In Wellington, the Dominion Post newspaper gives Left-Winger Chris Trotter a chance to publish his biased viewpoint in a regular column, called From the Left. On 29 September 2006, he vented his feelings about right-wing blogs without providing any real rational analysis of the issues. However, his own column demonstrates the main reason for this phenomenon, which he says he is frightened of.

He does not give any examples of the actual material that he objects to. He claims there is a lot of hatred expressed towards particular groups. Maybe there is, but we can't take his word for it, because it is clear that he only wants us to know and think what he thinks it is good for us to know and think!

Political power issues from the muzzle of a gun, to paraphrase Chairman Mao, and, ever since the Left (including the Soviet Union) won World War II, Leftists have had the power to publish weekly columns etc., such as Trotter's From the Left, in mainstream media, while the Right have been left with comparatively few mainstream published voices. The Left have had this media power, while all the time complaining constantly about the supposed right-wing bias of media owners. And now that the Internet has finally brought equal rights to our (only theoretical) freedom of speech, the Left are complaining!

The fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the Left is revealed by Trotter's nostalgia for the Good Old Days when newspaper editors, the judiciary and the police could arbitrarily curtail freedom of speech and the right of assembly. He even puts the words "free speech" into quotation-marks, as if it were some dangerous alien disease.

I was fortunate to be able to see, one day, a video at the Goethe Institut (Germany's cultural embassy, so to speak) which showed Communists being violent towards Nazis. I have never had a chance -- before or since -- to see anything bad about the enemies of Nazism in pre-war Germany. There is no doubt in my mind that the Nazis ended up committing genocide, but Trotter's article is an indication that the Left must have done a lot to polarise Germany, which enabled the Nazis to get elected.

The Nazis did get freely elected, in the first instance*, and this created a quandary for the Leftist political elites after World War II. How could they appear to maintain the trappings of democracy, but still manage to stop people getting elected that they disapproved of? I am not privy to all the tactics they have been using, but borrowing Goebbels' tactics of mass-indoctrination through the media (including film) was obviously one of them. Political Correctness was born.

Algeria is an example of how the West tolerates Democracy only a long as it produces the right result: There, an Islamic fundamentalist party was about to win a general election in 1991, so the Army mouted a coup -- no doubt with the support of some Western countries. That resulted in civil war. The United States has some form of Feminism as part of its foreign policy, and is busy imposing it on Afghanistan and Iraq. Feminism is certainly part fo the reason why it does not like Islamic Fundamentalism. Needless to say, this governmental Feminism is vague, woolly, ill-defined, and probably without Congressional sanction, but that is typical of the minds that Feminism is formulated in. It is undoubtably stiffening the resistance of the locals to the US presence.

McCarthyism, which Trotter refers to in his column, was obviously a reaction to Hollywood being used to brainwash society in Leftist Political Correctness. This, too, was a war that the Left won, because McCarthy has been discredited. But the victors write the history books, of course, and you never hear what precisely it was that McCarthy was fighting against, or why he thought such drastic measures were necessary.

The basic assumptions of political discourse itself have been modified by what I call the Media University Complex so as to conform with Political Correctness. This means that what counts as "extreme" has shifted leftwards, as the centre-ground has shifted leftwards.

I do not disagree with every tenet of Political Correctness, but what is pernicious about it is its Fascism, and the way it creates alliances between interest-groups, which encourages them to support each other's demands, without regard to the justifiablity or otherwise of those demands. The Western World is divided into those who understand why a woman would say (on BBC World TV) that Political Correctness is a form of Fascism and those who just don't get it.

It is this totalitarian mind-set, which Trotter himself suffers from, which is part of the cause of the phenomenon which he says he is frightened of. People do get angry when they are manipulated, brainwashed and lied to. And so they should!

*According to the webpage http://www.churchinhistory.org/pages/booklets/rise(n)-1.htm "General Schleicher formed an administration for a short period but was not able to solve the mounting problems. So on 30th January 1933, a coalition government was formed with nine Nationalist and two Nazi ministers. Hitler became Chancellor (Prime Minister) and Papen his deputy." Under MMP in New Zealand, there is a somewhat similar situation as regards forming governments. In fact, the then National Party Deputy Leader Gerry Brownlea accused the then Governor-General of bias for appointing a government headed by Labour, without giving National enough opportunity to form a coalition. Hitler was elected Chancellor at least as democratically as Labour's Helen Clarke was Prime Minister. In fact, the German Establishment was trying desperately to find ways of keeping Hitler from coming to power, no matter how many seats his party got, whereas Governor-General Silvia Cartwright was clearly a Labour-women supporter.

29 November 2006