‘Fearful’ misquotes have far-right links

A March 28 letter on this page began with a supposed quote from Karl Marx: “Remove one freedom per generation and soon you will have no freedom and no one would have noticed.” No, Marx did not say this! Any fact-checking source will shoot this down. I’m sure the writer of this letter has no idea what Marx believed or what socialism is.

A few years ago one of the frequent writers of letters to this page attributed a similar quote to Norman Thomas (1884-1968), who ran as the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America. The quote was not at all from Thomas and bore no resemblance to his thinking. Far from being the devil incarnate, Norman Thomas was a highly regarded Presbyterian minister and one of the best educated and most thoughtful, moral public figures in our national history. Nothing about him was subversive or unAmerican as this letter writer was asserting — unless we allow the obvious fact that the Christian gospel for which Thomas stood envisions a society that is far different from the one we have.

All of us, of all political stripes, carry around a lot of misinformation and accept as true things we shouldn’t, but it appears to me that more than 90 percent of the errors and hysteria that spill into print come from the far right. These people keep passing along the same tired misstatements, urban legends, misquotes and angry, fearful accusations as they gleefully knock over the same boogeymen year after year.

We need to do better than this.

SANDY WYLIE Bella Vista