A Treasury of Deception

by Michael Farquhar

  To bolster the fiction of paternal care and concern, thousands of sculptures and paintings of Stalin with children were commissioned. One image of him with an apple-cheeked little girl became an icon of the era, reproduced countless times and distributed across the Soviet Union. Stalin later had the child’s father shot.11 The iconography was all part of a vast propaganda effort in art, architecture, and literature to make Stalin the omnipotent god of the officially atheistic society. He loomed everywhere and was indeed adored.

  “The worship and boundless cult with which the population surrounds Stalin is the first thing that strikes the foreigner visiting the Soviet Union,” a German observer wrote. “On every corner, at every crossroads, in appropriate and inappropriate places alike, one sees gigantic busts and portraits of Stalin. The speeches one hears, not only the political ones, but even on any scientific or artistic subject, are peppered with glorification of Stalin, and at times this deification takes on tasteless forms.”

  Stalin was a jealous god. “He loved nothing more than he loved power,” wrote author Dmitri Volkogonov, “full, unlimited power, consecrated by the ‘love’ of the multitudes. In this he was successful. No other man in the world has ever accomplished so fantastic a success as he: to exterminate millions of his own countrymen and receive in exchange the whole country’s blind adulation.”

  History, of course, had to reflect Stalin’s greatness—even if it had to be rewritten. During the Bolshevik rise to power, he had been a mere party functionary, albeit an efficient one. But in his version of history, the required version, he and Lenin had led the Russian Revolution together, side by side as equals. That’s what the textbooks said, and the propaganda films, and every other tool used to “educate” the Soviet citizen. Lenin, however, had grave misgiv-ingsabout the man who became his surprise successor. “Having become General Secretary [of the Communist Party], Comrade Stalin has concentrated unlimited power in his hands,” the revolutionary leader warned shortly before his death in 1924, “and I am not sure that he will always use that power with sufficient care.”

  Lenin was frighteningly prescient on this point. As Stalin consolidated his power in the 1930s, he went on a murderous rampage against so-called “enemies of the people.” Millions were arrested in a vast terror campaign, from party leaders to ordinary citizens. “I have known Stalin for thirty years,” wrote Budu Mdivani, former premier of Soviet Georgia, before he was shot on Stalin’s orders. “[He] won’t rest until he has butchered all of us, beginning with the unweaned baby and ending with the blind great-grandmother.”

  Justice became a sick joke as people were forced through torture to confess crimes against the state that they didn’t commit. Hordes of unfortunates were summarily tried and executed, or sent away to gulags to die of disease and starvation. The engineer of one of the greatest holocausts in history oversaw it all with cold efficiency. He spent long hours poring over endless lists of those to be condemned and approving their death sentences, after which he often relaxed by watching a movie.

  All the problems of the state, which Stalin’s disastrous policies wrought, were blamed on “wreckers” and counterrevolutionaries. “The remnants of the dying classes,” he declared in 1933,

  . . . they have all wormed their way into our factories, our institutions and trading bodies, our railway and river transport enterprises, and for the most part into our collective and state farms. They have wormed their way in and hidden themselves there, disguised as “workers” and “peasants,” and some of them have even managed to worm their way into the party. What have they brought with them? Of course, they have brought their hatred of the Soviet regime, their feelings of ferocious hostility to the new forms of the economy, way of life, culture. . . . The only thing left for them to do is to play dirty tricks and do harm to the workers and collective farmers. And they do this any way they can, on the quiet. They set fire to warehouses and break machinery. They organize sabotage. They organize wrecking in the collective and state farms, and some of them, including a number of professors, go so far in their wrecking activities as to inject the livestock in collective and state farms with plague and anthrax, and encourage the spread of meningitis among horses, and so on.

  The Russian populace was so thoroughly indoctrinated by the official lies and slander that they clamored for the blood of the “traitors.” And they were sated. “Stalin felt he had achieved much,” wrote Volkogonov “in removing the truth from the people, he had turned them into a crowd for which he would take responsibility himself. Among all his other crimes, this was perhaps his worst.”

  The great purges of the 1930s had a devastating effect on the Red Army. An estimated forty thousand officers were executed in 1937 and 1938, more officers than were killed in all of World War II. And as that great calamity approached, the army that was to defend the Soviet Union from Hitler’s onslaught was virtually decapitated. The führer was thrilled with the news. “It makes a worse impression than it did in 1933,” he gloated over the Soviet military’s dangerously weakened state. “Russia needs years to recover its previous level.” Six months later, on June 22, 1941, he invaded Russia on a thousand-mile front in what was history’s largest land attack. Stalin was not to be seen for weeks after the invasion, hidden away and reportedly paralyzed by fear.

  The Soviet Union barely survived the war. More than twenty million men, women, and children were killed. But Stalin emerged stronger than ever. As the self-proclaimed father of the country, he was entirely identified with its victory over fascism, and its new place of power on the world stage. His deification was complete, his lies gospel, and his will absolute. The system over which he presided, however, was as unworkable as ever. Consequently, another massive purge was planned before his death in 1953.

  With the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, not to mention China’s decisive turn toward capitalism, history has rendered its verdict on the great lie that once threatened to take over the globe. Nevertheless, the spirit of Stalin still lingers, perhaps most abundantly in the pudgy little person of North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il. In one of the world’s most oppressive regimes, Kim reigns supreme by holding out the empty promise of paradise for his starving people.

  His is a land of illusion, particularly the capital of Pyongyang. Many of the city’s gleaming office towers and hotels sit empty—a facade of prosperity in a malnourished nation. Murals depict abundant harvests and cheerful peasants, though as many as two million people died of starvation during the 1990s. Policemen direct nonexistent traffic on empty boulevards, while stores display luxury goods that few can afford in a hopelessly failed economy. Citizens, mostly students, are used as props for massive, precisely choreographed demonstrations of devotion to the state and its leader. But their sunny faces belie the true condition of the Hermit Kingdom. “If you went a little outside the center of Pyongyang,” wrote Hwang Jang Yop, a party leader who defected to South Korea, “the roads were filled with people who were reduced to mere skeletons.”

  Kim reserves some of the most grotesque distortions for himself and his late father Kim Il Sung, whom Stalin installed as a puppet in North Korea after World War II, and from whom Kim inherited the totalitarian regime in 1994. Father and son are worshipped as demigods by a people brainwashed from birth. Their portraits hang side by side in every building, and citizens are required to wear a picture of the father pinned to their clothes, right over their hearts. “It’s a cult of personality like nothing in history,” Korea scholar Kongdan Oh told The Washington Post in 2003. “In North Korea [Kim] and his father are like God and Jesus Christ.”

  The mythology built around both men makes even Stalin look modest. According to official doctrine, Kim’s birth on Korea’s sacred Mount Paekdu was heralded by a bright star, a double rainbow, and a swallow that descended from heaven to announce the blessed arrival of “a general who will rule all the world.” (The true story is somewhat less glamorous. Kim was actually born in a Siberian army ca
mp, where his father and a small band of communist guerillas had fled from the Japanese.) His presence is said to make trees bloom and snow melt, and he is supposedly so gifted that he wrote fifteen hundred books while in college. No wonder his proud pop called him “a genius of 10,000 talents.” Of course it won’t do to have a deity that stands only five-foot-three, so Kim compensates as best he can with platform shoes and a puffy pompadour.

  The “Dear Leader’s” quasi-divine status in North Korea is still relatively low-key next to that of his dad, the “Great Leader,” who had erected more than thirty-four thousand monuments to himself by the late 1980s, and whose mummified corpse rests in a $900 million palace-cum-mausoleum. When he died in 1994, there was deep and genuine grief among the people whose minds he had manipulated for more than half a century. The propagandists had a field day. “When the Most Beloved Leader Kim Il Sung passed away,” relates one widely believed official myth, “thousands of cranes descended from heaven to fetch Him. The birds couldn’t take Him away because they saw that North Koreans cried and screamed, pummeled their chests, beat the ground and pulled out their hair. After ten days the heavenly birds decided to put Him to rest in a heavenly palace built on earth.” He still reigns as “President for Eternity,” and almost anything he ever touched has become a sacred relic.

  Like his father before him, Kim depends on the faith and hope of the people for survival. Truth, therefore, is his greatest enemy. If his oppressed subjects ever learned that communism has proven to be an abysmal failure in the rest of the world, that their fellow Koreans in the South enjoy such relative prosperity, or that their woes aren’t caused by the evil, decadent West, Kim would be booted from power. That’s why he keeps his people in such an extreme state of isolation. If anyone did manage to gather news from the outside, he would instantly join hundreds of thousands of his countrymen in a prison camp, or worse. So, the people who know no better continue to eat bark and clay to fill their bellies, offer their paeans to the “Dear Leader,” and wait expectantly for a better day. Meanwhile, the rest of the world waits anxiously to see what Kim’s going to do with his nukes.

  5

  What in the Name of God!

  God wills it!” Pope Urban II declared in 1095 as he launched the First Crusade. Rich rewards in heaven were promised for those who sacrificed themselves in the holy war against Islam. Almost a millennium later, Osama bin Laden guaranteed the very same thing, only he tossed in some heavenly virgins to sweeten the deal for those martyrs who died fighting the infidel.

  Poor God has been misrepresented so many times throughout history, even He must find it difficult to keep track of all those false prophets who have hijacked His holy name. What follows are sound bites of some of the most obscene and ridiculous lies ever disguised as divine will.

  “By the grace of Auramazda [God] I am king;Auramazda gave me the kingdom.”

  —Darius the Great of Persia (reigned 522-486 BC)

  “Are you the god-haters who do not believe me to be a god, a god acknowledged by all the other nations but not to be named by you?”

  —Caligula (reigned AD 37-41), the mad Roman emperor with divine pretensions, to an embassy of Alexandrian Jews

  “The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives on even in our times and so it is necessary that the guilt should live on, also. You are the one who opened the door to the Devil, you are the one who first plucked the fruit of the forbidden tree, you are the first who deserted the divine law; you are the one who persuaded him whom the Devil was not strong enough to attack. All too easily you destroyed the image of God, man. Because of your desert, that is, death, even the Son of God had to die.”

  —Tertullian, ecclesiastical writer in the second and third centuries, On the Apparel of Women

  “The Roman Church has never erred, nor can it err until the end of time.”

  —Pope Gregory VII (reigned 1073-1085), claiming infallibility ceded to the church by God

  “Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets. . . . Men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.”

  —Report from the French cleric Raymond d’Aguilers on the slaughter of Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem during the First Crusade in 1099

  “Kill them all; God will recognize his own.”

  —Papal commander Arnaud Amalric in 1208 when asked by his forces what should be done about the Catholic citizens of Béziers, who were indistinguishable from the “heretical” Cathars of the same town

  “In this way the battle of the Lord was triumphantly won, by God alone and through God alone.To God be the honor and the glory, who granted the victory of His Cross through Jesus Christ, our Lord.”

  —Report to the pope from King Alfonso VIII of Castile after the defeat of the Muslims at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212

  “Alfonso—God curse him!—pulled out of this place after he and his men had taken their fill of the chattels and possessions of the Muslims. . . .”

  —Muslim account of the same battle

  “It is the duty of every Catholic to persecute heretics.”

  —Pope Gregory IX (reigned 1227-1241), launching the Inquisition in 1232

  “Infidels should all be dispatched to hell with the proselytizing sword.”

  —Tamerlane, the fierce Mongol warrior of the fourteenth century who built great towers in the shape of minarets out of human heads

  “We come to conquer this land by [the King of Spain’s] command, that all may come to a knowledge of God and of His Holy Catholic Faith; and by reason of our good mission, God, the Creator of heaven and earth and of all things in them, permits this, in order that you may know Him and come out from the bestial and diabolical life that you lead. . . . Our Lord permitted that your pride should be brought low and that no Indian should be able to offend a Christian.”

  —Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro to the Inca emperor Atahuallpa at Peru in 1532

  “Alas, it cannot be anything but the terrible wrath of God which permits anyone to sink into such abysmal, devilish, hellish, insane baseness, envy, and arrogance. If I were to avenge myself on the devil himself I should be unable to wish him such evil and misfortune as God’s wrath inflicts on the Jews, compelling them to lie and to blaspheme so monstrously, in violation of their own conscience. Anyway, they have their reward for constantly giving God the lie.”

  —Protestant reformer Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies, 1543

  “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?”

  —Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509-1564) on the Copernican theory that the earth revolves around the sun

  “The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth; for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods.”

  —James I of England (reigned 1603-1625), firm believer in the Divine Right of Kings

  “We recognize the negro as God and God’s Book and God’s Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him—our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude.”

  —Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, 1861

  “We, the Order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, reverentially acknowledge the majesty and supremacy of Almighty God and recognize His goodness and providence through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

  —From the Constitution and Laws of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 1867

  “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. . . . The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign office of wife and mother.This is the law of the Creator.”

  —U.S. Supreme Court, 1873, upholding the Illinois Supreme Court’s refusal of Myra Bradwell’s application for admission to t
he bar because of her sex

  “The Catholic and Protestant religions are insolent to the gods, extinguishing sanctity, rendering no obedience to Buddha, and enraging Heaven and Earth. . . . But 8 million Spirit Soldiers will descend from Heaven and sweep the Empire of all foreigners.”

  —The Chinese Society of Harmonious Fists, or Boxers, a nativistic terrorist group that tortured and killed foreigners and Chinese Christians during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900

  “[The royal crown is] granted by God’s Grace alone and not by parliaments, popular assemblies, and popular decision. . . . Considering myself an instrument of the Lord, I go my way.”

  —Kaiser Wilhelm II (reigned 1888-1918), militaristic emperor of Germany who helped instigate World War I, one of the most savage conflicts in human history

  “God is with us.”

  —Motto on the belt buckles of Kaiser Wilhem’s soldiers during the Great War

  “Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

  —Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925

  “I believe that it was God’s will to send a youth from here into the Reich, to let him grow up, to raise him to be the leader of the nation so as to enable him to lead back his homeland into the Reich.”