THE PSYCHOLOGIST : How the left has changed -- once a bastion of principle, now a supporter of thugs

How the left has changed -- once a bastion of principle, now a supporter of thugs

The mask has slipped

During these last few weeks of grief and bloodshed in the Middle East, I have read at least five contributions to the Daily Camera that vehemently criticize Israel's response to Hamas' and Hezbollah's cross-border attacks - attacks which not only led to the kidnapping of three and the killing of 10 Israeli soldiers but also to the firing of rockets from Gaza and Lebanon into Israel.

All five writers, well-known local Left activists, justified the Arab attacks as valid responses to Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory; and all five promised us that if only Israel withdrew completely from its occupied territory, peace inevitably would follow. I have become very skeptical, however, of such rosy promises - and especially when offered with glib assurance in the face of much contradictory evidence and by parties who reside in peaceful Boulder rather than Haifa or Beirut.

As for the contradictory evidence, what better place to discover Hamas' and Hezbollah's avowed intentions than their founding documents promulgated only 20 years ago - Hamas' 1988 Covenant, and Hezbollah's 1985 Program. The first thing one notices is that these are not ordinary political programs, like the Republican or Democratic Party platforms - rather, these are passionate religious proclamations written by and for committed Muslim believers. The quasi-religious nature of both documents implies that their provisions will be obeyed without questions or hesitation by their adherents. Consider now some of these provisions. To begin, both documents affirm the inadmissibility of permanently abandoning to infidels any territory that had ever been in Muslim hands - an injunction which applies most particularly to Palestine, home of the third most sacred Muslim site. As the Covenant states:

"The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up." From this principle, the Covenant draws the following conclusion: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. "

Hezbollah's Program takes the identical position: "We vigorously condemn all plans for negotiation with Israel, and regard all negotiators as enemies, for the reason that such negotiation is nothing but the recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist occupation of Palestine." There is clearly only one conclusion to this religiously ordained command - Israel's destruction. Here is Hezbollah's Program: "Therefore our struggle will end only when this (Zionist) entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated."

It should also be noted that neither document mentions "occupation," that word so cherished by our Left activists, nor is there any hint that either movement might ever consider peaceful coexistence with Israel. In fact, the Covenant declares that "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."

Finally, what is the position of Hamas towards Jews as a people? As we discover from the Covenant, Hamas propounds an anti-Semitic creed as virulent as anything ever disseminated by Nazi Germany. Just like its Nazi teachers, Hamas holds international Jewry responsible for all the evil features of this modern age - i.e., for Capitalism, Imperialism and Communism. According to its Covenant, the Jews have been "behind" all significant, presumably unhappy, events of the last 200 years, beginning with the French Revolution and ending with the creation of the United Nations Security Council....

Many years ago, when I was young, the Left was an honorable antifascist movement. It fought racism, anti-Semitism, clerical obscurantism; it supported modernity, science, humanism. Today's Left defends fascist thugs like Saddam Hussein and Islamo-fascist parties like Hamas and Hezbollah - parties that advocate returning to the Seventh century, and preach the most virulent form of anti-Semitism. When I was young, men of the Left fought Fascism in Spanish trenches and on the beaches of Normandy; they would have been ashamed to shake a Nazi killer's hand. Today's Left activists preach Chamberlain's gospel of appeasement, and Left guru Chomsky joins Hezbollah leader Nasrallah on Lebanese TV, shakes his hand and voices approval of his 12,000-rocket arsenal donated to Hezbollah by Iran's mullahs for Israel's destruction. How low the Left has sunk since I was young.

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

How the left has changed -- once a bastion of principle, now a supporter of thugs

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