"Society is dead." Long live Society. () posted on Friday 12th of June 2009 at 6.18 pm
A posting (Here is the news) at The Bickerstaffe Record deserved comment.
It talks about the intentional blurring of left-right by The Conservatives; they argue that the BNP is in fact an extreme leftwing party.
I kid you not.
Dan Hannan, our favourite Tory MEP, joined the rubbish, writing in the Torygraph: "There's nothing Right-wing about the BNP".
A while ago I wrote a little webpage repeating an earlier blog and quoting much of the entry regarding "Neo-Liberalism" on Wikipedia. I haven't bothered to check out who made the changes, or for what reason, but yes that is also changed from the original.
Yes...wikipedia, you know, the online knowledge resource that got "edited" minutes after Cameron had a go at Gordon Brown over the lifespan of Titian at Prime Minister's question time a few months ago. The "Jesurgislac's Journal" piece entitled "Never, ever, try to win an argument by editing a Wikipedia page" points out that the IP address of the source of the edit was actually located inside Tory HQ.
Anyway, Wikipedia tells us the facts of the BNP: The British National Party (BNP) is a far-right and whites-only political party in the United Kingdom, formed as a splinter group of the British National Front by John Tyndall in 1982. The party's current chairman is Nick Griffin, himself an ex-National Front member.
So let's have a little think about political compasses.
Was Hitler communist?
I think the answer is definitely 'no'.
Was Hitler Fascist? Well, I believe he was, along with his pal Mussolini. Oh and he killed 20 million Communists in the Second World War as he invaded the USSR, so I *guess* he wasn't a communist; he was a fascist.
If you wish to recreate political landscapes, define "left" or "right" wing as *purely* economic measurements, then this is the way to do it. Forget about "society", pretend it doesn't exist, (also try to forget that it was a predecessor who killed it.)
Some of us don't wish to give up on the idea that "societies" "exist", and do so for good reason for us all.
That's my strange rambling for today.
