Since his death last week, there has been no shortage of fawning news articles about Fidel Castro.  (And no, these weren’t Cuban news articles. They were American).   I had the distinct displeasure of reading two of them recently.  One opened by calling Castro a fiery apostle of revolution.  The other went on and on about how Castro wouldn’t allow statues or images of himself like other commie leaders (i.e. Stalin).  What a guy.  The sycophantic, adoring tone of both articles made me sick and angry.

Statues or not, Castro had one thing in common with his comrades: He murdered his own people in droves.  Worship the beast or die (Rev. 13:15).

The Black Book of Communism estimates that communist regimes have killed at least 100 million of their own citizens.  This isn’t counting war casualties.  This is just run-of-the-mill, day-in-the-life reality under Marxist ideology.

Fyodor Dostoevsky lived and wrote in pre-communist Russia.  His novel The Brothers Karamazov includes a section called, “The Grand Inquisitor.”  It is a monologue, more or less, given by Ivan (one of the brothers).  Ivan is an atheist progressive.  He represents the ideological fuse that ignited the Bolshevik revolution.  Expanding on satan’s temptations of Jesus in the desert, Ivan explains why people would reject Christ for a political ideology like communism. Dostoevsky cleverly uses Ivan’s own words to expose the satanic roots of his beliefs.  I can think of no better rebuff for men like Castro (and their journalist fan-clubs):

The terrible and clever Spirit, the Spirit of self-annihilation and nonexistence, that great Spirit spoke with you in the wilderness, and we are told in the Scriptures that it ‘tempted’ you. Is that so? And would it be possible to say anything more true than those things which he made known to you in three questions and which you rejected, and which in the Scriptures are called ‘temptations’? […]

Decide for yourself who was right: You or the One who questioned You that day? Remember the first question, though not in literal terms, its sense was this: ‘You want to go into the world and are going there with empty hands, with a kind of promise of freedom which they in their simplicity and inborn turpitude are unable even to comprehend, which they go in fear and awe of—for nothing has ever been more unendurable to man and human society than freedom! Look, you see those stones in that naked, burning hot wilderness? Turn them into loaves and mankind will go trotting after you like a flock, grateful and obedient, though ever fearful that you may take away your hand and that your loaves may cease to come their way.’ But you did not want to deprive man of freedom and rejected the offer, for what kind of freedom is it, you reasoned, if obedience is purchased with loaves?

You retorted that man lives not by bread alone, but are you aware that in the name of that same earthly bread the Earth Spirit will rise up against you and fight with you and vanquish you, and everyone will follow it, crying: ‘Who is like unto this beast, he has given us fire from heaven!’ Are you aware that centuries will pass, and mankind will proclaim with the lips of its wisdom and science that there is no crime and consequently no sin either, but only the hungry. ‘Feed them, and then ask virtue of them!’ —that is what will be inscribed upon the banner they will raise against you and before which your temple will come crashing down.