Tim Blair

Everyone behold...the glorious alternative!

We're Socialists. Our proud motto is: "Democracy everywhere but where it might empower those who don't think like us!"

"The only people we hate more than the Romans are the f***ing Judean People's Front."

That's the People's Front of Judea! Get it right!

Splitter!

'February 15th was a high point of the anti war movement in the UK as more than a million people protested against the pending war in Iraq. For many, it has been all downhill since.'

Amazing how these groups need and want that which they so vehemently decry.

Stop the War coalition rejoices when war starts because it validates their existence. Then they fall apart when war ends for the reverse reason.

Similarly, Greens want and need environmental degradation in order to justify their occupation of the moral high ground. Guess that's why they hate people like Bjorn Lombok. Not because he says things aren't as bad as they seem (which you would think they would welcome) but because he cuts away their reason for being.

Peter Garrett has finally become a trendsetter! His Nuclear Disarmament Party was taken over by the local Socialist Workers Party and then faded into oblivion. I guess the CND is definitely on a warning.

I was in on that, as one of the losers. It was very educational for me.
"Oh my god there actually are communist conspirators intent on seizing power to the exclusion of the common good. And they're taking over so fast there's no time to do anything effective about it. And now they've won. That's it, we're a Communist Front, just like those crazy righties always warned us about. Well to hell with that: I'm out of here." (As was everybody else.)

Having read about Communism helped, because once I ran into Communism I had some history to relate it to and I was able to classify things and so on, but it hadn't fully connected to reality for me. The experience of having dead-faced Communist zombies infiltrate en masse, seize the commanding heights of power, and turn a popular cause into a petty dictatorship practically overnight was what did it. I didn't need a diagram of what would happen if this wasn't a tree-hugging party but a country that you couldn't just quit in disgust, or what those purge-happy Commos would have done next if they'd had state power and guns, rather than control of a formerly democratic party that they had gutted.

(Which later made me think that the destruction of the pacifist extreme left in Australia, at least for a while, had been a happy ending after all.)

When I talked later to a girl from Czechoslovakia, it might seem ridiculous to say that I understood what her family had gone through from the Communists, but we were able to talk very well, because we both understood exactly what we meant by "Communists", and her experience was that lots of people in Australia were complacent about living in a free country and were basically in denial.

So, I can understand that some people need to see the spirit of tyranny up close to really "get it". Books help a lot, but some people have to be doubting Thomases till they see stuff with their own eyes.

But what depresses me sometimes is that so many people can run into Nazis, Communists, Islamo-fascists and so on, and still not get it. It's about freedom and the fanatical legions of tyranny. It's important, but it's really not that complicated. Can't these people register that, even when the bastards are practically slapping them awake by pulling conspiratorial moves on them? But it seems not. :(