The true history of Marx is revealed in Who Was Karl Marx? The Men, the Motives and the Menace Behind Today’s Rampaging American Left. Most discussions of Marxism, Communism, Socialism and indeed Marx himself are conducted in the intellectual stratosphere, as though it were an exposition on quantum physics, and Marx himself is treated with godly reverence. But nothing could be further from the truth. As the book explains, Marx’s theories are absurd and Marx the man was a repulsive, greedy, parasitic slob — everything he claimed to despise about the bourgeoisie.
From a bourgeoise background himself, Marx was the selfish, spoiled-brat son of a wealthy German attorney. Despite the money showered on him by his wealthy father, Marx was perpetually in debt. His Communist Manifesto co-author Friedrich Engels was also a spoiled-brat, rich son of a wealthy industrialist. Marx received regular support throughout his life from Engels, who stole money from the petty cash account of his father’s business.
At other times, Marx hovered over ailing relatives, waiting for them to die to see what he would inherit. He would write to his wife and/or Engels, describing the reading of the will joyfully or angrily depending on the outcome. The book quotes many of these hilarious letters. Marx was even paid by the German government to spy on his Communist friends.
Marx never really worked. His mother complained that Marx should try engaging in a little capitalism instead of just talking about it. He also never bathed, and she harried him weekly to change his underwear.
His closest associates described him as brimming with hatred, rather than love for his fellow man, and someone of towering conceit, who tolerated no dissention. Engels said, “[H]e rages without ceasing, as if ten thousand devils had caught him by the hair.” Prominent Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin observed, “One has to worship Marx in order to be loved by him. One has at least to fear him in order to be tolerated by him. Marx is extremely proud, up to dirt and madness.”
Marx fathered an illegitimate son by his maid, but Marx claimed it was Engels’. Engels raised the child as his own and only admitted the truth on his deathbed. Two of Marx’s daughters and a son-in-law committed suicide. Three children died of malnutrition, and while Marx’s wife frantically sought to scrape up money for one of their coffins, Marx employed what author Frances Wheen referred to as, “a loutish, libidinous and thoroughly useless private secretary merely because he thought it unseemly for a man of his position to be without one.”
Marxist economic theories are foolish, almost to the point of absurdity. Marx never once darkened the doors of a factory and knew nothing of the working class he supposedly championed. He called them “rogues,” “stupid boys,” “asses.” Remember, these were the people who Marx claimed would be freed from their chains by Communism. Instead, Communism has enslaved half the world in chains that may never be broken. His ponderous three-volume Das Kapital is impenetrable. Even Wheen, a sympathetic reviewer noted, “’Das Kapital’ should be judged not as an economics treatise but as ‘a work of the imagination: a Victorian melodrama, or a vast Gothic novel.’”
Truer words…
Marxism points to the absolute folly of human pride — pride that drives some people to instigate war and commit murder to impose it and to go on killing wholesale when Marxist ideas reveal in practice just how mindlessly destructive they really are.
Who Was Karl Marx? catalogs the Communists of various stripes who helped promote and impose Marxism over the last century and a half, their many strategies and most importantly, their true objectives: absolute power and wealth. This is what many people miss. In the effort to debate the tenets of Marxism, they fail to see that Communists are just very clever grifters — a “new-style Mafia,” as presidential advisor John P. Roche put it.
Marx was not really an atheist either. He actually believed in God but desired to be His equal. This was Marx’s true goal, and he even said so much in a poem quoted in the book. Marxism is simply the latest version of Satan’s temptation of man, that “ye shall be as gods…”
Whitaker Chambers states in Witness:
It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world.
To obtain this vision, Marx and his followers preached destruction of the world, utter, complete destruction — revealing again their towering arrogance and complete disregard for any and all human life. Marxist’s common ailment is an almost universal hatred for man, and a desire to see society, Western society that is, destroyed root and branch.
The book traces all of the major strategies used to bring this about and the people who articulated them. Their one common goal is an asymmetric military strategy to overthrow America and replace it with their Communist vision.
In the book’s final chapter, “Back from the Brink: A Comprehensive Plan to Save America” are remedies for almost every single strategy the Left has been pushing. I felt that if I was going to alarm you with the true nature of what we face that I should be beholden to consider ways to defeat it. These remedies do not demand we move far out of our comfort zone either. They are practical solutions that everyone can use and do not seek to swim upstream against the prevailing cultural current, but rather to sidestep it and create more attractive alternatives.
This book is a comprehensive exposé on the men, the motives and the methods that are threatening the very survival of our nation today. It is written in plain, conversational language with enough detail for the most serious historian or activist, while concise and readily understandable for high school and even middle school children. We need our kids on America’s side, for their own sakes more than ours.
The hour is late and we are woefully behind, but we Americans are known for our ability to think out-of-the-box and pull rabbits out of the hat at the last minute. This is what comes of being a free people. May this book help keep us that way.