Revered folk hero to urban, latte-sipping, militant leftists, Karl Marx is known mainly for his insipid commentary on capitalism and failed economic prescriptions for an egalitarian society. His seminal 1867 work of fiction, Das Kapital, has spawned generations of diehard Marxist disciples and many incoherent branches and schools of thought. But while the literal unwashed youth who espouse the doctrines of Marxism think his philosophy is a panacea to what seemingly ails the planet, they might have a case of cognitive dissonance once they learn of his racism. Marx was a man from privilege who was a racist, anti-Semite, and misogynist. Is it time to tear down his monuments – and other socialist statues – from around the world? For the sake of intellectual consistency, it is high noon.
Karl Marx – The Racist
Karl Marx was not the kindest, most responsible, or even cleanest man. In his youth, Marx was a bully, a drinker, a spendthrift, and a hooligan. His adult years were not that much different. The main distinction was that he added womanizing and wife-beating to his arsenal of odious characteristics. His ideology killed tens of millions of people, but have academics even feigned concern over this fact? It is his views on blacks, Hispanics, and Jews that should force the left to demand his works be censored, banned, and burned. In an 1862 correspondence with Joseph Engels, Marx wrote:
“It is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes who had joined Moses’ exodus from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother on the paternal side had not interbred with a n—–. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product.”
When he was asked for his thoughts on the Mexican-American War of 1846, Marx responded with a question, “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?”
Marx’s anti-Semitic views were no secret. In 1844, he published an essay titled On The Jewish Question. He wrote that the worldly religion of Jews was “huckstering” and that the Jews’ god was “money.” Marx’s view of Jews was that they could only become an emancipated ethnicity or culture when they no longer exist. Marx was one step short of calling for genocide, averring in 1853: “The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.”
Racism in Socialism
It was not only the communist it-girl who purported iniquitous views on race. His enabler and partner in crime, Engels, repeatedly talked about supposed inferior character traits of blacks and other races. He went as far as advocating eugenics since “it would be difficult to teach them by proof to a bushman or to an Australian Negro.”
Marx’s philosophical successors shared ugly thoughts on blacks and other minorities, too.
Che Guevara, the man whose image graces kids’ teeshirts around the world, was a horrific racist. He wrote in his 1952 memoir, The Motorcycle Diaries: “The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.” British socialist Beatrice Webb griped in 1913 in the New Statesmen about declining birthrates among so-called higher races, which would lead to “a new social order” that would be created “by one or other of the colored races, the Negro, the Kaffir or the Chinese.” The Soviets espoused the same “Jewish world conspiracy” as the Nazis. Joseph Stalin embarked upon the “rootless cosmopolitan” campaign that led to the deaths of Jewish intellectuals for their apparent lack of patriotism.
Black Lives Matter’s Red Streak
The petulant Antifa miscreants, Black Lives Matter protesters, and other activists are desecrating and tearing down statues of men who did not live up to their standards of perfection. But why are only physical structures the target of their scorn and anger? Why not entire philosophies?
In a newly surfaced video from 2015, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors revealed to The Real News Network that she and her colleagues are “trained Marxists” and “super-versed on ideological theories.” Considering Marx’s views on blacks, Hispanics, and Jews, how could anyone demand racial justice and advocate equality when ideas emanate from the mind of an atrocious human being? Imagine if Milton Friedman uttered Marx’s nonsense. The left would say this is an indictment on free-market capitalism.
Indeed, the rational case could be made that the views, not the person, that are important. As the protests and riots have proven in recent weeks, rationality and nuance have been tossed out the window. You are either a racist or not a racist. If the leftist mob declares you a racist, then everything else is null and void and should not be heard in front of the communist-style show trials. By not denouncing famous socialists’ disgusting thought processes, Cullors and all the other BLM activists are proving that their movement’s ideological foundation supersedes racial prejudice.
Useful Idiots
In the Soviet Union, the leaders took advantage of useful idiots. These were people who believed in the cause’s objectives without realizing what the aims were, and they were themselves eliminated by those at the top when it became necessary. The white liberal today is the same useful idiot. BLM, Antifa, and other progressive organizations are using an army of left-leaning, middle-class, suburbanite Caucasians. They think they are fighting racism by toppling statues, beating up conservative and libertarian voices, and destroying public and private property. Their prizes for their anarchistic efforts are virtue-signaling, atoning for the past’s sins, and washing and kissing feet of strangers with different skin pigmentation. But do these organizers care about addressing racism? They are about as passionate about racial equality as the communist authorities were about the proletariat. The endgame is the concentration of power – and nothing more.
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