Observations From the Back Row: Fascists, Communists and Freedom's Forum

By Rich Kozlovich

Daily I get material from correspondents who like me ...they're newsies. One of these correspondents stores articles on issues and has been sending them to me. Here's her latest offering, and I think a good one considering the leftist insanity being imposed on the nation.

Let's start with this one from Jonah Goldberg. After Jonah Goldberg wrote Liberal Fascism, which was great, he didn't get much right after that, well, he finally got something right.

There's a natural human tendency to think that because you can't stand the other guy "or gal" he or she must therefore be your ideological opposite. The Brown Shirts (Nazis) and Red Shirts (Communists) weren't philosophical antipodes, they were Coke and Pepsi fighting for the same slice of the radical market by changing their recipes ever so slightly.

I've written over and over again that fascism and communism are leftist concepts, and are two sides of the same coin.  The only thing "right" about fascism is it's to the right of communism.  But I really like the Coke/Pepsi menu comparison much better as it lends a depth of thought, because it hints at the never ending changes adopted by the left.  Yesterday's leftists sacrosanct thoughts are tomorrow's sacrilege, constantly changing themselves into Angels of Light, all the while being demons of darkness.

Then there's this blather from "From the eminent liberal scholar Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr." Not Right, Not Left, But a Vital Center".    With a lot of history and entirely too much rhetoric, in too long an article, he states everything is too complex, so no simple solutions will work.   Nothing is right and nothing is wrong, so do everything you can to hold to the middle of the road.   And as he said all this to come to the conclusion, don't do anything that means anything, ending with this bit of fuzziness.

The problem of United States policy is to make sure that the Center does hold; and this can be done only by supporting it against all blandishments and all threats, from whatever direction they may come. The best must recover a sense of principle; and, on the basis of principle, they may develop a passionate intensity. We cannot afford to loose the blood-dimmed tide ever again. 

 

The "blood-dimmed tide"?   But here's what all this blather he spewed out really means! Whatever happens, we must never have a moral position we must defend against leftist aggression against the American identity, the American economy, the American culture and the Constitution.   It's the cry of the left to the right.....Please be quiet about our immoral excesses and treason, in order that we may destroy the nation without interference, or will will arrest you as domestic terrorists.  The key?  Never let them have any power or resources that allow them to implement tyranny.

 

One of the finest thinkers in the world today is Thomas Sowell who in 2012 posted this piece, Socialist or Fascist, 

saying:

Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama's point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.

 

That's the beauty of socialism....for socialists.  I means never having to say your sorry, but they're stupidity lingers on, negatively impacting humanity forever.  Thirty years after Jimmy Carter we're still suffering from his incompetence, and the long term consequences of the Obama administration are still with us and I hate to think what the long term unfixable damage Biden is doing.   

 

In this piece, The Concise Encyclopaeda of Economics, Sheldon Richman points out:

As an economic system, fascism is socialism  with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.

Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions.

 Again from Thomas Sowell, Socialism for the Uninformed noting:

Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.

While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.

With national income going down, and prices going up under triple-digit inflation in Venezuela, these complaints are by no means frivolous. But it is doubtful if the young people cheering for Bernie Sanders have even heard of such things, whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run.

Then there's this piece, which is long and tedious, but it defines the THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM.  As you review these definitions ask yourself.....where are we in relationship with this?  Here's my thought.

DANGER, DANGER WILL ROBINSON!