Michael Gove, the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath, has written an interesting and very ‘bloggy’ article in The Times with a subsection that was right on the money called Left-wing cant and the indefensible:
There’s a special sort of piece that appears only in The Guardian (or The New York Times) that deserves to be recognised as a journalistic genre in its own right. They masquerade as balanced and judicious profiles of individuals. But in fact they are vigorous defences, or at least pleas in mitigation, for people who cannot be allowed to be seen as guilty of any great sin because they’re On The Left.
We had two this weekend. We discovered last week that the playwright Arthur Miller, who abandoned his disabled son after the child was born because he was, in Miller’s words, “a mongoloid”, avoided all contact with the child until they met, to the playwright’s surprise, at a meeting where Miller was championing a better deal for disabled people. This sort of behaviour is beyond satire. To seek applause for your stance on behalf of suffering in general, while being so indifferent to the fate of individual suffering, is the quintessence of canting left-wingery. But for The Guardian Miller was as much the victim as anyone.
But their treatment of Miller was positively caustic besides their lionising of one of Britain’s most shameless intellectual apologists for evil. A fawning tribute to the Eric Hobsbawm, 90, made light of his championing of Soviet communism and his support for Stalin, the gulag and totalitarian tyranny. I’m happy to leave the old devil in peace to enjoy his dotage. But can we at least be spared any more laying of garlands at the feet of this man who supported mass murder?
Quite, although I am not so forgiving as the Honourable Member for Surrey Heath. It is intolerable that the Guardianistas get a free ride on these sort of issues. Now if only the leader of Gove’s hilariously misnamed party would call a spade a spade like that.
The essence of the left is that they only care about the abstraction of “groups” and never about individuals.
It is ironic that they spend so much time deriding others for judging people on sex, race, disability… whatever! Yet…
It is the left that talks so patronizingly about the “Black Community” or the “Gay Community” as though all these people had the same aspirations, the same needs and desires as everyone else in the same “community”.
How easy life must be if you can parcel the population up so neatly. How easy and how pathetic.
I’m both glad and sorry about the state of Conservatism;glad that you reported the article, and sad at what I saw on TV; Cameron.
He just makes my skin crawl.
Yes… That’s right… This is an exclusive fault of ‘The Left’… Because all that was heard on this site after the death of General Pinochet were rousing denunciations of a man whose regime murdered 2,279 of its own citizens, and tortured 30,000 more.
Those hypocritical Lefties, eh? Tchah!
I’m sure someone will be along to put you straight in a moment, Nathaniel. I cant be arsed just now.
Congrats on the happy event though.
Marx is an outstanding example of sheer bloody leftist hypocracy. Sponged of Engels and treated his family appallingly .
Yeah but RAB, he was doing it for The Greater Good.
Nathaniel, I remember exactly what happened on this blog on Pinochet’s demise. There was a lot of reasoned (and generally informed) debate basically along the lines of, “he was a swine, but Allende was worse”. Nobody said he was a top fella.
And, yes, it is a general fault of the left to group people artificially. I just reckon leftists either are amoral (they see the opportunity for themselves) or dim (they’re Lenin’s “useful idiots) to say otherwise.
Otherwise, how else do you organize a fair society? I mean it’s all about getting the stats to balance between whatever groups the Politburo divvy us all up into isn’t it?
But in fact they are vigorous defences, or at least pleas in mitigation, for people who cannot be allowed to be seen as guilty of any great sin because they’re On The Left.
Duh. Well of course people on the political left go easier on people they see as being like themselves — because everyone does. I’m sure that if Michael Gove was writing about the failings of a fellow Tory MP, he’d be less severe than if he was writing about one of his political opponents.
Nick M: The essence of the left is that they only care about the abstraction of “groups” and never about individuals. It is ironic that they spend so much time deriding others for judging people on sex, race, disability […] How easy life must be if you can parcel the population up so neatly. How easy and how pathetic.
And of course, when Nick M denounces the Left, he refers to specific individuals and doesn’t just talk about the abstraction of “groups”. Nick most certainly doesn’t neatly parcel up the population like that, because that would be easy and pathetic.
And we all know Nick is not easy or pathetic. Nor is he a hypocrite, or too stupid to realise he’s committing the same sin he accuses others of. Of course not.
You’re absolutely right, Nick; see Samizdata’s obituary post, and the leftist shibboleth in the comments that Pinochet is the archetype of the evil dictator.
So Arthur Miller was a true Marxist.
Hah, seems to me that many people of any political (or artistic, or whatever) disposition seem inclined to forgive terrible sins on the part of those they happen to admire or agree with. Samizdata posters & commenters are by no means free of such hypocrisy.
Many on both the Right & Left love nothing better than setting up some kind of demon “leftist”, “rightist”, “free marketeer”, “collectivist” or whatever, whose ultimate purpose is to define what they are not. Personally, I don’t think human decency is particularly monopolised by either left or right; the people on both sides just disagree about what the best way to run the world is, & this doesn’t usually seem to affect the way they run their personal lives & how charitable & generous (or stingy & selfish) they are.
How about dubbing such articles a “stream of false consciousness”?
the people on both sides just disagree about what the best way to run the world is
Au contraire, mon ami. As I understand it the Libertarian metacontext denies that there should be a “way to run the world” at all.
Asking a Libertarian how the world should be run is like asking an atheist what sort of God they believe in.
Mr Miller made his name denoucing “witch hunts” – i.e. comparing “outing” Reds to killing people for witchcraft.
There were several problems with Arthur Miller’s line:
Firstly no one was executed for being a communist (although a couple were executed for treason, handing over atomic bomb secrets, – the left tried to pretend that they were innocent for several decades, but have finally given up). Indeed even that old heavy drinker from Wisconsin only shouted at Reds when they provoked him first (the bits the television shows and Hollywood films do not show).
Also the “witches” were not witches – but the Reds were Reds. The “innocent people” who Mr Miller defended were not innocent at all – they were enemies of the United States who wished to take the means of “production, distribution and exchange” under “public” (i.e. government) control – thus destroying all liberty and meaning that tens of millions of Americans would have starved to death.
Also they supported the Soviet Union – a regime that under “Lenin” and “Stalin” (false, criminal cover, names) had already murdered tens of millions of people and was seeking to spread the power of evil (not too strong language) all over the world – including the United States. Control of such things as the “education system” (schools and colleges) and the entertainment industry was (and is) a basic objective of the Communists (although they call themselves by different names these days), in order to undermine American will to resist. Which is why such things as the Screen Actors Guild and the Screen Writers Guild were such important targets.
People who complain about the fireing of communist actors and writers in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s never complain about the hidden blacklist that operated against ANTICOMMUNISTS in the 1930’s.
Of course (as pointed out above) Mr Miller had a personal reason for trying to whitewash the Reds – his own position.
I do not know whether Mr Miller would have described himself as a Marxist, but he was a fellow traveller who supported the enemies of the United States at home and abroad. Indeed he gave them “aid and comfort” as the saying goes.
Some socialists did not (Sydney Hook springs to mind) – but he did.
His last line of defence was to pretend that opposing Reds was a matter of Jew hating (he plays this game in several short stories).
Of course this was a useful cover for Mr Miller (as he was of Jewish origin).
However, many anticommunists are also of Jewish or part Jewish origin. And, no Mr Miller (whatever part of Hell you are in presently), we are not like Jews who served as camp police for the National Socialists.
What Nick M said.
“the people on both sides just disagree about what the best way to run the world is, & this doesn’t usually seem to affect the way they run their personal lives & how charitable & generous (or stingy & selfish) they are.”
Ah. Right. That’s the point. Rightists in general and Libertarians in particular are very particularly NOT trying to tell everyone how to run their personal lives. Leftists generally are. That’s the whole sodding point.
In the 1930’s ?
Try do get TODAY a job in Main Stream Media, or Hollywood, or even a science institution if your opinions (openly expressed) are not PC.
For example – a mathematician who analyzed calculations at climateaudit
did it anonymously, as he was afraid he would not be able to get work if it was known he was a “denier”.
Oh, and I forgot the universities. Some lecturers and researchers who seek tenure keep their private opinions to themselves.
Arthur Miller was the archetypal leftist intellectual – always denouncing the US based on his ideology, without seeing or percieving or making contact with the actual reality he lived in. Same as Marx. They lived in their own world of phantasy.
Good article about Miller: Death of a phony
to sum up…
“I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand !”
Thanks, RAB. I’m taking advantage of her few sleeping moments…
so we are agreed, we don’t like left-wing cants.
Heh, ok, perhaps my phrasing wasn’t quite accurate there, “the best way the world should operate” might have been better. I’m fully aware of (& largely sympathetic to) the minimal-govt. preferences of most people who hang out here.
Cleanthes,
I’d agree with you on the Libertarian front.
As for the rest of the Right, I’m wholly unconvinced. I’d say that the mainstream right tends to be economically liberal but socially authoritarian (keen on telling you who you can have sex with, what you can watch, what you can ingest etc.), whereas the mainstream left tends to be on the whole more socially liberal but economically authoritarian. This is of course assuming you can neatly separate the social & the economic, which I’m not convinced you can. But anyway, given their past record, I am in no way convinced that the British Tory party say is “not trying to tell everyone how to run their personal lives”.
(also I’d argue that the “liberal” policies of both sides aren’t really very liberal, and both sides are pretty repressive on both fronts really)
Actually the British Conservative party is likely to mess people about in a “liberal” direction.
For example, if supports the various “antidiscrimination” laws that force (by the threat of violence) people to trade with or employ people they do not wish to trade with or employ.
It is much the same in the United States.
For example, the “Americans with Disabilities Act” was brought in by President George Herbert Walker Bush.
Contrary to leftist mythology there are not many people about who favour using the state to enforce conservative (as opposed to P.C.) morality (with the big exception of abortion in the United States).
Even Bill O’Reilly (the arch demon according to American leftists who they misquote and quote out of context more than any other person) does not do so.
For example.
He is not in favour of laws against homosexual acts – or anything like this.
I can not think of many (any?) Republican Senators or Congressmen who are.
As for the British Conservative party – homosexual acts are likely to get one promoted.
What a “conservative” (at least in the United States) may object to is someone (for example) being forced to take part in a “Gay Pride” parade.
As fireman (in both Britain and the United States) have been.
“Anything so long as it does not fighten the horses” was the old Tory attitude.
In short – do what you like in private (just do not display it).
It was no accident that the old “Personal Rights Association” in the 19th century was mostly Tory.
Philip, I once tested a debate by questioning certain ‘characteristic’ traits of ‘the left’.
All the other people on the list were leftists.
They began their responses with ‘we’.
Which is something of an admission, isn’t it, Philip.
Paul: can you please reference the hidden blacklist that operated against ANTICOMMUNISTS in the 1930’s? I never heard about it.
It wasn’t long before someone popped up to imply that the left’s moral depravity is OK really because someone else supported someone else (in this case, Pinochet) with the equally obnoxious label, right. Thats alright then. Keep the slaughter going.
I wonder how many of the posters agree with me that Arthur Miller’s plays are all yawn-making sophomoric stodge.
Alisa.
Sources and my old brain.
In journalism the book is (I think) called “The Spike” – how stories that do not suit the left do not get printed or broadcast.
In the publishing trade there is (for example) an old article “The Sainted Book Burners” by W.T. Crouch (in The Freeman) about how when he worked for the University of Chicago Press he was approached by a man (a Mr Miller – no relation to A. Miller) from a powerful New York publishing Houses and informed that respectable Houses had agreed not to publish the “Road to Serfdom” even though it would “sell very well” (the educated man accepted there were still a lot of evil reactionaries left in the United States in the 1940’s).
But on Hollywood – ouch, the title and author are gone from what is left of my brain.
However, it was unusually easy to spot.
Unlike now the Reds of the 1930’s were actually members of the Communist party and they put each other (and those who would go alone with them without being formal party members, but who belonged to various “progressive” front organizations and thus were also easy to spot) into positions where they could kill at birth scripts or projects they did not favour – on political grounds.
As Jacob and others would point out – they still do that. But these days they do not belong to a “Communist party” so it is much harder to expose them.
Of course as far as 99 out of 100 people are concerned the people shouted at in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s were innocent – “honourable” people, not traitors at all.
This is the true measure of enemy power – both in the “edcuation system” and in the media and entertainment industry.
Unionization and government funding (and government licenses) are only part of the story – the left WORK HARDER than we do.
Take the example of wikipedia.
We have just as much chance of editing that as they do.
But we either log on, look someone or something up and say “that is a tissue of lies” and leave in disgust.
Or we change it ONCE – then when go back and find the left have changed it back, we leave in disgust.
The idea of slogging day in, day out is beyond us (well – let me be honest here “beyond me”).
The trench warfare of ideas – the committees and back room deals. We are never going win that (it is not in our natures to do so).
As old W.H. Hutt said in reply to the question about the followers of Lord Keynes “won the debate” in economics.
“There was no debate – they gained control of examinations and appointments and that was it”.
pietr: Philip, I once tested a debate by questioning certain ‘characteristic’ traits of ‘the left’. All the other people on the list were leftists. They began their responses with ‘we’. Which is something of an admission, isn’t it, Philip.
I’m not sure I’d use the word “admission”; perhaps “unconscious revelation” might be better. But yes, you’re right, the people who replied were revealing something about themselves.
BTW do you have a URL for this conversation?
Thank you, Paul. Mind you, it’s not that I find it implausible, it just would be useful to have a reference. I looked up “The Spike” – this does not seem to be it. BTW, I know what you mean about that old brain – mine got really old when I turned 40. Yours is still in much better shape, believe me:-)
Without wishing to seem a total pedant, as Mr Gove is not (yet) a Privy Councillor, he is merely the Honourable, not the Right Honourable, Member.
Cheers
Philip, it was on ‘Crooked Timber’ on a debate about Gold.
Unfortunately it seems to have vanished a couple of months ago.
I suppose they archive?
There is an element of truth and an element of falsehood in this, as it pertains to me. If you asked me how the world should be “run”, I would answer “in a decentralized manner”.
I know that Libertarians, despite and perhaps because of the moral and intellectual superiority of our positions (ok, that was just for grins), will never convince all people that Libertarianism is the best way to live. The best I can hope for is a world in which there are many independent nations, each of which pursues it’s own ends by it’s own means, and none of which forcibly interferes in the internal activities of the other, regardless of how sick and wrong those activities may be.
If a nation wants to spread it’s ideals around the world, the only way it can do so is to practice those principals in it’s own affairs, and hope that people in other nations recognize the results thereof, and demand reforms.
The problem is that a Libertarian nation, even if it were to try to “spread liberty” to the rest of the world, would be reducing it’s own liberty to do so. It would not be spreading liberty, but redistributing it, from the people who earned it (it’s own citizens) to those who had not earned it (the citizens of other nations).
Since a Libertarian nation would naturally have an ongoing shortage of unskilled labor, there would, I expect, always be room to allow (legal) immigration into a Libertarian nation, though I believe (this is not strictly Libertarians) that such immigration should be limited to the point at which performing unskilled labor provides a reasonable standard of living. It could be that the unskilled labor supply was so limited that open immigration would be permissible, and if that were the case, I’m all for it.
The most difficult thing, to my way of thinking, is defining the role of the military in a Libertarian society. I would argue that the military should NOT be used to protect a societies business interests abroad. That is, the authority of the military would stop at the borders. Businesses which wished to do business in other nations should be free to do so, but not to be subsidized in the form of governmental protection of their interests abroad. The government of a Libertarian society should, therefore, be geographically limited in scope, with a responsibility to protect (or remove) all of those individuals within it’s territory, but not to protect it’s citizens if they leave the area of it’s protection.
This would require that the Libertarian society not station military personnel abroad, except during times of actual military conflict, since this would create opportunities for enemies to force a conflict very cheaply. If a country wants to start a war with a Libertarian society, they should be required to come to us to start it. We should not lead with our chins, putting our people in Cuban harbors or the Gulf of Tonken(sp?) to be attacked.
Countries should never be attacked, I believe, because they choose not to trade with the Libertarian society. If they did not want to trade with us, we should be able to do just fine, although there might be temporary dislocations (e.g. the internal price of oil might rise so high that it made sense to import ethanol or cane sugar instead, or to make ethanol from sugar beets.).
My suspicion is that, although if it were large (it need not be), and rich (I think it would be eventually and inevitably), it might generate some hostility in the outside world, that there would be very little reason to attack a Libertarian nation which minded it’s own business and didn’t mind the business of other nations. If I am wrong about that, the Libertarian nation should strike without mercy or moderation anyone who chose to attack it, but should never occupy or rebuild such nations afterwards.
As for terrorism, by non-state actors, it should be handled by non-state actors. A Libertarian nation could respond to such an attack by placing a reward, dead or alive, on the heads of such people. In the case of terrorists, it would be the individuals, not the countries in which they lived, which should be destroyed.
That is it in a nutshell, from my point of view. Note that I did not spend any time discussing what the neighbors of my hypothetical Libertarian nation should or should not do, since I don’t care. It is not that I am anti-Freetopia, it’s just that I don’t concern myself with anybody else, unless they are at war with us.
Rich Paul
Many governments (not all of them Muslim) support terrorism against the West in general and the United States in particular.
So killing off a few individuals will not stop it (although you did NOT say it would). Although I still support your bounty policy – not because I think that killing O.B.L. or his deputy (or Mullah Omar or whoever) will end attacks (such attacks have been going on against the West, on and off, for more than a THOUSAND YEARS after all), but because I would like to see these people killed for what they have done – period.
I am not interested in the consequences (good, bad, or indifferent) I just want them dead. And private people should be allowed to have a go (if they are not presently).
Alisa.
It is the periods when I can not make the connections, that really bother me – when the name I am looking for is gone, or some other such thing. And the periods of confusion are just going to get longer and worse (as well as general performance, even in the “good times”, going down the tube).
I believe Americans call such things “senior moments” (from “senior citizen”).
Still, looking back over the last few decades, I should be dead. So ageing faster than (say) my father or grandfather did is only to be expected.
Paul: ditto about the senior periods, but as to:
What the hell is wrong with you???!!! [taking a deep breath…]
Well at least you wont starve to death now, eh Paul 😉
Paul tends to see the downside of life before the up Alisa. No bad thing in many ways. I tend to too.
Then though something else kicks in with me.
I intend to laugh my socks off into that great Goodnight!
Yeah, RAB, I indulge in variously sized doses of healthy pessimism on a regular basis myself, but…
BTW, I know I owe you an e-mail (ditto Mid), but I have no time left with all this commenting going on!
Tsk Tsk. And I thought it was you ladies that were supposed to be the multi- taskers! 😉
But we are, dear! Dinner doesn’t just cook itself, does it now?
A source that describes the blacklists of the 30s and 40s in Hollywood is Lloyd Billingsley’s “Hollywood Party“
Thank you Jack, I’ll look it up.
Well, I did, and a couple of interesting links to go with it.
I thought that my comment was rather cheerful.
I said that given the last couple of decades (end of hope, shiftwork, diet, and so on) I should be dead – and I am not.
As for things wrong with me.
Well somethings have always been no good – my body does not work very well.
And somethings are more recently no good (memory and so on).
Perhaps “life style” related, but there is not much a person can do about that (contrary to what is often claimed).
I could say “if I had my life over again I would…..”
But that is a bit pointless.
So it is better to say that I am not dead yet, and there are still some good things in life.
As I said – quite a cheerful comment.
Thank you, Paul, I am feeling much better now:-)
And of course, when Nick M denounces the Left, he refers to specific individuals and doesn’t just talk about the abstraction of “groups”. Nick most certainly doesn’t neatly parcel up the population like that, because that would be easy and pathetic.
Yes it would be easy and pathetic, as collectivism is one of the Left’s core defining attributes. For them, individuals are insignificant; it is the group which defines identity and is morally sovereign. So it makes sense that Leftists cannot grasp the distinction between ideas and people that was implicit in Nick’s post. “The Left” is an ideology, not a group; “Leftists” are the group defined by their acceptance of those ideas that define “The Left”.
Of course, that only makes sense to those are individualists, who understand that it is individuals who possess free will and moral sovereignty, not groups — and that individuals as such are morally responsible for their ideas and their logical consequences.
In light of the 100+ millions of deaths found at the end of the Left’s road, I can see why that notion should give those who have self-identified with that ideology, but not bothered to discover its end-of-road, have apoplectic fits over such a notion.
I conjecture there exist significant correlations between certain personal, social and political stances. For example, I think being (albeit critically) respectful of tradition correlates with: being slow to make and break personal relationships, a gradualist anti-authoritarian political methodology, and personal generosity.
Conversely, I think being disdainful of tradition per se, correlates with: adherence to the until-something-better-turns-up school of personal relationships, a revolutionary (whether left, right, or libertarian) political methodology, and personal stinginess.
Here is a piece I read recently covering that very topic.
Though it can only be argued in a general sense since there are a few liberals who actually practice personal charity instead of empowering government to levy ever more egregious redistributive taxes to “take from the rich and give to the poor”, the most pithy axiom I’ve heard about liberal socialist ideologues is they truly do love humanity while hating people – particularly those conservatives who don’t agree with their utopian insanity.
The reason.com article that hankmeister linked to has a line that caught my eye: “On a wider scale, the party launched smear campaigns and blacklists against noncommunists, targeting such figures as Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, and Bette Davis.”
The intimidation and “dirty tricks campaign” apparently went further than just blacklists. Somewhere in my files is a newspaper clipping that, alas, I cannot seem to find at the moment. If memory serves (and I’m reasonably sure it does), the article notes that the LA police were investigating a serious fire at the home of Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor. The police had reason to believe that the house had been firebombed by communist agents.
Actually, he seems to be denouncing an ideology, which race, sex, disability etc. are not.
Hankmeister: thank you, I’ll take a look.
Good article Mike Mangum – it “got me”.
I was thinking “but my memory is not THAT bad, why can I not remember the Total Eclipse film” when the punch line hit me.
As for the 1930’s and early 1940’s – yes.
Alisa and Jack Coupal.
Thank you both for the reminders. It comes back to me – but it would not have had you not done the work I should have done.
On Ronald Reagan:
He was indeed a “liberal” (in the modern sense). Named after President Wilson (Ronald Wilson Reagan), father a New Deal administrator (because he was virtually the only Democrat in Dixon – and, being a drunk, had never managed to hold a job for long even in the 1920’s), and a full supporter of both the New Deal and of President Wilson style World Federalism.
But the communists were so blatent that it was obvious that the “progressive” organizations in Hollywood were fronts – and when Reagan noted that, they made trouble for him.
Then the good side of his father (for in this Ronald Reagan was like his father) kicked in – if someone makes a threat you do the opposite of whatever he wants you to do.
So Ronald Reagan started to oppose the Communists even reading forbidden books (such as F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” – he carried on with that, the Hayek books in the Reagan collection show signs of extensive use, including annotations), and opposing them in the Screen Actors Guild (of which he became President).
Of course this line of conduct meant checking his car for bombs every day and carrying a pistol at all times (anyone who thinks that was an over reaction does not know much about the history of American Labor Unions), but that was interesting in its way.
Carrying a pistol is a good way to prevent “accidents” and “suicide” of course.
All lefties have a deep abbhorance for Pinochet, but a pathetic piker in murder compared to their heros. His real crime is otherwise: imposing economic freedom at the point of a gun, and in an unfree culture and continent. It worked, and worse, then led to political freedom. This bad example stands to this day, causing hardship and embarrassment to left-wing utopians.
It should come as no surprise that Lord Justice Sir Stephen “Swabemall” Sedley ,the man who wants us all on the DNA register,was a communist..