Marxist Racism: in theory and practice
By Aravindan Neelakandan (of breaking India fame)
It is a subject that has been little discussed. And whatever that has been discussed has been confined in the guarded portals of the academic realm. It was never taken into public memory.
This unspoken dark secret is the embedded racism that resides at the core of Marxist ideology and practice. While in the case of Nazism its evil is explicit. It is easy to dismiss its pseudo-scientific racist claims. But even then the common psyche of Europe needed a Second World War to realize and dismiss the evils of racial constructs, that too only in European context.
But in the case of Marxism this explicit identification has never happened. In the minds of both ordinary persons as well as educated intellectuals, Marxism stands for raceless internationalist equality of all humanity. There is a considerable section of critics of Marxism who would say thus: Perhaps a failed utopian dream, but what Marxism conceptualized was worthy of dreaming and striving for… it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all…a grand failed experiment but it nevertheless it is a goal aimed at common goodness unlike the evil Nazi idea of future…is it not?
Or is it?
A study of the literature of Marxism at its formative stage through the writings of Karl Marx and Engels, reveal something contrary. Of course today we know that Marx and Engels were Euro-centric. But a third-world Marxist scholar would tell you, nevertheless despite their conditioning by the time and clime they lived in, Marx and Engels gave us tools to understand history and society with which we can understand humanity and its development scientifically. Individual pathos of scientists like Darwin or Einstein seldom come in our way of accepting their scientific discoveries and the same rule applies to Marxism – the science of human society.
How correct is this apologist argument?
What we shall explore here is the connection between what Marx and Engels wrote as part of Marxist perception of history and how that correlates with the implementation of Marxism as a state ideology by latter day saints of major denominations of Marxist creed.
Justifying the Colonization of India
That
both Marx and Engels were Euro-centric is well known. They
were convinced that non-European cultures could not possess anything of innate value. And whatever of value non-European cultures might have had, they had been surpassed in the march of history by Euro-American culture. However in the writings of Karl Marx, one finds a soft corner for Indians when compared to what he thinks of Slavs. The reason is not far to seek.
Marx finds Indian communities to be racially connected to dominant European nations. Writing in 1853 Karl Marx stated:
The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether. At all events, we may safely expect to see, at a more or less remote period, the regeneration of that great and interesting country, whose gentle natives are, to use the expression of Prince Soltykov, even in the most inferior classes, “plus fins et plus adroits que les Italiens” [more subtle and adroit than the Italians], a whose submission even is counterbalanced by a certain calm nobility, who, notwithstanding their natural langor, have astonished the British officers by their bravery,
whose country has been the source of our languages, our religions, and who represent the type of the ancient German in the Jat, and the type of the ancient Greek in the Brahmin.[1]
The sympathy Karl Marx has for Indians is essentially because he perceived them to be a fallen European master race. But even that sympathy would not stop Marx from envisioning the destruction of Indian industry by British colonialism as a much needed progressive march of history. So in the same article Marx wrote:
England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.[2]
Earlier the same year, in a letter to Friedrich Engels Marx rejoiced the destruction of Indian industry. He saw Indian villages as ‘idyllic republics’ offering ‘solid foundation for stagnant Asian despotism’ and hence the native industries should be destroyed to pave way for ‘Europeanization’ of Indian society:
I do not think anyone could imagine a more solid foundation for stagnant Asiatic despotism. And however much the English may have hibernicized the country, the breaking up of those stereotyped primitive forms was the sine qua non for Europeanisation. …
The destruction of their archaic industry was necessary to deprive the villages of their self-supporting character.[3]
Marx was well aware of the human misery including repeated ravaging famines that the collapse of Indic system by British colonialists, wrought on Indians. Yet the civilizational devaluing of India made him accept such human miseries as necessary price to be paid for the societal evolution on European lines. Marx showed nothing but contempt for Indian religion:
We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature,
exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.[4]
Yet paradoxically in the very same essay, Marx acknowledges that these very Indian weavers living ‘undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life’ had produced such ‘admirable textures ‘ and had sent them to Europe making Europe to send ‘in return for them her precious metals’.[5]
In other words the denunciation of Indian villages come from a civilizational bias rather than from an objective analysis based on economic productivity. Curiously, overlapping the period of observation made by Marx, in the span of just ninety years -from 1765 to 1858- India, coming under the grip of East India Company, had experienced twelve major famines and four ‘severe scarcities’ and for the first time India started experiencing famines not limited to small geographical regions but affecting a wider area and taking a heavy toll of life.[6] Ultimately Marx pronounces the historic verdict:
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not,
whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.[7]
Theoretical Devaluing of non-European Humanity
So it does not matter to Marx that a few million Indian might get wiped out by famines. With the devaluing of the civilization, comes the devaluing of human lives. Famines and brutalities do not matter anymore if Indian civilization could be destroyed and Europeanisation of Indian society could be achieved. Marx was not alone in this perception.
Civil Rights activist and sociologist Joyce Ladner, points out that the idea of European superiority to non-European societies was axiomatic in the writings of Engels as well:
Holding to this same axiomatic basis, Engels regarded the conquest of Algeria by the French as “an important and fortunate act for the progress of civilization.” “And after all,” he continued, “the modern bourgeois, with civilization, following him, is preferable to the feudal lord or the marauding robber, with the barbarian state of society to which they belong.”[8]
Marxist theorizing of the Western society as endowed with “civilization” and the non-Western cultures as being in “barbarian state of society”, justified colonialism and all its miserable effects on colonized humanity as “important and fortunate act for the progress of civilization.”
This devaluation of India and her culture by Marx continues to exert profound influence on Indian Marxists and explains some of the otherwise inexplicable behaviour of Indian Marxists like making themselves willing puppets in the hands of Communist Party of Great Britain, and then Communist Party of Soviet Union and now Maoist China. Their willingness to sacrifice Indian interests in the altar of international communist movement, whether during ‘Quit India’ movement or Chinese aggression of India can be traced to this devaluation of India by the founding fathers of Marxism.
The same devaluing of human lives of non-European societies can be found in Marx’s approach towards trans-Atlantic slavery. Prof. Cedric Robinson, political scientists and Black Studies scholar notes:
The cargoes of the slave ships were real human beings… However, Marx had not realized fully that the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality. These were the actual terms of their humanity. These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or decultured Blacks – men, women, and children separated from their previous universe.[9]
Here it should be emphasized that Marx was radically opposed to slavery in the then contemporary United States. But he saw slavery of Africans and the trans-Atlantic slave trade as necessary tools in the development of history. So leaving aside the ‘bad side of slavery’ treating it merely as an ‘economic category’, Marx pointed out the ‘good side of slavery’. The slavery he was dealing with was ‘direct slavery’ which was ‘Negro slavery in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America.’ It was this slavery that formed, ‘the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc.’ Marx goes on to explain:
Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.[10]
Thus it was decreed in Marxist theological view of human history. In Asian continent, Indian society had to be ‘Europeanised’ even if it meant millions of human lives destroyed by famines. Africans could be dragged out of their communities in millions, as human cargo in trans-Atlantic slave ships, and that was merely a necessary ‘economic category’ for the West to become ‘progressive’.
This utter disregard for any innate values in non-European cultures can be traced to the core belief system of Marxism.
Founding fathers of Marxism viewed race also as an ‘economic category.’ Marx considered non-European humanity as biologically inferior to European stalk. Of course they could be improved if they allowed themselves to be ‘Europeanised’ either through colonialism or through ‘direct slavery’. But as such they were a fallen race.
Anti-Black
Karl Marx was initially impressed by Charles Darwin’s theory of the origin of the species through natural selection. However soon he favoured the ideas of Pierre Trémaux, a French architect and an orientalist. He considered Trémaux’s speculations on evolution, published in 1865, as ‘a very significant advance over Darwin’. In his letter to Engels written in 1866, Marx explains:
In its historical and political applications far more significant and pregnant than Darwin. For certain questions, such as nationality, etc., only here has a basis in nature been found. E.g., he corrects the Pole Duchinski, whose version of the geological differences between Russia and the Western Slav lands he does incidentally confirm, by saying not that the Russians are Tartars rather than Slavs, etc., as the latter believes, but that on the surface-formation predominant in Russia the Slav has been tartarised and mongolised; likewise (he spent a long time in Africa) he shows that the common negro type is only a degeneration of a far higher one.[11]
Marx thus created a dangerous cocktail of biological racism camouflaged in the jargons of political economy. Engels theorized on this aspect further. He wrote in 1894:
We regard economic conditions as the factor which ultimately determines historical development. But race is itself an economic factor.[12]
Engels extended this analysis further with an erroneous notion of Lamarckian theory of acquired inheritance expanded to humanity – dividing races as if they were biological classifications- with a clear scale of ascending intellectual capacity. Of course Europeans were placed at the top:
By recognising the inheritance of acquired characters, it extends the subject of experience from the individual to the genus; the single individual that must have experience is no longer necessary, its individual experience can be replaced to a certain extent by the results of the experiences of a number of its ancestors. If, for instance, among us the mathematical axioms seem self-evident to every eight-year-old child, and in no need of proof from experience, this is solely the result of “accumulated inheritance.” It would be difficult to teach them by a proof to a bushman or Australian Negro.[13]
Anti-Semitism
Marxism also had a ‘secular’ justification for anti-Semitism. Marx himself was born in a Jewish family converted to Protestant Christianity. Marx should have imbibed all the anti-Semitic prejudices of Lutheran Protestantism throughout his student life when he was an ardent Christian. He was as anti-Semitic as any other German Protestant of his times. His biographer, Saul Kussiel Padover points out:
In his ‘Theses on Feuerbach (1845), a brief compilation of pithy sayings, he thought it necessary to drag in his bias, referring to the ‘dirty Jewish’ aspect of Christianity. His private letters are replete with anti-Semitic remarks, caricature and crude epithets: “Levy’s Jewish nose,” “usurers,” “Jew-boy,” “nigger-Jew,” etc. For reasons perhaps explainable by the German concept Selbsthass [self-hate], Marx’s hatred of Jews was a canker which neither time nor experience ever eradicated from his soul.[14]
But what marks him apart is that he could provide a convoluted theoretical justification to his hatred and this is true for every Marxist dictator. They could provide rational ‘scientific’ egalitarian justification to the worst horrors they enacted upon humanity based on their dark prejudices and power-hunger. As a secular philosopher Marx rationalized anti-Semitism through what he considered as secular scientific arguments. In an article written in 1843, Marx emphasized the need to find solution to the ‘Jewish question’ in scientific terms.
…the relation of Jew and Christian is no longer religious but is only a critical, scientific, and human relation. Science, then, constitutes their unity. But, contradictions in science are resolved by science itself.[15]
And what was this ‘scientific resolving’ of Jewish question? Conclusions of Marx become indistinguishable from the rant of a Nazi pamphleteer in the long article titled ‘Jewish Question’. Marx comes up with a very negative caricature of Jews:
Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general. The groundless law of the Jew is only a religious caricature of groundless morality and right in general, of the purely formal rites with which the world of self-interest surrounds itself.[16]
Though he criticizes Christians for becoming like Jews, he considers Christianity to be ‘too noble-minded, too spiritualistic’ to deal with the problem which it had transferred to the heavens. The final solution which Karl Marx offers antedates Auschwitz and theoretically confines Jews to annihilation.
We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism. … Since in civil society the real nature of the Jew has been universally realized and secularized, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious nature, which is indeed only the ideal aspect of practical need. Consequently, not only in the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but in present-day society we find the nature of the modern Jew, and not as an abstract nature but as one that is in the highest degree empirical, not merely as a narrowness of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society…. The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.[17]
Here what Karl Marx achieves is remarkable compared to what Hitler could achieve in terms of theoretical justification for anti-Semitism. Marx had mapped all societal evils to an archetypal Jew – a product of social history and theology. He sees Jewishness of Christian world causing the phenomenon of alienation – one of the cardinal themes in Marxist theology. In an accomplished act of sleight of theoretical hand, Marx portrays Jew as personification of all evils of capitalism. Jew becomes the symptom of a deeper disease plaguing Europe and he needs to be annihilated completely – the Jewish identity, Jewish religion, Jewish mind.
From Hatred to Annihilation
Consistent devaluing of non-European humanity is a recurring theme in the writings of Marx and Engels. With respect to those events in Europe where smaller European nationalities were struggling for survival, the sympathies of Marx and Engels were clearly with the dominant definers of European supremacy. They saw the smaller nations in Europe as irritants to the progress of Europe towards the coming Marxist utopia. The irritants needed to be removed. They needed to be completely wiped out – not just defeat of the smaller nation but destruction of entire people. Engels wrote:
But at the first victorious uprising of the French proletariat, which Louis Napoleon is striving with all his might to conjure up, the Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.[18]
Here we also see a justification for anti-Slavism – another xenophobic prejudice endemic in the common psyche of the West. Again Engels justifies the prejudice and hatred. He provides an action plan – not just subjugation of Slavic nations but complete ‘disappearance from the face of the earth …of entire reactionary people’. Marx too had expressed with derision, the same desire for ‘annihilation’ towards ‘Croats, Pandurs, Czechs and similar scum.’[19]
The very next month Engels further elaborated on the topic:
We repeat: apart from the Poles, the Russians, and at most the Turkish Slavs, no Slav people has a future, for the simple reason that all the other Slavs lack the primary historical, geographical, political and industrial conditions for independence and viability. Peoples which have never had a history of their own, which from the time when they achieved the first, most elementary stage of civilization already came under foreign sway, or which were forced to attain the first stage of civilization only by means of a foreign yoke, are not viable and will never be able to achieve any kind of independence. And that has been the fate of the Austrian Slavs….The same thing holds for the Southern Slavs proper….[20]
Engels also vehemently denounced the appeal of Mikhail Bakunin, a socialist-anarchist from Russia who called for Slav emancipation. Here Engels replies to Bakunin:
…hatred of Russians was and still is the primary revolutionary passion among Germans; that since the revolution hatred of Czechs and Croats has been added, and that only by the most determined use of terror against these Slav peoples can we, jointly with the Poles and Magyars, safeguard the revolution…. there will be a struggle, an “inexorable life-and-death struggle”, against those Slavs who betray the revolution; an annihilating fight and ruthless terror — not in the interests of Germany, but in the interests of the revolution![21]
The irrational xeno-phobic hatred Europe in general and Germany in particular has for Slavic people, becomes transformed into an expression of “primary revolutionary passion” and the use of “annihilation and terror” against Slavic people – not just their political defeat- becomes necessary to safeguard the interests of revolution. In other words, Marxist founding fathers had provided how to justify hatred with theory and execute crimes against humanity all the while professing to advance the cause of humanity.
A Marxist blueprint for Hitler and Stalin
In 1849 Engels grudgingly accepted Poland as one of the three Slav nations that might have a future. But by 1851 he was convinced that Poland should disappear as a nation. He proceeded to provide a blueprint for the dissipation of Polish nation:
Conclusion: To take as much as possible away from the Poles in the West, to man their fortresses, especially Posen, with Germans on the pretext of defence, to let them stew in their own juice, send them into battle, gobble bare their land, fob them off with promises of Riga and Odessa and, should it be possible to get the Russians moving, to ally oneself with the latter and compel the Poles to give way…. A nation which can muster 20,000 to 30,000 men at most, is not entitled to a voice. And Poland certainly could not muster very much more.[22]
History shows that the blueprint Engels expressed in his letter to Marx in 1851 was given a shape within the next hundred years. Stalin signed the notorious Munich agreement with Nazi Germany in 1939. The party line apologist argument in defense of this act of Stalin is that Stalin was being strategic and he prevented the Western powers trying to pit Nazi Germany against a newly developing Soviet Union. However a study of Soviet literature then, suggests a deeper cooperation between Nazis and Soviets particularly with respect to Poland despite Hitler’s visceral hatred for Communists.
The treaty between Nazis and USSR was signed on August 23 1939. On September 1 1939 Germany invaded Poland. On September 17 1939 Govt. of USSR sent a ‘note’ to Poland ambassador in Moscow. The content of the ‘note’ was published the very next day in Soviet propaganda magazine Izvestia:
Mr., Ambassador, The Polish-German war has highlighted the internal bankruptcy of the Polish state….In view of this situation, the Soviet Government has instructed the Supreme Commander of the Red Army to order its troops to cross the border and to protect the lives and property of the Western Ukrain and Western Byelorussia. Simultaneously, the Soviet Government intends to take all the measures to save the Polish people from the ill-starred war into which they have been plunged by their unwise leaders and to enable them to live a peaceful life. [23]
There are striking similarities between the logic used by both USSR and Nazi Germany to justify their entering of Poland. If USSR was using the logic of ethnic minorities of Ukrainian and Byelorussian origin within Poland to justify its aggression, Nazi Germany to justified its invasion of Poland. Nazi propaganda magazine ‘Die Wehrmacht’ wrote of ‘the brutal suppression of ethnic Germans in Poland’. If Soviets blamed the ‘unwise leaders’ of Poland and not Hitler for the war, Nazis were more Marxist in their justification. ‘Die Wehrmacht’ reminding the Poles that they ‘were the only remaining Slavic vassal in Eastern Europe’ accused Poland of ‘desire to play the role of the big man’.[24] Engels would have definitely empathized with the logic of ‘Die Wehrmacht.’
On September 28 1939 Soviet-Nazi treaty of friendship was concluded in Moscow. Izvestia reported the next day:
The Government of the USSR and the German Government following the disintegration of the Polish state … have come to an agreement with regard to the following: they establish as their boundary between their mutual state interests on the territory of the formal Polish state a line traced on the map…The necessary state restructuring on the territory west of the said line shall be carried out by the German Government, on the east of this line by the Government of the USSR.[25]
In other words, it was the same plan Engels wrote to Marx in 1853 regarding the deconstruction of Poland, which was now getting executed by Hitler and Stalin. However it did not stop with simply the dismembering of Poland and its occupation by Soviet Union and Nazi Reich. Both Hitler and Stalin used their occupied territories to execute their enemies – the annihilation of ‘scum’ and ‘reactionary people’ as a whole as envisioned by Marx and Engels.
Katyn – the Soviet Auschwitz
With Soviet-Nazi pact, Nazi Gestapo and its dreaded Soviet counterpart NKVD started an era of close cooperation. Again this was initiated by Stalin himself. Historian George Stanford explains:
It emerged after [the Soviet-Nazi pact] as part of their growing cooperation to destroy Poland. Stalin had already provided Hitler with a sweetener by returning some hundred German communists who had sought refuge in the USSR to the tender mercies of Nazi concentration camps. Their handing over at Brest-Litovsk provided early practice for the NKVD and Gestapo to work out the technique of prisoner exchanges.[26]
As soon as Soviet occupation of Poland with Nazi cooperation began in September 1939 14,500 Polish officers and policemen were taken prisoners by the Red Army and they continued to languish in three special NKVD run prisoner-of-war camps at three separate places. By mid-March 1940 all their contacts with outside world ceased and they disappeared without a trace. Another 7,300 Polish prisoners held in NKVD jails in the western regions of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic also similarly disappeared without a trace.[27] Soon the notorious Beria – Stalin’s killer hand, sent a detailed report to Stalin to segregate the Polish PoWs according to occupation zone and 33000 Polish prisoners were subject to exchange with the Germans.[28]
On 5-March-1940 Beria sent a top secret memorandum to Stalin. There had been a problem. In prisoner-of-war camps there were a great number of Polish prisoners who were “accursed enemies of Soviet power, filled with hate for the Soviet order.” So he suggested a solution in the memorandum:
The cases of the 14,700 former Polish officers, civil servants, landlords, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes and prison officers held in prisoner-of-war camps,….And also the cases of those arrested and held in camps in the western regions of the Ukraine and Belorussia numbering 11,000 people,… to examine them as a matter of urgency, with the application of the highest measure of punishment—shooting. To examine the cases without summoning those arrested and without presenting charges, stating the ending of the investigation and summing up…[29]
It was not a private note that passed between Stalin and Beria. But from the declassified documents now, it is clear that within the next two days, by 5th March, Politburo of CPSU agreed to all proposals submitted by Beria. 25,700 prisoners of war would be tried in the absence of the accused themselves and would be executed by shooting as agreed before the trials. Author Prof. Richard Sakwa notes:
From notes on the first page of the report we know that Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov and Mikoyan were directly involved in the decision, and from marginal notes that Kalinin and Kaganovich agreed to the action.[30]
It was an execution that would have pleased Engels.
Fortunately for Stalin, the massacre and mass graves were first discovered by Nazis. So it was conveniently dismissed as propaganda by Soviets and Communists for decades. Other allied powers also did not want to take up issues with Stalin as they were fighting the common enemy Hitler. But despite propaganda and denial, it was a well known secret among the Marxist power circles in Moscow. Yet they consistently denied Soviet authorship of this genocidal crime. It was only on April 13 1990, that Gorbachev admitted that Soviet NKVD was responsible for this mass murder which today goes by the name Katyn massacre. Even then he wanted to protect Communist Party of Soviet Union that he did not take the responsibility of Soviet government having ordered the murders of thousands of unarmed prisoners of war in cold blood. And the killing was a calculated genocidal step. Author Wesley Adamczyk points out, “…the Polish people “had lost about half of their homeland’s intellectual and military leadership”[31]
It was only on 14 October 1992, half a century after the Marxist crime against humanity was perpetrated, that the original Russian documents about Katyn massacre were handed over to Walesa by Rudolf Pikhoya as the senior archivist of Russia under orders from Yelstein.
It was a Marxist crime against humanity – a direct line connects the massacre of unarmed Polish prisoners of war by Soviets with the ideas put forth by Marx and Engels just as how the racism of Nazis connect with the victims of Auschwitz.
Theology of Hatred continues
Even today the embedded racism of Marxist theology continues to haunt humanity. In the third world countries, Marxism creates in its adherents, self-negation and derisional depreciation of their native cultural traditons. Then they develop a chauvnism of westernized modernity around the rootless native identity usually in confrontation with other neighbouring cultural identities which they label as inferior. Thus Communist Party of China as early as in 1927 passed an official resolution that China was not an Asiatic society.[32] This emotional uprootment from the spiritual and cultural matrix of China with decades of indoctrination in Marxism, paved way for ruthless destruction of all Buddhist monuments and treatises by Mao and his forces during the so-called cultural revolution.
Of course CPC does not officially and explicitly uphold Han nationalism. However the official policy is achieving a ‘final stage of integration’ where the nationalities should overcome their mutual alienation. Tim Oakes points out how this process effectively promotes Han superiority:
What would bring about this crystallization of the ‘collective body of the Chinese people’, the zhonghua minzu, was socialist modernization and cultural development, and in these the Han were the clear leaders.[33]
In a totalitarian state where such racio-cultural supremacy gets a theoretical justification, devaluing of the humanity of others is blatant. In 1957, Zhou Enlai proclaimed:
Without mutual assistance, especially assistance from the Han people, the minority peoples will find it difficult to make significant progress on their own.[34]
Educationists MacPherson and Beckett point out that such perceptions actively propagated by Marxist state, make ordinary Han Chinese think of Tibetians as a burden. This reflects exactly the sentiments expressed by Marx towards ‘Croats, Pandurs, Czechs and similar scum’, who he found deserving ‘annihilation’ for being thankless against the ‘civilizing mission’ of Germany. MacPherson & Beckett point out Han racism and Marxism reinforce each other:
This ethnic arrogance (Han chauvinism) is reinforced in the Marxist theory of progress by legitimating the subjugation of minorities to Han dominance in the name of “progress”.[35]
The destruction of monasteries in Tibet, devaluing of Tibetian culture and religion, ethnic cleansing of Tibetians and creation of Han settlements by Chinese State as alleged by Tibetians – all these are accepted methodologies in Marxist creed. In conclusion,
Marxism is as dangerous and evil as Nazism if not more, for Nazism is visibly evil, Marxism camouflages its evil with the promise of an Utopia but sledom does one know that the Utopia Marxism promises necessitates countless humans massacred on its way up and in the end when the doors of Utopia shut behind the pilgrim-revolutionary he finds himself not in a socialist heaven but deep inside the womb of a totalitarian hell. [36]
[1] Karl Marx, The Future Results of British Rule in India, New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, No. 856, August 9, 1853
[2] Ibid.
[3] Marx letter to Engels, June 14, 1853: quoted in Joyce A.Ladner, 1998
[4] Karl Marx, The Future Results of British Rule in India, New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, No. 856, August 9, 1853
[5] Ibid.
[6] Dharma Kumar, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Meghnad Desai, The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 2, CUP Archive, 1983, p.477
[7] Karl Marx, The Future Results of British Rule in India, New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, No. 856, August 9, 1853
[8] Joyce A. Ladner, The Death of White Sociology: Essays on Race and Culture, Black Classic Press, 1998, p.230
[9] Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism, The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, University of North Carolina Press, 2000, pp.121-2
[10] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Cosimo, Inc., 2008, pp.121-2
[11] Karl Marx letter to F.Engels dated 7-Aug-1866
[12] Engels letter to Borgius dated 25-Jan-1894
[13] Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of nature, Foreign Languages Pub. House, Moscow, 1954, p.353
[14] Saul Kussiel Padover, Karl Marx, an intimate biography, McGraw-Hill, 1978, p.171
[15] Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher; February 1844: written in Autumn 1843
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Friedrich Engels, Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 194, January 13, 1849
[19] Karl Marx, quoted in Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, ReadHowYouWant.com, 2010,p.131
[20] Friedrich Engels, Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 222, February, 1849
[21] Friedrich Engels, Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 223, February 16, 1849
[22] Engels to Marx: Letter dated 23-May-1851
[23] Izvestia, 18-Sep-1939: Soviet-German Treaty: Sputnik, Soviet Press Digest, August 1989
[24] “Warum und wofür?,” Die Wehrmacht, 3 (1939, Nr. 19), p. 2
[25] Izvestia, 29-Sep-1939: Soviet-German Treaty: Sputnik, Soviet Press Digest, August 1989
[26] George Sanford, Katyn and the Soviet massacre of 1940: truth, justice and memory, Routledge, 2005,p.45
[27] Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S.Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski [Editors], Katyn A Crime Without Punishment, Yale University Press, 2007,p.1
[28] George Sanford, ibid.
[29] Document 6.11 Katyn, Beria’s Memorandum to Stalin dated 5-Mar-1930, in Richard Sakwa, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union 1917-1991, Routledge 1999, pp.240-1
[30] Ibid.
[31] Wesley Adamczyk, When God Looked the Other Way: An Odyssey of War, Exile, and Redemption, University of Chicago Press, 2004, p.xi
[32] Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism,Oxford University Press, 1983, p.13
[33] Tim Oakes, Tourism and Modernity in China, Routledge, 1998, p.103
[34] Quoted in Seonaigh MacPherson & Gulbahar Beckett, The Hidden Curriculum of Assimilation, in Cultural Education– Cultural Sustainability: Minority, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Ethno-religious Groups in Multicultural Societies (Ed. Zvi Bekerman & Ezra Kopelowitz), Routledge, 2008, p.105
[35] Ibid.
[36]
http://centreright.in/2012/05/marxist-r ... 61UVfQr2nA
