Showing posts with label Communism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Communism. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Teresamerica's News and Views: James Delingpole Talks To Roger Hedgecock On Watermelons & Communitarianism



Here is James Delingpole's article:


The most unsettling aspect of modern politics is that the Enemy is no longer plain in view.
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.
We’re free to fly wherever we want on our hols. No one is starving. We can vote. There are no death camps. We don’t dread the small-hours knock at the door. Our politicians consult focus groups because they feel they ought to care what we think. There are lots of channels on TV, not all of which reflect the ideology of the state. Being Jewish, gay or an intellectual are not crimes. (More’s the pity in the case of the last one.) We can speak out against whomsoever we want (so long as they’re not Muslim) without fear of being arrested. We don’t need to belong to the Party to get a job. There are no bread queues. Our kids aren’t obliged to spy on us.
Why then do we yet feel so un-free? By ‘we’ I don’t mean all of us, of course. I can’t imagine, say, David Aaronovitch waking up every morning and gnashing into his Coco Pops over the liberties Big Government is taking with his liberty. I doubt Michael Moore, Paul Krugman or the environment pod at the Guardian have ever done anything except shudder very pleasurably as the tentacles of state have crept ever deeper into their every orifice. But I’m guessing I’m not the only Speccie-reading type who surveys this brave new world we inhabit with growing alarm. ‘I do hope it’s no more than my imagination,’ we say to ourselves. ‘But it seems to me that, politically, we are ****ed.’

And if that’s what you think, you’re right, we are. But your problem — as was mine, till I discovered this thing I’m going to tell you about — is that you don’t really know whom to blame, whom to hate, whom to fight. And the reason for this is that the Enemy have arranged it that way. These are exactly the same kind of people who brought you Nazism, Marxism and fascism. Their controlling, bullying, puritanical, freedom-hating instincts are as intense as ever. The only difference is that this time they’re inflicting them on you with your permission.
This nebulousness and insidiousness is precisely what makes communitarianism so much more dangerous than any of the other totalitarian philosophies I’ve just named. Communitarianism? Though it crops up quite a bit on websites, it’s still not a term you find in quotidian use. Which is odd, because it’s the defining ideological concept of our age — embracing everything from the puzzling leftishness of the supposedly ‘Conservative’ David Cameron to Australian farmers no longer being able to cut down trees on their land, to the mystifying career of comedy academic Philip Blond, to the EnvironmentalProtection Agency, Barack Obama, the Big Society, the EU, the UN, the BBC, your kids’ schools, my kids’ schools, Maurice Strong and the Rio Earth summit, to name but a few.
How does it work? Well one good example is the Localism Bill mentioned by Charles Moore the other week, which will give you, the people, more citizen power, supposedly. Except it won’t. What it will actually do is undermine one of the pillars of a free society: your property rights. By allowing ‘local people’ (clearly whoever drafted it has never watched The League Of Gentlemen) to designate something a ‘community asset’ — say, to use Charles’s example, a private field which the owner allows villagers to use as a cricket pitch — the Bill will strip away the ability of the property owner to dispose of his asset as he sees fit. What’s happening is a more consensual, touchy-feely version of what Jews experienced under the Nazis or aristocrats experienced under Lenin. Call it Big Society; call it social justice; call it what you like. What’s going on is state-sanctioned theft.

wish I had space to explain the communitarian philosophy in more detail. One of the best primers I’ve found is a blogpost by an Alaskan called Niki Raapana, who neatly defines it as ‘a Dictatorship of the Community’ whose ‘global standard of norms’ will ‘rebuild the world under a new model of governance with jurisdiction over all national state citizens’. Communitarianism’s great enabling act was a measure launched at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit called Agenda 21. Its almost risibly sinister name (quite accidental: it just means ‘an agenda for the 21st century’) means that whenever worried conservatives invoke it they come across like paranoid conspiracy freaks. But its effects are all too real. Over six hundred local government groups around the world from the City of Dallas to Woking Borough Council have signed up to Local Agenda 21, a voluntary code of practice committing them to a range of superficially worthy causes from (Marxist codeword) ‘sustainability’ to ‘diversity’. You didn’t vote for this stuff, but it’s on the books anyway.
One more brief example: lots of London councils have taken upon themselves the responsibility of ‘combating climate change’ by charging 4 x 4 owners more for their parking permits, encouraging electric cars, penalising non-recyclers and so on. But what if you’re a council taxpayer who knows it’s a crock: that electric cars are every bit as eco-unfriendly as normal ones, that recycling often uses more energy than it saves? Your view doesn’t count, nor even can you express it at the ballot box, since all the main political parties share the same valuesystem. This is communitarianism. And you are stuffed.

I didn't have all that great knowledge of Agenda 21 so I did some research on it and found two informative videos on it. 


This video shows at least some of the key players of Agenda 21



This explains Agenda 21 very well. Plus, this video exposes the Communitarians purposeful, harmful goals.




I apologize for the delay in posting my Eagle Freedom Links post but I have had a health issue to deal with which is quite painful and will hopefully have the post up tomorrow.  Have a great day!

Friday, March 11, 2011

Refusal to Compromise on Fiscal Responsibility is "Dangerous" and "Unchristian"

Now the Christian Left is accusing Wisconsin's Governor Walker of being a bad Christian because he cut off the unions' means to keep the bottomless pit of money and cushy benefits fund keep on coming - a.k.a. collective bargaining, even though the collective bargaining tactics employed by unions have hurt hard working taxpayers for years.  Diane Butler Bass accused Gov. Walker of being "dangerous" and unchristian" for being unwilling to compromise when it came to fiscal responsibility with regards to the budget.  Gov. Walker's fiscal policy is in fact responsible, pragmatic, harmless and ethically sound.



Then we have Jim Wallis asking What Would Jesus Cut?  Of course he's against the GOP making cuts to both domestic spending and international aid.  He claims that these cuts will hurt the poor and are unfair. He complains about the tax cuts for 2 percent of Americans and the fact that Republicans support an increase in military spending.  For some reason Jim Wallis makes the assumption that the high taxes imposed under Clinton were just and that the lower taxes imposed under Bush were unjust.  Both John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made tax cuts which spurred job growth and helped many people, including the poor, to obtain jobs.

Hunter Baker tackles Jim Wallis' claim that cuts in spending is a sub-Christian position:

"The implication is that this is obviously a sub-Christian position. But is it? Probably the most essential purpose of government is to protect the life and freedom of citizens. The government achieves this goal through military means. Unless one takes the position that Christianity implies corporate pacificism, then it is unclear the Republicans have blundered according to Christian ethics. Now, match the question of military spending versus international aid and/or domestic spending. Are the latter obviously superior to the former? No. It depends on not only what the stated objective is for the different types of spending, but whether they actually achieve their purposes. To simply state that the Republicans want to bolster military spending while cutting international aid and domestic spending is to achieve nothing at all by way of an indictment."
Here Hunter Baker deals with Wallis' position on taxes and asks " If there is a community need, is it righteous to grab a rich person and employ the power of legal coercion to extract the needed funds?" 


Then, Hunter Baker explains what's wrong with Jim Wallis' redistributionist philosophy: 


"Still another problem with this redistributionist attitude about taxes and spending is that it assumes a zero sum state of affairs. For example, one could assume that the most people would be better off under a system like the old Soviet Union that spread resources out to citizens in a way that prized equality of rations. The United States system didn’t do that nearly as much, not nearly at all. But which of the two systems provided a better life for people? The answer is easy. The United States and its emphasis on liberty did. Why? A more free economic system produces far more wealth than an unfree one. If your equality system produces a little, bitty pie, it may give you a lot of philosophical satisfaction, but it doesn’t do as much actual good for people as the system that prizes free productivity and success over equality." 


No, fair isn't better. It just means equally poor or equally miserable but not equally better off in society.  If so, then Communism would have worked in the past, but the cold hard facts have proven that Communism has always caused lives to be drastically worse rather than better wherever it has been implemented.  At the very least Communism harms.  Communism has also killed many people.  



According to Courtois who wrote The Black Book of Communism here is the breakdown of the number of deaths which have occurred under Communism: 
  • 65 million in the People's Republic of China
  • 20 million in the Soviet Union
  • 2 million in Cambodia
  • 2 million in North Korea
  • 1.7 million in Africa
  • 1.5 million in Afghanistan
  • 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
  • 1 million in Vietnam
  • 150,000 in Latin America
  • 10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power."


Do federal programs achieve what they set out to do?  Is there government waste or is the money allocated properly and used efficiently?  Well, the Government Accountability Office found wasteful spending on ending homelessness.

From Fox News:


The Government Accountability Office report found that in 2009, federal agencies spent about $2.9 billion on more than 20 programs that targeted homelessness. If that money were to be targeted toward the building of homes, at say, $200,000 per home, it could theoretically produce 145,000 houses.
"Take that money directly and give them sort of a voucher so they can go get housing on their own, or get some mental health benefits," Brian Darling, director of government studies at the Heritage Foundation suggested. "But the way it is now when you have all of these different government agencies administering the same program, you have government waste."



It is self-evident that government programs aren't efficient and in fact don't achieve what they set out to do.  Our government can do better with less money.  This government waste needs to stop.  Plus, the assertion that Governor Walker is a bad Christian is absurd.  He is exercising fiscal responsibility which is a good thing.