YES, WAS KARL MARX A SATANIST? IS A REAL BOOK

The Daily Beast's Patricia Murphy spoke to a number of people who knew Ted Cruz when he was a Princeton undergraduate. Some of them found him a bit odd:

When Craig Mazin first met his freshman roommate, Rafael Edward Cruz, he knew the 17-year-old Texan was not like other students at Princeton, or probably anywhere else for that matter.

"I remember very specifically that he had a book in Spanish and the title was Was Karl Marx a Satanist? And I thought, who is this person?" Mazin says of Ted Cruz. “Even in 1988, he was politically extreme in a way that was surprising to me.”

Yes, that book exists. It grew out of a pamphlet by a fairly well-known anti-communist named Richard Wurmbrand. There's a copy in Spanish Portuguese (apparently of just the pamphlet) at Scribd.*





In English, the book is known as Marx and Satan. A Goodreads reader praises it:

A fascinating book. I expected political conjecture or theological parallelism, but Wurmbrand offers the poetry of Marx and Engels themselves! Statements from Communists about working for Satan. Illumination of a (not entirely unknown) secret society, even, with its highest echelon called "Hell." Comparison of Satanist ritual with the writings and actions of Marxists of the highest pedigree.

Go to this PDF for a direct download. The full English text is also at Scribd. Here's some of Wurmbrand's "evidence" for Marx's Satanism:

One of the peculiarities of hack magic, as mentioned earlier, is the inversion of names. Inversions in general so permeated Marx's whole manner of thinking that he used them throughout. He answered Proudhon's book The Philosophy of Misery with another book entitled The Misery of Philosophy. He also wrote, "We have to use instead of the weapon of criticism, the criticism of weapons."

Here are further examples of Marx’s use of inversion in his writing:

Let us seek the enigma of the Jew not in his religion, but rather let us seek the enigma of his religion in the real Jew. Luther broke the faith in authority, because he restored the authority of faith. He changed the priests into laymen, because he changed the laymen into priests.

Marx used this technique in many places. He used what could be called typical Satanist style.

Shifting gears somewhat, men usually wore beards in Marx's time, but not beards like his, and they did not have long hair. Marx's manner and appearance was characteristic of the disciples of Joanna Southcott, a cultist priestess of an occult sect who claimed to be in contact with the ghost Shiloh.

Q.E.D., hunh?

I shouldn't be too flippant -- Wurmbrand was a Romanian who was imprisoned, tortured, and kept for years in solitary confinement for his Christian beliefs, before he finally made his way to the West.

But if this is what Cruz was reading -- in Spanish, no less ("This is America, speak English" wasn't a conservative slogan then?) -- in 1988, you have to imagine that he suffered a great loss when the Berlin Wall fell (tempered, of course, by the ongoing struggle against aging Fidel Castro), and thus he's still looking for a moral fight as pure as God vs. Satan and the Christian West vs. Communism ... which, according to this book he took to Princeton, are exactly the same fight.

That's frightening to me. It puts me in agreement with Cruz's freshman roommate:

Craig Mazin said he knew some people might be afraid to speak in the press about a senator, but added of Cruz, “We should be afraid that someone like that has power.”

And the idea that his freshman roommate could someday be the leader of the free world? “I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone,” Mazin said. “I would rather pick somebody from the phone book."

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* UPDATE: Vincent Jørgensen points out in comments that Era Karl Marx um Satanista? is Portuguese, not Spanish. I'm monolingual, but even I should have figured that out from the "um." Here's what I was looking for -- no download available, but it can be found at the Harvard library (!) and (unsurprisingly) in the Miami-Dade Public Library System:





Oh, and I see the complete Spanish text is here.