🎵 Ohhhhhh Jacob Rees-Mogg ... 🎶

It is a depressing indictment of British politics that the left has emotional but untrue articles of faith on its side, and the right has totally capitulated to the forces of statism and authoritarianism.

Jeremy Corbyn has shaken off most of his dusty geography teacher image and is now becoming a polished media performer. His hideously adoring acolytes greet his every utterance as the profound words of some venerable sage, and go round chanting "Tory scum" and "hang the Tories" wherever they go. And it's not an idle threat, I believe that if they do come to power, there will be "justifiable" violence. If someone doesn't die, it'll be lucky.

For those of us who have a job and better things to do than gather every bloody protest march, the pickings are slim. "Anyone but May" was my message to the world when the Tories were picking a leader, and really, could anyone have done a worse job in front of an open goal than she has? She should have absolutely stomped Jeremy Corbyn into the ground, instead she gave him credibility and made him look prime ministerial by comparison.

And her policies are equally repulsive. Mayism is an awful hodgepodge of big state nannyism and nonsensical market intervention. Honestly, when lefties are pointing out that Help To Buy is a terrible idea and Tories think it's the answer, we have gone through the looking glass.

It all came to a head for me when Jacob Rees-Mogg was accosted by a bunch of Corbynista thugs at a Conservative Party Conference fringe event. He calmly spoke plain words of common sense to the idiot who was screaming at him. He told him some calm facts. He pointed out that someone's policies did not inherently make them a bad person, just someone with a different view. I'd love to say it was a Damascene conversion, but it won't be. Shabbir Lakha will doubtlessly go on to great depths as a third-rate politician, knowing righteously in his heart that only Corbynistas know the true path to enlightenment and anyone who disagrees with them deserves to swing from a tree.

How has it come to this? How have blood-thirsty, thuggish, middle-class Corbynistas come to be so devout? Why does no-one on the right have any useful riposte or any balls? How has a backbench politician become a media star for just calmly pointing totally reasonable and sensible things out to a screaming buffoon? Why does the screaming buffoon now have a media presence?

I don't want "Moggmentum". I don't want a leadership cult politician running the show, of either stripe. I was calm, confident competence. I want opposing views to be heard, discussed and tolerated. I don't want this underlying threat of violence that underlies so much of our politics today.

Jacob Rees-Mogg might well hold some awful views, but the people shouting at him hold even worse views. There isn't a politician out there who doesn't hold some awful views in someone's opinion. In my opinion, they all hold awful views. So maybe someone who can actually calmly speak in the face of thuggery, keep calm and have manners is all we can hope for.

Can we have more of this from politicians, please?

Anti-Communism Article Misses The Point

I read, with some enthusiasm, this article on the evils of communism.

Marx’s philosophy promised to bring about universal equality, full liberation, and worldwide community. Marxism vowed to fully conquer nature, relieving the human race of scarcity, contingency, alienation, and anxiety. Marx’s aspirations were so striking that vast numbers of people, including Solzhenitsyn, committed themselves to bringing them into being.

Indeed, it is apparent that the aspirations of Marxism are possibly even more utopian that the most virulent anarcho-capitalism. But the article bothered me. Rather than just nodding my head at having my preconceptions stroked, I felt uncomfortable with some of the arguments and conclusions.

The Gulag Archipelago was more than a history of wrongdoing. Tyrants have existed throughout history, but the magnitude of Stalin’s ferocity was unparalleled. Why did people obey a maniac? How could human beings be so cruel? Marx claimed that once the Revolution occurred, there would be no need for the state. As a result, Marxists made no provision for limitations on government or checks on ambition, hoping instead that History would ameliorate conflict. When Stalin took over leadership of the Party, Solzhenitsyn shows, communists could not discern whether he was a psychopath or represented the true direction of progressive history. They were helpless to oppose his ruthless commands.

I struggle to accept that Stalin was any more of a tyrant, any more ferocious than Hitler or Pol Pot or Mao. But more than that, I am confused at the idea that communists could not discern his ruthlessness and were helpless to oppose it. People always have that option. Indeed, many people who opposed Stalin wound up in the gulags for doing so. They just weren't good enough at it.

But anyway, this wasn't the crux of my annoyance.

Solzhenitsyn displays with great force that Marxist ideology motivated both Stalin and his followers to perpetrate the greatest inhumanity in history. Marxists’ goals are idealistic but implausible. Human beings cannot be completely free; they need government to restrain their baser instincts. (Emphasis is mine)

This is where I call bollocks.

Marx said that come the Revolution, the state would wither and die, so having "the" Revolution and bringing into life a Marxist state would kill off the said Marxist state. But that is the opposite of how bureaucracy works. The biggest flaw in every implementation is not that Marxism doesn't provide for a way to restrain "baser instincts", it's that it provides for no limitations on government. Indeed, in every Marxist implementation, the state has spread like a cancer to the judiciary and every other aspect of society. This is the central failure in the Marxist view: the state is a cancer that needs to be kept in check and Marxist societies do nothing to stop it, which is why they always wind up needing fences to keep people in, why they always end up as totalitarian hellholes.

"Socialist" states may well implement more collectivist economic and other policies, but they do maintain independent judiciaries and other means to keep the state in check. I suspect that if this independence ever corrodes sufficiently due to "groupthink" and bad appointments, these states will shortly collapse into totalitarianism.

The more socialist or Marxist a state is, the more power that accrues to the executive. The greater the power or potential power available, the bigger the arsehole it attracts. This is why totalitarianism and socialism or Marxism go hand in hand. It isn't a coincidence that every Marxist country has ended with swathes of dead people. Poor economics may be a factor, but the truth is an untrammelled state is a very desirable target for a psychopath. And having all that power then leads to it being used at the whim of a madman.

I'll go out on a limb here and say every Marxist state is doomed to oppression, slaughter and eventual collapse. Sorry, Marxists. Your man was wrong about many things, but this is the one that leads to the gulag.

Update: I just found this Mises article which, while aiming to prove that Nazism and Bolshevism are both socialist, also fleshes out why socialism leads to totalitarianism.