Leftism versus Humanity
Speech to the Mises UK Conference
at the Charing Cross Hotel in London
27th January 2018
Andy Duncan
We are, I believe, at a turning point in history. I see a glimmer, the tiniest wee glimmer, of the ‘End of Socialism’. So what is socialism? At its core, it’s a religion of theft. And its God is ‘The State’.
So what’s ‘The State’? Well, the state is a murderous organised criminal gang, aided and abetted by its intellectual bodyguards who get their cut by masking this criminality.
My hero, Murray Rothbard; he was pessimistic in the short-term. He thought socialism would dominate the world. But he was equally optimistic for the long-term. When the masses suffer poverty, chaos and misery, that socialism always brings, in places like Venezuela, it eventually gets swept away.
But now we’re here in Rothbard’s long-term. Should we be pessimistic or should we be optimistic? This morning, I want to talk about why I think I can see the possible end of socialism and how we here can help accelerate this process along.
To do it, we need to analyse what makes socialism so appealing despite its utter stupidity. Then we can weaponise these ideas to put our boots onto its neck.
So what do I see in the world?
On the one hand, we’ve got Antifa and the millennial snowflakes. We also see Merkel’s Migrant Millions and Pope Francis urging us to take millions more into Europe. You’ll note, however, that this ‘Man of God’ is hardly bedding them down in the Sistine Chapel!
Perhaps as a socialist, he still believes that Marxism is heading inevitably towards full communism? But I see something else. I see resistance. I see the nostrums of socialism beginning to wither under a sustained assault.
It keeps failing everywhere. Yes, the socialists always have excuses. It was the wrong people; it was the wrong time; there were saboteurs.
But the list of failure goes on, and on, and on! The Soviet Union, National Socialism, North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, and now Venezuela. The death roll never stops. Everywhere they say they’re building Paradise. Everywhere they end up building Hell.
And so finally, we get to the greatest excuse of all!
Only a single world state without any property borders will solve all of our problems! Only then, when there’s nowhere left to hide, will we get socialist peace, joy, perfection, and complete happiness.
Plus a few million dead people. But one can hardly cook an omelette without breaking a few capitalist eggs.
Obviously, we know what will actually happen. A global Gulag will slide into existence, just like North Korea, but much, much worse. We’ll quickly travel along Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and then descend into absolute murderous chaos.
As we see in things like the movie Idiocracy, or in the Henry Hazlitt’s book, Time Will Run Back, the only cure for this economic chaos will be intelligence and the free market.
But I see a growing resistance to this dreamed-of borderless world state. In England, we’ve got Brexit. In Spain, we’ve got Catalonia. And in Poland, we’ve got a refusal to take on Merkel’s Migrant Millions.
Even in the U.S., we’ve got Trump ripping up the Paris Climate Accord. We also see Bitcoin, and that could be really significant.
And then of course, the Soviet Union did fall, despite being propped up for so long by western socialist governments!
I believe we will get to the world we desire, eventually. But it’s not just going to happen.
If we sit back and just let the state roll over us, to get to its desired global superstate, and then hope for this to fall apart, in the style of Rothbard, its bureaucrats may fall in love with their own power so much, they’d rather blow us all up with nuclear weapons, than let freedom come from the ruins of their own evil malevolence.
We must avoid this risk. We have to rip them apart ideologically, now!
We must pull whatever levers we can find to drive these leftist morons back into the shitholes that they crawled from.
So what makes socialism so attractive? The major factor, in my opinion, is from Hayek’s Fatal Conceit.
In the Stone Age, we were all part of a single genetic tribe. In groups of less than five hundred people, all closely related, we’d wander the Earth and then always divide the spoils of anything we managed to hunt or gather.
We had two main concepts. We had the tribe, and we had everything else.
If we came across other people, as long as were strong enough, we just killed them, and then took their stuff. We could kill anyone with impunity, as long as they were outside our tribe.
They were outside The Law.
Men would probably fight other men over women in love duels, but most of the time we never harmed other people in the tribe. However, outside the tribe, anything could happen.
So genetics generates the basic racism of socialism. Of course, the most obvious socialist racists are the National Socialists. But even in Karl Marx, we can see barely concealed anti-semitism, driven by self-loathing.
In all primitive socialist cultures around the world, corruption is a way of life. Steal anything you can, whenever you can, and give it to the tribe.
There’s also nothing more socialist in its structure than any state army. In the Middle Ages, you’d suffer death, if you insulted an officer. But these officers would never think twice about ordering you to slaughter everyone inside a captured enemy city.
And of course most socialists obsess about racism, all the time, night and day.
To me, this is just self reflection. This is their ‘Inner Chimpanzee’ which hates itself for its own racism. They especially hate one cultural race above all….
And that’s us!
We reflect them back to themselves and they hate us for it!
They accuse us of racism, but as usual, only because they possess no other arguments. Yes, we’re seekers after truth. This is true. Yes, we wish to live in communities of our own choosing. This is true as well.
But we believe that every single man and woman on Earth has the same God-given right to freely associate with whomever they please.
It’s socialism that’s racist. It collects and segregates people into specific groups. But we believe, on the other hand, in eight billion unique individuals.
So let’s get back to that Stone Age.
It was glorious. We could do whatever we wanted to anyone we wanted outside the tribe. And within the tribe we had complete equality with everyone else!
Socialists would never steal an iPhone at a socialist conference. But they would steal our phones here today, because we’re evil capitalist Others.
Then we get the winnowing of the Ice Age glaciations. More intelligent humans evolved who escaped this primitive egalitarianism. They learned that if you extended ‘Intra-Tribal’ law to ‘Inter-Tribal’ law – and then maybe enforced this with religion – you could raise your economic well-being.
Trading rather than stealing started us on the long, long road to civilisation. The economic means, rather than the political means.
And so, we learned to fight against tribal pride, gluttony, lust, laziness, sloth, wrathfulness, envy, and all those other sins.
Priests would enforce universal rules of behaviour, and these applied to everyone in the world. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not be jealous of another man’s stuff. Treat everyone else as you would treat yourself.
But!
The Inner Chimpanzee, the Inner Socialist, has always hated this control. It loves the seven sins; it wants to steal other people’s stuff; it’s always feeling violence, as driven by envy!
Most dangerous of all, socialist intellectuals especially want to be rewarded by the tribe, even when they’re completely useless.
All these things form the basic levers of how socialism always gains power.
Raw tribalism becomes the main urge that Mussolini and other fascist socialists used to gain power.
That’s why I love our group today.
We’ve got English people, German people, we’ve got Austrians – in both senses of the word – we’ve got a Brazilian, we’ve got some Polish people, and many others. I particularly love the American who gave me this magnificent gift!
However, the devil of socialism stands constantly at all of our shoulders. It entices us, it beguiles us, it leads us into temptation.
But we, here, can control this Inner Chimpanzee. The socialists can’t.
We see it in Marx – a terrible poet.
He dreamt of a world where he could spend all day writing horrible poems, but where he’d get paid for it. And this became his communist world.
We see exactly the same thing in Adolf Hitler, a truly terrible painter, who generated an evil socialist empire based on miserable artistic fantasy.
I would love to be a great rock and roll guitarist. I also hate the perverse market for denying me this deserved accolade. Just because it prefers other scallywags, like the Rolling Stones, and other such terrible capitalist people.
I say damn the free market!
But, if I want civilisation, I must curb this feeling.
Everyone should live within those talents that God gave us, and that the voluntary market is willing to pay us for.
We have to do this if we value civilisation.
Socialism, though, wants to drag us back in time. If we want to retain civilisation, we must actively resist it.
Because a Stone Age world is incapable of supporting eight billion people. A hundred million or less would probably be the global population, if the eco-socialists ever get their ‘one-world’ government.
A lot of them actually delight in the Schadenfreude of this likely complete decimation. They say it would be better for Mother Earth!
So why else is socialism attractive?
Kuehnelt-Leddihn provides other clues, in his fabulous book, Leftism, which I can highly recommend.
We’ve got Luther’s rejection of the rationality of the Renaissance. In his Reformation, he tried to turn the whole of society into a giant cloister of monks.
And there’s this deep appeal of monasticism deeply embedded within socialism.
We should all live in cells like ants, they say, and do whatever we’re told by authority. We should get given what some bureaucrat tells us we need, and then we should die in the service of the state!
It’s a life many aspire to, of being an insignificant cog inside a gigantic machine.
We also get this promise of sexual debasement in socialism.
Free love, compulsory abortion, and mandatory sex on demand. All these policies have been imposed in the past, by one socialist government or another.
In Europe now, the divorce, welfare, and abortion culture has led to a withered population which is being replaced with totally culturally dissimilar migrants, who’ve been brought in by Kommissars, like the DDR’s Angela Merkel, to divide and rule over everyone else.
And then of course there’s this constant Cargo Cult appeal of other people’s free stuff. Though of course, as we know from the early American Colonies, when you enforce free stuff, like the Puritan idiots did at first, everyone ends up with nothing.
If socialism is a religion of theft, then the evildoers are those who produce wealth. The virtuous are those who steal and consume wealth.
Obviously, once all the free stuff runs out – as it has in Venezuela – then we get to another problem. But most socialists are incapable of thinking beyond the next ten minutes. Their time preferences are very high!
We might be happy for them to live in voluntary Kibbutzes and impose whatever rules they want on themselves. But they want to impose their misery onto all the rest of us.
As Luther’s Reformation spread from Saxony, here in England it gave us the Puritans, the ones who murdered a King of England.
When they became really hated and ostracised – after banning Christmas and other petty miseries – they escaped with their communist poison to Massachusetts, where to this day their socialist misery still rules in ‘Government Center’ in Boston.
The links between religion and socialism are always evident, with former religious men like Josef Jughashvili, a seminarian, becoming the more familiar monster, Josef Stalin.
And always we get these same combinations of free theft, free sex, free violence over others, and most of all, the free celebration of resentment and envy!
It’s a powerful heady mix!
Another feature of socialism, is that like any good thief it camouflages itself really well.
It’s stolen all of our great words, like progressive, liberal, and so on. It’s left us with nothing except what I think’s the really ugly word, ‘Libertarian’, and the horse-scaring phrase, ‘Anarcho-Capitalism’.
I want to be a ‘Classical Liberal’, but in England, that means you’re a socialist who loves Beethoven!
This slippery nature of socialism is important. It always goes back to the same roots of the tribe getting free stuff. But the story constantly changes. It does this to avoid cognitive dissonance. Socialists think with their mouths. They never want to hear the truth with their ears!
In Marxism, the root to free stuff became Marx’s ‘Labour Theory of Value’.
Böhm Bawerk then destroyed this theory with Capital and Interest, and he was helped by Mises, with Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.
So how can socialists avoid the cognitive dissonance created by a love of Marxism and the irrefutable truth of the Austrian School? Did they roll over and die in a dialectical heap? Unfortunately, like deadly skin-eating bacteria, they evolved.
Like all good religions, when faced with contradictory facts, they just ignored the facts.
So when Mises destroyed them with the ‘Economic Calculation’ argument, socialism morphed into something else. The economic theories of Marx were downgraded, then replaced by Antonio Gramsci’s ‘Cultural Marxism’. And this is a plague that afflicts us today, the plague called ‘Political Correctness’.
Beating George Orwell by nearly 20 years, Gramsci’s brilliant idea, in the 1930s, was to remove every challenge to socialism by literally removing them all from the language.
Whenever he failed to do this directly, it became blasphemy to say things like men are different from women, that some people are more intelligent than other people, or that some people deserve more, because they’re more talented, better entrepreneurs, or that they work harder.
Gramsci also ordered socialists to invade schools as teachers. And so throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the precious fragile minds of children were bent into the shape of the hammer and sickle.
Even given Gramsci’s amazing efforts, we did still see the blood of the Soviet Union leaking under the Iron Curtain.
This created more cognitive dissonance. The perfection of cultural socialism got shattered by the truth of the millions murdered in Stalin’s Gulag!
And so the left morphed again in the 1960s, mainly following the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, a German, who emigrated to the United States to form what became known as the ‘New Left’.
Always, it’s these Germans!
The old socialist Gods had failed. All the illusions had been destroyed. So what came next? New Gods! New Illusions!
He stole another one of our key words, ‘Freedom’. This became ’Freedom from Want’, ’Freedom from Poverty’, and particularly, ‘Freedom from Capitalist Slavery’.
The New Left also drenched itself in a sea of sexual depravity straight from the Dark Ages. It degenerated all social taboos in a bid to decivilise society into rampant promiscuity, heavy drug use, and a deep, deep, deep hostility to consumerism.
But these snowflakes still like some consumerist items. Mobile phones, of course, regular holidays in Thailand, and ‘Pink Pussy’ hats. Everything else in capitalism is evil. But such things are OK!
And all of this in a bid to escape the failure of Marxist economics and all that bad news from the Gulag!
The New Left did become incredibly popular, and it’s still with us today. It turned your typical tie-wearing Trotskyite into a dishevelled degenerate mess.
It also gave us Punk Rock, vandalism, graffiti, everyone covered in tattoos, and a western culture filled with drugs and pornography.
A New Leftist is also likely to be a hero worshipper of that mass murderer, Che Guevara, as well as being an anti-sexist, an anti-racist, and an eco-environmentalist.
But these people all still want a single world state. It can come about any way you please, but they think the best route is still through the United Nations. So any means that increases the UN’s power, such as the obvious stupid lies about global warming, are used to prop up this overall aim.
Any enemies, such as people like us, get shouted down with violence and then accusations of racism, sexism, and all the other stupid nonsense.
But the truth about global warming, gender existence, and so on, is coming out. We’re laughing at them. And they hate us for causing them this painful cognitive dissonance. And we must keep refusing to take them or their stupid stories seriously.
Beyond shouting us down to hide the truth, they also want to shut down anything else they call ‘Fake News’, and that basically means anything they disagree with.
So we see that imbecile Macron in France postulating mass state censorship. He wants to suppress all the unwelcome news, such as the fact that he spends twenty thousand euros a month on make-up. All paid for with other people’s money.
This Emperor’s far from naked. This one’s covered in the very finest foundation!
So, the ladder to global socialism consists of lies, violence, and chaos. Its enemies are truth, peace, and order.
These Leftists wish to destroy humanity. And we must stop them!
First, we’ve got to keep exposing their lies about global warming, the existence of fifty-seven genders, and all that other stupid nonsense. We must keep laughing at them. This is serious!
If we laugh at them loud enough and long enough, I’m hoping their heads will explode from all that cognitive dissonance.
They’ll certainly lose their sympathisers.
As we’ve recently seen with that hero of our time, Jordan Peterson, we must keep speaking truth to power.
So what else can do we do? Well, it’s a bit like eating an elephant. One small bite at a time.
Most people still suffer from socialist delusion.
So in this country, probably 99% of people would say they love the NHS. And this is even when they can see, right in front of their eyes, that it’s an ongoing and total communist disaster, that’s killing people and bleeding everyone of money.
So, I could be very simple, and just say in the words of the famous T-Shirt, ‘Privatize Everything’.
But let’s break it all down in terms of being an Anti-Communist Manifesto. Now, point ten’s the most important, but let’s get through to it with nine more.
So, one, encourage the sale of government land to make it private! This would include most of the western United States.
Two, in the apocryphal words of Stephan Kinsella, keep getting the state to lower our goddamn taxes. Drain them of resources!
Three, agitate to get all inheritance taxes removed.
Four, fight for the abolition of all non-crimes. If some fabulously wealthy lady wants to hire me as a gigolo. Well, one, who can blame her? And two, I would really love an Aston Martin!
Five, encourage the rise of crypto-currencies, and any private production of money. We need to end the total power of central banks.
Six, hammer on the state to get rid of all subsidies for everything.
Seven, fight to abolish all state businesses. For example, here in the U.K., we should privatise Channel 4, which is run directly by the government, and privatise those ‘Buggers Broadcasting Communism’, at the BBC!
Eight, remove all state licensing of occupations, such as doctors, lawyers, and even nail salons – if I want a bad nails, let me have bad nails!
Nine, try to get all state planning laws overturned. This gives them tremendous power, and we need to rip away that power.
Ten, lastly, and most importantly, eliminate the state from those day prison propaganda farms, known as state schools – To this end, encourage home-schooling and any other way of getting the state out of our children’s minds!
Now, the greatest tool to achieve all ten of these points, is to encourage secession. A state which is halved is a state whose power is quartered.
All of us can do something, here. The Brits can keep hammering on Brexit and a free Scotland. The Spaniards can work on Catalonia. The Americans can work on New Hampshire, or Texas, or even California!
And the French….. well, maybe it’s a bit too late for the French!
Perhaps the necessary destruction of socialism will be beyond my lifetime, but worse things have happened at sea. And in the end, can there be a better thing in life than to work towards a world of peace, civilisation, property, and freedom?
And in just one final secessionary word… let’s go for a free Henley On Thames!
I am willing to step forward to become its new lifelong President!
Thank you very much.