For those of us whose main concern is the well-being of ordinary people, it is a no-brainer to abandon the left as soon as we acquire enough knowledge about what actually happens, as distinguished from what leftist theories say will happen.
It is a very different story for those on the left whose goal is either a self-righteous sense of superiority or the political power with which to express their self-infatuation by imposing their vision on others. Here the poor are a means to an end. These kinds of leftists show remarkably little interest in the creation of wealth, which has raised living standards for the poor, as compared to their obsession with redistribution, which has not.
These kinds of leftists concentrate on inequalities that can be dealt with by turning money and power over to people like themselves. These kinds of leftists will never desert the cause that serves them so well, no matter how badly it serves others.
“USEFUL IDIOTS”
Lenin is supposed to have referred to blind defenders and apologists for the Soviet Union in the Western democracies as “useful idiots.” Yet even Lenin might have been surprised at how far these useful idiots would carry their partisanship in later years—including our own times.
Stalin's man-made famine in the Soviet Union during the 1930s killed more millions of people than Hitler killed in the Holocaust—and Mao's man-made famine in China killed more millions than died in the USSR. Yet we not only hear little or nothing about either of these staggering catastrophes in the Communist world today, very little was said about them in the Western democracies while they were going on. Indeed, many useful idiots denied that there were famines in the Soviet Union or in Communist China.
The most famous of these was the New York Times' Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer prize for telling people what they wanted to hear, rather than what was actually happening. Duranty assured his readers that “there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be.” Moreover, he blamed reports to the contrary on “rumor factories” with anti-Soviet bias.
It was decades later before the first serious scholarly study of that famine was written, by Robert Conquest of the Hoover Institution, always identified in politically correct circles as “right-wing.” Yet when the Soviets' own statistics on the deaths during the famine were finally released, under Mikhail Gorbachev, they showed that the actual deaths exceeded even the millions estimated by Dr. Conquest.
Official statistics on the famine deaths in China under Mao have never been released, but knowledgeable estimates run upwards of 20 million people. Yet, even here, there were the same bland denials by sympathizers and fellow travellers in the West as during the earlier Soviet famine. One celebrated “expert” on China wrote: “I saw no starving people in China, nothing that looked like old-time famines.” Horrifying as the pre-Communist famines were, they never killed as many people as Mao's famine did.
Today, even after the evidence of massive man-made famines in the Communist world, after Solzhenitsyn's revelations about the gulags and after the horrors of the killing fields of Cambodia, the useful idiots continue to deny or downplay staggering human tragedies under Communist dictatorships. Or else they engage in moral equivalence, as Newsweek editor and TV pundit Eleanor Clift did during the Elian Gonzalez controversy, when she said: “To be a poor child in Cuba may in many instances be better than being a poor child in Miami and I'm not going to condemn their lifestyle so gratuitously.”
Apparently totalitarian dictatorship is just a lifestyle, like wearing sandals and beads and using herbal medicine. It apparently has not occurred to Eleanor Clift to ask why poor people in Miami do not put themselves and their children on flimsy boats, in a desperate effort to reach Cuba.
Elian Gonzalez and his mother were only the latest of millions of people to flee Communist dictatorships at the risk of their lives. Some were shot trying to get past the Berlin wall and hundreds of thousands of “boat people” were drowned trying to escape a Communist Vietnam that many useful idiots were celebrating from inside free democracies. Many who escaped from the Soviet Union to the West during the Second World War were sent back by American authorities, except for those who committed suicide rather than go back.
Yet none of this has really registered on a very large segment of the intelligentsia in the West. Nor are Western capitalists immune to the same blindness. The owner of the Baltimore Orioles announced that he would not hire baseball players who defect from Cuba, because this would be an “insult” to Castro. TV magnate Ted Turner has sponsored a TV mini-series on the Cold War that has often taken the moral-equivalence line.
Turner's instruction to the historian who put this series together was that he wanted no “triumphalism,” meaning apparently no depiction of the triumph of democracy over Communism. Various scholars who have specialized in the study of Communist countries have criticized the distortions in this mini-series in a recently published book titled CNN's Cold War Documentary, edited by Arnold Beichman.
Meanwhile, that moral-equivalence mini-series is being spread through American schools from coast to coast, as if to turn our children into the useful idiots of the future.
FACTS VERSUS DOGMA ON GUNS
For years, the tragic shooting of President Reagan's press secretary James Brady has been exploited politically by gun-control advocates. Federal gun-control legislation has been called “the Brady bill.” Yet there was scarcely a peep from the liberal media when it was announced recently that the man who shot Brady—John Hinkley—will be allowed furloughs from the mental hospital in which he has been kept.
Unfortunately, this is a classic liberal pattern—remarkably little concern over those particular people who actually commit crimes with guns, combined with ferocious crusades against law-abiding citizens who own firearms.
Furloughs, parole, probation or lenient sentences for violent criminals do not alarm the liberals. What alarms them is the thought that people who have never shot anybody might be able to have a gun in their home or business to protect themselves against the kinds of armed criminals that liberals allow to walk the streets.
Liberal dogma on gun control is like liberal dogma on so many other issues: Ordinary people cannot be trusted to look out for themselves, but must be put under the thumb of wiser and nobler people—such as liberals—through strict government regulations. According to the gun-control zealots, we will shoot each other in the heat of arguments if we have guns. Automobile accidents will lead to gunfire between angry drivers.
In other words, innocent people cannot be trusted with firearms. Far better to leave them helpless against armed criminals.
It is bad enough that liberals have this vision of the world. What is worse is that the liberal media will consistently ignore or suppress any facts which contradict that vision.
A massive empirical study by John Lott of the University of Chicago Law School shows the direct opposite of virtually everything in the liberal vision of gun control. Rising rates of gun ownership in particular counties across the country have almost invariably been followed immediately by falling rates of violent crimes in those counties.
This should not be a surprise to anyone. Violent criminals prefer helpless victims, not people who can shoot them full of holes. But where have you seen this empirical study mentioned in the media? Its title is More Guns, Less Crime.
In those European countries where citizens almost never have guns, burglaries are far more common than in the United States, and the burglars do not spend nearly as much time casing the place before breaking in. Similarly, in those American communities where liberal politicians have long had tight control, law-abiding citizens are similarly disarmed and similarly vulnerable.
As for the gunplay that would supposedly follow every fender-bender on the highway, John Lott has been able to find only one example. Two truckers had an accident and one was giving a brutal, bone-breaking beating to the other, until the second trucker pulled out a gun and opened fire, probably saving his own life.
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br /> Even in counties where a high percentage of the people are armed, bullets are not flying hither and yon on the highways—or anywhere else. There are usually far more shootings in places where the criminals know that ordinary citizens are unlikely to be able to shoot back.
Isolated incidents of accidental death from guns are inevitable in a country of more than a quarter of a billion people, just as there are accidental deaths from swimming pools, ski runs, wild animals and other causes. But only accidental gunshot deaths are played up big in the media. The larger numbers of lives saved by armed citizens protecting themselves and their families are seldom reported, much less weighed against the isolated gunshot accidents.
If our concern is for the safety of decent, law-abiding people, then all the facts need to be considered. But nothing that undermines the gun-controllers' vision is likely to be reported when the mass media show more concern for protecting liberal dogma than for protecting people.
In the media, it is all presented as a story of humanitarian efforts by the good guys to save lives against the evil resistance of the National Rifle Association. In the media, James Brady is repeatedly put on the screen when the issue comes up. Meanwhile, the man who shot Brady gets furloughs and nobody cares.
GLOBAL HOT AIR
A new political dogma is being spun in the media. “Science,” they say, has now “proved” that global warming is a real danger and that human beings are responsible for it, so that we need to take drastic steps to reduce greenhouse gasses. This has been the widespread response to a recent publication by the National Academy of Sciences, which many in the media have taken as proof that we need to follow the drastic requirements of the Kyoto accords, in order to reduce the threat of global warming.
There were some pretty heavy-weight scientists involved in the NAS discussions of the global warming issue. But, as the report itself stated clearly, these scientists not only did not write the report, they didn't even see it before it was published. They “were not asked to endorse the conclusions or recommendations nor did they see the final draft of the report before its release.”
So much for “science” having “proved” global warming and its human causation. Scientists were used as window dressing for a report made by government officials. Moreover, even that report was unable to claim unanimity among scientists on the global warming issue, though some in the media seem to think that it did.
The stampede toward draconian changes in our economy and in the whole American way of life is all too congenial to the mindset of the intelligentsia in general and the liberal media in particular. Anything that requires their superior wisdom and virtue to be imposed by government on the benighted masses has a favorable reception waiting in those quarters.
Back in the 1970s, the hysteria was about global cooling and the prospect of a new ice age. A National Academy of Sciences report back then led Science magazine to conclude in its March 1, 1975 issue that a long “ice age is a real possibility.” According to the April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek, “the earth's climate seems to be cooling down.”
A note of urgency was part of the global cooling hysteria then as much as it is part of today's global warming hysteria. According to the February 1973 issue of Science Digest, “Once the freeze starts, it will be too late.”
Nothing is easier than to come up with mathematical models and doomsday scenarios. Politicians and government bureaucrats have been trying for well over a decade to sell a doomsday scenario of global warming, which would enhance the power of—you guessed it—politicians and bureaucrats.
Among scientists specializing in the study of weather and climate, there are many differences of opinion, reflecting the complex and uncertain data. Among the prominent scientists who do not go along with the global warming hysteria are Richard S. Lindzen, who is professor of meteorology at MIT, and Dr. S. Fred Singer, who created the American weather satellite system and whose book, Hot Talk, Cold Science, is must reading for those who want scientific facts rather than a political stampede.
Although Professor Lindzen is one of the big names listed in the National Academy of Sciences report, he disagrees with the global warming hysteria. As Professor Lindzen notes, “the climate is always changing.” Innumerable factors go into temperature changes and many of these factors, such as the changing amounts of heat put out by the sun during different eras, are beyond the control of human beings.
Certain gasses, such as carbon dioxide, have the potential to affect temperatures, but that is very different from saying that a particular rise in temperature during a particular era is necessarily due to “greenhouse gasses.” A major part of the rising temperature over the past century took place before World War II—which was also before the large increase in carbon dioxide emissions in our time.
The National Academy of Sciences report itself tiptoes around the fact that the timing of temperature increases does not coincide with the timing of increases in greenhouse gasses. As the NAS report puts it: “The causes of these irregularities and the disparities in timing are not completely understood.”
Even if we were to cripple our economy by carrying out the radical steps proposed in the Kyoto accords, this “would not result in a substantial reduction in global warming,” according to Professor Lindzen. He laments the use of science “as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens.” Unfortunately, many of those uninformed citizens are in the media.
“CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM” FOLLIES
To crusaders for “campaign finance reform,” as with many other political crusaders, the facts simply do not matter. What matters is their vision—and winning. Facts can be left to others.
Most of the arguments for campaign finance reform cannot stand up to the facts. Take the notion that, without government regulation of campaign contributions, people with big money will simply “buy the election.” What are the facts?
The long list of rich people who became political candidates and lost, despite spending big bucks out of their own pockets, goes back as far as William Randolph Hearst and comes forward to Ross Perot and Steve Forbes. When the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 1994, for the first time in 40 years, the average winning Republican candidate spent less than the Democrat he defeated. Then, eight years later, when the Democrats staged a comeback and reduced the Republican majority, their spending averaged less than that of the Republicans.
What about the notion that the big money will always back conservative or pro-business candidates, giving one side of the political spectrum an unfair advantage at the polls? Big campaign money contributors have bankrolled political icons of the left from William Jennings Bryan to Bob LaFollette and Hiram Johnson in a bygone era to Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern in a later era. Hollywood millionaires were among Bill Clinton's biggest supporters and billionaire Ted Turner bankrolls left-wing causes.
What about the much-touted “quid pro quo” sought by “special interests”? Does this produce “the best politicians money can buy,” as claimed by campaign finance crusaders? Here we run into a chicken and egg problem. Do contributors generally contribute to elected officials who already espouse positions they like or do the politicians take their positions in order to attract money?
Since there is money available on both sides of most issues, it is by no means an open and shut case that positions are generally taken just in order to attract money. A Congressman who votes in favor of drilling for oil in Alaska may get contributions from the oil industry but, if he voted to oppose oil drilling in Alaska, he could get money from the Sierra Club.
According to House minority leader Richard Gephardt: “What we have is two important values in direct conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy.” Whatever Congressman Gephardt's definition of a “healthy” campaign, it is not part of the Constitution of the United States—and free speech is.
Across a whole spectrum of in
stitutions, free speech is being stifled so that the politically correct vision of the left can prevail, as it does in our educational system from the kindergarten to the graduate schools. It is the same story in most of the media. When a homosexual is murdered by anti-gay hoodlums, that is big news from coast to coast, but when two homosexuals capture, rape and kill a teenage boy, that story seldom sees the light of day.
Campaign finance restrictions reduce the chances of letting the public hear anything that has not been filtered through the liberal media and the liberal academic establishment.
What have been the actual consequences of previous campaign finance laws? A scholarly study of such laws—Unfree Speech by William A. Smith—concludes that they affect the channels through which money reaches political campaigns, rather than the total amount of money.
Lots of innocent people have been caught in legal technicalities created by a tangle of red tape regulations, while the organized special interests continue to pour millions of dollars through the loopholes. Small groups of concerned citizens dare not enter the political campaign fray without lawyers to guide them through the legal maze created by existing campaign reform laws. In short, laws designed to reduce the influence of special interests scare off ordinary citizens, thereby enhancing the influence of special interests.
Campaign finance laws also enhance the power of incumbents, who have access to the media by virtue of their offices and have direct access to the public through the power of press releases and junkets paid for by the taxpayers. Unfortunately, it is only incumbents who can vote on campaign finance laws—and they are obviously in favor of whatever increases their chances of keeping their jobs.
UGLINESS IN YOSEMITE
A visit to Yosemite National Park and its natural beauties and wonders is always an uplifting experience, even after having visited the park more than 20 years in a row. In recent years, however, the beauty of Yosemite has been tainted by the ugliness of the people who run it.
Controversial Essays Page 8