When Ignorance Becomes Invincible

Entertaining Incompetence

The reflexive mindset of the Left is that capitalists (owners of capital--that is, property or money) are evil.  They are involved in a grand conspiracy to oppress the proletariat.  Money means power.  Power always has its way over the poor, who, by definition, are powerless.  [A suppressed premise is always at work in this mindset: namely, that the pot of capital is fixed.  If one has more capital, the amount of wealth or capital held by others diminished accordingly. The Left, therefore, reflexively also believes that an egalitarian redistribution of all capital is the only just outcome.]

In New Zealand this has led to an unusual, yet completely understandable situation.  The Left believes that the current Prime Minister, John Key is both evil and corrupt.  He has to be, by definition, because he is rich.  Consequently, the Prime Minister is responsible for making other people poor.  He is an oppressor of the poor.  Moreover, to the Leftist mind, he made his money in the worst possible way.  It was easy money.  He did not work up a sweat.  He did not labour or work hard.  He made his money out of buying and selling currencies on global money markets.  Thus, Key is not only a member of the oppressor evil class.  He is also a leech, and a  blood sucker.

For the past decade the Left has laboured to expose John Key's corruption and evil.
 They have failed--miserably so.  To the complete consternation of the Left, Key's popularity remains at exceptionally high levels with the "ordinary" New Zealand citizen--that is, with a good swathe of the proletariat, the working man and woman.  This ought not to be, given that Labour politicians self-identify as the morally pure good guys, and Key is an evil, duplicitous man.  Some have coined the phrase Key Derangement Syndrome, otherwise known as KDS, to describe how Key has driven his political opponents into a state of derangement to where they can no longer see or think straight.

Prisoner to a corrupted, long discredited ideology the Marxist Left cannot see the world truthfully or coherently.  Possibly this would have been avoided if Key had have been a Prime Minister who had "worked hard" all his life, getting his hands dirty on a farm, or on a factory floor.  The Left would likely have recognised implicitly that Key was one of their own (as indeed he actually is).

The present leader of the Opposition, Andrew Little spends most of his time these days in Parliament flailing around making personal attacks on the Prime Minister all of which have a common theme: Key is corrupt, a liar, an evil man.  Little shows signs that  this is not a ploy.  He is a true believer.  He genuinely believes that Key is an evil man.  That feeds Little's redoubtable self-righteousness.

The recent brouhaha in Parliament and amongst the Chattering Classes has been over foreign trusts.  The Left's broadside against the corruption of secret money and Key's implicit involvement with it--where money is held in blind trusts--has been full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  It has been an extended argument of guilt by association.  The other day Key named in Parliament what an investigation of the hacked files from Panamanian legal firm, Fossack Monsecka uncovered: namely, that favorite sons of the Left, namely Greenpeace, Amnesty International, the Red Cross and a local Green MP had all been exposed--in the sense that they were named--in the hacked and leaked Panamanian papers.

The self-righteous outrage from those so named can be heard from one end of the country to the other.  But why?  After all, the whole campaign of the Left against the Prime Minister has been conducted on the principle of guilt by association.  New Zealand is named in the papers.  Therefore New Zealand is guilty of immorality at best, thoroughgoing illegality and corruption at worst.  Moreover, New Zealanders are named in the papers.  They must be evil and immoral.  And at the head of it all, apparently, is the PM busy pulling the strings of his puppets like some gargantuan, stinking Shelob.

But guilt by association goes two ways.  Now some of the Left's favorite sons are placed in the invidious position of having to defend themselves of the same faux guilt their political allies were heaping upon others.  Hoist on their own petard.  Ah, well, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.  Sorry about that Greenpeace.  Harden up.  Take one for the team.

The Left can be expected to remain trapped in this maw of gross incompetence as long as it clings to the ridiculously antiquated nostrums of capital versus labour and rich versus poor.  Long may it last.