In today’s Guardian, some dear lady says that she gives the Communist Manifesto out as a gift. Presumably to young nieces and nephews, to educate them in the ways of righteousness.
In the comments section I suggested she may just as well as hand out copies of Mein Kampf.
Unsurprisingly (we are talking the Guardian after all!) my comment created an uproar for and against and ended up by getting deleted.
The Communist Manifesto calls for “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”. The ideas of Engels and Marx have brought more death and misery on the world than any other barbarity in history. Communism with a small c was advocated by the historical Jesus but it may be noted by the more canny amongst us that poor old JC did not suggest armed revolt or the brutal death of untold millions.
I am all for a better and fairer society, achieved slowly and using democratic and peaceable means. The communist manifesto ushered in a dystopia of gargantuan and horrific proportions, dwarfing the evil works of Hitler, another 20th Century madman, in terms of eventual body count.
The communist manifesto promotes the slaughter of the wealthy, the capitalists and the bourgeois – and didn’t they do well? From Stalin and the Kulaks, to Mao and the intellectuals. From Pol Pot to the despots of Eastern Europe. Mass slaughter in the name of communism, which equated not to a better world for all, but a life of luxury and power for a political class who committed every evil known to man and were the equal of every awful tyrant humanity has ever known.
And we are still suffering from the aftermath, with Mr Putin and his cronies carrying on the great example of his forebears.
No excuse can be made for Hitler and Mein Kampf. A hideous, barbaric book and a hideous, twisted, vile, evil human being.
But I consider the Communist Manifesto of a work of evil as shocking as that of Mein Kampf. To promote revolution and death is an atrocity. Hitler both promoted and carried out atrocity. Marx and Engels may not themselves have committed atrocity but they were certainly responsible for it.
Weltanschauung 