Suchergebnisse

In order to understand the strategy adapted by the Albanian Communist Party in its struggle against religious beliefs, we shouldn't consider the violent persecution as the fundamental feature of the struggle; instead, we better look at it as one of the instruments of a more complex and vast tactic. Violence and persecution (veiled by political reasons), legislative and administrative measures and continues movement of the masses were all phases and elements of the State-Party's struggle. Yet, the final goal – the eradication of religious thought – couldn't have been achieved without moving the anti-religious battle to the ideological and conceptual level. The ideological struggle covered the education-al and cultural environments and was accompanied by propaganda. This considerable intellectual effort thus created an original atheology that would influence the Albanian people radically. The atheistic doctrines of western scholars and the Soviet atheism were intertwined with the laic thought of Albania's greatest scholars in order to create a corpus of original theories that would have effectively act against faith and religious thought. Placed under forms of indictment, the State's-Party condemned religion as a foreign and anti-Albanian element, an instrument in the hands of the rich and exploitative. They held it responsible for the submission of women and called it the enemy of scientific thought and progress. However, beside the prosecutrix ideology, the most original theory was a positive one. This theory was based on the Shqiptaria, the Albanianism faith, that exalts the Albanians as historically non-religious. Charming and self-exalting, it invited the people of the «Land of the Eagle» to believe in it blindly.