The Marxist Foundation of Cancel Culture By Chris Knight (Florida)

Robert Merz gives a tremendous account of the Marxist foundations of woke/political correctness and cancel culture. He details the racism of Karl Marx, who got this cultural war going, and how the neo-Marxists of today have moved from class warfare to cultural wars, an attack upon tradition. Paradoxically Karl Marx himself supported European colonialism and should be cancelled by the standards of today. He is not because that would be inconvenient, if not embarrassing.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/marx_and_cancel_culture_.html

“Today’s cancel culture is a form of on-line banishment embraced by the far Left.  It is used to expose, target, silence, and humiliate anyone who dares say anything they don’t like.     

The tactic has worked.  Today, many people in schools, the media, and the publishing business are forced to self-censor anything they say or write for fear of retaliation from leftist woke mobs.  In the publishing world, J.K. Rowling, the creator of the Harry Potter books is frequently cancelled for her views on transgenderism.  To show how serious this is, she has even received death threats.  

So, where does Marx fit in this equation?  First, Marx is the author of the modern cancel culture and second, he should probably be the victim of it -- but won’t be.   

In 1848, long before computers, Marx wrote that, in normal society, the past dominates the present, but in Communist society, the present had to dominate the past.  This means that history can only be seen and interpreted through the prism of Marxist theory.  Anything incompatible with the latest Marxist positions wouldl necessarily be altered to fit or eliminated (AKA Cancelled).   

This is necessary because Marxists have to control the “facts” and the narrative to fit their manufactured reality.  No competing messages or facts can be allowed.  This was the actual beginning of the cancel culture. 

One example of this was seen in a book, The Commissar Vanishes.  In it, photos show heroes of the revolution who were ‘disappeared’ when Stalin took power and accused any possible opponents of being enemies of the people -- usually they were both murdered and erased.  That makes Marx the father and Stalin the godfather of the cancel culture.   

Like Stalin in the great terror, the cancel culture mob rules by fear and intimidation. Today, books, plays, songs, and movies are not being removed by state censors (yet), but by authors, editors, publishers, distributors, protesters, news personalities, or others who think they have to remove anything that might be offensive -- just as Stalin banned Shakespeare’s Hamlet, because he didn’t like the play.  Some reports even indicate that the U.S. Government is now working with a social media company to censor posts containing what some bureaucrats call ‘misinformation’.  So much for the First Amendment.  

One of the favorite pastimes of the cancel culture mob is to attack anyone they can call a Nazi, a bigot, a racist, a Fascist, a homophobe, or any other name with -phobe attached to the end of it.  Plus, they go after these offenders no matter how long ago the supposed ‘offence’ occurred.  This is Marx’s present dominating the past. 

So, what did Karl Heinrich Marx, the founder of Marxism, say that could get him cancelled? 

Comrades in the West, most of whom have never actually read his works or lived in a Marxist state, speak glowingly of the person they call a great thinker, a philosopher, a champion of the working man, a champion of women’s rights, an internationalist, and a revolutionary hero.  These all sound great, except -- they are wrong.   

Let’s look.  Perhaps the attack term the cancel mob use most often is also the most erroneous.  They love calling people Nazis.   

They often claim that anyone who criticizes them or Marx is a Nazi.  Following that, they’ll go out of their way to claim that even though the actual name of the Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Worker’s Party -- they weren’t really socialists.   

But, if you look, you will find that Hitler said that he was a true socialist as opposed to Marx and Marxism.  Also, many of the things Marx wrote were strikingly similar to what Hitler said. 

In a 1934 May Day speech, Hitler said: “The hammer will once more become the symbol of the German worker and the sickle the sign of the German peasant.”  In a newspaper interview, Hitler also said that National Socialism was derived from the national resolution of the bourgeois tradition and creative socialism from the teaching of Marx.   

Marx and Hitler also had similar attitudes on Jews.  In 1844, Marx wrote an essay titled “The Jewish Question.”  In 1919, Hitler wrote about what he called the "Jewish question".  It is quite telling that they used the same terminology.    

Like Hitler, Marx never hid his anti-Semitism.  Marx also seemed to want to see the Jews eliminated.  He wrote: “The emancipation of the Jews, in the final analysis, is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” That doesn’t sound good, but it does sound Nazi.  

Like Hitler, Marx also hated a lot of people and cultures -- ones that he thought were less evolved than advanced Western Europeans.  

Marx despised Mexicans.  After the Mexican-American War he wrote: "Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?"  His buddy Engels added: “In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it.  It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States.” I wonder what the Critical Race Theory crowd and La Raza think of that? 

Marx also loved to use the N-word.  He even used it against his own son-in-law, who Engels said had “one-eighth or one-twelfth n***** blood.”  When Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, ran for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo, Engels said that it was appropriate as n*****s were closer to the animal kingdom than other people.  So much for Marxists courting the Black Lives Matter crowd. 

It wasn’t just Blacks and Jews.  Marx and Engels despised a lot of different people.  In his 1853 writings on the Crimean War, Marx disparaged Slavonians, Greeks, Wallachians (Romanians), Arnauts (Albanians), Moldavians, Serbians, and Turks -- equal opportunity hatred.   

Marx also wrote positively about British colonial rule in India.  He said that Indian society had no history at all, except for successive invaders who lost their empires when they became “Hindooized.”  He said that The British conquerors were superior to the Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Moguls (Mughal Empire) who had proceeded them in conquering India.  He said that the British had not succumbed to the “Hindoo civilization” but set the foundation of Western civilization.  Imagine – the first Marxist speaking in favor of racist colonialism and the destruction of native cultures. 

(The Indus Valley culture was in fact one of the first ancient civilizations and was contemporary with the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt.)   

Bottom line, Karl Marx was a racist, a religious bigot, a supporter of European colonialism, a person who thought white Europeans were superior to lesser cultures, and a person who had ideologies that were in line with Hitler’s and ideas which may indeed have inspired Hitler.  

So, why isn’t Karl Marx being cancelled?  Because he’s a Marxist and Marxists are a protected class in the U.S. today.  Questioning them is not allowed and indeed may indeed get you cancelled -- and called a Nazi.”

It is not widely appreciated what a nasty fellow old Marx was.