Radical left can sneak into community organizations
Re: “Groups plainly state their goals on their websites; accusations of communism daft” (Sept. 15)
Funny the letter-writer should bring up the Marxist-Leninist candidate that ran a few years ago. That person’s spouse was the head of the disastrous “CAPE” school board a few years back that insisted on spending more money than they had and was consequently fired by the provincial government. Now, spouses don’t always necessarily agree on everything, but it’s safe to say the person is left wing enough that it doesn’t matter if they’re actually full communist or not. Either way, the CAPE leader hadn’t openly stated they were Marxist/communist when they ran.
One need not be full-blown communist to have bad ideas that sound good on paper because the person cares, but which fail spectacularly in practice. Community organizations don’t necessarily start out with people so radically far left that they’re actual communists, but such people can get in after the fact and just remember not to say the quiet part out loud, so that nobody knows they’re in there.
I’m less concerned with whether someone’s fully communist rather than two millimeters to the right of Marx, than what their ideas are and how much power they have to implement very bad ideas that would do more harm than good. Evidence of leftist ideas gone wrong is evident in cities such as San Fransisco, which has a team patrolling the streets to remove the myriad of feces deposited daily. Just don’t copy what San Fransisco did that led up to that problem, and I think we’ll be fine.
Activism tends to attract the left because the left upholds itself as ‘caring about people’. Most people join activist organizations in the hopes of making the world a better place; I get that. The problem is when ideology overrules facts and logic. Just ask Dr. Patrick Moore about why he left Greenpeace. It had started to become filled with people with a decidedly fanatical misanthropic philosophy. One of the more ill-advised things they tried to do, which was the last straw for Dr. Moore, was a campaign for a worldwide ban on chlorine. You know, the same chlorine that is in table salt, water treatment facilities, many lifesaving medications, and everywhere on Earth. Fortunately, it never got off the ground. Was it an idea that started out with good intentions? Probably. But you know what they say about good intentions and the road to hell.
April J. Gibson
Duncan