Socialism and the EU

A very perceptive couple of quotations and a comment from demon at http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2016/03/22/poor-but-happy/ articulates something I've said before on here:

'Churchill:  The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

I also found this on a website... Bukovsky:   Socialism is the gradual and less violent form of communism, and socialism is the project of the European Union, which was born in Maastricht in 1992. The intent was to save socialism in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the predictable bankruptcy of the welfare state in the West as well.

I had never previously considered that the creation of the EU was specifically to replace the USSR (despite its similarity). But it makes perfect sense.'

The EU's future seems to be that of a bastardised marriage of socialism and Islam, are you happy? Will your children and grandchildren be?

Iain's Perfect Response To Holocaust Caller per LBC

This post might surprise some...

This LBC piece http://www.lbc.co.uk/auschwitz-survivor-i-cannot-say-i-forgive-112962 runs:

'A caller tells Iain Dale that Jews should "get over" the Holocaust - until Iain's passionate response shuts him up.

Tom in Chelsea called after Oskar Groening, known as "the book-keeper of Auschwitz", was sentenced to four years in prison for being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews.

He told Iain that Jewish people should stop going on about what happened under the Nazis in the 1940s - until the LBC presenter put him in his place. '

I'm actually partially in agreement with Tom from Chelsea. Not about Jews getting over the Holocaust, that's a vile and insensitive suggestion. But in relation to the way that the BBC and other media, as well as governments of all hues commemorate the evil of the Nazis whilst ignoring the greater numbers killed in the name of furthering communism by Stalin's Russia and Mao's China. The number of people still in the Labour Party and, presumably the BBC, who supported the Russian and Chinese communist regimes when, or soon after, they killed millions and imprisoned as many fills me with disgust. 

Until we recognise that the number of people killed by the left is something that we should take warning from, we leave ourselves open to it happening again.

Religious Freedom is important

The 2014 USCIRF Religious Freedom  report is out now and just as last year there seems to be some common threads that unite the worse offenders.

 Tier 1 CPC Countries
Designated by State Department & Recommended by USCIRF
Burma - Military government of a particularly nasty type
China - Single party Communist state
Eritrea - Single party state split 62.5% Christian, 36.5% Muslim
Iran - Islamic republic under Shariah Law
North Korea - One party authoritarian regime, based on Communism
Saudi Arabia - Islamic republic under Shariah Law
Sudan - Single party Islamic state
Uzbekistan - Former part of Communist Soviet Union




Tier 1 CPC Countries
Recommended by USCIRF
Egypt - Islamic state with Muslim Brotherhood problems
Iraq - Islamic state with troubled past and future
Nigeria - Troubled African country, approx 50% Muslim and 50% Christian with major Islamist problems
Pakistan - Islamic state
Syria - Islamic state with civil war in progress between different brands of Islamists
Tajikistan - Former part of Communist Soviet Union
Turkmenistan - Former part of Communist Soviet Union
Vietnam - Communist state

So of the 16 above countries:
Islamic - 7
Large part Islamic -2
Communist or ex Communist - 6
Military government - 1

Makes you think.

I await the BBC's reporting of this report, but as Israel are not listed I doubt that they will bother, 'mustn't spoil the narrative'...

Today is V.E. Day

Today is V.E. Day, the day we celebrate the victory of the Allied powers over Nazi Germany which ended the Second World War. The history of the end of the Second World War: the fight for Berlin, the last days in Hitler's bunker and the subsequent chaos make for interesting study but the real sentiment should be relief that the war ended and sorrow for the millions of people (Jews and others) murdered by the German National Socialist Party lead Germany and for the other civilians and armed forces that died to free Europe from Nazi tyranny.

Unfortunately the end of the Second World War did not end tyranny. Instead it ushered in a period of Communist tyrannical rule in Eastern Europe that would last until 1989, some would argue longer. It must be remembered that not only did the Russian Communist rulers kill many more civilians than Nazi Germany, but also that the Russian Communists were willing allies of Nazi Germany right up until Germany invaded Russia. National Socialism in Germany and Communism in Russia started as bedfellows and might have remained so had Hitler not made a grievous error.

Religious Freedom

The Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent advisory body created by the International Religious Freedom Act to monitor religious freedom abuses internationally, released its 2013 report, which idenitifes “governments that are the most egregious violators.”

The 15 countries are Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Vietnam, all of which severely restrict independent religious activity and harass individuals and groups for religious activity or beliefs. These nations are classified as Tier 1 “countries of particular concern” (CPCs) in the report.

Burma -  Military government of a particularly nasty type
China - Single party Communist state
Eritrea - Single party state split 62.5% Christian, 36.5% Muslim
Iran - Islamic republic under Shariah Law
North Korea - One party authoritarian regime, based on Communism (shh)
Saudi Arabia - Islamic republic under Shariah Law
Sudan - Single party Islamic state
Uzbekistan - Former part of Communist Soviet Union
Egypt - Islamic state, now under partial control of Muslim Brotherhood
Iraq - Islamic state with troubled past and future
Nigeria - Troubled African country, approx 50% Muslim and 50% Christian
Pakistan - Islamic state
Tajikistan - Former part of Communist Soviet Union
Turkmenistan - Former part of Communist Soviet Union
Vietnam - Communist state

So of the 15 above countries:
Islamic - 6
Large part Islamic -2
Communist or ex Communist - 6
Military government - 1

Makes you think...

Ed Miliband's biggest donor and his Communist Party plea - The Commentator

A fascinating article but not one that tells me anything surprising, the British Labour party has long contained Communist sympathisers. Many socialists are just light Communists. http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3285/ed_miliband_s_biggest_donor_and_his_communist_party_plea

The hypocrisy is the key:
' But what would the media's response be if David Cameron's biggest financial backer propped up, and was on the management board of a major Fascist outlet, or some other antiquainted ideology that slaughtered millions? Yes, it'd be front page news.

But Red Ed can carry on flying the red flag with his union fellows. The pro-EU, authoritarian, protectionist nationalisers.'

Many on the left still wear their Che Guevara t-shirts, put up posters of Mao and even look back fondly on the Russian communist experiment. They admire the murderers that killed many millions of people. But if you say you supported Lady Thatcher, they call you a Nazi...

Odd the heroes some people have

I challenged Richard Burden...

I was not deemed worthy of a reply but then I have been challenging Richard Burden about his 'pro-Palestinian' views. He hasn't replied to this either.

It is interesting that Richard Burden thinks that Eric Hobsbawm is worthy of praise, this being a man who:
' .. in 1994, in an interview with Canadian author and politician Michael Ignatieff on British television, Hobsbawm responded in the affirmative to the question of whether 20 million deaths may have been justified had the proposed communist utopia been created. The following year, when asked the same question on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, that is if "the sacrifice of millions of lives" would have been worth a communist utopia, he replied: "That's what we felt when we fought the Second World War". Hobsbawm has similarly argued that, "In a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing".

I have mused before about the weird double-standards of the left who use 'Nazi' as a term of abuse to close down debate and would never allow any praise of any aspect of Adolph Hitler, yet will defend aspects of Soviet Russia or Mao's China.

The useful idiots of the past and who are the useful idiots of today; Tony Benn?

A few weeks ago I heard a very interesting radio programme on BBC Radio 4 about the useful idiots who propagandised on behalf of Communist Russia in order to protect the name of Communism:

'refers to Western journalists, travellers and intellectuals who gave their blessing – often with evangelistic fervour – to tyrannies and tyrants, thereby convincing politicians and public that utopias rather than Belsens thrived.'

It is a story that I know well but one that does deserve repetition because I don't think that many people do know  how so many on the left of western politics covered up the evil of communist Russia, and indeed China as well.

What struck me when listening to the programme was how those who criticised Russia were the ones that were disbelieved and whose careers suffered at the time whilst those that supported the evil regimes were rewarded:

'In 1952 Doris Lessing, a British writer who has since won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was part of a delegation visiting the Soviet Union.
Her memories of the trip are clear and unforgiving:
“I was taken around and shown things as a ‘useful idiot’... that’s what my role was. I can’t understand why I was so gullible.”
She was not the only one. The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and American journalist Walter Duranty were some of those people who also visited the Soviet Union.
They mingled with political leaders, were escorted into the countryside by Joseph Stalin’s secret police, and returned home to speak and write of ‘a land of hope’ with ‘evils retreating before the spread of communism’.
However as stories mounted of mass murder and starvation in parts of Russia and the Ukraine, reporters such as Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge investigated and reported on ‘the creation of one enormous Belsen’.
Duranty responded with an article in the New York Times headed ‘Story of the famine is bunk’, and got an exclusive interview with Stalin.
Soon after, Jones died and Muggeridge’s career nose-dived. Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer.'

I didn't hear the second part but was struck by the BBC's own summary:

'The journalist and historian Jonathan Mirsky, who has written extensively on China, describes former leader Chairman Mao as:
“He had an enormous impact on China – but he was a monster… and…responsible for the deaths of 40 million people.”
But the veteran British politician Tony Benn argues that Mao played a significant role in building China's global importance and economic power - and that his actions - both good and bad - must be seen in historical context.
From Mao’s China, General Pinochet’s Chile, Apartheid-controlled South Africa, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to President Ahmadinejad’s Iran, why – and how – have so many supposedly intelligent people been manipulated by dictators into saying good things about bad regimes?'

'Historical context'? 'HISTORICAL CONTEXT'! Mao's regime killed around 50 million people but the BBC's hero Tony Benn thinks Mao's actions must be seen in 'historical context'. Maybe someone could ask Tony Benn what 'historical  context' justified the killing of 50 million people in communist China? Does Tony Benn also think that the millions of deaths ordered by Lenin and Stalin and the suffering in the gulags has to be seen in 'historical context'? What about the seven million Jews killed by Hitler's Nazis in Germany; do they have to be seen in historical context'? At this point Tony Benn would no doubt lean back and suck on a metaphorical pipe and tell you that he fought against Nazism during the second world war. Indeed you did Mr Benn, indeed you did but you still say that the deaths of millions more people needs to be seen in 'historical context'!

I wonder who the useful idiots of today are? Those who believed that the 'Arab Spring' would end other than with Islamist regimes perhaps.

On the 4th July

As the United States of America celebrates Independence Day and a statue of Ronald Reagan is unveiled in Grosvenor Square I thought some Ronald Reagan quotations would be in order, do read them and think about what they say:

"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem."

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

"Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other."

"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so."

"Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this [surrender], but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face — that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand — the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he would rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin — just in the face of this enemy?"

"The size of the Federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern."

"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

"How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."

"I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts."


And finally a quotation that is often attributed to Ronald Regan but is actually one of Gerald Ford's:
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."

Quote of the day

How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin. - Ronald Reagan

Thanks to Prodicus for that quotation spot.

Why is the media so left wing?

Standpoint Magazine have a great piece written by Nick Cohen that explains why ex members of the Revolutionary Communist Party are so prevalent on our airwaves...

Trouble in North Korea

Mick Hartley reports of North Korea that "The Current Situation is Unspeakably Terrible".

"As predicted by experts on North Korea’s economy, since the authorities have yet to officially release state prices, the North Korean people are now surviving by bartering.

A defector, who spoke with his family in North Hamkyung Province on Tuesday, reported the news to the Daily NK, “I called my family to send some money to them as I had heard they were in trouble, and they told me that the current situation is unspeakably terrible. They live only by bartering with others.”"

Meanwhile the Korean Central News Agency report that:

"A fierce struggle should be waged against the class enemies within the socialist society.

All those who try to destabilize the socialist society are the enemies of socialism. They include remnants of the exploiting classes who harbor antipathy towards the socialist system, those who work hard overtly and covertly to bring down the socialist system after being greased by imperialists, those who have degenerated ideologically and morally, taken in by the imperialists' ideological and cultural poisoning and those who are introducing corrupt bourgeois way of life into society. Only when a fierce struggle is waged against them is it possible to protect and reinforce the position of socialism."

Chilling for anyone who remembers what happened in Russia in the war against the kulaks, when millions perished in the famines and the gulag, in Mao's Cultural Revolution and of course in Pol Pot's Year Zero.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in context

Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the major steps in the fall of the Communist tyrannies of Easter Europe. You can read all you want about the events of 1989 in the papers and no doubt see many histories on the TV as well, however I want to tell you one story.

It's a story that touched me and was told to me by a woman whose parents and her escaped from East Germany to West Germany in 1955. Her parents packed what possessions they could into their car, much of it hidden inside the bodywork and upholstery, and travelled on a visa to attend a family wedding. The tale of the hour long search at the border post and the suspicion of the guards and the relief at being eventually let through really hit home. So did her tales of life in West Germany as a outsider and how parents struggled to make a new life in the west away from their friends and family in the east.

So when you read about the fall of the Berlin Wall remember that it affected real people and that many who escaped over the preceding 30 odd years also have tales to tell.

Also do remember those who were murdered by East German border guards as they tried to escape to freedom in the west. Thanks to Donal Blaney we have a list:

"1961
Siekmann, Ida
Litfin, Günter
Hoff, Roland
Urban, Rudolf
Segler, Olga
Lünser, Bernd
Düllick, Udo
Probst, Werner
Lehmann, Lothar
Wohlfahrt, Dieter
Krüger, Ingo
Feldhahn, Georg

1962
Schmiel, Dorit
Jercha, Heinz
Held, Philipp
Schmidtchen, Jörgen (Border Guard)
Böhme, Peter
Brueske, Klaus
Frank, Horst
Göring, Peter (Border Guard)
Haberlandt, Lutz
Hannemann, Axel
Glöde, Wolfgang
Kelm, Erna
Huhn, Reinhold (Border Guard)
Noffke, Siegfried
Fechter, Peter
Wesa, Hans-Dieter
Mundt, Ernst
Seling, Günter (Border Guard)
Walzer, Anton
Plischke, Horst
Reck, Ottfried
Wiedenhöft, Günter

1963
Räwel, Hans
Kutscher, Horst
Kreitlow, Peter
Muszynski, Wolf-Olaf
Mädler, Peter
Widera, Siegfried (Border Guard)
Schröter, Klaus
Schulz, Dietmar
Berger, Dieter
Schultz, Paul

1964
Hayn, Walter
Philipp, Adolf
Heike, Walter
Gneiser, Rainer
Wolscht, Norbert
Trabant, Hildegard
Mispelhorn, Wernhard
Schultz, Egon (Border Guard)
Wolf, Hans-Joachim
Mehr, Joachim

1965
Unknown (N.N.)
Buttkus, Christian
Krzemien, Ulrich
Hauptmann, Hans-Peter
Döbler, Hermann
Kratzel, Klaus
Garten, Klaus
Kittel, Walter
Cyrius, Heinz
Sokolowski, Heinz
Kühn, Erich
Schöneberger, Heinz

1966
Brandes, Dieter
Block, Willi
Schleusener, Lothar
Hartmann, Jörg
Marzahn, Willi
Schulze, Eberhard
Kollender, Michael
Stretz, Paul
Wroblewski, Eduard
Schmidt, Heinz
Senk, Andreas
Kube, Karl-Heinz

1967
Sahmland, Max Willi
Piesik, Franciszek

1968
Weckeiser, Elke
Weckeiser, Dieter
Mende, Herbert
Lehmann, Bernd
Krug, Siegfried
Körner, Horst
Henninger, Rolf (Border Guard)

1969
Lange, Johannes
Kluge, Klaus-Jürgen
Lis, Leo

1970
Wehhage, Eckhardt
Wehhage, Christel
Müller, Heinz
Born, Willi
Ehrlich, Friedhelm
Thiem, Gerald
Kliem, Helmut
Friese, Christian-Peter

1971
Kabelitz, Rolf-Dieter
Hoffmann, Wolfgang
Kühl, Werner
Beilig, Dieter

1972
Kullack, Horst
Weylandt, Manfred
Schulze, Klaus
Katranci, Cengaver

1973
H., Holger
Frommann, Volker
Einsiedel, Horst
Gertzki, Manfred
Krobot, Siegfried

1974
Niering, Burkhard
Sprenger, Johannes
Savoca, Guiseppe

1975
Halli, Herbert
Mert, Cetin
Kiebler, Herbert
Hennig, Lothar

1976
n/a

1977
Schwietzer, Dietmar
Weise, Henri

1978 and 1979
n/a

1980
Steinhauer, Ulrich (Border Guard)
Jirkowski, Marinetta

1981
Muschol, Dr. Johannes
Starrost, Hans-Jürgen
Taubmann, Thomas

1982
Freie, Lothar Fritz

1983
Proksch, Silvio

1984
Schmidt, Michael-Horst

1985
n/a

1986
Liebeke, Rainer
Groß, René
Mäder, Manfred
Bittner, Michael

1987
Schmidt, Lutz

1988
n/a

1989
Diederichs, Ingolf
Freudenberg, Winfried
Gueffroy, Chris"

Quote of the day

"There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide."

Ayn Rand in 1962

Peter Hitchens on Peter Mandelson's Young Communist League past

Peter Hitchens expands on a point I have made previously about the communist backgrounds of so many leading Labour figures.

As I have said before, another angle to this is that if a politician or opinion former is discovered to have been a supporter of a "far right" party during their youth then they are forever tarred with the brush of "racist" or "fascist" and yet those who dallied with the equally vile politics of the extreme left during their formative years are allowed to pretend this dalliance is of no concern. Either mistakes made in one's youth are unforgivable or they are not, but let us at least be consistent. In my mind allying ones self with racists and fascists is wrong, but no worse than allying oneself with the murderous creed that killed more people than fascism, kept on killing them after the Second World War and enslaved & killed many millions after the war had ended. The Marxist creed was responsible for around 20 million deaths in Stalin's Russia, 40 million in Mao's China, and millions more in Cambodia and elsewhere that Marxists decided they could improve their countries by imposing the will of the collective good.

I wonder if the latitude given by the BBC to the "ex"-Communists of the Labour party has any connection with the number of people of a similar background within the BBC; now that would be interesting to find out.

Not all men are equal

I note that Den Xiaoping's third wife, Zhuo Lin, died this week. They had five children together, somewhat more than the usual state allowance of one child per family. You see in a communist dictatorship the rules that apply to the people do not apply to the Party leaders.

Here comes communism?

"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism."

Karl Marx, Das Kapital, his doctrine of the theory of surplus value


UPDATE:
It appears that I have been spoofed, this is not a Karl Marx quotation; oops.




Thanks(?) to Theo Spark for the spot.