POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH'S DAVID BLAIR
Communism is a religion, a secular religion, and it has many, many parallels with the world's other great faiths.
Whether you choose to call their tenets 'delusions' or 'faith' depends whether you wish to discredit them or not.
It seems to me if you choose 'delusions,' which by the way I agree with, you must be consistent in applying it to other religions.
What could be more delusional than the stories of the Bible, into which so many millions put great trust.
Abraham thinking he must kill his son? Voices tell him otherwise? Today, he'd be labeled for what he likely was, a schizophrenic.
Jesus talking to Satan who tempts him with great offers? Pretty much the same case as Abraham, don't you think?
Tales of murder, rape, greed, brutality, idiocy, and what Mark Twain called 'upwards of a thousand lies'- that is a great deal of the Bible.
Look at Christian history, the bloodiest in all human history. Countless wars of religion, slaughters of aboriginals, terrors, slavery - all with millions and millions of victims.
Many Americans like to regard their nation as a Christian one - this is, of course, technically and legally incorrect, even the chief founders being mostly deists or skeptics wanting freedom from religion - yet the same people dropped two atomic weapons, on civilians. The same people slaughtered, often in horrible fashion, some three million in Vietnam. The same people practiced slavery on a massive scale for centuries.
Look at the irrational argument made for Israel (and there are other, rational arguments), that it was the Jewish homeland two thousand years ago. Clearly, by that logic, parts of Turkey belong to Greece owing to the Trojan War.
The world is full of this religious bilge, lacking all logic. Why regard the North Koreans any differently?
Communism will before long collapse there. It is inevitable. Communist societies carry the seeds of their own destruction from the beginning. You can't run a modern society on faith.
We need to be a bit concerned by their atomic materials when that happens, but we have seen several atomic-armed states go through political revolution without nuclear incident - Russia, China, and South Africa (given the technology by Israel and removed by the US after the collapse of apartheid) and if anyplace on earth is safe from terrorists it is a communist state.
