RUTHFULLY YOURS

London cemetery charges fee to see late communist’s memorial

HIGHGATE CEMETERY, LONDON—On a summer visit to the grave of Karl Marx, Ben Gliniecki found that he would have to pay £4, or about $6, to pay respects to the man who sounded the death knell for private property.

Mr. Gliniecki, a Marxist, said no.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx

“Personally, I think it is disgusting,” the 24-year-old political activist said. “There are no depths of irony, or bad taste, to which capitalists won’t sink if they think they can make money out of it.”

The charity that looks after this cemetery has long taken swipe at a different irony: Karl Marx’s decision to buy a burial plot in a private London graveyard over the then state-provided alternatives. They say their cover fee subsidizes the upkeep of a cemetery where 170,000 other people rest.

The two sides have squabbled since the early 1990s, when the Friends of Highgate Cemetery began charging to fund the conservation of a burial ground whose elaborate gothic tombs and winding paths had fallen into disrepair. Now, the charge is infuriating a new generation of Marxists. Interest in his legacy is gaining fresh legs in Britain following September’s election of Jeremy Corbyn, a self-described Marx admirer, as leader of the opposition Labour Party.

The day after Mr. Corbyn’s victory, Mr. Gliniecki sold 50 copies of the Socialist Appeal newspaper at a rally attended by the new Labour leader. Mr. Gliniecki says he would typically sell 20 to 30 copies at such a rally. This year, the Marxist Student Federation has seen a surge in new freshman members at British university orientation weeks, said Mr. Gliniecki, who helps run the organization.

Alain El-Mouchan is the pen name of a professor of history and geography in Paris.
In the effort to enforce its political principles, France is weakening them.

Sincere thanks to Ruth Wisse, Joshua Muravchik, and Michel Gurfinkiel for their thoughtful responses to my reflections on the twilight of French Jewry. Together, they raise a number of issues that deserve further clarification.

Both Joshua Muravchik and Michel Gurfinkiel chide me for, in their view, an overly optimistic description of the social and political comfort enjoyed by Jews in France in the long era between the 1789 French Revolution and the beginning of the present century. Everything they say is of course pertinent. My point, however, was not to indulge in historical reconstruction but, sticking to the realm of ideas, to investigate how the Jewish issue brings the French Republic face to face with its own deepest political principles, if not its reason for being.

In the realm of historical facts, we can all agree that the level of anti-Semitism in France has matched that in other West European states. In this sense, indeed, France has never been a “paradise” (my word) for Jews. During World War II, Muravchik reminds us, “one-quarter of the Jews living in France were murdered in the Holocaust, with French connivance.” Nevertheless, it is also a fact that three-quarters of French Jews survived the war, and they did so thanks to the numerous Frenchmen who challenged Nazi and Vichy laws. As real as was French “connivance” with the Nazi occupier, it has to be placed next to the far higher degree of complicity displayed by many other European countries during the war.

But, to repeat, I was speaking less about facts than about principles, and here an intellectual problem arises. France developed a republican model of governance that Anglo-Saxon liberals still have a hard time either understanding or accepting as a legitimate and authentic way of implementing the political ideals of the Enlightenment. Thus, Muravchik is right that “America is the place where the . . . values of the Enlightenment were first and most successfully put into practice,” but, as he himself admits, he is also being chauvinistic in his claim that the American version of those values—a version influenced most profoundly not by the European but by the English and Scottish Enlightenments—is also the “best.” I myself would argue that, from a philosophical point of view, republican values may well be the best.

As Europe is being inundated with “refugees” from the Third World, the fantasy of multiculturalism is colliding violently with reality.

In the 1994 TV movie, Fatherland, Germany is depicted as having won World War II, at least on the European continent, which now has been consolidated into a single political entity, Germania, or the Greater German Reich, stretching from the Mediterranean to Finland (see a summary of the story here).

In April 1964, Germania is preparing to celebrate Hitler’s 75th birthday. By 1964 standards, Berlin looks prosperous and completely rebuilt after the failed Allied bombing. A former German U-Boat commander, played by Rutger Hauer, now is a top detective in the criminal division of an SS that resembles a uniformed FBI. He investigates a murder which ultimately leads to his discovery of a cover-up of the Nazi “final solution”: that all the Jews were exterminated, though the government maintains the fiction that they were all “resettled” in Russian territory conquered from the U.S.S.R.

At the same time, Hitler has persuaded President Joseph P. Kennedy to pay a “reconciliation” call in Germania and meet with him. The discovery of the “resettlement” fiction and of a series of murders of the Nazis responsible for the Holocaust would squelch any amicable relations between the U.S. and Germania. The still operative Gestapo goes to work to silence anyone who would be able to jeopardize that “peace process,” beginning with the murders of all the Nazi higher-ups who took part in the Wannsee Conference. All these men had to die because they otherwise could have spilled the beans to the Americans about what really happened to the Jews – or at least blackmailed the Nazi government.

Despite promises of amelioration from Iran’s current President, Hassan Rouhani, the situation for Christians has not improved at all.

Rouhani, came to power as a proponent of human rights and reform, and has been considered a reformer and moderate in the West ever since. He made countless declarations of his intention to pursue a human rights agenda and guarantee equal rights for all Iranians: Every one of those promises has been broken, yet the U.S. continues to put faith in Rouhani as an honest broker.

“Christians continue to be arbitrarily arrested… [They] disappear for weeks at a time… Detainees are sometimes told they must to convert to Islam or their families will be killed.” — Ruth Gledhill, journalist

Even though many Sufi Muslims are fervently pious in their devotion to the faith of the Shi’a, clerics in Qom declared Sufis to be apostates and attempted to expel them from the town and to take over their religious centre.

The document organized the methods of oppression used to persecute the Baha’is, and contained specific recommendations. When Iranian judges offer the Bahai’s life in exchange for abandonment of faith it is a clear admission of a purely religious motive.