Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've previously highlighted Ellis Washington's ridiculous "dialectics" in which he attempts to portray himself as Socrates by putting his right-wing opinions in the mouth of the great philosopher, opinions the real Socrates would never have said.
Washington is at it again in his Jan. 13 WorldNetDaily column. This time, Washington -- er, Socrates is in smackdown mode, trotting out authors he doesn't like, distorting their work in order to create a straw man for Washington to knock down.
For instance, here's the "dialectic" between "Socrates" and "Nietsche":
Nietzsche: It was I who began an atheistic revolution in my 1882 book “The Gay Science,” by boldly professing that “God is dead.” I refused to repent but elevated my narcissistic blasphemy as the fundamental theme of my greatest work, “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886). In that opus I argued that men are driven by an amoral “Will to Power” and that inevitably superior men will triumph over Christianity, over religiously inspired moral rules, which I judged as “slave morality” and as artificial as every other moral rule. Therefore, it is the primary concern of the Ubermenchen (Supermen) to force, to dictate all laws necessary to secure their domination of the world over the inferior nations and races in their midst.
Socrates: Nietzsche, your brilliant but insanely evil ideas would served as the blueprint a generation later for the apotheosis of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis who worshipped your philosophy and fanatically implemented your ideas on a genocidal scale, causing World War II, the Holocaust and the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people.
Gee, we didn't know that "Socrates" knew so much about Nietsche or the Nazis -- we thought it would be a little difficult given that he died thousands of years earlier.
And here's "Socrates" and "Karl Marx":
Karl Marx: I wrote “Das Kapital” in 1867. Engels, my benefactor, posthumously published volumes II (1885) and III (1894) from notes I left behind. “Das Kapital” forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of my atheistic, materialistic theory of history. To me capitalism was the most contemptible word in the human language because I believed that all capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to the working class to reap the highest possible profits for themselves.
Socrates: When conservative Newt Gingrich can spend several millions of dollars on ads in South Carolina and Florida against “moderate” Mitt Romney for his role as head of Bain Capital by shamelessly speaking against capitalism as a demagogue, it is the triumph of Marxist ideas first promulgated in “Das Kapital.”
Washington's "Socrates" is even so up-to-date on current events that he mindlessly spews right-wing talking points, just like Washington himself:
Socrates: In February 2008, nine months before Election Day, when Barack Obama arrogantly declared, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” in reality, he was proclaiming the triumph of Sartre’s existential philosophy over America’s Christian founding; a diabolical idea rooted in narcissism, Marxism and failed delusions.
Washington concludes: "At our next Symposium we will discuss the remaining five books that have caused the downfall of society and contributed to the damnation of ideas." Of course, deliberate mischaracterization of ideas and bastardizing one of the world's greatest philosophers for the sake of political attacks is far from a "symposium" as one can get -- and it sure as heck has nothing to do with anything the real Socrates did.
