Walter E. Williams on slavery and our founding fathers

[northwye]

I thought of posting the following on Facebook. But I post on several interests of mine there, including on the Bible, and don't want to get booted out even temporarily.

Leo Lyon Zagami, a Facebook Friend,just posted on Facebook on a piece called "Let's Make California Republican Again." That might not go over well in Silicon Valley. The Democrats say they want to make Texas Blue again, and most highly urban Texas counties are Blue. And while there remains only one Abortion Clinic in Missouri which lost its license, the Abortion Clinics of Austin are going strong.

https://notyrants.blogspot.com/2012/03/andrew-breitbart-at-cpac-2012.html

"Thursday, March 1, 2012, Andrew Breitbart at CPAC 2012"

"This is my war cry for 2012. You need to join me in my war against the institutional left."

"This is not your mother's Democratic Party... duh! John Podesta and George Soros? This is not your mother's Democratic Party You know whose party it is? ...I have a thesis about who we're fighting against on the hard left... [In college] I had no idea these [left-wing academics] people were actually serious about the malarkey they were teaching. The post-structuralist, politically correct garbage."

"There's no such thing as a moderate Democrat."

"Barack Obama is a radical and we should not be afraid to say it. And Barack Obama was launched from Bill and Bernadine's salon... it became self-evident to me that [Obama enjoyed] many a meal there... And don't tell me, ABC, CBS and NBC that I can't posit that theory, because it is a self-evident truth. Just like it was a self-evident truth that he was with Jeremiah Wright. And just as it was a self-evident truth that when he was at Harvard, he was advocating for the worst of the worst to join the faculty. Radicals. Radicals at "Beirut on the Charles".

And that who's in the White House. And that's who's outside right now [the Occupy movement] telling you that you don't have a right to be here. They would squelch your free speech just as easily as they do at Harvard, Vassar, Yale, Wesleyan - they're a bunch of totalitarian freaks."

"The media can no longer be called objective journalists"

See https://www.independentsentinel.com/andrew-breitbart-explains-epiphany-cultural-marxism/

"Breitbart saw the danger of cultural Marxism before most people. Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly also saw the threat to a lesser degree and wrote a book about it — The Culture Wars."

"In the video, Breitbart discusses the transforming of the United States by pushing cultural Marxism with critical theory in his book — Righteous Indignation. Breitbart addressed the Frankfort School and his one great epiphany to explain what is happening in this country."

The disciples of the Frankfort School wanted to find a way to spread Marxism.

"Breitbart also discussed Saul Alinsky in the video and his ties to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Alinsky was able to transfer cultural Marxism into rules and bring it down to a street war level, Breitbart said."

Marxism arrived partly out of the French Revolution. One influence upon Marx was from Hegel, with his dialectics, and another influence was from the Jacobins, who were the most radical and murderous faction to come out of the French Revolution.

In 1793, during the French Revolution the Jacobin leaders began the Reign of Terror. Under Robespierre, who took over the Revolution. The Jacobins used the Terror of the guillotine not only against counterrevolutionaries, but also against former Jacobins, and Jacobins themselves, Finally, Robespierre was overthrown in 1794, but the spirit of the Jacobins lived on in Marxism.

Marx got into politics as a young radical intellectual in the movement called the Left Hegelians or Young Hegelians. Remember that Hegel had brought the Greek philosophy of the διαλεκτική, or dialectic, before the time of Christ, into modern philosophy.

I Timothy 6: 20-21 in Greek says "και αντιθεσεις της ψευδωνυμου γνωσεως,or "and anti-thesis of falsely called knowledge."

αντιθεσεις, or anti-thesis, is a technical term in the early Greek philosophy of the διαλεκτική, or dialectic, before the time of Christ. In the dialectic, there is a direct opposition between the thesis and the anti-thesis.

The Marxist interest in the Hegelian dialectic was called "Dialectical Materialism." Marx said he tuned Hegel on his head, meaning that Marx made the dialectic of Hegel atheistic, or without Christian morality.

The dialectic without morals became the Marxist method of making arguments in the promotion of Marxism.

The Marxist "dialectical materialism" takes off from but makes immoral that dialectic which in Greek philosophy before the time of Christ was a procedure for making arguments and counter arguments by use of a thesis and its opposition or anti-thesis. The dialectic is in appearance a formal way of making arguments. But remember that Paul says in I Timothy 6: 20-21 that the dialectic produces "falsely called knowledge."

 

[Gary K]

I found your last quote to be really interesting. Here's what Max Eastman had to say about that very subject. Max Eastman was at one time one of the leading, if not the leading, socialist activist in the US. He later rejected Marxism and all it's failures and wrote a very interesting little book on titled Reflections on the Failures of Marxism. My quote comes from that book. It's from chapter 7 which is titled The Religion of Immoralism.

this is a pretty long quote, a few pages out of a small booklet, but it is highly instructive as to how to view socialists and their behavior.

SINCE Stalin's death it has become necessary to find a new focus for our hostility to the unscrupulous and inhuman behavior of the Communists. I wish it might be focused on the real cause of the trouble: Marxism. Much force of argument is wasted among Western intellectuals through a wish to exempt Marx from responsibility for this retum to barbarism. Realpolitik in the evil sense was certainly not born with Marx. But the peculiar thing we are up against, the casting aside of moral standards by people specializing in the quest of ideal human relations, was born with
Marx. He is the fountain source of the mores as well as the economics of the Russian Bolsheviks, and is the godfather of the delinquent liberals in all lands.

The notion of Marx as a benign and noble brooder over man's hopes and sorrows, who would be "horrified" at the' tricks and duplicities of present-day Communists, is as false as it is widespread. Marx had a bad character. His best eulogists can hardly think up a virtue to ascribe to him-except, indeed, tenacity and moral courage. If he ever performed a generous act, it is not to be found in the record. He was a totally undisciplined, vain, slovenly, and egotistical spoiled child. He was ready at the drop of a hat with spiteful hate. He could be devious, disloyal, snobbish, anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro. He was by habit a sponge, an intriguer, a tyrannical bigot who would rather
wreck his party than see it succeed under another leader. All these traits are clear in the records of his life, and above all in his private correspondence with his alter ego and inexhaustible sugar-daddy, Friedrich Engels. There are bits in this correspondence so revolting to a person of democratic sensibility that they had to be suppressed to keep the myth of the great-hearted Karl Marx, champion of the downtrodden and of human brotherhood, alive at all. To give one example: Ferdinand Lassalle, who was eclipsing Marx as leader of a genuine working class movement in Germany, they discovered to be not only a Jew whom they called "Baron Izzy," "oi-oi, the great Lassalle," "the little Jew," '''the little kike," "Jew Braun," "Izzy the bounder," etc., but also "a Jewish ******." "It is perfectly obvious," Marx wrote, "from the shape of his head and the way his hair grows that he is descended from the Negroes who joined Moses on the journey out of Egypt, unless perhaps his mother or his grandmother had relations with a ******." Only the Russian Bol-
sheviks, who went in for the religion of immoralism with a barbaric candor impossible to an urbane European, had the hardihood to publish these letters unexpurgated.

I use the word religion in a precise sense. Although he dismissed God as a hoax and the heavenly paradise as a decoy, Marx was not by nature skeptical or experimental. His habits of thought demanded a belief both in paradise and in a power that would surely lead us to it. He located his paradise on earth, calling it by such beatific names as the "Kingdom of Freedom," the "Society of the Free and Equal,' the "Classless Society'' etc. Everything would be blissful and harmonious there to a degree surpassing even the dreams of the utopian socialists. Not only would all "causes
for contest" disappear, .all caste and class divisions, but all divisions between city and country, between brain and manual worker. Men would not even be divided into different professions as they are at this low stage of the climb toward paradise:

"Socialism will abolish both architecture and barrow-
pushing as professions," Engels assured the believers, "and
the man who has given half an hour to architecture will also
push the cart a little until his work as an architect is again
in demand. It would be a pretty sort of socialism which per-
petuated the business of barrow-pushing."
​

It would seem that only a benign deity could guarantee such a future to mankind, and only by teaching a higher morality could He lead us to it. But Marx hated deity, and regarded high moral aspirations as an obstacle. The power on which he rested his faith in the coming paradise was the harsh, fierce, bloody evolution of a "material," and yet mysteriously "upward-going," world. And he convinced himself that, in order to get in step with such a world, we must set aside moral principles and go in for fratricidal war. Although buried under a mountain of economic rationalizations pretending to be science, that mystical and antimoral faith is the one wholly original contribution of Karl Marx to man'sheritage of ideas.

It is common among those who condemn the lowering of moral standards by Marxists to blame their "materialism" for it, but that is a crass mistake. Throughout history, from Democritus to Santayana, men who believed genuinely that the substance of the world is matter have been among the noblest teachers of morality. Marx's materialism was not genuine. It was the disguise of a mystical faith. The world he called "material" was mental enough to be forever ascending "from the lower to the higher" with a determinism that is hardly distinguishable from determination. Engels, who did the work and took the risk of actually expounding this naive philosophy-for Marx played it safe as well as lazy by only jotting down a few notes-even tells us that "the celestial bodies like the formation of the organisms . . . arise and perish and the courses that they run . . . take on eternally more magnificent dimensions." Remembering that on this particular planet human society is also rising through successive stages to the "more magnificent" goal of the socialist society, you see what a godlike kind of "matter" it was that Marx believed in. It differed from Hegel's Divine Spirit only in agreeing with Marx about what is sublime, and in mapping out a course of procedure toward it that gave free
exercise to Marx's rebellious andcontumaceous disposition. The universe of dialectic materialism-to put it briefly-is a pantheistic God masquerading as matter, and permitting HimseH under that disguise forms of conduct that no God honestly named and identified could get away with in a civilized world.

Whittaker Chambers is very profoundly wrong when he says in his book, Witness, that the issue between Soviet Communism and the free world is between religion and irreligion, or between belief in man and belief in God. The Communists believe in man not as an independent power, but as a constituent part of the superhumanly ordained movement of the universe. That dialectic movement is their God, and it is that God who exempts them from the laws of morality. The difference between Christianity and Communism-the difference, I mean, that is vital in this connection is between a religion which teaches personal salvation through sympathy and loving-kindness and a religion which
teaches social salvation through bringing the morals of war into the peacetime relations of men.

Marx was so sure that the world was going to be redeemed by its own dialectic evolution that he would not permit his disciples to invoke the guidance of moral ideals. He really meant it when he said the workers have "no ideal to realize," they have only to participate in the contemporary struggle. He expelled people from his 'Communist party for mentioning programmatically such things as "love," "justice," "humanity," even "morality" itself. "Soulful ravings," "sloppy sentimentality," he called such expressions, and purged the astonished authors as though they had committed the most dastardly crimes.

Later in life, when Marx founded the First International, he felt compelled for the sake of a big membership to soft-pedal his highbrow insight into the purposes of the universe. He wrote privately to Engels: «I was obliged to insert in the preamble two phrases about 'duty and right,' ditto 'truth, morality, and justice.'" But these lamentable phrases-he assured his friend "are placed in such a way that they can do no harm."

This mystic faith in evolution set Marx's mind free, and, alas, his natural disposition, to replace the honest campaign of public persuasion by which other gospels have been propagated, with schemes for deceiving the public and tricking his way into positions of power. It was Marx, not Lenin, who invented the technique of the "front organization," the device of pretending to be a democrat in order to destroy democracy, the ruthless purging of dissident party members, the employment of false personal slander in this task. It was Marx and Engels who adopted "scorn and contempt" as
the major key in which to attack the opponents of socialism, introducing a literature of vituperation that has few parallels in history. Even the political masterstroke of giving the land to the peasants "initially" in order to take it away from them when the power is secure came from the same source. The introduction of such unprincipled behavior into a movement toward the highest ends of man was entirely the work of Marx and Engels. Lenin added nothing to it but skill, and Stalin nothing but total instinctive indifference to the ends.

So strong a force was set going after his death to sanctify Marx, and benevolize him, so to speak, that these practices were largely forgotten among Western Socialists. His religion of immoralism was smoothed over. But in Lenin's mind this religion found a perfect home, for Lenin had grown up under the influence of the terrorist wing of the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin was an ardent admirer of Nechayev, a rabid zealot of the 1870's who drew up a famous document called "Catechism of a Revolutionist."

"The revolutionist is a doomed man. . . . He has severed every
link with the social order and with the entire civilized world. . . .
He hates and despises the social morality of his time. . . . Every-
thing which promotes the success of the revolution is moral,
everything which hinders it is immoral."

​

Nechayev was denounced even by his sufficiently violent colleague, the anarchist Bakunin, as a dangerous fanatic" who "when it is necessary to render some service to what he calls 'the cause' . . . stops at nothing-deceit, robbery, even murder." But Lenin. startled his early friends by defending this madman and honoring his memory. Thus before he became a Marxist, Lenin had arrived by an emotional road at that rejection of moral standards which Marx deduced from a pretended science of history. The confluence of these two streams of thought is one of the greatest disasters that ever
befell mankind.

Lenin was even more credulous and more specific than Marx and Engels in describing the beauties of life in the paradise toward which this dialectic world was traveling. In his socialism every 'barrow-pusher'and every kitchen maid was to take part in the function of government. He was also more specific in describing the kinds of vile conduct which must be employed to help it along. "We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth," he exclaimed. "We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like, toward those who disagree with us."

Acting upon such principles, Lenin made use of slanderous lies and character-assassinations; he encouraged bank robberies and armed holdups as a means of replenishing the funds for the millennium. His disciples have carried the faith forward, not stopping at any crime, from bodily assassination to state-planned famine and wholesale military massacre. A chief organizer of those bank robberies and holdups was the Georgian Djugashvili, who took the party name of Stalin. The Marx-Leninist belief that such crimes are methods of progress toward a millennium was instilled
in this youth from the day of his revolt against Christian theology. He had no other education, touched no other conception of the world. He was once described by Archbishop Curley as "the greatest murderer of men in history," and the record when it is calmly written may bear this out. But he took no step beyond the logical implications of a devout belief in brutal and dishonorable conduct. He merely followed through on the doctrine invented by Karl Marx, that in order to enter the "Kingdom of Freedom," we must set aside moral standards. We must place "duty and right ... truth, morality, and justice," where "they can do no. harm." Or, in Lenin's words (spoken to an all-Russian Congress of Youth) :

"For us morality is subordinated completely to the interests
of the class struggle of the proletariat."


​

We have not entered, alas, the Kingdom of Freedom, and the Classless Society has failed to appear. Everything under the Communists moves in the opposite direction. But this religion of immoralism flourishes. The notion of an earthly paradise in which men shall dwell together in millennial brotherhood is used to justify crimes and depravities surpassing anything the modem world has seen. And this is true not only in Russia, but wherever the power of the Communist conspiracy extends. In countries beyond the reach of Moscow the taint is carried by Communist parties to their
fringe of aocomplices, dupes, and fellow travelers; even the once-honest liberals are not immune to it. More and more throughout the world those dedicated to an extreme social ideal, instead of being trained in virtue, are trained to condone crimes against the elementary principles of social conduct. Such a disaster never happened to humanity before. No such religion ever existed. That is why our statesmen have been bewildered and outwitted by it. Even after thirty years of being assiduously swindled by the Kremlin, they find it hard to believe that any human animal can be, on principle and with devout and selfless fervor, a liar, a murderer, and a cheat.

They are now looking for some. recrudescence of the old simple decencies in Malenkov and his associates. But they will look in vain. These men have been brought up in the same school. They are fanatics of the same antimoral and antiscientinc religion. Only the disproof and dislodgment of Marxism will ever cure the world of its present desperate
sickness.

 

[Gary K]

I hate this software. It's almost impossible to format a quote from a pdf file into this editor and have it come out looking halfway decent.

 

[The Barbarian]

Fact remains. The first president to publicly call for violating the 1st Amendment, the 2nd Amendment and due process was Donald Trump.

And he doesn't seem much like a leftist, does he?

 

[Gary K]

Fact remains. The first president to publicly call for violating the 1st Amendment, the 2nd Amendment and due process was Donald Trump.

And he doesn't seem much like a leftist, does he?

LOL. You are still wearing your blinders, and will continue to wear them. It's pretty much a necessity for you as if you were actually able to see outside your tunnel vision what you would see would cause you to run wild just like a spooky horse without blinders.