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.
Wednesday, 24 April 2019
Simon Wren-Lewis employs the ever popular “anyone who disagrees with me is a fascist” argument.
That’s in this article of his entitled “When people warning about incipient fascism….”. Wren-Lewis is incidentally a former economics professor at Oxford.
His first sentence is a joke. It reads “I’m old enough to remember left wing demonstrations in the UK when ‘fascist!’ was a standard chant.” Now wait a moment. Anyone who hasn’t been asleep 24/7 for the last few years must surely have noticed that “fascist” is chanted incessantly by lefties nowadays (along with the other three words they know: “racist”, “Nazi” and “xenophobe”).
Then in the rest of his first para, Wren-Lewis claims Donald Trump is quasi-fascist as apparently are large number of Europeans.
Well I’m no big fan of Trump, but the alternative was Hilary Clingfilm who was a bit of a war-mongerer (i.e. a fascist). So who were the American people supposed to vote for? (According to Chambers dictionary, “militarism” is one of the elements of fascism.)
As for Europeans turning fascist, well that’s true of Hungary. On the other hand it’s clear that Europeans are getting tired of the fascism inherent in a particular religion which I better not name just to make sure I am not arrested for wrong-think.
Oh but wait a moment: isn't arresting people with the “wrong” views a characteristic of fascism?....:-)
As to the religion I’m referring to, it’s the one that goes in for female genital mutilation and wife thumping, both of which are fascist activities far as any civilised person is concerned. But there’s a very long list of other fascist activities indulged in by members of the religion concerned, like the belief that anyone leaving the religion should be killed, threatening or killing authors and cartoonists, massacring people in churches, homophobia, etc. I could go on. (The belief that anyone leaving the faith should be killed is adhered to by roughly half of all members of the “religion which can’t be named”.)
But according to Wren-Lewis, Islamophobia is a form of fascism. Well I suggest any half civilized person would recognise that the above appalling aspects of the religion that cannot be named actually indicate that it’s supporters of that religion who are the fascists, not its opponents.
Anyway, I’d like to offer my heartfelt condolences to Wren-Lewis and like-minded folk on their abysmal failure to stop Europeans engaging in wrong-think despite W-L & Co employment all the tricks used by Hitler and Mussolini (like arresting and censoring those with the “wrong” thoughts).
Coincidentally, I was banned from Facebook for a week a couple of days ago for citing Islamophobic views. But they weren’t views expressed by Europe’s “far right”: they were the views of a Buddhist!
Even more delicious was the fact that I was banned on exactly the same day as the Sri Lanka authorities announced they thought the recent atrocities there were the work of Muslims.
But I’m sure the Sri Lanka authorities are wrong in their Islamophobic views: it must have been Martians or the man on the Moon who was responsible.
And finally, as evidence of the appalling extent of wrong-think among Europeans, see the chart below.
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