Rise of the Marxists

• Post by: Nicholas Kaminsky
• September 9, 2015

Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage Paul KengorWND Books, 2015; 256 pages, $18.95 In his latest work, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, Paul Kengor argues that twenty-first century Americans, with their unprecedented decision to redefine marriage, have unwittingly given to leftist radicals a kind of superweapon with which to finally dispatch their longtime mortal enemies, the family and the Church. The road to homosexual marriage, says Kengor, has been a long and twisting one. Ever since the mid-1800s, “the far left had its sights on the family, with marriage at the epicenter.” He stresses, however, that his work is not meant to expose some grand conspiracy for homosexual marriage that has been incubating for centuries. On the contrary, yesterday’s anti-family Marxists would be shocked—though thoroughly delighted—by the enthusiasm with which mainstream America has in remarkably short time embraced a truly revolutionary position of which none of them could have ever dreamed. The majority of Takedown’s pages are dedicated to tracing the course of the long war the radical left has waged against marriage and the family, and the author does an excellent job chronicling this conflict. He begins with early experiments in “free love” and communal sexuality, such as the nineteenth-century Oneida commune of John Humphrey Noyes. After this, he thoroughly discusses the anti-marriage stances of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, explaining that “it was widely understood that communist ideas were antagonistic toward the family.” This ideology would have concrete ramifications with the coming of the Russian Revolution and the rise of the U.S.S.R. The decades that followed saw the ripening of the bitter fruits of communism. In Soviet Moscow, the ideals of marriage and family were completely obliterated. In 1934, there were three abortions for e