Karl Marx must fall ahead of Admiral Nelson, surely?
Afua Hirsch writes in the Guardian that Nelson’s column should come down. Admiral Nelson was an imperialist supporter of slavery, as well as a naval hero who saved Britain. And so it begins, the far left campaign to spread the campaign running in the US to tear down statues of figures deemed politically incorrect comes to Britain.
I was only half-joking when I wrote yesterday that statues of Churchill will surely have to go, on the basis of his views on India in the 1930s, and that Alanbrooke and Queen Victoria have had it too. John Lennon must be vulnerable for crimes against music in the 1970s, but at least in the eyes of the Corbynite far left he came round to supporting Chairman Mao eventually.
As Ed West points out, Richard the Lionheart is ready-made as a target. Historian Tom Holland adds Cromwell.
One thought to throw into the increasingly demented cultural Marxist mix. If we are going to do this properly, and wipe from our public spaces monarchs and military heroes – all flawed, what with them being human beings and creatures of their time – then surely it must be done systematically with a point-scoring system and perhaps a national quango chaired by a veteran quangocrat. And who should be first on the list for their opening committee meeting?
Who is responsible for the most deaths and human hardship? There is a statue of him in Highgate Cemetery, atop his tombstone.
Surely we can all agree that Karl Marx’s appalling work led to communism, the gulag, mass starvation at various points, Soviet oppression, the Warsaw Pact, the Berlin Wall, Chinese communist mass murder, Cuban chic authoritarianism, Cambodian camps, North Korean horror and the meltdown of oil-rich Venezuela. Marxism is one of the worst creeds known to man, yet still it gets a pass from each new credulous generation of far-left students on the basis that Marx’s “heart was in the right place.” No it wasn’t. For all the claims that he was just misunderstood, Marx’s ideas – political violence and destruction of institutions and theft of property leading to common ownership of production – depend on the obliteration of the abstract, that is freedom, and the physical, that is flesh and blood. People who want to live in freedom and associate freely and sell each other stuff, object to being forced into a Marxist way of life, and when they object they eventually get locked up or killed in large numbers. Marxism is a horror story that always has the same ending, with variations based on the body count.
Before Nelson, Churchill and Queen Victoria are removed, Marx must go first, with the hashtag #Marxmustfall to accompany a campaign. Or shall we leave him in place and Nelson, Churchill and Queen Victoria too?
