Happy Monday, everyone! Hope y’all had an enjoyable weekend. As usual, Monday’s post is by Stephen Hall. Thanks, Stephen.
By no means am I associating libertarians with antifa, rather unlike those antifa people, I am actually using those words to mean what they actually mean. I do not mean to imply that libertarians are opposed to fascism, though I suppose some are, I mean that in the most fundamental ways across a panorama of issues, they are on the opposite side.
In the idiotic jargon of modern political meming, people like to picture politics as a Cartesian graph with the horizontal axis labeled with an economic dichotomy and the vertical axis as some political opposition. Sometimes one of the axis will be labeled along some social line rather than political or economic, and occasionally it will be measuring some aggressive measure.
Naturally, as the astute mathematically inclined readers that you are, you recognize that any set of mathematically orthogonal vectors can only denote independent, thus completely unrelated, concepts, and that all such graphic representations are rendered essentially meaningless. (That is, those right angles can only happen if the ideas have nothing whatsoever to do with one another.)
Mostly it is used to put ones political opposition in a quadrant so that they can slap an insulting and derogatory label upon them.
The modern college indoctrinated political activists have so little concept of the separation and distinction of ideas that all of these unrelated ideas become meshed together in a Gordian knot which requires an intellectual Alexander to unravel.
This is how they concoct statements like “true socialism has never been tried”, and oxymoronic phrases of “wage slaves”, “hate speech”, and “free speech zones”; they simply do not think to make meaningful distinctions much less try to comprehend actual meaning.
The indoctrinated want to promote a society of socialist utopia while vehemently denying that the fascists were, in point of fact, socialists, because in their minds they have redefined the word “socialist” to mean a fair society without political hierarchy, an idea which is again orthogonal to the economic system socialism.
It is not merely the indoctrinated leftists which engage in this, but often the anti-elitists who oppose them engage in the very same muddling of concepts of nationalism and ethnic and gender identity politics.
So, what is this “fascism” of which people so desire to be anti? I mean, one cannot truly oppose something if one does not actually know and understand just what they are opposing and why it ought to be opposed.
The word “fascism” was used by Benito Mussolini to name his political party derived from the ancient Etruscan symbol of the fasces, a symbol of the power of the state and of strength through unity.
Most of these anti-fascists would be horrified to learn that the fascis symbol appeared on American coinage even through the entirety of the second world war on the back of the mercury dimes.
Back to the topic, the fascists were indeed economically socialist, as they believed in the state owning, or sometimes indirectly controlling, the means of production, which is the very definition of socialism, contrary to the redefining being attempted by modern socialists.
The fascists, in contrast to most other forms of socialists, like the communists, did not seize the mines, farms, factories, and businesses, rather they left the legal title in the hands of private citizens but put in place government overseers to direct the work, allocated the production by a system of public work and rationing system, and created a number of government companies.
In part, this did not look like the state taking over existing businesses because many of those businesses and industries had been destroyed or removed as a result of the first world war; so the create of the state ran car company, Volkswagon, was not privatizing an existing company, while directing the production of Mercedes-Benz to producing tanks was just filling government purchases. On the surface, it didn’t appear as blatant a take-over as it actually was.
The socialized medicine was just a new public benefit provided by the government; public education and the promotion of the sciences; public works projects building the autobahn were jobs programs; the confiscation of media outlets were protecting the public; the confiscation of other businesses were just the redistribution of wealth. (The growth of socialism in America was occurring at the same time and just as invasive, but America had further to fall at that time.)
In the midst of a global depression when it looked like Capitalism had failed in the aftermath of a global war, a centrally controlled economy of a socialist state promised stability, and stability is always preferred when the alternative appears to be chaos and poverty.
However, on the social front, the fascists promised and promoted traditional societal values opposed to a corrupt, promiscuous decadence which had seen brothels, pornography, homosexuality, drunkenness, gambling and lechery take over large swaths of Germany and to a lesser extent Italy.
You see, the appeal of the Nazis was not simply an economic socialism, which alone would not sell, but it involved a moral crusade against a visible decline of society which had turned parts of Germany, particularly Munich, into a cesspool of a combination Las Vegas/Hollywood. Hitler was in some way like Carrie Nation and Susan B. Anthony bringing temperance to a drunkard nation, and if you think we are not susceptible, remember the 18th Amendment.
This is one of the reasons why the American Liberal are not directly comparable to Nazis, because their particular brand of moralizing is an advocacy or looser morals, though they advocate the same economic system as the fascists and the communists. (And why they are properly “leftists” not “liberals” because they want a decadent personal liberty but strict control over economic and political issues, very illiberal.)
It is also why the Libertarian can in many ways be viewed as the anti-fascists, in that the libertarian philosophy promotes a free market, capitalist economic perspective, while also advocating a hippiesque free love, sex, drugs, and rock and roll social perspective.
Libertarians sometimes cross the line into what one may easily term libertines in the advocacy of a complete lack of moral restraints, the “if it feels good do it” approach, or to borrow from the Church of Satan, “do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
The thinkers and philosophers of the libertarian movement obviously do not go this far, and recognize the old adage that one man’s rights end where another’s begin. Strictly speaking, the application of a free market ideology to the social and cultural arena by necessity implies the application of certain limits and rules, and an intellectual debate as to what those ought to be.
Unfortunately, the libertines have often been more vocal than the intellectuals, and the libertarians can never make political traction so long as the leaders are pushing a pot smoking, hedonistic debauchery.
The libertarians are big free market supporters, advocates for as little regulation of business and commerce. As such they would never accept the state control of the economy any more than they would accept the control of their personal lives.
The fascists and the libertarians are intellectually consistent in this regard that they want the same role for government in the culture as they do in commerce; the fascists wanting government control, the libertarians wanting liberty.
We have not the time in this article to distinguish the differences between conservative and libertarian outlooks on the role of government, merely attempt to contrast the libertarian philosophy with the fascist philosophy (without getting into the vagaries of the historic ties to an ethnic state).
The anti-fascists, we all know are not libertarians; they are not actually anti-fascists because they agree with the fascist economic perspective, just disagree with the cultural perspectives. They don’t even really disagree with the fascists’ ethnic perspective, just want to promote different ethnic groups.
