This weeks Waatea news column – Waitangi Tribunal ruling enshrines Treaty as a living document

1. Translation: The Treaty of Waitangi means what we tell you it means.

2. Try putting your viewpoint in a more measured, intelligent way and perhaps your posts will be published. Until then, your comments will continue to fill our Trash. – ScarletMod

3. Comment deleted. Unnecessary offensive remarks. – ScarletMod

   • Pointless rant deleted. – ScarletMod

4. Truly, Socialism can be described as “The Opiate of the Intellectuals.”

   It holds out to the disaffected intellectual the promise that one day their “superior” [gag, retch] brainpower will be duly recognised and rewarded, and that they will get to boss everyone else around (for their own good, of course).

   Socialism appeals to three kinds of people: [1] those who imagine that under such a system they will be the leaders; [2] those who welcome the freedom from life’s cares and personal responsibilities promised by the wannabe leaders; and [3] the psycopaths who under such a system are the secret police, the camp guards, and the turnkeys, who are given free rein in a socialist society to exercise their pathological impulses againt dissenters.

   Or as English novelist and historian, Dennis Wheatley put it: “Communists are swine. The vast majority Gadarene Swine who rush headlong over a clif to their destruction; the few, your ordinary voracious swine, who would eat you alive if you fell into their pen and couldn’t get out.”

   Just because something is taught at university doesn’t validate it at all.

   Western universities are full of Marxists who still believe that Communism, despite leading irrevocably to tyranny, mass murder, and economic privation for the masses, could somehow be made to work if only the right people were in charge.

   With the fall of the Berlin Wall, one celebrated Marxist intellectual, Eric Hobbsbawn, wrote an article entitled “The Dream Is Dead: Long Live The Dream.”

   This staggering piece of self-delusion theorised that now the debris of Stalinism had been cleared away, a “true” and “human” socialism could come into being.

   Communism is such a proven failure everywhere it has been tried that only an idiot or an academic could believe such horse shit.

   Communism promised a classless society, but soon led to hierarchies of power and privilege that were far from classless.

   Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss …

   It leads to mass murder because Communists feel obliged to exterminate whole groups and classes lest they contaminate others with their reactionary thinking, thus inhibiting the development of the “New Socialist Man” Communists mean to create.

   Communists believe there’s no such thing as human nature and that people are the product of their class environment.

   So change society, change man.

   If you won’t change, you’re not wanted anymore.

   Stalin murdered at a conservative estimate some 30 million Russians in the service of this objective.

   Mao-Tse Tung exterminated some 60 million Chinese.

   Pol Pot, in 7 years, offed around 35% of Cambodias’ pre-revolutionary population.

   Urban dwellers were forcibly deported to the countryside and forced to work collectively in agricultural communes to learn the value of unselfish labour for the common good.

   People were shot for possession of a pair of spectacles, since weak eyes identified them a “reactionary” holdover from the previous regime’s intellectual class.

   Others were sent to the killing fields for expressing a desire for their own toothbrush, rather than one shared with 50 others.

   Economic privation occurs because central planners cannot possess the perfect knowledge to allocate resources efficiently, whereas Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” harmonises the millions of individual economic decisions made in a free market economy rather nicely.

   For example, one Soviet Five Year Plan decreed that agriculture must be mechanised, so the USSR’s entire steel production over that period went into building tractors.

   In the absence of market signals, nobody gave any thought to who would operate and maintain the tractors that streamed out of Soviet factories.

   There were insufficient trained tractor drivers and mechanics to service them, so in a short time the tractors sat in the fields and rusted, while crops continued to be planted and harvested by horse and hand in the traditional manner.

   The misallocation of the entire steel output for the next five years meant that little or none was unavailable for other purposes.

   Since structural steel framing members are required for high rise buildings, no new apartment blocks got erected for many years after the disastrous tractor-building mania evaporated.

   Meanwhile, the population increased rapidly, so even when steel was once again available for building purposes, many urban dweller lived for years cheek-by-jowl in a four bedroom unit with three other families, one family to a room, and sharing toilet, washing and cooking facilities.

   Collectivising farming in the USSR required that an entire class of people, the kulaks or landed peasants, be wiped out in their millions for their resistance to collectivisation by way of summary executions and death from exposure when forced to walk thousands of kilometres into Siberian exile in the middle of winter.

   Collectivisation of Soviet agriculture removed the incentive to work hard, because it didn’t matter whether you were lazy or industrious, you still got to eat. So the lazy continued to coast through life, and the hardworking reduced their output to the bare minimum.

   The Soviet Union went from being “the Breadbasket of Europe” under the Czars to having to import millions of tonnes of grain annually from the US to keep its people fed.

   To prevent the people from starving, the Politburo was also obliged to allow farmers small private plots on which to grow food which they were permitted to sell at informal farmers’ markets in the larger cities and towns, just as long as they continued to work almost full time on the balance of the land allotted to the collective farming operation.

   These small hobby plots, amounting to around 7% of the available arable land, ended up producing 90% of the USSR’s food output.

   After the fall of the Soviet Union, people queued for hours outside the brand new Moscow McDonalds outlet to buy a Happy Meal at the cost of three months wages, just so that they could say they’d tasted “freedom.”

   In any Western country, the cost of a Happy Meal is less than half an hour’s labour minimum wage.

   Go figure.

   • Whilst I’m no fan of the former Soviet Union, it strikes me as deeply ironic that, after the fall of Soviet communism, you laud the availability of McDonald’s “Happy Meals”. Replacing a totalitarian government with fast food outlets that are the leading cause for a worldwide global obesity epidemic? Is that what you’re suggesting as an improvement, Reuben?

     From food shortages to global obesity… Not much of a choice, really, is it?

     Besides which, you equate socialism with the Soviet model? Why not the the Scandinavian model? Or the Savage/Labour model?

     It would be like equating Western capitalism with Nazism, as both used similar systems. Ridiculous, of course.

     By the way, Reuben – how does your diatribe relate to this blogpost? I fail to see any connection.

Comments are closed.