Health Risk: Dash Of Marxism Worse Than Soda And Salt

This Excerpt from 'Venice: A New History' By Thomas F. Madden (p.151) was interesting to me:

At one time it was fashionable among historians to blame the outcome of the Fourth Crusade on Venice and Doge Dandolo, reasoning that since the Venetians profited from the conquest of Constantinople, they must have planned it. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this explanation was seasoned with a dash of Marxism that cast religion as a tool of bourgeois oppression. Thus, it was argued, the greedy Venetian capitalists used fake piety to persuade the naive crusaders to divert Constantinople and win an empire for them. Crusade historians have long abandoned this fiction for the simple reason that it makes no sense. The Fourth Crusade shattered the stable markets on which Venice depended and forced Venetian citizens to spend their lives and their treasure building empire of their own to replace one that had been, for the most part, quite acceptable to them. Nonetheless, one still runs across in novels and guidebooks (the traditional last stand for poor history*) those crafty Venetians cleverly twisting the Fourth Crusade to their own ends. The entire period of the Latin Empire of Constantinople involved careful risk management for the Venetians.

*please allow me to add cinema.

Sound familiar? If you're inclined to believe economic and social ills (in whatever form) is the fault of "greedy capitalists" or "rich people" I would counter and submit you have a shallow take on things; especially history. Progressives think themselves as being able to understand complex issues only to corrode their outlook with simpleton catch phrases and beliefs. "Ban Christianity!" Or closer to home, the hideous interpretation of what constitutes secularism by the Part Quebecois and their divisive, regressive  and ultimately pointless "Charter of Values."

They, those who like their history with a 'dash of Marxism'(like the PQ and the North American left), tend to misinterpret and insult the notion of 'history repeating' itself. They're usually, well, wrong.