Posted on 04/19/2017 1:08:22 PM PDT by TBP
They are both forms of statism. They are the antithesis of the thesis of limited government, freedom, natural rights, and capitalism.
We are Socialists, we are enemies of today’s
capitalistic economic system for the exploitation
of the economically weak, with it’s unfair salaries,
with it’s unseemly evaluation of a human being
according to wealth and property instead of
responsibility and performance, and we are all
determined to destroy this system under all conditions.
German Chancellor
Hitler, Stalin, Woodrow Wilson.
Hayek understood this many decades ago. This quote really made a light bulb go on for me, regarding this fact:
Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under "communism" and "fascism." As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, "the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany."
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
-- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1944
Sorry, Professor Hayek, but that is just plain wrong.
So did Hayek. See my previous.
Oh, and his “liberal of the old school” is what we would now call a conservative.
Why do you think the Nazi flag was red?
Communist->Fascist->Liberal->Democrat->Moderate->Republican->Conservative->Libertarian->Anarchist
LEFT---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------RIGHT
Putting the Cards on the Table
11/12/02
Balint Vazsonyi
A few days ago the New York Times reported in the lead position, above the fold, that Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had the votes to become the next Minority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives. Much is discussed about the Congresswoman, but without a single mention of her executive position in the Progressive Caucus, and the latter’s ties to the Socialist International. (snip)
Exactly. Hitler was attracting Communists.
Goldberg and De Sapio understand that, but then go on to ignore it to score political points. This paragraph buried towards the end is worth pondering.
The point here is not to engage in “left wing”/“right wing” name calling. Rather, it is to realize that all these political movements were tied up in a historical moment – Goldberg calls it the “fascist moment” of Western history – which originated in the French Revolution and came to fruition in the 20th century.
“Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn beat Jonah Goldberg to this by decades.”
As did Balint Vazsonyi in his book “America’s thirty years War”
From Amazon: The Hungarian-born historian and concert pianist shows how every time America moves away from its founding principles it moves in the direction where a fantasy of “social justice” is pursued through ever-greater government control.
Most of us call that moment the Progressive Era.
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