So there I was. Me and my white privilege surfing the white information super-highway, when I came across this interesting article.
Anti-Racists Should Think Twice about Allying with Socialism
(Some snippets)
Modern racial justice movements like Black Lives Matter are embracing the historically false assumption that socialism is anti-racist.
*snip*
There is, in other words, a growing assumption among racial justice advocates that more socialism would result in less racism and, even, that socialism is, in itself, anti-racist. There is, in fact, no such necessary connection between socialism and anti-racism, as a closer look at early socialist writings amply shows.
*snip*
It is noteworthy that Engels wrote those words 16 years before Francis Galton, writing in Macmillan’s Magazine, urged humanity to take control of its own evolution by means of “good breeding” or eugenics.
Speaking of which, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who were both socialists and eugenicists, bemoaned the falling birthrates among so-called higher races in the New Statesman in 1913. They warned that “a new social order [would be] developed by one or other of the colored races, the Negro, the Kaffir or the Chinese”.
*snip*
Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary and friend of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, offered his views on race in his 1952 memoir The Motorcycle Diaries, writing, “The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.”
*snip*
In addition to racism, early socialist writings contained explicit calls for genocide of backward peoples. The toxic mix of those two illiberal ideas would result in at least 80 million deaths during the course of the 20th century.
*snip*
In the New York Tribune in 1853, Karl Marx came close to advocating genocide, writing, “The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.” His friend and collaborator, Engels, was more explicit.
*snip*
“From Engels' article in 1849 down to the death of Hitler,” George Watson wrote in his 1998 book The Lost Literature of Socialism, “everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist.”
There is much more good stuff in the article (some on Hitler's ties to socialism/Marxism). I would call that required reading if we are to know our enemy.
Do the sheep who scream their racial rhetoric and further the cause of socialism/communism understand the true nature of socialism? Does any useful idiot ever understand?
We report, you decide.
#LateNightMusings
