Two weeks ago, I mentioned the need for working people to defend their economic interests “by engaging in a political struggle against the Nativist fascists.”

Some readers thought it was a little premature for us, as class-conscious workers, to take the fight to the Nativists. These brothers and sisters thought it was too soon for such a confrontational approach — that it would look more like “jousting at windmills.”

But that was before last Friday, when Nativist ideologue Glenn Beck brought the fight to us with his fantasy piece, The Revolutionary Holocaust, broadcast on Fox News.

Beck’s “special report” was a 42-minute hack job on what is perceived as “communism.” It mostly goes on and on about the crimes and atrocities committed by the so-called “Communists” that ruled the Soviet Union, China and “people’s democracies,” as well as rehash inaccurate and fabricated stories about Russia, China and Cuba.

As we’ve said on more than one occasion, we take no responsibility for what a bunch of dispossessed managers, intellectuals and officials have done while obscenely calling themselves “Communists.” In our view, these people were to communism what George W. Bush was to capitalist democracy.

But Beck took it a step further, attempting to tar Marx and Engels, the theoretical founders of modern communism, with the stain of Stalin, Mao and even Hitler!

There is not enough space here to go “quotation” by “quotation” through Beck’s bevy of lies. (Besides, some of our trusted comrades are already on the case.) But it shows the extent to which Beck and the Nativists are willing to go to inoculate their supporters.

The passages “quoted” by Beck were, at best, taken out of their historical context. For example, one “quote” from Marx that Beck uses says that “classes and races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.” What Beck neglects to mention (i.e., lies about) is that Marx was talking about the bourgeois (capitalist) revolution.

The most damning, from Beck’s perspective, is a “quote,” falsely attributed to Marx, about how “the chief mission of all other races and peoples, large and small, is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust.”

Marx did not make any kind of comment like this. Engels, on the other hand, did make something that sort of resembles it — like how I resemble Johnny Depp ... at a glance, from a mile away, going 100 miles an hour.

What Engels wrote is: “All the earlier history of Austria up to the present day is proof of this and 1848 confirmed it. Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality — the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary.... All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. For that reason they are now counterrevolutionary.”

So, here we have Engels writing about a capitalist revolution in Austria in 1848, and the effect it had on the myriad of people who lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time, and how, in this context, those nationalities that opposed the capitalist revolution will perish in the wake of those revolutions.

Somehow, Beck turns that into a “quote” by Marx about a future workers’ revolution and “revolutionary holocaust.” Now, in fairness, the German word Engels used to say “storm” is now used as the word for “holocaust,” but that language change did not come about until after the Second World War.

This kind of falsification and Big Lie approach is all throughout Beck’s fantasy show. Even in areas where there was no need to lie about the horrors of the USSR, China, etc., Beck couldn’t resist cherry-picking the facts.

Even though some might see this as a failed attempt, the fact is that this has already had an effect among some elements.

In other words, the fight is on, whether we like it or not. So now it’s time for working people to step up and start fighting back.