THE DEVIL AND KARL MARX: A REVIEW
IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONE.COM - SAT. OCT. 3, 2020
"THE DEVIL AND KARL MARX" PAUL KENGOR, A REVIEW - THE CATHOLIC THING
by Robert Orlando - 2020/08/29
"Paul Kengor is a teacher and a writer who always had an eye for the spiritual dimension to history, politics, and economics....Prof. Kengor's new book, The Devil and Karl Marx Communism Long March of Death, is a hammer and sickle dismantling of the diabolical character of Karl Marx (1818-1883) ... ultimately the fight comes down to spiritual warfare: good versus evil."
Indeed, Kengor's new book is about the clash of the modern, devilish forces of socialism and communism - the key Marxist systems - against the eternally divine force of faith. The book opens with a portrait of Marx's formative early years, an approach similar to Paul Johnson' s in Intellectuals:From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (1988). John was accused of being moralistic for judging Marx's ideas through the lens of his character.
Of Marx's writings, Johnson says their "actual content can be related to four aspects of his character: his taste for violence,his appetite for power, his inability to handle money and, above all his tendency to exploit those around him."
Professor Kengor goes even further, depicting Marx as possibly under the Devil's spell. "The young Marx wrote some very dark poems filled with the sort of anti-religious sentiments that would inspire his Communist Manifesto. "It is in part, a tragic portrait of a man," Kengor writes, "but still more broadly so, an ideology, a chilling retrospective on an unclean spirit that should have never been let out of its pit."
Here's an example from Marx's poem, "The Pale Maiden" (1837)
Thus Heaven I've forfeited,
I know it full well.
My soul, once true to God
Is chosen for Hell.
Kengor (like Johnson) makes the case that Marx, a self-absorbed intellectual, never lived out his own convictions when it came either to money or the redistribution thereof, evidenced by his dismissive attitude towards providing for those under his care. For instance, Marx exhausted the resources and goodwill of his parents, and instead of becoming remorseful or apologetic, he defiantly
disowned them once the were no longer of value to him.
When it came to money, everything Marx touched turned to straw. His combustible life was filled with tragedy, debts, and, with the exception of the death of his wife Jenny, an apparent lack of regret in the face of his greatest losses. Family suicide, sexual exploits (including the possible abuse of a family maid) inflamed his life with bloody anger and fueled his revolutionary spirit. In this troubled background are the origins of his communist worldview - a complete rebellion against anything traditional or sacred. ...
Kengor ... highlights Pope John Paul II's success in his confrontation with Marxism and Communism. Having lived out his life in a communist regime, St. John Paul knew well Marxist ideas, which enabled him to deal effectively with the liberation theologians in South America. ...
Marxists are employing identity politics, lately with some success. But the aim is the same to sow cultural destruction...
Marx believed religion was a drug (the opium of the people) used by wealthy to maintain disproportionate power. In retrospect, of course, communism peddles its own drug: an idealized global world, in which inequality disappears in the obliteration of all human distinction. Kengor sees the seeds of our current flirtation with Marxism in the promotion of sexual freedom, "that plagues us to this today."
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