Marxism: The Most Destructive Superstition

As we watch yet another Marxist nation, Venezuela, near complete economic collapse, it is a good time to recall that this is all occurring because so many intellectuals around the globe, including our current Pope, embrace, in part or in full, the nineteenth century superstition dreamed up by Karl Marx.  Presented ostensibly as a description of how economics and history works, Marxism in practice served as an excuse for tyrants and would be tyrants to create regimes that would impose regimes of slavery on populations that would put to shame every other form of tyranny dreamed up in the lamentable chronicles of human crime and folly.  Richard Fernandez in a brilliant post at PJ Media takes a look at the destructive power of Marxism:

A German friend once remarked that Hitler was only the second most destructive thing his country had unleashed upon the world.  Worse by far, he said, were the ideas of Karl Marx. The notion  an idea could be more destructive than fleets of bombers and Panzer divisions is a large claim but there is evidence in support of it.  John Walters says that in sheer destructiveness Hitler beats Marx only if you add the Kaiser’s war.  If you add famine into the equation, Marx beats Hitler, Tojo and the Kaiser put together.

According to a disturbingly pleasant graphic from Information is Beautiful entitled simply 20th Century Death, communism was the leading ideological cause of death between 1900 and 2000. The 94 million that perished in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe easily (and tragically) trump the 28 million that died under fascist regimes during the same period.During the century measured, more people died as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communism’s total by only 9 million.

It gets worse when you look at the … Natural World … famine (101 million). Curiously, all of the world’s worst famines during the 20th century were in communist countries: China (twice!), the Soviet Union, and North Korea.

Yet despite this unparalleled record of destructiveness Walters notes that Communism retains enormously good press. “According to a 2011 Rasmussen poll, 11% of Americans think that communism would better serve this country’s needs than our current system.” Its core ideas are popular with Bernie Sanders’ followers. Only 3 years ago Jeremy Corbyn, the current leader of Britain’s Labor Party, expressed satisfaction with the program of the Venezuelan Bolivarian revolutionists. He tweeted “thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. He made massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world.” David Sirota writing in Salon at almost the same time as Corbyn’s tweet fulsomely praised “Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle.”

Miracle: for there was no other word for it.
according to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez’s first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved. Then there is a remarkable graph from the World Bank that shows that under Chavez’s brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its “extreme poverty” rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent just a decade later). In all, that left the country with the third lowest poverty rate in Latin America. Additionally, as Weisbrot points out, “college enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.”

How this “miracle” crashed down into ruin is something yet to be explained. Suffice it so say there is unexpectedly no food, no electricity, nor even gasoline in this oil-rich nation. In the ultimate irony “gasoline-making fluid catalytic cracking units … are currently down … with critics blaming shortages of spare parts, lack of maintenance, and a shaky electrical grid for outages and unplanned stoppages.” Looting is epidemic. Trucks are being swarmed by mobs on the highway. Army troops — crucial for regime survival — have been reduced to foraging to make up a meal. The Atlantic, hardly a right-wing publication, writes “Venezuela is falling apart”.

Go here to read the rest.  Ironically, considering how infested with Marxism the Catholic left is, the main attraction of this superstition for intellectuals is largely the atheism that is at the core of Marxism.  There is no God, merely an inevitable historical path laid out by Marx. Traditional morality was done away with:  cooperating with the inevitable historical process, the ultimate triumph of Marxism, was moral, and anything that opposed it was immoral.  Thus morality becomes a mere matter of political labels.  How convenient that this allowed movements dedicated to Marxism to commit any crime, no matter how vile, in the scramble for supreme power.  That Marxism has never been anything but a transparent fraud, with no more intellectual validity than a tale from The Arabian Nights, is a damning indictment of the human capacity to embrace any fable if it gives an excuse to engage in wretched conduct with an ostensibly clean conscience. Fernandez sums up all of this neatly:

Explosives can achieve gross destruction.  But it misses things between the craters;  by contrast a mental bomb can destroy civilization itself; its values, institutions, goals and even its grip upon reality.  In the contest between Panzer division and Manifesto, the manifesto appears far the more powerful. The computer revolution has given us the tools to understand why Communism has so much devastating power.  We can now recognize it as history’s greatest and most dangerous piece of intellectual malware, whose only true rival is radical Islam.  It tricks the social network into thinking you can get something for nothing; it promises freedom in exchange for enslavement.  It presents a deceptive interface but its inner methods are all destructors. It subverts the operating system and like the computer viruses we are familiar with uses the host’s own processing power to spawn more copies of itself.  The more powerful and resource-endowed a host is, the more powerfully the malware can attack it.  In the end it trashes everything and only a complete reinstall and rebuild can fix it.