Quotes of the Day: "If Marxists and Nazis were fighting over any principle at all, it was only about which particular noose to throw around humanity's neck. Where the Marxists collectivised on the basis of class, the Nazis collectivised on the basis of race."

"They were not so very different at all: If they [Marxists and Nazis] were fighting over any principle at all, it was only about which particular noose to throw around humanity's neck. Where the Marxists collectivised on the basis of class, the Nazis collectivised on the basis of race. That was perhaps their unique contribution -- and so very much simpler for the masses to understand and embrace... "
~ Unknown

"The failure of Marxism to develop according to the logic of its traditional theory was reaching a crisis [in the 1950s]... The symptoms were many. One was manifest in the splintering of the monolithic Marxist movement into many sub-movements emphasising the socialism of sex, race, and ethnic identity. Such movements abandoned the universalistic conceptions of human interests ...     "The international proletariat is a highly abstract concept. The universality of all human interests is a very sweeping generalisation... It is hard enough for a trained intellectual to conceive, as classical Marxism requires, of all of humankind as ultimately members of a universal class sharing the same universal interests. But—the more epistemologically-modest theorists of the 1950s begin to ask—can we really expect the masses to abstract to the view that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin? Can the masses conceive of themselves as a harmonious international class? The intellectual capacity of the masses is much more limited, so appealing to and mobilising the masses requires speaking to them about what matters to them and on a level that they can grasp. What the masses can understand and what they do get fired up about are their sexual, racial, ethnic, and religious identities. Both epistemological modesty and effective communication strategy, then, dictated a move from universalism to multiculturalism. In effect, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, significant portions of the Left came to agree with the collectivist Right on yet another issue: Forget internationalism, universalism, and cosmopolitanism; focus on smaller groups formed on the basis of ethnic, racial, or other identities."
~ Stephen Hicks, from his book Explaining Postmodernism

"There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred—brute, blind, virulent hatred—than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character is determined at birth in some unknown, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way—then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred. Tribal or ethnic rule has existed, at some time, in every part of the world, and, in some country, in every period of mankind’s history. The record of hatred is always the same. The worst kinds of atrocities were perpetrated during ethnic (including religious) wars. A recent grand-scale example of it was Nazi Germany..."
~ Ayn Rand, from her 1977 talk on “Global Balkanisation”


“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavouring to convert an atheist by scripture.”
~ Thomas Paine, on "The American Crisis"
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