Roald Dahl: Original books to be kept in print following criticism(bbc.com)

  In 1960s Germany, students where so outraged by the absence of Nazism from their history curriculum that they turned violent. They rioted, bombed, and killed because they felt they where being denied their right to learn their recent history. And they blamed this on the fact that their teachers and parents had been Nazis and thought they where trying to erase their crimes. In a flash of cruel irony, the state's desire to shelter the students from political violence ignited it again in the streets and in the hearts of their students.

  People say, “You claim to be Marxists, but did you know that Marx was a racist?” We say, “He probably was a racist: he made a statement once about the marriage of a white woman and a black man, and he called the black man a gorilla or something like that.” The Marxists claim he was only kidding and that the statement shows Marx’s closeness to the man, but of course that is nonsense. So it does seem that Marx was a racist.

  Now if you are a Marxist, then Marx’s racism affects your own judgment because a Marxist is someone who worships Marx and the thought of Marx. Remember, though, that Marx himself said, “I am not a Marxist.” Such Marxists cherish the conclusions which Marx arrived at through his method, but they throw away the method itself—leaving themselves in a totally static posture. That is why most Marxists really are historical materialists: they look to the past to get answers for the future, and that does not work.

  If you are a dialectical materialist, however, Marx’s racism does not matter. You do not believe in the conclusions of one person but in the validity of a mode of thought; and we in the Party, as dialectical materialists, recognize Karl Marx as one of the great contributors to that mode of thought. Whether or not Marx was a racist is irrelevant and immaterial to whether or not the system of thinking he helped to develop delivers truths about processes in the material world. And this is true in all disciplines. In every discipline you find people who have distorted visions and are at a low state of consciousness who nonetheless have flashes of insight and produce ideas worth considering. For instance, John B. Watson once stated that his favorite pastime was hunting and hanging n*****s, yet he made great forward strides in the analysis and investigations of conditioned responses. 

  Huey P Newton