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Communism and liberalism
       two faces of totalitarianism

"I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies but not the madness of the people" - Sir Isaac Newton

by Michael Newland

Many years ago I borrowed a saucepan.

Although being of normal size, it included a most unusual feature - it was so heavy it needed both hands to lift it. The explanation was that the saucepan had been made in Eastern Europe during the heyday of communism. Under the communist system, factories were given production quotas. The pots and pans quota was not based on the number of items produced, but on the amount of steel used. Factories thus made saucepans as heavy as possible - short of needing a crane to do the cooking - in order to fulfil their quotas as easily as possible.

The saucepan story is a neat parable explaining why such an entrenched system as communism could collapse, if not the breath-taking velocity of its demise in 1989. The needs of people - in this case a practical saucepan - were displaced by edicts of a theory which took little account of reality.

Those who pointed out the obvious, if they were lucky enough to escape persecution and imprisonment, would be told that the theory behind the political system was a 'scientific' one - Marxism-Leninism. Any deficiencies which appeared to exist in practice were therefore either temporary, the work of saboteurs, or likely the imaginings of the mentally disturbed. Societies, like individuals, can go mad.

Communism is now widely regarded as an aberrant system, and it is thought remarkable that it could have survived for so long among a species which regards itself as rational. There is little awareness that a system of broadly identical ideas dominates the west under the title of liberalism.

Tick off the five main points.

Both communism and liberalism maintain with complete certainty that the destruction of the existing society will give birth to a new form of human existence at the least approaching utopia. They are what Daniel Chirot dubbed 'tyrannies of certitude'.

A particular group of people has been responsible for blocking the happy development for centuries. In the case of communism it was capitalists, in the case of liberalism it is 'racists'. One must be harsh to build the new society and not make excuses. Few people know that the word 'racism' was invented by Leon Trotsky, one of the principal architects of the communist nightmare.

The rightness of the cause dictates that a political architecture of lies rather than reasoned argument is permissible if necessary to bring about the result. Since no one will willingly give up their human identity, and that is what we are being asked to do, lies will, in fact, be indispensable. The communists aimed at eradicating 'bourgeois consciousness'. The liberals are systematically eradicating our history and identity from schools to ensure pliancy before the onslaught of anti-majority bias in everything from newspapers to employment law. In this they are unlikely to succeed in the long run. The Russian and Yugoslav experience under communism has shown the persistency of racial and cultural identity.

Doubters concerning the wisdom of the new arrangements are to be marginalised, vilified or silenced - under communism they were dubbed capitalist spies and saboteurs, under liberalism they are 'racists' - a sound catch-all term of abuse for any person opposing their own marginalisation.

The 'racists' are well-organised and to blame for nearly everything which goes wrong according to authority, just like the 'counter-revolutionaries, western spies and saboteurs' in the heyday of communism. Under communism the newspapers would say 'capitalist spy ring raided'. Under liberalism we read 'police target racist groups'. In both cases good citizens are to congratulate themselves on the skill and wisdom of the authorities in protecting them from disruptions to the relentless march towards paradise on earth so evident on Soviet collective farms and now in Britain's inner-cities.

If communism was not delivering the goods then even more stringent action was needed to eradicate the source of the trouble. Since it had been scientifically proven that communism would deliver, what possible other cause could there be for failure except disruption by malcontents? If people do not actually enjoy mass immigration and the so-called 'multiracial society', it must surely be the work of similar malcontents. Liberal theory is flawless. Like communism, it presents itself as scientifically-based - an abundancy of pseudo-sociological tosh underpins its thinking - and dictates a historically-inevitable outcome in which we all celebrate the fact that we have as little in common with the people we live with as possible. Supposed 'historical inevitability' as a weapon of political language has been filched from communism and creeps into every liberal initiative. It is used, for example, to forward the European federal superstate project.

Both liberals and communists maintain that their systems can never be wrong. It is rather like the jesuitical argument that no innocent person has ever been hanged. Since all those hanged have been convicted by a court, they are by legal definition guilty! It is this feature - the refusal to admit to possible error in the theory - which makes liberalism as totalitarian in nature as communism and why it must be unmasked as the monster it really is. The rulers, too, can never be wrong since they are applying a system which can never err. They are relieved of all responsibility. Notice how no one in government within Britain today takes responsibility for anything! Blair has brought the tactic to a fine art.

How is it that our people could have been so hoodwinked as many are in our country? A system which targets our society for slow destruction is met with passivity and acquiescence. We can learn a lot from the experience of communism.

Most people assume that government is broadly competent. The latest theory must have some sense in it, people say, or it would not be introduced. New theories which claim to be idealistic enjoy an aura and are given a chance. That is what happened under communism. Sufficient people enthusiastically supported the experiment to carry along the rest - with plentiful dollops of intimidation against anyone who became too vocal in opposition. Most people, once they have passively accepted an ideas system, dislike it being challenged, since it implies criticism of their judgement. Those who draw attention to flaws provoke psychological discomfort. Anger and perplexity is a common response. None of us likes to seem made to appear foolish, and especially when merely to hear the message is thought to put one at risk. Later on no one wishes to admit that they were ever a believer.

Under communism, only the tiniest fraction of people expressed open dissent against the system. The system tried to draw in as many people as possible as accomplices. One of the most effective means was the threat that a failure to actively denounce opponents of the ideology would mean classification as a supporter.

We see this mechanism particularly clearly in a Britain where a political, police, teaching or media career means a requirement to offer regular tributes to the perfection of the theory on which the political system is based, and regret concerning backsliders who express any doubts. The most obnoxious exponents are the army of media apparatchiks who draw a regular thirty pieces of silver in reward for undermining their fellow Britons. The most pathetic are senior police officers with their vomit-making 'confessions' of 'institutional racism' before tribunals like that of Sir William Macpherson. They resemble the unfortunates who were tortured by the Inquisition to obtain admissions about the poisoning of wells with powdered toads. The police enquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence was botched not by racial prejudice but by a general inefficiency as Lord Skidelsky recently concluded.

Most of the populations of the formerly communist countries now congratulate themselves on having been opponents of communism. In reality, most would have crossed the road to avoid a dissident if they had met one at the time. As a communist secret policeman told one dissenter: "You are an intelligent man. Why oppose the system when it only brings you trouble to do so". Yet the system eventually collapsed. A small number of open doubters is no measure of the worth of a political system, or of its prospects for permanence.

Lenin's definition of a revolutionary situation was that the rulers could no longer rule in the same way, and the ruled no longer accepted the old ways. What finished communism was precisely what brought it about, but it took a long time before the bankruptcy of the system led to such a parting of the ways between rulers and ruled.

Communism could not provide even the material things. Liberalism does better in material terms but cannot provide meaning to life and human identity. Sooner or later, the increasingly open repression of Western peoples will lead to its fall. Liberal actions are constantly justified by the claim to be preventing inequality, but end up as a system of attacks on the majority which fail to produce results satisfying minority complaints. Sooner or later, the majority will use up the last of its goodwill and the national genie will leave the bottle. As under communism, even the leaders will no longer be able to believe their own lies.

One wonders what goes through the minds of leading members of the Labour Party, including Blair himself, who preach the virtues of the multiracial multicultural comprehensive school, while making sure that their own children do not attend them. The germ of doubt must eventually penetrate even their professionally duplicitous minds. Duplicity about schools is a liberal counterpart of the racket which operated under communism where special shops provided Communist Party members with luxuries unavailable to the mass of the population.

The methods by which the main political parties maintain power in Britain - largely psychological warfare involving ludicrous claims that the British people are a 'guilty race' - will eventually no longer work. Any relaxation of control to placate the populace in those circumstances would lead to demands for more freedom and would soon be reversed, as happened under communism at the end of the Prague Spring of 1968. 'Socialism with a human face' would soon be no socialism at all. Liberalism with racial and cultural identity would be a contradiction. No such experiments are being tried at present in Britain. The psywar against the people continues unrelentingly 24 hours a day. Like communism, liberalism has nothing new to try in a situation of public discontent but only more of the same, which will provoke further resentment. That is its fatal internal contradiction. Reinforcement of unsatisfactory policies is the answer when the regime finds itself in difficulty.

Political correctness following the Steven Lawrence enquiry has led to a massive increase in violent street crime in London as the police retreat from enforcing the law. The Government's answer is to increase the levels of political correctness within the police just as the communists tried to deal with unrest by reinforcing repression. The case of crime is a particularly telling example. The difficulty for liberal ideologues is that political correctness was supposed to remove resentments which were the principal cause of crime - supposedly an expression of revolt against oppression, sexism, racism and so on. What if the theory fails and measures to remove its supposed causes make it worse? The theory cannot be seen to be wrong, so the very measures which have failed must be reinforced on the basis that they have not been introduced vigorously enough! This causes more problems and resentments. Minority racial groups retreat from the multiracial project to protect themselves. The rulers are forced by their own logic to dig their own metaphorical graves.

People will eventually stop listening, no longer believe in the regime's ability to deal with their problems, its moral legitimacy or its basic assumptions, and Lenin's precondition for change will appear. It is already true that the population no longer believes that politics can change anything and joining political parties is no longer common.. The speed with which such watersheds can sometimes erupt was the lesson of 1989. We should not assume that change will necessarily occur in such a dramatic form in liberal Britain. What is more likely, given the temperament of the British people, is a gradual erosion of credibility attached to the regime. As with communism, a quiet subversion will undermine it, even if open revolt is impossible.

Chipping away quietly, we will, sooner or later, bring down an evil which, in the end, will bring no good to anyone. The zealots who have taken over our country will be seen as they really are.


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