He perhaps fancied himself a liberator, though history has since more than amply demonstrated the utter moral and intellectual bankruptcy of this delusion. From no other philosophical doctrine to date has there yet arisen such a surfeit of sophistry, abuse, tyranny, oppression, corruption, malice -- and even genocide – as has due to the result of Marxism’s implementation. Various adherents to Marx’s doctrines, revolutionary poseurs, most of whom reared their hideous heads at one point or another during the 20^th Century – Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro – were all summarily shown up for what they truly were: power-mad impostors.

To be sure, such is the self-contradictory nature of all government, no matter the self-proclaimed raison d’etre, whether that be a socialist “dictatorship of the proletariat,” or a “defense of democratic freedom,” or some such alternate balderdash. But Marx’s theory was that socialist revolution, and subsequent overthrow of the bourgeois middle and upper classes, would ultimately result -- through the process of dialectical materialism -- in a stateless society. This he called Communism.

To the remaining diehard believers, I’d like to ask just when you think the Cuban and North Korean states are going to flower into social-anarchist models of economic and social equality. Not only is it a sick joke to suppose that such governments will ever evolve into even this shortsighted morass of inanity, but that anarchism itself will ever manifest according to such a model. Since free or freed markets are the only ones consistent with the absence of political government, it follows that socialism – at least as a universally preferred default system – would and could never endure on any large, lasting scale, absent an oppressive government bootheel to keep it hobbling along by armed force. Such is the case now. And so, we can fully expect, will it ever be in the future. Human nature, and human desire, operates along quite different lines.

It is more than instructive to take note of even a percentage of what is contained in Marx’s infamous 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party: Abolition of all private land ownership, and rights of inheritance. Government monopolization of all transportation, communications, and educational systems. Forced redistribution of population (forced assignment of place of residency). A government-monopolized central bank. A heavy graduated tax on earnings. As to this last, Marx was quoted as saying that such a tax was necessary “to crush the middle class under the guise of of a need to finance the government.” In other words, Marx was in no way above blatant deception in order to garner widespread support for a tax which in truth was designed not simply to prevent financial upward mobility among the masses, but to prop up a fiat currency creation scheme with which to ensnare and enslave the world.

Marx’s shameless cynicism ran even deeper still: In an 1872 speech in Amsterdam, Holland, he proclaimed that, “a social revolution or economic conquest could be accomplished by peaceful means in America by taking advantage of libertarian traditions and free institutions to subvert them.”

It is easy to see that Marx had little regard for the individual, not only from this evident disdain for basic liberty, other than as a convenient mechanism through which to vend his poison, but in the fact that communistic theory and philosophy held the State as a sovereign and all-powerful entity against which no one person would have any recourse for grievance. Again, this is an inherent feature of any governmental construct, mitigated only by matter of degree. In communist ideology, however, there is no question raised – the legislative absolutism of the State is sacrosanct.

Yes, true enough, Hitler and his Nazis unleashed their horrors upon the world in grand enough fashion, as did Hirohito’s Japanese Empire, Mussolini, and countless other dictators and regimes of a fascist or other statist bent. But the Third Reich lasted a mere twelve and a half years (too long), and one or another junta even less. The ideas engendered and championed by Marx, at their peak, lasted over 75 years – three-quarters of a century from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 – and enslaved some one-third of the world’s population by the early 1980s. Of this percentage of the world’s population, an estimated ninety-four million were slaughtered by governments established to advance the ideals of Communism. Today, its oppressive influence is still very much felt in not only the aforementioned Cuba and North Korea -- but in China, Vietnam, Africa, and other parts of the Third World where the flags and slogans of yesteryear may have been sublimated, but the core elements of Marxist control remain firmly in place.

In fact, we need look no further than home to see how, due to the chimerical promises made by Marx, and bought into by the American political Left since the late 19^th Century (though accelerating profoundly from the Great Depression to the present), this insidious cancer has woven its way into the heart of a society that once held such promise for so many oppressed peoples around the world. One look at the Federal Reserve, the IRS, property taxes, public schools, and gun control demonstrate the rotten and pestilential fruits of Karl Marx’s highest ambitions.

All philosophies or doctrines that proselytize for any political government of any kind are utterly without intellectual or moral merit. This any honest libertarian will tell you. To my mind, however, the most egregious of these to date have been all of those which have been based – in whole or in part – upon the discredited lies and fantastical deceptions of Karl Heinrich Marx: the most evil man to ever live. Both the magnitude and duration of the impact of this conniving monster’s ideas – thoughts which are still, incredibly and without valid excuse, revered in some quarters even today -- demand no less of an unapologetic condemnation.