An Honest Marxist
Someone in Tennessee has hung an effigy of U.S. Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn from a tree, accompanied by the amusing slogan, “STOP THE HATE.”
In response to this, I see that Soopermexican at Right Scoop is describing this as “the winner of the political demonstration most lacking in self-awareness.” I disagree.
“Lack of self-awareness” is giving them too much benefit of the doubt. In fact, this is doctrinaire Marxist ideology, as preached in theory by progressives for a hundred and fifty years, and put into practice and propaganda by Marxist leaders, activists, and “reformers” for at least the last hundred years, from Lenin to Mao to Che Guevara to Bill Ayers to tens of thousands of hack university professors and hundreds of thousands of indoctrinated students:
Premise 1: Capitalism is intolerant and oppressive.
Premise 2: Intolerance and oppression must be eliminated before humanity can live in peace and harmony.
Conclusion: All adult capitalists must be murdered, and their children re-educated in the tenets of Marxist orthodoxy.
That’s not hatred. That’s just Marxism 101.
The Marxists or “socialists” or “social progressives” who do not employ this syllogism in verbal or practical form are merely being dishonest. It is what they believe and hope for, but, for whatever reasons, they lack the audacity or the stomach for expressing the view — the doctrinaire essence of Marxist political theory — as bluntly as their more honest and hardcore ideological kin.
Why, for example, did John Dewey dedicate most of the last half of his life to advocating, designing, and defending his model of so-called progressive schooling, with its explicit (though mildly expressed) aims of destroying the private family, undermining the belief in private property, and indoctrinating all young people to submit their lives to his concept of “social service” (i.e., spiritual enslavement to a progressive elite)? The answer: Because he was too cowardly to say “kill the capitalists and re-educate their children.”
If you doubt me on this particular example of Dewey, I invite you to read my full assessment of the man, his defense of Stalinism, and his educational philosophy, in Part Two of The Case Against Public Education, in the chapter named “Soft Fichteanism.”
