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Is the Red Menace Over?
May 23, 2014 / Written by: Andrea F. Phillips
With the fall of the iron curtain and the end of the cold war, there was a general sense that Communism was over. Suddenly the “red menace” had paled pink, many a Catholic affirming that the peace mentioned by Our Lady at Fatima was at hand.
One of the greatest mistakes of our era is to confuse the crumbling of the Soviet world with the end of Communist ideology. Of course, the fall of the Berlin Wall caused geopolitical changes around the world. But as Professor Plinio Correa de Oliveira, great Catholic leader of the 20th Century, often said, the red ideology only mutated.
We need only look at the present convulsions in Venezuela, at the iron fist that continues to grip Cuba, to understand what Georg Hegel, German philosopher precursor to Marx, said that defeats are only “negative contradictions” 1 leading to reformulations.
Indeed communist ideologues don’t go away. Rather, they make it an ongoing practice to re-hatch the failed experiments of the past. Like Talleyrand said of the return of the Bourbons, “they learned nothing and forgot nothing.” 2
Such is the case of Brazil; in 2010, Dilma Rousseff, previous Chief of Staff for Socialist president Luiz Inacio Lula, was elected as the country's first woman president.
From an upper middle class family, as a young woman Rousseff joined several subversive guerrilla groups after reading Revolution Inside the Revolution by Regis Debray, a friend of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. She consequently served a prison term for her involvement with bank robberies, stolen vehicles and bombings.
Always connected with leftists groups, she made her way to the top position of her large, wealthy South American nation, considered the largest Catholic country on earth.
Rousseff makes no bones about her Marxist/Leninist ideals. In the photo she appears seated at the center of the conference table at the 13th Congress of the Brazilian Communist Party.
“Russia will spread its errors throughout the world” 3 US not excluded.
Indeed, Communism is not only alive, but as Our Lady predicted in 1917 a few months before Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution, continues to spread its errors throughout the world.
Unfortunately, Our Lady’s prediction does not exclude our country, and the red menace is certainly making daring inroads. Socialist exploits, which only a few years ago would have been deemed unthinkable in America, are all over the news, often in our backyard. To cite only an example among many, the nation watches as a popular commercial chain, all-American, arts and crafts, inoffensive Hobby Lobby, fights to keep its doors open against a government mandate that requires the owners to violate their religious beliefs.
Presently the American family suffers a relentless siege, also a Communist tactic. Both Marx and Engels, leading communist theoreticians, affirm that if Communism is to succeed, there must be the abolition of the family.4 Today, on our land as around the world, the family is attacked on all sides, from conception to natural death. All around the US, magistrates are redefining the very nature of the family, denying God’s definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, often against the express wish of the people.
Indeed Communism is far from dead. Whether red, orange, or pink, whether symbolized by the sickle, red star, or rose, whether it frowns, scowls or smiles, the red wolf is always the same scheming prowler stalking the God-given freedom of peoples and nations.
Let us study our era’s red menace so as to detect its mutating colors, methods and tactics; let us watch, and let us pray the Rosary of Our Lady, the powerful weapon has historically often defeated formidable odds.
As we pray the Rosary, let us ask the Queen of Heaven for her ultimate victory, which she also predicted in Fatima:
“In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”5
Only then can the world have a chance at true peace.
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