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Pat Condell hits the nail on the head in his discussion of those who style themselves "progressives," from their complete lack of intellectual honesty to their regressive politics to their racism of low expectations:
Pat's take misses on one point and only alludes to another worthy of more specific citation. Condell describes the world view of "progressives" correctly, even down to their view of the West as imperialists with the stain of original sin (while ignoring that the most imperialist force in world history has been Islam). It is worth noting that this view comes directly from Karl Marx and his theory that all history is a struggle between the oppressed and the oppressors. In the progressive world view, we are the oppressors while anyone who can be shoehorned into a victim group are the oppressed entitled to permanent special treatment.
What Condell misses in his analysis is the animus of progressives towards Christianity. To understand fully the motivation of progressives, one must note their abhorrence of Christianity. Christianity is the foundation of Western civilization; progressive are warring against it. Christianity must be removed from the public square for "progressives" to achieve their goal of remaking society with themselves as the sole arbiters of morality. Thus the "progressive" treatment of Islam is more nuanced than simply that "brown skinned" people are not to be held to the same standards. Muslims also seek to displace Christianity, and thus they are, in many ways, allied with progressives.
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Showing posts with label Karl Marx. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karl Marx. Show all posts
Monday, October 21, 2013
Nothing More Racist (Or Regressive) Than A "Progressive"
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Is Charlie Manson The Model For Our MSM?
Bookworm Room has posted on her belief that "Mainstream media is the spiritual descendant of Charlie Manson." It is a very creative and well made argument. Says Book:
Manson had a goal: he envisioned a new world order, with himself and his followers as the leaders. To bring about this new world order, he first had to destroy the existing one. He came up with an idea that he called “Helter-Skelter“: he was going to incite race warfare because he was pretty sure that would bring America down, leaving room for him and his followers to take over. He figured that the best way to start an apocalyptic race war was through violent murder. He wasn’t going to do the murder himself, of course, but he did incite his dumb, sexually-opiated, often drugged followers to commit the deeds on his behalf.
Now, let’s think about the mainstream media. The MSM has a goal: a completely Democrat-dominated political machine, with the MSM and the politicians it’s created in total control. Because this will be a statist new world, the MSM must first destroy completely America’s current, still vaguely capitalist market and individualist ideology. To that end, the media has decided that it will incite race warfare, because it’s pretty sure that race warfare will destroy existing institutions and allow it and its political class to take over. Media members figure that the best way to start this societal breakdown is to sow so much division between blacks and whites in America that the country becomes dysfunctional and, if necessary, bloodied. The media elite are not going to sully their own hands, of course, but they will work hard to incite their followers to commit the deeds on their behalf. (And sadly, to the extent they have followers in black inner cities, these are young people who are minimally educated, inundated with unhealthy sexual messages from movies and rap songs, and too often on drugs. Just think of Trayvon….)
I can’t prove the MSM’s goal, but I can prove its tactics. . . .
Do read her whole post. Her reasoning is solid. I have to take issue on only one point - Charlie Manson was merely a cog in the great socialist wheel. I would name the spiritual progenitors of our MSM as Marx, Lenin and Stalin.
Here are the comments she and I made to her post:
Me:
A fascinating piece, but in the pantheon of mass murders with dreams of grandeur and world change, I think you aim a bit too low. I would have picked Stalin as the MSM’s ideological progenitor. He in fact worked to change an entire country, and indeed, under him, there came to be the division between objective truth and socialist truth. There was control of the media to communicate only approved messages. Etc., etc. And some of the old Soviet movies – particularly the post WWII biopic on Ivan The Terrible – are probably pretty analogous to The Butler in that both teach a version of history not grounded in fact, but rather in message.
On a final note, if you are going to point out things about Oprah, I think that you are missing the most outrageous – her assertion that Trayvon Martin is the “Emmett Till of our time.” Oprah rather surprised me, actually. She built her career by being careful to appear as a normal American rather than an “African American.” She was accepted on those terms. Yet now it turns out that she too is a closet race hustler. May her career be effected accordingly.
Book:
I agree with you about the media’s general leftism, along with its global domination plans. What struck me, though, was how tightly their script regarding racism follows Charles Manson’s plans. It’s as if, when it comes to destroying the U.S. specifically through racial divisions, the media poured over Manson’s evil plans for sowing racial disharmony, and made those plans their own.
Me:
Book, as to racism generally, the only reason blacks weren’t targeted as part of the leftist ideology in Stalin’s Russia was because there were none in that country. But that said, the very foundation of socialism and the left has always been the disparity between the “oppressed and the oppressor.” It is their entire schtick. Blacks were being heavily recruited into the communist party of the USA in the lead up to the 60′s. Even Thomas Sowell was recruited into communism as a young man. The treatment of blacks as a victim class fits hand in glove with the opening lines of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Manson’s view of a race war was nothing new. It was in fact Marx’s view of all human history.
While Stalin and Lenin didn’t have blacks, what they had was class warfare. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to Obama and thought that his words could have come from the mouth of Lenin demonizing the Kulaks. Indeed, I looked up some of Lenin’s old speeches old speeches on the Kulaks just to verify my thought – and I was 100% correct. Class war and race war are virtually one in the same – both rely on the oppressed and the oppressor paradigm, both involve demonization of the other, and both are political tools used in precisely the same manner. It is just Marx’s paradigm pointed in two slightly different directions.
I am not saying that your choice of Charlie Manson was in any way wrong. Indeed, I would say that it causes much more of an emotional response to think of it that way then the pedantic argument that I am making. I admit to a bit of shock when I was your post heading in a way that I wouldn’t have been if it referenced Stalin instead of Manson. Thus I will bow to your choice on this one.
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Monday, September 3, 2012
Obama Doesn't Realize That His Ideas Predate Black-&-White T.V.
Here is Obama yesterday lampooning the Republican Convention, coming up with the laugh line that not only are Republicans offering no new ideas, you could be watching their platform "on black and white t.v."
Funny - at least to a crowd of the historically ignorant. Virtually Obama's entire "progressive agenda" predates the commercial introduction of the television, circa 1930. It is an agenda that has already been tried and failed.
- The welfare programs Obama is protecting against any reform - despite the fact that they threaten to destroy our economy within one to two decades - date back to Bismark in the 1880's. Trying to maintain this over century old system in its same form is, as Janet Daley opines in the Telegraph, fiscally unsustainable, and as Nicholas Eberstadt opines in the WSJ today, rotting the soul of our nation.
- Obama's often lawless favoritism towards the unions, be it with GM, Boeing, or the massive funding for the teachers unions, is central to his Presidency. Unions are an anachronism of the dawning of the industrial age, circa 1750, and, as Marx opined in 1848, they are the building blocks of communism.
- Obama's crony capitalism has its roots in the ancient era of monarchies when the king dealt out the spoils to his supporters and divested his opponents of their property. Where once there was William the Bastard the Norman knights and the Saxons, there is now Obama and GE, Solyandra, and Phizer, while GM bond holders and Delphi non-union employees were divested.
- Obama's war on disfavored industries (insurance, oil), disfavored groups (GM bond holders) and on the rich ("fairness") resembles nothing so much as Lenin's 1920 war on the Kulaks, whom Lenin regularly demonized as "class enemies" and "plunderers of the people."
- Obama's complete embrace of identity politics is the very essence of Marx's 1848 theory, that all of history is to be viewed through the distorting and simplistic rubric of the oppressed and the oppressors, with the latter being our modern permanent victim classes entitled to special treatment in perpetuity. (Interestingly, in Time Magazine this week, leftie Joe Klein argues that the left should give up identity politics on wholly pragmatic grounds, that blue collar whites - traditional supporters of Democrats - are starting to feel far less guilt and more anger at their unequal treatment as permanent sinners.)
- Obama's war on Christianity and the pushing of contraception for all have their radical roots, respectively, in the 1798 French Revolution and the work of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, circa 1915.
- The Keynsian economic theory Obama has fully embraced (and quite arguably bastardized) actually does post-date the commercial introduction of black and white t.v. - by about three years.
- Massive deficit spending coupled with a major contraction of defense spending dates back over a millennium to the fall of the Roman Empire. As Prof. Niall Ferguson pointed out, it is "quite a short ride from here . . ."
". . . to here."
No one is more backward looking than Obama and the rest of the progressives. Indeed, they haven't had a new idea since 1933. If you want to compare it to the Republican plank:
- True, the theory of capitalism and the view of wealth creation as positive forces predates the t.v. by several hundred years. Not surprisingly, where it has been close to fully implemented, it has been the success story of history. As an aside, Friedrich Hayek, the most famous modern intellectual opponent of Keynsian economics, wrote his seminal work, The Road To Serfdom, in 1944.
- The idea that tax cuts might stimulate our economy most famously dates back to JFK, circa 1961.
- The idea that unions are a threat to our economy and need to be divested of power dates to Margaret Thatcher, circa 1984, who led her country to an economic boom and away from socialism. Unlike the U.S., there are no more "closed shops" in Britain.
- Fighting against an ever expanding regulatory regime that strangles our economy is most closely associated with Ronald Reagan, who likewise led us out of a severe economic downturn into a rapidly expanding economy for over a decade.
So, when it comes to ideas, Obama is not presenting new ones, he is fully embracing old ones that have virtually all failed. You couldn't watch Obama's plank on black and white t.v. - you would have to hear about over the telegram or get it by special delivery from the pony express. Moreover, not only does Obama have no new ideas, even his schtik is old:
(H/T Jammie Wearing Fool and Instapundit)
(Welcome Larwyn's Linx readers)
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Tuesday, February 21, 2012
A Turning Point In History - Feb. 21, 1848: Marx Publishes The Communist Manifesto
Reposted From Feb. 21, 2011: Steeped in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and born in the crucible of the French Revolution, socialism was meant to wholly rework society. Socialist philosophers, most notably Karl Marx, rejected class and religion as the bases for societal structure and advocated remaking society under the watchful eye of a central government that would redistribute the nation's wealth and mandate social equality. At the center of the socialist revolution was the Marxian belief that all events could and should be analyzed in terms of the oppressor and the oppressed, the victim classes and the victimizing class - a simplistic and distorting theme that makes up such a large part of our political discourse today. It creates, in its myopic view, a world of demons and perpetual victims. As Marx wrote in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. Inherent in that proposition is a rejection of Western values, history and norms and, in its stead, an embrace of militant secularism, moral relativism and, [in modern form], multiculturalism. II. The Process: . . . [T]he workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots. The Marxist conception of socialism is that of a specific historical phase that will displace capitalism and precede communism. The major characteristics of socialism (particularly as conceived by Marx and Engels after the Paris Commune of 1871) are that the proletariat [workers] will control the means of production through a workers' state erected by the workers in their interests. Economic activity would still be organised through the use of incentive systems and social classes would still exist, but to a lesser and diminishing extent than under capitalism. III. Application Outside Of The West She entered 10 Downing Street determined to reverse what she perceived as a precipitous national decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation, particularly of the financial sector, flexible labour markets, and the sale or closure of state-owned companies and withdrawal of subsidies to others. . . She took a hard line against trade unions. Perhaps most important in the turn from economic socialism, Thatcher significantly weakened the political power of Britain's labor unions, reforming them in a manner not too dissimilar to what we see occurring in Wisconsin today. Such was Britain's economic rebound under Thatcher that the Labour Party ultimately dispensed with the idea of promoting socialism as an economic model, withdrawing the infamous "Clause IV" of its plank calling for nationalization of industry and wide-scale redistribution of wealth. In addition, Labour has continued Thatcher's union policies. . . . [S]ocialists have warred against Christianity and Judaism for over two centuries. Indeed, when socialism was born in the crucible of the French Revolution, one of the first acts of the Revolutionary government was to initiate a systematic and brutal war on the Catholic Church and its clergy. VI. Conclusion
On this day in 1848, socialist philosopher Karl Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, first published their magnum opus, The Communist Manifesto. In it, Marx advocated for a complete reworking of society, starting with the formation of labor unions, building into socialism and then to communism. It marks the single most destructive and distorting philosophy ever put forth in history, bringing untold misery to the world and working destruction upon the fabric of Western civilization to this day. Its promise has always been that society can be perfected by government and utopia achieved on earth. And while it has done some societal good in the West, the overarching reality has been economic misery and massive bloodshed.
I. Background, Philosophy & Goals
At the time Marx wrote his book, he was responding to very real problems in European society during the Industrial Revolution. Sweat shops, dangerous work places and slave wages were only a few of those problems. Moreover, European society tended to be very stratified, with many obstacles to moving between economic and social classes. Marx was also responding to Europe's colonialism as a similar evil of "oppression." And indeed, colonialism of the era, as practiced by all but the British, at least in retrospect, could be so characterized. His solutions, as expressed in The Communist Manifesto and other works, were well intentioned, but as explained below, his basic assumption about the regulation of economic markets was wildly false and his analytical framework of history was both superficial and grossly distorting.
All of that is to say that Marx's socialism is not an inherent evil. Some aspects or legacies of socialism that have found their way throughout Western society since 1848 are quite legitimate. As Bookworm Room states in a very informative post on the topic, protections for workers and a safe workplace are some of those legacies. The great weakening of the class system and the rise of the welfare state are others. And while the latter has gotten wildly out of hand, the proposition that society should provide a minimalist, temporary safety net is quite legitimate. Unfortunately, for what good Marx's socialism has done for society at large, the harm it has done has been exponentially greater.
Marx did not invent socialism, but he greatly stengthened its philosophical underpinnings, as well as describing and agitating for the final stage of socialism, communism. As I described it previously:
Marx envisioned a multistep process to communism. The very first step, as he pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, was for workers to create unions:
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle . . .
For orthodox Marxists, socialism is the lower stage of communism based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution" while upper stage communism is based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"; the upper stage becoming possible only after the socialist stage further develops economic efficiency and the automation of production has led to a superabundance of goods and services.
A. Economic Model
As an economic model, neither communism nor socialism has ever succeeded in comparison to capitalism. This is because the central assumption of the socialist model - that governments can be a more efficient regulator of economies than free markets - has been proven false beyond any iota of rational argument. Related thereto, communism and socialism have failed because they look upon the fiscal self interest motivating the capitalist class as the penultimate sin.
"Greed" is not a dirty word, despite what our Commander in Chief might say in his attacks on capitalism. When fiscal self interest has been championed and combined with free market competition, it has massively lifted the standard of living for all in its ambit, including the lowest economic classes. And it should be noted that, in a free market economy, being a member of the lowest economic class at any given point is, for the vast majority, a transitory state. But when the opportunity to pursue one's fiscal self interest has been denied to the populace at large, as happens under socialism and communism, history has shown the result to be misery.
Those nations that have embraced socialism, with the government owning the means of production, are - or were before their collapse - economic basket cases. The Soviet Union fell apart in the 90's as a result of economic collapse. Communist China was well on their way to following the Soviet Union until Deng Xiaoping become the leader of the country and replaced communist economics with free market economics, starting China's economy on the road to what has been decades of rapid expansion. Cuba, North Korea, and Burma maintain full blown socialist economic systems, and all three have some of the lowest standards of living in the world today. In South America, Chavez is still in the midst of moving Venezuela into socialism, and its standard of living is tanking with stagflation and food rationing.
Similarly, in the Middle East, socialism and its closely related variant, crony capitalism, abound. Neither have worked there. For example, Iran, where government clerics own - and get rich off of - the major industries, is an economic basket case. Egypt is another example of a state with dominant socialist economics - and indeed, economic conditions were the motivating factor behind the recent revolution.
B. Social/Political Model
As a political and social model, Marx's philosophy has been even more destructive than its economic model. Marx's utopian world required an all powerful central government to enforce the distribution of wealth, to perfect society, to enforce equality of outcome, and to motivate people to produce in the absence of a profit motive. Marxism further rejected Judeo-Christian morality, leaving the state as the unchecked final arbiter of what is right and wrong, and thus prioritized individual human life below political goals to benefit the "proletariat" and the state. The end result has been slaughter on a scale never before seen in history. Well over 100 million people were murdered by their own communist regimes in the 20th century.
In China, "official study materials published in 1948 [show that] Mao envisaged that "one-tenth of the peasants" (or about 50,000,000 [people]) "would have to be destroyed" to facilitate agrarian reform." In the end, between the agrarian reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, Mao actually exceeded that total by several million. The Soviet Union purged at least as many of its citizens, if not far more, from its inception through the end of Stalin's regime. China and the Soviet Union were not anamolies. Virtually every country that has seen the imposition of communism has also seen government sponsored mass murder on a wide, if not industrial scale. For example, in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered roughly 20% of its population. In North Korea, somewhere between 710,000 and 3,500,000 of the populace have been slaughtered by the Kim dynasty.
IV. Marxism In The West
Britain is a casebook study in the experimentation with Marx's socialist ethos, both economically through the 1980's and, in social policy, through today. In the aftermath of World War II, Britain embraced socialism, voting in 1945 to reject their war-time leader Winston Churchill, in favor of Labour's Clement Attlee. Attlees's first orders of business were the creation of the welfare state, the nationalization of major industry, the creation of nationalized medicine, and the divestiture of the empire. Tremendous power was placed in the hands of labor unions, and Britain suffered economically for decades. It took Margaret Thatcher to turn things around:
Much of Europe is incrementally trying to follow Britain's lead. Decades of European experimentation with socialism and the welfare state have given Europe moribund economies with slow growth and high unemployment. But that is changing. In the words of the NYT, "socialism is collapsing in Europe."
And socialism is not merely collapsing economically in Europe, it is also collapsing as a driver of society. Multiculturalism is a natural outgrowth of Marx's deeply distorting view that all of society should be analyzed in terms of the "oppressed and oppressor," and that, within that rubric, Western societies, with a history of colonialism and imperialism, are uniquely sinful oppressors. It is a belief system wholly detached from historical reality.
Euorpean multiculturalism encourages minorities to define themselves by the culture of their nationality or by their religion. And because Marxism holds indigenous Western culture to be irredeemably sinful, multiculturalism requires that non-indigenous cultures be accepted non-judgmentally and, indeed, seems to hold them to be superior to indigenous culture. It deliberately balkanizes society and it is particularly insidious as regards to Islamic minorities in Europe. Yet today, it is widely being acknowledged across Europe that multiculturalism has failed utterly. So says French President Sarkozy, Britain's David Cameron, and Germany's Angela Merkel. Hopefully this rejection of multiculturalism is sufficiently timely to cure the toxin Marxian multiculturalism has released into European society.
Even as Europe moves away from socialism, Obama is trying to drive the U.S. towards the failed European economic model. Obama has set us on the road to nationalizing one sixth of our economy with Obamacare. Our government is today the majority owner of GM and Chrysler. Obama nationalized the student loan industry, ostensibly for greater efficiency. Moreover, Obama is insinuating the government deeply into our economy with a tsunami of new regulations, particularly in the areas of the environment and finance. Then there was the recent power grab to regulate the internet. Obama is ideologically committed to punishing the rich through taxes and redistributing their wealth for the 'greater good' of society. And lastly, Obama is showing a penchant for crony capitalism, picking winners and losers in the marketplace. If that is not incremental economic socialism, then nothing is.
It is not just Obama that is infected with the Marxist philosophy - it pervades the entire left wing in the U.S. The left in America today is not a monolith, but rather a mosaic of pigeon holed permanent victim groups - a toxin directly derived from Marx's oppressed / oppressor analytical framework. It is the maintenance of these 'oppressed' permanent victim groups - be they minority groups, gays, women, or public sector employees - that is the raison d'etre of the modern Democrat party. And indeed, the central financial foundation of the Democrats is taxpayer money laundered through public sector unions, the essential building block of Marx's march toward a communist utopia. This is not to say that a majority of Democrats are agitating to establish full blown socialism in America today. But it is to say that to understand our modern left and their trajectory, the first step is to read Marx. Step two is to study history in order to understand what will happen to our nation if they are allowed to pull our nation along that trajectory.
V. The War On Religion
Central to Marx's goal to entirely remake society was to drive Judaism and Christianity from society. Western culture, morality, history and societal structures are inextricably intertwined with the Judeo-Christian religions. Indeed, one could say that, at least until the Enlightenment, the history of Christianity, and to a lesser extent Judaism, were one and the same as the history of Western civilization. Thus Marx became an implacable enemy of these religions and started a war on them that the left continues to this day:
The left has waged this war against Christianity and Judaism ever since. Karl Marx, socialism's greatest philosopher, famously wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that religion is the "opium of the people" and that "[t]he abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." The British socialist party wrote in their 1911 manifesto that "it is a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion." In America, the socialist left has used activist Courts as an a means of removing all aspects of Christianity from the public square while in Britain, the Labour Party is demoting Christianity and deconstructing the Anglican Church. . . .
With the left's partial success in their war on Christianity has come an interesting phenomena - the search for something to replace Christianity among the newly secularized. It would seem that we humans are hard wired to look for what amounts to a religion to give ourselves a moral mooring and a greater purpose in life. Socialist governments recognized this. Indeed, the first socialists in France substituted government sponsored cult movements in place of the Catholic Church. In Communist countries, where raw police power was used - not wholly successfully - to crush Christianity and Judaism, socialism itself was raised to the level of a religion complete with a sainthood - the quasi-deification of communist leaders as part of a cult of personality. Catholics had the Shroud of Turin; Soviets had the mummy of Lenin.
On an individual level, the same search for a substitute is happening in the West. Many of the secular left today embrace environmentalism as a religion - and indeed, it was but a few months ago that UNEP explicitly called for the global warming movement to be pushed as a religious alternative to Christianity. Still others embrace the airy spiritualism of New Age thought.
All of this has existential ramifications for Western society. For the better part of two millennium, the Judeo-Christian ethic has provided a rock solid framework for morality at the heart of Western society - one that puts maximum value on each individual human life and one that provides moral clarity in such things as Christianity's Golden Rule and Judaism's "Great Commandment." Take that mooring away from the ancient expressions of our deity and all morality then becomes dependant on what any particular person or government defines as the greater good.
When governments and individuals can define by their whim what is moral or immoral, what is desirable and what is punishable, human life is almost inevitably devalued. Certainly Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot, between them responsible for the murder of well over a hundred million people in the 20th century, held to socialist belief systems that devalued human life and elevated in its stead political ideology. Many in the green movement argue that man is a parasite on the world and call for strictly limiting his impact using authoritarian means - including population control, forced sterilization and other such methods. . .
The bottom line is, regardless whether one believes in Judaism or Christianity, we will pay a very heavy price indeed for jettisoning them as the bedrock of Western society. Yet that is precisely what the left has sought for over two centuries, promising in their stead a secular heaven on earth. Ironically, should they fully succeed, history teaches us that their promised earthly heaven will be far more likely to resemble biblical hell.
The allure of Marx's socialist philosophy, despite its utter failure as an economic model and its evil, bloody history as a social and political model, is very much alive. People embrace its utopian ideals wholly irrepsective of historical reality. It is fair to say that, since Marx first published the Communist Manifesto, the clash between Marxist social and economic ethos on one hand and traditional Western freedoms and capitalism on the other has been a reoccurring and often predominant theme across all sectors of society and culture. And indeed, what we see happening in Wisconsin today, pitting democracy against labor unions, is simply one more event in the history of that conflict. Marx may be dead, but his ghost still very much haunts us today.
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Monday, February 21, 2011
Marx & The Communist Manifesto, From Feb. 21, 1848 To Today
Steeped in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and born in the crucible of the French Revolution, socialism was meant to wholly rework society. Socialist philosophers, most notably Karl Marx, rejected class and religion as the bases for societal structure and advocated remaking society under the watchful eye of a central government that would redistribute the nation's wealth and mandate social equality. At the center of the socialist revolution was the Marxian belief that all events could and should be analyzed in terms of the oppressor and the oppressed, the victim classes and the victimizing class - a simplistic and distorting theme that makes up such a large part of our political discourse today. It creates, in its myopic view, a world of demons and perpetual victims. As Marx wrote in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. Inherent in that proposition is a rejection of Western values, history and norms and, in its stead, an embrace of militant secularism, moral relativism and, [in modern form], multiculturalism. II. The Process: . . . [T]he workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots. The Marxist conception of socialism is that of a specific historical phase that will displace capitalism and precede communism. The major characteristics of socialism (particularly as conceived by Marx and Engels after the Paris Commune of 1871) are that the proletariat [workers] will control the means of production through a workers' state erected by the workers in their interests. Economic activity would still be organised through the use of incentive systems and social classes would still exist, but to a lesser and diminishing extent than under capitalism. III. Application Outside Of The West She entered 10 Downing Street determined to reverse what she perceived as a precipitous national decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation, particularly of the financial sector, flexible labour markets, and the sale or closure of state-owned companies and withdrawal of subsidies to others. . . She took a hard line against trade unions. Perhaps most important in the turn from economic socialism, Thatcher significantly weakened the political power of Britain's labor unions, reforming them in a manner not too dissimilar to what we see occurring in Wisconsin today. Such was Britain's economic rebound under Thatcher that the Labour Party ultimately dispensed with the idea of promoting socialism as an economic model, withdrawing the infamous "Clause IV" of its plank calling for nationalization of industry and wide-scale redistribution of wealth. In addition, Labour has continued Thatcher's union policies. . . . [S]ocialists have warred against Christianity and Judaism for over two centuries. Indeed, when socialism was born in the crucible of the French Revolution, one of the first acts of the Revolutionary government was to initiate a systematic and brutal war on the Catholic Church and its clergy. VI. Conclusion
On this day in 1848, socialist philosopher Karl Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, first published their magnum opus, The Communist Manifesto. In it, Marx advocated for a complete reworking of society, starting with the formation of labor unions, building into socialism and then to communism. It marks the single most destructive and distorting philosophy ever put forth in history, bringing untold misery to the world and working destruction upon the fabric of Western civilization to this day. Its promise has always been that society can be perfected and utopia achieved. And while it has done some societal good in the West, the overarching reality has been economic misery and, in terms of communism, massive bloodshed.
I. Background, Philosophy & Goals
At the time Marx wrote his book, he was responding to very real problems in European society during the Industrial Revolution. Sweat shops, dangerous work places and slave wages were only a few of those problems. Moreover, European society tended to be very stratified, with many obstacles to moving between economic and social classes. Marx was also responding to Europe's colonialism as a similar evil of "oppression." And indeed, colonialism of the era, as practiced by all but the British, at least in retrospect, could be so characterized. His solutions, as expressed in The Communist Manifesto and other works, were well intentioned, but as explained below, his basic assumption about the regulation of economic markets was wildly false and his analytical framework of history was both superficial and grossly distorting.
All of that is to say that Marx's socialism is not an inherent evil. Some aspects or legacies of socialism that have found their way throughout Western society since 1848 are quite legitimate. As Bookworm Room states in a very informative post on the topic, protections for workers and a safe workplace are some of those legacies. The great weakening of the class system and the rise of the welfare state are others. And while the latter has gotten wildly out of hand, the proposition that society should provide a minimalist, temporary safety net is quite legitimate. Unfortunately, for what good Marx's socialism has done for society at large, the harm it has done has been exponentially greater.
Marx did not invent socialism, but he greatly stengthened its philosophical underpinnings, as well as describing and agitating for the final stage of socialism, communism. As I described it previously:
Marx envisioned a multistep process to communism. The very first step, as he pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, was for workers to create unions:
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle . . .
For orthodox Marxists, socialism is the lower stage of communism based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution" while upper stage communism is based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"; the upper stage becoming possible only after the socialist stage further develops economic efficiency and the automation of production has led to a superabundance of goods and services.
A. Economic Model
As an economic model, neither communism nor socialism has ever succeeded in comparison to capitalism. This is because the central assumption of the socialist model - that governments can be a more efficient regulator of economies than free markets - has been proven false beyond any iota of rational argument. Related thereto, communism and socialism have failed because they look upon the fiscal self interest motivating the capitalist class as the penultimate sin.
"Greed" is not a dirty word, despite what our Commander in Chief might say in his attacks on capitalism. When fiscal self interest has been championed and combined with free market competition, it has massively lifted the standard of living for all in its ambit, including the lowest economic classes. And it should be noted that, in a free market economy, being a member of the lowest economic class at any given point is, for the vast majority, a transitory state. But when the opportunity to pursue one's fiscal self interest has been denied to the populace at large, as happens under socialism and communism, history has shown the result to be misery.
Those nations that have embraced socialism, with the government owning the means of production, are - or were before their collapse - economic basket cases. The Soviet Union fell apart in the 90's as a result of economic collapse. Communist China was well on their way to following the Soviet Union until Deng Xiaoping become the leader of the country and replaced communist economics with free market economics, starting China's economy on the road to what has been decades of rapid expansion. Cuba, North Korea, and Burma maintain full blown socialist economic systems, and all three have some of the lowest standards of living in the world today. In South America, Chavez is still in the midst of moving Venezuela into socialism, and its standard of living is tanking with stagflation and food rationing.
Similarly, in the Middle East, socialism and its closely related variant, crony capitalism, abound. Neither have worked there. For example, Iran, where government clerics own - and get rich off of - the major industries, is an economic basket case. Egypt is another example of a state with dominant socialist economics - and indeed, economic conditions were the motivating factor behind the recent revolution.
B. Social/Political Model
As a political and social model, Marx's philosophy has been even more destructive than its economic model. Marx's utopian world required an all powerful central government to enforce the distribution of wealth, to perfect society, to enforce equality of outcome, and to motivate people to produce in the absence of a profit motive. Marxism further rejected Judeo-Christian morality, leaving the state as the unchecked final arbiter of what is right and wrong, and thus prioritized individual human life below political goals to benefit the "proletariat" and the state. The end result has been slaughter on a scale never before seen in history. Well over 100 million people were murdered by their own communist regimes in the 20th century.
In China, "official study materials published in 1948 [show that] Mao envisaged that "one-tenth of the peasants" (or about 50,000,000 [people]) "would have to be destroyed" to facilitate agrarian reform." In the end, between the agrarian reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, Mao actually exceeded that total by several million. The Soviet Union purged at least as many of its citizens, if not far more, from its inception through the end of Stalin's regime. China and the Soviet Union were not anamolies. Virtually every country that has seen the imposition of communism has also seen government sponsored mass murder on a wide, if not industrial scale. For example, in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered roughly 20% of its population. In North Korea, somewhere between 710,000 and 3,500,000 of the populace have been slaughtered by the Kim dynasty.
IV. Marxism In The West
Britain is a casebook study in the experimentation with Marx's socialist ethos, both economically through the 1980's and, in social policy, through today. In the aftermath of World War II, Britain embraced socialism, voting in 1945 to reject their war-time leader Winston Churchill, in favor of Labour's Clement Attlee. Attlees's first orders of business were the creation of the welfare state, the nationalization of major industry, the creation of nationalized medicine, and the divestiture of the empire. Tremendous power was placed in the hands of labor unions, and Britain suffered economically for decades. It took Margaret Thatcher to turn things around:
Much of Europe is incrementally trying to follow Britain's lead. Decades of European experimentation with socialism and the welfare state have given Europe moribund economies with slow growth and high unemployment. But that is changing. In the words of the NYT, "socialism is collapsing in Europe."
And socialism is not merely collapsing economically in Europe, it is also collapsing as a driver of society. Multiculturalism is a natural outgrowth of Marx's deeply distorting view that all of society should be analyzed in terms of the "oppressed and oppressor," and that, within that rubric, Western societies, with a history of colonialism and imperialism, are uniquely sinful oppressors. It is a belief system wholly detached from historical reality.
Euorpean multiculturalism encourages minorities to define themselves by the culture of their nationality or by their religion. And because Marxism holds indigenous Western culture to be irredeemably sinful, multiculturalism requires that non-indigenous cultures be accepted non-judgmentally and, indeed, seems to hold them to be superior to indigenous culture. It deliberately balkanizes society and it is particularly insidious as regards to Islamic minorities in Europe. Yet today, it is widely being acknowledged across Europe that multiculturalism has failed utterly. So says French President Sarkozy, Britain's David Cameron, and Germany's Angela Merkel. Hopefully this rejection of multiculturalism is sufficiently timely to cure the toxin Marxian multiculturalism has released into European society.
Even as Europe moves away from socialism, Obama is trying to drive the U.S. towards the failed European economic model. Obama has set us on the road to nationalizing one sixth of our economy with Obamacare. Our government is today the majority owner of GM and Chrysler. Obama nationalized the student loan industry, ostensibly for greater efficiency. Moreover, Obama is insinuating the government deeply into our economy with a tsunami of new regulations, particularly in the areas of the environment and finance. Then there was the recent power grab to regulate the internet. Obama is ideologically committed to punishing the rich through taxes and redistributing their wealth for the 'greater good' of society. And lastly, Obama is showing a penchant for crony capitalism, picking winners and losers in the marketplace. If that is not incremental economic socialism, then nothing is.
It is not just Obama that is infected with the Marxist philosophy - it pervades the entire left wing in the U.S. The left in America today is not a monolith, but rather a mosaic of pigeon holed permanent victim groups - a toxin directly derived from Marx's oppressed / oppressor analytical framework. It is the maintenance of these 'oppressed' permanent victim groups - be they minority groups, gays, women, or public sector employees - that is the raison d'etre of the modern Democrat party. And indeed, the central financial foundation of the Democrats is taxpayer money laundered through public sector unions, the essential building block of Marx's march toward a communist utopia. This is not to say that a majority of Democrats are agitating to establish full blown socialism in America today. But it is to say that to understand our modern left and their trajectory, the first step is to read Marx. Step two is to study history in order to understand what will happen to our nation if they are allowed to pull our nation along that trajectory.
V. The War On Religion
Central to Marx's goal to entirely remake society was to drive Judaism and Christianity from society. Western culture, morality, history and societal structures are inextricably intertwined with the Judeo-Christian religions. Indeed, one could say that, at least until the Enlightenment, the history of Christianity, and to a lesser extent Judaism, were one and the same as the history of Western civilization. Thus Marx became an implacable enemy of these religions and started a war on them that the left continues to this day:
The left has waged this war against Christianity and Judaism ever since. Karl Marx, socialism's greatest philosopher, famously wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that religion is the "opium of the people" and that "[t]he abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." The British socialist party wrote in their 1911 manifesto that "it is a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion." In America, the socialist left has used activist Courts as an a means of removing all aspects of Christianity from the public square while in Britain, the Labour Party is demoting Christianity and deconstructing the Anglican Church. . . .
With the left's partial success in their war on Christianity has come an interesting phenomena - the search for something to replace Christianity among the newly secularized. It would seem that we humans are hard wired to look for what amounts to a religion to give ourselves a moral mooring and a greater purpose in life. Socialist governments recognized this. Indeed, the first socialists in France substituted government sponsored cult movements in place of the Catholic Church. In Communist countries, where raw police power was used - not wholly successfully - to crush Christianity and Judaism, socialism itself was raised to the level of a religion complete with a sainthood - the quasi-deification of communist leaders as part of a cult of personality. Catholics had the Shroud of Turin; Soviets had the mummy of Lenin.
On an individual level, the same search for a substitute is happening in the West. Many of the secular left today embrace environmentalism as a religion - and indeed, it was but a few months ago that UNEP explicitly called for the global warming movement to be pushed as a religious alternative to Christianity. Still others embrace the airy spiritualism of New Age thought.
All of this has existential ramifications for Western society. For the better part of two millennium, the Judeo-Christian ethic has provided a rock solid framework for morality at the heart of Western society - one that puts maximum value on each individual human life and one that provides moral clarity in such things as Christianity's Golden Rule and Judaism's "Great Commandment." Take that mooring away from the ancient expressions of our deity and all morality then becomes dependant on what any particular person or government defines as the greater good.
When governments and individuals can define by their whim what is moral or immoral, what is desirable and what is punishable, human life is almost inevitably devalued. Certainly Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot, between them responsible for the murder of well over a hundred million people in the 20th century, held to socialist belief systems that devalued human life and elevated in its stead political ideology. Many in the green movement argue that man is a parasite on the world and call for strictly limiting his impact using authoritarian means - including population control, forced sterilization and other such methods. . .
The bottom line is, regardless whether one believes in Judaism or Christianity, we will pay a very heavy price indeed for jettisoning them as the bedrock of Western society. Yet that is precisely what the left has sought for over two centuries, promising in their stead a secular heaven on earth. Ironically, should they fully succeed, history teaches us that their promised earthly heaven will be far more likely to resemble biblical hell.
The allure of Marx's socialist philosophy, despite its utter failure as an economic model and its evil, bloody history as a social and political model, is very much alive. People embrace its utopian ideals wholly irrepsective of historical reality. It is fair to say that, since Marx first published the Communist Manifesto, the clash between Marxist social and economic ethos on one hand and traditional Western freedoms and capitalism on the other has been a reoccurring and often predominant theme across all sectors of society and culture. And indeed, what we see happening in Wisconsin today, pitting democracy against labor unions, is simply one more event in the history of that conflict. Marx may be dead, but his ghost still very much haunts us today.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Cameron & Multiculturalism
PM David Cameron attacked multiculturalism in Britain yesterday. Here are a portion of his remarks.
I applaud his raising this issue. Whether Cameron will be able to follow through and change the hold multiculturalism has on Britain is suspect.
Multiculturalism is a direct outgrowth of marxism. Karl Marx, in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, stated that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles [between the] . . . oppressor and oppressed." And that defines the heart and the soul of the left to this day.
The left throughout Europe and America have taken the Marx paradigm and overlayed it upon society. The left divides society into "oppressed" groups by whatever sets them apart from the "oppressor" class, be it Muslims, women, blacks, gays, etc. The left treats the oppressed groups as entitled to special treatment and to freedom from judgment or criticism. Commonly, any criticism is delegitimized as a "racist" attack and the one speaking the criticism is demonized. The flip side of the left's marxist paradigm is that the "oppressor's" culture and history is demonized. This is, in a nutshell, is what actually defines "multiculturalism." It is and always was a tool to destroy traditional society, allowing it to then be rebuilt into a Marxian worker's paradise.
Britain has been on this multicultural path for decades in fits and starts, with it becoming core British policy under the Labour governments of PM Tony Blair and then PM Gordon Brown. It has, when applied to the triumphalist Islam that is pervasive in Britain's Muslim community, become a virulent toxin.
If Cameron is serious about attacking this cancer, then his task is daunting, for it has metastisized throughout British culture and is ensconced in British law. For just a few examples, see the following:
- an 80 yr old woman under attack for publishing her concerns with Islam in a Church newsetter.
- a discussion of Muslim no go areas, attacks on freedom of speech, and the degree of radicalism to be found amongst the Muslim population of Britain
- the problems of honor violence, forced marriages and female genital mutilation among the Muslim population in the UK
- a poll of 600 Muslim students attending university in Britain found that 32% of British Muslim students support killing for Islam and that 40% want to see Sharia Law imposed in Britain.
- any person or organization that takes a principled stand against the encroachment of Islam is inevitably demonized in Britain as "far right wing" and racist. Indeed, the treatment given such groups in Britain is even more vicious and pervasive than the treatment by the left of the Tea Party on this side of the pond. One such organization that figures prominently in the news reports below is the English Defense League. As to whether they are "far right wing," here is their website and below are two interviews with the head of the EDL. The EDL does not seem either racist or "far right wing" to me. They are standing up and saying, "no more." And that is driving the left crazy.
In the immediate aftermath of his speech condemning multiculturalism, Cameron was attacked by the left and by Muslims. This from the Guardian:
David Cameron was accused of playing into the hands of rightwing extremists today as he delivered a controversial speech on the failings of multiculturalism within hours of one of the biggest anti-Islam rallies ever staged in Britain.
Muslim and anti-fascist groups questioned the prime minister's judgment and sensitivity to the issues, saying he had handed a propaganda coup to the hard-right English Defence League as 3,000 of its supporters marched through Luton chanting anti-Islamic slogans. . . .
And this from the Daily Mail:
A major row over Islamic extremism erupted last night after Labour accused David Cameron of being a far-Right ‘propagandist’.
Sadiq Khan [the Labour Party's Shadow Justice Secretary] made the incendiary remark in response to an outspoken speech by the Prime Minister attacking ‘state multiculturalism’, calling for a stronger British identity and signalling a crackdown on Muslim groups. . . .
Gavin Shuker, the Labour MP for Luton South, questioned why Mr Cameron had given his speech on the same day that 1,500 EDL supporters demonstrated in the town. They were policed by 1,800 officers from 14 forces in an operation costing around £800,000.
‘On the day far-Right extremists descended on Luton, is Mr Cameron unwise to attack one form of extremism when another form is on the streets making people in Luton feel unsafe?’
The Muslim Council of Britain’s Dr Faisal Hanjra said: ‘The Muslim community is very much in the spotlight, being treated as part of the problem as opposed to part of the solution.’ . . .
The last quote, from the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), hints at the problems Britain has with its Muslm population. The MCB is Britain's branch of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, yet they are treated by many in the government and the media as spokesman for the UK's Muslim population.
At any rate, to say again, Cameron's task is daunting. Multiculturalism pervades not merely Britain's culture, but its laws. And it is augmented by permisive immigration rules. Moreover, given that multiculturalism is central to the left's power structure throughout the West, they will fight Cameron tooth and nail to preserve it in substance, if not in name. I hope Cameron succeeds, but I will be very surprised if he does.
Monday, August 16, 2010
The Dysfunctional Mindset Of Europe - & A Part Of America
French writer and philosopher Pascal Bruckner has written a fascinating essay at City Journal. His topic is the modern - and dysfunctional - European mindset. It is a mindset that sees its own historic sins as unforgivable while forgiving the sins of (almost) all others. It is a mindset that refuses to acknowledge historical realities and indulges in dangerous fantasy. To give you a snippet from his essay:
. . . There is nothing more insidious than a collective guilt passed down from generation to generation, dyeing a people with a kind of permanent stain. Contrition cannot define a political order. As there is no hereditary transmission of victim status, so there is no transmission of oppressor status. The duty of remembering implies neither the automatic purity nor the automatic corruption of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. History is not divided between sinner nations and angelic ones but between democracies, which recognize their faults, and dictatorships, which drape themselves in the robes of martyrs. We have learned over the last half-century that every state is founded on crime and coercion, including those that have recently appeared on history’s stage. But there are states capable of recognizing this and of looking barbarism in the eye, and there are others that excuse their present misdeeds by citing yesterday’s oppression.
Remember this simple fact: Europe has vanquished its most horrible monsters. Slavery was abolished, colonialism abandoned, fascism defeated, and communism brought to its knees. What other continent can claim more? In the end, the good prevailed over the abominable. Europe is the Holocaust, but it is also the destruction of Nazism; it is the Gulag, but also the fall of the Wall; imperialism, but also decolonization; slavery, but also abolition. In each case, there is a form of violence that is not only left behind but delegitimized, a twofold progress in civilization and in law. At the end of the day, freedom prevailed over oppression, which is why life is better in Europe than on many other continents and why people from the rest of the world are knocking on Europe’s door while Europe wallows in guilt.
Europe no longer believes in evil but only in misunderstandings to be resolved by discussion and dialogue. She no longer has enemies but only partners. If she is nice to extremists, she thinks, they will be nice to her, and she will be able to disarm their aggressiveness and soften them up. Europe no longer likes History, for History is a nightmare, a minefield from which she escaped at great cost, first in 1945 and then again in 1989. And since History goes on without us, and everywhere emergent nations are recovering their dignity, their power, and their aggressiveness, Europe leaves it to the Americans to be in charge, while reserving the right to criticize them violently when they go astray. It is notable that Europe is the only region in the world where military budgets go down every year; we have no armies that would be able to defend our frontiers if we were so unlucky as to be attacked; after the Haitian crisis, Brussels could not dispatch even a few thousand men to help disaster victims. We are well equipped to calibrate the size of bananas or the composition of cheeses, but not to create a military force worthy of the name. . . .
Mssr. Buckner draws numerous contrasts with America, such as, for example:
[Europe] has a history, whereas America is still making history, animated by an eschatological tension toward the future. If the latter sometimes makes major mistakes, the former makes none because it attempts nothing. For Europe, prudence no longer consists in the art, defended by the ancients, of finding one’s way within an uncertain story. We hate America because she makes a difference. We prefer Europe because she is not a threat. Our repulsion represents a kind of homage, and our sympathy a kind of contempt.
I would add two thoughts to Mssr. Bruckner's essay. One, though he never mentions the word "multiculturalism," that is precisely what he is describing. It is deeply dysfunctional philosophy that will prove suicidal to Europe if allowed to follow its logical course.
Two, Mssr. Bruckner ignores the contribution of Karl Marx's philosophy to the development of the European mindset. Marx posited that all events should be viewed through the lens of oppressor and oppressed. It is a deeply distorting philophy that is at the heart of the European mindset. I explain this in more detail when writing on virtually the same topic in the essay, "Thoughts on Britain, Colonialism and Multiculturalism." I think it an important point to make as, if this scourge is ever to be vanquished from the national psyche of Europe, then one must understand the origins of the disease.
It is also of note that the dysfunctional mindset described by Mr. Bruckner precisely describes the mindset of the left wing intelligentsia in the U.S., a point made by Victor Davis Hanson in his latest offering at PJM:
. . . This is the most tolerant society in the world, the most multiracial and richest in religious diversity — and the most critical of its exceptional tolerance and the most lax in pointing out the intolerance of the least diverse and liberal.
It is market capitalism, unfettered meritocracy, and individual initiative within a free society that create the wealth for Al Gore to live in Montecito (indeed to create a Montecito in the first place), or for Michelle to jet to Marbella, or for John Kerry to buy a $7 million yacht. We know that, but our failure to occasionally express such a truth, coupled with a constant race/class/gender critique of American society, results in an insidious demoralization among the educated and bewilderment among the half- and uneducated.
In short, the great enigma of our postmodern age is how American society grew so wealthy and free to create so many residents that became so angry at the conditions that have made them so privileged — and how so many millions abroad fled the intolerance and poverty of their home country, and yet on arrival almost magically romanticize the very conditions in the abstract that they would never live under again in the concrete.
A final thought: given what we know of collectivism now and in the past, government in places like Mexico or Syria, multiculturalism in nations as diverse as the Balkans and central Africa, and the role of religion in most locales of the Middle East, how exactly could critics of the U.S. gain the security to protest, the capital to travel, and the freedom to criticize should the system that they find so lacking erode or even disappear?
Indeed, it would seem that the paradigm of the left is to push America towards Europe in all respects, including philosophical. All of the West can be thankful that, as of yet, our left has not been wholly successful in this endeavor.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Thoughts On Britain, Colonialism & Multiculturalism
I am not long off the phone with a most amazing woman, a particularly erudite British woman who, seated in her office deep in a venerable British ivory tower, took part in a discussion with others of a more hard-left bent (which is, unfortunately, mainstream in British academia), all of whom decried Britain's colonial past. My friend, a closet conservative, kept her tongue out of a sense of self preservation. But when a Malaysian professor spoke up and said she was glad her country had been colonized, an uncomfortable silence descended.
I am always amazed by how completely the modern socialists of Britain have been able to plant the canard in the British public's mind that British colonialism is a grave and unforgivable sin - and one for which the country must atone through such things as multiculturalism and reverse discrimination. It involves a complete distortion of history and today's reality.
The truth is that British Colonialism was Britain's gift to the world. A sizable chunk, if not the majority of the most prosperous and free countries in the world today have emerged from Britain's colonial empire - the US, Canada, India (which today boasts the world's biggest democracy), Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand to name but a few. Indeed, as I pointed out in a post below, the U.S. not only adopted most of Britain's legal, governmental and bureaucratic systems, but the Bill of Rights itself is in large measure an amalgam of the rights of British Protestants at the time of our nation's founding. Our debt to Britain is deep and lasting.
In all of history, I can think of only two colonial powers that have had a major positive impact on the world. The first is Rome. As they expanded throughout Western Europe, they built up the infrastructure in each area they laid claim. They brought with them writing and a language that unlocked a rich store of knowledge. They brought advanced science, engineering and sophisticated forms of government administration. These things they left in their wake, allowing Western Europe to evolve much faster than those who did not benefit from Roman rule.
This Monty Python short from the Life of Brian that perfectly captures what it meant to be colonised by Rome.
The second colonial power to have such a major positive impact is of course Britain. The Brits, just like the Romans, brought a host of benefits to the nations they colonized, from education to the English language, from trade to capitalism, from government bureaucracy and democracy to the British legal system. What further set Britain apart from other colonial powers of the time was that Britain tended to treat her colonies as what amounts to junior trading partners. That was a major difference between Britain, Spain and France. The latter two looked upon their colonies as areas to be exploited for their riches
Compare Britain's former colonies today with those of France and Spain. The former are mostly functional, stable and economically viable states. The latter tend to be dysfunctional, corrupt and with lesser economic development.
For instance, compare the U.S. and Canada to Mexico, Argentina, or virtually any of the other South and Central American countries colonized and raped of their resources by Spain. Compare Nigeria - perhaps the most stable and prosperous of African states - with France's Chad. They are mirror opposites. Compare any of Britain's Caribbean Island colonies with France's former slave colony of Haiti, the poorest and most dysfunctional country in the Western Hemisphere.
There have been three classes of locales where British colonialism did not work to leave strong, stable countries in its wake. These classes are Islamic countries, many African countries still mired in tribalism, and in those countries that have suffered coups or dictatorships in the wake of Britain's withdrawal.
Virtually every Islamic majority country colonized at one time by Britain has failed to develop. Most today are ruled by autocracies of one form or another and are saddled with moribund economies. The reasons for that can be gleaned from the observations of Winston Churchill made during his time in the Middle East as a soldier and memorialized in his book, The River Wars:
"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries.
Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. . . .
The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899).
With the observations of Churchill in mind, compare Pakistan and neighboring India. Both were part of Britain's colonial empire and both received their independence at the same time. The people of Pakistan and India are of the same race. The only difference between them is that Pakistan is an Islamic country under the increasing influence of Wahhabism. Today, India is the world's largest democracy, it is a free capitalist nation with a booming economy. Pakistan is mired in poverty, its democracy is atrophied and its civilian elected government has only the most tenuous hold on power.
Or for that matter, compare all other Middle East countries with Israel. Israel has a vibrant democracy and economy built on the British model. All of the other many former British colonies in the Middle East, from Egypt to Jordan to Arabia and others, all have dysfunctional autocracies and weaker economies.
The second group of countries that did not benefit from British colonialism are those countries that were driven off the track by a coup or the installation of a dictator in the wake of Britain's withdrawal. Zimbabwe is one example. Uganda is another, as is Burma. Indeed, Burma exists next to Malaysia, another of Britain's colonies. Malaysia has a GDP fully 14 times that of Burma. And also close by is Singapore, one of the richest places on earth in terms of GDP. Malaysia and Singapore embraced the gifts of British colonialism. Burma was subject to a military coup by a junta that sought to impose Karl Marx's socialism.
Lastly are those former colonies in African nations where tribalism was and is stronger than nationalism. That said, Nigeria, once Britain's colony, is rapidly becoming the jewel of Africa based on the British model. It is overcoming a degree of tribalism that is amazing. Over a century ago, over 500 different languages where spoken in Nigeria. Today, English is the unofficial unifying language and Nigeria is a functioning nation state with a rapidly expanding economy.
To put all of this in perspective, the belief among Brits that British Colonialism is an unforgivable sin comes out of the socialist ethos of Karl Marx who famously wrote in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
Marx, a creature of his time and place, wrote his grand theory of history specifically as a condemnation of the colonialism, imperialism and capitalism that formed his world. But Marx's theory is a deeply distorting and simplistic one that ignores all which does not fit cleanly within its theoretical box.
Brits today who decry the colonial period are embracing their inner Marx. Britain's socialists, as Marx's theory directs, would focus on the sins of their forefathers as unforgivable while ignoring all of the reality around them. Today's British socialists suicidally think of nationalism as an evil and they would deconstruct their own nation out of guilt.
The reality is that virtually every nation on this earth has at one time or another taken control of the territory of others by force. If the Pakistanis make Brits feel guilty for colonization, lift up the knickers on Pakistan's history and you will find brutal wars of aggression against her neighbors sprinkled throughout her history. Virtually all nations and races have been colonial powers or fought brutal wars of aggression at points in their history. There are sins aplenty in every nation on earth.
And if we are going to do a comparative itemization of sins, let's begin with the Arabs and the Turks who spread Islam by the sword during the greatest imperialistic expansion in our world's history. They spent centuries laying waste to mostly Christian lands and installing Islam and Arab/Turkish rule in its stead. The Arabs made conquest of the entire Middle East, all of North Africa, Pakistan and Afghanistan, much of Spain and parts of Italy, with forays into France. The Turks did the same in Byzantium, Greece, and the Balkans, until finally beaten back at the gates of Vienna, Austria. And these colonizers never left of their own free will. Together the Arabs and the Turks are leagues beyond Britain in the breadth of their expansion and colonialism. Nor, with hindsight, can we say that their colonization was in any way benign.
But that aside, if Brits today believe colonialism is wrong, then they need not further engage in it. But that does not mean that they alone have to atone for outlandishly magnified sins of the past.
The penultimate question one must ask is whether the world would be better off today had there been no British colonialism? To anyone of intellectual honesty - and to at least one Malaysian professor teaching in Britain today - the answer to that question has to be an emphatic and absolute "No." The truth is that there is a significant portion of this world that owes their peace, prosperity and stability to the legacy of British colonialism.
The real tragedy is not that Britain was once a colonial power, but that today, Britain is so chained up in the distorting guilt of Marxian philosophy and so embracing of that philosophy's bastard child, multiculturalism, that a significant portion of Britain's populace - and in particular much of it's political and academic elite - no longer value and are willing defend their own culture and heritage. That said, if these individuals would only look about, they would see that there are a host of countries across the world who, once colonized, have adopted the many benefits Britain bequeathed them and are quite willing to defend to the death those benefits today.
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