Attlee, extreme socialism and its legacy

(Attlee and Lenin; looks weren't the only thing they had in common...)

Clement Atlee was the first Prime Minister of Britain after World War II ended, and there are few men who have ever had more far reaching influence in British political history than he. Yet, very little is understood about his regime and what it did; in many ways, the schemes of his extreme leftist gang are still very much with us today, and inspired leftist fanatics later in the century to continue the relentless march towards extreme leftist totalitarianism using any means necessary. I will attempt as best I can to reveal Attlee's regime as the extreme left disaster it was, so we can better grasp why Britain is the way it is today.

Clement Attlee (1883-1967)

The name Attlee (link) is one of the most revered in British leftist circles, and his regime is spoken of in hushed, hallowed tones by left wing demagogues, who accurately trace the beginnings of British big government leftism to his administration. Even many non-leftists in Britain pay lip service to him, and conclude that because his regime had some flowery ideas, then he must have been both a decent man and a political genius. There is a story that when Attlee went to Buckingham Palace to meet King George VI, he was driven to the palace by his wife, whom the guards assumed was his chaffeur! Coupled with his "touchy-feely" tours of working class neighbourhoods, Attlee projected the image of being "the ordinary man" with a "common touch", which in no small part helped him get his hands on power.

Yet in actual fact, Attlee was not a man with the common touch and he most certainly was not normal. Like most leftists, whilst he would talk endlessly about "poverty" and its effects, he himself was from a very comfortable middle class family. He was also a political midget; unlike the iconic political giant Winston Churchill, who could go toe to toe with anyone on earth, from Stalin and Hitler to Roosevelt and De Gaulle, Attlee was very unimpressive. At Yalta, Attlee was unassuming and dull, hardly what was needed given the gravity of the occassion.

However, he had two massive personal failings; firstly, he was an extreme far leftist, and thus was blinded by his own zealotry and fanaticism to the truth about human nature, a cardinal failure amongst leftists. He truly believed it was possible to build heaven on earth, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Secondly, as his biographer noted, he was devoid of any sense of regret or responsibility. Attlee could do something, and not feel even the slightest twinge of conscience if it went wrong, however, horribly so, and however many people were hurt in the process. The fact your leader is a) devoid of any sense of responsibility or remorse and b) is a mad leftist demagogue, is not a great combination, especially when you are trying to re-build after war. He was determined to build a far left society; and in 1945, he won the election and got his chance...

The 1945 Dilemma

In 1945, an election was held in Britain, which everyone expected Winston Churchill to win easilly. As it happened, he lost, and Clement Attlee's Labour Party were the new government. Labour had not expected to win, but now they had won, they were going to make sure the UK got a dose of extreme leftism. Labour had been in power before, but the sheer land slide scale of its 1945 election triumph meant it now had a sufficiently large majority to out-vote the other parties MP's in parliament and thus push through pretty much and legislation it wanted. They had many grandiose socialist schemes planned; a nationalised health care system, nationalised heavy industry, nationalised trains etc. In other words, a huge, spiralling beaurocracy and huge nanny state totalitarianism.

The problem is these schemes all need lots of money, and money was scarce in 1945; Britain had been the only allied nation to be at war for its full six year duration, and thus its economy was literally ruined. In today's money, Britain had borrowed over $100 billion in part of a generous loan scheme called "Lend Lease" to stay financially alive during the war; basically, the USA had sent vast amounts of arms, goods and supplies to the UK, which the UK was effectively not paying for. However, when avowed socialist Attlee came to power in 1945, the US government was supsicious. All across Europe, Communists and their camouflaged cousins Socialists, were jockeying for position in the post-war world. Communist parties had already won rigged elections across Eastern Europe, and Stalin had designs for the rest of Europe. The possiblity of crypto-communists gaining control over European nations was a very real threat in the post-war period, and the US could not run the risk that Attlee was one of them. Attlee bore an uncanny physical resemblance to Lenin as you can see in the pictures at the top of this report; the US was worried that this might not be the only similarity between the two.

Attlee and his administration were faced with a choice to make. Were they going to govern from the centre? Were they going to realise what an appaulingly weak economic position Britain was in and postpone its mad social engineering? Was it going to put the good of the nation ahead of its warped ideological fantasies? Or was it going to embark on its far left agenda and worry about the consequences later.

Guess what they chose...

Get the money

On August 23rd 1945, Attlee and his inner circle approached John Maynard Keynes (link), a learned and respected economist, to inquire about how to get the money to fund the programmes in its socialist agenda. The only place they could get this money was from the United States, and Keynes was ordered by Attlee to go to Washington and negotiate a massive interest free grant from the US. Keynes, a smooth talker with an acidic sense of wit and humour assured Attlee he could get the cash, and was dispatched to Washington to meet US Treasury officials. Keynes was renowned as being very self assured and persuasive, who could get anyone to believe just about anything, especially when it came to money; as Attlee's Health Minister, Anuerin "Nye" Bevan once remarked "When Keynes talks, I can almost feel the money jangling in my pockets; but I always wonder if its really there".

As it happened, the Americans, for all their admiration for the British people, did not trust the socialist Attlee, nor were they in the mood to give Britain more interest free loans now the war was over. Business is business as they say, and the US was considerably more icy towards the suspected crypto-communist and emotional robot Attlee, than it had been to witty and courageous Conservative Winston Churchill (who as an added bonus was half-American). This is interesting, as one would have thought that the Democrat Truman would have had more ideological common ground with Labours Attlee than with the Conservative Churchill with whom, ironically, the Democrats had enjoyed a fabulous working relationship during the war.

America talks trade not money

Not long after the negotiations began, it became very clear that Keynes had a much tougher task on his hands than he had expected. Keynes believed that all he had to do was go to Washington, smile and crack jokes and then present the war as a joint effort, which Britain had fought bravely in, and thus deserved the right, to use modern language, to be "cut some slack" by US creditors as it attempted to re-build its shattered nation. However, many Americans did not feel this way at all; Britain had only fought as long as it did because it was kept going by massive US loans, and over 400,000 Americans had died fighting in World War II. Furthermore, around 70% of the Western Alliance forces post D-Day were American, and many Americans therefore felt that it was not accurate to call the war a "joint effort", as Britain had very much been the junior partner. Shortly before his death, Keynes would write of his regret at employing this tactic, when he wrote "Perhaps showing off our medals was not such a good idea".

The British, behind the small talk, were essentially making demands. However, the Americans had some demands of their own. The Americans were adamant in their cancellation of Lend Lease; no more free lunches now your safe from the Nazi's. Furthermore, whilst the US was prepared to give the UK money, it was not a grant, but a high interest loan instead. The US also wanted the British pound to be a transferrable, convertable currency on the world market. Finally, the US wanted the UK to remove its "Imperial Preferrence" tariffs, which had effectively kept the British Empire's lands closed to American investment and competition. To say Keynes and his boss Attlee had not seen this coming was both an understatement and an idictment to Attlee's short sightedness.

What made the negotations even more stressful and protracted was Attlee's narrow agenda; "Just get the money". This meant that each day, the British government sent wildly self contradictory and desperate communications to Keynes and his delegation, one minute telling them not to budge on any American demand and then the next minute telling them they could accept American demands, but had to then try and convince the Americans to slightly modify them. Effectively, issues of national and global economic significance were being decided "on-the-run", and it is reprehensible that Attlee conducted national policy in such a way.

Eventually, a deal was reached. The "Imperial Prefrerence" tarrifs, were not quite scrapped, but they may as well have been. The US convinced the UK to agree that all nations should trade equally with all other nations, and thus, the US had neutralised Imperial Preferrence this way instead. This was the foundation stone of the WTO, IMF and various other supra-national tentacles of the New World Order. The trade monopolies, which were the foundation stone of British wealth and success, and which Britain had spent centuries building and defending, were erased over night because Attlee wanted to trade it all (no pun it intended) just to get his hands on money to fund his mad schemes. Eventually, Britains trade with the empire declined, pushing it closer towards the EU, with all its attendant tyranny and corruption.

By agreeing to make the pound a convertable currency on the world currency exchange, he placed it in a vulnerable position, and not long after it became transferrable, it plummetted in value, and on one occassion, according to the UKTV History Channel documentary "Political Mistakes", lost over 40% of its value in less than a week! This meant that the pound, which for nearly two centuries had been the global currency was forever harmed in reputation, and was replaced by the US dollar as the worlds global currency.

The economic ruin to Britain was tangible. Rationing, which had been introduced as an emergency measure during the war, was extended by Attlee, such was the nations inability to meet the economic needs of its citizens. Right up until 1952, more than a decade after it was introduced, it was still in operation, something which is still bitterly remembered by those who lived through it, surviving bombing and U-Boat attacks, only to find that peace under an extreme leftist isnt much better than war with one.

Whats wrong with free health care?

Well nothing. In principle. In practise, and especially in cold, hard economic terms, its filled with difficulties and complications. However, the Attlee regime made the creation of a nationalised health care system, which would provide free health care treatment to all, a top priority. The task of creating this was given to Welsh Socialist Aneurin Bevan, sometimes known as "Nye" Bevan in the UK media. Bevan, a dedicated socialist, who made his admiration for Karl Marx abundantly clear was now in charge, and this service was named "The National Health Service" (NHS) and it is still around today (link). The notion of a providing anyone, however rich or poor with whatever health care they need, however seriously they need it, is very admirable in ethical terms. But alas, we live in the real world of costs, logistics and human nature.

Perhaps the biggest weakness of the NHS is the fact it needs funding, and billions upon billions a year of funding at that. Providing free health care to tens of millions of people, some of whom have very complicated medical needs, is not cheap. It is the tax payer who funds this, in the UK through a special tax called the "National Insurance contribution" (I like the way they call it a contribution to make it sound voluntary; guess what, it isn't).

As my old sociology teacher once explained to me, the NHS is a victim of its own success. That is, if everyone gets free health care, this means their life expectancy goes up, and as people live longer, they need more health care in their old age. Therefore, the NHS needs more money to meet the increased needs of its ageing patients. This process, theoretically, continues ad infinitum, and thus the more money it spends, the more successful it will be; however, in order to keep this success, and expand upon it as demand increases due to an ageing population, it has a funding short fall, which needs even more money to keep it going. This means National insurance has to go up, and the tax burden on families is therefore increased. Whilst income tax remains relatively low in the UK by the standards of many English speaking nations, the NI is a fair chunk of your wage to have deducted each month, especially if theres a good chance the size of that chunk will get bigger.

Secondly, the NHS is a huge spiralling burearocracy, which means more paper work is needed, which in turn decreases efficiency. Furthermore, a large chunk of the NHS budget is ploughed into the top heavy beaurocracy. Addtionally, special interest group concerns have been allowed to further add to this weight of paper, as NHS employees are sent on "Equality and Diversity" seminars, seminars often given by far left groups who charge a large fee for their services, and when one considers British nurses earn only £18,000 a year, the fact hundreds of thousands of pounds is spent by regional NHS authorities on leftist seminars is not what I call good use of money. The NHS also spends millions each year translating its publications into various languages, money which could be better spent on health care for these community members if they just learned to speak English.

Finally, there is the potential for this free system to be abused. One thing that really gets the British peoiple angry is "health tourism", whereby foreign, usually third world citizens, enter Britain having never paid NI in their life and then have an expensive operation performed on the NHS (paid for by the British tax-payer).

Attlee says; "Lets try mass immigration!"

When Attlee came to power, Britain was a homogenous European nation, save a few small communities of non-European people in London. However, this was soon going to change as Attlee proposed massive third world immigration to Britain to fill a "labour shortage" in the UK jobs market created by the war. As it happens, there never was a labour shortage; what happened was after the war, much work needed to be done. However, the British workers were prepared to do it, but their wage demands were felt too high. Therefore, Attlee decided that cheap labour from the British Empires colonies in the Indian subcontinent, the Carribean and West Africa would be used instead. The government radically liberalised immigration law, and then ran poster and publicity campaigns in its third world colonies to encourage people to make the journey to Britain.

It wasn't long before racial friction occurred and eventually this would lead to race riots. In the early 1950's, there were clashes between blacks and whites in the Notting Hill district of London, and in the 1980's, there were race riots between blacks and the police in the inner cities of London, Liverpool and Manchester. In 2001, it there more race riots, this time the descendants of Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants in the Northern towns of Oldham, Burnley and Bradford.

In August 2001, Member of Parliament Khalid Mahmood confidently remarked to the BBC that Birmingham was never going to have the race riots of northern towns because "The people of Birmingham have shown they don't want to get together behind the colour of your skin, but as somebody who's prepared to deliver and do some work for the community". Yet, just four years later, in October this year, racial violence errupted in Birmingham between black and Bangladeshi communities (link). Mahmood should have listened to University of Birmingham Sociologist, Gargi Bhattacharyya; she predicted, acurrately, that Birmingham was actually more, not less likely to experience race riots because it had an unusually large number of ethnic groups in a city only one-sixth the size of London (link).

Conclusion

Attlee's regime was mercifully short lived, but it had dramatic social and political influence that extended far beyond its life span right into the present day. He ruined Britains already terminally ill economy in an amateurish attempt to get money from the Americans to fund his mad socialist plans, and he casually used the British people as pawns in a mad social engineering experiment that his ideological zealotry prevented him from seeing was unworkable. Many of his policies were continued by subsequent administrations of both Conservatives and Labour. Many British people tell us we should fondly remember this man. But I remember him with the contempt he deserves.

Wall Street Crash and Peak Oil

Today is the anniversary of the infamous Wall Street Crash, perhaps the seminal social event of the C20th. The Crash turned a booming, confident economy into a depression wasteland. Millions were left unemployed and desperate, suicide rates soared and inflation ran out of control. The economic catastrophe eventually subsided, but not before radical political and social revolutionaries had taken advantage of the situation to create societies in their image, societies it took a World War and sixty million deaths to undo.

We in the West, indeed, in the world are facing a similar crash, thanks to the so called Peak Oil phenomena. We must understand this is not a minor hiccup, like a recession, this will be a depression. One must examine the first major "crash" and then see how dramatic the changes could be in its aftermath.

The Roaring Twenties

Throughout the 1920's, America's economy had been booming. Several European countries had bought heavily from the US, making its export market strong and keeping millions of people in manufacturing and transport in a stable job. Germany, which had been beaten in the First World War, had been required by the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles to pay "reparations" to France and other countries it had attacked, which amounted to the equivalent of trillions of dollars in today's money; the original scheme for payment would have taken till 1984 to pay off. Consequently, Germany had to borrow huge sums of money from the US banks (at interest of course), with which Germany could compensate the nations it had attacked. Furthermore, the strong American economy was fuelling US investment overseas, creating jobs and wealth in other countries as well.

Everything looked great in 1929. The "War to end all wars" had been fought and won, by the right side of course, the aggressors punished, and now a new world order, based on internationalism and supra national agencies like the newly formed League of Nations were going to keep the peace and better humanity. Furthermore, the American economy was fire hot, and the world was nice and stable. But all that was about to change.

Wall Street Crash : "Black Tuesday" October 24th 1929

An additional new comer to the 1920's had been the phenomena of "playing the market", which was popular with all walks of society. People could buy shares at a certain price through a stockbroker, and because of the confidence of the market and the economy's strength, these shares would increase in value, meaning they could be sold off at a future date, at a tidy profit for the investor. This was a booming business, and many poorer people who did not have the disposable income required to buy shares, obtained loans, sometimes very large, from banks to use to buy shares. Lets use an example-

You are a manual worker in 1920's America. You only earn a low wage, which all has to be spent on food and bills. You borrow $500 (a vast sum in those days) from the bank and buy 1,000 shares in a company with that money. Then, 6 months later, the shares are worth $750, so you sell them. You can then pay back the bank the $500 you borrowed and have a rather cool $250 profit left over. It couldn't fail! Everyone was buying shares, the prices of shares were soaring, meaning the scenario outlined here was common; it was like betting on a horse you knew was going to win. As more people bought shares, eager to get in on the action, prices rose, banks did more business with loans, and the economy remained powerful.

However, as Isaac Newton proved, what goes up, must come down. On October 24th 1929, exactly 75 years ago today, the bubble burst. The share prices suddenly stopped increasing in value, and many investors, fearing the gravy train was coming to a halt began selling their shares to get their profit and run. This triggered panic selling, and on that dark day, 13 million shares were sold in a single day, so desperate were the people to sell before the shares became worthless, and they lost their money. Just a month later, the stock market had lost over 40% of its value.

The stockbrokers, who had made fortunes during the roaring twenties, often neglected to mention to their investors that share prices could go down as well as up. This meant they had to understand that whilst they could "play the stock market", and in the twenties they would almost certainly win, there was a risk they would not. Many stockbrokers, blinded by greed and unwilling to halt the gravy train through pessimism, kept quiet. When the crash happened, many lost their fortunes over night. Many chose to leap from sky scrapers such was their sense of hopelessness and shame, so much so, New Yorkers would often look at stockbrokers leaping from the tall buildings and remark "Gee, another jumper".

Millions of people were ruined. The millions who had borrowed from banks to buy shares they believed would always keep climbing in value found they actually had lost money because of the crash. To use our example, lets say you buy 1,000 shares at $500, only for the crash to make them worth $200. So now, not only are you $300 out of pocket, and lets remember what a vast sum this was in those days, but you also have to pay the bank the $500 you borrowed, making your debts over $800; and don't forget interest charges, the longer you take to repay it, the more you owe. Millions were unable to pay, and had their homes seized by angry landlords, furious at unpaid rent. Children went hungry and bare foot, and men wandered the streets with signs bearing heart breaking messages like "Will work for food", and women, desperate to feed their children sold themselves into prostitution, with all its attendant risks. Soup kitchens were set up.

Banks also went bust, partly because people simply could not afford to pay back the millions of dollars worth of loans the banks were owed, and this problem was made worse by desperate savings account holders who pulled their money out of the bank vaults to hide under their beds, only trusting currency they could see and touch, and not the dots and dashes on stockbrokers paperwork. It could be this that explains the older generations mistrust of credit cards and electronic wealth.

Put simply, the American economy, which at the start of the days trading on October 24th had been fire hot and on the crest of a never ending boom, was in ruins just weeks later. They say that when America coughs, Europe catches a cold. Now America had caught something much more serious than a cough, and Europe was going to catch it too.

Europe feels the impact

All across Europe, the effects of America's economic collapse were felt. As jobs were lost, European nations fell into Depression, and similarly desperate, heart breaking scenes were repeated on this side of the Atlantic. My own family also felt the pain; my great grandmother, herself only a slightly built teenage girl at the time of the Crash, was forced into scavenging in railway yards for excess coal, which she carried in sacks on her back for several miles to take home to help keep the family warm. In George Orwell's novel Road to Wigan Pier, he describes railway scavenging in an emotive passage which I cannot read without picturing my great grandmother being bowled aside by men twice her size and just as desperate for coal.

If things were bad for my great grandmother, things were infinitely worse in other countries. Germany, which had been almost entirely dependent on loans from the US banks to fund its reparations to France, now had two problems. Firstly, these US banks, many on the verge of collapse began demanding a hike in interest charges such was their desperation to keep afloat which Germany could not afford, and secondly, because the Germans could no longer afford the loans, France was not getting its reparations. France was furious that it was not getting its reparations, money it needed as it was hardly spared the horrors of the Wall Street Crash.

In Germany, the decadent Weimar Republic (link), lost all respect, and the mainstream political parties who had also lost the confidence of the people could no longer woo the voters. Something radical was needed to cope with this unforeseen crisis, and two contesting visions were put forward, one of Communism, which stated that this whole problem was the fault of greedy adventure capitalists and banks, and the other which was the Nazi's, who said the whole thing was the fault of the Treaty of Versailles, without which Germany would not have had to cripple its economy with reparations. The Nazi's, with their promise to reverse the Treaty, by war if necessary, won the day. Germany got a new Chancellor in Hitler. Across the world, nationalist parties came to power, who would be pulled along in his slip stream. And the rest as they say is history....

Peak Oil

The Peak Oil theory was first put forward by the American geologist Hubbert, who predicted that by the early C21st, more than half of the commercially extractable oil on earth would have been extracted. After this point, it would become increasingly expensive and difficult to extract oil from the remaining oil fields of earth. What Hubbert was saying was not that the worlds oil was going to run out; what he was saying was that cheap oil was running out, and it is cheap oil that is the blood of the global economy.

To use an example, it costs 1 unit of energy to extract a single barrel of oil from the ground, which has around 80 units worth of energy in it. Therefore, for the drilling cost of just 1 unit, we have a gallon drum of oil capable of giving out nearly 80 times the energy it took to extract it, a cool profit of 79 units. Clearly, this is commercially viable and profitable, and because there is/was so much of this cheap, easy to extract oil, it was easy to buy. Despite the grumblings of many consumers, oil still remains surprisingly low considering its importance.

Cheap fuel is what allows our supermarkets to transport food across continents to our shelves. Cheap fuel allows us to go to work and do our jobs and thus have money to pay our rent, bills and taxes, and buy consumer high street goods, consumer spending also being a strong buttress for the West's economies. Cheap fuel powers our ambulances, fire engines and police cars and cheap fuel allows us to jet around the world on various vacations. Its not just the fuel that's vital to the West; oil can be used to make more than just fuel (link). Plastics are derived from cheap oil, and plastic is everywhere in our society, from the keyboard I am typing at now, to medicines and hi tech medical equipment. When the cheap oil runs out, even these items will be expensive and scarce.

Seismic Shift

We will see the "peak oil crash" in our lifetime, my guess is no more than 20 years away. As the crash happens, we can expect lots of economic sliding; share prices dropping, interest rates fluctuating wildly, taxes being altered etc. None of which is going to wash to well with the public, and this inevitable down turn in consumer confidence will hit high street spending; why buy a new shirt or CD when you need the cash for your (now expensive) fuel to drive to work each day? And that means more job losses, especially if you work in a shirt or CD shop.

Another response will be fuel rationing, which we in Britain saw during the "Fuel Crisis" just a few years ago, when angry protestors blockaded oil refineries across the UK. During this period, very bad tempered motorists either lined up for hours for rationed fuel, or they had to cram into over crowded trains and buses. Supermarkets after just one week began unofficially rationing bread and milk, and people dependent upon cheap fuel for their direct living, like taxi drivers and truck drivers joined the protests. Blair only survived because he bluffed the protestors into calling off the blockade. Imagine this when the peak oil crash hits....

The government will also take measures like fuel rationing and possibly mandatory power cuts to prevent energy wastage, all of which will create a sense of intrusion into ones private life. There will also be a feeling of resentment, that we are forced onto over crowded public transport, whilst our leaders, I doubt, will abandon their limousines and private jets.

The apolitical lemmings, who don't as of yet care about what their political masters do to them, will also be effected. Content to wander through life buying CD's and cable TV subscriptions, or sunning themselves on beaches on their annual vacation, they will have these things taken away from them. The economic depression that will follow the peak oil crash means there will be no spare money to afford a season ticket to watch your team, buy cable TV or sun yourself on a beach. This, could be the key turning point.

As the Romans observed, you can control the lemmings with "panem et circenses" that is, bread and circuses. Put another way, as long as the lemmings are entertained by professional athletes or TV soap opera's, and have their bills more or less paid and their bellies more or less full, they will tolerate almost anything from their leaders. Part of the reason the lemmings do not join us patriots is because they have it too easy; why hand out leaflets telling the truth about the EU when you can watch the Champions league on cable? Why man a petition stall in the rain when you can sit on a beach in Spain?

But the comfort, bread and circuses the lemmings enjoy will not be with them when Peak Oil strikes. Denied their entertainment and vacations, which they consider their right, and possibly facing redundancy, lots of souls will be searched very intensely. Without the distractions of cable TV or foreign package vacations, suffering under the crash induced burden of personal financial crises and angered by the governments intrusive attempts to manage the problem, the population will be very receptive to new, radical ideas for re-structuring society.

Conclusion

In 1929, a global order based on rampant free marketeering, stock market speculation, and international "co-operation" at the League of Nations fell apart. It fell because it suffered a truly epoch making, devastating economic collapse and this triggered mass suffering on a global scale. This suffering made a docile, feckless public of lemmings suddenly more open to change, and change they got (to say the least).

We in the next two decades will see a similar collapse. Indeed, we now live in a "Global Village", where global markets are even more inter dependent than the US-Europe relationship of the 1920's, meaning such a global economic catastrophe is more, not less likely. It may be better described as a wither than a crash, with our economy withering away over a few short years rather than on one days trading like in 1929. To use an analogy, 1929 was a sudden death; the Peak Oil crash will be a slow, haemorage death. But make no mistake the crash is coming. The question is, are you ready for it? Some say the governments will save us. Don't be under any illusions the government will see it coming and avert it, as the greed of the fossil fuels companies and the politicians in their pay will prevent decisive action till its too late. Some, especially economic "experts", claim stock market protective measures, introduced to prevent another "Black Tuesday" ever happening again, will save us, even if the politicians don't or wont. Claims that these stock market preventitive measures will prevent this crash are false. These laws, limit the number of shares per day that can be sold and thus prevent "panic selling" don't prevent a long term withering of the market.

Like or loathe the parties that discuss how to take advantage of the Peak Oil crisis, they are light years ahead of the establishment in their understanding of just how severe it will be. And this means the future will probably belong to them...

Immunisation and the power of information

As I right this report, the deadly bid flu virus is sweeping across the world, and is now inside the borders of the European Union. The real fear is that it will mutate and trigger a global flu pandemic which could kill millions. For this reason, several governments are talking about the need to buy vaccines to immunise the population. In other words, giving us just a small injection to forever protect us from the effects of the threat. But it is inoculation of a different kind we in the West need, and that is inoculation from the propaganda of the far left, that so hypnotises and anaesthetises our people, preventing them from acting decisively to defend their values and freedom.

Inoculation Theory

The Korean War was a shocking time, but one of the most shocking features of all was the behaviour of many captured American GI's. Many had made public statements denouncing democracy and capitalism and pledging their support for communism. After the war when the prisoners returned, it transpired that Korean jailers had "brain washed" the GI's. In actuality, they had simply asked the GI's to defend democracy and capitalism, and because the belief these things were good was taken for granted in 1950's America, none of the GI's could explain why they believed what they did. This placed them in a weak position where they didn't know what they believed anymore, and opened them up to the follow up communist propaganda.

This led the American military to believe that the key to preventing this in future wars was to "inoculate" troops, in other words, to provide them with a psychological means of defending their beliefs when under attack from enemy propagandists. This need was first investigated by the psychologist McGuire in 1964. In his study, participants were asked to rate their levels of agreement with several statements (e.g. "it is good to brush your teeth twice a day"). It was found that if a person was mildly attacked on their health beliefs, these health beliefs got stronger, analogous to medical immunisation, where we are given a small dose of the illness so the body knows how to respond to the full blown disease.

Since then, the theory has been expanded upon, and there are now two accepted ways of "immunising" yourself against propaganda

1) Inoculation defense - this is where the enemy's point of view is examined, critiqued and then demolished. This means that when the enemy propaganda is used against us, we instantly have counter-arguments in memory we can use against it, and thus remain uninfected by it. An example of this inoculation defense is an article I wrote a while back (link)

2) Supportive defense - this is where information that supports our existing view is expanded upon and presented in new and different ways. This inoculates us against enemy propaganda because it makes us more sure of what we believe, and better able to defend those beliefs to others. Examples of this are basically every article that supports our position.

Both are absolutely critical if we are going to defend our people from the onslaught of ceaseless, droning leftist propaganda. I would urge all patriots to read up more on these theories, and to apply them in their activism.

The power of information

"Hitler, Stalin and Mao were right about one thing; the power of books" - Anonymous

The above quote is essentially stating the truth; information is power. Books were the way information was stored and distributed at the time it was coined, but in the modern era it is way too restrictive. Information can be conveyed across any medium, from the internet and satellite to simple leaflets and chats over the dinner table. Information is power; never forget that.

In any state with totalitarian objectives, be it the classic totalitarians of the USSR or North Korea, or such as the post-modern leftist semi-dictatorships of the West, the principle is unchanging. Both types of regime operate on similar lines concerning how they deal with information; they quickly bring all mass media either under their direct control as was the case in the USSR, or alternatively under their de facto control, for example in Italy, where whilst the state does not control the media, the Italian prime minister appoints the heads of certain TV channels. One common theme in all totalitarian states is that there is an "official ideology" of the state, of which criticism is forbidden.

You may argue that whilst his was true in the USSR and Nazi Germany, this is not true of the post-modern West. After all, people attack the government all the time on a number of issues with no legal consequence. Partly true there. Yes, you can attack the regimes position on taxation and other aspects of its rule to all your hearts content, because these attacks are not pointed at the heart of the ideology. That is no problem to the regime, but stating its deeply, fanatically held leftist ideology is wrong is a bridge too far, and this is why anything that attacks their ideology is treated so harshly in law.

But these regimes all need a pressure valve. They need to be able to create a vent into which dissent can be controlled; for example, in the USSR, there was a section of the official state newspaper Pravda called "Readers Letters". In this citizens could write their complaints, usually about mundane things, for example complaining about the state of litter on a certain street or angrily asking why there were no flowers in a local park etc. This allowed the citizens to vent their frustration, but the editors of Pravda were careful about what they printed. People who wrote in with letters attacking any aspect of the official ideology would not only get printed; the name and address of the writer would be forwarded to the KGB, who would have a "chat" with the writer...

We have a similar phenomena in the West. Our leaders let us have protests, and permit us to write letters to the press complaining about x, y and z. But attack the ideology, and its a different story.

Leftist management of information

If you want to defend your beliefs, you need information about examples which support it. For we patriotic Westerners, this is no problem, as we have a small thing called "the truth" to support our views. Indeed, the Greek writer Sophocles was correct when he said "The truth is the strongest argument". But what if your a leftist, and thus the ideology you are selling to the people is intrinsically untrue? There is not going to be any examples of information that support your view, or at very best only weak ones which can easily be explained alternatively. So there are several tactics the leftist can adopt.

Information supports regime ideology? Give it prominence

The leftist can give prominence in the news and media to stories that support the official ideology. For example, when black teenager Anthony Walker was murdered in Liverpool England in 2005, the media had a feeding frenzy (link). There were endless stories in the media about how wonderful and special this young man was, how much everyone in his community loved him, and we were treated to endless photographs of his cherubic smile and tear jerking interviews with his loved ones. The "anti-fascist" group "Love Music Hate Racism" concert in Liverpool was held in his honour. His funeral was televised live on national television, and the funeral was held in the magnificent settings of Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral, the service conducted by the Bishop of Liverpool, one the most senior clerics in the nation.

You see, Walker's murder "fitted" the ideological narrative of the leftist; innocent black man being set upon by racist white thugs. This meant it was given lots of prominent coverage in the media, and one could almost envisage a leftist jumping up and down with excitement as he pointed at the TV coverage of Walkers murder shouting "Told you so! Told you so!", such was his conviction that this murder had "proved" his leftist views on racism were correct. This was information that supported the leftist regime, and because that kind of thing doesn't come along that often, it gets endless coverage. American visitors to my site will see parallels with the Rodney King and James Byrd "dragging death" incidents and the Matthew Shepard "homophobic" killing, all of which have been given limitless prominence and media coverage because they "fit" the leftist regimes ideological narrative.

Information could cast doubt on regime ideology? Ignore it

Sometimes events occur which definitely do not fit the ideological narrative of the leftist. An excellent example is the case of Richard Whelan, a white man who was stabbed to death on a bus in London by a black passenger the very same week that Anthony Walker was murdered in Liverpool (link). The background was Whelan was sat on the bus when a black passenger threw chips at him; when he asked the man to stop throwing them, he responded by stabbing him to death in front of his girlfriend before casually getting off the bus.

You see this story could seriously effect the leftist propaganda about racial violence. In leftist dogma, black men are always oppressed and innocent, like Anthony Walker, and not sometimes anti-social and violent like the black man who killed Richard Whelan. If the news about this killing had gotten anything like the coverage Walkers got, the leftist racial ideology could have been seriously compromised. Therefore, the media largely ignored it; yes, it reported the murder, as it would report any murder, but that was it. No endless parades of pictures of the handsome Richard Whelan. No interviews with crying family members. No televised funeral in a magnificent cathedral overseen by a senior cleric. No concerts organised in his memory.

This case, not just because of what it was, but when it was, was too difficult for the leftist regime to deal with and explain using its narrow racial doctrines. Rather than potentially make matters worse with feeble attempts to explain it, the best thing for the leftist to do, was just downplay it, and bury it. And that's exactly what they did. A similar principle was in operation to cover up the particularly vicious "Wichita Massacre" in 2000 (link).

Information refutes regime ideology? Option 1 Control access to it

Thanks to the internet, and the legacy of free speech we had from previous pre-leftist takeover days, there is still information available out there that attacks the leftist ideology very directly. This is not information that as a side effect casts doubt on the official ideology, as was the case in the Whelan murder; this is information written by people who know full well what the leftist regime is upto, and who are not afraid to warn others and inoculate them against its propaganda.

Increasingly, the leftist is realising that alternative media, over which it has little or no control, is a major danger to it. It outflanks the leftist power structure, operates beneath the radar and is a constant danger to them. In some cases, this "unofficial" information is banned outright, as is the case with "hate speech" legislation, which is deliberately vaguely worded, and was only ever intended as a trap in which to catch right wingers who protest against their leftist regimes. It was never about protecting people from violence, as we already have those rules on the books. No, "hate speech" legislation is simply political gagging.

In some cases, especially in the United States where a very broad tolerance for speech exists, the government cannot outright ban certain forms of information dissemination. But there are indirect ways you can still restrict access to it; for example, the web search engine AOL has removed several websites from its listings deemed "politically incorrect", and this has also been done by Google, now the worlds largest web search engine. This is very subtle, but profound, as it states "the information is out there, but I'm going to make it very hard for you to find it". Only the most determined free thinking person will have the determination and inclination to find it, and such people, fortunately for the regime, are in short supply.

Information refutes regime ideology? Option 2 Cloak it in controversy

The Maori people of New Zealand often had wooden totem poles in their villages. It was held by their culture that if anyone touched the totem pole, they would die instantly. In their language, these totem pole were called "Tapoo", which is where we get the word "taboo" from, meaning any topic of discussion or investigation that has been deemed "out of bounds" by the society in question. As the Maori would discover when the British arrived in New Zealand, you don't die when you touch a taboo. Having said that, there are more ways to die than literally. Granted, in the USSR, if you touched a taboo e.g. is communism such a good idea, you would indeed die, although your death would have more to do with a KGB bullet in the back of the skull than Polynesian sorcery. However, you can also "die" professionally, especially in academia, a long standing bastion of extreme leftism.

Being a Masters Degree holder in Psychology, I can think of several examples in my field. When Professor Eysenck remarked that racial differences in IQ may exist, he was showered with abuse and called a Nazi, despite the fact Eysenck is Jewish. When Professor Arthur Jensen, speaking at the height of the so called "Civil Rights" era said that racial differences in IQ were genetic and not caused by poverty, he was abused by peers and received death threats. In Canada when Professor Jean-Phillipe Rushton stated that racial differences in IQ existed, he too received death threats, had to endure endless disruptions to his classes by "activists" staging sit-ins and on one occasion was physically assaulted by a student. Most recently, in Australia when Professor Andrew Fraser remarked that mass third world immigration was not such a good idea, he was attacked by university management and offered early "retirement" (in other words sacking him).

These academic martyrs are victims of leftist purges. You see, as long as you have people who challenge the official leftist ideology in positions of influence (standing in front of classes of several hundred young people), they are a threat to the regime, because they can and do disseminate information which challenges and undermines the leftist regime. Academic martyrdom is a big price to pay; many academic journals refuse to print research papers from "black listed" names. These martyrs are denied the right to teach their classes, depriving them of their contact with the students, and depriving struggling students of their expertise. They are passed over and ignored for promotions. Furthermore, the idyllic ivy clad safety of college campuses disappears as well, as the professors may have their car vandalised or their office door caked in accusational graffiti or they may even be physically attacked or threatened.

Information refutes regime ideology? Option 3 Deny it

If information challenges the regime, they can always restrict access to it. If you make it difficult for people to find websites that challenge the leftist ideology, that's helpful, but people sometimes get through that barrier. If they do that, you need to take up the next step, which is wrapping it in controversy to make it "taboo" and thus scare people who have got the information away from telling others. However, sometimes events occur, and information becomes available which the leftist can neither control access to or wrap in taboo. In these cases, the leftist just issues flat denials.

A good example is when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, triggering widespread looting and lawlessness, right in front of the world news camera's in real time, in broad daylight. The leftist media could not ignore such a massive event, nor could it control access to stories about it, and surprisingly, it could not wrap the discussion in taboo, as it was so blindingly obvious that most of the looters were inner city black welfare dependents. So the leftist began issuing flat denials.

In the first instance, as the looting was still going on, the leftist media denied there was any opportunist looting, and told us people were only looting for "the bare essentials to live", but this denial was quickly refuted by images of looters carrying DVD's, designer sports wear and crates of looted alcohol. With this denial laid to rest, the leftist denied this looting and violence reflected the character of the looters, and was instead the result of "poverty", only for people to point out that this looting did not happen after the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004. Now, the official leftist story is that the looting reports were "exaggerated" and the left continues to deny many of the stories about looting and violence to this day.

Conclusion

Information is power. The majority of people in the West do not know the full information about what our leftist regimes leaders have planned for us. As long as they only have half the story, or don't have it at all, and as long as they are unaware of the information manipulation tactics used against us, the leftist will continue to march us further down the path of leftist tyranny. But we can fight back. We need to pass on the truth about the far left using every medium available to us. I myself have phoned local radio station chat shows, have a blog, speak out in public forums and tell my friends all I can, such is my desire to get the truth out there and immunise my fellow citizens against the far left. The most beautiful words a political activist can hear is "I never knew that before", as it shows you have immunised a person against the propaganda. You see an immunised person almost never falls for the manipulation tactics I mentioned earlier, because they are forever immunised.

In medical research, once a person is immunised against a disease, they are free to enter the laboratory and work on a cure to finally defeat the disease, which they can do effectively only when they are immunised against it. We too, are fortunate in that we are immune to leftist propaganda thanks to the information we have and share with each other. This means we are the tip of the sword in the fight against creeping leftist tyranny; the more people we tell the truth to and immunise, the more people can join us and the sharper that sword becomes.

As I sign off, I gaze out of my window, and can see a flock of birds flying in a V shaped formation over head. Maybe they are carrying bird flu. However, I think about the leftist and his end goals; I think about his plans and ruthlessness. And all of a sudden, I don't fear the birds anymore. Its immunisation against the true danger (leftism) which our people need. And that is what we must strive to give them....

Revolutionary Defeatism; the key to understanding the far left

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" - Anonymous

Ever wondered why the far left supports mass immigration, despite the fact that demographic change is a proven recipe for anarchy and civil war? (link) Ever wondered why the far left supports gay militancy, despite the fact every society in history has recognised that the heterosexual nuclear family is the basic building block of stable societies? (link) Ever wondered why far leftists support criminals human rights and a "softly softly" approach to fighting crime, despite the fact that any society that can no longer protect itself from criminals is anarchic and chaotic? (link) Why is it leftists so energetically support the notion of "separation of church and state" and other policies aimed at secularising a nation, despite the fact religious beliefs provide an moral and societal stability? (link)

Well, in order to understand all of this, one must understand the little known, but extremely important Marxist belief in "Revolutionary defeatism". Put simply, it states that anything which causes instability and/or will one day lead to societal implosion and chaos must be supported by Marxists. The reason is, Marxists hold western society is hopelessly "fascist" and "capitalist" and therefore has to be totally annihilated, even if it is a gradual process rather than an instant one. In other words, Marxists are waging asymmetric warfare on the traditional West. They support "progressive causes" not because they believe in them; they simply support them because deep down they know full well that these causes will harm the stability of the west and contribute towards its eventual implosion. In other words, leftists don't support these causes in spite of the fact they harm society, but support them because they harm society! The only thing left to do, is to wrap up the cause in flowery language like "social justice", so as to disguise their true reasons for supporting it, and to stop the lemmings from seeing what is really happening.

Reform vs Revolution

It is said that people who want to change society can be divided into one of two camps; they are either reformers or revolutionaries. To illustrate the difference, lets use an analogy; lets say there is a house we want to change. The reformer will advocate buying new furniture, changing the carpets, re-wallpapering, maybe adding an extension to the side of the house, fitting central heating etc. In other words, whilst society is essentially ok, it does need some changes of various types to restore it to maximum strength and potential.

Revolutionaries however, are different. They advocate completely demolishing the house, tearing up the foundations and building a new house completely from scratch in its place. They regard the house as being totally against what they wish to build, so they set about trying to tear it down aggressively, clearing the way to build a new house on the site of the rubble of the old. Marxists and other leftists definitely fall into this latter category.

Leftist doctrine states that white, Western, capitalist society is so intrinsically evil and corrupt, that nothing short of its total, compete and final annihilation will do. As one American writer noted, in the past Marxists used to dedicate almost as much time discussing what they would build in its place, whereas now, modern leftists are concerned simply with tearing it down, confident that a society will be built in its place which is "inevitably" better.

False Consciousness and Useful Idiots

Two concepts are important to understand when discussing revolutionary defeatism, these being "false consciousness" and "useful idiots".

An excellent example of false consciousness is Islamic fundamentalism. Leftists hold that Muslims really want to overthrow capitalism and live in a classless utopia, but their religion stops them from seeing that (opium of the masses and all that). Eventually, leftists believe that Muslims will be secularised and made into good classless utopianites. However in the mean time, they are useful shock troops against the West leftists so hate; as early as 1920, the USSR was training Muslim terrorists at training camps in Uzbekistan to attack the West. Another example of false consciousness is black nationalism. Again, Marxists hold what black nationalists really want is to overthrow capitalism and live in a classless utopia, but their dedication to their racial group interests prevents them from seeing this. Leftists hold they too will one day become classless, raceless utopianites, but in the meantime, they too are useful shock troops; this explains the USSR's support for the "Uhuru" uprisings in Africa throughout the C20th (link).

However, the examples above were examples of leftists using proxy armies to attack other people in other countries whom the leftist were opposed too. In the C21st, the proxies are being used to help tear down the societies in which the leftists are currently living! This usually takes the form of "championing" the causes of the aforementioned groups; Marxists were heavily involved in the so called "Civil Rights" movement, which was aimed not at racial equality, but at harming the stability of society. As Cohen articulated, Marxists were championing black causes because they would inevitably lead to societal breakdown, as different racial groups were pitted against each other (link).

Marxists are also heavily involved in promoting and sustaining the high levels of third world immigration into the West, which threatens to balkanise and disintegrate the West in the long run. When Enoch Powell said the West was "...building up the funeral pyre of its own destruction" he probably had no idea how accurately he was describing the leftist plans. Leftists who started mass immigration like Clement Attlee and Lyndon Johnson, and modern leftists like the various anti-deportation "charities" who are promoting the continuation of this flow, did/do so because they know it will eventually lead to societal disintegration. When leftists promote "hate crime" laws that give special protection to minority interest groups, they do so because they both know and hope it will further nudge society towards implosion and conflict. When they angrily protest that "X MUST STAY" in a deportation hearing, they are doing so because they hope and know it will push society towards implosion. They do not care about the person concerned, they simply wish to use them as another log on the funeral pyre on which they will burn the West to ashes before they rebuild it in their sick, far left image.

It is extra ordinary to think leftists can be so ruthless and cold beneath the public mask of caring about "human rights", "social justice" and "equality". They do not care about these causes, much less believe in them. They are however, excellent buzz words which to attract allies, and in particular, well meaning but hopelessly misled idealists who are "useful idiots" as Lenin once called them. The definition of a useful idiot is a person or group who support the far left despite the fact they apparently have good reason not too. For example, a Christian minister who supports the far lefts push for "social justice", despite the fact the far left hates religion. Another example is the group "Journey of Hope" (link), an organisation for people who have lost loved ones to criminal violence, and therefore should know better than anyone else the cost of softly softly leftist approaches to crime; yet they say that victims/victims families should show "forgiveness" and "understanding" towards the killers/rapists of their loved ones. The phrase useful idiots could have been invented for these people!

"By any means necessary"...

Anything which harms the stability of the current Western civilization is seen by leftists as a good thing, as it will help smash down the West and clear the ground for the re-building of society in the far lefts image. And I do mean anything. Indeed, the phrase "By any means necessary" is a common motto of far left groups, first attributed to the Marxist inspired leaders of the so called "Civil Rights" movement (link), and even today, it features prominently in many leftist writings, slogans and posters (link). The reason this section gets a separate, if small sub-section, is because its critical to understand leftists will and do support any cause that is ultimately harmful to societal stability, indeed, a good measure of whether or not a cause is harmful to the West is to see if leftists are supporting it. If so, you can rest assured its ultimately harmful to us. It does not have to be immediately harmful, just as long as it is ultimately harmful. Smoking twenty cigarettes in a day may not kill you immediately that day, but in twenty years time.....

Conclusion

We have seen that leftists support a number of "progressive causes", not because they believe in them, but because they know deep down they are causes which will ultimately destabilise the west and cause its implosion. Leftists dress these causes up in flowery names to attract allies and useful idiots, and also to camouflage their true intentions so as not to alarm the average man in the street as to their true end goal.

These causes are slow acting, but rest assured they are corrosive and will cause the implosion of the West if something is not done to stop it. An American writer once remarked that leftists cultural subversion could be compared to waves hitting a cliff, on which was seated a house, the house representing our society. Each individual wave may be small, but it chips away at the cliff face, eroding it slowly and surely until the cliff finally collapses and the house falls into the sea to be destroyed. Leftists have become masters of gradualism, destroying the West through small steps and various causes. Leftists know this, which is why they have changed tactics, from preaching taking the society in a single violent coup e'tat as they did in 1917, to helping a society become rotten so it withers and falls into the lap of leftists. Lenin himself once used such an analogy to describe how successful gradualism could be.

We have two options; option one is we will expose the lies and true motivation of leftists support for certain causes. This will awaken our people to roll back the damage they have done to our culture and secure our future. Leftists cloak their intentions in colourful altruistic sounding language because they truly fear being exposed for what they are; shameless opportunists, using every trick in the book to try and destroy the West. Or option two, we will shrug our shoulders at leftist cultural subversion, waiting for someone else to stop it, until we fall into the foaming sea beneath the cliff face, with anything but a guarantee that we will ever climb out again.

The Chinese have a saying; when you hunt tigers, learn about tigers, learn about their habitat, their diet, their habits and their tactics. If you do not fully know about the tiger, you are not hunting tigers, you are just walking in the woods. A Western equivalent phrase is "Know your enemy". I know mine, how they think, how they operate and what their end goal is, and the tactics they will use to try and silence and stop me. Do you? In order to defeat the far left, we need to know him, and without a grasp of the concept of revolutionary defeatism, we do not truly know our enemy; we are just walking in the woods....