Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

Acknowledging that the Marxists understood the need for power to establish justice, he attacked them for pretending to have discovered a science of history even though Marx offered only an “apocalyptic vision” of triumph over selfishness and oppression, “in the style of great drama and classical religion.” Believing unreservedly in their false science, Niebuhr wrote, Marxists fell easily into blind tolerance of the injustice inherent in their creed, which, “charged with both egotism and vindictiveness,” proclaimed it the destiny of Marxists to speak for the poor and to exact vengeance upon the non-poor. According to Niebuhr, the inevitable result was a naïve credulity as well as “a policy of force and fear.”* He denounced Stalin’s “policy of ‘liquidating’ foes”—in a book published in 1932, years before most observers in the United States realized that such a policy really existed.