Totalitarian Instinct

Save the bags, loose the people

Andrew Bolt
Thursday, August 07, 2008 at 02:54pm
Irish filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney - the makers of the brilliant documentary Mine Your Own Business - are appealing for help to get their latest film, Not Evil Just Wrong - The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria, into cinemas. They are after $US3.5 million to get their film into 150 theatres across America by September.

It deserves your support, not least because it tackles the dangerous deceits spread by Al Gore. Check out the film’s site for more, and enjoy this preview:

Link:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/

Related by Andrew Bolt

Alexander Solzhenitsyn feeds the darkest temptation
Andrew Bolt
August 08, 2008 12:00am

Tribute to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

ALEXANDER Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning writer who died this week, spotted the danger back when it was called communism.

Mind you, it took no great brains to see evil in an ideology that was trying to destroy him.
After all, this Russian war hero had been arrested on wild charges of slandering Stalin and sent to the Gulag, where millions had died.

But we should be warned. When Solzhenitsyn published The Gulag Archipelago in English from 1974, warning of the horrors of the Soviet system he'd somehow survived, his revelations struck many intellectuals in the West like a clap of thunder.

What? Nice communism, meant to help people, actually slaughtered them in their millions?

Who'd have thought?

Well, not them. And which of our intellectuals can see now the newest form of the same totalitarian instinct?

What Solzhenitsyn described in his greatest work - a history rather than a novel - was how ideology licensed even intelligent people to be cruel.

What's more, this particular ideology taught that individuals could be sacrificed to the cause. To history.

It convinced its followers that the rest of us could be made to be happy, and anyone standing in the way of that moral plan must, of course, be evil. It was a duty to remove them.
So, said Solzhenitsyn, "it's thanks to ideology that it fell to the 20th century to experience villainy on a scale of millions."

Count its victims in Mao's China, Stalin's Russia and the Germany of the National Socialists. Count all those individuals sacrificed to save the State, Fatherland, or Party.

What Solzhenitsyn described was, of course, just the latest appeal to the totalitarian instinct that has tempted intellectuals from Plato to Marx. But with Marxism now dead, at least outside universities, what new ideology now tickles that temptation?

Read the rest:

Join Andrew on blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt