The article in the New Statesman about the alliance between hard-left and hard-right forces in the anti-war movement’s getting a lot of attention today (Jarvis, Simon, Hurryup Harry, et. al.) and it’s fair reading, although a bit insular. It makes the point that the SWP/radical Islamist alliance behind the anti-war movement wasn’t reported by the BBC on orders from management:
The anti-war movement wasn’t a simple repetition of the old story of the politically naive being led by the nose by sly operators. The far left was becoming the far right. It had gone as close to supporting Ba’athist fascism as it dared and had formed a working alliance with the Muslim Association of Britain, which, along with the usual misogyny and homophobia of such organisations, also believed that Muslims who decided that there was no God deserved to die for the crime of free thought. In a few weeks hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, would allow themselves to be organised by the opponents of democracy and modernity and would march through the streets of London without a flicker of self-doubt. Wasn’t this a story?
It’s a great story, I cried. But why don’t you broadcast it?
We can’t, said the bitter hacks. Our editors won’t let us.
…and goes on to marvel about the fact that the far left has become, in effect, pro-fascist. How this transformation has come about bears some examination (Simon does his usual soul-searching on the issue), and in the end comes down to one key observation, I think: a generation ago, the left had a plausible case that socialism’s ability to manage the distribution of wealth was indispensible for the creation of just societies. But socialism, we’ve learned, can only achieve just distribution by suppressing the formation of wealth, that is, it can make us all equally poor but it can’t make us all equally rich.
On balance, the poor fare better in a free economy than in the condition of state-managed (and some would say -mandated) poverty that socialism creates. So the forces of progress have been forced to abandon socialism, leaving only a hard core behind. Fascists have always been in favor of state-run economy, so they have the core issue in common with the hard left. And this is the way it’s always been.
The Left always spouts off some emotional rants about killing and oppression of the innocent.
They figure if they just scream really loud against the ‘establishment’ and ‘let it be’ that everything will ‘work itself out in the end.
My take on this is that they’ve never had to actually do anything for themselves and have enjoyed the luxury of freedom, that they are completely disconnected from the realities of the rest of the world.
They’re too blinded by their own emotions that they don’t realize they’re supporting the fascists that they claim to vehemently oppose.
That’s what happens when you have too much ‘understanding’ and ‘cultural relativism.’ You forget who you are, what you stand for, and where your grounded.
I’ll never forget when a girl-friend of mine argued that female genital mutilation is okay, and as American’s we just don’t ‘understand’ that it’s their ‘culture.’
At the risk of invoking Gaudier’s Law, is there a difference between Nazi Germany’s insistence on a healthy people (though holiday camps, emphasis on physical fitness and attacks on smoking) and the left’s insistence on a healthy people (though attacks on smoking, fast-foods and insistence on exercise)?
I think This kinda proves what I thought about “Political Spectrums” and their accuracy over time…
…They’re only so accurate for so darn long!
On one side there once were the conservatives and now the liberals. This is almost to the point of Hogwash and hokum. The rules and definitions seem to have changed in a wierd way.
A new spectrum is in order methinks. On one side: the individualists. Those who believe that individuals should have full power to achieve their own destiny with a minimum of meddling (within reason).
On the other hand we have conformists, who believe that a certain set of parameters are best for everyone.
I’m pretty far on the Individualist Side. Where are you at?
I made the point about the death of socialsm leading to the decline of the Democrats in a guest blog over at Winds of Change. 16 May 03.