QUESTION ASKED: Will Cancel Culture Find Out About Karl Marx The Racist?
Here’s a quote on how Karl Marx felt about Mexicans: “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?”
Marx, whose parents converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, was also a raging anti-Semite:
Marx’s essay, On the Jewish Question, originally published in 1844 contains the following:
What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.…. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.
And in addition to all of the above, Marx and Friedrich Engels, the co-author of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, weren’t keen on blacks, as Walter Williams has noted.
Of course, for 21st century leftists, Marx is guilty of the worst sin of all — being a white male — and for that, he already has gotten at least one taste of posthumous cancel culture. As James Lileks spotted in 2015, “Some Berkeley students are mad about a class that is just plain othering the living heck out of them. From a piece they wrote for the Daily Californian:”
We are calling for an occupation of syllabi in the social sciences and humanities. This call to action was instigated by our experience last semester as students in an upper-division course on classical social theory. Grades were based primarily on multiple-choice quizzes on assigned readings. The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.
In response, Lileks wrote:
If there’s one thing you take away from the Daily Californian essay, it’s the pursed-lip’d narrow-eyed glare of someone who is being forced to sit in a room and NOT BE VALIDATED. (Some of the complainants may be angry because they are witnessing the non-validation of others and are compelled to be enraged on their behalf.) College, apparently, is now a place where the notions of people freshly matriculated from high school must be handled with oven mitts and lightly buffed with soft cloth lest their orthodoxies suffer the slightest abrasion. Like the school that canceled the annual performance of The Vagina Monologues because it othered non-traditional women who lacked the titular orifice, it’s a delightful example of leftist autophagy. Marx is in foul order in Berkeley not for his ideas, or the heaps of corpses accumulated in his name, but because he had a prostate.
By the way, Foucault died of AIDS, so you can dismiss everything the students wrote. Homophobes and haters. No, kids, don’t bother defending yourselves. As your heroes would no doubt say: If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have accused you.
Heh. Yet another reminder that as Ray Bradbury predicted in Fahrenheit 451, the books will be burned as much to protect everyone’s feelings as much as to block the ideas within them.
Earlier: Question Asked: Since cancel culture is circling around Gandhi, when does it come for Mohammed? And then what happens?