Fun Facts About "Great" Communists
A reminder to those who don't know - or do know, just don't want to admit it.
Every few years, I re-post this post of mine from 2013 as a reminder to people from whence these people came and what destruction they left in their wake. Most who claim to be communists, secular humanists, progressives or postmodernists simply don’t know or choose to ignore the history of these people - and given the current status of our public education, kids sure won’t hear about this in the schools.
Dead ones:
Karl Marx: born into a wealthy Jewish family, his father was the leading lawyer in Trier, Germany – his family owned a number of Moselle vineyards. Marx spent his early college years drinking, gambling and running up debts. Father yanked him out of the University of Bonn and sent him to Berlin to attend university after he participated in a duel. He avoided military service when he turned eighteen due to a condition referred to as a “weak chest.” While living in England, he railed about the conditions of the British factories, yet never actually visited one. Died penniless and stateless – between 9 and 11 people attended his funeral. Atheist.
Friedrich Engels: the eldest son of a wealthy German cotton importer/industrialist. After he died, he left an estate worth $4.8 million to Marx’s daughters. Raised a Christian, became an atheist.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: Born to a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk. Baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, renounced God at 16. Atheist.
Josef Stalin: Son of a cobbler and a housemaid. Father was abusive and beat him and his mother. Educated at the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary of the Georgian Orthodox Church, became an atheist.
Leon Trotsky: born the fifth child of eight of well-to-do Jewish farmers. Lost battle for control of the Russian communist movement to Lenin and Stalin – Stalin had him assassinated during his exile to Mexico. Atheist.
Mao: son of a wealthy farmer. Father grew wealthy via capitalism but was a strict disciplinarian and beat Mao and his siblings. Raised Buddhist, became an atheist.
Pol Pot: born into a wealthy upper middle class family in Cambodia. While attending Catholic school, he lived with his cousin, she a member of the Royal Ballet and the mother of a child of the Cambodian king – the Crown Prince – his sister was also concubine of King Monivong. Pot grew up in the palace of the King through his relationships with these women. Traveled to Paris for university where he failed exams three years running but was radicalized there. Atheist.
Live ones:
Bill Ayers: born into a wealthy family, attended private schools. Father was Thomas G. Ayers, who was Chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison (1973 to 1980), and for whom Northwestern’s Thomas G. Ayers College of Commerce and Industry was named. Ayers is a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, formerly holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar.
Bernadine Dohrn: born into an upper middle class family. Dohrn graduated from Whitefish Bay High School where she was a cheerleader, treasurer of the Modern Dance Club, a member of the National Honor Society, and editor of the school newspaper. Bernadine is now Clinical Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern Law School.
Kathy Boudin: born into a family with a Muslim mother and a 1/2 Jewish Father, with a long left-wing history, and she was raised in Greenwich Village, New York. She attended kindergarten at the Little Red School House and its high school, the Elisabeth Irwin High School in Manhattan. Although she went to Bryn Mawr College intending to prepare for medical school, her interests quickly turned to politics. 1965, her last year at Bryn Mawr was spent studying in the Soviet Union. She was paid 75 rubles a month by the Soviet government and, according to her résumé, taught on a Soviet collective farm. Her great-uncle was Louis B. Boudin, a Marxist theorist. Her father, Leonard Boudin, grew wealthy as a communist legal defender and member of the National Lawyer’s Guild, he was the law partner of Victor Rabinowitz, himself counsel to numerous left-wing organizations. Kathy’s older brother, Michael Boudin, is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. After serving 22 years in federal prison for her role in a bombing that killed two police officers and an armored car guard, Kathy taught at Columbia and was recently honored by the New York University Law School program as its Rose Scheinberg Scholar in Residence.
Commonalities: Most had wealthy families, or were wealthy themselves – or at least had access to privilege. Most found radicalism in academia, some had violent upbringings. Most grew up in religious families, many Jewish, and yet became atheists.
Out of all the “great” ones, Stalin was the only one who actually experienced a poor upbringing. Perhaps that explains his ruthlessness.
Marxism is apparently a disease of prosperity, afflicting the children of privilege…but then that does reveal its origins as an elitist orthodoxy based on the childish idea of revolt and rebellion, doesn’t it? The children of the rich and the academics, presuming that their personal “trials” validate their “struggles” against their own wealth as if those “struggles” were the same as those of the hungry in the streets, then using their advantage of family wealth to construct an ideology designed to control others that they deem incapable of making decisions for themselves seems, well, a bit narcissistic.
Ayers, Dohrn and Boudin, who are all quite rich and very white, equated their “class struggle” with those who were black and poor and joined forces with the Black Panthers.
I don’t know, it seems all too self-righteous and self-aggrandizing to me.
Seems to be a touch of mental illness/irrational need for retribution here as well since Stalin killed 7-10 million Ukrainians by starving them and then relocating them by force to Siberia, Mao is estimated to have killed 45 million, Pol Pot had his killing fields where an estimated 3 million died. The glorious revolution of global Marxism is estimated to be responsible for between 100 and 150 million deaths.
And now for the important part…
These “great” Marxists all conspired to overthrow the governments of their counties and eventually initiated violent revolution under the guise of freeing “the people”, only to establish murderous and oppressive totalitarian regimes to retain power.
Compare these murderers and terrorists, all revered by the left, to great Americans like Washington, Jefferson, John and Samuel Adams and Ben Franklin.
The Founders never wanted to split from Britain. They petitioned the British Monarchy for redress, all unheard by King George III, for years before declaring independence. They didn’t want war because they only had poorly trained militia to go against the greatest army and navy in the world at the time – they only went to war to protect their homes and liberty – and afterwards?
As proof of their belief in individual freedom and liberty, they truly released the governance of the country to the people – something none of the “great Marxists”, people who professed to believe in the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, ever did, proving the lie that is Marxism.
General George Washington, called “the indispensable man”, wanted to go back to his farm, he did not want to be president but felt is was his duty to serve if the people wanted him to lead.
And yet we are supposed to believe that the American Republic is repressive and evil and we should forget our founding principles and throw in with these mentally unbalanced leftist criminals, thugs and charlatans.
Lenin exemplified another trait of all of these leftist thugs – the rejection of moral absolutism. Where the Founders of America trusted and turned to God, these “great” Marxists turned away.
Perhaps that is why they rejected God and the church because to do the things they did and believe what they did, they had to reject the idea that there is an absolute standard of good and evil. In the words of Lenin biographer Robert Service, Lenin considered “moral questions” to be “an irrelevance”, rejecting the concept of moral absolutism; instead he judged whether an action was justifiable based upon its chances of success for the revolutionary cause.
The entire ideology of Marxism, including its four supporting pillars: socialism, the labor theory of value, dialectical materialism and class struggle, is built on this relativistic lie; this is the reason that I find the foolish, covetous, infantile and illogical belief in Marxism the very embodiment of evil and I reject and will oppose to the death the concept of postmodernism.
Great reminder! Most people are clueless about this history!
Great reminder, Michael. I reposted your essay on gettr.com