L.K. Samuels Quotes

Because of Italian fascism’s roots in revolutionary syndicalism (labor unionism) and revised Marxism, Mussolini never thought of himself as a rightist; that label was already reserved for the reactionary forces of the monarchy and the clergy. According to the Encyclopedia Americana, Mussolini’s Fasci di Combattimento (combat groups) declared that they were trying to start a ‘leftist revolutionary program of action.’

Although most religions promise paradise after death, most collectivists, especially Marxists, preach paradise on earth, but through means rarely considered heavenly.

In the case of libertarianism, because it opposes fraud and the initiation of force, when pursuing its hereditary linkage to original liberalism it should be classified as standing on the left side of the political divide. Some might respond that legions of capitalists have taken leading roles in authoritarian productions. True, but these so-called capitalists mostly hobnob with politicians and statists, promote rent-seeking, endogenous policies to obtain state-sanctioned monopolies. As the cronies of statists, they are barely a cut above socialism, and have little interest in letting capital and goods move freely and unrestricted between buyer and seller, for whom, in turn, they have little sympathy. They are fastened to government coffers and machinations, and they downplay the value of the dynamics of competition.

[M]any historians take exception to lump fascists with communists, arguing that an absence of class distinction differentiates the left from the right. But Hitler, too, preached equality, classlessness, and social justice—though only for racially pure Aryans. The communists preached the same, except for certain impure classes.

The best way to differentiate between the two left-wing antagonists is to designate the volitional contingent the ‘free Left,’ and its authoritarian horde as the statist or Fascist Left. The free Left, like the Free French during World War II, comprises anti-authoritarians who felt as though their long-established realm had become occupied by foreign invaders. A logical progression would be to simply remain faithful to the original left-right classification and lump the entire menagerie of authoritarians (Nazis, Fascists, and Communists) into the reactionary ranks of the statist Right.

Proclaiming to be a ‘Left Libertarian,’ [Jeff] Riggenbach pored over the original meaning behind the seating arrangement of the 1791 French Legislative Assembly and noticed that those who favored authoritarian and dictatorial rule sat together on the right side of the aisle. So, under this interpretation, all authoritarians must be recognized as right-wingers, meaning that Communists, Nazis, and Fascists must occupy the same rows of pews even if they carry on like contentious, misbehaving siblings.

In practice, Marx-inspired despots have employed the absolutism of power once wielded by monarchies, while preaching a moralistic ethos embraced by the Catholic Church. Even Ayn Rand hinted at the same conclusion, writing in the 1960s that ‘socialism is merely democratic absolute monarchy…’

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) is considered a ‘hereditary monarchy’ that is racist, fascist, and manages to manifest a cult following. After the death of Kim Il-sung, founder of communist North Korea, his son Kim Jong-il inherited the throne in 1994. On December 17, 2011, Kim Jong-il died; within a few weeks, his son [[Kim Jong-un |

If people don’t have free agency, they become mere chattel to the herdsman who wields the biggest horsewhip.

The Girondins’ most lasting legacy was the ratification of ‘The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ (August 1789), which was directly influenced by Thomas Jefferson. As a US diplomat at the time, Jefferson had worked with General Lafayette to write a French bill of rights, which Lafayette introduced to the National Constituent Assembly.

The Girondin bloc also ratified laws ensuring equality in taxation, freedom of worship, and legal equality of punishment, and abolishing serfdom outright, including a 1791 law to emancipate Jewish citizens from unequal treatment. The Girondin-led assembly also granted free people of color full French citizenship and enacted universal voting rights for all adult males, regardless of race, religion, income, property or any other qualification. They even included a pro-gun rights provision in the French Declaration of Rights, which declared that ‘every citizen has the right to keep arms at home and to use them, either for the common defense or for his own defense, against any unlawful attack which may endanger the life, limb, or freedom of one or more citizens.’ Despite the effort, this draft did not make it into the final document.

Yet it was the majority-led Girondins who had spearheaded the revolution and challenged the establishment. They accomplished far more than did the Montagnards. After toppling the king, the Girondins rushed into an abolitionist spree fueled by liberty, dissolving the last vestiges of aristocratic privilege, the system of church tithes, dues owed to local landlords, and personal servitude. The radical liberals also released the peasants from the seigneurial (lord) dues, which helped tenant farmers buy their own private farmland. Next, they turned their abolitionist gun-sights on the guild system that blocked entry to markets, as well as ‘tax farming,’ where private individuals would be licensed to collect taxes for the state while taking a large share for themselves.

The statist Left’s first move was to alter the meaning of liberalism so as to keep the free Left and the public in a constant state of confusion. They diluted the original principles of liberalism while firing cheap polemical shots, arguing that John Locke’s liberalism had nothing to offer, that it contradicted itself. After all, if the statist Left could not win a fair fight on the philosophical battlefield, it had to resort to chicanery to gain an advantage. One way to accomplish this was to adulterate or falsify the liberal message to render it meaningless while advancing a new, redefined liberalism to replace the old. The deception was successful. The free-Left liberals and their allies had lost the semantic ammunition to defend liberty, and therefore became neutered, defanged, almost defenseless, deprived of the cognitive capability to defend the autonomy of the individual. As for the statist Left, they had to work diligently to ‘defascistize’ historical Fascism, because to do otherwise would force them to face an ugly image in the mirror.

If socialist regimes work together, trade together, fight together, collaborate, and have fundamentally equivalent ideologies and tactics, they are genealogically related (a sort of Communist-Nazi brotherhood), which could be regarded as a Fascist-Marxist mindset. Of course, these socialist ideologues also fight each like rival siblings.

There were two French Revolutions—the first stage instigated by free-Left elements imbued with toleration, anti-authoritarianism, secularism, individualism, liberty and the revolutionary individualism of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. The second stage of the French Revolution devolved into a bloody, terroristic dictatorship, an all-powerful state amidst a cult of personality, such as the so-called incorruptible Maximilien Robespierre, in a counter-revolution that was anti-liberal and antithetical to the Lumières movement, which became the Age of Enlightenment.