Karl Marx died on this day in London in 1883. His friend and co-writer Friedrich Engels described him as the 'best-hated man of his time' and that was before the Americans had ever heard of him. His book, The Communist Manifesto. written in German in London in 1848 is very short, very repetitive and has one good line - 'You have nothing to lose but your chains'. As a blueprint for revolution (as tried out by Lenin, Trotsky etc) it doesn't work. As an appeal to human nature it fails too. As for Marx himself, he spent most of his later life scrounging off Engels and has a truly awful tombstone in London's otherwise fantastic Highgate Cemetery.
Marx out of 10? 1.5
In other news ...
On this day 48 years ago dodgy nightclub owner Jack Ruby was found guilty of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald, the presumed assassin of JFK in Dealey Plaza, Dallas five months earlier. If Ruby wasn't part of a conspiracy himself then his removal of Oswald goes beyond the criminal. Had Oswald stood trial we might all know what happened that day in Dallas and a whole JFK industry would never have been born.
Ruby's motive in shooting Oswald at point blank range in front of TV cameras when Oswald was in police custody was 'I did it for Jackie Kennedy'.
Yeah, right.
