posted August 13, 2007 11:19 AM            

Michael Savage has noted...and wrote a book on the topic...Liberalism is a Mental Disorder. Right on target and that mental disorder has been identified...long ago as Oppositional Personality Syndrome. I doubt Savage was talking about classical liberalism but was rather talking about leftist radicals, a far different political/social/economic subdivision.

What's hysterically comical are attempts by leftist radicals to disassociate themselves from Hitler...who was a socialist and one of their boys.

It's also hysterical that these very same leftist radicals consider themselves to be rugged individualists...when in reality, they are the supreme conformists.

August 13, 2007
The Left's Lust for Revolutionary Transformation
By James Lewis

"Everything must be different!" or "Alles muss anders sein!" was a slogan of the Nazi Party. It is also the heart's desire of every Leftist since Karl Marx. Nazism was a deeply revolutionary creed, a fact that is always denied by the Left; but it's true. Hitler and his criminal gang hated the rich, the capitalists, the Jews, the Christian Churches, and "the System". They went through their Leftist phase early in life, and then went on to discover Aryan racial purity as their beau ideal. (As a swarthy Italian, Mussolini preferred to appeal to ancient Roman imperial glory).

Nazism was hatched in the same little intellectual cafes as a myriad of Leftwing ideologies, like social-democracy, anarchism, the Socialist Workers' Party, Trotskyism, Proudhonism, the lot. In the back streets of European cities you can still find the local anarchist or Leninist storefront, with old guys wearing 1900 laborer's caps and big mustaches, and fierce revolutionary posters of Lenin tacked on the walls. You can also find them in Berkeley, California.

"Everything must be different!" is the core psychology of Leftism, and has little to do with reasoned political beliefs. Most Marxists in the English Departments of America have never read Karl Marx's giant tome, Das Kapital, which parades as a work of economics and history, but is in fact a ponderous update of the Prussian philosopher Friedrich Hegel, who is even more unreadable than Marx. Instead of going to the fount of all Marxist wisdom, our academic "Marxists" have read the 1848 Communist Manisfesto and some hero-worshipping Leftist magazines. They are what Lenin, with magnificent disdain, called "vulgar Marxists" -- that is, proletarian dupes who just don't understand the deep philosophical roots of the real thing.

There are only a few ideas in Das Kapital. One is that human history is driven by class struggle between the rich and the poor, a wild oversimplification of history's rich and colorful tapestry. The other idea, borrowed from Hegel and flipped upside-down, is that the inevitable culmination of History in a state of Paradise is a material and this-worldly society, the condition of universal Communism, instead of an other-worldly condition, as Hegel predicted. Hegel believed that the Prussian State was a model of Paradise to Come. But since Marx was a "scientific" materialist, his version of history was called "dialectical materialism."

The final idea in Das Kapital is that economic profit (called "surplus value") belongs only to the workers, and not to the providers of entrepreneurial capital, nor to entrepreneurs who start and run businesses, nor to the inventors and developers who build intellectual capital all the way from Silicon Valley to Shanghai. Naturally, the radical Left gets to control what the workers produce. That's it. There's nothing else; it's a huge and ponderous rationalization of the impulse to overthrow whatever exists.

At bottom, the key political idea of Marxism is "Alles muss anders sein!" --- Everything must be different. The workers are supposed to be the revolutionary engine of Marxism, but of course they must follow the "guidance" of the Party, which is the intellectual vanguard of the proletariat --- the Party ruling elite, who are inevitably the same gang of parasites who were hatched in the same backstreet cafes in which Lenin and Hitler learned their craft. If the workers and peasants don't follow orders they must die or be sent to Siberia, as a logical matter of policy. It's all for the good of mankind. Naturally the real beneficiaries are the Leftist apparatchiks, who happily end up stealing anything the workers produce.

The craving that "Everyhing must be different!" begins in personal psychology, and then becomes articulated in political beliefs. That's why the same people can turn into anarchists or Nazis, Communists, or today, Post-Modernists, Deconstructionists, Radical Feminists, Socialists, Hillary followers, Islamo-fascists, you name it. It is why the ACLU chooses the worst criminals to defend; they secretly adore criminals, who are the ultimate rebels against society.

In teenagers the spirit of rebellion is perfectly normal, but it has its pathological extreme in what the psychiatric manual calls "oppositional personality disorder." The most psychologically acute philosopher in Western history, Friedrich Nietzche, called this oppositional personality syndrome the "reveral of values," and attributed it to Christianity (and its roots in Judaism two millenia ago). Christianity does tell us that "the poor shall inherit the earth," but like any other two-millenium religious phenomenon, it also includes far, far more than that. The wish that Everything must be different! is not limited to any faith or race, but is part of the human condition, to one degree or another. It's a normal part of growing up for most people.

But in some people it goes to murderous extremes -- such as the young Adolf Schickelgruber in Vienna, or the exiled Vladimir Ilyich Lenin not far away in Zurich. A young Cambodian named Pol Pot learned his version of Everything must be different! in Jean-Paul Sartre's Paris, was recruited as a promising candidate by the Soviet KGB, and then went back to Cambodia to kill three million people -- to create Paradise on Earth back home. Again. It's a predictable career path on the Left. Hugo Chavez today may follow the same logic as his model Fidel Castro.

What most conservatives don't understand is that the Left has reincarnated itself since the Soviet Union died. Conservatives think that obviously false beliefs should change; but that's not the way it works. Oppositional psychology is still at the core of the Left, and the mere crashing of the Soviet Empire and Maoist China hasn't changed a thing. The human condition is not that susceptible to reason or evidence. Oppositional personality just mutates and breaks out in other ways, like some insidious virus.

Marx thought that class struggle was the engine of history, but "deconstructionism," postmodernism, and the like have now generalized the class struggle to include race, class and gender, plus post-colonial revenge against the West, anti-rationalism, anti-scientific and anti-technology hatred, multiculturalism, militant Gays, transsexual gender benders, radical feminism, Afrocentrism, anti-Americanism, "man-boy lovers," the cultural assault against the traditional family, anti-Zionism, militant atheism, and all the other rabble-rousing "isms" of the Left. The key to all these movements is just one basic craving, that Everything must be different!

Inside the Left there is always a huge civil war, because Leftists fiercely compete with each other to be "more radical than thou." It's a big ego game. The wildest radical argument tends to get the biggest applause, so that the Left as a whole always edges closer and closer to the totalitarian extreme. At the heart of every fervent liberal is Uncle Joe Stalin, because "ordinary people" will never do what they are supposed to do. They don't follow orders from the Enlightened....**and so, we have to kill them.

As a result of the competition to be more and more radical, things get so weird that the Left must always exercise censorship to shut out critical voices. Stalin decided what the science of genetics would be in the Soviet Union, leading to yet more disastrous harvest seasons in the midst of general famine. He just knew in his Great Man's mind that new varieties of potatoes, and new human beings, could be created by environmental manipulation. Unfortunately that's not true. But during Stalin's time, that idea drove both "science" and agricultural practice in the USSR. Those ideas are so weird that they can only thrive in an environment of intimidation and censorship.

That is why we have Politically Correct censorship on America's university campuses. Too many people know they just can't submit their weird beliefs to skeptical analysis. PC censorship is the logical outcome of all those people telling skeptics and unbelievers to just shut up!

So the Marxist-Leninists hated the Anarchists, who hated the Trotskyites, who hated the Socialist Workers. In those little backstreet cafes in European cities the fights were mostly verbal, but whenever the Left took real power, the first order of business was always to kill, imprison, or forcibly convert one's enemies on the Left. This was not revolutionary madness; it was a matter of deliberate policy. Lenin's Bolsheviks killed the Russian Social Democrats, just as Hitler's SS purged the SA (which included many homosexuals), in order to purify the one true faith and centralize control.***as I have said before, if hard core leftists ever manage to seize power in the United
States the first order of business will be to kill all the useful idiots.

When Hillary Clinton presented her case to the Kos Kids last week, she trotted out an argument familiar to the Left: How pragmatic do you have to be to take power? The Kossicles are purists; they want to impeach Bush and some may fantasize about putting Dick Cheney up against a brick wall with a firing squad. But after a lifetime in politics, Hillary has drifted from being a young "idealistic" radical to a more pragmatic stance. Today she is happy to take money from corporate lobbyists, as long as she decides how to spend it.

As a Wellesley student Hillary Rodham was a fervent admirer of Saul Alinsky, who taught her his Rules for Radicals. The constant agitprop of today's establishment media goes back to Saul Alinsky's little book, the little Bible of the Boomer Left.

Alinsky basically taught the modern Left how to change the whole culture. That is why the New Conservative Media are such a threat to the Boomer Left: Conservatives are people who never fell for the liberal media narrative, and who were therefore shut out of the mainstream media. The New Left of the Sixties lived with the pleasant illusion of having won the culture war, before it found out that most Americans just never went along in their own minds. Now normal folks are speaking out in their own media, and it just freaks out our socialist Ruling Class.

Oppositional personality syndrome explains a lot. When Yasser Arafat was asked who his personal hero was, he answered with a broad smile, "Mao Zedong!"***Yes, terrorists have a natural affinity for radical leftists and visa versa! That should have told us everything we needed to know. The Palestinian movement never builds anything, because its overriding impulse is to destroy, not to build. That famous Hamas-TV Mickey Mouse character didn't teach little kids to build a wonderful new Palestine, but only to kill Jews. Islamic Fascism is therefore just another revolutionary creed, with radically different beliefs from atheistic Marxism, but driven by exactly the same craving that Everything must be different!

That is why the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1938 was a natural alliance. It is why Islamic Fascists in London get along so well with the Socialist Worker's Party in the Respect coalition, fronted by "Gorgeous George" Galloway in the British Parliament.

posted August 13, 2007 12:44 PM            

Will the Democrats abandon the middle in next year's election? That's the question posed in an op-ed in Friday's Wall Street Journal. But how can the Democrats abandon what they haven't occupied since, oh, the Kennedy Administration?

The story, written by the Journal's Kimberley Strassel, was heavy on forebodings from Harold Ford, Jr., the erstwhile Memphis Congressman and current Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. The piece led with words straight from Ford's mouth: "They'll find their way back to the middle," he said, referring to his fellow Democrats. "And if they don't, they won't win."

The story implied a shaky, if not outright false, premise: that the Democrats had found their way to the middle in the 2006 midterm elections. No such thing happened. Pelosi, Reid and party strategists recruited enough "centrist" candidates in the South and Midwest to beat out-of-touch or hapless Republicans, giving the Democrats slim majorities in Congress. What has this new centrism translated into in terms of legislation this year? Well, not much, unless you consider proposals for higher taxes and more regulation on the oil and gas industry moderate. Or the backdoor attempt at socializing medicine through legislation that aims at a multibillion dollar expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Or the endless calls for withdrawal from Iraq and efforts to undercut our military there.

Judging from words and deeds, the center of gravity in the Democrat Party remains decidedly left, as party leaders and architects intend it to be. The centrist Democrats elected in 2006 were, well, useful idiots, or tools for the party's leadership to retake Congress and press ahead with their leftwing agenda.

The notion that the DLC is "battling for the souls" of the party's presidential aspirants is either ridiculously naïve or plain silly. Conversions may well happen on the Road to Damascus, but not so often on the Road to the White House. To be certain, the Democrats' nominee-say, Hillary Clinton-may well thrust a wet-finger-in-the-wind to tack in the direction of voter sentiment on key issues, but does that rate as a conversion? No, it rates as a ploy, as a hardened and ambitious politician's calculation to temporarily mute or shelve true beliefs in order to capture 270 electoral votes and the White House.

Sounds suspiciously familiar, doesn't it? A variation of the Democrats 2006 strategy?

Harold Ford is correct, though, in that the Democrats, who have been journeying left on a Yellow Submarine since the 1960s, need to find a way of navigating back into the nation's mainstream. But the Democrats are so far off course that they can't possibly find the mainstream in a mere fifteen months.

If the Democrats win the presidency and Congress next year, it won't be because of a conversion or that their ruse was especially good, or because the establishment media was any better at hoodwinking the public. It will happen because of lingering voter fatigue with Republican Rule, no real progress in Iraq and, significantly, Republicans' failure to rediscover and embrace Reagan's conservatism, and to develop from that and articulate, proposals that address the concerns and aspirations of today's voters. Simply put, Republicans failed to campaign on their conservatism with genuine conviction.

If victory comes for the Democrats, it will come as a result of circumstance and Republican default.

Whatever the DLC is fighting for-a vague "progressive center," says Al From, the group's founder-the party's core activists and fundraisers are fighting for another go at Big Government and socialism. The ideological fervor, the passion and the manpower are with the reactionary left (check MoveOn.org and the Daily Kos). They will continue to furnish a lot of the dollars and much of the ground game to get the party's nominee elected to the presidency. And woe to Clinton or Obama if either fails to feed the leftwing beasts the red meat they demand. Whatever the window-dressing, a Democrat administration will be four years of tax hikes, expanded regulation of business and industry, retreat in the War on Terror and making mush of the definition of marriage and family, to name some choice items.

How does a party, led by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Dennis Kucinich, radicalized professors and a cadre of leftwing bloggers and fundraisers, ever find the true middle in America, a middle historically informed by conservative beliefs and values? That may take a psychic to figure out. What is known is that while Americans may accept that government has a role to play in their lives, it is far more circumscribed than what is desired by Europeanized liberals, unalloyed socialists and the nihilists who are the very heart and soul of the Democratic Party.

No, come to think of it, for the Democrats to find the middle, they would have to make an historic concession. Everywhere that socialism was tried in the 20th Century, everywhere it exists now, its failure was, and is, unequivocal, and that failure stands in stark contrast to the dynamism and vibrancy of free economies and free peoples. And that the mores and values that have undergirded Western Society for centuries are good and worthy of defense and advancement.

posted August 13, 2007 02:55 PM            

Hitler wasn't anything like an American Democrat or Liberal or Leftist. Not in any sense whatsoever.

posted August 13, 2007 03:14 PM            

National Socialist German Workers Party

Hitler, cut from the same bolt of cloth as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho, the IL's, Castro, Chavaz and all the other thug communist/socialist heroes and icons of leftists everywhere.

There truly are some people upon which an education is wasted effort, an exercise in futility. They don't need no stinkin facts.

posted August 14, 2007 09:11 AM            

Mussolini was a socialist too.

What a waste of education dollars.

In the real world, the record shows your brethren and buds the socialists and communists were cheering Hitler..when he signed the non aggression pact with Stalin. What a jolly good fellow that Hitler is.

This, while Hitler was bombing the hell out of London with V-1 and V-2 missiles.

I would have put a bullet in Hitler's sorry ass but your friends and comrades where singing Hitler's praises while he was killing our British friends and historically..though this is another area in which you are challenged, at best...our kin.

Historically, there wasn't a nickles worth of difference between Hitler and Stalin..or any of the other leftist thug dictators leftist worship..including Saddam Hussein. Their methods of operation were strikingly similar. Only in the leftist fantasy land of denial is that not true.

Of course Hitler railed against the communists...they were Stalin's communists, not his and they were trying to overthrow him. What's a socialist dictator to do? This is the historical pattern of socialists and communists...they attempt to kill the competition when they come into power and Hitler wanted to be top leftist thug in Europe...later, the world.

posted August 14, 2007 11:16 AM            

quote:

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I would have put a bullet in Hitler's sorry ass but your friends and comrades where singing Hitler's praises while he was killing our British friends and historically..though this is another area in which you are challenged, at best...our kin.

---

You would have BEEN Hitler's sorry ass if you were born in his place. Nationalistic, anti-Marxist (ultimately anti-Socialist), paranoid about outside forces trying to dominate the world, ok with violence to meet your needs, etc etc. You haven't even attempted to deny these links from your personality to his.

As I said previously, you CAN'T link any of Hitler's attributes to me. So if Hitler has more in common with you, how is it in any way logical to associate him with anything Socialistic or Democratic or Leftist, or whatever term you'd like to use?

posted August 14, 2007 01:06 PM            

Your problem is that you know nothing of history which makes you prime meat for any leftist meathead spewing nonsense...like Hitler was not a socialist.

The reality of socialism are the actions of socialists and communists when they come to power. The reality is not in the fluff socialists and communists spew about equal rights, social and economic justice and common ownership of property in the states name. That's for the benefit of the useful idiots whose help they need to gain power. The reality is far different in practice.

The Eighteenth Century concept of socialism has never been applied in any nation where socialists or communists came to power.

The reality is that socialist and communist regimes are the worst murderers in the history of earth and Hitler was one of them.

You must really have your head far up your ass acousic to suggest I am just like Hitler.

I despise government in general and dictatorships in particular. It's your crowd who loves government and the opportunity to increase the power and scope of government. No doubt that stems from leftists feelings of inferiority to compete in a free market economy...where one must have some skills and ability to sell on the employment market...or the knowledge, ability, initiative and vision to start and manage their own business. About the only things socialists and communists run well are their mouths and of course..death camps.

You prattle like the juvenile most leftists are. At your age, it's time you grow up..instead of making wild, baseless, unprovable and fantasy land accusations you can't back up with any facts.

I've backed up everything I've said...and you acoustic have backed up nothing.

posted August 14, 2007 02:11 PM            

Yep acoustic, I love America...unlike leftists who despise America and everything it stands for. I am quite willing to defend myself, my family...even your family and the United States...with force if necessary.

That puts me with about 85% of Americans..each of us little Hitlers..according to you and Ward Churchill.

The vast majority of Americans are not and don't intend to be citizens of the world. We'll leave that to the 15% of the nutty accidental Americans among us...but we're not going there.

I can see why you have real problems with your Leo/Aries parents with whom I would probably be friends but whom must despise your leftist friends...and ideas. Why don't you try out your leftist drivel on them..or have you already and didn't like the reaction?

There are no links to Hitler and myself.

There are an endless number of associations between what you've said on this forum and the most radical leftists in America.

You all long and pant for a little socialist/communist gulag where someone will always be there to tell you what to do, how to do it and when to do it. They will even tell you what you can say...and more importantly, what to think.

I remember directing you to some sources where you could get an opinion since you didn't seem to have any of your own.

You came back denouncing the United States and Americans..the mark of a weak and susceptible mind. Now, if you only had a strong back, perhaps someone would put you to work at something you can actually do.

posted August 14, 2007 04:42 PM            

Where your logic fails is in separation of ideology from practice. Ideologically Socialists would be against virtually all Communist and Socialist Dictators. In practice, it doesn't work, because everyone's inherently selfish to some degree, and people are of different intellects. The smart and greedy exploit the population, but retain the guise of Socialism, because it aids in the propaganda claiming, "We all are one. I'm acting in the interests of all people."

Erroneously claiming murderous dictators and thugs as you always dramatically put it are Socialists ignores 100% what Socialism is about.

I know you don't like be likened to Hitler, but the similarities are there with you. On the flip side, I don't see any similarities between myself, or anyone to the Left of you with that man.

If you were born into a nation that had been beaten down, and whose people were apathetic and downtrodden, you too would go after whoever you perceived to be the aggressor, wouldn't you? You too would believe in your nation's inherent superiority to all other nations (as you do right now where you are). You too would fight for control of your country, and considering your penchant for advocating violence it wouldn't be surprising if you engaged in Hitler-like tactics to get where you wanted to go politically. Are you really going to sit there, and try to tell me that you wouldn't grab the power for yourself Oh Leo with the 10th house Sun? What would you do? Base your government on that of one of your perceived enemies (the U.S.)? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Now, how exactly am I or anyone to the Left of you like Hitler? Can you answer that question? Let's see. I've always been non-violent, and advocated as such. I've never sought the destruction of the opposing political party. I've never claimed to be the ultimate authority on all things politics or governmental. I've always sought inclusion of other people, whereas you prefer exclusion (because you seem to think that regardless of how many people think that you're full of sh!t, you're always right).

By the way, you are not alligned with 85% of the country. You are a radical. You like to project that on to other people, but no one here is as extreme as you. You've tried to associate multiple people here with entities that they have no involvement with, and may not even know anything about. You say you sent me somewhere to get an opinion, but when you look in the mirror you realize that it's you who's always posting Ann Coulter columns and articles from extremely right-wing biased media, isn't it?

posted August 14, 2007 04:56 PM            

When Socialists and Communists come to power they do follow the Marx blueprint which is all about murder, suppression, oppression and total control. That's exactly what Hitler did, Lenin did, Stalin did, Mao did, Pol Pot did, Ho did, Castro did, the 2 Il's did and Chavez is trying to do.

The fact they fight with each other is not relevant. They are thugs worse than the Mafia...which btw fight among themselves too.

Your position is bullshiit acoustic and your arguments are hopeless.

posted August 14, 2007 08:30 PM            

quote:

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You're trying to assert the idea there are kinder, gentler socialists and communists but the world hasn't seen any of those in action...after they've taken over a nation.

---

Why do you lie so much? I already pointed out to you the ones that existed. They may not have been pure socialists but socialists they were and it seems everytime they are in power the economy is in an upswing and nations go through better times.

posted August 15, 2007 12:13 PM            

Your latest bullshiiit is just more of the same spread you've spewed here for some time.

To suggest that all the dictators I listed were not socialists is just the end of any credibility you might have had...not with me because from the beginning, you had none. Anyone and I mean anyone who can read can put the lie to your comment.

Communism and socialism are both about seizing and holding ultimate power. The nonsense socialists and communists spout is drivel for the tourists...and to help them come to power.

In that acoustic, you would be considered a "useful idiot" who believes the drivelmeisters of socialism and communism.

Nowhere on earth has any socialist or communist government ever produced the kind of society socialists and communists assert they are all about. Nowhere on earth...past or present.

posted August 15, 2007 03:02 PM            

quote:

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In Africa, the area of the world you touted as socialist meccas DL...and just for your information...socialism and communism have killed tens of millions. There are still communists and socialists in control in some areas of Africa and they are disasters. Their people are starving, there are wars among the various dictators over territory and resources and their economies are in the toilet. Surely, you can do better than attempt to use Africa as a model for socialism.

---

Oh yeah? Then You better start naming some names. If you do come up with any, they're probably just tyrants who are out for their own personal gain. Because I see none of the sort happening in East Africa right now (save the horn of Africa or really Somalia who is actually in the state of anarchy). I think I already gave you good examples anyways. Zambia was a perfect model after independence up until the 90's when a new gov't took over. In fact, most gov'ts on that continent were perfect examples during that period. Before that, there was little corruption, ecfonomies were booming, people were educated, life was alot better for the local people than it ever was under the Europeans. but when the gov't decided to privatize even more services during the last decade.....corruption got worse, and therefore so did the inflation, and therefore so did other things. They are now beginning to get back on their feet but theyt are a perfect example to all that socialism is not always bad and Western capitalism is not always the best solution. Every place is different. My own place of origin is vastly improving too and not everything is capitalized there either. I know the improvement has more to do with the fact the war is over and we have the sea as our advantage but it also shows that socialism is not always bad either. It also shows that socialism is not the same as communism simply because of the fact that people ARE allowed to make their own living, people are free to practice religion, and so on.

Civil War is another thing that doesn't always happen on the continent. Again, you either listen too much to the media or watch too many movies and cannot even be bothered to check out whether or not your resulting view is erroneous. There are places where people have been peacefully been able to settle their differences.....Zambia, Tanzania, and Kenya being some examples. Today, alot of nations on that continent are good examples.

Lastly, the situation of people starving is something you obviously have not picked up a book on and therefore is something I know you don't give a damn about. Because if you did you would know that that usually has to do more with natural occurences. These starving periods are not as consistent as the Western media wants you to believe. There are good times and there are bad. There are years with great rainy seasons and there are years where rainfall is little..... bringing drought and famine. And ironically, usually it is the so called "tyranical gov'ts" with the help of World relief organizations or whatever that step in to help in these bad times anyways.

It doesn't make sense why you continue to make yourself the expert on a gov't based on our culture when you are definitely not an African and have tellingly never done some good research on it just from reading that very statement of yours I have just quoted. All of this brings me to the conclusion that the header of this thread should really go something like "Will Jwhop ever grow up?"

posted August 15, 2007 03:07 PM            

I don't take issue with anyone scrutinizing my words, and I'd challenge anyone to come up with a lie amongst them. Just because you want to believe me a liar doesn't make it so.

Calling a Dictator a Socialist is nonsensical. Socialists believe in an absolute entitlement to equality, which is 100% impossible if there's a Dictatorship.

I guess by your logic I could call myself a Doctor, and just because I proclaim it to be true I would be one. Just because Hitler used the term Socialist doesn't at all mean that he was one.

quote:

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Communism and socialism are both about seizing and holding ultimate power.

---

Neither in theory nor philosophy are they about seizing and holding ultimate power. That's a fallacy.

quote:

---

In that acoustic, you would be considered a "useful idiot" who believes the drivelmeisters of socialism and communism.

---

Still attempting to attribute things to people that you know are inherently untrue? Go ahead. My brain is impervious to the mind control techniques of Naiad's thread. Knowing you hasn't pushed me an iota to the Left. I'm still the Centrist I've always been.

I defend the Left only because of your absolute commitment to unfairly disparaging it. You are an unreasonable person with a penchant for emotional displays. Most people don't enjoy dealing with that combination, so they don't. I personally would be remiss not to correct your nonsense since I have the ability to deal with your juvenile authority plays. With a single water planet I can turn off my emotions in a heartbeat.

posted August 17, 2007 02:30 PM            

DL, taking you up on your offer, I choose to start with Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. A nasty little socialist who has taken Zimbabwe from a net exporter of food to starvation. Not to mention the horrendous reduction in life expectancy in the country and the oppression and murder of his socialist regime.

posted August 17, 2007 09:35 PM              

When President Bush decided to invade Iraq, his spokesmen began comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler, the most monstrous figure in modern history. Everybody was therefore shocked when a high German bureaucrat turned the tables by comparing Bush himself with Hitler. As to be expected, she (the bureaucrat) was forced to resign because of her extreme disrespect for an American president. However, the resemblance sticks--there are too many similarities to be ignored, some of which may be listed here.

1. Like Hitler, President Bush was not elected by a majority, but was forced to engage in political maneuvering in order to gain office.

2. Like Hitler, Bush began to curtail civil liberties in response to a well-publicized disaster, in Hitler’s case the Reichstag fire, in Bush’s case the 9-11 catastrophe.

3. Like Hitler, Bush went on to pursue a reckless foreign policy without the mandate of the electorate and despite the opposition of most foreign nations.

4. Like Hitler, Bush has increased his popularity with conservative voters by mounting an aggressive public relations campaign against foreign enemies. Just as Hitler cited international communism to justify Germany’s military buildup, Bush has used Al Qaeda and the so-called Axis of Evil to justify our current military buildup. Paradoxically none of the nations in this axis--Iraq, Iran and North Korea--have had anything to do with each other.

5. Like Hitler, Bush has promoted militarism in the midst of economic recession (or depression as it was called during the thirties). First he used war preparations to help subsidize defense industries (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, etc.) and presumably the rest of the economy on a trickle-down basis. Now he turns to the very same corporations to rebuild Iraq, again without competitive bidding and at extravagant profit levels.

6. Like Hitler, Bush displays great populist enthusiasm in his patriotic speeches, but primarily serves wealthy investors who subsidize his election campaigns and share with him their comfortable lifestyle. As he himself jokes, he treats these individuals at the pinnacle of our economy as his true political “base.”

7. Like Hitler, Bush envisages our nation’s unique historic destiny almost as a religious cause sanctioned by God. Just as Hitler did for Germany, he takes pride in his “providential” role in spreading his version of Americanism throughout the entire world.

8. Like Hitler, Bush promotes a future world order that guarantees his own nation’s hegemonic supremacy rather than cooperative harmony under the authority of the United Nations (or League of Nations).

9. Like Hitler, Bush quickly makes and breaks diplomatic ties, and he offers generous promises that he soon abandons, as in the cases of Mexico, Russia, Afghanistan, and even New York City. The same goes for U.S. domestic programs. Once Bush was elected, many leaders of these programs learned to dread his making any kind of an appearance to praise their success, since this was almost inevitably followed by severe cuts in their budgets.

10. Like Hitler, Bush scraps international treaties, most notably the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Convention on the Prohibition of Land Mines, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Kyoto Global Warming Accord, and the International Criminal Court.

11. Like Hitler, Bush repeats lies often enough that they come to be accepted as the truth. Bush and his spokesmen argued, for example, that they had taken every measure possible to avoid war, than an invasion of Iraq would diminish (not intensify) the terrorist threat against the U.S., that Iraq was linked with Al Qaeda, and that nothing whatsoever had been achieved by U.N. inspectors to warrant the postponement of U.S. invasion plans. All of this was false. They also insisted that Iraq hid numerous weapons it did not possess since the mid-1990s, and they refused to acknowledge the absence of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq since the early nineties. As perhaps to be expected, they indignantly accused others of deception and evasiveness.

12. Like Hitler, Bush incessantly shifted his arguments to justify invading Iraq--from Iraq’s WMD threat to the elimination of Saddam Hussein, to his supposed Al Qaeda connection, to the creation of Iraqi democracy in the Middle East as a model for neighboring states, and back again to the WMD threat. As soon as one excuse for the war was challenged, Bush advanced to another, but only to shift back again at another time.

13. Like Hitler, Bush and his cohorts emphasize the ruthlessness of their enemies in order to justify their own. Just as Hitler cited the threat of communist violence to justify even greater violence on the part of Germany, the bush team justified the invasion of Iraq by emphasizing Hussein’s crimes against humanity over the past twenty-five years. However, these crimes were for the most part committed when Iraq was a client-ally of the U.S. Our government supplied Hussein with illegal weapons (poison gas included), and there were sixty U.S. advisors in Iraq when these weapons were put to use (see NY Times, Aug. 18, 1992). U.S. aid to Iraq was actually doubled afterwards despite disclaimers from Washington that our nation opposed their use. President Reagan’s special envoy Donald Rumsfeld personally informed Hussein of this one hundred percent increment during one of his two trips to Iraq at the time. He also told Hussein not to take U.S. disclaimers seriously.

14. Like Hitler, Bush takes pride in his status as a “War President,” and his global ambition makes him perhaps the most dangerous president in our nation’s history, a “rogue” chief executive capable of waging any number of illegal preemptive wars. He fully acknowledges his willingness to engage in wars of “choice” as well as wars of necessity. Sooner or later this choice will oblige universal conscription as well as a full-scale war economy.

15. Like Hitler, Bush continues to pursue war without cutting back on the peacetime economy. Additional to unprecedented low interest rates bestowed by the Federal Reserve, he has actually cut federal taxes twice by substantial amounts, especially for the top one percent of U.S. taxpayers, while conducting an expensive invasion and an even more expensive occupation of a hostile nation. As a result, President Clinton’s $350 billion budget surplus has been reduced to a $450 billion deficit, comprising an unprecedented $800 billion decline in less than four years. At the same time the U.S. dollar has steadily dropped against currencies of both Europe and Japan.

16. Like Hitler, Bush possesses a war machine much bigger and more effective than the military capabilities of other nations. With the extra financing obliged by the defeat and occupation of Iraq, Bush now relies on a “defense” budget well in excess of the combined military expenditures of the rest of the world. Moreover, the $416 billion defense package passed last week by Congress will probably need to be supplemented before the end of the year.

17. Like Hitler, bush depends on an axis of collaborative allies, which he describes as a “coalition of the willing,” in order to give the impression of a broad popular alliance. These allies include the U.K. as compared to Mussolini’s Italy, and Spain and Bulgaria, as compared to, well, Spain and Bulgaria, both of which were aligned with Germany during the thirties and World War II. As a result of their cooperation, Prime Minister Blair’s diplomatic reputation has been ruined in England, and a surprising election defeat has produced an unfriendly government in Spain. The Philippines have withdrawn their troops from Iraq to save the life of a hostage, and other defections can be expected in the near future.

18. Like Hitler, Bush is willing to go to war over the objections of the U.N. (League of Nations). His Iraq invasion was illegal and therefore a war crime as explained by Articles 41 and 42 of the U.N. Charter, which require two votes, not one, by the Security Council before any state takes such an action. First a vote is needed to explore all possibilities short of warfare (in Iraq’s case through the use of U.N. inspectors), and once this has been shown to be fruitless, a second vote is needed to permit military action. U.S. and U.K. delegates at the Security Council prevented this second vote once it was plain they lacked a majority. This was because other nations on the Security Council were satisfied with the findings of U.N. inspectors that no weapons of mass destruction had yet been found. Minus this second vote, the invasion was illegal. Bush also showed in the process that he has no qualms about bribing, bullying, and insulting U.N. members, even tapping their telephone lines. This was done with undecided members of the Security Council as well as the U.N. Secretary General when the U.S.-U.K. resolution was debated preceding the invasion.

19. Like Hitler, Bush launches unilateral invasions on a supposedly preemptive basis. Just as Hitler convinced the German public to think of Poland as a threat to Germany in 1939 (for example in his Sept. 19 speech), Bush wants Americans to think of Iraq as having been a “potential” threat to our national security--indeed as one of the instigators of the 9-11 attack despite a complete lack of evidence to support this claim.

20. Like Hitler, Bush depends on a military strategy that features a “shock and awe” blitzkrieg beginning with devastating air strikes, then an invasion led by heavy armored columns.

21. Like Hitler, Bush is willing to inflict high levels of bloodshed against enemy nations. Between 20,000 and (more probably) 37,000 are now estimated to have been killed, as much as a ro-1 kill ratio compared to the more than 900 Americans killed. In other words, for every U.S. fatality, probably as many as forty Iraqi have died.

22. Like Hitler, Bush is perfectly willing to sacrifice life as part of his official duty. This would be indicated by the unprecedented number of prisoners executed during his service as governor of Texas. Under no other governor in the history of the United States were so many killed.

23. Like Hitler, Bush began warfare on a single front (Al Qaeda quartered in Afghanistan), but then expanded it to a second front with Iraq, only to be confronted with North Korea and Iran as potential third and fourth fronts. Much the same thing happened to Hitler when he advanced German military operations from Spain to Poland and France, then was distracted by Yugoslavia before invading the USSR in 1941. Today, bush seems prevented by the excessive costs of the Iraqi debacle from going to war elsewhere if reelected, but not through any lack of desire.

24. Like Hitler, Bush has no qualms about imposing “regime change” by installing Quisling-style client governments backed by a U.S. military occupation with both political and economic control entirely in the hands of Americans. It is no surprise that Iyad Alawi, Iraq’s current temporary prime minister, was once affiliated with the CIA and has been reliably reported by the Australian press to have executed six hooded prisoners with a handgun to their heads just a day or two before his appointment a couple weeks ago.

25. Like Hitler, Bush curtails civil liberties in captive nations and depends on detention centers (i.e., concentration camps) such as a Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and any number of secret interrogation centers across the world. Prisoners at the camps go unidentified and have no legal rights as ordinarily guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions. They have also been detained indefinitely (for 2 ½ years already at Guantanamo Bay), though there is mounting evidence that many are innocent of what they have been charged--some, for example, having been randomly seized by Northern Alliance troops in Afghanistan for an automatic bounty from U.S. commanders. Moreover, many Iraqi prisoners have been tortured, in many instances just short of death. Recent U.S. documents disclose that as many twenty have died while being tortured, and twenty others have died under unusual circumstances yet to be determined.

26. Like Hitler, Bush uses the threat of enemies abroad to stir the fearful allegiance of the U.S. public. For example, he features public announcements of possible terrorist attacks in order to override embarrassing news coverage or to crowd from headlines positive coverage of Democratic Party activities. He also uses the threat of terrorism to justify extraordinary domestic powers granted by the Patriot Act. Even the books we check out of public libraries can be kept on record by federal agents.

27. Like Hitler, Bush depends on a propaganda machine to guarantee sympathetic news management. In Hitler’s case news coverage was totally dominated by Goebbels; in Bush’s case reporters have been almost totally “imbedded” by both military spokesmen and wealthy media owners sympathetic with Bush. The most obvious case is the Fox news channel, owned and controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Not surprisingly, recent polls indicate that the majority of Fox viewers still think Hussein played a role in the 9-11 attack.

28. Like Hitler, Bush increasingly reduces the circle of aides he feels he can trust as his policies keep boomeranging at his own expense. Just as Hitler ended up isolated in his headquarters, with few individuals granted access, Bush is now said to be limiting access primarily to Attorney General Ashcroft (who also talks with God on a regular basis) as well as Karl Rove, the Vice President, Karen Hughes, and a few others. Both Secretary of State Powell and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld are now said to be out of the loop.

29. Like Hitler, Bush has become obsessed with his vision of conflict between good (U.S. patriotism) and evil (anti-Americanism. Many in contact with the White House are said to be worried that he is beginning to lose touch with reality--perhaps resulting from the use of medication that seriously distorts his judgment. Possibly symptomatic of this concern is the increasing number of disaffected government officials who leak embarrassing documents.

30. Like Hitler, bush takes pleasure in the mythology of frontier justice. As a youth Hitler read and memorized the western novels of Karl May, and Bush retains into his maturity his fascination with simplistic cowboy values. He also exaggerates a cowboy twang despite his C-average elitist education at Andover, Yale, and Harvard.

31. Like Hitler, Bush misconstrues Darwinism, in Hitler’s case by treating the Aryan race as being superior on an evolutionary basis, in Bush’s case by rejecting science for fundamentalist creationism.

Of course countless differences may be listed between Hitler and President Bush, most of which are to the credit of Bush. Nevertheless, the resemblances listed here are striking, especially since Bush’s first term in office must be compared with Hitler’s performance as German Chancellor through the year 1937, preceding the chain of events immediately preceding World War II. In any case, George W. Bush seems the worst and most dangerous U.S. president in recent memory (for me since Roosevelt)--if not in the entire history of the United States.

posted August 17, 2007 10:29 PM            

In very broad strokes, socialism is an economic system in which "the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy." In modern societies, socialism often attempts to eradicate class divisions. While the word "socialism" is sometimes used interchangeably with "communism," the two aren't the same -- communism is a more extreme form of socialism.

Communism advocates the "collective ownership of property and the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members." While communism is first and foremost an economic system, it's also a political ideology that rejects religion. And just as communism is a form of socialism, Marxism, Maoism, and Leninism are branches of communism.

Like socialism and communism, fascism uses a central authority to maintain control, but "terror and censorship" are common. It results from economic failure in democratic political systems. Interestingly, while socialism and communism are both on the left end of the political spectrum, fascism contains elements of both "left and right ideology" and rises from economic collapse. The most famous fascist was Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. That ought to tell you it's not a good way to run a country.

posted August 17, 2007 10:32 PM            

George B. N. Ayittey

The following is abridged from a speech delivered at “Evenings at FEE” in April 2005.

Free at last! This euphoric cry rang across Africa in the 1960s as one country after another gained independence from Western colonial rule. New national flags were unfurled to the strains of new national anthems. Leaders who fought gallantly and won independence were hailed as heroes. The dream of self-rule, political freedom and economic progress was finally to become a reality. Africa was now free to develop in its own image: but into what? The challenge was daunting.

This dream never came true. The astounding natural wealth of the continent (gold, diamonds, palladium, titanium-name the mineral and you will find it in Africa!) was never used to lift the people out of poverty. By any standard, the vast majority of African people are worse off today than they were 40 years ago. The only thing that has changed is the skin color of the oppressor: from white to black.

Africans feel betrayed, yet it's not something we can talk about here in America because it is not politically correct.

What went wrong? First, democracy and pluralism were denounced as both "Western invention" and "imperialist dogma." In all but four countries, a one-party state rule was imposed, concentrating power in the hands of one individual. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that any political system with such concentration of power will degenerate into tyranny. The Soviet Union gave us a perfect example of it.

Second, new African leaders rejected capitalism. They harbored a deep distrust and distaste for capitalism, falsely perceiving it as an extension of colonialism and imperialism. To them, freedom from colonial rule meant freedom from capitalism, free enterprise and foreign investment, which was viewed as "foreign exploitation." To them, Soviet-style socialism with the state determining the economic destiny of the people seemed the most adequate and fair way to protect their hard-won sovereignty and to move Africa toward economic prosperity.

Socialism in Africa

Such a socialist transformation required the institution of excessive legislative regulations and controls. All unoccupied land was appropriated by the government. Many foreign companies were nationalized, and numerous state-owned enterprises were established. Roadblocks and passbook systems were employed to control the movement of Africans. Marketing boards and export regulations were tightened to fleece the cash crop producers. Price controls were imposed on farmers and merchants to make food cheap for the urban elites. Bewildering arrays of restrictions were imposed on imports, capital transfers, industry, wages, trade unions, prices, rents, interest rates and the like. Economic progress suffered, as it always does whenever the state intervenes. Poor planning and coordination resulted in dislocation of industries, low morale, lack of discipline and accountability, nepotism, disincentive to produce and chronic shortages of goods and services. Black markets naturally emerged; bribery and corruption thrived, lining the pockets of the elites and making them even more powerful.

West and East, governments poured money into new African economies with the same predictable results.

· In Kenya, the Norwegian government provided $25 million to set up a fish-freezing project for certain tribesmen. After the factory was built, a small problem was discovered: the tribesmen don’t fish—they raise goats!

· In Senegal, the United States provided aid to build 50 crop-storage depots. They were built in locations the peasants never visited.

· In Sudan, the Soviets built a milk bottling plant at Babanusa. But the Babanusa tribesmen drink their milk straight from the cow, and there aren’t any facilities to ship milk out of the area. The 20-year-old plant hasn’t produced a single bottle of milk.

· In Uganda, Yugoslavia built a state-owned factory that canned mangoes. The factory had a canning capacity that exceeded the entire world's trade in canned mangoes.

· In Somalia, the Italians built a banana-boxing plant. When the state-owned plant was completed it was discovered that the quantity of bananas needed for the facility to break even exceeded the country’s entire production of bananas.

Who Is Rich in Africa?

If you want to understand why Africa is so poor and America is so rich, ask yourself the following question: How do the rich in both places make and secure their wealth?

Here in America, the richest person is Bill Gates. How did he make his money? He earned it in the private sector by producing computer software. Who are the richest in Africa? Heads of states. What did they create or produce to make their fortunes? The answer is simple: nothing! They became rich by using power and privilege to rob their suffering people. African leaders betrayed us. Back in the 1960s they promised: “Only socialism will save Africa!” But in reality their “Swiss-bank socialism” destroyed Africa, allowing them to rape and plunder state treasuries for private accounts in Swiss and other foreign banks. According to a Zimbabwean official, “In Zimbabwe, socialism means what’s mine is mine, but what’s yours we share!”

In Nigeria between 1970 and 2000 more than $35 billion in oil revenue disappeared into the Nigerian government’s coffers. Nobody knows what happened to the money.

Africa’s most notorious kleptocrat, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, accumulated a fortune of $10 billion. He could have written a personal check to pay off his country’s entire foreign debt of $7 billion! Olusegun Obasanjo, the president of Nigeria, claims that African leaders have stolen $142 billion from their people since independence. That makes me very angry. If these leaders, who are always begging the West to help Africa— and begging belittles the dignity of the fine African people-would only return half the loot they have hoarded, it would put Africa in much better financial shape.

The Spirit of Africa

Socialism is always wrong. It is as alien to Africa as it is to the rest of the world. Traditional Africa was never socialist. It had private ownership of the means of production (land, labor and capital), free enterprise, free village markets, free trade and an entrepreneurial spirit. There is a great deal of confusion about communal land ownership in traditional Africa. But historically land in Africa was never communally owned, as the myth goes. It was privately owned by the family or clan, not a tribal government. In the West, the basic economic and social unit is the individual. In Africa, the basic economic and social unit is the extended family. For example, if you ask: “Whom does this land belong to?” the African will tell you: “It belongs to all of us,” meaning his extended family, which is a private entity. Africans also believe in a sacred bond between the living and the dead. Thus the land where their ancestors are buried cannot be sold. Traditionally Africans have gone about their activities of their own free will. The farmers produce what they need and sell the surpluses on open village markets. Such markets existed in Africa for centuries, long before the Europeans arrived. But to justify their choice of socialism, new African leaders insisted that these markets were colonial institutions. After independence, the leaders could have restored such indigenous markets and built upon them. They chose to destroy them—in some cases actually blowing them up. Free enterprise and free trade flourished in pre-colonial Africa, with commercial routes crisscrossing the whole continent. Africans didn’t need their chief’s permission to engage in trade or business. Chiefs didn’t determine prices; the market did.

People had their own ways of raising capital. In West Africa, for example, market activity was dominated by women. They understood how to raise capital using “revolving credit.” Ten women would get together and contribute $10 each a month into a pot. At the end of the month there was $100 in the pot. The women would then take turns using this money as capital—for instance, to buy a sewing machine.

All of this proves that nobody can defend socialism on the basis of African tradition. African governments alone imposed the alien ideology of socialism on their countries, consolidating an enormous economic and political power in the hands of the state. Over the years this evolved into what I call a vampire state, or a gangster state. Throughout the continent there are de facto apartheid regimes, where those in power use government to advance their interests and exclude everybody else, thus leading Africa into disaster. In the 1980s, with the economy in deep crisis, African leaders acknowledged some of their grave mistakes. Many signed agreements with the World Bank, promising to reform their abominable political and economic systems. Between 1981 and 1991 the World Bank spent $25 billion in an attempt to reform 29 African countries. The grim reality was a failure rate of more than 80 percent. Only six out of the 29 succeeded.

This is yet more proof that the African leaders are simply not interested in reform. They are not about to relinquish the economic control that has allowed them to build their personal empires and punish their rivals. All they are willing to do under international pressure is what I call the “Babangida Boogie”: one step forward, three steps back, a flip and a side kick to land in a fat Swiss bank account.

The same is true on the political front. In 1990 only four African countries were democratic. Even though the leaders came under demands to reform their political systems, today only 16 African countries are democratic. Political democratization has stalled. It is important to distinguish between “modern” and “traditional” Africa. It is the traditional systems that must be restored for Africa to rejuvenate. Africa’s crisis is of modern socialist making and stems from the misrule, mismanagement and corruption of the elite. The problem that we face today is the legacy of this betrayal, because the people you rob eventually rebel against you.

African leadership turned its back on its people, rejecting vital political and market reforms. If this continues, more and more countries will ignite in wars and devastation.

This is the reality we face in Africa today.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A native of Ghana, Dr. George Ayittey has firsthand knowledge of how the overreaching hand of government brought tyranny and misery to virtually all of Africa. War, disease, state terrorism and wanton carnage have devastated a continent that once had hope.

Dr. Ayittey is a passionate advocate of free men, free markets, and the rule of law as solutions to the problems that plague Africa today. He is the author of five books and dozens of articles.

He lectures extensively on the problems confounding Africa’s development and is a frequent guest on radio and television programs, including Nightline, The NewsHour, BBC World News, and CNN.

Dr. George Ayittey is Distinguished Economist at American University in Washington D.C., and the President of the Free Africa Foundation.

posted August 17, 2007 10:38 PM            

ADAMS, PHELPS

Socialism...confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

BASTIAT, FREDERIC, The Law

In practice, of course, full-blown socialism - including the nationalization of property - did prove the antithesis of liberty. The elimination of private property meant the elimination of the principal source of resistance to state power. Socialism promised freedom, prosperity, and community but delivered totalitarianism, poverty, and atomism.

BOAZ, DAVID, The Libertarian Reader

Socialize the individual's surplus and you socialize his spirit and creativeness; you cannot paint the Mona Lisa by assigning one dab of paint to a thousand painters.

BUCKLEY, JR., WILLIAM F., Up From Liberalism

[T]he Soviet has allowed its people to starve by the thousands...made itself a monopoly of monopolies...restored serfdom...indentured servitude...kept wages low and labor intense...It has pitilessly industrialized its women under the pretense of emancipating them...crowded the population into dingy quarters...stifled the growth of democracy...waged a class war against peasants, tradesmen, and mental workers...there is no opportunity for the expression of the public will...it has oppressed with unsurpassed barbarity men and women guilty of no other crime than the prosperity attendant upon enterprise industry, intelligence and thrift...it has refused the rights of habeas corpus, of trial by jury, of equality before the law; it has sent its secret police into a million homes...it has terrorized the public with marching armies, secret police, merciless penalties, and a million spies. It has deported or shot hundreds of thousands of men and women solely for political heresy and non-conformance...It has subjected to censorship every drama and every book...it has prostituted the press, the radio and the stage...It has suppressed all freedom of speech or assembly.

DURANT, WILL, The Tragedy of Russia, Simon and Schuster

At the time I wrote, socialism meant unambiguously the nationalization of the means of production and the central economic planning which this made possible and necessary...socialism has come to mean chiefly the extensive redistribution of incomes through taxation and the institutions of the welfare state.

HAYEK, F.A., The Road to Serfdom, 1976 Preface

[W]here the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation.

HAYEK, FRIEDRICH VON, The Road to Serfdom

[T]here is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves "the good of the whole."

HAYEK, F.A., The Road to Serfdom, Chapter 10

[S]ocialism can be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.

HAYEK, F.A., The Road to Serfdom, Chapter 10

Communism is merely the imposition of Socialism all at once by violence, and Bolshevism is the insistence that the Proletariat shall administer such imposition.

HOOVER, HERBERT, The Challenge to Liberty, Chapter V, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934

For Socialism to maintain its hold against those who still aspire to liberty every guaranty of freedom - free speech, free press, assembly or a free legislative body, a free judiciary - ultimately must be suppressed.

HOOVER, HERBERT, The Challenge to Liberty, Chapter V, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934

Because of ambitions to change human beings, communitarianism is a form of elitism. Its advocates have the feeling that they have been chosen to advise, to moralize, to know better than the 'normal' people what is right or wrong, what the people should do, what will be good for them. They want us not only to be free, but to be good, just, moral as well. Of course, in their definition of what is good, just and moral.

KLAUS, VACLAV, Society and the Crisis of Liberalism, Policy, Summer 1998-99

Wages are not paid for labor expended, but for the achievements of labor, which differ widely in quality and quantity.

MISES, LUDWIG VON, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Action Within the World

No socialist author ever gave a thought to the possibility that the abstract entity which he wants to vest with unlimited power—whether it is called humanity, society, nation, state, or government—could act in a way of which he himself disapproves.

MISES, LUDWIG VON, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.

MISES, LUDWIG VON, Socialism

The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decisions disappears.

PAUL II, POPE JOHN, Centesimus Annus

Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens...may continue to hold titles to property - so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.

PEIKOFF, LEONARD, The Ominous Parallels

Yet what dictator ever brought prosperity by interfering with the economy? History is littered with catastrophes that occurred because dictators couldn’t keep their hands off the economy. A century ago, exporting beef and wheat helped make Argentina one of the world’s wealthiest nations; but by the late 1940's, after dictator Juan Perón had introduced pervasive economic controls, there were chronic beef shortages...In China during the late 1950's, Mao Zedong ruthlessly enforced his orders about what people must produce, and the consequence was a famine in which as many 30 million people died. Russia used to be a major grain exporter; but the Bolshevik Revolution and decades of Five Year Plans brought shortages of grain and just about everything else ordinary people wanted...Wherever there is dictatorial power over an economy, wherever economic liberty is denied, people are sure to be suffering agonies of the damned.

POWELL, JIM, FDR’s Folly, Chapter 18 (2003)

From Plato’s Republic onward, all statist-collectivists have looked longingly up at an anthill as at a social ideal to be reached...a society where each particular kind or class is physiologically able to perform only one specific function.

RAND, AYN, To Young Scientists

The Pilgrims began the practice of a principle held up by Karl Marx two centuries later as the ideal of the Communist Party: From each according to ability, to each according to need - and by force! There was a good reason why these communalistic or communistic practices were discontinued. It was because the members of the Pilgrim colony were starving and dying.

READ, LEONARD E., The Essence of Americanism, 1961 Address

Government control and ownership of the means and/or results of production is authoritarianism, be it called state interventionism, socialism, or communism. It rests on the premise that certain persons possess the intelligence to understand and guide all human action. It is advocated by those who sense no lack of omniscience in themselves, by the naive followers of such egotists, by the seekers of power over others, by those who foresee an advantage to themselves in these political manipulations, and by those "do-gooders" who fails to distinguish between police grants-in-aid and Judeo-Christian principles of charity. All in all, they are a considerable number, but still a minority in terms of the tens of millions whose lives they would regulate.

READ, LEONARD, Anything That’s Peaceful

[S[tudents of liberty and the socialists have one position in common: the human situation is not in apple pie order; imperfection is rampant. The student of liberty, however...balks at halting the evolutionary process.

READ, LEONARD, Anything That’s Peaceful

[S]ocialism has a double-barreled definition, one of which is the state ownership and/or control of the results of production. Our incomes are the results of production. That portion of our incomes is socialized which the state turns to its use rather than our own.

READ, LEONARD, Anything That’s Peaceful

For Liberalism, the individual is the end and society the means...For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.

ROCCO, ALFREDO, The Political Doctrine of Fascism (1925)

The [[Virginia] colony was...being run on "communist" principles - each person contributed the fruit of his labor according to his ability to a common storehouse...and...each received produce according to his need. The result of this communism was what we might expect: each individual gained only a negligible amount of goods from his own exertions...and hence had little incentive to work, or to exercise initiative or ingenuity under the difficult conditions in Virginia. And this lack of incentive was doubly reinforced by the fact that the colonist was assured, regardless of how much or how well he worked, of an equal share of goods from the common store. Under such conditions, with the motor of incentive gone from each individual, even the menace of death and starvation for the group as a whole - and even a veritable reign of terror by the governors - could not provide the necessary spur for each particular man.

ROTHBARD, MURRAY, Conceived in Liberty, Vol. 1, The Virginia Company

They have the usual socialist disease; they have run out of other people's money.

THATCHER, MARGARET, Speech to a Conservative Party Conference, October 10, 1975

[C]ommunist regimes were not some unfortunate aberration, some historical deviation from a socialist ideal. They were the ultimate expression, unconstrained by democratic and electoral pressures, of what socialism is all about...In short, the state [is] everything and the individual nothing.

THATCHER, MARGARET, Speech of March 8, 1991

Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint.

TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE, Discours Prononce a l’Assemblee Aonstituante le 12 septembre 1848 Sur la Question du Droit au Travail

Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it - it requires brains to keep money as well as make it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again.

TWAIN, MARK, quoted from his notebooks in Mark Twain: A Biography, Chapter 121, Harper & Brothers, 1912

posted August 21, 2007 10:58 PM            

quote:

---

DL, taking you up on your offer, I choose to start with Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. A nasty little socialist who has taken Zimbabwe from a net exporter of food to starvation. Not to mention the horrendous reduction in life expectancy in the country and the oppression and murder of his socialist regime.

---

And for that one baddie I can name you a ton more good ones.....Kenneth Kaunda, Edoardo Mondlane, Samora Michel, Julius Nyerere,and will you look at that......Nelson Mandela, and many many more. So what was that you were saying?