The "Who Said It: Walt or Karl Marx?" Quiz
DIRECTIONS: The following quotations are statements made either by Karl Marx, the father of communism and big government thuggery, or by Walt in his pro-Lincoln postings on Free Republic. Without consulting outside sources, identify who you believe to be the author of each quote by indicating so. Each correct answer will be worth 1 point.. Answers will be displayed shortly after ample time has been allowed for response. Yankees are welcome to give it a try as well.
1. "Part of Lincoln's genius was in knowing what the country would accept, and another part was helping to guide it where it needed to go."
2. "[Abraham Lincoln was] one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good. Such, indeed, was the modesty of this great and good man, that the world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr."
3. "In accordance with the principle that any further extension of slave territories was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slaveholders at its root. The Republican election victory was...bound to lead to open struggle between North and South."
4. "[Lincoln] was firm "as with a chain of steel" on there being no expansion of slavery from where it already existed. That alone was enough to cause the war, because the slave owners knew that their "futures" in slaves and slave breeding would be compromised unless slavery were allowed to expand."
5. "This geographical barrier [containing slavery] was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill...[which] placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union government to treat them both with equal indifference"
6. " Lincoln was alarmed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act into becoming more politically active -- because he had a personal abhorance of slavery...he had a solution to at least begin the ending of slavery. And that is what the secessionists found so repugnant."
7. "Lincoln was a very pracical man. He did discover a way to begin to end slavery in the United States. If slavery were confined to areas in which it already existed, it would die"
8. "The whole movement was...based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the twenty million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of...slaveholders; whether the vast territories of the republic should be nurseries for free states or for slavery...whether the national policy of the Union should take armed spreading of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America as its device."
9. "[Lincoln] knew that if slavery was limited to areas where it was currently legal, it would die. The slave holders knew it too. That is why slave holders were continually trying to expand territory favorable to gang-labor slavery. That was why the Mexican War was fought and that is why the federal government tried to buy Cuba and that is why slave holders sent expeditions to disrupt Nicaraugua and other Central American locations."
10. "Lincoln bent over backwards to avoid war in his first inaugural. But Jeffeson Davis couldn't allow secession fever to cool. So he fired on Fort Sumter."
11. "It is above all to be remembered that the war did not originate with the North, but with the South...For months [the North] had quietly looked on while the secessionists appropriated the Union's forts, arsenals, shipyards, customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of arms, insulted its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the secessionists resolved to force the Union government out of its passive attitude by a blatant act of war, and solely for this reason proceeded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston."
12. "[F]rom 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed...Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress"
13. "[We are fortunate] that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln...to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world."
14. "Lincoln's words show what a great and good man he was, and his actions show [his critics] for a fool or poltroon."
BONUS QUESTION:
Identify the author of this quote denying the sovereignty of the states and advocating the union just like Lincoln did. It could be Walt. It could be Marx. Or it could be somebody else. Take a guess!
"[In America] it is impossible to speak of original sovereignty in regard to the majority of the states. Many of them were not included in the federal complex until long after it had been established. The states that make up the American Union are mostly in the nature of territories, more or less, formed for technical administrative purposes, their boundaries having in many cases been fixed in the mapping office. Originally these states did not and could not possess sovereign rights of their own. Because it was the Union that created most of the so-called states."
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ANSWERS:
1. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/703308/posts?page=2#2
2. Karl Marx, Address of the International Working Men's Association to President Johnson, 1865
3. Karl Marx, On the North American Civil War, October 20, 1861
4. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/700651/posts?page=88#88
5. Karl Marx, On the North American Civil War, October 20, 1861
6. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/688238/posts?page=62#62
7. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/688238/posts?page=42#42
8. Karl Marx, On the North American Civil War, October 20, 1861
9. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/688238/posts?page=42#42
10. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/662922/posts?page=85#85
11. Karl Marx, On the North American Civil War, October 20, 1861
12. Karl Marx, On the North American Civil War, October 20, 1861
13. Karl Marx, letter to Abraham Lincoln congratulating him on reelection as President of the United States, January 28, 1865
14. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/664750/posts?page=51#51
BONUS: Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf volume II, 1926
Holy cow bat fans...
The "Who Said It: Walt or Karl Marx?" Quiz
You present your "quiz" in a fairly light-hearted vein, but it actually has strong expository value.
It serves as a reminder -- especially the quote from Hitler at the end -- that Marx, Engels, Lenin, and all the German National Socialists were all alike men of the Left. The German NSDAP was the "National Socialst German Workers' Party" -- liberals like to leave out the part about "socialist" and "workers" because failure to do so correctly isolates capitalist small-"l" liberal democracy, i.e. conservatism, as the true enemy of all forms of Left tyranny.
Liberals could stand, for the longest time until Stalin's crimes started to become public, thanks to Nikita Khruschev, to keep kissing the pig of socialism and calling it beautiful. The stench of dead bodies forced them to attempt a divorcement of Nazism from socialism, which was one of the cheesier, and more successful, historiographic hustles of the last 500 years.
Conservative intellectuals like Frank Meyer and Ludwig von Mises have killed entire forests showing that the spirit of compulsion at the core of socialism -- it goes for communitarianism, too, indeed any form of collectivism -- is morally corrupt and inevitably leads to great crimes, the kind that are transacted at the level of policy.
The Soviet Communists and the German National Socialists have given us two huge confirmations of this insight, and that is the problem that rankles Abraham Lincoln's defenders. They realize now that Lincoln was of a piece with the parties of vanguard government and lumpen, "follower" societies, and that his Civil War may be morally indictable in kind with the murderous adventures of 20th-century totalitarianism.