Fifty-one years ago this Saturday, May 6, a “Hearing Before … the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C.” presented one of the most essential, riveting, and agonized warnings in American history to the “United States Senate, Eighty-Ninth Congress, Second Session.” But as usually happens with such alarms, the audience largely ignored it — and continues to do so.
The witness that day was “Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, … a refugee from Rumania” and communism. Indeed, he was an expert on the latter; at one point in the hearing, he removed his shirt to “show you my credentials, how I have studied communism.” Pointing to his horrific scars, he exhorted the senators, “Look here, look here, look here. … And so the whole body. … They tortured by all means. They beat until they broke the bones. They used red-hot irons, they used knives, they used everything. … They interrogated you very politely [at first], and if you did not wish to say what they asked they said, ‘Well, we have the first. On the 15th you will be beaten and tortured at 10 o’clock in the evening.’ Imagine what 14 days were after this. We have had prisoners who during this time … knocked at the door, ‘I can’t bear it. I will say everything,’ before they have been tortured.”
Romanian police first arrested Pastor Wurmbrand in 1948. They imprisoned him until 1956 and again from 1959-1964. The charge? “…[P]reaching ideas contrary to Communist doctrine.” But lest the Senators assume that Communists prey only on Christians, the pastor clarified that every prisoner was at risk, regardless of religion: “The Jewish religion has been persecuted just as the Christian religion. … We had in prison the Moslem priests and so on.” Wurmbrand implied that Communists also savaged non-political criminals, too: “And if I would not have been a clergyman but a murderer — it is a crime to torture a murderer, too.”
Not even animals were safe: the Communists “crucified a cat before ourselves. They beat nails in the feet of the cat and the cat was hanging with the head down, and can you imagine how this cat screamed and the prisoners, mad, bead [sic] on the door, ‘Free the cat, free the cat, free the cat,’ and the Communists very polite, ‘Oh, surely we will free the cat, but give the statements which we ask from you and then the cat will be freed,’ and I have known men who have given statements against their wives, against their children, against their parents to free the cat. They did it out of madness, and then the parents and the wives have been tortured like the cat.”
Communism’s depredations didn’t end at the prison’s walls: it destroyed the entire country. The State regulated the economy into starvation: “… now our population is very, very poor,” Wurmbrand testified. “… I caressed a child and the mother said to me, ‘This child is so good, it doesn’t weep even when it is hungry.’ It had given up weeping because the child knew it is useless to weep. You can’t get food.”
Naturally, the state decreed who could earn a living and who couldn’t. The pastor recalled, “I was licensed to preach — of course, nobody can preach in our country accept [sic] he has a license from the Government — and in the beginning I got a license, but which was withdrawn from me after the first week of preaching.”
Communism stole not only the people’s wealth but their liberty as well: “…[Y]ou can’t say ‘communism is cruel, they commit atrocities, it is a crime to poison children with atheism.’ If you do this you go to prison. … Nobody can say a word of criticism. Such a thing doesn’t even enter in the mind of somebody. … Nobody dares to say a word.”
Pastor Wurmbrand was by no means the West’s only admonition against Marxism. Before Hitler’s brand of totalitarianism wrecked Germany, Lenin’s had slaughtered so many millions of his own countrymen that right-wing Europeans welcomed the Nazis as a bulwark against Marxism’s spread.
Indeed, Britain and America’s refusal to join Germany in repelling bloodthirsty “Bolshevism” astonished Hitler, let alone their alliance with the murderous Stalin. And this while Moscow’s agents infiltrated countries worldwide, threatening to conquer the entire planet.
No matter: American communists successfully imposed their Satanic objectives on us. Communism and its cousins, socialism and Progressivism, are so firmly embedded in our culture and politics that Americans fiercely defend Social Security, Medicare, Obummercare, public schools, etc., whether from cuts to their budgets or libertarian critics.
Meanwhile, the country increasingly mimics the dystopia that Pastor Wurmbrand fled. American states license preachers (Ohio, for example, requires such licensing if clergy wish to officiate at weddings), and the IRS controls churches via tax-exemptions (houses of worship that refuse to recognize sodomy as “marriage” may soon find themselves reclassified as “for-profit” and paying taxes. And the IRS forbids religious bodies from “engaging in any political campaign activity.  … the prohibition also applies to statements opposing candidates”). The USSA even officially tortures, albeit not on communism’s staggering scale — yet.
“Wherever the communists came in the beginning,” Wurmbrand cautioned 51 years ago, “they said the same thing which I read here [in America] in newspapers and in periodicals. ‘You know Stalin’s communism has been very bad, but Yugoslavian communism or another kind of communism, this is very good.’ A little lion in its first days you can play with him just like with a puppy. When he becomes great, only then he is a lion. Yugoslavian communism is this little communism. And American communism a very little one and English communism is a very little one. When they grow, when they can do whatever they will to do, then only we can see them. … Communists in Rumania, too, were nice until they had the whole power in hand. … [Then] they have done things exactly as in Russia, and so they will do everywhere.”
Including here.
— Becky Akers

Becky Akers is a free-lance writer and historian who publishes so voluminously that whole forests of gigabytes have died. You’ve heard of some of the publications that carry her work (Personal Liberty Digest, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Barron’s, New York Post); others can only wish you’d heard of them. She’s also written two novels of the American Revolution, Halestorm and Abducting Arnold. They advocate sedition and liberty, among other joys, so the wise reader will buy them now, before they’re banned.