State of Mankind

How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World


Chapter Ten: Using the Law for Evil


Table of Contents

1. Law and Faith

2. Law: An Instrument of Tyranny in Communist Regimes
a. Extralegal Policies of State Terror
b. Ever-Changing Standards of Right and Wrong
c. The Chinese Communist Party: Official Neglect of the Law

3. How Communism Warps Law in the West
a. Subverting the Moral Foundations of the Law
b. Seizing the Powers of Legislation and Promulgation
c. Passing Evil Laws
d. Restricting Law Enforcement
e. Using Foreign Laws to Weaken U.S. Sovereignty

4. Restoring the Spirit of the Law

References

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1. Law and Faith

Law is the iron force of fairness and justice that affirms good and punishes evil. What is good and what is evil must be determined by those who write the laws. From the perspective of faith, these criteria come from gods. Religious scripture provided the basis for the laws that govern human society.

The Code of Hammurabi in ancient Babylon is the first written law in human history. Engraved in the stone tablet, above the code itself, is a powerful scene: Shamash, god of the sun and justice, bestows the laws to King Hammurabi. This is the depiction of a god granting a human sovereign the authority to govern his people using the rule of law.

For the Hebrews, the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament were considered to be simultaneously divine as well as secular law — a tradition that became the foundation of Western legal culture. Starting with fourth-century Roman emperors and the East Roman Justinian I and his successors and continuing to Alfred the Great, the first of Britain’s Anglo-Saxon kings, the legal system took the Ten Commandments of Moses and Christian doctrine as their inspiration. [1]

Followers of religion believe that in order to be considered legitimate, the law must accommodate divine standards of good and evil, as well as religious teachings. The thinking behind nonviolent civil disobedience in the United States can be traced back to early Christian doctrine. The Roman emperor commanded that Christians worship Roman gods and that statues of the emperor be erected before Jewish synagogues. As this meant direct violation of the first two Commandments, Christians opted to face crucifixion or be burned at the stake rather than follow them. In other words, secular law must be subordinate to divine commandment, which is sacred and inviolable.

In general, the Ten Commandments can be divided into two categories. The first four describe the relationship between man and God, that is, what constitutes the appropriate reverence for God. The other six govern relationships between people, and at their core reflect Jesus’s teaching to love others as you love yourself. Reverence for God is an imperative that enables humanity to maintain unchanged the principles of fairness and justice.

The same is true of China, where historically the law was promulgated by imperial decree. The emperor or Son of Heaven must follow providence and the principles of Heaven and earth. This is the “Tao” or Way imparted by Lao Zi and the Yellow Emperor. The Han Dynasty scholar Dong Zhongshu said: “The greatness of Tao originates from Heaven. Heaven never changes, and neither does the Tao.” [2] In ancient Chinese usage, “Heaven” is not an abstraction of the natural forces, but a supreme god. Faith in the Tao of Heaven forms the moral bedrock of Chinese culture. The Chinese legislative system derived from this belief influenced China for thousands of years.

American legal scholar Harold J. Berman believed that the role of the law coexists with compliance to overall principles of social morality and faith. Even under the separation of church and state, both are mutually dependent. In any society, the concepts of justice and legality must trace their roots to that which is considered holy and sacred. [3]

Put another way, the law must carry authority, which comes from the fairness and justice endowed by gods. Not only is the law fair and just, it is also holy. The modern legal system retains many facets of religious ceremony that strengthen its power.
2. Law: An Instrument of Tyranny in Communist Regimes

Communist parties are anti-theist cults. They will never follow the teachings of righteous gods in their legislative principles, and they aim to sever societies’ links to their ancestral culture and traditional values. From the very beginning, there was no prospect for communist parties to maintain fairness or justice.

a. Extralegal Policies of State Terror

In traditional society, Christians talked about loving others as you love yourself. Confucian teaching says that the benevolent man loves others. Here, love is not limited to the narrow concept of love between a man and a woman, or of the love that exists among family members or friends. Love also encompasses benevolence, mercy, justice, selflessness, and other virtues. With this cultural foundation, not only is the law sacred, but it embodies the spirit of love in human society.

No legal system can hope to account for any and all possible forms of conflict and provide judgments for each. Thus, laws are not only specific regulations, but they must also factor in the subjectivity of all parties. The judge must follow the spirit of the law and pass a verdict that abides by the principle of benevolence.

In the Temple of Jerusalem, Jesus admonished the Pharisees for their hypocrisy, for despite strictly adhering to the words of Moses, they ignored virtues required by the code, such as justice, mercy, truthfulness, and the like. Seeing beyond literal meaning, Jesus healed on the Sabbath and sat with gentiles, for what he cared about was the spirit of kindness within the doctrines.

By contrast, communism is rooted in hatred. It not only hates God, but also hates the culture, lifestyle, and all traditions that gods established for humanity. Marx did not mince words in expressing his desire to doom himself to ruin and bring the world down with him. He said, “With contempt shall I fling my glove in the world’s face, then shall I stride through the wreckage a creator!” [4]

Sergey Genadievich Nechayev, the crazed revolutionary of Czarist Russia, wrote in his pamphlet, The Revolutionary Catechism that the revolutionary “has broken all the bonds which tie him to the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its accepted conventions.” “He is their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily.” [5]

Nechayev demonstrated clear hatred of the world and saw himself beyond the authority of the law. He used the clerical term “catechism” to describe his vision of a cult that despises the world. “He is not a revolutionary if he has any sympathy for this world,” Nechayev said.

Lenin expressed a similar view: “Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.” [6]

Wielding political power to kill, torture, and mete out collective punishment in the absence of legal restraints is nothing other than state terror. This cold-blooded brutality is the first step taken under the rule of classical communist regimes.

In the month following the Bolshevik overthrow of the Russian government in 1917, hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the course of political struggle. The Bolsheviks established the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, abbreviated Cheka, and endowed it with powers of summary execution. From 1918 to 1922, the Chekists killed no less than two million people without trial. [7]

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, former propaganda minister of the Central Committee, Soviet Politburo member, and secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), wrote in the preface of his book Bitter Cup: Russian Bolshevism and Reform Movement: “This century alone, 60 million people in Russia died as a result of war, hunger and repression.” Using public archives, Yakovlev estimated the number of people killed in Soviet campaigns of persecution at 20 million–30 million.

In 1987, the Politburo of the Soviet Union set up a committee, of which Yakovlev was a member, to review miscarriages of justice under Soviet rule. After reviewing thousands of files, Yakovlev wrote: “There’s a feeling that I’ve long been unable to shake. It seems that the perpetrators of these atrocities are a group of people who are mentally deranged, but I fear that such an explanation runs the risk of oversimplifying the problem.” [8]
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