Assessing the Blame for Communist Evil

GOD’S Word states that “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap”. (Galatians 6:7) Making an interesting comment as to who helped sow the seed that is now being reaped by the nations in the form of that threat to world peace, international communism, is the following item, which appeared in the Edinburgh (Scotland) Evening News, December 26, 1952:

“The weapon of communism could not have been created but for the failure of the West to make an effort to master its own evils at home, states a leading article in the January issue of ‘Life and Work’, the magazine of the Church of Scotland. The Communist weapon—a weapon of ideas—was a Western creed created out of the West’s failure to master mass poverty, a creed conceived in Germany and brought forth in England. ‘It is a stolen weapon, the standing proof to the East, it may seem, that the West cannot produce evidence of its power and will to attack the want and hunger of the Eastern millions.’

“Did we remember that Russia had been the victim of Western aggression century after century and had come to regard the West with suspicion because of its long record of hostility? ‘When we speak of Communist aggression to-day how many of us remember that against this background it is defensive, the determination to break free of a threat which has never been long absent from Russian minds? We are guilty of superficial thinking when we say that we can’t understand how Soviet Russia can possibly consider herself threatened to-day by the “purely defensive” armaments of the West. Soviet Russia is holding in her mind, as suffering people always do, a long history of fear; she is not looking only at her immediate environment.’

“The Christian Battle”

“It was because of our failure to get to the roots of this old fear and new hope that we were seeing in our day the passing of the initiative from the West to the East in ideological, as distinguished from material, weapons. ‘We may contain Russia by the threat of atomic weapons, but we cannot win the Christian battle of the world by them and it is this battle which is now before us.’ One reality was what we had in our hearts to do for our hungry, ill-clad, sick neighboring nations, who were two-thirds of the human family. We were being judged by our attitude, our will, our desire, our concern, and our caring.”