Phillip Adams' anticapitalist lunacy
Gerard Jackson
Philip Adams is clearly unable to contain his psychopathological hatred of America and conservatives. His latest tirade (In bed with a dangerous stranger, Murdoch's Australian 15/7) amounted to a particularly snide defence of Saddam's sadistic regime. Adams, however, is literally dumb enough to believe that making a single reference to "the horrors of Saddam Hussein's rule" counts as a withering moral assault on the regime and a cast iron defence against accusations of bigotry.
But what is driving Adams' lunacy? The answer is simple. An irrational hatred of capitalism that even extends to making demented statements about successful entrepreneurs.
One particular assault on entrepreneurship by our socialist multimillionaire and pompous ass would have been hilarious if it were not driven by a genuine pathological loathing of its subject (The Australian 29/8/98).
In Adams' warped mind, for example, the "imperial ambitions" of "giant" corporations not only dwarf those of Rome (sic) they equal those of the "Third Reich". This is the kind of left-wing demagogic drivel that would have made Marx squirm with embarrassment. "What"! He would have roared. "Capitalists are driven by imperial ambition. Rot! every idiot knows that capitalists are not only driven by profit but that they too are trapped by the system." But then Phil the 'Pompous' has never been much of a scholar, despite his intellectual pretensions.
However, his Montypythonesque accusations were just to delicious to pass up. I can see it now, John Cleese, in the full regalia of an all-conquering Roman general, addressing his board of directors, describing to them every bloody detail of his successful Sainsburys campaign: of supermarkets laid waste and the land salted; of checkout tellers raped and sold into slavery; of store assistants, drivers, storemen, shelf stockists, etc, being put to the sword by the thousand. "That'll teach 'em," screamed the imperial Cleese, "to undercut our soap prices!!!"
But on reflection, and a sad one at that, anyone who can put Bill Gates on par with der Fuehrer definitely has a loose screw. How in his most wild imaginings, unless Adams' is on something illegal, he could equate Microsoft with Nazi Germany (sic) is completely beyond my ken.
Where is Bill's bunker, his Eagle's Nest, the place in which he plans world conquest and a New World Order? A world in which everyone must use Windows and have a bad haircut. Imagine, if you can, a nerd called Bill, complete with glasses and a school kid trim, leading a panzer division of highly trained killer programmers. See what I mean about a loose screw. No doubt about it, Phil, you've lost it. If Adams' loony ranting continue Rupert will have to put the local asylum on standby.
Of course, in Phil's fevered left-wing mind, what there is of it, multinationals are assigned the same vicious role that Hitler assigned to Jews. Just as Hitler preached that Germany's problems were the fault of scheming Jews, Adams claims that our problems are the fault of scheming capitalists. That they may have been caused by the kind of economic illiteracy that he supports would never occur to him. Why should it? Because that would require a moment's thought and his attention span is not that long.
Though Phil doesn't tell us why Bill Gates and his fellow capitalists want to create unemployment and misery he does tell us how they are going to do it. The unthinking masses will be "drugged with the desires to own brand-name toys and trinkets . . . ."
You don't have to be a discerning reader to see in this statement Adams' contempt for the masses; the lower orders who lack his knowledge, taste, insights and social conscience. He and those like him can see the capitalists' fiendish plots to enslave the masses by producing vast quantities of consumer goods like cars, TVs, VCRs, cameras, houses, clothing, foods, drugs (oops) and so on.
Not so the ovine masses, whom he sneeringly calls "insatiable consumers", "seduced", according to Adams, by "crap television, vacuous movies and the illusions of freedom". But to make matters worse, not only do scheming capitalists overwhelm us with vast quantities of destructive consumer goods they are also constantly improving on them, even as new ones come on to the market. A more devilish plot to enslave minds and countries has never been devised, even by that evil genius Dr Fu Manchu. (Gee, I loved those books when I was a kid).
Nevertheless, I agree with Phil, the whole thing is just too evil, too destructive of man's spirituality and cooperative nature. Away with it all! Back to the good old days when conquerors were honest and upfront, though a little bloody. Give me Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Joe Stalin or Adolph Hitler. Okay, so they killed a few million people. But hey, better to be sliced up, beaten to death or gassed then to be drugged with capitalist affluence and "seduced" by liberty. Right, Phil?
On a more serious note, difficult as that is, what Phil's hate-filled diatribes reveal about him, as well as his gutless editor, is that he is pissed off because the socialist tyrannies he supported finally collapsed leaving, at least for now, the field to the open societies.
Gerard Jackson is also Brookes' Economics Editor
BrookesNews.Com
Friday 18 July 2003