I kind of doubt this, given that your cite says -
Repression of religion is common in Communist countries like the USSR, China, Algeria, East Germany, North Korea, Romania, Cuba, and Albania.
As mentioned, Communists do not like any other source of authority besides themselves.
Regards,
Shodan
Labeling the Khmer Rouge “communist” doesn’t really cover it. The Khmer Rouge stood a world apart from just about every other communist society ever attempted. They made North Korea look like San Francisco. While someplace like, say, East Germany was able to integrate into the Western world fairly smoothly – yes, yes, I know there were some bumps – the Khmer Rouge fucked their country up for some time to come. Visit Cambodia and you will see what I mean.
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Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The U.S. was supporting the Khmer Rouge because they were opposed to Vietnam. The thought that an opponent of Vietnam might be evil was inconceivable to the U.S. government.
And at the time, Vietnam was indeed among the worst regimes in the world. That Cambodia really was worse is one of the most disturbing facts about it.
Religion presents a separate orthodoxy with a separate power structure that could tell the masses (or some of them) to do something counter to the rulers’ desires. Thus, any challenge to the authority of the ruling group must be suppressed. In situations like Franco’s Spain, and in the Europe of Marx’s time, the established religion was on the same side as the ruling class, and many of the influential members of the church hierarchies were basically members of the same faction as the ruling class. Hence Marx’s observation about religion being the opiate of the masses - it was used to keep the lower class docile, under control, to persuade them to do what the feudal lords or the establishment wanted the masses to do.
[QUOTE=Marx]
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
[/QUOTE]
The method employed to achieve that end was communist. Socialists aim at the same general end, but advocate a different method.