Tag: Stalin

Stalin Wasn’t All Bad (Explain British Schoolteachers)

Stalin
AP

Stalin wasn’t all bad, you know.

Sure he was a murderous thug responsible for around 50 million deaths, while reducing the rest of the population to a state of misery, poverty, and near-permanent terror. Sure his collective farming policy turned breadbaskets into famine-starved hellholes where cannibalism was rife and his Five Year Plans destroyed what was left of the Russian economy after Lenin.

But let’s not forget the upsides: he “ended the exploitation of peasants by greedy landlords and to rid of the greedy and troublesome kulaks”‘ and he “helped peasants work together”.

This, amazingly, is what children are being taught in British schools. The quotations come from the GCP GCSE Modern World History revision guide and indicate the kind of answers kids are expected to give in their history exams when talking about Stalin’s collectivisation of farms.

Apparently, this is part of a method where they are expected to discuss the Pros and Cons of each issue.

I learned this from an article in The Daily Telegraph by James Bartholomew, the financial journalist and author, who happens to be the guest on my Delingpole podcast this week.

Like me, Bartholomew is an ardent believer in a minimal state. That is, he thinks that whenever government tries to make things better it almost invariably makes things worse – and that the state is, therefore, best cut out of the equation as often as humanly possible.

That history is teaching lunacy is a fairly typical consequence of excess government. In a free education market, where anyone could set up a school, it’s somewhat unlikely that the history curriculum would allow the promulgation of such outrageous left wing propaganda.

Stalin was loathsome – directly responsible for more deaths even than Hitler. Yet schools that – as Bartholomew notes – would never dream of asking kids to talk about the Pros of the Holocaust somehow feel it’s OK to look for some of the positives in this sadistic Communist tyrant. Why?

Partly because in Britain – as in the U.S., where Betsy DeVos has arrived as Education Secretary not a moment too soon – schools have been skewed by the values of the public sector which, like those of public sectors everywhere, are unerringly left wing.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

BBC’s Green Gestapo Punishes Presenter for WrongThink

Getty

The BBC’s Green Gestapo has struck again – this time hauling one of its best loved presenters over the coals for having given voice to incorrect truths about climate change in a BBC Radio 4 documentary.

Quentin Letts, the censured journalist, has described his experiences here. He likens it to being airbrushed out of one of Stalin’s photographs: one minute, his documentary – about the Met Office – was freely available on the web; the next it had been written out of history. (But you can still read the full transcription here)

And all because some of the people he interviewed said a few disobliging – but perfectly accurate – things about the way Britain’s state-funded meteorological organisation has been hijacked by climate change alarmists.

In his piece, Letts chooses to be mildly amused by the BBC’s high-handed response to his journalism.

Meanwhile, the BBC top brass held meetings about my allegedly scandalous programme.

Apparently we should have done more to explain the science of climate change. There was a danger that listeners were ‘misled’ by my interviews with Mr Lilley and Labour MP Graham Stringer, who argued that the Met Office were ‘excellent’ at short-term forecasts but ‘very poor’ at climate and medium-term predictions.

I was on the naughty step. That was the last I thought of the matter until last month, when I received a long document from the BBC Trust — a draft of an official inquiry into my misdeeds, complete with a conclusion that there had been a ‘serious’ breach of BBC rules on impartiality in my programme. I was given a few hours to offer any comments before the finding was likely to be made public.

The report, which must have cost thousands of pounds to prepare (rather more than was spent on our programme, I’d wager), included news that from the outset of the production process it had been agreed that we would never touch on climate change.

Er, hang on, chaps. No one ever told me that. Why on earth would independent journalists accept such a stricture? Why should climate change be given such special protection?

Read the BBC Trust’s 20-page report into the incident, however, and you begin to appreciate why it was that George Orwell modelled his Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four on the BBC. Letts’s analogies to Stalin’s Soviet Union, you realise, are only slightly overdone.

Here, for example, is the entire department responsible for Lett’s programme being ordered to attend a re-education camp:

Read the rest at Breitbart.

In Praise of George Galloway and Keith Vaz (No Really!)

Yes, the oleaginous, dubious Labour MP for Leicester East and the scruffy-bearded, hard-left, kitten-impersonating, anti-Israel apologist for Islamism will not be many readers’ first choices for “politicians with integrity I most love and respect.”

But the fact remains that this week both Vaz and Galloway played a blinder and reminded us all that, whatever their manifold faults, these men are stellar talents who you’d dearly like to have on side with you in a ruck because they fight hard, they fight dirty and they know how to win.

Keith Vaz distinguished himself as Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee into the Rotherham child rape scandal, grilling the disgraced functionaries who helped make it all possible – among them the South Yorkshire police commissioner Shaun Wright and the Rosa-Klebb-like head of Rotherham children’s services Joyce Thacker.

I noticed one or two commenters on Twitter prejudging his performance by making the somewhat racist assumption that, as an Asian, Vaz would strive to whitewash the whole affair. Which just goes to show the problem with this blanket slur cast on the broader ‘Asian’ community by the wanton use of the ‘A’ word in the context of Rotherham et al. Vaz is a Roman Catholic, of Goan heritage, not a Pakistani or Kashmiri Muslim.

He is also – as he demonstrated – a barrister of considerable style, wit and brilliance. In the course of the committee hearing, Vaz expressed his frustration that there seemed to be no way of ousting Wright or Thacker from the well-paid jobs they had done so badly. But at least he managed the next best thing: with feline sarcasm and inquisitorial ruthlessness, he gave all those of us fortunate enough to have caught these gripping proceedings on the BBC’s parliamentary live-feed the exquisite pleasure of watching some deeply unpleasant people writhing like scorpions on a pin and being exposed as palpable, unconscionable liars.

Find out the other reasons why I’m bigging up these slimeballs at Breitbart London

Related posts:

  1. Rotherham: 1400 kids groomed, drugged and raped by multiculturalism
  2. Baroness Token resigns. Cameron should have known: ‘Never buy the first pony you see.’
  3. Muslim rape gangs and the disturbing role of Britain’s leading child welfare charity
  4. Loyal American children break into spontaneous praise of the Dear Leader Barack Hussein Obama

 

Communitarianism is a freedom-hating totalitarian philosophy like any other | James Delingpole

June 27, 2011

The most unsettling aspect of modern politics is that the Enemy is no longer plain in view. We may feel in our bones that we are as oppressed, disenfranchised and generally shat upon, in our way, as those who suffered under Nazism, Marxism and fascism. But the actual evidence doesn’t seem to bear this out.

(to read more, click here)

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  2. Nazis: the gift that goes on giving
  3. Ayn Rand’s books are deliciously anti-statist, but her philosophy is borderline Nazi
  4. Freedom of speech is dead in Australia

One thought on “Communitarianism is a freedom-hating totalitarian philosophy like any other”

  1. Nige Cook says:2nd July 2011 at 5:48 pmA great goal for an objective stops people from taking any real responsibility for their actions, because they can believe that any amount of “short-term” evil (like genocide) is justified by “long term” great goal’s benefits, like extra living space and an incrementally cleaner or less crowded environment. They know they have a “noble” goal of getting rich quick or making the world a utopia, so any method they use to get it – no matter how much it costs, how inefficient the solutions are, how much faking of “evidence” and no matter how many ad hominem attacks on justified criticisms – is justified to them.

    This is why these people never back down when disproved over mere “details”. They’re precisely like Hitler, who slapped his knee and said “I have nerves of steel” in 1933 when criticised for racism by Dr Max Planck, who told Hitler that Germany would suffer from the loss of Jews from German science under Nazi laws. Hitler and Stalin were stupid top dog bureaucrats who allowed utopian visions to block the perception of fatal flaws in their plans. Planck was able to get a face to face meeting with Hitler since he was founder of the quantum theory of radiation. Hitler ignored Planck’s warning, and kicked out top Jewish physicists from German academia (who fled to America), hence losing WWII by failing to make an atomic bomb. If Hitler had listened and given up racism, they would probably have made the bomb and dominated the world. Planck’s oldest son was killed in WWI and his younger son was executed by the Gestapo for an assassination attempt against Hitler.

    Such people are just deluded by wishful thinking into believing that they are morally justified by pursuit of big utopian goals, so that they don’t need to worry about the lying and evil details. The self-excusing “impossible to falsify” big-goal bureaucracy is the real evil. Trotsky had it right in The Revolution Betrayed (1936): Stalin appointed 15% of the population as bureaucratic administrators who did what they were ordered, just like the massive “eco-goaled” public sector today. With bureaucrats in power, liberty is dead.

Climategate reminds us of the liberal-left’s visceral loathing of open debate

If the argument isn’t going your way, close it down.

This was ever the way of liberal-left. Criticize the European Socialist Superstate and you’re a “Little Englander”; object to wind farms spoiling your view and you’re a “NIMBY”; demand curbs on immigration and you’re “a racist”; desire better education for your kids and you’re “elitist”; question the current majority scientific view on AGW and you’re a “Denier” who deserves only to be scorned, vilified and preferably silenced.

We have seen plenty examples of that last kind of bullying in the Climategate scandal (Warmergate, as Mark Steyn has wittily christened it: damn! Wish I’d thought of that): scientists ganging up to shut scientists who disagree with them out of the peer-review process; scientists actually gloating over their opponents’ deaths.

There’s another particularly splendid example of this approach from the Times’s resident ex-(?)Commie and apparently fervent Warmist David Aaronovitch. Often these days, the genial Aaronovitch is pretty good at portraying himself as the voice of commonsense and sweet reasonableness. But just occasionally, the former student radical’s half-buried inner Stalin will out – and never more so than in this diatribe against Lord Lawson of Blaby’s new climate change think tank, The Global Warming Policy Foundation.

What Aaronovitch gets particularly worked up about is Lord Lawson’s suggestion that there is not a consensus on global warming:

Lord Lawson’s acceptance of the science turns out, on close scrutiny, to be considerably less than half-hearted. Thus he speaks of “the (present) majority scientific view”, hinting rather slyly at the near possibility of a future, entirely different scientific view. That is why he qualifies “the majority scientific view” with the bracketed “and it is far from a consensus”.

Aaronovitch finds this very wrong. We know he does a) because of the way he weights every sentence with a molasses-thick layer of baseball-bat-on-the-head sarcasm but also because b) he concludes that Lord Lawson is effectively just another evil mouthpiece for the great capitalist, AGW-Deniers’ conspiracy to go on driving 4 x 4s and destroy the world:

They somehow believe that the whole global warming schtick is an amazing confidence trick performed upon the peoples of the world by a group of scientists and socialists, and pursued by politicans keen to get their hands on green taxes (though for what nefarious purpose we do not know), and which has taken in almost all the governments of the world, from the US to China.

They suggest that they are open-minded, but their foundations and articles are designed to reassure the witless that their attachment to their Porsche Cayenne Turbos and their hatred of recycling are somehow acts of non-conformist courage. The Lawson argument is a masterpiece in disingenuousness. A Magic Flute of guile. A Mona Lisa of chutzpah. Don’t buy it.

Before we get too carried away, let’s remind ourselves what the Global Warming Policy Foundation says it stands for:

We are an all-party and non-party think-tank and a registered educational charity which, while open-minded on the contested science of global warming, is deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated.

Through our website www.thegwpf.org  and in other ways, we shall be subjecting both the claims of the damage that might be caused by any future warming, and the costs and consequences of alternative policies that might be put in place, to dispassionate analysis based on hard evidence and economic rigour. We are in no sense ‘anti-environmental’. There is a wide range of important environmental issues, which call for an equally wide range of policy responses. Our concern is solely with the possible effects of any future global warming and the policy responses that may evoke. But we are also aware of the curse of world poverty, and of the crucial importance of growth and economic development in the poorer countries of the world as the only serious means of alleviating it.

Doesn’t sound that nakedly evil to me. All that Lord Lawson and this new body are trying to do is sift the evidence on Climate Change and its effects in order to help inform rational decisions as to the best course of action. What possible objection could any open-minded person have to that?

Unfortunately on this issue, like so many on the liberal-left, Aaronovitch isn’t remotely open-minded at all. This thing why he speaks with such reverence of “the majority scientific view”, and with such unutterable disgust that this might be replaced by “an entirely different scientific view.”

Er, David, I know you’re generally quite a bright boy. But were you not aware that this is how science works? Science is never settled. If it were, it would never advance. So when you criticise Lord Lawson for his apparent belief that the majority scientific view may change on Climate Change, what you are in fact having a go at is science itself. (Shades of Lysenkoism, anyone? Well you’d know about that, wouldn’t you, Comrade Aaronovitch?)

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