Far-left Antifa extremists prepare for a confrontation in Berkeley, Calif., on Aug. 27. The communist theory of dialectical materialism aims to incite conflict and struggle. (AMY OSBORNE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Communism’s Secret Tool

And why it still turns people against each other today

Despite all our talk of progress, the 20th century was the most violent in all of human history, and the overwhelming majority of that violence—resulting in at least 100 million unnatural deaths—was caused by communism, a belief system that still clings to the minds of many in our society.

Communism tries to seduce people with feigned kindness. It convinces people that it represents tolerance and caring for humanity, and that it intends to bring people happiness—but that this happiness can be achieved only after a segment of society is either suppressed or eradicated.

While its use of censorship and eradication have become hallmarks of communist systems, its promise to bring joy through its destruction of all social hierarchy has been shown to be a blatant lie. Communism has again and again led to famine, oppression, and genocide. Yet still it holds popularity.

To understand why communism still lingers, we need to understand its most fundamental tool for creating violent revolution—convincing people to turn against one another—and how it uses this tool to manufacture political issues. This then gives its followers the ability to gradually seize control.

This tool is the communist dialectic, known as dialectical materialism. Dialectics are a method of discourse between two parties. Dialectical materialism is used to formulate the communist view of the world, by reinterpreting all things through a lens that is absolutely atheistic and based in struggle.

Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin described this dialectical communist view of truth, in an article published in June 1920 in the Communist International journal Kommunismus, as “that which constitutes the very gist, the living soul of Marxism—a concrete analysis of a concrete situation.”

Communist leaders, using the dialectic as their core system for viewing issues, rewrote history through a new lens. They stressed the study of Lenin’s dialectic and applied it to the history of human thought, science, and technology. Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin, wrote in 1938 that “dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party.”

Pope Pius XII, who would later excommunicate Catholics who professed the doctrine of communism, described the nature of the communist dialectic in the encyclical “On atheistic communism” in March 1937.

Pope Pius XII said dialectical materialism is the tool used by the communists to “sharpen the antagonisms” between different parts of society, under their belief that “the conflict which carries the world towards its final synthesis can be accelerated by man. Hence they endeavor to sharpen the antagonisms which arise between the various classes of society. Thus the class struggle with its consequent violent hate and destruction takes on the aspects of a crusade for the progress of humanity.”

The communist dialectic, he added, is also the key tool of the violent nature within the ideology, which advocates that anything that resists “systematic violence” should be marked for annihilation.

Warped Discourse

Traditional forms of dialectics, such as the Socratic dialectic, look to find truth through rational argument between two parties.

On the other hand, the roots of dialectical materialism are in a theory by German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but it was altered throughout history by communist leaders, beginning with Karl Marx, to better fit their objectives. In 1908, Lenin wrote in “Materialism and Empirio-criticism” that the term “dialectical materialism” was coined by Czech-Austrian communist philosopher Karl Kautsky and was popularized only after the deaths of Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The core piece of Hegel’s theory, as it is used under communism, is his argument that “contradiction leads forward.” Marx and Engels used this argument, but altered Hegel’s theory overall, first by removing all elements that did not relate to materialism, including anything to do with religion or morality.

Stalin wrote in 1938, in “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” that the only part Marx and Engels retained from Hegelian dialectics was its “rational kernel,” and that they had cast aside all of its moral ideals.

Stalin described this new dialectic as something based purely on a rejection of the divine. He wrote that Marx’s dialectic discarded Hegel’s ideas of a “universal spirit” and “consciousness,” and instead viewed all life as nothing more than “matter in motion.”

Strategic Inversion

While traditional dialectics aim to help people understand truths through the exchange of varying ideas, or by looking at both sides of an issue, dialectical materialism does the opposite.

It looks at various issues in society and identifies their polar opposites. It then takes those opposites as the communist viewpoints and pushes these viewpoints as being absolute and unquestionable.

Mao Zedong, founder of the Chinese Communist Party, based his dialectic on inverting many of the religious and social beliefs found in Eastern systems.

He described it once by using an inverted view of the Daoist taiji (yin-yang) theory. In the ancient theory, two opposing sides of an element are seen as supplementing and harmonizing each other, so that two become one. In “Selected Works of Mao Zedong,” Mao wrote about it as two opposing forces, constantly in conflict with each other, and that through the communist dialectic, “one becomes two, two becomes four.” In other words, step by step, the element is divided.

Mao’s description of “one [becoming] two” is the heart of the communist revolutionary vision, based on the idea that, in place of harmony, communism can incite struggle between all tangible elements—whether they be races, social classes, or even married couples.

Under the communist dialectic, the objective is for people to replace belief with atheism and harmony with struggle.

According to “The Sword of the Revolution and the Communist Apocalypse” by Cliff Kincaid, communist leaders were in agreement with Lenin that the “nucleus” of dialectics was its use of contradictions.

Kincaid wrote, “The Soviets have summarized the core of dialectics as a ‘division into opposites,’ while Mao Zedong and the Chinese ‘workers of philosophy’ have finally summarized all the complexities of dialectical logic into the expression ‘one divides into two.'”

Kincaid cites Alexander Markovsky, a Russian emigre who studied Marxism-Leninism in the former Soviet Union, stating, “In the world of Marxist dialectical materialism, change is the product of a constant conflict between opposites, arising from the internal contradictions inherent in all events, ideas, and movements. Therefore, any significant change in a society, according to Marxism, must be accompanied by a period of upheaval.”

Marxist theoretician Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov wrote in “Dialectic and Logic” in 1928 that the communist dialectic follows three laws: to identify, to contradict, and to “exclude the middle.”

Plekhanov’s approach allows communists to manufacture issues by first identifying any issue with material development, to “contradict” or invert it, then to “exclude the middle” by driving it into only two extremes that discount the often vast variety of moderate viewpoints.

The trait to “exclude the middle” runs opposite to ancient wisdom that is shared across traditional belief systems—from Aristotle to Rumi, and from Sakyamuni to Solomon. These traditional theories closely reflect what was stated by Lao Tzu: “The best to keep is the middle way.”

Communism is based in the idea that its views are Utopian and the ends of all development. Marx held that struggle led to social evolution and argued that communism was the end stage. His communist system thus tried to incite struggle to hasten this process—a process that required fomenting economic, social, and moral collapse.

To advance its causes, it uses dialectical materialism to create its inverted truth, and to push these inversions to create discord and destroy traditions and social norms.

The idea to “exclude the middle” follows Lenin’s idea of “partisanship,” both of which are based in its “Utopian” outlook. Lenin categorized all people into only two groups: those who supported the communist revolution, and those who did not—and those who did not were marked for destruction.

With dialectical materialism as their driving force, the communists give no ground. If the other side compromises, the communists only succeed in gaining ground, then continue their push relentlessly as the opposing side is gradually worn down. When violent revolution fails, communism’s goal is to first push for “tolerance,” then “acceptance,” and finally forced “adoption.”

During this process, any who object are slapped with political labels, which allows them to be attacked by communist allies. This is the heart of the “political correctness” formulated by Mao in 1957, and its continual push to establish an alternate moral outlook based on the political objectives of the communist regime—with the dialectic inversion of issues, from their roots.

A Negative Worldview

The communist view of the world, and all issues within it, are formed through inversion—with dialectical materialism as its tool for identifying the inversions.

Under its dialectic, the communist perception is one of pervasive negativity. It is meant to alter a person’s perception of all issues so that any who follow its doctrine interprets issues by their inversions, and takes the path of those inversions.

To understand this takes a bit of background.

We all have different perceptions of the world around us. Two people looking at the same event may interpret it in many, diverse ways, based on their perceptions shaped by their culture, background, education, and beliefs.

Communism works to change a person’s perceptions and instill a “communist worldview” in a person, one that uses dialectical materialism to invert social norms and take the negative as its stance.

According to Kincaid, the communist dialectic manufactures struggle against social norms by using contradictions, under the communist principle of the “struggle of opposites.”

In terms of the goals of communism—revolution to forcefully overthrow all hierarchy, both social and spiritual—Kincaid holds that in order for communism to seize power, its inverted concepts must destroy the perceptions that previously existed within a society. Because of how dialectical materialism works, and the way in which it identifies which issues the communists oppose and which they advocate, the issues and policies of communist movements can differ greatly from country to country.

Kincaid cites “The Penkovsky Papers” by Oleg Penkovsky in 1965, to describe how radically different the thinking was between Soviet dialectical thinkers and non-dialectical thinkers.

Penkovsky said if someone were to hand the same set of information to generals in America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, “the American and the Englishman might possibly reach the same conclusion … but the Soviet general would arrive at conclusions which would be radically different from the other two.”

This is because, Penkovsky said, for the communist, “the logical process of his mind is totally unlike that of his Western counterparts, because he uses Marxist dialectics, whereas they will use some form of deductive reasoning.”

A Dark Ideology

One of the key changes Marx and Engels made to Hegel’s dialectic in order to form their communist dialectic was to remove all spiritual elements. Yet if we were to analyze dialectical materialism from the standpoint of anthropology, it would reveal a dark and destructive belief.

The methods of inversion within the communist dialectic are not new. The approach of inversion to create alternate understandings is a core tenant of dark occult practices that form their beliefs by inverting interpretations and perceptions of traditional practices.

The concept of inversion was detailed by the Terrorism Research Center in its 2016 book “Blood Sacrifices: Violent Non-State Actors and Dark Magico-Religious Activities,” edited by Robert J. Bunker, 2015 Futurist in Residence with the FBI Academy in Virginia and an adjunct research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. The term “magico” in this case refers to the perception and intent behind ceremonial activities.

It states that “we, as a species, do not perceive objective reality but, rather, a series of limited, mediated, and interlinked symbolic schemas that we, as individuals, assume to be ‘reality.'”

It states that our perceptions of reality can be changed through external systems, tied to how we interpret the meaning of issues, events, or objects as being “symbols” within the “cycle of meaning” of our own ideologies.

Within this system, the idea of “criminal magic” relating to intentions and perception, is described as where the promoted perception of issues “acts as a worldview that opposes the socially dominant one.”

For example, something that opposes the religious worldview would include things that violate the views of the religion on what is right and what is wrong, and accusations could include “child-stealing, ritual murder and cannibalism, and the worship of ‘evil.'”

If the concept were applied to political worldviews, it states, the “criminal magic” element would typically center around “disruption/overthrow of the social order, a desecration of ‘tradition’ or ‘history,’ and the overthrow of social morality.”

The more important, and “dangerous” form of this, it states, is “that which inverts core components of its own worldview with the specific aim of gaining dominance and power via fear and terror. … This type-2 criminal magic is referred to by many occultists as the Left Hand Path.”

The “Left Hand Path” closely relates to the communist dialectical methods for achieving revolution.

It states that the Left Hand Path degrades its own members to become “pawns to be manipulated, used, and thrown away.” We see this, for example, in the so-called “useful idiots” who help communist regimes seize power, only to themselves be marked for death under communism.

The Left Hand Path also encourages its followers to become “de facto sociopaths,” which we see under communism’s rejection of morality and its belief in fomenting human suffering to advance its goals.

It notes that if left unchecked, the Left Hand Path “endangers the survival of the entire society and its entire worldview” through its intentional degrading of trust in the existing worldviews, and by working to contain and destroy those who oppose its worldviews.

Nature of the Tool

The communist dialectic’s nature of ideological inversions and Left-Hand-Path revolutions have led many writers to point out its similarities to Satanism—which in its original forms worked by inverting the morals and ceremonies of Christianity and Catholicism.

According to “Marx & Satan ” by Richard Wurmbrand, one of the traits of black magic is the inversion of names, and “inversions in general so permeated Marx’s whole manner of thinking that he used them throughout. He answered Proudhon’s book ‘The Philosophy of Misery’ with another book entitled ‘The Misery of Philosophy.’ He also wrote, ‘We have to use instead of the weapon of criticism, the criticism of weapons.'”

What the author was observing was the communist dialectic in action, with its traits of inversion. But the author was also right about the nature of the technique—something that does in fact tie deeply into Left Hand Path practices, which would be defined as “demonic” from a religious perspective.

Marc Tyrell, symbolic anthropologist and co-author of “Blood Sacrifices,” said in an email that he used to describe Marxist theory to his students as “the last, great Christian heresy, since it inverts many of the mythic structures of Christianity.”

He added, however, that “their style of operations really precedes Christianity,” and that communist ideology can be traced to more ancient dark occult ideologies.

According to Tyrell, the ideas of “good” and “evil” are not necessarily binary, since the perceptions of both will change according to a person’s social and religious and worldviews. When it comes to the differences between Right Hand Path and Left Hand Path, however, he said this refers more clearly to polar positions such as “Order and Chaos,” “Law and Anarchy,” and “Predictability and Uncertainty.”

His descriptions of Left Hand Path, he said, refer to a “poisoning of chaos, anarchy and uncertainty; the purposeful evocation and manipulation of those reactions for personal gain.” From a spiritual perspective, “it can completely destroy the souls of the people doing it,” he said.

“Cambodia is probably the best example” of a Left Hand Path system, he said, referring to the rule of the communist Khmer Rouge, which killed close to a third of the country’s population. But he added, “we can find similar examples in pretty much every communist country.”

Communism is estimated to have killed at least 100 million people, yet its crimes have not been fully compiled and its ideology still persists. The Epoch Times seeks to expose the history and beliefs of this movement, which has been a source of tyranny and destruction since it emerged. Read the whole series at ept.ms/TheDeadEndCom

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.