Many years ago, when I was an angry teenager, I saw a play by the Marxist playwright David Edgar which was intended to expose the false philosophy underlying white supremacist ideology. The only scene in the play which I recall was an angry exchange between a sympathetically portrayed Marxist and his antagonist, a white supremacist activist. In this dialogue the Marxist tried to convince his interlocutor that political history was centred on class struggle, whereas the white supremacist responded that, on the contrary, it was centred on the struggle between the races. The Marxist sought liberation in class war, the white supremacist in race war. One sought to sow discord in society by dividing one class against another, the other by dividing one race against the other. In spite of their differences, an objective observer could see that they shared a common hatred of those in power and a common belief that political victory would take violence and the cancelling of their opponents.
Even in the wildest reaches of the imagination, I could not have foreseen that the Marxist would come to endorse the white supremacist view of history.
It seemed inconceivable that Marx could be seduced by Hitler. And yet “critical race theory” is as obsessed with race as were the Nazis. According to the new generation of Marxists, the political struggle is not about class war but race war; it’s not about a struggle between the classes but a struggle between the races. Like the Nazis, the critical race theorists don’t believe that racism is a prejudice in individuals but is something determined by history. It is not something evil in the heart of men but something systemic in history itself. Since this is so, the solution is not teaching and preaching the love of neighbour but the destruction of the “system.” And since the “system” is history itself, the final solution is the cancelling of the past, the utter erasing of the collective cultural memory of the people.
...As I ponder the way that Hitler has successfully seduced Karl Marx, I am reminded once again of the scene between the angry Marxist and the equally angry white supremacist in David Edgar’s play. The irony is that they have much more in common with each other than they realize. On the purely intellectual or philosophical level, they are children of the so-called Enlightenment. They are descended from Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Spengler, and other historical determinists who believe that problems and their solutions are systemic, not moral. They see things in systemic terms of “right” and “left,” not in moral terms of right and wrong. They believe in hating and cancelling their enemies, not in loving and forgiving them. They believe in systems so perfect that nobody will need to be good, whether it be the Dictatorship of the Proletariat or the Thousand Year Reich. They believe that the perfect system is not merely worth dying for but is also worth killing for. They are willing to practice what they preach, as history has demonstrated all too gruesomely, with guillotines, gas chambers, and gulags. They are ready to adopt final solutions, such as the proto-communist genocide in the Vendée, the Stalinist genocide in the Ukraine, or the Hitlerite genocide in the concentration camps of the Third Reich.
If the critical race theorists spent less time hating their neighbours for the colour of their skin and more time studying the history that they seek to cancel, they would see that it is they and not any particular race who have been humanity’s bane....