Of Youth?

There is a variously attributed to Churchill, a little homily on Socialism;
“Anyone who was not a liberal at 20 years of age had no heart, while anyone who was still a liberal at 40 had no head.”

Yet for me this was all compressed into a brevity, as a third former I embraced Utopia after reading about it in the School Library but by the end of what was a rather turbulent year involving Nasser Nationalising the Suez Canal and then later the Hungarians attempting to escape the suffocation of Soviet domination and being mercilessly crushed when the Red Army Tanks rolled into Bucharest bringing the threat of a revolution to restore Hungarian political freedoms to a shuddering halt.

From the end of WW2 during which the Hungarian Kingdom had sided with the Axis until the Red army rolled westward taking a residual Communist following from an estimated 17% of Hungary to absolute political power as Hungary was absorbed into the Warsaw Pact, involving some depredation of any and all opposition. The brief flirtation with ending Soviet dominion that began with a very few Students understanding how such revolutionary freedoms however attractive would require a concerted movement to become successful were very quickly disabused of their dreaming when the Stalinist Military backing of political power under Khrushchev, quickly restored the Communist government as the only party in town.

Of course the two turbulent attempts to alter who was to run things, Nasser in Egypt successful and Imre Nagy the leader of the hungarian Government who totally misread the limits of destalinization following an apparent thaw following the death of Stalin and dissolution of the powers held by his leading sycophants such as Lavrentiy Beria Molotov and company, a massive loser.   Reading the commentary on these events led to further research that quickly ended any dreams of the myth of Utopia, of particular interest and understanding with my reading of Animal Farm by Orwell and my rejection of any form of socialism extinguished in the reality that to each satisfaction of needs completely demolished with some are more equal than others theories proven demonstrably wrong.

I became a “Capitalist” embracing the mantra that industry, hard work and resulting wealth accumulation was to be retained by reducing the States apparent unlimited desire to purloin such accumulations by way of “the theft by taxation”. Not “evasion” but whole hearted adherence to “avoidance”.

How people such as Helen Clark can remain supporting socialism with a portfolio of Property and Dear old Spud Bolger can drift into socialism with advancing years remain a mystery as yet unresolved in my simple belief systems.