Anzac Day 2013

Anzac Day is largely ignored in the UK.

Which is sad, given that it started by commemorating the loss of life in World War One, for Britain.

Over 17,000 New Zealanders died from fighting for the British Empire in World War One.
Over 60,000 Australians died from fighting for the British Empire in World War One.

So tomorrow I will take a moment to remember them, and all the others who died fighting.  It's a day to wear a Poppy in London, causing some to be confused and some others to smile and acknowledge, for they too, have not forgotten.

Previous posts on Anzac Day are, as always, just as applicable.  Here, here and here.

Robyn Malcolm - the classic ignorant Green airhead - loving a mass murderer

I thank Peter Cresswell for highlighting this.  It may seem like a small accident to some, but airbrushing the mass murders and starvation of millions is not that.

It's not that she denies it, or pretends it didn't happen, she's just too ignorant to know about something she decided to celebrate.

Expecting actors to come up with pearls of wisdom about politics and history is a bit like expecting them to be competent at medicine, so I'm hardly surprised that Robyn Malcolm wished the mass murderer Lenin a happy birthday.

She said Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung and Pol Pot were very different from Lenin.

Brainless bint.

She is espouses the classic far left myth that Lenin's revolution was some glorious popular revolution that transformed Russia into a socialist state that was corrupted by Stalin's cruelty.

This view of history is the revisionist version that the CPSU spread after Khrushchev, as he "de-Stalinised" the country, which of course meant that instead of everyone fearing everyone else all of the time, everyone feared everyone else just some of the time.

Lenin was a monster, and airbrushing his history is a grotesque misjustice to the millions killed or starved under his misrule.

For a start, let's not forget that the Tsar was not overthrown by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, but a popular revolution in February 1917 which saw a democratically elected executive created.  In October, it was the Bolsheviks that overthrew that regime.

Beyond that the story is grim:

The "Red Terror" was Lenin's campaign to "cleanse Russia of the filth" who opposed him.

December 1917 the Cheka was established, the secret police.  It shut down all newspapers critical of the Bolsheviks and established a press monopoly, by force.  In 1919 concentration camps were set up, to place the bourgeoisie and hold them as slave labour for the revolution.  About 70,000 people were in such camps by 1923.

One shouldn't forget Lenin's famous hanging order:

Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity ... You must make example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so ... Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people

So the idea of the kulaks, the label for the hated scapegoats of the revolution popularised by Stalin, started under Lenin.

Historian Robert Gellately estimates that between 300,000-500,000 Cossacks were forcibly relocated or killed by 1920.  

In September/October 1918 10,000-15,000 were summarily executed by the Cheka.  Ownership of a business or a large house that you refused to surrender to the state (for no compensation) could be sufficient grounds to be liquidated.

Lenin, after confiscating farmland from landlords and giving it to peasants, then oppressed the peasants demanding any surplus after what they needed for their own "personal use" be sold at heavily knocked down prices to the state.  Some peasants sold produce to the black-market, and would be executed for this.  Many chose not to sell the surplus, and got it confiscated.  So they chose to simply produce less, given there was little point in working harder than was necessary to feed themselves and their families.  The resulting underproduction, and with a subsequent drought (and no surplus stock), saw the 1921 Russian Famine result. 

At least 3 million died in that famine, ameliorated only by the end of the Civil War which saw the Bolsheviks utilising the opposition (White Russian) surpluses in grain for their own needs.

Historian Richard Pipes said that:

Lenin repeatedly said that he would sooner the whole nation die of hunger than allow free trade in grain. In short, Lenin and his comrades knew with substantial certainty that their policies would cause widespread death from starvation. Under any sensible definition of murder, this makes Lenin the murderer of millions.

Now I don't expect Robyn Malcolm knew this, given her tweet I don't expect she's spent much time with books that don't have a lot of pictures in them.

As a result, she ought to apologise, profusely, for insulting the memory of the hundreds of thousands slaughtered by this tyrant.  A tyrant that spawned Stalin, and who then spawned 70 years of totalitarian terror spanning much of the world from Havana to Hanoi, Luanda to "Leningrad".  

It is, as if, she accidentally didn't know about the Holocaust, and it's disgusting.  

Earth Day 2013, keep it to yourself

I like what the Ayn Rand Institute said about it in 2009:

The lights of our cities and monuments are a symbol of human achievement, of what mankind has accomplished in rising from the cave to the skyscraper. Earth Hour presents the disturbing spectacle of people celebrating those lights being extinguished. Its call for people to renounce energy and to rejoice at darkened skyscrapers makes its real meaning unmistakably clear: Earth Hour symbolizes the renunciation of industrial civilization.

I called it onanistic vileness, as it is a childish exercise in mutual gratification amongst the self righteous who have the luxury to choose to spend a short period of their comfortable lives deprived of a light bulb, a car or maybe something else they take for granted.

Children are starving in gulags in north Korea today.  Tens of thousands of them, like concentration camps, whilst most people think north Korea is a bit of a joke.

Millions of people every year get electricity to power a light enabling a child to read a book at night.

Billions of people right now are alive because electricity and man-made energy enables them to be warm, to be fed and to be sustained.

To hell with Earth Day.   Yes, pollution kills.  Yes, it is important to not destroy the environment that sustains us all, but that isn't achieved through the worship of non-production, non-technology and de-industrialisation.

However, those who propagate Earth Day are at best hypocrites, like the jetsetting, big house owning, big mouth propagandist Al Gore, and at worst destructive towards humanity, like those waging war against genetic engineering.

Abstain from consumption if you wish, but don't pretend that asceticism towards energy use, technology, production, mining or the like is doing anyone any good.  If you want look after the environment, look after your own property and campaign for property rights to be expanded, and against the abuse of the commons because they are the commons.

For those who cite science as the basis for their policy misanthropy, are more often than not as much (if not greater) abusers of science than those they condemn.

North Korea - what's going on?

When I started studying north Korea it was the early 1990s, and few were paying attention.   Nobody paid attention then, and few pay attention now to the horrors of the totalitarian slave state that it has been for over 60 years.   The name - Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) - says much in itself.   Governments that use names to deliver messages about how utterly devoted they are to "the people" are  naturally quite the opposite.

The adjectives thrown about by the mainstream don't do justice to the place.  Stalinist?  No, the extent and efficiency of the  cultural revolution, the rewritten history and the personal cult far exceed that of Stalin, and it has now gone into two subsequent generations.   Dictatorship?  That bland term doesn't really highlight the totality of control in the DPRK.  Life there is under constant surveillance.  Totalitarian?  The DPRK should be the dictionary definition of it.

Much of the media coverage of the place focuses on how amusing it is to have a strongman leader, legions of soldiers goosestepping, and now how it is a bit of joke that he threatens to attack the United States.  Yet the DPRK isn't that funny for those living there.  

Thatcher was allied to Reagan, but never kowtowed to the USA

The Falkland Islands.

Grenada.

Supporting the right to first use of nuclear weapons.

Repelling Iraq from Kuwait.

On all of these, Thatcher disagreed with the US President of the day.

Why?

It was principle.