Socialist Paranoia

Driving home quite late last night I was listening to an interview on the radio with a couple of chaps from  the Human League, a bit like a poor man's eighties tribute band even then. It was quite revealing of the socialist mentality.

Apparently they thought that around the late seventies and early eighties we were all walking around on the point of nervous breakdowns. They reasoned that the hated Thatcher and Reagan were in power and were building more and more weapons, as was the USSR, which would obviously lead to mutual destruction.

Well I thought Reagan and Thatcher were superb leaders and never once felt in a panic that the bomb was going to finish us all off. So they were wrong for starters in their basic premise. It seemed obvious to me that the threat of mutual annihilation would ensure peace. Furthermore that Mrs T and Ronald Reagan's belief in standing up to tyranny would keep the USSR in check.

Now then, who was right? Not only did they keep tyranny in check, but they brought to an end the tyranny of communism in Europe. But, being small minded paranoiacs I don't expect socialists to ever give Mrs T and Ronald Reagan credit for that.

And that nuclear holocaust never happened did it? Indeed, thanks to nuclear weapons, we have had relative peace in Europe and the world since 1945 and Hiroshima.  Yes, there have been small scale conventional wars including Vietnam and Korea, but nothing on the scale of World War I or World War II. Now that's not a coincidence.

Socialism, when you look closely at it, does more and more resemble a form of paranoia rather than a political philosophy.