Edmund Burke Quote # 5

From "Speech Before the House of Commons in Support of Mr. Rose Fuller's Motion that the Commons Move to a Committee of the Whole in Order to Discuss the Threepence Tax on Tea":

...among vices, there is none which the House abhors in the same degree with obstinacy. Obstinacy, Sir, is certainly a great vice; and in the changeful state of political affairs it is frequently the cause of great mischief. It happens, however, very unfortunately, that almost the whole line of the great and masculine virtues, constancy, gravity, magnanimity, fortitude, fidelity, and firmness, are closely allied to this disagreeable quality, of which you have so just an abhorrence, and, in their excess, all these virtues very easily fall into it.

One of the most amazing, and yet utterly unsurprising, aspects of political discourse in this age is the degree to which people are loyal to ideas that have absolutely no track record of actually producing the benefits which they were supposed to produce.

I'm never one hundred percent sure whether it's idiocy, ignorance, willful blindness, lying in shameless pursuit of power, obstinacy--as Burke suggests here--or some hideous combination of all of them.

Probably it's the hideous-combination-thing. Yeah, that's it.

From Pat Buchanan's Day of Reckoning

He saith, as regards conservatism:

True conservatism is the antithesis of ideology. It is the negation of ideology. For conservatism is grounded in the past. Its principles are derived from the Constitution, experience, history, tradition, custom, and the wisdom of those who have gone before us--"the best that has been thought and said." It does not purport to know the future. It is about preserving the true, the good, the beautiful. Conservatism views all ideologies with skepticism, and the more zealous and fanatic with hostility.

Beautifully Put

Diana West writes:

...this is what zealots do. They serve theories, not men; they see visions, not reality.

Amen, and amen...

A Fifth Quote from The Truth War

So what is truth?

Here is a simple definition drawn from what the Bible teaches: truth is that which is consistent with the mind, will, character, glory, and being of God. Even more to the point: truth is the self-expression of God. That is the biblical meaning of truth, and it is the definition I employ throughout this book. Because the definition of truth flows from God, truth is theological.

Truth is also ontological--which is a fancy way of saying it is the way things really are. Reality is what it is because God declared it so and made it so. Therefore God is the author, source, determiner, governor, arbiter, ultimate standard, and final judge of all truth.

You would not--I say again, NOT--believe the discussions I've had with people over statements as simple as, "A statement is true if it corresponds with reality." People get livid about that. They want to be able to say that their ideas are true even if they don't actually happen to correspond to reality.

You see this in politics, too. Conservatives--Burkean conservatives, Kirkan conservatives, Buchanan conservatives--refer to people like this as ideologues. They are people so committed to the ideas of--for example--single-payer health-care, free trade (careful; I am not referring to free markets here), a green economy, a controlled economy, nation-building, etc., that the plain fact that these all have terrible track records simply has no impact on their thinking. They want so badly to believe that the idea is okay, it's only proper implementation that has been lacking, that they will believe obvious falsehood and will take great offense at anyone having the temerity to point out that reality does not confirm their opinions.

Communists, Communism, Marxists, Marxism

Not all socialists are communists, but--and, oh, boy, would a lot of people like you to forget this--all communists are socialists. People often overlook this, or try to; many would love to overlook the indisputable fact that one of the worst totalitarian states in history was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, aka "Communist Russia."

Communism is an explicitly godless--it was communists who coined the infamous phrase that "Religion is the opiate of the people", and it is no accident that many atheists are also communists--militant, violently repressive, international-in-design socialism. It is socialism's usual thieving oligarchy carried to a murderous extreme. Communists have been responsible, probably, for the murders of more human beings than any other ideological group--any group period, really--throughout the planet's history.

Communism's most influential and famous theoretician was Karl Marx, hence communism is often called "Marxism." It should send shivers down the spine of any knowledgeable, caring person that Barack Obama said in his own autobiography that he was drawn to Marxist professors in college; that it doesn't, to my mind, indicates that people have no clear idea of what Marxism means anymore.

In short, it means murder and oppression. Murder and oppression by the state, in the name of the people, for the sake of plunder, for the benefit of an oligarchy or dictator.

Occasionally, you will hear some ignorant fool--tool--opine that real communism has never been tried. By this, he means that it's never reached it's ostensible goal of such total brotherhood among men being reached that the state ends up withering away and leaving mankind in a kind of bucolic, egalitarian, eternal brotherhood of love. This is, of course, an admission that it's never worked, not once in all the times it's been tried. Communists often blame this on the fact that they have enemies--that the whole world isn't yet communist--and try to aggressively export their insanity.

At bottom, what you've got with communists are people hell-bent on setting up an oligarchy or dictatorship to dominate and plunder the people, all in the name of the people. I often think of this clip when I think of communists, though I wouldn't go as far as cursing a communist.

I would sure as thunder curse communism, though.