A May 7 blog post by CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman is a massive tirade against filmmaker Michael Moore for marking the 200th birthday of Karl Marx. Chapman starts out this way:
Documentary filmmaker and left-wing activist Michael Moore, who has an estimated net worth of $50 million, effusively praised Karl Marx, the intellectual founder of Marxist Communism, a brutal idology that killed an estimated 100 million people worldwide in the 20th century, and whose Soviet leaders — Lenin and Stalin — inspired the German National Socialist Adolf Hitler.
May 5 was the 200th birthday of Karl Marx (1818-1883), a constantly debt-ridden economist and revolutionary who is best known for his pamphlet, the Communist Manifesto.
On May 5, Michael Moore tweeted, “Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx! You believed that everyone should have a seat at the table & that the greed of the rich would eventually bring us all down.”
“You believed that everyone deserves a slice of the pie,” said Moore. “You knew that the super wealthy were out to grab whatever they could.”
That same day, Moore also tweeted, “Though the rich have sought to distort him or even use him, time has shown that, in the end, Marx was actually mostly right & that the aristocrats, the slave owners, the bankers and Goldman Sachs were wrong… ‘Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!”
Given Marx’s teaching, clearly explained in the Communist Manifesto, and his legacy, Moore might as well have sent birthday wishes to Hitler, or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot.
Chapman never actually gets around to responding to what Moore wrote about Marx — or anything Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, for that matter.He did, however, cling to his less-than-historical claim that communism and Nazism were one in the same because, um, Hitler and Stalin signed a nonagression pact:
Their allegiance to Marxist ideology was proven when Stalin allied with Hitler in 1939 and invaded Poland — the leftist intellectuals had no complaints. During the 1930s, the Soviets graciously allowed Nazi troops to drill and practice war games on Soviet land.
Chapman conveniently ignores the fact that Hitler was an anti-communist who expelled communists and Marxists from the German government when he gained power in 1933, having portrayed the Nazi Party as the only hope against a communist takeover of Germany. Chapman also forgets that Germany broke the alliance in 1941 by invading the Soviet-held portion of Poland and other areas under Soviet control under the pact.
But Chapman is mostly interested in right-wing, self-righteous ranting against Moore for noting that Marx had a point:
It’s not surprising that the multi-millionaire leftist Michael Moore supports Karl Marx, a man whose ideas led to the slaughter of 100 million people. In the 19th century and most of the 20th century it was the so-called “intellectuals” and leftist “artists” in the West who promoted Marx.
[…]Like the Communist apologists of the past, Michael Moore is nothing more than a propagandist for Karl Marx, a man whose violent ideas sowed the fields of China, Russia, and Eastern Europe with blood.Â
Moore’s sentiments are repulsive and dangerous. He should be condemned for praising a man who is the moral and ideological equivalent of Adolf Hitler.
More repulsive and dangerous than Chapman’s disregard of facts in spewing his rabid case of Michael Moore Derangement Syndrome?