Writing in the Kansas City Star, columnist Lewis Diuguid gets to the heart of why Team McCain describes Obama's tax pledge to "spread the wealth around" as socialist:
The "socialist" label that Sen. John McCain and his GOP presidential running mate Sarah Palin are trying to attach to Sen. Barack Obama actually has long and very ugly historical roots.
And what might those "ugly historical roots" be? Might they include Marx, Engels, Mao. and the economic, mental, and physical enslavement their grand ideas wrought?
No, it turns out that socialism's real ugliness came from those who fought against it. Just as with McCain and Palin today, the capitalist pigs' opposition to socialism was really a foil for their racism. As Diuguid attempts to explain (emphases his):
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to describe African Americans who spent their lives fighting for equality.
Those freedom fighters included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the Civil Rights Movement; W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1909 helped found the NAACP which is still the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization; Paul Robeson, a famous singer, actor and political activist who in the 1930s became involved in national and international movements for better labor relations, peace and racial justice; and A. Philip Randolph, who founded and was the longtime head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a leading advocate for civil rights for African Americans.
McCain and Palin have simply reached back in history to use an old code word for black. It set whites apart from those deemed unAmerican and those who could not be trusted during the communism scare.
Few would doubt that these gentlemen helped to craft a better America, and I'm not about to defend HUAC or McCarthy's witch hunts. But it's a matter of record that some of their economic empowerment ideas were indeed—and self-admittedly—socialist. Randolph and Du Bois (briefly) were even members of the Socialist Party. Diuguid's inability to conceive that being black and socialist are unrelated is nothing more than the same racist reductionism he accuses others of.
Oh, and for the record, Hoover (and plenty others) also had some choice words about Marx and Engels, who were white. So, if his take on the true nature of antisocialists is to be believed, Diuguid finds himself in the unusual position of accusing racists of being colorblind.
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TheSteelGeneral of NE 8:04AM May 10, 2009
Paul of WA 3:04PM October 26, 2008
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