so And welcome once again to another edition of A Plain Answer here at Redeemer Broadcasting. I'm Dan Elmendorf. Joining me on the Skype line today is Dr. Peter Hammond. Peter, it's great to have you with us today. Thank you, Dan. Good to be on your program. Peter, could you remind us, what is your role in, I believe it's South Africa and other places around the world? Yes, I'm African, born and bred. I'm born 1960 in Cape Town, South Africa, raised in Rhodesia, what today is communist Zimbabwe. And for the last 34 years, I've been a missionary, running Frontline Fellowship, leading our mission in pioneering missionary outreaches throughout Africa as far as Sudan and Nigeria and the Congo, especially work in war zones, restricted access areas, helping persecuted churches, smuggling Bibles, building schools and churches, and really doing everything one can do in leadership training, literature, and love and action to work for the fulfillment of the Great Commission, working for biblical reformation, praying for revival. And of course, in the process, we've been very much in hotspot fighting against Islam and communism. And I've been in prison a few times and shot up and bombed a few times also. by Marxist and Muslim governments and terrorists. Well, Peter, it sounds like a very almost scary life you've led, and we thank the Lord that you're still alive. Yes, indeed, and we've been accumulating death threats and hate mail from Marxists, Muslims, and other tolerant people. You mentioned something that really has caught our attention, and also you sent an email. I'm on your email list regarding Marxism, and I was wondering if you could help us understand the philosophy and practices of Marxism and contrast that. What does the Bible say versus what Marxism teaches and practices? Yes, you know, very few people have a fair understanding of what Marxism is all about. And in fact, a lot of what's given in the schools and universities is actually disinformation rather than education. Education should be about teaching people how to think critically, whereas indoctrination is instructing people what to believe without actually teaching them to think critically. And today, a lot of our schools seem to be more in terms of indoctrination, teaching you what to think, rather than education, which teach you how to think critically. And I'm grateful for a really good old world education brought up in the old Rhodesian colony where our teachers told us, think outside the box. Don't trust the textbook. Textbooks are written by governments. Governments lie. Wartime propaganda morphs into peacetime textbooks. Never accept the official version. Think. Ask why. Think outside the box. Don't just sit there like a clone. And so we had drummed into our minds to think critically. And I must say, as we were surrounded in Rhodesia by communist countries, and we were fighting a very hot war against Marxist terrorists, I had to learn what communism was. My brother was in the army fighting these terrorists while I was still at school at that stage. My turn would come later in the war in Angola with the South African army. But I remember as a child wondering, why do these communists hate us so much? And why are they trying to destroy us? Because We had to have weapons everywhere. The teachers were armed. When we went on school outings, it was on roads endangered by landmines and areas where terrorists conducted ambushes. The teachers were armed and teaching us never, ever open the front door without switching off the light behind you. Never switch on the light without closing the curtains. Never frame yourself in the light to be a target for a terrorist who could be taking a potshot from out in the bush. We just had to learn basic survival skills from early. And in time, I was converted to Christ, got involved in missions, started to go across the border into communist countries, smuggling bibles. And I ended up in communist terrorist camps and was in fact, captured and put in communist prison camps and tortured. And I experienced some of communism firsthand. For example, one time I was captured I was leading a medical team of six American medical missionaries and one other frontline person, so eight of us in total, and we got captured by communist troops, Russians. We're talking about 1989 in Mozambique during the hot part of the Cold War, at the culmination of the Cold War, and there we were arrested, captured behind enemy lines. We were helping resistance fighters with medical aid, and we get captured. put on the Soviet Mi-8 helicopter flown to secret police headquarters. And we were dragged from one place to the other and put in disgusting, disgusting cells, rat infested, filthy flea infested things. And the day came, I was dragged in front of this interrogator. And the first words he said to me is, I am the devil. Oh my. So I laughed. I said, you're not the devil. And he said, oh, I'm the devil. He said, I'm not only a Marxist and a Leninist, I'm a Stalinist. I was trained in Czechoslovakia. So I said, I'm a Christian. And a man spat out venom that I cannot even describe. He said, I hate Christians. Oh, my. Wow. What a conversation stopper. And next thing he gave us, long tirade against how much he hated Jesus Christ. But there was contradictions. He was saying Jesus Christ is the first communist and every Christian should be a communist because Jesus taught communism. And all of us should be communists. But then he is like Christianity is the root of all counter-revolutionary reactionary activity. So I tried to point out the inconsistency of his position. Why am I being locked up here if Jesus Christ is the first communist and all Christians support communism? And next thing he ranted and raved about the French Revolution. Then I thought, you know, communists like history, don't they? So I gave him a lecture on the Reformation. So he then gave me a lecture on the dangers of Margaret Thatcher's economic policies. So I gave him a lecture on the Renaissance and Voltaire and the dangers of it and all the negative effects. So he then ranted against Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. So I then gave a defense. And this carried on for six hours. I was watching the clock on a wall. I didn't have a watch. They'd taken it away. Didn't have shoes either. And as this was carrying on, I thought, you know, it's a good thing I love history. I've done a lot of reading. And I can argue and debate on these things. But the average person doesn't know enough history. And they would have had their fingernails ripped out by then. But I was so intriguing this person with the historical arguments, that he spent the whole interrogation arguing history with me and economics, instead of actually, he never even got my name. And I was on the hit list. I had a death threat in my actually in my file at home, where the Ministry of Justice Department of Cults and Religions of Mozambique had sent me a letter saying, if you come to Mozambique, we will kill you. And that's just because of my Mozambique report. I'd written a book in the killing fields of Mozambique. I documented the atrocities. I'd been to America, I testified in Britain and on the BBC, and in fact, sent to Jesse Helms. I'd read my whole Mozambique report in the Congressional Record exposing the atrocities of what the Marxists were doing, burning villages, churches, torturing people, all the hideous things going on. pages of this based on hundreds of testimonies and eyewitness dates and all this. So, because of my writings and ministry, I already had death threats. So, here I was captured, but they didn't know who they had yet. And they had actually, they had the wrong name for me because they had misunderstood my second name as my surname, Christopher. So, I've been introduced everywhere as Peter Christopher and Mr. Christopher, or Christopher come forward. That's my second name. They missed the Hammond, which was on the second line of the passport, and I was so glad there'd been this misunderstanding, because if they knew who they had, I'd have probably been put against the wall and just shot. But in all of this, you can imagine, it's not just of academic interest to me, with death threats and having been put against the wall, being told you're going to be shot in the morning sort of thing, to know what drives these communists and why do they hate us so much. Right. You reminded me something. Sometimes people do equate Christianity and say that's the first form of communism. I assume they're misapplying the Sermon on the Mount texts. That's correct. So what you sometimes get people saying is, well, communism tells us that, you know, from each according to his ability to each according to that need, that almost sounds like it should be in the Bible. It isn't, but it should be, shouldn't it? I mean, isn't that sort of roughly what Jesus was saying? And we've got to say, well, actually, no. It's not what Jesus was saying. There's a big difference between saying what's mine is yours and giving, and saying what's yours is mine and taking. And communism is institutionalized envy, and it's as legalized theft, because communism is not the church in the book of Acts graciously and generously sharing. In fact, in the book of Acts, you get a very unusual situation, because in the book of Acts, what we get is we get a church in Jerusalem that suddenly has an enormous amount of new converts to deal with. Because the prayer meeting and upper room of 120 people gets filled with the Holy Spirit, they go into the streets, they preach the gospel, there's people from all over the world there because this is the major time of ministry, it's the feast of Pentecost, and people have come from all over the world to the temple. And now 3,000 people get converted, and then within a short while, another 2,000, there's 5,000 new converts in Jerusalem, And who's going to look after them? Because instead of going back immediately, they need to stay for some extra discipleship and teaching. There's not exactly the same kind of economic situation we have today that exactly even have the kind of bed and breakfast we have. So before you know it, many of the church people are having to sell assets and property in order to make a plan for this crisis. And also, Jesus had said, Jerusalem's bad real estate investment Jerusalem's going to be destroyed. And so, the people there know from inside information that this is not a good place to be investing in real estate. And so, the Jerusalem people sell up their assets, and they are, at the moment, it seems, having things in common. Now, this is unusual. Nowhere else in the Book of Acts do we see churches doing this. In fact, the people in Jerusalem, after their sacrifices, were in such poverty that the churches in Corinth and Colossa and Philippi and all throughout the Roman Empire Thessalonica and so on, were taking up offerings to send to the believers in Jerusalem because they were suffering. They had done something that's dangerous economically, selling your assets, but it was necessary for the booster stage of the church. And anyway, Jerusalem, its days were numbered and Christians were disinvesting in Jerusalem because that was going to be destroyed as part of God's judgment on the people who crucified Christ. So what you see in the book of Acts is voluntary generosity. That's not the same thing as compulsory communist confiscation. by the state and all the corruption that goes with it. So it's amazing how communism has managed to infiltrate the church to such an extent that people actually think that some communist or socialist ideas might actually be biblical. Actually, it isn't. Karl Marx, it may surprise people to know, was actually an atheist. At one time, he was a believer, at least a nominal believer who went through confirmation in the Lutheran church. He wrote articles. on the Holy Spirit, and there's indications that he understood the gospel. But at about age 18, the man took a radical left turn. He abandoned Christianity. He became an atheist. And in a short while, we see him becoming an occultist and even a Satanist. There's a book written by Richard von Brandt on Marx and Satan, which, without any shadow of a doubt, shows us that the heart and soul of Karl Marx was Antichrist. Now, listen to what Karl Marx wrote. He said, the abolition of religion as the illusionary happiness of man is a prerequisite for the real happiness. Communism abolishes eternal truths. It abolishes all religion and all morality. Now that's pretty heavy, but then he goes further and says, and he wrote this, he wrote quite a few Antichrist poems. One of the poems was, I wish to avenge myself against the one who rules above. I shall build my throne high overhead, cold, tremendous shall its summit be, for its bulwark superstitious dread, for its marshals blackest agony. And he wrote, new gods need to be installed. He took the word Emmanuel and reversed it into Olinem. And that was the name of a drama he wrote, Olinem, the opposite of Emmanuel. And then he said, the hellish vapors rise and fill the brain till I go mad. And my heart is utterly changed. See the sword, the prince of darkness sold it to me. So for me, beats the time and gives the signs, ever more boldly I play the dance of death. And then he said often, everything in existence is worth being destroyed. Now imagine it, everything in existence is worth being destroyed. He's not just talking about church buildings and cathedrals. He's talking about people. And bear in mind that the people who implemented Karl Marx's teachings, not just in the 1848 revolutions, but in the 1917 Marxist or Bolshevik revolution in Russia and what became the Soviet Union, they devoured millions, tens of millions of people. In fact, the Black Book of Communism documents at least 100 million people having been killed, murdered in the 20th century, just between 1917-1991 in the Soviet Union and its satellites. So referring to Russia and Ukraine all the way through Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, all the way down to Bulgaria, and Romania, 100 million people killed in just over 70 years, and all in name of atheism and Marxism-Leninism. And most people are not aware of this. It's not even taught in average Christian school what communism did. And Alexander Solzhenitsyn has well documented it in his book, The Gulag Archipelago. And he was a Russian soldier, officer, who ended up in the concentration camps in Siberia for having written a private opinion in a letter during the war about Joseph Stalin, and that was enough to get him thrown in prison. So he survived the 14 years of hell. in a communist concentration camp and wrote about this in the Gulag Archipelago and opened up for the world a whole area that most people are not even aware of. Because the Soviet Union was an ally of America and Britain in the Second World War, its atrocities were covered up. And Hollywood doesn't seem to want to speak about it. But the fact is that we were allied with the most bloodthirsty, mass murdering dictatorship in the history of the world, who massacred so many people. In fact, the way it was put by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is, Who speaks about the 66 million Christians massacred by communism in the Soviet Union? And that's true. And now we know, according to Professor Rummel of the University of Hawaii, who's written the book, Death by Government, in the 20th century, communist governments killed well over 189 million people. If you add Red China and Cambodia and Vietnam and all the other dictatorships, North Korea, Cuba, if you add them all together, The death toll in the 20th century to communist governments come to over 189 million. That's out of this world. It's just beyond staggering. You know, we thought the First and Second World War were absolutely catastrophic, and they were. But communism has killed more people in peace than even died in both the First and Second World Wars combined. Now, that means that while war may be hell, peace under communism is worse. Yes, yes. Now, one thing I wanted to ask, today we're talking with Dr. Peter Hammond. He's been involved with all kinds of missionary endeavors. He's smuggled Bibles. He's been in a prison camp. He's been tortured and shot at. Peter, Marxism and the word communism, they seem to be pretty much the same thing in your mind? Yes. Now, the word communism really comes from communalism or the communards of the French Revolution. And so Karl Marx looks at the French Revolution as the first prototype communist revolution. And in fact, I've done a whole study showing how the French Revolution is the prototype and what Voltaire was to the French Revolution, the ideologue. So Karl Marx was to the Bolshevik Revolution and all communist revolution since what Robespierre was to the French Revolution as the man who made it happen, the activist. So Vladimir Lenin was in the Bolshevik or Russian-Soviet revolution. I use the word Russian revolution because people are used to it, but I'm rebuked by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and my Russian friends who say, you should never refer to it as the Russian revolution. It wasn't a Russian revolution. It was an anti-Russian revolution. Russians were the victims. It was a Bolshevik revolution. It was a communist revolution. And we Christian Russians were the victims. And so to call it a Russian revolution would be to blame the victims. Remember that communism was an alien ideology, it was anti-Christian, it was foreign to our Christian country, and we were being butchered by anti-Christian pagans. And so I should call it only the Soviet or the Bolshevik revolution and not the Russian revolution, or I'm insulting my dear Russian friends who suffered so horribly under it. Very helpful. Now, there's something here that's come out as you discussed some of the tenets and practices of a Marxist regime, and that's the idea of a legalized, quote-unquote, legalized redistribution of wealth, like a basically legalized thievery? That is correct. If you think of the Ten Commands saying you shall not steal and you shall not covet your neighbor's goods, well, Karl Marx says he wants to turn everything in Ten Commands upside down, and so they have Theft is institutionalized through the state, and he wants covetousness institutionalized through the Communist Party. So, for example, I found it very shocking to consider to what extent we've actually adopted Marxist ideas, because Marxism is anti-Christ. Karl Marx said in the Manifesto of 1848, the theory of communists may be summed up in one single sentence, the abolition of private property. And he says, you may reproach us for intending to do away with your property. Precisely so, that is just what we intend. So, now, consider the fact that to this end, he advocated the abolition of all property rights and the application of rents, of all rents, effectively the state, a heavily progressive graduated income tax, an abolition of all rights of inheritance by taxing inheritance, and now if you think about this, if you look at the Bible, the Bible forbids the state to tax land. Because land does not belong to the state. The state is a servant of the people, and the people are to pay tax on an equal system so that if it's a 2% tax or 3% tax, it's paid across the board. And the rich should not give more, and the poor should not give less. It is to be equal before the Lord. And so just like, for example, the tithe is 10%. But then remember, the church handled the schools. The church handled hospitals. Church handled missions and a vast amount of other things through the centuries. And it may shock you to know that Karl Marx was the first one to advocate that the state should run education. You see, until 1848, all schools in America and around Europe and the world were actually run by the church or missions. And the idea of state education was unheard of. The state was hostile to education. Governments don't tend to want well-educated, critical-thinking populations. And so states have always been traditionally hostile to education, and the church has been the bastion, especially the Protestant church, of education for all. Well, by 1848, it was quite clear that the state had lost the battle against education. And so Karl Marx said, okay, we can't stop schools, we need to hijack them, and we need to use them to promote atheism and to promote an anti-Christian worldview. State education and the fact that the state can even tell Christian schools what constitutes education and what should be in their textbooks and who qualifies a teacher is ridiculous. The state's job, according to Romans 13 and 1 Peter chapter 2, is to be a terror to evildoers and to protect the law-abiding, to be God's sword of justice, to be a minister of justice. And so the whole task of the state as a civil magistrate before God is law and order, justice, and national defense. That's about it. And education should be in the hands of parents and the church, the local communities. It should certainly not, you cannot trust the state or the molding of the minds of future voters. That's incredibly dangerous, as we have seen. But not only are they trying to take the next children, so that's why one of the principles of Marxist medication is compulsory education for all children in state schools. So they are wanting to hijack the children and they want to hijack property. So how do you hijack property? By putting taxes and rates and taxes on it. So now we've got people in our country, for example, who are pensioners that pay taxes all their lives and rates. And now they come to the pension and the state starts putting taxes on their property to such an extent that we've had pensioners having to sell their property, move into a rented place and go back into the workplace. because they can't afford to pay all the taxes on their own property to the state. And that is wicked. And then you have people who do what the Bible says, giving an inheritance to their children and their children's children, but now the state comes and puts death taxes, which is effectively taxing the dead, and they tax inheritance so that most of the inheritance basically sucked up by the state's taxes and changing of ownership papers and all the other things they come up with. It's an incredibly creative and insidious means that Karl Marx first advocated for basically confiscating people's property. And what's happened is you've got beautiful estates and lovely homes, which have belonged to people's grandparents, which are no longer in a family. And it's been lost because of the state coming in. And what are they using this money for? Well, illegal aliens, foreign dictators, people who murder Christians to establish new terrorist groups like the Syrian rebels who actually turn out to be ISIS, who murder Christians and behead Christians and blow up places. And foreign aid. When in the history of the world has there been foreign aid? Well, that's also Marxist idea, that you must take wealth from the productive Protestant countries and relocate it to the unproductive parasitical other societies. So there's got to be a redistribution of wealth from the productive to the unproductive, from the Protestants to the others. We've got to basically break down Protestant Christianity and Western civilization in order to raise up the new man. And so factories, instruments of production must be owned by the state. Wilderness areas must be nationalized by the state. Banking must be centralized. In the past, banks issued notes of credit, which would be, the bank notes would be a promissory note saying, I promise to pay the bearer on demand $1 in gold or silver. And that was what the money was, and it was a different bank, and the bank would sign it. But in 1913, when you got that wicked Woodrow Wilson come in as your president, what's one of the first things he did? Central banking, federal income tax, and he got the Federal Reserve Bank going, which, as somebody's pointed out, all wars in the 20th century have been bankers' wars. And the banks are what we call them the banksters these days. They are a mix between gangsters and bankers, banksters. But this centralization of credit and banks of the state, it's been well documented about Wall Street and the bankrolling of the Bolshevik Revolution and a whole lot of other hideous things and the best enemies money can buy. And honestly, when you look at it, your banks are involved. It's not just 2008 and the worthless derivatives and the loss of jobs for tens of millions of people and pensions and savings, but the wars that they have caused. It's hideous. So this is something Karl Marx has done. So just listing it, think of this. How many of these Marxist ideas have we adopted? Abolition of property rights, all rents to be paid to the state, heavily progressive graduated income tax, the more productive you are, the higher the percentage of tax you pay. Abolition of rights of inheritance by taxing inheritance, confiscation of property of immigrants and rebels to the state. centralization of credit and banks of the state by means of a national bank with an exclusive monopoly on money supply, centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state, factories and instruments of production to be owned by the state, wilderness areas to be nationalized by the state, establishment of industrial armies, combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, and free and compulsory education for all children in state schools. Well, Do you think Karl Marx has had any success in putting his Antichrist ideas into the mainstream? It's shocking. If someone would like to read more of your material, visit a website, is there a place where they could check you out? Certainly. We've got on frontline.org.za an article on this with a lot more details and a PowerPoint and also audio on this. visit www.frontline, that's F-R-O-N-T-L-I-N-E, frontline.org.za, Z-A for Zoodafrica or South Africa. So frontline.org.za. Also on Facebook, you'll find Frontline Fellowship. Also as a Facebook page, if you're on social media, we have also PowerPoints and lists on our slide share and sermonaudio.com. You can look for Frontline Fellowship or Peter Hammond on Sermon Audio as well. We've got those links on our website too. Hmm, that's beautiful. Thank you very much. So again, that's frontline.org.za. And today my guest has been Dr. Peter Hammond. Thank you so much for spending your time with us, Peter. Well, thank you so much. God bless you. And, you know, they promised them freedom while they themselves are slaves of depravity, is what the Scripture says, and I think that's very appropriate for the Communists. Indeed. Please join us next week at this same time for another edition of A Plain Answer. so