Thursday, December 28, 2006

Nazis to the Right of Me? I Must Be a Communist

That Relapsed Catholic is hitting my buttons today. The Catholic has excerpted the following from That Fascist, Heinlein:

Indeed, capitalism is the opposite of fascism, which favors government control of the every economic decision. Calling us (liberals and conservatives) 'fascists' simply reveals the Left’s nostaglia for truly evil enemies (like Nazis) and its current reluctance to engage in a battle of ideas. So Bush is a fascist and so is Heinlein…

(...)

"I was covering a anti-globalization street demonstration in Prague in 2000 for the Wall Street Journal and noticed that the crowd was chanting loudly in Spanish. I asked a demonstrator why this pan-European crowd was reciting Spanish slogans instead of Czech. 'Don’t you know it?' he asked. 'This is one of the great anti-Fascist chants from the Spanish Civil War.'

"In other words, it was from the 1930s.

"Even the young communists think like old men, living in a glorious past that has long since passed. This is why they still want to talk about McCarthy, Nixon, Vietnam, 'the 1960s,' the minimum wage, the draft, the United Nations…

Their solution for the Iraq war and the Iran A-Bomb? Get France, Britain, Russia and China to agree. In other words, get our World War II allies to join us. Hasn’t the world changed in 60 years? The French and British have given away their empires and forfeited a role in global affairs. They have one aircraft carrier each. Russia is failing state that could not rescue the crew on one of their own submarines. China could play only a bit part in the tsunami relief effort and is actively involved with two members of the axis of evil (Iran and North Korea). Surely India, Japan and Turkey are more important to us now?

"The Left’s one relatively new concern is global warming. Yes, they have been threatening an environmental catastrophe since the late 1950s and climate change since the early 1970s, but it, nonetheless, is among their fresher concerns. Still, it is worth pointing out that worrying about the weather is principally a concern of the aged. The rest of us are too busy hurrying to work."
Since Eric of Classical Values is in Spain I thought he might appriciate this bit of nostalgia.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, Hayek pointed out in "The road to serfdom" Hitler and Mussolini, as well as their respective parties, were leftist socialists. The Communists and socialists only turned on each other after they had already eliminated liberal democrats (classic liberals, "the right", capitalists, whatever.)

I think Franco was the only character from that period labeled a "facist" that wasn't actually a leftist. This only reinforces the idea that the word facist really has no meaning: you are a facist if the left thinks you are.