Lenin Books

“Lenin said that religion is the opium of the people. This profound remark will readily explain the sleepy submission, the supine placidity, the dull and drowsy obedience of the Irish people; as compared with the wild revolutionary frenzy, the incessant insurrection and revolt, the bloody riots and endless street- battles of the English people. Nobody ... can doubt that ... the Irish populace is passionately religious. It therefore follows, by the strict logic of Lenin, that the Irish populace has always been particularly patient and subservient and contented. Nobody who has lived in England all his life, as I have, can doubt that modern England, with its many manly and generous virtues, has become largely indifferent to religion. It follows therefore, by the strict logic of Lenin, that the English are the best Bolshevists in the world. To suppose anything else would be to indulge in the audacity, nay the blasphemy, of supposing that there is something wrong in the logic of Lenin.... The inference is that it is only by believing in God that we could possibly believe in the Government. But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God. That fact is written all across human history; but it is written most plainly across that recent history of Russia; which was created by Lenin. There the Government is the God, and all the more the God, because it proclaims aloud in accents of thunder, like every other God worth worshipping, the one essential commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods but Me.”

Lenin only fell into a slight error; he only got it the wrong way round. The truth is that Irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world. And, by the very nature of the Bolshevist and many other modern systems, as well as by the practical working of almost any system, the State will be the strongest thing in the world. The whole tendency of men is to treat the solitary State as the solitary standard. That men may protest against law, it is necessary that they should believe in justice; that they may believe in a justice beyond law, it is necessary that they should believe in a justice beyond the land of living men. You can impose the rule of the Bolshevist as you can impose the rule of the Bourbons; but it is equally an imposition. You can even make its subjects contented, as opium would make them contented. But if you are to have anything like divine discontent, then it must really be divine. Anything that really comes from below must really come from above. - from "Christendom in Dublin", Chapter 3, "Very Christian Democracy”
― G. K. Chesterton