In short, those who read Marx are among those least informed about the nature of communism. On the other hand, Americans who have suffered the depredations of the elites that Milley is courting have a better grasp of communism than any university professor.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley says he is interested in theory. This past week he defended teaching critical race theory in U.S. military academies because he thinks our troops should understand “white rage.” He said that he himself wants to understand why the American families who send their children to serve under him are angry. And so he believes that it’s a good thing to read books by authors like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi that call white Americans racist. He says it’s good for the military and the country, but in fact it’s just good for Mark Milley and the rest of the senior officer class that is making its retirement plans.
Milley told the committee that he’d read Marx, too, but that doesn’t make him a communist. He’s right, but it signals his ambition clearly. Outside of the faculty lounges of American universities, no one reads Marx because Marx is unreadable. You could fit everyone who has read all three volumes of Marx’s masterwork, “Capital,” into a small prison cell.
Milley said he reads to understand what other people think, but people who boast of having read Marx are trying to shape what other people think about them. He is addressing the kind of people who think reading Marx is part of the foundation of a well-rounded education. In America, these are the men and women of the establishment left who not coincidentally sit on the boards of big corporations and decide who gets to earn a million-dollar paycheck simply by occupying the board seat next to them. Saying you’ve read Marx shows that you’re ok, even if you’ve spent your career with an American flag on your shoulder.
Milley said he reads to understand what motivates people. But no one in the communist world, neither its politburos nor its proletariats, have ever been motivated by Marx, regardless of what they’ve written in their memoirs or on the walls of their prison cells.
By Lee Smith
