TIM BLAIR: HE DOESN’T KNOW HIS LEFT FROM HIS RIGHT

A classic ploy of the right-wing propagandist is to try and wedge the left. Tim Blair's propaganda piece today in Sydney's 'Daily Telegraph' newspaper is a classic example of this.

In 1967 a West German policeman, who also happened to be a member of the East German Stasi spy organisation, shot and killed a left-wing demonstrator in then West Berlin. Tim Blair's twisted mind sees this as a ‘leftist committing murder against a leftist’. He actually thinks that the Stasi, the most hated security police organisation in Europe at the time, is ‘left wing’ or ‘socialist’ and that this spy who was with the West German police must therefore have really been a ‘socialist’. He thinks this because he believes that the East German Communist Party was actually ‘Communist’.

Based on Blair's misguided and somewhat ignorant logic he would be telling us next that Stalin was ‘left-wing’ simply because he called himself a ‘communist’. If one follows this logic through, Bolt will no doubt also be believing that Hitler must be ‘left-wing’ because he called his party ‘Socialist’ and a ‘German workers’ party. The connotations couldn’t be more ‘left-wing’.

The fact is the Stasi officer that murdered a left-wing demonstrator whilst posing as a West German police officer was no more ‘left-wing’ or a ‘socialist’ than Hitler or Stalin was. Stalin’s so-called ‘Communist Soviet Union’ was as much a right-wing totalitarian state as Hitler’s National ‘Socialist German Workers’ state was and East Germany after the war was no better.

Just because people attach labels to themselves doesn’t mean to say they actually are what the label says they are.

But the right-wing would never want to let the reality of history get in the way of a propaganda opportunity.

And the Rightoid Tim Blair is no exception. Blair, and, of course, Andrew Bolt at Melbourne’s ‘Herald Sun’ who couldn’t resist getting in on the same propaganda, just don’t know their left from their right.