If you really want to destroy something, you pull it up by its roots. This explains why today’s cultural revolutionaries attack what is foundational to the West, such as the Founding Fathers; Christianity; and, as author and commentator Douglas Murray mentioned recently, even ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Yet while “dead white males” are the focus of this civilization-rending ire, there is one long-gone white man who gets a pass, even though he was a “racist” who used the “n-word” and defended black slavery in America.
That man was Karl Marx.
Murray made this point and others in a Fox Nation special that aired Sunday evening called “The War on the West,” which derives its theme and title from a book by the same name Murray recently had published. Joining him in the discussion were three fellow authors: podcast host Coleman Hughes, American Enterprise Institute research fellow and Schoolhouse Rot author Max Eden, and Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald.
Focusing on this war and its objective — the erasure of Western culture — Hughes warned of the indoctrination of children. “There’s this massive lie of omission about world history,” he said. “Most kids have no idea that the Arab world enslaved 14 million Africans; they have no idea about the history of slavery in China and Korea; they hear the word slavery and associate it only with the West.”
Such teaching is striking academic malpractice. The real historical anomaly was not slavery; it had been practiced anywhere and everywhere since time immemorial and is still found in certain backwater nations today.
The true historical anomaly was slavery’s abolition.
This first occurred in places such as the state of Vermont and later in Britain and the United States as a whole. So the truth should engender civilizational pride (or at least appreciation) in Western children. To wit: Westerners might not have been the first people to practice slavery.
But they for certain were the first to eliminate it.
Murray would later comment on what the above historical malpractice is a part of, saying (transcription provided by Fox News:
This remorseless attack on the West has attacked Western peoples; its attacked Western history. It’s also attacked Western ideas, the foundational ideas that we have. Every single foundational thinker in the West has now been assaulted through the dead White male lens. Aristotle was … attacked in The Washington Post for being, “the grandfather of scientific racism.”… So you can now de-platform Aristotle, 3,000 years later…. The idea that these people 2,500 ago happened not to share all of our views is now used against them. It’s also some of the thinkers who we credit in the West as being the people who came up with the concepts of rationalism, of reason. Voltaire in France, David Hume in the United Kingdom, and many more. This [is a] complete clearing away of the intellectual terrain of the past.
It’s obvious that white men are attacked because they’re ones who visibly founded and built Western civilization. This is also precisely why, as Eden pointed out (video below; relevant portion begins at 20:29), one Western “philosophy” — Marxism — along with its best known white progenitor, Karl Marx, get a dispensation from the anti-white rage:
Marxism is a “Western” ideology whose embrace serves to destroy Western culture.
And Marx gets his free pass despite having made comments about race that, Murray observed, he couldn’t even repeat on the air. Aside from using the “n-word” regularly, Marx wrote something interesting about a favorite subject of the Left.
“Without slavery, North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country,” he averred in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). “Wipe out North America from the map of the world and you will have anarchy — the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Abolish slavery and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”
(Note: Marx agitated against “patriarchy” because, he said, feminism — aka “feminine upheaval” — was necessary for socialist revolution.)
More of Marx’s racially/ethnically oriented statements are found here.
In fairness and as illustrated in Mark Twain’s book Huckleberry Finn, the “n-word” sometimes had a different connotation in the mid-1800s than it does today. In fairness again, however, context or intention is never considered exculpatory when at issue are the West’s foundational figures. They lack socialist privilege.
Of course, the very notion of rejecting messages because the messengers were flawed is itself flawed thinking (at best), as all people are flawed. It is sometimes necessary to consider sources (as journalists might say, “Know your sources”) when an assertion’s truth is unknown and, thus, the messenger’s credibility is your best guide. But using a source’s failings to discredit now-known truths he uncovered is only done by those with truly discreditable failings.
What’s more, we’d never do this with scientific triumphs, rejecting technological advancements because those registering them were, in many cases and by our modern lights, “racists,” “sexists,” or “homophobes.” Thus proceeding could have us regress back to being cavemen.
But this is precisely what the cultural revolutionaries do with our moral, cultural, and theological triumphs: They reject the glories bequeathed to us in the name of “progress”(ivism) and are, slowly but surely, turning us into moral and cultural cavemen.
It makes as much sense as rejecting the laws of gravity because you learn that Newton held views you find offensive — and then walking off a tall building’s roof. This would be stupid, but it would be a lot better for civilization than walking it off the cultural cliff whose precipice too many, like lemmings, are mindlessly marching toward.
