"The American Republic will endure, until
politicians realize they can bribe the people
with their own money." -- Alexis de Tocqueville

From http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000570.html

"The US is pretty much the only indistrialized nation that doesn't have much of a social democratic party, for some reason. "

It's also the richest, fastest-growing, freest, most powerful nation in the world.

Funny coincidence, that.
Posted by: ralph
Ralph:
ZING!
Posted by: Mark

And

"Hitchens seems to be extremely uninterested in reducing economic inequality."

Maybe in a nation where the poor suffer from obesity instead of malnutrition it seems a bit less urgent.

Let's consider three degrees of redistribution:
US (very little)
Sweden (medium)
Cuba (lots)

I won't even bother asking whether it's better to be 5th percentile poor in the US or 95th percentile rich in Cuba. But even the "happy medium" Sweden turns out to be a failure relative to the US. There was a recent study showing that the median Swedish buying power was a bit below that of the median US Black population. Being at the bottom of the US heap is still better than being in the middle of the heap in democratic-socialist Sweden.

If you're interested in getting poor people the most possible food, clothing, shelter, transportation, computer connectivity, etc., etc., go with free-market capitalism and low taxation.

The only reason to favor redistribution is if you actually prefer the equal poverty of Cuba to the unequal wealth of the US.
------------------------------
Or Sweden for that matter, with all of europe
to follow into the economic death spiral as the tax-decline-demand-repeat cycle of leftist decay saps the life out of the economy and destroys all their futures and hopes.

Consider this..
---------------------
"Communism had been approvingly described as liberalism in a hurry,' and liberals like Roosevelt affectionately dubbed Stalin 'Uncle Joe.'

Even today, few liberals blame Roosevelt for his abject truckling to Stalin.

The wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union ended with ten Christian countries falling to Communist tyranny, with persecution on a scale Nero would have blanched at -- a persecution liberals didn't, and still don't, care to talk about.

Today's liberals also like to forget that Roosevelt extended admiration and aid to Stalin long before World War II. He knew a kindred spirit when he saw one. After all, 'liberalism in a hurry' sought the same sort of social order American liberalism seeks - a secularist, materialist society in which power is centralized and the state controls economic life.

When Americans finally awoke to the evil of Communism, liberals had harsher words for Joe McCarthy, who cost a few people their government jobs, than for Joe Stalin, who cost tens of millions of people their lives

If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion. Where Communism smashed, liberalism erodes. The end result is the same: a soulless society in which liberty perishes and tradition is forgotten.

There is ample testimony that liberalism and Communism are essentially interchangeable, and much of that testimony comes from liberals themselves." --Joseph Sobran
------------------

In those glorious leftist utopias famine is the rule rather than the exception, in North Korea, or where leftist Mugabe turned africas breadbasket into a food crisis, all throuout history. during Maos "Great Leap Forward" a full 27 Million people starved to death due to Mao's mismanagement of Chinese agriculture in the early 1960s. This was the worst famine in human history, and it was caused entirely, though not deliberately, by politicians.

How many remember the many times we had to make grain shipments to russia because they came close to famine ?

All thru the Reagan years, while we was ending their military dream of one world communism by building a military collossus that caused them to abandon their dreams of American defeat and the victory of the Gulag, we was selling them wheat to keep them from starving.

Now, before the USA had ANY kind of so called safty net, how many starved to death in the USA ? did we even have any kind of regional famine ?

Even the poor farmers that found themselves in the dust bowl never saw one of thier children die from lack of food.

Put simply, it just didnt happen here, even during the great depression, sure there was soup lines and such but no starvation, no leftist blood sucking of the economy, charities fed many and the rest found help simply from regular generous americans.

In other words, the total lack of any safty net at all, was always better, measured in the mountains of emaciated bodies in those utopias, than we never had to experience.

And yet the American left, untill the mountain of death became more widely known (with no help from the leftist butcher loving New York Times, the Nation and other leftist rags, Walter Durranty!) the left still held up their leftist hellholes as mankinds utopia that we should emulate.

Even the horror of the killing fields of Cambodia did not change their blind fanatic indoctrinare Socialist devotion.

To the extent than any change can be seen, its been slow and with agony, others toss it off with a shrug and dismissal, all the Marxist professors indoctrinatating the next generation of morally obtuse Mao Red Guard either deny it,, or perhaps the depths of relativism and abolishment of right and wrong makes denial unnessisary.

The indoctrinare graduates seem to be people incapable of recognizing true evil, and so eager to denounce those who choose to identify it. The answer is long, and multi-faceted, of course, and should include such things as our unionized public school system (that above all else must teach a philosophy that justifies its own existence), the effect of past money funnelled into western activist groups and journalism schools by the KGB.

In some ways, we have yet to win WWII, because the collectivist philosophy, that made Nazi Germany and Communist Russia possible, still runs rampant throughout the world (it may be strongest in western universities). In the book "The Ominous Parallels", by Leonard Peikoff, He analyzes the conditions, especially in terms of philosophy, that lead to Nazi Germany. He makes the point that many of those same conditions exist in America today, and one of the primary conditions was a philosophy that left individuals unable to identify, and unwilling or afraid to judge, right from wrong.

Another thing the left hates is the church. in all the leftist utopias, perhaps it was worst of all in Russia, but in North Korea a bible will get you and ALL of your familly shoved in the Gulag and there all of you will stay for the rest of your life of torture and agony.

Why ? Einstein can give us some clues.
--------------------
"Being a lover of freedom, when the [Nazi] revolution came, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities were immediately silenced.

Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks....

Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth.

I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral freedom.

I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly." --Albert Einstein
--------------------

And that is why the left hates the church. its why the soviets abolished the church (then allowed services in St Peter cathedral during WWII, incidently, Stalin converted to NAZI during WWII, he embraced "Socialism in one Country" (NAZI Without actualy saying it) and to this day, the war with Germany is called "The Great Patrotic War", interesting hmm ? ) because it is a center of moral codes and it has those doctrines of individual freedom that was the foundation of the Declration of Independence and American ideas of freedom.

This is a threat to the leftist doctrines of state is god. there is no god but the state, so they hate the church. if its tolerated at all, they cant really teach any non approved ideas.

It took a murder of one of his friend by the black panthers before David Horowitz began his long journey back into reality, and for Ronald Radosh it took a visut to one of Castros hospitals where it seemed everyone there had a lobodomy, where they would exist for a short time and then die at the predeterined time, of "natural causes of course. the PR problem is just so much easter to handle that way.

In china they send the cost of the bullet to the familly, at least in cuba the familly wasnt forced to buy the drill.

I wonder how long it will take hitchins to get past the veil and find the black heart of pure evil behind all that leftist "concern" for his fellow man. Others have, perhaps it will help if he quits boozing so much.

I thought this was a comment on Hitchens. The comments read like Moore and Coulter sitting in a tree trying to push the other out.

I read Hitchens letter. It is consistant with his change. He sees the War against Jihadism as the greatest threat to Western Democracy. I agree with him. Like him I find the same people in the Republican Party "a malignant evil." They are no different than Stalin Hitler Franco Lenin et al. Where I disagree is in his support of Bush who is in thrall to them and all the Republicans(McCain is the worse because he suffered through it personally) whom are holding their nose thinking this is what it takes to win an election

If you read the FMA it is clear that Bush is calling for the support of an evil Amendment. It not only calls for a definition of marriage(which I think is frivoulous) but the very dangerous ideas that a whole class of Americans could legislatively lose any inability to control their own lives. It denies them by last count 106 opportunities that even single people have: who to leave your money to, if I become incapicated mentally and/or physically the ability to control my own live(if you think this is unimportant look at the Schiavo case). This is exactly how Nazi Germany started with its Jewish citizens

So unlike Hitchens I'm not conflicted by the fact Bush recognizes the War on Jihadism. Destroying the social and civil fabric of America in order to save it is simply unacceptable. Keeping us in fear will not help win the war. Being are best will.

I support President Bush for re-election.

I understand why he supports FMA. I sincerely believe he is wrong in wishing to amend the Constitution and I will oppose it's approval to the greatest extent to which I am capable.

Just because the man is right about some things does not mean he is right about all things.

I can agree with Mr Kerry in this instance. Or at any rate with what Mr Kerry says he belives.

If the left has any hope of becoming morally and intellectually relevant, it lies with figures like Norm Geras and Christopher Hitchens.

It's always fun watching Hitchens take apart a fellow leftist for espousing an incoherent and cynical anti-war position.

Robert Martin wrote:

I thought this was a comment on Hitchens. The comments read like Moore and Coulter sitting in a tree trying to push the other out.

And then proceeds to raise the level of debate with comments like:

Like him I find the same people in the Republican Party "a malignant evil." They are no different than Stalin Hitler Franco Lenin et al.

What was that about Godwin’s Law and the first person to accuse the other side of being “Hitler” automatically loses the debate? Robert Martin then provides the basis for his comments with:

If you read the FMA it is clear that Bush is calling for the support of an evil Amendment.

Note to self, defining marriage as between a man and a woman is now considered “evil” and those who support this institution are now the same as “Stalin, Hitler, Franco and Lenin.” Gee, Western Civilization was founded on an institution that’s actually “evil,” who’d thunk it?

It not only calls for a definition of marriage(which I think is frivoulous) but the very dangerous ideas that a whole class of Americans could legislatively lose any inability to control their own lives. It denies them by last count 106 opportunities that even single people have:

No it doesn’t.

who to leave your money to,

So single people aren’t able to write or enter into a will?

if I become incapicated mentally and/or physically the ability to control my own live(if you think this is unimportant look at the Schiavo case).

So single people aren’t able to write or enter into an advance directive (e.g. living will)?

This is exactly how Nazi Germany started with its Jewish citizens

So Nazi Germany got started when it declared that marriage was between a man and a woman? Got it.

Michael wrote:

I support President Bush for re-election.

I understand why he supports FMA. I sincerely believe he is wrong in wishing to amend the Constitution and I will oppose it's approval to the greatest extent to which I am capable.

Well I too support reelecting President Bush and plan on voting for him tomorrow morning and will draft my reason(s) for doing so on my blog tomorrow. The FMA isn’t at the top of my list but given a choice between that or having activist courts arbitrarily redefine civil marriage for the entire nation, I’d prefer the FMA which is more compatible with principles of both federalism and self-government. It isn’t my ideal choice but preferable to the most likely alternative.

I have been contributing comments to this site for over 2 years, so as a regular I am exerting the privilege of some time-limited pleading:

The election is 8 days away. The best way to express our convictions is to close the browser, turn off the computer, put on our walking shoes, and GET OUT THE VOTE.

If you want to elect Bush, volunteer for the final 72 hours campaign. Get out the phone book or call information and call your local GOP office. As Captain Ed says:

. . . find your local Republican campaign headquarters and volunteer your time for the 96-hour plan. You can deliver door hangers, make phone calls, drive people to the polls who can't get there on their own, or serve as poll watchers on Election Day. You can bet that our opponents have their ducks in a row for the final week, and if we want to compete we all need to sacrifice some of our time. I don't know about you, but I'd hate to wake up to find out that we lost the election and say to myself, "I could have done a couple of hours making calls instead of watching the Vikings last Sunday."

Your help is needed even if you are not in a swing state. The campaign will assist you to go to swing states during the last crucial 3 days and encourage registered voters to get to the polls. If you can't leave town, you can staff phone banks.

If you still don't believe how important this is, listen to the RedState folks, who are seasoned political operatives.

If you have gotten complacent at seeing Bush's poll number go up, read this.

GET OUT THE VOTE!!

Mr Winston is correct for admonishing me for saying marriage between a a man and a woman is evil. What is evil is the second line of the amendment. It states, "Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups". These legal incidents are taken for granted by singles. The operative word is unmarried couples. If you are a heterosexual couple, let alone a homosexual couple, you cannot do the things I mentioned if this amendment where to pass. It provides precendent to discriminate against anyone who is unmarried. That is the evil.

As to Godwin, it is clear he doesn't want to acknowledge that while a murdering psycho and sociopath Hitler was conservative in the rest of his views. So any reference to Hitler is denounced by those conservatives who don't want the hypocrisy of their views exposed. Just think Hitler wrote his ideas down in Mein Kampf long before he came to power. So if you are doing things to legislatively i.e., write them down, to take away another citizens rights then you are sanctioning evil. That is evil.

Further to perputuate this kind of discrimination during a time of war borders on treason. The Jihadists do not discriminate by race creed or color whomever you are if they decide you're against them. So to support a president whom is clearly seeking to retain power by discriminating against his own citizens is not something I will do.

" it is clear he doesn't want to acknowledge that while a murdering psycho and sociopath Hitler was conservative in the rest of his views. So any reference to Hitler is denounced by those conservatives who don't want the hypocrisy of their views exposed. "

Ahem, Hitler was a Socialist, and only 3rd place in rank for murder by socialists, Behind Mao and the USSR.

Point to one sigle policy, one, that was "conservative" if the Weinar republic, a democracy, modeled closely to the United States
and that freedom was the source of her fast rise to power and wealth, that Hitler hijacked.

Hitler was a less radical alternative to the Bolshivics, who had already created a mountian of dead of 10s of million inoocents.

Just what, in particualer, about National Socialist Germany was "conservative".

Hmm ?

Robert Martin -
Read it again. your quotation of the amendment says "Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups". You go on to say "These legal incidents are taken for granted by singles. The operative word is unmarried couples."

Let us return to the amendment you quoted and cut out a few words to highlight why I say you are misreading (or possible misquoting):
"Neither this Constitution ... shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred" This doesn't say the lealg incidents may not be conferred, but rather that they are not REQUIRED to be conferred. This leave it up to each state to confer or not.

Raymond please define socialist. I don't understand you to be using it in the way Marx describes it. That is my baseline.

As to Godwin, it is clear he doesn't want to acknowledge that while a murdering psycho and sociopath Hitler was conservative in the rest of his views.

Actually, Hitler and Stalin had similar opinions of Jews, homosexuals, marriage, etc. Hitler was simply more willing to act on those opinions. Thankfully, Stalin died before his planned purge of Russian Jewry could begin.

This just in:

Hitchens thinks better about it and endorses Kerry.

Philip Carter, too, among others.

Wow, or maybe the Bush endorsement was a hoax, the revenge of The Nation.

The German Workers' Party name was changed by Hitler to include the term National Socialist. Thus the full name was the National Socialist German Workers' Party Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) called for short, Nazi. By the end of 1920 it had about three thousand members.

The intellectual relations between the teachings of Adolf Hitler and those of Marx and his professed followers among Hitler's contemporaries give much insight, In his autobiography, and in recorded conversations with intimates among his own followers, Hitler said such things as,

"I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit" .. "the whole of National Socialism is based on Marx"

And that without racist commitments his own political movement ..

"would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground."

Hitler was a Socialist

"We are socialists because we see in socialism the only chance to maintain our racial inheritance and to regain our political freedom and renew our German state."

"We are a workers' party because we are on the side of labor and against finance."

"As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation's goods."

Joseph Goebbels, 1932

Yes they hated those Evil "Capitalist" Jews, didnt they.

Look the info is all over the net, JJ Ray has written some good stuff, start with that

Google is your friend.

As for the conservatives in Germany, the leftover princes and aristocrats leftover from Kiser Germany and feudalist aristocrats was one of the main targets of the night of the long knives.

Hitler was a socialist, he was a radical, he was not looking backward to the olden days of fuedal lords and comic opera princes.

Too bad they dont teach history anymore, all they get is indoctriantion to hate their own civilisation, the one nation whos had all the success both in human rights standard of living and justice than ever existed, and all they get is indoctriantion by those dreaming of creating another land of Gulags progroms and Purges.

As if we should look to those that created the largest mountain of murdered innocents for advice.

What an insult to thought itself that is.

In the European century that began in the 1840s, from
Engels article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler,
everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist
and no conservative, anarchist or independent did anything
of the kind.

The term Genocide in this context is not confined to the
extermination only of races or of ethnic groups, but embraces
also the liquidation of such other complete human categories
as "enemies of the people" and "the Kulaks as a class."

Before World War I, some socialists, such as the novelist
Jack London and the psychologist Havelock Ellis, saw
socialism as leading both fortunately and necessarily to
the triumph of the white races over the black and the brown.

Hitler was not saying that he either was or ever had been a
Marxist. From his first political activity, he had always
been opposed to communism, but that was not because it was
socialist, but because it was internationalist.
Hitler, although born and raised in Austria, had always been
a dedicated German nationalist.

Even those who are aware that Hitler's party was the
National Socialist German Workers' Party have doubted
the sincerity of its socialist professions. This is in
part because Hitler, upon coming to power, refrained
for tactical reasons from launching an immediate and
extensive program of state takeovers of private industries.

Rudolf Hoess, commandant of the infamous Auschwitz
death camp, recalled in his memoirs that even at the
height of the Nazi-Soviet war of 1941-45, his colleagues
had respected the socialist example of an exterminatory
program based on forced labor.

It was not just the idea of genocide that the Nazis owed
to Marx and the Marxists, but its detailed practice too,
not excluding camps and gas chambers.

White supremacists and Islamicists like Osama bin Laden
agreed on a lot of things - in particular, that globalism
and multiculturalism are the uber-enemies, and that separatism
and cultural purity are the answer.

Arab Students United, a New York University student group,
has been distributing anti-Semitic material written by
David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Third Way or Third Reich ?

Global elites are pushing a new way of governing that is
neither capitalist nor communist, but something in between.
Hitler called it "National Socialism." Mussolini called it
"Fascism." Hillary Clinton calls it the "Third Way."

The victims of the Nazi Holocaust continue to receive their
just place in history, but it is important to note that they
are not the only victims of mass murder.

The far greater holocaust was committed by those supposedly
working in the name of all humanity, rather than those
working in the name of the "master race." This is the Red
Holocaust, committed by socialist dictators from Stalin to
Mao to Pol Pot.

Their victims have not yet received their full measure of
remembrance, those who supported these dictators have not
yet received their full measure of disgust.

The crimes are immense in scale and in magnitude. The USSR
was founded on a basis of mass murder and deliberate
starvation: the Russian Civil War, the Red Terror and the
Reds' forced confiscation of food from the peasants, lead
to millions of deaths. This was prior to Stalin: upon his
succession, he began to use the security apparatus in order
to arrest and kill people on a virtually random basis.

Much like the factories under central planning, the
security organs had quotas to fulfill: one of the artifacts
to have survived the era shows that Stalin drew up lists of
each region, with two categories. One category would
indicate imprisonment, going to the slave labour camps. The
other category would indicate immediate death. Stalin often
would put notations on the list, such as "A further 6,000
for the Krasondar region," with a stroke of the pen, wiping
out a further 6,000 lives.

It was believed among top communists that there was a
certain percentage of the population that opposed the
regime and had to be done away with. But in typical
communist fashion, this was not something that could be
left to the discretion of low level cadre. After all,
iron, steel, pigs, wheat production, and virtually
everything else economically had to be defined by a quota
to assure that lower level cadre were guided in their work.

It may be utterly incomprehensible to those outside such
a totalitarian system that such cadre were also given
quotas of people to murder, but it was consistent with
the idea of central planning and control.

From Moscow NKVD (a predecessor to the KGB) headquarters
an order would go out to some small towns or villages to
kill so many "enemies of the people," and soon enough the
local henchmen would report back that the task was
completed.

That such orders would be given is incredible enough. That
the local official would obey them is unbelievable. Why
did "quite ordinary decent human beings, with a normal
hatred of injustice and cruelty" carry out these merciless
purges and executions? Simple: through sweating, trembling,
fear. Consider what Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, in their
book appropriately titled Empire of Fear, wrote about what
a friend, who is called M-, said of his experience,

as an N.K.V.D. official in a country town in the
Novo-Sibirsk region. The number of victims demanded
by Moscow from this town was five hundred. M-went
through all the local dossiers, and found nothing
but trivial offenses recorded.

But Moscows requirements were implacable; he was
driven to desperate measures. He listed priests and
their relatives; he put down anyone who was
reported to have spoken critically about conditions
in the Soviet Union; it was more than M-'s life was
worth not to fulfill his quota.

He made up his list of five hundred enemies of the
people, had them quickly charged and executed and
reported to Moscow: "Task accomplished in
accordance with your instructions."

M-...detested what he had to do. He was by nature
a decent, honest, kindly man. He told me the story
with savage resentment. Years afterwards its horror
and injustice lay heavy on his conscience.

But M- did what he was ordered. Apart from a man's
ordinary desire to remain alive, M- had a mother,
a father, a wife and two children.

Throughout this period Stalin was particularly concerned
about Ukrainian nationalism and their opposition to
collectivization. This was a major reason for Ukrainian
opposition to Moscow and a source of support for Ukrainian
exiles abroad planning for an independent Ukraine, and
being given aid to that end by Nazi Germany.

One strong base for this opposition was the peasant.
In the early 1930s Stalin created a famine. He blockaded
the Ukraine and would not let food in, and he sent cadre
on systematic forays against the peasants to uncover any
food they might be hiding. Even warm bread was taken off
peasants tables and seed grain for the next planting was
expropriated; dogs and cats were shot. At least 5 Million
and some accounts cite 10 Million, Ukrainians died from
hunger and disease as a result.

But, there was another source of nationalism, its
culture-carriers.

The communists therefore shot Ukrainian writers,
historians and composers, Ukrainian officials too
considerate of the Ukraine; and even itinerant,
blind folk singers.

Those with "bourgeoisie sensitivities" might find the
following from the memoirs of composer Dmitri Shostakovich
to have its own chilling horror.

Since time immemorial, folk singers have wandered
along the roads of the Ukraine....they were always
blind and defenseless people, but no one ever
touched or hurt them. Hurting a blind man-what
could be lower?

And then in the mid thirties the First All-Ukrainian
Congress of Lirniki and Banduristy [folk singers]
was announced, and all the folk singers had to
gather and discuss what to do in the future. "Life
is better, life is merrier." Stalin had said.

The blind men believed it. They came to the congress
from all over the Ukraine, from tiny, forgotten
villages.

It was a living museum, the country's living
history. All its songs, all its music and poetry.
And they were shot, all those pathetic blind men
killed.

Why ? ...here were these blind men, walking around
singing songs of dubious content. The songs weren't
passed by the censors. And what kind of censorship
can you have with blind men? You can't hand a blind
man a corrected and approved text and you can't
write him an order either. You have to tell
everything to a blind man. That takes too long.
And you can't file away a piece of paper, and
there's no time anyway. Collectivization.
Mechanization. It was easier to shoot them.
And so they did.

Turning now to communist China, its Cultural Revolution
during the 1960s was a tumultuous period. The communist
party was split between those who supported Maos desire
to continue the glorious communist revolution and those
who were more pragmatic, the so called "capitalist roaders."
No one could be neutral in the bloody conflict for power
between these two groups. Military units fought each other,
even with cannon and tanks; students waged pitched battles
with machine guns and grenades given them by military
sympathizers. The victors in one battle or another would
then systematically purge the opposition, subjecting them
to torture and mass execution. How many died in this
internal conflagration cannot be counted.

In this struggle, Mao and his supporters could trust no
intellectual or scientist of any sort, especially in the
governing of any organization. For this reason it was
customary in these years to put fanatical communist
radicals, regardless of their lack of experience or
knowledge of their job, in charge of universities,
schools, scientific institutes, hospitals, and
intellectual associations of one sort or another.

Consider the following experience related by a Chinese
scientist when Shan Guizhang, a fanatic and ignorant
radical, was appointed to head one of China's most
prestigious of institutes, the Institute of Optics and
Precision Instruments in Changchun.

Now Shan had read Tales of the Plum Flower Society, a spy
thriller about an entirely fictional effort to break a
Kuomintang espionage network in the Academy of Sciences.
The chief Kuomintang agent was named Peng Jiamu, also a
name, unfortunately, of a real scientist working at the
institute. Incredibly, Shan believed that scientist Peng
was in fact the real life spy in the book. So, fully
understandable in the context of the "Cultural Revolution,"
Shan had 166 scientists at the institute arrested as spies,
along with local accountants, policemen, workers, and even
nursery attendants. Some were beaten to death; some others
committed suicide. Sufficient proof of spying was the
existence of a radio or camera at home or the ability of a
person to speak a foreign language. After thus purging the
institute of these "spies," Shan was promoted to a
provincial Party committee.

In China, millions suffered and died because of Mao
Tse-Tung's ideas. Like the Great Leap Forward of 1958:
totally unrealistic food production quotas were created.
Production figures were thus falsified. Under the delusion
that the country had plenty of food, Mao demanded that the
people make steel. They did, often using homemade furnaces.
The steel, of course, was worthless, the country had not
been growing food while producing steel, and the result was
a massive famine.

It was the same as the total suppression of the
agricultural free market by the Soviets, an identical
gigantic human experiment with productivity by command.
Unwilling to learn from these disastrous results, blinded
by their love of Marxism, the Chinese communists did the
same thing once they had gained complete control over
mainland China and had prepared their peasants.

Within a few years all land and farms were taken over by
the government, collectives called communes were built,
and all farmers became, in effect, not only factory
workers, but forced conscripts in a national agricultural
army.

In many communes they lived in dormitories, woke to
bugles, ate their food in mess halls, and lined up after
breakfast to be marched off with flags flying to carry out
their group tasks and meet the communes quota.

This was true communism. It was the dream of those who
believed that government could build a society to improve
the lot of the poor and feed the needy. Here was total
reconstruction, the revolution for which Mao tse-tung had
worked and fought.

Of course, what this meant was that those communist
officials put in charge of a commune or agricultural
region, could not afford to underfill their quotas. All,
thus, exceeded them and food production soared. China was
becoming an agriculturally rich country. The experiment
had worked, or so it seemed to the government and to well
wishers abroad. But all these statistics were a sham. They
were only on paper.

The actual results were absolutely disastrous.
Catastrophic. Men, women, and children starved to death in
the communes and fields, in the villages and towns, and
cities. While food production records were being broken
the emaciated bodies began to pile up and soon their
numbers, even to top party rulers, became undeniable.
By 1962 the worst famine in world history was underway.

How many died in this is much in dispute. There are figures
as high as 40 Million dead. A well documented estimate is
27 Million. If we take this figure as close to the actual
number, it is as though the total population of Canada had
starved to death in two or three years.

Beyond that, the Cultural Revolution, which took off
during 1966 and finally screeched to a halt with the death
of Mao in 1976, involved young people continuing to beat,
threaten, terrorise those in positions in power,
specifically, those in positions of power who stood
opposed to Mao's radical ideas. Red Guards, students who
had mobilised in the name of Mao, killed those they
considered "capitalists" and when doctrinaire disputes
burst out, each other.

Pol Pot created the setting for the "Killing Fields." It
was the "year Zero" and random murder was part of creating
the new society. Cambodia is still coming to terms with
the Khmer Rouge and their crimes, though Pol Pot himself
is thankfully dead.

This is but a sample of the crimes committed in the name
of socialism. We must not forget those imprisoned or
killed in Eastern Europe. There are the martyrs of East
Germany and Poland in 1953, the freedom fighters who
fought for Hungary's freedom in 1956, the Czech protesters
squashed by Soviet power in 1968, the brave members of
Solidarity suppressed in 1980-1981, and we should not
allow ourselves to forget those shot trying to cross
the Berlin Wall.

Socialism in other parts of the world has been just as
murderous. There was the Red Terror in Ethiopia, under
Halie Mariam Mengistu. Angola and Mozambique were torn
to shreds by Communist movements, often with the help
of the Soviet Union and satellite states. There has been
murderous Red repression in Nicaragua and Cuba.

In short, wherever communism was tried, it meant murder,
terror, repression and the subjugation of the individual
by the state. Yet this world wide holocaust, whose
estimated dead range from 100 million to upwards of 150
million, is barely remembered.

The primary reason for this lack of remembrance is the
connivance of Western socialists. The ideas which they
advocate: that the state can be the primary agent for
change and ensuring equality in society, their contempt
for the individual and their total unwillingness to allow
individuals freedom are strikingly similar in form, if not
in content to what the Red murderers wished.

As sympathy for socialism exists in all important
institutions in the West, from government to academia, it
has been difficult to clear the air about the crimes from
the Left, certainly a far more difficult struggle than
detailing the crimes of Nazi Germany.

All attempts to communicate with these freedom hating
foamy mouthed rabid dog shout-you-down talk past you
Marxist moonies is usually in vain.

Their moral bankruptcy is equally matched with their
mental bankruptcy. They refuse to examine the birth
mother of their dogma as stubbornly as they ignore
the undesirable yet unavoidable side-effects of the
policies they advocate.

Evil repolished, by adjusting the dosage.

Let us contrast totalitarian socialist/communist states
with those that attempt to remain democracies. certainly
we wont see barbed wire and machine gun turrets installed
on the border of Sweden will we?

Lets start with the official question, it immediately
raises the issue of what we mean by socialism, do you
say socialism was the Soviet Union, N Korea, China, Nazi
Germany, and therefore guilty of the terrors of those
systems, or the opposing side arguement. Tthat socialism
is Sweden, and therefore innocent of violating human
rights to freedom and self determination and in 100+
million plus cases their right to life.

The old British Labour Party. From its foundation,
proclaimed itself a socialist party and stated its aim
in Clause IV of its constitution thereafter printed on
every membership card as being "the public ownership
of all the means of production, distribution and
exchange."

In its beginnings, many were attracted to socialism
precisely because they already saw it necessarily
involving rule by an elite.

Some of these elitists, such as the science fiction
writer H.G. Wells and the dramatist Bernard Shaw,
lived long enough to welcome this aspect of the
realization in the USSR of the socialist vision.

Socialism is not simply a synonym for a large state
or for government regulation of the economy. In both
the nasty Soviet model and the regurgitated Swedish one,
it is particularly concerned with some issues and less
concerned with others.

It may be a fuzzy term, but, like an electron's quantum
field, the fuzz forms around some places and not around
others. The goal of socialism is a fairer allocation of
economic resources, which its advocates often claim will
also be a less wasteful one. Socialism is about who gets
the goods and how. Socialism objects to markets because
markets allocate resources in ways socialists believe to
be unfair on both counts: both the who and the how.

In its pure form socialism essentially turns the economy
into a government monopoly, either through direct state
ownership of the means of production or through complete
state direction of economic life. Socialist governments
nationalize industries. They set up boards governing wages
and prices. They direct supply and demand. Until the
mid-1980s, this sort of socialism was common, not only
in communist countries but throughout the free world.

The American economy itself was marked by wage and price
controls and complex schemes to allocate energy supplies;
in the 1970s, you could call for the U.S. government to
nationalize the oil industry and not be dismissed as a nut.

There is the social democracy, or the redistributive state.
This is the Swedish model, which uses massive redistribution
through taxation and subsidies to rearrange economic
outcomes.

The goal is the same as for Hot socialism, a fairer
allocation of resources and the animating ideology is
economic egalitarianism.

The Swedish system is in serious trouble. The Swedish
economy is no longer creating jobs, private sector
employment has been shrinking for decades, and the public
sector can no longer absorb more workers. The country is
facing a brain drain. ( the effect is starting to show
in canada too )

A backlash is developing against refugees and immigrants,
who once represented Sweden's commitment to human rights
and now are increasingly seen as outsiders consuming a
fixed welfare pie.

Many Swedes are pessimistic about the future, in large
measure because they cannot imagine how their system can
survive, yet cannot overcome the political obstacles to
changing it.

The social democracy form of socialism is difficult
to maintain because it runs head on into the political
pressure of democracy which replaces abstract issues
of fairness with the practical calculations of interest
group politics and the economic pressure of open markets.

The Western democracies, Sweden among them, have not been
willing to sacrifice their political freedom or their
general prosperity to maintain ever expanding socialism.

They haven't, for instance, kept their people from leaving
the country or even, in most cases, from sending their
money abroad. That freedom has maintained the political
legitimacy of social democracies, but it has undermined
their ability to stay socialist.

Many kinds of economic planning are indeed practicable
only if the planning authority can effectively shut out
all extraneous influences; the result of such planning is
therefore inevitably the piling up of restrictions on the
movements of men and goods.

Countries that allow the more or less free movement of
products, people, and financial capital will find that
socialism cannot be sustained when the regime dependant on
monopoly power cannot survive the pressures of competition
from outside.

In the postwar period, a combination of liberal idealism,
economic pragmatism, and Cold War calculation led not to
piling up of restrictions but to increasingly free
international markets, greater freedom of movement, and,
most recently, ever freer capital flows, all enhanced by
advances in communications and transportation.

It's tempting to define any form of redistribution or
regulation as socialism and therefore to declare the
expansion of any and all government programs to be
socialism. But that sweeping definition leads to political
and economic confusion.

What distinguishes socialism is its appeal to economic
fairness. It declares that markets do not allocate wealth
and power fairly, and that political processes will do a
better job.

Socialism is not simply about moving money from the
powerfull to the powerless, a goal as old as politics,
but about flattening the distribution of income and wealth.

Porkbarrel spending is not socialism. Farm subsidies are
not socialism. Corporate welfare is not socialism. These
programs are not ideological in nature. They are about
competing interest groups.

Socialism is about claims of justice, and it is also about
money: about wealth, income, physical and financial
capital. It is an ideology based on allocating economic
resources. It may try to achieve that goal by
nationalizing assets, by command-and-control regulation,
or by taxation and redistribution.

But the goal is the same: to rearrange society's wealth,
generally from the haves to the have nots. Rearranging
wealth is not the only possible ideological goal of
economic regulation. It is merely the goal we have become
accustomed to since the late 19th century.

But open Socialism cannot survive, the Iron Curtain and
the Berlin Wall, the machine guns that pointed inward to
prevent their own citizens from leaving, was to counteract
the process fully underway in Sweden.

If you confiscate the rewards of labor to redistribute it
to others, you create an incentive for the person being
plundered to seek a better life elsewhere.

The USSR saw plumbers, craftsmen engineers and scientists
fleeing to the west for better compensation that would not
be confiscated, and to stop the exodus The reds built a
wall, strung barbed wire, erected thousands of machine gun
emplacements, and it had nothing to do with keeping out
the evil west, anyone who wanted to enter the sovet union
could do so as a tourist, but for a person inside to get
permission to venture out could take 5 years, and thats in
the terribly rare case permission was ever granted.

To avoid the socialist proven natural road to failure the
entire population had to live under a state no better than
a conscript. and when that failed to be sufficient cohersion
The USSR, like China and others still do today adopted a
system of terror and mass murder and labor Camps.

Incentive by compensation was replaced by fear terror and
the want for self preservation.

These are the same Communists that have murdered something
like 100-150 million, or nearly two-thirds of all those
killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and
guerrillas from 1900 to 1987 It is several times the 38
Million battle dead that have been killed in all this
centurys international and domestic wars.

The probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone,
one communist country, well surpasses this cost of war.
And those of communist China almost equal it.

These Socialist states are the marriage of an absolutist
ideology with absolute power.

Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely.
They believed that they knew through Marxism what would
bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness.

They believed that power, the dictatorship of the
proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal
or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture
to realize this utopia.

Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement.
Government, the Communist Party, was thus above any law.
All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and
sentiments were expendable. And the people were like
lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world.

Constructing this utopia was seen as a war on poverty,
exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the
greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And
thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary
enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists,
wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants,
rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got
caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the
cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler
and an utterly racist Nazism.

To the communists, the cause of a communist utopia
justified all the deaths. The irony of this is that
communism, in practice, even after decades of total
control, did not improve the lot of the average person,
but made their living conditions worse than before the
revolution.

It is not by chance that the greatest famines have
occurred within communist states, about 5 Million
dead during 1921-23 and 7 Million during 1932-3, and
27-40 Million dead 1959-61.

In total almost 55 Million people died in various
communist famines and associated diseases, a little over
10 Million of them from intentional famine. This is as
though the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand
had been completely wiped out.

And that something like 35 Million people fled communist
countries as refugees, as though Argentina or Columbia had
been totally mptied of all their people, was an
unparalleled vote against the utopian pretensions of
Marxism-Leninism.

But communists could not be wrong. After all, their
knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism,
an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and
human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view
of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has
been and why, and he and his interpreters have proved that
it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent
this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost
of more human misery.

Those who disagreed with this world view and even with
some of the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were,
without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not
Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that?

In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion.
It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had
its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the
answers. It had a heaven and indicated the proper behavior
to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its
crusade against nonbelievers.

What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its
seizure of all the states instruments of force and
coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all
independent sources of power, such as the church, the
professions, private businesses, schools, and, of course,
the family.

This was the disregard of the rights of the individual in
deference to the good of the masses.

Issac Steinberg, was the People's Commissar for Justice in
the Bolshevik regime, but not a member of the Bolshevik
Party, he was part of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries
which was a temporary ally.

Issac wanted the Cheka (the secret police) to adhere to
some sort of judicial procedure.

Lenin and Dzerzhinsky disagreed. In frustration,
Steinberg said to Lenin:

" What is the point of a People's Commissariat for
Justice?
It would be more honest to have a People's
Commissariat for Social Extermination. People
would understand more clearly."

Lenin replied:

" Excellent idea. That's exactly how I see it.
Unfortunately, it wouldn't do to call it that. "

To leftists, the rights of the person is a tree standing
in the way of the highway to utopia and must be cut down.

Lets see if we can see some simularity in these...

"The main plank in the National Socialist program
is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the
individual and the Marxist concept of humanity
and to substitute for them the folk community,
rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond
of its common blood."
-Adolph Hitler, A Study in Tyranny, by Alan Bullock

"It is thus necessary that the individual should
come to realize that his own ego is of no
importance in comparison with the existence of his
nation; that the position of the individual ego is
conditioned solely by the interests of the nation
as a whole ... that above all the unity of a
nations spirit and will are worth far more than
the freedom of the spirit and will of an
individual... This state of mind, which
subordinates the interests of the ego to the
conservation of the community, is really the first
premise for every truly human culture.
... we understand only the individuals capacity to
make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow
man."
-Adolph Hitler, 1933

"There is the great, silent, continuous struggle:
the struggle between the State and the Individual;
between the State which demands and the individual
who attempts to evade such demands. Because the
individual, left to himself, unless he be a saint
or hero, always refuses to pay taxes, obey laws,
or go to war." -Benito Mussolini

"It is the supreme duty of the state to grant life
only to the healthy and hereditarily sound portion
of the population.... The life of the individual
has meaning only in light of that ultimate aim."
-Nazi medical authority, Dr. Arthur Guett

"Fascist ethics begin ... with the acknowledgment
that it is not the individual who confers a
meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the
existence of a human society which determines the
human character of the individual. According to
Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot
take place unless the State has risen to a
position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The
curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at
once, and this need of rising the State to its
rightful position.
-Mario Palmieri, The Philosophy of Fascism 1936

"All our lives we fought against exalting the
individual, against the elevation of the single
person, and long ago we were over and done with
the business of a hero, and here it comes up
again: the glorification of one personality.
This is not good at all."
-Vladimir Lenin,
as quoted in Not by Politics Alone.

"Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the
individual decisively, once and for all."
-Nikita Khrushchev,
February 25, 1956
20th Congress of the Communist Party

"We must stop thinking of the individual and start
thinking about what is best for society."
-Hillary Clinton, 1993

"We cant be so fixated on our desire to preserve
the rights of ordinary Americans."
-President Bill Clinton,
USA Today, March 11, 1993, Page 2A

What is the common thread is the disregard for the rights
of the individual for the common good of the masses.

It is sobering to recall that the justification for the
initial B.A.T.F. raid was the suspicion that residents of
Mount Carmel had illegally converted semiautomatic weapons
to machine guns.

Before the raid, the Davidians had not been charged with
harming or threatening anyone, yet I suspect that many
Americans still believe that the Davidians basically got
what they deserved.

How can this be ?

Well follow the playbook of every perp of mass murder,
first you accuse then you demonize, and it never has
anything to do with the truth.

The Davidians were stigmatized as a dangerous "doomsday
cult" unworthy of respect, muting the public outcry about
their mistreatment. They were tarred with unsubstantiated
allegations of child abuse and accused of hostile intent
because they owned guns.

There was talk of a drug manufacturing lab, rocket
launchers, every rumor one could think to leak was leaked.

Their beliefs were depicted as utterly bizarre and alien,
and the Davidians themselves were portrayed as mindless
drones under David Koresh's spell, when in fact many of
them were highly educated.

For the leftist media with an agenda of their own, it
certainly was good for ratings.

This is the same media that tried and convicted Jewel as
the Olympic Park Bomber, the same media that is now
screaming "violence in schools on a rampage" as never
before. The true facts are that this is a rather large
country with a lot of people and School violence is
currently the lowest it has been in many years.

This is the same media that beat the steady drum of
"economy bad", "economy bad", "economy bad", and in a
fashion reminicent of BREMA TV, suddenly began reporting
"economy is improving" the day after Clinton was elected
President for his first term.

Covering up for Leftist murder is not a new crime of the media.

Let us go back to where it began.

Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent
from 1921 to 1934 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1932,
ranks as one of the worst and most dangerous examples of
sycophantry in journalism.

His consistent whitewash of Soviet rule, including the
man-made famine of 1932-33, in which as many as 10 million
men, women and children died, stands as a disgrace to
journalism and all those calling themselves journalists.

Malcolm Muggeridge, author, journalist and one-time socialist,
was one of the few who were able to get into the famine-ravaged
lands of the U.S.S.R. and report on what he saw.

Later, Muggeridge described Duranty as "the greatest liar
of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism."

Duranty's misrepresentation of events, and the contemporary
response to them, has a specific and immediate bearing upon
how today's news is presented, manipulated or unreported.

Unfortunately for the public, Duranty today has many
spiritual descendants whose reporting is colored by ideology
and/or self-interest.

Because of Duranty's manipulation of the news in order to
placate Soviet authorities, especially Josef Stalin, rather
than reveal the truth, the scope of horror wrought by the
communists in the pre-war U.S.S.R. was not fully comprehended
until many years later. As a result, the public could not really
gauge what communism was capable of, and what kind of man Stalin
actually was.

Duranty's activities in the Soviet Union have been revealed
in Robert Conquest's "Harvest of Sorrow,"
and in B.J. Taylor's "Stalin's Apologist."

Further discussion of the 1932-33 famine is found in the
appropriate chapter of "The Black Book of Communism."

Though known, Duranty's falsification of the news has never
drawn the deep-seated wrath that one might expect, despite
the fact that his "reporting" made him complicit in the
extermination of millions of people.

He should have shared the gallows with Josef Gobels, since
he was basically guilty of the same thing.

Duranty, in effect, was an accomplice to mass murder, but
his former employer, The New York Times, has expressed
something in the order of mere embarrassment.

Stalin's man-made famine of 1932-33 is one of the many leftist
mass killings, probably surpassing even Hitler's extermination
campaigns, and extended in territory from the Ukraine to
Kazakstan in Central Asia, nearly 2,000 miles.

Again I cite here the "reason" behind the slaughter.

The continuing struggle between the central government
in Moscow and small farmers in various regions who
resisted collectivization of the land, with the additional
desired result the destruction of Ukrainian nationalism.

The great terror-famine had nothing to do with poor harvests
or even an inadequate supply of food. Not only was there
enough food, during the 1932-33 famine, the Soviet Union
exported food.

In reprisal to resistance to earlier attempts at
collectivization, Stalin ordered that certain areas meet
impossible quotas of grain and other foodstuffs. The central
government took everything edible. Men and women were shot
for eating produce from their own fields. The numbers of
dead mounted as the process of extermination proceeded.

The NKVD, predecessor to the better-known KGB, was in complete
control of the regions affected. At will, roads could be blocked,
villages isolated and, of course, individuals executed without
trial or warning.

Secrecy was vital. Though diplomats of various nations did learn
of Stalin's war of extermination, there would be no threat to
carrying the plan out as long as the general public outside the
Soviet Union remained ignorant.

Publicity regarding the famine would have caused great damage
to the image of the Soviet Union, its leader Josef Stalin and
attempts to spread communist ideology.

On the rare occasion that an accurate report on the famine was
published in the press, reassurances quickly appeared countering
the original report and diluting its effect. Of all those involved
in famine disinformation, Duranty, as Moscow correspondent for the
prestigious New York Times, proved one of the most useful.

In 1932 Duranty wrote that there was no famine, nor "is there
likely to be."

He knew differently. In September 1933, Duranty detailed to
British diplomats how many had died and where: The North
Caucasus and Lower Volga had lost 3 million people in the
past year; Ukraine lost 4 to 5 million, and the total,
Duranty stated, could be as high as 10 million.

The truth concerning the terror-famine was difficult to
assess, but Duranty knew.

The NKVD had taken extreme measures to isolate and destroy
as much evidence as possible of the famine. Afflicted villages,
some losing as much as 100 percent of their population, were
cut off from the rest of the world Flags indicating an epidemic
were flown and roads to the area were cut off. Secret trains
were used that left for famine areas and then traveled to
remote rail spurs.

The contents were carefully guarded by the NKVD, but not
even the best efforts of the secret police could forever
hide the identity of the cargo, the corpses of the dead
piled indiscriminately for quick, anonymous, mass burial.

Seventy years hence, The New York Times, the outlet styling
itself as the newspaper of record with the motto, "All the
news that's fit to print" still lists Duranty among its
Pulitzer Prize winners, despite its former Moscow
correspondent's participation in covering up mass murder.

The media watchdog group Accuracy in Media has sought
for years to set the record straight regarding Duranty
and his reporting.

A.I.M. approached both the New York Times and the Pulitzer
Prize administrator about this matter. The Times indicated
that it would cooperate with the decision of the Pulitzer
Prize administrator.

In a letter now a year old, Reed Irvine, chairman of A.I.M.,
contacted Seymour Topping, the present administrator and also
a former Times Moscow correspondent, requesting that he take
action on the question of Duranty's award.

In the letter, Irvine pointed out that Duranty received special
favors from Stalin's government, including a car and a mistress,
designed to ensure the correspondent's cooperation.

Duranty did cooperate, and the truth about Stalin's policy
of extermination remained hidden for years.

Irvine questioned if the award would have been given to
Duranty at all if the truth regarding Soviet influence
upon the reporter had come to light.

Stating that "Trust in journalists and the media is at
a low ebb," Irvine challenged the Pulitzer Prize
administrator to meet the same standard as the
National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
In 1992 the Academy revoked a 1989 Grammy given to a
musical group that later was found not actually to have
sung its own lyrics.

To date no action has been taken on Irvine's request to
Seymour. Beyond an oblique acknowledgment that the Times
correspondent's Pulitzer has been challenged, no action
has been taken in the Duranty case.

The whole scenario just begs the question, Why not?
In an era when the past crimes of the Nazis continue
justly to elicit demands for punishment and retribution,
why have the crimes of the Soviets, and the activities of
those who cooperated with them, attracted so little attention
in the establishment media, the media of the Pulitzer
Prize and The New York Times?

Could it be because not much has changed since the days of
Walter Duranty?

Let's fast-forward from the '20s and '30s to the current era.

In its Jan. 1, 1990 edition, Time magazine's Senior Editor
Strobe Talbott explained why the newsweekly had selected
as its "Man of the Decade" not Ronald Reagan,
who had broken the back of the Soviet Union and brought
down the Berlin Wall, but Mikhail Gorbachev.

Wrote Talbott, "A new consensus is emerging that the
Soviet threat is not what it used to be. The real point
however, is that it never was. The doves in the
Great Debate of the past 40 years were right all along."

The Soviet Union was never a threat to the United States?

Gorbachev was a great leader?

This analysis by Time's senior editor would take on
tremendous significance during the Clinton administration,
just a couple of years later. ...

Time's Senior Editor Strobe Talbott left journalism to join
the Clinton administration as the president's most trusted
adviser on Russia, and the establishment media still engages
in denial and derision, with no acknowledgment of the truth.

In this way, they continue as the spiritual descendants of the
New York Times' correspondent Walter Duranty.

Franklin D Rosevelt called Stalin "Uncle Joe".

FDR, one of the god fathers adored by most moonie-Leftists,
was obstructed from embarking opon the same Tyranny here
at the time by our strong constitution.

Remember this was the same era where an amendment was
required for alcohol proabition because with full
freedom protection of the consitution still in effect,
the goverment had no authority without the amendment
granting control. and the same constitution, strong
as it was ( because its proscribed limitation was
respected ) blocked any socialist tyranny at the
hand of FDR, and the freedom hating left has been
attacking the constitution ever since.

Notice that the freedoms protected by the constiution
has been wounded so terribly that the central
goverment conducts a "drug war" without any authority
granted by any amendment.

Why leftists Hate freedom and free markets.

The free market has many characteristics. They serve and
express the individual pursuit of happiness. They spread
ideas. They foment change in the ways people live and
work, and in what character traits are valued. They
dissolve and recombine existing categories, from artistic
genres to occupations. They encourage the constant search
for improvements, and they subject new ideas to ruthless,
unsentimental testing. Markets evolve through trial and
error, experimentation and feedback. They are out of
anyone's control, and their results are unpredictable.
It is this dynamism of markets their nature as open ended,
decentralized discovery processes that attracts the
greatest ideological opposition today.

Markets don't build a bridge to the future, a path from
point A to point B across a scary abyss; they continually
add nodes and pathways in a web of many different futures.
Market processes make it impossible to make society as a
whole adhere to a static ideal, whether that ideal is a
traditional way of life, the status quo, or a planner's
notion of the one best future.

There is the argument against externalities. Most of us
have been willing to grant the problem of externalities
in such areas as air pollution and to look for ways of
addressing it with minimal disruption of market processes.
But it's not that hard to declare that every market action
has potentially negative spillover effects. The infinitely
elastic version of the externality argument turns the
language of market oriented economics against the
essential nature of commerce. We increasingly see the
externality argument aimed not at producers, the
traditional target, but at consumers.

My choice of which movies to watch creates cultural
pollution. My purchase of convenient packaging produces
environmental waste. My house color or garage facade does
not please the neighbors. My purchase of consumer goods
leads to luxury fever that hurts everyone. We are all
connected in the marketplace, and therefore, in this view,
our actions must be tightly regulated to contain
spillovers.

Green demands for sustainability and a steady state
economy have supplanted socialist concerns for fairness.
Critics like Juliet Schor and Robert Frank attack markets
for encouraging ever-expanding yuppie consumption, not for
immiserating the poor. The sociologist Richard Sennett,
who was raised on children's books from the Little Lenin
Library, attacks today's flexible capitalism not for
exploiting the workers or paying poorly but for fostering
instability and rewarding personal adaptability.

Today's jobs, Sennett complains in The Corrosion of
Character, do not tell workers who they are and thus
threaten "the ability of people to form their characters
into sustained narratives."

Egalitarian bioethicist Daniel Callahan attacks the push
for medical progress, which he finds expressed in the
dynamic interplay of markets, technological innovation,
and individual patients' desires. He calls for "steady
state medicine" and "finite health goals." Although
socialized medicine might provide a regulatory vehicle for
achieving his goals, Callahan is not making a socialist
argument.

Decentralized discovery processes cannot coexist with
technocratic, political control. There are many examples
of such objections, which are particularly virulent when
Europeans start denouncing the American openness of the
Internet.

The good news is that just as the breakdown of socialism
has created new alliances against markets, it has also
created new alliances in support of them. The idea that
markets produce not chaos and disruption but positive,
emergent order has become common in the same circles
where a generation ago socialism, or at least technocratic
planning, was all the rage.

The American center and, I suspect, Britain's New Labour,
is full of chastened technocrats who have come to accept
the practical limitations of state action and the
practical advantages of economic freedom.

There are also many political moderates journalists,
scholars, technologists, scientists, artists, and business
people, whose intellectual appreciation for self
organizing systems has come from outside economics:
from complexity theory, from the decentralized evolution
of the Internet, from the process of scientific discovery,
from ecological science, from cross-cultural exchange,
from organization theory. These centrist dynamists share
an appreciation for dispersed knowledge and trial and
error evolution that spills over into their attitudes
toward markets. They do not always prefer markets to
government, but they usually do.

They lack the leftist reflex that says a single,
government imposed approach is the best solution to public
problems. They are more concerned with finding mechanisms
to encourage innovation, competition, choice, and feedback.

One thing that makes our political discourse confusing is
that the term moderate does not distinguish between those
whose moderation implies an appreciation for market
processes and those whose moderation suggests just the
opposite, a long list of schemes for small scale
government tinkering.

Striking is the profound split on what used to be the left.
While leftists like Sennett are attacking economic dynamism,
their erstwhile allies are finding in markets the values of
innovation, openness, and choice.

The counterculture has morphed into the business culture
to the consternation of both commerce hating leftists and
cultural conservatives. The left that gave us socialism
is not the people that gave us personal computers and
Fast Company magazine.

The PC boom and America's hot new business magazine were
created by people who would have no great love of markets
if that concept implied static, hierarchical, bureaucratic
corporate structures. Instead they have embraced the idea
of markets as open systems that foster diversity and self
expression.

Diversity and self expression is individualism, the
excercising of Liberty. It is what people can do when
they have freedom.

Consider the following

"The conclusion is thus inescapable that the
history, concept, and wording of the second
amendment to the Constitution of the United States,
as well as its interpretation by every major
commentator and court in the first half-century
after its ratification, indicates that what is
protected is an individual right of a private
citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful
manner.
-- Report of the Subcommittee On The Constitution
of the Committee On The Judiciary,
United States Senate, 97th Congress,
second session (February, 1982),
SuDoc# Y4.J 89/2: Ar 5/5

"In recent years it has been suggested that the
Second Amendment protects the "collective" right
of states to maintain militias, while it does not
protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear
arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the
period during which the Constitution and the Bill
of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains
one of the most closely guarded secrets of the
eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving
from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such
a thesis."
-- Stephen P. Halbrook, 1984

The Bill of Rights protects any one persons rights from
being taken away no matter if its with the approval of
the balance of the citizens, and the founders rightly
prohibited any gun control equating it to freedom
control

The reason Leftist hate our freedom, is because as
long as we have that freedom, it nullifies or weakens
the oppressive instruments of force, coersion or terror
needed for socialist confiscation, not to mention that
an armed population might revolt if taxes are made too high.

"The American Republic will endure, until
politicians realize they can bribe the people
with their own money."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of
arms. The strongest reason for the people to
retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a
last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny
in government"
-- Thomas Jefferson,
1 Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334

Its no secret that our Founders equated taxes with tyranny.
The "Boston Tea Party" was a revolt over a tax on Tea!

I would like to point out some fairly recent history.

Our deranged freedom hating politicians, prompted by
outcry from the tyranical mob has attempted twice now
to enact laws designed to clear sexual and other
"objectional" material off the internet ( US Servers
anyway )

And so far both have been struck down as against our
freedom garranty of free speach.

The policians polled and they saw majority support,
they saw it would help them get elected, it was popular.
But tested against the bill of rights they where nullified.

This is an example of our rights being protected from another
form of what the Founders called tyranny, " The Tyranny of
the Majority".

They made no concealment that our rights are protected
against the ebbs shifts and all immediate desire demanded
by public opinion.

"The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration
of the right of the people at large or considered
as individuals, It establishes some rights of the
individual as unalienable and which consequently,
no majority has a right to deprive them of."
-- Albert Gallatin, Oct 7 1789

"A right is not what someone gives you;
it's what no one can take from you."
-- Ramsey Clark

"Are we to understand," asked the judge,
"that you hold your own interests above the
interests of the public?"

"I hold that such a question can never arise
except in a society of cannibals." -- Ayn Rand

Here again the moonie-Leftist foamy shout-down bots,
brainwashed by Marx and Kant remind one of Hitlers Brown
shirts, Stalin or Pol Pot Cadre, Mao Red Guard as the hit
the street with placards demanding the goverment take action
directly prohibited by the bill of rights.

Perhaps Pol Pots Cadre and murder squads made the greatest
use of the ignorant youth with 12 year olds fitted with
their own shortened stock AK47's merrily blasting flesh
to feed the killing fields.

We also have recent contemporary evidence of leftist
intolerance of not only our freedom garranty 2nd
amendment right to the tools of revolt ( guns )
but free speach as well.

Witness what is happened to those in the field of study
about the evolution of human behavior, under fire from
the left because they dared to publish findings that
showed many of our traits have an evolved genetic origin.

This flies in the face of leftist dogma that asserts, for
political reasons, that all human behavor is a malable
programable set of function installed by socialisation.

The left when confronted with the problem of getting
humans to toil in production by demand, or command, assert
its simply a socialisation problem, that we can all be
communal slavoids for the common good if we was programed
correctly from birth.

This leftist tact we have not seen mentioned often untill
recently. If you cannot jiggle fiddle tune tweak and meddle
socialism into being compatable with humans, perhaps we can
adapt the humans instead.

In reality, the leftists are right, You need to look no further
than the old USSR, or the current China and other leftist
controled countries to see this programming of human behavior
in action, by terror, mass murder, forced labor and death camps.

We all know the Soviet camps as the gulag.

Consider the following letter

To the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee
of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)

We appeal to you, asking you to pay a minimum of
attention to our request.

We are prisoners who are returning from the
Solovetsky concentration camp because of our poor
health. We went there full of energy and good
health, and now we are returning as invalids,
broken and crippled emotionally and physically. We
are asking you to draw your attention to the
arbitrary use of power and the violence that reign
at the Solovetsky concentration camp in Kemi and in
all sections of the concentration camp.

It is difficult for a human being even to imagine
such terror, tyranny, violence, and lawlessness.
When we went there, we could not conceive of such a
horror, and now we, crippled ourselves, together
with several thousands who are still there, appeal
to the ruling center of the Soviet state to curb
the terror that reigns there.

As though it weren't enough that the Unified State
Political Directorate [OGPU] without oversight and
due process sends workers and peasants there who
are by and large innocent (we are not talking about
criminals who deserve to be punished), the former
tsarist penal servitude system in comparison to
Solovky had 99% more humanity, fairness, and
legality.

People die like flies, they die a slow and painful
death; we repeat that all this torment and
suffering is placed only on the shoulders of the
proletariat without money, i.e., on workers who,
we repeat, were unfortunate to find themselves in
the period of hunger and destruction accompanying
the events of the October Revolution, and who
committed crimes only to save themselves and their
families from death by starvation; they have
already borne the punishment for these crimes, and
the vast majority of them subsequently chose the
path of honest labor. Now because of their past,
for whose crime they have already paid, they are
fired from their jobs.

Yet, the main thing is that the entire weight of
this scandalous abuse of power, brute violence, and
lawlessness that reign at Solovky and other
sections of the OGPU concentration camp is placed
on the shoulders of workers and peasants; others,
such as counterrevolutionaries, profiteers and so
on, have full wallets and have set themselves up
and live in clover in the Soviet State, while next
to them, in the literal meaning of the word, the
penniless proletariat dies from hunger, cold, and
back breaking 14-16 hour days under the tyranny and
lawlessness of inmates who are the agents and
collaborators of the State Political Directorate
[OGPU].

If you complain or write anything ("Heaven forbid"),
they will frame you for an attempted escape or for
something else, and they will shoot you like a dog.

They line us up naked and barefoot at 22 degrees
below zero and keep us outside for up to an hour.

It is difficult to describe all the chaos and
terror that is going on in Kemi, Solovky, and the
other sections of the concentrations camp.

All annual inspections uncover a lot of abuses. But
what they discover in comparison to what actually
exists is only a part of the horror and abuse of
power, which the inspection accidently uncovers.

One example is the following fact, one of a
thousand, which is registered in OGPU :
THEY FORCED THE INMATES TO EAT THEIR OWN FECES.

"Comrades," if we dare to use this phrase,
verify that this is a fact from reality, about
which, we repeat, GPU has the official evidence,
and judge for yourself the full extent of
effrontery and humiliation in the supervision by
those who want to make a career for themselves.

We are sure and we hope that in the All-Union
Communist Party there are people, as we have been
told, who are humane and sympathetic; it is
possible, that you might think that it is our
imagination, but we swear to you all, by everything
that is sacred to us, that this is only one small
part of the nightmarish truth. We repeat, and will
repeat 100 times, that yes, indeed there are some
guilty people, but the majority suffer innocently.

The word law, according to the law of the GPU
concentration camps, does not exist; what does
exist is only the autocratic power of petty
tyrants, collaborators, serving time, who have
power over life and death. Everything described
above is the truth and we, ourselves, who are close
to the grave after 3 years in Solovky and Kemi and
other sections, are asking you to improve the
pathetic, tortured existence of those who are
there who languish under the yoke of the OGPU's
tyranny, violence, and complete lawlessness.

To this we subscribe: G. Zheleznov, Vinogradov,
F. Belinskii.

China has its own Gulag, called the Laogai

The Laogai camps were established by the Chinese Communist
Party under Mao Zedong. The Laogai has outlived Mao, just
as the Soviet gulag continued long after Stalin's death.
The Laogai, like the gulag, has continued as an instrument
of Party rule. The gulag only ended when the Soviet Union
itself collapsed.

Despite many societal advances in the People's Republic of
China, the dictators in Beijing continue to depend upon
its Laogai system as a tool for suppression. Far from
abandoning it, the Chinese Communist party is constantly
strengthening its forced labor system.

A Mandarin term, "Laogai" translates literally as "reform
through labor," but within China, the term has come to
have a wider, colloquial meaning.

There, the word - no matter the context in which it is
uttered, can strike fear in the hearts and minds of
average Chinese. Almost everyone in China is related to or
knows someone who has served a lengthy sentence in a
Laogai camp. Millions know people who simply disappeared
into the camps, never to be heard from again.

Whether individuals are thrown into a prison (jianyu),
reform through labor camp (laogai dui) reeducation through
labor camp (laojiao suo) juvenile offender facility
(shaoguan suo), a psychiatric hospital run by the PSB, a
county detention center (kanshou suo) or are those inmates
who have fi

Raymond:

There's a lot of useful information in your post. I'd characterize the vast majority of it as true. But to post this long and really only semi-relevant disquisition here is an abuse. Of our resources, of our readers' attention, and of our trust in you to help make this site better by your participation.

I'm going to keep this comment, becuase there are too many things here I do not wish to throw away. But this is a warning - and heed it because it's the only one you'll get:

If you're going to participate in debates this way, your comments will be deleted.

Winds of Change.NET isn't a public commons, it's our property and we will sic the bouncers on you if you abuse our hospitality. If this kind of behaviour continues, we'll take further steps and fence you out so your ability to comment here is removed entirely (though you'll stil be able to read us).

If you have stuff like this in future, start a blogspot blog via blogger.com and post it there.