Greenfield: Marx and Mohammed in Manchester

Marx and Mohammed in Manchester The left bows to Islam. July 26, 2017 Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

The city with the highest death rate and some of the worst drug and alcohol problems in England is getting a statue of Friedrich Engels.

A scowling bearded cement statue of Marx’s best friend will fix everything wrong with Manchester.

The statue comes to Manchester courtesy of Phil Collins. That’s not the singer who crooned, “You’ll Be In My Heart”, but the British artist who introduced East German instructors of Marxism-Leninism to Manchester with Marxism Today. Like the more famous Phil, he has his share of love songs, but it’s Marx and Engels, who are in his heart.

Phil Collins lives in Berlin. The Engels statue comes from the Ukraine. And he would like to bring the unemployed instructors of Marxism-Leninism from East Germany to Manchester “to teach Marxism in schools there.” It failed in the Ukraine. It failed in East Germany. But it’s bound to work in Manchester.

The search for the statue started out in the Russian city of Engels: a post-industrial disaster area where unemployment is high and drug smuggling and human trafficking are major industries. The old Communist infrastructure is coming apart. And so on he went to Mala Pereshchepina in the Ukraine.

Mala Pereshchepina had previously been best known for the tomb of Kubrat, founder of Old Great Bulgaria, who had been laid to rest surrounded by golden vessels and jeweled rings. There Phil found a broken cement statue of an old monster and decided to haul the ugly old thing over to Manchester.

There’s always been a market for the art and tchotchkes of fallen totalitarian regimes. There’s a booming market in Nazi and Communist souvenirs. And Collins isn’t the first sympathizers to haul back one of the many Comrade Ozymandias statues that were tossed into the dirt when the Soviet Union fell.

There’s a Lenin statue in Fremont, Seattle. It was bought and shipped over by an English teacher who mortgaged his house to pay for the statue of a mass murderer. It’s been for sale for over twenty years. The current asking price is $250K. So far no capitalist has acquired Lenin as a lawn ornament.

The New York Lenin facing Wall Street hasn’t done any better. On Houston Street, the Red Square building houses a FedEx, a Dunkin’ Donuts, a Sleepy’s and an H&R Block. The building was built by a former NYU professor of “radical sociology”. Then it was bought for $100 million. The Red Square was renamed, Lenin came down and occupies a humbler perch on an eyesore of a tenement.

Being derivative, Phil Collins has to compensate by being twice as loud. The Engels statue will encourage Manchester’s working class to contemplate the “conditions of the working class” today. But Collins seems oddly uninterested in contemplating the condition of the working class in the former Communist countries he passed through while searching for the kitschy junk souvenirs of Marxist tyranny.

Indeed, the only people whose conditions he seemed interested in had been pushing Marxism-Leninism.

Phil Collins would not have done well under Communism. Just ask the Russian Futurists. What began with a boisterous call to throw the art and literature of the past overboard from the “steamship of modernity” ended with a muffled whimper as the Futurists were forced to adopt Socialist Realism. Collins’ statue is, among other things, a tribute to the Communist suppression of modern art.

The irony of modern art celebrating its own suppression is both heartbreaking and stupefying.

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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

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“The statue comes to Manchester courtesy of Phil Collins. That’s not the singer who crooned, “You’ll Be In My Heart”, but the British artist who introduced East German instructors of Marxism-Leninism to Manchester with Marxism Today.”

*Puts down Genesis albums and can of lighter fluid...*

There is a certain satisfaction in seeing Freddy covered in bird poop until the Muslims blow the statue up. And I was unaware the Lenin statue in Fremont had been on sale for that long. Some of the locals keep painting the hands red. I’m sort of surprised some well-heeled Berkeley donor doesn’t cough up a quarter mil plus shipping for the thing rather than purchase textbooks. The Cult Of Marx does have a need for its graven images.

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