Stephane Hessel - Nincompoop

Stephane Hessel is a 93 year old nincompoop. His little book, “Indignez-vous!”, actually a screed pamphlet, has been the Best Seller in France for 2 years. One loses all respect for the French when you see how much nonsense and how many errors and falsehoods crammed into 29 pages of text the gullible French suck up as truth. Have they no common sense? Now the pernicious pamphlet is invading the U.S. in an English translation entitled “Time for Outrage,” surely destined to be popular among elite faculty and mindless students. The core of the rant is hatred of capitalism as best expressed by the United States; the other lunacies in the screed are too innumerable to comment on. Hessel feels it is better to suck up to the Evil Empire than think the people of the world would be better off with a Wal-mart in every town. Hessel opines “...—and even as we had to lend a favorable ear to communism in order to counterbalance to American capitalism–.” He calls for “peaceful outrage” by the loony lefties of the world. Has he never heard of an oxymoron? Outrage by lefties throughout history is defined by deaths and followed by oppression.

What is it about lefties, socialists, liberals and academics that they justify the death and poverty caused by socialism as better than prosperity and growth under capitalism? In addition to the “favorable ear” to communism by Hessel, we have Neil Clark writing in the UK Guardian about Vaclav Havel’s good struggle for freedom:

“No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place. Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgment of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.” “Positive achievements” of communism - is this man insane?

And the morally blind Simon Winchester says of the evil North Korean dictator:

“The State’s founder, Kim Il Sung, claimed that all he wanted for North Korea was to be socialist, and to be left alone. In that regard, the national philosophy of self-reliance known in North Korea as “Juche” is little different from India’s Gandhian version known as “swadeshi”. Just let us get on with it, they said, and without interference, please. India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out — its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.”

Is Simon Winchester justifying starvation in North Korea because the country was saved from Wal-Mart?

How quaint that Materialists can protest about too much materialism in society. Now that’s another oxymoron.