Agreed.

Meanwhile the far right tend to have better economies as they tend to have the good sense to leave that to big business and their US backers. But...

The trouble is they are usually well ahead in terms of poor innocent folk disappearing into prisons populated by the lowest dregs often released from prison to act out their sadistic fantasies by slowly torturing people to death. Initially their
victims are "intellectuals" and/or the "left" and/or a target minority; but ultimately it descends to settling scores and whoever those with the thumb screws fancy killing.

I can't get my head around the double-negative in the thread title.

Palace since 19 August 1972. Palace 1 (Tony Taylor) Liverpool 1 (Emlyn Hughes)

And in response to my own post: Stalin, Mao, Pot, Kim a long list of lefty mass murderers.

Orwell, himself a socialist, often had the best criticisms of how the middle class practiced it. Here rather famously in chapter 11 of his 'The Road to Wigan Pier'.....an except that Jordan Peterson summed up as, 'socialists, don't love the poor, they just hate the rich'. (the implication being that they were the frustrated status drive middle class striving for easy cost free brownie points)

'It may be said, however, that even if the theoretical book-trained Socialist is not a working man himself, at least he is actuated by a love of the working class. He is endeavouring to shed his bourgeois status and fight on the side of the proletariat — that, obviously, must be his motive.

But is it? Sometimes I look at a Socialist — the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation — and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed.

The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard.

Take the plays of a lifelong Socialist like Shaw. How much understanding or even awareness of working-class life do they display? Shaw himself declares that you can only bring a working man on the stage ‘as an object of compassion’; in practice he doesn’t bring him on even as that, but merely as a sort of W. W. Jacobs figure of fun — the ready-made comic East Ender, like those in Major Barbara and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. At best his attitude to the working class is the s******ing Punch attitude, in more serious moments (consider, for instance, the young man who symbolizes the dispossessed classes in Misalliance) he finds them merely contemptible and disgusting. Poverty and, what is more, the habits of mind created by poverty, are something to be abolished from above, by violence if necessary; perhaps even preferably by violence. Hence his worship of ‘great’ men and appetite for dictatorships, Fascist or Communist; for to him, apparently (vide his remarks apropos of the Italo-Abyssinian war and the Stalin-Wells conversations), Stalin and Mussolini are almost equivalent persons.

You get the same thing in a more mealy-mouthed form in Mrs Sidney Webb’s autobiography, which gives, unconsciously, a most revealing picture of the high-minded Socialist slum-visitor. The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders.

On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred — a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacua hatred — against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs.'

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)