December 9, 2016 @ 6:30 AM
I'm currently doing a study on the "ten kings" of Revelation 17. Although it is turning out to be quite fascinating, it is also an arduous adventure and tedious trip through world history. In my study, I recently ran across a quote from Baron Roman von Unger-Sternberg, or as he is known today, the "Mad Baron." While I don't want anyone to take my sharing of his quote as sympathy with or support of his atrocious beliefs or behavior, the "Mad Baron" did understand the evil he was up against in his opposition to the Bolsheviks, the "majority" rule of Russia that eventually became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The "Mad Baron," out of frustration with his comrades' failure to see the evil beneath the thinly veiled benevolence of the Bolsheviks, said, "They cannot understand as yet that we are not fighting a political party, but a sect of murderers of all contemporary spiritual culture." He went on to justify his extreme cruelty toward Bolsheviks and their sympathizers by asking, "Why am I not allowed to rid the world of those who would kill the soul of the people?"
One of my great frustrations with my fellow-Christians today is their failure to see the evil beneath the thinly veiled benevolence and permeating philosophy of democratic socialism in today's America. While it is propagated by liberal Democrats for the most part, it is only faintly opposed by "conservative" Republicans and actually sympathized with by moderate ones. At heart, it is the same evil perpetrated by the Bolsheviks, government's usurpation of the place of God, making itself supreme and the final arbiter of the rights of the people.
Democratic socialism is far more than a political ideology. It's advocates and appeasers are, like the Mad Baron said of the Bolsheviks, "murderers of all contemporary spiritual culture," especially of the Christian Faith in the world today. While you may see democratic socialists as nothing more than misguided bleeding hearts determined to help the poor and downtrodden, they are really, as were the Bolsheviks, social Marxists who are hellbent on killing the soul of the people.