I make it a general rule to pay no attention to people who post here with silly, pretentious multi-word pseudonyms, particularly in the wearisome, unwitty but self-congratulatory format of ‘The-person-formerly-known-as’ .

Who do they think they are? Why should we care what they used to be known as? And I long ago recognised that there is simply no point in trying to debate with Mr ‘Bunker’, as I still think of him. Whenever I encounter his debating style, a picture forms in my mind of a mossy, weed-grown, lichen-blotched, dank concrete structure, in some twilit corner of a fallow field, with a lot of voluminous vests, greyish thermal long-johns and track-suit bottoms flapping heavily from an improvised washing line outside, as a thin stream of smoke, perfumed with bacon fat (or perhaps the aroma of supermarket lasagne), issues from an even-more-improvised chimney. A three-wheeled motor car stands not far away. Next to this sad decay, a large peeling sign proclaims, with enormous letters 'Bunkerism. World Headquarters' This is, I should state, my image of the mind of Mr ‘Bunker’, not of the chap himself. No doubt he is a handsome and well-dressed person, living in a normal home.

But I felt it necessary to correct the following statement, issued from the Bunker Vatican on Wednesday morning, and posted on the ‘Miliband…’ thread, with that unjustified confidence, and that hectoring tone, which typifies so many of his pronouncements.

Here it is : ‘I find it tedious in the extreme to have to explain for the umpteenth time that no crime has ever been committed "in the name of atheism". By definition. Atheism is the non-existence of a belief, and nothing can be carried out in the name of something that does not exist. You are completely wrong on this point. You say that communism is a fundamentally anti-religious ideology. So what? The reason why atrocities were committed "in the name of communism" (not of atheism) was that the dictators you mention wished to defend and spread their ideology (not atheism). Don't you understand that? ‘

Well, yes, I do understand that this is what he says. And it is historically incorrect. I do not think Mr ‘Bunker’ has made any effort to study the historical record. Given that this is so, he should surely be more modest and cautious in his assertions. But this is precisely why it is so tedious to argue with him. The less he knows, and the less he understands, the more certain he is of his case. And the more totally defeated he is in argument, the more he glows and exults with genuinely-felt triumph, like the Monty Python knight who, reduced by unequal combat to a limbless trunk ( and perhaps even to a trunkless head, I cannot remember), continues to issue bloodcurdling, boastful challenges to his antagonist.

As Beatrice and Sidney Webb wrote in their admiring description of the USSR (‘Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, 1940 edition) : ’It is exactly the explicit denial of the intervention of any God, or indeed of any will other than human will, in the universe, that has attracted to Soviet Communism the sympathies of many intellectuals and especially of scientists in civilised countries’.

They added :’Lenin insisted, as the basis of all his teaching, on a resolute denial of there being any known manifestation of the supernatural. He steadfastly insisted that the universe known to mankind (including mind equally with matter) was the sphere of science….

‘…When the Bolsheviks came into power in 1917, they made this defiant and dogmatic atheism the basis of their action’

(these passages are from Chapter XI, ‘Science the Salvation of Mankind’) .

Then one must examine the practical record of *specific*, deliberate and planned anti-religious acts by the Bolsheviks, which gave material expression to their beliefs on the subject .

(The parallel but differing behaviour of the German National Socialists, who, thank Heaven , had only 12 years of power instead of the Bolsheviks’ 73, is a matter for another posting, but there is no doubt that the Hitler Youth, in particular, were taught scorn for the Church, its teachings and priests, and especially for the fact that Christ was himself a Jew. I will not here reproduce the exact words of a typical Hitler Youth song (recorded by Olivia Manning in her Balkan Triology) which explained that followers of the Fuehrer did not wish to be Christians because Christ was a ‘Jewish swine’. It rhymes in German. Even so, it seems to me that the message is clear. The chapter ‘Converting the soul’ in Richard Evans’s ‘the Third Reich in Power’ is useful in this discussion. As is J.S.Conway’s ‘The Nazi Persecution of the Churches’).

Thus, one of the first decrees of the new Bolshevik government (first promulgated on 26th October 1917 old style, and repeated and reinforced the following January) was Anatoly Lunacharsky’s, as Education Commissar: All religious teaching was specifically forbidden in all schools. In January 1922, a second decree went much further, banning the teaching of religion to all children, even singly, in church buildings, churches or private homes. Severe punishment ‘with all the rigour of revolutionary law’ , up to and including the death penalty, was prescribed for those who broke this law.

The Soviet state, while encouraging the destruction, desecration, befouling and plundering of hundreds of churches (or the seizure of their buildings for deliberately squalid and degrading secular purposes, such as the use of the lovely Danilovsky monastery in Moscow as a reformatory for juvenile delinquents, a wicked act from which this building triumphantly re-emerged during the Gorbachev years), the public mockery, by state-sponsored groups, of religious ceremonies, processions, feast-days and rituals, the theft and melting down of their bells and the persecution , imprisonment and state murder of their priests and congregations, also set up large numbers of anti-God museums, and sponsored the publication of atheist materials, including the magazine ‘Bezbozhnik’ (‘The Godless’) . A 'Union of the Godless’ was also established at an ‘All-Union Congress of Anti-Religious Societies’. It later changed its name to ‘The League of the Militant Godless’. In a country in which all printing, meetings and speech were tightly controlled, this state-sponsored organisation was free to publish what it liked, and to mount meetings and demonstrations uninterrupted by the authorities. It attained an official membership of millions, unlikely to have been voluntary (this, by the way, is what we call understatement), and had 70,000 branches.

By contrast, in the year 1922 alone, 2,691 priests , 1,962 monks and 3,447 nuns were murdered by the Bolsheviks, often after having been provoked into defending themselves or their buildings by Bolshevik activists (Source for the figures of deaths is ‘The Black Book of Communism’ , Harvard University Press, 1997, Edited by Stephane Courtois) .

A distinguished American newspaper correspondent, who lived during this period in Russia, William Henry Chamberlin, recounted that ‘in Russia the world is witnessing the first effort to destroy completely any belief in supernatural interpretation of life’ (In ‘Russia’s Iron Age’, published 1935) .

Chamberlin noted energetic official campaigns against the bringing of Christmas Trees into Russian homes, campaigns to keep children from being influenced by their Christian grandparents, the severe persecution of priests and their children (denied both food rations and access to education, or employment, unless they renounced and denounced their fathers).

Mr Bunker might also learn (some hope, alas) from F.A. Mackenzie’s book ‘The Russian Crucifixion’ (1930) , which details the complex web of rules by which the Christian church was driven out of Russian life by legal persecution, plunder and violence (even Church sewing groups were banned by law).

Mackenzie quotes Susan Lawrence, a British *Labour* politician who, after a visit to Soviet Russia in 1922, noted that ‘the schools are propaganda schools, framed to inculcate a definite ideal, both in politics and religion. Communism is to be taught and religion to be exterminated’ , and the whole programme of the schools is to be directed towards this end’.

A fuller version of all the above is to be found in chapters 11,12 and 13 of my book ‘The Rage Against God’ published in Britain by Continuum, and in the USA by Zondervan.

The exasperating and yet comically unshakeable conviction (held by Mr ‘Bunker’) that the assertion of atheism is not a positive statement, that it is a mere passive absence, is directly contradicted by the death-dealing, violently destructive, larcenous and aggressively propagandist application of their own passionate and positive atheism by the Soviet authorities, as soon as they had the power to put their beliefs into action. If atheism is merely an absence, why on earth should it need to do these things to those who did not share its allegedly passive, non-invasive beliefs? And why, I might add, were both the Bolsheviks and the National Socialists so profoundly hostile to the idea of the Christian God (or, as Mr ‘Bunker’ would sniggeringly put it ‘gods’ )?

Well, because these people, imagining mischief as a law, have set themselves up as their own source of good, and cannot tolerate any rival to their own beliefs, in the minds of men. One thing you can say for them : they understood very well what it was they believed.