Frank wrote on Jun 19^th, 2024 at 12:57pm:


Well at least you follwed up your usual frothing at the mouth with some substance.

But again, your error is easily exposed: 'political autocracy' within a consensus meritocracy, governing on behalf of the common prosperity, is not a gulag.

The publication of Solzhenitsyn’s book unveiled the horrors of the gulag to the rest of the world. However, the Soviet Union was not the only communist nation to subject its prisoners to indoctrination and forced labor. For decades, the People’s Republic of China presided over a similar, arguably more extensive system of labor and reeducation camps. These camps were built for both political and nonpolitical prisoners and were referred to by the Chinese as Laogai and Laojiao, respectively. 
https://bigthink.com/the-past/reeducation-gulag-china-zedong/

This year marks the centenary of Lenin’s death. In January 1924, the consummate communist, having blighted as many lives as he could in his two years of rule, finally shuffled off his mortal coil, aged fifty-three. “That was young,” you may say. But we reply, “Not nearly young enough.”

It is worth pausing to remember the hideous legacy of that ice-cold totalitarian. What we have in mind is not so much Lenin’s butcher’s bill as his more general modus operandi. Estimates of the number of people Lenin had tortured, maimed, and murdered vary, but are always well into the millions. But what may be just as creepy is his model of government.

We were reminded of this when, late last year, Miguel Cardona, President Biden’s secretary of education, gave a talk to explain education-department priorities. Promoting a kinder, friendlier department, he said, “I think it was President Reagan [who] said, ‘We’re from the government. We’re here to help.’”

We suppose that was intended to be reassuring. What Reagan actually said, however, as was pointed out about ten thousand times on social media, was the opposite. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

Lenin would have known exactly what Reagan meant. The difference is that Reagan’s observation was meant as a warning, an admonition about the dangers of overweening bureaucracy. Lenin, by contrast, regarded the terrifying side of unlimited government as a feature, not a bug. He liked the terror. It has always been thus with budding totalitarians. While Maximilien de Robespierre was a piker by comparison with Lenin, he nonetheless sang from the same chorus sheet, doing his best to disfigure France in the brief time allotted him. An ardent student of that supreme political narcissist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robespierre was always going on about “virtue,” though he conflated the emotion of virtue with what a Marxist might call “really existing” virtue. Above all, Robespierre knew that achieving the utopia of his dreams would not be easy or painless, which is why he spoke frankly about virtue and its “emanation,” terror.

Karl Marx made a note of that emanation, and in due course his student Lenin aced the class. As Winston Churchill noted in The World Crisis, his magnificent history of the Great War,

Lenin was to Karl Marx what Omar was to Mahomet. He translated faith into acts. He devised the practical methods by which the Marxian theories could be applied in his own time.

The cynosure of Lenin’s character, Churchill wrote, was “implacable vengeance . . . . His purpose to save the world; his method to blow it up.”

The quality of Lenin’s revenge was impersonal. Confronted with the need of killing any particular person he showed reluctance—even distress. But to blot out a million, to proscribe entire classes, to light the flames of intestine war in every land with the inevitable destruction of the well-being of whole nations—these were sublime abstractions.

The perfection of that sublimity lay partly in its arbitrariness, partly in its brutality. As Lenin observed in 1906, the dictatorship of the proletariat depended upon “authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever and based directly on force.” Thus it is, as Leszek Kołakowski noted in Main Currents of Marxism, that, for Lenin, “ ‘true’ democracy” requires the “abolition of all institutions that have hitherto been regarded as democratic.” Freedom of the press, for example, Lenin dismissed as “so-called” freedom of the press, a bourgeois deceit. Sound familiar?

Lenin said he wanted to vest power in the people. But he insisted that the people had no business in deciding what their interests actually were. (Again, students of Rousseau will hear echoes of his proto-totalitarian idea of the “general will,” which he applauded, and the tawdry particular wills of individuals, which he was always ready to subjugate.)

At the center of the totalitarian impulse is the belief that ultimately freedom belongs only to the state, that the individual should not be treated as a free actor but rather, as Lenin put it, “ ‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism.” Of course, few canny bureaucrats quote Lenin today, his association with tyranny having knocked him out of the great game of political PR.

But is he completely gone? One of the most depressing recent spectacles has been the rehabilitation of people and movements that, just a few years back, seemed safely consigned to the underworld. But watching Eloi-like college students praising Hamas, chanting genocidal formulae such as “From the river to the sea,” even excusing the incontinent maunderings of Osama bin Laden, makes us wonder whether any enormity is sufficiently grave to overcome the moral anesthesia of the entitled class.

https://newcriterion.com/article/lenin-everlasting/

Top 10 Thomas Sowell (a tinted, black man) quotes:



1) Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.  (After Orwell)

2) The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

3) What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

4) If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

5) Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.

6) People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes.

7) It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance. (After Socrates)

8) It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

9) People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

10) The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny (like Mothra, Bbwian, Smith, ducky, sad, ltyc, tgd, et al) doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.



Gems.

Socialism of itself is fine - just a fair distribution of the benefits of a civilised society - unfortunately we ALL continue to adhere to that 'African King' thing where all the revenue comes to him first and then the crumbs fall to the rest - SS-DD.... and only the Propaganda Minister calls that 'socialism'.

The problems begin when socialists come to believe they have the same Divine Right to dispense wisdom and justice and legality and so forth, and coincidentally happen to accrue the best paid spots for doing it... and then they begin to enforce that rule of the Bolsheviks among them.

Then it becomes Socio-Fascism - Stalinist style 'government' which in the exact same manner as any out of control Fascist government, imposes without let on the entirety of the people.  Big Brother has declared that men with dicks are women at whim, as an example - and the Ministry Of Gender Correctness will not be disobeyed!  Again - SS-DD.... the difference between OUR socio-fascists (and you know who they are) and Russia's is that ours are better at donning their sheep's clothing.

Look at St Albo - comes across as a milquetoast and essentially ineffectual person who bluffs his way through and holds on to mummy's skirts in the form of his feminist controllers... and yet the outcomes of his marshmallow appearing actions are dire ..... dire ... dire..... sort of the Heinrich Himmler of Australia type.... an innocuous prick who can terminate millions with the sweep of a hand while enjoying the fattest in the land daily.  His Party's policies - and those of the opposition in near-synch seeking the same result - their dominance over our society nation and culture - are destroying this nation as we sleep through it.

So you don't see the connection between The African King and the neo-con socialists doing the rounds these days?  You actually think there's a difference between the neo-cons and all of these graspers and grifters grabbing for the best spots on the deck of the Titanic?  They ALL want the best spots - not the burden of true responsibility.

You all need to come to the Grappler College of Social Investigation and research.

Socialism as a social or moral philosophy was based on the ideal of human brotherhood, which can never be implemented by institutional means. There has never been, and there will never be, an institutional means of making people brothers. Fraternity under compulsion is the most malignant idea devised in modern times; it is a perfect path to totalitarian tyranny. Socialism in this sense is tantamount to a kingdom of lies.

This is not reason, however, to scrap the idea of human fraternity. If it is not something that can be effectively achieved by means of social engineering, it is useful as a statement of goals. The socialist idea is dead as the project for an “alternative society.” But as a statement of solidarity with the underdogs and the oppressed, as a motivation to oppose Social Darwinism, as a light that keeps before our eyes something higher than competition and greed—for all of these reasons, socialism, the ideal not the system, still has its uses.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2002/10/what-is-left-of-socialism