Are all human beings 'sinners'?

[Tannin]

Thankyou for demonstrating exactly my point. Dream up a Book of Right Things with a firm Higher Purpose, and use it to justify any horror you wish to commit. Inquisition or gulag, it makes no difference.

Do try to get your history right though: none of those things you mention - none - have anything to do with Marx. You need to look at political figures, Stalin in particular for them, and the Holy Texts used to justify those particular horrors weren't Marx either, in the main, they included a fair bit of Lenin and the various others who took over after Lenin's death, but were mostly justified by ad-hoc pronouncements from on high by committees of leaders.

It is as fair to blame Marx for a Stalin purge as it is to blame Saint Peter for a Papal bull on contraception. Once you have a Holy Text, it doesn't really matter what it says, still less does it matter what the writer meant or what he stood for. What matters is that other men can and do use the memory of whoever wrote the Holy Text (whether they existed or not) to justify acts for which no justification is possible.

It is evil to justify your acts by blaming them on a book or a belief. It's not just a cop-out, it's not just a cowardly abrogation of responsibility, it is a well-tried and very powerful way to justify the worst of evils. YOU and YOU ALONE are responsible for what you do.


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Footnote for historical accuracy:

Actually, The Communist Manifesto is a short, lively, and throughly entertaining book, with clarity of vision which is quite extraordinary. Not what you expect from Marx. But, of course, Marx didn't write it, Engels did, and Engles, for all that he lacked Marx's stupendous intellect, was a gifted communicator.

The Communist Manifesto, by the way, has nothing to do with your catalogue of evils. It has practically nothing to say about how society should be run (stand aside some vague and impractical, starry-eyed dreaming) and a very great deal to say about how things had got to where they were in 1848. (Or 2016 for that matter.) A very great deal of what is contained in the Communist Manifesto (or indeed in much else that Marx wrote) had either already been expressed (albeit less clearly) in the works of those great heroes of the right, Adam Smith and Ricardo, or soon would be by other modern free-market heroes such as Marshal, Mill, and Keynes.

You were no doubt thinking of the works of Lenin, which are a very different thing.

[Tannin]

Or, to put the whole screed above more succinctly ....

[stui magpie]

[Mugwump]

It's many years since I read the CM but the prose of it is indeed stirring, vigorous and excellent, even if the logic is poor. However, I think there is a line of succession between the things that are in the CM - dictatorship of the proletariat, the vesting of power in the state rather than in individuals, abolition of private property - and the totalitarianism which followed. It is a tract based on political absolutism, on abstractions about people, and on historical necessity. It's hard to see it ending other than it always has.

In contrast, there seems to me little line of succession - indeed, only rank contradiction - between the very personal morality of JC, and much that was subsequently done in his name by rapacious humans.

The works of the warlord of Medina are a different matter again. Read the texts and compare.

Finally, of course you alone are responsible for what you do. But we humans are almost incapable of separating our egotism - our interests and desires - from our ideas and beliefs about right and wrong (one of Marx's truly great insights). Anyone who is not overly troubled by that thought will find humanism enough, I suppose.