Academia is truly the last refuge of the Marxist.  Only in the hallowed cloisters and ivory towers of the state-funded university system do these anaemic advocates of a failed, murderous ideology subsist, ever ready to tell us what their parasitical, hypocritical, fine wine-quaffing, servant girl-impregnating hero wrote, and then, what he must have meant by it, the literal text being so strewn with inconsistencies, absurdities and busted fallacies, that interpretation is required if the charade is to proceed.

Read one Marxist, and you’ve read them all. The same turgid prose, the same paucity of reference.  You can’t perfume a pig, so the saying goes. Marxists recognise this. Their tendency to impenetrable verbiage constitutes an attempt, not merely to perfume the pig, but to drape it in fine silks and satins, dim the lights and put on some mood music.  The intellectually myopic may be beguiled, but no one else is fooled.  It takes more than a few clever phrases to wipe out the bloodstains of the 20^th Century.

What was I thinking of? What got me started? Oh yes. An article by Ed Rooksby, one of those vile Marxist academics we thought we’d seen the back of, once Eric Hobsbawm finally did us all a favour and croaked (MGHMOHS).  Rooksby attempts to liquidate two birds with one stone; attack UKIP and attack libertarians,  accusing us of being ‘authoritarian’, ‘racist’, ‘fascist’ even.

Personally, I don’t take lectures on authoritarianism from a man who sprays out quotes from Marx and Lenin like a hippo spraying out shit. Because when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were murdering one third of the population of Cambodia, he wasn’t quoting Locke, was he? He wasn’t quoting Rothbard, or Mises or even Hayek. No, he was quoting your heroes, Mr Rooksby, and he was realising your heroes’ dreams of the ideal society. With Marxism, the charnel house is not incidental, it’s imperative.

Maybe this is irrelevant. Maybe it’s ad hominem. Maybe I should deal with the points Rooksby makes.  You know, I was going to do that. But what would be the point? There is no shared language with a Marxist, so the salient lines of his article would need first to be translated, and once that is done, there’s nothing of substance left to deal with.

I will instead note one key difference between Marxists like Rooksby and libertarians. In a libertarian society, if people want to read books and spout quotes from murderous scum like Marx and Lenin, they can do so. They can work in universities and enjoy the good things in life provided by private enterprise, so long as other people are willing to pay voluntarily for their worthless services. But in the society imagined by Rooksby and comrades, the same liberty cannot be allowed to the libertarian, or anyone else who does not demonstrate total subjection to the dictators.