To Hell in a Handcart– the Opus Diaboli Walpurgisnacht Message 2010
Walpurgisnacht this year finds us in a tense, yet heartwarming place… with the world’s economies still in meltdown and on the cusp of the most hotly contested general election in decades, we are witnessing the collapse of the pestilent Labour government. First The Sun, then The Times and even the last true socialist newspaper of quality, The Guardian has abandoned support for Labour.
And who can blame them? Labour swept to power in 1997 on a promise of ‘education, education, education’ and ‘no more boom and bust’. Thirteen years later, one in five children leaves school functionally illiterate and the national debt is the equivalent of £31,000 for each person in employment.
This week, the thuggish Brown, in a break from the scripted, Stalinist encounters he usually has with hand-picked ‘voters’ – actually met one of the real people who support him. She asked him a pertinent question about the effect of immigration on jobs in her region. Afterwards, as he thrashed around looking for someone to blame for his own inability to answer questions (“whose idea was that?”), he slandered his own supporter as “bigoted”.
Hopefully what we will soon see is Labour shifted to third place in the polls, as they were in recent local government elections – and then bloodletting with begin. Accusation and counter accusation with flow thick and fast, and Labour will destroy itself… blaming, as usual, everyone else.
But hold! Is the death of socialism in the UK only part of a wider story? Since… well since living memory, really, Greece has been running itself on an economic model devised by the kind of students who draw hammers and sickles on their jeans in ballpen.
Their country, now bankrupt, has had to go cap-in-hand to the rest of Europe for a bailout.
A hopeless debtor, who sees his entire monthly paycheque disappear in interest payments and credit card penalties, eventually sits down and works out a strategy that will pay off the debt. This usually involves a period of living on cornflakes and water. The entire country of Greece is now in this position. The Greek people, as they have since Plato first drew a hammer and sickle on his toga, took to the streets to protest. Like a truculent teenager confronted with the fact that their behaviour has maxed out the family credit card – their response has been ‘well get another one then!’. Even the Greek government which has perpetrated the idea of state-provided free money and jobs, has reluctantly said this cannot go on.
When, in 2008 the world’s economy finally did go to Hell in a handcart, certain university lecturers who, despite the lessons of history and their own comfortable middle-class lifestyles, still claimed to be Marxists, were writing pieces for the broadsheet newspapers proclaiming the ‘death of Capitalism’. This has not happened, the cost has been great, but the mechanisms of Capitalism stayed in place and it has largely, repaired itself. In every case where a Communist country has undergone similar financial upheaval, it has ended up with thousands of people starving to death – Ayn Rand’s first-hand account of life in Russia in ‘We the Living’ being a good example.
Capitalism works and Communism never does. It was for this reason that in the late part of the 20th century we saw the death of Communism, with first Russia and then China giving up the pretence of anything even remotely Marxist in the way they conduct their economies. Communism is no longer the indulgence of superpowers, or even the second rate countries – only basket cases such as North Korea and Cuba cling to this model by force of will and by believing their own tractor production figures.
Perhaps now, two decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, socialism – Communism’s sallow-faced sibling – will also finally expire.
Then perhaps we will have heard the last of the idea that you can only strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
