The curse it is cast [the left supports Chavez]

The Belmont Club | June 3, 2007 | Wretchard - Richard Fernandez

[Malesherbes]

Good post. It is very true that we are increasingly caught between a choice of two evils. Long ago, it was correctly predicted that “the center cannot hold.”

[68skylark]

Long ago, it was correctly predicted that “the center cannot hold.”

You're thinking of the poem The Second Coming from William Butler Yeats. It's a bleak vision of our future. I'm not that pessimistic, although I agree that we need to stay vigilant about real threats that are out there.

[JasonC]

By the letter's reasoning, it was wholly legitimate for Adolph Hitler to seize all opposition newspapers and ban all opposition parties, since after all he was "democratically elected".

Tyranny doesn't change, and you will always find self described "intellectuals" licking the tyrant's boots.

[68skylark]

I think George Orwell said something like, "Some ideas are so stupid that only 'intellectuals' can believe them."

(If anyone has the actual quote, I'd love to see it.)

Only a stupid or blind person could fail to see that Chavez is a tyrant.

[fella]

one of the newspapers used habitually to poison the public opinion

This is from another post about the train bombing in Spain but is one of the best lines about the MSM that I've ever seen.

Changing my tag line.

[Hardastarboard]

Go over to DU and take a look at how they view him. He's a hero to them, and the fact that conservatives find him a despicable dictator tells them that we're the ones with issues. Those people are lunatics. But, of course, my tagline says that, too, sort of.

[68skylark]

Go over to DU and take a look at how they view him. He's a hero to them.

Yeah, they feel the same about Castro. Heck, they feel pretty much the same about Saddam. They never met a Stalinist dictator they don't admire -- even Uncle Joe Stalin himself.

[FreedomPoster]

>>>>Don’t forget right wing socialism. NAZI Germany and Peron’s Argentina.

>>Yeah, you make a good point.

I beg to differ. I invite both of you to read the third quote on my FR profile page, the two paragraph one by Hayek. He was a contemporaneous trained observer.

There’s nothing wrong with using an accurate descriptor. The problem is that the Left has misused the term so much.

There’s nothing “right wing”, in the American political lexicon, about socialism in any form.

[kilohertz]

These British Lefties sound as bad as the “Duke 88” ... but oh well, the Left never apologizes for its stupid mistakes, they just shows it cares ...

[dr_lew]

The bleak future seen by Yeats came and went with WWII. We’re looking at the second or third bleak future after that.

[68skylark]

The way I’ve always read that poem, Yates is fretting about the possibility that two thousand years of strife and darkness could be descending on the world. I guess others read it differently.

[Inquisitive1]

I find it amazing that current Admin does not criticize them enough.

Because it's 1/4 of the world's population that are craving to by 'things' from us.

[dr_lew]

“Twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

In the poem, the twenty centuries have already elapsed,
and from the perspective of 1919, the spectre of looming
cataclysm would have to be an adumbration of WWII,
the way I see it.

[GeorgefromGeorgia]

I agree that there is nothing right-wing about Socialism in America. My point was that Socialism and statism can take different forms. Any form of Socialism is destructive to a nation’s economic health. The left supporting Chavez will not help them or Chavez.

[GeorgefromGeorgia]

I disagree, those movements were not based on Marxist theory. Mass nationalization and collectivization were not used, however in both cases, the central government used massive methods to control the economy. Of course, their goals were more nationalistic, and more free enterprise remained than in Communism states.

[68skylark]

Thanks for your views -- it's always so interesting to learn how others read this kind of thing.

As I understood it, Yeats felt that history moved in two thousand year cycles. He dated the start of ancient history to the time when Leda was raped by Zeus, who descended as a bird (a swan). This ultimately led to Helen, and the Trojan war, and a whole religion of the gods.

And he felt our history started when Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit, who descended as a bird (a dove). This lead to Christianity. Now, Yeats was thinking about what cycle of history would be coming next.

I could be wrong, but that's what I learned in my studies of Yeats and it makes sense to me.

But like I say, it's great to hear other views as well, and maybe your views are correct! Since the poem was written in 1921, he'd have to be quite prophetic to foresee the rise of fascism and the storm clouds of WWII. If he had contemporary events in mind, I suspect he was thinking about Ireland and Irish independence, which was a burning hot issue at that time.

[68skylark]

Sorry if I wrote too much in my last comment. This is just such an interesting topic.

If you don’t mind one other comment, reading the poem today one can sense that mysterious, malevolent beast in the poem might represent militant Islam. I doubt Yeats had Islam in mind specifically, but he might have sensed how the aftermath of WWI was giving rise to all kinds of dangerous new ideologies — militant Islam was one of those (the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in the 1920's), and it's been one of the most enduring.

[dr_lew]

I think you’ve studied Yeats more than I have. I followed an on-line discussion some years ago about Yeats involvement with Fascism, as far as he was involved with it, and this started with the issue of Irish independence. I believe there were “Blue Shirts” and Yeats wrote some stuff valorizing political hooliganism. I did some reading about the ideological and philosophical sympathies in England towards Fascism in that era, and there was a lot of this. In the U.S. we think of this as pro-German tendencies, but there was a deeper philosophical strain to it. So, aside from Yeats’ plan for the poem, it seems to me that the rise of Fascism was part of the ferment that he seems to be expressing.

As for Islam, I think Yeats would have presumed that Europe’s dominance would remain unchallenged, and it was the European scene that counted.