-Source-American Thinker-
Two hundred years have passed since Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass, a pair of important 19th-century historical figures, were born. Marx's collectivist ideas are surging among America's young, while Douglass, a champion of civil rights and the first black man to receive a nominating vote for president of the United States, sits largely unnoticed in pop culture. The admiration lavished on Marx – whose communist ideology has led to hunger, misery, and tyranny wherever it has been implemented – should be accorded to Douglass, an iconic American scion of liberty.
Marx was born May 5, 1818 to a middle-class family in the old Germanic kingdom of Prussia. His father was an attorney, and his mother came from a prosperous business family. Marx grew up in a ten-room home, received a private education, and married a wealthy heiress. He never held a real job, living off his benefactors (those being his wife Jenny, writing partner Friedrich Engels, and wealthy uncle Benjamin Philips). Despite residing in posh European capitals, Marx raised his family in a dirty flat, languishing in poverty until he died of pleurisy in 1883. His governmental and economic theories, published in his books Manifesto of the Communist Party and Das Kapital, were not broadly adopted during his lifetime.
Douglass was born a slave in Maryland, likely in February 1818; because of scanty birth records, he did not know the exact date. He never knew his father, and his mother died sometime in the 1820s. Douglass had no formal education, and his mistress was excoriated by his slavemaster for teaching him to read. He experienced extreme deprivation, abandonment, hunger, beatings, false imprisonment, betrayal, and dehumanization until he completed a fantastic escape from bondage on September 3, 1838. Douglass eked out a living as a day laborer and was a fugitive until the mid-1840s, when sympathetic British supporters purchased his freedom. Thereafter, Douglass grew into the most prominent antebellum abolitionist orator, met thrice with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, published three widely read autobiographies, and received federal appointments as marshal of the District of Columbia and ambassador to Haiti. In spite of his achievements, Douglass faced ridicule and racism from his opponents until his death in 1895.
Despite these résumés, the modern left, with its mainstream media mouthpiece, lionizes Marx and engages in willful blindness of Douglass. How is it that the smart set in our country today largely ignores the life lessons of a self-made ex-slave who rose to the height of international acclaim while glorifying the teachings of an obscure, slovenly grifter who left his offspring impoverished?
The left abhors the concept of republicanism, so it is easy for leftists to praise Marx, who did not subscribe to republican governing principles. Read more