Liberalism and terrorism: Different stages of same disease ANN COULTER

anncoulter.org ^ | July 3, 2002 | Ann Coulter

[driftless]

When I was in my late teens (many,many, years ago), I too believed a lot of that leftist rot. It's the desire of many normally good and well-intentioned people to want to believe in a society where the rich do not have more (power, money, whatever) than the poor.

What changed my mind in my early twenties was reading facts about history, especially Solzhenitsyn's Gulag trilogy. That destroyed forever my belief that socialism was good and capitalism was evil. I knew that Stalin was evil, but like other fools I wanted to believe that socialism could be reformed. Von Hayek and Solzhenitsyn proved that it was a deadly evil, and the worst done by greedy capitalists does not approach the evils done in the name of socialism.

[Truthsayer20]

"The main thesis of the book is that National Socialism was indeed socialism, indeed of the left."

If you are so sure about this you should ask the present-day adherents on National Socialism whether they consider themselves part of the political left or not.

[Euro-American Scum]

Von Hayek and Solzhenitsyn proved that it was a deadly evil, and the worst done by greedy capitalists does not approach the evils done in the name of socialism.

And neither of them are read, taught or even mentioned on the American university campus of the 21st century. What does that tell you?

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

If you are so sure about this you should ask the present-day adherents on National Socialism whether they consider themselves part of the political left or not.

First, I don't make a practice of looking for a chance to interrogate such people. Second, to hear Hitler and Stalin tell it after they started fighting, there was no similarity between them--even tho if you or I had lived under one system and then under the other, we would have said there were distintions but not a dime's worth of difference between them.

Terms such as right, conservative, even liberal depend on context so much that I consider it a sterile discussion. I probably won't hold the discussion you suggest, since I would expect such a language barrier that it would be hard to make sense out of what they said.