Karl Marx

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Communism

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Opiates for the masses
From each
To each
The world would not be in such a snarl
had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.
—Irving Berlin
The Red Menace himself!

Karl Marx was the original pinko commie scum; he co-wrote the Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels) and Das Kapital. His ghost subjects Ayn Rand's to eternal wage slavery.

His fanboys have shown quite a tenacious resistance to the suggestion that something might be wrong with what he said (though given the large split between different factions, to the point where in the Spanish Civil War, Stalinists mostly killed Trotskyists, it is understandable), even as leaders professing his philosophy turn into dictators one after another, and the combined death toll from their regimes rises into the nine figures. One common response to this is to point out that certain anti-communists also racked up non-negligible skull counts in the name of fighting communism, notably Adolf Hitler, Suharto of Indonesia, and Syngman Rhee of South Korea.[1] Besides being an instance of the tu quoque, this is also to some degree a red herring, since (1) a much lower proportion of anti-communists racked up a skull count, and (2) of those who did, only one reached the one-million mark.[2]

Contents

[edit] Marx and Judaism

Marx was of Jewish descent, which was the original prompt by conspiracy theorists to tie Marxism in with the theory of the international Jewish conspiracy, claiming that communism was made to advance Jewish domination of the world. However, Marx's relationship with his Jewish identity is a great deal more complex than all that. His father, Herschel Mordechai, came from a long line of rabbis, but received a secular German education himself, and converted to Lutheranism around the time of Marx's birth, changing his name to Heinrich Marx. Karl Marx was baptized into the Lutheran church at age six, and later in life wrote an essay, On the Jewish Question, in which he drew on stereotypes of money-worshipping "huckster" Jews and stated that, as a part of the development of capitalism, "Christians [had] become Jews" (i.e., the "Jewish" culture of capitalism had assimilated all the old cultures of Europe). Though it also has been argued that it could be satirical, given that it had responded to a traditionally anti-Semitic article.[3]

[edit] Marx and light bulbs

Q: How many Marxists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: None. The light bulb contains within itself the seeds of its own revolution.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. During the Korean War, impoverished farmers were liquidated because they "might" have become communists in the future. Douglas MacArthur considered the matter to be an internal affair of America's anti-communist allies.
  2. However, others point to imperialism as an example of a capitalist-derived skull count, thus making the capitalist death toll significantly higher. (Regardless, two wrongs don't make a right.)
  3. Interpretations of On the Jewish Question on Wikipedia
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