Activists From The United States

"Almost everyone in private confessed their desire for buckets of money, but they usually swore the opposite in public. They bad-mouthed the rich as low-life scumbags. I could never understand why people despised something they wanted to be."

"Hah, try conducting yourself with coltish munchkins on the playground. Children were our argotic nemesis. They had no sense of propriety. Without any approval whatsoever, they would cobble together words of unknown meaning. They would make up idioms laced with sexual contexts, bathroom humor, and secret signals. Most were unintelligible, seductively cryptic. Every time we erased one slang anathema, the children would create two more. Sometimes I think they were poking fun at us."

"I had always subscribed to the cockroach theory: if you find one, there are bound to be far more. That meant that Dylan’s mission stank with a hoard of dirty-crawling secrets."

"The notion of miracles had a nice ring. But we were all alone… The natural laws of cruel reality were going to win out. Not only would the cavalry fail to save the day, but they also probably never got their marching orders. If goodness existed somewhere on the planet, it was probably on an extended sick leave."

"I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. Ellen had more than a relevant point. Why was I so defensive about our debased government? Why jump headlong into a meat grinder to defend those who would toss us on a flaming broiler without a second thought?"

"I no longer have a desire to defend the indefensible. I no longer trust the trustless. ‘As it looks now,’ she said, ‘it seems we have become accustomed to harming our people.’"

"In the absence of truth, there is no penalty for failure. We seem destined to live in a failure-prone society."

"They should issue ration coupons for information since it was always in short supply. The enemy could be rattling the gates of California or poised to ring my doorbell, and I would never know until it was too late."

"I pulled my jacket’s front pockets inside out and dangled them, utterly empty, in front of Ellen. ‘I’ve got so much of nothing that I don’t know where to keep it all.’"

"Our long-standing standards of capacity to deceive others were being subverted. The virtue of lying had lost its connection to advancing the common good. Noble deceptions were evolving into inferior falsehoods. That our virtuous lies were being distorted to conceal all manner of misdeeds tore at my newly discovered conscience. These lies served only a selected few. That seemed so wrong."

"I would have turned my mother into the authorities had they promised enough goodies. But then again, the authorities often failed to deliver the promised goods. The liars were always lying."

"Primitive men kill with wooden clubs. We have finely tempered steel and lead shot. No difference. Killing is killing, cruelty is cruelty, aggression is aggression. Man’s weapons have improved, but not his disposition. This is the beast that we must all fight. No man must rule over another for any reason whatsoever."

"Man came from the bowels of the earth, naked and primitive. So clever he thinks he has become. But I ask, if you put a naked savage in the same room with any lord of England in his finest silk breeches, what do you suppose is the difference?... Only the silk breeches."

"Flesh has this awful habit of decaying. It seems that the more we live, the more we die. I disapprove of the situation, of course. But does anyone listen to me? Mayhap we should get the Queen to outlaw death. That would do it… She has outlawed everything else."

"’Tis like a child playing in the dirt; he cannot help but besoil his garments. As Cromwell associated with England’s powermongers and elite, his temperament became more like them—muddier and corrupt."

"But after his victory over Scotland’s militia, I asked [Cromwell] whether England now blossomed with freedom. He hesitated. We both knew that he had arrested his opponents and censored his critics. I asked the question again. Finally, he said, ‘Aye, there be freedom in England. I may do whatever I wish.’"

"Your father reminded me of Lord Oliver Cromwell some fifty years ago in London. Lord Cromwell spoke of liberty. He fought the king to free England of tyranny. But after Lord Cromwell’s Ironsides had defeated the monarch, he turned ruthless. It was as if the monarchy had never been destroyed. Indeed, nothing had changed."

"The truth will always be innately painful,… Like dry, crusty bread, it can be hard to swallow. But mankind has an affinity for evil. ’Tis a distemper that burrows deep under the skin like an abscess. We all wish to make slaves of others: one man over another, one clan over another, one kingdom over another. Never ending, never ceasing. A world of battle to conquer one’s fellow man before he conquers you."

"To harm another human releases your inner beast, allowing him to devour you in an orgy of hate. It will lead to a frenzy of butchery and bloodshed. And it will enslave your soul until a larger beast feasts on your corruptible flesh."

"Every man creates his own private hell,… Brutal men believe they may challenge the mighty, and when they fall, they become embittered or befriend a shallow grave."

"A state of thievocracy is promoted because it permits politically connected taskmasters to redirect wealth to those deemed worthier by the state. In this sense, slavery is the socialization of labor and property, imposed to make the populace subservient to an institutionalized authority that often preaches equalitarianism and altruism but practices a slavery-enriched militarism. To the far statist Left and their slavocracy comrades, individuals have no ownership rights—so humans can be beasts of burden or simply be exterminated in cleansing bouts of genocide. Many leaders of the Democratic Party are still tied to this slavocracy-socialist tradition as a means to steal wages and assets from the citizenry as well as corrode free speech, due process and the presumption of innocence."

"The old parable about trapping wild pigs in the forest is prophetic. To capture and control the wild and free, one needs only to lay out a spread of free food while secretly constructing a sturdy fence around the perimeter. Every day, as the animals munch on freebies, the fence’s length expands until it has surrounded the oblivious victims. Once the trap is sprung, it is the trapper who feasts on the foolish. This anecdote illustrates how coercive socialism works to enslave a populace through perennial promises of ‘free stuff.’"

"According to the American historian Eric Foner, ‘Essentially what Lincoln said is slavery is a form of theft, the theft of labor, one person stealing another person’s labor without that person’s permission.’ This point cannot be overstated. Broken down to its simplest core element, autocratic socialism is based on the ‘sanctity of theft,’ whereby societal elites are licensed to steal anything from anybody and then redistribute the loot to the politically deserving. Nothing is private, nothing can be owned by individuals, nobody owns themselves, and all things are controlled and owned by the politically powerful. Collectivized theft and aggression is the perfection of a slave state."

"The Democratic Party began to tone down their supremacy-of-race ideology since the Civil Rights movement gained ground in the mid-1950s. As the belief in white people’s superiority continued to grow unpopular, the Democratic Party leadership realized that they were going to lose a huge influx of newly registered black voters. Embracing the superiority of white people became a dead end in the battle for power, which they saw as political suicide. The Democratic leaders had to devise another scheme to obtain votes from both white and black citizens while still subjecting them to the plantation bullwhip of paternalism and socialism. To accomplish this, the Democrats had to replace white supremacy with ‘state supremacy,’ which recast the state as the new slave master and societal overlord, regardless of race. This should not be surprising since Democrat Party ideological foundations were originally based on the ‘man-stealing’ premise of domination and submission."

"By 1934, Hitler’s administration had ‘transferred many functions of individual state (Länder) to the Reich,’ destroying the semi-autonomous federalism of the German states and turning Nazism into the quintessential anti-state rights ideology. Not only were German state governments ‘being overthrown’ by Hitler’s Nazification’ policies, but so were local governments, in accordance with a January 30, 1934, law that ‘abolishes all states’ rights.’ With the support of armed SA Stormtroopers and SS units, local Nazis occupied town halls, ‘terrorizing mayors and councils into resigning’ and replacing them with Nazi-loyal selections."

"As Germany’s new chancellor in 1933, Hitler inherited a welfare state, which he strengthened, fundamentally transforming Germany into a utopian-style welfare-warfare state that imposed price and wage controls, rent controls, progressive income taxes, corporate taxes, redistribution of wealth, onerous regulations, and deficit spending, which led to shortages and rationing under the disincentive effects of ‘high taxes.’ Hitler and the National Socialists were able to ramp up Germany’s welfare system to the point where it became the largest, most massive, all-encompassing social service system of its time, even, according to some, rivaling the Soviet Union’s inadequate socialist safety net. And in an effort to provide more healthcare services, the Nazi regime enhanced what was essentially a universal single-payer healthcare system fully owned and operated by the Third Reich."

"Prior to World War II, most socialists and socialist parties of Europe held strong anti-Semitic opinions and railed against the capitalistic middle class and wealthy, especially money-lending Jews who engaged in usury. Their schemes called for wealth-confiscation and redistribution to create a truly equal society."

"The ideology of Nazism included many of the same tenets of the social democrat and socialist democratic gradualists, today and in the past. The Nazis took gradualist positions to bring about socialism, social welfare measures, socioeconomic equality (known as Völkisch equality), classless society, public work projects, mandatory labor union membership, and class cooperation previously found appealing to Marxist heretics and reformers."

"Summarizing his deficiencies, Karl Marx was neither progressive nor enlightened; he was a racist, anti-Semite, a German nationalist, a warmonger, autocratic, anti-freedom proponent, Machiavellian, pro-Black slavery, petty, homophobic, megalomaniac, a bully and slanderer, anti-choice, and a reactionary against liberalism and industrial capitalism. In almost every sense, Marx fit the quintessential image of Hitler like a tight glove, both appearing almost indistinguishable. Like father and son, Marx and Hitler were two social justice warriors, determined to weaponize intolerance, racism, and nationalism for what they call the greater good. In so many ways, considering their almost identical political and social makeup, metaphorically speaking, Hitler could easily be regarded as the son of Marx."

"Marx also manifested chauvinistic and racial-nationalist sentiments in his disparagement of Slavic Russians,… According to Christopher Hollis, a British university teacher and politician, Marx had no faith in the equality of nations, and was instead a ‘through and through… pan-German nationalist’ where discourse ‘about the higher and the lower races was language that came most naturally to his pen.’ Instead of standing up for internationalism, in 1848, both Marx and Engels campaigned for the unification of Germany, publishing a short Communist Party of Germany pamphlet demanding that the ‘whole of Germany shall be declared a united, indivisible republic.’"

"Despite his subsequent reputation for anti-Marxist tirades, Hitler did not fight or oppose the communists during this time, as some might presume. He was serving them, although he later shared few details about this period in his life. One thing seems certain: Hitler did not try to escape from the political thicket in Munich, nor did he join the anti-Bolshevik armed forces of General Franz Ritter von Epp."

"*Racial intolerance against Jews plays little part in the question of whether Hitler’s own beliefs were more right-wing or left-wing, since historically the socialist movement from day one has been hostile to the Jews and their capitalist-merchant culture. According to Thomas Weber, ‘The question is not whether Hitler supported the left during the revolution, which he clearly did, but what kind of left-wing ideas and groups he supported or at least accepted.’"

"At an early meeting of a political group that eventually turned into the Nazi Party, Hitler told Friedrich Krohn, an early supporter of the party, that he preferred a type of ‘socialism’ he referred to as ‘national Social Democracy’ that was not dissimilar to nations like Scandinavia, England, and prewar Bavaria."

"Hitler not only supported Germany’s communist regime during this brief time period, but also bestowed his blessings to a government that had pledged allegiance to Lenin’s Soviet Russia in Moscow. Hitler apparently displayed few qualms over the international (or supposedly Jewish) aspects of Marxism. The significance of Hitler’s elected posts cannot be overstated. By serving under both the socialist, and later communist, governments, Hitler ‘held a position that existed to serve, support and sustain the left-wing revolutionary regime.’ One wonders, given this, why Hitler would be regarded as more of a right-wing socialist or revolutionary conservative than a left-wing socialist. Social Democrats have considered themselves left-wing and favored similar socialist policies that corresponded well to Hitler’s own collectivist visions and socioeconomic ideology."

"Marxists have always displayed a doctrinaire and opinionated mindset of moral superiority. To Marxists and Leninists, the unaligned, such as Social Democrats, German Nazis, Italian Fascists, or any other deviant political organization, were branded as adversaries and were repeatedly accused of lining up with other right-wing teammates. According to this logic, if one did not get pre-approved by the monolithic praxis of the Communist Party in Russia, due to a different interpretation of socialism, one had to be subjected to charges of blasphemy, betrayal or counter-revolutionary activities. This lack of Marxist-Leninist certification has driven many faithful socialists into the ranks of heretical or adversarial socialist movements. In this sense, these heretical deviants might be better classified as ‘socialist-lite,’ ‘moderate socialists,’ or as economist Murray Rothbard dubbed fascists and Nazis, ‘right-wing socialists.’"

"Noam Chomsky treated his version of the left-right continuum in a similar light, claiming that even Lenin and his Bolshevik allies were actually right-wing extremists because they did not adhere to classical Marxism. Exposing this insight in a 1989 speech, Chomsky said, ‘Lenin was a right-wing deviation of the socialist movement and he was so regarded…by the mainstream Marxists… Bolshevism was a right-wing deviation.’ In that same speech, Chomsky claimed that Lenin was not socialist at all, and had forged an oppressive and anti-worker totalitarian state that could lead many to visualize Lenin as a right-wing fascist."

"Marxism had a lot to offer Hitler. Largely saddled with an unmovable, single-mindedness, hardcore Marxism allowed proponents to see themselves as noble crusaders saving humankind. Here too, Hitler could identify with such closed-mindedness, political messianism, and authoritarian tactics that licensed him to see himself as the savior of the world. A lover of the power of politics, Hitler’s hidebound views pushed him into the unshaded world of white and black antipodes, a battleground where you were either with him or undoubtedly against him, leaving no luxury of neutrality. Such exacting standards of political absolutism likely blinded him to other alternatives, or at least to the possibility of subjective objectivity that would allow the people to freely display their own diversity of opinions."

"Furthermore, Hitler’s outward views had to endure a left-wing socialist perspective by the mere fact of the political makeup of the soldiers in Hitler’s unit, which ranged from moderate left to radical left; there were almost no conservative or monarchist elements within Hitler’s barracks. The struggle in the barracks oscillated between the moderate left Social Democrats and the radical left of the diehard Marxist revolutionaries, not between left-wing and right-wing ideology. The figures are stunning: more than 90 percent of these soldiers had voted for moderate or radical leftists in the January 1919 Bavarian elections in Hitler’s unit."

"It appears that Hitler’s involvement with the communist-run Bavarian Soviet Republic (Bayerische Räterepublik in German) demonstrates some type of commitment to communism. After all, Hitler held an elected position during the red Räterepublik government that was under the complete control of the Communist Party of Germany. He did not flee or resign his position."

"Because of Hitler’s penchant for nationalistic Social Democracy and Marxian revolutionary violence, Nazism could be easily identified as a militant Social Democratic movement."

"Hitler had allied with the Communist Party of Germany against the Social Democrats in support of a workers’ wage dispute. In that labor dispute, Hitler’s ‘brownshirts’ and red-flag-waving communists marched side by side through the streets of Berlin and damaged any buses whose drivers had failed to participate in the worker’s strike. Alongside the communists, Nazis ripped up tram lines, stood together, ‘shouted in unison,’ and ‘rattled their collecting tins’ to get donations for their strike funds in support of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO) for the communists and National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (NSBO) for the Nazis."

"Despite its vision of a perfect future, Marxism had moved to the dark side, corrupted by authoritarian socialism and debased with dictatorial intolerance. In this sense, Marxism could be regarded as manifesting the moral fortitude of Church while imposing the absolute authority of a monarchy, all garnished under the deceptively disguised trademark of revolutionary socialism."

"A number of socialist theorists reframed the concept of nationalism and asserted that it was an inseparable component of socialism in which to forge a national collectivity. Werner Sombart…, the prominent Marxian historian and Marxist social theorist, who was later drawn to Nazism, argued for a type of social nationalism disposed to a sort of collective and homogeneous group identity, embodied within the Volksgeist (national spirit)"

"Considering their propensity for using street violence to shut down opponents, Hitler and his SA Stormtroopers might be considered as the ultimate social justice warriors of their era. From the very start, Hitler made it plain that social justice was an important attribute to a healthy state. In one of his 1920 speeches, Hitler proclaimed to thousands of Nazi party followers: ‘[W]e do not believe that there could ever exist a state with lasting inner health if it is not built on internal social justice…’"

"Hitlerian socialism… was a form of socialism that resembled a combination of utopian socialism and the socialist market economy found in communist China."

"Although Karl Marx… confided that he derived many of his philosophical ideas from the French utopian socialist movement, he also knew that he was adopting an ideological movement rife with xenophobia. Anti-Semitism was so profuse in the French socialist community that historian Zosa Szajkowski concluded in an exhaustive study that he ‘could not find a single word on behalf of Jews in the whole of French socialist literature from 1820 to 1920.’"

"After the invasion of Poland in 1939, Goebbels framed the war between capitalist England and socialist Germany with this observation: ‘England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people’s state.’"

"Hitler in 1919 took a position in the Communist run Bavarian Soviet Republic, wearing in public a red armband, according to a number of historians including Thomas Weber. And a little later after the Bavarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Hitler claimed to be a ‘social democrat.’"

"Despite the fact that three-fourths of Italy’s economic sector was owned by the government by the mid-1930s, most scholars routinely ignored Italian Fascism’s slide into pure Soviet-style socialism, a concentration of state ownership so large that it was only eclipsed by Stalin’s Soviet Union. The conventional definition of socialism is described as a social and economic system characterized by ‘public ownership’ of the ‘means of production.’ On the other hand, fascism is often explained as a social and economic system characterized by ‘public control’ over the ‘agents of production.’ But Mussolini’s regime eventually morphed into Fascist socialism as its means of production was placed under public ownership."

"Since most of Italy’s industry was state-owned, Italian Fascism could be described as a watered-down version of Marxism, a throwback to Bernstein revisionism––in essence, a sort of Marxist-lite knockoff."