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From the National Post
A quick reminder that Marx inspired one of the most malevolent spasms of evil in human history — and that may very well have been his goal
On Saturday, Karl Marx turns 200 years old. A German dissident who spent most of his days in exile, Marx devoted his life to the notion that a literal heaven-on-earth was just a revolution away. Instead, he ended up inspiring one of the most prolonged epics of suffering in modern history.
Amazingly, this seems to have done very little to tarnish Marx’s apparently Teflon reputation. He just got a fawning biopic. He got glowing birthday wishes in the New York Times. And this weekend, EU commission president Jean-Claude Juncker will be unveiling a statue of the man in Marx’s hometown of Trier, Germany.
Europe already had plenty of statues of Marx, although you might not know it because a lot of them got pulled down in the late 1980s. Here’s a quick reminder why people would have felt the need to do that.
Yes, the communist terror is Marx’s fault
In the understated words of writer Jonathan Chait, “the fact that every communist country in world history quickly turned into a repressive nightmare is kind of important.” Since 1917, whenever a country has tried to turn itself into a Marxist utopia, it’s only a matter of time before a whole lot of people are starving, imprisoned or shot. Indeed, just as the Titanic required 1,500 dead to become history’s most famous ship, Marx required epic spasms of bloodshed to become history’s most famous thinker. Without the Russian Revolution (and the revolutions it spawned) Marx would be “a not very important nineteenth-century philosopher,” wrote biographer Alan Ryan. A scientist would look at communism’s lengthy record of failure and conclude that the initial theory was obviously flawed. Despite this, the view persists that Marx’s ideas are still valid and have zero relation to the scores of mass graves created in his name. “It would be like blaming Jesus for the (Spanish) Inquisition,” reads a typical online retort. However, Marx was quite clear that he wanted his followers to impose his sweeping ideas on society using force. “The Communists … openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions,” reads one of the last lines of the Communist Manifesto. All the horrors that follow ultimately sprang from this core belief.
In the understated words of writer Jonathan Chait, “the fact that every communist country in world history quickly turned into a repressive nightmare is kind of important.” Since 1917, whenever a country has tried to turn itself into a Marxist utopia, it’s only a matter of time before a whole lot of people are starving, imprisoned or shot. Indeed, just as the Titanic required 1,500 dead to become history’s most famous ship, Marx required epic spasms of bloodshed to become history’s most famous thinker. Without the Russian Revolution (and the revolutions it spawned) Marx would be “a not very important nineteenth-century philosopher,” wrote biographer Alan Ryan. A scientist would look at communism’s lengthy record of failure and conclude that the initial theory was obviously flawed. Despite this, the view persists that Marx’s ideas are still valid and have zero relation to the scores of mass graves created in his name. “It would be like blaming Jesus for the (Spanish) Inquisition,” reads a typical online retort. However, Marx was quite clear that he wanted his followers to impose his sweeping ideas on society using force. “The Communists … openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions,” reads one of the last lines of the Communist Manifesto. All the horrors that follow ultimately sprang from this core belief.
From left to right, former Russian leader Josef Stalin and Soviet politician Nikolai Bukharin are seen Nov. 21, 1930.
Millions murdered
Marx may well have had some prescient critiques about capitalism, but in the words of author Andrew McAfee “there are so many thinkers about economics and technology who haven’t inspired mass murder and inhuman states.” The Black Book of Communism, published by European scholars in 1997, estimates that Communist governments killed 94 million people in the 20th century. There are no explicit calls for mass murder in Marx’s writings, but he was very enthusiastic about all the ingredients that made such atrocities possible. It was Marx who endorsed a “dictatorship of the proletariat” to remake society using “despotic inroads” if necessary. It was Marx who sought to tear down any existing power structures that could check the rise of a revolutionary tyrant. And it was Marx who taught that there were no such thing as “excesses” in a revolution, and that “hated individuals” should be sacrificed to “popular revenge.” It shouldn’t be all that surprising that so many of Marx’s followers interpreted his writings as a blank cheque on killing. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once told the writer Maxim Gorky that while be loved Beethoven, he could not listen to music too often, since it baffled him to hear beauty created by people who did not realize they lived in “a filthy hell.” “They ought to be beaten on the head, beaten mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people,” Lenin added.
Marx may well have had some prescient critiques about capitalism, but in the words of author Andrew McAfee “there are so many thinkers about economics and technology who haven’t inspired mass murder and inhuman states.” The Black Book of Communism, published by European scholars in 1997, estimates that Communist governments killed 94 million people in the 20th century. There are no explicit calls for mass murder in Marx’s writings, but he was very enthusiastic about all the ingredients that made such atrocities possible. It was Marx who endorsed a “dictatorship of the proletariat” to remake society using “despotic inroads” if necessary. It was Marx who sought to tear down any existing power structures that could check the rise of a revolutionary tyrant. And it was Marx who taught that there were no such thing as “excesses” in a revolution, and that “hated individuals” should be sacrificed to “popular revenge.” It shouldn’t be all that surprising that so many of Marx’s followers interpreted his writings as a blank cheque on killing. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once told the writer Maxim Gorky that while be loved Beethoven, he could not listen to music too often, since it baffled him to hear beauty created by people who did not realize they lived in “a filthy hell.” “They ought to be beaten on the head, beaten mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people,” Lenin added.
Skulls showcased in a Cambodian museum provide a grim reminder of the more than one million people killed by the Khmer Rouge.
Millions starved
The famines engineered under Communism are utterly staggering. Not only are they among the largest in history, but they were often entirely man-made. The Irish Potato Famine, which killed 1.5 million, was a natural disaster made worse by government negligence. The tens of millions who starved to death in Ukraine, China and North Korea did so in spite of fertile soil, healthy crops and good weather. In China alone, Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” of misguided agricultural reforms resulted in 45 million premature deaths. Incredibly, even during the worst depths of the catastrophe, Mao continued to export large quantities of food in order to keep up the fiction that his Marxist experiment was working. In the book Mao’s Great Famine, historian Frank Dikötter wrote that the architects of the Chinese disaster were able to justify their actions because they “shared an ideology in which the end justified the means.” This notion comes up often in communist history, and has many parallels in Marx’s writings. As he wrote in 1848, “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”
The famines engineered under Communism are utterly staggering. Not only are they among the largest in history, but they were often entirely man-made. The Irish Potato Famine, which killed 1.5 million, was a natural disaster made worse by government negligence. The tens of millions who starved to death in Ukraine, China and North Korea did so in spite of fertile soil, healthy crops and good weather. In China alone, Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” of misguided agricultural reforms resulted in 45 million premature deaths. Incredibly, even during the worst depths of the catastrophe, Mao continued to export large quantities of food in order to keep up the fiction that his Marxist experiment was working. In the book Mao’s Great Famine, historian Frank Dikötter wrote that the architects of the Chinese disaster were able to justify their actions because they “shared an ideology in which the end justified the means.” This notion comes up often in communist history, and has many parallels in Marx’s writings. As he wrote in 1848, “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”
Employees of the Shin Chiao Hotel in Beijing build a small and rudimentary smelting steel furnace during the period of the ‘Great Leap Forward.’ The initiative would kill 45 million people.
Millions imprisoned
At their height, gulags in the Soviet Union held five million people. Meanwhile, the North Korean labour camps they inspired are still open, killing untold thousands through starvation and exhaustion. The Communist Manifesto dismisses human rights as “bourgeois freedom.” The whole point of communism, after all, was a classless, stateless communal society where the concept of rights would be irrelevant. Marx even believed that families were a “disgusting” bourgeois invention that would vanish as soon as his utopia came to pass. “To the Marxist, both the concept of liberty and the idea of human rights … are the specific expressions of a bourgeois society that is on the verge of collapse,” wrote Leszek Kołakowski, a Polish critic of Marxist thought. Marx never personally opened a gulag, of course, but he was well-known for his utter intolerance to dissent. “Everyone who contradicted him, he treated with abject contempt; every argument that he did not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who had advanced it,” reads one oft-quoted description of Marx from a contemporary. He referred to democracy as “vulgar” and angrily broke with fellow radicals when they abandoned his sweeping visions in order to pursue more realistic goals such as universal suffrage and limits on the working day. In Marx’s words, these were merely bourgeois attempts to “bribe the workers by more or less concealed alms and to sap their revolutionary vigour.” Marx’s intolerance made him a prickly old man with a lightly attended funeral. But in the hands of the dictators he inspired, that same intolerance would spawn unspeakable crimes against humanity.
At their height, gulags in the Soviet Union held five million people. Meanwhile, the North Korean labour camps they inspired are still open, killing untold thousands through starvation and exhaustion. The Communist Manifesto dismisses human rights as “bourgeois freedom.” The whole point of communism, after all, was a classless, stateless communal society where the concept of rights would be irrelevant. Marx even believed that families were a “disgusting” bourgeois invention that would vanish as soon as his utopia came to pass. “To the Marxist, both the concept of liberty and the idea of human rights … are the specific expressions of a bourgeois society that is on the verge of collapse,” wrote Leszek Kołakowski, a Polish critic of Marxist thought. Marx never personally opened a gulag, of course, but he was well-known for his utter intolerance to dissent. “Everyone who contradicted him, he treated with abject contempt; every argument that he did not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who had advanced it,” reads one oft-quoted description of Marx from a contemporary. He referred to democracy as “vulgar” and angrily broke with fellow radicals when they abandoned his sweeping visions in order to pursue more realistic goals such as universal suffrage and limits on the working day. In Marx’s words, these were merely bourgeois attempts to “bribe the workers by more or less concealed alms and to sap their revolutionary vigour.” Marx’s intolerance made him a prickly old man with a lightly attended funeral. But in the hands of the dictators he inspired, that same intolerance would spawn unspeakable crimes against humanity.
A 1932 photo of a Soviet gulag at Manzanar, Belbaltlag
Oppression for everyone else
One of the better Communist countries to live was East Germany. It had no famines, no gulags and — as the wealthiest nation in the Soviet sphere — its citizens could even buy poor-quality cars and jeans. And yet, East Germany kept order with one of the most ruthlessly oppressive secret police forces ever devised, and by regularly shooting people trying to leave its borders. Of course, in all its 51 years of piling up bodies and brutalist apartment blocks, East Germany got nowhere close to achieving the classless, stateless utopia that its citizens were promised. Life under communism was to “live within a lie,” famously wrote the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel. The excesses of communism have often been justified with the 19th century expression that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” But as Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once said, he “had seen the broken eggs, but no one he knew had ever tasted the omelette.”
One of the better Communist countries to live was East Germany. It had no famines, no gulags and — as the wealthiest nation in the Soviet sphere — its citizens could even buy poor-quality cars and jeans. And yet, East Germany kept order with one of the most ruthlessly oppressive secret police forces ever devised, and by regularly shooting people trying to leave its borders. Of course, in all its 51 years of piling up bodies and brutalist apartment blocks, East Germany got nowhere close to achieving the classless, stateless utopia that its citizens were promised. Life under communism was to “live within a lie,” famously wrote the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel. The excesses of communism have often been justified with the 19th century expression that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” But as Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once said, he “had seen the broken eggs, but no one he knew had ever tasted the omelette.”
The Berlin Wall memorial site at Bernauer Strasse in Berlin, Germany
… and the guy was a hypocrite
The Soviet Union had once claimed that they were building a society of “New Men”; selfless, educated, disciplined supermen who would usher the world into true communism. Marx fit none of these descriptors. He was a child of privilege who spent his teen years drunkenly ploughing through family money. He kept a poorly paid housekeeper, got her pregnant, and then disowned the child. And despite being pretty confident that he understood the destiny of the working man, he never held down a labour job or visited a factory. Apologists for Marx often hold that his vision of utopia is still good, but has failed only because it keeps getting perverted by the flawed men who tried to implement it. Human flaws had been a major worry for many of the revolutionary theorists who preceded Marx. In both France and the United States, thinkers had agonized over how to build equitable governments without accidentally handing power to tyrants. But Marx generally refused to consider human nature a factor; his revolutions couldn’t be hijacked by despots because communism was inevitable. For a guy who couldn’t even be bothered to take care of his own kids, Marx had a tragic amount of faith in the desire of humanity to drop everything and fulfill his vision of a perfect world.
The Soviet Union had once claimed that they were building a society of “New Men”; selfless, educated, disciplined supermen who would usher the world into true communism. Marx fit none of these descriptors. He was a child of privilege who spent his teen years drunkenly ploughing through family money. He kept a poorly paid housekeeper, got her pregnant, and then disowned the child. And despite being pretty confident that he understood the destiny of the working man, he never held down a labour job or visited a factory. Apologists for Marx often hold that his vision of utopia is still good, but has failed only because it keeps getting perverted by the flawed men who tried to implement it. Human flaws had been a major worry for many of the revolutionary theorists who preceded Marx. In both France and the United States, thinkers had agonized over how to build equitable governments without accidentally handing power to tyrants. But Marx generally refused to consider human nature a factor; his revolutions couldn’t be hijacked by despots because communism was inevitable. For a guy who couldn’t even be bothered to take care of his own kids, Marx had a tragic amount of faith in the desire of humanity to drop everything and fulfill his vision of a perfect world.
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