Kevin Swanson, a right-wing, fundamentalist Christian radio blowhard, who I had been blissfully unaware of until today, did an interview recently with another right-wing, white supremacist crackpot. His guest, according to RWW, was some babbling 'The Confederacy Shall Rise Again' clown named:
...Walter Kennedy, the author of books such as “Lincoln’s Marxists” and “Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists: Marxism in the Civil War.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Kennedy as “a member of the hard core of the neo-Confederate movement” and “a founding member of the League of the South,” who has “called for a new Southern secession to escape the ‘overgrown and unresponsive’ federal government.” He also co-wrote a book entitled “The South Was Right!,” which defended Southern slavery.
Hmmm...well,
he sounds nice. So what was on what we must call, tongue-firmly-in-cheek, Wally's 'mind'?
...Kennedy said that “radical socialists and communists” helped launch the Republican Party and put Lincoln in the White House, and then led “the prosecution of ‘The War Against the South.’”
“The Democrats, both Northern and Southerners, believed in limited government and the Marxists hated that concept, they wanted to do away with states’ rights and limited government so that they’d have one big all-powerful indivisible government that could force its will upon the American people,” Kennedy said.
After Swanson asked if “the communists had the ear of Lincoln,” Kennedy said that Karl Marx and other socialists revered Lincoln for opposing the South’s “fight to keep small government alive, states’ rights alive.”
Although it pains me to say it, Wally The White Supremacist is actually almost within a light-year or so of having a point. Almost. But, no cigar.
In fact, Marx did admire Lincoln and this letter he wrote to the President, dated Nov. 22-29, 1864 is well worth reading.
But as the letter makes crystal-clear, Marx didn't give a flying fuck about White Wally's cherished 'states' rights'. What Marx admired was Lincoln's stand against slavery, regarding it (understandably) as part of the world-wide 'class struggle'.
Kennedy went on to say that Lincoln created a “supreme” federal government that led an “incessant attack on religious values in America,” arguing that Lincoln gave communism a “big boost” by winning the Civil War.
Honest Abe: Marxist Fellow Traveller? When you're a lunatic, I guess
anything's possible. But the crazy gets even deeper:
“Post-Civil War, you’ve got the socialist goals, the communist platform, the Manifesto platform, I think there are ten elements to the platform, one by one they come about in our country,” Swanson added. “And first was the public schools.”
Yes...
public schools, those dens of Marxist iniquity, hotbeds of anti-American activity, those breeding grounds for pinkos and Spartacists.
How did America survive for this long? Given the fact that the vast majority of Americans attended a public school at some point, how is it that America isn't a full-blown Marxist workers' paradise?
Oh, that's right...I forgot: according to Wet-Brain Wally and Kevin Swanson, it is.
Roll over, Abe Lincoln and tell Leon Trotsky the news...