It is tiring to be accused of being ‘far-Right’ by people doing (however unwittingly) the bidding of the corporations and investors who recently made a killing on Covid. It is particularly irritating that such people, whilst deriding low-income workers and the ‘uneducated’, have convinced themselves that they are somehow being virtuous. They call themselves ‘Left’, but so do I. We either need to re-think or ditch these outdated epithets, or be more honest about our positions.
As explanation, the following is a list of some actual ‘Left’ policies I have always supported. They lean towards public health issues, as this is relevant to the times. They include:
- An emphasis on human rights, bodily autonomy and freedom of movement.
- An effort to limit inequality in wealth distribution.
- Decolonisation, i.e., large rich countries and the corporations in them (or that run them) should not dictate to, or extract wealth from, smaller and poorer countries.
- Community-based influence or control on local policy and resources, particularly healthcare.
- A publicly funded health system that ensures reasonably equal access to good basic care.
- Free and equal opportunity for education, to reduce poverty and improve gender equality.
- Constitutional democracy, where governments exist on the will of the people, and inviolable rules protect minorities.
- Free speech (essential to stop dictators from entrenching themselves and to ensure progress).
- Willingness to stand your ground for the above principles, even at some personal cost.
The list could go on, but generally this is where I was, and remain. This is why, ignorantly or not, I have always voted that way. Working in global health, I had thought that was where most of my colleagues were, though I was fine with those that differed. However, with notable exceptions, nearly all have actively supported the following list of antithetical policies during the past few years:
- Mandated face coverings and injections, and vilification and exclusion of individuals and minorities who refused (note: ‘exclusion’ is the opposite of ‘inclusion’, so the opposite of DEI).
- Desperation to defend the largest concentration of wealth in the history of humankind, with ‘Left-wing’ media lauding the recipients (and sponsored by them).
- Imposition of global policies geared to ensure broad uptake in low-income countries of Western health products to address a Western problem (e.g. ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’), at the cost of deterioration of the health issues that actually impact low-income countries most.
- Increasing centralisation in international public health policy, with the World Health Organisation (WHO), ‘philanthropists’ and a parrot-like sponsored media pushing the same policies onto young mothers in Nigerian villages that they push on aged-care centres in Seattle.
- Restricting healthcare access across much of the globe, from chemotherapy for NHS cancer patients in Britain and basic birthing support for young mothers in Kenya.
- Advocating for school closures that will ensure increased poverty for the next generation, widening gender inequality, promoting child marriage and child labour.
- Rule by emergency decree, because the public may choose differently from the Government. Then planning for a transfer of powers to WHO for any health event, or even the threat of one, that WHO staff in a comfortable Swiss city deem to call an ’emergency’.
- Development of a whole new concept called an ‘infodemic’. This involves people who are losing their right to show their face, work or visit family, questioning the regime that is removing these rights. The same regime that is profiting from their confinement. In an ‘infodemic’, the people asking the questions are deemed to be the problem, not the regime. (Remember when raging against the machine was a thing?)
Support for these actions requires an abandonment of any inclination to stand for those principles that we (the ‘Left’) once believed in. Perhaps to hide this weakness from themselves, many now label human rights advocates and free-speech defenders as ‘anti-whatever’ or ‘whatever-denier (insert the latest thing, it is usually incoherent, or use the derogatory ‘free-dumb’ instead).
If someone cannot see through this piece of Orwellian double-speak played out in the media and in life, benefiting the few at the expense of the many, then the behavioural psychology is working as intended. They won’t recognise reality until they snap out of it. But for those who agree with the first list above, but still persist in closing down debate and name-calling, self-reflection might bring a return of strength.
People can change their minds. Intelligent people do as they learn new things and find time to think.
Which brings us to the obvious conclusion. The new movement of cancellation, vilification, exclusion and abuse is not a Left or Right movement. It promotes a form of totalitarianism closer to fascism than anything else, whilst calling others ‘fascist’ for valuing free thought and free association. Fascism is not a synonym for freedom; it has a different and unpleasant meaning.
We live in a divided society. The divide is political. It is between those who value democracy, equality and intrinsic human worth and those who think it virtuous to deride them. Those who still recognise these values as worthy should stop calling people stupid names and start asking, and allowing, questions. Inclusiveness is not a dogma; it is fundamentally the opposite. There is strength in diversity, not in subservience to another’s uniformity.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva and coordinated malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a member of the Executive Committee of PANDA.
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Like all people who hold luxury beliefs, they find it easy to “take a stand” when the going is easy.
But when it matters, they fold quicker than a sheet of rice paper in the hands of an origami master.
No fundamental ethical bedrock to their ideas, you see.
Champagne Socialists.
Or Caviar Gauche, as the French call them.
They also love any opportunity to boss people around. The climate scam, the covid scam, all the scams.
The left only ever “rages against the machine” as a ruse in order to gain control of the damned thing. Then it extends it, soups it up and drives it at maximum speed. The left is composed of liars, hypocrites and tyrants and always has been.
Even the band Rage Against the Machine shilled for the jab.
Sadly were are seeing the fruition of years of left wing policies.
Equality means putting large numbers of incompetent people in important positions.
Internationally the Left has only ever raged against injustice if it’s perceived to be Western injustices (Israel, South Africa). It has always been largely silent about Communist China, the Soviet Union.
The KGB infiltrated universities long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. If effect we lost the Cold War.
The cold war was always a pretend-thing supposed to obscure the fact that the so-called communist regimes in eastern Europe could really only have been installed with the help of the supposed western anti-communists. As shining example of that, the GDR existed for as long as the FRG was willing to foot this bill as well.
“The Left Has Forgotten it Used to Rage Against the Machine”Really? Then what is Communism if it isn’t a giant bureaucratic collectivist machine that consumes all within it’s malevolent cogs.
When the left ally themselves with big business the resulting political philosophy is usually given a name. When “the media’s use of propaganda techniques to delegitimise MP Andrew Bridgen’s speech on excess deaths signals its role in shoring up Government and corporate interests” (Rebekah Barnett on Substack) it confirms that the correct name is fascist.
This started with Blair and governments since have confirmed that is what they are. The idea of liberal democracy has long since been abandoned.
I always felt that Blair and Brown were the most hardline /authoratarian PMs we have had in a long time in the UK.Thats why I always refer to the creature as BlairThe Fascist , . I also have a name for Johnson ,which is less complimentary Useless Cxxt…
I don’t think the left has ever raged against the machine. The old labour just raged against the Tories, capitalism and middle/upper class while longing for their machine to be installed – one that eradicated capitalism and class. That’s just raging for a different machine. But that machine removes power from the people and actually extends the mechanics of the machinery. Current labour are the middle/upper class raging against themselves in various acts of self-harm in the name of virtue. Still though, they want a bigger machine, not actually much different to the one that old labour wanted to build. Miners have just been replaced by bun-wearing, latte drinking, accountants who despise the type of people that used to make up old labour.
I appreciate the authors piece, but would point out that a lot of what he bullet points as his stand are in complete contradiction with each other, and some of which are at the very source of the societal destruction we’re currently experiencing.
“As explanation, the following is a list of some actual ‘Left’ policies I have always supported. They lean towards public health issues, as this is relevant to the times.”
Well the list contains some policies that may come into conflict with others. The writer may very well be an extremely principled person who respects freedom of speech, basic rights and bodily autonomy, but sadly most people who go into “public health” and politics generally do not seem to be as restrained, and efforts to improve “equality”, “limit wealth inequality” and “improve public health” seem to lead to the removal of freedoms and the confiscation of a lot of private wealth for little apparent gain.
I have come to believe the role of the state should be minimal, and the state should not have “aims” beyond fulfilling its minimal role as well as possible, principally in protecting the freedom of its citizens. And no, I don’t mean that the state should invent a bunch of things it needs to be involved in and then outsource them – that’s not shrinking the state at all but simply funnelling money to corporations that do the state’s budding.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/where-are-sages-scientists-now-priming-us-for-un-agenda-2030/
Part 1 of a series from TCW looking at the rewards given to the SAGE traitors. Number one is chief Next Tuesday Vallance.
As Guy de la Bédoyère rightly pointed out in another article: Totalitarianism is as old as mankind. Fascism was a short-lived Italian phenomenon of the early 20th century and firmly gone by the middle of it. In modern American use, it’s a catch-all term which just means the enemy, whoever the enemy happens to be and whatever that enemy happens to propose. The so-called left and the so-called right happily accuse each other of fascism all the time. The right thing to do with regards to that would be to stop using this meaningless epithet.
Yes what happened to Occupy Wall Street….Woke saved the day and the rest is history. Check this article based on a false premise:https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/greta-thunberg-accused-of-spreading-climate-disinformation-a-glimpse-into-the-polarized-world-of-climate-activism/ar-AA1iK7st?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=71867f57057f4499be3da09c147cebe7&ei=12
It is high time that the efforts of activists like Greta Thunberg are understood, appreciated, and supported, rather than being mired in controversy and criticism.
If you don’t agree with this statement, don’t waste your time with reading the article culminating with it.
I shared the article with humour in mind.
The most brilliant trick the elites have pulled off is that they have convinced deluded leftists think they are winning. They are not. The Davos elites have spliced together a Frankenstein’s monster that is Marxist in appearance, but is mechanistically Fascist. In reality it is a creation designed to serve neither left nor right, it only serves those billionaire stake-holder capitalists who spawned it.
Our own government is part of this globalist cabal which includes the WHO, MSM, OFFCOM, NGOs, and Big Tech amongst others who collude to use fake emergencies like covid, climate change, and the culture wars to bypass democratic accountability and take liberties at every contrived opportunity. Leftists are fully signed up to this new religion, unfortunately they are too dim to realise they are doing someone else’s bidding. The only people who are truly winning are the elites themselves.
Agree. People who consider themselves on the real left need to swallow their pride and align themselves with those of us who are on the real right. And vice versa. In my experience you don’t have to be intelligent to change your mind when faced with the facts. You only have to be prepared to question groupthink.
I think that the culture wars are being intentionally fermented to keep left and right apart. Some of the older ones on the left can see through it, but most of the younger ones have been seduced by the prospect of breaking societal norms. The cannot see that the they too will be oppressed by the censorious anti-democratic society that is currently being created.
Welcome to the New World Order:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-8BoWU3XMo
A very obvious gap in Dr. Bell’s little list, is any mention of the Lefty Arts Grad Greenie worship of those very complicated machines that are to replace those old fuddy duddy machines that actually produce affordable and reliable energy.
Blow all that up – and the well paid and skilled jobs that went with it.
Replace with eyewateringly expensive weather depenent gadgets that will never in their lifetime produce enough energy to build a new one.
What could go wrong?
Hear, hear! (I have paid £5 out of my less-than-minimum-wage-income to be able to make this comment.)