Melanie Phillips writes:

Twenty years ago today, supporters of freedom and human rights cheered and wept for joy as the Berlin Wall was torn down by jubilant young Germans.

To so many, that heady day seemed to herald the emergence of a better world. The spectre of communism had finally been laid to rest. Liberty had triumphed over tyranny.

The end of the Cold War even led some to proclaim that this was ‘the end of history’ — which was to say that liberal democracy was now the dominant and unchallengeable force in the world. However, the 9/11 attacks on America tragically proved this to be absurdly over-optimistic. The eruption of radical Islamism revealed that, while the West may have been rid of one enemy in the Soviet Union, another deadly foe had risen to take its place.

So much is, sadly, all too evident. But what is perhaps less obvious is that communism did not just vanish in a puff of historical smoke.

The Soviet Union was defeated and fell apart, for sure. But the communist ideology that fuelled it did not so much disintegrate as reconstitute itself into another, even more deadly form as the active enemy of western freedom.

Soviet Communism was a belief system whose goal was to overturn the structures of society through the control of economic and political life. This mutated into a post-communist ideology of the Left, whose no-less ambitious aim was to overturn western society through a subversive transformation of its culture. …

The collapse of communism was actually a slow-burning process. Its moral and political bankruptcy became obvious decades before that glorious Berlin day in November 1989. … But as communism slowly crumbled, those on the far-Left who remained hostile towards western civilisation found another way to realise their goal of bringing it down. This was what might be called ‘cultural Marxism’. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles that these embody and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped.

This key insight was developed in particular by an Italian Marxist philosopher called Antonio Gramsci. His thinking was taken up by Sixties radicals — who are, of course, the generation that holds power in the West today.

Gramsci understood that the working class would never rise up to seize the levers of ‘production, distribution and exchange’ as communism had prophesied. Economics was not the path to revolution. He believed instead that society could be overthrown if the values underpinning it could be turned into their antithesis: if its core principles were replaced by those of groups who were considered to be outsiders or who actively transgressed the moral codes of that society.

So he advocated a ‘long march through the institutions’ to capture the citadels of the culture and turn them into a collective fifth column, undermining from within and turning all the core values of society upside-down and inside-out. This strategy has been carried out to the letter.

The nuclear family has been widely shattered. Illegitimacy was transformed from a stigma into a ‘right’. The tragic disadvantage of fatherlessness was redefined as a neutrally-viewed ‘lifestyle choice’.

Education was wrecked, with its core tenet of transmitting a culture to successive generations replaced by the idea that what children already knew was of superior value to anything the adult world might foist upon them. The outcome … has been widespread illiteracy and ignorance and an eroded capacity for independent thought.

Law and order were similarly undermined, with criminals deemed to be beyond punishment since they were ‘victims’ of society …

The ‘rights’ agenda — commonly known as ‘political correctness’ — turned morality inside out by excusing any misdeeds by self-designated ‘victim’ groups on the grounds that such ‘victims’ could never be held responsible for what they did. …

This mindset also led to the belief that a sense of nationhood was the cause of all the ills in the world, precisely because western nations embodied western values. So transnational institutions or doctrines such as the EU, UN, international law or human rights law came to trump national laws and values.

But the truth is that to be hostile to the western nation is to be hostile to democracy. And indeed, with the development of the EU superstate we can see that the victory over one anti-democratic regime within Europe — the Soviet Union — has been followed by surrender to another.

For the republic of Euroland puts loyalty to itself higher than that to individual nations and their values. It refused to commit itself in its constitution to uphold Christianity, the foundation of western morality. …

We agree with most of what she says, but not with the value she places on the Christian religion and Christian morality. We do not believe that the greatness of Europe is due to Christianity. We share with Edward Gibbon the opinion that Christianity brought a thousand years of darkness down on Europe. What made Europe great was the Renaissance and the Enlightenment: the rediscovery of Greco-Roman civilization, the displacement of a deocentric by an anthropocentric world-view, the rise of scientific enquiry, the revival of the Socratean questioning of ideas in general, the ideal of personal liberty, the triumph of rationality. In other words, by the loosening and finally the casting off of the shackles of religion, even though Christianity, in proliferating variety, continued to exert a malign influence on Europe’s history for some centuries after Spinoza and Hume crippled it.

The dark ideologies of Leftism and  Islam cannot be overcome by the darkness of another religion, but only by reason. Physical force may be necessary, and should not be shirked when it is. But victory in war – as victory in the Cold War demonstrated – is not sufficient if the ideology lives on, whether openly or incognito under new names. It is the argument that must be won, however hard it is to change by reason a view that has not been arrived at by reason. Reason’s victory is enormously aided by its practical achievements in science and technology. Even the dark-age Muslims extant in our world want vaccinations, organ-transplants, aircraft, telephones, television, computers, the internet, refrigerators  – and also, ever more determinedly and dangerously, nuclear weapons. The West failed to keep those out of the hands of Communist and Muslim states, which is why war may be necessary again quite soon. Our side, the side of reason, demands that our weaponry should always be more advanced than the enemy’s. As long as we can innovate, we can win. Innovation is the child of freedom and rationality.

Today, November 9, 2009, is the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It was one of the greatest events of history.

The wall both literally and symbolically marked the division between tyranny and freedom.

It was erected on Sunday, August 13, 1961, to prevent people living under the Soviet-controlled Communist regime in East Germany from fleeing into free West Berlin.  About 1500 people a day had been migrating westward.

Within 24 hours West Berlin was sealed off from the so-called Democratic Republic of Germany.

At first it was a fence consisting of barbed wire, spread over some 96 miles.

In 1962 an inner wall was built. The 100 yard gravel area between the fence and the wall was booby-trapped with trip wires, and mined.

In 1975  a stronger, higher, thicker wall made of concrete and reinforced with mesh fencing and barbed wire was constructed. It was known as the ‘Grenzmauer 75’. Soldiers stationed in some 300 watchtowers had a clear view of the space, and orders to shoot down anyone attempting to cross it.

Over 100,000 people tried to escape to freedom. Some 5,000 succeeded, mostly in the early years before the ‘Grenzmauer 75’ was built. Later, successful crossings were made through tunnels. Two families succeeded by hot-air balloon, and one man in a light aircraft. At least 136 people were killed in the attempt, most famously 18-year-old Peter Fechter, shot on August 17, 1962, as he tried to climb the wall. He lay for hours in the space between the wall and the fence, crying out for help while he bled to death. The East German border guards waited for him to die before they carried him away.

Twenty-five years later, on June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan of the United States stood on the west side of the Brandenberg Gate beyond which the wall ran, and said to the Russian leader in a famous speech, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’

The speech was symptomatic of the firm stand he maintained against the Soviet Union.

Two and a half years later the wall was brought down.

Its fall heralded the collapse of Soviet Russia and its evil empire. It marked the end of the Cold War and the victory of the free world, led by the United States of America.

The conquering hero of that stupendous victory was President Reagan. How he won the Cold War is the subject of volumes, but win it he did.

Of inestimable help to him was Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain.

A few days ago Mikhail Gorbachev, George H. W. Bush who was president of the US when the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, and Helmut Kohl who was Chancellor of West Germany at the time, met on the stage of a Berlin theatre to commemorate the fall of the wall.

Margaret Thatcher, who had not wanted the reunification of Germany but nevertheless played a decisive part in defeating the Communist tyranny over Eastern Europe, was not included.

The president of the United States, Barack Obama, has refused to attend any of the celebratory ceremonies in Germany. His excuse is that he is ‘too busy’.

Jillian Becker  November 9, 2009

A diary has been found in the US National Security Archive which reveals details of the relationship between the British Labour Party and the Soviet Union. It was kept by one Anatoly Chernyaev, the man who pandered between the Kremlin and the Labour leaders (particularly Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock). If anyone should know, he should. And it’s quite likely he’s telling the truth, though with such people there can be no certainty, of course.

The diary is making some headlines in Britain, notably in The Spectator, which has made it this week’s cover story, and the Daily Mail.

Among its ‘revelations’ is a story that the Labour leaders tried to get the Soviets to help them beat the ‘common enemy Margaret Thatcher’. The Soviets apparently agreed to help these treacherous men, and maybe they did something or other, but whether they did or not, Mrs Thatcher remained triumphantly in Downing Street throughout the 1980s, to be replaced by another Conservative leader, John Major, in 1990.

The Mail, realizing perhaps that this isn’t much of a revelation, and that as news it is rather stale, does its best to work up something juicier:

More worrying, perhaps, is the fact that the document shows in stark detail how the political ideology of so many of those who govern today was shaped by the unspeakable communist creed of the Soviet Union. The unpalatable truth is that many ministers in Government today rose through the ranks of a British socialist movement that was heavily influenced – and even controlled – by the Kremlin in Moscow. … In Britain, those on the Left who know about the depth of the Soviet influence over this country in the latter half of the 20th century, have maintained an embarrassed silence about this shameful episode in British political history. Above all, the intimate co-operation between Moscow and the trades unions which nearly brought the country to its knees in the Sixties and Seventies has been an utterly taboo subject. … This diary reveals that the cosy relationship between the Kremlin and Labour was far more widespread than previously thought – and had been going on for years. …’

Actually, it was pretty well known that the particular trade union leaders mentioned by the Mail were sponsored by the Soviets. The subject, far from being ‘utterly taboo’ was discussed at length and often in Conservative circles, especially when Prime Minister Thatcher tamed the trade unions good and proper. As for the ‘intimacy’ between the Labour Party rats and the Soviet top brass, such details as the diary records – and only the details are news really, the general picture being well known to anyone who took an interest in such things back then – show the rats in a rather pathetic light. It seems that they had to beg for a few minutes with Brezhnev, and later with ‘the senile’ Chernenko, so they could tell the newspapers back home that they were received by the Man. Hardly a ‘cosy’ relationship!

The Mail tries harder yet:

It is not just the Left’s close connection with the Soviet Union, but the lasting influence of that connection that should concern us all.

By which it means that Gordon Brown, who is still in power though not for much longer, was originally given his safe seat by the decision of two senior trade union officials who were themselves sponsored by the USSR. Thus, urges the Mail, ‘the control the Soviets had over Labour, its leadership and aspiring politicians, is still having a profound impact on Britain.’

Even this, we surmise, will not greatly scandalize or even startle most British readers.

We find one comment interesting. It’s made by Peter Oborne in his Spectator column on the subject. He says that ‘these communist influences’ account for many of the ‘characteristics’ of Tony Blair’s New Labour. The characteristics he notes are:

‘Its deep suspicion of outsiders, its structural hostility to democratic debate, its secrecy, its faith in bureaucracy, embedded preference for striking deals away from the public eye, its ruthless reliance on a small group of trusted activists .’

Why this list strikes us as worth noting is that it applies equally to Obama’s Democratic Party. And the influences are of the same sort, and from the same poison well: not the Kremlin, which was only a conduit, but the Communist creed itself.

You think you own your body?

Well, you don’t.

How can you be so selfish, so acquisitive, so greedy as to want to claim permanent possession of it?

You have no moral claim to it whatsoever. Any more than to any other private property.

As Proudhon said: ‘Property is theft.’

Or at most a loan.

You’ve only got your body on loan from the community.

Not only must it be returned to common ownership after your death, but bits of it can be taken away from you while you’re still alive.

So says Obama’s ‘regulatory czar’, Cass Sunstein.  He proposes the ‘routine removal’ of human organs from the dead, because ‘the state owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions, and it can remove their organs without asking anyone’s permission.’

If starving isn’t unhealthy, what does the word ‘unhealthy’ mean?

There are powerful persons who believe with fanatical conviction that (other) people should starve to death rather than eat something ‘unhealthy’.

As a result, millions are deprived of food.

Even Bill Gates protests about this state of affairs. We say ‘even Bill Gates’, because he usually goes along with the thinking of those who believe in government control of individual lives, aka socialists. (See in the quotation below a list of lefty organizations he supports.)  He doesn’t seem to realize that he is one of the greatest benefactors of mankind ever, through supplying billions of people with something they want: the products of Microsoft, which are put to trillions of productive uses throughout the world. Doing so –  as a model capitalist – has rightfully made him rich, and he has no moral obligation to redistribute his wealth in a secondary and much feebler attempt to do good. But he apparently thinks there is, perhaps out of some unwarranted feeling of guilt.

Whatever prompts him, he has undertaken to alleviate the chronic hunger of whole populations in Africa. And he has run into an impediment: the adoption, by stupid African rulers, of two Western ‘progressive’ notions: that people must be made to eat healthy food, and that genetically modified foods are unhealthy.

This article is from FrontPageMag:

The left-of-center philanthropist says starving Africans should be allowed to eat genetically modified foods.

Bill Gates took on the Famine Lobby while addressing a forum on the world food supply in Iowa. Speaking at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Gates took aim at the chorus of environmental leftists and organic food advocates who believe Africans should starve rather than eat genetically modified (GM) foods. “Some voices are instantly hostile to any emphasis on productivity. They act as if there is no emergency, even though in the poorest, hungriest places on earth, population is growing faster than productivity,” he said.

The opposition is significant, because Gates is left-of-center himself. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with assets of $29 billion as of 2005, has focused on the “population” side of the “problem” in the past, sending billions of dollars in grants to such pro-abortion groups as Planned Parenthood; Population Action International, Population Services International, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, and the Population Resource Center. Gates has also financed such organizations as the [Soros supported] Tides Center, the Tides Foundation, the National Council of La Raza, and has supported a gun control initiative in Washington state.

However, Gates announced he will issue a $120 million grant to increase food productivity in sub-Saharan Africa through the planting of genetically modified seeds. In Des Moines, Gates cited a Stanford study from 2008 concluding African farmers will lose one-quarter of their productivity within 20 years if they continue to plant the same strains of corn. However, “If the seeds perform well, African farmers can expect to produce two-million more tons of maize in a year of moderate drought.” Radio Iowa reports Gates has “committed more than a billion dollars” in all.

In proposing this initiative, he is standing up to the Green Left, which has long favored environmental “purity” [over] human well-being. Greenpeace cooked up the term “Frankenfood” to demonize genetically modified foods a decade ago. …

Dire predictions aside, GM foods not only potentially increase food production but have replaced the need to spray crops with chemical pesticides, which sickened or killed Africans. Those farmers who spray can now streamline the process, saving them much time and money. The modified crops are more resistant to cold, drought, herbicides, pests, and disease. They also supplied nutritional gaps in the consumption patterns of the poor. For instance, so-called “golden rice” spliced Vitamin A into rice, which could stave off blindness among the world’s poor who eat little more than rice. …

Greenpeace has long claimed GM foods increase allergies; however, the World Health Organization – hardly a corporate, capitalist shill – concluded, “No allergic effects have been found relative to GM foods currently on the market.” Although six EU nations ban GM foods, Jaap Satter, a senior policy adviser at the Dutch Agriculture Ministry, has said, “You cannot say anymore that there is a scientific reason to be against genetic modification.” The National Research Council summed up the situation: “no conceptual distinction exists between generic modification of plants and microorganisms by classical methods or by molecular techniques that modify DNA and transfer genes.”

Some environmentalists seem concerned the foods will be too successful at feeding the poor. Al Gore has worried, “The most lasting impact of biotechnology on the food supply may come not from something going wrong, but from all going right…we’re far more likely to accidentally drown ourselves in a sea of excess grain.” Given the environmentalist movement’s hatred of population – best exemplified by Obama Science Czar John Holdren’s justification of compulsory abortion in the United States – this may be the real locus of their disdain.

So deep is the Green Left’s hatred of GM foods that even an organization Gates founded has given genetically modified food a chilly reception. “The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa was established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” and the Rockefeller Foundation in 2006 “with the objective of improving agriculture in Africa.” However, its leader, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, vowed in 2007: “We in the alliance will not incorporate GMOs [genetically modified organisms] in our programmes. We shall work with farmers using traditional seeds.”

The scare tactics and shunning of American and Euro-socialist leftists is theoretical and faulty – but their mania has reaped a deadly harvest among the world’s most vulnerable people.

In 2002, Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa refused to accept tons of U.S. food aid for his starving nation, because the aid contained genetically modified food (maize, specifically). “Simply because my people are hungry, that is no justification to give them poison, to give them food that is intrinsically dangerous to their health,” he said. The deluded president continued, “I will not allow Zambians to be turned into guinea pigs no matter the levels of hunger in the country.”

The levels of hunger were staggering. Nearly one-third of Zambia’s 10 million people faced famine. Some 14 million Africans faced starvation region-wide. Nonetheless, the president privately upbraided officials in the UN World Food Programme for distributing GM foods, which fed 125,000 people in five camps. The WFP reported some impoverished Zambians “resorted to eating little more than twigs and ash from the fire in a brown soupy concoction.” Desperate, rural villagers broke into the palace where the stockpiles were rotting and stole 2,000 bags of maize.

In response, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in 2002, signed a “statement of solidarity” with Zambia. Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace went further, alleging the humanitarian aid constituted a sick capitalist ploy. “There is a constant drip of pressure from the U.S. government and biotech industry to make sure Africa is softened up for GM,” he theorized. “Europe is closed to them and they need a market for it.”

Others offered more than ideological support. Zimbabwe joined the boycott, preventing GM grain’s importation. Angola followed suit in 2004. Lesotho and Mozambique milled all such grain so it would not be planted and “infect” other crops.

Not all were limited to the EU and Africa. In 2004, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez passed “possibly…the most sweeping restrictions on transgenic crops in the western hemisphere.”

At home, the opposition has been remarkably well-heeled. National Review’s Deroy Murdock found:

In 2001, the 30 leading anti-biotech groups…spent $341.4 million, including Greenpeace USA’s expenditure of $23,748,737, Environmental Defense’s $38,794,150 and the Natural Resources Defense Council’s $41,625,882. Between 1996 and 2001, this crusade’s lavish underwriters included the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($11,906,500), the Ford Foundation ($39,978,020) and the Pew Charitable Trusts ($130,996,900).

It also included a large portion of the organic food market. Somehow, this story of an industry trying to spike a competitor did not make MSNBC or the pages of Mother Jones.

Whatever the dangers, the prohibition of GM foods is a moral issue. As Velasio De Paolis of the Pontifical Urban University has said, it is “easy to say no to GM food if your stomach is full.” However misled he is on other issues, Bill Gates deserves credit for standing up against the Green Left on this point.

But on another, closely related, issue he has so far failed to take the right stand:

The question remains, will he do so on the issue that seems closest to his heart: the eradication of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa? In a recent speech on the topic Gates admitted, “two tools helped to bring the death rate down: One was killing the mosquitoes with DDT.” Before Rachel Carson’s crusade – based entirely on scientific theories that never panned out – DDT use had nearly eradicated malaria. Now, according to one report, “there are approximately 350 to 500 millions cases of malaria, killing close to one million people” annually. “Every day, malaria takes the lives of 2,000 children in Africa alone.” Yet instead of backing DDT use, Gates has sought to find a vaccine.

If Gates truly wants to put the well-being of Africans above political correctness, DDT is the best place to start.

For decades the World Council of Churches has been on the wrong side of the great political divide, consistently supporting collectivism and opposing freedom. Not a word of criticism of the Soviet terror came out of the WCC through all the years of the Cold War. Now, all too predictably, it wants the paranoid psychotic Manuel Zelaya back in power in Honduras, where he was deposed by constitutional means before he could entrench himself as dictator.

Mark D. Tooley writes:

An international church delegation recently visited Washington, D.C. to demand U.S. and global pressure on Honduras to restore Hugo Chavez wannabe Zelaya to the presidency.

Evidently uninterested in Zelaya’s unconstitutional attempts to gain an illegal second term, modeled on Venezuela’s populist dictatorship, the church officials insist that Honduras was “torn apart by a coup’etat.” Of course, Zelaya was removed by Honduras’ Supreme Court and Congress, and legally replaced by the second inline for the presidency, who was from Zelaya’s own party. But evidently any resistance to permanent left-wing rule is illegitimate, these religious voices of conscience seem to believe.

“The suffering and insecurity of the people of Honduras has reached crisis proportions, and long delays in resolving the situation following the coup are unacceptable,” a news release from the World Council of Churches (WCC) solemnly intoned. If there is a “crisis” in Honduras, it is mostly thanks to international sanctions imposed against Honduras, one of the hemisphere’s poorest nations, in solidarity with Zelaya. Pushing for “firmer and more decisive action to restore democracy and ensure full compliance with rule of law and respect for fundamental human rights in Honduras,” the delegation included officials from the U.S. National Council of Churches, the U.S. United Church of Christ, the Swiss-based WCC, an Argentine Methodist bishop and human rights activist, and an apparent Honduran seminary official.

Most of Honduras’ religious groups supported Zelaya’s constitutional ouster, including the Roman Catholic Church and many evangelicals. But the international Religious Left, as with Cuba for 50 years, and as with Sandinista Nicaragua in the 1980’s, claims a higher level of spiritual discernment that overrides local religious opinion when it resists Marxist or far-left rule. Sitting in ecclesial offices in New York on Geneva, left-wing church officials evidently can more impartially judge human rights situations than can the simple locals. …

The WCC’s UN representative … explained that “churches in Honduras feel called to accompany the people in creating dialogue and promoting a message of healing and reconciliation.” It’s not clear to which Honduran churches he referred. The WCC delegation seemed mostly to represent declining liberal denominations in wealthy, first world countries, not Honduras. “The repression and violations of human rights must stop and new bridges must be built to create a society which is based on justice and respect for all,” he still insisted.

Honduras’ resistance to permanent Chavez-style, leftist rule has so perturbed the WCC that in August it dispatched a special delegation of international church leftists, in tandem with the equally left-leaning Latin American Council of Churches, to that ostensibly troubled nation. The religious international busybodies wanted Honduran churches to “accompany the people in their search for peace with justice and the re-establishment of democracy.” But what if Honduran churches do not want Chavezism in Honduras? The delegation of course hoped Honduran churches would heed wiser outside voices.

This August delegation wanted “Christian voices [to] be heard […] in defense of human rights and in support of humanitarian actions” and alleged that “violence has intensified” since Zelaya’s removal. The church officials, apparently without the help of professional pollsters, mystically discerned that the Honduran people “do not accept the imposition of a de facto government.” So the church delegation urged “the re-establishment of the constitutional order as soon as possible,” which it equated with political restoration for the man legally removed for subverting the constitution.

A WCC news release described Zelaya’s having been exiled in a “coup” by the military and “civilian sectors,” in the “context of a power struggle” over Zelaya’s “plans for constitutional change, which had been rejected by the Supreme Court and the Congress.” That’s a polite way of describing how Zelaya organized a mob to seize ballots for an illegal referendum to keep him in power indefinitely.

This delegation sought “reconciliation” and to “heal wounds,” as it tried to stir up Honduras churches “not to resign themselves to accept the present situation” and to rise up and “to accompany all people who suffer and to practice solidarity with those in greatest need.” It incongruently claimed that “the response of the people in the face of the coup d’état was immediate and massive,” thanks to decades of work by and among popular movements.” In fact, it plainly was distressed by the lack of wider, pro-Zelaya resistance, and was acclaiming only “the people” who were Zelaya’s revolutionary activists.

Twenty-five years ago, church groups like the NCC and WCC similarly expected Nicaragua’s churches to support the Sandinista revolution. The majority of churches that declined, especially the Roman Catholics, were deemed counter revolutionary reactionaries. Undoubtedly, these international church leftists feel similarly contemptuous towards most Honduras Christians who don’t share their revolutionary fervor. …

While the WCC is pushing for MORE international pressure against struggling Honduras, it is urging removal of international sanctions against communist North Korea. Evidently, in the eccentric WCC mind, Honduras’ constitutional government, which will hold previously scheduled national elections in November, is worse than North Korea, where no free election has ever been held, and whose slave masters aspire for nuclear weapons. Wherever churches in the world are looking for political counsel, they do well to learn the WCC’s stance, and vigorously pursue the alternative.

David Horowitz knows the left from the inside, as he was once passionately part of it. He changed to become a great campaigner for freedom.

What he tells us about the left is to be trusted.

These paragraphs by him are from his blog at FrontPageMag:

Bill Clinton is not like those who worship him, corrupting himself and others for a higher cause. Unlike them, he betrays principles because he has none. He will even betray his country, but without the slightest need to betray it for something else – for an idea, a party, a cause. He is a narcissist who sacrifices principle for power because his vision is so filled up with himself that he cannot tell the difference.

But the idealists who serve him — the Stephanopoulos’s, the Ickes’s, the feminists, the progressives and Hillary — can tell the difference. Their cyncism flows from the very perception they have of right and wrong. They do it for noble ends. They do it for the progressive faith. They do it because they see themselves as gods, as having the power — through correct politics — to redeem the world. It is that terrifyingly exalted ambition that fuels their spiritual arrogance and justifies their means.

And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. You are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your “reactionary” commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and stocking political war chests, but as both means and end.

Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will always be blind-sided by the sheer malice of the left — by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on their principles; by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity; by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal; and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the poor on the part of those who preen themselves as their champions.

Conservatives are surprised because they see progressives as merely misguided, when they are, in fact, morally – and ontologically — misdirected. They are the messianists of a false religious faith. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them.

From Newsmax:

President Raul Castro …  called for a national dialogue on the future of the country’s socialist system in an August speech.

Since then, authorities have set up discussions at universities, government workplaces and under the glow of street lamps. Community organizations called Committees for the Defense of the Revolution — created in part to root out anti-government activity — are now tasked with collecting criticism of the socialist system, along with suggestions for how to reform it.

Declining revenues and mounting debts have stretched the Cuban government to the point that it must trim some of its longstanding entitlement programs, Castro told the National Assembly during the August speech.

“Nobody, no individual nor country, can indefinitely spend more than she or he earns. Two plus two always adds up to four, never five,” he said. “Within the conditions of our imperfect socialism, due to our own shortcomings, two plus two often adds up to three.”

That losing formula has the Cuban government increasingly exhorting its citizens to work harder, expect less and come up with solutions to their own problems.

The input is funneled upward to Cuba’s leaders and will ostensibly be used to guide the reform process. Similar discussions soliciting criticism and ideas were gathered during a round of open-air discussions called by Castro in 2007. The government collected 1.3 million opinions from residents during that period, Castro said, nearly half of which were criticisms of one problem or another.

While Cuban authorities have made it clear that major political and economic reforms to the country’s one-party system are not on the discussion agenda, participants at the meetings are being encouraged to speak freely and openly about problems in their daily lives.

Many Cubans simmer with frustration brought by chronic transportation and housing shortages, a gargantuan state bureaucracy and salaries that average roughly $20 a month, even though most consumer goods in state-run stores are priced above what they would cost in the United States.

Subsidies for food, utilities and other basics offset those meager earnings, but as the government’s fortunes decline, authorities are increasingly telling Cubans to tackle their own problems. One high-ranking party official recently said Cubans can’t expect for the “daddy state” to fix everything, waiting with open mouths “like baby birds.”

Such a statement is “offensive” to the Cuban people, said dissident economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, who has spent time in prison for his opposition to the government.

“This system was designed to control everyone, so it’s absurd that the official propaganda talks about the ‘daddy state,’” he said, referring to Cuba’s government-run media. “It’s as if the Cuban people were to blame for this economic debacle, and not the government. The government is to blame for the way Cubans behave, because this is the system it created.”

Espinosa Chepe said Cubans would gladly solve their own problems if the government would allow for more small businesses and other forms of economic independence. …

Two major rollbacks of the island’s socialist system are now under consideration, and both involve major government programs that, though often criticized, deliver basic nutrition staples to all Cubans. The first proposed reform would gradually eliminate the workplace cafeterias that provide nearly-free lunches to a third of the island’s population each weekday, at a cost of more than $350 million a year. Instead, workers will receive a cash stipend, doubling the average workers’ salary.

The second major reform threatens to eliminate the ration-card system that provides every Cuban with about two weeks’ worth of food at highly subsidized prices, but is beset by inefficiencies. In the name of egalitarianism, the program doles out the same amount of food to everyone, even to those who don’t need it. [Who could those be? – JB]

Earlier this month in a much-discussed editorial that appeared in the communist party daily Granma, editor Lazaro Barredo Medina said the ration book had become a drag on the state’s struggling finances and reform efforts. “The ration booklet was a necessity at one time, but it has become an impediment to the collective decisions the nation must take,” he said.

His words touched off rampant speculation about the imminent demise of the ration system. But it’s not clear how the Cuban government would be able to quickly implement such a measure, since so many seniors and low-income families depend heavily on it. Cuba has no income-tax system and a vast black market economy, so ascertaining citizens’ real earnings for the purpose of welfare eligibility would be extremely difficult.

Then there is the threat of inflation.

“Getting rid of the ration book seems like a good move, but only if salaries can keep pace with the price of food,” said Aurelio Alonso, deputy editor of Cuba’s Casa de las Americas journal.

For Cubans to be able to pay market prices for food, worker salaries would have to double or triple, he said, and that would bring inflation if food supplies remain the same. “And that would be a big problem,” he said.

Still, Alonso said he sees the younger Castro as a practical man who understands economics, and he expects further reforms to follow. “You can’t have social justice and social goods if you don’t have an economy capable of sustaining it.”

And if you have an economy capable of sustaining ‘social justice’ and ‘social goods’, you’ll wreck it if you put it to that use.

The choice is freedom or collectivism. You cannot have both. They are mutually exclusive. Freedom brings plenty, collectivism brings want. Will the ‘practical man who understands economics’ – Raul Castro – ever get to understand that?

The left passionately desires to reduce the First World to the level of the Third World and destroy the nation state. That is the ideal in the minds of Obama and his henchmen, and it explains his foreign policy.

It is the ideal of the British Labour Party. Throughout their long years in power, that socialist cabal worked to achieve the destruction of Britain, and they have succeeded to such a degree that the damage is probably irreversible. They’ve done it by admitting Third World immigrants in massive numbers.

Melanie Phillips writes:

So now the cat is well and truly out of the bag. For years, as the number of immigrants to Britain shot up apparently uncontrollably, the question was how exactly this had happened.

Was it through a fit of absent-mindedness or gross incompetence? Or was it not inadvertent at all, but deliberate?

The latter explanation seemed just too outrageous. After all, a deliberate policy of mass immigration would have amounted to nothing less than an attempt to change the very make-up of this country without telling the electorate.

There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire democratic process. Now, however, we learn that this is exactly what did happen. The Labour government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage.

This astonishing revelation surfaced quite casually last weekend in a newspaper article by one Andrew Neather. He turns out to have been a speech writer for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

And it was he who wrote a landmark speech in September 2000 by the then immigration minister, Barbara Roche, that called for a loosening of immigration controls. But the true scope and purpose of this new policy was actively concealed.

In its 1997 election manifesto, Labour promised ‘firm control over immigration’ and in 2005 it promised a ‘crackdown on abuse’. In 2001, its manifesto merely said that the immigration rules needed to reflect changes to the economy to meet skills shortages.

But all this concealed a monumental shift of policy. For Neather wrote that until ‘at least February last year’, when a new points-based system was introduced to limit foreign workers in response to increasing uproar, the purpose of the policy Roche ushered in was to open up the UK to mass immigration.

This has been achieved. Some 2.3million migrants have been added to the population since 2001. Since 1997, the number of work permits has quadrupled to 120,000 a year.

Unless policies change, over the next 25 years some seven million more will be added to Britain’s population, a rate of growth three times as fast as took place in the Eighties.

Such an increase is simply unsustainable. Britain is already one of the most overcrowded countries in Europe. But now look at the real reason why this policy was introduced, and in secret. The Government’s ‘driving political purpose’, wrote Neather, was ‘to make the UK truly multicultural’.

It was therefore a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country. It was done to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions.

It was done to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place. And it was done without telling or asking the British people whether they wanted their country and their culture to be transformed in this way.

Spitefully, one motivation by Labour ministers was ‘to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.

Even Neather found that particular element of gratuitous Left-wing bullying to be ‘a manoeuvre too far’.

Yet apart from this, Neather sees nothing wrong in the policy he has described. Indeed, the reason for his astonishing candour is he thinks it’s something to boast about. Mass immigration, he wrote, had provided the ‘foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners’ without whom London could hardly function.

What elitist arrogance! As if most people employ nannies, cleaners and gardeners. And what ignorance. The argument that Britain is better off with this level of immigration has been conclusively shown to be economically illiterate.

Neather gave the impression that most immigrants are Eastern Europeans. But these form fewer than a quarter of all immigrants. [Most are Muslim – JB]

And the fact is that, despite his blithe assertions to the contrary, schools in areas of very high immigration find it desperately difficult to cope with so many children who don’t even have basic English. Other services, such as health or housing, are similarly being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers.

But the most shattering revelation was that this policy of mass immigration was not introduced to produce nannies or cleaners for the likes of Neather. It was to destroy Britain’s identity and transform it into a multicultural society where British attributes would have no greater status than any other country’s.

A measure of immigration is indeed good for a country. But this policy was not to enhance British culture and society by broadening the mix. It was to destroy its defining character altogether. …

They were, he wrote, reluctant to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all to Labour’s core white working class vote. So they deliberately kept it secret.

They knew that if they told the truth about what they were doing, voters would rise up in protest. So they kept it out of their election manifestos. …

For years [Britons] have watched as their country’s landscape has been transformed out of all recognition — and that politicians from all mainstream parties have told them first that it isn’t happening and second, that they are racist bigots to object even if it is.

Now the political picture has been transformed overnight by the unguarded candour of Andrew Neather’s eye-opening superciliousness. For now we know that Labour politicians actually caused this to happen – and did so out of total contempt for their own core voters. …

Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin have, in an amazingly short space of time and with the radiance of rising suns, become, at least for the present, the de facto leaders of the opposition to the collectivists who have lied and conned their way into power.

Intellectual conservatives may find them, or at least may find  Beck and Limbaugh, too populist for their taste; but they must surely welcome as we do the millions of voters they are winning over to a voluble and potentially highly active resistance. Beck often makes remarks we disagree with, but we consider them unimportant compared with everything he says that rings true, and that tolls the death-knell – with any luck – of the would-be totalitarians in power.

We confess to looking forward every week-day to watching Glenn Beck expose the people in power as the America-hating Marxists they are. The red telephone that never rings, only the White House having the number so it can correct anything wrong or inaccurate in what he tells his vast audience; Joe sitting beside it dressed as Mao Tse Tung whom Anita Dunn likes to ‘turn to most’ for wisdom; the charming, harmless, floppy, bitch puppy he holds up to show us what the Press Watch-Dog looks like now … they are funny, unforgettable, entertaining, apt, brilliant.

That the Democrats and their supporters in the media have had to invent quotations from Rush Limbaugh to support their smear that he’s ‘a racist’, and that they bully and persecute Sarah Palin and her children, are clear indicators of how much the left fears these brightening stars.

Also rising brightly is the impressive Liz Cheney, who is obviously well informed and extraordinarily perceptive in matters of foreign affairs and defense. Now there’s someone to please the intellectuals! (Contrast with poor old John McCain, whose undoubted heroism in war fails to compensate for his insufficient intelligence in politics.)

Another confession: among the many important reasons why we’d be glad if Sarah Palin or Liz Cheney became president, an extra small one is that her election would intensely annoy the lefty feminists.