Revisionism at its best, with a seasoning of intolerance tossed in as well...

Good lord.

When I read this, I had to double-check to make sure it wasn't the Onion.

Nope. You usual Sydney Morning Herald, not a bit of onion in sight.

First of all, the intolerance. Mr. Glover feels that anyone who isn't a true believer should be tattoed so they can be identified as sinners. Above and beyond the sheer intolerance and outright bloody-mindedness of the idea, Mr. Glover takes it one step further, actively denying the past.

Mr. Glover, the Left defended and justified the brutal repression of the Hungarians in 1956. Not perhaps your smarmy drawing-room git who thought he was a socialist (but in fact simply resented his low place in society) and was perfectly willing to change his colors whichever way the wind blew, most likely supporting Mrs. Thatcher when it became apparent that it behooved him to do so.

No, I'm talking about your true believers, the unrepentant, those who could, with a straight face, argue that the Wall in Germany was really to protect the East Germans from the fascist West Germans.

Goodness.

Key quote:

Facts that don't fit one's world view can be difficult to see. Consider the way the left spent decades ignoring the horrors of Soviet communism, horrors that were obvious to anyone who cared to look from at least the early 1930s. The facts didn't fit in with the way they wanted to see the world, so they spent decades in denial, looking the other way.

For most of the left, that blindness ended, dramatically, with the invasion of Hungary in 1956: it became impossible not to acknowledge the brutal realities of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Like I said, revisionist history at its finest. Further, and this is the core of Mr. Glover's thesis, he is projecting: the reality is that the facts on global warming don't fit the theories (and if you think the IPCC talks about facts, take a closer look: peer review doesn't mean something is true, especially the kind of kid-glove peer review that is the norm for what is dubiously called climate change science), not the other way around. Mr. Glover wants those who don't think like him - he calls them the right - to suffer the same disappointments that he and his ilk have.

It's not those who you call deniers who are in denial, Mr. Glover: it is you. You and your fellow travellers were wrong on socialism and communism - and you cannot separate the two, as they are tied together forever - and you are wrong on anthropogenic climate change.

The Left didn't have any problems acknowledging the brutal realities of the dictatorship of the proletariat: it is exactyl what they deeply wanted and desired for their own countries. Anything else would have been bourgeois sentimentalities and worthy of a lengthy stay in Siberia to understand the errors of their thinking.

Good lord. Only in today's deliberate ignorance and respression of how truly evil the Left was, is, and will always be could someone even try to make this case. The examples that disprove his thesis are legion: the unwillingness of the SPD in Germany, for instance, to even contemplate unification because it meant abandoning the dream of real existing socialism on German soil (they were dragged kicking and screaming - behind closed doors, but nonetheless - by the US, the UK and France, along with the German conservative parties into agreeing for the liberation of East Germany and unification with West Germany. These were the same folks who tut-tutted when the Czechs dared to stand up to their rightful Soviet masters and want some meaningless, bourgeios freedoms instead of the glorious life of Czech socialism in 1968, warning that to even protest the march into Czechoslovakia would be provocative.

Mr. Glover is both guilty of projection and viewing what is apparently his own history with rather rose-colored glasses, selectively seeing what he wants to, rather than what actually is.

Further:

Each generation of people has a job to do; a burden that falls to their time. Sometimes, it's a war or depression. Sometimes, it's the work of building the first railways and roads. Sometimes, it's a plague that wipes out half the population or a fire that destroys a whole city.

God help anyone who actually believes such nonsense: they are in the arms of delusion and, worst of all, true believers in something that doesn't exist. There is no such thing as History as a force of nature, something that charts the paths of men: there are just people trying to exist and live their lives as they see fit. Mr. Glover and all of his like would put that to a right proper stop and show them the errors of their ways.

Beware the utopian idealist. The greatest political slaughters always beging with them, and end only when ordinary people stop them. It's one of the great mysteries of human society that so many fail to see this.