[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

[Little Bill]

In one of Richard Pipes' books He quotes Benito saying , about the Italian commies, "They are my children....."

Benito used to write Lenin giving him advise after the revolution of 1918.

[ClearCase_guy]

Bump to read later.

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks, I have bookmarked this to go with other bookmarked articles showing how unchecked socialism results in fascism.

[KarlInOhio]

Bump to read later

[Eva]

I didn't read the whole article, but the currency of fascism is power. This is the commonality that runs through all fascist regimes. The currency is generated by the union workers in the form of allegence to the state and maintained through government control of private industry in a quid pro quo relationship with the ruling elite.

[Aurelius]

BUMP

[Man of the Right]

Mussolini was a socialist until 1919.

[grimalkin]

bump and bookmarked

[Hobsonphile]

Who the REAL fascists are. Ping!

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I missed this 2002 article. It should be of considerable interest to people who have been interested by:

The Road to Serfdom

(Link to the Readers' Digest Condensed Version in PDF!)

and/or:

Marx's Legacy of Hatred (communism & socialism a source of antisemitism)
Institute for Liberal Values (New Zealand) ^ | Jim Peron

[FreedomPoster]

Great article. This quote is on my FR home page; it deserves to be on this thread as well, as it well-summarizes the similarity of the Fascist and the Communist, and the affinity to the Socialist.

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