Persecution Under Communist Rule - Part 2

Good morning, praise the Lord. It's Saturday. Tomorrow it's Palm Sunday and the Holy Week starts.

Now here in America you don't, you're not so much bothered by this kind of thing, holidays, but in Romania we do. And Holy Week is a very special week. Now, I have an anniversary, the anniversary of 1977.

It's difficult to explain all the intricacies of the event of that time, but there were new forms of persecution started about a year before. Christians were being fired from their jobs, students were harassed in the schools, expelled from the schools. And people were watched if they had house prayer meetings and they were invaded in the house and they were heavily fired for the prayer.

Now the outside, the communists were bragging that communism means freedom and it's a free country. So to betray, to tell the world about persecution meant high treason. And we were six people who collected the facts about this persecution.

We made a horrifying description of these kinds of persecution. Now another thing that you are not aware of, if you wanted at that time everybody to know something, you had to send the message to the Radio Free Europe, which was an American radio broadcasting from Munich, Germany. And everybody in Romania was listening not to the government radio, but to Radio Free Europe.

So through our channels, we sent that paper to Radio Free Europe. And on Saturday night, this weekend, that paper was read on Radio Free Europe. And our fate was sort of settled there because we were all six arrested.

And on Monday, we were charged with treason and conspiracy to commit treason because we conspired together. And the conspiracy to commit treason is met by death. So there we were on Monday.

Each one of us in another room, each got a good beating that morning. I heard others screaming in the other rooms. I didn't believe it was coming to me too.

But about lunchtime, a general came in and he just made a sign to the two interrogators. And they went out. And the general just came and started to slap me and eventually to hit me with the fist in the forehead.

I hit the wall. My head almost cracked. And then he left.

And the other, the interrogators came back, just like nothing had happened. And they said, let's continue with the interrogation. Well, it continued.

On Thursday, we were still there in interrogation. Again, about lunchtime, the general came in my room, and made a sign to the other two. And I took the table like that, waiting for the second round of boxing.

And the general sat down at the table of the interrogators. He saw the gesture, smiled. He said, don't worry.

This time I am calm. And I came to talk. Now, the Lord told us that when we are there in interrogation, it's not we who speak.

The Holy Spirit who speaks through us. So that's why he said, you don't prepare the sermon beforehand. That's not referring to the pulpit brothers.

That refers only for when you are there at the secret police. So I just said, said, Mr. General, because you came to talk, I first want to apologize for what happened on Monday. Now, on Monday, he beat me.

It didn't make sense for him that I thank. He said, Mr. General, let me explain. I shouldn't have shouted.

See, when he started to beat me, I started to scream. Not for her being heard, but we had a sign to let the others that we are being beaten. You see, that's another thing.

It's illegal to beat somebody in a communist country. So, Mr. General, I'm sorry for shouting. It dawned me on Tuesday as I was thinking, this is the Holy Week, and you beat me in the Holy Week.

Mr. General, for a Christian, nothing is more beautiful than to suffer when his Lord suffered. Mr. General, you beat me in the Holy Week. Thank you for the beating.

Thank you for the most beautiful gift you could have ever given me. I saw he couldn't swallow, and then he said, okay, I shouldn't have done it. Let's talk.

It was a very interesting talk, and because of that, although we were charged with treason, he decided that me and my five colleagues should go free for Easter and celebrate Easter with our people and then come back on Tuesday. Thank you for the beating, the most beautiful gift he could have ever given me, to be beaten in the Holy Week, to suffer when my beloved Lord suffered. So, that's my anniversary.

It's a beautiful time. Okay, this is an introduction. What is Marxism? Karl Marx was born in Germany in 1818.

His father was a converted Jew. He was a very devout Christian, and he sent his son Karl to a Christian school, and the young Karl was a devout student and Christian. He wrote a beautiful paper for the last year in the high school, a paper entitled The Union of Christ with the Believer.

Then something happened, nobody knows what. When he was 19, he started to write satanic verses. In one of the poems he wrote, he states, I wish I could have a rope to bind all mankind and drag them after me in hell and then laugh about it.

What sort of man are you who want to do that? Now, Richard Wurmbrand told us in a little book entitled Marx and Satan, that he can prove that actually Marx became a Satanist. He literally had sessions of worshipping Satan. He wasn't taken too seriously, but I told you last night that an American named Paul Kangor last year came with a huge book entitled The Devil and Karl Marx.

He takes Richard Wurmbrand's brochure and gives you the content, and then he develops on that the story of Marx and then on the other Marxists who are involved with Satan directly. So now people, Marxists, don't like this part. But anyhow, Karl Marx got friends with a man called Friedrich Engels, and the two wrote in 1980, 1848, they published their book called The Communist Manifesto.

Communist Manifesto is, first of all, a historic survey. Marx says that all history is the history of class struggle. First, you have the slaves and the owners of the slaves.

Later in the feudal time, you have the serfs and the owners of the land. And later you have the working class, the proletariat, and the owners of production, the bourgeoisie. Always these two classes fight, and hate is the engine of history.

Hate is what makes things happen. So when the working class will have enough power, enough vision, and enough hate, they will stage an uprising, and they will destroy the bourgeoisie, and then they will build an ideal society. So communism is at the end of the goal.

Now, you remember what I told about Lenin. Lenin was a Russian Jew who took from Marx everything, and he was the one who succeeded to produce a communist revolution in Russia. And I told you about his expectancy that man will immediately change, become a good, loving, righteous, diligent person, because you change the environment.

But man didn't change. So here was the entrance of Pavlov. And incidentally, the other book that it's a must is the Black Book of Communism, published by a group of people who give you the story of communism in Russia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, up to Venezuela.

Twenty million people killed in Russia. Sixty million killed in China in a few years' time. And then a million in Cambodia and all the others, including a million in Eastern Europe.

And we were there, part of that story, looking how people arrested, summarily tried tried, either shot or sent to a labor camp to perish there. A reign of terror. Marxism never gives you a description of an ideal society because they didn't plan such a thing.

They only planned the destruction part. And you should remember that Marxism was conceived as how to destroy the bourgeoisie. But then, well, automatically everything will be right.

So we just have to destroy. Remember this. Now we come to America and we have to know exactly the story of how America became a Marxist country.

In 1921, the Communist Party of Italy was formed by a man called Antonio Gramsci. Antonio Gramsci had a question. Why did Marxism succeed in Russia but not in Western Europe? So in 1922, Antonio Gramsci went to Moscow with a question.

Why Western Europeans are not bothered with the Marxist revolution? And the wise man from Kremlin gave him the answer. The Western European countries are too Christian. You will not make a bloody revolution with Christian people.

You have to take Christianity from their heads, their hearts, and when you take Christianity away, you obtain a desperate society. And you have to create a desperate society that will make a revolution, a Marxist revolution. Now, Gramsci came back to Italy and he shared with a lot of people the new vision.

First, we have to destroy Christianity. In Frankfurt, Germany, there was an Institute for Social Research led by a group of Jews, and they learned from Gramsci. Marxism must destroy Christianity first.

In 1933, Hitler started to persecute the Jews, so this group of Jews took refuge in the United States. At least four of them were Jews. They all got jobs at Columbia University in New York, and their plan was, first of all, to produce Marxist professors and start the universities of America with Marxist professors.

So that was the first plan. Then, how to corrupt the young people? Yes, corrupt, poison. And one of them, Marcuse, studied Freud.

Freud with sexual unlimited elaboration. You see, Christianity enslaves people with taboos, with interdictions. If you want to liberate people, liberate them sexually.

And that is what you obtained in 1960s. You older people remember the student revolt, the sexual revolt with the Woodstock and the other places of sex without limit. That was part of the Marxist liberation.

And it was only when Marx and Freud were put together, and they started to have that fantastic success in the American universities. Now, we have to understand America. America is a unique country in the world in the way it is organized.

So how is America unique? The first thing is that America doesn't have a state religion. You say an established religion. I never understood that until somebody said state religion.

Well, a religion that is imposed by the state. You see, when in the time of Reformation, a group of people in Zurich came to the conclusion that the reform is not complete until you introduce believer's baptism. And in 1525, a group of them decided to, one baptized himself and then he baptized all the others.

And because they were all baptized as babes, now they were called rebaptizers. In Greek, anabaptists. And all of a sudden, horror came to the leaders.

Wait a minute. We don't then establish what these young people are. We don't Christianize them when they are babes.

We let religion be at their choice. When they are grown up, you convince them to become Christians, and they accept and you baptize them. And that's exactly what they said.

You are free to be a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, or an atheist. That's your business. No, that's the business of the state.

Because we all have to be one of faith. Otherwise, there is no unity in the nation. And the anabaptists were considered the most dangerous people in the world.

And they, uh, from that original group, in the next three years, all of them were either burnt at stake or decapitated. They all perished because they were considered the most dangerous people in the world. Now, when they were working out what sort of country United States should be, a group of Baptists in Virginia told Madison, we elect you with one condition.

Don't establish a religion. Don't make a state religion. Let religion be the individual's job.

So eventually that's what they decided. No religion would have the government support. Religion has to be supported by its believers.

Now, this is unique in the world. You don't realize how extraordinary this is. Now, here is the problem.

The moment you don't have an established religion, a state religion, what happens with the schools? It's a long story, but you cannot teach any religion in the state school because that would be actually the government imposing one religion or the other. So very shortly in American history, atheism became the religion of the school. Now, you know, it was a long story of fight in the courts and eventually through the courts, even the 10 commandments were taken down from the classrooms because that was imposing one religion.

It's so strange, but the things will also be fought from now on in the courts. Now, what happened at that point? Most of the parents said, we make our own schools. That's how there are now 34,000 private schools in America.

Five million and a half students in the private schools. By 1990, some parents didn't like the private schools either because they were too expensive or they were not on how the parents wanted them to be. So they invented homeschooling.

I think this was a unique American invention. How can you educate people from the first grade to the 12th grade at home? And very soon it was proven that it's much more efficient to have the homeschooling. But again, they were sued in court.

And I think it was in 1994 when the big trial was with the question, be careful, whose are the children? Do they belong to the parents or do they belong to the government? Now you shudder even to hear the question. But in 1931, when the Socialist Party took the power in Scandinavia, it was introduced as a law that the children belong to the state and the state decides what the children should be taught. In America, the answer was the children belong to the parents.

This is a very fundamental issue again. Whose are the children? Children belong to the parents and the parents decide what sort of education their children should have. Now, when these Marxists came to America, they found here what no other country had, a system of education wide open to the teachers' union.

You know that the most impowerful trade union in America is the teachers' union. They have a building of their own very close to the White House. And it is there that they decide what should be taught in the American schools, public schools.

And of course, they embraced wholehearted the idea of Marxism being fed in the schools. They encouraged the education of the professors in Marxism. That's why I told you last night there are about 10,000 professors of Marxism today in the schools.

You know, Marxism in Europe became a very hated subject. Even in France, somebody said about 50 years ago, if we need a debate with a Marxist professor, we have to go to take it from America. We don't find here experts in Marxism.

They are only in America. Again, why? Because of the nature of the education. Now, I don't want to jump over.

I don't want to come too early to the solutions because there are solutions to the problem. But I don't want them to be too early on the table. I thought a lot.

I couldn't sleep last night for a long time because I still didn't have some of the answers. But I think I have very important answers for you here for tonight, for America. But to change a little bit for this morning, now I want another thing before that.

I'll open it for questions. But go back to my confrontation with Marxism. I was a pastor at that time in the city of Plohest, and I was asked to go to the secret police.

And the officer there told me some new guidelines for me. I said, Sir, I don't believe that and I will not do that. He looked to me and said, You don't know where you are.

You don't know that we have all the power here, that you are in our hands. I smiled. He said, Sir, of course I know.

Listen very carefully. I know you can kill me whenever you want. But let me tell you something very important.

Killing is your supreme weapon. Dying is my supreme weapon. Here is how it works, Sir.

You know that by now my sermons are on tapes. At that time we had real tapes, long tapes, and you had 50 sermons on one huge tape. It was a tape recorder.

Sir, my sermons are on tapes all over the country. Everybody has a tape with my sermons, every Christian. Sir, when you kill me, practically I sprinkle my tapes, my sermons with my blood.

Everybody will take that tape and say, This preacher really meant it because he died for it. Sir, my sermons will speak 10 times louder after you kill me. Because you kill me, I win the battle for Christianity, for God in this country because you kill me.

Go on and do it. Wait. He said, Wait a little bit here in his office.

So he led me there. He went to his boss. He stayed half an hour.

He reported what I said and he came back very calm, very polite. Mr. Tso, go home and we'll see what will happen. Now, about a month or so later, a Baptist pastor from Bucharest came to Ployersty and said, Joseph, I was interrogated by a colonel in the secret police of Bucharest and he told me something I didn't understand.

I want to know, what did he mean? He said, We know that Mr. Tso would love to be a martyr, but we are not that big fools to fill his plan. Oh, and I told the story. Oh, yes.

What they realized is that if they make me a martyr, I actually win the war in this country. Now, you see, put this together with the story with the general, and I will tell you a few more of this today and tomorrow morning. So that you know, don't allow yourself conquered by evil.

Contrarily, conquer the evil by goodness. We are in the most vicious battle of the world, but our kind of battle is different.