Posted on 10/16/2009 1:11:03 PM PDT by madconservative
Parties and ideas continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable course; the political soil itself steals forth by imperceptible degrees, like a travelling glacier, carrying on its bosom not only political parties but their flag-posts and cantonments; so that what appears to be an eternal city founded on hills is but a flying island of Laputa. It is for this reason in particular that we are all becoming Socialists without knowing it; by which I would not in the least refer to the acute case of Mr. Hyndman and his horn-blowing supporters, sounding their trumps of a Sunday within the walls of our individualist Jericho—but to the stealthy change that has come over the spirit of Englishmen and English legislation. A little while ago, and we were still for liberty; 'crowd a few more thousands on the bench of Government,' we seemed to cry; 'keep her head direct on liberty, and we cannot help but come to port.' This is over; LAISSER FAIRE declines in favour; our legislation grows authoritative, grows philanthropical, bristles with new duties and new penalties, and casts a spawn of inspectors, who now begin, note-book in hand, to darken the face of England. It may be right or wrong, we are not trying that; but one thing it is beyond doubt: it is Socialism in action, and the strange thing is that we scarcely know it.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldlibrary.net ...
http://worldlibrary.net/eBooks/WorldeBookLibrary.com/lamor.htm#1_1_6
or here:
I can empathise with the inspectors and their notebooks. I tell you straight, there is no more frightening and awful thing on this planet than a health and safety inspector who enjoys his work...
mark
Sounds to me by this essay that the electorate was already heading that way 20 years before WWI. Similar to the radicals in power in our country gaining momentum over the last 40 years...
People keep saying to me, “I can’t believe how fast we have descended into Socialism”, but it took a long time for the Socialists to win over half of the voters, the rest is just policy.
“Sounds to me by this essay that the electorate was already heading that way 20 years before WWI.”
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That’s fairly accurate. The Progressive movement had been around awhile, and was the new intellectual “toy” of the day’s pundits. (The Progressive movement, for those in Rio Linda, basically says the state is the perfector of man, and as the Communist Manifesto from which most of its ideas were drawn also said, only an “elite” ruling class could understand how this perfecting process was to play out.)
How far back does it go? Well, recent college students may notice some interest in a heretofore obscure 19th century author named William Dean Howells. He was enormously popular in his day, and Mark Twain called him a literary mentor. Howells returned the compliment by referring to Mark Twain as “the Lincoln of our literature.”
Howells was also a socialist in a rather innocent sense (if that can really be said of socialists).
In the late 1800s, the plight of the worker was a big deal, and there really was some nasty exploitation going on in places by the “plutocrats,” or tycoons. The Progressive Movement used that exploitation as a cover, IMO. It became a very popular idea at the time. Woodrow Wilson was an ardent admirer of Socialism as many of us know.
We’ve gone downhill from there.
Make no mistake, this is nothing new. The resurgence in Howells’s writings are part of it all, to me at least... Our universities have become Leftist think tanks, and are turning out a frightening number of mind-numbed robots.
FWIW, Howells himself laments that Mark Twain “never went so far in Socialism as I have gone...”; and for good reason. Henry H. Rogers, an “evil” capitalist saved Twain’s bacon when he was literally bankrupt at nearly 70 years of age. But, I digress.
We have a lot of work to do, to get things back where they should be; our own “long march through the institutions,” and I’m somewhat at a loss as to how to start. I suppose I’m hoping that enough of our young people see through the scam and take action of their own. I’m gettin’ too old for all this $***.
From what I’ve read, the Prime Minister at the time of WWI had ordered his people to give the trade unions anything they wanted because the Germans were trying to cause an uprising among the workers to try and get England out of the war.
So he gave carte blanche to ANYTHING that labor wanted and once you start down that slope...there is no going back.
Nah, socialism just became legit, gained critical mass, at that time.
Socialism was on the march ever since early 1800s. In this country, it did not look palatable for a while, it has been promulgated under the name of "progressivism." It "has been installed" by Roosevelt. It would be silly to say that the 1929 crash "installed" socialism in America; the crash simply helped socialism to win hearts and minds of Americans. We witness the same today.
Socialism was in full sway in Europe before WWII. It was only the common enemy of Nazism that temporarily halted political power for statists.
We’ve been back on the slide for decades now.
How soon people forget.
During WWII, England mobilized for war more thoroughly than Germany did. This is the socialism am talking about. For the Brits hard times did not end with the end of fighting, and our refusal to float them a loan, on the same terms as we had since 1915, let to a collapse of their economy—and their empire. The NHS was not more than extending military medicine to the whole nation. The Labour Government’s nationalization was simply an extension of war socialism —not unlike the kind that Roosevelt proposed for America and practiced by Wilson’s administration—into peacetime.
I understand you better now; thanks.
I studied British history in graduate school. What most surprised me is how DOWN the British were in 1946-47. They lacked the money to get their industry started. It was worn out, exhausted. The Marshall Plan was not as generous as we like to think. It forced the Brits —in effect- to liquidate their empire by denying to them any profit from it. What worries me about our commitments in the Middle East is that the Europeans et al, have done the same thing to us in reverse. We gain little economically compared with what Europe and China receive —which is a stable oil supply—and we bear the expense.
later
That is exactly right.
It appears I have a chance to ask an expert: could you please recommend some reputable (from YOUR standpoint) book(s) on the post-war British history? I know I could do a search myself but I am concerned not to get stuck with some politically correct book that promulgates post-colonial guilt or some such anti-Western thought. I would be most grateful if you could recommend something informative.
Ironically, I have to recommend a Fabian Socialist, G.D.H. Cole. His book “The Post-war Condition of Britain”,(1956) which you can get on Amazon—I just Checked—for about $10. OO, or in some college library. He is a very reliable sociologist and you can see in him the thinking of the Labour Government. So you will have no doubt where he stands on things. It is about 500 pages and lots of graphs and stuff. As to being an expert, I must decline to accept that description. I haven’t done any real reading in the scholarship since about 1970.
And by the way, I found that in getting background for by master’s thesis —never went further with study than that I learned a tremendous amount by reading back issues of The Economist.(also got insight into what was happening in Vietnam, which was just lighting up while I was in school: amazing how much ignorance about the period 1945-54) That and reading memoirs that had began to appear in the ‘60s. You have to get beyond the generalities one finds in modern histories of the post-war period.
Many, many thanks for the pointers. I have almost no knowledge about this period “beyond the generalities one finds in modern histories,” which is unfortunate, since it explains much of what we see in both Britain and on the Continent. The real reasons for (beyond the “struggle of classes” and “liberation movements” views) and the process of the dissolution of the British empire are also fascinating to me. Thanks again for your help.
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