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Christ versus Plato, Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx


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By Lev Navrozov
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
Lev Navrozov

December 29, 2003

On the birthday of Christ, it is appropriate to compare Jesus with four Westerners who influenced the mental development of the world.

The Athenian philosopher Plato was admired at the Western universities throughout the millennium of their existence. Plato ascribed his wisdom to Socrates, who was generally considered among the educated in the West and Russia even in the 20th century the wisest person who had ever lived, the sage of sages. Published in 1987 by Professor Allen Bloom was a study entitled ÒThe Closing of the American Mind.Ó What is the cause? The American universities do not pay sufficient attention to Plato and Socrates.

The best known book of Plato-Socrates, written by Plato, since Socrates did not write but expressed himself orally, describes the ideal State and hence is entitled ÒThe State,Ó mistranslated into English as ÒRepublic,Ó though ÒrepublicÓ is a Latin, not Greek, word, and appeared after Plato's death.


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The ideal State of Plato-Socrates resembles the tyrannical Sparta, a mortal enemy of Athenian democracy, but this ideal State of Plato-Socrates is far more Spartan than Sparta. It is a country-wide cattle-breeding farm on which pedigree human cattle is raised. Men and women live separately, and a man and a woman, selected by the proper authorities to produce pedigree progeny, meet only for this ÒpairingÓ or Òcoupling,Ó the resulting child being taken away from them for proper collective upbringing and education. Provided the child satisfies the pedigree standards. Otherwise the child is destroyed. If it is born without the due pairing or coupling authorization, it is destroyed ipso facto then and there.

If someone is so sick that he or she cannot work, he or she should not be treated, but should be allowed to die as not fit for survival. If alive, he or she will mar the pedigree purity of the human cattle as a whole. The weak, the sick, those unable to work, must die off and thus make the pedigree human cattle as a whole stronger and healthier.

About 23 centuries after Plato, an English clergyman studying nature and named Darwin discovered that man had evolved from the monkey. All the more reason to breed human cattle on a country-wide cattle-breeding farm (or a zoo?). Darwin's contemporary (and disciple!) Nietzsche contended, with triumph, that man is the most predatory animal, a super-beast, a Òbestia.Ó The Romans used to say: ÒMan to man is a wolf.Ó But wolves have not been especially noticeable for attacking one another. On the other hand, a Mongol army, a pack of Mongols, would attack a city, and, unless it surrendered, the attackers not only killed its entire population but also smashed all the buildings into stones so small that it was impossible to find that the city ever existed.

If wolves could invent and write down proverbs, a wolf, wishing to put down wolves, would say: ÒWolf to wolf is a man.Ó

Marx invented not a ruthless war of nations or religions, but a ruthless war of classes. The rich are the enemy. The rich do not surrender? The rich should be destroyed. As the Internationale was sung: ÒThe entire old world of coercion we will raze to the ground.Ó As the Mongols razed to the ground a city that would not surrender.

Christ was born to a Jewish woman, named in English ÒMary,Ó grew up as a Jew, spoke, read, and wrote no language except Hebrew, spent all his life and died in a Jewish country, and had only Jews as disciples. According to Luke 2:47, when Jesus was twelve, Mary and Joseph discovered the boy in the Temple, Òsitting among the TeachersÓÑthe rabbis. Jesus was like a prodigy child matching at twelve the Teachers of forty or eighty. ÒEveryone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.Ó

Jesus did, indeed, become, when he was Òabout thirty years oldÓ (Luke 3:23), a Teacher, teaching his disciples not within orthodox synagogues but in the streets and in the bosom of nature. Jesus said that he was not to Òabolish the Law and the Prophets [that is, Judaism], but to fulfill them.Ó (Matthew 5:17).

To put this into a modern lay language, it can be said that thus a scientist of genius does not abolish his science created before him, but ÒfulfillsÓ it. Accordingly, the Christian Holy Bible consists of the Judaic (Hebrew) Old Testament Christ knew so well already at the age of twelve, and the New Testament Christ created, to ÒfulfillÓ the Old Testament.

What was it that Christ created to ÒfulfillÓ Judaism?

Nietzsche applied to himself the name Òanti-Christ.Ó He used to say that Christianity is the worst evil in history. Had Jesus been an essayist, able to see his opponents for twenty centuries ahead, and five centuries behind, he would have called himself anti-Plato, anti-Nietzsche, anti-Darwin, and anti-Marx. The first and the last (in the social hierarchy or in Plato's opinion) may be the last and the first (in human value). If you are rich, give away your wealth to the poor. Do not resist evil with equally evil or more evil evil. Blessed are not the strongest fighting men, but the weak (such as women and children), the meek, the suffering, the poor, the unfit for survival, and they need thy compassion, pity, and help.

Of course, for example, the notion of charity looms large in Judaism. But Christ made it a critical spiritual need as for Nietzsche, who protected a horse against blows with his own body (see below).

To the four opponents, Christ would have said:

To Plato: Fortunately, your State is a figment of your infinitely arrogant imagination.

To Nietzsche: When you saw a horse being beaten, you rushed to protect the poor creature with your body, you were weeping, you were pronounced to be insane, and you thought that you were me, crucified.

To Darwin: The higher organized life is, the more unfit it is for survivalÑmankind may yet destroy itself, while grass may continue to grow.

To Marx: Your war of classes will lead to nothing except death and destruction.

What happened in the fourth century is as strange as Nietzsche's attempt to protect a horse with his own body. The Roman Empire, obsessed with power, including wars of expansion, and with wealth, including wars of acquisition of wealth, adopted the teaching of Christ after three centuries of persecution of Christians starting with the crucifixion of Christ.

How did Christianity change Christendom? Wars continued, but there appeared a Christian-aristocratic knighthood, chivalry, rules of war, while two Chinese colonels published at the close of the 20th century ÒUnrestricted Warfare,Ó denying any rules. Infectious microbes were discovered in the 19th-century Europe, which has not, however, waged bacteriological war.

Christendom never practiced the Mongolic, Chinese, Nazi, or Soviet mass exterminations, though the British empire came close to them in its Imperial zeal, helped by Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase Òthe struggle for the survival of the fittestÓ used by Darwin as basic to his evolution. Spencer argued that the British were the fittest for the survival and a high death rate among colonial nations merely contributed to the pedigree health of the human race.

Charity became a common notion. As it was in Judaism. Many Americans do not understand that Òdemocratic socialismÓ and Christian Socialists in Europe had nothing to do with Marx. The word ÒsocialismÓ came into use in France and England soon after 1825 and had been probably coined by Auguste Comte, a mathematician and the founder of sociology (also his word). What has been called in the United States Òsocial benefits,Ó Òsocial security,Ó Òwelfare,Ó etc., can also be called socialism, which sprang from the same Judaic-Christian notion of charity. The manifesto that Marx and Engels published in 1848 was entitled ÒThe Communist [not Socialist!] ManifestoÓ and proclaimed a world proletarian revolution, that is, a world class war to seize power all over the world. They condemned peaceful socialism, stemming from the Christian notion of charity and Christianity itself as enemy devices to delay a world proletarian revolution.

Lenin and his Bolsheviks or Communists persecuted the Russian democratic socialists as their worst foes, traitors, and criminals.

As for sociology, even after the death of Marx and Engels, the orthodox Marxists (in Soviet Russia and post-1949 China, for example) considered it a Òbourgeois pseudo-scienceÓ up to the 1960s!

The suspension of Christianity in Lenin's Russia and Hitler's Germany, as well as the advent of Marxism in Mao's China, led to class or ethnic mass exterminations with the implication that human beings can be exterminated the way animals are, for human beings are animals that should be bred like cattle, and the war for survival must be as ruthless as unrestricted warfare in the two Chinese colonels' recent book.

Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.

December 29 2003

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