Farcical critique of ‘flawed Marxism’

ROGER COTTRELL’S critique of “flawed Marxism” (Irish Examiner letters, April 24), especially in relation to the Rising of 1916, was as good an example of pure farce as we are likely to read in any of the national dailies.

Unless, of course and this is the scary part he was being serious.

It was almost, but not quite, as outlandish as a recent piece in another Irish newspaper, which tried to draw parallels between revisionists and poor old Judas.

The weird and wonderful pious orthodoxies of our history, it seems, are to remain the last great untouchables - beyond criticism or beyond parody as we pay tribute to all the great crackpot ideologies of the world and the undigested cabbage-green philosophical nonsense which underpins many of them.

Arguably, the greatest revisionist of all time was Jesus of Nazareth, whose life and legacy set the default standards of much our world. Not that you'd notice, mind you, if you were to take some humorously-challenged interpreters seriously!

Richard Dowling

Coote Street

Mountrath

Co Laois.