Written by Thomas Magstadt   

If you play with fire, you're likely to get burned. The know-nothing Wingnuts don't seem to realize they are playing with fire when they invoke "class" as the cause of the social protest movement growing stronger by the day. There's poverty in this country but no "proletariat" of the sort Karl Marx had in mind, so red-baiting references to "class warfare" can only mean one thing: the middle class.

Are the propagandists for the 1% really serious? Do they really want to draw an even sharper line between the rich and the rest of us than the growing wealth gap has already done? Do they honestly believe pitting the plutocracy against the middle class is a good idea? Can they be that bone-headed?

Apparently, the answer is yes.

Fox NEWS and Republican Party leaders persist in accusing Occupy Wall Street backers of “class warfare”. There are only two possible explanations for this baseless charge: 1) they are shills for the super rich or 2) they have no idea what they are saying. Both explanations ring true.

Politicians and commentators who use class warfare as a cheap gimmick to smear political opponents obviously have no knowledge of world history or why, for example, we engaged in a costly Cold War for nearly half a century with a "totalitarian" state called the Soviet Union. They apparently know nothing about the origins of the term “class warfare” or the suffering that was inflicted upon millions and millions of innocent men, women, and children in the last century in the name of – you guessed it – class warfare.

One wonders, have they never heard of Stalin's gulag archipelago – the chain of slave labor camps Stalin created and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the survivor who went on to win a Nobel prize for literature, immortalized in a book of the same name? Do they really not know about Stalin's blood purges and the state-planned starvation of millions in the Ukraine in the 1930s, or the mass persecution of millions of so-called class enemies, that it was all done in the name of class warfare?

Are they totally ignorant of the fact that in the early 1950s, Mao Zedong celebrated the Chinese Communist victory over Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists by launching a blood purge of his own, engineering the death of untold millions of innocent people in the process? Mao's atrocities were also the sanguinary fruits of class warfare.

Is class warfare what America's new class of extreme right-wing ideologues really mean? Is class warfare what they really want? Because if it isn’t, they would be well advised to stop using the words “class” and “warfare” in the same sentence, much less as a catchphrase for the silent majority who sympathize wholeheartedly with the Wall Street occupiers even if they can't bring themselves to go to the barricades – yet.*

So to the 1% who apparently don't understand what class warfare is all about, here's the message of the Occupy movement distilled down to its simplest form: Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

*According to syndicated columnist Frank Rich, the train has already left the station. See, "The Class War Has Begun," New York Magazine (October 30, 2011).