We always hurt the one we love, goes a popular song. Perhaps. But there’s hurt and there’s hurt.
One man may hurt his wife by forgetting their wedding anniversary, or by drinking too much and earning too little, or by neglecting to do the dishes. Another man may hurt his wife by regularly putting her in A&E with broken bones.
Both may claim love and beg forgiveness, and the first man may well be justified in his declaration and his entreaty. But the second man must be locked up for as long as the law allows. And if he still insists he loves his wife, he’s either a hypocrite or a madman.
A man doesn’t express love for a woman with his fists. Nor does a political activist express love for a country with lifelong efforts to bring about a Marxist revolution. Never mind their – or their relations’ – protestations. In both instances, it’s hate speaking.
Ralph Miliband was such a Marxist activist. He devoted his life to glorifying Marxism in theory and trying to help it vanquish in practice. So whatever his son Ed says in response to the Daily Mail article, Ralph hated Britain – objectively, to use a term from the Marxist jargon.
“Britain had to start working towards building a viable alternative that would be genuinely revolutionary socialist in its positions,” he wrote – and then worked towards this goal with enthusiasm worthy of a better application.
To those who haven’t experienced it first hand, Marxism may look like an innocent intellectual pose. It isn’t. Neither is it a beautiful theory perverted by the Soviets.
In fact even at their most murderous the Soviets fell far short of the cannibalistic prescriptions swelling the tomes by Marx and Engels.
For example, their Manifesto prescribes the nationalisation of all private property without exception. Even Stalin’s Russia in the thirties fell short of that ideal. In fact, a good chunk, as much as 15 percent, of the Soviet economy was then in private hands.
Marx also insisted that family should be done away with, with women becoming communal property. Again, for all their efforts, Lenin and Stalin never quite managed to achieve this ideal either, much to the regret of those who could see an amorous pay-off in such an arrangement.
Then, according to the Manifesto, all children were to be taken away from their parents and raised by the state as its wards. That too remained a dream for the Bolsheviks. Their kindergartens and young pioneers’ camps weren’t compulsory, and those fortunate women who could get by without full-time employment were still free to read Pushkin to their children.
Modern slave labour, such an arresting feature of both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, also derives from Marx – and again Lenin, Stalin and Hitler displayed a great deal of weak-kneed liberalism in bringing his ideas to fruition.
Marx, after all, wrote about total militarisation of labour achieved by organising it into ‘labour armies,’ presumably led by Marx as Generalissimo and Engels as Chief of the General Staff. Stalin came closer to this than Hitler, but again fell short: no more than 10 percent of the Soviets were ever in forced labour at the same time.
One aspect of Bolshevism and Nazism that came close to fulfilling the Marxist dream was what Engels described as “specially guarded places” to contain aristocrats, intelligentsia, clergy and other “noxious insects”, in Lenin’s heartfelt phrase.
Such places have since acquired a different name, but in essence they are exactly what Marx and Engels envisaged. Here Lenin and Stalin did come close to fulfilling the Marxist prescription, but they were again found wanting in spreading concentration camps to a mere half of the world. So where the Bolsheviks and Nazis perverted Marxism, they generally did so in the direction of softening it.
Genocidal or ideological mass murder widely practised by both the Nazis and the Soviets also derives from Marxism. Here are a few quotations from their works to give you a taste of exactly what Ralph Miliband tried to introduce to the country he supposedly loved:
“All the other [non-Marxist] large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary holocaust. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary… these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character… [A general war will] wipe out all this racial trash.”
“In history nothing is achieved without violence and implacable ruthlessness… In short, it turns out these ‘crimes’ of the Germans and Magyars against the said Slavs are among the best and most praiseworthy deeds which our and the Magyar people can boast in their history.”
“…only by the most determined use of terror against these Slav peoples can we, jointly with the Poles and Magyars, safeguard the revolution… there will be a struggle, an ‘inexorable life-and-death struggle’, against those Slavs who betray the revolution; an annihilating fight and ruthless terror – not in the interests of Germany, but in the interests of the revolution!”
“We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”
Truer words have never been spoken. The Russians have never made excuses for the Marxist carnage they perpetrated. And now the Marxist Ed Miliband is trying to make excuses for his Marxist father.
Here we have another apple falling not far from the tree. Don’t pick it up – it’s poisonous.