Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Frederick Engles was a proto-Nazi, and I stand by my words and this is why

Frederick Engels, "The Magyar Struggle," 1849: "The chief mission of all the other great and small nationalities and peoples is to perish in the universal revolutionary storm. ... [the] long-decayed and impotent nationalities, such as the Austarian Slavs ... Czech and Serbs ... these remnants of a nation, mercilessly crushed, as Hegel said, by the course of history, this national refuse is always the fanatical representative of the counter-revolution and remains so until it is completely exterminated or de-nationalized, as its whole existence is in itself a protest against a great historical revolution. ... The South Slavs have trailed behind the Germans and Magyars for a thousand years ...the Austrian Germans and the Magyars will take a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will scatter this Slav Sonderbund and annihilate all these small pig-headed nations even to their very names. ... the next world war will cause ... also [these] entire reactionary peoples [to disappear]. And that too is an advance."

Frederick Engels, Democratic Pan-Slavism: "The Germans have taken the pains to civilize the obstinate Czechs and Slovenes and to introduce amongst them trade, industry, a tolerable agriculture and education! ... And one day we shall take a bloody revenge on the Slavs ... hatred of the Russians was, and still is, the first revolutionary passion of the Germans ... a hatred of the Czechs and Croats has been added to this ... we can only secure the revolution against these Slavs by the most decisive acts of terrorism ... no reference to an indefinite democratic future of these lands will prevent us from treating our enemies as enemies. ... then we shall fight an impeccable life-and-death struggle with Slavdom ... a war of annihilation and ruthless terrorism."

From Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848 (New York: Penguin Books, 1993)

There is even more of this stuff of which Marx too was guilty. Revolutionary racism, yeah?

1 comment:

  1. Well, he certainly was not a Leninist!

    The right of nations to self-determination is Lenin's invention. (...and Stalin's)

    ReplyDelete