Did You Hear About That World Record of Marxmanship?
Did You Hear About That World Record of Marxmanship?
By Paul B. Skousen
Somebody told me there’s a Guinness World Record at the end of this interesting pursuit, so let me share it with you.
First, we need to visit Karl Marx in his dingy, slummy accommodations in London. It was here that this barrel-chested and very unemployed philosopher with disheveled hair and a bushy beard sat about chain-smoking his clay pipes and blustering his philosophies and complaints to whoever would listen.
He was only part way through his life of reckless demands and manipulations when he came across a collaborator with money—a man named Friedrich Engels. They became fast but oddly-paired friends in 1844, mutually bent on re-creating the world in their images.
By 1847, after some initial spats of intrigue and power ploys with a growing communist movement in Europe, Marx and Engels won the trust of their compatriots and were asked to write up a declaration of principles or a “Manifesto to the World,” the Communist Manifesto.
When it was done, the pair had settled on six goals or prerequisites that would invite a new era of world-wide peace and prosperity. All it took was:
1) the overthrow of capitalism
2) the abolition of private property
3) the elimination of the family as a social unit
4) the abolition of all classes
5) the overthrow of all governments
6) the establishment of a communist order with communal
ownership of property in a classless, stateless society.
Now we need to fast forward to 1867 when we find Marx and Engels already well known for both good and bad among their communist comrades. They had been all over Europe, through difficulties and triumphs. But behind them and around them was turmoil in various nations, infighting among communist federation memberships, backstabbing and maliciousness to gain power.
The ends justified the means for Marx, and he did what he could—and wanted—to take power. He succeeded and he failed, but mostly he failed. And with the failure of the First International—a congress of communist movers and shakers—Marx had lost his bully pulpit.
So what does a world conqueror do when he has no army with which to conquer? He writes a book. For Marx, that book was a sort of guidebook that explained history and communist philosophy. He called it Capital.
(Okay, in German its title is Das Capital, but let us wrap this up.)
Just a side note about his personal life, when Marx died in 1883, he joined family members who preceded him in death including daughter Francisca who died in 1852, Edgar who died in 1854, an unnamed baby who died in birth in 1856, daughter Eleanor who committed suicide, daughter Laura who committed suicide, his wife who died of cancer in 1881, and daughter Jenny who died in January 1883. Two months later, Marx himself died. They say 7 or 8 people attended the funeral.
“It was a pathetic life,” as Dr. W. Cleon Skousen said in his best seller, The Naked Communist wherein the above discussion is fleshed out. Marx’s life, Skousen said, was “filled with burning ambition, constant frustration and continuous failure.”
But Marx’s ideas unfortunately did not die with him. In short, Marx said he simply wanted to “dethrone God and destroy capitalism.” It was up to Engels to carry the work forward for another 12 years.
These two anarchists saw three primary problems as the source for the world’s woes.
First was the notion of private property. Marx and Engels said the haves always fighting the have nots was the root cause of the world’s problems—the property owners fighting to control everything, and the poor fighting for a piece of the pie.
And worst of all, Marx said, the rich exploited the poor, making them beasts of burden forced to work for low wages just so the property owners could expand their holdings and become rich and more rich.
Marx and Engels decided that those evil rich guys, in order to keep a strangle hold on the poor, came up with two powerful tools of leverage.
The first was the State (the government), the Big Stick that forced people to obey the property rights of the land owners—or go to jail.
The second was Religion, invented, they said, to keep the poor in their place, prevent rebellion, to keep them contented and subservient. Such adages as “thou shalt not steal,” and “thou shalt not covet,” and “judge not” were meant to teach this one lesson: Keep Your Hands Off My Stuff—lest God smite you for your thievery and covetousness.
Marx and Engels thought it perfectly obvious what had to be done: to bring lasting change to the world, to make it better, to ensure universal peace, universal prosperity, and universal cooperation, those bastions of what they called tyranny—Property, the State, and Religion—had to be annihilated.
Today we see the cost to bring about Marx’s and Engels’ idea of universal peace and prosperity is shockingly unacceptable. For example, the cost in human life is at least topping more than 100 million people executed, slaughtered, starved, gassed and destroyed—in the name of communistic peace. And that in just over 100 years.
So now we get to the part about the world record.
With Marx and Engels’ idea for universal peace failing to catch on, somebody tried another tact. It is unknown just how many converts to the failure formula have been attracted, but evidently it has had an impact based on the numbers of people who sing along.
In 1971, a catchy little tune captured the goals of Marx and Engels in such an enticing way that it swept the world in just a few weeks, selling out everywhere, being played tens of millions of times. Somebody said it was the most played piece of music any where any time, and therefore should be declared a Guinness World Record.
Let us review the lyrics of this musical mausoleum to the doctrines of Marx (with editorial commentary in italics):
First, the assault on Religion:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…
Next comes the assault on the State:
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too …
And third, here come the horrible evils of private property:
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man ….
Finally and from beyond the grave, Marx’s plea to join him and the other founding fathers of Annihilation that include Plato, Socrates, Engels, Stalin, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Hitler, Che Guevara:
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
So—was John Lennon just being poetic and fancifully utopian with his song? Were his lyrics simply accidently lockstep with Marx and Engels?
In the book “Lennon in America,” author Geoffrey Giuliano quotes Lennon saying his hit song Imagine was “an anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic [song], but because it’s sugar-coated, it’s accepted.”
Elsewhere Lennon is quoted saying his song is “virtually the Communist Manifesto, even though I am not particularly a communist and I do not belong to any movement.”
So how does that bring us to The Guinness World Records? The Guinness people did a poll in Britain in 2002, and found that Imagine ranked number 2 as the all-time most played, most listened to and favorite rock song in that country, falling behind only to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. It was similarly popular in the U.S. and other nations all around the world.
Not quite a world record, but for those three targets of annihilation—Property, the State, and Religion—Lennon’s song certainly hit all the Marx.
фуфа смотрел…
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