Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

„in its first stage.“ Lenin defined the law of the interim socialist stage in a very drastic way:
„In one place...a half dozen workers who shirk their work...will be thrown into prison. In another
place, they will be made to clean the lavatories. In a third place, they will be handed
yellow tickets-of-leave after having completed a term of imprisonment so that the entire population
might keep an eye on them as harmful elements until the time of their reformation. In a
fourth place, one out of ten who is guilty of laziness will be shot on the spot. In a fifth place,
one will devise a combination of different means.“ 34 A typical figure in this shady „interim
socialist stage,“ which was vicious even to its own adherents, was Stalin, of whom it is said in
the official biography published by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute that „with an iron hand“
he hunted down the „bankrupt creatures of Trotsky.“ He was „tireless in exposing the enemies
of Leninism“ and „liquidated“ these „monsters,“ this „scum of humanity.“ The „Soviet courts
of justice uncovered their crimes and condemned the Trotskyist monsters to be shot.“ The
entire people, however, „hung on the words of their wise and brilliant leader..., approved the
annihilation of the Trotskyist band, and went on with the order of the day.“ 35 When Khrushchev
exposed Stalin’s crimes at the twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union and pointed out „that Stalin had killed ninety-eight of the l39 members of the Central
Committee elected at the seventeenth party congress,“ „commotion, unrest, and dismay“
arose among the delegates. The protest of numerous scientists and poets of the Soviet Union
is an outcry of conscience against the „rule of violence“ which, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn
writes, „abuses the masses as dung for the prosperity of small minorities, and in the end only
of the final skimmings“ (NZZ, June 4, l974), and which has led to a new villeinage of entire
peoples. Impressed by the revelations of Solzhenitsyn and other eyewitnesses, numerous
young intellectuals in France coming from the radical left have for several years been passionately
attacking the Marxist ideology, especially André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Levy,
Jean-Marie Benoist, Philippe Nemo, Christian Jambet, Guy Landreau, Michel Guérin, and
Edgar Morin (the’ new philosophers’).
André Glucksmann calls the Soviet Union „capitalist and fascist“; Lenin has created „an incredible
apologia for a party equipped with an infallible doctrine.“(32a) Karl Marx, writes
Bernard-Henri Levy, is „the Machiavelli of this century“ and his system „an opium for the
people.“ 36
Second, it is characteristic for the ‘interim socialist stage’ that the dictatorship of the proletariat
arm itself for war against the non-Bolshevist countries. At the second conference of the
Friends of Peace in Moscow, it was declared: „We must never become tired of unmasking
these warmongers, these preachers of death, these werewolves...A curse on the American nuclear
cannibals! A curse on these demons!“ Lenin, however, left this legacy to Soviet imperialism:
„The fact that socialism is victorious in one land in no way excludes all wars at a single
stroke. On the contrary, it presupposes such wars.“ „Only after we have overthrown the bourgeoisie
throughout the entire world and not only in one land, completely defeated and expropriated
it, will wars become impossible.“ 37 Neither Marx nor Lenin dreamed that the socialist
states could threaten one another with war. The Peoples’ Republic of China reproaches the
Soviet Union with a „diabolical social imperialism“ and calls the occupation of the Czechoslovakian
Socialist Republic (August 20-2l, l968) the „most shameless revelation“ of power
politics of the „Soviet revisionist social imperialists“ (Neue Züricher Zeitung, August 22,
l973). „Their political power comes from their rifle barrels,“ said Mao. In the meantime, a
further split in the communist camp is taking place: Eurocommunism which alleges that it is
striving for power, not by oppressing the majority, but by „convincing the majority.“(33a) is
only after the total victory over the capitalist states that there begins in the Marxist pseudo
34 Ibid., 297.
35 Joseph Stalin (Berlin, 1945), passim.
36 Cf. Manfred Spieker, Neomarxismus und Christentum (Munich-Paderborn-Vienna, 1974), 48.
37 Lenin, Ausgewählte Werke (Moscow, 1946), I:878.
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