QUOTES ABOUT/BY
THE NEW LEFT/MODERN LIBERALS

The failure to surrender to their victorious opponents [supporters of capitalism, the successful economic system that does more for people] has led tattered "socialist" parties like the NDP and their leftist members and supporters to mindlessly, recklessly and uncritically support cruel, feudal, racist and terrorist regimes and movements as long as those villains are also anti-American.
The reason: The United States is simply the symbol of the failure of their life's work and dreams. Defeat and resentment have rendered these formerly idealistic individuals and organizations vulnerable to new and pernicious forms of anti-Semitism and other political foolishness.
-- Bob Friedland, Victoria lawyer, in the Vancouver Sun of July 25, 2002.
(The NDP is a prominent political party in Canada, avowedly socialist, rooted in the labour union movement and prairie farmer activism. Friedland was a civil rights activist in the deep south, a human rights bureaucrat in state government, and a lawyer who often represented persons with a discrimination claim.)

The Sixties might have been a time of tantalizing glimpses of the New Jerusalem. But it was also a time when the "System" - that collection of values that provide guidelines for societies as well as individuals - was assaulted and mauled. As one center of authority after another was discredited under the New Left offensive, we radicals claimed that we murdered to create. But while we wanted a revolution, we didn't have a plan. The decade ended with a big bang that made society into a collection of splinter groups, special interest organizations and newly minted "minorities" whose only common belief was that America was guilty and untrustworthy.
- Peter Collier and David Horowitz in Destructive Generation: second thoughts about the sixties.

"...hijacked a considerable portion of the environmental movement back in the mid-'80s and who have become very clever at using green language to cloak campaigns that have more to do with anti-industrialism, antiglobalization, anticorporate, all of those things which are basically political campaigns."
- Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace, speaking of proponents of policy to restrict use of PVC, Boston, October 23, quoted in Wired Magazine.

"But the result could be very close and may not be settled before the [Democratic presidential candidate nominating convention], at which point Democrats face the prospect of a deadlocked race being settled by the "superdelegates."

Who are the superdelegates? They are Democratic office-holders and organizers who are given an extra vote in the convention as the voice of the party establishment. Funny, isn't it, that the "anti-establishment" left gives its own establishment special weight in the Democratic Party's decisions?"
- Robert Tracinski, TIA Daily, February 7, 2008

"Only once did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it."

"After so much hope and struggle, and so many lives sacrificed around the world, socialism's epitaph turned out to be: If you build it, they will leave."
- Joshua Muravchik, in Heaven On Earth - the Rise and Fall of Socialism

"No member of the modern liberal intelligentsia can stare at a social problem for very long. He retreats into alleged structures over which the victim has no control. And out of the need to avoid the rawness of reality he spins utopian schemes of social engineering."
- Theodore Dalrymple, in Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, publisher Ivan R. Dee, quoted by Bruce Ramsey in the Seattle Times of August 21, 2005

"Like so much that Obama has said and done over the years, this is standard stuff on the far left, ...... where opinions different from those of the left are ascribed to emotions ("bitter" in this case), rather than to arguments that need to be answered.

"Like so many others on the left, Obama rejects "stereotypes" when they are stereotypes he doesn't like but blithely throws around his own stereotypes ..."

"Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having distain or contempt for them as human beings.
Karl Marx said, "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing." In other words, they mattered only in so far as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda.
Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the "detestable" people who "have no right to live."
- Thomas Sowell in "A Living Lie" on "Real Clear Politics" web site, April 2008. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/a_living_lie.html

"We shall proclaim destruction - why? why? because the idea is so fascinating! But - we must get a little excercise. We'll have a few fires - we'll spread a few legends.....And the whole earth will resound with the cry 'A new and righteous law is coming.' "
- Dostoevsky in The Devils
(as quoted in Destructive Generation: second thoughts about the sixties, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz)

"This self-sacrificing will, to give ..... one's own life for others ....., is most highly developed in the Arayan."
and
"The Arayan is not greatest in his mental [quotient].... as such, but in the extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community."
- Adolf Hitler, in Mein Kampf

"A society too squeamish to call evil by its right name has destroyed its first, best line of defense against cut-throats. Our best line of defense against crime is to hate it."
- a survivor of the Unabomber's mail-bombs, quoted by psychologist Michael Hurd in his Living Resources newsletter

"Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100% literacy."
- John Derbyshire's comment in a May 1, 2000 column. (The context was those who still think that communism is good, that Castro is a nice man, etc. "After some blather about Cuba having 100 percent literacy and rock-bottom infant mortality, as if Cuban government statistics were worth the paper they are printed on, .....")

"Since September 11th, the courageous acts of countless Americans have set a new standard for the nation. Indeed, a new American spirit has been forged. That sprit is characterized by sacrifice, humility, and a refusal to quit in the face of adversity. At a time when our entire country is banding together and facing down individualism, ...."
- from document "STATEMENT of SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY ON THE NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS VICTORY IN SUPER BOWL XXXVI, February 4, 2002" as posted on his web site, complete with their typos.

My comment: It is amazing that an experienced American politician can claim that fighting an enemy whose soldiers are willing to sacrifice their individual lives to a collective's mission of killing is an act of "facing down individualism". Either he has an anti-American agenda or is whacko. (The collective of radical Islam, whose mission is to kill citizens of a country founded on protection of the individual (the U.S.A.), and whose reasons include elimination of the freedom enjoyed in the U.S.A.) As well, the notion of sacrifice and humility seems at odds with the defensive action implied by "staring down".
But his statement does urge "sacrifice for the greater good", which is what the terrorists are doing to themselves and their victims. Yet it is not logical to use the football team as an example of sacrifice - they are individuals choosing to work together to gain a shared value, victory in a voluntary game. The players are cooperators, not sacrificers, not killers as the terrorists are.
I sent a message to Kennedy asking him to clarify how he makes the connection. He has not responded.
- Keith Sketchley

Michael Campbell's column of November 22, 2003 in the Vancouver Sun newspaper identifies the beliefs of several anti-American protest groups in the UK and US.
- International Answer supports North Korea's regime, Saddam Hussein, and Slobodan Milosevic. It associates with Communist and anarchist groups.
- the Stop the War Coalition is part of Hate-America International, whose leadership has a high proportion of Communist and Marxist groups, plus radical Islamics and some environmentalists. - there is evidence that leftist-Islamist alliances were promoted by senior al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

"The United States and Israel must be today the two most dangerous of the 125 sovereign states among which the land surface of this planet is at present partitioned."
- Arnold Toynbee, English historian, 1968

"When Hitler came along, Toynbee was an enthusiastic appeaser. He met Hitler in 1936 and came away deeply impressed (the two men hated some of the same things). He told his countrymen that Hitler sincerely desired peace."
- Among the Bourgeoisophobes, by David Brooks, The Weekly Standard, 04/15/2002, Volume 007, Issue 30

"And once the bourgeoisophobes had experienced the basic spasm of reaction, they soon settled on the Americans and Jews as two of the chief objects of their ire. Because, as Henry Steele Commager once noted, no country in the world ever succeeded like America, and everybody knew it. And no people in the European experience ever achieved such sustained success as the Jews."
- Among the Bourgeoisophobes, by David Brooks, The Weekly Standard, 04/15/2002, Volume 007, Issue 30

"The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death,"
- al Qaeda's Mualana Inyadullah

Jews "love life more than any other people, and they prefer not to die,"
- Hamas official Ismail Haniya

"Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should be stopped, that armed force should be abolished as a means of settling disputes among nations, and that war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictatorships; the political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from welfare statism to socialism to fascism to communism. This means that they are opposed to the use of coercion by one nation against another, but not by the government of a nation against its own citizens; it means that they are opposed to the use of force against armed adversaries, but not against the disarmed."
- Ayn Rand

Consider the case of "Hanoi Jane" Fonda, who had herself photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese gun to protest US action in Vietnam. Whether or not US action was justified (worth the cost to Americans - and certainly the military draft was not moral) what was the nature of her action? In my judgement she was consciously aiding the military of an evil regime (a communist one). Why would she do that instead of working to convince US politicians that the US' actions were wrong?
- Keith Sketchley

We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth. We can and must write in the language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like, toward those who disagree with us.
- Lenin

... a German intellectual named Karl Marx gave one of the most influential accounts of the new capitalist system—and he got everything wrong. An Industrial Revolution driven by scientific and technological advances springing from the minds of a few extraordinary individuals, he would describe as the anonymous, collective product of brute physical labor; an economic system of liberty, he would describe as a system of oppression; a system built on the right to property he would describe as a system based of expropriation—and then he would propose actual oppression and expropriation as the solution.
- Robert Tracinski, October 2, 2007, in article "The Historic Significance of "Atlas Shrugged", in TIA Daily

My comment: Karl Marx of course popularized the maxim "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." (In "A Critique of the Gotha Program", 1875, perhaps adapting words of Louis Blanc in "Organisation de Travail" or Morelly in "Code de Nature") The receiving half of that maxim can be found in popular Christian bibles as "And distribution was made unto every man according as he had need." (Acts 4:35, according to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations) How did Marx justify the contradiction observed by Tracinski? Marxism has a type of logic that claims contradictions are good.

And another quote from Tracinski in TIA Daily: "So why all this talk about America having to show that it is a "good citizen" and having to "shoulder our responsibilities"? Isn't serving as the world's strongest and most resolute bulwark against tyranny and terror, bringing down two evil empires and working on preventing a third — shouldn't that be enough to earn the world's gratitude?"
I comment that the talk reflects the leftist line that terrorism comes from poverty and their equating of defense with aggression.
BTW, you can find TIA Daily here.

REFERENCES

© Keith Sketchley
Page version 2008.05.19 (1921PDT)

Keith's Applied Philosophy Page