I am not a leftist

Nikk said:


"Things fall apart; The centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world........"
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What's the source of that quote? It sounds applicable to a lot of situations. I'm reminded of Stephen King's The Stand: "Things are getting flaky around the edges."--Randall Flagg
 
QuarkChild said:

What's the source of that quote? It sounds applicable to a lot of situations. I'm reminded of Stephen King's The Stand: "Things are getting flaky around the edges."--Randall Flagg
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"The Second Coming" by Yeats.
 
shanek said:
"The Second Coming" by Yeats.
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
 
Nikk said:
I didn't realise he had been appropiated by the right!
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Time and oral history is sandpaper. "It wears away distinctions. "You played it for her now play it for me" has become "play it again sam".

Animal Fram has come to be known as an indictment on Communism and by extension, Socialism. Conservatives and republicans (myself included) love to reference Orwell. But in truth Orwell was not trying to indict Socialism but alert the people to the dangers of puting to much trust in leaders and power.

"I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning point of the storey was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves". --George Orwell

Animal Farm and 1984 are ripe for Conservative rhetoric and I can live with that. I would however like people to know the truth about him.
 
a_unique_person said:
That is one thing that p**s me off. He has been appropriated by the right. He never went in for the Stalinist style of politics, but he certainly wasn't a right winger either.

A very interesting to read is 'A Homage to Catalonia'. (We had it on our reading list for school). A real eye-opener in terms of just how varied the world of lefty politics is and what his political views were. He ended up being chased out of Spain by the Stalinists.
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In all fariness it should be pointed out that Hitler was also a socialist. That fact had slipped from my memory until I watched the made for TV mini-series "Hitler."
 
RandFan said:
In all fariness it should be pointed out that Hitler was also a socialist. That fact had slipped from my memory until I watched the made for TV mini-series "Hitler."
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Don't be confused by the word "socialist", RandFan. The Nazi Party, or NSDAP, was "National Socialist", which is extreme right wing, not leftist. The Nazis had countless bloody battles with the German bolsheviks until Hitler gained power and wiped them out completely.
 
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