I can’t stand coercive statism. Neither can the lady on the left, it turns out. Slavery to the state these days is generally supported by left-wing hypocrites who champion their own self-aggrandizement while posing as “lovers of humanity.” The most murderous statists of all time—from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to Mao to Ho Chi Minh to Fidel Castro—all claimed to love humanity, yet they created violent, tyrannical dictatorships. What motivates such people? English writer, sociological philosopher, and former Leftist Melanie Phillips explains it all:
As a university-educated young woman with hippie-style hair and an attitude, I generally toed the standard Leftist line in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Poverty was bad, cuts in public spending were bad, prison was bad, the Tory government was bad. The state was good, poor people were good, minorities were good, sexual freedom was good.
I felt loved and cherished, the favoured child of a wonderful and impressive family. To my colleagues, there was virtually no question that the poor were the victims of circumstances rather than being accountable for their own behaviour and that the state was a wholly benign actor in the lives of individuals.
It never occurred to us that there could be another way of looking at the world. Above all, we knew we were on the side of the angels, while across the barricades hatchet-faced Right-wingers represented the dark forces of human nature and society that we were all so proud to be against.
But then Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979; and although at The Guardian it was a given that she was a heartless, narrow-minded, suburban nightmare, I found myself listening, despite myself, to a point of view I had not heard before. These Thatcherites were not the usual upper-class squires, but people whose backgrounds were similar to my own. They were promoting the values with which I had been brought up in my Labour-supporting family — all about opportunities for social betterment, hard work, taking responsibility for oneself.
The scales began to fall from my eyes. I came to realise that the Left was not on the side of truth, reason and justice. Instead, it promoted ideology, malice and oppression. Rather than fighting abuse of power, it embodied it.
Bit by bit, I saw through the delusion of the Left’s supposedly ‘progressive’ politics. Increasingly, I turned away from their stupidity, hypocrisy and moral blindness. The result was social ostracism. This revealed another sad truth about the Left. What matters to them above all is that they are seen to be virtuous and compassionate. They simply cannot deal with the possibility that they might not be. They deal with any such suggestion not by facing up to any harm they may be doing, but by shutting down the argument altogether. That’s because the banner behind which they march is not altruism, as they kid themselves….
It is narcissism.
Read the entire essay by Phillips—Why the Left hates families-—in the Daily Mail Online HERE.
Well worth reading. In its entirety.