One intellectual pygmy on another

“As anyone who opens Das Kapital will know, his was an intellect of formidable power,” writes Dominic Sandbrook to commemorate Marx’s anniversary.

For Marx was a jolly bright fellow, and nobody can “deny him a place, alongside other Victorian figures such as Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, as one of the genuinely titanic intellectual influences on the modern world.”

Well, I can deny just that. Influences, yes. ‘Genuinely titanic intellectual influences’, no. The three manifest frauds didn’t appeal to the intellect, nor even to emotions. They appealed to the putrid modern swamp of viscera where evil resides.

But of course young Dominic can’t think in terms of good and evil because they are outside his ken. His upward intellectual journey stops several tiers below the system of thought where such concepts live.

That’s why he writes things like “And although [Marx’s] ideas – the importance of class struggle, the urgency of revolution, the dream of a socialist society – remain hugely controversial, there is simply no escaping them. Indeed, you could even argue that, to some degree, we are all Marxists today.”

Speak for yourself, Dominic… Actually he has.

Marx’s ideas aren’t ‘hugely controversial’. No controversy exists. They’ve been proved not just wrong but fraudulent – empirically, philosophically and historically.

Hence only a small mind will allow his thinking to be influenced by the Marxist methodology, whatever conclusions pro or contra he draws. The wide spread of Marxist ideas only validates the fact that most people’s minds are indeed small.

“…Thanks to the sheer force of Marx’s intellect,” continues Sandbrook, “[his teaching] has attracted some very clever people.” Such as “the British historian Eric Hobsbawm.”

No one who can’t see through ‘the sheer force of Marx’s intellect’ can be genuinely clever. He’s more likely to be genuinely evil, and Hobsbawm is a prime example.

The three iconic figures Sandbrook mentioned had no real intellect – if they had, they would have been seeking the truth, not just universal influence. What they, emphatically including Marx, actually had was some intellectual charisma and a highly sensitive nose to the needs of Zeitgeist.

Using such traits, Marx gave modernity something it had been sorely missing: an eschatology to fit its instincts. These were informed by the Enlightenment, which misnomer is applied to a mass revolt against Christendom – not just its founding faith, but everything it had produced: its morality, politics, aesthetics and system of thought.

This removed the intellectual and moral anchor, and society was cast adrift. Sensing that, people craved a new system of thought and morality to provide some self-justification and some sort of haven. Marx with his animal cunning sensed that need and responded to it.

Thanks to him the extermination of Christendom could now be put on a pseudo-intellectual footing. While the kingdom in heaven had been debunked, the kingdom in earth was at last described in detail.

Marx went the likes of More, Companella, Fourier and Owen one better by creating a utopia that didn’t look utopian. His ideal society appeared to be there for the taking, however long that took to achieve. It was a utopia nonetheless, but one put together with more evil sleight of hand than any of his predecessors had been able to master.

Had modern barbarians actually read Marx, instead of relying on politicised mouthpieces, they’d know that the central doctrines of Marxism were false even at the time of writing.

Marx wrote for political, not intellectual, ends. So he showed the way for many a modern politician by suppressing the data that contradicted his theories.

For example, the first edition of Das Kapital gives most statistics up to 1865 or 1866, except those for the changes in wages that stop in 1850. The second edition brings all other statistics up to date, but the movement of wages again stops in 1850 – it was essential to emphasise the workers’ plight.

Any serious study will demonstrate that Marx based his theories on the industrial conditions that either were already obsolete at the time or had never existed in the first place. That’s no wonder, for Marx never saw the inside of a factory, farm or manufactory.

The point about Marx’s selective treatment of facts is only worth making because of all the numerous claims to scientific truth made by, and for, him. Whatever else he was, Marx wasn’t a scientist, nor, God forbid, a philosopher. He wasn’t after truth, and all his writings were designed for one purpose: to stab a venomous sting into Christendom’s heart.

Sandbrook doesn’t realise how fraudulent and intellectually puny Marxism is. But he is aware of its awful consequences: “Well, the death toll speaks for itself. In the Soviet Union alone, his disciple Stalin killed perhaps 12 million people.”

Sandbrook is right in principle, but slipshod in his facts. ‘In the Soviet Union alone’, even Marx’s disciple Lenin killed more people than the number Sandbrook cites.

Marx’s disciple Stalin ran the score up to about 61 million, but then, since ‘we’re all Marxists now’, there’s an instinctive need to downplay Marxist monstrosities even when acknowledging them.

The monstrous acts are directly linked to Marx’s monstrous ideas, which, to his credit, Sandbrook knows – and supports with a few quotations (I did the same thing in my piece of 28 April). But, because the concept of evil is alien to him, he misunderstands the nature of the link.

“The Soviet dictator was not a monster who happened to be a Marxist,” Sandbrook writes, “He was a monster because he was a Marxist.” Yes, but why was he a Marxist?

Evil theories are always concocted by evil men. And, as I wrote above, Marx provided modernity with an eschatological justification for its evil instincts. But, for their possessor to accept that justification and act accordingly, those evil instincts have to be there to begin with.

Stalin was a monster not because he was a Marxist but because he was a monster. But no man likes to think of himself as such. Enter Marxism, or any of its eschatological derivatives, such as socialism, communism, fascism or Nazism.

Suddenly the monster isn’t a monster any longer. He’s a man who regretfully has to be cruel in pursuit of a supposedly noble, in fact wicked, idea. But the need for such an idea comes from the evil nature of his personality.

That’s why I’m always sceptical about ex-communists (in other words, justifiers of mass murder) who claim to have converted to conservative goodness. Acceptance of ideological democide may or may not involve some rational process. But it always answers a deep emotional need, an innate personality defect.

And I doubt that, barring a Damascene epiphany, anyone can change his personality any more than he can change the colour of his eyes. To put it in clichéd terms, you can take a boy out of Marxism, but you can’t take Marxism out of a boy.

Understanding evil is essential to understanding Marx and Marxism. Anyone capable of such understanding will know that celebrating the birthday boy’s anniversary is tantamount to celebrating evil by taking part in a satanic rite.

Intellect, even as low-grade as Marx’s, has no role to play there. But this kind of thinking is beyond Sandbrook and his ilk.