THE “DEATH” OF THE LEFT?

By Gene Berman

Time has not, in recent history, been kind to the Left. But, in a very real sense, it may be considered to have been far kinder than deserved and (momentary triumphalism aside) it should be obvious that the Left (as Jesus said of the poor) "are ever with us."

"The Left" is neither political movement nor coherent philosophy. Rather, it is the catch-all refuge of all that is negative and vicious in the human psyche. The Left organizes and justifies the poor, the weak, and the failed--to find outside themselves (personally, ethnically, religiously, nationally) those "root causes" for what are nothing more than the most ordinary human inadequacies.

The Left is the nihilistic politics of resentment, malice, jealousy, and revenge. It (the Left) may be fought -- even suppressed -- but cannot be eradicated; it shall be ever with us, its endurance due to its very humanness. Inferiority and dissatisfaction are the universal, omnipresent characteristics of the human personality.

No (sane) man can be other than keenly aware of his "place" in a bewildering array of hierarchically-ordered comparisons. Improvement in most of these is open to nearly all (indeed, is pursued with varying success by nearly all) and the lack of complete success in most resolved by adjustment to reality and a healthy integration in society. Everyday life brings abundant examples of both phenomena but, as well, an equal abundance of failure to achieve either the desired improvement or the reasonable adjustment.

In other words, every man who is not a king, who is not the richest, who is not as big, strong, fast, smart, brave, handsome, admired, respected, famous, and sexually-surfeited -- every man who has ever endured the slightest dissatisfaction with his existence -- is a potential target for the lure of the Left. That's an awful lot of people! The Left is the political expression and organization of what, in relation to medicine and physical health, is termed "quackery." It offers (to all sufferers -- of whatever ails them) the illusion of a coherent etiology for their unsatisfactory conditions, whatever they may be, and a "program" -- nostrums for their relief.

It would be an easier task to eliminate homeopathy, naturopathy, chiropractic, "holistic," and other "alternative" medicines (as well as belief in the supernatural: fortune-telling, "channeling," ESP, astrology, spells, and demons) from their acceptance over the world than to eliminate the constantly-renewable reservoir upon which the Left is constituted and feeds. To recognize these things is not defeatist nor does it suggest the disparagement of successes, whether enduring or evanescent; it is simply acknowledgment that the "battle" is forever.

Pope Tells All In The Star

By Arlene Peck

Dang! I just discovered I've been looking for love, or fair and unbiased reporting in all the wrong places. All this time I've been writing and complaining about the attacks on Israel from mainstream papers like The Los Angeles Times. Or, I've watched CNN and the BBC spew their hatred and, I shouldn't have been paying any attention to them. Folks, I've discovered it's the trash scandal sheets that know the real scoop.

For instance, while on a recent trip to the hairdressers, I sat under the dryer with a stack of those magazines that are read by everybody but, no one has ever admitted to buying. What a Mecca of real information.

For instance, did you know that "The Star" had the real scoop on 'alleged anti-Semite' Mel Gibson's new movie, "The Passion of the Christ". It was from none other than "The Man'" Pope John Paul II who apparently despite his failing eyesight and the apparent inability to form a coherent sentence, has seen this movie and "given it two thumbs up". I find it truly amazing that at this point in time the Pope who appears to have to have his head propped up could even raise that hand, but hey, it was a Vatican official who reported it so how could there be any doubt.

Except Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, (according to the L.A. Times and we know how truthful they are) quoted Foxman as saying he snuck into a screening, paid a $295 registration fee and found it "painful, offensive and capable of stoking anti-Semitism."

Interesting how the Jews could look at this abomination and find it "unambiguous portrayal of Jew as being responsible for the death of Jesus. And concerned that Mel's movie "could fuel latent anti-Semitism that exists in the hearts of those people who hold Jews responsible for the death of Jesus." Funny, how the Catholics see the same thing and give it "two thumbs up."

An article in the mainstream press denies that the pope made any reference to Gibson's movie, for or against. So who knows what the real story is folks; but I'm sticking with the Star, because you know how reliable the mainstream press is especially when it comes to Jews and Israel."

Anyway, this same Vatican official reported "It is as it was" the Holy One said." And, hey, he should know. He was probably there.

I wonder if this movie goer Pope who has been ever so vocal about the dangers of the Fence that Israel has been building to protect them from the violent neighbors who surround them has ever noticed the monstrous fence that encompasses his hometown, Vatican City? And, that's just to keep out the tourists who are vying for one of those favored visits with him. Remember how cute he and Arafat were in those photo-ops?

I suppose he's been to busy being a movie critic to notice those stories and lawsuits the Catholic church has been paying out to victims of pedophiles.
And, speaking of that! The Star was full of all kinds of juicy tid-bits about super star Michael Jackson's (Jacko's) Dream Team.

Imagine my surprise when next to a full page spread of the friends and supporters of' possible upcoming felon Jackson I should see, next to a clip of Louis Farrakhan, "Jackson pal Rabbi Shmuley Boteach! How delighted I was to see a picture of the good Rabbi, kepot and all, smiling into the camera saying, "I don't believe Michael Jackson is a pedophile. It is the rest of his life that is so screwed up." And, "The Star" heard if first.

Actually, that triggered thoughts of another encounter I had with the "celebrity Rabbi' It was a couple of years ago and he was promoting that scholarly book, "Kosher Sex". He had arranged at a local theatre a 'dialogue' with yet more paragons of virtue, Hustler Magazine publisher, Larry Flint and "white trash with money", Rosanne who now is redeemed because she's discovered Kabala.

Naturally the audience was filled to the brim with young Orthodox kids who had come to be enlightened with their dialogue of sex, pornography and I'm sure religion was tied in there somewhere. When the Rabbi was able to get a word in edgewise, between Rosanne's four-letter expletives, he was generous in his praise with those who shared the stage with him. So, I wasn't too surprised in the class he showed by praising his good friend Michael Jackson.

Yet, another surprise was awaiting me in the full page spread of "Jacko's Dream Team" Liza Minnelli ) was also in this 'Star special' giving glowing reports to "suspected" pedophile Jackson. Now, would you have ever seen such earth-shattering news in the mainstream press? Probably.

But elsewhere in many of these same scandal sheets as of late was even more about one-time star, Minnelli. It seems that the tabloids say Liza Minnelli has a new man in her life. Several have said that "Liza (57) is often seen with Yossi Dina, 49, a former Israeli army captain described as a pawnbroker to the stars" He supposedly lends her diamond jewelry, and she invites him to high-profile events such as Liz Taylor's recent AIDS fundraiser." The news out here in Hollywood is giving glowing reports to this happy couple.

Aw, but I have a scoop that I don't think even the tabloids know yet. I know Yossi personally and his reputation is that he only likes under aged, blond, bimbetts. Hmmmm, maybe I can start writing for the Star or Inquirer?


Arlene Peck is an internationally syndicated columnist and television talk show hostess - Arlene speaks regularly around the country and keeps a packed suitcase ready to GO.

Arlene can be reached at: bestredhead@earthlink.net and www.arlenepeck.com

A RESPONSE TO THE "CHOICE MAKES US UNHAPPY" CLAIM

A recent article in the NYT -- to the effect that too much choice can be bad for you -- has attracted some attention. Below is Peg Kaplan's response to it


A reasonable article. I empathize with those who are overwhelmed with choice; too often, I find myself in similar straits.

But I think that part of the reason I feel overwhelmed and do not make a choice isn't so much that we have too many choices: the reason is that we have the goal of perfection.

What if we buy a digital camera ... and find out that there was a superior one for $25 more? or we sign up for a mutual fund - and ours ends up earning only 7.3% annually instead of 8.5%? Although we would be fine with the slightly "inferior" camera or mutual fund ... we cannot accept that we chose one way, when there was something better. When we have a huge array from which to choose - and we are perfectionists - too often we make no choice at all.

Another factor involved, I believe, is that, too often, we are being trained to have our ability to choose removed from us. Look at how many functions either the government and/or our employer makes for us today - unlike 50 or more years ago. retirement? handled by the government and employee pensions. (at least, in theory *_*) healthcare insurance? employer for some, emergency room for the poor; playing as a child? no more games of running and chasing on an open field. Nope. Now Mom drives kids to soccer or swimming or gymnastics ... all supervised by an adult, with little opportunity for a child's creativity.

No wonder when choice stares us in the face, too often we are unprepared to handle it. A couple of stories, perhaps to illustrate.

First - my friend Bonnie. She just put a beautiful new kitchen in her home. I ooohed & ahhhhed - and asked her if it was tough to find the lovely cabinetry, hardware & appliances. Not at all, she replied: The company with whom she worked showed her some ideas; She saw something that she liked and knew would work - and she selected it. She didn't feel a need to look at every door-pull or cooktop ever invented: "If I see something a little better, I don't care," explained Bonnie. No wonder she's one of my smartest and most practical friends.


Second - the story of Vera: She came here from Russia, roughly 25 years ago, pregnant at the time. She soon had her second child and went to the local department store to purcahse a baby blanket. She came home empty handed. Did they not have any? Of course not! they had too many! In Russia, Vera explained, if you needed a baby blanket, you went to the store - and if you were lucky, they had one. You wanted it? You bought it. There was no choice of color, of yarn, of style, of size ... one blanket. Here in the United States, Vera was overwhelmed by having to choose -- when she never had such an array of goods before in her life. She couldn't do it.

In the long run, if we learn to choose - and choose reasonably - all of us will be better off.

Finally - when it comes to social security, all of the above discussion and the article in the New York Times is really irrelevant. Today, unless you have an income above a certain level, you have NO choice when it comes to retirement. You get social security - and that's it. You don't make enough to save and have a choice about where to park your investment assets. So you are protected to some degree until you and your spouse die. But that's it. Nothing to leave to your offspring. If we want to give those earning less a crack at a little wealth, privatization is the only opportunity for it. Why not let these people have some choice about where their money goes? Why not give them the opportunity to amass some nest egg - something that they could leave to their children for a downpayment on a house - or their grandchildren's college educations?

Choosing is tough. if it's available. We then have to work and weigh our options. We might make a poor choice, and then we have to live with the knowledge that we went wrong. Still, I'll take choice any day over having someone else make it for me.

Note the new address for Aaron's Rantblog. His old address has gone to that great blogspot in the sky where blogspot sites do sometimes go. Warning: Aaron puts up lots of good graphics so his site is slow-loading unless you have a high-speed connection. Aaron's current project is to get Hillary Clinton rather than George Bush as the No. 1 link returned by Google in response to the search-term "Miserable Failure". A fun project, it seems to me. He has got an amusing photo of her up on his "failure" site.

Reason to believe - by Michael Jacobs

Summary:

Over the last quarter of a century something very large, and not entirely understood, has happened to politics in western Europe. It is a commonplace that labour and social democratic parties - not least New Labour - have become more moderate, and more accommodating to capitalism. But a change much deeper than merely one of policy has occurred. It's a cultural, indeed a psychological, shift. A kind of spirit has been extinguished writes Michael Jacobs.

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When Max Weber analysed the way in which the post-Enlightenment processes of rational thought gradually permeated European consciousness in the 18th and 19th centuries, he described the world as becoming 'disenchanted.' The religious world view which the Enlightenment largely destroyed had made the world an enchanted place, filled with the magic and mystery of gods and God. But cold, hard rationality killed them off. Even for those who remained religious, Weber observed, the world ceased to be magical. It was subject to physical laws which were knowable through science. God did not die, but he no longer inhabited the everyday world.

In the last 20 years, something similar has happened to left-of-centre politics in European societies. Up to the 1980s, politics on the left was enchanted-not by spirits, but by radical idealism; the belief that the world could be fundamentally different. But cold, hard political realism has now done for radical idealism what rationality did for pre-Enlightenment spirituality. Politics has been disenchanted.

There are many who welcome this process. But it is equally possible to argue that it has been profoundly damaging, not just for the causes of progressive politics but for a wider sense of public engagement with the political process.

It is true that the British Labour party was always pragmatic in office. But there is something that Labour has lost, which it used to have-an ideology of social transformation. Until at least the mid-1980s most members of the Labour party, in common with its sister parties throughout Europe, believed in a different kind of social and economic order, with institutions and social relationships founded on morally superior values. This was socialism, and belief in it infused the whole of left-of-centre politics.

Socialism was not merely the end-point towards which those on the left believed themselves to be working. For large numbers of activists and politicians, it was an animating force in their lives. People were socialists in the way that others (sometimes the same people) were Catholics or Jews: it was part of their identity. 'Socialist' did not just describe a set of views you had. It was something you were.

This was true of the moderates as much as the revolutionaries. It is easy to forget this now, so accustomed are we to politicians who aim for nothing more than their pragmatic policy positions. Prior to the mid-1980s, the most mainstream Labour politicians talked often and without embarrassment about socialism. Here is Tony Crosland, Labour's principal revisionist of the 1950s and 1960s, writing about the central socialist value of equality in a 1975 Fabian pamphlet: 'By equality we mean more than a meritocratic society of equal opportunities... we also mean more than a simple redistribution of income. We want a wider social equality embracing the distribution of property, the educational system, social class relationships, power and privilege in industry.'

The Fabian tradition is often thought of as the moderate end of socialism, but Fabian pamphlets from the Webbs through to the 1980s were full of statements such as this. This was how all Labour people thought. There were deep divisions between those believing in rapid change and those favouring a more gradual approach. But the transformative ideals of this ideology ran right through the party.

Today all this has gone. No one speaks about socialism: the word sounds quaint. But it is more than semantic. New Labour no longer seeks to transform society, even as an ideal. Of course Labour wants change; it sees many things wrong in society and wants to improve them. Two of its goals, if achieved, would be genuinely far-reaching: the eradication of child poverty and the target of 50 per cent of young people entering higher education. But Labour politicians no longer claim that it is possible to change the structures which perpetuate inequality. We hear no visions of moral improvement, personal liberation, or the ability of humans to live more fulfilling lives than those offered by consumer capitalism. Even in its rhetoric-where most of this used to lie-New Labour's aims have become managerial, about the better administration of society, rather than about its transformation.

Tony Blair emphasises the continuity of his values with Labour's past. But the values are vague: "equal worth, opportunity for all, responsibility, community." They are not translated into concrete ends, a vision of different kinds of institutions and relationships in society. Indeed, as Robert Skidelsky has pointed out in Prospect, Blair's mantra of 'eternal values, modern means’ is not true. Labour values-equality and the favouring of the public/collective over the private/individual-have been abandoned. The idea that one might have principles about means, or that different kinds of social institutions might be ends in themselves, is rejected as dogma. The third way is not an ideology. It provides neither a guide to policy-making, nor a vision of the society towards which social democrats aim. New Labour is left with no more than piecemeal social reform.

Electorally, of course, this has been very successful. But within the Labour party it has had a devastating effect. This has gone largely unnoticed by those outside. But inside the party it is visible and widespread. It is not that the government's policies are too moderate-party members are used to this. Some of the policies in fact command widespread support, particularly now that they come with higher spending and taxation. It is the loss of ideology which creates the sense of alienation. It is the abandonment of the party's historic commitments to equality and to radical social change. Talk with any group of longstanding party members, especially those over 40, and this sense of alienation will come up, and not only among leftists. If anything it is the old moderates of the party, the people who would once have been called right-wingers, who feel most confused. It was they who won the fight to reclaim the party after the aberrations of the 1980s. Now they find that the party's rhetoric has carried on marching right past them.

Membership figures tell a tale: down by 130,000, nearly one third, in five years. For some, there's a moment which tips them over the edge-vouchers for asylum seekers, the promotion of selective schools, the prospect of war with Iraq. For others, it is a dull sense that there is no longer much point. When Labour wanted to change society, it was, at heart, a campaign: it needed members. But if it just wants to manage things better, why bother?

And for every member who leaves, there are many more who cannot bring themselves to do so, but whose commitment to the party barely rises above the payment of a membership fee. Look at the rates of activism: the attendance at meetings, the numbers of canvassers. The party is not quite in crisis, because for many the bonds of loyalty remain strong, and there are newer members who are not disillusioned because they never had illusions in the first place. But there can be little doubt that something profoundly corrosive has been happening to it.

In fact, the trauma runs deeper than this. It is not just about the party leadership. The truth is that most people on the left no longer know what they believe. They still think that gross inequality is immoral, they dislike competitive individualism and argue that capitalism generates social evils. What they don't know is what to replace it with. Once it was socialism. The trauma of left-wing politics is that the third way is not enough-but it is not clear what else there could be.

What happened to radical idealism? What was the political equivalent of Weber's Enlightenment rationality? The answer, in part, is the fall of the Berlin wall. There had been signs of ideological collapse from the early 1980s. But it was after 1989 that socialism as an animating spirit began properly to disintegrate. In many ways this was paradoxical, because the vast majority of people on the left welcomed the end of communism. They had always felt that the Soviet system was a burden, an actually-existing version of socialism used to discredit them. What they hadn't realised was its powerful symbolic effect. Communism was hateful, but it did prove that capitalism was not inevitable.

Then into this new world stepped Francis Fukuyama. His 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man was rubbished by left-wing critics at the time (more rubbished than read). Socialists above all were at pains to deny that liberal capitalism was the end-point of history. Yet it was among the left that Fukuyama's thesis planted itself most deeply. Almost imperceptibly, they felt their self-confidence draining away. People who were once convinced of their prescription for change suddenly found their idealism disappearing.

It wasn't only the resurgence of global capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s which had this effect. Socialists had lived through previous eras of capitalist triumph before, secure in the knowledge that they wouldn't last. What happened in the 1990s was at an intellectual level. As the last dregs of actual alternatives-from building societies to Vietnam's resistance to American multinationals; from worker co-ops to the control of international finance capital-were sluiced out of sight by the onrushing tide of liberal capitalism, the idea that all this could be turned back came to feel more and more unrealistic. The insidious thought developed: maybe this is it. Maybe there is nothing more now than piecemeal social reform.

For the strategists of New Labour, this new political realism was a liberation. No longer did they have to pretend to believe in something which they were patently not aiming to achieve. For most of the rest of the party, it was a traumatic shift.

The debate over Clause IV in 1994-95 revealed this starkly. For the leadership and their younger followers, Labour's old commitment to 'common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange' was self-evidently absurd. For their opponents on the left, it was just as obviously fundamental. But for the huge majority of party members it was neither. The words of Clause IV were old, but they symbolised the party's commitment to a different kind of society. Everyone knew that the party was not trying to achieve such a society in practice. But the words kept the spirit alive. They affirmed the party's radical idealism. This was why there was such reluctance among the members to give them up. The New Labourites won, of course, because exposed to the cold light of day the mystery of socialist ideology could no longer be supported. But the effect on the party - and on the whole of progressive politics - was more profound than was realised at the time.

People outside progressive politics might shrug and say 'so what?' What does it matter if some people have grown up and realised that they cannot change the world, something everyone else accepted long ago? Socialism had not been a realistic political alternative in the west since the 1930s; its final intellectual demise was belated and is not to be mourned. Many others from within progressive politics will also say 'good riddance'. There is a strong case to be made that socialist ideology was a profoundly damaging force for the decent politics of reform.

There are many things wrong with today's capitalism, this argument runs, but the alternatives are worse. Fukuyama was right. Market democracy is the best system of ordering social and economic institutions, not only producing the most happiness, but also the most liberty, and possibly the most equality, for the greatest number. Naturally it is not perfect; but that is why modern social democracy exists. Capitalist societies need ameliorating, but they do not need replacing by some other system which social democrats can no longer identify.

This makes politics dull, but that is how it is. New Labour looks technocratic and uninspiring because that is what politics is now like-incremental, managerial amelioration. We should be grateful to live in such uneventful times, not resentful. In any case real politics is increasingly about negotiating dilemmas between competing values which are no longer expressed as simple conflicts between good and bad or elites and masses.

One of the reasons that socialist ideology flourished in the past was that it fitted the tribalism of a class society. Ideologies which came as whole packages of belief attached themselves easily to fixed, collective identities. But people's identities today are more fragmented, looser, more malleable; and by and large this is a welcome form of personal liberation. It is unsurprising then if belief systems are also not taken on as a whole, if people pick and choose their political views as they try to create their sense of self.

This is why New Labour abandoned socialist ideology. The voters didn't believe in it. Moreover, it created a gap between the party's rhetoric and the realities of its policies which led to constant conflict between leadership and activists. The ideology also put off many voters who might otherwise have supported it. By abandoning the ideological pretence, New Labour has at last buried the lie at the heart of the old Labour party and has been able to achieve some historic goals: a minimum wage, devolution, huge investment in the NHS, among others.

The arguments against ideology are powerful. In these circumstances, can there be a defence of radical idealism? I think there can. Indeed, without a renewal of radical conviction the Labour party, and possibly modern politics as a whole, is in serious danger of atrophy.

Such conviction cannot be a return to socialism. There is now no alternative "system" which is imaginable as a replacement for liberal capitalism. But there does not need to be. Radical idealism does not require a belief that modern economies and societies could be run under fundamentally different principles, merely that the present system could be made to generate fundamentally different outcomes. For its root is a very simple impulse. It is the feeling that many people must surely have when looking at the world: that too much in the present order is morally wrong. A billion people living in absolute poverty, species and habitats being wiped out, many groups subject to systematic violence and discrimination, some people consuming vast amounts while others starve. The impulse is not complex, nor does it carry self-evident prescriptions. It simply says: the world does not need to be like this.

As such, today's transformative ideal stands between two opposite but equally debilitating claims. On the one hand, it escapes the comforting complacency of belief in wholesale system change, where real-world problems did not need addressing because all would be different 'under socialism.' On the other, it rejects the paralysing (and almost always self-serving) assertion that significant change is impossible because the present order of things is the only one available. It is not an argument against liberal capitalism per se, but is an argument against the fatalism of political action that now generally accompanies it.

This is why it is inevitably ideological in form. Idealism envisages a better kind of world and makes this its political goal. It does not seek a simple leap from here to there: it must engage with the present order and seek a feasible path of change. But it does allow political vision to extend beyond present constraints. It permits the politician to say, 'this is all we can do now, but here is what we are aiming for in the future.'

And this is just the objection that many have to it. For New Labour strategists, it was the gap between rhetoric and policy which damaged the party in the past, frightening voters with radical aims which were not even on the agenda. Why go back to that?

There are three different answers. The first, perhaps surprisingly, is pragmatic. It is that without a clear ideology, political parties are electorally vulnerable. Their support may grow wide but remains shallow, and may be swept away. Ideology gives a government roots. In providing voters with a strong sense of a government's purpose, it gives them something to grip on. Policies are often weak instruments for attracting public support. They are complex; they must be designed to satisfy different, even conflicting, interests; they can take a long time to have visible effect; they sometimes fail. A clearly articulated philosophy can not only explain the aim of policy to the public, it reassures them that the government has a purpose and direction when its policies are not making this evident. This was why Margaret Thatcher placed so much emphasis on ideology in her speeches. As the slow pace of Labour's improvements in the public services becomes plainer, a clearer sense of vision-of what it is trying to do, even if it is not yet doing it-may help this government similarly.

Paradoxically, this role for public philosophy in underpinning electoral support may become more necessary as society becomes more fragmented and less tribal. When people are no longer voting according to class tradition, they need more reasons to choose one party over another. Most people's understanding of specific policies is small, and often people don't know exactly what they think. In these circumstances, as opinion polling shows, leadership becomes highly prized. Voters want leaders with a clear sense of purpose and direction. Values alone do not provide this: they sound too vacuous. What does is a vision of a better society: a description of how things will work-how people will be-in the world the politician is striving to create. Ideological clarity inevitably reduces the breadth of public support. But it makes that support deeper and more reliable. New Labour has not yet been tested by this thesis, since it has faced no serious Tory challenge since 1997. But the way in which the opinion polls swung so rapidly against it during the only period when it faced concerted opposition-the fuel protests-suggests that it does apply. The great lack of enthusiasm for the government revealed in qualitative surveys reinforces the sense that its support is weaker than poll numbers indicate.

But this argument goes beyond New Labour. The second case for political ideology is that it can help to fire interest in politics more generally. The bigger problem of the managerial form of politics is its failure to capture the public's attention. There are many reasons for the decline in election turnouts over the last decade. But one of them may well be that politics isn't interesting enough. If all that the parties are offering are alternative management prospectuses, it is perhaps not surprising that public engagement with politics has fallen.

Does this matter? On one account of modern politics, no. If contemporary capitalism is genuinely the best sort of society there can be, then as long as it is not managed too badly, we should neither expect nor want politics to be that important to the public.
But here we arrive at the real issue. The third argument for political ideology stems from deeper questions about the role of politics in human nature. The "managerial" view of politics sees it as instrumental. Politics is not an end in itself but a means to the good administration of society. The less politics required to achieve that administration, the better. But there is another view. It stems from Aristotle's claim that "man is a political animal." Today that claim is often interpreted negatively: that human nature is argumentative and power-seeking. But for Aristotle it was a claim of virtue. Humans are political because they are sociable. Politics is an expression of our inescapable involvement with the strangers amongst whom we live.

From this perspective, an interest and involvement in politics is part of what it means to live a good life, to be a fully developed human being. This cannot be just any involvement in politics.

Political activism designed only to benefit oneself and one's narrow social group carries no particular ethical value. What gives politics its claim to virtue is its orientation towards others. It is when we care enough about the wellbeing of other people to want to make the world a better place-for them and ourselves-that politics finds its proper moral expression.

We have particular reason to value that expression today. As western societies have become more individualistic, people's sense of social connectedness has declined. This is difficult to measure, but reductions in rates of voluntary activity and charitable giving appear to indicate a reduction in people's orientation towards others. Sociologists note the decline in "social capital": the bonds of trust and collective activity that bind communities together. A kind of hedonism pervades popular culture. Most young people don't seem interested in political causes; most of them seem barely interested in the world. It is hard to escape the sense, however inchoate, that we are more selfish, more self-oriented, than we were.

This is why radical idealism is still important. Belief in the possibility that the world could be different, and the desire to act politically to make it so, is a vital expression of an outward orientation. We should want more people to feel their identity and purpose in life bound up with the wellbeing of others. Of course this can be overdone. A rounded person also needs self-awareness, self-deprecation, a sense of fun. But it is good to feel inspired to act, to want to change the world. We need that sense of magic, the enchantment of belief.

This is why so many people have felt sympathy for anti-globalisation protestors, even without necessarily agreeing with their aims. In the summer of 2001, when thousands of protestors surrounded the G8 summit in Genoa, Tony Blair dismissed them as a rabble circus. But to the astonishment of the mainstream media, public opinion was on the side of the protest. The public saw young people who cared enough about the world to want to do something.

Throughout history it has been the pressure of a critical mass of people expressing radical idealism of this kind which has pushed mainstream politics, including that of the Labour party, towards reform. Without it the lobby for the status quo is too strong.
It is difficult to look at the world today and not feel that such idealism is needed. It may be harder to find the great causes in domestic politics than it once was: the result of the successful idealism of an earlier generation of welfare state socialists. Enlarging the consumption of the already comfortable is not a goal to make the political heart beat faster. Yet it does not take much understanding of British society to feel motivated by the cause of eradicating poverty or of giving deprived young people the chance to realise themselves-or even by the desire to improve the quality of life of those caught on the treadmill of overwork, stress and meaningless consumption.

And once one's gaze extends to the world as a whole the causes are plain. It is not surprising that the real energy in British politics today comes from the environmental and global justice movements. Here is genuine inspiration to be found: the hope of profound change to large wrongs. Reading about the present and likely future suffering highlighted at the sustainable development summit in Johannesburg, who can say we do not need radical idealism today?

Labour's ministers came back from the summit claiming to be pleased with the final agreement. In doing so, they illustrated what is wrong with the present state of social democracy. It presents a fatalistic resignation about what is achievable which robs politics of its moral ambition. The idea that "there is no alternative" has long been a powerful weapon of conservatives. It is the infection of left-of-centre thought by this idea that has been the most damaging consequence of the post-1989 order. And it is why politics needs re-enchanting now. Of course politics is the art of the possible. But only by pushing at them will we discover where the boundaries of the possible lie.

In this sense, the re-enchantment of politics today will be the reverse of the Enlightenment. Then humanism-the belief in the capacity of human societies to determine their own destiny-was the agent of disenchantment. Now political humanism is on the side of the spirits. In the face of both the terrible material conditions still affecting so much of the world, and of those voices arguing that they cannot be fundamentally changed, the spirit of moral idealism is no less than a reassertion of human will. Without it, it is difficult to see how politics today will inspire a new generation to make a difference.

Michael Jacobs is General Secretary of the Fabian Society. This article first appeared in the September 2002 issue of Prospect Magazine

BLIND HATRED

By Ann Leslie

SO IT'S all George W. Bush's fault. President Bush is responsible for the death of British Consul General in Istanbul Roger Short, leaving his wife and three children utterly bereft. Bush killed Mr Short's secretary Lisa Hallworth who, like the consul, was blown to pieces by Thursday-'s bomb.

Bush is the reason why a busy shopping street was suddenly drenched in blood, scattered with severed hands and heads and the limbs of innocent passers
Bush is the reason why Muslin: mothers, fathers, sons and daughters are still desperately scanning hospital lists to see if their loved ones have been slaughtered like sacrificial cattle by fellow Muslims, who acted in the name of a bizarre and mutant version of Islam.

The world would obviously be much safer if Bush didn't exist; 60 per cent apparently consider him to be a danger to world peace.

Are we now so unhinged by global terror that we're actually going slightly mad? We have long ago abandoned the idea that each and every rape victim somehow "asked for it"; we regard as deeply uncivilised the idea, prevalent in some societies, that, by being raped, a woman has brought "dishonour" on her family, and therefore that she - rather than the rapist - must be punished for the crime committed against her.

Yet we say that we, and especially President Bush, because of our "provocative" actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, have "asked for" the carnage in Istanbul.

And that Muslim Turkey with a moderate Islamic government has, by being an ally of the West, also somehow "asked for" this carnage.

Frankly when I, as a Londoner, heard "my" Mayor Ken Livingstone declaring before the president arrived that Bush "is the greatest threat to life on this planet that the world has probably ever known", I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or simply be deeply embarrassed

One young woman, carrying a mass-produced placard with a portrait of Bush beneath the slogan ''The World's No. 1 Terrorist". was asked how she could accuse Bush of "terrorism" when it was bin Laden's disciples who were causing innocent people to die in the streets of Istanbul. She replied confidently: 'They're dying because of him!"

No, dear lady. they're dying, not because of Bush. but because a small and highly organised group of Islamic fascists chose to kill them. Islamic fascists have been murdering fellow Muslims for decades, long before Bush came to power.

Newspaper columns, written by journalists much younger than me, describe Bush as "the most vilified US president in history". Sorry, boys and girls, but most of you were still at school when Ronald Reagan was in the White House. He, too, was denounced as an affable but dangerous nincompoop.

(About 37 per cent of the British apparently believe "Dubya" Bush is "unintelligent" - but then they, unlike myself and others who have actually spent time with Bush one-on-one, have been deluded by the lazy media caricatures.)

You young things don't remember the uproar occasioned by Reagan's frank description of the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" (which, of course, it was).
You don't remember how, in the British House of Commons in 1982, he also gave a speech whose sentiments almost exactly mirror the speech given by President Bush on Wednesday.

Reagan said then: "I've often wondered about the shyness of some of us in the West about standing for those ideals that have done so much to ease the plight of man and the hardships of our imperfect world."

He was accused of "cultural imperialism" by stating that so-called Western values were, in fact, basic human values, and that people - whatever their culture or history - did actually want freedom whenever they were offered it: ''it would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy."

Today, similar "experts" denounce Bush for his refusal to believe that the Arab Muslim world is not culturally, or genetically, suited to freedom, democracy or the rule of law.

When Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher decided there was no 'moral equivalence" between the Soviet empire and Western democracy and that Western democracy had to be defended, they were denounced as warmongers, just as Bush is now.

To this week's protesters, Bush's "crimes" were, by implication, equivalent to those committed by Saddam Hussein. Bush, indeed, has his faults but, as far as I know,
America does not contain the mass graves of 300,000 innocent people who oppose the president; he does not cut out the tongues of those who criticise him; he does not order his army to massacre whole families, including small children who are tossed into their graves still clutching their toys; he has not gassed his own people; he has not caused the deaths of about a million of his co-religionists in order to remain in power.

Bush's vision will be vindicated in the long run, as Reagan's has been.
This vindication by history will not -- as Bush admits, and as Reagan did before him - come about easily or overnight. And yes, even in these dark and terrifying days, there is already a slim glimmer of hope.

China's Chairman Mao once declared that "the guerilla fighter is like a fish in water; and the water is the people". The more that the mass of ordinary people in the Muslim world (even those who resent the power and wealth of the West) realise that they - as much as we - are victims of Islamic fascism, the more they will turn against the "guerilla fighters" who pretend that they speak and act in their name.

We cannot, as the 'peacemongers" insist, negotiate our way to a quiet life.
The demands of those who slaughtered the innocents in Istanbul are utterly non-negotiable - because their stated aim is to destroy Western civilisation itself.
Taking refuge in trivial, self-regarding, self-deluding stunts like pulling down the effigy of Bush in Trafalgar Square will simply play into the terrorists' hands.


Excerpts from Page 64 of “THE SUNDAY MAIL” (Brisbane, Australia) of November 23, 2003

FRANCIS BELLAMY, EDWARD BELLAMY & BIGOTRY & RACISM

Pledge of Allegiance, Looking Backward

By Rex Curry


The dogma behind the Pledge of Allegiance included bigotry and racism. Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, was a bigot.  His cousin and cohort Edward Bellamy was also a bigot.

The pledge itself was inspired by xenophobia and bigotry toward immigrants.  The United States had long been a melting pot, but the 1880s brought increased immigration, especially from countries in eastern and southern Europe. Bellamy, whose family was not native American-Indians, joined similar Americans who feared that these "new" immigrants did not have the same education and skills of those from northern European countries.  They also worried about another difference: Most of the new immigrants were Roman Catholic and Jewish.

"The hard, inescapable fact is that men are not born equal. Neither are they born free, but all in bonds to their ancestors and their environments...," Francis wrote .

As editor of the magazine "The Illustrated American," he wrote editorials denouncing immigrants from southern Europe. "A democracy like ours cannot afford to throw itself open to the world," he wrote in 1897. "Where every man is a lawmaker, every dull-witted or fanatical immigrant admitted to our citizenship is a bane to the commonwealth. Where all classes of society merge insensibly into one another every alien immigrant of inferior race may bring corruption to the stock ... there are other races (e.g Irish, Jews, Italians, Latins) which we cannot assimilate without a lowering of our racial standard."

Other Bellamy quotes: "The leaders of the negroes have been unendurable, more than the negro voters themselves ... So ... (all parties) make common cause ... for the disenfranchisement of the negro"

"peon ... a shiftless and unreliable kind. The native Mexican works only that he may ... live for a month on the rewards of a week's work."

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by people who belonged to fraternal organizations that were racist and were segregated by race and sex. Francis Bellamy was a Mason in Little Falls Lodge No. 181, in Little Falls, NY.

Francis Bellamy was assisted in writing the pledge by James Bailey Upham, a Mason in the Converse Lodge in Malden Massachusetts.  Within the Masonic order, Upham was a Knights Templar, the most esteemed and discriminating order.  The word “discriminating” is a double entendre in that the Knights Templar is the only Masonic order that excluded (and still excludes) non-Christians (people they classify as Jews, Muslims and atheists) according to the book “To the Flag” by Richard J. Ellis.  The Masons also exclude women and there is a separate “auxiliary” organization for women called the “Order of the Eastern Star.”

Francis Bellamy promoted a government take over of schools, in an effort to eliminate all of the better alternatives, and the government schools imposed racism and segregation through WWII and even the 1960's.  It was the same segregation described in the book "Equality" by Edward Bellamy (Francis' cousin) where blacks are allowed to participate in Edward Bellamy's "industrial army" but kept separate from whites. http://rexcurry.net/pledgetragedy.html

Here is a quote from Edward Bellamy's book "Looking Backward," a fantasy of totalitarian socialism "....the great nations of Europe as well as Australia, Mexico, and parts of South America, are now organized industrially like the United States, which was the pioneer of the evolution. The peaceful relations of these nations are assured by a loose form of federal union of world-wide extent. An international council regulates the mutual intercourse and commerce of the members of the union and their joint policy toward the more backward races, which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions."

Here is another quote from "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy "Perhaps more important than any of the causes I mentioned then as tending to race purification has been the effect of untrammeled sexual selection upon the quality of two or three successive generations. I believe that when you have made a fuller study of our people you will find in them not only a physical, but a mental and mortal improvement. It would be strange if it were not so, for not only is one of the great laws of nature now freely working out the salvation of the race but a profound moral sentiment has come to it's support. Individualism, which in your day was the animating idea of society, not only was fatal to any vital sentiment of brotherhood and common interest among living men, but equally to any realization of the responsibility of the living for the generation to follow. To-day this sense of responsibility, practically unrecognized in all previous ages, has become one of the great ethical ideas of the race, reinforcing, with an intense conviction and duty, the natural impulse to seek in marriage the best and noblest of the other sex."

The bigotry of the Bellamys explains their desire for socialism, government schools and a collective robotic recitation of the same "Pledge of Allegiance" every day upon the government's cue.  Socialism and Government schools are inherently racist and bigoted in that they are used to destroy individuality, individual liberty, and are used for regimentation, and to create a homogenous society where people are taught the same things in order to think, dress and behave the same.

As in all socialist dogma, the spokesmen were terrified of "foreigners stealing or destroying local jobs" either in person by immigration or by international free trade. Under socialism, the state is obligated to prevent family fathers and mothers from becoming unemployed because 'Fremdarbeiter' (German for "foreign workers") are taking away their jobs by working for "low wages."

Of course, the only way socialists try to achieve "equality" is by making everyone equally poor, bringing everyone down to the lowest level, and even that won't work. Ultimately they have to make everyone equally dead.

"Equality" was/is a euphemistic excuse for socialism's hate-spewing radical paramilitary "industrial army" in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (62 million killed), the Peoples' Republic of China (35 million killed) and the National Socialist German Workers' Party (21 million killed) etc.  http://rexcurry.net/socialists.html  Those socialists achieved "equality" for 62 million, 35 million, 21 million people respectively.   It explains the military-socialism complex. http://rexcurry.net/pledge_military.html  

Other motivations for the pledge of allegiance included anxiety about creeping materialism, which is a form of bigotry based on envy and jealousy toward anyone who is perceived as being "better off."  At that time the Bellamys and the Knights Templar and Masons in general lamented what they called capitalism’s crass commercialism, selfish materialism, and excessive individualism.

When a socialist says he wants "equality" he is saying that he doesn't like you and doesn't like the way you are, and wants to change you and he wants to use government force to do it.  He is saying that he dislikes all people because they are "different" and have different possessions, incomes, clothes, cars, property, families, ideas, educations, successes, cultures,  languages, interests, entertainment, etc.  He is saying he wants you to believe that changing everyone is a good idea.

That is why he supports government schools, as a way to use government to force change and stop differences and make everyone a cog in an "industrial army."

It is all spelled out in the novel "Looking Backward" and its description of the totalitarianism that Francis Bellamy promoted.

Francis Bellamy wrote in ways hauntingly similar to Hitler, as evidenced by Bellamy’s words in the Illustrated American in 1897:

"The hard inescapable fact is that men are not born equal. Neither are they born free, but all in bonds to their ancestors and their environments . . . . The success of government by the people will depend upon the stuff that people are made of. The people must realize their responsibility to themselves. They must guard, more jealously even than their liberties, the quality of their blood. . . . A democracy like ours cannot afford to throw itself open to the world. Where every man is a lawmaker, every dull-witted or fanatical immigrant admitted to our citizenship is a bane to the commonwealth. Where all classes of society merge insensibly into one another every alien immigrant of inferior race may bring corruption to the stock. . . . There are races, more or less akin to our own, whom we may admit freely, and get nothing but advantage from the infusion of their wholesome blood. But there are other races which we cannot assimilate without a lowering of our racial standard, which should be as sacred to us as the sanctity of our homes."


Some people make a to do about Francis Bellamy's remark that he wanted to include "equality" with "liberty and justice for all" but that Bellamy believed that "equality" was too much of an advanced concept for society. That is because Bellamy's concept of "equality" was backward socialism. Undermining Bellamy is the proper concept of non-socialist equality that was already an established part of American history. How different would our society be today if, instead of the Pledge of Allegiance, schoolchildren (in private or home schools, of course) were required, each day, to read or recite this paragraph from the Declaration of Independence:”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”What if, instead of starting every day being marinated in the language of submission (to pledge “allegiance,” after all, is to proclaim one’s status as a vassal bound in service to a feudal lord, or “liege”), youngsters were taught, on a daily basis, the principles of self-responsibility, individual liberty, and principled rebellion? If that kind of thing were to become common, politicians and other Bellamy-supporters would simply criminalize the Declaration. They’ve done it before, and they would be more than happy to do so permanently.The sobering truth is that, due to the cultivated docility of the American populace, Jefferson’s document, much like the Constitution created eleven years later, poses no threat to the designs of socialists today.

http://members.ij.net/rex/pledgebigot.html

Controversial study gives food for thought

Excerpts from an article in “The Times” [London] of 10 November, 2003

BY GLEN OWEN

ONLY the bravest academics dare to embark on the study of comparative intelligence, a field fraught with social, racial and sexual sensitivities. Professor Richard Lynn, a fellow of the British Psychological Society and a member of the editorial boards of the journals Intelligence and Personality & Individual Differences, has often provoked controversy. Despite being described by colleagues such as Oliver James as “kindly and unbigoted”, his findings have led some students to boycott his lectures.

In 1996 he annoyed feminists by concluding that more men were winning first-class degrees because their brains were about 80 cu cm (5 cu in) larger than women's, so that more men had IQs above 130 (which he calculated was needed for such degrees). He believes that males are innately more intelligent than females by about five IQ points from the age of 21 onwards.

Two years later he enraged social reformers by arguing that the tendency for intelligent people in good careers to delay having children and to have fewer of them — compared with the average — will knock half an IQ point off the average score in each generation.

His co-author, Tatu Vanhanen, the father of Matti Vanhanen, the Prime Minister of Finland, specialises in the study of democracy, in particular the social and economic preconditions necessary for its existence.

The longest shadow hanging over psychometrics — the measurement of intelligence — comes from The Bell Curve, the 1994 book on genetic influences written by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. It claimed that blacks in Western countries scored on average 15 points below the average white IQ of 100, and that a "cognitive elite", led by Ashkenazi Jews with an average IQ of 115, would come to lead developed societies. Opponents said the statistics were flawed and called the book racist.

IQ tests are nearly a century old. They were first used in France in 1904 to identify intelligent children, but adapted in the First World War to decide who should be promoted and who would remain in the ranks

IQ (Intelligence Quotient) is not a measure of general knowledge but instead how your mind thinks. It measures different aspects of the brain's skills, including verbal and non-verbal reasoning, visual abilities and mental arithmetic

The link to the full article from which this excerpt was taken is here