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April 10, 2026
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"Nothing contributed more to the emergence of private property in the West and the rights associated with ownership than the appearance in the late Middle Ages of urban communities."
"Moscowâs insistence that âfascismâ was the polar opposite of âcommunismâ found wide acceptance in socialist and liberal circles in the West."
"Both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany did indeed allowâor, more accurately, tolerateâprivate property. However, it was âpropertyâ in a peculiar and very restricted senseânot the virtually untrammeled private ownership of Roman law and nineteenthâcentury Europe, but rather conditional possession, under which the state, the owner of last resort, reserved to itself the right to interfere with and even confiscate assets which in its judgment were unsatisfactorily used."
"A theoretical defense of private property as a feature of Natural Law, however, was not fully made until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the age of Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius. But that the idea occurred to Romans is evident from Ciceroâs argument that government could not interfere with private property because it had been created in order to protect it."
"Stoicismâs contribution to the shaping of the Western intellectual tradition is probably second only to that of Jewish monotheism. If monotheism advanced the revolutionary concept of an all-powerful and all-pervasive but non-material God ruling the universe, the theory of Natural Law posited that Godâs universe was rational and capable of being grasped by human intelligence."
"The main Roman contribution to the idea of property lay in the realm of law. Roman jurists were the first to formulate the concept of absolute private ownership, which they called dominium⌠Roman jurisprudence went to great lengths to stipulate every conceivable nuance of property rights: how acquired and how lost, how transferred, how sold. The rights implicit in dominium were so absolute that ancient Rome knew nothing of eminent domain."
"The economic policies of Mussoliniâs Italy and Hitlerâs Germany resembled the âstate socialismâ which Lenin wanted to institute in Soviet Union upon coming to power, under which private enterprise would work for the governmentâan idea Lenin was force to abandon under the pressure of the âLeft Communistsâ."
"[For the Romans] an essential element of the Law of Nature is the equality of man, specifically, equality before the law, and the principle of human rights, including the rights to property, which antedated the state, and thus are independent of it. Fifteen hundred years later these ideas would furnish the philosophical cornerstone of Western democracy."
"By 1921 it had become clear to all but the more incorrigible optimists that there would be no repetition of October 1917 anywhere else and that for an indeterminate period the revolution would remain confined to Russia and her possessions. The concept of âsocialism in one countryâ was not launched by Stalin in his conflict with Trotsky, but earlier by Lenin himself."
"Because he did not care about his country, Lenin was prepared to promise everybody whatever they wanted without giving much thought to the future. The peasants wanted private land for their communes? Let them take it: eventually all the land will be confiscated and collectivized anyway. Until then, âlooting the lootâ will win over, or at least neutralize, the peasantry. The workers demand to run the factories? Even though âworkersâ control is a detestable syndico-anarchist slogan, there is no harm in granting their desiresâfor the time being. Once industries have been nationalized and subjected to general economic plan of production, âworkersâ controlâ will vanish of itself."
"Last but not least, the factor which prevented Trotsky from succeeding Lenin was his Jewishness. Trotsky hated to be reminded that he was a Jew. Whenever anybody come to him asking him to help other Jews, he would explode in anger and insist that he was not a Jew but an âinternationalist.â On one occasion he said that the fate of the Jews concerned him as little as the fate of the Bulgarians."
"Aristotle based his opposition to common ownership not only on logical but also, and principally, on utilitarian grounds. It is impractical because no one takes proper care of objects that are not his: âHow immeasurable greater is the pleasure, when a man feels a thing to be his own, for surely the love of self is a feeling implanted by natureâŚ"
"Another advantage of Leninâs derived from the fact that he did not care about Russia. He cared about Germany and England in the sense that, for him, as a revolutionary, they were the key countries. Russian he viewed as nothing more than a stepping-stone to global upheaval;âŚ"
"Aristotle argues, possessions enable men to rise to a higher ethical level by giving them the opportunity to be generous: âliberality consists in the use which is made of propertyââan argument which would greatly appeal to Christian theologians of the Middle Ages. Aristotleâs preferred regime was one founded on a middle class, with an equitable distribution of assets."
"From 1920 onward, [Mussolini] depicted Italy as a âproletarianâ nation exploited by hostile âplutocraticâ countries determined to deny her her rightful place under the sun. The true class struggle, according to Fascist doctrine, was the struggle between nations. Fascism strove to surmount narrow class allegiances: all classes had to subordinate their private interests to those of the nation and collaborate against the external enemy."
"The purpose of totalitarian parties, for which Bolshevism provided the model, was not to become the government, but to manipulate the government from behind the scenes."
"Lenin wanted power. This may sound self-evident; after all, every politician is assumed to lust for power. But deep down, Leninâs rivals did not want it."
"The Empire was traditionally run by a bureaucracy and a gentry, after 1880 reinforced by a political-police organization. This political policing was a Russian invention; Russia was the first country to have two police systems, one to protect the state from its citizens, and the other to protect the citizens from each other. Subsequently, this dual structure became a fundamental feature of totalitarian states."
"Studying Russian history from the West European perspective, one also becomes conscious of the effect that the absence of feudalism had on Russia. Feudalism had created in the West networks of economic and political institutions that served the central state, once it replaced the feudal system, as a source of social support and relative stability. Russia knew no feudalism in the traditional sense of the word, since, after the emergence of the Muscovite monarchy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, all landowners were tenants-in-chief of the Crown, and subinfeudation was unknown. As a result, all power was concentrated in the Crown."
"According to Marx, the evolution of capitalism would inevitably lead to the pauperization of the proletariat and then, just as inevitably, to its radicalization. It is interesting that Bento Mussolini arrived at an identical judgment ten years later. Before the outbreak of the first World War, Mussolini had been the closest analogue to Lenin in the European socialist movement, being equally revolutionary and anti-reformist. He was the Lenin of the Italian Socialist Party with the difference that, whereas Mussolini managed to rally behind him a revolutionary majority and expel the reformers, in Russia, Lenin found himself leading a minority and forced to break away from the Social-Democratic Establishment."
"Marxism and Bolshevism, its offspring, were products of an era in European intellectual life that was obsessed with violence. No-one embraced this philosophy more enthusiastically than the Bolsheviks: âmercilessâ violence, violence that strove for the destruction of every actual and potential opponent, was⌠the only way of dealing with problems."
"The collapse of the Soviet Union, a state which appeared as solidly entrenched to us as the tsarist Empire did in its day, was not triggered by social unrest: there were no strike waves, no massive demonstrations, no widespread violence. The USSR disintegrated because of political decisions made at the top."
"If we turn to the differences separating Communist, Fascist, and National Socialist regimes, we find that they can be accounted for by contrasting social, economic, and cultural condition in which the three had to operate. In other words, they resulted from tactical adaptation of the same philosophy of government to local circumstances, not from different philosophies."
"We cannot determine whether or not he had met Lenin during their common exile in Switzerland; Mussolini once cryptically remarked: âLenin knew me better than I knew him.â"
"The party which Lenin forged and led was really not a party, in the customary sense of the word. It was more of an âorder,â in the sense in which Hitler called his National-Socialist Party âein Orden,â bound by the membersâ unshakable loyalty to their leader and one another, but subject to no other principle and responsible to no other constituency. Genuine political parties strive to enlarge their membership, whereas these pseudo-partiesâthe Bolshevik one first, and the Fascist and the Nazi ones laterâwere exclusive in that they treated membership as a privilege, restricting it to persons who met certain ideological as well as class or racial criteria. Elements regarded as unworthy were purged."
"Hitler did not have Mussolini's revolutionary socialist background... Nevertheless, he shared the socialist hatred and contempt for the 'bourgeoisie' and 'capitalism' and exploited for his purposes the powerful socialist traditions of Germany. The adjectives 'socialist' and 'worker' in the official name of Hitler's party ('The Nationalist-Socialist German Workers' Party') had not merely propagandistic value... On one occasion, in the midst of World War II, Hitler even declared that 'basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.â"
"Given the opportunity, Mussolini would have been glad as late as 1920-21 to take under his wing the Italian Communists, for whom he felt great affinities: greater, certainly, than for democratic socialists, liberals and conservatives. Genetically, Fascism issued from the 'Bolshevik' wing of Italian socialism, not from any conservative ideology or movement."
"Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism."
"One channel for transmitting Communist models to the Nazi movement were right-wing intellectuals with a left-wing bent close to Hitler, known as the âNational Bolsheviks.â Their chief theoreticians, Joseph Goebbels and Otto Strasser, greatly impressed by Bolshevik successes in Russia, wanted Germany to help Soviet Russia build up her economy in return for her political support against France and England."
"Even as the Fascist leader, Mussolini never concealed his sympathy and admiration for Communism: he thought highly of Leninâs âbrutal energy,â and saw nothing objectionable in Bolshevik massacres of hostages. He proudly claimed Italian Communism as his child."
"No prominent European socialist before World War I resembled Lenin more closely than Benito Mussolini. Like Lenin, he headed the antirevisionist wing of the countryâs Socialist Party; like him, he believed that the worker was not by nature a revolutionary and had to be prodded to radical action by an intellectual elite."
"In 1925, Goebbels and Strasser argued in the Nazi daily, VĂślkischer Beobachter, that only the introduction of a âsocialist dictatorshipâ could save Germany from chaos. âLenin scarified Marx.â Goebbels wrote, âand in return gave Russia freedom.â Of his own Nazi Party, he wrote in 1929 that it was a party of ârevolutionary socialists.â"
"[Mussolini] was not a theoretician but a tactician, whose intellectual eclecticism, a blend of anarchism and Marxism, as well as his emphasis on violence, resembled the ideology of the Russian Socialists-Revolutionaries."
"In Western Europe since Roman times, private property was considered sacrosanct. The principle enunciated by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca that kings rule by the will of the people became fundamental to Western civilization, together with private property, which was the main source of productive wealth."
"The Nazi appealed to the socialist traditions of German labor, declaring the worker âa pillar of the community,â and the âbourgeoisââalong with the traditional aristocracyâa doomed class. Hitler, who told associates that he was a âsocialist,â had the party adopt the red flag and, on coming to power, declared May 1 a national holiday; Nazi Party members were ordered to address one another as âcomrades (Genossen). His conception of the part was, like Leninâs, that of a militant organization a Kampfbund, or âCombat League.â"
"We need to keep a very keen eye on our own government. It's getting too rich and redistributing wealth is a sure way of robbing us of our private property rights and other rights along with them."
"Moscow consistently favored the Nazis over the Social Democrats, whom it called âsocial Fascistsâ and continued to regard as its principal enemy. In line with this reasoning, it forbade the German Communists to collaborate with the Social Democrats. In the critical November 1932 elections to the Reichstag (Parliament), the Social Democrats won over 7 million votes and the Communists 6 million: their combined votes exceeded the Nazi vote by 1.5 million. In terms of parliamentary seats, they gained between them 221, against the Nazi 196. Had they joined forces, the two left-wing parties would have defeated Hitler at the polls and prevented him from assuming the chancellorship. It thus was the tacit alliance between the Communists and the National Socialists that destroyed democracy in Germany and brought Hitler to power."
"The three totalitarian regimes differed in several respects⌠What joined them, however, was much more important than what separated them. First and foremost it was the common enemy: liberal democracy with its multiparty system, its respect for law and property, its ideal of peace and stability. Leninâs, Mussoliniâs and Hitlerâs fulminations against âbourgeois democracyâ and the Social Democrats are entirely interchangeable."
"For historians of the left even to raise the question of affinities between Soviet Communism and âFascismâ is tantamount to conceding the possibility of a causal relationship. Since âFascismâ for them is by definition the antithesis of socialism and Communism, no such affinities can be admitted and the sources of âFascismâ must be sought exclusively in conservative ideas and capitalist practices. In the Soviet Union this trend went so far the under Lenin, Stalin and their immediate successor, it was forbidden to use the term âNational Socialist.â"
"Communism, Fascism and National Socialism exacerbated and exploited popular resentmentsâclass, racial and ethnicâto win mass support and to reinforce the claim that they, not the democratically elected governments, expressed the true will of the people. All three appealed to the emotion of hate."
"Both Hitler and Mussolini regarded themselves as revolutionaries, and rightly so. Rauschning claimed that National Socialism was actually more revolutionary in its goals than either Communism or anarchism."
"The third factor inhibiting inquiries into the influence of Bolshevism on Fascism and National Socialism was the insistence of Moscow on banishing from the vocabulary of âprogressiveâ thought the adjective âtotalitarianâ in favor of âFascistâ to describe all anti-Communist movements and regimes."
"[T]he view that anti-Communism equals Fascism remained obligatory in countries subject to Communist censorship until the advent of Mikhail Gorbachevâs glasnost. It was prevalent also in foreign âprogressiveâ circles. Western scholars who had the temerity to link Mussolini or Hitler with Communism in any way or to depict their regimes as genuine mass movements risked verbal or other forms of harassment."
"In 1925, Mussolini adopted the term [totalitarian] and assigned it a positive meaning. He defined Fascism as âtotalitarianâ in the sense that it politicized everything âhumanâ as well as âspiritualâ: âEverything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.â"
"The French Jacobins were the first to realize the political potential of class resentment. Exploiting it, they conjured constant conspiracies by aristocrats and other enemies of the revolution: shortly before their fall they drafted legislation expropriating private wealth and had the unmistakable communistic implications. It was from the study of the French Revolution that its aftermath that Marx formulated the theory of class struggle as the dominant feature of history. In his theory, social antagonism was for the first time accorded moral legitimacy: hate, which Judaism condemned as self-destructive, and Christianity (in the guise of anger) treated as one of the cardinal sins, was made into a virtue."
"My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation."
"If I could deliver one message to the researchers who are looking for the cause of diabetes, and the cause of clogged arteries, and the cause of high blood pressure, and the cause of obesity, I would tell them the answer is in three words. It's the food!"
"If people adopted a plant-based diet, the changes we would see in our individual health, in our national health situation and in this physical, environmental world we live in, would be so profound!"
"The purpose of cowâs milk is to turn a 65-pound calf into a 400-pound cow, as rapidly as possible. Cowâs milk is baby calf growth fluid. Thatâs what this stuff is. Everything in that white liquid, the hormones, the lipids, the protein, the sodium, the growth factors, the IGF, every one of those is meant to blow that calf up to a great big cow, or it wouldnât be there. And whether you pour it onto your cereal as a liquid, whether you clot it into yogurt, whether you ferment it into cheese, whether you freeze it into ice cream, itâs baby calf growth fluid. And women eat it and it stimulates their tissues, and it gives women breast lumps, it makes the uterus get big, and they get fibroids and they bleed and they get hysterectomies, and they need mammograms, and it gives guys man-boobs. Cowâs milk is the lactation secretions of a large bovine mammal who just had a baby. Itâs for baby calves. I tell my patients, âGo look in the mirror. Do you have big ears, do you have a tail? Are you a baby calf? If youâre not, donât be eating baby calf growth fluid.â In any level, thereâs nothing in it people need."
"The current American diet is based on animal flesh and processed food: saturated fat, denatured animal protein, cholesterol, oils, refined sugars. This food is incredibly toxic to the blood vessels and the immune system, and it flows through our bloodstreams, and our children's, every four or five hours. The results are predictable. We're becoming grossly obese, arteries are clogging up. High blood pressure, diabetes, cancers. Autoimmune diseases have direct correlations with the meat and salt in animal products. The vast majority of diseases are created today by what people are eating in the West. Until that is recognized, we're just going to be treating symptoms. We're not getting to the root cause of disease, and that is the great transgression that the medical profession inadvertently perpetrates on the public."