Just How Compassionate is the Progressive Left?

The Progressive Fantasy

America is fast approaching a tipping point.  The Left has captured most of the media, one entire political party, most universities, colleges, high schools, junior highs, middle schools and elementary schools. The film industry still makes conservative sorts of films when they want to make money, but mostly they make money-losing seriously "woke" and progressive post-modernist stories of misery and debauchery - at least the ones that want to win Oscars. 

So let me list some things, besides my 40 years having to deal with entrenched leftist government programs, that have led me to my current conservative philosophical position.

Hatred:

Democrat rally in Michigan

• Progressives hate Nazis
  
• Nazis hate the Jews
• Communists hate Nazis and vice versa in the same way the Crips hate the Bloods.
  
• In WWII Muslim leaders of some Muslim nations like Iraq and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem actually supported Hitler in their shared hatred of Jews.
• Many Muslim political factions, including Palestinian terrorist groups, hate the Jews and vow to "drive the Israelis into the sea.
• Most Progressives unequivocally support Palestinian groups who share hatred of the Jews with the Nazi Party. 

Socialism:

• Progressives are pro-socialist and originate from Marxist philosophy.
  
• Nazis were national socialists, not capitalists, but socialists all the same.
• Communists consider themselves the logical end state of socialism.
• Socialism in the 20th century has a dismal record of creating for people under socialist governments, what Churchill called "shared misery". The proletariat who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of socialist systems of government experienced deprivation, hunger, and oppression, surviving through black markets, theft and smuggling.
  

Socialist Mass Murder:

• Communist and Marxist socialists in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other communist states murdered hundreds of millions of "enemies of the state" and killed other millions in waging war on their neighbors in just the 20th century.

• Nazis killed more than 14 million Jews, Germans and Gypsies they considered enemies of the state and genetically defective Germans in the name of producing a pure Aryan race.
• Progressive polices promoting abortion killed tens of millions of largely minority unborn children. 

Serving the Collective:

• Communists believed that citizens should serve the state/collective not the other way round.
• Nazis believe that citizens should serve the state/collective not the other way round.
• Progressives believe citizens should serve some vague sort of collective to be determined when the movement finds its superior leaders and create the Progressive Utopia which other socialist nations failed to do correctly.

Marxist Socialism:

• Soviet Communists were Marxists Leninists.
• Chinese Communists were Marxist/Maoists.
  
• Nazis were Marxists. Hitler claimed Nazism was simply a better sort of Marxism.
  
• Progressivism is a direct descendant of 19th century Marxism and draws the roots of its political model from Karl Marx.

 

Socialism's Eugenics Roots:

• Communists practiced eugenics.
• Nazis were enthusiastic eugenicists.
• Progressivism throughout its history has believed in and practiced eugenics in the form of laws that resulted in forced sterilization of what they termed genetically inferior people (mostly the developmentally and mentally retarded), mass abortions of minorities that Progressive heroine Margaret Sanger called "human weeds," and policies of separation of people by race via Jim Crow laws, terrorism (the KKK), and segregation practices. 
• Progressive icon, George Bernard Shaw, insisted that "the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man", even suggesting, that defectives be dealt with by means of a "lethal chamber".
• Liberal titan and mastermind of the welfare state, William Beveridge argued that those with "general defects" should be denied not only the vote, but "civil freedom and fatherhood".
• Charles Darwin had a profound effect on politics and the ideas of Karl Marx. Early progressive socialists embraced the eugenics movement's definition of "unfit." The target of the left's efforts to improve humanity through science was not limited to the physically or mentally impaired. It held "that most of the behavioral traits that lead to poverty are inherited. Progressive luminaries like Shaw, HG Wells, progressive economist John Maynard Keynes, Harold Laski and JBS Haldane believed that the poor and certain races were genetically inferior to the educated middle class." It was not poverty that had to be reduced or even eliminated: it was the poor. 
• Darwin, himself, wrote, "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world."  
• John Maynard Keynes, darling economist of the progressive left, was vice president of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944. His belief in Malthusian and Eugenics pseudo-science influenced British leftists from 1907 till his death in 1946 when he endorsed eugenics as a legitimate science. 

Progressivism's Confused Roots:

• Darwin introduced the idea of evolution by survival of the fittest, which led to his belief that natural selective breeding would separate the intelligent upper class from the lower cast who would die out naturally from their own stupidity or be exterminated by the smart people.
• Friedrich Nietzsche predicted the rise of progressive neoliberalism and attacked what he contemptuously characterized as the “Christian-moral view of the world.” He famously said "God is dead," and blamed Christianity for a rise to a general European culture of “decadence” that he claimed was careening on its way to catastrophe.
• Karl Marx's philosophy that sketched the outline of the socialist worker's collective was seized upon by the upper classes who still held to the old idea of a superior noble class as a way to restore the privileged class to leadership that had been brutally undercut by the example of American constitutional democracy which had infected the Western world.
• Francis Galton's theories about how to use a mish mash of Darwin, biology and genetic theory to improve the human race thoroughly infiltrated early progressive politics, capturing Theodore Roosevelt's, Woodrow Wilson's, HG Wells', George Bernard Shaw's and the Democrat Party's attention. 
• Eugenics was a good fit for the Democrat Party with their traditional belief that certain races were genetically inferior. Eugenics explained for progressive Democrats why Republicans didn't understand about race - even the white ones.

Every one of the political versions that came from progressive origins has committed more than its share of atrocities. The Soviet Union had it's gulags and mass starvation of the Kulaks. China's Great Leap Forward killed and/or starved millions of Chinese, especially poor ones. North Korea shoots any who disagrees with the Kim family, often with anti-aircraft guns at point blank range. North Vietnam murdered 2 million of its people after they overran the abandoned South. Cambodia killed a couple of millions in the infamous killing fields. And the list goes on and on. Che Guevara, the Cuban enforcer and darling of the American left, murdered people in the most brutal ways imaginable, a fact the progressives prefer to "forget".

And the American Progressive Left, really does think it can do progressive socialism better than anyone had done it before. This ignores the fact that even if you find a perfect leader, when he dies or is assassinated, the next guy is liable to be a sadistic monster like Josef Stalin and the whole thing goes to hell. 

People don't want to believe in the idea of Original Sin - basically that left to themselves, people are no damned good. Progressives socialists philosophy is based on the idea that was later theorized by Abraham Maslow that people, if a heirarchy of needs is addressed, people will become progressively.......better. I've worked half a century with people and that dog won't hunt. Good people tend to be the ones who choose to follow the Christian morality that Nietzsche complained loudly about.

Turns out a godless Utopia just doesn't work out. Still Progressivism is rapidly approaching a tipping point, beyond which, our only hope is if Jesus gets the bus loaded and comes to get us. Dear God, make it so.

© 2023 by Tom King