un-American Activities, September 1959, Part 2, pp. 1-2).  As a reward, Khrushchev was appointed by Stalin to the powerful Central Committee of the Communist hierarchy in Moscow.  Because of continued unrest, he was sent back to the Ukraine as its political dictator in 1938.  Once again, the purges started.  When World War II broke out and the Nazis moved in, the Germans were welcomed by the Ukrainians as liberators.  Khrushchev, forever vengeful, before fleeing for Moscow, poured out his retribution once again.  When the Nazis arrived, they found numerous mass graves.  In one area alone, there were over 90 mammoth burial plots containing approximately 10,000 bodies of ‘peasants, workers, and priests’, each with hands tied behind their backs and a bullet in the head.  

    After the Germans were driven out in 1944, Khrushchev returned to the Ukraine determined to annihilate the ‘collaborationists’.  Whole segments of the population were deported.  A complete liquidation of the principal Christian churches was launched, ‘people’s leaders’ were arrested and executed, and the NKVD was turned loose on the populace with terrible ferocity intended to terrorize the people and to eliminate all resistance to the Communist reoccupation.  Khrushchev gained the title “Hangman of the Ukraine”.  Because Khrushchev had so completely demonstrated his dedication to Stalin, in 1949 he was returned to Moscow as the secretary of the powerful Central Committee.  Because of sluggish centralized farm organization, he was given the assignment to produce more food.  This time his terror tactics failed, and Khrushchev could only raise enough food to keep the people at a bare-subsistence level.  This was the status of Khrushchev at the time of Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953.

     Because the Stalin/Khrushchev ‘team’ has ‘contributed’ so much to the problems the world experiences today, we will continue to follow the history next week.  We face competing kingdoms being built today by politically powerful adversaries that do not hold a Christian worldview, and they intend to rule us.  If we do nothing, they will enslave us in totalitarianism, remove our Constitutional liberties, and ban our religious expression, forcing us to practice their beliefs or endure government punishment at their hands.  It would not be a world first.  It is not necessary to explain the threats of Islamist political ideology.  Many totalitarian Muslims understand dominion, and they are on a global march.  They intend to rule the world, unless we are willing to establish permanent liberty in our land.  The American left is not sitting idly by and does not want peace and harmony.  They are well organized, intend to rule over us, and are already taking political dominion incrementally every day, not just for their own expression but to forbid ours.  They frequently use discrimination as a weapon, but what they actually legislate is forced participation in sin.  If we fail to defend liberty, tyrants will rule us.  They fear the name of Jesus Christ and will do all they can to eliminate it in public statements and in determining public policy.  Our Christian pastors and congregations are on the front lines of this battle.  The enemy will win if this ‘front line’ collapses.

– Bob Munsey

“Politicians are the same all over.  They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.”  Nikita Khrushchev, Russian Soviet politician (If anyone knows about such promises, it is Khrushchev.)