Karl Marx has often been cited as the source of the derogatory comment concerning Southern Slavs to be "ethnic trash." I myself have used the refernce in a published work. Last night, I came across a minor refernce that indicated this attributation was not entirely correct and spend far longer than I perhaps should have searching for the source of the quote in its original language.
Marx may well do to share the credit/blame, but it was Fredrich Engels who actually wrote it.
In January, 1849, the tract Der magyarische Kampf ("The Magyar Struggle") was published in Neue Rheinische Zeitung (n.194, v.13), authored by Fredrich Engels (not Karl Marx, bless his long gray beard). A paragraph midway through begins:
So in Östreich die panslawistischen Südslawen, die weiter nichts sind als der Völkerabfall einer höchst verworrenen tausendjährigen Entwicklung.
Previous to this the term Völkerabfälle had already been uused. In this instance, the term is slightly changed due to context, Völkerabfall.
The beginning of the sentence would be: "…the pan-Slavist Southern Slavs, who are nothing but people's waste/racial refuse/ethnic trash…"
Literally, this mean's "people's waste."
In the local language about who it concerns this term can be translated to naroda otpada. If we take it to mean (and the translation would not be inaccurate) ethnic trash, the local tongue would have it be etničkih smeće.
So, the always eloquent (notice the switch to sarcastic font there) Fredrich Engels, is actually calling the Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Albanians, and their neighbors, human shit.
Don't think that it is above ideological philosophers to use vulgar terms. Engels and Marx were, after all, discussing genocide at a time when that word had yet been coined.
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