A speech by John F. Kennedy making fun of Karl Marx and Engels

[AmilcarCabral]

Dear brothers and sisters: Most people in America think that Kennedy was a very progressive president, well he was better than Obama, and Bush. However take a look at this speech in this video at the beginning of the speech of how Kennedy in front of many people from the press and media, making fun of Karl Marx and Engels. He was even saying of how all Karl Marx wanted to do was fame and glory. When we all know that if it wasn't for Karl Marx there wouldn't even be food-stamps and medicare in USA, and many poor people in other countries would be a lot worse. No wonder socialism is still unpopular in USA because even progressive politicians in USA hates Marxism and Marx. Even The Green Party which is supposed to be a pro-Marx party, a pro-socialism party is hardcore anti-Marx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJJCCFa9Vcs


XJJCCFa9Vcs


.

[Fourth Internationalist]

Kennedy is better than Obama and Bush? Marx is responsible for food stamps and medicare in the US? People will only begin to like Marx once 'progressive politicians' do? The green party, a liberal bourgeois party, is supposed to be pro-Marx and socialist?

Rubbish.

[Goblin]

Dear brothers and sisters: Most people in America think that Kennedy was a very progressive president, well he was better than Obama, and Bush. However take a look at this speech in this video at the beginning of the speech of how Kennedy in front of many people from the press and media, making fun of Karl Marx and Engels. He was even saying of how all Karl Marx wanted to do was fame and glory. When we all know that if it wasn't for Karl Marx there wouldn't even be food-stamps and medicare in USA, and many poor people in other countries would be a lot worse. No wonder socialism is still unpopular in USA because even progressive politicians in USA hates Marxism and Marx. Even The Green Party which is supposed to be a pro-Marx party, a pro-socialism party is hardcore anti-Marx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJJCCFa9Vcs


XJJCCFa9Vcs



.

Lay of the weed TrotskistMarx

[Remus Bleys]

I will truly never understand the JFK fascination.

[Prometeo liberado]

Where did you arrive with your sweeping summations as to what the country thinks about JFK? As for the Green Party they go out of their way to say that they are not socialist. I could go on for ever, and I probably would but theirs just too much to say.

[Rurkel]

Wow. I thought that Kennedy was a progressive socialist president. Then I watched this video. How dare he say such things about Marx! :mad: Everything I thought about life, universe and everything is now completely shattered :crying:

[Sinister Intents]

Well damn. I thought I made bad posts.... I'm pretty sure the green party is very anti communist and that all presidents were horrible people. JFK is dead and I'm glad, he can't spit his bullshit anymore

[consuming negativity]

People like JFK because he got shot.

[Per Levy]

trotskistmarx really succeeds in lowering my opinion on him more and more and my opinion on him was allready low as it gets. seriously though who still cares for jfk and even more importently what he said about marx/engels?

[Red Economist]

You've really got yourself confused on what is and isn't socialism. But for progressives, from what I understand Kennedy represents the political idealism of the 60's (and his speeches remain inspiring even if you disagree with his content). Historians appear to have written about his assassination as a metaphor for the loss of faith in popular-democratic, liberal and progressive ideals, before the disillusion of conspiracy around JFK's assassination, Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate, Ford's Pardon before entering the neo-liberal period where the exercise of the powers by the state itself is demonized as inherently evil and driven by selfishness.
Politicians often emulate Kennedy in the hope of kindling nostalgia, but have so far failed to grasp that the most inspiring thing about his speeches was that he was talking about the future and not the past. We badly need leaders of this sort, irrespective of whose side they are on, to inspire a collective faith in the power of politics as the means by which to solve problems, not simply leave it to the market and the individual to fight it out alone. We also, even more desperately, need people to deliver on such promises, not the Obama "yes we can" bullsh*t which was either gob-smackingly naive or viciously cynical or both, but after Bush- who can blame America for believing him.

His comment is not much different as the often recited hope by liberals and social democrats that if only the Vienna Art school had taken on a young, frustrated painter by the name of Adolf Hitler the future of Europe had been more peaceful. In both cases however, it was not Marx or Hitler that determined the course of history, but much larger and collective forces driven by the realization of technological possibilities, regrettably producing new forms of political warfare between countries, and in the case of fascism and communism, within countries themselves. Their ideas came to represent the antagonistic social forces that realized these possibilities and would have happened without them, though of course- some what differently.
You should listen to the whole speech as in making that opening comment, it is somewhat a reflection of the disappointment of the hopes of an earlier era over the apparent dangers of Utopianism and- though I'm not sure if this is the right word- modernism. In much the same way many of our generation look back at Kennedy, so they looked back at the beginning of the twentieth century before two world wars where people had much greater and deeper confidence in the future when no-one expected a future involving nuclear war and how they arrived at the absurdity of fighting Stalinized Communism in the year of the speech, in 1961. No-one knew who was going to win the cold war, or indeed, if anyone was going to 'win' and it took the Cuban Missile Crisis to get everyone to sit up and realize that that toxic mixture of pursuing a course of action to a simultaneously absurd and lethal conclusion of mutually assured destruction was not the way to go.
I suspect Kennedy is admired because- by appearances at least- he tried to meet a potentially existential challenge of the times with optimism and idealism, and it's particularly a bitter feeling because this is something which seems beyond the capacity of even our best politicians in our times such as on Climate Change.

[tachosomoza]

OP gave me a migraine.

Personally, I'd say Ted and RFK would have been better presidents, but that's like saying I'd rather be vaporized in a millisecond as opposed to being pricked to death with thumbtacks.

[Comrade Jacob]

That's why we're glad he's dead.

[Bostana]

I love it when U.S. presidents insult Marx. Marx moved for the betterment of all human life while those asshole presidents who insult are responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people. So go ahead presidents insult him because he has done more good in one week of his life then you ever will your whole life

[Hit The North]

The fucker was a cold war president - it was his duty to ignorantly slag-off Marx and Engels.

[Luís Henrique]

George Bush is a tree-hugging hippy compared to JFK...

Luís Henrique

[Sinister Intents]

@ Luis Henrique: How so?

[AmilcarCabral]

I am not high on weed. I am high on coffee which is cheaper than weed


Lay of the weed TrotskistMarx

[AmilcarCabral]

I am not trotskist anymore. And it seems to me that you are very loyal to Trotsky, because most leftists supporters of Trotsky are very sectarian, very dogmatic, very perfectionist and hate non-trotsky leftists. The negative aspect I see in trotskists (Like the website http://www.wsws.org) is that they attack other leftists like marxist-leninists, chavistas and maoists more than capitalists. So in the anti-scientific world of trotskists, Hugo Chavez, Mao Tse Tung and Fidel Castro are more evil than George W. Bush, Peña Nieto (The current president of Mexico) and Carlos Andrez Perez (Former Venezuelan president)



Lay of the weed TrotskistMarx

[La Guaneña]

JFK

Assassination attempts: 1
Result: DEAD

Fidel

Assassination attempts: more than I can remember
Result: :castro:

Shitty idols, murrica, shitty idols...

[Red Commissar]

JFK holds a lot of popularity among American liberals, but I don't think any socialists take him seriously. I believe a lot of problems of this comes from the lens Liberals have viewed JFK through, especially of a post-Iraq War dynamic where somehow the Democratic Party moved itself to try and capitalize on anti-war sentiment in the 2004 and 2008 elections. JFK got transformed some how into a good president for the Democrats to try and claim lineage too, even despite some of his alleged affairs.

Of course, the reality is that the Democrats were just as war hungry as their Republican counterparts- JFK for his part ran on a campaign blasting the Eisenhower campaign for being too soft on the Soviets and consistently tried to paint itself as being tough on communism. While the commitment in Vietnam began in Eisenhower's administration, it was JFK who escalated it into a more visible military involvement and into full-blown war under LBJ. The roots of neoconservatism- particularly aggressive foreign policy, viewing the world in black and white, and the primacy of a liberal democracy- had its roots among these hawks in the Democratic Party during the Cold War- besides JFK and company another example was Senator Henry Jackson (or "Scoop" Jackson).

Heck even if a Liberal is willing to overlook JFK's foreign policy, he didn't achieve particularly too much in his short term. If anything a lot of the major social programs were put into effect under LBJ's term, "Great Society" as he termed it, that is more relevant to those liberals. Likewise FDR for Liberals who at least had something going on in the domestic arena.

I don't particularly know why JFK became a cause celibre. Maybe he was more charismatic and able to say what people wanted to hear, something that Eisenhower wasn't all that great at, and especially Nixon when they ran against one another, so that may've skewed things. A theme I tend to notice among the conspiracy theories regarding his assassination is usually involvement from within the government, usually the CIA, because his views had begun to change or something. I don't really know how one could follow that, more so considering that this gives too much credit to the position of the president to genuinely shape and direct the state, and whether Kennedy's views had really been all that radical compared to the predominant views in Washington.

I must say though another Democratic president I've seen odd praise for is Woodrow Wilson, trying to list him as among the progressives of the turn of the century. Admittedly this seems to ignore when they were a vastly different party as well as the rather amorphous shape of the progressive movement in the states. Wilson was of course for himself pretty racist, even by what passed as normal for those times and that reflected the way he thought his programs should be administered. Plus the inconsistency of running as an isolationist and then entering into WWI and campaigning for the League of Nations, as well as what tends to be a whitewashed 14 Points which ignores that Wilson didn't care for their application outside of what he considered to be the "civilized" world.

[tachosomoza]

Woodrow Wilson basically banned black people from Princeton.

[Per Levy]

@trotskistmarx:
The negative aspect I see in trotskists is that they attack other leftists like marxist-leninists, chavistas and maoists more than capitalists. So in the anti-scientific world of trotskists, Hugo Chavez, Mao Tse Tung and Fidel Castro are more evil than George W. Bush, Peña Nieto (The current president of Mexico) and Carlos Andrez Perez (Former Venezuelan president)

several things are really funny in the post of yours, first of all trots attack stalinists, as stalinists dont do the same with trots. not to mention that there are more then enough trots who supported every leftleaning(say socialdemocratic) leader of many countries. also critizising anyone as "anit-scientific" is really rich coming from you, trotskistmarx, for you spout almost nothing else than idealistic and confused bullshit.

but lets forget that for a moment, for i wonder are you still a anti-semite? you know the reason why your trotskistmarx account got banned for?

just to refresh your memory:


LIEBERMAN, MCCAIN AND BUSH AND THE SATANIC JEWS ARE THE REAL ANTI-CHRISTIAN MAFIA CARTEL THAT WANT TO STEAL LIBYA'S OIL

do you still belive in that shit?

[Damon]

I'm not even sure if it's worth responding to, because so many other people have said quite a bit in response to the OP.

But, just to offer up something to those who might still be questioning the sentiments of JFK:


...Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived....he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.

John F. Kennedy 'Prelude To Leadership - The European Diary of John F. Kennedy - Summer, 1945. Regnery Publishing, Inc. Washingon, DC. p 74

[Luís Henrique]

@ Luis Henrique: How so?

Bush doesn't seem to have ever seriously considered nuking Cuba, which JFK did.

Luís Henrique