For speaking the English language and using a standard metaphor (“nigger in a woodpile”) in a totally non racial context a Tory MP has been (grotesquely) suspended. I wonder whether the works of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, two rabid racists, will now be banned?
Karl Marx might have presented his entire philosophy as being about the dignity of labour, crushed by capitalism but he was never in danger of any actual labour himself. He had to beg from others to indulge his absence from the labour market, his philosophical musings and his copious writing – like the factory owner, his friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels whose views of the working class were insulting: “stupid”, “fools” who “believe anything”.
Marx wrote in a letter to Engels about one of his supporters and indeed regular donors the fellow socialist Ferdinand Lasalle:
“The Jewish nigger Lasalle…fortunately departs at the end of this week. The obtusiveness of the fellow is also nigger like…………it is perfectly obvious from the shape of his head that he is descended from negroes………unless his mother or grandmother had relations with a nigger”.
And whereas the Tory MP Anne Marie Morris used the term as a mere metaphor unrelated to racial comment, Marx’s remarks about Lasalle are just one of many targeted and deliberately racist comments usually reciprocated by Engels. Further examples of Marx’s rabid racism are:
“What is the religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money”
and
“He proves that the common Negro type is only a degeneration of a much higher one” **
“Chinese nationality with all its overbearing prejudice, stupidity, learned and pedantic”
Not to be outdone in the racist bigotry stakes Friedrich Engels was scathing about Slavs, Irish, Latins and Scandinavians:
“The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity places him little above the savage….the Irish are related in their whole character to the Latin nations”
“We have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and rejoiced in it”
“Scandinavianism is enthusiasm for the brutal, sordid and piratical”
“Only by the most determined use of terror against these Slavs can we safeguard the revolution”
I look forward to the Conservative Government (which has suspended an innocent totally non racist MP) banning all books by the racists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels from libraries and universities. “What is sauce for the goose………”
** Marx’s view of Blacks is reflected in his musings on SLAVERY:
1846 letter to Pavel Aveenkov:
As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America.
Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map.
