Commentaries (some of them cheeky or provocative) on economic topics by Ralph Musgrave. This site is dedicated to Abba Lerner. I disagree with several claims made by Lerner, and made by his intellectual descendants, that is advocates of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). But I regard MMT on balance as being a breath of fresh air for economics.
Monday, 2 May 2016
Tired of the Labour Party’s “I’m less anti-semitic than thou” contest?
Then maybe the latest episode in the left’s never ending and totally hypocritical “I’m less fascist than thou” contest might interest you.
I say “never ending” because the word fascist is one of those words that lefties repeat over and over, like demented parrots. And they’ve been doing that for a very long time: George Orwell (who died in 1950) said that the word had become meaningless because of over-use.
Anyway, the above mentioned “latest episode” is thus. Ann Pettifor came out with a bog standard bit of leftie nonsense on the subject of fascism. The offending and hilarious sentence in her article is:
“Hence the rise of right-wing and fascist parties in for example, France, Hungary and Greece. Right-wing populism - a reaction to, and movement against market fundamentalism - now poses a real threat to European democracy..”.
Gosh, so Europe’s “far right” parties are fascist are they? Let’s think about that.
One element of fascism as per my Chambers dictionary is “militarism”. Now who sent the British military to Iraq and took part in the slaughter of a million Muslims for no good reason? Er…um…that would be the Labour Party (assisted by the Tories).
In contrast, the UK’s “far right” parties, the British National Party and UKIP, opposed that war from day one.
So unless you’re as brain dead as the average leftie journalist, you ought to be able to work out who the real fascists are – at least as far as “militarism” goes.
There is of course the additional point that killing a million Muslims for no good reason is about a million times as racist as anything the allegedly “far right” BNP or UKIP have done. (And if you don’t like a “million”, I’ll reduce that by an order of magnitude of one or three, and make it “ten thousand times as racist” or even “a hundred times as racist”: whatever tickles your fancy.)
And just in case you’re in any doubt as to whether killing a million Muslims is racist, the ultimate racist crime is KILLING a member of another race for no good reason. Compared to that, insulting them, or not allowing them to migrate to your country is a very minor offence, if indeed it’s an offence at all. So again, unless you’re a leftie journalist (i.e. brain dead), you should be able to work out who the real big time racists are.
Populism.
Another nonsensical element in the above nonsense strewn sentences of Ann Pettifor’s is that she accuses the political right of “populism” while also criticising it of not being in favour of democracy. Now hang on. Democracy consists of letting ordinary people have a say in how the country is run. And populism? Well you could pretty much define that in the same way: trying to attract votes from ordinary people (as opposed to attracting votes from pseudo intellectual, pseudo sophisticated prats).
Political violence.
Another element of fascism is political violence: e.g. barging your way into other political parties’ meetings and breaking them up – one of Hitler’s favourite tactics in the 1930s (not that communists were exactly innocent on that score).
Now what d’yer know? According to Europol about 90% of acts of political violence are perpetrated by LEFT WING political groups, rather than RIGHT WING political groups. So there again, lefties win hands down when it comes to fascism.
Arrests.
Another fascist tactic used by the political left (and indeed the political centre ground) is arresting your political opponents – a tactic used, of course, by Stalin and Hitler.
And what do you know? Marine Le Pen has been threatened with arrest for saying what every Tom, Dick and Harry is currently saying about Muslims. And Nick Griffin of the BNP was arrested and put on trial ten years ago for speaking the truth about Asian / Muslim grooming in the UK.
Conclusion.
All in all, when it comes to fascism, the political left really ought to keep its big mouth shut. As Oxford’s former professor of government, Max Beloff said, there’s something “dangerously fascist” about New Labour. And two of the most violent and extreme fascists to appear in the last hundred years came from the political left: Hitler and Stalin.
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