Posted on 03/26/2018 12:44:32 PM PDT by kocooked
It will come as no surprise that this year Hillsdale College has chosen to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of Frederick Douglass. Born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, Douglass fled north to freedom in 1838. Eventually, he became a celebrated orator, and a leading figure in the abolition movement. Douglass also became a friend of Hillsdale College. He was twice an honored guest of the college. His first visit took place in January 1863, a few weeks after the final issuance of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. On that occasion, Douglass delivered an address entitled “Popular Error and Unpopular Truth.”
It is rather more surprising — indeed it is jarring — to learn that Carnegie Mellon University, a school established and sustained to this day by exemplars of American capitalism, would choose to mount a year-long celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. This celebration, denominated “Marx@200,” takes the form of a series of lectures and symposia, sponsored (ironically enough) by the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
The would would be a better place today if Karl Marx was strangled in his crib.
Balint Vazsonyi, 10-02-02
Over the past few years, it seems, everybody and his brother speaks about the capitalist system in America. Before, using the word was the hallmark of marxist training or influence. Yet lately, everybody is using the word - regardless of political leaning.
It bothers me because capitalism - the word and the concept - was the brainchild of Karl Marx. As well as offering an “-ism” opposite his own -ism, it describes a rigid class society in which one class possesses the means of production, the other nothing except its labor. The latter class is called “The Proletariat” who, as Lenin declared, can lose nothing but its chains when it rises against the oppressor.
This is not the place to argue whether capitalism was the appropriate way to describe certain European societies. The point is that owning things has always been open to Americans. The moment you buy one share of stock, you part-own “means of production,” not to mention owning your home and arriving at your place of work in your own automobile - a very American image.
America never had a proletariat.
http://balintvazsonyi.org/shns/shns100202.html
The only problem is that Wall Street and America’s High Society and Titans of Industry ALL SUCKED UP TO MARX and were proud to be by his side. Same with Hitler.
“who is worth celebrating, 200 years later?”
Robert E. Lee. Stonewall Jackson. And, as an object lesson, Auty Custer.
One freed slaves
The other enslaved entire nations.
Douglass was a pro-gun Republican, so I’ll go with him. He said freedom rested in the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box.
Not necessarily. There has always been that segment of the right that sees the left as merely a front for the "malefactors of great wealth" (ie, "David Rockefeller rules the world"). Ironically, today's right wing rogues gallery is essentially the same as that of the nineteenth century Populists (who were socialists, btw).
Douglas was a great man who is not honored enough but that is by design because the left hates him. If every freed slave believed in a “Douglasism” and the racists in post war South eliminated, our country today would be spectacular. In reality ghetto is the status quo.
Excellent. I have long sought to avoid embracing the term.
Maryland ping
Frederick Douglass would have destroyed Karl Marx in a one-on-one debate.
He was a courageous, thoughtful and intelligent man who actually put his life on the line for his beliefs.
Karl Marx was a bad philosopher with second-rate mind who never had the guts to test his own third-rate “theories”
...I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.
Though Mr. Lincoln shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro, it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery. The man who could say, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war shall soon pass away, yet if God wills it continue till all the wealth piled by two hundred years of bondage shall have been wasted, and each drop of blood drawn by the lash shall have been paid for by one drawn by the sword, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether," gives all needed proof of his feeling on the subject of slavery... He had not been schooled in the ethics of slavery; his plain life had favored his love of truth... His moral training was against his saying one thing when he meant another. The trust that Abraham Lincoln had in himself and in the people was surprising and grand, but it was also enlightened and well founded. He knew the American people better than they knew themselves, and his truth was based upon this knowledge.Frederick Douglass
Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln
Delivered at the Unveiling of The Freedmen's Monument in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C.
April 14, 1876
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