Actually, a nightmare is more like it. For John McDonnell, our likely next chancellor, dreams of overthrowing capitalism.
Thus his entry in Who’s Who openly states that his life’s work is “fermenting the overthrow of capitalism.” He probably means ‘fomenting’, but it’s the thought that counts.
McDonnell’s worthy goal has earned him a sympathetic, nay fawning, profile by Rachel Sylvester in The Sunday Times, formerly known as a conservative paper and now filled to the gunwales with leftist slow learners.
He emerges as the powerful brain behind Corbyn, a man driven by pursuing noble, quasi-religious ends made so much more laudable for being daring.
Thus Miss Sylvester passes without comment McDonnell’s story of his spiritual progress from Christ to Marx. “John McDonnell has always been a believer,” she explains, first in Christ, then in Marx, which is sort of the same thing.
McDonnell was raised as a Catholic, but at age 16 “I just came to the conclusion that I didn’t believe there was a deity.” Other than Marx, that is.
To his credit, McDonnell is generous with his theological insights: “The New Testament is about transforming society, tackling poverty, all those things that are embedded in socialism… I always looked on Jesus as a socialist.”
I always looked on Jesus as Our Lord, but then I can’t remember off-hand a single line in the Gospels pointing at his ambition to run a poverty programme. I do remember his saying “The poor you will always have with you”, but perhaps I haven’t studied the Scripture as closely as McDonnell did in his childhood.
There’s this slight problem that, wherever socialism was tried in earnest, it failed miserably. How would McDonnell explain that?
Simple. “Of the failures of the Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela… It was never socialism.” No, of course not. Had it been socialism, it would have succeeded – that’s axiomatic.
Then there’s another small matter of the millions murdered by Marxists around the world. Hold on, I get it: those hundreds of millions of murders had nothing to do with Marxism.
“You wouldn’t read the New Testament and blame Jesus Christ for the Spanish Inquisition”, explains McDonnell. He’s right for once, we wouldn’t.
First, a minor point of historical arithmetic. The Holy Inquisition never sentenced anyone to death. When it found a defendant guilty, it passed his case on to the secular authorities, with a specific recommendation not to put him to death.
The secular authorities didn’t always comply: in the roughly 400 years that the Inquisition was in business, about 10,000 people were executed. Compared to the 60 million murdered by Soviet Marxists alone in just 50 years, this number is trivial (if any death can be so described).
Second, a more important point. There’s no doubt that Christians have committed many crimes, including murders, throughout history. Such, alas, is the human propensity that always remains constant.
However, it takes monumental ignorance or else evil chicanery to trace such crimes back to anything Jesus and his disciples taught. Love one another as I have loved you – this message permeates the whole New Testament.
Christian criminals thus act against their Scripture. On the other hand, Marxist criminals uphold both the spirit and the letter of their founding documents.
They have brought to fruition Marxist dictates on concentration camps (Engels called them “special guarded places”), slavery (Marx: “Slavery is… an economic category of paramount importance”), mass murder (Marx: “the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries”), anti-Semitism (Marx: “…the Polish Jews… this dirtiest of all races,” “Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew”) and genocide.
Here are a few other choice quotes from McDonnell’s idols:
“All the other [non-Marxist] large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary holocaust. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary… these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character… [A general war will] wipe out all this racial trash.”
“…only by the most determined use of terror against these Slav peoples can we, jointly with the Poles and Magyars, safeguard the revolution… there will be a struggle, an ‘inexorable life-and-death struggle’, against those Slavs who betray the revolution; an annihilating fight and ruthless terror – not in the interests of Germany, but in the interests of the revolution!”
“We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”
A far cry from “love thy enemy”, isn’t it?
McDonnell’s economic ideas come straight from Marx, no deviations from the general line for him: “Eventually you will get to a situation where goods will be held in common, so workers will own their own companies.”
Quite. But at present the companies are owned by others, either private individuals or shareholders. For the workers to gain ownership, the current owners would have to be dispossessed, meaning robbed. And, if they resist, killed.
He also plans a land grab, forcing owners to sell at the prices set by McDonnell or else using extortionate property taxes as a kick up the owners’ backsides.
Anticipating this development, many ‘capitalists’ are already fleeing Britain at an accelerating pace. When their worst fears of a Marxist government become a reality, they’ll leave in droves, taking their capital, and therefore jobs, with them.
Nor will investors, foreign or domestic, be encouraged to risk their capital in a country committed to confiscating it.
All that will instantly shrink the taxation base, scuppering McDonnell’s grandiose plans for spending an extra £48 billion on public services and £250 billion on infrastructure development, to be financed by taxation and (suicidally inflationary) borrowing.
The question arises, as it always does with a government committed to robbing the populace, making private property insecure and forcing people into economic slavery: what if the people resist?
The most cursory of glances at every Marxist government in history provides the answer, which has to include concentration camps as an essential component. This inhuman, satanic doctrine of hate and envy can only ever be enforced by violence – to this rule there are no known exceptions.
That McDonnell is evil ought to be clear to anybody. But this “brain behind the Labour party” is also obtusely ignorant and not conspicuously bright.
Just look at his explanation of why he’s working class: “Do I own or control the means of production? No, I don’t. So I’m working class.”
My financial advisor doesn’t own any means of production either. Neither does my doctor. Neither does any banker. Neither does the Queen. Are they all working class then?
McDonnell’s underdeveloped mind is firmly lodged in Marx’s fallacies produced in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, and widely seen as obsolete even then. The poor chap doesn’t realise, or else pigheadedly refuses to accept, that in our post-Industrial age his economic ideas aren’t just obsolete, but simply cretinous.
Miss Sylvester graciously acknowledges that McDonnell’s dreams aren’t without a potential for risks. I disagree.
A risk describes a situation whose outcome is uncertain. McDonnell’s ideas, even if only attempted and not fully realised, are guaranteed to produce an instant, universal and possibly irreversible catastrophe.
In short, when this evil, illiterate doctrinaire takes over the Exchequer, head for the hills. May I suggest the French Alps?
” I always looked on Jesus as a socialist.”
Of course. JESUS was the first communist.
Miracle of fishes and loaves. And then everybody shared. Of course.
“in the roughly 400 years that the Inquisition was in business, about 10,000 people were executed. ”
During the height of the Inquisition in Spain, about 5,000 persons executed in a hundred year period. Approximately one per week for a century. I would venture the number of those hit and killed by lightning probably greater.
There is a story that in the early 1950s the BBC television programme Panorama planned to do a feature on the famous people who had made use of the public reading room at the British Museum (records had been kept of the season ticket sales). One bright spark with a very old grandmother suggested there may be someone still alive that had actually met Karl Marx. The Museum did have some records of staff that had started work there at a very young age in the pertinent time frame. It seemed possible that at least one of them could be still alive. Eventually, they traced an old boy in his nineties living in Hounslow. He confirmed that he had started work at the BM at the age of 17. They needed young fellows like me to run up and down steps and ladders to get books from the collection he said.
Sensing imminent triumph, the Panorama researcher asked him if he had met Karl Marx, showing him his picture. ‘Oh, that geezer, he was always ordering books and kept me busy for years’ he said. ‘Thank goodness, he took breaks but they weren’t long enough for my liking. Then he stopped coming in and nobody heard of him since’.