The troubles with Karl Marx are legion: Antisemitism, Racism, Terrorism, and Genocide

"Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism… As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction." - Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 1, The Gathering Storm (1948) 

 
Looking back at Karl Marx's writings demonstrates that by current standards the German philosopher falls far short.  Marx's early formulation of communism is antisemitic and offers a "solution" to the "Jewish Problem."

"Money is the Jealous God of Israel, beside which no other God may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities.  The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world. In emancipating itself from hucksterism and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself...by destroying the empirical essence of Judaism, the Jew will become impossible." Source Karl Marx-Engels Collected Works (London 1975ff),vol. iii,pp146-74

His early defense of using terror, one of the key elements of Totalitarianism is also problematic.

"We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you.  When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism." Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503-5

"Far from opposing the so-called excesses, those examples of popular vengeance against hated individuals or public buildings which have acquired hateful memories, we must not only condone these examples but lend them a helping hand." Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vii p 239

Karl Marx in the essay “Forced Emigration,” in the New York Daily Tribune, 22 March 1853 seems to view the elimination of classes and races as a necessary part of revolution:

Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. 

 In a July 30, 1862 letter to Frederick Engels, his chief benefactor, Marx described nineteenth-century German socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, in a racist manner:

The Jewish Nigger Lassalle . . .fortunately departs at the end of this week . . . It is now absolutely clear to me that, as both the shape of his head and his hair texture shows – he descends from the Negros who joined Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the paternal side hybridized with a nigger). Now this combination of Germanness and Jewishness with a primarily Negro substance creates a strange product. The pushiness of the fellow is also nigger-like.

 Joshua Dill has written an important essay on how even with the early Marx one could see how things would turn out so badly when his theories were implemented.

..."The year was 1844. Hoping to unite German and French radicals, Marx and his colleague Arnold Ruge moved with their wives to Paris in order to found a new theoretical journal, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals)."

Ruge falls out with Marx and goes on to provide a nuanced analysis of what the communists were offering and its shortcomings:

“What I’ve recently read, Fourier and the communists, has much to say in the critical realm—in the organic realm it is always highly problematic; and you are completely right, before one sees the “how,” there is not much to be said for the idea of a new reality. Heads are confused, and the socialist parties don’t speak much more clearly than they think. Neither the complicated proposals of the Fourierists nor the abolition of private property of the communists can be formulated clearly. Both amount in the end to a veritable police state or slave state. In order to free the proletarians both spiritually and physically from need and the pressure of need, they think of an organization that would make all people experience this need and this pressure. One must accept the challenge of ending the neglect of man at any price, and if it is necessary that the privileged suffer for this, one must accept this too. But is the practical problem even solved in this case? Is freedom achieved when both need for and abundance from the state is evenly distributed? And would men become more humane if some are relieved and some are burdened in that way? The communists say ‘yes’ and dream of a paradise as soon as the next revolution brings them to the helm, as they believe will happen. The communists are so far removed from humanity and from actual communism that living with them presents no intellectual or social attraction.”

 Those in 2017 who view Marx as having "had it figured out all along" need to have their head examined. One can diagnose a problem but providing a solution worse than the original problem should not be celebrated. The past century of communism in action, with over a 100 million dead, not to mention ideological offspring such as fascism, leaves a clear and negative record that is no cause for celebration.

Restoring Freedom in the United States: Dismantle the Welfare-Warfare State and Reform the Patriot Act

"Well, the truth is, there are simple answers, they just are not easy ones." ~ Ronald Reagan

 

Despite trillions spent on defense, terrorists on September 11, 2001, murdered 2,977 men, women, and children on US soil. The US military was only able to put two jets in the air to protect the entire Eastern seaboard and the two planes did not have live ammunition. Popular Mechanics, in a report debunking 911 myths, reports that on that day "there were only 14 fighter jets on alert in the contiguous 48 states" in a year when the military had a US$400 billion dollar budget and hundreds of military bases in 130 countries around the world. Frederick the Great's observation that “He who defends everything defends nothing.” was once again proven true. Major Heather Penney, of the first District of Columbia Air National Guard, was one of the first two warriors to take to the air on September 11, 2001, to defend the United States from a terrorist attack. In a 2011 interview on C-Span, she reflected on September 11 a decade later, observing:

I often wonder if we have forsaken some of what it means to be Americans ... to try to assure our citizens of security. There is no such thing as perfect security. ... Have we been overzealous? Has the pendulum swung too far? Such that we are abdicating our value set...?

What led this courageous pilot to such a dire reflection? A month after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed and George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act into law that expanded state power while undermining individual freedoms. Since then, the United States has been at a turning point, and the options are clear: continued arbitrary rule in a bankrupt police state or the restoration of accountability and limits. The first seems ominous, since history is littered with the wreckage of states, including democracies, that overextended themselves both domestically and internationally. If we are to address root problems in the policy realm and save the United States from "abdicating its value set", we will have to end the welfare-warfare state. Murray Rothbard, a US American economist, historian, and political theorist, noted back in 1973 that the emergence of the permanent welfare-warfare in the United States was first observable following World War II with the Cold War.

The underlying premise of the welfare-warfare state is that the radical expansion of the size and scope of the government and its intrusion on privacy can resolve challenges to security. This has been demonstrated to be flawed. Paul Cianca's shooting rampage at LAX airport and simultaneous terrorist bombings in totalitarian communist China in early November 2013 reveal once again that giving up freedoms does not translate into a guarantee of security. The welfare-warfare state did not protect American lives and property on 9/11 and a further expanding security and surveillance under the Patriot Act did not stop one lone gun man from successfully killing a TSA official and wounding at least one other or two young Muslim men on April 15, 2013 from bombing the Boston Marathon killing three and seriously wounding many more.

It did not have to be this way.

When the Cold War ended, Patrick Buchanan announced his candidacy for president in 1991, calling for a national discussion to, in effect, end the welfare-warfare state. Two decades later, and with the problem only ballooning, Buchanan summed up the policy he had wanted to see implemented at the time: "After the Cold War we should have downsized the empire dramatically and returned to become a more normal nation in a more normal time."

There are consequences to the path taken, and Buchanan has outlined the cost in treasure. At the same time the military footprint overseas while expensive and unsustainable also leads to more terrorists targeting the country. Buchanan offers an explanation of the terror attacks on the United States that the "mainstream" fails to make:

Evil though they may be, Islamic killers are over here because we are over there. They are not trying to kill us because they dislike our domestic politics, but because they detest our foreign policy. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. . . . As Osama bin Laden said, they want us to stop propping up the Saudi regime they hate, and to get off the sacred Saudi soil on which sit the holiest shrines of Islam. They want our troops out of Saudi Arabia – and if we don’t get out, they are coming over here to kill us any way they can.

Reforming the Patriot Act and making defending the lives, liberty and property of American citizens the main priority of American foreign policy not advancing the narrow interests of what President Eisenhower described in his farewell address as the military-industrial complex. There is still time to turn things around both restoring freedom and increasing security by dismantling the welfare-warfare state.

Ten years after 9/11: A horrible day followed by a horrible decade

Never Forget.

2,977 victims of September 11, 2001 terror attacks

2,977 men, women and children were murdered on September 11, 2001 over the course of a few hours on a sunny Tuesday morning. The victims were distributed as follows: 246 on the four planes converted into flying missiles. Two of the planes flew into the Twin Towers which collapsed and led to the deaths of 2,606 human beings in New York City in the towers and on the ground, and a third struck the Pentagon taking 125 lives. The fourth plane, heading to Washington D.C., never arrived and crashed into an open field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania as the passengers of the flight fought the terrorists over control of the flight.



Hours after the attacks on September 11, 2001 Thomas Fleming posted a prescient essay on what had happened and what would follow over the next decade. Essays by Pat Buchanan and George Will reflecting on the response to the attacks are chastened by failures of American policy makers. Will writes of self-inflicted wounds and Buchanan offered his judgement on the past decade:

Looking back on the decade since 9/11, one appreciates Edmund Burke’s summary judgment of that generation of British leaders who lost the North American colonies. “A great empire and little minds go ill together.”

It is not only the pundits and talking heads questioning the response over the past decade but one of the first two warriors to take to the air on September 11 to defend Washington DC. Her name is Major Heather Penney, of the first District of Columbia Air National Guard, in an interview on C-Span reflecting on September 11 a decade later said beginning at 54 minutes and 31 seconds:

"I often wonder if we have forsaken some of what it means to be Americans - some of what it means to be America in our response to try to assure our citizens of security. There is no such thing as perfect security." [..] Have we been overzealous? Has the pendulum swung too far? Such that we are abdicating our value set in terms of what it means to be an American in our desire to be totally safe?

Later on in the same interview she seemed to be echoing a sentiment echoed by Benjamin Franklin over two centuries earlier: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." The erosion of civil liberties, and the passage of the so-called "Patriot Act" are just two of the many shadows to emerge from that horrible day ten years ago that has had terrible consequences over the past decade. Terror and war are the tools that revolutionaries have always used to subvert and destroy established orders and do away with long cherished freedoms.

Today is a day to pray, remember the victims, honor those who risked their lives to save others and also remember and process what happened and the response. We owe it not only to those who died on September 11, 2001 but to the long departed and those yet to be born what kind of country will be passed on to the next generation.