TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I pick out what I think are my best posts for the week:

On Dissecting Leftism I look at Black/White income disparities

On Political Correctness Watch I have some news about Britain's gypsy problem

On Greenie Watch I look at the latest Greenie scare about us "running out" of things

On Education Watch I note an argument in favour of "spare the rod and spoil the child"

On Socialized Medicine I note that with 1.4 million employees to serve 60 million people, Britain's NHS still cannot provide adequate medical care

On Gun Watch I say that the latest school shootings show that gun banning has plainly failed

On MarxWords I show that Engels thought Aryans were superior

On Leftists as Elitists I note a seemingly endless parade of unproven assertions by an elitist who thinks he knows what's best but who cannot even spell

On Majority Rights I say that Winston Churchill WAS a neocon

On Blogger News I note that homosexual conservatives are being persecuted by the Left

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WAS THE POPE A CONSERVATIVE?

Lawrence Auster has a heap of posts and comments up at the moment about the late Holy Father. Auster is derisive of the view that John Paul II was a conservative. But that depends on what you mean by conservative and Auster has an unusual view of that. It is certainly clear that JPII was a political centrist but I think one could say much the same of GWB. So is GWB a conservative? NO! I can hear some people shouting. But no real-life politician wins universal approval even from his own side of politics so I think we have to say that in the ordinary meaning of the term GWB IS a conservative.

From my own libertarian conservative viewpoint both GWB and JPII are/were not nearly conservative enough but I think that real-world conservative politics at least from Disraeli on have almost always consisted of finding a safe balance between competing political claims rather than pursuing some hard-line ideology. Hard-line ideologies are for Leftists. So I think Auster's view of the matter misses the point that JPII was of necessity a real-world politician -- so compromises were to be expected of him. Even my great hero, Ronald Reagan, signed into law some pieces of legislation I would rather not think about.

What I think Auster also misses is that political centrism is thoroughly Papal. The attitudes of JPII were simply modern adaptations of traditional Papal thinking. I go into that at slightly greater length here. Papal thinking is in fact the ancestor of the Blairite "third way". The syndicalism that was recommended in the famous 1891 encyclical De rerum novarum of Pope Leo XIII also tried to strike a balance between capitalism and socialism.

Update: I guess I should mention explicitly something I initially thought was too well-known to require comment: That there was one respect in which His Holiness was NOT a centrist -- his stand in favour of individual rights versus the power of the Communist State. So in that respect he was very much a conservative, and a great one.

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ELSEWHERE

George Watson's latest article on the great similarites between Nazism and Communism is now online. The similarities are even greater than is commonly known and Watson sets out well their common origins in the ideas of Marx & Engels. Excerpt: "Racialism was already widely accepted as the mark of the Left in many countries, including England. There the Fabians led. In 1900, in Fabianism and the Empire, they announced in imperial vein that "the state which obstructs international civilisation will have to go, be it big or little". Two years later H.G. Wells, another Fabian, wrote Anticipations, where in its last pages he called for the extermination or all non-white races to build a universal socialist utopia; and in August 1913, in the New Statesman, Sidney and Beatrice Webb called for the endless domination of the world by the white races"

Interesting excerpt from a review of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?: "And yet Frank's portrait of Kansas conservatives is often brilliant. One of the high points of the book is his interview of Tim Golba, the organizer of Kansans for Life. Frank is impressed that this man of power is a mere line worker in a soda-pop plant. Frank visits him in his little house, unscreened by trees, baking in the prairie sun, far from the leafy neighborhoods of the bourgeoisie. Apparently Golba is not conducting his crusade out of an economic interest. "Ignoring one's economic self-interest may seem like a suicidal move to you and me, but viewed in a different way it is an act of noble self-denial," Frank writes. "This is a man who has turned his back on the comforts of our civilization - who defies the men in great palaces. He smites their candidates; he wastes their money; he ends their careers." [So it is conservatism that offers the little guy a share in power]

My latest quote on MARXWORDS shows that Marx believed in superior and inferior races. And guess whom he thought to be superior? (Hint: Adolf agreed).

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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