Across the United States and other Western countries, including Australia, left-wing protesters have vandalised statues of leading historical figures as part of their Black Lives Matter (“BLM”) movement.
Ironically, their alleged fight against racism is taking place in the midst of a supposedly deadly pandemic, which reveals, once again, that the major threat to human rights in the West comes from an anachronistic left-wing ideology in which the concept of human right is entirely politicised and possesses no intrinsic worth.
If these left-wing vandals were really concerned about racism, they would not be vandalising the statues of brave historical figures who fought against racial discrimination and championed equal rights for all. By contrast, some of the most dreadfully racist people of the past were precisely those who are now elevated by them to the pantheon of the greatest idols of the Far Left, including the likes of Karl Marx and eugenicist Margaret Sanger, the thoroughly racist advocate of eugenics.
One of the statues vandalised by the leftist mobs is that of Abraham Lincoln, who brought black slavery to an end at the cost of some 600,000 American lives. Lincoln believed that America’s founders intended everyone to be treated equally and endowed by God with inalienable rights to life, liberty and property. Enacted on January 1, 1863, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation stated that everyone who was held as a slave “henceforward shall be free”.
However, Marty Walsh, the radical leftist mayor of Boston, supports taking down his city’s memorial in Lincoln’s honour. Situated in the city’s Park Square, the statue was intended to show the 16th President’s commitment to freeing all black people from slavery. “It depicts Lincoln with one arm extended above a freed slave with broken shackles, symbolizing that, by Lincoln’s hand, the institution of slavery was broken”. The inscription on the statue reads: “A race set free and the country at peace. Lincoln rests from his labors”.[1] However, a new petition supported by the Boston mayor contends, in post-modernist fashion, that the monument “instead represents us still beneath someone else”.
Similarly, BLM rioters have defaced the beautiful Robert Goud Shaw Memorial honouring the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, a monument erected in honour of the first African-American volunteer regiment that saw extensive service in the Union Army during the American Civil War. The superintendent of National Parks of Boston, Michael Creasey, says “the memorial has been a beacon of hope and a rallying point for conversations about race, justice and human rights”.[2]
Another vandalised statue is dedicated to Matthias Baldwin, the remarkable 19th century entrepreneur and inventor who not only fought against slavery but also supported black voting rights. His statue in the City Hall was defaced with paint and graffiti during BLM protests in Philadelphia.[3] “The irony of vandalizing a monument to those who died to end slavery is lost on the morons who don’t know their history”, explains Joe Walsh, a member of the Friends of Matthias Baldwin Society.[4] Baldwin opened a school for black children in Philadelphia, and for years paid the salary of its teachers. As a machinery manufacturer, he hired blacks in his shops and paid them generously when that was not the norm.
The desecration of the statues of poet and abolitionist Jon Greenleaf Whittier (left) provides another example of disrespect for the memory of those who truly fought against racism. His statue was vandalised over last weekend in the very city that bears his name. The rioters wrote “BLM” and “racist” on the seated statue located in the city’s Central Park. The protesters fail to understand that Whittier was a leading anti-slavery activist in his time, and an active delegate to the first meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Movement.[5] As noted by Celia Caust-Ellenbogen, an archivist at the Friends History Liberty of Swarthmore College, “Whittier edited anti-slavery newspapers, helped to establish the Liberty Party, wrote numerous poems supporting the abolitionist cause, as well as an 1833 tract in favour of immediate and unconditional emancipation of enslaved people”.[6]
As the violent mobs continue to vandalise statues with impunity, perhaps they should consider targeting those of their own left-wing icons. The likes of Karl Marx and Margaret Sanger immediately comes to mind. In fact, modern anti-Semitism and racism can be traced without difficulty to that great icon of socialism and darling of the New Left: Karl Marx.
Karl Marx
Two centuries after his birth, Marx remains idolised by many left-wing politicians and intellectuals, as the unveiling of a five-metre statue of him in his birthplace of Trier, Germany, in 2018 fully testifies. Another equally famous statue of Marx can be found 
atop his tomb at Highgate Cemetery, in London. In the United States, there is a white bust of Marx on full display at the National Zoological Park, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington. Another famous image can be found at New York’s Guggenheim Museum (right). This work is a painting by Cecilia Vicuña and part of her notorious collection depicting the greatest mass-murderers in International and Latin American Socialism, including Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, and others.
That Marx viscerally abhorred black people is a fact beyond dispute. While he saw ‘class struggle’ as the primary instrument for social-economic progress, Marx was certainly not averse to inflicting violence on “reactionaries” who dared to resist the advance of communism. Whereas Hitler later extolled the “master race” and its “right” to eliminate the so-called “weaker races”, Marx believed that, in his own words: “The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust”.[7]
Marx effectively supported white supremacy via Britain’s colonisation of non-white nations, primarily on racial grounds. It was entirely acceptable for him, a person so full of hatred for his political adversaries, to describe them in dehumanising terms such as “vermin”. Such people, in his view, deserved to be destroyed for the sin of “retarding the long march of history”.[8] Although ethnically a Jew, Marx often resorted to appalling anti-Semitic tirades. He had a special inclination to use terms like “dirty Jew” and “Jewish nigger” in order to describe these political adversaries.[9] In 1862, he wrote to Engels that “the Jewish nigger” Ferdinand Lassalle (below), a Prussian-German jurist and social-democratic activist, was leaving Britain to Return to Ge
rmany. He described Lassalle as follows:
It is now perfectly clear to me that, as the shape of his head and the growth of his hair indicates, he is descended from the Negroes who joined in Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the father’s side was crossed with a nigger). This union of Jew and German on a Negro base was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid. The pushiness of the fellow is also nigger-like.[10]
Marx wrote to Engels, in 1861, that the Prussian Egyptologist, Karl Lepsius, had “proved” that the Jewish exodus was “the expulsion of a Leper people from Egypt, at the hands of whom was an Egyptian priest named Moses”.
In another letter Marx argued that French evolutionist Pierre Trémaux, author of numerous scientific and ethnographic publications, “proved that the common Negro type is the degenerate form of a much higher one”, crowing that this appraisal was “a significance advance over Darwin”. A further example can be found in his article attacking Moses Levy, the then editor of London’s Daily Telegraph. There Marx describes Levy’s nose as “an elephant trunk, an antenna, a lighthouse, a telegraph”. [11]
In On the Jewish Question, published in 1843, Marx openly attacks the Jewish community for allegedly “Judaizing the whole of Europe” and, in effect, “dissolving earlier forms of solidarity and turning Europeans into this own caricature of Jews”.[12] This book is primarily a critique of classical liberalism and individual rights, rather than a criticism of Judaism, but one where we can find terribly anti-Semitic tirades such as that “money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist”. To make “the Jew” impossible it is actually necessary, Marx stated, “to abolish preconditions that produced Judaism”.[13] According to him, “in emancipating itself from hucksterism and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself”.[14]
In other words, to make the capitalist order and its attitude to money disappear, Marx concluded that it was necessary to also make the Jewish religion entirely disappear. Similar to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union cited Marxist ideology to create entire categories of people as “sub-humans”. In Nazi Germany, this included the physically impaired and mentally ill, followed then by the Jews. In the Soviet Union, the main targets of mass extermination were “the enemies of the people”, an abstract category of individuals that included not only the “bourgeoisie” but also entire cultural, national, and ethnic groups, “if they seemed (for equally ill-defined reasons) to threaten the Soviet state”.[15]
Those classified as belonging to these targeted groups would first be dehumanised and then mercilessly destroyed. They were described as vermin, parasites, and infectious diseases so as to be exterminated for the good of the community as a whole.[16] The Marxist regime regarded them as nothing but a “pollution” and “poisonous weeds needing to be uprooted”.[17] They were deemed “half-animals and something even lower than two-legged cattle”. [18]
It is little wonder therefore that Marxist teachings were responsible for the invention of the first concentration camps in Europe.[19] Indeed, the modern practice of genocide was invented by Marxist-inspired communists, not the Nazis.[20] There is no essential moral difference between Marxist class-warfare and Nazi race-warfare, or between destroying people belonging to a social class and destroying people comprising an ethnic group.
Of course, Marx was never in a position to personally carry out large-scale exterminations. However, some of his most notorious disciples – the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Fidel Castro and Mao – did practice such wholesale barbarism, and they did so with the sort violence that Marx felt in his heart and which his works so intensely radiate.[21] The modern practice of genocide was therefore born out of the hateful teachings of Karl Marx and then implemented by his most successful disciples at the cost of at least 120 million lives in the past century alone.[22]
Margaret Sanger
The American birth-control activist, in addition to advocating sex education and family planning, was an ardent eugenicist. The most-well known statue of Sanger is located at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. There are other similar statues of Sanger, for instance at the Old South meeting house in Boston, and also at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. Some other dedications to Sanger can be found in the form of street signs, plaques and building names spread across the United States.
An active member of the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist Party, Sanger spent a couple of years in England so as to escape arrest for violating several provisions of the obscenity law. While living in England, she married eugenicist and advocate for forced sterilisation of the “unfit” Havelock Ellis. Their marriage fell apart when Ellis discovered Sanger was having an extra-marital affair with H.G. Wells, another champion of eugenics and euthanasia. Her daughter with Ellis was so deeply neglected that the poor girl ended up dying of pneumonia at the age of four. As Sanger candidly stated: “I am not a fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration”.[23]
Sanger championed numerous racist policies which sought the sterilisation of the “unfit” and those who, in her mind, comprised an inferior ethnic group. This, in her mind, included the entire African-American population. To achieve the goal of eventually exterminating the American black population, Sanger brought about the notorious “Negro Project”, in 1939, consisting of a eugenics policy ultimately aiming at the black population’s adoption of birth control as a means of preventing them to have more children. Sanger’s appearance in at least one Ku Klux Klan (“KKK”) event is well documented. Sanger even wrote about the event herself in her 1938 autobiography Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938), explaining how, in 1926, she delivered a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.
In November 1939, in a memorandum entitled ‘Suggestions for the Negro Project’, Sanger’s New York regional director (Dr Clarence J. Gamble, co-founder of Procter & Gamble) advised Sanger that some black leaders would realise that the ‘Negro Project’ was nothing but an “extermination plot”.[24] Sanger’s solution was rather Machiavellian: place corrupt black leaders in positions of power by giving them the appearance that they were actually charge. Since Sanger correctly recognised that in those days African-Americans were deeply family-oriented and religious, she concluded that it would be useful to recruit black ministers to further advance the more sinister agenda of black population control and eventual extermination. Indeed, as Sanger candidly pointed out in a letter to Dr Gamble:
The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.[25]
Apart from conceiving the Negro Project, Sanger also established what is now broadly recognised as the world’s leading abortion provider: Planned Parenthood. The organisation strongly denies its own eugenic roots and the fact that Sanger was overtly racist. In support to such a false claim, Planned Parenthood insists that Sanger stopped editing The Birth Control Review in 1929, and so was not associated with the eugenicist movement when the organisation was established.[26] However, the organisation conveniently ignores Sanger’s 1932 address to the Eugenics Society, which was published with her consent in The Birth Control Review. A fair-minded person simply cannot read that article today without finding similarities not only to the darkest dystopias of the feminist imagination but also to Nazi eugenics. There she openly admits a continuing bent towards racial policies and eugenics.
In a certain sense Sanger’s Planned Parenthood is even more eugenic than it was during the time it was created. In today’s America, more than half of all black pregnancies end in abortion. African-Americans comprise roughly 12 per cent of the entire US population, but they have more than a third (37 percent) of all abortions in the country. Revealingly enough, roughly 80 percent of US abortion clinics are located at or near minority communities.[27] As noted by American conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, “since we’re dismantling anything [allegedly] built by white supremacists I guess it’s time to get rid of Planned Parenthood”.[28] Because far more unborn black children are killed by this organisation than those of any other ethnic group, surely this demonstrates black lives really don’t matter for Sanger’s modern disciples.
* * *
AS seen above, both Marx and Sanger nurtured a visceral hatred and animosity toward certain ethnic groups, in particular Jews and blacks. That being so, those who continue to vandalise or demand the removal of statues of historical figures on grounds of racism should for consistency’s sake demand also the removal of the busts of Sanger and Marx from a place of honour in the Smithsonian Institute.
Above all, if these radical leftists truly believed in equality and social justice, surely they would condemn the appalling racism of these icons of the Extreme Left a long time ago. Instead, they worship them and attack others based purely on ideological motivations and furthering their collectivist agenda as a supreme value that trumps all other considerations. As Allie Beth Stuckey correctly stated: “If the statue-topplers were really doing so because of outrage over slavery, they would be outraged by Marx and Lenin, whose ideas led to the objectification and slaughter of millions. But they don’t – they worship them”.[29]
Of course, this is all part of an ongoing Marxist assault on Western values, ideals and history. Arguably, the “useful idiots” who assist these radicals in destroying the statues of good people are simply too ignorant and brain-washed to know what they are actually doing. As for the true ideologues, of course, they know exactly what they are doing but they couldn’t care less about black lives unless it might be useful to advance their cause and score a few political gains. One can safely assume that these radicals are not really interest in equal rights and justice at all. Such people are nothing but virtue signallers and hypocrites who are appealing to racial issues to merely advance a more sinister Marxist agenda.
[1] Anthony Leonardi, ‘Boston Mayor in Favor of Removing City’s Abraham Lincoln Statue’, June 15, 2020.
[2] Dan Murphy, ‘Restoration Work on Shaw 54th Memorial Now Underway’, Beacon Hill Times, May 28, 2020, at https://beaconhilltimes.com/2020/05/28/restoration-work-on-shaw-54th-memorial-now-underway/
[3] Dapaul vid Mikkelson, ‘Did George Floyd Protesters Deface the Statue of an Abolitionist?’, Snopes, June 17, 2020, at https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/defaced-abolitionist-statue/
[4] Zachary Evans, ‘Park Volunteer Outraged Over Vandalism of Philadelphia Abolitionist Statue: “He Was BLM Before There Was A Slogan’, National Review, June 11, 2020, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/park-volunteer-outraged-over-vandalism-of-monument-to-philadelphia-abolitionist-he-was-blm-before-there-was-a-slogan/
[5] Ruby Gonzales, ‘Statue of Abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier Vandalized in his Namesake City’, Whittier Daily News, June 15, 2020, at https://www.whittierdailynews.com/2020/06/15/statue-of-abolitionist-john-greenleaf-whittier-vandalized-in-his-namesake-city/
[6] Ruby Gonzales, ‘Statue of abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier vandalized in his namesake city’, Whittier Daily News, June 15, 2022, at https://www.whittierdailynews.com/2020/06/15/statue-of-abolitionist-john-greenleaf-whittier-vandalized-in-his-namesake-city/
[7] Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity? (Washington/DC, Regnery, 2007), p 220.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (New York/NY: HarperCollins, 2001), p 62.
[10] Marx and Engels, Vol XXX, p 259 cited in Johnson, above note 9, p 62.
[11] Max Young, ‘Karl Marx: The Racist Godfather of Leftist Racism’, 1828, September 4, 2019, at https://1828uk.com/2019/09/04/karl-marx-the-racist-godfather-of-leftist-antisemitism-2/
[12] Tom G Palmer, ‘Bismarck’s Legacy’, in T G Palmer (ed.), After the Welfare State, Ottawa/IL, Jameson Books, 2012, p 38.
[13] Ibid, pp 57–8.
[14] T B Bottomore (ed), Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York/NY: McGraw-Hill, New York, 1963), pp 34–7.
[15] Applebaum, Gulag: A History (Knopf Doubleday, 2004) different times Stalin conducted mass arrests of Poles, Chechens, Tartars, and — on the eve of his death — Jews’, p xxxvi .
[16] Ibid, p xxxvi.
[17] Ibid, p 102.
[18] Ibid, p 102.
[19] A J Kaminski, Konzentrationslager, pp 82–3 cited in Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York/NY: Vintage Books, 1997), p 836.
[20] Johnson, above note 9, p 71.
[21] Ibid., p 72.
[22] Ibid., p 71.
[23] Ibid.
[24] ‘Black Genocide’, at http://www.blackgenocide.org/archived_articles/negro03.html
[25] Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the Left – From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (Penguin Books, 2007), p 259.
[26]. Ibid. p 277.
[27] Ibid. p 272.
[28] Quoted from: Bill Muehlenberg, ‘The Cancel Culture: Crucify Him Again’, CultureWatch, June 23, 2020, at https://billmuehlenberg.com/2020/06/23/the-cancel-culture-crucify-him-again/
[29] Ibid.
