BBC4 is one of the least watched of the channels of the State funded fake news broadcaster and its "edgy progressive" content really only appeals to die-hard Guardian reading hardliners. Just occasionally I stop by as I flick the control onto the channel next door, ITV3, home to Midsomer Murders and Lewis re-runs. And thus last night I started to watch a programme about erecting a statue to Friedrich Engels in Manchester. After 15 minutes my will to live was almost exhausted.
You could gauge the tine by an opening sequence in which the narrator said that for people in Manchester 1989 evoked thoughts of the height House Music and the Hascienda nightclub whereas in Eastern Europe it evoked memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed we must view all such themes as momentous world events. Are the population of Manchester really that dimwitted?
Linking the airheads of Manchester with Eastern Europe is Karl Marx's collaborator Friedrich Engels who travelled to the grim North in 1842, to oversee his evil bourgeois father's mills, and produced his opus magnum "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845" Thus artist Phil Collins arranged to find a statue of Engels to go up in Manchester.
Oddly there were not many such statues left in Eastern Europe. Folks there enjoyed seventy years of murders, tyranny and poverty thanks to the practical application of the theories that Karl and Friedrich created. Since 1989 they have become richer in absolute terms, enjoyed liberty and have been at a low risk of being murdered by the State. Thus across Eastern Europe there was not that much enthusiasm for commemorating a man whose theories have been proven to be utterly wrong and in whose name tens of millions of innocent folk were slaughtered.
Before anyone suggests that Marx and Engels theories were not wrong let us remind ourselves o the central tenet of their science. That is to say a belief that society would develop into one where the bourgeoisie (capitalists) would be exploiting the proletariat (workers) in ever more despicable ways thanks to industrialisation which would inevitably lead to uprising and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proles to create a classless state where everyone would have want they needed not what they wanted.
In fact, the only country in Europe to have seen a successful revolution in the name of Marx was agrarian Russia where the result was that only very few had what they needed ( and more) while everyone else suffered. Across Western Europe under capitalism workers got better and better off. Hence when the Berlin Wall fell it was not the prelude to the liberation of the proles from the Western Bourgeoisie but the liberation of all in the East from Marxist misery.
As it happens, even by 1845 Engels was talking demonstrable rot. The industrial revolution was creating, in England, the greatest increase in life expectancy and quality of life for the poorest seen in our history. Capitalism does not create equality but it makes all better off.
Somehow Collins manged to find an Engels statue in the Ukraine to bring back to Manchester where folk were seen celebrating. A ghastly Northern Women intoned in the way one imagines East German TV used to drone on about tractor production as to how relevant Engels words (already wrong in 1845) were to today's society.
I managed to suffer 15 minutes of this until we were taken to a Manchester work centre trying to find jobs for the unemployed. You are of course aware that unemployment is at multi year lows but that was not reflected in the programme. Instead we saw a young immigrant being interviewed by a counsellor about his search for work. He answered a few questions before being asked if he was gay. He did not seem to understand the question so had it explained to him. He laughed. Clearly he was into women. But why on earth ask such a question. How on earth does it relate to finding a job?
I could sense how the programme was going, I could bear it no longer. That our universities ( including that at which my wife lectures) teach Marxism as a science when as a theory it is right up there with flat-earthism as discredited bunkum based on false data and assertions and disproved in the laboratory of Europe just shows how addled the brains of so many of our fellow citizens have become.
Across the BBC and the pages of its sister paper, the Guardian, we have been subjected to numerous reports celebrating 100 years since the Russian Revolution. 20 million, largely, innocent Russians died under Stalin, millions more under Lenin before him and the various bastards who succeeded him. Those 20-30 million are not celebrating and neither are most of the survivors and their descendants. It is only among the liberal elite of the degenerate West who are so profoundly ignorant of history, that such celebrations can take place.
This piece is dedicated to my father's good friend the late Janos Nyiri, a celebrated novelist and playwright. A Hungarian Jew born in 1932 he evaded capture by the Germans in World War two although most of his family were less lucky. 12 years later he fought the Russian tanks. Janos fought two forms of evil totalitarianism, fascism and communism. For him it was hard to tell the difference. He hated both. I'm glad he is not around to see the silly intelligentsia of the country he came to love displaying such ignorance and plain stupidity about events 100 years ago and in 1845.
My father tells a tale of Paris in 1967 when the communist students were rioting. Maybe he has this story wrong but he and my mother (then carrying me inside her), Janos and his wife were pondering events when Janos stood up and said "get me a gun, I know how to deal with these people". For the students Communism was a dream an ideal. For Janos it was something he had experienced first hand.