USSR wasnt just atheist, it was literally an atheist theocracythey had their own state-sponsored religion: MARXISMmarxism = communism = worship of the proletariatlenin/stalin = high priests, enforcing dogma and purging hereticsgulags = inquisitorial torture chambers for thoughtcrimemarxist ideology = holy scripture, unquestionable and infalliblesoviets = church of marx, collecting tithes (taxes) and spreading the gospel (propaganda)> https://www.jstor.org/stable/40969497This is what americans actually believed in 50s.
>>17437520Yes. Like how modern liberalism is a religion where climate change disaster replaced Revelation, alcohol replaced The Lord's Supper, and The Constitution replaced the Bible
>>17437552More like wokeness is a neoabrahamic religion>climate change allarmism replaced apocalypticism>transgenderism replaced circumsition, eunuchs and castration>critical race theory replaced original sin (your ancestors were evil whether they were the white race or Adam and Eve)>whites kiss the feet of niggers the same way holy Roman emperors did the pope (humiliation rituals)>shitty dyed hair replaced shitty monk tonsure
>>17437520>marxist ideology = holy scripture, unquestionable and infallibleI don't think anyone in the Soviet Union actually read any Marxist or Leninist works, they never talk about them after the revolutionary period. Maybe they mandated it in school or something. By and large the Soviet Union had its own entirely idiosyncratic state ideology that just used Marx as an aesthetic saint
>>17437595its weird because in china they still take marx and other leftist authors like that still very seriously ignoring the revisionist nature of the chinese economy and on rednote it's basically chinese people trolling the fuck out of americans coming on
>>17437589Trans is based
>These are not analogiesAnd yet they're analogies.
>>17437595I graduated from university while Ceausescu's regime was still in power. Marx, Engels and Lenin were treated like the Talmud or the Ten Commandments: it was customary to make allusions to them and the countless volumes were on the bookshelf behind the desk of every professor and party functionary, but nobody read them except excerpts quoted in the framework of other topics, like we had a 'Philosophy' course and a 'Political economy' course.I do agree with the idea that communism is a religion, in fact I have posted about this parallel multiple times on various fora. the parallels go much farther than OP suggests. bearded prophets. promised glorious future for the worthy and chosen. in general a divine plan for history. priesthood = party agitators. week-end liturgy = communist saturday (look it up). thoughtcrimes and inquisition. attempts to fill up your entire time with religious activity like community work. index of prohibited books. stranglehold on education. sexual puritanism (except in the DDR and to some extent in Hungary for some reason). monumental buildings for the glory of the party. the party is in the background, not directly governing. everything good and worthy came out of the Soviet Union, specifically from its ethnic russian part (all discoveries and inventions were made by some obscure schoolteacher in some middle-of-the-mud russian village before the globally acknowledged inventor). heretics who were almost but not entirely as communist as the ruling class were a much bigger bogeyman than the U S of A. incessant reference to communist conscience. etc.I fucking hate abrahamic religions, and the reason is not that communists indoctrinated me (I was a rather open cultural christian until 1989). I hate them because they resemble communism, which btw. is not just another religion but another jewish one. it's amazing how even YHWH can be left out from abrahamism and it still works the same.
OTOH I disagree that these regimes were atheist theocracies. atheism got a very short script, it was treated as a matter of course, then we moved on. there weren't specifically atheist classes or subjects. it's weird, seeing how out of the many specifics of communism atheism is in the forefront of western right-wing thinking, when viewed from the inside it was just another irrelevant stance of communists, like those about the future purely communist society.
>>17437520It is blatantly clear that Communism is the end goal of AtheismAtheists refuse to accept that because they don't want to associate their belief with a system that keeps on failing. Literally, not real atheism
even Albania couldn't successfully destroy all religion. And, stalin made several alliances with the ordobox church, Marxism-Leninism is, in itself, a neo-ascetic religion: personal luxury is bad, living lavishly is bad, opulence, private-life libertinage ,and deviancy is bad.The soviet union had MORE in common with a Calvinist Theocracy, than with the "liberal capitalism" of the modern USA>noo! don't get drunk every day! think of The Working People!>no! don't be a homeless welfare moocher, WORK IS GOOD, actually! laziness is a ""sin""the true revolutionaries living in the soviet lands, would have been NEETs who break a limb with farm equipment to get disabilitybux and be-catered to
>>17437771yet the irony is that you couldn't even read the complete unexpurgated works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in communist countries. only elite party brass had access to those while everyone else got an edited edition designed to support whatever the current party line is, which can change at any time. this is still true in China. any book stall will have copies of Mao Zedong's writings but always an edited version to back up whatever the CCP currently promotes.
>>17437816that sounds oddly similar to religious groups (ISKCON, mormonism, etc) having such huge controversy over different variations of their holy books, or even Luthers' (mistaken, but anyways) accusations that the catholic church "withheld" the Latin Bible, hence the explosion of vernacular versions
It's fair game to compare features of non-religious institutions to religions, and line up commonalities on how these different kinds of institutions are developed, how they function, the role they take in societies. Ideologies, corporations, governments, even fanbases -- lots of things can be looked at this way. Perfectly legit exercise.But you cross a bright line when you say they're literally one and the same. And you cannot be forgiven. People identify this or that as a "religion" or "cult" all the time, colloquially. We all get what they mean -- that in some ways it resembles some church. We get that the "high priest" of woke or whatever is a figure of speech. Everyone understands religion to refer to an establishment of belief involving the spiritual and/or supernatural. It's really that cut and dry. It's why we have a word for that. I frankly don't believe anyone sincerely holds a different definition, but they'll sometimes pretend in order to make a lame point.
>>17437520Marxism isn't atheism. Go read what Stalin said. Atheism was just a tool to remove the other religions, to install the Marxism cult.
>>17437816I have no doubt certain works were purged (like some of Lenin's journal articles), but I really doubt available works were censored. nobody would read them anyway, who got the time to wade through mind-numbing banalities? the policy seemed to be to make the population uniformly dislike even the idea of thinking about political stuff, not even primarily by means of threats (although it wasn't safe to discuss politics) but by means of suggesting it's absolutely boring, sterile hogwash everyone should be happy not to have to touch for the rest of his life after escaping school.
>>17437790atheists think theists are stupid for believing fairy tales of middle-eastern goatfuckers. that's the whole extent of it.
>>17437706Yeah it's a thing and you can degrees in Marxism at universities, and I think materialist dialectics is taken as the floor approach in primary school curriculum, so it can filter out to people. So, in high schools for example, when there's discussions of world religions, I think the curriculum is written by the party to approach it that way, like how religin is a superstructure in a given mode of production. An interesting thing is that most Chinese never practiced Abrahamic religion but Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, and I think that reflects in their Marxism. They've pivoted a lot since Mao but the communist ideology still has power there, and there are things they which don't seem as inexplicable when you consider that the government is run by a bunch of atheist materialists. There's a lot of futurism in the propaganda too:https://youtu.be/eNX4lCtzJOsAlso the state runs the media. They have that Soviet approach that media/communications is a tool that can either "educate/enlighten" or poison people's minds, which creates a reason for regulating it and censoring things, but I don't think it's totally cynical or just because the party wants to maintain its monopoly (although it definitely does).The term "revisionist" is also kind of weird and not something I've ever really understood. It's often thrown around to mean "not doing like the USSR under Stalin in the 1930s," but I've read within Marxist theory that it's like "over-emphasizing the particular/private at the expense of the general/common.">>17437771>the party is in the background, not directly governing.Yes. It's like a shadow organization that mirrors every other institution in society.>I hate them because they resemble communism, which btw. is not just another religion but another jewish one. Yuri Slezkine said basically that in The Jewish Century. He was a Soviet Jew, born in the 50s. But he didn't like the USSR, as many didn't then, although it was different earlier on.
>>17437826>that sounds oddly similar to religious groups (ISKCON, mormonism, etc) having such huge controversy over different variations of their holy booksI've thought the constant splitting of American Marxist sects mirrors Protestantism, and you end up with different groups that go through all kinds of mutations.>I have no doubt certain works were purged (like some of Lenin's journal articles), but I really doubt available works were censored. It depended on when. Reading about the Stalinist era in the USSR, it was so repressive I find it hard to believe, unimaginable, but it was real. Then a lot of stuff that was censored and repressed was reversed after he died and became available again. Mikhail Pokrovsky, one of Russia's top Marxist historians, had his work suppressed and historians of the "Pokrovsky School" were labeled a nest of unpatriotic "pests, spies and terrorists." Basically there was a selective rehabilitation of Tsarism going on (and particularly the issue of the Russian Empire's various wars, which the Stalinist regime began to promote as having "progressive significance") and Pokrovsky's work was getting in the way of that.
