THE LEFT WERE ONCE MORE CONSERVATIVE

I pointed out at some length a week ago that the further back you go in history the more "Rightist" Leftists appear to have been. Below are some excerpts from a recent essay on the history of the British Labour Party that bear that out. Leftists will use for their own aggrandisement whatever attitudes they see as popular at the time -- from revolution for an angry and much put-upon Russian working class in 1917 to mere sound-good crisis management for the calm and practical British -- though both may be against the long-term best interests of the people concerned. If you think long-term, you are a conservative.

"Patrick Diamond, editor of the recent book New Labour's Old Roots, argues that the germ of New Labour existed from the start. There has been a strong pragmatic streak in the Labour Party, with a succession of modernisers who, like Blair, freely adapted their politics to the needs of the times. The Labour Party was never a hotbed of theoretical analysis, preferring instead those British values of practical application and common sense.

There weren't many hotheaded radicals among Labour's old leadership, most of whom preferred a go-slow, God-fearing version of 'socialism'. 'Socialism.is an excellently conceived and resolute effort to Christianise government and society', judged Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, during the party's radical, formative years in the early twentieth century

Even Clement Attlee's 1945-51 reputedly Labourist 'golden age' was pretty prosaic at heart, playing the primary role of restoring profitability in the British economy. Attlee maintained rations, introduced wage restraint in 1948, sent troops to break strikes and imprison militants, and devalued the pound in 1949. ....

When it came to foreign policy, Labour ministers were at least as gung-ho in defending British interests as were the Tories. The recent speeches made by Labour members in parliament about the party's long-standing anti-war tradition have little basis in fact. Attlee was in power in 1945 when Britain's ally America dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima, and he ordered the development of the British bomb without consulting the cabinet, never mind parliament....

(I have corrected the author's spelling of "Attlee" above. She gave it as "Atlee")

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ELSEWHERE

Surprise, Surprise! I said from the beginning that the "Hobbits" were just pygmies: "Indonesian scientists have found a community of Pygmy people on the eastern island of Flores, near a village where Australian scientists discovered a dwarf-sized skeleton last year and declared it a new human species, a newspaper says. The latest discovery will likely raise more controversy over the finding of homo floresiensis, claimed by Australian scientists Mike Morwood and Peter Brown in September last year. They dubbed the new species "hobbits". Kompas Daily reported yesterday that the Pygmy community had been found during an April expedition in the village of Rampapasa, about 1km from the village of Liang Bua where the "hobbits" were found. The newspaper quoted Koeshardjono, a biologist who discovered the Pygmy village, as saying that 77 families had been found living in the village. Eighty per cent of the Rampapasa villagers were of small stature, with most male adults under 145cm and female adults about 135cm". (A few more details here)

There is a type of deadpan Jewish humour that I really love and Arlene Peck is a very Jewish lady so I enjoyed this snippet from the unexpurgated version of her latest column (which I have just posted here): "Today, we are lazy and without a clue about the subjects that make a real difference. I remember when I lived in Israel and the men there, unlike most of the ones I meet here who are gay, married or dead� sometimes all three, were sexual beings. If they woke up at three in the morning, it was to make love. Today, they�ll get up at 3:00 A.M. to watch a Lakers game". The thought of someone being at once gay, married and dead really cracked me up.

Methodists consult everything but the Bible: "A Methodist court Friday reinstated a gay minister who had been defrocked for declaring to her congregation that she was in a relationship with another woman. The United Methodist Church appeals panel voted 8 to 1 to set aside the December decision by another church court to oust Irene "Beth" Stroud for violating the denomination's ban on "self-avowed, practicing homosexual" clergy. The panel said the ban was "null and void" because the church procedures were not followed when it was adopted."

Franklin Delano Mussolini "So, taking a few pages from Mussolini's fascist reforms in Italy, Roosevelt began to group American industries into cartels. These cartels, called Code Authorities, operated under government supervision and had immense authority. They could set quality, prices, and output quantities for the industry. Lower-priced competition was effectively outlawed. This program's failings are too many to elaborate on here, but John Flynn's book The Roosevelt Myth would be a good start for someone wanting more on this topic. In brief, the cartelization scheme was economic nonsense. ... "Mercifully, this program (run as the National Recovery Administration) was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935.... What Roosevelt had created, Mr. Flynn brilliantly foresaw in 1948, was "that kind of state-supported economic system that will continue to devour a little at a time the private system until it disappears altogether." In a word: fascism (an economic term the appropriateness of which is in no way refuted by the absence of goose-steeping storm troopers in the streets)"

The socialist who admitted he was wrong: "Robert Heilbroner, the bestselling writer of economics, died early this month at the age of 85. He and John Kenneth Galbraith may well have sold more economics books than all other economists combined. Alas, their talents lay more in the writing than the economics. Heilbroner was an outspoken socialist... He was not entirely impervious to new evidence, however. In 1989, he famously wrote in The New Yorker: "Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won... Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism." .... Alas, in that same article he went on to say that while socialism might not in fact produce the goods, we would still need to reject capitalism on the grounds of...let's see...I've got it-environmental degradation..... On the big issue of capitalism vs. socialism, though, he did continue his rueful acknowledgment of error. In 1992, he explained the facts of life to Dissent readers: "Capitalism has been as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure.... He also noted then that "democratic liberties have not yet appeared, except fleetingly, in any nation that has declared itself to be fundamentally anticapitalist."

There is an unusual retrospective on the Vietnam war Here that points out important gains for the USA from the Vietnam war. The second biggest lot of criminals (after the Communists) in that war was the U.S. "peace" movement that harried the U.S. Congress into cutting off all support for the South -- thus ensuring a Communist victory. Hundreds of thousands who had fought bravely for their liberty lost their lives as a result.

There is a rather awful story up on Strange Justice at the moment about government child abuse in New York City.

In my latest quote on MARXWORDS I note that even Karl Marx's kindly father thought Karl was a bad egg.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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