MARX DEBUNKED BY TIME MAGAZINE

From TIME MAGAZINE article on May 19, 1947, Karl Marx is man is examined under the light of a man named Schwarzchild who had just written a book about the notorious political philosopher. My, how times have changed.

"If a name had to be found for the age in which we live," says the author of this book, "we might safely call it the Marxian era. For, in one way or another, the most important facts of our time lead back to one man—Karl Marx."

Biographer Leopold Schwarzschild is no admirer of Marx or Marxism. He is pointing to the fact that since World War I no other mind has so potently influenced the political and economic thinking and action of our times. There are masses of unconscious Marxists—men & women who have never read Marx's Capital, and who would rather be found dead than reading the Communist Manifesto, but whose thinking about the role of economic forces in history, the responsibility of government for the individual, and the importance of economic security v. political freedom has nevertheless been profoundly influenced by the choleric expatriate from Prussia.

Even the efforts to fight Marxism with its own weapons have inevitably taken a Marxist turn. Both Naziism and Fascism, Biographer Schwarzschild points out, are Marxist mutations whose predestined political form is therefore the police state. In Nazi concentration camps, as in Russian forced-labor camps, Karl Marx was the presiding genius. In the name of human progress, Marx has probably caused more death, misery, degradation and despair than any man who ever lived.

Complacent & Patronizing. For a mind whose consequences have been so monstrous, this biography is singularly debonair. It is certainly the most readable life of Marx available. For those who wish to see so alarming a monster debunked, it is a complacent job of debunking. Nor need readers fear exposure to the rigors of Marxist political theory or economics. Biographer Schwarzschild lightly writes off those arid involutions.

Schwarzschild's indictment is most effective when describing Marx's personal and political life from 1818 to 1883. Here is Marx the boy taken to a church in Trier, in the recently Prussianized Rhineland, and baptized a Lutheran. His father, the first lawyer in an interminable line of distinguished rabbis, admired Prussia and its official religion. Here is Marx the future socialist, unsocially shunning his school fellows while his mental acrobatics charm Ludwig von Westphalen, a much older man of a much higher social position. Marx later repaid Westphalen for this early interest by marrying his daughter, Jenny, against the wishes of her family. And here is Marx the frustrated poet, wasting his time, and his father's (and later his widowed mother's) slim resources as a shiftless college student. Marx finally received a kind of mail-order degree from the University of Jena.

Boring from Within. Marx got his start in life as editor of the Rhenish Gazette. This newspaper had been founded by a group of solid businessmen turned publishers. Like other publishers since, they were presently bewildered to discover that their paper had been infiltrated by socialists and was being used as a mouthpiece for revolutionary ideas. Marx lost his job. Then began his lifelong career as an expatriate and professional revolutionist.

In Paris he hobnobbed with Friedrich Engels, elegant, fox-hunting scion of a prosperous German textile tycoon. With him Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848), with him he shared his ideas, hopes, miseries and triumphs. Engels gave him implicit intellectual and political obedience, supported him most of his life and finally settled an annuity on him. In 1848 both Marx and Engels were neckdeep in the revolutionary wave that swept over Europe.

With the first gunshots, Marx rushed back to the Rhineland to edit the New Rhenish Gazette. The chapter on this episode shows the extent to which Marx's tactics are still standard Communist equipment. The New Rhenish Gazette was a tight little dictatorship of the proletariat run by a back-room clique of case-hardened Communists. But communism or socialism were rarely mentioned in its columns ; the paper posed as a liberal organ. The Communists posed as liberal patriots. In the name of liberalism, Marx shouted for war between Prussia and Denmark. He knew that war is good growing weather for communism. The result, as always, was the gradual discrediting of the liberals.

Character Assassination. Other enlightening chapters describe Marx's tactics of character assassination (still standard Communist practice) against anybody who threatened his exclusive leadership. One of his victims was Wilhelm Weitling, a tailor's apprentice, one of the few proletarians who has ever become an intelligent Communist leader. Marx falsely accused Weitling of being a literary crook and hounded him to the U.S. Another target was Ferdinand Lassalle, brilliant founder of the German Social Democratic Party. Marx somewhat inconsistently referred to Lassalle as "Baron Izzy" and "the little Jew."

Another victim was Michael Bakunin, an ardent Russian anarchist who threatened Marx's, control of the First International (founded in 1864 in London). Marx charged Bakunin with shady financial dealings and with being a Czarist agent. He could not make the charge stick, but Bakunin withdrew to lick his wounds.

After the collapse of the 1848 revolutions, Marx spent the rest of his life fighting off creditors, plotting against the public peace, burying his son,* suffering from attacks of carbuncles that sometimes covered him from head to foot, grinding away at economics so that he could "prove" (in Capital) that capitalism was inevitably doomed and that socialism was its inevitable successor, lashing his enemies with invective sometimes worthy of an Old Testament prophet and sometimes unprintable. When he was buried in a cemetery in Highgate, London, only eight friends were at the grave.

Author Schwarzschild's biographical facts are true, as far as they go. But the Marx he presents is a man with his brain cut out. Hence the facts add up to a caricature. Schwarzschild's thesis is that Karl Marx was 1) a rabbinical thinker whose pyramids of abstract logic were brilliant, but had nothing to do with facts; 2) a vicious egomaniac determined to ruin any man or group that he could not dominate; 3) a political seer whose prognostications were almost always wrong; 4) a self-styled "scientific" socialist whose science was about as scientific as astrology; 5) an economist whose economic knowledge was perfunctory and puerile. Marx's mind was undoubtedly diabolic (history is studded with malignant political geniuses). But it is no help in understanding or combating Marxism to deny its author's perverse brilliance.

Read it all.

GOING THROUGH THESE THINGS TWICE

IT HAD HAPPENED BEFORE, and it was happening again last week. An obscure man whose only tools were his brain and his pen was shaping the minds of men who shape the world. Winston Churchill had made one of this man's books "must" reading for the British War Cabinet and for Dominion Premiers who visited London last May. British liberals, scorned and derided by this man, had risen against him. A later book by the same man had just begun to make a stir in the U.S.

The man is Leopold Schwarzschild, a German Jew who once was also a German idealist and democrat. The book that gripped Winston Churchill is World in Trance, a burning, raging indictment of the Versailles era— "years of lofty dreaming and low demagogy . . . the era of the empty phrase . . . the age of complacency . . . the years of self-destruction." When the book was published in 1943, it got almost no notice. But the book and its current sequel, Primer of the Coming World (Knopf), were news last week because:

The Allied attitudes and beliefs which these books examine are still alive in the world, and must soon be put again to the test of peace.

The German formula for recovery and reaggression after World War I, also examined by these books, is still the German formula, as no less an authority than Joseph Goebbels made clear last week when he asked the world to believe that the Germans are decent and worthy people who mean well.

The Myth.

Author Schwarzschild left Germany in 1933, moved from Paris to New York in 1940. At root, his thesis is simple: the Old Adam is, always has been and always will be uppermost in mankind. People have not improved much in the past, they are not improving now, and only fools assume the contrary. Woodrow Wilson and all those caught with him in the perfectionist dream of the Versailles years did assume the contrary, and led the world into chaos.

"Never again," says Schwarzschild, "must we succumb to the myth that power and armaments and compulsion are of themselves sinful. . . . All order, all civilization, all law and dignity, rest on the existence of weapons and power." The Illusion. Author Schwarzschild's No. 2 thesis is that Germans have more than their share of the Old Adam in them. Woodrow Wilson, believing that the postwar Germans of the new republic would be good and deserving democrats; the British, playing balance-of-power politics and encouraging a strong, pre-Hitler Germany; the assorted liberals, radicals, plain men of good will who trusted the Weimar Republic—all these, says Schwarzschild, were members of Germany's "foreign legions," and their illusion was part of the era's tragic foolery.

Of Versailles' Big Four—Wilson, Lloyd George, Vittorio Orlando, Georges Clemenceau—'only Clemenceau really impressed Schwarzschild. The old Frenchman's attitude, denounced the world over as a fatally stupid and selfish policy, was actually, says Schwarzschild, the only sensible policy. Only the Tiger understood that Germany was a jungle to be controlled for France's sake and the world's. Says Schwarzschild:

"For those who knew the German people, their longing for democracy was always extremely doubtful. ... In the field of foreign policy [Hitlerism] was only the continuation of previous German policy. . . . Even if the Officers' Corps and their hangers-on had not made an alliance with Hitler . . . Germany would have inevitably steered her course toward the restoration of her overwhelming military power and eventually toward war."

The Remedy. Schwarzschild's remedy is armed internationalism—total, indefinite occupation of Germany by U.S., British and Russian troops (600,000 would do the job, he thinks). Furthermore, Germany must be deprived of every means of making war, of preparing for war, or of teaching war. Says Schwarzschild:

"Nothing, positively nothing [must] survive which can materially or spiritually become the nucleus of a new military renaissance . . . not just for a few years, but for a minimum of 50 to 60. . . . By A.D. 2000, the last Germans who have ever led or trained troops or manufactured weapons will have died."

The Rebuttal.

H. G. Wells called Schwarzschild "superficially intelligent and massively stupid." Journalist Michael Foot, called Trance "a facile, scintillating treatise which . . . has received applause from those weary brains which prefer the dismal past to the adventurous future. . . ."

Leopold Schwarzschild's appeal to ordinary folks is about as simple as the Old Adam. To them, he sounds like a man telling them what they already know, deep down: that they aren't really as noble, great and good as their Fourth of July orators make out. And that is at least half the story.

Keep this in mind when the Code Pinkers and Obama's minions come to take away your guns just as the Arabs and other distorted Muslims are ready to conquer the world on suicide bomber or set of buildings at a time.