A New Chapter

The latest guest-essay by our Israeli correspondent MC takes a look at the bubble known as “Socialism”.

A New Chapter
by MC

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a history of popular folly by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841. It featured write-ups on such follies as Tulipomania and the South Sea Bubble. But I think a chapter needs to be added, a chapter for the new secular religion of Socialism, and its suicidal sponsorship of Islam.

Socialism is the new boy on the block, a utopian crypto-religion, which believes that if we all care and we all share, then hey presto! and abracadabra, a utopia comes along and scoops us all up into a warm and cuddly nirvana called kumbayah.

A great deal of jargon is involved, however, and the small print at the bottom of the terms and conditions page is incomprehensible outside of the ivory towers of Cultural Marxist academia.

The problem being that socialists are so sure of their belief system that they consider that we must all be forced to care, and we must all be forced to share whether we like it or not.

My brother and his wife, both state employees for most of their working lives, are graduates of London University. When first married they got state subsidised housing and other goodies by virtue of her job as a social worker. Plus free rail travel by virtue of his employment with the (at the time nationalised) British Rail.

Most socialists do not realize the deeply religious components of their humanism. For many years my sister-in-law tried to proselytize me into her religion, remorselessly belittling my profession (Officer in the Royal Navy), all the while criticising me for being ‘judgmental’ and ‘intolerant’. She could not see, and still does not see, the inherent hypocrisy in her stance.

But fashion is fashion, and the most outrageous things are done in the name of fashion. Socialism is fashionable, conservatism is not. To be ‘fashionable’ one must put on a uniform; big hat, little hat, no hats, long skirts, miniskirts, long hair, crew-cuts, man-bag, bum bag (fanny pack). But if one is not careful, the uniform one puts on is a black and silver uniform with jackboots.

There are ‘dictators of fashion’ and there are ‘followers of fashion’. The followers do not think, they ‘do’ what the dictators tell them to do.

In the German city of Celle, on the 8th April 1945 (the Germans surrendered in May of that year) and with the Allied armies just down the road, there was a massacre of concentration camp inmates. There was a train of cattle trucks in the goods yard with its usual socialist cargo of ‘unwanted’ humanity. Next to it was a train full of munitions. Unfortunately, the goods yard was attacked by Allied planes. The bombers scored a direct hit on the munitions train, which immediately blew up.

In the resulting chaos, many of the Untermenschen fled the damaged and burning cattle trucks to try for safety (from the air raid and its aftermath). Their SS guards opened fire on them. Several hundred made it to the open fields, so a hunting party was organised in which civilians took part. Orders were to shoot these starved and often wounded ‘hares’ on sight:

As the squadron veered away and the dust and smoke gradually cleared, people who lived in the area were approached by emaciated, bloody figures dressed in striped prison garb. Some of them permitted the strangers to help themselves to food, drink and civilian clothes; there were also reports that residents fed the prisoners or administered first aid. Others, apparently the great majority, chased them away.

What happened then has entered oral history as a “hare hunt” — indeed, for a good 40 years the memory of the massacre was preserved solely by word of mouth. This much is known: citizens of Celle, some in uniform, others in civilian clothes, became a regular hunting party tracking the strangers in gray-blue clothes, who, according to one eyewitness, “were dashing across the fields like hares.” Indiscriminately, they shot at the fugitives wherever they found them, in orchards and on the streets. For two days, residents searched the woods, gardens and basements for prisoners, shot them and beat them to death. An estimated 200 to 300 died.

The civilians of Celle had a choice: to be good National Socialists and kill the escaping ‘hares’, or to have mercy on fellow humans caught up in the tangled webs of tyranny. Those who chose to become killers were under no compulsion, they chose to show their virility by shooting unarmed starving — maybe wounded — fellow humans.

Socialism, whether it be Communist, Nazi, Islamic or Moderate, damages the psyche, the philosophy of “the end justifies the means” distorts the “milk of human kindness” and if I may misquote the Bard, in the case of Celle, “the quality of mercy was not strained”.

On the Gates of Vienna website recently, I made the comment “there is no such thing as moderate socialism, if one can advocate theft (redistribution of wealth) one can also condone murder”. I attracted some critics, maybe rightly so, some because of my heritage and place of residence. One in particularly compared me to Ayn Rand (an escapee from violent socialism); I am flattered. The commenter’s argument in defence of redistribution of wealth cited a wealthy Swedish businessman who did not mind paying 50% tax, and after all who would mind paying for Defence or Education? This of course is not redistribution of wealth, this is paying for a service; redistribution of wealth happens when money is forcibly taken (stolen) from one person to give to another person deemed (by the thief) to be in ‘need’.

There are some underlying assumptions here, firstly, my Tanack (Bible OT) says “Thou shalt not steal” so how can I support the forcible redistribution without compromising my beliefs? In the socialist multiculti game, however, my beliefs do not matter because they are ‘Judeo-Christian’ and therefore part of the problem. Secondly, there are some exceedingly rich socialists around and they, of course, ‘give’ very generously and publicly whilst also expecting (and maybe forcing), the widow to expend her few mites at their behest.

We, in the capitalist West, still have some choices, like the citizens of Celle. We can either clothe and feed the escapees, or we can hunt them down, beat them up, and shoot them. The religion of Socialism dictates that we hunt them down as enemies of the state. Judeo-Christianity dictates that we feed and clothe them. But most of us just do nothing.

Socialism is utter insanity, and those who escaped at Celle were victims of that particular national insanity; Hitler and Stalin were not insane, but the rose-tinted religion that drove them was the epitome of insanity. The religious desire for utopia is very strong, but the moment that any religion starts a process of forcible conversion in order to achieve its utopia, then that religion is off the rails.

Judeo-Christianity, like most religions, does not support forcible conversion, although deviants have been known to erroneously support it. Islam, on the contrary, supports forcible conversion although deviants have been known to denounce it. The religion of Socialism assumes the absolute right to forcibly convert all mankind to its religious tenets.

The idea of forcible conversion here should include the idea of conversion by deceit, a part of which is conversion by ‘fashion’. The idea of the King parading down the street clothed in garments so fine that only the most discerning can see them is most apt here. There are three facets to the story, the tailors who sold the idea, the King and his courtiers who were gullible (or self-interested), and the little child who could see through to the bottom of the problem.

It is the second group who are of most interest. These are the useful idiots of the first group, and in a democracy, they are supposed to be the King, but when fashion or self-interest dictates blindness to the bare facts of life then it becomes crude.

Our own exotic dancer-king has stripped down to the G-string, and we, the audience, are raptly wondering if this is the end of the show, or if she/he is going to go all the way. It’s a “crying game” moment.

We have a choice: we can stop the show, or we can indulge our prurience and take the consequences; but we know that life will never be the same again.

Somebody else’s utopia is never quite what you think it is. It may look great. It may sound great. But, like real estate, the realtor’s description leaves out the Homer who lives next door.

Socialism is a bubble, with known dire consequences when it pops, but it is a very pretty bubble which appeals to a certain childishness whilst it lasts. Charles Mackay would have been fascinated.

72 thoughts on “A New Chapter

  1. Just a minor quibble, but Islam does not mandate conversion. Rather, it offers a choice of three options: conversion, dhimmitude, or death. By choosing dhimmitude, one can pay the jizya and obey the Sharia rules for “people of the book”. Technically, non-book people don’t get to be dhimmis; they must choose between death or conversion, though at times, for practical reasons, I’ve read that Hindus and others have been deemed dhimmis.
    Thus, those with modest expectations can appreciate Islam’s magnanimity.

    • With due respect to you jewdog, Islam’s magnanimity toward those who choose to retain their religion while paying the jizya and becoming dhimmi’s, has very little to do with Islam’s benevolence and appreciation for the people of the book, but more to do with the parasitic nature of how Islam survives in conquered territory.

      That is the politics of Islam and not the religious aspect.

      • The Muslims are Perfectly content in a Christian state as a minority. If there are enough to blackmail the Christians 10-15 % they can extract benefits and sit on their backsides sucking the productive dry as they smuggle drugs and pimp out the native women.

        • Agreed Napier, that’s my reading of the situation too, trouble is those outside clink breed like the [disparaged creatures] they truly are, so for them, it’s a win – win situation, until they get to take over and change laws, WE feed and shelter those bent on OUR subjugation.

          I make a point of bringing this to peoples attention most weekends at informal gatherings, the majority prefer to talk about other things unfortunately.

      • I was mainly being sarcastic. I agree with your dim view of Islam, but it’s technically true that Islam does not require conversion.

        • jewdog, but islam does require a conversion; from your set of social beliefs/rules (SB/R) to their set of SB/R. Your initial set of SB/R are based on your religion (or lack thereof), and the new set of SB/R are based upon theirs. At that point you either have to violate your own religious beliefs – and live ‘peacefully’ with the islams, or stick to your beliefs – and be beaten or worse, murdered. That is forced behavior change.

    • Yes, but the three options are unequal because Muslims intentionally make the dhimmitude and death options very painful in order to force conversion to Islam.

      Dhimmi Hindus and Christians – who share borders with Muslims – watch helplessly as Muslims kidnap, rape, forcibly marry, and forcibly convert their young daughters (and thus grandchildren) to Islam.

      In the past, Muslims kidnapped Christian boys to use as military slaves. In the present, various Muslim sects and countries import our dhimmi Christian troops as their mercenaries (if we fight for them) and target practice (if we fight against them).

      Persecuted dhimmis are fear the very real possibility that Muslims will rape, torture, maim, and/or murder the dhimmis in the MOST painful and gruesome ways. Muslims are even known to grossly mutilate – and even cannibalize – dhimmi bodies after violent murders.

      • You should look at the fiscal structure of Islam. They don’t need you to convert. They just control the host. of course any wasp like group can do this of course.

        • Muslims are not primarily motivated by greed, but by fanaticism. A telling detail in the experiences of Cervantes with Muslims of his day (he was imprisoned and enslaved twice by Muslims in North Africa and had numerous close friends likewise abused by Muslims): The Muslims of the slave-towns of North Africa loved every fresh batch of abductees from the ships they had raided through piracy, because they loved to verbally and physical torture them in the most horrific ways. However, they would immediately cease their grotesque sadism and throw away that pleasure at the slightest indication the victim wanted to convert to Islam — at which time there was great rejoicing by the Muslims.

          A common — and persistent — misunderstanding of our enemy is that he must be somehow like us, with our faults and foibles. They are not like us; they are frighteningly and hideously fanatical in ways that surpass even the Japanese Kamikazes.

        • The idea that one community has to be a majority to rule itself or dominate culturally is false.
          The Germanic tribes, though numerically inferior in the Late Antique world, dominated the greater populations of Romans and Roman provincial societies.
          I’m sure the Muslims have studied this and are taking it very much to heart in their use of terror.

        • You are attributing rationality to Muslims who are the living manifestation Islam which is, at best, a violently emotional and irrational cult, and, at worst, a Satanic religion. Either way, Muslims act in the interest of Islam rather than their own self-interest – especially with regard to eliminating infidels.

          A quick survey of the Islamic countries radiating out from the founding country Saudi Arabia will show that Muslims do indeed intend to eliminate 100% of infidels – whether or not infidel elimination negatively affects the finances of the average Muslim living in a completely disfunctional economy.

          The same phenomenon can be found in the black Africans who have been and are persecuting and eliminating white South Africans with immediate negative ramifications for black Africans.

          Although Muslims are fundamentally raiders and pirates whose economy requires richer neighbors to plunder, the average Muslim would not even realize that their raiding economies were – and are – disfunctional without the stark comparison of Muslim economies to Western economies provided by television and immigration.

          Television and immigration also caused the dissatisfaction experienced by communists around the world who could see the success of capitalism with their own eyes.

          South Africa is a prime example where black Africans immigrated to a thriving white economy – and promptly murdered the economy along with the white Africans. Whether the blacks murdered the economy due to their uniform of race or due to their adopted philosophy of communism matters naught where the negative financial result would have been the same with either source as its cause.

          Thus, Jesus revealed, “For you have the poor always with you; but me you have not always.”

          If your assertion were correct, then minority Muslims would be the first to lobby to stop all Muslim immigration to the West, but Muslims and their leftist allies are clearly lobbying to increase Muslim presence and power in Western countries.

          http://4freedoms.com/group/maps/forum/topics/list-of-supremacist-statements

    • Dhimmitude was introduced after the death of Mohammed. It was a mechanism by which caliph Omar decided to turn non-muslims into farmed animals. We are described in the koran as “cattle”.

      If you track the life of Mohammed, allowing non-muslims to survive as farmed cattle was superceded by his genocide/enslavement of the Banu Qurayza. It is perfectly feasible for a truly fundamentalist islam to denounce dhimmitude as heresy.

      If dhimmitude was considered a third option between death and slavery, then Mohammed would not have driven all non-muslims from Arabia. He would have just farmed us.

        • Yes, Napier. But, the SPIRITUAL basis of the Umma requires that Muslims eliminate ALL infidels.

          The primary driver of Muslims is NOT personal finance.

  2. MC, I liked your article. Socialism is really a disease to minds who aspire to some kind of human utopia but never really give it much thought on how to get there, while being willing dupes for those who know exactly what socialism means and what its installation will require.

    Socialists are very good at hiding their true aspirations from those who fail to understand the con job that is played on them. An example of this would be the intended diversionary labelling of National Socialism as being of a ‘right wing’ construct by those who know there is very little difference between Communism/Socialism/Progressivism and National Socialism. Hitler was bad but there is nothing wrong with Communism!

    It is often stated that 80% of any population is completely ignorant to what the other 20% of the population are getting up to. That half of that 20% is working at trying to control the other 90% of the population while the remaining half of the 20% is trying to alert the ignorant 80% gets very little air play.

    Some points to ponder;

    If the SSM (Soviet Style Media) were not in the tank with the controlling 10% of the population, the majority population would have been well and truly alerted to the malfeasance and treachery that continues at a blistering pace, long ago.

    And if not for the internet the West would have fallen under the complete influence of the controlling 10% some years ago.

    A good essay!

    • I disagree. Nazism is a blood and soil political belief. It is also anti egalitarian. Not that socialism is actually about equality either, but what they hey!

      The Celle Burghers were in their own eyes exterminating foreign elements who were effectively combatants allied to the bombers that had been dumping payloads on their heads. Not to justify it but I don’t see how their behaviour is socialist. Were the Cavalry who exterminated Indian villages acting as socialists or simply killing people who were foreigners?

      • “The civilians of Celle had a choice: to be good National Socialists and kill the escaping ‘hares’, or to have mercy on fellow humans caught up in the tangled webs of tyranny.”

        I did not state that the people of Celle were ‘Socialist’ the point is, they had a choice, but even with the Allies a few kilometers down the road, and Nazism folding up before their eyes, many took the “National Socialist” choice, others did not.

        The Celle incident was a vicious outcome of the morbid insanity which hovers around socialist religious extremism.

        • The [Germans] were in a racial war. I’m even prepared to agree that the Germans started it too.

          But plenty of indidents like this have happened in wars since the dawn of time.

          It inadvertently makes the argument to keep Muzzies and large groups of foreigns out, because such things always happen when people don’t get along.

          • Thanks for the article. I read it all. It is a dreadful article – a one-sided propaganda piece with the idea to SHAME all Germans – young and old.

            Who ever cares that many million MORE Christians were murdered in WWII than Jews?

            Who ever cares that Nazis were against Christian ideals – rather than representatives of Christian ideals?

            “Stories of less dramatic but successful acts of resistance — the protest against the removal of crosses in Bavarian churches, the daylong demonstration in 1943 of “Aryan” women demanding that the Government release their Jewish husbands, who had already been rounded up for transport to the camps — have not been passed on to the generation now growing into adulthood.”

      • Napier, you can disagree with anything I write, but the simple fact is that National Socialism or Nazi, is derived from Nationalosozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei and fits the definition of Socialism in any Dictionary.

        The blood and soil aspect of Nazism was to enforce German nationalism and had very little else to do with the actual Nazi system and structure.

        Your explanation for the hunting down of persons dressed in concentration camp uniforms around Celle due to them being seen as foreign elements, that somehow were complicit in American bombers dropping bombs, is fanciful at best and just plain silly at worst, because any captured combatants, as you refer to them, and under the Geneva Convention, got to keep their uniforms which identified them as Prisoners of War, not concentration camp inmates.

        ‘Were the Cavalry who exterminated Indian villages acting as socialists or simply killing people who were foreigners?

        Are you kidding?

      • The Cavalry weren’t “exterminating” Indians; they were defending innocent men, women and children from the savagery of the natives, who persistently refused the invitation to co-exist and lashed back for generations with the most ghoulish and grotesque violence.

        • As the Native Americans were, so the Westerners shall be in Europe and wherever they live in community.
          Who’s the cavalry in white?
          Why, the Muslims, of course!

        • If you can be bothered, please see my reply to your post of (I think) the 15th. The invaders- or, if you will, the settlers- had ideas about ownership of land which were incompatible with those of the natives, who were driven into smaller and smaller enclaves, and found a major source of sustenance (the buffalo) increasingly denied to them), and naturally fought back. After all, they were there first, so unless you claim some kind of innate superiority for the newcomers, such as Islamist immigrants might claim (in which case we have no common ground for a debate), “invitation to co-exist” describes an even worse form of dhimmitude.

      • The U.S. Army, by assisting the national project of redistributing land, while it was not part of a socialist government was implementing a policy that might be construed as socialist in effect.
        To deprive a person of life, liberty, limb, possessions for the supposed “greater good” can easily be construed as socialism, even if not institutionally, certainly in effect.
        And effects matter.
        Big time.

      • I sense that your argument is to imply that Nazism is an extreme form of conservativism (classical liberalism).

        Were the Cavalry a band of individualists in search of self-realization or were they part of an organized group doing their “duty” as told to them by their superiors?

        Nazism was very collectivist – rugged individualists didn’t last long. Many civilians allowed basic morality to be trumped by “duty”.

        Nazism was a phenomenon which was a result of nationalism plus a history of social chaos – a fertile ground for its horrors to arise. But to deny that it was not socialist is to deny the gross social and mental manipulation which made it possible.

        They were anti-communist as far as private property was concerned but the social engineering aspect of Nazism made it a close parallel to Stalinism.

    • The British welfare state was the best manifestation of socialist thinking that there has ever been – compassionate and generous. It began to fall apart when that compassion and generosity was extended to include any tom dick or harry that landed on British soil with begging bowl in hand (and cutlass behind back).

      • Socialism only ever APPEARS to work because socialism is fundamentally theft – class theft, inter-generational theft, racial theft, and religious theft.

        When socialism APPEARS to work, it is an illusion – a transitory state leading to a failed state – a mirage disguising a desert.

        Because socialism is theft, the urge of thieves to steal more and more is irresistible – until there is nothing left to steal because a vast financial and moral wasteland lies before them.

        As socialists gain power via increasing funds, socialists steal morals, safety, freedom, and peace-of-mind in addition to money.

        “Margaret Thatcher, in a TV interview for Thames TV This Week [[1]]on Feb. 5, 1976, Prime Minister Thatcher said, ‘…and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They [socialists] always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them.'”

        • So true Egghead. Our previous Labor (socialist) Federal government put out of office three months ago has left us, according to our new Treasurer, a 665 Billion Dollar financial mess that now threatens our economic survival.

          And this from a nation with only 23 million souls that make it up!

          • Actually, you should get the numbers correct.

            In Hockey’s MYEFO this week he said GROSS debt would hit $400 billion in 2016. Nett debt is currently $144 billion or 9% of GDP. (Source Appendix D – MYEFO papers available at http://www.budget.gov.au)

            This is ridiculously low. US is about 90% of GDP whilst UK is 85%.

            You may blame the Socialists for many things, but exaggerating the seriousness of the debt problem isn’t correct.

          • Exaggeration? Tony, the sum total in Treasury’s estimation for the fiscal years to 2016 is 665 Billion! You may believe that figure is low compared to other nations, but our ‘Golden Goose’ the booming and greatly expanded mining sector that got us through the GFC back in 2008, is now winding down with thousands of jobs being lost in the process while the welfare bill continues to soar!

            Yes, and I will blame the previous Socialist government which came into office in December 2007, inheriting a budget surplus of 22 billion which they then proceeded to fritter away on extravagant pipe dreams and expanding government, while borrowing heavily to finance their fantasies!

  3. Pingback: A NEW CHAPTER, THE BUBBLE KNOWN AS SOCIALISM……. |

  4. These past few years it has struck me, looking back on my life as a socialist, how similar is the mentality of socialists to that of missionaries.

    A few months ago, seeing a socialist group who were starting to criticise islamo-fascism, I went along to their meeting. After the talk, I was mingling, and was disgusted by how much I was being interrogated and judged. It was clearly an informal process by which the group ensured that everyone there was reciting the same catechism. Unlike catholicism, the socialist catechism has very vague edge-cases, and have the wrong opinion on the edge-cases and you are treated like a heretic/witch. It was one of the most unpleasant nights I can remember. I’ve never experienced such intolerance on EDL demos.

    If you notice how socialists treat National Socialists, provided the National Socialist denounces his previous beliefs but does not reject socialism he is forgiven. However, should he reject National Socialism and become an anti-socialist, he is treated as if he is still a National Socialist.

    • That seems to happen to bni on a regular basis but I have no idea why. Given our own travails with mischief makers and just recently having had to move up to a more expensive platform with better security (ah, thank you, Henrik), I can only guess that this is also a problem for them also.

      IIRC, they specialize in jihad porn. Or that was the case last time I checked – several years ago now. They had lots of images and videos showing Islam’s barbarity. Those kinds of things trigger my PTSD something wicked so we don’t post them. Or rather, if it is ever necessary to use the stuff to make a point, those images, etc., are put on page 2 where I can’t see them.

      Which is not to say they -BNI- don’t have the right to display the sadism and cruelty, just that I literally can’t stomach looking at it. And I suspect the bad guys want to interfere with their mission to expose the barbarity.

      Site lock is some form of web-based security. You can google the name and look at the information.

      I don’t know how often BNI goes down, but it used to be a regular occurrence.

  5. I consider myself an American center leftist (equivalent to the European center right.)

    Socialism is not a religion. It is a symptom of a dysfunctional society. When wealth distribution becomes so incredibly lopsided that a few percent own almost 99% of everything then socialism begins to grow as a natural result.

    The reason why the Republican party is losing it’s grip on power (and sanity) is because the vast middle class that used to be their base has eroded to almost nothing. Even as a leftist I considered it a ‘good sign’ that there were enough successful people to vote Republican (50% of the time). Now they are almost totally gone and the GOP has shifted it’s base to the [insulting descriptors redacted].

    People make rational economic decisions (except religious people). You know a Democrat will tax (the rich) and spend (on the poor), so why would anyone vote for a Democrat? BECAUSE THERE ARE NO MIDDLE CLASS PEOPLE LEFT WHO CARE ABOUT TAXING THE RICH. Our society allowed people like the Koch brothers and the Wall Mart heirs to economically rape the other 99% of us and when they were done all that was left was millions of destitute people with nothing but a vote and a grudge.

    So now that the middle class is gone, socialism is free to grow ever larger. What started out as simple (AND FAIR) income redistribution will gradually morph into a monster much like the bloated thoughtcrime states of Europe.

    Instead of plowing the money taken from the rich into equalizing factors like education or small business tax breaks, it’s instead put into eternal dependence programs like food aid and housing credits. What Democrat wants to put himself out of business by rebuilding the middle class? And what Republican cares anymore about the middle class (or small business owners or the Chamber of Commerce) when they have 50 million [epithet] Anti-Abortionists?

    So remember: As our country descends into a distopian Socialists Christo-Fascist civil war. It was YOU CONSERVATIVES who started this ball rolling in the 80s when your buddy Reagen started dismantling all the protections that were keeping the 1% from using their power to grab 99% of all the wealth.

    • @Porky’s2istan
      You will find that the more “progressive,” e.g., socialist the politics and governance, the more the middle class disappears.

      Case in point: California has probably led the nation in progressive politics and governance for the last number of decades. And it is no coincidence that California has also led the nation in the disappearance of the middle class.

      The middle class has been disappearing both by attrition and by flight.

      • Though my larger reference comment is below, I must point out that it’s not what remains of the middle class that has been fleeing California, but what remains of the White middle class that has been fleeing California. Myself included.

        To bring you around to seeing how the Progressives have managed to hoodwink the White middle class because of the latter’s inability to handle race, I’ll cite Cal gov. officials and hired statisticians (and Britgov, notoriously), who forever claim that while x #of people moved out, y #of people moved in, y being greater than x, so what’s the worry? What they never say is that x number of American or British white taxpayers have left, and y number of Mexican, Salvadoran, Somali, Jamaican of Gypsy tax eaters and social capital destroyers have moved in.

        • I’m such a “waysist” that I automatically associated the middle class with the white middle class. The middle class was largely white.

    • You have come close to the truth.

      Communism and Capitalism are in the final analysis no more than a cover for a rigged game. All the billionaires like Adelson and Zuckerberg for instance. They plow money into leftist Multicult policy. Why? To open up the borders.

      Once the historic population of the US and the UK is so diluted that the economy cant support a shell of a middle class, they’ll move on and do it to China. If the Chinese let em.

    • It is a m.e.g.o. moment whenever I run across hyphenated name calling as a summation used in place of reasoned discourse. It’s difficult to even find the energy to address this kind of snipped “history”.

      Reagan was an anomaly. An unfortunately brief episode in an otherwise long slide from 1913 to now. After the Federal Reserve was created and Income Tax constitutionalized, we had the interruption of our safely late entry into WWI before govt-induced poverty hit via those two odious events in ’13 which helped create the Great Depression…

      Then came more muscular federalism in the form of Galbraith’s wealth-killing economic theories and FDR’s New Deal – in reality, the third Raw Deal foisted off on the U.S. -#3 after the two in 1913. If not for the convenient WWII, we might still be mired there.

      It took a long time for the poison to set in thoroughly but by the time LBJ pushed through his Big New Deal in the form of the “War” on Poverty in the mid-60’s we were ready to destroy the underclass by expanding it and making it a permanent entitlement class. An ever-expanding, wealth-sucking population of malcontents.

      Then Nixon, with his price controls and further destruction of wealth via de-linking the dollar from gold, began the debasement of the dollar which has brought us to the fiat mess we have now. The permanent poverty class successfully established, it was time to begin attacking the middle class. But it takes a long time to destroy a country as vastly wealthy as the US once was. By the time Reagan came along to prop up the cadaver created by Carter’s deeply dystopic belief system, it was already too late for “the morning in America” Reagan so hoped would happen.

      The sinking of the USSR caused a vacuum into which the entire West was pulled. That was the sucking sound everyone heard and which the intelligentsia convinced us was just the door shutting on history. History was done. The End.

      As for the saga of Walmart, Sam Walton out in fly-over country created an empire in a time people said entrepreneurial wealth creation was no longer possible. Walmart, MacDonalds, etc., are all iconically American. Make them evil if that fits your world view, but those founders were individuals. Where are their European counterparts? Besides Ikea, I can’t think of one…and I don’t know if Ikea was an individual’s idea or not, and I have no idea if it is government-subsidized. I hope not, since it provides for so many people via good ideas, good designs, and durable furniture for a vast swath of the public.

      Do you even know what a conservative *is*?? Try reading Russell Kirk for a clue as to what conservatism is NOT.

      The poisonous idea of taking money from the rich and “plowing” it into education is not smart thinking. Just look at our educational system to see how well that has worked. Thank God for the escape valve of home-schooling.

      And for heaven’s sake, what is a Christo-Fascist civil war? Or is the Socialists word part of your Armageddon too?

      Strange…

  6. It’s usually my task to point to the large elephant sitting on the couch in the middle of the room. MC you are right, but there is more: socialism is no longer the old-school wealth transfer ideology. Via the Frankfurt School it has evolved into a war waged on Whitey by the colored, the sexually deviate, the felon or mooching slacker, the penis-envying and the pathologically hateful — e.g. feminazis or those seeking revenge on Whitey for Hitler, American slavery, apartheid etc. The ideologues of this movement saw that the broad base of the middle class, particularly in the main Anglo countries, plus the compassionate slant of both the Christian and Jewish populations there, doomed old-school socialism to failure. However, the timidity of this populations relative to race reality, its inability to self-define as a white-and-straight majority and to protect its power made it possible to blow the whole thing up by using the relative poverty or criminality of the colored as an ipso facto proof of racist discrimination, the heterosexual nature of the culture and its institutions as proofs of discriminatory treatment of the sexually deviate, and so on.

    In the United States it’s very clear that everything Obama has been doing, before his election and after, is to transfer more treasure and power from the white to the black. White “conservatives” are too timid to speak about this in this vein, they complain about BHO’s “socialism” — but it’s not socialism that motivates him but racialism. The entire far-Left is exactly of the same vein, regardless of race, but if you check you’ll find that an extraordinary number of Black public figures where in the past overt commies (think Paul Robson) or covert commies (ML King, Mandela), or as-good-as-commies (more than half of the Black Congressional caucus).

    Second, it’s not them I blame, as I don’t blame Islam. It’s natural for all living species and subspecies to seek to further their interests. It’s our people that I blame: the timidity of the white Anglo, the cowardice before the loud, aggressive, violent “other,” the maudlin “peace, compassion and social justice” that’s just about the only thing of Christianity that remains for most Christians, and of Judaism for Jews. Everywhere around you are the unintended consequences of Tikkun Olam.

    Third, it’s the capitalist themselves that ought to be blamed for the spread of socialism now. Modern-day capitalism has robbed the Western middle class of its job base and self-respect. It has built up a giant and menacing Frankenstein in China. Financial gangsters rule the politics of the UK, US and the entire West so that the mega-zillionaire malefactors go scot-free and governments print money (literally or metaphorically) to camouflage the destruction the have wrought. By “printing” to save the banksters from the lamppost Wstern governments are further destroying the savings, fixed income and retirement security of the middle class.

    When people see the destruction wrought all-around them by Wall Street, and by the job-exporting, China-importing, Left NGO-supporting multinationals, what else can they do but start thinking socialist thoughts? Lenin has long ago predicted that the capitalists would weave and sell him the rope with which he would hang them.

  7. I’m flattered that an essayist of MC’s erudition should remember my references to Ayn Rand and the Swedish businessman interviewed by the BBC (and I’m not being sarcastic). But he says himself that Rand was reacting (I would say over-reacting) to her family’s experience of enforced socialism in Soviet Russia.

    I remember a quote that “communism is socialism with a gun to make you take it”. The obverse must also be true: hence the Swede’s lack of resentment at the taxes taken by his democratically elected government; as he said, “the state is us”. Sweden, till recently, was productive and prosperous enough to afford this attitude, and no-one here needs reminding why this may no longer be the case! (clue: beards and burkhas)

    As a leftist with some awareness of the foibles and blind spots of my fellows- excusing Islamism being the most dangerous for all of us- I try to be objective, and I’ve long thought that humans inhabit a spectrum between the competitive and the cooperative. The former will naturally tend to favour capitalism and competition, the latter liberalism/democratic socialism and what they (I) see as a more equitable distribution of rewards, usually organised by the state. Americans, with the distrust of state institutions- and power, often abused- inherited from many of their forbears, tend to the Right, insofar as this still means anything; continental Western Europeans to the Left. Here in Britain we’re sandwiched in between, and cause perplexion to our friends on both sides!

    Marx believed the communist revolution would start in industrialised nations where he imagined the workers were most downtrodden; it actually happened (not without some forceful help) in Russia and China, where the condition of the huge number of workers on the land was worse. Today in the most capitalistic economies, eg the US and UK, the gap between rich and poor has widened in recent decades, the bankers have ripped us off, and while I remain a democrat and opposed to violent revolution, I’m amazed and disappointed that all we can come up with is the likes of “Occupy”.

    Naturally I’m not expecting much agreement here, but I am attempting a dispassionate response to MC’s article. Socialists are often accused, sometimes rightly, of an inability, or unwillingness, to appreciate that others of goodwill may not share their perceptions and prejudices. I’ve known, and liked, many “conservatives”, sometimes more than people I was politically closer to, but since following GoV and other sites, I fear that goodwill, and giving one’s opponent the benefit of the doubt and credit for being sincere, may be in increasingly short supply in some quarters on the Right too.

    Well, there you go, a Brit looking for compromise!

    • …I’ve long thought that humans inhabit a spectrum between the competitive and the cooperative. The former will naturally tend to favour capitalism and competition, the latter liberalism/democratic socialism and what they (I) see as a more equitable distribution of reward…

      That seems a restrictive black-and-white pov; nor does it align with my own experience of how people believe and behave.

      I left my kami-kaze liberal beliefs behind for a number of reasons, but the most important were (1)a gain in intellectual understanding of how the world (i.e., real economic life) works, and (2) a slow, sadder-but-wiser experiential process/observation of the ways in which people comprehend and act out their economic beliefs.

      If I had to boil down the difference between capitalists and socialists it would be something like this: most capitalists operate out of a sense of abundance while most socialists are limited by their belief in a zero-sum game – i.e., the fear that there won’t be enough to go around, a deep sense of scarcity.

      The parable of the loaves and fishes describes well the fundament of free-market systems – but only when those systems are not corrupted and/or bled dry by greedy government regulations and distrust. IOW, I don’t believe in the sleazy easy caricatures one sees in the press and academia regarding unfettered, unlawful, no-holds-barred Kapitlaisme.

      Above all, I never fail to be surprised by the basic ignorance of most folks about the basic tenets of economic theory. It’s a fascinating field but many come to their reasons for holding particular economic beliefs by paths that don’t include any journeys through Reason or Discernment. It’s all about how things make us *feel* – e.g., if someone is very wealthy, we ‘feel’ he acquired that wealth through some sort of injustice.

      The closest parallel is our widespread ignorance about the basic tenets of physics. If one studies either field (economics or physics) for any length of time the result is an increase in humility and a decrease in fear. I don’t mean professional study but simply a layman’s investigations into what makes things tick. I remember my great surprise when I found out that this seemingly solid oak desk wasn’t solid at all. Or rather, that on one level – the everyday, quotidian experience – it was dense and dependable, but on a deeper level, it morphed into something beyond my ken.
      ——————————
      Having worked for several years with people who were the recipients of generous welfare entitlements, I was surprised to find that these free gifts from their fellow-citizens, distributed to them via the medium of taxation and redistribution by the government, did not appear to contribute to their happiness. If anything, they were aggrieved, even resentful, toward those who had more than they did. Being an idealist, this hypervigilance about who had what took me by surprise. Eventually I left social work because (among other things) I saw the inter-generational perpetuation of a sense of scarcity in those receiving ‘benefits’ and the slow, soul-killing destruction of their individual initiative. Not to mention that the load of make-work paperwork required by various oversight bureaucracies (who sole reason for being was to check up on my work) interfered mortally with my ability to do that work.

      The second part of my change in beliefs about which economic systems worked best – i.e., provided the best outcomes for the average person – came from reading Bastiat, Cobden and Hazlitt.

      Because of the accents on Bastiat’s first name the wiki link doesn’t work.

      However if you go to his Parable of the Broken Window, you’ll find links to his ideas about love being the basis of human cooperation. It’s simple to understand, but complicated to explain. At least with a migraine it is.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Hazlitt

      And here is Mr. Cobden:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cobden

      I’ve gone on long enough, but I would love to see any socialist refute these three gentlemen.

      • What a great man Cobden was!

        I agree that the market is generally more efficient than government at utilising resources- human and material- to generate wealth and jobs; I’d still like government to have a hand in deciding how to distribute the resulting surplus.

        Welfare dependency is a debilitating and expensive waste, but where an economy is generating insufficient decently paid work for people to escape that dependency if they want to, are they to be left starving and homeless? Unless all wealthy people decide to be as generous as Gates or Buffett, who but the state will provide?

        • The essence of the Constitution is that governments cannot be trusted to deal with issues without trying a power grab, and history is full of powergrabbing politicians.

          The cutural marxists have got their nutcrackers around the constitution, and are sqeezing hard. They want the nut that is inside.

          In reality, governments have an amazing ability to turn gold into lead, thereby poisoning all and sundry.

          “what shall we do with the poor” has always been an excuse for power grabs, and history shows us that to let the government deal with poverty is to eventually destroy the nation.

          I work with the poor and hungry of Sderot, the whole city being a victim of Muslim aggression (please donate use the side button!), The money for the food we give out comes ONLY from western/anglo nations; nations with a history of capitalism, the bulk comes from the USA.

          Israel is a very socialist state, but somehow that socialism seems to only benefit the few, it provides “jobs for the boys”, the clique, the rest go hungry and are fed mainly by the generosity of US and EU Christians .

          Socialism means that we must trust our governments to do what is right, can we really afford to do this? or will we have to watch, powerless, whilst our hard earned monies are spent on corrupt pork and sponging cronies?

    • What makes you think that socialism would be a more equitable solution? Please see my reply above to Porky’s2istan.

      Humbert Fontova writes that during the dictator Battista’s tenure Cuba had a thriving middle class and that per capita income in the country before Battista’s ouster was a par with that of Switzerland. Contrast that to nearly universal Cuban poverty of the Castro regime, during which people “vote with their feet” and literally die trying to escape from the socialist paradise. And there was no large influx of the bearded and turbaned ones into the country as far as I know.

      Are you old enough to remember the stark contrast between East and West Germany during the Soviet years? No bearded immigrants there either as far as I recall. Again, people died trying to leave.

      You give the example of the Swede: in the U.S. we’ve had prominent capitalists speaking out in favor of Obama’s policies. Later to find that these same capitalists were getting favors from the Obama Administration which more than offset any taxes they were paying.

      By the way, some of the big Swedish industialists are among the richest people in the world. And how do you know that the economy of Sweden would have continued to function well without the influx of 3rd worlders? Is that an article of faith on your part to say that it would have continued to do so in perpetuity?

      Having said all that, I must say I appreciate and agree with Takuan’s comments about western capitalists destroying the job base and financial base of the western middle class.

      And I appreciate his comparison of the Islamic surge in the West to an opportunistic infection of a sick host (I hope that I’m not mischaracterizing his view here).

      It’s like a perfect storm in some ways, isn’t it?

      • Re: Battista
        I was in Chile a few months after Pinochet kicked out Allende. I like to get the pulse of the country by chatting up taxi drivers, shopkeepers etc. In five such conversations I had with the lower end of the Chilean middle class, all my interlocutors told me that they were praying daily for Pinochet’s health; life under him was far better than it had been under Allende.

        Re: Sweden

        I’d like to adduce a self-congratulatory article about Swedish education, comparing it favorably to the one in China. I have considerable first-hand experience of both countries.
        http://www.thelocal.se/20131216/china-teaches-kids-to-sit-exams-sweden-its-kids-to-think-pisa-education-quality-schools-pupils-students-shanghai

        This article is 35% right. It’s right because Swedish education indeed produces happier, more creative people who can “think” better. Why is it 65% wrong, then?

        Because, ultimately, it’s China that’s buying up Sweden not the other way around (e.g. Volvo is now a Chinese company). Second, the Swedes’ ability to think does not translate into an ability to see that they are destroying themselves economically via socialism, and socially via cultural marxism. The #2 status on world rape charts is entirely a gift that the happy, thinking products of Swedish education have brought unto themselves. And their consent to the censoring of news concerning the identity of the perpetrators is another instance of the fruits of that touted education.

        The Chinese, with a lesser taught ability to “think,” would never be so stupid…

        • The people who prayed for Pinochet’s health might have better considered the disappeared, tortured and murdered victims of his regime.

          • Acknowledged. But ultimately, all but affluent PC-brainwashed contemporary Westerners care about their own lives first, and the moral choices of their countries’ leaders second. It’s easy, for instance, to condemn the German nation for voting for Hitler (though that was before the atrocities). What’s not easy is to condemn the Allied fools who had put together the Treaty of Versailles, which destroyed what had remained of Germany and thus paved the road for Hitler. And he did improve the Germans’ lives quite a bit for a number of years, until it all went off-track into nightmare territory.

      • Think I’ve covered this in my reply to Dymphna, above, except of course that I thought it was obvious that I’m not in favour of communism, which is enforced socialism.

        No-one was ever shot trying to get over the Berlin Wall in the other direction!

    • I think we all have a little bit of the Socialist within us. It’s just that some become susceptible to an ideal that suits their outlook on life. The most influencing ideal within socialist philosophy is the utopian aspiration for everyone to be living in a perfect world.

      While there is nothing wrong with thinking that ideal, the practical applications of such ideology, and given the many and varied cultures that do not share that ideal, would make it unattainable.

      I consider myself ‘conservative’ in nature, but in practise I am probably more middle of the road to which I may sometimes lean left or right of center – where ever the thinking may take me.

      The ideals of Socialism or Conservatism are recently modern in that they describe a political point of view and leaning. The problem with socialism is that the ideals expressed become captured by a minority, who as Mark Twain once commented, is the criminal class. This dominant minority are then able to exploit those who share the socialist model while manipulating them as the ‘useful idiots’, attributed to by either Lenin or Stalin, or maybe it was both?

      Does anyone believe that Lenin, Hitler and Stalin and their abettors were not criminals?

      The problem with ‘conservatism’ is that there is no real ‘rallying point’ from which to take on the idealism of socialism as most Conservatives tend to be individuals who may happen to share some common goals, such as retaining those things that have been proven to work over time and not to change them just for changes sake.

      In other words; if it ain’t broke don’t fix it!

      And the Socialists take full advantage of this by labelling those who stand up to their agenda with any number of epithets, that I’m sure, most of us have become familiar with.

      I go back to my previous post, that 80% of the population are not fully aware of the war going on between the other 20% for control of their minds. The indoctrination of the 80% of the population by the criminal class has been rather successful because of the ill defined directions that ‘Conservatives’ have been taking which has led to innumerable cave-ins to the criminal class who continue to call the shots. The criminal class will continue to call the shots until a rallying point becomes the vanguard for fight-back or a ‘grass roots’ movement erupts bringing with it so much civil unrest and uncertainty that the government will collapse causing new political parties to spring up, and ideally, with more narrowly defined and restrictive codes of conduct for each elected representative.

      If government could be kept to more middle of the road governing as the American Constitution insists, why do we need other political parties that become either Left or Right of that insistence?

  8. “there is no such thing as moderate socialism, if one can advocate theft (redistribution of wealth) one can also condone murder”.

    I am surprised that some had a problem with this comment. It is the most natural logical outcome of Socialist thinking. The end is everything, the individual has no right to decline to participate, and he must be forced to do so. If he refuses, then imprisonment and/or death is the only option left for the rulers.
    Recently, Pope Francis the Iconoclast made the patently false comment that he has known Marxists that were good people. There is no such thing as a good Marxist. Even if he comes over at midnight to fix your broken water pipe or “gives you the shirt off his back”, if he advocates system that will control your life to the nth degree, he is not as good person. The Socialist could not care less if he has the opportunity to live in a place in which Marxism is practiced; his main concern is that no one is given the opportunity to live in a place in which Marxism is NOT practiced. His hatred of the fact that you are able to avoid living under a system that he wants for everyone irks him to no end.

    • “There is no such thing as a good Marxist. Even if he comes over at midnight to fix your broken water pipe or “gives you the shirt off his back”, if he advocates system that will control your life to the nth degree, he is not as good person. ”

      Same goes for all those “nice Muslims” who fool so many people in the West — even to the point of fooling many within the ragged edges of the Counter-Jihad.

      Wait, it’s not merely the same: Muslims — in their fanaticism and the menace this portends for us in the coming decades — are far, far, far, far, far, far worse than Socialists.

      • It has been remarked upon numbers of times that western Muslims can be perfectly nice and rational until you touch upon two subjects: Islam and Israel. Then rationality goes out the window usually along with decency.

    • But Marxism is just a confidence trick. It’s quite possible that some Marxists are sincere. I know lots of sincere people who are destructive and unpleasant.

      Francis was making an attempt to begin a discussion about Marxism. World leaders get 120 characters these days. I noticed Prince Charles briefly mentioned Islamists persecuting Christians. I know approx where he stands now.

      • Do socialists advocate a redistribution of wealth?

        In real world practise for the majority the outcome is enforced conformity in poverty and an inept minority that rewards itself for ruling.

        For the last thirty plus years the biggest plunder of UK wealth has been public–private partnerships were billions of pounds have been robbed out of the treasury and redistributed to a corrupt cabal in the name of capitalism.

        What most UK commentators miss is the redistribution of wealth in the UK was doled out at the banks via bad credit and mortgages not at the social security offices.

        There are two mainstream economic political debates in the UK, on the right and left but they both end in the same place a plundering of wealth for the few.

        The few are now convincing everyone that everything is rosy in the economic garden so they can continue their plunder.

  9. Even after the war ended the allies ran into certain pockets of “resistance” who were lying in ambush for them. These diehard Nazis also hanged and shot German soldiers who had enough of Hitlers army and exchanged their uniforms for civilian attire.

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