The Devil and Karl Marx | Dr. Paul Kengor | EP 455

The only part of the end of the Communist Manifesto anybody remembers is "Workers of the world unite; yeah, we have nothing to lose but our chains." But if you just go back one paragraph at the end, the Communists support every revolutionary movement, the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. I mean, those lines are in the next two final paragraphs, and that's what really the manifesto is all about.

Hi everybody, I have the privilege of speaking with Paul Kengor today. He's written a book, many books; one of them is, for example, "The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism." This is going to be made into a movie. I just interviewed the lead actor for that movie a couple of weeks ago, um, Dennis Quaid, and so that'll be releasing a movie at the end of August. Paul is also the editor of the American Spectator, and this month's version has a list of the best conservative colleges in the United States, and so that could be a very helpful list for those of you who are thinking about going to college or who have children who are thinking about going to college.

So that's the American Spectator, and so, but what we're concentrating on today is actually a different book: "The Devil and Karl Marx." I really like this book, not least because it delves into Karl Marx's work as a poet and a playwright, and it sheds light, I think, on the underlying structure of his motivation for the so-called economic theories that he developed later. So we discuss the Mephistophelean nature of the fantasies, the poetic fantasies that Karl Marx developed as a young man, and how that ethos shaped and crafted the murderous doctrine that he developed as a poet and a so-called economist. So join us for that.

So welcome, Paul. I just read your book "The Devil and Karl Marx" recently, and there was a lot of it that was striking to me for a couple of reasons, I suppose reasons that are more idiosyncratic to me. There are many reasons that it's of general interest, but the first one was one of the things I noticed about my students, especially the ones that were really searching, is that if I gave them free reign to write an essay, they'd often include or want to show me a poem that was relevant to that pursuit.

My first book, "Maps of Meaning," actually started as about a 40-page poem. Wow! Well, so I know where you're going with this. Okay, okay, so well, so I studied Jung's analysis of creative thought a lot, and Jung had this notion which I think is right: that when we first investigate something that we don't understand, we fantasize about it. Right? Which in some ways seems so obvious that it hardly needs to be said. But it does need to be said because you fantasize about it, or you dream about it, or you daydream about it, and what you're doing is you're using what you already have a grip on to get a new grip on this indeterminate object, and that's fantasy.

You have, it's like you have the dream, and then you have the drama. No, you have the drama, and then you have the dream, and then you have something like the poem. Because a poem is where the dream meets the verbal, and then you can differentiate that further so it becomes more and more semantic and more explicit.

Now, this is a long way of asking you this question: one of the things you took pains to do in this book was to concentrate on some of Marx's work before he was an economist because he wrote drama and he wrote poetry. Your claim in the book is that, well, we should really be paying attention to some of that early work because it does something like set the frame; it sheds light on his motivation, and it also sheds light on the story that he was imagining or acting out. So can you make some comments about that?

Yeah, so this is quite fascinating. I think you should write the next foreword. The foreword for this one was written by Michael Nolles, a colleague of yours at Daily Wire. Yeah, yeah. So Marx fancied himself a poet. I mean, Marx's secret love was poetry, in fact. One of his, I think, is the most important biographers—this guy has been, it's kind of fallen—people just don't know about him today. No one had anything against him, really, but his name was Robert Payne.

So he was a British academic, a man of letters, the arts, a translator, drama. I mean, he was no right-winger; he was probably slightly left of center. He did several works on Marx in the late '60s, early 1970s, published by New York University Press, Simon & Schuster, so, you know, very in. He was really the first one to mine Marx's poetry, to go through and figure out how much of it is there, how much po—well, there's quite a bit, and it's deeply disturbing stuff.

A lot of it is about the devil; you know, quite literally about the devil. It's chilling, right? You thus, Heaven, I forfeited, I know it full well; my heart, once true to God, is chosen for Hell. Right? 18 straight Lucifer from Milton, 1837—that one was one of his first published writings. He would have only been 19 years old at that time.

Another one—it's called "The Player" and it was 1841, and here he puts himself, it appears in the form of this kind of mad violinist who's like frenetically, maniacally sawing away at the violin, and he's summoning up the powers of darkness, and he's doing this in front of his love interest. The love interest, yeah, right? And the love interest, Robert Payne says, appears to be his girl at the time, Jenny, the girl he would end up marrying. He's summoning up the powers of darkness, and she’s saying, why are you doing this?

It's like a Faustian bargain mor—I'm f'ing Mephistopheles in a moment. But just to sort of set the table for people who are shocked by what I said about him writing about the devil, so here's what he says in "The Player." Here's just one stanza. He tells the girl,

"Look, now my blood-dark sword shall stab unerringly within thy soul. The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed. See the sword? The Prince of Darkness sold it to me, for he beats the time and gives the signs ever more boldly. I play the dance of death."

Then he plays this sort of Faustian bargain. But back up a little bit—that's his poetry from an early age.

And Robert Payne, who wrote the book, the Simon and Schuster book, the New York University press, said Marx's first love was poetry, and he fancied himself as aspiring to be nothing less than the Goethe of his age, to write the Faust of his age. And Faust, of course, the famous character, is the Mephistopheles character. I've done a fair bit of study about because, well, there's a motif that's repeated both in Faust I and II.

Mephistopheles in Faust is a variant of the heavenly adversary, right? So he opposes being itself, and his ethos, which Goethe has him state twice, is that the suffering that exists—the suffering that's a necessary consequence of existence in its finite and limited manifestation, so our mortal frames, let's say—that suffering is so unbearable and so unconscionable that it would be better if existence itself did not exist.

Yeah, that's so well.

So what Satan does in Goethe's conceptualization is make the case that life is so unfair in its fundament—he's like the anti-natalists, the modern anti-natalist—that anyone ethical would act in order to bring being itself to a cessation. Now, the problem with that seems to be, as far as I can tell, and this is the problem with anti-natalism, one of many problems, is that the reason that Mephistopheles is anti-being, hypothetically, is because of the suffering. But the problem is, if you turn that into a political doctrine, right, all you do is multiply the suffering. Yes, right? Because you become anti-life.

And so you might say, well, I'm working for the cessation of suffering because I'm working for the extinction of consciousness. But if the price you pay for that is the endless multiplication of suffering, then Marxism—well, that's the horror.

Well, that's partly why I found your book so horrifying, is that because all that's in principle lurking beneath the surface. Okay, so what do you make of this conceptually now?

Marx proclaimed himself an atheist. Okay, so the first question you might ask is, well, what the hell does an atheist have to do with Satan, right? Right? Well, so what do you think about that?

And by the way, he had a favorite line from Mephistopheles, which was—in fact, they said this was Marx's favorite quote: "Everything that exists deserves to perish." Exactly, that's exactly the line. Everything that exists deserves to perish. And that's repeated in Faust II, too. That's his favorite line.

So if someone were to ask me, do you have a favorite quote? Do you have a favorite line? I might give a scripture verse. I might be "Not Afraid," something like that. But Marx said, "Ah, yes, yes, Mephistopheles, you know, Goethe's Faust, everything that exists deserves to perish." That's terrifying. Perish. Well, it's terrifying because it truly is the case that, as the character of Mephistopheles is revealed in Faust, in Faust I and II, that's the apotheosis of his philosophy, right?

When you really start to understand who Mephistopheles is, that's the final revelation. He's the foe of everything that exists. Now, the rationalization is because of the suffering; or it isn't just the suffering. Because there's a Luciferian pride element, Mephistopheles is opposed to the structure of being also because it doesn't meet his standard, right? Right.

In one of the poems, Marx shouts in the form of Satan, "I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind." And Robert Payne says, picture Marx standing there in the middle of a burned-down village, a burnt-down house, right? The raised red building and flames all around him, you know? Everything that exists deserves to perish. And as if to say, now we can begin, right? He wants to take everything down. He wants to completely level it.

And yet, all of this, going back to your original point, this is what he was writing before he was doing anything on economics before he was doing—and also yet at the same time—because I know there might be some Marx biographers who've ignored this; I know they've ignored it. And they might say, well, it's so early. He did this as one of his first published writings, 1837, he was 19 years old. That's not the real Marx.

Well, the one I just read to you, "The Player," that's 1841. That was the same year that he started with Bruno Bauer at the University of Bonn as professor of the archives of atheism, the annals of atheism journal that he started. His peak of writing was really in the 1840s. I mean, they were writing the Communist Manifesto 1846, 1847, released February 1848. So he's—it's not that long.

Well, the other thing too is that if the hypothesis that we described at the beginning of this discussion is true—and I truly believe it is—the like a complex set of ideas comes out of a dreamlike matrix. And you could make the case that someone radically shifts their view away from that initial revelation. But that isn't generally how things work. And I think you need very strong evidence of discontinuity not to accept the default proposition that continuity is the much more likely occurrence.

I mean, one of the things I do in my interviews with the people that I'm fortunate enough to interview, all of whom are accomplished people, is an autobiographical analysis. And it's invariably the case that you can trace the seeds of—you can trace who they are to seeds that made themselves manifest very early.

Now, you might say, well, that's all retrospective memory. But I don't believe that because one of the things I've noticed in doing that kind of interviewing is that the people who tell the story are shocked themselves at how much of what they still do was there in the latent form, right? Like even when they were children.

And so, now my sense—Marx's father saw that, yeah, right? Marx's father, Heinrich Marx, in the letter that he wrote to him in 1837—and that was not long, probably—well, in that letter, he talks about the disorder in Marx's life. I know, and I know you write a lot about order, including in your most recent book—that Marx was all about tearing down the traditional order. In fact, he said he and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "Communism represents the most radical rupture in traditional relations." The most radical conceivable disruption, right?

So, the most radical, right? And the one word—well, two words—that jump out of the Communist Manifesto, all of Marx and Engels' writings, are "criticism." And Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge in 1843, called for the ruthless criticism of everything that exists. Right, right. Same thing. And by the way, not just, you know, people thinking about this—not just for the ruthless criticism of, you know, the bad things in society, right? Of that malady or this ill. The ruthless criticism of everything that exists.

Yeah. And the other word that they use all the time is "abolition." They want to abolish everything. Right? Communism calls for the abolition of the present state of things, they said in the manifesto. So after they talk about the entire theory of the Communist may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property. Alright, so that’s gone. Abolition of capital. Yeah. In the manifesto, they write abolition of the family! Exclamation mark, right?

Even the most radical flare-up of this infamous proposal of the Communists. So we’ve got capital property family, the present state of things, entire societies. I mean, it's complete. So one person said to me it's nihilism, right? But in a sense, he has kind of a—it's worship of destruction.

Exactly, that's different. Care. Right, right, right. No, no, this is way different. No, no, if he's an avid devotee of Mephistopheles, it's active destruction. You don't want to underestimate the fact that a poetic line takes root in someone's soul, especially when it's produced by someone as profound as Goethe. That's not nothing. That really means that Marx identified the central spirit of Mephistopheles, he pulled out the central message, and that's stuck in his memory.

Right? And then, okay, so that's stuck in his memory and integrated into his worldview, right? Into what he loved doing the most—writing poetry. So it’s really fully, deeply a part of him.

And, yeah, it's—well, you also talk in the book a fair bit about the sordid details of his private life. I mean, Marx was also, by all accounts, a person who was filthy in every way essentially that you could be filthy—like literally—because his personal hygiene habits were detestable, to say the least. But he also lived in a—well, you're better at explaining this than me—so do you want to walk people through that?

And I would circle this back to the point of disorder, right? Exactly. So it is a totally disordered personal lifestyle. His father noticed it when Marx was in college, and then when Marx got married, his life was a wreck. Both his mother and his wife both expressed the wish that Carl would start earning some capital, right? Rather than just writing about it. The family had to beg for money all the time, everywhere they went.

First, they got the money from Carl's father. Alright? And then when he died—and by the way, Marx didn't attend the funeral of his father. Some biographers have said that's because it was out of spite against his father. Another biographer says he just couldn't make it there, maybe because of the weather. I don't know. But he didn't go to the funeral of his father; he was interested in his father's money. And the one letter that I quote from his father—the father's like, "Okay, here's what you really want. I will give you the money for whatever, whatever, whatever."

So he clearly knows that the son wants money. After the father died, he went to visit his mother, who he wasn't close to at all. He was at least a little close to the father, and the goal was to get money from the old lady. He writes a letter back to Jenny, his wife, ahead of time, basically reporting that, "Well, I really didn't get much money out of the old lady, but she did agree to burn up the IOUs."

So, in other words, success, right? I at least got her to do that. And then Jenny would go begging to her relatives, and in one case—well, she was from a rich family, correct? Yeah, a fairly well-off family.

And that family eventually got to the point of tough love; they had to cut her off as well. And both her family and also Marx's wider family all knew that when Jenny or Marx came knocking on the door, it was because they wanted money. So they lived in economic disarray, economic disarray, to the point where Jenny's family got to the point where they said, "Okay, look, we know that you and Carl have all these kids; we know that you need money; these are our grandchildren; we feel bad for you, Jenny; we can't give you any more money; we just can't do it."

So the family lends to the Marx family—the family nursed—now this is a woman named Helen Deuth, who was called Lenin. So the nickname was Lenin. She grew up with Jenny's parents, say okay, we will lend you Lenin to help the family out rather than giving you more money. So Lenin basically hears, "Karl Marx, champion of the proletariat, the working class," right? Doesn't pay her a dime. Never gives her any money.

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That’s right. In fact, really what he's developing is kind of the ideal world that he wants for himself, which is that other people will pay for him to do whatever he does in the library—the writing, the research. So at one point, Marx has sex with Lenin behind Jenny's back, and she got pregnant. Now, Robert Payne says that he thinks that the sex might have been non-consensual, that it could have been rape, but I don't know how he would know that.

But either way, Lenin got pregnant; Marx refused to admit that the child was his. Everybody knew the child was his. Jenny knew it. In fact, Jenny was crushed. I mean, her heart was broken. She never really forgave her husband for this. The child, Friedrich Engels, steps up. Now, the Marx family gets most of their money at this point from Engels. Engels becomes the Marx family’s sugar daddy. I mean, he’s not just a partner with Marx. Engels inherited all this money from his wealthy industrialist father's inheritance, and so he subsidizes not just Karl but the Marx family.

So Engels, who doesn't believe in marriage, alright? These guys were against marriage long before anybody else was. Engels has various women that he shacks up with, which in that day is really unusual. I mean, that was scandalous—you didn't live with a woman that you weren't married to. And a lot of these women wanted Engels, you know, Friedrich, to marry them, make honest women out of them. One of them, um, one of them died, and Engels was really crushed by it—really brokenhearted.

Marx writes him a letter, and he kind of acknowledges Engels' loss in the first couple sentences, and then he gets straight to the point of asking for more money. Engels just raged back in a letter, "Even my bourgeois friend showed more compassion and interest than you did."

But, uh, but the point of Lenin—so Engels, um, doesn't care about his reputation. Everyone knows he doesn't believe in marriage, so he steps forward. Helen Deuth-Lenin gives birth to this baby boy, and Engels says, "I'll accept paternity. Let's give him the name Friedrich." So the son is known as Freddy Marx.

Never acknowledges his existence, never acknowledges that it's his kid, of course, never gives him a penny, just like he never gave a penny to Lenin. And by the way, that poor kid, Freddy, ended up surviving all the Marx family—Marx, of the six kids he and Jenny had, four of them died before they did—the two girls that survived both committed suicide in suicide packs with their husbands and by drinking poison.

And as you noticed in Marx's poetry, a recurring theme in all of his poetry is about the couples coming together—the pale maiden, which sounds like a late-night B-movie horror flick. This pale maiden, you know, she drinks hemlock; she commits suicide—lovers committing suicide and suicide packs. That's how Marx’s two daughters died.

But the family it was a complete wreck—the household. The house was in complete disarray. There are German police reports from 1848, 1849 on how one of them says trying to take a seat in the Marx household is a dangerous enterprise or something like that because the chair could break from under you.

It was dirty. The landlords kicked them out. The landlords would cut off the heat. Marx suffered from boils, carbuncles, which Paul Johnson, the late British historian, said, you know, people don’t consider this, but "Das Kapital" is kind of this long agonizing painful-to-read work. Marx's carbuncle on his bottom were at their worst when he was writing "Das Kapital."

He had them on his private parts, on his penis, to the point where they would sometimes send him into these outbursts of rage. He wrote one letter to Engels, he said, "I have this boil between my upper lip and my nose; it's like the devil has been hurling excrement at me"—use the word "t."

But he suffered, and the doctors tried to figure out, boy, why does Marx have all these boils and carbuncles? No one else in that home seems to have them. Well, the answer is he wouldn't bathe! The guy refused to bathe. A lot of some of these communists were like this, but he was a very disordered individual at so many different areas of his life.

Even his research—and we could probably talk about this later. You and I are both PhDs; we've done academic social science research. Marx never went into the field or the factory. I mean, he wrote about the proletariat from, you know, from the vantage, from the library, from a desk in the library in London or at his home. He never actually did real field research.

And if you read the Communist Manifesto, it is not the work of an economist. It is more like a pamphlet. It’s more like a philosophical statement. He said once, "The revolution that began in the brain of the monk"—that would be Martin Luther—"will now begin in the brain of the philosopher."

So he really fancies himself a philosopher and a poet—poet above all. He's really not an economist if he is.

Yeah, well, that was probably an accurate self-characterization because, yeah, his work really—I know there are economists who've fallen under his sway, let's say—but his work really served the purpose of motivational doctrine, right?

So the typical writings of an economist aren't taken up by the masses as a rallying point, right? But poetry and philosophy can be taken up as a rallying point, and so—and that's what this book does. Right? I mean, if you read, if you actually read the Communist Manifesto, which most young people who say, "Well, if you read the Communist Manifesto, it's a pretty good book; it talks about sharing," they haven't read it. They haven't read it.

It's about that thick, okay? The one I have in mind—the 1998 Penguin Classics Edition edited by Martin Malia—is 56 pages. Yeah.

With my Marxism course at Grove City College, every spring semester, we read it. It's only 56 pages. It's not long. But it is, um, you're right. If it was an economics work or tract, I mean, it would have data; it had information. It wouldn't be anything that could rally anybody, right?

But this is more like a Jefferson Declaration of Independence, right? And, except the same— Mephistophelean aim—right? Polar opposite. But in the sense of in the sense of Adams and Franklin saying, you know, we need a kind of statement here to rally everybody for this.

Who can write that? Jefferson's a great writer, right? Thirty-three years old, fantastic writer, you know? One of the course of human events just puts it out. And of course, in his case, it's truth, and it's inspiring. But what Marx sits down to write is just kind of this pamphlet, the Communist Manifesto is kind of a diatribe.

It’s really, um, there's a lot of anger in there. There's a lot of, um, catchphrases—kind of revolutionary catchphrases—a guy who could really turn a phrase. I mean, that was Marx. Radical leftists are very good at turning phrases. They really are.

Yeah, gender-affirming care, there’s a stroke of genius! Diversity, equity, and inclusivity. Right, seriously! Like, there—like, once those slogans—slogans—you know what the derivation word slogan is, right?

This is so funny—what's that? It comes from the Welsh two words: "slu," and "gm." Slug: s-l-u-a-g-h, and "gam" is g-h-a-i-r-m. Slug-gam: battle cry of the dead. That's what a slogan is. Oh, it's so perfect, right?

Because it conjures up images of armies of the dead fighting against the living. Yeah, yeah, that’s what a slogan is. Oh yes, no kidding!

Yeah, yeah, he was really good at sloganeering. In fact, to the point where the only part of the end of the Communist Manifesto anybody remembers is, "Workers of the World Unite!"

Yeah, we have nothing to lose but our—but, you know, people just back, according to their need is pretty damn good! That's a good one, too. That's a good one.

But if you just go back one paragraph at the end, right? The Communists, uh, support every revolutionary movement, um, uh, the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. I mean, those lines are in the next two final paragraphs, and that's what really the manifesto is all about.

Okay, so let's—I want to go get back to a question that we touched on but didn't fully address. What in the world is an atheist? Absolutely! Why is an atheist toying with—not toying with—centered on, what would you say, analysis of and identification with religious tropes?

Yeah, right! Now, he claims atheism, but you don't write a Faustian poem being in league with Mephistopheles is not technically atheism. Now, you might ask about the relationship between the two, but that's a question. But so what do you make of the fact that he was obsessed with these Faustian notions and with ideas of conjuring up the underworld, despite his professed atheism?

Yeah, by the way, even the phrase from each according to his ability, to according to his needs, that's a twisting of the scripture, right? Of the New Testament. Right, right, right?

But in his case, so yeah, and people have asked me this. They say, well, if he had this fascination with the devil, it must have only been in a kind of rebellious sort of way—like M, yeah, right—like Mikhail Bakunin. Um, Saul Alinsky, in the intro to "Rules for Radicals," right?

"Lest we forget, at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to that first radical who won his own kingdom." Yeah, lest we forget! Yeah! No kidding!

Yeah, you don't walk by that sort of statement accidentally. No, definitely not! And a lot of people on the left do. They're like, well he's just being—right, well those are the same people who think that Milton's Lucifer is a hero.

Lots of people thought that. And give their magazines names like "The Jacobin." Absolutely! Why the hell would you name your magazine after a group that guillotined 40,000 people in France in 1793-1794?

Absolutely! Well, I've also noticed that I've read a lot of comments by online anonymous trolls a lot, and I've looked at their names. There’s a sizable minority of the really vicious online trolls who adopt satanic names! Absolutely, more than—far more than you'd expect—and it's not cute or funny!

No, and not in the least! And it sums up the manner in which they deal with the world with much more accuracy than they might imagine, right? When they’ve had the—what would you call it—unmitigated gall to DARE such a thing, right?

In fact, one of them—and I won’t say who it is because she could end up watching this, but it's somebody I know—the name of the magazine and her pen name, I won't give the first name but the last name is "Diavolo," right? A-v-o-l-o, which is Italian for devil, right? And I mean, what does that tell you?

An plume of all things, Diavolo! It is the question: what does it tell you? Because the people who—well, the people who pick that would say, "Well, Lucifer is misunderstood because he's just a rebel against tyranny." Sure, right?

And so that’s their—that's their standard. Uh, the devil is misunderstood; he's just a rebel against tyranny. That's how Mikhail Bakunin, who was one of Marx’s associates, got in the state; he wrote about Lucifer in this heroic way, and he was an atheist.

Now, in Marx's case, alright, so he wasn't an atheist in 1837 when he wrote that first poem, okay? Even by 1841—was he an atheist? Probably! Let me back up—well, the question is: was he ever an atheist? You know what I mean?

Because if he stated his allegiance to Mephistopheles true when he’s 19 or 20, and that’s actually the motif of his writings, he’s never an atheist.

He might not be very pleased with the idea of God, but that's not exactly the same thing as being an atheist. And they also end up putting their faith in Marxism-Leninism in an almost religious-like way.

Ronald Reagan—well, Marxism-Leninism, that religion of theirs. Yeah! The opium of the intellectuals is what Raymond Aron called it.

Yeah, but in Marx's case...getting back a little bit, so he's born May 5, 1818 in Trier, Germany. Trier is spelled like tribe. T-R-I-E-R; a very religious city, right?

Right? I mean, like, 90% Roman Catholic. The great cathedral of Trier was founded around the year 320-330; it was paid for by St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, of all people! Right?

Oh really? So it's that early?

Yeah, yeah, exactly that early. And so, by the way, it is also the birthplace of St. Ambrose, who was the Bishop of Milan later and brought Augustine into the faith. So Ambrose and Marx are both from Trier, Germany of all things.

So you have this cathedral, and Trier St. Helena is the one that goes to the holy land and brings back all kinds of relics. Alright? In fact, she believes that she found the holy lance, which is to pierce the side of Christ, and that is at the Vatican today.

She believes she found the crown of thorns, which is in Notre Dame. She believed that she found the holy robe that Jesus wore at the crucifixion, that the Roman soldiers cast lots for at the foot of the cross—the holy robe is in that cathedral in Trier, by the way.

Marx, in his 1841 poem "The Player," right, which is actually a play—because you mentioned drama—a lot of these plays are actually dramas as well. His demonic violinist, who's summoning up the powers of darkness—Marx not only wrote the character and the word, he also wrote the stage, the production, the furniture on the stage, the clothes people would wear.

The violinist is wearing the holy robe of Christ from the cathedral in Trier while he's summoning up—I mean, chilling! Chilling! Of all things!

And there's a letter between Marx and Jenny, his wife, who's an atheist, and at one point, when everyone’s coming to town for like the annual sort of festival where people come in to venerate the robe, Jenny's making fun of them, like, "Oh, these silly people."

But in Marx's case, he’s born May 5, 1818 in Trier. He was baptized in 1824. Now, he’s a Jew. The family—he comes from a very Jewish family, not just in terms of ethnicity but Judaism; they are religious Jews, they're Orthodox Jews—a bunch of rabbis in the family.

His father had converted to Christianity, to Lutheranism specifically, Heinrich Marx, and some say that he did because of social pressures in Germany in the day, anti-Semitism and perhaps so. Maybe.

He had an uncle who converted to Roman Catholicism, which most people there did because it was like 90% Roman Catholic. But Marx's father converted to Lutheranism, and Marx's father died a believer, right?

It’s probably kind of a more liberal Christian, but he was a Christian. So Marx converts. Marx is baptized in 1824. He would have been five or six years old. His mother really didn't want him to. The mother really didn't want him to convert, but Marx is a fairly dedicated Christian through his teenage years, and he really doesn't start to change until college.

Any idea what happened?

Well, he came under the influence—it's hard, I had a hard time pinning this down, and I don't think there's enough good information—and you’ll appreciate this as a fellow academic. So many academics don't give a damn about faith at all!

I mean, the first biography that I set out to do on Ronald Reagan—I've written, I think, eight books on Reagan—was going to be about him and the end of the Cold War, and I ended up writing a book called "God and Ronald Reagan" because I found all this stuff on Reagan’s faith that no one had talked about.

Oh, yeah! Yeah! I thought, look at all this! Look at all this! Look at all this! All of these letters!

Well, that’s particularly relevant in the context of this conversation. Yeah!

Because you really do look at it and you say, this seems demonic; this seems diabolical. You know, another quote from Reagan, uh, this isn’t a matter of rockets and economics; this is something of the spiritual order. You know, there’s something deeper, darker going on here.

Yeah, no, I think—I can’t see how you can be. I also think that’s a motif that found expression in Marx.

Yeah, right. Right? I think that there’s a reflection in that of the dragon treasure dichotomy. You know, we know from time immemorial that you go searching for treasure where the dragons are, and there isn’t a dragon that’s more terrifying than the dragon that’s the spirit of malevolence itself.

And you cannot study communism without encountering the spirit of malevolence. And then the treasure that lurks there is something like a recognition that the overarching religious framework is actually necessary to conceptualize the problem properly, and probably to offer something approximating a solution—like a genuine solution.

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. Yeah. There’s a church encyclical “Divini Redemptoris” from 1937 by Pius XI, and they described it as a satanic scourge orchestrated by the sons of darkness. I mean, the church then came to that conclusion, that they believe that everything that the communists wanted and said and wrote in their books can only be interpreted in this really dark, demonic sense.

What do the liberation theologians think of that?

Oh, yeah, they're nuts. I mean, they're—yeah, they're powerful nuts. They are still—and even someone like Pope Francis said in December 2013, he said the Marxist ideology is wrong, but that having been said, he's not a very good anti-communist.

Right? I mean, well, it's a very powerfully contaminating force, and its tendrils are everywhere and not necessarily that easy to identify.

That's exactly, especially if you don't really want to look! Yeah.

And if you tell somebody, you know what? You're engaging in there could be a form of Marxism applied to culture—Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci, cultural hegemony—founders of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno wrote about the culture industry and the dialectic of enlightenment. You know, this is a kind of Marxism applied to culture.

They look up cultural Marxism; it pops up, "Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory." So, well, what's that? Right? But, you know, it's to the point where it’s infiltrated things where people engaging in the framework or meta-narrative or Marxist superstructure on gender, race, culture, whatever, often don’t even know that they’re guilty of it, which, you know, credit to them—they don’t know it. But it’s so seeped into the culture at large that, yeah, this is what we’re dealing with.

Y, y, y. Alright, sir. Hey, this was great! Thanks so much!

Thank you very much!

Well, there were many other things too that we could have talked about, too. I would have liked to have talked about your work on Reagan and your other books as well, but we may save that for a further discussion. This was worth the devotion of 90 minutes to, I would say, just this topic. So I'm very glad that we did it.

Me too. Glad too. And for everybody watching and listening on the YouTube side, we're very happy for your time and attention as well. And to the film crew here, we're at the Museum of the Bible, which is a very appropriate place to be having this discussion in Washington, D.C.

Um, that's a museum whose work I did a documentary on for The Daily Wire, which I think is quite a successful documentary and was a great joy to actually produce. And it’s a great museum. So if you ever do happen to come to D.C., go check it out.

It’s the kind of place that can help you understand a lot more deeply the relationship between, at minimum, the relationship between the fact of the Bible and the fact of literacy itself in its worldwide distribution because those two things are very integrally associated, and that’s a underappreciated contribution of Christianism and Protestantism to the world.

So anyways, thanks to the Museum of the Bible for hosting us today. And I'm going to continue this discussion for another half an hour on the Daily Wire side, and what we'll talk about is what I often talk about in that additional half an hour, which is the development of the interests that underlie this body of work devoted, not least, to the catastrophe of Marxism and communism. So join us there.