Mr. Simons. “Yes, sir. And the anti-Christ spirit as well.”
The testimony of Mr. Simons on this subject was as follows:
Senator King. “What I am trying to get at is, for my information, why Bolshevism is bitterly opposed to all sorts of religion or sacraments of the church—Christianity; because I suppose that they recognize that Christianity is the basis of law and order and of orderly government. I was wondering if you had discovered why they were so bitter against Christianity, and if you found that all the Bolsheviks were atheistic or rationalistic or anti-Christian?”
Mr. Simons. “My experience over there under the Bolsheviki régime has led me to come to the conclusion that the Bolsheviki religion is not only absolutely anti-religious, atheistic, but has it in mind to make all real religious work impossible as soon as they can achieve that end which they are pressing. There was a meeting—I cannot give you the date offhand; it must have been in August, 1918—held in a large hall that had once been used by the Young Men’s Christian Association in Petrograd for their work among the Russian soldiers. The Bolsheviki confiscated it; put out the Y. M. C. A. In that large hall there was a meeting held which was to be a sort of religious dispute. Lunacharsky, the Commissar of the People’s Enlightenment, as he was called, and Mr. Spitzberg, who was the Commissar of Propaganda for Bolshevism, were the two main speakers. Both of those men spoke in very much the same way as Emma Goldman has been speaking. I have been getting some of her literature, and recently I have been very much amazed at the same line of argumentation with regard to the attack on religion and Christianity and so-called religious organizations.”
Senator King. “She is the Bolshevik who has been in jail in this country and who will be deported as soon as her sentence is over?”
Mr. Simons. “I do not know as she will be deported.”
Senator King. “I think she will be.”
Mr. Simons. “She ought to be put somewhere where she cannot issue any more of that literature. Lunacharsky and Spitzberg came out with pretty much the same things that she has been saying and printing. This is one of these theses: ‘All that is bad in the world, misery and suffering that we have had, is largely due to the superstition that there is a God.’”
Senator King. “I noticed in yesterday’s paper that in their schools the children are being taught, wherever they have schools at all, positive atheism. Did you verify that?”
Mr. Simons. “Lunacharsky, as the official head of the department of education, Commissar of the People’s Enlightenment, said: ‘We now propose to enlighten our boys and our girls and we are using as a textbook a catechism of atheism which will be used in our public schools.’ Yet he had the audacity to say: ‘We are going to give all churches the same chance.’ And a priest replied to him, saying: ‘Then you ought not to put your catechism of atheism into the schools.’”[19]