Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: cinque libri su Marx e il marxismo

http://undertheoculartree.com/2013/05/07/i-am-going-to-annihilate-you/
 
 
Sunday would have been Karl Marx’s 195th birthday. This is something
well worthwhile commemorating. What better way for me to do that in
“honour” of this birthday than to  list five book on Marx and
Marxism.
 
1. Leopold  Schwarzchild, The Red Prussian: The Life and Legend of
Karl Marx, (Pickwick Books, 1986)
 
In this book, originally published in Britain in 1948, one can get a
true sense of the type of man Marx was. The following few sentences
are extracted from pages 68-69 and are based on an account provided by
Marx’s assistant, Carl Heinzen:
 
[Marx's] most pleasing trait was his appreciation of good wine. Every
evening they repaired to the inn to drink; and then, as they emptied
one bottle after another, Marx became gay, jovial, and natural. When
he was in a good mood, he amused himself time and time again with the
same joke. He would say suddenly to someone at the table: “I am going
to annihilate you,” and say it over and over again, enjoying himself
tremendously
 
2. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, (Vintage, 1990)
 
In this ground-breaking monumental study, Richard Pipes provides a
convincing argument why the Russian Revolution was not a class
uprising as Leninists would have people believe, but a coup d’état
where a small minority with the use of terror and mass murder took
control of government. The following short extract is from page 833:
 
On August 8 [1918, Trotsky] ordered that, for the protection of the
railroad line from Moscow to Kazan, concentration camps be constructed
at several nearby localities to isolate such “sinister agitators,
counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites and speculators”
as were  not executed “on the spot” or given other penalties…. [On
August 9, 1918, Lenin] ordered that mutinous “kulaks” be subjected to
“merciless mass terror”- that is executions – but “dubious ones
incarcerated in concentration camps outside the cities.”
 
3. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An
Experiment in Literary Investigation, (Harper Perennial Modern
Classics, 2007)
 
Strictly speaking this is three books, as this magisterial work
comprises three volumes. For the purpose of this list I count it as
one entry. This report of life and death in the Soviet prison system
that began under Lenin and substantially expanded under Stalin is
chilling. Millions died under Stalin of which a substantial number of
people were killed via the judicial system. The short extract below is
from page 564 of that first volume:
 
General-assignment work – that is the main and basic work performed in
any given camp. Eighty percent of the prisoners work at it, and they
all die off. All. And then they bring new ones in to take their places
and they again are sent to general-assignment work. Doing this work,
you expend the last of your strength. And you are always hungry. And
always wet. And shoeless. And you are given short rations and short
everything else. And put in the worst barracks. And they won’t give
you any treatment when you’re ill.
 
4. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, (Jonathan
Cape, 2005)
 
This highly acclaimed biography of the Chinese leader is superbly
researched. The death and destruction wrought by Mao brought Communist
killings to a new high. Chang and Halliday document the evidence
against this Communist monster. The extract below is from pages
456-458:
 
Close to 38 million people died of starvation and overwork in the
Great Leap Forward and the famine which lasted four years….Mao
knowingly starved and worked these tens of millions to death…. Death,
said Mao, “is indeed to be rejoiced over… We believe in dialectics,
and so we can’t not be in favour of death.”…. “Deaths have benefits,”
he told the top echelon on 9 December 1958. “They can fertilise the
ground.”….When he was in Moscow in 1957, he had said: “We are prepared
to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world
revolution.”
 
5. John Barron and Anthony Paul, Peace with Horror: The Untold Story
of Communist Genocide in Cambodia, (Hodder and Stoughton, 1977)
 
This was the first book that came out detailing the horrors of the
Khmer Rouge. It is largely based on eye-witness accounts. The killings
started as soon as the Khmer Rouge got to power with the forced exodus
of the population from the cities to the countryside. The extract
below is from page 116:
 
The killing during the great exodus was all the more terrifying
because so much of it was unpredictable and pointless. A former truck
driver, Thiounn Kamel, was swept up in the throngs pushed out of Phnom
Penh on National Highway 1. “When I couldn’t move because of the
crowd, I stopped on the side of the road. That time there was a truck
loaded with armed Khmer Rouge. When their truck also couldn’t move,
they just shot at the people to clear the way and killed some of them.
It was savage.”

"quasi due secoli, e ancora non vi fa dormire la notte "
http://groups.google.com/group/it.politica.internazionale/browse_thread/thread/3a993a75ced44b41
 
 
che vita di merda, addormentarsi sapendo che farai solo incubi.

 [Marx's] most pleasing trait was his appreciation of good wine
 
salute
 
-- 
Maurizio Pistone    strenua nos exercet inertia  Hor.
 
http://blog.mauriziopistone.it
 
 
http://www.lacabalesta.it
 
 
http://blog.ilpugnonellocchio.it