fpb: (Athena of Pireus)
fpb ([personal profile] fpb) wrote2014-03-07 09:52 am

"History is on our side." It probably is, and that is why you are doomed to lose.

The people who say that history is on their side are the people who look back to the recent past and see a direction in it. That is why they are bound to lose: because the future is practically never like the past. It changes, and changes exactly at the point when a tendency has reached its peak and seems established as a law of history - because when a tendency has reached its peak, it has peaked. Example: Hitler grew up in a world where Germany was growing economically and politically stronger and stronger, till by 1914 she was effectively the strongest power in the world, strong enough to launch that bid for world domination that became known as World War One. (Very simplified version of what happened - but that is what happened.) Hitler could not imagine a world where German power would not go on growing above all others, as he had seen it in his childhood and adolescence, and so he went into another World War, without being able to get his head around the fact that in the intervening years America and Russia had grown way beyond Germany's potential. Come the war, America and Russia ate Germany and burped. Likewise, Lenin grew in a period when the Socialist movement was growing riotously all over Europe, from about 1890 to about 1910, when most European countires had a Socialist plurality among their electorates and in their parliaments. Convinced that socialism was the wave of the future because it was the wave of his own recent past, Lenin brutally imposed his own tyrannical version of it on Russia - but Socialism was in fact peaking across the West. It would never achieve more than a plurality in any election, and never, in spite of its claim to represent "the people", represent more than an important section of it. And on this partial and mistaken claim Lenin and his followers built their demand for absolute power. Indeed, by introducing into the unstable Socialist movement the acidic element of his own centralized and aggressive movement, and by associating it with tyranny and unreason, Lenin may actually have sped up its decline. People can't see the future, only the recent past, and the very fact that they declare that history is on their side proves it beyond any doubt - for history is the record of the past.

[identity profile] johncwright.livejournal.com 2014-03-29 05:47 am (UTC)(link)
This is off topic, but I felt compelled to write you.

In times past, you spoke out fiercely and strongly in favor of the British Health Service.

But you have spoken out fiercely and strongly in favor of life, and God's commandments that we choose life, and you reject abortion as murder.

Now it has been discovered that the British Health Service has been burning the corpses of thousands of aborted babies and miscarriages to heat one of their hospitals. It is a nice combination of two ideas, that of recycling, and that of a woman's right to choose.

Whom do you serve? God? Or the baby burners?

If you think the choice is not that stark and simple, think about how you plan to support the British Health Service -- without supporting what the British Health Service does and will continue to do to unborn babies.

[identity profile] fpb.livejournal.com 2014-03-29 08:57 am (UTC)(link)
Don't be ridiculous. The basic evil is abortion, and abortion is practiced just as happily by your free marketeers. Once you have removed that beam - and several others - from your own eye, you may have something to say about ours.

When was the last time you paid £1000 ($1500) of your own money to a British citizen, because the British health service was murdering him? Me - to an American person I don't even know - last year. And it wasn't even the first time - more like the third or fourth. A CIVILIZED COUNTRY DOES NOT LEAVE ITS OLD AND SICK TO BEG FOR MONEY FROM STRANGERS BECAUSE THEY CAN NO LONGER ENRICH INSURANCE COMPANIES. And I suggest you never touch this subject again, because the way I feel about American health care - both before and after Obama - would make it end-of-friendship stuff.
Edited 2014-03-29 09:07 (UTC)