Three great quotes via the �Fed�:

THE CARTER PEACE PRIZE

"There is an ex-President who not only sought peace but who achieved peace, who reduced the threat of nuclear annihilation dramatically and liberated tens of millions of people from dictatorship. His name is Ronald Reagan�.

COMEDIANS COMMENT ON CLINTON

Bill Clinton spoke Wednesday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center about his recent trip to Africa. He said Africa is home to 70 percent of the world's AIDS cases. Most business travelers just check the weather forecast before they go someplace.

Today is Bill and Hillary's 27th wedding anniversary!
27 years ago tonight Bill cheated on Hillary for the first time.


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NAZIS VERSUS �REDS�

When I point out how far to the Left most of Hitler�s policies were, a strong reaction I get from many who know something of history is to say that Hitler cannot have been a Leftist because of the great hatred that existed at the time between the Nazis and the �Reds�. One such challenger has been Jiri -- to whom I am greatly indebted for a lively and erudite correspondence about the politics of the interwar years. One of Jiri�s observations seems to me a very good one indeed:

I am surprised that you have not seized on Hitler's anti-semitism as a
proof that he was a socialist. So widespread had been anti-semitism among the
Leftists in Europe that Lenin himself denounced it as "the socialism of the
stupid man"

My reply to Jiri and others was of course that there is no hatred like fraternal hatred and that hatreds between different Leftist groupings have existed from the French revolution onwards. That does not make any of the rival groups less Leftist however. And the ice-pick in the head that Trotsky got courtesy of Stalin shows vividly that even among the Bolsheviks themselves there were great rivalries and hatreds. Did that make any of them less Bolshevik, less Marxist, less Communist? No doubt the protagonists concerned would argue that it did but from anyone else�s point of view they were all Leftists at least.

Nonetheless there still seems to persist in some minds the view that two groups as antagonistic as the Nazis and the Communists just cannot have been ideological blood-brothers. Let me therefore try this little quiz: Who was it who at one stage dismissed Hitler as a "barbarian, a criminal and a pederast"? Was it Stalin? Was it some other Communist? Was it Winston Churchill? Was it some other conservative? Was it one of the Social Democrats? No. It was none other than Benito Mussolini, the Fascist leader who later became Hitler�s ally in World War II. And if any two leaders were ideological blood-brothers those two were. So I am afraid that antagonism between Hitler and others proves nothing. If anything, the antagonism between Hitler and other socialists is proof of what a typical socialist Hitler was.

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CATHOLIC LEFTISM REVISITED

I have just received the following counterblast to the email I published yesterday about Catholic Leftism:

� Christianity is a monarchy with Christ the King. It does not promote individuality in terms of doctrine, scripture or history. Why then should the Catholic Church? If Catholicism promotes statism, why did John Paul II fight the Commies so hard? The writer is comparing apples to oranges. If you want to talk religion, if the Catholic Church promotes Statism then Protestantism promotes chaos. Who interpetes scripture for the Protestants? At least with the Catholics its the Church and the Magisterium. With the Protestants it�s �Do your own thing�.

I must say that, as far as I can see, Christ was most emphatic in his lifetime that he was not concerned with the politics of his day but rather with preparation for the afterlife. I have quoted some of the scripture concerned here. Surely those who really follow him would also keep out of politics and concentrate on salvation. Some extreme Protestant sects (e.g. Jehovah�s Witnesses) do in fact withdraw as far as they can from the affairs of the secular world. I think they have scripture on their side in doing so.


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Comments? Email me:
Email: jonjayray@hotmail.com.
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