Socialism as a Perpetual Civil War

by R. J. Rushdoony

From the Chalcedon Foundation book Law & Liberty 2nd Edition

Socialism and communism presuppose that their system represents the true order of the ages and is the answer to man's problems. This assumption is one that assumes man's problems to be not spiritual but material, not sin but environment. Change man's environment and you will then remake man, it is held. The answer to man's problems is therefore not the spiritual regeneration of man by Jesus Christ but the reorganization of society by the scientific socialist state.

Basic to the theory of scientific socialism is its infallibility concept. Every system of thought has an infallibility concept, but few are honest enough to admit it. Ultimate, final, and inerrant authority is vested somewhere in the system as the basic and assured arbiter of truth or reality. The scientific socialistic state sees scientific socialism as the infallible truth of history; its application ensures the perfect social order. If failures occur in scientific socialist states, it is not the fault of scientific socialism, which is by definition infallible and true, but of the hostile people, remnants of the capitalistic class, or traitorous members of the party. Because the scientific socialist state cannot blame itself, it must wage civil war against some portion of the state. Thus, first of all, socialism's answer to every problem is civil war. Someone is guilty, but never socialism itself.

Illustrations of this are many. The Soviet Union has faced a situation of continual purges. The purges of the 1930s stand out merely as being more dramatic than the routine ones. But every crisis in the Soviet Union demands a scapegoat, and war is therefore waged against some portion of the Party, the bureaucracy, or the masses.

In Communist China, according to a news report of Friday, March 24, 1967, pestilence broke out widely, with many contagious diseases spreading across the country. The Communist regime's answer to an already serious crisis was to threaten the doctors of China with a purge. The doctors were responsible, the Shanghai Radio declared, because they "had ignored Mao's health policies."¹ The consequence of such a policy, the purge of doctors in a country with a serious shortage of medical men, only aggravated a serious situation, but anything is preferable to admitting that socialism can make mistakes and be an erroneous theory.

In the United States, inflation is a product of the federal government's departure from a hard money standard, from gold to paper, and a product of its debt living or deficit financing. The guilt for inflation is essentially the federal government's guilt. But the blame is instead shifted by federal officials to the private sector: labor is creating inflation by demanding higher wages, and business is inflationary because it demands higher prices for goods, and threats are made of wage and price controls. The demands of capital and labor are, of course, the results of inflation and their steps to protect themselves against it, but the policy of socialism is to ascribe all guilt to the people, and all wisdom to the state, in every crisis.

In these and other cases, the answer always remains the same: the socialist state wages war on the people. Whenever the scientific socialist state makes a mistake, the people suffer.

The second aspect of this socialist civil warfare is that it is perpetual civil war because of perpetual failure. Socialism is incapable of solving any problem it addresses itself to in the economic sphere. Because its premises are unsound and wholly in error, its conclusions are consistently failures. But, since socialism is by definition the scientific answer to problems of society, socialism cannot blame itself. As a result, it wages perpetual civil warfare as its answer to perpetual failure.


Third, the consequence of this perpetual civil warfare is an ever-deepening crisis. Propaganda works to disguise the crisis. We are always told that the Soviet Union is making economic and industrial progress and is becoming a milder dictatorship, but the reality is that it has merely gone from crisis to crisis and has faced a growing food shortage as a tribute to its incompetence. The other socialisms of the world have similar troubles. The little Fabian Socialist State of Great Britain is sinking steadily into the economic consequences of its own policies, and other Fabian states face a growing monetary and economic crisis. Socialism is never the way out for socialism, but simply the guarantee of an economic dead end.


Fourth, this perpetual civil warfare can and will terminate in the death of the state, and possibly of the civilization as well. It is destructive of the public and private resources of the state; the socialist state can sometimes build stone monuments and edifices, but it cannot perpetuate a living social order; it can only kill the order it seizes or inherits. It has often been observed that it is only when a civilization is dying that it begins monumental building constructions. Prior to that time, its concern is more with life than show. We cannot therefore misread socialism's predisposition for monumental construction as a sign of life; it is tombstone construction.


Fifth, perpetual civil warfare means in some form perpetual violence or repressive force, and as a result, the use of terror is not only accepted but is often justified and exalted. Terror is defended and upheld as necessary to suppress the enemies of the people and to protect the state from destruction. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, spoke of terror as "the very bond of fraternity." Terror is made a moral principle and an inevitable requirement of history. As a result, "total terror" is practiced as a necessary and moral requirement of scientific socialism. Incredible brutality, barbarism, savagery, and degeneracy become the products of scientific socialism.² Thus, the perpetual civil warfare that the scientific socialist state wages against its people is also a form of total warfare. It is more radical than total warfare, in that normal total warfare is for a stated period of hostilities, whereas the socialistic civil war and its terroristic total warfare have no end. It is a perpetual threat to the people, and, in varying degrees, continuously practiced. The more the state approaches total socialism, to that same degree it also approaches total terror and total civil war. It is this aspect of perpetual and total warfare that has made socialists like George Orwell, author of 1984, turn from socialism in horror, without believing really in anything else. Theirs is not a conversion but simply revulsion from terror.

Such a situation, of course, breaks down the will to work and the will to live of the subject peoples. Hope of escape, or hope that the socialist regime will end, begins to grow weaker, and the result is all the greater slow-down in agricultural and industrial production. This decline in productivity creates a major crisis, and the socialist leaders must give the people some reason to believe that there is hope of a change, a "thaw," in the socialist terror and oppression. A cow, after all, will finally give no milk if it is not fed, and so the masses, like human cattle, are given enough fodder to make them productive again. Their previous sufferings are blamed on bad underlings, poor managers. Stalin, for example, placed the blame on minor officials who were supposedly too eager to attain perfect socialism overnight. In dealing with enforced collectivization of farms, in a Pravda statement of April 3, 1930, Stalin declared that the policy was a "voluntary one," but unfortunately some officials were using threats and pressure.³ It was after this statement that millions were starved to death for resisting collectivization, but Stalin in advance had cleared himself publicly of responsibility and also encouraged those who were hostile to feel freer to make a stand. Khrushchev also gave promises of a thaw, and then launched into the vicious terror in Hungary, and the still-continuing and greatest terror against Christians.

The purposes of these brief thaws and breathers are strategic: they serve to give a despairing populace hope for a change. This, then, is simply a sixth, aspect of socialism's civil warfare against its people. The thaw creates a deviation from socialist policy only for the purpose of reinforcing that policy.

This points clearly to a seventh aspect of socialism's perpetual civil war: truth is at all times a central casualty. Since there is no truth apart from the scientific socialist state, any device, any lie, any strategy which will further the socialist experiment is valid. The lie is spoken to delude the masses and the enemy; speech has as its purpose not the communication of truth but utility to the dictatorship of the proletariat as a weapon of warfare. Semantics therefore becomes a major concern of socialism. Language must be used; it is a superb weapon. Certain words have powerful meanings to many men, and one way of using men's minds against themselves is to misuse the words that have a particular meaning to them. To expect language to have the same content to a socialist as it does to a Christian is a delusion. For the socialist, language is instrumental; it is a tool of revolution. Instead of representing a means of communicating an objective order of truth, language is basically an instrument of power. For the socialist state to neglect to use language as an instrument of power is for it to be guilty of bourgeois sentiments and illusions.

This, then, is the course of action, perpetual civil warfare, required by the scientific socialist state to maintain its delusion of infallibility. This perpetual civil warfare is a consequence of its departure from God and its socialism. It is a suicidal course, one well described by our Lord of old, when He declared, "He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death" (Prov. 8:36).

1. Oakland Tribune, "China Hit by Outbreak of Pestilence," Friday, March 24, 1967, 1.
2. Albert Kalme, Total Terror (New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), and Harold H. Martinson, Red Dragon Over China (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1956).
3. W. R. Werner, ed., Stalin Kampf (New York, NY: Howell, Soskin, 1940), 252-257.

Used with permission.

Statist Medicine

by R.J. Rushdoony

(Although written in the middle of “The Cold War”, this article on government-sponsored medicine is relevant to the health-care debate going on today. --Ed.)

An important book published recently is Alexander Podrabinek’s Punitive Medicine.¹ The author is now serving a sentence of exile in Siberia. This is a careful and documented account of the use of psychiatry for political purposes in the U.S.S.R.

Notable opponents of the communist regime are discredited by being sentenced to mental institutions, there to be drugged and tortured into submission. The psychiatrists act on orders from above. They justify this prostitution of their profession by saying that no man in his right mind would speak out, take a stand against, or contradict and challenge the state system and the official ideology. “Normalcy” and mental health to them means living with the system. To question or fight the system is for them not a normal act nor a sensible one; hence, it is a sign of mental problems.

Thus, mental health is defined by conformity to the Marxist order, not by a sound mind in relationship to God, and to men in and under God. Normalcy and mental health become whatever the state decrees and does. Such a definition is very close to that of the Western democracies and their schools; men are group directed, subject to group dynamics, and are trained to regard the behavior of those resisting the group as “deviant.” (One mother of an intelligent boy, whose father was a noted scientist, was called to the public school to discuss her “deviant” son. His “problem,” which brought him under suspicion, was a preference for reading over playground horseplay.) The group is the norm; society determines standards and mental health. The Marxists have simply put this humanistic standard under more disciplined direction: not the group, but the state, determines normalcy and mental health.

As a result, we have what Podrabinek calls “legalized lawlessness.”² The new psychiatric “hospitals” are less evil,³ but all grow in perversity with time, and sadism becomes the order of the day among doctors and guards.⁴ No doubt, the courage of the resisters is a reproach to them, and intensifies their sadism and evil. Added to this is the fact that orderlies use patients for sexual perversions.⁵

The Soviet definition of mental health as conformity leads to strange diagnoses such as these: “She is suffering from nervous exhaustion caused by justice-seeking;” “You have schizo-dissent,” and so on.⁶ “Soviet psychiatry does not allow any opportunity for conscientious refusal to adapt.”⁷

Very aptly, Juliana Geran Pilan calls all this “The Shame of Soviet Medicine.”⁸ The problem is not restricted to psychiatry but is common to all medicine in Marxist countries. For example, venereal diseases are dogmatically called “bourgeois.” How can a bourgeois infection exist in a socialist paradise? It not only exists but is very widespread, although not acknowledged. No statistics are given on V.D.; it has supposedly been abolished. Because it has been abolished, there are no clinics to treat it. The unhappy patient must go to the “dermatology” clinics for treatment! Dermatologists visiting the Soviet Union are assumed to be specialists in venereal diseases.

The same is true of narcotics. The newspapers like to write about “The Absence of Addicts in the Soviet Union: One More Proof of the Superiority of Communism Over Capitalism.” All the while, the use of drugs flourishes, and a drug culture is very real.⁹

The point is clear. Diseases and problems do not “exist” unless the Marxist state allows them an official existence or recognition. Medical training is controlled; doctors and psychiatrists are controlled; hospitals are controlled; drugs, like all medical practice, are a state monopoly. The medical profession serves the state, not the patient. Doctors are a part of a bureaucracy which has a state-controlled life and conscience.

Punitive medicine? Of course. It cannot be otherwise. As Podrabinek notes: “Punitive medicine is a tool in the struggle against dissidents who cannot be punished by legal means.”¹⁰

The most serious mistake we can make is to treat punitive medicine as a Soviet aberration. We should instead see it as the logical conclusion of all socialized medicine.

The advocates of socialized medicine believe that such a step would bring more medical care to the poor and needy. The fact is that, at least in the United States, the poor have usually had more medical services rendered to them than any other class. The fact of their poverty has made them the recipients of free services, or subject to very nominal fees, and hence they have more readily used doctors.

But the problem goes deeper. Ostensibly, socialized medicine will serve the people. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, in his book, In Critical Condition, The Crisis in America’s Health Care (1972), sees socialized medicine as “the choice of conscience.” “The government” will supposedly have a conscience and a concern for the poor which doctors ostensibly lack. Private practitioners, whom he sees as grasping businessmen, will somehow all become Good Samaritans when the federal government controls them. His picture is a passionate, selected, and extremely partial one. It is also very unrealistic.

There is no reason to believe that socialized medicine anywhere will serve the people any better or as good as private practice. On the contrary it will serve the federal government. Let us remember, after all, that the Sixteenth Amendment (the income tax) was voted into the U.S. Constitution in the name of helping the poor! The income tax was to be limited to “soaking the rich” and distributing the wealth. It would make a freer and happier America possible. The worker would come into his own, and there would be a better America after all.

There is no reason to suppose that a socialized and federalized medicine will be any more benevolent that the Internal Revenue Service. The I.R.S., after all, was created with at least equal idealistic motives. Anyone who can think of the I.R.S. as the people’s friend today does indeed have mental problems! Socialized medicine will be no better than the I.R.S., and potentially far worse. Any and everything which puts us into contact with a powerful state and its bureaucracy is dangerous, and socialized medicine will place us in a very close relationship to that power-state: at pregnancy and childbirth, in ill health and accidents, for a variety of required medical examinations, and much more. Also, as euthanasia becomes an accepted practice like abortion, the more the state knows about you, the less safe you are.

Already, of course, the hand of the state is very heavy upon all doctors. Medical schools are extensively subsidized and thereby federalized. Because of funding, the medical school looks as much to Washington, D.C., as it does to the general practitioner, or the surgeon, and their problems. Hospitals are also serving the state and are more ready to displease doctors and patients than federal authorities. What the state controls serves state purposes.

Thus, Alexander Podrabinek’s Punitive Medicine gives us merely the avant garde aspect of the new medical practice, socialized medicine.

It is a very logical development. The state is a punitive agency or institution. Its purpose is to punish or to vindicate. Its basic and truest instruments are the courts, the police, and the military. Their purpose is to punish or to vindicate. The life of the state is geared to punitive action. St. Paul, in Romans 13:1-4, makes clear that the true function of the ministry of justice (the state) is to be a terror to evil-doers. The state is the agency of coercion. The church’s function is to educate; industry’s function is to produce, and the medical professions’ function is to heal. To place the healing arm of society under the coercive or punitive arm is the height of folly and unreason.

No realm taken over by the state has escaped its coercive and punitive nature, to the detriment of its original function. Thus, before the states in America took over education, the United States had the world’s lowest illiteracy rate and a remarkably capable populace. Today, after a century and a half of Horace Mann’s evil “reform,” state control of education, we have our highest illiteracy rate in history. Jonathan Kozol, in Prisoners of Silence, gives us some very alarming estimates, from federal and other sources. The Office of Education estimates that fifty seven million Americans are unequipped to carry out the most basic tasks. This means over 35% of the entire adult population. Some place the figure as high as sixty four million. Perhaps twenty three to thirty four million of these are illiterate; the rest can barely function. Illegal aliens, who may number as high as eight million, are not in these statistics at all. Kozol is a liberal, a concerned liberal. How does the teachers’ bureaucracy deal with all criticisms of its incompetence? With evidences of illiteracy among teachers themselves? Typical of its reaction is an article on “New Right’s Attack on Teachers” in the Tennessee Teacher, April 1980. Well, it is all an ugly conspiracy! “Since we as teachers believe in public education and in professional dignity, then surely we see the New Right as very wrong—a dangerous threat to the freedoms we inherited and continue to espouse.” A bureaucracy calls itself the vessel of freedom! This is 1984 and newspeak indeed! It is also the voice of monopoly and unreason. Coercion remains in the public schools, because they are agencies of the state: compulsory attendance laws, the persecution of Christian Schools, and the like. But education is disappearing.

There is no reason to believe that socialized medicine will be any better. It will rather become punitive medicine.

Thus, the problem is not merely a Soviet problem: it is our problem as well.

The sphere of the state is the ministry of justice according to the Bible. Its activities are properly punitive, and its jurisdiction must be limited to those areas which are legitimately punitive. Healing is not one of these. When the state takes over all areas, coercion prevails in all areas. As a result, because no independent, uncoerced, and free voice exists, corruption is the bribe. Without it, the economy would collapse.¹¹ As Brokhin further observed: “There will be a Watergate-style scandal in the Soviet Union. No party boss ever has been or ever will be brought to trial and jailed for bribery, corruption, or theft. If one corrupt high official were ever sent to jail, all the rest would have to go too, almost without exception.”¹² Where charges of corruption are made in the U.S.S.R., they are a façade for a personal vendetta, or for coercing dissent.

American life—and medicine—needs to be preserved from statist controls. Punitive medicine is not an agency of healing but an aspect of total terror. Those who seek it should be viewed with distrust. At the very least, they suffer from moral and intellectual myopia.

1. An important book published in 1980 is Alexander Podrabinek’s Punitive Medicine. The author served a sentence of exile in Siberia. This is a careful and documented account of the use of psychiatry for political purposes (at the time in the USSR);
2.  Ibid., 99.
3. Ibid., 34.
4. Ibid., 30ff.
5. Ibid., 31.
6. Ibid., 78.
7. Ibid., 77.
8. Reason Magazine, January 1980.
9. See Yuri Brokhin: Hustling on Gorky Street, pp. 74, 121.
10. Punitive Medicine, 63.
11. Ibid., 97.
12. Ibid., 102. 

(From the Chalcedon Medical Report #8, an early Chalcedon Foundation newsletter, as republished in Dr. R.J. Rushdoony’s Roots of Reconstruction book (first published in 1970 and updated in new editions through 2003), pp. 499-503. )

© Used with permission of Chalcedon Foundation (http://chalcedon.edu)

Daniel 12: The Certainty of Victory

"Daniel 12: The Certainty of Victory"—by R. J. Rushdoony1

The vast perspective of Daniel, historical and political prophecy with all time in purview, does not work, however, to the detriment of the personal perspective. Daniel's very private grief at the setting aside of Israel as a nation, and the creation of a new non-racial Israel to be the people of God, is always in view. It comes into especially sharp focus in 12:1.

The last prophecy began (10:14) with Israel's destiny and fall in view, and Daniel's concern and relation thereto. Again, with reference to "that time," the vision continues. Jesus' citation of 12:1 (Matt. 24:21-22) with reference to the fall of Jerusalem (Matt. 24:21-22 is otherwise interpreted by some, however), is of significance here. The fall of Jerusalem, and the public rejection of physical Israel as the chosen people of God, meant also the deliverance of the true people of God, the church in Christ, the elect, out of the bondage to Israel and Jerusalem, "which were aspects of "the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified" (Rev. 11:8). Daniel is accordingly identified with the elect, and is to seek his identity therein, for "at that time thy people shall be delivered, everyone that shall be found written in the book" (12:1). This new people of God shall not be confused with the remnant of Daniel's day; rather than a remnant, it is a multitude, ultimately the overwhelming majority, so that this description (12:2), setting forth salvation and pointing ahead to the general resurrection, can speak of the elect of God as the "many," and the reprobate as "some." Those who are wise or are teachers of the elect during the course of the oppression of the elect shall have all the greater reward and responsibility in the eternal kingdom (12:3).

Daniel's prophecy was given the status and dignity of Scripture, and was stated to be valid throughout time, as a means of true knowledge for men. The pursuit of knowledge, earnest but vain in that God is bypassed, will characterize human history. As Young translates it, "many shall run to and fro, that knowledge may be increased" (12:4).2

The conclusion of Daniel, 12:5-13, itself introduces, as Deane and Young have both noted, a new symbol, "the river" of verses 5, 6, and 7, a word in the original which indicates reference to the Nile, although the actual river is the Tigris or Hiddekel.3 The double reference gives evidence of the generality of reference: every captivity of the elect, whether to Egypt, Babylon, or the organic or legalistic states, will be in its entirety in the hands of the Almighty, and will be used by Him for His own glorious purpose. God is on both sides of the river with His angels, and controls every aspect of every step of history (Rom. 8:28), so that no captivity can end in other than God's glory and the destruction of the captors. Even as God miraculously delivered Israel from Egypt, and was about to use the Persian Empire to His glory, so in every age the wrath and treasures of men are made to serve Him.

The objective of all these events is the triumph of the saints, to be revealed with the collapse of the "little horn" at the end of "a time, times and an half' (12:7; cf. 7:25). With that collapse, Christian society shall triumph in every realm; then the suffering shall "be finished," that suffering which indeed is a cause for "wonders," since it seems to indicate the helplessness of God's people, and the failure of God to deliver (12:6-7).

This answer failed to satisfy Daniel, who "understood not" and accordingly asked, "O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things?" The response is pointed: Drop the subject, go no further, for here the matter goes beyond your time and your concern, but it will be understood by those who need it, who are wise, redeemed, and mature in the Lord (12:8-10). Much as the suffering may seem to dominate the worldview, yet it is far from being the total picture. The daily newspaper may report fires, murders, and thefts, all in actuality far from depicting the day's events, in the main made up of worship, work, rest, and play, but the abnormality dominates the stage. Even so, the tribulation of the elect seems to dominate the perspective, while far from representative of it. The persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes is compared to 1290 days, i.e., a little more than half of seven years, or the fullness of time, so that these grim days, not without their important revitalization of faith, can at best be said to represent the fact that the suffering of the true church, with every aspect thereof, will be only a circumscribed and limited element of history. Those who wait through these trials and attain their victories in Christ find the blessedness at the 1335 days, 45 days more than the earlier period. The two sums, 1290 and 1335, add up to more than seven years, and are not intended as proportionate representations of time and history. The first represents persecution; the second, blessing of a signal sort. History also has its eras of stagnation, development, groping, etc., and the depiction of these two periods as "days" indicates their limited nature in terms of the whole, and yet, by their relationship to seven years, their importance in terms of the meaning of the whole. Suffering or trial, and fulfillment, have both decisive roles in man's life and history. The culminating word is one of triumph in history, in the "1335 days" (12:11-12).

The concluding word to Daniel is, "But go thou thy way till the end," or, as Young has interpreted it, "Go on as thou art until the end of life,"4 and rest, and then "stand in thy lot at the end of the days," i.e., receive your eternal inheritance in the Lord (12:13).

Daniel is political prophecy, and it is confident prophecy, declaring the certain victory of the kingdom of God (not to be confused with or limited to the institutional church, which is one manifestation thereof), in history. If the victory of Christ is to be eschatological only, and in terms only of an eternal order, then Daniel is a monstrous piece of irrelevance. The sorry tribulation-complex of a smug and self-satisfied church, surrounded by ease and luxury, is certainly an amazing fact, one surely indicative of a masochistic desire for self-atonement by means of suffering. But the whole of Scripture proclaims the certainty of God's victory in time and in eternity, and the resurrection is the bold and uncompromising declaration of that victory in time. There can be no retreat from victory without a corresponding retreat from Christ. The Great Commission, with its confident command to make disciples of all nations (Matt, 28:19), was no mere hyperbole or vain expression of wistful hope, but the assured promise of Him who could say, "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth" (Matt. 28:18), "Go ye therefore" (Matt. 28:19). Unhappily, since the day of Calvary, the church has all too often been concerned with embalming Christ, while His enemies, a little more realistically, have vainly sought to guard themselves from His power. It is high time to proclaim the power of His resurrection.
The resurrection is given in Daniel 12:2 as the keynote of the gospel age, i.e., of the latter days. The "day" or time of resurrection began with the resurrection of Jesus Christ, so that Christians live in the resurrection era. The age has its tribulations, its battles unto death, but its essence for the Christian is victory unto life. Because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, it cannot be otherwise.

1) A chapter excerpt from R.J. Rushdoony, Thy Kingdom Come:  Studies in Daniel and Revelation  (Vallecito, CA:  Ross House Books, 1970 and 1998).  Used by permission of Chalcedon Foundation (http://chalcedon.edu).
2) Commentary, ad loc.
3) H. Deane, in Ellicott, Commentary on the Whole Bible, v. V.  (Grand Rapids: Zondervan), 400; and Young Commentary, ad loc.
4) Commentary, ad loc.