Truly Amazing...and Appalling

Here is an book review on a book about Marxism and its effect on the world.

But if you read the review, there is one thing substantially and damningly missing: the sheer inhumanity of Marxism, the necessity of terror and the decades of human suffering imposed by delusional control freaks in the name of a "philosophy" that, in order to work, must deny fundamental human interests and humanity itself, all in the name of a Greater Good.

Appalling. Truly appalling. If this is the face of the modern left, all one can say is that for those who truly believe in the inevitability of history, their historical ignorance is truly appalling.

Here is the tenor:

In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, most of them no longer felt that way. What had happened in the meanwhile? Were these people now buried under a pile of toddlers? Had Marxism been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking new research? Had someone stumbled on a lost manuscript by Marx confessing that it was all a joke?

The only ones who believed that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue in 1976 were those whose knowledge of what went on behind the Iron Curtain was nil. The reason that a decade later no one in their right mind could believe in Marxism is that it is, was, and will remain a fundamentally flawed doctrine.

Marx failed because he reduced work to a commodity: his future utopia could only work if work no longer mattered, that the mechanics of supply and demand were removed entirely and replaced by commands for workers to do as they were told, effectively by their betters.

Further:

If one thinker left a major indelible mark on the 20th century,' Hobsbawm remarks, 'it was he.' Seventy years after Marx's death, for better or for worse, one third of humanity lived under political regimes inspired by his thought. Well over 20 per cent still do. Socialism has been described as the greatest reform movement in human history. Few intellectuals have changed the world in such practical ways. That is usually the preserve of statesmen, scientists and generals, not of philosophers and political theorists. Freud may have changed lives, but hardly governments. 'The only individually identifiable thinkers who have achieved comparable status,' Hobsbawm writes, 'are the founders of the great religions in the past, and with the possible exception of Muhammad none has triumphed on a comparable scale with such rapidity.'

I suppose that you can consider socialism to be one of the greatest reform movements in human history if you see mass murder, genocide, deliberately caused ecological disasters and ruthless surpression of fundamental human rights as being "reform". To consider this a "practical" change underscores the utter moral bankruptcy of those who consider themselves Marxists or, more pointedly, even Leftist.

I find the fact that there are those who consider themselves to be true Marxists to be both amazing and appalling. Amazing because it most certainly must count as a truly bizarre way to look at the world; appalling because of the necessary complete and total denial of the lessons that history has taught us about Marx and his "philosophy" that has led to such massive suffering and death. No religion, despite what has been written there, has ever caused so many deaths as Marxism has.