Marxism and its derivatives are simply another form of chattel slavery dressed up as a “science.” It is the mad dream of an earthly paradise based on envy.
I once took a lit crit class wherein one of the assignments required exploring Marxist critique. My response was that I had less interest in Marxist critique, an idea responsible for t…
Marxism and its derivatives are simply another form of chattel slavery dressed up as a “science.” It is the mad dream of an earthly paradise based on envy.
I once took a lit crit class wherein one of the assignments required exploring Marxist critique. My response was that I had less interest in Marxist critique, an idea responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people and possibly as many as 160 million, than I was in exploring Nazi critique.
The only reason Marxism isn’t treated with the same level of contempt as Nazism is that there were never Nuremberg type revelations of communist regimes when they collapsed.
Marxism/socialism is worse than slavery. Slavery was universal until serious abolition began a couple of centuries ago. But even slaves were individuals. Epictetus is a major example. Marxism/socialism treats human beings as interchangeable ciphers. The purging of whole classes and the quotas of Stalin are good examples. National Socialism likewise, with its Holocaust, reprisal massacres and imposed famines. As G K Chesterton said of G B Shaw’s socialism, such ideologues respond to the failures of socialism not by replacing the theory, but by replacing the populace. There are rigid religious monocultures too. The grey blob has many faces.
The world is and always was a shitty place. So far, the only kind of Marxism we’ve observed is the shitty, murderous, expansionist kind. I have no problem with little voluntary Marxist communes here and there, but I have a big problem when it tries to drag everyone into its rapacious grip. And of course, Marxism is all about the dialectical, so the synthesis of Marxist-Leninism is a feature and not a bug.
At least with the Crusades, most were defensive wars against a totalitarian aggressor who spread a particularly vicious strain of religion out of the Arabian peninsula, across North Africa, throughout the Spanish Peninsula and almost to Paris in the west. In the East, it fought its way through the Levant, into the Balkans and as far northwest as Vienna. After centuries of attacks against the eastern Roman Empire, when Constantinople was finally defeated, it spread east into Central Asia and as far as China. Whatever the sins of the Crusaders, it was better than the alternative we still live with today.
Most people blame expansionist Islam for Christendom’s defensive reaction after 500 years of Muslim conquests.
Authoritarian communism is the only kind of state communism we’ve seen, so I’m not sure why the ideas of Marx aren’t the ideological source for the deaths of a hundred million or more victims under state communist regimes.
Lenin invented the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party to transition society from capitalism to communism. The violence of those communist regimes is his brain child, not Marx. Lenin's regime was violent to other Marxists that didn't fall in line, so there were obvious disagreements even within the movement. See the Kronstadt rebellion.
If you don't want to use the Levantine crusades as analogy then look at the Northern Crusades where pagans were forced to become Christians or killed. Or the Albigensian Crusade where Christians that were not someone else's idea of Christian were slaughtered when they refused to convert. Who is to blame for these events?
Marxism and its derivatives are simply another form of chattel slavery dressed up as a “science.” It is the mad dream of an earthly paradise based on envy.
I once took a lit crit class wherein one of the assignments required exploring Marxist critique. My response was that I had less interest in Marxist critique, an idea responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people and possibly as many as 160 million, than I was in exploring Nazi critique.
The only reason Marxism isn’t treated with the same level of contempt as Nazism is that there were never Nuremberg type revelations of communist regimes when they collapsed.
Marxism/socialism is worse than slavery. Slavery was universal until serious abolition began a couple of centuries ago. But even slaves were individuals. Epictetus is a major example. Marxism/socialism treats human beings as interchangeable ciphers. The purging of whole classes and the quotas of Stalin are good examples. National Socialism likewise, with its Holocaust, reprisal massacres and imposed famines. As G K Chesterton said of G B Shaw’s socialism, such ideologues respond to the failures of socialism not by replacing the theory, but by replacing the populace. There are rigid religious monocultures too. The grey blob has many faces.
The world is and always was a shitty place. So far, the only kind of Marxism we’ve observed is the shitty, murderous, expansionist kind. I have no problem with little voluntary Marxist communes here and there, but I have a big problem when it tries to drag everyone into its rapacious grip. And of course, Marxism is all about the dialectical, so the synthesis of Marxist-Leninism is a feature and not a bug.
At least with the Crusades, most were defensive wars against a totalitarian aggressor who spread a particularly vicious strain of religion out of the Arabian peninsula, across North Africa, throughout the Spanish Peninsula and almost to Paris in the west. In the East, it fought its way through the Levant, into the Balkans and as far northwest as Vienna. After centuries of attacks against the eastern Roman Empire, when Constantinople was finally defeated, it spread east into Central Asia and as far as China. Whatever the sins of the Crusaders, it was better than the alternative we still live with today.
Blaming Marx for authoritarian communism is like blaming Jesus for the crusades. You want to put Lenin on trial, not Marx.
Most people blame expansionist Islam for Christendom’s defensive reaction after 500 years of Muslim conquests.
Authoritarian communism is the only kind of state communism we’ve seen, so I’m not sure why the ideas of Marx aren’t the ideological source for the deaths of a hundred million or more victims under state communist regimes.
Lenin invented the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party to transition society from capitalism to communism. The violence of those communist regimes is his brain child, not Marx. Lenin's regime was violent to other Marxists that didn't fall in line, so there were obvious disagreements even within the movement. See the Kronstadt rebellion.
If you don't want to use the Levantine crusades as analogy then look at the Northern Crusades where pagans were forced to become Christians or killed. Or the Albigensian Crusade where Christians that were not someone else's idea of Christian were slaughtered when they refused to convert. Who is to blame for these events?