100 Short Years Ago....

[whitehall]

Since we didn't have internet or T.V. or barely radio at the dawn of the 20th century they were depressingly poetic in print and music and even art. The bottom line is that Woodie Wilson or his wife sent Americans to defend France and then we had to do it all over during another democrat administration barely twenty years later.

 

[Manonthestreet]

Dont think I disagreed with that......

 

[Old Rocks]

I like Reagan as much as he next guy, but Europe's mass ennui had nothing to do with being better red than dead. Lots of people felt nothing was worth fighting for, the world was just a meat grinder, so why bother? The Lost Generation wasn't about politics or any of the millions of -isms floating about; it was about the attitude that we might as well live for the now because either we die in the trenches or the flu will get us or we'll buy it in a factory or our lives will get pissed away by our political masters.

And really, after the horrors of WW1, who can blame that attitude?

"....who can blame that attitude?"


Me.

And your dd214 is from when? And you served where?

 

[PoliticalChic]

I like Reagan as much as he next guy, but Europe's mass ennui had nothing to do with being better red than dead. Lots of people felt nothing was worth fighting for, the world was just a meat grinder, so why bother? The Lost Generation wasn't about politics or any of the millions of -isms floating about; it was about the attitude that we might as well live for the now because either we die in the trenches or the flu will get us or we'll buy it in a factory or our lives will get pissed away by our political masters.

And really, after the horrors of WW1, who can blame that attitude?

"....who can blame that attitude?"


Me.

And your dd214 is from when? And you served where?

I appreciate service to this great nation, but let's be clear.


The Left, for whom you also serve as a Janissary, refuses to recognize evil, much less confront it, and that is the central point of my post....


It not only infantilizes, it feminizes.

Thus, all sorts of rationalizations from this administration about Iran, Russia, Gaza.




"A distinguishing characteristic of Liberals and Leftists is an aversion to recognizing or acknowledging evil and its permutations, i.e., communism. On another level, it explains the Left’s dislike for capitalism, a system which produces winners and losers, a painful fact that the Left would rather not see.

If one believes that people are 'good,' then every conflict can be settled through negotiations, that war solves nothing, and one can avoid recognizing evil. Feelings matter more than truth. 'What is right' takes a backseat to 'what is right for me.'

The Left is content to fight imaginary evil,such as carbon emissions and second hand smoke."
Dennis Prager





And in your post is the carping desire of all Leftists....silence all opposing voices.

Your post, essentially, said 'How dare you offer an opinion when you haven't worn the uniform.'

That is as unAmerican as you can get, Rocks.

 

[Mad Scientist]

And your dd214 is from when? And you served where?

Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution or Bill or Rights says you must have done a hitch in the Military in order to have Freedom of Speech. Or any other rights for that matter.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Since we didn't have internet or T.V. or barely radio at the dawn of the 20th century they were depressingly poetic in print and music and even art. The bottom line is that Woodie Wilson or his wife sent Americans to defend France and then we had to do it all over during another democrat administration barely twenty years later.

Did you mention Wilson????

See...now you've gotten me started...


1. At its core, fascism is the view that every element of society must work together in spiritual union toward the same goals at the behest of the state. One can see it defined in Mussolini's own summary of the Fascist philosophy: "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato" (Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State)
MODERN LEFTISM AS RECYCLED FASCISM

a. Almost 100,000 government propaganda agents were sent out to whip up support for the regime and the war
Nearly a quarter million ‘goons’ were given legal authority to beat and intimidate ‘slackers’ and dissenters
http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/Classical_Liberalism_vs_Modern_Liberal_Conservatism.pdf p. 9



2. Once elected President, Wilson helped to usher in the first wave of Progressive reforms that would later take full flower under the Administration of Franklin Roosevelt. While some assert that the expansion of the federal administrative state that originated in the Wilson Administration was due to the war mobilization effort, several key expansions came well before war mobilization was even on the horizon. Wilson, for instance, signed the national income tax into law in 1913 at the very outset of his Administration. In the same year, he pushed the Federal Reserve Act through Congress; early plans for this Act had envisioned a private board, but under Wilson’s leadership, the Federal Reserve was created as a government enterprise.
Woodrow Wilson: Godfather of Liberalism


3. Progressives saw WWI as an opportunity to change America and enforce collectivization. “In 1917, as Woodrow Wilson prepared to take the United States into the European war, the leading collectivist intellectuals of the day, John Dewey and Herbert Croly of The New Republic, beat the drums for American participation. …Dewey wrote that the progressive opponents of war were blind to the “immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war.” He hoped they would work “to form ... the conditions and objects of our entrance.” In other words, they should exploit the opportunities war bestowed for collectivizing America. Croly was pithier: “The American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure.”
http://fff.org/freedom/fd0203c.asp


a. “Once the war is on, the conviction spreads that individual thought is helpless, that the only way one can count is as a cog in the great wheel. There is no good holding back. We are told to dry our unnoticed and ineffective tears and plunge into the great work.”
From a Randolph Bourne essay published in June 1917, “The War and the Intellectuals.”


b. Dewey reveled in the thought that the war might force Americans to “give up much of our economic freedom…we shall have to lay by our good natured individualism and march in step.”
Taking liberties - LA Times






"... the war might force Americans to “give up much of our economic freedom…we shall have to lay by our good natured individualism and march in step.”

Is that not an excellent definition of Liberalism???

 

[Steven_R]

Either you lack any empathy for what the Europeans that actually suffered through WW1 went through, you simply don't know enough about the subject, or you're just a moron.

Why don't you "dazzle" us with yer WWI knowledge Steve.

Like what? Numbers? France had 8 million men under arms and 6 million of those ended up killed, wounded, or missing. That's a 75% casualty rate. Or that France lost 4.2% of its total population during the war. That's over one in twenty five people in France alive in August 1914 were killed by November 1918. Just to put that in perspective, there are 318 million Americans right now. 4.2% of that figure being killed outright would be like losing 13.4 million people.

Or should we talk about the Pals Battalions, where men were put in units with other men from their hometowns and then thrown into the meat grinder of the Western Front. What do you think that did to the youth population of small villages?

Or maybe we should discuss the Gallipoli campaign and how the British officers couldn't get around to moving inland from the beaches and the Turks rained hell on the Aussies for 6 weeks? Or how so many of the generals on both sides just kept throwing wave after wave after wave over the top of the trenches with nothing to show for their efforts except increasing casualty numbers and when the shell shocked troops just couldn't do it any longer, they were shot for cowardice?

We could also discuss German aerial bombardment of civilian cities like London. Nothing screams worthwhile war effort like watching your kids get blown up. Or how governments ostensibly fighting for freedom used the war as an excuse to crack down on people wanting outrageous things like the right to vote and not being arrested for being a minority. Maybe we can discuss villages that had stood for two thousand years that no longer existed. Not abandoned, not ghost towns, physically destroyed down to every last trace. Just gone.

And after it was all over, then we got to have people drop like flies from the Spanish Flu. And the men who survived all of that and came home couldn't find work and were told to keep a stiff upper lip, stop complaining, and shut up. Go back to the horrible prewar conditions where the masters of the world had rights and power and the little folk had nothing. Fight for freedom like the propaganda posters proclaimed and then come home and get a hickory shampoo for wanting paid in cash instead of script or wanting real safety standards in mines and factories.

And for what? What was the point of all of that pain and suffering? So some kings and Kaisers and tsars and emperors could redraw some lines on a map and proclaim themselves the rulers of all they surveyed. WW1 sucked for all those people who fought and died and those they left behind. It was a nightmare and it shouldn't be some shock that afterwards people just said enough. Some did it through politics, and all those -ists said they had a different plan that didn't involve being killed for a king or some rich guy or some line on a map in far away lands. It was all bullshit, but it shouldn't be a surprise that enough people wanted something else than what they turned away from the status quo towards one -ism or another.

I'm not a Marxist or Communist or Leftist or Socialist by any means, but it isn't real hard to see why those movements and philosophies were popular with the poor and disenfranchised and the beat upon after seeing what they went through while their masters in London and Paris and Moscow and Washington just kept throwing them into a meat grinder.

 

[Manonthestreet]

On August 4 householders are asked to turn off their lights between 10pm and 11pm

and to leave a single light or candle on as a mark of respect for the sacrifices made and to share an hour of quiet reflection.

The lights out event commemorates the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey’s famous remark on the outbreak of the First World War.

“The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time." Turn lights out to honour First World War dead (From Messenger Newspapers)

 

[TheGreatGatsby]

I'm not a Marxist or Communist or Leftist or Socialist by any means, but it isn't real hard to see why those movements and philosophies were popular with the poor and disenfranchised and the beat upon after seeing what they went through while their masters in London and Paris and Moscow and Washington just kept throwing them into a meat grinder.

More like the masses of degenerates. You don't have to be rich to understand the value of freedom and liberty.

 

[Agit8r]

WWI exacted a terrible toll....and one result was a feeling on the continent that there was nothing worth fighting and dying for.....'better red than dead.'

Ronald Reagan came along and convinced many Europeans otherwise.




And, before Reagan...

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. "

John Stuart Mill

There seems to be this pervasive pattern of you quoting people who do not agree with you in order to support spurious arguments. It is sad really.

"The restraints of Communism would be freedom in comparison with the present condition of the majority of the human race"
-- John Stuart Mill; from 'Principles of Political Economy' (1852)

 

[Steven_R]

I'm not a Marxist or Communist or Leftist or Socialist by any means, but it isn't real hard to see why those movements and philosophies were popular with the poor and disenfranchised and the beat upon after seeing what they went through while their masters in London and Paris and Moscow and Washington just kept throwing them into a meat grinder.

More like the masses of degenerates. You don't have to be rich to understand the value of freedom and liberty.

You also don't have to be poor to see that "freedom for me but not for thee" isn't exactly a recipe for long term success. How many kings and aristocrats ended up losing a head over the years because they went out of their way to exploit and oppress the normal guy in the streets?

 

[PoliticalChic]

WWI exacted a terrible toll....and one result was a feeling on the continent that there was nothing worth fighting and dying for.....'better red than dead.'

Ronald Reagan came along and convinced many Europeans otherwise.




And, before Reagan...

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. "

John Stuart Mill

There seems to be this pervasive pattern of you quoting people who do not agree with you in order to support spurious arguments. It is sad really.

"The restraints of Communism would be freedom in comparison with the present condition of the majority of the human race"
-- John Stuart Mill; from 'Principles of Political Economy' (1852)

1. In stretching to try to find some way...any way....to get away from the intellectual beating that I administer to you on a regular basis, you do what so many imbeciles do....

....you evince a lack of understanding of the history to which you appeal.

It is clear that you don't know in what meaning that quote uses "communism."


Now....watch as I rip a new one for one who is one:

The quote is dated 1852.



2. "In its modern beginnings, socialism was optimistic and well intentioned, without the overlay of its contemporary varieties that tend to bemoan prosperity, romanticize poverty, and promote a view that place individual rights are a secondary concern. This is to say that the earliest socialists sought the fullest possible flourishing of humanity, “the common good.”

3. A half-century before Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto, there was Gracchus Babeuf’s Plebeian Manifesto, which was later renamed the Manifesto of the Equals. Babeuf’s early (1796) work has been described as socialist, anarchist, and communist, and has had an enormous impact. He wrote: “The French Revolution was nothing but a precursor of another revolution, on which will be bigger, more solemn, and which will be the last…We reach for something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of goods! Nor more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.” Here, then, are the major themes of socialist theory. It takes very little interpolation to find that opponents profit at the expense of the environment, and conditions of inequality in society.

4. For Babeur, socialism would distribute prosperity across the entire population, as it would “[have] us eat four good meals a day, [dress} us most elegantly, and also [provide] those of us who are fathers of families with charming houses worth a thousand louis each.”

5. Oscar Wilde: “Under socialism…there will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings…Each member of society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society…”

6. Marxism rested on the assumption that the condition of the working classes would grow ever worse under capitalism, that there would be but two classes: one small and rich, the other vast and increasingly impoverished, and revolution would be the anodyne that would result in the “common good.” But by the early 20th century, it was clear that this assumption was completely wrong! Under capitalism, the standard of living of all was improving: prices falling, incomes rising, health and sanitation improving, lengthening of life spans, diets becoming more varied, the new jobs created in industry paid more than most could make in agriculture, housing improved, and middle class industrialists and business owners displaced nobility and gentry as heroes.

7. These economic advances continued throughout the period of the rise of socialist ideology. The poor didn’t get poorer because the rich were getting richer (a familiar socialist refrain even today) as the socialists had predicted. Instead, the underlying reality was that capitalism had created the first societies in history in which living standards were rising in all sectors of society."
From a speech by Rev. Robert A. Sirico, President, Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.
Delivered at Hillsdale College, October 27, 2006





So, dolt, the bright promises of "communism" of 1852 is hardly the oppression and slaughter of the 100 million killed by same in the last century.


In short, the meaning of communism then, was not how any enlightened individual sees same today.



And, of course, I exclude you from "enlightened."

It is sad really.

 

[Agit8r]

So, dolt, the bright promises of "communism" of 1852 is hardly the oppression and slaughter of the 100 million killed by same in the last century.


In short, the meaning of communism then, was not how any enlightened individual sees same today.

So, if I am understanding correctly, you agree (along with Mill) that communism was a noble but impracticable idea aimed at solving actual problems, even though it would ultimately prove a failure. That is the only conclusion one can draw from your above comments, after all.

 

[PoliticalChic]

So, dolt, the bright promises of "communism" of 1852 is hardly the oppression and slaughter of the 100 million killed by same in the last century.


In short, the meaning of communism then, was not how any enlightened individual sees same today.

So, if I am understanding correctly, you agree (along with Mill) that communism was a noble but impracticable idea aimed at solving actual problems, even though it would ultimately prove a failure. That is the only conclusion one can draw from your above comments, after all.

You know very well what I said. It was the kind of pipe dream based on typical Leftist thinking....if it can be called thinking.....'I wish it true, so it must be true.'


And then, overlook the slaughter and oppression that Leftism always brings.

Always based on a lack of understanding of human nature.



Classical liberals, Conservatives truly understand humans, as shown here:
Each kind of government is a reflection on the way human nature is perceived. The Founders did not feel that man is either perfect, nor perfectible. James Madison, Federalist No. 55, February 15, 1788 “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust.” Therefore, a government must account for this nature, thus checks and balances.


Federalist 10- checks and balances, to keep passions in check.
Tocqueville tells how centralization of power can lead to despotism. Beware of government by experts and beaurocrats.



And from the Left....Progressive Woodrow Wilson, in his essay “What is Progress?” compares the Founders ideas of checks and balances as the construction of a government as one would construct an orrery, and based on immutable laws as in Newton, while he contends that government should conform to Darwin. “ It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live.”
Get it: no checks or balances.

That's Obama: "Obama: 'If Congress Won't Act, I Will' Obama: 'If Congress Won't Act, I Will' | Video - ABC News

 

[konradv]

So, dolt, the bright promises of "communism" of 1852 is hardly the oppression and slaughter of the 100 million killed by same in the last century.


In short, the meaning of communism then, was not how any enlightened individual sees same today.

So, if I am understanding correctly, you agree (along with Mill) that communism was a noble but impracticable idea aimed at solving actual problems, even though it would ultimately prove a failure. That is the only conclusion one can draw from your above comments, after all.

True. I feel that Marx didn't envision Stalin when writing his thesis. Trying to change human nature is a dangerous thing to do and often ends badly. Today it seems libertarians are falling into that trap. They feel that most problems can be solved on a person-to-person basis, forgetting that human nature dictates that many of the strong will take advantage of the weak with their rose-colored notions of a perfect society becoming just a pipe dream.

 

[PoliticalChic]

So, dolt, the bright promises of "communism" of 1852 is hardly the oppression and slaughter of the 100 million killed by same in the last century.


In short, the meaning of communism then, was not how any enlightened individual sees same today.

So, if I am understanding correctly, you agree (along with Mill) that communism was a noble but impracticable idea aimed at solving actual problems, even though it would ultimately prove a failure. That is the only conclusion one can draw from your above comments, after all.

True. I feel that Marx didn't envision Stalin when writing his thesis. Trying to change human nature is a dangerous thing to do and often ends badly. Today it seems libertarians are falling into that trap. They feel that most problems can be solved on a person-to-person basis, forgetting that human nature dictates that many of the strong will take advantage of the weak with their rose-colored notions of a perfect society becoming just a pipe dream.

"Trying to change human nature is a dangerous thing to do and often ends badly."


Couldn't agree more.



The earlier poster gave me the idea:

http://www.usmessageboard.com/politics/368262-on-human-nature-and-politics.html

 

[PoliticalChic]

So, dolt, the bright promises of "communism" of 1852 is hardly the oppression and slaughter of the 100 million killed by same in the last century.


In short, the meaning of communism then, was not how any enlightened individual sees same today.

So, if I am understanding correctly, you agree (along with Mill) that communism was a noble but impracticable idea aimed at solving actual problems, even though it would ultimately prove a failure. That is the only conclusion one can draw from your above comments, after all.

True. I feel that Marx didn't envision Stalin when writing his thesis. Trying to change human nature is a dangerous thing to do and often ends badly. Today it seems libertarians are falling into that trap. They feel that most problems can be solved on a person-to-person basis, forgetting that human nature dictates that many of the strong will take advantage of the weak with their rose-colored notions of a perfect society becoming just a pipe dream.

BTW....you know how Marx suggested handling of unresponsive human nature?

Exactly as Stalin did.


1. "Early socialists publically advocated genocide, in the 19th and 20th centuries. It first appeared in Marx's journal, Rheinishe Zeitung, in January of 1849. When the socialist class war happens, there will be primitive societies in Europe, two stages behind- not even capitalist yet- the Basques, the Bretons, the Scottish Highlanders, the Serbs, and others he calls 'racial trash,' and they will have to be destroyed because, being two stages behind in the class struggle, it will be impossible to bring them up to being revolutionary." George Watson, Historian, Cambridge University.

a. "The classes and races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way...they must perish in the revolutionary holocaust." Karl Marx, People's Paper, April 16, 1856, Journal of the History of Idea, 1981

b. "Before Marx, no other European thinker publically advocated racial extermination. He was the first."
George Watson.

 

[Steven_R]

b. "Before Marx, no other European thinker publically advocated racial extermination. He was the first."
George Watson.

Carthago delenda est

 

[PoliticalChic]

b. "Before Marx, no other European thinker publically advocated racial extermination. He was the first."
George Watson.

Carthago delenda est

I see....you believe that Stalin was channeling Cato.....

 

[Steven_R]

Politicians and political thinkers have long been publically advocating the "wipe them out, all of them" approach to problem solving, long before some German philosopher put pen to paper.