A rchive Date
[ 30-07-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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['Font of wisdom' was a nitwit
Darling of the socialist left in '60s and '70s babbled like a buffoon
By PAUL JACKSON - Calgary Sun
July 30, 2000
Professor Herbert Marcuse was the darling of the trendy intellectual left throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Or should I say "pseudo-intellectual" left?
His 1964 book, One Dimensional Man, was the bible on campuses across North America and in Europe. You didn't read it? Well, you missed nothing.
The other day while channel-hopping I hit The History Channel and there was Marcuse pontificating in an old black-and-white interview. It was all how socialism was the 'vanguard' and if you were against socialism you were living in the past.
The man's a fool, I thought, but in his day he had many an adherent from the feeble-minded set. Today, we know all Marcuse said was out of focus, but during his lifetime he was the idol of the Lib-Left. One imagines Pierre Trudeau thought highly of his fellow pseudo-intellectual.
In this interview, with a fawning host who hadn't the courage to tell the philosopher he was spouting claptrap, Marcuse was saying as to how only socialism could eradicate evil and create equality for all. Let's run through Marcuse's arguments:
* We need a world without war, and only socialism can achieve that.
No mention that two of the most infamous socialists, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, were also two of the biggest warmongers of all time. Throw in Mao Tse-tung and make that three socialists who, with their allies, were responsible for the slaughter of 100 million humans. Socialism gave us the 'killing fields' of Cambodia.
Who fought against tyranny and held the bloodlusting socialists of the Soviet Union and China at bay after the Second World War? Why the 'capitalist' nations of the U.S., Britain, Canada and Western Europe.
* We need societies without oppression, and socialism is the way to achieve them.
Marcuse casually ignored the oppression of socialist societies in Eastern Europe, in which every single thought, word and deed was controlled by the state. Calling themselves 'people's democratic republics,' there was nothing democratic about them. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Hungary, men and women were imprisoned by the socialists for simply asking that their democratic rights, as guaranteed under the bogus constitutions, be given them.
Meanwhile, in Western Europe and North America, governed by 'capitalist' political parties, individual rights were ever-more expanded. Still are.
*We need fair distribution of wealth, rather than a society in which the rich get richer and the poor poorer.
In socialist societies the rich - the state gauleiters - do get richer and the people poorer. The Soviet Union was home to the poorest white people on the globe - and on a per capita basis, more blacks in South Africa owned cars than did whites in Russia and its white colonies. Europe and North America were awash in ever-increasing numbers of consumer goods - goods those in the East could only dream about.
Britain's socialist Labour party balked when Margaret Thatcher made one million people homeowners at the stroke of the pen when she let them buy their state-owned homes.
Marcuse's socialism the vanguard of the future?
Well, socialism exists today only in dictatorships like Cuba, North Korea and China - with China undergoing radical economic changes to turn itself into a free-enterprise economy. Cuba and North Korea are ruled by brutal dictatorships, and everyone with an ounce of common sense knows their peoples would be far, far better off in 'free enterprise' societies.
While Marcuse was at his zenith, another philosopher, Ayn Rand, was being mocked by the 'intelligentsia' for claiming `capitalism' was the basis of freedom, equality, and prosperity for all. Today, with socialism basically confined to the garbage bin, we know Rand was absolutely right in her assessments, and Marcuse absolutely wrong.
In retrospect, this font of left-wing wisdom was just a nitwit.
Jackson, associate editor of the Sun, can be reached at paul.jackson@cal.sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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