Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

Kevin D. Williamson

Dec 2010 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

In The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to Socialism, Kevin Williamson reveals the fatal flaw of socialism—that efficient, complex economies simply can’t be centrally planned. But even in America, that hasn’t stopped politicians and bureaucrats from planning, to various extents, the most vital sectors of our economy: public education, energy, and the most arrogant central–planning effort of them all, Obama’s healthcare plan.In this provocative book, Williamson unfolds the grim history of socialism, showing how the ideology has spawned crushing poverty, devastating famines, and horrific wars. Lumbering from one crisis to the next, leaving a trail of economic devastation and environmental catastrophe, socialism has wreaked more havoc, caused more deaths, and impoverished more people than any other ideology in history—especially when you include the victims of fascism, which Williamson notes is simply a variant of socialism.

Ratings and reviews

This book deserves one star only because at least it is honest that it is a "politically incorrect" book about socialism, which means that the author is presenting an unacademic book that is intentionally biased. For a serious book reader, this book is merely McCarthyist propaganda. Its cover plainly associates all of socialism and even American liberalism to communism with the hammer and sickle of the Bolsheviks and the picture of Karl Marx bearing an "Obama" pin. It associates all of socialism with totalitarian Bolshevik tyranny without acknowledging the historical fact that the totalitarian Bolsheviks in the October Revolution overthrew the democratic socialist Socialist Revolutionary Party's Provisional Government that itself overthrew the hated tyranny of the Tsars months earlier in February 1917 and had established the first ever free multiparty democratic elections in Russian history. The reader will not find any information on the causes of socialism in Industrial Revolution era Europe such as the severely impoverished slum conditions of workers and the poor, the lack of any safety measures in factories or insurance for injuries, use of child labourers under abusive foremen managers, the rigged electoral systems based on wealth and landownership that prevented workers and the poor from having any democratic rights, the worst of these were the cause of disgust even to some of the most right-wing figures of the time, that helped to legitimize socialism as an alternative to capitalism, conservatism, and liberalism. Nor will the reader find information about social democrats who fought against totalitarian Bolshevism like West German chancellor Willy Brandt. Nor will the reader find out that the book 1984, considered one of the the most famous condemnations of the totalitarian socialism of Stalin was written by a democratic socialist, George Orwell. Instead it accuses Obama of far-left socialism even though others, including socialists themselves and even including conservatives have noted the Obama 2008 campaign's and administration's connections with big business, a very capitalist trait. All that the reader will find is an angry, right-wing American McCarthyist conservative diatribe against left-leaning American liberals accused of being socialists and real American socialists, portrayed in black and white partisan polarized thinking in which anything considered left-wing or socialist is connoted with evil while conservative right-wing capitalism is associated with good. If you hate socialism, hate liberalism, and hate the U.S. Democratic Party, you will love this book as it will give you both some real facts of the tyranny of genuine totalitarian socialist Bolshevik tyrannies like the Soviet Union or North Korea and exaggerations, distortions, and hyperbole about liberals and social democrats that will combine to make them look as bad as Stalin. For the serious, educated or educatable reader of scholarly works, well if the title hasn't clued them in, this book is unacademic and not worth the time to consider seriously. At least this book will serve as a historical testament to the furiously partisan, slanderous, fear-mongering, and paranoid nature of American politics and the yellow journalism media of the early 21st century.

Claims socialism is bad, then shows he has no idea of socialism due to calling socialist countries nationalistic and stating americas economy is socialist ..

The title of the book claims it is only politically incorrect. What is not readily apparent is the degree to which it is FACTUALLY incorrect. That is to say, nearly its entirety.

About the author

Kevin Daniel Williamson (born September 18, 1972) is an American conservative commentator. He is the theater critic for The New Criterion and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism (2011, Regnery), The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome (2013, HarperCollins/Broadside Books), The Dependency Agenda (2013, Encounter Books), and The Case against Trump (2015, Encounter Books), and has contributed chapters to The New Leviathan: The State Vs. the Individual in the 21st Century (2013, Encounter Books) and Future Tense: The Lessons of Culture in an Age of Upheaval (2013, Encounter Books). Williamson previously worked at the Mumbai-based Indian Express Group, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Journal Register Newspapers, and the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, where he directed the journalism and communication programs, and as an adjunct professor at The King's College. Williamson was the editor of The Bulletin , a former daily newspaper in Philadelphia.