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on united in hate - the left’s romance with tyranny and terror
In my view, this is a very important
book. Not because it is original, for any highly informed
person knows much of this stuff. Not because the book
is perfectly constructed, because it is not - it has many
peripheral errors of logic.
This book is important because it collects together so
much of the history of the mental confusion, or even derangements,
known as socialism.
United in hate does something very difficult,
it tries to penetrate the ‘mind’ of socialism.
It attempts to understand just why socialists are so irrational
and out of touch with the real world.
Now, reading minds is not a possibility for human beings.
The best you have is the confused communication from human
to human. This objective is bad enough in normal circumstances
with approximately sane people. Trying to do that with
people as confused as socialists must inevitably be
a heroic task, a task that traces back to the work of Freud
and others.
Glazov repeatedly makes the case that guilt
and inadequacy are major psychological drivers in these murderous and
suicidal death cults. In these cults, the adherents sublimate their
self-destructiveness in a cause that seeks,
not only destruction of others, but also expresses their own death wish.
In fact, I think Jamie Glazov misses a central issue
of people involved in cults such as socialism and
jihadi
islam: the desperate need to be ‘important’,
the need to be ‘taken seriously’, to belong.
One of Glasov’s main examples is Chomsky
- a typical example of a failed would-be scientist seeking
fame by any means possible because he cannot adjust to
his own ‘ordinariness’.
Here are some examples:
p. 177
“As outlined earlier, the collapse of the Soviet
Empire in 1989-91 robbed the Western Left of its central
source of hope and object of veneration. Then came 9/11.
Believers, who longed to worship a tyrannical enemy
of their native society, looked upon this appalling
catastrophe as a gift. Just as the progressives had
found new totalitarian models to worship throughout
the twentieth century, from Stalin's Russia to Mao's
China to the Sandanistas' Nicaragua, so they now discovered
a new death cult through which they could express their
destructive urges.”
—
p. 179
“This is a long tradition of the Left: progressives
have always assumed that they understand the world much
better than the people for whom the purport to speak.
In terms of the terror war, there exists an obvious
and profound racism in the believer's disposition, since
the implication is that Muslims and Arabs are not bright
enough to understand their own circumstances, and therefore
their explanations of their own actions cannot be taken
seriously.
“So while the likes of bin Laden and Moussaoui
may insist that the holy jihad is motivated by the desire
to spread sharia throughout the world, to erase individual
freedom, and to kill, convert, or subjugate infidels,
the Western leftist is constrained to rationalize that
they are saying such things only because they have been
hurt by capitalism and American imperialism....”
—
p. 180
“ ....Contrary to the believer's vision, militant
Islam finds its breeding ground in economic prosperity
and Westernisation - just as the socialist Left itself
has never drawn its strength from actual poor people,
but rather from intellectuals
and other members of the privileged class that benefits
most from capitalism and freedom...”
—
p.207
“...This is why so many leftist feminists, like Dworkin
herself, de-feminize and de-beautify themselves as
a social statement. Thus, the concept of women having
their femininity submerged and forcibly covered under
an adversarial despotic regime is utopian. By contrast,
the reality of women enjoying their own physical beauty
and feeling and being empowered by it is anathema -
at least as bad as anything the Taliban might do. Journalist
Jill Nelson personifies this mentality. Writing about
the Islamic riots that followed the Miss World pageant
in Nigeria, she commented on MSNBC's Web site: "It's
equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing
around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking
the streets shrouded in burqas in order to survive."
Hymowitz reflects on this world view: "The utopian
is less interested in freeing women to make their own
choices than in engineering and imposing her own elite
vision of a perfect society.”
The book is highly recommended and
an excellent basic source.
end note
- Calling
the Left ‘progressives’ is a misnomer, even
calling them ‘intellectuals’ is a somewhat
confused.
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United in hate
- the left’s romance with tyranny and terror
by Jamie Glazov
WND Books, 2009, hbk
ISBN-10: 1935071602
ISBN-13: 978-1935071600
$17.13
£16.06
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the web address for the article above is
http://www.abelard.org/news/review2009.php#united_in_hate_160509
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on the damaging effects on the poor of ‘welfare’ programmes 
Why welfare increases dysfunctional behaviour. This is one of the seminal books of the twentieth century. The central message is that welfare causes poverty and social disfunction.
Murray is among the most acute and well-informed of modern
sociologists. Unusually, he even writes well. This book was written over thirty
years ago and still socialist governments repeat the same errors.
“Law 1
The law of imperfect solutions
Any objective rule that defines eligibility for a social transfer program
will irrationally exclude some persons.
“Law 2
The law of unintended rewards
Any social transfer increases the net value of being in the condition that
promoted the transfer.
“Law 3
The law of net harm
The less likely it is that the unwanted behaviour will change voluntarily,
the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.”
[Quoted from pp. 211-216]
“More generally, social policy after the mid-1960s demanded an extraordinary
range of transfers from the most capable poor to the least capable, from the
most law-abiding to the least law-abiding, and from the most responsible to
the least responsible. In return, we gave little to these most deserving
persons except for easier access to welfare for themselves - the one thing
they found hardest to put to ‘good use’.”
[Quoted from p. 201]
Keep in mind that negative transfers to the deserving poor include
elements like more crime in their areas, as well as motivating those trying
to get by to give up and instead go on welfare.
“ ...they will inherently tend to have enough of an inducement to produce
bad behaviour and not enough of a solution to stimulate good behaviour; and
the more difficult the problem, the more likely it is that this relationship
will prevail.”
[Quoted from p. 218]
“...the almost complete immunity of the elite from the price they
demanded of the poor.”
[Quoted from p. 222]
[All quotes from 1984 edition.]
And still the Clown’s ‘New’ Labour doesn’t
get it, or doesn’t care.
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Losing Ground: American Social Policy
1950-1980 by Charles Murray
Basic Books, 1986
ISBN-10: 0465042325
ISBN-13: 978-0465042326
amazon.co.uk
amazon.com |
related material
In Our Hands:
A Plan to Replace the Welfare State by Charles Murray
The Bell Curve
by Charles Murray
the web address for the article above is
http://www.abelard.org/news/review2009.php#damaging_welfare_programmes_080109
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