Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...
hardcore_gamer

Is Karl Marx the father of racial genocide?

Recommended Posts

There is a scene in the Soviet Story (documentary) that reveals some interesting information/quotes from Karls Marx himself where he talks about how nations unable to reach a state of revolution should be destroyed for being unable to live up to the communist ideal. Most modern world communists try to defend the crimes of the past by arguing that unlike Nazism, communism was just good idea executed poorly as a result of corrupted leaderships. But if this is true and Karl Marx did indeed say that (watch the video) then this may forever destroy whatever sympathy I had for communism.

One could argue that communism never openly talks about how entire nations should be destroyed and that it only preached peace and unity, but I would like to point out that Hitler never told the German nation that he intended to systematically slaughter every race on the planet that he did not consider to be a part of his "master race". Just because Karls Marx said this and that, that doesn't mean all of it should be taken at face value and for all we know the man could have had all sorts of other sinister believes that he did not openly talk about a lot do to their radical nature.

What is your take on this? Do you think that Karls Marx might have been a whole lot more bloodthirsty then people are willing to admit?

Discuss.

Oh! And here is the clip by the way:

Share this post


Link to post

No.

The Mongol conquest of China by Genghis Khan resulted in somewhere between 15 million and 60 million death, depending on which historian you ask. That was at the dawn of the thirteenth century, back when there weren't a billion Chinese people.

Just for fun, look at something like this. That's even older. And there are a lot of similar passages in the same source.

Share this post


Link to post
Gez said:

No.

The Mongol conquest of China by Genghis Khan resulted in somewhere between 15 million and 60 million death, depending on which historian you ask. That was at the dawn of the thirteenth century, back when there weren't a billion Chinese people.

Just for fun, look at something like this. That's even older. And there are a lot of similar passages in the same source.


Racial genocide and genocide isn't really the same thing. Sure the Mongols killed a lot of people but the Mongol leadership did not just sit down prior to the slaughter and said "ok guys, the Chinese are all filth and now we will put a end to their existence". By racial genocide I mean large scale genocides driven by ideological reasons that don't serve any other practical purpose. As ruthless as the Mongols were, they did not exterminate the populations of the lands they had absorbed into their empire if they were no longer trying to resist their new Mongol masters.

Share this post


Link to post

A genocide is by definition a racial one. That's directly built in the etymology of the word: you kill genes.

The Mongols had ideological and racial reasons, plenty of them.

And I can tell that you didn't follow the little link I provided, out of laziness no doubt, because you didn't address it one whit.

Finally, "destroying a nation" does not necessarily imply genocide. Poland has been destroyed a couple of times, for example.

Share this post


Link to post

Yeah, genocide is about as old as civilization itself, if not older. The old testament is full of the Jews doing it.

Share this post


Link to post

Do you believe what the bible says but only if it suits your argument?

Yeah God dealt a heavy hand because blood was required but all the while a "gift" was promised. A final blood sacrifice.

And ,if I'm not mistaken, that biblical passage Gez offered refers to a story in which the people disobeyed God's command because they couldn't resist 'the spoils'.

Look at today. It's all just the same story over and over and over...

Share this post


Link to post
Danarchy said:

Yeah, genocide is about as old as civilization itself, if not older. The old testament is full of the Jews doing it.


I wouldn't quote anything in the Bible as being historically accurate, and at best with a grain of salt.

Besides Jewish people aren't a race per se, especially at the time that the biblical events would have occurred. I'm pretty sure worldwide genetic tests have linked Jewish people with others of a similar geographic origin, Palestinians for instance.

Racism is a fairly new concept considering the whole of human history. In the past, you were more likely to be singled out for violence based on the religious, social, or political situation of the time.

Share this post


Link to post
E.J. said:

Besides Jewish people aren't a race per se, especially at the time that the biblical events would have occurred.

Yes they were, and still are to an extent. Why do you think there is all that mythology about the Tribes of Israel, and being the "Chosen People", and tracing everyone to a Patriarch? The word "semitic" (and by extension, "antisemitic") does not refer to an ideology, religion, or philosophy; but to a common ancestry traced to the mythical Sem (or Shem).

There is some element of truth behind these myths, because since proselytism was forbidden to them by the Romans, the only way for Judaism to remain in existence was filial propagation. (Interestingly, it was originally patrilineal, but it became matrilineal at some point in time.)

E.J. said:

Racism is a fairly new concept considering the whole of human history.

It's not. Oh no it's not. What's relatively recent is pseudo-scientific justifications for racism, but before people didn't try to have proof of their people's superiority over all others, they just assumed it was true and that was good enough for them.

For example, the concept "barbarian", with all the associated baggage of brutish cruelty and stupidity, was created by the ancient Greeks and designated anyone who did not speak their language.

The Roman Empire was uniquely successful at the time because the vanquished people were accepted into the empire as full citizens, rather than remaining an underclass as was usual everywhere else. Even then, though, they kept a hierarchy of races, with them at the top. Given their troubles trying to conquer Germany, they saved face by claiming the guys there were actually their cousins (which is why they're called Germans by the way).

Share this post


Link to post
Gez said:

Yes they were, and still are to an extent. Why do you think there is all that mythology about the Tribes of Israel, and being the "Chosen People", and tracing everyone to a Patriarch? The word "semitic" (and by extension, "antisemitic") does not refer to an ideology, religion, or philosophy; but to a common ancestry traced to the mythical Sem (or Shem).

Two to four thousand years ago (by some's Bible standards) is not a long time considering the whole of human history (
~150,000 years)
.

Gez said:

There is some element of truth behind these myths, because since proselytism was forbidden to them by the Romans, the only way for Judaism to remain in existence was filial propagation. (Interestingly, it was originally patrilineal, but it became matrilineal at some point in time.)

The truth being in as they incorporated places, and/or some of their contemporaries (real people) of the time. If Tom Clancy wrote a fictional spy thriller that had real places in it like New York, Berlin, or Beijing, and real people like Obama, or Kim Jong-il, would that mean it had elements of truth?

Gez said:

It's not. Oh no it's not. What's relatively recent is pseudo-scientific justifications for racism, but before people didn't try to have proof of their people's superiority over all others, they just assumed it was true and that was good enough for them.

For example, the concept "barbarian", with all the associated baggage of brutish cruelty and stupidity, was created by the ancient Greeks and designated anyone who did not speak their language.


While there may have been ancient theories on race, there was no racial class system in ancient Greece, or Rome. The majority of their slaves were by today's standards "white". More than one emperor looked more favorably upon the Egyptians, and Ethiopians than they did the Gauls, and the peoples of the Germanic territories of the time.

Kind of contradictory to the Aryan views that fueled racism in more recent times...

I believe it was the writing of Frank Snowden, and Orlando Patterson, that first brought this to my attention.

As far as the genetic component goes:

Dr. Harry Ostrer, professor of pediatrics, pathology and medicine and director of the Human Genetics Program at NYU Langone Medical Center. "More recent studies of Y chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA have pointed to founder effects of both Middle Eastern and local origin, yet, the issue of how to characterize Jewish people as mere coreligionists or as genetic isolates that may be closely or loosely related remained unresolved."

"Our study demonstrated that the studied Jewish populations represent a series of geographical isolates or clusters with genetic threads that weave them together," added Dr. Gil Atzmonl assistant professor of medicine and genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, the study's lead author. "These threads were observed as identical strands of DNA that were shared within and between Jewish groups. Thus, over the past 3000 years, both the flow of genes and the flow of religious and cultural ideas have contributed to Jewishness.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100603123707.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Genographic_Project

Share this post


Link to post

Maybe you should actually read Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels before considering this. Their ideas are pretty good. While communism isn't ideal, extreme capitalism is far from ideal too and they were pretty much challenging that. No racism or any of that involved.

Share this post


Link to post
E.J. said:

Two to four thousand years ago (by some's Bible standards) is not a long time considering the whole of human history (
~150,000 years)
.

Sure, if by "history" you mean "including prehistory".

But you can ask your nearest Neanderthal neighbors about whether or not genocide may have happened in prehistory.

E.J. said:

The truth being in as they incorporated places, and/or some of their contemporaries (real people) of the time. If Tom Clancy wrote a fictional spy thriller that had real places in it like New York, Berlin, or Beijing, and real people like Obama, or Kim Jong-il, would that mean it had elements of truth?

Well, yeah, as you just said it: the mention of real places and real people. Note that all the places and people mentioned in the Bible corresponded to real stuff. But it is a historical document -- one that cannot be trusted as it's more about mythical history and hagiography, omitting stuff and insisting on trivial points, mixing fact and fiction, and so on. No historical document is really reliable anyway; a large part of a historian's work is gathering and recouping sources, both primary (about the event) and secondary (about the other sources).

For example, the thread was about the birth of the notion of genocide. Not about actual genocides; Karl Marx is not considered to be a criminal against mankind, he didn't organize mass slaughter himself. Therefore, the many accounts in the OT of the Chosen People slaughtering everyone in a country -- men, women, children, babies, even the animals they had domesticated, and destroying everything they had built -- certainly count, because whether it happened or not, the idea of entirely deleting a people was present.

E.J. said:

As far as the genetic component goes:

If you bring actual genetic science to the debate, the entire notion of race is rendered moot, since there is only one human race, biologically speaking. All that rubbish about being Caucasian, Australoid or whatever is not genetically significant enough to deserve being called a race.

With the looser definition of race as used in racism, though, then yeah Jews are a race; and there are many many races (Slavs and Anglo-Saxons are both white, but they can still be considered different races by

Share this post


Link to post

hardcore_gamer said:
There is a scene in the Soviet Story (documentary) that reveals some interesting information/quotes from Karls Marx himself where he talks about how nations unable to reach a state of revolution should be destroyed for being unable to live up to the communist ideal.

Maybe if you use should in the sense that it will probably happen. That's not something he is advocating; it's something in the social and economic process he's describing (accurately or not). If by saying that race and class will be eliminated when society reaches the state of communism means people of specific classes and races need to be hunted down and killed, then we can conclude that motions to eliminate monopolies imply the extermination of corporate owners and employees.

Most modern world communists try to defend the crimes of the past by arguing that unlike Nazism, communism was just good idea executed poorly as a result of corrupted leaderships.

How does that defend any crimes of the past? Stalin, for example, isn't absolved of having many people killed if communist theories aren't to blame for his actions. Unless, of course, you mean communists' main crime is having certain ideas, rather than any killings or other atrocities they executed.

The idea of blaming ideas is in itself ridiculous, and contradicts certain conceptions Marx himself may be responsible for bringing to our attention, intellectually speaking. That is, on the development of ideas, economically and historically.

Just because Karls Marx said this and that, that doesn't mean all of it should be taken at face value and for all we know the man could have had all sorts of other sinister believes that he did not openly talk about a lot do to their radical nature.

For all we know, yeah, we could just make up some nice little conspiracy theories trying to interpret snippets of what he said in oblique ways for people who didn't even read his work.

E.J. said:
While there may have been ancient theories on race, there was no racial class system in ancient Greece, or Rome. The majority of their slaves were by today's standards "white". More than one emperor looked more favorably upon the Egyptians, and Ethiopians than they did the Gauls, and the peoples of the Germanic territories of the time.

The same tribal elements we find today in nations did exist back then, as you are illustrating there by noting favoritism, but cultural standards were different. Gauls were more "barbaric" and thus considered culturally inferior than many "races" in the Mediterranean, which was the center of Western culture, especially with the cultural heritage of the fertile crescent and Egypt. Racism doesn't depend on a theory or on an understanding of genetics or the evolution of species; it depends on giving certain human traits inherent superiority or inferiority. When genetic and cultural differences between groups are taken, in antagonism, as stereotypical signs of supremacy or debasement, you get racism.

Using the term based on modern ideology is linked to the Holocaust, considered to be the most a central crime against humanity in Western culture. The Holocaust was caused by a group using 19th-century science merged with nationalism as a pretext. This created a legal precedent that gave this definition a particular political import. As far as the process of discrimination is concerned, racism and xenophobia are the same thing because we know that racial conception is culturally defined by stereotypes and is nonspecific due to the complexity of genetic mutation.

Share this post


Link to post
myk said:

For all we know, yeah, we could just make up some nice little conspiracy theories trying to interpret snippets of what he said in oblique ways for people who didn't even read his work.

Yeah there was this one floating around about him being a Jewish Satanist and Freemasons were responsible for the Communist Revolution. The silly ideas some people come up with.

Share this post


Link to post
Danarchy said:

Yeah, genocide is about as old as civilization itself, if not older. The old testament is full of the Jews doing it.

Rofl.

hardcore_gamer asked:
Is Karl Marx the father of racial genocide?

No, he just talked about a form of government (the ideal communism) that is really awful to implement. Capitalism together with democracy is the only way for humans I think.

Share this post


Link to post

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×