Thus, in capitalist society, we have a democracy that is curtailed, poor, false; a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to Communism, will, for the first time, produce democracy for the people, for the majority, side by side with […]
Anne Pringle replaces Tony Brenton as HM Ambassador in Moscow, to official Russian smirking. This is, I think, the most senior diplomatic position in terms of batting weight ever achieved by a woman in HM Diplomatic Service. Yo. One of the problems as a senior diplomat posted overseas is how […]
Take the piece by Kishore Mahbubani on the Guardian’s site today: "The Sermons of Cowards". Into the sausage machine are thrown the usual ingredients. Guantanamo, "the gulag of our times"; the USA’s Patriot Act ("In the face of threats from terrorism, the population has, in effect, accepted a reduction of […]
Looking again at the twitterings of Mr Mahbubani, one comes away wondering why he is so patronising towards if not contemptuous of his fellow Asians. Let’s assume the world is complicated and that running any sort of government structure and pursuing numerous different policy objectives requires ever-higher levels of sophistication […]
Type “South Africa peaceful transition” into Google and over a million hits appear. There are references aplenty to statements such as this: South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy was indeed a miracle that captured the imagination of people all over the world. Wikipedia has been spotted proclaiming that the post-apartheid Government of South Africa have made […]
Via Ed Driscoll (who has the best hat in the blogosphere) this account from Lileks of the 1943 Nazi version of Titanic, presented by those National Socialists as explicitly anti-capitalist propaganda. It’s all on YouTube in bite-sized chunks. Here is Part 8: the wicked capitalists continue their drunken scheming as […]
They said that if President Bush were re-elected we would see a ruthless clamp-down on dissent and freedom of speech. And they were right!
One of the many Stalinist Very Big Lies still echoing on down the ages is that there can be no attempted equivalence between Nazism and Communism, since Nazism (as Extreme Rightism) was an explicitly racist ideology whereas Communism (as part of general Leftism generally) utterly repudiated racism. This is not a dead […]
(Transparency Note: I met Jonah on a cruise back in 2005 and enjoyed his ideas and company. But we were not lovers.) What to make of Jonah Goldberg’s remarkable (if long) new book Liberal Fascism? Plenty. His basic thesis boils down to three propositions: First, non-trivial parts of today’s Western Leftist/progressive style and […]
I have been invited to take part in a debate in London later this year to discuss the proposition that "Western Policy in the Balkans since 1991 has been a Disaster". As someone involved in formulating part of that policy I am down to argue against this proposition. What to […]
