Posted on 09/23/2002 4:33:05 PM PDT by knighthawk
Saturday, September 21, 2002
In Canada and the United States, the political left is always dying (even leftists say so), but somehow it never goes away. We keep it alive by worrying about it, and giving it advice. Every former sympathizer knows precisely how the left can regain legitimacy.
In decades past I voted NDP, not always but often. My father voted for the CCF, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation -- a dumb and unattractive name, as its slow-witted organizers realized after about two decades. It seemed natural for me to vote for the CCF and, after 1961, for its successor, the New Democratic Party. That's when I wasn't voting for Lester B. Pearson, the Liberal prime minister who was my generation's idea of greatness (OK, near-greatness).
It was Fidel Castro who finally broke the NDP's shaky grasp on my affections. The New Democrats called themselves "democratic socialists," but in foreign affairs they were just socialist, not democratic. They spoke with great enthusiasm of Castro and didn't want to know about political opponents driven into exile, poets jailed, homosexuals rounded up and penned in prison camps, etc. Castro is a standard-issue egomaniac dictator, always has been, but the New Democrats made him their pal, if only because the United States hated him. Never the best way to choose a friend.
Eventually the remaining believers will learn the truth and "lose their innocence." Leftists keep on losing their innocence. It's what they do best. They lost their innocence about Stalin, then Lenin, then Trotsky, then of course Mao, etc. There's no end to how much innocence you can lose when you set your mind to it.
Ronald Radosh described this process last year in Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left. A bright man, he was nevertheless a slow innocence-loser. On a New Left junket to Cuba in the 1970s he was disappointed not to find a happy and vigorous society. When his group visited a mental hospital, a doctor proudly declared that "in our institution, we have a larger proportion of hospital inmates who have been lobotomized than any other mental hospital in the world." Most of the young Americans were horrified, but one found a way to explain it: "We have to understand that there are differences between capitalist lobotomies and socialist lobotomies."
Still, Radosh remained a socialist. Then he set out to prove that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 for spying, were innocent. Instead, he discovered Julius was guilty, a conclusion other leftists rejected in an instant. The sudden wave of hatred directed at him by his old friends accomplished what the Cuban lobotomies could not: It destroyed his innocence.
Camille Paglia, who expressed her leftist sympathies by voting for Ralph Nader in the last presidential election, argues that the left needs reform. For one thing, she wrote, it doesn't appreciate capitalism, being blind to "the enormous contributions that capitalism has made to democracy and individualism." All true, but can leftists holding that view be considered leftists? She seems to think that pro-capitalism leftists could function as critics of business and prevent catastrophes like Enron.
The left as defender of corporate virtue? Not necessarily a bad idea; maybe the NDP can work it into the platform. Paglia goes a bit far, though, when she utters the ultimate right-wing view of production: "Without the profit motive, few are inclined to work for long."
But she retains her leftist credentials by coming down on the approved side of one issue: She thinks that what happened to American politics in the 1960s was pretty damn great. She mourns "the decline in prestige and effectiveness of leftist organizations since their high point in the 1960s."
Well, actually, the 1960s were the low point. In the 1960s the New Left, having pretended to free itself from the rigidities of the Old Left's Stalinist cult, put its conscience in the hands of despots such as Ho Chi Minh and Mao. Some New Leftists had kind words for Pol Pot and others warmed to the promise of Enver Hoxha. He was the monster who ruled Albania, a country of which most New Leftists had barely heard. But he was an implacable Stalinist long after Stalin's death, an uncompromising enemy of revisionism. Certain New Leftists loved him for that alone, and for a while the student paper at McGill University maintained a strict Hoxha line, to the stupefaction of its readers. Hoxha fans in those days got their world news by short-wave from Radio Tirana, which caused confusion when they mentioned it in the cafeteria; pronounced by an English speaker, Tirana sounds like a slurred pronunciation of a large Canadian city to the west of Montreal that good McGill students were even then learning to despise.
Camille Paglia thinks the greatest task that faces the left is purging its dead rhetoric. She's wrong. What the left needs most is an honest look at its own past and a reconsideration of how it came to make so many friends among the tyrants whose crimes dominated the 20th century.
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca; http://www.robertfulford.com/
Tyrants thrive among the left because they're weak.
The weak... limp wristed liberals are the life blood of Tyrants
A Tyrants path to power is paved with weak, limp wristed, leftist liberals.
History has proven this yet the spineless invertebrates will never get it.
He could have written the anti-war posters I saw at a recent left rally.
I was astonished that anyone could support the guy, but there they were.
D
"Useful Idiots"
European parliamentary systems fail in this respect because they fall prey to majoritarian democracies where the majority imposes their will on the minority. Their aristocratic heritage belies a state where the individual is "granted" rights by the state rather than having been born with them. A tryranny of the majority which Jefferson, Madison and other founders of the American republic railed against.
All collectivist regimes are identified by their proclivity to demand adherence to conformity. The greater the indivdual freedom, the greater human creativity. Without such freedom humanity descends into the "dark ages".
Which explains perfectly the endless list of losers and tyrants from Che to Idi Amin who have enjoyed the rapturous approbation of the singalong left. The left is, typically, long on theory, short on practical application, and entirely bereft of real-world success. They're legends in their own minds. They're not, when it comes down to it, very bright people.
I think the left's love and admiration for the dictators of the world is simply their acceptance of the Hayek principle. They know that it takes a dictatorship to achieve the nirvana that they "know" is the savior of humanity.
They also know that the Hillary principle: “It takes an Elite Force to run a good socialist system” is also true and that they will be able to enjoy the good life that they are willing to deny the rest of us (the "Workers") in order to save the planet.
These liberals are the scum of the earth.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.