Left and Right: Do These Words Mean Anything?

Is Ron Paul a left or right winger?

He is a Republican, so on the face of it you would say he's on the right.

But his foreign policies, particularly his pacifist stance and opposition to American military interventions, place him on the left.

Not only that. He, like other Republicans and conservatives, is a libertarian.

Let me start with a little historical digression.

The first time I came across the word "libertarian" it was in conjunction with "communist". Communist libertarians is another name for anarchists: that's how many anarchists in the 19th century were called, to distinguish them from individualist libertarians like the French Proudhon, the man who wrote "Property is theft".

This association between libertarianism and anarchism should not be surprising, since anarchy, as its Greek origin indicates (privative alpha + arkhe, power), is the absence of a state, and libertarianism is the drive towards decreasing the size and reach of the state. So anarchism is, in some way, just the extreme form of libertarianism.

And here we have a clear paradox of the left-right divide in politics: anarchism is a classical leftist movement. At the time of the First International, Karl Marx and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin famous disagreements did not focus on the goal: they both wanted the same thing, the abolition of the state. Their disagreement only concerned the means to reach that goal: Bakunin advocated the establishment of anarchism immediately after the proletarian revolution, whereas for Marx after the revolution there was to be a transitory phase, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which he (obviously wrongly) thought would eventually dissolve itself to give way to anarchism.

So, we have a political position typically associated with the right, libertarianism, which is just on the same spectrum of opinions of Marxist and anarchist aspirations.

What is ironical, of course, is also to think of classical communists wanting to abolish the state, albeit only after establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, when today leftists the world over are trying to increase the size of governments beyond any autocrat's wildest dreams.

The problem is also to do with the meaning of the terms "freedom" or "liberty" which, like "justice", can have diametrically opposed interpretations.

In the case of justice, some people believe that what is just is that everybody, irrespective of what good or bad, much or little they have done, should get identical outcomes and have as much as possible the same: they see justice as a leveller.

Others think that justice means rewarding people for what they have done good, punishing them for what they have done bad, and doing neither if people omitted to do good or bad: they see justice as a life guidance, something that guides you to make the right choices.

The latter definition, in my view, is the one that is likely to produce better results in helping people to express the best of themselves and achieve their potential, whereas applying the former interpretation of justice almost inevitably leads to complacency and even downright abuse.

As for liberty, Marx stretched its meaning beyond recognition, in a way reminiscent of the Orwellian 1984's "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is knowledge". He thought that liberty meant giving people everything they needed, he was thinking of freedom from need rather than freedom from the controlling power of others, be they the government or other citizens.

The latter is clearly the historical liberal interpretation and the most commonsensical use of the word.

It is no coincidence that the communist and even socialist distortion of the meaning of freedom has led to some of the most oppressive, repressive and liberty denying regimes the world has ever seen.

Since "libertarian" derives from "liberty", again it is no coincidence that the conflict of opinion surrounding the latter is transferred into the controversy around the former.

In conclusion, my answer to the question that forms the headline of this article is that the words "left" and "right" in politics still have a meaning, in the sense that they represent real differences in world views about humanity, society and government, albeit not as clear cut and defined as some would have it.

I don't expect to treat this issue exhaustively in an article, but it's fair to say that the demarcation lines are much more blurred than is usually thought.

In particular, what I find objectionable is some behaviour, much more often seen in people on the left, of referring to the opposite end of the spectrum, in this case "right wing" or "fascist", as an epithet to shut down debate in the absence of valid arguments.

The fact that there is a certain overlapping, historical and ideological, between right and left makes this behaviour even more irrational.

I started with Ron Paul as an example of a difficult definition, now I'll give the example of myself: on most things I would be classified as being on the right, but I am a supporter of animal rights. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.


Photo by George Kelly

Global Warming or Global Control?

Well done to Australia's new Prime-Minister-Elect, the conservative Tony Abbott.

He pledged, as his two top priorities, to stop the tide of asylum seekers to the country and to scrap the highly unpopular tax on carbon emissions. Both very admirable intentions.

Cutting CO2 does nothing for the environment but a lot for the economy: it destroys it.

The environmentalist movement is fundamentally socio-communist. It has proclaimed itself the only saviour of the earth, but the reality is that one does not need to agree with its pseudo-scientific, highly ideological theories or belong to it to care about the environment.

Being Leftist, environmentalists want to see the role of the government expand and its control over individuals and businesses snowball.

Communism is internationalist in nature - "Workers of the world unite!", Karl Marx said. The first socialist upheaval, the Russian Revolution, was supposed to spread to other countries and only reluctantly, when that became impossible, the idea of "socialism in one country" was accepted.

An old dream of communists is that of a world government. This internationalism (and transnationalism) is another of the many aspects in which Muslims and Leftists are similar - along with promising paradise on earth, being utopian and therefore authoritarian and dictatorial - , and which make them such ideal allies.

"Global warming" is the perfect pretext for global governance and control. Not coincidentally Canadian communist Maurice Strong, a great believer in world government, was behind the project of establishing the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The world government - "global problems require global solutions" - that environmentalists and people like Strong have in mind is such that in comparison the European Union pales into insignificance.

The most absurd aspect of any kind of policy designed to tackle climate change is that, even if the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory were true, which is highly doubtful, there is very little we could do to stop this alleged Armageddon.

One thing on which even the warmists agree is that anything we could do - even if we completely stopped carbon emissions, shut down our economies and returned to a primitive society - would, at most, delay the catastrophe by a few years.

In addition, since the Kyoto Protocol is not binding for countries like China and India, by far the most populous, carbon-emitting nations in the world, even that small delay would not be achieved.

That in itself is enough to show that saving the planet is not the reason and the purpose for all this gigantic tumult and scare. Frightening people is a very good way to control them, and whoever controls the energy production and consumption - by dictating what individuals and companies can and most importantly cannot do - controls the economy and therefore the world.

Obama's Top Aide: No Concrete Evidence of Assad's Responsibility for Gas Attack

A survey by The Associated Press of members of the US House of Representatives shows that, of all those declaring a position, 6 times more respondents were or were leaning towards opposing military intervention in Syria than supporting it.

This anti-war skepticism corresponds to that manifested in recent polls by the American public, even among those who believe that Assad is responsible for the chemical attack.

This allegation is far from established beyond a reasonable doubt, as has been admitted even by Obama's Chief of Staff.

The number of people killed by the sarin attack on August 21 in Syria is disputed. The US cites intelligence reports saying that over 1,400 people died, and the Anti-Assad Syrian Coalition, in Washington to lobby members of Congress to vote in favour of an American intervention in the war, claims the number is even higher.

But in fact only 502 have been confirmed dead.


http://www.chron.com/news/politics/article/US-Common-sense-test-holds-Assad-responsible-4796462.php

Going to War to Help Jihadists? Here's an Idea!

It makes me furious when I hear US Secretary of State John Kerry or other people like him say that we must not remain idle but respond to the atrocity committed by Assad in using chemical weapons against Syrians.

For many years now hundreds of thousands of Christians have been persecuted, massacred and ethnically cleansed predominantly by Muslims the world over. Every five minutes, it has been calculated, a Christian is killed just because of his faith and nothing else. This is in addition to all the other causes for which Christians as well as non-Christians are killed, like wars, civil wars and so on.

Does this not constitute an atrocity, in Kerry's, Cameron's, Obama's, Hague's, Hollande's estimeed opinion?

Judging from their actions it doesn't: they have hardly uttered a word about this crime of the greatest magnitude, let alone expressed the intention to go to war because of it.

If your predisposition to moral outrage is so selective as to become criminally discriminatory, if the expression "double standard" is as weak to describe your behaviour as that of a man jumping into a pond to help person A keep her hair dry while letting person B drown, you have lost any credibility in claiming ethics as the reason for your actions.

What, if not morality then, could be the motive of Kerry, Obama and their gang of interventionists?

You'll forgive me if I cannot find any without the consultation of a standard psychiatry text, which I don't have handy at the moment on my holiday in St Ives, Cornwall.

Unless the decisive reason against going to war on the side of Assad's opponents, the "Syrian" (20 percent, though: 80 percent are foreign jihadists going wherever non-Muslim infildels can be killed and Sharia states imposed) rebels dominated by Al-Qaeda and other terrorist elements, gives us some clue to at least Obama's desires.

The rebels have made clear their intentions of moving their jihad warfare to Europe and America when they're done with Syria. Once Syrian Christians will be dead, or have fled the country, or converted to Islam, or accepted subjugation to their Islamic masters and paid the special jizya tax imposed on non-Muslims, once all the other niceties of sharia law will be forced on Syria, the jihadists' task there will be accomplished, finished, and they'll have to find somewhere else to do their good work.

Since, thanks to our wonderful, progressive program of encouraging invasion from the Third World, celebrating diversity and welcoming Islam, many of these jihadists are European, nothing will be easier for them than coming back home and putting to use the various techniques and skills they've acquired in the Syrian war: there is nothing like hand-on experience for mastering a job to perfection.

America will be next too.

Given that Barack Hussein Obama was born and raised a Muslim and has never failed to show the strength of his ties with and admiration for his old religion, the only reason, unlikely as it might be, for the senseless act of helping Muslim terrorists in their program of Islamisation of all countries, including ours, can only be that this does not appear senseless to someone who shares the same Islamic ideals.

I'm sincerely hard-pressed to find other motivations that don't involve a study of the level and pathology of the mental faculties of the war hawks (with apologies to these magnificent birds of prey for the unflattering comparison).

Welfare Reform Is as Necessary as Immigration Reform

It is no coincidence but on the contrary highly significant that the British modern welfare state was born after the Second World War.

Having fought together against Hitler provided that sense of unity that is necessary for people to willingly financially support total strangers.

For a welfare state to succeed that sense of an entire society's belonging figuratively to the same family is a conditio sine qua non. Another necessary condition is a general sense of trust, the perception that the welfare recipients will not exploit and take advantage of the welfare donors' generosity.

Both these indispensable conditions have now been lost.

Immigration is undoubtedly a cause of this loss, but it is not the only one. The welfare state over the long decades of its existence has produced what American sociologist Charles Murray and others call the "underclass" (incidentally another sign that the US, contrary to European popular opinion, does have an extensive welfare state too).

The underclass is a new social class, it is no longer the working class. It is not characterised by its economic status so much as by its behaviour, mores and ethos.
It has a disproportionately high illegitimacy rate, school drop-out rate, unemployment rate and crime rate. It is anti-social in its outlook, attitudes, rules and codes.

In the US the underclass is disproportionately black but in Britain it is mainly formed by indigenous Britons.

This is why only solving the problem of immigration will not solve the welfare problem.

That pro-welfare consensus after World War II does not exist any more. Now the opposite consensus exists.

One of the purported reasons for the creation of the welfare state was the desire to reduce income inequality (or relative poverty), portrayed as a cause of social unrest.

I don't know if enough evidence exists that income inequality causes social unrest. As is well known, correlation is not causation.

Social instability is more likely to be caused by poverty - real, absolute poverty in relation to one's needs, not the feeling of envy generated by looking over the fence at the neighbour's garden and seeing there rare orchids not found in one's own pretty but not luxurious garden - not income inequality. Moreover, it is caused by agitprop elements who keep telling people that they are treated unfairly (a bit like the US black leaders, that author Tammy Bruce calls "merchants of misery", who have made a career out of perpetuating in blacks a never-ending sense of victimhood and desire for retribution).

At the moment, much of Western social unrest is caused by the disastrous effect of governments' overspending, mostly due to elephantine welfare states.

US Racist and Capital Crimes Have a Black Hue

There are far more blacks on Death Row in the United States than whites, and this is attributed by the usual suspects, namely the mainstream media and Lefties, to - you'll never guess - racism.

This is an exampe of the kind of pro-black, anti-white prejudice that we have to constantly endure from the self-proclaimed "progressives" (who are anything but):

Today people of color continue to be disproportionately incarcerated, policed, and sentenced to death at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts.

The much simpler, Occam-razor-obeying in its parsimony, explanation is that blacks commit disproportionately many more crimes, including capital ones.

American blacks perpetrate almost 8 times more murders per capita than whites.

These are the U.S. Department of Justice official statistics:

The demographic characteristics of homicide victims and offenders were different from the characteristics of the general population.

This means that some race, sex and age groups are disproportionately represented in murder statistics.

Based on available data from 1980 to 2008—
Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders. The victimization rate for blacks (27.8 per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000). The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).

Males represented 77% of homicide victims and nearly 90% of offenders. The victimization rate for males (11.6 per 100,000) was 3 times higher than the rate for females (3.4 per 100,000). The offending rate for males (15.1 per 100,000) was almost 9 times higher than the rate for females (1.7 per 100,000).

Approximately a third (34%) of murder victims and almost half (49%) of the offenders were under age 25. For both victims and offenders, the rate per 100,000 peaked in the 18 to 24 year-old age group at 17.1 victims per 100,000 and 29.3 offenders per 100,000.

So, basically blacks are much more likely to commit murder than whites, in the same way that men and youngsters perpetrate more homicides than women and people over 25. The difference is that, although it is well known and accepted that males and young people offend more, we don't read or hear in the mainstream media that blacks offend more, even if the public is not stupid and suspects it.

While whites are 82.9% of the American population, they only execute 45.3% of all murders. Conversely, blacks, who are just 12.6% of the population, carry out an astonishing 52.5% of all homicides.

The different rates of victimization (6 times higher for blacks) and offending (8 times higher for blacks) for murder quoted above also belie the "black-on-black" crime narrative which the media love and use to try to shelter blacks from the accusations of racism and hate crimes that would arise spontaneously by looking at the statistics. Blacks commit more attacks on whites than on other blacks. From the New Century Foundation's report The Color of Crime:

Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.

Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.

Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.

Oh, look who is racist now!

The blog of my friend, author Alexander Boot, has some more statistics:

What about interracial crimes then? There’s no shortage of those, according to the FBI study for 2007, cited in Pat Buchanan’s book Suicide of a Superpower... Blacks also perpetrated 14,000 assaults on white women – with exactly zero committed by white men on black women.

Buchanan himself adds:

If interracial crime is the ugliest manifestation of racism, what does this tell us about where racism really resides — in America?

A reference to the pamphlet Black Skin Privilege, by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, can provide us with the appropriate conclusion by means of the following considerations:

Black sin privilege has created an optical illusion in the liberal culture that white on black attack are commonplace events when in fact there are five times as many black attacks on whites as the reverse. As Horowitz and Perazzo note, in 2010, blacks committed more than 25 times the number of acts of interracial violence than whites did.

UK Muslims Back 7/7: So What's New?

This is another article transferred from my older blog which I'm closing down, still relevant today.

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A 7 August 2006 survey reveals that almost a quarter of British Muslims believe the July 7 terror attacks in London, the worst the city has ever seen in its long history, were justified because of Britain's support for the war on terror.

And nearly half of the UK Muslims questioned said that the 9/11 attacks on New York were a conspiracy between the US and Israel.

The survey found Muslims under the age of 24 were twice as likely to justify the 7/7 attacks as those aged over 45.

A third of those polled said that they would prefer to live under Sharia law in the UK rather than British law.

Now the question is: what is the news value of these results?

Only if you are a liberal, a leftie or a person brainwashed by politically correct propaganda, this may seem shocking to you.

Let’s face it: the Muslims living or trying to live in the West are extremely lucky that the Western people do not know almost anything about Islam.
Ignorance is the greatest ally of the Islamic world or, to paraphrase a famous song, Western ignorance is a Muslim’s best friend.

The majority of people of Western countries, understandably, do not want to read the Koran and do not want to know about the Muslim doctrine. Who can blame them? It’s one of the most uninteresting theories ever developed, philosophically it’s a non-entity.

Unfortunately, its importance does not derive from its non-existent intellectual worth: it stems from the terrible power it holds on people who culturally and morally belong to a different age from ours, from its political significance.

Who else in the West should know anything about Islam? The media people, like all those on the left of the political spectrum, are completely naïve in their misunderstanding of the Muslim world. They erroneously believe that everybody is the same, that all humans of all races, cultures and latitudes want the same things and share the same values, which is obvioulsy not true. So they attribute to Muslims the same desires, intentions and attitudes of mind that they have, so losing any possibility of grasping the first thing about them.

One detail particularly revealing of this huge incomprehension, a funny one too, occurred when Channel 4’s Jon Snow, during the TV broadcast yesterday of his survey of UK Muslims, talked in sheer puzzlement to the camera about a Muslim bloke who had just tried to convert him to his own religion: “He tried to convert to Islam even me!” he cried, in true disbelief, as if the young chap had attempted something amazing and not simply done what was the most natural thing to him, what the Koran demands him to do with any means.

For the Koran, the whole world must become Muslim one day.

The advertisng blurb for this recent survey was “You’d better know him better” next to the picture of a Muslim lad.

But the point is: we know who Muslims are already, or at least the Western authors, political thinkers and philosophers who have not been blinded by the current media propaganda and political orthodoxy know.

Whenever some Muslim commits an atrocity, you watch the news coverage and what do you get? TV crews interviewing Muslim leaders, “scholars” and common people about whether that is the “real Islam” or “what the Koran says” or not.

But you never see or read anything in the mainstream media that shows the other side of the coin, a different opinion.

This biased, one-sided reporting is the equivalent of a situation in which some staff of a large corporation, like a multi-national for example, committed something illegal or damaging to the public health or the environment, and the only people that journalists bothered to interview, the only ones asked to voice their opinion on the matter, were the spokespersons of the company involved itself.