QUOTES ABOUT/BY
THE NEW LEFT/MODERN LIBERALS

"The failure to surrender to their victorious opponents [supporters of capitalism] has led tattered "socialist" parties like the NDP and their leftist members and supporters to mindlessly, recklessly and uncritically support cruel, feudal, racist and terrorist regimes and movements as long as those villains are also anti-American."
The reason: The United States is simply the symbol of the failure of their life's work and dreams. Defeat and resentment have rendered these formerly idealistic individuals and organizations vulnerable to new and pernicious forms of anti-Semitism and other political foolishness.
-- Bob Friedland, Victoria lawyer and former civil rights activist, in the Vancouver Sun of July 25, 2002.
(The NDP is a prominent political party in Canada, avowedly socialist, rooted in the labour union movement and prairie farmer activism. Friedland was a civil rights activist in the deep south, a human rights bureaucrat in state government, and a lawyer who often represented persons with a discrimination claim.)

"Psychologically, they do not see what you see. They see the present and the past through a special lens. What is overwhelmingly clear to them is an imagined future collectivist utopia .... where antagonisms of class and race have been eliminated. . .poverty does not exist and social justice reigns...and an economy planned by people like themselves has produced economic abundance. . .You look at Soviet history and see the Gulag, the executions of the Terror, the pervasive oppression... Psychologically, the leftists you speak of see little of that. They see a Communist state that articulated their vision of the future and which sought to destroy the societies and institutions they hated. They cannot see the horror that communism actually created."
- Historians Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, interviwed by Jamie Glazov, “Frontpage Interview: In Denial”, www.frontpagemagazine.com. Quoted by Andrew Bernstein in The Capitalist Manifesto, page 168.

“Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.”
– Thomas Sowell

“In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.”
- The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx

The Sixties might have been a time of tantalizing glimpses of the New Jerusalem. But it was also a time when the "System" - that collection of values that provide guidelines for societies as well as individuals - was assaulted and mauled. As one center of authority after another was discredited under the New Left offensive, we radicals claimed that we murdered to create. But while we wanted a revolution, we didn't have a plan. The decade ended with a big bang that made society into a collection of splinter groups, special interest organizations and newly minted "minorities" whose only common belief was that America was guilty and untrustworthy.
- Peter Collier and David Horowitz in Destructive Generation: second thoughts about the sixties.

"Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out"
- @horowitz39, David Horowitz on Twitter, reported on Front Page magazine's web site.

"...hijacked a considerable portion of the environmental movement back in the mid-'80s and who have become very clever at using green language to cloak campaigns that have more to do with anti-industrialism, antiglobalization, anticorporate, all of those things which are basically political campaigns."
- Patrick Moore, early member and key executive of Greenpeace, speaking of proponents of policy to restrict use of PVC, Boston, October 23, quoted in Wired Magazine. (Moore woke up one morning and asked himself why he was living a negative life. He switched to being a proponent of resource harvesting.)

"But the result could be very close and may not be settled before the [Democratic presidential candidate nominating convention], at which point Democrats face the prospect of a deadlocked race being settled by the "superdelegates."

Who are the superdelegates? They are Democratic office-holders and organizers who are given an extra vote in the convention as the voice of the party establishment. Funny, isn't it, that the "anti-establishment" left gives its own establishment special weight in the Democratic Party's decisions?"
- Robert Tracinski, TIA Daily, February 7, 2008

"Only once did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it."

"After so much hope and struggle, and so many lives sacrificed around the world, socialism's epitaph turned out to be: If you build it, they will leave."
- Joshua Muravchik, in Heaven On Earth - the Rise and Fall of Socialism

"No member of the modern liberal intelligentsia can stare at a social problem for very long. He retreats into alleged structures over which the victim has no control. And out of the need to avoid the rawness of reality he spins utopian schemes of social engineering."
- Theodore Dalrymple, in Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, publisher Ivan R. Dee, quoted by Bruce Ramsey in the Seattle Times of August 21, 2005

"Like so much that Obama has said and done over the years, this is standard stuff on the far left, ...... where opinions different from those of the left are ascribed to emotions ("bitter" in this case), rather than to arguments that need to be answered.

"Like so many others on the left, Obama rejects "stereotypes" when they are stereotypes he doesn't like but blithely throws around his own stereotypes ..."

"Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having distain or contempt for them as human beings.
Karl Marx said, "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing." In other words, they mattered only in so far as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda.
Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the "detestable" people who "have no right to live."
- Thomas Sowell in "A Living Lie" on "Real Clear Politics" web site, April 2008. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/a_living_lie.html

"We shall proclaim destruction - why? why? because the idea is so fascinating! But - we must get a little excercise. We'll have a few fires - we'll spread a few legends.....And the whole earth will resound with the cry 'A new and righteous law is coming.' "
- Dostoevsky in The Devils
(as quoted in Destructive Generation: second thoughts about the sixties, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz)

"This self-sacrificing will, to give ..... one's own life for others ....., is most highly developed in the Arayan."
and
"The Arayan is not greatest in his mental [quotient].... as such, but in the extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community."
- Adolf Hitler, in Mein Kampf

Chavez doesn't admit the idea that not everybody is obliged to be in accord with him. He considers, as do all these messianic leaders, that those who are against him are his enemies.
- Teodoro Petkoff, former leftist Venezuelan guerrila who is an aide to the Venezuelan opposition leader Mr. Rosales, quoted in the National Post of december 2, 2008.
Keith's comment: Chavez acts by force.

"A society too squeamish to call evil by its right name has destroyed its first, best line of defense against cut-throats. Our best line of defense against crime is to hate it."
- a survivor of the Unabomber's mail-bombs, quoted by psychologist Michael Hurd in his Living Resources newsletter

"Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100% literacy."
- John Derbyshire's comment in a May 1, 2000 column. (The context was those who still think that communism is good, that Castro is a nice man, etc. "After some blather about Cuba having 100 percent literacy and rock-bottom infant mortality, as if Cuban government statistics were worth the paper they are printed on, .....")

"Since September 11th, the courageous acts of countless Americans have set a new standard for the nation. Indeed, a new American spirit has been forged. That spirit is characterized by sacrifice, humility, and a refusal to quit in the face of adversity. At a time when our entire country is banding together and facing down individualism, ...."
- from document "STATEMENT of SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY ON THE NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS VICTORY IN SUPER BOWL XXXVI, February 4, 2002" as posted on his web site, complete with their typos.

My comment: It is amazing that an experienced American politician can claim that fighting an enemy whose soldiers are willing to sacrifice their individual lives to a collective's mission of killing is an act of "facing down individualism". Either he has an anti-American agenda or is whacko. (The collective of radical Islam, whose mission is to kill citizens of a country founded on protection of the individual (the U.S.A.), and whose reasons include elimination of the freedom enjoyed in the U.S.A.) As well, the notion of sacrifice and humility seems at odds with the defensive action implied by "staring down".
But his statement does urge "sacrifice for the greater good", which is what the terrorists are doing to themselves and their victims. Yet it is not logical to use the football team as an example of sacrifice - they are individuals choosing to work together to gain a shared value, victory in a voluntary game. The players are cooperators, not sacrificers, not killers as the terrorists are.
I sent a message to Kennedy asking him to clarify how he makes the connection, but he did not respond before he died.
- Keith Sketchley

Michael Campbell's column of November 22, 2003 in the Vancouver Sun newspaper identifies the beliefs of several anti-American protest groups in the UK and US.
- International Answer supports North Korea's regime, Saddam Hussein, and Slobodan Milosevic. It associates with Communist and anarchist groups.
- the Stop the War Coalition is part of Hate-America International, whose leadership has a high proportion of Communist and Marxist groups, plus radical Islamics and some environmentalists. - there is evidence that leftist-Islamist alliances were promoted by senior al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Discover The Networks provides information on neo-Marxist activists. The case of Medea Benjamin is illustrative (note the reason she chose her first name, and her explicit support for North Korea where starving people are forbidden from receiving food from relatives in Communist China).

"The United States and Israel must be today the two most dangerous of the 125 sovereign states among which the land surface of this planet is at present partitioned."
- Arnold Toynbee, English historian, 1968

"When Hitler came along, Toynbee was an enthusiastic appeaser. He met Hitler in 1936 and came away deeply impressed (the two men hated some of the same things). He told his countrymen that Hitler sincerely desired peace."
- Among the Bourgeoisophobes, by David Brooks, The Weekly Standard, 04/15/2002, Volume 007, Issue 30

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
- Adolf Hitler, Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306, referred to by John J. Ray in the "Hitler was a Leftist" web page.)

"And once the bourgeoisophobes had experienced the basic spasm of reaction, they soon settled on the Americans and Jews as two of the chief objects of their ire. Because, as Henry Steele Commager once noted, no country in the world ever succeeded like America, and everybody knew it. And no people in the European experience ever achieved such sustained success as the Jews."
- Among the Bourgeoisophobes, by David Brooks, The Weekly Standard, 04/15/2002, Volume 007, Issue 30
(There was a Part 2 of the article later in April. The publication has closed.)

"The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death,"
- al Qaeda's Mualana Inyadullah

Jews "love life more than any other people, and they prefer not to die,"
- Hamas official Ismail Haniya

(Which reminds me of the character John Galt in the famous novel Atlas Shrugged:
”You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.”)

"When I saw the first tower cascade down into that enormous plume of dust and paper, there was a little voice inside me that said "yeah!" When the second tower came down the same way, that little voice said "Beautiful!"....and I secretly said to myself "Go, Osama, Go!"
- Kevin Potvin, 2002, regarding destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York City on September 11, 2001 by Islamic terrist warriors.
(quoted by the Vancouver Sun of April 14, 2007 at the time of controversy over his candidacy for the Green Party of Canada; at which time he issued a fairly strong apology that was rejected by the party's leader Elizabeth May who wanted a "significantly deeper" apology, saying "The only thing that really completely precludes running for the Green party of Canada is celebrating the death of innocents...")
My comment: Hopefully he has seen the error of his ways, apparently claiming to have searched deep in his mind as to the reasons for his negative emotions. Nevertheless, his remarks illustrate what many Modern Liberals expressed after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Why did they have such extreme hurtful emotions?
What is the source of his psychological problem? The bad ideas are expressed in his statement: "This is not a war against terrorism. It is a war against unbridled corporatism and militarism." Thus to people like Potvin the occupants of the World Trade Center were not innocents - they were capitalist exploiters and representatives of the United States of America which is of course to blame for all the wars against fine people like Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.

The Left's support of Totalitarian Islam will work against causes it claims to support. (Ed Cline, Capitalism Magazine, February 2015)
Regrets, link dead, link title is odd.

"Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should be stopped, that armed force should be abolished as a means of settling disputes among nations, and that war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictatorships; the political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from welfare statism to socialism to fascism to communism. This means that they are opposed to the use of coercion by one nation against another, but not by the government of a nation against its own citizens; it means that they are opposed to the use of force against armed adversaries, but not against the disarmed."
- Ayn Rand

Observe further that no one ever speaks of tolerating rationality or honesty or integrity or productiveness. No one ever speaks of tolerating cultures that respect rights and uphold the rule of law. The objects allegedly deserving tolerance are invariably the irrational, the dishonest, the unjust, the parasitic, the rights violating, the murderous, the tyrannical. Ask yourself why.
- Craig Biddle, The Objective Standard, Fall 2010

The Left Loses the Vietnam War
(Robert Tracinski in http://www.realclearpolitics.com and http://www.tiadaily.com, August 2007)

My comment: The conduct of the Vietnam War by the U.S. was fundamentally wrong in one respect - forced military service, which is immoral and fosters sloppy military strategy and tactics. It is debatable whether or not it was in the best interest of Americans to bother helping those in SE Asia fight oppression, but there is no doubt the Communist enemy was immoral at root. Thus for Jane Fonda to have herself photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun emplacement to protest US action in Vietnam was fundamentally wrong. In my judgement she was consciously aiding the military of an evil regime (a communist one), against the society that left her free to be an actress and to speak out. Why would she do that instead of working to convince US politicians that the US' actions were wrong?
(Her action also worked against US prisoners of war in North Vietnam, according to credible POWs.) - Keith Sketchley

We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth. We can and must write in the language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like, toward those who disagree with us.
- Lenin

"The secret to [the late Greenpeace co-founder] David McTaggart’s success is the secret to Greenpeace’s success: It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true. You are what the media define you to be. Greenpeace became a myth, and a myth-generating machine."
- Paul Watson, one of the co-founders of Greenpeace, in a 1991 article in Forbes magazine
(from Green Tracking Library)

“[A]bsolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.”
- Eric Hoffer (quoted in Climate Scientology, Islam, and Religious Fanaticism at http://ibloga.blogspot.com/)

"The academic left, ...., is fiercely judgemental and highly vociferous, though all the while it is eager to denounce judgemental behaviour in its opponents."
- Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, in Higher Superstition (the academic left and its quarrel with science)

... a German intellectual named Karl Marx gave one of the most influential accounts of the new capitalist system—and he got everything wrong. An Industrial Revolution driven by scientific and technological advances springing from the minds of a few extraordinary individuals, he would describe as the anonymous, collective product of brute physical labor; an economic system of liberty, he would describe as a system of oppression; a system built on the right to property he would describe as a system based of expropriation—and then he would propose actual oppression and expropriation as the solution.
- Robert Tracinski, October 2, 2007, in article "The Historic Significance of "Atlas Shrugged", in TIA Daily

My comment: Karl Marx of course popularized the maxim "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." (Widely published as "A Critique of the Gotha Program", 1875, an application of his beliefs to a debate over the proper form of governance for an area of Germany. He may have adapted the words of Louis Blanc in "Organisation de Travail" or Morelly in "Code de Nature". The receiving half of that maxim can be found in popular Christian bibles as "And distribution was made unto every man according as he had need." (Acts 4:35, according to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.)) The problem is force, which Marx clearly meant. How did Marx justify the contradiction observed by Tracinski? Marxism has a type of logic that claims contradictions are good.

In the terminology of Marx and Engels the words communism and socialism are synonymous. The same was true for the practice of all Marxian groups and sects until 1917.
- Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos

And another quote from Tracinski in TIA Daily: "So why all this talk about America having to show that it is a "good citizen" and having to "shoulder our responsibilities"? Isn't serving as the world's strongest and most resolute bulwark against tyranny and terror, bringing down two evil empires and working on preventing a third — shouldn't that be enough to earn the world's gratitude?"
I comment that the talk reflects the leftist line that terrorism comes from poverty and their equating of defense with aggression.
BTW, you can find TIA Daily here.

REFERENCES

AND THE WATERMELONS

Scratch an environmentalist activist and you'll find a well of anti-human beliefs that are the foundation of, and popularized by those who believe, Marxist teachings.

In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
- quoted by Michael Crichton in his talk “Aliens cause warming”, about a prediction that simply did not come true (reality is that food production has increased more than population)

"We are not interested in the utility of a particular species or free-flowing river or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value-to me-than another human body, or a billion of them."
- David M. Graber, a research biologist with the U.S. National Park Service, in his Los Angeles Times book review of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, quoted by George Reisman in "The Toxicity of Environmentalism".

“Honorable representatives of the great saurians of older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of a dainty!”
- John Muir referring to alligators, quoted by environmentalist Bill McKibben, according to George Reisman in The Toxicity of Environmentalism.

Yes, I read negativity in most environmentalist claims - they presume doom, caused by those unreliable humans who (claimed Marx) cannot be trusted to live well and aren't creating more. They don't look out their window and see the gardens and forests planted and nurtured by humans. They don't see the shelters and mobility created by humans. They are oddly blind, mentally.


The term "new left" distinguishes an anti-industrial mentality from the old scientific marxism. The separation is not strict of course - one newspaper columnist, not young, who supports environmentalism uses "scientific" in a deterministic way typical of the old left.

Underlying the negative view of humans that Marxist political theories are based on is the fundamental error of Plato that Kant amplified. Failing to understand the human mind, Plato theorized that there are two worlds - the unreal one we live in and the real one we can only know by some obscure method of study. Kant concluded that humans can't know anything. Marxism is based on that anti-human conclusion, though bizarely the collective and its elite somehow know everything and can pre-ordain the future.
In contrast, Aristotle avoided Plato's error and emphasized reality. The advances in knowledge of the Renaissance era, and subsequent inventions to help human life, were facilitated by Aristotle's teaching. Ayn Rand later recognized that sound thinking fosters life and is self-reinforcing, putting a foundation under ethics.

MORE COMMENTS FROM KEITH (especially on Art)

And adherents are blind to reality. For example, Lysenkoism, of which the article says “So when the doctrines of science and the doctrines of communism clashed, he always chose the latter—confident that biology would conform to ideology in the end. It never did.” That of course fits Marxism – including the idea that words create reality. And the related distrust of what most of us consider normal science (misleadingly called 'Western').
(With a version of that in Nationalsozialistische Germany, which had the same roots as Communism: "Jewish science" as a sneer used to reject contributions of scientists who were Jewish.)

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